Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  They went up the red rope to a nondescript court. At a word from Wismon, Maxwell led them within. It was quiet there. A man sat in the doorway of his hutch, eyes downcast as if lost in thought. He was hooked into a small transcorder unit. “Cousin!” Wismon cried. “Sam Pepys!”

  The man scrambled to his feet, bracing himself within the frame. “My Lord!” he said. “You do me honor, coming to Seething Lane.” He swept a hand at an imaginary table. “I was just now working on your accounts.”

  To Wyeth, the fat man said, “Samuel Pepys was a clerk of the British navy on Earth in the seventeenth century. A ludicrous little man, but able enough in his way. A bit of a diarist. The transcorder feeds him a wafer of background sensation. His only connection with the real world is through myself. He takes me to be his relative, Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. Isn’t that right, Samuel?”

  The man smiled gravely and bowed, obviously pleased. “Your lordship gives me too great a credit. Will you stay to dine? Mr. Spong has sent over a barrel of pickled oysters, I’ll have the girl fetch it. Jane! Where is that lazy slut?” He looked fretfully over one shoulder, setting the transcorder leads swinging.

  “It’s a simple enough delusional system,” Rebel said. “Rich people have been known to spend good money for two weeks of that kind of delusion. I’ve arranged for a few such vacations myself.” That had been during Eucrasia’s internship, she recalled. It had been dull work, cookie-cutter programming, but (because legally dubious) lucrative.

  “Ah, but always under sensory deprivation, eh? Otherwise small incongruities creep in from the real world.” A cat woman was exploring the court. She sniffed curiously at Pepys’ crotch. He didn’t notice. “Right in the middle of the battle of Thermopylae, a city cannister eclipses the sun. On virgin Arctic snow, a lone papaya glows with otherworldly light. Little by little your dream world crumbles into paranoia and nightmare. But the beauty of this system is its flexibility. It can justify any amount of incongruity. Samuel, I have noticed a great number of brontosauri in the streets of London this past week.”

  Pepys frowned. “Brontosauri, my Lord? The … ah, large, ancient lizards, you mean?”

  “Aye, Samuel, three in Whitechapel alone, and two more by the ’Change. Down by Saint Paul’s the streets are filthy with their spoor. What make you of that, Cousin?”

  “Why, that it will be a mightily cold winter,” Pepys said. “The brutes never venture out in such numbers be the coming weather fair and clement.”

  “I fail to see the point of this,” Wyeth said stiffly.

  “Patience. Samuel, poke up the fire, would you?” Pepys obliged, seizing an imaginary poker and stirring up the logs and embers of a fireplace that was not there. The mime was so perfect that Rebel could almost see his stuffy little room and feel its monotonously heavy gravity.

  Suddenly Wismon shouted, “Samuel! A coal has landed on the back of your hand. It’s burning the flesh!”

  With a shriek of pain, Pepys tumbled over backwards, waving his hand. Spinning slowly in the air, he put hand to mouth and sucked on it. At a gesture from Wismon, two rude boys steadied him.

  “Here, Cuz. Show me your hand.”

  Pepys extended a hand trembling with pain. An angry red circle swelled on its back. Even as they watched, puss-white blisters bubbled up on the inflamed spot. Wismon laughed. “Belief! Belief alone burned that hand. Think on it. It rather puts some starch into an ancient notion that all we experience is illusion to begin with, doesn’t it?” He stroked the hand lovingly, breaking the blisters. “But Samuel doesn’t perceive our illusions, only those that are pumped into him. All that stands between him and reality is one thin wafer of electronic London. Let’s see what happens when we remove that final veil.”

  Maxwell held up the transcorder for Wismon, who daintily took the wafer’s pull-ring between thumb and forefinger. “Samuel?”

  “My Lord?”

  “Tell me what you see.” He yanked the wafer.

  Pepys stiffened, and his eyes jerked open wide. Unblinking, they focused on infinity. “The walls! The walls fade like smoke! I can see through ceiling, rooms, and roof to the clouds beyond.… Nay, the sky too is become pellucid and the stars stand bright and stark.… But now e’en they too fade. I see …”

  “What do you see, Sammy?”

  For the longest moment Pepys was silent. Then, “Music,” he said. “I see the music of the crystal spheres celestial.” He began to cry gently.

  Wismon giggled. “Perfect madness. I could as easily have had him die. Come. This is only prologue to what I really wish to show you, dearest mentor.”

  They exited, leaving Pepys afloat in the center of the court, weeping.

  For half the length of the passage, Maxwell hesitated at each doorway and was waved on. Then Wismon nodded and Maxwell peeled back a sheet of tin, and they entered a courtyard. Again it had but a single inhabitant, a man. He had a bland face with an enormous beak of a nose. Perched on a rope, he seemed some kind of ungainly bird. As they entered, he looked up and smiled. “Hallo,” he said. “Quite a crowd.”

  “Yes, I’ve brought some friends to examine you,” Wismon said. “You don’t mind?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Question him,” Wismon commanded.

  “All right,” Rebel said after a pause. “Do you know where you are?”

  “This used to be Queen Lurline’s court. She’s gone now. I’m the only one here. King Wismon is holding me as an experiment in recursive personality.” The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth.

  “Do you know who you are?”

  “King Wismon calls me Nose. For self-evident reasons.” He rubbed his fleshy nose and chuckled. Rebel looked to Wyeth and shrugged. There was something askew in the man’s sourceless, irrational humor, but nothing in her or Eucrasia’s experience could explain it.

  Wyeth looked thoughtful. ‘Let’s see. You showed me that last guy—Pepys?—to demonstrate how perfect a delusionary system you could create. So this must be a refinement on that. What is a step beyond delusion?” He snapped his fingers, glanced at Rebel. “Reality!” She caught his reference: It came from something she’d said when he was new-programmed, and she’d wanted to strip his persona down and start over again. Delusion was hard enough to deal with, she’d said, but a frivolous grasp of reality was worse. “You don’t believe that what you’re seeing is real, do you?”

  Nose kicked his feet with joy. He had to grab at the rope to keep from floating away. “Oh, this is most entertaining. Really!”

  “Nose is a prototype of the perfect citizen,” Wismon said. “His true persona is entirely hidden from the outside world. His surface persona is a perfectly consistent game the submerged persona plays. He thinks he is dreaming. To him, his entire past is an irrational construct that’s just come into existence. Thus, he denies continuity but is able to act within it. He will accept anything, endure anything, for none of it is real. Which leaves me free to control his dreams. No matter what happens, he is happy to obey whatever instructions he receives. Isn’t that right, Nose?”

  Nose nodded happily.

  “All right,” Wyeth said sourly. “I’ll ask the question you want me to ask. Why are you showing me this creature?”

  “Oh, that’s the best joke of all. Nose, why don’t you tell us who you are when you’re not dreaming?”

  “Should I?” Nose laughed. “Well, what does it matter? My name is Wyeth. I was Wismon’s mentor some years ago, and now I am his enemy. That’s why I’m dreaming about him. He’s getting out of hand, I’ll have to do something about him soon. Possibly even destroy him. Maybe this dream will show me the pattern I have to act within.”

  “That was your mystic voice,” Wismon said. “Do you care to hear your other voices? I can call them up from the depths, if you like.”

  “No,” Wyeth said. “No, I … no.” He was ashen pale. “This is what you have planned for me, isn’t it?”

  “What are you two talking about?” Rebel asked. Wismon mock
ingly mouthed the words in perfect unison with her, but she finished the sentence anyway.

  “Please try not to be so obvious, Ms. Mudlark. My mentor has just realized that what I can do to his simulation I can do to him, access to metaprogrammer or not. He can be made into whatever I choose. But the joke goes deeper than that: Perhaps this man is not my mentor at all, but merely some poor fool I’ve programmed into thinking he is. Perhaps Nose here is the true Wyeth. Perhaps neither of them is.”

  “Wyeth is Wyeth,” Rebel said coldly. “If he can’t trust his own sense of self, he can take my word for it.”

  “Ah, but how does he know that you exist? After all, I control the dream.”

  Nose laughed delightedly.

  “What I don’t understand,” Wyeth said, “is how you’ve accomplished all this in so little time. You’re a brilliant planner, but you don’t have the programming skills to write up the personas. Where did you get the programmers? There’s months of detail work in these two characters alone.”

  “Thus we come full circle,” Wismon said. He flicked a finger at Maxwell, who disappeared out the doorway. “You have not yet mentioned why you entered my domain in the first place, but of course you didn’t need to. You wanted to recover the child-savant you snatched from the Comprise.”

  “Yes, we came for Billy.”

  “You never tested him for his aptitudes. Most careless. To me the possibilities were obvious. Are you familiar with the cant term ‘plumber’? It means someone with a natural bent for the mechanics of wetcircuitry. In this child, the instinct is squared, or even cubed. He is preternaturally talented, a superplumber, if you will. I need only describe what I want, and he can draw it up.”

  Maxwell returned, leading Billy Defector by the hand. Behind him came Fu-ya and Gretzin, and from the apprehensive looks on their faces, Rebel could tell they had been left untouched, so they could care for him.

  “A thought has been germinating, mentor, for some time, and I think it has finally come to fruition,” Wismon said. Maxwell handed the child a briefcase. “Billy. Bring up that map we made of my persona.”

  Billy looked to Gretzin, and she nodded. He touched the briefcase’s surface, and an enormous wetware diagram filled all of the court with lacy green. There were tens of thousands of branchings visible to the naked eye alone. “Test it one more time for a kink, would you?”

  Billy’s fingers danced. A small red cursor zipped through the court, following the major persona branches, then moved to secondary and tertiary circuits. It moved too fast for the eye to fix on it for over a full minute, and then stopped. The solemn-faced child said, “No kink.”

  Wismon smiled.

  “Well, it was inevitable that sooner or later you’d come to the conclusion that I’ve been bluffing,” Wyeth said. “But the fact is that I’m not. You wish to believe I am because you’re unwilling to accept me as your superior. But I could destroy you here and now with a single word.”

  “Then do it,” Wismon said.

  “Right in the middle of your traveling freak show?” There was an acid edge to Wyeth’s voice. “Come off it. They’d rip my head off.”

  Heavy lids crept down over Wismon’s eyes, until he appeared to be trembling on the brink of sleep. His every muscle froze to perfect stillness. Then, through lips that barely moved, he said, “Everyone here is to obey my mentor completely, no matter what he tells you to do. Only my direct orders override his. Do you understand? The two of us will talk now. Everyone else must wait outside.” Two rude boys took Rebel by the arms and swept her through the doorway. “Are you satisfied now?” Wismon asked. But Rebel was already outside and couldn’t hear Wyeth’s answer.

  Time passed.

  In the quiet of the corridor, the cat women prowled up and down the rope, endlessly fascinated by their eternally new world. Their movements seemed unbearably slow to Rebel, as if they moved through a crystalizing flow of honey. One of the rude boys broke into a hutch and emerged wearing a woman’s lace collar. He primped and postured while the others laughed. Every now and then one would glance at Rebel, wistful dreams of violence in his eyes. Nose chuckled to himself.

  At last the sheet metal door shivered and groaned and swung open. Wyeth swam out of the court and gestured to Fu-ya, Gretzin, and Billy. “Escort these people to the sheraton,” he told the dumb-founded rude boys. “The cat women can wait here.” He took Rebel’s arm and kicked downpassage. Maxwell stared unbelievingly after him, then dove into the court.

  “You weren’t bluffing, then. You really did put a kink in him,” Rebel marveled.

  Wyeth shook his head. “You don’t need a kink to destroy a persona, if you know its weaknesses well enough. Wismon’s blind spot was his conceit. He had to prove that he could best me on my own turf. It made him overlook the obvious.”

  “But what did you do?”

  “I snapped his neck,” Wyeth said. “Come on, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Behind them, Maxwell found the body, and screamed.

  It took a full day for Wyeth’s samurai to scour the tanks clean of Wismon’s creatures. In dribs and drabs, pairs and dozens, they were brought to the sheraton to be restored. The task would have been impossible without Billy Defector. Under his fingers, the elaborate programs needed to repair the damaged personas flowed magically into existence. Fu-ya or Gretzin could coax the child into working for two or three hours before he turned cranky. Then he would be allowed to play for a time before being returned to the task. Twice, he put in a night’s sleep.

  Rebel fine-tuned a programmer, slid in the therapeutic wafer, turned to the next gurney, and realized that they were done. She stretched, looking about the conference room. Where the topiary garden had been, Constance’s team had resodded the floor and installed a croquet lawn. An antique pink Martian sky played monotonously overhead. It had been forty hours since she’d slept last. “You know what? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of this room without loathing.”

  “I know what you mean,” Wyeth said. With a sigh, he slowly sat down. An attentive pierrot slid a chair under him just in time.

  “I’ve been cured of the urge to create new minds, too. I mean, just seeing the monstrosities that Wismon created.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s been rough on both of us. But I still feel that new minds are necessary if the human race is going to face the challenge of Earth. We can’t just walk into the future with wetware evolved sometime in the neolithic and expect …” His voice trailed off, and he slumped back in his chair. “Hell, I’m too tired to talk about it.”

  Gretzin returned from the, goldfish stream, where Billy had been playing. The child slumped in her arms, his head hooked over her shoulder. Seeing them both seated, she said, “You done with Billy now?”

  “Oh,” Wyeth said groggily. “Okay, sure. Why don’t you find someplace to put him, and then you can hunt up the paymaster and get your money. I’ll have them give you double pay. You deserve it after all you’ve been through.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gretzin said. “Tell you what, I’ll take Billy back to the village first and get his things. Fu-ya is there now, getting them together. Pictures and crap. Won’t take but an hour. I can pick up my pay when I get back.”

  “Fine.” Wyeth waved a hand of dismissal, and Gretzin left.

  “Be right back,” Rebel said, and followed after. She caught up to Gretzin in the lobby. Billy was asleep on her shoulder, looking like a shavepate angel. “Listen,” Rebel said. “You can borrow my broomstick, it’s as fast as any. I’ve got it tethered at the hub.”

  Gretzin’s harsh face twisted almost into a smile, and she leaned forward to brush lips dry as old leaves across Rebel’s cheek. “Goodbye,” she said, and stepped into the elevator.

  A few minutes later, back in the conference room, Wyeth straightened abruptly. “Hey! Why does she need to take Billy with her to pick up his things? She could leave him sleep here while she did that.” He pitched his voice for an intercom line. “Has the village w
oman come through there?”

  “Yes, sir,” a samurai replied. “She took a broomstick toward the orchid some five minutes ago.”

  “Damn!” Wyeth lurched to his feet.

  “Wyeth,” Rebel said. “Let her go.”

  “What are you talking about? That kid’s got a brilliant future ahead of him. It’d be a crime to waste a talent like his. We can’t let him grow up in the slums without any kind of training.”

  When they got to the orchid they found Rebel’s broomstick abandoned by its fringe. The path markings were gone. They were just in time to see a dim, distant figure snatch one last rag from its place and disappear into the gloom.

  The village was lost for good.

  9

  DEIMOS

  The geodesic hurtled toward Mars. In its last hour of travel, the stormy red planet grew from the size of a fist to larger than a platter. Deimos crept humbly toward the center of the planet, then suddenly blossomed, dwarfing and eclipsing Mars. To the party watching over the lobby intercom, it seemed they were about to crash into the ungainly-looking moon. Then the geodesic tripped a magnetic trigger and shot into the waiting transit ring. The ring accelerated the space through which it traveled to a velocity equal but opposite in vector to what the geodesic had.

  And there it stood.

  The Comprise began disassembling the ring. Within the sheraton the assembled employees, everyone from Constance Frog Moorfields down to the lowliest pierrot, cheered. A steel-pipe percussion group struck up, and the paymasters broke open their salary machines. Lids were yanked from troughs of wine. “Well,” Wyeth said sadly, “it’s over.”

  Rebel gave him a quick hug.

  A few minutes later a party of five citizens entered the geodesic to take possession. They wore cache-sexes the color of mildew, with matching utilitarian cloaks that were recomplicated with straps, loops and cinches, and knee-high gravity boots.

  After the delicate paintlines of Eros Kluster, the People’s paint seemed blunt and graceless—a simple green triangle covering nose and eyes. Under the triangles, humorless mouths. The party toured the sheraton in disapproving silence. At last their leader, a man named Stilicho, said, “I suppose it’s what we contracted for.”