Michael Swanwick - Vacumn Flowers

Briefly, the man’s face went blank, as if he were arguing with himself. Then it cleared and he said, “Look. I live in King Jonamon’s court, Tank Fourteen. That’s probably the best place you could go, if you’re on the run from something. There’s a couple of shacks empty. Come with me, and I’ll stake you to the first week’s rent.”

“Why would you do something like that for me?” Rebel asked suspiciously. “Just who are you, anyway?”

“I’m… an old acquaintance. A fellow-worker.” He tapped behind one ear, and Rebel saw a small red abrasion circle there. “We persona bums have to stick together, right?”

“I…” Rebel retreated into the folds of her cloak. “Look.

I’m sorry. It’s just that people have been taking a lot ofinterest in my case lately. I didn’t ask for any of it. I don’t want any of it.”

“Okay, then.” He shrugged and turned away.

Something desperate came tearing up from deep within Rebel then, and she cried, “Wait!” The man turned back.

That cautious face. She colored, because she had no idea why she had cried out. To cover, she said, “Maybe I was a little hasty.”

Another instantaneous shift of expression, and the man laughed heartily. “You crack me up, Sunshine.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“All right. Eucrasia, then.”

Her face felt cold and hard. “The name is Rebel,” she said. “Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark.”

“Wyeth.” A lopsided grin and a shrug said that that was all the name he had.

They took a jitney to the tank towns, crammed hip and knee with twenty others, almost too tight to breathe. It carried them to the shadow of the Londongrad cannister, where a cluster of fifty-year-old air tanks floated. They were enormous things, each large enough to hold an entire cannister city’s atmosphere under pressure, and retro-fitted with crude airlock and docking facilities. Faint traces of rust edged the locks, where the long whisper of oxygen leakage ghosted over metal.

“Jeez, it’s hot in here,” Rebel grumbled. “I should’ve just gone solo in my suit.”

“What’s that?” Wyeth asked. Then, when she repeated herself, “Tank towns don’t have magnetic cushions. We’re talking heavy-duty slums here.”

The jitney pilot slammed into a dock and bawled, “Tank Fourteen!” and they squeezed out.

The light was dim at the locks and murky beyond. Theyswam up a crowded corridor, through ramshackle hutches that were no more than pipework frames with corrugated tin sheets for walls. The air was fetid with rotting garbage, stale wine, and human sweat, with a sweet undersmell of honeysuckle. Children shrieked at play, and there was a constant yabber-yabber-yabber of voices. Bees hummed as they moved mazily among the flowery vines that overgrew everything. A green rope led up the corridor, and they followed this handway, occasionally grabbing it to twist clear of an oncomer, until it was crossed by an orange rope. They took this deeper into the tank.

A raver came down the rope, and people shrank away from her. Wyeth grabbed Rebel and pulled her out of the way. They slammed noisily against a tin wall, and then the woman was gone and they proceeded up the rope.

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 biofluorescent 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!” Hegrabbed 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.”