Vacumn Flowers

She looked at the woman beside her, and it was still Nee-C. They were following behind Wyeth and Bors. Bors had red cuts across his face.

They four were the only survivors.

The tree was brighter ahead, the soft green-yellow light reaching down to the level of their feet and below, like a wall of radiance cutting across the universe. She was that close to it, the vertiginous hint of message her old, monkey-faced mother-self had wanted her to decode. If she just kept walking, would that wall wait for her, opening up into spacious vistas of clarity and revelation, or would it continue to recede from her forever? She stretched out a hand, and it got no closer.

“Wait,” Wyeth said, and ran out on a long, bare branch.

Leaves rustled as he disappeared into curtains of green. A

few minutes later he returned. “The tree ends here.” He slashed a hand downward. “Just like that. All we have todo is climb down. We’ve reached the center.”

“Ah,” Rebel said.

She had it now.

14

GIRLCHILD

Where is everyone?”

The down station was a perfectly round, perfectly flat clearing, surrounded on all sides by the palisade of trees.

The tangled root floor had been covered with a thin pad of tarmac, and at its distant center stood the two transit rings: one horizontal and close to the ground, the second floating high above treetop level, aligned to some unseen sending station. A platform rested under it, and a spiral stairway descended the all-but-invisible tower.

Scarlet ibises flew overhead as the diminished party walked toward the rings. Wyeth led, his limp pronounced.

The tarmac was hot underfoot. Midway to the rings was a small building shaped like a hat, one end canted up, glass walls shimmering with corporate logos—a human-run hospitality shed. It was obviously deserted.

“Ought to be somebody here,” Nee-C insisted. She was stropping her blade back and forth across the palm of her hand, as if trying to hone it to a finer edge. Rebel couldn’t help but think that in the absence of somebody else to cut, she’d turn that knife on herself, slice her own hand to ribbons, just to see some blood flow.

Far ahead, under the transit ring, were parked a few dozen transport vehicles. They walked over paintlines that divided the tarmac into cargo territories and corporate holdings, and they were all empty. There was nothing left but grease stains. Wyeth fell back to take Rebel’s arm.

Nee-C stayed on Rebel’s other side, still escorting her, and Bors fell back to walk alongside Wyeth, so that they now walked four abreast. “You feeling better now?” Wyeth asked. Rebel nodded. “Good.”

“Well?” said Bors. He squinted ahead. “What’s the story here?”

Wyeth sighed. “I’ll tell you the truth. Back by the autopsy pond— when we first got onto the island?—as soon as I saw there weren’t any Comprise there, I knew they were waiting for us. You’ve never been here before so you couldn’t tell, but this place is almost deserted. There’s not a fraction the number of Comprise in the trees there were a week ago. They mostly cleared out before we got here.”

“Why?”

“Obviously for the same reason we came here. Earth wanted to see what the shyapple juice would do to it and what defenses it could mount against it, risking a minimum amount of its substance in the process.” They walked on in silence for a bit, the rings still distant. Then Wyeth gri

“You mean like them?” Nee-C pointed.

Something stirred under the rings. Tall, elegant machines stepped from behind the transports and strode across the tarmac at them.

The trees were too distant; they found shelter in the hospitality center instead. Through its transparent walls they watched the robots form a cordon about them. The silvery blue machines walked on pairs of insect-delicate legs and peered through sensor slots in their carapaces.

These were exotics, no two alike. Some sprouted projectile tubes under their mandibles; featureless weapons spheresfloated above others. One small machine with a stiff crest of needles ru

Within, Nee-C mirrored the martinet device’s restlessness, pacing the interior first one way and then the other, anxious to get out and fight. Rebel yanked the disks from Bors’ forehead and jerked her chin. “You want her programmed down too?”

Bors smiled suavely. “She’d hardly thank you for it.

Unchopped, she’s just another clerical.” He peeled off his earth suit and stepped gingerly into the conversation pool.

“Well. Since they haven’t killed us, we must have something they want. We’ll wait.” He chose a seat with a good view of the rings.

There was food in the service counters and fresh clothing in a boutique case. Still a little queasy from shyapple aftermath, Rebel ignored the former, but tapped the latter for an orchid-pink cache-sexe, somber purple cloak, and the finest filigree arm and leg bands they had.

Then she drew a fresh line across her face, the top of a silhouetted lark in flight. At a time like this, she wanted to look her best.

Outside, one killer machine squatted and tracked her with its weapon cluster as she put the new cloak aside and joined Wyeth and Bors in the pool. Frogs scattered as she eased herself down. She should have felt frightened, but truth to tell, there was no fear left in her. And she’d recovered a touch of her old ruthlessness in the jungle.

Earth wanted her wettechnics. It would negotiate. She broke the stem of a water lily and placed it in Wyeth’s hair.

He grimaced and brushed it away. Then, relenting, he smiled faintly and put an arm about her shoulders. She leaned against him. Her wizard-mother’s directions burned bright within her, filling her with insane confidence.

Now that she knew what she wanted, she welcomed the coming confrontation with Earth. Win or lose, she was in control. It was powerful stuff, the sting of purpose, like a drug, and she understood now why Wyeth courted it so closely.

Perhaps only half an hour later, the island shook with thunder as a vacuum tube winked into existence and then collapsed. A small egg-shaped craft rested within the upper transit ring. It cracked open, and a tiny figure began the long climb down the spiral stair. “Probably grown specially for us,” Bors said, climbing from the pool. He picked up a towel. “When Earth wants to talk seriously, it likes to take an impressive form—giants, sometimes, or ogres. Something straight out of your nightmares.”

The negotiator slowly crossed the tarmac. Robots parted for it, and it walked up to the doorway. “We are Earth,” it said. “Will you let us enter and speak with you?”

It was a girl, a scrawny little thing no more than seven years old, and perfectly naked. She had no arms.

“Do you remember being born?” the armless girl asked.

“We do.”

She stood alone on the white moss floor in the center of the shed. Bors stood directly before her, flanked by Wyeth and Rebel, while Nee-C lounged in the doorway, tensely eyeing the girlchild’s back. Rebel couldn’t help staring at where the child’s arms should have been. The flesh was smooth there, and unblemished. Her shoulder blades jutted slightly to either side, like tiny wings. Rebel looked down, found herself staring at the child’s crotch, at her i

The child seemed such a perfect avatar of helplessness that it was hard to think of her as the focus, as she had said, of perhaps a billion Comprise, as massive a point source of attention as Earth ever needed to assemble. “Get to the point,” Bors said roughly.