Vacumn Flowers

Rebel leaped away, crashing sideways into the wall. The hot acid edge of the knife drifted across her side, barely breaking the skin, searing the finest possible line over her ribs. Rebel pushed away from the wall, her entire side ablaze with pain, and stumbled backward. Heisen glided forward, his eyes deathly calm.

Something hard slammed Rebel in the back. The edge of the bar. Perfect, she thought. One corner in the entire damned skywalk and I back myself into it. Something smooth and metallic and chill touched her back ever so gently.

The headfreezer.

In one swift motion she snagged the thing from behind her and thrust it at Heisen, gripping the handle in both hands. He fell back a pace.

The problem was that it was not easy to hold the freezing unit up before her. It was heavy, and her arms trembled. It was too short, too blunt, too clumsy. If Heisen weren’t so damned quick, she’d be tempted to just drop it on his foot.

Under one finger she could feel a trigger built into the handle. Which meant that if she could convince him to stick his hand inside the device, she could take him.

Otherwise, it made a lousy weapon.

I’ll have to throw it at him, Rebel thought. Swing it up, catch him under the jaw, break a few teeth. Then grab the knife and hold him for the security people. That was a good plan. It ranked right up there with suddenly learning how to teleport.

She could see Heisen’s muscles tensing. His face went very calm.

All in a flurry, he drove the knife up in a killer stab, she swung the case toward it, and there was a shout from behind Rebel. Reflexively, Heisen’s eyes flicked up, past her shoulder, to assess the intruder. In that second’s inattention, Rebel thrust the headfreezer forward, shoving it over the extended knife and hand. She hit the trigger. The unit grunted, an almost silent mechanical cough.

For a long instant neither Rebel nor Heisen moved.

Then Rebel jerked back the case. Its exterior was hot with transferred energy and painful to the touch. Heisen looked down. Gingerly, wonderingly, he reached out to touch his knife hand.

It shattered.

Both knife and hand fell to the deck and broke into fragments, leaving behind an arm that simply stopped halfway between elbow and wrist. Rebel’s fingers felt weak. She dropped the headfreezer. She couldn’t stopstaring at the amputated arm; it seemed to glow and swell, filling her vision. Behind her came the staccato sound of ru

Heisen came to himself then. Showing no sign of pain, he reached with his surviving hand into his cloak and removed a small black ball. “Stand clear,” he gravely advised, and threw the ball at a distant stretch of wall.

The samurai were drawing near when the wall exploded, bursting outward in a shaped gush of water and glass. One seized Rebel and pulled her back, while the other leaned forward, trying to snag Heisen with her pike. But Heisen was already leaping through the new opening. He fell out and away. Wind screamed, and some of the gushing water was thrown back in their faces. The air reeked of salt, and wet strands of kelp were everywhere. To either side of the walk, heavy safety doors slammed shut.

Rebel got one glimpse of Heisen tumbling, his cloak flapping wildly, before the darkness swallowed him.

“What a mess!” a samurai said. He kicked at a flopping fish. Wind lashed his hair.

It was all Rebel could do to keep from crying as the samurai led her away.

On the graphics window, a glittery wedding band of machinery was afloat in the vacuum. Hundreds of the Comprise crawled about its surface, anchoring and adjusting small compressed gas jets. Painstakingly they guided the ring with a thousand tiny puffs of gas, until the geodesic hung motionless at its precise center. Only now did Rebel get any feel for the ring’s size—miles across, so large that the most distant parts seemed to dwindle to nothing.

“That’s not good enough,” Wyeth said. “I want all those rooms secured, and I want it now. Understand?” He looked up as Rebel entered the lobby and gave her a wink.

Then, pitching his voice differently, “Do you have the broomsticks out yet? The winds are dying down, let’s see some action.”

The lobby was aswirl with samurai, patrols scurrying purposefully in all directions. “I was almost killed,” Rebel said. “Just a minute ago.”

“Yes, I know. When you got lost I sent some limpets around the outside of the sheraton. Caught the last few minutes of your confrontation. That should never have happened. As soon as I get things squared away, heads will roll. There’s no excuse for that kind of security foul-up.”

Red warning lights blinked on across the length of the transit ring. As one, the Comprise kicked free of the machinery, leaping inward in acrobatic unison, like a swirl of orange flower blossoms seen through a kaleidoscope. By tens and scores they linked hands and were snagged by swooping jitneys. Wandering up out of nowhere, hands deep in pockets, Constance said, “That’s really quite lovely. It’s like a dance.”

Wyeth didn’t look up. “Not quite so lovely when you consider why they’re so perfectly coordinated.”

She blinked. “Oh, quite the contrary. When you think of the complex shapes their thoughts take, the mental structures too wide and large to be held by any one mind…

Well, that’s cause for humility, isn’t it?” Then, when Wyeth said nothing, “The Comprise is a full evolutionary step up on us, biologically speaking. It’s like… a hive organism, you see? Like the Portuguese man-of-war, where hundreds of minute organisms go into making up one large creature several orders of magnitude more highly structured than any of its components.”

“I’d say they were an evolutionary step down. Where human thought creates at least one personality per body, the Comprise has subsumed all its personalities into one self. On Earth, some four billion individuals have beensacrificed to make way for one large, nebulous mind.

That’s not enrichment, it’s impoverishment. It’s the single greatest act of destruction in human history.”

“But can’t you see the beauty of that mind? Gigantic, immensely complex, almost godlike?”

“I see the entire population of mankind’s home planet reduced to the status of a swarm of bees. A very large swarm of bees, I’ll grant you, but insects nevertheless.”

“I don’t agree.”

“So I see,” Wyeth said coldly. “I will keep that in mind, madam.” The ru

They’ve armed their explosives.”

Constance looked confused. “What’s that? Explosives?

What in life for?”

The jitneys slowly converged on the geodesic. Ahead of them a gang of spacejacks was fitting an airlock. They welded it through the metal skin, yanking open the exterior iris just as the first transport drifted up. Then they popped the jitney’s drive and replaced it with a compressed air jet system. “They’re about to enter the geodesic, sir,” a samurai said.

“God help you if a single one of the Comprise isn’t accounted for when they reach the sheraton,” Wyeth said darkly. Then, to Constance, “The Comprise doesn’t want us snooping through their technology, Ms. Moorfields. So of course they’ll have programmed the ring to self-destruct if we try anything. And since they have, and since the helium in the ring is only rented, we won’t.”

The jitney eased into the interior atmosphere. It was crammed full and covered over with orange-suited Comprise; they clung three deep to its outside. The pilot hit the jets and it moved toward the sheraton.

“I don’t understand this mutual suspicion,” Constance said. “So mankind has split into two species. Give us timeand there’ll be a dozen, a hundred, a thousand! Space is big enough for everyone, I should think, Mr. Wyeth.”