Vacuum Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Just okay? Hey, you tap in with a line of credit as close to unlimited as anything Records has ever seen, booked through to Tirnannog, and Mom calling in every few days to see if you’ve gone through yet … shit, that’s going to be one fascinating meeting! So what do you want, anyway? Egg in your beer?”

  The holographic traffic markings were coming into focus now. A clutter of grimy craft waited outside the hourglass grid marking the active lanes. The grid’s waist threaded the transit ring, and its ends flared, restricting a flashy amount of local space. “Well, the money’s not exactly mine,” Rebel said. “Not anymore. But yeah, you’re right. I’m going home, I’m happy about that.”

  “Yeah, and you look it too,” the ALI said sardonically. “All hangdog and guilty-faced as sin. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, sis, but you’d better cut it out. Lighten up! Life is too short for this kind of crap!”

  “That’s easy enough for you to—” Rebel flared. She stopped. “Um. Hey, look, I’m sorry. I forgot that you’re …”

  “Temporary?” The old woman shook her head. “You’ve got the dog by the wrong end, sugarcakes. Everybody is mortal—what’s the alternative? Me, I like being alive, and if I only get a few minutes of it, I’m going to spend those few minutes just enjoying hell out of it.” The image wavered. “Just enjoying hell out of it. Whoops! The Reaper calls. Look, do me a favor, will you, kid? Try to keep your pecker up.”

  Rebel smiled weakly. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Mud faded away in midlaugh, in midwink.

  The cable car slammed into the dock and rang like a bell.

  A second later, the cable car was scooped up by a passing rampway and smoothly lifted and accelerated into the outermost ring. It came to rest, and Rebel stepped out. The car’s cybersystems began loading her baggage onto a trundle cart.

  A thin young man with golden skin and a little black mustache was waiting for her. He bowed and said, “Welcome to Hummingbird Station. My name is Curlew, and I am your escort.” Cute little piece of action, dressed like he was just in from the archipelago. From Avalon, perhaps, or P’eng-Lai. His eyes twinkled mischievously. “This way.”

  He waved a hand, and the baggage cart scuttled after them.

  “The out stations are Elizabeth Charm Mudlark’s legacy to the System, the visible structure of the Mudlark Trust, and a pipeline from the Klusters directly into the Oort Cloud,” Curlew recited. “Thanks to our patron’s generosity, the transit rings have cut the years of voyaging previously needed to reach the archipelagoes down to a matter of days. The Trust also endowed the corresponding in stations within the archipelagoes and the Titan-class rings which will accelerate selected dyson worlds toward nearby stars. This unimaginably expensive project cost her the entirety of a fortune that no ordinary mortal could simply have given away. But then, Ms. Mudlark is no ordinary mortal.” Curlew coughed, and in a more natural tone of voice said, “She’s very old. What else did she have to spend it on? You must have met her ALI—weird old bat, isn’t she?”

  “Uh …”

  They were passing through a long hallway decorated with enormous holoflats of the extrasolar planets. There were detailed shots of Dainichi, Susa-no-o, Inari with its bright moon Ukemochi, the Izanagi-Izanami system, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and Yatecutli, as well as more speculative images of Morrigan and the horned giant Cernunnos. The hallway emptied into a mall busy with shops and financial offices. Deutsche Nakasone had a branch right next to her own corporation’s local. Rebel tried hard not to look at either.

  “Doubtless you have already noticed how many concerns here have no direct relationship with Hummingbird’s transit ring functions, or even trade with the dyson worlds.” They stepped around a man sitting lotus on the floor, sticking long needles through his flesh to demonstrate a new line of yogic wetware. “They are here because Hummingbird Station was established as a Corporate Trade Zone. Here, away from intrusive government restrictions, private business can operate in a free and competitive atmosphere.” He winked. “They’ve all bought so much protective legislation in their home Klusters that they’re almost paralyzed with armor. On the bright side, as long as Hummingbird serves their purposes, the corporations won’t be so eager to get the Trust.”

  They strolled through a shop selling comet-grown blossoms twice Rebel’s height. “Don’t buy any,” Curlew advised. “They don’t last.” But there were also small black cigars, and Rebel paused long enough to buy one last one. It was a habit she was going to miss.

  A moving rampway scooped them up, and in quick succession they rose through three levels to the inmost ring. Vast expanses of open space, impassive people hurrying by. The air carried a surf of murmured voices, distant cries, nearby coughs. A carefully-calculated snowfall drifted through the warm air, flakes melting just as they hit the porous floor.

  With a grand wave of the hand, Curlew said, “These are the pioneers of a new age. Dyson worlds, it has been said, attract a special kind of emigrant, adventurers who like their comfort, starfarers willing to spend a lifetime in the traveling. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Also tourists.”

  A wave of incoming treehangers flowed by, several in life-support chairs, their gravity adaptations not yet complete. A teenager turned quickly to gawk at Rebel’s breasts, and she blew cigar smoke in his face.

  “We are now in the midst of the last-hour rush as the final shuttles arrive from and depart to the archipelagoes. Since Hummingbird Station is so close to the Sun—relatively speaking—it is inevitable that as it moves in its orbit it will slide out of position to serve as a transit terminus. However, Jackdaw Station’s launch window is designed to exactly overlap Hummingbird’s, to prevent a disruption of service.” He grinned meanly. “Of course, it’s not completely built yet. So there’ll be a hiatus of a few months before Plover moves into place. That’s typical for this operation. None of the shuttles they ordered when Hummingbird was designed have been delivered either. They’re using converted local liners. Have you seen them yet?”

  “Only a glimpse from the cable car.”

  “Decrepit things.” He wrinkled his nose. “They’re cramped and they smell bad. Sort of a mixture of stale sweat, cottage cheese, and oil. Most people prefer to go coldpacked.” He put an arm around her waist and said, “Listen, you don’t really want to hear the sightseeing chatter, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so.” He led her out of the snow to a grassy waiting area, with low benches and a scattering of lily ponds. They sat. “You have no idea how many times a shift I go through that line of drivel.”

  “Obviously you don’t intend doing this for the rest of your life,” Rebel said. “What are you, some kind of student?”

  “That’s right,” Curlew said, pleased. “Yeah, my family wanted to send me to the University of Faraway, for a degree in the mind arts, but I wanted to get into wetware design, so they’re making me pay my own way through. Do you know anything about wetware design?”

  “A little.”

  “It’s interesting stuff. They can do almost as much with their little machines as a wizard can with a modern mind art studio. But here’s the interesting thing, the two sciences are incompatible! They don’t even have a common language.” He shook his head wonderingly. “One of these days someone is going to merge the two, and then you’ll have a model that’ll really describe how thought works. That’s when we’ll really see things start to hop!”

  Two young men were miserably kissing goodbye alongside a baggage cart. The emigrant was already dressed treehanger. Rebel had to look away, it was so sad. “You’re an ambitious lad, sport.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say it had to be me doing the merging.” Curlew laughed. “But it won’t be long before anybody with a background in both sciences will be able to name his own price. Tell you something else, whoever merges the arts, it’s going to happen in the worlds. These System types are all so serious, and they all think they’re hot, but they’re not
so hot at all. The real action is out in the worlds. That’s where it’s all happening.”

  “Well,” Rebel said judiciously. “At least you get more variety out in the worlds.”

  Curlew laughed at her deadpan understatement, and after a second she joined him. He took her hands in his and looked her boldly in the eyes. “You seem a little sad, if you don’t mind my saying it. There’s still an hour before the shuttle to Tirnannog, and we’re not far from a branch Bank of Mimas. We could rent a consultation niche and …” He raised an eyebrow.

  As gently as she could, Rebel told him no.

  Watching his pretty little body walking away, Rebel had to sigh. First cigars, then empty-headed young men. Where would it end?

  Rebel stood on the empty platform. She shifted in her foot rings, stared off into a perfectly black sky powdered with stars. The air was chill here, held in by subtle forces that had been explained to her, but which she did not understand. Far ahead, in the center of her vision, she saw a small black dot swelling, swallowing up stars. Her shuttle.

  Out in the vacuum, a cluster of bright flowers grew from a holoflare support strut. They were tough little things, almost impossible to exterminate.

  She glanced down at the coffin by her feet. The rest of her luggage had been put through ahead. She thought back to that last argument with Wyeth and wondered if he would ever forgive her. She laid a hand on the coffin and felt a chill only partly physical.

  An emigration officer safety-leashed to a guiderail drifted up and stuck out his hand. She surrendered her passport and he popped it into a reader. “Rebel Eucrasia Mudlark,” he said in a bored voice. If the name meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. He rapped the coffin with his knuckles, made sure it was latched firmly to the platform. “This your coldpack?”

  “My husband’s.”

  “Aha.” The officer mumbled into his hand, then gave her back her passport. “Enjoy your trip.” He kicked away, leaving Rebel alone with her thoughts again.

  With startling irrelevance, she thought of all those wyeths and rebels she was leaving behind in the System and wondered if any of them would ever find each other. She thought she might like to have children someday. Real ones, not just copies of herself.

  Wyeth was going to be awfully angry a week from now when he woke up and discovered what she’d done to him.

  He was going to be even angrier when he found that she’d timed it so they’d just make Tirnannog’s passage through the transit ring. By the time he woke up, the last shuttle back to the System would be a matter of history.

  Three passengers took up rings on the platform almost overhead.

  He was going to be a lot of trouble anyway. A man like him was bound to stir up trouble wherever he went; it was in his nature. But Rebel didn’t care. She was glad she had invoked his kink.

  The shuttle was bigger now. It blotted out most of her vision. Rebel felt the urge to duck as it swelled up over her, but she kept her back straight.

  She felt awfully small and alone, and not at all sure she was doing the right thing.

  She was going home.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to Marianne for naming the Pequod, undifferentiating cells, and seeding a stagnant drop of water, to Jack Dann for the scripture from Pushkin, to Bob Walters for supplying plesiosaurs and designing Wyeth’s vacuum suit, to Greg Frost and Tim Sullivan for last-minute advice, to Tom Purdom for breakfast beer, to Gardner Dozois for the usual reasons, and to Virginia Kidd for patience. Financial support was provided by the M. C. Porter Endowment for the Arts. And a special debt of gratitude is owed Mario Rups, Ed Bryant, and Don Keller for irritating remarks.

  About the Author

  Michael Swanwick published his first story in 1980, adding him to a generation of new writers that included Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Since then he has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards, and received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years. He also has the pleasant distinction of having lost more major awards than any other science fiction writer.

  Roughly one hundred fifty stories have appeared in Amazing, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, High Times, New Dimensions, Eclipse, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, the Infinite Matrix, Omni, Penthouse, Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, Triquarterly, Universe, and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies, and translated into Japanese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Czech, and French. Several hundred works of his flash fiction have also been published.

  A prolific writer of nonfiction, Swanwick has published comprehensive studies of Hope Mirrlees and James Branch Cabell, as well as a book-length interview with Gardner Dozois. He has taught at the Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South writing workshops.

  Swanwick is the author of nine novels, including In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, The Dragons of Babel, and Dancing with Bears. His short fiction has been collected in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Imaginary Lands, Moon Dogs, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar Box Faust and Other Miniatures, The Dog Said Bow Wow, and The Best of Michael Swanwick. His most recent novel, Chasing the Phoenix, chronicles the adventures of confidence artists Darger and Surplus in post-Utopian China. He is currently at work on a third and final novel set in Industrialized Faerie.

  He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. In 2016 he will appear as guest of honor at MidAmeriCon II, the World Science Fiction Convention.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Michael Swanwick

  Cover design by Jesse Hayes

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3650-4

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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