by Robert Reed
“And what else do you do? How much are you a hero?”
He seems disappointed by her words.
But she persists. “You were my hero last night.” The big smile comes to her face without effort, instincts taking hold. “Did I thank you properly?”
His expression is watchful and somewhat innocent. “Like I told you, you were stupid to go into that place.”
“I know.”
“What were you thinking?”
“That it would prove safe.”
He breathes and seems to weigh her answer on his tongue. Then he nods and asks, “Why did you need a safe place?”
She says, “A hiding place.”
“Why?”
“Steward?” She waits, then asks, “Have you ever spoken to a Flower? Before me, I mean.”
“Hide from whom?”
“The misconceptions are enormous. Even in Quito.” She pauses, then tells him frankly, “We aren’t fucking machines. Or mindless, moronic robots built in factories. And certainly not succubi and incubi that rise up only when our masters are in bed.”
“You’re no freelancer—”
“Intellectually, we’re close to human. More sophisticated, actually. In some ways.”
“—so there’s an owner pining away for you. Somewhere.” He wonders, “Who is he?
“I was conceived in a plastic vessel and born this size,” touching herself. “I was in a brothel at the foot of the main Quito skyhook, Steward. I was devised, Steward. Besides my shape and basic needs—water and food and so on—I have no relationship to humans. None. My genetics are derived from single-helix nucleic acids. Not DNA. Not RNA. A synthetic nucleic acid. And all of my genes are the product of laboratories and wholly original.”
“Devised,” he echoes.
But she talks on, giving the history not for the purpose of dispensing information, but so her intellect can be showcased. A Flower is a graven image, she admits. An abomination. Most worlds of the System and most areas on the Earth itself do not allow them to be produced, and if Flowers travel through restricted zones, then their freedoms are severely limited. Local whores don’t want the competition. Local sensibilities find them a delicious taboo—something most people halfway want to try, if only once, and halfway wish banned. Flowers are the perfect lovers in popular mythology. Nothing compares. And the public’s ignorance only helps to enlarge the myth and help it sprout wings.
Flowers have been possible for centuries.
But possible doesn’t mean something is done. There are a staggering number of technologies still in the cupboard waiting to be applied. Like truly intelligent AIs. Like world-cracking antimatter bombs. Like any new thing that might threaten the long-lived creatures of dominion—Mankind. Convention and social goals paint synthetic humans as a new danger to true people. Flowers, as a result, have been flesh-on-blood realities for only a little more than a century. Quito is their stronghold. In Quito, most people will swear that anything can be bought without the buyer or seller invoking any messy moral sensibilities. It’s a corrupt and thoroughly wondrous city stretching from the hollow Andes to the Galapagos Islands. Two billion people live in its confines. Plus Ghosts. The better areas hold some of the wealthiest humans in the System. Only the royalty of Kross and certain old-money Belters could pile up their assets and stand taller on the piles, proud for the view.
Regardless of wealth, however, people can live but three centuries or so. Then they wear out and they die.
Tailoring and modern medicines have slowed the aging process as much as seems possible. Organs can be transplanted. Flesh can be grown anew and grafted onto the weary old flesh. The brittle calcium sticks devised by natural selection can be replaced with plastics or even hyperfiber bones. But the limit comes with the human brain. No one has yet learned a way to build the perfect cyborg body, then mesh it with that fatty lump of tangled neurons. And even if that trick were possible, she reminds her audience, there comes the steady erosion of the brain’s capacities and its redundancies and its general vigor. Brains are the weakest link in any life-extending process. They’re the seats of the soul, and unless you wish to be torn apart and made into a Ghost (Chiffon’s true self made ill by the simple thought) the prospects are clear as to the destiny of all those precious thinking gray lumps.
A score of diseases, both ancient and modern, inflict themselves on the oldest living people.
A century and a half ago, without warning, some of the wealthiest elder members of the Quito community got ill and died with shocking suddenness. The source of infection was traced to a virus native to far Titan, usually beneficial to its hosts—but not to dusty old Terrans, it seemed, and before it was identified and killed it had claimed several thousand citizens worth billions. The main mode of infection was through delicious contacts. Certain popular whores were identified as carriers. There was a near-panic inside the exclusive clubs and health parlors. And even once the virus was gone and its living victims treated with success, a general sense of dread lingered on.
What if new diseases appear? people wondered.
What then?
Quito receives produce and people from all over the System. What if the whores became carriers of something worse? How can a true epidemic, the first in a thousand years, be combated before millions die out of sheer ignorance and lust?
Flowers were one answer.
Says Miss Chiffon, “I can’t hold or spread any virus or bacteria.” She says, “I am a functional alien in every sense,” and she shrugs and looks at Steward, smiling her pretty smile and telling him, “You know that already. Even in Yellowknife they have to know about us—”
“You’ve got an owner somewhere.”
She says, “I do.” She says, “We’re property, yes. In Quito and elsewhere. Our treatment is regulated, or it is supposed to be regulated, and the truth is that we live better lives than most average citizens.” She sighs and tries to look small. No one could see her and not feel a measure of pity. “Since we’re supposed to entertain some of the most cultured, well-educated minds in the System, we’ve got sharp minds of our own. And flexibility. And humor. And a demon’s skill with pleasure.” She sighs again, working to blend her charms with the visible helplessness. “Which is small consolation for being a slave, Steward.”
He says, “I bet.”
She tells him, “Yes, I’ve got an owner. And the truth is that I’ve run away from him.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“We’re both smart,” he says. “Try explaining.”
“And yet it’s simple, too.” She smiles with a hint of embarrassment, this business so much dirty laundry. “I’ll explain.”
“Do.”
“For my hero,” she coos.
And he says, “I don’t know. Tell me and then we’ll decide what to call me. Okay?”
The walls of the room are covered with shelves, and the shelves are alive. Steward listens to Miss Chiffon and looks at the various books and trinkets. They’re part of what people won’t see when they look inside his home, the Masking Glass more than a luxury to him. He installed it himself, at night and in secret. He built the shelves later, splicing into the feeding wires and the vascular pipes running inside the walls, extending them and then shaping the resulting structures with care. At first there was nothing on them. He had brought nothing from Yellowknife besides weapons, and those were stored elsewhere. But eventually, slowly, Steward added the antique books bought in the Old Quarter and the rare trinket or ornament—ill-labeled nothings with no clear value, each representing some portion of his life in Brulé.
She is talking about her mysterious owner.
“Where is he?” Steward asks.
“Now?” She seems uncomfortable, perhaps afraid that talking about the man will produce him from out of the air. She says, “Nearby,” and squirms in her seat. Her bare toes dig into the carpeting, between pale brown and green stalks, and she tells him, “I was devised to suit him.
Only him. He’s wealthy and very special in his wants. Very unusual.”
“Explain.” He doesn’t want to sound tough. He almost tells her as much, then catches himself.
“He’s cruel.” She sighs and reports, “He enjoys being cruel.”
Steward tries to remain objective. Calm. Okay, he thinks. Cruel.
And now she draws a picture with words. She has a sober, careful voice when she describes what a Flower must suffer when her master is separate from the law. She mentions knives and electrical currents and droppers of warm acid, and when she doesn’t tell him how these things are applied, Steward’s imagination is sufficient. He tries to look at the shelves, tries to keep her hurting face out of his eyes, remembering the merits of cool estimations and sober assessments, Chiffon and her owner and Steward too—all mixed into this crazy stew.
And she breaks him down.
He can’t say when or how. He wouldn’t know how to resist, he thinks, and he finds himself staring at her toes, then her bare knees, and finally at her face with the sober voice coming out and wrapping around him and pulling some sort of knot around his poor insides. He knows pain. He’s certainly experienced worse pain than she’s known, and much of it he sought out for himself. But he is trained in suffering and surviving. A Flower isn’t the same. This strange Miss Luscious Chiffon is near tears and being so brave about it, he thinks. He thinks back to last night when he mentioned the Masking Glass, that everyone saw a fictional Steward living in a bare room, that’s all, and he had felt the relief come into her suddenly and all her nervousness before then making sense. Now, he thinks. She’s crazy because of the bastard, he thinks. Look what he’s done to her—!
“I’m sorry,” he offers, recalling the cut on her leg.
“For what? You’ve done nothing wrong to me.”
“There’s a rich bastard somewhere in Brulé City—”
She says, “You’ve helped me more than anyone.”
And a thought comes into his head.
She asks, “What is it?”
“Scars.” He has to ask, “Why aren’t you scarred?” His fingertips and tongue have been everywhere, nothing found besides that one healing wound and all the perfect smooth skin, scented and sweet tasting. “I don’t understand,” he confesses.
“Flowers heal.”
“How do you mean?”
“We can’t scar,” she says. “Our beauty heals completely. For as long as I live.” She gives a weaker smile and shrugs.
“Oh.” He remembers how he was lost at the height of sex last night, and he can’t count more than a handful of times when that kind of passion had happened to him. “Go on. I’m listening,” and he leans forward in his chair.
“You know the rest.”
“You ran away from him.”
“Yes.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
And he has an urge to sit with her and hug her until she bursts. She’s so lovely, he thinks. She carries herself as if she doesn’t even know it. And still there’s a toughness wrapped inside her beauty. He can catch it in her face and her posture. She’s been injured, mightily injured, but she persists, undaunted by her circumstances.
He asks, “Does this happen often?”
“What?”
“Flowers fleeing their masters?”
She says nothing, crossing her arms and looking between his feet.
“You’re loyal, aren’t you? By nature?” He needs to make it sensible in his head. He wants it to become clear and reasonable, but he has to confess, “I’ve heard stories of a Flower’s loyalty. It’s fierce to an owner. It’s in their genes.”
“Running isn’t easy,” she whispers. “Oh, no.”
“I’m sure.”
“But you’re wrong.”
“How?”
“Anything can be inside our genes. We can be trained in any fashion desired.”
“Okay.”
She looks at him with her perfect mouth closed and grim.
“What’s your blood and schooling telling you, Chiffon?”
“To withstand almost anything, then flee. There came a point when I had to flee—”
“Of course.” He shakes his head, saying, “A brutal rich turd is somewhere in Brulé, and you couldn’t live with him anymore. That’s fine. You’ve been terribly lucky, Chiffon. I found you and you’re safe, quite safe, and don’t worry about anything.”
She watches him, volunteering nothing.
On one shelf is a little globe. Steward remembers when he bought it for almost nothing in a secondhand shop in the Old Quarter, reconditioning its workings himself. He’s afraid to touch Chiffon now—afraid her nerves are too tightly strung—but he needs something in his hands and so he picks up the globe, the roundness firm and pleasantly heavy. It’s a Universal Globe. He bought it because in Yellowknife he had lived without World-Net or Ghosts or even talking AIs; he felt backward that first year, people saying so in his presence. Or saying worse. So the Globe seemed smart. Name a world, any world, and it projects the image with an old-fashioned holo arrangement. Like now. It’s showing the Earth as it is today, this minute, with its several kinds of green, continents and sea, and the lines of rainstorms moving away from the equator, white as curdled milk and apparently solid.
She finally says, “Remember? I was devised by him.”
He says, “Yes,” with his most patient voice.
“He’s done this before. Many times. He devises Flowers and does the same terrible things to each of them, and all eventually run away. He expects it.”
“He wanted you to run?”
“He enjoys the good hunt.” She smiles and hurts with the same expression. “Does this make sense?”
“A game?” Steward can almost feel his hair straighten. He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised, but he is surprised. Even stunned. He tells her, “In edible chess, the player who captures a piece gets to eat the piece.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the only piece on the board, aren’t you?”
“I just want to hide.”
He aches to his bones. “As long as you need,” he promises. “How long before he quits hunting you?”
“Five months.” The answer is precise and immediate. Her voice has gone flat. She looks straight at him and reports, “My genetic material is not only synthetic, you see, it’s unstable. The typical Flower lives a year, rarely more, and I am seven months old.”
He hears himself say, “I understand.”
“I’m scared.”
And Steward glances at the globe. He can’t remember the last time he used it or which of the tens of thousands of worlds he had wanted to see, but he recalls how he learned quickly that people in Brulé have no compelling interest in anything outside Brulé. He thinks how five months isn’t any time at all. He thinks he should put down this stupid globe and say something or do something, only he doesn’t know what. So he sits, saying nothing, telling himself that people are odd. They can learn so much and see so much and yet they care only about the things immediate. It’s been that way from the beginning, surely, and it’ll be that way to the end.
A Freestater, she is thinking.
While she lies to him, telling him the fable she devised while lying awake in the early morning hours, she tries to decide how she might make use of him and his skills. She sees him as an opportunity, gray but potentially enormous. She sure knows enough about Freestaters to be excited. No one is more tough-headed. No one. They’ve been fighting the oddest, longest set of wars in human history. More than a thousand years of steady confrontation. Odd because there are so few fatalities and so little destruction. Warriors inflict ritualized pain and fear on one another, and battles are decided with all the ceremony and tradition of a grand wedding. He was talking about some of it last night. Now she tries to sketch in the blanks with what little she remembers. The Neoamerindian Movement had been a religious phenomena. A Revival, Steward had called it. It was a conscious attempt to mix ele
ments of mankind’s tribal nature and aboriginal faiths with modern technologies. Selective technologies, she thinks. Never World-Net. No. Each little Freestate is a nation unto itself, each possessing its own history and demanding faith and a unique sense of culture; its people somehow manage to hold themselves in isolation from the rest of the System—a wicked trick for remote comets and asteroids, a marvel for people so close to so much.
If they started killing one another, of course, the big City-States would put an end to their fun.
Immediately.
Wars can’t be tolerated. Not when smart individuals with few resources can build and deploy weapons of terrible destruction. Not when tiny nations lacking status or real populations can fabricate nukes and gamma-ray lasers capable of eradicating billions. There hasn’t been a major war in fifteen hundred years. There aren’t even any standing armies anymore. And that’s what makes someone like Steward so damned valuable, she tells herself. A warrior! A potent Yellowknife warrior!
What’s he doing down here? she wonders.
Then she decides not to question her good fortune. Just think of ways where Steward can help…not that he’ll be worth damp shit against people like Dirk and Minus, of course. Not nose to nose. But his home, his hideout, and his warrior sensibilities and all—
“Five months is worth a fight,” he declares.
“I’ll keep out of your way,” she promises, making her voice sweet and submissive. “I’ll pay for your trouble, too. Whatever—”
“No.” A big hand cuts at the air. “Forget it.”
She wonders what he would say if he knew the truth and how long his hero mentality would linger. She has no intention of including him, not like she would have done with the Quito boy, and she thinks about the boy and all the things that might have happened. Maybe he’ll show in spite of everything? There’s no knowing. She tells Steward, “Thank you,” and he says:
