Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Your wetsurgeon, yeah.” The walk bridged a pond thick with water lilies. Pierrots waited on tables by the water’s edge. “Not to worry, though—I’m off-program. I wouldn’t turn my worst enemy over to those bastards at Deutsche Nakasone on my own time. Not that I have any choice when I’m programmed up.…” The crowd thickened and slowed and came to a halt. “Here. We go downtown now.”

  The elevator bank was set by the druid tree’s trunk, its vacuum sleeve tunneling right through the root network. The cars were dirty and harshly lit and a whiff of urine and stale body sweat emanated from them. As the crowd swept forward, Rebel stared up wistfully, flashing on a quick fantasy: She would fight her way free of the crush and scramble up the tree trunk, nimble as a squirrel, moving faster and faster as she swarmed higher and the gravity grew less, surging from limb to limb. Until, at the very top, she would pull knees to chest, brace toes against bark, and leap … soaring high into the air, body taut and outstretched, her flight slowing gradually, until at the last possible instant she’d touch axis and be snagged by the magnetic line, to be hauled far and away from here in the time it took to draw a breath.

  (But she didn’t have the armbands or leg rings for the magnetic field to grab. She would plummet like a stone, with excruciating slowness at first, then faster, a wingless Icarus, curving down to smash bloody dead against the city walks. It was a stupid fantasy.)

  “Deutsche Nakasone is going to come looking for you. You know that?” They stepped into a car along with a hundred others. The doors sighed shut and the floor dropped. “They want a clean recording of that personality of yours. And then they want to revert you to Eucrasia Walsh. Out of the goodness of their corporate heart, you ask? Shit. They’re just worried about retaining copyright.” Heisen’s face was so close to hers that their hoods kissed. His breath was sour as he murmured in her ear. “They don’t care that to you—the present you, the one you think you are—it’ll be just the same as dying.”

  Some of the elevator stayed behind to let off passengers; the rest continued downward. A black-and-white painted rude boy with a metal star hung about his neck cruised Rebel, hooking a fist on his hip and throwing back his cloak to reveal a body-length strip of flesh. She looked away, wrapping her cloak tightly about her, and he laughed. “But why? Why are they doing this to me?”

  Heisen sighed. “It’s a simple enough story,” he said, “if an ugly one. Do you remember being Eucrasia? Working as a persona bum?”

  The memory was there, but it was painful and Rebel flinched away from it. It keyed into the suicidal madness she had fallen into earlier, and she wanted to keep her distance from that. Though like a tongue returning again and again to worry at an aching tooth, her thoughts had a will of their own. “My memories are all in a jumble.”

  Another slice of elevator stayed behind and another. They stepped back. Heisen glanced around at the blank faces. “Well, tell you what, let’s not go into that here. Somebody might hear. I’ll give you the story at Snow’s.”

  The elevator opened. Hot, steamy air breathed into Rebel’s face. This low, the gravity was over Greenwich normal, and she felt clumsy and heavy-footed. They were jostled forward into a vasty cavern of interlocking kelp bars and surgical parlors, gambling lofts and blade bazaars. A shifting holo banner struck her eye, and she winced. Three strains of music clashed; the subimbeds made her feel anxious and restless. Sweat sheened up on her body. I’ve been here before, she thought. No, I haven’t.

  “Down Bakuninstrasse,” Heisen said. Away from the uptown elevators the shops thinned and were broken by ebony stretches of building foundation and habitat supports. Light flared as they passed a wetware mall, and Heisen stopped and pointed within. Rebel stared: Customers edged down narrow aisles, passing slow hands over the endless racks. Now and then somebody would lift a wafer and slide into one of the programming booths that lines the rear wall. Advertising holos flashed overhead: SUZY VACUUM, said one. She looked to be some kind of Amazon. The most beautiful boy Rebel had ever seen floated over the single word ANGELUS. And then she spotted the Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark banner. Against a starry backdrop was a woman who was not her, doing something she would never do. Rebel stared at it, horrified.

  “Notice the little comets in the background? You treehangers are very fashionable this season.”

  Rebel turned her stunned face toward Heisen. He shrugged.

  “Prepublicity. They’ve got a lot of money tied up in you. I wanted you to see what an expensive little piece of developmental wetware you are. Come on.”

  Down a slideway and into an access corridor with long stretches of black stressed slag. On the lower reaches slogans were crudely permasprayed in nightglo colors, one over the other, in a tangled and almost incoherent snarl. STAY YOURSELF GOD HATES was overrun by FREEMINDSFREEMINDSFREEMINDS which raged over BURN BRIGHT BRAIN before smashing up against SHAPESHIFTERSFACE DANCERS WEREWOLFVAMPIRES GOTO HELL. Someone had made a serious effort to erase a wheel logo with the words EARTH FRIEND about it. Beneath the graffiti a workman sat on a crate facing the wall. He had removed an access hatch and was cyborged into a tangle of color-coded wires.

  Around a corner they passed a sling city. The burn cases stumbled down, looking for handouts. They babbled in endless monotones, their minds rotted out with God, sex, information, their reflexes shattered, their faces vacant-eyed and twitching. Heisen hissed and stepped up his pace. “Scum!” he gasped once they were safely past. “They ought to be …” They turned down a yet smaller run where garbage was mulched thin against the street and starting to ferment. The stench of rotting squid and old grease hung in the air, and the soles of Rebel’s feet were going black.

  Rebel glanced at Heisen and was shocked to see the man was trembling. Sweat poured down a face gone fishbelly white. “God damn, sport,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s just the wetware.” Heisen waved a hand at his face. “I keep the imaginative processes cranked way up, so I’ll be fast to pick up on the main chance, right? Makes me a touch … paranoid, though.” They stepped down a slanting gallery where most of the overheads had been smashed or stolen. Exhaust fans grumbled in shadow. Tangles of black cable drooped from the ceiling; they had to duck under the lower loops. “God damn her,” Heisen fretted. “She doesn’t have to have her office down here, she just wants all that space. I wish …” They rounded a final corner and he pointed to a door grey with urban grime. “Here.”

  Over the doorway hung a flickering neon switchblade, a piece of antique technology that must have cost a fortune to recreate. It buzzed and crackled, tinging the shadows red. The knife’s blade blinked off and on, as if snapping in and out of the handle. On the center of the door was taped a small white rectangle, a business card:

  snow

  the cutting edge

  ostend kropotkinkorridor bei berkmangallerie

  neues-hoch-kamden, E.K.

  “Snow?” Heisen said uncertainly.

  The door opened, and they stepped within.

  Whatever Rebel might have been expecting, it was not this: a room so large and empty she could not guess its size. Eggshell-textured walls, white and featureless. No furniture. The only item in all that space was a small prayer rug in its center. A solitary figure knelt there, hood down, shaven head bowed. The room was chilled to an ambient that was, after a moment’s relief, as oppressive as the heat outside.

  They walked forward. This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks—to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls. The room would be laced with an invisible tracery of trigger-beams, directional mikes and subvocal pickups. There was power here, for one who knew its geography.

  The woman raised her head, fixed Rebel with cold snakelike eyes. Her skull was white as marble, and her face was painted in a hexangular pattern suggestive of starbursts and ice crystals. “What have you stolen for me this time, Jerzy?”

  The color was back in Heis
en’s face. He showed teeth again, and flamboyantly threw back his cloak to allow himself a sweeping, mocking bow. “May I present,” he said, “the only clean copy in existence of next month’s lead release from Deutsche Nakasone.”

  The woman did not move. “How did this happen?”

  “What a pleasure it is to see you, Jerzy, won’t you have a chair?” The little man grinned cockily. “Isn’t that what you meant to say, Snow? Or are we expected to sit on the floor?”

  Snow moved her head slightly, the sort of movement a lizard might make on a cold morning after prolonged stasis. “Behind you.” Rebel turned and almost stumbled into a Queen Anne chair. Its twin rested neatly beside it. Reflexively she stepped back. Heisen, too, looked unnerved. However the chairs had been sleight-of-handed into existence, it was as pure and uncluttered an effect as any medieval miracle.

  They sat, and there was an odd glint in Snow’s eyes as they faced her again. Was it amusement, Rebel wondered? If so, it was buried deep. Heisen cleared his throat and said, “This is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. Two days ago she was a persona bum, name of Eucrasia Walsh. Eucrasia was doing prelim on a string of optioned wetsets when she burned on the Mudlark wafer and popped her base. Wound up in Our Lady of Roses, and—”

  “Hold it right there, chucko!” Rebel said angrily. “Reel it back and give it to me without the gobbledegook.”

  Heisen glanced at Snow and she nodded slightly. He began again, this time directing his speech at Rebel. “Deutsche Nakasone reviews a lot of wetware every day. Most of it is never used, but it all has to be evaluated. They hire persona bums to do the first screening. Not much to it. They wire you up, suppress your base personality—that’s Eucrasia—program in a new persona, test it, deprogram it, then program you back to your base self. And start all over again. Sound familiar?”

  “I … think I remember now,” Rebel said. Then, urgently, “But it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve done. It’s like it all happened to somebody else.”

  “I’m coming to that,” Heisen said. “The thing is that persona bums are all notoriously unstable. They’re all suicidally unhappy types—that’s how they end up with that kind of job, you see? They’re looking to be Mister Right. But the joke is that they have such miserable experience structures they’re never happy as anyone. Experience always dominates, as we say.” He paused a beat and looked triumphantly at Snow. “Only this time it didn’t.”

  Snow said nothing. After an uncomfortable pause, Heisen said, “Yeah. We’ve got the exception that disproves the rule. Our Eucrasia powered on, tried the persona—and she liked it. She liked it so much that she poured a glass of water into the programmer and shorted it out. Thus destroying not only the safe-copy of her own persona, but also the only copy in existence of the Mudlark program.”

  Again, that small lizard-movement. “Then …” Snow said. “Yes. Yes, I see. Interesting.” With the small, electric thrill of remembering something she couldn’t possibly know, Rebel realized that Snow was accessing her system, that a tightly-aimed sonic mike or subcortical implant was feeding her data. “How did you manage to lift her?” Snow asked.

  Heisen shrugged. “Blind luck. She broke herself out, and I happened by.” He told what he knew of her escape.

  “Now that is interesting.” The woman stood. She was tall and impossibly, ethereally thin. A wraith in white, she kept her cloak clutched tight. Two long, fleshless fingers ghosted out to touch Rebel’s forehead. They were hard and dry as parchment, and Rebel shivered at their touch. “What kind of mind are we dealing with here?” Snow fell silent.

  “Take a look at her specs.” Heisen yanked a briefcase from a cloak pocket and punched up a holographic branching-limb wetware diagram. It hung in the air, a convoluted green sphere, looking for all the world like a tumbleweed. Or like a faraway globular tree … It looked exactly like Rebel’s home dyson world, and the image hit her hard. “Okay, this is a crude representation,” Heisen said eagerly. “But look—see where the n-branch trines? You’ve got a very strong—”

  The green sphere burned in the air like a vision of the grail, and Rebel flashed to that light-filled instant when her persona had flooded her skull, and she had picked up a glass and upended it over the programmer. The water writhed in the air, sparkling, and the supervising wettech twisted around in horror, mouth falling open, panic in her eyes as Rebel threw back her head, feeling the rich, full laughter form in her throat. It felt good to be alive, to sense the thoughts warming the brain like sunshine, and to know what she had to do. But then, even as the water splashed into the wafer’s cradle and the tech shrieked, “What are—” she realized that the programming wires were still jacked into her cortex. The wafer went up with a sizzle as she reached, catching the stench of burning plastic as she tried, random static leaping up the wires to smash her sideways, hand yanking out the leads an instant too late as the universe whited out into oblivion.…

  The memory cut off, and Rebel trembled. Where was she? Hospitalized? Recaptured? Heisen and Snow were still talking, the tall, slim woman looking down impassively at the fierce little man, and then Rebel remembered who they were. Neither had noticed her snapping out; it must have been a brief episode.

  “I’m taking points on this one,” Heisen said. “You hear me, Snow? I want points.”

  “Maybe it’s too big for us?” Snow communed with herself for a long moment. “Well, let’s try.” She addressed Rebel directly. “Let me put a hypothetical case to you. Imagine that you were approached by a small firm that does knock-offs of commercial personas. Suppose you were offered”—she cocked her head slightly—“three points for your help in making a clean recording. This would spoil your value to Deutsche Nakasone. No value, no interest—they’d leave you alone. Now, keeping in mind that without this deal they’ll hunt you down and wipe you out of your own brain … what would you say?”

  The episode had left a bad aftertaste in Rebel’s mind. Or possibly it was just the day’s events catching up with her. It was hard to concentrate. She shook her head. “I don’t understand … knockoffs?”

  “Well, let’s say the current best-seller is …”—Snow listened—“a young man with the improbable name of Angelus. He is … sensitive, romantic, shy. The publicity wheels grind and suddenly every fourteen-year-old in the Kluster wants to be sensitive, romantic, shy. There’s a big market for that persona. We lift an early copy, make enough changes to foil legal action, and dump a hundred thousand wafers on the grey market. These personas are not exactly Angelus, but they are sensitive, romantic, and shy. And cheap. The big kids make their big profit, and we tag along for a taste.”

  “Only this time,” Heisen said, “we’ll be on the market first, riding all that publicity free. They’ll have to pick up on our wafer, and they’re just not geared for speed the way we are. We can skim off the top profit for a good week before …”

  Rebel’s skin crawled at the thought of a hundred thousand strangers sharing her thoughts, her face, her soul. Experiencing her innermost feelings, her deepest emotions. She pictured them as pasty white insects, swarming in blind heaps, biological machines without will or individuality. “No,” she said. “Forget it. I won’t whore my mind.”

  “No, but damn it, you have no room to—” Heisen leaped up, reaching for Rebel, and she started to her feet. She found her balance and drew back a fist. She’d never been trained in heavy gravity fighting techniques, but the muscles of her new body integrated well with each other, and she didn’t doubt that she could drop Heisen where he stood. Smash his nose first, and then—

  “Stop.” Snow’s arm shot out from her cloak (a flash of corpse-white skin stretched taut over bones, small black nipples on fleshless breasts) and formed a barrier between them. The arm was long, anorexic, and covered with silver filigree-exo-skeletal muscle multipliers. Powered on, she’d be able to punch her fist through a slag wall or break bones without thinking. “So far I’ve been speaking hypothetically; no offers have been made.” Those unblinking eyes
fixed on Rebel, as if she were a mystery that they could penetrate by sheer force of will. Without turning her head, she said, “She could be a trap, Jerzy. Didn’t you think of that?”

  Heisen’s face twisted. “No, I—but she could be, couldn’t she?” He darted forward and jabbed a finger at the floating wetware diagram. “Look at that! That split in the r-limb!” Then he calmed slightly. “No, you couldn’t fake something like that. She has to be legit.” But new sweat had appeared on his forehead, and there was a wary look in his eyes.

  Snow folded her arm back into her cloak. She dismissed the diagram with a shrug. “More to the point, I find it hard to imagine a persona bum suddenly finding happiness and content in a new personality. It’s a fairy tale.” She glided back to her prayer rug, graceful as a geisha. “I’m afraid, child, that we are not ready to strike a deal at present. Much as I’d love to find out what’s in that intriguing mind of yours.” At her side, Heisen trembled like a hound on a leash. She shook her head. “We’ve found out as much as we can without getting our fingers burned.”

  In the silence that followed, one of Snow’s hidden spikes whispered in Rebel’s ear, in a voice that was both like and unlike Snow’s own: “Deutsche Nakasone’s goons will be here in a minute.” A laser flashed holo images on one of her retinas: a convoluted local street-and-gallery map. Two blinking lights crept toward Snow’s office. “Jerzy will have to be sacrificed, but if you turn left when you leave and run like hell, you ought to escape.” The map vanished. “Go wherever you wish. We will know if you escape. And when you’re ready to do business, one of us will contact you.”

  Snow herself had not spoken. She stood slim and solitary as a madonna. Aloud, she said, “The door is behind you.”

  Rebel turned and fled.