Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Yeah, right,” Gretzin said. “Tell you what, I’ll take Billy back to the village first and get his things. Fu-ya is there now, getting them together. Pictures and crap. Won’t take but an hour. I can pick up my pay when I get back.”

  “Fine.” Wyeth waved a hand of dismissal, and Gretzin left.

  “Be right back,” Rebel said, and followed after. She caught up to Gretzin in the lobby. Billy was asleep on her shoulder, looking like a shavepate angel. “Listen,” Rebel said. “You can borrow my broomstick, it’s as fast as any.

  I’ve got it tethered at the hub.”

  Gretzin’s harsh face twisted almost into a smile, and she leaned forward to brush lips dry as old leaves across Rebel’s cheek. “Goodbye,” she said, and stepped into the elevator.

  A few minutes later, back in the conference room, Wyeth straightened abruptly. “Hey! Why does she need to take Billy with her to pick up his things? She could leave him sleep here while she did that.” He pitched his voice for an intercom line. “Has the village woman come through there?”

  “Yes, sir,” a samurai replied. “She took a broomstick toward the orchid some five minutes ago.”

  “Damn!” Wyeth lurched to his feet.

  “Wyeth,” Rebel said. “Let her go.”

  “What are you talking about? That kid’s got a brilliant future ahead of him. It’d be a crime to waste a talent like his. We can’t let him grow up in the slums without any kind of training.”

  When they got to the orchid they found Rebel’s broomstick abandoned by its fringe. The path markings were gone. They were just in time to see a dim, distant figure snatch one last rag from its place and disappear into the gloom.

  The village was lost for good.

  9

  DEIMOS

  The geodesic hurtled toward Mars. In its last hour of travel, the stormy red planet grew from the size of a fist to larger than a platter. Deimos crept humbly toward the center of the planet, then suddenly blossomed, dwarfing and eclipsing Mars. To the party watching over the lobby intercom, it seemed they were about to crash into the ungainly-looking moon. Then the geodesic tripped amagnetic trigger and shot into the waiting transit ring. The ring accelerated the space through which it traveled to a velocity equal but opposite in vector to what the geodesic had.

  And there it stood.

  The Comprise began disassembling the ring. Within the sheraton the assembled employees, everyone from Constance Frog Moorfields down to the lowliest pierrot, cheered. A steelpipe percussion group struck up, and the paymasters broke open their salary machines. Lids were yanked from troughs of wine. “Well,” Wyeth said sadly,

  “it’s over.”

  Rebel gave him a quick hug.

  A few minutes later a party of five citizens entered the geodesic to take possession. They wore cache-sexes the color of mildew, with matching utilitarian cloaks that were recomplicated with straps, loops and cinches, and knee-high gravity boots.

  After the delicate paintlines of Eros Kluster, the People’s paint seemed blunt and graceless—a simple green triangle covering nose and eyes. Under the triangles, humorless mouths. The party toured the sheraton in disapproving silence. At last their leader, a man named Stilicho, said, “I suppose it’s what we contracted for.”

  “Good. Then you’ll summon a member of the Stavka for me to surrender authority to?” Wyeth asked.

  A stern young woman curled her lip in scorn. “You outsiders and your cult of leadership! The Stavka is merely a jurisdictional body chosen by random lot. The People will honor any legal commitment made by any citizen.”

  She had a long jaw, grey crewcut hair, and a muscular body with bright, perky nipples, pink as rosebuds.

  “That may well be,” Wyeth said. “However, my superiors still require a member of the Stavka. So I’m afraid that your word will not be sufficient.”

  “Enough,” Stilicho said impatiently. “I myself am of the Stavka. I will accept all responsibility.”

  “May I see your credentials?”

  “No.”

  Stilicho and Wyeth glared at one another. Wyeth was wearing his warrior face. Jaws set and eyes ablaze, the two reminded Rebel of nothing so much as a pair of tropical apes caught in a silent territorial dispute.

  At last Wyeth’s head canted over at a wry angle, and he showed his teeth in a grin. “What the hell, Stilch, your word is good enough for me,” he said. “I’m not proud.”

  Before Stilicho could respond, Rosebuds said, “I will take over here.” She slid an arm through Wyeth’s and steered him away from her leader. “It will take several days to decommission this project. In the meantime, the People will provide you with quarters on Deimos.” She glanced at Rebel and added, “And also for your staff.”

  “What’s wrong with us staying in the sheraton?” Rebel asked.

  “You will be given the same quarters that citizens receive,” Rosebuds said coldly.

  “Well, that sounds reasonable.” Wyeth had switched personas again, and he bent over his data controls, eyes already vague with schedules and task rankings. “Rebel, why don’t you get our things ferried over and squared away? I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

  Rebel nodded, said nothing. But she lingered for a moment, studying Rosebuds. The woman released Wyeth’s arm and surveyed the lobby. It was hard to tell, under that aloof citizen’s programming, what she might be thinking.

  “First thing, this celebration,” Rosebuds said. “This unprogrammed rabble must be cleared away.”

  * * *

  The geodesic was parked at the outskirts of a vast orbital slum anchored by Deimos. Farms, factories, tank towns and wheel hamlets swarmed about the lopsided rock that was patently no true moon but an asteroid captured by Mars eons ago. It was all junk, not a cannister city or other major structure in the lot. Rebel caught a stand-up hopper, along with Stilicho and the one other citizen not directly involved in the decommission. The flight was long, made awkward by Stilicho’s rough pilotage. Time and again he swerved abruptly to avoid some sudden manmade object. Apparently the People’s Militia maintained only rudimentary traffic control.

  As the hopper flew toward Deimos, pillars rose from the moon’s surface, thread-thin and bright as mirrors. They soared outward hundreds of kilometers, then bent on long stems, like tornadoes, spreading slightly as they were acted on by Mars’ gravitational field. “What the fuck are those?” Rebel asked, and then had to snatch for the grab bars as Stilicho slewed the hopper wildly away from a rising pillar.

  “Dust,” Stilicho grunted. He slammed the controls to the side, pulled them back as quickly.

  “Pulverized rock,” Vergillia added. “Tailings from our mining and tunneling operations, sent up by mass drivers.

  The dust is given an electrostatic charge, polarized, and then shot outward in phased pulses, on the order of seven hundred twenty per Greenwich second, a rate so fast that the flow appears continuous.” The woman was warming to her subject. Rebel looked away, cutting her off. Something about that fanatic drone made her itch.

  “When are you going to be programmed a citizen?”

  Stilicho demanded.

  “You’ve already asked me that question three times.

  Why don’t you just give it a rest?”

  “You haven’t given me a satisfactory answer yet.”

  Stilicho waved a hand irritably. “Evasions, fluff, wordsthat don’t say anything! If you take programming as soon as we reach Deimos, you can be put to work tomorrow. A

  flight of ice asteroids is coming in, and the seeding crews could always use another hand.” He put a holographic projection of an ice asteroid—a dirty thing, with more carbon than water to it—in the center of the hopper. A

  mining camp clung to the surface, and interior lines glowed, showing shafts, drifts, and galleries. “The small triangles represent spore packets. No bigger than your thumb, but there are hundreds of them scattered through the ice. The stars represent bacterial charges packed in fragmentation chambers.�
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  Rebel stared out the hopper’s visor strip at the twisting columns of dust. People’s Mars’ mining crafts were too sophisticated for her to follow, and their biotechniques were antiquated, dating back to the beginning of the century, when the first comets had been seeded. There was no middle ground in this lecture, nothing she might be interested to hear.

  Vergillia, seeing her staring at the dust columns, mistook evasiveness for interest. “You are witnessing a very elegant use of resources,” she said. “The waste dust is shot out into one of two areosynchrous orbits, where it forms mirror clouds which reflect additional sunlight down to the surface. Total insolation is thus increased by nearly ten percent.”

  All this while, Stilicho kept talking. “The ice asteroids approach from the leading edge of Mars and hit the surface with the force of fusion bombs—”

  “Since the orbit is not permanent, there is slow but inevitable loss of dust, which must then be replenished—”

  “Not only does the impact fragment the upper regolith, but the buried bacteria and spores are distributed through the shattered permafrost by explosive—”

  They were like two machines that could not be turned off. Their overlapping babblings ebbed and crested toform surges of pure abrasive noise that were all but unbearable. And through it all, that irritating quality of Vergillia’s voice ran, like fingernails dragged across slate.

  “Shut up!” Rebel shouted. “God damn it, I don’t want your programming! I’m not going to become a citizen! I despise all of you! Is that straightforward enough, or do you want me to be more explicit?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. “Well,” Vergillia said at last. “Perhaps you need more time to consider.”

  Right then, something swam into focus in Rebel’s memory, and she was finally able to place Vergillia’s voice.

  She understood why that tone of bland assurance, with just that accent delivered in just that flat cadence, set her teeth on edge.

  The woman sounded just like Eucrasia’s mother.

  * * *

  The tunnels bored deep into the dead rock of Deimos were long, straight, and perfectly round, drilled with simpleminded undeviancy. Even weighted down by Wyeth’s dozen crates of possessions and her own two, the slight gravity made it hard to walk. They drifted deep into the moon, past lighting towers spaced so there were stretches of gloom between harsh brilliancies. Rebel felt as if she were moving through the faraway childhood her mother had so proudly hated. These were the grey and black rockscapes she had heard of so often. These rapidly moving citizens in grey were the same people her mother had despised so guiltily.

  “You will note the perfect roundness of the tunnels,”

  Stilicho said. “All our spaces are multipurpose. What is a dormitory today may be grain storage tomorrow. A

  corridor may become a conduit for water or industrial chemicals or even bacterial seed stock, depending on need. Nothing is dedicated solely to human comfort.”

  Eucrasia’s mother had told stories of people drowning in a sudden flood of creosote or of molasses, when thecitizen-comptroller operating the gates had pulled the wrong switch. Rebel glanced over her shoulder. It was a long way to the nearest exit. “It doesn’t sound like a very appealing way to live.”

  “You must understand that when Mars has been terraformed, we will all move to the surface, and Deimos will be abandoned. It would make no sense to waste effort on temporary quarters.”

  Ahead a group of noncitizens—all heavily wetpainted—were installing a failsafe gate. As Vergillia and Stilicho strode forward, the work gang scattered to get out of their way. Eucrasia’s mother had also told stories of what happened to those who got in the way of programmed citizens. “When will Mars be ready, then?”

  “Two hundred and eighty years.”

  They came to a train station. Without her guides, Rebel would not have known. To her it was just the unmarked junction of two tunnels, by which a drab crowd of citizens and a few programmed outsiders stood. Then, from a crosstube, a metal worm floated into view. Its blind front eased to a halt, and doors sighed open. Vergillia and Stilicho helped Rebel load her bundle of cartons into the freight section, and then they all entered a transit car.

  Rebel hooked feet and hands through the appropriate rings. The car filled to capacity.

  A bell chimed, and the doors closed. The train leaped forward in a horrid burst of acceleration, and the lights went off. In the pitch darkness, with bodies pressing on her from all sides, Rebel felt Eucrasia’s claustrophobia rise up. “What’s wrong?” she cried. “What happened to the lights?”

  “Lights are not necessary here,” Stilicho said. “The People never waste resources unnecessarily.”

  The train flew into the black and lightless rock.

  * * *

  Rebel was still feeling weak and a little helpless when they arrived at the day’s designated dormitory niches.

  Some quarter of them were in use. People came and went constantly. “Diamond blue seventeen,” Stilicho said.

  “Remember that.”

  “Your leader’s niche is beside it. Diamond blue eighteen,” Vergillia added.

  “Oh, good,” Rebel said. The niches were small, with a sleeping space scooped from one rock wall. The crates nearly filled one niche completely, much to her guides’

  amusement. “How do I close the door?”

  “Door?” asked Vergillia.

  Stilicho said, “Do not worry about your possessions.

  With a few exceptions such as yourself, all noncitizens allowed into Deimos are rigidly programmed. There is no theft here.”

  “I meant for privacy.”

  “Privacy?”

  Shaking her head wearily, Rebel said, “Listen, it’s been fun. Thanks for your help. Now why don’t you two just leave me alone for a while?” She sat down in the sleeping space. The rock smelled faintly of olive oil and machine lubricant. “Go away.”

  “Perhaps,” Stilicho said in a concerned voice, “you don’t understand how badly new citizens are needed for the great task—”

  “My mother was a citizen,” Rebel said angrily. “Did you know that?”

  They looked at her.

  “Yeah, she was born right here on Deimos. She was brought up in one of your creche collectives. Took citizenship at age ten. Did everything she was supposed to do, and got reprogrammed once a year. She was just like you, you know that?”

  “I don’t—”

  But Rebel talked through the reply, driven by a near-hysteria born of exhaustion. “Here’s the interesting part. She was on an ice asteroid seeding crew, just like you want me for, okay? She was on the green team, so she was in on it from the beginning. Went to Saturn orbital and was on the team that negotiated the deal with the ice butchers.” The citizens were staring at her in flat amazement. “So she was your quintessential constant citizen, right? Only it’s—what?— maybe a two-year trek from Saturn to Mars, even with early acceleration and a solar sail rig. So there was time for personality drift. The green team stavka thought there wasn’t enough opportunity for unshared experience for individualization to occur. So they weren’t vigilant enough.

  “Okay, so the asteroid is passing through the belts, and there’s an unscheduled breakdown. Kills half the green team. The big tunneler needs parts and a major overhaul from the nearest industrial Kluster. My mother is on the buying collective, makes the score, returns.

  “One of the fitters the Kluster sent out was my father. He was a big guy, very competent, sure of himself, quiet. A

  hell of a guy. The kind that people admire. And my mother fell in love with him. You see that? She didn’t know what was happening at first, ’cause citizens don’t fall in love, right? How could they? By the time she realized what had happened, she was so far gone she didn’t want to come back. He smiled at her, and she went with him. Back at the Kluster, she took industrial asylum, and the green team had to go on without her.” Rebel’s throat was dry. She coughed into her hand.
“So you see what I’m saying? I know all about you. I heard all about your tricks when I was a kid. I know what you’re selling, and I’m not buying any. Okay?”

  Stilicho turned stiffly and bounded away. Vergillia hesitated long enough to say, “I am sorry that your mother was a sex-criminal and deprived you of your birthright.

  But that does not excuse you for rudeness.”

  Then she too was gone.

  The stone was cool under Rebel’s back and vibrated with the subsonic rumble of faraway digging machines. Her stomach was queasy, and her head ached. Eucrasia’s memories had come back to her totally. There was much in Eucrasia’s past that she hadn’t had occasion to think about, but it was all there, and accessible to her.

  But along with the dread weight of Eucrasia’s memories came unexpected insight. She realized now why her mother had filled her childhood with pointless droning stories about the corridors of Deimos, about quiet misery and bleak sameness and unending work. She understood her mother’s sudden flares of dark anger, her randomly-applied prohibitions, her sourceless punishments. They had all been her faltering, uninformed attempts to immunize Eucrasia against People’s Mars. To foster a hard independence that would ensure she never returned to the moon of her mother’s birth, never surrendered to its citizenship program.

  And yet here she was, in these same tired old tunnels.

  This is not my past, Rebel thought. This guilt is not mine.

  And yet lying in this doorless niche, with citizens moving briskly by and occasionally glancing in with cool impersonal curiosity, the coughs and growls of distant machines bouncing down stone walls, Rebel felt like crying.

  After a while, she did.

  * * *

  The clamor of voices echoed about the communal dining hall. The chamber was huge, as high as it was wide, and the hundreds of tables and benches and thousands of diners didn’t come near to filling it. High over Rebel’s place an enormous conduit gaped, water stains trailing from its lip. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the distantentryway, wondering how many here would make it to the nearest failsafe lock were that distant citizen-comptroller to suffer a single instant’s inattention.