Flight of the Vajra (113 page)

“From where I sit, it’s plain,” I said. “It’s that
in those couple of weeks, you’ve gotten more back from her than you’ve ever
gotten from the IPS for all the years you gave to them.”

He was silent and still enough to tell me I’d
touched a nerve.

Ioné picked up where he left off. “I plan on
maintaining my own commission if they will allow it,” she said, “if only as a
way to continue the work I started as a Continuum liaison. I may receive a new
template extension as part of it.”

Eotvo nodded. “The last few days have given
Heuristics a great deal to work with. The new assessments that Ioné helped us
build have shown that the risk involved was well worth it.”

“I was wondering about that,” I said. “Whether or
not you’d look at the mess we left behind and say, ‘Sorry, you folks need to
find another place to make camp.’ I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

“Except
you
didn’t leave that ‘mess’. And
the very presence of that ‘mess’—” I loved how she gave the word just the right
bemused stress. “—allowed us to see rewards that were never considered
available, let alone desirable.”

“What kinds of rewards?”

“Access to a broader palette of individual and
collective understandings. Those things can only be added a few at a time, but
the few that have been added now are proving to be indispensable. You are not
merely guests of ours, for as long as you wish it. You are collaborators.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and shook on it.

At the end
of that week, a cleanup team
found enough of Enid’s body to identify her.

Mountains and hillocks of debris had formed at what
had become the bottom of the city during its hijacking. She had fallen onto one
of them, been swept along by the water for several more kilometers, and then been
buried under successive landslides. Her CL still responded to close-range
resonance, a standard way for them to comb the debris for both survivors and
remains. One of the advantages of CL, and of having so many IPS grunts, and
also to living in what amounted to a glorified sandbox: we were able to find
and account for the vast majority of the thousands of dead.

In Enid’s various pockets they found Cioran’s
butterfly pendant, Angharad’s comb, a wadded-up sheet of MemoCel, a single
Cytherian-denomination gold coin, and her half of the p-knife still gripped in
one hand, her fingers wound through the knuckle-guard holes extruded from its
hilt.

Continuum helped us instantiate a place to lay to
rest those who’d died, an annex just off the new city grounds. For a giant
underground room, much like the city itself was, it was flooded with such
fierce blue and yellow light that brought to mind a sunny day on a hillside
somewhere. What could have been a mere storage room for the dead was instead a
slope-ceilinged solarium fifty rows across, four rows deep, and four levels high.
Climbing the transparent stairs to the upper levels felt less like poking
through Arsèni’s warehouse and more like rising into the sky itself.

On the floor at the front, one could see the words
Nature likes those who give into her—
.
The rest was covered up by those standing shoulder-to-shoulder during the
funeral, but no one needed to be told how that sentence ended.

“It should have been a new first generation that
consecrated our home,” Angharad said (among other things), “not the bodies of a
few thousand of our comrades. We lay them to rest not to discharge a duty or a
burden, but so that some remnant of their presence can always be found
somewhere, the better to spark us to rise ever higher . . . ”

In the reverent pause that followed, Angharad
spoke again, this time in a voice quieted by, and thickening with, reminiscence.

“There is one being laid to rest here today, a
young woman who in the short time I knew her became a close friend of mine. It
is difficult to become truly close to anyone; doubly so when so many eyes are
on you for so many reasons. But she made herself close to me, and in a way that
was so brazen and heedless I could not help but be moved by it. She wanted
something that only I could give her, and before I had the chance to fulfill
that, she gave her life so that another friend, no less close to me, might live.
And now I owe them both a debt that will only be paid with and through all the
days of my own life.”

Another silence, inside which I heard a sound no
louder than an insect ticking against a window: her tears, pattering on the
floor between her feet. And yet her voice hadn’t wavered, either in CL or for
real.

“This, then,” she said at last, “is the spark of
which I speak.”

In that room, throughout the rest of the city, and
later on across the galaxy, people bowed their heads.

Later, as the hall emptied out and the pattering
of thousands of feet died off, nine of us—Angharad, Cioran, Ulli, Kallhander,
Ioné, Eotvo, Aram, MacHanichy (to my surprise), and myself—climbed the stairs single-file
to Level 4, Row 11, Block 6 and stood in front of the bier there. Just under
the glassed-steel plaque reading
Enid Sulley
sat
a tray of soft pine; on it sat a balsa-wood lantern and the few things found on
her.

The butterfly pendant, at Angharad’s direction,
went back to Cioran. He held it in his open hands, looking down at it, then
closed his hands around it and straightened his very long back.

The MemoCel, we decided, would need to have its
contents copied to a fresh sheet before it started failing. Both Angharad and I
knew who needed to receive it, and it wasn’t someone who was present. No one
objected to that.

I took my half of the knife out of my pocket and
joined it to Enid’s half. “It’ll take another antiques expert to put these back
together,” I said, but it was clearly mine for the keeping.

The comb, several of its teeth now missing,
Angharad restored to her own forehead.

All that was left was the last of her Cytherian coins,
which inspired a moment of uneasy silence. Aram reached for it—not to take it,
but to simply examine it—then placed it back on the tray and said, “It should
stay with her. Payment for her passage, yes?”

Yes, we said.

The lantern we also left behind us on its tray, its
single candle flickering along with thousands of others in that room until it
was only a cold white puddle, and the insides of its paper panels rusty yellow with
soot.

Over the course
of the next couple of
days, we finished rebuilding. We traded our temporary tents for a fresh
instance of our house, watched as the skyline became knurled once again with
rooftops.

It never stops frightening me, even now, how easy
it is to clean things up and put them away. On the outside, at least. A road
can be repaved, a wall re-instantiated; we have a whole civilization geared
around making such things as easy as breathing. As for anything on the inside
that might be missing or ruined—well, that was your job.

Maybe it was better that way. Harder to sustain,
but better for not being driven by someone else’s idea of what was right. But
knowing that didn’t make it any less painful to actually do it.

A few days after that another, much smaller, IPS
contingent arrived. This one was led by Ralpartha, and they brought with them
no relief supplies (what else was new? I told myself), only four assistants.
From what I’d gleaned, Ralpartha was only being disciplined in the most token
of ways. He’d followed the wording of the Bridgehead planetary charter to the
letter, and now IPS had circled its wagons around him.

Eotvo walked Ralpartha and his four cronies into the
common area of our rebuilt house, where Angharad and I both immediately
recognized one of the four as not being IPS at all. It was Third Prelate Xavier
Jainio, looking as nervous and uneasy as I’d remembered him. Ralpartha, to my
surprise, stood out of the way and let Angharad speak to her comrade.

“How is the little one?” she said to him, clasping
his hands.

“Still little.” Jainio tried to make both of them
laugh and succeeded. “And doing well, thank you. I . . . ” He looked
back at Ralpartha, who seemed annoyed that he was being eyed for some sort of
cue. “ . . . I came here on behalf of the rest of the Achitraka, and
at least partially on his behalf as well. Came as fast as I could, and managed
to allow myself to arrive in their company. You see . . . there was
talk of IPS Central filing suit against a number of people, including you. The
official charge was—”

“—‘Obstruction of IPS charter’,” Ralpartha said.
“Title 2, chapter 5.”

I gave him my new personal best cosm-take-you stare.
“You have
got
to be kidding,” I said. Then, to Angharad: “That’s what
they charge you with when they can’t really charge you with anything. It’s a—”

“Let him finish,” she said as gently as she could.

“—garbage indictment. All right, go on.”

“There’s a standing courtesy,” Jainio went on, “that
any charges filed against someone in the Achitraka get echoed to us as well.
You can imagine the ruckus this raised, especially after your speech. I
demanded to know the substance of the charges, and they provided a full
dossier. They argued that your schism constituted an attempt to interfere with
the administration of IPS charters between worlds. This also, I am sorry to
say, included charges to be filed against Mr. Sim here, among others, for
conspiracy to commit said obstructions. Well, there was a debate, and I said,
in the interest of ‘ecumenical accord’—which I’m afraid made the others
laugh—that I’d beg on your behalf for those charges to be dropped.”

If all you’d heard was his voice, you’d never have
known the poor man’s sweat was beading between his eyelashes. I reached into my
breast pocket and extruded a kerchief for him.

“Thank you.” He mopped his eyes and went on.
“Again, I . . . the Achitraka were not particularly sympathetic to my
position at first. But I managed to make it clearer. ‘Attack her,’ I said, ‘and
they will only see that many more reasons for leaving
us
.’ They agreed,
although they still reserved the right to file civil charges against her later.
I understand they are considering a breach-of-contract suit. —So, I caught up
with the commissioner here, and asked him to reconsider. Especially after all
you’ve been through.” Out came the rest of his breath in one fast pant, as if
he’d been running the whole time.

“We’re still moving forward with the other
prosecutions we have on our docket,” Ralpartha said. “Prince Nancelares,
mainly. Marius Astatke himself—well, we
were
going to charge him, but
you provided us with the forwarding key for his backups, and there was enough
evidence to show he’s dead a dozen times over. Arsèni Dragoji, too, since the
evidence collected by our team here in what was left of Marius’s ship showed
there’s no case he’s extant either.”

I knew what he was talking about. One of the
grimmer finds from the ship Marius had been assembling were two occupied Dezaki
biers. One contained Marius’s body, which he’d torched after having instantiated
the various copies of himself, including the one he’d immersed into the
substrate ocean.

The other bier contained Arsèni. A dump of its CL
program showed Marius had plugged him into it and run a barn-burner program on
him. Total sensory isolation, plus a feedback loop constraint: for every moment
that he wasn’t thinking about how to build the ship Marius needed, he’d have
his fear centers flooded. It was a tossup as to whether he’d done his work and
then been put out of his misery, or only given Marius just enough to satisfy
him before Arsèni figured out how to bypass the neural blockade and suffocate
himself.

Ralpartha looked back at Angharad. “And that
brings me to the main reason I’m here. We’ve come to demand the surrender of
any and all surviving instances of Aram Dezaki, but . . . I think I
know what you’re going to say.”

“The being in question,” Angharad said, “is a
political refugee under our protection. I cannot turn you over to him.”

“Your Grace—” Even he still can’t help but call
her that, I thought. “
—t
here
isn’t a single Highend
or
Old Way world that doesn’t have strained
tensions over all this right now. And if the dossier that was forwarded to us
from here about Marius’s nova weapon is accurate, things stand more chances
then ever of turning into an actual shooting war. There’s good reason to
suggest embryonic Dezaki nodes are on
every single inhabited planet
in
IPS protectorate worlds.”

“You do have all the information needed to locate
those instances, yes?”

“We have his encrypted replay repository key, yes.
Now that we know what to look for, it’s not hard to single it out. We’re having
all his repositories rooted out as we speak.”

I want to learn how to die properly
, he’d
said. Well, I thought, now he really didn’t have a choice.

“But you still want this one remaining instance of
him for yourself?” Angharad asked.

Ralpartha shook his head. “No. Not for ourselves.
For the sake of every world under us that demands justice. The only reason they
are signatory to our charter is because they rely on us to provide that
justice. What are we if we don’t do this for them? You can understand that,
can’t you?”

“I sure can,” I said, and stood up.

It’s always like this, isn’t it? I thought. All
our lives, we’re looking outside ourselves for some place to either lay the
blame or receive the blessings. And even when we do find it, it’s never enough.
You could help one man understand that, but how were you going to help a whole
society understand? I had one answer, but it wasn’t one I liked.

“Here’s my offer,” I went on. “See what you think.
We keep Dezaki and the rest of his kind here for the rest of their natural existences,
and you hand down a suspended sentence or find him guilty
in absentia
or
whatever you want to do on your own. Because from everything I’ve seen—” I
looked to Angharad. “—they’re going to be putting their time here to good use.
Under her.”