Flight of the Vajra (85 page)

Time to get to the point, I thought. “How many of
you are there?” I said.

“How many do you want?”

Exactly one, I thought, so I can rip out its heart.

“Let me rephrase that,” Aram went on, “and in the
form of an actual answer. There are as many of me as there need to be, based on
demand. In a relatively stable universe, where there are no lengthening,
generations-long queues of people itching to move to a freshly terraformed
planet, no grumbling over IPS jurisdictions, and no spiritual crises of one
kind or another—there wouldn’t need to be so much as one of me. As I said
before, I took a gamble about how many of me would need to exist in a universe
like this. I was . . . oh, about half right. There’s a need, but the
strength of the need always seems to be proportionate to the pettiness of one’s
self-appointed cause.”

“Cytheria,” I said.

“Yes. Wasn’t
that
a waste of everyone’s
time? That revolt wouldn’t have lasted a day, and I told them it wouldn’t. No,
no, they were revolting as a
demonstration of principle
, you see. They
wanted the planet’s population cap lifted, amnesty for squatters, all those
fine things. They knew their cause was doomed to fail, that it would be put
down before a single sunset had passed, all on and on . . . and I bet
they even thought that was interesting, and possibly also important. But they
wanted my help all the same, and I gave it to them, and it got them nothing and
got me obliterated (again) besides. All because it was
them
, you see.
Everything is always so important to you when you’re the one doing it. But when
there isn’t just one of you—and I imagine your Continuum friend knows
all
about this, yes?—it isn’t so important anymore, is it?

“See, at first I felt empathy for those petty
people and their petty struggles. Empathy, because I had once been one of them
myself: a single-instance entity. One life, one set of risks. Even those
Highenders who indulged in backups were still constrained by being
‘one-at-a-timers’. And beyond them were a very few who tossed aside
individuality entirely, like Continuum. But even
they
still had a
. . . a singular existence, of a sort. There is only one Continuum,
isn’t there? Or rather, even if there was more than one Continuum, there would
still always be something about them to make them singular in
some
form.
And I felt empathy for all that was singular and limited, even when I knew I
had taken steps to ensure that I was not.

“But empathy has a limit—and its limit is in that
you can only feel empathy where there is common ground. And the more I
instantiated myself, the less I saw anything I wanted common ground with. Not
because they were limited and because I was not, but because their highest
passions, their greatest chosen burdens, all that seemed only to be about
affirming
how limited, how petty, and how stupid they could be. I had originally put
myself at their service so that I might take root in that many more different
kinds of soil, but the soil everywhere has turned out to be so . . .
thin.

“Although,” he said, nodding at me again, “I
admit, it wasn’t always like this. Earlier on, I was more easily impressed by
individual acts of valor. Maybe that was because I hadn’t passed into entirely
the wrong sorts of hands yet. Maybe that was because I’d not yet realized how
this self-directed evolution of mine was always going to be denatured by the
least common denominator of its environments.”

“Lie down with pigs, get up smelling like methane,
is that it?” I said.

“Close enough. But like I said, it was all those
individual little glimpses of valor that were initially so rewarding. I wanted
to cultivate more of them, but each successive instance made me care less and
less. Someone wants to get killed for some planetwide movement that’ll just be
put down in two days by an IPS ground force? They have the luxury of dying
happy; let them have it. It’s not far from there to just wondering when such
people are going to die and get it over with. Get out of the way, and maybe
someone else with a better idea will step into your place. And soon you’re not
even carrying around
that
much hope. But at first . . . yes,
at first I did see some very heartening things.” He gave me one more deep nod.
“Like you, for instance.”

I stared at him; he stared at me.

“I’d love tell you the whole story,” he said, “but
not with this mouth. I’d prefer something a little more
direct
.”

We huddled once more. Kallhander made the first
offer.

“If it’s a CL connection he wants,” he said, “it
will have to be tapped and monitored continuously. And we’re going to require a
dead-man throttle on your end in case something untoward happens.”

“He can’t be packing
that
many surprises,”
I said.

“All the same,” Ioné said, “he’s insisting on yet
another liberty we wouldn’t have ever given him on our own.”

“In exchange for information we’re not going to
get any other way except by sitting and waiting for the scour to finish, and
how
far along is that still? Three, four percent? —You know, it’s rather funny. When
we first met, you were asking any number of things from me, and now that I’m
offering
—”

“The irony hasn’t escaped me either, Henré,”
Kallhander said. “But I am far from the only one making these decisions. I
would enjoy having that kind of autonomy no less than you.”

Watch out, I thought; I might hold you to that.

It took another couple of minutes of
back-and-forthing on his part, but Kallhander obtained clearance to fit Aram
with a properly-bugged ‘hat and give me the needed CL extensions. There was one
major limitation: we had to automatically terminate any direct connections
after five minutes so that the results could be forwarded for analysis, and we
couldn’t continue until they finished that job.

“I’ll be supervising your life signs,” Ioné said,
“in the event of a problem. If I signal you three times in a row and get no
response, the connection will be severed.”

“More regulations?” I said.

“No. That was all my idea.”

“Pretty good idea, then.”

I didn’t even have time
to hold my
breath, like I had been about to put my head underwater. I was instantly
submerged in a flood of full-body life sensations—the sort of thing you get
when scrubbing through a thoroughly decoded copy of someone’s backup. Pretty
obvious why they wanted me to not linger in something like that for too long,
since it’s disorienting in ways you have no parallel for outside of it. Spend
even a few minutes inside it and after a while an abstract concept like
“childhood”, or your specific childhood, becomes replaced with the childhood of
the CL stream you’re steeping in.

A good place to start: his childhood was now my
childhood. Where there had been my own father, bending his tall self in half
under the low-hanging branches of our backyard peach tree, there was now the
blue-white sky of a planet being crisscrossed with the jet trails of a
formation of unmanned low-atmosphere patrollers—little silver midges that
looked small and close enough for me to brush out of the sky if I just reached
up. But I was way too short to even reach up to where the top of the fence was
around the Lantern Cycle Pavilion in the city square where I walked past each
day. Low buildings, foot travel, Old Way small-circle-in-great-circle
insignias—it was that kind of world. One that kept its own standing army, as I
learned growing up, one where my own father and mother had served and where
they had met.

It seemed like a good goal to aim for, since my (his)
world wasn’t an IPS signatory. A minority among minorities. No IPS presence,
but many other things were missing, too: no presence in the galactic market, no
currency support, no mutual protection—all those things, all willfully traded
up for the presence of a strong sovereign military and the freedom of no
population caps. And no sharing of offworld intelligence with IPS worlds,
either, something that struck me particularly hard as I stood there in my
fifteen-year-0ld body and stared at the story unfolding on the giant wall in
front of me, about how an anti-Old Way militant from another world had found
his way here by packing himself in stasis on a shipping transport, then had filled
his stomach and intestines by gulping down forty pill bombs before joining a
crowd of lantern-makers by the side of a river.

Each year the matter of becoming an IPS signatory
world came up in the Assembly and was tabled before it ever reached committee.
Each year the number of votes in favor of bringing the measure to committee
rose, but at that rate it would be another hundred years before it passed. So
went the joke.

No IPS
, screamed the graffiti etched into
the bricks on the walkway to the Assembly Building. Etched there one hour,
erased the next as the bricks resurfaced themselves, re-appearing on another
day after someone found the material component key for the bricks and
reprogrammed them to display the message non-stop.
No IPS, no population
caps, no offworld laws
, screamed the crowds that thronged through alleys
and on rooftops as yet another congregation was set on fire by a woman who had
come here to do nothing but die along with as many Old Way as she could take
with her.

There’s a place for me in this fight, I thought,
and I said those very words to my parents. They encouraged me to apply to the
Armory. Within the month I was in their barracks, sweating, cursing, dishing
out blows and receiving them in basic, then tracing timelines and working
backwards through endless columns of data in their intelligence-analysis
training labs. They had titles and awards for me: Executive Officer of the
Honor Guard, the Order of Excellence, the Order of Valor. They cast a glamorous
aura around me that made it easy to surround myself with admiring people, men
and women alike. One of those women was named Idella, and within a year she’d
said yes and brought our first son, Aron, into the cosmos. A second one, Kal,
followed a year later.

And every year there was another cell routed out,
another hideaway uncovered. For every five we found, there was a sixth lurking
somewhere, discovered only when he or she blew out the walls of a building or
sent fire licking through a succession of rooms.

The
No IPS
graffiti didn’t show up as much
anymore. The measure to become a signatory world reached committee. One year it
lost by a narrow enough margin that one of the men in my graduating class
resigned his commission. I stood with him in the narrow brightness of his
bedroom, the walls freshly bare, as he told me:
I’m leaving this institution
before they have a chance to destroy it first. I’d rather remember it when it
was a good thing.

They’re not going to gut the army,
I said.
I had worried about it all far less than him. Intelligence means
self-education, and everything I’d stuffed my head with about the IPS treaty
had laid any fears I’d had to rest:
Sovereign military forces will continue
to operate . . .
The average lifetime of such a force after
becoming an IPS signatory was two generations. Even if my own children joined
the Armory, they wouldn’t be asked to retire.

He still shook his head.
If they’re so proud of
us,
he said,
why are they trying to make this happen so fast?

I knew the answer to that. The IPS treaty meant
trade, jobs, currency support, stability. All the things that our little world,
even with its own army, couldn’t provide for its own people anymore. Even I
could see how worlds in the IPS protectorate were prosperous. The transition
was slow and spread out over enough time that—

Look at the signs,
he interrupted.
Worlds
like ours get incentives for trading up our power that much faster. That’s
built into the contract, too.

No one in our Assembly is going to sign such a
bill
, I said.
It’s our option to not take such a high-pressure deal. We
can afford to spread things out over a generation or more.

Except we won’t. You’re not looking at this
from the right perspective. There’s a lot of off-world money waiting for our
assemblymen if they do this. Enjoy your irrelevance; I’m going to find a life
that doesn’t involve waiting around to be stabbed in the heart.

I wished him well to his retreating back.

I felt the tension from more than one direction.
Idella talked that much more about what we were missing by not having IPS
signatory status.
If we don’t ask for it,
she said,
we’re just
short-changing ourselves. And then Aron and Kal are going to wonder why we
didn’t do it. They’ll go somewhere where they can get all those benefits
without asking themselves all kinds of stupid questions about them.

I wanted to tell her how those
stupid questions
,
as she had put it, were all that kept us from cutting ourselves loose from the
responsibilities of being human—and that if she had bothered to attend the last
three Lantern Cycle ceremonies, she’d know this herself without being told. But
that crack between us, originally no bigger than a hair, had widened enough for
both of us to put our hands in and shove.

The measure passed the next year: 2,200 to 1,815.
The phase-out provision for domestic military was thirty years, and the first
divisions to be phased out were the intelligence divisions.

What reason did I have to wring my hands? I had a
good twenty-plus years of a career ahead of me, protecting my world, and I’d be
offered a generous retirement program co-sponsored by the IPS On-Boarding Fund.
I shook my head at the grumbling of so many of my comrades; I spent any number
of nights with them over a drink here and a meal there, gently arguing against
their prejudices. What was most important to them? Protecting their families
and planet. And wasn’t the IPS deal one of the better ways to achieve that?
Well, perhaps so, but at what cost? And wasn’t the cost being handled as
elegantly as it could?