Flight of the Vajra (99 page)

I opened up a link to the refugees’ CL subnet and
sent out a call:
Have we any architects in the house?

That we did: Caleba Carrinn. Wiry-limbed,
knob-jointed and frizzy-haired, Caleba had been one of the urban planners who’d
overseen the maintenance and reconstruction of many of the newly-installed
emigrant quarters on Bridgehead. She was as tired as any of the rest of us, and
she joked with me about how I might be better suited to the job, not because of
remaining stamina or skillset, but reputation: “Look at it this way: how many
people would rather live in a Sim house than a Carrinn house?” But the mere
offer of the work, and its significance for everyone involved, wiped away more
of her exhaustion than she’d been prepared to believe.

“Let’s call this our ‘starter homes’,” she said,
“since we just moved here and I’m working entirely from memory with a plan that
wasn’t designed to be fancy. It’ll look very canned now, but we can let everyone
tweak it later on their own. —I feel almost ashamed for saying that, you know!”

“Why is that?” Eotvo said.

“First time in my life, I’ve been offered an
absolutely
unlimited protomic budget—and I can’t think of a thing to do with it. All I can
think right now is, ‘I can’t wait to get a roof over my head and a pillow under
it.’
 
”

The bottom layer of the “homestead”, as Eotvo had
called it, was dead flat. Caleba started by tricking that up a bit—a hill here,
a valley there. On discovering that our environmental budget included liquid
water, she carved a meandering scratch through the middle of the homestead
floor, flooded it, then flung a few bridges across it. A dimple in the ground
in one corner of the whole plot became a lake. Each house that sprung up or mushroomed
out (depending on its floor plan) automatically published its statistics to the
refugee subnet: rooms and sizes thereof; how far it was from the edge; degrees
of incline for the street; distance from bodies of water . . . all
for the taking as they appeared.

There was a biological budget as well courtesy of
an adjoining arboretum—that explained the fresh-air smell; it had to have been
coming from
somewhere
—and from there we imported strips of turf, chunks
of sod, trees large and small. Overhead, the “ceiling” of the homestead space
began to come alight. Not artificial lighting, either: the entire roof of the
giant room had translucified and to let in what was now late afternoon sun. All
around the outside edges of the homestead plain, the thousands who had
disembarked crowded close to the railing and watched as far below the walls
pushed upwards and folded into roofs, the paving oozed into position, and the boxes
of grass dragged themselves in to carpet one surface after another. It took
hours for everything to take shape, and at a slag cost that would have made it
impractical anywhere else, but people crowded into the city as its surfaces and
edges filled out, sitting wherever a seat presented itself.

An unlimited protomic budget, I said to myself. Only
unlimited in the sense of
no practical limit
, at least not for a group
of this size. But I was naïve to think all this—our very being here, our making
a life in what amounted to the backyard of our hosts—wouldn’t come at some cost.
Because nothing’s ever
free
. You just find more clever ways to shift its
burden.

So what happens, I thought, when we find out what all
this does really cost?

The thousands all around me were filling the distant
air of the homestead with applause and cheering, both real and virtual. I felt
Enid’s hand on my elbow, and with a cheery cock of her head she led me onto the
extruded lip of the platform that would lower us into the new city below.

The building
Caleba had instantiated
for the “core group” was patterned vaguely after the Bridgehead villa: a
central atrium-cum-common room with a removable ceiling, with individual
apartments off a corridor that ringed the center. “It wasn’t my design,” she
said, “but a colleague’s—he told me I could use it if I wanted. He’s on Rigia
now, designing a submarine casino there. I said, ‘I didn’t know you liked to
gamble!’ He said, ‘Neither did I, and then I tried it. It’s a good thing I
actually
live
there or I’d end up washing dishes.’
 
” Flashes of his
adventures—lifting up the corners of cards and biting his lip; expanding a
sheet of Type C into an underwater tunnel only to see deep cracks slit its
length—popped out at me from her CL feed as she went on with that story. It was
fun to let her ramble, but I kept thinking:
Mouth or mind, pick a medium and
stick with it
.

Each of the apartments was its own convenience
room, also with an unmetered protomic budget. I didn’t like the word
“unlimited”, and neither did Eotvo, as it proffered all the wrong connotations,
so “unmetered” was the official term. There were practical limits to protomics
of all kinds, but on top of that our hosts had made a polite but firm note that
any consumption outside the 99th percentile had to be cleared beforehand
through someone we’d designated as a community head. Unpacking Continuum’s
expectations had proved to be its own challenge: that statement was the first
time we’d heard anything about “community heads”. Angharad noted she had been
just on the verge of setting something like that up anyway, so the timing had
been conveniently coincidental, but . . .

“Perhaps you should provide us now with all of the
expectations you have for our behavior,” she told Eotvo.

“It’s better than us demand-paging it out of you,
isn’t it?” I added.

“Oh, of course, of course.” Eotvo nodded firmly,
as if
we
had been agreeing with
her
and not the other way around.
“You must understand, this is literally the first time we have welcomed a group
this large for anything other than a provisional meeting. Hundreds, but not
tens of thousands, and never an autonomous group. So, some assumptions were
made about your leadership and internal organization.”

“All questions that require authority on our part
will be answered by the two of us jointly,” Angharad said.
The two of us
meaning
me and her, I thought. “And as for the appointing of community heads, that will
be done shortly.”

“Although,” I said, “don’t expect anything for at
least half a day, because most of us with Old Way blood are dead on our feet. I
know
I
am.”

“There’s no immediate pressure at all. Take your
time.”

Actually, from where I stood—eyeing the back of Eotvo’s
head as she left—there was plenty of immediate pressure. If the cost of not
giving them what they asked for in a timely way was going to be one capricious
“misinterpretation” after another like this . . .

“Growing pains, I guess,” I said out loud to
Angharad after the door closed.

“Birth pains,” she corrected. “And yes, let us
both rest. No more than six or seven hours, though.”

“Take eight. You could use it. You’ve been up as
long as I have, and I’ve been jolting myself non-stop ever since we landed.
It’s a miracle my face hasn’t melted off. I don’t even
want
to know what
it’s like for you.” I stepped in and saw her eyes were terribly bloodshot,
heavy underneath with dark bloating. “Let someone else do a little work for a
change?”

She was about to contradict me; I could tell from
the way she raised one hand. It only went up a little bit, then sagged as she
nodded in my direction. Then she reached up again with the same hand, but this
time it was so that she could coax me into leaning down a bit, the better to
kiss me on the cheek and lean her own against the inside of my neck.

“When someone says ‘I love you’,” she said, “do
they mean anything more by it than ‘You are not alone’? Is that not enough by
itself?”

“If there’s any more, it’s all footnotes,” I said.

I barely noticed the glitter and sheen of the city
outside through the window as we walked past it. Some of that glittering was
the ongoing reshaping of buildings. The part of my brain that still dared to
think despite its exhaustion wondered if tomorrow we’d see the first arguments
about someone blocking someone else’s view. Now I saw why Eotvo had wanted us
to establish a chain of accountability within ourselves as quickly as possible:
for our own good as much as theirs.

Tomorrow, I told myself.

Behind another open door, visible as we passed,
Enid and Cioran were rebuilding the walls to create a shared exercise space.

I was barely even aware I’d followed Angharad back
into her room, the window of which presented us with the same glorious view. I
dimmed the window as she undid her wimple and stretched out on the bed, and
after a moment I slid out of my jacket and shoes and draped myself on the
mattress next to her. I put one arm around her stomach—the way I had so many
nights in a row with Biann, waiting to feel Yezmé stirring there for the first
time—and fell asleep with my cheek pressed against the bare nape of her neck.

Eight hours of sleep
wasn’t enough. I
knew that the second I opened my eyes and polled my CL for the time, and
realized I still felt the exertion and stress of the last couple of days
weighing me down. One good night’s sleep, nothing; I needed a month of them.

The spot in the bed next to me was empty, and not
all that warm, either. Angharad had already been up for some time, and
according to our local CL network she was taking questions in anticipation of a
speech to be given at noon “local” time. I sat up and let the outside light
flood over me—it was real sunlight, channeled not just through the giant roof
over the city but through the walls that enclosed the sides of our homestead’s
space as well. Outside, in the street below that looped around our building, I
saw Enid and Cioran chasing each other around, all to approving looks from at
least one passer-by.

I want so badly to believe this is “home”, I said
to myself. To just put down everything I’ve been carrying and believe in this
place and all it has to offer me . . . But my skepticism and my worry
were stronger than those desires: skepticism about Continuum; worry about
Marius; fear for how there was no home, no safe place to be found in a universe
where people like him were lolloping around in it.

First step: the mundane stuff. Get cleaned up, get
into a fresh change of everything, get caught up. Find out what (if anything)
Enid had unearthed since me passing out; paw through the community-document
material Continuum had laid down for us. Eat something that actually needed to
be
chewed.
That last part gave me enough of a jolt to wake me all the
way up; our hosts not only had a good grasp of what kinds of environmental flora
and fauna to instantiate for us, but they got the comestibles right as well.
Fruit juice that didn’t have a metallic aftertaste, breakfast broth where the
flavor came from the actual beans and vegetables and not just from salt—I was
still eating a second round of all this when Enid and Cioran tumbled back in,
perspiring happily from their run-around.

“News’ll be on your way in a few, boss,” Enid
called out to me en route to the shower. “And yes, I did get
some
sleep.
But let’s face it, this is exciting.”

“I’ll be at the noon forum as well,” Cioran said
over his shoulder as he retreated into his room. “Some of the folks here have
it in their heads that I should be balloted as some kind of Minister of Popular
Culture, or somesuch!”

“You think they’re serious?” I said.

“They? Oh, yes.
Me
?” He sucked in air
between his teeth, declared “Let me wash all this mud off my legs first,” and
shut the door behind him.

Enid instantiated a CL presence for herself in the
seat next to me, and for my eyes and ears only. “You weren’t in your room last
night,” she said, trying to find a steadiness in her voice that wasn’t there.
“Where were you?”

I put my cup down and looked at the faint rainbow
sheen on the surface of the coffee. “Angharad’s room,” I said. “I walked her to
bed and fell asleep in there.”

“As in, you slept with her.”

“In the most literal sense of the term ‘slept
with’, yes.”

“Is that as far as it’s ever going to go?”

I finally looked her way, although I didn’t quite
get to eye contact. She looked like she was trying to choose between one of five
different things to spit out, all of them painful.

“In theory,” she said at last, “no one, including
me, should care about that stuff. But remember the whole thing that erupted
when we landed at Bridgehead? There’s even more eyes than ever on us now,
Henré. How do you think it’s going to look for her if the word is the reason
you’re here at all, that this whole thing is just an excuse to shack up?” Her
face drooped with the weight of shame. “You know all this already, I bet. I’m
sorry I said anything. This isn’t my business anyway.”

“Hey, no, no, no.” I reached out and put a hand on
her head, then let go in favor of just taking her hand. “It is your business.
You want to make sure everything the bunch of us is working for isn’t pissed
away over something stupid. Someone has to look out for those things, right?”

“Do you love her?” she said.

Even a CL connection couldn’t help her make clear
how she was trying to say that. Wistful, despondent, eager—none of that came
through, just the bare question.

“I respect her more than I ever imagined I would,”
I said, knowing full well that wasn’t what she asked. “And she loves me, that
much I know . . . and I’m pretty sure it isn’t the same kind of love
as, how would she put it, ‘benevolence for all that is and becomes’.”

“I think you’re right about that.” And this time,
I heard a specific emotion in her words, one which in the end I couldn’t call
anything but joy. “She loves you to cosm’s end, Henré. All of us, sure; me,
too. But she’s caught up on you most of all, and I don’t think either of you
want to come out and say anything about it.
We
can’t keep acting like
she’s anything but human. I just wish I knew what to
do
about it.”