Vacumn Flowers

He pointed to a fine crazing of lines in the visor. “Poor bugger miscalculated acceleration stress. The internal organs are probably mush.” He turned off the coldpackunit and somebody else yanked off the helmet.

Acceleration jelly gone liquescent sloshed onto the deck, revealing a woman’s face. It was angular, with high cheekbones. The hair, short and wet, was a mousy blond.

Her skin was a bloated and unhealthy white, almost blue in places. There were small globs of jelly caught in her nostrils. A tech wiped them away, and the woman took a sudden, gasping breath. She shivered and opened her eyes. It was Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, in her own body.

A trickle of blood came from the corner of her mouth.

She gri

Then she died.

Maxwell was not looking when it happened. He was rummaging in a small corner chest for body jewelry.

When he found a piece he liked, he’d try it on, preening for her. Now he turned, a string of pearls about his waist.

“You like it?” He swiveled his hips making the string spin.

“It takes a good body to wear pearls.”

The hologram drew slowly back, the scurrying Perimeter Defense people growing smaller as they vainly tried to revive the body. “Coldpack revival shock,” a medtech muttered. “Damage to brain tissue complicated by cumulative radiation damage. Compression, shear, and tidal effects to liver, pancreas, heart…” Her voice droned on monotonously as she read the diagnostics into the record. Someone else put a cryonics unit over the head and flash-froze the brain. Later, the personality and surface memories could be teased out with supercooling induction techniques, if the traffic investigators needed an interview.

I died, Rebel thought flatly. She remembered it happening very clearly now, the faces bent over her, their concerned expressions and the way it had all drawn away into whiteness as…

The pearls orbited Maxwell’s waist like a ring ofsatellites. His navel danced at their center.

Now, as the Perimeter Defense employees slowed and the clamor of voices fell to a murmur, Rebel’s name rose in black Gothic letters. It dominated the scene for a beat, then burst into sudden, bright flame. When the flames died down, a new Rebel Mudlark rose from them like a phoenix.

The new Rebel was an idealized version of the original, taller and thi

The words available soon scrolled up.

“Turn it off,” Rebel whispered desperately. “Oh God, turn that damn thing off.” The memory of her death burned in her brain. She wouldn’t be able to forget it again.

Maxwell picked up the briefcase, looked at it blankly, touched a glowing red dot. The room went dark. “Hold me,” Rebel said. “I don’t want to do anything, just… hold me, please hold me.”

She floated in the dark, flooded with misery. She’d felt like this when her mother had died in the accident at the Kluster refineries. Her pain had caught her by surprise then, because she’d hated the cold bitch. You’ll never hurt me again, she had thought angrily, and yet she’d still felt abandoned and desolate. She hugged Maxwell to her, like a big, sexless cuddly toy.

Vague shapes swam in her vision, threatening to coalesce into a stretched and bloated skull. She’d seen death’s face before, as a child. Her first time solo in a vacuum suit, she had blundered across a laser cable and shorted out half her suit. Her visor went black and her rebreather stopped. Floating alone and sightless, gaspingand choking, she had suddenly realized that she was going to die. And in that horrified instant, she saw a face before her, bone-white and distorted, with empty eye sockets, small dark nostrils, and black, gaping mouth. She threw her head back and the face lurched at her, and she was abruptly hauled in by a Traffic Control employee who injected an air line through the skin of her suit. It had only been her reflection, lit by a lone failsafed helmet monitor light.

Maxwell gently slid a hand between her legs and moved them apart. He started to enter her. Upset and distracted as she was, she almost let him do it. It would be the easy thing, the path of least resistance. But then the Rebel persona asserted itself, and she shoved him away. She would not let herself be taken advantage of.

“Back off there, bud! Who gave you permission to do that?”

Maxwell looked bewildered. “But—”

“You don’t listen too good, do you? I said I didn’t want to do anything, and I by God meant it.” As she raged at him, Maxwell backed away, fell into a fighting crouch, straightened, crouched again. His hands fisted and unfisted. His face twisted with conflicting programmed urges. “What are you, some kind of machine? Willing sex isn’t good enough for you?” Clumsily, Maxwell threw a slap at Rebel’s face. She batted his hand away contemptuously and tried to punch him in the stomach.

He flinched back, and his string broke, pearls exploding in all directions. They bounced off the tin walls like hail.

“Just get the fuck out of here!”

Maxwell was backed into a corner, quivering. In a tiny voice he said, “But this is my place.”

For a long moment Rebel glared at him scornfully. Then she laughed, and with a kind of rough good will, reached out to tousle his hair. “You’re kind of useless, you know that?”

“It all depends on what you want,” Maxwell said, eyes averted sullenly. But his tension was gone. He began gathering up the pearls that still bounced about the room, nabbing them out of the air and holding them in one hand.

“I mean, I can fight just as good as I sex, but I got to have clear signals. You can’t expect me to—hey, what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“Listen!” They fell silent. In the distance was a dull clank-clank-clank of people hammering on the pipes. It went on and on, growing in volume as more and more people to one end of the tank town hammered in unison.

Rebel touched a frame pipe and felt it vibrating in sympathy. Outside, the constant murmur of voices died.

“It’s the heat! God damn. We got to get away.” Maxwell let go of the pearls and grabbed for his cloak.

“Get away? Where? What are you talking about?”

Maxwell was frantically struggling into his clothes.

“You’ve never been in a raid before? They start by grabbing the airlock. That takes maybe a dozen jackboots.

And they bring in a few crates of programming units and these enormous stacks of arrest programs.”

“Arrest programs?”

“Yeah. Then they move out from the locks in a long line.

They arrest maybe one out of five people they nab for failure to cooperate and sentence them to like six hours enforcement duty. Program ’em up on the spot, give them their orders, and send them out to bring in more to be programmed. They spread out like a storm. Before long, you got jackboots everywhere.”

In her mind’s eye, Rebel saw the police expanding through the tank in an ever-widening cordon, swelling their numbers as they went, doubling every few minutes, like an explosion of yeast culture through a warm medium.

“But what are they looking for?”

“What the fuck does it matter? You want them to gethold of you?” Maxwell untwisted a corner wire holding on the back wall and shoved the tin to show a thin, dark line of weeds. “Look, worse comes to worst, we can slip out back. Nothing there but vines. Only don’t move around much, ’cause I got a beehive back there. I don’t want you disturbing them.” He took Rebel’s hand and pulled her out into the court. “What we’ve got to do is slip past the storm front. See, they’ll be spread out thin. Questioning everyone, right? Once we get by them, we’re clear.”