Vacumn Flowers

1

REBEL

She didn’t know she had died.

She had, in fact, died twice—by accident the first time, but suicide later. Now the corporation that owned her had decided she should die yet again, in order to fuel a million throwaway lives over the next few months.

But Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark knew none of this. She knew only that something was wrong and that nobody would talk to her about it.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

The doctor’s face loomed over her. It was thin and covered by a demon mask of red and green wetware paint that she could almost read. It had that horrible programmed smile that was supposed to be reassuring, the corners of the mouth pushing his cheeks into little round balls. He directed that death’s head rictus at her.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said.

A line of nuns floated by overhead, their breasts bobbing innocently, wimples starched and white. They were riding the magnetic line at the axis of the city cannister, as graceful as small ships. It was a common enough sight, even a homey one. But then Rebel’s perception did a flipflop and the nuns were unspeakably alien, floating upside-down against the vast window walls that were cold with endless stretches of bright glittery stars embedded innight. She must have seen the like a thousand times before, but now, without warning, her mind shrieked strange strange strange and she couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was seeing. “I can’t remember things,”

Rebel said. “Sometimes I’m not even sure who I am.”

“Well, that’s perfectly normal,” the doctor said, “under the circumstances.” He disappeared behind her head.

“Nurse, would you take a look at this?”

Someone she could not see joined him. They conferred softly. Gritting her teeth, Rebel said, “I suppose it happens to you all the time.”

They ignored her. The scent of roses from the divider hedges was heavy and cloying, thick enough to choke on.

Traffic continued flowing along the axis.

If she could have moved so much as an arm, Rebel would’ve waited for the doctor to lean too close, and then tried to choke the truth out of him. But she was immobilized, unable even to move her head. She could only stare up at the people floating by and the stars wheeling monotonously past. The habitat strips to either side of overhead were built up with platforms and false hills, rising like islands from a starry sea. By their shores occasional groups of picnickers ventured onto the window floor, black specks visible only when they occulted stars or other cannister cities. The strange planet went by again.

“We’ll want to wait another day before surgery,” the doctor said finally. “But her persona’s stabilized nicely. If there aren’t any major changes in her condition, we can cut tomorrow.” He moved toward the door.

“Wait a minute!” Rebel cried. The doctor stopped, turned to look at her. Dead eyes surrounded by paint, under a brush of red hair. “Have I given permission for this operation?”

Again he turned that infuriatingly reassuring smile on her. “Oh, I don’t think that’s important,” he said, “do you?”

Before she could answer, he was gone.

As the nurse adjusted the adhesion disks on Rebel’s brow and behind her ears, she briefly leaned into Rebel’s view. It was a nun, a heavy woman with two chins and eyes that burned with visions of God. Earlier, when Rebel was still groggy and half-aware, she had introduced herself as Sister Mary Radha. Now Rebel could see that the nun had been tinkering with her own wetware—her mystic functions were cranked up so high she could barely function.

Rebel looked away, to hide her thoughts. “Please turn on,” she murmured. The video flat by the foot of her cot came up, open to the encyclopedia entry for medical codes.

Hastily, she switched it over to something innocuous.

Simple-structure atmospheric methane ecologies. She pretended to be absorbed in the text.

Then, as the nurse was leaving, Rebel casually said,

“Sister? The flat’s at a bad angle for me. Could you tilt it forward a little?” The nun complied. “Yeah, like that. No, a bit … perfect.” Rebel smiled warmly, and for a moment Sister Mary Radha basked in this manifestation of universal love. Then she floated out.

“Fucking god-head,” Rebel muttered. Then, to the flat,

“Thank you.”

It turned itself off.

The flat’s surface was smooth and polished. Turned off, it darkly reflected the foot of Rebel’s cot and the medical code chart hanging there.

Rebel quickly decoded the reversed symbols. There were two simplified persona wheels, one marked Original, and the other Current. They looked nothing at all like each other. Another symbol for wetsurgical prep, and three more that, boiled down, meant she had no special medical needs. And a single line of print below that, where her name should have been. Rebel read it through twice, letter by letter, to make sure there was no mistake: Property of Deutsche Nakasone GmbH

Anger rose up in Rebel like a savage white animal. She clenched her teeth and drew back her lips and did not try to fight it. She wanted this anger. It was her ally, her only friend. It raged through her paralyzed body, a hot storm of fangs and claws and violence.

Then the fury overran her sense of self and swept her under. Drowning, she was carried down into the dark chaos of helplessness below. Into the murky despair that had no name or purpose, where she lost her face, her body, her being. She was a demon, blindly watching people stream through the air and stars slide to the side, and hating them all. Wanting to smash them all together in her hands, cities and stars and people alike, and smear them into a pulpy little ball, as she laughed, with black tears running down from her eyes…

She came out of her fugue feeling weak and depressed.

“Please tell me the time,” she said, and the flat obeyed.

Four hours had passed.

A woman stepped into the niche, a skinny type in greenface with a leather tool harness, some kind of low-level biotech. Humming to herself, she began to trim the walls. She worked methodically, obsessively, pausing every now and then to train a rose back into place.

“Hey, sport,” Rebel said. “Do me a favor.” Her loginess evaporated as the adrenalin began to flow. She flashed a smile.

“Hmm? Ah! Er… what is it?” With a visible effort, the woman pulled herself away from her work.

“I’m getting out in a couple of hours, and nobody’s arranged for any clothing for me. Could you drop by wherever-it-is on the way out, and get them to send something over?”

The woman blinked. “Oh. Uh… sure, I suppose. Isn’tyour nurse supposed to take care of that?”

Rebel rolled her eyes. “She sees universal purpose in the stars, and the meaning of existence in the growth of a rose.

The little stuff she’s not so good on. Know what I mean?”

Anyone working in a hospital with a nursing order would find that easy to believe.

“Well. Yeah, why not?” The woman returned to her work, visibly relieved the conversation was over. Twigs and leaves snowed down from her fingers. By the time she left, Rebel was sure the woman had forgotten her promise.

But an hour later an orderly stepped in and wordlessly deposited a cloak on the table by her bed. “Sonofabitch,”

Rebel said softly. She was actually going to break out of this place!

Rebel napped. When she awoke, she spent an excruciating hour staring at the people floating through the eternal twilight before Sister Mary Radha returned.

The nun’s belly overhung her cincture, and she was as heavily mystic-wired as ever.

“Sister,” Rebel said, “the leads in my adhesion disks are out of adjustment. Would you take a look at them?” Then, when the woman’s hands were deep in the wires, she said,

“You know, there’s a verse by one of your prophets that’s been running through my head. But I’ve forgotten part. It starts: ‘Tormented by thirst of the spirit, I was dragging myself through a gloomy forest when a six-winged seraph appeared to me at the crossroads.’ Are you familiar with that? Then it goes”—she closed her eyes, as if trying to bring up the words—“ ‘He touched my eyes with fingers light as a dream, and my eyes opened wide as those of a frightened she eagle. He touched my ears…’ and I forget the rest.”

Sister Mary Radha’s hands stopped moving. For one still, extended moment she said nothing. Then the nun stared up into the infinite depths of night and murmured,

“Saint Pushkin.” Her voice rose. “ ‘He touched my ears, and roaring and noise filled them, and I heard the trembling of the angels, and the movement of creatures beneath the seas, and the growing of the grass in the valleys! And he laid hold of my lips, and tore out my sinful tongue—’ ” She arched her back and shivered in religious ecstasy. Her hands jerked spasmodically. One of the adhesion disks was yanked askew, and Rebel’s head slammed to the side. But she was still paralyzed.

“Sister,” Rebel said quietly. “Sister?”

“Mmmm?” the nun replied dreamily.

“The doctor wanted you to remove my paralysis now. Do you remember that? He asked me to remind you.” Rebel held her breath. This was the moment when she either won free or lost it all. Everything depended on how long it took Sister Mary Radha to reconnect with reality.

“Oh,” the nun said. She fumbled with a switch, haltingly changed two settings. With somnambulant slowness, she lifted off the disks. Then she shook her head, smiling vaguely, and wandered out.

Rebel let out her breath. She could move! But for a long minute she did not, choosing instead to stare up, unseeing.

The memory of her reflection in the video flat, foreshortened and distorted though it had been, pinned her to the cot with dread. At last she gathered up courage and gingerly, haltingly, held up an arm before her eyes.

Slowly she rotated it.

The arm was whole and its muscles shifted smoothly.

The skin was a soft, Italian brown, unscarred, lightly fuzzed with fine dark hair. The fingers were short, the nails a pearly pink. Horrified, Rebel sat bolt upright and stared down her body.

Her breasts were round and full. Her thighs were a trifle heavy, but still muscular. The hospital had left her cache-sexe on for modesty’s sake, but above it a thin line of black hairs marched up her belly like ants. Her legs wereshort, functional, strong. It was a good, healthy body.

But it was not her body. Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark’s body was long and lean and knobby at the elbows and knees.

Her skin was white as porcelain and her hair was mousy blond. Her hands and feet were long and slender, with an artist’s fingers, a concert pianist’s toes. Almost the exact opposite of the body she had now.

I shall go mad, Rebel thought. I will scream.

But she did neither. She stood and examined her paint in the obsidian surface of the flat. Ignoring the strange round face with button nose and dark eyes—eyes that flashed animal fear at her. A line of red paint ran from ear to ear, like a mask, with spiky wing lines flying up the brows. “Please turn on,” she said, and looked it up under wetware codes. Logically enough, it identifed her as Hospital Patient, Wetsurgery Prep.

The paint smeared. It took only a second to change the markings to Outpatient, Wetsurgery Postop. Two small antennae now reached down from the eyes, a second pair of wings sprouted on the forehead. She wrapped the cloak about her, hood up, and stepped out of her niche, onto a flagstone walk.

The walk ran between high rosehedges, angled into another. She was swept up in a flow of medical personnel in gowns that matched their facepaint masks—surgical greens, diagnostics blues, wetware reds—and a sprinkling of civilians in their cloaks. They strode along crisply, blankly, as self-absorbed as robots. Rebel moved invisibly among them, gliding along on tiptoe since it was a gravity-light area.

She moved confidently at first, cloak streaming in her wake. Then the walk branched, and branched again, and she was hopelessly lost in the rose maze, among the hundreds of niches where patients were packed tight as larvae in a hive. Without warning, she felt naked and exposed, and she couldn’t remember how to walk. Allthose complex motions. In a panic, she pulled her cloak about her and stumbled.

The zombies swirled by, stepping deftly aside as she fought for balance. Cold faces glanced quickly at her, then away.

Just as she went sprawling, an arm reached out and snagged her elbow, and she was hauled gracelessly to her feet. Turning, she found herself looking into a thin, vulpine face slashed by a single orange wetware line. The stranger smiled, narrow jaw, sharp little teeth. He had a painful grip on her arm, just above the elbow. “This way,”

he said.

“That’s okay, sport,” Rebel said quickly. “I just lost my footing. Point me the right way out, and I’d be grateful.”

“Oh bullshit,” the man said. “They’d’ve caught you already if anybody knew you were missing yet.” Rebel yanked her arm free and found that her new, unfamiliar body was trembling with adrenalin reaction. The man smiled condescendingly. “Listen, I know somebody who can help you out of this mess. Do you want to meet her or not?”

They were on the spine of their habitat island, where the giant druid oaks grew. One spread its limbs over the commercial maze of shops and taverns bordering the hospital. Its trunk reached halfway to the axis. Looking up as they strolled, Rebel saw stars blinking in its upper reaches, appearing and disappearing in the gaps between leaves. “Hell of a stunt, escaping from full therapeutic paralysis,” the man said. “I’d love to know how you did it.”

Then, when she did not respond, “Hey. My name’s Jerzy Heisen.”

In among the branches, leaves descended slowly, barely moving through the suspended dust, as if the air had thickened to hold them up. In the soft light, the dust and leaves shared a stillness that was actually slow, tirelessmotion, an endless eddying as ponderous and inevitable as the rotation of spiral galaxies. “Is that so?” Rebel wished she could climb up the tree, in among the floating twigs and detritus, so like the vast tidal fronts of home. “I take it from your knowing hints that I needn’t bother introducing myself.”

“Oh, I know all about you.” They passed between displays of body jewelry: silverplated armbands gleaming softly under blue spots, some sparkling with Lunar diamonds, impact emeralds, even Columbian tourmaline.

“You’re a persona bum, currently suffering from a major personality erasure—self-induced, by the way—and held together by a prototypical identity overlay that is, properly speaking, the property of the Deutsche Nakasone Gesellschaft. Your name is Eucrasia Walsh.”

“No, it’s—” She stopped, bewildered. The name did sound familiar, in a crazy kind of way, as if Heisen had put a name to all that was ugly within her, to all the self-pitying and wounded hatred she sank into when her mood turned dark. The stale, dusty smell of defeat and weary guilt rose up within her, and she ducked her head.

Heisen took her elbow and urged her forward.

“Confused, eh? Well, that’s perfectly normal,” he said,

“under the circumstances.”

She looked directly at him then, and something about his face, the small pinched lines of it, the long narrow nose, that brush of red hair… She knew that face. It took only a small act of imagination to see it covered with a demon mask of red and green lines. “You’re my doctor!”

“Your wetsurgeon, yeah.” The walk bridged a pond thick with water lilies. Pierrots waited on tables by the water’s edge. “Not to worry, though—I’m off-program. I wouldn’t turn my worst enemy over to those bastards at Deutsche Nakasone on my own time. Not that I have any choice when I’m programmed up…” The crowd thickened and slowed and came to a halt. “Here. We go downtown now.”

The elevator bank was set by the druid tree’s trunk, its vacuum sleeve tunneling right through the root network.

The cars were dirty and harshly lit and a whiff of urine and stale body sweat emanated from them. As the crowd swept forward, Rebel stared up wistfully, flashing on a quick fantasy: She would fight her way free of the crush and scramble up the tree trunk, nimble as a squirrel, moving faster and faster as she swarmed higher and the gravity grew less, surging from limb to limb. Until, at the very top, she would pull knees to chest, brace toes against bark, and leap… soaring high into the air, body taut and outstretched, her flight slowing gradually, until at the last possible instant she’d touch axis and be snagged by the magnetic line, to be hauled far and away from here in the time it took to draw a breath.

(But she didn’t have the armbands or leg rings for the magnetic field to grab. She would plummet like a stone, with excruciating slowness at first, then faster, a wingless Icarus, curving down to smash bloody dead against the city walks. It was a stupid fantasy.)

“Deutsche Nakasone is going to come looking for you.

You know that?” They stepped into a car along with a hundred others. The doors sighed shut and the floor dropped. “They want a clean recording of that personality of yours. And then they want to revert you to Eucrasia Walsh. Out of the goodness of their corporate heart, you ask? Shit. They’re just worried about retaining copyright.”

Heisen’s face was so close to hers that their hoods kissed.

His breath was sour as he murmured in her ear. “They don’t care that to you—the present you, the one you think you are—it’ll be just the same as dying.”

Some of the elevator stayed behind to let off passengers; the rest continued downward. A black-and-white painted rude boy with a metal star hung about his neck cruised Rebel, hooking a fist on his hip and throwing back his cloak to reveal a body-length strip of flesh. She looked away, wrapping her cloak tightly about her, and helaughed. “But why? Why are they doing this to me?”

Heisen sighed. “It’s a simple enough story,” he said, “if an ugly one. Do you remember being Eucrasia? Working as a persona bum?”

The memory was there, but it was painful and Rebel flinched away from it. It keyed into the suicidal madness she had fallen into earlier, and she wanted to keep her distance from that. Though like a tongue returning again and again to worry at an aching tooth, her thoughts had a will of their own. “My memories are all in a jumble.”

Another slice of elevator stayed behind and another.

They stepped back. Heisen glanced around at the blank faces. “Well, tell you what, let’s not go into that here.

Somebody might hear. I’ll give you the story at Snow’s.”

The elevator opened. Hot, steamy air breathed into Rebel’s face. This low, the gravity was over Greenwich normal, and she felt clumsy and heavy-footed. They were jostled forward into a vasty cavern of interlocking kelp bars and surgical parlors, gambling lofts and blade bazaars. A shifting holo banner struck her eye, and she winced. Three strains of music clashed; the subimbeds made her feel anxious and restless. Sweat sheened up on her body. I’ve been here before, she thought. No, I haven’t.

“Down Bakuninstrasse,” Heisen said. Away from the uptown elevators the shops thinned and were broken by ebony stretches of building foundation and habitat supports. Light flared as they passed a wetware mall, and Heisen stopped and pointed within. Rebel stared: Customers edged down narrow aisles, passing slow hands over the endless racks. Now and then somebody would lift a wafer and slide into one of the programming booths that lined the rear wall. Advertising holos flashed overhead: suzy vacuum, said one. She looked to be some kind of Amazon. The most beautiful boy Rebel had ever seen floated over the single word angelus. And then she spottedthe Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark banner. Against a starry backdrop was a woman who was not her, doing something she would never do. Rebel stared at it, horrified.

“Notice the little comets in the background? You treehangers are very fashionable this season.”

Rebel turned her stunned face toward Heisen. He shrugged.

“Prepublicity. They’ve got a lot of money tied up in you. I wanted you to see what an expensive little piece of developmental wetware you are. Come on.”

Down a slideway and into an access corridor with long stretches of black stressed slag. On the lower reaches slogans were crudely permasprayed in nightglo colors, one over the other, in a tangled and almost incoherent snarl, stay yourself god hates was overrun by FREEMINDSFREEMINDSFREEMINDS which raged over BURN BRIGHT BRAIN before smashing up against SHAPESHIFTERSFACE DANCERS

WEREWOLFVAMPIRES GOTO HELL. Someone had made a serious effort to erase a wheel logo with the words EARTH FRIEND about it. Beneath the graffiti a workman sat on a crate facing the wall. He had removed an access hatch and was cyborged into a tangle of color-coded wires.

Around a corner they passed a sling city. The burn cases stumbled down, looking for handouts. They babbled in endless monotones, their minds rotted out with God, sex, information, their reflexes shattered, their faces vacant-eyed and twitching. Heisen hissed and stepped up his pace. “Scum!” he gasped once they were safely past.

“They ought to be…” They turned down a yet smaller run where garbage was mulched thin against the street and starting to ferment. The stench of rotting squid and old grease hung in the air, and the soles of Rebel’s feet were going black.

Rebel glanced at Heisen and was shocked to see the man was trembling. Sweat poured down a face gone fishbellywhite. “God damn, sport,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s just the wetware.” Heisen waved a hand at his face.

“I keep the imaginative processes cranked way up, so I’ll be fast to pick up on the main chance, right? Makes me a touch… paranoid, though.” They stepped down a slanting gallery where most of the overheads had been smashed or stolen. Exhaust fans grumbled in shadow. Tangles of black cable drooped from the ceiling; they had to duck under the lower loops. “God damn her,” Heisen fretted. “She doesn’t have to have her office down here, she just wants all that space. I wish…” They rounded a final corner and he pointed to a door grey with urban grime. “Here.”

Over the doorway hung a flickering neon switchblade, a piece of antique technology that must have cost a fortune to recreate. It buzzed and crackled, tinging the shadows red. The knife’s blade blinked off and on, as if snapping in and out of the handle. On the center of the door was taped a small white rectangle, a business card: snow the cutting edge ostend kropotkinkorridor bei berkmangallerie neues-hoch-kamden, E.K.

“Snow?” Heisen said uncertainly.

The door opened, and they stepped within.

Whatever Rebel might have been expecting, it was not this: a room so large and empty she could not guess its size. Eggshell-textured walls, white and featureless. No furniture. The only item in all that space was a small prayer rug in its center. A solitary figure knelt there, hood down, shaven head bowed. The room was chilled to an ambient that was, after a moment’s relief, as oppressive as the heat outside.

They walked forward. This was the ultimate form ofostentation among technology freaks—to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls. The room would be laced with an invisible tracery of trigger-beams, directional mikes and subvocal pickups. There was power here, for one who knew its geography.

The woman raised her head, fixed Rebel with cold snakelike eyes. Her skull was white as marble, and her face was painted in a hexangular pattern suggestive of starbursts and ice crystals. “What have you stolen for me this time, Jerzy?”

The color was back in Heisen’s face. He showed teeth again, and flamboyantly threw back his cloak to allow himself a sweeping, mocking bow. “May I present,” he said, “the only clean copy in existence of next month’s lead release from Deutsche Nakasone.”

The woman did not move. “How did this happen?”

“What a pleasure it is to see you, Jerzy, won’t you have a chair?” The little man grinned cockily. “Isn’t that what you meant to say, Snow? Or are we expected to sit on the floor?”

Snow moved her head slightly, the sort of movement a lizard might make on a cold morning after prolonged stasis. “Behind you.” Rebel turned and almost stumbled into a Queen Anne chair. Its twin rested neatly beside it.

Reflexively she stepped back. Heisen, too, looked unnerved. However the chairs had been sleight-of-handed into existence, it was as pure and uncluttered an effect as any medieval miracle.

They sat, and there was an odd glint in Snow’s eyes as they faced her again. Was it amusement, Rebel wondered?

If so, it was buried deep, Heisen cleared his throat and said, “This is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. Two days ago she was a persona bum, name of Eucrasia Walsh. Eucrasia was doing prelim on a string of optioned wetsets when she burned on the Mudlark wafer and popped her base.

Wound up in Our Lady of Roses, and—”

“Hold it right there, chucko!” Rebel said angrily. “Reel it back and give it to me without the gobbledegook.”

Heisen glanced at Snow and she nodded slightly. He began again, this time directing his speech at Rebel.

“Deutsche Nakasone reviews a lot of wetware every day.

Most of it is never used, but it all has to be evaluated. They hire persona bums to do the first screening. Not much to it. They wire you up, suppress your base personality—that’s Eucrasia—program in a new persona, test it, deprogram it, then program you back to your base self. And start all over again. Sound familiar?”

“I… think I remember now,” Rebel said. Then, urgently,

“But it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve done. It’s like it all happened to somebody else.”

“I’m coming to that,” Heisen said. “The thing is that persona bums are all notoriously unstable. They’re all suicidally unhappy types—that’s how they end up with that kind of job, you see? They’re looking to be Mister Right.

But the joke is that they have such miserable experience structures they’re never happy as anyone. Experience always dominates, as we say.” He paused a beat and looked triumphantly at Snow. “Only this time it didn’t.”

Snow said nothing. After an uncomfortable pause, Heisen said, “Yeah. We’ve got the exception that disproves the rule. Our Eucrasia powered on, tried the persona—and she liked it. She liked it so much that she poured a glass of water into the programmer and shorted it out. Thus destroying not only the safe-copy of her own persona, but also the only copy in existence of the Mudlark program.”

Again, that small lizard-movement. “Then…” Snow said.

“Yes. Yes I see. Interesting.” With the small, electric thrill of remembering something she couldn’t possibly know, Rebel realized that Snow was accessing her system, that a tightly-aimed sonic mike or subcortical implant was feeding her data. “How did you manage to lift her?” Snowasked.

Heisen shrugged. “Blind luck. She broke herself out, and I happened by.” He told what he knew of her escape.

“Now that is interesting.” The woman stood. She was tall and impossibly, ethereally thin. A wraith in white, she kept her cloak clutched tight. Two long, fleshless fingers ghosted out to touch Rebel’s forehead. They were hard and dry as parchment, and Rebel shivered at their touch.

“What kind of mind are we dealing with here?” Snow fell silent.

“Take a look at her specs.” Heisen yanked a briefcase from a cloak pocket and punched up a holographic branching-limb wetware diagram. It hung in the air, a convoluted green sphere, looking for all the world like a tumbleweed. Or like a faraway globular tree… It looked exactly like Rebel’s home dyson world, and the image hit her hard. “Okay, this is a crude representation,” Heisen said eagerly. “But look—see where the n-branch trines?

You’ve got a very strong—”

The green sphere burned in the air like a vision of the grail, and Rebel flashed to that light-filled instant when her persona had flooded her skull, and she had picked up a glass and upended it over the programmer. The water writhed in the air, sparkling, and the supervising wettech twisted around in horror, mouth falling open, panic in her eyes as Rebel threw back her head, feeling the rich, full laughter form in her throat. It felt good to be alive, to sense the thoughts warming the brain like sunshine, and to know what she had to do. But then, even as the water splashed into the wafer’s cradle and the tech shrieked,

“What are—” she realized that the programming wires were still jacked into her cortex. The wafer went up with a sizzle as she reached, catching the stench of burning plastic as she tried, random static leaping up the wires to smash her sideways, hand yanking out the leads an instant too late as the universe whited out into oblivion…

The memory cut off, and Rebel trembled. Where was she? Hospitalized? Recaptured? Heisen and Snow were still talking, the tall, slim woman looking down impassively at the fierce little man, and then Rebel remembered who they were. Neither had noticed her snapping out; it must have been a brief episode.

“I’m taking points on this one,” Heisen said. “You hear me, Snow? I want points.”

“Maybe it’s too big for us?” Snow communed with herself for a long moment. “Well, let’s try.” She addressed Rebel directly. “Let me put a hypothetical case to you.

Imagine that you were approached by a small firm that does knock-offs of commercial personas. Suppose you were offered—” she cocked her head slightly—“three points for your help in making a clean recording. This would spoil your value to Deutsche Nakasone. No value, no interest—they’d leave you alone. Now, keeping in mind that without this deal they’ll hunt you down and wipe you out of your own brain… what would you say?”

The episode had left a bad aftertaste in Rebel’s mind. Or possibly it was just the day’s events catching up with her.

It was hard to concentrate. She shook her head. “I don’t understand… knock-offs?”

“Well, let’s say the current best-seller is…”—Snow listened— “a young man with the improbable name of Angelus. He is… sensitive, romantic, shy. The publicity wheels grind and suddenly every fourteen-year-old in the Kluster wants to be sensitive, romantic, shy. There’s a big market for that persona. We lift an early copy, make enough changes to foil legal action, and dump a hundred thousand wafers on the grey market. These personas are not exactly Angelus, but they are sensitive, romantic, and shy. And cheap. The big kids make their big profit, and we tag along for a taste.”

“Only this time,” Heisen said, “we’ll be on the market first, riding all that publicity free. They’ll have to pick upon our wafer, and they’re just not geared for speed the way we are. We can skim off the top profit for a good week before…”

Rebel’s skin crawled at the thought of a hundred thousand strangers sharing her thoughts, her face, her soul. Experiencing her innermost feelings, her deepest emotions. She pictured them as pasty white insects, swarming in blind heaps, biological machines without will or individuality. “No,” she said. “Forget it. I won’t whore my mind.”

“No, but damn it, you have no room to—” Heisen leaped up, reaching for Rebel, and she started to her feet. She found her balance and drew back a fist. She’d never been trained in heavy gravity fighting techniques, but the muscles of her new body integrated well with each other, and she didn’t doubt that she could drop Heisen where he stood. Smash his nose first, and then—

“Stop.” Snow’s arm shot out from her cloak (a flash of corpse-white skin stretched taut over bones, small black nipples on fleshless breasts) and formed a barrier between them. The arm was long, anorexic, and covered with silver filigree-exoskeletal muscle multipliers.

Powered on, she’d be able to punch her fist through a slag wall or break bones without thinking. “So far I’ve been speaking hypothetically; no offers have been made.”

Those unblinking eyes fixed on Rebel, as if she were a mystery that they could penetrate by sheer force of will.

Without turning her head, she said, “She could be a trap, Jerzy. Didn’t you think of that?”

Heisen’s face twisted. “No, I—but she could be, couldn’t she?” He darted forward and jabbed a finger at the floating wetware diagram. “Look at that! That split in the r-limb!” Then he calmed slightly. “No, you couldn’t fake something like that. She has to be legit.” But new sweat had appeared on his forehead, and there was a wary look in his eyes.

Snow folded her arm back into her cloak. She dismissed the diagram with a shrug. “More to the point, I find it hard to imagine a persona bum suddenly finding happiness and content in a new personality. It’s a fairy tale.” She glided back to her prayer rug, graceful as a geisha. “I’m afraid, child, that we are not ready to strike a deal at present.

Much as I’d love to find out what’s in that intriguing mind of yours.” At her side, Heisen trembled like a hound on a leash. She shook her head. “We’ve found out as much as we can without getting our fingers burned.”

In the silence that followed, one of Snow’s hidden spikes whispered in Rebel’s ear, in a voice that was both like and unlike Snow’s own: “Deutsche Nakasone’s goons will be here in a minute.” A laser flashed holo images on one of her retinas: a convoluted local street-and-gallery map.

Two blinking lights crept toward Snow’s office.

“Jerzy will have to be sacrificed, but if you turn left when you leave and run like hell, you ought to escape.” The map vanished. “Go wherever you wish. We will know if you escape. And when you’re ready to do business, one of us will contact you.”

Snow herself had not spoken. She stood slim and solitary as a madonna. Aloud, she said, “The door is behind you.”

Rebel turned and fled.

Outside, she ran blindly down the hot and heavy corridors of downtown. She fled randomly, through crowded galleries and empty alleyways, until she was gasping for breath and covered with sweat and her fear rose up and swallowed her.