Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Hush now,” Rebel said. She put her arms around him, rocking him gently. But they might as well have been in different universes. Eucrasia’s memories were growing stronger. Soon they would swallow her up completely, and then she would be no more. She wanted to care about Wyeth’s problems, but they just didn’t seem important to her.

  “Hush,” she said again. “You’re not alone.”

  8

  DELUSION’S PASSAGE

  Rebel visited Billy daily, after singlestick practice. But she quickly found that while she lived by the sheraton’s strict Greenwich time, the village ran on different, internal rhythms. People ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, kept to no external schedule. Sometimes she would find that by village time only a few languid hours had passed. Other times, days would have sped by in a frenzy of work and play, of long naps and small meals.

  One day she discovered that thousands of small spider webs, no bigger than tufts of cotton, had covered the orchid about the village like mist. In the filtered white wintery light, the children played a game with a rusting air tank. A child would leap into the court and bounce off the tank, kicking it toward the far side. Then a child from that side would jump out, trying to bounce it back. One girl got stuck in the court’s center, and was loudly and derisively called out. Then the game started over again.

  Gretzin sat before her hut, weaving a grass mat to replace a worn wall. Rebel greeted her, then said, “Where did all these spiders come from?”

  “Where do you think they come from? The tanks,” Gretzin said impatiently. “Lots of vermin been spreading out. You should’ve been here yesterday, there were blackflies everywhere. Clouds of them.” She put the mat aside. “Fu-ya’s sleeping. Hold on, and I’ll get your little boy.”

  A minute later she returned, hauling Billy by one arm. “I don’t want to!” he cried. “I want to play!” Seeing Rebel, he started to cry.

  Rebel felt an odd sadness that the boy didn’t like her. A cold touch of failure. “Well, that’s a sign of progress,” she said to Gretzin. “His temper.” She ran a hand over his head, and the delicate fuzz of new hair tickled her palm like static electricity. Gretzin had cut off his braid; possibly the children had been teasing him. “This won’t take long at all, Billy.”

  She put him under and went to work.

  An hour later she released Billy and called Gretzin over. “There’s not a lot more for me to do. His identity is a little fragile yet, but it’ll strengthen in time. Basically, he should be able to pass for human now.”

  “Pass for human, huh?” Gretzin said.

  “Yes, it’s good timing, too, since we reach Mars soon. I don’t know what Wyeth will do with him then.” She covered her uneasiness about the boy’s future with a smile. “I’ll bet you’ll be glad not having to worry about him anymore.”

  “Yeah. That’ll be terrific.”

  Being outside the geodesic after all this time was a shock. Some free-floating spores must have adhered to the hull before it was accelerated away from Eros Kluster, for it was now covered with great mottled mats of vacuum flowers. They were everywhere, growing in tangled heaps and piles. The blossoms twisted slowly, tracking the sun.

  The flowers had been scraped away from the airlock and for dozens of meters around, revealing a hull that was dull, pitted, and uneven. Scatterings of foot rings had been snap-welded across the cleared surface. Standing in a pair, Rebel felt a perfectly irrational urge to start scraping flowers. Her hands itched for it.

  Wyeth stood beside her, overseeing the departure of the Comprise. Almost half a thousand coldpack units were being lashed to a single jitney frame, layer upon layer building into a crude sphere. Inside those soot-black coffins were suspended the Comprise, throats and lungs filled with crash jelly. Spacejacks swarmed about them.

  “Hey, look.” Rebel touched Wyeth, pointed. Two unmarked silver suits crawled across the geodesic toward them. Among the carnival riot of personalized suits worn by the workers recruited from the tanks and orchid villages, they stood out as startlingly as a croquet ball in a case of Fabergé Easter eggs.

  The intercom crackled. “I can’t believe they trust you to coldpack them after what you put them through.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be checking how far through the hull the flowers have eaten?” Wyeth asked.

  The silver figures pulled themselves almost to his feet, slipped into rings, and stood. “That’s what I came to report. You’ve got four inches skin at the very thinnest. Nothing to worry about.”

  The spacejacks brought up a disposable fusion drive at the end of a kilometer-long connector rod and coupled it to the jitney, hot end away from the Comprise. They leaped away and (using long ropes) yanked the shielding. “Well, stay and watch the show if you want, Connie. Hallo, Freeboy. Still with us, I see.”

  “He’s as loyal as a wizard’s daughter,” Constance said dryly. An almost invisible plasma flame puffed from the engine, and the assembly started away.

  Three days, Rebel thought. Two to reach Mars, be intercepted and fitted with retros by People’s Defense, decelerate, and be unpacked. One day for the Comprise to build the transit ring that would bring the geodesic’s velocity to relative zero, leaving it at rest in Mars orbit. It wouldn’t take much of a mistake for them to miss the ring entirely, crashing the project and all its people right into the side of the planet.

  “They were as helpless as a vat of kitten embryos,” Constance said. “I can’t imagine why they trusted you. I certainly wouldn’t have.”

  “The Comprise is not human.” Wyeth’s mirrored visor turned toward her. “They don’t carry personal grudges.”

  Constance looked away, toward the dwindling coldpack assembly, then turned back and with sudden heat said, “I’m glad we’re parting ways at Mars!” She bent over to grab the foot rings, then pulled herself hand over hand toward the airlock. Freeboy followed.

  When she was gone, Wyeth said softly, “I’m going to miss that woman.”

  The next day, when Rebel reached the village she found it deserted. Spiders had shrouded the huts in white. A woven wall, ripped from its frame, floated in a silent curl at the center of the court. “Hello?” she called.

  No sound but the buzzing of flies.

  All the huts were vacant, their contents largely undistrubed. A brush frozen in a bowl of hardened ink floated by Fu-ya’s door. Trailed by her two samurai, Rebel looked down all the twisty paths that had been marked out from the village to private plantations, clearings, and the like. They went a distance down the red rag trail, and then the blue, but found nothing but more empty huts.

  Rebel took a long, shuddering breath. She felt her fear prowling through the orchid depths, silent and shadowy. “Treece, what happened here?”

  The second samurai offered Treece a bit of, blood-stained cloth that the flies had drawn him to. Treece brushed it aside, examined a fractured wetwafer. “Press gang,” he said. “Very slick, whoever they were. Took out the guard, surrounded the village, didn’t miss anyone. Put a compulsion on them and took them all away.”

  “Away?” Rebel asked. “Where away? Why?”

  Treece bent the wetwafer back and forth in his blunt fingers. At last he shrugged. “Well. Let’s go tell the boss.”

  “I don’t like it,” Wyeth said. “Look, none of us likes it, but it’s the only logical way to proceed.” Dice clicked and rattled obsessively in his hand. He threw them down, scooped them up. “We don’t know for sure that it’s Wismon. Let’s not kid ourselves—I haven’t had any news from the tanks in two days. Only Wismon could’ve found and silenced my spies.”

  They stood in the empty lobby of the sheraton. Wyeth had dismissed all his samurai and darkened the room so he could think. The only light came from the orchids outside. “What are you arguing with yourself about?” Rebel asked in exasperation.

  “Strategy.” Wyeth rolled the dice again. “I can’t go up against Wismon in my warrior persona. He’d be able to predict my every move.
The only way I can take him by surprise is to go mystic. Right?” He waited, and none of his other voice’s spoke up. “Good. At least we’re agreed about that.” He rolled the dice again.

  “For God’s sake, what is it with you and those dice?”

  “Random number generator. By randomizing my tactics, I keep Wismon from anticipating me. Already the dice have decided on direct confrontation on his home turf. Now they’re deciding how many samurai I take with me.” He rolled again, fell silent.

  In the dark and quiet, Rebel’s thoughts kept returning to Billy. His persona was fragile. Any crude attempt at reprogramming would destroy him, collapsing not only his personality structure, but much of his autonymous control systems as well. The best he could hope for was permanent catatonia. At worst, he might die. “They wouldn’t reprogram the children, would they?”

  “Depends,” Wyeth answered abstractedly. “Slavers wouldn’t need to, once they’ve grabbed the parents. But who can say, with Wismon? We don’t even know why he did it. My people tell me this is the only orchid village he’s hit. That’s not just coincidence.” He took a deep breath. “Well. Time to go meet the man.”

  Impulsively, Rebel asked, “Can I come with you?”

  Wyeth shook the dice, looked at them.

  “Yes.”

  As the elevator slowly rose toward the central docking ring, Rebel thought to ask: “How many samurai are you bringing?”

  “None,” Wyeth sid somberly. His mischievous voice came up. “That’ll sure take Wismon by surprise. I can’t wait to see how we’re going to handle him.”

  They rode broomsticks around the orchid. As the tanks swelled, they saw that the metal exteriors were covered with glowing lines of paint—gang chops, territorial markings, threats and warnings, a small propaganda war in graffiti. There was no traffic. Everyone had either fled or been impressed into the gangs. “I’m afraid,” Rebel said.

  Beside her, Wyeth grinned cockily. “Me too.”

  The closer she got to the tanks, the less clear Rebel’s motives for going were to her. She’d wanted to have a hand in rescuing Billy, but now that they were at the crunch point, that desire seemed sourceless and quixotic. She wasn’t exactly close to the child. Certainly he didn’t much care for her. So why was she doing this?

  Maybe because Eucrasia wouldn’t have.

  They swooped down on Tank Fourteen. The airlock’s outer doors had been blown away in some recent skirmish, and there were blast marks among the rust. But to judge by the way a few dimly-seen guards floated within, slow and unconcerned, the gang wars were obviously over.

  At the locks, bright-eyed women kicked out of the shadows to take their broomsticks and search them for weapons. The women were painted with bioluminescent tiger-stripes, not just on their faces, but down their bodies as well, and they were all stark naked. “We’ve come to see Wismon,” Wyeth said when one brought out a programming unit. “Tell him that his mentor wishes to speak with him.”

  The women glanced at one another quickly, uncomprehendingly. One smiled and licked her lips. She held up the programmer again, and Wyeth impatiently pushed it away. “Listen, your boss isn’t going to—”

  With a snarl, the woman seized his head in both hands and twisted. Wyeth grunted in pain as he spun about. The cat woman’s legs were wrapped about his thighs, and her hands cupped his chin. She yanked him back, and he floated helplessly.

  All this happened in an instant. “Hey!” Rebel said, and then she was floating in a similar hold, unable to talk and barely able to breathe. She tried to hit the woman on her back, but it was an awkward reach, and her hardest blows were soft taps when they landed.

  In a wash of horror, Rebel saw the cat women attach the programmer to Wyeth and switch it on. He stiffened. The device buzzed softly to itself. I won’t let them do that to me, Rebel promised herself. I’ll die first. She struggled in her captor’s iron hold.

  Those guards not directly involved watched with alert interest. They prowled restlessly about the lock without ever once exchanging a word; their silence was superhuman. Two almost collided, but disdainfully, carelessly, slapped hands together and bounced off each other. Finally a red light flashed on the programmer, and Wyeth was released. He floated dead-eyed and unresponsive.

  The women turned to Rebel.

  “Heads up, Sunshine!” Lashing out with one foot, Wyeth kicked the cheap little programmer from one cat woman’s hands, right into the face of the woman who held Rebel captive. For an instant she was free. Spinning around, she punched her captor in the nose, as hard as she could, and blood exploded outward from her fist. By then a dozen more guards had converged upon them, and they were both recaptured.

  One woman retrieved the programmer, broke it open, reassembled it. She ran a finger over Wyeth’s forehead, then brought her face close to his and sniffed his lips. She looked puzzled. Meanwhile, others had bound his wrists and ankles together behind his back and done the same to Rebel. “Wyeth?” Rebel asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh yeah,” Wyeth said. Two of the guards looped ropes around their wrists and kicked off. They were yanked after. “That’s my best trick. When we built me, I was given access to my own metaprogrammer. All the time they were programming one persona up, another persona was programming it down.”

  “Oh.”

  They were hauled through the deserted corridors of the tank town. Without the traffic continually sweeping them clean, the narrow corridors were dense with trash. The flowers seemed barely able to lighten the gloom, and there was a thrumming quality to the silence, like vastly extenuated echoes of distant bass rumblings. The stench of rot and decay was almost unbearable.

  They were taken to Wismon.

  “Ah, mentor! As always, a surprise to see you. What a delight!”

  The fat man floated behind a guard of sullen rude boys, his mad little eyes dark with inner furies. A thin string of saliva clung to one corner of his mouth, waving slightly as he talked. “How do you like my angelheaded little girls? Lovely, aren’t they?”

  “They’re certainly something,” Wyeth said. “What have you done to them?” Behind him, the women snapped his bonds and then Rebel’s. There were two pairs of rings by Wismon’s ankles, and the guards knelt within them, crouching at his feet. He reached out to clumsily pat one on the head, and she arched her back in pleasure.

  “I’ve increased their intelligence—they’re quite as smart as am I. Ah, don’t turn pale. I’ve also deprived them of language. They have no symbolic structure at all. They cannot make plans, cannot reason complexly, cannot lie. All they know is what instructions I’ve programmed into them. Isn’t that marvelous? They’re perfectly innocent. They act by instinct alone.”

  “They’re grotesque,” Rebel said.

  “They are very beautiful animals,” Wismon said reprovingly. “One of their instincts is to bring me anything out of the ordinary. Anything interesting. Are you still interesting, mentor?”

  “I’ve always wondered what sort of society you would create,” Wyeth said.

  “Oh, piffle. I’m just having a little fun. I only have three days before we reach Mars, isn’t that right? And then I’ll have to put my toys back in the box and return to a gentlemanly life of quiet comtemplation. The pity is that so much time was wasted dealing with factions of petty criminals that might more profitably have been used for my researches.”

  “You’re going to restore everyone you’ve forcibly programmed?” Wyeth sounded skeptical.

  “Oh, absolutely. Except for my rude boys, of course. I had them before all this began. And I think I’ll keep my beautiful little girls, how could I ever bring myself to give them up? And there are a few more that might prove useful in the future—but enough of that! I mentioned my researches? Well, I flatter myself that I’ve made some small progress. I have created a garden—no, a menagerie of new minds. Perhaps you’d care for a brief tour of the highlights?”

  “No.”

  “A pity. I remember a time when you wer
e not so scornful of scientific endeavor.”

  “I was young then.”

  “Wait,” Rebel said impulsively. “I’d like to see what you’ve done.” Wyeth turned to her, astonished.

  “Well! An original thought—you charm me, Ms. Mudlark, I will deny you nothing.” Wismon extended his arms and the cat women stood under them, each stretching a supporting arm across the immensity of his back. “Where’s my zookeeper? Call him to me.”

  A sullen rude boy ducked into an archway. A moment later he returned, followed by a young man painted for wetware research.

  “Maxwell!” Rebel cried.

  “I knew you’d have a spy in my organization,” Wyeth said with a touch of sadness. “Did you buy him or just reprogram him?”

  “Oh, I assure you he acted not for any ignoble reasons, but purely out of love. You do love me, don’t you, Maxie?”

  Maxwell nodded eagerly, face rapt. His expression was at once so ardent and so familiar that Rebel had to look away. “Lead us to your charges,” Wismon said. “I grow bored.”

  The party floated out of the court. Maxwell led, followed by Wismon and his cat women. They eased him along with feather-light kicks and grabs against the walls and ropes. Rebel and Wyeth came next, escorted by a guard of rude boys. They came to a confluence of passages and halted.

  “What shall I show you? I’ve arranged my creations by type. Would you care to go down the tunnel of fear? The straight and narrow way of discipline? Or perhaps you two lovebirds would enjoy a kick and stroll down lovers’ lane.” They said nothing, and Wismon flapped a bloated pink hand at one passage. “We’ll go the way of delusion, then. I have something I’m especially eager for my dear mentor to see.”