Vacumn Flowers

“Yeah, it’s a locator ring. So he can keep track of you, where you are and so on.” He waved a hand at the ceiling cameras. “Listen, you come over to the tanks later on, visit my hut. No surveillance there. We can get private, know what I mean?”

Eucrasia shrugged in baffled a

Heisen had withdrawn to a discreet distance. The kid glanced curiously at him, decided he wasn’t important, and blew her a kiss. “See you in my hutch!” he called over his shoulder. Eucrasia vaguely wondered who he was.

Heisen took her arm again. He steered her through a meadowlike meeting room. The grass was cool underfoot, and bees hovered drowsily over the raspberry bushes.

“Let’s go over this way, and stroll through the skywalk. It’s a very pleasant walk. Free of cameras and prying eyes.”

He swung the cherry-red case lightly back and forth as he led her away.

The skywalk looped out from the sheraton in a long, graceful curve. Fish swam through strands of kelp within the transparent tube walls. The teak boardwalk sounded almost musically underfoot. “I designed Wyeth’s warrior aspect after my father,” Eucrasia said. She had totally lost track of who she was talking to, but the memories were compulsively strong, and they drove the words before them. “He was a willful man, my father was. Determined.

Nobody could talk him into anything, not unless he wanted them to. But he wasn’t… flexible, you know? He couldn’t adapt to change. He couldn’t show emotion. But underneath he was a wonderful man, very kind, and I loved him. When I was a girl I was always wishing I could change him. Not in any big way, but in little ways, so he could get past all that defensive armor and breathe a little.

So he could enjoy his life. That was a big factor in my choice of career, I think.”

She fell silent. Remembering when she was a little girl and the Kluster was passing out of the belts. The refineries were closing, which had put both her parents out of work.

Those had been bad times. Her mother’d taken a job as pierrette, and the wetware was primitive then. She’d come home after shift with a goony look to her and a subservience that took hours to wear off. Daddy had hated that.

Once Eucrasia came home from nurture to find her father sitting at the center room table, turning a wetcartridge over and over in his hands. It was a big, bulky thing in a black case, almost obsolete already, and she didn’t know yet that it was loaded with electronic godhood. But she knew that she was tired of having her father around all the time, moping about gloomily, and of almost never seeing her mother the way she used to be.

And she didn’t like the guilty, weak look that melted her father’s face when he saw her. He had always been a strong man. So it was involuntary how, as he fumblingly tried to hide the cartridge, she stared up at him, mind superchilled and pulsing with inarticulate pain, and felt the anger sear through her eyes like an invisible psychic laser, and said, “I hate you, Daddy.”

What happened then shocked her.

Her father’s hand clenched into a fist. It trembled.

Then—so fast she almost didn’t see it happen—he hit himself right in the middle of his face. That big fist struck hard. It must have hurt like hell. It broke the cartilage inhis nose, and blood flowed down. Then he hit himself again. And again, with less hesitation this time, as if he’d savored the experience and decided he liked it. At first the only sound was of fist striking flesh, but then gradually he began gasping, a wet noise like sobbing. Still he kept on hitting himself.

Eucrasia had rushed forward, grabbing at that huge, muscular arm, trying to stop him. “Daddy, no!” she shrieked, and somehow—it was like a small, dark miracle—he’d stopped.

For a long moment he just stood there, chest working, shoulders heaving. His face was all dark with blood. One red drop fell on Eucrasia’s foot, tickling her little toe. Her father stared around and around him, as if wondering where he was. Then his eyes fixed on Eucrasia, and they both stood there, mouths open and silent, unblinking, looking at one another.

Then he turned away.

“This is far enough,” Heisen said. He stopped and put down his case with a heavy thump. “Why don’t you sit down, Eucrasia?”

They had come to a transparent bar built out from the wall of the skywalk. An octopus was searching for food down by the floor, pulling himself along the glass with graceful swirls of his tentacles. Eucrasia sat on one of the stools. “He was a good man,” she said. “He was a good man. He didn’t deserve for that to happen.”

“This will only take an instant.”

Eucrasia stared out into the darkness. There were a few vague patches of luminosity in the distance, but nothing more. Where were the stars? she wondered. Tiny wheatseed lights edged the boards underfoot and ran along the rim of the bar, but outside all was Stygian gloom.

She felt like she’d been caught in an afterworld where things struggled to take form from nothingness, and failed.

Heisen lifted the headfreezer above her. One of his elbows touched her shoulderblade.

Startled by some movement below, the octopus exploded in Eucrasia’s face. One instant she was staring out into featureless black, and the next she confronted a pale, distorted shape that had leaped before her. A reflexive startlement keyed subliminal memories of empty eye sockets, a mouth that was a gaping scream.

Simultaneously, her claustrophobia gripped her and she realized that somebody was standing at her shoulder, about to put a box over her head.

Eucrasia screamed and lurched to the side. Rebel fell off the stool, one edge of Heisen’s cryonic device smashing against her shoulder, and then she slammed to the floor.

In a white burst of pain she rolled away and tumbled to her feet. Heisen lifted the thing again. “Get away from me!” Rebel cried.

“Now, Eucrasia,” Heisen said. He made soothing, hushing noises. But his eyes were calm and cold and they did not look away from her for an instant. He advanced a step, and she backed away. There was nothing but skywalk behind her—at least an eighth of a mile of tubing without branching or exit.

“Listen, Jerzy, I don’t know how you got in here, but Wyeth’s going to notice I’m missing soon. This place is crawling with samurai— there’s no way you can get out without being caught.”

Heisen stepped back a few paces so he could set the cryonics device on the bartop. He reached into his cloak and removed a case from a liner pocket. Without looking down, he flipped it open.

“Jerzy? Listen to me, will you? I’m sure you can be reprogrammed. You can have a normal life again. Answer to nobody but yourself.” He slipped his hand through the hilt of a fat-bladed dueling knife. It was the kind rude boys favored, a cross between stabbing blade and brassknuckles, because it was almost impossible to lose one’s grip on it in a fight.

Now Heisen smiled calmly and took a swipe at her.

“Oh shit!” Rebel danced back. Grabbing the loose end of her cloak, she whipped it about one forearm. Now she had a shield of sorts. In a giddy, crazily gleeful corner of her mind, she felt like a Renaissance dandy. This was how they had fought in Spain, in Rome, in Greece, all those centuries ago, in desperate back-alley scuffles.

Of course, they’d had weapons of their own.

Heisen advanced slowly; even with the advantage, he was programmed to be a cautious fighter. He feinted twice, stabbing at her face and then her belly, and watched how her arm jerked forward to protect them. Where Heisen’s movements were all smooth, controlled menace, Rebel’s reflexes were made rough and nervous by the jagged edge of fear. It coursed through her veins, danced behind her eyes, and tasted sour in her mouth. She was defeated already.

Heisen’s smile faded, and for an instant he was perfectly still. Then he lunged forward, feinting left to draw away her arm, then slashing downward at the exposed side of her throat.