Flight of the Vajra (56 page)

I squashed my hat back onto my head and left him
sitting there.

Enid’s room
was not the trashed suite I
feared I would find. The damage was limited to a single overturned hassock, and
the floor-to-ceiling wall mirror that she’d instantiated next to the bed was
also intact. Enid herself, though, was jammed into the narrow space between the
wall and the other side of the bed with her legs splayed out in front of her,
her body bent into an
L
.

“The door was open,” I said. Well, unlocked,
anyway.

Enid leaned to one side and chinned herself on the
bed, holding the p-knife between two fingers on the bedspread mere centimeters from
her nose. She flicked open the knife’s extensions in twos and threes—knife plus
this, driver tool plus that—the way a bored kid rolls the same marble back and
forth endlessly. I sat on the edge of the bed and pretended this was nothing
more than something she did to while away the time, as if I’d seen her
engrossed in it however many times back on the
Vajra.

“There was a part of me that never believed any of
it was for real anyway,” she said.

“You did a good job of ignoring that part of you,
though.”

“Not good enough, I guess.” The knife collapsed
back into neutral mode. “You know what hurts most, what really hurts about all
this? It’s not being lied to, because I’ve been lied to before. That’s nothing
new. It’s that he seems to think it’s just some ‘rite of passage’ for me,
something like that. ‘Oh, kid, don’t get so worked out about it, people lie to
each other all the time, they lead each other around all the time, the sooner you
get used to it the better.’ Because for
one second
I believed, I really
believed he was above all that kind of petty stuff. I wanted to believe if
there was one person above anyone else who wasn’t going to be that big of a
liar, and for those kinds of reasons, it was going to be him.”

“And that he was going to let you into his life.”

“Well, that’s not happening, now, is it? But hey, he
doesn’t let
anyone
into his life, does he? It’s all about what you can
get away with. And if you’re Cioran, you can get away with anything. What’s
some fifteen-year-old spacebrat carny girl to all that?” She looked over at me,
but almost immediately looked away again. “I mean, if he was faking
you
over with this whole story, then I didn’t exactly stand a chance either, did I?”

I ought to wait until at least some of this
bitterness blows over, I thought, but I went on talking anyway:

“I’m betting this is a little far from your mind
right now, but if what he’s talking about actually exists—and given that an
alleged former comrade of his just tried to neuralyze him for it and kill the
bunch of us—we are about a hundred different ways not prepared to deal with
it.”

“Figured I’d leave that part to you,” she mumbled.
“It’s a little too big for me to even think about.”

“Is it?” I leaned sideways along the bed until I
was back into her field of vision. “I’ve never understood how the most capable
people, the ones who can stretch themselves the most and in the end are limited
the least—I’ve never understood how people like that can convince themselves
there are some places they just shouldn’t go.”

“Talking about yourself again?”

“Talking about
you,
grumpynugget.”

She pushed her face into the bedspread to smother
her laugh. “Come on, Henré—it
is
too big for me to think about it. Look
at me: I’m a spacebrat carny, that’s all I am. And it shows more and more every
day, doesn’t it?”

I used my elbows to pull myself a little closer.
“Do me this one thing, at least. Don’t ever, ever feel bad for letting yourself
get carried away by him.”

She raised her head and squinted out a frown at
me.

“Maybe you think you should have known better,” I
went on. “But you think you’re the only one? There’s probably a
backlog
of people who all took a number and stood in line to be in the position you’re
in with him. You’re not alone.”

“That doesn’t make me any less stupid.”

“So now you know one less way to be stupid. The
wheel turns, Enid. —And yeah, it would have been great for it all to have been
true! But there’s still at least two other people who aren’t gonna pull a stunt
like that. I’d like to think they know better.”

“I guess they do.” Her hair had fallen over her
face, but that wasn’t the reason her voice was barely a mumble. She sat up,
tossed her hair back, and reached for the newly-extruded tissue dispenser slot
next to the bed. I tried not to laugh at the
blaaat
she produced when
she blew her nose, but I wasn’t very successful—and she got her revenge by
wadding up the tissue and bouncing it off my forearm. I rescued it and threw it
back, and the only thing that stopped us from devolving into full-blown warfare
was a CL signal informing me Kallhander had returned. No, not just him, but
Ioné as well, the latter escorting Angharad back from the summit center.

“Gotta run,” I said. “Duty calls.” I leaned in and
gave her a peck on the forehead, so fast she didn’t even have time to take a
swipe at me for doing it.

It shouldn’t have been true,
but the
first thing that struck me on seeing Angharad was that she’d removed her ’hat.
Small wonder I hadn’t heard a thing from her, even while she was on the way
back to the villa and presumably not in a cone of silence. Then I saw the
exhaustion and defeat in her face—no, not just in her face, but in everything:
her rounded-down shoulders, her ponderous steps . . .

“How did it go?” I said, not wanting to assume
anything. I even sounded halfway cheerful.

Angharad eased herself into the big wicker chair
that occupied a corner of her room right next to the window. “I would like to
say it was ‘productive’,” she said, fishing for each word. “And perhaps it was.
For the first time the full dimensions of all our agendas have been laid bare.
I think they are rather surprised at the stance I chose.”

The Angharad I know is not this tentative, I
thought. “They thought you were going to come out against emigration entirely?”
I suggested.

“That would have been the stance I might have
taken once, yes. And in fact, it was. But I know now all too well that it will
not do to simply say ‘No, not in that way will you go!’ Rather, it is more a
matter of ‘Go, but see all too clearly what will be lost and cannot be regained
in another form.’ I cannot prevent my people from coming here, but I can
encourage in them the need to see what it is they are abandoning.”

I’d parked myself at the window and filled the
left half of my vision with the ocean outside, while Angharad occupied the
other half. I didn’t have to think very long about whether or not to say out
loud what it was she herself seemed to dare not speak of; I went ahead and said
it. She can take it, I thought.

“But you don’t believe it, do you,” I said. “You
know that if you let them, they’ll come here and turn their backs on you all
the more. And all this talk about getting them to seeing this place with
blinders off—it won’t amount to much, will it? Am I wrong?”

I waited the however many seconds that dragged by
before she finally shook her head. “No,” she said, “and I have refused to let
myself be consumed by that resignation. I cannot say ‘The Old Way stands with
its arms open,’ only to have them believe it stands with its arms open only to
block their path. I cannot say that, not as I am now.” The gentle fire I always
associated with her was slowly flickering back up. “For if I say no and that
means the end of the matter, then there is no possible progress at all. But if
I let them come here, there always remains, even if only in the slenderest way,
the chance they can have their sense of loss reawakened. It does not take much
sometimes. I know there are many here who apply themselves to the new work that
has been created for them, who climb as vigorously as they can, who never avert
their eyes from the top of the mountain they are climbing. Someday, they say to
themselves and each other, someday one of us—perhaps even I!—will reach that
pinnacle and become one of these demigods that has granted me a place here. Then,
they tell themselves, then they will finally be able to do all the things they
have only dreamed of; only then will life have actually
begun
. That is
the seduction that we all face in this universe, is it not? That the life we
aspire to, the life that is most worth having for us, is always somewhere
else—always behind this rampart or below that cliff face. It is always
. . . somewhere else. Was not the whole mission of the Old Way to
remind ourselves, no, what you seek is not somewhere else, it is here, it has
always
been here, you simply find ever the more elaborate ways to overlook it?”

She spoke now as she always had—with the
self-possessed calm of the true believer. But it wasn’t clear-eyed and upright
anymore; it was hollow and ashen, worn down.

“I take it you and Ulli clashed over this, then,”
I said. She had to be brought back on track, I thought.

“We did, yes. But not quite in the way either of
us anticipated, I think. We soon realized what our real stances were. Neither
of us were against emigration to Bridgehead. Where we parted was in how we
wanted my followers to feel about it. I want them to approach it skeptically,
and she feels such skepticism is . . .
silly
.” She seemed
faintly amazed that the word had been used. “All throughout I sensed the
unspoken notion from her that the end of the Old Way is simply a matter of
time, and that no number or variety of holding actions will be worth the
effort. And I . . . I confess I believe she is entirely correct. But
I do not believe that all that lies beyond in no way resembles what came
before.” Her smile—she did have a smile now, thank goodness at least she had
that much—bent at the edges. “How strange it is to hear her stop just short of
saying, ‘Why persist in this charade? Why not come over
here
, to our
side, and make yourself
comfortable
for once?’ She wants very much not to
understand that my existence is not predicated on comfort alone.”

“And she tried to make it sound like you wanted
the same thing for all your people, too? Inconvenience for the sake of an
inconvenience?” It was far from the first time someone had sneered at the Old
Way like that—I’d done it myself, both under my breath and out loud.

“She is a very good opponent,” Angharad admitted.
“She presents me with a challenge I have always wanted: to construct a truly
indomitable defense of the Old Way.”

“You realize you’re never going to create anything
like that.”

“Not for the Old Way as it currently is, no.”

“Not if you knock it down and build something
else, Angharad! That’s what the human race
does
, with everything: it looks
for the cracks. It looks for the cracks and slips through.” I’d knelt down—no,
just more like seated myself at her feet—while talking. “You know it. All of
this challenge and difficulty is the best thing that happened to the Old Way in
too long a span of time. You’re just hung up on finding out what that next
thing beyond it is. And then when you find that, you’ll be wondering what’s
next
—or
maybe your successor, whoever that turns out to be. —I should stop telling you
things you already know.”

“They become new when you speak of them, Henré.”

Is this more of the adulation that Anjai was
talking about? No, I told myself, don’t look her in the eyes; you’ll only
convince yourself it is and get derailed. Besides, you still have to bring up
the day’s events with her.

“That reminds me,” I said. “You’d better hear
about what happened earlier.”

“Ioné briefed me on the incident in the protomics
shop. Was that it?”

“There’s . . . more.”

Was there ever more. I finally did look up at her
face while I told her all about it— Cioran and Enid, Cioran and Arsèni, Cioran
and Ulli, Cioran and myself, the drive module. I was tempted to tell her to put
her ’hat on so I could just dump the whole day’s experience to her directly,
but I’d seen firsthand how relying on such things came at the withering of that
wonderful human ability to sum up, to take out everything that doesn’t need to
be there (at first, anyway) and spur another on to be curious. She was the last
one I wanted to lose such things.

“You were not wholly wrong to scoff at the idea
that Cioran might be a spy,” she said at last. “Not only because of his
connections, but because of his demeanor. It seemed impossible for him to
believe he would do anything out of a sense of a purpose higher than himself.”

“And I’m not convinced that higher purpose is
Ulli,” I said. “Or, if it is, then there’s got to be more going on between them
than either one lets on. He’s very good at telling you just enough of the truth
to shut you up, I’ve noticed. Then you squeeze him, and he demand-pages out a
little more truth until you shut up again. And so on.”

“I suspect she envies me,” Angharad said. She
sounded almost good-humored about it. “I saw a hint of this today, if no more
than just a hint of it. ‘It would be quite something to be like you,’ she told
me. ‘One word from you and they all line up!’
 
”

I had to laugh. “Sounds like she thinks you
cherish having something like that—and from all I’ve seen, you don’t.”

“Nonetheless, I have it. I make the best use of it
I can.”

My CL tickled me; I stood back up. “Kallhander
just let me know she’s on her way over here right now. She’s going to make a
stink about this whole situation, you can be sure of it. I wouldn’t be
surprised if she withdrew from the summit entirely over this, now that his
cover’s blown.”

“I think both of them have ways of surprising us,”
Angharad said as she pushed herself out of the chair. I agreed with her
completely, but this time I wasn’t sure I wanted to.