Vacumn Flowers

“Count four,” she said.

“What?”

“Open the door.” She swung both hands open, so that she peered between them, and said, “You’re in a room without any floor.”

Wyeth’s face relaxed. His eyes were alert and calm and unblinking. “Well?” Rebel asked. Then, when he didn’t respond, “You were lying when you said you’d found Eucrasia’s kink and debugged it, weren’t you?”

Wyeth nodded. “Yes.”

“You know something? I wondered how you’d picked up the programming skills to outfox Eucrasia. I should’ve known you were bluffing. Hell with it. Metaprogrammer open? Construction catalog in access? Major branch linkages free and unimpaired?”

“Yes,” Wyeth said. Then, “Yes,” and “Yes.” He lay before her, naked, and it was impossible for any man to be more at her power than he was now. She could do anything she wanted to him, from giving him a craving for chocolate to entirely rewriting his personas. She could tell him to abandon Bors’ raid and take her up the nearest drop tube, and he would do so without hesitation. If she wanted, he didn’t even need know it hadn’t been his own idea. She had the skills.

But Wyeth stared up at her so trustingly that she couldn’t begin. “Close your eyes,” she ordered, and heobeyed. It didn’t help. She reached down to brush a wayward strand of hair out of his face, and then blurted out the one question she dared not ask. Knowing that he couldn’t lie in this state. “Do you really love me?”

“Yes.”

“You son of a bitch,” Rebel said. “Go to sleep.”

And closed him up, unchanged.

The next morning was foggy, which Bors welcomed as a good omen, but made the run across the Burren a nightmare. Two of the wolverines carried Wyeth in a sling between them, and it was not long before they came to the stretch of coast where he had sunk his skimmer. He called across the ocean, and it rose up, water pouring from the ballast tanks. While Rebel programmed a pilot and navigator, the others readied the craft. Within the half hour they were set. Octants of tinted canopy closed over the deck, and the skimmer stood on a single long leg and sped forward, above the water.

They were passing a wide river mouth, not long after, when the fog parted momentarily. Under the cliffs, serpentine necks rose grey and mysterious from the water. They must have been thirty or forty feet long, topped by tiny flat heads. The creatures glided inland, as Rebel frantically searched the library’s natural history section to discover what they were. Plesiosaurs. Probably elasmosauri, to judge by their size. But according to the library, they had been extinct for millions of years, creatures that had lived and died in Mesozoic seas. “I don’t believe it,” Rebel breathed.

Bors was standing nearby. “You know what I find most remarkable about them?” he asked.

“What?”

“No windows.”

Rebel stared at him, then back at the plesiosaurs,baffled for the moment it took to realize what he was talking about. What she had taken to be natural rock cliffs were actually enormous buildings, tall and featureless, edging the water like clustered masses of quartz crystals.

They had a pale, diffractive quality to them, their flat surfaces shimmering with faint pinks and blues, a suggestion of prismatic green, colors that intensified the longer she stared at them. Then the fog closed in and wiped them away. “Are they all like this?” she asked. “The Comprise cities, I mean.”

“No, I think they’re all very different from one another, don’t you? Kurt! Come over here and get your rock-ru

By the time the fog had lifted, they were on the open sea, nothing but water to be seen. Notched away in Eucrasia’s store of memories were any number of rhapsodies on the beauty and lure of oceans, the romance of wooden ships, the glamor of the sea-rover. But Rebel could understand why People’s Mars wasn’t building any of their own. The ocean was choppy and featureless, offering the eye neither rest nor variety, with all the monotony of flatness but none of the stark beauty. It was ugly, and wasteful as well—all that water! Rebel was sick of it already.

Hour after hour, the skimmer sliced through the waves.

Sometimes Rebel sat quietly talking with Wyeth. Often, though, he had to go belowdecks to confer with Bors, and she was not welcome to overhear. Then she simply sat, watching clouds roll overhead and the ocean shift from green to grey and back as the light changed. Once they made a wide detour to avoid an undersea enclave of Comprise, but in all their time asea they never saw another ship or flying machine. Rebel remarked on this when Nee-C wandered by from a knife game she’d been playing—and losing, to judge by the network of fine slashes on the backs of her hands—with the other wolverines.

Nee-C shrugged. “Guess the Comprise don’t need tomove things around much.”

“If it’s all that rare, then how did Wyeth manage to steal this boat? You’d think they’d notice it was gone.”

“Ain’t no Comprise boat,” Nee-C said scornfully. “Look at the cabin hatch.”

Rebel turned, saw an open hatchway with stairs leading down. Scowling, Nee-C kicked the jamb, and a hatch slid up. It had a corporate logo painted on it, a round shield with owl and olive wreath. “Pallas Kluster!”

“Yeah, belonged to a batch of Kluster lazarobiologists.”

Nee-C snickered. “They got them a long walk home now.”

“Yes, but—”

“You know your problem?” Nee-C stood, drawing her blade. “You talk too much.” She strode to the bow, where the other wolverines were clustered, knelt, and rejoined the game.

The day stretched on monotonously. Finally, though, a setting sun turned half the horizon orange and faded to night. Rebel slept on a mat on deck, alongside Wyeth.

When she awoke, she didn’t need to be told they were no longer in the Atlantic. The water was calmer here, almost glassy, and low-lying land, finger-smudges of green on the edge of the sky, was visible to either side. Straight ahead was an island, overgrown with trees, dark as a floating clump of seaweed.

Wyeth handed her a beer and some boiled bread.

“Breakfast time, sleepyhead,” he said. “We’ll be at the island within the hour and you’ll need your strength then.”

“Where are we, anyway?”

Bors looked down from where he sat cross-legged atop the cabin and said, “We’re in a midcontinental sea.

Technically speaking, it’s more a big salt lake than anything else. Earth created several of them shortly after it became conscious. Nobody’s sure why. The populartheory is that it was a mistake, a weather control project that went awry. The polar icecaps used to be larger, you know.”

“You seem to know a lot about Earth,” Rebel said.

“My dear young lady,” Bors said, and with that feral programming wild on his face, his exaggerated politeness was as startling as if a poisonous serpent were to suddenly rear its head and speak, “I’ve been studying Earth for half my life.”

As the island neared, the skimmer slowed, sank down on its leg, and touched seawater. It lurched sideways as it was hit by the waves, slewed a bit to one side, then steadied into a gentle up-and-down rocking motion. The pilot retracted the canopy, and salt air flooded the boat.

Wyeth pointed ahead. “Take a good look,” he said. “It’s the only floating island on Earth.”

Rebel tapped her library. The island was all one tangled tree complex, almost perfectly round, with a clearing for the down station at its center. It was new—thirty years ago, it had not been there, and nobody knew why the Comprise had decided to grow it. Staring up into the blue, Rebel imagined she could make out the invisible outlines of the vacuum tu