Flight of the Vajra (82 page)

I went outside.
I had to.

I didn’t mind that half the streets outside were
impassable; I didn’t bother trying to cover up the wreckage by toggling on a CL
overlay and pretending, like most everyone else, that the mess was just another
one of those real-world inconveniences that could be worked around. I parked
myself on the bridge near Malek Pirinçim’s shop—or tried to, anyway, since the
bridge was blocked off at both ends while its repairs were under way. It wasn’t
just a matter of slapping a new façade on things; this construction had to be
structurally tested, too, so it would take time. The barriers sported
estimated-time-to-completion countdowns: by this afternoon, most likely around
the time I was enjoying (ha ha) the Prince’s hospitality, the bridge would be
open once again.

I rested against the chest-high lattice that kept
people from auguring off the adjoining street and into the water below. I had
been right all along—not about Cavafy, but myself. There was far less pain to
be gleaned from finally seeing the mistake I’d made and appreciating its full
magnitude, than there was from inching that much closer to seeing Cavafy as
unworthy of being defended. Better the pain I know and that I’ve been
conditioning myself for all this time, I thought. I could always do something
about my own stupidity, but I could never do anything about Cavafy being a
traitor and a liar and cosm know what else.

“They told me you’d gone for a walk—”

Enid, in the real, stood behind me.

“—and what with your CL not taking links, I
thought I’d go for a walk too.” She put one foot up on one of the waist-high
impact attenuators that now blocked the entrance to the bridge, then stepped up
onto it like a mountain goat finding purchase in the rocks. It put her a good
head and change higher than me.

“I thought you and Cioran were hard at work,” I
said.

“We figured that work can wait.”

“So they told you what happened, I guess?”

“Actually, no. Just told me you’d needed some air.
I think they figured they’d leave the actual explaining to you, of whatever it
was that got you worked up.”

“I’ll run it back for you.”

I heard her protest for a second as I opened up
and sent her the playback for everything I’d said to the officers earlier. The
last thing I wanted to do was talk about it all over again, and for once I
didn’t care if I was betraying the very attitude that she’d developed in
imitation of me about such things. Just once, I thought, the convenience of being
able to do this actually makes a difference that matters to me.

She slumped into a crouch as she listened and
watched. I couldn’t tell if it was gloom on her face, or difficulty parsing the
explanation I’d given. For all I knew her mind was running hither and yon
looking up everything I’d touched on. I didn’t ask, just let her digest
everything in the minute or more of silence that followed.

“You thought it was your fault all along,” she
said, “so this isn’t exactly new, is it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all in
how
. I suspected
all this time—I just didn’t know how exactly to lay the blame. But now I have
it.”

“And you think on top of all that, your friend
exploited this little mistake of yours, to do something you’d never believe was
in him?”

“That’s their theory, not mine.”

“Sure sounds like you think it has weight now,
though.”

“I wish I didn’t think so.”

She slid off the impact attenuator and leaned
against the lattice, her back to the river, so she could stare at me halfway in
the eye. “You know what I think?” she said. “I think you
like
feeling
guilty. I think if you stopped feeling guilty about all this, even for ten
seconds, you’d be stuck. You wouldn’t know
what
to do! And now that
you’ve got all these things to
not
feel guilty about, you’re backing
off.”

“You think I have a choice? This—”

She cut it right off: “Sure, you’ve got a choice!
Same choices as everyone else! What do you think’s going to happen if you
don’t
keep this up? You think one of us is going to shake our heads? ‘How dare you
turn your back on your past’, or your friend, or whatever? —And I thought you’d
finally put all that down! You sure had
me
fooled, anyway.”

She folded her arms and let the corners of her
mouth warp into a bitter smile.

“And even if you didn’t fool me,” she went on, “I
would have still thought you were better than all that. ‘Cos it’s not hard to
see good things in you from where I stand—and I know I’m not the only one who
thinks that way.”

Without looking, I reached over with one arm and
pulled her in close. I didn’t have time to come up with a plan of defense; by
the time she’d planted her mouth on my cheek, it was already too late.

“Nobody,” she said into my ear, “especially not
me, nobody’s saying, turn your back on all them, on your friend and your wife
and your little girl. Maybe it sounds like that—but is that them, or is that
you
?
I mean, really.”

She relaxed her grip on me a bit and let me look
her right in the eye with some distance between us.

“You don’t exactly want to let go of a few things
in your life, either,” I said.

“No. I still want my dad back. I know that. But
he’s not the
only
thing. There’s room for . . . a lot more
than just that. There is now, anyway.” She rubbed at her nose and made a
sniffle that sounded suspiciously like the kind that preceded tears. “I keep
thinking, you should probably talk to Angharad about this stuff if you haven’t
already.”

“Not in the way I should have.”

“She’s going to be better at it than me, that’s
for sure. —You know, you’re the whole reason she said yes to helping me in the
first place.”

“Come on. Can’t you leave me at least a few of my
delusions?” It was my turn to be bitter with my smile. “I’d like to believe she
did it because that’s what she
is
, not because . . . ”

That again, I thought:
because she was trying
to impress me.
I didn’t want to say that out loud, because then I’d have to
go even further into the mud. Isn’t it better to believe Angharad is just like
that, that she really is the embodiment of all those qualities, not just for my
sake but for anyone’s sake, anyone at all? But every time I brought that
argument back out of the box where I’d stored it, it smelled all the mustier.
Angharad had said it herself—why
shouldn’t
it be about connecting with
someone else, a specific someone else and not just some impossible generalized
“humanity”? Why not?

“Stop it,” Enid said, blinking fiercely, “you’re
embarrassing me.”

I didn’t have to ask what she was talking about;
she demonstrated that when she extruded part of her sleeve and blotted my face
with it, then hers. One tear of mine, I thought: does that even count as
crying?

“Come on. If anyone around here should be a
crybaby, it’s me,” she said. Her own tears had made the consonants in her voice
run together.

I hugged her to my chest again and let her weep
there for as long as she needed. The lapel of my jacket, it seemed, worked
nicely as an impromptu handkerchief. Especially when she blew her nose into it.

Prince Nancelares of Bridgehead
—just
thinking
that name put my teeth on edge—didn’t want to have his audience with us via CL
alone. He wanted us up in his house, in person. Consider that demand one of the
few bona fide status symbols left: when you can not only ask for but receive an
in-person audience with anyone—say, Angharad the Kathaya—that’s proof of how
upper your particular crust is.

The two of us hustled back to the villa and
changed. Our dress clothes had been cleaned and repaired enough to be
presentable, although it felt like cheating to have the torn end of this and
the frayed edge of that patched up with protomic imitations of the material in
question. But nobody, least of all Malek Pirinçim, was open for business today;
we had to make do. Enid discovered, for what I suspected was the first time,
how even the preprogrammed variety of Type D substrate works as a good shoe
polish with the right off-the-shelf code.

Stroma Castle was the official name for that
looming pile of spires, a few kilometers on a side, sprouting from the rolling hills
at the epicenter of the city. “Castle” was as arbitrary a word as any to describe
it: one month it might be an actual castle with guttering torches, arrow-slits
and moats; another month it might be a lazy sprawl of single-level ranch-style
houses shaded by trees that were just as fake as the stucco or terracotta.
Today, from the look of it, it was being torn down and reconfigured, so it
resembled nothing more than a five-way collision between different slabs of mica
splattered with random iridescent fungus growths. Nestled in the back of that
mess was a single humble-looking two-story house that looked like it had been
stamped out of marzipan.

 “That place definitely looked different in the
pictures,” Enid said.

“Maybe it’s been instantiated in that form
specifically for us.” Ioné peered down at it as our helio circled lower and
aimed for the little pulsing red-and-white circle in the dead center of the
mica collision.

Wisecracks about the size of the Prince’s
substrate bill came to my mind, but I pushed them away. They didn’t apply here.
He outright owned all the substrate production in his territory; whatever was
left over after he withheld however much he felt like was whatever got sold on the
open market—sold to everyone who worked for him, which was technically the
whole rest of the city barring the IPS. Even with production being as automated
as it was, you still needed some warm bodies to oversee the whole thing—which
meant it wasn’t economical to produce more than you could safely store,
examine, transport and regulate. But you could still have enough lying around
casually to rebuild your whole house once a week or more. I wasn’t the only one
to wonder what the point was of such conspicuous consumption when almost no one
ever actually witnessed it in the first place. The mere
fact
of it was
good enough for some people.

The minute we stepped out of the helio, the seven
of us felt a location-based override make itself available through our CLs—a
major sign that the physical configuration of this place wasn’t what we were
going to be experiencing for the most part. Instantly the low ceiling over our
heads (barely two meters up) dropped back and became a series of shaftways, far
above which one could barely see vaulted cream-and-pink ceilings. This
CL-simulated inside was as much a collision as the outside: an interpenetrating
series of galleries, arcades, ramps, corridors, and stairs that seemed there
mostly to lead somewhere. Sunlight poured in from what seemed like an
impossible number of directions at once, most likely captured from the outside
and refracted by any number of surfaces. The marble underfoot may have been a
protomic substitute, but it had been laminated and fused together from multiple
Type B and Type D programs—four times the substrate budget, six times the
curing time, and it was still probably the cheapest material program in the
whole mansion. It didn’t make the atmosphere any less tasteless or jarring. It
was the house of a man who couldn’t decide what kind of house he wanted, so he
decided to just have all of them at once.

Then I stopped. The CL tweak we’d experienced was
a switching-
off
, not a switching-on. It hadn’t been there to immerse us
in this labyrinth, but to
reveal
it to us. The mess we’d seen from the
outside
was
the real exterior, and this maze inside
was
the real
interior.

“Was it like this when you dropped in earlier?”
Cioran asked Ulli. “Generous amounts of standing around and waiting, plenty of
opportunities to practice patience?”

“Actually,” Ulli said, “we had our earlier
audience over CL, much to his annoyance. He rather likes having excuses to
bring company over in person. ‘Please, do come and see the house. I’ve done
some lovely things with it lately.’
 
”

—
If his tastes are any measure of his mindset
or ambitions,
I CLed to Angharad and Enid,
this is going to be one short
conversation.
To Ulli: —
What did he say to you?

—
He insisted that we’d talk business later.
Not a hint of her usual buoyancy in those words, I thought.
He can be a
. . . a bit of a firecracker, after all.

From somewhere, I heard laughter—an echo of an
echo, then more than just echoes as it was soon joined by quick and light
little footfalls. Hearing that, I half-expected Enid to come charging out from
one of the adjoining corridors, but she still stood right next to me. Her own
head turned at the sound, and she was all but knocked over when two girls about
her age, maybe even a bit younger, rushed into the nexus where we stood and
literally ran a ring around us. They were barefoot and wore skirts and shifts
made of something so heavily pleated it looked torn.

“Come on! Come on!” they called out at us, and ran
off ninety degrees counter-clockwise from the way they’d come in. The way
they’d passed close to Enid had seemed like a taunt, and it seemed she’d taken
it in that spirit as well. She was the first one to charge off after them, as
fast as her shoes and good outfit would let her (which wasn’t very).

“They’re
projections
!” I shouted after her.

“I
know
!” she shouted back. Whatever, I
thought; if she wants to chase CL shadows she can never catch, how am I supposed
to find fault with that?

As the rest of us followed them, the two girls periodically
let us catch up by leading Enid in circles. There were enough cross-corridors,
anterooms and dead ends to provide plenty of room for such a wild goose chase.
Enid didn’t seem to mind; she was having a fine time, whooping and trying (and
failing) to cut the two of them off at whatever pass she could discern. It was
a moment before I realized I’d seen all this before, the very first time we’d
met in person, with her streaking up and down through the alleys and byways of
Port Cytheria.