Vacumn Flowers

“Mr. Wyeth, you are being disgusting.” Constance turned away.

“Don’t be like that,” Wyeth said in his whimsical voice.

“Here, have an apple. Nice and crunchy.” He placed something in her hand.

“An apple?” Constance looked down at the shyapple and dropped it, horrified. “Where did that come from?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. This is an example of your mind art biotechnology, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but…” She tightened her lips. “Hook me into your intercom system.” One of the Comprise stepped forward and, stooping, reached for the fallen shyapple. Wyeth stepped on the woman’s hand, hard, and she jerked it back.

“We were curious,” the Comprise said mildly. Several new lines of interaction co

“So what?” Wyeth gestured to the samurai. “Keep the Comprise on their side of the stream. And open up a cha

A moment later, Freeboy’s image appeared, and Constance shook the shyapple at him. “Freeboy, you’re the only one who’s been working with directed viruses. Is this your doing?”

“Aw, hell,” Freeboy said. “It’s just pocket money.”

“You never mentioned this skill to me.”

“It’s not a skill. It’s only cookbook stuff. I got the recipe from a wizard in Green City, when I was in Tirna

Constance’s face was cold and white. The boy spread his hands, his shoulders hunching slightly. “Hey, it’s only a Billy Bejesus—eight hours’ looniness, and it deprograms itself. It’s not like I was hurting anybody. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Like hell you didn’t, young man.”

While the young treehanger was being dressed down, Rebel saw an odd thing: The Comprise, who had been moving about seemingly randomly, had all simultaneously arrived at the water’s edge. The samurai guarding them shifted uneasily. They stared across the water, orange faces blank, eyes unblinking. The electromagnetic interactions increased, lines blinking on and off like laser strobes. For a long moment, no one moved.

Then the Comprise jumped, individual componentsru

In that instant’s confusion, a small orange figure darted across the stream. The guards’ eyes had been drawn one way and another, and he leaped through a blind spot. All in a flash, he was at Constance’s side, reached up, and snatched the shyapple from her hands. Before anyone could react, he was back among the Comprise. “That was a child!” Rebel said.

“Catch him!” Wyeth commanded, and three samurai leaped the stream. As they converged on the child, he crammed the fruit in his mouth and swallowed. One snatched him up and carried him back, the others defending. But the Comprise offered no resistance. They turned away, again as aimless as so many cattle. Still, red interaction lines co

“Too late,” Wyeth said when the samurai placed the boy before him. “He’s already swallowed it.”

“But this is a child,” Rebel repeated.

“This is the body of a child. Comprise engineering teams always include a few children for tasks where a bigger body would just be in the way.”

“But that’s awful.”

“I agree.” Wyeth smiled at Constance. “How about you?

Still feel that there’s no crime in five billion human minds with only one single identity among them?”

“We must be careful not to anthropomorphize,”

Constance said weakly. She looked pale.

“Very well put.” Wyeth turned to the child Comprise.

“Why did you do it?”

“We were curious,” the boy said. “We wished to know whether this new technology might prove useful to us. Inthat sense—in that we are always eager for new information, new ideas, new directions of thought—we are indeed the spies you accuse us of being. But only in that one sense of being true to our nature.”

“You see?” Constance said.

“More importantly, it distresses us to be separated from the true Comprise.” Rebel couldn’t see the child’s face now for the blaze of red interaction lines touching the skin over his buried recte

“You might say that we were bored.”

Wyeth turned to Freeboy’s image. “How long does your drug take to hit?”

Freeboy shrugged. “Not long. A minute or two. There are receptor enhancers in the shyapple matrix. Tell you, though, maybe this isn’t really a good idea. Those apples are adult dosages. I don’t know what they’ll do to a kid.

This one looks like he has low body mass.”

Constance reached for the boy, and a samurai batted her hand away. “But there’s still time. If I stick a finger down his throat…”

“Now, now,” Wyeth chided. “Mustn’t anthropomorphize. Let’s just wait and see. This might be interesting.”

The boy stood still between his guard of samurai.

Suddenly he stiffened. His eyes opened wide. “Oh,” he said. One hand rose before his face and writhed spasmodically. “I think—”

The child screamed.

The lawyers arrived while the Comprise were still thrashing on the ground. Four samurai held the boy’s limbs, and Constance knelt beside him. The directionalbeams flicked on and off, lashing blindly through the air like the frenzied legs and ante

“I wonder why it worked so well?” Wyeth murmured thoughtfully to himselves. “They’ve got defenses against intrusive wetprogramming. This must be something new.

This must be an entirely different approach.”

“Hold still, dear. If I can get you to throw up, you’ll feel better,” Constance said.

The boy twisted his head away from her. “I,” he said. “I saw the moon I saw a tree I saw the moon caught in a tree I saw a tree caught in the moon.” His eyes were wide as saucers; they quivered slightly in time to some i

“I saw a peacock with a fiery tail, I saw a blazing comet drop down hail, I saw a cloud—”

“Take him to the surgery,” Wyeth ordered. “Do what you can to ease his discomfort, but get the radio implants inside him deactivated before he regains his senses. I don’t want him reco

“You can’t do that,” Constance objected. “He’s a part of the Comprise. That’s where he belongs.”

“Well?” Wyeth asked the lawyers. “Can I do that or not?”

The lawyer in yellowface chewed his lower lip. “It’s a difficult point.”

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” the lawyer in purple said, “then it’s a duck. This individual looks human and uses the first-person singular.

Therefore he’s human, not Comprise.”

“Thank you,” Wyeth said. He gestured at Freeboy’s image. “This joker’s been dealing dangerous hallucinogens out in the orchid. What can I get him for?”

“Nothing,” the purple lawyer said. “There’s no law against giving people the opportunity to hurt themselves.”

“We-ell now, there is the question of presumed societal consent,” Yellow said. “Consensus-altering drugs would come under the foreseeable cultural change clauses of—”

“Good,” Wyeth said. “I sentence you to status of programmed informant for the duration of transit. Stay where you are. The programmers will come for you.”

Freeboy looked stricken. “You’ll be attached to Moorfields here. Observe her, and report to me at this hour of every day.” He turned to Rebel and offered his arm. “I think we’ve done enough, don’t you? Shall we go?”