Vacuum Flowers (5 page)

Now and then light spilled from a doorway, or a string of lanterns lined a cluster of informal shops and bars, places where people offered alcohol or other goods from their own homes. Everywhere the vines were thick and lush, with frequent bio-fluorescent blooms. There were sections where the flowers provided the only illumination. “This is awful,” Rebel said.

Wyeth peered about; as if trying to detect what flaw she saw in his world. “How so?”

“It's like a parody of my home. I mean, if you know the biological arts, there's no excuse for this kind of squalor. Back home, the cities are …”

“Are what?” Wyeth asked.

But the hard, undeniable truth was that she could not remember. Not a thing. She tried to recall the name of her city, the faces of her friends, her childhood, the kind of life she'd led, and none of it would come. Her past was an impressionistic blur, all bright colors and emotions, with no fine detail. “I don't know,” she admitted.

“Sunshine, your answers are about as revealing as your silence.” Wyeth touched her arm. “Here we are!” He grabbed the rope to stop himself, flipped over, and kicked through an opening between hutches. Rebel followed.

A skeletally thin old man leaned out of a shanty window into the entraceway. “Hallo, Jonamon. How's the kidneys?” Wyeth said. He was wearing his laughing face. “Got a new tenant for you.”

“Hallo yourself.” The old man's skin was fishbelly white, and red blotches ran over his bald pate. “Rent's due tomorrow.” Then he noticed Rebel, and pursed his lips suspiciously. “You the religious type, girlie?”

Rebel shook her head.

“Then where's your paint?” He jabbed a bony finger at the abrasion circle behind Rebel's ear, and said to Wyeth, “You put the mark on her! Don't allow none of that shit in my court. I run a clean place here—no drunks, no whores, no burn cases, and no reprogramming. I don't care what kind of excuse you got, God don't like—”

“Hold on, hold on—nobody's reprogramming anybody!” Wyeth said. “What are you ragging on me for? The lady's right here, you can ask her for yourself.”

“Be damned if I won't.” The old man swam out the window, chasing them into the courtyard. Then he grabbed the side of his hutch, muttered, “Damn! Forgot the book,” and darted back through the window.

The courtyard was just a large, open space fronted on by some dozen or so hutches. Three ropes crisscrossed the area, tied to outcroppings of pipe. Here and there people clung to them, chatting or working on private tasks. A young man sat wedged in a doorway, playing guitar.

“I'm sorry about this,” Wyeth said. “Old Jonamon is a terrible snoop, even worse than most landlords. He was a rock prospector seventy years back, one of the last, and he thinks that gives him the right to pester you half to death. If you don't feel like facing him, I think I can put him off for a day or so. That'd give us time to find you a place nearby.”

“Actually,” Rebel had been chewing thoughtfully on a thumbnail; now she spat out what she had gnawed off, “I think I would like to talk about it. All these weird things have been happening to me, and I haven't had the chance to sort them out. And I guess I owe you some kind of explanation too.” She frowned. “Only maybe I'd better not. I mean, there are people out there looking for me. If word got out—”

Wyeth flashed a wide, froggish grin. “There are no secrets in a tank town. But there are no facts either. You tell your story to Jonamon, and in ten minutes the whole court will know it. Inside an hour everyone within five-courts will know—but they'll have it a little wrong. Half the people in the tanks are on the run from something. Your story will melt into theirs, a detail here, a name there, a plot twist from somewhere else. By tomorrow all the tank will know the story, but it will have mutated into something you wouldn't recognize yourself. Nobody's ever going to trace those stories back to you. There are too many of them, and not a one that's worth a damn.”

“Well, I—”

Jonamon swooped into the court, a scrawny old bird in a tattered cloak, pushing a book before him. It was three hands wide and a fist thick, with one red cover and one black. Opening it from the black side, he said, “The Lord Jesus despised reprogramming. ‘And behold the herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea and perished in the waters.' That's from Matthew.”

Wyeth looked like he was having trouble holding his laughter in. “Jonamon, that's the third time this week you've quoted the Gadarene swine at me.”

“Krishna don't love demons neither,” the old man snapped. He flipped the book over, red side up, and thrust it at Rebel. “Swear on the Gita you ain't been reprogrammed. That'll be good enough for me.”

“Maybe I'd better tell my story first,” Rebel said. “Then I'll swear it's true afterward. That way you'll know what I'm swearing to.” She shifted to a more central spot, sitting cross-legged in the air, the rope gripped in one foot. Then she wrapped her cloak in storytelling folds (inwardly marveling at her own dexterity) so that one arm and breast were covered and the other arm and breast free. Seeing her thus, people came out from their shanties or shifted places on the ropes so they could hear.

She began:

“I was dead—but they wouldn't tell me that. I was lying in a hospital bed, paralyzed; unable to remember a thing. And they wouldn't tell me why. All I knew was that something was wrong, and nobody would answer any of my questions.…”

When she was done, Jonamon took her oath on his book and shook his head. “Well, I'll be fucked if that don't beat anything
I
ever heard.”

“Mmmm.” Wyeth's face was grim and stony, lost in thought. It had a humorless, almost brutal set to it. He looked up suddenly and glared around at the listeners. “What are you staring at? Show's over. Go away!” They scattered.

Rebel shivered. He looked an entirely different man now—a thug, all suspicion and potential violence.

Jonamon laid a hand on her knee and said, “You watch yourself, young lady. Deutsche Nakasone is a nasty bunch, they'll do what they want with you. They just don't give a fuck.” She drew away from him.

“That's every gesellschaft, old man,” Wyeth said. “That's inherent in the corporate structure.”

“You think so, eh? Let me show you something.” Jonamon huried off to his shack and returned with a cloth-wrapped package. “Maybe I'm just another old man with calcium depletion now.” He began slowly unfolding the cloth. “I'm stuck here nowadays, my bones would snap like breaksticks if I set foot in full gravity anymore. But I wasn't always like this. I used to own my own corporation. Hell, I used to
be
my own corporation.”

The ropehangers had come edging back to listen. One of them, a lean young man with rude boy paint, caught Rebel's eye and flashed a smile. Cute little thing. He laughed, and Jonamon glared at him. “Laugh if you want. Individuals could incorporate back then. You can't imagine how it felt, having all the legal protection of a corporation to yourself. It was like being a little tin god.” He sighed. “I was one of the last, wiped out by the Corporate Reform Act. I was a rock miner, maybe Wyeth here mentioned that to you. A prospector. When the Act came along, I had claims on a few hundred rocks, a real valuable inventory, worth a fortune back then, and even more now. But with the reforms, I had to liquidate. I entered into negotiations with a number of concerns, finally signed a preliminary letter of intent with Deutsche Nakasone. Look.” He held up the unwrapped package. It was a formal holographic portrait of a line of corporate functionaries looking serious for the camera. The young Jonamon stood in the center, a sharp-chinned man with an avaricious cast to his face.

“This was taken the day before the Act went into effect. Right after this, the president and I retired to a private office to settle the last few details and sign the agreement. You never saw anyone so nice and polite in your life. Did I want a drink? Don't mind if I do. Would I like to screw? Hell, she was kind of cute. Then she asked if I wanted to try out a new program they had. Made it sound real nice. I said sure.

“They was just getting into wetware then. Just recent bought up a batch of patents when Blaupunkt went belly-up. So anyway, the president puts the inductor band around my head and turns the damn thing on. Whoooeee! That was one hell of a ride, I'll tell you. Even today, I blush to think on it. Imagine all the sex and pleasure you can take just slamming into you again and again, so intense you can't hardly take it, and you want it to stop, only … not quite yet. Just a little bit longer before it becomes unbearable. Can you imagine that? Shit, you can't imagine it at all.”

“So what happened?” Rebel asked.

“What happened was somebody turned it off. Wow, did I feel awful! Kind of hungry and achy and thirsty all at once. My head was pounding, and I must've lost half the free water in my body.

“The president had put her clothes back on and left, a long time back. There was a couple of corporate guards giving me the hairy eyeball. ‘What's happening?' I asked them.

“They told me that the Reform Act had just gone into effect, and they didn't need me anymore. Then they gave me the bum's rush, and I was never in
that
office again in my life, let me tell you.

“You see what happened, don't you? They'd kept me programmed up until the Act went through and I didn't legally own my claims anymore. And because I'd signed that letter of intent, they all belonged to Deutsche Nakasone now. They never paid me a damn thing for them either. I went to the lawyers and they said it's all legal. Or rather, to prove it
wasn't
legal, I'd have to be a corporation myself. And I wasn't, anymore.”

After a long silence, he said, “Well, it's all to the best, I imagine. A young man thinks with his gonads. An old man sees things more spiritual. I made my peace with God, and I take my solace from the Bible Gita now.”

Rebel yawned then, and Wyeth said, “I think it's time you turned in.”

He showed her to a vacant hutch. It had room enough for two people to sit and talk, or for one to stretch out and sleep. There was a bit of wire by the doorframe, so she could tie up her helmet, and four looped hammock strings to sleep in. Nothing more.

“Best break out your rebreather,” Wyeth said. She looked at him blankly. “From your helmet. Ventilation's poor in this corner of the court, and your waste gases can build up while you sleep. Keep your mouthpiece in, and you can avoid waking up with a bad headache.”

“Okay,” she said, and he kicked away. There was no window, and hanging her cloak over the doorway filled the hut with darkness. She stuffed her things into her helmet and slipped into the hammock strings. Hanging suspended, she bit down on the rebreather. Her breath sounded loud and slow within her skull.

The outside noises were muffled within the hut, but constant. Music and faraway argument blended into each other. Buried deep within this human beehive, Rebel felt painfully alone and isolated. From somewhere distant she heard a dull
clank-clank, clank-clank
, someone hammering on the pipes to signal a neighbor. She had heard (though she couldn't remember when or where) that the constellations of courts within the tanks had all been put up helter-skelter, pipes mated to existing pipes, forming monkey-bar tangles with no plan or formal structure. Only the lack of gravity kept it all from collapsing. But occasionally the stresses of everyday living—people slamming against their-hutches, kicking off from them, grabbing ropes tied to the frames—would cause whole groupings of court structures to shift. Torque forces would slowly swing the hutches together, crushing entire neighborhoods in a scream of buckling metal. And then the survivors would scavenge the rubble to build back into the space thus opened.

Rebel was so tired she couldn't sleep. Lying afloat in her hut, restless and jumpy, she felt so lonely and awful she wanted to die. She twisted and turned in the hammock strings, but no position seemed comfortable. She was as lost as a child away from home for the first time, cut loose from security and surrounded by hostile forces against which she had no defense.

Finally she could take it no longer. Throwing on her clothes, she darted across the court to Wyeth's hut. He'd talk to her, she was sure. A deft grab on one of the ropes flipped her around and brought her to a dead stop just before his door. It was covered with his cloak. She was about to rattle his wall when she heard his voice within. Was he with someone? A little self-consciously, she floated closer to eavesdrop.

“She's trouble,” Wyeth mumbled. “Deutsche Nakasone wants her bad, and anyone who gets in the way is going to be hurt.… So there's risk! She could be an enormous help to us.… Which ‘she' are you talking about anyway, Eucrasia or Rebel? … Go with the current occupant, that's always the easiest course. Whoever comes out on top … I wouldn't mind getting on top of her.… Oh, get serious! The point is that if we cut a deal with her, we're risking everything we've built so far. It's an all or nothing gamble.” There was a pause, and then Wyeth said, “Risking everything! That's just great. We're risking a half-hour shanty in the slums, some cockeyed plans, and our perfect obscurity. That's it. What's the use of saying we're going up against Earth, if the first good opportunity that comes along, we just sit here on our thumbs? I say either we stand up and be counted, or dissolve the whole thing right now as a bad job. Any argument?”

The voice stopped, and Rebel drew back from the door. He's talking about me, she thought. And he's crazy. Either he's crazy or he's something I don't know about that's probably worse. A word floated up from Eucrasia's past. Tetrad. It was a kind of new mind. But that was all she could remember about it. Her body trembled. She wanted very much to turn around and retreat into her hutch.