Flight of the Vajra Page 3

  I slept in late the next morning, and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the bottle of beer I’d lugged back home with me. It was in a near corner, lying on its side as if it were imitating me. I had plenty of experience dealing with real alcohol, real drinking and real hangovers, so my mild headache and leaden steps were all familiar territory. The tap water had a strange greenish tinge to it (“It’s the local minerals,” I was told), but I immersed myself in a tubful of it anyway.

  While watching the sun coming in through the window slit and make a slow transit across the floor, I mumbled to myself some things that passed for plans. They mostly involved being seen in public living up to my current reputation as a failure.

  From all I’ve seen, people speak more freely in front of someone they think of as being a little bit pitiable. They share more with someone they can safely condescend to as a hard-luck case. A harmless man’s a captive audience for bragging.

  That’s why I didn’t change names when I changed careers. I wanted the universe to know Henré Sim the starship architect, Henré Sim the genius of his kind, Henré Sim the bereaved and broken, was now Henré Sim the aimless, wandering playboy. The way I figured it, after enough wandering I might find myself in the company of the sort of folks willing to engineer the deaths of a few thousand people by splitting the hull of a starship like a stomped grape.

  I didn’t care about the odds of ever finding such people to be orders of magnitude out of my league. I had any number of decades of life still left in me and absolutely nothing else to do with them but look and listen and learn. And, maybe one fine day, take action.

  That was the level I’d sunk to—and would soon rise from again.

  The rooftop of the hotel was decorated with lawn chairs and strings of fluttering pennants overhead—a place to lie back, soak up some sun, and let something alcoholic stay cold in the bucket next to you. I dressed and went up there for the view. The hotel wasn’t the tallest building in town, but it was tall enough to show me the whole sloppy sprawl of everything rolling right up to the edge of the water. Being on a hillside also helped. It was another beautiful day, and Cytheria’s smaller moon was directly overhead. The available worlds out there that were this livable, without centuries of tinkering, were fewer than ever.

  After all of that ruminating in the tub, I was finally saying to myself what I’d been trying to clam up inside for too long: Maybe slumming it like this isn’t the best way to an answer. Well, it wasn’t like I’d tried other things first, but I’d never been able to shake the feeling the only way to find out what had really happened was to go down into the same gutters where people who could do such a vile thing lived and splashed around. I’d thus far avoided admitting to myself the reason I’d gone down there was only to wallow in that same gutter.

  I stepped to the edge of the roof and peered over the wrought-iron fence—it came only up to my waist—down into the street below. Someone with a printer, a big square metal frame, was stopping every so often to press the device against a wall or sidewalk. After a brief spitting sound from the printer, he’d step away and there on the concrete or tarmac was a newly-printed poster. Not for the circus; those posters were already dissolving faster than I’d anticipated. This was for the other circus.

  By the time I was downstairs and out in the street, a couple of other folks—one of them a fellow with the too-classy, too-clean look of a tourist, rather like me—had also emerged from the hotel lounge to see what was worth billeting the neighborhood about. I think I was the one that felt the most astonishment, even if I didn’t show it.

  Her Grace, The 16th Supreme Kathaya of the Old Way, Angharad il-Jakaya, in an open town hall meeting on Day 251 (sol. 6/2) at the Public Pavilion in Port Cytheria. All are welcome but seating will be by random lottery at the discretion of the hosts.

  Below that headline, Angharad herself—sitting on a cushion, wrapped in midnight blue robes, a wimple half-concealing her face. With eyes as large and deep as hers (and a mouth as sweetly happy to boot), it’s no wonder there were a couple trillion people across the galaxy who put a picture of her somewhere conspicuous and gave it honor every day.

  I had been one of those people. Once.

  Under the portrait were three frames in which a number of slightly blurry 3D image loops played themselves out. Those little ink droplets could be programmed to do a whole slew of things, after all. There was more stuff in smaller print, and some coded data for those who could interpret it, but after the name and the picture below it you didn’t need anything else.

  “Oh good grief,” the tourist next to me said out loud.

  “I’ll go with just ‘good’, personally.” I smiled when I said it, trying to make it all the more clear that it was a joke. His CL was off as well, which meant he had to depend on such tiresome crutches as tones of voice and facial expressions to tell such things. Small wonder I didn’t miss having that thing turned off.

  “I came here to get away from crap like this. If I’d known she was coming here I would’ve left for Lythander by now.” He slapped the flat of his hand against the closest instance of the poster, right on Angharad’s face, and when he lifted it away the face had become a runny watercolor. He probably had a protomic glove on—for all I knew, the whole hand could have been protomic—with an extension that could, among other things, disable those kinds of ink particles. He wasn’t supposed to be walking around down here with something like that, but a) I didn’t think he would be given too much grief for something that minor and b) I was packing a lot more than he was, and a whole lot more clandestinely, so who was I to be critical?

  Just for fun, he smeared the face of three more wall-etched posters on his way up the street to my left, then stepped away from the wall and doubled his pace. Probably on the way to find out what other few kicks Cytheria had to offer the likes of him. He’d been tall, with the chiseled good looks, and the lousy taste in everything from cosmetics to haberdashery, of someone from a pretty high-end world. I turned away from him and looked back at one of the unspoiled pictures of Angharad. I had lapsed from the Old Way—and that was entirely by choice—but no, I couldn’t deny how even a picture of her still made me feel that much more comfortable in my own skin.

  She’s here tomorrow afternoon, I thought. This planet is going to be mobbed. But I doubted they would raise the inbound planetary traffic quotas for anyone, even Angharad. Whoever got to see her would most likely be whoever was already planetside and in the vicinity or lucky enough to know she’d been coming and had reserved a visa accordingly. There were pilgrims who puppy-dogged her from planet to planet whenever they could, but even she had come out and told them they needed to put their time to better use. Not that they listened, mind you.

  “Watch it, you tadpoles!” shouted a voice from up the street. The tourist, again. I turned and saw he’d been aiming his voice at a whole gaggle of kids barreling through a cross street right in front of him. What really caught my eye was the kid at the head of the pack: round face, big eyes, white hair, bodysuit ... The girl from the circus; no mistaking that even at this distance, with or without magnifying vision. What looked like a bunch of little flags seemed to be following her at about head-and-a-half height, but she and the others vanished around the corner before I could properly size it all up. With my CL turned off that meant things like optical replay were also out of the question, but that in turn gave me an excuse to go take a closer look.

  I jogged up the street, about halfway to the intersection where all the commotion had played out, and then noticed there was a small alley to my right that I hadn’t seen from further back. Echoing out from the mouth of that alley were high and shrill sounds that could only be kids at play.

  The alley was not quite narrow enough that I had to turn sideways to walk through it, but it was close. A pool of something stagnant, with oily soap-bubble colors on its surface, had formed from whatever was dripping from a few stories up. Just as I was stepping over it, the kids came around a
corner from where the alley split off further down. She was still in the lead, and I could see now that she had five or six little triangular flags of different colors—they looked like the same kind fluttering on the roof of the hotel—mounted on long wands protruding from the back of her belt. The kids chasing her had been making grabs for them, but with one good leap she shot straight up into the air, out of reach.

  At the apex of her jump she stuck her legs out in both directions and lodged herself there between the alley walls. There was nothing for the other kids to climb onto; they threw themselves at her and couldn’t even so much as get their fingers to scrape along the undersides of her legs. She grinned. No, she hadn’t gone up that far originally, but had eased her way up that much more, using one foot at a time, after wedging herself in that position. With my two meters of height and my big frame, I could have reached up and spoiled the whole game, but I hung back instead.

  “Oh, come on,” I chided her. “They followed you this far. Throw them a bone.”

  “If you insist.” She pulled her feet back in and landed on her toes, ankles together. The kids ran up, each one snatching away a flag before winding around the two of us to disappear up the street.

  “You were really something yesterday,” I said, and meant it. “How long have you been doing this with that circus crew?”

  “Two years. But this is the end of it.” She put her back to the wall and raised herself up on her toes, as if she were about to leap up again. “Bumming around from one planet to another sure seems like fun until you actually do it for long enough.”

  Good thing you’ve learned that this early in life, I thought. Out loud: “You have any plans?”

  She squinted at a spot just over my left shoulder. “I thought . . . I’d just see what this place has to offer me first and go from there.”

  “From what I can see, Cytheria mostly offers tourists. And not much to offer someone from off-world who’s used to the creature comforts of cortical links and protomic clothing.”

  She stuck her jaw out and frowned. “I’m not spoiled, you know.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Fifteen solar.”

  “You’re fifteen solar and you’re leaving behind what I presume are your current legal guardians? How’d they take to you breaking that news to them?”

  “They don’t have to like it, and they’re not my guardians. I joined them ‘cos I wanted to; I can leave any time. I joined up with them right after I passed my emancipation interview.” She eased down off her toes. “And that’s legal on pretty much every world where there’s human beings.”

  “Yeah, but why walk away from something that looks like a pretty good deal? You get to travel, you do the thing you love . . . ”

  “I’m bored and I wanted a change. Is that enough for you?”

  The kids ran past the mouth of the alley once more. One of them dropped his flag and almost tumbled butt over skullcap cutting a U-turn to go back for it. I had a feeling the girl in front of me was enjoying throwing answers back at me as much as I was enjoying fishing for them, so I went on.

  “Not a lot of other kids traveling with you, I guess?” I realized my mistake the instant I’d said it: she wasn’t a “kid”, and she was going to make damn sure I knew it.

  But all she did was look out the mouth of the alley, arms folded across her chest. “It’s been a long time since I just did my own thing, that’s all.” Those words came out a lot quieter than I thought they would.

  “I’m Henré, by the way.” Even if our CLs had been on, I suspected I would have still done the introduction the old-fashioned way.

  “I’m Enid.” She shifted her gaze back to me. “And you’re one of those candy-snatchers who comes to planets like this to look for girls who don’t put up too much a fight, is that it?”

  There’s a lot of external dangers my outfit could protect me against, but they couldn’t protect me from laughing my own ass off. I sagged against the wall behind me and did everything I could to smother my hilarity short of biting my fingers. Finally I gave up, stuffed the heel of my hand into my mouth and just snorted around it.

  “What’s so funny!” She wrinkled her nose at me as she shouted that.

  The fact that you haven’t stormed off yet, I thought. You’re testing me, so I’m going to test you right back.

  “Okay,” I managed to say, getting my giggling under control and sticking my hand back in my pocket. “Would it help if I came out and said, no, I’m not that kind of tourist? Besides—after seeing what you can do, I’m pretty sure any struggle between us would be You 1, Me Zero. I haven’t met an acrobat yet that didn’t have some martial training. Especially when they’re spacebrats.”

  “How many spacebrat acrobats have you met?”

  “Two, including you.”

  “That’s not a whole lot, is it?”

  “You tell me if I’m wrong. Hey, I’m trying to praise you here. Will you let it sink in? Or are you that touchy about taking props from someone who’s at least three times your age?”

  I still had a joshing tone to my voice, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about kids—teenagers especially—they always think you’re mocking them when you’re actually trying to get them in on the joke. That might explain why in the next second after speaking those words, I suddenly couldn’t see anything but her foot in front of my face.

  She didn’t actually kick me, mind you. She just reared back on one leg and put her other heel a centimeter from my nose. I didn’t move; she didn’t move. Then she broke the stalemate by tapping my forehead lightly with her toes and standing down.

  “Brown belt,” she said. “Last time I checked, anyway.” And then she put on one of those crooked, sidelong smiles that told me yes, she felt she was quite capable of knocking me onto my ass. “Live training, too, with a real teacher. None of that neuro-kinesthesia crap. I mean, yeah, I use that to brush up or to pull off some of the fancier tricks, but all the core training was live and direct.”

  What she thinks she’s capable of, I thought, and what she can actually do, is not something I want to put to the test just yet. “You want some lunch?” I said. “On me. And out in public.”

  “Sure.”

  I let Enid pump me for information after we took seats in the hotel restaurant. I’ve always believed I’m a bad liar—that the vaguer the story I tell, the less embellishment I throw in, the easier it is for someone to believe me. They can fill in the gaps themselves, and with most of the people I tell those open-ended sob stories to, they’re just waiting for me to stop talking so they can start anyway. And since most of the time I never see them again, there’s little harm done.

  But Enid didn’t let me off easy. Again, not that I minded: there was scarcely a thing she could ask me that I hadn’t already told someone else or which wasn’t public record somewhere. She was just trying to prove to herself how smart she was, that she couldn’t be fooled by the likes of me.

  “So how many ships have you designed?” She said that right after her mango lemonade arrived, in a tone of voice that sounded like the word allegedly was going to be shoved in at the end there.

  “I’ve lost count,” I said. I imagined to her ears that sounded like I was just as full of shit as she hoped.

  “Five? Ten? Dozens? Come on, your memory can’t be that bad.”

  I raised fingers. “The Nimbus-class personal cruiser. The Halo; the Corona. The Coriolis-class luxury liner.” Saved the worst for last, did you? I told myself. “There’s more than that, but those are probably the four everyone remembers.”

  There was always the chance she was too young (or too incurious, or both) to associate the word Coriolis with Kyritan and therefore with disaster. If we were on a world where CLs weren’t almost completely banned, she would have looked it all up by now—heck, she could have simply run my CL tag and learned everything she needed that way. But she wasn’t uncomfortable asking me these things; she wasn’t wholly uncomfortable living without
a CL. Old Way, I thought; she’s from a world or at least an environment where those things weren’t taken for granted, and so she doesn’t itch for them. Just for that alone I felt all the more comfortable around her.

  “The Coriolis class was really something,” I heard myself saying. “It was amphibious, and then some. Protomic hull, so it could be reconfigured—you could start off planetside, sail around on the oceans. Then shove everything around, break it into lots of little compartmentalized pieces that you could wagon-train up a planet’s orbital elevator, provided it had one. Put the pieces back together at the other end: starship. Off to the next destination. And it worked, too; it went through five flawless shakedown missions. Spotless ten-year operational record. I won the Proteus Society medal for that thing. Morphic Journal did this whole piece on both it and me.—Oh, thanks.”

  My beer had arrived; I looked at Enid over the top of the bottle. She was still sizing me up, hanging back, waiting for me to say something else she could pin me down with.

  “I guess all this is before your time,” I said lamely, before shutting myself up by putting the mouth of the bottle to my own lips.

  “What happened?” she said, quieter than I expected. Yeah, I thought, you can tell from the way it was all coming out that something happened, can’t you?

  “I got out of the business.”

  “Why did you get out of the business?”

  Tenacious, she was. Not like I hadn’t been fishing for a little tenacity to shake me up.

  “There was an accident with the Kyritan, a late-iteration Coriolis ship. Something went wrong with . . . a whole bunch of things at once. One thousand one hundred forty-six people died. There was a long and very exhaustive investigation after which the board concluded that there had been no design flaw in the ship, but that was the end of my design career any way you cut it. I received a severance settlement. And now I look around for nice places where I can soak up the sun and talk to teenaged acrobats.”