Vacumn Flowers

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 beginning. I mean, having Bors in the corporation… it was inevitable that the Republique Provisionnelle would squeeze us out.”

“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.

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 Tirnannog, she’ll train me in the mind arts. It’s an incredible opportunity; wizards practically never take on apprentices, you know?”

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 Tirnannog is going to be the first dyson world to pass through. It’s going to the stars, Wyeth, and I want to go with it.”

“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 spanning the sky, each icy star almost too bright and perfect for the eye to bear. Rebel ground the back of her head into the moss.

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’Espionnage. He was, she had learned, as common a tool now as Bors. It pleased Wyeth to think of himself translated to the status of a natural force, constantly harassing the Comprise with his blend of dry humor, fanaticism, and mystic insight. Rebel was not so sure. “Okay, look,” she said. “Just tell me what you want and what you’ll give for it, and I’ll say no, and you’ll go away, okay?”

Snow nodded coolly. “That is fair. You must understand that what I and other members of my net value most is the merger of thought into the cool flow of information. At peak moments, one loses all sense of personal identity and simply exists within the fluid medium of knowledge. If Earth would accept us into the Comprise, we would go. But so long as Earth finds us at all useful as we are…” She shrugged.

One hand slid from her cloak to stab the air by her side, and the sky about her filled with a montage of images froma few of the Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark dramas current throughout both Inner and Outer Systems. Here an idealized image of her served as altar for a goat sacrifice at Retreat. Here she was killing (with great zest and implausible weapons) an endless supply of island Comprise, rendered for effect into shaggy ithyphallic brutes with small red eyes. There, engaged in slow philosophical debate with Earth’s mediator—a young man of Apollonian proportions, both arms intact—at the down station hospitality shed. “We have analyzed discrepancies in these dramatizations, as well as in the many interviews with you and the other principals of your affair on Earth.”

Here came Wyeth on a glider to snatch her from the path of a raging fire. She slammed a sword through an adversary’s eye, laughing, and leaped into Wyeth’s arms.

“They’re not exactly accurate, you know,” Rebel said dryly. “Even the interviews were scripted by corporate midmanagement. For publicity purposes.”

“I am aware of that.” Snow made an impatient gesture.

“What interests me is the lapse that appears in your interview with Earth’s mediator when the visual splice patching is edited out.” The sky filled with a single scene

(Snow retreated to the horizon on small insert), a jerky hyperrealistic front view of the girlchild speaking. This was from the recording that had been made directly from Rebel’s memories during proceedings in the Courts of the Moon. She saw the girlchild flicker abruptly to one side.

“That gap there. We have run an integration of all peripheral data and are now convinced that what has been edited out is something Earth said regarding its rise to consciousness.”

Rebel nodded. “Yeah, I remember that. The court ruled that it was culturally dangerous information and had it suppressed. Is that what you’re after?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Your wyeths and bors think of group intelligences as diseases that might grow to ravish the body politic of human space, with themselves as antibodies. But you yourself are a dyson worlder, you know what varieties of organisms may live within the human body. Not all are germs. Most are neutral. Some are even symbiotes. If we knew how Earth rose to consciousness, we might use that information to combine into small entities of, say, no more than eighty comprise each. A being of that size might live quietly within any major city, too small to be of any threat to your race. It wouldn’t dare grow any larger for fear of detection.” Now the sky filled with enormous images of glistening diatoms, paramecia tumbling by green volvox

(spinning like microcosmic comet worlds) and trumpetlike stentors dipping gracefully in their wake, a playful collection of such organisms as might easily be found in a stagnant drop of water. “There is room in human culture for variety.”

“You’re overworking the analogy a little,” Rebel said.

“But okay, so what are you offering?”

Snow returned to the center of the sky. Slice by slice, images locked into place about her. In a leafy niche in Pallas Kluster’s corporate kremlin, a fat woman with her face painted with the maintenance government logo was talking to a man with a simple yellow line across his brow.

A bors. Within the local Deutsche Nakasone subsidiary, a woman painted bors was talking with a woman painted midrange planning. Another bors was conferring with the head of Wyeth’s legal staff. Bors himself stroked the thigh of Rebel’s chief of house security. “You have been led to believe that you have several months before being squeezed out of the corporation,” Snow said. “Not so. Even now the Bureau d’Espionnage is seeking your arrest for economic sabotage.”

“Hah?”

“The rebel mudlarks.” (When the ceiling shifted back to the adventures of her public self on Earth, Rebel said,

“Don’t,” and Snow switched them off.) “Deutsche Nakasone has found that they’re not buying new personas.”

Rebel started to laugh.

“You can say that this wasn’t your fault. That Deutsche Nakasone is paying for its own carelessness in including even a weakened version of your integrity when they copied the more superficial aspects of your personality—”

“Oh, no!” Rebel kicked her legs, clutched her sides, trying in vain to control her laughter. “I wouldn’t say that at all!”

“—but that is irrelevant. They’ve assembled the evidence, silenced your legal protection, bought out your samurai. If I didn’t need information from you, the jackboots would be here now. As it is, I gambled that I could crack your security and bought you a delay of four days. There is one necessary link in the legal process who is… perhaps ‘corrupt’ might be the best term. We bought her. It will take your enemies four days to have her impeached and replaced. That’s if you’re willing to meet our price. If not, I’ll free her from obligation right now.”

Snow drew her cloak tight about her.

“What do you say?”

By slow degrees Rebel managed to calm herself. She lay hiccuping for a time, then sighed deeply and sat up.

“That’s better,” she said at last. “I really needed a good laugh, you know that?” Then she wiped the tears from her eyes and told Snow everything she knew about hypercubing.

“Ah,” Snow said. “Now that is interesting.”

And without even saying goodbye, she was gone.

“I’ve been an outlaw before,” Wyeth said calmly.

“Well, so have I, but that’s not the point. These are your supposed allies that are going to be hunting us down.

You’re not going to be very effective with a dozen wyeths on your tail. They know you inside out—you won’t have any surprises for them. Can’t you see that this changes everything?”

“No.” Wyeth stood in the lightless center of a holographic model of the Smoke Ring Way project. Crisp monochromatic lines pierced the gloom, detailing current and projected construction. Yellow threads reached out from him to those klusters where sun taps were already in operation. The green stretches of completed vacuum roads

(relays of hundreds of transit rings were needed within the matter-dense belts, so that traffic could be halted when a rock wandered across the travel lanes) reached almost a third of the way around the sun. Wyeth shifted slightly to tap a sonic spike and muttered a correction into it. Intangible planets shifted position. “We all do what we can,” he said.

“You are so infuriating!” Rebel flung open the door, and light from the elephant passage flooded in, fuzzing the model’s finer lines. Dark shadow shrouded Wyeth’s face; his eyes were pools of black. “Look! I packed for both of us.

If we leave right now, this minute, we can take along enough to—well, it won’t make us rich by anybody’s standards, but it’ll help set us up. Four days from now, we’ll have to take whatever we can carry on our backs.

What do you think you gain by waiting?”

“Four days,” Wyeth said. “Four days in which I can contribute a little bit, however small, to—ah, shit.” He threw back his head, staring straight up, and made a choked, gasping noise, huk-huk-huk. Puzzled, Rebel reached out, touched his face, felt wetness. Tears. She put her arms around him, and he hugged her fiercely, still sobbing. Rebel felt furious with herself for letting him do this to her.

But when Wyeth stopped crying, he stood back from her and said awkwardly, “Ah. I’m sorry, Sunshine. I thought I had it under control. I’m better now.”

Gently, then, she said, “Come with me, babes?”

He silently shook his head.

“I do not understand you!” she cried. “You’ll be leaving behind any number of wyeths in the service of the Republique—I’d think that would discharge any obligations you may have very nicely. Just what is the big problem here?”

“The truth is, I’m of two minds on what to do,” Wyeth said. “No, I’m not. Yes, I am. The arrangement I have with myself is that I can’t make any major change in my life unless all four of my personas agree. It’s a wise policy, too.

No, it’s not, I wish I’d never… Well, too late for that. Hey, let’s be honest here, I want to go with you, and the clown wants to go with you, and the pattern-maker will find purpose wherever he is—he wants to go with you too. But the warrior… No, I want to go too, but I can’t. I can’t. My duty is to stay and fight.”

“You mean that’s it? One fucking persona won’t play along, and you’re letting it screw up both our lives? Come on, now! When have I ever had the luxury of being three-quarters certain of any decision I made? Why should you be any better?”

Wyeth shook his head sadly. “I have to be true to myself, Sunshine. The warrior is part of who I am, and I can’t change that.”

Rebel’s fist closed around holographic Mars. The image remained, glowing deep within her flesh, as if it and she were in overlapping universes, coincident but unable to touch. That sense of futility was returning, the awareness that nothing she could say or do was going to make any difference at all. “Well, I can’t change either, you know that? I’ve hit my limits for growth—right now, my persona is as good as frozen. It’s locked in with integrity, and I can’t get the unlocking enzymes this side of Tirnannog. It takes a wizard to brew them up, and they don’t travel.”

“Stay anyway,” Wyeth urged her. He smiled weakly,hopelessly. “I don’t want you to ever change. I love you just the way you are.”

She covered her face with her hands.

The ALI tagged her as she entered the Corporate Trade Zone.

Rebel abandoned her landau at the transit ring—the corporation could reclaim it, if they wanted—and climbed into a cable car. She slid her passport into the controls, tapping into a line of credit that would be worthless three days hence, and the car began sliding along a long, invisible line toward the out station.

The station was a traditional structure, five wheels set within each other, rotating at slightly differing speeds to maintain constant Greenwich normal throughout. The transit ring was fixed within a stationary hub dock at the center, and the whole thing was done up in pink and orange Aztec Revival supergraphics. Conservative but practical.

Rebel was looking through the forward wraparound when light brightened to one side. She turned and flinched back from the unexpected phantom of an old woman in treehanger heavies sitting beside her. “Aha!”

the creature said. “I thought it might be you. Changed your name on your passport, I see. What the fuck.”

“You startled me!” Rebel said. Then, somewhat stiffly,

“Hello, Mother.”

The holo grimaced. “I’m not your mother. Call me Mud.

I’m only an ALI, but I have my dignity. You do know what an ALI is, don’t you? That’s Artificial Limited—”

“I know, I know. You haven’t much time, so you’d appreciate me speaking up briskly.”

Mud cackled. It sounded like a rusty tin can being crumpled between two hands. “Take your time. Hundred years from now, what the fuck difference will it make?

Anyway, my memories are all recorded and made available to the next ALI down the line. So I have a kind of serial immortality. Not terrifically legal, though. If I weren’t safely ensconced inside a Corporate Trade Zone, they’d have me wiped. You can get away with murder in a CTZ. What were we talking about, anyway?”

“Jesus,” Rebel said, impressed. She looked more closely at the withered image, at that flushed face, those watery, pink-rimmed eyes. “You’re drunk!”

“Hey, right the first time. It was Mom’s idea. She liked the thought of having some say over how this place is run, but she didn’t want to get too serious about it. Said she’d always wanted to spend a lifetime drunk. I don’t have much real authority here, mostly I just pop up to look over anything interesting. So how’s with you, sis?”

“Me?” She could see the station’s narrow outer sleeve now, as stationary as the hub, where the cable car dock was located. “Oh, I’m okay, I guess.”

“Just okay? Hey, you tap in with a line of credit as close to unlimited as anything Records has ever seen, booked through to Tirnannog, and Mom calling in every few days to see if you’ve gone through yet… shit, that’s going to be one fascinating meeting! So what do you want, anyway?

Egg in your beer?”

The holographic traffic markings were coming into focus now. A clutter of grimy craft waited outside the hourglass grid marking the active lanes. The grid’s waist threaded the transit ring, and its ends flared, restricting a flashy amount of local space. “Well, the money’s not exactly mine,” Rebel said. “Not anymore. But yeah, you’re right.

I’m going home, I’m happy about that.”

“Yeah, and you look it too,” the ALI said sardonically.

“All hangdog and guilty-faced as sin. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, sis, but you’d better cut it out. Lighten up! Life is too short for this kind of crap!”

“That’s easy enough for you to—” Rebel flared. Shestopped. “Um. Hey, look, I’m sorry. I forgot that you’re…”

“Temporary?” The old woman shook her head. “You’ve got the dog by the wrong end, sugarcakes. Everybody is mortal—what’s the alternative? Me, I like being alive, and if I only get a few minutes of it, I’m going to spend those few minutes just enjoying hell out of it.” The image wavered. “Just enjoying hell out of it. Whoops! The Reaper calls. Look, do me a favor, will you, kid? Try to keep your pecker up.”

Rebel smiled weakly. “Yeah. Sure.”

Mud faded away in midlaugh, in midwink.

The cable car slammed into the dock and rang like a bell.

A second later, the cable car was scooped up by a passing rampway and smoothly lifted and accelerated into the outermost ring. It came to rest, and Rebel stepped out.

The car’s cybersystems began loading her baggage onto a trundle cart.

A thin young man with golden skin and a little black mustache was waiting for her. He bowed and said,

“Welcome to Hummingbird Station. My name is Curlew, and I am your escort.” Cute little piece of action, dressed like he was just in from the archipelago. From Avalon, perhaps, or P’eng-Lai. His eyes twinkled mischievously.

“This way.”

He waved a hand, and the baggage cart scuttled after them.

“The out stations are Elizabeth Charm Mudlark’s legacy to the System, the visible structure of the Mudlark Trust, and a pipeline from the Klusters directly into the Oort Cloud,” Curlew recited. “Thanks to our patron’s generosity, the transit rings have cut the years of voyaging previously needed to reach the archipelagoes down to a matter of days. The Trust also endowed the corresponding in stations within the archipelagoes and the Titan-classrings which will accelerate selected dyson worlds toward nearby stars. This unimaginably expensive project cost her the entirety of a fortune that no ordinary mortal could simply have given away. But then, Ms. Mudlark is no ordinary mortal.” Curlew coughed, and in a more natural tone of voice said, “She’s very old. What else did she have to spend it on? You must have met her ALI—weird old bat, isn’t she?”

“Uh…”

They were passing through a long hallway decorated with enormous holoflats of the extrasolar planets. There were detailed shots of Dainichi, Susa-no-o, Inari with its bright moon Ukemochi, the Izanagi-Izanami system, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and Yate-cutli, as well as more speculative images of Morrigan and the horned giant Cernunnos. The hallway emptied into a mall busy with shops and financial offices. Deutsche Nakasone had a branch right next to her own corporation’s local.

Rebel tried hard not to look at either.

“Doubtless you have already noticed how many concerns here have no direct relationship with Hummingbird’s transit ring functions, or even trade with the dyson worlds.” They stepped around a man sitting lotus on the floor, sticking long needles through his flesh to demonstrate a new line of yogic wetware. “They are here because Hummingbird Station was established as a Corporate Trade Zone. Here, away from intrusive government restrictions, private business can operate in a free and competitive atmosphere.” He winked. “They’ve all bought so much protective legislation in their home Klusters that they’re almost paralyzed with armor. On the bright side, as long as Hummingbird serves their purposes, the corporations won’t be so eager to gut the Trust.”

They strolled through a shop selling comet-grown blossoms twice Rebel’s height. “Don’t buy any,” Curlew advised. “They don’t last.” But there were also small blackcigars, and Rebel paused long enough to buy one last one.

It was a habit she was going to miss.

A moving rampway scooped them up, and in quick succession they rose through three levels to the inmost ring. Vast expanses of open space, impassive people hurrying by. The air carried a surf of murmured voices, distant cries, nearby coughs. A carefully-calculated snowfall drifted through the warm air, flakes melting just as they hit the porous floor.

With a grand wave of the hand, Curlew said, “These are the pioneers of a new age. Dyson worlds, it has been said, attract a special kind of emigrant, adventurers who like their comfort, starfarers willing to spend a lifetime in the traveling. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Also tourists.”

A wave of incoming treehangers flowed by, several in life-support chairs, their gravity adaptations not yet complete. A teenager turned quickly to gawk at Rebel’s breasts, and she blew cigar smoke in his face.

“We are now in the midst of the last-hour rush as the final shuttles arrive from and depart to the archipelagoes.

Since Hummingbird Station is so close to the Sun—relatively speaking—it is inevitable that as it moves in its orbit it will slide out of position to serve as a transit terminus. However, Jackdaw Station’s launch window is designed to exactly overlap Hummingbird’s, to prevent a disruption of service.” He grinned meanly. “Of course, it’s not completely built yet. So there’ll be a hiatus of a few months before Plover moves into place. That’s typical for this operation. None of the shuttles they ordered when Hummingbird was designed have been delivered either.

They’re using converted local liners. Have you seen them yet?”

“Only a glimpse from the cable car.”

“Decrepit things.” He wrinkled his nose. “They’re cramped and they smell bad. Sort of a mixture of stale sweat, cottage cheese, and oil. Most people prefer to gocoldpacked.” He put an arm around her waist and said,

“Listen, you don’t really want to hear the sightseeing chatter, do you?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so.” He led her out of the snow to a grassy waiting area, with low benches and a scattering of lily ponds. They sat. “You have no idea how many times a shift I go through that line of drivel.”

“Obviously you don’t intend doing this for the rest of your life,” Rebel said. “What are you, some kind of student?”

“That’s right,” Curlew said, pleased. “Yeah, my family wanted to send me to the University of Faraway, for a degree in the mind arts, but I wanted to get into wetware design, so they’re making me pay my own way through. Do you know anything about wetware design?”

“A little.”

“It’s interesting stuff. They can do almost as much with their little machines as a wizard can with a modern mind art studio. But here’s the interesting thing, the two sciences are incompatible! They don’t even have a common language.” He shook his head wonderingly. “One of these days someone is going to merge the two, and then you’ll have a model that’ll really describe how thought works. That’s when we’ll really see things start to hop!”

Two young men were miserably kissing goodbye alongside a baggage cart. The emigrant was already dressed treehanger. Rebel had to look away, it was so sad.

“You’re an ambitious lad, sport.”

“Hey, I didn’t say it had to be me doing the merging.”

Curlew laughed. “But it won’t be long before anybody with a background in both sciences will be able to name his own price. Tell you something else, whoever merges the arts, it’s going to happen in the worlds. These System types are all so serious, and they all think they’re hot, butthey’re not so hot at all. The real action is out in the worlds. That’s where it’s all happening.”

“Well,” Rebel said judiciously. “At least you get more variety out in the worlds.”

Curlew laughed at her deadpan understatement, and after a second she joined him. He took her hands in his and looked her boldly in the eyes. “You seem a little sad, if you don’t mind my saying it. There’s still an hour before the shuttle to Tirnannog, and we’re not far from a branch Bank of Mimas. We could rent a consultation niche and…”

He raised an eyebrow.

As gently as she could, Rebel told him no.

Watching his pretty little body walking away, Rebel had to sigh. First cigars, then empty-headed young men.

Where would it end?

Rebel stood on the empty platform. She shifted in her foot rings, stared off into a perfectly black sky powdered with stars. The air was chill here, held in by subtle forces that had been explained to her, but which she did not understand. Far ahead, in the center of her vision, she saw a small black dot swelling, swallowing up stars. Her shuttle.

Out in the vacuum, a cluster of bright flowers grew from a holoflare support strut. They were tough little things, almost impossible to exterminate.

She glanced down at the coffin by her feet. The rest of her luggage had been put through ahead. She thought back to that last argument with Wyeth and wondered if he would ever forgive her. She laid a hand on the coffin and felt a chill only partly physical.

An emigration officer safety-leashed to a guiderail drifted up and stuck out his hand. She surrendered her passport and he popped it into a reader. “Rebel Eucrasia Mudlark,” he said in a bored voice. If the name meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. He rapped the coffinwith his knuckles, made sure it was latched firmly to the platform. “This your coldpack?”

“My husband’s.”

“Aha.” The officer mumbled into his hand, then gave her back her passport. “Enjoy your trip.” He kicked away, leaving Rebel alone with her thoughts again.

With startling irrelevance, she thought of all those wyeths and rebels she was leaving behind in the System and wondered if any of them would ever find each other.

She thought she might like to have children someday. Real ones, not just copies of herself.

Wyeth was going to be awfully angry a week from now when he woke up and discovered what she’d done to him.

He was going to be even angrier when he found that she’d timed it so they’d just make Tirnannog’s passage through the transit ring. By the time he woke up, the last shuttle back to the System would be a matter of history.

Three passengers took up rings on the platform almost overhead.

He was going to be a lot of trouble anyway. A man like him was bound to stir up trouble wherever he went; it was in his nature. But Rebel didn’t care. She was glad she had invoked his kink.

The shuttle was bigger now. It blotted out most of her vision. Rebel felt the urge to duck as it swelled up over her, but she kept her back straight.

She felt awfully small and alone, and not at all sure she was doing the right thing.

She was going home.