Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  Bors was standing nearby. “You know what I find most remarkable about them?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “No windows.”

  Rebel stared at him, then back at the plesiosaurs,baffled for the moment it took to realize what he was talking about. What she had taken to be natural rock cliffs were actually enormous buildings, tall and featureless, edging the water like clustered masses of quartz crystals.

  They had a pale, diffractive quality to them, their flat surfaces shimmering with faint pinks and blues, a suggestion of prismatic green, colors that intensified the longer she stared at them. Then the fog closed in and wiped them away. “Are they all like this?” she asked. “The Comprise cities, I mean.”

  “No, I think they’re all very different from one another, don’t you? Kurt! Come over here and get your rock-running program scrubbed out.”

  By the time the fog had lifted, they were on the open sea, nothing but water to be seen. Notched away in Eucrasia’s store of memories were any number of rhapsodies on the beauty and lure of oceans, the romance of wooden ships, the glamor of the sea-rover. But Rebel could understand why People’s Mars wasn’t building any of their own. The ocean was choppy and featureless, offering the eye neither rest nor variety, with all the monotony of flatness but none of the stark beauty. It was ugly, and wasteful as well—all that water! Rebel was sick of it already.

  Hour after hour, the skimmer sliced through the waves.

  Sometimes Rebel sat quietly talking with Wyeth. Often, though, he had to go belowdecks to confer with Bors, and she was not welcome to overhear. Then she simply sat, watching clouds roll overhead and the ocean shift from green to grey and back as the light changed. Once they made a wide detour to avoid an undersea enclave of Comprise, but in all their time asea they never saw another ship or flying machine. Rebel remarked on this when Nee-C wandered by from a knife game she’d been playing—and losing, to judge by the network of fine slashes on the backs of her hands—with the other wolverines.

  Nee-C shrugged. “Guess the Comprise don’t need tomove things around much.”

  “If it’s all that rare, then how did Wyeth manage to steal this boat? You’d think they’d notice it was gone.”

  “Ain’t no Comprise boat,” Nee-C said scornfully. “Look at the cabin hatch.”

  Rebel turned, saw an open hatchway with stairs leading down. Scowling, Nee-C kicked the jamb, and a hatch slid up. It had a corporate logo painted on it, a round shield with owl and olive wreath. “Pallas Kluster!”

  “Yeah, belonged to a batch of Kluster lazarobiologists.”

  Nee-C snickered. “They got them a long walk home now.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You know your problem?” Nee-C stood, drawing her blade. “You talk too much.” She strode to the bow, where the other wolverines were clustered, knelt, and rejoined the game.

  The day stretched on monotonously. Finally, though, a setting sun turned half the horizon orange and faded to night. Rebel slept on a mat on deck, alongside Wyeth.

  When she awoke, she didn’t need to be told they were no longer in the Atlantic. The water was calmer here, almost glassy, and low-lying land, finger-smudges of green on the edge of the sky, was visible to either side. Straight ahead was an island, overgrown with trees, dark as a floating clump of seaweed.

  Wyeth handed her a beer and some boiled bread.

  “Breakfast time, sleepyhead,” he said. “We’ll be at the island within the hour and you’ll need your strength then.”

  “Where are we, anyway?”

  Bors looked down from where he sat cross-legged atop the cabin and said, “We’re in a midcontinental sea.

  Technically speaking, it’s more a big salt lake than anything else. Earth created several of them shortly after it became conscious. Nobody’s sure why. The populartheory is that it was a mistake, a weather control project that went awry. The polar icecaps used to be larger, you know.”

  “You seem to know a lot about Earth,” Rebel said.

  “My dear young lady,” Bors said, and with that feral programming wild on his face, his exaggerated politeness was as startling as if a poisonous serpent were to suddenly rear its head and speak, “I’ve been studying Earth for half my life.”

  As the island neared, the skimmer slowed, sank down on its leg, and touched seawater. It lurched sideways as it was hit by the waves, slewed a bit to one side, then steadied into a gentle up-and-down rocking motion. The pilot retracted the canopy, and salt air flooded the boat.

  Wyeth pointed ahead. “Take a good look,” he said. “It’s the only floating island on Earth.”

  Rebel tapped her library. The island was all one tangled tree complex, almost perfectly round, with a clearing for the down station at its center. It was new—thirty years ago, it had not been there, and nobody knew why the Comprise had decided to grow it. Staring up into the blue, Rebel imagined she could make out the invisible outlines of the vacuum tunnel, like twin fracture lines in the sky. The island beneath was all joyous green surface wrapped around a dark interior. Somewhere in its depths, a pair of large yellow eyes blinked, and Rebel shivered with premonition.

  Bors was handing out equipment. He slapped a small plastic pistol into Rebel’s hand and moved on. She examined it. A pair of compressed gas cartridges sprouted to either side of the rear sight, like bunny ears. There was a reservoir of clear liquid inside the transparent handle.

  She squinted into a pinprick nozzle, and Wyeth turned it away from her. “Careful. That sucker’s loaded with shyapple juice.” He showed her how to hold the pistol and where the safety was. “Don’t fire until you’re right on topof your target. Aim for the forehead, right where the third eye would be. The fluid’s bonded with dimethylsulfoxide, so wherever it touches, it’ll sink right through the flesh into the bloodstream. But that shouldn’t be necessary. The pistol spits out droplets at a speed that’ll slam them right through skin at four feet. Got that?”

  “I guess so.” She raised the pistol, aiming at the back of Bors’ neck, and Wyeth yanked her hand down. “What’s the matter? I wasn’t really going to shoot him.”

  Wyeth rolled up his eyes. “Tell you what. Don’t shoot—no, don’t even aim that pistol at anybody or anything unless the rest of us are all safely dead, okay?

  You have no idea how easy it is to accidentally shoot a friend. Just keep that thing stowed away, and be very careful not to get any of the juice on yourself. We don’t want you snapping out in the middle of the raid.”

  “Okay.” Wyeth turned away, and she tucked the gun into the waistband of her earth suit. She felt like something was watching her.

  * * *

  Bright tropical birds looped in and out of the greenery, making sharp, metallic cries, as the skimmer crept toward the floating island. High up in the trees were masses of dark flowers, purple almost to the point of blackness, some of them large as bedsheets.

  The skimmer slid by a long limb or root that arched out from the green thickets, turning black where it dipped into the water. Waves slapped quietly against it. “Stay in the center of the patrol,” Wyeth murmured to Rebel. “We’ll keep you alive.” They were barely moving now. The island swelled and reared up into the sky. Another dark tree limb slid by, and an air squid, sunning itself atop the limb, took fright and dropped into the water with a soft plop.

  Rebel strapped the library to her back and secured the adhesion disks with a protective headband. Then she swung her cloak over her shoulders, chameleoncloth sideout. She shivered nervously, forced a smile, whispered,

  “How do I look?”

  “Hunchbacked.”

  “Those the stills?” Bors jabbed a finger upward at the translucent purple flowers. Bubbles flowed up their veins, and tangles of pale white roots fell downward into the water. Wyeth nodded, and Bors said, “Kurt, grab a drug pump and get up there.”

  Rebel craned her neck to watch the wolverine scramble up the roots. “Librarian!” Bors snapped. “What is that man do
ing?”

  Without looking down from the dwindling figure, Rebel said, “He’s climbing up to the distillery flowers. They purify the water for the island’s population of Comprise.

  There are several nexuses of stalks just beyond the flowers where the desalted water is gathered, and then larger stalks that move the water to Comprise drinking stations by gravity feed. That’s where Kurt will insert the drug pump. The pump contains an encapsulator so that the shyapple fluid is contained in microspheres that won’t dissolve until they reach their target vectors.” The information flowed to the surface of her mind freely and naturally. She spoke it automatically, so that the sense of it came simultaneously with the words. “The microcapsules should travel at a rate of—”

  “Enough!” Bors turned away. “We’re ready.”

  They glided under the arching tree limbs. Daylight gave way to soft shadow. Leafy boughs raked the deck, and mats of brown vegetation floated on the water’s surface.

  The island ahead was indistinct, all shadow within darkness. A monkey shrieked, like the agonized war cry of a ghost. The wolverines took out long sticks and began poling the skimmer. The air dimmed to a cool, green cavernousness.

  The skimmer scraped along a submerged limb, caught its bow in a dragging vine and, after a moment’shesitation, was free. The lead polesman swung the nose about, edging it into a long black incursion of water that moved into the gothic depths like an inverted stream.

  Moss and branches hung low over the inlet, making it almost a tunnel. As they were passing under a snarled tangle of vines, Kurt dropped down on the deck. Rebel flinched back from the sudden apparition of his grin.

  “Done,” he said, and Bors nodded.

  The boat slowed to a stop. Rebel was reminded of the geodesic’s orchid here, it was that dark and close. Gretzin and Fu-ya would’ve liked this island. Rebel stared into the shadows, her heart pounding. Any number of Comprise could be crouching an arm’s length distant and never be seen. She looked up. There were yellow shafts of light high above that did not seem to quite reach the water, and tiny patches of blue like faraway windows that winked on and off with the shifting of the trees. Parrots darted between limbs, and something that might have been a monkey swung into the light and was gone. A fearful sense of the insanity of going into that tangled and clotted darkness lanced through Rebel. “Let’s go,” Bors said.

  They walked and climbed through the brush. Rebel was in the middle of the patrol, with Bors behind her and wolverines fore and aft. Wyeth led, the head of a predatory virus injecting itself into the island. The floor here was a slick mass of roots, covered in places with rotting vegetation and the occasional puddle of salt water.

  The sea slapped against a thousand branches behind them.

  Rebel found the going surprisingly easy, even natural, perhaps due to shadow memories of her life in Tirnannog.

  She was comfortable here; traveling took up a fraction of her attention. She touched a leaf, and the library whispered larch. This five-pointed one was maple. Over there, that clump was all monkey-puzzle. Branches grew in and out of the trunks, in complete disregard for species, hemlock growing out of oak, and arrowwood into banyan.

  This was basic comet-tree bioengineering, primitive but effective, where the functions of plant and environment had been warped one into the other. There were tiny crabs in the tidepools, and sea anemones as well. She brushed her fingers slightly over their life-cycle data, decided not to touch.

  “Going gets easier now,” Wyeth said over his shoulder.

  The floor rose and became dryer, and the trees opened out. They walked single-file through dark, open spaces, an almost tactile pressure of trees pushing down from above, so high and lush that no light reached them here. The straight boles of the trees were overgrown with phosphorescent fungi, some like stacked white plates and others that were elaborate glowing fantasias. They walked as if through a dark cathedral lit by blue corpselight. The sea behind them had been silenced by deadening masses of plants, to be replaced by slow creaking noises, as of the hulls of wooden ships afloat at anchor. Rebel imagined herself in the hold of an ancient galleon, acolyte to some hidden gnostic ceremony. She stuck a hand in her cloak pocket, and it closed about the wafer she had made in Geesinkfor, the recording of her persona.

  They detoured around a pond-sized opening in the floor.

  Black salt water bobbed restlessly within it. “This is where they cut the transceivers out of the skulls of their dead,”

  Wyeth said. Mulch squished underfoot. “The flesh is thrown into the water. There are meat-eaters down there.”

  Bors picked up something—a bone or a tool—from the water’s edge, glanced at it, threw it in. Somewhere nearby a trickle of water fell steadily. “So where’s the Comprise?”

  “I don’t know,” Wyeth said tensely. “There’s usually some here.”

  Clutching the slick, slightly greasy wafer, Rebel felt the weight and involuted complexity of the island clamp down about her. She sensed it as a single organism,interconnected through all its varied parts, with hidden messages encoded in every twig and leaf. Perhaps it was conscious, its paths of thought and personality expressed in the twisting of limbs and placement of flowers. Rebel might well be walking through the confines of a mind that mirrored her own, wandering the mazy wetroutes of memory and persona. She stared down at her closed fist, then up into darkness, and both were equally unreadable to her.

  “The drugs should have hit the drinking stations by now,” Wyeth said.

  Nee-C said, “Then why ain’t nothing happened?”

  “Shut up!” Bors snarled.

  Rebel was no longer afraid of the Comprise. If the island was in some sense her brain, then they were simply bad thoughts haunting the mind jungles, as forceless and insubstantial as fear. She conjured up the memory of her wetware diagram, and it surrounded her in green lace, a midscale model of the forest about her, the brain within.

  She let it fade, the branches slowly melting away, until all that remained was that strange circular logic structure floating about her like an electric green halo.

  Without warning, something dropped down in front of them. It was human-tall and impossibly, elegantly thin. Its arms, slender and graceful, reached almost to its feet, and it was covered with short pale fur. It glowed gently in the gloom. Its eyes were large and liquidly expressive, like a lemur’s, but its face was entirely human. “Boss Wyeth,” it said.

  As one, three wolverines shot it with their plastic pistols.

  It blinked. Long, expressive fingers rose to touch its forehead. “We must—” it began.

  And screamed.

  The creature fell sideward, eyes shut tight, clawing at its face, and howled in agony. “That’s it!” Bors shoutedhappily. “Let’s go up!” They all followed Wyeth at a near run.

  Rebel hardly noticed the incident. She was still considering the differences between mind projected upon tree and upon wafer. Perhaps where a human brain operated at electrochemical speeds, a tree would operate at the biological speeds of metabolism and catabolism, its thoughts as slow and certain as the growth of a new branch. The ceramic wafer could only operate on the level of atomic decay, each complete thought eons long, its lifespan greater than stars. It would be a crime then, as serious as murder, not to cherish and shelter the wafers from harm through the ages the expression of their lives would take. They had come to an enormous tree, where short, dead limbs spiraled up the trunk, like a ladder’s rungs warped into a stairway, and were climbing it on all fours. She thought it was a fir of some sort; the library was getting harder to access.

  They climbed endlessly. The green ring still floated about her, a tatter of shredded lace. She imagined herself traveling within its cryptic twistings and windings, around and around, a pinlight of consciousness exploring the pathways of thought. But of course that was all illusion. If she were actually crawling through her mind, in whatever sense, the answers she sought were not to be found in the interior. The combat tea
m was aimed straight as an icepick at the center of the island, and it was there, if anywhere, that answers would be found. She felt her metaprogrammer clumsily struggling to free itself from an endlessly looping pathway, and then the library clicked in briefly, and she found she could map their progress by the species of vegetation they passed, which changed as they moved away from the sea and climbed toward the light.

  There were tiny green insects on the bark, delicate insectivores feeding on mites too small to be seen. Rebel paused to look at them, and one stepped onto her thumb, as dainty and worshipful as a devotee climbing atop thehand of God. Staring down into the faceted lenses of its eyes, she imagined a multiple image of a world-filling face, brown and wrinkled as a dried apple. It was an ancient version of her original face, stern and filled with strange humors, and the mouth moved with silent commands. It was her wizard-mother. Then Bors gave her a shove, and she moved onward.

  Vague with speculation, Rebel somehow missed the end of the climb. They were running up the center of a wide limb now, on a path that had been smoothed into the bark.

  Nightblooms grew in clusters here, and they ran through an arch of papery material and were among the Comprise.

  Shallow bowls of grey flooring surrounded the tree trunks, overlapping where branches crossed, and on them lay hundreds of those thin lemur creatures. Twisting in slow agony, they moaned softly, continuously, a low keening that filled the universe. They hardly moved at all, like bees that had been smoked from their hive and now lay helpless as it was looted of its treasures. The grey paper grew up the trunks, complexly figured with narrow walks and grouped sleeping niches no larger than a Comprise body. Some were filled and papered over, all but the face, and nurse snakes tried to tend to their occupants, offering regurgitated protein and drawing back in reptilian bafflement when it was not accepted. The edge of one bowl had broken where something had fallen through, and it was acrawl with paper wasps working to repair the damage.