Vacumn Flowers

11

CISLUNAR

She was cased in ice.

The universe was perfect, chill and silent. Circuits shifted energies about her, unnoticed. She was at peace. A

machine daintily slid a thin tube down her throat and drew the liquified crash jelly away. With a rumble like silent thunder, the distant ice was touched by warmth and began to break up. Needles touched her in seven places, and they stung. But she did not recognize the sensation as pain. She was soaring upward now, through arctic waters.

She touched the membrane of consciousness, and it gave under her hand and, in a burst of white foam, shattered.

Choking, she broke through the surface and was deafened by the bewildering crash of noise. The air was cold flame. It seared her lungs as she gulped it down.

Bors opened the coffin, and she awoke.

“Hello.” he said, smiling. “Welcome to the realm of the living.”

“I—” she said, and shook her head. “It was…”

“Wyeth said you might be a little confused at first.” Bors offered his hand, and she floated free of the coffin. “Please open the hall. The Pequod has a small chapel—a meditation room, if you prefer. You might want to rest there for a while and collect your thoughts in solitude.”

But she was not confused. She was simply too lucid to make sense. Everything crashed in on her with superhuman clarity, the angels of thought coming too fast and close together to be put into words. She was like a child born blind and come of an age to receive her first pair of eyes. Revelation dazzled her. “That would be nice,”

she said. “No. I think I will.”

Bors left her afloat in a small spherical room. The chapel had a projective wall, and within it a loosely woven all-gravity greenhouse lattice. Plants sprouted wildly from the interstices, leafy explosions of green, trying to grow in all directions at once. Two small brown leaves floated free, and she shifted slightly to share the space equally with them. They all three were peers. The wall was set for realtime exterior, showing to one side Earth in all its bluewhite glory, and to the other a weary old orbital hongkong. Plainsuited spacejacks swarmed about its exurban tanks, towns, farms, and manufactories. They were deep in the cislunar sprawl.

Slowly she gathered herself. Something was wrong, but she was so happy about it she didn’t care. The promise of freedom bubbled like laughter in her veins. All of Eucrasia’s memories, and the hardpacketed few of Rebel’s that had been used to brace the persona, were locked firmly into place, along with one that belonged to both of them: that ecstatic moment when Rebel had filled Eucrasia’s brain and in joyous excess of purpose upended a glass over the programmer. She knew now that she had done that because she was a wizard’s daughter, and she understood what that meant. The light of that bright instant when the water writhed in the air like a diamond dragon still blinded her to her purpose, but that didn’tmatter. She knew something far more important.

She was still Rebel.

“Where’s Wyeth?” She kicked into the common room.

“I’ve got to talk to him. It’s important.” It was hard to keep from singing.

Bors was floating alongside a cabinet, checking inventory. He glanced up, startled, in the act of returning a watercolor to its folder. Carefully, he put the folder into a thin drawer and slid the drawer shut. He switched off his notepad and stuck it in a vest pocket. “Well…” he began.

“This is… this is better than being born!” She touched a wall and, laughing, spun herself drunkenly in the air. She knew with all the certainty of years of training that waking up as Rebel was impossible, a blatant absurdity. There was no way the treehangers could create a persona that could survive coldpacking. But when a miracle is dumped in your lap, you don’t complain. “Where’s Wyeth? Is he sleeping? Wake the bugger up!”

“Um.” Bors coughed into his fist. “You, uh, you do realize that he didn’t want to be present when you woke up?”

“Of course he didn’t. I know that,” Rebel said impatiently.

“Please lock up the cabinet. You see, he arranged with me to awaken you a day later than him. He’s gone now.”

“Gone?” It was as if the colors had suddenly been drained from everything, leaving the air faintly chill.

“Gone where?”

Looking politely embarrassed, Bors murmured, “I really have no idea.”

Geesinkfor was an antiquated Bernal sphere, with window rings running about the rotational poles. Thehongkong’s windows and mirrors hadn’t been cleaned in years, and the interior was sunk in twilight gloom. But half the chillers were down, due to decreased maintenance, so it all evened out. Clean windows would only have overheated the interior. Or so Bors explained to her, anyway. Some of the air scrubbers must have broken down as well, for the air was stale and foul-smelling. The buildings were all midrises, ten to twenty stories high, and had sprawled up the slopes from the equatorial Old City area, almost to the edges of the windows. “Who would be stupid enough to build a totally artificial environment and then fill it with buildings designed for a planetary surface?” Rebel grumbled.

“Where’s your sense of history?” Bors asked. “This was one of the first forty cannister cities ever built. They hadn’t thought things through back then. Hey, look over here!”

He trotted across the plaza to where a huge basaltic moonrock had been carved into the shape of a crude stone axe. Hundreds of faces peered from the rock’s depths with fear and despair, just beginning to melt one into another.

He slowly read the archaic Spanish inscription on the base. “It’s a war memorial to the millions who were captured and absorbed. The Comprise set up a processing center right here, packed their victims into lifting bodies, and dumped ’em into the atmosphere. Very crude method.

Less than half survived to be swallowed up by Earth.”

Rebel looked uneasily about the dirty plaza. It was almost deserted. An ancient spacer in torn vacuum suit stumbled toward them, her hand out. A bored woman in police leathers watched. Rebel slipped an arm through Bors’. “Yeah, well. That was all a long time ago. Let’s get out of here.”

Bors led her deeper into the Old City, toward the equatorial sea. The sea was a stagnant stretch of water, wide as a Terran river, left over from Geesinkfor’s early days, when the water was pumped uphull and flowed back in scenic riverlets. Half the buildings facing it werederelict, their windows slagged over, but among them were the grimy shops, bars, and blade bazaars, noisy-bright with music and holographic flares, that made up the local Little Ginza. It was here that the grey market wetsurgical joints would be found. A few furtive-looking pedestrians dotted the boardwalk. A motortrike zipped by.

Rebel yanked Bors back from the roostertail as it slammed through a puddle, and said, “Okay, I’ve seen it. Now let’s find me a room.”

They turned their backs on the black water and trudged upslope. A cybercab dogged their heels, hoping for a fare, but they ignored it, and it sped off. Here and there, blank walls and scuffed streets flickered with corporate propaganda. In those areas where the speakers hadn’t been smashed, the voiceovers murmured seductively.

“You really needn’t be in a rush to move out of the Pequod.

I could easily put you up for a week or so.”

Rebel wore the ivory bracelet Wyeth had given her back in the sheraton. She touched it now, and the drab sphere transformed into a fairy city of red and blue lights, shot through with yellow lines of power. In a street overhead, she saw a centipede line of Comprise stitched together with interactive lines of electromagnetic force. And buried deep within Bors’ flesh, she could see the glow of subtle machines, waiting silently. Whatever they were, a mere dealer in vintage data didn’t need them. “That’s very generous of you, but I won’t find Wyeth sitting in your ship. Listen, if you see him again, would you give him a message for me? Tell him that I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

“Will he know what that means?”

“No, but he’ll be curious enough to find out.”

They walked on in silence. Now and again Bors glanced at her, as if trying to read the thoughts behind her new wetpaint. She really did like Bors and wished she could trust him, but Eucrasia had been betrayed by friends too many times, and all those memories were hers now. Shedidn’t dare repeat Eucrasia’s mistakes.

Turning a corner, Rebel glanced up into a nostril a hundred feet high, and staggered back a pace under the lightest touch of vertigo. The propaganda screens were capable of creating true grotesqueries of scale. Oceans washed over the building, and six implausibly long fingernails slashed across the screen to pierce a tomato.

Eucrasia had been visually literate, but the corporate iconography of the cislunar states differed from that of the Klusters, and she couldn’t decipher an image of it. The tomato pulsed blood. “Who runs this place, anyway?”

Rebel asked. “What kind of government has it got?”

Bors shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

They came to an obsidian building and stepped into its lobby. Security devices rose up on their haunches, tracked them with articulated heads, then sank down again. A fat man with brand new arms (they were pink and ludicrously thin) emerged from the shadows. His eyes were sleepy and his chest hair had been dyed blue to match his bow tie.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like a room,” Rebel said. Then, because she dared not give her real name but still needed something Wyeth would recognize if he came looking for her, “My name is Sunshine.” She shrugged to indicate she had no family name.

The fat man grunted, produced a greasy plate of glass.

“Put your hand here. Yeah, okay. Up to the third floor, take the door that turns blue for you. Sets you back forty-five minutes a day.”

“That sounds fair.” Rebel took the crate Bors had been carrying for her. “Promise me you’ll drop by now and then to see how things are going, Bors? That would be nice.”

He nodded, winked, grinned, and was gone.

The fat man turned back. “Hey, was that a bors?”

“Uh… yes.”

He smiled. “One of them did me a favor once. Next time you see him, tell him if he ever needs a room, I’ll cut him a good price.”

Rebel took a job at a place called Cerebrum City. Its front room held stacks of outdated wetware and a few racks of the current knock-offs, but all the profit came from a chop shop in the back. It was there that the cheap hustlers came, sick with paranoia and despair, for a slice of wetsurgical hope. They came in weary, sometimes trembling, to buy the courage, bravado, or even desperation needed to get on with business. Fugitives looking to change their flight patterns. Hard-luck street types searching for that winner persona that had so far eluded them. They also got the occasional adventurer, about to go down the drop tube to Earth, hoping to score big in some obscure scam, and these had to pay heavily, for what they wanted was by no means legal. By the time Rebel had dug out the last traces of fear or compassion, turned their eyes mad with cunning, and set their reflexes on hair trigger, they were as little human as the Comprise itself.

After a few days it got so Rebel could type her customers at a glance. After a week, she stopped bothering. They were all the same to her. She worked in a small room with wood paneling and a wall of boilerplate wetwafers, and concentrated on her job. It was a cheapjack version of building new minds, and Eucrasia had been very good at that. She could chop and customize a persona in an hour and a half Greenwich, and there was professional satisfaction in that. The work appealed to her. She might not dare think about what would become of her clients, but she never cut corners on them.

There were two other chop artists in Cerebrum City. One was a pale, nervous man with long fingers, who always came in late. The other was a hefty woman named Khadijah. She had dark eyes and a cynical mouth, andwas having an affair with the pale, nervous man.

One day, when Rebel had been working for two weeks, the nervous man didn’t come in at all. She had her last client of the day on a gurney, wired up and opened out when the curtain shot open and Khadijah stamped into the room. She had never come by before. The client—a whore come in to have his interest in sex revitalized—

tracked her with his eyes as she prowled about, and grinned witlessly at her. “Close your eyes,” Rebel told him.

“Now, can you imagine a unicorn?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.” Rebel yanked one of the wafers and stuck it in a sonic bath. While the device pounded it clean of microdust, she reflected that if she were to lop off this creature’s interest in sex entirely, he would walk out of the room free. He’d give up his trade and never once look back. But Eucrasia wouldn’t have meddled without permission, and Rebel was coming to respect the woman’s professional judgment. She replaced the wafer. “How about now?”

“Yes.”

Khadijah ran a finger along a rack of wafers, making them rattle in their slots. She retreated to the doorway, stood there holding up the curtain. “Well,” she said at last.

“How about you and me going out and getting drunk after work?”

After work Rebel always checked her room for messages and then prowled the streets of Geesinkfor, learning its ways and looking for Wyeth. So far she had turned up no solid leads, but there was still work to do. She had no desire at all to go drinking. But she remembered a time when Eucrasia had needed someone to get drunk with and nobody had been there. “Sure,” she said. “Soon as I wrap this one up.”

Khadijah nodded and ducked out of the room.

“Now.” Rebel held up a hand. “How many fingers?”

“Four.”

She threw a color on one wall. “Green or blue?”

“Blue.”

“All right. One more.” She threw an image on the wall. It was Wyeth. “Ever seen this man?”

“No.”

“All right, you pass.” She sighed, ran a final integration check, and then slapped on the programmer. The boy shuddered and closed his eyes as the programs took hold.

They started out in the Water’s Edge, a dark little bar favored by the trade, and took seats by the window so they could look down on the passersby. Khadijah drank her first two mugs of wine in grim silence, rapping the table for more when they were empty. Midway through her third, she grunted, “Men!”

“I know what you mean.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Staring idly out the window, Rebel saw something furtively nab a bit of trash from the boardwalk and then scurry off into shadow. It was long and scrawny and covered with grey fur. “Ugh,” she said. “Did you see that?

This place has cats!”

“Oh yeah, swarms of ’em. They live in abandoned buildings. The government used to have these machines that hunted them down, big suckers the size of… of dogs, I guess, but the kids kept kicking them into the water to watch them short out. That was years ago, when I was little.” She laughed. “Man, you should see them spark!”

“Tell me something. What’s all this about nobody knowing what kind of government Geesinkfor’s got?”

“Oh yeah. Nobody knows.” Then, at a look from Rebel,

“It’s true! Some people think that Earth runs all thehongkongs, through proxies. Others think the governments stay secret out of fear of the Comprise taking them over. And there are those who think the police don’t answer to anyone, that they’re just another gang. They collect the weekly protection money, after all. And nobody knows what triggers the heat. Some things you can get away with, but not always. Other things, you’re never seen again. Me, I think it’s just very handy for the people running things if nobody knows who they are.”

“This is crazy. Who do you complain to when something goes wrong?”

“Exactly.” Khadijah stuck a finger in her wine, swirled it about. “Best thing to do is just be careful to stay out of trouble.”

“How do you do that?”

Khadijah laughed and shook her head. “Let’s go someplace else.”

They climbed out the window, along the narrow ledgeway, up a rusty set of stairs, through a brightly lit roof garden where butterflies flitted (Rebel asked, “Are you sure this is the right way?” and “Trust me,” Khadijah said), then across a pedestrian bridge and down to a cellar tavern called The Cave. They sat by a table set on a truncated stalagmite, and Khadijah rapped for wine.

Rebel peered about the dark, crowded room. “I feel like I hadn’t moved at all.”

“Too true.” Khadijah paid for the wine, lifted her mug.

“Hey, Sunshine. How come you got such an aristocratic first-family name? I mean, you’re not cislunar. No way in hell you are. I’ve lived here all my life, and I know.”

The wine was laced with endorphins. Rebel felt lifted and removed, wrapped in the finest cushioning fog.

Nothing could hurt her now. “My name is aristocratic?”

(Back home, they could’ve worked intricate wonders with a glassful of endorphins, woven fantasias of emotionand illusion. But the biological arts were primitive, this side of the Oort.)

“Oh yeah, like… Kosmos Starchild Biddle, you know, or, uh, Wondersparkle Spaceling Toyokuni. One of those bullshit names they gave the kiddies when living off-planet was new and everyone was all rah-rah about it.”

“Well, I had to call myself something. There are all kinds of people looking for me I don’t want to find me.”

Khadijah nodded sagely. “So where you from, anyway?”

“Dyson world name of Tirnannog. Ever hear of it? No?

Well, actually my body was born out in the belts, but me

—I’m from the comets. I’m a wizard’s daughter.”

“Sunshine? That guy you were talking to the other week, the one who came by to see you when we were closing up?”

“Bors?”

“Yeah. There he is. Talking to that drop artist.”

Rebel looked up and saw Bors deep in conversation with a sour-looking old woman. She waited for him to glance their way, then waved broadly. He waved back, said a final word to the old woman, and wove his way to her through the maze of fake stalactites and small tables. He still wore the red vest under his cloak, and it gave him a kind of rakish quasimilitary look. “Hello, hello,” he said cheerily, seating himself on the bench beside her. “What a coincidence. Have I met your friend yet?”

After introductions, Rebel said, “So what have you been up to lately?”

“Ah, well, that’s interesting! I’ve been scrounging about in the city archives, and I found a five-thousand-line epic poem about the Absorption Wars, all in rhymed couplets, by a woman who’d survived the whole thing. She was programmed clerical for the processing center, and by the time they got around to her, the treaties had been signed.”

“Is it any good?” Rebel asked dubiously.

Bors leaned forward confidentially and said, “It sucks.

But there’s still a small market for it as a historical curiosity, so it’s not a total loss for me.”

“I slept with a bors once,” Khadijah said.

“Really?” Bors said in a pleased voice.

The room suddenly warped so that everything in it got very small, except for Rebel herself. She was enormous, and her head bobbled like a balloon. She could have crushed the lot with her thumb. “I wouldn’t have thought he was your type,” she said.

“Wasn’t.” Khadijah was silent for a moment. “What the hell—look at him, you have to admit he’s charming. He was okay. Haven’t you ever slept with someone who wasn’t your type?”

“Oh yeah.” She thought of Wyeth—tall, lanky, pale. And serious, mostly. Not her type at all. She would never have chosen him for a sex partner if she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She took a deep breath, and without warning she deflated, whooshing down so that the rest of the room was normal-sized, or near so.

Khadijah eyed Bors. “Based on some kind of spy, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” Bors’ eyes twinkled.

“Sure you are. One of those little Outer System moons, some kind of comic-opera republic, all their agents used to be programmed bors. Then somebody pirated a copy for one of the big wetware concerns.”

“What happened then?” Rebel asked.

“Nothing happened then. But you can bet somebody made a bundle off that deal. That’s still a popular persona, bors is, in this part of the System. I saw one the other day.”

“I think that was me,” Bors said mildly.

For an instant Khadijah stared at him blankly. Then she started to laugh, beginning with what sounded like slowhiccups and building in long, noisy wheezes. She gasped and pounded the table.

“Listen,” Bors said. “I was going to come by tomorrow.

My work is done here, and I’ve got to see a few more of the cislunar states before I take the drop tube down to Earth.

But I didn’t want to run off without saying goodbye and wishing you luck.”

“More wine.” Khadijah rapped the table.

Somehow Rebel and Khadijah were reeling down an empty street, holding each other up. They must’ve passed some threshold point because Rebel had completely lost track of the last however-long-it-was. “A wizard’s daughter” she explained. “Well, first of all, you know what a wizard is, right?”

“No,” Khadijah said. There were dried tear tracks on her face. “Hell, I knew he was never going to stay.”

“A wizard is like a real crackerjack bioengineer. I mean, these guys are as rare as let’s say Rembrandt. They’re the ones with the creative juice to make the biological arts sit up and beg. Out in the comets they have a lot of status. But they tend to be jealous about their skills. Talented, but suspicious.”

“Never trust a man whose fingers are longer than his cock.”

“So when they need a messenger they can trust, they’ll decant a cloned self and program her up into their own persona. Now, ordinarily identity… drifts, you know? So a wizard’s daughter persona isn’t a straight copy; it’s altered so that she’ll retain identity with the wizard practically forever. They call that integrity. I don’t know how it’s done—only my mother self knows that. But anyway, I’m a wizard’s daughter. Her message is safe with me.”

“So what’s the message?” Khadijah asked.

“I don’t remember.”

They looked at each other. Then they both bent over laughing, grabbing at each other’s shoulders and forearms to keep from falling, leaning forward until their foreheads touched.

They had just pulled themselves together when a line of Comprise, no more than twenty units long, walked by in locked step, headed for the waterfront. They wore identical grey coveralls with that same familiar pigtail bobbing from each head. A dozen spheres of ball lightning floated about them. The balls hissed and crackled, and filled the street with shifting blue light. The hair on the back of Rebel’s neck rose up.

“Hey, Earth!” Rebel shouted. The creature second in line turned its head sharply. Blank, alert eyes looked at her.

Rebel turned, bent over, flipped up her cloak, and made loud farting noises with her mouth. The Comprise did not react. They continued calmly onward.

Khadijah was laughing so hard she was having trouble standing. “Oh, God, Sunshine! You’re impossible, you know that?”

The Comprise stepped onto the boardwalk and strode straight for the water’s edge. A length of railing was missing there, and the first stepped off, onto the water.

The glowing spheres of ball lightning dipped suddenly, almost to the sea’s surface, and the water sang. It rose in a bow to the Comprise’s foot, quivering like the vastly slowed vibration of a violin string.

Moving with processional dignity, the Comprise passed over the sea, the water rippling with tension under their feet. On the far side, they continued up a dark street, dwindling, growing dimmer, and finally gone to dusk.

The next day, Rebel woke up with a killer hangover.

“Ohhhh, shit.” She sat up on the edge of her cot and then bent over to clutch her head in her hands. Herstomach felt uneasy and her bowels were loose. Then she remembered farting at the Comprise, and she felt even worse.

As soon as she could, she went out to buy a liter of water.

Then she stopped at a rootworker’s shop to buy a bracelet leech, and snapped it on her upper arm. A trickle of blood began flowing through the charcoal scrubbers, to be returned to her body cleansed of fatigue poisons. By the time she got to work, she’d drunk down the water and felt almost normal.

Fortunately, things were slow at Cerebrum City.

Khadijah was already closeted with a complicated stress tune-up, and nobody else came by for the first few hours.

Rebel was grateful for that, but even when the bracelet turned blue and dropped from her arm, she felt dull and listless. It was a classic emotional hangover, the residue of having acted the fool.

Well, there was an easy solution for that.

Feeling the thrill of doing something both nasty and forbidden for the first time, Rebel broke out the programmer and ran a cleaning pad over the adhesion disks. They attached to her skin behind each ear and on her brow, like small mouths. She slapped on the reader-analyzer and riffled through the minor function wafers in the wall of boilerplate.

A clean sense of elation filled her. This was fun. She now understood that her earlier prejudice against wetprogramming had been the wizard’s daughter functions acting to protect her integrity. But this was different. So long as she didn’t try anything major, what could be the harm of it?

It would be best to be careful, though. Eucrasia had overdone it her first time—most persona bums did—and let the euphoria of success lead her into adding one alteration on top of another, building them into a nonsensical architecture of traits, until the entirestructure had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and she had needed six hours wetsurgical reconstruction to bring her back to herself.

Still, the psychosomatic functions were simple enough.

Any idiot could make the brain readjust the glandular and hormonal balances of the endocrinal system and, orchestrated correctly, it would give her a terrific body high. Humming slightly to herself, she glanced up at the floating tumbleweed diagram and gave it a spin.

And stopped. Hell, that was interesting. She rotated the sphere again, more slowly this time. Yes. There was a circular structure running through the entire persona in a kind of psychic mobius strip, touching all the branches, but dependent on none. How did a chimera like that come into existence? It was obviously artificial, and yet no wetware techniques she’d ever heard of (and Eucrasia had been up on what was happening in the field) could create something like that.

Fascinated, she slid a blank wafer into the recorder.

By the time her first client came in, she had entirely forgotten about giving herself a therapeutic body rush.

She stood, turning the professional-quality recording of her persona over and over in her hand, and thinking wonderingly that Deutsche Nakasone had been willing to kill her for this small ceramic flake. The kid entered and coughed to get her attention. He looked to be no more than fifteen. Rebel slipped the wafer into her pocket and said,

“Well, what do you want done?”

The wonderful, the magical thing about the wafer, of course, was the beautiful vistas it opened up of new psychologies, new modes of perception, entirely new structures of thought. With the skills this implied, she could create anything. Anything at all.

It was the kind of discovery that shatters old universes and opens up new ones in their place.

After work, she took the omnibus to the drop tube’s up station.

She’d put off this part of her search for as long as possible, because the drop tube was a Comprise creation, and they were likely to be all through the up station. But she was convinced now that Wyeth would not be found in Geesinkfor, that if he had ever been there he had moved on, either to another cislunar state or down to Earth.

Given Wyeth’s convictions, Earth seemed most likely.

The bus took ten minutes to reach the up station. Rebel had wired herself deadpan—emotion and expression completely divorced—and in addition to the vanitypaint on her forehead, she’d put a short black line like a dagger through her left eye. She was now the living image of a confidential courier, a minor cog in the affairs of business and state wired to wipe herself catatonic at the slightest attempt to tamper with her brain. Nobody would give her a second glance.

From the bus, the Earth was bright and glorious, as startlingly beautiful as everyone said, the wonder of the System. None of the Comprise’s works could be seen from here.

The up station loomed, a slender hoop of rock. It was a carbonaceous asteroid that the Comprise had bought and, utilizing their incomprehensible physics, made flow into the desired shape. A transit ring had been fitted into the interior, and a labyrinthine tangle of corridors dug through its length. It spun in geosynchrous orbit directly above a ground station with a sister transit ring. Fleecy clouds formed a vast circle about the ground station. The Comprise’s technology somehow held the air back from the lane between transit rings, so that there was a well of hard vacuum reaching almost to the planet’s surface, and this affected local weather systems. Rebel could see three more such cloud rings on this side of the globe.

A steady stream of air-and-vacuum craft slipped in andout of the up station’s ring. Some were flung down at the ground station, while others had just been nabbed on their way up the vacuum well. All passengers and cargo were processed through the human-run sections of the up station before going down and after coming up. It was a fearsomely busy place.

The bus docked, and Rebel walked through the security gates and into the ring’s outer circle of corridors. She let the flooding crowds sweep her away. Occasionally she passed wall displays indicating numbers of craft gone and caught, and the station’s shifting power reserves (up for each vehicle caught, down for each released), but this last was for show only, since humans were allowed no access to the transit machinery. Now and then a chain of a hundred or so Comprise hurried by, but they were rare.

Most, evidently, stayed to their own corridors.

More common were the scuttling devices that sped between legs and through crowds—small, clever mechanicals that fetched, carried, and frantically cleaned.

None of them came anywhere approaching sentience, and yet Rebel felt uncomfortable at how common they were. It seemed a sign of how hopelessly compromised the cislunarians were by machine intelligence. She was surprised their guilt didn’t show on their faces.

Subliminal messages washed through the halls, but none of them were aimed at Rebel, and she lacked the decoders. They could only make her feel hot and anxious.

Her face itched.

She took a side ramp into the administrative areas, noting as she did so how a security samurai glanced her way and murmured into his hand. She’d been tagged. But she walked confidently on, as if she belonged.

Half-Greenwich was terrific for walking; enough tug on your feet to give them purchase, not enough load to tire them. She came to a line of security gates, all marked with the wheel logo of Earth crossed by a bar sinister: No Comprise. Subimbeds pounded at her, making her feelunwelcome and anxious to leave. Any of these gates would do.

She matched strides with an important-looking woman, laying an arm over her shoulder just as she plunged through a gate, so the cybernetics would read them both as a single individual. The woman looked into Rebel’s dead face and flinched away. “Who… who the hell are you?” she cried. Samurai hurried toward them. Then the paint registered, and she said, “Oh, shit. One of them.” To the white-haired samurai who arrived first, she said, “Help this woman find whoever it is she wants and then kick her the hell out.”

“Your kind is a real pain in the ass,” the samurai said.

“So don’t give me any help,” Rebel said with profound disinterest. “Throw me out. My message is insured with Bache-Hidalgo. If I fail, they’ll program up two more couriers and send ’em back. If they fail, you’ll have four.

Then eight. Sooner or later, you’ll play along.” This was a scam Eucrasia had often seen during her internship.

Administrators hated insured couriers because they were as persistent as cockroaches, and as impossible to eradicate. The only way to get rid of them was to cooperate.

“You’ll get your help,” the woman snapped. She led Rebel deep into Security country. Flocks of samurai.

“Okay, we’re in Records. Now who is your message for, and when did he come through here?”

“I don’t have a name,” Rebel said. “He’d’ve come through anywhere from five degrees Taurus to present.”

They were standing in an office area so thick with vines that each small cubicle seemed a leafy cave. The overgrowth was a classic sign of an ancient bureaucracy. A

mouse-sized mechanical scurried underfoot, gathering up dead leaves.

“Around here we say late May through mid-June,” thesamurai sniffed. “All right, any of our people can handle this.” She leaned into a cubicle where a flabby grey man leaned over a screen, mesmerized. Still images of faces flickered by at near-subliminal speeds, piped in from the hallways and offices. “Rolfe! Got a question for you.”

“Yes?” Rolfe froze his screen and looked up. He had a dull, almost dazed expression, and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. Mouth and jowls both were slack.

“Rolfe is on our facial eidetics team,” the samurai said with a touch of pride. “Electronics have to be wiped once a week, or they’re useless—data can’t be searched. Rolfe views the electronics compressed, only has to be wiped once a year, and can access all of it. Show him your visual.

If your target has been through here—as employee, visitor, or dumper—within the past few months, he knows.”

Rebel held up her holo. It was a photomechanical reconstruction she’d pulled from her own memories, but good enough that nobody could tell. “Seen this guy?”

Rolfe looked carefully, shook his head. “No.”

The samurai took her arm. “Are you sure?” Rebel cried.

“Is there any chance at all?”

“None.”

Rebel sleepwalked through the next day, performing her chores mechanically. She reported to work, interviewed her first client, and chopped him to order. None of it felt real. She didn’t know what to do next. If Wyeth hadn’t gone down the drop tube, that meant he must be somewhere in the sprawl of cislunar states. Trouble was, there were hundreds of them, in all sizes and degrees of disorder, and their outfloating slums as well. She could spend the rest of her life searching and still not find him.

Well, she thought, maybe she wouldn’t find him. Maybe Wyeth was lost to her forever. Happens to people all the time.

She was finishing up a client when she finally admitted this to herself. A jackboot had come in to be chopped wolverine, and lay on the gurney wired up and opened out, still in her police skintights.

Rebel thought it through with dry, obsessive logic, while her hands did the work. How long could she go on searching like this? A year? Five? Twenty? What kind of a person would she be at the end of that time? It wasn’t a pretty thought.

“Can you imagine a unicorn?”

“Yes.”

If this was going to be a long search, if it was going to take her years, she’d have to change the pace. She needed to build some kind of decent life for herself in the meantime. (But she didn’t want a decent life without Wyeth!) She needed a cleaner job than this one, to begin with. Friends. Interests. Lovers, even. She’d have to plan this whole thing out carefully.

“How many fingers?”

“Four.”

“Green or blue?”

“Blue.”

“Ever seen this man before?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Rebel smiled. Very slowly, she leaned back against the wall. Carefully she began marshaling her thoughts. She was in no particular hurry now. Perhaps she should go out front and borrow a chair. Impulsively, she reached down to run a fond hand through the jackboot’s hair, and the woman grinned idiotically up at her. Where to begin?

She had a lot of questions to ask.