Flowercrash

by Stephen Palmer

  “Do you want me to watch for clues to your enemies?”

  “You could do.” Zoahnône sat beside a white campion, a male flower with a small screen. After some anther tickling she called up an image of two faces. “The left face is Baigurgône, the right Shônsair.”

  Manserphine studied the right image. “I think I recognise that gynoid,” she said.

  Zoahnône sat rigid. “You do? Surely not.”

  Manserphine tried to remember where she had seen that noble, yet arrogant face. The longer she looked, the more certain she was, and to aid her memory she tried to put voice to face. She imagined rough speech.

  “Blissis!”

  “What would Shônsair do in Blissis?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Manserphine replied. “But I remember who it was now, and at the time I thought her a woman. There were two doorwardens at the Shrine of Complete Inebriation, and Shônsair was one of them.”

  “You must be mistaken,” said Zoahnône. “Shônsair is a haughty, intellectual gynoid of immense power. She would never become a skivvy in hedonistic Blissis.”

  But Manserphine knew she was right. “It’s her,” she said. “I recall now that she spoke differently to the others. I know all about accents and culture, and she was not of Blissis. I sourced her speech in Veneris, but it somehow seemed external to Zaïdmouth.”

  “That rings true,” Zoahnône admitted, “but the tale is nonetheless fantastic.”

  “Go to Blissis. There you may see her. Will she recognise you?”

  “No. I am to the world a strange gynoid called Eollyndy. Yet I must be careful, for we have been opposed for aeons and know one another intimately. Blissis, you say… you must come with me, Manserphine.”

  “I cannot,” Manserphine replied, shaking her head and standing as if to go. “My work starts tomorrow. I shall be very busy.”

  Zoahnône was disappointed, replying, “In that case we must discuss how strange spring is this year.”

  They exchanged significant looks, before Manserphine dropped her gaze and murmured, “Yes, it is a bit odd.”

  “You know what it signifies.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You do! Humanity is in peril, and you know it.” Zoahnône swept her arms through the air, then said, “Look at what is around you. Rose after rose after rose, and only hoverflies to go with them. A monoculture. This is a deliberate deed, Manserphine, and it means that the flower crash is due soon, and with it the extinction of hundreds, even thousands of beautiful species. We must not let those two inhumane minds achieve their ends.”

  “If Baigurgône and Shônsair are indeed responsible.”

  “I believe they are. This spring reeks of them.”

  Manserphine, chastised, just shrugged and said, “I’ll do what I can.”

  Saying nothing more, Zoahnône departed. Manserphine watched her slip through the compost heaps and nettle undergrowth, then vanish into the shadows at the side of the inn. She returned to her Shrine through the wicket gate.

  That evening she presented herself at Curulialci’s chamber. The Grandmother Cleric sat awaiting her, and with a twinge of fear Manserphine recognised the azure dress and wrap she wore as those of her own vision. She glanced around the chamber, noticing the screens of roses and late snowdrops. It seemed incredible. She had foreseen this event through these very optics. How could that be?

  “You seem distracted,” Curulialci said.

  “My apologies, Grandmother Cleric.”

  Curulialci walked across to Manserphine and embraced her. Her eyes shone. “I am glad you have returned. No banishment is easy. You fared well?”

  “Yes, Grandmother Cleric.”

  “You did not succumb to temptation?”

  “No,” Manserphine replied, holding that green gaze steady with her own. “I ate and drank, but no more than usual. I want to remain your Interpreter.”

  “Good. You having no obvious successor, I do not want to demote you.” Again she hugged Manserphine. “Welcome back!”

  “Thank you.”

  Curulialci led Manserphine to a couch, where they sat and drank scented elderberry wine. After more small talk, Curulialci sent Manserphine back to her room.

  Night came. Manserphine lay in her bed, restless with insomnia, imagining what the new Garden would bring in the morning.

  ~

  The rituals next day began with a stately walk to the Headflower Chamber. With the Shrine’s clerics and laity watching in silent rows, Curulialci led Yamagyny and Manserphine into this circular room at the heart of the Shrine. They wore heavy dresses that trailed along the ground, and they carried clay crone models.

  The Headflower Chamber was panelled with luminous hardpetal from which autonomous daisies grew, their petals mimicking faces, symbols, even animal forms, according to stray data they had stored. The omnidirectional light made the womens’ faces glow. From a hole in the centre of the floor three white poppies grew, their blooms a little larger than a head. They drooped towards the floor from swan necks. Three couches lay pointing outwards from the hole, so that the blooms hung over the headrests.

  After her superiors sat, Manserphine settled herself in the remaining couch, and waited. Soon she felt the creepy, slightly claustrophobic sensation of a poppy head settling over the crown of her head, and seconds later she saw petal edges before her eyes, and then the glittering portals of retinal projectors. She shivered. In the heart of the flower, devices were moving, repositioning themselves, and this she felt through her hair and across her scalp. Manserphine had never been able to rid herself of the impression that grubs and even insects lived there, waiting to gnaw into her brain. Again she shivered, as the goosebumps rose and fell upon the bare skin of her arms.

  When the Garden began transmitting, the image of defocussed white petals faded. She concentrated on the retinal projections and the sound entering her ears from soft earpieces. Within seconds her brain had assimilated the stereoscopic visual and audio information, and, although she knew it to be an illusion, she found herself standing in the Garden. Motion sensors made other parts of the Garden appear as she moved her head. Curulialci and Yamagyny awaited her.

  Part of her had expected changes. The Garden was as bright as the previous year, its profusion of flowers as colourful as ever, but almost everything she could see was a member of the rose family. There seemed to be a few bluebells in the distance, and, at her feet, one scarlet daffodil. Hoverflies in their thousands buzzed from bloom to bloom. Manserphine shaded her eyes from the bright blue sky to look at the horizon. This was a spherical reality. She seemed to be standing inside a bubble of colour.

  The changes in the technological flowers had indeed altered this artificial reality.

  Suddenly Alquazonan materialised. She was a gynoid of medium height and voluptuous build. Her tanned skin and white hair—including white eyebrows—made her appearance particularly striking. She wore a pale grey cloak, made flowing to cover her distended torso; for some decades she had suffered from a technological cancer of the innards.

  Manserphine studied her covertly as all four of them walked towards the centre of the Garden. The pact that had been made after the momentous events of fifty two years ago, when the Gang of Three had managed to control the Garden for half a week, had thrust Alquazonan into the position of Guildmistress of the Wild Network Guild, following the death of the previous incumbent, Teoalquar. From her lonely Guildhall base Alquazonan projected her image and received Garden transmissions, as she had done since that time. She looked after gynoid interests and advised on the wild flower networks, which constituted half of those in Zaïdmouth.

  Behind a screen of dwarf cherry Manserphine saw four seats. Just a few yards away ten more lay. They walked across a dark arc of grass, the border between the Inner and Outer Gardens, and as they did five figures materialised behind them. Manserphine glanced back to see Ashnaram of the Shrine of Flower Sculpture, Ephroyao of the Shrine of Root Sculpture, and beside them Luihaby, Ianniyas and Z
entenzin, the three civic representatives, who would be sitting somewhere in the chamber reserved for them elsewhere in the Shrine of Our Sister Crone. From where they waited the five could hear nothing. Manserphine and her three colleagues, however, could hear everything, for the barrier was one way, silencing speech only from the Inner Garden to the Outer. This was how the Garden systems had reorganised themselves following the trauma of the Gang of Three.

  As Interpreter, Manserphine would sit with her superiors and Alquazonan in the four seats of the Inner Garden, or with all nine representatives in the ten chairs, should they be speaking as a whole. Most often her task was to interpret behaviour and cultural patterns, but she was also called upon to translate difficult speech, such as that of Ashnaram, Ianniyas, who represented Novais, and Zentenzin of Blissis.

  Again she glanced back at the others. Her friend Luihaby gave her a cheery wave. All this was public stuff, watched by the citizens of Zaïdmouth on flower screens.

  So the morning progressed. They discussed winter damage to the networks, then agreed to set up pollination groups to encourage bulbs damaged by the frost, and finally moved on to consider currency rates. Nobody mentioned species reduction.

  At noon, they paused. Manserphine stood, intending to walk among the plants of a distant zone.

  A figure materialised.

  It was Fnfayrq.

  They stood as one, as if under threat. The Sea-Cleric was dressed in a black robe that swung at her ankles. Her fingers were heavy with silver, her hair strung with quartz beads, and she wore an opal-studded circlet at her brow. With her stern manner and compelling face she commanded their attention, yet she stood silent, like an angry noble.

  Manserphine approached. Only she could speak with this woman. She said, “Welcome to the Garden, forgotten tides coming in at last, the phosphorescent wakes of squid marking a path across the ocean.” It was a greeting she had devised long ago, but never expected to use.

  Fnfayrq surveyed them all. “This Garden, beetles dig, bees heavy, oh, I miss the sound of my surf.”

  This reference to what Fnfayrq saw as the alien quality of the Garden annoyed Manserphine, but her professionalism allowed her to keep her silence. She had heard worse insults. It was surprise that was affecting her.

  Fnfayrq sat at the seat reserved for her, then looked them over, the beads in her hair clacking together like so many crab claws. “I am here, so sea-soon, bright in the mind for foreign shells.”

  Curulialci was at Manserphine’s side. “Ask her why she’s come.”

  “That is what she has just told me,” Manserphine replied. “She thinks she is early, but now she has seen us here, she is keen to take her place.”

  “But…”

  “Yes, exactly,” Manserphine sympathised. “Don’t ask me why she is here, I have no idea.” But in the privacy of her mind she suspected there must be a connection with her own winter visit, and that, she knew, would put pressure on her when she wanted it least.

  “In that case,” Curulialci said, “ask her whether she has any specific points to raise.”

  Manserphine said, “Bright starlight glitters upon the sea, twinkling, circling, how easily we impose our own patterns upon them.”

  Fnfayrq nodded, then replied, “Sea currents circle, tiny plankton ending up where they began.”

  “No,” Manserphine told Curulialci.

  “Then what does she want to do?”

  Manserphine asked this question, to receive the reply, “At night we can lie naked on our shore, absorb the endless, so-perfect white noise of crashing surf.”

  “She only wants to listen to us debating,” Manserphine reported. “Here is my advice. Let’s finish the day as normal. I’ll translate for Fnfayrq, and at the end of the day I can give you my feelings.”

  This was agreed. The afternoon was spent as the morning, until, as the artificial, sunless sky began to dim into soft streaks of rose and violet, the ten women one by one vanished from the Garden into their own chambers. Manserphine was left in the Inner Garden, her two superiors at her side, Alquazonan standing some yards away contemplating moths that were already appearing from flower-laden bushes.

  “What do you make of Fnfayrq’s appearance?” asked Yamagyny.

  Manserphine decided to tell a harmless truth. “I took a trip into Aequalaïs during my banishment,” she said. “There may be a connection.”

  “Did you meet Fnfayrq?”

  “Yes. She threw me out.”

  Curulialci frowned. “Why did you go?”

  Without hesitation Manserphine replied, “You know of my visions. I discovered that the insects appearing afterwards all fly south into that urb. I went exploring.”

  Curulialci seemed satisfied with the explanation, though Yamagyny described it as rash. So they departed the Garden, having bade Alquazonan farewell.

  Back in the real world dusk was upon Veneris. Manserphine hurried to her chamber, changed into a flimsy gown and a jacket, then ran into the gardens of the Shrine, ending up inside a walled garden stuffed with scented blooms. With night close these nocturnal flowers were opening, and moths were flapping everywhere. She forged a way through to the single orange great-snapdragon that she knew grew by the north wall. There it was. Now for the tricky part. Without a humble bee pen she would have to tickle anthers, a difficult operation given the enclosed petals that resembled a beast’s mouth. The screen was stuck at the base of the bloom.

  She cursed the impractical networks. But then she stopped herself. Zoahnône’s words rose up in her mind. She realised that she was imposing her own view upon the natural complexity of the system—and that was wrong. She must learn to accept the flower networks as they were. These thoughts made Zoahnône’s plan urgent in her mind, and she resolved to do everything she could to assist, for if she, an enlightened woman, was so easily led into such a view, how much more easily would the general populace be led.

  So she struggled to make the screen work. And there lay a message from Zoahnône, which she opened immediately. It read, ‘This humble bee pen makes information placing easy! I have been to the Shrine of Complete Inebriation, where I discovered that two doorwardens recently departed the place. One was a sot named Lizlaini, the other the tall, noble woman who must be Shônsair, but who used a false name. I am continuing my search. I am also debating with myself the wisdom of killing Shônsair. Of course, that is murder, but it may be justified. We shall see.’

  Manserphine felt repelled by the naked emotion of Zoahnône’s last thoughts, and she wondered just what she had become involved with. But again she considered the flower networks, which she loved for their beauty and elegance, and she knew that Zoahnône was right. She decided personal differences was gynoid business and nothing to do with herself.

  In a state of calm thoughtfulness she returned to her room. To her surprise she found Yamagyny sitting at the door, reading a hardpetal tablet.

  Yamagyny looked her up and down. “Your dress is rather dirty. Where have you been?”

  “Just for a walk in the gardens.”

  “I’ve a task for you.”

  They entered Manserphine’s room and sat down. Manserphine said, “I hope this is a short task.”

  “It’s an important task. We know you’re friends with Luihaby and so it has devolved upon you. Curulialci suspects a affair between Luihaby and a man. Men, possibly. We want you to investigate. You two being friends, Luihaby won’t suspect. But please be subtle. If news gets out the Garden will suffer a setback in the public eye, and, worse, to the other representatives. Above all, with Fnfayrq on the scene we don’t want to seem weak.”

  Manserphine scoffed at this. “You know as well as I do that Fnfayrq has sworn no oath of celibacy. The Sea-Clerics are notorious debauchees, who lie with different men in sandy pits along the shore.”

  “That’s just unsubstantiated rumour,” Yamagyny said.

  “I beg to differ,” Manserphine interrupted, offended by this slur on her ability. “I know the Sea-Cl
erics better than anybody outside Aequalaïs.”

  Flustered, Yamagyny waved her hands at Manserphine and said, “We stray from the point.”

  Manserphine knew she had won over a particularly smug form of hypocrisy, for affairs in the lower shrine were commonplace here. She said, “Do we? As for this task, with Fnfayrq present in the Garden I shall have no time for investigations. I am sorry.”

  “You have no choice,” Yamagyny stated. “Report to me as soon as you have evidence.”

  Manserphine scowled as the Mother Cleric departed her room. This was the last thing she wanted. After Shrine duties came Zoahnône, and nobody else.

  The next day work continued at the Garden. It was a full day, offering Manserphine no respite, but she was delighted to hear that the next two days would be a recess, allowing civil mathematicians time to finish calculations concerning memory requirements. This gave her the space she needed, for she could both speak with Zoahnône and investigate Luihaby.

  Zoahnône had left no message, so she concentrated on Luihaby. Although they were friends Manserphine knew little about Luihaby’s private life, for they met mostly at the Shrine of Our Sister Crone. Thinking, however, of Luihaby’s responsibilities for the male inhabitants of Veneris, in the Woods and at the edges of the urb, she wondered if an indiscretion had after all occurred. Luihaby was young, pretty, and the oath of celibacy was controversial; and sometimes broken. Manserphine herself, having enjoyed a healthy interest in men, had found the last eight years of celibacy difficult, despite the doctrinal advantages.

  So she walked up the short street leading to the edge of the Venereal Garden. Flowers in the central aisle flopped over the edge track, brushing against her legs, so that touch-sensitive networks were activated by her passing. Lights flickered and glowed. She carried a fan so that insects, of which there were now thousands, could be gently batted away from her face. Some local residents wore face masks, while around doors and windows sheets had been hung, painted in ultra-violet ink with lines of system code, a language the insects would understand and avoid.