Vacumn Flowers

Gravity sex was nice. You didn’t have to keep track of where you were, constantly shifting handholds; half the work was done for you. Then too, there was that good, solid weight atop her. It had a satisfying feel.

She was moving through passion now to a far, detached calm, a lofty mental landscape where her thoughts were wordless and as crystalline clear as cold mountain air.

Here, where her body’s sensations were a pleasant background murmur, she felt at peace with herself. She felt simple and uncomplicated. It was easy to look within herself and search out the nameless discontent that had been gnawing at her for some time, the hidden poison that she could not isolate in the crowded babble of normal thought.

Everybody wanted something from her. That was a part of it. Deutsche Nakasone wanted her persona, and Jerzy Heisen wanted her death. Snow and the rest of her network wanted to record her persona as well. And Wyeth wanted to use her as bait to snare and destroy Snow’s network. According to him, they were all traitors, humans who had sold out to the Comprise and served the interestsof Earth. It made sense when you considered how deeply they were sunk into the experience of machine communion, that they should wish to be part of the ultimate merger of mind into machine. But in all this welter of desires, it was Wyeth who bothered her most. He was using her. For some reason that troubled her even more than the assassination attempt did.

Maxwell was moving faster now, losing rhythm as he approached orgasm. But the answer was already in Rebel’s grip. She might not want to look at it, but there it was.

The fact was that it was not Maxwell she wanted inside her. It was Wyeth she wanted, and not just for a few sweaty hours on the quilt. She was falling for the man, alien four-faceted mind and all, and while it was a stupid thing to do—what kind of future could there possibly be with him?—her emotions were unreasoning and absolute.

And who was there to complain to?

Maxwell arched his back, squeezing shut his eyes, and screamed soundlessly. Almost absently, Rebel reached out and squeezed his cheeks, digging her nails in good and hard. The paper birds were all on the floor.

Then Maxwell was lying beside her, sweaty and gasping.

For the longest time they said nothing. Then she sent Maxwell out for food, and he returned with biscuits, slices of fried yam, and oranges from the trees in the hall. By the time they were done eating, he was interested again.

“Wa

“I suppose so.”

Then she was alone with her thoughts again. In love with Wyeth. What a mess. What a fucking mess.

6

ORCHID

When the sheraton’s lights greenshifted from blue-tinged evening to yellowish dawn, Rebel kicked Maxwell out and went to meet Wyeth.

Trailed by a bodyguard of five samurai, they rode broomsticks into the geodesic. With her hair and cloak streaming behind, she felt like an Elizabethan lady riding to the hawks with her retinue, an illusion heightened by the scout cameras that soared at a distance, feeding information back to the guard. Except that the compressed air tanks chilled down as they were used, and after a while the saddle grew unpleasantly cold.

They rode by the outlying strands of orchid, where tangles of air roots held obsidian globes of water larger than her head, and, slowing, headed into the plant. The stalks grew closer together as they flew into the epiphyte’s labyrinthine folds. It had blossomed and the huge bioluminescent flowers shed gentle fairy light through the darkness. This was a vague light, not like the full bloom of luciferous algae back home, but more like the periodic night seasons when the algae died back. At last they came to a large clearing deep within the plant and brought their broomsticks to a halt. “You won’t consider martial arts programming?” Wyeth asked. “Very simple. It’d take maybe five minutes, with minimal personality change.”

“No. I don’t want anyone screwing with my mind.”

He sighed. “Well, you’ve got to be able to defend yourself. So we’ll have to reprogram you the old-fashioned way, with an instructor and lots of practice. Same results, just takes a lot more time and sweat. Treece.” A thick little troll of a samurai slipped from his broomstick and floated beside it, one hand touching the saddle. He had a dark face and a froggish mouth. “Teach her.”

Treece unlashed two singlesticks from his back and offered one to Rebel. She dismounted and accepted it.

They both tied cloaks to saddles and kicked their vehiclesaway. “Good. Now take a whack at me.”

Rebel eyed the swart little man, shrugged, and lashed out fast and hard, flinging back her opposing arm to control her drift. She was not at all surprised to see Treece slip out from under her blow—he was, after all, the instructor—but she was amazed when he slammed the back of her stick with his own, and the added energy set her tumbling end over end. “First lesson,” Treece said.

“You’re going around and around one little point in your body, something like an axis. That’s your center of mass.”

“I know that!” Rebel said angrily, wishing Wyeth weren’t watching her. She concentrated on not getting dizzy. “I grew up weightless.”

“I grew up in gravity. Does me no good against somebody programmed judo.” He let her spin. “Now the center of mass is very important. First off, you set somebody spi

“Second, you’re going to want to remember to strike at the center of mass.” He poked at her with the tip of his staff.

“Try it yourself. Move around all you like. What’s the one point of your body you can’t move when you’re afloat? It’s your center of mass. It just stays there.” He jabbed at her again. “Now. Move away from this.”

All in a flash, Rebel slammed her singlestick forward, two-handing it against his weapon with a crack that made her palms smart. Reaction threw her over his head, and on the way by she took a swipe at his skull. Treece brought his stick up for a parry and hook that brought them back to stable positions. “Absolutely right,” he said. “When you’re afloat, all serious movement is borrowed from your opponent.”

The samurai all floated in a plane, honoring a consensushorizon. Treece wheeled upside down, leering at her. “So touching your opponent is both the source of opportunity and your greatest danger. Take my hand.” Rebel reached out, and instantly he had seized her wrist, climbed her arm, and taken her throat between stick and forearm. “I could snap your neck like this. Once you’ve been touched, you’re vulnerable. But you can’t accomplish a damned thing without touching your opponent.” He moved away, gri

Wyeth had been leaning back in his saddle, eyes closed, directing his pocket empire via a transceiver equipped with an adhesion disk. Now he opened his eyes and said,

“That’s as nice a paradigm for political maneuvering as I’ve ever heard.”

Rebel started to respond and almost didn’t hear her instructor’s stick whistling toward her in time to parry.

“No small talk!” Treece snapped. “We’re done with talk now anyway. No more theory, no more gab, just dull, repetitive exercise. Rest of today and every day until you get it right, is nothing but sweat.”

A long time later, he looked disgusted and spat into the orchid. “Enough. Same time tomorrow.”

Samurai brought up their broomsticks. Rebel felt exhausted, but pleasantly so. Aware of her every muscle.

Luckily, Eucrasia had kept her body in good shape.