Flight of the Vajra (16 page)

“It worked well enough,” Kallhander said. “They
weren’t expecting resistance from total strangers, but it drew the needed
attention and allowed other operations in the coup to unfold.”

“So what else has been going on since we left?” I was
interested despite myself.

“The situation appears stable. Ships have been
able to come and go and there’s been no disruption of the defense grid. The
main government is issuing communiques to the effect that they are in command
and that nothing has changed. A minority of the planet’s infrastructure or
architecture is protomic, which has made it a little harder for a prospective
insurrectionist to take control. They have to seize it the old-fashioned way,
by shooting the right people.” He allowed himself a smile. Guess he still had a
few of those left after all.

“So if I—we—weren’t even where the real action was
at,” I said, “why do you want to talk to us?”

“For the sake of completeness. You were, after
all, the only direct off-world witnesses or participants in the kidnapping
attempt. It helps to know all the details.”

There is so much about this I’m not buying, I told
myself, that if I tried to buy it I’d go right into hock.

“Suppose we still don’t talk? You gonna scour us?”
Enid said, looking back from the window. “I don’t know much about the police,
but I know for sure you can’t do
that
without a court order.”

Another dead-fish Kallhander smile. “No, we can’t
use a backup-replay scan in a situation like this; you’re completely right
about that. And again, it wouldn’t be all that productive, either, since
neither of you have backups in the first place.”

And in both our cases it was an accident of birth,
I thought. Which is why when you have a couple where one has a backup and the
other doesn’t, the first one usually deletes theirs because the second one
can’t add one. ‘Til death do them part.

I knew all too well about it.

 “All technological advances aside,” Kallhander
went on, “we’ve found in the long run it’s just best to let a witness speak for
himself first.”

“And you are, after all, officially envoys,” Ioné
said. I couldn’t be sure, but under her cheer there was a hint of something
that seemed like jealousy.

For the most part,
Enid kept her gaze
aimed out the window during the ride to Kathayagara City. There hadn’t been
much to see for kilometers at first: the base for the planet’s elevator was a
giant, blank swath of protocrete about twenty kilometers on a side. VIPs had
their ships docked here, underground: when they arrived at the bottom of the elevator’s
sky-tether they were taken below, rotated to face one of six different subterranean
highways, and then guided into a spare bay.

Zoning and safety rules forbade anything other than
official or municipal buildings for several kilometers around the dock, and
only ground traffic vehicles for those coming and going. All you saw for minutes
on end while arriving or departing was long, desolate stretches of automated
roadways, the domes and spires of power-control stations, and the single spiky hemisphere
that was planetside traffic control. It was all about as aesthetically
appealing as a sewer line.

Then the desolation gave way to grass—not just
safe little manicured roadside tufts, but real swaying pampas of the stuff,
glittering blue-green or gold. Then trees—and again, not boring little nursery-planted
products, but everything from wind-knotted oaks to towering plane trees. And
then buildings again, but not like before—buildings that looked like people
actually
lived
there. Some of them were the usual stock protomic designs
you saw on most any civilized world (although most of what had been in, say,
Port Cytheria had been hand-build, Old Way style). But others were that much
more original, since this world was just Old Way enough to honor an individual’s
creation and allow it to be augmented through protomics instead of merely
turned into another die-stamped product. Houses sported glittering roofs and
flared cornices, all iridescent purple from the solar-gathering film they’d
been treated with. An apartment block set far back from the road and surrounded
by trees had the Gothic, heavy-walled look of a university campus I’d once seen
only in pictures. Off the same side as the window Enid peered out of was a
low-topped, sparse little forest of squared-off stone. There were fewer Old Way
worlds than ever that still bothered to keep cemeteries, but when they did,
they still did it the Old Way way: they used only the rock that could be
quarried from your birth world for your tombstone.

Gradually the city itself began to accumulate
around us. Streets twisted between brilliant splashes of light from shopfronts,
all merging into the color of confetti as they receded behind the car. Walls of
windows ten dozen stories up were all mosaicked with light from inside. Streets
passed under the road we were on with the tops of groundcars gleaming back up
at us.

The streets between were studded with people—at
long last, people where for so long all I’d seen was walls and buildings,
dividers and roads. At one point the cab slowed to allow a stretch-car to pass in
front of us, and on the corner of the nearest sidewalk I saw some of those
little dots up close as fully-formed human beings. A cluster of five young men laughed
and chased each other out of the glass doors of M.M. AYARAND, LUXURIST. One of
the boys (strange to use a word for someone at least as tall as me, somehow)
held a cigar, unlit, clamped tightly in his teeth; he almost lost it when his
friend ducked away from him, laughing. Even in this day and age of perpetual
fake youth, the raw, brash real thing always advertised itself plainly.

The cigar-wielder almost augured into a woman
wrapped in a leather duster that sported a prismatic sheen, and a lazy-looking
slynx draped around her shoulders. The slynx was one of those distant-cousin
breeds of housecat created mainly to add extra vertebrae to their backbone; I
couldn’t tell if the one she was sporting was the real thing, tired after being
out for a walk, or just a tasteless piece of fur trim for her jacket collar.

In that moment I pictured myself standing on that
same corner, witnessing all this byplay, smiling and laughing and turning away
with a “How about that?” look on my face, and then maybe going into the shop of
M.M. Ayarand, Luxurist, for one of those fine smokes that had caught my nose
while passing. A world still Old Way enough to still have shops and streets and
all the other trappings of life as I’d been raised to know it was all right by
me. Even if I lived long enough to watch it all vanish.

Then our cab set itself in motion again, and I
kept that charming little sliver of life in view as long as I could until it
dwindled and disappeared.

Far to the east, seemingly hovering over the river
that we were crossing on a bridge six lanes wide and four levels high in either
direction, was a glittering birthday-cake palace of gold and green—the
Independent Nation of the Kathayan Seat itself, Achitraka House. It sat on an
artificial island about a kilometer and a half out from the shore. Once, every
spire, every buttress and every paving stone of the House itself had been hewn,
heaved and laid by hand. When it had been destroyed in what had been the first
(and so far last) interplanetary war, it had been replaced with its current
protomically-constructed edition. Few people found that ironic anymore.

And underneath it all, my CL buzzed like a bottled
fly with all the potential wavelengths and feeds it was now primed to receive.
News broadcasts, midday roundtable chats, out-loud streetcorner arguments,
libraries of image and word and idea—everything that might normally come
through the eye or ear or leave through the mouth now came and went through one’s
CL. One had to dial it down, focus it to keep from being overwhelmed, and that
was precisely the kind of discrimination and guidance the Old Way had provided
for its adherents: a life preserver to keep one’s head above the waters of
cheerfully uncheckable progress. Sometimes it was nothing more than manners: do
not broadcast your personal CL feeds in undesignated public places. Sometimes
it was law: public CL broadcasts are forbidden from sundown to sunup on penalty
of fine and temporary suspension of CL privileges. Sometimes it was plain old
morality: the more we push of ourselves through these little brain-to-brain
interfaces, the less there is of ourselves to call
ourselves
; we are not
simply here to gorge on the gossip of our neighbors and the excesses of
strangers . . .

“Phew!” I saw Enid was smiling. “It’s going to
take some getting used to, having full CL again.”

“I’ve got my CL battened down myself,” I said.
“One set of old habits versus another.”

With some old habits being good ones, I thought.
If you were a room away or half a continent away, that was easy enough, but
even receiving a mental avatar of the other person when you talked via CL wasn’t
the same as seeing, hearing, appreciating. It was something people had
discovered and re-discovered for themselves countless times: for every piece of
convenience and speed CL gave you, it took away that much more of the things
that our brains had spent a couple million years building themselves for. And
if you really
were
that keen on not having to talk to people or read
something with your own eyes—well, the Emigration Bureau’s that way. Don’t let
the door hit you in the ass too hard; we just repaired it.

When I was born, there had been one Emigration
Bureau office in all of Kathayagara City. There were now six.

The Old Way was fast becoming No Way At All.

The spires of the palace vanished once and for all
behind a forest of city buildings as we exited the bridge. That saved me the
trouble of having to look away before it vanished, I thought.

The Kathayagara City Dunham
ranked
among the best Dunham Inns on record, or so the travel guides told me as we
stopped in the taxiway out front. It sure looked the part: black granite, gray
marble, and strategically-placed gold leaf that managed to look theatrical and
bold instead of quite a bit tacky.

I’d stayed in a Dunham plenty of times before the
accident but only once after, and that was during one of the legs of my
self-financed “apology tour”. Small wonder just the sight of the stylized-D
Dunham logo was enough to make my stomach hatch butterflies: it felt like I was
on my way to yet another round of
mea culpa
s.

I ignored the feeling, tipped my hat to the
doorman as he opened the cab, and did the same again for the
other
doorman manning the actual front door as he swung that open for us. The
bellhops and doormen probably all shared the same private CL frequency; we’d be
seeing show-off atavisms like this through our whole stay here. Their mere
presence—and the whole appeal of a Dunham in the first place—was calculated to
draw in Old Way customers for as long as they existed to enjoy such things.

The only person at the check-in desk was a
long-haired Old Way pilgrim having a painfully slow-worded argument with one of
the clerks. They still had to keep at least one person on shift to deal with
such CL-less customers.

Kallhander had set everything up in advance; he
CLed me and Enid a pair of room-key avatars. Ioné brought up the rear as we
headed to the elevators.

“Nineteenth floor,” I said to Enid, and realized
how strange and loud my voice sounded when it rang back at me from the walls of
the lobby. “At least we get a great view.”

“I don’t think I could live down here,” Enid said.
“I love the way it looks, but . . . ”

“Nonstop CL-ing isn’t your thing either.”

”You get used to not having it. But I gotta say,
you also can get used to having it again, real fast.” I gave Kallhander and
Ioné both a look as the elevator doors melded shut. “You seem comfortable with
it.”

“It’s a prerequisite for the job.” Kallhander
sounded proud of himself, which was amusing given how trivial the achievement. “IPS
agents have to deal with both CL and non-CL worlds, and the more capable they
are in each the better.”

“I take it Continuum counts as all-CL, all the
time,” I said.

“That would be one way to put it, yes,” Ioné said.

“What would be another?” Enid looked up at the
other woman.

Ioné looked back at the two of us. I didn’t see any
of the can-do cheer she’d been sporting the whole ride; what she showed us now
was frustration. “Something I haven’t quite found the words for,” she said at
last, then faced forward and lifted her chin to better greet the opening doors
properly.

I once told someone
that Continuum was
what happened when a world decides to become Highend and just doesn’t stop.

By the best estimates and most detailed evidence
available, Continuum was established some three hundred and fifty solar years
before I’d been born, courtesy of an existing pool of Highend colonists. They
had previously been hired to help deal with the problem of colonizing a four-G
world, which they solved by simply doing away with physical bodies—a common
solution to a common problem, but one which usually had drastic side effects.
Once you did away with a body, one of two things happened: you either wanted to
get back into one as soon as possible, or you never wanted to bother with being
tethered to a meat pile ever again. That and most people ducked the whole
problem of colonizing multi-G worlds by simply squatting the ones that were
within human norms. As long as you didn’t get caught—and you typically only got
caught if someone squealed on you—why colonize? And when the penalty for
getting caught was to be packed off to a colony in the first place—again, why
colonize?

But these folks wanted to do more than just not
cheat a planetary waiting list. At first they’d done away with their bodies, despite
having picked a world well within habitable norms of gravity (albeit no useful atmosphere),
and limited their interactions with the physical universe to CL-connected
technology. Then they found there was little point in finishing the job they’d
started when they could simply bag themselves up and experience each other’s
minds as raw sensory and neural input. Soon they did away with the divisions
between different minds altogether, and existed as nothing more than a network
of thought buried inside a self-sustaining protomic catacomb that wasn’t even
on the same world they had originally colonized.

Continuum: the place to
really
get away
from it all. Body
and
soul.

Continuum existed in this form for at least a
couple of centuries, and by all accounts quite happily. It drank in energy from
its parent star, using that to fuel itself without end. It created an
underground basin hundreds of kilometers across in which protomic structures of
various kinds were synthesized and then reclaimed: miniature cities populated
by avatars that were different algorithmic expressions of all the facets of its
consciousness. It imported, in measured amounts, all of human culture there was
to offer, recreating it in miniature in its little protomic sandbox and then
dissolving it again. It bathed itself in contemplation, showered itself in
theory.

It also didn’t welcome any visitors.

Those who approached Continuum were encouraged to
leave, immediately. With nothing much else to expend resources on, Continuum
had set up a defense grid orders of magnitude wider and denser than any
constructed elsewhere. Word spread this massmind was planning war: what else
would it do with such an armada? But none of its grid defense ships had
entanglement engines, and the few communications that had been received from
Continuum amounted to:
Nothing personal, but we like it here by ourselves.
See you in a century or two, maybe?

And then, some decades before I was born, the
first Continuum ambassador presented “himself” to the nearest IPS-signatory
world. It described itself as an “extrusion” or “node” of Continuum, an
embodiment of its intentions in a form that could interact with us.

What Continuum wanted, much to everyone’s surprise
after so many years of insular silence, was a diplomatic rapport with the rest
of the populated worlds. It wanted to provision more such extrusions, each
analogous to different human roles, and send them out to experience the rest of
the universe firsthand. Eventually each would be recalled, and maybe replaced
with another (or simply retired).

The first dozen, including that diplomat, spent
the next decade mingling on various worlds. They dove for seafloor-scraping
ore-fish on Nineveh; they aided in the Gennady terraforming effort (which
helped finished it slightly ahead of schedule); they met the eleventh Kathaya
and traded gestures of good will. In every case, Continuum declared its
intentions explicitly. If its request was heeded immediately, it was grateful;
if it was stalled or stonewalled, it patiently repeated its request with no
change in wording. It never threatened, bargained, cajoled or begged. It said
please
and
thank you
, which only made some people all the more uneasy.

Whatever official motives it had were laid out in
the words of that first ambassador:
Continuum must fulfill the purpose
inherent in its name. To truly continue it must change; to change it must
understand what it is possible to change into.
Any questions about what it
was up to or what it wanted were answered with some variation of that
formula—and sometimes those exact words and nothing more.

In the end, it wasn’t an exosociologist or cyberpathologist
who found the best way to talk about what Continuum was up to and why. It was
writer Kallath Sylinas who laid it all straight in his essay “Oh, Continuum!”:
The
most likely result of spending three hundred years holed up on a planet
contemplating all six thousand of your own synthetic navels (or all one of
them) is going to be dead stone boredom. All Continuum has done is decide to
come out and play with the other kids in the neighborhood. And if I’m wrong
about that, I’ll boil my hat in rooster sauce and eat it.

And then, one fine day, the lid
really
blew
off. Continuum extruded a diplomat, sent it to IPS headquarters, and petitioned
for recognition as an IPS-signatory world.

The furor over the “Continuum question” went on
for two solid decades. The bare logistics of such a thing were bad enough: how in
cosm’s name do you run a census for a world where the entire populace is
virtual
?
Or do you just write
N/A
on that part of the form and get on to more
important things? Et so many other ceteras.

But after one, two, three generations of IPS
governance had come and gone, and the presence of Continuum on so many worlds
no longer seemed like an aberration but simply a fact of their existence, the
resistance faded. If anything, Continuum had helped its own case by becoming
that much more selective about where it chose to manifest. Its total number of instances
were now in the hundreds galaxy-wide, rather than the tens of thousands, and
they stayed in their respective positions for far longer.

It also raised no objections when IPS
counter-offered with a slightly sterner version of its usual treaty. The IPS
had to establish fulltime presence on Continuum itself (albeit as little more
than a stub of its usual such presence, and in what amounted to a sterile zone);
Continuum would not be eligible to enlist its own extrusions as IPS officers
for at least twenty years; enlistees had to follow IPS regulations to the
letter, including the stipulation that IPS officers must submit to a full-blown
CL tap during two randomly-selected months of every solar year; and so on.
Continuum agreed, cheerfully even, to all those terms.

By the time I was married, there were two hundred
and thirty-seven Continuum instances mingling freely with populations on IPS
worlds. Six of them were full-time IPS officers. Every single one of them had
exemplary service records.

Sylinas never got to attempt his particular
kitchen experiment; he died two years after writing the essay, in a
skip-gliding accident. He’d converted to hardline Old Way the year before, and
had torched his backups. He only seemed all the more right with every passing
year, though. The idea that Continuum was planning some kind of massive,
ghastly insurrection had gone from being dubious to downright laughable. Continuum
was still odd—endlessly cheery, curious and eager—but no longer something to be
feared.

But as my father once said, “It can afford to be
patient. It’ll probably outlive us all anyway.”

I wonder now how I’d ever found those words funny.

In theory,
every hotel room’s view can be
a good one. When every wall is a protomic display panel, you don’t have to
worry about how high up you are or whether or not another inconveniently large
building is blocking the sights—your windows can show you anything you want.

In practice, people still fork over premium nightly
prices for a room with a view. A
real
view, one where you could in fact
slide back the glass and step out onto the balcony and experience the wind and
the vertigo and, yes, the sight of being all those stories up. If there is one
thing left paying a premium for in this universe, it was the real thing—whatever
that “real thing” is from wherever you stood.

We were led past door after door without comment,
then walked through a maintenance area with badly scuffed walls and floors. My
puzzlement ratcheted up. At the far end, a slit about a meter wide provisioned
itself and opened as we drew closer, and it melded shut behind us.

We didn’t have a room with a view. We didn’t even
have a
room
—not in the same way everyone else in the hotel did. Each
floor of the hotel reserved a certain amount of unused space for various
functions: sometimes a conference center, sometimes a reception area, and
sometimes (like now) an actual guest room. Furnishings, subrooms and fixtures
were all extruded and provisioned as needed. After we checked out, the whole
area would be reformatted and repurposed for something else. Granted, if
someone was crazy or determined enough, they could chisel through an adjoining
wall into our little nook, but not without setting off every sensory surface
around us.

Despite the ridiculous get-in, the suite looked no
different on the inside from the rest of the hotel’s swankness. The only
obvious difference was the windows—or, rather, lack of same. We had display
panels that gave us views from the sensory surfaces on the outside of the
building, with all the color but none of the depth or oomph of the original.

“It’s like going to a five-star restaurant and
being served a picture of the food.” I bumped one fist gently against the
glass.

“I’m going to go get cleaned up,” Enid announced.
No one contradicted her, certainly not me; I guessed she wanted to enjoy the
luxury of a full-sized bathroom with no time limits on the hot water as long as
she could. Within seconds she had padded into the bathroom and shut the door.

“So what’s it like having a Continuum instance as
a partner?” I said to Kallhander as soon as the slam finished echoing up the
hallway. “I imagine it takes a while to get used to all her stupid questions.
—Wait,
do
I say ‘her’? Or do I say ‘it’?”

“Ioné identifies as being female for the sake of
our convenience. Each successive Continuum instance that has entered IPS’s
policing program has been of the opposite gender. Or, rather, a gender-mutable
one is followed by a fixed-gender one; Ioné is fixed-female.”

“I take it someone like her is better suited to
working Old Way worlds?”

“Not exclusively, but there’s truth to what you
say. Also, frankly, the stereotype of the Continuum instance as a font of naïve
questions went out of vogue some time ago.”

“Do you still have to hold her leash?”

“She’s aware that like any other IPS officer, her
provision can be terminated at any time if needed. The rules are no stricter
for her than they are for me.”

The subject of our conversation entered from the
main foyer. Ioné had been puttering around near the front door of the suite,
doing who knew what, and I took this as a cue to get back on my own track.

“Okay,” I said. “You said you had something
relevant to tell me. So start being relevant.”

Kallhander sat on the edge of the larger of the
two semicircular couches in the main area and folded his hands. “I’m sure you
can tell me, without looking it up, the main reason why the
Kyritan
was
destroyed.”

“Unexpected and catastrophic system integrity
failure across several of the ship’s structural nodes.” I’d gotten to the point
where I could reel it off like I was spelling my name.

“And you know that there have been rare but
recorded instances of such things happening spontaneously?”

“Not in the last sixty years, and only because of
oversights in design integration. ‘Spontaneous’ is a garbage category.”

“Was that why you took it upon yourself to conduct
your own investigation?”

“Among other things.”

“What did you find on your own?”

“Nothing two other teams of disaster specialists
hadn’t already found.”

“Including any evidence of sabotage?”

“
Especially
any evidence of sabotage, or
for that matter, incompetence on my part. They didn’t find anything, and I didn’t
find anything either.”

“The report I read indicated you were
. . . well, concerned that you might have missed something, and that
you didn’t trust anyone else to examine your own work.”

“You read right.” So far Kallhander was doing a
great job of telling me absolutely nothing I didn’t know.

I reached to lift the lid of the little
humidor-like box in the middle of the table. Fresh-baked helläga cake, most
likely baked by hand and not spit out of a protomic kitchen. The manual effort
alone meant it might well carry a pricetag almost as high as a full meal for
all of us.

I wasn’t about to tell him that
I knew my ship
,
and that if someone had tried something sneaky I would have found out in
seconds, not months or years after the fact. If something
had
gone
wrong, it was because I hadn’t done my damn homework. I’d found such things
before, and stomped them flat. And I’d grown tired of picking open the same
wounds for different people, over and over.