Flight of the Vajra (65 page)

With protomics,
you can sculpt just
about any surface you want: frills, herringbone patterns, even “smooth”
surfaces that are actually replicas of natural materials like fine-grained wood
or polished stone. That makes an empty, blank-walled room all the more
unnerving.

I suspect the designers of the interrogation room
had that in mind when they made every single surface in it designed to reflect
only just enough light to be seen. The only real features in the room are the sensor
arrays that showed up as faint dot patterns on the walls, and those only showed
up when you looked away from them slightly. The light seems to come from
everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Your gaze roves, looking for something
to latch onto, but it just slides about, and soon you find yourself looking at
nothing but the face of the person a mere meter or so in front of you. That all
this was being fed to me through the many-eyed surrogate sight of a room’s
sensory surfaces only made it harder to take.

The middle of the room was divided by a single
transparent sheet of protomic, zero-reflectivity ghostglass. On one side,
Angharad; on the other, Arsèni. Both sat in one-piece chairs that had been
extruded from the floor. Hers had back support; his did not, to discourage relaxation.

Somewhere, behind all this, Enid was telling Marius,
If I have met someone like you before, I can’t remember—but you leave an
impression, that’s for sure.

“Hello again, Mr. Dragoji,” Angharad said.

“Ma’am.”

I wasn’t able
to imagine Arsèni calling Angharad
Your Grace
.

“The powers that be, as it were, originally were
skeptical about allowing me to visit you,” she went on. “They believed nothing
would come of it. You were able to prove them wrong.”

Marius: —
Is that what you look for, Enid? People
who leave an impression?

Arsèni: “What d’you mean, me? You’re the one who
came here ‘n the first place.”

Angharad: “But you chose to respond to my
presence. You chose to speak to me, where before you said nothing. Why was
that?”

Enid: —
It isn’t that I go looking for them. I
think it’s more like, I leave the door open for them more than I would anyone
else. They see the door open, they walk on in . . .

Arsèni frowned. “Gotta imagine, they don’t like
you
very much either, do they? Last I heard you’re—” He held up a hand and tilted
it, as if diagramming something sliding downhill. “—losing favor?”

Marius: —
They come in, and you decide you like having
their company?

Enid: —
Exactly!

“You made a similar point the last time we spoke,”
Angharad said. “And I replied that said decline was true, but it was not
something I intended to simply let happen. I came here to Bridgehead as part of
that larger mission to do something about that.”

“You want to know what to do about it?” Arsèni
leaned in a bit. “No ‘fense, but you ought to just let it die. Every time
people talk about the Old Way, it’s the same thing: it isn’t the Old Way, it’s
just
in the way.
”

I wasn’t expecting Angharad to laugh at that, but
she did. Primly, with her fingers over her mouth. I think Arsèni was only
marginally less surprised than I was.

Marius: —
I have to admit, when I learned about
you being in the company of the Kathaya, and Mr. Sim, and Cioran—where’s
Cioran, anyway? I thought he would have come with you?

Enid: —
He’s taking the day off. Yesterday left
him kind of rattled.

Marius: —
Well, when I learned about you being
in that group, I started to think about the dynamic of the group as a whole.
It’s another part of my thesis submission, about heterostratic social dynamics.
That’s when you have a group made up of people who represent different levels of
human advancement, and not just thrown together but conscious of their
closeness.
He knotted his fingers into each other.

Enid: —
Together by choice.

Marius: —
Exactly.

Every time I tried to come up with an excuse to
tune them out, I voted it down.

“Forgive me,” Angharad said, “I am not laughing at
you. The joke you referred to has come my way more times than I can count, and
for some reason each time I hear it I do find it unaccountably funny. The other
Achitraka find nothing funny in it, and I think that is because I believe
something they do not: that there are some things that must be laughed at
because
we take them so seriously. And the reverse as well—that there are many things
worth taking seriously that it would never cross our minds to do so. I chose to
visit you and hear out your plight for that reason.”

“I already talked too much last time. I’m not
cuttin’ deals.”

Marius: —
Most of the time, people stay in the
strata, the level of advancement, that they’re comfortable with. That’s usually
the same one they were engendered in. Now, some people leave that comfort zone
by choice, and my thesis is partly about why they do that. The first big reason
is that they’re looking for something, consciously or not, that simply being
with their peers won’t provide them with. What they want, whatever it is, can’t
be satisfied that way. They see the risk of being rejected by their regular
peers, or the risk of being spurned by the new peers they’re trying to make, as
being more potentially fruitful than the immediate rewards of staying put. So
they seek out,
without realizing it,
others who are equally
self-displacing. The long-term reward for them doing so is being able to create
an entirely new,
vertical-form
strata, one that transcends all the
horizontal strata they’ve been scaling, either upwards or downwards.

“The police expected nothing from you in that
vein,” Angharad said. “They were prepared to learn what they could from you and
then proceed from there, with or without your conscious aid. And I felt it my
duty to argue against that. I did this knowing full well you would reject such
help, Mr. Dragoji. But I did not do it because I imagined you would be grateful
for having someone speak for you. I did not do it for you alone, just as I do
not inhabit this seat and wear these robes for the sake of any one person, or
hundred people, or billion. The principle I embody commanded it. For them to
create a copy of you, from your own memory, so that it might tell them
everything you know, is against everything I claim to represent. I knew full
well I had to say this even if the face of your scorn.”

“Well,” Arsèni said, “then you’re even dumber than
I thought you were.”

Enid: —
So you’re saying, this whole thing that
exists between the bunch of us follows that pattern you’re talking about.

Marius: —
That’s what it seems like to me. You
can see why I’m curious about all of you.

Enid: —
But that’s just a convenient way to be
curious about
me
, right?

Marius: —
You like that idea?

Enid: —
I’ve never had anyone flatter me
that
way, that’s for sure.

They both warm up fast to being teased, I thought.

“Is
this
how you plan on fixin’ things up?”
Arsèni went on. “Stick your neck out for people who just hate your guts for
bothering? Save that stuff for suckers who’ll actually thank you and then cry
when you want them to. —That’s what the
real
problem is right there,
isn’t it? It’s not about help. You just want to sleep nights knowing you did
‘the right thing’. You know how you help people? You give them what they need
to stand up and walk away. And then you turn your back on ‘em, because
otherwise they’ll just limp right on back to you! But you—that happens to you
all the time, I bet. And you don’t even think there’s anything wrong with it,
do ya? No, you just think that’s a sign you’re on the right track.”

He raised a fist and bashed the edge of the table
with it, and it was just then that I noticed it wasn’t a fist, just a flat
hand. Every single one of Arsèni’s protomic-prosthetic fingers were missing.
Probably confiscated when they arrested him, along with all of his other
gimmicks.

“You were right about one thing,” he went on, “you’re
just a woman. Nothing special about you except the fact that you’ve got a title
and a lotta people who take you seriously.”

“Although,” Angharad said, “sometimes that by
itself is enough.”

Marius: —
Is it a different kind of flattery
that you’re used to?

Enid: —
I’ll tell you this. Being with Henré and
his friends, it’s the first time I was ever with a group that I didn’t
work
for where people weren’t constantly bugging me to “do that thing”. And then I’d
get applause for that thing, whatever it was, which I guess was their idea of
flattering me. Henré and Angharad actually treat me like a
person
and
not a pet that can do tricks.

Funny she didn’t mention Cioran here, I thought. Especially
since her now words had been a play on the ones he’d said to her:
Enid,
you’re the first person I’ve met in a long time whose first words to me weren’t
“Play that song”.

“When I contacted the officers responsible for
your case,” Angharad said. “I made the argument that replaying your backup would
be a waste of time, that instead it would be best to appeal to you directly.
And from what I have seen—” She leaned in, which in that tiny room only made
Arsèni squirm despite the glass between them. “—I strongly suspect this
environment is to blame for your reticence. A man cannot help but behave a
certain way when he is enclosed within walls.”

“Wh—” For moments on end Arsèni could only laugh
out little pieces of words. “What makes you think I
want
to get out of
here? I’m probably safer in here than any of you are out there!”

“Why would ‘any of us’ be unsafe out here?”

Arsèni only hesitated for a second, but after that
second he flung himself at the barrier between him and the other woman, then
slumped to the floor as his CL-tap kicked in. Guards in the ribbed black of
low-level IPS enforcers entered and dragged him out like a sackful of grain.

On the other side of the glass, Angharad stood and
straightened the corners of her wimple before turning to leave.

At that moment I felt Enid’s mouth against
Marius’s, and disconnected that link before I also felt the full heat of their
tongues against each other.

I stumbled and saved myself at the last second
from pitching sideways into Mylène’s pool.

Kallhander,
I CLed, glad for the medium as a
way to keep myself from shouting,
you want to take a stab at what he meant
by that?

It took a few more moments
before
Kallhander’s words penetrated the buzzing that had taken up residence in my
head.

—
I think at this point we don’t have any choice
but to instigate a replay of his backup.

Me: —
Which will take days at least to get set
up. Now we’ve
got some guests coming over, so I—we—need to go be nice so
nobody knows anything horrible is about to happen.

I dumped the connection before he could say
anything else that would infuriate me and
again
almost stepped right
into the pool. One of the unforeseen consequences of having completely
un-wired-up clothing; you don’t have little things like haptic proximity
feedback or all of those other little environmental-sensor goodies to keep you
from banging your shins on the furniture. Once again, I envied Enid for being
unspoiled despite progress.

From behind the line of trees that screened off
the pool from the rest of the rear yard, I heard Diamond let out a bothered-sounding
yowl, since her territory was being invaded. Off from another direction, up the
road leading to the house, came the scrinching of many tires on tarmac. Some were
in unmarked ground vehicles, and some were in air-to-ground landers probably
using a short landing strip I’d glimpsed behind the house itself. The method they
chose depended entirely on their aesthetics (do I like the view from the road
or from above the trees?) and their paranoia (will I get shot at from behind that
hill or over that rooftop?).

Rather than knock on Enid’s CL, I went around back
and jogged up the little stone path that popped up from the grass and wound
between the trees. Past the trees—it took an eyeblink or two to register this—was
the same view Enid had seen as soon as she’d left the house. Always strange to
encounter for yourself something you’ve only seen through another’s eyes; all
the stranger now since I felt uneasy about what I’d find when I approached the
big sycamore in the middle of the field.

What I saw was Mylène hustling back from said tree,
with Marius immediately behind her and Enid following close after. Enid’s march
was slowed by the grass, but from the set of her jaw I could tell she would
have been double-timing it if possible.

“I’ve been looking for this one
all over
,”
Mylène called out to me, trying to put more joviality into her voice than her
face told me there should have been.
This one
was Marius, and if Mylène
hadn’t been present as only a CL projection—she was moving right through the
grass without pushing any of it aside—the body language between her and her son
made me suspect she was, in their CL space, leading him with one hand around
his wrist.

“I didn’t see them either,” I called back
helplessly. “And Diamond—wait, is she
up
in that tree?”

“She goes there all the time.” Marius waved a hand—not
the hand he might well have been led along by, which only increased my
suspicions. “She’ll come down when she feels like it. I think she heard all the
folks coming up the path and decided to go where she won’t be bothered. I don’t
blame her.”