Flight of the Vajra (70 page)

“That’s no explanation!”

“Hey, you
asked
,” Enid said. She shook out
the edges of her jacket, then reached behind the lapel and began patting it out
from the inside.

“Well, I’ll ask again. Explain it in more than
just an aphorism?”

Angharad turned to Marius. “We think of everything
as having a beginning, a continuation, and an ending—but all those things are
simply our frames of reference. We let those frames of reference speak for us;
we even identify with them
as
‘us’. But in the end they are nothing more
than conveniences. Officer Ioné, where is the Continuum that existed a hundred
years ago? Or even five minutes ago? Where is the ‘you’ that existed before I
began speaking to any of ‘you’ about this? Look as you might, you will never
again find those things.” She nodded towards both of them in turn. “And as many
have said to me before, ‘That’s all well and good, but how does it
change
anything? My husband is still dead, my child still suffers.’ Such people
surround themselves, quite understandingly, with ways to change their universe,
to bring it more in line with their expectations. But they must first change
themselves.”

“Do you think I should do this, then?” Ioné said.

Everyone, me included, stared.

“I can tell no one what to do,” Angharad said.
“But I can give what I have when it is asked for. That I will never deny anyone
who comes to me.”

“I would—I’d like that, then. When we have the
time, of course . . . ” Ioné laced together her fingers and tilted
her head down, and we all stepped in a little closer to drink in the sight of
it.

“I think I’m misjudged both of you,” Marius said,
draping an arm around both of their shoulders. “And not by a little, either—”

At that moment my external CL link went dead. The
general carrier had gone out, and the local mesh signals only gave me back the
objects in my immediate vicinity.

I didn’t have time to complain about it. In the same
moment there was a furious high-voltage
snap
, a blue actinic flash that
splattered my vision with phosphorescing blotches, and both Angharad and Ioné
fell away from Marius making grabbing motions at their necks.

Even my CL playback
of the next few
seconds is nothing but a smudge, no thanks to my senses already having being
clobbered by the shock of seeing Angharad and Ioné laid out. From what I was
able to reconstruct later, I pulled the puck of Mylène’s protomic concoction
out of my jacket, and was preparing to kick in the Escapist when I saw that
Enid, too, had started her own Escapist boost as well.

Something flat and squared-off went scything
through the air from Ioné’s outstretched arm towards Enid. Ioné had been
knocked down, but not out, most likely thanks to her being a protomic
assemblage that could withstand a lot more than a stun-shock.

It wasn’t until Enid clapped her hands together
around the thing flying at her and folded it flat against itself that I
realized what it was: the p-knife, in one of its inert formats for storage. She
sprang at Marius with it and scythed a newly-extended blade from it down right
at Marius’s thigh, but he twisted his leg away like a flamenco dancer and
slammed a closed fist into the side of her neck.

He’s also got The Escapist running, I thought. And
his biology gives him a leg up on us as well. Small wonder he took Ioné out
first.

For about seven or eight furious seconds Marius
and I stood bare centimeters apart, slashing away—me with a freshly-extruded razor
edge of the protomic puck always somehow slicing through the space where he had
been a tiny moment ago, him landing skidding blows along my ribs and shoulder
and the side of my neck which I swatted away. I’d fed the Escapist hints about
sending him a blow to one of his nerve clusters, but it wasn’t working. Great
way to be at a disadvantage, I told myself; I’d shed most of my protomics for
the sake of being a good guest at this party, and look what it had earned me.

Marius’s next punch went straight into my throat
and delivered a jolt that nearly sent me back into the pool. The Escapist
automatically deactivated, but it still took seconds on end for the roaring in
my ears, the haze in my eyes, and the tilting in my head to subside. Everything
in my body that had a nerve attached to it felt like it had been tenderized.
The side effects of the Escapist, I thought: they ought to wear off in a few,
but who knows if one of us tore something in that fight.

Angharad lay some steps away, face-down. Ioné was
slowly getting to her feet, the sleeve over her right arm extruded and
displaying its orange chevron quite prominently. The chevron was a warning: the
gun that made up the inside her right arm was armed and on standby.

Then she lowered the arm as I watched, and I heard
the quiet sliding clicks of her main armament shutting off. The puck—what was
left of it—lay in several pieces at the edge of the pool.

“The officer has the right idea,” Marius said to
all of us. “Please, all of you keep from doing something rash.”

“Like what you did wasn’t?” I spat. Literally
spat: my tongue and lips weren’t working very well.

Angharad slowly sat up. Fastened around her neck
was a flat ribbon of Type B or C—a metal collar, most likely the way he’d
delivered that shock. I realized the soreness in my neck wasn’t just from being
jostled around; I was wearing one such collar myself. I stood up and realized
my left leg was lagging behind the right one. More short-term Escapist damage;
I couldn’t count any more on being able to run away from anything or throw a
good kick.

Enid hauled herself up with the help of a
doorframe, took one step and almost fell over.

“Restore the links to the outside,” Ioné said,
reaching over to steady Enid. “If you don’t, I’ll be declared MIA in minutes—”

“—and you’ll have a search party tearing this
place apart, I know. I’ll put the link back up in just a moment, as long as you
and everyone else here consent to have a CL filter attached. Can’t have you all
yelling for help the second I turn my back.”

“What’re the
chokers
for?” I said. My voice
still wasn’t working too well, but the hoarse syllables I pushed out sounded
close enough to get by.

“Should be obvious. First penalty for disobedience
is another shock. Don’t ask what the second penalty is. Now: your CL keys,
please.”

Something was happening to the pool. No, that was
nothing more than the protective mesh in the pool, I told myself; it was reforming
so it could filter the water from bottom to top. But the mesh wasn’t completely
flat—it had formed a coffinlike bulge where the waters were deepest, a bulge
which added convolutions and refinements to its shape in the seconds that went
by. A portion of the floor of the pool in exactly that shape was rising to the
surface, and the mesh was parting the water bottom to top for it.

I’ve seen that shape before, I thought. Not in the
real world—only in CL, in my simulations.

“What do you want with Angharad?” I said. Anger
was doing a very good job of clearing the roughage from my voice.

“What does it look like I want with her?” Marius
was contemptuous, not angry. “She’s a hostage. And a very useful one, given
that she has no backups. You think any Kathaya in their right mind is going to
indulge in such a sinful thing?”

“The Kathaya’s not any one person, remember? It’s
an institution. If she dies, someone steps up to fill her place. You’ll gain
nothing.”

“You say that, but you know as well as I do there
is
no Kathaya quite like this one, is there? If you can’t figure out that I have
good reasons for picking her and her alone, then you’re not much of a
second-in-command to her, are you?”

“What do you
want
?” Enid sounded like
rolled all the hurt she’d ever had into those four words. I saw now she was
collared as well.

“We’re going to get in a car together,” he said,
“all of us, and we’re going to drive to your ship and make a trade. You and Angharad
for Arsèni and the drive module.”

“Why’s Arsèni important?” I said. “They already
know everything he does. You’re not going to stop him from spilling anything.”
Forget about the time factor in unscrambling the mess they pulled out of him, I
thought; just keep Marius talking. “Is he really that useful?”

“Give me your CL keys, please. All of you.”

I closed the rest of the distance to Angharad, and
put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, but on seeing her
face as frozen as it was, I felt all the worse for saying those words. I was
surprised Marius didn’t try to stop me, but then again what could any of us do
right now, other than grind our teeth?

“Where’s your
mother
?” I tried to make the
word sound as much like a malediction as I could.

“My mother? My mother has been dead for months.”
He might as well have talking about the location of a missing shoe.

“What!”
That was Enid, looking like she was
ready to tear the floor tile out from under her and throw it at him.

“She
did
say she had complete trust in me,”
Marius went on. “And I’ve seen as much of her work as anyone else had. More,
even. Before long, she just gave me copies of all her private CL keys to make
her job easier. I found out fast how it’s not hard to impersonate someone over
CL when they’ve spent their whole life making
sure
you understand every
disgusting detail about them.” He sounded pained, as if he were due more
appreciation for such dirty work.

The coffin-like shape had reached the surface, and
it was indeed the exact dimensions of the capsule I’d seen in my simulations.
The early evening air was so still that I could hear the last echo of his words
dying back at us from some hillside near the house.

Don’t call yourself stupid, I thought. After all,
no one else saw it, either. No one else had paid attention to the fact that never
once during the entire time we were here did Mylène ever manifest in the flesh.
Why would they? Who notices such a thing on a Highend world, where you’re lucky
if you actually touch another person’s hand once a year?

Well, I should have, I thought. I thought I was
the one who sees these things, when everyone else just squeezes their eyes
shut.

The capsule floated towards the edge of the pool
and split open lengthwise. Nestled inside, filling out a form-fitting
indentation within, was a human figure—a Highender, judging from the height,
the muscular heft, the super-perfected look. He had a mane of straight black
hair that clung to the top half of his damp (and entirely naked) body as he sat
up. His dark eyes and high cheekbones brought to mind what could have been some
distant cousin of Angharad’s. What unnerved me all the more was how he seemed
to also have a fair amount of her serenity and singularity of purpose: he
looked at me, and at me, and
at
me. The only way I managed not to flinch
when he reached out to run a giant hand down the side of my face was by curling
my toes as hard as I could.

“I’d like all of you to meet a friend of mine,”
Marius said.

“Should I know you?”
Marius’s colleague
said, eyeing me up and down. His voice was small and reedy, not nearly as
romantic as a face like that would demand to have.

“I’m not sure,” Marius said. “
Should
you
know him?”

“I would have asked for dossiers but you had all
CL shut down in the area. Wise precaution, at least temporarily.
Her,
on
the other hand—of course, I know her.” He gestured towards Angharad.

She lowered her head very slightly to bow to him.
The collar around her neck glinted in the light reflected off the surface of
the pool. I’d heard of gimmicks like this before—they didn’t just deliver
shocks, but could also do plenty of other things, like slit your throat by
remote control.

Estimated time required for the filament inside
the collar to fully actuate and slice Angharad’s neck: one, maybe two seconds
tops. I wasn’t sure my natural reaction time would be enough to beat that.

No, not my
natural
reaction time, I told
myself. And if there was anything worth throwing a limb out of joint for, it
was her.

“Should
we
know
him
?” I shot back.

Marius’s shrug was as hostile as shrugs get. “You
can call him Aram. That’s what I decided to call him. Now:
keys
, please.
I won’t ask again.”

I gave him my CL key, and a second later I felt his
tap filter install itself.

The only time in your life you give someone your
master key is when you’re with a doctor. Even then, you don’t give him the real
thing: you give him a temporary master key which expires within the hour. If
you’re particularly paranoid—or if you’re me—you regenerate your own master key
afterwards, just for safety.

The conventional wisdom about granting someone the
master key is that it’s game over; they have
total
control. They can
make you eat glass or walk off cliffs; pipe unending horror shows right into
your sensory cortex; lurk undetected inside your head until you’re within
handshake distance of the planet’s Prime Minister.

The truth is a little more, well, granular than
that. Give someone your master key and they can only take control of what your
CL has been granted control over in the first place. They can’t read your mind
(that one alone left a lot of people breathing easier) and they can’t make you
swandive into empty swimming pools. They can only suppress the behavior of CL
extensions that accentuate gross motor control, like Tom’s Toolkit. And, of
course, they can block or redirect any of your access to the CL grid in the
first place, which by itself is bad enough.

 The good news is that the number of times this
happens in a given year could be counted in the single digits, thanks to
improved CL security. The bad news is that when it does happen, it tends to
happen to people well worth going through the trouble to hijack that way. And
the even worse news is that such hijackings usually involve a physical
component—like, say, the collars we now wore—which made it all too possible to
do all those really terrible, previously-feared things.

And the worst news of all was that it was now
happening to us, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do about it.

CL came back online, sort of. I tentatively
reached out for Ioné or whoever else I could contact and found myself shrouded
in a proxy. Nothing in and nothing out without Marius’s approval, thanks to the
filters he’d attached. It wouldn’t fool the rest of the world for long, but I
suspected he wouldn’t need long.

Marius knelt down and picked up Enid’s p-knife,
which had been lying underneath one of the benches near the pool. Probably had
been waiting for the filters to be put into place before doing that, just to
make sure no nasty little surprises were waiting for him. Keep paying attention
to him, I thought; at some point he’s going to not realize where he’s putting
his hand and you’re going to be there to stomp on it.

“Aram,” Marius said, gesturing at Angharad, “fit
her.”

“Please don’t move,” Aram said to Angharad. He
held her by the side of the neck with one large hand, and with the other
pressed something against the back of her neck, just above her new collar, that
pinged and hissed and made Angharad let out a drawn-out, gasping cry.

“What did you do?” I shouted.
“What did you
do?”

“Is it taking?” Marius said. “Talk to me.”

“Give it a moment.” Aram frowned and looked at the
spreading bruise on Angharad’s neck. “It can take as long as two minutes to be
fully actuated.”

“Get them into the car in the meantime; we can
check on it there.”

“You—” The tendons in Enid’s forearms swelled as
she clenched her fists. “
You put a CL on her
?!”

Angharad blinked out tears and wiped at her face
with the back of one hand.

“It’s better than one of those flimsy temporary
things she was wearing,” Marius said, “and it has the advantage of not being
removable. At least, not without cutting and digging. Come on, all of you.”

We were marched into the car, where “Aram” fit us
into the seats with restraints—all type C, metalloid. Typical Highender, I
thought: he thinks just because these things can be remotely opened and locked,
that negates all the other things that can go wrong with them.

It was oddly comforting. The more I saw of what he
was doing, the more I thought:
All the eggs are in one basket.
All I
have to do is figure out how to either saw out the bottom or cut the handle. I
didn’t know how long I could cling to such thinking in the face of what was
happening, but cling I did, as it was all I had to work with.

The car doors melded shut and we began crunching
along the driveway back down to the main road. We were seated in two rows,
facing each other: directly in front of me was Marius, a window to his side and
Angharad to his left. On her left, Aram; on his left, against the other window,
Ioné. Enid, on my right, made a loud swallowing sound—not out of nerves,
perhaps, but just to see how much motor control she still had.

I held up my manacled hands, or rather tried to. —
This
is overkill
, I said—or, rather, again, tried to. Nothing came out; Marius
had disabled speech and any gross motor movement below the neck, it seemed.

The world around us melted away in the next couple
of seconds—the inside of the car, the view through the windows, our views of
each other. It all dissolved, broadened out and became a palatial room big
enough to park the
Vajra
in. Eight-sided, with squared-off archways
leading in each direction to what looked like a maze of alleys and arcades, all
lit by some unseen afternoon sun that somehow also came straight down through
the octagonal hole in the ceiling. The center of the room sported a sunken
pool, also eight-sided, ringed with red leather chaises longue for everyone.
None of us were fooled by this bit of CL-delivered pseudo-hospitality—at least,
I knew I wasn’t. I knew full well we were still riding in Marius’s car, locked
into our seats and unable to do much of anything except respire and metabolize.

Angharad was also here, which told me the CL she’d
just had forcibly installed in her—a top-class felony on any IPS-signatory
world—must have taken successfully.

Marius himself—and now Mylène, too—sat side by
side on the same couch, one built that much larger to accommodate the both of
them. No, I told myself, there’s no “them”: it’s just Marius.

“I would have used this space for the guests at
the party,” “Mylène” said, “but I knew full well Mother—I mean, ‘me’—wouldn’t
have done something like that. I was proud of the actual house I’d built, in
bits and pieces; I never turned down a chance to show it off. Or tell my son
about it.”

Enid pushed herself off her couch and executed a
beautiful leap across the pool, right at Marius. She never made it; she stopped
dead over the water and fell face-down into it, as if she’d hit a wall or reached
the end of a tether. The splash Enid made lapped out far enough to hit
Angharad’s feet; she stood up and helped Enid stand and step back up. I only
then noticed how the bottom of the pool was covered with copper coins.

“Honestly, I can’t fault you for wanting to do
that,” Marius said. “If you’d like to go a few rounds for real—well, as real as
a CL space gets—we could do that, I suppose. Get the rest of that vitriol out
of your veins.”

“I don’t recommend that,” Aram said, seated to
Marius’s other side.

For this Marius rewarded him with a brush-off
gesture. Chain of command, I thought; Marius is calling all the shots, and
don’t you forget it. It still didn’t explain who exactly his Number Two was,
but one life-threatening conundrum at a time.

Enid, eyes still burning, sloshed back to her
couch. She was dry by the time she threw herself back onto the cushions.

“This is all overkill,” I repeated, this time out
loud. “You’ve got the keys to the city. What do you need hostages for? News
value?”

“I’ve got the keys to
most
of the city,”
Marius said. “I don’t have the keys to places like the inner sanctum of the IPS
infrastructure, which is an isolated system.”

“IPS is not going to cut a negotiation with you! They’re
going to send a team out to pull your head off!”

“For one of their own, plus the Kathaya,
and
two of her diplomatic attachés? I think they will cut a deal.”

“Did you give this much thought to murdering your
mother?”

“When did I ever say I was murdered?” “Mylène”
said. Cosm above, she was smiling when she said it.

“What other conclusion am I supposed to draw? The
woman I knew wouldn’t have killed herself.” Well, I thought, give anyone’s life
a few years, see what happens, but never mind that now.

Marius shook his head. “No, she wouldn’t have. Not
intentionally
, you mean.”

I blinked. Part of it was shock on my part, but
another part of it was buying a moment of time to poke that much more closely
at the filter Marius had installed on my CL. The funny numbness that had ebbed
in and out from my vocal cords reminded me of something: there was a common,
stock CL filter that had such a side effect.
Clamp
, they called it. Easy
to work with, low memory and processing overhead.

And from what I remembered offhand, not something
you wanted to use in a life-or-death setting. It was good, but not
robust.
It wasn’t meant to take a beating, which was ironic give how it had been
brought on the market to replace something that
really
couldn’t take a
beating.

Please let this big brain of mine be on to
something useful for a change, I thought.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m agreeing with you,”
Marius said. “My mother had too much of a love of life, in whatever form, to
turn her back on it. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t sometimes take undue
risks. That experimental protomic laminate that she loved to play around with,
for instance. That was her own design. Did I mention that? She loved it.
Amateur protomics engineering, a fun weekend hobby.

“At first she was using it for nothing more than
little things, preserving artifacts and mementos; scrapbooking, basically. Then
she started experimenting with it a lot more closely, seeing how interactive it
could be—how it would react to one’s touch, both from the outside and the
inside. She left herself plenty of failsafes—at first, anyway—and she kept her
backup current in the event things went wrong. But that was after I’d already
been trusted with all her personal keys, and long after I’d already decided she
was being far too generous with me vis-à-vis the details of her work life. So
there came a day off, one of those days when her CL was not accepting outside
traffic and most everyone, especially me, got used to the silence that ensued.
Then I came into her workshop to ask her something and saw the silence wasn’t
ever going to be broken, now that she was on the floor mummified inside a good
ten centimeters of her own laminate.” He shrugged. “I guess she forgot to turn
something off.”

“
 
‘Accidents
will happen’.” I made a really good sneer out of those six syllables. (Clamp didn’t
have backdoors or anything that obvious—one point in its favor—but there was
always the chance Marius hadn’t completely secured its administrative
interfaces. Any toehold in a storm, I thought.)

“It wasn’t hard to take advantage of it, either,”
Marius went on. “Cloning a dead person’s CL into your own is not difficult if
you know how, and being her son I had access to all sorts of know-how and
how-to. Her deadman alarm wouldn’t kick in until the next morning, so that gave
me plenty of time to prepare. She’d already saved me a lot of legwork involving
her job, since her home was her office and everything I needed to know she’d
let me see in some form. Since she liked to tell herself how much at odds she
was with her peers, whether or not there was any truth to it, I could maintain
all the physical distance I needed from them—not that being all-CL all the time
would have been unusual in the first place. She’d played me enough of her
memories from the earlier parts of her life that I was never caught off guard
by guests.”

“Including faking her attitude towards me,” I
said. He sounded proud—no,
pushy
, the way I, once upon a time, might
have tried to explain more and more about something to evoke an appreciative
reaction when I didn’t get it at first.

(The admin interface was indeed open to outside
messages. By the time Marius started speaking again, I’d found an overflow
attack that worked, disabled the filter and set it into dummy-response mode. No
sign he noticed; at least, he didn’t look to
me
like he’d just had a
rung sawed out from under him.)