Flight of the Vajra (50 page)

But all the same, sleep still didn’t come. Just as
I would be on the verge of nodding off, something in the back of my head would
kick in (automatically disabling the CL dampening) and I’d be lying in bed
staring at the ceiling once again. The third or fourth time it happened and I
found myself awake again, I could hear and feel the distant bustle of someone moving
around in the other room. Enid, I thought. It wasn’t that she’d woken me up—the
sense dampening would have prevented that—but rather, now that I was awake and
the dampening was off, I was all the more conscious of what sounded like
her
being awake and restless, and now that I knew that I wasn’t going to get any
sleep no matter what I did. (I always have the worst time sleeping when I know
someone else can’t, either.)

I CL-knocked on her link: “You awake?”

“I wish I wasn’t.”

“Same here. Come on out, the view’s gorgeous from this
side.”

I half-expected her to remind me that she could
savor the view through my own eyes if I let her, but a second later the door
between our rooms melded back and she plodded in, yawning and grabbing at her
hair in frustration.

“There’s drugs in the kitchenette,” she said, “and
I’m probably just going to take some myself.”

“That’s two of us,” I said.

She walked to the window and looked out at the
black-and-red night tide. “I was hoping Cioran would just come out and
tell
me what’s going on and save us all a trip or two. But it looks like the
original plan still holds. And besides—I
want
to know what he’s up to.
Even if I end up hating it.”

“In that case, I’ve got something for you. A whole
passel of somethings, actually.”

She turned, and in that moment I CLed her the
little archive of protomic programming I’d been gradually assembling for her
ever since she’d first hinted at wanting such a thing. That knocked all the
tired right out of her; she fairly put a dent in the ceiling with the one big
leap she made when she threw herself at me.

“Easy, easy,” I said. “I need the ribs
and
the spine.” Not only that, I thought, but being knocked back onto my bed by her
on top of me made for an uneasy feeling, to say the least. I righted both of us
and went on. “Take a look at what’s in the package—some of it may need a
walkthrough.”

“Well—” She looked. “Tom’s Toolkit doesn’t need
much of a walkthrough, if you ask me.”

“Point.”

Tom’s Toolkit, so named for the programmer who’d
concocted the original version, was a collection of add-ons for protomic
clothing and CLs. Most of them involved re-tooling (hence the name) what you
wore so that it could function as a variety of different sensor arrays. The
functionality for the Toolkit varied depending on what your clothes were
already programmed to do, whether or not you had substrate available to fuel
certain actions, and what sort of environment you were in, so your mileage
definitely varied. Protomic programmers (e.g., me) typically got the best results
from the Toolkit, because they had the most savvy for how to take what could be
harvested with it and make it useful with other stock routines. Most people had
a cut-down version of the Toolkit and didn’t even know it, since the full-blown
version would be total overkill for them, and constitute a possible security
issue besides.

“For needing a walkthrough, I’d say that more
about . . . the Escapist Mod.” I made a magic-trick gesture as I sent
that program her way as well.

She shouted me down with glee. “
The Escapist?!
You put the Escapist in there?”

“Shush! Remember the neighbors.”

Cosm alive, what a delight it was to watch her
face light up like that. Even when I knew full well you didn’t give just anyone
the Escapist and crossed your fingers and told them to go have a good time. A
mod like the Escapist—which allowed your body’s reflexes to be spiked at high
speeds and guided by machine intelligence to improve accuracy—might get you out
of a jam, but wouldn’t do anything for the torn ligaments or snapped bones you
might pile up in the process.-

“Have you ever used the Escapist?” I asked her.
Shake of the head. “But you know the basic idea?” Nod. “Good,” I went on, “because
then you also ought to know that you can mess yourself up
completely
with
it if you don’t know what you’re doing. Let it calibrate to you—you can do that
with your morning workout or something—and then
leave it alone.
Don’t
push it. Let it do the work when you need it. If you override it, you’re going
to end up breaking things you didn’t even know you had. It’s like the
instructions say, it’s for—”

“—for Emergency Use Only. Right.”

The glee I was harboring was interleaved with
guilt. Giving the Escapist to someone as physical as Enid—both naturally
physical and physical in a way that had required cultivation and training—was
like giving someone a pile of cash and saying
Now don’t go spending it all
in one place.
If she was going to do
anything
with the Escapist, it
would be to push it—and her—as far as she could go. I knew this, and yet I’d
given it to her anyway—which was why I’d added a wedge to it that would not
allow the Escapist to be fully uncorked unless we were in CL contact. She could
use it as-is, but there was no way she was going to take the safeties off
unless I was there.

“Did Kallhander know you had this?” she asked me.

“No.”

“What if he finds out?”

“By the time he finds out,
if
he finds out,
he’ll have his hands too full of other things to bug me about it. Having a copy
of the Escapist squirrelled away is going to be pretty dinky change compared to
other things. Besides, his job here is to protect us from outside threats, not each
other.”

She didn’t seem all that worried. I suspected she
was asking me just to see what kinds of answers I’d give her—and maybe then use
those same answers in turn on someone else if it came to it.

“Just two things to keep in mind,” I went on.
“First, they’re defensive only. No starting anything on your own. If anything
starts—”

“—then I run.”

“Right you are; you run your little ass off.
Second thing: they’re
yours
only. Nobody else gets to have them.”

“What if Cioran needs one of them?”

“I’m guessing he’s got all of this and more for
himself already—but if you ask me, I don’t think he’d ever bother. It’s always
been easier for him to talk his way out of something than punch, or even run.”

“What if I’m cornered,” she said, “and I can’t do
anything
except
punch?”

Worst case scenario time, I thought; she’s testing
the water to see what might be swimming there. “Then you punch—but at the same
time, you yell good and loud. I plan on making myself handy if it looks like
you’re being backed against a wall. —And before you say something clever like
‘I can take care of myself’, I know perfectly well you can. I’m saying
I
can take care of you, too, if it comes to it.”

She didn’t give me an answer—not in words, anyway.
She just gave me a hug, and held it for a good long moment, long enough for me
to return the hug.

She’s getting comfortable doing that, I thought. Well,
so am I.

At what amounted to eight a.m. solar time
(closer to the 10th local hour), I threw myself out of bed, into a shower, and
back into my clothes in preparation for meeting with Anjai Navgary.

I wasn’t expecting to see anyone from our party by
the time I was dry and fully dressed. I didn’t see Angharad or Kallhander; both
of them had left for the conference center, housed in a different part of the
same general parcel of land as the villa. If this had been an all-Highend
conference I suppose everyone would have just stayed put in their rooms and
CLed in, but someone (could have been Angharad herself, for all I knew) had
insisted on some degree of personal presence for the meeting. History was on
her side: you did get more done that way.

I would have been fine with leaving my room and
joining Anjai somewhere, even if I had Ioné or some other guard tailing me
around.
No, you don’t have to go that far
, Anjai replied, not understanding
my meaning.
I’ll connect to you whenever you’re ready.
I decided to
compromise: I’d take a walk around the complex, as that way I wouldn’t need a
chaperone, and let Anjai connect to me as needed. That way I could satisfy at
least some of my wanderlust without making him feel like he was being dragged
somewhere out of his way.

Outside, in the little atrium in front of the
villa, was a cobblestone-paved traffic circle surrounding a multi-level
fountain. Water sprayed up from its center and washed down across various
ever-evolving protomic glass (Type B) blades. I parked myself next to that
contraption—it caught the sun beautifully—and groaned when Anjai attempted to
connect to me and was rebuked with a warning: THE RECIPIENT OF THIS CONNECTION
IS WITHIN A RESTRICTED AREA. SENSORY RELAY WILL BE LIMITED TO PREVENT SECURITY
HAZARDS. Sterile zone, indeed. I poked around in the welcome packet I’d been given
and found that the
whole damn area
had been “sanitized” like this. All
inbound connections were going to have no more interactivity than two-way
voice. I had half a mind to walk outside somewhere and continue, but Anjai rang
me back:
I’m shorter on time than I’d like today. Shall we just make it
voice-only?

—As long as you don’t mind, I don’t mind.

“Hello, Henré,” Anjai said at last.

The sound of his gentlemanly, oboe-toned voice put
an unexpected smile on my face. “How’ve
you
been?” I said, in a way I
hoped was just as suave. “You’re now running the whole shooting match at
Morphic
.
Last time we talked, you were high up on the pole but not that high.”

“My good work has paid off,” he said. “Miqual’s
retired, and there was at that point only one person he trusted with the
operation, which was me. I’d wanted to inherit the position anyway, so there
were no regrets on either side.”

“What’s Miqual up to these days?”

“Not far from where you left off, actually. He’s a
consultant to one of the protomic-assembly firms that deals in industrial-grade
to planetary-scale work. I hear from him maybe twice a solar year but he has no
regrets.”

“As long as he’s not involved in any hopelessly
over-schedule terraforming projects.”

“Actually, he’s slated to take over one of those
and get it back
on
schedule. I did what any sane man would do when hearing
such a thing: I wished him all the luck that could be had.”

“How has it been going?”

“I’m overdue to hear from him. I suspect he’s
either happy in his work or so demoralized he can’t speak of it.”

He tried to laugh at his joke, and I laughed with
him, but I knew too much about such tarpit projects to find it all that funny.

 “Let’s start with what I hope is an easy
question,” Anjai said, all business once again. “What brought you back out of
retirement?”

“The Kathaya.”

“Can you be more specific about how she did that?”

“The sheer force of her ebullient personality.
—Okay, okay.” He was laughing, but I decided the joke could only go so far. “She
approached me back when we were both on Cytheria. I didn’t even know she was
going to be in town when I landed; it wasn’t intentional on my part. But she
asked to meet me—somehow word had gotten around I was there, too—and the next
day I was sitting knee-to-knee with her. I didn’t think for a minute that
anything important would come from that.”

“And yet here you are.”

“And yet here I am. Exactly. It wasn’t any one
thing that did it, either. That first conversation was the knock on the door.
Then came the whole business with the coup—”

“How was it that she ended up in your
safekeeping?”

“Luck. Me being in the right place at the right
time. But I’m not sure I believe entirely in luck. I had my suspicions
something
was going to happen, so I put myself in a position where I could choose to get
involved. Before long I realized, yes, I’m going to have to make that choice.
I’m just glad I was able to choose the right thing.”

There’s only so much of a story like this you can
tell someone who wasn’t there from the beginning, especially when the chips
still haven’t finished falling. And there was only so much of it that Anjai was
willing to buy, too: How about the IPS officers? How did they get involved? Was
that you tipping your hand as well? No, said I, they made a good case for their
presence with us. I didn’t want them along, but I realized we were better
served by having them close at hand . . . And so on, with me
strategically leaving out details like the deal cut between me and the
officers, or
anything
about Angharad’s long-term (or not-so-long-term
plans).

I got sick pretty quickly of just standing around
near the fountain—it was picturesque, but I’m built to move; some part of me is
always restless, as Cavafy himself had once accused me. The only other people
in sight were a couple of women who looked like low-level retinue for one of
the other diplomats; based on the stink coming from their smoking apparatus,
they were probably Nevaldini. Nevaldine tobacco has all the aesthetic appeal of
burning hair, with tobacco itself (“The Weed That Could Not Be Weeded Out”) routinely
brought up as yet another example of why the Old Way ought to be renamed the
Dead End. I smiled in their direction; they said hello mostly by blowing fumes my
way, which persuaded me all the more I didn’t want to be downwind of them. At
least if I go outside the compound, I told myself, I can feel that much more
like I’m having a
conversation
with Anjai.

The gate resembled an oversized revolving door
made of interlocking C-shaped protomic glass barriers, and it took a good minute
to get through it since it revolved so slowly. Once outside, though, Anjai
popped into view next to me, matching me stride for stride. People rarely
changed much physically these days: he didn’t even have any extra gray in his
close-cropped, honey-colored hair. Compact, boyish (right down to the spring in
his step), he had the bright-eyed, fresh-faced look of someone who was easy to
underestimate. An Old Way could be forgiven if he looked at Anjai and didn’t
see a few decades of experience, but he’d notice it in the way Anjai put the
screws to me all the harder now that we were able to see each other.

“Look. How is it,” he went on, “that someone who
has no experience in diplomacy per se, no direct dealings with the Kathaya or
the Achitraka, none of that—how is it that someone of such a stature gets
welcomed into her inner circle, is appointed part of her staff—”

“It’s a
pro tem
appointment.”

“
Pro tem
or not, it’s still an appointment.
You’re part of her staff, you’re part of her advisorship—and she hasn’t even
taken any of the high-ranking Achitraka prelates with her on this mission—”

“That’s because she’s trusting them to keep all
the wheels turning back at home.”

“—How is it possible? That’s all I’m asking. How
did you enter into such a position of profound trust with her in so short a
time? You can’t imagine such things
won’t
turn heads.”

I waited a couple more steps before speaking. If
nothing else, I thought, it’s a beautiful day to hang myself with my own words.

“The two of us spent more time together, in close
custody, than either of us intended to,” I said. “The trip out from Cytheria to
Kathayagara—we didn’t act like ‘Angharad il-Jakaya’ and ‘Henré Sim’. We were
just two people who’d barely beaten a retreat from death. And, well, nearly
getting killed has a way of stripping the pretenses out of everything. You
share that with someone and it creates something between the two of you that
isn’t matched by
any
thing else.”

Anjai stepped in front of me. It’s funny how
knowing full well you can’t collide with someone who’s just a CL projection
doesn’t keep you from flinching. I flinched and found him looking me up and
down as if trying to admit to something terrible.

“Henré—off the record, here—I can’t get over the
feeling the two of you are involved.”

It’s a good thing the slightest change in
expression registers through a CL avatar. I overdid it without trying, though:
I gave Anjai a stare that would have spoiled meat.

“Oh, god, Anjai. Not this again,” I said. “I
already waded through all this the last time I had a press conference, and the
answer was no.”

“Let’s frame it from an outsider’s point of view,”
he went on. “You have two people, one of whom is a supreme pontiff with untold
influence and importance. The other is as quotidian in his concerns as the
first is not, but has been no less capable a politician when he wanted to be.
They meet, and within days the latter has been accepted into the deepest inner
circles of the former. What would this seem like to you? To me—I can’t see it
as being anything other than a relationship, a deeply emotional relationship.
Not a business venture, not a strategic collaboration—an emotional attachment.”

I kept on staring. “Anjai—for cosm’s sake! I’m not
in
love
with her. Respect is a dif—”

“All right, try it this way. Maybe
she
loves
you
,”
he said, each word creating its own separate incision in me.

I wasn’t even staring
after Anjai said
that. I just stood there with my clouded-over eyes pointed in his general
direction as he kept talking.

“Either way,” he admitted, “I’m speculating. But
I’m basing my speculation on simple facts. People, especially people in such
sensitive and pivotal positions, don’t allow strangers such unprecedented
access and trust to their lives. Not unless a mitigating circumstance exists.
From all I’ve seen, the most common mitigating circumstance for such things,
when it isn’t pressure, is emotional attachment.”

“And you know this entirely from the outside, how?”
I was too stunned to sound vehement. In person he might barely have heard me at
all.

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, Henré. Some
people in positions of power lack emotional connections of a kind that others
take for granted. The very power they wield ensures that others are unable to
relate to them any other way except as a power object. When someone does relate
to them as a human being and not merely a power object, an unexpected degree of
attachment often develops in either direction. Sometimes both.”

Oh, I thought. “You finishing a psych thesis?”

“My husband, actually. He did some valuable work
in this area. He was the one who suggested something like this might be going
on.”

“You and Pendarvis still married, then?”

He nodded. “It’s always been a fruitful relationship
for both of us. And as far as your relationship goes, it’s not something I’m
going to speak of anywhere outside of this. I said off the record, I meant it.”

“Thank you.” Again, barely a mumble.

Anjai looked deflated. “I’m sorry to have brought
it up.”

“No, but at the same time you do know me slightly
better than casually, even if we haven’t said a word in years.” I took the
harder tack I should have used in the first place. “Anjai—what if I think
you’re wrong?”

“Because of specific evidence, or because you
would rather me not be right?”

He never sounds like he’s screwing me to the wall,
I thought. Apologetic. A little sad. The kind of winsome curiosity that allows
him to do this for a living, that allows him to invent and dispense such vast
theories about people and even get away with it all.

“I was going to say,” I said, “earlier, that I
doubt what exists between us is anything like that. It’s more a sense of mutual
respect. She’s found someone with whom she can collaborate to create something
new. My skills, my personality, my outlook on thing—something about that whole
package got her attention, I think.
Useful
. That’s it: she sees me as
useful. And for once I don’t mind being of use.”

“For what?”

“This bridge we’re trying to get built here, at
this conference. And maybe other things after that, but that’s something you’d
have to ask her about.”

“Do you think she would talk to me about these
things?”

“After the conversation we just had, you think I’m
going to let her feed some pet theory of yours about us? I’m sorry, but you’re
on your own with that one.”

“I apologize, Henré. But you’re right—I have known
you better than casually for a long time. And I can’t deny what I see.
Especially now that I’ve seen for myself the way you speak about her.”

I was tempted to can the connection. No, don’t
hang up on him, I told myself. That’s just going to make things an order of
magnitude worse.

 “Whenever you talked about Biann,” Anjai went on,
his voice quieter, “you always wore the same sort of face. And I never saw you
appear that way for anyone or anything else, until now. I don’t know from which
direction this started, but
—”
Anjai
was even more hushed now, even if that didn’t mean a thing in CL-space. “—the
two of you should defend what you have, at all costs.”