Flight of the Vajra (34 page)

“He’s just mushing around with some red tape, he
told me. He’ll be right back.
Wow
, this is awful.” She put the film back
over the plate and reached for a sealed bottle of barley tea to rinse out her
taste buds—or to put back in everything she’d lost while sweating it out up on
stage, judging from how quickly she drained most of it.

She was uncapping a second bottle when Cioran
entered, having swapped his flashy stage outfit for something only slightly
more buttoned-down but which still gave his bare chest (now in “male” mode) plenty
of room to advertise. He reached down to give Enid a hug—one which lifted her
off the couch high enough to allow her legs to dangle freely—gave me a hearty
clap on the shoulder which I returned, then popped loose one of the end cushions
from the couch, positioned it in front of Angharad and sat as if preparing to
receive a lecture from her. Maybe that had been part of his plan.

“My backstage invitation,” he said to her, “wasn’t
just a matter of socializing. I’ll come right to the point: I want to offer my
services.”

Enid and I both leaned forward hard enough to make
someone think the room had tilted.

“By ‘services’,” Angharad said, “do you mean as an
entertainer?”

“No. As a diplomatic attaché.”

It was Kallhander’s turn to look surprised. He
seemed ready to say something, then thought better of it and allowed Cioran to
hang himself with his own rope.

“I suppose I don’t need to explain to anyone that
I’ve been quite the peripatizer,” Cioran went on. “I can’t stay in any one
place for too long, or I just
itch.
So I flit about, and in flitting
about I make friends and enemies alike. More the former than the latter, if I’m
allowed to quote my own balance sheet. And those friends run the absolute
gamut. A Cassivarian judicial administrator here; a Viridiani IPS attaché
there; a whole
bunch
of groupies on Fallada, who have since gone their
merry ways and become influencers of all stripes. You don’t even have to ask
me
to prove it. Ask anyone else who’s seen me come and go, and seen what I’ve left
behind in my wake.

“My point is this. You, Madam Your Grace, are
about to embark on an errand of diplomacy where you’ll be attempting to
influence the opinions and decisions of a whole slew of Highend hobnobbers,
nabobs, and knob-jobs. I’m going to wager—at the risk of touching a nerve and
possibly a neuron or two as well—that you are entering into such discussions at
a disadvantage. What you will need, unless you have already found someone to
fill this role, is someone who has already strode through many of the same
corridors that they have—someone who even knows a few of them more than
slightly casually. I am such a person, and I have strode those very corridors
not just once but many times. I know more than just the politics of each of these
diplomats’ worlds. I know many of
them,
period.

“I offer you, on minimal condition, the use of my
services as a diplomatic consultant during the course of this upcoming summit.
I offer you an advantage many others would pay to enjoy, and which I would
scarcely grant anyone even if they did. I don’t even ask for compensation, only
the privilege to enjoy your company—and the fine company you’ve gathered around
you. I also promise to . . . how to put this? . . . keep
some of my more libidinous behavior solidly in check during that time. If
people narrow their eyes at the fact that I’m in your company, I will be the
first one to suggest that I leave.”

He sat back. Despite being seated, he’d been in
motion the whole time: leaning in, leaning out, bending himself sidelong,
raising himself up on his hands to swing his legs about. A human origami
sculpture, I thought, folding himself for our eyes, and he was able to do it
with enough precision and skill to not make such behavior seem like fidgeting
or, more appropriate for him, a bid for attention.

Angharad’s only response at first was to recross
her own legs. “What you offer,” she said at length, “makes sense in the light
of your admitted experience. But something you hinted at does suggest a greater
issue. You mentioned those who might ‘narrow their eyes’ at you being in my
company. Who specifically were you thinking of?”

“If you mean your followers, actually, no.” Cioran
pointed over his shoulder. “That crowd you witnessed earlier today—I would
hazard a fair majority of them actually consider themselves Old Way. I refer
instead most to those in the Highend worlds who are, well—”

“Peeved at you,” I said.

“Fine way to put it, yes.”

“They’re peeved because to them you’re all but a
traitor.” I wasn’t being accusatory, just running through facts known to
everyone as a way to lay out my argument. “You ditched out on them so you could
slum around on Old Way worlds and ‘play to their cultural decadence’, or
something along those lines. Of course, that’s a very selective reading of the
truth . . . but it’s enough to look bad in most people’s eyes,
right?”

“And, so you might be thinking, make them inclined
to take Her Grace here that much less seriously. But: Consider this.” Cioran
held up three fingers. “One, they’re going to have attachés of their own, from
the Old Way side of the aisle, who may well have reputations every bit as
checkered as mine. (Not that I consider my reputation to be all that checkered,
if you ask me, but you get the idea.) So for them to attack you for having me
along is going to seem like the crassest hypocrisy—and frankly, I wouldn’t
hesitate at pouncing on them for it if they play that card.

“Two—I’d bet my take for this concert they’re
banking on you not having the support of someone of my ilk. This is politics,
not a dinner party—even if there are a great many dinner parties planned for
this outing. They will look for every weakness you have, and the mere fact
you’re Old Way is itself a weakness to them. The more you break that up, the
better.”

“Three—where else in the cosm are you going to
find someone to help you out who’s this much fun?”

He uncrossed his legs one last time and planted
his feet flat on the floor between them. In my mind I was giving Angharad yet
another award for sporting the best look of benevolent detachment I’d seen in
my whole life.

“I do have advisors of my own I can draw on,” she
began, “people who are intimately familiar with the Highend Worlds. You were
correct to assume as much. That said, you have made a very intriguing case for
yourself—” (
Intriguing
, I thought; what a word.) “—and I shall take your
offer under consideration. Mr. Sim here knows how to contact you?”

“I do now,” I said.

“Although,” Cioran put in, leaning back towards
me, “just to be absolutely clear, there’s a strong chance I may be asked to
participate in something at least as, um, momentous—well, personally momentous,
all other things being equal—within the next three days or so. I don’t mean to
pressure you, but if there is a ‘no’ to be had, or cosmos forbid a ‘yes’, would
it be terribly . . . undiplomatic to ask for an answer sooner rather
than later?”

“You’ll get an answer one way or another,” I
assured him. “I hated never having my messages returned either.”
What’s the
rush?
I wanted to growl at him.
Got someone else you need to duck out on?

“Splendid! That’s all I ask. Now—” He spun in his
seat and faced the table. “—I don’t know about you, but I’d like to have
something in my stomach a little less vile than this spread. Enid, you didn’t
listen to me when I said this stuff was terrible, did you?”

Enid shook her head. “I’ve had worse. I just don’t
remember when.”

An idea I’d been unable to do justice to for days
on end came back to mind.

“Well, I thought maybe . . . ” I turned
my hands outwards. “ . . . my place?”

“What do you mean, your place?” Enid looked at me
up and down. “You don’t have a place down here—at least, not yet?”

“Are you referring to the
Vajra
?” Angharad
said. “As I recall, the ship is still docked, and might be somewhat
inconvenient a space for this many people.”

“That’s
exactly
what I was thinking of using
this as an excuse to do something about,” I said, standing up and arching my
shoulders. The number of joints I popped doing that impressed even Enid.

When you want to work with protomics—
really
work
with them, not just manipulate a factory-locked shape—you need
three things: raw unlocked protomic substrate, some kind of work environment,
and a materials license. For the first and the third, I turned to Angharad:
since I was going to be an employee of hers, I had to complete some placeholder
paperwork (it didn’t take more than the time needed to go back to the cab in
the garage) and have her grant me the provisional use of her organization’s
materials license. Most organizations of any size had one, even if they barely
used it. Achitraka House was no different, although I was willing to bet this
one makeover of the
Vajra
was going to use more of their substrate
allotment than they’d racked up in the entire past month. Or even year.

The work environment, though, was another story.
For that I would need the dockyard where the
Vajra
was currently stowed.

Enid and Cioran spent most of the ride out to the
dockyard playing what-planets-have-
you
-been-to?, out loud for the
edification of everyone else in the cab—well, mostly Angharad. I had to keep
steeling myself away from feeling bad for her. She could have cheated and worn
a claphat, like the one she’d used to speak to me via CL when I was at the
hotel (or the way she’d first spoken to Prelate Jainio), but for now we were
among people who had courtesy enough to not force her to do that. But the
summit, I told myself, is going to be a very different story.

The sun was most of the way down by the time we
left the ‘Drome, and it was entirely gone as we exited city limits. A building
about forty stories tall, limned in blue and silver thanks to its own inner
illumination, was at the very edge of town—well, it had been about forty
stories tall, but we could see it was in the slow process of being unraveled from
the top down. The pieces were crawling away, block by slow block,
redistributing themselves out into several smaller buildings, the whole process
taking weeks on end. I’d heard buildings more than
x
stories tall
weren’t allowed to remain standing for more than
y
months if they were
more than
z
meters from the center of the city, and evidently some over-ambitious
developer had run smack into that particular local legislation and couldn’t
stall any longer. People were still happy to pay for the luxury to live at the
top floor of
something
, for as long as they could get away with it.

The dock where the
Vajra
was parked could
be used as a work platform, but only for vehicles up to a certain size. Based
on the specs I’d pulled up for the dock, size wasn’t an obstacle—plus, they
provided a substrate feed on-site as well, albeit at a slight markup. It wasn’t
anything I could handle out of my own pocket, and I’d decided from the
beginning that I would foot the bill first (including the licensing fee) before
even thinking of asking Angharad to cover the cost of the project. Plus, I
mused, if our deal soured, I could leave without feeling like too many strings
were attached.

The changes I planned to make to the
Vajra
weren’t
all that grandiose, compared to some of the other projects I’d been hip-deep in—or
compared to the one I was about to take on. I just needed to double the crew
cabin, maybe expand the cargo hold by about fifty percent, and rearrange a
couple of other things to make the kitchen into something a little less
provisional.

A crew of . . . six, I told myself. Just
to be on the safe side.

I gave the ship the global substrate-unlock
command, allowing a good five minutes for the command to penetrate every cell
and fiber in the hull. From the sensory surfaces in the docking bay I could see
the each bulkhead and subcompartment detach from its neighbors and extrude
intakes that were fed by nozzles that felt forward from the dock like so many
elephant’s trunks. Substrate flowed in and began to fill the newly-emptied
spaces, like intelligent honey rolling back into its comb.

Through access ports I’d built into the original design,
I injected sheets of type A and B substrate to redo the upholstery, flooring,
glass-analogue and other surfaces. The kitchen would be fully functional within
the hour; the hull, spaceworthy in about four to five hours. Flakes and
splinters of decommissioned substrate—all the old flooring, emulated fabrics
and portals, now reduced to crystalline tinsel—were scooped up, blotted up,
siphoned up and drained away by a spidery scavenger pod I’d extruded from the
ship’s inside ceiling. The recycling fee was minimal; I’d always been good
about re-using existing structures instead of ditching things wholesale and
replacing them.

I did a fair amount of this in the forty minutes
we spent sitting in the cab, with Angharad nestled against me on one side and
Enid waving her legs around in front of me. She quit doing that as soon as the
cab pulled into the access tunnel, and when I showed her a feed of
Vajra 2.0
from inside the dock she leaped out of the cab feet-first.

Even Angharad seemed impressed. The six of us
stood in the entryway to the dock, ogling my handiwork—ogling long enough that
after a moment I detached myself from their company and walked towards the ship’s
gangway to prod them into coming closer. Everyone with a CL feed could see the
old
Vajra
for themselves courtesy of the captures I’d made from the sensory
surfaces, with the new
Vajra
right in front of them for comparison. As
for Angharad, she didn’t need a CL to like what she saw; she watched with the
rest of us as the last of the big changes cured up over the course of the next
half hour or so.

The new
Vajra
was twice the height of the
previous one, although about the same girth. I hadn’t done much more than take
the same design, flip it, and stack it on top of itself, like a pair of dinner
plates—but it made the inherent symmetry in the design stand out all the more.
The two revolving lobes in the center that held crew and cargo now numbered four,
and the surrounding crescents were somewhat thicker. Again, I thought, when it
takes you that long to come up with something that good, why mess with it?

“I also finally got around to adding a kitchen,” I
said. “A
proper
kitchen.”

“What kept you?” Enid led the way up the ramp.

“Something I don’t know if you’d be familiar
with.” The expanded cabin area allowed the bunch of us to sit in a circle
facing each other, as if we were in a slightly scaled-down version of the
lounge we’d been in not long ago. Of the six couches, the one closest to what
was arbitrarily designated the bow was also the largest—you can’t have a
captain’s chair without it looking the part—but I was sure the rest would be no
less comfortable.

“There’s two kinds of people who travel
habitually,” I went on. “The first is people like you: you’re not attached to
any one mode of travel, or any one vehicle—”

“Not . . . really.” Enid shook her head.
“Well, we did have our own ship, but . . . Yeah, I guess. It wasn’t
like it was
my
ship, or even
theirs
. It was just ‘the ship’.”

“The second variety, then, is people who do have
their own ship,” Angharad said.

“Right.” I nodded her way. “What I’ve noticed
about people in the first camp is they don’t have any incentive to do much with
the space they’re given except make it comfortable enough to endure. But
there’s also people in the second camp who are the same way.” I winked at
everyone. “After dividing my time living out of the
Vajra
and living out
of hotel rooms, and bungalows, and being a guest on the good grace of friends,
I’m realizing I thought of this ship the same way. It wasn’t a place I
lived
.”

“Only a mode of transport,” Ioné said, “and
nothing more.”

“Nevertheless,” Kallhander added, “this ship has
been the closest thing to a home for you, hasn’t it?”

“That’s just it.” I gestured at the newly-extruded
kitchen at the back of the cabin. “It wasn’t home in anything but name. I never
added enough space for more than me and maybe a couple of other people, because
. . . well, it never felt like it would be worthwhile. It would
always just be me, in the end, and . . . I knew somehow that wasn’t
what I really wanted. You don’t make a space this big, and you don’t really
want to do much with it, unless you plan to fill it with
company
.” I
walked to the countertop, activated the heating surfaces and let the warmth
from the almost-invisible glow soak into my hands. “And company’s here at
last.”

Cioran hadn’t seated himself. He’d spent the whole
time running the entire length of the cabin in a squat, fingers splayed out to
explore every curved edge and swept-back, glassed-silver surface. “They do call
‘em ‘Sim Surfaces’ for a reason,” he declared as he reached the rear of the
cabin (the bathroom door, actually), stood, and reached up to explore where the
floor bent and met the ceiling. “You
know
that look, whether it’s on the
outside of a ship or the inside! And what a kick it is to see it all up-close
and personal, freshly rendered for the first time in . . . what is
it, years?”

“Years.” I turned from the stove, wondering if
anyone else heard in that word what to my ears sounded like wonder. Because it
was still hard for me to fathom how, in the last day or so, so much of my
curiosity and ingenuity had been reawakened all at once. Even as I’d been
revamping the
Vajra
from the cab’s back seat, I’d also been thinking
about how all of Achitraka House could be unfolded into a single ribbon of
compartments and cubicles and sent up the elevator. Each floor, and each room
on each floor, was inconsistently sized, so . . . I’m getting
distracted again, I thought. But in a good way. A very good way.

“And now,” I said, “
calories
.”

It took about half an hour
for the
grocery delivery to come through. I spent the whole time beforehand walking
from cabin to cabin, running my hands across every surface and checking the
melding of each joist and the way every active surface melded and split and
re-melded. It was the euphoria of it all, I told myself. The sheer thrill of
everything going on around me; that was what impelled me to stand in front of a
cooker and prepare a meal for both myself and the rest of these people. Two of
them I trusted not at all; one of them was only a notch about a total stranger;
the rest I felt, well, responsible for. But I didn’t mind any of that, somehow;
I was celebrating a return to form, and they were all invited to the party.

For all, there was a hot-pot: locally-printed
ostrich and angus, roof-garden-grown bamboo shoots, cellar-bred mushrooms and tofu.
Angharad (and to my surprise Ioné) stuck with the vegetable parts of the meal,
despite the meat being Old Way OK. I’d also prepared a shepherd’s salad and
ordered in a quick-rise loaf of herb-crust bread as an alternative for the two
of them, which they also made short work of. In Ioné’s case, it wasn’t so much
that she
couldn’t
eat such things; she was just able to get along fine
without them. Kallhander ate with the same gusto as the women—inasmuch as
someone as stolid as him had “gusto” for anything—and didn’t seem to worry
about me having maybe mickey-finn’d his portion. Then again, the sensor mesh in
his left glove alone would probably have alerted him to anything fishy.

It was only after a solid five minutes of silence
had filled the room—silence except for the chewing—that I realized why I’d gone
so far out of my way for all of them. A selfish feeling, that’s what it was:
the urge to sit in a room,
my
room, with people I knew—even if they were
only people I knew slightly—and have a meal together.

I compromised. “How is everything?” I said, and
instantly winced: what am I, a damn
waiter
? I should be making
real
conversation.

From every point of the table came grunts of
affirmation. Enid and Cioran produced thumbs-up; Kallhander and Ioné CLed “Very
good / Very impressive” (right on top of each other, too), and Angharad bowed
with hands together over her bowl.

“I was hoping I could have pulled together
something a little more structured,” I said, “but the nice thing about hot-pot
is it takes very little work ahead of time. And it’s open-ended; with all these
different appetites, I figured it would be the best choice on short notice
. . . ” Something popped back to mind that had nothing to do with
food. “Cioran—stupid question, hope you don’t mind me asking, but what happened
with the rest of the band? Normally, there’s an after-party, isn’t there?”

“Hm? Oh, this time—well, let’s just say there were
mitigating circumstances for all parties involved. After I did such a fine job
of persuading Enid here to join me on stage—”

“I didn’t need all that much persuading!” Enid put
her elbow into his side.

“—I decided to pre-empt any after-show events, and
I convinced the other bandmembers to postpone the festivities until sometime
tomorrow. They were understanding; they all know my time here is limited, and I
need to spend it as best I can.” He capped off the sentence by stuffing his
mouth with shoots.

“Cioran, is there any one place that you do call
home?” Angharad said.

“I used to worry about whether or not I had such a
thing.” Cioran lifted a mushroom out of the bowl, made as if he was about to
bite into it, then simply threw it into his mouth whole. “About whether or not
having a ‘home’ was something I’d . . .
underrated
all this
time. I know any number of planets where any number of people are willing to
offer me a place to stay, indefinitely, but are they ‘home’? And it’s not as if
I haven’t in the past had the money for a place of my own; it isn’t about
finances. See, over time, something else has occurred to me—something that only
occurs to someone, I’d say, that has spent the better part of their life cutting
attachments instead of keeping them. When you do that long enough, you realize
what matters most isn’t what you have right now. It’s what you can ... how to
put this? —It’s what you know you can make come to you when all you do is
stretch out your hand. When you live like that long enough, unencumbered by
many of the things that other people bind themselves up in, you learn how to
make such things come to you all the more readily. You learn not to worry as
much about where you’ll be tomorrow, or in a year solar. You teach yourself how
to always yearn for that next step out into . . . eh, who knows what?
And you relax into that.”