Flight of the Vajra Read Online Free Page A

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.

    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