Vacumn Flowers

That night, Rebel fell asleep after making love, and dreamed that she was walking the empty corridors of some ancient manor. It was cold, and there was the scent of lilacs in the air. A breeze stirred her hair, passed chill hands over her thighs and abdomen. She came face to face with an ornate Victorian mirror. The gravity was half again Greenwich normal, pulling down her flesh, making her face look old and gaunt. She wonderingly reached out a hand to the mirror.

Her reflection’s hand broke through the liquid surface of the mirror and seized her wrist.

Rebel tried to pull away, but the grip was unbreakable.

Long red nails dug painfully into her flesh. In the mirror Eucrasia showed her teeth in a smile. She was a fat-breasted little woman, but there was muscle under that smooth brown skin. “Don’t go away, dearest. We have so much to talk about.”

“We have nothing to talk about!” Rebel’s panicked words bounced from the walls and echoed down to nothing.

Eucrasia pushed her face against the mirror’s surface, the glass bulged out by nose and lips but held together bysurface tension. Silver highlights played over her skin.

“Ah, but we do. My memories are going to overwhelm you if you don’t do something about them.” Behind her was a white room, a surgery, with trays of chromed instruments.

“Come closer, sweet love.”

She yanked Rebel forward, right up against the mirror.

Their nipples touched, kissed at the surface. “I want to help you,” Eucrasia whispered. “Look at me.” For the first time, Rebel looked into the woman’s eyes. There was nothing in the sockets but an empty space where the eyes should have been. She could see through them to the back of Eucrasia’s skull. “You see? I have no self. No desires.

How can I intend you harm?”

“I don’t know.” Rebel began to cry. “Let me go.”

“There are only two ways you can survive. The first is to have me recreated as a secondary persona. You’d be like Wyeth, then. You’d have to share your life, but the memories would all be shunted over to the Eucrasia persona. You could remain intact.” The reflection shifted to one side, and Rebel was forced to move with it. “The second alternative is to make a complete recording of your persona. Then you could reprogram yourself every few weeks. This is less desirable, because it precludes any chance of personal growth.” Their stomachs touched now.

Eucrasia placed her lips on Rebel’s. “Well?” she asked.

“Which will it be?”

“Neither!”

The reflection reached out and yanked Rebel’s head into the mirror. Quicksilver closed about her. It was like being underwater, and Rebel couldn’t breathe. “Then your personality will dissolve,” Eucrasia said. “Slowly at first, and then more quickly. You’ll be gone within a month.”

Rebel choked, and awoke.

“Wake up,” Wyeth said. He was holding her. “You’re having a nightmare.” Then, seeing her eyes open, “It was only a dream.”

“Jesus,” Rebel said. She buried her face in his chest and cried.

When she finally stopped, Wyeth released her and she sat up. She looked about dazedly. Wyeth had apparently been up for some time, thinking his own thoughts, for the walls had been turned on. A starscape, piped in from outside, glowed in the night. “Look,” Wyeth said. He pointed to a fuzzy patch almost overhead. “That’s Eros Kluster. The asteroid is invisible from here, and what we’re seeing is the attenusphere—the waste gases from the factories and refineries, the oxygen lost whenever an airlock opens, fine matter from reaction jets. It surrounds the Kluster, and the solar wind ionizes it, like the gas in a comet’s tail. Assuming the comet is unplanted, of course.”

He pointed out more smudges, all in the plane of the ecliptic. “There’s Pallas Kluster, Ceres Kluster, Juno Kluster, Vesta…” He sang off the names in a gentle litany.

“Civilization is spreading. Someday there’ll be major developments everywhere in the asteroid belts. Those hazy patches will link then, into one enormous smoke ring around the sun. That would be something to see, hey?”

“Yes,” Rebel said in a little voice.

“Feel up to talking about it yet?”

So she told him her dream. When she was done, Wyeth said, “Well, there’s your mysterious pursuer.” She frowned. “Back in the orchid, you thought someone was following you? Eucrasia. The memories are rising up, and you’re projecting them into the exterior world.”

“That may be so,” Rebel said. “But knowing it doesn’t do me any good.”

“You really have only two choices,” Wyeth said softly.

“Your dream spelled them out for you. You were a topnotch wetprogrammer, and your diagnosis is sound.

Listen, you want my advice? Take Eucrasia in with you. I knew her, she’s not such a bad sort. You can live with her.”

“I won’t do it,” Rebel said. “I won’t let anyone touch my mind, I… I just won’t, is all.”

Wyeth turned away. There was tension in the muscles of his back. After a very long time, Rebel touched his shoulder, and he turned back abruptly, almost violently.

“Why are you being so stubborn?” he cried. “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” Rebel admitted. “It’s just the way I am, I guess.”

7

BILLY DEFECTOR

Rebel woke to an empty bed. She breakfasted and went in search of Wyeth. A pierrot directed her through a rock garden and around a kitchen, and a samurai sent her past the orgy pits and down a ramp. She came to a bottom ring room where three holographic wetware diagrams spun slowly in the air. Rebel saw that they were morphs of the same personality. Judging by the sickliness of the main branches and twisted distribution of the lesser limbs, it was a very badly damaged persona indeed.

The Comprise child sat beneath the rotating green spheres. He hadn’t slept. His face was puffy, his eyes glazed. His orange skin was blotchy with grey patches.

“What’s your name?” Wyeth asked. “Do you have a name?”

The boy shook his head. “I… uh, what?” Wyeth repeated the question, and without raising his eyes, the child said,

“B-Billy. Billy B-Be…” His voice stuttered to a halt.

Wyeth gri

“He’s not going to thank you for doing this to him.”

“Shut up, Constance. Now, Billy, do you remember being a part of the Comprise? Do you remember what it was like?”

Billy’s head jerked up, eyes fearful. His hands twisted in his lap. Then he looked down again and mumbled, “I…

yes.”

“Good. Do you remember the briefing you got before coming here?” Billy said nothing. “Do you remember your instructions?”

Samurai parted for Rebel, and she slipped into the room. Her guard stayed outside. Freeboy glanced at her quickly from one corner, then away. His lips were thin, and he stared rigidly unblinking at Constance. Rebel walked over to him and whispered, “What happened to the kid’s face?”

“What? The blotches? We injected a phage under the skin to neutralize his dye; it takes a few days to flush it out of the system. Itches some, too. But since he’s not Comprise anymore, your boss doesn’t want him marked as one.”

“I thought your apple was supposed to deprogram itself.”

Freeboy curled his lip. Without looking at her he said pedantically, “For a normal psyche, a Billy Bejesus is a harmless, ego-intensive shyapple that leaves nothing behind but memories. But the Comprise have only embryonic egos—even the memory of having a strong personal identity is damaging to them. Changes the creatures drastically.”

“Shock imprint syndrome,” Rebel said, Eucrasia’s memories coming to her effortlessly. “Yes, of course.”

At the sound of her voice, Wyeth turned. “Sunshine!

Just the person I wanted to see. It seems you and I are the closest things to competent wetprogrammers we have.” He snapped open a thin white case and ran a finger down oneline of wetwafers. Hundreds of codified character traits, skills, compulsions and professions rippled under his touch. “I’d expected to just program up some experts. But it seems the regulations have changed in the last few years. Wetprogramming ware is very tightly controlled now. Beautiful, hey? None of the other professions are protected like that.”