Flight of the Vajra (51 page)

I let several more breaths come and go before
feeling something like calm again. No, it wasn’t rage that had me teetering,
and that forced me to sit on the edge of a planter until I felt I could take
steps that weren’t tangled up in each other. Not rage but exhilaration, and
maybe even gratitude.

I straightened my back and looked up at Anjai. In
theory I could have looked him in the eye no matter what position I was in—CL
projections can work like that—but I told myself a little affirmation of
posture on my part couldn’t hurt.

“I don’t know about
all
costs,” I said,
“but you’re right about the defending part.”

He seated himself next to me and let his shoulders
sag a bit more. “Still. I imagine that was far from the best way to share those
insights with you.”

“You got to admit, you’ve set some kind of record.
I’ve been called a lot of names in my time, but . . . ” The giggling
started with me. “ . . . ‘Kathaya-lover’—wasn’t—one of them!”

With a CL conversation, it’s a shame you can’t
really lean against the other person when you’re both laughing helplessly.
There’s haptic feedback simulation that creates a dandy illusion of that
happening, but it still falls short. At least we were able to shake off the
tension that way.

I’d been wondering since before we started
speaking whether or not I could properly call him a friend, but all the
evidence tended that way. He’d interviewed me many times before, shared drinks
in the over-the-rooftop garden that arched across my house, helped lift Yezmé
out of a mud puddle during an informal picnic of Protomic Design Society
members when one of her shoes broke. And when Yezmé had given us both devilish
looks and immediately thrown herself right back
into
the puddle (she was
already covered in mud), we’d collapsed against each other laughing in the same
way. Only Biann held out—staring, the filling dripping out of her sandwich as
she held it too tightly, shaking her head as if we were all truants.

Anjai and I sobered up. “I have another interview
to conduct,” he said, “but you’ll get to see what I have of this before I run
it sometime this evening. —Also, I have to admit: I am
very
interested
in whatever happens next. Everything you’ve said points towards something of
magnitude happening after the conference, regardless of whatever’s decided
there. Am I at least right about that?”

I did my best to sound diffident. “If she has
anything like that in mind, she hasn’t even told me.”

Maybe he even believes that, I thought. The only
thing worse than being a bad liar is never finding out if you’re a good one.

We thanked each other and shook hands. Handshakes,
like everything else in a CL connection, still fall short of the real thing—but
for the most part, people live with the unreal thing. As long as they can keep
themselves from wondering what they’re missing. I, being I, could not.

The best solution to being numb is to get moving.
I hadn’t gone very far—maybe a couple of blocks from the villa, across the wide
thoroughfare where the CL-projection protests had manifested. I half-expected
the faces of buildings and the paving of the sidewalks to still be defaced, but
the whole area had been scrubbed clean. Every public surface within CL range
was locked down or just plain didn’t register anymore—especially the
municipal-access advertising surfaces. And it wasn’t as if that graffiti had
been for the natives, anyway, all of whom had CL with custom environmental
censorship. There wasn’t a thing in any world they didn’t have to see if they
didn’t want to. This graffiti had been for the tourists, the off-world media,
the visitors—in other words, people like me.

For the first time since I’d arrived, I decided to
take in a good view of the city with my own eyes.

Tytali City is what happens when you use engineers
and designs from Kathayagara to create a place like Cytheria. Almost none of
the buildings in our neck of the woods were more than six stories tall; all had
(despite being of obviously protomic construction) the good-natured panache of
rows of hand-crafted cakes in a pastry shop display case. The prismatic film
surfaces, the blocks of glass, the rococo polychrome contours of the edges of
buildings—they managed to look welcoming and even merry, instead of gaudy and
officious. People
lived
here—even if the whole of their lives were being
lived for the benefit of whoever was in those few barely-visible silver spires
up on the distant, treeless hill further inland. When you saw the surfaces
shining under your feet, or arcing around you as you rounded a corner, it was
almost possible to forget that little fact.

It was also possible to forget that people even
lived here at all, given how few of them you might see out in public. Like so
many Highend worlds, CL was the way everyone dealt with their world and with
each other. If they went anywhere, it was only because they had a burning
reason to do so—because they
wanted
to and not even because they
had
to. Apart from the folks who had been hanging out at the villa’s courtyard, I
hadn’t seen one other human being yet. No—that changed as soon as I started
crossing one of the little bridges that laced the city. A man in clothing too
elegantly-cut to be anything but hand-assembled (the material looked like copper-colored
sharkskin) was standing at the far end of the bridge I was about to cross. His
CL broadcast told me he was MALEK PIRINÇIM, BESPOKE CLOTHIER (most every CL
broadcast beacon is a sales pitch of some kind), one of the artisans of the
city’s second tier, with at least half of his business being off-world
commissions and with twenty-six solar years of business to his name. He pitched
something into the water that flowed under the little bridge, turned, and
strode back into the building right behind him. The bridge had its own public sensory
surfaces, and through them I could see he’d thrown a bit of something that two
ducks were now fighting over.

Contrived.
That was the word that came to
mind the more I thought about this place. Cytheria had been one kind of
contrivance, and Bridgehead had become another. The canals through the city,
the city itself—all of it existed only as a fancy design decision. The Highend
folks here didn’t
need
any of these people; there were any number of
ways to get on without them, and far more efficiently too. They’d created a game
out of letting them come here and flourish, and now that game had become the
whole of all their lives.

I’d preoccupied myself with thoughts of this kind
ever since Anjai had rung off, mostly as a way of not thinking about what he’d
brought up. I sat in the same spot where the tailor had been moments before, listening
to the water trickling by under the bridge and the ducks blatting back and
forth at each other, and also tried not to think about my dream of Angharad
wading into the pool and wrapping herself around me like a scarf embracing a
neck. I’d tried to file away that vision as nothing more than wish-fulfillment,
a dangerous distraction, but now that Anjai had made a case for it I knew I
wouldn’t be able to walk into the same room with her (or hear her voice, or
even think of her
name
) without feeling desire punching its way through
me and out of me.

A new outfit, I thought, doing my best to change
the subject. I plucked at the protomic “linen” suit that had become my
trademark look—it was linen the way fool’s gold was gold—and decided if I was
going to be that much more of a public presence, I ought to invest in something
that made me look the part. I pushed off from my perch on the bridge railing
and strode right into the boutique of Malek Pirinçim.

“A pleasure to have your business, Mr. Sim.”

Malek was narrow all over: thin face, thin
features on the face, hair that hung straight up and down, cool narrow fingers
that wrapped around my hand as he welcomed me inside. Looking at him made me
understand why the term
bony
was often a pejorative.

“You’re not the first customer to come through
courtesy of the summit,” he said, “and I suspect you won’t be the last, either.”
Thin little smile, too, to go with everything else.

“Really! Who else’ve you had come through?” I took
off my hat; it had barely left my head before Malek swept it up in his hands
and hung it on an extrusion next to the door.

“One of the aides for the diplomatic contingent
from Merridon was here just this morning. She brought in a dress that had been
made by her own grandmother. Exquisite Yamazoya silk, but it was in such poor
shape—its seams were coming apart as we touched it. I’m to reconstruct the same
design with new fabric.”

“You have material on hand for a job like that?”

“I keep material on hand for most every job
imaginable. And if I don’t have it on hand, I know where to find it or, worst
case, how to synthesize it. She was willing to wait the time needed for me to
conduct a search for an exact replacement rather than simply have a protomic
surrogate. They don’t even
make
Yamazoya silk anymore; the last of the
family went Highend a generation ago. For me, though, that just makes the job
all the more interesting. Part fashion and part archaeology.”

“You get challenges like that often?” I said.

“Not as often as I’d like. Most of the time, it’s
about superlatives and hyperbole. The biggest this, the flashiest that. Or it’s
about outdoing someone else’s work—most often something I myself was
commissioned to do just the other month. That’s the most tiresome part of any
job: discovering you’re the best in your field, and then having little come
along to challenge you.”

Then you’re just not looking hard enough for a
challenge, I thought.

“So what might I help you with?” he said, after
we’d both seated ourselves in chairs that were upholstered with what couldn’t
have been anything but real leather.

“An upgrade,” I said, plucking at my suit again,
“for this. Same basic design, but not quite so—well,
generic
. I like the
material on this one—or, rather, I’d like it more if it was real linen.”

“Real linen will cost you, but I imagine that’s no
objection.”

“None whatsoever.”

“Outside of the material, there’s also
workmanship. There, you have two options. You can get on the waiting list for
all the other people who want a handmade suit from my shop, which will mean a wait
time of at least a month, and a label on the inside which no one except you and
the person hanging up your coat will ever see. Or you can have the whole thing
assembled from the same material via protomically-assisted construction, which will
take a fraction of the time and be of indistinguishable quality.” He raised an
eyebrow at me. “I give you this speech because I imagine you, of all people,
will understand how minimal the difference really is at this point.”

“Wouldn’t matter to me if you sewed it with your
toes,” I said. “However you put it together, it just has to look sharp.”

“Sharpness, I guarantee. When I’m done with it,
you’ll have something sharp enough to leave a puncture wound. Do you mind if I
use your existing measurements?”

I shook out my sleeves. “Best place to start, I’d
say.”

Malek tapped into the telemetry for my existing
clothes and downloaded my body measurements, convolutions, gait data,
everything that would be useful for him. The snobs that were most of his
customers knew just as well as I did there was no part of this that couldn’t be
fulfilled by a whole horde of protomic machine-guts in an anonymous room
somewhere. They paid for the pleasure of having a person involved in the
transaction—the pleasure of knowing his eyes and hands had been part of the
whole job, and that if something went wrong you would in fact have a living,
breathing human being to yell at.

“A custom job like this would normally take me a
few days,” he said, flicking through the data (it was visible to no one but
him, but he had the slightly distracted look of someone preoccupied with a CL
feed), “but that other job won’t go anywhere until one of my contacts gets back
in touch with me with a line on some Yamazoya silk anyway. Tomorrow afternoon,
perhaps?”

“Can you make it tonight?”

“My standard fee for rush jobs is fifteen percent
over the quoted price. Although, again—”

“—that’s not going to put a hole in my pocket, no.
Also—” I looked around. “I need something for a young girl as well, something
formal in the same way. Young as in— “

“—fifteen or so? I have plenty of designs of that
nature.” Sounds like he had been reading the news as well, I thought, but at
least he was being halfway tactful about it. I gave him Enid’s telemetry and
measurements—she’d shared them with me rather casually before when I was
setting up her combat program—and he also quoted me a 15% rush job surcharge
for that one.

“Do you also handle millinery?” I asked.

“You were thinking of replacing the hat as well? I
don’t do such work myself, but I can give you several good recommendations.”

“Please do. It’s no rush; I’m just curious.”

Malek CLed me addresses for hatmakers, one of whom
was only a few steps away. I was tempted to connect to him then and there, save
myself the trouble of walking . . . what? Walking those few steps up
the street and across the way? Maybe there really wasn’t anything wrong with saving
myself the journey: I could browse their inventory in less time than it would
take to go there, and by the time I arrived I’d be able to pick the exact item
I wanted and leave—or have it delivered back to the villa, as I was arranging
to have done with the suit once that was finished.

That’s how it all starts, I reminded myself. Little
bits of convenience, cheerfully taken into hand, shaving down the edges and
corners of your life until there’s not that much of a life to lead. No need to
walk here or there, until finally you have no need to walk anywhere at all. And
when you protest this shaving-away, they have all sorts of comebacks ready for
you:
What are you grumbling about? You do it too, you know. Maybe you don’t
do it as broadly as others, but you too want a taste of whatever conveniences
you’re willing to compromise for.