Flight of the Vajra (61 page)

Silly me, assuming a cushy municipal job had
softened her around the edges. If anything, it had just serrated those edges
all the more. She sure did a good job of sounding sympathetic, though.

“I think I’m getting off on the wrong foot,
though,” she said. “I didn’t come here to pry into your friends’ gray-area shopping
habits. This is all my way of saying, this is how much access I do have, and I
don’t want that fact deterring you from hearing me out on some other things. You
would’ve found out soon enough that I knew about this anyway; better you hear
it from my mouth than someone else’s first. This information goes nowhere
except between you and me, and you already have it, so it’s going twice as
nowhere. Besides, I’m not stupid enough to think the only diplomacy that goes
on here takes place behind the closed doors of a summit room.”

Oh, I thought.

Not long after I’d said yes to Angharad, I’d
resigned myself to the notion that one by one most everyone I’d known, worked
with, said hello to or brushed shoulders in the hallways with would come back
out, shake my hand, and start asking me all manner of uncomfortable questions.
What
have you been doing since you ran off with your tail between your legs? When’s
your next ship coming on the market, assuming there ever is another one? What
in cosm’s name are you doing shacking up with the likes of Angharad and Cioran
and that kid and all the rest of them? Oh, and where’s that six thousand you
owe me, you cheapjack?
I’d been prepared for all of that, but only in the
most provisional way—as my botch of an interview with Anjai, among plenty of
other things, had proven. But I was even less prepared for one of my former
social contacts being changed even more drastically by all those years than I
had been. Even less prepared than that for one of them being a former co-worker
who’d had oversight over me, and who was now showing the kind of overweening
interest in me that a cat reserves for a freshly loosed mouse.

“Lunch for me plus one, you said?” I spoke up
before letting too long a pause elapse.

“You have someone in mind?”

“I do, and I think she’ll appreciate being able to
get out of the house for a bit.”

She wished me well and left me directions to her
place. I pinged Enid and filled her in.

“
Wow
,” Enid boggled. “So you think this Mylène
knows what really happened?”

“I’m counting on it. If Kallhander or the IPS are
sitting on anything they don’t think we should know about, this would be a good
way to find out.”

“But you don’t think she’s going to use any of
that against us.”

“Not while there’s a sign hanging outside the
conference room door that says DIPLOMACY IN PROGRESS, no. That’s why I’d rather
get her talking on our terms instead of having her grill us on hers.. She’s
always been a bit of a hard-noser, and the nose is now apparently galvanized. So
it might be useful if you come along as a barometer. For one, I’m wondering
what the substance of what she has to say will change when you’re both in and
out of the room, you having been part of yesterday’s dust-up.”

She didn’t respond. I turned my attention to
her—I’d been briefly distracted by her p-knife sitting on the end table, and
had stepped in for a closer look—and saw an expression on her face I couldn’t
put a name to.

“What is it?” I said.

“The more I’m involved in any of this, the weirder
it feels. I mean . . . I’m only really here by accident, aren’t I?
Because Angharad decided to use me as an example of how serious she was about
things?”

 She didn’t sound embittered or snide, more curious
and surprised. Like she had just discovered for the first time where her father
had been stashed away.

“But I don’t want that to be the only reason I’m
here,” she went on. “I don’t want to be the one who just stood around, or sat
around, and took it easy and didn’t stick my neck out when everyone else around
me was doing that. You know? —Look, after I left home, every place I’ve been
was a little like that. You gave back as much as you could, and you didn’t wait
for something to just be handed to you. The circus was like that; all the
little odd jobs between were like that. And . . . ” Her lips wrinkled
in dismay. “I didn’t do such a good job of it. I had plenty of chances where I
could have given a little
more
, and I knew it—and all I did was give
people what they
expected
. It was enough for them, but I knew it wasn’t
enough for
me
. That was what it was all about with Cioran, now that I
think about it: being
useful
to him. And useful to you, too. And now
here I’m in the middle of something that’s even throwing you for a loop a
little, and you ask me if I want to be of some use . . . and am I
going to say no to that?”

No, you certainly aren’t, I thought.

“Still shouldn’t have called you a ‘barometer’,
though,” I said, which at least made her smile. “You realize we’re not going
anywhere with all this except into more and more trouble, right? And that means
all those plans you’re making for what happens after all this is done—don’t
count on any of it ever coming true. Are you okay with that? —Look me in the
eye when you answer me.”

I was smiling when I said that, but when she
looked me right in the eye and said “Yes, Henré, I am,” she was as serious as
Kallhander. “Because right now, I can’t think of anything else I want to do more
than all this.”

“Well, if you change your mind,” I said, “—and
you’re young, and that means you’re guaranteed to change your mind—you yell
good and loud about it, you promise?”

“I promise.” Then, smirking: “When have you ever
known me to
not
complain?”

I spent a few minutes
getting changed
into my new suit, itching strangely as I closed seams and yanked out sleeves.
In the wake of my last couple of conversations, I felt like my skin had been
branded invisibly with the word
Father
.

So why, I told myself, are you so easy with the
idea of allowing Enid to accompany you? That she was legally an adult and that
she was nowhere nearly as helpless as my aborted fatherly instincts told me to
believe all seemed reasonable enough, but those same instincts—even if in the
guise of plain old common sense—had a way of welling back up inside me.

I opted to loop in a second opinion and pinged
Kallhander about that—and the fact that someone fairly high up in Bridgehead’s
power circles had a less censored idea of what had happened in Dragoji’s
warehouse. He was, to use the mildest possible word, intrigued.

—
That said
, Kallhander CLed,
Mylène admitted
knowing all this to you in the first place. That has two implications: either
she is attempting to earn your trust, or she is attempting to extort your
conformity. It may be hard to know which without talking to her.

—
D’you really think someone that far upstairs
is going to be dumb enough to jinx major-league diplomatic work going on in her
backyard? What does your own research tell you about the ethics of people in
her position, or near her?

—
Nothing that would lead me to believe she is
prepared to sabotage her career by abusing her knowledge. Which, by the way,
she obtained well within the limits of her jurisdiction. I still feel the fact
she confronted you with this information at all is troubling. She was under no
obligation to warn you she knew about it.

—Maybe she’s worried the real deal about what
happened will leak from somewhere else before long, and she wants to cover her
ass ahead of time.

—It’s unlikely such a thing would happen, but
not impossible. By all accounts, Cioran hasn’t attempted to do anything of the
kind. He consented to allowing his CL to be filtered for any external
connections, and he has made none so far.

—Everyone else I can think of who’s a candidate
. . . if they let something like that leak they’d only be hurting
themselves more than anyone else. And if you ask me, by the time such a thing
hit the street it wouldn’t matter.

—
May I offer a prejudiced opinion?
Kallhander
CLed.
If it’s Enid’s safety you’re most concerned with, from everything I’ve
seen the safest place for her is somewhere near you. With Ioné nearby as well.

—
At this rate we’re going to need more IPS.
(Never
thought I’d see the day when I’d utter those words, I thought.)

—Ioné is free to escort you both; she should be
there shortly.

—Any new word about the drive module or our
friend in the lockup?

—Nothing on either count. I am, however, being
pressured to have Arsèni give us more information by the end of the day. I
suspect IPS is preparing to insist that his backup be replayed. I’ve
counter-argued that they should at least wait for Angharad to be done with the
day’s talks and be allowed to speak to him again first.

—But you’re not very confident in their track
record for hearing you out when you dissent.

—Not as confident as I would like to be.

By the time Kallhander disconnected, neither of us
had been able to come up with a solid reason why Mylène could be wholly
distrusted. That only bothered me all the more. This wasn’t some dodgy protomic
junk dealer; this was a piece of my own past, someone in a high place, and someone
I wanted to say was inherently trustable.

I gave my cuffs one final yank and nodded at
myself through the room’s sensory surfaces. The Henré Sim who could walk into a
room and make friends out of total strangers was making a surprise comeback.
Enid, having changed into her own party attire, agreed—both about my looks and
about having some backup.

“On the one hand,” Enid said, reaching over to
smooth down my suddenly errant jacket flaps, “I think having Ioné hovering over
us for something like this is a waste of her time and ours. On the other hand
. . .
yesterday
!”

“If something like that can happen, yeah. I’d
rather have someone hovering over me who has the right to use more and bigger
guns than I do.” I reached out and adjusted her own collar, tugged at the side
of her dress jacket—and bumped something in one pocket that felt just heavy
enough to trip alarms. The p-knife; she’d slipped it into a flank pocket. “Whoa,
whoa. What are you bringing this for?”

“I forgot I had that in there! Honest!”

“Yeah, honest like I’m my own grandfather. Come
on. What’s it doing shoved under your coat?”

“You ever bring something with you just because?”

I thought about my family pictures, sandwiched in
with all the other little bits and pieces I couldn’t bring myself to toss out. “I
know all about it, hon. I just think something like that turns the wrong kinds
of heads. You getting ideas about things to do with it?”

“The more I just let myself hang out with
something like that, the easier it is to think of things to do with it. Just so
you know I wasn’t planning anything
dangerous
with it.”

“Not dangerous in my eyes, no. But we do have to
think—”

“—about our guests, I know, I know.”

I confiscated the knife and tossed it onto the endtable.

Ioné arrived in an unmarked groundcar, giving us
surprised looks when I wheeled Kanthaka out. “There’s only room for two there,”
she said, “unless you planned on extruding a side-car.”

“I’ll slave its drive control to your car,” I
said, “and we’ll ride with you.”

“Why bring in the first place, then?” Enid said.

“After yesterday, I’m thinking having a self-pedigreed
second set of wheels nearby is coming in
real
handy, no matter what the
occasion. If nothing else, I get to show Mylène something I designed during my
sabbatical. She was right about one thing she said: I don’t think I’ve ever
been
entirely
on vacation.”

Most cities got more rural
as you
approached its fringes. This one also did that the closer you reached its
center—the great swath of land which housed the one Bridgehead Highender for
whom all these others existed to serve, directly or indirectly. As the city
itself thinned out it gave way to estates populated by all the folks only one
or two rungs down from the top of the ladder. People like Mylène: the planners,
the overseers, the bolt-tighteners. You could take them completely out of the
equation and turn the whole city into one giant protomic machine—many Highend
worlds were like that—but that always came at the cost of that much more
flexibility of purpose, the very flexibility a world like Bridgehead still
clung to albeit with weakening fingers.

Kanthaka trailed some distance behind Ioné’s car,
its canopy opacified and a set of dummy tags on the body and in the CL link to
throw off prying eyes. Ioné had sensed Enid’s dismay at not being allowed to
ride Kanthaka out there, and let the two of us ride in her on the conditions
that we follow her security precautions. We still had more than a few
spectators along the way, but once we reached the outer edges of Mylène’s
estate and the IPS sensory surface blackout kicked in, it wouldn’t matter.

Enid spent most of the trip with one cheek or the
other pressed against my back, admiring the view. Seen from the adjoining road,
nestled between hills, Mylène’s estate looked like someone had gathered up the
triangular remnants of a shattered mirror and planted them in the ground,
points up. On drawing closer you could see the shards merely formed the flanged
outer shell of the building; they projected from the skin of the building
itself, which was shaped like a vertically-rising cylinder sliced crosswise
into three staggered sections. Draw even closer and you could see the shards
were in fact thick enough to sport windows in their edges; they were like
buttresses with no towers for them to support. One side of the building glowed
with the slow shimmer of reflected sunlight from a pool big enough to allow the
Vajra
to bellyflop into it.

Our cars were guided into a dome-shaped side
building. Its door melded shut behind us and we stood to one side of the garage
within, waiting for the various automated security checks to cycle through.

“Hey, Ioné,” Enid said, “you’d think the fact
we’re in your company would be good enough for them, right?”

“This is a private residence,” Ioné said. “They
have every right to impose as many security measures of their own as they like.
They don’t, however, have the right to force me to surrender or deactivate my
weapons.”

“Good! Then
you
can take this.” Enid
reached under the hem of her dress jacket, detached something with a click, and
passed it to Ioné. A flat piece of what looked like metal, riddled with grooves
and slight extrusions—it took a moment for me to realize it was the p-knife,
its pieces reconfigured to fold flat for storage. She’d collapsed it and
re-stowed it somewhere else on her person; after all, all I’d done with it was
put it back on an endtable and turn my back on it. I guess I deserved that, I
thought.

“You . . . are
impossible
,” I
said anyway, shaking my head.

“If you can take Kanthaka with you,” Enid said,
fast enough that I suspect she’d been rehearsing this line, “then what’s
stopping me from taking this? You have your own form of backup; why can’t I
have mine?”

“I’ll retain it,” Ioné said. Even in her voice I
could hear the sound of someone working as fast as they could to defuse things.
“If the situation demands it, I’ll release it to her.”

“Fine.” I turned on Enid. “I just wish you hadn’t
used
this
as a . . . a test case for your sense of autonomy.”
I should have known she would try to push the envelope, I thought. And if not
here, then where?

The lights inside the garage finally came all the
way on. The only way out of the garage was a corridor about as wide as the car
itself—that is, about wide enough to allow any four of us to walk
shoulder-to-shoulder. It ended in a circular glass revolving door, the same as
the “airlock” at the front of the villa, through which each of us passed.

We were standing in what I took to be one of the
east-facing “slices” of the bottom-most stack in the cylinder, a room at least eight
meters tall, ten at its rear and fifteen at its front. Every surface was
protomically-extruded glass, but not simply used as construction material: it
was
lacquer
. Underfoot, it coated dark wooden floorboards; overhead, it
encased crossbeams of the same heft and grain. It thinned to cloth and enveloped
the fine-threaded cushions of the couches (and the couches themselves); it
narrowed and hardened into Euclidean solids that encased the vases, paintings,
and cloth wall-hangings that adorned many of the room’s horizontal and vertical
surfaces.

I’m in a museum, I thought.

“Cioran would
love
this place,” Enid said.

“Collection’s gotten a little bigger since the
last time I saw it!” I called out to Mylène.

There she was, in the sunken center of the room
which served as a lounge area and was ringed with cushions. She had been facing
the front windows, an inhalerette between her index and middle finger, the
reflected light from the pool playing across the glass and illumining the outer
contours of her clothes. Not all of the pensive look she’d been wearing
vanished by the time she turned around, but the face she substituted for it
brightened up the room quite nicely. It didn’t bother me much that she wasn’t
actually present in person—that what we saw of her was a CL projection,
inhalerette and all. For all I knew her body was somewhere else in the
building, tying up loose ends at work. For her not to receive her guests in
person would have been a gross breach of etiquette elsewhere; in Highend
society, it didn’t garner so much as an eyeblink.

“Well, that
was
almost a solar decade ago,”
Mylène said, mounting the steps from the sunken lounge. “You have to expect
some
progress on my part since then.”

“I also don’t remember things being this—” I
gestured at the wide-lipped kylix on the pedestal nearest my hand. “—aggressively
protected.”

“This isn’t just your average display-case
hardware, Henré.” She docked her inhalerette in a tray next to the couch (she’s
keeping up the charade of being with us quite thoroughly, I thought) and pointed
at the kylix. “Go on, pick it up. By the handles.”

I was about to say,
That’s not happening
, since
the whole of the cup was behind walls of protomic glass. I might as well have
tried to reach into a mirror to shake my own hand. But the second my fingers
touched the case, the material shrank back under my touch until there was only
a layer the thickness of a veil between my hands and the cup’s handles. Even
the lacquered texture of the pottery was being reproduced under my fingers.

“Mylène’s all-protomic artifact petting zoo,” I said,
grinning until my face hurt, and let one hand go, watching the material fill
the empty spaces back in on one side. “I’ve seen applications like this before,
just . . . not on this scale, or in this form. How do you keep it
from running dry?”

“The pedestal’s a contact-recharge surface,” she
said, “so the protomics have enough ambient standby power to trigger a defense
reflex—”

She didn’t even finish her words before the material
under my remaining hand twitched and I lost my grip. Enid gasped and grabbed
for it, but the awkward shape of the thing—doubly awkward because of the
protomic shell around it—caused it to bounce off her hands, flip up and to the
side, and hit the floor. It made a sound like a half-inflated ball being
punched.