Vacumn Flowers

The up station loomed, a slender hoop of rock. It was a carbonaceous asteroid that the Comprise had bought and, utilizing their incomprehensible physics, made flow into the desired shape. A transit ring had been fitted into the interior, and a labyrinthine tangle of corridors dug through its length. It spun in geosynchrous orbit directly above a ground station with a sister transit ring. Fleecy clouds formed a vast circle about the ground station. The Comprise’s technology somehow held the air back from the lane between transit rings, so that there was a well of hard vacuum reaching almost to the planet’s surface, and this affected local weather systems. Rebel could see three more such cloud rings on this side of the globe.

A steady stream of air-and-vacuum craft slipped in andout of the up station’s ring. Some were flung down at the ground station, while others had just been nabbed on their way up the vacuum well. All passengers and cargo were processed through the human-run sections of the up station before going down and after coming up. It was a fearsomely busy place.

The bus docked, and Rebel walked through the security gates and into the ring’s outer circle of corridors. She let the flooding crowds sweep her away. Occasionally she passed wall displays indicating numbers of craft gone and caught, and the station’s shifting power reserves (up for each vehicle caught, down for each released), but this last was for show only, since humans were allowed no access to the transit machinery. Now and then a chain of a hundred or so Comprise hurried by, but they were rare.

Most, evidently, stayed to their own corridors.

More common were the scuttling devices that sped between legs and through crowds—small, clever mechanicals that fetched, carried, and frantically cleaned.

None of them came anywhere approaching sentience, and yet Rebel felt uncomfortable at how common they were. It seemed a sign of how hopelessly compromised the cislunarians were by machine intelligence. She was surprised their guilt didn’t show on their faces.

Subliminal messages washed through the halls, but none of them were aimed at Rebel, and she lacked the decoders. They could only make her feel hot and anxious.

Her face itched.

She took a side ramp into the administrative areas, noting as she did so how a security samurai glanced her way and murmured into his hand. She’d been tagged. But she walked confidently on, as if she belonged.

Half-Greenwich was terrific for walking; enough tug on your feet to give them purchase, not enough load to tire them. She came to a line of security gates, all marked with the wheel logo of Earth crossed by a bar sinister: No Comprise. Subimbeds pounded at her, making her feelunwelcome and anxious to leave. Any of these gates would do.

She matched strides with an important-looking woman, laying an arm over her shoulder just as she plunged through a gate, so the cybernetics would read them both as a single individual. The woman looked into Rebel’s dead face and flinched away. “Who… who the hell are you?” she cried. Samurai hurried toward them. Then the paint registered, and she said, “Oh, shit. One of them.” To the white-haired samurai who arrived first, she said, “Help this woman find whoever it is she wants and then kick her the hell out.”

“Your kind is a real pain in the ass,” the samurai said.

“So don’t give me any help,” Rebel said with profound disinterest. “Throw me out. My message is insured with Bache-Hidalgo. If I fail, they’ll program up two more couriers and send ’em back. If they fail, you’ll have four.

Then eight. Sooner or later, you’ll play along.” This was a scam Eucrasia had often seen during her internship.

Administrators hated insured couriers because they were as persistent as cockroaches, and as impossible to eradicate. The only way to get rid of them was to cooperate.

“You’ll get your help,” the woman snapped. She led Rebel deep into Security country. Flocks of samurai.

“Okay, we’re in Records. Now who is your message for, and when did he come through here?”

“I don’t have a name,” Rebel said. “He’d’ve come through anywhere from five degrees Taurus to present.”

They were standing in an office area so thick with vines that each small cubicle seemed a leafy cave. The overgrowth was a classic sign of an ancient bureaucracy. A

mouse-sized mechanical scurried underfoot, gathering up dead leaves.

“Around here we say late May through mid-June,” thesamurai sniffed. “All right, any of our people can handle this.” She leaned into a cubicle where a flabby grey man leaned over a screen, mesmerized. Still images of faces flickered by at near-subliminal speeds, piped in from the hallways and offices. “Rolfe! Got a question for you.”

“Yes?” Rolfe froze his screen and looked up. He had a dull, almost dazed expression, and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. Mouth and jowls both were slack.

“Rolfe is on our facial eidetics team,” the samurai said with a touch of pride. “Electronics have to be wiped once a week, or they’re useless—data can’t be searched. Rolfe views the electronics compressed, only has to be wiped once a year, and can access all of it. Show him your visual.

If your target has been through here—as employee, visitor, or dumper—within the past few months, he knows.”

Rebel held up her holo. It was a photomechanical reconstruction she’d pulled from her own memories, but good enough that nobody could tell. “Seen this guy?”

Rolfe looked carefully, shook his head. “No.”

The samurai took her arm. “Are you sure?” Rebel cried.

“Is there any chance at all?”

“None.”

Rebel sleepwalked through the next day, performing her chores mechanically. She reported to work, interviewed her first client, and chopped him to order. None of it felt real. She didn’t know what to do next. If Wyeth hadn’t gone down the drop tube, that meant he must be somewhere in the sprawl of cislunar states. Trouble was, there were hundreds of them, in all sizes and degrees of disorder, and their outfloating slums as well. She could spend the rest of her life searching and still not find him.

Well, she thought, maybe she wouldn’t find him. Maybe Wyeth was lost to her forever. Happens to people all the time.

She was finishing up a client when she finally admitted this to herself. A jackboot had come in to be chopped wolverine, and lay on the gurney wired up and opened out, still in her police skintights.

Rebel thought it through with dry, obsessive logic, while her hands did the work. How long could she go on searching like this? A year? Five? Twenty? What kind of a person would she be at the end of that time? It wasn’t a pretty thought.

“Can you imagine a unicorn?”

“Yes.”

If this was going to be a long search, if it was going to take her years, she’d have to change the pace. She needed to build some kind of decent life for herself in the meantime. (But she didn’t want a decent life without Wyeth!) She needed a cleaner job than this one, to begin with. Friends. Interests. Lovers, even. She’d have to plan this whole thing out carefully.

“How many fingers?”

“Four.”

“Green or blue?”

“Blue.”

“Ever seen this man before?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Rebel smiled. Very slowly, she leaned back against the wall. Carefully she began marshaling her thoughts. She was in no particular hurry now. Perhaps she should go out front and borrow a chair. Impulsively, she reached down to run a fond hand through the jackboot’s hair, and the woman gri

She had a lot of questions to ask.