Flight of the Vajra (52 page)

Well, that’s it, then: every man has to find for
himself where he’s willing to stop compromising, and draw that line for himself
only. We’d all tried to draw those lines in the sand, but now a high wind was
rising and blurring them.

I walked back out onto the bridge
and
set my CL to public-global mode, the equivalent of taking the plugs out of my
ears. The streets flowered with the projections of people, all hooking into the
sensory surfaces of the city, using those surfaces as eyes and ears while they
themselves remained snug in apartments, or under rooftop canopies, or maybe
rattling around in the corridors of that castle up on the hill. (Yeah, I
thought; in the latter case, all
one
of them.) The only reason this
city, this world, hadn’t done away with everything that a visitor would
recognize
as
a city was because they had visitors in the first place.
That made sense: most of what I could walk through and touch was for people
like them, and me, and not for anyone who actually deigned to live here. And
one fine day everyone who comes here will be above such things as a stroll
through someone else’s streets . . . or they’ll quit bothering to
visit other worlds at all. Heck, most of them already had; hence the single
remaining planetary elevator.

I debated whether real-world silence was better
than the fake clamor I was now surrounded by, but by the time I saw someone
paddling down the river in a gondola—also a projection—I’d forgotten all about that
dilemma. Why not, I thought; even a fake bit of beauty is still
beauty-of-a-sort.

“Hey!” said someone in Enid’s voice.

There she was—her projection, anyway—standing in
the gondola as it passed under the bridge. Standing straight as a flagpole,
perched on her tiptoes—and with one deep bend of her knees and one good push
she launched herself into a forward flip and landed in a crouch on the bridge
railing. I knew full well I myself could cut capers that were just as outlandish,
using whatever projection of me I chose to show her: I could stand sideways on
walls, poke my head out of a dozen windows at once. On worlds where CL
projection was common, most kids did that sort of thing for about a year after
they received their first link, then got tired of it and found more productive
wastes of their time.

I applauded, then stopped. “Wait. Should I be
clapping for something that didn’t even happen?”

“That all depends on your definition of ‘happen’,
doesn’t it?” She stood on the railing of the bridge as the gondolier
disappeared under us. “I know it isn’t the same thing as real acrobatics. I had
that pounded into me pretty hard by my dance instructor. He didn’t believe CL
‘practice’ counted the same as the real thing. You either worked up a sweat or
you didn’t bother. And while he was
right,
that doesn’t make this stuff
any less
fun
.”

“Provided you know the difference.”

“More like, provided you
care
about
the difference. I sometimes wondered, when I grew up—would I still be around
people who cared about those differences, too?”

“That depends more on you than them, I’d say. You
should know; you’re the one who wants most to decide your own destiny, pick
your own paths. If you found yourself surrounded by people who weren’t like
that, there’d always be some world you could go to where your attitude would be
welcome.”

“As long as at some point I wouldn’t
have
to keep moving.”

She didn’t even seem self-conscious about what she
had just said. I didn’t hammer on it, though; I just took my hat off and gently
pressed it onto her own head. It was slightly too large, but it sized itself to
fit—just as its real-life counterpart would have done.

“Did you get the feeling,” she went on, curling a
few of her fingers around the brim of the hat and bending it up, “that when
Angharad was talking about what she wanted to do, she was really just talking
about making someplace that people could call home? Starting with her? And
maybe also starting with you and me—and that was why she told us about it
first?”

“She’s lonelier than she lets on,” I said. That
was as close as I could get to saying
I think she’s in love with me
. No
way was I going to spit that one out right then and there, I thought.

I went on after Enid looked at me. “When she told
us about her plans, all I could think was: cosm alive. Look at this woman,
locked up inside this castle, wanting something that far away, gambling on
throwing herself at strangers as a way to make it happen. Because she wants
something all of that power and access can’t give her: a real connection with
another person.”

Enid blinked, pointed at herself.

I nodded. “Among others.”

Enid blinked again, pointed at me, then a moment
later added: “So you really think this isn’t about reforming the Old Way at
all?”

I shook my head. “This is
how
she’s going
to do that, by starting with people like us. Because if it doesn’t start with
someone real, it doesn’t mean much, does it? So, yes, I think you’re right.
This
is
about making someplace that can be called home. Only I think
she’s going about doing it in a way nothing like what anyone imagined, least of
all me.”

I would have continued paving my way to the word
love
if she hadn’t jumped to her feet and thrown at my CL an invitation to
direct-connect to her back at the villa.

I plugged in and found myself in her bedroom,
Cioran standing nearby fixing his shirt and smoothing down the creases on his
trousers (or, rather, watching while they did those things for him).

—Cosm! I’m sorry, I should have told you at
first
, Enid CLed me.
I’ve been waiting for minutes on end for Cioran to
finish getting ready so we can go out like he’s been talking about. Where are
you, physically? Send me a grid.

I sent her a grid.
—Any idea where you’re
headed?
I asked her.

—
No. I’m gonna keep this link open, okay?

—
You do that. I’m going to be on the move, but
as soon as I have a fix on where you end up, I’ll close in and stay nearby just
in case.
And then: —
Are you sure you want to do this
this
way?

—I’m the one that sent
you
the invite to
see all this happening through my eyes, remember?

Cioran was once again in his female mien; “she”
snapped “her” sleeves out and set “her” mouth in what looked to me like dismay.
I’d seen Cioran manifest every kind of happy there seemed to be a dictionary
entry for, and without so much as a pause for breathing. This, though, was
uptight.
It didn’t last long, though; she sensed Enid’s eyes on her (courtesy of my
guidance), and immediately summoned more of the old breeziness.

“Ready for your day out on the town, li’l sister?”

“Ready and ready!” Enid declared. I could feel her
snap him a salute.

A direct CL sensory link
is a little
like having someone shrink you down to the size of a pea, stuff you into their
ear, and let you ride the controls of their body from inside their head. You
get to mop up after yourself if you puke.

There’s reasons aplenty you won’t do it too much,
or for too long a time. For one, it gets disorienting—and not in the sense of
being lost in the woods without a terrain grid. Disorienting in the sense that
after a while, it doesn’t just feel like your arms and legs are somehow gloved
inside the other person’s arms and legs, but that you don’t even
have
any arms and legs—not even the other person’s. Some people are able to keep
“CL-float” at bay for longer than others. Some have to bail out and go back to
their real body sooner than others.

For the first minute or so, while Enid and Cioran
made their way out of the villa, I stayed put and got used to the feeling of
floating around inside Enid’s limbs. There was no restriction against me CLing
back to the villa, as my CL had access permission to do so, so I wasn’t worried
about losing the link elsewhere because of some petty location-based block.

Enid: —
Cioran tells me the guy we’re going to
meet is twitchy and only accepts physical visitors, or so he says.

Me: —
Can you patch me into what he’s feeding
you?
I asked.
It’ll be easier than just telling me everything.

Enid: —
Sure, but if he makes me turn on truth
mode, I’ll have to kill the link.

Truth mode was one of the endless examples of how
morality and technology evolved along divergent paths. In theory, once two CLs
established a trusted relationship, turning on truth mode would have everyone
in the whole conversation informed about things like third-party eavesdroppers
who’d been silently looped in (e.g., me). In practice, the whole thing was a
joke: modded CLs could be used to make any number of end runs around that, and
the only thing it was good for was intimidating the poor kids unlucky enough to
have grown up on a world where CL mods were met with frowns, finger-waggling
and the loss of access to many municipal services. A fair number of people had CL
mods anyway, knowing full well many worlds would demand they shut it off before
clearing customs. Small wonder Angharad, Ulli and all the rest of the people at
the summit were most likely at that moment in a closed room talking
face-to-face with all CLs off and all CL access smothered.

Enid kicked in the relay, and sure enough Cioran
and Enid were having two parallel conversations. On the outside, as they passed
through the revolving airlock-like exit for the villa compound, they were
chatting about splendid weather and not a cloud in the sky and should we walk
or ride? But the CL connection was all business.

—
You’ve been kind of secretive about this guy,
Cioran,
Enid said.
Is that just because he’s secretive?

—
An eccentric, more like, and eccentrics should
always protect their own.

“Is that why you’re so keen on “cultivating” something
with me? Because I’m eccentric?” She’d switched to out-loud, maybe because this
part of the conversation wasn’t going to tip anything off to passers-by.

“Hah! You know I only mean that in the best way,
and only because we still have to stick together as best we must. There’s a
lie, and an easily-believed one, about how the universe we live in today allows
such unprecedented freedom of eccentricity. It does, but at the cost of not
allowing it to go anywhere or add up to anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not like
you’ve been stopped from being successful.”

“Not in the simple, material sense of success, no.
I go where I wish, I create the things I desire—but I meet so few people who
see themselves as being anything but nodes in the matrix of their society. With
so many trillions on so many worlds, in a way I don’t blame them for their
resignation.”

“So you think you’re an original’s original, or
something like that?” No wonder Enid hung around me, I thought; she was soaking
up my acerbicism.

“Me? I’m an
eccentric
, but I don’t know if
I’m an
original
. Not
yet
, anyway.”

“
 
‘Not
yet’?”

“I’ve been throwing that word around rather
freely, I admit.
Original
. You hate it, don’t you?”

“I don’t hate it. Why would I hate it?” —
Where in
cosm’s name is this going?
Enid wondered at me, but I was paying more attention
to what Cioran said next.

“Because,” Cioran went on, “
 
‘original’ is what
everyone
thinks
they want. What people want is not the truly original,
but originality from a safe distance. They want what’s original as long as it
doesn’t leave strange tastes in their mouths or overturn the chair they’re
comfortable in. Yet still they complain: ‘Show us something
new
! Show us
something
different
!’ But it’s all a proxy, a sham: what they really
want is a way to be oh-so-pleasantly surprised with the same old things in
shiny new skins. Like all these Highenders. They don’t want anything to be
really new, least of all themselves. No new generations; no new thought; no new
problems that would lead to new solutions. They just want to be catered to by
things that remind them most of themselves. Over time, though—?”

He held the pause long enough for Enid to pick up
on it: “Over time . . . it’ll get harder to do that, because people
aren’t as easy to fool.”

“
No
. Just the opposite. Over time it’s only
become all the
easier
to do that. Because it becomes incrementally
easier for people to fool themselves about what really constitutes the ‘new’.
They overlook the
real
newness more and more when it shows up, because
it’s often a very quiet thing. Me, I’m rather noisy—”

“Never would have guessed!”

“—and the whole reason I’m so noisy is because I’m
rehearsing the way to get people’s attention when I truly and unmistakably have
something new to show them. And the only way I can do that is with people who
have the same sensibilities.”

“That’s all that stuff you were talking about last
night.” —
Sorry, Henré, I’ll try to get him back on track.

—No, no,
I CLed
. Don’t push it. Just
follow this thread. See where it takes both of you.

“The very same stuff,” Cioran said.

—
And this guy’s part of that, too?
Enid had
switched back to CL for Cioran.

—
Not . . . in the way that you are,
Cioran
replied
. But he is, in his own far-flung way, a part of how I want to bring
something new into the universe.

Not that he was trying, and not that he could have
known, but Angharad’s own words to Enid came right back to mind:
From the
outside—no, this mission will not seem all that different. But for me—and I
hope for you and your father as well—it will be something new.

Better get moving, I told myself. I put Enid’s CL
feed into the background—I was already beginning to feel a little watery in the
limbs—pushed away from the railing of the bridge, and started walking.

Back when we had settled in at the villa, I’d
checked to see if there was a manufaxture station there. There wasn’t, for no
reason I could discern—maybe they had been reluctant to put something like that
inside the sterile zone, which made sense. All we had was the dinky little
in-room fabs, which were good for maybe coughing up new clothes and nothing
more. The closest full-blown manufaxture to the villa was a fair walk, and I
was tempted to just get a ride there, but my CL map told me I’d already covered
most of the distance on foot. Plus, Enid and Cioran didn’t seem to be in the
biggest hurry themselves, either: they had paused at a sculpture, a protomic
water-clock that seemed to be made out of water itself, and they were breezing
away at each other about how stage presence was something you had to
wrest
from
an audience instead of
deliver to
an audience. Doing all that
out loud, too: their entire under-the-table conversation had gone silent.

The manufaxture station occupied the entire ground
floor of a quarter-block allocation—a fairly large slice of real estate for a
city where the buildings didn’t go much past ten floors. They did, here and
there, but only as intermittent spires, not as dense bristling walls that
wrapped around each other like the ones in Kathayagara City. This building was
about twenty stories, tops, with every other window a glinting pyramidal
extrusion. Here, anyone could submit a protomic design—either in person or
remotely—then have the results constructed while they waited. The finished
product could be picked up, delivered, or even commanded to deliver itself to
you if it had been constructed to have that kind of functionality. I preferred
to walk in and take it myself.

The floor in the entryway reacted to your weight,
and the letters PROTOMICA, LTD. spelled themselves out in a rippling mosaic of
tile embedded just under the transparent surface of the flooring blocks. With
each step you took different designs washed in and out, and one herringbone
weave of colors supplanted another. The flooring in the main reception area was
less gaudy—it was paved with the same pressure-reactant tile, but these had
been programmed to only shift colors very slightly. In the right light one
could see, behind the wall-sized windows, large glass-and-steel vessels that
reached floor-to-ceiling: protomic substrate reservoirs. They were baby
versions of the giant artificial lakes of the stuff that existed underneath
this city and on every other planet where protomics were used.

Two other people were sitting on the circular
couch that took up most of the center of the room; both had the blank looks of
people deep in some CL trance. I checked to see if they were consuming some
public feed, something I might be interested in as well, and got lucky: one of
them was watching the assembly of their order as captured by a dozen sensory
surfaces at once. All I saw was a tangle of tubules wrapping around themselves,
shot through occasionally with thicker, more fibrous ropes—and no color,
either. I patched into the same feed and realized I was seeing a
five-thousand-mag image, but before zooming out I entertained myself: It’s
ostensibly a closeup of some protomic replacement for a cellular mechanism, I
thought. So, which organ? I went through a couple of guesses before giving up
and zooming out.

Answer: a
kidney
. I’d been staring at a synthetic
glomerulus as it was spontaneously self-assembling. Someone needed a
replacement for the organ, or maybe they were just getting peeved at how their
last body self-test had come back with results ever so slightly off from the
norm and they had spare change to throw at a few new innards. The one having
the kidney assembled was outwardly female—her CL was markered as such, but
people reserved the right to not display such markers—with a whole cloud of
hair swept up and piled high nearly as tall as her head, and the rest of her
body wrapped in what looked like several concentric layers of gold mesh that
were strategically thicker in some parts than others. An up-tier local. Apart
from the gender data, though, her CL personal-data broadcast was off, as
alluring to some as dark glasses were to others. I had to wonder why she’d come
here in person instead of have her work delivered; for all I knew, she lived in
an adjacent building and just wanted a change of real-world scenery, however
minute.

Enid and Cioran had started walking again; I
distracted myself from my impromptu prosthetic biology lesson to see what they
were up to. They were descending a set of stairs—oh, great, I’d missed
something. Good thing I’d also been passively copying everything from Enid’s
feed into a buffer, so I kept the live feed running while also winding back
through the buffer to retrace their steps. No, they hadn’t gone very far;
they’d hung out at the water clock, bantered good-naturedly about the best way
to monopolize the audience’s attention (“You always want to make it seem like
you’re holding just a little bit back” was Cioran’s theory), then walked the
rest of the way towards a set of stairs that led below street level and down to
a thick door which clicked open and swung inwards to admit them.

Time to also do what I came here for, I thought,
and connected to the manufaxture’s welcome interface. I almost disconnected
immediately again in shock: the costs for having designs realized here were
nearly
six times
what they’d been on Kathayagara. Then again, they
offered a broader range of services, too—the most appealing being better JIT
(just-in-time) manufaxturing speeds and the heaviest of heavy-duty production.
It wasn’t as if the
Vajra
couldn’t do such manufaxture—all I needed was
the substrate, plenty of amperage and a few hours to kill. But it was more
cost-effective to have some such work done in a dedicated shop, and so I’d previously
had just Kanthaka’s engine fabbed elsewhere and put aside for whatever rainy
days were in store. When we’d been back on Cytheria and I’d had the
Vajra
instantiate Kanthaka, all the
Vajra
did was extrude the body and the
“dumb” mechanics, and layer those around the engine like someone pouring melted
chocolate over a cherry. Here, though, I could build
everything
from
scratch: engine, chassis, program channels, self-warming seat cushions, all of
it. At a premium cost, of course.

I re-connected to the welcome panel and gave it
plans for both Kanthaka and Gunjita. Rather than summon them from the
Vajra
,
it was easier to just instantiate them right here. Plus, I had a few mods for
each of them which I’d dreamed up the other night, and I patched the plans with
those bright ideas before sending them over to be fabbed. There wasn’t anything
in this particular iteration of the bike that would have caused the
manufaxture’s oversight program to wave red flags and scream—all of my changes
were innocent tweaks for speed and stability. I could add all the off-market
goodies I wanted later, on my own.