Flight of the Vajra (45 page)

My bed was set to wake me up if anyone so much as
dropped a drinking straw while I was asleep. Given that I had this many
strangers (two of them
cops
) on board, I wasn’t about to leave guard
duty to any other one person by themselves. It did occur to me, in the last
hazy minutes before sleep came, that this was yet another way for me to insist
that I didn’t need the kind of help that only someone else might be able to
provide. It wasn’t old habits that died hardest; it was the newest ones,
relatively speaking. You thought of them less as habits, more as the right
things to do.

I was lying in a pool
—one no deeper
than one’s waist, my legs floating out in front of me, the water warm as blood.
Light from an archway in front of me threw glittering, twisting lines on the
walls and ceiling, and as I stared at those reflections they became the
molecule-level clockworks of some protomic assembly. I put out a hand to stop
their internal clocks and dump their state stacks, as if they were in a running
simulation, but they continued without me like an overheard conversation in
another room.
Come on
, I said out loud,
don’t do this to me; I’m
trying to work on something here.

The reflections dimmed, and for a moment I thought
they’d heeded my words in some way—but it was only because someone else was
entering through the archway. It was Angharad, clad in a headdress and a glittering
golden robe that seemed to be made from threads pulled from the reflections on
the ceiling. She entered the water, letting her robe fall away as she waded in.
By the time she had closed the distance between us her robe had dissolved into
the surface of the water and allowed all the reflected light in the room to be tinged
with gold. From somewhere, maybe her hair—she was that close now—I smelled lush
things that shouldn’t have come from her. She twined one leg around mine and
slid her tongue into my mouth.

—
This isn’t right,
I said.

—
What about it is not right? Where is it
written that I must never love another?

I knew I was dreaming, and I knew this wasn’t the
Angharad I would wake up to face. That didn’t stop me from wrapping my arms
around her and pulling her headdress loose so I could drown in her hair. After
Biann’s death, everything sexual seemed only to be a terrible hassle—yet
another way to get dragged down into the mess that was other peoples’ lives.
But here I was, my mouth on hers, wondering why I had to feel I wasn’t worthy
of this or that it would somehow be her ruin.

Somewhere between that moment and me waking up was a
long blur, inside which floated the two of us. And when I finally did wake up,
I stood next to Angharad’s bier (she was still asleep inside it), looked down
at her, and felt myself turn as red as the moment when she’d said to me:
You
are not an “outsider”.

There’s something about the final jump
in a journey that brings out the spectator in everyone. In the minutes before
we were projected to make that last leap, everyone crowded into the bridge area
to see where we would pop out. Even Kallhander and Ioné joined us, and by that
point their presence was more than welcome. I had learned to think of them as
crew and fellow travelers, not equipment or pieces of furniture.

The extra margin of caution I’d asked from the
Vajra
for this last leap had cost us some time, but not an undue amount of it. In
fact, we were set to come within reconnaissance distance of Bridgehead about
five hours early of my estimates. Not nearly enough to win me any trophies, but
still one of my personal bests.

Five minutes before the jump, Enid and Cioran bounded
up the spiral stairs and installed themselves on either side of me. (Neither of
those two ever just
walked
anywhere.) Angharad was already present on
the far side of the cabin, engrossed in a meditation cycle. No one bothered
her. One less thing for me to warn people about, I thought.

At minus four minutes, Enid took out one of her
coins and balanced it edgewise in a groove on the console in front of us. “Who
wants to make a bet?” she announced.

“I always want to make a bet!” Cioran bounded up
and down in place.

“
 
‘Kay.
Bet is this: If Bridgehead is more than a day away from where we pop out, I
win. Deal?”

“Come on. You got to sweeten that up a little
bit,” I said. “Gindy’s Odds, at the very least.”

“If you’re gonna play Gindy’s Odds, we need to
make an actual
pool
.” Enid poked at the coin and let it fall over into
her hand. “As far as I know I’m the only one toting cash around, right? And
it’s no fun when you can say ‘I’ll pay you planetside’ and duck out on it
forever. The fun’s in raking all that cash into your pocket for real!”

“You willing to accept something other than cash
as a buy-in?” Cioran always had some sliver of mischief in his voice, but now that
sliver had expanded to something large enough to get impaled on.

“What? You’re going to put up your polylute?” Enid
drew back from him. “What’s the fun in that? It’d just find its way right back
to you, all the time we spend together. And you’re the only one who can
play
the damn thing.”

“I was thinking . . . ” Cioran ran a
hand under his mesh shirt and withdrew something I realized had been on a chain
underneath it—a pendant that could have fit comfortably on the face of one of Enid’s
coins. A black butterfly made of onyx slivers, chased and bound together with
platinum wire. I’d seen him wearing it before, on an armband or sometimes as a
choker.

For a moment Enid looked tempted—tempted enough at
least to let the butterfly rest on the pad of a finger and bring it close to
her eye. “Don’t I know this from somewhere?”

I ruined the guessing game. “It’s the logo of the
Transcendentalist League. Let me guess: Ulli left you with that as a parting
gift, but it brings up memories that are just
too
painful to—”

“Wrong and wrong!” Cioran’s nose wrinkled. “It was
a giveaway during one of their networking bashes, at which I threw an impromptu
concert. These little tchotchkes are normally as common as paired hydrogen. I
kept that particular one only because I had a feeling someday I could put it
into someone else’s hands.”

“And let them assume it was valuable
because
it came from your hands,” I said.

“Exactly!”

“Oh, very funny!” Enid flicked her hand at
Cioran’s face and made the butterfly bounce off his chin. “You have to stake
something
valuable
.”

“This
is
valuable! To wit: ‘Look what I got
from Cioran!’ Don’t tell me such statements carry no clout in this universe.”

I turned around and faced Kallhander, who was
standing directly behind me and trying hard not to make his normally distant
smile look not-so-distant. “You see what I have to put up with?” I said as the
haggling continued.

“Oh, I don’t envy you one bit,” he said, wearing
the very smallest of his already-small smiles.

Minus three minutes. Angharad stood up from her
meditation cycle, exhaled deeply twice, and joined the rest of us. The haggling
over who could bet what had wound down: Enid was willing to accept Cioran’s
table stakes, but only if he was willing to follow it up with actual cash when
his financial situation was a little less uncertain. “Whenever
that
is,”
Enid threw in a moment later.

“Now, now!” Cioran pointed fingers at her. “No
picking on a man’s credit rating. There are some things in everyone’s life that
are always beyond control.”

I faced Angharad. “I didn’t figure you for the
gambling type, but these two—” I indicated the others with a thumb. “—they’re
going to circulate everything they own between the two of them if they get a
chance.”

“Well.” Angharad considered this. “At least it
will give them a chance to be that much less attached to things.”

It took me a minute to realize she was kidding.
She could do a deadpan better than almost anyone I’d known. Enid got it after I
did, but she was still the first one to laugh.

At minus two minutes I saw the engine’s bottle had
already long passed its entanglement-harvesting quota. I enabled every display
surface in the cabin to show the outside of the ship, dimmed the lights, and
leaned back.

“And . . . poof,” I said, as the universe
outside changed.

Back before immigration to Bridgehead started,
you
could look at a satellite map of the planet and believe it was completely
uninhabited. The only lights visible during nighttime were aurorae, or the
occasional glitter in the ocean courtesy of a school of glowreys. Those
bioluminescent, squidlike amphibians were one of the many species used to seed
the planet after it had been properly terraformed centuries ago. They clustered
near the shorelines at night, departing only for deeper waters at dawn. Nowhere
had there been the speckled smears of light across continents that tipped off
visitors they were at a civilized world.

With their entire population originally numbering
somewhere in the mere thousands, the Bridgeheaders had untold amounts of space
at their disposal—and no need to create concentrated population centers to
support those lifestyles, either. CL kept them in touch with each other (that
is, when they bothered to talk to each other in the first place); protomic
harvesting and manufacturing provided them with everything they could ask for.
The only sign of life had been the orbital elevator and platform dock. Few
came; none left; none who came, stayed.

Finally, one fine day, the doors were kicked open from
the inside when the population of Bridgehead declined by exactly one.

His name was Attalal Tytali—age, two-hundred
fifty-one solar; occupation (inasmuch as Bridgeheaders had one), macrobotanic
phycollator; cause of death, “misadventure”—the single most common cause of
death amongst Highenders. Tytali had fallen off a balcony in his home
overlooking the ocean, and his friends were rather shocked to learn he had
nullified the backup-resurrection clause in his living will. If a Highender
didn’t kill herself outright, that was the next worse thing: it amounted to
allowing yourself to die for keeps the next time your body went kaput. It was
anyone’s guess if he
had
killed himself for real, and one surefire way
to no longer be invited to certain parties was to say something like
Say,
this suicide-by-null-backup stuff happens a lot more with you Highend guys than
you’d think; ever notice that?

The
other
provision in Tytali’s will that
made everyone clutch their pearls was what broke the dam on the immigration
deal. He had willed his entire holdings in the name of an off-world trust that
had been set up in the unlikely event someone on Bridgehead decided to sell
their land. In Tytali’s case, he’d outright donated it—on the condition that
the immigration policy was to be revisited every generation or so.

The new population cap started at one million. It
was filled within a solar week. Even after the imposition of a five-year
waiting list and a screening period to allow any one slot to be filled in the
first place, the demand didn’t flag. Even after the list of candidate émigré
worlds was narrowed to a mere dozen, the odds of landing a slot on Bridgehead
were lower than landing in the middle of a sun after an entanglement jump—but
the crowds still teemed outside the gates. A whole ready-made bureaucracy of
Formynxi had to be imported just to keep the paperwork flowing.

It wasn’t just the population cap that changed,
rising to over fifty million over the course of three generations. It was the
people themselves. Those who came were at first entirely Old Way, but almost
none of them stayed as such. These newly-minted Highend chafed all the more at
the one-child-per-couple limits—the whole reason they had come to Bridgehead
was so that their children could be blessed with the backups they’d never had.
But how else were they going to strike a balance between the next generation of
locals and the constant influx of new faces? It was a model a few other worlds
tentatively adopted, only to find themselves swamped and their population caps
blown out as well.

The Highend on Bridgehead soon found themselves
living an entirely different life as well. What had begun as mere make-work
provided by them—things to keep the new arrivals busy and grant them a sense of
being productive—had turned into real industries that the new arrivals, both
Old Way and non-practicing alike, took pride in. Glowrey fishing for those who
ate such things without qualms; protomic substrate production (a staple on
every world, to be sure, but with an aura of glamour here because of the
locale); at least one bespoke building-tailoring business of galactic repute; endless
little concerns that catered to the newfound whims of the original Bridgeheader
populace. These newly-arrived neighbors—serfs, to some—introduced them to the
pleasures of clothing that wasn’t protomic or didn’t come from
protomically-assisted manufacturing, of meals that had the immediate ingenuity
and invention of another human being behind them, of any number of luxuries
that now felt all the more like
luxuries.
Their efforts had a whole
world of human context behind them to give them a gravity and reality they
otherwise wouldn’t have.

After all those centuries of being near-gods unto
themselves, it was nice for them to have something like worshippers again. A
host of obedient archangels, at the very least. But now these gods were
flirting with two prospects: open
every
estate on Bridgehead to
off-world populations . . . or let the existing population fill those
estates instead and end the immigration experiment for keeps. The gates to
Heaven (or Elysium at least) were preparing to swing completely shut.

The ship had popped out
within nine
hours and change of Bridgehead. Enid won the bet and cheerfully wound the chain
for Cioran’s black butterfly around her upper arm.

After coming within an hour of orbit we were
flanked by escorts—pearlescent beachballs, each slightly too large to fit
inside the new
Vajra
’s hull. Since we had a valid visa and they’d been
expecting us, all we got was a nice, friendly escort to the orbital insertion
point and the elevator platform, instead of being worried to death by a dozen
other drones.

We didn’t get a second of peace, though. The
minute our presence was registered, we were bombarded with requests for
everything from an interview to a banquet. For the sake of everyone’s sanity,
mine especially, I had them all tabled until we were planetside and safely
tucked in.

Angharad didn’t seem to mind, though: “None of
these questions seem all that far out of gamut. It might also seem in our favor
if we provided them with answers to at least some of them before making
planetfall.”

“Are you up for doing that now?” I looked: she
didn’t seem too tired, but I had to ask.

“I should be. I have, after all, had days to
prepare for precisely this sort of thing. It would be best if I did not
hesitate.”

“You’re worried about losing your nerve?”

“I would say . . . I would not want to
find out too late that I have lost it.”

I had the
Vajra
produce a ’hat for her, and
extruded the privacy barrier around her couch all the way to the ceiling so she
could talk in peace. As she opacified the barrier, I realized I had more than half
a mind to follow her example, and so I dug back into the pile of invitations.
Right at the top was a name that I recognized: Anjai Navgary, Senior
Contributing Editor,
Morphic Journal.

Make that two names I recognized, the man and the
publication.
Morphic
had never lost readers by devoting space to me, and
Navgary had almost always been my point of contact with them. The last time I’d
talked to him had been while the threat of a lawsuit was still hanging over my
head. He’d tried to get me to go on the record about the whole thing and I
politely refused with something along the lines of
I suspect this wouldn’t
be good for either of us if I did.
He apologized, wished me well, and then
a month later sent me another tentative request for a discussion. I never
replied to it, but I never forgot that he asked—another stone in my shoe,
however small, that I told myself someday I’d shake out.

Anjai?
I sent back.
It’s good of you to
get in touch with me after all this time—sorry I haven’t been speaking to,
well, much of anyone recently, but I’ve been taking a few years to clear my
head
(and scrape all those layers of shit off my heels, I thought).
And
now that I’m involved in some very interesting work courtesy of Her Grace the
Kathaya XIV Angharad il-Jakaya—details to be announced in good time—it does
seem like the right moment for us to sit down and have a chat somewhere. I
can’t predict with any degree of accuracy what my schedule will be like until
we’re planetside, but . . .
I went on in this chatty vein for a
bit more than I needed to, but I wanted to declare the ice well and truly
broken between us, at least on my side. The rest of the guff awaiting my
attention could go hang, I told myself: if I got caught up with Anjai and was back
in something resembling good graces with him, that would be accomplishment
enough as far as the rest of the universe outside the crew of the
Vajra
was concerned.