Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  Bors and Wyeth were discussing war and literature.

  “What you have to understand is the extreme speed with which the technology blossomed,” Bors said. “When Earth first became conscious, it used all its resources to spread the technology as efficiently as possible. The first transceiver was implanted in March, let’s say, and all Earth was integrated by Christmas. The first clear notion anybody off-planet had of what had actually happened was when the warcraft were launched. Like a swarm of hornets bursting out of a well right into their faces, as the humorist put it.”

  Moving her chair a smidge closer to the fire. Rebel sat down and drew her knees to her chin. She hugged her legs, feeling warm and comfortable and quiet, and watched the firelight play on Wyeth’s face.

  “Yes, but that’s irrelevant. There were hundreds of millions of people living off-planet at that time. You can’t tell me that they didn’t take their literature with them. If anything was lost in the wars, it was probably too minor to be worth recovering. The idea of major literary works waiting to be found—well, that’s pure fantasy.”

  “No, no, we’re talking about an extremely uncultured period of history. The first century of emigrants weren’t exactly Earth’s finest, after all. And romantic fiction didn’t come back into vogue until the colonization of the Outer System. Believe me, when you’re stuck in a tiny ship for months at a time without coldpacking—that’s when you appreciate Anthony Trollope. The pity is that by then half his works were lost.”

  “But the best were preserved. Those that people actually cared enough about to read.”

  “Not necessarily. Keep in mind that a hundred fifty years ago most data were kept electronically, and that the data systems were the first things hit by Earth. In that initial month of war, before Earth retreated back to its own surface, it injected AI’s into every significant data net in the Inner System. They all had to be crashed. There are even some who say that without Wang and Malenkov—”

  “I believe that Malenkov himself was an artificial intelligence.”

  “But a patriot.”

  “Oh, certainly.”

  “Well, anyway …”

  Rebel hooked her chin over her knees, let her head fall a little to one side, and listened contentedly. She felt happy and cozy and wistfully sad all at the same time. Savoring the fireplace’s warmth, she let the words wash over her in a homey, meaningless babble that rose and fell in soft familiar cadence. This was nice. Stop, she thought. Let this moment linger forever.

  “Here’s a sample of what I mean,” Bors said. “Listen:

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Nice stuff, eh?”

  “It’s terrific. But your point is?”

  “That’s from Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. But the only surviving version of that poem is exactly fourteen lines long, a descriptive fragment containing none of what I quoted. The critical work that scholars dug the darkling plain fragment from said that it was a major poem. You’d never know that from what we have.” Bors sighed. “It would make my career if I could recover the original.”

  Wyeth laughed and held up his hands. “I surrender! You’re absolutely right. There are doubtless thousands of manuscripts squirreled away in the dusty nooks of Earth that contain lost treasures. New Shakespearian tragedies, volumes of Bashu’s haiku, the complete Iliad, the interactive for Kpomassie’s essays on cultural responsibility.”

  “Now I didn’t actually claim …” A soft chime sounded, and the fire went out. The water stopped, and the entire fireplace slid into the wall and was covered by enameled panels. “Look at the time! We’re entering public sunspace now. Brace yourselves.”

  And then, right on cue, the fusion tug burned out and gravity cut off. In a swift, giddy instant of disorientation, Rebel lost all concept of up and down. A gentle noise puffed through the coldship as the lightsail deployed. Rebel’s stomach lurched, and she had to swallow back the vomit to keep from throwing up. Her fingers clutched the chair tightly, and that helped her to steady her. And then, of course, she was okay again. She released the chair and floated over it.

  “Well,” Bors said. “Since we haven’t the food, oxygen, or inclination to do otherwise, it’s time. I must say I’m sorry to interrupt this conversation, but perhaps it can be resumed a few months from now in Earth orbit. Coffins, please.” Gently, three black coldpack boxes rose from one floor. Rebel looked at them with something akin to panic.

  She wasn’t ready to go under yet, was the thing. To sleep away the months between planets.

  To die.

  As a persona bum—and Eucrasia had been a good one—she knew that her identity wouldn’t survive coldpacking. There was that moment on revival, the merest instant, when the mind didn’t know itself. Perfectly free of yearning and ego, it tottered on nothingness and then grabbed for identity and was itself again. Tests had been run, and the results were always the same. When there were two or more identities to choose from the strongest one always won. By wetdesign standards strength was measured by connections to memory.

  And Eucrasia’s memories were complete now.

  Wyeth turned to Rebel, started to say something. She shook her head, and he fell silent. She could see by the stiffness of his expression that he too had been ignoring the realities. Pretending that this moment would never arrive. He did not rise from his chair.

  “Am I missing something?” Bors asked, looked from face to face.

  Neither answered him. Rebel turned away and kicked over to the furthest coffin. She examined its fittings, slid open the lid. “Sunshine …” Wyeth began in a choked voice.

  “Don’t.”

  She slipped into the coldpack unit and lay down. The padding was stiff and grey, and the workings crowded in about her. She wriggled slightly, shoved back a coil of cabling that was digging into one hip. She didn’t look at Wyeth at all.

  She wanted to say to him that it had been fun. That she loved him. That she didn’t regret … Well, she wasn’t sure about that one at all. She regretted a lot of things. But she knew that if she once started talking, she’d never be able to stop.

  Most of all she wished she could at least kiss him goodbye.

  It was probably best this way. To go cleanly and suddenly, rather than to waste away with a slow rot that didn’t show until its work was done and everything that was Rebel had been eaten away, leaving nothing behind but a woman who wasn’t her.

  All she had to do was to close the lid. The needles would enter her then, in five places, the sudden sting of pain chilling down almost instantly into numbness, and then spreading. The crash jelly would flood in, and she would hold her breath for as long as possible, and then open her mouth and breathe in the jelly and choke, and then … no more.

  She looked up then, against all her will, and saw Wyeth’s face. It was rigidly contained, but underneath she could see the pain and horror. She thought he was going to cry.

  One hand rose ever so slightly toward her. He started to lean forward. She knew that if Wyeth were to touch her, however lightly, she would break into a million fragments.

  Rebel reached up and slammed the lid shut.

  11

  CISLUNAR

  She was cased in ice.

  The universe was perfect, chill and silent. Circuits shifted energies about her, unnoticed. She was at peace. A machine daintily slid a thin tube down her throat and drew the liquified crash jelly away. With a rumble like silent thunder, the distant ice was touched by warmth and began to break up. Needles touched her in seven places, and they stung. But she did not recognize the sensation as pain. She was soaring upward now, through arctic waters. She touched the membrane of consciousness, and it gave under her hand and, in a burst of white foam, shattered.

  Choking, she broke through the surface and was deafened by the bewildering crash of noise. The air was cold flame. It seared her lungs as she
gulped it down.

  Bors opened the coffin, and she awoke.

  “Hello,” he said, smiling. “Welcome to the realm of the living.”

  “I—” she said, and shook her head. “It was …”

  “Wyeth said you might be a little confused at first.” Bors offered his hand, and she floated free of the coffin. “Please open the hall. The Pequod has a small chapel—a meditation room, if you prefer. You might want to rest there for a while and collect your thoughts in solitude.”

  But she was not confused. She was simply too lucid to make sense. Everything crashed in on her with superhuman clarity, the angels of thought coming too fast and close together to be put into words. She was like a child born blind and come of an age to receive her first pair of eyes. Revelation dazzled her. “That would be nice,” she said. “No. I think I will.”

  Bors left her afloat in a small spherical room. The chapel had a projective wall, and within it a loosely woven all-gravity greenhouse lattice. Plants sprouted wildly from the interstices, leafy explosions of green, trying to grow in all directions at once. Two small brown leaves floated free, and she shifted slightly to share the space equally with them. They all three were peers. The wall was set for realtime exterior, showing to one side Earth in all its bluewhite glory, and to the other a weary old orbital hongkong. Plainsuited spacejacks swarmed about its exurban tanks, towns, farms, and manufactories. They were deep in the cislunar sprawl.

  Slowly she gathered herself. Something was wrong, but she was so happy about it she didn’t care. The promise of freedom bubbled like laughter in her veins. All of Eucrasia’s memories, and the hardpacketed few of Rebel’s that had been used to brace the persona, were locked firmly into place, along with one that belonged to both of them: that ecstatic moment when Rebel had filled Eucrasia’s brain and in joyous excess of purpose upended a glass over the programmer. She knew now that she had done that because she was a wizard’s daughter, and she understood what that meant. The light of that bright instant when the water writhed in the air like a diamond dragon still blinded her to her purpose, but that didn’t matter. She knew something far more important.

  She was still Rebel.

  “Where’s Wyeth?” She kicked into the common room. “I’ve got to talk to him. It’s important.” It was hard to keep from singing.

  Bors was floating alongside a cabinet, checking inventory. He glanced up, startled, in the act of returning a watercolor to its folder. Carefully, he put the folder into a thin drawer and slid the drawer shut. He switched off his notepad and stuck it in a vest pocket. “Well …” he began.

  “This is … this is better than being born!” She touched a wall and, laughing, spun herself drunkenly in the air. She knew with all the certainty of years of training that waking up as Rebel was impossible, a blatant absurdity. There was no way the treehangers could create a persona that could survive coldpacking. But when a miracle is dumped in your lap, you don’t complain. “Where’s Wyeth? Is he sleeping? Wake the bugger up!”

  “Um.” Bors coughed into his fist. “You, uh, you do realize that he didn’t want to be present when you woke up?”

  “Of course he didn’t. I know that,” Rebel said impatiently.

  “Please lock up the cabinet. You see, he arranged with me to awaken you a day later than him. He’s gone now.”

  “Gone?” It was as if the colors had suddenly been drained from everything, leaving the air faintly chill. “Gone where?”

  Looking politely embarrassed, Bors murmured, “I really have no idea.”

  Geesink for was an antiquated Bernal sphere, with window rings running about the rotational poles. The hongkong’s windows and mirrors hadn’t been cleaned in years, and the interior was sunk in twilight gloom. But half the chillers were down, due to decreased maintenance, so it all evened out. Clean windows would only have overheated the interior. Or so Bors explained to her, anyway. Some of the air scrubbers must have broken down as well, for the air was stale and foul-smelling. The buildings were all midrises, ten to twenty stories high, and had sprawled up the slopes from the equatorial Old City area, almost to the edges of the windows. “Who would be stupid enough to build a totally artificial environment and then fill it with buildings designed for a planetary surface?” Rebel grumbled.

  “Where’s your sense of history?” Bors asked. “This was one of the first forty cannister cities ever built. They hadn’t thought things through back then. Hey, look over here!” He trotted across the plaza to where a huge basaltic moonrock had been carved into the shape of a crude stone axe. Hundreds of faces peered from the rock’s depths with fear and despair, just beginning to melt one into another. He slowly read the archaic Spanish inscription on the base. “It’s a war memorial to the millions who were captured and absorbed. The Comprise set up a processing center right here, packed their victims into lifting bodies, and dumped ’em into the atmosphere. Very crude method. Less than half survived to be swallowed up by Earth.”

  Rebel looked uneasily about the dirty plaza. It was almost deserted. An ancient spacer in torn vacuum suit stumbled toward them, her hand out. A bored woman in police leathers watched. Rebel slipped an arm through Bors’. “Yeah, well. That was all a long time ago. Let’s get out of here.”

  Bors led her deeper into the Old City, toward the equatorial sea. The sea was a stagnant stretch of water, wide as a Terran river, left over from Geesinkfor’s early days, when the water was pumped uphull and flowed back in scenic riverlets. Half the buildings facing it were derelict, their windows slagged over, but among them were the grimy shops, bars, and blade bazaars, noisy-bright with music and holographic flares, that made up the local Little Ginza. It was here that the grey market wetsurgical joints would be found. A few furtive-looking pedestrians dotted the boardwalk. A motorbike zipped by. Rebel yanked Bors back from the roostertail as it slammed through a puddle, and said, “Okay, I’ve seen it. Now let’s find me a room.”

  They turned their backs on the black water and trudged upslope. A cybercab dogged their heels, hoping for a fare, but they ignored it, and it sped off. Here and there, blank walls and scuffed streets flickered with corporate propaganda. In those areas where the speakers hadn’t been smashed, the voice-overs murmured seductively. “You really needn’t be in a rush to move out of the Pequod. I could easily put you up for a week or so.”

  Rebel wore the ivory bracelet Wyeth had given her back in the sheraton. She touched it now, and the drab sphere transformed into a fairy city of red and blue lights, shot through with yellow lines of power. In a street overhead, she saw a centipede line of Comprise stitched together with interactive lines of electromagnetic force. And buried deep within Bors’ flesh, she could see the glow of subtle machines, waiting silently. Whatever they were, a mere dealer in vintage data didn’t need them. “That’s very generous of you, but I won’t find Wyeth sitting in your ship. Listen, if you see him again, would you give him a message for me? Tell him that I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

  “Will he know what that means?”

  “No, but he’ll be curious enough to find out.”

  They walked on in silence. Now and again Bors glanced at her, as if trying to read the thoughts behind her new wetpaint. She really did like Bors and wished she could trust him, but Eucrasia had been betrayed by friends too many times, and all those memories were hers now. She didn’t dare repeat Eucrasia’s mistakes.

  Turning a corner, Rebel glanced up into a nostril a hundred feet high, and staggered back a pace under the lightest touch of vertigo. The propaganda screens were capable of creating true grotesqueries of scale. Oceans washed over the building, and six implausibly long fingernails slashed across the screen to pierce a tomato. Eucrasia had been visually literate, but the corporate iconography of the cislunar states differed from that of the Klusters, and she couldn’t decipher an image of it. The tomato pulsed blood. “Who runs this place, anyway?” Rebel asked. “What kind of government has it got?”

  Bors shrugged. “Nobody knows.�
��

  They came to an obsidian building and stepped into its lobby. Security devices rose up on their haunches, tracked them with articulated heads, then sank down again. A fat man with brand new arms (they were pink and ludicrously thin) emerged from the shadows. His eyes were sleepy and his chest hair had been dyed blue to match his bow tie. “Yeah?”

  “I’d like a room,” Rebel said. Then, because she dared not give her real name but still needed something Wyeth would recognize if he came looking for her, “My name is Sunshine.” She shrugged to indicate she had no family name.

  The fat man grunted, produced a greasy plate of glass. “Put your hand here. Yeah, okay. Up to the third floor, take the door that turns blue for you. Sets you back forty-five minutes a day.”

  “That sounds fair.” Rebel took the crate Bors had been carrying for her. “Promise me you’ll drop by now and then to see how things are going, Bors? That would be nice.”

  He nodded, winked, grinned, and was gone.

  The fat man turned back. “Hey, was that a bors?”

  “Uh … yes.”

  He smiled. “One of them did me a favor once. Next time you see him, tell him if he ever needs a room, I’ll cut him a good price.”

  Rebel took a job at a place called Cerebrum City. Its front room held stacks of outdated wetware and a few racks of the current knockoffs, but all the profit came from a chop shop in the back. It was there that the cheap hustlers came, sick with paranoia and despair, for a slice of wetsurgical hope. They came in weary, sometimes trembling, to buy the courage, bravado, or even desperation needed to get on with business. Fugitives looking to change their flight patterns. Hard-luck street types searching for that winner persona that had so far eluded them. They also got the occasional adventurer, about to go down the drop tube to Earth, hoping to score big in some obscure scam, and these had to pay heavily, for what they wanted was by no means legal. By the time Rebel had dug out the last traces of fear or compassion, turned their eyes mad with cunning, and set their reflexes on hair trigger, they were as little human as the Comprise itself.