Flight of the Vajra Read Online Free

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