Nature likes those who give in to her
but she loves those who do not.
—Turid Aarstad
He never said he was going to stay, either. All he wanted to do was look around a little bit, because the place reminded him of his childhood home (or so he said). But he hung around, and I made the stupid mistake of offering him coffee, and before long he was talking about how the front room could stand to be redecorated, and did you know he actually does handywork for a very reasonable sum?
It took me a good ten years before I could find Henré Sim, the interloper in question, the main character of Flight of the Vajra, a book of his own to dwell in. Out of my head and into your hands.
I don’t mean that it took me ten years to write Flight of the Vajra. It only took two and a half years to produce the text and make it what it is now. What did take ten years was for me to turn into the kind of person that was able to sit down and write Flight of the Vajra.
Where it all started was when this guy walked in—Henré Sim, a starship designer, a far-future Jony Ive with a hollowed-out heart—and said to me, “You. Give me a story.”
Most pitches for space opera or far-future stories start with the setting. There’s this Galactic Empire, see, and … Or There’s this technology, see, and … I confess, that was how I pitched Vajra to myself at first, because everyone wants to come up with great fodder for flap copy and endpaper maps.
With Vajra, there was no Galactic Empire, but there was This Technology. Protomics, I called it. Substances that can be programmed to assume shapes, change colors, alter their densities. Create something like that and watch the whole of humankind pick it up and run with it, out to the stars. The possibilities are endless.
Maybe a little too endless, because that’s the problem with any tech that takes on a life of its own. After a while, you have a hard time telling where you end and the tech begins. Maybe there’s some virtue in finding a way to remain grounded in the non-protomic world, where things like birth and change and death and reminiscence still have a place.
Maybe the best incarnation for this Old Way, as they call it, is not just in a credo or in a manifesto, but a full-blown system of faith—an institution of its own, one that self-sustains and hands itself down across the generations, one that reminds people that they’re made of starstuff and back to starstuff one day they will go.
Maybe that only goes so far.
Maybe after a while you want more than words and good intentions for your children. Maybe this business of forsaking life-enhancing and –prolonging technologies, either in whole or in part, is just so much sour grapes. Maybe the Old Way’s hourglass has only so much sand in it, and that sand is about to run out.
What kind of person would be most troubled by this state of affairs? This Henré Sim, for instance—nominally Old Way but like so many of his kind, disillusioned by how the Old Way could only offer so much comfort in the face of an indifferent universe. But he’s also skeptical of the Highend, not thrilled with the way they are all running away as fast as they can from anything resembling humanity.
Who else would be in dismay? How about the most recent pontiff of the Old Way, Angharad il-Jakaya? She, too, was someone else who entered my imagination unbidden and demanded to be done justice to—a woman of quiet grace and great gravity, somewhere between the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. She knows full well the Old Way can’t survive as it is, but she also knows full well the Highend is its own kind of dead end.
Maybe, together, the two of them could accomplish what neither of them alone could do—or, for that matter, what trillions of others couldn’t do.
Soon I found it wasn’t just Henré and Angharad who found themselves looking for a new place to be. Consider Enid, the kid looking for her dad after he ran off to join what could be described as an Old Way cult. All she wants is her dad back—and she’s convinced that only Angharad, the one person everyone in the universe thinks of as the Old Way incarnate, can bring him back to her. (Angharad, to Enid’s amazement, agrees.)
And then there’s Cioran, the closest a future like this has to a rock star, a Highend wanderer with an eye for adventure. Ulli, his diplomat ladyfriend, with secrets gleaned from a lifetime behind many different closed doors. Kallhander and Ioné, the long arm(s) of the law—one who counts as human only by default, the other not at all.
None of them would have ever guessed they’d end up in the same boat, a boat of Henré Sim’s design named—what else?—the Vajra.
In truth, I never expected it to work out that way either. But here we are, ten years and three years and however many drafts and pages later.
At long last, Henré Sim and his friends have a home.
I hope you’ll want to take a look inside for yourself.