Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  The child laughed and clapped his hands.

  “He seems to like you,” Rebel said.

  The scholar laid his brush in the air before him. “He’s a nice kid. Welcome to our village. We haven’t gotten around to naming it. If you’re staying, I advise you not to build too far from the clearing; one man did that already and lost his hut before he thought to mark the trail. Other than that, there’s plenty of room.”

  The air was fragrant here. The village had been built within a local cluster of blossoms, and the light was soft and pervasive. Rebel liked it. It could have used a little more life. Butterflies at least. A few lizards, a squirrel, perhaps a tree squid. But other than that, it was pleasant here, sheltered within the orchid. “Maybe I will build a hut,” she said. “I could spend my free time here. Who should I talk to about rent? Who’s your king here?”

  “There are no kings here,” Fu-ya said. Billy tugged at his cloak, and the scholar handed him brush and paint. From the hut behind him, he drew a piece of paper. “Here, have fun.”

  “No kings?” Treece said, puzzled. “Then who owns all this?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps no one. Perhaps the man in the wheel.” He spread his hands. “You see, when people realized they could build here, they didn’t stop to worry about legalities. They just packed up and moved in.”

  One of Fu-ya’s neighbors came up with a sphere of fresh-brewed tea and a handful of drinking syringes. Scowling, Treece took one and said, “Why? Why burrow so deep in the orchid? Why post a guard by the trail?”

  “Defense is simple here,” the neighbor said. “One guard can hold off a dozen attackers. If more came, we could just untie the rags from the path—they’d never find their way in. Or if that didn’t work … we’d all scatter, I guess. That’d be the end of the village, but there’s others out there. Lots of room to build another, for that matter.”

  “No, no,” Fu-ya said to Billy. “You want to hold the brush upright, between thumb and forefinger. There, you see? That way you won’t smudge.”

  “Who are you expecting to attack you?” Treece said testily.

  Another neighbor had come up, a large bony woman who seemed all knees and elbows whenever she moved. She said, “You’re not from the tanks, then? No, I can see you’re not. Well, the gang wars are heating up. It’s funny. You live in the tanks, you think: what did the police ever do for me? Beat you up, smash your teeth, catch you up in their raids. But now, with no police, there’s nothing to stop the gangs but each other. So they try to spread out. People were getting snatched up and reprogrammed all over the place. You don’t watch out, you find yourself being rude girl for some hoodlum you never even heard of before. Only now, you’re willing to die for him. Very bad. Especially now that everybody has these rifles; have you seen them? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Everybody?” Treece said. “I noticed your guard had one. She shouldn’t. Those are supposed to be restricted to programmed samurai.”

  The villagers laughed. There were some eight people sitting about by now. “There must be hundred rifles in the tanks.” Fu-ya explained. “Maybe even two hundred. It’s a very bad problem.” He had seated Billy in his lap. Now he looked down and said, “Hey, look at that. That is very good.”

  Billy Defector did not look up. He was drawing circuits on the paper, long glowing lines and intersections like cool rivers of light, straight and pure and enigmatic.

  Somewhere, Wyeth was fighting a wizard’s duel with the Comprise. Possibly it was already over. But here, sitting and chatting and laughing, all was peace. A girl who ducked her head, coloring, whenever spoken to, brought out a flute and began to play. Somebody produced two short metal pipes and provided percussion. Soon a band had coalesced and people were dancing.

  Rebel didn’t join in. To her way of thinking, zero-gravity dancing was like zero-gravity sex, a lightweight version of the real thing. While Billy drew his circuits, she attached him to a programmer. “Don’t wriggle,” she said, and put him in a trance. Her hands slid down the wafers, and she lost herself in the delicate art of editing. This was the kind of work both her personas enjoyed, and for at least an hour she had no clear idea who she was. Then her hands hovered over the wafers in indecision and drew away. With a sigh, she removed the adhesion disks. Billy stirred. Fu-ya’s woman, Gretzin, said, “Is your little boy all right now?”

  “I’m just the doctor,” Eucrasia said irritably. “The little boy doesn’t belong to me or anybody else for that matter. He’s an orphan, I guess.” Then, with a gentle internal shift, she was Rebel again. “He’ll need lots more work before he’s all right. I only dared make minor changes, because he’s so fragile. There’s only a trace of personality to work on—just the memory of a hallucinogenic persona, really. It’s not the easiest thing to set right.”

  Fu-ya swam up and lifted the child away. “Come on, Billy. I’ll show you how to fold a paper bird.”

  Gretzin stared after the two. “I didn’t really think he was your little boy. I just kind of hoped.” She snorted. “Paper birds!”

  The sheraton was a mess. Uprooted trees floated over drowned parasols in the ponds. Rebel skirted a pile of broken glass. She trailed a finger along a wall, and it came up stained with soot. “Where’s Billy?” Wyeth asked, coming up on her suddenly.

  “I found a couple in the orchid and hired them to look after him. He’s staying in their village.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I thought they’d be good for him. A little quiet living should strengthen his sense of identity enough for me to try a bit more editing.” They matched strides. “Oh hell, Billy took a shine to Fu-ya, and when I tried to take him away, he started screaming hysterically. I was afraid if I separated them his emotions might run out of control and collapse what little mental structure he has.”

  “Hmmm.” They stepped around a team of wallknobbers, gilders, and scrimshaw artisans. Workers were everywhere, making repairs. “Look here. I want to show you something.”

  A morgue had been set up in the conference room, the corpses laid out on gurneys by the goldfish stream. There were seven cadavers, all Comprise. “I panicked them into moving early,” Wyeth said. “That’s one reason the casualties were so low. They knew they couldn’t take over the sheraton permanently and that they’d have to pay reparations for any humans killed.” He stopped at a Comprise corpse whose torso was cut open and the skin peeled back. Rebel looked down at the glistening organs, horrified and fascinated. Metal glinted here and there. Wyeth picked up a hand and turned it over. “See here? Retractable patch leads inside each fingertip. All she had to do was bite off a bit of callus on the tip and she could interface with anything. There are three separate rectenna systems buried under the skin, and a second spine with God knows how many gigabytes of storage capacity.”

  “My God,” Rebel said. “Are they all like this?”

  “No, just five. We call them lockpicks because their sole purpose is to break into computer systems. The Comprise hide a few inside every group they send into human space. They were easy to spot because they’re carrying all that metal within them. As soon as we took them out, the fight was over.”

  “Killed.” Constance limped in, trailed closely by Freeboy. He had a dirty bandage on his head. “You did not ‘take them out,’ Mr. Wyeth. You killed them.” Several embroidererd panels in her clothing were stained; she reeked of smoke and wrath.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be tending to the shrubberies, Moor-fields?”

  “My people are taking care of that. I want to know why you provoked this senseless, brutal battle.”

  A tech reached into an access hatch by the foot of the bridge. The sky flickered and went on. Blue, with big, fleecy clouds.

  “Oh, hardly a battle.” Wyeth smiled. “And far from senseless. It certainly took the starch out of the Comprise. Half of them are down with shyapple sickness. Also, I learned a great deal from this incident. Means of fighting the Comprise, which I’ve taken
the liberty of taping and sending to every major public data bank in the System. They’ll be there when they’re needed.” His voice switched from warrior to mystic. “Someday, humanity is going to have to fight the Comprise. Someday the conflict will be out in the open. And when that happens, we’ll be the tiniest bit better prepared because of today.”

  “You sound like you’re looking forward to a nice, big war.”

  “No, but unlike you, I see it as inevitable. Ah, here are the lawyers.” Two men in legalface, one People’s, the other Kluster, strode up. Wyeth bowed to Rebel. “Shall we?”

  They crossed the bridge and walked in among the Comprise. First came Wyeth, arm in arm with Rebel, and then the lawyers. Constance hesitated, then followed, and Freeboy scuttled after her. Four samurai brought up the rear. “Over the Rubicon,” Wyeth said cheerily, but to Rebel it felt more like crossing the Styx, to the land where the bloodless dead dwell in perfect equality. The Comprise parted for them, closing back around the group as it passed. Hundreds of eyes stared at them.

  Wyeth chose a man at random, grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “You. Can you talk? We’ll talk through this individual.”

  “That is not necessary,” the Comprise said.

  “That’s how we’ll do it anyway. I’m going to ask you some questions. If I am not satisfied with the answers, I’ll charge you with violent aggression and see to it that the four hundred however many of you never rejoin Earth again. Do you want that? I can do that to you.”

  The Comprise stirred uneasily. “You manipulated us into attacking you.”

  “So what?” Wyeth turned to his lawyers. “Does that make any difference legally?”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  Rebel touched her bracelet and saw the tangled lines of energy linking the Comprise in a shimmering haze. Electromagnetic fields rose from them like wings. Directional beams blinked on and off, converging upon the spokesman. He flashed bright as the eye of a coiled dragon. “Ask, then.”

  “What does the Comprise want?’

  Almost scornfully, the Comprise said, “What does any organism want? To live, to grow, and to employ one’s abilities constructively.”

  “I was thinking of something a little less sweeping. Why did you want the shyapples so badly? You almost killed young Freeboy here, trying to get information he didn’t even have. What information were you hoping to find? What did you want that badly?’

  “Earth is interested in all new developments in the mind arts.”

  “Answers,” Wyeth said grimly.

  Again the Comprise shifted in agitation. Individuals jostled against each other; heads turned at random. Several cried out. “We …” the spokesman began. He paused as the interactive fields shifted configurations wildly, withdrew, and then closed in about him. “We seek integrity. We seek a means of maintaining our identity as Comprise when we are separated from Earth.”

  “Integrity? I don’t understand.”

  “Away from Earth, we are cut off, orphaned,” the Comprise said. “We lose identity. You could not understand. Our sense of being Earth fades and shifts. We become Other. You would say individual. We do not desire this. It is painful to us.”

  “Ah,” said Wyeth. “Now that is interesting.”

  “Are you satisfied now?” Constance demanded. Wyeth looked at her. “You’ve been torturing this creature for your own … your own paranoid fantasies, that’s all. You are a dangerous man, Mr. Wyeth, a machine running out of control and causing pain for no purpose at all.”

  Rebel reached out, touched the spokeman’s wrist. “Tell me something,” she said hesitantly. “Is Wyeth right? Are humans and Comprise really enemies?”

  “Of course not,” Constance snapped.

  “Yes,” the Comprise said. “We are by definition natural enemies since we compete for the same resources.”

  “Resources? You mean like … what? Energy sources? Metal ores?”

  “People. People are our most important resource.”

  Constance stood motionless, looking pale and betrayed. “I …” she said. “I thought—” Her voice was close to tears. Abruptly she turned away and limped back across the bridge, to the land of the living. Freeboy scurried after her.

  Not actually grinning, Wyeth favored Rebel with a nod and a wink. He turned to the Comprise. “Another question. Why haven’t you taken over human space already? You have all the resources of Earth at your disposal, and the kind of physics we can only dream of. Why have you stayed put? Why aren’t you out here among us in force?”

  The crowds of Comprise expanded slightly, then contracted, like an enormous beast taking a deep breath. “We are held back by the speed of communication. It is not true that thought is instantaneous. Thought is only as fast as our electronic linkages allow. Even on Earth this causes problems. It is possible for the Comprise to be divided against ourself. Thought moves in vast waves, like pressure fronts, across the continents. Sometimes two conflicting thoughts arise on opposite sides of the planet. The thought fronts race outward, and where they collide, there is conflict. It is like a mental storm. You would not understand it. But these are momentary unbalances, easily settled. The problem becomes crucial only when Comprise leave Earth.

  “Earth has tried creating colonies of ourself in near orbit, on the moon, elsewhere. But small Comprise such as we are sicken away from the communion of thought. We become indecisive, we make errors. The large Comprise do not sicken, but they lose integrity and drift away from Earth, becoming individuals in their own right. Then they must be destroyed. Three times it has been necessary to apply the nuclear solution. It is not permissible that the Comprise of Earth become Other. You would not understand.”

  “I see,” Wyeth said. “I think I see. That’s the reason for your interest in the mind arts, then? You want a means of keeping Comprise colonies integrated with Earth.”

  “Yes. For a long time Earth has sought the answer in physics. A means of instantaneous communication would bind the Comprise across vast distances. But the speed of light remains an absolute barrier. It cannot be cheated. There is no simultaneity in the universe. So we look elsewhere. Perhaps a solution can be found in the mind arts. Perhaps a new mental architecture.”

  “That brings me to my next question—”

  “No,” The Comprise said. “You are satisfied. Sickened though we are, we can read you that well, Boss Wyeth. You got as much from us as you had hoped for. We need give you no more.” The spokesman took a step backwards, merging into his fellows. Hundreds of eyes all turned away at once.

  For a moment Wyeth stood open-mouthed. Then he laughed.

  When they made love that night, Wyeth was awkward and he came too soon. He rolled away from Rebel, staring out the window wall. Faint strands of orchid floated slowly by as the sheraton revolved. “Wyeth?” Rebel said gently. He looked at her, eyes bleak and hollow. “What is it?”

  Wyeth shook his head, looked downward. “I have a sick conscience. I am not at all at peace with myselves.”

  “Hey,” Rebel said. “Hey, babes, it’s all right.” She took his hand, held it in both of hers. “Which one of you is this? It’s the leader, right?”

  “Yes, but we all feel this way. Constance was right. About the kid. Billy was perfectly content as part of the Comprise. Not happy, not aware—but content, anyway. And then I appear in a blaze of light and a rush of noise, and yank him into consciousness. Here, kid, have an apple. Bright and shiny. Let me make you one of us. I dragged him out of the Comprise and halfway to human, and made him into what? A crippled, crazy, unhappy animal of some kind.”

  “Hey, now, it wasn’t your fault he ate the shyapple. The Comprise did that. It caught us all by surprise.”

  Wyeth sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He sat there, not moving. “You think not? I waved that apple under their noses. I wanted them to bite. I wanted to see what would happen. But when I pried Billy loose from Comprise, it turned out he didn’t know one fucking
thing. So what good did I do? None. I acted blindly, and now there’s one more miserable creature walking the sky.”

  “I’ll heal him for you, Wyeth, I promise I will. I’m coming to terms with Eucrasia’s skills.” Rebel hugged him from behind, crushing her breasts against his back, and laid her cheek against his shoulder. “Listen, I can really do it.”

  Wyeth shook his head back and forth ponderously. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all.” She released him, rocking back on her heels. “Undoing the damage won’t help. The thing is, I don’t want to be the kind of person who’d do that to a child.”

  Rebel said nothing.

  “Do you remember when we first met? I was just a persona bum. Very bright, very good, but with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The one thing I wanted most was to have a sense of purpose. We collaborated on the tetrad’s design together, do you remember that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad. It was an exciting piece of work. We put lots of late hours into it. It was pirate programming, we had to do it in secret. Eucrasia came up with the notion of a four-faceted persona for the stability, the self-sufficiency of it. She was hell for self-sufficiency. I was more interested in it because it would generate its own sense of purpose.”

  Rebel felt irrationally jealous of Eucrasia, working so closely with Wyeth. She wondered if they’d slept together, and felt an oddly unclean excitement at the thought. “How?” she asked.

  “The pattern-maker. I figured he’d take care of that. He did, too. First time he came up, he asked what is the most important thing happening in our times? How can we contribute to it? The answers—well, you know the answers. Eucrasia was disappointed. She thought I was being grandiose and impractical, and she wanted to strip the program down and start over again. So we parted ways. I mean … the survival of the human race! What better cause could you have?” He fell silent, then said, “Only now I don’t know. Maybe what I really wanted was to have a good opinion of myself. I mean, I made me into a kind of secular saint, a self-contained guardian of humanity. A man with no doubts. But now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure of anything. I guess I don’t know myself as well as I thought I did.”