Flight of the Vajra (31 page)

That actually put a small smile on Angharad’s
face. “No, I am not,” she said. “But lack of official recognition would not be
the same as a total defeat. There will never be defeat as long as there is
striving on someone’s part.”

Until even the striving itself starts to feel like
defeat, I thought, and then immediately banished the thought. Cynicism tempted
me, unrepentantly, every time she stopped speaking; it was only banished when
she started again.

It wasn’t just her, though. For years, everything
and everyone outside of me that radiated the faintest degree of purpose had
made me feel obliged to be cynical. It was fine for Angharad, or Enid, or
Cioran, or Kallhander (or Ioné, for that matter) to talk about future plans, or
striving, or any kind of here’s-what-I’d-like-to-do. It reminded me of the sort
of person I’d been once, half a lifetime ago, before I’d started forbidding
myself to be like that anymore. No sense in just setting myself up for yet
another letdown.

But here I was, sitting knee-to-knee with future
plans, sitting elbow-to-elbow with striving, preparing to dine in the company
of two entirely different kinds of here’s-what-I’d-like-to-do. No, I told
myself:
three
different kinds. You’re included, remember? You’re not
just a passenger on this particular journey. You’re the pilot and the engineer
and . . . from the way they’ve been looking at you all along, you’re
some form of moral support, too.

“Here’s to striving, then,” I said, and raised my
glass to theirs.

“To striving,” Angharad echoed.

“To striving and
thriving
.” added Enid.

There was, in the end,
only one way to
get me to stop talking shop: put a full plate in front of me. That did the
trick for all of us: between me with my pasta and chicken, Enid and her lamb
shish, and Angharad and her deep-pan pizza, we barely uttered ten words in
about as many minutes.

And
work
, actual work, the promise of
something to
do
—once you wave that under my nose, nothing shuts me up.
Maybe on the outside, but definitely not on the inside. I may have looked like
I was focusing my attention on which part of my cutlet to attack first, but inside
I was still talking shop to myself. If we’re using the
Vajra
as her
official new diplomatic vessel, I told myself, it’s not going to cut it in its
current size. I’ll have to expand the hull—not hard, technically speaking, but
I still have to go out and get legit unlocked protomics. Which means I’ll need
a proper materials-working license—something I haven’t bothered to renew in I
don’t know how long. I told myself to draft a work request for Angharad to look
over and approve first thing tomorrow morning, after they got my actual
employment paperwork sorted out, and in the meantime to shut up and eat. I only
had to tell myself to shut up and eat four more times before it sunk in.

“Listen,” I said, after we’d all made decent
headway towards the bottoms of our plates, “how about we move the table
thataway, towards the window, and let Enid see the stadium? If you’re worried
about security, still, we can leave it one-way.”

Enid stopped chewing. “I . . . forgot
all about that!” A gobbet of lamb almost rolled out from behind her lower teeth
and back onto her plate, but she shut her mouth just in time.

“Actually,” I said, “from here all you’ll get is a
great view of a very crowded set of bleachers.
Maybe
you’ll see him run
down a soundcheck, but the soundcheck’s only fed via CL to some hundred-odd
people picked at random in the day before or so.”

“Yeah, but what if we’re one of the lucky ones?”

Angharad had summoned the maître d’ and was
murmuring into her ear, receiving one nod after another in reply. A minute
later, the floor began to scroll towards the far wall, which was de-opacifying
by degrees and letting in a great wash of afternoon sun.

I stood up from the table and took my drink with
me to peer down at the ‘Drome, but first noticed something a great deal closer.
Outside, and half a floor down, was a patio that stretched out to either side
and most likely wrapped the rest of the way around the building. The room we
were in was tall enough to be two floors, so each patio was staggered between
floors to allow people dining inside to look straight out and down. Said patios
were also adjustable; they could be raised to match the floor level for the
inside, so that a party of a few hundred could fling open the walls and mingle
both inside and outside. Right now the patio was half a level down and populated
by a sprawling picnic of people. Below and beyond them was the ‘Drome itself,
already a sparkling mass of people, a mixture of ten different colors of sand
in a single jar.

“I guess they decided to book seats here instead
of in the stadium,” Enid said. “For all I know, this place might be cheaper.”

“It’s a crapshoot,” I said, as Enid stood next to
me and peered down as well. “You
might
be within broadcast range of him
if you’re up here. You’re more or less guaranteed a broadcast signal if you’re
in the stadium. That’s why people shell out all that money to see him there
when he shows up on no notice, because they have no idea if they’ll get any
other chance. I heard about one group of people who were driving a loop around
one city, a ten-kilometer loop—they rode for three straight hours and they were
always within broadcast range of where he was. Lucky ducks!”

Angharad had turned her seat around, but hadn’t
stood up—her seat was right next to the window, so all she had to do was face
the other way. She’d eaten her pie and had her salad, and from what I knew of
her personal habits that was probably the one big meal she would have for the
whole day. She radiated simple contentment at all times, but even she wasn’t
immune from radiating just that much more of it after a good meal.

That made the look of creeping surprise on her
face all the more striking.

I turned my head and followed her gaze. The knot
of people on the patio below—how could I have skimmed over those faces without
recognizing them?
Cioran,
and he’d been right in the dead center of the
whole crew, to boot. And Nishi right next to him, drink in hand and looking
very much like she had many more drinks put away already. Around them was a
constellation of others, some from last night’s club and many more I didn’t
recognize. I remembered one of the more popular CL add-on mods for the
terminally busy was a supplemental face-recognition system that could help jog
your memory about who was who if their beacon was off. I swore I’d sooner roll
myself in honey and lie across an anthill than ever resort to something like
that, but now I was starting to see why it might have such an appeal.

Enid came to the same realization around the same
time Angharad and I did, and plastered her face to the glass with a thunk. She
looked like she was ready to osmose herself clean through the glass to get to
him.

“You wanna go down and talk?” I offered.

“What do you
think
!”

I gave Angharad an isn’t-she-a-piece-of-work smile
and offered my hand. “How about we get in touch tomorrow, after I’ve nailed a
few more things down—”

“I had an alternate suggestion.” She had a look on
her face that hinted at how much I might not like it. “I have, you see, been very
interested in meeting this man for some time now. I thought I might take
advantage of the moment.”

Enid and I both shot looks at each other, then
down at the patio below. “You want to talk to
him
?” we both said. Then,
I added: “
Why
?”

“I am . . . interested in him.”

It’s not the first time I’ve been at a loss for
words around her, I thought, and it isn’t likely to be the last.

“Be that as it may,” I said, “are you sure that’s
such a hot idea? If someone in that party has a grudge—if
he
has a grudge—”

“—then no force in the universe would stop them
from harming me eventually. Bear in mind, the same guards that protect me in
here are also stationed downstairs as well.”

“She’s got a point.” Enid snapped her arms out and
tightened up her sleeves. “Besides, even if you didn’t go,
I
sure
would.”

Angharad was already making her way to the
elevator. “Look,” I said, hurrying to stay in step with her; despite all those
robes she sure moved fast when she wanted to. “It’s one thing to say, ‘I need
to be more of a diplomat and less of an idol’, if that’s what this is all
about. You want to knock down that many more walls between you and everyone
else; you want to meet people on their level. Right so far?”

“Yes.”

“I’m just saying, is this the right way to do it?
To just walk out in front of what amount to total strangers, and welcome
anything that comes your way?”

“Hey, why not?” Enid said, doing a neat little
jeté
into the elevator and planting herself between us. “It’s what she did with
you and me, wasn’t it?”

Angharad’s smile was as unbroken and placid as
ever.

“What is this?” I shrugged at everyone around me
as the doors closed. “For once
I’m
the sensible one.”

What I didn’t tell either of them just then was
how much, under it all, I agreed with both of them in principle. If the Old Way
was to be reformed, it was to be reformed from the inside out, through the
individual actions of individual people, not via policy alone. Something like
that had already long been under way with Angharad’s tenure, and she’d said much
the same thing after each tireless attempt on her part to stride out into the
universe, to put herself on whatever front line was looming most directly in
front of her.

It was one thing to look on that from a distance,
nod and say
Now
that’s
how it’s supposed to be done,
and feel
smug.
It was another thing entirely to be faced right up-front and
personal with the possibility that the person you were talking to just now
might step out a door and be dead seconds later, all because someone quite
simply hated her. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been confronted with a version of
that reality before: it had been foremost in my mind while we were hightailing
it off Cytheria. But to think that when people had already started shooting at
you was easy; to think about it in a restaurant so posh and upscale it had its
own private armed security detail, wasn’t. It wasn’t the amount, or lack, of
security that brought such thoughts to mind; it was Angharad’s persistence in
not letting the presence or absence of such a thing deter her from sticking her
neck out.

If there’s one thing that woman’s not afraid of, I
thought, it’s not death. It’s looking stupid. Your body can only be killed
once, but mockery kills the rest of you endlessly.

I mulled all this over as the elevator descended
all of half a story and rotated to meet the tunnel which would lead us out onto
the patio. Enid was already bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet as the
door opened, and was the first one out the door and across the tiles. Angharad,
again, moved faster than I anticipated. I found myself bringing up the rear,
slowing down that much more to savor the weather. It was a beautiful day—just
warm enough to keep you comfortable and not so much that you’d sweat, and no
need to make changes to the porousness of one’s clothing.

Cioran’s party—in the sense of both “celebration”
and “group”—numbered about twenty, spread out over four or five large tables.
They were in the last stages of their get-together; the plates were slathered
with sauce stains and littered with slimy bones (genuine animal meat was
evidently one of the things on the secret menu), and the bottles between their
glasses were occluded with fingerprints. Next to Cioran—he sat in the middle of
this whole circus—was a portable carving station on which was spitted the
grease-lacquered remnants of some bird carcass. He was in the middle of peeling
off a hunk of it and stuffing it sidelong into his mouth when Enid skipped
right on up to him.

Cioran tilted over backwards and uncrossed his
legs—almost clipping across the jaw the girl sitting next to him—then shot
himself out of his seat, and landed almost toe-to-toe with Enid. Barely one
breath passed between them before they both began trading lines at each other:

Cioran:
“Hey, kid, what’s your name?”

Enid:
“Got no name, got my mother to blame.”

C:
“If you got no blame, then you can’t
complain.”

E:
“I never complain, ‘cos I’m always the same.”

Their laughter spread out to infect the rest of
us. I knew this act: it was one of any number of kids’ games played on
countless Old Way worlds. You and your partner ran through the tongue twister
as fast as you could, each saying every other line or even word. There were
dozens of other “lyrics”, each one run through a little faster than the last
one. The first to stumble, lost. Things got really fun if the two of you had a
CL: you synced them up and saw how fast you could trade rhymes before falling
over out of sheer dizziness. It was a toss-up whether Enid had taught it to him
or whether he’d learned it himself on one of his own sojourns.

“So good to see you again—and
you
again,
too!” Cioran directed this last at me, over Enid’s shoulder, as he rose from
his crouch and crab-walked around her to get a better look at me. I didn’t
expect it would last long given who else was standing in my immediate vicinity.
I was spot-on: less than a second after Cioran had crossed in front of me, he
crab-walked
again
, planted himself in front of Angharad, and folded
himself clean in half in front of her.

“Mr. Cioran.” Angharad bowed her head and reached
out her hand.

“Miss Kathaya, I presume.” Cioran did the same as
she had, putting just enough exaggerated gravity into his voice to let
everyone, her especially, know he was only kidding. “Er—Your Grace. —You do understand,
it’s always quite a rattler to meet someone so high up that at first you don’t
even know what name to use!”

Everyone else in Cioran’s party was now staring at
us—or rather, staring at the way Cioran was dealing with us. I suspected they
found his behavior more startling than anything we could have done ourselves,
now that it was clear who we were—and who she was.

“Mr. Sim and Miss Sulley call me Angharad,” she
said. “Sometimes ‘Your Grace’, but mostly that for simplicity’s sake.”

“Then, Your Grace Angharad Kathaya,” he declared,
finally straightening up (I was wondering how he even drew breath in that
position), “a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry if my friends here seem more than
a little puzzled at the reception I’ve been giving all of you, as neither I nor
they were expecting company of this caliber.
Your aide-de-camp
here—”
(meaning me, I presumed) “—I’ve already had the pleasure of meeting; along with
this talented young lady here.” He half-turned—probably trying not to turn his
back on Angharad; he struck me as someone who knew more than enough about
etiquette to know how to violate it creatively—and called back to the rest of
the now-doubly-dazed partygoers: “Gentleladies-and-men, he-shes and her-sirs
. . . some newly-made friends of mine. In the black dress—well, what
was
a black dress, and is now quickly becoming something far more form-fitting and
amenable to a stage appearance—is the young talent who so captivated me last
night with her movements and her spontaneous invention, Enid Sulley.”