Flight of the Vajra (88 page)

“It sounds like your memory goes pretty far back,”
I said, “and has a lot of detail.”

“It wasn’t difficult to make it like that. The
hardest part was making sure the syncretized whole was safely hidden from any
eyes except ‘mine’. I should say, even now I’m working on the next version of
how to do that, so if your IPS friends are out there poking around, following
the paths my memory traveled from one repository to another, they’re wasting
their time. It’ll be an educational exercise, but it’s still a waste.”

“How much do you remember about the
Kyritan
?”
My voice caught less than I thought it would.

“Everything. How much do you want to know?”

“Everything,” I repeated, in the same offhand way
he’d said the word.

He sat back a bit on his mattress, his smile
widening with a sigh. A tourist, reminiscing about one of his little sojourns;
pity about all those people. Cioran’s lyrics came back to mind:
just a
traveler, with everywhere left to go
.

I gave the
Vajra
as much of my attention I
could spare, realizing offhandedly how much of my original design for the
Vajra
could be used as a centerpiece and a motif for the new design. I let the two
designs merge, allowed the algorithms to figure out how the different shapes
could blend.

“I’d always made a point of entertaining different
ways to propagate myself,” Aram said as I tinkered. “Choosing places of unrest
and violence as soil in which to come to fruition—that was actually not
something I came up with at first. The original iterations I made and sowed
were fairly random, by design. Various instances of me were deposited in
out-of-the-way places and came to fruition after months or even years of being
left alone.”

The outer and inner clocks, I thought. The outer
clock had been there to gauge how long a given seed instance of him had been
left relatively undisturbed. If someone bothered it, the outer clock would
reset and the seed wouldn’t germinate. That way only seeds with some degree of
isolation came to flower. Of course, if you knew how to activate the seed in
the first place, as Marius had figured out, it didn’t matter.

“I wanted to see what environments I might
propagate best in,” Aram went on, “
whether undisturbed and remote, or public and teeming with activity. A city
here, a forest there . . . and, eventually, an ocean as well. An
ocean being traversed by a ship of what I later found out had been a highly
creative design. Creative enough that it had the sorts of irregularities I
could thrive in, as it turned out. I was able to exploit those irregularities
when the ship shifted modes and became spaceborne, and I soon found myself
easily avoiding detection. I would have continued to do so . . . but
I suspect my fakery was slightly less than perfect. I was soon stumbled upon by
someone who saw me with their own eyes, and not the eyes of an easily-lied-to
sensory surface.”

Cavafy, I thought.

“I think we were both as surprised as the other,
although he was at a disadvantage. I was quite heavily armed, and he wasn’t;
after all, he was just here on a cruise. My passive CL jamming made sure that
he didn’t scream for help, and he agreed to be fitted with a CL proxy before
his time off the grid turned into something suspicious. I admit, I had never
used CL-proxy torture before, in part because I was dubious about how effective
it was. Maybe I had been uneasy about the idea that people could fold so
quickly when confronted with pain. But it was very effective here, far more so
than I had been willing to give it credit before. It’s not pain in the present
moment that people fear; it’s the promise of
future
pain, the certainty
that your future will never be free of pain, physical or mental, or that the
pain you face in the future will be far worse than the present pain.

“I was even luckier than I had realized. Not only
did this man have the needed system keys, but he surrendered them with barely a
blink. They seemed to work; the control surfaces they exposed provided me with
the correct degree of feedback. He tried to be clever, though; he set up a
delayed emergency trigger that would engage the lifeboat protocols and allow
the occupants to escape. But he forgot something—or, rather, I discovered
something that he might not have counted on being exploited. When an emergency
trigger is activated on board most ships—”

“—the emergency access keys also go into effect.”
No way I couldn’t see this coming, I thought; we had to put that stuff in.
Regulations. “For rescue and guided landings and . . . drive control.”

“And he had surrendered access to those as well.
One of the disadvantages of carrying too many keys around with you at once
. . . well, in his purview, not ‘too many’. He was just being a
little too prepared for his own good.”

No, I thought, that was
me
being too
prepared. I’d been the one who had let him take them so I could spend an
evening thinking about anything but that.

“So you destroyed the whole ship, why exactly?” I
said.

“No one reason. Aborting the experiment, for one. Propagating
myself in that particular way was clearly more hassle than it was worth, so I
had to cross that off my list. Also, covering my tracks, as well. I made sure
the only traces that were left behind were those that wouldn’t be casually
deciphered—but I have to say, your friends in the IPS caught onto that faster
than I anticipated.”

“You could have made a real-life career out of a
discovery like that,” I said.

“I know. But why? Why, when I’d hatched out a
. . . far more substantive way to be immortal than just through my
work? Well, through my work, certainly, but not in such a limited way.”

“How do you like it so far?” Enid said. Her voice
was oddly calm. Behind her the last section of the new
Vajra
coiled into
place—a rope of large beads wrapped around a core that resembled the expanded
version of the original ship.

That’s right, I thought; she can’t speak to him
directly. She had just realized that herself after saying those words, but I
did her the favor of repeating them back to Aram. I wanted to know myself.

“How do you like it so far?” I said. “Immortality,
that is.”

“Well.” He sat up as far as the bed would let him,
which wasn’t very, and the bag that contained his guts crinkled and folded
under him. “It
was
fun. For a while, anyway. But it’s become very
. . . disappointing, I guess you could say, to find yourself time and
again in the company of nothing but thugs. Or hotheads like Marius Astatke, who
think they’re far smarter than they really are, and who turn out to only be
interested in you for what services you can provide, which mostly consist of
tricking other people and then beating them up. But I suppose that’s my
fault—after all, that’s how I presented myself to them, and that’s how they
accepted me. And it’s not like at this stage I could just saunter out into the
void and start over again. Too many eyes on me, too much history.”

That’s probably as close to an atonement as we’re
ever going to get from the likes of you, I thought. Just as well, really. If
you’d had the nerve to say
I’m sorry,
I’d probably puke in your half-reconstituted
lap.

Next to Enid, I saw Angharad step in from nowhere.
Enid had probably added her to her own connection, which was fine by me. I had
the feeling the conversation was headed in that direction anyway.

“So it’s about the
company
,” I said,
letting sarcasm drip freely from that word.

“Sure,” Aram said. “Isn’t all life about the
company we keep? You can tell yourself all you like that you’re alone, that
you’re one of a kind, but . . . surprise, surprise, the universe
proves you wrong. Two of my nodes met each other once, you know. Actually, more
than once; many times. You know what happens when they do that?” He reached
down with one hand and smoothed out his guts-bag. “Not a thing. They recognize
each other, they perform some telemetry, and then they go away. They’re not
supposed to clump up, after all. Wherever there are resources for more than one
instance, they’re supposed to spread out and diversify. They go to great
lengths to obscure their presence, so that those who encounter them believe
there is only the one in front of them and no other. The only exception to this
is if someone instantiates a whole slew of me at once—and the one time that
happened, it was a travesty that didn’t last very long. I have never, not once,
ended up in the hands of someone who had the faintest idea of what to
really
do with me. And now that I have . . . I’ve come far enough to
understand what a hopeless ass he is.”

“I’ve been called worse,” I said.

“Not
you
. Marius. There’s a rule at work
here, I think: the bigger the dreams, the smaller the man.”

“And the smaller the man, the smaller the dreams.
And—” I was following that thread despite myself. “—by that token, then the
really big dreams don’t start off big, or from big people.”

“I thought something similar, actually.”

What a shame it is, I thought, that it’s you and I
talking about something like that instead of, say, Angharad and I. I wrenched
myself back on topic.

“So what kind of dreams?” I said. “In Marius’s
case, that is.”

“Oh, the usual garbage that clutters the minds of
people who see the universe as a prison. Thoughts of escape. A jailbreak, if
you want to call it that. He found some new toys—some very attractive new toys,
actually—and decided right away the first thing to do with them was run off
somewhere with them and play in private. That’s what he’s done, hasn’t he? The fact
that he’s not the one talking to me, and that you’ve got me bottled up
somewhere, pumping me for answers, tells me a great deal.”

“So why are you telling
me
all this?”

“Why? Because you asked,” he said, “and because,
the more I think about it, the more I realize you’re the only person who would
ever actually
care
about any of it. At least, in a way that was about
more than someone just doing their job.”

“No,” I said. “Not the only person.”

“Hello, Aram,” Angharad said, as I patched her in.

“Hello, again, Kathaya,” Aram said around his own laughter.
“Oh, so many familiar faces.”

I let Angharad talk
while I turned all
my attention back to the
Vajra
. The automatic build processes were all
finished, and the first round of test-suite simulations were under way—all
stuff I’d normally let run by itself and come back to over coffee, but I now
had the sims in step-by-step mode and was reading every line of the result log,
even just the warning-level entries. I couldn’t bring myself to disconnect
completely from the conversation, but the only other things likely to come out
of my mouth just then would have been nothing but seething obscenities.

“You seem surprised,” Angharad said to Aram, “that
I am deigning to speak to you at all.”

“If anyone would ‘deign’ to speak to me,” Aram
said, “I imagined it might be you. You didn’t say no to that girl Enid, so I
imagined I had at least half a chance.”

On hearing that, I patched Enid in all the way as
well. At this stage, I thought, she wasn’t likely to do anything stupid with
the two of us grownups in the room.

“You said something before that intrigued me,”
Angharad said. “The bigger the dreams, the smaller the man.”

“Oh, I can’t take full credit for that one,” Aram
said. “It’s been floating around for some time now, I think. But seeing Marius
made it clear. He wants to do all these things—to ruin the infrastructure of a
whole planet, to steal the identity and privileges of his own mother—all these
huge, logistically difficult things . . . and all for the most
trivial reasons, the most pathetic ends. All because he wanted more than what
was given him. He wouldn’t shut up about it, you know. From the way he talked,
the whole reason other people existed was to get in his way.”

“Me included, I guess?” Enid said.

Aram looked at her. “Either in his way, or put in
his way to be used if they weren’t smart enough.”

“All of which,” Angharad said, “you recognized as
being very familiar.”

“It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it.” Aram
grabbed the bars on the sides of the bed and lifted himself up off the mattress
with a grunt, the better to let the tangle of tubes under him untangle
slightly. He put one hand under himself and gave his guts a gentle tug. “It
was, however, the first time I’d seen it that up close and for that long.
One-on-one, as it were. Marius instanced me about four or five months before
usurping his mother’s position—”
Usurping
, what a sanitized little word,
I thought. “—and kept me in either the pool or his wing of the house during
that time. It wasn’t until he had replaced her with himself that I thought,
It’s
always going to come down to dealing with people like this, isn’t it?
That
I had picked a way to propagate myself which was . . . so
. . . ”

“
Boring
,” Enid and Angharad and I all said
at the same time, all with slightly different inflections. Enid, disgust;
Angharad, sad sympathy; me, sarcasm.

“That’s the problem with getting rid of death,
isn’t it?” I said. My attention was still on the
Vajra
simulation suite
results, but I felt just enough nerve to speak again. “It turns out to be
nothing more than a tradeoff.”

“So the choice is to be between oblivion or
boredom, then?” Aram said. “That explains a great deal of the stupidity I see.”

“The choice has never been between oblivion or
boredom,” Angharad said. “It is between an existence with meaning and an
existence without one. Any existence can be imbued with meaning, no matter how
limited. But the meaning has to be chosen freely. It cannot be given to you,
just-so. People come to me because they believe I have the power to do this for
them, but I never have. I never will. I can only point the ways.”