Flight of the Vajra (36 page)

“You going back with him?” I said to Enid, canting
a head at Cioran as he disappeared into the bathroom. First time I’d seen him
do that, but I guessed there was a first time to catch someone at everything.

Enid knuckled at one of her eyes. “I’d love to,
but . . . after everything that happened today, I know I’m not doing
myself any favors if I don’t get some rest.”

“Wise plan. —Still, it looks like you two made
quite a connection.”

She pulled her finger away from her eye and perked
right up. “You have no idea! —Well, maybe you do, but still! I mean, he and I
were talking a bit about some things—all depending on what happens, of course.
If he comes along . . . ”

“What if he doesn’t? Is it going to be just the
two of you, then?”

Her perkiness perked down a bit. “I haven’t
forgotten about my dad, if that’s what you’re talking about. I just . . .
there’s a lot of things he’s considering that sound like really good ideas.
He’s been thinking about creating a more permanent troupe, for one. An actual
band
,
instead of just having people fight for a spot whenever he makes planetfall. He
likes the spontaneity of that stuff, but—”

“—but in all honesty,” Cioran said, “I’m growing
more and more curious about exploring the long-term creative synergy that forms
between compatriots instead of just total-strangers-turned-friends.” He
unreeled all this as he emerged from the bathroom, ducking slightly under a
crossbeam as he did. “Enid here—I hope you won’t find this to be just bare
flattery!—having her on stage with me, especially after the connection we
forged the night before, reawakened me to the fertile possibilities that lie
thus far unharvested in such things.” He rested his hands on Enid’s shoulders
from behind and bounced lightly in place—the sort of thing I’d seen Enid
herself doing any number of times, which made it all the odder to witness.

“What kept you from trying before?” I said.

“No one thing. Oh, if it was any
one
thing,
it was certainty—the certainty of my faith in being eternally unmoored, that’s
all. If I find a few others who are willing to share that unmooring, does that
make me anchored to them? Or do we just learn all the better how to free each
other? I suppose this is the only way to find out.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said, not believing a
word of it myself.

Enid gave him one last chest-collapsing hug and
wished him well. Cioran promised he’d be in touch tomorrow as well, and the
minute the cabin door resealed I let out a long breath I hadn’t even really
been holding. It got the look of exasperation from Enid I’d hoped it would
produce.

“You
really
don’t like him much, do you?”
she shot at me. She was smiling when she said it, but with folded arms and a
serrated undertone to her words.

“It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s that I’m not
sure if I can trust him.”

“You and Angharad, both.” She seated herself on
the edge of what she was claiming as “her” acceleration couch / bed and kept
giving me the same undiluted dirty look. “Why don’t you just come out and say
it? You don’t like the fact that he likes
me.
Jealousy gets you nowhere,
you know.”

And once again the fact I was three times her age
came back to slap me in the face. “Look. One, I’m not your dad. Yes, I feel a
responsibility, but not
that
way. Two, from everything I’ve gathered
about Cioran, he’s the kind of person who promises a lot of things but is very
selective about what he actually delivers. Look at it: he says he wants to keep
the Old Way alive, but without ever actually being a part of it. He wants to
preserve it so he can slum around on those worlds and still feel like there’s
people he can dazzle. Is that flattery or condescension?”

“Since when did you suddenly start giving such a
huge damn about the Old Way?”

“Since around lunchtime, since you’re counting.
—Look, again. I don’t hate the guy. But jealousy? Are you seriously surprised
that
someone
in this cosm is actually jealous of
Cioran
? Sure,
I’m a little jealous; I’m not going to pretend none of that exists. But don’t
assume me being skeptical of his motives is out of jealousy. I can be jealous
of him for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with wondering why he
horned in on us and pitched his services to Angharad as if his pension depended
on it.”

She still didn’t look completely convinced, so I
eased off on my tone.

“You guys were great on stage,” I said. “I’d love
to see more of that. And with any luck, I’d love to see more of it knowing
there are . . . no strings attached. Know what I mean?”

“Do they really think he could be a spy?”

“They probably thought
I
was a spy. They
probably thought
you
were a spy. Why not? We’re drifters, all three of
us. We have no loyalties except to ourselves. We’re independently wealthy—well,
in your case, it’s more like you know how to live frugally, which is even
better if you ask me. Of course they’re going to suspect people like us. I
don’t think we’d still be even talking to any of them unless they figured we
had
something
valid to contribute.”

“In my case, it’s because Angharad made her
promise. Nothing more than that.” She sounded more resigned than anything else.
“And it was kind of the same thing for you, wasn’t it? Now that I think about
it.”

A pause, then she went on: “You know what’s the
worst part about her making a promise like that?” She didn’t sound resigned
anymore; this was bitterness. “What happens if we go all the way out there
together, and then we discover Dad is—you know, he’s dead or he’s moved on, or
he’s just plain not going to talk to me or even her anymore, for whatever
reason . . . We come all that way for nothing, and I feel like if
that happens all I’m going to be able to do is hate her even more for promising
something she couldn’t ever give me.”

“When did she ever promise you that she’d give you
your dad back?” I said.

After she’d been looking at her toes for a good
thirty seconds, I decided that had been the wrong way to put it. I stood up and
put my own hands on her shoulders. “She may not have come out and said as
much,” I went on, “but maybe when someone of her caliber promises to help you,
it feels like they’re offering you the moon, doesn’t it?” There; she looked up
at me and nodded. “She promised us diplomatic protection, and that had the same
flavor to it. It gets to feeling like she has real godhood floating around her.
But . . . ”

“ . . . she’s only human,” Enid said in
a cracked voice. “I know.” It came out sounding like,
I wish I didn’t.

“You should get some rest,” I said, letting go of
her. “That or Cioran’s going to make wisecracks about the bags under your
eyes.”

Her giggle was minimal, but it still qualified. “And
Angharad’s going to bust your chops about why you can’t fit two words together.”

“Yeah, like ‘Your’ and ‘Grace’.”

I should have dropped right off the edge into
sleep—just like she did within minutes after pulling the canopy shut on her
acceleration couch. I couldn’t have heard her snoring through the canopy, but
after reading her vital signs I could have sworn I did hear it. Such things
were a reminder of something else that had changed in me after the
Kyritan
,
of how before that I’d barely been able to sleep at night what with all the
ideas that would bubble up right in the wee hours. I didn’t want to be a
short-sleeper—I
liked
my dreamtime once a solar day, thank you—so I would
log everything that came to mind until I finally did nod off of my own accord.
After the disaster, there was no reason to stay awake anymore, nothing to invent
or muse over.

But now here I was again, lying under the sleep canopy,
staring up into its milky underside and seeing there the towers and spires of
Achitraka House unraveling themselves and becoming a kilometers-long ribbon of cubical
or tetrahedronical pearls to be towed up the elevator into orbit . . .
and the prospect of grappling with this challenge filled me like warm blood
displacing cold. Something beyond the disaster was within reach now. What kind
of entanglement engine setup could you expect to fit onto whatever came out the
other end? Was there some more efficient way to repackage the target
configuration, the better to reduce the total number of EE fields you’d need to
encapsulate the whole thing? I didn’t want to sleep, not when I had something like
this zinging back and forth between my ears, and me so happy to have it back
too. But sleep came for me anyway, filled as it was with dreams of palaces and starships.

There’s nothing quite like waking up
and finding several dozen folks all waiting to hold a press conference with you
and three of your most newly-minted friends.

It had been a long time since I’d been the subject
of a formal press conference. Sometime right after I’d accepted my payoff I’d staged
one, but that whole period of time had just become one continuous smudge in my
memory. I was grateful for that. What I remember mostly was sitting in my seat
with my face burning and not even really answering any of the questions,
wanting nothing more than the chance to get out of there and shut many, many doors
behind me.

But this time, I didn’t feel harried or
threatened. A nice surprise. I woke up, saw the pending messages, roused Enid,
tried to get in touch with Achitraka House—all the while thinking
Well, this
is what has to be done, doesn’t it?
No dismay. Maybe a tiny touch of unease
about how this could blow up in my face, but at that point my face had already had
so much blow up in it, what could one more explosion do?

Angharad agreed that it would be a good idea to
make a formal statement. If word had gotten out on its own, she theorized, then
we should confirm what we can and be sincere about it without sounding
defensive. Kallhander and Ioné concurred: the IPS’s public relations division
had already issued a press release on their behalf, which was not what had
sparked all the attention in the first place but did confirm for a lot of
people that attention needed to be paid. And so we cleaned ourselves up, put on
our best jackets and ties, and let them bombard us with questions. Enid and I
took them from the bridge of the
Vajra
; Angharad took hers through a
link at Achitraka House. Cioran was looped in as well, from wherever he was.

Q: Mr. Sim, is it true that you’ll now working
with the Kathaya?

A: It is, yes. I’ve been contracted to do some
work for her. I can’t talk about the details just yet, unfortunately
. . .

Q: What’s your relationship with Enid Sulley?
The Kathaya’s relationship to her?

A: Enid Sulley’s an adult emancipate who’s
traveling with the Kathaya so that she can speak to her father, a member of a
Wayfarer cult. The Kathaya’s repeatedly stressed that she does not speak for
Wayfarers . . .

Q: Is there any truth to the rumor that the
Kathaya was seen in the company of Cioran?

A: The two did meet after Cioran’s last
concert, yes. As for what they talked about, I couldn’t tell you. For all I
know they were comparing makeup tips.
(That one made Enid giggle.)

Q: Miss Sulley, any comments about being
invited to join Cioran on-stage?

A: Cioran’s a fantastically creative man, and I
couldn’t have asked for more. He and I worked really well together, and there’s
the chance we may work together again once we’ve both gotten a few things out
of the way.
(Nice, I thought; no coaching needed.)

Q: Cioran, can you talk about how any of this
is going to change your future work?

A: All I can say is that it will. More than
that, even I don’t know yet, and I actually rather like it that way! It’s a
long time since I was able to surprise myself this thoroughly.

Q: Mr. Sim, has there been any change in the
status of your agreement with your former employers?

A: No, there’s been no change.
(I decided
not to push that one. I didn’t imagine it would get me anywhere I wanted to be
in the first place.)

Q: Your Grace, do you believe the incident on
Cytheria was an attempt to prevent you from joining the Bridgehead Summit?

A: I do not know if that was the intent but I
would not dismiss such a possibility out of hand. At this time I shall refrain
from speculating without additional evidence.

Q: Can you comment at all on the nature of your
work with Mr. Sim? Does it have anything to do with Bridgehead?

A: The only comment I can make is that Mr. Sim
is working closely with me on a project which will be revealed in its full
scope after the Bridgehead conference. That will be the best context for doing
so.

There was more, all of it softball stuff.
Well-wishing from Old Way contingents (and Angharad well-wishing them right
back); Cioran fans with love letters written on the side of a building whose
windowpanes had been commandeered for that (which gave him no end of laughs); some
dingbat hinting that I’d sleazed my way into both Enid
and
Angharad’s
beds, which got the offender booted and blocked from the conference in short
order, and which got a firm, quiet little rebuttal.
I would like to put it
on the record that I am not having a “relationship” with Enid Sulley or the
Kathaya, except in the sense that we met under adverse circumstances and out of
that experience have become friends and now co-workers.
I didn’t add that
the only people who would have given a damn were the heavier-duty Old Way types
who still got hung up about professional and personal lives becoming so entangled,
but why let anyone second-guess you? And having Enid and Angharad say the same
things in their own different ways probably didn’t hurt either, although we
probably could have done without Enid adding:
Because if he
had
tried
to get under my skirt, he’d be talking to you through a broken nose right about
now.

“Was that really necessary?” I groaned at her
after we’d closed up the CL links.

“Oh, come on. You were biting your lip to keep
from laughing.”

“And some of the press crew were cracking up anyway.
Well, at least you got on their good sides. —You realize they’re probably going
to be tracking down your old friends from the circus, grilling them about you?”

She shrugged. “They’re not going to say anything
about me I don’t already know. Or wouldn’t want someone else to hear. The worst
thing they could say about me is that I—”

“—ran off with some stranger she just met.”

“And so what if I did? Whose business is that
except mine? You said as much yourself.” She bent down next to the console
where I was sitting—I’d flattened it out to eat on, trying to get my first meal
of the day into me—and looked me in the eye. “You really, really worry way too
much about what other people think of you.”

I paused with my hardboiled egg halfway to my
mouth, then threw it in and formulated an answer while I was chewing. “And
you,” I finally said, “seem to think that people in certain positions shouldn’t
worry at all about such things. I have to think about that stuff now more than
ever, given the company we keep.”

“If you know you get so worked up about it, why’d
you say yes to Angharad in the first place?”

“Because I knew if I didn’t I’d never stop
regretting it.” I put one end of my zwieback toast in my mouth and broke it in
half. “So, yes, maybe between me worrying about it too much and you worrying
about it not enough there’s a happy medium.”

“Or maybe you could just not worry about it at all
and deal with whatever happens whenever it happens.
If
it ever happens
in the first place.” She stood up and flapped her hands in my direction,
exasperated, then strode into the bathroom and discovered to her dismay you
couldn’t really slam the door. She settled for blowing out a groan.

I drank the rest of my coffee and tried to
remember what kind of carefree feelings, if any, I’d had at her age. As far
back as I could remember I had always felt like someone’s eyes were on me—maybe
not malevolent ones, but that didn’t mean malevolence couldn’t come of them passing
on what they saw, if only innocently. Over time I’d cursed that feeling away
and found there was very little that could hurt you as long as you acted like
it wouldn’t. And then one fine day I’d lost that feeling, and had been
struggling to get it back ever since.

She has a head start on you, I told myself: she
flung herself out into far deeper a void than you ever had, far earlier in
life, and with fewer nets under her (except for those on stage). She didn’t
depend on the same things you depended on—and maybe you didn’t depend on them
either, once you looked at it all closely enough.

By the time she came back out, I’d finished my
breakfast—early lunch at this point—and was running a preliminary version of
the Achitraka House “unpacking” as a simulation, projected into the space over
my console. I could have just run it straight into my CL, but call it a kind of
etiquette: by having it running out in the open when Enid emerged, it worked as
a tacit hint that I wanted her to see it for herself and appreciated the
feedback. It worked: she paused at the bathroom door, seeing the whole of
Achitraka House unzipping itself into a single long tube.

“Ever seen one of those Najohapi rope
constructions?” I said out loud.

She shook her head, stepped in closer.

“They make all kinds of things out of rope—mats,
dolls, doll-houses—all made out of just a single length of rope folded up and
coiled against itself. Now imagine someone building something the size of, oh,
say, the Achitraka House out of rope that’s a couple of meters in diameter. Try
taking that apart. The whole construction unzips itself into a single long rope
a couple of meters wide and many kilometers long. The hard part is figuring out
how to get it to unzip, because it can’t be more than those few meters wide or
tall at any one point—and if you have to pack the crew and the cargo in along
with it, that makes things even more complicated. So you wind up subdividing
the whole construction into lots of little units that can unfold and re-fold to
go up and down the elevator, like a chain. One big room has to be repacked as three
little ones, all for the sake of fitting in the elevator.
That’s
where
you wind up ripping most of your hair out.”

Enid reached out and interrupted the simulation,
turning it various ways and single-stepping it back and forth. “You think she’s
going to want to take the whole building up at once? Lock, stock and council?”

“From the way she was talking about this whole
project, I had the bad feeling we might all be pulling up roots in a massive
hurry. I’d rather overplan for something like that than get caught with my
cummerbund untied.”

“For once, I don’t blame you for worrying.”

I spent the next hour making as much of a mountain
as I could out of the molehill of data Angharad had sent me about the House. I
even partially solved the irregular-spacing problem by using a toolkit that
someone else had written specifically to address such issues in these
contexts—some guy named H. Sim who used to be a starship designer, apparently.
It was still easy to make jokes about how all that work had been done by a
different person, but that different person was starting to feel like
me
again. With each tweak of a surface and each convolution of a manifold, that
once-upon-a-me was reasserting himself, unzipping my skin and stepping back out.

I let myself get absorbed enough in the work that
when Enid mentioned she was popping out to meet up with Cioran again I barely
broke stride. “Have a nice time,” I said. “Watch out for the public eye.”

Then I stopped her two seconds before she got to
the door. “Wait. Where are you meeting him?”

“He’s got a room. Some place where we’re not going
to have people pounding on the door and pestering us, that’s for sure. And,
again, he asked me to tell you that you’re invited.”

“He did?—‘Again’?”

“I mentioned it before, but, well, you were a
little preoccupied.” She pointed at the schematic spiraling away in front of
me.

What’s
he
doing being all shy about it? I
thought. Or maybe he just figured such things were best passed through a
trusted third party. It was an atavism, and it wasn’t as if atavisms didn’t
exist or weren’t cultivated. There’d been that friend of my father’s, for
instance: the planetary tectonologist who left handwritten notes for friends on
paper he made himself. But with Cioran—for him to do something like that, how
much of it was sincere and how much of it was just him deigning to be more like
“us”?

I made a mental note to stop torturing the
significance out of everything done by the people in my life I wanted to call
my friends, and told her I might well catch up with them later if that was
okay.

It was okay, and off she went, her CL trace
occupying a continual background presence in my mind. It wasn’t all that hard
to put myself back into the habit of doing such things—to insist that much less
on physical presence every moment, and also to trust Enid a bit more. She
chafed when people coddled her, so no more coddling, at least not from my end.

About another hour later, I was most of the way
through computing an average planetside-to-orbit transit time for the
Achitraka—
after
all, why not just call it that? I thought—when Angharad called. Kallhander and
Ioné had just provided her with a dossier about Cioran, something they’d taken
most of the morning to check directly with a few other people, and there were
some things in it that were worth discussing.

“Maybe I should come there and talk about it in
person,” I said. “I get the feeling you and I will both feel that much more
comfortable.”

“The officers—” By that she meant Kallhander and
Ioné, whom I could tell were standing nearby as she made the call. “—believe
this channel is as secure as it can be, but I would be inclined to agree.”

The path from the docks directly to Achitraka
House was only about half an hour, maybe not even that. I spent most of the
trip there still fooling with the simulation I’d been running, but I didn’t get
any real work done with it. All I did was pull it apart, stick it back
together, pull it apart again. It gave me something to look at instead of the
scenery skipping and flickering by outside, the sight of which just made me
wonder all the more what Kallhander and Ioné had been hinting at.