Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  As soon as she could, she went out to buy a liter of water.

  Then she stopped at a rootworker’s shop to buy a bracelet leech, and snapped it on her upper arm. A trickle of blood began flowing through the charcoal scrubbers, to be returned to her body cleansed of fatigue poisons. By the time she got to work, she’d drunk down the water and felt almost normal.

  Fortunately, things were slow at Cerebrum City.

  Khadijah was already closeted with a complicated stress tune-up, and nobody else came by for the first few hours.

  Rebel was grateful for that, but even when the bracelet turned blue and dropped from her arm, she felt dull and listless. It was a classic emotional hangover, the residue of having acted the fool.

  Well, there was an easy solution for that.

  Feeling the thrill of doing something both nasty and forbidden for the first time, Rebel broke out the programmer and ran a cleaning pad over the adhesion disks. They attached to her skin behind each ear and on her brow, like small mouths. She slapped on the reader-analyzer and riffled through the minor function wafers in the wall of boilerplate.

  A clean sense of elation filled her. This was fun. She now understood that her earlier prejudice against wetprogramming had been the wizard’s daughter functions acting to protect her integrity. But this was different. So long as she didn’t try anything major, what could be the harm of it?

  It would be best to be careful, though. Eucrasia had overdone it her first time—most persona bums did—and let the euphoria of success lead her into adding one alteration on top of another, building them into a nonsensical architecture of traits, until the entirestructure had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and she had needed six hours wetsurgical reconstruction to bring her back to herself.

  Still, the psychosomatic functions were simple enough.

  Any idiot could make the brain readjust the glandular and hormonal balances of the endocrinal system and, orchestrated correctly, it would give her a terrific body high. Humming slightly to herself, she glanced up at the floating tumbleweed diagram and gave it a spin.

  And stopped. Hell, that was interesting. She rotated the sphere again, more slowly this time. Yes. There was a circular structure running through the entire persona in a kind of psychic mobius strip, touching all the branches, but dependent on none. How did a chimera like that come into existence? It was obviously artificial, and yet no wetware techniques she’d ever heard of (and Eucrasia had been up on what was happening in the field) could create something like that.

  Fascinated, she slid a blank wafer into the recorder.

  By the time her first client came in, she had entirely forgotten about giving herself a therapeutic body rush.

  She stood, turning the professional-quality recording of her persona over and over in her hand, and thinking wonderingly that Deutsche Nakasone had been willing to kill her for this small ceramic flake. The kid entered and coughed to get her attention. He looked to be no more than fifteen. Rebel slipped the wafer into her pocket and said,

  “Well, what do you want done?”

  The wonderful, the magical thing about the wafer, of course, was the beautiful vistas it opened up of new psychologies, new modes of perception, entirely new structures of thought. With the skills this implied, she could create anything. Anything at all.

  It was the kind of discovery that shatters old universes and opens up new ones in their place.

  * * *

  After work, she took the omnibus to the drop tube’s up station.

  She’d put off this part of her search for as long as possible, because the drop tube was a Comprise creation, and they were likely to be all through the up station. But she was convinced now that Wyeth would not be found in Geesinkfor, that if he had ever been there he had moved on, either to another cislunar state or down to Earth.

  Given Wyeth’s convictions, Earth seemed most likely.

  The bus took ten minutes to reach the up station. Rebel had wired herself deadpan—emotion and expression completely divorced—and in addition to the vanitypaint on her forehead, she’d put a short black line like a dagger through her left eye. She was now the living image of a confidential courier, a minor cog in the affairs of business and state wired to wipe herself catatonic at the slightest attempt to tamper with her brain. Nobody would give her a second glance.

  From the bus, the Earth was bright and glorious, as startlingly beautiful as everyone said, the wonder of the System. None of the Comprise’s works could be seen from here.

  The up station loomed, a slender hoop of rock. It was a carbonaceous asteroid that the Comprise had bought and, utilizing their incomprehensible physics, made flow into the desired shape. A transit ring had been fitted into the interior, and a labyrinthine tangle of corridors dug through its length. It spun in geosynchrous orbit directly above a ground station with a sister transit ring. Fleecy clouds formed a vast circle about the ground station. The Comprise’s technology somehow held the air back from the lane between transit rings, so that there was a well of hard vacuum reaching almost to the planet’s surface, and this affected local weather systems. Rebel could see three more such cloud rings on this side of the globe.

  A steady stream of air-and-vacuum craft slipped in andout of the up station’s ring. Some were flung down at the ground station, while others had just been nabbed on their way up the vacuum well. All passengers and cargo were processed through the human-run sections of the up station before going down and after coming up. It was a fearsomely busy place.

  The bus docked, and Rebel walked through the security gates and into the ring’s outer circle of corridors. She let the flooding crowds sweep her away. Occasionally she passed wall displays indicating numbers of craft gone and caught, and the station’s shifting power reserves (up for each vehicle caught, down for each released), but this last was for show only, since humans were allowed no access to the transit machinery. Now and then a chain of a hundred or so Comprise hurried by, but they were rare.

  Most, evidently, stayed to their own corridors.

  More common were the scuttling devices that sped between legs and through crowds—small, clever mechanicals that fetched, carried, and frantically cleaned.

  None of them came anywhere approaching sentience, and yet Rebel felt uncomfortable at how common they were. It seemed a sign of how hopelessly compromised the cislunarians were by machine intelligence. She was surprised their guilt didn’t show on their faces.

  Subliminal messages washed through the halls, but none of them were aimed at Rebel, and she lacked the decoders. They could only make her feel hot and anxious.

  Her face itched.

  She took a side ramp into the administrative areas, noting as she did so how a security samurai glanced her way and murmured into his hand. She’d been tagged. But she walked confidently on, as if she belonged.

  Half-Greenwich was terrific for walking; enough tug on your feet to give them purchase, not enough load to tire them. She came to a line of security gates, all marked with the wheel logo of Earth crossed by a bar sinister: No Comprise. Subimbeds pounded at her, making her feelunwelcome and anxious to leave. Any of these gates would do.

  She matched strides with an important-looking woman, laying an arm over her shoulder just as she plunged through a gate, so the cybernetics would read them both as a single individual. The woman looked into Rebel’s dead face and flinched away. “Who… who the hell are you?” she cried. Samurai hurried toward them. Then the paint registered, and she said, “Oh, shit. One of them.” To the white-haired samurai who arrived first, she said, “Help this woman find whoever it is she wants and then kick her the hell out.”

  * * *

  “Your kind is a real pain in the ass,” the samurai said.

  “So don’t give me any help,” Rebel said with profound disinterest. “Throw me out. My message is insured with Bache-Hidalgo. If I fail, they’ll program up two more couriers and send ’em back. If they fail, you’ll have four.


  Then eight. Sooner or later, you’ll play along.” This was a scam Eucrasia had often seen during her internship.

  Administrators hated insured couriers because they were as persistent as cockroaches, and as impossible to eradicate. The only way to get rid of them was to cooperate.

  “You’ll get your help,” the woman snapped. She led Rebel deep into Security country. Flocks of samurai.

  “Okay, we’re in Records. Now who is your message for, and when did he come through here?”

  “I don’t have a name,” Rebel said. “He’d’ve come through anywhere from five degrees Taurus to present.”

  They were standing in an office area so thick with vines that each small cubicle seemed a leafy cave. The overgrowth was a classic sign of an ancient bureaucracy. A

  mouse-sized mechanical scurried underfoot, gathering up dead leaves.

  “Around here we say late May through mid-June,” thesamurai sniffed. “All right, any of our people can handle this.” She leaned into a cubicle where a flabby grey man leaned over a screen, mesmerized. Still images of faces flickered by at near-subliminal speeds, piped in from the hallways and offices. “Rolfe! Got a question for you.”

  “Yes?” Rolfe froze his screen and looked up. He had a dull, almost dazed expression, and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. Mouth and jowls both were slack.

  “Rolfe is on our facial eidetics team,” the samurai said with a touch of pride. “Electronics have to be wiped once a week, or they’re useless—data can’t be searched. Rolfe views the electronics compressed, only has to be wiped once a year, and can access all of it. Show him your visual.

  If your target has been through here—as employee, visitor, or dumper—within the past few months, he knows.”

  Rebel held up her holo. It was a photomechanical reconstruction she’d pulled from her own memories, but good enough that nobody could tell. “Seen this guy?”

  Rolfe looked carefully, shook his head. “No.”

  The samurai took her arm. “Are you sure?” Rebel cried.

  “Is there any chance at all?”

  “None.”

  * * *

  Rebel sleepwalked through the next day, performing her chores mechanically. She reported to work, interviewed her first client, and chopped him to order. None of it felt real. She didn’t know what to do next. If Wyeth hadn’t gone down the drop tube, that meant he must be somewhere in the sprawl of cislunar states. Trouble was, there were hundreds of them, in all sizes and degrees of disorder, and their outfloating slums as well. She could spend the rest of her life searching and still not find him.

  Well, she thought, maybe she wouldn’t find him. Maybe Wyeth was lost to her forever. Happens to people all the time.

  She was finishing up a client when she finally admitted this to herself. A jackboot had come in to be chopped wolverine, and lay on the gurney wired up and opened out, still in her police skintights.

  Rebel thought it through with dry, obsessive logic, while her hands did the work. How long could she go on searching like this? A year? Five? Twenty? What kind of a person would she be at the end of that time? It wasn’t a pretty thought.

  “Can you imagine a unicorn?”

  “Yes.”

  If this was going to be a long search, if it was going to take her years, she’d have to change the pace. She needed to build some kind of decent life for herself in the meantime. (But she didn’t want a decent life without Wyeth!) She needed a cleaner job than this one, to begin with. Friends. Interests. Lovers, even. She’d have to plan this whole thing out carefully.

  “How many fingers?”

  “Four.”

  “Green or blue?”

  “Blue.”

  “Ever seen this man before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” Rebel smiled. Very slowly, she leaned back against the wall. Carefully she began marshaling her thoughts. She was in no particular hurry now. Perhaps she should go out front and borrow a chair. Impulsively, she reached down to run a fond hand through the jackboot’s hair, and the woman grinned idiotically up at her. Where to begin?

  She had a lot of questions to ask.

  12

  THE BURREN

  There were vacuum flowers on the outside of the Pequod, only a few, sprouting from the jointed strutwork of the gables, but enough to tell from the shape of the petals that these were a variant strain, already indigenous to cislunar orbit. Rebel noted them on the way in, mildly wondering why Bors had put off his basic maintenance for so long.

  The ship recognized her, and the lock opened to her touch.

  A few hours later Bors returned, just as Rebel had finished brewing tea. The pot floated in the center of the parlor. “Well!” Bors said in a pleased tone. He doffed his suit, donned his cloak, and pulled up a pair of leg rings.

  “How very pleasant of you to drop by to see me off.”

  “How very pleasant of you to say so.” She drew off a syringe of tea and gently floated it to him. “I’ve prepared a snack.” She opened a tray of scalloped cakelets that were shaped rather like her silver brooch, and he unclipped two. Rebel smiled, sipped her tea, waited.

  After a polite pause, Bors said, “So. How goes the search for your friend, Wyeth?”

  “Ah! Now that’s a very interesting question.” Rebel leaned forward in her chair. “I was questioning a jackboot earlier today—I had her lashed down and opened up, you understand, so there was no question of her lying—and she gave me a valuable lead.”

  “Indeed,” Bors said. “A jackboot, you say?” He took another bite of his pastry. “That’s, ah, a somewhat dangerous proposition, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. She had this really baroque plot-and-counterplot kind of story about dropping down surfaceward as an observer to… well, no reason to bore you with it. She said she’d seen Wyeth.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Yeah. She told me she’d seen him with you.”

  After a very long silence, during which neither looked away from the other, Bors took a squirt of tea and said,

  “She was mistaken, of course.”

  “Of course.” Rebel stood. Her natural impulse was to seize the man and try to strangle the truth out of him. But she smiled instead. Eucrasia would never have done anything so bold, and in a situation like this, Eucrasia’s approach had its points. Her chances of overpowering Bors on his home turf were slight. He was, however polished, a professional ruffian. “I’ll just get my suit and leave, then. Sorry to have caused you the trouble. Bon voyage, eh, sport?” She floated to the lock, Bors watching her warily. “Oh. You could do me one little favor?” Bors raised his eyebrows. “Just say for me, ‘Please open the collecting drawers.’ ”

  “Please open the collecting drawers?” Bors repeated puzzledly.

  Throughout the room, cabinets opened smoothly. One by one the drawers slid out. They were all empty. “Good lord,” Bors gasped. “What have you done with all my watercolors? My prints?”

  “I burned them.”

  Bors was out of his seat, running furious hands through the empty drawers and slamming them shut, in search of an overlooked drawing, a crumpled print stuck in a corner, anything. “You didn’t!” he wailed in despair.

  “Well, no,” Rebel said calmly. “Actually, I didn’t.”

  He looked at her.

  “You remember the two crates I had? I emptied them out and filled one with your watercolors and the other with your prints. I had to pith your ship’s security system before it would let me at them, but it’s surprising the tools you can buy when you have the right connections—andyour little jackboot had good connections, I can assure you.” She was talking too fast, too angrily. She wanted so badly to hurt Bors that his pain only increased that hunger. Eucrasia would have said that she was cycling out of control. Taking a deep breath, she floated back to her chair and sat. Then, more calmly, “The crates are both safe, and you’ll never find them unless I tell you where.

  You can have one back right now, no strings
attached. The other will cost you.”

  Slowly, Bors took his own chair. “I won’t betray my nation,” he said flatly. “Not if you piled up every work of art in the System and held a flame to the heap.”

  “Well, bully for you mate! But I’m not asking for any such thing. Just give me Wyeth. I’ll give you your choice of crates now, and tell you where the other is as soon as I’ve had the chance to talk with Wyeth face to face. What do you say?”

  “The watercolors,” Bors said bleakly. “Where are they?”

  * * *

  The city had no name that anybody remembered. It had been cracked and abandoned over a century before, and its exterior was overgrown with flowers. Now a small hopper flew through the gap where an axial window had been and into the airless interior. Black buildings reached up to grab at them as they floated down. It was a tricky bit of navigation because the city was still rotating, and the ravaged buildings shifted as they approached. “There,”

  Bors said. At street level, yellow light shone from a lone pressurized window. With a swooping twist that folded Rebel’s stomach over on itself, Bors matched velocities with the street and brought the hopper down.

  The old woman who cycled them through the lock looked displeased to see Rebel. “This one’s no jackboot,” she grumbled. It was the drop artist Rebel had seen with Bors in Geesinkfor. The room was crammed with vintage technology—robot probes, shoulderjets, fist-sized assassinsatellites.

  “There’s been a slight change of plans.”

  “Heh.” She leered over a protruding knob of a chin.

  “Changes will run you extra. There’s a good borealis brewing up now, and I can’t say when the next one’s due.

  Don’t like to drop people without some electromagnetic confusion in the atmosphere. Helps to hide them from the Comprise.”

  “You are an avaricious old pirate,” Bors said, “and I’ll not be blackmailed by the likes of you. This young lady is taking the jackboot’s place, and the drop will go off on schedule, as planned, and for the amount agreed upon, or we can just call the whole thing off.”