Flight of the Vajra (39 page)

Cioran faced her, then everyone else with the same
enterprising grin he’d worn back when he’d made his first sales pitch to
Angharad. But this time I could see him working that much harder to make it convincing.

We spent the next part of the afternoon
hammering out our contracts in the bowels of Achitraka House’s legal
department. Even the lawyers were wrapped in Old Way robes, but they had the
same wound-up, are-you-
sure
-you-want-to-do-that? patter that I’d heard
in every legal department since my first self-incorporation. Cioran
counter-negotiated for a 7% (down from Angharad’s offer of 10%) pre-deduction
from his wages for the loan payoff, and asked for one solid week off out of
every four for “personal cultural outreach” (read: concerts). Angharad had
originally offered ten days off out of every forty, but he preferred more frequent
albeit shorter breaks, and she had no issues with that.

The aides had brought in a tureen of hot
potato-tomato soup and arm-sized loaves of black bread to keep the negotiations
fueled, but Cioran and Angharad would up their discussion in less time than it had
taken for Angharad and Ioné to lay down their offer in the first place. Copies
of everything were filed, Cioran and I affixed our biometrics where prompted,
and I caught myself staring as Cioran offered his hand and Angharad delicately
accepted it. Never thought I’d see this, I told myself, and I would have kicked
in my CL logging to immortalize the moment if it weren’t for the fact that it
had been forced off in there.

In the adjoining vestibule, Angharad granted
Cioran and I access to a manifest of other participants at the summit—one which
we would be able to access through CL once we left the building, but we could
peruse softcopy facsimiles of them on MemoCel for the time being. Cioran didn’t
mind reading with his own eyes instead of just CL-ing direct; after all, he’d
kept (and written) paper books, so this was hardly a step down for him.

“These,” Cioran said, scrolling and scrolling
through the text, “these are all
very
familiar faces. Some more familiar
than others, but still. How soon would you want something?”

“Your earliest convenience,” Angharad said.
“Within two days if at all possible. I hope I don’t sound presumptuous when I
say you should put aside everything else for this.”

“No, no—I work for you now. It only makes sense to
do that. —Good grief, is
he
still
in
politics? I thought he’d
given it all up for that upside-down hanging garden thing . . . ” He
shook his head at yet another name that rang no bells with me. I decided he
would have wasted the whole afternoon that way if nothing was done about it, so
I gave him a discreet poke on the arm. He needed a second, less discreet poke before
the hint took hold and he finally stood up.

I took Angharad aside in her office and had her brief
me on the terms of Cioran’s contract. “Whatever you do,” I said when she was
done, “don’t give him an excuse to sit down at the conference table with you.
That’ll be
the
end.”

“Nothing of the kind will happen,” she said. “His
contract is very clear on that point. His duties are confined entirely to
providing us with intelligence in a supporting role, not conducting
negotiations. And we reserve the right to terminate his contract if we believe
he is attempting to overstep his role.”

“You realize that just having him in our party at
all is going to make us look that much more disreputable, right?” I seated
myself next to the window and tried not to be too distracted by the city and
ocean outside. “Is what he can offer us really worth this kind of a gamble?”

“It isn’t merely what he knows. It’s, as you
pointed out, the fact that his presence will be a catalyst. The Highend worlds
and the Old Way have both chosen to ignore, or downplay, the ways they can
intermix. That is the very substance of why we are there, isn’t it? And I
intend to allow that issue to be forced—to make it clear that we can no longer
ignore how the children of the Old Way and the iconoclasts of the Highend are coming
together.” She finally allowed herself a smile, albeit a small and controlled
one. “You see a fiasco in the making. I see it as the breaking of some ice that
has remained frozen over for far too long.”

“Yeah, but is
this
the way to do it?”

“I brought him into our company to make him that
much less useful to the competition, and that much more useful to us. If he
knows half of what he claims to be familiar with—and he has already supplied me
with some anecdotal evidence to that end—then no amount of sneering on the part
of those on the far side of the conference table will matter.”

She’s got her reasons, I told myself, and no
amount of me shoving that particular rock will get it to budge. I’d had the
feeling that at some point, I’d come up against some species of such immutable
certainty in her. I just wished it hadn’t been over
this.

“I’m going back to the ship,” I said, “and getting
some work done.” It was the best way I could think of the end the conversation
on a productive note. “Where’s Cioran staying?”

“I believe he said he would take you up on your
offer.”

I had, in fact, offered to let him stay in the
Vajra
.
I found myself regretting the decision while I rode back to the dock—I’d been
operating alone for so long, I’d forgotten how much it drove me crazy to have
other people in my hair when I was working on something. Truth be told, I made
the offer mostly to dangle that much more over his head while he was agreeing
to our terms. I didn’t imagine he’d turn it down, since he enjoyed our company;
there wasn’t any direct cost to him involved; and being around us kept him out
of trouble. Theoretically.

A funny thing had happened to me
by the
time I returned to the
Vajra
: the apprehension I’d been feeling about
having yet another mouth to feed—especially if that mouth was Cioran’s—had
undergone some kind of turning-about. By the time I stepped into the access
vestibule for the dock, I was actually looking forward to seeing him.
Perverse
was the only word that came to mind for such a feeling.

Enid had most likely let him back in, since she’d
gone back to the ship instead of hanging around while we assembled all the
paperwork; I didn’t blame her. Odds were, I told myself, the two of them had
moved the couches around to make room for gymnastics.

I was half-right. They’d moved the couches away,
but instead of tumbling all over the place they were attempting some kind of
balance pose. Enid was standing on Cioran’s left shoulder, one hand pressed up
against the ceiling. Neither one moved.

“That looks like it hurts,” I said out loud.

They turned their heads—they had been facing away
from me—and slowly relaxed from that position. Cioran tilted his shoulder so
that Enid’s foot slid from his shoulder down the length of his arm and into his
cupped hand, and in this manner he helped lower her to the floor. They work too
well together for me to get testy about it, I thought.

“It’s a trust exercise,” Cioran said, flexing his
right hand back against the left.

Enid jumped right in: “I told him about it
earlier, and he wanted to try it out. You use these kinds of exercises with
people you’re going to be on stage with. We’re doing it with CL on and off, and
he actually likes it better with it off.”

“Because then it’s more about the
body
.” He
did the hand-flex again, this time left against right. “There’s room for using
CL in a performance, but some things you have to learn to do all on your own,
right? —Although, since I’m a little heftier than she is, I can’t very well
stand on
her
shoulders, but there’s a whole gamut of such exercises we
can run through—”

“Cioran,” I said, sincerely rueful, “not to dash
your enthusiasm, but you’ve got homework to do, remember? You’ve got a report
to compile for Angharad. And as long as you’re here under my roof, I’m obliged
to keep you on track.”

“Oh, I know. But all the same, what’s the hurry?
The summit itself isn’t for another half-a-baker’s-dozen-minus-one.”

“Yeah, nine days. A good six to seven of which are
going to be taken up with travel, given how far we have to go. It’s some insane
number of hops.” I stepped past them into my own chair and eased myself into
it—all the muscles in my lower back had gone horribly tight during the
conversation with Angharad, and I decided I’d explore the simplest options for
dealing with that first. Like sitting down.

“—And?” he replied. I had to hand it to him:
Cioran did blasé better than most anyone I’d known. “We’ll have a cache of the jumpnet
in here, won’t we? It’s not like I won’t be able to look things up if I have
to.”

“Not the point. Angharad wanted as much of a
report as you could deliver
before
we left, remember? She needs all that
time before the summit to plan ahead.”

“Fiiine, fiiine. Just as long as we get something
to eat soon.”

I waved him off with both hands. “I’ll order in.
Promise you this: when we leave, we’ll get another one of my wonderful
home-cooked meals. And it’ll be a little more ambitious than hot-pot.”

I
did
enjoy this. I told myself that as I
pulled up the
Achitraka
schematic and once again began examining how to
integrate crew flight compartments into the sub-partitioned design. Even the
parts of it that I wanted to believe were annoying, weren’t. They reminded me
of what it was like to have people in your life—no, not just that, but what it
was like to
let
people into your life, to allow their happy accidents to
unfold within whatever little space you’d etched out for yourself. I knew I’d
had what seemed like perfectly good reasons for pushing all that away, but put those
reasons under this kind of sunlight and they all withered. In the end, I
couldn’t see how those reasons had amounted to anything more than so many
different incarnations of the same basic idea: that I didn’t deserve the
company of others, and that all I would do with such company was set up myself
(and others) for that many more disappointments. Now I had more company than I
knew what to do with, and more plans for them than I ever thought I would. And
I deserved all of it, damn it.

I put aside the
Achitraka
plans, ordered
dinner—a
rijstaffel
tower-box, with one drawer for each of us—and asked
for a private CL link with Enid. Cioran looked like he was absorbed in his
research, but I wanted to take that many more steps to keep things between us.

To that end, I set up a CL shell environment, a
simulation patterned after the ocean near my old house. A big flat rock to sit
on, a sunset, gulls fumbling about on the muddy sand—to all of our senses it
felt like the real thing, although we both knew full well it wasn’t, and we
could toggle out of it at any second. What’s more, both of us most likely had
protections enabled that kept us from nodding off in it or staying in it so
long that it endangered our vital signs. Those things were no longer mandated
by law in many places, but most sane people kept them on anyway: if you were
going to go mountain-climbing, why skimp on the pitons and the lanyard? That
didn’t stop some people from baking their brains raw in a CL shell—they’d been
doing it for cosm knows how long since CL was invented—but I wasn’t going to be
one of those people. For me, the real world was more than interesting enough.
That said, there were times when being able to draw virtual curtains around
yourself and any number of other people was undeniably handy.

Enid stood on the rock and faced out to sea,
shielding one side of her face against the setting sun with an upraised arm.
“It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like this,” she said. “Why now?”

“Privacy,” I said, “and also because I have the
feeling where we’re going with this summit, we’re going to be doing that many
more things like this. Time to get back into the habit.”

“Was it a habit for you once?”

“Not too much of one. I guess it wasn’t much of
one for you at all.”

“Only because it was there. Not because I really
needed it.” She sounded proud—not just of her, but of both of us. “So what did
you want to talk about?”

“Cioran, among other things. You still planning on
collaborating with him?”

“
Yes
. You were thinking I’d change my mind
after discovering he was lousy with money?”

“Or at least be that much more cautious. I mean, I
always knew he was a free spender—who didn’t?—but I had no idea he was in up to
not only his own neck but several other peoples’.”

“Well, you heard him. He’s only in it because he
was trying to help someone who means more to him than most other people ever
would. You don’t think that’s worth some bad credit?”

“I don’t think it’s the bad credit that’s the real
thing to worry about. I suspect he’s telling us a story that played out very
differently for him and Ludi and the credit agency.”

“What do you mean?” The waves lapped up against
the rock; Enid dangled her feet down over the edge and let them soak in the
surf.

“Interpretations of facts. The facts involve
Cioran accumulating this much debt, paying out that much money to this
particular party. No big mystery there; all you have to do to confirm all that
is look at a balance sheet. It’s
why
he did it that stinks like dreck.
He’s got this cavalier attitude about other people that I don’t think has
anything to do with him being Highend and everything to do with him being a
legend in his own mind.”

“Well—so are
you
, you know.” She splashed
water at my trouser leg and missed.

“Takes one to know one, then, doesn’t it?”

“So is this your way of telling me, ‘That new
boyfriend of yours, he’s just gonna leave you crying on the corner’?”

“Oh, good
grief,
” I laughed. Exasperated
laughter still counts as laughter. “First of all, I’m not your father—you’ve
already got one, and I don’t
want
the job. Second, we went over this
already. This is not about me being
jealous
. This is about me suspecting
his motives about things far bigger than just how he’s treating you.”