Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Uh … no, not actually.”

  “Well, neither do I.” He laughed, and then the ring’s running lights turned green. “Whoops. Here we go.”

  Involuntarily, Rebel gripped the edge of the desk. Onscreen, the transit ring, along with Londongrad, New High Kamden, the asteroid, and all other artifacts of the Kluster … vanished. It was as if they had been wiped from the wall, leaving behind only the unchanging stars. “Was that it?” Rebel asked.

  “Not much to look at, eh?”

  “What happens to the transit ring now? Does the Kluster get to keep it?”

  “They wish! No, what happens now is that it’ll dismantle itself. Then Kluster security will analyze the pieces and try to figure out how they all fit togetheer, and of course they’ll fail. The Comprise is very good at cybersystems.” He glanced down at the inputs, and his expression changed. “Look. I’ve got a lot of work to do right now. Why don’t you check out your room, get some food, maybe catch a little sleep. Tomorrow morning, we can plan strategy, okay?”

  “Okay.” She started toward the elevator, then paused. “Wyeth? Were you worried when you saw Heisen trying to kill me?”

  “Not really. I had samurai in the area. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The upper ring, where Rebel’s room was, was filled with off-program samurai, pierrots and pierrettes, and other service types. They were in a holiday mood, plucking fruit from the ornamental trees, laughing and splashing in the fountains. Paint was beginning to smear already. Somebody had broken open a crate of paper birds, and the air was filled with white flapping devices, flying in slow circles as their elastic bands unwound. Rebel strode through the revelers, full of melancholy energy, and this time she didn’t object when Maxwell slipped an arm around her waist and matched strides with her. “I hear they’re forming up an orgy in the water lily pond,” he said. “What do you say?”

  “Too many people for me. I’m going to my room.” Then, knowing already that it was a bad idea, but running a little short on good ones, she said, “Care to come along?”

  The room was a standard luxury oval, with an off-center bed and programmable walls and ceiling. They stripped and tumbled onto the orange-and-red bear paw quilt, throwing their cloaks over the room monitor. Then, while Rebel instructed the walls to display a realtime exterior starscape, Maxwell wound all the birds tight and released them one by one.

  The quilted bed floated among the stars, paper birds whirring quietly overhead, as they made love. At first Rebel sat atop Maxwell and did all the work, slapping his hands away whenever he reached for her. Then, when he was good and hot, she lowered herself onto him, and he seized her roughly and rolled over on top of her. He thrust away like some kind of machine, an untiring organic sex robot. She turned her head to the side, staring off into the infinity of tiny colored stars that was the Milky Way.

  Gravity sex was nice. You didn’t have to keep track of where you were, constantly shifting handholds; half the work was done for you. Then too, there was that good, solid weight atop her. It had a satisfying feel.

  She was moving through passion now to a far, detached calm, a lofty mental landscape where her thoughts were wordless and as crystalline clear as cold mountain air. Here, where her body’s sensations were a pleasant background murmur, she felt at peace with herself. She felt simple and uncomplicated. It was easy to look within herself and search out the nameless discontent that had been gnawing at her for some time, the hidden poison that she could not isolate in the crowded babble of normal thought.

  Everybody wanted something from her. That was a part of it. Deutsche Nakasone wanted her persona, and Jerzy Heisen wanted her death. Snow and the rest of her network wanted to record her persona as well. And Wyeth wanted to use her as bait to snare and destroy Snow’s network. According to him, they were all traitors, humans who had sold out to the Comprise and served the interests of Earth. It made sense when you considered how deeply they were sunk into the experience of machine communion, that they should wish to be part of the ultimate merger of mind into machine. But in all this welter of desires, it was Wyeth who bothered her most. He was using her. For some reason that troubled her even more than the assassination attempt did.

  Maxwell was moving faster now, losing rhythm as he approached orgasm. But the answer was already in Rebel’s grip. She might not want to look at it, but there it was.

  The fact was that it was not Maxwell she wanted inside her. It was Wyeth she wanted, and not just for a few sweaty hours on the quilt. She was falling for the man, alien four-faceted mind and all, and while it was a stupid thing to do—what kind of future could there possibly be with him?—her emotions were unreasoning and absolute. And who was there to complain to?

  Maxwell arched his back, squeezing shut his eyes, and screamed soundlessly. Almost absently, Rebel reached out and squeezed his cheeks, digging her nails in good and hard. The paper birds were all on the floor.

  Then Maxwell was lying beside her, sweaty and gasping. For the longest time they said nothing. Then she sent Maxwell out for food, and he returned with biscuits, slices of fried yam, and oranges from the trees in the hall. By the time they were done eating, he was interested again. “Wanna do it a second time?” he asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  Then she was alone with her thoughts again. In love with Wyeth. What a mess. What a fucking mess.

  6

  ORCHID

  When the sheraton’s lights greeenshifted from blue-tinged evening to yellowish dawn, Rebel kicked Maxwell out and went to meet Wyeth. Trailed by a bodyguard of five samurai, they rode broomsticks into the geodesic. With her hair and cloak streaming behind, she felt like an Elizabethan lady riding to the hawks with her retinue, an illusion heightened by the scout cameras that soared at a distance, feeding information back to the guard. Except that the compressed air tanks chilled down as they were used, and after a while the saddle grew unpleasantly cold.

  They rode by the outlying strands of orchid, where tangles of air roots held obsidian globes of water larger than her head, and, slowing, headed into the plant. The stalks grew closer together as they flew into the epiphyte’s labyrinthine folds. It had blossomed and the huge bioluminescent flowers shed gentle fairy light through the darkness. This was a vague light, not like the full bloom of luciferous algae back home, but more like the periodic night seasons when the algae died back. At last they came to a large clearing deep within the plant and brought their broomsticks to a halt. “You won’t consider martial arts programming?” Wyeth asked. “Very simple. It’d take maybe five minutes, with minimal personality change.”

  “No. I don’t want anyone screwing with my mind.”

  He sighed. “Well, you’ve got to be able to defend yourself. So we’ll have to reprogram you the old-fashioned way, with an instructor and lots of practice. Same results, just takes a lot more time and sweat. Treece.” A thick little troll of a samurai slipped from his broomstick and floated beside it, one hand touching the saddle. He had a dark face and a froggish mouth. “Teach her.”

  Treece unlashed two singlesticks from his back and offered one to Rebel. She dismounted and accepted it. They both tied cloaks to saddles and kicked their vehicles away. “Good. Now take a whack at me.”

  Rebel eyed the swart little man, shrugged, and lashed out fast and hard, flinging back her opposing arm to control her drift. She was not at all surprised to see Treece slip out from under her blow—he was, after all, the instructor—but she was amazed when he slammed the back of her stick with his own, and the added energy set her tumbling end over end. “First lesson,” Treece said. “You’re going around and around one little point in your body, something like an axis. That’s your center of mass.”

  “I know that!” Rebel said angrily, wishing Wyeth weren’t watching her. She concentrated on not getting dizzy. “I grew up weightless.”

  “I grew up in gravity. Does me no good against somebody programmed judo.” He let her spin. “Now the center of m
ass is very important. First off, you set somebody spinning around it, their effectiveness is lessened. Got all they can do to keep themselves oriented—their thrusts and parries won’t be as crisp as they might be.” He reached out with his stick and Rebel seized it, putting herself stable in relation to him again. “Second, you’re going to want to remember to strike at the center of mass.” He poked at her with the tip of his staff. “Try it yourself. Move around all you like. What’s the one point of your body you can’t move when you’re afloat? It’s your center of mass. It just stays there.” He jabbed at her again. “Now. Move away from this.”

  All in a flash, Rebel slammed her singlestick forward, two-handing it against his weapon with a crack that made her palms smart. Reaction threw her over his head, and on the way by she took a swipe at his skull. Treece brought his stick up for a parry and hook that brought them back to stable positions. “Absolutely right,” he said. “When you’re afloat, all serious movement is borrowed from your opponent.”

  The samurai all floated in a plane, honoring a consensus horizon. Treece wheeled upside down, leering at her. “So touching your opponent is both the source of opportunity and your greatest danger. Take my hand.” Rebel reached out, and instantly he had seized her wrist, climbed her arm, and taken her throat between stick and forearm. “I could snap your neck like this. Once you’ve been touched, you’re vulnerable. But you can’t accomplish a damned thing without touching your opponent.” He moved away, grinned sourly at her. “That’s what makes it a skill.”

  Wyeth had been leaning back in his saddle, eyes closed, directing his pocket empire via a transceiver equipped with an adhesion disk. Now he opened his eyes and said, “That’s as nice a paradigm for political maneuvering as I’ve ever heard.”

  Rebel started to respond and almost didn’t hear her instructor’s stick whistling toward her in time to parry. “No small talk!” Treece snapped. “We’re done with talk now anyway. No more theory, no more gab, just dull, repetitive exercise. Rest of today and every day until you get it right, is nothing but sweat.”

  A long time later, he looked disgusted and spat into the orchid. “Enough. Same time tomorrow.”

  Samurai brought up their broomsticks. Rebel felt exhausted, but pleasantly so. Aware of her every muscle. Luckily, Eucrasia had kept her body in good shape.

  They rode to the edge of the orchid and stopped. Wyeth hitched his broom to an air root, and Rebel followed suit, while the guard moved away, expanding their patrol. Wyeth clambered along a thick trunk, inexpertly grabbing for handholds. Rebel followed more gracefully.

  They came to the end of the plant, a break here as sudden and startling as when a climax forest gives way to grassland. Out in the darkness, distant stretches of the air plant were like streamers of luminous clouds. Alone and bright, the sheraton spun like a wheel. Its light was redder now, almost noontime orange. The silvery glimmerings about it were people flitting to and fro like mayflies.

  Finally Wyeth said, “This is the first time I’ve ever had people working under me. I’ve always been something of a lone wolf.”

  Rebel looked at him, not sure what to say. At last she feebly joked, “More of a lone wolfpack, hey?’

  “I guess.”

  More silence. Then, “What’s it like?” Rebel asked. “Having four personas?”

  “Well … when I’m not actually in use, I don’t really do anything. I have a passive awareness of myself. I see what’s going on. It’s like there are four of us standing around a small stage, with a bright light on its center. We watch everything that happens, hear it all, feel it all, but we don’t do a thing until we step into the light. When we’re in the dark, we don’t really much care. Sometimes all of us are in the light, and—”His voice changed slightly—“sometimes two of us are in the light, but one keeps his mouth shut. Another half hour monitoring and I expect to be spelled.” His voice changed back again. “That was my warrior aspect. Right now he’s directing security back in the sheraton. That frees me up to use the body.”

  “That’s weird,” Rebel said. “The way your voice changes. You don’t really have to speak out loud to communicate with yourself, do you? I mean, you can think something and the others will pick up on it?”

  “No, I have to talk or at least subvocalize, because … well, thoughts are most of what a persona is, you see. They’re the architecture, they define the shape and existence of a persona, where it starts and when it lets off. We can’t share our thoughts directly—”

  “—without breaking down the persona,” Rebel finished for him. “Yeah, that’s right, they’d all merge together, like breaking the membrane between twinned eggs.”

  “Eucrasia’s training is really coming back to you.”

  Rebel looked away. “You don’t have to sound so cheerful about it. It’s like—I feel these memories closing in on me, crushing me. They’re all hers, and none of them mine, and I can feel myself being affected by them, you know? I think they’re changing me, making me more like her.” She fought down a dark, helpless urge to cry. “Sometimes I think all those memories are going to rise up and drown me.”

  Wyeth touched her arm. “Your persona is only a mask,” he said in his pattern-maker voice. “Ultimately it’s not important. You—your being, your self—are right here, in the compass of your skull and body.” Rebel shivered again under his touch, and she turned to him. Then, it was like the singlestick exercise of climbing your opponent’s arm—it happened all in a furious instant, too fast for thought. Wyeth’s arms crushed her to his body, and they were kissing each other. She wanted him so desperately it was hard to believe that he had reached for her first.

  “Come on.” Wyeth drew her back into the orchid, into a space that was dark and sheltered. He slid her cloak from her and set it to the side. His hands moved down her body, rolled away her cache-sexe. He buried his face in the side of her neck.

  “Wait,” Rebel said. “I want the big guy.”

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “Your warrior aspect. I want to make love to you while you’re being the warrior.”

  Later, Rebel went out riding with the fool. They laughed and joked as they went no place in particular. “You’re going to have to give up your irrational prejudice against wetprogramming,” Wyeth said, smiling. “It’s useful stuff. If I didn’t have another persona running the sheraton, I couldn’t be out here now, gallivanting about with you.”

  They rode on and came to a carnival.

  It was located where the orchid grew closest to the tanks. One long vine, in fact, had been disentangled and tied to an airlock; people traveled along it, following the holiday music to where a clearing had been chopped inside the plant.

  From outside, the carnival looked like a ramshackle collection of huts and frames caught in the tangled growth. Within, it was bright with flowers and strings of paper lanterns. Tank towners in cloaks as garish as jungle moths flitted to and fro. Lengths of flash-dried vine had been lashed together to make dueling cages, booths for astrologers and luck-changers, lovers’ mazes, gambling wheels and huckster tables. Artisans were painting panels for a centrifuge ride, conjuring up kings, bulls, starships, and reapers.

  A singlestick duel was in progress by the main gate. The samurai glanced at it with interest as they entered.

  “Look!” Wyeth drew Rebel into a booth where fairgoers threw waterballs at a distant bozo. “Give me three!” He flung the first with too much force, and it broke into tiny drops that splattered past the clown like rain. The bozo jeered, and Wyeth threw again. This time the ball exploded into a thousand spherelets in the bozo’s face. “Ah, that felt good!”

  When the barker floated him the last waterball, Wyeth winked at the bozo and smashed it into his own face. Nearby fairgoers laughed in astonishment. Away from the paper lanterns, their eyes were shadowy and their faces pale masks.

  Wyeth and Rebel wandered past simple games of rigged chance to hucksters selling jams and candies, carved wooden astronauts, b
right straw dolls and dark barrel men. “Right here!” a barker cried. “Yes, yes, yes!” Rebel bought a sugar skull and bit into it. Red jelly oozed from one eye socked. She stared at it in dismay, then laughed. She was considering some silver bells with toe-ribbons when she was struck with sudden unease. Looking up, she saw Wyeth holding a luminous apple the size of a cherry tomato.

  “Seven hours?” Wyeth said. “Seven hours Kluster for an apple?”

  The huckster was a little man with spidery arms and legs, a lopsided grin, and a crazy look to his dark eyes. He sang:

  “Awake, arise, pull out your eyes,

  And hear what time of day.

  And when you have done, pull out your tongue

  And see what you can say!”

  Then, speaking to Wyeth, “Ah, but the shyapple is no ordinary fruit; no, it was a worm at its heart.”

  “What does the worm do?”

  “Why it eats, sir. It eats and excretes, until it drowns in its own liquor.” He plucked the apple from Wyeth’s fingers. “You must swallow it whole: core, pips, and aye. Like thus.

  “What did I dream? I do not know;

  The fragments fly like chaff.

  Yet strange my mind was tickled so

  I cannot help but laugh.”

  Then, speaking again, “My name is Billy Bejesus and I live in a tree. If I’m not there yet, why then that must be me.” He tumblesaulted over in the air, kicking his heels.

  Appalled and intrigued, Wyeth turned to Rebel. “Can you make any sense of this madman’s ranting?”

  “Don’t touch those things! Don’t you know a shyapple when you see one?” Big-eyed, Wyeth shook his head. “They’re mind alterers. By the sound of it, this lot is just directed hallucinogens, but a shyapple can be prepared to do almost anything—to give you a skill, to make you mad, to bring you sanity. Some are prepared so they’ll negate themselves after a few hours, and others are … permanent. You wouldn’t want to put one in your mouth without knowing what it does, first.”