Flight of the Vajra (76 page)

“I agree; you may well have a good deal to
contribute in terms of perspective. But the talking will be handled entirely by
us.”

“No arguments there,” I said.

—
I’ll keep my mouth closed from now on,
I
CLed to Angharad.
Seeing you getting your dander up, I was dumb enough to
assume that was a cue I could do the same.

Angharad didn’t answer. That alone made the pit of
my shame feel a little deeper.

The rooms shifted yet again. The entire right-hand
wall of the whole shared CL space fell away and dissolved into a niche that
resembled, in its subtly uncomfortable featurelessness, the interrogation room
Angharad had confronted Arsèni in. Seated in the middle of it, upright in a
chair that looked like something he’d borrowed out of his own house, was
Marius.

“Hello, Ralpartha,” Marius said, in the same
genial, slightly abashed air he’d greeted us with at the party. “I was
wondering why you didn’t come by the party earlier.”

“I was busy,” Ralpartha said. “In big part, it
seems now, because of you.”

“You’re upset that you didn’t notice all this
sooner, then?”

Ralpartha seethed slightly too long over his
response, before Marius continued:

“This is interesting. After mother died, one of
the first things I did was pull some statistics from the city’s
infrastructure—statistics about the movements of people that I could safely
describe as Highend. The fact they had a backup, for instance, or the amount of
live connect time and bandwidth they were using through the CL grid, things
like that. I’d formed a hunch about such things, based on watching my mother,
her friends, her co-workers, most everyone else we had passing contact with.

“The hunch was this: the average time between
in-person contacts for any two such people was on the order of local months.
And that there would be people highly placed in the system who might even go
for
years
at a time without making an in-person appearance. Based on my
mother’s echelon ranking and a few other variables, and the amount of time
needed to prepare everything, I deduced with something like a four-sigma degree
of confidence that I could set everything up without anyone ever checking in
person to see if all was well. 4.013 sigma, actually. I was a little surprised
to find the odds would be
more
in my favor if I made a regular business
out of bringing people to the house, so they could draw their
own
assumptions about everything being all right. I wouldn’t have to tell them
anything!” His expression said:
That
was
neat, wasn’t it?
“So if
you’re upset, that’s fine. It’s very illustrative. I mean, I imagined this
scenario would give me a lot of material to work with, but it looks like even I
wildly underestimated just how much.”

“What do you
want
, Marius?” What little
patience Ralpartha showed before had evaporated.

“What do I want?” He gestured at the space between
him and the rest of us. “You’re giving it to me right now!
This
is what
I want. Your behaviors under these particular conditions. And, I have to say,
you’re all delivering beautifully.”

“You’re
welcome
,” Enid said, in a tone so
foul I ordered her outbound link blocked.

“See,” Marius went on, “it’s all part of something
that’s been bothering me for a long while, but which really took hold when I
started working on my thesis. The tendency over time, for civilizations of any
size, is towards control and rigidity. Or maybe I should say
predictability
.
A good thing, I imagine you’re thinking.” The
you
was aimed right at
Ralpartha. “The greater the rigidity and predictability, the more difficult it
becomes to deal with truly out-of-gamut events. First it’s just difficult to
protect against them; then it becomes difficult to even
imagine
them in
the first place. It’s a paradox: the more you ever prevent whole classes of
things from happening, the greater the odds of them actually manifesting in a
completely uncontrollable way!” He turned to me. “You: you’re an engineer; you
understand the importance of not making a structure too rigid. We have plenty
of social engineers, and many of them understood the importance of having room
for dissent. But now what’s happened? Instead of real dissent, we simply have
movement into two increasingly inflexible vertical strata: Old Way and Highend.
There’s no room for a
real
third choice anymore.”

“Not that you actually want such a thing,” I said,
somehow not shouting at him.

“Actually, I do. And I also want to see what it
will take to make
you
want that, too. Because from everything I’ve seen,
you don’t seem to want it very much. Not enough to make any real changes,
anyway. —You know, I was originally thinking I’d become a teacher after I
graduated, but I’ve decided I could be a teacher right now. And from everything
I’ve seen, the best education is through pain. It’ll teach both of us
something, I’m sure.”

He sat back and recrossed his legs.

“This will all be simple,” he went on, “as long as
you choose to keep it simple. All I want is what I was originally going to ask
for in the first place. I want unobstructed passage off the planet courtesy of
a ship of my choice; I want the drive module that was found in Arsèni’s shop;
and I want Arsèni himself. I imagine he’s in better shape than Aram is right
now, anyway. In exchange for all that, you get your people back, and you get
the keys to disarm my helpers. This, by the way, is a limited-time offer: one
hour. I doubt you’d want to push past that; it’s not as if your people have more
than five hours’ oxygen anyway. And if you want to talk to them yourself, no
worries about that. Here they are.”

 The wall behind him opened outwards and became a
corridor, one where an entire wall was glass. Dividers behind the glass carved
up that space into meter-wide booths, each one occupied by a different hostage.
Almost immediately the corridor filled up with friends, lovers, relatives, all now
just connecting into this CL space. Hostages and relations alike all ran themselves
up against the glass—pressing palms together, touching foreheads, doing all
those poor substitutes for touching instead of just seeing and hearing.

Ulli found Cioran before the rest of us did, and
so by the time Angharad, Enid and I all reached him, she had already flattened
herself cheek-to-cheek with him and begun sobbing with her knuckles pressed
against her mouth.

“Ulli, Ulli!” Cioran patted the glass in a way
meant to mimic caressing her hair. “Please. They’ll think we’re
involved
or something!”

She smote the glass with the heel of her hand
right where his nose was. “Oh, stop trying to make me laugh when I’m having a
perfectly good cry over you!”

Enid walked up to the glass herself, started to
reach for it, then put her hand back down. The dejection now in her face hadn’t
appeared until she’d seen all those other people reach for the glass and come
away with nothing. I guess she figured, why bother, when all you’d do is
frustrate yourself?

“You know,” Cioran said, “back at the party, whole
I was passing around my little concoction, I did in fact have the nerve to ask
myself, why won’t Mylène deign to join us in person? Why only taste my
handiwork through someone else’s proxy? But that’s just the way some in the
Highend go about their business. I taught myself to ignore it.”

“We all did,” Enid said.

“And then she had the never to pretend she was
drinking it,” I said. “And got away with it, too, because who at
any
party
is even going to care about counting the number of glasses left over?” It was
only just then hitting me how she had been strutting around with a glass of the
stuff, one no one had ever actually see her claim in person.

“I’m still going to give my concert, though,”
Cioran went on, injecting as much buoyancy into his voice as it could hold just
then. “Once all this is dealt with, of course. Not that we have to settle
everything to enjoy ourselves, you know. There’s a saying—attributed to me, I
think, and rightfully so—something like this: ‘Never turn down a chance to fake
having a good time. It might well become the real thing.’ I say, cosm take terrorism
and corruption in high places!—”

“I’m obliged not to turn my back completely on it,
I imagine,” Ulli said. “On the corruption, that is.”

“Why?” Cioran let some fluster slip out. “You
think the blame for this is going to be laid at your feet?”

“It may not be laid at anyone’s,” Angharad said.
She turned and faced Ulli. “Be honest with me. Do you sincerely believe
Bridgehead, in all of its insularity, all of its awareness of its
frailties—will it submit itself to the kind of rigorous self-criticism needed
here?”

“No, of course not,” Ulli said. No spite, just
resignation of the same grim colors as Angharad’s. “They’re not that foolish.
One glimpse of that ought to be plain. They like things just the way they are,
flawed if they may be. It would scarcely be the first time someone of privilege
abused his position on a Highend world.”

“And got away with it,” I said.

Ulli leaned her head against the glass, a poor
substitute for Cioran’s actual shoulder. “I say these things because it will be
exactly what comes from their mouths, too.”

“And how much of that do you believe?” Enid said. “Enough
to see through it and out the other side? Because it sure sounds like it.”

“That’s a
very
good question,” said Marius.

I would have thrown a punch at him if it hadn’t
all been a CL simulation. And if I hadn’t been surrounded by people who would
have thought less of me—
and
if Marius hadn’t been on the other side of
the glass, with one arm hanging loose around Cioran’s neck. Cioran began to
lift the arm free in the hesitant manner of someone trying to make a delicate
exit for the bathroom, but Marius tightened the grip.

“In fact,” he went on, “that’s a good enough
question that I would love to hear an answer for it myself from the
powers-that-be. Eventually. But right now, I have other priorities.”

“Like skipping town with stolen goods and
hostages?” I said.

“You should be grateful.” He shook his head at me,
as if I’d flipped up my nose at his fine home cooking. “I’m getting everything
I asked for, and you’ll be getting everything you were promised. Except,
judging from the looks in your eyes, my head on a platter, but what part of
life doesn’t come without compromise?” He removed his arm from Cioran’s
shoulder. “You should know that. Look at everything you gave up to be the
person you wanted to be. Your homeworld, all of the ties and privileges that go
with it. Your
backups
.”

Marius let go of Cioran, stood back, then puckered
his lips and whistled. Every head, on both sides of the glass, turned to face
him.

“Denizens!” he called out. “I hope you haven’t
been too put off by my poor hospitality. Not to worry; you’re all going home
very soon now. Your government’s been good enough to honor all of my requests
to the letter—something I hope you’ll think about in depth the next time they
choose to ask anything of
you
, mm-hm?”

The glass thinned out and dissolved entirely.
Cioran found himself being hugged from both sides—Ulli to his right, Enid to
his left. All the other hostages and relations were following suit; the only
sound to be heard around us (inasmuch as any of these “sounds” were real) were
sobs of joy and the calling of names. They weren’t physically free yet—not in
the real world, anyway, where they were all still at the bottom of some
artificial lake of protomic substrate,
embottled
in blobs of Type B and C amalgam. But this much freedom was intoxicating
enough.

Angharad leaned in. “Arsèni—” She stopped herself,
then went direct-private to me before going on. CL etiquette was still way too
new to her. “Arsèni has asked to speak with me once more before he’s traded
out.”

It took a moment before I realized no, I hadn’t
parsed her sentence incorrectly.
He
was asking
her.
“What if he
just sits there and insults you?” I said.

“I never felt he was unworthy of my efforts, Henré.”

“Why?”

“Because this is done not only for his sake, or
even mine,” she said. “This I do so that I might better understand how the
‘unreachable’, the ‘
unhelpable’
, can be
reached and helped all the more. You may think of what I do as foolish, but all
I ask is that you do it without thinking of me as a fool.”

I saw the difference she was delineating. I wasn’t
sure I agreed, but at least the difference was plain to me. She took my hand
and led me sideways through a wall.

CL spaces
are fluid by nature, so no
particular ritual—like, say, walking—is needed to go from one place to another.
That said, Angharad was evidently still comfortable with some kind of
real-world transition. She turned towards a blank wall, watched it dilate back,
and stepped into an analogue of the interrogation room I’d seen before. Arsèni
stood there, no longer behind protective glass and no longer manacled, but in
CL-space neither having nor not having those restraints hardly mattered.

“I was surprised you asked to speak to me,” Angharad
said. I checked and found that she’d only conferenced me in through her link; I
wasn’t able to speak directly to Arsèni. I didn’t mind; this was her show.

“Not like I really have anyone else to talk to
who’s gonna listen.” He squatted down and a seat manifested under him. “I mean,
that
was
the thing I kept thinkin’ about. That
you
came to
me.
Even if you’d been told to do that . . . but naw, I don’t think
you would’a let anyone tell
you
what to do.”