Flight of the Vajra (69 page)

Kallhander:
I concur. Also, consider this—

The map fragments jittered about and pulled away
from us. The area in question was now a single spot on the outer periphery of a
hazy circle that encompassed many other districts—including, to everyone’s
dismay, the conference center itself.

Kallhander:
Those are from the last series of
modified data points in the array. I believe that requires little effort on our
part to parse.

Mylène:
You’re implying
everything
in
that zone is in danger?

Ulli:
That’s a rather broad interpretation,
wouldn’t you say?

Me:
If that “area of interest” turns out to be
only one point among many, then yeah, I’d say it’s a safe bet that everything
in that space is in some kind of bad trouble.

Ulli:
Are you suggesting an evacuation is in
order?

Me:
Ulli, given what you know might be at stake
here, I’m thinking that might be the
least
we could do.

Mylène:
I’m not going to say that’s a bad idea.
I think he’s dead right, to be honest. But there’s easily millions of people in
that zone—as well as the local IPS liaison office itself. If we sanitize that
entire zone, we’re going to be looking at pulling the plug on the entire conference.
And for keeps this time.

Me:
I’d rather have that than whatever else
Arsèni and his confreres were cooking up. You can always make up for lost time,
not lost lives.

Ulli:
Some lives are not always lost forever,
of course. But I do see your point. It’s best not to assume everyone has such a
fallback.

Mylène:
The other problem is doing it without
inspiring at least as much panic as we’d be trying to defray. You can’t cordon
off that much of the city and not expect people to get uneasy.

Kallhander:
And the nature of the issue
requires that we do direct physical inspection. Mylène has already spoken of
how sensors might not be trustable at a distance.

Mylène:
Plus, we’re never going to be able to
do a full building-by-building sweep in anything like a timely fashion, either.
We have to start with the obvious stuff and work our way down from there.

I flipped back to my stock senses and looked
around. The atmosphere around the pool was seesawing between merely lively and
outright rowdy, and I couldn’t always tell where one ended and the other began.
Lucky them, I thought. The less they know how many time bombs they’re sitting
on top of, the better. Angharad and Lycullis were still debating (the latter
using loud but friendly-sounding tones); Farhouad was in a three-way juggling
spree with Enid and Cioran, while at the same time attempting to defend his position
that to develop physical talent “naturally” was just as contrived as to develop
it through CL programming. “Each is the product of an act of will, isn’t it?
It’s the will that matters, the striving, not the methodology!”

To that Angharad had her own reply: “It’s the
methodology that shapes the force of will into its ultimate form, and makes it
valid or invalid.”

And Cioran had his as well: “Not much point in
that will when all it amounts to is, ‘Oh, another hundred years of
this
?’
 
”

And Enid: “Quit jabbering and work on your aim!
Both of you!”

Angharad and Cioran, I thought. Two foci. Everyone
in the pool area was listening to one of them.

Ulli
, I CLed,
how’d you like to do me a
favor? I have an idea.

Whether it was my words or Ulli’s bafflement that
caught the attention of everyone else in the CL conversation, I’m still not
sure. But either way, I had everyone’s attention, and I used it.

Me:
There’s one surefire way to get everyone
out of that danger zone, or most of everyone—no, maybe everyone after all. But
it requires you to make a case to Cioran to do something he might be a little reluctant
about right now. How likely do you think he’d be to make the effort to get one
of his famous on-the-spot concerts started? As in, in the next couple of hours or
so?

Ulli:
Why not ask him yourself?

Me:
Well, I can talk to him, but
I’m
pretty sure right now you’re the only one he’s going to take a favor from. If
you think it’ll help all the more, you don’t even have to breathe my name. If
he
asks
, own up. But pitch it like it’s a strategic move we all dreamed
up at the same time.

Mylène: [Laughter, the disbelieving sort] [
. . . and then just plain laughter]

Me:
There’s an outdoor venue, the Onzekoro Amphitheater,
that is both big enough
and
far enough away from the trouble zone that
it should do the job, and as far as I can tell it wasn’t booked for anything
but an open athletic meet, and that’s only in the enclosed gymnasium. I’m
pretty sure anyone who gathered for
that
would be more interested in
Cioran dropping in and playing a few tunes. The longer he can keep people
there, the better. Didn’t he turn a five-song gig on Merridon into an
all-night-and-all-day festival? I know he has it in him. If anything, this’ll
give him an excuse to beat his own personal best.

Kallhander:
My main concern is that it would
simply create an entirely new target, a far more concentrated one.

Me:
And one where you can do detailed screening
in an automated fashion, a pre-screened clean zone. Besides, it’s still not
even clear what we’re looking
for
other than “infrastructure anomalies”.
—Look, I said it was an
idea,
not a
plan.
And I’m in favor of
using what we have to do
something
instead of sitting back and
pretending we can’t.

Ulli:
Forwards ever, backwards never, is that
it? —Promise me only this, Henré. If you wish to
use
Cioran that much
more, you must also make him that much more central to everything else that
takes place in your circle. He offered himself to you, albeit at a certain
price—one which you and Angharad were clearly willing to pay. Now, you’re going
into
his
debt.

Me:
Given that you and him were sitting on top
of something fairly volcanic this whole time, it’s going to take a good long
while before we’re in anything like “debt”!

Ulli:
My assertion stands, Henré. All I want is
for him to be taken seriously enough to be a proper part of your inner circle.
Or is the only value he holds for you that of a chess piece? Am I no more than
that as well? Yes. We were silent about a great many things. You understand now
that to have been anything but silent about them would have been dangerous. We
refused no cooperation with your party or with IPS; the information we
volunteered proved useful. But if you wish to
use
us in this fashion, we
demand no less than our fair share of participation in your goings-on. —After
all, I think you will find that we have much to contribute, and in more than
just the easiest and most obvious of favors.

I had to admire the way she’d shifted from “him”
to “us” in the course of those sentences. It was something I was still
fulminating over by the time I said:
We’ll argue about the details later.

Kallhander [to me, privately]:
You can leave to
us all details of security involving her, if that’s what concerns you.

Me [back to him, privately]:
Thanks. One
problem down, six thousand to go.

Mylène [still laughing]:
Good cosm, Henré. You
really
are
working overtime to make sure we all have some great stories
for our kids, aren’t you?

I sat down inside
and took another
drink—just a pomegranate punch to clear the throat; alcohol needed to be off
limits for now—while Ulli took Cioran aside in CL-space and explained the plan
to him. I wasn’t privy to that discussion, but afterwards Cioran walked up to
me and gave me a friendly swat on the shoulder. He was still damp from the
pool, wearing nothing more than his freshly extruded swim trunks and a big,
crooked grin.

“I’ve decided,” he said, “that I love being able to
go to someone and say ‘Yes, why didn’t
I
think of that?’ Actually—the
truth? I
did
think of that. I just threw it over my shoulder and said,
‘No, no, too much like work.’ But you were right to think Ulli would do a fine
job of selling me on the concept. Sold I am! She also provided me with venues
to spread the news, so I’m wording the invitations now. ‘Come and see! All live
and all of the night! Quickly, before they kick him off-world and you have to
hunt and peck once again! With extra-special co-guest star . . . ‘
 
” He flashed his hands
out towards the pool area, where Enid had emerged and was now tossing the
beanbag back and forth between Farhouad. “She’s going to get cleaned up before
hieing herself thence, but I’m
just
loony enough to show up looking like
this.”

The sight of him giving his damp, entirely
too-clingy swimwear a sideways yank made me laugh despite myself. Lycullis, on
his way back out, blinked at this and (maybe as a dig in return) snapped shut
the wide-ribbed fan he had in one hand with a loud slap. No, not a fan; it was
his own hand, tricked out with a protomic prosthetic.

“Just remember,” I said to him sidelong in CL,
“this is only a concert on the surface. Under the skin, it’s a diversion.”

“Oh, naturally, sir!” Cioran gave a rubber-necked
nod. “A crowd like this desperately needs all the ‘diversion’ they can get!”

“You know what I meant.” The best way to punish a
smart-ass, I thought: make him answer to yet another smart-ass. “Get moving;
we’re giving ourselves a two-hour setup window.”

He saluted and skipped off to find a changing
vestibule. I drained my glass, still going back and forth as to whether his
sir
had been sarcasm or sincerity.

To his credit, he didn’t waste time demonstrating
his work ethic. Barely five minutes elapsed before the planet’s entire public
CL interchange came alive with the same message:

Isn’t everything
better when it’s a surprise?

CIORAN
AT ONZEKORO
+2h UNTIL . . .

The “+2h” began a countdown—2:00:00, 1:59:59, and
on. Nothing else except clips from his previous gigs, but even the text alone
said everything. In the time it took me to return my empty glass to the
sidebar, the entire party started to go agog with excitement and empty out into
the driveway and backlot.

Enid padded out into the living room, blotting at
her hair and face with a towel. “Cioran said I’d better get cleaned up and eat
something before the show,” she said, with the pop-eyed breathlessness that
doesn’t come from exertion. “I told him he’d better give me at least some of
the gross receipts! I don’t plan on just standing around and looking cute, you
know.”

“Congratulations,” Marius said, arriving from
outside. He draped his arms across Enid’s shoulders from behind and reached up
to muss her wet hair. Bad idea; he got her soggy towel in the face for his
trouble.

“See? Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to hug
strange women?” I said.

“All the time!” Mylène called out from the far end
of the room, where she had just been seeing off several of her guests. “I take
it you’re going to join her at the show?”

Marius wiped at his eyebrows. “Once I’m dried off and
cleaned up, absolutely.”

“Well,
good
!” Enid turned around to face Marius
and flicked fingers across his forehead, which only served to make him grin
wider. “Otherwise you’re going to miss something that works best in-person.”

“You and all that in-person, of-the-moment
attitude—”

“Go on and say it. I dare you.” She moved her
mouth to say it herself without speaking it out loud:
Old Way
.

“All right. Old Way! It’s very Old Way. But you’re
making a better and better case for it, I’ll admit to that.”

“Good! Now let’s dry off before we create our own little
wading pool here.” Not that there was much water running off the two them—their
bare feet were just leaving damp sole-prints on the floor, the dark wood of
which was sealed away under that protomic laminate. But those same bare
feet—and Enid and Marius themselves—had been a lot closer than I felt
comfortable with. Go on, I told myself, call it jealousy, the same way you
called it when Enid came down off Cioran’s stage the first time.

No, this isn’t jealousy, I thought. This is
something entirely different. Seeing the two of them together made me realize
how much she needed someone like him—not a father-substitute, not an older
brother or a mentor, but a
peer
, an honest-to-cosmos peer of her own
choosing.

But if you look at him and all you can think is
Not
that one; it better not be that one—
how is that not jealousy?

It would have been nice if Yezmé had grown up, I
thought. I might have garnered some proper experience in distinguishing
protectiveness from mere possessiveness.

The three of them walked off in different
directions—Enid to wash up in the guest rooms, Marius to do the same in his own
subdivision of the house, and Mylène to continue seeing people off outside.
There, by the pool, she wished Farhouad, Lycullis, and Angharad hearty
thank-yous and all-the-bests. Most of the other guests had already hurriedly
packed up and preparing for the trip across town to find prime seating. Ioné,
to one side, looked CL-distracted; I decided to let her be.

“It was such a pleasure having you,” Mylène said
to both Angharad and I. The words came out quietly enough to be nothing other
than sincere.

“I was only too happy to be your guest,” Angharad
said, bowing in turn.

“I’m also sorry you had to put up with all that
grilling—”

“There was nothing about it I would have refused.
I have come to learn that it is my lot in life to be misunderstood
. . . or at least, that is my lot as the Kathaya. All the more reason
for me to answer as earnestly as I can, and turn no question away.”

“Even if the question is ‘Have you stopped beating
your slaves?’
 
” I
said.

“Henré!” Mylène shook her head at me, then said to
Angharad: “I don’t know how you put up with him. Then again, he’s
always
been an armful.”

“I chose him,” Angharad said, “because I knew he
would never tell me only what I wanted to hear. So far, I have been entirely
correct.”

I’m betting now it’s more than just that, I
thought. Especially now that you’re telling other people that’s my job.

Her words brought a laugh out of all of us all the
same, and seemed to function as a cue to bring Ioné forward. “Your Grace,” she
said, “I’m ready when you are.”

“Hm?” I looked at the two of them.

“Your plan with Cioran gave me a similar idea,”
Angharad said. “After Ioné informed me about what was being attempted, I
considered something similar—staging a talk of my own with Ulli, as a way to
draw the attention of all those who might not find Cioran as, well, palatable.”

“Ulli said yes to this?”

“She has gone to arrange a venue and spread word;
Cioran just left with her under IPS guard. I think she was rather surprised I
would agree to do such a thing in public. Her exact words were, ‘Aren’t you
tired of talking with me by now?’
 
”

“I know you. You don’t get tired
that
easily.”

“I never tire of being near the people I know I
must.”

From somewhere, echoing over the top and sides of
the house and between the trees, came the sounds of car doors clicking shut and
ground-car tires kissing pavement. Some of them would retrace the path we’d
arrived by; some would retreat to a safe distance and leave by air.

“In my case,” Mylène said, “I’m surrounded by
people who don’t agree with me whether or not I like it. But I’ve learned to
live with it. —I’m not shooing you out or anything, by the way. Take your time;
I know Enid’s still getting cleaned up. Besides, Henré, it looks like you and I
are going to be sharing that much more intel as this whole thing unfolds. I’m
going to go see off the last of the others and get un-distracted.”

“Keep me posted,” I said, and waved her off. The
sudden emptiness of the house and its grounds closed around me like a returning
echo.

Enid pinged me: —
Talk to you for a moment?

She wasn’t finished cleaning up. Apparently our
host’s bath was luxurious enough that she’d decided to give herself a few
minutes’ downtime in it. I was about to gripe, but then remembered she wasn’t
running on the same timetable I was. For convenience, I set us both up in a private
CL shell—a copy of the pool area and the surrounding house, its telemetry
harvested from the house’s own sensors—and patched her in.

“Stop me if I’m reading the two of you wrong,” I
said, “but I can’t figure out for the life of me if you and Marius are at each
other’s throats for real, or just poking at each other’s armor.”

“It’s called
flirting
, stupid. Try it
sometime.”

“I did! I ended up married and with a daughter,
remember? No regrets, mind you.”

“Never thought you had any. —That said, I’ve
teased out a few things from him I wasn’t expecting to get myself. He seemed to
be dropping hints that whatever it was that his mother was currently working
on—and by that I’m guessing he meant this whole business with Arsèni—that he
was going to be working with her on that, too. He made it sound like the two of
them, mother and son, worked together on a lot of similar things.”

“Did they?”

“I asked him flat-out; he said yes, that the only
reason he hadn’t been hired outright by his mother is because he’d be headed
off-world for school and because her fellow staffers would have gotten their
hair in a knot about it.”

“She talks a lot about not being very popular with
her fellows. If I didn’t know any better I’d say she was actually
proud
of it. Him, too.”

“Momma and me, against the world.” She swished a
toe across the water’s surface. “You want me to ask Cioran if I can bail from
my performance and just keep an eye on him directly?”

“This is going to make you want to hit me, but
. . . ” Her eyes narrowed; I got on with it. “ . . . from
what I see, the best place for you right now is up on stage next to him, giving
everyone and their brother something else to think about. You do a good job of
it, too. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Well, sure, but—”

The door to the inside opened, and Ioné and
Angharad emerged. Even a Continuum node’s body language says something, I
thought: the way they were close together, even after they had both stepped
through the door, told me something. The words they spoke out loud only
confirmed it—out loud, since Angharad was in the process of removing her ‘hat
and running her fingers through her hair.

“Even if the headache is nothing more than
psychosomatic,” Angharad was saying, “that makes it no less of a headache. I
suspect that is a warning to me about how much CL to indulge in at any given
time.”

“Five minutes rest, no more,” Ioné cautioned.
“With everything that’s been transpiring, you should remain connected as
consistently as possible. And stay here until you reconnect.”

Enid emerged from the same doorway, back in her
dress outfit and with only a slightly damp head of hair to show for her earlier
frolicking. Behind her, Marius, also re-clad in his sleek blacks, followed
close enough to irk me, but I put those feelings aside for all of our sakes.

“Am I wrong?” Ioné said to Angharad, after a
moment had gone by.

“Wrong about what?”

“About being curious—about what I mentioned
earlier.”

“It is the nature of every living thing to wonder
about death, Officer.” Angharad’s words made all of us turn and listen. I was
about to say
Did I miss something?
, but I realized now I was about to
get the explanation of just that.

“From your perspective,” Angharad went on, “death
is nothing more than the extinguishing of a single node in the collective. I
believe one of your kind described it from our point of view as nothing more
than the loss of a hair or a fingernail. But the same one also said,
‘Nevertheless, this is not
death,
’ and I agreed with that statement.”

“And what’s more, we’re . . . worried
about being curious in that way,” Ioné said.

“Why does being curious about death disturb you?”

“Because it wasn’t something we were curious about
before. We knew what it was, which was why we became the way we did—as a way to
make death a solved problem of sorts. If there’s always something with the name
‘Continuum’, then nothing of it can ever be said to be ‘dead’. Then we started
sending out our emissaries, some of whom died. And again, there seemed to be no
problem at all. As long as there was something called ‘Continuum’, then there
was no death.” Her words were unhurried, tranquil. “Not long ago one of us
heard something you said about death in another context, about how there was
neither death nor immortality. Do you still believe that?”

“I do.”

“Mind explaining
that
one to me?” Marius
said. He slid the door closed behind him.

“There is neither death nor immortality, because
nothing is ever born, nothing ever dies—and nothing ever continues, either.”