Vacumn Flowers

“God damn you,” he whispered. “God damn you all.”

They caught up with Bors just an hour inside Mars’s sunspace. Rebel kept expecting pursuit, but there was none. Apparently nobody had noticed the hopper was gone. Even so, the hours at 2.5 Greenwich made it a rough trip. You could steal anything on Deimos, except for heavy gravity couches. There were none to be had. Apparently citizens were expected to simply stand and take it.

When they matched speeds with the Pequod, Rebel shook her head at the visual. “Is that it?”

“It certainly is a sight,” Wyeth agreed.

Perched on the end of the pushrod of a Workhorse-class disposable fusion tug was the oddest structure Rebel had ever seen. It looked something like a storybook Queen A

“See that Tudor arch portico?” Wyeth asked. “The one with the stained glass fanlight? That must be it.”

“Hah? Why?”

“It has a brass nameplate by the door.” He instructed the hopper to mate with the Pequod, wait ten minutes, and then kick away to fall back into a recovery orbit. “Let’s grab our things.”

The airlock opened on a room rich with furnishings—tapestries on walls, framed woodcuts set into a paneled ceiling, and all-gravity furniture everywhere.

Bors looked up from a chair by the fireplace and put down a book. “I thought that might be you. Come in, sit down.

Let me help you with those crates.” He sniffed. “Do I smell organics?”

Wyeth separated out two crates. “These will need to be soft-frozen. The rest can be stored anywhere.”

“Storage, please.” Cupboard doors twinkled open, and a minute later everything was secure. Rebel and Wyeth hung their cloaks in a closet by the door. “Welcome to my humble abode.”

Rebel sat in a chair, slid her legs through the holes, and leaned back. “It’s lovely,” she said. The fireplace was covered with climbing ivy. Water trickled down it, over bricks and leaves, to be collected at the bottom. There it was broken into hydrogen and oxygen, and the gases fed into the fire, where they burned merrily. The water vapor was drawn up the flue, chilled, and left to trickle down the bricks again. Rebel had never seen such a thing before; it was hypnotic to watch.

In the privacy of his ship, Bors wore not only his vest, but also a pair of green culottes and purple knee-socks. He was almost as aggressively covered as a dyson worlder.

“Should I take my clothes off?” he asked solicitously.

“Would that make you feel more at ease?”

“Oh, we’re cosmopolitan enough,” Wyeth said. He settled into a chair, idly examined a set of plastic Napoleonic foot soldiers embedded in a display table beside him. “You could wrap yourself head to foot in linen, and we wouldn’t blink an eye.”

“So long as you mean that,” Bors said. “Oh, and you both do realize that we have less than an hour’s gravity left? If either of you wants to take a shower…”

Rebel looked up. “Shower?”

Rebel felt a lot better after showering. Relaxed andcomfortable. She dried and dressed, and walked back through the dark paneled hallway to the parlor. A pair of side passages into distant parts of the coldship beckoned, and she was sorry there wasn’t the time to explore. Ahead, she could hear the two men, already talking like old friends.

Bors and Wyeth were discussing war and literature.

“What you have to understand is the extreme speed with which the technology blossomed,” Bors said. “When Earth first became conscious, it used all its resources to spread the technology as efficiently as possible. The first transceiver was implanted in March, let’s say, and all Earth was integrated by Christmas. The first clear notion anybody off-planet had of what had actually happened was when the warcraft were launched. Like a swarm of hornets bursting out of a well right into their faces, as the humorist put it.”

Moving her chair a smidge closer to the fire, Rebel sat down and drew her knees to her chin. She hugged her legs, feeling warm and comfortable and quiet, and watched the firelight play on Wyeth’s face.

“Yes, but that’s irrelevant. There were hundreds of millions of people living off-planet at that time. You can’t tell me that they didn’t take their literature with them. If anything was lost in the wars, it was probably too minor to be worth recovering. The idea of major literary works waiting to be found—well, that’s pure fantasy.”

“No, no, we’re talking about an extremely uncultured period of history. The first century of emigrants weren’t exactly Earth’s finest, after all. And romantic fiction didn’t come back into vogue until the colonization of the Outer System. Believe me, when you’re stuck in a tiny ship for months at a time without coldpacking—that’s when you appreciate Anthony Trollope. The pity is that by then half his works were lost.”

“But the best were preserved. Those that people actuallycared enough about to read.”

“Not necessarily. Keep in mind that a hundred fifty years ago most data were kept electronically, and that the data systems were the first things hit by Earth. In that initial month of war, before Earth retreated back to its own surface, it injected AI’s into every significant data net in the I

“I believe that Malenkov himself was an artificial intelligence.”

“But a patriot.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Well, anyway…”

Rebel hooked her chin over her knees, let her head fall a little to one side, and listened contentedly. She felt happy and cozy and wistfully sad all at the same time. Savoring the fireplace’s warmth, she let the words wash over her in a homey, meaningless babble that rose and fell in soft familiar cadence. This was nice. Stop, she thought. Let this moment linger forever.

“Here’s a sample of what I mean,” Bors said. “Listen: And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Nice stuff, eh?”

“It’s terrific. But your point is?”

“That’s from Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. But the only surviving version of that poem is exactly fourteen lines long, a descriptive fragment containing none of what I quoted. The critical work that scholars dug the darkling plain fragment from said that it was a major poem. You’d never know that from what we have.” Bors sighed. “It would make my career if I could recover the original.”

Wyeth laughed and held up his hands. “I surrender!

You’re absolutely right. There are doubtless thousands of manuscripts squirreled away in the dusty nooks of Earth that contain lost treasures. New Shakespearian tragedies, volumes of Bashu’s haiku, the complete Iliad, the interactive for Kpomassie’s essays on cultural responsibility.”

“Now I didn’t actually claim…”A soft chime sounded, and the fire went out. The water stopped, and the entire fireplace slid into the wall and was covered by enameled panels. “Look at the time! We’re entering public sunspace now. Brace yourselves.”

And then, right on cue, the fusion tug burned out and gravity cut off. In a swift, giddy instant of disorientation, Rebel lost all concept of up and down. A gentle noise puffed through the coldship as the lightsail deployed.

Rebel’s stomach lurched, and she had to swallow back the vomit to keep from throwing up. Her fingers clutched the chair tightly, and that helped her to steady her. And then, of course, she was okay again. She released the chair and floated over it.