Vacumn Flowers

“Don’t mean nothing,” Nee-C snapped. “It’s just a big goddamned tree. Stupid bitch. I oughta throw you over the side and be done with you.”

They were up near the treetops now, bathed in softly filtered natural light, and about to run through another constellation of Comprise nests. There must’ve been thousands of nests on the island.

That was the beauty of a three-dimensional environment; it would support enormous numbers. A

dyson world might be no more than two hundred miles across, but that was still over four million cubic miles of living space. Billions could live in one without crowding.

This island was only ten miles across, a few hundred feet high. But that was still some eighty square miles, or over three cubic. Room enough for hundreds of thousands of Comprise. Packed the way they were, there could be millions.

There was a wooden basin in the center of the nest.

Rebel stood by it, watching the water dance and leap in response to a trickle that fell from above. The overflow slid over the lip, through a mossy hole and into the depths. It was joyous to watch. Whenever a Comprise straightened or showed any faint glimmer of intelligence, it was hit by a droplet from a wolverine pistol and carried to a safe spot, to serve as poisoned meat against any attempt to reunite the island Comprise.

The water constantly shattered into near-subliminal mandalas, patterned wave fronts destroyed by the next drop before Rebel could decipher them. She leaned against the trough, intent on the images trying to break through the fluid surface, and accidentally pressed against her bracelet. The air filled with lashing red directional beams, reaching from Comprise to Comprise and then away, sometimes stabilizing into networks of twenty to fifty linked individuals before hitting poisoned meat and disintegrating again.

Suddenly the trees brightened to one side, glowing a profound blue, and everything was submerged in the energy of some impossibly powerful distant source. The red directional lines faded, slowed, winked out in its soothing wash. A purple sun burned low in the distance.

“Here it comes!” Wyeth shouted. “The counterattack!”

A rumbling noise rose up on all sides, the murmur of outraged ants dopplered down into the bass that tumbled and swelled like slow thunder, rolling over and over itself as it crashed in upon them. Local Comprise staggered up, backs arching as if galvanized with megavolts of raw power, eyes blind, lips curling back from savage teeth.

Hitting them with more shyapple juice had no effect.

Holstering his pistol, a wolverine shouted, “Here we go, kiddies!”

Then the Comprise were howling, not in pain but from the depths of some primal chasm of madness. They shrieked and tore at each other, their fury directed at whatever flesh stood closest. Bors waved the team back up a sloping branch away from the nest. Out of the roiling orgy of violence, five Comprise ran up after them, arms low, faces flat with rage.

Wyeth and Kurt fell back to cover the retreat.

Singlesticks appeared magically in their hands. They were manic with combat glee, totally wired, giggling obscenely to themselves as they braced for the fight. Wyeth danced alittle quick-step jig, and Kurt tossed his stick from hand to hand, and then the Comprise were on them.

Kurt swept the first over the edge of the limb with one long, fluid motion, releasing the stick to snatch out his combat blade in time for the next Comprise. He slammed the knife into the creature’s heart and was bowled over backward by the body’s momentum. “Get moving, you dumbass drug-head!” Eucrasia screamed, dragging Rebel after her.

Two Comprise were atop Wyeth, attacking him and each other. One had its legs on his shoulders and was trying to rip his head from his body. Another leaped on Kurt as he was trying to free himself of the corpse of his second kill.

Rebel watched over her shoulder as she was pulled forward.

Swearing, Kurt was swept off the limb.

Rebel realized suddenly that she wasn’t half drugged enough. She saw Kurt fall into darkness, locked in combat with the Comprise, and the sight burned away the mists of whimsy and distraction, leaving her for the instant with no veil between herself and reality. The Comprise are only bad thoughts, she told herself, dire-wolves and tigers aflame in the ganglion forests of the brain. “Stop talking and run!” Eucrasia ordered.

She ran.

She ran, and they were higher now, in the upmost treetops, where yellow butterflies half melted into the light and flights of egrets scattered at their approach. The roaring anger of the Comprise was everywhere, a universal scream of rage such as might issue from the very mouth of Hell, but the Comprise themselves were lost in the foliage. Bors and Wyeth consulted, and Wyeth pointed to the west.

“... help it, the signal’s being broadcast from somewhere off the island.”

“What a fool,” Eucrasia said. “Can’t fight, can’t look after yourself—what the fuck good are you?”

They were sitting, resting, in a field of birds’ nests, intergrown mats woven from leaves and small twigs and stuck together with saliva. Tufts of down sprouted here and there. Rebel leaned back, and the air was sweet with bird droppings. Her bracelet had turned itself off some time ago.

Eucrasia was playing with a trophy head she’d taken.

The stump of neck was black with dried blood, the fur short and stiff. She rubbed noses with it, kissed the drying black lips. Then she lifted it up and held it before her face like a mask. “Hey. Speak to me when I ask you a question.”

Startled, Rebel looked directly at her and saw an old monkey-woman, eyes half sunk in gloom, face near dead with age. It was Elizabeth. That ancient face twisted around, slowly turned upside down. “Well?” she snapped.

Rebel was nearly paralyzed with horror. But Eucrasia was her guide and sister. If she’d turned herself into the distant wizard-mother who had sent her journeying into the System to begin with, there must be some reason for it, some lesson to be learned. “What do you want?” Rebel whispered. “What do you want from me?”

“Don’t want shit.” Elizabeth reached up to slice off one of her own ears. Then she pulled her head from her neck, threw it away, and was Nee-C again.

They were traveling. Rebel felt light-headed, but better.

She still had a hard time co

There were open treeless stretches, too, like dark lakes and oceans, through which swam air creatures carefully adapted into complex interlocking food cycles, some of them dangerous and others playful. Too, there was not this incessant gravity—in a comet, gravity was only statistical. Left alone long enough, everything in a room would float to one wall, and that was the floor.

But for all of that, this tree felt a lot like home. The Comprise had taken basic comet tree technology, distorted it for their own purposes, and grown a small model of what might exist out in the Oort. It was possible that they had thoughts of reaching the stars. The Comprise were immortal; a few thousand years slow travel might mean nothing to them.