Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “I really don’t see the benefit of terraforming a planet,” Rebel said dubiously. “For that kind of effort you could build thousands of city cans, or seed I don’t know how many comets.”

  “A planetary surface is the best place for an expanding postindustrial culture. The air is free, to begin with. There is so much land area that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to charge rent. You’d just live wherever you wanted. Croplands in a functioning ecosphere are self-irrigating and self-fertilizing. In fact, everything takes vastly less effort on a planetary surface.” She laid down more cards. “Here is a vision of the croplands. Here is a vision of the treelands. Here is a vision of one of the larger lakes. The opposite shore is barely visible, it is so large. Within the lake will be fish, eels, mussels. On its verges, rice, wetwheat, cranberries. Here is a vision of the parklands.…”

  “That’s a really primitive structure you got there,” Freeboy said. “You’ve got a one-to-one transferrence of Terran ecologies, you see? But with a little thought you could adapt ocean fish, squids, maybe revert a few land plants to lakeweeds, set up a lichen bridge across the surface, and before you know it you’ve got a much more interesting and complex system going. Why haven’t your people whomped up something like that?”

  “Look about you,” Rosebuds said. “How many plants do you see? We cannot afford to devote resources to the support industries a bioengineering economy requires. And yet, as you say, the need is great. You will find that there is much for you to do when you take on citizenship.”

  “No, no, not me!” Freeboy held up his hands, laughing. “I’m going back to Hibrasil with all the money I earned on this swing through the System, and then some. Matter of fact, I just made a bundle on the currency exchange today.”

  “You didn’t exchange outside currency for People’s credit?” Bors looked concerned.

  “Is there a problem?” Freeboy asked, the smile dying on his face.

  “Our social systems are built to support the ideal of the selfless, communal citizen,” Rosebuds said. “Since the amassing of private wealth is destructive to the personality, we have ways of discouraging it. That is why, for example, we are assigned new living quarters daily. When you have to move all that you own once a day, you learn to retain only that which has true value. Similarly, our economy has an engineered inflation rate of ten thousand percent daily.”

  Freeboy turned to Bors. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that People’s credit has to be spent immediately. Otherwise it disappears. If you’ve held on to it for an hour, it’s practically worthless.”

  Freeboy stood, pale with outrage. “I …” He shook a finger at Wyeth. “All I went through working for you! And … I …” He choked and, turning away, fled.

  Turning over another card, Rosebuds said, “This is a vision of the living quarters we will share in the new civilization.”

  Wyeth reached out, put a hand over the cards. “What I’d really like to talk about is your attitude toward the Comprise. I’ve been watching, and it’s obvious to me that you’re not taking proper precautions against them. I’ve even seen some using your data ports. You obviously have no appreciation of how dangerous they are.”

  “The People cannot be in danger,” Rosebuds said, “since we cannot be corrupted.” She swept up her holographic flats and stood. “I can see, however, that none of you has a true interest in citizenship as yet. We shall discuss the matter further at a later time.” She left, and two more citizens came along to take her place and the one beside it.

  “Have you used the facilities here yet?” Bors asked Rebel, smiling.

  “Oh, God! The first time I sat down on a crapper and a man came up and sat down beside me, I almost died. And then he saw me turning red, and wanted to know what the problem was.” Rebel laughed, and Bors and Wyeth joined her.

  The citizens looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” one said, and when Rebel tried to explain, “But where is the humor in that?”

  Rebel simply shook her head.

  A few minutes later the new citizens took their trays and left. “People come and go so quickly around here,” Rebel marveled.

  “That’s because mealtime is the only chance they get to socialize,” Bors said. “Every hour of their day is spent constructively. If they’re not working, they’re studying. If they’re not working or studying, they’re asleep. This is the only chance they get to simply talk.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the subject.”

  “Yes, I do, don’t I?” Bors said, pleased.

  When Rebel led Wyeth back to diamond blue seventeen, he glanced quickly at his crates and said, “Snug, isn’t it?” Then, in his warrior voice: “Listen, I want to do a little poking around in the public data base, see how thoroughly the Comprise have infiltrated it. Why don’t you wait here for me? I won’t be long.”

  Rebel knew better than to argue with Wyeth’s warrior persona. She sat down in the sleepspace. There was nothing to do here save listen to the constant light-gravity scuffle of citizens in the hall. After ten minutes of that she began to appreciate the motivating power of boredom. Given the chance, she would gladly have volunteered to scrape vacuum flowers, just to have something to do.

  Rosebuds appeared in the doorway. She stood there silently, her cloak open.

  “He’s not here,” Rebel said grimly. “And you can’t have him, anyway.”

  Doffing her cloak, Rosebuds stepped within. She left her boots by the door and sat beside Rebel. “I didn’t come here for him.” She put a hand on Rebel’s knee. “The Stavka is very concerned about you. I informed them that you were brought up by a renegade, and they were worried that this may have made you anti-sex, possessive, and private.” Her hand slid up Rebel’s thigh.

  The woman’s tone was so matter-of-fact that it was not until she started to peel away Rebel’s cache-sexe that Rebel realized what she was talking about. With a startled cry she cringed back in the sleepspace, tugging her clothing up and raising knees to chin so that her legs formed a barrier between them. “Hey! Wait a minute, I’m not into that kind of—”

  “We could tell,” Rosebuds said. “That is one reason we sent you a woman. To help in your healing. You are depriving yourself of many modes of pleasure needlessly.”

  “Yeah, well, Wyeth will be back in a minute, so maybe you’d better go.”

  “There’s room for him as well. Perhaps that would be the quickest way of freeing you from your possessiveness.” She raised a leg and gently ran her foot up the side of Rebel’s body, tweaking her earlobe between first and second toes. “Pleasure is communal. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”

  “But I don’t want to enjoy myself!” Rebel cried. “Not that way! All I want is Wyeth and … and …”

  “This isn’t working,” Rosebuds said scornfully. “Look at you. You are so fearful. Do you think I am going to take you by force? Let me tell you something. I see how you sneer at the great dream of terraforming and at the People. You think our lives are constricted, but they are not half so narrow as your own. The citizenship program makes us full human beings. A citizen understands duty, sex, work, pleasure, friendship, and sacrifice, and welcomes them all. I have been down to the surface five times, and that is a very dangerous place. I have been as close to death as I am to you now, and I never once showed fear. You laugh at the People because we are all the same. But we are heroes, every one of us. I am one, and I know!”

  She pulled on her boots and left.

  When Wyeth returned, they made love. It was a sweaty, desperate lovemaking, and Rebel put all she had into it. I am not afraid, she told herself, and I am not missing any pleasure. At the moment of climax, as she squeezed Wyeth tight inside her and dug her nails so deeply into the flesh of his back that they drew blood, he groaned into her ear, “I love you.”

  “Hah? What?” she said blankly.

  “I love you.” Lying weak and exhausted beside her, Wyeth brushed her cheek with his own. “I really do.”

&nb
sp; “What are you talking about?” This was all too ludicrous to be real. “Which one of you? Or should I say, how many?”

  “Listen to me.” Wyeth rolled atop her, gazed straight into her eyes. “I … don’t think that love is a matter of persona, of personality. I think it goes deeper than that.” His fist thumped his chest. “I love you, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. I think I would love you no matter who I was.”

  Silent and unblinking, Rebel looked at him until she felt her eyes sliding out of focus, and blinked and had to say something. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  She didn’t accent that last word, but it hovered between them, cold and harsh as truth itself. There couldn’t be much time left to her. Eucrasia’s memories had returned, and the persona could not be far behind. And then Rebel would be melted down, back into the ocean of soul, and exist no more. “Why now?” she repeated. Maybe it didn’t matter to him who she was—Rebel or Eucrasia. Bitter thought.

  He read her eyes. “It’s not Eucrasia. It’s not this body. There will never be anyone for me but you. Listen. I know that you’re … going away soon, and I don’t want you to dissolve without ever knowing that I love you. I don’t think I could bear it. Is that too greedy of me? Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  In a storm of happiness and misery, she hugged him to her and held him tight so that he couldn’t see her face, her tears. When he started to talk again, she silenced him the only way she could think of, and they were making love again.

  All through it, she loved him so much she had to bite her tongue to keep from telling him. She was afraid that if she spoke the words they would split her wide open. She loved Wyeth more now than she ever had, and she loved him most of all for lying to her. Because of course she didn’t believe a word of what he’d said.

  But it was nice that he’d said it.

  That night Eucrasia appeared to her in the form of a rotting corpse. Her fingers ended in chrome scalpels, and when she opened her mouth, hypodermic syringes slid from the flesh like rows of lamprey teeth. “Go back,” Rebel said. Eucrasia raised a grey hand in graceful gesture, and razor racks stung across Rebel’s face.

  For a shocked instant, Rebel stood her ground, staring through a haze of blood globules, and then Eucrasia lifted her other hand, and Rebel turned and kicked away.

  She fled down an endless tangle of stone tunnels, falling up some and struggling down others. Time and again the necromantic horror behind her reached out lazily to slash the soles of her feet. She was trailing blood, and throbbed with pain from the knees downward. It seemed to her that she was fleeing through the arteries of a vast body, a dead body, a body of dead stone, and that the body was her own. With this insight, she found herself paralyzed and strapped to a gurney within a niche of New High Kamden’s rose maze.

  Eucrasia’s face loomed over her. The wetsurgical paint was cracked and dry, the cheeks taut, and the mouth slightly agape with the tightening of the flesh. Eyes dry and sightless. She leaned close and, breath sweet with putrefaction, spoke.

  But when Rebel finally awoke, all she could remember was that Eucrasia had told her truths that she dared not accept.

  10

  SHADOW OF SNOW

  The next day somebody shot a citizen.

  Rebel didn’t hear of it until dinnertime. She’d been straw-bossing a work crew fitting a new airlock on Tank Fourteen. It was one of a dozen crews, all but hers overseen by citizens, that Wyeth was coordinating, but the others were all off on the hull or in the orchid. Half the hustlers in the tanks came out to sell her workers spiced fruit, wine, ganja, or bootie, and it was a constant hassle keeping them out of the way. The day before, the macrobioengineers had killed the orchid, and it was starting to liquesce. Even through the rebreathers needed now that half the air had been pumped from the geodesic, the stench was appalling. It was late when she finally got the lock working, and she was barely in time to catch a hopper to Deimos. She stepped into the bench as Wyeth was finishing his meal.

  “Citizen got shot today,” Wyeth said. He gave her a hug, handed her a tray. A passing pierrot filled it with food.

  “What happened?”

  “The crew that was chopping the orchid for the protein refineries? They stumbled across a nest of bootleggers brewing up absinthe gin. Pretty marginal operation, I’d say, or they would’ve written that last batch off. Anyway, one of them had an air rifle. It went off.” He shrugged. “These things happen.”

  “Was he hurt bad?”

  “Here he comes now.” Two citizens took places at their table. One wore a chest sling, and Rebel could see the prosthetic lung moving within its amber depths. “Hallo, Cincinnatus. How’s the prognosis?”

  “No permanent damage done,” Cincinnatus said.

  “I am curious,” the woman beside him said. “This air rifle, is it a common weapon in the belt Klusters?”

  “No, no,” Wyeth said. “In fact, it’s extremely impractical in most Kluster environments—more a toy than a weapon. Its range is greater than a blade’s, but its accuracy is less. It’s cheaper than energy weapons, but less versatile. However, there does seem to be something of a fad for the things in the tanks.”

  Three more citizens came by, with Bors tagging after. He sat beside Rebel, braids swimming lazily about his head then slowly settling down. The static balls kept them away from his face. “This is my last supper.” He spread his hands to either side of him. “My coldship is being prepped even as we sit here.”

  “And yet, as you say, this weapon seems peculiarly well suited to the needs of petty criminals. Why did you introduce it in the first place?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Wyeth said lightly. His questioner frowned.

  Stilicho also joined the group. “I’ve been out examining the damage done by the weeds that came along with the sheraton. These vacuum flowers. I found them growing on tanks, on farm exteriors, on vacuum docks—there is even a patch on the surface of Deimos. They seem to be everywhere.”

  “Oh they’re tenacious all right,” Wyeth said. “Once they get a toehold, there’s no getting rid of them.” Bors chewed slowly, watching the exchange with bright interest. “Speaking of unwanted presences, Stilicho, I was browsing through your public data base yesterday and found it riddled with Comprise incursions. I hope you don’t keep any secrets there.”

  “The People have no secrets,” Stilicho said. “Freedom of information is a basic right of our society. About these vacuum flowers of yours. How are they controlled on Eros Kluster?”

  “Mostly they’re not. They’re kept down by dint of constant labor, but I couldn’t say that they’re controlled. The problem is that they’re bioconstructs designed for trash transformation. The idea was that it’d be easier to harvest and process the flowers than pick up and process the trash. Somebody explained to me once how they got out of hand. Something about single-organism ecosystems. I forget the details.”

  “Do you know any People’s law?” Bors asked abruptly.

  “I’ve seen something of it,” Rebel said.

  “The geodesic should have been examined before acceleration. These verminous little plants will cost us enormous effort to exterminate—if they can indeed be exterminated. Seeding our space with their spores was criminal negligence,” Stilicho said.

  “Somebody goofed, that’s for sure,” Wyeth agreed. “Similarly, I think you’ll be making a mistake if you don’t sterilize your data system as soon as you can.”

  “Fascinating stuff. Very informal, very final. Once judgment has been made, there’s no appeal,” Bors said. “Their trials are held at mealtime. A few members of the Stavka gather at the suspect’s table and ask questions. Witnesses drop by to chat, then wander off. By the time the meal is over—” he impaled seven peas on an eating needle and popped them in his mouth—“the guilty party has been condemned. And if he wasn’t paying attention, he might well have mistaken it all for casual dinner conversation.”

  Rebel glanced quickly at Wye
th. The expression on his face was suddenly careful. “Of course I myself had nothing to do with the exterior of the hull,” he said, “since I was responsible solely for internal security.”

  “A legalism,” Stilicho said.

  Cincinnatus shook his head. “No, that’s a valid point. What I’m concerned with are all these rifles loose in the tanks. I believe they could well grow into a major social problem given time. It would—”

  “Have you ever eaten meat?” Bors asked Rebel loudly. “I don’t mean fish or termite compress, but real meat. Dead flesh, carved from animal corpses.”

  Rebel stared at him blankly, and he jabbed her with his thumb. “People used to eat rabbits, I know,” she faltered. “And chickens.”

  “They still do in the Outer System. Had it myself. Dead chicken is mighty fine eating.”

  Several citizens glanced at Bors with distaste. Wyeth leaned forward and said, “I understand that on Earth people used to eat the major mammals—horses, cows, bears, apes.”

  “Apes?” Cincinnatus said, horrified.

  “Cows were more common, I believe. The cooks prepared them by hand, first killing the cow with a blow to the head with a large hammer. The animal grunts, the knees buckle, and there’s your food.”

  “I do not think this conversation is necessary,” Stilicho said. “Certainly not while people are eating.”

  “Oh, but there’s more!” Bors said. “Did you know that the internal organs were considered delicacies—the liver, the heart, the brains? You’d be surprised how little there is of a dead animal that you can’t eat. The pizzle was boiled and served on a bun. The stomach was crammed with a stuffing made of the minor organs, roasted and then sliced—there’s irony for you, eh?” Two citizens, faces pale, put down their utensils and fled. “Now the way they prepared lobster—this is especially interesting—they placed the creatures, still alive, in a large pot of cold water, then put a flame beneath the pot. Very slowly they brought the water to a boil. At first the lobster would skitter about, trying to escape, but then, as the water heated up, its motions slowed, and it died. When it was bright red, it was ready. To eat it, you had to crack the shell open and suck the dead meat out.”