Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  The old woman quailed before his anger. “Oh,” she said.

  “Well, then.”

  * * *

  It was an expensive drop, and an unobtrusive one. As it was explained to Rebel, eight shaped coldpack units were to be frozen in the center of snowy flurries of ablative materials and then towed to the center of a natural fall of meteors. They would be swept up by the advancing Earth and fall into the dawn, burning bright on the way down, fleeting scratches in the pale morning sky.

  Deep in the atmosphere, the last of the ablatives would burn away, to reveal coldpacks that had been crafted as lifting bodies. Simple cybersystems would loft them then, killing speed and flying them toward the rendezvous point.

  Their steep evasive glides would end in spectacular gouts of white surf as they slammed into the North Atlantic.

  Slowly, then, they would begin to sink in the cold salt water.

  Before they could hit bottom, fleet dark forms would converge upon them. These were sea mammals, descendants of seals, that had been hotwired for such tasks with bootleg mutagens and bioprogramming.

  Slipping their heads through pop-out grab loops, they would haul the coffins toward land. It was a slow and complicated means of travel but one that, in theory at least, the Comprise could not track.

  There would be people waiting on the shingled beach.

  * * *

  Rebel opened her eyes. She was in a beehive-shaped room, Greenwich normal. Unmortared stone walls with an array of pinprick lights wedged into the chinks. The air was a trifle chill. Rebel looked up at a woman in a hooded red robe. “I’m on Earth,” she said.

  “Yes.” The woman had a fanatically starved face with sharp cheekbones and no eyebrows. But her voice was soft and she kept her head bowed. “In a place called the Burren. This complex of buildings is Retreat. It’s a place of God.” She gestured toward a sheila-na-gig by the door, a cartoon in stone of a grotesque, moon-faced woman holding herself open with both hands. Rebel sat up. “Your gear is laid out before you. The earth suit is worn under your cloak—the Burren is a much harsher environment than you’re used to. This devotee is named Ommed. If you desire anything, it is your slave.” She ducked out of the room.

  Rebel shook her head and began dressing. The earth suit consisted of chameleoncloth pants and blouse with multiple fastenings that weren’t easy to figure out. She felt horribly covered up with them on, though they were no worse, she had to admit, than what she’d worn as a treehanger. She donned her cloak and gravity boots, and lifted the library case. That was part of the deal she’d cut with Bors, that she’d serve as the combat team’s librarian.

  Then she stooped out the door.

  Rebel straightened and saw vast stretches of grey rock under a milky sky. The land went on forever, dwindling impossibly with distance as it rose to a line of mountains as barren as the moon. It was all exposed bedrock,runneled with weathered depressions from which poked tufts of brown grass. Low stone walls ran like veins over the land; they could have been a thousand years old or built yesterday. There was no way of knowing. The few devotees at work nearby were insignificant specks. She had always heard that Earth was green, but this land was desolate and godforsaken, almost a parody of barrenness.

  The wind boomed, and she staggered forward. It was as if someone had placed a hand on her back and pushed.

  Her hair and cloak streamed out in front of her and, visions of hull punctures and explosive decompression rising within, Rebel cried out in sudden terror, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  Ommed was there and slipped an arm around her waist to hold her steady. “Nothing is wrong. It’s just the wind coming off the sea.”

  “Oh,” Rebel said weakly, though the explanation meant nothing to her. She turned to look behind and saw the land cascading down to a slate green ocean specked with white-tipped waves. Clouds curdled with grey rushed upon her from a vague horizon, so fast she could see them move, melting one into another as they came. “My… God, this is… it’s huge!” She felt vertiginous and almost fell.

  Everywhere, the air was aprowl, a vast, restless giant with the clouds in its grip, larger than mountains. It was all too huge. “How can you stand it?”

  “We are here to abase ourselves,” Ommed said, “and we welcome the humbling immensities of God for that reason.

  But you will discover yourself that what at first appears terrifying can become, as you grow to know it, exhilarating.”

  Almost breathless with disbelief, Rebel stared across rock and ocean, letting their immensity wash through her.

  There was so much of everything here that her head almost ached with it, but… yes, Ommed was right. It was awful, but at the same time rather grand, like the firsthearing of a symphony in a new musical form that is so magnificent it terrifies.

  “Your friends are meeting around the far side of Retreat.

  Perhaps it is time that you join them.”

  “Yes.”

  Retreat was a sprawl of stone beehive huts, of varying sizes, built one upon the other in a curving swirl up the slope. It was all of the same grey bedrock that everywhere dominated the land, and the far reaches of the mass faded to near invisibility, like a skirl of smoke against the ground. It was the only artificial structure in sight. From horizon to horizon was no trace of anything that might not have existed there millennia ago. “How do you hide all this from the Comprise?” Rebel asked.

  “We call the great mind Earth,” Ommed corrected her gently. “Earth knows us well. We are here at its tolerance.

  It observes us. We don’t know why. Perhaps Earth considers us beasts for its study. Perhaps it maintains the Burren as a kind of wildlife preserve. The question is not an important one.”

  “It observes you?” Rebel looked around, saw no sign of cameras. Of course Earth might have more subtle devices, extremely small or distant.

  “Every seven years Earth takes a tenth of our number to be absorbed into the great mind.”

  “And this doesn’t bother you?”

  They walked around the upper curve of Retreat. In the smokehouses there, devotees were preparing racks of fish and slices of monoclonal protein from the fermenters.

  “We are here to learn the discipline of submission.

  Submission to the will of God takes many forms. We practice all of them.” She looked up, and Rebel flinched back from the intensity of her gaze, the knowing intimacy of her smile. “This is the hut. Your people are within.”

  “Yeah. Well, it was great of you to show me the way.”

  “You do not yet understand the pleasure there can be in the surrender of will.” Ommed touched the nape of Rebel’s neck with a fingertip cold as ice. Rebel’s body involuntarily stiffened, shivering. “If you wish to learn, ask any of the devotees. We are all your slaves.”

  “Jesus.” Rebel ducked into the hut.

  It was unlit, and at first she thought it was empty. Then somebody moved, and somebody else coughed, and she realized there were seven people crouched against the walls, all in chameleoncloth; and they were all looking at her. Their faces floated in the gloom, and the eyes in them were cruel and alert. They’d all been chopped wolverine.

  “This is your librarian,” somebody said. “Protect her.

  She carries your survival skills. And if she dies, one of you will have to be programmed down to take her place.”

  There was a low growling noise that might have been laughter.

  “You have your orders,” the voice continued. “Go!” The wolverines flowed out, sliding by Rebel on either side in perfect silence. Their leader stood, and the silver spheres at the ends of his braids clicked gently. Rebel was pretty sure this was Bors, but with that feral programming burning on his face, she couldn’t be sure. “Librarian, you will stay.”

  She sat. The leader leaned closer, face dominated by a mad, joyless smile. She could smell his breath, faintly sweet, as he said, “Get your skills in.”

  Rebel snapped open the library, ran a fingertip
down its rainbow-coded array of wafers. Deftly she wired herself to the programmer and set the red user wafers running.

  There were three: basic research skills, rock running skills, and an earth surface survival package combined with a map of the Burren. Whiteness buzzed and swirled at the base of her skull as the device mapped her short-term memory structure. Then the air about her shivered as the programs raised their arms and beganassembling themselves into airy circuits and citadels of knowledge. Their logics reached through the walls toward infinity, and Rebel was lost in an invisible maze of facts.

  Three wafers were the limit; more than that couldn’t be assimilated without losing half the data. She could feel her location in the Burren now, halfway up the western slopes of the enormous limestone formation. That was the map function. She knew its hills and mountains, down to the networks of caves beneath its surface. She knew which skills could be chipped into a berserker program and which could not. (“Librarian!”) She knew how to shift her weight when a rock turned underfoot just as she landed on it. She knew the Burren’s plants and insects, which were good to eat and which were not. She knew where to find water. (“Librarian!”) She knew which three skills an ecosaboteur needed most. The facts shimmered through and about her, leaving her feeling stunned, cold, distant.

  Someone slapped her. It stung. Startled, she focused on the leader and saw the calm, happy afterglow of violence settle on his face and under it—yes, it was Bors, all right.

  “Librarian!” he repeated. “Are your programs run yet?”

  “Uh… yeah,” she said shakily. She knew how to run now. Her legs trembled with the desire to be off and away.

  She heard an ugly bird-sound just outside. A rook.

  “Librarian, you are not part of our team, but we will still be relying on your programming. So you’ve got to be tested. I want you to run to the Portal Dolmen. If you get there by sunset, I’ll know your skills have taken hold.”

  She knew what sunset was. She knew what the Portal Dolmen was. “But that’s twelve miles away!”

  “Then you’d better get started, hadn’t you?”

  * * *

  She ran. It was amazing the kind of speed you could make when you knew what you were doing. Rebel was following what had been a road once but had now largely melted into the rock. The broken roadbed made betterrunning, though, for the bedrock tended to fracture in long slabs that would occasionally snap underfoot, and then only her uncanny reflexes kept her from twisting an ankle. Also, off the road the low stone walls were everywhere, curving twistily over bare rock and even looping over the largest boulders. Impossible as it seemed, people must have lived here long ago and found some use for the land worth their marking off parcels of it as their own.

  The road twisted and steepened, and she adjusted her heartbeat in compensation. It felt like the rock was spinning underfoot, and herself perfectly motionless. She ran with her cloak’s chameleoncloth liner inward, and from a distance must’ve looked like an immense bat flapping crippled along the ground. The patch of cloud that could not be looked at directly was lower than it had been. That meant it was growing late. Now and then she slowed to a walk, and twice she rested. But running was best, for it kept her from thinking.

  A dark circle appeared on the rock before her, as sudden and unexpected as a meteor strike. Then it was gone behind her, but another appeared, and then another.

  They came in clusters, and then the first drop of water struck her face, and it was raining.

  She knew all about rain—it was on the earth skills wafer—but knowing was not experience. The drops came down like pebbles, smashing against her head and forming rivulets that ran into her eyes, blinding her.

  Worse, the wind drove the rain in sudden gusts that slammed into her and left her gasping for air. She couldn’t run now, but strode forward with cloak wrapped tight and hood up. When she looked up, she couldn’t see mountains or sea at all. They had vanished in greyness.

  The road crested, and she pushed forward. Not far from the top of the ridge was a wedge-shaped gallery grave—she sensed it on the map. It was half hidden by a patch of gorse, but she found it anyway, four flat uprights forminga kind of box, with a fifth stone as lid. The cairn of stones that had covered it and the bones it had sheltered were gone long ago, and there was enough of a gap where it had been broken into for her to climb within. She huddled there, out of the rain, clutching knees to chin.

  The cloak was wool and, even wet, kept her warm. What was bad was not the gloom or the rattling thunder of rain on stone (the wafer hadn’t included the knowledge that rain made noise), but the solitude that left her time to think of Wyeth.

  She had known, the instant that she opened her eyes and saw a strange woman in red, that Wyeth was not at Retreat. He’d’ve been there to greet her. She had known that there was going to be no good news of him, and she had wanted to put off the learning of the bad for as long as possible. She’d refused to recognize the dark premonition that was growing within her.

  Now, though, she could not help but think about it.

  It was a long time before the rain slowed, then stopped, and she could climb from the wedge of rocks. She went back to the road, started walking again. Then running.

  It rained three more times before she reached the Portal Dolmen.

  * * *

  Day was darkening when she came to a high and windy place, barren even by local standards, and stopped. The sky behind her was yellow where it touched the rock. She stared blankly about the flat expanses for a time before spotting the Portal Dolmen.

  It was huge, two upright slabs supporting a canted third, like a giant’s table falling to ruin. Slowly, she followed her shadow to it. Two more slabs of rock lay nearby, the missing sides of what was just another wedge grave denuded of its cairn, though an enormous one. It looked like a gateway, and she gingerly stepped through it, halfexpecting to be suddenly transported through the dimensions into another, mystic land.

  Bors snickered. “You’re on time, Librarian, but only just.”

  Startled, she whirled about. Bors had come up behind her silently. He slowly sat down on a fallen slab, smiling sardonically. Behind him stood two of his wolverines.

  They watched her with interest. “Listen,” Rebel said.

  “Listen, I want to know where Wyeth is.” Her hands were cold. She stuck them in her armpits, hunching forward slightly. The sense of futility that had struck her on the road rose up again now, stronger than before. “He’s not here, is he?”

  “No.”

  “He never was supposed to be, was he?” Eucrasia had lived through disappointment this bitter before and knew that the best way to handle it was to shunt it off into anger.

  But Rebel lacked the strength of will for that.

  “He was supposed to be here when we arrived. But he’s late.” Bors looked serious now. He squinted off into distant clouds that were the exact color of the rocks. Rebel felt her internal map intensify; to the east and south, the Burren bordered Comprise. But the map contained no details, just a sense of great numbers.

  Bors muttered, “Actually, he’s extremely late.”

  * * *

  She slept with the wolverines that night in a small cave, all huddled together for warmth because Bors wouldn’t permit a fire. The next morning he gave her some salt fish to eat on the way and sent her back to Retreat, saying, “We don’t need you until Wyeth shows up. And what we do in the meantime is none of your business. Go back. We’ll find you when we need you.”

  She returned more slowly than she had come, arriving as late afternoon was fading to dusk. The devotees werebringing in their currachs from the sea and their carts from the peat bogs. Some were preparing an evening meal. In the dining hut, Rebel sat through a long prayer in a language she didn’t know and then ate something whose flavor did not register. Ommed spoke to her, and she answered vaguely.

  Afterward, she went back to her hut. She crawled inside, put down her library, sat on the sleeping led
ge. “Well,”

  she sighed, “I’m home.”

  Not long after, somebody clapped politely at the door.

  Rebel called a welcome, and a young devotee entered. He was as hairless as the rest, but not so starved looking.

  Kneeling before her, head down, he murmured, “This devotee is named Susu. It is an ancient word meaning

  ‘gossip.’ ”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Rebel snapped. “Don’t grovel like that. Here.” She slid over on the ledge, patted the rock beside her. “Sit down, relax, and tell me whatever it is you came here to say.”

  “I…” the young man began. He blushed. “This devotee has not been here long. It has not yet learned fully to abase itself.” Then, abruptly, he looked her full in the face with eyes a preternatural blue and took her hands in his.

  “The community has seen your sorrow and discussed it. If you could use the solace there is to be found in flesh, this one has come to offer you its service.”

  “Jesus!” she said. But he was awfully handsome, and she didn’t pull her hands away from him. After a while, she said, “Well, maybe that would be the best thing to do.”

  Susu was the hottest thing she had ever taken to bed. He was perfectly solemn, but his attention to her desires was complete, and he obviously knew more about sex than she did. He did not strive to give himself pleasure, but to give pleasure to her. He was like some impossible combination of athlete, dancer, and geisha. He brought her to the edge of orgasm and then kept her there, frozen on the edge ofecstasy, until she completely lost track of where her body left off and his began.

  Finally, shuddering, Rebel grasped Susu tightly about the waist, clutched his bald head with both hands, and rode her pleasure to stillness. “Jeeze,” she said, when she could talk again. “You’re really something, you know that?”

  His face was beautiful, a mask of holy calm. “This devotee is the least of your slaves.”

  “No, I mean really.” She laughed, and said jokingly, “Are all the devotees as good at this as you?”

  Susu looked at her with that astonishingly flat openness.