Vacumn Flowers

“Go!” Treece shouted, and Rebel got her hands back on the broomstick and kicked the jet nozzles wide open.

They screamed away. “Where are we going?” she yelled over her shoulder.

Treece brought his broomstick up alongside hers. Now that they were out of danger, he was impassive again.

“Anywhere you like, so long as it’s not the sheraton. Or the tank towns. Security is a problem there. This is a rigged fight, even if the Comprise doesn’t know it yet. All we have to do is lay low for a few hours, and it’ll be safe to go back home.”

They cruised the orchid’s edge, Rebel slowly killing speed with short bursts of retro, until they were moving at a crawl. Up ahead, Rebel saw a white rag tied to a stalk.

“Look there. What’s that for, do you think?”

Treece shrugged.

Coming to a stop, Rebel peered into the tangles of orchid. She saw another white rag tied further in. Between rags, several stalks looked frayed, as if they had served as common kickstops. The ghost of a memory from her life in Tirna

His braid stuck straight out. She held it against his skull and wondered how old he was. Seven? Nine? Not that it mattered. “How are you doing, Billy?”

The boy shook his head.

They drifted deeper into the orchid, the light dimming as blossoms grew rarer. Roots and stalks grew thicker here, and more tangled. Rebel had to dismount. She put Billy into the saddle and towed the broomstick behind her. He peered about silently. She tugged the broomstick deeper into the vines, finding handholds and grabspots, and always following the rags. It was almost like a tu

“This would be the perfect spot for an ambush,” he said.

A woman laughed. Not a friendly laugh. “Too true,” she said from the gloom. “So state your business. What do you want with the village? You mean us harm or not?”

Treece gestured Rebel back, then put his hands on his hips. “You see this woman, this child? You try to hurt them—you die. Anybody else tries to hurt them dies too.”

Silence. “But so long as you don’t hurt them, we intend no evil. We’re only looking for someplace to spend a few quiet hours. If you let us pass, we’ll go on. Otherwise, we’ll turn back now.”

A woman floated forward, materializing from gloom and tangled root. She held a rifle. “Fair enough,” she said.

“Pass. Just remember, there’s only the one path, and you have to come by me again on your way out. Behave yourselves.” She was gone.

The village was a handful of stick huts around a central clearing, something like a larger version of the courts in Tank Fourteen. But the huts here were loosely woven frames with wide stretches of orchid between, like a scatter of wicker boxes discarded in the weeds. As they paused at the edge of the clearing, several people peered from their huts with frank curiosity.

Rebel’s broomstick bobbed, and she turned to see Billy slip from the saddle. He darted to a hut where a man sat cross-legged in the doorway, a small pot of luminous ink before him. He had a scholar’s facepaint and was carefully drawing a long line on a rectangle of parchment.

The child approached the drawing slowly, as if hypnotized, the long, glowing line doubly reflected in his unblinking eyes.

The scholar raised his head. Shadows pooled under his brows. “You like it?” He lifted the brush from the end ofthe line and dipped it into the inkpot. “It’s a pun.” With quick dabs he drew an ideogram on a leaf, held it up for inspection. “You see that? That’s my name—Ma. It means horse. My name is Ma Fu-ya. What’s yours?”

“Billy,” the child answered without hesitation.

“Well, Billy, you see this line I just drew? I want you to imagine that it’s the same as this line here”—the brush touched one line of the leaf ideogram—“only stretched long and warped out of shape. You see? Then this next line runs along one foreleg.” Quickly, surely, he drew the other lines, and together they made a horse. “You see?”

The child laughed and clapped his hands.

“He seems to like you,” Rebel said.

The scholar laid his brush in the air before him. “He’s a nice kid. Welcome to our village. We haven’t gotten around to naming it. If you’re staying, I advise you not to build too far from the clearing; one man did that already and lost his hut before he thought to mark the trail. Other than that, there’s plenty of room.”

The air was fragrant here. The village had been built within a local cluster of blossoms, and the light was soft and pervasive. Rebel liked it. It could have used a little more life. Butterflies at least. A few lizards, a squirrel, perhaps a tree squid. But other than that, it was pleasant here, sheltered within the orchid. “Maybe I will build a hut,” she said. “I could spend my free time here. Who should I talk to about rent? Who’s your king here?”

“There are no kings here,” Fu-ya said. Billy tugged at his cloak, and the scholar handed him brush and paint. From the hut behind him, he drew a piece of paper. “Here, have fun.”

“No kings?” Treece said, puzzled. “Then who owns all this?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps no one. Perhaps the man in the wheel.” He spread his hands. “You see, when peoplerealized they could build here, they didn’t stop to worry about legalities. They just packed up and moved in.”

One of Fu-ya’s neighbors came up with a sphere of fresh-brewed tea and a handful of drinking syringes.

Scowling, Treece took one and said, “Why? Why burrow so deep in the orchid? Why post a guard by the trail?”

“Defense is simple here,” the neighbor said. “One guard can hold off a dozen attackers. If more came, we could just untie the rags from the path—they’d never find their way in. Or if that didn’t work… we’d all scatter, I guess. That’d be the end of the village, but there’s others out there. Lots of room to build another, for that matter.”

“No, no,” Fu-ya said to Billy. “You want to hold the brush upright, between thumb and forefinger. There, you see?

That way you won’t smudge.”

“Who are you expecting to attack you?” Treece said testily.

Another neighbor had come up, a large bony woman who seemed all knees and elbows whenever she moved.

She said, “You’re not from the tanks, then? No, I can see you’re not. Well, the gang wars are heating up. It’s fu

You live in the tanks, you think: what did the police ever do for me? Beat you up, smash your teeth, catch you up in their raids. But now, with no police, there’s nothing to stop the gangs but each other. So they try to spread out. People were getting snatched up and reprogrammed all over the place. You don’t watch out, you find yourself being rude girl for some hoodlum you never even heard of before.

Only now, you’re willing to die for him. Very bad.

Especially now that everybody has these rifles; have you seen them? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Everybody?” Treece said. “I noticed your guard had one. She shouldn’t. Those are supposed to be restricted to programmed samurai.”

The villagers laughed. There were some eight people sitting about by now. “There must be a hundred rifles inthe tanks,” Fu-ya explained. “Maybe even two hundred.

It’s a very bad problem.” He had seated Billy in his lap.

Now he looked down and said, “Hey, look at that. That is very good.”

Billy Defector did not look up. He was drawing circuits on the paper, long glowing lines and intersections like cool rivers of light, straight and pure and enigmatic.