Flight of the Vajra (32 page)

Enid bent her knees in place to do a deep
plié
for
the crowd. They had roused themselves from their post-meal torpor enough to sit
up straighter, applaud, and (in one case) wave a napkin.

“And accompanying her—a man whose name has been
somewhat out of the picture as of late but which I am anticipating will be
returning to the public eye
very
soon—Henré Sim.”

The applause I got was a good deal louder and more
enthusiastic. I stepped up a bit, to be shoulder-to-shoulder with Enid, and
gave everyone a little how-d’-you-do bow.

“And, last but in no sense least . . . ”
Cioran crouched down, faced his audience all the way, and dropped his voice a
register. “ . . . folks, if you don’t know who the Fourteenth Kathaya
of the Old Way is, I sure won’t bother explaining
that
to you.”

Angharad stepped forward to what turned out to be
only Cioran’s applause.

One of the people in the party—the girl Cioran had
almost clipped with his foot when straightening up—pushed herself to her feet
and hustled past us with the walk of someone whose skin was burning just from having
been near us. Three other folks, one sporting a yawn big enough to swallow the
flatware he’d been eating from, got up and followed the first lady out.

Cioran’s mouth wagged open, then shut. The rest of
the crew began fidgeting, stretching, and leaving in twos and threes as well.
Without thinking about it, I took a couple of steps to make sure I was between
them and Angharad as they trickled past. When I glanced sideways, I saw Enid
had apparently done the same; her hands were slightly out to her sides in the
manner of someone expecting an ambush.

“So are they with her?” said a lank-haired,
mustachioed man who’d been on the other side of the carving station when we
entered. He was still there, but not for long: he was peeling off another hunk
of meat from the wing and wrapping it in a torn-off pocket which now sported a
newly-extruded airtight seal. “
 
‘Cos
if they are, I don’t see us having much to stick around for.”

“They’re guests!” Cioran tried to sound sprightly
and inviting.

“Then
you
be their host,” the other man
said. “We’ve got
real
work to do.” He stuffed his take into his pocket with
fingers thick with metal rings, and gave Cioran a condescending pinch of the
cheek
en passant
on the way out. It left a glistening stain.

For seconds all we did was stand around amidst
empty tables, skewed chairs and grimy flatware. I was the first one to move;
took a couple of steps over to Cioran, whose back was still to me. I knew full
well what it was like to be blown off on general principles.

“That was . . . ” Cioran whipped around
to face me, all smiles. Even with someone like him—whom I’d met barely a day
ago and who had never
not
been smiling in the entire time I’d been in his
company—it was possible to tell the difference between his real smile and
something that was just his mouth pinching back. He was wounded and bleeding,
and I knew it.

“I guess,” he went on, “we could call that a kind
of test. Wait, no—better word for it:
gauntlet.
Only it’s a matter of
opinion whether it was
they
who ran that gauntlet, or whether it was
I
.
An outsider would think the latter; those knowing better, they realize it was
the former.” He reached for a napkin and blotted his cheek.

“What did just happen?” I said. “Aside from us
getting snubbed. That part is obvious.”

“That freshly-exited crew, they fancy themselves
some kind of drama troupe or other. I heard they were in town, arranged to drop
in for a quick meal before the show, thought maybe they’d be interested in some
collaborative work. Although, after witnessing their reactions to your
presence—no offense, Miss Your Grace-ness—it seems any talk of a collaboration
between the one of me and the bunch of them has been binned for keeps.” His
neck vanished briefly into a shrug. “Nothing was lost; it started nowhere, went
nowhere, ended nowhere.”

“I apologize,” Angharad said.

“You apologize for nothing!” He bent himself in
half—well, this time only half in half—in front of her. “I have you to
thank
,
Madam Angharad. Without you I would never have known what—what provincial
little
plasms
they were!” His mouth crumpled up around the last few
words. “Or at the very least I would have found out only after I’d committed
myself to something not easily backed out of. Certainly not without the kind of
pain that cannot be defrayed even with money or charm.”

Something occurred to me about the departees: they
had all been talking out loud. They’d all clearly been Highend, but they had
been eschewing CL in favor of speaking out loud, even before we’d stepped up.
Specifically, before Angharad—the one person in our group anyone with two synapses
to bang together would know wasn’t CLed—had stepped up. I’d seen that kind of
behavior before, where Highend folks pretend to be less than Highend to seem
that much more “in touch” with their Old Way brethren. Those on the receiving
end of such not-always-intentional condescension had a word for it:
soul-slumming.
In this case, I wasn’t convinced the condescension was unintentional.

“Oh-
whoops
.” Cioran raised his head as if
stung, turned, ran to the railing—almost running over Enid’s toes in the
process—and squinted out at the stadium. The noise coming from it was distant,
like the ocean from behind a high seaside wall, but it was undeniably louder
than when we’d first stepped out onto the patio.

“Minutes to go, gentlemen. Minutes to go.” Cioran
rubbed his hands together, clapped them against each other, his knees, his
cheeks. “Much as I hate to run off once again, I’ve got a concert to get into
concert, a performance to perform, a show to . . . show. Here!” Enid
and I blinked as we felt something register in our CLs. “Full-access tickets.
There’s a plus-one sans-CL admittance stub in there for Her Grace to accompany
you as well. You don’t have to join me in person down there, by the way—those
tickets will get you a front-row feed no matter where you are on this ball. But
if you were to drop on by afterwards in person, for a meet in the meat—well,
speaking for myself, it would be a fine way to get the taste of that last
little snub out of my mouth. You are
cordially
invited.”

He turned sideways and put one foot up on the
railing. Angharad made a little noise that took me a moment to realize was an
involuntary gasp. By the time I’d figured that out, he had already put the
other foot
over
the railing and was stepping off.

He didn’t fall far. He was standing on the
extruded flatbed of a freshly-summoned air taxi, which rose until he stood a
good head and change above even me.

 “Building rules forbid throwing, dropping or
firing anything from the patio,” he declared, putting one foot back up on the
railing. “But I’ve read them twice, forwards and backwards, and they say any
thing
,
but not any
one
. That and I went and bought a permit for it. Or rather,
they
sold
me
one, just to see what I’d do—so I thought I’d give them a show
before the show.
Vé n’adjyoz
, gentlepeople!”

With his Formynxi
See you soon!
still
resonating in our ears, Cioran lifted his foot back from the railing, then let
himself fall sideways onto the flatbed—which, now that I noticed, was bulbous
with air cushions. He used them to cartwheel sideways as the taxi shoved away
from the edge.

Something behind the taxi whipped and whistled, a
tiny eyelash of a line that seemed to be extending in a lazy curve back and
down into the city. It was a lanyard, probably woven from strands of Type A/B
or B/C, and despite its wispiness I suspected it could have held most of the
weight of the car it was attached to.

Cioran stood on the edge of the taxi’s flatbed
and, once again, stepped out into the air. Except this time as he fell, he
raised one hand and caught the wire with a mini-pulley now strapped around said
hand, and sailed downwind—all the way down to the ‘Drome, I realized—with his
legs raised in a V. I could have sworn I heard him yodeling.

Enid took one step towards the railing.

I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “Don’t
even
.”

“I was just going to
look
,” she said testily,
and shrugged off my hand. The taxi jetted off, taking up the slack from the
rear of the wire as it followed Cioran back down to the stadium.

I turned and saw the maître d’, CL-avatar check “in
hand” for Angharad (who was approving the payment just then), staring at the empty
space beyond the railing where the taxi had been a second ago. I guess she
wasn’t the one Cioran bribed to pull that stunt, I thought.

And next to the maître d’, Angharad stood and
watched Cioran whizzing across the wire and down into the glittering bowl of
the stadium. If I didn’t know any better, I thought, I’d say she was as envious
of his spontaneity as I was.

A Cioran concert
is something you have
to meet halfway. In theory, you could plug into the show via CL and experience
it most anywhere, albeit in a dialed-down version. Some people, on hearing
Cioran’s coming to town, scrape out their savings and buy themselves one of the
few front-row or backstage tickets that go on sale (and sell out almost
immediately thereafter). Anything for a shot at the real experience.

Most folks, though, buy the personal-presence
ticket—the one that requires you to be at least within a few kilometers’ radius
of the actual performance space. This creates any number of concerts outside
the concert. Congregations and impromptu Cioran parties spring up everywhere.
In restaurants and bars, the staff push the tables out of the way and create a
mini-stage. Public parks, private nature preserves, rooftops and backyards, the
conference rooms of hotels and the dens of exclusive clubs all become Cioran’s virtual
performance space. Even someone’s house, as long as there’s a decent slice of
floor, will do nicely. Any space smaller than that becomes problematic, but only
if you’re completely unwilling to suspend disbelief.

I knew that Enid would accept no substitutes. She
wanted to be down in the ‘Drome, experiencing the show in its full glory with
all the other Cioranies. That said, I was loathe to take Angharad down to the
‘Drome just as we were, without at least some kind of protection.

In the ride back down to the ground floor, I
called Kallhander. I didn’t waste time: “Congratulations; you and Ioné have the
job. Your first mission is to provide us with an escort.” I gave him a
rendezvous point—the lobby of the Gamma Anteria—and allowed myself the biggest,
slyest grin I’d worn in what felt like months.

“What’s got you all gassed up?” Enid asked.

“I just gave Kallhander
orders
.” We traded
handclasps, and as we did Angharad turned her head our way. She didn’t look
elated, but she didn’t look horrified either.

“They’re meeting us here,” I told her. “Then, the
‘Drome—and then, I assume, we’d have some time to do more than just get snubbed
by not-quite-friends of his.”

“There are many things I would like to ask him,”
Angharad said. “You see, I know that I will have many opportunities to speak to
Highenders during the coming summit, but . . . it will be in an
environment where the primary agenda is political. We will all be there for a
specific reason: to discuss whether or not the remaining Highend world
provisions for Old Way emigration should be extended or discontinued. I have no
delusions about why I am there, mind you; I know my participation in the summit
takes precedence over anything else I might bring with me. But at the same
time, I know there will be value in finding others to build a rapport with.”

“Hence, Cioran?” I said.

“He strikes me as one possible candidate. His
flamboyance, his creativity, his gregariousness—there are sparks there that
should be given the right sort of tinder.”

“And you’re the one to provide it,” Enid said,
sounding like she was making a dare out of it. “Is that it?”

“I might be one of the ones to provide it. How
else could I I find out?”

The lobby of the building was empty, save for all
that cheap glitz I’d winced at on the way in. It looked even gaudier on the way
out. That was the problem with protomic designs: the fact you could make just
about anything you wanted out of it didn’t mean that it was a good idea to make
it at all. My CL told me there were forty minutes to showtime, and counting.

“What d’you expect to get from him, exactly?” Enid
asked. My back was turned; I was running my hand idly along one of the more
ridiculous wall contours.

“He stands astride two realms,” Angharad said.
“The Highend gave him birth, provided him with his biology and the arena for
his formative years. The worlds and lives of the Old Way tempted him away from
all that. I gather they showed him not simply that other ways were possible,
but even fruitful. And I further gather that was something he was not only
primed to believe by the time he left home, but something he had already been
enacting.”

“You talk like you know him already.” Enid’s
squint had all the skepticism of her voice and then some.

“These are all things he has admitted to on his
own, if not in so many words.”

“Where, in his autobiography?” I said, turning
from the wall. “And you take that on face value?”

“My curiosity about him long predates encountering
his own words about himself.”

During these last couple of sentences, the front
doors opened and in came—no, not Kallhander and Ioné, as I’d been bracing for
the two of them to show up any second now, but instead another couple. They
were decked out in ruffles and flairs that made them look like missing bits of
décor for the very building they were walking into. The maître d’, no longer
redfaced after Cioran’s roof-jumping prank, greeted them and walked them into
the elevator, giving the Kathaya another bow in the process.

Angharad had seemed entirely uninhibited about
discussing these things even in the potential presence of total outsiders. Even
the lobby of the Gamma Anteria wasn’t
that
insular a place by nature;
you were bound to be overheard. Some part of me chalked it up to old habits on
her part: when you’ve spent so much of your career assuming every place you go
has been sanitized ahead of time for you, it’s easy to forget not every place
is.

But as the elevator doors melded shut, another
theory came to mind. Maybe this was her way of trying to break that very habit.
If there was one thing I knew about her—and which she’d gone to some lengths on
her own to prove—it was that she was determined to stick her own neck out for
what mattered. I admired it, while at the same time bothered by it. Was that
the only way to prove to others the depth of your sincerity?

Well, why not? I told myself. It’s what you did
yourself, isn’t it?

Yes, I replied to myself, and look where that got
me.

Well, where
did
it get you? Next to
her
,
for one thing. That’s not something to just dismiss, is it?

The doors swung open once more. Kallhander and Ioné
entered, and for once I was grateful for their presence as an interruption from
something.

“Inspectors Delius Kallhander and Continuum Ioné,”
Kallhander said to Angharad, by way of introduction. That’s right, I told
myself; the few times when Continuum folks associated with anyone not from
their little cosm, that was the format for whatever sobriquet they used. “We
are, and I speak for IPS as a whole when I say this, extremely grateful that
you have allowed us to provide our protection.”

Enid, to one side and slightly behind the two of
them, rolled her eyes and made a jack-off gesture. I bit the inside of my cheek
to keep from laughing.

“And I am grateful to receive your protection,”
Angharad declared.

And with that the stuffy formalities were over.

With Angharad sandwiched between the two of them,
we hustled out through an enclosed traffic tube and immediately into a waiting
car—yet another anonymous cab, but I’d figured by now these were all IPS
incognito jobs.

—
They saw you being cute back there, you know,
I
CLed Enid as soon as the doors closed.

—
They can just eat a whole
bag
of me,
you know,
she shot back.
But you just watch me; I’m on my best behavior
from now on.

—
Oh,
now
you tell me this. Very
convenient.

Neither officer had blinked when Angharad had told
them our destination was the ‘Drome. I hadn’t imagined they would, but I was
silently keeping a running tally of the number of times either of them were
wrenched off-course by something unexpected, to see when they finally did blink.
The officers’ only stipulation was that we make use of one of the ‘Drome’s
subdivisible VIP boxes. From what our invites told us, there was room enough in
the orchestra zone for a few more such seats. They seated up to four each—not a
limit of their construction, since they were instantiated on demand, but rather
the ‘Drome’s policies on ticketing.

It was a short enough ride that we could have
walked over—the more Highend the world, the less likely you are to use your
legs for anything unless you really want to—but they’d insisted on ferrying us.
Part of me would have been perfectly happy to mingle with the crowds that were
clogging the streets for blocks in all directions, filling the over- and
underpasses (the latter of which were visible through transparent paving
blocks), stumbling into each other’s backs on the multiple skybridges that led
into the ‘Drome from most every adjacent building.

Cioran’s face was everywhere, just as Angharad’s
image had been part of the scenery on Cytheria in the hours and days before her
talk. That sly-fox face beamed out from the millions of protomic light elements
on the outside of the ‘Drome. It glittered on the fronts of shirts, and on the
bare backs of those who went shirtless courtesy of subcutaneous protomic arrays.
A girl riding on her father’s shoulders waved a fan made of Type A right behind
the car’s window; on its surface was a looped image of Cioran cavorting around,
taken from a previous concert.

It came to me that I hadn’t seen a single picture
of Angharad anywhere in the city, in the entire time we’d been planetside.
Maybe that was just the easy contempt borne of familiarity: why bother with a
picture of someone who was part of the planet’s own cultural furniture, as it
were? I wanted to say it was nothing more than Cioran and Angharad occupying
two very different parts of the lives of these people—but on top of that I felt
the suspicion that everything Angharad represented to them was losing more
ground, and faster, than most people wanted to admit.

Most people except for, perhaps, Angharad herself.
And if anyone needed to be conscious of such a loss, or already was, it was
her.

We left the thousand-legged crowds behind as we
entered the ‘Drome’s underground garage and parked in one of the enclosed VIP
docks. From there we would walk through a custom-extruded tunnel under the
‘Drome’s floor, which led directly up into the booths we had reserved. No
crowds, no fighting for a spot—but most importantly, little to no risk of being
ambushed by someone who wanted anything from an autograph to some freshly-spilled
blood. It was safe and convenient, but a luxury found in few places—and it was also
terribly unnerving to walk through all those corridors in near-silence, nothing
but the sounds of our own feet, then climb a short flight up and find ourselves
in the middle of several thousand screaming fans.

Enid and I took one booth; Angharad, Kallhander
and Ioné the other. The VIP booths were spaced every several meters apart in
the orchestra area, slightly raised and surrounded on all sides (including the
top) by people with general-admission tickets. The booths provided a few clever
CL extensions: when you sat in one and plugged yourself in, the walls of the
booth were masked out—replaced selectively by views from the sensory surfaces
on all sides of the booth. Everyone else outside saw the booth in the middle of
the floor like a pillbox on a battlefield; you saw the crowd around you and the
show in front of you.

Or, I thought, you could just pay for offsite VIP
ticketing, get an omniscience pass, and see the whole show through whatever sensory
surface you wanted in the whole arena.

But not for a show like this. For Cioran, not
being there yourself for what he had to give you was like breathing through one
nostril. Not just because of him, but also because of the thousands striving to
be that much nearer to him when he gave of himself. When we stepped into the
booth and connected with the CL feed there, we felt the walls of the booth melt
away around us and let the crowd’s roar shake our chests. Across the rest of
the city, and maybe the rest of the planet, the same thing was happening in countless
rooms and hallways, on numberless hilltops and rooftops—but only here did you
know that with one step you could be in the middle of that crowd for real.

I was considering plunging out into that crowd
myself. I hadn’t expect the atmosphere of the show to invigorate me as much as
it did, but I also wanted to keep a direct eye on Enid—although if she wanted
to merge with the mob outside, I was going to be hard-pressed to stop her. She
was pressed right up against the all-glass front of the booth (which from the
outside looked like a dull onyx mirror), doing her patented
bounding-up-and-down-in-place that I knew now was a symptom of irrepressible
excitement. The stage outside was still blank, but if your eyes were shut and
you only had the seething noise all around us to go on, you’d think the show
was already well under way.

A moment later, the stage wasn’t empty anymore—it
was covered in light that laced in from above and below, back and sides,
swiveling about to focus on a single slender figure that flung himself in from
one side. It was a beautiful bit of misdirection; you looked and looked,
thinking the light show was guiding your eyes, only to have Cioran burst out of
nowhere and have the music come crashing in behind him after his first few
words:

We’ve only just travelers

With everywhere left to go—

Sometimes it was just Cioran and a direct line
from his CL; sometimes it was him and his polylute. This time, it was a full
band—all professional-level fans he’d handpicked and asked to go on standby
before making planetfall. They had to know his material by heart, and be able
to show up on time and play it on a moment’s notice. For this one gig they
typically earned more than most other people in the same line of work earned in
a whole month.