Flight of the Vajra (80 page)

I broke into a full-blown run again, to give all
the energy I suddenly had something to do. I threw it into running all the way
out to where the beach ended in a high cliff face that jutted out far into the
water. I’d scramble right up over it and keep running, I thought, if me doing
so wouldn’t have triggered a perimeter alert.

No: back up again, I thought. You don’t need the
whole systemwide master key to fake
those
kinds of numbers. You just
need access to the traffic-switching system . . . which Cavafy had.

Not this again, I thought.
Questionable but not
suspicious
, that was how they had characterized Cavafy’s movements right
before everything went south. He’d asked me for the keys so I could “live a
little”, as he put it—and then he’d given me my gift. Then he’d gone to take a
look at one of the interstitial compartments, and two minutes after that, the
hull had ripped open. And he
had
given me something that sounded like an
apology, the sort of thing someone might have said when he was about to do
something terrible to you—but that’s not how it came off at all. From Cavafy’s
mouth, it sounded more like someone apologizing for
not doing enough.

And maybe I was the only one who could have heard
it that way, because I knew what to listen for.

You’ll figure something out. You always do.
That’s the one advantage you’ve always had over me.

I wasn’t the only one who had no trouble at all
seeing something suspicious in all that. But I was probably the only one who
still refused to believe it.

I turned around and burned the rest of my fuel
heading full-tilt back to the villa.

Once inside,
I shook the sand out of my
clothes, re-tailored them into their original shapes, and compiled my
discoveries into a dossier. It helped to have them formalized and concretized,
and to have specific annotations and extractions from the
Kyritan
’s logs
to prove my points. There was only so much they could directly support, even with
the evidence harvested in the aftermath, but at last now I had a good explanation
as to why it didn’t look like sabotage had been in play. There
had
been
sabotage, but all evidence of it had been scrubbed right as it had unfolded. And
of course a search for explosives had turned up nothing: there hadn’t been any.
Small wonder Cavafy could have been considered a culprit; small wonder I had
been unable to completely shake that feeling myself.

It took an hour to put it together and another hour
for Kallhander and Ioné to digest it in detail. It took less than a minute for
Kallhander to dash my hopes.

“You’ve introduced a likely second scenario,” he
said, “but I can’t say you’ve made a complete case for it. It’s still possible
to interpret this another way—that Cavafy was co-conspiring with this
. . . instance, I suppose you could call it?”
Instance
was a
good word, when it was likely there were more of whatever Aram was floating
around out there than could be counted on any number of fingers.

“I know, I know,” I said. “It’s natural of me to
want to defend a friend; I had that whole argument the first time. Doubly so
when he left me in his will a bunch of stuff that I was glad I didn’t look into
until after all the investigations had been closed.”

I let them stare at me with those
Why didn’t
you tell us this sooner? e
yes before I went on: “Where do you think I got
all the unlocked substrate for the original iteration of the
Vajra
from?
He’d been hoarding it, giving it to friends of his on the side as a gift.” I
let that sink in. “You can see why I didn’t talk much about that in the depositions.
The first thing you learn when you’re in a hole is ‘Stop digging’.”

And here I was, I thought, thinking they’d figured
it all out on their own.

“I think you had better tell us about it anyway,”
Ioné said. “I don’t imagine this is prosecutable at this point.”

“That and you have bigger fish to spear right now,
don’t you?”

Even Kallhander had to agree with that.

The whole thing
[
I explained to Kallhander
and Ioné
] started off simple enough. There are any number of people out
there, right now, who keep a private manufaxture. Some of those folks also have
a private protomic distillery—an unlicensed system for creating unlocked
substrate on the down-low. The fact that Cavafy had one of these things will
only raise the eyebrows of people with nothing better to complain about.

Cavafy made unlocked substrate on the side and gave
little samples of it to his friends, me included. Like tomatoes from his
garden, I said to him once. He thought it was a pretty apt analogy: the
substrate he was producing was not only unlocked but had no tracing tags. You
could self-sign them if you wanted, but you were better off leaving them
unsigned—that much more anonymous. No one was going to get into your hair if
they discovered your outfit or even a few of your furnishings were blobbed from
an unsigned substrate farm. As a society we were past all that, we told
ourselves, and for the most part we were right. Nobody I knew from Cavafy’s
circles ever got a fire lit under them for this. A big part of why: Cavafy was not
dumb enough to give his substrate to people who had already proven themselves
to be loose enough in the lips to sink his ships.

[
Pun intended, I thought.
]

The way Cavafy did it was also important. Usually,
it would be during a party—always at his place, never anyone else’s. He’d CL
you, take you aside, and lead you through a couple of double-blinded passages
into a workspace under the house that was buried underneath a solid slab of
Type C. He later moved the lab off-premises, which is why when the IPS searched
the place later, all they found was a filled-in block of foundation material.

When you entered the place, he’d seal it back up
behind you and put into your hands a cask normally used to hold licensed
substrate, filled with his own custom brew. And then he’d give a speech:
I
don’t give this out to just anyone; go have fun with it; just keep your mouth
closed. I’m giving this to you because I trust you.
Lots of talk about
trust
,
you see, so you’d feel like the cosm’s biggest ingrate for ratting him out. The
cask usually never held more than a liter of substrate, which was enough for
most people tinkering with clothes or jewelry.

It wasn’t like that when he brought me down there,
though.

About a solar year before the
Kyritan
, I
was at his place. He’d had a vanity pond installed in the valley in back of his
house, with the two of us at one end and all his other guests flapping around
in it at the other.

We’d both had drinks—there was no one there who
wasn’t already soused—and I’d started owning up to him about something I’d only
hinted at before. There’d been a time before that when he’d asked me, “Is this,
everything you have right now, what you really want?” I’d shrugged the question
off then; I’d said yes, I was happy. What else could I want? A career like
this, wife like this, lovely little girl like this—what was missing? So he said,
“That’s good,” but I couldn’t get over the feeling he seemed let down that I’d
been so quick to say yes.

I had been too quick to say yes, and I knew it.

There’s a feeling that creeps into everyone’s
lives whether they’re aware of it or not, whether they look for it or not, and
which stays even if they fight it. Sometimes it stays all the more fiercely
when they fight it, which is a sign they’re fighting it wrong. It’s the feeling
that under it all, you would rather be someone else, somewhere else, doing
something else. And the more people I bump into, the more I get the impression
that the greater the scope of your ambitions, the more your “potential”, the
more you have a feeling like that stacking up inside of you. With all that you
could be doing, why are you
here
, with
this
?
. . .
Wouldn’t
you be better off doing something more, well,
more
? The more you reach
for, the more you actually grasp, the more of a feeling you get that there’s
something else never reached for.

And I couldn’t deny it; I’d had feelings like that
since before I met Biann. I’d ignored them. I married her and I ignored them;
that was how I ignored them. I won a design award, and so I ignored those
feelings. We had Yezmé, and so I ignored them some more. But in the middle of
all the great work and the cheers of here’s-to-us, there would always come
those moments again—mailing themselves back into my life from under the door.
What else, really, could I be doing with all the talent I had, besides coming
up with classier and snazzier ways for people to do the same exact things they
had been doing long before I ever appeared in the universe?

I hadn’t a clue, and it was chewing me up inside.
Quietly, but all the more painful for being so quiet.

There were only two other people in the whole of
the cosm I had the nerve to talk to about this, because I knew they wouldn’t
brush me off. One was Biann. She listened to me stumble through trying to
explain it all, then ran a hand through my hair and said, “You’ve always
worried you were going to regret everything, haven’t you?” It wasn’t the
not
doing
that was bugging me, she told me, but the
regret
. The feeling
that you, or someone else, would look at everything you’d done and shake your
head and say you could have done better. And so she kissed me and said, “You’ll
always be doing just right.”

I believed her. What else could I do?

After she died, whenever I remembered her, I chose
to ignore all the things about her that had exasperated me—her streaks of
stubborn coldblooded selfishness, her disdain for anyone not having a good time
when she was (“Why do you have to be such a
stick
?”), all the little
things which had left me that much more primed for Enid’s bullheaded ways. I
chose to ignore all those things because of every moment when Biann had done
something like kiss me and say that I would always be doing just right.

So I believed her—for a while.

The other person I believed was, of course, Cavafy.

I told him all this while we were throwing stones
across the water and hoping to cosm around us that someone didn’t surface near
us and get clipped in the head. I told him about it all more or less the same way
I just now told it to you.

He said, “So, the first time I asked if this was
all you really ever wanted—you lied to me, is that it?”

“Ha ha ha,” I said.

“It’s all right, Henré. I didn’t expect you to
give me a straight answer then. No one ever does the first time they’re slapped
in the face with a question that big.”

“So you asked me to get me to lie to you, is that
it?”

“In a sense.”

“In a sense?!”

“To get the gears unstuck. To get you to start
thinking about it. If you didn’t end up thinking about it, it would burn out on
its own. But if you did . . . well, here we are.”

“Oh, well, thanks, I guess.”

“All the same: you wouldn’t be here talking to me,
owning up to all that, if it wasn’t important to you.”

“You’re right. And it is important. Important
enough that I don’t go talking about it to just anyone. So why did you bring it
up to me in the first place?”

“What do you think?”

“Because you’ve been bothered by the same worries too.”

“I’ve been more than bothered by it, Henré.
‘Bothered’ is not the word I’d use. Look at what we’ve done. The human race, as
a whole. We’ve broken through so many barriers that we thought would encircle
us forever! But we keep getting stuck . . . and we always get stuck
on the same questions. What are we supposed to be doing with ourselves? I look
at the ships you designed, and I think: that’s just the tip. That’s only the
tiniest tip of what we could be really doing. And I don’t mean building bigger
ships, Henré; I don’t even mean building faster ones. I don’t mean figuring out
how to live for centuries or combine ourselves with our technologies in all
these different ways, because we’ve
done
all those things. And all we’ve
ever derived from them is new ways to be insular and dissatisfied, and to band
together here so we can hate the folks over there. We’ve come all this way, but
without really changing anything. We’ve kept all our old appetites, and just
found new ways to satisfy them.”

You can guess by now that I didn’t have the
faintest idea what in this cosm he was talking about, either.

I tried to pin him down a bit: “Okay, so we’re
both infested with the same vague dissatisfaction about things. And?” (I was
ready to use on him something like the same line Biann had used on me: what was
this
really
about, except maybe your own vague sense of regret?)

“I’m tired of just sitting and watching,” he said.
“I know it’s possible for us to do more with our lives. I’ve seen how it
happens, if only a little at a time. What I want to do is create something—a
circle of people, a place between people, so to speak—where that can happen
completely. I want to look for people who have tasted a little of that regret
and who aren’t afraid to act on it. People who are hungry to see something more
than just a bigger spaceship or a more long-lived populace or a slick new
protomic superstructure or a faster terraform.” He flung a fresh stone across
the water with a zip and a plop.

“But you don’t even know yourself what that
something is, do you?” I said.

“No. That’s the terrible part, isn’t it? But I
believe that yearning doesn’t exist just to torment us, Henré. I believe it’s
there for a reason. It’s there to goad us, to kick us hard and make us want
something that isn’t just the continuation of our comforts. Is there anything
like that, anything at all, in you?”

“I suppose there is,” I said. “But it’s like you
said: it’s so unformed it might as well not even be there.”

“And who’s to say that’s only because we haven’t
tried? The Old Way—at least they
try.
For all of the disparaging things
that can be said about them—and there’s no end of those—they
try
. And I
say this knowing full well you make the lanterns yourself.”

“Yes, but I don’t expect the Old Way to give me
all the answers anyway.”

“I don’t want all the answers either! I just want
a better
question
, or the next set of questions. That’s all. Everything
we’re doing now, all of it—it seems so
unworthy
of us.”

“How do you want to go about looking, exactly?”

“Again: I don’t know. Right now, I’m just looking
for—hah!—co-conspirators. That’s all. Fellow travelers. I’m not asking for
people to follow me off a cliff, either, Henré. If anything I’m trying to go
the exact other way. Do you want to be a part of this?”

“I suppose if I didn’t,” I said, “I wouldn’t still
be listening.”

That was how it started, with that one drunken talk
by the pond.

A couple of solar months later, we took the next
step.

Cavafy invited me down into the lab—it wasn’t the
first time I’d been down there, but seeing then how bare it had become, I
immediately suspected it would be the last. Nothing in it but five barrels,
each with a substrate label.

“This is the final time anyone, me included, will
come down into this room,” he told me.

“Why?” I said.