Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “I can’t,” Rebel said helplessly. Brushing open her cloak, she dug out the briefcase. She held it forward, two-handed. “I’ve got to listen to some stuff.”

  Maxwell took the briefcase and, holding it upside-down, solemnly examined the lights. “Listen to it in my hut. I’ll feed you honey while you work.”

  “All right.”

  She wedged the briefcase between wall and pipe as Maxwell pinned up their cloaks. A touch converted it to spoken command. She waited until the hutch was dark, then said, “Please turn on.” Light blossomed.

  The holography opened on a shot of Eros Kluster Traffic Control. The EKTC station was shaped like a barbell and revolved slowly within a maelstrom of traffic holograms. “How’s this?” Maxwell asked. The image rippled over his body as he swam to her.

  “Mmmm.” Rebel skipped the scene forward.

  They were in the interior now, a hemispherical transparent hull crisscrossed by thin catwalks between work stations. The traffic techs looked upset. One man bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

  “That can’t be—” someone said. Rebel backtracked the program.

  “Open up,” Maxwell said. He popped a bit of honeycomb into her mouth. Sweet.

  An operator gave a long, low whistle. “Look what just came up on visual!” His supervisor was at his side at once, a big woman with a bulldog jaw. “Now that ought to be a lightsail,” the man said. “Spectroanalysis gives us a solar signature, ever so slightly blueshifted. But it’s not registered, and it’s headed right down our throats.”

  “Velocity?”

  “Hard to say.” The tech’s fingers flickered, coaxing up data. “If it’s a standard-size sail, though, and assuming a median range load of five kilotons, then it’ll rip through the Kluster sometime tomorrow.”

  “Shit!” The supervisor pushed him from his station. “Grab something vacant and restructure the programming to give me more capacity. Take it off of, um, the holos. Let them drift a bit. Set them to correct only once every point-zero-three seconds, okay?”

  The operator bounded toward the empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

  “That can’t be—” the supervisor said. “No, that doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s not an industrial delivery.”

  “More honey?”

  “Mmm.” Maxwell’s fingers lingered on her lips, and she kissed them absently.

  Another tech said, “We’re having trouble estimating mass. There’s something screwy about the way it’s slowing down.” Rebel stopped motion, and asked the briefcase to give her the terminal display. It appeared, a chart in seven colors, showing every pinprick of light as it appeared from the EKTC station. It pulsed, and the lights shifted to an earlier configuration. A speck of light, circled in red, raced sunward, from beyond Jupiter. A sidebar identified it as COMET: COMMERCIAL CARRIER (LUMBERED TREE FARM).

  The EKTC system was crammed with economic warfare programs. Reflexively, it showed the positions of other lumbered comets moving into the system. It also showed a pod of young comets climbing up from the Sun, their tails of ionized gases winking out as new vegetation covered their surfaces. An operator wiped them off the screen.

  “What a pig. You’ve got honey on your chin.”

  “Hey, I’m busy, okay?”

  “Hold still and I’ll lick it off.”

  Now a sidebar appeared with the comet’s registry. It was a small, uncolonized comet, carryng a lumbered first growth of some seventy gigatons of oak, teak, and mahogany hybrids. The trees had been grown over one long swing down to the sun and back out to the edge of the Oort Cloud. There, archipelago lumberjacks had coppiced the comet, leaving roots intact for a second growth, and then artificially accelerated it for its trek back into the system. Eros Kluster speculated heavily in timber, but this was not a local deal. The freight was due to Ceres Kluster as per a contract signed some two decades ago. Since Eros had no financial interest in it, the traffic computer has never before seen fit to bring it to human attention.

  Maxwell followed a trail of dribbles down the side of Rebel’s neck, toward her breasts. She giggled and pushed him away. “That tickles.”

  The display shifted to fast replay. The comet rushed down on Jupiter. It dipped into the giant planet’s gravity well, was slewed around, and emerged on a new orbit. It dumped velocity in the process, shifting to a shorter ellipse that would take it within the orbit of Mercury, and then out again to its client Kluster. The readout shifted momentarily to show the Inner System with old and new orbits displayed as dotted yellow lines.

  “How about this? Does this tickle too?”

  “No. That’s nice.”

  Midway between Jupiter and Eros, the comet’s brightness quadrupled. There was an explosive flare of light, which quickly fell behind the comet—a lightsail unfurling. It bobbed slightly on the solar wind, tacked gracefully. The computer ran a projected course for it. It was headed straight into the heart of Eros Kluster.

  Rebel switched back to live action. “Go on,” the supervisor said.

  “The sail is tacked away from the sun. So the drag ought to be easy to calculate. But it’s slowing down too fast for anything I’ve ever seen. Even a single kiloton shipment ought to—”

  “Could the treehangers be dumping some kind of bomb on us?” the supervisor muttered to herself. “No, that’s stupid. Maybe they—wait. Try calculating the rate of deceleration for a shortsail with a payload of a third of a ton.”

  Fingers danced. “Damn! It works.”

  “That’s it, then. One human in a vacuum suit, plus the mass of a frame, controlling mechanism and cables. I’d say that what we’ve got here—”she tapped the screen—“is someone using a small lightsail as a drogue chute.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “A drogue chute. Like a parachuter—um, it’s hard to explain. Just contact Perimeter Defense and tell them we’ve got a space cadet that needs rescuing. Dump the whole thing in their laps.”

  The scene shifted to the exterior of a Perimeter Defense multipurpose cruiser.

  “Hey,” Rebel said. “I don’t think you’re going to find any honey down there.”

  “Want to bet?” Maxwell was kissing and nuzzling her belly. Now he slowly moved his hands up her thighs and even more slowly pulled down her cache-sexe.

  “Please stop,” Rebel murmured. The briefcase shut itself off. In the dim light seeping through the ill-fitting edges of the tin walls, she saw that Maxwell was already naked. And interested.

  Definitely interested.

  They made love twice, and then she sent Maxwell out with her bracelet to bring back lunch. He returned with a huge meal and no change. They ate, and then somehow they were making love again. It just seemed to happen. At last she had to say, “No, really. I’ve got to listen to this.”

  She flicked the briefcase back on.

  The multipurpose cruiser had matched speeds with the lightsail. A dozen Perimeter Defense employees launched themselves at the rigging. Clumsily, surely, they cut away the harness, drew in the sail, and disentangled an unmoving vacuum-suited figure.

  Back inside the cruiser, workers swarmed about the vacuum suit. It was worn and frayed; crystalized patching ooze covered several small cuts. “Look,” a medtech said. He pointed to a fine crazing of lines in the visor. “Poor bugger miscalculated acceleration stress. The internal organs are probably mush.” He turned off the coldpack unit and somebody else yanked off the helmet.

  Acceleration jelly gone liquescent sloshed onto the deck, revealing a woman’s face. It was angular, with high cheekbones. The hair, short and wet, was a mousy blond. Her skin was a bloated and unhealthy white, almost blue in places. There were small globs of jelly caught in her nostrils. A tech wiped them away, and the woman took a sudden, gasping bream. She shivered and opened her eyes. It was Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, in her own body.

>   A trickle of blood came from the corner of her mouth. She grinned weakly. “Hey, sports,” she said. Then she looked puzzled. “I feel kind of sick.”

  Then she died.

  Maxwell was not looking when it happened. He was rummaging in a small corner chest for body jewelry. When he found a piece he liked, he’d fry it on, preening for her. Now he turned, a string of pearls about his waist. “You like it?” He swiveled his hips making the string spin. “It takes a good body to wear pearls.”

  The hologram drew slowly back, the scurrying Perimeter Defense people growing smaller as they vainly tried to revive the body. “Coldpack revival shock,” a medtech muttered. “Damage to brain tissue complicated by cumulative radiation damage. Compression, shear, and tidal effects to liver, pancreas, heart …” Her voice droned on monotonously as she read the diagnostics into the record. Someone else put a cryonics unit over the head and flash-froze the brain. Later, the personality and surface memories could be teased out with supercooling induction techniques, if the traffic investigators needed an interview.

  I died, Rebel thought flatly. She remembered it happening very clearly now, the faces bent over her, their concerned expressions and the way it had all drawn away into whiteness as …

  The pearls orbited Maxwell’s waist like a ring of satellites. His navel danced at their center.

  Now, as the Perimeter Defense employees slowed and the clamor of voices fell to a murmur, Rebel’s name rose in black Gothic letters. It dominated the scene for a beat, then burst into sudden, bright flame. When the flames died down, a new Rebel Mudlark rose from them like a phoenix.

  The new Rebel was an idealized version of the original, taller and thinner, with spectacular muscle structure. She stood wide-legged, fists on hips, and laughed self-confidently. The holo drew back. Green dyson worlds floated behind her, and she was surrounded by a ring of cringing admirers. One reached a trembling hand out for her, and she kicked him right in the mouth.

  The words AVAILABLE SOON scrolled up.

  “Turn it off,” Rebel whispered desperately. “Oh God, turn that damn thing off.” The memory of her death burned in her brain. She wouldn’t be able to forget it again.

  Maxwell picked up the briefcase, looked at it blankly, touched a glowing red dot. The room went dark. “Hold me,” Rebel said. “I don’t want to do anything, just … hold me, please hold me.”

  She floated in the dark, flooded with misery. She’d felt like this when her mother had died in the accident at the Kluster refineries. Her pain had caught her by surprise then, because she’d hated the cold bitch. You’ll never hurt me again, she had thought angrily, and yet she’d still felt abandoned and desolate. She hugged Maxwell to her, like a big, sexless cuddly toy.

  Vague shapes swam in her vision, threatening to coalesce into a stretched and bloated skull. She’d seen death’s face before, as a child. Her first time solo in a vacuum suit, she had blundered across a laser cable and shorted out half her suit. Her visor went black and her rebreather stopped. Floating alone and sightless, gasping and choking, she had suddenly realized that she was going to die. And in that horrified instant, she saw a face before her, bone-white and distorted, with empty eye sockets, small dark nostrils, and black gaping mouth. She threw her head back and the face lurched at her, and she was abruptly hauled in by a Traffic Control employee who injected an air line through the skin of her suit. It had only been her reflection, lit by a lone failsafed helmet monitor light.

  Maxwell gently slid a hand between her legs and moved them apart. He started to enter her. Upset and distracted as she was, she almost let him do it. It would be the easy thing, the path of least resistance. But then the Rebel persona asserted itself, and she shoved him away. She would not let herself be taken advantage of.

  “Back off there, bud! Who gave you permission to do that?”

  Maxwell looked bewildered. “But—”

  “You don’t listen too good, do you? I said I didn’t want to do anything, and I by God meant it.” As she raged at him, Maxwell backed away, fell into a fighting crouch, straightened, crouched again. His hands fisted and unfisted. His face twisted with conflicting programmed urges. “What are you, some kind of machine? Willing sex isn’t good enough for you?” Clumsily, Maxwell threw a slap at Rebel’s face. She batted his hand away contemptuously and tried to punch him in the stomach. He flinched back, and his string broke, pearls exploding in all directions. They bounced off the tin walls like hail.

  “Just get the fuck out of here!”

  Maxwell was backed into a corner, quivering. In a tiny voice he said, “But this is my place.”

  For a long moment Rebel glared at him scornfully. Then she laughed, and with a kind of rough good will, reached out to tousle his hair. “You’re kind of useless, you know that?”

  “It all depends on what you want,” Maxwell said, eyes averted sullenly. But his tension was gone. He began gathering up the pearls that still bounced about the room, nabbing them out of the air and holding them in one hand. “I mean, I can fight just as good as I sex, but I got to have clear signals. You can’t expect me to—hey, what’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Listen!” They fell silent. In the distance was a dull clank-clank-clank of people hammering on the pipes. It went on and on, growing in volume as more and more people to one end of the tank town hammered in unison. Rebel touched a frame pipe and felt it vibrating in sympathy. Outside, the constant murmur of voices died.

  “It’s the heat! God damn. We got to get away.” Maxwell let go of the pearls and grabbed for his cloak.

  “Get away? Where? What are you talking about?”

  Maxwell was frantically struggling into his clothes. “You’ve never been in a raid before? They start by grabbing the airlock. That takes maybe a dozen jackboots. And they bring in a few crates of programming units and these enormous stacks of arrest programs.”

  “Arrest programs?”

  “Yeah. Then they move out from the locks in a long line. They arrest maybe one out of five people they nab for failure to cooperate and sentence them to like six hours enforcement duty. Program ’em up on the spot, give them their orders, and send them out to bring in more to be programmed. They spread out like a storm. Before long, you got jackboots everywhere.”

  In her mind’s eye, Rebel saw the police expanding through the tank in an ever-widening cordon, swelling their numbers as they went, doubling every few minutes, like an explosion of yeast culture through a warm medium. “But what are they looking for?”

  “What the fuck does it matter? You want them to get hold of you?” Maxwell untwisted a corner wire holding on the back wall and shoved the tin to show a thin, dark line of weeds. “Look, worse comes to worse, we can slip out back. Nothing there but vines. Only don’t move around much, ’cause I got a beehive back there. I don’t want you disturbing them.” He took Rebel’s hand and pulled her out into the court. “What we’ve got to do is slip past the storm front. See, they’ll be spread out thin. Questioning everyone, right? Once we get by them, we’re clear.”

  The court was empty. They swam to the gateway. “Does this sort of thing happen here often?” Rebel asked.

  “Naw. Once a month, tops.”

  They paused at the gateway and looked down the corridor. Doors opening onto it had been shut and windows tied down. It was crowded with people fleeing the jackboots. Suddenly there came a babble of voices from, upgrain, and people hesitated, colliding in midair as those ahead of them turned back abruptly.

  “What the hell—?”

  “Keep moving, you idiots!”

  “No, no! Turn back!”

  A raver came down the rope, eyes full-mad and staring, globules of drool spewing from his mouth. He was a scrawny old man with long grey beard, his cloak in tatters. He raged as he came, tearing with insane strength at whoever got close. One of his legs was broken, and it waved fluidly behind him. It was clear he did not notice the pain.

  “Sweet Krishna!” some
body wailed, and floated back from the raver, trailing large red spheres of blood. The corridor was filling with thrashing, panicky people. Somebody pushed past Rebel into the courtyard, and then two more. “Come on,” Rebel said worriedly, “we’ve got to get away from here.”

  But then there was a rush on the gate, and Rebel was borne back from the corridor while Maxwell went tumbling forward. A fat man jammed his pink face right up against her, shouting hysterically. Rebel grabbed a rope and pulled herself free of the crush of people, and then the rope broke and she slammed into a tin wall.

  Shrieking voices rose in demon chorus. Rebel clawed across the fronts of the hutches to Maxwell’s and climbed inside. It took her only a second to slip out the back. She shoved the wall into place, and was hidden in the vines.

  It was dark between courts. Here and there a nightflower glowed, a dull fuzz of light that revealed nothing. The vines were wet and slimy. Floating alone and sightless, like a traveler among the final stars at the end of the universe, Eucrasia’s claustrophobia rose up within her.

  It started as a tingling up the base of her spine, then spread until her entire body itched. She became aware of her own breath. The outside noises were muffled here, a dull wash of voices like the white noise of surf, and her breath sounded rough and raspy. She couldn’t get enough air in her lungs. Her head swam dizzily, and she started breathing through her mouth.

  Rebel’s nose almost touched the back of the wall. The smell of metal was strong. Her skin crawled from the wall’s closeness, and she drew back her head. That felt better. Slowly, almost by compulsion, she began pulling herself forward, through the vines. A honeybee burned past her ear, and she froze, afraid of bumping into its hive. But stopping brought back the claustrophobia, and she moved forward again, occasionally reaching out a hand to touch the backs of the huts to keep from losing her way. Finally she came to a place where the tin was not. It was a gap between hutches, maybe even the one Maxwell had emerged from earlier. She crept into it.

  Light slowly grew. Rebel paused only when she could just barely see into the court, buried an arm’s length into the vines. She could bear being enclosed, so long as there was light. She drew her hood about her face, peering through the merest slit. Then she held herself motionless, like an old pike lying craftily in wait among the weeds.