Flight of the Vajra (83 page)

Every time I think she’s grown up a bit, I
thought, she goes and does something like this. But not in a way that
disappoints me.

Before long, we were all jogging, then running
after the three of them. Angharad wasn’t the fastest runner—that privilege went
to Ioné, closely followed by Kallhander, Cioran, and then myself—but the
cheered look on Angharad’s face was heartening. It lasted right up until the
girls rounded a corner, we rounded it right after them, and we all found
ourselves in a room that was too spacious, too airy, too brightly lit, and too
lavish to be anything but a throne room.

The throne at the far end of the room, bathed in
light streaming from windows above and to the sides, was more of a chaise
longue in its design than it was an actual throne, but the plushness of the
cushions, the earthy grain of the wood, the extravagant weave of the fabric—the
only person who deserved to park his body on such a thing had to be some kind
of king.

He didn’t look like a king, though; he was a
prince, head to toe. From his tousled page-boy haircut to his buckled shoes, he
looked like a boy of about ten who had just staged an escape from whatever finishing
school he’d been packed off to. With one foot up on the armrest next to him and
one arm dangling over the side, he also looked like he’d grown freshly bored of
having staged just such an escape, and was now looking to us to entertain him
anew.

“Linny, Lycie,” he called out to the girls, who
were now weaving about in circles directly in front of him. “Sit. That’s
enough.”

The girls pouted and threw themselves onto
matching cloth-covered three-legged stools that sat on either side of the
throne. Enid found herself standing unaccompanied in the middle of the space
where they’d just been cavorting; she wiped back her hair from her face and
blew out big breaths.

Of course, I thought. The girls were
real—household staff hired from the populace of the city outside. They’d most
likely been sitting in a vestibule somewhere, projecting themselves through the
house for both the Prince’s own amusement and theirs, and he’d in turn been
savoring their antics through a shared CL link. Now they were here in the
flesh.

Prince Nancelares swung his feet around and
planted them on the floor—the couch was low enough to allow this—and chinned
himself on his fists, with his elbows against the tops of his knees. He had the
same bored smile and half-lidded eyes that he’d been wearing since Enid and the
other girls had come tearing into the room.

 “Ulli,” he said at last, “a pleasure, as always.
And your guests seem like a sprightly bunch so far.”

 “I’m pleased they intrigue you,” Ulli said, “and
I’ve explained to them the real nature of our visit here—”

“Oh, of course,
that
. That can come in due
time. I’m in no giant hurry. Girls, set the table for our guests; they’re
probably famished after all that walking.”

“It’s already set,” said Linny (the slightly
taller one).

“It’s just in the other room,” said Lycie (the shorter
one with the slightly chubbier face).

“Then bring the table in
here
, you silly
geese!” The Prince slapped his hands against his thighs. “Haven’t we all done
enough walking for one day? Good cosm’s grief.”

Chin in hand, he went on hectoring the girls as
they brought in the table, wheeled in the massive cart laden with food, and
ferried in chairs for each of us. It’s all a charade, I thought; whenever he
stamps his feet and shouts “Not there, you idiot!”, it’s all part of the game
being played for our benefit, the better to remind us he’s in charge. I’d seen
it before in any number of households, Highend or not, where the masters of the
house had money enough to throw at a staff who had, among the other duties
expressly spelled out in their contract, being the subject of any amount of
verbal abuse.

—
Last year,
Ulli CLed me,
his household
theme was The Old Lord of the Manor. This time around it’s The Young Master. He
switches off every so often, and rotates in the staff as needed for it.

—
So what does the Old Lord involve? Having
those two help him walk around, lower him into the bath, that kind of thing?

—Why, yes, actually. Plus a number of other
charades which I won’t mention before we eat.

And why shouldn’t he act out those things? I
thought. When you’ve got no particular obligation to
be
anyone or
anything, even being consistently able-bodied must come as a bore after a
while. All the more reason to make a game out of things.

Which meant if one of us didn’t set this
get-together on track, we might end up being playtime hostages for the rest of
the day. So far Angharad hadn’t said anything; she’d been simply drinking it
all in, maybe looking for an opportunity to pipe up but not finding one. She
was, mercifully, offered just such a chance when the dishes were placed in
front of us, as the lid on hers was lifted to reveal a bean curd salad.

“It is a common misconception that the Kathaya is
entirely forbidden from eating all meat,” she said, “but I do prefer something
of this nature whenever possible, so I thank you.”

“You’re only too welcome, Your Grace.”

What a shock, I thought: he was now two for two,
getting both her dietary preferences
and
her title correct—especially
when everything he’d done before hinted that he wouldn’t have cared about
either. He was, however, still lounging back on his couch and being hand-fed by
one of his girls.

“I’ve never met a Kathaya before,” he went on. “I’d
extended invitations to the previous two—three? yes, three—the previous three,
but they had never taken me up on them. I felt rather . . . faithless,
for lack of a better word, about the whole situation.” (Pun intended? I
wondered.) “So when you had your ascendancy, I admit I thought, ‘Let’s save
ourselves the trouble. She has her worlds and I have mine. Why bother?’ But
you’ve done a lot to call attention to yourself. And I’m willing to bet you
haven’t even gotten started, either! There’s much more in store for all of us,
isn’t there?”

“Yes, there is.”

“I gathered as much! But I hate guessing games. See,
now that the summit has been formally cancelled, I thought we might have some
talks of our own. I was hoping now that you don’t have quite as many
. . . distractions, you could enlighten me as to what the next steps
are. I’m not just curious for my own sake, you see. I ask for the sake of
everyone else in the pyramid of people who exist below me.” He didn’t say
and
serve me
, but he also didn’t have to. “It was circulated widely that you
were going to come out in favor of allowing emigration to Bridgehead to
continue, yes?”

“I would continue to allow it, yes, but not in the
sense that I sanctioned it.”

“Explain that to me, would you?” He craned his
neck slightly to make up the distance between his mouth and the end of the fork
held by Linny. I was amazed how so far none of us—especially me—had smashed down
our napkins and walked off in disgust. If all this really is just some kind of
social endurance test, I thought, then so far Angharad is in the top one
percentile of passing grades.

“I made my stance clear before, to Ulli and
others, both in and out of session,” Angharad said, “The option to emigrate to
Bridgehead should remain open to all of the Old Way, if only so that they may
see for themselves what it is.”

“So what
is
it, exactly, then? A ‘spiritual
dead end’? Weren’t those the words you yourself used to describe it the first
time the issue was raised all those years ago?” He pushed the girls away from
him and swung his feet over the side of the couch once more. “I’m sure you still
believe that. If anything, you believe it all the more strongly now. That all
Bridgehead has to offer anyone is stagnation at best and corruption at worst.
Isn’t that right? You specifically, and vociferously I might add, made that
very point many times during your career. I’m far from deaf to such statements,
you know. And I won’t lie: they hurt. They make it sound as if I have nothing
at all to offer these people.”

“In your words, then,” Angharad said, “what is it
you offer them?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He shoved himself off the
couch and crossed over to where Angharad sat. “I offer them the opportunity to
climb a whole new kind of ladder, one that simply doesn’t exist on the vast
majority of their worlds. Once upon a time, the idea that any off-worlder could
become part of the higher social nexus on Bridgehead was unthinkable. Now those
opportunities exist. They could very well decamp and being anew somewhere else
on their own terms, start their own society along Highend lines—why not? It’s
been done many times before; it’s how Bridgehead itself started! But again,
that was all back in the days when there wasn’t a century-long waiting list for
freshly terraformed worlds, or when an orbital colony wasn’t seen as a virtual
death sentence. And no other Highend society even
dreams
of allowing
off-worlders, let alone ex-Old Way immigrants, a chance to scale their
respective ladders. Until something major changes—like, oh, say, a shattering
breakthrough in EE propulsion—” His gaze was right on Ulli as he said that.
“—we represent their biggest and best chance for them at a truly better life. Not
just this one world, but all the other societies that look to us for an
example. And your attitude about it—”

“I have commanded no one to leave or stay away,”
Angharad said.

“It doesn’t matter! They know full well you resent
the loss of your flock to a palpably better life. And I resent the way you use
that to poison what few people you still exert that kind of power over. You
tell them life extension beyond a certain point isn’t worth it, and they
believe you; you tell them human archival replication only makes the reality of
death all the more appalling when it finally does happen, and they believe you;
you tell them a whole farrago of things that were arguably not true before and
increasingly no longer true now! And you do it in the name of—what, exactly? So
that people aren’t tempted to come here and do their best and, suffering death,
thrive
in a way that they could never thrive on a hundred-odd other
worlds? What is it?”

How long has he been saving
this
one up? I
thought. Was that the whole point of this visit? To belittle Angharad and put
her in her place? Why do that, when he knows it’s not going to end in anything
other than a formal apology, even for him?

Enid looked like she had swallowed her fork. Ulli
and Cioran were, for the first time I could ever remember, sweating; she had
her hand on her forehead, as if trying to keep what was inside from leaking out.
Kallhander and Ioné simply sat there, something I imagined was only possible
courtesy of IPS training.

I stood up to break the stalemate. “I think we’ve
heard enough.”

“Let me ask,” Angharad said, far more quietly than
seemed human, “a hypothetical question.”

“As long as it’s a way station towards an answer
to
my
question, by all means.” The Prince leaned against the table on
one elbow.

“From everything you have said,” she went on, “it
is not simply the substance of my words that has disturbed you. They form the
majority of it, certainly, but the true base of your dismay is elsewhere. It is
in fact that I say these things as the Kathaya.”

“How else are you going to say them? It’s an
inevitability. Anything that comes from you, even ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’, is a
Kathaya’s ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’. You don’t think there’s anything problematic
in that?”

“What if I were no longer the Kathaya?”

I stood there with my hands still pressed against
the table on either side of my plate. My arms were shaking. It took me until
the Prince spoke again—what felt like minutes on end—before I sat back down.

“Meaning—what exactly?” the Prince said.

“Meaning exactly what I said,” Angharad said.
“What if I were no longer the Kathaya? What if I chose to leave my position and
cultivate another spiritual path of my own choosing?”

The Prince covered his mouth and shook in place as
if he were collapsing bit by bit from the inside. It was clear to me long
before he took his hand off his mouth that he was laughing hysterically. “I’d
love to see you try,” he managed to say, the words coming out like hiccups. “I
really would. Because then maybe you’d have some taste of what it’s like to be
undermined. What it’s like to have more and more of the very people you welcome
to your world, welcome into your life, make part of the fabric of your existence,
have more and more of them with each passing year add to the muttering that
goes on all the time when your back is turned.
It’s all just exploitation,
the Kathaya said so.
Or,
It’s all just a dead end, the Kathaya says so.
”

“Nancelares—what in cosm above?” Ulli had managed
to make her voice work. “You invite us here, and then you insult—”

“
Insult
?” His voice was piping enough, but
with that word it somehow managed to find yet another octave to go up into. “You
don’t find it insulting that the world you yourself represent is being painted
in such a hopeless light? And by someone you’ve apparently decided to call a
friend, no less? You’ve been polite to her about it, haven’t you? Diplomatic
and easy-going; accommodating and respectful. Well, I say enough with respect.
Respect is wasted on those who only exist to live as the manifestation of the
resentment of everything you are. I insulted the Kathaya?
It’s high time
someone did!
Why you—all of you—continue to give her a pass for doing such
snide things with a smile, I can’t understand. An insult? A
corrective
,
let’s call it; an adjustment of attitude long overdue. That old bitch, the Old
Way, can suffer a few stung cheeks and hurt feelings. I’ve sat around with my
hand over my mouth for
decades
while she’s made us Bridgeheaders all
look like bloodsuckers. See those girls there?” He pointed at Linny and Lycie,
who stood at the sideboard and looked far too cheerful for the scene unfolding
around them. “They were two of
six thousand
applicants for this position.
Six thousand, from planetside alone! You can use all the spiritual rhetoric you
like, but you can’t deny that
people want this.
They want to come here;
they want to work; they want to climb the ladder that leads into this palace!
Who are you to tell them they cannot want any such thing? That wanting
something like that only makes them invalids? What gives you the right? The
aura of sanctity cloaking your ever-declining cause? The venerability of your
moldering institution, which becomes more irrelevant and, yes,
dangerous
with each passing day? And here I’ve been sitting, decades on end, waiting for
someone to throw down that gauntlet in a real way. Waiting and waiting, and then
realizing: no one will do it. Everyone still believes in the mirage of the Old
Way’s power. Everyone! Even those who don’t believe in it
per se
,
believe in its power! The declining numbers are just a hiccup. They all still
believe in it. Well, except for me, and who knows how many others. So perhaps it
falls to me to go to her, face to face, and say what no one else will say. Especially
not you, Ulli. When will you realize, dear Kathaya, when will you acknowledge,
that everything you are has long outlived its usefulness? I wait, and another
broadcast arrives, another encyclical is released . . . and I shake
my head, for that was not the day for such a realization. But today
. . . here, now . . . today
is
different, isn’t it?
Today is definitely not the same. Today, painful truth. Today, a burned bridge
or three. A diplomatic incident, maybe?
I’m counting on it
. The worlds
of the Highend have wasted enough time pretending we can coexist. They’ve all
just been waiting for someone else to say it first.”