Vacumn Flowers

In the elevator, a pierrot proffered a silver tray with a line of black Terran cheroots. Wyeth ignored it, but Rebel picked one up and waited while it was lit for her. She drew in a little smoke, exhaled. “So what are we going to do now?” she asked carefully.

“I don’t know. We have infinite money for the next few months, however long it takes them. At the end of that time, the corporation will repossess everything. It’s not legal for individuals to have the kind of wealth we do. Once we’re forced out of the corporation, we’re dirt poor again.”

The pierrot stood nearby, so unobtrusive as to be almost invisible, listening to their every word and forgetting it immediately. This was the kind of privacy the very rich could buy, their servants programmed to ignore their grossest crimes. Wyeth could strangle Rebel with his bare hands—or she him—in front of their bodyguards, without raising an eyebrow. So long as only the patrons themselves were involved.

They floated into the hub, trailing a thin line of blue-grey smoke. Their landau waited there, at the center of the newly retrofitted transit ring. The door was open, and they stepped within. “Home,” Wyeth said. The wheel disappeared from around them. A traffic redirector swallowed them up, spat them out, and they hung in the receiving ring of their estate.

“Listen, Wyeth, I got another tape from Elizabeth.”

“That old harridan.”

“Careful now, you’re talking about me a hundred years from now,” Rebel said, smiling. “She told me that if I goback to Tirna

Wyeth said nothing.

Their elevator slowly descended. “I want to go home, Wyeth. Now, while I still have the money and the chance.

They’ve just finished the big transit ring, and Tirna

“Ah.” Wyeth closed his eyes. “I’ve been waiting for this, Sunshine. I mean, I can see you’re not exactly happy here…”

“It’s not a question of happy, gang, it’s… just so artificial here, you know? I mean, in the System. And being rich doesn’t help at all, it’s just like always being wrapped in padding to protect you from hard surfaces and sharp edges and any least contact with the real world. Listen.

Come along with me, okay?” She put her cigar down

(somebody removed it) and squeezed his hand hard. “Give up this whole business here as a bad job. Come away with me, babes, and I’ll give you the stars.”

Wyeth smiled wanly. “Sunshine, we’ll be old before any of those dyson worlds reach even the first star. Even Proxima Centauri is a good fifty years away.”

The elevator stopped, and they stepped out into a lobby with polished marble and coral floors. Orange orchids drooped from onyx pillars. “So? We’ll be old together under an alien sun. Come on, don’t tell me that your sense of adventure is entirely dead.” They walked down a long hall between rows of granite elephants.

“It’s not that, you know it isn’t. But Earth is starting to slip into the System. They bought a dozen cislunar cities, and they’ve got an enclave on the moon. Soon they’ll be everywhere. Conflict is inevitable. I’ve got to be here when it happens.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Rebel, we’ve gone over and over this. This isn’t just some whim of mine—it’s my duty. It’s my purpose.”

“Wyeth, people don’t have purposes—machines have purposes. People just are. Come on, gang, you’re the mystic, you know that.” But looking deep into his eyes, she saw that he simply wasn’t listening.

He was not going to come with her.

Rebel’s face was numb, stung by sudden cold loss.

Wyeth paused to touch open a pair of enormous burnished doors. They opened upon sculptured meadowlands, an impressionistic Jovian sky. Rebel ducked her head, stared down at her feet flashing forward and back. Wyeth ran after her and caught her by the wrist.

She wheeled.

“Stay,” he urged her. “We’ve been poor together. We can do it again.”

Rebel shook her head sullenly. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all.”

Again Wyeth hurried to catch up with her. “What, then?”

“I won’t destroy my life for you,” she muttered. “I mean, you know me, I’d give up everything for you if I had to. But not this way, not just because you want to have everything your own way.”

“I’m not asking you to—oh, what’s the use of talking? If I could, I’d go with you. But I can’t. It’s simply not my choice.” Rebel stopped before a second pair of doors, and Wyeth reached out to touch them open.

“Thank you,” Rebel said coldly.

Then, as Wyeth stared at her open-mouthed with outrage, she stepped inside and closed the doors in his face.

“Stars, please.” Rebel lay in a mossy cleft atop a bare rock hilltop, wind playing gently over her. This was her favorite room, the only one, in fact, that didn’t strike her as being incredibly ugly, with the special vulgarity of new wealth. She’d had it modeled after the Burren. The sky blackened, then lit up with the kind of fierce starscape that simply could not be seen from the surface of Earth. The Milky Way was a river of diamond chips spa

She felt as if every cell in her body were dead and ruptured, a small moan of grey agony.

After a while Wyeth stopped pounding on the door.

There were small blue gentians growing in the cracks of the rocks. Rebel poked one with a fingertip, left it unpicked. She wasn’t going to stay with Wyeth. She wasn’t.

A shooting star sped across the sky, chiming softly.

“No calls, please.” Rebel stared blindly up, trying to think. She could feel her life branching into two possible directions, and they were both bleak and meaningless.

Another star chimed across the sky, then a third. After a pause, the Pleiades blossomed with dozens of shooting stars, tinkling like a celestial wind chime. “I said no more calls, thank you!”

The sky jumped. Stars rippled, as if stirred by gigantic tidal forces, and then faded away.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. Rebel sat up and stared uncomprehendingly as the sky folded into featureless planes—blank white walls, floors, ceiling, all so uniformly pure they blended one into another. In the center, kneeling on a small red prayer rug, was an emaciated woman in white. Her head was bowed, hood down, revealing a bald skull. Then the woman looked up.

Cold eyes. A hard face painted with crystalline white lines.

“You are a difficult woman to contact,” she said. “Your defenses against intrusion are almost certainly better than you know.”

“Snow—or Shadow, or whoever or whatever you are—I am not in the mood for your clever little games today, so why don’t you just go bugger off, huh? I mean, Earth’s already got everything it wanted from me.” Then, bitterly,

“Everybody did.”

“I am not acting on behalf of Earth.”

“Oh?” Rebel said before she could catch herself.

“Things are changing. You know that. Major political and cultural shifts are in the offing. One minor effect is that as Earth moves into human space, it values my network’s services less. At the same time, the new wyeths have been giving us a great deal of difficulty. We’ve had to become more discreet, less accessible. Less effective.”

It made Rebel feel odd, knowing that Wyeth existed in a hundred temporary incarnations throughout Amalthea’s Bureau d’Espio