Vacumn Flowers

But an hour later an orderly stepped in and wordlessly deposited a cloak on the table by her bed. “Sonofabitch,”

Rebel said softly. She was actually going to break out of this place!

Rebel napped. When she awoke, she spent an excruciating hour staring at the people floating through the eternal twilight before Sister Mary Radha returned.

The nun’s belly overhung her cincture, and she was as heavily mystic-wired as ever.

“Sister,” Rebel said, “the leads in my adhesion disks are out of adjustment. Would you take a look at them?” Then, when the woman’s hands were deep in the wires, she said,

“You know, there’s a verse by one of your prophets that’s been ru

Sister Mary Radha’s hands stopped moving. For one still, extended moment she said nothing. Then the nun stared up into the infinite depths of night and murmured,

“Saint Pushkin.” Her voice rose. “ ‘He touched my ears, and roaring and noise filled them, and I heard the trembling of the angels, and the movement of creatures beneath the seas, and the growing of the grass in the valleys! And he laid hold of my lips, and tore out my sinful tongue—’ ” She arched her back and shivered in religious ecstasy. Her hands jerked spasmodically. One of the adhesion disks was yanked askew, and Rebel’s head slammed to the side. But she was still paralyzed.

“Sister,” Rebel said quietly. “Sister?”

“Mmmm?” the nun replied dreamily.

“The doctor wanted you to remove my paralysis now. Do you remember that? He asked me to remind you.” Rebel held her breath. This was the moment when she either won free or lost it all. Everything depended on how long it took Sister Mary Radha to reco

“Oh,” the nun said. She fumbled with a switch, haltingly changed two settings. With somnambulant slowness, she lifted off the disks. Then she shook her head, smiling vaguely, and wandered out.

Rebel let out her breath. She could move! But for a long minute she did not, choosing instead to stare up, unseeing.

The memory of her reflection in the video flat, foreshortened and distorted though it had been, pi

Slowly she rotated it.

The arm was whole and its muscles shifted smoothly.

The skin was a soft, Italian brown, unscarred, lightly fuzzed with fine dark hair. The fingers were short, the nails a pearly pink. Horrified, Rebel sat bolt upright and stared down her body.

Her breasts were round and full. Her thighs were a trifle heavy, but still muscular. The hospital had left her cache-sexe on for modesty’s sake, but above it a thin line of black hairs marched up her belly like ants. Her legs wereshort, functional, strong. It was a good, healthy body.

But it was not her body. Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark’s body was long and lean and knobby at the elbows and knees.

Her skin was white as porcelain and her hair was mousy blond. Her hands and feet were long and slender, with an artist’s fingers, a concert pianist’s toes. Almost the exact opposite of the body she had now.

I shall go mad, Rebel thought. I will scream.

But she did neither. She stood and examined her paint in the obsidian surface of the flat. Ignoring the strange round face with button nose and dark eyes—eyes that flashed animal fear at her. A line of red paint ran from ear to ear, like a mask, with spiky wing lines flying up the brows. “Please turn on,” she said, and looked it up under wetware codes. Logically enough, it identifed her as Hospital Patient, Wetsurgery Prep.

The paint smeared. It took only a second to change the markings to Outpatient, Wetsurgery Postop. Two small ante

The walk ran between high rosehedges, angled into another. She was swept up in a flow of medical perso

She moved confidently at first, cloak streaming in her wake. Then the walk branched, and branched again, and she was hopelessly lost in the rose maze, among the hundreds of niches where patients were packed tight as larvae in a hive. Without warning, she felt naked and exposed, and she couldn’t remember how to walk. Allthose complex motions. In a panic, she pulled her cloak about her and stumbled.

The zombies swirled by, stepping deftly aside as she fought for balance. Cold faces glanced quickly at her, then away.

Just as she went sprawling, an arm reached out and snagged her elbow, and she was hauled gracelessly to her feet. Turning, she found herself looking into a thin, vulpine face slashed by a single orange wetware line. The stranger smiled, narrow jaw, sharp little teeth. He had a painful grip on her arm, just above the elbow. “This way,”

he said.

“That’s okay, sport,” Rebel said quickly. “I just lost my footing. Point me the right way out, and I’d be grateful.”

“Oh bullshit,” the man said. “They’d’ve caught you already if anybody knew you were missing yet.” Rebel yanked her arm free and found that her new, unfamiliar body was trembling with adrenalin reaction. The man smiled condescendingly. “Listen, I know somebody who can help you out of this mess. Do you want to meet her or not?”

They were on the spine of their habitat island, where the giant druid oaks grew. One spread its limbs over the commercial maze of shops and taverns bordering the hospital. Its trunk reached halfway to the axis. Looking up as they strolled, Rebel saw stars blinking in its upper reaches, appearing and disappearing in the gaps between leaves. “Hell of a stunt, escaping from full therapeutic paralysis,” the man said. “I’d love to know how you did it.”

Then, when she did not respond, “Hey. My name’s Jerzy Heisen.”

In among the branches, leaves descended slowly, barely moving through the suspended dust, as if the air had thickened to hold them up. In the soft light, the dust and leaves shared a stillness that was actually slow, tirelessmotion, an endless eddying as ponderous and inevitable as the rotation of spiral galaxies. “Is that so?” Rebel wished she could climb up the tree, in among the floating twigs and detritus, so like the vast tidal fronts of home. “I take it from your knowing hints that I needn’t bother introducing myself.”

“Oh, I know all about you.” They passed between displays of body jewelry: silverplated armbands gleaming softly under blue spots, some sparkling with Lunar diamonds, impact emeralds, even Columbian tourmaline.

“You’re a persona bum, currently suffering from a major personality erasure—self-induced, by the way—and held together by a prototypical identity overlay that is, properly speaking, the property of the Deutsche Nakasone Gesellschaft. Your name is Eucrasia Walsh.”

“No, it’s—” She stopped, bewildered. The name did sound familiar, in a crazy kind of way, as if Heisen had put a name to all that was ugly within her, to all the self-pitying and wounded hatred she sank into when her mood turned dark. The stale, dusty smell of defeat and weary guilt rose up within her, and she ducked her head.