Flight of the Vajra (77 page)

Angharad’s smile was prim, but sincere.

“You know,” he went on, “if I had choices, I
would’a just
sold
him what he wanted and washed my hands. But what he
wants ain’t something I can sell to him in a package. A lot of that’s my own
damn fault, and I know it. He told me what he did to his mother, see. ‘I
liked
my mother,’ he said. ‘I don’t like
you
.’
 
”

“If he keeps all this power over you,” Angharad
said, “why speak of it and jeopardize yourself?”

Arsèni’s answer was at first nothing but a tired
breath out. “There’s no way through any of this that I’m not endin’ up dead,”
he said quietly. “I know this now. They’re gonna trade me for those hostages,
and then either I’m going to give him what he wants or he’s gonna find a way to
take it from me anyway.”

“What is it that he wants?”

“My skills. Meaning, everything I ain’t done
yet
.
Same thing anyone wants from someone else that they can’t get from memory or
from what’s already been done a billion times before. He knows I’m good, and he
has some project that needs someone of my caliber. I’m right here, I’m close to
him, I already know too much . . . and I was easy to get to. I keep
my peace and follow his directions, and my reward is I don’t die too soon.
Versus me dyin’
real
soon.” He looked right through the spot where my
image might well have been displaying to him if I’d been allowed to show it.
“Then again, for him,
anyone
down here would be easy to get to.”

“The engine module he was interested in—did you
know what about it aroused his interest so?”

“He didn’t have to tell me. I already had Cioran
sniffin’ around for it for so long, slippin’ me money on the side to see if
some warehouse lot or wreck salvage had it. Cioran said I shouldn’t worry about
bein’ busted for dealing in stolen goods, ‘specially if I had him on my side.
Finally I turn up somethin’ like it, and next thing I know I got Marius also
huffin’ down my collar.” He gave her the first genuinely sullen look of the
conversation so far. “You know somethin’ I don’t?”

“What we know is not likely to be of much use
either.”

“Or maybe you don’t wanna tell me because you
don’t want
him
to know. Fair enough. I wouldn’t blame you. —Anyway, so I
suspect Marius wants me to build him a ship. He’s got the engine pieces, I’ve
got some know-how there. I’ve restored a few one- and two-man jobs in my time.
Cops saw the little skiff I had in my shop, right before they pulled its plug,
anyway. I was gonna start working on more of ‘em—maybe that was what caught his
eye, the fact I’d been lookin’ at restoring some others. —See, he saw that ship,
you know. Came by the shop a couple weeks before he started his whole hassle
with me. He liked it; I thought he wanted to buy it off me. Then he saw my
hands and said, ‘So you did this whole thing hands-on?’ I sure had.” He held up
his hands, now clawed with extensions even in CL-space (even if the real ones
no longer were). “I think that part caught his eye something fierce. That I
wasn’t just fabbin’ everything second- and third-hand; I was actually
building
things.”

I hoped Angharad didn’t interrupt him. I got my
wish; it seemed she was listening just as closely as I was now.

“That was how it really all got started ‘tween
us,” Arsèni went on. “That talk. He was walkin’ ‘round my warehouse, looking at
everything I’d restored or put together . . . I could see it in him,
that he had a care for somethin’ made that way. Hadn’t ‘spected that from
someone like him, but he was askin’ me all the right questions when he
talked—how I did this, how I was gonna do that. Must have been . . . an
hour we talked like that. First time in I don’t know how long someone comes in
and I have a conversation that good.

“Then a couple days later, he gets in touch with
me again, asks about what I’m working on. Then he says, ‘You get anything
unusual in lately? My mother’s got a taste for that sort of thing, got her
birthday comin’ up.’ I send him over a list of stuff, but the engine module’s
not on it, ‘cos Cioran already put in a down payment on that. Doesn’t want any
of what I tell him about, sounds kind of let down.

“What I figured I’d do then is, I thought I’d
surprise
both
of ‘em. So I dug around to learn more about him ‘n his
mother, and found out about that protomic resin she’d created. Someone did a
piece on it a while back, part of a bigger story ‘bout her. She doesn’t sell it
or nothin’, though, but all the same I thought maybe I could talk her into
lettin’ me use some of it for a one-off job. Maybe trade something of mine that
caught her eye.” He had his forehead in one hand, his head tilted to one side,
and he was smiling the first smile I’d ever seen him wear. “I still only had
half the idea in my head at the time about what to do, but I figured, I get the
other half right, and I got myself a workin’ relationship with someone with
some clout. And it’ll be someone who gets it—someone who gets
me
.

“So I ask to come by Mylène’s place one day, talk
shop with her. She says yes, but the whole conversation’s . . . strange.
Got to talking about her resin, and she’s really enthusiastic about the whole
thing . . . but only for a bit. I started mentioning ‘bout how I’d
done some restoration techniques for old-school p-glass, and come up with stuff
that almost seemed like precursors of the resin she came up with. She’s fine
talking about it herself, but as soon as I started askin’ questions, she clams
up. Not even about how she doesn’t want to give away her secrets, more like
. . . ” He shook his head, his forehead still resting in one cupped
palm.

“More like she didn’t even know the answers,” I
said.

After all, I thought, it isn’t like Marius would have
improved on her formula or even taken it upon himself to completely understand
it. And why would he, when he’d clearly been busy with other things?

I’d forgotten my link wasn’t live outbound, but
Angharad repeated my words to Arsèni. His response was another shake of the
head and another smile.

“No way for me to put that together then, of
course. So I come back from her place, and I find his friend Aram ripping apart
my workshop. He puts the strong-arm on me, and then Marius himself comes in and
waves the engine module at me and says, ‘You didn’t have this on your list of
new goodies. Why?’ Told him I already had a buyer for it, and that’s when he
put the screws on me to make sure the buyer could confirm it,
and
maybe
take him along as collateral. And the rest, you already know.”

So that had been the extent of Cioran’s
involvement, I thought. Arsèni just needed him to confirm the engine module was
what it was cracked up to be. Everything after that—pure opportunism.

Arsèni had fallen silent and stayed silent, and
I’d been so focused on his words that the sight of Angharad reaching over and
taking his free hand in hers had passed me right by.

“The one time,” he went on, “the one time someone
reaches back out and says, ‘Hey, you do good work,’ and the one I reach back
and say ‘Thanks’ . . . the
one
time I reach back, and this
happens. Everyone else in my field, they all hear about me workin’ with my own
hands, restoring all this legacy stuff the hard way, taking the ‘slow road’ or
the ‘hard way’—all of ‘em saying, ‘What d’you want to make all that work for yourself
for?’ Because they all saw it as
work
, that’s why. This wasn’t ‘work’
for me. Not like, ‘drudgery’. This was what I
did
. I
wanted
it
the ‘hard way’. Nothin’ more complicated to it than that.”

It was another long moment before Angharad spoke.

“You now understand,” she said, “what it is that I
feel. Along with so many others.”

 He didn’t nod, but he didn’t shrug her off
either. He raised his head and last and tried to look her in the eyes, but
there was something like grief tugging at the edges of his face that made it
hard for him to do it.

“And more importantly,” she went on, “you
understand why. You refused to throw this feeling away, did you not? You clung
to it because it defined you.”

“Could say that.”

“Then understand this: you are not wrong for having
done so. There is not one alive, anywhere, who does not have this feeling
sometime in their lives. Their only mistake is in believing they alone have it
. . . or that they alone have it in the way that matters most.”

He tightened one hand around hers as he used the
other one to try and rub the deepening grief out of his face. I remembered how
I’d done something like that once, right before the first time I’d tried to
tell the wife of a man who’d died in the
Kyritan
how sorry I was.

“You know,” he said, “when you plugged in just now
and started talkin’ to me, I thought. ‘What’s she gonna have for me ‘cept for
words
?
What good are those?’ You oughta know I’m gonna need a lot more than words to
get through this.” The way he said
you
, it was clear what he meant:
You,
of all people.

“If there is more,” she said as gently as she knew
how, “it only exists within you. It is nothing I can give you, nor anything
that can be given, period. Only you have it. Were there time, I would have
helped you to find it . . . but there is only time enough for me to
say that only you will ever have it.”

Arsèni’s face was crumpling all the further as she
spoke.

“I’ve got to give him what he wants,” he said
around the hand now covering most of his face. “I don’t want to die. I’ve
got
to give it to him; what else ‘m I gonna do? I can’t just up and die. Who in
this cosm is gonna die so I can’t die? You?”

“I would, yes,” she said. “But I know that will
not satisfy him.”

He sat there with one hand enclosed in both of
hers, the other with tears leaking around it, until the IPS cut the signal and
Angharad sat back in her chair.

There’s a kind of loosening of inhibitions that drenches
some people when they first get a CL and being horsing around in CL-space. You
get too close, you laugh too freely, you grab the other person and toss them up
in the air and let them ride around on your back, all those things you can’t do
(or which are that much harder to do) when you’re stapled down into your
respective bodies. The way Angharad was suddenly standing too close, the way
she was looking at me with that much less reserve—it reminded me way too much
of that kind of giddy punch-drunkenness. She showed it off in a much more
dialed-down way than most other people would, but it was still there, and it
made my heart hammer all the harder when she slipped her (admittedly virtual)
hand into mine and swung it back and forth.

Go on and say it, I thought. Say the thing that’s
been slowly coming to you ever since she insisted on talking to him originally.

“All of that,” I said, “with him—all this time—you
were doing this to
impress me.
”

The space around us began to go dark as the
simulation closed up.

“It’s not supposed to work that way,” I went on.
“You can’t make all this into things like that. You have a duty—you have to do
that duty
first
. I’m only here to help you do it, remember?” There was
more I could have said, but it was all like that, a jumble of denial and
begging and shaking my head. It’s all wrong, I told myself, all wrong that she
should go and do something like that, do anything that she had been doing just out
of love for me.

She closed her other hand around mine as well and
then, only after a moment’s hesitation, let go. The space around us went
completely dark, and my CL monitor told me she had disconnected.

What was left of the Vajra
was
airlifted back to a temporary holding zone set up a few kilometers from the
spaceport, as the dock was still a wreck. Cioran had been released—spit out on
a corner near the performance space we’d singled out, oh irony—but was to be
given a quick physical shakedown by IPS before he could come back home. On his
insistence, we didn’t wait up for him, but went back to the villa.

Our place had been banged up even worse than the
surface feeds had told me, but repairs had started on it the minute the
infrastructure in that sector of the city had been greenlit once again. Our
belongings had been blown across the floor and mixed with a salad of debris
that seemed to have come from everywhere around. I recognized a piece of sky-colored
wall tiling the size of a dinner plate; it had been ripped off the façade of a
building I’d passed on the way to the manufaxture where Kanthaka had been fabbed.

Angharad and I hadn’t said a word to each other
since we’d dropped the CL link. She looked exhausted; I felt exhausted. It was
a good excuse not to make things worse. Enid, likewise, went straight into her
own room without a word and closed the door.

I sat on the bed—it had been freshly replaced; the
replacement for the large chair was still being fabbed—and watched through all
the available public surfaces as Marius, under heavy guard and with his neck
covered with medical-grade protomic cladding, walked up to Ralpartha in a
public square and shook hands. To one side stood Arsèni, his face puffy and
eyes dark like holes in the earth. To the other side stood an IPS officer, who
attached a stasis case to Marius’s arm.

Across a dozen different venues, commentary blared
about the whole incident. I heard my name (and Angharad’s, and everyone else
close to us) brought up again and again, and always with the same grim innuendo
hovering around it.
It wasn’t until they showed up
, and
Who’s to say
they’re not part of this
, and
The IPS has a lot of housecleaning to do
,
and
Tentative word has it that the remainder of the summit has been
postponed indefinitely,
and a good deal more I let pass through one ear and
out the other.