Vacumn Flowers

“Yes.”

Khadijah ran a finger along a rack of wafers, making them rattle in their slots. She retreated to the doorway, stood there holding up the curtain. “Well,” she said at last.

“How about you and me going out and getting drunk after work?”

After work Rebel always checked her room for messages and then prowled the streets of Geesinkfor, learning its ways and looking for Wyeth. So far she had turned up no solid leads, but there was still work to do. She had no desire at all to go drinking. But she remembered a time when Eucrasia had needed someone to get drunk with and nobody had been there. “Sure,” she said. “Soon as I wrap this one up.”

Khadijah nodded and ducked out of the room.

“Now.” Rebel held up a hand. “How many fingers?”

“Four.”

She threw a color on one wall. “Green or blue?”

“Blue.”

“All right. One more.” She threw an image on the wall. It was Wyeth. “Ever seen this man?”

“No.”

“All right, you pass.” She sighed, ran a final integration check, and then slapped on the programmer. The boy shuddered and closed his eyes as the programs took hold.

They started out in the Water’s Edge, a dark little bar favored by the trade, and took seats by the window so they could look down on the passersby. Khadijah drank her first two mugs of wine in grim silence, rapping the table for more when they were empty. Midway through her third, she grunted, “Men!”

“I know what you mean.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Staring idly out the window, Rebel saw something furtively nab a bit of trash from the boardwalk and then scurry off into shadow. It was long and scrawny and covered with grey fur. “Ugh,” she said. “Did you see that?

This place has cats!”

“Oh yeah, swarms of ’em. They live in abandoned buildings. The government used to have these machines that hunted them down, big suckers the size of… of dogs, I guess, but the kids kept kicking them into the water to watch them short out. That was years ago, when I was little.” She laughed. “Man, you should see them spark!”

“Tell me something. What’s all this about nobody knowing what kind of government Geesinkfor’s got?”

“Oh yeah. Nobody knows.” Then, at a look from Rebel,

“It’s true! Some people think that Earth runs all thehongkongs, through proxies. Others think the governments stay secret out of fear of the Comprise taking them over. And there are those who think the police don’t answer to anyone, that they’re just another gang. They collect the weekly protection money, after all. And nobody knows what triggers the heat. Some things you can get away with, but not always. Other things, you’re never seen again. Me, I think it’s just very handy for the people ru

“This is crazy. Who do you complain to when something goes wrong?”

“Exactly.” Khadijah stuck a finger in her wine, swirled it about. “Best thing to do is just be careful to stay out of trouble.”

“How do you do that?”

Khadijah laughed and shook her head. “Let’s go someplace else.”

They climbed out the window, along the narrow ledgeway, up a rusty set of stairs, through a brightly lit roof garden where butterflies flitted (Rebel asked, “Are you sure this is the right way?” and “Trust me,” Khadijah said), then across a pedestrian bridge and down to a cellar tavern called The Cave. They sat by a table set on a truncated stalagmite, and Khadijah rapped for wine.

Rebel peered about the dark, crowded room. “I feel like I hadn’t moved at all.”

“Too true.” Khadijah paid for the wine, lifted her mug.

“Hey, Sunshine. How come you got such an aristocratic first-family name? I mean, you’re not cislunar. No way in hell you are. I’ve lived here all my life, and I know.”

The wine was laced with endorphins. Rebel felt lifted and removed, wrapped in the finest cushioning fog.

Nothing could hurt her now. “My name is aristocratic?”

(Back home, they could’ve worked intricate wonders with a glassful of endorphins, woven fantasias of emotionand illusion. But the biological arts were primitive, this side of the Oort.)

“Oh yeah, like… Kosmos Starchild Biddle, you know, or, uh, Wondersparkle Spaceling Toyokuni. One of those bullshit names they gave the kiddies when living off-planet was new and everyone was all rah-rah about it.”

“Well, I had to call myself something. There are all kinds of people looking for me I don’t want to find me.”

Khadijah nodded sagely. “So where you from, anyway?”

“Dyson world name of Tirna

Well, actually my body was born out in the belts, but me

—I’m from the comets. I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

“Sunshine? That guy you were talking to the other week, the one who came by to see you when we were closing up?”

“Bors?”

“Yeah. There he is. Talking to that drop artist.”

Rebel looked up and saw Bors deep in conversation with a sour-looking old woman. She waited for him to glance their way, then waved broadly. He waved back, said a final word to the old woman, and wove his way to her through the maze of fake stalactites and small tables. He still wore the red vest under his cloak, and it gave him a kind of rakish quasimilitary look. “Hello, hello,” he said cheerily, seating himself on the bench beside her. “What a coincidence. Have I met your friend yet?”

After introductions, Rebel said, “So what have you been up to lately?”

“Ah, well, that’s interesting! I’ve been scrounging about in the city archives, and I found a five-thousand-line epic poem about the Absorption Wars, all in rhymed couplets, by a woman who’d survived the whole thing. She was programmed clerical for the processing center, and by the time they got around to her, the treaties had been signed.”

“Is it any good?” Rebel asked dubiously.

Bors leaned forward confidentially and said, “It sucks.

But there’s still a small market for it as a historical curiosity, so it’s not a total loss for me.”

“I slept with a bors once,” Khadijah said.

“Really?” Bors said in a pleased voice.

The room suddenly warped so that everything in it got very small, except for Rebel herself. She was enormous, and her head bobbled like a balloon. She could have crushed the lot with her thumb. “I wouldn’t have thought he was your type,” she said.

“Wasn’t.” Khadijah was silent for a moment. “What the hell—look at him, you have to admit he’s charming. He was okay. Haven’t you ever slept with someone who wasn’t your type?”

“Oh yeah.” She thought of Wyeth—tall, lanky, pale. And serious, mostly. Not her type at all. She would never have chosen him for a sex partner if she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She took a deep breath, and without warning she deflated, whooshing down so that the rest of the room was normal-sized, or near so.

Khadijah eyed Bors. “Based on some kind of spy, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” Bors’ eyes twinkled.

“Sure you are. One of those little Outer System moons, some kind of comic-opera republic, all their agents used to be programmed bors. Then somebody pirated a copy for one of the big wetware concerns.”

“What happened then?” Rebel asked.

“Nothing happened then. But you can bet somebody made a bundle off that deal. That’s still a popular persona, bors is, in this part of the System. I saw one the other day.”

“I think that was me,” Bors said mildly.

For an instant Khadijah stared at him blankly. Then she started to laugh, begi

“Listen,” Bors said. “I was going to come by tomorrow.

My work is done here, and I’ve got to see a few more of the cislunar states before I take the drop tube down to Earth.

But I didn’t want to run off without saying goodbye and wishing you luck.”