Flight of the Vajra (81 page)

“I’m shutting down this lab and moving it to
another location where it’s not likely to be stumbled across, and one I can
work with remotely. All CL-automated. But I’m leaving you with a parting gift.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of this.”

“It’s not meant to be sinister. I just meant
this’ll be the last time I’m giving away any free samples to friends. From now
on all of that custom-substrate work is going to be done specifically for the
. . . project we talked about. I wanted to keep it all a little
closer to the vest, and I thought I’d inaugurate things by giving you the last ‘public’
batch.”

I was flattered, but I had to ask: “What do you
want me to do with it? It doesn’t sound like you just want me to feed my house
with it or whatnot.”

“Create something.”

“That’s . . . vague.”

“It’s meant to be. I don’t want to tell you what
to do. I just want you to think about everything we talked about, and build
. . . tools. Things you could use to further the agenda we talked
about. Not ends in themselves, but means. Things you couldn’t make with
conventional locked substrate, and things you wouldn’t put into the hands of
the rest of the universe because you wouldn’t want their power diluted. Even if
you and I don’t know what those things are, I have confidence that you’ll find
them in time. You’ll know what they are. One day you’ll wake up and realize
what’s been missing all along—whatever bridge it is that had to be built to get
us all closer. All I ask is that when you build it, you let me know about it
first.”

“You got it. Although . . . it might be
a while before I come with something.”

“I’m patient. —Around
you
, I have to be.”

Eight and a half solar months later, he was dead.

A solar year and a half after that, once no one
was looking too closely, I unlocked the slab vault under his house and took the
substrate back with me.

Four solar months later, the first
Vajra
took flight.

I did as he had asked me: I built a tool. A
vessel, one with which I could search for whatever it was we were supposed to
all be doing next.

I let five years slip past me that way. I let the
quest degenerate into wandering. I stopped looking, because the more I looked
the less I thought I’d found. I saw all the more to convince me that Cavafy had
been wrong, that a yearning in the gut isn’t a real sign of what direction to
move in . . . and that any “answers” I might find about what had
happened to him and Biann and Yezmé were a waste of time. Maybe he really had
been responsible, and that was the end of it, and I should have listened to all
those around telling me the same blasted thing.

It didn’t matter
why
he’d done it. That
time by the lake, and all those other little follow-up conversations we had,
they ought to have been enough to show me his motives were a muddle. Even he
didn’t know what he was doing, and he had owned up to as much. All he had was
pure longing, burning him up. Who knows what kind of fuel he’d thrown into that
fire to keep it going—maybe it even included me and my family and his own life,
and the lives of so many others.

But my own fire had never completely died. I’d had
ashes raked over my beliefs, but they’d just covered them up and had even kept
the embers from dying out. I was still prepared to believe in him—if only a
good reason for that would present itself. Wander around long enough, I’d thought,
and maybe it will.

Well, now I have it. And any port in a storm’s a
good one, right?

[
And as soon as I finished speaking those words,
I thought:
I sure hope I picked the right audience for this confession.]

“Whatever it was
Cavafy wanted to do,”
I went on, “it wasn’t going to be for anything like
this
, I can tell you
that. There was nothing in his work that even came close to something like
this.”

“Or in your work,” Ioné said.

Nice to know they were at least somewhat on my
side, I thought. After all this time they had damn well better be.

“Besides,” I said, “from the way you’d been
talking, it didn’t sound like you particularly cared where I’d gotten all my
goodies from.”

“Not as such, no,” Kallhander said. “But I agree—what
you described does make him seem like a suspect in that light. A man who
engages in one kind of clandestine behavior is that much more likely to engage
in another.”

“Except,” I said, “that a man who distills a
little substrate in his basement so he can sneak some to his friends on the
side as a gift—is that the same kind of man who kills a thousand-some-odd
people with a sidelong warning to his friend beforehand? Or someone who creates
a self-replicating beast like this? He was skilled, but he didn’t have
those
kinds of skills. More like, he didn’t have the inclinations that would lead
him to develop those skills.”

Ioné seemed ready to speak up, then stopped. It
looked like my last sentence had pre-empted the question she’d had in mind.

“Although,” she ventured a moment later, “it’s
common enough to realize in retrospect how your understanding of another person
has been limited or colored by circumstance.” That made her smile. “I imagine
that sounds strange coming from me.”

“Yeah. All the more reason to do away with those
pesky divisions between ‘me’ and ‘someone else’, right? No risk of being
surprised, no nasty discoveries that your friend
is
in fact cooking up
something ghastly in his garage . . . ”

“Is it at all possible,” Kallhander said, “that
there remained areas of Cavafy’s life—including his expertise and his
inclinations—that were outside of your appreciation? By your own admission, he
was already able to keep some fairly large secrets.”

“Only from people who would have made his life uncomfortable.
Employers, law enforcement, that kind of thing. His friends—me included—we all
knew he was doing those things. And we had a good idea what he
wasn’t
doing, too, and what he wasn’t interested in doing, wasn’t capable of.”

“At least consider whether it’s possible,” Ioné
said, “that he pretended ignorance on some subjects, just to throw others off.”

“You know how hard it is for a smart person to
play
really
stupid?” I said.

“Actually, yes. A certain degree of that is
required in this work.”

Well, shame on me for trying to one-up the IPS, I
thought. “Still,” I went on, “a project like this, there would have been a hint
left behind somewhere, right? Nothing like that ever turned up.”

“Perhaps the reason nothing like that ever turned
up,” Ioné said, “is because he went to lengths you never recognized to conceal
it and eventually destroy it.”

Kallhander’s voice stayed as conversational as
ever while he tightened the vise. “You yourself admitted he had been able to
erase any traces of his original laboratory before relocating, by simply
filling it with substrate and turning it into part of the foundation for his
house. That implies the same thing may have been possible elsewhere, under
other circumstances. There may have been other locales, apart from his
secondary laboratory, which you had free access to, where such a thing was
possible.”

I looked at the two of them. What do I call them?
I thought. Allies? Friends? Co-conspirators? I’d hated both of their guts when
they’d been first standing in front of me in the dock access tube on Kathayagara.
I’d learned to hate Kallhander a little more, and then a little less, as he fed
me crumbs from someone else’s table one by one, and then turned his own pockets
inside out as much as he could. I’d let that get under my skin, and while I
couldn’t say I had ever befriended him, I could say I’d learned to take pride
in having him on my side. If that was as good as you could get with some
people, that was still better than you could get with most. And Ioné—I’d
started off dismissive, and then seen bit by bit the real curiosity she had
been tamping down all along, curiosity about questions that only someone like
Angharad could answer. The sight of her standing in front of the Kathaya with
shining eyes had hit me in a place I didn’t realize had no armor around it.
Fight it as I might, I had to admit: there were places in both of them, now well-known
to me, which I felt all the closer to now.

All the same, I thought: are you sure you picked
the right audience for this particular confession?

“I can think of one place,” I said at last.

“Which is?” Ioné said.

“The interstitial compartment on the
Kyritan
,”
I said, “that Cavafy went into right before everything went pear-shaped. A compartment
that doesn’t even exist half the time.”

I’m getting mighty good at making them stare, I
thought.

I started talking, as much to myself as to them.

“One of the first things you learn about a
multi-form-factor protomic construction,” I said, “is that, if you haven’t done
so, you need to go back and take a crash course in topology, just to be safe. A
ship’s subcompartments, when refolded against themselves, will sometimes create
new interstitial spaces between them. It depends on the configuration of the
ship; every ship’s a little different in that regard. Those interstitials, as
we call them, they can do a bunch of different things: they can just be hollow
spaces in the ship’s structure where they serve as impromptu storage, or they
can be filled in. In this case, I’d set them up to be filled in after the ship came
back up off the elevator and refolded. The way that works is, the surfaces in
question are melded together by being filled in from behind, from one end of
the new compartment to the other.” I pressed my hands together, flattening them
against each other from the fingertips on down. “That way if anything is stuck
between those surfaces or in those compartments, they can be pushed out into
space instead of getting trapped there.”

I put my hands down and started to rush all the
more headlong into the fire I’d started.

“Well, I just realized something—something that
didn’t come to me during the entire time I was banging my head against the
plans for
Kyritan
, but also something that apparently didn’t come to
anyone else, either. Two things, actually. First: the way the fill-in
controller works, it doesn’t always report back about which direction the fill
is taking place in. So you could fill the gap from back to front, instead of
front to back, and anything inside would get expelled
within
the ship,
into whatever adjacent compartment was available.” I put my hands back
together—this time, from the wrists on up towards the fingers. “If someone
wanted to introduce something into the ship from the outside, all they’d have
to do is place it on the surface of the ship right as we were coming off the
elevator—or even as we were getting
onto
it—and reverse the order of the
fill. The logs would never show that. They only show whether or not the
compartment’s sealed at both ends. Not from
which direction
.”

I put my hands back down again, if only because I
was starting to make them into fists. It was fun, if only in the most desperate
way, to do this by pretending I was criticizing someone else’s work. And it
didn’t count to say that the person I was all those years ago was someone else.

“Also, second: the
type
of sensory feedback
from inside that compartment. You know that adding sensors to a sensory surface
isn’t difficult. You can populate a protomic surface with all kinds of sensory
systems. But one of the things they pound into you in design school is how the
fewer types of sensors you add to a given surface area, the less data you
inundate yourself with, and the less chance you have of getting false positives
or negatives. And the less maintenance that needs to be performed on keeping
the surface healthy, and so on. So you make your life simpler—and, by
extension, everyone else’s—by only putting the sensor types you need in a place
like that. All I was checking for was whether or not the compartment was
closed, whether or not it was pressurized, and whether or not it was airtight
against the outside world—
not whether or not anything was actually in it.
Someone could have created a compartment by just sealing both ends, but leaving
a space in the middle. That’s why nothing ever showed up in the sensor log. Nothing
outside of gamut, anyway.

“Wait, I just realized.” I was laughing, damn me.
“It wouldn’t even have mattered anyway. If they knew what sensor types were in
the array on the surfaces in question, which is trivially easy—sensory surfaces
are stock configurations—they could easily route a bogus closure signal back
and forth across the surface of their object. The better to trick the system
into thinking the entire space had been filled in.”

The whole idea had been drifting about in my head
in an unformed fashion ever since I’d started working on the new Achitraka
House. What new security measures I might have to take; what considerations I’d
need to bring to mind for a ship that continuously housed someone of that
caliber—and, with them, a slew of little things I’d brought to my own mind when
building the
Kyritan
and all the other ships before it, but which I’d either
steered myself away from or which the design team had decided was overkill:
No,
why would we need to do that?

Kallhander and Ioné continued to look at me. I’d
ended the sentence with just enough of an inflection to hint that there was
more to say. I’d better give it to them, then, I thought. Even when I put my
head down and rubbed the side of my face with my hand, they were still waiting
for the last word.

Whatever, I thought. I might as well give it to
them.

“So,” I said, “it looks like I really fucked that
one up, didn’t I?”