Vacumn Flowers

Bors was handing out equipment. He slapped a small plastic pistol into Rebel’s hand and moved on. She examined it. A pair of compressed gas cartridges sprouted to either side of the rear sight, like bu

She squinted into a pinprick nozzle, and Wyeth turned it away from her. “Careful. That sucker’s loaded with shyapple juice.” He showed her how to hold the pistol and where the safety was. “Don’t fire until you’re right on topof your target. Aim for the forehead, right where the third eye would be. The fluid’s bonded with dimethylsulfoxide, so wherever it touches, it’ll sink right through the flesh into the bloodstream. But that shouldn’t be necessary. The pistol spits out droplets at a speed that’ll slam them right through skin at four feet. Got that?”

“I guess so.” She raised the pistol, aiming at the back of Bors’ neck, and Wyeth yanked her hand down. “What’s the matter? I wasn’t really going to shoot him.”

Wyeth rolled up his eyes. “Tell you what. Don’t shoot—no, don’t even aim that pistol at anybody or anything unless the rest of us are all safely dead, okay?

You have no idea how easy it is to accidentally shoot a friend. Just keep that thing stowed away, and be very careful not to get any of the juice on yourself. We don’t want you snapping out in the middle of the raid.”

“Okay.” Wyeth turned away, and she tucked the gun into the waistband of her earth suit. She felt like something was watching her.

Bright tropical birds looped in and out of the greenery, making sharp, metallic cries, as the skimmer crept toward the floating island. High up in the trees were masses of dark flowers, purple almost to the point of blackness, some of them large as bedsheets.

The skimmer slid by a long limb or root that arched out from the green thickets, turning black where it dipped into the water. Waves slapped quietly against it. “Stay in the center of the patrol,” Wyeth murmured to Rebel. “We’ll keep you alive.” They were barely moving now. The island swelled and reared up into the sky. Another dark tree limb slid by, and an air squid, su

Rebel strapped the library to her back and secured the adhesion disks with a protective headband. Then she swung her cloak over her shoulders, chameleoncloth sideout. She shivered nervously, forced a smile, whispered,

“How do I look?”

“Hunchbacked.”

“Those the stills?” Bors jabbed a finger upward at the translucent purple flowers. Bubbles flowed up their veins, and tangles of pale white roots fell downward into the water. Wyeth nodded, and Bors said, “Kurt, grab a drug pump and get up there.”

Rebel craned her neck to watch the wolverine scramble up the roots. “Librarian!” Bors snapped. “What is that man doing?”

Without looking down from the dwindling figure, Rebel said, “He’s climbing up to the distillery flowers. They purify the water for the island’s population of Comprise.

There are several nexuses of stalks just beyond the flowers where the desalted water is gathered, and then larger stalks that move the water to Comprise drinking stations by gravity feed. That’s where Kurt will insert the drug pump. The pump contains an encapsulator so that the shyapple fluid is contained in microspheres that won’t dissolve until they reach their target vectors.” The information flowed to the surface of her mind freely and naturally. She spoke it automatically, so that the sense of it came simultaneously with the words. “The microcapsules should travel at a rate of—”

“Enough!” Bors turned away. “We’re ready.”

They glided under the arching tree limbs. Daylight gave way to soft shadow. Leafy boughs raked the deck, and mats of brown vegetation floated on the water’s surface.

The island ahead was indistinct, all shadow within darkness. A monkey shrieked, like the agonized war cry of a ghost. The wolverines took out long sticks and began poling the skimmer. The air dimmed to a cool, green cavernousness.

The skimmer scraped along a submerged limb, caught its bow in a dragging vine and, after a moment’shesitation, was free. The lead polesman swung the nose about, edging it into a long black incursion of water that moved into the gothic depths like an inverted stream.

Moss and branches hung low over the inlet, making it almost a tu

“Done,” he said, and Bors nodded.

The boat slowed to a stop. Rebel was reminded of the geodesic’s orchid here, it was that dark and close. Gretzin and Fu-ya would’ve liked this island. Rebel stared into the shadows, her heart pounding. Any number of Comprise could be crouching an arm’s length distant and never be seen. She looked up. There were yellow shafts of light high above that did not seem to quite reach the water, and tiny patches of blue like faraway windows that winked on and off with the shifting of the trees. Parrots darted between limbs, and something that might have been a monkey swung into the light and was gone. A fearful sense of the insanity of going into that tangled and clotted darkness lanced through Rebel. “Let’s go,” Bors said.

They walked and climbed through the brush. Rebel was in the middle of the patrol, with Bors behind her and wolverines fore and aft. Wyeth led, the head of a predatory virus injecting itself into the island. The floor here was a slick mass of roots, covered in places with rotting vegetation and the occasional puddle of salt water.

The sea slapped against a thousand branches behind them.

Rebel found the going surprisingly easy, even natural, perhaps due to shadow memories of her life in Tirna

She was comfortable here; traveling took up a fraction of her attention. She touched a leaf, and the library whispered larch. This five-pointed one was maple. Over there, that clump was all monkey-puzzle. Branches grew in and out of the trunks, in complete disregard for species, hemlock growing out of oak, and arrowwood into banyan.

This was basic comet-tree bioengineering, primitive but effective, where the functions of plant and environment had been warped one into the other. There were tiny crabs in the tidepools, and sea anemones as well. She brushed her fingers slightly over their life-cycle data, decided not to touch.

“Going gets easier now,” Wyeth said over his shoulder.

The floor rose and became dryer, and the trees opened out. They walked single-file through dark, open spaces, an almost tactile pressure of trees pushing down from above, so high and lush that no light reached them here. The straight boles of the trees were overgrown with phosphorescent fungi, some like stacked white plates and others that were elaborate glowing fantasias. They walked as if through a dark cathedral lit by blue corpselight. The sea behind them had been silenced by deadening masses of plants, to be replaced by slow creaking noises, as of the hulls of wooden ships afloat at anchor. Rebel imagined herself in the hold of an ancient galleon, acolyte to some hidden gnostic ceremony. She stuck a hand in her cloak pocket, and it closed about the wafer she had made in Geesinkfor, the recording of her persona.

They detoured around a pond-sized opening in the floor.

Black salt water bobbed restlessly within it. “This is where they cut the transceivers out of the skulls of their dead,”

Wyeth said. Mulch squished underfoot. “The flesh is thrown into the water. There are meat-eaters down there.”

Bors picked up something—a bone or a tool—from the water’s edge, glanced at it, threw it in. Somewhere nearby a trickle of water fell steadily. “So where’s the Comprise?”

“I don’t know,” Wyeth said tensely. “There’s usually some here.”