Flight of the Vajra (63 page)

I stood up and pretended to stretch out a
lower-back muscle. Enid had been only too happy to fill the air with chatter
about her previous and subsequent careers, although from what I heard as I
walked to the door she was still picking her words carefully. “I’m not sure if
it’s going to be a long-term collaboration or a one-off,” she said (about
Cioran), “but we’re collaborating, and letting what comes of that lead us.”
Maybe diplomacy
was
one of her strong suits after all, I thought.

The door to the lounge unmelded itself at my
approach. Ioné was on her feet, and by the time we’d walked back to the sunken
couch I’d shared with her the building plans and braced for her reply.

—Her words indicated she believes there may be
other buildings in the city modified in this fashion,
Ioné CLed.
But she
hasn’t provided evidence for it.

—
The twinge in her gut. Not much evidence by
your standard, but let’s get Kallhander in the loop anyway.

—
I’m trying, but his connection’s on standby. I
suspect he’s in one of the no-CL neutral zones. I can get in touch with the
field office instead.

—Hold that thought. Mylène’s twitchy about
anyone who isn’t us, and that includes IPS. Half of me thinks she’s being
paranoid and the other half thinks she’s only being smart. Keep pinging K; loop
me in the second he replies.

—I will.
“And thank you,” she said out
loud, to Mylène, who was welcoming her back.

“And look who else decided to join us!” Mylène was
on her feet, arms out, walking towards the wide doors that were just past the
lounge entrance. Marius stood there, now dressed in a close-fitting black
outfit, the skin of his face and throat lustrous from his workout in the pool. He
had his head angled in a bashful tilt as soon as Mylène released him from her virtual
hug, but he raised his chin as he stepped towards the rest of us.

“Mr. Sim, Officer,” Marius said to each of us in
turn, “and you’re Enid?”

“The very one.” Enid looked particularly pleased about
that fact. “And while Cioran and Angharad aren’t here to say hello
. . . well, I’m sure I could arrange some meeting between them and
the son of one of Bridgehead’s most valuable—”

“
You
arrange something!” I said out loud.
“Well. With Cioran, maybe. With Angharad? I think that’s a little out of your
jurisdiction.”

Enid was as unruffled by all that as I hoped she
would be. “Well, we are a closely-knit group. You can’t deny that. And all the
better for it, given the pressures we’re all being subjected to right now.”

“So what
is
the Kathaya like, anyway?”
Marius sat—rather close to Enid, by my eyes—and tilted forward in his seat as
if ready at any moment to propel himself back out of it. From bashful to eager,
I thought, as fast and as easy as one would turn over one’s hands. “It’s so
strange. When people talk about someone else for long enough, it’s almost like
that other person stops becoming real. Then they show up for real, and everything
goes askew . . . ”

“Marius has been interested in meeting her, or so
he tells me,” Mylène said.

“I have been.” Marius nodded. “I just wouldn’t
know what to
say
. Enid, what did you say to her when you met her?”

Give me back my father
, I thought, but Enid
instead laughed and admitted she had been every bit as stuck for words. Nothing
about what Angharad had promised, either.

I forced my attention back to Mylène, who was
watching her son and Enid bantering. It always takes someone else to see how
much you have invested in another person, I thought. I look at her, and I can
see why the other Highend in her circles wince. You’re not supposed to be that
deeply invested in another person if you’re Highend; if you care that much
about someone else—especially
progeny
(assuming you’re daft enough to
have
any)—your priorities are wrong. After all, what’s there to be had in life that
can’t be had on your own, once you have your world lined with protomics and
your CL installed and online? What
can’t
be had that way? And had far
more easily than through any Old Way handstands and contortions?

I’ll tell you what can’t be had that way, I
thought.
This
. The simple act of looking at your own son, or daughter,
and knowing you were responsible for bringing him into being in only your way.
It had been a long time since I’d heard a Highender let out one of their
patented full-bodied sneers at “mere biology”, or an Old Way shake his head at
“gimmickry and rotten substitutes” (even Angharad hadn’t been that snide), but
all those old arguments and counter-arguments were welling back up now, freshly
awakened by our conversation.

 “It’s not that I don’t understand,” Marius was
saying. “It’s that I ask myself, which way are we
supposed
to do these
things?”

“But that’s just the thing,” Enid said. “It’s not
that you’re supposed to have kids or not have kids, or that you’re supposed to
have a CL or not have a CL. That’s the impression I’m getting now that I’ve
actually talked to her somewhat. It’s about knowing that if you do those things,
what else is going to happen. And that includes things you don’t always know
about just in your own life. I mean, I have a CL and I use it all the time; you
can see that! But I know that’s not the
only
thing that’s important or
useful. I’ve got this body, and while I’ve gotten all these CL programs for
enhancing the way I use it, I also know people are going to care most about
what I can do with it when you take all that stuff away. That’s what they came
to see me do in the first place, right? And that was what we saw they cared
about more than anything else: what you could do when it was just
you
.”

“I don’t mind thinking of ‘me’ as ‘me and a CL’,
though!” Marius was grinning. “Everyone on Bridgehead is the same way, from
what I’ve seen. They don’t think of a CL as a crutch propping something up.”

“But what happens if you don’t have it?”

“Except a scenario like that almost never exists,”
I said. “At least, not in the Highend. They have it all set up so such things just
don’t happen. And they’ve been able to keep that a consistent trend for how
many generations now? Lots.” I edged around them and made as if to sit on Enid’s
other side; no one stopped me.

Marius nodded in my direction. “And that’s not a
problem. That’s just how they chose to live their lives. The problems don’t
come from the way they live; it comes from the ways those livelihoods create,
or deny, other livelihoods, other ways of life. The more I talk to people about
it, the more they say things like, ‘It’s not that we don’t want people to live
different lives; it’s just a question of
how
much difference it’s
possible for one universe to tolerate.’ —I’m working on my admissions thesis in
extropic sociology, you see.” The more he talked, the more I saw someone with
the bright, fresh-scrubbed attitude of someone eager to knock on any door he
might come to, even if it was immediately slammed in his face.

“Now I don’t feel stupid for thinking you
were
a student.” I gave him my best go-get-‘em smile. “You plan on applying for
direct study?”

“I am. I was thinking about applying off-world,
maybe at Kettenkrad or Omn Leva, but . . . Mother’s not too excited
about that.”

“I’m selfish,” Mylène said. “What can I say? I
want him to stick around and have him use that big beautiful brain of his to
help me run the circus here for a bit.”

Marius did the duck-and-blush thing again. “But
you always told me, ‘It’s your mind, you—’
 
”

“
 
‘—you
have to use it your way.’ Exactly. That doesn’t mean I can’t be jealous of your
choices. Or suggest a few options of my own.” Mylène sat on the couch’s
endcushion, leaned into her son’s shoulder and gave him a kiss on the temple. I
had to imagine how much more of this fawning there might have been if she had
been with us in person.

“Is ‘jealous’ really the right word?” Enid said.

“Only because Marius here’s going to have that
many more options than I will,” Mylène said. “He’s one more generation removed
from everything that shaped me.”

“That’s something else I’ve been looking at in my
thesis,” Marius said. “About the ways each successive generation of Highend
both distanced and did not distance themselves from their pasts and from
humanity’s past in general. My thesis is that they kept at least as much as
they threw out, and found that each time they threw something out, they had to
backtrack and find something else to add in its place. All of those big
‘societal planning’ systems, they worked until it was time to think seriously
about a succeeding generation. They always assumed in the long run there
wouldn’t
be
one. The succeeding generations would always just be
them
,
in another form. The only society I know of that pulled off such a thing with
any success is Continuum.”

“Yeah, to what end?” Enid said, then instantly
cringed. “—No offense, Officer.”

“If I may,” Ioné said, unruffled. “Enid isn’t
wrong to make such a criticism. While Continuum valued our safety above all
other things, we found there was only so much it could give us. We still value
our continuity of existence as a whole—that’s why we call ourselves what we do.
But we’ve found there are always things to be learned from those who don’t
follow that path. That’s why I exist, for instance; I was instantiated from a
template designed for first-hand curiosity.”

Marius turned around to face her. “That’s right! I
saw your ident, but for some reason it didn’t click with me just then. What
kinds of things? —I mean, clearly, you don’t speak for all of Continuum, but—”

“We all speak for Continuum in our own way,” Ioné
said. “It’s very difficult for any one of us not to speak for all of us.”

“All right, tell me, then! What do you see as
being the chief problem in Highend social planning? The fact that they do it at
all, or that they’ve picked the wrong goals, or what exactly?”

Ioné seated herself opposite us and mulled the
question for the length of a deep breath.

“No one society we’ve observed,” she said, “including
our own, seems to be able to engineer its own future. The minute a future is
engineered for it, it becomes a constraint. It requires what has been called
the ‘outsider’s gaze’ to see things we cannot, or choose not to. But even
that’s no guarantee that what’s seen by them can be used properly. We broke our
silence and offered ourselves to the rest of the universe as a way to see how
our presence elsewhere might influence us, and how it might influence others as
well. We’ve come to no firm conclusions about this, other than the mere act of
mingling is important.” She paused, then added, “It might be wisest to ask
again in another hundred years or so.”

“Sure. I ought to have my post-doctorate by then,”
Marius laughed.

The term
outsider’s gaze
stuck in me like a
burr, until I realized it was something Angharad had said long before we’d met.
An outsider’s gaze is not that of an enemy; he sees all we cannot. His very
strangeness should be welcomed.

“Henré?” Enid said. “What do you think Angharad
would say about all this?”

“I think she’d be on the side of the minglers,” I
said. “I think she’d be on the side of anyone who had come to realize a plan is
only as good as the moment you make it in.”

“How’s that again?” Marius shook his head. On his
mother’s face I saw something like:
Oh, yes, I know about this.

“Every plan’s a product of its moment,” I said,
framing the air in my lap with my hands. “You plan for the future, but you can
only do that planning it in the present. That means the best way to make any
plan is to make an embodiment of that plan, make it a living thing.
Be
that plan. Instead of rules and guidelines, you need wisdom and insight. You
need someone who can take the plan on their shoulders. My previous job was all
about this sort of thing,” (Emphasis, I thought, on
previous.
) “The more
ships I built, the more I ran up against things I could never have been taught,
because nobody knew them in the first place. The only way to learn them was
discover them. And once I’d discovered them, the only way to transmit them to
someone else, really get them to understand, was to give them access to the
same situations. Let them go make the same mistakes. That’s hard enough on an
individual level. It’s no wonder we still can’t do it on a societal scale!
. . . But every society has to deal with that, the fact that they
only know about what there is as they know it. And the more you think all that
can be reduced to formulas, templates, logistics,
plans
, the more it
comes back to bite you.” I shook my head. “I think I might need another drink
to explain this right..”

“You’re doing a better job than
my
professor did,” Mylène said. “Cosm alive. What a waste of a tutelage season that
was.”

“Mother, nothing of the kind’s going to happen
with me,” Marius insisted.

“What? When did I say anything of the kind was
going to happen with you?”

“I heard it in your voice!”

“You hear a lot of things I don’t have in my
voice.”

—
Henré!
Ioné CLed, right as my next
stumbling sentence was being lined up.
I’ve finally linked up with Kallhander.
He was indeed in a no-CL zone. I’m bringing him up to speed.

—
Put him through to me the second he’s ready.
This is a great conversation but, really, we can have this any time.

—
I’m afraid I agree.

“Would you excuse me a moment?” I said, standing
up. “I’m about to get very distracted.”

Enid, bless her soul, picked up the conversation in
my wake as I walked to the window and stared out at the pool to give myself
something soothing to look at.