Vacumn Flowers

“Well, the shyapple is just a matrix. It’s the worm that’s altered according to what effects are desired. It’s…

injected with a virus that… When the shyapple’s center liquifies, the virus undergoes explosive growth and…” She faltered to a stop. “No. It’s gone now. I used to know, but it’s all gone.” And yet it was—she sensed—vitally important in some way.

“I never heard of them before.” Wyeth held a shyapple to his eyes, admiring the translucent skin, the candy-red shimmer, its full-to-bursting juiciness. “Where did they come from, I wonder? Why did they show up here all of a sudden?”

Rebel shook her head helplessly.

“You’ve got what? Three crates there?” Billy Bejesus’s grin was luminescent. “I’ll take them all. Treece. Arrange the details and see that these things are taken back to the sheraton.”

They floated on. Rebel lingered at a jewelry display, examining a tray of religious pins: stars, crosses, swastikas, and the like. She bought a white scallop shell and pi

“Good thinking. Though if I were you, I’d find out what your pin stands for. Might save you an embarrassing conversation somewhere down the line.”

They were floating hand in hand before an enormous mesh sphere, watching the cockfights, when Wyeth said in his leader voice, “Crap. Come on. We’ve got to get back tothe sheraton.” He tugged Rebel toward the gate. Their bodyguard materialized around them.

“What’s the trouble?” Rebel asked.

“Constance is talking with the Comprise.”

All the way back to the sheraton, Rebel’d had the uneasy feeling that someone was following her, a shadowy presence flitting through the leaves and vines that was never there when she looked back over her shoulder, but returned the instant she looked away. Here, in the bright-lit rooms of the complex, that sense faded but did not go entirely away. There was somebody outside coming for her.

“Heisen’s body was never found,” Wyeth said when she mentioned this to him. “He very well could be coming for you. That’s half the reason I’ve assigned you a permanent guard.”

“What’s the other half?”

“We’re going in to deal with them now.” He slipped a bracelet from his wrist, one of a pair of thick ivory bands lined with silver. “Here. Put this on. It monitors the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Samurai stepped aside as Wyeth slammed through the doors to the center ring’s main conference room. There, under a holographic sky, Constance sat on the edge of a red lacquered bridge. She was dabbing her feet in the goldfish stream. Several Comprise stood by, listening to her talk. Scattered among the topiary bushes were her team with the tools of their trade—fermenters, chimeric sequence splicers, microbial bioreactors and the like—demonstrating lab techniques while Comprise in identical coveralls clustered about them, like patches of orange mist. Wyeth’s face hardened into granite slabs.

“All right, Moorfields!”

Constance leaped to her feet. “Oh!” She blinked. “Youstartled me, Mr. Wyeth.”

“I’ll do worse than that to you.” Wyeth glowered at her from the bank. “Just what do you think you’re doing? Why have you moved your lab and people from the third ring?”

“Well, I had to. I wanted to chat with the Comprise, and I was told there was some silly rule against their leaving the central ring.”

Some hundred Comprise dotted the room. Several drifted over, into a loose semicircle about Wyeth and Rebel, studying them gravely but saying nothing. “Clear the treehangers out,” Wyeth ordered. Samurai moved in and started escorting the bioengineers away. “Have two people programmed legal, one Londongrad and one People’s Mars, and send them here.” To Constance,

“You’ll find that Kluster law is extremely legalistic, and People’s law is informal and rational. Between them, I expect that if you step out of line again, I can hang you for treason.”

“Treason! Surely you’re joking.”

“I am very serious.”

Constance shook her head, clasped her hands, let them fall. “But we were just exchanging scientific information.”

“Oh? What information did they give you?”

“We were on the preliminaries, just swapping basics.

Talking shop. You know.”

“I know very well.” Wyeth’s hands were clenched and white. “Use your head! Your gang was swapping detailed bioscientific chitchat with a team of Comprise that is ostensibly here as engineers and physicists. How did they know the jargon? How did they happen to know enough of the biosciences to understand what you were talking about?”

“Well, Earth is, after all, a planet. They have the largest set of interlocking ecologies in the I

Embarrassed, Rebel shifted her gaze out the window wall. She saw tiny motes of light shifting through the orchid; people were astir out there. Doubtless the tanks were emptying out as people moved into the plant. But looking away couldn’t keep her from overhearing the argument.

“That’s nonsense! They know because they’re spies, that’s why. Before they left Earth they were systematically crammed with the basics of every corner of science, in the hope they’d stumble across something useful. Ms.

Moorfields, look at them! They are not human, they’re not friendly, and they’re not altruistic. They’ll take whatever technology you’ve got and then use it against your own race. You’re selling humanity down the tubes—and for what?”

Unexpectedly, a Comprise said, “She wants the technology to build a transit ring.”

Constance started. “I didn’t tell them that!”

“The Comprise is very quick on the uptake,” Wyeth said sardonically. He asked the Comprise, “Why did she want that information?”

“The desire for private gain is a common failing of individual intelligence.”

“That’s not it at all!” Constance cried. “It would open up the stars. Can’t you see?” She appealed directly to Wyeth.

“It could be used to accelerate comets beyond the Oort Cloud, toward the nearer stars. The closest could be reached within the span of one long lifetime—they gave me the figures! Imagine thousands of dyson worlds drifting from star to star. Expanding into the universe. Imagine an age of exploration and discovery.” Her voice was fervent, almost devout, and Rebel found herself responding to it as she might to a farbranch revivalist prophet. “Imagine mankind finally freed from the cradle of the sun and wandering the starry galaxies in search of… I don’t know.

Truth, maybe? Destiny! All the final answers!”

Before Wyeth could reply, the Comprise said, “Do not trouble yourself, Boss Wyeth. She has nothing we desire.”

“That’s not true. You told me…” But the Comprise had wandered off. Almost pleading, she said, “They told me they were interested in the mind arts. We know a great deal about them.”

“You yourself?” Wyeth asked. “One of your people?”

“Well, no. It’s all new technology. The breakthroughs are being made, but the skills aren’t widespread yet.”

“And yet you’re all biologists. Isn’t it a coincidence then that a Comprise of engineers are up on the mind arts, while your own people know zilch? I’d say you’ve just proven that your friends here are indeed spies.” Wyeth casually touched a bracelet on his wrist and crooked an eyebrow at Rebel. She touched the bracelet he had given her.

The world was transformed. Electricity glowed white from wires hidden in the walls. Heat shimmered green.

Cobalt particles sleeted through the room, cosmic radiation to which matter was as insubstantial as a dream.

A red haze of radiocommunication surrounded the now-green figures of the Comprise, and laser-crisp directional beams reached from individual to individual, shifting as thoughts were divided and routed for processing. Rebel blinked, and it all disappeared for an instant. She looked down at the bracelet and saw the blazing circuits of a holographic projector. One of Wyeth’s spy devices.