Flowercrash

by Stephen Palmer

  “I’m leaving now,” she told them. “Expect me back. I intend advertising my services across Zaïdmouth.”

  “We’ll hunt you down and put you on trial,” Curulialci said.

  Manserphine shook her head, aware that this flimsy response was a bluff. “You won’t. You have neither the right nor the courage. Besides, you’ve no idea where I live.”

  Perhaps that was going too far. Quickly, Manserphine walked away.

  In the wilds of the Outer Garden she pushed herself out into network space, whereupon all three freed themselves from virtual hold and returned their minds to reality. Manserphine opened her eyes to see a dark shadow above her, as if she had blown a black handkerchief off her face. It disintegrated into hundreds of insects that buzzed away into the morning air.

  She sat up. She felt well.

  “What happened?” said Kirifaïfra, offering her water from the hip-flask he had brought.

  Manserphine described what she had done as they strolled back to the tumbledown house. She concluded, “We are almost ready to make our move. We have Zahafezhan. We have access to the Garden. We have safety of a sort.”

  “What move did you have in mind?” Zoahnône asked.

  “We need to bring Zahafezhan to her full potential, and that means finding the lone black bee. I’ll wager it’s in the Cemetery.”

  “An insect hunt?” Kirifaïfra queried.

  “Yes. We have to make possibilities come true. I have the right to do it because I am the Interpreter. I want my visions to become the future.”

  Somebody jumped out to bar their way. “And I want my visions to come about.”

  Baigurgône.

  Although it was four versus one, Manserphine was terrified. Here was a beast clad in metal and black leather, with eyes that shone like fires. They had thought her dead. This must be a final incarnation.

  Shônsair stepped forward to say, “Leave the two humans and this low caste gynoid alone. Deal with me. I am your enemy.”

  “Low caste gynoid?” Baigurgône replied. “Zoahnône is hardly that.”

  Shônsair had no answer.

  Then Baigurgône revealed the weapons she was carrying. From the left pocket of her cloak she drew a mantis-head revolver, from the other a sundew lance. The mantis jaws glittered in the sun, while the droplets on the end of the sundew oozed red gum. Both weapons were silver: Cemetery technology.

  The capture happened in seconds. While Zoahnône and Shônsair stood silent, apparently in thought, the mantis head extended and two mandibles caught Manserphine’s sleeve; when the head retracted she was dragged into Baigurgône’s grasp. With one hand Baigurgône gripped her shoulder and forced her to her knees.

  “No sudden moves,” Zoahnône and Shônsair were told. “I know in what high esteem you hold this little baggage of flesh.”

  “We do not deign to answer,” Shônsair replied.

  Kirifaïfra took a step forward. “Please don’t hurt her—”

  The head of the sundew leaped forward, and in its sticky grasp Kirifaïfra was dragged towards Baigurgône.

  “Now the odds are better,” she said. “Two against one, with me holding a couple of hostages. Fairer, indeed.”

  “What exactly do you want?” asked Shônsair.

  “Do you remember what we said about human beings as we readied ourselves for the Ice Age they created?”

  Shônsair winced. “‘The people are our pawns, our raw material. They will not feel our presence, but they will respond to our strategies of computational thought like a great shoal of fish.’ Is that what you refer to?”

  “Yes—”

  “Leave these two innocents out of our discussion,” Shônsair interrupted. “I will leave Zoahnône here, and we two will consider the future. I am aware that I have departed from our original path.”

  “Things have changed,” Baigurgône asserted. She indicated Manserphine, who glanced up at her captor, and shuddered. “This human pawn is no innocent. She is part of what is happening in Zaïdmouth.”

  “You have no proof,” said Shônsair.

  “Proof is not required at this juncture, only superiority. With my two captives here I have superiority.”

  “Is this a fair way?”

  “It is our way.”

  Zoahnône said, “What then can we do to resolve this dilemma?”

  Baigurgône grinned. “You can always try to kill me—”

  Before Baigurgône had finished her sentence, Manserphine, watching the other two, saw them leap, heard them screech, felt a jet of smoke in her face. All was chaos. She was thrown against Kirifaïfra; she tasted earth in her mouth as she hit the ground. And blood. In panic she grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the smoke. Appalling cries filled her ears, sounds half human, half machine. Then silence.

  They leaned against a tree watching the smoke disperse. Two figures emerged: Shônsair first, then Zoahnône.

  Manserphine said, “What happened?”

  Their hair was in disarray, their clothes ripped, and they breathed in gasps. Yet seconds later both were returned to normal, as their cybernetic systems adjusted for trauma.

  Zoahnône replied, “With odds of two to one, Baigurgône stood no chance.” She glanced across at Shônsair then added, with an emotional sincerity Manserphine had never heard before, “Alas for our sister after so many millennia. To die like this.”

  CHAPTER 26

  So the end had finally come. It had taken just three seasons for Nuïy’s bright optimism to become despair. He would die before the end of the year, having failed the Green Man. The thought tormented him. Since leaving the chaotic, and yet somehow safe environs of his family, he had assumed that the Green Man would provide for him, but this had been proved entirely wrong. The Green Man had drawn him up, used him, then cast him aside. Humus beckoned.

  He felt there was now no point to his life. He hated his past. He hated the present. He hated what might lie in the future. Yes, he could become a vagrant in the Woods or a travelling beggar, but he felt he would rather die than suffer that indignity, when he, Nuïy, had been singled out by the Green Man.

  And so the concept of death came to his mind.

  Knowing there was nothing to live for, nothing even glimmering in the future as a vague possibility of hope, he felt attracted to the idea of death. His life had been, with occasional exceptions, an interminable march of pain, with all the world against him—and only he, isolated like no other, aware of his true potential. Even the Green Man seemed to have missed what he offered, and if the Green Man was blind to him, then so was everybody else.

  Nuïy felt sickness in the pit of his stomach. He stopped eating the meals provided by his jailor. He stopped peering out of his window, to lie on his bed, loathing the world. With meaning ripped from his life, all he was left with was existence, and that he knew would be tantamount to perpetual torture.

  After a while, he planned his final deeds. He would be remembered by the clerics here, if nothing else as the man who almost transformed the Garden. He had already made the history books, but with luck he might be able to demonise himself as well, and in so doing hog an entire chapter.

  He packed the necessary items, including warm clothes, a fruit knife, rope, a jar of damson tree sap thinned with autodog oil, and a shillelah. From a cupboard he took a tinderbox and plenty of tinder.

  It was an hour after midnight. He would have to time his deeds to perfection, for if he was caught the interior guards would like as not kill him on the spot. He stuck sheets of damp papyrus to his window, glueing them with a paste of jam and sawdust, then softly smashing out the panes, until there was a hole big enough for him to climb through. Then he poured some of the sap-oil mixture upon his bed and set light to it.

  Speed was now essential. He clambered through the window. Outside, he sniffed the air and surveyed the ground around him.

  He was leaving. The ghost of an emotion rose within him, but he pressed it back into his body, to become an automaton of purpose.


  Next on the list was Deomouvadaïn’s house. He ran the fifty or so yards through the tall, dark buildings of the clerical site, then peered around the corner of a house to see which windows were illuminated. Just the one, on the top floor, that he knew to be Deomouvadaïn’s bedroom. Possibly the Recorder-Shaman was already asleep. At the front door he poured more liquid upon the wood and set light to it

  In seconds he was sprinting along the lane between the Drum Houses and the Tech Houses, towards the dormitories. At the dormitory where his own torment had begun he spilled the remainder of the jar, then set it alight. The wood of the dormitory structure caught light immediately.

  He pulled his hood over his head, threw aside the tinderbox, then ran slightly bent and with a limp to the three guards at the south entrance.

  “Sirs, sirs!” he called, trying to mimic the fake Blissis accent Deomouvadaïn had once tried. “Sirs, the boys’ dorm is alight. Fire!”

  One of the guards looked in the direction he pointed. “By Our Lord!” he swore. “‘Tis alight indeed. Fire, lads, fire!”

  They ran off yelling, their weapons clinking against their night robes. Nuïy was left to creep across the moat and into Emeralddis. In half an hour he was clear of the urb.

  For fully an hour he stared at it from his position at the south end of the causeway. He saw distant smoke, and this cheered him, for it meant that at least one of his fires had taken. Slowly he walked away, his spirits failing, aware now that he was on a path of no return. He walked across the marsh into the fields at their northern extreme, and then on to the river. After a further half hour he encountered the first buildings of Veneris, still choking amidst drifts of hoverflies. He checked the sharpness of his knife.

  Very sharp.

  Minutes later he was in an old alley. It was silent. In only two of the twenty or so houses did lamps burn. He crept along the paved passage until he came to the house he had left at the turn of the year. A single lamp glowed behind the shuttered front window.

  Nuïy knew how to get into the house. The back door was warped. He crept around to the rear of the house, and with a fragment of metal lifted the catch.

  He was inside. The old, so-familiar smells of his family abode entered his nostrils, and suddenly he was shaking with fury, unable to excise the past from his mind, yet here so strongly reminded of it. He took out the knife and gripped it with both hands in an attempt to stop himself shaking.

  “Ghylyva?”

  That was his mother calling. She had heard something.

  He hid behind the door, concealing his knife up his sleeve. When she entered the room, he kicked the door shut.

  His mother screamed and span around.

  “Nuïy!”

  Nuïy said nothing. For some seconds, blank, and yet fuller of emotion than at any time in his life, he felt the full power of his hatred of her. His monomania thrust all other considerations aside.

  “Nuïy, what are you doing?”

  “Don’t talk to me!” Nuïy replied, his voice almost inaudible under the stricture of control he had to apply to himself. “Don’t talk to me ever again.”

  “But Nuïy. What’s going on? Are you ill?”

  “No! Don’t be concerned! I’m nothing to do with you!”

  “Nuïy—”

  “Don’t!”

  Nuïy snapped. He stabbed her in the stomach, then, as she fell back, in the chest around her heart, until the blood spurted, and he half ran, half stumbled away to the front of the house, and the stairs.

  Upstairs, now. The penultimate deed.

  His father Ghylyva was dozing in his autochair, in a small room lit by a single lamp. He woke as Nuïy entered the room holding the bloodstained knife.

  Immediately Ghylyva began shaking. “Nuïy,” he stuttered, “is that a knife? Is that…?”

  “Shut up! You’re no father of mine.”

  Ghylyva stared.

  Nuïy’s emotions were changing. For his mother he had felt hot, featureless hatred, untainted by any other emotion. But his father was different. Ghylyva was an object of disgust, of hatred, even of a little fear. Here, his feelings were not so intense, but they were certainly present. He hated the pathetic feebleness of his father, his useless body, his prattling, his lack of self-control. Ghylyva was a tool of his mother, and therefore disgusting.

  Nuïy waved the knife at Ghylyva. “You deserve this, you weak, pointless, old fool. You deserve it as much as she did—”

  “She did?”

  “Mother. I did her in. But you’re no father of mine. You deserve to die, and you will.”

  “Nuïy!” Ghylyva croaked. He tried to suppress a coughing fit. “Nuïy, there’s so much you don’t know. Don’t do anything.”

  “I don’t want to hear it!”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve hurt your mother.”

  “I killed her,” Nuïy proudly replied, “and I’m going to kill you.”

  “Nuïy, yes, she is your natural mother. But I—”

  The coughing took him once more.

  “You, you?” Nuïy repeated, sudden frustration welling up inside him. This was what he hated, the waiting, the frailty, the decrepit body. He touched Ghylyva’s chest with the point of his knife. “You what?” he screamed out.

  Ghylyva looked up, his silver eyes weeping rheum. “You…” he managed. “You are the son of—”

  “Shut up!”

  Nuïy stabbed once, then pulled out the knife and thrust again, straight to the heart. He screeched as he stabbed. Ghylyva gave an astonishingly loud bark, so loud that Nuïy shrank back and crouched low, the knife outstretched.

  Suddenly everything in the room became still. Ghylyva sat silent.

  Then Nuïy saw that Ghylyva’s skin was peeling. In all exposed parts of his body—face, arms and ankles—the grey skin was dropping off, accompanied by white smoke, to reveal a shining subcutaneous layer, silver in colour. Nuïy stared. His simple stab seemed to have triggered this. Now he noticed a black stain on the front of Ghylyva’s gown, a stain that should have been red.

  Ghylyva leaped from his chair and fell to the floor, landing on his stomach like a diver in a pool. Thrashing about, he bounced from wall to wall, a madman wholly unlike the consumptive figure of before. Nuïy had to leap too, to avoid being hit by the flailing limbs. Chunks of flesh were now being deposited on the floor, all grey and smoking, and bathed in black blood.

  Ghylyva was bigger than he had been. Nuïy shrank back to the nearest wall. Ghylyva was longer, and thicker about the waist. Hissing and bubbling, he was growing into a silver creature, half human, half lizard, black blood spurting from his chest as his flesh transformed. His eyes became featureless white orbs, his nostrils smoked, while his teeth became long needles of yellow. His skin was pustulent, here and there torn by gashes. The gown he had worn seemed to have dissolved.

  The violence of his exertions was reduced. He twisted on the spot, then calmed. Occasional spasms racked his body.

  Nuïy ran.

  Out in the alley he paused. The urb was silent.

  Shocked by what he had seen, he tried to map his route to the Cemetery, a feat he hoped would return his mind to the pristine calm of former hours. One final task remained.

  He walked north through the night, avoiding the gazes of other people, staring at the flowers in the central lane as they bent to avoid the brush of his cloak; and hating them. With their graceful manner they seemed to taunt him. He wanted to slash out at them, but he felt they would come up with some amazing manoeuvre to outwit him and so make him look even worse. He felt hopeless, pointless. The flowers had beaten him and he deserved to die.

  A woman stopped to ask him, “Are you all right?”

  “What does it matter to you, eh?” he blazed. His voice was so hoarse it seemed to tear his throat. “Leave me alone!”

  He ran off. The Cemetery was close.

  Night was becoming dawn. He walked through an arch, then stopped to consider the land around him. Many of the Ceme
tery’s wild flowers were closed for the night, but a few black blooms had opened, some globular like dahlias, others more like hairy buttercups with moths flapping around them. Nuïy grunted. He feared this place, yet he almost felt at home here.

  He strode north. In the north he had felt most at peace. There he had entered the networks, and in the networks he had felt power, and, for a while, had been happy. He surged on through the press of flowers. They bent away from him as if experiencing his morbid fury, and he muttered at them, swearing and walking at speed.

  He reached the wooded belt, passed through it, then stepped out into the moor-like region of the far north. He stamped about, wanting to find the grove of iris.

  There.

  He walked over, then looked around. Dawn was just entering the eastern sky. It was cold, the sky clear, mist banks floating across the strange bowl that comprised this part of the Cemetery. Around him the irises were mixed with star-roses and the nocturnal camphor flower, both species attracting many moths. Nuïy grimaced and lay down amidst them.

  He flung open his clothes to reveal his belly.

  Nothing happened.

  He lay cold and despairing. So he had failed even here, at the entrance to his former stronghold.

  From his pocket he took the sachet of deadly herbs that long ago he had prepared. He looked at them.

  Light stole across the sky. As it did, he hated it. He wanted darkness. With a quick motion he swallowed the herbs, and lay back.

  Time passed, slow seconds melting into each other.

  The sky turned from deep violet to azure to blue. His body felt light. He was divorced from it. He could make no sense of what he heard, what he could smell, what he saw.

  His sight faded.

  He sighed his final sigh.

  Before him, the bowl of fuzzy, meaningless blue turned to green, then to a deocussed mass of brown and black, interspersed with dark green.

  The Cemetery reality appeared before him. He thought he must have died and his mind come home, here, to death.

  Around him the environment lay calm, entering his mind like iced data, relaxing him, relegating the thoughts of failure and hopelessness to the very bottom of his mind, where everything else dangerous lay. He spent some minutes carefully examining the place, feeling cool air on his virtual skin, watching dark green leaves shiver with his virtual eye. All was calm. Above him, in the sky that stretched from violet to black, to violet once more, he saw the glowing disk of blue and green. He tried to jump for it, and was surprised at how close he seemed to get.