Flight of the Vajra (44 page)

“After that many decades of no results? I was
surprised they hadn’t cut and run sooner.”

“There’s more. Ulli has condemned any such move as
a sign that the world in question is attempting to develop such technology on
their own without sharing it. In theory that’s a sanctionable offense.”

“It’s another thing entirely to get more than any
five IPS worlds to agree on any one set of sanctions, though.” I bit into my
raisin cornbread; I think I was the only one of the crew who’d had the nerve to
try it. It was better than it looked. “She can stamp her feet all she likes,
but does she have the kind of clout to make anything actually happen because of
that?”

“And what’s more,” Enid said, finally surfacing
from her tilapia-mahi dish long enough to speak, “is she even right? If I go
off and make something like that on my own, is that really such a big deal?”

I frowned. “No, of course not! Nobody would ever
worry that you’re going to use it to bypass every world’s planetary defense
network and start a war.” I’d been gambling on being just out of range of a
shin-kick, but she landed one on me anyway. Must have been working on her
reach.

“That’s part of why I don’t get politics,” Enid
said. “If I invented something like that, and the first thing I thought of
doing with it was
attacking
everyone else in the universe—well, first
off, that’s not the first thing I’d think of doing with it.”

“What would you try to do with it?” Angharad said.

“I’d try and see if we could leave the galaxy, for
one. Or try to go into all the zones where entanglement engines don’t work. You
know, something
interesting.
What is it about some people that they find
blowing other people up interesting? What’s so interesting about that?”

“That by itself is not what is interesting about
it to such people.”

“Okay, so what
is
? What makes them pick
something like that?”

This ought to be memorable, I thought. She had all
of our attention now, and it was clear to me she planned to use it.

“I have never known a single head of state who did
not have, at the ready, any number of proper reasons to wage war,” Angharad
said. “And that is only because there is no one in this universe who does not
have, somewhere, a legitimate grievance that cannot be turned into a reason to
fight with another. On Nestor’s Planet there was the League of the Blue Flag,
those who were stridently against having CL in many walks of life. In their
eyes, it was the abuse of CL that had caused whole segments of their populace
to come unmoored from each other, that allowed any number of charlatans to use
CL as a way to bilk others with promises of learning at dozen-fold speed, or
any of the other ways CL has come between people instead of bringing them
together.”

“Which makes for a long list,” I said.

“That was why when I sat with the Blue Flag and
their opponents, all at the same table, I left all such talk out of the
picture. There was no way they, or those who favored CL for all the reasons
they did not, could ever be more in the right. Perhaps someday when they were
not setting fire to each other’s parliaments, such a discussion could take
place. I did not sit with them to find out which had the most justifiable
grievances, because such a discussion would have never ended. I sat with them
to end their hostilities, to help create a space in which all of that manner of
discussion could take place without bloodshed.”

“Did it work?” Enid said.

Angharad tilted a shoulder. “After a fashion.
Their argument continues to this day, but at least it continues without the
threat of planetwide power cuts. But if they had killed each other—and they
were preparing to do that—they would if nothing else be in agreement on that
one issue: that the only way for the bitterness of one side to subside would be
for the other side to be dead. The more I saw of the ones who threatened
violence, the more I saw it was the simple
fact
that their opponents
existed which drove them. They could not bear to live in a universe that
contained the presence of others not like them.”

“Even if those others were on the other side of
the galaxy?” I said.

“Even then.”

Enid shook her head. “There’s just so many better
things to do with your life, if you ask me.”

“Oh, motion seconded!” Cioran raised his hand.

“
We
know that,” I said. “And
you
know that. But there are some people whose whole existence depends, at all
costs, on them
not
knowing it.”

I had a feeling that was as good an explanation as
we were going to be able to give her. One of the costs of growing up, I
thought, is learning that you live in a universe where some people just plain
hate each other.

By the sixth day of transit,
Cioran had
turned in his entire dossier for Angharad, composed a new song, and beaten Enid
at two rounds of seven-and-sterling. I had conferred on and off with Angharad
about what was to come, but we just kept circling back to the same conceits:
Ulli was the biggest obstacle she faced, and it was imperative that Angharad
find common ground with her or the whole mission was a washout. I reassured her
as best I could: this wasn’t something you could see from here; once everyone
was in the same room the possibilities for finding common ground would be
plain. She agreed, but I knew her slightly too well at this point to believe
that her downcast eyes and her fingers loosely laced in her lap were nothing
more than a meditative pose.

I kept myself busy. I set to work on the second
stage of the plans for the
Achitraka
—seeing whether the pieces could be
recombined in useful ways outside of a gravity well, for one. I toyed around a
bit more with the
Kyritan
evidence, but all that brought to mind was
what a stupid waste the last several years had been, and how the real substance
of my life was not going to be in cracking open a piece of the past. It was
right here in front of me in this ship, something worth reminding myself of
every so often.

After the tenth jump on day six, we had come out
slightly ahead of schedule, but I was still putting odds on us falling slightly
behind at the end. In every trip I’d made that went past thirty jumps or so, it
was normal to spend the first half of the trip thinking you were beating the
odds—only to lose whatever lead you thought you’d built up by the time you
finally put into port. There’s still a whole subculture of jump-racers who
think double-supercooling the quantum resonance bottle or any number of other magic
tricks will let them shave an hour or two off their round trip . . . and
there’s still a whole industry’s worth of hucksters willing to sell them
however many cargo drums of snake oil they think they need. I’d gone through my
own phase of such tinkering, and all I had to show for it was various
extraordinarily deep and exotically-shaped dents in my wallet. Among the few
things I took pride in was the fact that no such boondoggles had shown up in
the work I’d done for others. They had been free to add such things on their
own, but only
after
I’d signed off on the project and turned my back.
The less I knew about how they chose to waste their money, the better.

During the next overnight shift change, when Ioné
came upstairs to do her duty, she found Angharad fast asleep in her bier and me
still awake. Very little surprised her, but somehow this did.

“You would normally have been resting by now,” she
said. “I wondered if something was amiss.”

“Nothing’s ‘amiss’—I’m just absorbed in work.”

Half-truth. I’d been getting caught up on the
headlines, which we’d received a feed for after our last stopover, as we’d come
out within a few light-minutes of range of a jumpnet node. Gossip, all of it,
with some choice lines I could have written myself in a previous life: “
Bringing
Cioran along as a cultural attaché to Bridgehead is like having a CL link-lush
lecture you about ‘the allure of the real’.
” Not that CL addicts were ever
in the habit of moralizing at anyone, but at least that particular zinger had,
well, zing. The rest ranged from speculations about kickbacks and tie-ups—“
all
protected under the mantle of ‘diplomatic immunity’ as granted to the
self-congratulating scion of the galaxy’s most openly corrupt cultural
institution
”. Even some of Angharad’s most vocal long-time defenders were
getting tetchy. I dreaded what sort of mob we’d be fending off at Bridgehead. (I’d
argued with Kallhander that the time we had for stopovers was limited enough
that we couldn’t go through with the security refits they had in mind—not while
we were still flopping around in space. Better to do that once we’d touched
down at Bridgehead. Now I regretted arguing him out of it; I’d shirked a chance
to buy some more time to think of a suitable response to what we’d be facing.)

“Have you
seen
all this?” I asked Ioné
helplessly, and showed her what I’d been cogitating over.

“It doesn’t seem all that different from the
general tone of commentary generated during Angharad’s previous diplomatic
assignments. The presence of Cioran complicates things only slightly, as in
those previous missions there were any number of equally confounding
circumstances.”

There had been. Angharad’s appearance on Cytheria
had brought back to mind any number of earlier digs at her and the empire she’d
inherited. The kindest commentators couldn’t help but shake their heads and tug
their forelocks at the how this woman of principle and kindness was now saddled
with one of the worst jobs in the universe. The more malicious folks cut right
to the point with lines like
Old Way? More Like, Old And In The Way.

“Sounds like you did your homework,” I said.

“Well . . . ” Her smile told me she was
gearing up for a more full-blown explanation. “I looked at twenty-two major
incidents during Angharad’s career as Kathaya, and compared the delta in two discourse-clouds—one
harvested from a general population of followers, versus one sampled from those
mentioning her in a professional mode. The latter group continued to reflect
negatively on her, even after multiple incidents which raised her discourse
ranking in the eyes of the former. What’s truly unusual, though, is how the
former spoke most consistently of her present work—what she was doing or had
just done. The latter spoke most consistently of things she had done before, or
what they anticipated she would be doing.
And always negatively!”

If my eyes were shut, I thought, she’d sound like
graduate student, breathlessly sharing her dissertation with whoever she could
steal an ear from.

“In plainer language,” I said, “it doesn’t matter
what everyone else says about her, because it probably won’t match the facts
anyway, and no one that matters is listening.”

“That’s an astute way to put it. Now—” She leaned
in, like she was about to confide trade secrets. “When each data cloud was cross-correlated
with the other, the latter group’s greatest influence was on
itself
—not
on the larger, more public group of followers. The larger group does influence
the smaller group, in the sense of individual opinions in the latter being
reassessed provisionally based on personal experiences provided by members of
the former. But that mode of influence isn’t nearly as large; it’s clearly asymmetrical.
The most direct influence path, and the most crucial one, is from Angharad to
the bulk of her followers. Everything else is just—well, commentary.”

“Wait, I thought your expertise was protomics.
Kallhander’s right-hander, and all that. Where’d all this come from?”

“It’s also part of my assignment: assessing human
assets that in some way are part of the mission. And given how apprehensive
you’ve seemed about this mission, I thought providing you with research on her
public perceptions would be useful. You seemed most worried about public
perception of the work being undertaken. Everything I have seen shows that’s
unfounded, or at least overblown.”

“You know why I have apprehension about this
mission?” I said, making sure the deck was sealed before I started up. “I mean,
where do I start? I think bringing Cioran along is a mistake, but Angharad was
convinced saying no to him would have just meant he’d go sell what he knows to
someone not on our side. I think having you and Kallhander in for the ride is
only happening because Angharad was terrified that you’d make all our lives
miserable if you didn’t come. And the only reason I said yes to it all myself
was because I didn’t want to walk away from a chance to be that close to
someone who could make a difference for me—and who I could make a difference
for in return.”

I was calm all the way through that little speech,
and proud of it. Icy calm, the kind that glazes you over when you know yelling
and throwing whatever’s not nailed down won’t make a lick of difference.

“We never had any intention of pressuring Angharad
to accept our help,” she replied after a moment.

“It’s not the intentions that matter. It’s the
perceptions. You’re
IPS
. You can’t
help
but be that way.” I eased
off. “Look, if you’re right, and all this just turns out to be nothing more
than hot air and bad breath, then I’ll . . . well, buying you dinner
would be pointless, I guess.”

The smile on her face had long since faded, and my
attempt at a joke hadn’t brought it back. “I’ll let you rest, then,” she said,
and stepped back towards the stairs. She was disappointed, I thought, but not
in me: in herself, for not being able to use that great mind of hers to put me
at ease.

I prepared the seat for bed, all the time telling
myself all the more forcefully how on the other side of this mess-in-the-making
there was the chance that something good would flower.