Vacuum Flowers (27 page)

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 the 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. Her stomach felt uneasy and her bowels were loose. Then she remembered farting at the Comprise, and she felt even worse.

As soon as she could, she went out to buy a liter of water. Then she stopped at a rootworker's shop to buy a bracelet leech, and snapped it on her upper arm. A trickle of blood began flowing through the charcoal scrubbers, to be returned to her body cleansed of fatigue poisons. By the time she got to work, she'd drunk down the water and felt almost normal.

Fortunately, things were slow at Cerebrum City. Khadijah was already closeted with a complicated stress tune-up, and nobody else came by for the first few hours. Rebel was grateful for that, but even when the bracelet turned blue and dropped from her arm, she felt dull and listless. It was a classic emotional hangover, the residue of having acted the fool.

Well, there was an easy solution for that.

Feeling the thrill of doing something both nasty and forbidden for the first time, Rebel broke out the programmer and ran a cleaning pad over the adhesion disks. They attached to her skin behind each ear and on her brow, like small mouths. She slapped on the reader-analyzer and riffled through the minor function wafers in the wall of boilerplate.

A clean sense of elation filled her. This was
fun
. She now understood that her earlier prejudice against wetprogramming had been the wizard's daughter functions acting to protect her integrity. But this was different. So long as she didn't try anything major, what could be the harm of it?

It would be best to be careful, though. Eucrasia had overdone it her first time—most persona bums did—and let the euphoria of success lead her into adding one alteration on top of another, building them into a nonsensical architecture of traits, until the entire structure had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and she had needed six hours wetsurgical reconstruction to bring her back to herself.

Still, the psychosomatic functions were simple enough. Any idiot could make the brain readjust the glandular and hormonal balances of the endocrinal system and, orchestrated correctly, it would give her a terrific body high. Humming slightly to herself, she glanced up at the floating tumbleweed diagram and gave it a spin.

And stopped. Hell, that was interesting. She rotated the sphere again, more slowly this time. Yes. There was a circular structure running through the entire persona in a kind of psychic mobius strip, touching all the branches, but dependent on none. How did a chimera like that come into existence? It was obviously artificial, and yet no wetware techniques she'd ever heard of (and Eucrasia had been up on what was happening in the field) could create something like that.

Fascinated, she slid a blank wafer into the recorder.

By the time her first client came in, she had entirely forgotten about giving herself a therapeutic body rush. She stood, turning the professional-quality recording of her persona over and over in her hand, and thinking wonderingly that Deutsche Nakasone had been willing to kill her for this small ceramic flake. The kid entered and coughed to get her attention. He looked to be no more than fifteen. Rebel slipped the wafer into her pocket and said, “Well, what do you want done?”

The wonderful, the magical thing about the wafer, of course, was the beautiful vistas it opened up of new psychologies, new modes of perception, entirely new structures of thought. With the skills this implied, she could create anything. Anything at all.

It was the kind of discovery that shatters old universes and opens up new ones in their place.

After work, she took the omnibus to the drop tube's up station.

She'd put off this part of her search for as long as possible, because the drop tube was a Comprise creation, and they were likely to be all through the up station. But she was convinced now that Wyeth would not be found in Geesinkfor, that if he had ever been there he had moved on, either to another cislunar state or down to Earth.

Given Wyeth's convictions, Earth seemed most likely.

The bus took ten minutes to reach the up station. Rebel had wired herself deadpan—emotion and expression completely divorced—and in addition to the vanitypaint on her forehead, she'd put a short black line like a dagger through her left eye. She was now the living image of a confidential courier, a minor cog in the affairs of business and state wired to wipe herself catatonic at the slightest attempt to tamper with her brain. Nobody would give her a second glance.

From the bus, the Earth was bright and glorious, as startlingly beautiful as everyone said, the wonder of the System. None of the Comprise's works could be seen from here.

The up station loomed, a slender hoop of rock. It was a carbonaceous asteroid that the Comprise had bought and, utilizing their incomprehensible physics, made flow into the desired shape. A transit ring had been fitted into the interior, and a labyrinthine tangle of corridors dug through its length. It spun in geosynchrous orbit directly above a ground station with a sister transit ring. Fleecy clouds formed a vast circle about the ground station. The Comprise's technology somehow held the air back from the lane between transit rings, so that there was a well of hard vacuum reaching almost to the planet's surface, and this affected local weather systems. Rebel could see three more such cloud rings on this side of the globe.

A steady stream of air-and-vacuum craft slipped in and out of the up station's ring. Some were flung down at the ground station, while others had just been nabbed on their way up the vacuum well. All passengers and cargo were processed through the human-run sections of the up station before going down and after coming up. It was a fearsomely busy place.

The bus docked, and Rebel walked through the security gates and into the ring's outer circle of corridors. She let the flooding crowds sweep her away. Occasionally she passed wall displays indicating numbers of craft gone and caught, and the station's shifting power reserves (up for each vehicle caught, down for each released), but this last was for show only, since humans were allowed no access to the transit machinery. Now and then a chain of a hundred or so Comprise hurried by, but they were rare. Most, evidently, stayed to their own corridors.

More common were the scuttling devices that sped between legs and through crowds—small, clever mechanicals that fetched, carried, and frantically cleaned. None of them came anywhere approaching sentience, and yet Rebel felt uncomfortable at how common they were. It seemed a sign of how hopelessly compromised the cislunarians were by machine intelligence. She was surprised their guilt didn't show on their faces.

Subliminal messages washed through the halls, but none of them were aimed at Rebel, and she lacked the decoders. They could only make her feel hot and anxious. Her face itched.

She took a side ramp into the administrative areas, noting as she did so how a security samurai glanced her way and murmered into his hand. She'd been tagged. But she walked confidently on, as if she belonged. Half-Greenwich was terrific for walking; enough tug on your feet to give them purchase, not enough load to tire them. She came to a line of security gates, all marked with the wheel logo of Earth crossed by a bar sinister No Comprise. Subimbeds pounded at her, making her feel unwelcome and anxious to leave. Any of these gates would do.

She matched strides with an important-looking woman, laying an arm over her shoulder just as she plunged through a gate, so the cybernetics would read them both as a single individual. The woman looked into Rebel's dead face and flinched away. “Who … who the hell are you?” she cried. Samurai hurried toward them. Then the paint registered, and she said, “Oh, shit. One of them.” To the white-haired samurai who arrived first, she said, “Help this woman find whoever it is she wants and then kick her the hell out.”

“Your kind is a real pain in the ass,” the samurai said.

“So don't give me any help,” Rebel said with profound disinterest. “Throw me out. My message is insured with Bache-Hidalgo. If I fail, they'll program up two more couriers and send 'em back. If they fail, you'll have four. Then eight. Sooner or later, you'll play along.” This was a scam Eucrasia had often seen during her internship. Administrators hated insured couriers because they were as persistent as cockroaches, and as impossible to eradicate. The only way to get rid of them was to cooperate.

“You'll get your help,” the woman snapped. She led Rebel deep into Security country. Flocks of samurai. “Okay, we're in Records. Now who is your message for, and when did he come through here?”

“I don't have a name,” Rebel said. “He'd've come through anywhere from five degrees Taurus to present.” They were standing in an office area so thick with vines that each small cubicle seemed a leafy cave. The overgrowth was a classic sign of an ancient bureaucracy. A mouse-sized mechanical scurried underfoot, gathering up dead leaves.

“Around here we say late May through mid-June,” the samurai sniffed. “All right, any of our people can handle this.” She leaned into a cubicle where a flabby grey man leaned over a screen, mesmerized. Still images of faces flickered by at near-subliminal speeds, piped in from the hallways and offices. “Rolfe! Got a question for you.”

“Yes?” Rolfe froze his screen and looked up. He had a dull, almost dazed expression, and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. Mouth and jowls both were slack.

“Rolfe is on our facial eidetics team,” the samurai said with a touch of pride. “Electronics have to be wiped once a week, or they're useless—data can't be searched. Rolfe views the electronics compressed, only has to be wiped once a year, and can access all of it. Show him your visual. If your target has been through here—as employee, visitor, or dumper—within the past few months, he knows.”

Rebel held up her holo. It was a photomechanical reconstruction she'd pulled from her own memories, but good enough that nobody could tell. “Seen this guy?”

Rolfe looked carefully, shook his head. “No.”

The samurai took her arm. “Are you sure?” Rebel cried. “Is there any chance at all?”

“None.”

Rebel sleepwalked through the next day, performing her chores mechanically. She reported to work, interviewed her first client, and chopped him to order. None of it felt real. She didn't know what to do next. If Wyeth hadn't gone down the drop tube, that meant he must be somewhere in the sprawl of cislunar states. Trouble was, there were hundreds of them, in all sizes and degrees of disorder, and their outfloating slums as well. She could spend the rest of her life searching and still not find him.

Well, she thought, maybe she
wouldn't
find him. Maybe Wyeth was lost to her forever. Happens to people all the time.

She was finishing up a client when she finally admitted this to herself. A jackboot had come in to be chopped wolverine, and lay on the gurney wired up and opened out, still in her police skintights. Rebel thought it through with dry, obsessive logic, while her hands did the work. How long could she go on searching like this? A year? Five? Twenty? What kind of a person would she
be
at the end of that time? It wasn't a pretty thought.

“Can you imagine a unicorn?”

“Yes.”

If this was going to be a long search, if it was going to take her years, she'd have to change the pace. She needed to build some kind of decent life for herself in the meantime. (But she didn't want a decent life without Wyeth!) She needed a cleaner job than this one, to begin with. Friends. Interests. Lovers, even. She'd have to plan this whole thing out carefully.

“How many fingers?”

“Four.”

“Green or blue?”

“Blue.”

“Ever seen this man before?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Rebel smiled. Very slowly, she leaned back against the wall. Carefully she began marshaling her thoughts. She was in no particular hurry now. Perhaps she should go out front and borrow a chair. Impulsively, she reached down to run a fond hand through the jackboot's hair, and the woman grinned idiotically up at her. Where to begin?

She had a lot of questions to ask.

12

THE BURREN

There were Vacuum flowers on the outside of the
Pequod
, only a few, sprouting from the jointed strutwork of the gables, but enough to tell from the shape of the petals that these were a variant strain, already indigenous to cislunar orbit. Rebel noted them on the way in, mildly wondering why Bors had put off his basic maintenance for so long. The ship recognized her, and the lock opened to her touch.