Vacumn Flowers

The vines rustled slightly. “Heads up, Sunshine!”

She opened her eyes.

It was Wyeth, painted as if programmed police. Those fierce eyes laughed at her from either side of the red stripe, and he gri

She climbed out of the vines. Following Wyeth’s lead, she recovered her helmet and vacuum suit. Wyeth was at the gate, calling to her to hurry, when she noticed something floating half-hidden by a sheet of tin in an obscure corner of the court. “Wait,” she said. It was a body.

Rebel kicked away the tin. Old Jonamon floated there, pale and motionless, like a piece of detritus. At her touch, he opened one eye. “Careful now,” he muttered.

“Jonamon, what did they do to you?”

“I’ve survived worse. You think maybe you could get me some water?” Wyeth silently fetched a bulb and held it to the old man’s mouth. Jonamon sucked in a mouthful and coughed it out, choking. When he’d recovered, he gasped,

“It’s hell being old. Don’t let nobody tell you different.”

The old man was all tangled up in his cloak. Gently, Rebel unwrapped it. When she saw his body, she gasped.

“They beat you!”

“Ain’t the first time.” Jonamon tried to laugh. “But they couldn’t put their programmer on me without they beat me unconscious first.” His arms moved feebly, like a baby’s. “So I escaped.”

Rebel wanted to cry. “Oh, Jonamon. What good did that do you? You might have been killed!”

Jonamon gri

Wyeth drew Rebel away. “Sunshine, we don’t have much time.”

“I’m not leaving without Jonamon.”

“Hmm.” He cracked his knuckles thoughtfully, and his lips moved in silent argument with himself. “Okay, then,”

he said finally. “You take the one arm and I’ll take the other.”

They moved slowly downcorridor, the old man between them. His mouth was open and his eyes half shut with pain. He didn’t try to talk. The tank towners, seeing Wyeth’s jackboot paint, gave them a wide berth. “Queen Roslyn has her court down this way,” Wyeth said. “She’s a predatory old hag, and she stocks a lot of wetware. Ifanybody has a hospital going, it’ll be her.”

They followed a purple rope into a dark neighborhood with one brightly lit gateway. People hurried in and out of it. Rebel didn’t need to be told that this was their destination.

At the gateway, an angular woman with bony shoulders and small, black nipples blocked their way. “Full up! Full up!” she cried. “No room here, go someplace else.” She didn’t even glance at Jonamon, who was now fully unconscious.

Wordlessly, Wyeth stripped the salaries from one wrist and held them forward. The woman cocked an eye at them, then let her gaze travel to his other wrist. Wyeth frowned. “Don’t get greedy, Roslyn.”

“Well,” Roslyn said. “I guess we could make an exception.” She made the salaries disappear, and led them inside.

It was chaos in the court, with stretcher lines hung up every which way. The lines were crowded with wounded rude boys and rude girls, temporary jackboots, unpainted religious fanatics, and even one tightly bound raver. A

miasma of blood droplets, trash, and bits of bandages hung in the air. But people with medical paint moved among the wounded, and their programming seemed efficient enough. Roslyn stopped one and said, “Give this guy top priority, okay? His friends are paying for it.” The tech gave a tight little nod and eased Jonamon away.

Roslyn smiled. “You see? Ask anyone, Roslyn gives good value. But you got to go now. I got no room for bystanders.” She shooed them back.

On the way out, Rebel suddenly spotted a familiar face.

She seized Wyeth’s arm and pointed. “Look! Isn’t that…?”

Maxwell was stretched out on a line, unconscious. The red police strip was smudged on his finely chiseled face.

Roslyn saw the gesture and laughed. “Another friend of yours? You oughta maybe get some new ones who can stayout of trouble. But he’s okay. Might lose a tooth. But mostly he’s just got a histamine reaction from being bee-stung too often.” They were at the gateway now. “Young woman brought him in. Pretty little thing.” She cackled. “I think she’s sweet on him.”

“Oh?” Rebel said coolly. “Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.”

They moved through near-empty corridors, away from the center of the tank, and away from the receding storm front. “Wyeth,” Rebel said after a long silence,

“Jonamon’s problems are all the result of his calcium depletion, aren’t they?”

“Jonamon’s problems are all the result of his being a stubborn old man. He’ll survive this time, but it’s going to kill him sooner or later.”

“No, really,” Rebel insisted. “I mean, like the kidney troubles, he gets them from the calcium depletion, right?

You watch him for any length of time, and you see that he gets muscle cramps, his breathing gets irregular… So why hasn’t he had that corrected?”

They were nearing the shell. The temperature was cooler here, up against the outside of the tank. Wyeth paused, took a narrow side-way, and Rebel followed. “It’s not correctable. You live a year or so in weightlessness, and you reach the point of no return. It can’t be reversed.

Slow down, we make a turn soon.”

“But it would be so simple. You could tailor a strain of coraliferous algae to live in the bloodstream. In the first phase they’re free-swimming, and in the second they colonize the bone tissue. When they die, they leave behind a tiny bit of calcium.”

“Coral reefs in the bones?” Wyeth sounded bemused.

“That’s how we do it back home.”

“You come from an interesting culture, Sunshine,”

Wyeth said. “You’ll have to tell me all about it someday.

But right now… here we are.” The corridor they had entered was completely shuttered and lit only by nightblooms. Scattered trash gathered in long drifts unbroken by the passage of traffic. They were the only people in sight. Silently, Wyeth moved down the corridor, looking for a particular door. When he found it, he stopped and rattled a wall. “This is King Wismon’s court.

He’s got something we need.”

“What’s that?”

“A bootleg airlock.”

4

Londongrad You’re too late, I’m afraid. You’ll simply have to go away.”

Eyes closed, King Wismon floated in the center of his court. In stark contrast to the ski

“We have to be gone before the police front comes by again!” Rebel held forward her wrists. “We can pay!”

Without opening his eyes, Wismon said, “I have been paid for use of my airlock five times today. That is enough.

The lock is the basis of whatever small affluence I have—I don’t want to draw attention to it. The secret of a good scam is not to get greedy.”

“Hallo, Wismon,” Wyeth said. “No time for an old friend?” The fat man’s eyes popped open. They were bright and glittery and dark. “Ah! Mentor! Forgive me for not recognizing you—I was asleep.” He waved an ineffectual little arm at the rude boys. “Leave. This man is a brother under the skull. He won’t harm me.”