Flight of the Vajra (37 page)

This time, I walked right through Achitraka
House’s main entrance without even being blinked at. I guess they already had
me on file for admittance, but they still insisted on escorting me into a
conference room that was about the same size as the audience chamber where we’d
first sat with Angharad the other day. The one table in there was extruded from
the floor and could be expanded to seat as many as a dozen or more; here, it
only seated the four of us—Angharad, “the officers”, and me. Beautiful arched
ceilings, the same “Achitraka House” curves I’d seen everywhere else in the
building. I spent a second trying to imagine along what seams this structure
could be carved up for the sake of the elevator before I stopped myself and
paid attention.

“Cioran is severely in debt,” Kallhander said. He
offered me a MemoCel dossier—most likely on paper for Angharad’s sake.

I looked at it but let Ioné’s words summarize for
me what I was seeing. “His assets,” she said, “are hard to audit given the ways
he earns a living, but he’s clearly in debt far out of proportion to what he
makes even at the best of times.”

“You’re talking orders of magnitude here,” I said,
looking at all the zeroes. “He’d have to spend nothing and give concerts for
the next
decade
before he could make a dent in this. And that’s without the
interest.” I looked up at all three of them “Who’s he in debt to?”

“Several private finance firms,” Kallhander said,
“who perform select loans to pre-screened customers of his caliber. He recently
tried to consolidate and restructure all of them into a single loan from
Jacquays Capital.”

He gave me enough of a pause to allow me to dive
in there, which I did. “Which you only do if you’re desperate,” I said. “All
you have to do to get a loan from
them
is prove you’re carbon-based—but
they’ve been investigated how many times now?”

“
Many
.” Kallhander was better than I’d
thought at packing ugly meanings into a single word. “Most recently, when
Rollain’s terraforming project stalled over financing issues, they were accused
of manipulating a terraforming-futures fund. There were allegations they had
paid off one of the engineers on the project to deliberately overestimate how
long it would take to finish. Nothing was ever proven, in large part because
the engineer in question quit and has refused to speak to anyone about his
experiences. Anyway, Cioran attempted to have his outstanding loans
consolidated through them and was turned down, probably due to his recent poor
credit.”

“His payments on three of those loans are tardy by
several pay cycles,” Ioné said. “The fourth only received an already-delayed
payment just this morning.”

I started to understand why Cioran had been
putting off hanging out with his own band: he was ducking out on having to pay
them
.
“Which would explain,” I said, turning to Angharad, “why he was suddenly so
enthusiastic about selling himself to you as some kind of Highend diplomacy
maven. He needed the money.”

“There is some irony in that,” Angharad said,
“After all, he may well be quite suited to that job. But at least now more of his
motives are clear. By seeking employment with us, he might be able to gain
temporary protection from having his debts called in.”

It was Ioné’s turn to advance a theory: “I also
suspect that money isn’t the only goal—or even the main one.”

“Well, I can think of something on top of all that,”
I said. “Bridgehead is pretty deep in Highend space, isn’t it? Once he’s on
Bridgehead, all he has to do is ride one hop and he could be on any number of
worlds, or colonies, that not only don’t have a financial exchange but aren’t
even IPS signatories.”

“No extradition,” said Ioné.

“No extradition, no default landing treaty,
nothing. It won’t keep them away forever, but it wouldn’t cost him much out of
pocket to do it, and it would buy him time on the years-to-decades scale. Living
in one of those places is no picnic, but maybe for him it beats being dunned. And
while he’s down here on Achitraka, he’s a default judgment waiting to happen,
right?”

“And riding with the Kathaya provides him with the
advantage of having diplomatic protection while in transit,” Ioné said.

“Right. But the minute that’s all over, he’s
boned.” I shook my head. “We can’t let him go with us. This has so many red
flags all over it.” I dumped the report back on the table.

“Perhaps not.”

All of us looked at Angharad. I loved how she was
able to say things like that without even so much as changing the pitch of her
voice.

“There is one element of the report that I find
out of character with all this,” she said, reaching for it and running her
fingernail down the side of the page to bring the right reference into view. “The
vast majority of this debt was incurred during one two-month period about three
years ago. But there was nothing else in his financial history or his
documented behavior that hinted at
why.
No signs of a major personal
upheaval; no lifestyle changes apart from those that were already habitual for
him; no gambling debts—”

Me: “Amazingly, no.”

“—no accidents or property losses, nothing that
would signal a need for this much money at once. Up until that point he was
actually quite solvent.”

“I’m not sure that matters,” Kallhander said, in a
tone that made it sound like he was jealously defending his thesis against the
inconvenience of facts. “It’s entirely possible for someone to incur great
expenditures without any obvious outward reason why.”

“I can think of one reason,” I said. “And given
Cioran’s lifestyle, I’m kind of surprised nobody mentioned it sooner. What’s one
thing you’d suddenly need a whole ton of money for, on no notice, and which
from the outside would just appear to have vanished with no tangible sign of
having been spent on anything?”

There was a pause. Angharad beat everyone else to
it: “Extortion,” she said.

“We considered that,” Kallhander said. For someone
who never seemed to get all that emotional, I could now tell he was in fact
getting annoyed. “It was never more than a tertiary theory, for one simple
reason: his history. Consider Cioran’s own behavior in the face of criminal or
civil pressure.”

“I know,” I said, “I thought about it myself. Every
time someone’s tried something vaguely like that, his answer has been to laugh
his ass off and then go tell everyone about the idiot who tried to four-flush
him. He doesn’t care about things like that the way you and me care about it. Right?
But maybe someone
did
find some fat, juicy nugget on him that coarsened
his hairs. And when he found out how deadly it really would be to him, he
panicked, and he dug himself a hole.” I shook my head yet again. “But even so,
how’d he dig the hole this deep? You don’t get as far as someone like him by
being
that
lousy with money."

“There’s something of a paradox there, isn’t it,”
Kallhander said. “The richer you are, the more you can afford to be foolish
with your finances.”

If Enid thinks I have something against Cioran, I
thought, she should hear
this
guy.

Kallhander reached for the report, but Angharad
stayed his hand with hers.

“Let us speak to him,” she said, “as one group. I
imagine if nothing else his explanation may furnish you with that much more for
your own investigation. And I . . . ” She took the report back. “I
must admit—I want to believe he can be valuable to us, when I worry many of the
other sources I would draw on for his kind of expertise might be compromised.”

“What’s worse,” I said, “the compromise you know
or the compromise you don’t know? Who was it on your side that you had as your
go-to person for that kind of intel, anyway?”

“Prelate Jainio. He was in charge of that
division, among others.”

Oh good grief, I thought. I looked at Kallhander.
“And what’s stopping you guys from supplying her with intelligence?” I said.

“We have been,” Kallhander said, “as policy and compartmentalization
permit. But from everything that’s been described, the type of intelligence
Cioran has gathered is a good deal more . . . intimate than anything
we have legitimate access to.” One corner of his mouth was working a good deal
more than it usually did. “More intimate, but I also question how accurate it
might be.”

“You
really
don’t like him, do you?” It
felt weird to echo Enid’s same words over to him. “All right, look. Let’s just
see if he’s worth the trouble or not. I’m thinking ‘not’ at this point, but I’m
prepared to be surprised. And if it’s ‘not’, then we need to make up for what
we’re losing—or at least what you feel you can’t use without corroboration.” I
aimed this last at Angharad as we stood up and let the chairs melt into the
floor.

On the way to the unmarked ground car, I shot
looks at Angharad. She walked ahead of me and to the right, with Ioné next to
her and Kallhander next to me. The brief glimpses of her face I could see looked
that much more like someone who was realizing they were going to need a bigger
can for the worms they’d just decanted.

First day on the job, I thought, and I’m already
in over my head, too. The fact that Jainio had been axed so completely from her
trust told me she was still sitting on something about him that couldn’t quite
come out yet. Or, conversely, something about herself. She hadn’t yet committed
to openly breaking away from the institution she was rooted in, and so she was
still obliged to use a lot of what it had provided her with. But there had to
be better alternatives than
Cioran
, for cosm’s sake.

Unless, I thought, like Cioran himself, the whole
business of diplomacy wasn’t the real reason she was considering him for the
job. Enid had been more right than she’d known when she groused that Angharad
was only human, too. I suspected the officers knew that too, and it was a big
part of why they (well, Kallhander anyway) were cringing a bit now that they’d
started this work. What other bad decisions lay in wait, all because Angharad
couldn’t resist doing the right thing by someone she felt for? Me included?

From everything I’d seen, what Kallhander had said
about money also applied to power. And maybe the reason she was divesting
herself of the kind of authority all this gave her was so she could learn to do
the right thing without it.

Buildings that employed protomic substrates
were deliberately limited in their range of malleability. The Dunham we’d
stayed in thanks to the generosity of our IPS hosts had been like that: you
could extrude a few pieces of pre-formatted furniture, opacify surfaces, change
the textures of floors and so on. But merging rooms, removing ceilings or
floors, deleting supports—all of those were no-nos. If you wanted all that and
more, you could get it, just not there. For that you needed at least a
convenience suite.

A convenience suite was for people who didn’t mind
burning through a fairly large protomic substrate bill and didn’t care about
whether or not the floor met the ceiling at right angles, never mind whether or
not the bed was made (in every sense of the term). Xiovan Towers was one of
many such convenience suites throughout the city. By default, each apartment in
the building consisted of two rooms: a tiny fixed entryway and a main room
which was all one big protomic reservoir. You stood in the entryway (or
connected to the apartment’s remote-management interface), extruded and shaped
everything inside as you saw it, and then entered. Or you could just dive right
in without bothering to extrude anything first, and . . . improvise.

Enid and Cioran were improvising when we reached
the apartment they’d rented. They’d seated themselves in depressions in the
floor—as if they were sitting on a trampoline—and were slowly extruding and
merging surfaces from the floor to meet in the air over their heads. Things to
swing from or even jump from, I thought, given the height of the fixed ceiling
in the place. The ceiling, too, was in on the action—dripping down stalactites
that joined at their lowest points and thinned out to become everything from
hanging-wires to trapezes.

“Surfacting”, they called it—surface-surfing,
where you wallowed around in the very surfaces you were manipulating, as if you
were swimming through water that sculpted itself into walls, furniture and
bedding behind you. The sheer amount of substrate they were burning through
would probably have kept me for a month and change in the hotel room I’d just
recently evacuated.

Which made me wonder: if Cioran was so hard up for
funds, where did he get the financing to rent this place? Probably out of his
cut of the take for the concert, which by itself told me how good he was at dealing
with money and planning for anything past next week. In two words: not very. I
understood now why he’d been so fond of having a patron of some kind or
another.

The four of us stood in the vestibule and waited
while Cioran created a ledge along the nearest wall for us to sit down on.

“Seems you caught us,” he declared, “in the middle
of a material improvisation. A space we were creating between ourselves for
each other’s sake—a possible performance. We were thinking about taking a
protomic sandbox with us on the road, using that as a production space in the
round. Very tentative, but—” He rubbed his hands together fiercely. “—what’s
happening between us is throwing off so many new sparks at once, who knows how
many fires may be started!”

“That’s great,” I said in my chummiest voice.
“Who’s your blackmailer?”

His smile didn’t melt at the edges like I’d hoped.
“Pardon?”

The three others, in turn, laid it out for him.
Kallhander described the loans; Ioné explained the attempts to transfer to the
new (declined) loan; Angharad laid out her blackmail theory. Each in their own
way, too: Kallhander, coolly officious; Ioné, cheerily cool; Angharad, quietly
sad. It only registered with me by the time Ioné started that Cioran was in
female form, including his CL gender-identity tag (for Old Way folks who were
still hung up on “he” and “she”). He’s getting into the habit of taking that
form every time Enid’s around, I thought, most likely as a way to make Enid
feel that much more at ease around him. I still had trouble not applying the
male pronoun to him, though; not that, from what I could tell, he minded.