Flight of the Vajra (41 page)

Behind all of us, Ioné and Kallhander entered.
They paused—Kallhander in particular had an
Am I interrupting something?
look on his face—but I gave them a tilt of the head to indicate they could walk
in and not worry.

“That is the beginning of such an understanding,”
Angharad replied. “But it is far from the whole of it. I know well enough now
that
because
there is only one of me, and one of me in my position, the
demands I make for myself will never parallel that of anyone else. I have, you
might say, a sacred duty to be forgiving of others. Without that, I could
scarcely expect to be trusted.” A pause. “But I would still loan someone my
comb anyway.”

“Good! So can I borrow your comb?” Enid stuck out
a hand.

“It’s been packed away, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, you’re no fun.”

“Let’s get that crate stowed,” I said, indicating
the box Cioran was still reclining on. Ioné was standing to one side with the
blank look of someone CL-communing—probably wrapping up the last of the loose
ends and reserving us the next available spot on the elevator.

I was right about the last part. Just as we had
Cioran’s junk stowed and secured, Ioné lowered her hand and sent my CL a
cleared departure manifest. We were fifth in line to go out. Estimated
departure time: twenty minutes. Everyone followed my example without prodding,
thank goodness, and got seated and locked in. The panic box had already
finished curing up and was ready for the use I hoped I’d never have to put it
to.

I was about to give the all-clear when the port
authority signaled me. Apparently someone was trying to place a call to the
Vajra
and had just CLed directly to the ground management station. I gave them
permission to connect directly and spent the next second and a half wondering
who down here had stalled this long to say goodbye.

“Hey,” Nishi said.

“Hey,” I said.

So far so good, I thought; we haven’t bitten each other’s
faces off.

“I had no idea Cioran was your guest of honor,” I
said experimentally.

“Yeah, for all of that one night. Now he’s
your
guest of honor, seems like.”

For cosm’s sake, Nishi—
“I wasn’t trying to
poach him from you.”

“By the way, I didn’t know this was your new job,”
she went on. “If I’d known, I would have congratulated you properly. Taken you
out to dinner or something.” Her voice, face, all of her was in that twilight
space between bitter and numb. “Is this another one of those things you do to
drive people away from you, Henré? Because I’ve decided it’s not going to work
on me.”

“There’s a lot of reasons I’m doing this. Very few
of them have anything to do with you.”

“That’s interesting. I never realized being a
chauffeur is something that can have so many different reasons attached to it.”

“Nishi, if you’re going to tear my throat out, get
it over with.”

“No, I’m not—going to tear your throat out,
Henré.” Her voice caught. She must have been talking out loud on her end, and
filling up with tears for real, too. “I’m just stupid enough to believe that
when you’re done with this . . .
errand
, you’ll have done
something that’ll make up for every bruise and every scar you put into me. Am I
stupid for thinking something like that’s going to happen?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.” And there’s a billion
reasons I can’t tell you why just now, I thought. Maybe if we’re lucky, a few
days from now, you’ll find out what they are along with most everyone else in
the galaxy.

“Okay,” she said. Then: “You know, if this is the
new Henré Sim, the one I have to learn to live with—maybe I’m the fool for not
getting used to it sooner.”

“You’re no fool. You never were. You lit into me
good and hard for walking away from everything that looked good in my life, and
I know telling you ‘There’s a reason for everything’ isn’t going to cut it with
you.”

“Everyone’s got a reason—”

“
 
‘—and
that’s just the problem,’
 
”
we said together. I went on: “Are you willing to wait a bit and see what my
reasons are all about?”

“Given that you’ve got Cioran and the Kathaya in
there with you? Oh, why not.”

It was the first laugh we’d shared in five years. I
promised to bring her back a good wine if she’d supply the steaks, and we hung
up. One second later, ground traffic control was chewing my ear off asking me
what in cosm’s name had taken me so long to queue up for exit.

We had to dismantle the Vajra for the ride up,
but
it wasn’t a terribly complex dismantling—we just had to split the hull into
pieces no wider than the old
Vajra
, and line them up across what
amounted to five slots on the elevator. Angharad and I shared one slot, Enid
and Cioran shared the second one, the officers the third, and the last two were
the engine assembly and bulk cargo holds. I wasn’t exactly pinching pennies,
but I knew the costs for slots on the ride back up were that much more
expensive than their down-bound counterparts—and there was a jump in cost
between four and five slots that would make the more budget-conscious among us
scream and pull their hair out.

I turned my chair around to watch the
Vajra
being slid apart. The floor between the seats sprouted seams, and the seams
reached up to split the walls and ceiling as well. Enid’s couch moved further
away, Angharad’s moved closer, the floor and ceiling rumpled themselves into
squared-off manifolds as they were compressed together, and the compartment
sealed itself off behind us with a sound like paper slapping against paper.

“I never get tired of seeing this happen,” I told
Angharad.

“As well you never should.” Seeing me blink, she
went on to explain: “This is the work that gives your life meaning. You should
find every reason you can to continue finding that meaning in it.”

Yes, boss.

The elevator took a good two solar hours to bring
us up to the exit platforms. That last segment was little more than an
open-ended conveyor belt onto which each piece of the ship was loaded and
allowed to reassemble itself. Eight of those belts radiated outwards from the
top of the elevator, since reassembly tends to create the most bottlenecks:
once you reached the top, the pieces of your ship were shunted off onto
whatever belt was free, you got a refueling line should you need it (reassembly
uses up a certain amount of protomic substrate, and yes, whatever you buy from
them is added onto your docking bill), and only once you had finally cobbled
all the pieces back together and paid your exit toll were you allowed to
disengage. From there, you floated free and set up your entanglement engine to
find a lock-on to your destination, or at least the first jump towards same.

The disassembled bits of the
Vajra
slithered back together—like cell mitosis in reverse, I thought. The divider at
the rear of what had been my sub-cabin dilated back to reveal the rest of the
ship, the manifolds in the bulkheads smoothed out as the cabin expanded back to
its full size, and seconds later the consoles and my CL link said
Hi!
to
each other and began filling my head with telemetry, travel plans, provision
complements. Angharad gave me the access key to pay the exit toll, and we were
gone from the off-ramp in a matter of minutes.

“And now,” I told everyone, “comes the boring
part.”

I showed everyone the maps. Bridgehead was a
whopping
one hundred twenty-one
jumps from Kathayagara. Simple math
dictated that if we wanted to make the whole trip in six solar days, seven
tops, we’d need to make at least seventeen to eighteen jumps a day. Depending
on the breaks, we could afford to make quick pitstops along the way, but I’ve always
been of the mindset that the fastest way to get where you’re going is to keep
driving.

A jump took on the average an hour and change to
triangulate, sometimes more depending on the local environment. I could in
theory let the
Vajra
itself execute a few of those jumps while I was getting
some sleep—but given the nature of our (living) cargo, I didn’t want to be
asleep and dreaming when any of that happened. Ioné offered to supervise the
flight during those times, but I gently turned her down, fighting the
temptation to say
What part of “
my
ship” isn’t clear?
She also
tried to talk me into letting the whole flight automate itself, but again I
said no. A polite no, but still a no.

Someone once wrote:
People equals irrational.
Anything that’s “human” is always going to have some ineradicable streak of the
human in it. Passengers on a ship always feel more comfortable knowing there’s
one of their own kind at the controls—even if spaceflight is one of the least
interactive things imaginable; even if the ship itself is guided by what
amounts to the accumulation of several hundred million man-lifetimes of flight
patterns, never gets distracted and never needs time off for lunch. But some
part of every passenger—even those of the more Highend worlds—just felt that
much more comfortable knowing one of their own had at least one hand on the controls.

“It isn’t that people are more
reliable
,” Cavafy
once said. “It’s that they can
improvise like mad.
They always think of
something to do when our own creations fall short.”

“
And
they give us someone to yell at,” I
countered.

I could think of at least three people on board
who shared that feeling. One was me; the other two were prior passengers of
mine.

Now, I thought, we all just have to figure out how
to get through the next week or so without throttling each other.

My guesses about how things would play out
turned out to be spot-on, at least for the first day or so. My biggest wish
also came true: no one tried to smash anyone else’s face into a bulkhead.

Enid and Cioran, the restless ones, unplugged from
their couches, cleared some shared floorspace in the middle of their level
(there were three couches to each level of the ship, each one subdividable into
a compartment), and, as I’d predicted, set about jointly amusing themselves.
Sometimes it was via a dance exercise, whether of the “trust-building” variety
or just something to keep their bodies in motion; sometimes it seemed like
little more than a game of “think fast”, where each would test the other’s
reflexes. It was strange, being so close to two people—one of whom I’d come to
know slightly better than casually—working so hard to share something I knew I
wasn’t a part of. Not that they had consciously excluded me, but I knew better
than to horn in on what they were creating together—even if the real reason for
my self-conscious distance was to allow Enid to glean that much more from
Cioran.

Kallhander stayed on the top level with Angharad
and I, although every so often he and Ioné would trade shifts. Between he and
Ioné, he slept all the more (even if only incrementally so), and so it fell to
Ioné to watch over all of us the majority of the time. I wasn’t thrilled with
the idea—my neck was still chafing from the leash they’d slipped around it—and
to be on the safe side I set up a whole bevy of alerts to wake me if she did
anything more suspicious than stir her coffee with her finger. I had both the
future plans of the
Achitraka
and the past puzzle of the
Kyritan
to keep me busy, but for most of that first day I merely skipped between them
without accomplishing anything. Too much else had crowded into my mind on short
notice.

I’d gotten used to Kallhander showing
approximately one-and-a-half expressions, total, with that weird little smile
being the dominant one—so it was a little surprising to turn in my seat and see
him in one of the other seats on my level, head tilted back, eyeing the ceiling
as if something ominous was inscribing itself there.

“Something’s bothering you,” I wagered out loud.

Kallhander didn’t look at me; his eyes remained
pointed up and out. “I’m not as enthused as I thought I would be about being
right.”

That was enough to make even Enid—then sitting on
a temporary cushion extruded from the floor—blink and sit up a bit. “Right
about what?”

“About the code-obfuscation system.”

“You mean, the encryption stuff? Henré explained a
little of it to me.” (I had.) “I didn’t get quite the whole gist, but I got
enough, I think. Enough to understand how big a deal it would be.” She ran her
finger down the seam of the wall panel next to her. “So what is it about the
whole thing that bugs you?”

“The implications, obviously. It’s long been
theorized that it would be possible to inject sustainably obfuscated code into
protomics, but no one ever created a proof-of-concept. Now we have not only a
proof-of-concept, but it’s been used in a real-world attack scenario.” He still
didn’t look at either of us. “That implies we’re too late.”

“You’re worried this was the first of many?” I
said. Just saying the words myself made my throat feel like something was
sticking in it, but I ignored it.

“I’m worried it may have greater implications than
that. In the wake of every novel weaponization of protomics, there has been a
subsequent social backlash.”

“Backlash?” Enid looked between us. “As in?”

“Old Way proponents have long maintained that
protomics have only the most drastically-curtailed place in our lives,”
Kallhander went on. “They look constantly for evidence to support this view.
Historically, their opinions have had little traction outside of their own
circles, but with each incident of this kind it’s been shown they are taken
that much more seriously. The reverse-certification hacking scandal; the
recursive retro-rider disassembly infestation . . . ”