Vacumn Flowers

by Michael Swanwick

  A wolverine impatiently lifted a body that was in her way and heaved it over the edge. Rebel heard it crashing noisily downward, bouncing off the larger branches and snapping the smaller for a very long time. It was savage stuff, gravity was.

  The wolverines ran through the nest in a frenzy, smashing things and planting aerosol mines and time-release injector bracelets. There were bunches of hogshead-sized nuts that burst open like rotted melons,releasing a thin, penetrating stench. Clawlike arms reached feebly from the milky white spillage. Things that looked to be overgrown fetuses struggled into the air and died. Rebel was reminded of the cloning cysts back home in Green City, and that in turn brought a lullaby to mind, one she’d never head before. She sang:

  “Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green, Father’s a nobleman, Mother’s a queen.”

  Bors was shaking her, hard as he could. His face was red and furious. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Librarian?” It was hard to hear him over that universal simian groan.

  “I’m only five years old,” Rebel said wonderingly. “My mother’s name is Elizabeth.”

  “She’s stoned,” Nee-C said with satisfaction. Then Wyeth yanked the pistol from Rebel’s waistband and thrust it at Bors. Who sniffed the trigger, shrugged, and threw the thing over the side of the limb. In a flash of analytic clarity Rebel focused on Wyeth’s face and saw on it, instead of anger, only sadness and resignation.

  The library said that tree shrews were insectivores, that protozoan pseudopods were used for crawling or the apprehension of food but not for active swimming, that the Tremallales were a small family of saprophytic fungi with gelatinous fruit-bodies. They kept running through nests of Comprise. The creatures seemed to gather in groups of half a thousand. Sometimes there were large empty stretches between nests, other times dozens grew together, one into another. The papery floors crunched slightly underfoot. Someone unstrapped the library from her back, and Wyeth’s face floated into view, saying, “…

  only a threshold dosage, she can be led,” before her attention wandered away. Then Nee-C grabbed her arm and yanked her after the others.

  “Get your ugly butt in gear!” Nee-C’s face was all eyes and teeth and hard animal glitter. The Comprise nests fellbehind, like dwindling planets. Nightblooms glowed to all sides, stars caught in the branches of an enchanted forest.

  Rebel was sophisticated enough to know that if she were running through the Fairytale Wood, through a route as labyrinthine as that her newly liberated metaprogrammer wove through her fragmented memories, then this animal-woman beside her was actually her advisor and spiritual guide, come to help her find the secret meaning locked in the forest’s dark center.

  “Don’t mean nothing,” Nee-C snapped. “It’s just a big goddamned tree. Stupid bitch. I oughta throw you over the side and be done with you.”

  * * *

  They were up near the treetops now, bathed in softly filtered natural light, and about to run through another constellation of Comprise nests. There must’ve been thousands of nests on the island.

  That was the beauty of a three-dimensional environment; it would support enormous numbers. A

  dyson world might be no more than two hundred miles across, but that was still over four million cubic miles of living space. Billions could live in one without crowding.

  This island was only ten miles across, a few hundred feet high. But that was still some eighty square miles, or over three cubic. Room enough for hundreds of thousands of Comprise. Packed the way they were, there could be millions.

  There was a wooden basin in the center of the nest.

  Rebel stood by it, watching the water dance and leap in response to a trickle that fell from above. The overflow slid over the lip, through a mossy hole and into the depths. It was joyous to watch. Whenever a Comprise straightened or showed any faint glimmer of intelligence, it was hit by a droplet from a wolverine pistol and carried to a safe spot, to serve as poisoned meat against any attempt to reunite the island Comprise.

  The water constantly shattered into near-subliminal mandalas, patterned wave fronts destroyed by the next drop before Rebel could decipher them. She leaned against the trough, intent on the images trying to break through the fluid surface, and accidentally pressed against her bracelet. The air filled with lashing red directional beams, reaching from Comprise to Comprise and then away, sometimes stabilizing into networks of twenty to fifty linked individuals before hitting poisoned meat and disintegrating again.

  Suddenly the trees brightened to one side, glowing a profound blue, and everything was submerged in the energy of some impossibly powerful distant source. The red directional lines faded, slowed, winked out in its soothing wash. A purple sun burned low in the distance.

  “Here it comes!” Wyeth shouted. “The counterattack!”

  A rumbling noise rose up on all sides, the murmur of outraged ants dopplered down into the bass that tumbled and swelled like slow thunder, rolling over and over itself as it crashed in upon them. Local Comprise staggered up, backs arching as if galvanized with megavolts of raw power, eyes blind, lips curling back from savage teeth.

  Hitting them with more shyapple juice had no effect.

  Holstering his pistol, a wolverine shouted, “Here we go, kiddies!”

  Then the Comprise were howling, not in pain but from the depths of some primal chasm of madness. They shrieked and tore at each other, their fury directed at whatever flesh stood closest. Bors waved the team back up a sloping branch away from the nest. Out of the roiling orgy of violence, five Comprise ran up after them, arms low, faces flat with rage.

  Wyeth and Kurt fell back to cover the retreat.

  Singlesticks appeared magically in their hands. They were manic with combat glee, totally wired, giggling obscenely to themselves as they braced for the fight. Wyeth danced alittle quick-step jig, and Kurt tossed his stick from hand to hand, and then the Comprise were on them.

  Kurt swept the first over the edge of the limb with one long, fluid motion, releasing the stick to snatch out his combat blade in time for the next Comprise. He slammed the knife into the creature’s heart and was bowled over backward by the body’s momentum. “Get moving, you dumbass drug-head!” Eucrasia screamed, dragging Rebel after her.

  Two Comprise were atop Wyeth, attacking him and each other. One had its legs on his shoulders and was trying to rip his head from his body. Another leaped on Kurt as he was trying to free himself of the corpse of his second kill.

  Rebel watched over her shoulder as she was pulled forward.

  Swearing, Kurt was swept off the limb.

  Rebel realized suddenly that she wasn’t half drugged enough. She saw Kurt fall into darkness, locked in combat with the Comprise, and the sight burned away the mists of whimsy and distraction, leaving her for the instant with no veil between herself and reality. The Comprise are only bad thoughts, she told herself, dire-wolves and tigers aflame in the ganglion forests of the brain. “Stop talking and run!” Eucrasia ordered.

  She ran.

  She ran, and they were higher now, in the upmost treetops, where yellow butterflies half melted into the light and flights of egrets scattered at their approach. The roaring anger of the Comprise was everywhere, a universal scream of rage such as might issue from the very mouth of Hell, but the Comprise themselves were lost in the foliage. Bors and Wyeth consulted, and Wyeth pointed to the west.

  “... help it, the signal’s being broadcast from somewhere off the island.”

  “What a fool,” Eucrasia said. “Can’t fight, can’t look after yourself—what the fuck good are you?”

  They were sitting, resting, in a field of birds’ nests, intergrown mats woven from leaves and small twigs and stuck together with saliva. Tufts of down sprouted here and there. Rebel leaned back, and the air was sweet with bird droppings. Her bracelet had turned itself off some time ago.

  Eucrasia was playing with a trophy head she’d taken.

  The stump of neck was black with dried blood, the fur
short and stiff. She rubbed noses with it, kissed the drying black lips. Then she lifted it up and held it before her face like a mask. “Hey. Speak to me when I ask you a question.”

  Startled, Rebel looked directly at her and saw an old monkey-woman, eyes half sunk in gloom, face near dead with age. It was Elizabeth. That ancient face twisted around, slowly turned upside down. “Well?” she snapped.

  Rebel was nearly paralyzed with horror. But Eucrasia was her guide and sister. If she’d turned herself into the distant wizard-mother who had sent her journeying into the System to begin with, there must be some reason for it, some lesson to be learned. “What do you want?” Rebel whispered. “What do you want from me?”

  “Don’t want shit.” Elizabeth reached up to slice off one of her own ears. Then she pulled her head from her neck, threw it away, and was Nee-C again.

  They were traveling. Rebel felt light-headed, but better.

  She still had a hard time connecting one moment with another, but she was beginning to consistently know where she was at any given instant, if not how she got there. Deep within, something greater was happening, too, the fragmented shreds of her history knitting themselves together into a gossamer whole. She looked critically about the trees, faint impressions of her life in Tirnannog overlaying everything. Treehangers didn’t adapt themselves to their comet trees the way the Comprise had to this island—turning oneself into some kind of monkey might be the most efficient use of an arboreal environment, but civilized people didn’t necessarily choose efficiency. The archipelago comets had real cities with houses and libraries, theaters and schools.

  There were open treeless stretches, too, like dark lakes and oceans, through which swam air creatures carefully adapted into complex interlocking food cycles, some of them dangerous and others playful. Too, there was not this incessant gravity—in a comet, gravity was only statistical. Left alone long enough, everything in a room would float to one wall, and that was the floor.

  But for all of that, this tree felt a lot like home. The Comprise had taken basic comet tree technology, distorted it for their own purposes, and grown a small model of what might exist out in the Oort. It was possible that they had thoughts of reaching the stars. The Comprise were immortal; a few thousand years slow travel might mean nothing to them.

  She looked at the woman beside her, and it was still Nee-C. They were following behind Wyeth and Bors. Bors had red cuts across his face.

  They four were the only survivors.

  The tree was brighter ahead, the soft green-yellow light reaching down to the level of their feet and below, like a wall of radiance cutting across the universe. She was that close to it, the vertiginous hint of message her old, monkey-faced mother-self had wanted her to decode. If she just kept walking, would that wall wait for her, opening up into spacious vistas of clarity and revelation, or would it continue to recede from her forever? She stretched out a hand, and it got no closer.

  “Wait,” Wyeth said, and ran out on a long, bare branch.

  Leaves rustled as he disappeared into curtains of green. A

  few minutes later he returned. “The tree ends here.” He slashed a hand downward. “Just like that. All we have todo is climb down. We’ve reached the center.”

  “Ah,” Rebel said.

  She had it now.

  14

  GIRLCHILD

  Where is everyone?”

  The down station was a perfectly round, perfectly flat clearing, surrounded on all sides by the palisade of trees.

  The tangled root floor had been covered with a thin pad of tarmac, and at its distant center stood the two transit rings: one horizontal and close to the ground, the second floating high above treetop level, aligned to some unseen sending station. A platform rested under it, and a spiral stairway descended the all-but-invisible tower.

  Scarlet ibises flew overhead as the diminished party walked toward the rings. Wyeth led, his limp pronounced.

  The tarmac was hot underfoot. Midway to the rings was a small building shaped like a hat, one end canted up, glass walls shimmering with corporate logos—a human-run hospitality shed. It was obviously deserted.

  “Ought to be somebody here,” Nee-C insisted. She was stropping her blade back and forth across the palm of her hand, as if trying to hone it to a finer edge. Rebel couldn’t help but think that in the absence of somebody else to cut, she’d turn that knife on herself, slice her own hand to ribbons, just to see some blood flow.

  Far ahead, under the transit ring, were parked a few dozen transport vehicles. They walked over paintlines that divided the tarmac into cargo territories and corporate holdings, and they were all empty. There was nothing left but grease stains. Wyeth fell back to take Rebel’s arm.

  Nee-C stayed on Rebel’s other side, still escorting her, and Bors fell back to walk alongside Wyeth, so that they now walked four abreast. “You feeling better now?” Wyeth asked. Rebel nodded. “Good.”

  “Well?” said Bors. He squinted ahead. “What’s the story here?”

  Wyeth sighed. “I’ll tell you the truth. Back by the autopsy pond— when we first got onto the island?—as soon as I saw there weren’t any Comprise there, I knew they were waiting for us. You’ve never been here before so you couldn’t tell, but this place is almost deserted. There’s not a fraction the number of Comprise in the trees there were a week ago. They mostly cleared out before we got here.”

  “Why?”

  “Obviously for the same reason we came here. Earth wanted to see what the shyapple juice would do to it and what defenses it could mount against it, risking a minimum amount of its substance in the process.” They walked on in silence for a bit, the rings still distant. Then Wyeth grinned and shook his head. “You know? They never did try what I would’ve thought was their easiest option. I was expecting them to send combat robots after us.”

  “You mean like them?” Nee-C pointed.

  Something stirred under the rings. Tall, elegant machines stepped from behind the transports and strode across the tarmac at them.

  * * *

  The trees were too distant; they found shelter in the hospitality center instead. Through its transparent walls they watched the robots form a cordon about them. The silvery blue machines walked on pairs of insect-delicate legs and peered through sensor slots in their carapaces.

  These were exotics, no two alike. Some sprouted projectile tubes under their mandibles; featureless weapons spheresfloated above others. One small machine with a stiff crest of needles running over its crabshell body strutted like a rooster back and forth before the ring of guards, as if keeping its brutish cousins in line.

  Within, Nee-C mirrored the martinet device’s restlessness, pacing the interior first one way and then the other, anxious to get out and fight. Rebel yanked the disks from Bors’ forehead and jerked her chin. “You want her programmed down too?”

  Bors smiled suavely. “She’d hardly thank you for it.

  Unchopped, she’s just another clerical.” He peeled off his earth suit and stepped gingerly into the conversation pool.

  “Well. Since they haven’t killed us, we must have something they want. We’ll wait.” He chose a seat with a good view of the rings.

  There was food in the service counters and fresh clothing in a boutique case. Still a little queasy from shyapple aftermath, Rebel ignored the former, but tapped the latter for an orchid-pink cache-sexe, somber purple cloak, and the finest filigree arm and leg bands they had.

  Then she drew a fresh line across her face, the top of a silhouetted lark in flight. At a time like this, she wanted to look her best.

  Outside, one killer machine squatted and tracked her with its weapon cluster as she put the new cloak aside and joined Wyeth and Bors in the pool. Frogs scattered as she eased herself down. She should have felt frightened, but truth to tell, there was no fear left in her. And she’d recovered a touch of her old ruthlessness in the jungle.

  Earth wanted her wettechnics. It would negotiate. She broke th
e stem of a water lily and placed it in Wyeth’s hair.

  He grimaced and brushed it away. Then, relenting, he smiled faintly and put an arm about her shoulders. She leaned against him. Her wizard-mother’s directions burned bright within her, filling her with insane confidence.

  Now that she knew what she wanted, she welcomed the coming confrontation with Earth. Win or lose, she was in control. It was powerful stuff, the sting of purpose, like a drug, and she understood now why Wyeth courted it so closely.

  Perhaps only half an hour later, the island shook with thunder as a vacuum tube winked into existence and then collapsed. A small egg-shaped craft rested within the upper transit ring. It cracked open, and a tiny figure began the long climb down the spiral stair. “Probably grown specially for us,” Bors said, climbing from the pool. He picked up a towel. “When Earth wants to talk seriously, it likes to take an impressive form—giants, sometimes, or ogres. Something straight out of your nightmares.”

  The negotiator slowly crossed the tarmac. Robots parted for it, and it walked up to the doorway. “We are Earth,” it said. “Will you let us enter and speak with you?”

  It was a girl, a scrawny little thing no more than seven years old, and perfectly naked. She had no arms.

  * * *

  “Do you remember being born?” the armless girl asked.

  “We do.”

  She stood alone on the white moss floor in the center of the shed. Bors stood directly before her, flanked by Wyeth and Rebel, while Nee-C lounged in the doorway, tensely eyeing the girlchild’s back. Rebel couldn’t help staring at where the child’s arms should have been. The flesh was smooth there, and unblemished. Her shoulder blades jutted slightly to either side, like tiny wings. Rebel looked down, found herself staring at the child’s crotch, at her innocent, hairless fig, and looked quickly up again.