Michael Swanwick - Vacumn Flowers

Bors leaned forward confidentially and said, “It sucks.

But there’s still a small market for it as a historical curiosity, so it’s not a total loss for me.”

“I slept with a bors once,” Khadijah said.

“Really?” Bors said in a pleased voice.

The room suddenly warped so that everything in it got very small, except for Rebel herself. She was enormous, and her head bobbled like a balloon. She could have crushed the lot with her thumb. “I wouldn’t have thought he was your type,” she said.

“Wasn’t.” Khadijah was silent for a moment. “What the hell—look at him, you have to admit he’s charming. He was okay. Haven’t you ever slept with someone who wasn’t your type?”

“Oh yeah.” She thought of Wyeth—tall, lanky, pale. And serious, mostly. Not her type at all. She would never have chosen him for a sex partner if she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She took a deep breath, and without warning she deflated, whooshing down so that the rest of the room was normal-sized, or near so.

Khadijah eyed Bors. “Based on some kind of spy, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” Bors’ eyes twinkled.

“Sure you are. One of those little Outer System moons, some kind of comic-opera republic, all their agents used to be programmed bors. Then somebody pirated a copy for one of the big wetware concerns.”

“What happened then?” Rebel asked.

“Nothing happened then. But you can bet somebody made a bundle off that deal. That’s still a popular persona, bors is, in this part of the System. I saw one the other day.”

“I think that was me,” Bors said mildly.

For an instant Khadijah stared at him blankly. Then she started to laugh, beginning with what sounded like slowhiccups and building in long, noisy wheezes. She gasped and pounded the table.

“Listen,” Bors said. “I was going to come by tomorrow.

My work is done here, and I’ve got to see a few more of the cislunar states before I take the drop tube down to Earth.

But I didn’t want to run off without saying goodbye and wishing you luck.”

“More wine.” Khadijah rapped the table.

Somehow Rebel and Khadijah were reeling down an empty street, holding each other up. They must’ve passed some threshold point because Rebel had completely lost track of the last however-long-it-was. “A wizard’s daughter” she explained. “Well, first of all, you know what a wizard is, right?”

“No,” Khadijah said. There were dried tear tracks on her face. “Hell, I knew he was never going to stay.”

“A wizard is like a real crackerjack bioengineer. I mean, these guys are as rare as let’s say Rembrandt. They’re the ones with the creative juice to make the biological arts sit up and beg. Out in the comets they have a lot of status. But they tend to be jealous about their skills. Talented, but suspicious.”

“Never trust a man whose fingers are longer than his cock.”

“So when they need a messenger they can trust, they’ll decant a cloned self and program her up into their own persona. Now, ordinarily identity… drifts, you know? So a wizard’s daughter persona isn’t a straight copy; it’s altered so that she’ll retain identity with the wizard practically forever. They call that integrity. I don’t know how it’s done—only my mother self knows that. But anyway, I’m a wizard’s daughter. Her message is safe with me.”

“So what’s the message?” Khadijah asked.

“I don’t remember.”

They looked at each other. Then they both bent over laughing, grabbing at each other’s shoulders and forearms to keep from falling, leaning forward until their foreheads touched.

They had just pulled themselves together when a line of Comprise, no more than twenty units long, walked by in locked step, headed for the waterfront. They wore identical grey coveralls with that same familiar pigtail bobbing from each head. A dozen spheres of ball lightning floated about them. The balls hissed and crackled, and filled the street with shifting blue light. The hair on the back of Rebel’s neck rose up.

“Hey, Earth!” Rebel shouted. The creature second in line turned its head sharply. Blank, alert eyes looked at her.

Rebel turned, bent over, flipped up her cloak, and made loud farting noises with her mouth. The Comprise did not react. They continued calmly onward.

Khadijah was laughing so hard she was having trouble standing. “Oh, God, Sunshine! You’re impossible, you know that?”

The Comprise stepped onto the boardwalk and strode straight for the water’s edge. A length of railing was missing there, and the first stepped off, onto the water.

The glowing spheres of ball lightning dipped suddenly, almost to the sea’s surface, and the water sang. It rose in a bow to the Comprise’s foot, quivering like the vastly slowed vibration of a violin string.

Moving with processional dignity, the Comprise passed over the sea, the water rippling with tension under their feet. On the far side, they continued up a dark street, dwindling, growing dimmer, and finally gone to dusk.

The next day, Rebel woke up with a killer hangover.

“Ohhhh, shit.” She sat up on the edge of her cot and then bent over to clutch her head in her hands. Herstomach felt uneasy and her bowels were loose. Then she remembered farting at the Comprise, and she felt even worse.

As soon as she could, she went out to buy a liter of water.

Then she stopped at a rootworker’s shop to buy a bracelet leech, and snapped it on her upper arm. A trickle of blood began flowing through the charcoal scrubbers, to be returned to her body cleansed of fatigue poisons. By the time she got to work, she’d drunk down the water and felt almost normal.

Fortunately, things were slow at Cerebrum City.

Khadijah was already closeted with a complicated stress tune-up, and nobody else came by for the first few hours.

Rebel was grateful for that, but even when the bracelet turned blue and dropped from her arm, she felt dull and listless. It was a classic emotional hangover, the residue of having acted the fool.

Well, there was an easy solution for that.

Feeling the thrill of doing something both nasty and forbidden for the first time, Rebel broke out the programmer and ran a cleaning pad over the adhesion disks. They attached to her skin behind each ear and on her brow, like small mouths. She slapped on the reader-analyzer and riffled through the minor function wafers in the wall of boilerplate.

A clean sense of elation filled her. This was fun. She now understood that her earlier prejudice against wetprogramming had been the wizard’s daughter functions acting to protect her integrity. But this was different. So long as she didn’t try anything major, what could be the harm of it?

It would be best to be careful, though. Eucrasia had overdone it her first time—most persona bums did—and let the euphoria of success lead her into adding one alteration on top of another, building them into a nonsensical architecture of traits, until the entirestructure had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and she had needed six hours wetsurgical reconstruction to bring her back to herself.

Still, the psychosomatic functions were simple enough.

Any idiot could make the brain readjust the glandular and hormonal balances of the endocrinal system and, orchestrated correctly, it would give her a terrific body high. Humming slightly to herself, she glanced up at the floating tumbleweed diagram and gave it a spin.

And stopped. Hell, that was interesting. She rotated the sphere again, more slowly this time. Yes. There was a circular structure running through the entire persona in a kind of psychic mobius strip, touching all the branches, but dependent on none. How did a chimera like that come into existence? It was obviously artificial, and yet no wetware techniques she’d ever heard of (and Eucrasia had been up on what was happening in the field) could create something like that.