Flight of the Vajra (78 page)

The ship that had been fabbed for Marius and
Arsèni was a standard two-person yacht, a free design you could pick up
anywhere and fab yourself if you could pay for the substrate. It took a good
hour before Marius was satisfied it was entirely his and hadn’t been bugged,
and that was after he’d demanded being able to fab it himself at the docks from
substrate taken from a pool of his own choosing. They broke atmosphere forty
minutes after takeoff, and ten minutes after that they’d entanglement-jumped for
points unknown, with the last of the hostages automatically being dispensed
(Marius’s word) a few minutes afterwards.

And that, it seemed, was very much that.

I went into the bathroom and was on the verge of
asking the dispenser there to give me something, but then I went back inside
and found, still stowed away in the back of the bar, an unbroken bottle of Henn
Jursudakul, aged 21 solar. One shot of it was enough to bring me close enough
to sleep that I nodded off within seconds of lying down, bathed in the
red-and-blue lambency radiating from the moons of the night sky.

You know it’s love, I thought, when you don’t mind
sharing her misery. Or when her not sharing it would have hurt you worse.

By the time I woke up,
the only sign a
dozen multilegged wrecking balls had torn through our apartments was the grit
on the floor inside the closet. The superstructure hadn’t been wrecked, so
everything else was technically just cosmetic damage. A little CL birdie had
told me ‘pon awakening that a buffet breakfast was waiting for us, so I bumbled
into the common area with my eyes still swollen half-shut.

All of them—Angharad, Enid, Ulli, Cioran,
Kallhander, Ioné—in that order clockwise—were sitting at the main table; all
turned to face me the minute I entered. Enid leaped to her feet and led me back
over to the table, seeing how I had been standing there gaping at the single
biggest braided honey-roll loaf I’d seen since my father had left the kitchen
forever. I hadn’t been able to see the whole thing from my position at the
door, but on coming closer I saw that a big part of why they were all grinning
so sheepishly (even Kallhander, inasmuch as something like that could come to
his face) was in anticipation of me seeing the elegant way THANK YOU, HENRÉ had
been written in icing on the top.

‘This is . . . some breakfast,” I said,
wondering how I was going to face anything that sweet first thing in the
morning. I couldn’t stave off the laugh or the smile forever; they both rose
out of me before I’d finished the sentence.

“We couldn’t sleep,” Cioran said. “Or, rather, I
didn’t need to sleep—”

“—and while I wanted to,” Ulli added, “I simply
couldn’t.”

“I know
I
couldn’t sleep!” Enid said. “So
we passed some time together, and had this ready in plenty of time for
breakfast.”

Ulli: “It’s far from the only way we wanted to
thank you.”

Cioran: “But I think it’s a good start.”

“Are you sure this isn’t . . . premature?”
I said. I elaborated when their faces told me they had no idea what I meant:
“That is, maybe you should wait until I’ve done something worth being thanked for?”

“I think you have done more than enough for that,”
Angharad said. “At least, from where I sit.”

I pulled off a lobe from one end of the loaf and swallowed
it. I had been wrong: it was a great choice for breakfast. I shared a hug and a
handshake with everyone—Angharad, too—before sitting down and serving them all.
It was the least I could do in return, at least then and there.

“I get the impression,” I said, while still
swallowing a fresh mouthful, “the rest of the powers-that-be aren’t too
thrilled with how far we stuck our necks out the other day.”

“Prince Nancelares has pooled his requests for
audiences with us,” Angharad said, “so that we are all asked to attend
together, later today. After that—we’ll see.”

Enid spoke with her mouth full also. “That could
either be very good
or
very bad.”

 “
 
‘Asked’,
nothing.” Cioran spread marmalade on his slice as if balming a wound.
“Commanded, is more like it!”

“Yeah, sounds like we’re getting the riot act read
to us,” I said. “I was anticipating something like that eventually—ever since
the day before when everything blew up in Arsèni’s shop. Maybe even earlier
than that.”

“It won’t be the riot act,” Ulli said, “not if I
have anything to say about it. Nancelares may be silly and vain, but if he’s
going to listen to anyone he’s going to listen to me. I suspect he has come to
some premature conclusions of his own about the policies being debated—he was
mouthing off about something like that before. I’ve asked to speak to him on my
own beforehand, but he hasn’t replied. At least, not yet.” The hasty way she
threw those last words in sounded like her shoring up that much more of a
defense against her own rising disappointment. “Oh, and I’ve been
tasked—unofficially, although I suspect it’ll be official shortly enough—with
assembling plans for a new summit, perhaps in a few months. One which, I
suspect, won’t be hosted here.”

“What will you tell him?” Angharad asked her.

“About my policy recommendations, you mean?” This
time, Ulli couldn’t hide the rest of her exhaustion and gloom. “To keep the
doors open, of course, and to inspire the other provinces here to open their
doors as well. But I . . . I wasn’t about to say this before, you
see, but I suspect his mind has been made up for some time now.”

Even her grim tones didn’t put a complete damper
on the meal. The fact that we were all here, and all in one piece, was by
itself a big morale booster.

I tapped Angharad’s shoulder—literally—after the
table had been cleared, and drew her aside into her room. I realized, just as
the door shut, that she probably thought this was more follow-up from last
night’s blurting-out. Might as well start there, I thought.

“Last night,” I said, “you never did answer me.
Whether or not you did all that because—”

“It was not only because of my love for you,
Henré,” Angharad said.

There, I thought:
love
. Said just like she
would say any other word. The best way to say it, come to think of it.

She went on: “You feel that has guided too many of
my actions, but for me it was one of many sorts of fuel that I compounded to
drive them. And I take it you feel that for me to do this has distorted my
judgment.”

“I don’t want you doing anything just to impress
me
.
You know I’m just one person—”

“And one of the most valued and important.
Henré—why do you shirk this? You will never be just another associate of mine.
You never were and cannot ever be again. And neither can Enid, or for that
matter Cioran or Ulli, or even Kallhander or Ioné. They have all become
important. But you, you most of all. You have staked everything that you are,
and much of what you could become, on me. I cannot think of any other way to
repay that than with love.”

She went on some more while I was still stuck for
an answer, any answer: “You worry that by doing this I will ruin, or at least
damage, the reputation, the good will, all the things that go with being the
Kathaya. But you must remember that my time as the Kathaya that everyone knows
is limited. I will not be that person for much longer. I have been seeking what
comes after that. Perhaps you still feel, then, that this was not the way to do
it—that it should have been done without so much else hanging in the balance.”

‘You know I do.”

“And you still think of me as a fool, perhaps, for
staking so much on this.”

“So much of what
other people
expect of
you, yes. You still have a duty, whether you like it or not. You can’t use that
duty as a platform for experiments.” I’m begging, I thought; it’s all I can hear
is left in my own voice. “All those people whose worst mistake was nothing more
than to believe in you—you can’t just pretend you’re not hurting them!”

“Did you yourself at one point not say that the
Kathaya is more than just a person?”

I knew what she was referring to. “Yeah,” I said.
“Most recently, back in the car, when you had a leash around your neck. —But
that doesn’t give you an excuse to trade on that! Even if I’m the only one who
knows why you’re doing it.”

She lowered her eyes and stepped towards me, and
before anything else I could say became coherent, she put her head against my
shoulder and left it there.

“I owe you many apologies, then,” she said. “I
have never wanted to be anything but a friend to you. I am ashamed to see I
have done this poorly.”

“C’mon. You haven’t done
too
bad,” I said.
“You just need to—well, not let impressing me be the ultimate criterion for
what’s best, that’s all.”

“But that is what’s wrong with all of it, isn’t
it?” She raised her head. “When you brought Enid to me, and when I reached out
to her and promised to make things right by her and her father, I saw the first
hint of what had to be done. To be the Kathaya, or anyone of such authority at
all, means to be at a certain distance from everyone at the same time. It is as
I said to Arsèni: I cannot help but speak from a position of privilege. He only
confirmed this for me.

“And so I contrived ways in which this privilege
could be cast aside. Not all at once, not in some single great defrocking, but
whittled down, reduced by degrees to an irrelevancy. I entertained an idea that
I might simply walk among others—like you, like that girl—as nothing more than
a friend. I longed for this far more desperately than I wanted to admit. And
for a time, I convinced myself it was not only possible but easy. All I had to
do was show others that I took the power I had been given only as seriously as
they did. For those who took it seriously, I took it seriously as well. For
those who thought of it as a privilege, I put away privilege and walked as
nakedly as I could amongst them.

“But you are right, I fear: with few exceptions,
they will only see me as Kathaya and nothing more. At least, until the day
someone else wields that title . . . in which case I will still have
the privilege of being the ‘former Kathaya’. And so on. Do you not see? There
is no end to it. I have known this, in one form or another, but I wanted never
to speak of it out loud. And yet still I long for nothing more than to walk
amongst others and share what I have as a friend. Not as a god sitting on a
cushion.”

I didn’t have the nerve, not until much later
anyway, to play things back and see which one of us had started kissing the
other first just then. I preferred to believe we both hit on the idea at the
same time. Me kissing her forehead as a way to find a moment to breathe,
though—that was entirely my idea.

I reached up and took her hands in mine as a way
to put some more space between us. “You have work to do,” I said, “and I know I
do. Let’s just do the work we know we need to do, at least for now.”

“Yes, of course.”

Neither of us had much enthusiasm by then, but we
both knew to get back to work was the right thing. The first kiss we’d shared,
on the night she’d snuck out to visit Arsèni—I’d kept telling myself it would
have been better if it had been the first
and
last. Now it had been
followed by a second one, and I felt like I’d taken us both another step
towards being made all the more degraded by the very happiness we were looking
for.

CL environment or no,
I didn’t want to
stay in my room. I headed for the newly-repaired roof and looked out across the
rest of the city from there. Here and there I could see the scars of last
night’s insurrection—a scoured and gouged building façade, a torn-up length of
street, splinters of debris collecting at the shoreline. At least one of the
wrecked windows I glimpsed in passing was quietly reconstructing itself, its
glint of reflected sun growing brighter with each passing moment. I never
doubted the city would put itself back together in short order; it was the
people I had my doubts about.

I extruded a bit of roofing canopy, stretched out
under it in a recliner, and fired up my CL workspace once again. The villa’s
own computing power was back online and could be rented out, so I provisioned out
as much space as was available and offloaded into it the simulation of the life
cycle from the sample I’d snipped from Aram. Mixing that with the data
Kallhander had provided me was like putting together two of Cioran’s perspective-map
drawings after they had been torn up. You knew they referred to the same
things, but it took imagination, not analysis, to see how they did so.

I’d spent barely ten minutes with the simulation,
tweaking parameters and experimenting with time scales, when a message came my
way. Anjai Navgary, again: was I all right? Did I want to perhaps share my
experiences about the other day? Least important but still worth asking: Was
the article to my liking? I froze the simulation and tagged Anjai to call me
back directly; knowing he was sitting around waiting for an answer from me
wasn’t going to do a thing for my concentration.

Anjai seemed to like the view from the roof, too,
especially now that he’d been explicitly permitted to project himself there. He
leaned against the railing and peered out at the debris that had washed ashore,
which was now being slurped up by a crablike beach-sweeper drone.

“I was more or less ordered by the rest of the
editorial board to see if I could get a few words from you.” His CL projection
looked as dapper as ever but I could hear exhaustion in his voice I didn’t
remember from last time. “First off—is there anything already in the public
record you want to correct? For instance, I hear you wrecked a docking bay, but
you also apparently had damn good reason for it.”

“The facts on record are solid,” I said, “and they
speak for themselves. —Listen, instead of grilling me—okay, instead of
just
grilling me—how about going out and also grilling some of the good people of
this burg who got duped just as bad, if not worse, by Marius and his mom?”

“Well, you said yes to talking to me, for one.” (I
winced.) “Also, I had something of what you described already in mind. I just
thought I might start with you and see who else I could reach. Journalists who
ask pointed questions about the gullibility of the people inhabiting the ranks
of the planet’s power structure are not being treated with a great deal of
courtesy right now.”

“The diplomats aren’t having the best time of it
either.”

“They’re arranging to reconvene at their own
discretion, aren’t they?”

“Ulli Kijusto is heading up the planning for that
gig, so any policy recommendations from her would get brought back to Nancelares.
That part hasn’t changed, at least.”

“I have to imagine the Prince is going to be that
much less impressed with whatever comes out of such a summit, given what
happened this time around.” Now I realized why they called him the Prince; when
spoken with the right tone of voice, it
was
a pejorative.