Vacumn Flowers

5

PEOPLE’S SHERATON

You’re in for something that’s pretty rare this far from a planetary surface,” Wyeth said.

“What’s that?”

“A windstorm.”

Beneath its elaborations—balconies, outcroppings, light and heavy gravity wings, bubbles and skywalks—thesheraton was a simple orbital wheel, with three floors moving at slightly different speeds to maintain Greenwich normal gravity. Wyeth had set up security headquarters in the lobby at the foot of the elevator from the central docking ring. He sat behind the front desk, eyes moving restlessly as he scanned a dozen holographic inputs. A

tone-controlled mike rested before him, and he murmured instructions into it from time to time, pitching his voice for the channel desired.

Rebel sat in a sling chair, staring out through the window wall. The stars trembled with the flicker of subliminal memories. She could see Wyeth reflected on the inner surface of the glass.

There was a cascade of movement across the window.

“We’ve secured the locks, sir. The people aren’t very happy about it. Minor violence at tanks twelve and three.”

Despite her samurai paint, the woman hardly looked like security. She’d been recruited from the tanks and wore a daisy-yellow cloak and far too much jewelry.

“They were notified,” Wyeth said. When the woman was gone, he sighed. “I wonder at people. If they don’t understand why they can’t use the locks for an hour or two, then what do they think is waiting for them when we reach Mars orbit? I’m afraid they’re in for a rude awakening.”

Spacejacks were bolting the preassembled segments of the geodesic around the sheraton and tanks, working with programmed efficiency. The structure was covered with transparent monomolecular skin. From Rebel’s chair, it looked like a faint haze gathering across the stars. The workers began spraying powdered steel over the completed exterior, vacuum-welding layer upon layer.

Now it was like watching the heat death of the universe, the stars slowly clouding up and fading to black. Gloom swelled and overwhelmed everything. Finally the only light within the geodesic was what spilled from the windows of the sheraton.

“This is spooky,” Rebel said. Suddenly she had an overwhelming sense of someone standing at her shoulder.

She whirled, and no one was there.

“You like it, huh?” Wyeth threw an exterior camera projection onto one quadrant of window. From outside, the geodesic looked like a gigantic ball bearing, dazzlingly bright in the raw sunlight. Stars rippled over its flank. Just off center was the distorted reflection of Londongrad, with the Kluster corporate logo (two classical figures, one bending) superpainted on its side. In an unfamiliar voice Wyeth said, “Think of it as an enormous cell. The tank towns at the center are the nucleus. The sheraton is… oh, the centrosome, I guess. The air plant would have to be the mitochondria.” He laughed and spread his arms. “And behold! A new form of life floats upon the winds of space.

What vast, unimaginably complex creatures will evolve from this first simple cell, a million years hence?”

Rebel looked up sharply. “Which one of you is that?”

Again that strange laugh. “The pattern-maker, I guess you’d call me. I’m the intuitive one, the persona that guesses at the big picture, that decides what we think about God and infinity. Of course, it’s only a name. In an Aboriginal hunting party, I’d be the shaman.”

“Hah?”

“Don’t you know where the tetrad comes from? Eucrasia patterned us after the ancient Aboriginal hunting party.

They went out in groups of four, and no matter what individuals they picked, during the hunt they took on four distinct roles—the leader, the warrior, the mystic, the clown. It made for a remarkably stable and efficient group.

And it makes for a remarkably stable and efficient mind.”

This was all very familiar. Staring out into the darkness, Rebel saw half-formed memories of Eucrasia’s past striving to take shape. “I thought she was a persona bum?”

“Well, a little bit of a persona bum, yeah. But a hell of a good wetsurgeon in your own right.”

“In her own right.”

“Whatever.” As they talked, Wyeth occasionally turned away to touch an unseen control or murmur an order.

People continually passed through the lobby. A squad of security samurai took the elevator up to the docking ring, armed with truncheons and barbed pikes, and looking dangerous. In their wake, a young kid with mahogany skin strode in. He stood at the window, hands behind back, peering out with elaborate interest.

“What are you doing here?” Rebel asked coldly.

“Hey, I got experience in security work.” Maxwell put a hand on her shoulder, and she stood, knocking it away.

Without looking up, Wyeth said, “He’s a messenger. I need any number of runners who can take messages in and out of the tanks.”

“He’s not painted as a messenger.”

“Yes, well, we’re dealing with the Comprise here. The less programming the better.”

On the window flashed images of cold fusion alembics being hooked into the geodesic and powered on. Newly created oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and trace gases gushed into the sphere. The sheraton shuddered as the winds hit, and Wyeth lost two limpet cameras, their perches torn out from under their grips. They went hurtling helplessly away, one to shatter against the tanks, the other against the geodesic’s inside wall.

A short, grey-haired woman dressed treehanger style walked up to the front desk. “Got all my people at their stations. What do you need us to do when?” It was the supervisor from the biolab on Fanchurch Prospekt.

“Oh Christ,” Rebel muttered. “It’s Old Home Week.”

The woman peered at her. “Don’t I know you, dear?”

Rebel turned away, and Wyeth said, “Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, I’d like you to meet Constance Frog Moorfields, our macrobioengineering project director. Connie, I’mgoing to need you to cue your people in just a few minutes.

Grab a channel, will you?”

“Oh yes, certainly.” Constance peered owlishly at the controls. “How do I work this thing?”

Maxwell slid an arm around Rebel’s waist and said, “Tell you what, why don’t you sit on my lap, and we’ll talk about the first thing to come up?” She threw a punch at his stomach, and he danced back, grinning.

Outside, the storm howled. “Now,” Wyeth said, and Constance nodded and murmured into her mike. In some distant room the macrobioengineers hit their remotes.

Explosive bolts broke open the small holding sphere, sending the pieces flying. The air plant within twisted and expanded, lashing through the air. The winds took it in their teeth, and strands slammed against the tanks and the geodesic walls, rebounding furiously. Through the windows, Rebel saw hugh loops of the plant loom into the dim light from the sheraton and recede again. “It’s enormous,” she marveled.

“Twenty-seven miles,” Constance said with satisfaction.

“Stretched out full, that is. And it’s still young. Ought to grow like green hell in the next few days.” She reached over to the controls and threw several biostructural schematics on the windows. “See, we’ve designed it to—”

Rebel turned and walked away.

The hallway was long and straight, with a barely perceptible upward curve. Rebel wondered why it was so dark, shadows lapping up against her ankles and hovering over either shoulder. Must be some reason. She touched one paisley wall, and remembered another, similar hallway she had walked down a thousand times before, the one connecting her office with the wetsurgery.

A breeze stirred her cloak, and she drew it together slightly. A scrap of paper fluttered by, and behind her she heard a silver bowl crash to the floor and go tumbling end over end before hitting a wall. Somewhere, theoff-program samurai were opening the airlocks, glorying in the rush of new air. Outside, the wind sang in demon chorus. Within, all was cool gush and flow.

She was striding along, lost in her memories, when Jerzy Heisen stepped from a conversation niche and took her arm. “Hello, Heisen,” she said absently. “Anything new on the Mudlark program?”

He gave her a peculiar look. “Not yet. Soon, I hope.”

“I’ve decided to try the program on myself. It looks interesting, but the kind of interesting that’s only comprehensible from the inside, if you get me. I don’t want that information filtered through some subliterate, only marginally coherent persona bum.” She couldn’t keep a touch of bitterness from her voice. The support staff she’d been given was poor material, incompetent to begin with and hastily programmed on top of that. She had to do half their work herself.

Heisen frowned, then said carefully, as if reciting lines from a play or remembering the exact wording of an old conversation, “Is that wise? We haven’t had the master wafer duplicated yet.”

She brushed his objection aside scornfully. “It’s only for ten minutes. God’s sake, what can happen in ten minutes?”

A pause. When she looked directly at him, Heisen’s eyes were oddly intent, but the instant she looked away he faded to a vague presence again. “You think it’s a commercial persona, then?”

“You’re so damned mercenary, Heisen! I’m talking about a new trait, a new characteristic, a new property…

Something that might make programming richer and more interesting.”

“But it does have commercial potential?”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

Footsteps came running up from behind, and suddenly adark-skinned kid was standing before her, proffering a cheap amalgam ring. Eucrasia had to squint to see him.

“Wyeth told me to give this to you.”

“Wyeth?” She recognized the name. How could she forget? He was the best work she’d done yet—pirate surgery, of course, but she’d put everything she had into it, because some of the most interesting programming was, strictly speaking, illegal. “Wyeth asked you to give me a ring?”

“Yeah, it’s a locator ring. So he can keep track of you, where you are and so on.” He waved a hand at the ceiling cameras. “Listen, you come over to the tanks later on, visit my hut. No surveillance there. We can get private, know what I mean?”

Eucrasia shrugged in baffled annoyance.

Heisen had withdrawn to a discreet distance. The kid glanced curiously at him, decided he wasn’t important, and blew her a kiss. “See you in my hutch!” he called over his shoulder. Eucrasia vaguely wondered who he was.

Heisen took her arm again. He steered her through a meadowlike meeting room. The grass was cool underfoot, and bees hovered drowsily over the raspberry bushes.

“Let’s go over this way, and stroll through the skywalk. It’s a very pleasant walk. Free of cameras and prying eyes.”

He swung the cherry-red case lightly back and forth as he led her away.

The skywalk looped out from the sheraton in a long, graceful curve. Fish swam through strands of kelp within the transparent tube walls. The teak boardwalk sounded almost musically underfoot. “I designed Wyeth’s warrior aspect after my father,” Eucrasia said. She had totally lost track of who she was talking to, but the memories were compulsively strong, and they drove the words before them. “He was a willful man, my father was. Determined.

Nobody could talk him into anything, not unless he wanted them to. But he wasn’t… flexible, you know? He couldn’t adapt to change. He couldn’t show emotion. But underneath he was a wonderful man, very kind, and I loved him. When I was a girl I was always wishing I could change him. Not in any big way, but in little ways, so he could get past all that defensive armor and breathe a little.

So he could enjoy his life. That was a big factor in my choice of career, I think.”

She fell silent. Remembering when she was a little girl and the Kluster was passing out of the belts. The refineries were closing, which had put both her parents out of work.

Those had been bad times. Her mother’d taken a job as pierrette, and the wetware was primitive then. She’d come home after shift with a goony look to her and a subservience that took hours to wear off. Daddy had hated that.

Once Eucrasia came home from nurture to find her father sitting at the center room table, turning a wetcartridge over and over in his hands. It was a big, bulky thing in a black case, almost obsolete already, and she didn’t know yet that it was loaded with electronic godhood. But she knew that she was tired of having her father around all the time, moping about gloomily, and of almost never seeing her mother the way she used to be.

And she didn’t like the guilty, weak look that melted her father’s face when he saw her. He had always been a strong man. So it was involuntary how, as he fumblingly tried to hide the cartridge, she stared up at him, mind superchilled and pulsing with inarticulate pain, and felt the anger sear through her eyes like an invisible psychic laser, and said, “I hate you, Daddy.”

What happened then shocked her.

Her father’s hand clenched into a fist. It trembled.

Then—so fast she almost didn’t see it happen—he hit himself right in the middle of his face. That big fist struck hard. It must have hurt like hell. It broke the cartilage inhis nose, and blood flowed down. Then he hit himself again. And again, with less hesitation this time, as if he’d savored the experience and decided he liked it. At first the only sound was of fist striking flesh, but then gradually he began gasping, a wet noise like sobbing. Still he kept on hitting himself.

Eucrasia had rushed forward, grabbing at that huge, muscular arm, trying to stop him. “Daddy, no!” she shrieked, and somehow—it was like a small, dark miracle—he’d stopped.

For a long moment he just stood there, chest working, shoulders heaving. His face was all dark with blood. One red drop fell on Eucrasia’s foot, tickling her little toe. Her father stared around and around him, as if wondering where he was. Then his eyes fixed on Eucrasia, and they both stood there, mouths open and silent, unblinking, looking at one another.

Then he turned away.

“This is far enough,” Heisen said. He stopped and put down his case with a heavy thump. “Why don’t you sit down, Eucrasia?”

They had come to a transparent bar built out from the wall of the skywalk. An octopus was searching for food down by the floor, pulling himself along the glass with graceful swirls of his tentacles. Eucrasia sat on one of the stools. “He was a good man,” she said. “He was a good man. He didn’t deserve for that to happen.”

“This will only take an instant.”

Eucrasia stared out into the darkness. There were a few vague patches of luminosity in the distance, but nothing more. Where were the stars? she wondered. Tiny wheatseed lights edged the boards underfoot and ran along the rim of the bar, but outside all was Stygian gloom.

She felt like she’d been caught in an afterworld where things struggled to take form from nothingness, and failed.

Heisen lifted the headfreezer above her. One of his elbows touched her shoulderblade.

Startled by some movement below, the octopus exploded in Eucrasia’s face. One instant she was staring out into featureless black, and the next she confronted a pale, distorted shape that had leaped before her. A reflexive startlement keyed subliminal memories of empty eye sockets, a mouth that was a gaping scream.

Simultaneously, her claustrophobia gripped her and she realized that somebody was standing at her shoulder, about to put a box over her head.

Eucrasia screamed and lurched to the side. Rebel fell off the stool, one edge of Heisen’s cryonic device smashing against her shoulder, and then she slammed to the floor.

In a white burst of pain she rolled away and tumbled to her feet. Heisen lifted the thing again. “Get away from me!” Rebel cried.

“Now, Eucrasia,” Heisen said. He made soothing, hushing noises. But his eyes were calm and cold and they did not look away from her for an instant. He advanced a step, and she backed away. There was nothing but skywalk behind her—at least an eighth of a mile of tubing without branching or exit.

“Listen, Jerzy, I don’t know how you got in here, but Wyeth’s going to notice I’m missing soon. This place is crawling with samurai— there’s no way you can get out without being caught.”

Heisen stepped back a few paces so he could set the cryonics device on the bartop. He reached into his cloak and removed a case from a liner pocket. Without looking down, he flipped it open.

“Jerzy? Listen to me, will you? I’m sure you can be reprogrammed. You can have a normal life again. Answer to nobody but yourself.” He slipped his hand through the hilt of a fat-bladed dueling knife. It was the kind rude boys favored, a cross between stabbing blade and brassknuckles, because it was almost impossible to lose one’s grip on it in a fight.

Now Heisen smiled calmly and took a swipe at her.

“Oh shit!” Rebel danced back. Grabbing the loose end of her cloak, she whipped it about one forearm. Now she had a shield of sorts. In a giddy, crazily gleeful corner of her mind, she felt like a Renaissance dandy. This was how they had fought in Spain, in Rome, in Greece, all those centuries ago, in desperate back-alley scuffles.

Of course, they’d had weapons of their own.

Heisen advanced slowly; even with the advantage, he was programmed to be a cautious fighter. He feinted twice, stabbing at her face and then her belly, and watched how her arm jerked forward to protect them. Where Heisen’s movements were all smooth, controlled menace, Rebel’s reflexes were made rough and nervous by the jagged edge of fear. It coursed through her veins, danced behind her eyes, and tasted sour in her mouth. She was defeated already.

Heisen’s smile faded, and for an instant he was perfectly still. Then he lunged forward, feinting left to draw away her arm, then slashing downward at the exposed side of her throat.

Rebel leaped away, crashing sideways into the wall. The hot acid edge of the knife drifted across her side, barely breaking the skin, searing the finest possible line over her ribs. Rebel pushed away from the wall, her entire side ablaze with pain, and stumbled backward. Heisen glided forward, his eyes deathly calm.

Something hard slammed Rebel in the back. The edge of the bar. Perfect, she thought. One corner in the entire damned skywalk and I back myself into it. Something smooth and metallic and chill touched her back ever so gently.

The headfreezer.

In one swift motion she snagged the thing from behind her and thrust it at Heisen, gripping the handle in both hands. He fell back a pace.

The problem was that it was not easy to hold the freezing unit up before her. It was heavy, and her arms trembled. It was too short, too blunt, too clumsy. If Heisen weren’t so damned quick, she’d be tempted to just drop it on his foot.

Under one finger she could feel a trigger built into the handle. Which meant that if she could convince him to stick his hand inside the device, she could take him.

Otherwise, it made a lousy weapon.

I’ll have to throw it at him, Rebel thought. Swing it up, catch him under the jaw, break a few teeth. Then grab the knife and hold him for the security people. That was a good plan. It ranked right up there with suddenly learning how to teleport.

She could see Heisen’s muscles tensing. His face went very calm.

All in a flurry, he drove the knife up in a killer stab, she swung the case toward it, and there was a shout from behind Rebel. Reflexively, Heisen’s eyes flicked up, past her shoulder, to assess the intruder. In that second’s inattention, Rebel thrust the headfreezer forward, shoving it over the extended knife and hand. She hit the trigger. The unit grunted, an almost silent mechanical cough.

For a long instant neither Rebel nor Heisen moved.

Then Rebel jerked back the case. Its exterior was hot with transferred energy and painful to the touch. Heisen looked down. Gingerly, wonderingly, he reached out to touch his knife hand.

It shattered.

Both knife and hand fell to the deck and broke into fragments, leaving behind an arm that simply stopped halfway between elbow and wrist. Rebel’s fingers felt weak. She dropped the headfreezer. She couldn’t stopstaring at the amputated arm; it seemed to glow and swell, filling her vision. Behind her came the staccato sound of running feet.

Heisen came to himself then. Showing no sign of pain, he reached with his surviving hand into his cloak and removed a small black ball. “Stand clear,” he gravely advised, and threw the ball at a distant stretch of wall.

The samurai were drawing near when the wall exploded, bursting outward in a shaped gush of water and glass. One seized Rebel and pulled her back, while the other leaned forward, trying to snag Heisen with her pike. But Heisen was already leaping through the new opening. He fell out and away. Wind screamed, and some of the gushing water was thrown back in their faces. The air reeked of salt, and wet strands of kelp were everywhere. To either side of the walk, heavy safety doors slammed shut.

Rebel got one glimpse of Heisen tumbling, his cloak flapping wildly, before the darkness swallowed him.

“What a mess!” a samurai said. He kicked at a flopping fish. Wind lashed his hair.

It was all Rebel could do to keep from crying as the samurai led her away.

On the graphics window, a glittery wedding band of machinery was afloat in the vacuum. Hundreds of the Comprise crawled about its surface, anchoring and adjusting small compressed gas jets. Painstakingly they guided the ring with a thousand tiny puffs of gas, until the geodesic hung motionless at its precise center. Only now did Rebel get any feel for the ring’s size—miles across, so large that the most distant parts seemed to dwindle to nothing.

“That’s not good enough,” Wyeth said. “I want all those rooms secured, and I want it now. Understand?” He looked up as Rebel entered the lobby and gave her a wink.

Then, pitching his voice differently, “Do you have the broomsticks out yet? The winds are dying down, let’s see some action.”

The lobby was aswirl with samurai, patrols scurrying purposefully in all directions. “I was almost killed,” Rebel said. “Just a minute ago.”

“Yes, I know. When you got lost I sent some limpets around the outside of the sheraton. Caught the last few minutes of your confrontation. That should never have happened. As soon as I get things squared away, heads will roll. There’s no excuse for that kind of security foul-up.”

Red warning lights blinked on across the length of the transit ring. As one, the Comprise kicked free of the machinery, leaping inward in acrobatic unison, like a swirl of orange flower blossoms seen through a kaleidoscope. By tens and scores they linked hands and were snagged by swooping jitneys. Wandering up out of nowhere, hands deep in pockets, Constance said, “That’s really quite lovely. It’s like a dance.”

Wyeth didn’t look up. “Not quite so lovely when you consider why they’re so perfectly coordinated.”

She blinked. “Oh, quite the contrary. When you think of the complex shapes their thoughts take, the mental structures too wide and large to be held by any one mind…

Well, that’s cause for humility, isn’t it?” Then, when Wyeth said nothing, “The Comprise is a full evolutionary step up on us, biologically speaking. It’s like… a hive organism, you see? Like the Portuguese man-of-war, where hundreds of minute organisms go into making up one large creature several orders of magnitude more highly structured than any of its components.”

“I’d say they were an evolutionary step down. Where human thought creates at least one personality per body, the Comprise has subsumed all its personalities into one self. On Earth, some four billion individuals have beensacrificed to make way for one large, nebulous mind.

That’s not enrichment, it’s impoverishment. It’s the single greatest act of destruction in human history.”

“But can’t you see the beauty of that mind? Gigantic, immensely complex, almost godlike?”

“I see the entire population of mankind’s home planet reduced to the status of a swarm of bees. A very large swarm of bees, I’ll grant you, but insects nevertheless.”

“I don’t agree.”

“So I see,” Wyeth said coldly. “I will keep that in mind, madam.” The running lights on the transit ring were blinking in rapid unison. To Rebel he said, “See that?

They’ve armed their explosives.”

Constance looked confused. “What’s that? Explosives?

What in life for?”

The jitneys slowly converged on the geodesic. Ahead of them a gang of spacejacks was fitting an airlock. They welded it through the metal skin, yanking open the exterior iris just as the first transport drifted up. Then they popped the jitney’s drive and replaced it with a compressed air jet system. “They’re about to enter the geodesic, sir,” a samurai said.

“God help you if a single one of the Comprise isn’t accounted for when they reach the sheraton,” Wyeth said darkly. Then, to Constance, “The Comprise doesn’t want us snooping through their technology, Ms. Moorfields. So of course they’ll have programmed the ring to self-destruct if we try anything. And since they have, and since the helium in the ring is only rented, we won’t.”

The jitney eased into the interior atmosphere. It was crammed full and covered over with orange-suited Comprise; they clung three deep to its outside. The pilot hit the jets and it moved toward the sheraton.

“I don’t understand this mutual suspicion,” Constance said. “So mankind has split into two species. Give us timeand there’ll be a dozen, a hundred, a thousand! Space is big enough for everyone, I should think, Mr. Wyeth.”

“Is it?” The jitney glided toward the hotel’s docking ring.

The winds had almost died now, save for those generated by the spinning of the sheraton itself and by its own rotation-preservation jets. Still, the compressed air guidance retrofit had been a clumsy one, and the jitney lurched as its pilot overcorrected for yaw. The huddled Comprise grabbed for one another and hung on—all but one, who lost grip and went sailing away. For an instant the unit peacefully glided, and then it jerked violently. Bits of helmet exploded away from its head. Again the corpse jerked, and again. Some half-dozen samurai on pressurized broomsticks closed in on it.

“See those weapons they’re holding?” Wyeth asked. “Air rifles. I had them machined in the tanks; the things are illegal in the Kluster. But I needed them. The geodesic’s too thin for lased weapons, and blades just aren’t fast enough.”

“You killed that man!” Constance cried.

“We’re not playing games here.” The corpse was being towed away. “I assure you, my reasons were good.”

“That’s what Heisen would have said,” Rebel muttered.

Wyeth looked up sharply, and then the elevator doors opened and the first cluster of twenty Comprise were ushered in. Their skins were dyed to match their orange suits; it would be hard to lose one in a crowd. But what struck Rebel was not their garish color or the single long braid that all—men and women—wore, but the fact that each face was different. She hadn’t expected that. For all that they thought, lived, and moved alike and were all part of a larger mind, each had the face of an individual human being.

Somehow that made the horror of it all that much more.

The group passed through single-file, some with eyes closed, others peering about with interest. Theirradiocommunication implants were invisible, placed deep within their bodies for safety. The leader broke rank and strode toward Wyeth. Two samurai fell into step to either side of her.

Wyeth looked up, waited. “We will need exercise areas, to keep these bodies in shape,” the woman said. “Also, the metal in this structure acts as a weak Faraday cage. We require that triaxial cable with local rectenna lead-ins be laid through all living areas.” Wyeth nodded. “Also, we have lost one of our bodies. Your security forces killed it.”

“So?”

“Earth assumes that the charge for consumables will be reduced by an appropriate fraction of a percent,” she said,

“since it will not be able to consume them.”

“I'll see to it.”

The woman joined the rear of her line. As the first group disappeared, the elevator doors opened and the next twenty were ushered through. Wyeth smiled sourly.

“Wonderful stuff, eh? The Kluster is so hot to be rid of this crew that they stuff ’em right within striking distance of twenty-some tank towns. Let fifty of these characters into the tanks, and an army couldn’t dig them out. Within a month they’d have everyone in the tanks subsumed into their group mind.”

“That is sheer prejudice,” Constance said. “Earth is just another form that human intelligence can take. You’re acting as if it were an enemy.”

“It is an enemy, Ms. Moorfields. It’s the worst enemy the human race has, with the possible exception of the kind of stupidity that lets us think we can deal with Earth without getting burned. And the only thing we’ve got going for us here is me. I’ll see them all dead and in Hell before I let a single one loose.”

Outraged, Constance spun about and left. Wyeth put his hands on the edge of his desk and, stiff-armed, leanedforward. He stared at the Comprise filing by, his eyes two hot coals.

Rebel shivered.

For a long hour the Comprise passed through the lobby under deferential guard. Technically they were guests, since they were paying for transit to Mars orbit. So for all their blades, pikes, and singlesticks, the samurai guided their five hundred charges with smiles and bows. The Comprise, of course, displayed neither approval nor displeasure.

More running lights had come on across the transit ring, first yellow and then orange. “How does that thing work?”

Rebel asked.

Wyeth shrugged. “I know diddly-squat about physics to begin with. And of course no one understands Earth’s brand of physics; they’re centuries ahead of us. You could program me up to be another Miiko Ben-Yusuf, and I couldn’t explain how that thing works.” Then his face warped into a mischievous smile as his aspect changed. “I can give you the lecture for idiots, though. The way it was told to me, what the ring does is to take the space lying within it and accelerate that space. It actually moves space through space, and those things lying within that space remain embedded in that space and go along for the ride.

So we’re here, and here we stay; only ‘here’ moves. The effect is instant speed. Velocity without acceleration. So you don’t have all the problems of inertia. Get it?”

“Uh… no, not actually.”

“Well, neither do I.” He laughed, and then the ring’s running lights turned green. “Whoops. Here we go.”

Involuntarily, Rebel gripped the edge of the desk.

Onscreen, the transit ring, along with Londongrad, New High Kamden, the asteroid, and all other artifacts of the Kluster… vanished. It was as if they had been wiped fromthe wall, leaving behind only the unchanging stars. “Was that it?” Rebel asked.

“Not much to look at, eh?”

“What happens to the transit ring now? Does the Kluster get to keep it?”

“They wish! No, what happens now is that it’ll dismantle itself. Then Kluster security will analyze the pieces and try to figure out how they all fit together, and of course they’ll fail. The Comprise is very good at cybersystems.” He glanced down at the inputs, and his expression changed.

“Look. I’ve got a lot of work to do right now. Why don’t you check out your room, get some food, maybe catch a little sleep. Tomorrow morning, we can plan strategy, okay?”

“Okay.” She started toward the elevator, then paused.

“Wyeth? Were you worried when you saw Heisen trying to kill me?”

“Not really. I had samurai in the area. Why?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The upper ring, where Rebel’s room was, was filled with off-program samurai, pierrots and pierrettes, and other service types. They were in a holiday mood, plucking fruit from the ornamental trees, laughing and splashing in the fountains. Paint was beginning to smear already.

Somebody had broken open a crate of paper birds, and the air was filled with white flapping devices, flying in slow circles as their elastic bands unwound. Rebel strode through the revelers, full of melancholy energy, and this time she didn’t object when Maxwell slipped an arm around her waist and matched strides with her. “I hear they’re forming up an orgy in the water lily pond,” he said.

“What do you say?”

“Too many people for me. I’m going to my room.” Then, knowing already that it was a bad idea, but running a little short on good ones, she said, “Care to come along?”

The room was a standard luxury oval, with an off-center bed and programmable walls and ceiling. They stripped and tumbled onto the orange-and-red bear paw quilt, throwing their cloaks over the room monitor. Then, while Rebel instructed the walls to display a realtime exterior starscape, Maxwell wound all the birds tight and released them one by one.

The quilted bed floated among the stars, paper birds whirring quietly overhead, as they made love. At first Rebel sat atop Maxwell and did all the work, slapping his hands away whenever he reached for her. Then, when he was good and hot, she lowered herself onto him, and he seized her roughly and rolled over on top of her. He thrust away like some kind of machine, an untiring organic sex robot. She turned her head to the side, staring off into the infinity of tiny colored stars that was the Milky Way.

Gravity sex was nice. You didn’t have to keep track of where you were, constantly shifting handholds; half the work was done for you. Then too, there was that good, solid weight atop her. It had a satisfying feel.

She was moving through passion now to a far, detached calm, a lofty mental landscape where her thoughts were wordless and as crystalline clear as cold mountain air.

Here, where her body’s sensations were a pleasant background murmur, she felt at peace with herself. She felt simple and uncomplicated. It was easy to look within herself and search out the nameless discontent that had been gnawing at her for some time, the hidden poison that she could not isolate in the crowded babble of normal thought.

Everybody wanted something from her. That was a part of it. Deutsche Nakasone wanted her persona, and Jerzy Heisen wanted her death. Snow and the rest of her network wanted to record her persona as well. And Wyeth wanted to use her as bait to snare and destroy Snow’s network. According to him, they were all traitors, humans who had sold out to the Comprise and served the interestsof Earth. It made sense when you considered how deeply they were sunk into the experience of machine communion, that they should wish to be part of the ultimate merger of mind into machine. But in all this welter of desires, it was Wyeth who bothered her most. He was using her. For some reason that troubled her even more than the assassination attempt did.

Maxwell was moving faster now, losing rhythm as he approached orgasm. But the answer was already in Rebel’s grip. She might not want to look at it, but there it was.

The fact was that it was not Maxwell she wanted inside her. It was Wyeth she wanted, and not just for a few sweaty hours on the quilt. She was falling for the man, alien four-faceted mind and all, and while it was a stupid thing to do—what kind of future could there possibly be with him?—her emotions were unreasoning and absolute.

And who was there to complain to?

Maxwell arched his back, squeezing shut his eyes, and screamed soundlessly. Almost absently, Rebel reached out and squeezed his cheeks, digging her nails in good and hard. The paper birds were all on the floor.

Then Maxwell was lying beside her, sweaty and gasping.

For the longest time they said nothing. Then she sent Maxwell out for food, and he returned with biscuits, slices of fried yam, and oranges from the trees in the hall. By the time they were done eating, he was interested again.

“Wanna do it a second time?” he asked.

“I suppose so.”

Then she was alone with her thoughts again. In love with Wyeth. What a mess. What a fucking mess.