Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “I suspected as much.”

  He pounded a fist into his palm, chewed at his lip. “Getting down here has cost us. Drop artists don’t come cheap. We’re going to raid the Comprise whether Wyeth’s here to lead us or not.” Rebel nodded, not really listening. There was an unreal haze over everything. She realized now that she would never see Wyeth again. He had been swallowed up by the cold immensities of Earth.

  Standing under the deep Terran sky, with an infinite weight of rock underfoot and air aswirl all about her, she realized that it was nobody’s fault, not hers or Bors’ or even Wyeth’s, but just something that had happened. One man can only do so much. When he matches himself against something on the scale of an entire planet, he is going to lose so casually and completely as to simply cease to be.

  “It’ll take us five days or so to prepare our alternatives, and then we’ll move. But we still need a librarian. If you go along with us, I’ll get you a place on the lift back to Geesinkfor and standard pay. You can’t ask fairer than that.”

  Bors was waiting for an answer. “I understand,” Rebel said bleakly. “You’ve waited longer than I expected, even. Okay, I’ll do my bit. And when you get back to Geesinkfor, have somebody drag the stretch of the equatorial sea just out front of a dive there called the Water’s Edge. That’s where I ditched your crate of prints. You’ve done your best, and I’ll keep my side of the bargain.”

  Bors looked surprised. Then he patted her shoulder roughly, started to say something, gave up on it.

  He ran back to Retreat.

  The next day Rebel was feeding the goats when Li scampered up, all but squeaking with excitement. “Look, look!” Li cried, tugging at Rebel’s sleeve.

  Rebel slapped her hands together, wiped them on the front of her earth suit. Goat-tending wasn’t exactly tidy work. The pens were going to need a good mucking out soon. “Li, whatever it is, I’m really not in the mood for it.”

  “No, look!” Li insisted. Rebel turned to look where she pointed.

  Staff in hand, Wyeth limped over the top of the hill.

  13

  ISLAND

  “Rebel?” he said in a small, stunned voice.

  Then Wyeth shook his head wearily. “Eucrasia. Don’t be angry with me. Since I broke this leg, I’ve been seeing things off and on. I thought …”

  She felt as if she were a phantom wandered from the realms of shadow and suddenly confronted by mortal flesh. This man before her, with a face more worn than she remembered and eyes infinitely sad, was too solid, too real. She was numb and bloodless before him. Rebel tried to speak and could not. Then something broke, and she leaped forward, hugging him as tightly as she could. Tears tickled her face. Wyeth’s arms went lightly about her, staff held in one fist, and he said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s Rebel Mudlark,” Bors said dryly. “Her persona didn’t collapse after all.”

  Wyeth’s staff clattered to the ground. He was hugging her, making a noise somewhere between tears and laughter. Nearby, rooks scavenged the rock, strutting and pecking. A wolverine wandered by, stood watching for a while, then left. Finally Rebel gathered herself together and said, “You must be tired. Come on, my hut’s not far.”

  Bors moved to block their way. He cocked his head and squinted up at Wyeth. “You haven’t made your report yet.”

  “Later,” Wyeth said. “Everything’s set, it just took me a little longer than I expected.”

  Inside, Wyeth stretched wearily out on the stone slab. “God, Sunshine, it’s good to see you again! I don’t have the words for it.”

  “Hush, now, let me take a look at that leg.” Rebel wired herself into the library, hunting up the medical skills as she eased off his earth suit.

  Wyeth looked at her oddly. “That’s new.”

  “I’ve come to terms with the stuff,” Rebel said. Then, seeing his expression. “It’s me, honest and truly. Eucrasia is buried for good. I’ll explain it all later.” Slowly, lovingly, she began to wash the dust of travel from his body, using a folded cloth and a basin of water. She started at his brows, and Wyeth closed his eyes at the touch of the damp cloth. “Ahh, now that’s heaven.” He was looking better and more familiar by the moment.

  “So where have you been all this time?” she asked, not really caring.

  “Spying. Getting the lay of the land. Stealing a ship. I take it from your being here that you know all about the plan?”

  “No, Bors didn’t think I should have that information,” she said, running a hand lightly along the injured leg. He still wore five splint rings. “Poor thing. It looks to be healing up well, though. You must’ve had a good medical kit with you.” She yanked the adhesion disks.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Wyeth tried to sit up, was stopped by her hand on his chest. “This is going to be dangerous. He had no right to involve you without—”

  “It wasn’t his choice.” She was washing his torso now, those lean, hard muscles.

  “Oh, Sunshine, I really wish you hadn’t … This isn’t going to be an ordinary raid. You remember the shyapples? The three crates I bought in the orchid? Well, I drew off almost a gallon of their liquor. We’re going to go in among the Comprise and dose them with it, to see what happens.”

  She was humming silently to herself. “Why?”

  “It’s a rehearsal for Armageddon,” he said in his clown’s voice. Then, serious again, “It’s a weapon that’s proved effective against small numbers of Comprise. We want to try it out against all of Earth. See what kind of defenses it can mount against us. If it works at all well, the Republique will sponsor a buying trip to Tirnannog, hunt up the wizard who cooked up the shyapples, and order something a little more … directed. Something that doesn’t deprogram itself after a few hours. Who knows? Maybe something infectious. I mean, think about it. It’s an outside chance, sure, but we’re looking at the possible death of the Comprise.”

  “Ah.” She washed a little lower, a bit more lingeringly. “Just how dangerous do you think this raid will be?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Anything can happen. But listen, I’m sure I can get Bors to smuggle you into a down station-security is nil from this end. You could be cislunar before the …” He stopped. “I’m not going to talk you into it, am I? I know that look.”

  “Hey. It’s just you and me, gang. Right?” Rebel took his hand, squeezed it tight. “You think you’re going to pry me away from you now, you’re very badly mistaken.” She bent down to kiss him, Wyeth drew in his breath, and she smiled. “Should I stop?”

  “No, no, that’s nice,” he said quickly. Then, “Well, maybe you should. I mean, I’d really love to, but I just don’t think I have the energy.”

  Rebel put the cloth down. “You lie there, and I’ll do all the work.” She shucked boots and trousers, then knelt over his body, careful not to touch his injured leg. With one hand, she inserted him inside her.

  “Ah,” Wyeth said. “I’ve missed that.”

  “Me too.”

  Some time later, Rebel lay snuggled into Wyeth’s side. Her blouse was bunched up under her arms, but she put off tugging it down. The pinhole lights were off, and she lay in the grey air, feeling Wyeth’s silent tension. A similar tension was growing within her and silently heterodyning to his, until finally she had to speak. “Wyeth?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Don’t do it.”

  He said nothing.

  “They don’t need you. They’ve got your shyapple juice, they’ve got your plans, you can tell them whatever it is you’ve spied out. They don’t need you. The two of us could slip into a down station, go up the tube, and be orbital by morning. We could be up and gone before the raid begins.”

  In the gloom, the hut seemed to close about them, like a stone womb contracting. Wyeth cleared his throat, a slow protracted noise that was almost a groan, and said, “Sunshine, I couldn’t do that. I gave my word.”

  “Fuck your word.”

  “Yes, but it’s my duty to—” />
  “Fuck your duty.”

  Wyeth laughed easily. “I can’t argue if you’re going to do that to everything I say.”

  “Who wants to argue?” She struggled out of his grasp and sat up. “I don’t want to argue—I just want you to do this my way. I went through a lot to get you back, and I don’t want to see you run off and get yourself absorbed into the Comprise.”

  “Well, neither do I, Rebel. But you have to understand, this is the fight that I created myself for. This is not just my duty, it’s my cause. It’s my purpose. And if I’m not true to it, then what will I be true to?”

  “Next you’ll be singing patriotic songs!” She looked down on that smug, confident face and wanted to hit him. “God, but you’re exasperating. Sometimes I think Eucrasia was right. She should have unwritten you entirely and started all over again from the ground up. Then—” She stopped and eyed Wyeth with sudden speculation. She held up both hands before her face, thumbs tucked in. “Count four,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Open the door.” She swung both hands open, so that she peered between them, and said, “You’re in a room without any floor.”

  Wyeth’s face relaxed. His eyes were alert and calm and unblinking. “Well?” Rebel asked. Then, when he didn’t respond, “You were lying when you said you’d found Eucrasia’s kink and debugged it, weren’t you?”

  Wyeth nodded. “Yes.”

  “You know something? I wondered how you’d picked up the programming skills to outfox Eucrasia. I should’ve known you were bluffing. Hell with it. Metaprogrammer open? Construction catalog in access? Major branch linkages free and unimpaired?”

  “Yes,” Wyeth said. Then, “Yes,” and “Yes.” He lay before her, naked, and it was impossible for any man to be more at her power than he was now. She could do anything she wanted to him, from giving him a craving for chocolate to entirely rewriting his personas. She could tell him to abandon Bors’ raid and take her up the nearest drop tube, and he would do so without hesitation. If she wanted, he didn’t even need know it hadn’t been his own idea. She had the skills.

  But Wyeth stared up at her so trustingly that she couldn’t begin. “Close your eyes,” she ordered, and he obeyed. It didn’t help. She reached down to brush a wayward strand of hair out of his face, and then blurted out the one question she dared not ask. Knowing that he couldn’t lie in this state. “Do you really love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Rebel said. “Go to sleep.”

  And closed him up, unchanged.

  The next morning was foggy, which Bors welcomed as a good omen, but made the run across the Burren a nightmare. Two of the wolverines carried Wyeth in a sling between them, and it was not long before they came to the stretch of coast where he had sunk his skimmer. He called across the ocean, and it rose up, water pouring from the ballast tanks. While Rebel programmed a pilot and navigator, the others readied the craft. Within the half hour they were set. Octants of tinted canopy closed over the deck, and the skimmer stood on a single long leg and sped forward, above the water.

  They were passing a wide river mouth, not long after, when the fog parted momentarily. Under the cliffs, serpentine necks rose grey and mysterious from the water. They must have been thirty or forty feet long, topped by tiny flat heads. The creatures glided inland, as Rebel frantically searched the library’s natural history section to discover what they were. Plesiosaurs. Probably elasmosauri, to judge by their size. But according to the library, they had been extinct for millions of years, creatures that had lived and died in Mesozoic seas. “I don’t believe it,” Rebel breathed.

  Bors was standing nearby. “You know what I find most remarkable about them?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “No windows.”

  Rebel stared at him, then back at the plesiosaurs, baffled for the moment it took to realize what he was talking about. What she had taken to be natural rock cliffs were actually enormous buildings, tall and featureless, edging the water like clustered masses of quartz crystals. They had a pale, diffractive quality to them, their flat surfaces shimmering with faint pinks and blues, a suggestion of prismatic green, colors that intensified the longer she stared at them. Then the fog closed in and wiped them away. “Are they all like this?” she asked. “The Comprise cities, I mean.”

  “No, I think, they’re all very different from one another, don’t you? Kurt! Come over here and get your rock-running program scrubbed out.”

  By the time the fog had lifted, they were on the open sea, nothing but water to be seen. Notched away in Eucrasia’s store of memories were any number of rhapsodies on the beauty and lure of oceans, the romance of wooden ships, the glamor of the sea-rover. But Rebel could understand why People’s Mars wasn’t building any of their own. The ocean was choppy and featureless, offering the eye neither rest nor variety, with all the monotony of flatness but none of the stark beauty. It was ugly, and wasteful as well—all that water! Rebel was sick of it already.

  Hour after hour, the skimmer sliced through the waves. Sometimes Rebel sat quietly talking with Wyeth. Often, though, he had to go belowdecks to confer with Bors, and she was not welcome to overhear. Then she simply sat, watching clouds roll overhead and the ocean shift from green to grey and back as the light changed. Once they made a wide detour to avoid an undersea enclave of Comprise, but in all their time asea they never saw another ship or flying machine. Rebel remarked on this when Nee-C wandered by from a knife game she’d been playing—and losing, to judge by the network of fine slashes on the backs of her hands—with the other wolverines.

  Nee-C shrugged. “Guess the Comprise don’t need to move things around much.”

  “If it’s all that rare, then how did Wyeth manage to steal this boat? You’d think they’d notice it was gone.”

  “Ain’t no Comprise boat,” Nee-C said scornfully. “Look at the cabin hatch.”

  Rebel turned, saw an open hatchway with stairs leading down. Scowling, Nee-C kicked the jamb, and a hatch slid up. It had a corporate logo painted on it, a round shield with owl and olive wreath. “Pallas Kluster!”

  “Yeah, belonged to a batch of Kluster lazarobiologists.” Nee-C snickered. “They got them a long walk home now.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You know your problem?” Nee-C stood, drawing her blade. “You talk too much.” She strode to the bow, where the other wolverines were clustered, knelt, and rejoined the game.

  The day stretched on monotonously. Finally, though, a setting sun turned half the horizon orange and faded to night. Rebel slept on a mat on deck, alongside Wyeth.

  When she awoke, she didn’t need to be told they were no longer in the Atlantic. The water was calmer here, almost glassy, and low-lying land, finger-smudges of green on the edge of the sky, was visible to either side. Straight ahead was an island, overgrown with trees, dark as a floating clump of seaweed.

  Wyeth handed her a beer and some boiled bread. “Breakfast time, sleepyhead,” he said. “We’ll be at the island within the hour and you’ll need your strength then.”

  “Where are we, anyway?”

  Bors looked down from where he sat cross-legged atop the cabin and said, “We’re in a midcontinental sea. Technically speaking, it’s more a big salt lake than anything else. Earth created several of them shortly after it became conscious. Nobody’s sure why. The popular theory is that it was a mistake, a weather control project that went awry. The polar icecaps used to be larger, you know.”

  “You seem to know a lot about Earth,” Rebel said.

  “My dear young lady,” Bors said, and with that feral programming wild on his face, his exaggerated politeness was as startling as if a poisonous serpent were to suddenly rear its head and speak, “I’ve been studying Earth for half my life.”

  As the island neared, the skimmer slowed, sank down on its leg, and touched seawater. It lurched sideways as it was hit by the waves, slewed a bit to one side, then steadied into a gentle up-a
nd-down rocking motion. The pilot retracted the canopy, and salt air flooded the boat. Wyeth pointed ahead. “Take a good look,” he said. “It’s the only floating island on Earth.”

  Rebel tapped her library. The island was all one tangled tree complex, almost perfectly round, with a clearing for the down station at its center. It was new—thirty years ago, it had not been there, and nobody knew why the Comprise had decided to grow it. Staring up into the blue, Rebel imagined she could make out the invisible outlines of the vacuum tunnel, like twin fracture lines in the sky. The island beneath was all joyous green surface wrapped around a dark interior. Somewhere in its depths, a pair of large yellow eyes blinked, and Rebel shivered with premonition.

  Bors was handing out equipment. He slapped a small plastic pistol into Rebel’s hand and moved on. She examined it. A pair of compressed gas cartridges sprouted to either side of the rear sight, like bunny ears. There was a reservoir of clear liquid inside the transparent handle. She squinted into a pinprick nozzle, and Wyeth turned it away from her. “Careful. That sucker’s loaded with shyapple juice.” He showed her how to hold the pistol and where the safety was. “Don’t fire until you’re right on top of your target. Aim for the forehead, right where the third eye would be. The fluid’s bonded with dimethylsufloxide, so wherever it touches, it’ll sink right through the flesh into the bloodstream. But that shouldn’t be necessary. The pistol spits out droplets at a speed that’ll slam them right through skin at four feet. Got that?”

  “I guess so.” She raised the pistol, aiming at the back of Bors’ neck, and Wyeth yanked her hand down. “What’s the matter? I wasn’t really going to shoot him.”

  Wyeth rolled up his eyes. “Tell you what. Don’t shoot—no, don’t even aim that pistol at anybody or anything unless the rest of us are all safely dead, okay? You have no idea how easy it is to accidentally shoot a friend. Just keep that thing stowed away, and be very careful not to get any of the juice on yourself. We don’t want you snapping out in the middle of the raid.”