Chapter Three
Slowly, Angharad eased herself onto her cushion. Her eyes were wide and frightened instead of wide and elated, but the rest of her face held the same serenity it had before Enid had lunged at her. By the time she was fully seated, even her eyes were calm again. Nice trick, I thought; me, I’m still shaking on the inside and sweating on the outside. I heard footfalls outside, loud and heavy.
“Go easy,” I told Enid, relaxing my grip, “and don’t you dare do anything else funny, or we’ll both get eaten alive.”
She had pulled herself halfway into a sitting position by the time the doors were flung back. Two guards—not Angharad’s retinue, but planetary security forces—stood in the doorway. Their olive-green body armor and their yellow-visor helmets didn’t belong in this serene house with all its gardens and light, but here they were.
“It’s quite all right,” Angharad told them, flapping a hand dismissively. “The girl stumbled on one of the mats and had a tumble. Nothing more.”
“Is that what happened?” The guard looked at the two of us, all no-nonsense. I didn’t doubt I could handle him or his weaponry if it came to it, but I really, really didn’t want to.
“Yeah, we’re fine. Just worried for her,” I said.
Enid said nothing, just reached out and started to massage her allegedly stubbed toe. The guards gave us one final look—you better not make us regret this—nodded to Angharad (“Ma’am.”) and stepped back into the hallway.
“You realize they’ve got every room in this place under surveillance,” I said out loud to both of them once the retreating steps were gone. Not that it mattered by then what I said out loud, I thought.
“I said before, this conversation is entirely private.” Angharad gestured at the ceiling. “One of the conditions I insisted on before using this venue was that all sensory surfaces for any room I used were to be disabled for the duration of my stay. The authorities granted that and several other requests sight unseen. I refuse to hold official audiences in private under those circumstances.”
Enid was pulling gingerly at her foot. She’d probably bent something the wrong way when I’d yanked her to the floor. That’s right; pain’s a great teacher, isn’t it? I thought.
“You want to explain yourself?” I said to her. “I’d think that anyone with the brio to take a swing at the Kathaya using nothing but her own bare fists has a really damn good reason for it.”
Enid gathered herself up, stood, then re-seated herself—very formally, legs tucked under—on the guest’s cushion. Spine straight up and down, hands flat on her thighs . . . seeing her comport herself like that only made me a little more riled. You’re only now getting all formal because you don’t have the luxury of punching her anymore? I thought. But I shelved my anger, much as she must have done, and let her take the floor.
“I lost my father,” Enid said, “three years ago.”
Angharad nodded in recognition. “I am sorry to hear . . . ”
“I lost him because of you.”
I think Angharad and I both recoiled at that one.
“We both lost Mom when I was only three. We were living in this apartment off the campus where Dad was teaching. She had gone to the beach to surf, and something happened while she was in the water. A heart problem. ‘Aortic dissection’, they called it. Nothing you can diagnose ahead of time. It just happens. She fainted, was dragged under and drowned. Her CL bio-alarm went off, but by the time the lifeguards got to her, it was too late ten times over. And since my Mom and Dad were Old Way—like the whole rest of that planet—they didn’t believe in backups. Dead is dead.”
I’d inched over to look at her from the side, and I could see the sardonic little smile she put on when she said that.
“’So it’s only Dad and me now, and he wants to do anything to make me happy. Dance lessons, karate. I’m throwing myself into all of it, too. I get real good at it. Everyone tells me that. But he looks at me sometimes and I can see him worrying, because he knows backups only work if you start doing them right when someone’s born. You can’t start now; it’s years too late. He could lose me one day the same way he lost Mom, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
“And then there are days when he looks at me and he doesn’t see me anymore. He looks at everything and all he sees is Mom. It doesn’t help if he recites the Cycle of Grace a hundred times a day. He just wants her back. I sat down with him one time, and I said, ‘Dad, it’s not like I don’t want her back too.’ But I had other things now, and all he told himself he had was her.”
She yanked at her nose and sniffed hard. She wasn’t crying, but I’d seen that gesture before as the kind of thing you did to ward off incoming tears.
“So one day Dad goes to a camp meeting for the Glory of the Way. You know them, right?”
“I know them,” Angharad replied. “You must also know I do not sanction them or their actions.”
I knew them, too, and to know them was to wrinkle one’s nose at them. If the Old Way was the religion, the Glory of the Way was the cult. They roamed in packs of twenty to fifty, bumming around from one planet to another in frank imitation of Angharad’s own pilgrimages. Whenever she appeared planetside somewhere, they showed up and made a royal nuisance of themselves. She had on more than one occasion begged them—sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently—to stop doing that. They never took the advice.
“He dragged me along to that damned thing,” Enid went on. “I‘ve been in a circus myself, so I won’t call what this was a circus. A zoo is more like it. They spent all their time doing three things: figuring out where you were gonna show up next, figuring out how to scam free room and board from whatever planet they were on at the time, and reciting all the different Cycles in their own messed-up, rewritten versions. I was there for a day and a half, and I ran off before they jumped the planet. I ran off; Dad didn’t. He stayed. He left with them the morning after I ran off.
“I ended up on the doorstep of a friend of my dad, a guy named Anjeoh. Cried out the whole thing to him. He took me in, him and his partner, and that first night while I was lying in their guestroom looking at the ceiling, I thought two things. One was, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to go back to dance practice like nothing happened.’ The other was, ‘I’m going to get emancipated so I don’t have to depend on any more stupid crazy people.’ And I did both of those things. I went and did my plies and my practice, and then I started getting my act together so I could take the emancipation test. I couldn’t take it until I was at least thirteen, but I had to start somewhere.
“Anjeoh went and told the police about Dad. They put out a warrant, but they warned me, ‘If he’s gone runabout he might not turn up for a long time, if ever.’ They told me all kinds of stories about how Glory Groups have these sneaky different ways of avoiding the authorities. Well, I wasn’t going to wait for him. I was just going to get on with my own life. That’s what I told myself.”
Another sniff from her.
“How old were you when all this happened?” Angharad asked.
“I was ten.”
“Did they find your father?”
“Sure. Five months later. He was in the same Glory Group he’d bailed on me with. They were trying to smuggle themselves planetside in cargo containers, which is pretty typical for them. They got caught when the latrine system they’d built into the container broke and leaked out into the hold of the ship they were in.” Her smile was crooked and mirthless. “Now he’s on some farmstead colony, working to pay off the fines. Last I heard he’ll get everything paid off sometime next year or so, but all he wants to do is join right back up with another Glory Group. I guess I just don’t measure up to that.” Her smile bent itself a little more.
“Let me ask something,” Angharad said, putting space between her words to better contrast Enid’s onrushing talk. “What is it that you believe I can do about this?”
“Because you’re the only one he’ll listen to!” Enid seethed on. “You go to him and you say, ‘Look, do you realize what a mistake you’ve made? You’ve got a daughter out there who just wants you back. Why can’t you just take that instead of chasing something that isn’t real?’ And it has to be you saying that. He won’t listen to anyone else, because that’s the—the thing he’s all bound up in now, that’s how it all works! It’s all stemming from you, and you can’t just wave your hands and say, ‘Look, I tell them to cut it out, but they’re not really my problem.’ Don’t you tell me they’re not your problem!” Her tears had come at last; I wrapped my fingers around my knees and forced myself not to look away. “You talk all the time about how much you care and how you want to make things better for the people who follow you? Well, what about this? If you really cared about this, you’d g—you’d go and tell him to c-cut it out!” Her last few words were half-submerged under her blubbering.
It was the same thing I’d said to myself in the wake of all the dead from the disaster: If you really cared about this, you’d—what? Do something other than sit on my ass and pretend this wasn’t my doing, that’s what.
How many times had Angharad said to others, in interviews and quotes: I have nothing that you don’t have yourself? Now I saw it was true. She was just like me, if only in one way: she only had so many ways to say she was sorry before she had to go and do something about it.
It would have been easy for me to say something like, Kids will be kids . . . Just brush it all off as the whining of someone who still hadn’t done enough of certain kinds of growing up.
But I knew, from a place inside me that I didn’t have the kind of words to talk about with others, that this kid was hitting a nerve. Both with me and with Her Grace.
Angharad rose from her seat and sat down again, knee-to-knee with Enid. Enid, her arms shaking, had covered her face with her hands; she almost jumped when the older woman put her own hands on her shoulders. That made me, all of a meter away, flinch too. A full jump from Enid would have dented the ceiling.
“I can’t promise you that anything will happen,” Angharad said, “but I can promise you that I will try. I will go to your father and speak to him as you have said. But everything that happens from then on is entirely his. Will you accept that?”
“Yeah.” The word came out as a dismal sob.
“Let me ask a favor of you as well. If you can, please come tomorrow to the open house that I’ll be holding. I can guarantee entry for the two of you, although there are limited seats.” She smoothed back Enid’s hair from both sides of her face. “There are people who come to these meetings and who ask me many of the same questions that you do. ‘Why do these things happen?’ ‘Why won’t you take responsibility?’ I have answers for all those things—and while they may not be the answers you want to hear, they are the only answers that I can give. Will you come? We can arrange the rest of the details there.”
Another “yeah”, this one not quite as dismal as before.
I let go of my knees and stood up. My feet had fallen asleep.
“I will arrange to have a cab meet you at the back gate,” Angharad said, in a slightly more conversational tone.
“Thanks.” I reached down and gave Enid a hand up. From the way her ankles wobbled—something I’d not seen them do before—she needed it.
Enid didn’t say a word until we were sinking back into the cushions of the cab’s back seat. The cabs here were all ground-only units; they had ordinances against non-police flight to keep the sky clear, the usual Old Way resort-planet stuff. The kind of pretentious atavism some people cherished, I reminded myself, me included—but after Enid’s outburst and confession it wasn’t hard to remember why some people cherished it so lovingly.
The same Old Way that had given her a real mother and father had taken them from her as well. One taken from her by dint of Enid being the product of a world where serial cognitive restoration was not permitted, meaning (as Enid had so aptly put it) dead is dead. The other, though, had been taken from her in a far more complicated way.
I broke the ice as soon as we left the main gate. “I’m sorry about your mother and father.”
“It’s all so stupid.” Her face was resolutely turned to face out the window.
“What is?”
“The Old Way. All it does it give people reasons not to do things. You can’t make backups of yourself like they do on the Highend worlds, because that’s just, you know, wrong. You can’t do this and you can’t do that. It’s all about what you can’t do, and I’m sick of life just being one big ‘no’ to everything.” She thumped the window with her fist—gently, over and over, a bored kid’s game.
“You think Angharad’s stupid too? But you seem pretty convinced your dad will listen to her.”
She turned from the window, finally. “I’ve seen it happen before! The way other people respond to her, just her. —And, no, I don’t think she’s stupid, exactly. I just hate the fact that she’s got that kind of power over other people. That all she has to do is say something and it’s reality to them.”
“Why don’t you try turning that around?”
“Huh?”
“Why don’t you instead hate the fact,” and with this I hunkered down a bit in the seat to put myself more at her eye level, “that other people let someone have that kind of power over them?”
She looked right back at me and put on the same bitter smile I’d seen her wearing when she was telling Angharad about her wayward father. “What am I supposed to do about that?”
“Nothing this red-hot second. It’s just something to think about.” The tall trees shading the avenues around the Summit Lodge had once again given way to the closely-crowded low buildings of the city’s outskirts. I imagined taking a month and doing nothing but getting lost in all those shadowy dead-ends, but the impulse didn’t come as strongly as I had hoped it would. The needs of the moment were getting in the way.
“You know where you want to go?” I went on. “Even without all that cash in your pocket, there’s still a lot of places you can go.”
Enid stuck her legs out in front of her, unbuttoned the very pocket in question, and took out one of her coins. “I’ve got a lot more money than this, you know. I’ve been saving up, stashing it away. I figured at some point I’d find a good use for it, and now I’ve got it.”
Ping. She flipped the coin right at me.
My arm, my fingers, moved and snapped it out of the air before my head even turned all the way to face it.
Maybe it wasn’t the best time to demonstrate that I’d spent a time getting familiar with a neuro-kinesthesia feedback training system before setting out on my own, but like she said—at some point I’d find a good use for it, and this was as good as any. In my experience, NKF training was an arms race: it put you ahead of most people, but also made you that much more of a target for the few who were always going to be better than you. That and any NKF wielded by the untrained could wreck you just as badly as any enemy could.
Enid didn’t seem flustered by my reflexes. Then again, I imagined it would take a lot more than a parlor trick like that to fluster her.
“That’s down payment,” she said.
“What for?”
“I’m hiring you as transport. I want you to take me to where Dad’s being halfway-housed. He’s on Lamia’s Light.”
“It’s not that difficult to buy a ticket to Lamia’s Light, you know. Because that’s about what you hiring me would amount to—I’d buy you a seat on a cruiser, put you on it, and wave my hanky at you.”
I flipped the coin right back at her, and she clapped it in her upraised palms without blinking. Pretty good, I thought. We could pass that thing back and forth between us all day, but I could easily think of better pastimes.
“Dad’s work colony does allow visitors. Thing is, if I go by myself, I have to say it’s me, and he won’t see me ‘cos I’m the one that turned my back on him, see? And I can’t go under an assumed name; they won’t allow that. But if it’s me plus someone else, then they can say it’s you here to visit him, plus others. See? That should get us all in the same room at least. Then he won’t be able to say no to me anymore.”
“Hold on a millisec. Why are you talking about seeing him? I thought you were gonna leave that to Her Grace.”
She shook her head. “She isn’t going to help me.”
“When did that happen? I didn’t hear anything go ‘clonk’.”
“You heard her in there. All that stuff—she was just saying it to hustle me out of the room. That and something you said—that business about letting someone have power over you. Why should I let her have that kind of power over him? No . . . ” She shook her head and smiled. “It’s like, why should I let her have that kind of power over me? Why should I feel like she’s the only one who could do that? Besides, it’s her fault, isn’t it?” She put the coin down on the seat between us. “That kind of thing just makes me want to hire you for this mission all the more.”
I thought: Oh. Out loud I said: “How much are you offering?”
Part of me felt terrible for even saying that. Money wasn’t an issue on my end; I had enough of it squirreled away in many different places to keep me for quite a while. Taking cash from her would be like looting the small change from behind a couch cushion in the hopes of bribing a minister.
“This—” She slapped her pocket, rattling the four other coins against each other. “—for down payment. Then thirteen thousand when we get to Lamia’s Light.”
“Your life savings.” A wild guess on my part, but a number like that sounded too large for her to be explained any other way. “You’re gonna blow your entire life savings just to get me, whom you barely just met, to take you to Lamia’s Light? You, who almost just clocked the Sixteenth Kathaya herself?” I was laughing out the words by that point. “You’re too dangerous to let loose without a chaperone.”
“So it’s a deal, then?” She’d picked up some of my laugh for her own.
“No,” I said, and I realized just then how very good I’d become at removing my smile on a moment’s notice.
Enid was still sulking when we arrived at the hotel, and I did my pointed best to ignore her as she followed me inside. I stopped at the convenience store in the lobby to buy a cocoa-and-chestnut anpan—my best cure for irritation, barring booze, has always been something sweet and wholly non-nutritive—and I saw Enid stride up to the check-in desk. Fine, I thought: maybe she’ll take a week off, practice some katas on the roof or something, forget about all this nonsense.
I went back up to the room, set the privacy lock, and used the desk (one of the few places I could make a CL link) to connect with my ship. No sign of anyone poking around in the hull or doing anything else that said they suspected I wasn’t what I said I was. That’s right, folks; nothing to see here.
Before leaving the ship I’d set up a few information feeds from the planet’s public-access networks. Seismic activity, gravitational mapping, orbital live views with multispectral scans . . . no one of them alone would be enough, but together they could tip me off if what I was looking for turned up. Provided, that is, the warning signs from all these inputs didn’t click into place minutes after things had already been blown up or wiped flat.
There was a part of me that hoped I wouldn’t find anything here. There was another part of me that suspected all too well I would. Because if Angharad was in town, at least one of her ideological opponents was, too. Someone who might not think twice about taking out a city to cross her off his list.
Or a continent. Or a planet.
Or a ship with thousands on board.
If that happened, I’d let my own leash slip and fling myself at that threat. And I didn’t want to have anyone in tow, or anyone to protect, when that happened.
Sorry, Enid. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that your timing couldn’t have been worse.
I collated what data there was to sift through, which wasn’t much, and decided I was as ahead of the game as I could get. I did my exercises, laid down, and slid into sleep far more easily than I anticipated, but I didn’t like what I found there.