Vacuum Flowers (36 page)

“Oh, no!” Rebel kicked her legs, clutched her sides, trying in vain to control her laughter. “I wouldn't say that at all!”

“—but that is irrelevant. They've assembled the evidence, silenced your legal protection, bought out your samurai. If I didn't need information from you, the jackboots would be here now. As it is, I gambled that I could crack your security and bought you a delay of four days. There is one necessary link in the legal process who is … perhaps ‘corrupt' might be the best term. We bought her. It will take your enemies four days to have her impeached and replaced. That's if you're willing to meet our price. If not, I'll free her from obligation right now.” Snow drew her cloak tight about her.

“What do you say?”

By slow degrees Rebel managed to calm herself. She lay hiccuping for a time, then sighed deeply and sat up. “That's better,” she said at last. “I really needed a good laugh, you know that?” Then she wiped the tears from her eyes and told Snow everything she knew about hypercubing.

“Ah,” Snow said. “Now that
is
interesting.”

And without even saying goodbye, she was gone.

“I've been an outlaw before,” Wyeth said calmly.

“Well, so have I, but that's not the point. These are your supposed allies that are going to be hunting us down. You're not going to be very effective with a dozen wyeths on your tail. They know you inside out—you won't have any surprises for them. Can't you see that this changes everything?”

“No.” Wyeth stood in the lightless center of a holographic model of the Smoke Ring Way project. Crisp monochromatic lines pierced the gloom, detailing current and projected construction. Yellow threads reached out from him to those klusters where sun taps were already in operation. The green stretches of completed vacuum roads (relays of hundreds of transit rings were needed within the matter-dense belts, so that traffic could be halted when a rock wandered across the travel lanes) reached almost a third of the way around the sun. Wyeth shifted slightly to tap a sonic spike and muttered a correction into it. Intangible planets shifted position. “We all do what we can,” he said.

“You are so infuriating!” Rebel flung open the door, and light from the elephant passage flooded in, fuzzing the model's finer lines. Dark shadow shrouded Wyeth's face; his eyes were pools of black. “Look! I packed for both of us. If we leave right now, this minute, we can take along enough to—well, it won't make us rich by anybody's standards, but it'll help set us up. Four days from now, we'll have to take whatever we can carry on our backs. What do you think you gain by waiting?”

“Four days,” Wyeth said. “Four days in which I can contribute a little bit, however small, to—ah, shit.” He threw back his head, staring straight up, and made a choked, gasping noise,
huk-huk-huk
. Puzzled, Rebel reached out, touched his face, felt wetness. Tears. She put her arms around him, and he hugged her fiercely, still sobbing. Rebel felt furious with herself for letting him do this to her.

But when Wyeth stopped crying, he stood back from her and said awkwardly, “Ah. I'm sorry, Sunshine. I thought I had it under control. I'm better now.”

Gently, then, she said, “Come with me, babes?”

He silently shook his head.

“I do not understand you!” she cried. “You'll be leaving behind any number of wyeths in the service of the Republique—I'd think that would discharge any obligations you may have very nicely. Just what is the big problem here?”

“The truth is, I'm of two minds on what to do,” Wyeth said. “No, I'm not. Yes, I am. The arrangement I have with myself is that I can't make any major change in my life unless all four of my personas agree. It's a wise policy, too. No, it's not, I wish I'd never … Well, too late for that. Hey, let's be honest here, I want to go with you, and the clown wants to go with you, and the pattern-maker will find purpose wherever he is—he wants to go with you too. But the warrior … No, I want to go too, but I can't. I can't. My duty is to stay and fight.”

“You mean that's it? One fucking persona won't play along, and you're letting it screw up both our lives? Come on, now! When have I ever had the luxury of being three-quarters certain of any decision I made? Why should you be any better?”

Wyeth shook his head sadly. “I have to be true to myself, Sunshine. The warrior is part of who I am, and I can't change that.”

Rebel's fist closed around holographic Mars. The image remained, glowing deep within her flesh, as if it and she were in overlapping universes, coincident but unable to touch. That sense of futility was returning, the awareness that nothing she could say or do was going to make any difference at all. “Well, I can't change either, you know that? I've hit my limits for growth—right now, my persona is as good as frozen. It's locked in with integrity, and I can't get the unlocking enzymes this side of Tirnannog. It takes a wizard to brew them up, and they, don't travel.”

“Stay anyway,” Wyeth urged her. He smiled weakly, hopelessly. “I don't want you to ever change. I love you just the way you are.”

She covered her face with her hands.

The ALI tagged her as she entered the Corporate Trade Zone.

Rebel abandoned her landau at the transit ring—the corporation could reclaim it, if they wanted—and climbed into a cable car. She slid her passport into the controls, tapping into a line of credit that would be worthless three days hence, and the car began sliding along a long, invisible line toward the out station.

The station was a traditional structure, five wheels set within each other, rotating at slightly differing speeds to maintain constant Greenwich normal throughout. The transit ring was fixed within a stationary hub dock at the center, and the whole thing was done up in pink and orange Aztec Revival super-graphics. Conservative but practical.

Rebel was looking through the forward wraparound when light brightened to one side. She turned and flinched back from the unexpected phantom of an old woman in treehanger heavies sitting beside her. “Aha!” the creature said. “I thought it might be you. Changed your name on your passport, I see. What the fuck.”

“You startled me!” Rebel said. Then, somewhat stiffly, “Hello, Mother.”

The holo grimaced. “I'm not your mother. Call me Mud. I'm only an ALI, but I have my dignity. You do know what an ALI is, don't you? That's Artificial Limited—”

“I know, I know. You haven't much time, so you'd appreciate me speaking up briskly.”

Mud cackled. It sounded like a rusty tin can being crumpled between two hands. “Take your time. Hundred years from now, what the fuck difference will it make? Anyway, my memories are all recorded and made available to the next ALI down the line. So I have a kind of serial immortality. Not terrifically legal, though. If I weren't safely ensconced inside a Corporate Trade Zone, they'd have me wiped. You can get away with murder in a CTZ. What
were
we talking about, anyway?”

“Jesus,” Rebel said, impressed. She looked more closely at the withered image, at that flushed face, those watery, pink-rimmed eyes. “You're drunk!”

“Hey, right the first time. It was Mom's idea. She liked the thought of having some say over how this place is run, but she didn't want to get too serious about it. Said she'd always wanted to spend a lifetime drunk. I don't have much real authority here, mostly I just pop up to look over anything interesting. So how's with you, sis?”

“Me?” She could see the station's narrow outer sleeve now, as stationary as the hub, where the cable car dock was located. “Oh, I'm okay, I guess.”

“Just okay? Hey, you tap in with a line of credit as close to unlimited as anything Records has ever seen, booked through to Tirnannog, and Mom calling in every few days to see if you've gone through yet … shit, that's going to be one fascinating meeting! So what do you want, anyway? Egg in your beer?”

The holographic traffic markings were coming into focus now. A clutter of grimy craft waited outside the hourglass grid marking the active lanes. The grid's waist threaded the transit ring, and its ends flared, restricting a flashy amount of local space. “Well, the money's not exactly mine,” Rebel said. “Not anymore. But yeah, you're right. I'm going home, I'm happy about that.”

“Yeah, and you look it too,” the ALI said sardonically. “All hangdog and guilty-faced as sin. I don't know what you've been doing, sis, but you'd better cut it out. Lighten up! Life is too short for this kind of crap!”

“That's easy enough for you to—” Rebel flared. She stopped. “Um. Hey, look, I'm sorry. I forgot that you're …”

“Temporary?” The old woman shook her head. “You've got the dog by the wrong end, sugarcakes. Everybody is mortal—what's the alternative? Me, I
like
being alive, and if I only get a few minutes of it, I'm going to spend those few minutes just enjoying hell out of it.” The image wavered. “Just enjoying hell out of it. Whoops! The Reaper calls. Look, do me a favor, will you, kid? Try to keep your pecker up.”

Rebel smiled weakly. “Yeah. Sure.”

Mud faded away in midlaugh, in midwink.

The cable car slammed into the dock and rang like a bell.

A second later, the cable car was scooped up by a passing rampway and smoothly lifted and accelerated into the outermost ring. It came to rest, and Rebel stepped out. The car's cybersystems began loading her baggage onto a trundle cart.

A thin young man with golden skin and a little black mustache was waiting for her. He bowed and said, “Welcome to Hummingbird Station. My name is Curlew, and I am your escort.” Cute little piece of action, dressed like he was just in from the archipelago. From Avalon, perhaps, or P'eng-Lai. His eyes twinkled mischievously. “This way.”

He waved a hand, and the baggage cart scuttled after them.

“The out stations are Elizabeth Charm Mudlark's legacy to the System, the visible structure of the Mudlark Trust, and a pipeline from the Klusters directly into the Oort Cloud,” Curlew recited. “Thanks to our patron's generosity, the transit rings have cut the years of voyaging previously needed to reach the archipelagoes down to a matter of days. The Trust also endowed the corresponding in stations within the archipelagoes and the Titan-class rings which will accelerate selected dyson worlds toward nearby stars. This unimaginably expensive project cost her the entirety of a fortune that no ordinary mortal could simply have given away. But then, Ms. Mudlark is no ordinary mortal.” Curlew coughed, and in a more natural tone of voice said, “She's very old. What else did she have to spend it on? You must have met her ALI—weird old bat, isn't she?”

“Uh …”

They were passing through a long hallway decorated with enormous holoflats of the extrasolar planets. There were detailed shots of Dainichi, Susa-no-o, Inari with its bright moon Ukemochi, the Izanagi-Izanami system, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and Yatecutli, as well as more speculative images of Morrigan and the horned giant Cernunnos. The hallway emptied into a mall busy with shops and financial offices. Deutsche Nakasone had a branch right next to her own corporation's local. Rebel tried hard not to look at either.

“Doubtless you have already noticed how many concerns here have no direct relationship with Hummingbird's transit ring functions, or even trade with the dyson worlds.” They stepped around a man sitting lotus on the floor, sticking long needles through his flesh to demonstrate a new line of yogic wetware. “They are here because Hummingbird Station was established as a Corporate Trade Zone. Here, away from intrusive government restrictions, private business can operate in a free and competitive atmosphere.” He winked. “They've all bought so much protective legislation in their home Klusters that they're almost paralyzed with armor. On the bright side, as long as Hummingbird serves their purposes, the corporations won't be so eager to get the Trust.”

They strolled through a shop selling comet-grown blossoms twice Rebel's height. “Don't buy any,” Curlew advised. “They don't last.” But there were also small black cigars, and Rebel paused long enough to buy one last one. It was a habit she was going to miss.

A moving rampway scooped them up, and in quick succession they rose through three levels to the inmost ring. Vast expanses of open space, impassive people hurrying by. The air carried a surf of murmured voices, distant cries, nearby coughs. A carefully-calculated snowfall drifted through the warm air, flakes melting just as they hit the porous floor.

With a grand wave of the hand, Curlew said, “These are the pioneers of a new age. Dyson worlds, it has been said, attract a special kind of emigrant, adventurers who like their comfort, starfarers willing to spend a lifetime in the traveling. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Also tourists.”

A wave of incoming treehangers flowed by, several in life-support chairs, their gravity adaptations not yet complete. A teenager turned quickly to gawk at Rebel's breasts, and she blew cigar smoke in his face.

“We are now in the midst of the last-hour rush as the final shuttles arrive from and depart to the archipelagoes. Since Hummingbird Station is so close to the Sun—relatively speaking—it is inevitable that as it moves in its orbit it will slide out of position to serve as a transit terminus. However, Jackdaw Station's launch window is designed to exactly overlap Hummingbird's, to prevent a disruption of service.” He grinned meanly. “Of course, it's not completely built yet. So there'll be a hiatus of a few months before Plover moves into place. That's typical for this operation. None of the shuttles they ordered when Hummingbird was designed have been delivered either. They're using converted local liners. Have you seen them yet?”

“Only a glimpse from the cable car.”

“Decrepit things.” He wrinkled his nose. “They're cramped and they smell bad. Sort of a mixture of stale sweat, cottage cheese, and oil. Most people prefer to go coldpacked.” He put an arm around her waist and said, “Listen, you don't really want to hear the sightseeing chatter, do you?”