Flight of the Vajra (40 page)

“All right. Then let me put it this way: what do
you want
me
to do about it?”

I had to think about that one, and in that lull I
stuck a hand into the picnic basket that sat between us. It was entirely for
show, since there was little worse than pretend-eating in a CL-shell when you
were actually hungry. You always came back up out of the shell ravenous enough
to bite your own arm.

“I just want you to cultivate a little more
. . . skepticism about him, that’s all,” I said. “He’s not some
cradle-robbing confidence man, even with all his sins rolled in. But he’s also
not your best friend, or mine. Even if you did get up on stage with him and
even if you are planning Great Things with him, keep in mind you met him all
of, what, a day and change ago? And while I know when you live the life of a
spacebrat you tend to make connections with people that much more quickly, the
reverse happens, too: connections also get
broken
that much more
quickly.” I ought to know, I thought; look at the connections I myself had
forged in the last few days.

She hadn’t pulled the plug yet, so I softened my
tone—even though it was already pretty conciliatory, in my ears—and went on.

“Funny life I’ve had, now that I think about it.
People called me a legend, a living legend, some variation on those words. Go
in the right social circles, talk to the right people, that’s the answer
they’ll give when you ask them about me. Then you go to the people who are
themselves
legends to boot—people who know you as a neighbor, as someone they shot pool
with or drank too much with and threw up on the beach with. They don’t care about
who’s a legend in anyone’s eyes, or even who’s not. They care about whether or
not you tore up their garden, or cheated at pool, or puked on their dog. I
don’t have a second’s doubt that Cioran’s a volcano of inspiration and ideas
and creativity and everything else. I
also
don’t have a second’s doubt
that you are capable in your own way of being at least as much of a mover,
shaker and cage-rattler as he is.” I’d leaned in that much closer to her,
unconsciously. Even though she hadn’t shrunk away from me, I still leaned back
to put her that much more at ease. “And the last thing I’d want to see is for
you to have that get blown because he . . . You ever hear someone say
about someone else, ‘he sinned against his talent’?”

A funny light came into her eyes. “Once, I think.”

“You know what they meant by it?”

“The way I heard it, it meant it doesn’t matter
how great a spark you have if you screw your life up in other ways. —Look, I
see what you’re saying, Henré. But I’m not old and bitter like you, okay? I like
him for my own reasons. And yes, I
still
think you’re jealous.”

I pinched at a centimeter of air in front of her
nose. “Yes, a
little
jealous. Of his talents, his sense of freedom. But I’m
also worried about his real motives, and more worried of him than I am jealous.
Can you at least accept that? And I’m old, at least compared to you, but not
bitter, at least not yet. Don’t mistake experience for bitterness.”

“I’ll take your word for it. So, again: what do
want me to
do
? Details, Henré.”

“Keep your eyes and ears open around him, open
enough that he gets tempted to fill them himself. He trusts you, and I have the
feeling he’s going to trust you with things he’s not going to trust the rest of
us with. If you get the impression anything he’s talking about is going to put
our missions in jeopardy or doesn’t add up or just plain seems skeevy, you
spill it to me and me alone.”

She nodded, without much enthusiasm powering the
nod.

“You think I’m the cosm’s own great killjoy, don’t
you,” I said.

Her response was to give me a not-very-angry punch
on the shoulder. “I’ll do it,” she said, “but only because I’m pretty sure
you’re dead wrong about what’ll happen.”

“You want to make a bet on it?”

“What kind of wages?”

“One of your Cytherian coins.”

“
No
! Are you crazy? I
need
that
money.”

“Since when? It’s not like that’s your only
hoard.”

She still looked hesitant

“Sentimental value?” I said.

There; I’d hit a mark with that one. I went on:

“If I’m right, and he’s just been filling our ears
with guff about his money situation and all the rest of it, then—” I leaned
over, one elbow on the picnic basket. This time I didn’t mind seeming a little
pushy. “—one of your coins. No more. And there’s always the possibility you can
win it back from me later.”

She cackled—same sound as before when my back was
turned, showing plenty of teeth. “That’s not much of a possibility, you know!”

“Them’s my terms.”

“Terms accepted. —Look, maybe it doesn’t seem this
way to you, but whenever you get all clouded up about him, it
is
a real
killjoy for me.”

“Oh, c’mon. If I had real joy-killing in my heart
I would have done something like marched up onto the stage and dragged you off
by your wrist saying things about your bedtime and no dinner.”

“And you’d have gotten how many steps before the
crowd broke your face?”

“Think about how many steps we got past those
guards on Cytheria. And
they
had guns.”

I was tempted to ask,
You don’t josh around
with
him
like this, do you?
It didn’t seem like they did such things.
That was something that belonged to the two of us alone—the way we constantly
poked at each other’s armor, just to see what was in there.

The beach, surf and sunset all flickered. Dinner was
here, for real, and we both disconnected from the CL shell to find Cioran still
engrossed in himself. I gave him a shoulder-shake and he sat right up. Even he
wasn’t about to let CL get in the way of a good meal. He had, by his own
confession, never had
rijstaffel
before. I think it was a toss-up which
of us was most surprised by that.

The next day was pure, headless panic.
Kallhander and Ioné came to the new
Vajra,
gave it a fresh once-over,
and made some additional design suggestions for the sake of security that I had
to drop everything to implement before we left. This business of simply giving
everyone couches wasn’t going to do; we would need at least three or four
private crew quarters, even if they were only bunk-sized. One of them had to be
security-reinforced for Angharad’s sake. The same quarters had to be
escape-ejectable. Or there at least had to be a panic box she could be
ensconced in if things got sticky. And so it went, to the point where my final
plans ended up nearly doubling the girth of the ship I and had to figure out
how to split it to fit into that many more elevator slots.

“This is also going to require an engine upgrade,”
I lied. It didn’t
require
it, but I was leery of using just one
entanglement engine in the new design, and this was as good an excuse for an
upgrade as any.

“That shouldn’t pose any budgetary issues, at
least,” Kallhander said.

“What do you mean?
I’m
paying for this.”

“Angharad is officially assuming the cost out of
her pocket. Evidently she hadn’t made that clear?”

No, I thought, evidently not. I guess she didn’t
mind taking on the financial burden after all.

Kallhander stood at the fore of the cabin, arms
folded, looking out the front window (currently translucent) at a great view of
the absolutely featureless near wall of the bay. I was slumped in the main
couch—I’d been there since I woke up, when I’d been nursing a headache which
had not responded to any of the usual treatments—and suddenly wishing I had, in
fact, created individual crew cabins. That would have given me a fine excuse to
wall myself off from everyone and get some real work done without resorting to
a CL cocoon. Maybe I could subdivide the cabins later, as soon as I wasn’t
thinking about getting Kallhander out of my hair.

“I’m just worried that with all these changes
we’re never gonna clear planetside in time,” I said. “Look, why don’t we just
make do with what we have until we reach the first stopover jump point? We can
swap out the engine first; that’s no skin lost. The rest of the changes we can
make incrementally as we go, since we won’t have to figure out how to cram this
whole crazy mess back up the elevator. Do we
really
need to leave
Kathayagara with all these changes in place, or can we get away with showing up
there that way?”

“I don’t imagine that will be unreasonable. But
Ioné has strongly recommended those changes and I concur with them.”

“You realize one of the worst things you can do to
a designer is second-guess his work.” If the two of them are going to poke me,
I thought, then I’ll poke them right back.

“Nothing we have suggested is mandatory, only—”

“—a really good idea. I know, I know. I’ve been
through the whole rigmarole of a planetary transportation safety board audit,
many times.”

“There were other security suggestions that we
were prepared to make, but I elected to leave them out. I imagined they would not
have been received well.”

“Now you have me curious. What were they?” This
had to have been deliberate; I couldn’t imagine him dangling that bait for any
other reason.

“For one, I would have recommended that Enid and
Cioran be sequestered on entirely separate flights.”

“For their security or ours?”

“Either one would be fitting.”

I went to full-immersion CL, to keep from being
walked in on, and to keep my concentration completely on the talk; he did
likewise. “I thought about it,” I said. “But I decided to keep them both under
my wing, especially during the flight out.”

“You had reasons in mind?”

“I get the impression I can learn a great deal
more about what’s happening with Cioran by keeping Enid close to him than I can
any other way. I mean, sure, everything they could talk about in the ship would
be logged—which you’re doing through him anyway, until further notice—but he’s
still that much closer to her than anyone else I see here. —Plus, Angharad
still owes her a favor. She isn’t getting off until that’s taken care of.
She
said as much, Enid did.”

I went back to out-loud. “Look, if anything
actually happens, there’s always you and your partner. Yes, there are the odds,
however slight, of a dock-jacking. Was that also on your mind?”

“Not as long as you’ve sufficiently randomized the
route.”

“You’re free to check my work.” I showed him. “And
every stop along the way ought to be crawling with IPS, whether or not they
know we’re swinging by their particular neck of the woods. Plus, you ought to
know as well as I do, the only successful dock-jackings in the history of space
travel were inside jobs.”

“The Riseside case was one of the first
investigations I worked on.”

I was impressed despite myself. “How did that play
out? —For real, now, not some journalist’s version.”

“It’s as you said: it was an inside job. Both on
the ship side and on the dock side. They even went to some lengths to make the
fake ‘victims’ in the ship look suitably victimized by having them fused to a
bulkhead while still in their suits.”

“What did they overlook?”

“Nothing. They all playacted their roles
perfectly, and there was nothing in the suits’ own telemetry to indicate the
story happened any other way, right up until the moment their own suits
suffocated them.”

I took a guess. “Why kill a bunch of bystanders,
who’ve probably never seen your real faces anyway? Unless you’re covering
tracks.”

“Exactly. See, my own contribution to the case was
actually rather minimal. I only confirmed the initial forensics summary, that
none of the available evidence had been forged. And it hadn’t been. The real
forgery was all behavioral. The victims had all rehearsed their behaviors,
right down to the way the evidence was recorded in their clothing and in the
environment. It took a great deal of patience to backtrack far enough to find
when the dead had colluded with the living.”

“In the end, it’s always about the people,” I
said. “They’re always the one thing that really does go wrong.”

“That sounds rather embittered.”

“Enid called me bitter earlier, too. I said it was
experience. Don’t go proving her right on me, now.”

And he probably thinks he knows why I sounded that
way, too, I thought. He thinks I mean that
I’m
the one that “went
wrong,” and that was how thousands died. Is that what I still believe?

I pretended to look as if I’d remembered
something. “I need to finish packing,” I said, and straightened up.

Someone once wrote that the more advanced a
civilization is, the less its citizens have to pack whenever they travel. Another
sign of an advanced civilization is that they can take any damn thing they want
with them, because that’s no hindrance either.

Me, I traveled light by design. The only
things
I’d had with me since I started out on my own were the
Vajra
itself and
my clothes. The latter were entirely protomic and the former were as close to
that as the laws of physics were going to allow you to get. Everything else was
just data somewhere: my bank account, my portfolios of intellectual properties,
my family snapshots and CL-feed dumps.

What few physical things I did bring with me all
fit into a box about thirty centimeters on its longest side. Said box was in
the hold compartment directly under my seat, and while Kallhander was
preoccupied with something else I unlocked it and took it out. In there was the
chemical-contact portrait of my wife and daughter; another one of Cavafy Enno;
my physical copies of my diplomas; my certificates of having been granted this
or that award. The physical awards themselves were in a storage locker somewhere
in the house I’d left behind; what did I need to tote those around the universe
for? It wasn’t like I needed them on a shelf overhead, all my achievement’s
ducks in a row.

“Is that your family?”

Kallhander was standing behind me—not close enough
to be over my shoulder, so there was no way I could accuse him of such a thing.
Plus, the photo had been on my lap in plain view. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t
run the pictures through his own search; he was asking mostly as a way to be
social. Not a very good way, but a way all the same.

“This is from not long before the accident, yeah,”
I said. “The other guy who’s not me, that’s an old friend of mine who also died
in the same accident.” It was almost fun to pretend he didn’t know who these
people were. He could probably have found out more about Cavafy than I would
have ever known, just in the time he was standing behind me.

I called him on it: “Why ask me who they are?
There’s nothing stopping you from doing your own homework on them.”

“What people know and what they claim to know are
sometimes very different things. I didn’t imagine in your case you would have a
great and overriding motivation to mislead me. If anything I suspected you
would have said something along the lines of, ‘None of your damn business.’
 
”

That actually made me laugh. “You
are
getting to know me. Maybe a little too well for your own good.”

“Not at all. Knowing the range of your responses
makes it easier to deal with genuine crises when they arise.”

“Now you sound like Ioné. Has she been rubbing off
on you?”

“Only the good parts.”

I’ll give it to the end of this flight, I told
myself, and if by then I feel he’s that much more like a
crewmember
and
that much less like an overgrown nursery school teacher, I’ll consider that
progress.

I put everything back in the box and stowed it,
and then after a moment of staring at the open nook under my seat, I decided I
might as well instantiate the panic box Kallhander had recommended, in the
floor of the bridge. Something that size ought to be cured up and ready for use
by the time we were go for leaving, anyway.

Enid, Angharad, Cioran and Ioné all showed up a
little later, each under Ioné’s collective wing. As with me, they all traveled
light—Enid’s only luggage was the coins in one pocket and the MemoCel in the
other; Angharad didn’t need anything but her clothes; and Cioran’s stuff
consisted of his polylute in a freight crate and another case labeled WARNING:
VICIOUS ANIMAL that turned out to be some changes of (non-protomic) clothes.

“Cute,” I said, closing the lid on said case. “I
bet the customs people had two tons of fun with that one.”

“I was thinking of smuggling myself in it.” Cioran
lifted the lid again and slid one leg inside. “That way, it would be truth in
advertising!”

Enid eased the lid all the way back up and whipped
out something that had caught her eye while I’d been pawing through it: a
fur-trimmed jacket whose front was divided vertically by alternating stripes of
black leather and mesh. She held it up against my chest—I was at least two sizes
around the ribs too big for it—and squinted.

“You’d look lousy in fur.” She shook her head.

Cioran yanked his leg out of the box a split
second before she kicked it shut, but she hadn’t put the jacket back inside.
She was now holding it up against herself and posing in the nearest mirrorable
surface, which happened to be the bathroom door.

“She’s petite enough that it might well fit her,”
Cioran said to me, sidelong. I couldn’t help but notice he was in female form
again. “Normally I’m very possessive about certain things—that jacket was a
custom creation courtesy of an old friend. I wouldn’t let just anyone grub up
all over it.”

Looks like the trust between them is as two-way as
I thought it was, I told myself. Let’s see if it stays that way.

Angharad, to my surprise, was in fact carrying a
single piece of luggage apart from the clothes on her back: a round valise
about the size of a hatbox, made from some sturdy material that resembled
canvas. Heavy, though; I felt my shoulder yank a bit when I helped her stow it
in the compartment under her seat.

“That’s one heavy toothbrush.” I said. Even if the
toothbrush was something you only used these days if you were unlucky enough
not to have the right anticarietic treatments, she knew what the idiom meant.

That and she took the joke in the spirit it was
intended: “I was told most every amenity we might need would be provided for us
at the summit, but I elected to remain as independent of that as I could. I am
not ungrateful, mind you—I just find it easier to believe in self-reliance by
acting on it that much more.”

“Even if it comes down to a toothbrush?”

“Especially when it comes down to something that
small. For greater things, oddly, it seems that much less an issue.”

“So you’re saying,” Cioran said, lying down across
the top of his trunk and arching his back (I could hear the joints pop), “that
you’d sooner trust someone who asks for your help averting a war than you would
trust someone who wants to borrow your comb?”

“I can only assume if they come to me for the
former, they have no choice. A comb can be had from most anywhere, but there is
only one of me.”

Enid, still at the mirror, spoke up. “So if I
borrowed Henré’s comb, would you think any the less of me?” She turned around,
still holding the jacket up against herself. “There is, after all, only one
Henré.”

“Yeah, thank the cosmos for that, right?” I
quipped.

Angharad shook her head. “I would not think any
the less of you, no. I speak only of the standard I set for myself.”

“But the standard you set for yourself—” Cioran
wrenched himself into a sitting position on top of the case. “—is still going
to be one you apply to others, even if you don’t know it! Or are you claiming
it’s the sort of thing you can dismiss as long as you can say to yourself,
‘Well, I
know
all that’?”