Vacuum Flowers (11 page)

“A tetrad is a single human mind with four distinct personalities.” His face changed expression, to serious, then distracted, then open, and finally mischievous. “That's what we am. Or should I say, that's what I are?”

5

PEOPLE'S SHERATON

“You're in for something that's pretty rare this far from a planetary surface,” Wyeth said.

“What's that?”

“A windstorm.”

Beneath its elaborations—balconies, outcroppings, light and heavy gravity wings, bubbles and skywalks—the sheraton was a simple orbital wheel, with three floors moving at slightly different speeds to maintain Greenwich normal gravity. Wyeth had set up security headquarters in the lobby at the foot of the elevator from the central docking ring. He sat behind the front desk, eyes moving restlessly as he scanned a dozen holographic inputs. A tone-controlled mike rested before him, and he murmured instructions into it from time to time, pitching his voice for the channel desired.

Rebel sat in a sling chair, staring out through the window wall. The stars trembled with the flicker of subliminal memories. She could see Wyeth reflected on the inner surface of the glass.

There was a cascade of movement across the window. “We've secured the locks, sir. The people aren't very happy about it. Minor violence at tanks twelve and three.” Despite her samurai paint, the woman hardly looked like security. She'd been recruited from the tanks and wore a daisy-yellow cloak and far too much jewelry.

“They were notified,” Wyeth said. When the woman was gone, he sighed. “I wonder at people. If they don't understand why they can't use the locks for an hour or two, then what do they think is waiting for them when we reach Mars orbit? I'm afraid they're in for a rude awakening.”

Spacejacks were bolting the preassembled segments of the geodesic around the sheraton and tanks, working with programmed efficiency. The structure was covered with transparent monomolecular skin. From Rebel's chair, it looked like a faint haze gathering across the stars. The workers began spraying powdered steel over the completed exterior, vacuum-welding layer upon layer. Now it was like watching the heat death of the universe, the stars slowly clouding up and fading to black. Gloom swelled and overwhelmed everything. Finally the only light within the geodesic was what spilled from the windows of the sheraton.

“This is spooky,” Rebel said. Suddenly she had an overwhelming sense of someone standing at her shoulder. She whirled, and no one was there.

“You like it, huh?” Wyeth threw an exterior camera projection onto one quadrant of window. From outside, the geodesic looked like a gigantic ball bearing, dazzlingly bright in the raw sunlight. Stars rippled over its flank. Just off center was the distorted reflection of Londongrad, with the Kluster corporate logo (two classical figures, one bending) superpainted on its side. In an unfamiliar voice Wyeth said, “Think of it as an enormous cell. The tank towns at the center are the nucleus. The sheraton is … oh, the centrosome, I guess. The air plant would have to be the mitochondria.” He laughed and spread his arms. “And behold! A new form of life floats upon the winds of space. What vast, unimaginably complex creatures will evolve from this first simple cell, a million years hence?”

Rebel looked up sharply. “Which one of you is that?”

Again that strange laugh. “The pattern-maker, I guess you'd call me. I'm the intuitive one, the persona that guesses at the big picture, that decides what we think about God and infinity. Of course, it's only a name. In an Aboriginal hunting party. I'd be the shaman.”

“Hah?”

“Don't you know where the tetrad comes from? Eucrasia patterned us after the ancient Aboriginal hunting party. They went out in groups of four, and no matter what individuals they picked, during the hunt they took on four distinct roles—the leader, the warrior, the mystic, the clown. It made for a remarkably stable and efficient group. And it makes for a remarkably stable and efficient mind.”

This was all very familiar. Staring out into the darkness, Rebel saw half-formed memories of Eucrasia's past striving to take shape. “I thought she was a persona bum?”

“Well, a little bit of a persona bum, yeah. But a hell of a good wetsurgeon in your own right.”

“In
her
own right.”

‘Whatever.” As they talked, Wyeth occasionally turned away to touch an unseen control or murmur an order. People continually passed through the lobby. A squad of security samurai took the elevator up to the docking ring, armed with truncheons and barbed pikes, and looking dangerous. In their wake, a young kid with mahogany skin strode in. He stood at the window, hands behind back, peering out with elaborate interest.

“What are you doing here?” Rebel asked coldly.

“Hey, I got experience in security work.” Maxwell put a hand on her shoulder, and she stood, knocking it away.

Without looking up, Wyeth said, “He's a messenger. I need any number of runners who can take messages in and out of the tanks.”

“He's not painted as a messenger.”

“Yes, well, we're dealing with the Comprise here. The less programming the better.”

On the window flashed images of cold fusion alembics being hooked into the geodesic and powered on. Newly created oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and trace gases gushed into the sphere. The sheraton shuddered as the winds hit, and Wyeth lost two limpet cameras, their perches torn out from under their grips. They went hurtling helplessly away, one to shatter against the tanks, the other against the geodesic's inside wall.

A short, grey-haired woman dressed treehanger style walked up to the front desk. “Got all my people at their stations. What do you need us to do when?” It was the supervisor from the biolab on Fanchurch Prospekt.

“Oh Christ,” Rebel muttered. “It's Old Home Week.”

The woman peered at her. “Don't I know you, dear?”

Rebel turned away, and Wyeth said, “Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, I'd like you to meet Constance Frog Moorfields, our macrobioengineering project director. Connie, I'm going to need you to cue your people in just a few minutes. Grab a channel, will you?”

“Oh yes, certainly.” Constance peered owlishly at the controls. “How do I work this thing?”

Maxwell slid an arm around Rebel's waist and said, “Tell you what, why don't you sit on my lap, and we'll talk about the first thing to come up?” She threw a punch at his stomach, and he danced back, grinning.

Outside, the storm howled. “Now,” Wyeth said, and Constance nodded and murmured into her mike. In some distant room the macrobioengineers hit their remotes. Explosive bolts broke open the small holding sphere, sending the pieces flying. The air plant within twisted and expanded, lashing through the air. The winds took it in their teeth, and strands slammed against the tanks and the geodesic walls, rebounding furiously. Through the windows, Rebel saw huge loops of the plant loom into the dim light from the sheraton and recede again. “It's enormous,” she marveled.

“Twenty-seven miles,” Constance said with satisfaction. “Stretched out full, that is. And it's still young. Ought to grow like green hell in the next few days.” She reached over to the controls and threw several biostructural schematics on the windows. “See, we've designed it to—”

Rebel turned and walked away.

The hallway was long and straight, with a barely perceptible upward curve. Rebel wondered why it was so dark, shadows lapping up against her ankles and hovering over either shoulder. Must be some reason. She touched one paisley wall, and remembered another, similar hallway she had walked down a thousand times before, the one connecting her office with the wetsurgery.

A breeze stirred her cloak, and she drew it together slightly. A scrap of paper fluttered by, and behind her she heard a silver bowl crash to the floor and go tumbling end over end before hitting a wall. Somewhere, the off-program samurai were opening the airlocks, glorying in the rush of new air. Outside, the wind sang in demon chorus. Within, all was cool gush and flow.

She was striding along, lost in her memories, when Jerzy Heisen stepped from a conversation niche and took her arm. “Hello, Heisen,” she said absently. “Anything new on the Mudlark program?”

He gave her a peculiar look. “Not yet. Soon, I hope.”

“I've decided to try the program on myself. It looks interesting, but the kind of interesting that's only comprehensible from the inside, if you get me. I don't want that information filtered through some subliterate, only marginally coherent persona bum.” She couldn't keep a touch of bitterness from her voice. The support staff she'd been given was poor material, incompetent to begin with and hastily programmed on top of that. She had to do half their work herself.

Heisen frowned, then said carefully, as if reciting lines from a play or remembering the exact wording of an old conversation, “Is that wise? We haven't had the master wafer duplicated yet.”

She brushed his objection aside scornfully. “It's only for ten minutes. God's sake, what can happen in ten minutes?”

A pause. When she looked directly at him, Heisen's eyes were oddly intent, but the instant she looked away he faded to a vague presence again. “You think it's a commercial persona, then?”

“You're so damned mercenary, Heisen! I'm talking about a new trait, a new characteristic, a new property.… Something that might make programming richer and more interesting.”

“But it
does
have commercial potential?”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

Footsteps came running up from behind, and suddenly a dark-skinned kid was standing before her, proffering a cheap amalgam ring. Eucrasia had to squint to see him. “Wyeth told me to give this to you.”

“Wyeth?” She recognized the name. How could she forget? He was the best work she'd done yet—pirate surgery, of course, but she'd put everything she had into it, because some of the most interesting programming was, strictly speaking, illegal. “Wyeth asked you to give me a ring?”

“Yeah, it's a locator ring. So he can keep track of you, where you are and so on.” He waved a hand at the ceiling cameras. “Listen, you come over to the tanks later on, visit my hut. No surveillance there. We can get private, know what I mean?”

Eucrasia shrugged in baffled annoyance.

Heisen had withdrawn to a discreet distance. The kid glanced curiously at him, decided he wasn't important, and blew her a kiss. “See you in my hutch!” he called over his shoulder. Eucrasia vaguely wondered who he was.

Heisen took her arm again. He steered her through a meadow-like meeting room. The grass was cool underfoot, and bees hovered drowsily over the raspberry bushes. “Let's go over this way, and stroll through the skywalk. It's a very pleasant walk. Free of cameras and prying eyes.”

He swung the cherry-red case lightly back and forth as he led her away.

The skywalk looped out from the sheraton in a long, graceful curve. Fish swam through strands of kelp within the transparent tube walls. The teak boardwalk sounded almost musically underfoot. “I designed Wyeth's warrior aspect after my father,” Eucrasia said. She had totally lost track of who she was talking to, but the memories were compulsively strong, and they drove the words before them. “He was a willful man, my father was. Determined. Nobody could talk him into anything, not unless he wanted them to. But he wasn't … flexible, you know? He couldn't adapt to change. He couldn't show emotion. But underneath he was a wonderful man, very kind, and I loved him. When I was a girl I was always wishing I could change him. Not in any big way, but in little ways, so he could get past all that defensive armor and breathe a little. So he could enjoy his life. That was a big factor in my choice of career, I think.”

She fell silent. Remembering when she was a little girl and the Kluster was passing out of the belts. The refineries were closing, which had put both her parents out of work. Those had been bad times. Her mother'd taken a job as pierrette, and the wetware was primitive then. She'd come home after shift with a goony look to her and a subservience that took hours to wear off. Daddy had hated that.

Once Eucrasia came home from nurture to find her father sitting at the center room table, turning a wetcartridge over and over in his hands. It was a big, bulky thing in a black case, almost obsolete already, and she didn't know yet that it was loaded with electronic godhood. But she knew that she was tired of having her father around all the time, moping about gloomily, and of almost never seeing her mother the way she used to be. And she didn't like the guilty, weak look that melted her father's face when he saw her. He had always been a
strong
man. So it was involuntary how, as he fumblingly tried to hide the cartridge, she stared up at him, mind superchilled and pulsing with inarticulate pain, and felt the anger sear through her eyes like an invisible psychic laser, and said, “I hate you, Daddy.”

What happened then shocked her.

Her father's hand clenched into a fist. It trembled. Then—so fast she almost didn't see it happen—he hit himself right in the middle of his face. That big fist struck hard. It must have hurt like hell. It broke the cartilage in his nose, and blood flowed down. Then he hit himself again. And again, with less hesitation this time, as if he'd savored the experience and decided he liked it. At first the only sound was of fist striking flesh, but then gradually he began gasping, a wet noise like sobbing. Still he kept on hitting himself.

Eucrasia had rushed forward, grabbing at that huge, muscular arm, trying to stop him. “Daddy, no!” she shrieked, and somehow—it was like a small, dark miracle—he'd stopped.

For a long moment he just stood there, chest working, shoulders heaving. His face was all dark with blood. One red drop fell on Eucrasia's foot, tickling her little toe. Her father stared around and around him, as if wondering where he was. Then his eyes fixed on Eucrasia, and they both stood there, mouths open and silent, unblinking, looking at one another.