Vacumn Flowers

There was motion under the rings. Transit craft were arriving and being towed to the side to make room for more. The paintlines on the tarmac lit up. Commerce was begi

“Well,” Bors said. “Let’s get back to the rings. The sooner we reach the moon, the sooner we’re done with it all.”

Nee-C laughed and spun her knife in the air.

On the long walk to the rings, it occurred to Rebel that there was one person in the room who, silent and ignored, had not been asked what she wanted. Eucrasia. She was dead of course, her persona destroyed and beyond anypossible resurrection. But her memories remained, and it shouldn’t be much of a trick to determine what she would have asked for. Rebel thought she was begi

Eucrasia had never wanted money, really, nor power.

Her desires had been negative, mostly—an end to the petty fears and guilts that had silted up and choked her pleasure in life. She’d wanted to be someone who liked herself, capable of a little fun now and then, even a touch of adventure, without being overwhelmed by dreads and doubts. All of which she had achieved on her own.

For it was not Rebel alone who had plunged that knife of water through the programmer in that instant of diamond light when Eucrasia’s memories had welcomed her in with an almost sexual intensity of desire, a bright peaking burst of joy that could only be love. Two minds had moved that hand.

But Rebel remembered working in the chop shop back of Cerebrum City in Geesinkfor, how she’d warmed to the task. The thrill that had filled her when she opened up a mind. The sense of fitness, the comforting relief of working with the emotive circuits, balancing logics against consequences. If anything remained of Eucrasia, it was the love of her craft. She’d want to continue at it if she could. This was not a gift that Earth could give her. But Rebel thought that she might. As a kind of an offering to the dead.

She was not really a bad sort, after all, was Eucrasia.

“Hey! Wake up in there!” Wyeth clapped hands lightly before her face, and she blinked, startled. Looking about, she saw that she and Wyeth had lagged behind the others.

Then she saw the quiet unhappy doubt behind Wyeth’s clowning expression and said, “You’re pretty glum.”

“Well.” He shook his head, laughed unhappily. “I’ve got this little paranoid fantasy. Maybe you’d like to hear it? I think that maybe Earth doesn’t need your wettechnicsafter all. Could be, it was just playing a little game with us.

Maybe what it was buying was not so much your integrity as a plausible story to feed the human race. A way of buying a quiet entry into human space. I mean, the story is plausible enough.”

“Then why did you go along with the trade?”

“Because I believed the story of why the Comprise retreated back to the surface of the Earth. And it seemed to me that if Earth wanted to work on the problem of integrity and had the clues it has— traces of shyapple juice, bits of information comet worlders dropped in front of its agents, and so on—it could solve the problem.

Knowing that a solution existed, how long would it take the Comprise to find it? A year? A century? Can you imagine a thousand years going by without Earth solving the problem? I can’t.

“So we were trading something that Earth doesn’t actually need for something that humanity needs desperately. The transit ring. Earth is right. There’s no way we can guarantee our own survival until the human race can get out of the neighborhood.”

“Oh. So that’s it.”

“Why? What did you think it was?”

“I thought maybe you were just pretending to go along with the offer, and then when we got cislunar you were going to try to convince me to go underground with you.”

Wyeth shook his head admiringly. “Sunshine, you’re even more devious than I am!”

They had come to the transit rings. There was a luxury transport ready to go, its hull a gleaming white enamel.

Robots directed the workers and trade diplomats away from the ship, and they climbed the stairs. It was a large device, plush where the hospitality shed had been spare, and they had it all to themselves.

In just a few hours they would be standing in the Courtsof the Moon, where high justice was acted out under the watchful eyes of custodians wetwired to perfect honesty and hardwired to thermonuclear devices. There Earth would produce its stacks of chips to be examined and Rebel would have a clear recording made of her persona.

And there the exchange would be made.

“Ms. Mudlark!” a robot called after her.

She turned on the steps.

“You forgot something.” It stepped daintily forward, then knelt, proffering her old cloak. Tattered and worn, with the silver seashell pin on one lapel. Rebel accepted it, uncomprehending. Bors had also left his cloak behind, and it hadn’t been returned to him. Then she was struck by sudden memory, and frantically searched through lint-lined pockets until she came up with the worn, greasy wafer she’d made in Geesinkfor, the recording of her persona.

“Let’s get a move on!” shouted Nee-C. “We gotta go get rich!”

“I’m ready,” she said in a strained little voice.

They broke through the sky.

15

TIRNANNOG

Two years later, Rebel said, “Well?”

They were strolling through the most opulent legal services park in Pallas Kluster, a place that was half illusion and conjuring trick, laced through with holographic fantasy. A false surf thundered to one side, a perfectly constructed jungle hid law boutiques to the other. Seven voluptuous moons floated in a velvet sky. It was what Rebel imagined an opium dream would be like:brightly detailed yet somehow vague, not quite convincing, and ultimately banal. She wondered if this were what the People thought they were building on Mars. If so, they were in for a disappointment.

“We’re going to lose it all,” Wyeth said. “That’s the best judgment of our lawyers.” They followed a lazy brick path into the jungle, where orchids glowed gently in dusky foliage. “Hell, we should’ve known that from the begi

“But we own two-fifths of the corporation. Our share must be worth millions of years.”

“Billions,” Wyeth said moodily. Then he chuckled.

“Well, easy come, easy go.” A shadowy figure gestured them away from the path, and they stepped through a hidden doorway into a harshly lit access corridor. The floor felt gritty underfoot. A barrel full of discarded orange peels flavored the air.

“But how could they possibly take it away from us?”

“As I understand it, most of the dirty work was done during the corporate restructuring, when your mother dumped her stock in order to create the Mudlark Trust.

Then we had to leverage our holdings when Deutsche Nakasone got that judgment against us—”

“They’ve got a lot of nerve. I mean, they got their recording, and it was a best-seller, too. There must be hundreds of thousands of rebel mudlarks loose in the System by now. More, if you count the grey market knock-offs.”

Wyeth shrugged. “Those were just the opportunities. It was simply something that was going to happen. The Republique has better lawyers than we have, and I’m not even sure of the loyalty of our own. But I still don’t know how they magicked it all away… and that’s it in a nutshell.

They know how and we don’t.”

They were moving within an enchanted circle of protection, a ring of samurai that stayed always out of sight, like a membrane filtering out anything that was potentially dangerous. Now they came to a juncture of hallways, and a bodyguard bowed them to one side. They entered an elevator cage that was all black Victorian wrought iron and rose toward the hub.