Flight of the Vajra (47 page)

“We’re not ‘bottled up’! You’re right in here with
us! Besides—” (This part, it seems, I had predicted accurately.) “—everyone’s
going to be doing it here. Even Angharad’s trying to get into the habit.”

“I hope she’ll be able to get back out again.”

“You really think
she,
of all people, would
have that kind of trouble? That’s the kind of thing
I
would say, Henré.”

CL conversations never manage to be less than
jarring. I knew—and could see—Enid was physically sitting two rows behind me.
And yet because of our CL link, she was also sitting next to me, displacing my
real-world view of Angharad. Where she positioned herself in my field of
artificial vision was a compromise between what she wanted and what I needed. She
wanted to manifest “next to me”, wherever that might be and regardless of what
the environment there was like. I fixed that so she was now “seated” across
from me; it made it easier for us to have something like eye contact, anyway.

“I’m just being reminded of all the things about
CL that I never liked,” I said, “and did my best to avoid. But if I gotta, I
gotta. And if
she
does it—” I canted my head to indicate Angharad; it
was still slightly eerie to know she couldn’t hear any of this. “—then I’m not
doing myself any favors by not following along.”

“Did you always get this testy about CL?”

“Not always, no.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “I fell out of the habit. After I quit
my job, I simply didn’t have to use it as much. I enjoyed being free of it. —But
you were never all that big on it yourself, either.”

“Not as far as my work went. I only have one real
body, and that’s the one that matters most for this kind of thing, isn’t it?
Nobody would pay to see me do ‘Born, Never Asked’ or ‘Quickening My Steps’ in
this
space.”

“Sure. Nothing at stake.”

“Nothing
happening.
There’s no actual
movement
in CL, of course. —But when it comes to what’s convenient and easy, I don’t
mind being like this. I know what really matters and where I have to go to get
it.” She gave me a smile that had a heavy underbelly of accusation and
suspicion. “You’re worried I’m going to prefer this to being real. Isn’t that
it?”

“Who wouldn’t worry about that?”

“Yeah, but
you
specifically worry about
it.” She wrapped her arms around herself and pretended she was being hugged.
“You, because you think I’ll take one little push and then I’ll tip over and
break into a million pieces.”

“So now you’re going to say,
Quit protecting
me, I can handle myself
?”

“I’ve been saying it all along, Henré.” Her smile
was gone now; she was strangely sober and sad instead. “I don’t want you to run
after me all the time trying to save me. It’s not what you want anyway, is it?
I’d rather you just hung out next to me. —Like you said, you already had a
daughter, and I already have a dad. We both know it.”

Awkward silences work a lot better outside of CL,
I thought. The whole conversation had taken less than a fourth of the time it
would have if done out loud. That made the pause that followed downright
abyssal.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “But you’re worth at
least
some
trouble.”

I think I managed to stupefy us both with that
one. What followed was an even longer pause, and it only broke when both of us
burst out laughing. One good thing about CL: you can laugh your ass off and not
bother anyone else.

“We should be social,” I said after the laughing
tapered off. “I don’t want our hosts to think we’re snubbing them.”

“I thought
they
were being insular. Ulli
and Cioran, that is. It seems like the two of them are doing all the talking.”

“Let’s find out.”

It turned out we were missing a conversation that
had enveloped all the rest of them, as Ulli was in the middle of a sentence
when we connected back into their general loop.

“ . . . even the dead-ends had to be
re-opened and re-examined. That was something I expressly asked for. —Mr. Sim!
And Miss Sulley! I was just bringing the Kathaya and all the rest up to speed
on the Gang of Ten. There’s a good deal to talk about that isn’t reported very
well. It’s shameful if you think about it: we keep few secrets, we bleed and
sweat to make this work public, and at the end of the day it’s still all you
can do to have anyone even remember your
name
.”

Cioran: “Well, when it’s
your
name, who’s
going to forget?”

“Oh, one can certainly hope. But even there, they
barely remember I work on this as well.”

“So maybe I’m a little behind the times on this,”
I said, “but what’s the current state of the research? From your mouth, that
is.”

“In the last ten years—” I imagined her sigh
sounded even more exasperated outside of CL. “—there has been exactly
one
advance of any significance, and it was nothing more than an energy-utilization
refinement. The core problems remain the same: distance and accuracy.”

 “The problem being that if those concerns were
addressed,” said Angharad, “you would then have a practical method by which to
wage warfare more destructive and one-sided than anything previously
conceived.”

Obligatory for
her
to say that, I thought.

“Your Grace, I have never doubted that,” Ulli
said. “And I stand by my original position: that by determining if this is
possible, we stand that much better a chance to protect ourselves against its
abuse.”

“You evaded my earlier question. Will such a
discovery be made public or not?”

It’s been a while since Angharad had been
that
sharp with someone, I thought.

“Then I’ll repeat my earlier answer, which was no ‘evasion.’
That will depend entirely on the nature of what is discovered. The core theory
will almost certainly be presented for public peer review. But detailed
technical implementations will not.”

“Will you create an implementation of it
yourselves?”

“That seems only logical, wouldn’t you say? Yes,
we would—and under watchful eyes. We certainly wouldn’t speak of the fact that
we were doing so. That seems all too easy a way to attract the wrong sorts of
attention from the wrong sorts of people.”

“And how are we to know that you yourselves will
not become ‘the wrong sorts of people’, without the slightest of oversight? Are
you willing to perform such work under the auspices of a governing body?”

“But—my dear, you can’t fail to see that would
only hasten its corruption! A government would only have all the more incentive
to weaponize the results, instead of selectively place it in the public domain.
The Gang of Ten as a whole owe their allegiances to no one entity; that’s why
we formed the group as we did, to prevent precisely those sorts of abuses. That’s
why we convinced as many worlds as we did to sign the Hierotymos Charter. Any
world signatory to the charter that developed such an advanced version of EE
would be subject to severe sanction.”

“Sure, assuming they ever get
caught
,” I
said.

Ulli was undaunted. “If you are wary of the
conceit that we trust ourselves and absolutely no one else with this work,
perhaps a brisk survey of all the aggressions that have been conducted between
worlds, without a single shot needing to be fired, will do. How many Old Way
worlds have blockaded each other’s trade? Sent saboteurs that executed their
work only after decades and generations? How much bribery to ensure they were
first in line to secure a piece of some newly-terraformed settlement?”

“They then had their own leaders removed from
power for precisely those reasons,” Angharad said. “Their accountability is
slow, but it does come. The inevitable nature of any group not created by the
consent of the whole is for it to have no accountability at all.”

“You could well be speaking of the Achitraka
itself, you know!”

“Yes. I suppose I could.” She bowed slightly
towards Ulli. “The Achitraka is only accountable to others in that others
legitimize its existence when they are one of the Old Way. Without followers, the
Achitraka are nothing more than men and women under a roof somewhere. I owe all
that I am to that fact. And I am not ashamed of it. If anything, it gives me
all the more to strive for, all the more promises to be fulfilled. I am not
ashamed to place myself in the hands of many. If this work is as important as
you claim—and I believe it is—then you have everything to gain and nothing to
lose by allowing it to be given the oversight it will need.”

“My dear, I would love nothing more than to place
it in ‘the right hands’.” Ulli smiled and shook her head. The smile had dismay;
the head-shake, compassion. “I have considered this for . . . oh,
goodness, quite some time, now. Possibly longer than you yourself have been
alive. And in more iterations than I could recall.” (That part, I didn’t
believe: she probably had every single one of those discussions with herself
logged and backed up somewhere. It just sounded better that way for all the
non-Highend people.) “Always, always, it came down to this:
If I cannot
trust myself, then who is there to trust?
Out of that has come our whole
approach for this project. It hinges entirely on our ability to trust
ourselves. Oversight—what is oversight, but the enforcement of skepticism by
way of another? And who is to say the many are not able to be terribly wrong
about something this normative? The many have been wrong countless times
before. And we Ten stand a better chance to improve our own track record in the
time we have than we do improving everyone else’s.”

“If you give up that easily on the many,” Angharad
said, “who is to say they will not in turn shirk you as well?”

Ulli managed not to look too ruffled. “By that
time, will it matter? Again: who else but ourselves? Who else would engender
that sort of trust?”

“We might,” said Angharad. With that she put out
her hand towards Ulli, palm facing up, head slightly lowered, as if
supplicating the other woman.

“If you change your mind,” Angharad went on, “and
choose not to keep those secrets to yourself, you now know there is one who
will be happy to shoulder the burden of making it public. Vest those
discoveries in us, and we will be obliged by the weight of all who follow us to
be true to our promises to keep them public and accessible.” She let her arm
fall slightly. “After all, there is nothing in the Old Way that forbids space
travel—otherwise, I would scarcely be here myself, would I not?”

Ulli looked at each one of us in sequence,
settling finally on Cioran. “If this were anyone else but her,” she said, “I’d
never believe for a moment she was sincere about it all. —How did
you
end up in her circles, anyway?”

Cioran shrugged back. “Oh, you know how it is.
Showed up on the doorstep one day, couldn’t bring myself to kick her out.”

Enid reached over and gave the top of Cioran’s ear
a tug. “Behave, you!”

Ulli patted his arm. “If all the high-level talks
I had were this entertaining, I’d pay
them
to let me have the job.”

Angharad looked somewhere between puzzled and pleased.
After a moment, she settled for pleased.

The conversation ended there as the shuttle put
into dock. Our CL-space was interrupted by happy chimes and friendly warnings
to that effect.

It only then hit me that I’d missed the view during
the entire ride. I’d been keeping my CL buffer on passive logging ever since
we’d left Kathayagara, so in theory I could dig out and play back the landscape
sliding past whenever I wanted to. But I didn’t want it that way. The first
version of any experience, the one you get right as it happens—what replaces
that?

From the air,
Tytali City is a bulge of
high rolling hills surrounded by collars of low-lying city. The city buildings
don’t rise much past ten stories until you go further inland, where they
bristle and spike upwards ambitiously. But those gently rolling hills aren’t
parks—they’re the enclaves where the occasional Highend native of Bridgehead
lives.

At the dead center of Tytali City was the estate of
Prince Nancelares—“prince” in the same way someone would sign themselves
Esquire,
a wholly symbolic title. Ownership of the city had passed into his hands
after Tytali’s death as part of the dead man’s instructions, and it was only by
Nancelares’s grace that an immigrant populace continued to exist. No other Highend
on Bridgehead had dared to break the status quo and allow their own immigrant
populace; they were all looking to Nancelares to give the thumbs-up or -down to
his own people, and then follow that model.

The cluster of city immediately around him, the “estate
district”, is inhabited by nothing but “up-tier” immigrants, the folks whose work
directly sustains that one Highender’s lifestyle. There you’ll find his
tailors, should he choose to dress himself in something that isn’t assembled
from a protomically-controlled fabrication system; his kitchen staff, which
might well consist not only of cooks and prep crew but game hunters, breeders,
gastrobiologists, culinary chemists, theoreticians, and so on down the list of
technical specialties; his construction staff; his security specialists; his
artists, authors and journalists, as there wasn’t a single Highender on
Bridgehead that didn’t have their own publication, gallery, or media concoction;
and so on down through every possible indulgence, distraction, and curiosity.

Almost every one of the up-tiers who worked in
those trades spent maybe fifteen percent of their actual labor on their
masters. The rest was turned back outwards to the universe at large. The
gastrobiologists, for instance: their research fed right back into countless
lines of biology work being done across the galaxy. Such a post on Bridgehead
gave you not only unprecedented access to a real-world laboratory that you
couldn’t find on any of a dozen other worlds, but also gave you the capital,
the spare time, and the clout to make your work lionize anyone’s attention.
Same goes for those in the more creative venues: to be an author for a
Bridgehead house publication meant not only perpetual patronage, but an
enthusiastic audience on hundreds of other worlds as well. If it meant cranking
out the occasional puff piece to satisfy the whims of your Bridgehead
house-master, that wasn’t even a price to pay; that was a spare-change tithe
squeezed out of one’s hip pocket.

Below the up-tiers were the primary immigrant
residents of Tytali City who kept them feeling special: the “support staff”. These
were the ones who kept things clean, wired-up, properly-fed and watched-over.
They lived only marginally better than they might have on any number of
worlds—Cytheria, for instance—but here, every so often, one of them might have
a shot, however infinitesimal, at stepping into the freshly-vacated shoes of
whoever they had once served.

Those who’d come to Bridgehead for the summit had an
entire estate district set aside for them on the coast. A whole block of
residences had been erected just off the beach—the kind of on-demand-instantiation
architecture that people took for granted with protomics, but on Bridgehead
even the lowest tier of construction and design for such things was
luxury-grade product anywhere else. They exported such work to other worlds at
prices of their own choosing—which meant those other worlds had black markets
for Bridgehead-style construction at one-tenth of the cost of the real thing.
Well, more like one-seventh, after you factored in the graft needed to make
sure the right people were looking the other way when agents for the real builders
came by.

The diplomats’ shared villa—the apartment complex
or even “bungalow stack” as some called such things—rose some fifteen stories
over the beach, with our level being the one directly below the roof. The whole
thing was built into a sloping cliffside, so each story was set back somewhat
from the one below. Angharad had evidently been offered one of several possible
layouts for the floor, and it had been instantiated while we’d been in transit.
A map of the floor would have looked like a Venn diagram, each of the nine
rooms a circle that only very slightly overlapped its neighbors. That was where
doors between them nominally appeared, but the eight private rooms could all be
manipulated independently, with the ninth central room subdividable into
privacy corridors if no one inhabited it.

Right after we set foot inside, Enid and Cioran chased
and peek-a-boo’ed each other through that nexus, their laughs echoing out into
my own room. Angharad, lucky her, reserved the room with the largest view of
the water. I ended up in one of the two adjoining rooms; Enid was in the room
that adjoining mine and was further “inland”. We two kept the door between us
open while we settled in, although there wasn’t much to it except for
replenishing our clothes and—in Enid’s case—dunking one’s self in the tub.

My slice of the view facing the water had a retractable
window and an outside porch, and I dilated the glass and stepped outside. The
villa and the area surrounding it for kilometers in all directions, sky and ocean
included, was “sterile”: nobody except us diplomats, our handles, and planetary
security were allowed there. We had the run of the place, though—we could
stretch out on the roof (which could be domed over for extra security if
needed), visit our neighbors if they allowed us to, even take a stroll on the
beach. I looked down at the sand and decided yes, I did want to feel some of
that between my toes. The CL beach that Enid and I had basked on before had made
me all the hungrier for the real thing.

A set of stairs extruded from the lip of the
balcony, wound down the side of the building, and reached all the way to the sand.
I popped my shoes off, let my cuffs roll themselves up to mid-shin, and
galloped down the steps with giddiness on my breath. It struck me just then how
I’d made almost every home of mine somewhere near the water: my parents’ house
had been a short walk from the river; my own house had overlooked the sea
. . .

From a distance the beach all looked like the
black sand of volcanic rock, but as you walked across it—and especially as the
water darkened it even further and then as it dried in the sun—you saw a whole
spectrum of color issue forth from within that black. You could take a handful
of it, stare into it, and try to find the same dark rainbow there, but you’d
never see it there: it could only be seen in the beach as a whole when it was
ablaze like this. Bridgehead had three red moons—one roughly Luna-sized, the
other two maybe a quarter that size—which came out at various times to chase
each other across the sky in a line. I wondered if their light would create a
rainbow as red as this one seemed black. Be nice to find out later, I thought.

I almost blundered into Enid. No, it wasn’t
her
—she’d
made a CL connection to me, and was using my senses to project her image into
the scene.

“You should come down here for real,” I chided
her.

“The water in the tub’s warmer! Besides, I’m not
big on salt water. It makes my hair feel like it’s gonna break off.” Then, all
joviality gone: “Cioran’s talking about going into town tomorrow.”

“With or without a chaperone?”

“Duh. Without.”

“That’ll raise eyebrows, but as long as nothing
actually
happens
, I don’t think anyone’s going to care. Nobody here is
under house arrest, and as far as the rest of the planet’s concerned we’re
honored guests. And since he’s CL-tapped in the first place—”

“Yeah, but from what he told me, he asked Angharad
to have that rolled back now that he’s held up his end of the bargain.”

“And?”

“You’d have to ask her, but he sounded pretty
confident he’d get it. And if he does, then—” A second’s hesitation in the real
world is forever in CL. “—I think he wants me to go with him.”

That gave me pause enough to pick my next words
twice as carefully.

“
Do
you want to go with him?” I said.

Now her grin was lopsided enough to only barely
count as one. “Is the Kathaya female? Of
course
I want to go with him,
even if it wasn’t about keeping an eye on him. He’s always going to be doing
something interesting. And I mean more than just, you know, creeping off to
some hydroponica to smoke moss or whatever.”

“By the way. When he’s not doing that, there’s a
visit or two I know I want to pay. I recognized a few names on the masthead of
the city’s governing board, and I thought I’d be nice and social for a change. Plus,
there’s a journalist who wants to talk to me, but I think I can do that without
dividing up my attention too badly.” My face crinkled as I backtracked mentally
to the previous topic. “I keep thinking—Cioran would respect more of a
challenge here. If he’s trying to get his tap lifted and then sneak out—”

“—you want to give him the satisfaction.”

“I want to make it feel like he’s giving
himself
the satisfaction. ‘Sneak’ implies something clandestine. You think he’ll catch
on to being deliberately let off his leash?”

Enid stood with her hands planted in her
newly-extruded front pockets, legs apart, looking down as the tide sloshed
between them. “I think he’s trying to do something sneaky,” she said, “and,
again, I think he wants me specifically to come with him and see it.”

“For him, from what I’ve seen, you are one of the elect,”
I said. “You’re in with him far tighter than most people ever get. Me included.”

“I know, and that’s what’s still weird about it.”
She looked up, facing me with the same searching light in the eyes she’d given
me back when we had first talked about her getting in tight with Cioran. “The
more I’m around him, the more I feel like he sees something in me that I don’t
know if I can give him or not. It’s not just about ‘being special’. I
know
I’m something special.”

Rejoice, O young one, in thy youth, I thought.

She went on, but a tinge of worry now colored her
words. “It’s . . . what if I’m not special in this way that only he
has in mind? What if I let him down? Then he’ll just get bored and move on, the
way he’s ditched so many other people.”

“You’ve been wondering all along if he would do
that?”

“I thought about it. I didn’t take it seriously. I
was like, ‘Oh, I’ll be the lucky one.’ Now I’m wondering if anyone gets that
lucky with him. Look at it—even someone like Ulli wasn’t enough for him.”

“Maybe you have that backwards? Maybe he was too
much for her.”

“Still!—I like that he’s interested in me, but the
more I see, the more I’m thinking it won’t last long. It’ll last until
something else distracts him. And I also get the feeling that something else is
happening here on Bridgehead, and he can’t talk to me about it because he
doesn’t want me to
cry.
” That last word came out in a growl; then she
went on, wistfully: “You know what he said to me, the other day? It was one of
the sweetest things anyone’s ever said to me. He said, ‘You’re the first person
I’ve met in a long time whose first words to me weren’t “Play that song”.’ I
don’t want someone like that to just walk off on us.”

Us
, I thought.

Aloud I said: “There isn’t a day that goes by when
I don’t see a dozen things that lie outside of my sphere of control. And in
each one of those cases I tell myself: ‘Wait, no, maybe it’s not
completely
out of reach.’ I tell myself there are always things that can be done. I tell
myself that when something can’t be done, it’s all because I was too lazy to do
it. I made excuses, I gave myself permission to look the other way. I
blinked
.”

“You still think the
Kyritan
was like that,
though?”

“For the first time, I’m letting myself doubt that
a little bit. I’m so used to my own wisdom being the right kind, and everyone
else’s being wrong.” I lifted my head and looked at the horizon: the first and
largest of the three moons, red enough to be its own little fake sunset, was on
the rise. “If he walks away from you—from
us
—it’s not going to be for
any lack of trying on your part.”

“And what happened with your folks—” She stopped,
looked at me strangely, and from the top of the stairs I heard the padding of
bare feet. Enid was taking the steps down, two and three at a time, pushing off
from the edge of each step like she was sprinting. Her hair was still wet from
the bath and slapped against her shoulders in unruly ropes as she ran, but she
was fully dressed. She ran right through her own CL projection (it vanished in
what looked like a burst of refracted sunlight) and slipped her arms around my
chest from the side, pressing her cheek against my ribs.

“You know what’s stupid?” she said into my side.
“There are days when all I want to do is run and run until I don’t see a single
other human being, and I think about how great it would be to wrap myself up in
that forever. There’s been all these ways for me to do it all along, you know.
There’s CL, and there’s just knocking around the galaxy and never staying more
than a couple of days here or there, and there’s doing things that almost
nobody else can share, except maybe by just watching. All these ways. And then
I do that—or as close to that as I can get without getting scared—and then I
meet someone new, and I ask myself ‘Why did I want to run away? I can’t think
of not having someone like this around.’
 
”

I gave her shoulder a hug, and then realized I
wasn’t just hugging her shoulder—I was in a full-blown embrace. Cosm with it, I
thought; if we’re throwing our arms around each other, so be it. Nobody here is
ashamed of this anymore.