Vacuum Flowers (28 page)

A few hours later Bors returned, just as Rebel had finished brewing tea. The pot floated in the center of the parlor. “Well!” Bors said in a pleased tone. He doffed his suit, donned his cloak, and pulled up a pair of leg rings. “How very pleasant of you to drop by to see me off.”

“How very pleasant of you to say so.” She drew off a syringe of tea and gently floated it to him. “I've prepared a snack.” She opened a tray of scalloped cakelets that were shaped rather like her silver brooch, and he unclipped two. Rebel smiled, sipped her tea, waited.

After a polite pause, Bors said, “So. How goes the search for your friend, Wyeth?”

“Ah! Now that's a very interesting question.” Rebel leaned forward in her chair. “I was questioning a jackboot earlier today—I had her lashed down and opened up, you understand, so there was no question of her lying—and she gave me a valuable lead.”

“Indeed,” Bors said. “A jackboot, you say?” He took another bite of his pastry. “That's, ah, a somewhat dangerous proposition, isn't it?”

“Yeah. She had this really baroque plot-and-counterplot kind of story about dropping down surfaceward as an observer to … well, no reason to bore you with it. She said she'd seen Wyeth.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. She told me she'd seen him with you.”

After a very long silence, during which neither looked away from the other, Bors took a squirt of tea and said, “She was mistaken, of course.”

“Of course.” Rebel stood. Her natural impulse was to seize the man and try to strangle the truth out of him. But she smiled instead. Eucrasia would never have done anything so bold, and in a situation like this, Eucrasia's approach had its points. Her chances of over-powering Bors on his home turf were slight. He was, however polished, a professional ruffian. “I'll just get my suit and leave, then. Sorry to have caused you the trouble.
Bon voyage
, eh, sport?” She floated to the lock, Bors watching her warily. “Oh. You could do me one little favor?” Bors raised his eyebrows. “Just say for me, ‘Please open the collecting drawers.'”

“Please open the collecting drawers?” Bors repeated puzzledly.

Throughout the room, cabinets opened smoothly. One by one the drawers slid out. They were all empty. “Good lord,” Bors gasped. “What have you done with all my watercolors? My prints?”

“I burned them.”

Bors was out of his seat, running furious hands through the empty drawers and slamming them shut, in search of an overlooked drawing, a crumpled print stuck in a corner, anything. “You
didn't!
” he wailed in despair.

“Well, no,” Rebel said calmly. “Actually, I didn't.”

He looked at her.

“You remember the two crates I had? I emptied them out and filled one with your watercolors and the other with your prints. I had to pith your ship's security system before it would let me at them, but it's surprising the tools you can buy when you have the right connections—and your little jackboot had good connections, I can assure you.” She was talking too fast, too angrily. She wanted so badly to hurt Bors that his pain only increased that hunger. Eucrasia would have said that she was cycling out of control. Taking a deep breath, she floated back to her chair and sat. Then, more calmly. “The crates are both safe, and you'll never find them unless I tell you where. You can have one back right now, no strings attached. The other will cost you.”

Slowly, Bors took his own chair. “I won't betray my nation,” he said flatly. “Not if you piled up every work of art in the System and held a flame to the heap.”

“Well, bully for you mate! But I'm not asking for any such thing. Just give me Wyeth. I'll give you your choice of crates now, and tell you where the other is as soon as I've had the chance to talk with Wyeth face to face. What do you say?”

“The watercolors,” Bors said bleakly. “Where are they?”

The city had no name that anybody remembered. It had been cracked and abandoned over a century before, and its exterior was overgrown with flowers. Now a small hopper flew through the gap where an axial window had been and into the airless interior. Black buildings reached up to grab at them as they floated down. It was a tricky bit of navigation because the city was still rotating, and the ravaged buildings shifted as they approached. “There,” Bors said. At street level, yellow light shone from a lone pressurized window. With a swooping twist that folded Rebel's stomach over on itself, Bors matched velocities with the street and brought the hopper down.

The old woman who cycled them though the lock looked displeased to see Rebel. “This one's no jackboot,” she grumbled. It was the drop artist Rebel had seen with Bors in Geesinkfor. The room was crammed with vintage technology—robot probes, shoulderjets, fist-sized assassin satellites.

“There's been a slight change of plans.”

“Heh.” She leered over a protruding knob of a chin. “Changes will run you extra. There's a good borealis brewing up now, and I can't say when the next one's due. Don't like to drop people without some electromagnetic confusion in the atmosphere. Helps to hide them from the Comprise.”

“You are an avaricious old pirate,” Bors said, “and I'll not be blackmailed by the likes of you. This young lady is taking the jackboot's place, and the drop will go off on schedule, as planned, and for the amount agreed upon, or we can just call the whole thing off.”

The old woman quailed before his anger. “Oh,” she said. “Well, then.”

It was an expensive drop, and an unobtrusive one. As it was explained to Rebel, eight shaped coldpack units were to be frozen in the center of snowy flurries of ablative materials and then towed to the center of a natural fall of meteors. They would be swept up by the advancing Earth and fall into the dawn, burning bright on the way down, fleeting scratches in the pale morning sky.

Deep in the atmosphere, the last of the ablatives would burn away, to reveal coldpacks that had been crafted as lifting bodies. Simple cybersystems would loft them then, killing speed and flying them toward the rendezvous point. Their steep evasive glides would end in spectacular gouts of white surf as they slammed into the North Atlantic.

Slowly, then, they would begin to sink in the cold salt water.

Before they could hit bottom, fleet dark forms would converge upon them. These were sea mammals, descendants of seals, that had been hotwired for such tasks with bootleg mutagens and bioprogramming. Slipping their heads through pop-out grab loops, they would haul the coffins toward land. It was a slow and complicated means of travel but one that, in theory at least, the Comprise could not track.

There would be people waiting on the shingled beach.

Rebel opened her eyes. She was in a beehive-shaped room, Greenwich normal. Unmortared stone walls with an array of pinprick lights wedged into the chinks. The air was a trifle chill. Rebel looked up at a woman in a hooded red robe. “I'm on Earth,” she said.

“Yes.” The woman had a fanatically starved face with sharp cheekbones and no eyebrows. But her voice was soft and she kept her head bowed. “In a place called the Burren. This complex of buildings is Retreat. It's a place of God.” She gestured toward a sheila-na-gig by the door, a cartoon in stone of a grotesque, moon-faced woman holding herself open with both hands. Rebel sat up. “Your gear is laid out before you. The earth suit is worn under your cloak—the Burren is a much harsher environment than you're used to. This devotee is named Ommed. If you desire anything, it is your slave.” She ducked out of the room.

Rebel shook her head and began dressing. The earth suit consisted of chameleoncloth pants and blouse with multiple fastenings that weren't easy to figure out. She felt horribly covered up with them on, though they were no worse, she had to admit, than what she'd worn as a treehanger. She donned her cloak and gravity boots, and lifted the library case. That was part of the deal she'd cut with Bors, that she'd serve as the combat team's librarian. Then she stooped out the door.

Rebel straightened and saw vast stretches of grey rock under a milky sky. The land went on forever, dwindling impossibly with distance as it rose to a line of mountains as barren as the moon. It was all exposed bedrock, runneled with weathered depressions from which poked tufts of brown grass. Low stone walls ran like veins over the land; they could have been a thousand years old or built yesterday. There was no way of knowing. The few devotees at work nearby were insignificant specks. She had always heard that Earth was green, but this land was desolate and godforsaken, almost a parody of barrenness.

The wind boomed, and she staggered forward. It was as if someone had placed a hand on her back and pushed. Her hair and cloak streamed out in front of her and, visions of hull punctures and explosive decompression rising within, Rebel cried out in sudden terror, “What's wrong? What's wrong?”

Ommed was there and slipped an arm around her waist to hold her steady. “Nothing is wrong. It's just the wind coming off the sea.”

“Oh,” Rebel said weakly, though the explanation meant nothing to her. She turned to look behind and saw the land cascading down to a slate green ocean specked with white-tipped waves. Clouds curdled with grey rushed upon her from a vague horizon, so fast she could see them move, melting one into another as they came. “My … God, this is … it's huge!” She felt vertiginous and almost fell. Everywhere, the air was aprowl, a vast, restless giant with the clouds in its grip, larger than mountains. It was all too huge. “How can you stand it?”

“We are here to abase ourselves,” Ommed said, “and we welcome the humbling immensities of God for that reason. But you will discover yourself that what at first appears terrifying can become, as you grow to know it, exhilarating.”

Almost breathless with disbelief, Rebel stared across rock and ocean, letting their immensity wash through her. There was so much of everything here that her head almost ached with it, but … yes, Ommed was right. It was awful, but at the same time rather grand, like the first hearing of a symphony in a new musical form that is so magnificent it terrifies.

“Your friends are meeting around the far side of Retreat. Perhaps it is time that you join them.”

“Yes.”

Retreat was a sprawl of stone beehive huts, of varying sizes, built one upon the other in a curving swirl up the slope. It was all of the same grey bedrock that everywhere dominated the land, and the far reaches of the mass faded to near invisibility, like a skirl of smoke against the ground. It was the only artificial structure in sight. From horizon to horizon was no trace of anything that might not have existed there millennia ago. “How do you hide all this from the Comprise?” Rebel asked.

“We call the great mind Earth,” Ommed corrected her gently. “Earth knows us well. We are here at its tolerance. It observes us. We don't know why. Perhaps Earth considers us beasts for its study. Perhaps it maintains the Burren as a kind of wildlife preserve. The question is not an important one.”

“It observes you?” Rebel looked around, saw no sign of cameras. Of course Earth might have more subtle devices, extremely small or distant.

“Every seven years Earth takes a tenth of our number to be absorbed into the great mind.”

“And this doesn't bother you?”

They walked around the upper curve of Retreat. In the smokehouses there, devotees were preparing racks of fish and slices of monoclonal protein from the fermenters. “We are here to learn the discipline of submission. Submission to the will of God takes many forms. We practice all of them.” She looked up, and Rebel flinched back from the intensity of her gaze, the knowing intimacy of her smile. “This is the hut. Your people are within.”

“Yeah. Well, it was great of you to show me the way.”

“You do not yet understand the pleasure there can be in the surrender of will.” Ommed touched the nape of Rebel's neck with a fingertip cold as ice. Rebel's body involuntarily stiffened, shivering. “If you wish to learn, ask any of the devotees. We are all your slaves.”

“Jesus.” Rebel ducked into the hut.

It was unlit, and at first she thought it was empty. Then somebody moved, and somebody else coughed, and she realized there were several people crouched against the wally, all in chameleoncloth; and they were all looking at her. Their faces floated in the gloom, and the eyes in them were cruel and alert. They'd all been chopped wolverine.

“This is your librarian,” somebody said. “Protect her. She carries your survival skills. And if she dies, one of you will have to be programmed down to take her place.”

There was a low growling noise that might have been laughter.

“You have your orders,” the voice continued. “Go!” The wolverines flowed out, sliding by Rebel on either side in perfect silence. Their leader stood, and the silver spheres at the ends of his braids clicked gently. Rebel was pretty sure this was Bors, but with that feral programming burning on his face, she couldn't be sure. “Librarian, you will stay.”

She sat. The leader leaned closer, face dominated by a mad, joyless smile. She could smell his breath, faintly sweet, as he said, “Get your skills in.”

Rebel snapped open the library, ran a fingertip down its rainbow-coded array of wafers. Deftly she wired herself to the programmer and set the red user wafers running. There were three: basic research skills, rock running skills, and an earth surface survival package combined with a map of the Burren. Whiteness buzzed and swirled at the base of her skull as the device mapped her short-term memory structure. Then the air about her shivered as the programs raised their arms and began assembling themselves into airy circuits and citadels of knowledge. Their logics reached through the walls toward infinity, and Rebel was lost in an invisible maze of facts. Three wafers were the limit; more than that couldn't be assimilated without losing half the data. She could
feel
her location in the Burren now, halfway up the western slopes of the enormous limestone formation. That was the map function. She knew its hills and mountains, down to the networks of caves beneath its surface. She knew which skills could be chipped into a berserker program and which could not. (“Librarian!”) She knew how to shift her weight when a rock turned underfoot just as she landed on it. She knew the Burren's plants and insects, which were good to eat and which were not. She knew where to find water. (“Librarian!”) She knew which three skills an ecosaboteur needed most. The facts shimmered through and about her, leaving her feeling stunned, cold, distant.