Flight of the Vajra Read Online Free Page B

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,