Vacumn Flowers

“Where’s your sense of history?” Bors asked. “This was one of the first forty ca

He trotted across the plaza to where a huge basaltic moonrock had been carved into the shape of a crude stone axe. Hundreds of faces peered from the rock’s depths with fear and despair, just begi

He slowly read the archaic Spanish inscription on the base. “It’s a war memorial to the millions who were captured and absorbed. The Comprise set up a processing center right here, packed their victims into lifting bodies, and dumped ’em into the atmosphere. Very crude method.

Less than half survived to be swallowed up by Earth.”

Rebel looked uneasily about the dirty plaza. It was almost deserted. An ancient spacer in torn vacuum suit stumbled toward them, her hand out. A bored woman in police leathers watched. Rebel slipped an arm through Bors’. “Yeah, well. That was all a long time ago. Let’s get out of here.”

Bors led her deeper into the Old City, toward the equatorial sea. The sea was a stagnant stretch of water, wide as a Terran river, left over from Geesinkfor’s early days, when the water was pumped uphull and flowed back in scenic riverlets. Half the buildings facing it werederelict, their windows slagged over, but among them were the grimy shops, bars, and blade bazaars, noisy-bright with music and holographic flares, that made up the local Little Ginza. It was here that the grey market wetsurgical joints would be found. A few furtive-looking pedestrians dotted the boardwalk. A motortrike zipped by.

Rebel yanked Bors back from the roostertail as it slammed through a puddle, and said, “Okay, I’ve seen it. Now let’s find me a room.”

They turned their backs on the black water and trudged upslope. A cybercab dogged their heels, hoping for a fare, but they ignored it, and it sped off. Here and there, blank walls and scuffed streets flickered with corporate propaganda. In those areas where the speakers hadn’t been smashed, the voiceovers murmured seductively.

“You really needn’t be in a rush to move out of the Pequod.

I could easily put you up for a week or so.”

Rebel wore the ivory bracelet Wyeth had given her back in the sheraton. She touched it now, and the drab sphere transformed into a fairy city of red and blue lights, shot through with yellow lines of power. In a street overhead, she saw a centipede line of Comprise stitched together with interactive lines of electromagnetic force. And buried deep within Bors’ flesh, she could see the glow of subtle machines, waiting silently. Whatever they were, a mere dealer in vintage data didn’t need them. “That’s very generous of you, but I won’t find Wyeth sitting in your ship. Listen, if you see him again, would you give him a message for me? Tell him that I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

“Will he know what that means?”

“No, but he’ll be curious enough to find out.”

They walked on in silence. Now and again Bors glanced at her, as if trying to read the thoughts behind her new wetpaint. She really did like Bors and wished she could trust him, but Eucrasia had been betrayed by friends too many times, and all those memories were hers now. Shedidn’t dare repeat Eucrasia’s mistakes.

Turning a corner, Rebel glanced up into a nostril a hundred feet high, and staggered back a pace under the lightest touch of vertigo. The propaganda screens were capable of creating true grotesqueries of scale. Oceans washed over the building, and six implausibly long fingernails slashed across the screen to pierce a tomato.

Eucrasia had been visually literate, but the corporate iconography of the cislunar states differed from that of the Klusters, and she couldn’t decipher an image of it. The tomato pulsed blood. “Who runs this place, anyway?”

Rebel asked. “What kind of government has it got?”

Bors shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

They came to an obsidian building and stepped into its lobby. Security devices rose up on their haunches, tracked them with articulated heads, then sank down again. A fat man with brand new arms (they were pink and ludicrously thin) emerged from the shadows. His eyes were sleepy and his chest hair had been dyed blue to match his bow tie.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like a room,” Rebel said. Then, because she dared not give her real name but still needed something Wyeth would recognize if he came looking for her, “My name is Sunshine.” She shrugged to indicate she had no family name.

The fat man grunted, produced a greasy plate of glass.

“Put your hand here. Yeah, okay. Up to the third floor, take the door that turns blue for you. Sets you back forty-five minutes a day.”

“That sounds fair.” Rebel took the crate Bors had been carrying for her. “Promise me you’ll drop by now and then to see how things are going, Bors? That would be nice.”

He nodded, winked, gri

The fat man turned back. “Hey, was that a bors?”

“Uh… yes.”

He smiled. “One of them did me a favor once. Next time you see him, tell him if he ever needs a room, I’ll cut him a good price.”

Rebel took a job at a place called Cerebrum City. Its front room held stacks of outdated wetware and a few racks of the current knock-offs, but all the profit came from a chop shop in the back. It was there that the cheap hustlers came, sick with paranoia and despair, for a slice of wetsurgical hope. They came in weary, sometimes trembling, to buy the courage, bravado, or even desperation needed to get on with business. Fugitives looking to change their flight patterns. Hard-luck street types searching for that wi

After a few days it got so Rebel could type her customers at a glance. After a week, she stopped bothering. They were all the same to her. She worked in a small room with wood paneling and a wall of boilerplate wetwafers, and concentrated on her job. It was a cheapjack version of building new minds, and Eucrasia had been very good at that. She could chop and customize a persona in an hour and a half Greenwich, and there was professional satisfaction in that. The work appealed to her. She might not dare think about what would become of her clients, but she never cut corners on them.

There were two other chop artists in Cerebrum City. One was a pale, nervous man with long fingers, who always came in late. The other was a hefty woman named Khadijah. She had dark eyes and a cynical mouth, andwas having an affair with the pale, nervous man.

One day, when Rebel had been working for two weeks, the nervous man didn’t come in at all. She had her last client of the day on a gurney, wired up and opened out when the curtain shot open and Khadijah stamped into the room. She had never come by before. The client—a whore come in to have his interest in sex revitalized—

tracked her with his eyes as she prowled about, and gri

“Now, can you imagine a unicorn?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.” Rebel yanked one of the wafers and stuck it in a sonic bath. While the device pounded it clean of microdust, she reflected that if she were to lop off this creature’s interest in sex entirely, he would walk out of the room free. He’d give up his trade and never once look back. But Eucrasia wouldn’t have meddled without permission, and Rebel was coming to respect the woman’s professional judgment. She replaced the wafer. “How about now?”