Flight of the Vajra (46 page)

Crew
, I echoed to myself. Well, that was
the word that had leaped most quickly to mind. Not that anyone had
rigidly-defined roles apart from the security detail, and even
those
two
could be said to have a rather fluid definition of their roles. But to think of
them as my
crew
, and not just a gang of passengers who happened to be
sharing some cabin space—

I turned around and saw Angharad was opening the
privacy curtain, pressing her fingers to her forehead. Not a headache; she was
removing the ’hat and smoothing her hair back after doing so. Correction, I
told myself:
I
—maybe even
we
—are
her
crew. I’m just the
pilot. And if that’s the case, then I owe it to all of us to make us more into
co-collaborators than just “crew”.

“How’d you make out?” I asked.

“I repeated myself a great deal.” Her laugh was
small and tired; I had the feeling she was going to be very happy to get out of
this glorified shipping container, breathe uncanned air, and see a whole lot of
sky above her head. “That is to say, I said little more than everything I
already said when we were interviewed on Kathayagara. Just to different people,
with different interests.”

“I remain surprised.”

“At what?”

“Human nature versus human ingenuity. All that we
talked about in that interview has made it to just about every corner of the
galaxy by now. Yes, we’ve figured out how to transmit information faster than
the speed of light, and not by a little—but we
still
can’t get people to
stop asking the same stupid questions.”

“Oh, quit expecting the impossible,” Cioran chided
me, poking his head up from the stairwell. “Or if you do, at least lower your
expectations to the grossly improbable.”

“Did anyone bug you for some talk time?”

“Naturally. I have a little statement prepared—no
revelations, nothing detailed—which I thought I’d let you see before I started
using it to keep ‘em at bay. After this whole bit of business is finished, I
plan on sticking around for at least a few days and seeing if the locals will
let me get away with throwing a little bash for a few hundred thousand of my
closest friends.”

“As long as you don’t hold that bash in the
council chamber.”

“Now don’t go tempting me like that! I already
have more ideas than I know what to do with.”

“Do any of them involve violating a public safety
code?”

“Pfh. What fun would they be if they didn’t?” And
down his head went again.

We spent most of the wait for the ride down to
planetside
getting caught up on the news, delivering a few more
very carefully stage-managed interviews, and experimenting with the new kitchen
I’d put in. The most I could do with it, no thanks to the meager selection of
raw ingredients on board, was make garbage omelets (in the sense of a little of
everything in it, not in the sense of where you wanted to put it).

The biggest sign we might be facing trouble was the
graffiti protest. Along one thoroughfare near where we were supposed to be
staying, a slew of buildings had their façades hijacked and defaced in
CL-space. Nasty slogans like “KATHAYA GO HOME” and “OLD AND IN THE WAY”
appeared to everyone who came within line of sight of the area. The prevailing
theories were it being either an inside job or the owners choosing to look the
other way. I knew too much about protomic infrastructure management to not go with
the second explanation.

Kallhander, Angharad and I all cleared Cioran to
speak, but on only the most anodyne of subjects. His position as cultural
attaché was entirely for the sake of perspective and advice, and in no way was
he authorized to speak on behalf of . . .
etc.
That was fine
with him, and anyway the interview he gave ended up being more about Enid’s
surprise debut (new partner? new creative plans? do tell!) than anything
“political”, which had the bonus of thrilling Enid to no end. It gave something
for her to talk about, too.

Angharad, Kallhander, and I shared space on the sheared-down
version of the
Vajra
’s main deck as we docked. Apart from our automated
escort, there wasn’t a single other ship in sight—nothing in the dock platform,
nothing else on the elevator rail. The last time we’d put into port, we’d
arrived incognito, and so there were no security provisions that would have given
us away. But then again, I thought, maybe it’s like that for Angharad whenever
she comes home. Here, she’s a guest of honor. Back on Kathayagara, she’s just
another denizen—and, along with the rest of the Achitraka, one who is, with
each passing year, that much less welcome or ennobled.

“Did they pre-emptively clear everything out for
us?” I asked Kallhander. “I don’t remember anything in the info packet about
that—unless it was eyes-only stuff, and I wouldn’t have seen it anyway.”

“Not that I was informed, either.” Kallhander
looked down briefly, then back up again—the only sign you’d get he was
searching through the goat-choking wad of documentation we’d been given for the
summit. “I’ll query them about it.”

Angharad had overheard our exchange—it was yet
another thing I’d said out loud specifically for her sake—but hadn’t sent so
much as a flicker of concern in our direction. Her attention was on the view
all around us during the ride down: Bridgehead’s watery colors pushing out the
black of space, with clouds salting the air below and the atmosphere growing
thicker with each passing second.

“This is strange,” Kallhander said.

Not the words I wanted to hear from him. “What’s
strange?”

“The dock and elevator were cleared by special
request, specifically for us. All other arrivals and departures were pre-empted
for this timeslot.”

“That’s mighty nice. Special request, courtesy of
whom
?”

“Trying to clarify that now.”

I CLed Enid and Cioran:
Are you following this?
I don’t know about you, but when I get gifts signed
An anonymous friend,
or something else equally coy, I’m tempted to return them unopened.

Enid:
I thought they would have done this for
us anyway.

Me:
I’m learning it’s not safe to assume
anything.

Cioran:
What’s there to distrust? If you ask me,
I would have assumed more danger if we
did
have company.

Me:
The fact we weren’t told about it was—

There are some people who are able to follow and
even respond to two, three, even four simultaneous CL feeds at once. (Last I
checked the current record holder from an Old-Way-world denizen was
nineteen
,
with coherent conversations on deeply divergent topics upheld on each of them.)
I lose it at two, and so having both Cioran and Kallhander suddenly CLing on
top of each other forced me to set each of them to mute and say:
Kallhander,
you first.

Kallhander:
The dock clearance was enacted on
special request courtesy of Ulli Kijusto. There was apparently a notification
intended for us on the subject, but it was not sent through the usual channels.

Me:
Cioran?

Cioran: . . .
I just found something
in the flood of messages I received earlier—

Me: —
which you completely overlooked, right? An
old friend of yours, doing you and your new friends a big favor,
right
?

If Cioran had an answer, I didn’t hear it. I’d
already pulled the plug and was mystifying Angharad with why I was laughing so
hard.

You can only
know so much about someone
indirectly. All the words I’d read about Ulli Kijusto, all the pictures I’d
seen and all the CL playback I’d digested of her—all of that disappeared the
second I stood face-to-face with her in the gangway for the planetside dock
where the
Vajra
was berthed. Even CL playback is only so “real”: there’s
always that little sense nibbling in the back of your head that all you’re
being immersed in is only so many little voltages being passed through your
brainstem. The Cycle of Nature had a line or two about that:
This one true
petal, this one true flower / Even its few true thorns, how great they also are
. . .

“My goodness,” Ulli said as soon as the airlock
door had irised all the way open. “I don’t even know who to welcome first.”

She stood about my height—two meters plus or minus
some spare change—and dressed like the top half of her wanted to be Angharad
and the bottom half of her wanted to be Cioran. All gauzy robes and raiments above;
pantaloons and witchy-toed boots below. A non-Highender would have made her for
maybe sixty, with her skullcap of floss-colored hair and the slight wattle
under her chin. Eyebrows sharp enough to impale you, and a mouth demure enough
to apologize for the goring a moment later. I’d seen her do both in the same
sentence, albeit not in person. Maybe now I would.

I stood to one side and let Cioran step out
towards her first. Even when seen from behind, his steps and posture were
nothing like the jaunty devil-may-care-ism he’d exuded ever since he’d first
crossed our path. With his head hanging a little and his feet dragging just so,
he seemed more like an unruly kid waiting for a lecture than a planet-hopping
iconoclast.

They faced each other in profile and exchanged an
embrace, hands over the backs of each other’s necks as they drew close.

“There was a bit of a mix-up,” Cioran said, still
sheepish. “They never found out about the little note you sent me. Our poor
pilot was convinced an ambush of some kind of was being laid on the elevator!
—I know, I know. Entirely my fault for not reading
all
my messages. I’ve
ordered
them to hold you blameless.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense.” Ulli shook her head
vigorously. “
My
fault for thinking I could make a little end-run around
proper protocol. Of course, I shouldn’t lie . . . I was hoping
you’d
be the one to respond directly.” She tilted her head and smiled, in the
motherly way any woman does with her man (whatever the actual biology)
.
“Just
as disorganized as ever, I see.”

“But that was what you liked so much!” He tapped a
finger to the end of her nose. “And you didn’t call it ‘disorganized’ back
then. You called it—”

“
 
‘—creative.’
 
” That was both of them
at once.

I stepped forward. “Just for the record,” I said,
“the pilot holds nothing against anyone.”

“Mister
Sim
!” Ulli faced me, hand out; I
shook and let her size me up from top to bottom. “You can’t imagine the
surprise I experienced on learning you were in this particular party. So am I
to take it that your years of being out of the public eye have come to an end?”

“Call it a . . . first step out of the
shadows.” I kept my back straight and my tone lively. “They—well, the Kathaya,
specifically—offered me the chance to be part of something interesting, and what
they proposed far outstripped anything I was working on myself at the time.”

“That’s quite a statement, given the magnitude of
the things you’ve come up with on your own! Are we to find out this week what
sorts of offerings are in store, then?”

“That, you’d have to ask
her
about.” I
stepped away and let Ulli have an unobstructed view of what I thought would be
Angharad—but the only people visible behind me, in the doorway to the ship,
were Kallhander and Ioné, shoulder to shoulder, with Enid peeking sidelong
around Kallhander’s left forearm. After a moment, during which they finally got
it through their fat heads that nobody was going to start shooting, the
officers stepped apart and re-opened the door behind them.

Angharad stepped out, bowed, walked the six or so
strides to Ulli with her chin firm and her steps broad, and bowed once more.
After seeing her so subdued and pensive for so many days on end, seeing her as
the
Kathaya
again instead of just “Angharad” was enough to make even Enid straighten
her own back a bit.

“A pleasure to meet you in person at last, Madam
Kijusto,” Angharad said. “I pray this will be a productive and enlightening
time for both of us.”

Ulli closed the rest of the distance between them
and instantly enveloped Angharad’s right hand in both of hers. “As do I! I
can’t emphasize how relieved I was when I heard you agreed to attend. Relieved,
because I knew full well there was so much we simply could not do without you
here.”

“Is that so!” Angharad looked surprised, both at
what was being described and at the fact that her hand was still clasped
between both of Ulli’s. Fortunately, Ulli let go just as Angharad began to tug
her arm back. “Then I am all the more pleased to have joined you. You seem to
already know Henré Sim—”

“Who doesn’t?” I kept my grin most of the way in
check.

“—and Officers Ioné and Kallhander have been
installed as IPS liaisons for the duration of this trip—”

The two of them bowed slightly. With Ioné, it was
like watching a primitive prosthetic arm in motion: it didn’t do anything
but
bend and straighten back out again. Only the crinkles that formed around
Kallhander’s eyes made his humanity seem that much less contrived.

“—and Enid Sulley, an associate of Henré’s and Cioran’s.
And someone with whom I have unfinished business.”

Enid put one leg around Kallhander’s left side,
slid into view, and cheerily thrust her hand into Ulli’s. Ever the performer, I
thought; no wonder she and Cioran became so tightly knit in such a short time.

“Tell me, Miss Sulley,” Ulli said, “what sort of
unfinished business does the Kathaya have with you?” The mark of a diplomat, I
thought: Ulli knew how to ask a question like that—especially when it was aimed
at a girl around one-tenth her age—without sounding snide or officious.

For a moment I thought Enid was going to crack
wise and say something like
The unfinished kind
, but she was polite: “It’s
about something she actually owes my father. There’s something he’s been
wanting to ask her in person for a long time, and she’s vowed to see that
through.”

“How scrupulous! I wish both her and you the best
in completing that mission, then. Is this something set to happen during or
after these talks?”

“After.” She looked over at Angharad for some sign
of approval, and got it in the form of a gentle nod. “I’d like to think my
problems are more important, but . . . I know better.”

“Your problem is scarcely one of lesser magnitude,
Enid,” Angharad said. “If I was unable to help one young woman in her way, then
I would be that much less equipped to do right by so many billions of others in
their own ways.”

“Hey, I came late to the party. I have to wait my
turn. Nothing wrong with that.”

“And a good thing, too!” Cioran collared her with
one arm and dragged her closer, making her yelp and giggle. “Otherwise we two
ships in the night well have passed each other for keeps.”

I guess Ulli’s not the jealous type, I thought.
She doesn’t look all that dismayed that Cioran’s got himself someone new to pal
around with—someone new,
and
a whole order of magnitude younger. Of
course, that could just be the diplomatic side of her personality keeping
things even.

“Before we leave the bay,” Kallhander said, “I
think it might be best if the Kathaya were to equip herself with this.” He
approached Angharad with something slightly larger than her hand sealed in a
soft pouch, which she slit open with one pull of the little red tab on the
side.

A ‘hat, I thought, and unlike the one I’d extruded
for her, one attuned to being used planetside. The icon on the face of the
packaging had been plain enough—a silhouette of a head encircled with an oval,
much like a cartoon halo. Angharad slipped it across her forehead and into her
hair with all the indifference of someone removing a stray forelock.

I must have looked more surprised than I wanted to
be, because she faced me and shook her head. “It is only what must be done for
now,” she said. “There are, after all, far more people at this conference with
CL than without it.”

“That and to be without CL on a planet like
Bridgehead, it’s to be minus eyes and ears that everyone else has.” Ulli puffed
out a slight sigh. “And it helps, it really does, in the long run. The more you
let it help you, the more useful it becomes.”

“Let’s get checked in, shall we?” I said, giving
my arms an enthusiastic flap that was maybe a bit too vigorous. “Stretch our
legs. Eat something that doesn’t come from a pouch.”

That, to my relief, set everyone in motion towards
the exit doors.

We had been able to stretch our legs a bit
while on board the
Vajra
, but we could only stretch them so much. The
hull was programmed to extrude everything from simple treadmills to more elaborate
workout gear, and I’d made good use of it during the flight. But even a
full-sensory CL feed on a treadmill fell short, and it always fell short in the
ways that mattered the most. You could give yourself the illusion of running
along a beach at daybreak or through grassy plains at sunset, but some part of
you always knew where you
really
were: in a cabin of a ship thousands of
light-years away from anything remotely like the scene you were prancing
through. The more you indulged in the fakery, the worse the crash when you
withdrew from it. The richer you were, the more likely you were to indulge in
such things to make it feel like you were never
traveling
anywhere—and
the more readily you could afford the “repairs” needed to your psyche.

Enid had ostensibly spent enough spacebrat time to
learn how such cheating always caught up with you, but I wondered if being
around Cioran was compelling her to fall out of the habit. She’d clocked in no
CL time at all during our first flight together, but more than a few times
during this last trip I’d seen her sport the glassy, dreamy look of someone all
linked up with nowhere to go. Don’t let it bother you, I told myself; stay
cooped up long enough with someone like Cioran and you’d start CLing
thoughtlessly too.

My self-reassurance lasted as long as it took for
the seven of us to pile into the airshuttle that was waiting for us just
outside the dock. The minute we sat down and took our seats, Cioran and Enid
plugged themselves in and
everyone
—Kallhander, Ioné, Angharad —followed suit
right after. Even when your CL is not fully engaged, other people’s CL
activities register very lightly through your own CL—just enough to give you a
taste of the goings-on. It’s not as if you can’t turn the volume down
altogether on such things, but that just makes you wonder all the more what
you’re missing, and in the end you cave anyway and join the party.

Environmental CL, or ECL for short, is the bath of
input and output that people on Highend worlds spend most of their waking (and
even sleeping) hours steeped in. Everything and everyone you sense or encounter
becomes a potential font of information; every surface can become a library,
billboard, porthole, or workstation; every space you enter can take on the properties
of any other space that exists. Or you can create a space that doesn’t exist at
all, fill it with whatever you like, and take it with you wherever you go.
That’s assuming you actually
go
anywhere at all, and don’t just park
yourself on a couch somewhere and populate the backside of your forehead with
whatever—much as I’d done for Enid and myself in our fake-beach shell
environment.

I knew I would be steeped in that sensory stew
from the moment we landed, and I had been dreading it. I wanted to think it
wasn’t just about me having grown up relatively Old Way, with CL being
something you only used when you didn’t have much of a choice. I’d been in
enough environments where CL was more mandatory than optional, and I’d even
thrived in some of them. The reason I was annoyed was because I knew full well
what most people did when in such an environment: they acted as if there had
never been any other way to deal with other people except through the stupid
little electronic stent embedded in their brainstem.

And so it went: barely a minute into being
formally on Bridgehead, and already we’d all wrapped ourselves in fluffy clouds
of virtual sensation. As the shuttle lifted and began skimming the coastline
south towards Tytali City, I tried to convince myself everyone else was just
doing what was needed to fit in that much more on this most Highend of worlds,
immigrant populace and all. I still felt like the only man in a sport coat at a
black tie ball, though. I
did
want to see the water below and the rough
jutting of the coastline to the side, even if the only way I could see all that
at once was through the shuttle’s own sensory surfaces. The shuttle itself had
few portholes, all of which were dogged over anyway, and I doubt anyone down
here missed seeing through them: when you can make anything into a “window” via
CL, why bother building the real thing?

“You OK? You look out of it.”

That was Enid, CLing me privately. For her to do
that no longer felt like something special was happening; it was just another way
for people to talk here.

“I get pensive every time I land somewhere, that’s
all.” I said (also through our private channel). “That and I’m not crazy about
everyone suddenly bottling themselves up in CL-land.”