Vacuum Flowers (34 page)

“Integrity?” Bors said, baffled.

Wyeth moved behind Rebel, put a hand on her shoulder. “It's an old bit of wetsurgical slang. Integrity is that quality which protects identity. A persona with absolute integrity cannot be destroyed; it heals itself. There was a recurrent rumor that it had been discovered out in the Oort, but nobody took it seriously. By all we know, it should be a myth, an ideal, as impossible to achieve as perpetual motion. But it appears that Rebel has absolute integrity, or close to it. She woke from coldpacking with her own persona dominant in a mind that was loaded with another's memories.” He spoke to the girlchild. “But she's not for sale, under any terms. So you can just—”

“Shut up, Wyeth.” Rebel smiled at the shock on his face, lifted his hand from her shoulder and kissed the knuckles. “Honest, gang, you don't know what's going on here,” she said gently. To the child, “My wizard-mother sent me into the System to sell just that commodity. To you, presumably, since nobody else has what she wants. Now Elizabeth Charm Mudlark is a genius, that goes without saying, but she's been lucky as well. You're not going to buy integrity from anybody else. She fell into it by accident, saw that she had something special to sell, and so she grew me and sent me here to sell it. She's a dyed-in-the-wool treehanger, and something of a patriot, so you can probably guess what she wants.”

Bors touched a finger to a patch of skin by one eye in a deliberate gesture that put Rebel in mind of someone flicking a switch, and then of the machines she'd seen hidden deep within his flesh. When the girlchild had asked to enter, he'd said to her, “Why should I trust you?” and the child had replied, “You shouldn't. A man with a major implosive device wired to his cortex needn't trust anyone.”

Smiling kindly, Bors lowered his hand. A simple warning.

“We will pay her price,” the child said.

“No, it's not that easy now. I can see that this thing is even more valuable than she thought. If I hadn't been sidetracked when I arrived, one of your agents could have bought it cheap. But now that I have some glimmering of its worth to you, you'll have to do better.”

“Your wizard-mother wants what any comet worlder would want: to travel to the stars.” The child turned slightly, and a blur of air curved through the room. For an instant a small machine was visible hovering over a countertop, as apositional and indeterminate as a hummingbird. Ten outsized wafers materialized on the counter, and then (Nee-C slashing her knife through its wake) it was gone.

“These are the plans for the transit ring. The theoretical base, the engineering specifications, detailed structure for the backup industries, and selected supervisory wetware. It is wealth beyond even human greed. There's a revolution in physics there, to begin with, and technology that will transform human space. You can use it to tap the energy of the sun in a small way, and with this energy, you can build roads through the System, nets of transit rings linking every settled Kluster and moon, bringing them only hours apart. Injected into human space, this knowledge means an economic boom such as your race has never seen. Whoever is sitting atop that boom will be richer than any human has ever been.” The child smiled slightly disdainfully. “This is what you asked for. Isn't it enough?”

Elizabeth's instructions leaped up within Rebel, hot and compulsive, urging her to accept, but she swallowed them down. “No. Not half enough.”

“What more do you want?”

“I want everything I can get! I want you to give everybody in this room everything they ask for, however large or unreasonable.” She was shaking and her throat was dry. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke. “I want you to give us so much that it'd be impossible for us to turn you down.”

“It may turn out to be less than you think,” the girlchild said. “Very well. Nee-C, we'll start with you. What do you want?”

“Me?” She straightened with startlement, eyes widening slightly, lips parting, blade hand falling. Then she leaned back against the door, and her face tightened craftily. “Money. Enough of it so I can get any damned thing I want on my own, without having to get specific with you.”

“It's already there. The four of you and your absentee wizard can incorporate around the patents in these chips and control more wealth than you can imagine. Bors?”

“My life is dedicated to the welfare of my nation,” Bors said carefully. “I wish only its glory.”

“That too is within your grasp. We are not uninformed of the internal politics of Amalthea, nor of the ambitions that fuel its aggression against us. Yours is a small nation and a poor one, and what stature it has in human space is derived from the secret war you wage upon us. We also know that while on Deimos you met with the Stavka's theoreticians and that among your provisional agreements was one covering the contingency of our transit ring ever coming widely available. The People could use a moon of sufficient size to act as counterweight to the sun's torque, in order to slow the wobble of Mars' spin axis. The added insolation this would result in could cut fifty years off their latest Three-Hundred-Year Plan. The agreements were only tentative, not legally binding. But a ring large enough to accelerate a dyson world across interstellar space could also move Amalthea from Jovian orbit. They offered you ten percent ownership of the completed and terraformed Mars, and you believe that you could get fifteen.”

“You oversimplify enormously. The agreement also commits Amalthea's citizenry to heroic amounts of manual labor. Your technology wouldn't free us of this obligation.”

“Politics is the art of the possible,” the child said. “And it is possible that your government would not thank you for turning down a fifth-ownership of the transit package. Think on that. Who's next?”

“You know what I want,” Wyeth said. “Are you offering to commit mass suicide? That's an offer I just might take you up on.”

“Wyeth, you want guaranteed safety for the human race. There is no such thing. We cannot guarantee it for ourself, much less for you. However, we want you to consider how difficult it is to exterminate the human race even now. Consider also how strengthened it would be by the new physics and the new technologies. Consider that branches of your race will be leaving in their dyson worlds soon, scattering through the universe. In a century comet worlds will orbit all the neighboring stars. In a hundred thousand years, there will be trees floating in the center of the galaxy. Even if we wished—and why should we?—we could not track them all down and destroy them. Surely some would survive. We put it to you: Are you not best off taking our offer?”

“Well, I …”

“Last of all, Rebel, we come to you. Rebel, you want a pair of ruby slippers.”

“What?”

“You want to go home.” The girl leaned her head to one side in a kind of half shrug. “That is beyond us. But if you accept this knowledge, you will have the wealth to do whatever you have the strength to choose to do. If you want to go back to Tirnannog, you can. Nobody will be able to stop you.”

They were all silent.

“Come, come,” Earth chided. “We've agreed to give you anything you can name. Surely you can name one thing we haven't already offered you?”

“Matthew Arnold!” Bors cried suddenly. In a hoarse voice he said, “I want the complete
Dover Beach
—I want every poem that Arnold ever wrote. I want Proust and Apollinaire and Tagore. I want Garcia Lorca and Kobo Abe and the first three acts of Shakespeare's
Hamlet
. I want every work of literature that was lost when you swallowed up Earth. Indexed!”

“That will take several hours to produce. Much of its exists only in memory now. But it will be done. We will have the cases ready for examination by the time you reach the Courts of the Moon.” The girlchild turned and walked away. Behind her, the pile of wafers disappeared.

There was motion under the rings. Transit craft were arriving and being towed to the side to make room for more. The paintlines on the tarmac lit up. Commerce was beginning afresh. Business was returning to normal.

“Well,” Bors said. “Let's get back to the rings. The sooner we reach the moon, the sooner we're done with it all.”

Nee-C laughed and spun her knife in the air.

On the long walk to the rings, it occurred to Rebel that there was one person in the room who, silent and ignored, had not been asked what she wanted. Eucrasia. She was dead of course, her persona destroyed and beyond any possible resurrection. But her memories remained, and it shouldn't be much of a trick to determine what she would have asked for. Rebel thought she was beginning to know Eucrasia well enough to guess.

Eucrasia had never wanted money, really, nor power. Her desires had been negative, mostly—an end to the petty fears and guilts that had silted up and choked her pleasure in life. She'd wanted to be someone who liked herself, capable of a little fun now and then, even a touch of adventure, without being overwhelmed by dreads and doubts. All of which she had achieved on her own.

For it was not Rebel alone who had plunged that knife of water through the programmer in that instant of diamond light when Eucrasia's memories had welcomed her in with an almost sexual intensity of desire, a bright peaking burst of joy that could only be love. Two minds had moved that hand.

But Rebel remembered working in the chop shop back of Cerebrum City in Geesinkfor, how she'd warmed to the task. The thrill that had filled her when she opened up a mind. The sense of fitness, the comforting relief of working with the emotive circuits, balancing logics against consequences. If anything remained of Eucrasia, it was the love of her craft. She'd want to continue at it if she could. This was not a gift that Earth could give her. But Rebel thought that she might. As a kind of an offering to the dead.

She was not really a bad sort, after all, was Eucrasia.

“Hey! Wake up in there!” Wyeth clapped hands lightly before her face, and she blinked, startled. Looking about, she saw that she and Wyeth had lagged behind the others. Then she saw the quiet unhappy doubt behind Wyeth's clowning expression and said, “You're pretty glum.”

“Well.” He shook his head, laughed unhappily. “I've got this little paranoid fantasy. Maybe you'd like to hear it? I think that maybe Earth doesn't need your wettechnics after all. Could be, it was just playing a little game with us. Maybe what it was buying was not so much your integrity as a plausible story to feed the human race. A way of buying a quiet entry into human space. I mean, the story is plausible enough.”

“Then why did you go along with the trade?”

“Because I believed the story of why the Comprise retreated back to the surface of the Earth. And it seemed to me that if Earth wanted to work on the problem of integrity and had the clues it has—traces of shyapple juice, bits of information comet worlders dropped in front of its agents, and so on—it could solve the problem. Knowing that a solution existed, how long would it take the Comprise to find it? A year? A century? Can you imagine a thousand years going by without Earth solving the problem? I can't.

“So we were trading something that Earth doesn't actually need for something that humanity needs desperately. The transit ring. Earth is right. There's no way we can guarantee our own survival until the human race can get out of the neighborhood.”

“Oh. So that's it.”

“Why? What did you think it was?”

“I thought maybe you were just pretending to go along with the offer, and then when we got cislunar you were going to try to convince me to go underground with you.”

Wyeth shook his head admiringly. “Sunshine, you're even more devious than I am!”

They had come to the transit rings. There was a luxury transport ready to go, its hull a gleaming white enamel. Robots directed the workers and trade diplomats away from the ship, and they climbed the stairs. It was a large device, plush where the hospitality shed had been spare, and they had it all to themselves.

In just a few hours they would be standing in the Courts of the Moon, where high justice was acted out under the watchful eyes of custodians wetwired to perfect honesty and hardwired to thermonuclear devices. There Earth would produce its stacks of chips to be examined and Rebel would have a clear recording made of her persona. And there the exchange would be made.

“Ms. Mudlark!” a robot called after her.

She turned on the steps.

“You forgot something.” It stepped daintily forward, then knelt, proffering her old cloak. Tattered and worn, with the silver seashell pin on one lapel. Rebel accepted it, uncomprehending. Bors had also left his cloak behind, and it hadn't been returned to him. Then she was struck by sudden memory, and frantically searched through lint-lined pockets until she came up with the worn, greasy wafer she'd made in Geesinkfor, the recording of her persona.

“Let's get a move on!” shouted Nee-C. “We gotta go get rich!”

“I'm ready,” she said in a strained little voice.

They broke through the sky.

15

TIRNANNOG

Two years later, Rebel said, “Well?”

They were strolling through the most opulent legal services park in Pallas Kluster, a place that was half illusion and conjuring trick, laced through with holographic fantasy. A false surf thundered to one side, a perfectly constructed jungle hid law boutiques to the other. Seven voluptuous moons floated in a velvet sky. It was what Rebel imagined an opium dream would be like: brightly detailed yet somehow vague, not quite convincing, and ultimately banal. She wondered if this were what the People thought they were building on Mars. If so, they were in for a disappointment.

“We're going to lose it all,” Wyeth said. “That's the best judgment of our lawyers.” They followed a lazy brick path into the jungle, where orchids glowed gently in dusky foliage. “Hell, we should've known that from the beginning, I mean, having Bors in the corporation … it was inevitable that the Republique Provisionnelle would squeeze us out.”