Flight of the Vajra (86 page)

It took less than two years for these little
scraps and tatters to be torn away.

It didn’t even happen all at once, either. Each
piece, each fragment, was pulled loose and allowed to fly away on its own. The
liaison division of the domestic intelligence services, where I worked, did all
the intelligence-sharing with IPS. One year we found our budget had been
halved. The share of our tithe that went to the IPS fund had been increased,
because that money had more “intelligence-purchasing power.”

The next year they decided my division could be
dropped entirely. Don’t worry, they said, the planet and all of your loved ones
are in good hands. You wanted them to be kept safe; this is the best way to do
it. Of course, you won’t have the luxury of actually helping them—at least, not
in this capacity. Go join the private sector, there’s plenty of places to find
work there for a man of your expertise.

Idella was just as blunt:
Either we emigrate or
I’m leaving you. I’m tired of losing out. There are better lives to be lived.
Stop kidding yourself about it, for all our sakes.

A week after that argument, she found out a close
friend of hers had acquired a black-market backup tap for the new child that
was on the way. It sparked another, even more vicious argument.

So tell me what’s so wrong with it
, she
shouted at me.
Tell me what’s so wrong with knowing he doesn’t have to just
disappear if something stupid happens to him.

I know all the right answers now, of course. I
know what I should have said:
The only person who truly fears death, fears
it enough to hide from it, is one who never knows what real living is. Real
living includes real dying.
Not my words, of course; words of a Kathaya
long gone.

But I also know those right answers wouldn’t have
made a difference. She knew them, too. None of them had changed her mind. She
had always wanted those things, for herself and for the boys—and, yes, even for
me—and I’d always been foolish enough to think I could talk her out of them.

I let her take the boys. If they are happier
without me, I thought, let them be happier that way.

I walked around the city I had grown up in and
didn’t recognize a thing about it anymore. The Old Way temple had been
relocated twice, each time to a smaller building. The Lantern Cycle Pavilion
had been dismantled, and in some stroke of great irony, recreated as a CL-space
mirage.

I thought, I don’t belong here anymore. Everything
I was close to, everything I gave myself to, is now gone. I signed my name on a
few contracts and went fourteen hops to the Yellowgarden Colony. Randomly, you
could say. I went there with my generous lifetime pension (well, one hundred
biological years, anyway) because there was some part of me that just wanted to
live in a place where there was still a Lantern Cycle Pavilion.

I knew about Yellowgarden. No, both of us knew:
the I that was still Henré under all of Aram’s memories also know of the place.
A splinter group like the one that had gobbled up Enid’s father; a retreat for
Old Way playacting (my word, not Aram’s) for people who had the money. Your CL
was controlled by a timetable, or shut off completely; your contacts with
off-worlders and visitors deliberately limited; your room was whitewashed adobe
with a hardwood floor, which you painted and paneled yourself as an admittance
project.

I (Aram) had the money to participate, and given
how much I spent on it I had every reason to think of it all as more than just
playacting. I thought of it as a place to isolate myself from a universe that
seemed determined to take everything worthwhile and valuable and smother it.

I spent the first (mandatory minimum) year as
everyone else did there: turning soil, standing in the setting sun, building
lanterns and setting them free on the water. That year was barely half done
before I began to think:
Is this what I came all this way for?

If you surround someone with enough opportunities
to lie to himself, he will do it. He will be only too happy to fill his head
with false pretenses and his mouth with useless words. He will do this because he
knows if he does it just right, no one will ever, ever hold him to any of it.
But if he does all this knowing the lie, knowing full well all he does is
hollow and has no bottom—then no amount of nods or back-pats or
You’re doing
the right thing
will change that. Once the bottom falls out there is no
stitching it back in again, and the whole of creation will drop through if
you’re not careful.

There were other worlds I could go to that would
gladly welcome someone with my pedigree. I found a place where my pension could
be converted to a living fund and a scholarship. Protomics had only been
casually interesting to me before, but the math that underpinned much of their
programming had been of more than casual interest. I’d used the same math in my
work, and now I found it served as a point of entry into an entirely new field.
Protomic applications security—independent consultant and analyst.

The top half of my mind filled up with encryption
and equations, simulations and stack traces. The bottom half—oh, look at
yourself, Henré, you know how it is, too, don’t you? That leaden certainty of knowing
all of these things and putting them to use will still not drain out the
heartache that’s been filling you like pus. And further under that are two
brutal, wholly incompatible understandings: that to live means to die, and thus
to lose everything; and that to die means to make a mockery of all that lives,
including yourself.

It was my (Aram’s) wife, of all people, who told
me that you do away with such things by learning to laugh at them. I laughed at
it all and submitted my graduate thesis, then went to drink with my classmates
and have a CL triathlon.

But what you laugh off in the evening stalks back
into your mind the following day. Sometimes, it even sets up shop overnight.
The dead-end atavism of the Old Way was bad enough, but now I found myself
growing just as tired of the new Highend company I was keeping. The highest of
the Highend were shucking off their bodies and enshrouding themselves in pure
thought and insight . . . and doing nothing with it. Having
some
kind of body made more sense than having no body at all—but the opposite, a
single body cherished for its own sake, was a cul-de-sac as well. And to treat
the body like a mere bowl into which you ladled yourself—or a whole succession
of bowls, replaced as each one tarnished and cracked—it merely repeated the
worst aspects of both.

I won’t ever forget. It was evening, when a cover
of clouds painted over most of the sky except for the horizon, and one great
blade of sunset-colored horizon came crashing across the tops of the trees. I
was standing in a field a half a kilometer or so from the house of a colleague,
and I rounded a hillock to see a half-rotten tree stump in its shadow.
Literally half-rotten: the side facing the sunset had become softened with
decay, while the other half remained somewhat less weathered—still hard enough
to hold a nail. At the very bottom of this little pile of ripened decay was the
mouth of an anthill, on top of which a knot of ants was boiling slowly. The
whole planet was a terraform, with everything transplanted, even the insects,
something I knew had been the subject of many a joke:
If you’re going to
rebuild everything from scratch, why bother keeping the ants, for cosm’s sake?
Or
the cockroaches, or the lice, or the termites, or what have you. You know that
yanking any one of those bricks out of the wall of an ecosystem is a poor idea,
that all the pieces need to be in place for the whole cycle to work well—but
tell that to someone with a tick-bite on their ass.

It’s the insects that are always the butt of that
joke, aren’t they? We know the insects have their place, and we respect it at
arm’s length—but it’s the
idea
of the insects, the mindless swarm that
only knows how to reproduce and specialize and scavenge, that we hate so much.
We hate the insects because we fear becoming like them, and even the most
Highend who are the most insectlike—what accident is it that they call their
congregations “hives” and “colonies”?—even they still wrinkle their nose at
being considered mere bugs.

I squatted down and watched the ants writhing
together, even dipping a finger into them. And there and then, I realized I’d
been wrong, as had everyone else. This was not something to be feared. This was
a path we had simply not chosen to explore, because it was weighed down with
the baggage of our own thinking about it. We had never been able to step
completely away from such prejudices, not even at the highest end. We had
always labored under the delusion that a
more evolved
creature, or
intelligence, is by necessity a
more complex
creature. We did not want
to think about how to direct our evolution towards something
less complex
but
more refined
. We did not want to throw out all that did not need to
truly be there, because we presumed we would be left with—what? Anthills,
termite mounds?

The ants wound their way around my finger and down
into the hollow of my hand.

There have been others who walked a similar path,
haven’t there? The Toyonjo colony; the followers of Iznagian. And, of course,
Continuum. All of them strove to bring together many under the umbrella of one.
They either fell apart completely (Iznagian) or never came properly together in
the first place (Toyonjo) or reached an inertia that is now petering out
(Continuum). I knew all this, so I asked myself: why did they fail? The ants,
somehow, in their wordless way, told me why—more like, reflected back at me the
one right answer out of the many I was entertaining. All of those were an
attempt to make one out of many, to subordinate—either willingly or by
force—multiples into a single design. Where one started with multiples, wherever
you began with diversity, diversity would always find a way to remain. A true
colony had to be started from
one
and made from that into
many
that
inerrantly reflected the one.

I would have to instigate my own singular design,
and then inherit it.

I would have to become my own leader, my own
follower, my own successor.

And I would have to ensure this plan would
continue, uninterrupted, wherever I might manifest.

I will not propagandize for my cause, I told
myself. My very existence is declaration enough of my intent. I need no
“followers”.

It was clear, even without any thought on my part
about the matter, that there would be resistance, enormous resistance from all
sides, to such a plan. But as one of the ants wound around my wrist and started
to lose itself on the inside of my sleeve, I realized how such resistance could
be transformed into a source of boundless energy. It was through
violence
that I would find the best way to propagate
this new self.

This would not be violence I myself instigated,
but existing instances of violence into which I could infuse myself. Upheavals,
revolutions, insurrections—for they all carried with them a quality I knew I
needed in order to survive and propagate:
lawlessness
.

I could not thrive, at least not in my current
state, on a world that had no existing human populace. It would be a waste of
effort. An existing populace and its attendant infrastructures would be the
matrix, the soil, in which I would germinate the first stage of my new life.
That soil would provide me with many kinds of raw material. When it was furrowed
by lawlessness, it meant those raw materials could be accessed all the more
readily, without oversight or interference. And among those raw materials was
human greed
itself.

The best way to prosper amongst humans propagating
violence and lawlessness was to appeal to the greed of those who might use
me—to present this new singular-and-multiple self to them as their greatest
ally. Such men thirst most for allies in violence, and in my new incarnation I
could provide as many of them as they desired, with the only limitations being
practical tones: time, raw materials, the constraints of instantiation. They
would want everything from “technical advisors” to full armies. I would start,
then, by providing my would-be allies with the know-how of a soldier and an
intelligence man, learn as much as I could about what complemented their needs
in that form, and then use that to create the next, far more aggressive
iteration. And so on. And in every case, those who drew on me would never
suspect they were simply contributing to their eventual displacement as a
species. With each stage of my progress there would be as much discarded as
there was added.

Even in this greatly becalmed cosmos, thanks to
the IPS, I knew unrest was gathering itself together. Worlds were growing
scarcer. Each planet’s populace’s jealous protectiveness of its holdings,
whether tangible or not, fattened up like sows with each passing generation.
Where there were any two men, I knew there would be a fissure and discord—no, I
didn’t just know such things; I wished for them, prayed for their continued
existence. Those things were my life now—my meta-life, maybe, the source of my
life-beyond-life.

You’ve seen yourself how each of my instances is
created. There is a germinal mode, the original seed, which over time and with
the proper feedback produces a full instance. (Marius kept me in his pool and
let me reach maturity there.) Once matured, the instance is then front-loaded
with data from a backup store, squirreled away in one of any number of encrypted,
remotely-stored archives. As each instance acquires experience, the essence of
that experience is distilled and echoed back to the archives, which are all in
anonymous repositories around the galaxy that keep each other in sync.