Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Neither!”

  The reflection reached out and yanked Rebel’s head into the mirror. Quicksilver closed about her. It was like being underwater, and Rebel couldn’t breathe. “Then your personality will dissolve,” Eucrasia said. “Slowly at first, and then more quickly. You’ll be gone within a month.”

  Rebel choked, and awoke.

  “Wake up,” Wyeth said. He was holding her. “You’re having a nightmare.” Then, seeing her eyes open, “It was only a dream.”

  “Jesus,” Rebel said. She buried her face in his chest and cried.

  When she finally stopped, Wyeth released her and she sat up. She looked about dazedly. Wyeth had apparently been up for some time, thinking his own thoughts, for the walls had been turned on. A starscape, piped in from outside, glowed in the night. “Look,” Wyeth said. He pointed to a fuzzy patch almost overhead. “That’s Eros Kluster. The asteroid is invisible from here, and what we’re seeing is the attenusphere—the waste gases from the factories and refineries, the oxygen lost whenever an airlock opens, fine matter from reaction jets. It surrounds the Kluster, and the solar wind ionizes it, like the gas in a comet’s tail. Assuming the comet is unplanted, of course.” He pointed out more smudges, all in the plane of the ecliptic. “There’s Pallas Kluster, Ceres Kluster, Juno Kluster, Vesta …” He sang off the names in a gentle litany. “Civilization is spreading. Someday there’ll be major developments everywhere in the asteroid belts. Those hazy patches will link then, into one enormous smoke ring around the sun. That would be somethng to see, hey?”

  “Yes,” Rebel said in a little voice.

  “Feel up to talking about it yet?”

  So she told him her dream. When she was done, Wyeth said, “Well, there’s your mysterious pursuer.” She frowned. “Back in the orchid, you thought someone was following you? Eucrasia. The memories are rising up, and you’re projecting them into the exterior world.”

  “That may be so,” Rebel said. “But knowing it doesn’t do me any good.”

  “You really have only two choices,” Wyeth said softly. “Your dream spelled them out for you. You were a topnotch wetprogrammer, and your diagnosis is sound. Listen, you want my advice? Take Eucrasia in with you. I knew her, she’s not such a bad sort. You can live with her.”

  “I won’t do it,” Rebel said. “I won’t let anyone touch my mind, I … I just won’t, is all.”

  Wyeth turned away. There was tension in the muscles of his back. After a very long time, Rebel touched his shoulder, and he turned back abruptly, almost violently. “Why are you being so stubborn?” he cried. “Why?”

  “I don’t know why,” Rebel admitted. “It’s just the way I am, I guess.”

  7

  BILLY DEFECTOR

  Rebel woke to an empty bed. She breakfasted and went in search of Wyeth. A pierrot directed her through a rock garden and around a kitchen, and a samurai sent her past the orgy pits and down a ramp. She came to a bottom ring room where three holographic wetware diagrams spun slowly in the air. Rebel saw that they were morphs of the same personality. Judging by the sickliness of the main branches and twisted distribution of the lesser limbs, it was a very badly damaged persona indeed.

  The Comprise child sat beneath the rotating green spheres. He hadn’t slept. His face was puffy, his eyes glazed. His orange skin was blotchy with grey patches. “What’s your name?” Wyeth asked. “Do you have a name?”

  The boy shook his head. “I … uh, what?” Wyeth repeated the question, and without raising his eyes, the child said, “B-Billy. Billy B-Be …” His voice stuttered to a halt.

  Wyeth grinned and tugged the child’s braid. “We’ll call you Bill Defector, okay? Because you’ve come over to our side, you’re going to be human now. Would you like that?”

  “He’s not going to thank you for doing this to him.”

  “Shut up, Constance. Now, Billy, do you remember being part of the Comprise? Do you remember what it was like?”

  Billy’s head jerked up, eyes fearful. His hands twisted in his lap. Then he looked down again and mumbled, “I … yes.”

  “Good. Do you remember the briefing you got before coming here?” Billy said nothing. “Do you remember your instructions?”

  Samurai parted for Rebel, and she slipped into the room. Her guard stayed outside. Freeboy glanced at her quickly from one corner, then away. His lips were thin, and he stared rigidly unblinking at Constance. Rebel walked over to him and whispered, “What happened to the kid’s face?”

  “What? The blotches? We injected a phage under the skin to neutralize his dye; it takes a few days to flush it out of the system. Itches some, too. But since he’s not Comprise anymore, your boss doesn’t want him marked as one.”

  “I thought your apple was supposed to deprogram itself.”

  Freeboy curled his lip. Without looking at her he said pedantically, “For a normal psyche, a Billy Bejesus is a harmless, ego-intensive shyapple that leaves nothing behind but memories. But the Comprise have only embryonic egos—even the memory of having a strong personal identity is damaging to them. Changes the creatures drastically.”

  “Shock imprint syndrome,” Rebel said, Eucrasia’s memories coming to her effortlessly. “Yes, of course.”

  At the sound of her voice, Wyeth turned. “Sunshine! Just the person I wanted to see. It seems you and I are the closest things to competent wetprogrammers we have.” He snapped open a thin white case and ran a finger down one line of wetwafers. Hundreds of codified character traits, skills, compulsions and professions rippled under his touch. “I’d expected to just program up some experts. But it seems the regulations have changed in the last few years, Wetprogramming ware is very tightly controlled now. Beautiful, hey? None of the other professions are protected like that.”

  Without any sense of transition, Rebel was at the case. Her hands floated down over lines of joys, fears, sorrows, and ecstasies with unhesitating sureness, and teased out a manual skills program. It was for vacuum-casting ceramics as thin and delicate as soap bubbles. She slid it into an analyzer, tilting back her head to see its effect on the diagram overhead. The r-branch was straightened, but a self-destructive paradigm opened up near the midsection of the n-branch.

  The rift was easily filled by altering the sensorium distribution and heightening religious susceptibility. Rebel eased two more wafers into the analyzer, adjusted tone readings, and edited out a few irrelevancies. This strengthened the n-branch, but kinked the l-branch at its first major split, so she replaced the ceramics wafer with a woodworking package. Little by little, the template began to shape up.

  This was the great challenge, to find the health hidden within a damaged psyche and to assemble the programs that would restore it. She lost herself in the work. Some time later—minutes? hours?—she looked up again and found the interrogation was still going on. Not much progress had been made.

  “Billy, do you remember being Earth? Do you remember what it was like?”

  “It was like—” The child stopped and swallowed. “Nothing happened. It was warm. No thoughts. Many thoughts. Nothing was real.”

  “What kind of thoughts?”

  Billy closed his eyes for a long moment. Then, in a rapid monotone, he said, “Rotate grating six raise two and rotate again reroute quote the Comprise agree in principle but with reservations unquote raise the vial of eagle’s blood reroute using Allen wrench adjust the potentiometer to the red mark reroute ship to Sanfrisco marked green code green reroute injecting kerosene between vascular stations seventeen and twelve reroute railroad bedding excavation—”

  “Stop!”

  Billy obeyed.

  “What’s the problem?” Rebel asked.

  Wyeth looked disgusted. “It’s all garbage. Bits and pieces jumbled together at random. I’m not going to learn anything from this child because he never knew anything. He never thought a complete thought through in his life. He just processed a constant flow of babble.”

  Now Constance folded her arms
, glaring at Wyeth. “He’s used to being a part of oceanic thought. You’ve ripped him out of his natural environment. Of course you can’t get any sense out of him.… Look at him! He’s been damaged. Being remade in the mold of a human individual is a major devolutionnary step for him.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is. God damn that superior smile, it is! This is the way that life evolves, from simple to complex. We’re all on an evolutionary voyage from the small and uncomplicated to the macrocosmic. From one-celled plants to comet oaks. From amoebae through fish to apes. From simple sensation through sentience, intelligence, and then macrointelligence. Can’t you see the progression? All of life evolves toward Godhead.”

  “A very pretty theory, but with all due respect, it’s full of shit.”

  The boy was sweating. Constance wiped his brow. He began breathing heavily, and she dabbed a fluid on his throat. As it sank through the skin, his breathing eased. “You—”

  Movement at the door. “Sir?” Two samurai escorted in a tall Comprise. “This one said he had to talk with you personally.”

  “You have one of our number,” the Comprise said. “Return him.”

  Wyeth shifted slightly, put his hand on the child’s shoulder. Looking at Constance, he said, “Billy? Do you want to return?”

  Billy trembled. His eyes darted here, there, everywhere but toward the Comprise. His body twisted away spasmodically. “In his condition, he can’t possibly give informed—” Constance began.

  “Why?” Rebel asked the Comprise. “I mean, he can’t be much use to you in his condition. What do you want him for?”

  “Experimentation. Dissection.”

  Constance opened her mouth, shut it again. The Comprise spoke into the sudden silence. “We also require a good analytical laboratory, a surgery, and a supply of the drug administered to us. We will need to take a large number of tissue samples. The analytical equipment should be suitable for a comprehensive mapping of chemical trace effects in the brain. Earth will of course pay for your trouble.”

  “The hell you say.” Wyeth’s face was hard.

  Before the Comprise could respond, Billy bent forward, covering his head with frantic hands, and began to cry. Gingerly, Rebel sat beside him, put an arm around his shoulders. He turned, throwing himself at her, and buried his head between her shoulder and neck. Small hands clutched at her painfully. “We are not sure what you mean by that,” the Comprise said.

  “Let me spell it out for you,” Wyeth said. “First, we like the boy, and we’re going to keep him. Second, our resources are limited, and we do not have the laboratory equipment to spare, no matter what price you’re willing to pay. And third …” He turned to a nearby samurai. “Those crates of shyapples I had brought here? Destroy them all.”

  The floor exploded upward.

  “Holy shit!” Freeboy cried, and then fell backwards as something fast glanced off the side of his head. The room was suddenly full of black, acrid smoke. A cable ripped free from the floor, stiffened with voltage, and fell forward, like a huge snake striking. Sparks skittered across the floor. Wyeth flung out an arm to point at Rebel and Billy. “Treece!” he shouted. “Get them out of here!”

  Orange figures boiled up from the hole.

  The Comprise child was heavy. Treece hustled them through long corridors while electrical equipment hissed and erupted about them. All the lights went out. “What’s happening?” Rebel cried. The boy’s small hands still clutched at her. He kept his face buried in her shoulder.

  “Power outage. Wyeth’s crashed the computers. It’ll be on in a minute.”

  Something exploded up ahead. There was a chemical stink in the air. “No, I mean—”

  Treece grinned thuggishly. “Oh, you mean in general. The Comprise have taken over our computer systems. Nothing to worry about. We were waiting for this.” The lights went back on. In the hall behind them, a wall collapsed, and the lights blacked out again. In the dark, a squad of samurai trotted by.

  “What?”

  “Turn right here.” A sudden wind boomed down the hall, and Rebel almost lost her footing. “The Comprise will always suborn a computer system. It’s second nature to them. But our systems are built to be crashed. We’ve got manual cut-offs through the sheraton. We can crash the system and rebuild it as many times as they can take it over.”

  They stepped into an orangery with a stormy holographic sky. While Treece rummaged through an adjacent storeroom, Rebel stood dully looking at the orrery in the center of the room. Marigolds had been planted at its base. The samurai emerged with two broomsticks and thrust one at Rebel. He also carried a rifle and two singlesticks, one of which he also gave Rebel. “Feel like you can handle the kid?”

  “I feel like a marsupial.” The way Billy was clutching her, he wasn’t likely to come loose. She climbed into her saddle. “Let’s go.”

  Treece raised his rifle and blew out the window.

  They exploded out into darkness. Almost immediately limpet cameras swooped down on them from all directions. “Son of a bitch!” Treece screamed, bringing up the rifle. He burst all but two of the cameras before the remotes could reach them. One dove for his face, and he swung the rifle around like a club to smash into its complexly-lensed front. Fragments of camera and gun went flying.

  The last camera came at Rebel. She slashed with her singlestick and almost lost her seat. The camera bobbed under her swing, and then there was an instant’s darkness as the sheraton’s computers were crashed yet again. The wheel’s lights came back on, and, before the Comprise systems could reprogram the camera, its momentum carried it through a window. It crashed to the floor, buzzing and crippled. Then window, room, and all swung away.

  “Go!” Treece shouted, and Rebel got her hands back on the broomstick and kicked the jet nozzles wide open.

  They screamed away. “Where are we going?” she yelled over her shoulder.

  Treece brought his broomstick up alongside hers. Now that they were out of danger, he was impassive again. “Anywhere you like, so long as it’s not the sheraton. Or the tank towns. Security is a problem there. This is a rigged fight, even if the Comprise doesn’t know it yet. All we have to do is lay low for a few hours, and it’ll be safe to go back home.”

  They cruised the orchid’s edge, Rebel slowly killing speed with short bursts of retro, until they were moving at a crawl. Up ahead, Rebel saw a white rag tied to a stalk. “Look there. What’s that for, do you think?”

  Treece shrugged.

  Coming to a stop, Rebel peered into the tangles of orchid. She saw another white rag tied further in. Between rags, several stalks looked frayed, as if they had served as common kickstops. The ghost of a memory from her life in Tirnannog tugged at her. “It’s a path. Somebody lives in there.” She angled her broomstick inward. The boy had not spoken since their flight had begun. She put a hand on the top of his head. It was warm, almost fevered; she imagined she could feel the interplay of emotions within. His braid stuck straight out. She held it against his skull and wondered how old he was. Seven? Nine? Not that it mattered. “How are you doing, Billy?”

  The boy shook his head.

  They drifted deeper into the orchid, the light dimming as blossoms grew rarer. Roots and stalks grew thicker here, and more tangled. Rebel had to dismount. She put Billy into the saddle and towed the broomstick behind her. He peered about silently. She tugged the broomstick deeper into the vines, finding handholds and grabspots, and always following the rags. It was almost like a tunnel now, an irregular passage created by training back selected vines. Treece followed after.

  “This would be the perfect spot for an ambush,” he said.

  A woman laughed. Not a friendly laugh. “Too true,” she said from the gloom. “So state your business. What do you want with the village? You mean us harm or not?”

  Treece gestured Rebel back, then put his hands on his hips. “You see this woman, this child? You try to hurt them—you die. Anybody else tries to hurt them dies too.�
�� Silence. “But so long as you don’t hurt them, we intend no evil. We’re only looking for someplace to spend a few quiet hours. If you let us pass, we’ll go on. Otherwise, we’ll turn back now.”

  A woman floated forward, materializing from gloom and tangled root. She held a rifle. “Fair enough,” she said. “Pass. Just remember, there’s only the one path, and you have to come by me again on your way out. Behave yourselves.”

  She was gone.

  The village was a handful of stick huts around a central clearing, something like a larger version of the courts in Tank Fourteen. But the huts here were loosely woven frames with wide stretches of orchid between, like a scatter of wicker boxes discarded in the weeds. As they paused at the edge of the clearing, several people peered from their huts with frank curiosity.

  Rebel’s broomstick bobbed, and she turned to see Billy slip from the saddle. He darted to a hut where a man sat cross-legged in the doorway, a small pot of luminous ink before him. He had a scholar’s facepaint and was carefully drawing a long line on a rectangle of parchment.

  The child approached the drawing slowly, as if hypnotized, the long, glowing line doubly reflected in his unblinking eyes.

  The scholar raised his head. Shadows pooled under his brows. “You like it?” He lifted the brush from the end of the line and dipped it into the inkpot. “It’s a pun.” With quick dabs he drew an ideogram on a leaf, held it up for inspection. “You see that? That’s my name—Ma. It means horse. My name is Ma Fu-ya. What’s yours?”

  “Billy,” the child answered without hesitation.

  “Well, Billy, you see this line I just drew? I want you to imagine that it’s the same as this line here”—the brush touched one line of the leaf ideogram—“only stretched long and warped out of shape. You see? Then this next line runs along one foreleg.” Quickly, surely, he drew the other lines, and together they made a horse. “You see?”