Flowercrash (17 page)

CHAPTER 11

It was spring.

In Veneris, the pale blooms of winter made way for the colour splashed heads of new flowers. The narrow, paved streets became passable only with difficulty, partly because of the amount of technology cluttering up the central aisle of every street, but also because swarms of insects appeared. These insects were the procedural vectors of the networks. Some were bees from the autohives, those processing systems that were the powerhouse of the larger networks, but also making appearances were hoverflies, a few butterflies, and at night a great number of moths with immensely long tongues suitable for the transfer of data.

In back gardens and on empty land more network flowers emerged; cherry, rose, meadow-sweet, and other, more exotic species such as white plum and wet-rose. The onset of spring coaxed the networks out of hibernation, and people were again able to communicate over distance, act remotely, access their databases and accounts, or perform research; in short, they could manage all the transactions that their various cultures so depended on. In particular, screens became active.

And yet this spring was different.

It was soon noticed that there seemed to be a reduction in the number of species flowering. One family dominated all others: Family Rosaceae. Before long people also began remarking on the lack of butterflies and other specialised insects, for apart from the bees and nocturnal moths only hoverflies had appeared. There were great quantities of these, but no variety.

Manserphine returned to her chamber in the Shrine of Our Sister Crone. Soon she had unpacked, and the small room was again untidily stuffed with clothes and other oddments, thrown inside the antique furniture that occupied every corner. Her first task was to find the humble bee pen. Slipping into the Insect Chamber, she opened the single cupboard there to see what was available. Because such pens were rare it would not be possible for her simply to take one, since this would be noticed and there would be an outcry. Yet she was entitled to use the devices here. In the end she decided to swap her own generic bee for the humble bee, which she took to the Determinate Inn paddock via a back gate. There Zoahnône waited.

“Use this only with orange snapdragons,” she explained. “Ideally you should keep to one flower, for the information you send will then remain in fewer bees. But it’s not essential. I’ll check the snapdragon in the garden of the Shrine every evening. Code your information to me alone.”

Zoahnône nodded. “We must keep in touch. If we need to talk face to face we should arrange to meet here, where it is safe.”

“I’d rather not,” Manserphine said, “because I want to escape this inn. There are many other old gardens in north Veneris where we could meet. But what will you do now?”

“I have three immediate tasks. I have to locate Shônsair, Baigurgône, and I have to prepare the embodied gynoid plan. I hope that my first such creation will be born soon, most likely from a gynoid already mature, for I intend bypassing the normal ex-utero process.”

“Do you want me to watch for clues to your enemies?”

“You could do.” Zoahnône sat beside a white campion, a male flower with a small screen. After some anther tickling she called up an image of two faces. “The left face is Baigurgône, the right Shônsair.”

Manserphine studied the right image. “I think I recognise that gynoid,” she said.

Zoahnône sat rigid. “You do? Surely not.”

Manserphine tried to remember where she had seen that noble, yet arrogant face. The longer she looked, the more certain she was, and to aid her memory she tried to put voice to face. She imagined rough speech.

“Blissis!”

“What would Shônsair do in Blissis?”

“I couldn’t say,” Manserphine replied. “But I remember who it was now, and at the time I thought her a woman. There were two doorwardens at the Shrine of Complete Inebriation, and Shônsair was one of them.”

“You must be mistaken,” said Zoahnône. “Shônsair is a haughty, intellectual gynoid of immense power. She would never become a skivvy in hedonistic Blissis.”

But Manserphine knew she was right. “It’s her,” she said. “I recall now that she spoke differently to the others. I know all about accents and culture, and she was not of Blissis. I sourced her speech in Veneris, but it somehow seemed external to Zaïdmouth.”

“That rings true,” Zoahnône admitted, “but the tale is nonetheless fantastic.”

“Go to Blissis. There you may see her. Will she recognise you?”

“No. I am to the world a strange gynoid called Eollyndy. Yet I must be careful, for we have been opposed for aeons and know one another intimately. Blissis, you say… you must come with me, Manserphine.”

“I cannot,” Manserphine replied, shaking her head and standing as if to go. “My work starts tomorrow. I shall be very busy.”

Zoahnône was disappointed, replying, “In that case we must discuss how strange spring is this year.”

They exchanged significant looks, before Manserphine dropped her gaze and murmured, “Yes, it is a bit odd.”

“You know what it signifies.”

“Maybe.”

“You do! Humanity is in peril, and you know it.” Zoahnône swept her arms through the air, then said, “Look at what is around you. Rose after rose after rose, and only hoverflies to go with them. A monoculture. This is a deliberate deed, Manserphine, and it means that the flower crash is due soon, and with it the extinction of hundreds, even thousands of beautiful species. We must not let those two inhumane minds achieve their ends.”

“If Baigurgône and Shônsair are indeed responsible.”

“I believe they are. This spring
reeks
of them.”

Manserphine, chastised, just shrugged and said, “I’ll do what I can.”

Saying nothing more, Zoahnône departed. Manserphine watched her slip through the compost heaps and nettle undergrowth, then vanish into the shadows at the side of the inn. She returned to her Shrine through the wicket gate.

That evening she presented herself at Curulialci’s chamber. The Grandmother Cleric sat awaiting her, and with a twinge of fear Manserphine recognised the azure dress and wrap she wore as those of her own vision. She glanced around the chamber, noticing the screens of roses and late snowdrops. It seemed incredible. She had foreseen this event through these very optics. How could that be?

“You seem distracted,” Curulialci said.

“My apologies, Grandmother Cleric.”

Curulialci walked across to Manserphine and embraced her. Her eyes shone. “I am glad you have returned. No banishment is easy. You fared well?”

“Yes, Grandmother Cleric.”

“You did not succumb to temptation?”

“No,” Manserphine replied, holding that green gaze steady with her own. “I ate and drank, but no more than usual. I want to remain your Interpreter.”

“Good. You having no obvious successor, I do not want to demote you.” Again she hugged Manserphine. “Welcome back!”

“Thank you.”

Curulialci led Manserphine to a couch, where they sat and drank scented elderberry wine. After more small talk, Curulialci sent Manserphine back to her room.

Night came. Manserphine lay in her bed, restless with insomnia, imagining what the new Garden would bring in the morning.

~

The rituals next day began with a stately walk to the Headflower Chamber. With the Shrine’s clerics and laity watching in silent rows, Curulialci led Yamagyny and Manserphine into this circular room at the heart of the Shrine. They wore heavy dresses that trailed along the ground, and they carried clay crone models.

The Headflower Chamber was panelled with luminous hardpetal from which autonomous daisies grew, their petals mimicking faces, symbols, even animal forms, according to stray data they had stored. The omnidirectional light made the womens’ faces glow. From a hole in the centre of the floor three white poppies grew, their blooms a little larger than a head. They drooped towards the floor from swan necks. Three couches lay pointing outwards from the hole, so that the blooms hung over the headrests.

After her superiors sat, Manserphine settled herself in the remaining couch, and waited. Soon she felt the creepy, slightly claustrophobic sensation of a poppy head settling over the crown of her head, and seconds later she saw petal edges before her eyes, and then the glittering portals of retinal projectors. She shivered. In the heart of the flower, devices were moving, repositioning themselves, and this she felt through her hair and across her scalp. Manserphine had never been able to rid herself of the impression that grubs and even insects lived there, waiting to gnaw into her brain. Again she shivered, as the goosebumps rose and fell upon the bare skin of her arms.

When the Garden began transmitting, the image of defocussed white petals faded. She concentrated on the retinal projections and the sound entering her ears from soft earpieces. Within seconds her brain had assimilated the stereoscopic visual and audio information, and, although she knew it to be an illusion, she found herself standing in the Garden. Motion sensors made other parts of the Garden appear as she moved her head. Curulialci and Yamagyny awaited her.

Part of her had expected changes. The Garden was as bright as the previous year, its profusion of flowers as colourful as ever, but almost everything she could see was a member of the rose family. There seemed to be a few bluebells in the distance, and, at her feet, one scarlet daffodil. Hoverflies in their thousands buzzed from bloom to bloom. Manserphine shaded her eyes from the bright blue sky to look at the horizon. This was a spherical reality. She seemed to be standing inside a bubble of colour.

The changes in the technological flowers had indeed altered this artificial reality.

Suddenly Alquazonan materialised. She was a gynoid of medium height and voluptuous build. Her tanned skin and white hair—including white eyebrows—made her appearance particularly striking. She wore a pale grey cloak, made flowing to cover her distended torso; for some decades she had suffered from a technological cancer of the innards.

Manserphine studied her covertly as all four of them walked towards the centre of the Garden. The pact that had been made after the momentous events of fifty two years ago, when the Gang of Three had managed to control the Garden for half a week, had thrust Alquazonan into the position of Guildmistress of the Wild Network Guild, following the death of the previous incumbent, Teoalquar. From her lonely Guildhall base Alquazonan projected her image and received Garden transmissions, as she had done since that time. She looked after gynoid interests and advised on the wild flower networks, which constituted half of those in Zaïdmouth.

Behind a screen of dwarf cherry Manserphine saw four seats. Just a few yards away ten more lay. They walked across a dark arc of grass, the border between the Inner and Outer Gardens, and as they did five figures materialised behind them. Manserphine glanced back to see Ashnaram of the Shrine of Flower Sculpture, Ephroyao of the Shrine of Root Sculpture, and beside them Luihaby, Ianniyas and Zentenzin, the three civic representatives, who would be sitting somewhere in the chamber reserved for them elsewhere in the Shrine of Our Sister Crone. From where they waited the five could hear nothing. Manserphine and her three colleagues, however, could hear everything, for the barrier was one way, silencing speech only from the Inner Garden to the Outer. This was how the Garden systems had reorganised themselves following the trauma of the Gang of Three.

As Interpreter, Manserphine would sit with her superiors and Alquazonan in the four seats of the Inner Garden, or with all nine representatives in the ten chairs, should they be speaking as a whole. Most often her task was to interpret behaviour and cultural patterns, but she was also called upon to translate difficult speech, such as that of Ashnaram, Ianniyas, who represented Novais, and Zentenzin of Blissis.

Again she glanced back at the others. Her friend Luihaby gave her a cheery wave. All this was public stuff, watched by the citizens of Zaïdmouth on flower screens.

So the morning progressed. They discussed winter damage to the networks, then agreed to set up pollination groups to encourage bulbs damaged by the frost, and finally moved on to consider currency rates. Nobody mentioned species reduction.

At noon, they paused. Manserphine stood, intending to walk among the plants of a distant zone.

A figure materialised.

It was Fnfayrq.

They stood as one, as if under threat. The Sea-Cleric was dressed in a black robe that swung at her ankles. Her fingers were heavy with silver, her hair strung with quartz beads, and she wore an opal-studded circlet at her brow. With her stern manner and compelling face she commanded their attention, yet she stood silent, like an angry noble.

Manserphine approached. Only she could speak with this woman. She said, “Welcome to the Garden, forgotten tides coming in at last, the phosphorescent wakes of squid marking a path across the ocean.” It was a greeting she had devised long ago, but never expected to use.

Fnfayrq surveyed them all. “This Garden, beetles dig, bees heavy, oh, I miss the sound of my surf.”

This reference to what Fnfayrq saw as the alien quality of the Garden annoyed Manserphine, but her professionalism allowed her to keep her silence. She had heard worse insults. It was surprise that was affecting her.

Fnfayrq sat at the seat reserved for her, then looked them over, the beads in her hair clacking together like so many crab claws. “I am here, so sea-soon, bright in the mind for foreign shells.”

Curulialci was at Manserphine’s side. “Ask her why she’s come.”

“That is what she has just told me,” Manserphine replied. “She thinks she is early, but now she has seen us here, she is keen to take her place.”

“But…”

“Yes, exactly,” Manserphine sympathised. “Don’t ask me why she is here, I have no idea.” But in the privacy of her mind she suspected there must be a connection with her own winter visit, and that, she knew, would put pressure on her when she wanted it least.

“In that case,” Curulialci said, “ask her whether she has any specific points to raise.”

Manserphine said, “Bright starlight glitters upon the sea, twinkling, circling, how easily we impose our own patterns upon them.”