Vacuum Flowers (14 page)

“Well … when I'm not actually in use, I don't really do anything. I have a passive awareness of myself. I see what's going on. It's like there are four of us standing around a small stage, with a bright light on its center. We watch everything that happens, hear it all, feel it all, but we don't do a thing until we step into the light. When we're in the dark, we don't really much care. Sometimes all of us are in the light, and—”His voice changed slightly—“sometimes two of us are in the light, but one keeps his mouth shut. Another half hour monitoring and I expect to be spelled.” His voice changed back again. “That was my warrior aspect. Right now he's directing security back in the sheraton. That frees me up to use the body.”

“That's weird,” Rebel said. “The way your voice changes. You don't really have to speak out loud to communicate with yourself, do you? I mean, you can think something and the others will pick up on it?”

“No, I have to talk or at least subvocalize, because … well, thoughts are most of what a persona
is
, you see. They're the architecture, they define the shape and existence of a persona, where it starts and when it lets off. We can't share our thoughts directly—”

“—without breaking down the persona,” Rebel finished for him. “Yeah, that's right, they'd all merge together, like breaking the membrane between twinned eggs.”

“Eucrasia's training is really coming back to you.”

Rebel looked away. “You don't have to sound so cheerful about it. It's like—I feel these memories closing in on me, crushing me. They're all
hers
, and none of them mine, and I can feel myself being affected by them, you know? I think they're changing me, making me more like her.” She fought down a dark, helpless urge to cry. “Sometimes I think all those memories are going to rise up and drown me.”

Wyeth touched her arm. “Your persona is only a mask,” he said in his pattern-maker voice. “Ultimately it's not important.
You
—your being, your self—are right
here
, in the compass of your skull and body.” Rebel shivered again under his touch, and she turned to him. Then, it was like the singlestick exercise of climbing your opponent's arm—it happened all in a furious instant, too fast for thought. Wyeth's arms crushed her to his body, and they were kissing each other. She wanted him so desperately it was hard to believe that he had reached for her first.

“Come on.” Wyeth drew her back into the orchid, into a space that was dark and sheltered. He slid her cloak from her and set it to the side. His hands moved down her body, rolled away her
cache-sexe
. He buried his face in the side of her neck.

“Wait,” Rebel said. “I want the big guy.”

He looked at her questioningly.

“Your warrior aspect. I want to make love to you while you're being the warrior.”

Later, Rebel went out riding with the fool. They laughed and joked as they went no place in particular. “You're going to have to give up your irrational prejudice against wetprogramming,” Wyeth said, smiling. “It's useful stuff. If I didn't have another persona running the sheraton, I couldn't be out here now, gallivanting about with you.”

They rode on and came to a carnival.

It was located where the orchid grew closest to the tanks. One long vine, in fact, had been disentangled and tied to an airlock; people traveled along it, following the holiday music to where a clearing had been chopped inside the plant.

From outside, the carnival looked like a ramshackle collection of huts and frames caught in the tangled growth. Within, it was bright with flowers and strings of paper lanterns. Tank towners in cloaks as garish as jungle moths flitted to and fro. Lengths of flash-dried vine had been lashed together to make dueling cages, booths for astrologers and luck-changers, lovers' mazes, gambling wheels and huckster tables. Artisans were painting panels for a centrifuge ride, conjuring up kings, bulls, starships, and reapers.

A singlestick duel was in progress by the main gate. The samurai glanced at it with interest as they entered.

“Look!” Wyeth drew Rebel into a booth where fairgoers threw waterballs at a distant bozo. “Give me three!” He flung the first with too much force, and it broke into tiny drops that splattered past the clown like rain. The bozo jeered, and Wyeth threw again. This time the ball exploded into a thousand spherelets in the bozo's face. “Ah, that felt good!”

When the barker floated him the last waterball, Wyeth winked at the bozo and smashed it into his own face. Nearby fairgoers laughed in astonishment. Away from the paper lanterns, their eyes were shadowy and their faces pale masks.

Wyeth and Rebel wandered past simple games of rigged chance to hucksters selling jams and candies, carved wooden astronauts, bright straw dolls and dark barrel men. “Right here!” a barker cried. “Yes, yes, yes!” Rebel bought a sugar skull and bit into it. Red jelly oozed from one eye socked. She stared at it in dismay, then laughed. She was considering some silver bells with toe-ribbons when she was struck with sudden unease. Looking up, she saw Wyeth holding a luminous apple the size of a cherry tomato.

“Seven hours?” Wyeth said. “Seven hours Kluster for an apple?”

The huckster was a little man with spidery arms and legs, a lopsided grin, and a crazy look to his dark eyes. He sang:

“Awake, arise, pull out your eyes,

And hear what time of day.

And when you have done, pull out your tongue

And see what you can say!”

Then, speaking to Wyeth, “Ah, but the shyapple is no ordinary fruit; no, it was a worm at its heart.”

“What does the worm do?”

“Why it eats, sir. It eats and excretes, until it drowns in its own liquor.” He plucked the apple from Wyeth's fingers. “You must swallow it whole: core, pips, and aye. Like thus.

“What did I dream? I do not know;

The fragments fly like chaff.

Yet strange my mind was tickled so

I cannot help but laugh.”

Then, speaking again, “My name is Billy Bejesus and I live in a tree. If I'm not there yet, why then that must be me.” He tumblesaulted over in the air, kicking his heels.

Appalled and intrigued, Wyeth turned to Rebel. “Can you make any sense of this madman's ranting?”

“Don't touch those things! Don't you know a shyapple when you see one?” Big-eyed, Wyeth shook his head. “They're mind alterers. By the sound of it, this lot is just directed hallucinogens, but a shyapple can be prepared to do almost anything—to give you a skill, to make you mad, to bring you sanity. Some are prepared so they'll negate themselves after a few hours, and others are … permanent. You wouldn't want to put one in your mouth without knowing what it does, first.”

“Really? Chemical wetprogramming?” Wyeth rubbed a fingertip over the bright skin, held it to his nose, and sniffed gingerly. “How does it work?”

“Well, the shyapple is just a matrix. It's the worm that's altered according to what effects are desired. It's … injected with a virus that … When the shyapple's center liquifies, the virus undergoes explosive growth and …” She faltered to a stop. “No. It's gone now. I used to know, but it's all gone.” And yet it was—she sensed—vitally important in some way.

“I never heard of them before.” Wyeth held a shyapple to his eyes, admiring the translucent skin, the candy-red shimmer, its full-to-bursting juiciness. “Where did they come from, I wonder? Why did they show up here all of a sudden?”

Rebel shook her head helplessly.

“You've got what? Three crates there?” Billy Bejesus's grin was luminescent. “I'll take them all. Treece. Arrange the details and see that these things are taken back to the sheraton.”

They floated on. Rebel lingered at a jewelry display, examining a tray of religious pins: stars, crosses, swastikas, and the like. She bought a white scallop shell and pinned it to the collar of her cloak. “Now I can wipe off this face paint,” she said. “People will assume I'm some sort of religious fanatic.” Oddly enough, her sense of unease was stronger than ever.

“Good thinking. Though if I were you, I'd find out what your pin stands for. Might save you an embarrassing conversation somewhere down the line.”

They were floating hand in hand before an enormous mesh sphere, watching the cockfights, when Wyeth said in his leader voice, “Crap. Come on. We've got to get back to the sheraton.” He tugged Rebel toward the gate. Their bodyguard materialized around them.

“What's the trouble?” Rebel asked.

“Constance is talking with the Comprise.”

All the way back to the sheraton, Rebel'd had the uneasy feeling that someone was following her, a shadowy presence flitting through the leaves and vines that was never there when she looked back over her shoulder, but returned the instant she looked away. Here, in the bright-lit rooms of the complex, that sense faded but did not go entirely away. There was somebody outside coming for her.

“Heisen's body was never found,” Wyeth said when she mentioned this to him. “He very well
could
be coming for you. That's half the reason I've assigned you a permanent guard.”

“What's the other half?”

“We're going in to deal with them now.” He slipped a bracelet from his wrist, one of a pair of thick ivory bands lined with silver. “Here. Put this on. It monitors the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Samurai stepped aside as Wyeth slammed through the doors to the center ring's main conference room. There, under a holographic sky, Constance sat on the edge of a red lacquered bridge. She was dabbing her feet in the goldfish stream. Several Comprise stood by, listening to her talk. Scattered among the topiary bushes were her team with the tools of their trade—fermenters, chimeric sequence splicers, microbial bioreactors and the like—demonstrating lab techniques while Comprise in identical coveralls clustered about them, like patches of orange mist. Wyeth's face hardened into granite slabs.

“All right, Moorfields!”

Constance leaped to her feet. “Oh!” She blinked. “You startled me, Mr. Wyeth.”

“I'll do worse than that to you.” Wyeth glowered at her from the bank. “Just what do you think you're doing? Why have you moved your lab and people from the third ring?”

“Well, I had to. I wanted to chat with the Comprise, and I was told there was some silly rule against their leaving the central ring.”

Some hundred Comprise dotted the room. Several drifted over, into a loose semicircle about Wyeth and Rebel, studying them gravely but saying nothing. “Clear the treehangers out,” Wyeth ordered. Samurai moved in and started escorting the bioengineers away. “Have two people programmed legal, one Londongrad and one People's Mars, and send them here.” To Constance, “You'll find that Kluster law is extremely legalistic, and People's law is informal and rational. Between them, I expect that if you step out of line again, I can hang you for treason.”

“Treason! Surely you're joking.”

“I am very serious.”

Constance shook her head, clasped her hands, let them fall. “But we were just exchanging scientific information.”

“Oh? What information did they give you?”

“We were on the preliminaries, just swapping basics. Talking shop. You know.”

“I know very well.” Wyeth's hands were clenched and white. “Use your head! Your gang was swapping detailed bioscientific chit-chat with a team of Comprise that is ostensibly here as engineers and physicists. How did they know the jargon? How did they happen to know enough of the biosciences to understand what you were talking about?”

“Well, Earth is, after all, a planet. They have the largest set of interlocking ecologies in the Inner System, so they must use …”

Embarrassed, Rebel shifted her gaze out the window wall. She saw tiny motes of light shifting through the orchid; people were astir out there. Doubtless the tanks were emptying out as people moved into the plant. But looking away couldn't keep her from overhearing the argument.

“That's nonsense! They know because they're spies, that's why. Before they left Earth they were systematically crammed with the basics of every corner of science, in the hope they'd stumble across something useful. Ms. Moorfields, look at them! They are not human, they're not friendly, and they're not altruistic. They'll take whatever technology you've got and then use it against your own race. You're selling humanity down the tubes—and for what?”

Unexpectedly, a Comprise said, “She wants the technology to build a transit ring.”

Constance started. “I didn't tell them that!”

“The Comprise is very quick on the uptake,” Wyeth said sardonically. He asked the Comprise, “Why did she want that information?”

“The desire for private gain is a common failing of individual intelligence.”

“That's not it at all!” Constance cried. “It would open up the stars. Can't you see?” She appealed directly to Wyeth. “It could be used to accelerate comets beyond the Oort Cloud, toward the nearer stars. The closest could be reached within the span of one long lifetime—they gave me the figures! Imagagine thousands of dyson worlds drifting from star to star. Expanding into the universe. Imagine an age of exploration and discovery.” Her voice was fervent, almost devout, and Rebel found herself responding to it as she might to a farbranch revivalist prophet. “Imagine mankind finally freed from the cradle of the sun and wandering the starry galaxies in search of … I don't know. Truth, maybe? Destiny! All the final answers!”

Before Wyeth could reply, the Comprise said, “Do not trouble yourself, Boss Wyeth. She has nothing we desire.”

“That's not true. You told me …” But the Comprise had wandered off. Almost pleading, she said, “They told me they were interested in the mind arts. We know a great deal about them.”