Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  Once Eucrasia came home from nurture to find her father sitting at the center room table, turning a wetcartridge over and over in his hands. It was a big, bulky thing in a black case, almost obsolete already, and she didn’t know yet that it was loaded with electronic godhood. But she knew that she was tired of having her father around all the time, moping about gloomily, and of almost never seeing her mother the way she used to be. And she didn’t like the guilty, weak look that melted her father’s face when he saw her. He had always been a strong man. So it was involuntary how, as he fumblingly tried to hide the cartridge, she stared up at him, mind superchilled and pulsing with inarticulate pain, and felt the anger sear through her eyes like an invisible psychic laser, and said, “I hate you, Daddy.”

  What happened then shocked her.

  Her father’s hand clenched into a fist. It trembled. Then—so fast she almost didn’t see it happen—he hit himself right in the middle of his face. That big fist struck hard. It must have hurt like hell. It broke the cartilage in his nose, and blood flowed down. Then he hit himself again. And again, with less hesitation this time, as if he’d savored the experience and decided he liked it. At first the only sound was of fist striking flesh, but then gradually he began gasping, a wet noise like sobbing. Still he kept on hitting himself.

  Eucrasia had rushed forward, grabbing at that huge, muscular arm, trying to stop him. “Daddy, no!” she shrieked, and somehow—it was like a small, dark miracle—he’d stopped.

  For a long moment he just stood there, chest working, shoulders heaving. His face was all dark with blood. One red drop fell on Eucrasia’s foot, tickling her little toe. Her father stared around and around him, as if wondering where he was. Then his eyes fixed on Eucrasia, and they both stood there, mouths open and silent, unblinking, looking at one another.

  Then he turned away.

  “This is far enough,” Heisen said. He stopped and put down his case with a heavy thump. “Why don’t you sit down, Eucrasia?”

  They had come to a transparent bar built out from the wall of the skywalk. An octopus was searching for food down by the floor, pulling himself along the glass with graceful swirls of his tentacles. Eucrasia sat on one of the stools. “He was a good man,” she said. “He was a good man. He didn’t deserve for that to happen.”

  “This will only take an instant.”

  Eucrasia stared out into the darkness. There were a few vague patches of luminosity in the distance, but nothing more. Where were the stars? she wondered. Tiny wheatseed lights edged the boards underfoot and ran along the rim of the bar, but outside all was Stygian gloom. She felt like she’d been caught in an afterworld where things struggled to take form from nothingness, and failed.

  Heisen lifted the headfreezer above her. One of his elbows touched her shoulderblade.

  Startled by some movement below, the octopus exploded in Eucrasia’s face. One instant she was staring out into featureless black, and the next she confronted a pale, distorted shape that had leaped before her. A reflexive startlement keyed subliminal memories of empty eye sockets, a mouth that was a gaping scream. Simultaneously, her claustrophobia gripped her and she realized that somebody was standing at her shoulder, about to put a box over her head.

  Eucrasia screamed and lurched to the side. Rebel fell off the stool, one edge of Heisen’s cryonic device smashing against her shoulder, and then she slammed to the floor. In a white burst of pain she rolled away and tumbled to her feet. Heisen lifted the thing again. “Get away from me!” Rebel cried.

  “Now, Eucrasia,” Heisen said. He made soothing, hushing noises. But his eyes were calm and cold and they did not look away from her for an instant. He advanced a step, and she backed away. There was nothing but skywalk behind her—at least an eighth of a mile of tubing without branching or exit.

  “Listen, Jerzy, I don’t know how you got in here, but Wyeth’s going to notice I’m missing soon. This place is crawling with samurai—there’s no way you can get out without being caught.”

  Heisen stepped back a few paces so he could set the cryonics device on the bartop. He reached into his cloak and removed a case from a liner pocket. Without looking down, he flipped it open.

  “Jerzy? Listen to me, will you? I’m sure you can be reprogrammed. You can have a normal life again. Answer to nobody but youself.” He slipped his hand through the hilt of a fat-bladed dueling knife. It was the kind rude boys favored, a cross between stabbing blade and brass knuckles, because it was almost impossible to lose one’s grip on it in a fight.

  Now Heisen smiled calmly and took a swipe at her.

  “Oh shit!” Rebel danced back. Grabbing the loose end of her cloak, she whipped it about one forearm. Now she had a shield of sorts. In a giddy, crazily gleeful corner of her mind, she felt like a Renaissance dandy. This was how they had fought in Spain, in Rome, in Greece, all those centuries ago, in desperate back-alley scuffles.

  Of course, they’d had weapons of their own.

  Heisen advanced slowly; even with the advantage, he was programmed to be a cautious fighter. He feinted twice, stabbing at her face and then her belly, and watched how her arm jerked forward to protect them. Where Heisen’s movements were all smooth, controlled menace, Rebel’s reflexes were made rough and nervous by the jagged edge of fear. It coursed through her veins, danced behind her eyes, and tasted sour in her mouth. She was defeated already.

  Heisen’s smile faded, and for an instant he was perfectly still. Then he lunged forward, feinting left to draw away her arm, then slashing downward at the exposed side of her throat.

  Rebel leaped away, crashing sideways into the wall. The hot acid edge of the knife drifted across her side, barely breaking the skin, searing the finest possible line over her ribs. Rebel pushed away from the wall, her entire side ablaze with pain, and stumbled backward. Heisen glided forward, his eyes deathly calm.

  Something hard slammed Rebel in the back. The edge of the bar. Perfect, she thought. One corner in the entire damned skywalk and I back myself into it. Something smooth and metallic and chill touched her back ever so gently.

  The headfreezer.

  In one swift motion she snagged the thing from behind her and thrust it at Heisen, gripping the handle in both hands. He fell back a pace.

  The problem was that it was not easy to hold the freezing unit up before her. It was heavy, and her arms trembled. It was too short, too blunt, too clumsy. If Heisen weren’t so damned quick, she’d be tempted to just drop it on his foot. Under one finger she could feel a trigger built into the handle. Which meant that if she could convince him to stick his head inside the device, she could take him. Otherwise, it made a lousy weapon.

  I’ll have to throw it at him, Rebel thought. Swing it up, catch him under the jaw, break a few teeth. Then grab the knife and hold him for the security people. That was a good plan. It ranked right up there with suddenly learning how to teleport.

  She could see Heisen’s muscles tensing. His face went very calm.

  All in a flurry, he drove the knife up in a killer stab, she swung the case toward it, and there was a shout from behind Rebel. Reflexively, Heisen’s eyes flicked up, past her shoulder, to assess the intruder. In that second’s inattention, Rebel thrust the headfreezer forward, shoving it over the extended knife and hand. She hit the trigger. The unit grunted, an almost silent mechanical cough.

  For a long instant neither Rebel nor Heisen moved. Then Rebel jerked back the case. Its exterior was hot with transferred energy and painful to the touch. Heisen looked down. Gingerly, wonderingly, he reached out to touch his knife hand.

  It shattered.

  Both knife and hand fell to the deck and broke into fragments, leaving behind an arm that simply stopped halfway between elbow and wrist. Rebel’s fingers felt weak. She dropped the headfreezer. She couldn’t stop staring at the amputated arm; it seemed to glow and swell, filling her vision. Behind her came the staccato sound of running feet.

  Heisen came to himself then. Showing no sign of
pain, he reached with his surviving hand into his cloak and removed a small black ball. “Stand clear,” he gravely advised, and threw the ball at a distant stretch of wall.

  The samurai were drawing near when the wall exploded, bursting outward in a shaped gush of water and glass. One seized Rebel and pulled her back, while the other leaned forward, trying to snag Heisen with her pike. But Heisen was already leaping through the new opening. He fell out and away. Wind screamed, and some of the gushing water was thrown back in their faces. The air reeked of salt, and wet strands of kelp were everywhere. To either side of the walk, heavy safety doors slammed shut.

  Rebel got one glimpse of Heisen tumbling, his cloak flapping wildly, before the darkness swallowed him.

  “What a mess!” a samurai said. He kicked at a flopping fish. Wind lashed his hair.

  It was all Rebel could do to keep from crying as the samurai led her away.

  On the graphics window, a glittery wedding band of machinery was afloat in the vacuum. Hundreds of the Comprise crawled about its surface, anchoring and adjusting small compressed gas jets. Painstakingly they guided the ring with a thousand tiny puffs of gas, until the geodesic hung motionless at its precise center. Only now did Rebel get any feel for the ring’s size—miles across, so large that the most distant parts seemed to dwindle to nothing.

  “That’s not good enough,” Wyeth said. “I want all those rooms secured, and I want it now. Understand?” He looked up as Rebel entered the lobby and gave her a wink. Then, pitching his voice differently, “Do you have the broomsticks out yet? The winds are dying down, let’s see some action.”

  The lobby was aswirl with samurai, patrols scurrying purposefully in all directions. “I was almost killed,” Rebel said. “Just a minute ago.”

  “Yes, I know. When you got lost I sent some limpets around the outside of the sheraton. Caught the last few minutes of your confrontation. That should never have happened. As soon as I get things squared away, heads will roll. There’s no excuse for that kind of security foul-up.”

  Red warning lights blinked on across the length of the transit ring. As one, the Comprise kicked free of the machinery, leaping inward in acrobatic unison, like a swirl of orange flower blossoms seen through a kaleidoscope. By tens and scores they linked hands and were snagged by swooping jitneys. Wandering up out of nowhere, hands deep in pockets, Constance said, “That’s really quite lovely. It’s like a dance.”

  Wyeth didn’t look up. “Not quite so lovely when you consider why they’re so perfectly coordinated.”

  She blinked. “Oh, quite the contrary. When you think of the complex shapes their thoughts take, the mental structures too wide and large to be held by any one mind … Well, that’s cause for humility, isn’t it?” Then, when Wyeth said nothing, “The Comprise is a full evolutionary step up on us, biologically speaking. It’s like … a hive organism, you see? Like the Portuguese man-of-war, where hundreds of minute organisms go into making up one large creature several orders of magnitude more highly structured than any of its components.”

  “I’d say they were an evolutionary step down. Where human thought creates at least one personality per body, the Comprise has subsumed all its personalities into one self. On Earth, some four billion individuals have been sacrificed to make way for one large, nebulous mind. That’s not enrichment, it’s impoverishment. It’s the single greatest act of destruction in human history.”

  “But can’t you see the beauty of that mind? Gigantic, immensely complex, almost godlike?”

  “I see the entire population of mankind’s home planet reduced to the status of a swarm of bees. A very large swarm of bees, I’ll grant you, but insects nevertheless.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “So I see,” Wyeth said coldly. “I will keep that in mind, madam.” The running lights on the transit ring were blinking in rapid unison. To Rebel he said, “See that? They’ve armed their explosives.”

  Constance looked confused. “What’s that? Explosives? What in life for?”

  The jitneys slowly converged on the geodesic. Ahead of them a gang of spacejacks was fitting an airlock. They welded it through the metal skin, yanking open the exterior iris just as the first transport drifted up. Then they popped the jitney’s drive and replaced it with a compressed air jet system. “They’re about to enter the geodesic, sir,” a samurai said.

  “God help you if a single one of the Comprise isn’t accounted for when they reach the sheraton,” Wyeth said darkly. Then, to Constance, “The Comprise doesn’t want us snooping through their technology, Ms. Moorfields. So of course they’ll have programmed the ring to self-destruct if we try anything. And since they have, and since the helium in the ring is only rented, we won’t.”

  The jitney eased into the interior atmosphere. It was crammed full and covered over with orange-suited Comprise; they clung three deep to its outside. The pilot hit the jets and it moved toward the sheraton.

  “I don’t understand this mutual suspicion,” Constance said. “So mankind has split into two species. Give us time and there’ll be a dozen, a hundred, a thousand! Space is big enough for everyone, I should think, Mr. Wyeth.”

  “Is it?” The jitney glided toward the hotel’s docking ring. The winds had almost died now, save for those generated by the spinning of the sheraton itself and by its own rotation-preservation jets. Still, the compressed air guidance retrofit had been a clumsy one, and the jitney lurched as its pilot overcorrected for yaw. The huddled Comprise grabbed for one another and hung on—all but one, who lost grip and went sailing away. For an instant the unit peacefully glided, and then it jerked violently. Bits of helmet exploded away from its head. Again the corpse jerked, and again. Some half-dozen samurai on pressurized broomsticks closed in on it.

  “See those weapons they’re holding?” Wyeth asked. “Air rifles. I had them machined in the tanks; the things are illegal in the Kluster. But I needed them. The geodesic’s too thin for laser weapons, and blades just aren’t fast enough.”

  “You killed that man!” Constance cried.

  “We’re not playing games here.” The corpse was being towed away. “I assure you, my reasons were good.”

  “That’s what Heisen would have said,” Rebel muttered. Wyeth looked up sharply, and then the elevator doors opened and the first cluster of twenty Comprise were ushered in. Their skins were dyed to match their orange suits; it would be hard to lose one in a crowd. But what struck Rebel was not their garish color or the single long braid that all—men and women—wore, but the fact that each face was different. She hadn’t expected that. For all that they thought, lived, and moved alike and were all part of a larger mind, each had the face of an individual human being.

  Somehow that made the horror of it all that much more.

  The group passed through single-file, some with eyes closed, others peering about with interest. Their radiocommunication implants were invisible, placed deep within their bodies for safety. The leader broke rank and strode toward Wyeth. Two samurai fell into step to either side of her.

  Wyeth looked up, waited. “We will need exercise areas, to keep these bodies in shape,” the woman said. “Also, the metal in this structure acts as a weak Faraday cage. We require that biaxial cable with local rectenna lead-ins be laid through all living areas.” Wyeth nodded. “Also, we have lost one of our bodies. Your security forces killed it.”

  “So?”

  “Earth assumes that the charge for consumables will be reduced by an appropriate fraction of a percent,” she said, “since it will not be able to consume them.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  The woman joined the rear of her line. As the first group disappeared, the elevator doors opened and the next twenty were ushered through. Wyeth smiled sourly: “Wonderful stuff, eh? The Kluster is so hot to be rid of this crew that they stuff ’em right within striking distance of twenty-some tank towns. Let fifty of these characters into the tanks, and an army couldn’t dig them out. Within a month they
’d have everyone in the tanks subsumed into their group mind.”

  “That is sheer prejudice,” Constance said. “Earth is just another form that human intelligence can take. You’re acting as if it were an enemy.”

  “It is an enemy, Ms. Moorfields. It’s the worst enemy the human race has, with the possible exception of the kind of stupidity that lets us think we can deal with Earth without getting burned. And the only thing we’ve got going for us here is me. I’ll see them all dead and in Hell before I let a single one loose.”

  Outraged, Constance spun about and left. Wyeth put his hands on the edge of his desk and, stiff-armed, leaned forward. He stared at the Comprise filing by, his eyes two hot coals.

  Rebel shivered.

  For a long hour the Comprise passed through the lobby under deferential guard. Technically they were guests, since they were paying for transit to Mars orbit. So for all their blades, pikes, and singlesticks, the samurai guided their five hundred charges with smiles and bows. The Comprise, of course, displayed neither approval nor displeasure.

  More running lights had come on across the transit ring, first yellow and then orange. “How does that thing work?” Rebel asked.

  Wyeth shrugged. “I know diddly-squat about physics to begin with. And of course no one understands Earth’s brand of physics; they’re centuries ahead of us. You could program me up to be another Miiko Ben-Yusuf, and I couldn’t explain how that thing works.” Then his face warped into a mischievous smile as his aspect changed. “I can give you the lecture for idiots, though. The way it was told to me, what the ring does is to take the space lying within it and accelerate that space. It actually moves space through space, and those things lying within that space remain embedded in that space and go along for the ride. So we’re here, and here we stay; only ‘here’ moves. The effect is instant speed. Velocity without acceleration. So you don’t have all the problems of inertia, Get it?”