Vacumn Flowers

3

STORM FRONT

Someone kicked her wall in passing, and Rebel awoke.

Blearily, she dressed and floated out. Of the three sometime restaurants in the court, only the one marked

“Myrtle’s Joint” had its window open.

She rapped for service and an iguana scurried away and burrowed into the vines. Myrtle’s face flashed out of the gloom with a quick smile. Rebel yawned and woke up a little more, and said, “I’d like to buy some food.”

“What meal?”

“Breakfast.”

Myrtle ducked down and rummaged about. “I got a mango. I could slice it up with a little chutney. There’s a dab of spiced rice that’s not too old. And beer.”

They haggled up a price, and Rebel took a place on the rope as Myrtle put breakfast together. “Hey. My man told me about how you used to own a corporation and all. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.” A flock of naked children darted into the court, shrieking and laughing. For an instant the air was full of them. Then one spotted a gap between hutches and darted through. The others followed and were gone, as quick and sudden as minnows.

Rebel ate slowly. Finally she licked a last bit of chutney from a knuckle and returned the empty Belhaven tube to Myrtle. “Um, this is kind of embarrassing, but how do I find the—?”

“Orange rope downgrain to blue, blue upgrain to red, that’ll take you to the shell.” Myrtle laughed. “From there you can just follow your nose.”

The community toilets were overgrown with masses of nightbloom. The leaves rustled and waved in the wind from the airstacks. But under the flowery scent was a darker smell of human waste and of body gases. She swam in the ladies entrance and took a seat on the communal bench. It was cool here. The air flowing down the holes was enough to hold her on. Resting her elbows on the grab bars, she read the graffiti. There were the usual EARTH

FRIEND and NEWMINDS/FREEMINDS scrawls, with an INDIVIDUALITY DOES NOT EXIST written in one hand and SPEAK FOR YOURSELF scratched beneath it in another. The only really interesting graffito was EVEN

YOUR SHIT BELONGS TO THE RICH.

Well, it made sense. Considering that almost none of the food eaten here was grown within the tank. The toilets had to be emptied to keep the tank towners from literally strangling in their own wastes. The nightblooms helped keep the air fresh, but somebody had to replenish the oxygen that was lost in tiny gasps every time the locks swung open and shut. Even a drastically oversimplified ecology like this needed to be looked after.

The entire Kluster, in fact, was an extremely loose system, leaking air and garbage from every pore. To Rebel’s eyes, it was criminally wasteful how much oxygen and water vapor, reaction mass and consumer trash must be lost to the vacuum every day. Any attempt to tighten the system had to be applauded.

Still, it was humbling to think that the tank towns were being maintained by people who saw them simply as fertilizer farms.

She was leaving the toilets when a familiar voice hailed her from the cluster of commercial data ports next door.

Wyeth, helmet on arm, waved and kicked up to join her.

“I’m just about to leave for work,” he said. “But I’ve cloned my briefcase for you.” He gave her what looked like a hand-sized plate of smokey glass and felt like amber, only cool. Small colored lights danced in its depths. Rebeltouched one, and they all shifted. The device felt right in her hand. She felt a lot better having it. “You operate it by—”

“I know how to work this.” She ran a fast recursive, and schemata appeared in the air over the plate. It was the only skill she possessed worth having, and she… but that was Eucrasia’s though, and Rebel suppressed it. “What have you got in there for me?”

“Your history.”

She looked at him.

“I made a quick raid on Deutsche Nakasone for their unclassified data on Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark.” He touched the plate and two tiers of yellow lights lined up against the right-hand edge. “As you can see, there’s not much. A fast-edited history put together for publicity purposes, I’d guess. I thought you’d be interested.”

“Yes.” She closed her hands around the briefcase, held it to her stomach. “Won’t that lead them to this tank, though? Won’t they be looking for this kind of data request?”

“I don’t see how,” Wyeth said. “Sandoz Lasernet is very big on equipment optimization. They keep their trunk lines flickering on and off constantly. In the fifteen seconds my call took, it was probably routed through half the cities in the Kluster. Following it would be like trying to track a feather in a methane storm. You’d need a program with full sentience and a lot of power to do it.”

Eucrasia’s memories were fading quickly, so that the beginning of Wyeth’s explanation had seemed childishly oversimplified and the ending almost opaque. “Won’t they have a sentient program on the job then?”

“After what happened to Earth?” Wyeth laughed. Then he said, “Listen, I’ve really got to be going. Enjoy. I’ll see you when I get back.”

Rebel wandered back to Jonamon’s court, the briefcase in her cloak pocket as thick and massive as a bad conscience. She wanted to view it, to see what it could tell her about herself, and yet she didn’t.

While she was perched on a rope thinking, the young rude boy she had noticed eyeing her the other day emerged from the vines between two hutches. His torso was mahogany dark and very long, and for an instant she thought he was naked. Then his orange cache-sexe appeared. He held something in one hand, and with the other reached for a cloak that had been left tied to a hutch frame.

He noticed her.

For a moment neither moved. Then the boy fastened his cloak about his shoulders and walked up the rope toward her, gripping the line between his toes. He smiled and showed her what was in his hand.

“Honeycomb.” His dark eyes sparkled. He cocked a hip slightly, bringing his muscles into sharper delineation, and bit into the wax. His mouth and chin glistened. “Want some? My name’s Maxwell.”

“I can’t,” Rebel said helplessly. Brushing open her cloak, she dug out the briefcase. She held it forward, two-handed. “I’ve got to listen to some stuff.”

Maxwell took the briefcase and, holding it upside-down, solemnly examined the lights. “Listen to it in my hut. I’ll feed you honey while you work.”

“All right.”

She wedged the briefcase between wall and pipe as Maxwell pinned up their cloaks. A touch converted it to spoken command. She waited until the hutch was dark, then said, “Please turn on.” Light blossomed.

The holography opened on a shot of Eros Kluster Traffic Control. The EKTC station was shaped like a barbell andrevolved slowly within a maelstrom of traffic holograms.

“How’s this?” Maxwell asked. The image rippled over his body as he swam to her.

“Mmmm.” Rebel skipped the scene forward.

They were in the interior now, a hemispherical transparent hull crisscrossed by thin catwalks between work stations. The traffic techs looked upset. One man bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

“That can’t be—” someone said. Rebel backtracked the program.

“Open up,” Maxwell said. He popped a bit of honeycomb into her mouth. Sweet.

An operator gave a long, low whistle. “Look what just came up on visual!” His supervisor was at his side at once, a big woman with a bulldog jaw. “Now that ought to be a lightsail,” the man said. “Spectroanalysis gives us a solar signature, ever so slightly blueshifted. But it’s not registered, and it’s headed right down our throats.”

“Velocity?”

“Hard to say.” The tech’s fingers flickered, coaxing up data. “If it’s a standard-size sail, though, and assuming a median range load of five kilotons, then it’ll rip through the Kluster sometime tomorrow.”

“Shit!” The supervisor pushed him from his station.

“Grab something vacant and restructure the programming to give me more capacity. Take it off of, um, the holos. Let them drift a bit. Set them to correct only once every point-zero-three seconds, okay?”

The operator bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.

“That can’t be—” the supervisor said. “No, that doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s not an industrial delivery.”

“More honey?”

“Mmm.” Maxwell’s fingers lingered on her lips, and she kissed them absently.

Another tech said, “We’re having trouble estimating mass. There’s something screwy about the way it’s slowing down.” Rebel stopped motion, and asked the briefcase to give her the terminal display. It appeared, a chart in seven colors, showing every pinprick of light as it appeared from the EKTC station. It pulsed, and the lights shifted to an earlier configuration. A speck of light, circled in red, raced sunward, from beyond Jupiter. A sidebar identified it as COMET: COMMERCIAL CARRIER (LUMBERED TREE

FARM).

The EKTC system was crammed with economic warfare programs. Reflexively, it showed the positions of other lumbered comets moving into the system. It also showed a pod of young comets climbing up from the Sun, their tails of ionized gases winking out as new vegetation covered their surfaces. An operator wiped them off the screen.

“What a pig. You’ve got honey on your chin.”

“Hey, I’m busy, okay?”

“Hold still and I’ll lick it off.”

Now a sidebar appeared with the comet’s registry. It was a small, uncolonized comet, carrying a lumbered first growth of some seventy gigatons of oak, teak, and mahogany hybrids. The trees had been grown over one long swing down to the sun and back out to the edge of the Oort Cloud. There, archipelago lumberjacks had coppiced the comet, leaving roots intact for a second growth, and then artificially accelerated it for its trek back into the System. Eros Kluster speculated heavily in timber, but this was not a local deal. The freight was due to Ceres Kluster as per a contract signed some two decades ago. Since Eros had no financial interest in it, the traffic computer had never before seen fit to bring it to human attention.

Maxwell followed a trail of dribbles down the side of Rebel’s neck, toward her breasts. She giggled and pushed him away. “That tickles.”

The display shifted to fast replay. The comet rushed down on Jupiter. It dipped into the giant planet’s gravity well, was slewed around, and emerged on a new orbit. It dumped velocity in the process, shifting to a shorter ellipse that would take it within the orbit of Mercury, and then out again to its client Kluster. The readout shifted momentarily to show the Inner System with old and new orbits displayed as dotted yellow lines.

“How about this? Does this tickle too?”

“No. That’s nice.”

Midway between Jupiter and Eros, the comet’s brightness quadrupled. There was an explosive flare of light, which quickly fell behind the comet—a lightsail unfurling. It bobbed slightly on the solar wind, tacked gracefully. The computer ran a projected course for it. It was headed straight into the heart of Eros Kluster.

Rebel switched back to live action. “Go on,” the supervisor said.

“The sail is tacked away from the sun. So the drag ought to be easy to calculate. But it’s slowing down too fast for anything I’ve ever seen. Even a single kiloton shipment ought to—”

“Could the treehangers be dumping some kind of bomb on us?” the supervisor muttered to herself. “No, that’s stupid. Maybe they— wait. Try calculating the rate of deceleration for a shortsail with a payload of a third of a ton.”

Fingers danced. “Damn! It works.”

“That’s it, then. One human in a vacuum suit, plus the mass of a frame, controlling mechanism and cables. I’d say that what we’ve got here—” she tapped the screen—“is someone using a small lightsail as a drogue chute.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A drogue chute. Like a parachute—um, it’s hard to explain. Just contact Perimeter Defense and tell them we’ve got a space cadet that needs rescuing. Dump the whole thing in their laps.”

The scene shifted to the exterior of a Perimeter Defense multipurpose cruiser.

“Hey,” Rebel said. “I don’t think you’re going to find any honey down there.”

“Want to bet?” Maxwell was kissing and nuzzling her belly. Now he slowly moved his hands up her thighs and even more slowly pulled down her cache-sexe.

“Please stop,” Rebel murmured. The briefcase shut itself off. In the dim light seeping through the ill-fitting edges of the tin walls, she saw that Maxwell was already naked.

And interested.

Definitely interested.

They made love twice, and then she sent Maxwell out with her bracelet to bring back lunch. He returned with a huge meal and no change. They ate, and then somehow they were making love again. It just seemed to happen. At last she had to say, “No, really. I’ve got to listen to this.”

She flicked the briefcase back on.

The multipurpose cruiser had matched speeds with the lightsail. A dozen Perimeter Defense employees launched themselves at the rigging. Clumsily, surely, they cut away the harness, drew in the sail, and disentangled an unmoving vacuum-suited figure.

Back inside the cruiser, workers swarmed about the vacuum suit. It was worn and frayed; crystalized patching ooze covered several small cuts. “Look,” a medtech said.

He pointed to a fine crazing of lines in the visor. “Poor bugger miscalculated acceleration stress. The internal organs are probably mush.” He turned off the coldpackunit and somebody else yanked off the helmet.

Acceleration jelly gone liquescent sloshed onto the deck, revealing a woman’s face. It was angular, with high cheekbones. The hair, short and wet, was a mousy blond.

Her skin was a bloated and unhealthy white, almost blue in places. There were small globs of jelly caught in her nostrils. A tech wiped them away, and the woman took a sudden, gasping breath. She shivered and opened her eyes. It was Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, in her own body.

A trickle of blood came from the corner of her mouth.

She grinned weakly. “Hey, sports,” she said. Then she looked puzzled. “I feel kind of sick.”

Then she died.

Maxwell was not looking when it happened. He was rummaging in a small corner chest for body jewelry.

When he found a piece he liked, he’d try it on, preening for her. Now he turned, a string of pearls about his waist.

“You like it?” He swiveled his hips making the string spin.

“It takes a good body to wear pearls.”

The hologram drew slowly back, the scurrying Perimeter Defense people growing smaller as they vainly tried to revive the body. “Coldpack revival shock,” a medtech muttered. “Damage to brain tissue complicated by cumulative radiation damage. Compression, shear, and tidal effects to liver, pancreas, heart…” Her voice droned on monotonously as she read the diagnostics into the record. Someone else put a cryonics unit over the head and flash-froze the brain. Later, the personality and surface memories could be teased out with supercooling induction techniques, if the traffic investigators needed an interview.

I died, Rebel thought flatly. She remembered it happening very clearly now, the faces bent over her, their concerned expressions and the way it had all drawn away into whiteness as…

The pearls orbited Maxwell’s waist like a ring ofsatellites. His navel danced at their center.

Now, as the Perimeter Defense employees slowed and the clamor of voices fell to a murmur, Rebel’s name rose in black Gothic letters. It dominated the scene for a beat, then burst into sudden, bright flame. When the flames died down, a new Rebel Mudlark rose from them like a phoenix.

The new Rebel was an idealized version of the original, taller and thinner, with spectacular muscle structure. She stood wide-legged, fists on hips, and laughed self-confidently. The holo drew back. Green dyson worlds floated behind her, and she was surrounded by a ring of cringing admirers. One reached a trembling hand out for her, and she kicked him right in the mouth.

The words available soon scrolled up.

“Turn it off,” Rebel whispered desperately. “Oh God, turn that damn thing off.” The memory of her death burned in her brain. She wouldn’t be able to forget it again.

Maxwell picked up the briefcase, looked at it blankly, touched a glowing red dot. The room went dark. “Hold me,” Rebel said. “I don’t want to do anything, just… hold me, please hold me.”

She floated in the dark, flooded with misery. She’d felt like this when her mother had died in the accident at the Kluster refineries. Her pain had caught her by surprise then, because she’d hated the cold bitch. You’ll never hurt me again, she had thought angrily, and yet she’d still felt abandoned and desolate. She hugged Maxwell to her, like a big, sexless cuddly toy.

Vague shapes swam in her vision, threatening to coalesce into a stretched and bloated skull. She’d seen death’s face before, as a child. Her first time solo in a vacuum suit, she had blundered across a laser cable and shorted out half her suit. Her visor went black and her rebreather stopped. Floating alone and sightless, gaspingand choking, she had suddenly realized that she was going to die. And in that horrified instant, she saw a face before her, bone-white and distorted, with empty eye sockets, small dark nostrils, and black, gaping mouth. She threw her head back and the face lurched at her, and she was abruptly hauled in by a Traffic Control employee who injected an air line through the skin of her suit. It had only been her reflection, lit by a lone failsafed helmet monitor light.

Maxwell gently slid a hand between her legs and moved them apart. He started to enter her. Upset and distracted as she was, she almost let him do it. It would be the easy thing, the path of least resistance. But then the Rebel persona asserted itself, and she shoved him away. She would not let herself be taken advantage of.

“Back off there, bud! Who gave you permission to do that?”

Maxwell looked bewildered. “But—”

“You don’t listen too good, do you? I said I didn’t want to do anything, and I by God meant it.” As she raged at him, Maxwell backed away, fell into a fighting crouch, straightened, crouched again. His hands fisted and unfisted. His face twisted with conflicting programmed urges. “What are you, some kind of machine? Willing sex isn’t good enough for you?” Clumsily, Maxwell threw a slap at Rebel’s face. She batted his hand away contemptuously and tried to punch him in the stomach.

He flinched back, and his string broke, pearls exploding in all directions. They bounced off the tin walls like hail.

“Just get the fuck out of here!”

Maxwell was backed into a corner, quivering. In a tiny voice he said, “But this is my place.”

For a long moment Rebel glared at him scornfully. Then she laughed, and with a kind of rough good will, reached out to tousle his hair. “You’re kind of useless, you know that?”

“It all depends on what you want,” Maxwell said, eyes averted sullenly. But his tension was gone. He began gathering up the pearls that still bounced about the room, nabbing them out of the air and holding them in one hand.

“I mean, I can fight just as good as I sex, but I got to have clear signals. You can’t expect me to—hey, what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“Listen!” They fell silent. In the distance was a dull clank-clank-clank of people hammering on the pipes. It went on and on, growing in volume as more and more people to one end of the tank town hammered in unison.

Rebel touched a frame pipe and felt it vibrating in sympathy. Outside, the constant murmur of voices died.

“It’s the heat! God damn. We got to get away.” Maxwell let go of the pearls and grabbed for his cloak.

“Get away? Where? What are you talking about?”

Maxwell was frantically struggling into his clothes.

“You’ve never been in a raid before? They start by grabbing the airlock. That takes maybe a dozen jackboots.

And they bring in a few crates of programming units and these enormous stacks of arrest programs.”

“Arrest programs?”

“Yeah. Then they move out from the locks in a long line.

They arrest maybe one out of five people they nab for failure to cooperate and sentence them to like six hours enforcement duty. Program ’em up on the spot, give them their orders, and send them out to bring in more to be programmed. They spread out like a storm. Before long, you got jackboots everywhere.”

In her mind’s eye, Rebel saw the police expanding through the tank in an ever-widening cordon, swelling their numbers as they went, doubling every few minutes, like an explosion of yeast culture through a warm medium.

“But what are they looking for?”

“What the fuck does it matter? You want them to gethold of you?” Maxwell untwisted a corner wire holding on the back wall and shoved the tin to show a thin, dark line of weeds. “Look, worse comes to worst, we can slip out back. Nothing there but vines. Only don’t move around much, ’cause I got a beehive back there. I don’t want you disturbing them.” He took Rebel’s hand and pulled her out into the court. “What we’ve got to do is slip past the storm front. See, they’ll be spread out thin. Questioning everyone, right? Once we get by them, we’re clear.”

The court was empty. They swam to the gateway. “Does this sort of thing happen here often?” Rebel asked.

“Naw. Once a month, tops.”

They paused at the gateway and looked down the corridor. Doors opening onto it had been shut and windows tied down. It was crowded with people fleeing the jackboots. Suddenly there came a babble of voices from upgrain, and people hesitated, colliding in midair as those ahead of them turned back abruptly.

“What the hell—?”

“Keep moving, you idiots!”

“No, no! Turnback!”

A raver came down the rope, eyes full-mad and staring, globules of drool spewing from his mouth. He was a scrawny old man with long grey beard, his cloak in tatters.

He raged as he came, tearing with insane strength at whoever got close. One of his legs was broken, and it waved fluidly behind him. It was clear he did not notice the pain.

“Sweet Krishna!” somebody wailed, and floated back from the raver, trailing large red spheres of blood. The corridor was filling with trashing, panicky people.

Somebody pushed past Rebel into the courtyard, and then two more. “Come on,” Rebel said worriedly, “we’ve got to get away from here.”

But then there was a rush on the gate, and Rebel was borne back from the corridor while Maxwell went tumbling forward. A fat man jammed his pink face right up against her, shouting hysterically. Rebel grabbed a rope and pulled herself free of the crush of people, and then the rope broke and she slammed into a tin wall.

Shrieking voices rose in demon chorus. Rebel clawed across the fronts of the hutches to Maxwell’s and climbed inside. It took her only a second to slip out the back. She shoved the wall into place, and was hidden in the vines.

It was dark between courts. Here and there a nightflower glowed, a dull fuzz of light that revealed nothing. The vines were wet and slimy. Floating alone and sightless, like a traveler among the final stars at the end of the universe, Eucrasia’s claustrophobia rose up within her.

It started as a tingling up the base of her spine, then spread until her entire body itched. She became aware of her own breath. The outside noises were muffled here, a dull wash of voices like the white noise of surf, and her breath sounded rough and raspy. She couldn’t get enough air in her lungs. Her head swam dizzily, and she started breathing through her mouth.

Rebel’s nose almost touched the back of the wall. The smell of metal was strong. Her skin crawled from the wall’s closeness, and she drew back her head. That felt better. Slowly, almost by compulsion, she began pulling herself forward, through the vines. A honeybee burned past her ear, and she froze, afraid of bumping into its hive.

But stopping brought back the claustrophobia, and she moved forward again, occasionally reaching out a hand to touch the backs of the huts to keep from losing her way.

Finally she came to a place where the tin was not. It was a gap between hutches, maybe even the one Maxwell had emerged from earlier. She crept into it.

Light slowly grew. Rebel paused only when she couldjust barely see into the court, buried an arm’s length into the vines. She could bear being enclosed, so long as there was light. She drew her hood about her face, peering through the merest slit. Then she held herself motionless, like an old pike lying craftily in wait among the weeds.

The court was full of people looking for an exit that was not there. For every one who realized that and left, two more came in. They pushed and shoved at each other, and even exchanged blows in their blind flight.

Then the gateway filled with jackboots. They were a motley bunch, in all color of cloak and even work garb.

One woman wore a welder’s apron, though she seemed to have lost her mask. All had red stripes down the center of their faces, and fierce, merciless expressions. Three of them grabbed a young boy and fit a programmer across his forehead. He thrashed and then went passive. A fourth held a piece of paper to his face, and he shook his head. He was shoved out the gateway, and another civilian was seized.

One of the processers was called away, and the next civilian questioned was programmed police. Somebody repainted her face, and someone else shoved a fistful of papers at her. One went flying, and Rebel saw that it was a cheap repro hologram. Her face—her new face, Eucrasia’s face—floated above the paper, twisting and folding into itself when the paper doubled up against a hut.

Rebel shivered and tried to keep from thinking about it.

Later.

A heavy, bullish man snapped a length of pipe from a doorframe and tried to smash his way through the gate.

One jackboot fell back, clutching his head, but others seized the man’s arms and legs and forced a programmer to his brow. “You’re a strong one,” the welder laughed as the samurai look came on his face. She drew a red stripe from his chin to his hairline. He joined the line.

Rebel’s leg itched furiously. She did not move a muscle.

As the people were processed out and the courtyard emptied, those who remained grew calmer. Some even formed a sullen line, to get through the questioning more quickly.

There was a flurry of conferences, and four new jackboots entered. Three of them were permanent police, felons who’d pulled long enough terms to merit extensive training. They wore riot helmets with transparent visors, and low-mass body armor. Their insignia identified them as corporate mercenaries, rather than civil police. Two carried long staffs with complicated blades at their ends, like a cross between a pike and a brush hook.

The fourth was Maxwell.

There was no doubting it. The four passed right by Rebel’s hiding place, and she got a good look at the young man. He had a stripe of killer red up the center of his face and a glittery, unforgiving look to his eye. “Of course I’m not mistaken,” he snapped. “I heard her story myself. It’s Deutsche Nakasone that’s sponsoring this raid, right?

Well, that’s who she escaped from. How could I be mistaken?”

He led the others to his hut and watched complacently as they ripped the front wall off, sending his jewelry and clothes scattering through the court. Moving efficiently, they jammed their hooks into the rear wall and began cutting it free of the frame.

Rebel had a horrible urge to sneeze. She wanted to scream, to break and run. But that was Eucrasia’s impulse, and Rebel would not give in to it. The jackboots at the gateway were processing out the last three tank towners. Their motions were quick and alert.

The thing to do was not to move.

I am old sister pike, she thought to herself. I am patience.

The rear wall went flying, and the police jabbed theirpoles into the vines behind it. Maxwell shouted a warning, and they ignored it. He waved his arms frantically.

And then there were cries of dismay. With an angry shrill, a swarm of honeybees rose from their broken hive.

The police fell back, swatting and cursing. At the gateway, somebody grabbed a jerrycan of water from Jonamon’s hut and flung its contents at the swarm. The water broke into spheres and smashed into both bees and jackboots, doing nothing for the temper of either. The permanent jackboots retreated to the corridor, dragging Maxwell after them. One cursed him furiously.

Maxwell answered back and was struck in the mouth.

The courtyard emptied. The jackboots pulled away from the gateway, and soon only one lingered. Go away, Rebel thought at him. But he did not. He gazed long and thoughtfully at the floating debris in the courtyard and the occasional bee zipping angrily by. He kicked into the court and poked his head into a hut or two.

The man examined a vine-filled gap halfway across the court from her. Then he swam over to her patch. Rebel closed her eyes so the reflection from them would not betray her. Her skin itched.

The vines rustled slightly. “Heads up, Sunshine!”

She opened her eyes.

It was Wyeth, painted as if programmed police. Those fierce eyes laughed at her from either side of the red stripe, and he grinned comically. Then his face went grim again, and he said, “We’ll have to get a move on. They’re going to be back.”

She climbed out of the vines. Following Wyeth’s lead, she recovered her helmet and vacuum suit. Wyeth was at the gate, calling to her to hurry, when she noticed something floating half-hidden by a sheet of tin in an obscure corner of the court. “Wait,” she said. It was a body.

Rebel kicked away the tin. Old Jonamon floated there, pale and motionless, like a piece of detritus. At her touch, he opened one eye. “Careful now,” he muttered.

“Jonamon, what did they do to you?”

“I’ve survived worse. You think maybe you could get me some water?” Wyeth silently fetched a bulb and held it to the old man’s mouth. Jonamon sucked in a mouthful and coughed it out, choking. When he’d recovered, he gasped,

“It’s hell being old. Don’t let nobody tell you different.”

The old man was all tangled up in his cloak. Gently, Rebel unwrapped it. When she saw his body, she gasped.

“They beat you!”

“Ain’t the first time.” Jonamon tried to laugh. “But they couldn’t put their programmer on me without they beat me unconscious first.” His arms moved feebly, like a baby’s. “So I escaped.”

Rebel wanted to cry. “Oh, Jonamon. What good did that do you? You might have been killed!”

Jonamon grinned, and for a second Rebel could see the young, avaricious man of the old hologram. “At least I’d’ve died in a state of grace.”

Wyeth drew Rebel away. “Sunshine, we don’t have much time.”

“I’m not leaving without Jonamon.”

“Hmm.” He cracked his knuckles thoughtfully, and his lips moved in silent argument with himself. “Okay, then,”

he said finally. “You take the one arm and I’ll take the other.”

They moved slowly downcorridor, the old man between them. His mouth was open and his eyes half shut with pain. He didn’t try to talk. The tank towners, seeing Wyeth’s jackboot paint, gave them a wide berth. “Queen Roslyn has her court down this way,” Wyeth said. “She’s a predatory old hag, and she stocks a lot of wetware. Ifanybody has a hospital going, it’ll be her.”

They followed a purple rope into a dark neighborhood with one brightly lit gateway. People hurried in and out of it. Rebel didn’t need to be told that this was their destination.

At the gateway, an angular woman with bony shoulders and small, black nipples blocked their way. “Full up! Full up!” she cried. “No room here, go someplace else.” She didn’t even glance at Jonamon, who was now fully unconscious.

Wordlessly, Wyeth stripped the salaries from one wrist and held them forward. The woman cocked an eye at them, then let her gaze travel to his other wrist. Wyeth frowned. “Don’t get greedy, Roslyn.”

“Well,” Roslyn said. “I guess we could make an exception.” She made the salaries disappear, and led them inside.

It was chaos in the court, with stretcher lines hung up every which way. The lines were crowded with wounded rude boys and rude girls, temporary jackboots, unpainted religious fanatics, and even one tightly bound raver. A

miasma of blood droplets, trash, and bits of bandages hung in the air. But people with medical paint moved among the wounded, and their programming seemed efficient enough. Roslyn stopped one and said, “Give this guy top priority, okay? His friends are paying for it.” The tech gave a tight little nod and eased Jonamon away.

Roslyn smiled. “You see? Ask anyone, Roslyn gives good value. But you got to go now. I got no room for bystanders.” She shooed them back.

On the way out, Rebel suddenly spotted a familiar face.

She seized Wyeth’s arm and pointed. “Look! Isn’t that…?”

Maxwell was stretched out on a line, unconscious. The red police strip was smudged on his finely chiseled face.

Roslyn saw the gesture and laughed. “Another friend of yours? You oughta maybe get some new ones who can stayout of trouble. But he’s okay. Might lose a tooth. But mostly he’s just got a histamine reaction from being bee-stung too often.” They were at the gateway now. “Young woman brought him in. Pretty little thing.” She cackled. “I think she’s sweet on him.”

“Oh?” Rebel said coolly. “Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.”

They moved through near-empty corridors, away from the center of the tank, and away from the receding storm front. “Wyeth,” Rebel said after a long silence,

“Jonamon’s problems are all the result of his calcium depletion, aren’t they?”

“Jonamon’s problems are all the result of his being a stubborn old man. He’ll survive this time, but it’s going to kill him sooner or later.”

“No, really,” Rebel insisted. “I mean, like the kidney troubles, he gets them from the calcium depletion, right?

You watch him for any length of time, and you see that he gets muscle cramps, his breathing gets irregular… So why hasn’t he had that corrected?”

They were nearing the shell. The temperature was cooler here, up against the outside of the tank. Wyeth paused, took a narrow side-way, and Rebel followed. “It’s not correctable. You live a year or so in weightlessness, and you reach the point of no return. It can’t be reversed.

Slow down, we make a turn soon.”

“But it would be so simple. You could tailor a strain of coraliferous algae to live in the bloodstream. In the first phase they’re free-swimming, and in the second they colonize the bone tissue. When they die, they leave behind a tiny bit of calcium.”

“Coral reefs in the bones?” Wyeth sounded bemused.

“That’s how we do it back home.”

“You come from an interesting culture, Sunshine,”

Wyeth said. “You’ll have to tell me all about it someday.

But right now… here we are.” The corridor they had entered was completely shuttered and lit only by nightblooms. Scattered trash gathered in long drifts unbroken by the passage of traffic. They were the only people in sight. Silently, Wyeth moved down the corridor, looking for a particular door. When he found it, he stopped and rattled a wall. “This is King Wismon’s court.

He’s got something we need.”

“What’s that?”

“A bootleg airlock.”