Flight of the Vajra (87 page)

If any one instance dies, it means nothing. Does
an ant weep for its brother? Why would it, when they are all the same ant? So do
you think Marius sheds any tears for me, knowing full well he has as many more
of me as he needs, wherever he goes?

Once I had the core work on such a scheme done, I
spent a good while creating the first front-load backup dump from my own
experiences and memories. Since I had no backups to begin with, the process
would not involve replaying an existing backup—but rather, co-integrating my
own mind into its new receptacle and diffusing it by degrees into it, a one-way
process that might take months. I had no alternative.

It was during this time that I sensed how everything
I had lugged around with me, all these burdensome questions of life and death,
of loss and sorrow, all vanished. I did not free myself of them; they freed
themselves of me. They found other men to nest in, other men to worry with
their claws and slash with their beaks. That convinced me I would not have to
worry about my original body, my “zero instance”, dying, for I had been looking
for an exit from it for some time anyway. “The vessel that is birthed must be
greater than the one that gives birth”: is it not one of your own Kathayas that
said those very words? And isn’t it in fact the one Kathaya whom you yourself
hold so dear? Yes, I know it is.

And one morning “I” opened my eyes, and the first
and greatest joy of “my” new life presented itself to “me”: the sight of my
former singular body, now just a hollowed-out corpse, lying in the bier from
which the first and last pattern impressions had been taken. Victory at last!
“I” thought. He simply
exists
, the way space itself does, the way the
ants exist more as an indestructible idea than as any one tiny, fragile insect
at a time.

He will never have been born, and now he can never
truly die.

And then the I that was still Henré Sim pushed away
the I that was Aram, pushed as hard as he could and closed every single
connection that he could conceivably have wended his way back in through, and
fell backwards on the bed with sweat slickening every bit of the human body he
still thankfully had.

I didn’t stay there.
I sat back up, stalked
into the shower, and scrubbed myself raw under the water for a good ten
minutes, trying to wash out from under my skin the feeling of wanting to barge into
the room where they had that thing bolted to a table and feel its fake flesh
pulling apart under my own hands. I knew I had to plunge myself back into that
filth, those squirming guts, to find the rest of the answers I’d set out to
get—but not in the state I was in. Kallhander had seen and heard everything I
had, and was most likely triangulating every identifiable piece of it.

Why would he tell me all that? I thought, as I shut
off the water and let the air vents massage me. Why wave all that under my
nose, assuming it’s the truth? To tempt me, why else? Same reason Kallhander
himself had tempted me: to bring me in that much deeper. He knows he has
answers I want, and he won’t give them up for nothing.

I CLed Kallhander as I got dressed: —
You got
all that, I take it.

—
I did, and it’s already yielding results. We
have a strong suspicion now who Aram’s original progenitor is. Real name Aram
Dezaki, a former IPS draftee and—Are
you
all right?

—No.

From the other end of the link, I felt something
that resembled a pained sigh. Well, I told myself, I
had
been looking
for as many ways I could to get under Kallhander’s skin, just to see if
anything could pierce that deeply. I closed the link without making things any
worse for either of us.

And then I thought, to myself only:
Don’t look
back.

I didn’t know if those were words once spoken by
someone else and only just now remembered by me, or if they arose straight out
of me from the demands of the moment. Either way, they were telling me what to
do, and I was listening. I could chase answers I was never likely to get, or I
could face forward and look instead for a place where I could find better
questions to ask.

I knew it would hurt me all the worse to face
forward, but that alone told me why it would be worthwhile. The pain alone
might be enough to wipe me clean.

Angharad and Enid were together in the former’s
room. On the table between them was Enid’s MemoCel, on which it was possible to
make out a blurry image—someone seen from behind, hurrying down a corridor into
darkness. Both women—it didn’t bother me to think of Enid as a woman now, with
all the risks she’d been proud to take—looked up at me as I came in. I guess
the expression on my face and the set of my shoulders was enough to make them
worried.

“Angharad,” I said, “how much money do you have?
Not Achitraka funds;
your
money.”

Angharad looked puzzled.

“I’m getting out of here,” I said, gesturing at
the walls around and above and below, “since they want us all out of here
sooner rather than later anyway. The docks and the assembly areas are all back
online and open for business. I figured it was about time we started paving the
path we’d been planning to take anyway.”

“Don’t you mean, ‘
We’re
getting out of
here’?” Enid said. She undid the flap of her leg pocket and reached inside,
where I knew the remaining Cytherian coins were still stored. “And if you’re
taking up a collection to finance a new
Vajra
, you know I’m in.”

“Money,” Angharad echoed vaguely. Seems like I’ve interrupted
her in the middle of something heavy, I thought; it’s taking her a bit to come
back down to earth with the rest of us. “I have savings of my own, of course.
And yes, you are entirely right—a new ship for us should come out of our own
funds, not the Achitraka’s. But the design you showed me before—I suspect no amount
of money we could produce on our own would be able to finance something of that
size. It’s rather . . . large, isn’t it?”

“There’s nothing that says we have to build a
full-scale version, is there? We just have to build enough of it for this
crew.”

 “The three of us or the . . . ” Enid
counted quickly on her fingers. “ . . . seven of us?”

“Seven.” I shot Angharad a nod. “You being the one
with the final say, of course.”

Angharad nodded right back. “Which I gave before,
on the way here. The seven of us to begin with—and then, from there, we shall
see.”

“Grab whatever you’re taking with you,” I said,
“and meet me in the foyer. I’ll let the others know.”

I threw one last look down at the MemoCel, but
Enid had swiped it off the table and folded it up before I could see any more
than I already had. I’ll learn about that one in due time, I guess.

Seven of us. A good start, I thought. You can’t
summon the future by just snapping your fingers; you have to walk into it at
the same speed as everyone else. The problem is you trick yourself into
thinking you can jump ahead.

The only things I had to pack and take with me
were my new suit and the few other things that had been sitting in their box. I’d
never even unpacked them. It all fit into a single quarter-area cargo
container, from which I extruded wheels.

I stopped in the doorway of the suite and took a
last look out at the ocean. I’ll turn my back on this place, I thought, and in
a week this whole building’ll be torn down and fed back into a reclamation
hopper somewhere. Not a sign would remain that any of us had ever been here,
except maybe in the limbo of other people’s memories. For all I knew, this
whole expedition would be remembered by whatever population remained on
Bridgehead as nothing but the fiasco that cut short the future for so many
hopefuls who were still on that waiting list. They’ll remember our names, I
thought, and then they’ll spit at whatever wall is nearest. There had to be a
better legacy to leave than that.

I stopped in the doorway to the lobby. Everyone
had arrived: Enid and Angharad, sitting on their own little cargo cases; Kallhander
and Ioné, carrying nothing but themselves; Cioran and Ulli, the latter sitting
and the former standing over her. In fact, everyone’s attention was on Ulli as
I entered, as she was sharing something with the group. Maybe Kallhander had
dissuaded her from looping me in after I’d hung up on him?

“Well,” Ulli was saying, “it’s official now. I’ve
been given my walking papers. I am now expressly forbidden from representing,
speaking for, acting as an agent of ... oh, you can guess the rest. See for
yourself.” She said this last at me, and sent me a CL of something very
official-looking, very wordy, and very sternly-phrased.

I read the first paragraph of it and made a sound
like I’d been kicked in the stomach. It sure felt like I had been. “I
especially like the part where they found a way to unload some blame for Marius
and Mylène on you,” I said. “I give them points for being creative.” There was
more than that, a lot more, but that particular singling-out gave a good idea
of the overall tone of the thing.

“Oh, I was far from being the only one who’s been
sacked over this.” Ulli parked her chin in one hand and waved the other, as if
wishing someone good riddance. “But I’m one of the more readily-identifiable
names. I wouldn’t be surprised if Commissioner Ralpartha was also asked to step
down or at the very least take a reassignment. After all, this whole donnybrook
boiled up on
his
watch.”

“At least they let you walk out the door with your
severance package,” Cioran said, squeezing her shoulder. “Well, some of it.”

“Oh, yes, very generous of them. Half my salary as
pension, for the next twenty years solar, and as a further gesture of courtesy
they aren’t heaving me into the elevator with my visa cancelled. But they must
know all too well I have plenty of other pies to keep my fingers warm in, so in
their eyes I won’t miss this all that much. They were looking for easy
scapegoats on top of some genuinely guilty parties, and they found them.”

“You interested in helping co-finance a new
venture, then?” I said.

Ulli raised her head from her hand. “You certainly
don’t waste any time, do you? —Oh, I imagined you’d be asking something of that
kind before long. A ‘reconstruction effort’, as it were?”

“That and a whole lot more. We can talk shop on
the way to the shipyard.”

Kallhander bent my ear in private as we waited for
a freshly-instantiated helio to show up. —
I was saying, we’ve made a
tentative identification based on the talk you had with Aram. I want to release
the full dossier to you, but Commissioner Ralpartha is being . . . obdurate
.

—
If what Ulli said has a grain of truth in it,
then Ralpartha making the best of what time he has left before he’s asked to
clean out his desk too. I bet he’s annoyed enough that I was allowed to talk to
Aram, despite all it gave them.

—They haven’t yet blocked access to Aram, but
no guarantees on how long that will last. And less than no guarantees on
whether or not we’ll be able to get it back. I’m also not positive we’d have
access to the scour produced from his memory, and I suspect IPS Countermeasures
and First Response are preparing to have a seek-and-destroy set up to remove
any other copies of it that might still be extant.

Looks like I wasn’t going to be allowed to turn my
back on this mess so quickly after all, I thought.

—Then either we talk to the Aram we have,
I
told Kallhander,
or we get one for ourselves.

The silence from his side was telling.

—
Look,
I went on,
you’ve seen for
yourself that he’s willing to talk to me. He
likes
rubbing what he is in
my face. That tells me a lot about his complicity in ...
everything
I’ve
come this far for. If your people aren’t smart enough to take advantage of
that, they’re in the wrong business.

—There’s one other possibility which would buy
us time, but it is farfetched. If Aram is willing to claim political asylum
with Angharad, he could leave with us.

Time for me to be boggled.

—
Kallhander,
I CLed,
he’s got no rights.
You said as much yourself. He can’t claim political asylum any more than a
bullet
can.

—Not directly; not by himself. But if Angharad
recognizes him as a stateless citizen held against his will, he could ask for
asylum with the Achitraka, she could grant it, and IPS would be hard-pressed
not to oblige. This is a political gray area and a gamble, but as you mentioned,
the only other options are even more questionably legal—

—And they require time we don’t have.

—Unfortunately, yes. I’ll explain the situation
to the Kathaya; you continue to make contact with Aram while we still can. And
Ioné will attempt to release you what we’ve found regarding his identity.

Make contact with Aram, he’d said. It was hard not
to hear him say those words as if he had been saying,
Go plunge your face
back into this boiling cauldron of mud.
Small wonder I procrastinated,
knowing full well every second I wasn’t talking to Aram (or letting him talk to
me, however the discussion went) I was letting slide past me the one
opportunity I’d come all this way for.

And I knew why, too—it was all because the truth I
got wasn’t the truth I had been holding out for, and so I had turned and fled.
Some part of me still believed when I faced the truth of the matter, I could do
it—well,
heroically
. But here I was, stomach flipping over, all but
wetting my pants.

The shuttle arrived, extruded an ovipositor-like
tube from its backend, siphoned up our luggage, and allowed us to board. I
stalled as long as I could before re-opening the link to Aram—waited until the
bags were stowed, waited until we’d been snapped into our seats, waited until
the doors sealed over and Enid, without warning, put her hand over mine. All it
takes her is one good look at my face now to know I need such a thing, I
thought.

“I gotta talk to Aram again,” I said. “I might be
a bit. I might be twitchy.”

“If you want me in there with you—”

“You really want to do that?” I almost said
stick
your face in there
, but stopped when I realized I was speaking about my own
revulsion. This didn’t disgust her anywhere nearly as much as it did me.

“For your sake,” she said. “You look like you
could use someone in the co-pilot’s seat. And Angharad’s a little tied up at
the moment.” I saw, on her word, how the Kathaya had the distant stare of
someone engrossed in a CL conversation. It would be a while, if ever, before
she mastered the art of CLing in mixed company.

I gave Enid the shared link and we dove back in.

The environment they had Aram shrouded in was the
same as before—the same sterile, characterless hospital setting, closer to a
morgue than anything else. The lower half of his body was still a blob of only
partly-constituted innards, but at least it was now swathed in a blurry,
translucent membrane that provided about the same level of dignity as the
frosted surface of a shower door. And he now had arms.

Aram turned his head towards me and smiled. “I
take it my story was a bit much for one sitting?” he said.

“No, just a bit—unguided,” I said. “I thought I
might ask some more specific questions.”

“Ask away. I haven’t had company of this caliber
in quite some time.”

Enid, invisible to Aram, had appeared behind me,
back to the wall. Behind her, and dominating a good portion of my attention,
was the manifestation of the plan for the mobile Achitraka House. No, I
thought:
Vajra.
Just
Vajra
and nothing more. I’d already started
some procedural functions at work on it, plucking out segments of the hull and
hybridizing them, telescoping them into each other. In theory I could do all
that work via unguided algorithms alone, but I knew if I didn’t supervise the
results as the process unfolded I was just making more work for myself later
on. On a whim I let Enid watch the whole thing unfold as well, and her
attention flitted between the intertwining coils of the design behind her and
the conversation in front of her.