Flight of the Vajra (112 page)

Both of our clothes were now just about out of
power no thanks to the bad advice I’d given. I couldn’t even so much as close a
seam. All that was left was near-field communications, and even that was
getting flaky.

A moment later a rock not much bigger than Enid’s own
fist banged into her shoulder. The insides of her legs went raw as she skidded
several centimeters along the length of the beam, then something smashed into
her foot and she lost her grip and fell, pulling the wire taut.

I screamed as the wire raked along the outside of
my one good arm. More than raked: it was cutting
into
my arm, like a
vegetable peeler’s blade. There had to be blood flowing, with that much pain,
but I couldn’t see it.

—
Henré.

Enid sounded calmer than I had ever heard her,
calm enough to terrify me.

—
Henré, I think my other shoulder’s dislocated
and one of my ankles are broken. I can’t climb. All I can do is hang here.

I couldn’t see her; she couldn’t see me. All
either of us could see was water and flying debris. I tried to move as if to
pull her up and only realized I’d screamed after I got a lungful of water and
coughed it back out. I felt the pain transfixing her foot and shoulder and
realized she was right.

—
Henré, if I don’t let go, I’ll ruin your other
arm, and then you’ll fall.

Our conversation wasn’t happening in words
anymore, but a dozen times faster than speech, via the little emotional charges
and counter-charges, flashes of images and rushes of feeling, that can be
conducted in CL between people who have grown close enough to get away with it.

Down below us all I could see was churning, filthy
water, jagged with debris. I could have told her to hang on a little longer and
maybe that flooding would subside a bit, but the wire bit that much deeper into
my arm in the time it took me to consider it. I overwhelmed her with a scream.

—
Henré! Listen—I’m not scared of this. I hate
it, but I’m not scared.

I hate it
and
I’m scared of it, both, I
thought.

But this is how such things happen, I told myself.
Just like that. You cross from one side of a room to the other, and behind your
back, people die. Someone steps away for a moment, and then that moment never
ends. The universe is big enough to allow such things to happen without any
outcry but your own.

—
Enid, I shouldn’t have let you come all this
way with me, I . . .

—
No, Henré!
No more blaming yourself for
what other people do. I came “all this way” with my eyes open the whole time.
Even you said so yourself to all the others, remember?

I had, and I’d even told myself I wouldn’t regret
saying it.

—
I’m not scared of this
because
of you,
she
said.

In the next second came a rush of words and
images, everything she had been saving up for this moment without knowing. A
burst of
it was so much fun to work with you
for Cioran; a quick stab of
you take care of yourself, okay?
to Ioné; a wave of love for Angharad
and myself.

That can’t be all, I thought.

But that was all. The wire went slack. And for the
three seconds we had until our CL link died, I felt her lips burning against my
forehead.

The substrate
in the reservoir under
the city began to leak out and mingle with everything that was Marius as he
sucked it up and made it his.

The map, I told myself, the substrate map—take that
and layer over it the activity you’ve been tracing whenever he speaks. Keep him
talking. Anything to also keep my mind off what had just happened.

—
Y’know, I just realized something myself.

On the verge of
dying, people do tend to make discoveries, for all the good it does them.

—
Was it you that said this? Whether Aram or
Dezaki or you: I can’t really punish any of you for having killed my family.

I don’t believe
I said that, but I do agree with you. You would be mistaken to shift the
responsibility to me.

—
No. But now that I think about it?

Yes?

—You’ll do.

In the span
of one moment, all the
tendrils of substrate leaking from my reservoir lit up with an actinic flash as
they actuated. There wasn’t any need to shape them into anything; they just
needed to be slagged, all at once and as explosively as possible.

The hundreds of crucial nexuses within Marius’s new
mind, the ones that had routed the overwhelming majority of the signals back
and forth, both through himself and to and from me, became nothing more than drifting
chunks of tinsel as the connections between them splintered.

Marius and his thousands of fingers broke apart
like stale bread in water. The bubble he had formed around the city broke open,
too, and in rushed a whole ocean of substrate no longer under his command.

In that last moment, I could have sworn I heard him
say something his mother would have slapped him for.

The torrents
washing down around me were
finally easing. I felt morbidly calm now. All I have to do is set the city
flat, I thought, even if I myself don’t make it.

One degree, two, three—

Was it minutes or hours that were going by? I
couldn’t tell anymore.

—
Henré, we have it from here. There’s enough
control restored to the planet’s systems that we can continue.

Was that Ioné or Eotvo? Either, both; they were
two faces on the same head.

—four, five, six—

—
Henré, as soon as things flatten out enough
we’ll send in an aerial rescue.

I couldn’t think of an answer. Neither
Thank you
nor
I’m sorry
came remotely close to what was seething inside me.

By degrees, gravity returned to its proper
direction, and I eased my legs onto the nearest jagged remnants of flooring
that looked like they would support my weight. The house around me had been
reduced to a bent frame, with most of its walls punched out or washed away. Bit
by bit, sunlight from the lens far above shone in full, replacing the
half-twilight everything had been bathed in. The city around me looked like a
giant rake had been dragged across it: furrows torn in the ground here and
there (where the ground wasn’t just a sea of churned mud and foundation
blocks), buildings skewed or with their top floors smashed away. All I could
smell was dampness and rot. My stomach heaved and I brought up a mouthful of
what looked like muddy water, right into my already-filthy lap.

Not even here three days, I thought, and I’ve
already made a mess of everything.

I lay there, I don’t know how long, with my cut-up
arm in my lap and my broken one at my side, until I heard shouting in the
distance and saw the light from a hovering helio play down on me. And when they
came to ease me into a stretcher, they found I had half the p-knife, its power
exhausted and its configuration frozen, loose in my fingers with its cold hilt
pressed against my heart.

Sometime near
the end of that day, an
entire detachment of IPS arrived from off-planet.

They’d read our instructions and were prepared to
drill in through the ceiling of Marius’s dock chamber, but instead found a
friendly landing beacon waiting for them. On seeing the mess, they called for
further support, which they apologetically said might take a few days to show
up. By the time it arrived, Eotvo guessed, we would have reconstituted enough
infrastructure to do the cleanup ourselves, but she accepted their aid as a
sign of good faith.

Thanks, I thought, but don’t try to tell me this
is to make up for when Bridgehead was burning.

The guesses for how many people were dead were at
first in the hundreds, then in the thousands. Many people had the good sense to
hide down below when things started going really crazy, but not everyone had
been able to take cover in time. At least one person had died when he and three
of his friends climbed into a helio they’d fabbed (they had probably been
putting that thing together since they’d arrived) and were hit by debris
falling from the outer dome. If I had been them, I might well have thought
flying would have kept me safe, too.

I don’t remember being taken to the crowded
hospital tent, created in a newly-instantiated space west of what had been the
Vajra
landing pad, a space where the city was to later be rebuilt anew. There, they
set my broken arm and closed up the torn meat in my other one. I only remember
being in pain, then not being in pain, and then finally having enough of the not-pain
lift to be able to see the walls and floor around me, Type B/C-weave fabric
that you could see undulating if you watched it long enough. Behind the fabric
walls I could hear footfalls, murmured voices, the occasional crying-out. It
felt almost reassuring to know I was amongst others who were also suffering, if
not in the same way I was.

I toggled back on CL and saw a lot of familiar
names, except for one. That was enough to make me shut it right off again.

Early next morning, even before breakfast came
around but I found myself awake anyway, the door unzipped and in came Angharad.
One side of her face was still puffy and purple-green, and her left hand was
splinted, but she was alive and her eyes wide with gratitude on seeing me. I
put my one now-working arm around her and let her put her face down on my chest
and weep.

The little table next to my bed—a lip that
extruded from the side of the bed, actually—had a few things on it. Among them
was my half of Enid’s p-knife. It was now little more than a hilt with a
fragment of blade sticking out of it.

“How is everyone else?” I said.

“They are injured, but no worse than I. They saw
you earlier while you were resting.” She lifted her head slightly and showed me
more composure. “We were inside the vault the whole time, and we were washed
downstream some distance by the flooding.”

“I let her stay up there with me.” I shook my
head. “I let her do it.”

Of course you did, I thought. Because she
convinced you she could take it. And you, without having to say much of
anything, convinced everyone else the two of you knew what you were doing by
yourselves . . .

“You might well ask why the rest of us hid,”
Angharad suggested.

“
Because you’re not stupid, that’s why,
” I
shouted, and covered my eyes with one hand. It was a moment before I felt her
hands on my head.

“Do you really believe,” she said, “the only
reason she might have done that is because she was foolish?”

“I was talking about
me
, not her.” I still
had enough rage left to half-shout. It was supposed to be aimed at me, but it
was, as usual, hitting everyone else in the vicinity.

I knew what she was trying to do, which was no
different from what anyone else with far fewer spiritual credentials would have
done. She was trying to find what good she could in all this, even when I
couldn’t find any myself and wasn’t sure I wanted to. Sometimes people die, I
thought, and sometimes they die stupidly, so why dig any deeper than that?

And then I thought: Didn’t you spend these past
five years digging anyway? And look what you found: an answer that eclipsed
every question you could have asked.

“I know why I didn’t have her take cover when she could
have,” I said. “It’s because I let myself forget for just long enough that I
had a body in the first place. Me and her, both. You probably only know about
this sort of thing third-hand, from people who do a lot of CL-based work.”

“No. I have experienced it myself.”

“And given all the experience I had with it, I
should have known better. And she . . . ” I wasn’t vehement anymore,
just elegiac. “ . . . she stayed because she wanted to. And maybe
because she figured I could use the help.”

I reached over and took the p-knife into my hand.
Angharad reached for it as well, and with one unsplinted hand tried to
manipulate it. She might as well have been trying to turn the pages on a rock.

“She saved my life,” I said, “and I repaid her by
killing her.”

I felt Angharad shake her head; all I could see
was the knife handle, inches from my face. “That is not the kind of
responsibility you bear.”

Well, I thought, what kind is it, then?

An IPS orderly, a strawberry-blond gendermute,
unzipped the tent flap and brought in breakfast. I don’t think s/he had been
expecting to see Angharad there; s/he dithered for a moment, as if embarrassed
for not bringing more than one tray. It brought a smile to my face, one that
almost immediately died. It occurred to me that I
was
hungry, but only
in the dull, distant way that doesn’t allow food to be anything more than mere
calories.

Ulli and Cioran stepped in before I’d even
swallowed the first mouthful. Angharad embraced them both, then promised me she’d
return later. Heavy silence followed after she closed the flap behind her.

“It’s rare,” Cioran said, the words stepping
slowly out of him one by one, “in life, to find yourself so stuck for something
to say, anything at all. —And it’s awful, because all I want to say is silly
things, things like, ‘But we had barely begin to work together.’ Or, ‘Now that
I think about it, I never did get her autograph.’
 
”
He shook himself. “The fact we just met wasn’t enough by itself to keep us from
being separated. It’s something you know, the way you know the ocean is wet
even without having to fall into it. And then one day, you
do
fall into
the ocean, and you don’t want to think of things that way anymore.”

Ulli brought his head down onto her lap, but
instead of giving her a lazy snuggle as he might have before, he remained
wide-eyed, almost fiercely so.

“I didn’t mind her being your eyes and ears when I
went to visit Arsèni, you know,” Cioran went on. “It was all quite an adventure,
and I could see—I was sure I saw—that she thought the same way.”

“I never did ask how you met her,” Ulli said. “I
know that she came into your company because of her father, but I imagine there
was a longer story?”

“She was looking for someplace new to go,” I said,
“and someone new to go with. And that someone was me.”

Ulli considered this for a moment, then spoke in
an even more subdued tone as she ran a hand through Cioran’s forelocks. “I
don’t mean to sound as if I’m dismissing the subject, but early this morning,
after they restored full communications through the planetary link, I received
a rather distressing message from one of my old colleagues. A back-channel
leak, it seems. She knows some folks who monitor things related to the
paperwork that is shuttled back and forth between IPS and outside agencies, and
the word I was given was that the amount of chatter taking place right now
indicates a major action of some kind is being prepared. Her guess—and I’ve
rarely known her to guess wrong—is that it will involve you. Do you have a lawyer?”

“I think she’s still speaking to me, yes. Why me?”

“I haven’t the faintest.” She reached forward—Cioran
sat up to clear the path—gripped my right shoulder, and gave me a proud smile.
“And whatever it is, I’m sure it’s going to be the utterest of shit.”

They wanted
to keep me in the medical
tent for at least two days, and they convinced me to stay by allowing me to see
via CL the mess that was still outside. It would take time to clear the wreckage,
recycle all the slag, restore the city according to the last telemetric
snapshots taken . . . and separate out the bodies. There was already
talk of leaving the wrecked city grounds as-is for the sake of a memorial—something
I imagined we’d get sneered at over by the non-Old Way share of the universe.

We didn’t have to wait long. At least one off-world
comment (from a Highend world, predictably enough) arrived to the effect that
you’d think we’d have finally learned what an annoyance the dead are, all the
more reason to do away with them. To which someone else snapped back:
If you
think a dead body is such a burden, then maybe you don’t think much of the live
ones, either.

Spit as I might at the Highend who sneered at
death, they did have a germ of the truth: what was a dead body but a husk? Well,
a husk with a history, that’s what, and without history, you forget everything
important.

There was work to do, even with me still smashed
up, and I tried to busy myself with it. Eotvo, Ioné, Kallhander Angharad and I
collaborated on a public statement to be jointly released on all our
behalves—IPS, Continuum, and Angharad. She was all too aware how she and her
followers needed a collective label distinct from the main line of the Old Way,
but one thing at a time.

“Many aspects of Marius’s current plan resembled his
previous one,” Kallhander told me, and with that began throwing diagrams at me
in CL. I was too tired to complain; I just opened them and followed lamely
along. “As soon as he had key control over the substrate reservoir, he began
instantiating those tendrils and anelliform attack structures from deep inside
it. But what was most interesting was how he had projected himself into the
reservoir, so to speak. He hadn’t actually replayed a backup into it. He had
taken one of the Aram templates, replayed a backup of his into it, and then
taken the core, infused it into the reservoir—”

I saw where this was going. “—and let it expand in
there. Like a sponge in water. But it didn’t gain any complexity as it
expanded, did it? It was the same brain he’d always had, just . . . zoomed up.”
Wrecked as the whole of me was emotionally, the engineer part of me still
worked.

 “No. And I suspect he believed there would be
emergent complexity on that scale, which would provide its own protective
redundancy.” Then, as if trying to sound a little less one-upped: “None of
these techniques are totally alien to us, of course. All are fraught with risk,
and all are enormously illegal and unethical.”

“Sure. What’s a few more laws down the drain when
you’ve already held the universe hostage?” Then I remembered how he’d had some
partners in crime: “Did the Prince ‘fess anything about his role in this?”

“It seems your suspicions were partially founded.
The Prince claims Marius approached him with an offer. If he provided Marius
with cover during his impersonations and other related work, he would get his
pick of planets, plural, after Bridgehead was destroyed. Apparently he wanted
‘whatever planet the Kathaya would happen to be on, if she lives’.”

My curiosity about something else had been piqued.
“When do you get your next debriefing?”

His answer was uncharacteristically wan. “I don’t
know.”

“Kallhander, with all that you’ve done, I don’t
see how they can keep you on a leash anymore.”

“MacHanichy believes I ought to be commended; at
the very least have my desk duty probation rescinded. It might as well be
rescinded in fact, since it has been in practicality.” He didn’t sound elated
by any of this. “I could wait for the debriefing and see what comes of it, but
there are always other possibilities.”

“You mean resigning your commission.”

“Yes.”

I looked at Ioné. It seemed the two of them had
already discussed this, and she was as ambivalent about it as he was.

“All this time,” Kallhander went on, “the position
I’ve been in has granted me many things. Not just security of work, not just
access or privileges or freedom of movement—all of those things, certainly, but
more than anything else it granted a sense of . . . I suppose you
would call it ‘being on the right side of history’. To have IPS at your back,
or to be part of IPS being at someone else’s back—that seemed the best place to
be.

“You remember what I said about Professor Jiang. I
always thought if you followed his work far enough, you would find monsters
waiting to escape. But I see now that the monsters escaped a long time ago,
whether or not I was looking for them. The things Marius did, or the things
Dezaki achieved—
they are not aberrations
. They are logical endpoints,
natural progressions. Things like this have happened before on smaller scales,
and while those were caught and shut down, it wasn’t inevitable that they would
always be caught and shut down. Sometimes, a disaster
must
happen for
people to know it exists or is possible. —I’m explaining this very badly.”

“You’re doing better than you think. Go on.”

“What’s strange is,” he continued, “that I should
be terrified of know all this, but somehow, now I’m not. And I believe now I
know why.”

“It’s Angharad, isn’t it?” I suggested.

“She’s . . . another right side of
history, I suppose you could say. All my work with IPS was never able to
completely shore up the fear I felt. But in these few weeks with her, all that
fear seems very different now. Even with all the calamity that was unleashed,
and the promise of much more to come.” He put the side of his head in his hand,
as if weighing the contents. “It’s, again, not something I’ve found words for
until now. And not even the remotely right ones.”