Flight of the Vajra (55 page)

“I’m asking
you
,” I said. I closed the
distance between us (if only in our shared CL-space, but still, I hoped, an
intimidating move). “Something about what you were interested in got him
interested, too. Very interested, so much so that he was willing to torch the
whole place and maybe himself along with it. Why do I have the feeling there’s
more between you than a couple of favors owed?”

Ah, shit, I thought, that’s not something I’m
supposed to know. But at this point I doubted me giving away I knew such things
was very high on Cioran’s list of Things To Fret About.

“You want to tell me about it now,” I went on, “or
you want to tell Kallhander and Company about it after the
next
disaster, whatever that is? The only reason they’re not ripping into you about
this right now is because I am.”

Cioran raised his polylute as if preparing to
wield it as a shield. I wasn’t about to start throwing punches, but I was sure
at that point I looked like I was.

“For you,” he said, “and for Enid, and for
Angharad, I’ll speak freely. For you, most of all, since you stand the best
chance of keeping this . . . compartmentalized. Because there’s one
person who stands most to lose if I speak about this.”

“Who?”

“Ulli.”

“Oh,
cosm
. More pillow talk? Is that what
this is about?”

“No, Henré. It’s a bit less anodyne than that.” He
was far better at sounding serious than he had ever let on. “Ulli and I—we have
a very difficult-to-explain relationship. Or, rather, we have a relationship
that we try very hard to make look like one thing in public when it’s really
quite another in private.”

“You’re doing a great job of explaining nothing.”

“When I first met Ulli,” and with that Cioran’s
tone became downright melancholy, “I don’t think either of us expected to be as
enamored of each other as we were. Or, rather, I was deeply enamored of her,
and she was amused by me. I didn’t mind things being so . . . asymmetrical.
‘It’s attention,’ I told myself, ‘and better some attention than none,
especially from someone like
her.
‘Someone like her’ meaning someone in
power in a Highend world, someone who had power in multiple manifestations of
the Highend, actually. I thought little of it at first; why would I? All it
meant to little vagabond me was that she moved and shook with other movers and
shakers that were moving and shaking in circles I would never enter, or
want
to enter. So I tagged along, with her permission, as we attended this
garden-top party or that suborbital get-together. Nothing I hadn’t seen before,
I told myself. And I was even able to squeeze some extra attention for myself
out of it. The Highend may loathe me in principle, but I’ve yet to have too
hard a time getting a sizeable number of them to line up and buy tickets with
my name on them.

“And again, at first, I didn’t take it very
seriously. I might be here, now, but who knows where I would be in six months
solar? So I’d leave, I’d flit, I’d find myself wondering why there was no dent
in the pillow next to mine where I woke up . . . and in time I’d
wander back into her always-open arms. To this day I don’t know if she couldn’t
make up her own mind about me—whether to condescend or to be charitable, or
maybe find a way to do both at once. But I could not ignore the evidence. The
door always stood open; there was always an opportunity for me to connect to
through her; there was always her tea and her sympathy. And her bed.

“Seven times I did this, over the course of a few
years solar. Seven times I wandered off, telling myself ‘It’s the road leading
away from her door that’s more important than the road back to it!’ Away,
away—away to High Nags Head and Greenways, away to Djeranpur and Port Heimdall.
And always back again, seven times. And on the eighth time I sat her down one
fine morning and said, ‘You’ve got no business being so welcoming to me, do
you?’ She didn’t know what I meant, so I explained: ‘I’m your clown and your
buffoon, and I love it! And everyone else rolls their eyes with contempt at us,
but all the same they can’t tear those same eyes away from us, can they? So
what am I to you? Why is your door always open for me?’

“And she said, ‘My boy, I was hoping someday you’d
ask me that. Consider it a sign of your growing-up.’
 
”

Ulli’s voice, speaking Ulli’s words. The memory of
all this, recorded through Cioran’s CL, was now being played back in the CL
space he had set up while talking. Cioran had fallen back to letting his memory
do the retelling. Or, rather, he was relying on the atavistic notion that a CL
projection of a memory has more authenticity than simply recounting it, even if
in this day and age a projection can be faked as easily as telling a lie.

“So you think I’m a child in desperate need of
growing up, is that it?” Cioran said to Ulli—or rather, to the projection of
her from years back—where she looked, to my complete lack of surprise,
indistinguishable from the way she did now.

“That’s up to you to want, isn’t it?” Ulli said.
She turned and looked out over a garden manicured with such precision that it
couldn’t have been anything but a protomic fake. (This conversation, it seemed,
had taken place in her residence; the walls and floors of the villa had long
since melted away and been replaced with her own, much lusher, surroundings.)
“Cio, there’s so many things about you I love dearly . . . and for so
long I told myself one of them was your very fickleness. I kept my door open to
you because I couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing what you were doing
next—and more than that, I couldn’t bear the thought you might do it without
me.” She kept her eyes on a patch of tall grass outside, rippling from a sudden
breeze out of a brilliant and cloudless sky. “And I also believed—not in vain,
it seems—that you would soon want to see what lay beyond mere fickleness.”

“If you’re offering me a place to put down roots,”
Cioran said, rushing up next to her and breathing the words into her ear, “you
know it won’t work. Not here, anyway. I’m a fun diversion on a Highend world,
but no more than that and you know it. To put down roots here, to become a
fixture of any permanence—it’s
lethal
. Then I really
will
become
the clown everyone despises; what fangs I have will be pulled forever. You know
this.” He stepped back slightly and spoke in a voice a few notches up from a
whisper. “My roots are in rootlessness.”

“I wouldn’t ever ask you to put down roots, Cio. Not
for me, and not for anyone else.” She faced him and reached out to curl the
hair over his ear around her finger. “What I had in mind to ask you was
something that would make use of your very rootlessness.”

Cioran reached up and closed his hand around hers.
His smile was bitter. “Some Highend gospel you want me to spread, maybe? A bit
of Gang of Ten goodwill propaganda? If that’s the case then you’re picking the
wrong wandering minstrel for the job.”

“I want you to help me find something,” Ulli said,
“something I myself can’t be caught with or discovered looking for. You are the
only one I’d trust to look for it . . . and if anyone
else
imagines that you would be out and about looking for it, then I say I
deserve
to be trumped by them!”

I wanted to think her laughter was hollow, but it
wasn’t. It sounded rather hearty and triumphant, actually.

“That’s why
my door’s always stood open
for you, Cio,” the CL-Ulli continued. “I waited for the day when you would come
to me and say, ‘I want to do something
important
, Ulli. I want to do
something
you
think is important.’
 
”

“—And now that I think about it,” Cioran said
directly to me, the CL memory dropping into the background and fading as it
paused, “I had been hoping for just such a thing, somewhere. Hoping against
hope, which is the worst sort of hope to have. I never imagined anyone would
ever offer me such a thing, because . . . well, I never imagined
anyone would have the nerve. They would never offer
me
such a thing,
d’you see what I’m saying? They’d think me above all that—or, worse, beneath it.
And they’d be right. I thought myself above all that, at least until I found
myself in her company, again and again . . . ”

He trailed off, and stayed trailed off until I
prodded him.

“What was it,” I said, “that she wanted you to
look for? Some entanglement engine module?”

“That much should be obvious. She had clues about
the module in question, where it had come from and had ended up. I was to
follow those clues as inconspicuously as I could. At first she provided lavish
patronage, but over time that dried up—not because she relished yanking at my
purse-strings, mind you, but more because a couple of her other associates in
the Gang of Ten had put two and two together and threatened to walk from the
group if she kept funding my activities. She came back with what I thought was
a perfectly good defense: what I do with my own money and on my own time is
none of anyone else’s business.” (There, in the background, blurred and grey
but still perceptible, was Ulli shouting out those very words to someone not
visible.) “I saved her the trouble and told her, ‘Don’t. It’s not like I ever
have trouble raising money on my own.’
 
”

The scene behind and around us returned to life
and color. Cioran was holding Ulli’s hands and looking her in the eyes as he
spoke those words.

“It’s not worth making such trouble for yourself,
Ulli.” Cioran went on.

“Cio!” Ulli sounded like chiding him was her
favorite hobby. “If there was anything in this universe worth making trouble
for, or over, it’s you.”

The scene went to gray again.

“Could I believe her?” Cioran said to me, his
hands now empty once more. “I could, I suppose. But I’d already found that to
earn my own way, however erratically, gave me a thrill that no patron could
inspire in me. Not even her. That’s something you discover only slowly and by pieces:
all the different ways your heart can be made to jump, and what each of those
different jumps mean. To rally my own audience around me was one kind of
thrill, an unexpected thrill. Go to any planet where they’ll let me land, and
by the end of the day there’s a concert with my name on it, a dozen tables
waiting in a dozen restaurants, sycophants by the yard! It wasn’t the same sort
of thing to have Ulli sponsor me. That was a warm feeling, a comforting one,
but it wasn’t a
thrill
. There were thrills she could give me, but that
never did become one of them. So while I couldn’t turn my back altogether on
her, I also couldn’t have her dictate to me the way that search of hers would
be conducted.”

I turned down the CL connection and checked the
rest of the floor plan. Enid was just out of the shower and ought to be
blundering across us any second now.

“So what was the incentive?” I said.

“The incentive? Well, as I said, she did pay me,
but in time that—”

“The
real
incentive. There must have been
something else she promised you for helping her complete that mission.
Something bigger than money, or you wouldn’t have kept knocking around and
digging yourself into a hole over it.” I had to laugh. “You were in debt to the
tune of who knows how much, and all you had to do was knock on her door—and she
wouldn’t even spot you the cost a lousy ticket to Bridgehead?”

“It’s not that she wouldn’t do it.” There it was,
I thought: the first real anger, the first hint in his voice of something that
wasn’t whimsy or romanticism. “It’s that I couldn’t accept it. I knew what it
would lead. I wanted to show her I could do it on my own, even if it cost me as
much as it did. I had to show her I could do it—”

“What did she offer you, Cioran?” I tried to sound
as calm as he wasn’t. “What were the two of you chasing?”

I ended up shouting it out loud. My timing
couldn’t have been better: Enid was in the doorway, running Angharad’s comb
through her hair. I guess she had decided to use it for more than just
decoration, I thought.

“Salvage,” Cioran said, slow and small, also out
loud, “from the cargo of the Trungpa derelict.”

“Salvage,” I repeated. “Something special enough
that someone else saw fit to try and steal it from you—special enough that he
was prepared to toast all of us to keep it out of our hands. And since you’ve
been so damn cagey about both what Ulli was offering you and what that thing
is
,
I’m going to assume the two were one and the same. That
was
your final
payment, because something like that doesn’t
have
a pricetag. Stop me if
I’m wrong?”

Enid stepped in next to me and took hold of my
arm. Not in a comforting or even comforted way; more like someone clinging to
flotsam to keep from drowning.

“What is it for, Cioran?” I asked. The touch of
Enid’s hand had quieted my voice a bit, but not enough to calm anyone.

“It’s an incarnation,” Cioran said, each word
coming out breathless and choked-up, “of what the Gang of Ten have been trying
to create this whole time. At least, that’s what Ulli believes it is. And I
have no reason to doubt her.”

“She thinks it’s what, exactly?” I said. “An
entanglement engine with no trillionth-mile problem? And they found one just
floating around in the cargo hold or engine bay of some wreck?”

“No, no. The wreck . . . that ship was
the prototype. Someone built one, she thinks. Someone’s built one and has been
testing it out. They had an accident with the prototype, and now it’s been
bouncing around from one pair of hands to the next ever since. May I sit down?”

“You can sit on the damn ceiling if you like.”

Even in that frayed state of mind Cioran insisted
on making a production out of just sitting. He extruded a cushion from the
floor, pretzeled his legs under himself (easy to do with those spindly legs of
his), and tried to breathe as deeply as he hadn’t been when speaking.

I just took the chair in the corner. Enid let go—I
didn’t blame her for being frightened of me—and leaned against the doorframe,
fingers curled around it as if any second she was going to pull the wall over
her face like a bedsheet.

“I’m fairly sure,” Cioran said, calmer now (or at
least quieter), “what Ulli shared with me is the vast majority of what she also
knows. I don’t have much reason to believe she duped me. Much as I imagine you
think you, and many others, have been made into dupes by us. Please, don’t let
such prejudices get the better of you until you hear me the rest of the way
out.”

“I’m listening.” I said it like I was counting
down a last few seconds.

“When news of the Trungpa wreck arrived in my
circles—that is, when Ludi came to me and cried all about it—I mentioned it
rather casually to Ulli as well. The mere mention of it provoked a reaction in
her, or rather a degree of reaction, that I had never seen before. ‘You must
find out what you can!’ she insisted. ‘But you mustn’t go there yourself; it’s
too dangerous.’ Oh, how we argued about it! She didn’t understand that all that
talk of
danger, danger, danger
was precisely what made it interesting.
So when that other fellow came along and cried into Ludmilla’s lap about Berletan
and Vynangard Limited and their squabbling and the cargo . . . well,
I think he was wise enough to not talk to her about what he was really after.
But it was plain enough to Ulli and I: he wanted to finance his own, shall we
say,
extracurricular
salvage expedition. He wanted to have that third
party actually be his own privately financed crew, someone who would duck out
there and liberate the cargo for
him
, for a cut of what would come
later. That third party needed to be, uh . . . suitably enmuscled to
make such a thing happen should the ship’s real owners (or the cargo’s real
owners) come calling. But you and I both know you won’t find mercenaries
willing to work on spec, and he was short on both time and credibility.”

“So you put up the stakes for that mission,” I
said. “This wasn’t about Ludmilla blowing her nest egg on it and you stepping
in to help her;
you
were the one that financed the whole thing to begin
with.”

“I was, yes. And some of that was also Ulli’s
money—before I grew tetchy about such things. I didn’t want gaping voids
showing up on
her
balance sheet as well.”

“So what happened?” Enid said, in a ghost of her
regular voice.

“Didn’t I tell you that already?” Cioran shrugged.
“I gave her the money, she staked his salvage job, he kissed her on both
cheeks—”

“—and was never seen again,” I finished for him. “And
then Berletan and Vynangard Limited kiss each
other
on the cheeks, and
go do the salvage via a third party that’s theirs and theirs alone, and you
never see any of it. And now the two of you have been—well, the
one
of
you, with her holding down the fort at home and using her connections for
information—you’ve been bouncing around the universe ever since trying to pick
up that loose thread.”

“And today we picked it up.” His smile was profoundly
humorless. “Or rather, I picked it up through someone I knew slightly better
than casually, and I followed it. And now your fine people of the IPS have it.
Well—one person, and a Continuum node, strictly speaking. Cosm knows
what
they’re going to do with it.”

“Ostensibly, find out whether or not it lives up
to the legend.” Something else clicked for me. “Looks like that was what your
friend Arsèni was trying to find out. If it
was
a solution to the
trillionth-mile problem, all he’d have to do is activate it anywhere and he’d
be able to
get
anywhere.” I stood up; a bad idea, since it felt like my
stomach was in danger of sliding into one of my legs. “How accurate is it?”

“We don’t know. We just know that a prototype
engine control system exists, and that it survived several test runs. Nothing
beyond that, not even a general configuration.”

I should have sat back down, but I just stood
there, despite my legs growing as rubbery as unfixed Type B substrate. I should
just quit here, I thought—just take everything I have, dump it in Kallhander’s
lap and tell him
It’s your problem now.
The engine was in their hands
anyway; why not make them feel all the more like they were doing their job?

 “So it’s all been a big sham, then, right?” Enid was
still talking in the same shadow-of-a-voice tone she had used before, but at
least she was no longer hugging the doorway.

Cioran looked at her, but seemed stuck for an
answer. That's right, I thought; shut up for once and let someone else talk.

“You and me,” Enid went on, “or more like, you and
anyone, really . . . it’s all just been about whatever you could mop
up for yourself, hasn’t it? This whole business with us, with me—it was all
just a way to get closer to your little buried treasure, wasn’t it?”

Cioran finally found his words—haltingly, as if he
were dismayed at the condition they were in as he used them. “Enid, don’t
assume just because I had my own agenda that nothing that happened along the
way wasn’t genuine—”

“You nearly got yourself killed!” Enid’s shouting
made all of us wince. “You and a bunch of other people, me included, but who
cares because you have
your own agenda
, like you said, and other people
only matter when they bother to follow along, and cosm knows you can’t make
yourself
really
care about them instead of just
talking
about
it—” There was more, but it was choked off, mercifully, and she didn’t switch
to CL and continue broadcasting the rest of it at either of us. She pushed
herself out of the doorway and vanished back down the hall into her room. For
neither the first nor the last time I reflected on how one of protomic
architecture’s typical side effects was that the irising, melding or extrusion
of doors meant that you couldn’t blow off steam by giving them a good slam. But
I heard, however distantly, something in her room turn over and hit the floor
all the same.

I looked around and saw my hat leaning against one
of the empty chairs in the room, behind me. At some point I had managed to
knock it off my own head by waving my hands around.

“Well?” I said, rescuing the hat. “You tell me: is
she just some stupid kid who’s in over her head? And if she is, whose fault is
that? You’re the one that let her in, you know. You’re the one that hinted to
her at so many future possibilities for both of you. Like she said—was all that
just ‘cover story’?”

 “I’ll give you this,” he said, after a pause
which left me wondering what he could possibly reply with. “She did make for a
good spy.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Enid. You did pick the right person—or maybe I
should say, the right person picked me to get so up-close. For someone a mere
fifteen solar, spacebrat or not, she did a very good job of not tipping her
hand while following me around. Under what I assume to be your explicit
direction.”

“
She
asked to do it.”

“After you proposed it to her originally, yes?
Somehow I doubt she would come up with a plan like that on her own and feed it
to you.”
Then you don’t know a damn thing about her,
I wanted to shout.
“I’d like to think I’m many things—panoplytic Cioran, that’s me—but I would
also like to think of those many things, the one I am not is stupid. At the
very least, don’t condescend to both of us at once.”