Vacumn Flowers

“Well,” Bors said. “Since we haven’t the food, oxygen, or inclination to do otherwise, it’s time. I must say I’m sorry to interrupt this conversation, but perhaps it can be resumed a few months from now in Earth orbit. Coffins, please.” Gently, three black coldpack boxes rose from one floor. Rebel looked at them with something akin to panic.

She wasn’t ready to go under yet, was the thing. To sleep away the months between planets.

To die.

As a persona bum—and Eucrasia had been a good one—she knew that her identity wouldn’t survive coldpacking. There was that moment on revival, the merest instant, when the mind didn’t know itself. Perfectly free of yearning and ego, it tottered on nothingness and then grabbed for identity and was itself again. Tests had been run, and the results were always the same. Whenthere were two or more identities to choose from, the strongest one always won. By wetdesign standards strength was measured by co

And Eucrasia’s memories were complete now.

Wyeth turned to Rebel, started to say something. She shook her head, and he fell silent. She could see by the stiffness of his expression that he too had been ignoring the realities. Pretending that this moment would never arrive. He did not rise from his chair.

“Am I missing something?” Bors asked, looking from face to face.

Neither answered him. Rebel turned away and kicked over to the furthest coffin. She examined its fittings, slid open the lid. “Sunshine…” Wyeth began in a choked voice.

“Don’t.”

She slipped into the coldpack unit and lay down. The padding was stiff and grey, and the workings crowded in about her. She wriggled slightly, shoved back a coil of cabling that was digging into one hip. She didn’t look at Wyeth at all.

She wanted to say to him that it had been fun. That she loved him. That she didn’t regret… Well, she wasn’t sure about that one at all. She regretted a lot of things. But she knew that if she once started talking, she’d never be able to stop.

Most of all she wished she could at least kiss him goodbye.

It was probably best this way. To go cleanly and suddenly, rather than to waste away with a slow rot that didn’t show until its work was done and everything that was Rebel had been eaten away, leaving nothing behind but a woman who wasn’t her.

All she had to do was to close the lid. The needles would enter her then, in five places, the sudden sting of pain chilling down almost instantly into numbness, and thenspreading. The crash jelly would flood in, and she would hold her breath for as long as possible, and then open her mouth and breathe in the jelly and choke, and then… no more.

She looked up then, against all her will, and saw Wyeth’s face. It was rigidly contained, but underneath she could see the pain and horror. She thought he was going to cry.

One hand rose ever so slightly toward her. He started to lean forward. She knew that if Wyeth were to touch her, however lightly, she would break into a million fragments.

Rebel reached up and slammed the lid shut.

11

CISLUNAR

She was cased in ice.

The universe was perfect, chill and silent. Circuits shifted energies about her, u

machine daintily slid a thin tube down her throat and drew the liquified crash jelly away. With a rumble like silent thunder, the distant ice was touched by warmth and began to break up. Needles touched her in seven places, and they stung. But she did not recognize the sensation as pain. She was soaring upward now, through arctic waters.

She touched the membrane of consciousness, and it gave under her hand and, in a burst of white foam, shattered.

Choking, she broke through the surface and was deafened by the bewildering crash of noise. The air was cold flame. It seared her lungs as she gulped it down.

Bors opened the coffin, and she awoke.

“Hello.” he said, smiling. “Welcome to the realm of the living.”

“I—” she said, and shook her head. “It was…”

“Wyeth said you might be a little confused at first.” Bors offered his hand, and she floated free of the coffin. “Please open the hall. The Pequod has a small chapel—a meditation room, if you prefer. You might want to rest there for a while and collect your thoughts in solitude.”

But she was not confused. She was simply too lucid to make sense. Everything crashed in on her with superhuman clarity, the angels of thought coming too fast and close together to be put into words. She was like a child born blind and come of an age to receive her first pair of eyes. Revelation dazzled her. “That would be nice,”

she said. “No. I think I will.”

Bors left her afloat in a small spherical room. The chapel had a projective wall, and within it a loosely woven all-gravity greenhouse lattice. Plants sprouted wildly from the interstices, leafy explosions of green, trying to grow in all directions at once. Two small brown leaves floated free, and she shifted slightly to share the space equally with them. They all three were peers. The wall was set for realtime exterior, showing to one side Earth in all its bluewhite glory, and to the other a weary old orbital hongkong. Plainsuited spacejacks swarmed about its exurban tanks, towns, farms, and manufactories. They were deep in the cislunar sprawl.

Slowly she gathered herself. Something was wrong, but she was so happy about it she didn’t care. The promise of freedom bubbled like laughter in her veins. All of Eucrasia’s memories, and the hardpacketed few of Rebel’s that had been used to brace the persona, were locked firmly into place, along with one that belonged to both of them: that ecstatic moment when Rebel had filled Eucrasia’s brain and in joyous excess of purpose upended a glass over the programmer. She knew now that she had done that because she was a wizard’s daughter, and she understood what that meant. The light of that bright instant when the water writhed in the air like a diamond dragon still blinded her to her purpose, but that didn’tmatter. She knew something far more important.

She was still Rebel.

“Where’s Wyeth?” She kicked into the common room.

“I’ve got to talk to him. It’s important.” It was hard to keep from singing.

Bors was floating alongside a cabinet, checking inventory. He glanced up, startled, in the act of returning a watercolor to its folder. Carefully, he put the folder into a thin drawer and slid the drawer shut. He switched off his notepad and stuck it in a vest pocket. “Well…” he began.

“This is… this is better than being born!” She touched a wall and, laughing, spun herself drunkenly in the air. She knew with all the certainty of years of training that waking up as Rebel was impossible, a blatant absurdity. There was no way the treehangers could create a persona that could survive coldpacking. But when a miracle is dumped in your lap, you don’t complain. “Where’s Wyeth? Is he sleeping? Wake the bugger up!”

“Um.” Bors coughed into his fist. “You, uh, you do realize that he didn’t want to be present when you woke up?”

“Of course he didn’t. I know that,” Rebel said impatiently.

“Please lock up the cabinet. You see, he arranged with me to awaken you a day later than him. He’s gone now.”

“Gone?” It was as if the colors had suddenly been drained from everything, leaving the air faintly chill.

“Gone where?”

Looking politely embarrassed, Bors murmured, “I really have no idea.”

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