Vacumn Flowers

“No.”

“A pity. I remember a time when you were not so scornful of scientific endeavor.”

“I was young then.”

“Wait,” Rebel said impulsively. “I’d like to see what you’ve done.” Wyeth turned to her, astonished.

“Well! An original thought—you charm me, Ms.

Mudlark. I will deny you nothing.” Wismon extended his arms and the cat women stood under them, each stretching a supporting arm across the immensity of his back. “Where’s my zookeeper? Call him to me.”

A sullen rude boy ducked into an archway. A moment later he returned, followed by a young man painted for wetware research.

“Maxwell!” Rebel cried.

“I knew you’d have a spy in my organization,” Wyeth said with a touch of sadness. “Did you buy him or just reprogram him?”

“Oh, I assure you he acted not for any ignoble reasons, but purely out of love. You do love me, don’t you, Maxie?”

Maxwell nodded eagerly, face rapt. His expression was at once so ardent and so familiar that Rebel had to look away. “Lead us to your charges,” Wismon said. “I grow bored.”

The party floated out of the court. Maxwell led, followed by Wismon and his cat women. They eased him along with feather-light kicks and grabs against the walls and ropes.

Rebel and Wyeth came next, escorted by a guard of rude boys. They came to a confluence of passages and halted.

“What shall I show you? I’ve arranged my creations by type. Would you care to go down the tu

They said nothing, and Wismon flapped a bloated pink hand at one passage. “We’ll go the way of delusion, then. Ihave something I’m especially eager for my dear mentor to see.”

They went up the red rope to a nondescript court. At a word from Wismon, Maxwell led them within. It was quiet there. A man sat in the doorway of his hutch, eyes downcast as if lost in thought. He was hooked into a small transcorder unit. “Cousin!” Wismon cried. “Sam Pepys!”

The man scrambled to his feet, bracing himself within the frame. “My Lord!” he said. “You do me honor, coming to Seething Lane.” He swept a hand at an imaginary table.

“I was just now working on your accounts.”

To Wyeth, the fat man said, “Samuel Pepys was a clerk of the British navy on Earth in the seventeenth century. A

ludicrous little man, but able enough in his way. A bit of a diarist. The transcorder feeds him a wafer of background sensation. His only co

The man smiled gravely and bowed, obviously pleased.

“Your Lordship gives me too great a credit. Will you stay to dine? Mr. Spong has sent over a barrel of pickled oysters, I’ll have the girl fetch it. Jane! Where is that lazy slut?” He looked fretfully over one shoulder, setting the transcorder leads swinging.

“It’s a simple enough delusional system,” Rebel said.

“Rich people have been known to spend good money for two weeks of that kind of delusion. I’ve arranged for a few such vacations myself.” That had been during Eucrasia’s internship, she recalled. It had been dull work, cookie-cutter programming, but (because legally dubious)

lucrative.

“Ah, but always under sensory deprivation, eh?

Otherwise small incongruities creep in from the real world.” A cat woman was exploring the court. She sniffed curiously at Pepys’ crotch. He didn’t notice. “Right in the middle of the battle of Thermopylae, a city ca

Pepys frowned. “Brontosauri, my Lord? The… ah, large, ancient lizards, you mean?”

“Aye, Samuel, three in Whitechapel alone, and two more by the ’Change. Down by Saint Paul’s the streets are filthy with their spoor. What make you of that, Cousin?”

“Why, that it will be a mightily cold winter,” Pepys said.

“The brutes never venture out in such numbers be the coming weather fair and clement.”

“I fail to see the point of this,” Wyeth said stiffly.

“Patience. Samuel, poke up the fire, would you?” Pepys obliged, seizing an imaginary poker and stirring up the logs and embers of a fireplace that was not there. The mime was so perfect that Rebel could almost see his stuffy little room and feel its monotonously heavy gravity.

Suddenly Wismon shouted, “Samuel! A coal has landed on the back of your hand. It’s burning the flesh!”

With a shriek of pain, Pepys tumbled over backwards, waving his hand. Spi

“Here, Cuz. Show me your hand.”

Pepys extended a hand trembling with pain. An angry red circle swelled on its back. Even as they watched, puss-white blisters bubbled up on the inflamed spot.

Wismon laughed. “Belief! Belief alone burned that hand.

Think on it. It rather puts some starch into the ancient notion that all we experience is illusion to begin with, doesn’t it?” He stroked the hand lovingly, breaking theblisters. “But Samuel doesn’t perceive our illusions, only those that are pumped into him. All that stands between him and reality is one thin wafer of electronic London.

Let’s see what happens when we remove that final veil.”

Maxwell held up the transcorder for Wismon, who daintily took the wafer’s pull-ring between thumb and forefinger. “Samuel?”

“My Lord?”

“Tell me what you see.” He yanked the wafer.

Pepys stiffened, and his eyes jerked open wide.

Unblinking, they focused on infinity. “The walls! The walls fade like smoke! I can see through ceiling, rooms, and roof to the clouds beyond… Nay, the sky too is become pellucid and the stars stand bright and stark… But now e’en they too fade. I see…”

“What do you see, Sammy?”

For the longest moment Pepys was silent. Then,

“Music,” he said. “I see the music of the crystal spheres celestial.” He began to cry gently.

Wismon giggled. “Perfect madness. I could as easily have had him die. Come. This is only prologue to what I really wish to show you, dearest mentor.”

They exited, leaving Pepys afloat in the center of the court, weeping.

For half the length of the passage, Maxwell hesitated at each doorway and was waved on. Then Wismon nodded and Maxwell peeled back a sheet of tin, and they entered a courtyard. Again it had but a single inhabitant, a man. He had a bland face with an enormous beak of a nose.

Perched on a rope, he seemed some kind of ungainly bird.

As they entered, he looked up and smiled. “Hallo,” he said.

“Quite a crowd.”

“Yes, I’ve brought some friends to examine you,”

Wismon said. “You don’t mind?”

“Oh, no.”

“Question him,” Wismon commanded.

“All right,” Rebel said after a pause. “Do you know where you are?”

“This used to be Queen Lurline’s court. She’s gone now.

I’m the only one here. King Wismon is holding me as an experiment in recursive personality.” The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth.

“Do you know who you are?”

“King Wismon calls me Nose. For self-evident reasons.”

He rubbed his fleshy nose and chuckled. Rebel looked to Wyeth and shrugged. There was something askew in the man’s sourceless, irrational humor, but nothing in her or Eucrasia’s experience could explain it.

Wyeth looked thoughtful. “Let’s see. You showed me that last guy—Pepys?—to demonstrate how perfect a delusionary system you could create. So this must be a refinement on that. What is a step beyond delusion?” He snapped his fingers, glanced at Rebel. “Reality!” She caught his reference: It came from something she’d said when he was new-programmed, and she’d wanted to strip his persona down and start over again. Delusion was hard enough to deal with, she’d said, but a frivolous grasp of reality was worse. “You don’t believe that what you’re seeing is real, do you?”