Flight of the Vajra (30 page)

“Okay.
Why
?” Enid’s chin was in her hand;
it forced her whole head to wag when she spoke. “Why do all this?”

“Since in this case it was IPS that learned of my
intentions, this provides them with some intelligence they will no doubt find
of great strategic importance. And the
manner
in which they acquired it
should also further convince them their instincts are correct. Flattery is as
effective on an institution as it is on an individual, provided it is lavished
in the right way.”

“And you just allowed them to lavish it on
themselves,” I said. Okay, I admitted to myself; I’m impressed. If she’s
played, she can play right back. “That said, they asked me to pass along an
offer. They—Kallhander and Ioné, specifically—they want to get in on whatever
it is you’re planning and serve as official IPS liaisons to you directly. Meaning
they’d also provide security. There’s a bunch of other stuff they mixed in
there about how you breaking away on your own would be a big gamble, but I’m
betting that’s nothing everyone else hasn’t told you already.” Me included.

Angharad’s tilt-of-the-head nod came after a long
moment. “They are aware of your own position as well, then?”

“Just the basics. I haven’t told them about the
actual job I’m undertaking. All they need to know for now is that I’m throwing in
my lot with you. The rest—well, I’m looking forward to seeing the look on
Kallhander’s face when he finds out what I’ve been hired to do.” I grinned into
my ice water.

Enid snorted. “
What
look on Kallhander’s
face? He only has
one
look.”

As the table lights dimmed and the overhead lights
returned, a doorway in one wall extruded—and continued to extrude, forming a
tunnel that reached out to meet our table at the rate of about a meter every
five seconds. Another security measure, I guessed—security
theater
, more
like, given how flashy it was and how it didn’t provide any protection that
couldn’t be defeated with a little effort. I had half a mind to ask Angharad to
come back to the hotel, but given how much of a nonrefundable reservation
deposit she had paid (out of her own pocket, most likely) to have this floor
extruded for us—and how we’d still be more vulnerable clomping around outside
than staying put—I stayed put.

Inside the tunnel was the waiter with our drinks
glittering away on the tray in front of her, walking slowly to match the tunnel’s
own movement and radiating all the pomp of a one-person wedding procession. I
waited until we were served and the waiter was once again tucked away inside
her security tunnel before continuing.

“Here’s the other thing, Your Grace,” I said. “How
are your own people going to take to you accepting IPS presence on this
mission? The second they hear about that, they’re going to be livid all over.
Or was that the idea?”

“If I dictate it will be done, they will accept
it. They are not obliged to like it. “

“So instead you’re going to put your safety in the
hands of what amounts to a bunch of strangers,” Enid said.

“Did I not say before that I consider you far from
being strangers?” Angharad replied. “If you refer to Officers Kallhander and
Ioné—yes, again, they represent another authority, but again, one that has a
great vested interest in ensuring our protection.”

“What’s wrong with the Achitraka honor guard?” I
asked.

“Only that their allegiances are to the Achitraka
as a whole, and not me specifically. With Mimu and Wani, their allegiances to
me were something I built over quite a long period of time. But they were, I
feel, the exception and not the rule. And now that they are gone—”

I leaned in as far as the table between us would
allow. “You want to just come out and say that you don’t trust any of them
anymore, period?”

“I have been inching my way towards that
conclusion for some time now.”

“Don’t be ashamed of it. If that’s what you
believe—”

“I am ashamed of it.” She didn’t lower her head,
or even her eyes, but if I hadn’t been looking at her the tone of voice she
used would have conjured up just such an image. “I am ashamed that I did not
sense sooner that there was such a rift between myself and the Achitraka at
large, in all its forms. The Kathaya is a post that is held for life; there is
no voting me out or otherwise superseding my authority. Except in the sense of
. . . circumventing it.”

“Undermining it,” I said.

“Doing an end run around it,” Enid said, lifting
her chin from her hand. “So that’s the
other
reason you’re breaking away
from them. It’s because they’ve already done so much breaking away from
you
on their own that you don’t trust them to even keep you safe?” She shook her
head.

“That is, I fear, one of the many things I can no
longer trust them to do,” Angharad said.

The silence that came after that forced me to
speak up.

“When the accident happened,” I said, and I didn’t
see the need to explain which accident; as far as I was concerned there was
only one, “I had a personal staff of about six people, who helped me deal with
things like public relations, special events, everything that wasn’t actually
work. They were my arms and legs. One of them, my publicity manager—his name
was Yulian—he had this way of always being the ringleader whenever something
involved him. If we were going out to dinner, it was me, Yulian, and whoever
else he had dragooned into going with us. The way he stepped up and took
control of things—with those dinners, sometimes I felt like they were going
more with
him
than we were all going together. A little of that feeling
leaked into everything we did. I didn’t mind; I trusted him. He was efficient.
He freed me up to do my
real
work. That’s how I justified it to myself,
anyway.

“About a month after the accident, I was in my
office—I remember this so well—I was sitting there, a pile of stuff in my lap
from the inquest. All of my work had been pushed aside for this, because I
knew
I was the only one who could handle it. I’d actually had a fight with Yulian
about it the day before—well, what passed for a fight between us. He’d said,
‘You need to let this be handled by the right people; you have other things to
work on,’ and I told him, ‘Right now there isn’t any other work in my life
that’s more important than this; this
is
my life’s work,’ words to that
effect. And he’d said, ‘Okay, sure,’ shrug, nod, walk off. I thought that was
the end of it.

“But then he showed up the next day, and I was so
deep in what I was doing that at first I didn’t even hear what he said. I
thought he was inviting me out to lunch or something, and so I jumped a bit
when he said, ‘Did you hear me?’ I looked up and he said, ‘We came by to say
good-bye, Henré.’ He was standing there with just about every other member of
my personal staff, all lined up in the hallway behind him. I asked why, and Yulian
said—his exact words—‘There’s no place for us here anymore.’ They felt like
they’d been shut out of everything, that I’d bottled myself up in it all and
made it impossible for them to help me. So they quit. I didn’t want to fight to
keep them, and now that I think about it I probably should have put up a fight
anyway. But instead I just wished them well, and that was the last I heard of
them.

“The whole time everything was falling to pieces,
though, I kept thinking,
I really screwed that up, didn’t I?
I blamed
myself for being so absorbed in making everything right that I’d pushed them
away. And why not? I’d gotten so used to assuming everything
had
been my
fault that it was no big extra step to lump that in, too.

“After I started bopping around on my own, though,
I realized something else.” I turned my hands out, palms up, on the table
between us. “I had never lied to them about what my mission of redress meant to
me. I’d said to them, over and over again, ‘Only I can make any of this right.
I can’t delegate that process out to people. Only I can do this.
Because
that’s what everyone else who’s not us is going to be looking for.
’ I knew
that
I
had to be the one stepping up and saying to those people, ‘Your
families are dead because of me and I won’t rest until I find out why.’ And if Yulian
and the others couldn’t deal with me doing that, if they insisted on treating
the whole thing like just another PR gaffe, then I didn’t want them taking on
any of my responsibilities in the first place.

“See, we’d never all been through something that
brutal together; we really hadn’t. We’d faced all kinds of outside obstacles,
but we’d never dealt with a rift inside, between us. And now that we had, it
showed me they were the wrong people to trust myself that deeply to. They cared
more about keeping the ship together—even if it was a ship with a hole in the
bottom—than they did about doing the right thing overall. They were devoted,
all right, but it was to all the wrong parts of what kept us together.”

“But there was no way you could have known that
then
,”
Enid said.

“Exactly. I know this
now
, just like
you
know this now, Angharad. I chose the right people at the time, just like you
chose the right people at the time. If you realize now they’re not the right
people for this, you can’t let that paralyze you. And I
know
you’re
going to feel like you deserve to be paralyzed. I know I felt that way. Who was
I to throw over a team that worked as well as we did for so many years? What
kind of selfish crap was that? It took me too long to realize
they
were
the ones being selfish.”

I turned my hands back over and drew them back—or
tried to, because I felt something stop my right arm. I hadn’t noticed it,
because so much of my attention had been on Angharad’s face, but at some point
she’d brought her hand to rest gently on my wrist.

“You have just demonstrated,” she said, wearing
the best of her soft little smiles, “why I prefer to trust this ‘stranger’ in
front of me over any of my own people.”

I leaned back and sat up a little straighter. I
think Enid did the same thing, too.

For the next few minutes,
we weren’t
having a meeting. We were just a circle of friends, looking at the same menus,
swapping ideas about which orbit-grown, sun-dried vegetable garnish was best.

We got back to business after placing our order,
though. Or, rather, I brought business back to everyone’s attention.

“So what kind of budget and schedule are we
talking about? In the short term, that is,” I asked Angharad after wetting my
mouth with my Mardoval Blanc. This batch was drier than what I was used to, but
also not nearly as cloying; some of the Mardovals were so syrupy you might as
well just pour them into a gelatin mold.

“The schedule will almost certainly be over a
period of months to years,” Angharad said. “Consider it a long-term
collaborative project between the two of us. Of course, between now and the
time we formally begin work, we both have a number of goals to complete.”

“There’s the residency vote,” I said. “There’s the
Highend emigration summit meeting.”

“There’s
me
,” Enid said.

“And I have not forgotten about any of those
things,” Angharad said. “The summit in particular, and Enid’s father
. . . I mentioned before that I had planned on using the former as my
first test flight, as it were—something we could do with only what we have at
hand, as it were.”

“Meaning me, you, Enid, and the
Vajra.
” I
pointed between us.

“And Officers Kallhander and Ioné as well. I
myself constitute the official Old Way envoy for the talks, which are to
commence in two weeks, although I will list everyone else as ‘staff’. The
residency vote then comes two weeks after the summit. Although, after my work
is finished in the conference, I imagine it will not be a problem for me to
cast my vote
in absentia
and then devote myself to something more
personal.”

That last was directed at Enid, who offered a
bubbly “Thank you!” in return.

“Bear something in mind,” Angharad went on. “I
know full well IPS is not apolitical. They speak for many worlds at once, which
means they have no choice but to exert political force when the opportunity
presents itself. What’s more, what I am about to do
will
throw a great
many things into turmoil. That is not speculation. It is certainty. They are
wise to prepare themselves in the face of such an upset. But you and I must not
allow that to become part of our own decision-making. They will do their best
to make that happen; they would never establish such a close presence with me
if they had no intention of doing so. I know full well they are not simply
looking out for my safety, or the stability of the worlds, or their own
careers. They want all of these things and a good deal else besides.”

“What do
you
want?” I didn’t mean to sound confrontational,
but there was a little of it in my voice anyway.

“To create a new future for the Old Way. Nothing
more than that. But I know full well that one thing is made up of so many other
things they cannot possibly be achieved or encompassed in my own lifetime. It
simply will not happen on that scale. But I know I must set the wheel in motion,
and if doing that requires leverage that can only be supplied by others, then so
be it.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” Enid said.

My glass was halfway to my mouth when she said
that, and I paused to keep from sloshing it on myself. “You want to explain
what you mean by that?” I said.

“What if it doesn’t work?” she repeated. “What if
you break off, you do your own thing—
we
do our own thing—and they all
say, ‘Sorry, we don’t recognize you as the Old Way,’ or even recognize you for
whatever it is you’re going to be representing. What then? Because—” She put
her chin back in her hand. “—I don’t see you as the kind of person who just
slinks on back home with your head down.”