Flight of the Vajra (84 page)

Another calculated performance, I thought. He’s
got to know the Kathaya isn’t someone you can goad into an intemperate
reaction. I hoped to whatever god was listening she didn’t give him one.

“What is it that you want me to do,” Angharad
said.

“You? Nothing, and as much of it as possible.” He
wasn’t shouting anymore; his voice was barely louder than hers now. “It’s what
I’m
going to do that will make all the difference. First, I’m closing the world to
immigration, effective immediately. The policy was due to be revised; I’m
revising it. The doors are shut. Your bluff is being called, if you even
thought of it as a bluff. If you would rather have your precious flock keep to
themselves . . . let’s do that, then. Let’s not kid ourselves, or
each other. If you think so little of Bridgehead, then Bridgehead only deserves
to think that much less of you. Oh, I have been waiting so very, very long to
make this happen. And this week has given me all the excuses I needed.”

Ulli stood. I understood just then what people
meant when they said someone looked “stricken”.

“Nancelares,” she said, “all this time—how long,
exactly? You’ve been waiting, all this time, just to tell her to her face, all
these things—?”

“All ‘this time’ and longer,” the Prince said. “You
must admit. It was well worth the effort it took to bottle it up.”

He snatched up a plate from the sidebar as he
strode towards an exit.

“Don’t wait around on my account,” he called out to
the room in front of him.

We didn’t wait around on his account.
The
girls showed us back to the garage where the helio was parked. Not as if we
needed the guidance—and this time, they walked us there with the flat-footed
stalk of someone’s mother dragging their children home, with us as the kids.
They didn’t even so much as smile or wave us off as we climbed back in and jetted
away.

Ulli folded herself in half and pressed her face
against her knees. The rest of us gathered aside our mental skirts and
coattails and let Cioran sit next to her, arm around her shoulder, and receive
her sobs into the nape of his neck. It went on like that for most of the ride
back to the villa.

“That,” she eked out, “was the single greatest
mistake I have ever made.”

“Well,” Cioran said, raising a finger, “there
was
that one time you tried to make the couscous stir-fry—”

“Oh, stop it, you hopeless comedian you!” She pushed
at his forehead with the heel of her hand. “I know I can count on you for the
cheering-up, but I’m sorry to say, all that seems very far away now. Especially
now that I, and most everyone else in power on this gob of rock, is looking at
a full-blown culture war. Possibly followed by the first shooting war in I
couldn’t even compute how long. Oh, what a
lovely
week this has been.”

Angharad reached over, like she was trying to pet
a fly, and put her hand on Ulli’s shoulder.

“Oh, no, now,” Ulli said to the other woman,
shaking her head, “don’t you even
think
of apologizing. Evidently he’s
come to the conclusion that the best response to a belief system he isn’t a
party to is to insult its pontiff and disabuse its followers. And he’s been
waiting for the opportunity to make his case at the cost of a great many other
things.”

“You did say he was a bit of a firecracker,” I
said.

“I did, yes. And out of the vain belief he was a
relatively low-yield one. He’s been disrespectful to guests before; everyone
expects a certain amount of that sort of upper-class clowning from someone of
his stature. And I know I mentioned before his disdain for the Old Way. You
didn’t talk about it around him. The one time it was hinted at obliquely in his
presence by someone else, he shouted at the poor man: ‘Don’t you ever mention
that
cow’s religion
around me again!’ And he threw a tumbler at him for
good measure.”

Angharad removed her hand and sat back.

A culture war, I thought. Was there any other
kind?

“How is it your fault,” Ulli asked her, “if he’s
such an insufferable prat about something you’ve given your life to? And yes, I
know how strange that sounds coming out of my mouth.”

“He is not wholly wrong to feel as he does,”
Angharad said. “You must know that there is not a man alive who has no
grievance with some grounding in the truth.”

“It’s not the grievances, my dear; it’s how he
upended the whole barrelful of them over your head at once!” Ulli lifted
herself all the way from Cioran’s shoulder. “And so childishly, too. That’s why
people like him
have
diplomats in the first place, or at the very least
appoint others to speak sensibly for them. But it’s as I said before
. . . he’s high up enough not only in his world but all worlds that
he doesn’t see such things as necessary. It was harmless enough, once upon a
time.”

“Angharad,” Enid said, “you weren’t going to take
him seriously, were you? About not being the Kathaya?”

—
You know she’s serious about it in the long
run,
I CLed her.

—
I know that too. I just didn’t think the long
run would be this . . . short. Or that she would do it in a way that
looked like she was reacting to something like this
. Enid’s inner voice was
a good deal more composed than her outer one.

“Am I wholly wrong,” Angharad said, “in thinking
how the platform that gives me a voice also cages me up?”

“I know you’ve said that before,” Cioran said.
“And more than a few times now. But it’s like Ulli said once: ‘If they give you
the power you don’t want, that’s a sign you might deserve it.’
 
”

Ulli blinked at him. “When did I ever say that?”

“The day you got this job!”

“No,” Ioné said, “it’s not wrong of you to have
the power, or to use it. But there is the question of what it’s all for, isn’t
it?”

Angharad faced her; that alone spurred Ioné to
keep talking.

“You said just now,” Ioné went on, “that there’s
no one in this universe without a valid complaint of some kind. Sometimes it’s
with others . . . and sometimes it’s with ourselves. We sense our own
limits more fiercely than we do someone else’s.” Kallhander’s stare—for him, a
puzzled sidelong glance was someone else’s full-out pop-eyed look—only egged
her on.

Ioné turned to Angharad. “Are you worried that
anything you would plan to do after this would simply seem like a reaction to
him?”

“A reaction to him,” Angharad said, “and not an
act of my own true accord.”

“That shouldn’t be a reason to not do anything,” I
said. “You know everyone’s going to draw their own conclusions anyway.”

“Maybe,” Enid said, “it’s high time you did what
he did, too. Came out and said what had to be said.”

Angharad looked at all of us in turn, then gave
the whole of the cabin a single bow.

“Those of you that do not already know this,” she
said, “have most likely intuited it already, or learned it from others on the
side. If this was the case, then I thank you for saying nothing until now. I
am, I admit, ashamed that it took a temper tantrum from someone such as the
Prince to bring this to the surface. But to the surface it has come, and there
is no submerging it again now.

“With the conclusion of this summit, I was to have
announced that I had made a decision. The Old Way itself, and the best
interests of those who follow the Old Way, are no longer compatible. This,
again, the Prince said in his own fashion—his own, rather terrible fashion.
Soon enough I too will say it to the rest of the universe in my own way—what I
hope will prove to be a far more constructive manner. I will relinquish my
position as the Kathaya, and call upon the Achitraka to replace me within a
suitable timeframe. Enough time for me, certainly, to conclude any unfinished business.”
She nodded towards Enid.

“But it will be as the Prince said, although maybe
not in the exact manner he said it. There is only so much that can be done when
carrying the weight of this tradition, or bound up inside it. Pontiff and
follower alike are both laboring under a burden that has only grown heavier
with the years. I took up the mantle thinking I could lighten that burden by
taking all the risk that my predecessors had gradually avoided. I left
Achitraka House behind me as much as I could; I placed myself in front of my
followers, not behind them. Or so I told myself. I did not go far enough, you
see. If I was to leave Achitraka House behind, I had to leave it behind
entirely. I knew this, even as I found any number of reasons to never act on
it. But now I see no reason to doubt myself any longer.

“Perhaps all this sounds vague. It is,
intentionally so. In the entire time I had these unresolved doubts roiling
within me, I never did devise a precise plan. Henré chastised me—and rightfully
so—for acting that way. He was right to be angry with the way I used my
position all the more as an . . . experiment. If I do this, the
burden of risk has to be entirely mine.”

“No,” I said. “Not entirely.”

She looked stuck on what she knew she had to ask
next. I saved her the trouble.

“You’re not commanding me to follow,” I said. “I’m
volunteering.”

“Me too,” Enid said. “But you probably knew that
already. And . . . if my father wants to come along, maybe there’s a
place for him, too?”

“I am sure there would be,” Angharad said.

Ulli looked at Cioran and gave vent to a shaky
sigh. “After this, I suspect I won’t have much of a career down here, anyway,
wouldn’t you say? —Angharad, dear, if you’d have me—”

“I would.”

“
Us
,” Cioran corrected. “I’m sure there’s
something
the two of us can do for you. That is, if you’ll have us in the first place. I
can’t imagine we made the best impression with our earlier antics—”

“Oh, do shut up,” Ulli said, smiling despite
herself.

“This is all very heartening,” Kallhander said, in
a way that implied it wasn’t, “but the shorter-term agenda is much more
pressing. Official communiqués just arrived from the Prince’s public relations offices.
The entire off-world diplomatic contingent, myself included, has been given one
solar day to leave and conduct their business elsewhere, ‘to prevent any
further risks to the local population or power structure.’ Being that Henré is
involved in a project that involves IPS resources, I was able to negotiate on
our behalf to extend that to three days’ time for all of us. Also, the first
galaxywide IPS reports for any sightings of Marius are in; so far, negative.”

“Maybe he’s dead, then,” Enid said, packing her
words with all the spite they could hold. “That would sure save us all a lot of
trouble, wouldn’t it?”

“Got any more good news?” I said.

“The Aram copy is now conscious. We’re preparing
to interrogate it; I imagine you’ll want to be present for that.”

He did seem at least provisionally embarrassed for
having broken the spell that had been building in the cabin. Lucky for him, we
touched down within the next few seconds and he was lucky enough to be the
first one out. It was one of the few times I can remember when I was grateful
for a conversation not to be continued via CL.

The first things we saw
on entering the
foyer of the villa were three shipping cubes piled against the wall (two at
bottom, one on top), each one meter on a side. They had the carbon-powder black
surfaces and attention-getting orange symbols of all IPS property, although I
recognized the call numbers lettered on the side of the crates as the most
recent one for the
Vajra
.

“Were we expecting deliveries?” I asked Kallhander.

“Salvage from your ship,” he said. “In the event
you wanted to keep any of it. They finished reprocessing the wreckage this
morning.” Then, more confidentially: “I thought it was an open question as to
whether or not you wanted to reconstitute it, but I had the useful salvage
reclaimed and placed in your account anyway.”

“Please, do keep right in surprising me,” I said.
“You’re doing a bang-up job.”

“I take it there will not be another iteration of
that ship?”

“Not
that
ship, no. But there’s going to be
another
Vajra,
all right. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you a thing.”

I took a seat in my room and had the crates
wheeled in and stacked to one side. Probably nothing in there worth keeping;
I’d go through it when I had a slow moment—if I was lucky enough to get such a
thing before we were packed off-world. In the moments before Kallhander patched
me into the CL link for the interrogation room for Aram, I checked my bank accounts—more
than enough to regenerate a new
Vajra
, but again, I was dubious if that
was what we ought to be doing anyway.

The CL link kicked in, and the far wall of my room
fell away. Beyond where it had stood was a chamber that resembled a
critical-care ward—self-sterilizing surfaces, and a humaniform bulge in one
wall from which one could extrude a full-body CL-controlled prosthesis. I
didn’t need to suit up in one of those; there were plenty of native sensory
surfaces to work with, and it wasn’t as if I was going to be cutting and
plastering any tissue myself.

Instead of a bed, the center of the room was taken
up with one of the biers that Aram had been instantiated out of. Most of the
lower half of his body was a twisted, glistening mess of protomic surrogate
organs all squeezing and quivering away, keeping everything from his neck up
alive while the rest of his body was slowly being regenerated. All they had
needed from the original biological program was the head, and they’d been able
to directly program the neural tissue as it regenerated, using the data it had
attempted to retrieve remotely in the first place. No prizes on how long the
copy lasted, though: the faster the instantiation, the more likely the whole
thing would turn into a pudding of broken cell walls within days. A good world
took a century or more to properly terraform, so that it too could be proven
habitation-worthy. Likewise, a body worth inhabiting took a good couple of
months to instantiate, which is why you threw a party when you were finally
back into it.

Kallhander and Ioné were also patched into the
same CL space, and they both wore expressions that made them seem like they
were about to start running naked through a field of nettles. They sent me a
copy of the interrogation program: the ruse we were using was that we’d
recovered his body from the wreckage of Marius’s estate. Kallhander had been
specifically ordered not to reveal to it that this was an IPS interrogation. The
clearance required for that had already been processed while we’d been whooping
it up earlier.

“How’re we handling this?” I said. “I doubt you
were just planning to wake him up and badger him. Also, why bother with the
whole body when you could just scrape the upload?”

“Incentive,” Ioné said. “Providing him with a body
gives him that much more . . . hope, I suppose you could say. If we
tempt him with the possibility of the whole thing, he may cooperate all the
more.”

“We’re also already scraping the upload data in
parallel,” Kallhander said. “So far it’s not provided us with anything but
low-level procedural data: language formations, task-based memory, that sort of
thing. There’s quite a bit of that to sift through and reconstruct. Much of it
is off-the-shelf material: combat training, for instance.”

“Makes sense based on what we saw,” I said, then
nodded at Ioné. “But you still outgunned him.”

“I’m not sure I could repeat that reaction time
again.” Ioné looked at the twisted bushel of pearl-colored organ bulbs protruding
from the bottom half of the torso in front of her. “I suspect it was because I
had a . . . very specific level of motivation.”

“I think we all did,” I said.

Red and green lines drew themselves in the air in
front of us, overlaying the body on the table and demonstrating where various
neural stimulations were being enacted. The muscles on the face twitched, and a
choked gust of air came out of the mouth. No direct CL: they didn’t dare outfit
it with one. Everything was relayed back to it through the projection surfaces
in the room. Kallhander was the only one who manifested to Aram, and not even
as himself but in the green coveralls of a medical technician.

“Can you hear me?” Kallhander said. “If you are
unable to speak, blink three times.”

“I can speak,” it rasped. The voice was sickly,
croaking, but it gained in strength each time it returned.

“Can you identify yourself?”

“You first.”

Touché, I thought.

“I’m a doctor, and you are in a medical bay. Your
body was recovered from the wreckage of an estate on the planet Bridgehead—”

“Oh, the
boy,
” it said, coughing out
something that could have been a laugh. “What did he do
this
time?”

“Are you unable to identify yourself?”

“Well, I know who
I
am. But it hardly
matters.”

“Why is that?”

The body on the bier raised its head slightly and
looked down at the mess that remained of its body. It had no arms, but I could
imagine from the way one shoulder twitched that it would have run its own
fingers through that pile of breathing synthetic meat and ripped everything
loose just to shut itself up.

“Rather a rush job,” it said, “but I suppose you
didn’t have the time for anything more than this. Then again, you’re IPS;
you’re always in a hurry over something.”

Good guess, I thought. Then again, maybe he hadn’t
expected to end up anywhere except under IPS scrutiny if he was caught. So much
for that bluff.

“Look, is this an official interrogation?” it went
on. “Because if it is, I’m going to invoke my rights under the Charter, and one
of those rights is to not have to utter a single word.”

“You’re not bound by the Charter,” Kallhander
said. “You’re an unlicensed synthetic construct. Unless you can provide
evidence that the use of your cortical dump entitles you to claim the identity
of a—”

“Oh, now the
rule book
comes out!”

“—a citizen of an IPS signatory world, your legal
status is that of a piece of physical evidence.”

“Shrug,” it said. I remained impressed at how much
spite could be packed into a single word. “Is this meant to scare me? Because
you’re not telling me anything I haven’t mulled over the consequences of in
triplicate years ago. That and I imagine you’re running a scour on my memory
dump somewhere right now, so I think I’ll just sit here and admire the ceiling
and let you smart, smart people put the pieces together yourself.”

Faced with that, the three of us went into a
huddle.

“I figured it would be like this,” I said. “I’m
actually surprised he didn’t start by saying ‘Where’s my lawyer?’
 
”

“If he demands representation, it’ll be given to
him,” Kallhander said, “but our own legal staff concurred that any lawyer would
tell him his rights were all abridged a long time ago.”

“Some of what he said is still useful,” Ioné said.
“He mentioned he was quite aware that he might be considered property.”

“It’s the exact wording that got me,” I said. “
 
‘Mulled over the
consequences’, he said. What does that sound like to you?”

“Someone who has deliberately abandoned legal status
as a Charter-bound entity,” Kallhander said.

“I can think of only two types of people who do
that to themselves: political dissidents and criminals. No prizes for guessing
which bucket
he
falls into.” I’d been using the word
it
mentally,
but the more humane pronoun popped right out of me without so much as a
thought.

It also occurred to me right after speaking that
he might well be a bucket all his own.

“You still want to bother talking to him?” I went
on. “Because if you don’t, I will. You know full well what we have here is a
walking, speaking—” Maybe not
living,
precisely. “—thinking embodiment
of everything that killed my family.”

“You seem quite convinced it would be
responsible,” Ioné said.

“That or he’s the closest one to being
responsible.” She’s still calling him
it
, I thought. Anything to put
that much distance between her and him, maybe?

“You’ll continue to have access to him as long as
we have,” Kallhander said. “Although . . . based on our first
conversation, they may simply take their chances sifting through his scour. I
can’t guarantee that said access won’t be revoked from all of us at once.”

The full importance of this didn’t immediately
reach me, but when it did, I felt a quiet appreciation for him that I hadn’t
felt at all before. After all the inches of neck I’d risked for him, here at
last were a few inches of his own in return.

“There are limits,” he admitted. “All of the
discussions to and from him must be filtered through me. I wasn’t able to
provide you with more access than that.”

“I’ll take what I can get. Look, are they worried
if I said the wrong thing, their whole jig would be up? It’s been up since
before we even started talking to him, anyway. And besides, maybe we’d benefit
from a different conversational style?”

A pause, during which I imagined Kallhander making
a quick sidelong appeal to those in the higher pay grades. “If you want to
speak to it as yourself,” he said hesitantly, “then, again, that will have to
be done through me to approve each transaction. It shouldn’t impose much of a
delay in the conversation, however.”

“Like I said. I’ll take what I can get.”

We came out of the huddle, and I was allowed to
manifest directly to Aram. (At least call the thing by its name and don’t call
it “it”, I told myself; it’ll be less of a hassle.) I was about to say
Do
you remember me?
when Kallhander shot me a warning:
Don’t imply that you
know it directly. All of your experiences with it might not have been synced to
the backup before it was taken offline. The network traffic patterns we’ve
isolated indicate that’s possible, but we would rather have it confirm that without
any prompting. Continue.

This is going to be one bumpy conversation, I
thought, and started over.

This time, I didn’t say anything at all. I just
let the sight of me—my suit, my dreads, my tall frame—register with him and
provoke a response on their own.

“Mister Sim,” Aram said. “So they’ve corralled you
into prodding me to talk, is that it?”

“No, I’m here because I want to be.”

“Why would you want to be with
me
? Except
maybe to put your hands around my throat? Given that the last thing I remember
is you sitting in a car across from me and the boy, and then my memory cutting
off very suddenly, I suspect it’s because you want to finish what you started.
You didn’t take kindly at all to being treated like that and I don’t blame
you.”

Must have squirted out an incremental backup
before he died, I thought. Good; it meant we had all the more to work with.

“What happened to just sitting there and admiring
the ceiling?” I said. To my amazement, Kallhander let that one go through. “And
you said ‘the boy’, and if I didn’t know better, the way you wrinkled your lips
when you said it was pretty telling. Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning . . . he made for better
company at arm’s length than he did up close. As most of them do.”

“Them?”

“The sort of company I always end up keeping.”

“What kind of company is that?”

“People who think they can outsource their criminal
inclinations. I was expecting something a little more ambitious, really. I
suppose that’s more of the kind of thinking I could have done without, but
. . . I let myself believe, again and again, that it would be better
next time. And sometimes it was incrementally better, but it was never what I
could imagine. Every time I fell into new hands, I tried to describe to my new
confederates—if that’s even the word for what they were—I tried to tell them,
Imagine
how it could be.
But they weren’t interested in what I had to tell them.
They just wanted solutions to technical problems, the sorts of things they knew
I had answers to, which was why they took me into their company. I suppose I
deserved what I got. I threw myself into the void, and I got reincarnated as a
. . . a military textbook. And one where most of the pages would get
ripped out and thrown on the floor anyway.” He gave me a direct look. “I’m not
ruining anything by telling you this stuff, you know. I have confidence that
whoever’s sifting through my scour will put all that together themselves in
good time. But you’re in a hurry, aren’t you? And the fact that you’re in a
hurry tells me you got your hands on me but not Little Lord Astatke. Oh, I had
high hopes for him, you know. Still do, assuming he’s alive and successfully
picked up his ‘package’. He told me all about it. For all I know there’s
another of me riding out there with him right now. Impossible to tell while
cooped up in here, of course, so I’ll just have to wait and guess—and hope.”