Vacumn Flowers

“Okay, so the asteroid is passing through the belts, and there’s an unscheduled breakdown. Kills half the green team. The big tu

“One of the fitters the Kluster sent out was my father. He was a big guy, very competent, sure of himself, quiet. A

hell of a guy. The kind that people admire. And my mother fell in love with him. You see that? She didn’t know what was happening at first, ’cause citizens don’t fall in love, right? How could they? By the time she realized what had happened, she was so far gone she didn’t want to come back. He smiled at her, and she went with him. Back at the Kluster, she took industrial asylum, and the green team had to go on without her.” Rebel’s throat was dry. She coughed into her hand. “So you see what I’m saying? I know all about you. I heard all about your tricks when I was a kid. I know what you’re selling, and I’m not buying any. Okay?”

Stilicho turned stiffly and bounded away. Vergillia hesitated long enough to say, “I am sorry that your mother was a sex-criminal and deprived you of your birthright.

But that does not excuse you for rudeness.”

Then she too was gone.

The stone was cool under Rebel’s back and vibrated with the subsonic rumble of faraway digging machines. Her stomach was queasy, and her head ached. Eucrasia’s memories had come back to her totally. There was much in Eucrasia’s past that she hadn’t had occasion to think about, but it was all there, and accessible to her.

But along with the dread weight of Eucrasia’s memories came unexpected insight. She realized now why her mother had filled her childhood with pointless droning stories about the corridors of Deimos, about quiet misery and bleak sameness and unending work. She understood her mother’s sudden flares of dark anger, her randomly-applied prohibitions, her sourceless punishments. They had all been her faltering, uninformed attempts to immunize Eucrasia against People’s Mars. To foster a hard independence that would ensure she never returned to the moon of her mother’s birth, never surrendered to its citizenship program.

And yet here she was, in these same tired old tu

This is not my past, Rebel thought. This guilt is not mine.

And yet lying in this doorless niche, with citizens moving briskly by and occasionally glancing in with cool impersonal curiosity, the coughs and growls of distant machines bouncing down stone walls, Rebel felt like crying.

After a while, she did.

The clamor of voices echoed about the communal dining hall. The chamber was huge, as high as it was wide, and the hundreds of tables and benches and thousands of diners didn’t come near to filling it. High over Rebel’s place an enormous conduit gaped, water stains trailing from its lip. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the distantentryway, wondering how many here would make it to the nearest failsafe lock were that distant citizen-comptroller to suffer a single instant’s inattention.

Scattered here and there among the grey citizens, conversing, were several hundred orange Comprise (and one silent one who studied Rebel with dead insectoid stare) and the rarer multicolored brightness of Constance’s work crew. The chatter was light, and there was constant motion between tables. Wyeth slipped into the bench holes beside her. “How was your day?” Rebel asked.

“We managed to empty out the orchid, anyway.” A

pierrot set a tray before Wyeth, and he picked up the food tongs. “It was awful. I spent all my time keeping Little Miss Bloodthirsty from killing people. She wanted to give the orchid villagers an hour’s notice and then pump out the air.”

“No!”

“What is so remarkable?” Rosebuds latched her tray to the table and took the place beside Wyeth. Freeboy and a noncitizen Rebel didn’t recognize—he wore a zebra-striped cloak and a red vest with twin rows of brass buttons—took places opposite her. “Share it with us all.”

“A private joke,” Wyeth said easily. “Hallo, Freeboy.

Who’s your friend?”

“Bors is my name, sir.” Flash of white teeth. Bors’ hair was done up in long, thin braids, their ends contained in silver static balls. He wore a slim, noncommittal line of yellow paint across his brow. “I am a commercial traveler in vintage information from the Republique Provisio

Wyeth introduced himself and Rebel, and then said,

“You’ve come a long way.”

“And a long way yet to go. My coldship is bound for Earth in another day. Deimos is only a side-trip for me, a bit of mining technology transfer that was too profitable to resist.”

Freeboy, who had been listening impatiently, abruptly leaned forward and said to Rebel, “Hey! You’ll never guess who’s taken on citizenship today. You want to try and guess?” Confused, Rebel shook her head. Freeboy leaned back, looking smug. “Your little friend Maxwell, that’s who.”

“Maxwell?” Rebel said. Freeboy nodded. “Slim, dark, irresponsible, hedonistic kid? Are we talking about the same guy?”

“It does seem hard to credit,” Wyeth said. “This was voluntary, you say?”

“Oh yeah, he wanted it all right. He said—”

“This is all very interesting,” Rosebuds said. “Now I have something I’d like you all to see.” She slid her tray aside and started dealing out cards from a deck of holographic flats. She laid down an image of Mars as it appeared in prehuman times, red and lifeless, then covered it with a second card. The planet wavered, then blurred with storms. The icecaps were darkened by a light dustfall of Phobic matter, and shrank. A single glint of green showed within the crater of Olympus Mons. “You see the progress we’re making. The Olympus eden is a showcase microecology, a sample of what all Mars will be like eventually, and is not yet available for colonization.”

Swiftly she laid down further cards. “Fifty years from now, a hundred, one fifty. At this point most of the permafrost has melted, and the atmosphere is thick enough for humans equipped with rebreathers. But we will not be satisfied. Two hundred years.” Mottled green covered the floating sphere. There were thin clouds. “Three hundred.”

The entire planet was transformed. Gentle green stretched from polar region to polar region. Here and there tiny lakes were pinpricks of glacial blue.

“You will note that there are no oceans. The Martian ecology will be more delicate and at the same time more supportive of human life than the Terran ecology. While the oceans of Earth make its ecosphere incredibly stable, they also waste most of Earth’s resources on marine life.

The total colonizable land area of Mars will be equal to that of Earth, and it will all be put to the service of the People.”

“I really don’t see the benefit of terraforming a planet,”

Rebel said dubiously. “For that kind of effort you could build thousands of city cans, or seed I don’t know how many comets.”

“A planetary surface is the best place for an expanding postindustrial culture. The air is free, to begin with. There is so much land area that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to charge rent. You’d just live wherever you wanted.

Croplands in a functioning ecosphere are self-irrigating and self-fertilizing. In fact, everything takes vastly less effort on a planetary surface.” She laid down more cards.

“Here is a vision of the croplands. Here is a vision of the treelands. Here is a vision of one of the larger lakes. The opposite shore is barely visible, it is so large. Within the lake will be fish, eels, mussels. On its verges, rice, wetwheat, cranberries. Here is a vision of the parklands…”

“That’s a really primitive structure you got there,”

Freeboy said. “You’ve got a one-to-one transference of Terran ecologies, you see? But with a little thought you could adapt ocean fish, squids, maybe revert a few land plants to lakeweeds, set up a lichen bridge across the surface, and before you know it you’ve got a much more interesting and complex system going. Why haven’t your people whomped up something like that?”