Flowercrash

by Stephen Palmer

  “Who lives here?” Kirifaïfra whispered into her ear.

  “Strictly speaking nobody lives here permanently. Most of the people are based in the Shrine of the Sea, which is huge.” She pointed east. “It must be over there, behind the dunes. But there are roving bands of people who dwell in these buildings, living off the sea. If you look on the horizon you can see some of their fishing smacks.”

  “What do you know of these people?”

  “Not much. They are as isolated as the Sea-Clerics. Although there are tales of attacks, they will leave us alone as long as we don’t threaten them. Their lives are too precarious to consider aggression. No, it is the Shrine of the Sea that we must be careful of.”

  “Then we will be. What do we do now?”

  Manserphine considered. “Let’s walk towards the sea. We are looking for winter flowering blooms—I want to sift a few networks. Eventually I’d like to access the Shrine networks, but we’ll have to locate the right species first.”

  They began walking down the nearest street, ice edged though damp in its centre. Manserphine found herself jumping as reflections appeared in glass panels to their sides. In these mirrors they looked very small; dwarfed by their environment. They came across a few small flowers, but these were data collectors and had no screens. Plants here were prickly, pale, often succulent or cactus-like, but their leaves and buds glowed under the touch of Manserphine’s hand. It was something she had never seen before, and it moved her, as if they were affirming a connection.

  Soon she was looking down upon the beach itself, russet in morning light, with the sea rippling in a wriggling line. She looked to her left and saw a golden spire. “There it is!”

  Carefully, they moved towards it, until the whole Shrine was visible. Inside a salt-encrusted wall encompassing an area of six acres stood the Shrine of the Sea, a series of golden onions massing up to one vast central dome, from which the spire emerged. It shone. Windows and external doors showed up as dark dots. Behind the Shrine they saw the ends of jetties, and boats moored in an artificial harbour. Manserphine, who had only seen the place in pictures, was impressed by its grandeur. She looked down at the wall. There stood the single entrance, the black gate that was Iron Maw.

  “Look to your left,” Kirifaïfra said. “I see white and yellow flowers.”

  They crawled down a sandy hillock to the strip of foliage Kirifaïfra had seen. Flickering lights inside the giant mimulus blooms seemed to greet them, and again Manserphine received the impression, as if from the echo of a vision, that they were aware of her, responding to her presence.

  She thrust the thought aside. Time to explore. The miniature screens inside the newly opened flowers were insensitive to her insect pen, so she was forced to resort to the old standby of anther tickling. At times like this the network ecology could really annoy. Eventually, she had windows up that allowed her to view the types of information used and acquired by the less important sections of the Shrine. She noticed that the Shrine had been using great quantities of softpetal, but she did not have enough privileges to find out what they wanted it for. Sculpting of some description? She wondered where they found the stuff, and where the effluent went that followed its use.

  “This is going to be difficult,” she said. “To find out important things I would have to get inside the Shrine. The flower networks around here are just too strange, not to mention quiet because it is winter.”

  “Perhaps we could return in the summer,” Kirifaïfra suggested.

  Manserphine sighed. She did not regret coming, in fact she felt a connection with this urb and its lonely Shrine, a connection growing stronger with the passing weeks; there was an as yet undiscovered ocean within her. But there were too many obstacles here, and she was an outsider.

  But when five minutes later she noticed a sub-set of information refering to dresses, she learned a singular fact. The idea to create the softpetal impregnated dress had not originated in the Shrine of Flower Sculpture, rather it had been devised by Sea-Clerics and then shunted in disguise to Cirishnyan’s data beds. Yet another connection…

  “Hola!”

  They all span around. From the dune behind them came five women. Aitlantazyn had been looking down at the Shrine; now she turned around and flourished her scimitar.

  “Hola, zeema ssoo!”

  Manserphine pulled Aitlantazyn’s arm down. The women were dressed in sumptuous black cloaks and they wore silver circlets on their brows. These were cleric guards from the Shrine.

  “Tell them we’ll go away,” Kirifaïfra urged.

  Manserphine cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I can. I don’t speak their private tongue, only the dialect. This lot have probably never seen anybody from another urb.”

  “Kanka graya! Ye, te, zeema ssoo!”

  Manserphine shrugged, then held her hands out, palms up, and said, “We come, we stay, we smell the tang, we go.”

  The five women approached, frowning at one another and talking in their rhyming tongue. One knelt to speak into a flower, which she then turned to face them, as if transmitting an image. Manserphine did not like this at all.

  In a leaden voice she said, “If we are taken inside the Shrine it is not inconceivable that we’ll never leave.” She hesitated. “It happened to my great-grandmother. So my mother told me.”

  “Never mind that,” Kirifaïfra said, “how do we get away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shall I make a move?” Aitlantazyn asked.

  “No. Stay still. Don’t threaten them.”

  Manserphine began signing that they were from the north and wanted to return home. The leader of the group, who had spoken to the flower, nodded and smiled at her, a disconcerting action that made her falter.

  “Look!” Kirifaïfra said, pointing to the Shrine.

  From Iron Maw a single woman had emerged, and now she was running towards them. As she closed Manserphine saw that she was a tall woman whose tails of beaded hair swung around her head like angry serpents. She wore a rich blue cloak and under that a flowing, full-length dress like Manserphine’s; also a silver circlet upon her brow. She wore sandals, allowing a view of ten toes, six of which boasted a ring. A fierce woman, yet beautiful.

  Manserphine recognised her. “This is Fnfayrq, the Shoreline Cleric.”

  “The who?”

  “This is the public face of the Shrine. She’s supposed to take her place in the Outer Garden every spring, but she never does. There are only two Sea-Clerics above her in the hierarchy.”

  “Is this the end of us, then?” asked Kirifaïfra.

  “I don’t know. But at least I can talk to her.”

  Fnfayrq closed, then stood a few yards away. She stared at Manserphine, shock plain in her face. “You, here, so sea soon, when all is dark in the mind?”

  Manserphine was confused by Fnfayrq’s anger at their presence. It was as if they had dared to cross a line drawn in the sand. She replied, “We came to breathe, we live, we draw together, shore-sounds fading quietly to silence.” Manserphine hoped that telling the Sea-Cleric of their intention to leave Aequalaïs was not too forward.

  Fnfayrq replied, “But you, lover, you dive into us, you pour yourself into our minds, so sea soon?”

  Fnfayrq objected to her presence. Manserphine frowned. Why should her appearance cause Fnfayrq so much anguish? She began, “Truthfully, lover, all is waves—”

  Contemptuously Fnfayrq gestured for silence. Her blue eyes, now clouded, held nothing but savage anger. From the pocket of her cloak she pulled a bracelet, a coiled cylinder of dark silver set with amber, which she unwound, grunting with the effort. She walked up to Manserphine and looked into her eyes. Anger. And fear. Manserphine understood now that the Sea-Cleric was terrified by her appearance here. The anger was a cover for something deeper.

  Fnfayrq grabbed Manserphine’s hand and the bracelet coiled itself three times around her wrist, making her skin crawl at the slithering sensation. Its weight made her flex h
er arm muscles to compensate. She stared at it.

  Fnfayrq told her it would ensure she never returned to the dunes. And she could never pull it off. Manserphine just stared.

  Fnfayrq pointed north and spoke to the five guards. “Im ssaa, gu, tu!”

  As Fnfayrq turned and walked away Manserphine felt her mind change. The guards seemed like giants, oppressing her. She felt sick at having to stand on this ground. When the guards began to make north she followed, Kirifaïfra and Aitlantazyn behind her, expressions of confusion on their faces.

  Because she knew she was leaving Aequalaïs the pain in her mind was less than it might otherwise have been, for she saw the place now as a dead land of metal and mirror, fit for nobody. Tears of joy ran from her eyes when she saw a tunnel entrance, and she ran toward it, while the five guards pointed and sniggered to themselves. They stood still.

  But this was not quite the end. To her right she saw figures crawling along the streets. The guards turned to see where she was looking, and their smirking faces changed to faces of shock. The newcomers were mermaids, five of them, a merman bringing up the rear, each raising an arm to plead with Manserphine while pulling themselves along with the other. Their expressions mingled joy and fear. All were naked, but their skins and scales were coated with a thick film, colours swirling like oil on water. Manserphine stared at them, reminded at once of the mermaid of her visions. Suddenly frightened, she ran.

  With Aitlantazyn and Kirifaïfra already at the tunnel, all that remained was the final walk. The moment they were out she felt better. The dark cloud of suspicion that had settled upon her lifted, and she became her old self. But the memory of the place was bad, like a nightmare, and the mermaids, who before had seemed pathetic in their attempts to reach her, now seemed like venomous fish.

  An hour later they sat exhausted in the common room of the Determinate Inn. Manserphine flung her coat to the floor and wrung out the sopping edges of her dress, which had dragged through mud and water, kicking off her boots then tying up her dress to warm her bare legs at the fire. Kirifaïfra drank mead from a tankard, eyeing his uncle. Aitlantazyn sat silent.

  “How did it go?” Vishilkaïr asked.

  Manserphine held up her right arm. “I seem to have acquired a python.”

  Vishilkaïr came over to examine it. “This is unusual, very old… where did it come from?”

  “Sea-Clerics.”

  “This is ancient technology,” Vishilkaïr opined. “Not from the Shrine of Root Sculpture.”

  Manserphine agreed. That Shrine, the satellite of Our Sister Crone, was the main source of technology not sourced in Zaïdmouth’s flowers, but all its works had a distinctive radical character. “This is something other,” she said, “very heavy, and it’s affecting my mind.”

  “Hmmm. Affecting your mind, you say?”

  “Anti-Aequalaïs.”

  “I see.”

  Vishilkaïr glanced at Kirifaïfra, prompting Manserphine to remark, “You two obviously know something. What is it?”

  “I think I could have this removed. But you would have to be brave.”

  “I can take a bit of pain.”

  “I was thinking more of terror. Weren’t you, Kirifaïfra?”

  “If you say so, unc.”

  Vishilkaïr frowned. “He knows what I mean,” he said.

  Manserphine slapped him on the shoulder. “What do you mean?”

  “This is the sort of thing that certain Bands unearth from…”

  Manserphine interrupted, “The Cemetery? So this is the secret you two have been hiding. You scoundrels. You work for a Cemetery Band.”

  “Now don’t get the wrong idea,” Vishilkaïr said. “I can categorically state that neither of us is in a Cemetery Band.”

  “Well?” Manserphine insisted.

  Vishilkaïr dipped and bobbed his head, as if searching for the right phrases. “We have certain contacts,” he said. “When you’re a man it is unavoidable, unless you become the drone of some guardian, or beholden to the Green Man. We have simply exploited our position, that is all.”

  Manserphine half believed them. “So how do you intend getting this thing off my arm?”

  “Have you tried pulling it off?”

  “Fnfayrq said I could never pull it off.” She tested this. Pain shot through her arm. “Ooh. She was right.”

  “As I thought. We will need to raise a Cemetery, er… assistant.”

  Manserphine could see that this was a path she ought not to be going down. Unfortunately there was no choice. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said, sourly. “All right, I’ll do it, but I reserve the right to drop out the moment I’m in danger.”

  Vishilkaïr shrugged. “That essentially is what we will be doing.”

  Kirifaïfra looked at his uncle, then said, “Is this wise?”

  “Of course. We must help our guest. What happened to your gallantry?”

  “It’s been scared right out of me.”

  “When will you go?” Manserphine asked.

  “We? You must come too.”

  Disappointment made her frown, then sag back into her seat. “I didn’t realise that. I can’t go to the Cemetery. You see, I have this premonition that if I ever enter it alive, I will die.”

  “Premonition?” Kirifaïfra asked, sitting at her side.

  “Of my own demise,” she told him. “I know it sounds odd, but I could never challenge my own vision.”

  “Vision,” he murmured, deep in thought.

  “Premonition,” Manserphine insisted, hoping she had not given anything away. “Anyhow, the plan is off.”

  “Not off,” Vishilkaïr said, “just more difficult. There is a way. You need not enter the Cemetery. I know a ruined tower from which you could watch.”

  “Well…”

  “It will be safe. Come along, no time like the present.”

  Bustled back into her coat and boots, a reluctant Manserphine, the two men at her side, departed the inn. They walked up the main street of Veneris into the hilly northern district, passing through markets that choked the narrow thoroughfare, fending off hawkers, merchants and demagogues. After fifteen minutes they passed the Shrine of Root Sculpture, an oval dome to their left, while at their right hand lay the scented paradise of the Venereal Garden, with its centrepiece, the Pagoda Azure, just visible behind evening mist.

  At the Cemetery, Vishilkaïr pointed out the ruined tower, a mound of stone surrounded by lumps of ivy-covered masonry. “Sit up there and observe,” he said. “Come to the Cemetery wall when I call, but don’t enter.”

  Ensconced on a stone, Manserphine watched. She could see ragged men in the Cemetery and more walking in and out of the Woods, which lay just a stone’s throw away. She watched the two men vault the wall and approach a green cloaked figure, that she knew must be a cleric of the Shrine of the Delightful Erection. After a few minutes talking the three knelt upon the ground and began to beat it with their bare hands, in a rhythm that Manserphine could just make out over the sound of soughing trees. She knew what they were doing. Old songs kept alive by the clerics of the Shrine of the Delightful Erection, and learned by many children in the play-yard, were supposed to bring Cemetery beasts up from the earth, where, depending on the potency of the song, they would make a bargain of lesser or greater power. Manserphine herself knew many of these songs.

  Intrigued, and not a little appalled, she watched. After just a minute of beating, the earth rose a few yards away from them, as if a mole was about to emerge, but then a gleaming snout appeared and after that a six-foot beast like a fat, segmented worm with fiery eyes and a lipped mouth. Vishilkaïr waved her down while Kirifaïfra talked to the beast.

  Apprehension made her stomach knot. Never having considered the male culture of this region she had not realised the element of truth in the old stories. Her eyes had been opened. At the Cemetery wall she waited while the men coaxed the metallic beast away from its hole. Manserphine could hardly look. It wriggled and flopped. Vishilk
aïr ran up to her and grabbed her hand, so to display the bracelet.

  “No!” she screamed, trying to pull away.

  “It’s all right,” he insisted. “Be brave.”

  The beast was at the wall. It raised itself and, opening a toothed mouth, eyed her wrist.

  Manserphine screamed louder and in panic tried to pull away from Vishilkaïr, but his grip on her arm was too strong. The beast closed, placed its mouth around her wrist, and—

  Manserphine felt herself lose control. She tried to tear herself away from Vishilkaïr.

  “There,” he called out.

  She looked. The remains of the bracelet disappeared into the beast’s mouth as if it had sucked in a worm. It crunched, and blue fluid dribbled from its mouth. It turned, then buried itself into the ground.

  “Success,” Vishilkaïr said. “Now we can return to the inn and enjoy a good hot meal.”

  They walked away in silence. Manserphine glanced back, to see three men at the wall, who looked at her and Kirifaïfra with malice in their eyes.

  Later on, wondering about the details of the bargain, she noticed that Kirifaïfra’s prized insect-wire, with which he made his pigtail, had gone, leaving a few long strands free to whip about in the breeze.

  INTERLUDE 1

  Shônsair stood upright and motionless as the morning progressed. Behind her, stone blocks radiated heat energy, which she felt through the sensor hierarchies in her back. Somehow, she knew, she had to become one with this sensory information; she had to experience it, just as she had to experience inebriation, drugs, sensuality, and all the rest of it.

  Life was experience. Living was being experienced.

  Later in the morning a woman approached, smiling when Shônsair inclined her head to observe. “Morning,” the woman said. “You two got a moment? Bit of a prob you could help us with.”

  Shônsair’s fellow guard Lizlaini replied, “Piss off, y’bloody beanpole. Can’t you see we got jobs to do?”

  “I only wanted a chat. Not a damn lecture.”

  “Just piss off or else, y’bloody posh bitch.”

  The woman scowled as Shônsair glanced at her. “I only need a bit of advice,” she insisted. “Looking for gynoids, weird ones, for a friend. Nothing urgent, just a job. We all got jobs, ain’t we?”