Flight of the Vajra (68 page)

“It seems this embodies a pattern I have seen
before,” Angharad said. She, too, had joined us out on the pool deck, although
the drink she had was only what was left of her unsweetened iced tea. “On the
one hand, you have the self; on the other, you have the sense of selflessness.”

“How does that correspond to what’s being talked
about here?” called out Lycullis, an attaché for Omn Leva. “She” was a
gendermute (CL-tagged as female for Old Way folks) with a plump face that
appeared to be eyebrowless, but which merely had hair the same rusty-clay hue
as the skin beneath. That same hair also descended from her head in ropes even
heavier and knottier than mine. “Forgive me, Kathaya, but I don’t see it at
all.”

The few times I’d heard it happen, Highend folks
had always addressed Angharad directly as “Kathaya”, and never “Your Grace” or
even Angharad. They always made it sound like a name used to scold her with.

“It isn’t complicated.” Angharad sat on the edge
of the pool at the shallow end, rolled off her socks, and lifted her cassock to
dangle her own feet in the water. “There is the artist who assumes that his
audience also only thinks of himself and his own pleasure, who counts on it to
be the case. He is confident in all this, perhaps even a bit smug. And then
there is the artist who can only think of in what way he will connect with his
audience. He worries about it, is perhaps even neurotic about it. We want very
badly to believe that the neurotic one is in the wrong and the confident one is
right, but we forget too easily about motives. The latter, if he is honest, he
worries not simply to torment himself, but rather to keep his aim true.”

“I just skip the tormenting-myself part entirely,”
Cioran said, “and have a fine time.” He gave the now-empty drink tray a fling,
and to everyone’s surprise it flew like a discus straight across the surface of
the pool. Enid snatched it out of the air by clapping her hands together onto
it, and it emitted a brief gonglike warble. From the way she held it up in one hand,
I was worried she would clock someone over the head with it. Maybe Marius, who
was now peeling off his suit and revealing a set of trunks, the same swimwear
he’d doffed earlier.

“About this business of
connecting
,” Lycullis
said, hustling over to stand next to Angharad (and, it couldn’t be a
coincidence, to speak down at her). “It’s all well and good on the surface, but
isn’t it something more suited to an Old Way mind than anything else? Look at
such things in a wider light, and they amount to nothing more than
. . . well, residues!”

Residues
. I’d heard that word plenty of
times before, always out of the mouths of Highenders. When Angharad herself had
said it, back on board the
Vajra
, she’d talked about differently Highend
and Old Way used the word. The Highenders had always said it with finality,
satisfaction:
Look what we’re ridding ourselves of.
With Angharad it was
despair:
Look what is slipping through our fingers.

“Exactly,” said Farhouad. “Life is not merely the
preservation of existing habits. That’s
existence
, but not life. A
prerequisite of life is the discovery of the new! Tell us one thing that the
Old Way has discovered that is
new
.”

Angharad hesitated, but I saw it was only because
the right words took a moment to come together.

“That the need for the discovery of the new,” she
said, “is itself as much a residue as any other behavior.”

I put my drink down and gave her a quiet clap,
although she didn’t wait for either my approval or for Cioran to stop making
his little “Oh-h-h!” noise of delight.

“If all our efforts,” she went on, “are directed
towards nothing more than finding ‘the new’ and shucking away that much more of
‘the old’, do we not fall victim to a kind of magical thinking no better than
the one we have left behind? What is it by which we know ‘the new’ and ‘the
old’, after all? Nothing less than ourselves. It is we who divide the old and
the new; outside of us, there is neither old nor new. There is something
greater than to simply sift the old from the new, and it is to know ourselves
entirely, old and new alike.”

Enid, grinning, spun the tray between her hands
and looked like she was bracing for a fight to break out.

“That’s Old Way for you,” someone back near the
trees called out. “Start on any subject, and they end up by throwing scripture
at you! No wonder nothing ever gets done with them!” He muffled his laugh in
his drink, but a few other people picked up on it, albeit only as a weak
giggle.

“I dunno,” I said, “If I have to choose between
her scripture and most of the policy I hear about, I’ll take the scripture. At
least it’s good poetry.”

“Oh, come, please.” Farhouad shook his head.
“Sentimentalism. Since when has that ever made for a proper social program?”

“Sentimentalism?” Cioran stepped out onto the
water and, in a gesture I couldn’t help but think was designed to both mimic
and mock what he’d just seen done to Angharad, bent himself in half to stare
down at Farhouad. “Is the sentimentalism of ‘forward ever, backwards never’ any
less sentimental than ‘all in each, each in all’?”

“You
would
say that, wouldn’t you?”
Farhouad said.

“Consider only this,” Angharad said. “Are the two
entirely
irreconcilable? Is there not some of your ‘forwards ever, backwards never’ in
our ‘all in each, each in all’?

“Ooh, I smell heresy!” Lycullis pursed his mouth
and drew back in mock-shock.

“Nothing of the kind,” Farhouad said. “Watch;
she’ll tie it all back into Old Way doctrine before long.”

“But, still! Isn’t it, though?” Lycullis went on.
“That sort of pseudo-heresy has been your stock-in-trade for some time now,
hasn’t it? That sort of co-mingling of philosophies? Well, I can’t say it’s won
you any defenders—”

“I’d count a few of them right here,” I shot back.
“Starting with myself.”

“Two,” said Enid.

“Three,” said Cioran.

“Four,” said Mylène, having entered the pool area
from a door instantiated behind me. She’d swapped her inhaler for one of
Cioran’s red-sorghum vodka specials, which seemed like it had put extra spring
in her step and volume in her voice. “I don’t think any of us could say where
she’s going with all this, but color me curious enough to hang around and find
out.”

“You’ll forgive me if I dissent, Mother,” Marius
said. He was now waist-deep in the water. “She can go her way, as long as I’m
left to go mine.”

“It’s a big universe!” I said. “What’s stopping
you?”

“The fact that no matter how big the universe, for
some unfathomable reason, someone else always seems to want a piece of
your
part of it.” He waded over to where Enid stood, the water-film parting as he
did so, and as the film finally gave way under her he seized her around the
waist. Tried to, anyway; she yanked herself down and away, then resurfaced a
meter or so ahead of him, smirking.

“Is that a not-very-veiled reference to the Old
Way immigration issue?” I said.

“Veiled? Why should I even hide it? It’s not as if
the Kathaya here doesn’t know about the objections others have to the presence
of Old Way immigrants here.”

“
Former
Old Way.”

“Are they?”

You’re way too smart to be this pigheaded
,
I wanted to say, but what with Mom standing over one shoulder I decided I
didn’t need to push my luck that far.

“Why don’t you ask them?” I said.

“I have been. They many not light their lanterns
and recite the Cycles, but they certainly have reverence for, or maybe I should
say deference to, the Kathaya. So to make my objection clear, it’s that they
want it both ways. They want the Kathaya on their side, but they don’t want the
burden, the baggage, of actually
being
Old Way anymore. Even she would
agree with me that’s a bit of hypocrisy, isn’t it?”

Not even CL protects you from the uproar of
everyone trying to talk at once. Cioran declared there was no hypocrisy in
someone wanting to take the best of whatever each way of life has to offer;
Farhouad started insisting on something about taking a path and sticking with
it; Lycullis and Mylène shot back and forth at each other over what constituted
hypocrisy; and over and under all of them came many other voices, real and
virtual alike. Angharad, wisely enough, waited for the furor to die down, and I
followed her lead. Enid’s reply was the most direct: she cupped her hands
together and shoved an apron of water right into Marius’s face.

My CL proximity system poked me, and I turned to
see Ioné standing at the sliding door to the living room. Her face looked
leaden—now that’s a first, I thought; bearer of bad news?—but then she stepped
out onto the porch and stood next to Angharad on her left side (Lycullis was
still sitting to her right), placed a hand on the other woman’s shoulder, and looked
like she was gathering the nerve to say something. The amount of surprise I saw
on Angharad’s face told me I wasn’t the only one who found all this out of
gamut for Ioné.

“What ails you?” Angharad said. “Tell me.”

“Which one is most important to you?” Ioné asked. “
 
‘Forwards ever, backwards
never’ and ‘All in each, each in all’—which one is most crucial to
you
,
yourself? Not you, the Kathaya; you, Angharad. Which?”

“I’d like to know the answer to that that myself!”
Enid called out from her end of the pool.

Where’d all this come from? I thought. Had this
been building up the whole time Ioné had been hearing Angharad’s words, and
only just now escaping? Ioné’s face was now as composed and even cheery as
ever, but the tremulous concern in her voice put the lie to that.

“Are you sure that’s a fair question?” Mylène
said. “I know how difficult it is to say ‘I only speak for myself’ on anything.
Nobody
ever believes you really only speak for yourself.”

“Sad, but true.” Farhouad shook his head.

“I unfortunately must agree,” Angharad said. “Even
if they come on bended knee, maybe even especially when they do so, it is
because they want to partake of your power. Is that how it seems?”

“Some of it,” Lycullis said, tilting a shoulder in
a shrug.

Ioné said nothing and let Angharad continue.

“To know both of these extremes means to be forced
to choose between two ways of alienating others. I know only that if there is
any future in the mantle on my shoulders, it is in a place where both such
polarizations no longer exist.”

“More sentimentalism,” Farhouad threw in, but
Angharad kept going:

“You have asked me: What is it that I would say if
asked to speak only for myself? The only answer I can give is this: that is
exactly what I came here to discover. Through all the rest of you.”

“That’s not much of an answer!” Lycullis raised
her glass at Ioné. “I’d say our intrepid officer here deserves a reply with a
little more nutritional value!”

“That reply,” Ioné said, turning to face the
others, “was better than any I could have come up with myself.”

“It has the benefit of being sincere, too!” Cioran
had shed his formal outfit and piled it at the edge of the pool. “Of course,
that’s something you only tend to pick up on once you’ve been in her presence
for a while, but I believe I speak for all of us on that note . . . ?”

“Some of us, at least,” said Ulli, who had just
emerged from the house as well. “But I’m willing to add my vote for sincerity
to that tally!”

Something’s up between Ulli and Mylène, I thought,
or the two of them would have joined this conversation a lot faster. I saw
Mylène turn her head with a distracted expression surfacing fast on her face,
and then in the same moment I felt Kallhander patch in and begin flooding me
with what could only have been something dredged up from the bowels of Arsèni’s
protomic workshop.

Biann had played the piano,
and she had
started learning young. She told me once that, as a child, there had been no
thrill for her that came close to looking at a piece of music, knowing what it
sounded like, and reveling in knowing how you did indeed have the power to
understand such things.

Protomic programming had become like that for me,
too. One glance at a protomic framework and I could see its target deployment
state flowering in my mind, like Biann hearing her sheet music. The thrill had
lost much of its luster over time, but there were moments—like this one—when a
great understanding stood naked in front of me, and the luster of its newness
returned all at once.

What swam in my head—and Kallhander’s, and now
Ulli’s and Mylène’s as well—was what I recognized as a state dump from a memory
cell for a protomic structure. When sliced along certain memory range
boundaries, it became a series of what I quickly realized were public addresses
for sensory surfaces. It was trivial to take that and correlate it with a live
map; less trivial to figure out what some of the other values referred to.

—
This has not been processed in any way
,
Kallhander CLed,
just as Henré requested.

Not so much a request as a snide wish, I thought,
but I wasn’t about to complain. The details that did come through were
incrementally telling—especially the one that involved the values that had
puzzled me. They weren’t addresses within the city’s layout, but state vectors
for some of the previously-defined points within it. Mylène latched onto that
right away at my behest and started pulling it apart the way someone
disassembles a sandwich to get rid of the toppings they detest.

Look at that,
she CLed.
Remember the
backflow fluctuation? One of those vectors you just isolated is a dead-on match
for it. And among the other “points of interest” on that map is a building
adjacent to the junction where we found that.