Vacuum Flowers (6 page)

No, she thought, I won't be a coward.

She rattled the side of Wyeth's hutch, and a second later he poked out his head. “I heard you talking about me,” she said.

Wyeth took down his cloak and wrapped it about himself. Rebel got a glimpse of his naked body and reddened. “How much of what I said did you understand?” he asked.

She shook her head helplessly. “You're making that face again.”

Wyeth looked surprised. Then he grinned, and his harsh expression was instantly and totally gone. “I was trying to make up my minds. You're something of a dilemma for me, Sunshine.”

“So I gather.”

“Look, I'm only in partial agreement what to do at this point. Let's both sleep on it. We can discuss this thing better when we're rested, okay?”

Rebel considered it. “Okay.”

Back in her hutch, she lay half awake for the longest time, thinking wide, empty thoughts. There was a knife fight in the next court, two young bloods with rude boy programs, cursing and swearing at each other as they jockeyed for position. A young couple were going at it hot and heavy not far away, separated from her hut by only an arm's length of nightflowers. A baby began to cry and was shushed by its mother.

Closeby, a peeper frog cried out for a mate.

If you floated right up against them, the iron pipes and tin walls had a distinct odor. It disappeared as you moved away, but was strong up close. There was nothing else quite like that smell. It must stay with slum dwellers, Rebel thought. No matter how far they might get from their tanks, a smell like that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

3

STORM FRONT

Someone kicked her wall in passing, and Rebel awoke. Blearily, she dressed and floated out. Of the three sometime restaurants in the court, only the one marked “Myrtle's Joint” had its window open.

She rapped for service and an iguana scurried away and burrowed into the vines. Myrtle's face flashed out of the gloom with a quick smile. Rebel yawned and woke up a little more, and said, “I'd like to buy some food.”

“What meal?”

“Breakfast.”

Myrtle ducked down and rummaged about. “I got a mango. I could slice it up with a little chutney. There's a dab of spiced rice that's not too old. And beer.”

They haggled up a price, and Rebel took a place on the rope as Myrtle put breakfast together. “Hey. My man told me about how you used to own a corporation and all. I just wanted to say I'm sorry.”

“That's okay.” A flock of naked children darted into the court, shrieking and laughing. For an instant the air was full of them. Then one spotted a gap between hutches and darted through. The others followed and were gone, as quick and sudden as minnows.

Rebel ate slowly. Finally she licked a last bit of chutney from a knuckle and returned the empty Belhaven tube to Myrtle. “Um, this is kind of embarrassing, but how do I find the—?”

“Orange rope downgrain to blue, blue upgrain to red, that'll take you to the shell.” Myrtle laughed. “From there you can just follow your nose.”

The community toilets were overgrown with masses of night-bloom. The leaves rustled and waved in the wind from the airstacks. But under the flowery scent was a darker smell of human waste and of body gases. She swam in the ladies entrance and took a seat on the communal bench. It was cool here. The air flowing down the holes was enough to hold her on. Resting her elbows on the grab bars, she read the graffiti. There were the usual
EARTH FRIEND
and
NEWMINDS/FREEMINDS
scrawls, with an
INDIVIDUALITY DOES NOT EXIST
written in one hand and
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF
scratched beneath it in another. The only really interesting graffito was
EVEN YOUR SHTT BELONGS TO THE RICH
.

Well, it made sense. Considering that almost none of the food eaten here was grown within the tank. The toilets had to be emptied to keep the tank towners from literally strangling in their own wastes. The nightblooms helped keep the air fresh, but
somebody
had to replenish the oxygen that was lost in tiny gasps every time the locks swung open and shut. Even a drastically oversimplified ecology like this needed to be looked after.

The entire Kluster, in fact, was an extremely loose system, leaking air and garbage from every pore. To Rebel's eyes, it was criminally wasteful how much oxygen and water vapor, reaction mass and consumer trash must be lost to the vacuum every day. Any attempt to tighten the system had to be applauded.

Still, it was humbling to think that the tank towns were being maintained by people who saw them simply as fertilizer farms.

She was leaving the toilets when a familiar voice hailed her from the cluster of commercial data ports next door. Wyeth, helmet on arm, waved and kicked up to join her. “I'm just about to leave for work,” he said. “But I've cloned my briefcase for you.” He gave her what looked like a hand-sized plate of smokey glass and felt like amber, only cool. Small colored lights danced in its depths. Rebel touched one, and they all shifted. The device felt right in her hand. She felt a lot better having it. “You operate it by—”

“I know how to work this.” She ran a fast recursive, and schemata appeared in the air over the plate. It was the only skill she possessed worth haying, and she … but that was Eucrasia's thought, and Rebel suppressed it. “What have you got in there for me?”

“Your history.”

She looked at him.

“I made a quick raid on Deutsche Nakasone for their unclassified data on Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark.” He touched the plate and two tiers of yellow lights lined up against the right-hand edge. “As you can see, there's not much. A fast-edited history put together for publicity purposes, I'd guess. I thought you'd be interested.”

“Yes.” She closed her hands around the briefcase, held it to her stomach. “Won't that lead them to this tank, though? Won't they be looking for this kind of data request?”

“I don't see how,” Wyeth said. “Sandoz Lasernet is very big on equipment optimization. They keep their trunk lines flickering on and off constantly. In the fifteen seconds my call took, it was probably routed through half the cities in the Kluster. Following it would be like trying to track a feather in a methane storm. You'd need a program with full sentience and a lot of power to do it.”

Eucrasia's memories were fading quickly, so that the beginning of Wyeth's explanation had seemed childishly oversimplified and the ending almost opaque. “Won't they have a sentient program on the job then?”

“After what happened to Earth?” Wyeth laughed. Then he said, “Listen, I've really got to be going. Enjoy. I'll see you when I get back.”

Rebel wandered back to Jonamon's court, the briefcase in her cloak pocket as thick and massive as a bad conscience. She wanted to view it, to see what it could tell her about herself, and yet she didn't.

While she was perched on a rope thinking, the young rude boy she had noticed eyeing her the other day emerged from the vines between two hutches. His torso was mahogany dark and very long, and for an instant she thought he was naked. Then his orange
cache-sexe
appeared. He held something in one hand, and with the other reached for a cloak that had been left tied to a hutch frame.

He noticed her.

For a moment neither moved. Then the boy fastened his cloak about his shoulders and walked up the rope toward her, gripping the line between his toes. He smiled and showed her what was in his hand.

“Honeycomb.” His dark eyes sparkled. He cocked a hip slightly, bringing his muscles into sharper delineation, and bit into the wax. His mouth and chin glistened. “Want some? My name's Maxwell.”

“I can't,” Rebel said helplessly. Brushing open her cloak, she dug out the briefcase. She held it forward, two-handed. “I've got to listen to some stuff.”

Maxwell took the briefcase and, holding it upside-down, solemnly examined the lights. “Listen to it in my hut. I'll feed you honey while you work.”

“All right.”

She wedged the briefcase between wall and pipe as Maxwell pinned up their cloaks. A touch converted it to spoken command. She waited until the hutch was dark, then said, “Please turn on.” Light blossomed.

The holography opened on a shot of Eros Kluster Traffic Control. The EKTC station was shaped like a barbell and revolved slowly within a maelstrom of traffic holograms. “How's this?” Maxwell asked. The image rippled over his body as he swam to her.

“Mmmm.” Rebel skipped the scene forward.

They were in the interior now, a hemispherical transparent hull crisscrossed by thin catwalks between work stations. The traffic techs looked upset. One man bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

“That can't be—” someone said. Rebel backtracked the program.

“Open up,” Maxwell said. He popped a bit of honeycomb into her mouth. Sweet.

An operator gave a long, low whistle. “Look what just came up on visual!” His supervisor was at his side at once, a big woman with a bulldog jaw. “Now that
ought
to be a lightsail,” the man said. “Spectroanalysis gives us a solar signature, ever so slightly blueshifted. But it's not registered, and it's headed right down our throats.”

“Velocity?”

“Hard to say.” The tech's fingers flickered, coaxing up data. “If it's a standard-size sail, though, and assuming a median range load of five kilotons, then it'll rip through the Kluster sometime tomorrow.”

“Shit!” The supervisor pushed him from his station. “Grab something vacant and restructure the programming to give me more capacity. Take it off of, um, the holos. Let them drift a bit. Set them to correct only once every point-zero-three seconds, okay?”

The operator bounded toward the empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

“That can't be—” the supervisor said. “No, that doesn't make any sense at all. That's not an industrial delivery.”

“More honey?”

“Mmm.” Maxwell's fingers lingered on her lips, and she kissed them absently.

Another tech said, “We're having trouble estimating mass. There's something screwy about the way it's slowing down.” Rebel stopped motion, and asked the briefcase to give her the terminal display. It appeared, a chart in seven colors, showing every pinprick of light as it appeared from the EKTC station. It pulsed, and the lights shifted to an earlier configuration. A speck of light, circled in red, raced sunward, from beyond Jupiter. A sidebar identified it as
COMET: COMMERCIAL CARRIER
(
LUMBERED TREE FARM
).

The EKTC system was crammed with economic warfare programs. Reflexively, it showed the positions of other lumbered comets moving into the system. It also showed a pod of young comets climbing up from the Sun, their tails of ionized gases winking out as new vegetation covered their surfaces. An operator wiped them off the screen.

“What a pig. You've got honey on your chin.”

“Hey, I'm busy, okay?”

“Hold still and I'll lick it off.”

Now a sidebar appeared with the comet's registry. It was a small, uncolonized comet, carryng a lumbered first growth of some seventy gigatons of oak, teak, and mahogany hybrids. The trees had been grown over one long swing down to the sun and back out to the edge of the Oort Cloud. There, archipelago lumberjacks had coppiced the comet, leaving roots intact for a second growth, and then artificially accelerated it for its trek back into the system. Eros Kluster speculated heavily in timber, but this was not a local deal. The freight was due to Ceres Kluster as per a contract signed some two decades ago. Since Eros had no financial interest in it, the traffic computer has never before seen fit to bring it to human attention.

Maxwell followed a trail of dribbles down the side of Rebel's neck, toward her breasts. She giggled and pushed him away. “That tickles.”

The display shifted to fast replay. The comet rushed down on Jupiter. It dipped into the giant planet's gravity well, was slewed around, and emerged on a new orbit. It dumped velocity in the process, shifting to a shorter ellipse that would take it within the orbit of Mercury, and then out again to its client Kluster. The readout shifted momentarily to show the Inner System with old and new orbits displayed as dotted yellow lines.

“How about this? Does this tickle too?”

“No. That's nice.”

Midway between Jupiter and Eros, the comet's brightness quadrupled. There was an explosive flare of light, which quickly fell behind the comet—a lightsail unfurling. It bobbed slightly on the solar wind, tacked gracefully. The computer ran a projected course for it. It was headed straight into the heart of Eros Kluster.

Rebel switched back to live action. “Go on,” the supervisor said.

“The sail is tacked away from the sun. So the drag ought to be easy to calculate. But it's slowing down too fast for anything I've ever seen. Even a single kiloton shipment ought to—”

“Could the treehangers be dumping some kind of bomb on us?” the supervisor muttered to herself. “No, that's stupid. Maybe they—wait. Try calculating the rate of deceleration for a shortsail with a payload of a third of a ton.”

Fingers danced. “Damn! It works.”

“That's it, then. One human in a vacuum suit, plus the mass of a frame, controlling mechanism and cables. I'd say that what we've got here—”she tapped the screen—“is someone using a small lightsail as a drogue chute.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A drogue chute. Like a parachuter—um, it's hard to explain. Just contact Perimeter Defense and tell them we've got a space cadet that needs rescuing. Dump the whole thing in their laps.”

The scene shifted to the exterior of a Perimeter Defense multipurpose cruiser.