Michael Swanwick - Vacumn Flowers

“Done,” he said, and Bors nodded.

The boat slowed to a stop. Rebel was reminded of the geodesic’s orchid here, it was that dark and close. Gretzin and Fu-ya would’ve liked this island. Rebel stared into the shadows, her heart pounding. Any number of Comprise could be crouching an arm’s length distant and never be seen. She looked up. There were yellow shafts of light high above that did not seem to quite reach the water, and tiny patches of blue like faraway windows that winked on and off with the shifting of the trees. Parrots darted between limbs, and something that might have been a monkey swung into the light and was gone. A fearful sense of the insanity of going into that tangled and clotted darkness lanced through Rebel. “Let’s go,” Bors said.

They walked and climbed through the brush. Rebel was in the middle of the patrol, with Bors behind her and wolverines fore and aft. Wyeth led, the head of a predatory virus injecting itself into the island. The floor here was a slick mass of roots, covered in places with rotting vegetation and the occasional puddle of salt water.

The sea slapped against a thousand branches behind them.

Rebel found the going surprisingly easy, even natural, perhaps due to shadow memories of her life in Tirnannog.

She was comfortable here; traveling took up a fraction of her attention. She touched a leaf, and the library whispered larch. This five-pointed one was maple. Over there, that clump was all monkey-puzzle. Branches grew in and out of the trunks, in complete disregard for species, hemlock growing out of oak, and arrowwood into banyan.

This was basic comet-tree bioengineering, primitive but effective, where the functions of plant and environment had been warped one into the other. There were tiny crabs in the tidepools, and sea anemones as well. She brushed her fingers slightly over their life-cycle data, decided not to touch.

“Going gets easier now,” Wyeth said over his shoulder.

The floor rose and became dryer, and the trees opened out. They walked single-file through dark, open spaces, an almost tactile pressure of trees pushing down from above, so high and lush that no light reached them here. The straight boles of the trees were overgrown with phosphorescent fungi, some like stacked white plates and others that were elaborate glowing fantasias. They walked as if through a dark cathedral lit by blue corpselight. The sea behind them had been silenced by deadening masses of plants, to be replaced by slow creaking noises, as of the hulls of wooden ships afloat at anchor. Rebel imagined herself in the hold of an ancient galleon, acolyte to some hidden gnostic ceremony. She stuck a hand in her cloak pocket, and it closed about the wafer she had made in Geesinkfor, the recording of her persona.

They detoured around a pond-sized opening in the floor.

Black salt water bobbed restlessly within it. “This is where they cut the transceivers out of the skulls of their dead,”

Wyeth said. Mulch squished underfoot. “The flesh is thrown into the water. There are meat-eaters down there.”

Bors picked up something—a bone or a tool—from the water’s edge, glanced at it, threw it in. Somewhere nearby a trickle of water fell steadily. “So where’s the Comprise?”

“I don’t know,” Wyeth said tensely. “There’s usually some here.”

Clutching the slick, slightly greasy wafer, Rebel felt the weight and involuted complexity of the island clamp down about her. She sensed it as a single organism,interconnected through all its varied parts, with hidden messages encoded in every twig and leaf. Perhaps it was conscious, its paths of thought and personality expressed in the twisting of limbs and placement of flowers. Rebel might well be walking through the confines of a mind that mirrored her own, wandering the mazy wetroutes of memory and persona. She stared down at her closed fist, then up into darkness, and both were equally unreadable to her.

“The drugs should have hit the drinking stations by now,” Wyeth said.

Nee-C said, “Then why ain’t nothing happened?”

“Shut up!” Bors snarled.

Rebel was no longer afraid of the Comprise. If the island was in some sense her brain, then they were simply bad thoughts haunting the mind jungles, as forceless and insubstantial as fear. She conjured up the memory of her wetware diagram, and it surrounded her in green lace, a midscale model of the forest about her, the brain within.

She let it fade, the branches slowly melting away, until all that remained was that strange circular logic structure floating about her like an electric green halo.

Without warning, something dropped down in front of them. It was human-tall and impossibly, elegantly thin. Its arms, slender and graceful, reached almost to its feet, and it was covered with short pale fur. It glowed gently in the gloom. Its eyes were large and liquidly expressive, like a lemur’s, but its face was entirely human. “Boss Wyeth,” it said.

As one, three wolverines shot it with their plastic pistols.

It blinked. Long, expressive fingers rose to touch its forehead. “We must—” it began.

And screamed.

The creature fell sideward, eyes shut tight, clawing at its face, and howled in agony. “That’s it!” Bors shoutedhappily. “Let’s go up!” They all followed Wyeth at a near run.

Rebel hardly noticed the incident. She was still considering the differences between mind projected upon tree and upon wafer. Perhaps where a human brain operated at electrochemical speeds, a tree would operate at the biological speeds of metabolism and catabolism, its thoughts as slow and certain as the growth of a new branch. The ceramic wafer could only operate on the level of atomic decay, each complete thought eons long, its lifespan greater than stars. It would be a crime then, as serious as murder, not to cherish and shelter the wafers from harm through the ages the expression of their lives would take. They had come to an enormous tree, where short, dead limbs spiraled up the trunk, like a ladder’s rungs warped into a stairway, and were climbing it on all fours. She thought it was a fir of some sort; the library was getting harder to access.

They climbed endlessly. The green ring still floated about her, a tatter of shredded lace. She imagined herself traveling within its cryptic twistings and windings, around and around, a pinlight of consciousness exploring the pathways of thought. But of course that was all illusion. If she were actually crawling through her mind, in whatever sense, the answers she sought were not to be found in the interior. The combat team was aimed straight as an icepick at the center of the island, and it was there, if anywhere, that answers would be found. She felt her metaprogrammer clumsily struggling to free itself from an endlessly looping pathway, and then the library clicked in briefly, and she found she could map their progress by the species of vegetation they passed, which changed as they moved away from the sea and climbed toward the light.

There were tiny green insects on the bark, delicate insectivores feeding on mites too small to be seen. Rebel paused to look at them, and one stepped onto her thumb, as dainty and worshipful as a devotee climbing atop thehand of God. Staring down into the faceted lenses of its eyes, she imagined a multiple image of a world-filling face, brown and wrinkled as a dried apple. It was an ancient version of her original face, stern and filled with strange humors, and the mouth moved with silent commands. It was her wizard-mother. Then Bors gave her a shove, and she moved onward.

Vague with speculation, Rebel somehow missed the end of the climb. They were running up the center of a wide limb now, on a path that had been smoothed into the bark.

Nightblooms grew in clusters here, and they ran through an arch of papery material and were among the Comprise.