Flight of the Vajra (64 page)

—
Henré
, Kallhander CLed.
I
saw the details Mylène forwarded you. I take it you share her view that what we
see might not be confined to that one building.

If he had been prodding me to be blunt, it worked.

—Kallhander, I think we need to get everyone
out of the meeting and suspend talks indefinitely.

The pause that followed was the longest one I
could remember ever having in a CL with Kallhander.

—
That will be impossibly disruptive—

—
And if the twinge in my gut is telling me
anything, we’re sitting on something a whole order of magnitude more
“disruptive” than a botched diplomatic summit! —Look, just get them out of
there for the day. Find an excuse to suspend everything early.

—
Henré, if there is something as grave as you
suggest—and I have no reason to believe there isn’t—it might be best to keep
them right where they are. The conference center may well be the safest place
in the entire city right now.

I looked back over at Mylène. —
You know
. . . why don’t we let the resident infrastructure expert weigh in on
that? She’s of the opinion that tampering is going on in places we refuse to
believe tampering could go on in. But go easy on her, okay? She’s only going to
talk to you because I vouched. From everything I’ve gathered one of the reasons
she’s been so tightlipped is not just because she doesn’t want to waste energy
on her superiors because they think she’s socially maladaptive; it’s because for
some things, she hates being right.

I looped Mylène in. Her turn to make an excuse to
the others and step aside. It was somewhat comforting to know there were only
so many things a Highend could do at once, too—at least, a Highend of her
particular stature.

—
I’m running an infrastructure cross-check on
the summit building now,
Mylène CLed to both of us. Tones of voice in CL do
not come across as such, but their essence is still conveyed, and Mylène
sounded downright dismal.
Nothing out of the ordinary in the logs or in the
live sensors, at least not at a glance. I’ll map all this against the
building’s reference design—if something is genuinely askew, we’ll know about
it that way. It might take a few, though.

—
Do it right rather than fast,
I Cled.

—But the faster the better, I’m sure.

No argument there.

I CLed Kallhander directly: —
Arsèni? I forgot
to ask about him earlier.

—
He still hasn’t talked. If he is still silent
by this evening, they’ll begin procedures to replay his backup.

—
That’s not going to help and you know it.
Anything they get out of him could take weeks to unscramble. By that time
. . .

—I know, and I agree. I would rather see
Angharad attempt to have him talk again first. But if Mylène finds nothing of
note, we have one less excuse to break up the goings-on. We may have to invent
a plausible excuse and then attribute it after the fact to being overly
cautious.

—Part of me hopes she
does
find
something. The problem with making things up is you can never tell in advance
how your tiny little fiction is going to overlap with great big reality.

—Gentlemen!
Mylène CLed.
I have
something. Small, but it’s something. There’s a minor back-pressure fluctuation
in the protomic substrate feed exchange for the summit building. Minor but
measurable. It doesn’t mean there’s a problem
in
the building, though,
but it might mean something going on
nearby
.

Me:
—And there’s our excuse.

Kallhander:
—I’ll have the event hall cleared.

Mylène:
We’re also going to need to send some
warm bodies down into the exchange to scope it out firsthand, and see if they
can trace things back manually. It’ll be slow, but I really don’t want to find
out all this is because of a dead sensory surface. Or because a dead sensory
surface wasn’t telling us what we needed to know. —Actually, while we’re at it,
I’m sending out amended invitations for tonight’s get-together. I thought I’d
start things a little sooner.

Kallhander: —
It’s their choice if they wish to
attend, of course, but I think they would be safest back in their rooms.

Me: —
Mylène, no offense, but I’m with him. What’s
the harm in letting them all go back and get some rest?
Except for
Angharad, I thought, although Mylène’s doing a fine job of becoming just as big
an overachiever.

Mylène: —
Let me put it this way, gentlemen. If
there’s one building on the face of the planet whose security and
infrastructure I trust and would stake my career on, it’s this one.

You can’t really exchange glances with someone in
CL—at least not unless you’re avatared to each other—but you can do a dandy
simulation of it. Kallhander and I CL-blinked at each other.

Mylène: —
If something is indeed being hatched, whoever’s
responsible may well try and bring it here, to me and my guests. And that’s not
going to happen as long as I’m still walking around and metabolizing. Plus,
this gives us some stopgap time to make sure the villas and the other sensitive
spots in the city also haven’t been compromised. They can party here while
having their suites swept.

Kallhander: —
I’ve contacted planetside
authority. They strongly recommend allowing an IPS detachment to be present
during the festivities. I imagine they made a case for such a thing before, but
now they have twice as much of one.

Pause, during which I could sense Mylène’s
synapses grinding against each other.

Me: —
I don’t know about you, Mylène, but even
I
have to admit: if you’re in power and you can’t trust IPS, maybe you shouldn’t
be in power.

Mylène nodded, but still didn’t say anything. It
only hit me much later how I should have wondered about that.

As far back as I can remember,
I always
took for granted the idea that the more time you spend with a given circle of
people, the more you think like them. At first it’s nothing more than not
wanting to be everyone’s least favorite party pooper. Over time, though, it
becomes something more insidious, as you find yourself agreeing not only in
word but in spirit to things that either would have never crossed your mind before
or been hastily dismissed if they did.

I knew I’d been hanging out with cops for too long
when the next question I had to Kallhander was: —
Is there any way I can
patch into the conversation between Angharad and Arsèni?

—
She would have to wear a ‘hat in order for you
to remain in contact with her,
Kallhander CLed.
Arsèni seems only
willing to talk to her because of her inherent lack of CL.

—I’m not going to go through her. Just through
the room’s sensory surfaces so I can hear what’s going on and don’t have to
wait for it. Or through you as a relay, since you’ve got access to all that in
the first place.

—
That last would be most feasible. To be
honest, I wonder why you hadn’t asked earlier.

—I can only jettison so many of my scruples at
once, Kallhander. Keep me posted as soon as she’s in there and talking.

I disconnected and felt a bleary wave of
disorientation, like I’d missed the bottom step of a staircase. Too much
switching in and out of CL-space—or staying in it for too long—will do that to
you. Worse yet is when you start losing track of whether you’re in or out of
it. I wasn’t that bad yet, but I was teetering on the edge of it.

The entire house had started to prepare itself for
the arrival of guests as soon as Mylène had rung off. The pool glowed both underneath
and above the water’s surface, and at the bottom of the shallow end I could see
the faint metallic glitter of rescue mesh that would lift to the surface anyone
who fell in. The kitchen fired up, the windows canted open to let the minty
afternoon air cross-ventilate through the house, and Mylène’s pet lynx Diamond
yawned cavernously and padded out from her little enclave under the wet bar at
the back of the main room. I knelt down and let Diamond snort at my fingers;
she brushed the underside of my hand with the fronds at the tips of her ears
and went to look for someone else to suss out.

“Long time no see to you too, Diamond,” I said, straightening
up and letting her brush against and then briefly encircle my legs.

“Diamond the Third, actually.” Mylène had fetched
herself a drink, wherever she actually was. “She was spawned from the same gene
mix as I and II, although I couldn’t bring myself to do a copy-dump for those
two, or for this one. Each one of them deserves to be her own person—well, animal.
So that’s why she doesn’t recognize you; she’s wasn’t replayed from any of her
predecessor sisters’ backups.”

“And proud of it, sounds like,” Enid said. She’d
been standing near an endtable that had started delivering snacks a moment
earlier, and was now trying to fit her mouth around the corner of a very
thickly-stuffed onion bun. That got cut short when Diamond wandered over to her
and tickled the backs of her legs with his tail; she shrieked with glee and
almost spat her food in my direction.

“Have you seen the fields out back?” Marius asked
her. “It’s beautiful; you can walk for hours. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Enid nodded a yes and followed him through the
house, although as she did so her CL link came alive: —
He’s been trying to
get me to walk around with him ever since you took that CL. I’m going to go
with him but I’m leaving this link open for you.

—That might get a little hard to follow on my
end when Angharad starts talking with our friend in the holding pen. You think
Marius is coming on to you or something?

—If he is, I’m not complaining. He’s cute
and
smart, and he asked all the right questions when I started talking about my own
career.
The view from her eyes became briefly overwhelmed with sunlight as
they stepped out the back door and onto a cobbled footpath that mushroomed up
under their feet from the grass as they took each step.
You get the feeling
there’s something between him and his mom they’re not talking about?

—There’s something like that between every
parent and child if you dig far enough. I know I have any number of examples
from both my father and my daughter. I’m betting it’s the same on your end.

—Oh, sure. But this—this feels like something
recent
.
Like they both just had a fight about something and they’re trying to make up
for it by being lovey-dovey in front of people.

I had to give her a little more credit each time I
turned around. She had a sense about people that Highend folks either pretended
was a formula (and thus none of their business), or didn’t have much of a sense
of at all. She just has to make sure it doesn’t run away with her, I told
myself.

I had to ask her:
—All that stuff you came up
with while you were talking to Marius—where did that come from?

—Where do you think it came from? You hang
around Angharad long enough, you hear stuff like that.

—But did you actually believe it?

—I still believe it now. I guess that means I
believed it when I said it.

The field out back was unfenced, and not because
any property lines were virtual. It was simply that big. Enid buttoned her
jacket so it wouldn’t flap loose and snag on anything, and she followed Marius closely
as he waded out into the tall grass. I let the scent of grasses that Enid
brushed under her nose (it tickled) provide a warm bed for the other riot of aromas
that were now starting to fill the house from the kitchen. The sun was still
high and I felt Enid’s face and scalp and forearms warmed by it, but the earthy
air that ran along the tops of the grasses was cool against her ears.

“When we first came to Bridgehead,” Marius said,
“Mother would bring me out into this field and we’d run around after each other
until I could barely even breathe anymore. I was used to having a lot of room,
but it was all protomic spaces of one kind or another. ‘Nature in your lungs,
Nature between your toes,’ Mother used to say. ‘It’ll be good for both of us.’Stuff
like that.”

Behind them I could hear Diamond padding into the
grass as well.

“Took some getting used to?” Enid said. She turned
and confirmed with her eyes what I had sensed through her ears: Diamond was
keeping pace with them.

“At first Mother would say things like, ‘This is
all important for reasons you won’t understand right now,’ and so on. And of
course at the time I didn’t know what she meant, didn’t
want
to know
what she meant. I got a little older, and she would start citing the reasons
for why it was important—and I’d say to myself, ‘But those reasons are all
things you don’t need to go through all that trouble for. I know this
now
.
How come you’re so much older than me and you
still
don’t know this?’
But I never came out and said it at the time.”

The grass gradually shortened and gave way to a cleared
field, at the far end of which was a single thick-trunked sycamore, its bark
peeling like mud drying on skin. At about head height its base cleaved three
ways, creating a seat big enough for the two of them to sit in with room to
spare. The branches reached far out enough to spread shade a good three meters
in all directions.

“This tree was transplanted here with the house,”
Marius went on. “Mother wanted one like it because it reminded her of what she
had near where her genofather lived.”

“Wait, she knew him?”

I shared Enid’s curiosity. It was rare for a
Highend heterogamete sponsor to be introduced to his own offspring, but not impossible.
Most of them were schooled out of it to keep from getting too involved in their
own progeny. You only reproduced because you had to, and you only reproduced
that way when you had to—if, for instance, you wanted to repay someone socially.
Mylène had reproduced because she wanted to, and from what I could see the
desire hadn’t been mere frivolity.

Marius nodded. “Her biomother introduced them when
she was around my age, or so she told me. They were friendly. She wanted to do
the same thing with my genofather, but I said no. I said no when I was young, I
said no when I was repro-certified, and I’m still saying no. She still brings
it up, though: ‘Aren’t you even a little curious about—?’ ‘No, Mother.’ ‘All
right, then.’ And then a year later it happens all over again.”

Enid: —
Remember what I said about feeling like
something had happened between them?

Me: —
You think this is it?

Enid: —
I don’t know if this is
it
, but
it’s close enough in my book.
Out loud: “My father and I have a kind of a
strange relationship, too. Not like yours, though.”

“You being Old Way, that makes all the
difference.”

“Even outside of that. Well, because of that, too,
but not the way you might think.”

She explained it for him as they hoisted
themselves up into the crotch of the tree, then leaned back to look at all the
little pieces of the sky that could be seen between the leaves. I almost forgot
that I’d meandered outside the house and parked myself by the pool while they
had been talking. The sun reflecting off the water felt wonderful on my face,
and it mingled with the same patches of sun that came down from between the
branches to touch Enid’s skin.

“I wonder what exactly I’m going to find when I
finally see him again,” she said. “I wonder if I should even call it ‘Dad’.
It’s frightening, really. There’s something that’s alive, and still has his
face and his body, and even his name, but it’s not something I’d call ‘him’. Is
Dad really still in there?” I felt in her throat and mouth how she was about to
say more, but she stopped herself.

“That right there is part of why I decided I
didn’t want to meet my genofather,” Marius said. “Because I couldn’t think of a
single thing it would give me that mattered. He ought to know full well he’s
not obliged to receive my attention, either, so I’m not worried about thinking
that I’ve spurned him. Our lives are our own.”

“You think maybe my father would think the same
thing?” Enid said. She did a fine job of making that sound regretful.

“Maybe he has. What’s wrong with that? Isn’t it
possible that all this is something he really did want? Never mind how he went
about arriving at that conclusion. But you’re not the girl he left behind, and
he’s not the father that would have been there for you. Not anymore, at least.”

“I’d still like to at least try and see what
happens.”

“Of course. But imagine this.” Marius’s words came
slowly, like an encroaching dusk. “You finally reach him, you and the Kathaya,
and you find that he really
has
become that shell. You break open the
shell and there’s nothing inside. All that’s left is the shell you were so obsessed
with. Do you then just turn around and leave? That’s what you tell yourself now,
but I’ve seen how it’s not like that. It wasn’t like that with my mother; she
can’t let go of some things at all. There’s always hope that she’ll wake up one
morning and it’ll be different. And she’s always wrong about that, but all being
wrong does is convince her she’s not going about all this the right way. Time
and again I tell her, however I can: Mother, this won’t change. Only
you
really change.”

My flinch became Enid’s as Marius parked his hand
on her bare forearm. Except Enid’s own response wasn’t a flinch; it was a wave
of goosebumps.

“I was enjoying the way you talked about all the
things you wanted to do and were already doing,” Marius went on. “I don’t see
you giving up on all those things.”

“I don’t plan to.”

“No. But you also shouldn’t feel torn if it comes
to that. No one in this life should ever feel they are wrong for turning their
back. If he makes his choices, so should you. And if his choices don’t include
you, then why should yours include him?”

Diamond reached up along the trunk of the tree and
arched out her meter-and-change-long body. Between my fingers, the water in the
pool felt warm, but I wondered how much of that was the sun and how much was
the heating filament that threaded through the water, which would withdraw as
soon as something big enough to be a body entered it.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Enid said.

“I said it before. I
like
you. I heard
about you when you first arrived with the Kathaya’s party. Everything I’ve seen
firsthand about you so far, I like a great deal. You have an attitude I see in
few enough places as it is, whether Highend or Old Way. You
want
something. So many other people just seem happy to . . .
inherit
something instead. To receive it passively instead of reaching out for it. I
wish more people were like that. Every time I meet someone like that, I feel I
have to say something about it.” He took his hand away and looked down at the
ground, and (I guessed) at Diamond sharpening her claws on a protruding root.

“Someone like that?” I could feel Enid smiling.
“You mean ‘someone like me’, right? Or is it more that you’ve never really met
anyone like me?”

Marius was having trouble looking her in the eye
when he raised his head again. Enid’s glee at evoking such a feeling in a young
man flooded through me.

He finally looked all the way back up and said, “Have
you ever met anyone like me, either?”

I never caught Enid’s answer. It was drowned out as
Kallhander connected to me and fed me the link from inside Arsèni’s
interrogation room.