Flight of the Vajra (6 page)

The invitation was folded in on top of my wallet;
I’d shoved it into my pocket on the way out of the hotel room, with the
rationalization that something like that was safest on my person and nowhere
else. I had the wallet in one hand and the letter in the other when I realized
Enid had gotten up from her chair and circled around behind me.

The next thing I knew she was on my back, with one
arm over my eyes and her legs encircling my chest hard enough to pop out my
spareribs. I now had first-hand evidence her strength wasn’t in that protomic
bodysuit of hers. All natural muscle at work. Good.

I let her get away with it. She was laughing the
whole time we tottered and turned in place. Besides, if even
she
thought
I was that much more helpless, it might well pay off later on.

Then I felt the RSVP pulled out of my hand (I’d
been preparing to let go of it in some vain attempt to pry her off me anyway)
and her laughter stopped. A second later, her arm withdrew and I felt her
slither off my back.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” I told the waitress,
who looked ready to run off to the fire-control point and douse Enid with the
extinguisher as a disciplinary measure. “She’s my niece. She’s just being cute.”

She finally managed to laugh it off and leave us.
I was about to turn to Enid and read her the riot act for that bit of horseplay
when I saw she had picked up the note and was reading it. I’d only known her
for a total of a day and a half, but that was enough for me to tell the
stricken look she was wearing was a pretty rare thing. I guess I should have
left out the niece bit, I thought.

“You’re seeing
her
?” she said, pressing the
note back into my hand.

I shrugged, then nodded, then shrugged and nodded
at the same time.

Enid looked at the floor and made the tiniest
little sweep of the space in front of her with one foot.

I’d only had my daughter for a few years, but that
was enough time for me to get to know all the things she did when she wanted
something. The way she would look down, the way she would point one toe just so
. . . these were things all kids did, although as they got older they
learned how to hold back more and more of it.

And when you were Old Way, you learned at some
point in your life that all the worlds that weren’t Old Way didn’t know these
things, because their idea of what constituted a “kid” was anyone under the
biological age of fifty or so—and they rarely, if ever, had any kids
themselves. It was easier to import them wholesale, as adults.

“Can I go with you?” she said. Her voice was
cracking and there was a flush rising on her face that, again, wasn’t something
I’d seen her even come close to. Not even when her co-workers from the circus
had come for her; not even when she’d been pleading with them in front of me.
CanIgowithyou?
w
as how the words came out.

This wasn’t the same kind of need as her wanting
to follow me around. This was coming from someplace totally different—someplace
rooted even deeper, it seemed. And I knew I was responding to it.

“You want to see her? Why?” I kept my voice down.

“There’s something I gotta ask her. Just one
question. Five minutes, not even. I mean, I knew she was going to be in town
doing that town hall meeting, but the people for those things are all selected
way in advance, and . . . ” She had, thank goodness, kept her voice
down during all that (not that she sounded like she could have raised it above
a shaky whisper anyway). “Can we at least try?”

“I don’t know if they’ll let us do that, Enid. It
says me, not me plus one.”

“Can we at least
try
?”

Without thinking about what I was doing—something
I’d been growing accustomed to, unfortunately—I put my hands on her shoulders. “They
gave me an hour. Maybe they’ll be willing to give me forty-five minutes and you
fifteen.”

She put her arms around me again, this time from the
front. I stood there and let everyone stare at us for a few seconds, then
retrieved my wallet from the floor and put a generous tip on the table.

The Cytherian Summit Lodge is
somewhere
between a hotel and a conference center, but it’s reserved specifically for
VIPs who come planetside and are received by the Cytherian Assembly as guests
of the state. Angharad fit smack into that category, so I wasn’t surprised she
would be staying at this building that looked from the outside for all the
world like a classy countryside resort. The lobe of it that had been set aside
for us was barely two stories tall, but surrounded by gardens and with a
fenceline far enough around the property that it felt more like they were
trying to keep something in than keep the rest of us out.

People were loitering for blocks in every direction
around the lodge. I made most of them for journalists—backs to walls,
squinting, smoking, playing with the cortical-capture rigs around their necks.
What with CL stuff all but prohibited planetside, they had to use obvious
external models to get any real work done, and they all looked fed up at having
to drop down that far on the evolutionary ladder. They were mixed in with all
the rest of the crowd, the pilgrims and the faithful—carrying ikons of Her
Grace, seated on cushions (a couple of them were even sitting on top of a
parked groundcar), clasping loops of beads wrapped around little totems of the
greater/lesser interlinked circles of the Old Way. My pace slowed as I walked
past them, as the sight of all this brought up a burst of nostalgia I didn’t
know what to do with. You don’t go right back to believing just because you’re
surrounded by the right kind of people on the outside again, I told myself.
Something inside has to be alive and burning, too.

I realized with a dull little buzz that I might
end up with my name in the news again just for being here, and quickened my
steps. Enid still outpaced me all the way up to the lodge’s outer gate.

Two of Angharad’s retinue were waiting at the gate
to walk me up the gravel path. The front doors, lacquered red and black, slid
back, and cold air from inside puffed out at me. I was tempted to crack a joke,
something like
I guess even Angharad doesn’t say no to air conditioning
,
but kept it in. Nobody
needed
to know just how irreligious or
iconoclastic I’d become in the last few years; that would all come out on its
own.

I’d brought the letter Angharad had sent me, just
in case I needed it—Old Way living, old-school methods—but they settled for
some plain old biometrics and a passive CL identity-tag check instead. Even
when “off” the CL still responded to near-field requests from those with authority,
and in most jurisdictions it was mandatory for a CL to generate a reply to
Who are you?

Angharad’s room had one wall open to face one of
the inner gardens, where a three-level fountain burbled and attracted the
occasional bird. The room itself was minimal—matted floors, small round
cushions for guests, and a large square one (more like a platform) on which Her
Grace herself sat at the far end of the room.

Millennia of civilization have not managed to make
it any less startling to see someone in person for the first time after you’ve
spent half a lifetime only looking at pictures or replaying CL dumps. She had
more than a few biological years on me, and true to her Old Way heritage she
wore with pride the slight lines in her face and the tinges of gray in her
hair. She wore the same midnight blue wimple and robes she’d been clad in on
the posters, with what I knew to be waist-length black hair wound tight in a
multi-coiled coiffure. Two ropes of that coiffure peeked out from either side
of the wimple, framing her face all the more closely, accentuating her
purple-grey eyes and her smile—which in every picture I’d seen always looked
like she was welcoming a friend.

“Mister Sim!” (And seeing her is nothing compared
to the jolt you get when you hear her actually
saying your name.
) “Please,
sit. If there is anything you would like, the Lodge offers a full range of
refreshments.”

“I’m fine, thank you.” I sounded a lot creakier
and less confident than I thought I would. She sounded like just saying hello
to someone in that contralto of hers was more fun than anything else you could
ask her to do. For some reason it was hard for me to get into a proper
crosslegged seating position in front of her, and I felt doubly weird towering
over her even when sitting down. She was barely taller than Enid herself, maybe
a hundred sixty centimeters to my full two meters and change.

“I, uh . . . ” (Cosm take it all, what
do
you say to the living avatar of the belief system you were reared in and then
left behind? “Heard you missed me”?) “This
was
all kind of out of the
blue, you know, so I’m a little . . . Look, how did you find me?”

“This isn’t a very large town. One of my personal
assistants overheard your name being mentioned in what appeared to be an
argument in the open-air section of a hotel’s restaurant. She identified you
and came to me.”

The woman in the blue robes.
Well, serves
me right for staring back, I guess. And it wasn’t as if someone looking for me
under my real name wouldn’t eventually find me. I had never bothered to hide:
anyone who came looking for me usually came away massively disappointed anyway.

“I had been meaning to speak with you after the
incident with your family,” she went on, tamping down the buoyancy in her voice
a bit. “Unfortunately, I was unable to make contact with you, and then you
withdrew from public life for quite some time.”

People tend to do things like that after their
family and best friend die, I thought. Along with tons of other folks whose big
mistake that day was simply being together in the same ship.

“Wait, you were looking for me back then, too?” I
said.

“I was, but I did a very poor job of it.” She
sounded even more reserved now, eyes down a little further. “At the time, I
paid, I admit, little attention to such things as starship disasters. But when
word reached me about the restitution campaign you attempted, I attempted to
contact you. By then, however, you had removed yourself from the public eye.
So, again, I apologize.”

“Well—” I don’t remember what I originally had in
mind to say after that, because the laugh that came out of me instead swept it
clean away. “From the sound of it, if anyone should apologize, it’s
me
.
I’m the one that squirreled himself away for so long.” I straightened my back a
bit more.

“It can only be presumed that you had your
reasons, Mister Sim.”

Fine, I thought, because I wasn’t about to tell
even (and especially) her what I’ve really been doing all this time.

“Henré is fine. Look—” I shifted around again on
the cushion—my damn legs were already starting to fall asleep on me in that
pose—and tried, not very successfully, to sound petulant. “—why did you come
looking for me? I mean, not just to offer condolences, from the sound of it.” I
didn’t want to come out and say
What do you
want
from me?
, but I
was getting mighty close.

“I had heard about your self-instigated campaign
to apologize to the families and relatives of all the others who had lost their
lives on the
Kyritan
,” she said, and suddenly the dull buzzing in my
legs was nothing compared to the hard, loud buzzing in my head. “My
understanding is that you took a fair amount of your own time and money to
approach many of them individually and apologize to them for what you perceived
as your failure. But this was interrupted when the manufacturers and managers
of the
Kyritan
took legal action against you for what they believed to
be a mischaracterization of the quality of their products—”

“Yes. Exoluft thought I was using the whole thing
as a platform to badmouth them.” Talking only made the head-buzzing worse, but
I went on anyway. “I wasn’t doing anything of the kind, but that’s how they
saw
it. They made noises about suing me at first, and then they approached me
privately with a settlement on the condition I make no more public statements
about the incident.” I looked around, let out a little between-the-teeth laugh.
“I wonder—you’re a public figure. Does this count as a ‘public statement’?”

Her smile was as serene as mine was forced. “This
conversation is entirely private.”

Wings fluttered outside, and something went splash
in the fountain. I turned my head too late to see what had caused the
commotion, and found myself staring out there into the sunlit greenery for
seconds on end. Angharad didn’t even so much as clear her throat to get my
attention. Maybe she trusted I’d snap out it before too long.

“What did you want from me?” I finally asked.

“I wanted to know why you wanted to apologize for
something that was manifestly not your fault. You were, after all, cleared of
any wrongdoing in two separate investigations.”

She’s done her homework
and
the
extra-credit assignment, I thought. With what she already knew, I wondered how
she couldn’t have put the rest together herself.

Or maybe she had and she was just waiting for me
to come out and say it.

I shook my head. “
They
cleared me of
wrongdoing. That doesn’t mean I felt
I
was blameless.”

“What was it you felt you had done wrong?”

“There had to be
something
, right? Look, I
know my own work, or at least that’s what I told myself. And if I don’t know my
own work, then that’s bad news. If anything was wrong, I thought I’d be the
only one to discover it. Things like this don’t just
happen.
I went back
over every design, every materials program, and I just kept coming up
empty-handed. They did their own two investigations and finally just shrugged
and said ‘Sabotage, maybe.’ Didn’t say whether it was sabotage by some third
party or some negligence on my part that would have
looked
like sabotage
to an outsider. So I went back and kept bugging them to keep looking, because
it sounded like they wanted to close the file without actually
closing
it. They told me this was their job, not mine. They didn’t bother looking a
third time. Soon they started paying out settlements to the families involved,
me included. And I said, ‘This isn’t going to be enough. People want answers.’ If
Exoluft wasn’t going to give answers, I would. So I went and started looking up
the bereaved on my own, seeing if they would even want to talk to me. And you
know what? Some did. They let me into their houses; they let me sit in their
kitchens and on their porches. I showed them pictures of my wife and daughter
and they showed me the ones they’d lost . . .