Vacumn Flowers

“Integrity?” Bors said, baffled.

Wyeth moved behind Rebel, put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s an old bit of wetsurgical slang. Integrity is that quality which protects identity. A persona with absolute integrity ca

“Shut up, Wyeth.” Rebel smiled at the shock on his face, lifted his hand from her shoulder and kissed the knuckles.

“Honest, gang, you don’t know what’s going on here,” she said gently. To the child, “My wizard-mother sent me into the System to sell just that commodity. To you, presumably, since nobody else has what she wants. Now Elizabeth Charm Mudlark is a genius, that goes without saying, but she’s been lucky as well. You’re not going to buy integrity from anybody else. She fell into it by accident, saw that she had something special to sell, and so she grew me and sent me here to sell it. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool treehanger, and something of a patriot, so you can probably guess what she wants.”

Bors touched a finger to a patch of skin by one eye in a deliberate gesture that put Rebel in mind of someone flicking a switch, and then of the machines she’d seenhidden deep within his flesh. When the girlchild had asked to enter, he’d said to her, “Why should I trust you?”

and the child had replied, “You shouldn’t. A man with a major implosive device wired to his cortex needn’t trust anyone.”

Smiling kindly, Bors lowered his hand. A simple warning.

“We will pay her price,” the child said.

“No, it’s not that easy now. I can see that this thing is even more valuable than she thought. If I hadn’t been sidetracked when I arrived, one of your agents could have bought it cheap. But now that I have some glimmering of its worth to you, you’ll have to do better.”

“Your wizard-mother wants what any comet worlder would want: to travel to the stars.” The child turned slightly, and a blur of air curved through the room. For an instant a small machine was visible hovering over a countertop, as apositional and indeterminate as a hummingbird. Ten outsized wafers materialized on the counter, and then (Nee-C slashing her knife through its wake) it was gone.

“These are the plans for the transit ring. The theoretical base, the engineering specifications, detailed structure for the backup industries, and selected supervisory wetware.

It is wealth beyond even human greed. There’s a revolution in physics there, to begin with, and technology that will transform human space. You can use it to tap the energy of the sun in a small way, and with this energy, you can build roads through the System, nets of transit rings linking every settled Kluster and moon, bringing them only hours apart. Injected into human space, this knowledge means an economic boom such as your race has never seen. Whoever is sitting atop that boom will be richer than any human has ever been.” The child smiled slightly disdainfully. “This is what you asked for. Isn’t it enough?”

Elizabeth’s instructions leaped up within Rebel, hot and compulsive, urging her to accept, but she swallowed them down. “No. Not half enough.”

“What more do you want?”

“I want everything I can get! I want you to give everybody in this room everything they ask for, however large or unreasonable.” She was shaking and her throat was dry. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke. “I want you to give us so much that it’d be impossible for us to turn you down.”

“It may turn out to be less than you think,” the girlchild said. “Very well. Nee-C, we’ll start with you. What do you want?”

“Me?” She straightened with startlement, eyes widening slightly, lips parting, blade hand falling. Then she leaned back against the door, and her face tightened craftily.

“Money. Enough of it so I can get any damned thing I want on my own, without having to get specific with you.”

“It’s already there. The four of you and your absentee wizard can incorporate around the patents in these chips and control more wealth than you can imagine. Bors?”

“My life is dedicated to the welfare of my nation,” Bors said carefully. “I wish only its glory.”

“That too is within your grasp. We are not uninformed of the internal politics of Amalthea, nor of the ambitions that fuel its aggression against us. Yours is a small nation and a poor one, and what stature it has in human space is derived from the secret war you wage upon us. We also know that while on Deimos you met with the Stavka’s theoreticians and that among your provisional agreements was one covering the contingency of our transit ring ever coming widely available. The People could use a moon of sufficient size to act as counterweight to the sun’s torque, in order to slow the wobble of Mars’

spin axis. The added insolation this would result in could cut fifty years off their latest Three-Hundred-Year Plan.

The agreements were only tentative, not legally binding.

But a ring large enough to accelerate a dyson world across interstellar space could also move Amalthea from Jovian orbit. They offered you ten percent ownership of the completed and terraformed Mars, and you believe that you could get fifteen.”

“You oversimplify enormously. The agreement also commits Amalthea’s citizenry to heroic amounts of manual labor. Your technology wouldn’t free us of this obligation.”

“Politics is the art of the possible,” the child said. “And it is possible that your government would not thank you for turning down a fifth-ownership of the transit package.

Think on that. Who’s next?”

“You know what I want,” Wyeth said. “Are you offering to commit mass suicide? That’s an offer I just might take you up on.”

“Wyeth, you want guaranteed safety for the human race.

There is no such thing. We ca

Consider also how strengthened it would be by the new physics and the new technologies. Consider that branches of your race will be leaving in their dyson worlds soon, scattering through the universe. In a century comet worlds will orbit all the neighboring stars. In a hundred thousand years, there will be trees floating in the center of the galaxy. Even if we wished—and why should we?—we could not track them all down and destroy them. Surely some would survive. We put it to you: Are you not best off taking our offer?”

“Well, I…”

“Last of all, Rebel, we come to you. Rebel, you want a pair of ruby slippers.”

“What?”

“You want to go home.” The girl leaned her head to one side in a kind of half shrug. “That is beyond us. But if you accept this knowledge, you will have the wealth to do whatever you have the strength to choose to do. If you want to go back to Tirna

They were all silent.

“Come, come,” Earth chided. “We’ve agreed to give you anything you can name. Surely you can name one thing we haven’t already offered you?”

“Matthew Arnold!” Bors cried suddenly. In a hoarse voice he said, “I want the complete Dover Beach—I want every poem that Arnold ever wrote. I want Proust and Apollinaire and Tagore. I want Garcia Lorca and Kobo Abe and the first three acts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I want every work of literature that was lost when you swallowed up Earth. Indexed!”

“That will take several hours to produce. Much of it exists only in memory now. But it will be done. We will have the cases ready for examination by the time your reach the Courts of the Moon.” The girlchild turned and walked away. Behind her, the pile of wafers disappeared.