Flight of the Vajra (43 page)

“—warmed your pillow.”

“Pillows, plural. And I warmed hers as well. That
was before she took over as head of the Transcendentalist League, and before
she entered her current position as a key Bridgehead liaison, so there was a
little less at risk back then.”

I sat forward. “Transcendentalist League? Wait.
Ulli?
You slept with
Ulli
?”

“You’re surprised I’ve slept with someone? Why,
did I beat you to the punch?”

To my right, Enid had gone blank-faced; she was doing
a CL lookup. Probably hunting for “Ulli” in the
Vajra
’s local jumpnet cache;
odds are she’d find it in the first news headline that appeared.

To my left, Angharad was cultivating enough
patience to fill a garden. “Will this create issues if you encounter each
other?” she said after a moment.

“Issues? Us?” Cioran scoffed—first out of one side
of his mouth, then the other. “We’re still the best of friends! We just have
geography and some not-entirely-mutually-shared life’s ambitions between us
now, that’s all. It’s not as if she’ll be weaponizing the furniture if I step
into the room.”

“And what of the others?”

“Lady Your Grace—I assure you, if there was
anyone
on that roster I had qualms about being within striking distance of, you would
know about it. The petty jealousies and mean-minded ambitions you hear about
that allegedly hatch between many high-end Highend types—I’ve been luckier than
most, I suppose, to have missed out on all that. Now: my first report awaits
you.”

“Thank you.”

He waved one of his longer locks at Enid and slid
back down the spiral stairs. Enid, looking a little out of sorts, followed him
down a moment later. I suspect getting caught in the middle of any burgeoning
argument about politics seemed about as much fun to her as filing down her
teeth.

Angharad, looking a little less pained, extruded a
surface from her couch and started reading Cioran’s report. I leaned back in my
own seat, CLed in, and followed suit.

Ulli Kijusto.
Titles upon titles,
accomplishments on top of accolades. Very Important Mover And Shaker.

Item. Subject is a native of Bridgehead. 167 solar
years old, but biologically snapshotted at around sixty or so, in big part
because her Grand Dame looks and demeanor carried a certain psychological
weight with the Old Way folks. A partygoer and party-thrower, but only after
hours. The rest of the time, she meant at least as much business as Angharad did,
and sometimes even more.

Item. Subject is current head of the
Transcendentalist League. A familiar little
klatsch
: they were billed as
an “outreach association” whose mission was to foster “greater cultural
collaboration and connectivity between worlds separated by more than just
space”. Scrub the smell of public relations off those words and under it you’d
find a far less pleasant odor. The TL’s real mission was to make the propaganda
arms of the various Highend societies seem that much more welcoming and that
much less officious—especially when said arms were opened wide to receive
scores of Old Way immigrants. Their approach, as I understood it—and as Cioran
confirmed it—was not to make the Highend worlds see Old Way folks any differently,
but to provide any number of social mechanisms for allowing Old Way folks to
not feel quite so bad about ditching out on their comrades and breaking their
vows.

Item. Subject is a founding member of the “Gang of
Ten”, a research- and resource-sharing affiliation of Highend-world nabobs. All
had fingers in the same problem’s pie: how to fix the FTL accuracy problem,
where jumps could in theory be conducted with sub-light-second precision. The
Gang of Ten had picked up where all dozen-whatever previous such initiatives
had left off, whether because the science had dried up, the incentives had
expired, the people involved had decided their time was better spent elsewhere,
or because their resident researchers stood up
en masse
and said there
was simply no way we could contort the laws of physics any further
. . . or because the motives for doing such work seemed shaky at best.
If you wanted to speed travel times between worlds, fine. If you wanted a whole
new way to rain flaming death down on any other planet that wasn’t yours
. . . not so fine. But better that such a thing be discovered out in
the open, so that an effective countermeasure could also be developed out in
the open. Those were Ulli’s own words, and her justification for founding the
Gang of Ten. After nearly eighty years of work their entire dossier of results could
be summed up in four words:
Still working on it
. No one was holding
their breath.

Item. She represents Bridgehead itself in these
talks. Hence, her presence here.

Item. Cioran enjoyed (in all senses of the word) a
relationship (in all senses of the word) with Ulli for a little over a decade.
Ten solar years he’d been jetting in and out of her life and her bedroom, each
enjoying the other’s company. From his extended time with her he was able to
glean several facts about her stances, none of which are likely to have changed
for this meeting:

—That the People of the Old Way are, by and large,
well-meaning but fundamentally misguided. If their numbers are withering, then wither
they must . . . and nowhere is it implied that after it withers it
will be automatically replaced with any one thing. Did the Old Way itself not
teach that all things have their time and their end, only because another will
have its time and its beginning?

—That emigration to worlds like Bridgehead is a
good idea if in the long run it means more Highenders and less Old Way
folks—and that such movement will in turn lead to that much more of an impetus
to accelerate terraforming schedules or modify those ever-untouchable planetary
population quotas.

—That she still thinks the world of Cioran, even
if she finds his wayward and socially indiscriminate ways to be
counterproductive. As in: “It’s all well and good that you are driven to do
what fascinates you, to create something new, Ci, but do you
have
to go
and do it with
those
people?” Cioran’s many Old Way fans would most
likely wince at being called “
those
people”.

—That cracking the FTL accuracy problem is worth
things like allowing the Old Way to fall to pieces.

—That most of the above was nothing you’d glean
from her public statements, but were things she was happy to share with both Cioran
and others behind various closed doors.

—That as far as public statements go, she’s
planning on increasing the Bridgehead immigration quota . . . the
better to have that many less Old Way.

—That she plays one brutally strong game of
îgo
.
Then again, after sixteen decades, who wouldn’t?

I broke for toddy and biscuits, which Angharad was
happy to share. But any thoughts on my part that we’d use the break to discuss
what we’d just read fell by the wayside when she spent a good few minutes on
end brooding over the top of her cup.

“You look dismayed,” I ventured.

“I feel I have in her a very direct form of
competition,” she said. “She is someone I know without having met personally—at
least, not met yet. And from all I have seen, my loss amounts to her gain.”

“Stealing your flock?”

“Allowing them to bolt, would be the better
analogy. Or rather, picking them up from the roadside after they have already
strayed.” She didn’t sound embittered—if anything, she almost sounded amused by
the whole thing. It was an improvement from the blank look and distant voice
she had manifested earlier. “She wants the doors opened all the wider for
emigrants; I want emigrants to see for themselves how such a choice only leads
them, in the long run, into a cul-de-sac.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s getting harder
to convince people the Old Way is going to be anything for them but an inconvenience.”

There’s no nice way to say something like that, I
thought. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have tried harder to be tactful.

“If the Old Way has become an inconvenience,”
Angharad said, “whose fault is that? It lies to us to make the path worth walking.
I have said as much before, haven’t I?”

“You have. And you also hinted you’re no longer
even sure how to do it.”

“This is how we find out. I imagine Kijusto and I
will have a great deal to discuss—but I worry it will become little more than each
of us defending our chosen territory.”

I figured a little prodding couldn’t hurt, so I
prodded: “That’s not a very constructive attitude.”

“It is a realistic one. I imagine that any meeting
between the two of us would simply end in each of us staking out our respective
positions. —That is, any meeting where all that has brought us together under
the same roof is talk of politics. There must be something else that the two of
us can speak about that will be common ground.”

“Sure, but why not wait ‘til you’re actually in
the same room and talking before worrying about that? I mean, look at the two
of us. Did you really think before I came and sat in front of you that we’d
have anything to say to each other ‘cept maybe for ‘Sorry about your family’
and ‘You’re one brave woman’?”

“And yet out of those things we found much more
common ground than either of us believed.” She unfolded one of her legs from
under her and let it dangle over the edge of her couch cushion, watching it
swing as if she were attempting to hypnotize herself. “Somewhere between the
two of us there lay a shared path, which both of us walk together now,
hand-in-hand. With Ulli Kijusto, I am tempted to believe there is no such
common ground . . . but I have all the evidence I need to believe she
feels that as well, all the more strongly. It falls to me to break that
stalemate.”

“How do you know she’s not thinking the same
thing?”

“She is attending this event to defend the
interests of all she is identified with, just as everyone believes I am. She cannot
afford to back down from that, lest she lose face. And yet . . . ”
She reached down and pulled the leg back under her—then tilted her head back,
closed her eyes and spoke as if reciting prayers from memory. “I realize now,
all the more, what the nature of my schism is with the Old Way. It is not that
the Old Way needs ‘reforming’; it is not that we need relaxed rules of conduct,
or anything so . . . constrained. It is that our scope is too small.
I
must convince her that I speak for her as well.
This, you can imagine, she
will not accept on the face of it. It falls to me, again, to do something to
change that.” She opened her eyes and looked most of the way at me, at my
breastbone more than anything else. “Until now, everything that has been at
stake was within the confines of what was known and familiar. The Old Way was
the universe I lived in. The shell of that universe has split, ever so
slightly, and I realize now what cold and barren land lies outside.”

“Just as long as she doesn’t infer what bigger
plans you have in store.” I was slowly getting used to the idea of giving
her
advice. “The last thing you’d want is for Ulli to twig to the idea that you’re
thinking about ditching the Old Way entirely. If she puts those pieces together
before you’ve formed a real rapport—heck, even
after
that happens—you’re
going to need a lot more than Cioran’s pillow-talk diaries to keep her from
having multiple upper hands.”

Her gaze rose to meet mine, but only made it partway.
“Is it strange for you to hear me say ‘She is not the enemy’?”

I shook my head. “Not strange at all. The whole
reason we’re attending this thing is because we all believe on some level none
of us are really enemies. Allegedly, anyway. —And if I didn’t say it before
. . . you’re not alone in this, remember?”

I thought back to us haranguing Cioran, however
gently, about how even someone like him needed to ask for help and not feel
shame when doing so. I wanted to give Angharad a little of the same slightly
bitter medicine just then, but maybe her roundabout words were her own way of
asking for help—a way of asking without sounding like she was asking.

“I mean,” I added, “it
is
cold outside, but
it’s not
that
cold outside.”

She smiled while still looking half at me. It had
been easier for her to look me in the eye—look
down
on me in the
eye—back when we had still been strangers, I thought. Now it was her turn to
practice being humbled by someone else.

Cioran was a more diligent worker
than
I had been willing to give him credit for. He turned in the rest of his report
in installments over the next three days. Each one put another tile into the
mosaic, and even if there were still more gaps than actual picture, we could
see enough to understand the shape of the whole.

As Ulli went, so went the Bridgehead vote. And
since all eyes were on Bridgehead as the test case for how well Old Way
emigration to High End worlds was working out—well, as Bridgehead went, so went
the rest of Highend space.

No pressure.

After a couple of days of bottling things up—or
leaking them out selectively only to me—Angharad talked out her worries to the
others over dinner. I’d loaded the best grade of travel meals I could find into
the
Vajra
before we’d left town (and why not? Angharad was footing that
part of the bill), and so we had dishes that more closely resembled something I
might have whipped up as opposed to something you squeezed from a polybag or
unzipped from a tray.

The extra expense paid off, at least in Enid’s
case. On uncovering her meal, she looked like her birthday had come early; she
spent most of the first several minutes just filling her face. Kallhander and
Angharad ate with their usual precision and reserve, and Ioné did a great deal
of her usual nothing at all. From the way she watched us, I wondered if it was
out of jealousy.

“Of
course
Ulli isn’t the enemy,” Cioran
declared, twirling his fork around in his pasta. “One sight of me and she’ll—”

“
Not
happening.” I shook my head. “You’re staying
away from the conference table in any way, shape or form, remember?”

“Who said anything about the conference table? No
law, regulation or rule of order says I can’t catch up with her when
she’s—we’re—out and about on our own.”

“No, but don’t forget you’re CL-tapped until
further notice. And, there is this little thing called
decorum—
” Then I
remembered who I was talking to.

“All right, all right. Let’s put it this way. It’s
going to be all but impossible for them
not
to know I’m in your party as
a, what, ‘special cultural advisor’ or whatever the title was going to be. Let
me drop some general information about where I’ll be—nothing too precise, just
enough for people to know—and we’ll see if she picks up from there on her own.
Fair enough?”

“Fair enough. Although you have to know she’s
going to watch herself if she knows you’re tapped.”

“Do you believe she will contact you on her own?”
Angharad said.

“She’s going to be damn curious, I can guarantee
that. Especially now that I’ve turned up in your company, not to mention
your
company—” Cioran nodded Enid’s way. “—and when she finds out about
yours
—”
(me) “—odds are she won’t be able to stop hounding me about all I’ve been doing
since we two parted.”

“There’s another initiative on the summit agenda
that she will likely have major influence over,” Kallhander said.

“You’re talking about the FTL accuracy research
thing, right?” I said.

“Yes. Several of the member worlds in the
consortium she organized are considering abandoning their funding of the
project. They see nothing more than a repetition of the same mistakes in
previous generations.”