Flight of the Vajra (103 page)

The Prince was flanked and followed by a cadre of
some six attendants. Entertainer types, I thought, stamped from the same mold
that Cioran had contrived for himself: open shirts revealing bare chests, billowing
pantaloons, footwear that exposed more than it protected—all of it a stark
contrast to the Prince’s sober and formal tails and ruffles.

“Well,” he said, surveying the glass sun-lens far
overhead, with the eye of someone looking for dirt, “I suppose I shouldn’t
bother trying to find my house in this place?”

A decade of growth for his body hadn’t been
accompanied by any other discernible maturity, I thought.

“It’s wonderful to see you, too,” Cioran said,
every bit as tartly. “I’d congratulate you for making it out alive, but I
suppose that would be like congratulating someone for correctly metabolizing
oxygen. Besides, it wasn’t
you
that made it out alive anyway, just your
backup.”

“A difference that no one thinks of as a
difference
is
no difference.” The Prince stepped past him towards the
rest of our group. “Well, let’s get one bit of business out of the way. I’m
going to assume, Cioran, that you didn’t in fact follow the very specific terms
of our contract. Lying to a delirious and dying man—that’s rather low, even for
you, wouldn’t you say? Or would you excuse that as ‘expedient means’? Just
doing what had to be done to save many lives at the expense of a little lousy
property and the relatively minor disgrace of breaking your word? And given
that it’s Cioran we’re dealing with here, a word that was hardly worth much to
begin with?”

“It doesn’t matter what it was worth to
you
,”
Cioran said. I started to get the feeling I was about to see him in a way I
hadn’t before: angry. “You left your own people to die. You spit in the face of
friends and colleagues. You don’t have the slightest standing to be lecturing
me about ripping you off, not when word of what you’ve done is already halfway
across the cosmos.”

“
My
people?” The Prince pressed splayed-out
fingers across his throat. “Now where did you ever get the idea they were
my
people? I don’t
own
them. I just happened to be custodian of the land
they agreed to live on. Go paw through the citizenship statutes for yourself.
Nowhere does it say I am
commanded
to take responsibility for their
lives. All it says is that there exist
incentives
for me to do so,
incentives I found less than worthwhile to pursue. They chose to come and live
on my land, at my invitation, and I let them.

“They could have set up their own rescue fund, you
know—entirely separate of the one I paid into on my own, one which only assumed
responsibility for myself and the property I declared, just as with all the
other Highend-only territories on Bridgehead. But ‘my people’ chose not to.
They assumed that if anything ever did happen, IPS would come along and bail
them out, or that
I
would come along and bail them out, because I’d been
so generous to them for all these generations. They forgot that IPS only exists
for those who participate willingly in its maintenance. It’s not a charity. No,
not even if people get it into their heads that it ought to be one; that
doesn’t make it one. ‘My people’ banked on public opinion being strong enough
to overcome such a thing, when such a thing only existed in their minds. A
hundred thousand people . . . in a universe of trillions, that many
die every solar
minute
!

“So they chose to assume protections they never
really had, to just live off what I chose to give them. They never said no to any
of it. They have no right to get indignant about the letter versus the spirit
of the law, when
they themselves benefited from just such obscurantism.
Tell
me something,” and with this he turned on Ulli and Angharad, “during that
summit meeting you were having, was there so much as
one
conference,
one
breakout session,
one
paper,
one
talk, one
anything
that
revolved around the local populace becoming its own independent IPS signatory?
—Nothing? See? The opportunity was there all along, and
you never took it.
Not that you ever took it before, either. There have been—six? seven?—different
referenda that were proposed during my time along those lines. And
every
single time
it was brought to the table, there were always so many
perfectly good reasons not to do it—not least of all because the last thing the
majority of the people wanted was to lose the one thing that stood between them
and the indifference of the rest of the universe: me. I should know. After all,
I’ve known them for
how
long now? So when it came time for IPS to do
something, they elected to save the part of the planet that actually bothered
to maintain a presence with them. A good deal less taxing on their resources,
too.

“So now you know some of the long-term cost of
living on someone else’s generosity. And when word of what happened gets out,
what will amount to? The rest of the cosmos shaking its head and saying, ‘
Caveat
emptor
, you stupid apathetic slags.’
 
”
He looked up again at the sun-lens. “And from what I see here, I’d say history
has a nice way of repeating itself.”

Angharad stepped forward, her tiny footfalls
sounding very loud in that space now that there wasn’t another sound to be
heard apart from it. Even with her standing close enough to chuck him under the
chin, the Prince didn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated. Everything I’d seen
told me he wasn’t one to find himself bending at the knee with even the Kathaya
that close.

“Why have you come here?” she said.

“I came here to use my compensation from the
disaster fund. I’m willing to drop my pending breach-of-contract suit against
Cioran in exchange for territory equivalent to what I lost on Bridgehead.
Technically, I’m a refugee too. My other neighbors are demanding their own
pieces of the pie elsewhere, but unlike me they haven’t yet overcome their
fundamental distaste for living on a world that’s not really
theirs.
”

Eotvo stepped in to stand next to Angharad. “Any
negotiations involving territory would need to be conducted through me. But the
territory we provided to Angharad and the other refugees in her care wasn’t a
sale.”

“It wasn’t? Well, what
was
it, then? A
charity raffle?” He turned to his cadre behind him and flashed them a
can-you-believe-that? expression; laughter rose from them as he turned back.
“Are you telling me that you’re willing to
give
these people a piece of
your property—property which I’m sure is going to be thought of as being all
the more in demand very soon—but you’re not willing to
sell
even one
square centimeter of it? Tell me, what does someone need to do to receive a
gift like this? If it’s a matter of being a refugee, what makes me not eligible
for such a thing? Go on, I’m curious.”

“In what way are you being denied buying property
elsewhere?” Angharad said.

“By the sheer fact that there’s almost nothing to
buy! Nothing I
want,
anyway—”

“Well, boo
hoo
,” Enid said.

“—and nothing
anyone
wants, really. The
Highend worlds are all crammed to the gills; nobody who has a piece of such
territory wants to part with it at any price. And you
know
how
possessive we are about such things. It’s not the resale value of any of it;
it’s the
fact
of having it.”

“My heart just bleeds, sir,” I said.

“And bleeding little hearts like yours are slowly
going extinct, in case you didn’t notice. The Old Way worlds have plenty of
land, but refuse to sell it except to those who follow the Old Way
. . . at least, for now. A few generations from now, who knows?
Personally, I don’t think they can afford to hold out that long. If their
governments don’t see the wisdom in giving up on being obstinate, it’s only a
matter of time before their own populaces do.

“And while you
could
live in space, who
wants to? Don’t you think there’s a reason people have to be paid exorbitant
amount of money to work, let alone live, in those environments? And why would
they settle for a cheap imitation of sovereignty when they could have the real
thing? A actual world, not just an arbitrary point in space? Not when it takes
on the average a hundred solar years to terraform an existing world, and many
times longer to create one, and at what cost? My other displaced colleagues
have even been considering settling for a colony somewhere, but we’ll see how
long
that
last. As for me, I’m not taking up such a plan. I’m here to
make an offer. I’m sure even Continuum can think of some use to make of my
money.”

Eotvo stood a little straighter and said,
“Properties on Continuum are not at this time being offered for sale to any
party.”

I waited for the Prince’s sick little smile to
fade, but it didn’t. If anything, it just broadened into an even wider and
sicker one. “You know,” he said, “that makes me right about two things. One was
Cioran being a welcher. The other . . . well, I’ll just let my friend
here speak for himself.”

He gestured to the doorway to the access tube. Out
stepped Marius Astatke, as dapper as the Prince himself, who didn’t so much as
flinch when a dozen IPS ran into the antechamber behind us and focused sights
on him and shouted commands at him he clearly had no intention of obeying.

“Do you really think,” Marius said, “there’s only
just this one of me?”

“Tell the officers
to stand down,” Eotvo
said to Kallhander. Evidently her word still carried some currency, because a
moment later the targeting dots switched off.

“Enid!”

That was Ioné shouting, and in the second before
the echoes from the shout had died off, just about everyone in that space had
turned to see her closing her left hand around Enid’s right. Enid had shifted
the p-knife into pistol mode and had been preparing to raise it.

“Enid,” Ioné went on, in a much lower but somehow
far fiercer voice, “let go or I will break this wrist.”

Enid let go. Ioné took the p-knife, muzzle first,
emptied the semiliquid contents of the firing chamber into a pocket on her
right sleeve, and dropped the disarmed p-knife into Enid’s hand.

I put my arm on Enid’s shoulder, but she shrugged
away from me and put Angharad between the two of us. If there was anyone else
here who knew firsthand about unsatisfying revenge, it was me, but I could
always lecture her some other time.

For what must have been an entire minute on end, all
Marius did was walk up the middle of the room, looking out at the sight of the
homestead through the window that ran along one wall. If this is about to play
out the way I think it will, I thought, he’s going to either proxy everyone’s
CL so we can’t say a word to each other without it going through him, or he’ll
just shut down the whole grid out of spite. And after the last time he did
that, he’s probably made sure he’s nowhere nearly as vulnerable to the kind of
attack I pulled before. Attacking him head-on is out of the question. It’ll
have to be some kind of pre-emptive end run we can use around any censorship
he’d impose.

“It’s a shame,” Marius finally said out loud,
still facing the window.

“What is?” Angharad said. If anyone had the nerve
to talk, I thought, it was always her.

“You came all this way,” Marius went on, “only to
pick up right where you left off.”

Nobody replied. I’m not sure anyone even understood.

Marius turned and leaned against the window. “Who
here knows about the invention of the laser?”

No answer.

He went on: “Did you know that when the laser was
first invented, they calibrated them in ‘blades’? As in, razor blades. A laser
that could burn through a single razor in one second was a ‘one-blade’ beam. If
it could burn through two in one second, it was a ‘two-blade’ beam. And so on.”

I’d heard this story before myself. How it
connected to what he was talking about, I couldn’t say. I ignored him and tried
instead to remember something I’d heard once about maverick applications for side-band
signaling.

 “What struck me most about that story when I
heard it the first time,” Marius continued, “was something that hadn’t even
occurred to the person telling it to me. The last went on to become as much a
part of the lives of its inventors as protomics have become a part of ours. But
at the time, they couldn’t think of anything to do with it, except
. . .
blow holes in razor blades
. Doesn’t that strike you as
being a massive, massive poverty of imagination?”

He wasn’t kidding when he hinted at there being
more than one of him, I thought. He means it literally now, but it’s
metaphorical, too. There’s the Marius who grinned and chatted about his thesis
and leaped up into a tree with Enid, and then there’s the Marius who latched a
CL tag into Angharad’s cerebral cortex and impersonated his mother for months
on end. And I wasn’t even sure which one I was looking at in that moment. He
had all the enthusiasm of the former, and radiated all the repellence of the
latter.

“It’s always easy to say things like that in
retrospect, isn’t it?” I dared to say out loud.

“You’re missing my point.” He slapped the window
with the flat of his hand. “All this—this way of living—you recreated it all out
of habit. You came all this way to create something
new
, didn’t you? You
had the chance to create something completely new, and all you did was pick up
where you left off.”

“What else are human beings supposed to do?”
Angharad said. She sounded ready to scold him, but she never got that far.

“They’re supposed to
innovate
, for one,”
Marius said, “and when they don’t innovate, they stagnate. And sometimes the
only way they innovate is by cutting themselves off from their own centers of
tradition.”