Vacumn Flowers

Nose kicked his feet with joy. He had to grab at the rope to keep from floating away. “Oh, this is most entertaining.

Really!”

“Nose is a prototype of the perfect citizen,” Wismon said.

“His true persona is entirely hidden from the outside world. His surface persona is a perfectly consistent game the submerged persona plays. He thinks he is dreaming.

To him, his entire past is an irrational construct that’s just come into existence. Thus, he denies continuity but is able to act within it. He will accept anything, endure anything,for none of it is real. Which leaves me free to control his dreams. No matter what happens, he is happy to obey whatever instructions he receives. Isn’t that right, Nose?”

Nose nodded happily.

“All right,” Wyeth said sourly. “I’ll ask the question you want me to ask. Why are you showing me this creature?”

“Oh, that’s the best joke of all. Nose, why don’t you tell us who you are when you’re not dreaming?”

“Should I?” Nose laughed. “Well, what does it matter?

My name is Wyeth. I was Wismon’s mentor some years ago, and now I am his enemy. That’s why I’m dreaming about him. He’s getting out of hand, I’ll have to do something about him soon. Possibly even destroy him.

Maybe this dream will show me the pattern I have to act within.”

“That was your mystic voice,” Wismon said. “Do you care to hear your other voices? I can call them up from the depths, if you like.”

“No,” Wyeth said. “No, I… no.” He was ashen pale. “This is what you have pla

“What are you two talking about?” Rebel asked. Wismon mockingly mouthed the words in perfect unison with her, but she finished the sentence anyway.

“Please try not to be so obvious, Ms. Mudlark. My mentor has just realized that what I can do to his simulation I can do to him, access to metaprogrammer or not. He can be made into whatever I choose. But the joke goes deeper than that: Perhaps this man is not my mentor at all, but merely some poor fool I’ve programmed into thinking he is. Perhaps Nose here is the true Wyeth.

Perhaps neither of them is.”

“Wyeth is Wyeth,” Rebel said coldly. “If he can’t trust his own sense of self, he can take my word for it.”

“Ah, but how does he know that you exist? After all, I control the dream.”

Nose laughed delightedly.

“What I don’t understand,” Wyeth said, “is how you’ve accomplished all this in so little time. You’re a brilliant pla

“Thus we come full circle,” Wismon said. He flicked a finger at Maxwell, who disappeared out the doorway. “You have not yet mentioned why you entered my domain in the first place, but of course you didn’t need to. You wanted to recover the child-savant you snatched from the Comprise.”

“Yes, we came for Billy.”

“You never tested him for his aptitudes. Most careless.

To me the possibilities were obvious. Are you familiar with the cant term ‘plumber’? It means someone with a natural bent for the mechanics of wetcircuitry. In this child, the instinct is squared, or even cubed. He is preternaturally talented, a superplumber, if you will. I need only describe what I want, and he can draw it up.”

Maxwell returned, leading Billy Defector by the hand.

Behind him came Fu-ya and Gretzin, and from the apprehensive looks on their faces, Rebel could tell they had been left untouched, so they could care for him.

“A thought has been germinating, mentor, for some time, and I think it has finally come to fruition,” Wismon said. Maxwell handed the child a briefcase. “Billy. Bring up that map we made of my persona.”

Billy looked to Gretzin, and she nodded. He touched the briefcase’s surface, and an enormous wetware diagram filled all of the court with lacy green. There were tens of thousands of branchings visible to the naked eye alone.

“Test it one more time for a kink, would you?”

Billy’s fingers danced. A small red cursor zippedthrough the court, following the major persona branches, then moved to secondary and tertiary circuits. It moved too fast for the eye to fix on it for over a full minute, and then stopped. The solemn-faced child said, “No kink.”

Wismon smiled.

“Well, it was inevitable that sooner or later you’d come to the conclusion that I’ve been bluffing,” Wyeth said. “But the fact is that I’m not. You wish to believe I am because you’re unwilling to accept me as your superior. But I could destroy you here and now with a single word.”

“Then do it,” Wismon said.

“Right in the middle of your traveling freak show?”

There was an acid edge to Wyeth’s voice. “Come off it.

They’d rip my head off.”

Heavy lids crept down over Wismon’s eyes, until he appeared to be trembling on the brink of sleep. His every muscle froze to perfect stillness. Then, through lips that barely moved, he said, “Everyone here is to obey my mentor completely, no matter what he tells you to do. Only my direct orders override his. Do you understand? The two of us will talk now. Everyone else must wait outside.”

Two rude boys took Rebel by the arms and swept her through the doorway. “Are you satisfied now?” Wismon asked. But Rebel was already outside and couldn’t hear Wyeth’s answer.

Time passed.

In the quiet of the corridor, the cat women prowled up and down the rope, endlessly fascinated by their eternally new world. Their movements seemed unbearably slow to Rebel, as if they moved through a crystalizing flow of honey. One of the rude boys broke into a hutch and emerged wearing a woman’s lace collar. He primped and postured while the others laughed. Every now and then one would glance at Rebel, wistful dreams of violence in his eyes. Nose chuckled to himself.

At last the sheet metal door shivered and groaned and swung open. Wyeth swam out of the court and gestured to Fu-ya, Gretzin, and Billy. “Escort these people to the sheraton,” he told the dumbfounded rude boys. “The cat women can wait here.” He took Rebel’s arm and kicked downpassage. Maxwell stared unbelievingly after him, then dove into the court.

“You weren’t bluffing, then. You really did put a kink in him,” Rebel marveled.

Wyeth shook his head. “You don’t need a kink to destroy a persona, if you know its weaknesses well enough.

Wismon’s blind spot was his conceit. He had to prove that he could best me on my own turf. It made him overlook the obvious.”

“But what did you do?”

“I snapped his neck,” Wyeth said. “Come on, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Behind them, Maxwell found the body, and screamed.

It took a full day for Wyeth’s samurai to scour the tanks clean of Wismon’s creatures. In dribs and drabs, pairs and dozens, they were brought to the sheraton to be restored. The task would have been impossible without Billy Defector. Under his fingers, the elaborate programs needed to repair the damaged personas flowed magically into existence. Fu-ya or Gretzin could coax the child into working for two or three hours before he turned cranky.

Then he would be allowed to play for a time before being returned to the task. Twice, he put in a night’s sleep.

Rebel fine-tuned a programmer, slid in the therapeutic wafer, turned to the next gurney, and realized that they were done. She stretched, looking about the conference room. Where the topiary garden had been, Constance’s team had resodded the floor and installed a croquet lawn.

An antique pink Martian sky played monotonouslyoverhead. It had been forty hours since she’d slept last.

“You know what? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of this room without loathing.”

“I know what you mean,” Wyeth said. With a sigh, he slowly sat down. An attentive pierrot slid a chair under him just in time.