Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  “Of course. What did you think we were here for?”

  “Well, uh.” What was it Ommed had said? “Submission to God, right?”

  “Submission takes many forms.” He knelt before her, knees apart, hands behind back, eyes downcast.

  “Submission to the bodies of strangers is one of the more important sacraments.”

  “What?”

  “Do you command explanation?” Taking her silence for consent, Susu said, “The universe is made in the image of God. That much is self-evident, isn’t it?” He looked up, waited for Rebel’s not very confident nod. “Think of it! The universe is one, pure, whole and holy, and united. But we experience it only through opposites and extremes.” He held up his two hands, cupped, empty. “Hot and cold.

  Pleasure and pain. Joy and sorrow. Cock and fig. These are all local illusions—we cannot see the galaxy for the stars. But how can creatures born into illusion see beyond and through these opposites into unity? By ignoring them?

  But they are there, they will not go away. We embrace the opposites of experience, we welcome the extremes of ecstasy and of pain, and we unite them both within ourselves. We repeatedly experience the sacraments oflust and submission both as men and women, and in the end, the self is destroyed, and all differentiation, and we break through into the unity that is here all along.”

  The boy’s eyes were afire with visionary intensity. He was starting to grow erect again. But he was not looking at her, but upward into the unseen. “It is as if we are all born with poison in our bellies, and to purify our bodies must gorge ourselves on more and more of the poison, until we are forced to vomit it all up.”

  “Um, well.” Rebel had been going to ask him to stay the night. Now, though… She’d never really thought of herself as a purgative. “Maybe you’d better run on. I think I hear your little buddies starting the evening prayers.”

  Lying abed, trying to sleep, she listened to the devotees chanting. It was a lovely sound, deep and profoundly pure.

  From the midst of the chant arose cries and gasps that might have been orgasmic, but might equally well have been pain. She could not tell which. They went on and on, and she fell asleep before they had ceased.

  * * *

  Rebel did not sleep with anyone from Retreat again. It made her feel unclean knowing that any and all of the devotees were available to her, and that they would do whatever she desired. Sometimes she wondered if this uneasiness she felt were not actually a form of attraction, one she dared not give in to for fear of losing herself forever to the extremes of experience.

  Instead, she explored the Burren. Every day she ran out onto the rock, stretching her muscles, growing used to Earth. Sometimes she looked for the tiny purple gentians that hid in the cracks or the giant elk that the Comprise were supposed to have restored to the land. Sometimes a pair or triplet of wolverines came for new skills— they were too suspicious to come singly, without someone to guard them while they were opened up—and they would talk. But the news was always the same. Wyeth was laterthan expected. Bors was still waiting.

  Sooner or later, Bors would not be willing to wait.

  In Retreat, she took on some of the easier chores, tending the goats and (with the devotees’ own skills chips)

  performing minor surgery. She befriended a devotee who was in transition between male and female, face plump with extra calories, persona placid with neuroprogrammers, and (Li let her look when she asked)

  crotch covered over with chrysalid scab, beneath which the reproductive organs had been reverted to undifferentiated cells and were in the process of reforming into new configurations. For the transition phase, Li was excused from the religious disciplines of Retreat and was free to guide Rebel about. For her part, Rebel appreciated the fact that Li never tried to seduce her.

  One afternoon, after two days’ hard rain, Li clapped at Rebel’s door and called, “Come out! The rain’s stopped and the turlough is full.”

  “What are you going on about?” Rebel said crankily, but she came, following Li’s slow waddle up the paths above Retreat. The rocks were already growing dry, though the plants poking from the water-filled cracks were cold and wet.

  They went a mile or so up a path Rebel had followed dozens of times before. Li giggled and refused to answer when Rebel demanded to know where they were headed.

  Finally they topped a rise and looked down over dark land, just barely lightened by the last rays of a low sun. There was a silvery, shimmering stillness filling the valley bottom that had not been there before. “My God,” Rebel said. “It’s a lake.” She felt sickened by the immensities of air and water moisture that something like this required.

  Everything about this planet, it seemed, was monstrous.

  “God is miraculous,” Li agreed happily, and gestured with both hands. “The water flows down from all sides andgathers at the bottom. But the rock is porous, and there are caverns that open into the lowest part of the turlough.

  The lake will be gone by morning.”

  * * *

  Weeks passed.

  There came a day when the wolverines returned. It was a joyously beautiful morning with a weird blue sky overhead, the rock just slightly overwarm to the touch.

  Rebel rounded a corner of Retreat and found one of the pack pissing on a wall. He grinned a greeting. Not far beyond, another wolverine was caressing a devotee’s face with her knife. “What if I wanted to slit your eyelids?” she crooned. “Would you let me do that, too?” The point glided over a cheek, barely breaking skin, leaving behind a fine line of straightest red.

  The devotee shuddered, but did not move away.

  “Having fun?” Rebel asked.

  The wolverine turned. She was a small woman, with red hair chopped close to the skull and thin white lines on one side of her jaw. Her expression changed. “Yeah.” The knife disappeared from her hand, reappeared, was in the other hand, was gone. She slid into a fighting crouch, took a deep breath.

  “You kill her—you take her place,” Bors said coldly. The woman glared at him, lip curling up over one canine, then looked away. She sheathed the knife and stamped off.

  “You do like to live dangerously, Ms. Mudlark.” He gestured upslope. “Come. Let’s go for a walk.”

  They strolled beyond the goat pens, toward a lone tree, stunted by rock and weather, not much taller than Rebel was. There was no particular reason to walk to the tree; it was simply the only landmark in the direction they were headed. Once there, Rebel turned and looked back to where the ocean turned grey and melted into sky. She waited, and at last Bors said, “We haven’t heard fromhim.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  He pounded a fist into his palm, chewed at his lip.

  “Getting down here has cost us. Drop artists don’t come cheap. We’re going to raid the Comprise whether Wyeth’s here to lead us or not.” Rebel nodded, not really listening.

  There was an unreal haze over everything. She realized now that she would never see Wyeth again. He had been swallowed up by the cold immensities of Earth.

  Standing under the deep Terran sky, with an infinite weight of rock underfoot and air aswirl all about her, she realized that it was nobody’s fault, not hers or Bors’ or even Wyeth’s, but just something that had happened. One man can only do so much. When he matches himself against something on the scale of an entire planet, he is going to lose so casually and completely as to simply cease to be.

  “It’ll take us five days or so to prepare our alternatives, and then we’ll move. But we still need a librarian. If you go along with us, I’ll get you a place on the lift back to Geesinkfor and standard pay. You can’t ask fairer than that.”

  Bors was waiting for an answer. “I understand,” Rebel said bleakly. “You’ve waited longer than I expected, even.

  Okay, I’ll do my bit. And when you get back to Geesinkfor, have somebody drag the stretch of the equatorial sea just out front of a dive there called the Water’s Edge. That’s where I ditch
ed your crate of prints. You’ve done your best, and I’ll keep my side of the bargain.”

  Bors looked surprised. Then he patted her shoulder roughly, started to say something, gave up on it.

  He ran back to Retreat.

  * * *

  The next day Rebel was feeding the goats when Li scampered up, all but squeaking with excitement. “Look,look!” Li cried, tugging at Rebel’s sleeve.

  Rebel slapped her hands together, wiped them on the front of her earth suit. Goat-tending wasn’t exactly tidy work. The pens were going to need a good mucking out soon. “Li, whatever it is, I’m really not in the mood for it.”

  “No, look!” Li insisted. Rebel turned to look where she pointed.

  Staff in hand, Wyeth limped over the top of the hill.

  13

  ISLAND

  Rebel?” he said in a small, stunned voice.

  Then Wyeth shook his head wearily. “Eucrasia. Don’t be angry with me. Since I broke this leg, I’ve been seeing things off and on. I thought…”

  She felt as if she were a phantom wandered from the realms of shadow and suddenly confronted by mortal flesh. This man before her, with a face more worn than she remembered and eyes infinitely sad, was too solid, too real. She was numb and bloodless before him. Rebel tried to speak and could not. Then something broke, and she leaped forward, hugging him as tightly as she could. Tears tickled her face. Wyeth’s arms went lightly about her, staff still held in one fist, and he said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s Rebel Mudlark,” Bors said dryly. “Her persona didn’t collapse after all.”

  Wyeth’s staff clattered to the ground. He was hugging her, making a noise somewhere between tears and laughter. Nearby, rooks scavenged the rock, strutting and pecking. A wolverine wandered by, stood watching for a while, then left. Finally Rebel gathered herself together and said, “You must be tired. Come on, my hut’s not far.”

  Bors moved to block their way. He cocked his head and squinted up at Wyeth. “You haven’t made your report yet.”

  “Later,” Wyeth said. “Everything’s set, it just took me a little longer than I expected.”

  * * *

  Inside, Wyeth stretched wearily out on the stone slab.

  “God, Sunshine, it’s good to see you again! I don’t have the words for it.”

  “Hush, now, let me take a look at that leg.” Rebel wired herself into the library, hunting up the medical skills as she eased off his earth suit.

  Wyeth looked at her oddly. “That’s new.”

  “I’ve come to terms with the stuff,” Rebel said. Then, seeing his expression, “Its me, honest and truly. Eucrasia is buried for good. I’ll explain it all later.” Slowly, lovingly, she began to wash the dust of travel from his body, using a folded cloth and a basin of water. She started at his brows, and Wyeth closed his eyes at the touch of the damp cloth.

  “Ahh, now that’s heaven.” He was looking better and more familiar by the moment.

  “So where have you been all this time?” she asked, not really caring.

  “Spying. Getting the lay of the land. Stealing a ship. I take it from your being here that you know all about the plan?”

  “No, Bors didn’t think I should have that information,”

  she said, running a hand lightly along the injured leg. He still wore five splint rings. “Poor thing. It looks to be healing up well, though. You must’ve had a good medical kit with you.” She yanked the adhesion disks.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Wyeth tried to sit up, was stopped by her hand on his chest. “This is going to be dangerous.

  He had no right to involve you without—”

  “It wasn’t his choice.” She was washing his torso now, those lean, hard muscles.

  “Oh, Sunshine, I really wish you hadn’t… This isn’t going to be an ordinary raid. You remember the shyapples? The three crates I bought in the orchid? Well, I drew off almost a gallon of their liquor. We’re going to go in among the Comprise and dose them with it, to see what happens.”

  She was humming silently to herself. “Why?”

  “It’s a rehearsal for Armageddon,” he said in his clown’s voice. Then, serious again, “It’s a weapon that’s proved effective against small numbers of Comprise. We want to try it out against all of Earth. See what kind of defenses it can mount against us. If it works at all well, the Republique will sponsor a buying trip to Tirnannog, hunt up the wizard who cooked up the shyapples, and order something a little more… directed. Something that doesn’t deprogram itself after a few hours. Who knows? Maybe something infectious. I mean, think about it. It’s an outside chance, sure, but we’re looking at the possible death of the Comprise.”

  “Ah.” She washed a little lower, a bit more lingeringly.

  “Just how dangerous do you think this raid will be?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Anything can happen. But listen, I’m sure I can get Bors to smuggle you into a down station—security is nil from this end. You could be cislunar before the…” He stopped. “I’m not going to talk you into it, am I? I know that look.”

  “Hey. It’s just you and me, gang. Right?” Rebel took his hand, squeezed it tight. “You think you’re going to pry me away from you now, you’re very badly mistaken.” She bent down to kiss him, Wyeth drew in his breath, and she smiled. “Should I stop?”

  “No, no, that’s nice,” he said quickly. Then, “Well, maybe you should. I mean, I’d really love to, but I just don’t think I have the energy.”

  Rebel put the cloth down. “You lie there, and I’ll do all the work.” She shucked boots and trousers, then knelt over his body, careful not to touch his injured leg. Withone hand, she inserted him inside her.

  “Ah,” Wyeth said. “I’ve missed that.”

  “Me too.”

  Some time later, Rebel lay snuggled into Wyeth’s side.

  Her blouse was bunched up under her arms, but she put off tugging it down. The pinhole lights were off, and she lay in the grey air, feeling Wyeth’s silent tension. A similar tension was growing within her and silently heterodyning to his, until finally she had to speak. “Wyeth?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Don’t do it.”

  He said nothing.

  “They don’t need you. They’ve got your shyapple juice, they’ve got your plans, you can tell them whatever it is you’ve spied out. They don’t need you. The two of us could slip into a down station, go up the tube, and be orbital by morning. We could be up and gone before the raid begins.”

  In the gloom, the hut seemed to close about them, like a stone womb contracting. Wyeth cleared his throat, a slow protracted noise that was almost a groan, and said,

  “Sunshine, I couldn’t do that. I gave my word.”

  “Fuck your word.”

  “Yes, but it’s my duty to—”

  “Fuck your duty.”

  Wyeth laughed easily. “I can’t argue if you’re going to do that to everything I say.”

  “Who wants to argue?” She struggled out of his grasp and sat up. “I don’t want to argue—I just want you to do this my way. I went through a lot to get you back, and I don’t want to see you run off and get yourself absorbed into the Comprise.”

  “Well, neither do I, Rebel. But you have to understand, this is the fight that I created myself for. This is not just myduty, it’s my cause. It’s my purpose. And if I’m not true to it, then what will I be true to?”

  “Next you’ll be singing patriotic songs!” She looked down on that smug, confident face and wanted to hit him.

  “God, but you’re exasperating. Sometimes I think Eucrasia was right. She should have unwritten you entirely and started all over again from the ground up. Then—” She stopped and eyed Wyeth with sudden speculation. She held up both hands before her face, thumbs tucked in.

  “Count four,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Open the door.” She swung both hands open, so that she peered between them, and said, “You’re in
a room without any floor.”

  Wyeth’s face relaxed. His eyes were alert and calm and unblinking. “Well?” Rebel asked. Then, when he didn’t respond, “You were lying when you said you’d found Eucrasia’s kink and debugged it, weren’t you?”

  Wyeth nodded. “Yes.”

  “You know something? I wondered how you’d picked up the programming skills to outfox Eucrasia. I should’ve known you were bluffing. Hell with it. Metaprogrammer open? Construction catalog in access? Major branch linkages free and unimpaired?”

  “Yes,” Wyeth said. Then, “Yes,” and “Yes.” He lay before her, naked, and it was impossible for any man to be more at her power than he was now. She could do anything she wanted to him, from giving him a craving for chocolate to entirely rewriting his personas. She could tell him to abandon Bors’ raid and take her up the nearest drop tube, and he would do so without hesitation. If she wanted, he didn’t even need know it hadn’t been his own idea. She had the skills.

  But Wyeth stared up at her so trustingly that she couldn’t begin. “Close your eyes,” she ordered, and heobeyed. It didn’t help. She reached down to brush a wayward strand of hair out of his face, and then blurted out the one question she dared not ask. Knowing that he couldn’t lie in this state. “Do you really love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Rebel said. “Go to sleep.”

  And closed him up, unchanged.

  * * *

  The next morning was foggy, which Bors welcomed as a good omen, but made the run across the Burren a nightmare. Two of the wolverines carried Wyeth in a sling between them, and it was not long before they came to the stretch of coast where he had sunk his skimmer. He called across the ocean, and it rose up, water pouring from the ballast tanks. While Rebel programmed a pilot and navigator, the others readied the craft. Within the half hour they were set. Octants of tinted canopy closed over the deck, and the skimmer stood on a single long leg and sped forward, above the water.

  They were passing a wide river mouth, not long after, when the fog parted momentarily. Under the cliffs, serpentine necks rose grey and mysterious from the water. They must have been thirty or forty feet long, topped by tiny flat heads. The creatures glided inland, as Rebel frantically searched the library’s natural history section to discover what they were. Plesiosaurs. Probably elasmosauri, to judge by their size. But according to the library, they had been extinct for millions of years, creatures that had lived and died in Mesozoic seas. “I don’t believe it,” Rebel breathed.