Michael Swanwick - Vacumn Flowers

Rebel sleepwalked through the next day, performing her chores mechanically. She reported to work, interviewed her first client, and chopped him to order. None of it felt real. She didn’t know what to do next. If Wyeth hadn’t gone down the drop tube, that meant he must be somewhere in the sprawl of cislunar states. Trouble was, there were hundreds of them, in all sizes and degrees of disorder, and their outfloating slums as well. She could spend the rest of her life searching and still not find him.

Well, she thought, maybe she wouldn’t find him. Maybe Wyeth was lost to her forever. Happens to people all the time.

She was finishing up a client when she finally admitted this to herself. A jackboot had come in to be chopped wolverine, and lay on the gurney wired up and opened out, still in her police skintights.

Rebel thought it through with dry, obsessive logic, while her hands did the work. How long could she go on searching like this? A year? Five? Twenty? What kind of a person would she be at the end of that time? It wasn’t a pretty thought.

“Can you imagine a unicorn?”

“Yes.”

If this was going to be a long search, if it was going to take her years, she’d have to change the pace. She needed to build some kind of decent life for herself in the meantime. (But she didn’t want a decent life without Wyeth!) She needed a cleaner job than this one, to begin with. Friends. Interests. Lovers, even. She’d have to plan this whole thing out carefully.

“How many fingers?”

“Four.”

“Green or blue?”

“Blue.”

“Ever seen this man before?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Rebel smiled. Very slowly, she leaned back against the wall. Carefully she began marshaling her thoughts. She was in no particular hurry now. Perhaps she should go out front and borrow a chair. Impulsively, she reached down to run a fond hand through the jackboot’s hair, and the woman grinned idiotically up at her. Where to begin?

She had a lot of questions to ask.

THE BURREN

There were vacuum flowers on the outside of the Pequod, only a few, sprouting from the jointed strutwork of the gables, but enough to tell from the shape of the petals that these were a variant strain, already indigenous to cislunar orbit. Rebel noted them on the way in, mildly wondering why Bors had put off his basic maintenance for so long.

The ship recognized her, and the lock opened to her touch.

A few hours later Bors returned, just as Rebel had finished brewing tea. The pot floated in the center of the parlor. “Well!” Bors said in a pleased tone. He doffed his suit, donned his cloak, and pulled up a pair of leg rings.

“How very pleasant of you to drop by to see me off.”

“How very pleasant of you to say so.” She drew off a syringe of tea and gently floated it to him. “I’ve prepared a snack.” She opened a tray of scalloped cakelets that were shaped rather like her silver brooch, and he unclipped two. Rebel smiled, sipped her tea, waited.

After a polite pause, Bors said, “So. How goes the search for your friend, Wyeth?”

“Ah! Now that’s a very interesting question.” Rebel leaned forward in her chair. “I was questioning a jackboot earlier today—I had her lashed down and opened up, you understand, so there was no question of her lying—and she gave me a valuable lead.”

“Indeed,” Bors said. “A jackboot, you say?” He took another bite of his pastry. “That’s, ah, a somewhat dangerous proposition, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. She had this really baroque plot-and-counterplot kind of story about dropping down surfaceward as an observer to… well, no reason to bore you with it. She said she’d seen Wyeth.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. She told me she’d seen him with you.”

After a very long silence, during which neither looked away from the other, Bors took a squirt of tea and said,

“She was mistaken, of course.”

“Of course.” Rebel stood. Her natural impulse was to seize the man and try to strangle the truth out of him. But she smiled instead. Eucrasia would never have done anything so bold, and in a situation like this, Eucrasia’s approach had its points. Her chances of overpowering Bors on his home turf were slight. He was, however polished, a professional ruffian. “I’ll just get my suit and leave, then. Sorry to have caused you the trouble. Bon voyage, eh, sport?” She floated to the lock, Bors watching her warily. “Oh. You could do me one little favor?” Bors raised his eyebrows. “Just say for me, ‘Please open the collecting drawers.’ ”

“Please open the collecting drawers?” Bors repeated puzzledly.

Throughout the room, cabinets opened smoothly. One by one the drawers slid out. They were all empty. “Good lord,” Bors gasped. “What have you done with all my watercolors? My prints?”

“I burned them.”

Bors was out of his seat, running furious hands through the empty drawers and slamming them shut, in search of an overlooked drawing, a crumpled print stuck in a corner, anything. “You didn’t!” he wailed in despair.

“Well, no,” Rebel said calmly. “Actually, I didn’t.”

He looked at her.

“You remember the two crates I had? I emptied them out and filled one with your watercolors and the other with your prints. I had to pith your ship’s security system before it would let me at them, but it’s surprising the tools you can buy when you have the right connections—andyour little jackboot had good connections, I can assure you.” She was talking too fast, too angrily. She wanted so badly to hurt Bors that his pain only increased that hunger. Eucrasia would have said that she was cycling out of control. Taking a deep breath, she floated back to her chair and sat. Then, more calmly, “The crates are both safe, and you’ll never find them unless I tell you where.

You can have one back right now, no strings attached. The other will cost you.”

Slowly, Bors took his own chair. “I won’t betray my nation,” he said flatly. “Not if you piled up every work of art in the System and held a flame to the heap.”

“Well, bully for you mate! But I’m not asking for any such thing. Just give me Wyeth. I’ll give you your choice of crates now, and tell you where the other is as soon as I’ve had the chance to talk with Wyeth face to face. What do you say?”

“The watercolors,” Bors said bleakly. “Where are they?”

The city had no name that anybody remembered. It had been cracked and abandoned over a century before, and its exterior was overgrown with flowers. Now a small hopper flew through the gap where an axial window had been and into the airless interior. Black buildings reached up to grab at them as they floated down. It was a tricky bit of navigation because the city was still rotating, and the ravaged buildings shifted as they approached. “There,”

Bors said. At street level, yellow light shone from a lone pressurized window. With a swooping twist that folded Rebel’s stomach over on itself, Bors matched velocities with the street and brought the hopper down.

The old woman who cycled them through the lock looked displeased to see Rebel. “This one’s no jackboot,” she grumbled. It was the drop artist Rebel had seen with Bors in Geesinkfor. The room was crammed with vintage technology—robot probes, shoulderjets, fist-sized assassinsatellites.

“There’s been a slight change of plans.”

“Heh.” She leered over a protruding knob of a chin.

“Changes will run you extra. There’s a good borealis brewing up now, and I can’t say when the next one’s due.

Don’t like to drop people without some electromagnetic confusion in the atmosphere. Helps to hide them from the Comprise.”