“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 side out. 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 doing?”
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’s hesitation, 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 shouted happily. “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 team 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 the hand 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. Night-blooms 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.
A wolverine impatiently lifted a body that was in her way and heaved it over the edge. Rebel heard it crashing noisily downward, bouncing off the larger branches and snapping the smaller for a very long time. It was savage stuff, gravity was.
The wolverines ran through the nest in a frenzy, smashing things and planting aerosol mines and time-release injector bracelets. There were bunches of hogshead-sized nuts that burst open like rotted melons, releasing a thin, penetrating stench. Clawlike arms reached feebly from the milky white spillage. Things that looked to be overgrown fetuses struggled into the air and died. Rebel was remined of the cloning cysts back home in Green City, and that in turn brought a lullaby to mind, one she’d never heard before. She sang:
“Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green,
Father’s a nobleman, Mother’s a queen.”
Bors was shaking her, hard as he could. His face was red and furious. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Librarian?” It was hard to hear him over that universal simian groan.
“I’m only five years old,” Rebel said wonderingly. “My mother’s name is Elizabeth.”
“She’s stoned,” Nee-C said with satisfaction. Then Wyeth yanked the pistol from Rebel’s waistband and thrust it at Bors. Who sniffed the trigger, shrugged, and threw the thing over the side of the limb. In a flash of analytic clarity Rebel focused on Wyeth’s face and saw on it, instead of anger, only sadness and resignation.
The library said that tree shrews were insectivores, that protozoan pseudopods were used for crawling or the apprehension of food but not for active swimming, that the Tremallales were a small family of saprophytic fungi with gelatinous fruit-bodies. They kept running through nests of Comprise. The creatures seemed to gather in groups of half a thousand. Sometimes there were large empty stretches between nests, other times dozens grew together, one into another. The papery floors crunched slightly underfoot. Someone unstrapped the library from her back, and Wyeth’s face floated into view, saying, “… only a threshold dosage, she can be led,” before her attention wandered away. Then Nee-C grabbed her arm and yanked her after the others.
“Get your ugly butt in gear!” Nee-C’s face was all eyes and teeth and hard animal glitter. The Comprise nests fell behind, like dwindling planets. Nightblooms glowed to all sides, stars caught in the branches of an enchanted forest.
Rebel was sophisticated enough to know that if she were running through the Fairytale Wood, through a route as labyrinthine as that her newly liberated metaprogrammer wove through her fragmented memories, then this animal-woman beside her was actually her advisor and spiritual guide, come to help her find the secret meaning locked in the forest’s dark center.
“Don’t mean nothing,” Nee-C snapped. “It’s just a big goddamned tree. Stupid bitch. I oughta throw you over the side and be done with you.”
They were up near the treetops now, bathed in softly filtered natural light, and about to run through another constellation of Comprise nests. There must’ve been thousands of nests on the island. That was the beauty of a three-dimensional environment; it would support enormous numbers. A dyson world might be no more than two hundred miles across, but that was still over four million cubic miles of living space. Billions could live in one without crowding. This island was only ten miles across, a few hundred feet high. But that was still some eighty square miles, or over three cubic. Room enough for hundreds of thousands of Comprise. Packed the way they were, there could be millions.
There was a wooden basin in the center of the nest. Rebel stood by it, watching the water dance and leap in response to a trickle that fell from above. The overflow slid over the lip, through a mossy hole and into the depths. It was joyous to watch. Whenever a Comprise straightened or showed any faint glimmer of intelligence, it was hit by a droplet from a wolverine pistol and carried to a safe spot, to serve as poisoned meat against any attempt to reunite the island Comprise.
The water constantly shattered into near-subliminal mandalas, patterned wave fronts destroyed by the next drop before Rebel could decipher them. She leaned against the trough, intent on the images trying to break through the fluid surface, and accidentally pressed against her bracelet. The air filled with lashing red directional beams, reaching from Comprise to Comprise and then away, sometimes stabilizing into networks of twenty to fifty linked individuals before hitting poisoned meat and disintegrating again.
Suddenly the trees brightened to one side, glowing a profound blue, and everything was submerged in the energy of some impossibly powerful distant source. The red directional lines faded, slowed, winked out in its soothing wash. A purple sun burned low in the distance.
“Here it comes!” Wyeth shouted. “The counterattack!”
A rumbling noise rose up on all sides, the murmur of outraged ants dopplered dow
n into the bass the tumbled and swelled like slow thunder, rolling over and over itself as it crashed in upon them. Local Comprise staggered up, backs arching as if galvanized with megavolts of raw power, eyes blind, lips curling back from savage teeth. Hitting them with more shyapple juice had no effect. Holstering his pistol, a wolverine shouted, “Here we go, kiddies!”
Then the Comprise were howling, not in pain but from the depths of some primal chasm of madness. They shrieked and tore at each other, their fury directed at whatever flesh stood closest. Bors waved the team back up a sloping branch away from the nest. Out of the rolling orgy of violence, five Comprise ran up after them, arms low, faces flat with rage.
Wyeth and Kurt fell back to cover the retreat. Singlesticks appeared magically in their hands. They were manic with combat glee, totally wired, giggling obscenely to themselves as they braced for the fight. Wyeth danced a little quick-step jig, and Kurt tossed his stick from hand to hand, and then the Comprise were on them.
Kurt swept the first over the edge of the limb with one long, fluid motion, releasing the stick to snatch out his combat blade in time for the next Comprise. He slammed the knife into the creature’s heart and was bowled over backward by the body’s momentum. “Get moving, you dumbass drug-head!” Eucrasia screamed, dragging Rebel after her.
Two Comprise were atop Wyeth, attacking him and each other. One had its legs on his shoulders and was trying to rip his head from his body. Another leaped on Kurt as he was trying to free himself of the corpse of his second kill. Rebel watched over her shoulder as she was pulled forward.
Swearing, Kurt was swept off the limb.
Rebel realized suddenly that she wasn’t half drugged enough. She saw Kurt fall into darkness, locked in combat with the Comprise, and the sight burned away the mists of whimsy and distraction, leaving her for the instant with no veil between herself and reality. The Comprise are only bad thoughts, she told herself, dire-wolves and tigers aflame in the ganglion forests of the brain. “Stop talking and run!” Eucrasia ordered.
Vacuum Flowers Page 24