Flight of the Vajra (49 page)

“But perhaps it isn’t.” Ulli showed Angharad her
two deeply-lined palms. “And perhaps there is such a thing as being
too
noble, Kathaya or not. If the lesson taught from this is that you are willing
to go to such lengths for strangers, then what stranger might not feel entitled
to show up at your door and demand six kinds of salvation while you’re still
rubbing the sleep from your eyes? —Please, don’t misunderstand me as an
advocate for . . . well, discompassion. But it’s clear she’s done
fine for herself without her father. Even better, perhaps! She saw in you
someone she could make answer for her father’s mistakes, all of which he made
of his own free will. With or without you. You are not the only person of
stature who has a following in this universe, to say nothing of the fact that
the Kathaya is an office and not embodied eternally in only one subject.”

“You are saying, then, that he would have simply found
a way to make the same mistakes some other way.”

“Of course! Human beings seek opportunity in all
forms, including those they hardly would recognize as opportunities. Miss
Sulley here believes, maybe not altogether incorrectly, that you are the source
of her father’s misery. Or if not the source of it, that only you have the
power to act in a way that can change it. She may think of it as nothing more
than the justice that anyone else in her position would seek. I’m sure she
doesn’t think of it as exploitive—and from all you’ve told me, you don’t
either. But why say yes to helping her, for reasons that
others
will
almost certainly seize upon and misuse?”

—Because that will be my last act as the
Kathaya
, Angharad said via CL, looking right at me.
And by the end of
this conference, I would like to be able to tell Ulli that as well.

—
Don’t bank on it
, I told her.

To Ulli she said: “Were I anyone else, I am
certain the choice would be easier.”

“Ah, well, that
would
provide you with an
escape route from all this, doesn’t it?”

“What would?”

“Being someone else!” And she had a good laugh at
her own joke.

I found Enid and Cioran
on the enclosed
porch overlooking the ocean, a blazing jewel box of stars above. Their empty
plates sat on an endtable, and they both leaned back against the railing and
stared up and up.

“The perfect antidote to ten days of shipboard
cuisine?” I guessed.

“
The
perfect one.” Enid straightened up a
bit to face me. “So I take it the actual sessions start tomorrow?”

“First thing in the morning, Angharad will be in
chambers. That leaves us to do . . . well,
most
of what we
want. That means no leaping off buildings,” I said, giving Cioran my best
frown.

“What I would not give,” Cioran said, following
Enid’s example and sitting up (he did it in a far more abrupt motion), “to be a
fly—a sensory surface—on the wall of that conference room. So
frustrating!
To be brought all the way here, and to know history will be made just on the
other side of some wall within walking distance . . . and to not be
able to know a thing about it until it’s wound down, same as the rest of the
hoi polloi.
So
, so frustrating!”

“Why so frustrating for you?” Enid turned to him,
empty plate now in hand. I suspected she was hankering for one of the desserts
that were now festooning the table inside. “Oh, I get it. You’re a
history-maker, not a history-reader.”

“That’s how he seems himself, yes ma’am,” I said.

“Oh, come off it, both of you!” He bent himself
backwards over the railing, arching his back with such alarming sharpness that
I was more worried something would break than that he would fall off. “Why
shouldn’t I be frustrated that great things are happening and that my total
contribution to same has been as the author of a mere dossier?”

“Hey, that was what you volunteered.” I positioned
myself next to him. “Did you expect that to magically transform itself into an
all-access backstage pass, like the kind you dole out? Or are you just bitter
that Ulli didn’t cut you in on more of the action now that you’re actually
here?”

“Well. I shouldn’t be
too
bitter, I guess.
Not so much that I ruin my appetite for whatever else there is to be feasted
on. —See, I didn’t really imagine she would pop open that many doors for me now
that I was here. But it sure would have been nice . . . a fine return
to form for both of us.”

“She thinks of you as an ex-something?” Enid was
physically outside, reloading her plate, but her CL projection remained in the
room with us as she spoke. “She still seems to like you, though. More than just
‘like’, come to think of it.”

“Oh! Plenty of ‘like’ left between us, that’s for
sure. But precious little . . .
true
confidence. We adore each
other, but in her eyes, somewhere along the line, we became that much more
. . . unraveled.”

“Maybe,” I said, “that’s because the total time
you spend in any one place can only be measured in Planck intervals.”

“Henré!” Enid appeared in the doorway back to the
dining room, mock horror on her projection’s face. “Behave!”

“Oh, don’t bite his head off for telling the
truth.” Cioran straightened up once more and slid his long bones into the chair
next to him. I’d dialed back my CL slightly to see how much of this physical
clowning was in fact taking place; it all was. “Everyone, Ulli included, knows
I’m restless. Sometimes I’m accused of being more restless than faithful. I
freely plead guilty to that—and to the additional charge of reckless emotional
endangerment, I also throw myself on the mercy of the court. But I submit there
are mitigating circumstances. I have no
malice
for those who feel left
behind by me. They are not left behind out of any sense that they failed to
fulfill some part of some compact between us. All I am doing is testing those I
find, seeing if they choose to keep up or not. The few that have, as Ulli did
for a time, they never completely leave my heart even if my body leaves them.
My door always stands open for them again.” He reached for his polylute—it was
leaning against the wall next to him, half-invisible thanks to the red light of
the three moons—and slid it flat across his lap. “If they choose not to walk
back through it, is that my fault?”

Enid stood over him, holding her plate so gingerly
I thought for a moment she was going to drop it across his instrument, and not
as a harmless CL prank, either. “So what you’re saying is, you’re looking for
someone who can keep up with you—but you’re not going to meet them halfway, is
that it?”

“That just sounds like a formula for disappointing
yourself,” I added.

“But it’s
not
!” He was playing now but the
music seemed to be coming from outside and up the beach somewhere—like it was
coming from a strolling party taking in the the scent of the night air and the
sight of the black sand. “I’m not
disappointed
by any of this. I may
seem that way, but come morning it’ll have blown past me. It isn’t as if I
harbor grudges. I thought I said as much: Ulli is always welcome to come back
into my heart if she’ll have me. But she has to take me as I am—undiluted and
untamed. Somewhere out there, I imagine, there’s someone just as undiluted and
untamed as I. Someday we’ll meet and out of that meeting will come something so
far beyond what either of us could ever conjure on our own that we will both be
astonished. That’s why I refuse to settle for anything less. I want alchemy,
not simply the predictable mixing of elements. I want fire, but I won’t settle
for the fire of a cooking stove; it must be the fire of a sun . . . ”

The music now sounded as if it were coming from
directly below. I leaned to one side and saw six figures on the beach—all in
flowing, gossamer doublets, their hoods, long sleeves and pantaloons
illuminated from the inside. Each carried some variant on Cioran’s own ‘lute,
making it seem like they were playing his tune. One quick inspection from my CL
debugger told me they were Cioran’s own environmental creations, even leaving footprints
on the black-and-red sand (which would vanish when they did). But the exact
nature of the trickery didn’t matter; their appearance had created the needed
spell, enough to make Enid forget her butter cake, wander to the railing, and
peer down at the synthetic passers-by too.

“And you’re okay with never finding that fire?”
she said. “Because that could be the case, you know. In fact, if you ask me,
it’s more likely to not happen. You’re never going to find someone with the
kind of fire in you that you have.” Why does she sound
hopeful
, I
thought? “That’s why everyone else is always going to stand back and stare when
they see you. They can’t live up to what you want from them. I get the feeling
only
you
can do that.”

“Why would you feel that way? It’s a big universe,
isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “and from what I see, it’s barely
big enough for you as it is.”

“Admitting to that
is
a form of flattery,
you know.” His tone changed, became sly. “Say—when you said we could leave, you
also said ‘do
most
of what we want’, yes?”

“I sure did. Play it back for yourself if you
don’t believe your own lying ears.” That was one thing I did love about being
around him: I could rib him endlessly. He was constitutionally incapable of
taking anything the wrong way.

“He just likes being ‘out there’,” Enid said,
still chewing on her butter cake. “It doesn’t have to be for a reason.”

“She’s nailed it!” Cioran muted the ‘lute,
interrupting the chord progression he had been building. None of that required
his hands, but he’d been moving his hands all throughout his performance
anyway, to maintain the illusion. “It’s not about going out to do something.
It’s about going
out
, period. Let me ask you this, then. I know—well,
I’m highly
certain
that Ulli wouldn’t hold such a sojourn against me,
especially if there was no harm done. But would Her Grace be the same way? The
planetary authorities?”

“No and I don’t know,” I said. “Although
Kallhander and Ioné would each chew one of your ears about creating a possible
security hazard for yourself and maybe the rest of us as well. I’m guessing you
don’t savor the idea of being kidnapped—”

“That’s happened a few times. Do I look like I
worried about it?”

“—and having what you know about this meeting
beaten out of you. And that would be one of the
nicer
things that could
happen.”

Cioran started playing again, an amorphous choral
drone that seemed to be coming from one of the stars (or maybe moons) above. I
looked up and saw that a good percentage of the sky was now taken up with his projection
of a fully occulted sun—a corona of red on one side and blue on the other, with
the real moons in the sky transiting across the face of this fake eclipse. I’m
supposed to be giving him incentives to leave, I thought, not stay. But I was
getting the feeling dangling such danger in front of him only made him think
all the harder of how he was going to resist it, vault clear over it.

The more I talk about what can go wrong, I
thought, the more tempting it all is for him. Good.

“You’re worried I’ll be disloyal,” Cioran said,
“even if I have no such intention. Surely you realized that just by saying yes
to my agreement, you got whatever loyalty you could expect from me? I wouldn’t
betray you
consciously
; isn’t affirming that enough?”

Enid was looking at him, wiping the crumbs from
her fingers. She didn’t send me a sideband signal, didn’t do anything other
than raise her eyes to meet mine and say, “You brought
me
along, too,
didn’t you?”

I didn’t poke her back to see if she was just
fueling Cioran’s ego with those words. Everything I saw and knew told me she
was. She’d let him do most of the talking, which was just as it should have
been.

“I just find it funny,” I said (and I
did
find it funny, without trying all that hard), “that they give you some of the
best accommodations on any world, and all you can think about doing is cutting
loose and finding some dive where you can swing from the rafters. —Maybe
literally, in your case,” I added at Enid. “Thing is, I know it’s not
ingratitude. It’s about just . . . wanting things on your own terms.”

“And wanting them in the
sincerest
possible
form.” Cioran gestured over the railing at the fake eclipse bathing everything
in false colors. A second later, it was replaced with the real beach scene,
with fewer colors (mainly red now) but also with no need for the gaudiness of
imagination to make them interesting. “And what’s more, I doubt there’s
anything some plug-twister could get out of me that they wouldn’t already have
seen in the headlines.”

“Or get out of
me
,” Enid added.

I knew that last part wasn’t true, but all the same
I was able to pretend it was. Casually, and with a crooked smile even, just to
further cement the deal.

The party dissolved amicably not long after that.
Angharad and Ulli (well, Angharad more than Ulli) had to be up at a proper hour
to begin the first day’s talks. We wished both of them the best and drifted
back downstairs into our rooms. I felt I should have had something more to say
to Angharad than just
I’ll be thinking about you
or
Good luck,
but
in the end that was all that came to mind. Not like she would object, I told
myself, but all the same it stayed with me after I’d pulled off my clothes,
stretched out on the bed, let the blank ceiling fill my vision, and for once
decided to use CL neutering to blank out my vision and drift off to sleep all
the faster that way.