Michael Swanwick - Vacumn Flowers

“Ah.” She washed a little lower, a bit more lingeringly.

“Just how dangerous do you think this raid will be?”

“I honestly don’t know. Anything can happen. But listen, I’m sure I can get Bors to smuggle you into a down station—security is nil from this end. You could be cislunar before the…” He stopped. “I’m not going to talk you into it, am I? I know that look.”

“Hey. It’s just you and me, gang. Right?” Rebel took his hand, squeezed it tight. “You think you’re going to pry me away from you now, you’re very badly mistaken.” She bent down to kiss him, Wyeth drew in his breath, and she smiled. “Should I stop?”

“No, no, that’s nice,” he said quickly. Then, “Well, maybe you should. I mean, I’d really love to, but I just don’t think I have the energy.”

Rebel put the cloth down. “You lie there, and I’ll do all the work.” She shucked boots and trousers, then knelt over his body, careful not to touch his injured leg. Withone hand, she inserted him inside her.

“Ah,” Wyeth said. “I’ve missed that.”

“Me too.”

Some time later, Rebel lay snuggled into Wyeth’s side.

Her blouse was bunched up under her arms, but she put off tugging it down. The pinhole lights were off, and she lay in the grey air, feeling Wyeth’s silent tension. A similar tension was growing within her and silently heterodyning to his, until finally she had to speak. “Wyeth?”

“Mmm?”

“Don’t do it.”

He said nothing.

“They don’t need you. They’ve got your shyapple juice, they’ve got your plans, you can tell them whatever it is you’ve spied out. They don’t need you. The two of us could slip into a down station, go up the tube, and be orbital by morning. We could be up and gone before the raid begins.”

In the gloom, the hut seemed to close about them, like a stone womb contracting. Wyeth cleared his throat, a slow protracted noise that was almost a groan, and said,

“Sunshine, I couldn’t do that. I gave my word.”

“Fuck your word.”

“Yes, but it’s my duty to—”

“Fuck your duty.”

Wyeth laughed easily. “I can’t argue if you’re going to do that to everything I say.”

“Who wants to argue?” She struggled out of his grasp and sat up. “I don’t want to argue—I just want you to do this my way. I went through a lot to get you back, and I don’t want to see you run off and get yourself absorbed into the Comprise.”

“Well, neither do I, Rebel. But you have to understand, this is the fight that I created myself for. This is not just myduty, it’s my cause. It’s my purpose. And if I’m not true to it, then what will I be true to?”

“Next you’ll be singing patriotic songs!” She looked down on that smug, confident face and wanted to hit him.

“God, but you’re exasperating. Sometimes I think Eucrasia was right. She should have unwritten you entirely and started all over again from the ground up. Then—” She stopped and eyed Wyeth with sudden speculation. She held up both hands before her face, thumbs tucked in.

“Count four,” she said.

“What?”

“Open the door.” She swung both hands open, so that she peered between them, and said, “You’re in a room without any floor.”

Wyeth’s face relaxed. His eyes were alert and calm and unblinking. “Well?” Rebel asked. Then, when he didn’t respond, “You were lying when you said you’d found Eucrasia’s kink and debugged it, weren’t you?”

Wyeth nodded. “Yes.”

“You know something? I wondered how you’d picked up the programming skills to outfox Eucrasia. I should’ve known you were bluffing. Hell with it. Metaprogrammer open? Construction catalog in access? Major branch linkages free and unimpaired?”

“Yes,” Wyeth said. Then, “Yes,” and “Yes.” He lay before her, naked, and it was impossible for any man to be more at her power than he was now. She could do anything she wanted to him, from giving him a craving for chocolate to entirely rewriting his personas. She could tell him to abandon Bors’ raid and take her up the nearest drop tube, and he would do so without hesitation. If she wanted, he didn’t even need know it hadn’t been his own idea. She had the skills.

But Wyeth stared up at her so trustingly that she couldn’t begin. “Close your eyes,” she ordered, and heobeyed. It didn’t help. She reached down to brush a wayward strand of hair out of his face, and then blurted out the one question she dared not ask. Knowing that he couldn’t lie in this state. “Do you really love me?”

“Yes.”

“You son of a bitch,” Rebel said. “Go to sleep.”

And closed him up, unchanged.

The next morning was foggy, which Bors welcomed as a good omen, but made the run across the Burren a nightmare. Two of the wolverines carried Wyeth in a sling between them, and it was not long before they came to the stretch of coast where he had sunk his skimmer. He called across the ocean, and it rose up, water pouring from the ballast tanks. While Rebel programmed a pilot and navigator, the others readied the craft. Within the half hour they were set. Octants of tinted canopy closed over the deck, and the skimmer stood on a single long leg and sped forward, above the water.

They were passing a wide river mouth, not long after, when the fog parted momentarily. Under the cliffs, serpentine necks rose grey and mysterious from the water. They must have been thirty or forty feet long, topped by tiny flat heads. The creatures glided inland, as Rebel frantically searched the library’s natural history section to discover what they were. Plesiosaurs. Probably elasmosauri, to judge by their size. But according to the library, they had been extinct for millions of years, creatures that had lived and died in Mesozoic seas. “I don’t believe it,” Rebel breathed.

Bors was standing nearby. “You know what I find most remarkable about them?” he asked.

“What?”

“No windows.”

Rebel stared at him, then back at the plesiosaurs,baffled for the moment it took to realize what he was talking about. What she had taken to be natural rock cliffs were actually enormous buildings, tall and featureless, edging the water like clustered masses of quartz crystals.

They had a pale, diffractive quality to them, their flat surfaces shimmering with faint pinks and blues, a suggestion of prismatic green, colors that intensified the longer she stared at them. Then the fog closed in and wiped them away. “Are they all like this?” she asked. “The Comprise cities, I mean.”

“No, I think they’re all very different from one another, don’t you? Kurt! Come over here and get your rock-running program scrubbed out.”

By the time the fog had lifted, they were on the open sea, nothing but water to be seen. Notched away in Eucrasia’s store of memories were any number of rhapsodies on the beauty and lure of oceans, the romance of wooden ships, the glamor of the sea-rover. But Rebel could understand why People’s Mars wasn’t building any of their own. The ocean was choppy and featureless, offering the eye neither rest nor variety, with all the monotony of flatness but none of the stark beauty. It was ugly, and wasteful as well—all that water! Rebel was sick of it already.

Hour after hour, the skimmer sliced through the waves.

Sometimes Rebel sat quietly talking with Wyeth. Often, though, he had to go belowdecks to confer with Bors, and she was not welcome to overhear. Then she simply sat, watching clouds roll overhead and the ocean shift from green to grey and back as the light changed. Once they made a wide detour to avoid an undersea enclave of Comprise, but in all their time asea they never saw another ship or flying machine. Rebel remarked on this when Nee-C wandered by from a knife game she’d been playing—and losing, to judge by the network of fine slashes on the backs of her hands—with the other wolverines.