Flight of the Vajra (8 page)

She looked right back at me and put on the same
bitter smile I’d seen her wearing when she was telling Angharad about her
wayward father. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Nothing this red-hot second. It’s just something
to think about.” The tall trees shading the avenues around the Summit Lodge had
once again given way to the closely-crowded low buildings of the city’s
outskirts. I imagined taking a month and doing nothing but getting lost in all
those shadowy dead-ends, but the impulse didn’t come as strongly as I had hoped
it would. The needs of the moment were getting in the way.

“You know where you want to go?” I went on. “Even
without all that cash in your pocket, there’s still a lot of places you can go.”

Enid stuck her legs out in front of her,
unbuttoned the very pocket in question, and took out one of her coins. “I’ve
got a lot more money than this, you know. I’ve been saving up, stashing it
away. I figured at some point I’d find a good use for it, and now I’ve got it.”

Ping.
She flipped the coin right at me.

My arm, my fingers, moved and snapped it out of
the air before my head even turned all the way to face it.

Maybe it wasn’t the best time to demonstrate that
I’d spent a time getting familiar with a neuro-kinesthesia feedback training
system before setting out on my own, but like she said—at some point I’d find a
good use for it, and this was as good as any. In my experience, NKF training
was an arms race: it put you ahead of most people, but also made you that much
more of a target for the few who were always going to be better than you. That
and any NKF wielded by the untrained could wreck you just as badly as any enemy
could.

Enid didn’t seem flustered by my reflexes. Then
again, I imagined it would take a lot more than a parlor trick like that to
fluster her.

“That’s down payment,” she said.

“What for?”

“I’m hiring you as transport. I want you to take
me to where Dad’s being halfway-housed. He’s on Lamia’s Light.”

“It’s not
that
difficult to buy a ticket to
Lamia’s Light, you know. Because that’s about what you hiring me would amount
to—I’d buy you a seat on a cruiser, put you on it, and wave my hanky at you.”

I flipped the coin right back at her, and she
clapped it in her upraised palms without blinking. Pretty good, I thought. We
could pass that thing back and forth between us all day, but I could easily
think of better pastimes.

“Dad’s work colony does allow visitors. Thing is,
if I go by myself, I have to say it’s me, and he won’t see
me
‘cos I’m
the one that turned my back on him, see? And I can’t go under an assumed name;
they won’t allow that. But if it’s me plus someone else, then they can say it’s
you
here to visit him, plus others. See? That should get us all in the
same room at least. Then he won’t be able to say no to me anymore.”

“Hold on a millisec. Why are
you
talking
about seeing him? I thought you were gonna leave that to Her Grace.”

She shook her head. “She isn’t going to help me.”

“When did that happen? I didn’t hear anything go ‘clonk’.”

“You heard her in there. All that stuff—she was
just saying it to hustle me out of the room. That and something you said—that business
about letting someone have power over you. Why should I let her have that kind
of power over him? No . . . ” She shook her head and smiled. “It’s
like, why should I let her have that kind of power over
me
? Why should I
feel like she’s the only one who could do that? Besides, it’s
her fault,
isn’t
it?” She put the coin down on the seat between us. “That kind of thing just
makes me want to hire you for this mission all the more.”

I thought: Oh. Out loud I said: “How much are you
offering?”

Part of me felt terrible for even saying that.
Money wasn’t an issue on my end; I had enough of it squirreled away in many
different places to keep me for quite a while. Taking cash from her would be
like looting the small change from behind a couch cushion in the hopes of
bribing a minister.

“This—” She slapped her pocket, rattling the four
other coins against each other. “—for down payment. Then thirteen thousand when
we get to Lamia’s Light.”

“Your life savings.” A wild guess on my part, but
a number like that sounded too uneven to be explained any other way. “You’re
gonna blow your entire life savings just to get me, whom you barely just met,
to take you to Lamia’s Light? You, who almost just clocked the Sixteenth
Kathaya herself?” I was laughing out the words by that point. “You’re too
dangerous to let loose without a chaperone.”

“So it’s a deal, then?” She’d picked up some of my
laugh for her own.

“No,” I said, and I realized just then how very good
I’d become at removing my smile on a moment’s notice.

Enid was still sulking
when we arrived
at the hotel, and I did my pointed best to ignore her as she followed me
inside. I stopped at the convenience store in the lobby to buy a
cocoa-and-chestnut anpan—my best cure for irritation, barring booze, has always
been something sweet and wholly non-nutritive—and I saw Enid stride up to the
check-in desk. Fine, I thought: maybe she’ll take a week off, practice some
katas on the roof or something, forget about all this nonsense.

I went back up to the room, set the privacy lock,
and used the desk (one of the few places I could make a CL link) to connect
with my ship. No sign of anyone poking around in the hull or doing anything
else that said they suspected I wasn’t what I said I was. That’s right, folks;
nothing to see here.

Before leaving the ship I’d set up a few
information feeds from the planet’s public-access networks. Seismic activity,
gravitational mapping, orbital live views with multispectral scans
. . . no one of them alone would be enough, but together they could
tip me off if what I was looking for turned up. Provided, that is, the warning
signs from all these inputs didn’t click into place minutes after things had
already been blown up or wiped flat.

There was a part of me that hoped I wouldn’t find
anything here. There was another part of me that suspected all too well I
would. Because if Angharad was in town, at least one of her ideological
opponents was, too. Someone who might not think twice about taking out a city
to cross her off his list.

Or a continent. Or a planet.

Or a ship with thousands on board.

If that happened, I’d let my own leash slip and
fling myself at that threat. And I didn’t want to have anyone in tow, or anyone
to protect, when that happened.

Sorry, Enid. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that
your timing couldn’t have been worse.

I collated what data there was to sift through,
which wasn’t much, and decided I was as ahead of the game as I could get. I did
my exercises, laid down, and slid into sleep far more easily than I
anticipated, but I didn’t like what I found there.

Somewhere before dawn I was awake.
Some
deeply-buried nerve in me had started tingling and wouldn’t shut up, and
whenever that happens I can forget about getting back to sleep for more than
five minutes at a time. I de-opacified the night curtain and saw the streets
were now lined with wall-to-wall pilgrims carrying the traditional handmade
paper-and-tin lanterns, creating a gently rocking ocean of glittering orange
lights. The line of the orbital elevator, normally black against a grey pre-dawn
sky, was lit up from top to bottom with spots of light that indicated incoming
ships. At some point they would have to close that door to keep the planet (or
at least the local landing pad) from becoming one big parking lot.

I got dressed, found the buffet was open, and took
my excuse for breakfast out onto the roof. The grey in the sky had turned pink,
and the streets below were still gridlocked with people—if anything, they
seemed jammed in all the more tightly now. Behind the rumble and scrape of the occasional
patrol vehicle cutting overhead I could hear countless low voices and the slow
shuffling of feet. The posters for Angharad’s appearance now showed a countdown
timer superimposed over her face. Evidently all those who couldn’t get a seat
would be able to watch a planetwide broadcast of the goings-on through any
number of venues

Standing at the edge of the roof, framed against
that lightening sky, was Enid. She was raising and lowering first one leg, then
the other, then her arms, then arms and legs in synchrony. She still wore the
same leotard and divided-toe thick-soled footwear as before—although since it
was all protomic it wasn’t like it would get too grubby with extended wear. She
had, however, changed the color scheme: pastel blue up top fading to an
electric scarlet down below, with her toes and heels the lighter blue for
contrast.

“Quite a turnout,” I said around my kifli,
indicating what was down below with a tilt of my head.

Enid pivoted in place, still flexing and bending.
To my surprise she gave me a smile. “Are you going to see her?”

“I did promise her that much. You?”

She delivered a shrug that looked like it was part
of her exercise. “I should. If nothing else so I can tell her I’m going on my
own.” She bent deeply from the waist, then straightened herself again before
asking: “I guess there’s still no way I can convince you to take me.”

My eggs were a little more edible than they had
been before, but they were still lousy. I ruminated on that as a way to avoid
thinking about answering her. Maybe, I told myself, the only answer she’ll take
is the truth that will eventually come out if things go the way I fear they
will.

“I’m not crazy about the idea of being responsible
for someone right now,” I said. A nice, half-assed way to put it, I thought.

“Meaning what exactly?” She stepped down from the
chair she had been standing on. And just in time, too: the first other morning
patron, a woman with a giant rope of hair braided down past her waist, emerged
from the stairwell and parked herself at the railing to watch the streets
bristle with the faithful. From somewhere came the hiss and crackle of a lone
firework.

“I’ve made some enemies in my time,” I said,
groping for something that would sound impressive to her green little ears. “People
who have a tendency to pop up when I least expect it. The
last
thing I
want is for someone like you to be hanging around if that happens.”

She crouched on the chair next to mine and looked
at me like I was telling a particularly bad joke. “You don’t think I haven’t
seen trouble myself?”

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t want
my
trouble becoming
your
trouble. Because no matter how much money you
throw at me, those problems won’t go away. They’re not the kinds of things you
can bury with cash.”

“Enlighten me.”

Oh, boy, you are so asking for it, I thought. “Are
you sure you want to be enlightened about this?”

“You were right about making it sound tempting.”

Rotten little pixie, I thought. “Trust me, it’s not
like I want to.”

I took my sweet unmetered time
finishing
my breakfast, then led Enid downstairs and through the nearly-immobile crowds
in the street out front.

Every belief system has its symbols. With the Old
Way, it’s a lantern—one you can make out of nothing more than paper and tin, or
paper and balsa, or just plain paper if you’re really stuck. You don’t buy them
as-is; you buy the pieces—either by themselves or as a kit—and then you recite
the Cycle of Nature, the Cycle of Grace and the Cycle of Spirit while
assembling it. Down below—amongst the crowds, in the mouths of the alleys, and
at the corners of the side streets—there were any number of people selling the
kits from waist-high, roll-around cases.

I hadn’t put one together since before Biann died,
and so it felt weird to even have a lantern kit in my hands at all. I bought
two kits, one for each of us, and we stood with our foreheads almost touching
and our faces to a wall as we put the lanterns together. No prayers from our
lips, though; the whole thing was just a way to talk without being noticed. One
of Angharad’s posters continued ticking off the minutes right in front of us.

“I told you about the accident—the ship I’d
designed,” I said.

“I had a feeling this was about that.”

“In what way did you think it was about that?”

“I don’t know. Just that . . . if it was
going to be
about
anything, that would be it.”

I lowered my voice even further than it already
was and put my mouth right next to hear ear.

“My family,” I said, “and one of my best friends,
were both on board that ship.”

She began to turn her head, but stopped.

“It’s not a giant secret,” I went on. “For those
who know about it, it’s pretty common knowledge. You didn’t even know about the
incident when I mentioned it, so it stands to reason you wouldn’t know that
part either.”

“Your family?”

“I had a wife and a daughter. And there was my
friend Cavafy Enno, a close associate with whom I’d collaborated on a lot of
work.” Some of which, I reminded myself, had not been made public for damn good
reasons. “And when they died, I blamed myself, and I went on blaming myself as
I looked and looked . . . trying to find out what had gone wrong. I
wanted to believe I was at fault, because if
I’d
made a mistake, that
wasn’t as horrible as the alternative . . . ”

“Sabotage?”

“Murder. Just call it murder. You don’t tamper
with a craft like that just to see what happens. You do it to kill people.
Someone wanted them dead; someone probably wanted
me
dead. And I spent a
year and a half waiting while other people sifted through the wreck and
followed all the little leads that went nowhere—”

“You think whoever did this is
here
?”

“No. —Well, they could be here; they could be
anywhere. But that’s what I’ve been doing. All this bumming around
. . . I haven’t just been getting sun and looking for places to have
breakfast on the roof. I’ve been looking and listening. At some point someone
is going to screw up. Especially if they wanted me dead and messed it up the
first time—”

“What if it wasn’t you they wanted dead?”

“I’ve thought about that.”

“Not as much as other things, it sounds like.”

Touché, sprite. “Well, without trying to sound
arrogant—what else would be the point of an exercise like that? It wasn’t an
accident; believe me, I made
sure
it wasn’t. That leaves sabotage. Not
sabotage for terror, because nobody claimed responsibility. So sabotage for
murder, or someone with sick tastes in thrills.”

I watched her hands as she slotted the last of the
heavy paper into place and inserted the candle at the bottom of the lantern.
Men and women in the shawls and wimples of Old Way pilgrims were wandering
through the crowd, offering brass cisterns full of smoldering tapers; you took
one, lit the candle inside, then passed it along to whoever else might need one.
Enid did this, then held the lantern up to her eyes while the light inside
bounced, flickered, and then brightened.

“So who kills thousands of people just like that?”
I said. “Someone who has something bigger than human life on their mind. I was
very Old Way at the time, and so I couldn’t help but think things like, ‘For a
human being, what’s bigger than human life?’ It’s not as if I didn’t know back
then that there were people, whole worlds, who
did
think like that. I
knew those things, factually, but not in the same way I knew what the color of
my wife’s eyes were without having to look.”

Enid held the lantern in both hands by its base.
Its little light was being defeated, gradually, by the dawn that was splashing
up the length of the adjoining street. Her face was detached and distant, the
same look I’d seen her wear when she was doing her morning gymnastics. Probably
didn’t hear half of what I said, I thought. She’s got at least as much on her
mind as I do.

Both of us turned our heads at the yelp of a
siren. Local police, armed with nothing more than batons and the occasional
riot shield, were wading slowly up the street and insisting that the
thoroughfares be cleared. The café up the street unlocked its swinging doors,
and the part of the crowd that had been standing in the empty patio flooded
inside—all except for a few who congregated near another of the countdown
posters sprayed on an adjoining wall. And right in front of us, a little
spicy-noodle place lifted its front shutter and let in a great many other
people who probably weren’t coming there to eat either. There were posters on
the inside, on the walls and ceiling, all ticking off the countdown.

I realized I’d only half-assembled my own lantern.
I snapped together the rest of it in haste and touched fire to the wick. I didn’t
even know why I was hurrying until the flame—first blue, then gold—grew on the
wick. It was all about appearances; I didn’t want to look like I had no idea
what I was doing. That’s the fear of a man who wears masks: he’s worried that
if one falls away from his face even a little, the strings on the rest will
also break.

“As soon as these streets are a little clearer,” I
said, raising my voice a bit to get her attention, “let’s head on over to the
Pavilion. It’s a short walk.”

Probably doesn’t matter to her how long the walk
is, I thought. She’s young, and since when does an acrobat hate being off her
feet? But her attention was still entirely on the lantern; it was only after
another moment went by that she blinked and looked my way.

“Did you hear a word I just said?” I noticed now
when I said things like that to her, I did have a smile. A bent smile, but a
smile all the same. If she couldn’t figure out I didn’t mean any harm with that
kind of teasing, she was going to have more problems than she could pay me to
fix.

“I was just thinking about something.” Her eyes
were still on the lantern as she said that. “The last time I put together one
of these lanterns was the last time I saw Dad. Right after he dragged me to the
camp. We were looking inside it together—through the top, like this—and it was
like all the other times we’d done that before, just for a moment. No
craziness, none of that. Just him and me. And I thought, ‘Well, if it’s like
that now, maybe it can be like that again someday?’
 
”

There isn’t anyone alive who hasn’t wanted that
once in their life, I thought. And we’re still debating whether the real men
are the ones who outgrow that feeling or find a way to actually make it happen.

I wrapped my arm around my lantern, like someone
carrying home a trophy, and led Enid into the street. A copy of the poster had
been sprayed underfoot at the next intersection, and I noticed everyone, save
the two of us, was taking pains not to step on Angharad’s face. I watched my
step from then on.

The Pavilion was unapproachable.
Four
blocks out from the main gate, there was a crush of hundreds of people all
simply standing there, most of them with lanterns in hand. A few had scurried
up onto the old-style lampposts and were peering or hollering out over everyone
else’s heads. The clocks on the posters stood at T minus one hour.

We shoved our way through despite the occasional
dirty look. “They closed the gates already,” someone shouted at me from behind.
“I was just there. You won’t see a damn thing.”

“I’m an old friend of hers,” I shot back.

The Pavilion had a traffic circle out front, gated
off from the main thoroughfare and staffed with wall-to-wall security forces.
Every so often you saw one with a message on his riot shield: IF YOU HAVE A
BIOMETRIC INVITATION PLEASE APPROACH HERE. I stepped up, let them scan us, and
envied their jobs not one bit as they closed ranks to keep everyone else
immediately behind from shoving through.

We stumbled out into the open air of the traffic
circle, panting like we’d just been let out of a stuffy closet. There were only
a few other people in sight; everyone else must have already taken seats
inside. The façade of the Pavilion reminded me of a posh concert hall—a whole
row of open doors at street level, and above them huge protomic windows that could
be density-tuned to allow in everything from sunlight to fresh air in on a nice
day. Not today, though: they were both opaque and solid.

More guards on the inside, yet another biometric
exam, a silent protomic screening courtesy of the doorways we had to pass
through (not that they were going to find anything on me, I was sure of that),
and then finally the audience hall itself. The only seats left were in the
roped-off VIP section down front. Guards escorted us to the first row on the
left side and closed the rope as soon as we stepped inside. I felt like we’d
just been put in a jury box. And given how the audiences at some of these
things were supposed to be combative, maybe the feeling wasn’t far from the
mark.