Flight of the Vajra (4 page)

“Not a lot of other kids traveling with you, I
guess?” I realized my mistake the instant I’d said it: she wasn’t a “kid”, and
she was going to make damn sure I knew it.

But all she did was look out the mouth of the
alley, arms folded across her chest. “It’s been a long time since I just did my
own thing, that’s all.” Those words came out a lot quieter than I thought they would.

“I’m Henré, by the way.” Even if our CLs had been
on, I suspected I would have still done the introduction the old-fashioned way.

“I’m Enid.” She shifted her gaze back to me. “And
you’re one of those candy-snatchers who comes to planets like this to look for
girls who don’t put up too much a fight, is that it?”

There’s a lot of external dangers my outfit could
protect me against, but they couldn’t protect me from laughing my own ass off.
I sagged against the wall behind me and did everything I could to smother my
hilarity short of biting my fingers. Finally I gave up, stuffed the heel of my
hand into my mouth and just snorted around it.

“What’s so funny!” She wrinkled her nose at me as
she shouted that.

The fact that you haven’t stormed off yet, I
thought. You’re testing me, so I’m going to test you right back.

“Okay,” I managed to say, getting my giggling
under control and sticking my hand back in my pocket. “Would it help if I came
out and said, no, I’m not
that
kind of tourist? Besides—after seeing
what you can do, I’m pretty sure any struggle between us would be You 1, Me
Zero. I haven’t met an acrobat yet that didn’t have
some
martial
training. Especially when they’re spacebrats.”

“How many spacebrat acrobats
have
you met?”

“Two, including you.”

“That’s not a whole lot, is it?”

“You tell me if I’m wrong. Hey, I’m trying to
praise
you here. Will you let it sink in? Or are you that touchy about taking props
from someone who’s at least three times your age?”

I still had a joshing tone to my voice, but if
there’s one thing I’ve learned about kids—teenagers especially—they always
think you’re mocking them when you’re actually trying to get them in on the
joke. That might explain why in the next second after speaking those words, I
suddenly couldn’t see anything but her foot in front of my face.

She didn’t actually
kick
me, mind you. She
just reared back on one leg and put her other heel a centimeter from my nose. I
didn’t move; she didn’t move. Then she broke the stalemate by tapping my
forehead lightly with her toes and standing down.

“Brown belt,” she said. “Last time I checked, anyway.”
And then she put on one of those crooked, sidelong smiles that told me yes, she
felt she was quite capable of knocking me onto my ass. “Live training, too,
with a real teacher. None of that neuro-kinesthesia crap. I mean, yeah, I use
that to brush up or to pull off some of the fancier tricks, but all the core
training was live and direct.”

 What she thinks she’s capable of, I thought, and
what she can actually
do
, is not something I want to put to the test
just yet. “You want some lunch?” I said. “On me. And out in public.”

“Sure.”

I let Enid pump me for information
after we took seats in the hotel restaurant. I’ve always believed I’m a bad
liar—that the vaguer the story I tell, the less embellishment I throw in, the
easier it is for someone to believe me. They can fill in the gaps themselves,
and with most of the people I tell those open-ended sob stories to, they’re
just waiting for me to stop talking so they can start anyway. And since most of
the time I never see them again, there’s little harm done.

But Enid didn’t let me off easy. Again, not that I
minded: there was scarcely a thing she could ask me that I hadn’t already told
someone else or which wasn’t public record somewhere. She was just trying to
prove to herself how smart she was, that she couldn’t be fooled by the likes of
me.

“So how many ships have you designed?” She said
that right after her mango lemonade arrived, in a tone of voice that sounded
like the word
allegedly
was going to be shoved in at the end there.

“I’ve lost count,” I said. I imagined to her ears
that sounded like I was just as full of shit as she hoped.

“Five? Ten? Dozens? Come on, your memory can’t be
that
bad.”

I raised fingers. “The Nimbus-class personal
cruiser. The Halo; the Corona. The Coriolis-class luxury liner.” Saved the
worst for last, did you? I told myself. “There’s more than that, but those are
probably the four everyone remembers.”

There was always the chance she was too young (or
too incurious, or both) to associate the word
Coriolis
with
Kyritan
and therefore with
disaster.
If we were on a world where CLs weren’t
almost completely banned, she would have looked it all up by now—heck, she
could have simply run my CL tag and learned everything she needed that way. But
she wasn’t uncomfortable asking me these things; she wasn’t wholly uncomfortable
living without a CL. Old Way, I thought; she’s from a world or at least an
environment where those things weren’t taken for granted, and so she doesn’t
itch for them. Just for that alone I felt all the more comfortable around her.

“The Coriolis class was really something,” I heard
myself saying. “It was amphibious, and then some. Protomic hull, so it could be
reconfigured—you could start off planetside, sail around on the oceans. Then
shove everything around, break it into lots of little compartmentalized pieces
that you could wagon-train up a planet’s orbital elevator, provided it had one.
Put the pieces back together at the other end: starship. Off to the next
destination. And it
worked
, too; it went through five flawless shakedown
missions. Spotless ten-year operational record. I won the Proteus Society medal
for that thing.
Morphic Journal
did this whole piece on both it and me.—Oh,
thanks.”

My beer had arrived; I looked at Enid over the top
of the bottle. She was still sizing me up, hanging back, waiting for me to say
something else she could pin me down with.

“I guess all this is before your time,” I said
lamely, before shutting myself up by putting the mouth of the bottle to my own
lips.

“What happened?” she said, quieter than I
expected. Yeah, I thought, you can tell from the way it was all coming out that
something happened
, can’t you?

“I got out of the business.”

“
Why
did you get out of the business?”

Tenacious, she was. Not like I hadn’t been fishing
for a little tenacity to shake me up.

“There was an accident with the
Kyritan
, a
late-iteration Coriolis ship. Something went wrong with . . . a whole
bunch of things at once. One thousand one hundred forty-six people died. There
was a long and very exhaustive investigation after which the board concluded
that there had been no design flaw in the ship, but that was the end of my
design career any way you cut it. I received a severance settlement. And now I
look around for nice places where I can soak up the sun and talk to teenaged
acrobats.”

I’d left out a lot, of course. If she was as good
as I was at sniffing out lies by omission, she’d know by now.

“They thought you were at fault for something?”
she said.

I took another drink and used the wetness in my throat
to help mimic the nasal voice of the chief investigator. “
 
‘It is the finding of
this board that while there is no direct evidence of sabotage, the possibility
of same cannot be completely ruled out.’ Not sabotage by
me
, but all the
same, I didn’t feel like I had much of a career after that.”

The waiter came back with Enid’s tartare salad and
yam fritters. After seeing her rip open the paper around her fries and pick up
her fork, I decided man cannot live by liquid bread alone, flagged the waiter right
before he disappeared around the near end of the bar, and asked for one of what
she was having. The waiter was a kid probably only a few years older than Enid—skinny
wrists, Adam’s apple sticking out like a wart on a witch’s cheek. Unreconstructed
genetics. Old Way in the blood, I thought, like everyone else down here; for
all I know he might have started working here when he was younger than she was
now.

“So now nobody wants to work with you? They can’t
. . .
not
know it wasn’t . . .
your
fault.”
Even the way she stumbled over her own syntax was adorable, I had to admit. You
only word a sentence like that when you’re trying hard to make someone else
look like the bad guy.

I shook my head. “It was the other way around.”

“How so?”

I stopped, realizing I’d never before put this
into words for someone else’s sake. It was tougher to do that than I thought.

“I started getting job offers again after the
noise died down,” I said, “and for one of them, I remember—I was having dinner
with the CEO of the outfit, on a rooftop a little like the one in this hotel.
It was a pretty up-level planet, too, with this little touristy oasis of no CL
and all those other Old Way things, to make it look ‘quaint’. Anyway, we’re up
there, and he’s got his drinks and I’ve got mine, and he makes the mistake of
getting a little more legitimately drunk than he should have. I got the
impression he did this sort of thing a lot, but had always done it around
people who weren’t Old Way, people who wouldn’t think too much about what he
said when he was sloshed because, hey. But anyway, I’ve got most of a bottle of
wine in me and I’m still good, and he’s got about that much put away—and he
says, right between one thing and another, ‘Nobody’s going to be looking over
your shoulder here, not even me. Don’t worry about it.’ And I wanted to say
something like, well, if I’m not supposed to worry about it,
why in the cosm
did you bring it up
? But I knew better than to say anything, and for me
right there the whole thing was out in the open. I wasn’t going to be able to
do those things anymore, not without someone wanting to look over my shoulder.
I didn’t live in that kind of universe anymore, just because. And call it what
you want, call it stubborn or stupid, but I just couldn’t work like that anymore,
knowing I was going to be surrounded by people who had to force themselves,
however much or however little, to trust me. Or, worse, that I had to hide
behind someone else to get the kind of trust other people could get naturally.”

I looked at the bottle and decided I didn’t want
to see it quite that full anymore. I drained most of it in one long pull. From
somewhere behind me I heard the
boomp-bump
of a ball bounding against
the pavement, and when I turned my head I saw a gaggle of kids scuttling around
it at play. I was fairly sure the short one with the curly yellow hair had been
among the gang playing Snag-the-Flag with Enid.

“Well—to me, it sounds stubborn
and
stupid,”
Enid said after she finally finished chewing her current mouthful. Go ahead, I
thought, feel free to believe that. “So you decided it was better to just quit?”
she went on.

I did my best to not make myself sound bitter. “Why
did you decide to leave the Sky Theater?”

She was suddenly all wound up. “What’s
that
got to do with anyth—”

“I’m making a point. Why did you decide to leave?”
I stayed as calm as she wasn’t.

“I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Because—” Good, I thought; she’s exasperated.
Best way to get the truth out of someone is to exasperate them. “Because it stopped
being fun, okay? I hate running from planet to planet. I hate the schedules. I
hate the fact that I have to do the same ten or twelve dumb tricks over and
over each time.”

“Do you hate the
people
you work with?”

“No. They’re . . . all right. I mean, I’m
gonna miss them, honestly. It’s not
them
that’s the problem.”

“It’s just that it’s not fun doing it
like this
with them. Right?” She nodded. Good; I had her. “Now you know how I felt.”

I killed the rest of my bottle and swapped it for
a fresh one right as my own meal arrived. I was proud of myself: even with most
of a beer in me and all the temptation in the world to scold her, I’d said
those last six words with nearly as much sympathy as the last time I’d said
I’m
sorry.

“I guess I’ll understand when I’m older.”

Her words sounded way too close to an apology for
my ears, so I deflected them with a smile. “Well, I
am
older. And I
still
don’t understand anything.”

I made us both laugh with that. I think I needed
it more than she did.

She kept on needling me through the whole meal,
though. Little things, and sometimes not so little: “So you’re really never
gonna build another ship?” (I shook my head.)

Somehow, she knew that someone like me wouldn’t
just give up on creating. And she was right: I hadn’t given up. I had just—how
would my wife have put it?—“shifted venues”.

That’s when it hit me why I’d sought out her
company. Not just to look for a captive audience, but to have that captive
audience understand me from the inside out—and maybe even give me the very
forgiveness I’d trained myself not to accept.

Because someday, someone was finally going to give
me that forgiveness in a way I couldn’t say no to.

The patio out in back of the hotel
was
walled in on three sides: the hotel itself on one, and walls covered with
climbing vines on the other two. The fourth side was a strip of sky between the
other buildings on the hillside, in which every now and then we could see the
glittering ribbon of the planet’s elevator, thin as an eyelash, running up as
far back as you could tilt your head.