Vacumn Flowers

6

ORCHID

When the sheraton’s lights greenshifted from blue-tinged evening to yellowish dawn, Rebel kicked Maxwell out and went to meet Wyeth.

Trailed by a bodyguard of five samurai, they rode broomsticks into the geodesic. With her hair and cloak streaming behind, she felt like an Elizabethan lady riding to the hawks with her retinue, an illusion heightened by the scout cameras that soared at a distance, feeding information back to the guard. Except that the compressed air tanks chilled down as they were used, and after a while the saddle grew unpleasantly cold.

They rode by the outlying strands of orchid, where tangles of air roots held obsidian globes of water larger than her head, and, slowing, headed into the plant. The stalks grew closer together as they flew into the epiphyte’s labyrinthine folds. It had blossomed and the huge bioluminescent flowers shed gentle fairy light through the darkness. This was a vague light, not like the full bloom of luciferous algae back home, but more like the periodic night seasons when the algae died back. At last they came to a large clearing deep within the plant and brought their broomsticks to a halt. “You won’t consider martial arts programming?” Wyeth asked. “Very simple. It’d take maybe five minutes, with minimal personality change.”

“No. I don’t want anyone screwing with my mind.”

He sighed. “Well, you’ve got to be able to defend yourself. So we’ll have to reprogram you the old-fashioned way, with an instructor and lots of practice. Same results, just takes a lot more time and sweat. Treece.” A thick little troll of a samurai slipped from his broomstick and floated beside it, one hand touching the saddle. He had a dark face and a froggish mouth. “Teach her.”

Treece unlashed two singlesticks from his back and offered one to Rebel. She dismounted and accepted it.

They both tied cloaks to saddles and kicked their vehiclesaway. “Good. Now take a whack at me.”

Rebel eyed the swart little man, shrugged, and lashed out fast and hard, flinging back her opposing arm to control her drift. She was not at all surprised to see Treece slip out from under her blow—he was, after all, the instructor—but she was amazed when he slammed the back of her stick with his own, and the added energy set her tumbling end over end. “First lesson,” Treece said.

“You’re going around and around one little point in your body, something like an axis. That’s your center of mass.”

“I know that!” Rebel said angrily, wishing Wyeth weren’t watching her. She concentrated on not getting dizzy. “I grew up weightless.”

“I grew up in gravity. Does me no good against somebody programmed judo.” He let her spin. “Now the center of mass is very important. First off, you set somebody spinning around it, their effectiveness is lessened. Got all they can do to keep themselves oriented—their thrusts and parries won’t be as crisp as they might be.” He reached out with his stick and Rebel seized it, putting herself stable in relation to him again.

“Second, you’re going to want to remember to strike at the center of mass.” He poked at her with the tip of his staff.

“Try it yourself. Move around all you like. What’s the one point of your body you can’t move when you’re afloat? It’s your center of mass. It just stays there.” He jabbed at her again. “Now. Move away from this.”

All in a flash, Rebel slammed her singlestick forward, two-handing it against his weapon with a crack that made her palms smart. Reaction threw her over his head, and on the way by she took a swipe at his skull. Treece brought his stick up for a parry and hook that brought them back to stable positions. “Absolutely right,” he said. “When you’re afloat, all serious movement is borrowed from your opponent.”

The samurai all floated in a plane, honoring a consensushorizon. Treece wheeled upside down, leering at her. “So touching your opponent is both the source of opportunity and your greatest danger. Take my hand.” Rebel reached out, and instantly he had seized her wrist, climbed her arm, and taken her throat between stick and forearm. “I could snap your neck like this. Once you’ve been touched, you’re vulnerable. But you can’t accomplish a damned thing without touching your opponent.” He moved away, grinned sourly at her. “That’s what makes it a skill.”

Wyeth had been leaning back in his saddle, eyes closed, directing his pocket empire via a transceiver equipped with an adhesion disk. Now he opened his eyes and said,

“That’s as nice a paradigm for political maneuvering as I’ve ever heard.”

Rebel started to respond and almost didn’t hear her instructor’s stick whistling toward her in time to parry.

“No small talk!” Treece snapped. “We’re done with talk now anyway. No more theory, no more gab, just dull, repetitive exercise. Rest of today and every day until you get it right, is nothing but sweat.”

A long time later, he looked disgusted and spat into the orchid. “Enough. Same time tomorrow.”

Samurai brought up their broomsticks. Rebel felt exhausted, but pleasantly so. Aware of her every muscle.

Luckily, Eucrasia had kept her body in good shape.

They rode to the edge of the orchid and stopped. Wyeth hitched his broom to an air root, and Rebel followed suit, while the guard moved away, expanding their patrol.

Wyeth clambered along a thick trunk, inexpertly grabbing for handholds. Rebel followed more gracefully.

They came to the end of the plant, a break here as sudden and startling as when a climax forest gives way to grassland. Out in the darkness, distant stretches of the air plant were like streamers of luminous clouds. Alone and bright, the sheraton spun like a wheel. Its light was redder now, almost noontime orange. The silvery glimmeringsabout it were people flitting to and fro like mayflies.

Finally Wyeth said, “This is the first time I’ve ever had people working under me. I’ve always been something of a lone wolf.”

Rebel looked at him, not sure what to say. At last she feebly joked, “More of a lone wolfpack, hey?”

“I guess.”

More silence. Then, “What’s it like?” Rebel asked.

“Having four personas?”

“Well… when I’m not actually in use, I don’t really do anything. I have a passive awareness of myself. I see what’s going on. It’s like there are four of us standing around a small stage, with a bright light on its center. We watch everything that happens, hear it all, feel it all, but we don’t do a thing until we step into the light. When we’re in the dark, we don’t really much care. Sometimes all of us are in the light, and—” His voice changed slightly—“sometimes two of us are in the light, but one keeps his mouth shut. Another half hour monitoring and I expect to be spelled.” His voice changed back again. “That was my warrior aspect. Right now he’s directing security back in the sheraton. That frees me up to use the body.”

“That’s weird,” Rebel said. “The way your voice changes.

You don’t really have to speak out loud to communicate with yourself, do you? I mean, you can think something and the others will pick up on it?”

“No, I have to talk or at least subvocalize, because… well, thoughts are most of what a persona is, you see. They’re the architecture, they define the shape and existence of a persona, where it starts and where it lets off. We can’t share our thoughts directly—”

“—without breaking down the persona,” Rebel finished for him. “Yeah, that’s right, they’d all merge together, like breaking the membrane between twinned eggs.”

“Eucrasia’s training is really coming back to you.”

Rebel looked away. “You don’t have to sound so cheerful about it. It’s like—I feel these memories closing in on me, crushing me. They’re all hers, and none of them mine, and I can feel myself being affected by them, you know? I think they’re changing me, making me more like her.” She fought down a dark, helpless urge to cry. “Sometimes I think all those memories are going to rise up and drown me.”

Wyeth touched her arm. “Your persona is only a mask,”

he said in his pattern-maker voice. “Ultimately it’s not important. You — your being, your self — are right here, in the compass of your skull and body.” Rebel shivered again under his touch, and she turned to him. Then, it was like the singlestick exercise of climbing your opponent’s arm—it happened all in a furious instant, too fast for thought. Wyeth’s arms crushed her to his body, and they were kissing each other. She wanted him so desperately it was hard to believe that he had reached for her first.

“Come on.” Wyeth drew her back into the orchid, into a space that was dark and sheltered. He slid her cloak from her and set it to the side. His hands moved down her body, rolled away her cache-sexe. He buried his face in the side of her neck.

“Wait,” Rebel said. “I want the big guy.”

He looked at her questioningly.

“Your warrior aspect. I want to make love to you while you’re being the warrior.”

Later, Rebel went out riding with the fool. They laughed and joked as they went no place in particular. “You’re going to have to give up your irrational prejudice against wetprogramming,” Wyeth said, smiling. “It’s useful stuff.

If I didn’t have another persona running the sheraton, I couldn’t be out here now, gallivanting about with you.”

They rode on and came to a carnival.

It was located where the orchid grew closest to the tanks.

One long vine, in fact, had been disentangled and tied to an airlock; people traveled along it, following the holiday music to where a clearing had been chopped inside the plant.

From outside, the carnival looked like a ramshackle collection of huts and frames caught in the tangled growth.

Within, it was bright with flowers and strings of paper lanterns. Tank towners in cloaks as garish as jungle moths flitted to and fro. Lengths of flash-dried vine had been lashed together to make dueling cages, booths for astrologers and luck-changers, lovers’ mazes, gambling wheels and huckster tables. Artisans were painting panels for a centrifuge ride, conjuring up kings, bulls, starships, and reapers.

A singlestick duel was in progress by the main gate. The samurai glanced at it with interest as they entered.

“Look!” Wyeth drew Rebel into a booth where fairgoers threw waterballs at a distant bozo. “Give me three!” He flung the first with too much force, and it broke into tiny drops that splattered past the clown like rain. The bozo jeered, and Wyeth threw again. This time the ball exploded into a thousand spherelets in the bozo’s face.

“Ah, that felt good!”

When the barker floated him the last waterball, Wyeth winked at the bozo and smashed it into his own face.

Nearby fairgoers laughed in astonishment. Away from the paper lanterns, their eyes were shadowy and their faces pale masks.

Wyeth and Rebel wandered past simple games of rigged chance to hucksters selling jams and candies, carved wooden astronauts, bright straw dolls and dark barrel men. “Right here!” a barker cried. “Yes, yes, yes!” Rebel bought a sugar skull and bit into it. Red jelly oozed from one eye socket. She stared at it in dismay, then laughed.

She was considering some silver bells with toe-ribbonswhen she was struck with sudden unease. Looking up, she saw Wyeth holding a luminous apple the size of a cherry tomato.

“Seven hours?” Wyeth said. “Seven hours Kluster for an apple?”

The huckster was a little man with spidery arms and legs, a lopsided grin, and a crazy look to his dark eyes. He sang:

“Awake, arise, pull out your eyes, And hear what time of day.

And when you have done, pull out your tongue And see what you can say!”

Then, speaking to Wyeth, “Ah, but the shyapple is no ordinary fruit; no, it has a worm at its heart.”

“What does the worm do?”

“Why it eats, sir. It eats and excretes, until it drowns in its own liquor.” He plucked the apple from Wyeth’s fingers. “You must swallow it whole: core, pips, and aye.

Like thus.

“What did I dream? I do not know; The fragments fly like chaff.

Yet strange my mind was tickled so I cannot help but laugh.”

Then, speaking again, “My name is Billy Bejesus and I live in a tree. If I’m not there yet, why then that must be me.” He tumblesaulted over in the air, kicking his heels.

Appalled and intrigued, Wyeth turned to Rebel. “Can you make any sense of this madman’s ranting?”

“Don’t touch those things! Don’t you know a shyapple when you see one?” Big-eyed, Wyeth shook his head.

“They’re mind alterers. By the sound of it, this lot is just directed hallucinogens, but a shyapple can be prepared to do almost anything—to give you a skill, to make you mad, to bring you sanity. Some are prepared so they’ll negate themselves after a few hours, and others are… permanent.

You wouldn’t want to put one in your mouth without knowing what it does, first.”

“Really? Chemical wetprogramming?” Wyeth rubbed a fingertip over the bright skin, held it to his nose, and sniffed gingerly. “How does it work?”

“Well, the shyapple is just a matrix. It’s the worm that’s altered according to what effects are desired. It’s…

injected with a virus that… When the shyapple’s center liquifies, the virus undergoes explosive growth and…” She faltered to a stop. “No. It’s gone now. I used to know, but it’s all gone.” And yet it was—she sensed—vitally important in some way.

“I never heard of them before.” Wyeth held a shyapple to his eyes, admiring the translucent skin, the candy-red shimmer, its full-to-bursting juiciness. “Where did they come from, I wonder? Why did they show up here all of a sudden?”

Rebel shook her head helplessly.

“You’ve got what? Three crates there?” Billy Bejesus’s grin was luminescent. “I’ll take them all. Treece. Arrange the details and see that these things are taken back to the sheraton.”

They floated on. Rebel lingered at a jewelry display, examining a tray of religious pins: stars, crosses, swastikas, and the like. She bought a white scallop shell and pinned it to the collar of her cloak. “Now I can wipe off this face paint,” she said. “People will assume I’m some sort of religious fanatic.” Oddly enough, her sense of unease was stronger than ever.

“Good thinking. Though if I were you, I’d find out what your pin stands for. Might save you an embarrassing conversation somewhere down the line.”

They were floating hand in hand before an enormous mesh sphere, watching the cockfights, when Wyeth said in his leader voice, “Crap. Come on. We’ve got to get back tothe sheraton.” He tugged Rebel toward the gate. Their bodyguard materialized around them.

“What’s the trouble?” Rebel asked.

“Constance is talking with the Comprise.”

All the way back to the sheraton, Rebel’d had the uneasy feeling that someone was following her, a shadowy presence flitting through the leaves and vines that was never there when she looked back over her shoulder, but returned the instant she looked away. Here, in the bright-lit rooms of the complex, that sense faded but did not go entirely away. There was somebody outside coming for her.

“Heisen’s body was never found,” Wyeth said when she mentioned this to him. “He very well could be coming for you. That’s half the reason I’ve assigned you a permanent guard.”

“What’s the other half?”

“We’re going in to deal with them now.” He slipped a bracelet from his wrist, one of a pair of thick ivory bands lined with silver. “Here. Put this on. It monitors the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Samurai stepped aside as Wyeth slammed through the doors to the center ring’s main conference room. There, under a holographic sky, Constance sat on the edge of a red lacquered bridge. She was dabbing her feet in the goldfish stream. Several Comprise stood by, listening to her talk. Scattered among the topiary bushes were her team with the tools of their trade—fermenters, chimeric sequence splicers, microbial bioreactors and the like—demonstrating lab techniques while Comprise in identical coveralls clustered about them, like patches of orange mist. Wyeth’s face hardened into granite slabs.

“All right, Moorfields!”

Constance leaped to her feet. “Oh!” She blinked. “Youstartled me, Mr. Wyeth.”

“I’ll do worse than that to you.” Wyeth glowered at her from the bank. “Just what do you think you’re doing? Why have you moved your lab and people from the third ring?”

“Well, I had to. I wanted to chat with the Comprise, and I was told there was some silly rule against their leaving the central ring.”

Some hundred Comprise dotted the room. Several drifted over, into a loose semicircle about Wyeth and Rebel, studying them gravely but saying nothing. “Clear the treehangers out,” Wyeth ordered. Samurai moved in and started escorting the bioengineers away. “Have two people programmed legal, one Londongrad and one People’s Mars, and send them here.” To Constance,

“You’ll find that Kluster law is extremely legalistic, and People’s law is informal and rational. Between them, I expect that if you step out of line again, I can hang you for treason.”

“Treason! Surely you’re joking.”

“I am very serious.”

Constance shook her head, clasped her hands, let them fall. “But we were just exchanging scientific information.”

“Oh? What information did they give you?”

“We were on the preliminaries, just swapping basics.

Talking shop. You know.”

“I know very well.” Wyeth’s hands were clenched and white. “Use your head! Your gang was swapping detailed bioscientific chitchat with a team of Comprise that is ostensibly here as engineers and physicists. How did they know the jargon? How did they happen to know enough of the biosciences to understand what you were talking about?”

“Well, Earth is, after all, a planet. They have the largest set of interlocking ecologies in the Inner System, so they must use…”

Embarrassed, Rebel shifted her gaze out the window wall. She saw tiny motes of light shifting through the orchid; people were astir out there. Doubtless the tanks were emptying out as people moved into the plant. But looking away couldn’t keep her from overhearing the argument.

“That’s nonsense! They know because they’re spies, that’s why. Before they left Earth they were systematically crammed with the basics of every corner of science, in the hope they’d stumble across something useful. Ms.

Moorfields, look at them! They are not human, they’re not friendly, and they’re not altruistic. They’ll take whatever technology you’ve got and then use it against your own race. You’re selling humanity down the tubes—and for what?”

Unexpectedly, a Comprise said, “She wants the technology to build a transit ring.”

Constance started. “I didn’t tell them that!”

“The Comprise is very quick on the uptake,” Wyeth said sardonically. He asked the Comprise, “Why did she want that information?”

“The desire for private gain is a common failing of individual intelligence.”

“That’s not it at all!” Constance cried. “It would open up the stars. Can’t you see?” She appealed directly to Wyeth.

“It could be used to accelerate comets beyond the Oort Cloud, toward the nearer stars. The closest could be reached within the span of one long lifetime—they gave me the figures! Imagine thousands of dyson worlds drifting from star to star. Expanding into the universe. Imagine an age of exploration and discovery.” Her voice was fervent, almost devout, and Rebel found herself responding to it as she might to a farbranch revivalist prophet. “Imagine mankind finally freed from the cradle of the sun and wandering the starry galaxies in search of… I don’t know.

Truth, maybe? Destiny! All the final answers!”

Before Wyeth could reply, the Comprise said, “Do not trouble yourself, Boss Wyeth. She has nothing we desire.”

“That’s not true. You told me…” But the Comprise had wandered off. Almost pleading, she said, “They told me they were interested in the mind arts. We know a great deal about them.”

“You yourself?” Wyeth asked. “One of your people?”

“Well, no. It’s all new technology. The breakthroughs are being made, but the skills aren’t widespread yet.”

“And yet you’re all biologists. Isn’t it a coincidence then that a Comprise of engineers are up on the mind arts, while your own people know zilch? I’d say you’ve just proven that your friends here are indeed spies.” Wyeth casually touched a bracelet on his wrist and crooked an eyebrow at Rebel. She touched the bracelet he had given her.

The world was transformed. Electricity glowed white from wires hidden in the walls. Heat shimmered green.

Cobalt particles sleeted through the room, cosmic radiation to which matter was as insubstantial as a dream.

A red haze of radiocommunication surrounded the now-green figures of the Comprise, and laser-crisp directional beams reached from individual to individual, shifting as thoughts were divided and routed for processing. Rebel blinked, and it all disappeared for an instant. She looked down at the bracelet and saw the blazing circuits of a holographic projector. One of Wyeth’s spy devices.

“Mr. Wyeth, you are being disgusting.” Constance turned away.

“Don’t be like that,” Wyeth said in his whimsical voice.

“Here, have an apple. Nice and crunchy.” He placed something in her hand.

“An apple?” Constance looked down at the shyapple and dropped it, horrified. “Where did that come from?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. This is an example of your mind art biotechnology, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but…” She tightened her lips. “Hook me into your intercom system.” One of the Comprise stepped forward and, stooping, reached for the fallen shyapple. Wyeth stepped on the woman’s hand, hard, and she jerked it back.

“We were curious,” the Comprise said mildly. Several new lines of interaction connected with her.

“So what?” Wyeth gestured to the samurai. “Keep the Comprise on their side of the stream. And open up a channel for Ms. Moorfields.”

A moment later, Freeboy’s image appeared, and Constance shook the shyapple at him. “Freeboy, you’re the only one who’s been working with directed viruses. Is this your doing?”

“Aw, hell,” Freeboy said. “It’s just pocket money.”

“You never mentioned this skill to me.”

“It’s not a skill. It’s only cookbook stuff. I got the recipe from a wizard in Green City, when I was in Tirnannog.”

Constance’s face was cold and white. The boy spread his hands, his shoulders hunching slightly. “Hey, it’s only a Billy Bejesus—eight hours’ looniness, and it deprograms itself. It’s not like I was hurting anybody. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Like hell you didn’t, young man.”

While the young treehanger was being dressed down, Rebel saw an odd thing: The Comprise, who had been moving about seemingly randomly, had all simultaneously arrived at the water’s edge. The samurai guarding them shifted uneasily. They stared across the water, orange faces blank, eyes unblinking. The electromagnetic interactions increased, lines blinking on and off like laser strobes. For a long moment, no one moved.

Then the Comprise jumped, individual componentsrunning furiously to one side or the other, forming clusters and gaps. Twenty charged across the wooden bridge. The samurai braced themselves to receive the charge.

In that instant’s confusion, a small orange figure darted across the stream. The guards’ eyes had been drawn one way and another, and he leaped through a blind spot. All in a flash, he was at Constance’s side, reached up, and snatched the shyapple from her hands. Before anyone could react, he was back among the Comprise. “That was a child!” Rebel said.

“Catch him!” Wyeth commanded, and three samurai leaped the stream. As they converged on the child, he crammed the fruit in his mouth and swallowed. One snatched him up and carried him back, the others defending. But the Comprise offered no resistance. They turned away, again as aimless as so many cattle. Still, red interaction lines connected the boy directly to half the Comprise in the room.

“Too late,” Wyeth said when the samurai placed the boy before him. “He’s already swallowed it.”

“But this is a child,” Rebel repeated.

“This is the body of a child. Comprise engineering teams always include a few children for tasks where a bigger body would just be in the way.”

“But that’s awful.”

“I agree.” Wyeth smiled at Constance. “How about you?

Still feel that there’s no crime in five billion human minds with only one single identity among them?”

“We must be careful not to anthropomorphize,”

Constance said weakly. She looked pale.

“Very well put.” Wyeth turned to the child Comprise.

“Why did you do it?”

“We were curious,” the boy said. “We wished to know whether this new technology might prove useful to us. Inthat sense—in that we are always eager for new information, new ideas, new directions of thought—we are indeed the spies you accuse us of being. But only in that one sense of being true to our nature.”

“You see?” Constance said.

“More importantly, it distresses us to be separated from the true Comprise.” Rebel couldn’t see the child’s face now for the blaze of red interaction lines touching the skin over his buried rectenna, but his voice was bland. “There are only five hundred Comprise in this structure—and we are used to the mental stimulation of billions. Restricted as we are, any new challenges are taken up eagerly.” A pause.

“You might say that we were bored.”

Wyeth turned to Freeboy’s image. “How long does your drug take to hit?”

Freeboy shrugged. “Not long. A minute or two. There are receptor enhancers in the shyapple matrix. Tell you, though, maybe this isn’t really a good idea. Those apples are adult dosages. I don’t know what they’ll do to a kid.

This one looks like he has low body mass.”

Constance reached for the boy, and a samurai batted her hand away. “But there’s still time. If I stick a finger down his throat…”

“Now, now,” Wyeth chided. “Mustn’t anthropomorphize. Let’s just wait and see. This might be interesting.”

The boy stood still between his guard of samurai.

Suddenly he stiffened. His eyes opened wide. “Oh,” he said. One hand rose before his face and writhed spasmodically. “I think—”

The child screamed.

The lawyers arrived while the Comprise were still thrashing on the ground. Four samurai held the boy’s limbs, and Constance knelt beside him. The directionalbeams flicked on and off, lashing blindly through the air like the frenzied legs and antennae of a dying insect. Then, all radio contact with the drugged child finally severed, the other Comprise slowly got to their feet, a hundred individual expressions of collective horror on their faces.

“I wonder why it worked so well?” Wyeth murmured thoughtfully to himselves. “They’ve got defenses against intrusive wetprogramming. This must be something new.

This must be an entirely different approach.”

“Hold still, dear. If I can get you to throw up, you’ll feel better,” Constance said.

The boy twisted his head away from her. “I,” he said. “I saw the moon I saw a tree I saw the moon caught in a tree I saw a tree caught in the moon.” His eyes were wide as saucers; they quivered slightly in time to some inner pulse.

“I saw a peacock with a fiery tail, I saw a blazing comet drop down hail, I saw a cloud—”

“Take him to the surgery,” Wyeth ordered. “Do what you can to ease his discomfort, but get the radio implants inside him deactivated before he regains his senses. I don’t want him reconnecting with the Comprise.”

“You can’t do that,” Constance objected. “He’s a part of the Comprise. That’s where he belongs.”

“Well?” Wyeth asked the lawyers. “Can I do that or not?”

The lawyer in yellowface chewed his lower lip. “It’s a difficult point.”

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” the lawyer in purple said, “then it’s a duck. This individual looks human and uses the first-person singular.

Therefore he’s human, not Comprise.”

“Thank you,” Wyeth said. He gestured at Freeboy’s image. “This joker’s been dealing dangerous hallucinogens out in the orchid. What can I get him for?”

“Nothing,” the purple lawyer said. “There’s no law against giving people the opportunity to hurt themselves.”

“We-ell now, there is the question of presumed societal consent,” Yellow said. “Consensus-altering drugs would come under the foreseeable cultural change clauses of—”

“Good,” Wyeth said. “I sentence you to status of programmed informant for the duration of transit. Stay where you are. The programmers will come for you.”

Freeboy looked stricken. “You’ll be attached to Moorfields here. Observe her, and report to me at this hour of every day.” He turned to Rebel and offered his arm. “I think we’ve done enough, don’t you? Shall we go?”

That night, Rebel fell asleep after making love, and dreamed that she was walking the empty corridors of some ancient manor. It was cold, and there was the scent of lilacs in the air. A breeze stirred her hair, passed chill hands over her thighs and abdomen. She came face to face with an ornate Victorian mirror. The gravity was half again Greenwich normal, pulling down her flesh, making her face look old and gaunt. She wonderingly reached out a hand to the mirror.

Her reflection’s hand broke through the liquid surface of the mirror and seized her wrist.

Rebel tried to pull away, but the grip was unbreakable.

Long red nails dug painfully into her flesh. In the mirror Eucrasia showed her teeth in a smile. She was a fat-breasted little woman, but there was muscle under that smooth brown skin. “Don’t go away, dearest. We have so much to talk about.”

“We have nothing to talk about!” Rebel’s panicked words bounced from the walls and echoed down to nothing.

Eucrasia pushed her face against the mirror’s surface, the glass bulged out by nose and lips but held together bysurface tension. Silver highlights played over her skin.

“Ah, but we do. My memories are going to overwhelm you if you don’t do something about them.” Behind her was a white room, a surgery, with trays of chromed instruments.

“Come closer, sweet love.”

She yanked Rebel forward, right up against the mirror.

Their nipples touched, kissed at the surface. “I want to help you,” Eucrasia whispered. “Look at me.” For the first time, Rebel looked into the woman’s eyes. There was nothing in the sockets but an empty space where the eyes should have been. She could see through them to the back of Eucrasia’s skull. “You see? I have no self. No desires.

How can I intend you harm?”

“I don’t know.” Rebel began to cry. “Let me go.”

“There are only two ways you can survive. The first is to have me recreated as a secondary persona. You’d be like Wyeth, then. You’d have to share your life, but the memories would all be shunted over to the Eucrasia persona. You could remain intact.” The reflection shifted to one side, and Rebel was forced to move with it. “The second alternative is to make a complete recording of your persona. Then you could reprogram yourself every few weeks. This is less desirable, because it precludes any chance of personal growth.” Their stomachs touched now.

Eucrasia placed her lips on Rebel’s. “Well?” she asked.

“Which will it be?”

“Neither!”

The reflection reached out and yanked Rebel’s head into the mirror. Quicksilver closed about her. It was like being underwater, and Rebel couldn’t breathe. “Then your personality will dissolve,” Eucrasia said. “Slowly at first, and then more quickly. You’ll be gone within a month.”

Rebel choked, and awoke.

“Wake up,” Wyeth said. He was holding her. “You’re having a nightmare.” Then, seeing her eyes open, “It was only a dream.”

“Jesus,” Rebel said. She buried her face in his chest and cried.

When she finally stopped, Wyeth released her and she sat up. She looked about dazedly. Wyeth had apparently been up for some time, thinking his own thoughts, for the walls had been turned on. A starscape, piped in from outside, glowed in the night. “Look,” Wyeth said. He pointed to a fuzzy patch almost overhead. “That’s Eros Kluster. The asteroid is invisible from here, and what we’re seeing is the attenusphere—the waste gases from the factories and refineries, the oxygen lost whenever an airlock opens, fine matter from reaction jets. It surrounds the Kluster, and the solar wind ionizes it, like the gas in a comet’s tail. Assuming the comet is unplanted, of course.”

He pointed out more smudges, all in the plane of the ecliptic. “There’s Pallas Kluster, Ceres Kluster, Juno Kluster, Vesta…” He sang off the names in a gentle litany.

“Civilization is spreading. Someday there’ll be major developments everywhere in the asteroid belts. Those hazy patches will link then, into one enormous smoke ring around the sun. That would be something to see, hey?”

“Yes,” Rebel said in a little voice.

“Feel up to talking about it yet?”

So she told him her dream. When she was done, Wyeth said, “Well, there’s your mysterious pursuer.” She frowned. “Back in the orchid, you thought someone was following you? Eucrasia. The memories are rising up, and you’re projecting them into the exterior world.”

“That may be so,” Rebel said. “But knowing it doesn’t do me any good.”

“You really have only two choices,” Wyeth said softly.

“Your dream spelled them out for you. You were a topnotch wetprogrammer, and your diagnosis is sound.

Listen, you want my advice? Take Eucrasia in with you. I knew her, she’s not such a bad sort. You can live with her.”

“I won’t do it,” Rebel said. “I won’t let anyone touch my mind, I… I just won’t, is all.”

Wyeth turned away. There was tension in the muscles of his back. After a very long time, Rebel touched his shoulder, and he turned back abruptly, almost violently.

“Why are you being so stubborn?” he cried. “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” Rebel admitted. “It’s just the way I am, I guess.”