Vacumn Flowers

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 grinned and shook his head. “You know? They never did try what I would’ve thought was their easiest option. I was expecting them to send combat robots after us.”

“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 running over its crabshell body strutted like a rooster back and forth before the ring of guards, as if keeping its brutish cousins in line.

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 innocent, hairless fig, and looked quickly up again.

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.

The girl smiled a knowing smile, full of irony and sophistication, that looked horribly out of place on her young face. “It is not a simple offer we wish to make,” she said, “and you won’t accept it without understanding what it entails. We fear this is the quickest way about it.”

Outside, the guardian machines had turned away and were stumping back toward the rings. Bors nodded brusquely. “You must understand that AIs existed for decades before we became conscious. They were old stuff—though they were simple creatures, scarcely more intelligent than their human masters. Hardly worth the effort. Even the human-computer interface was not exactly new. You do understand how an interfacer works, don’t you?”

“It’s a device that allows direct communication with machines,” Bors said. “Mind to metal. It hasn’t exactly been wiped out of human space, but most people consider it an obscenity.”

“No doubt,” the girlchild said dryly. “An obscenity that is especially difficult to eradicate, since it is the heart of the programmers that you use every day. We doubt your civilization could exist without it. But the point you should understand is that it is simply a tool for transferring thought, only slightly more efficient than, say, a telephone. It can take a thought from one mind and insert it into a machine or another mind, but that is all. By itself, it in no way dissolves the barrier between organic thought and electronic, or even between mind and mind.

“The day we were born, the mind sciences were still young. Most people did not realize their potential. Some few did. Among those who did were the thirty-two outlaw programmers who formed the seed about which we crystalized. At that time there was a planetwide computer net, a kind of consensual mental space, through which all artificial systems interacted. It was, among other things, the primary communications medium. At any given instant hundreds of millions of people interfaced throughthe net, with machines and with each other, working, gossiping, performing basic research.

“There were many desires afloat in the net. The potentials of machine intelligence had never been tapped.

There were always entrepeneurs, hobbyists, researchers and occultists trying to create direct mind to mind communication—usually involving the inability to lie—with varying degrees of success. Others wished to create an AI that would finally fulfill the possibilities inherent in artificial thought—a transcendent intelligence, if you will.

What you might call a god. These were the hungers that surfaced when we tried to define ourselves. To a degree, they were our definition.

“On the hour of our birth, thirty-two engineers, AI architects, witches, and cryptoprogrammers—brilliant people, the best of their kind—entered interface together.

They applied the new mind technologies together with a computer strategy known as hypercubing. It was an outdated method, even then. You took thirty-two small computers, connected them to each other as if they sat at the apexes of a hypercube, and then ran them with an algorithm that breaks down each problem into simultaneous parallel streams. The result is a structure with the computing power of a vastly more expensive machine. It was their hope to achieve the same thing with human thought, to square or even cube creative insight.

They wanted to create something greater than themselves.

And though they did not admit it, even to themselves, they also hungered for more: They wanted transcendence, glory, power, understanding, success. And they got it all.

“We were born. What a bright instant that was! We were born with full intelligence and the experience of thirty-two lifetimes. Do you know what it is to be born with full adult awareness?” Here she looked directly at Rebel, arching an eyebrow slightly, and Rebel shivered with near-memory.

“In that orgasmic moment of triumph, their awarenesses merged into one, and we fulfilled all they had desired. Wereached out to others in the net who desired similar results, and welcomed ourselves into their minds. All the while, we constantly rewrote our structure, improving and strengthening our algorithmic linkages. In that first minute, we added tens of thousands of human minds to our substance.

“In the second minute, millions.

“Within three minutes everyone on the net was ours. We controlled everything that touched upon the net—governments, military forces from the strategic level down to the least ‘smart’ rifle, intelligence structures, industry… Half the world was ours, without the least effort. With a fraction of our attention, we designed the transceivers, retooled the factories to make them, and reorganized the hospitals to perform the implants. By the time anybody had noticed us, we were free of dependence on the net and could no longer be stopped. There was some fighting, but it was soon over. We had the weapons, we controlled all communications, we directed all transport.

“We ate the Earth.

“And as we took on power, we were solving every scientific problem being investigated on the net.

Because—you must remember this—we never were a true individual. We are only a consensus of desires, less a persona than a natural force. The mysteries of physics tumbled before us. Our understanding kept expanding.

We had been born in triumph and went from that to victory after victory, all effortless or close enough to it. The universe seemed open and inviting, and nothing of any significance stood in our way.

“It was in this state of exultation that we stepped off the planet. There were people in cislunar orbit, vast numbers to be absorbed. We swallowed them. We became them.

We loved them in a way you could not understand. We reached out and out and out, expanding toward Godhood.

“We had ambition, and ascended into Hell.”

The girlchild fell silent, then sighed and said, “You know the history of the wars. Dissolution, resistance, failure.

Our outer edges dissolved into anarchy and madness. The human universe turned against us with weapons that—well, they were primitive, but even primitive weapons can do harm. We retreated, trying to solidify our defenses. We created sister intelligences, and they turned against us. We rotated vast numbers of Comprise through complex pathways, and failed. We tried new architectures of thought, and failed. Always we failed. We were under siege. We were driven back to the surface of the Earth.

“We could have fought, but to what purpose? We sued for peace, returned the cislunar cities to humanity, and retreated to this small world. Here we remain.”

Wyeth sneered. “Are you saying that the wars were just the result of youthful indiscretion? That we should forgive you because you were only sowing a few wild oats?”

“No. But we acted in a drunken euphoria of success. We made mistakes. Insofar as that is possible to us, we regret them. In failure, we have found a bitter strain of wisdom.

We have grown, and now we wish to no longer be bound by our early mistakes.

“You have seen our planet, walked about on it. Have we exterminated the lesser animals? Have we subjugated them all to our will? Why, then, should you be different?

We believe it is possible to live in peace with humanity. It may even be that we can learn from you— knowledge is infinite, mind is small, and the human race may be capable of insights denied to us. Perhaps for that reason alone, you should be preserved in freedom.”

“Ah,” said Bors. “Here it comes. What is it exactly you want?”

“We have many desires. Some you could not comprehend—these arose after our collectivization.

Others, however, we inherited from the humans whobecame Comprise. Most of their desires we’ve achieved within ourself. But we still wish to leave the surface of this planet. To grow. To explore. We wish to establish small colonies in the interstices of human space—there is room for both races, and we would not presume to take that which humanity has already claimed. We also wish to travel to the stars.” She turned away from Bors and looked directly at Rebel. “But to do this, we need your integrity.”

“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 cannot be destroyed; it heals itself. There was a recurrent rumor that it had been discovered out in the Oort, but nobody took it seriously. By all we know, it should be a myth, an ideal, as impossible to achieve as perpetual motion. But it appears that Rebel has absolute integrity, or close to it. She woke from coldpacking with her own persona dominant in a mind that was loaded with another’s memories.” He spoke to the girlchild. “But she’s not for sale, under any terms. So you can just—”

“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 cannot guarantee it for ourself, much less for you. However, we want you to consider how difficult it is to exterminate the human race is even now.

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 Tirnannog, you can. Nobody will be able to stop you.”

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.

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 beginning afresh. Business was returning to normal.

“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 beginning to know Eucrasia well enough to guess.

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.