Flight of the Vajra (53 page)

Turned out I was first in the queue—business was
slow today, possibly because of the summit—so I wouldn’t be there more than a
few minutes. I kept a feed open in the background to show me the progress of
the assembly, although there wouldn’t be anything to look at for a bit—just
flat slabs and brittle wafers of material sliding up against each other and fusing
together, both on their own and under the watchful eyes and fingers of the
manufaxture’s assembly drones.

I refocused myself on Enid. She was listening to
Cioran say, “When you hold back, it’s not for your sake; it’s for theirs.”

“So that makes people wonder,” Enid said.
“Something like, ‘If he’s like this and he’s
still
holding something
back . . . ‘
 
”

“Exactly! It’s a way to instill awe that they
aren’t even aware of. And also to remind them that no, you haven’t given
yourself up completely to what you’re doing. You’re still in control; you still
have mastery.”

“Cioran and the Art of Performing,” I said out
loud to myself and no one else.

From inside her eyes and within her limbs, I
followed Enid down the stairs and across several more blocks, until she entered
another door and found myself staring at what looked like the shelves of a
warehouse as they stretched up at least a dozen stories.

Arsèni Dragoji
looked like he would
have been greasy fresh out of the bath. What he didn’t have in height he made
up for in width, facial hair and black curls that descended down both sides of
his head. He wasn’t fat—just stoutly built, with thick, knobbly hands big
enough to smother a bear. Middle and index fingers on both hand sported what
looked like rings after the second knuckle, but which I knew were actually the
rims of sockets into which his fingers had been screwed. Pop off the fingers,
pop in any number of tools as needed depending on what kind of work you were up
to. I’d seen things like that before on some no-CL, Old Way worlds, since you
couldn’t direct-connect via CL to the fab systems that had made show-off prosthetics
like that obsolete (after all, why modify yourself when you could just plug
into something else that was far more customizable than you could ever be?).
Why he still had them, especially here, was another story. Three possibilities,
which I shared with Enid, came to mind: one, he’d left them in because they
were still useful; two, he wanted to show off his Old Way roots (as further
evidenced by his body type); three, he was just plain dumb.

There was barely room enough in the aisle between
those shelves for two people to stand. Cioran was skinny enough to count as
half a person, in either her male or female incarnation (currently female), and
so she turned sideways and inserted herself in the space next to Arsèni. They
eyed each other for a long moment before Cioran leaned in and gave him a kiss
on the cheek.

“Hey. No flirting during business hours,” Arsèni said.
He didn’t sound all that stern about it—more like such horseplay was a tiresome
requirement when dealing with Cioran. “So you, uh—taking in babysitting on the
side or something?”

Enid’s facial capillary response was instantaneous
and extreme.

—
Easy, girl
, I told her.
We’re not here
to make friends anyway. Just smile back and pretend you’re in on the joke.

“Enid here’s a collaborator, not a dependent,”
Cioran said, now looking properly annoyed for having wasted a kiss on him.
“Anyway. Shall we get caught up?”

“What, just while standing here inna middle of the
aisle?”

“I take it the fact you want to go somewhere to
talk means we have a lot to talk about.”

Arsèni flapped an arm, turned and started plodding
up the aisle deeper into the warehouse. Cioran kept pace behind him. I didn’t
blame Enid for looking up and around as she walked; the rest of the warehouse
was a lot more captivating than staring at the back of Cioran’s bobbing head.

Each individual row of the shelves in the
warehouse was tall enough to allow Enid to stand up in it without her head
touching anything. In those spaces, flooded with light from both above and the
side, were protomic scraps—lifeless furniture, inert husks of vehicles,
variegated slabs of protoglass that threw splintered rainbows of light on their
neighbors. We even spied an entire protomic body-clam—a surrogate bit of flesh
for those either unlucky enough to need replacements for everything below the
neck, or willful enough to
want
to replace all that flesh.

Enid followed the others until the warehouse
shelves widened out to reveal a space large enough for the
Vajra
itself
to be parked in. This was the showroom floor; we’d entered through a service
door in the back, to which Cioran had ostensibly been given the key. The
showroom was a well-lit square of space with a conference table in the center
and waist-high display cases at the periphery. Enid peered into the nearest
one: more bits and pieces glittered there, some cast from designs that I hadn’t
seen in decades.

On most worlds, expired protomics were just
reclaimed for their raw material and converted back into substrate for another
round of use. Some places, though, were more in the habit of “steep-and-keep”,
where you marinated a piece of expiring protomic material in substrate to allow
it to be charged and replenished. The full reclamation cycle was more
efficient, but took days to weeks and required a facility big enough to park a ship
in. Steep-and-keep took hours and only needed a space not much bigger than a
standing desk, but only worked so many times with a given protomic product before
it had to be reclaimed anyway. To deal with both scenarios, protomic scrap
dealers still flourished here and there—but mostly on worlds that were either
still freshly-baked colonies or which sported Old Way strictures about throwing
public (or even private) money at protomic infrastructure. Bridgehead was not
that kind of planet, and so what Arsèni was doing here on Bridgehead with his
warehouse full of proto-parts smacked less of economizing than it did being a
tourist trap. You could buy some honest-to-goodness Old Way world scrap
trinkets for showing off over the door, or installing on the plinth in the
garden . . . but I couldn’t imagine, overpriced as this stuff might
be, that such commerce was the only source of his income.

“You see that?” Arsèni was at Enid’s elbow. He
lifted the lid on the case in front of her. “Genuine protoglass from Bayala,
pre-terraform, back from when all they had on the surface was domes of this
stuff. Little glass domes here and there, people huddling inside, everything outside
a hundred and fifty degrees.” He withdrew a square of the protoglass about
twenty centimeters on a side, clamped into a frame. “They got it down an
average of ten degrees every ten years, but still. Outside’s all real tempered
thermal; inside’s all protomic. They’d look outside, see their weather reports
and heads-ups projected on it. Still works, too. I’ve kept it working.” He held
it up to the light and showed her the digits glowing faintly in the film on the
inside of the glass: temperature, barometric pressure, some other
environmentals, all blurry but still readable. “I had two others like this one.
One’s been sold to a woman who was the all-cosm p-bow archery champion for four
solar years running. She was building a resort house on Lilliharma, wanted
something ‘unique’ and ‘attention-getting’ for one of the bay windows. I said,
how about one of these as a decorative panel or something? She loved the idea.”

“How much?” Enid asked.

“That one went for two thousand. The second one,
the Terraforming Museum picked that one up; thirty-five hundred. They outbid on
my original offer. I think they were worried they had competition ‘r something.”
He grinned and lowered the glass back into the display case. “This one, five
thou. I figure
someone’s
going to be willing to pay that. Piece of
history, right?”

—
He did a good job restoring it
, I admitted
to Enid.

“You did a good job restoring it,” she told
Arsèni. Huh, I thought. I hadn’t asked her to echo his words, but at least it
got him talking:

“Sweated my teats off for it. Took like five tries
to find a single pane that was large enough and still had all the skin intact.
I could’ve bathed a broken pane and restored it, but I didn’t want to do that
if I could help it. All the other panes in the big panel I found, the protomics
were all veiny and peeling—but I finally got three perfect panes out of that
one big panel.”

“You could have just dunked the whole panel and
said cosm take it, you know.” Cioran was at Enid’s other elbow now, leaning
across to chide Arsèni. “Who would have noticed? It would be all functional,
and you could have gotten thirty or forty thousand for something that classic—”

“Who would’ve noticed?
I’
d’ve noticed.” He
slapped a hand against his chest. “What’s better, one whole fake restoration,
or three genuine pieces even if they’re small ones?”

“That depends on who’s buying, doesn’t it?” Enid
said, no prompting from me. “Do most of the people who come here look for ‘the
real thing’, or just something nice?”

“If they don’t come here looking for the real
thing, I don’t
want
‘em in here,” Arsèni said. “I’ve been doing this for
sixteen years. I went from slingin’ slag on those shitty orbital deathtrap
colonies to building a collection people pay good money to get pieces from. There’s
a dozen places you can go, on this planet even, where you can get ‘restored’
protomics that are just re-castings built from a copy of the original program
using modern substrate. Not a single cell of original substrate in ‘em.
Sometimes that’s unavoidable, sure, but that’s not where I want to start.”

He reached back into the display case and took out
a first-generation terraformer’s p-knife, a six-way weapon-cum-utility pack:
serrated cutter, stun prod, proto-pincer, a few other tools I didn’t know the
name of without CLing out for them, all packed into a space about the size of
someone’s closed fist. I felt Enid’s eyes widen and her hand move for it, and
to my surprise he let her pick it up.

“Beauty, yeah?” Arsèni was smiling. “Older than both
of us put together, probably. I restored it with reclaimed substrate—all
substrate reclaimed from the period, with the same period programming, same everything.
Took me
months
just to get the molds to take, but it was worth it. It
now takes modern substrate as a retrofit, which is about as close to
‘modernizing’ something like that as I’ll get. Me, I’d just as soon keep it
recharged with classic substrate, but I’ll let someone who can afford a habit
like that indulge in it.”

At Enid’s touch the p-knife’s embedded CL woke up
and asked her for a passcode. “Why is it locked?” she asked.

“That’s to keep people from running it down before
I can
sell
it.” Arsèni’s smile was sidelong. “Like I said, classic
substrate is pricey. Someone wants to buy it and run it down, then fill it up
with classic or recharge it with modern—they can do that on their
own
budget. Not mine.”

“Can I at least get a demonstration?”

“Sixty seconds max.”

“Stingy.” Cioran’s tone was now downright
critical.

“Hey, what I put into it just to get it running—I
don’t want it burned out before I even have a chance to sell it. Anyway, sixty
seconds.” He waved a hand and granted Enid a temporary passcode.

The p-knife sprung open. Not just once but six
different times over, each time extruding a different function with the sound
of flat metal slithering against itself. Based on the control surfaces
available through the p-knife’s CL interface, more than one instance of each extrusion
could also be instantiated, and an expert user could combine them as he saw fit.
Two knives plus a slight modification to the control surface: a pair of
scissors. Knife plus electric prod, with a modification to the knife tip: a
soldering iron for non-protomics. Then came a seventh steely twinge, and I saw
something I hadn’t expected to see: a single-charge peashooter with a reservoir
for type E to be used as either the propellant, the projectile, or both. For
added fun, Enid had kicked on Tom’s Toolkit and was using it to trace the
little dances of power that jolted back and forth through the p-knife during
each of its contortions, like time-lapse pictures of a city ground traffic
grid.

Sixty seconds is easy to let breeze by when something
has enveloped your attention. By the time the temporary passcode expired and
the p-knife reverted to its standby state, I felt Enid’s eyes had, if anything,
widened even more. I was tempted to chide her about them getting stuck that
way.

“How much?” she asked.

Arsèni shot Cioran a less-tired smile. “You didn’t
tell me she’d be a possible customer.”

Cioran’s own smile was far from tired. “I didn’t
know she would be one myself. Consider yourself twice as lucky today.”

“Huh. I could close early.” To Enid: “One thousand.”

Enid lifted the flap of her leg pocket, slid out
one of the coins, and rolled it towards Arsèni across the top of the display
case. He slapped a hand down over it, lifted the hand, looked at her, then
laughed. “Cytheria?”

“I spent some time there for work, got paid in
local currency.”

“Least you got paid. Last time someone I know
stopped on Cytheria for ‘work’, he got paid, all right—in local-grown prime
rib. Anyhow, I don’t make change from coins this big. I’ll write you back a
deposit for the difference.”

“As long as I get my merchandise.”

“Oh, you got it all right. Can’t have you walking
out of here with it activated, though—local ordinances and all that. I’ve got
to box it up for you.”

Arsèni took the p-knife out of the display case
and walked off out of sight between a pair of high shelves, probably to find an
instantiator for the box. Enid and Cioran chattered back and forth: