Michael Swanwick - Vacumn Flowers

Wyeth looked like he was having trouble holding his laughter in. “Jonamon, that’s the third time this week you’ve quoted the Gadarene swine at me.”

“Krishna don’t love demons neither,” the old man snapped. He flipped the book over, red side up, and thrust it at Rebel. “Swear on the Gita you ain’t been reprogrammed. That’ll be good enough for me.”

“Maybe I’d better tell my story first,” Rebel said. “Then I’ll swear it’s true afterward. That way you’ll know what I’m swearing to.”

She shifted to a more central spot, sitting cross-legged in the air, the rope gripped in one foot. Then she wrapped her cloak in storytelling folds (inwardly marveling at her own dexterity) so that one arm and breast were covered and the other arm and breast free. Seeing her thus, people came out from their shanties or shifted places on the ropes so they could hear.

She began:

“I was dead—but they wouldn’t tell me that. I was lying in a hospital bed, paralyzed, unable to remember a thing.

And they wouldn’t tell me why. All I knew was that something was wrong, and nobody would answer any of my questions…”

When she was done, Jonamon took her oath on his book and shook his head. “Well, I’ll be fucked if that don’t beat anything I ever heard.”

“Mmmm.” Wyeth’s face was grim and stony, lost in thought. It had a humorless, almost brutal set to it. He looked up suddenly and glared around at the listeners.

“What are you staring at? Show’s over. Go away!” They scattered.

Rebel shivered. He looked an entirely different man now—a thug, all suspicion and potential violence.

Jonamon laid a hand on her knee and said, “You watch yourself, young lady. Deutsche Nakasone is a nasty bunch, they’ll do what they want with you. They just don’t give a fuck.” She drew away from him.

“That’s every gesellschaft, old man,” Wyeth said. “That’s inherent in the corporate structure.”

“You think so, eh? Let me show you something.”

Jonamon hurried off to his shack and returned with a cloth-wrapped package. “Maybe I’m just another old manwith calcium depletion now.” He began slowly unfolding the cloth. “I’m stuck here nowadays, my bones would snap like breaksticks if I set foot in full gravity anymore. But I wasn’t always like this. I used to own my own corporation.

Hell, I used to be my own corporation.”

The ropehangers had come edging back to listen. One of them, a lean young man with rude boy paint, caught Rebel’s eye and flashed a smile. Cute little thing. He laughed, and Jonamon glared at him.

“Laugh if you want. Individuals could incorporate back then. You can’t imagine how it felt, having all the legal protection of a corporation to yourself. It was like being a little tin god.” He sighed. “I was one of the last, wiped out by the Corporate Reform Act. I was a rock miner, maybe Wyeth here mentioned that to you. A prospector. When the Act came along, I had claims on a few hundred rocks, a real valuable inventory, worth a fortune back then, and even more now. But with the reforms, I had to liquidate. I entered into negotiations with a number of concerns, finally signed a preliminary letter of intent with Deutsche Nakasone. Look.” He held up the unwrapped package. It was a formal holographic portrait of a line of corporate functionaries looking serious for the camera. The young Jonamon stood in the center, a sharp-chinned man with an avaricious cast to his face.

“This was taken the day before the Act went into effect.

Right after this, the president and I retired to a private office to settle the last few details and sign the agreement.

You never saw anyone so nice and polite in your life. Did I want a drink? Don’t mind if I do. Would I like to screw?

Hell, she was kind of cute. Then she asked if I wanted to try out a new program they had. Made it sound real nice. I said sure.

“They was just getting into wetware then. Just recent bought up a batch of patents when Blaupunkt went belly-up. So anyway, the president puts the inductor band around my head and turns the damn thing on. Whoooeee!

That was one hell of a ride, I’ll tell you. Even today, I blush to think on it. Imagine all the sex and pleasure you can take just slamming into you again and again, so intense you can’t hardly take it, and you want it to stop, only… not quite yet. Just a little bit longer before it becomes unbearable. Can you imagine that? Shit, you can’t imagine it at all.”

“So what happened?” Rebel asked.

“What happened was somebody turned it off. Wow, did I feel awful! Kind of hungry and achy and thirsty all at once.

My head was pounding, and I must’ve lost half the free water in my body.

“The president had put her clothes back on and left, a long time back. There was a couple of corporate guards giving me the hairy eyeball. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked them.

“They told me that the Reform Act had just gone into effect, and they didn’t need me anymore. Then they gave me the bum’s rush, and I was never in that office again in my life, let me tell you.

“You see what happened, don’t you? They’d kept me programmed up until the Act went through and I didn’t legally own my claims anymore. And because I’d signed that letter of intent, they all belonged to Deutsche Nakasone now. They never paid me a damn thing for them either. I went to the lawyers and they said it’s all legal. Or rather, to prove it wasn’t legal, I’d have to be a corporation myself. And I wasn’t, anymore.”

After a long silence, he said, “Well, it’s all to the best, I imagine. A young man thinks with his gonads. An old man sees things more spiritual. I made my peace with God, and I take my solace from the Bible Gita now.”

Rebel yawned then, and Wyeth said, “I think it’s time you turned in.”

He showed her to a vacant hutch. It had room enoughfor two people to sit and talk, or for one to stretch out and sleep. There was a bit of wire by the doorframe, so she could tie up her helmet, and four looped hammock strings to sleep in. Nothing more.

“Best break out your rebreather,” Wyeth said. She looked at him blankly. “From your helmet. Ventilation’s poor in this corner of the court, and your waste gases can build up while you sleep. Keep your mouthpiece in, and you can avoid waking up with a bad headache.”

“Okay,” she said, and he kicked away. There was no window, and hanging her cloak over the doorway filled the hut with darkness. She stuffed her things into her helmet and slipped into the hammock strings. Hanging suspended, she bit down on the rebreather. Her breath sounded loud and slow within her skull.

The outside noises were muffled within the hut, but constant. Music and faraway argument blended into each other. Buried deep within this human beehive, Rebel felt painfully alone and isolated. From somewhere distant she heard a dull clank-clank, clank-clank, someone hammering on the pipes to signal a neighbor. She had heard (though she couldn’t remember when or where)

that the constellations of courts within the tanks had all been put up helter-skelter, pipes mated to existing pipes, forming monkey-bar tangles with no plan or formal structure. Only the lack of gravity kept it all from collapsing. But occasionally the stresses of everyday living—people slamming against their hutches, kicking off from them, grabbing ropes tied to the frames—would cause whole groupings of court structures to shift. Torque forces would slowly swing the hutches together, crushing entire neighborhoods in a scream of buckling metal. And then the survivors would scavenge the rubble to build back into the space thus opened.

Rebel was so tired she couldn’t sleep. Lying afloat in her hut, restless and jumpy, she felt so lonely and awful she wanted to die. She twisted and turned in the hammockstrings, but no position seemed comfortable. She was as lost as a child away from home for the first time, cut loose from security and surrounded by hostile forces against which she had no defense.