Vacumn Flowers

8

DELUSION’S PASSAGE

Rebel visited Billy daily, after singlestick practice. But she quickly found that while she lived by the sheraton’s strict Greenwich time, the village ran on different, internal rhythms. People ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, kept to no external schedule. Sometimes she would find that by village time only a few languid hours had passed. Other times, days would have sped by in a frenzy of work and play, of long naps and small meals.

One day she discovered that thousands of small spider webs, no bigger than tufts of cotton, had covered the orchid about the village like mist. In the filtered white wintery light, the children played a game with a rusting air tank. A child would leap into the court and bounce off the tank, kicking it toward the far side. Then a child from that side would jump out, trying to bounce it back. One girl got stuck in the court’s center, and was loudly and derisively called out. Then the game started over again.

Gretzin sat before her hut, weaving a grass mat to replace a worn wall. Rebel greeted her, then said, “Where did all these spiders come from?”

“Where do you think they come from? The tanks,”

Gretzin said impatiently. “Lots of vermin been spreading out. You should’ve been here yesterday, there were blackflies everywhere. Clouds of them.” She put the mat aside. “Fu-ya’s sleeping. Hold on, and I’ll get your little boy.”

A minute later she returned, hauling Billy by one arm. “I don’t want to!” he cried. “I want to play!” Seeing Rebel, he started to cry.

Rebel felt an odd sadness that the boy didn’t like her. A

cold touch of failure. “Well, that’s a sign of progress,” she said to Gretzin. “His temper.” She ran a hand over his head, and the delicate fuzz of new hair tickled her palmlike static electricity. Gretzin had cut off his braid; possibly the children had been teasing him. “This won’t take long at all, Billy.”

She put him under and went to work.

An hour later she released Billy and called Gretzin over.

“There’s not a lot more for me to do. His identity is a little fragile yet, but it’ll strengthen in time. Basically, he should be able to pass for human now.”

“Pass for human, huh?” Gretzin said.

“Yes, it’s good timing, too, since we reach Mars soon. I don’t know what Wyeth will do with him then.” She covered her uneasiness about the boy’s future with a smile. “I’ll bet you’ll be glad not having to worry about him anymore.”

“Yeah. That’ll be terrific.”

Being outside the geodesic after all this time was a shock. Some free-floating spores must have adhered to the hull before it was accelerated away from Eros Kluster, for it was now covered with great mottled mats of vacuum flowers. They were everywhere, growing in tangled heaps and piles. The blossoms twisted slowly, tracking the sun.

The flowers had been scraped away from the airlock and for dozens of meters around, revealing a hull that was dull, pitted, and uneven. Scatterings of foot rings had been snap-welded across the cleared surface. Standing in a pair, Rebel felt a perfectly irrational urge to start scraping flowers. Her hands itched with it.

Wyeth stood beside her, overseeing the departure of the Comprise. Almost half a thousand coldpack units were being lashed to a single jitney frame, layer upon layer building into a crude sphere. Inside those soot-black coffins were suspended the Comprise, throats and lungs filled with crash jelly. Spacejacks swarmed about them.

“Hey, look.” Rebel touched Wyeth, pointed. Twounmarked silver suits crawled across the geodesic toward them. Among the carnival riot of personalized suits worn by the workers recruited from the tanks and orchid villages, they stood out as startlingly as a croquet ball in a case of Faberge Easter eggs.

The intercom crackled. “I can’t believe they trust you to coldpack them after what you put them through.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be checking how far through the hull the flowers have eaten?” Wyeth asked.

The silver figures pulled themselves almost to his feet, slipped into rings, and stood. “That’s what I came to report. You’ve got four inches skin at the very thi

Nothing to worry about.”

The spacejacks brought up a disposable fusion drive at the end of a kilometer-long co

“He’s as loyal as a wizard’s daughter,” Constance said dryly. An almost invisible plasma flame puffed from the engine, and the assembly started away.

Three days, Rebel thought. Two to reach Mars, be intercepted and fitted with retros by People’s Defense, decelerate, and be unpacked. One day for the Comprise to build the transit ring that would bring the geodesic’s velocity to relative zero, leaving it at rest in Mars orbit. It wouldn’t take much of a mistake for them to miss the ring entirely, crashing the project and all its people right into the side of the planet.

“They were as helpless as a vat of kitten embryos,”

Constance said. “I can’t imagine why they trusted you. I certainly wouldn’t have.”

“The Comprise is not human.” Wyeth’s mirrored visor turned toward her. “They don’t carry personal grudges.”

Constance looked away, toward the dwindling coldpack assembly, then turned back and with sudden heat said,

“I’m glad we’re parting ways at Mars!” She bent over to grab the foot rings, then pulled herself hand over hand toward the airlock. Freeboy followed.

When she was gone, Wyeth said softly, “I’m going to miss that woman.”

The next day, when Rebel reached the village she found it deserted. Spiders had shrouded the huts in white. A

woven wall, ripped from its frame, floated in a silent curl at the center of the court. “Hello?” she called.

No sound but the buzzing of flies.

All the huts were vacant, their contents largely undisturbed. A brush frozen in a bowl of hardened ink floated by Fu-ya’s door. Trailed by her two samurai, Rebel looked down all the twisty paths that had been marked out from the village to private plantations, clearings, and the like. They went a distance down the red rag trail, and then the blue, but found nothing but more empty huts.

Rebel took a long, shuddering breath. She felt her fear prowling through the orchid depths, silent and shadowy.

“Treece, what happened here?”

The second samurai offered Treece a bit of blood-stained cloth that the flies had drawn him to. Treece brushed it aside, examined a fractured wetwafer. “Press gang,” he said. “Very slick, whoever they were. Took out the guard, surrounded the village, didn’t miss anyone. Put a compulsion on them and took them all away.”

“Away?” Rebel asked. “Where away? Why?”

Treece bent the wetwafer back and forth in his blunt fingers. At last he shrugged. “Well. Let’s go tell the boss.”

“I don’t like it,” Wyeth said. “Look, none of us likes it, but it’s the only logical way to proceed.” Dice clicked andrattled obsessively in his hand. He threw them down, scooped them up. “We don’t know for sure that it’s Wismon. Let’s not kid ourselves—I haven’t had any news from the tanks in two days. Only Wismon could’ve found and silenced my spies.”

They stood in the empty lobby of the sheraton. Wyeth had dismissed all his samurai and darkened the room so he could think. The only light came from the orchids outside. “What are you arguing with yourself about?”

Rebel asked in exasperation.

“Strategy.” Wyeth rolled the dice again. “I can’t go up against Wismon in my warrior persona. He’d be able to predict my every move. The only way I can take him by surprise is to go mystic. Right?”