Flight of the Vajra (18 page)

People who grew up with CL—or were just about born
with it, depending on how early that sort of thing was allowed in a given
society—tended to adapt that much better to its use than those who didn’t. No
surprise there: the human organism is if nothing else adaptable. But the fact
that you can adapt to something doesn’t always mean it’s a good complement to
your constitution, and that explained why even in societies that were allegedly
well-acclimated to CL things like chronic migraines, sleep disturbances and a
lot of other low-to-mid-level dysfunctionality got traced directly back to the
prevalence of CL.

Small wonder many folks—not least of all, any of
the previous Kathayas—had made a strong case for limiting CL’s pervasiveness in
society. All it takes is one scream-runner, one CL-hack episode, one bit of
remote braintaping blackmail to give you a taste of the downside—and maybe turn
you off from the taste altogether.

But that didn’t stop me from having a CL. Or Enid,
or Kallhander, or just about everyone else I’d met in my time. They were
useful, there was no doubt about that. They made a lot of things easy. They
also made a lot of things uncomfortable, unadventurous, intrusive, and
downright damned annoying.

The only person who didn’t have one, and whose name
I could actually think of, was the Kathaya Herself: Angharad. And while I didn’t
believe for one Planck-second she would have one installed, I had looked at how
the Old Way was losing out and wondered if her successors would feel the same
way.

I was hungry,
and I assumed by then
Enid was as well. Kallhander CLed us some menus for both the hotel itself (a
single omelet was
how
much?) and some tourist-trap restaurants in the
area. To my amazement Ioné didn’t roll her eyes at those of us who needed an
actual
meal
, but maybe she’d already had plenty of practice at not doing
that in front of others.

The bedroom door, to my surprise, wasn’t locked. I
opened it and found Enid, hair still damp from her shower, stretched out on the
couch near the so-called window. She had the sheet of MemoCel spread out across
her raised knees, and was stepping slowly through the farewell scene she’d
recorded. No sound, just sad faces and the occasional shake and dim blurring of
the image as someone embraced her. She could have copied the file out to her CL
and played it back without needing the MemoCel, but if her Old Way world upbringing
had been anything like mine, she’d discovered how re-experiencing something
like that through an intervening medium was a way of putting that much more
distance between yourself and the thing, a way to better say goodbye to it. I
didn’t want to interrupt her, so I just let the fact I was standing there
garner her attention after a moment or two.

“You ran away from them, and now you miss them,” I
said. “It’s always like that, isn’t it?”

 “It’s not like that,” Enid said, trying to unbend
one dog-eared corner of the MemoCel. “It’s more about . . . these
were the only people I’ve left behind that I’ve ever been able to say a proper
goodbye to. I didn’t have that with Dad, and I sure didn’t have that with Mom.”

“You seemed pretty eager about getting away from
that crew as soon as you could, though.”

Shrug. “I admit it. I wasn’t thinking too hard
about exactly how I got out of there. I know
now
, though . . .
and I’m just glad I even have that much there to remember them by. I wanted to
leave, but—it wasn’t like I wanted all of them to dry up and blow away.”

“Well, sure. You wanted your freedom again. You
just weren’t sure if you wanted to pay the price of leaving them behind for
keeps. And while you can still hear from them, you
know
that’s not the
same as seeing them, being there in the same room ... ”

“ . . . hearing their bad jokes, getting
punched in the shoulder by them.” She shook her head. “Plus, CL doesn’t work
when someone’s halfway across the galaxy.”

“No, and thank the cosmos for that.”

Both of us laughed. If we hadn’t deserved each
other to begin with, we were getting there mighty fast.

I stood back up. “If I can help it, I don’t want
to keep us cooped up in here for too long a stretch, by the way. It’d be nice
to walk around with our own legs, see something other than walls and ceilings
with our own eyes. That and I don’t want
you
going buggy in here,
because I get the feeling me helping them means a lot of you not doing much.”

“I don’t
have
to stay here, you know. It’s
a big city. Lots to do.”

“Well, I get the feeling they want to keep an eye
on you, too. Just in case. And really, I don’t blame them. If there’s some
loyalist from Cytheria down here who just happens to have my name on his list
and pictures of both of us . . . ” I ran my hand up across my
forehead; it felt like my hairline had receded a good centimeter or so since
yesterday. “After all, I’m the one that walked into all this and dragged you
with me.”

“You’re not
dragging
me anywhere. I’m going
because I want to go.”

You say that now, I thought, but is that only
because I’m here in front of you? What do you tell yourself when the door’s
closed and you’ve got no one to make happy but yourself?

I looked at her between my fingers, which I’d
laced together over the bridge of my nose. “You see what I mean when I said ‘I
don’t want
my
trouble becoming
your
trouble’? Because my trouble
is
this
kind of trouble. It’s me running headlong into things, thinking
I have a plan, and discovering a good half the time I don’t.”

“What about the other half?”

I thought about that for a good moment, long
enough for her to giggle unprovoked.

“Anyway. Sorry to wave this under your nose,” I
added, taking my hands away from my face and CLing her the menus I’d received, “but
let’s figure out what we want to eat. I don’t think our illustrious boys and
girls from the IPS are joining us, so it’s entirely up to us. That and I want
to find out if it’s at all possible for us to go walkabout tomorrow. The two of
us, together. Those two out there—” I motioned at the main area, where
Kallhander and Ioné were most likely staring at the wall while CLing their
faces off at each other. “—may want to play chaperone, but that’s fine with me
as long as we can move around.”

“You know, I never used to think twice about the
cops.” Enid looked over at where I’d put the MemoCel; it had flattened out of
its own accord but still curling a bit at the edges, displaying the face of
someone she knew and I didn’t. “I mean, I knew they had a lot of power. They
would sometimes throw their weight around when we were traveling—they’d scan our
luggage, give us hassles about our visas. But it was never trouble like this.”
She gestured around. “I don’t like the idea that . . . that I
have
to be thrown head-first into something to understand what it’s really all
about.”

“’The only way you get to know what
anything
really is, is when you’re thrown in head-first.” I was smiling, though; I could
feel the yearning behind her words was something bigger than just one girl’s dissatisfaction.
“For a long time, I thought I’d dodged that myself. I thought I had found some
way to strike a bargain with the universe. ‘Okay, universe: you get these
things I never wanted anyway, and in return I get all this stuff many other
people don’t find as important, but for me—they’re life itself. Good deal?’
Good deal.”

“But that doesn’t work, does it.” Her turn to
smile, too. And her smile had the same unspoken subtitle:
You and me both.

“No, that doesn’t work.” I shook my head. “Because
you don’t make bargains with the universe. You can tell yourself that’s how it worked
out, though. You didn’t die in this freighter crash or that cryo-control
accident, because you and the universe had a
pact.
You can look back on
everything that happened to you—even the things that were horrible when they
happened but are easier to look at now in retrospect—and say, that was all part
of the pact. But that’s not it either. There is no pact there. There’s just
what you choose to see. If you think you got off lucky because of something
like that, you’ll see that and nothing else. You’ll always believe a pact like
that is possible, even when there’s nothing behind it.”

I stretched out on the other chair and looked up
at the ceiling as I went on. “I had a teacher who was like that, come to think
of it. My first protomics programming professor. He was a hundred and six and
he had refused retirement three times. He’d say things like ‘Without a
classroom I’m nothing,’ and he meant it. He lived to teach. He didn’t do much
of anything else. He had a great mind—he was still publishing papers and doing
theoretical work—but he
was
his work. No marriage, no children, not even
much in the way of vacations or getting drunk and puking on the dean’s rug,
nothing.
”
Enid giggled at that. “And he wasn’t just proud of all that, he was
grateful
for it. He was grateful nothing had soured the little deal he’d made with the
universe, and he was convinced he’d gotten exactly what he wanted.

“One time—I don’t quite remember how—he and I and
someone else, one of his other students, we got in this conversation about
someone’s dog. And he said—and I remember the tone more than anything else—‘Oh,
I’ve never owned a pet.’ Blithely, he’d said it.
Jolly
about it. That’s
one burden he’d never have to carry. Maybe I just found that terrible because I’d
had a dog once, an Afghan named Lhadjia. Even with Lhadjia crapping on
everything and chewing on the fringes of my rug and all the rest of it, I wouldn’t
take those ten years I’d had with him and throw them out. They were ten years
where I’d had him, and where he had slept across my feet at night, and whenever
I’d come into the house he’d bounce through the kitchen and just about wrap
himself around my legs when he collided with me. I can’t imagine
not
having those ten years. But for him all that was . . . ”

“ ‘Dogs. Ick.’ ”

“Exactly. But that’s not how it works. You don’t
say, ‘No dogs in my life, therefore that many less problems.’
 
”

“Because you get the problems anyway, don’t you?”
she grinned.

There you are, I thought. And how eager she
sounds; how happy to know someone was listening and agreeing, and telling her
she’s right. It’s been a while since someone did that for her, hasn’t it?

And it felt better than I could have imagined to
know I was the one who’d done it.

“As far as cops go, though,” she went on, “I get
the impression you just plain don’t like them. And you’ve got a head-start on
me and a lot of other people there.”

“After dealing with them sifting through my life
for nearly two years—no, I can’t say I do. And now they come around and want my
help again? And their idea of generous compensation is dangling some fat piece
of bait in front of me about my family? That and this Kallhander takes a year
and a day, both solar, to get to the point about anything. So don’t ask him to ‘start
from the beginning’, or you’ll get ‘Well, fifteen billion years ago . . .
‘
 
”

Enid covered her mouth and giggled into her palm. “You’re
too funny to be this bitter.”

“Being funny and being bitter are not mutually
exclusive. So what do you want to eat?”

“Burgita.”

My stomach twinged in agreement.

The “homemade” burgita place around the corner
from the hotel did in fact deliver. Kallhander charged the whole thing to his
account and tried not to act too smug about it. “You are, after all, here as
our guest, and that applies across the board,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I won’t open the
mini-bar on
your
tab.”

I broke a personal rule and tried to reach
Angharad via the CL link to her offices she’d told me about. Said link shunted
me directly to a mailbox—not surprising; after all that running around she was
probably either neck-deep in a debriefing of her own or fast asleep. I left a
message where I explained most everything that had happened since we’d parted,
and thanked her—not very eloquently—for all her help. There was, always had
been, something about accepting anyone else’s help that chafed at me. With
Kallhander and Ioné and the IPS, it was easy to hate them. Their idea of “help”
was to cuff someone’s hands to their ankles and tell them this was a good way
to work out the stiffness in their lower back. (They might not be going that
far
now
, but just wait, I thought.)

With Angharad, now that I’d spent some time in her
company, it was clear why few people who’d done the same could work up a
genuine contempt for her. She lived to help others in need, to embody the
charity and the togetherness of the Old Way, and too bad for you if you thought
she was just fronting off. Or if, as in my case, her behavior rankled on your
stupidly inflated sense of personal honor. I thought I’d completely shed my
pride when I left home, but all I’d done was allow it to change its clothes.

The food arrived. Enid and I sat on either end of
the sofa in “our” bedroom, and extruded a doily over the little table from the
tab on its side. Burgita, greens, takuan, scarlet onion fritters—you could in
theory get this meal anywhere, but the details were what mattered. The little
knurls on the outer edge of the burgita dough where it had clearly been pinched
together by hand, or the fact that the takuan wasn’t simply sitting in a puddle
of its own pickling juice but instead reclining in a cross-cut cherry tomato.

The hardest thing about the art of cooking is how few
people believe it’s an art in the first place. A long while back they did blind
taste-tests between hand-cooked meals and the same dishes created via
protomically-managed synthesis of the same raw ingredients. The latter were
chemically identical to the former, and many people wolfed both down without
ever noticing anything amiss. But over time a funny thing happened: the more
someone ate both kinds of meals, the better they got at telling the difference
between the two. With some people all it took was a second double-blind test to
refine their tastes enough to sense where the synthetic cooking fell down. It
didn’t fail in the obvious ways that industrial cooking did when it was first
produced: bland flavors, too much salt, unappealing textures. Maybe it was
something chemical—the very literal sweat from the hands of the makers—but
however you cut it, it just
wasn’t the same
. That alone by itself was
enough to get people to reject the imitations once they’d tasted the so-called
real thing.
Not that this stopped many folks from relying on
mass-produced food—and in some places you had no choice—but the difference was
clear and stark, and no restaurant that wanted to distinguish itself could do
without the little two-hands-in-the-pan icon on its menus that designated they’d
been Certified 100% HPM (Human-Prepared Meals). There was nothing in the cartons
we’d opened up that couldn’t have been done automatically, but seeing that same
little icon on the side of the box and at the bottom of the menu gave you that
much more of a feeling there was a
person
at the other end of all this.
No wonder tourists, especially Old Way folks, sought it out: how better to feel
welcome in a strange city on a strange world?