Flight of the Vajra (3 page)

To my eye she couldn’t have been more than
fourteen or fifteen years old, but as she stood with her feet wrapped around
the wire that rose from the water (it supported on either side by pyramidal
drones), she straightened her back and shot herself through with the kind of
poise you would normally only believe possible from an adult. That’s what you
get for living so long on worlds where barely anyone is under the biological
age of twenty-five in the first place, I told myself: you forget what’s
possible in people.

She arched herself back and raised her arms, and I
saw now that behind her, hovering just over the water, were two more drones
shaped like piles of pyramids joined together at their vertices. They flexed
and twisted like proteins folding, and as I peered closer (Customs hadn’t
forced me to disable the protomics in my sunglasses, so I could zoom in without
trouble) I saw their churnings were guided by the ways her wrists bent and her
fingers flexed.

From somewhere at the edge of the water, almost
out of sight behind the wall, musicians were playing a reedy, sinuous tune that
rose and fell as it wished. They weren’t making it so much for us to listen to
as they were to make her turn and bend, to make her arch her back and do a
cartwheel so slow there seemed no way for her to
not
slip off the wire.
But she didn’t slip, not even when she shot herself straight up and landed back
on the wire hard enough to make the drones at either end jitter in place.

The other drones, the ones that had started off
hovering behind her, followed her moves. When she swayed, they swayed; when she
lunged, they lunged, and in lunging they skated across the surface of the water
hard enough to hit the lowest seats with glittering evening mist. The crowd
showered her right back with applause, me included.

I know there was more. The jugglers with their
protomic props that split and rejoined, sprouting razor edges and spewing
plasma. Or the other dancers who turned somersaults across the water, landing
right on wires that were submerged just below the waves. I know there was more,
but the only part I trust in my memory was the sight of that girl: Enid.

I slept in late the next morning,
and
the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the bottle of beer I’d lugged
back home with me. It was in a near corner, lying on its side as if it were
imitating me. I had plenty of experience dealing with real alcohol, real
drinking and real hangovers, so my mild headache and leaden steps were all
familiar territory. The tap water had a strange greenish tinge to it (“It’s the
local minerals,” I was told), but I immersed myself in a tubful of it anyway.

While watching the sun coming in through the window
slit and make a slow transit across the floor, I mumbled to myself some things
that passed for plans. They mostly involved being seen in public living up to
my current reputation as a failure.

From all I’ve seen, people speak more freely in
front of someone they think of as being a little bit pitiable. They share more
with someone they can safely condescend to as a hard-luck case. A harmless man’s
a captive audience for bragging.

That’s why I didn’t change names when I changed
careers. I wanted the universe to know Henré Sim the starship architect, Henré
Sim the genius of his kind, Henré Sim the bereaved and broken, was now Henré
Sim the aimless, wandering playboy. The way I figured it, after enough
wandering I might find myself in the company of the sort of folks willing to
engineer the deaths of a few thousand people by splitting the hull of a
starship like a stomped grape.

I didn’t care about the odds of ever finding such
people to be orders of magnitude out of my league. I had any number of decades
of life still left in me and absolutely nothing else to do with them but look
and listen and learn. And, maybe one fine day, take action.

That was the level I’d sunk to—and would soon rise
from again.

The rooftop of the hotel was decorated with lawn
chairs and strings of fluttering pennants overhead—a place to lie back, soak up
some sun, and let something alcoholic stay cold in the bucket next to you. I dressed
and went up there for the view. The hotel wasn’t the tallest building in town,
but it was tall enough to show me the whole sloppy sprawl of everything rolling
right up to the edge of the water. Being on a hillside also helped. It was
another beautiful day, and Cytheria’s smaller moon was directly overhead. The available
worlds out there that were this livable, without centuries of tinkering, were fewer
than ever.

After all of that ruminating in the tub, I was
finally saying to myself what I’d been trying to clam up inside for too long:
Maybe
slumming it like this isn’t the best way to an answer
. Well, it wasn’t like
I’d tried other things first, but I’d never been able to shake the feeling the
only way to find out what had really happened was to go down into the same
gutters where people who could do such a vile thing lived and splashed around. I’d
thus far avoided admitting to myself the reason I’d gone down there was only to
wallow in that same gutter.

I stepped to the edge of the roof and peered over
the wrought-iron fence—it came only up to my waist—down into the street below.
Someone with a printer, a big square metal frame, was stopping every so often
to press the device against a wall or sidewalk. After a brief spitting sound
from the printer, he’d step away and there on the concrete or tarmac was a
newly-printed poster. Not for the circus; those posters were already dissolving
faster than I’d anticipated. This was for the other circus.

By the time I was downstairs and out in the
street, a couple of other folks—one of them a fellow with the too-classy,
too-clean look of a tourist, rather like me—had also emerged from the hotel
lounge to see what was worth billeting the neighborhood about. I think I was
the one that felt the most astonishment, even if I didn’t show it.

Her Grace, The 16th Supreme Kathaya of the Old
Way, Angharad il-Jakaya, in an open town hall meeting on Day 251 (sol. 6/2) at
the Public Pavilion in Port Cytheria. All are welcome but seating will be by
random lottery at the discretion of the hosts.

Below that headline, Angharad herself—sitting on a
cushion, wrapped in midnight blue robes, a wimple half-concealing her face.
With eyes as large and deep as hers (and a mouth as sweetly happy to boot), it’s
no wonder there were a couple trillion people across the galaxy who put a
picture of her somewhere conspicuous and gave it honor every day.

I had been one of those people. Once.

Under the portrait were three frames in which a
number of slightly blurry 3D image loops played themselves out. Those little
ink droplets could be programmed to do a whole slew of things, after all. There
was more stuff in smaller print, and some coded data for those who could
interpret it, but after the name and the picture below it you didn’t need anything
else.

“Oh good grief,” the tourist next to me said out
loud.

“I’ll go with just ‘good’, personally.” I smiled
when I said it, trying to make it all the more clear that it was a joke. His CL
was off as well, which meant he had to depend on such tiresome crutches as
tones of voice and facial expressions to tell such things. Small wonder I didn’t
miss having that thing turned off.

“I came here to get
away
from crap like
this. If I’d known she was coming here I would’ve left for Lythander by now.”
He slapped the flat of his hand against the closest instance of the poster,
right on Angharad’s face, and when he lifted it away the face had become a
runny watercolor. He probably had a protomic glove on—for all I knew, the whole
hand
could have been protomic—with an extension that could, among other
things, disable those kinds of ink particles. He wasn’t supposed to be walking
around down here with something like that, but a) I didn’t think he would be
given too much grief for something that minor and b) I was packing a lot more
than he was, and a whole lot more clandestinely, so who was I to be critical?

Just for fun, he smeared the face of three more wall-etched
posters on his way up the street to my left, then stepped away from the wall
and doubled his pace. Probably on the way to find out what other few kicks
Cytheria had to offer the likes of him. He’d been tall, with the chiseled good
looks, and the lousy taste in everything from cosmetics to haberdashery, of
someone from a pretty high-end world. I turned away from him and looked back at
one of the unspoiled pictures of Angharad. I had lapsed from the Old Way—and
that was entirely by choice—but no, I couldn’t deny how even a picture of her
still made me feel that much more comfortable in my own skin.

She’s here tomorrow afternoon, I thought. This
planet is going to be mobbed. But I doubted they would raise the inbound
planetary traffic quotas for anyone, even Angharad. Whoever got to see her
would most likely be whoever was already planetside and in the vicinity or
lucky enough to know she’d been coming and had reserved a visa accordingly.
There were pilgrims who puppy-dogged her from planet to planet whenever they
could, but even she had come out and told them they needed to put their time to
better use. Not that they listened, mind you.

“Watch it, you
tadpoles
!” shouted a voice
from up the street. The tourist, again. I turned and saw he’d been aiming his
voice at a whole gaggle of kids barreling through a cross street right in front
of him. What really caught my eye was the kid at the head of the pack: round
face, big eyes, white hair, bodysuit ... The girl from the circus; no mistaking
that even at this distance, with or without magnifying vision. What looked like
a bunch of little flags seemed to be following her at about head-and-a-half
height, but she and the others vanished around the corner before I could properly
size it all up. With my CL turned off that meant things like optical replay
were also out of the question, but that in turn gave me an excuse to go take a
closer look.

I jogged up the street, about halfway to the
intersection where all the commotion had played out, and then noticed there was
a small alley to my right that I hadn’t seen from further back. Echoing out from
the mouth of that alley were high and shrill sounds that could only be kids at
play.

The alley was not quite narrow enough that I had
to turn sideways to walk through it, but it was close. A pool of something
stagnant, with oily soap-bubble colors on its surface, had formed from whatever
was dripping from a few stories up. Just as I was stepping over it, the kids
came around a corner from where the alley split off further down. She was still
in the lead, and I could see now that she had five or six little triangular
flags of different colors—they looked like the same kind fluttering on the roof
of the hotel—mounted on long wands protruding from the back of her belt. The
kids chasing her had been making grabs for them, but with one good leap she
shot straight up into the air, out of reach.

At the apex of her jump she stuck her legs out in
both directions and lodged herself there between the alley walls. There was
nothing for the other kids to climb onto; they threw themselves at her and
couldn’t even so much as get their fingers to scrape along the undersides of
her legs. She grinned. No, she hadn’t gone up that far originally, but had eased
her way up that much more, using one foot at a time, after wedging herself in
that position. With my two meters of height and my big frame, I could have
reached up and spoiled the whole game, but I hung back instead.

“Oh, come
on
,” I chided her. “They followed
you this far. Throw them a bone.”

“If you insist.” She pulled her feet back in and
landed on her toes, ankles together. The kids ran up, each one snatching away a
flag before winding around the two of us to disappear up the street.

“You were really something yesterday,” I said, and
meant it. “How long have you been doing this with that circus crew?”

“Two years. But this is the end of it.” She put
her back to the wall and raised herself up on her toes, as if she were about to
leap up again. “Bumming around from one planet to another sure seems like fun
until you actually
do
it for long enough.”

Good thing you’ve learned that this early in life,
I thought. Out loud: “You have any plans?”

She squinted at a spot just over my left shoulder.
“I thought . . . I’d just see what this place has to offer me first
and go from there.”

“From what I can see, Cytheria mostly offers
tourists
.
And not much to offer someone from off-world who’s used to the creature
comforts of cortical links and protomic clothing.”

She stuck her jaw out and frowned. “I’m not
spoiled
,
you know.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Fifteen solar.”

“You’re fifteen solar and you’re leaving behind
what I presume are your current legal guardians? How’d they take to you
breaking that news to them?”

“They don’t have to like it, and they’re not my
guardians. I joined them ‘cos I wanted to; I can leave any time. I joined up
with them right after I passed my emancipation interview.” She eased down off
her toes. “And that’s legal on pretty much every world where there’s human
beings.”

“Yeah, but why walk away from something that looks
like a pretty good deal? You get to travel, you do the thing you love
. . . ”

“I’m bored and I wanted a change. Is that enough
for you?”

The kids ran past the mouth of the alley once
more. One of them dropped his flag and almost tumbled butt over skullcap cutting
a U-turn to go back for it. I had a feeling the girl in front of me was
enjoying throwing answers back at me as much as I was enjoying fishing for
them, so I went on.