Vacuum Flowers (18 page)

The crowds of Comprise expanded slightly, then contracted, like an enormous beast taking a deep breath. “We are held back by the speed of communication. It is not true that thought is instantaneous. Thought is only as fast as our electronic linkages allow. Even on Earth this causes problems. It is possible for the Comprise to be divided against ourself. Thought moves in vast waves, like pressure fronts, across the continents. Sometimes two conflicting thoughts arise on opposite sides of the planet. The thought fronts race outward, and where they collide, there is conflict. It is like a mental storm. You would not understand it. But these are momentary unbalances, easily settled. The problem becomes crucial only when Comprise leave Earth.

“Earth has tried creating colonies of ourself in near orbit, on the moon, elsewhere. But small Comprise such as we are sicken away from the communion of thought. We become indecisive, we make errors. The large Comprise do not sicken, but they lose integrity and drift away from Earth, becoming individuals in their own right. Then they must be destroyed. Three times it has been necessary to apply the nuclear solution. It is not permissible that the Comprise of Earth become Other. You would not understand.”

“I see,” Wyeth said. “I think I see. That's the reason for your interest in the mind arts, then? You want a means of keeping Comprise colonies integrated with Earth.”

“Yes. For a long time Earth has sought the answer in physics. A means of instantaneous communication would bind the Comprise across vast distances. But the speed of light remains an absolute barrier. It cannot be cheated. There is no simultaneity in the universe. So we look elsewhere. Perhaps a solution can be found in the mind arts. Perhaps a new mental architecture.”

“That brings me to my next question—”

“No,” The Comprise said. “You are satisfied. Sickened though we are, we can read you that well, Boss Wyeth. You got as much from us as you had hoped for. We need give you no more.” The spokesman took a step backwards, merging into his fellows. Hundreds of eyes all turned away at once.

For a moment Wyeth stood open-mouthed. Then he laughed.

When they made love that night, Wyeth was awkward and he came too soon. He rolled away from Rebel, staring out the window wall. Faint strands of orchid floated slowly by as the sheraton revolved. “Wyeth?” Rebel said gently. He looked at her, eyes bleak and hollow. “What is it?”

Wyeth shook his head, looked downward. “I have a sick conscience. I am not at all at peace with myselves.”

“Hey,” Rebel said. “Hey, babes, it's all right.” She took his hand, held it in both of hers. “Which one of you is this? It's the leader, right?”

“Yes, but we all feel this way. Constance was right. About the kid. Billy was perfectly content as part of the Comprise. Not happy, not aware—but content, anyway. And then I appear in a blaze of light and a rush of noise, and yank him into consciousness. Here, kid, have an apple. Bright and shiny. Let me make you one of us. I dragged him out of the Comprise and halfway to human, and made him into what? A crippled, crazy, unhappy animal of some kind.”

“Hey, now, it wasn't your fault he ate the shyapple. The Comprise did that. It caught us all by surprise.”

Wyeth sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He sat there, not moving. “You think not? I waved that apple under their noses. I wanted them to bite. I wanted to see what would happen. But when I pried Billy loose from Comprise, it turned out he didn't know one fucking thing. So what good did I do? None. I acted blindly, and now there's one more miserable creature walking the sky.”

“I'll heal him for you, Wyeth, I promise I will. I'm coming to terms with Eucrasia's skills.” Rebel hugged him from behind, crushing her breasts against his back, and laid her cheek against his shoulder. “Listen, I can really do it.”

Wyeth shook his head back and forth ponderously. “That's not it. That's not it at all.” She released him, rocking back on her heels. “Undoing the damage won't help. The thing is, I don't want to be the kind of person who'd do that to a child.”

Rebel said nothing.

“Do you remember when we first met? I was just a persona bum. Very bright, very good, but with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The one thing I wanted most was to have a sense of purpose. We collaborated on the tetrad's design together, do you remember that?”

“No.”

“That's too bad. It was an exciting piece of work. We put lots of late hours into it. It was pirate programming, we had to do it in secret. Eucrasia came up with the notion of a four-faceted persona for the stability, the self-sufficiency of it. She was hell for self-sufficiency. I was more interested in it because it would generate its own sense of purpose.”

Rebel felt irrationally jealous of Eucrasia, working so closely with Wyeth. She wondered if they'd slept together, and felt an oddly unclean excitement at the thought. “How?” she asked.

“The pattern-maker. I figured he'd take care of that. He did, too. First time he came up, he asked what is the most important thing happening in our times? How can we contribute to it? The answers—well, you know the answers. Eucrasia was disappointed. She thought I was being grandiose and impractical, and she wanted to strip the program down and start over again. So we parted ways. I mean … the survival of the human race! What better cause could you have?” He fell silent, then said, “Only now I don't know. Maybe what I really wanted was to have a good opinion of myself. I mean, I made me into a kind of secular saint, a self-contained guardian of humanity. A man with no doubts. But now I'm not so sure. I'm not sure of anything. I guess I don't know myself as well as I thought I did.”

“Hush now,” Rebel said. She put her arms around him, rocking him gently. But they might as well have been in different universes. Eucrasia's memories were growing stronger. Soon they would swallow her up completely, and then she would be no more. She wanted to care about Wyeth's problems, but they just didn't seem important to her.

“Hush,” she said again. “You're not alone.”

8

DELUSION'S PASSAGE

Rebel visited Billy daily, after singlestick practice. But she quickly found that while she lived by the sheraton's strict Greenwich time, the village ran on different, internal rhythms. People ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, kept to no external schedule. Sometimes she would find that by village time only a few languid hours had passed. Other times, days would have sped by in a frenzy of work and play, of long naps and small meals.

One day she discovered that thousands of small spider webs, no bigger than tufts of cotton, had covered the orchid about the village like mist. In the filtered white wintery light, the children played a game with a rusting air tank. A child would leap into the court and bounce off the tank, kicking it toward the far side. Then a child from that side would jump out, trying to bounce it back. One girl got stuck in the court's center, and was loudly and derisively called out. Then the game started over again.

Gretzin sat before her hut, weaving a grass mat to replace a worn wall. Rebel greeted her, then said, “Where did all these spiders come from?”

“Where do you think they come from? The tanks,” Gretzin said impatiently. “Lots of vermin been spreading out. You should've been here yesterday, there were blackflies everywhere. Clouds of them.” She put the mat aside. “Fu-ya's sleeping. Hold on, and I'll get your little boy.”

A minute later she returned, hauling Billy by one arm. “I don't want to!” he cried. “I want to play!” Seeing Rebel, he started to cry.

Rebel felt an odd sadness that the boy didn't like her. A cold touch of failure. “Well, that's a sign of progress,” she said to Gretzin. “His temper.” She ran a hand over his head, and the delicate fuzz of new hair tickled her palm like static electricity. Gretzin had cut off his braid; possibly the children had been teasing him. “This won't take long at all, Billy.”

She put him under and went to work.

An hour later she released Billy and called Gretzin over. “There's not a lot more for me to do. His identity is a little fragile yet, but it'll strengthen in time. Basically, he should be able to pass for human now.”

“Pass for human, huh?” Gretzin said.

“Yes, it's good timing, too, since we reach Mars soon. I don't know what Wyeth will do with him then.” She covered her uneasiness about the boy's future with a smile. “I'll bet you'll be glad not having to worry about him anymore.”

“Yeah. That'll be terrific.”

Being outside the geodesic after all this time was a shock. Some free-floating spores must have adhered to the hull before it was accelerated away from Eros Kluster, for it was now covered with great mottled mats of vacuum flowers. They were everywhere, growing in tangled heaps and piles. The blossoms twisted slowly, tracking the sun.

The flowers had been scraped away from the airlock and for dozens of meters around, revealing a hull that was dull, pitted, and uneven. Scatterings of foot rings had been snap-welded across the cleared surface. Standing in a pair, Rebel felt a perfectly irrational urge to start scraping flowers. Her hands itched for it.

Wyeth stood beside her, overseeing the departure of the Comprise. Almost half a thousand coldpack units were being lashed to a single jitney frame, layer upon layer building into a crude sphere. Inside those soot-black coffins were suspended the Comprise, throats and lungs filled with crash jelly. Spacejacks swarmed about them.

“Hey, look.” Rebel touched Wyeth, pointed. Two unmarked silver suits crawled across the geodesic toward them. Among the carnival riot of personalized suits worn by the workers recruited from the tanks and orchid villages, they stood out as startlingly as a croquet ball in a case of Fabergé Easter eggs.

The intercom crackled. “I can't believe they trust you to coldpack them after what you put them through.”

“Aren't you supposed to be checking how far through the hull the flowers have eaten?” Wyeth asked.

The silver figures pulled themselves almost to his feet, slipped into rings, and stood. “That's what I came to report. You've got four inches skin at the very thinnest. Nothing to worry about.”

The spacejacks brought up a disposable fusion drive at the end of a kilometer-long connector rod and coupled it to the jitney, hot end away from the Comprise. They leaped away and (using long ropes) yanked the shielding. “Well, stay and watch the show if you want, Connie. Hallo, Freeboy. Still with us, I see.”

“He's as loyal as a wizard's daughter,” Constance said dryly. An almost invisible plasma flame puffed from the engine, and the assembly started away.

Three days, Rebel thought. Two to reach Mars, be intercepted and fitted with retros by People's Defense, decelerate, and be unpacked. One day for the Comprise to build the transit ring that would bring the geodesic's velocity to relative zero, leaving it at rest in Mars orbit. It wouldn't take much of a mistake for them to miss the ring entirely, crashing the project and all its people right into the side of the planet.

“They were as helpless as a vat of kitten embryos,” Constance said. “I can't imagine why they trusted you. I certainly wouldn't have.”

“The Comprise is not human.” Wyeth's mirrored visor turned toward her. “They don't carry personal grudges.”

Constance looked away, toward the dwindling coldpack assembly, then turned back and with sudden heat said, “I'm
glad
we're parting ways at Mars!” She bent over to grab the foot rings, then pulled herself hand over hand toward the airlock. Freeboy followed.

When she was gone, Wyeth said softly, “I'm going to miss that woman.”

The next day, when Rebel reached the village she found it deserted. Spiders had shrouded the huts in white. A woven wall, ripped from its frame, floated in a silent curl at the center of the court. “Hello?” she called.

No sound but the buzzing of flies.

All the huts were vacant, their contents largely undistrubed. A brush frozen in a bowl of hardened ink floated by Fu-ya's door. Trailed by her two samurai, Rebel looked down all the twisty paths that had been marked out from the village to private plantations, clearings, and the like. They went a distance down the red rag trail, and then the blue, but found nothing but more empty huts.

Rebel took a long, shuddering breath. She felt her fear prowling through the orchid depths, silent and shadowy. “Treece, what happened here?”

The second samurai offered Treece a bit of, blood-stained cloth that the flies had drawn him to. Treece brushed it aside, examined a fractured wetwafer. “Press gang,” he said. “Very slick, whoever they were. Took out the guard, surrounded the village, didn't miss anyone. Put a compulsion on them and took them all away.”

“Away?” Rebel asked. “Where away? Why?”

Treece bent the wetwafer back and forth in his blunt fingers. At last he shrugged. “Well. Let's go tell the boss.”

“I don't like it,” Wyeth said. “Look, none of us likes it, but it's the only logical way to proceed.” Dice clicked and rattled obsessively in his hand. He threw them down, scooped them up. “We don't know for sure that it's Wismon. Let's not kid ourselves—I haven't had any news from the tanks in two days. Only Wismon could've found and silenced my spies.”

They stood in the empty lobby of the sheraton. Wyeth had dismissed all his samurai and darkened the room so he could think. The only light came from the orchids outside. “What are you arguing with yourself about?” Rebel asked in exasperation.

“Strategy.” Wyeth rolled the dice again. “I can't go up against Wismon in my warrior persona. He'd be able to predict my every move. The only way I can take him by surprise is to go mystic. Right?” He waited, and none of his other voice's spoke up. “Good. At least we're agreed about that.” He rolled the dice again.