Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  Wyeth flashed a wide, froggish grin. “There are no secrets in a tank town. But there are no facts either. You tell your story to Jonamon, and in ten minutes the whole court will know it. Inside an hour everyone within five-courts will know—but they’ll have it a little wrong. Half the people in the tanks are on the run from something. Your story will melt into theirs, a detail here, a name there, a plot twist from somewhere else. By tomorrow all the tank will know the story, but it will have mutated into something you wouldn’t recognize yourself. Nobody’s ever going to trace those stories back to you. There are too many of them, and not a one that’s worth a damn.”

  “Well, I—”

  Jonamon swooped into the court, a scrawny old bird in a tattered cloak, pushing a book before him. It was three hands wide and a fist thick, with one red cover and one black. Opening it from the black side, he said, “The Lord Jesus despised reprogramming. ‘And behold the herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea and perished in the waters.’ That’s from Matthew.”

  Wyeth looked like he was having trouble holding his laughter in. “Jonamon, that’s the third time this week you’ve quoted the Gadarene swine at me.”

  “Krishna don’t love demons neither,” the old man snapped. He flipped the book over, red side up, and thrust it at Rebel. “Swear on the Gita you ain’t been reprogrammed. That’ll be good enough for me.”

  “Maybe I’d better tell my story first,” Rebel said. “Then I’ll swear it’s true afterward. That way you’ll know what I’m swearing to.” She shifted to a more central spot, sitting cross-legged in the air, the rope gripped in one foot. Then she wrapped her cloak in storytelling folds (inwardly marveling at her own dexterity) so that one arm and breast were covered and the other arm and breast free. Seeing her thus, people came out from their shanties or shifted places on the ropes so they could hear.

  She began:

  “I was dead—but they wouldn’t tell me that. I was lying in a hospital bed, paralyzed; unable to remember a thing. And they wouldn’t tell me why. All I knew was that something was wrong, and nobody would answer any of my questions.…”

  When she was done, Jonamon took her oath on his book and shook his head. “Well, I’ll be fucked if that don’t beat anything I ever heard.”

  “Mmmm.” Wyeth’s face was grim and stony, lost in thought. It had a humorless, almost brutal set to it. He looked up suddenly and glared around at the listeners. “What are you staring at? Show’s over. Go away!” They scattered.

  Rebel shivered. He looked an entirely different man now—a thug, all suspicion and potential violence.

  Jonamon laid a hand on her knee and said, “You watch yourself, young lady. Deutsche Nakasone is a nasty bunch, they’ll do what they want with you. They just don’t give a fuck.” She drew away from him.

  “That’s every gesellschaft, old man,” Wyeth said. “That’s inherent in the corporate structure.”

  “You think so, eh? Let me show you something.” Jonamon huried off to his shack and returned with a cloth-wrapped package. “Maybe I’m just another old man with calcium depletion now.” He began slowly unfolding the cloth. “I’m stuck here nowadays, my bones would snap like breaksticks if I set foot in full gravity anymore. But I wasn’t always like this. I used to own my own corporation. Hell, I used to be my own corporation.”

  The ropehangers had come edging back to listen. One of them, a lean young man with rude boy paint, caught Rebel’s eye and flashed a smile. Cute little thing. He laughed, and Jonamon glared at him. “Laugh if you want. Individuals could incorporate back then. You can’t imagine how it felt, having all the legal protection of a corporation to yourself. It was like being a little tin god.” He sighed. “I was one of the last, wiped out by the Corporate Reform Act. I was a rock miner, maybe Wyeth here mentioned that to you. A prospector. When the Act came along, I had claims on a few hundred rocks, a real valuable inventory, worth a fortune back then, and even more now. But with the reforms, I had to liquidate. I entered into negotiations with a number of concerns, finally signed a preliminary letter of intent with Deutsche Nakasone. Look.” He held up the unwrapped package. It was a formal holographic portrait of a line of corporate functionaries looking serious for the camera. The young Jonamon stood in the center, a sharp-chinned man with an avaricious cast to his face.

  “This was taken the day before the Act went into effect. Right after this, the president and I retired to a private office to settle the last few details and sign the agreement. You never saw anyone so nice and polite in your life. Did I want a drink? Don’t mind if I do. Would I like to screw? Hell, she was kind of cute. Then she asked if I wanted to try out a new program they had. Made it sound real nice. I said sure.

  “They was just getting into wetware then. Just recent bought up a batch of patents when Blaupunkt went belly-up. So anyway, the president puts the inductor band around my head and turns the damn thing on. Whoooeee! That was one hell of a ride, I’ll tell you. Even today, I blush to think on it. Imagine all the sex and pleasure you can take just slamming into you again and again, so intense you can’t hardly take it, and you want it to stop, only … not quite yet. Just a little bit longer before it becomes unbearable. Can you imagine that? Shit, you can’t imagine it at all.”

  “So what happened?” Rebel asked.

  “What happened was somebody turned it off. Wow, did I feel awful! Kind of hungry and achy and thirsty all at once. My head was pounding, and I must’ve lost half the free water in my body.

  “The president had put her clothes back on and left, a long time back. There was a couple of corporate guards giving me the hairy eyeball. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked them.

  “They told me that the Reform Act had just gone into effect, and they didn’t need me anymore. Then they gave me the bum’s rush, and I was never in that office again in my life, let me tell you.

  “You see what happened, don’t you? They’d kept me programmed up until the Act went through and I didn’t legally own my claims anymore. And because I’d signed that letter of intent, they all belonged to Deutsche Nakasone now. They never paid me a damn thing for them either. I went to the lawyers and they said it’s all legal. Or rather, to prove it wasn’t legal, I’d have to be a corporation myself. And I wasn’t, anymore.”

  After a long silence, he said, “Well, it’s all to the best, I imagine. A young man thinks with his gonads. An old man sees things more spiritual. I made my peace with God, and I take my solace from the Bible Gita now.”

  Rebel yawned then, and Wyeth said, “I think it’s time you turned in.”

  He showed her to a vacant hutch. It had room enough for two people to sit and talk, or for one to stretch out and sleep. There was a bit of wire by the doorframe, so she could tie up her helmet, and four looped hammock strings to sleep in. Nothing more.

  “Best break out your rebreather,” Wyeth said. She looked at him blankly. “From your helmet. Ventilation’s poor in this corner of the court, and your waste gases can build up while you sleep. Keep your mouthpiece in, and you can avoid waking up with a bad headache.”

  “Okay,” she said, and he kicked away. There was no window, and hanging her cloak over the doorway filled the hut with darkness. She stuffed her things into her helmet and slipped into the hammock strings. Hanging suspended, she bit down on the rebreather. Her breath sounded loud and slow within her skull.

  The outside noises were muffled within the hut, but constant. Music and faraway argument blended into each other. Buried deep within this human beehive, Rebel felt painfully alone and isolated. From somewhere distant she heard a dull clank-clank, clank-clank, someone hammering on the pipes to signal a neighbor. She had heard (though she couldn’t remember when or where) that the constellations of courts within the tanks had all been put up helter-skelter, pipes mated to existing pipes, forming monkey-bar tangles with no plan or formal structure. Only the lack of gravity kept it all from collapsing. But occasionally the stresses of everyday living—people sl
amming against their-hutches, kicking off from them, grabbing ropes tied to the frames—would cause whole groupings of court structures to shift. Torque forces would slowly swing the hutches together, crushing entire neighborhoods in a scream of buckling metal. And then the survivors would scavenge the rubble to build back into the space thus opened.

  Rebel was so tired she couldn’t sleep. Lying afloat in her hut, restless and jumpy, she felt so lonely and awful she wanted to die. She twisted and turned in the hammock strings, but no position seemed comfortable. She was as lost as a child away from home for the first time, cut loose from security and surrounded by hostile forces against which she had no defense.

  Finally she could take it no longer. Throwing on her clothes, she darted across the court to Wyeth’s hut. He’d talk to her, she was sure. A deft grab on one of the ropes flipped her around and brought her to a dead stop just before his door. It was covered with his cloak. She was about to rattle his wall when she heard his voice within. Was he with someone? A little self-consciously, she floated closer to eavesdrop.

  “She’s trouble,” Wyeth mumbled. “Deutsche Nakasone wants her bad, and anyone who gets in the way is going to be hurt.… So there’s risk! She could be an enormous help to us.… Which ‘she’ are you talking about anyway, Eucrasia or Rebel? … Go with the current occupant, that’s always the easiest course. Whoever comes out on top … I wouldn’t mind getting on top of her.… Oh, get serious! The point is that if we cut a deal with her, we’re risking everything we’ve built so far. It’s an all or nothing gamble.” There was a pause, and then Wyeth said, “Risking everything! That’s just great. We’re risking a half-hour shanty in the slums, some cockeyed plans, and our perfect obscurity. That’s it. What’s the use of saying we’re going up against Earth, if the first good opportunity that comes along, we just sit here on our thumbs? I say either we stand up and be counted, or dissolve the whole thing right now as a bad job. Any argument?”

  The voice stopped, and Rebel drew back from the door. He’s talking about me, she thought. And he’s crazy. Either he’s crazy or he’s something I don’t know about that’s probably worse. A word floated up from Eucrasia’s past. Tetrad. It was a kind of new mind. But that was all she could remember about it. Her body trembled. She wanted very much to turn around and retreat into her hutch.

  No, she thought, I won’t be a coward.

  She rattled the side of Wyeth’s hutch, and a second later he poked out his head. “I heard you talking about me,” she said.

  Wyeth took down his cloak and wrapped it about himself. Rebel got a glimpse of his naked body and reddened. “How much of what I said did you understand?” he asked.

  She shook her head helplessly. “You’re making that face again.”

  Wyeth looked surprised. Then he grinned, and his harsh expression was instantly and totally gone. “I was trying to make up my minds. You’re something of a dilemma for me, Sunshine.”

  “So I gather.”

  “Look, I’m only in partial agreement what to do at this point. Let’s both sleep on it. We can discuss this thing better when we’re rested, okay?”

  Rebel considered it. “Okay.”

  Back in her hutch, she lay half awake for the longest time, thinking wide, empty thoughts. There was a knife fight in the next court, two young bloods with rude boy programs, cursing and swearing at each other as they jockeyed for position. A young couple were going at it hot and heavy not far away, separated from her hut by only an arm’s length of nightflowers. A baby began to cry and was shushed by its mother.

  Closeby, a peeper frog cried out for a mate.

  If you floated right up against them, the iron pipes and tin walls had a distinct odor. It disappeared as you moved away, but was strong up close. There was nothing else quite like that smell. It must stay with slum dwellers, Rebel thought. No matter how far they might get from their tanks, a smell like that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

  3

  STORM FRONT

  Someone kicked her wall in passing, and Rebel awoke. Blearily, she dressed and floated out. Of the three sometime restaurants in the court, only the one marked “Myrtle’s Joint” had its window open.

  She rapped for service and an iguana scurried away and burrowed into the vines. Myrtle’s face flashed out of the gloom with a quick smile. Rebel yawned and woke up a little more, and said, “I’d like to buy some food.”

  “What meal?”

  “Breakfast.”

  Myrtle ducked down and rummaged about. “I got a mango. I could slice it up with a little chutney. There’s a dab of spiced rice that’s not too old. And beer.”

  They haggled up a price, and Rebel took a place on the rope as Myrtle put breakfast together. “Hey. My man told me about how you used to own a corporation and all. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” A flock of naked children darted into the court, shrieking and laughing. For an instant the air was full of them. Then one spotted a gap between hutches and darted through. The others followed and were gone, as quick and sudden as minnows.

  Rebel ate slowly. Finally she licked a last bit of chutney from a knuckle and returned the empty Belhaven tube to Myrtle. “Um, this is kind of embarrassing, but how do I find the—?”

  “Orange rope downgrain to blue, blue upgrain to red, that’ll take you to the shell.” Myrtle laughed. “From there you can just follow your nose.”

  The community toilets were overgrown with masses of night-bloom. The leaves rustled and waved in the wind from the airstacks. But under the flowery scent was a darker smell of human waste and of body gases. She swam in the ladies entrance and took a seat on the communal bench. It was cool here. The air flowing down the holes was enough to hold her on. Resting her elbows on the grab bars, she read the graffiti. There were the usual EARTH FRIEND and NEWMINDS/FREEMINDS scrawls, with an INDIVIDUALITY DOES NOT EXIST written in one hand and SPEAK FOR YOURSELF scratched beneath it in another. The only really interesting graffito was EVEN YOUR SHTT BELONGS TO THE RICH.

  Well, it made sense. Considering that almost none of the food eaten here was grown within the tank. The toilets had to be emptied to keep the tank towners from literally strangling in their own wastes. The nightblooms helped keep the air fresh, but somebody had to replenish the oxygen that was lost in tiny gasps every time the locks swung open and shut. Even a drastically oversimplified ecology like this needed to be looked after.

  The entire Kluster, in fact, was an extremely loose system, leaking air and garbage from every pore. To Rebel’s eyes, it was criminally wasteful how much oxygen and water vapor, reaction mass and consumer trash must be lost to the vacuum every day. Any attempt to tighten the system had to be applauded.

  Still, it was humbling to think that the tank towns were being maintained by people who saw them simply as fertilizer farms.

  She was leaving the toilets when a familiar voice hailed her from the cluster of commercial data ports next door. Wyeth, helmet on arm, waved and kicked up to join her. “I’m just about to leave for work,” he said. “But I’ve cloned my briefcase for you.” He gave her what looked like a hand-sized plate of smokey glass and felt like amber, only cool. Small colored lights danced in its depths. Rebel touched one, and they all shifted. The device felt right in her hand. She felt a lot better having it. “You operate it by—”

  “I know how to work this.” She ran a fast recursive, and schemata appeared in the air over the plate. It was the only skill she possessed worth haying, and she … but that was Eucrasia’s thought, and Rebel suppressed it. “What have you got in there for me?”

  “Your history.”

  She looked at him.

  “I made a quick raid on Deutsche Nakasone for their unclassified data on Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark.” He touched the plate and two tiers of yellow lights lined up against the right-hand edge. “As you can see, there’s not much. A fast-edited history put together for publicity purposes, I’d guess. I thought you’d be interested.�
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  “Yes.” She closed her hands around the briefcase, held it to her stomach. “Won’t that lead them to this tank, though? Won’t they be looking for this kind of data request?”

  “I don’t see how,” Wyeth said. “Sandoz Lasernet is very big on equipment optimization. They keep their trunk lines flickering on and off constantly. In the fifteen seconds my call took, it was probably routed through half the cities in the Kluster. Following it would be like trying to track a feather in a methane storm. You’d need a program with full sentience and a lot of power to do it.”

  Eucrasia’s memories were fading quickly, so that the beginning of Wyeth’s explanation had seemed childishly oversimplified and the ending almost opaque. “Won’t they have a sentient program on the job then?”

  “After what happened to Earth?” Wyeth laughed. Then he said, “Listen, I’ve really got to be going. Enjoy. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  Rebel wandered back to Jonamon’s court, the briefcase in her cloak pocket as thick and massive as a bad conscience. She wanted to view it, to see what it could tell her about herself, and yet she didn’t.

  While she was perched on a rope thinking, the young rude boy she had noticed eyeing her the other day emerged from the vines between two hutches. His torso was mahogany dark and very long, and for an instant she thought he was naked. Then his orange cache-sexe appeared. He held something in one hand, and with the other reached for a cloak that had been left tied to a hutch frame.

  He noticed her.

  For a moment neither moved. Then the boy fastened his cloak about his shoulders and walked up the rope toward her, gripping the line between his toes. He smiled and showed her what was in his hand.

  “Honeycomb.” His dark eyes sparkled. He cocked a hip slightly, bringing his muscles into sharper delineation, and bit into the wax. His mouth and chin glistened. “Want some? My name’s Maxwell.”