Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Really? Chemical wetprogramming?” Wyeth rubbed a fingertip over the bright skin, held it to his nose, and sniffed gingerly. “How does it work?”

  “Well, the shyapple is just a matrix. It’s the worm that’s altered according to what effects are desired. It’s … injected with a virus that … When the shyapple’s center liquifies, the virus undergoes explosive growth and …” She faltered to a stop. “No. It’s gone now. I used to know, but it’s all gone.” And yet it was—she sensed—vitally important in some way.

  “I never heard of them before.” Wyeth held a shyapple to his eyes, admiring the translucent skin, the candy-red shimmer, its full-to-bursting juiciness. “Where did they come from, I wonder? Why did they show up here all of a sudden?”

  Rebel shook her head helplessly.

  “You’ve got what? Three crates there?” Billy Bejesus’s grin was luminescent. “I’ll take them all. Treece. Arrange the details and see that these things are taken back to the sheraton.”

  They floated on. Rebel lingered at a jewelry display, examining a tray of religious pins: stars, crosses, swastikas, and the like. She bought a white scallop shell and pinned it to the collar of her cloak. “Now I can wipe off this face paint,” she said. “People will assume I’m some sort of religious fanatic.” Oddly enough, her sense of unease was stronger than ever.

  “Good thinking. Though if I were you, I’d find out what your pin stands for. Might save you an embarrassing conversation somewhere down the line.”

  They were floating hand in hand before an enormous mesh sphere, watching the cockfights, when Wyeth said in his leader voice, “Crap. Come on. We’ve got to get back to the sheraton.” He tugged Rebel toward the gate. Their bodyguard materialized around them.

  “What’s the trouble?” Rebel asked.

  “Constance is talking with the Comprise.”

  All the way back to the sheraton, Rebel’d had the uneasy feeling that someone was following her, a shadowy presence flitting through the leaves and vines that was never there when she looked back over her shoulder, but returned the instant she looked away. Here, in the bright-lit rooms of the complex, that sense faded but did not go entirely away. There was somebody outside coming for her.

  “Heisen’s body was never found,” Wyeth said when she mentioned this to him. “He very well could be coming for you. That’s half the reason I’ve assigned you a permanent guard.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “We’re going in to deal with them now.” He slipped a bracelet from his wrist, one of a pair of thick ivory bands lined with silver. “Here. Put this on. It monitors the electromagnetic spectrum.”

  Samurai stepped aside as Wyeth slammed through the doors to the center ring’s main conference room. There, under a holographic sky, Constance sat on the edge of a red lacquered bridge. She was dabbing her feet in the goldfish stream. Several Comprise stood by, listening to her talk. Scattered among the topiary bushes were her team with the tools of their trade—fermenters, chimeric sequence splicers, microbial bioreactors and the like—demonstrating lab techniques while Comprise in identical coveralls clustered about them, like patches of orange mist. Wyeth’s face hardened into granite slabs.

  “All right, Moorfields!”

  Constance leaped to her feet. “Oh!” She blinked. “You startled me, Mr. Wyeth.”

  “I’ll do worse than that to you.” Wyeth glowered at her from the bank. “Just what do you think you’re doing? Why have you moved your lab and people from the third ring?”

  “Well, I had to. I wanted to chat with the Comprise, and I was told there was some silly rule against their leaving the central ring.”

  Some hundred Comprise dotted the room. Several drifted over, into a loose semicircle about Wyeth and Rebel, studying them gravely but saying nothing. “Clear the treehangers out,” Wyeth ordered. Samurai moved in and started escorting the bioengineers away. “Have two people programmed legal, one Londongrad and one People’s Mars, and send them here.” To Constance, “You’ll find that Kluster law is extremely legalistic, and People’s law is informal and rational. Between them, I expect that if you step out of line again, I can hang you for treason.”

  “Treason! Surely you’re joking.”

  “I am very serious.”

  Constance shook her head, clasped her hands, let them fall. “But we were just exchanging scientific information.”

  “Oh? What information did they give you?”

  “We were on the preliminaries, just swapping basics. Talking shop. You know.”

  “I know very well.” Wyeth’s hands were clenched and white. “Use your head! Your gang was swapping detailed bioscientific chit-chat with a team of Comprise that is ostensibly here as engineers and physicists. How did they know the jargon? How did they happen to know enough of the biosciences to understand what you were talking about?”

  “Well, Earth is, after all, a planet. They have the largest set of interlocking ecologies in the Inner System, so they must use …”

  Embarrassed, Rebel shifted her gaze out the window wall. She saw tiny motes of light shifting through the orchid; people were astir out there. Doubtless the tanks were emptying out as people moved into the plant. But looking away couldn’t keep her from overhearing the argument.

  “That’s nonsense! They know because they’re spies, that’s why. Before they left Earth they were systematically crammed with the basics of every corner of science, in the hope they’d stumble across something useful. Ms. Moorfields, look at them! They are not human, they’re not friendly, and they’re not altruistic. They’ll take whatever technology you’ve got and then use it against your own race. You’re selling humanity down the tubes—and for what?”

  Unexpectedly, a Comprise said, “She wants the technology to build a transit ring.”

  Constance started. “I didn’t tell them that!”

  “The Comprise is very quick on the uptake,” Wyeth said sardonically. He asked the Comprise, “Why did she want that information?”

  “The desire for private gain is a common failing of individual intelligence.”

  “That’s not it at all!” Constance cried. “It would open up the stars. Can’t you see?” She appealed directly to Wyeth. “It could be used to accelerate comets beyond the Oort Cloud, toward the nearer stars. The closest could be reached within the span of one long lifetime—they gave me the figures! Imagagine thousands of dyson worlds drifting from star to star. Expanding into the universe. Imagine an age of exploration and discovery.” Her voice was fervent, almost devout, and Rebel found herself responding to it as she might to a farbranch revivalist prophet. “Imagine mankind finally freed from the cradle of the sun and wandering the starry galaxies in search of … I don’t know. Truth, maybe? Destiny! All the final answers!”

  Before Wyeth could reply, the Comprise said, “Do not trouble yourself, Boss Wyeth. She has nothing we desire.”

  “That’s not true. You told me …” But the Comprise had wandered off. Almost pleading, she said, “They told me they were interested in the mind arts. We know a great deal about them.”

  “You yourself?” Wyeth asked. “One of your people?”

  “Well, no. It’s all new technology. The breakthroughs are being made, but the skills aren’t widespread yet.”

  “And yet you’re all biologists. Isn’t it a coincidence then that a Comprise of engineers are up on the mind arts, while your own people know zilch? I’d say you’ve just proven that your friends here are indeed spies.” Wyeth casually touched a bracelet on his wrist and crooked an eyebrow at Rebel. She touched the bracelet he had given her.

  The world was transformed. Electricity glowed white from wires hidden in the walls. Heat shimmered green. Cobalt particles sleeted through the room, cosmic radiation to which matter was as insubstantial as a dream. A red haze of radiocommunication surrounded the now-green figures of the Comprise, and laser-crisp directional beams reached from individual to individual, shifting as thoughts were divided
and routed for processing. Rebel blinked, and it all disappeared for an instant. She looked down at the bracelet and saw the blazing circuits of a holographic projector. One of Wyeth’s spy devices.

  “Mr. Wyeth, you are being disgusting.” Constance turned away.

  “Don’t be like that,” Wyeth said in his whimsical voice. “Here, have an apple. Nice and crunchy.” He placed something in her hand.

  “An apple?” Constance looked down at the shyapple and dropped it, horrified. “Where did that come from?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. This is an example of your mind art biotechnology, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but …” She tightened her lips. “Hook me into your intercom system.” One of the Comprise stepped forward and, stooping, reached for the fallen shyapple. Wyeth stepped on the woman’s hand, hard, and she jerked it back.

  “We were curious,” the Comprise said mildly. Several new lines of interaction connected with her.

  “So what?” Wyeth gestured to the samurai. “Keep the Comprise on their side of the stream. And open up a channel for Ms. Moorfields.”

  A moment later, Freeboy’s image appeared, and Constance shook the shyapple at him. “Freeboy, you’re the only one who’s been working with directed viruses. Is this your doing?”

  “Aw, hell,” Freeboy said. “It’s just pocket money.”

  “You never mentioned this skill to me.”

  “It’s not a skill. It’s only cookbook stuff. I got the recipe from a wizard in Green City, when I was in Tirnannog.” Constance’s face was cold and white. The boy spread his hands, his shoulders hunching slightly. “Hey, it’s only a Billy Bejesus—eight hours’ looniness, and it deprograms itself. It’s not like I was hurting anybody. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Like hell you didn’t, young man.”

  While the young treehanger was being dressed down, Rebel saw an odd thing: The Comprise, who had been moving about seemingly randomly, had all simultaneously arrived at the water’s edge. The samurai guarding them shifted uneasily. They stared across the water, orange faces blank, eyes unblinking. The electromagnetic interactions increased, lines blinking on and off like laser strobes. For a long moment, no one moved.

  Then the Comprise jumped, individual components running furiously to one side or the other, forming clusters and gaps. Twenty charged across the wooden bridge. The samurai braced themselves to receive the charge.

  In that instant’s confusion, a small orange figure darted across the stream. The guards’ eyes had been drawn one way and another, and he leaped through a blind spot. All in a flash, he was at Constance’s side, reached up, and snatched the shyapple from her hands. Before anyone could react, he was back among the Comprise. “That was a child!” Rebel said.

  “Catch him!” Wyeth commanded, and three samurai leaped the stream. As they converged on the child, he crammed the fruit in his mouth and swallowed. One snatched him up and carried him back, the others defending. But the Comprise offered no resistance. They turned away, again as aimless as so many cattle. Still, red interaction lines connected the boy directly to half the Comprise in the room.

  “Too late,” Wyeth said when the samurai placed the boy before him. “He’s already swallowed it.”

  “But this is a child,” Rebel repeated.

  “This is the body of a child. Comprise engineering teams always include a few children for tasks where a bigger body would just be in the way.’

  “But that’s awful.”

  “I agree.” Wyeth smiled at Constance. “How about you? Still feel that there’s no crime in five billion human minds with only one single identity among them?”

  “We must be careful not to anthropomorphize,” Constance said weakly. She looked pale.

  “Very well put.” Wyeth turned to the child Comprise. “Why did you do it?”

  “We were curious,” the boy said. “We wished to know whether this new technology might prove useful to us. In that sense—in that we are always eager for new information, new ideas, new directions of thought—we are indeed the spies you accuse us of being. But only in that one sense of being true to our nature.’”

  “You see?” Constance said.

  “More importantly, it distresses us to be separated from the true Comprise.” Rebel couldn’t see the child’s face now for the blaze of red interaction lines touching the skin over his buried rectenna, but his voice was bland. “There are only five hundred Comprise in this structure—and we are used to the mental stimulation of billions. Restricted as we are, any new challenges are taken up eagerly.” A pause. “You might say that we were bored.”

  Wyeth turned to Freeboy’s image. “How long does your drug take to hit?”

  Freeboy shrugged. “Not long. A minute or two. There are receptor enhancers in the shyapple matrix. Tell you, though, maybe this isn’t really a good idea. Those apples are adult dosages. I don’t know what they’ll do to a kid. This one looks like he has low body mass.”

  Constance reached for the boy, and a samurai batted her hand away. “But there’s still time. If I stick a finger down his throat …”

  “Now, now,” Wyeth chided. “Mustn’t anthropomorphize. Let’s just wait and see. This might be interesting.”

  The boy stood still between his guard of samurai. Suddenly he stiffened. His eyes opened wide. “Oh,” he said. One hand rose before his face and writhed spasmodically. “I think—”

  The child screamed.

  The lawyers arrived while the Comprise were still thrashing on the ground. Four samurai held the boy’s limbs, and Constance knelt beside him. The directional beams flicked on and off, lashing blindly through the air like the frenzied legs and antennae of a dying insect. Then, all radio contact with the drugged child finally severed, the other Comprise slowly got to their feet, a hundred individual expressions of collective horror on their faces.

  “I wonder why it worked so well?” Wyeth murmured thoughtfully to himselves. “They’ve got defenses against intrusive wetprogramming. This must be something new. This must be an entirely different approach.”

  “Hold still, dear. If I can get you to throw up, you’ll feel better,” Constance said.

  The boy twisted his head away from her. “I,” he said. “I saw the moon I saw a tree I saw the moon caught in a tree I saw a tree caught in the moon.” His eyes were wide as saucers; they quivered slightly in time to some inner pulse.

  “I saw a peacock with a fiery tail,

  I saw a blazing comet drop down hail,

  I saw a cloud—”

  “Take him to the surgery,” Wyeth ordered. “Do what you can to ease his discomfort, but get the radio implants inside him deactivated before he regains his senses. I don’t want him reconnecting with the Comprise.”

  “You can’t do that,” Constance objected. “He’s a part of the Comprise. That’s where he belongs.”

  “Well?” Wyeth asked the lawyers. “Can I do that or not?”

  The lawyer in yellowface chewed his lower lip. “It’s a difficult point.”

  “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” the lawyer in purple said, “then it’s a duck. This individual looks human and uses the first-person singular. Therefore he’s human, not Comprise.”

  “Thank you,” Wyeth said. He gestured at Freeboy’s image. “This joker’s been dealing dangerous hallucinogens out in the orchid. What can I get him for?”

  “Nothing,” the purple lawyer said. “There’s no law against giving people the opportunity to hurt themselves.”

  “We-ell now, there is the question of presumed societal consent,” Yellow said. “Consensus-altering drugs would come under the foreseeable cultural change clauses of—”

  “Good,” Wyeth said. “I sentence you to status of programmed informant for the duration of transit. Stay where you are. The programmers will come for you.” Freeboy looked stricken. “You’ll be attached to Moorfields here. Observe her, and report to me at this hour of every day.” He turned
to Rebel and offered his arm. “I think we’ve done enough, don’t you? Shall we go?”

  That night, Rebel fell asleep after making love, and dreamed that she was walking the empty corridors of some ancient manor. It was cold, and there was the scent of lilacs in the air. A breeze stirred her hair, passed chill hands over her thighs and abdomen. She came face to face with an ornate Victorian mirror. The gravity was half again Greenwich normal, pulling down her flesh, making her face look old and gaunt. She wonderingly reached out a hand to the mirror.

  Her reflection’s hand broke through the liquid surface of the mirror and seized her wrist.

  Rebel tried to pull away, but the grip was unbreakable. Long red nails dug painfully into her flesh. In the mirror Eucrasia showed her teeth in a smile. She was a fat-breasted little woman, but there was muscle under that smooth brown skin. “Don’t go away, dearest. We have so much to talk about.”

  “We have nothing to talk about!” Rebel’s panicked words bounced from the walls and echoed down to nothing.

  Eucrasia pushed her face against the mirror’s surface, the glass bulged out by nose and lips but held together by surface tension. Silver highlights played over her skin. “Ah, but we do. My memories are going to overwhelm you if you don’t do something about them.” Behind her was a white room, a surgery, with trays of chromed instruments. “Come closer, sweet love.”

  She yanked Rebel forward, right up against the mirror. Their nipples touched, kissed at the surface. “I want to help you,” Eucrasia whispered. “Look at me.” For the first time, Rebel looked into the woman’s eyes. There was nothing in the sockets but an empty space where the eyes should have been. She could see through them to the back of Eucrasia’s skull. “You see? I have no self. No desires. How can I intend you harm?”

  “I don’t know.” Rebel began to cry. “Let me go.”

  “There are only two ways you can survive. The first is to have me recreated as a secondary persona. You’d be like Wyeth, then. You’d have to share your life, but the memories would all be shunted over to the Eucrasia persona. You could remain intact.” The reflection shifted to one side, and Rebel was forced to move with it. “The second alternative is to make a complete recording of your persona. Then you could reprogram yourself every few weeks. This is less desirable, because it precludes any chance of personal growth.” Their stomachs touched now. Eucrasia placed her lips on Rebel’s. “Well?” she asked. “Which will it be?”