Flight of the Vajra Read online

  The entire corridor was tearing open, as if the different layers of the ship’s infrastructure had all decided to walk off in separate directions. The floor yanked itself around for a few dozen centimeters in all directions before the flooring, made of tuned-to-transparent Type B substrate (emulates heavier plastics and thin metals), splintered. Air screamed out around me and threatened to freeze-dry my eyes right in their sockets.

  I shut my eyes and threw myself at the nearest inward-facing bulkhead. I’d tried to patch into the ship’s sensory surfaces via CL, and see what was around me through the ship’s own eyes instead of mine, but nothing came back. If I wanted to climb into a rescue pod, I’d have to do it by touch alone, and I had mere seconds to do it before my blood boiled and I passed out.

  My fingers groped and closed around the handles set into the walls. Normally they were hidden, but despite everything that was going wrong, the emergency depressurization routines at least seemed to have triggered. I remembered the one very boring night I’d spent deploying all that code into most every bulkhead in the ship, reminding myself this might well save someone’s life in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Now all I could think, as I yanked myself along from one handle to the next, was: Please don’t let it be just me that’s saved. Please don’t let it be just me.

  The fifth handle I reached was larger than the rest and had a familiar trigger set into the underside. Next to it was the rounded edge of a doorway that hadn’t existed before. I hauled myself around and bailed forward into the hatch, right on top of four other warm bodies. I opened my eyes, blinked the mist out of them, and saw vaguely familiar faces: the gender-mutable who had been playing cello the other night; another ’mute who was most likely that one’s lover; the director of technological services for the company; a teenaged girl who had been in the pool and was still wearing only a slightly damp one-piece bathing suit, her teeth chattering.

  We were thrown to the floor in a newly-disorganized pile as the pod lurched and we were blown free. I didn’t strap myself in like everyone else; I scrambled up to the one porthole in the top of the pod and clung to the handles on either side of it, staring back up at what was left of the Kyritan.

  Like a glass peapod split up the middle, I thought. A hailstorm of glittering shards spewed outwards from the two remaining husks of the hull.

  I connected to the CL mesh network that I knew would have been established between the escape pods and hunted frantically for the only three names that mattered. I was still searching for them long after the last icy remnants of the Kyritan had passed from view, and even longer after I knew full well all hope would have to be laid to rest.

  And then one fine day, five solar years later—

  Chapter One

  There were two circuses in town shortly after I arrived on Cytheria. Well, only one of them called itself a circus.

  The fact they were in town was a bonus. I hadn’t been on a tourist-visa waitlist for a month to come to Cytheria for a circus. I was there just to rock back on my heels somewhere where drinks were cheap and the ocean breeze had soaked itself into the curtains over your hotel room window, and you didn’t have to worry about what was coming through (or going out of) your cortical link.

  It’s a fairly hardline Old Way world, Cytheria, so I’d been politely asked to deactivate most everything I was wearing or harboring when I touched down. I suspect a good half of the tourists who come through bitch endlessly about locking their clothes into a single pattern or—horrors—turning off their CL. It wasn’t like I would use the latter a whole lot down there, on a world where the only people sporting CLs in the first place were the tourists who came here mostly to turn theirs off in the first place. And it wasn’t like I couldn’t stand to wear some clothes that might actually need to be changed for real once in a while. I’d been born on an Old Way world relaxed enough to allow things like CLs and protomic clothing, albeit little beyond that.

  That was the whole point of being Old Way: you still had dirt between your toes, so to speak. Not only that, but you knew the value of getting that dirt in there to begin with.

  The customs inspector who debriefed me started his whole patter about disabling CLs right as I was stepping out of the lock for my ship—he was running a scan on me, and halfway through his speech he stopped and said, “Oh, good, you’ve already turned off your CL. And I see your clothes have also been locked down . . . good, good.”

  I gave him a shrug and a smile. “Friends of mine gave me the drill before I came planetside.”

  “Well, I see that the hull of your ship is also a protomic construct. We’ll need to—”

  “Absolutely. Take your time,” I said, with as much cheer as I could simulate, and sat down in the little vestibule opposite his desk. He needed to make sure I wasn’t smuggling anything in a suspension lattice, or that the hull was capable of being transmuted into weaponry, or any of the dozen-hundred other paranoias that come courtesy of protomics. Not that he was really capable of preventing any of that from happening; he just wanted to say he’d done his job, and I just wanted to pass his inspection without having to grease his hands. Cytheria was like most Old Way worlds: if you did shady business, the only thing stopping you from coming planetside was a slightly stiffer bribe and maybe some friendly favors on the way back out. I’d known this going in, but I’d decided to just be a tourist this time.

  He paused before entering the ship, and I wanted to believe that was so he could admire what I’d made: two closely-fused spheres which revolved together to provide 1G emulation, surrounded by a ring that was actually a pair of crescents fused at the horns. The skin of the ship was gold and red patterns over lacquer black. Vajra, I called her. It had taken me years to come up with a design where I couldn’t think of anything else to take away.

  I counted floor panels and got up to thirty-eight before he, too, came back smiling and approved my visa.

  “Welcome to Cytheria. Enjoy your stay!”

  “Already am.”

  I almost felt bad for the guy. If he really had been able to tell what the hull and my clothes and a few other things were made of, he would have had one amazing story to tell his grandkids. There’s protomics, and then there’s . . . protomics. Such as Cavafy’s gift, from which my ship had been spawned, and which most definitely fit into the second category.

  But by that point I’d gotten good at hiding things from most everyone. To this man I was just plain old Henré Sim, former protomics-systems engineer and ship designer. Alleged reason for travel: pleasure. Real reason for travel: not telling.

  Septimus’s Great Sky Theater: A Panopoly of Aerodromic Gyrotoma read the posters. Just under that wooly title, a spiky tangle of what looked like drastically-modified low-altitude craft (possibly even unmanned drones) swirled like a fresh summer cloud of butterflies. At the bottom, a slender, moon-faced girl in a single-piece leotard—white chased here and there with red, like strategically-applied body paint—stood with toes wrapped across a high wire. Her hair, and she had a lot of it to show off, was also white, with its own share of red at the roots and tips. The show was tomorrow evening at the docks. Free admission. Evidently they made their keep either by being paid by the town government to draw business, or by selling souvenirs, or both.

  I’d come planetside only a couple of days before said Great Sky Theater of Whatever was supposed to do its thing, and the posters had already mottled most every wall throughout the crumbling maze of streets near the wharf. Sometimes they popped up underfoot on the sidewalks, five abreast all the way to the curb. They’d been spot-sprayed using the same protomic pigment used for any number of other ads. Each ink droplet was its own little machine for soaking up light and re-radiating it back out in pre-programmed patterns. In a few days, the weathering of feet and wheels and, well, weather itself would dull all those spirited colors and turn those swirling letters into broken hieroglyphs. A day after that, what was left would quietly melt away of its own accord—silicon, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen,
all mixing effortlessly with the rain like sugar melting in your tea. By that time, Septimus and Cie. would have long since packed up and poofed offworld.

  The engineer part of me, which was buried deep inside but still came out from time to time, emerged and had its bitter laugh for the day. The same protomics, the same microscopic-machine protean-matter technology used to create everything from self-reconfiguring starship hulls to replacement body parts to the very suit I wore, was also used to plaster advertising across any available flat surface.

  At least the rain’ll wash it off, I thought. But only because it was designed to let that happen.

  I stood at the corner of the cobblestoned, sharply-rising street where I’d rented a room for the week. On a relatively staid little Old Way world like this, they made most of their money by spinning all kinds of house variations on the game of Skinflint the Tourist. The fee for getting on the planet’s waitlist was bad enough; the fee for actually visiting Port Cytheria itself was pure extortion. If you wanted to get in and out of your own ship while it was parked in their docks, you had to pay an “access fee” that was only slightly less than what it cost to rent a damn room in the first place. That was on top of the “docking fee” and the “orbital approach fee”. They had no orbital dock here (few did), and no orbital elevator, either—in fact, they prided themselves on not having those things, proving once again people were willing to pay for extra hassle that sported the pretense of being classy. Even only a few of the highest of Highend worlds had no elevator, either; most still kept just one as a token gesture to the rest of the lowly universe.

  So I’d stuck the Vajra in one of the seaside niches, a few kilometers south of this place by rail, and decided to take the week off. Not that I wasn’t already “off”; for the last five years I’d listed myself as having no income apart from various interest and capital-gains earnings on my savings and investments.

  But it wasn’t like I was doing nothing. I had a mission of my own; I just knew better than to talk about it.

  Port Cytheria is all sloping roofs and twisting stony streets leading up and down a hillside towards the water. The sun sets right over it and those two little moons that kick up such interesting cross-tides transit the sky at least twice during the day. Awnings flap and flash in gold and brown; pennants and streamers hang down from third-story windows and advertise the cafés and restaurants in red and green. You stand in doorways and you smell tracked-in street dust, locally-hybridized peppers drying on a string just over your head, fresh-cut flowers wet and cold. People smile at you with their head down a little bit, as if they’re inviting you to be in on a secret. You could almost believe it wasn’t all by design.

  Those who come here from lives on more upscale worlds always have trouble discovering how efficiently the liquor gets you good and drunk (and gives you honest-to-god hangovers) or how everything from the meat on their grill to the tomato in their salad sports flavors so fierce they can barely chew any of it. Many of them beat a safe retreat back to whatever soggy, limp excuses for a meal can be found back at home, and only venture out to Cytheria or the like as a way to jolt themselves. They don’t live like this—and they don’t want to—so they only come here for the thrill of being able to get away from it after a few days. They would rather leave the experience of living here to those unlucky enough (in their mind) to be born here in a place that chose to live as little as possible with CLs and most kinds of protomics and with population controls (a planet of barely two hundred fifty million? Are you kidding?) that are best described as . . . well, religiously strict. No prizes for guessing which religion.

  Because despite all that, up and down all those streets in Port Cytheria are more kids than you’ve ever seen in your life, especially if you’re from a higher-end world. Look at ‘em—running barefoot or thin-sandaled, punting balls or waving homemade eight-bladed windbreakers. It didn’t matter that a good chunk of them would emigrate offworld by the time they were eighteen, most of them to worlds where the Old Way was less devoutly observed—or not observed at all—where they could get a CL and wrap themselves in protomics and forget that much more about being Old Way human. But plenty still stay behind, because it’s all they know, and they find something here in the Old Way that they can’t find anywhere else. Some leave, find that out after breaking their knuckles for a few years working for people who barely even see them as sentient, and they come on back wondering what they ever saw in leaving behind home cooking. And many more crowd in here on the sly, paying off the locals to look the other way and not report them on the planet’s census. Those two hundred fifty million are only the official numbers, and the time was fast approaching when the official numbers wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone.

  All the same, Old Way worlds are crowded with the young; they’re the only place left in the whole galaxy to find the young ones anymore.

  I should know; I’d had a kid myself, once. But I’d grown skilled at thinking less about it.

  The harbor was only four blocks away, already soaked in sunset. Part of me wished it had been further off—I wanted to stretch my legs a little more—so I cheated and picked as circuitous a route as I could find from the map that had been left in my hotel room. No CL headmaps here; you used your eyes and your whole brain. For some people this was as nasty as camping out without nothing to wipe down with.

  I was still in my favorite outfit—white suit, snappy Panama hat, mutable wraparound shades (because sometimes you just wanted to hide your eyes)—and I’d gotten into the habit of letting my hair get long after my retirement. I could tame it any number of ways, or even get rid of it entirely and get protomic implants, but in the end I’d just put it in dreads and kept it oiled. By itself it wouldn’t make people think me that much more a dropout, but it was one of the many small ways I served notice I wasn’t the Henré Sim of before. My two-meter frame and broad shoulders were a bit stooped over and hollowed out now. But all the things Biann had liked in me—the big brow, the big jaw (and the big smile to go with it), and the maybe-too-big nose—all those hadn’t gone anywhere.

  No sense denying it: there was some part of me that was still a little vain, still a little bit thirsty for some spotlight time, wherever I could find it. Maybe that was why I wandered over to see the Sky Theater Etcetera—to see someone else in the spotlight, and imagine how they dealt with it.

  Behind the breakwater wall at the beach were bleachers eight and ten steps high. Any seat in the house was a good one; the sun and the sea filled your vision. Right overhead, a single vertical smear of cloud was shot through with sunset. The hills behind me were too steep to see the first stars coming out, but both moons were wandering around overhead, pale and tiny. And crowds of people were sitting or standing all around me—men in coveralls, women in flimsy summer dresses, boys and girls riding on shoulders. Two men at my feet, similar enough to each other to be brothers, with their curly black hair and protruding ears, undid the seal on a bottle of beer nearly as tall as my forearm was long, and filled a pair of knobby green glasses. They offered me the rest of the bottle, about a third left. I took it with thanks and soon its heavy, nutty flavor was swirling around in both my stomach and my head. Not too fast, now, I warned myself, and sat down with the bottle clasped between my knees.

  Applause and whooping burst out around me. I looked up from fumbling with the bottle cap.

  There she was.

  The way she had been depicted on the poster wasn’t too far from the truth. She had the same waterfall of white hair, the same bodysuit—but I saw now that her suit was in fact tricked out with a sensor array, with the red chasings not just for decoration. Whatever it is she was going to do, they wanted to show she could use only her body to do it, that no CL trickery was needed. Not that she would have been able to use a CL here in the first place, but . . .

  To my eye she couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, but as she stood with her feet wrapped around the wire that rose from the water (it supported
on either side by pyramidal drones), she straightened her back and shot herself through with the kind of poise you would normally only believe possible from an adult. That’s what you get for living so long on worlds where barely anyone is under the biological age of twenty-five in the first place, I told myself: you forget what’s possible in people.

  She arched herself back and raised her arms, and I saw now that behind her, hovering just over the water, were two more drones shaped like piles of pyramids joined together at their vertices. They flexed and twisted like proteins folding, and as I peered closer (Customs hadn’t forced me to disable the protomics in my sunglasses, so I could zoom in without trouble) I saw their churnings were guided by the ways her wrists bent and her fingers flexed.

  From somewhere at the edge of the water, almost out of sight behind the wall, musicians were playing a reedy, sinuous tune that rose and fell as it wished. They weren’t making it so much for us to listen to as they were to make her turn and bend, to make her arch her back and do a cartwheel so slow there seemed no way for her to not slip off the wire. But she didn’t slip, not even when she shot herself straight up and landed back on the wire hard enough to make the drones at either end jitter in place.

  The other drones, the ones that had started off hovering behind her, followed her moves. When she swayed, they swayed; when she lunged, they lunged, and in lunging they skated across the surface of the water hard enough to hit the lowest seats with glittering evening mist. The crowd showered her right back with applause, me included.

  I know there was more. The jugglers with their protomic props that split and rejoined, sprouting razor edges and spewing plasma. Or the other dancers who turned somersaults across the water, landing right on wires that were submerged just below the waves. I know there was more, but the only part I trust in my memory was the sight of that girl: Enid.