Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  Bors led her deeper into the Old City, toward the equatorial sea. The sea was a stagnant stretch of water, wide as a Terran river, left over from Geesinkfor’s early days, when the water was pumped uphull and flowed back in scenic riverlets. Half the buildings facing it werederelict, their windows slagged over, but among them were the grimy shops, bars, and blade bazaars, noisy-bright with music and holographic flares, that made up the local Little Ginza. It was here that the grey market wetsurgical joints would be found. A few furtive-looking pedestrians dotted the boardwalk. A motortrike zipped by.

  Rebel yanked Bors back from the roostertail as it slammed through a puddle, and said, “Okay, I’ve seen it. Now let’s find me a room.”

  They turned their backs on the black water and trudged upslope. A cybercab dogged their heels, hoping for a fare, but they ignored it, and it sped off. Here and there, blank walls and scuffed streets flickered with corporate propaganda. In those areas where the speakers hadn’t been smashed, the voiceovers murmured seductively.

  “You really needn’t be in a rush to move out of the Pequod.

  I could easily put you up for a week or so.”

  Rebel wore the ivory bracelet Wyeth had given her back in the sheraton. She touched it now, and the drab sphere transformed into a fairy city of red and blue lights, shot through with yellow lines of power. In a street overhead, she saw a centipede line of Comprise stitched together with interactive lines of electromagnetic force. And buried deep within Bors’ flesh, she could see the glow of subtle machines, waiting silently. Whatever they were, a mere dealer in vintage data didn’t need them. “That’s very generous of you, but I won’t find Wyeth sitting in your ship. Listen, if you see him again, would you give him a message for me? Tell him that I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

  “Will he know what that means?”

  “No, but he’ll be curious enough to find out.”

  They walked on in silence. Now and again Bors glanced at her, as if trying to read the thoughts behind her new wetpaint. She really did like Bors and wished she could trust him, but Eucrasia had been betrayed by friends too many times, and all those memories were hers now. Shedidn’t dare repeat Eucrasia’s mistakes.

  Turning a corner, Rebel glanced up into a nostril a hundred feet high, and staggered back a pace under the lightest touch of vertigo. The propaganda screens were capable of creating true grotesqueries of scale. Oceans washed over the building, and six implausibly long fingernails slashed across the screen to pierce a tomato.

  Eucrasia had been visually literate, but the corporate iconography of the cislunar states differed from that of the Klusters, and she couldn’t decipher an image of it. The tomato pulsed blood. “Who runs this place, anyway?”

  Rebel asked. “What kind of government has it got?”

  Bors shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

  They came to an obsidian building and stepped into its lobby. Security devices rose up on their haunches, tracked them with articulated heads, then sank down again. A fat man with brand new arms (they were pink and ludicrously thin) emerged from the shadows. His eyes were sleepy and his chest hair had been dyed blue to match his bow tie.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like a room,” Rebel said. Then, because she dared not give her real name but still needed something Wyeth would recognize if he came looking for her, “My name is Sunshine.” She shrugged to indicate she had no family name.

  The fat man grunted, produced a greasy plate of glass.

  “Put your hand here. Yeah, okay. Up to the third floor, take the door that turns blue for you. Sets you back forty-five minutes a day.”

  “That sounds fair.” Rebel took the crate Bors had been carrying for her. “Promise me you’ll drop by now and then to see how things are going, Bors? That would be nice.”

  He nodded, winked, grinned, and was gone.

  The fat man turned back. “Hey, was that a bors?”

  “Uh… yes.”

  He smiled. “One of them did me a favor once. Next time you see him, tell him if he ever needs a room, I’ll cut him a good price.”

  * * *

  Rebel took a job at a place called Cerebrum City. Its front room held stacks of outdated wetware and a few racks of the current knock-offs, but all the profit came from a chop shop in the back. It was there that the cheap hustlers came, sick with paranoia and despair, for a slice of wetsurgical hope. They came in weary, sometimes trembling, to buy the courage, bravado, or even desperation needed to get on with business. Fugitives looking to change their flight patterns. Hard-luck street types searching for that winner persona that had so far eluded them. They also got the occasional adventurer, about to go down the drop tube to Earth, hoping to score big in some obscure scam, and these had to pay heavily, for what they wanted was by no means legal. By the time Rebel had dug out the last traces of fear or compassion, turned their eyes mad with cunning, and set their reflexes on hair trigger, they were as little human as the Comprise itself.

  After a few days it got so Rebel could type her customers at a glance. After a week, she stopped bothering. They were all the same to her. She worked in a small room with wood paneling and a wall of boilerplate wetwafers, and concentrated on her job. It was a cheapjack version of building new minds, and Eucrasia had been very good at that. She could chop and customize a persona in an hour and a half Greenwich, and there was professional satisfaction in that. The work appealed to her. She might not dare think about what would become of her clients, but she never cut corners on them.

  There were two other chop artists in Cerebrum City. One was a pale, nervous man with long fingers, who always came in late. The other was a hefty woman named Khadijah. She had dark eyes and a cynical mouth, andwas having an affair with the pale, nervous man.

  One day, when Rebel had been working for two weeks, the nervous man didn’t come in at all. She had her last client of the day on a gurney, wired up and opened out when the curtain shot open and Khadijah stamped into the room. She had never come by before. The client—a whore come in to have his interest in sex revitalized—

  tracked her with his eyes as she prowled about, and grinned witlessly at her. “Close your eyes,” Rebel told him.

  “Now, can you imagine a unicorn?”

  “No.”

  “Hmmm.” Rebel yanked one of the wafers and stuck it in a sonic bath. While the device pounded it clean of microdust, she reflected that if she were to lop off this creature’s interest in sex entirely, he would walk out of the room free. He’d give up his trade and never once look back. But Eucrasia wouldn’t have meddled without permission, and Rebel was coming to respect the woman’s professional judgment. She replaced the wafer. “How about now?”

  “Yes.”

  Khadijah ran a finger along a rack of wafers, making them rattle in their slots. She retreated to the doorway, stood there holding up the curtain. “Well,” she said at last.

  “How about you and me going out and getting drunk after work?”

  After work Rebel always checked her room for messages and then prowled the streets of Geesinkfor, learning its ways and looking for Wyeth. So far she had turned up no solid leads, but there was still work to do. She had no desire at all to go drinking. But she remembered a time when Eucrasia had needed someone to get drunk with and nobody had been there. “Sure,” she said. “Soon as I wrap this one up.”

  Khadijah nodded and ducked out of the room.

  “Now.” Rebel held up a hand. “How many fingers?”

  “Four.”

  She threw a color on one wall. “Green or blue?”

  “Blue.”

  “All right. One more.” She threw an image on the wall. It was Wyeth. “Ever seen this man?”

  “No.”

  “All right, you pass.” She sighed, ran a final integration check, and then slapped on the programmer. The boy shuddered and closed his eyes as the programs took hold.

  * * *

  They started out in the Water’s Edge, a dark little bar favored by
the trade, and took seats by the window so they could look down on the passersby. Khadijah drank her first two mugs of wine in grim silence, rapping the table for more when they were empty. Midway through her third, she grunted, “Men!”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Staring idly out the window, Rebel saw something furtively nab a bit of trash from the boardwalk and then scurry off into shadow. It was long and scrawny and covered with grey fur. “Ugh,” she said. “Did you see that?

  This place has cats!”

  “Oh yeah, swarms of ’em. They live in abandoned buildings. The government used to have these machines that hunted them down, big suckers the size of… of dogs, I guess, but the kids kept kicking them into the water to watch them short out. That was years ago, when I was little.” She laughed. “Man, you should see them spark!”

  “Tell me something. What’s all this about nobody knowing what kind of government Geesinkfor’s got?”

  “Oh yeah. Nobody knows.” Then, at a look from Rebel,

  “It’s true! Some people think that Earth runs all thehongkongs, through proxies. Others think the governments stay secret out of fear of the Comprise taking them over. And there are those who think the police don’t answer to anyone, that they’re just another gang. They collect the weekly protection money, after all. And nobody knows what triggers the heat. Some things you can get away with, but not always. Other things, you’re never seen again. Me, I think it’s just very handy for the people running things if nobody knows who they are.”

  “This is crazy. Who do you complain to when something goes wrong?”

  “Exactly.” Khadijah stuck a finger in her wine, swirled it about. “Best thing to do is just be careful to stay out of trouble.”

  “How do you do that?”

  Khadijah laughed and shook her head. “Let’s go someplace else.”

  They climbed out the window, along the narrow ledgeway, up a rusty set of stairs, through a brightly lit roof garden where butterflies flitted (Rebel asked, “Are you sure this is the right way?” and “Trust me,” Khadijah said), then across a pedestrian bridge and down to a cellar tavern called The Cave. They sat by a table set on a truncated stalagmite, and Khadijah rapped for wine.

  Rebel peered about the dark, crowded room. “I feel like I hadn’t moved at all.”

  “Too true.” Khadijah paid for the wine, lifted her mug.

  “Hey, Sunshine. How come you got such an aristocratic first-family name? I mean, you’re not cislunar. No way in hell you are. I’ve lived here all my life, and I know.”

  The wine was laced with endorphins. Rebel felt lifted and removed, wrapped in the finest cushioning fog.

  Nothing could hurt her now. “My name is aristocratic?”

  (Back home, they could’ve worked intricate wonders with a glassful of endorphins, woven fantasias of emotionand illusion. But the biological arts were primitive, this side of the Oort.)

  “Oh yeah, like… Kosmos Starchild Biddle, you know, or, uh, Wondersparkle Spaceling Toyokuni. One of those bullshit names they gave the kiddies when living off-planet was new and everyone was all rah-rah about it.”

  “Well, I had to call myself something. There are all kinds of people looking for me I don’t want to find me.”

  Khadijah nodded sagely. “So where you from, anyway?”

  “Dyson world name of Tirnannog. Ever hear of it? No?

  Well, actually my body was born out in the belts, but me

  —I’m from the comets. I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

  “Sunshine? That guy you were talking to the other week, the one who came by to see you when we were closing up?”

  “Bors?”

  “Yeah. There he is. Talking to that drop artist.”

  Rebel looked up and saw Bors deep in conversation with a sour-looking old woman. She waited for him to glance their way, then waved broadly. He waved back, said a final word to the old woman, and wove his way to her through the maze of fake stalactites and small tables. He still wore the red vest under his cloak, and it gave him a kind of rakish quasimilitary look. “Hello, hello,” he said cheerily, seating himself on the bench beside her. “What a coincidence. Have I met your friend yet?”

  After introductions, Rebel said, “So what have you been up to lately?”

  “Ah, well, that’s interesting! I’ve been scrounging about in the city archives, and I found a five-thousand-line epic poem about the Absorption Wars, all in rhymed couplets, by a woman who’d survived the whole thing. She was programmed clerical for the processing center, and by the time they got around to her, the treaties had been signed.”

  “Is it any good?” Rebel asked dubiously.

  Bors leaned forward confidentially and said, “It sucks.

  But there’s still a small market for it as a historical curiosity, so it’s not a total loss for me.”

  “I slept with a bors once,” Khadijah said.

  “Really?” Bors said in a pleased voice.

  The room suddenly warped so that everything in it got very small, except for Rebel herself. She was enormous, and her head bobbled like a balloon. She could have crushed the lot with her thumb. “I wouldn’t have thought he was your type,” she said.

  “Wasn’t.” Khadijah was silent for a moment. “What the hell—look at him, you have to admit he’s charming. He was okay. Haven’t you ever slept with someone who wasn’t your type?”

  “Oh yeah.” She thought of Wyeth—tall, lanky, pale. And serious, mostly. Not her type at all. She would never have chosen him for a sex partner if she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She took a deep breath, and without warning she deflated, whooshing down so that the rest of the room was normal-sized, or near so.

  Khadijah eyed Bors. “Based on some kind of spy, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?” Bors’ eyes twinkled.

  “Sure you are. One of those little Outer System moons, some kind of comic-opera republic, all their agents used to be programmed bors. Then somebody pirated a copy for one of the big wetware concerns.”

  “What happened then?” Rebel asked.

  “Nothing happened then. But you can bet somebody made a bundle off that deal. That’s still a popular persona, bors is, in this part of the System. I saw one the other day.”

  “I think that was me,” Bors said mildly.

  For an instant Khadijah stared at him blankly. Then she started to laugh, beginning with what sounded like slowhiccups and building in long, noisy wheezes. She gasped and pounded the table.

  “Listen,” Bors said. “I was going to come by tomorrow.

  My work is done here, and I’ve got to see a few more of the cislunar states before I take the drop tube down to Earth.

  But I didn’t want to run off without saying goodbye and wishing you luck.”

  “More wine.” Khadijah rapped the table.

  * * *

  Somehow Rebel and Khadijah were reeling down an empty street, holding each other up. They must’ve passed some threshold point because Rebel had completely lost track of the last however-long-it-was. “A wizard’s daughter” she explained. “Well, first of all, you know what a wizard is, right?”

  “No,” Khadijah said. There were dried tear tracks on her face. “Hell, I knew he was never going to stay.”

  “A wizard is like a real crackerjack bioengineer. I mean, these guys are as rare as let’s say Rembrandt. They’re the ones with the creative juice to make the biological arts sit up and beg. Out in the comets they have a lot of status. But they tend to be jealous about their skills. Talented, but suspicious.”

  “Never trust a man whose fingers are longer than his cock.”

  “So when they need a messenger they can trust, they’ll decant a cloned self and program her up into their own persona. Now, ordinarily identity… drifts, you know? So a wizard’s daughter persona isn’t a straight copy; it’s altered so that she’ll retain identity with the wizard practically forever. They call that integr
ity. I don’t know how it’s done—only my mother self knows that. But anyway, I’m a wizard’s daughter. Her message is safe with me.”

  “So what’s the message?” Khadijah asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  They looked at each other. Then they both bent over laughing, grabbing at each other’s shoulders and forearms to keep from falling, leaning forward until their foreheads touched.

  They had just pulled themselves together when a line of Comprise, no more than twenty units long, walked by in locked step, headed for the waterfront. They wore identical grey coveralls with that same familiar pigtail bobbing from each head. A dozen spheres of ball lightning floated about them. The balls hissed and crackled, and filled the street with shifting blue light. The hair on the back of Rebel’s neck rose up.

  “Hey, Earth!” Rebel shouted. The creature second in line turned its head sharply. Blank, alert eyes looked at her.

  Rebel turned, bent over, flipped up her cloak, and made loud farting noises with her mouth. The Comprise did not react. They continued calmly onward.

  Khadijah was laughing so hard she was having trouble standing. “Oh, God, Sunshine! You’re impossible, you know that?”

  The Comprise stepped onto the boardwalk and strode straight for the water’s edge. A length of railing was missing there, and the first stepped off, onto the water.

  The glowing spheres of ball lightning dipped suddenly, almost to the sea’s surface, and the water sang. It rose in a bow to the Comprise’s foot, quivering like the vastly slowed vibration of a violin string.

  Moving with processional dignity, the Comprise passed over the sea, the water rippling with tension under their feet. On the far side, they continued up a dark street, dwindling, growing dimmer, and finally gone to dusk.

  * * *

  The next day, Rebel woke up with a killer hangover.

  “Ohhhh, shit.” She sat up on the edge of her cot and then bent over to clutch her head in her hands. Herstomach felt uneasy and her bowels were loose. Then she remembered farting at the Comprise, and she felt even worse.