Flight of the Vajra (97 page)

“When they’ve uncrated all of us,” I said, “what
say we sit down in person and knock a few glasses together?”

“Now
that’s
a plan I can get behind.”

He gave me another shoulder-crusher of a hug—I was
now primed for what he’d do to me in person—and disconnected.

“I spoke with him before,” Angharad said as she
returned to full view. “He was one of the first people I encountered after we
were all admitted to the Prince’s property.”

“And he sounds like someone worth having in your company.
You’re not peeved he hasn’t decided to join up?”

“I cannot make anyone do this, Henré.”

“No. But you could offer more of the kinds of
incentives that would turn their heads. So far, you seem to think just being part
of this project is incentive enough by itself.”

“Should it not be so?”

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t. And maybe you think,
‘If I need to give them more incentive to join up, they aren’t the kind of
person I want along’. Was there some of that at play here?”

It took her a moment to nod, and only a very small
one at that.

“Give them more,” I went on. “Even if it isn’t
something
you
think would be an incentive. You need people like
that—people who are
not
like you, who need those kinds of motives. Do
you think
I’m
an idealist?”

“Yes,” she said, with no sign she was being
flip—not that she ever had. “You want what is best, what is highest and most
good, even when you know full well it is unattainable as you imagine it. There
are many kinds of people I need with me—in that respect I agree completely with
you—but I sense those with that spirit will be the ones I need most, and who
will in turn need me the most. That said,” she went on, “shall I leave it to
you to devise incentives you feel will be appropriate? You seem to have an idea
of what is needed.”

“I’ll come up with something,” I said, and then
thought: A suitable epitaph.

They called it Aulum Park
—a flat
stretch of protomically-sculpted grassland several kilometers on a side,
bordered by gently rising hills to the north. Tilt your head back only
slightly, and there was nothing to be seen but sky—the kind of place I could
lose myself in for a week or so after all this delicious madness had ended.

This was where the module train for the
Vajra
III
was parked, in one long boustrophedonic snake that filled the whole of
the field. Each strophe of the snake was interleaved with relief vehicles from
the planet’s IPS office. Not one civilian vehicle, I thought; not that I
expected to see any yet in the first place. Every rescue module had been popped
open, and tens of thousands of people were milling about on the grass,
embracing, talking, setting up fold-out tables to eat something that wasn’t paste
in a bag or a bar in a wrapper.

I let myself roam between the alleys of pods—no
particular mission in mind, just to put that much more of a face, my real face,
to the whole project. Did they need anything? I asked. Was anyone hurt? Have
you been able to get on the grid and send word to anyone else that might be
waiting? Here and there, a problem: a clogged reclaimer, a faulty gyro, but on
the whole all I saw and heard and experienced were smiles and thanks and shakes
of the hand. And stories, so many stories poured out at my feet despite the
exhaustion and the weak voices:

My name is Yun Siamao. On Bridgehead I was a fab
oversight officer. My partner was kidnapped during the uprising and broke his
foot. The fix-up injection was still setting when we got word about the nova.
He and I are both here now because of you.

My name is Alsa Kluss Kest and I used to be a ward
supervisor. My house was destroyed when Marius tried to take over; the IPS dug
me out of the wreckage. I was in a temporary apartment nearby when my friend
passed me news about something being wrong with the sun. I couldn’t afford passage
off-world the conventional ways, so I half a mind to stand on my roof and just
watch it happen. But . . .

My name is Bisshé Subiramdal and I’m a ground
telemetry and traffic analyst. I was working when the news came, and
. . . please don’t tell anyone this . . . (You have my
word, I said.) . . . I thought about using the op-codes I know I have
access to so I could hijack something. I’m glad I didn’t have to do that. (Not
that it would have worked anyway, I said.)

My name is Malek Pirinçim and—

“Hello, again,” I said, blinking. “I’m sorry you
weren’t able to take much of anything with you.”

“It’s quite all right, Mr. Sim.” Malek was seated
with his legs up on an extendable table, an instant meal box open in his lap, a
splash of sun on his face. “After all, I took the most important part of my
trade with me.” He tapped his temple with the handle of his spoon. “There’s
demand out there for services like mine. Maybe not here, I’m still looking into
that. I understand Omn Leva doesn’t have much in the way of bespoke services. Nor
much of a need. They’re very ‘focused’.” He gestured around with his other
hand. “It’s strange how calm I am, and how everyone else is, too. I suppose
that’s a sign of a job well done on your part?”

I wanted to say it was more numbness than calm,
something that he either simply didn’t understand or was choosing to ignore, and
that it had almost nothing to do with me
per se
, but instead I shook my
head. “The job isn’t nearly done yet,” I said. “It’ll be a little easier from
here on out, especially since many people are electing to go elsewhere.”

“Yes. I have to say, the more I have seen of the
Kathaya, the more she seems to be all good intentions and not much else.” He
spoke again before I could. “Listen. I have a life to live and a trade to put
to use. I’m not interested in subsuming that to a social experiment. I am not
that bold. It’s all well and good to say ‘What’s life without adventure?’, but
the actual adventure, from what I have seen, is rather dismal stuff. And so my
trust, as I see it, is best invested in things that already
exist
.”

He put down the spoon and extended his hand. “But
all the same, I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done.”

“Living well is the best thank you.”

I shook his hand. Even for someone like him, I
thought, I’ve still done the right thing.

I went barely ten paces before I saw something
sleek and black stalking between pods. It stopped and blinked its gemlike
little yellow eyes at me.

“Diamond?” I called out, disbelieving, but when he
padded towards me and out into the open, I had to believe. Even the way he
nuzzled at my leg didn’t make me feel any less foolish for having forgotten
about him in the chaos after Mylène’s unmasking. I checked for a CL ident but
it had been wiped.

“Oh, cosm, is she yours?”

I looked up and saw a woman—heavy-grade Protex work
coveralls from the neck down, a giant mane of ropes of hair banded loosely
back, big enthusiastic eyes—stepping out from the pod in front of me.
Ousmadi
Ogosibaya,
read her CL tag.

“I found her poking around near the house where I
work,” she went on, “right as everything was going to slag. She had no CL tag,
nothing else on her, so when the call went out for refugees I stuck her into my
car and registered a slot for her.”

One of the thousand or so overage slots I’d
instantiated just in case, I thought.

She was just then twigging to who
I
really
was by the time I opened my mouth. “The person she belonged to back
planetside,” I said, “has been dead for a while now. You might have to talk to
the IPS about your experience, but I think they’ll agree with me that she’s in
good hands.”

Her smile broadened in relief and she knelt down
to give Diamond a sidelong hug. “Did she have a name? I was going to call her
Mabichi.”

“Diamond,” I said. “Well—Diamond the Third, they
told me.”

“Diamond III it is, then! And I imagine you’re
tired of hearing this, Mister Sim, but—thank you.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing it,”
I smiled at Ousmadi.

I turned away from her to talk to the folks in the
next pod, but the exhaustion that had been building inside of me had been
cresting ever since Malek’s words about adventure being dismal stuff. I’d been
awake for at least two solar days straight; it felt like it had been a month.
Pepping myself up with drugs or CL stimulation seemed an even worse idea than
usual, given that I had an indeterminately-timed invitation to join Angharad
whenever she had her sit-down with the Omn Leva administration.

I sealed myself back into my couch in the
Vajra
III
’s command module—as long as everyone else was roughing it, so would
I—and asked Enid to wake me when we had a time to meet nailed down.

The dream I slid into, more or less immediately, was
everything from the past two or three days rolled into a seething ball. As I
ran between the rows of rescue pods stretching out across Aulum Park, they
became the squirmer-battered building and streets of Bridgehead. People pointed
up at the sun as it ballooned to fill half the sky, but I reached up and with
two fingers gently pushed the sun back together into a benign little
wine-colored spot on the horizon.
See?
I said to everyone around me.
It’s
not that difficult, as long as you don’t mind getting your fingers burnt.
I
looked down at my hand and saw a rustlike stain on my fingers—not a burn, but
more like dried blood, which I started to wipe away.
Here, let me help you
with that
, someone said, and wrapped my hand in a kerchief as if they were
shaking hands with me through it. A slender and soft hand; Biann’s. She gave my
hand an exaggerated shake, her head turned sweetly to one side. Like kids
playacting at grown-up things, I thought. When I let her hand go and turned to
let the next person thank me, she drew herself up a little taller and gathered
Yezmé close, urging her too to straighten up.
That’s not just anyone there,
you hear? That’s your father.
And when I turned away from them at last to
shake the next set of hands, I could feel them still watching me, still proud.
And shedding no tears, since I wasn’t shedding any either.

“Boss?” Enid said,
cutting through what
was left of my dream. “Meeting with Dean Toro-Amano and President Wahir in three
hours. You and Ulli and Angharad. No CL, either. Personal presence. There’s a walk-in
wash-up on campus; I booked you all a stall there.”

“Beautiful. Give yourself a five percent raise,” I
said, and started clawing sleep out of my eyes with my thumbs. She was turning
into one
efficient
little scamp.

One local hour. I’d been asleep for barely four, so
I resorted to some CL-stim to jolt me the rest of the way out of my fog. My
guess was our illustrious president and distinguished dean had finally found
time in their busy, busy schedules to squeeze us in. The poor man’s way to
assert authority: look preoccupied, no matter what. Such mean-spirited thoughts
were the residue that rose within me courtesy of their earlier talk of our
presence being “problematic”. But I choked down my annoyance, ordered a car for
the three of us, winced at the delay they quoted us (thanks to many people in
the camp slowly getting their temporary visas approved and now also hailing
transport), and rode in silence with the others to the dead center of Omn
Leva’s main campus.

You can drive for hours and not realize you’re
even
on
the campus. Ninety percent of it is bucolic sloping hills,
little lazy arcs of buildings spread here and there between valleys. The
remaining ten percent, the actual administrative offices and audience halls, is
a twenty-kilometer-on-a-side island of silver-and-onyx spires, sporting wildly
varying knobbly-glass geometries, separated here and there by little ponds of
water (and trees and grass). The tens of millions who came here to enjoy the
luxury of personal study with the tens of thousands who taught here could
either live in the urb or the suburb; their choice. Most stuck with the latter
and CLed to class from the comforts of country-view dorms, but the few who
savored the experience of the former often ended up as professors
themselves—something about Omn Leva’s faculty being self-selecting for those
who preferred the shoulder-rubbing gregariousness of city life.

All this space, I thought, and they can’t wait to
pack us up and hustle us off. Not that we’d get treated any differently most
anywhere else, either.

The office they met us in was in easily the
tallest building of the whole urban campus, at the extreme south end of its
geography. One glance out the windows told us why it was there and not in the
dead center: a person could take in the whole of the campus in one view this
way. Ulli spent a bit longer admiring the view than I did; Angharad seated
herself and remained undistracted by what was outside.

If Pinoa of Escape Maneuvers had been Nishi’s
older brother, Dean Lalla Toro-Amano could have been Nishi’s more serene older
sister. Her turban of elegantly-wrapped cornrows made my dreads feel loose and
sloppy, even if I’d spent that much more time in the wash-up stall making sure
I looked less like a refugee and more like a compatriot of the Kathaya. President
Salain Wahir, the actual head of state on the planet, was barely taller than
Angharad. His lean, tight-angled face looked perilously close to splitting when
he smiled, but his stout-fingered hand gripped mine well. Now I saw why this
was a physical visit: they made a far better initial impression in person than
their tersely-worded statements had, and they wanted no curtain of CL to
prevent us from feeling that. If only to shut us up all the more completely.

“You’ll have to forgive us for being always a step
behind the facts,” the Dean said, “but based on what the Kathaya has just
submitted to us, a good percentage of the refugee population is already in the
process of preparing their own passage off-world.”

“They were offered the opportunity to continue on with
us,” Angharad said, “but many declined.”

“That’s the other thing that we heard about,” the
President said, “your plans to—Well, to be honest, we heard a number of
different and conflicting stories and we weren’t sure which one of them had any
truth at all.” He talked fast enough to make one breath do the work of five.

“We’re in the process of brokering a settlement on
another world,” I said. That was our official line until we actually
had
a plan. “This is all still very tentative, so we’d appreciate this not being
shared with anyone else—” (The President shook his head vigorously.) “—but
that’s the plan as it stands.”

The Dean’s curiosity seemed a lot more tempered
than the President’s. “Can you provide me with an estimate on how much longer Aulum
Park and IPS relief resources will be needed? Although, it sounds as if things
are already under way for an exit.”

The President interrupted with a laugh, and
another flurry of words, before any of us could answer. “I imagine to your ears
Lalla here must sound a little impatient, which is something the two of us were
talking about earlier before you showed up. It’s a difficult situation not
least of all because Omn Leva is technically running a population surplus.
IPS-sig rules about such things have exceptions for worlds with high transient
populations such as educational institutions, but even with that factored in we’re
still running at one hundred twenty-seven percent overage. It’s costing us—”

It was the Dean’s turn to butt back in. “It’s
costing us quite a bit, yes. Also, when all is said and done, this
is
an
educational institution. We are happy to have helped, but we have to be honest:
even the short-term consequences of such a thing can be problematic.”

“What sorts of consequences?” Angharad said.

“Those normally associated with displaced
populations.”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that,” Ulli
said. “You see, Bridgehead was my home.
I
count as a ‘displaced person’.
I’d be very interested in knowing what sorts of ‘consequences’ I would be
responsible for engendering by my mere presence here. Or is this an observation
you wished to make only about those of us not in the room?”

The President put his hand on the Dean’s shoulder,
which was rising slowly as she drew in a breath that looked deep enough to blow
us all over backwards.

“You must try and see the situation from our
side,” the President said. “The arrival of any displaced population inevitably
produces a variety of sentiments. There’s the resentment felt by those who are
already present—even those who understand full well how the displaced have
little control over their fates. There’s the burden on the government receiving
the displaced; once, that meant material resources, but now it means
expectations—for if you receive one refugee, why not receive all of them,
everywhere?”

I suddenly wanted to go to the other side of the
room so as not to be so close to those two, but I doubted the stink of
sanctimonious nonsense would be any less strong over there.

The bridge of Ulli’s nose was beginning to wrinkle
up; I guess she smelled it too. “IPS signatory worlds are obliged to provide
support for displaced populations—”

“It’s
IPS
that’s obliged to provide such
support,” the Dean said, “and the language of the treaty is clear: ‘—obliged to
provide such support as can be provided without constituting a burden on the
local government, and without violating any existing local agreements’.”

“Which you and I both know,” Ulli said, “means the
local government can define ‘burden’ any way it pleases, especially if it’s an ‘educational
institution’.”

“Meaning, from what I see,” I said, “you don’t
feel obliged to do anything more than throw us a packet of peanuts and call
that a ‘relief effort’.”

“We’ve fulfilled all our obligations,” the Dean
said.

“We just wanted to make our position as clear as
possible,” the President threw in.

“And since you already have plans to leave,” the
Dean went on, doing an impressive job of not using all the air she’d drawn in
to shout, “I’m at a loss as to what else to discuss.”

Angharad was on her feet before the Dean finished
speaking the last words. She bowed, said “Thank you for your time,” and led us
back out. I heard the President start to speak something, but even he wasn’t
fast enough to beat the doors closing behind us.

“The galaxy is screwed,” I said.

We were in another transport, this one airbound,
headed back to Aulum Park. Ever since we’d taken off, Angharad had been
studying the backs of her hands like they were prayerbooks. Ulli had removed a
folding fan from one of her elegantly-disguised upper sleeve pockets and was
vigorously waving air down her neckline—not so much because of the temperature
(even a cheap suit of clothes would take care of that) but because it gave her
something halfway decorous to do with her angry energy.

“I don’t know about you,” I went on, “but I’m
positive Bridgehead is going to only be the first nova of its kind. Which even
if it
doesn’t
mean massive death and suffering, means more displaced
populations. And when you combine that with the kind of political intransigence
we saw back in there—”

“Oh, I
know
,” Ulli sighed.

“And this is one of the
more
progressive,
permissive, forgiving, whatever you want to call it—this world’s at the
top
of that heap. Everyone else is a good deal worse. If
they
aren’t
prepared to handle what comes next, then
no one
is.”

Only by the end of my sentence did I see how every
time I raised my voice Angharad shrank back away from me in her seat a little
more. I took hold of myself.

“Well. At least they let us stop off long enough
to take a leak,” I said.

“And then confiscated the very pots we pissed in!”
Ulli ran her hands along her throat, as if massaging the air into it. “But it
does prove something, doesn’t it? They care nothing about provenance or
intentions. They care only about what you are right here and now. Worldless,
meaning
rootless
—if you’ve got no home, then you
must
be
trouble!” Her fanning slowed, and I realized she was blinking back tears. “Well,
I’m not some bit of debris washed ashore. None of us are. I
have
a
home.” She finally flinched and wiped at her face—spastically, as if trying to
rip the tears off and throw them out the window.

It was sunset by the time we returned to the
Vajra
III
. Just outside the perimeter set up by the IPS was another little sneak
of vehicles; their CL idents told me they were part of the student relief
effort. They’d finally been allowed to deliver their share of supplies and
helping hands—too late, it seemed. Because apart from the snake of the
Vajra
III
itself, layed out on the ground in so many pieces, there was another
newly-formed snake made up of those leaving the field.

That line of ground cars wound its way out across
the hills, over a newly-instantiated strip of road that led to the same highway
we’d taken through campus. A few were headed to the urban campus as part of the
attempt to obtain local residency visas. Most of them were headed for an elevator
to the north, where they’d gamble on seeing if there were Old Way worlds with
residency slots open—or, failing that, tourist visas they could use to sneak
off somewhere and establish a squat for however long that would last. More than
a few would probably try to bribe themselves a squat-spot on a world with a
porous border. Maybe a very few would reach a world with open slots where the
Old Way was a choice and not a mandate . . . or they’d find a way to
make that happen right where they were and save themselves a step.

And then there remained the rest of us—the 36% or
so Angharad had mentioned, only slightly over one out of every three from the
original rescue. If nothing else it meant more room in each pod and a more
comfortable ride, and so I quietly pushed out a patch to revamp the pod’s
internal construction during the pre-flight reassembly phase. It gave me
something to think about other than all the different ways everything was
threatening to go wrong.

We can all run, I thought, but where in this cosm are
we going to run to? Other worlds just as vulnerable as Bridgehead, if not more
so? Free-floating colonies that nobody would live in unless they got paid well
for it, or unless they were (un)lucky enough to be born there?

“So, how fared the, er, diplomatics?” Cioran
called out to us as we stepped back into the
Vajra III
’s core module. He
was physically in the upper level of the module, but his shared-out CL space
was teeming with an audience from the encampment; he’d been keeping them all
entertained, quite successfully it seemed. On seeing us and our hung heads, he pushed
his smile a few more notches to make up for it. When even Cioran’s sunshine seemed
like nothing but a veneer, you knew there was a problem.

His veneer cracked all the more when he saw Ulli’s
face up close. Back in his CL space he gave his audience a thank-you and an
apology—
I’ve got some official business now that will eat into the whole of
my attention span, but a return engagement within the day is all but
guaranteed!
—then sat with us in the main module and allowed the dank mood
there to round down his shoulders a bit more. Enid climbed down from above to
join us as well, hesitating when she saw our gloom.

“Enid, any news for us?” I said.

Enid went through the list in the same tone of
voice as someone describing the symptoms of a fatal disease. “IPS investigation
about the nova ‘ongoing’; not like we didn’t already know that. Most of the Bridgehead
Highend population’s being reconstituted at Lux Ava, where it looks like
they’re going to be encamped for a while. Lucky them. —Okay, not
lucky
;
it’s because they can
afford
it.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re paying
for the population overage fee themselves, and apparently at some insane
markup. Who knows how long they’re going to be able to manage that.”