Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Ah.” Wyeth closed his eyes. “I’ve been waiting for this, Sunshine. I mean, I can see you’re not exactly happy here …”

  “It’s not a question of happy, gang, it’s … just so artificial here, you know? I mean, in the System. And being rich doesn’t help at all, it’s just like always being wrapped in padding to protect you from hard surfaces and sharp edges and any least contact with the real world. Listen. Come along with me, okay?” She put her cigar down (somebody removed it) and squeezed his hand hard. “Give up this whole business here as a bad job. Come away with me, babes, and I’ll give you the stars.”

  Wyeth smiled wanly. “Sunshine, we’ll be old before any of those dyson worlds reach even the first star. Even Proxima Centauri is a good fifty years away.”

  The elevator stopped, and they stepped out into a lobby with polished marble and coral floors. Orange orchids drooped from onyx pillars. “So? We’ll be old together under an alien sun. Come on, don’t tell me that your sense of adventure is entirely dead.” They walked down a long hall between rows of granite elephants.

  “It’s not that, you know it isn’t. But Earth is starting to slip into the System. They bought a dozen cislunar cities, and they’ve got an enclave on the moon. Soon they’ll be everywhere. Conflict is inevitable. I’ve got to be here when it happens.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. Rebel, we’ve gone over and over this. This isn’t just some whim of mine—it’s my duty. It’s my purpose.”

  “Wyeth, people don’t have purposes—machines have purposes. People just are. Come on, gang, you’re the mystic, you know that.” But looking deep into his eyes, she saw that he simply wasn’t listening.

  He was not going to come with her.

  Rebel’s face was numb, stung by sudden cold loss. Wyeth paused to touch open a pair of enormous burnished doors. They opened upon sculptured meadowlands, an impressionistic Jovian sky. Rebel ducked her head, stared down at her feet flashing forward and back. Wyeth ran after her and caught her by the wrist. She wheeled.

  “Stay,” he urged her. “We’ve been poor together. We can do it again.”

  Rebel shook her head sullenly. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all.”

  Again Wyeth hurried to catch up with her. “What, then?”

  “I won’t destroy my life for you,” she muttered. “I mean, you know me, I’d give up everything for you if I had to. But not this way, not just because you want to have everything your own way.”

  “I’m not asking you to—oh, what’s the use of talking? If I could, I’d go with you. But I can’t. It’s simply not my choice.” Rebel stopped before a second pair of doors, and Wyeth reached out to touch them open.

  “Thank you,” Rebel said coldly.

  Then, as Wyeth stared at her open-mouthed with outrage, she stepped inside and closed the doors in his face.

  “Stars, please.” Rebel lay in a mossy cleft atop a bare rock hilltop, wind playing gently over her. This was her favorite room, the only one, in fact, that didn’t strike her as being incredibly ugly, with the special vulgarity of new wealth. She’d had it modeled after the Burren. The sky blackened, then lit up with the kind of fierce starscape that simply could not be seen from the surface of Earth. The Milky Way was a river of diamond chips spanning the sky, each icy star almost too bright and perfect for the eye to bear. Rebel ground the back of her head into the moss. She felt as if every cell in her body was dead and ruptured, a small moan of grey agony.

  After a while Wyeth stopped pounding on the door.

  There were small blue gentians growing in the cracks of the rocks. Rebel poked one with a fingertip, left it unpicked. She wasn’t going to stay with Wyeth. She wasn’t.

  A shooting star sped across the sky, chiming softly.

  “No calls, please.” Rebel stared blindly up, trying to think. She could feel her life branching into two possible directions, and they were both bleak and meaningless. Another star chimed across the sky, then a third. After a pause, the Pleiades blossomed with dozens of shooting stars, tinkling like a celestial wind chime. “I said no more calls, thank you!”

  The sky jumped. Stars rippled, as if stirred by gigantic tidal forces, and then faded away.

  That wasn’t supposed to happen. Rebel sat up and stared uncomprehendingly as the sky folded into featureless planes—blank white walls, floors, ceiling, all so uniformly pure they blended one into another. In the center, kneeling on a small red prayer rug, was an emaciated woman in white. Her head was bowed, hood down, revealing a bald skull. Then the woman looked up. Cold eyes. A hard face painted with crystalline white lines.

  “You are a difficult woman to contact,” she said. “Your defenses against intrusion are almost certainly better than you know.”

  “Snow—or Shadow, or whoever or whatever you are—I am not in the mood for your clever, little games today, so why don’t you just go bugger off, huh? I mean, Earth’s already got everything it wanted from me.” Then, bitterly. “Everybody did.”

  “I am not acting on behalf of Earth.”

  “Oh?” Rebel said before she could catch herself.

  “Things are changing. You know that. Major political and cultural shifts are in the offing. One minor effect is that as Earth moves into human space, it values my network’s services less. At the same time, the new wyeths have been giving us a great deal of difficulty. We’ve had to become more discreet, less accessible. Less effective.”

  It made Rebel feel odd, knowing that Wyeth existed in a hundred temporary incarnations throughout Amalthea’s Bureau d’Espionnage. He was, she had learned, as common a tool now as Bors. It pleased Wyeth to think of himself translated to the status of a natural force, constantly harassing the Comprise with his blend of dry humor, fanaticism, and mystic insight. Rebel was not so sure. “Okay, look,” she said. “Just tell me what you want and what you’ll give for it, and I’ll say no, and you’ll go away, okay?”

  Snow nodded coolly. “That is fair. You must understand that what I and other members of my net value most is the merger of thought into the cool flow of information. At peak moments, one loses all sense of personal identity and simply exists within the fluid medium of knowledge. If Earth would accept us into the Comprise, we would go. But so long as Earth finds us at all useful as we are …” She shrugged.

  One hand slid from her cloak to stab the air by her side, and the sky about her filled with a montage of images from a few of the Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark dramas current throughout both Inner and Outer Systems. Here an idealized image of her served as altar for a goat sacrifice at Retreat. Here she was killing (with great zest and implausible weapons) an endless supply of island Comprise, rendered for effect into shaggy ithyphallic brutes with small red eyes. There, engaged in slow philosophical debate with Earth’s mediator—a young man of Apollonian proportions, both arms intact—at the down station hospitality shed. “We have analyzed discrepancies in these dramatizations, as well as in the many interviews with you and the other principals of your affair on Earth.” Here came Wyeth on a glider to snatch her from the path of a raging fire. She slammed a sword through an adversary’s eye, laughing, and leaped into Wyeth’s arms.

  “They’re not exactly accurate, you know, “Rebel said dryly. “Even the interviews were scripted by corporate midmanagement. For publicity purposes.”

  “I am aware of that.” Snow made an impatient gesture. “What interests me is the lapse that appears in your interview with Earth’s mediator when the visual splice patching is edited out.” The sky filled with a single scene (Snow retreated to the horizon on small insert), a jerky hyperrealistic front view of the girlchild speaking. This was from the recording that had been made directly from Rebel’s memories during proceedings in the Courts of the Moon. She saw the girlchild flicker abruptly to one side. “That gap there. We have run an integration of all peripheral data and are now convinced that what has been edited out is something Earth said regarding its rise to consciousness.”

&
nbsp; Rebel nodded. “Yeah, I remember that. The court ruled that it was culturally dangerous information and had it suppressed. Is that what you’re after?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Your wyeths and bors think of group intelligences as diseases that might grow to ravish the body politic of human space, with themselves as antibodies. But you yourself are a dyson worlder, you know what varieties of organisms may live within the human body. Not all are germs. Most are neutral. Some are even symbiotes. If we knew how Earth rose to consciousness, we might use that information to combine into small entities of, say, no more than eighty comprise each. A being of that size might live quietly within any major city, too small to be of any threat to your race. It wouldn’t dare grow any larger for fear of detection.” Now the sky filled with enormous images of glistening diatoms, paramecia tumbling by green volvox (spinning like microcosmic comet worlds) and trumpet-like stentors dipping gracefully in their wake, a playful collection of such organisms as might easily be found in a stagnant drop of water. “There is room in human culture for variety.”

  “You’re overworking the analogy a little,” Rebel said. “But okay, so what are you offering?”

  Snow returned to the center of the sky. Slice by slice, images locked into place about her. In a leafy niche in Pallas Kluster’s corporate kremlin, a fat woman with her face painted with the maintenance government logo was talking to a man with a simple yellow line across his brow. A bors. Within the local Deutsche Nakasone subsidiary, a woman painted bors was talking with a woman painted midrange planning. Another bors was conferring with the head of Wyeth’s legal staff. Bors himself stroked the thigh of Rebel’s chief of house security. “You have been led to believe that you have several months before being squeezed out of the corporation,” Snow said. “Not so. Even now the Bureau d’Espionnage is seeking your arrest for economic sabotage.”

  “Hah?”

  “The rebel mudlarks.” (When the ceiling shifted back to the adventures of her public self on Earth, Rebel said, “Don’t,” and Snow switched them off.) “Deutsche Nakasone has found that they’re not buying new personas.”

  Rebel started to laugh

  “You can say that this wasn’t your fault. That Deutsche Nakasone is paying for its own carelessness in including even a weakened version of your integrity when they copied the more superficial aspects of your personality—”

  “Oh, no!” Rebel kicked her legs, clutched her sides, trying in vain to control her laughter. “I wouldn’t say that at all!”

  “—but that is irrelevant. They’ve assembled the evidence, silenced your legal protection, bought out your samurai. If I didn’t need information from you, the jackboots would be here now. As it is, I gambled that I could crack your security and bought you a delay of four days. There is one necessary link in the legal process who is … perhaps ‘corrupt’ might be the best term. We bought her. It will take your enemies four days to have her impeached and replaced. That’s if you’re willing to meet our price. If not, I’ll free her from obligation right now.” Snow drew her cloak tight about her.

  “What do you say?”

  By slow degrees Rebel managed to calm herself. She lay hiccuping for a time, then sighed deeply and sat up. “That’s better,” she said at last. “I really needed a good laugh, you know that?” Then she wiped the tears from her eyes and told Snow everything she knew about hypercubing.

  “Ah,” Snow said. “Now that is interesting.”

  And without even saying goodbye, she was gone.

  “I’ve been an outlaw before,” Wyeth said calmly.

  “Well, so have I, but that’s not the point. These are your supposed allies that are going to be hunting us down. You’re not going to be very effective with a dozen wyeths on your tail. They know you inside out—you won’t have any surprises for them. Can’t you see that this changes everything?”

  “No.” Wyeth stood in the lightless center of a holographic model of the Smoke Ring Way project. Crisp monochromatic lines pierced the gloom, detailing current and projected construction. Yellow threads reached out from him to those klusters where sun taps were already in operation. The green stretches of completed vacuum roads (relays of hundreds of transit rings were needed within the matter-dense belts, so that traffic could be halted when a rock wandered across the travel lanes) reached almost a third of the way around the sun. Wyeth shifted slightly to tap a sonic spike and muttered a correction into it. Intangible planets shifted position. “We all do what we can,” he said.

  “You are so infuriating!” Rebel flung open the door, and light from the elephant passage flooded in, fuzzing the model’s finer lines. Dark shadow shrouded Wyeth’s face; his eyes were pools of black. “Look! I packed for both of us. If we leave right now, this minute, we can take along enough to—well, it won’t make us rich by anybody’s standards, but it’ll help set us up. Four days from now, we’ll have to take whatever we can carry on our backs. What do you think you gain by waiting?”

  “Four days,” Wyeth said. “Four days in which I can contribute a little bit, however small, to—ah, shit.” He threw back his head, staring straight up, and made a choked, gasping noise, huk-huk-huk. Puzzled, Rebel reached out, touched his face, felt wetness. Tears. She put her arms around him, and he hugged her fiercely, still sobbing. Rebel felt furious with herself for letting him do this to her.

  But when Wyeth stopped crying, he stood back from her and said awkwardly, “Ah. I’m sorry, Sunshine. I thought I had it under control. I’m better now.”

  Gently, then, she said, “Come with me, babes?”

  He silently shook his head.

  “I do not understand you!” she cried. “You’ll be leaving behind any number of wyeths in the service of the Republique—I’d think that would discharge any obligations you may have very nicely. Just what is the big problem here?”

  “The truth is, I’m of two minds on what to do,” Wyeth said. “No, I’m not. Yes, I am. The arrangement I have with myself is that I can’t make any major change in my life unless all four of my personas agree. It’s a wise policy, too. No, it’s not, I wish I’d never … Well, too late for that. Hey, let’s be honest here, I want to go with you, and the clown wants to go with you, and the pattern-maker will find purpose wherever he is—he wants to go with you too. But the warrior … No, I want to go too, but I can’t. I can’t. My duty is to stay and fight.”

  “You mean that’s it? One fucking persona won’t play along, and you’re letting it screw up both our lives? Come on, now! When have I ever had the luxury of being three-quarters certain of any decision I made? Why should you be any better?”

  Wyeth shook his head sadly. “I have to be true to myself, Sunshine. The warrior is part of who I am, and I can’t change that.”

  Rebel’s fist closed around holographic Mars. The image remained, glowing deep within her flesh, as if it and she were in overlapping universes, coincident but unable to touch. That sense of futility was returning, the awareness that nothing she could say or do was going to make any difference at all. “Well, I can’t change either, you know that? I’ve hit my limits for growth—right now, my persona is as good as frozen. It’s locked in with integrity, and I can’t get the unlocking enzymes this side of Tirnannog. It takes a wizard to brew them up, and they, don’t travel.”

  “Stay anyway,” Wyeth urged her. He smiled weakly, hopelessly. “I don’t want you to ever change. I love you just the way you are.”

  She covered her face with her hands.

  The ALI tagged her as she entered the Corporate Trade Zone.

  Rebel abandoned her landau at the transit ring—the corporation could reclaim it, if they wanted—and climbed into a cable car. She slid her passport into the controls, tapping into a line of credit that would be worthless three days hence, and the car began sliding along a long, invisible line toward the out station.

  The station was a traditional structure, five wheels set within each other, rotating at slightly di
ffering speeds to maintain constant Greenwich normal throughout. The transit ring was fixed within a stationary hub dock at the center, and the whole thing was done up in pink and orange Aztec Revival super-graphics. Conservative but practical.

  Rebel was looking through the forward wraparound when light brightened to one side. She turned and flinched back from the unexpected phantom of an old woman in treehanger heavies sitting beside her. “Aha!” the creature said. “I thought it might be you. Changed your name on your passport, I see. What the fuck.”

  “You startled me!” Rebel said. Then, somewhat stiffly, “Hello, Mother.”

  The holo grimaced. “I’m not your mother. Call me Mud. I’m only an ALI, but I have my dignity. You do know what an ALI is, don’t you? That’s Artificial Limited—”

  “I know, I know. You haven’t much time, so you’d appreciate me speaking up briskly.”

  Mud cackled. It sounded like a rusty tin can being crumpled between two hands. “Take your time. Hundred years from now, what the fuck difference will it make? Anyway, my memories are all recorded and made available to the next ALI down the line. So I have a kind of serial immortality. Not terrifically legal, though. If I weren’t safely ensconced inside a Corporate Trade Zone, they’d have me wiped. You can get away with murder in a CTZ. What were we talking about, anyway?”

  “Jesus,” Rebel said, impressed. She looked more closely at the withered image, at that flushed face, those watery, pink-rimmed eyes. “You’re drunk!”

  “Hey, right the first time. It was Mom’s idea. She liked the thought of having some say over how this place is run, but she didn’t want to get too serious about it. Said she’d always wanted to spend a lifetime drunk. I don’t have much real authority here, mostly I just pop up to look over anything interesting. So how’s with you, sis?”

  “Me?” She could see the station’s narrow outer sleeve now, as stationary as the hub, where the cable car dock was located. “Oh, I’m okay, I guess.”