Flowercrash

by Stephen Palmer

  “Aye to that,” they chorused.

  CHAPTER 19

  Manserphine’s response to the flower crash was despair. She wandered the alleys of central Veneris, explored the Shrine lanes, strode up to the oldest districts in the north, to find everywhere the remains of blooms flopped like exhausted soldiers at the pathetic and gruesome end of a battle. Screens showed gritty images in black and white. Many, however, were blank.

  She walked down to the Sump, where she was able to gaze out over the artificial ocean created by the Sea-Clerics. Sick with despondency, she saw innumerable floating bees, and she realised that the flower crash had deprived them of their natural behaviour patterns. Inutility had caused their demise. The dead bees represented a lost pool of knowledge. She understood too that the Sea-Clerics had been unable to force the flower networks to follow their vision, and so had been unable to control the event itself. But then another thought troubled her. Suppose the Sea-Clerics now returned to the use of force?

  It was all hopeless. They had lost. Humanity had lost.

  She returned to the Determinate Inn, and slept.

  She woke. She lay in bed, Kirifaïfra at her side. Already the inn’s autospiders had rounded up a handful of hoverflies and stached them in their nets, ready for release, but still a few smacked against the window.

  It was a Garden day, the first session after the flower crash.

  Inside, all nine members were present. Ianniyas, who had become Interpreter during Manserphine’s incarceration, gave her a wide berth, but Manserphine ignored this, knowing that Ianniyas was ruled by her ambition and was probably annoyed at her return from the Shrine of the Sea.

  But the Garden had changed. Manserphine, who always managed to slip up her hat when the poppy heads descended, could feel the difference.

  No longer was it a random collection of borders, bushes, and scented blooms drooping from elegant stems. Now it was grey and damp, stolid and slow under a grey sky, scentless and grim. With only small packets of data moving through the networks, the Garden had been forced to reduce itself to the bare minimum, a low resolution reality fraying at the edges, small and hazy. Already the root backup systems were being overloaded. Soon the whole system would fail, just as it failed every autumn.

  They stood in the Outer Garden. Curulialci called for their presence in the Inner Garden, so Manserphine walked over, alongside Yamaygyny and Alquazonan. Again, much was different. The jumble of blooms had been replaced by monochrome. For a while they wandered this new environment, amazed at the cold, the gloom, the bland and pixelated images, taking in the foul air, fearful of what the change suggested.

  “It reminds me of before,” Alquazonan reminisced. “About fifty years ago there was a great change, when the Garden split into two.”

  “Tell us more,” said Manserphine.

  “It was around the time of the Gang of Three. Previously, the Garden had been comparatively bare, but suddenly it was lush, scented, far bigger than before. Now it has returned to something like its earlier state.”

  Manserphine considered these words. She passed under a bare brick arch and into a circular arbour about twenty feet across. There was another entrance on the opposite side, but apart from that the arbour was enclosed. The only objects of note were three chairs of twinkling granite, massive like split boulders, yet with natural seats for sitting in.

  Suddenly she was aware that she was alone.

  She turned. At the arch, Alquazonan and the two clerics were staring in, trying to walk underneath, but somehow unable to. She walked back to them, and said, “Come on, it’s quite safe.”

  They heard her, but seemed not to see her, as the lesser members in the Outer Garden saw those of the Inner but did not hear them. Manserphine realised that she was a shifting mirage to them. She stepped out, and they jumped back.

  “Manserphine!” Curulialci said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. You cannot walk under the arch?”

  They all tried, but the natural forces of the Garden stopped them. Once more Manserphine entered the arbour, looked at the three chairs, then wondered if they were waiting for somebody to sit in them.

  Outside, Curulialci said, “You became a ghost to us and we could hardly hear you.”

  “It is as before,” Alquazonan said. “Certain members are not allowed across the new boundary. The Garden is now a tripartite reality. We must name this arbour the Core Garden. Yet it is odd that only Manserphine can walk inside. Why is she different?”

  “She has silvery skin here,” Yamagyny remarked.

  “What causes the other five members of the Garden to halt at the boundary between the Outer and Inner Gardens?” Manserphine asked.

  “That is a secret of Our Sister Crone,” Curulialci said, glancing at Yamagyny. The pair looked uncomfortable.

  “Now would seem to be the time to share it,” Manserphine said.

  They walked off, talking in quiet voices. Alquazonan glanced at Manserphine and said, “I wonder if the flower crash caused this new reality?”

  “Do you think there is a link?”

  “Well, I cannot help but recall what happened fifty years ago. Then there was a massive change in the Garden.”

  “But no flower crash.”

  Alquazonan agreed. “There had been a particularly good summer the year before, however, with lots of seeds. The year after… a completely different Garden.”

  Manserphine was struck by the similarity to last year’s seed production. “It’s almost as if the networks can plan for future events.”

  Alquazonan nodded. “The Wild Network Guild was at the time a minor organisation, since wild networks were not common then. But fifty two years ago those networks became much more numerous, and they have since spread across Zaïdmouth, along with the influence of the Guild I now lead.”

  “I must tell my friends Zoahnône and Shônsair,” Manserphine said. “This changes a great deal.”

  Again Alquazonan agreed. “Fifty two years ago there was no flower crash, just a bounty of flowers and new networks. This time it is different. The networks have taken a mortal blow. But there are always those seeds lying dormant in the ground, full of knowledge, full of data, awaiting next year.”

  Ten minutes later, Curulialci returned to say, “Yamagyny has gone back to inform the other five of the new changes.”

  “This secret,” Manserphine said. “What is it?”

  Curulialci hesitated, then replied, “Determination of who enters the Inner Garden is made by the Garden itself and is not based on individual merit. It is based on role. Whoever is Grandmother Cleric, Mother Cleric, and presumably whoever is Guildmistress, although so far there has only been one, is admitted. The Garden is an entity with its own rules.”

  “Then it is clear that I have for some reason been chosen by the Garden,” Manserphine said. “The networks have their own ethics, you might say. We must ask why I have been chosen.”

  “Do you know why?” Curulialci asked.

  Manserphine saw that it was time to admit the one difference she knew of. “I have a small confession to make,” she said. “I do not experience the Garden as you do—”

  “I knew it,” Alquazonan interrupted. “For some time I have wondered about your skin colour. Now I know. The Cemetery.”

  “The Cemetery?” Curulialci said, her face wrinkled with disgust.

  “Around my brain there lies an interface,” Manserphine said. “I acquired it by accident. I did not even know about it until later. The hat I wear covers the interface ecology on my forehead. Every Sea-Cleric has access to this technology, and it is why they wear silver circlets.”

  “This is not the reason,” Alquazonan confidently said. “Your method of interface is like mine. As we speak now, my body lies supine in the Guildhall, flowers at its forehead. But I cannot enter the Core Garden. No, the Garden, and by implication the networks, sense that you are conceptually different, just as Curulialci, Yamagyny, you and myself are different from the lesser mem
bers. It is something in your nature, or possibly in your social role.”

  Manserphine remembered what the mermaids had told her. “I am an agent of change in Zaïdmouth,” she said. “Those mermaids sharing my vision can sense it in me.”

  “That is a more likely reason,” Alquazonan said.

  Curulialci sighed. “Whatever the reason, the change has happened and we cannot reverse it. At least Manserphine has nobody to talk to inside the arbour, since she alone was chosen by the Garden.”

  Alquazonan looked at Manserphine, as if expecting a denial.

  Manserphine said, “There are three granite chairs inside. One must be for me. I think two other people are expected.”

  “That cannot be,” Curulialci said. “The Garden is composed of ten people, six of whom cannot enter the Inner Garden to get to the Core Garden.”

  “That is incorrect,” Alquazonan said. “Shônsair and Zoahnône were able to enter the Inner Garden during the attempted transmutation. And there is Fnfayrq to consider. Has she ever attempted to enter the Inner Garden?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Then she remains untested. As for Zoahnône and Shônsair, they may be able to enter the Core Garden, depending on what they can offer Zaïdmouth.”

  “Zoahnône can offer much,” Manserphine said. “We must ask her to try.”

  “That would be a good start. What a pity we will never see Fnfayrq again. She is of an organisation with the potential for change.”

  “Bad change.”

  “Change, nonetheless,” Alquazonan said. “There are many agents of change in this world, some of who only have the opportunity to alter the sheen on a flower petal, others with opportunity enough to write history. We must sift one from the other until the most important agents of change are identified. Then we must consider their possibilities. Then we must act.”

  “Act?” Curulialci said.

  “We are not yet defeated.”

  With the conversation over, the remainder of Garden business was concluded and then Manserphine left to find Zoahnône. At the Determinate Inn she learned that she and Shônsair were soon expected, so she settled down to wait. At last they arrived, and she told them what had happened in the Garden, concluding, “Change is afoot. Even Alquazonan can feel it. We must try to understand what is happening.”

  “Would that we could,” Zoahnône replied. “With Baigurgône controlling the networks many of our options are gone. Indeed, she may soon make a punitive strike on the Garden.”

  “What is her goal?” asked Manserphine.

  Zoahnône simply replied, “To defeat us.”

  “Is that all? Does she know your plans?”

  “We don’t know. It’s not impossible. There are a million ways to manipulate the networks if you know what you’re doing.”

  Manserphine sighed. “We must win. The embodied gynoid—Zaha whatever her name is—must be born.”

  “Manserphine,” Shônsair said, her voice quiet but intense, “have you noticed that Alquazonan is a fat android?”

  “Yes.”

  “We jested that she may be pregnant, but Kirifaïfra lately reported that the strange men from Emeralddis have linked Alquazonan with pregnancy. Have your visions anything to say about this?”

  “I only saw the new being,” Manserphine replied, “not her mother. But Alquazonan spoke to me in the Garden about the flower crash. Perhaps we should all question her face to face in case some fragment of information is thrown up.”

  The idea was discussed, then agreed to. Having sent a message to tell Alquazonan they were on their way, they departed the Determinate Inn, leaving Vishilkaïr to look after it.

  Two hours before midnight they arrived, to be ushered through the Guildhall up to the top floor, where Alquazonan had her private chamber. This was a single, square room painted black, but decorated with textiles woven from luminous threads all colours of the rainbow, so that a uniform, almost hallucinatory light was thrown into the room. There were no shadows. Elegant censers wrought as statues of women in athletic poses stood free, all isolated by this ubiquitous illumination. There was no furniture except bulky cushions and mattresses thrown at random about the floor.

  Alquazonan welcomed them in, and in the manner of Novais aristocrats invited them to take a cushion and gather in the centre of the room.

  For some minutes the five sat quiet, as if nobody dared break the silence. The faint whisper of autospiders directing one another to remove hoverflies hissed around them. Then Shônsair said, “Alquazonan, we have during our travels wondered about the cause of your technological cancer. Perhaps you could describe it to us.”

  “The cause is a mystery to me,” Alquazonan said, “but describing it is easier. I first became aware of it fifty or so years back, after the change in the Garden, and since then it has slowly grown inside me, pulling power from my internal cells to aid its growth, tiring me, perhaps even eroding my basic parts so that a kind of death is nigh. Soon it will reach my interface, and then I expect I will die.”

  “But some of these symptoms are like those of a human pregnancy,” Shônsair said.

  “How can I be pregnant?” Alquazonan said. “I am a gynoid. Gynoid bodies emerge from the very earth, from wombs of red hardpetal. Our physiology is entirely non-human.”

  “It is the metaphor that counts,” Shônsair said, haughtily. “Suppose you are pregnant—”

  “Wait,” Zoahnône cautioned. “Alquazonan does not know of my plan to create the first embodied gynoid.” Briefly, Zoahnône outlined her ideas, concluding, “Shônsair naturally wonders if your cancer is actually the first such gynoid, but of course, it cannot be, since so far we have developed no sure method of linking such a gynoid with its mother. Mating comes before pregnancy.”

  “Exactly,” Alquazonan said. “But I am not pregnant with anything. The technology that we gynoids have at our foreheads exists as interface, but it surely cannot expand to create a developing gynoid, even if such a being existed.”

  “We do not know that for sure,” Zoahnône said. “Shônsair and I have both developed models for gynoid pregnancy involving the exact process you describe.”

  Manserphine had been listening with keen interest to all this. In the silence that followed she said, “There is one thing we do know. My vision told me that the first embodied gynoid is alive, now, today.” Manserphine reached into her mind and tried to pull out the name, but she could not. “Zaha-something,” she said. “That being lives today in Zaïdmouth.”

  “Now that,” Shônsair remarked, “is compelling evidence.”

  Another long silence fell. Alquazonan looked uncomfortable, and she shifted in her cushion as if aware of the weight in her belly. Everyone looked at the bulge, and at her.

  “I am not pregnant,” she stated. “How can I be? Who is there to mate with a gynoid such as me?”

  “An insect?” Kirifaïfra said.

  This suggestion made Alquazonan stare at him. Manserphine became aware that a train of thought had been started in the gynoid’s mind. She waited.

  “There is one thing,” Alquazonan said. “Fifty two years ago, in wintertime, a strange thing chanced in the Cemetery. I was walking westward with Teoalquar, Guildmistress of the Wild Network Guild, then the most junior member of the Garden, when we happened to pass through the region of stones to the north. It was the time of the coup of the Gang of Three, and I was one who dared enter the Garden to try and expel them, along with the then Grandmother and Mother clerics of Our Sister Crone. We failed, until I happened to bump into one of the Gang of Three standing alone. I expelled him and the other two followed, but later, in the Cemetery, I met three men.” Alquazonan paused, as if replaying the events of that icy day in her mind’s eye, before saying, “Now that I come to recall it, the man I expelled and the man who attacked us and killed Teoalquar looked similar. The same man, perhaps. He fell to the ground and a black bee descended upon the golden flower he exposed, which then brushed over me. Next day I notice
d how well the wild flowers were doing, despite the season.”

  “It’s clear to me,” Manserphine said, triumphantly. “The genesis of the embodied gynoid is linked to this symbolic event—a massive transfer of data. You bear the being in your belly. The man was the method of initiation, but the bee was the method of impregnating.”

  Zoahnône gestured for Manserphine to cease talking. She said, “I am persuaded by this argument, but although we have seen a pattern, we do not know the reason for this pattern.”

  “I do,” Manserphine said. “The Garden changed fifty two years ago along with the networks, and it changed yesterday too. It’s the Garden, or perhaps the networks as a whole, that have impregnated Alquazonan. Your plan has been going for fifty two years, Zoahnône! All you have to do is be the midwife. The networks know what they are doing, and they even knew last year that the flower crash would come.”

  Zoahnône nodded. “If this is true, we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. An embodied gynoid may soon be born. We must strive with all our might to bring this about, for in that being we have the only way of defeating Baigurgône. The flower crash has changed the mode of the networks, and, yes, it is a major event, but if the embodied gynoid is born, the entirety is changed—everything from molecules of hardpetal substrate up to the most abstract metaphor.” Zoahnône turned to Alquazonan and said, “You must be protected, and of course you must be observed.”

  Alquazonan seemed a little reserved in her reply. “I in particular find myself in an extraordinary position. Well, protection will be simple enough. The Guildhall will remain my home.”

  “One task awaits us,” Shônsair said. “We must discover what aspect of the networks, or possibly of the Garden, has united with Alquazonan to create the embodied gynoid, if truly it lies within her belly. To that end we need to find a black bee.”

  “I have a prediction,” Kirifaïfra said. “Many varieties of orchid are shaped so that only one species of insect will pollinate them, and those insects are correspondingly rare, as I’ve observed over the years. If this golden flower is unique, then so is the black bee. You’ll have to search for one bee amongst millions.”