Flowercrash

by Stephen Palmer

  “Who are you?” Nuïy said.

  Now it was her turn to frown, and Nuïy became aware of the roughness of his accent compared to her own. She walked forward a pace, and he took two back.

  He noticed that her form was split. There was a mark down her face, and when she turned to sit on her chair he saw that her hair was sundered by what seemed to be a massive scar. Looking closely, he saw that her black cloak was actually made of two halves stitched together. Her boots were different, one of darker leather with a slightly lower heel.

  She spoke for a third time. “We wander our shore, so-sea sharp, watching for nereids.”

  Nuïy grimaced at her and sat in the chair furthest from her. He intended resting, then exploring the rest of the Garden. If he could.

  INTERLUDE 4

  Shônsair sat next to Zoahnône. Manserphine lay between them with orchids all around, bees and hoverflies speeding to and from the interface scar at the centre of her forehead, sustaining the illusion of a different reality.

  Zoahnône said, “She is out of range now. We can relax.”

  “We have played our part,” Shônsair agreed. “All we can do is wait to see what transpires.”

  She glanced back at the dense undergrowth in which they had hidden the still quiescent body of Zahafezhan. Having heard Manserphine’s story, they knew they could never leave Zahafezhan alone again.

  “What did Manserphine mean by a final deed?” Shônsair asked.

  “I think she was speaking from the uttermost depths of her mind,” Zoahnône replied. “When I first conceived my plan, I wondered if I would find a woman like Manserphine, sensitive to the future states of the networks. When I did I was delighted. But recently I’ve come to realise that she does not only speak in vision, but also, without knowing it, in normal speech. Manserphine is a profound woman. Occasionally, she says something so remarkable I sit and think for seconds on end. In describing these hours as those of a last deed, I believe she is sensing the focus that we are about to encounter. She understands that much rides on her choices, on her deeds.”

  “But who is she?”

  “Just a sensitive woman. Her morality is to be lauded. I only hope her goodness will see her through.”

  “The networks speak to her,” Shônsair mused, “and she speaks back.”

  “There is symbiosis,” agreed Zoahnône. “Let us hope it is productive.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Manserphine found herself at the boundary of the Inner and Outer Gardens. Nobody else was in the vicinity. She did not know whether this was a day in which the Garden was in session, but she did not care, for today the action would take place in the Core Garden, where only three could enter. Briskly she walked on, passing along lanes and between scented bushes, until she came to the arbour, and saw its arch.

  She walked inside. As she had guessed, two seats were occupied, one by Fnfayrq, whom she had expected, and one by the Emeralddis man whom she had captured and tied up at the Determinate Inn. Nuïy. So he was after all a third agent of change. He stared at her, clearly shocked.

  She sat in the empty chair, looked right to Fnfayrq, then left to the man. “I’m Manserphine, the Independent Interpreter of Zaïdmouth.”

  “I know who you are, hag-crone,” Nuïy replied.

  “This is the Shoreline Cleric, Fnfayrq of the Shrine of the Sea.”

  Nuïy glowered at Fnfayrq. Manserphine translated this introduction for Fnfayrq’s benefit, saying, “A dark and glistening seal emerges from the surf, and, oh, how I wish I knew why it navigated the endless currents.”

  Fnfayrq replied, “In a weedless shoreline pool a lone woman drowns, before her eyes life passing, so many eddies in the moments surging through her aquamarine life.”

  Manserphine glanced down. So Suracunah her cousin was dead. Returning her gaze to Fnfayrq, she said, “Does the seal smell its home, are endless currents mixing into formlessness?”

  “So many eddies, but the last an ocean itself, wide, brimming, almost a life, a seal scents its family and with flipper and body swims on.”

  A final vision for the mermaid. Manserphine became excited, for this was further proof that the networks were aware of what was going on in the real world. The final moment of Suracunah’s life had been her first and only independent vision—one telling Fnfayrq that she was needed in the Core Garden.

  But what now?

  She looked at them both. Nuïy seemed glacial, his skin hard like an insect’s pale exoskeleton. His eyes burned. Fnfayrq was relaxed, but her face was marked with a vertical scar, like her sundered garments. Manserphine looked down at herself and saw that her own skin was sheened with sweat, making her clothes dark from moisture.

  An event would happen here. She felt she had to prove herself. And she felt the others would stop her.

  Turning to Nuïy she said, “You and your Shrine have failed, haven’t they? You failed to capture Alquazonan, you failed to capture me, you didn’t get anybody from the Determinate Inn, you didn’t get Zahafezhan. Abject failure. So much for the Green Man, lording it about in his fine, leafy cloak.” She let all her anger mould her voice as she continued, “Yes, so much for that fine man, so selfishly proud of himself. So isolated. And so pathetic. What have you got to say for yourself, you hopeless failure?”

  Nuïy choked, but managed to calm himself. With white fingers gripping the granite armrests he replied, “You foul little un-man, what do you know? I am not finished until I am dead. I still live. Do not insult me, or I will kill you as we sit here now, in the name of the Green Man, who is my glory.”

  Manserphine laughed. “But he’s impotent. He can’t do anything. Nuïy, you acted in his name and you failed. Admit it. You got nowhere. No result, no success, just failure after failure. Your cleric Gaddaqueva even captured me, and I escaped!”

  Nuïy jerked back in his seat. “Escaped?”

  “How do you think I got here? Through your hopeless networks? I live now in Zaïdmouth, a free woman.”

  With snapping sounds Nuïy’s skin cracked, as he tried to repress his rage. Manserphine watched as the cracks sped up his arms. Visibly he calmed himself, mastering his emotions, until the cracks sealed themselves up.

  And suddenly she understood. Here, in the networks, they three were symbols. Nuïy must therefore be directly connected to the networks, like Fnfayrq and herself. One of them would therefore emerge as a true symbol of the networks. And an awesome possibility occurred to her; the networks might actually have a favoured symbol. Perhaps herself.

  Could it be that simple?

  She looked again at both of them. Both wanted to win. Both saw conflict in Zaïdmouth. She was the only one with an integrated view. Could it be that she was here to oust forever the possibility of masculine domination and seaborne arrogance?

  Manserphine felt that she had to weep. The emotions inside her were too strong, and anyway she did not want to master them like Nuïy. She was not frightened of the depths of her self. So she wept, and the tears dripped down her cheeks, every one, clinging to her skin and wetting her clothes. She felt hot power coursing through her body. Emotion was strength, not weakness. It carried knowledge. She craved that knowledge.

  They stared at her. Nuïy was disgusted, Fnfayrq embarrassed. Manserphine looked at them; he glanced away, and so did she. A victory. This small sobbing already counted in her favour.

  She looked down to her skin. Moisture dotted her skin in perfect pear shaped droplets.

  Nuïy coughed, then said in a voice thickened by his toughened jaw, “You cannot accuse me of failure because I have succeeded merely by existing. I was meant to be, un-man. This is how, and this is why. I have mastered the human intellect. My memory is perfect. If I memorise something, it is forever engraved, as if upon a diamond. I represent the perfect future of the Green Man. In years to come we will dominate this land, and then we will strike out across others. Not even another Ice Age can stop us. We will be like lords, each of us an ideal. We will memorise what we see, we w
ill spread our culture in the name of the Green Man, and all will bow before us. You cannot stop that. Emeralddis is immune to you.”

  Manserphine could not help but laugh at this absurd hubris. Aware again of the importance of her deep and natural reactions, she laughed and laughed, until she ceased. Nuïy sat immobile. He stared at her with immeasureable hatred.

  Manserphine sighed. What now of Fnfayrq?

  She turned to the Sea-Cleric and wondered how to word the speech of condemnation she must now make, hammering home how the arrogant vision of the Sea-Clerics had brought their downfall. She said, “So many flowers reaching up to the sun, see them grow, the salty water tries to enter their phloems but, oh, it does not, and watch now as little sea-mites float on the rippling surface, so small, but thinking so big, a tiny lobster eats away at their boats, and they sink, and drown.”

  Fnfayrq found this interpretation an insult. Manserphine knew she would refer to the alteration of sea plants into flowering species, and sure enough she did. “See, so many flowers, all of this world, even plants came from our ocean, the mighty wave crashes and there is change, and progress.”

  Manserphine countered this argument of forced evolution with a simple reposte, pointing out that evolution occurred in the context of a natural environment, organisms and land acting upon one another in an unbreakable loop. Anything else was just tinkering. She said, “The stars shine down upon the sea and the sea reflects starlight up to the heavens, an eternal circle, so calm, so right, if a porpoise leaps from ocean its surface is broken, see ripples spreading out, oh, now the starlight is lost.”

  Fnfayrq thought awhile, then said, “Ocean is the fount of all life, ocean is our lover, soft water rippling foamy across our naked limbs, its moisture to ours, its nutrient is ours, we swim.”

  Manserphine felt sorrow at this simple statement of connection, but she saw now how the narcissism of the Sea-Clerics had formed their arrogance. Basically, they were marine fundamentalists. Their society was a structure appallingly streamlined, with the rigour of that society responsible for the sundering of emotion and intellect. She said, “A mermaid dives deep, her elders telling her to find pearls, her heart weeping at the rape of the oyster.”

  These harsh words caused Fnfayrq to make a final declaration. She said, “Ocean bring life, the Garden is life, our ocean seeps into the Garden, flowers fading to steely green, see the sky cloud over, smell the salt on the air, come seal, come turtle, come jellyfish, come gnat, come diatom, oh come all you great and small of our deeps, caress our shores, and fertilise our willing loins.”

  Manserphine was moved to tears by the intensity of this speech. Again she wept, for the foolhardy Sea-Clerics, for their passion, and for the recognition she felt of the fact that there was, in the end, hope for them.

  As before her tears clung to her, so that her skin was now a rippling fabric, pink, damp, warm with the power thrumming through her poised body. Suddenly she shivered. Rarely had she felt so alive. Nuïy, by contrast, seemed to be suffocating in the armour of his hardening skin, while Fnfayrq sat cross legged, her body at an uncomfortable angle.

  Suddenly Nuïy shouted at Fnfayrq, “You tricked us, un-man! You stole our procedures, used our networks, made our moat salty. You do not deserve to live. The Green Man will take his revenge for the wound laid upon his leafy skin. Get out of here! I do not want to see your ugly face.”

  Manserphine translated.

  Fnfayrq replied, “When a cormorant dives at a shoal of fish, one is eaten.”

  Nuïy glanced at her. Knowing he would not understand, Manserphine translated. “She says you would have done the same in their position. They did what you did—you tried to transform the Garden, they tried to transform the Garden through you.”

  “You lie, un-man,” Nuïy snarled. “It was an attack on us.”

  “It wasn’t,” Manserphine said. “They used you, but they wanted you under their thumb as well. Because the networks had their own ideas, you never noticed.”

  “You lie,” Nuïy muttered, like an angry boy.

  Manserphine let her own anger show. “Don’t call me a liar. I’m still the Interpreter!”

  Fnfayrq intervened with her final explanation. “Mermen lie lazy at the edge of our sea, so fatty heavy, sand on their unkempt fins, the mermaids laugh at their shallow pretensions, oh, see our desires rolling into the future.”

  Nuïy struggled to get out of his chair, falling, then standing up. Manserphine translated for him. “She says they only wanted to control you because they are better than you. You see, they want you changed. She says women of the sea are superior to men, and ultimately they hope never to have to suffer your embraces to make more Sea-Clerics.”

  Nuïy uttered a groan. The armour plates at his joints shattered, allowing him freedom of movement. He grew in stature until he was seven feet tall, causing both Manserphine and Fnfayrq to jump out of their seats.

  Nuïy screamed at Fnfayrq, “You will never beat us. We will win!”

  Fnfayrq seemed to be in pain. She stood bent over, and Manserphine noticed that her cloak was tearing, the stitching coming apart, while the scar at the back of her neck was now a gash, bloodless, but horrifying.

  Manserphine told Fnfayrq, “You are paying for your exclusivity. Because you exclude others, you split yourself.” She turned to Nuïy, to say, “You too exclude a part of humanity. We in Veneris do not, and that is why I will not pay the price you both now suffer.”

  Fnfayrq, though in distress, found it within herself to look up at Manserphine, though she said nothing. The split in her body was becoming deeper. The right half of her body seemed taller, clothed in black and silver, paler than before, the right half of her face split from the left by an appalling cleft that seemed to crack her very skull. The left half was smaller, pinker, and was losing its clothes. Manserphine, taken aback by the transformation and wondering if she had caused it, just stared. Now Fnfayrq was writhing on the ground, her body two halves linked by bridges of flesh and abstract fabric. She was silent, however, and the transformation itself was soundless.

  Then she became two. The taller half acquired a left side and sprang up. This Fnfayrq was tall and grim, emotionless, armed with a blade and a merciless grin. Her clothes were swept behind her in the blast of an abstract wind. The left half was slightly shorter, also a whole woman, her body naked, her skin flushed, her hair loose and wild. Her smile was devious.

  Manserphine understood that the Core Garden was presenting this image because of the fundamental split between Fnfayrq’s emotions and intellect. Here stood two women in one; the rational half could not direct its intellect in a caring way, while the emotional half could only aspire to hedonism. Manserphine looked down at herself, damp and seemingly weak set against these apparitions, and wondered what would happen next.

  Fighting. The taller Fnfayrq leaped at Nuïy and the pair began to struggle. Manserphine was left to face the emotional Fnfayrq.

  She was immediately faced with the power of Fnfayrq’s sexuality, which, because she had already experienced it, was a potent force, expressing itself in the virtual arena as a glamour compelling Manserphine to surrender herself to feelings already glowing in her nipples, and between her legs. But she ignored these feelings and faced the truth. This was an emotional woman, yes, but emotions were nothing without moral direction, for although they expressed personal truth, that truth was irrelevant if unconnected to the real world. So Manserphine simply ignored the stamping woman before her. Fnfayrq became isolated behind a mist, and Manserphine was able to step in and surround the Sea-Cleric’s body, her legs and arms extending and bending to bring the fading woman into the real world.

  Since the real world was almost identical to Manserphine’s, Fnfayrq was vanquished.

  Meanwhile, Nuïy had defeated the other Fnfayrq. She had been unable to beat through the porcelain-like skin that served Nuïy as armour against both the world and his own truths. Nuïy had stood still, while she had hammered and struck, until
she became thinner, paler, and taller, and eventually disintegrated with a sigh and a final drift of pink dust.

  Manserphine turned to face him. “So now it is just you and me.”

  “Yes,” he replied, though his voice was hard to make out behind the translucent mask forming before his face. Manserphine closed in. Her own body was wetter than ever, her burning red skin awash with fluid. She took these to be signs of her encompassing nature, able to connect and dissolve, to bond and support. The flushed skin was on this reading a mark of her emotional excitement. She felt whole, and immensely powerful.

  But she faced an extreme. Somehow she would have to crack the rough diamond standing before her.

  Violence would not work. She knew that from within, but also because she had seen Fnfayrq fail. Yet she must overcome Nuïy. She had to prove that her way was best. If Nuïy won this final struggle, then a brutal and domineering culture would overrun this land.

  She studied Nuïy’s gleaming armour. He stood waiting, assured and mocking, his body hard as metal, his face almost invisible, expressionless, immoveable. Nothing could come in or go out. Manserphine had a sudden ghastly image of millions of men like him, smashing into one another like marbles, never changing, never relating. She had to fatally undermine this possibility.

  She approached until she stood a foot from him. He thought he was invulnerable. He seemed to be smiling behind the mask, but she could not be sure.

  She reached out and touched his arm.

  Immediately a shadow departed from the arm, like a ghostly bat. The sweat that she had deposited on his armour hissed, then vanished as it reacted with the skin. A thought occurred to her. In touching him, she had connected with him, and connection was what he denied most of all.

  She let her arms and legs extend and swathed him in herself, allowing her moist body as much contact with his armour as possible, so that a storm of hissing began. Shadows—that she saw to be memories—escaped him like steam from a kettle. He tried to struggle, but the armour, because of its strength, was rigid, and he could not escape. Soon she had begun dissolving him. She let her limbs extend further, so she was like an octopus around him, wrapped around and around. Her moisture ate into him. When he was reduced to an armour of steaming, half dissolved wreckage, he screamed and struggled, but it was too late. Manserphine had him wrapped.