Flight of the Vajra (109 page)

Eotvo blessed my words with a single nod. “Yes.
That was part of it, yes.”

“So what’s the point of doing that if you’re not
going to learn from it when it actually
matters
?” Begging, I thought;
I’m out-and-out begging now. Because fury can only blast through so much and drill
so far.

Eotvo sat back down. Angharad stood next to her
and placed a hand on her shoulder, but it was Ioné who spoke first.

“Take the risk, Eotvo,” she said. “It guarantees
better long-term survival for all of us if we take the risk collectively. Apply
my formula; see for yourself.”

“We didn’t want to depend on an untested formula
for such a situation—” Eotvo cut herself off.

“Why?” Angharad said. “Were you worried you would
be compelled to act sooner and all the more completely, when you had already created
that many reasons not to?”

Eotvo continued to stare at an empty point
somewhere to the left of Enid’s head.

“When I said before that you are not alone and you
are not forgotten,” Angharad went on, “I did mean you as well. Perhaps it was
not clear before.”

A moment, then Eotvo brought her gaze back to bear
on Ioné, then Angharad, then me.

“If we use our existing template of action,” Eotvo
said, weary at first but gaining assurance, “the split between success and
failure, from our standpoint, is relatively small. In other words, the gains
are relatively minor, but so is the projected loss. But one of the unique
aspects of the Ioné template is a different gauging of the standpoint for gain
and loss. It allows what is considered in Continuum’s interests to be a more
broadly-defined set of parameters. The definition of ‘ours’ and ‘us’ becomes
more open-ended. This is one of the ways her template was designed to emulate
everything you were describing. We were ourselves surprised by the results. But
. . . ” Here comes the pain, I thought. “ . . . using her
template causes the split between success and failure to be much wider. If we
win, we win far more thoroughly. If we lose, however, the loss may be
. . . total. That said—” She looked up at Angharad. “You said in your
speech earlier, ‘You have been given the gift of more life than can possibly be
lived, and it has become a curse.’ If you say now that all your words were
meant for us as well, that includes those words too, doesn’t it?”

“Is life more than merely the fact of existing?”
Angharad said.

“It would seem so. Yes.”

“Then show us.”

Dawn was lighting up
the sky-lens (the
term “roof of the world” never seemed more literally true) as Ulli and Cioran
returned from their own private hobnob. They’d been devising a suitable
capitulation note from a world both of them felt comfortable faking a letter
from, and which could not arrive any sooner than T minus four hours local time.

To throw off anyone who might have been watching, they’d
bedded down. “You’d be surprised how inwardly productive you can be when you’re
in a clinch,” Cioran said.

“Maybe how productive
you
can be,” Ulli
shot back. “By the end, you were the only one being ‘productive’.”

“Let’s see what you came up with,” I said. Even
now
they were playing dueling innuendoes, I thought; maybe that’s just their way of
coping. But the quality of their work was sterling: they not only had down pat the
sober, somber tones one would expect from such capitulations, but they’d thrown
in a few obligatory references to recent planetary history (including the
Kathaya’s own involvement in same) and ended with a stubborn little note that
“while ties can be relinquished, pride never can”.

“Good line,” I said.

“There’s more.” Cioran produced four other similar
missives, each from a different world, appropriately time-stamped, all just as
turgid in their prose. “I imagine the first one will do, but we determined
these all ought to arrive in roughly the same timeframe as well.”

“I realized something,” Ulli said. “Why settle for
one such letter when you can run four of them and compare his responses side-by-side?”

“
I
should have realized that.” I hugged
both of them, one in each arm, for real. Outside of the pirate CL link, I
mouthed some line about regretting not spending more time drinking with them.
If this falls through, I thought, that regret might well be real. “I’ll get
this set up with Kallhander, since it’s his job to forge the headers and
certificates, and . . . the rest is just going to be sitting and
waiting, I think. Unless either of you have some more brilliant left-field
ideas?”

“Haven’t we traditionally looked to you to be the
repository for such things?” Cioran said.

“I suppose you have. Yeah.” I looked outside at
the brightening streets and decided the best way to see if any more ideas of
that caliber bubbled up in the time remaining was to shake them loose with a
walk. Enid liked the sound of that and joined me, breakfast sandwiches in hand
for both of us.

MacHanichy was at the door to put an end to that
idea, but after a quick argument out loud he agreed to allow us to walk but
only within a block’s radius. “And if one of Marius’s boys shows up, and
hassles you,” he added as we were being hustled out the door, “don’t do
anything
,
because we sure won’t. The last thing we need is to give him an excuse.”

“Yes,
sir
.” Enid flipped him a salute that
no one over the age of two would have recognized as respectful, then turned to
follow me.

The house was still encircled with guards and blockaded
to traffic, but the crowd that had gathered there the night before was gone.
Whether on the IPS’s orders or Marius’s, it hardly mattered: the only people I
saw out and about were guards like the one following us a pace behind, or folks
I sized up as being Dezaki templates from Marius’s crew. I expected that bunch to
be running about, leaping over fences, kicking in windows and toppling over
anything not nailed down. To my surprise, they weren’t doing anything of the
kind—just stalking about in twos and threes, looking supercilious and smug, throwing
people smiles that weren’t returned. I remembered Marius’s own words about how
it was more fun to let people devise their own tortures than create them
yourself.

Enid held up the MemoCel. From the way she was
looking at our surroundings through it, I thought she might have been
recording, but instead on its surface I saw glimpses of all our earlier
adventures flitting past. Sliding down one of the walls in the convenience
suite on Kathayagara; everyone asleep in their bunks on the way to Bridgehead;
me barefoot on the beach outside the villa . . . I had to remind
myself to either keep an eye on my surroundings or actually use the telemetry
protocol for something other than chatting with my friends undetected. I opted
for the former.

Enid, out loud: “You and Angharad slept together,
didn’t you?”

She wasn’t looking at me when she said it, but a
moment later she faced me with the oddest little smile. Not snide, not
sinister—it took a moment of seeing it without prejudice for the two words it
summoned up to speak themselves in my mind:
About time.

 “She’s been in love with me for a long time now,”
I said, “or so other people have believed.”

“I know
I
believed it.”

“And you never said anything?”

“I don’t know if you would have heard me out. Or
if it would have been appropriate. More the first than the second, now that I
think about it. —What about you? What did you feel?”

Me, in love with her? I thought. “Only that you
don’t let such feelings develop for someone like that,” I said. “Not unless the
two of you have a good excuse.”

“I kept thinking,” and I could hear the amusement
bubbling up all the more in her voice, “how long it would take after she
stepped down for something like this to happen. —Minutes! Whole
minutes
!”

We were both still laughing at that when one of
the Dezaki nodes walked close enough to Enid to reach out and snatch the
MemoCel from between her hands.

“Hey!” Enid started to give chase, but the slagger
just wadded up the MemoCel, threw it at her chest, and ran off with a laugh. It
landed against her chest with a bit more of a thump than something that flimsy
should have.

Enid made as if to unfold the MemoCel, but then
crushed it back against her chest with both hands, wrapped her fingers around
it, and stuffed it into her leg pocket. Her outward expression was one of
annoyance, but in our pirate CL space she shot me an astonished look and an
even more astonished few words.

“Henré—the p-knife. They wrapped it in the MemoCel
and gave it back to me.”

I looked back at the “they” in question, now a
good half a block away and retreating, and like Enid tried to seem outwardly
irritated as a way to cover my real curiosity.

“Don’t connect to it,” I said, in private. “For
all we know they bugged it. Leave it in there for now.”

She smoothed down the flap of her leg pocket and
clenched a fist from the hand she’d used to do it.

“If we hadn’t been told to leave them alone,” she
growled out loud, “I’d’ve chased him down and stuffed this back up an orifice
or three.”

There were ways to find out if either the MemoCel or
the p-knife had been bugged, but now that I thought about it, neither of them
received nor harvested the telemetry signals we were using for our private
talks. That left me at least half-confident merely having them in the same room
with us wouldn’t be by itself a pitfall.

I connected hesitantly to the MemoCel and showed
its contents to Enid, which inspired a frown from her. “I don’t remember
putting
half
this stuff in here. I mean, it’s all
mine
, but . . .
”

“I know that feeling,” I said. “When they brought
me back the salvage from the
Vajra,
I couldn’t believe all the trash I’d
let accumulate in its memory. You tell yourself it’ll all come in handy
sometime, and then one day you find yourself in a situation where nothing
you’ve ever hoarded will help you. Like when you have people you know and trust
telling you someone loves you to death, and you have no idea how to return the
feeling without making a mess of it.”

“But you did return the feeling. And from
everything I see, you sure haven’t made a mess of it.” She gave my arm a swat.
“Go on, give yourself a little credit.”

“I have been. I just try not to be too noisy about
it, you know?”

“Oh,
be
noisy about it for a change! Because
then I won’t have to drag it out of you!”

“Oh, all right!”

I threw an arm around her shoulder and let myself
pretend, for the rest of our little walk, that we weren’t returning home to
anything worth dreading.

T minus two hours and change.
At the
house, in the common area, I saw via the public CL links that Angharad was
holding an impromptu morning congregation for the whole populace. Half an hour
of her own words, half an hour of question-taking, which ballooned into a full
hour and change. The words from her were as gentle as she could make them; the
questions lobbed her way were anything but. Question: How could she turn her
back on all of her people in the hour when they needed her most? Answer: No
back has been turned (and a few others in the audience pointed out the same
thing in their own ways); it is simply that the old mechanism for gathering a
flock together must be replaced with a new one. The need for a flock, for a
shepherd—or perhaps better to say, those who wish to learn and those who are
willing to teach—has not changed. Even if the only weapon Angharad had at hand
to dispel the uneasiness around her was her own clear-eyed calm, it seemed to
be the right one. There was still unease by the time she closed the session,
but far less of it than before.

Via the pirate link, she sat with Ioné and Aram,
with anyone else welcome to join. Enid and I sat in as well—in fact, about the
only person that didn’t seem to be sharing the experience was Kallhander—and I
used Angharad’s voice as a backdrop for casting back through my mind to see if
there was anything else we could prepare for.

“I hope to not sound blunt by quoting your own
words back at you,” Angharad said to Aram, “but you asked me before if I might
teach you how to die. I want to know more of what you meant by that.”

“I amended that to ‘how to die properly’,” Aram said.
“Actually, hearing your speech convinced me all the more I was on the right
track for reframing it that way.”

“Please tell me more, then.”

“It isn’t all that complicated, really. ‘Do not
ignore your restlessness, your boredom, your unease’—that was all mined out of
what you saw in me, wasn’t it? But you never mentioned
fear
there. That
surprised me at first. It implied, at least to my ears, you did not believe all
those others did not also know fear. Why such an omission?”

“Do you say this because you feel fear?”

“No. On the contrary. I say it because any fear of
death I once held, evaporated after I reincarnated myself in this new form. And
because I understand now what a . . . mistake that was!” His
projection, seated on an (equally fake) cushion on the floor, kicked its folded
legs out from under him. “There’s no shortage of people without fear in this
universe. Or better to say, no shortage of people who no longer live with
it—which is, I imagine, why you didn’t include it in your missive to them. They
have built their lives in such a way that their worst fears are of the very
boredom and restlessness and unease you singled out. I’ve seen them myself, in
so many incarnations.”

Meaning incarnations of both them
and
him,
I thought.

“I wonder if my erstwhile partner thought the same
things,” Aram went on. “Perhaps he felt it was high time genuine fear made a
comeback. But if that were so, he would have scarcely confined his threats to
the Old Way worlds. No, he has the same short-sightedness as the rest of them
. . . but would that not be a good approach, then? To die properly
through a better understanding of fearing it once again?”