Vacumn Flowers

9

DEIMOS

The geodesic hurtled toward Mars. In its last hour of travel, the stormy red planet grew from the size of a fist to larger than a platter. Deimos crept humbly toward the center of the planet, then suddenly blossomed, dwarfing and eclipsing Mars. To the party watching over the lobby intercom, it seemed they were about to crash into the ungainly-looking moon. Then the geodesic tripped amagnetic trigger and shot into the waiting transit ring. The ring accelerated the space through which it traveled to a velocity equal but opposite in vector to what the geodesic had.

And there it stood.

The Comprise began disassembling the ring. Within the sheraton the assembled employees, everyone from Constance Frog Moorfields down to the lowliest pierrot, cheered. A steelpipe percussion group struck up, and the paymasters broke open their salary machines. Lids were yanked from troughs of wine. “Well,” Wyeth said sadly,

“it’s over.”

Rebel gave him a quick hug.

A few minutes later a party of five citizens entered the geodesic to take possession. They wore cache-sexes the color of mildew, with matching utilitarian cloaks that were recomplicated with straps, loops and cinches, and knee-high gravity boots.

After the delicate paintlines of Eros Kluster, the People’s paint seemed blunt and graceless—a simple green triangle covering nose and eyes. Under the triangles, humorless mouths. The party toured the sheraton in disapproving silence. At last their leader, a man named Stilicho, said, “I suppose it’s what we contracted for.”

“Good. Then you’ll summon a member of the Stavka for me to surrender authority to?” Wyeth asked.

A stern young woman curled her lip in scorn. “You outsiders and your cult of leadership! The Stavka is merely a jurisdictional body chosen by random lot. The People will honor any legal commitment made by any citizen.”

She had a long jaw, grey crewcut hair, and a muscular body with bright, perky nipples, pink as rosebuds.

“That may well be,” Wyeth said. “However, my superiors still require a member of the Stavka. So I’m afraid that your word will not be sufficient.”

“Enough,” Stilicho said impatiently. “I myself am of the Stavka. I will accept all responsibility.”

“May I see your credentials?”

“No.”

Stilicho and Wyeth glared at one another. Wyeth was wearing his warrior face. Jaws set and eyes ablaze, the two reminded Rebel of nothing so much as a pair of tropical apes caught in a silent territorial dispute.

At last Wyeth’s head canted over at a wry angle, and he showed his teeth in a grin. “What the hell, Stilch, your word is good enough for me,” he said. “I’m not proud.”

Before Stilicho could respond, Rosebuds said, “I will take over here.” She slid an arm through Wyeth’s and steered him away from her leader. “It will take several days to decommission this project. In the meantime, the People will provide you with quarters on Deimos.” She glanced at Rebel and added, “And also for your staff.”

“What’s wrong with us staying in the sheraton?” Rebel asked.

“You will be given the same quarters that citizens receive,” Rosebuds said coldly.

“Well, that sounds reasonable.” Wyeth had switched personas again, and he bent over his data controls, eyes already vague with schedules and task rankings. “Rebel, why don’t you get our things ferried over and squared away? I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

Rebel nodded, said nothing. But she lingered for a moment, studying Rosebuds. The woman released Wyeth’s arm and surveyed the lobby. It was hard to tell, under that aloof citizen’s programming, what she might be thinking.

“First thing, this celebration,” Rosebuds said. “This unprogrammed rabble must be cleared away.”

The geodesic was parked at the outskirts of a vast orbital slum anchored by Deimos. Farms, factories, tank towns and wheel hamlets swarmed about the lopsided rock that was patently no true moon but an asteroid captured by Mars eons ago. It was all junk, not a cannister city or other major structure in the lot. Rebel caught a stand-up hopper, along with Stilicho and the one other citizen not directly involved in the decommission. The flight was long, made awkward by Stilicho’s rough pilotage. Time and again he swerved abruptly to avoid some sudden manmade object. Apparently the People’s Militia maintained only rudimentary traffic control.

As the hopper flew toward Deimos, pillars rose from the moon’s surface, thread-thin and bright as mirrors. They soared outward hundreds of kilometers, then bent on long stems, like tornadoes, spreading slightly as they were acted on by Mars’ gravitational field. “What the fuck are those?” Rebel asked, and then had to snatch for the grab bars as Stilicho slewed the hopper wildly away from a rising pillar.

“Dust,” Stilicho grunted. He slammed the controls to the side, pulled them back as quickly.

“Pulverized rock,” Vergillia added. “Tailings from our mining and tunneling operations, sent up by mass drivers.

The dust is given an electrostatic charge, polarized, and then shot outward in phased pulses, on the order of seven hundred twenty per Greenwich second, a rate so fast that the flow appears continuous.” The woman was warming to her subject. Rebel looked away, cutting her off. Something about that fanatic drone made her itch.

“When are you going to be programmed a citizen?”

Stilicho demanded.

“You’ve already asked me that question three times.

Why don’t you just give it a rest?”

“You haven’t given me a satisfactory answer yet.”

Stilicho waved a hand irritably. “Evasions, fluff, wordsthat don’t say anything! If you take programming as soon as we reach Deimos, you can be put to work tomorrow. A

flight of ice asteroids is coming in, and the seeding crews could always use another hand.” He put a holographic projection of an ice asteroid—a dirty thing, with more carbon than water to it—in the center of the hopper. A

mining camp clung to the surface, and interior lines glowed, showing shafts, drifts, and galleries. “The small triangles represent spore packets. No bigger than your thumb, but there are hundreds of them scattered through the ice. The stars represent bacterial charges packed in fragmentation chambers.”

Rebel stared out the hopper’s visor strip at the twisting columns of dust. People’s Mars’ mining crafts were too sophisticated for her to follow, and their biotechniques were antiquated, dating back to the beginning of the century, when the first comets had been seeded. There was no middle ground in this lecture, nothing she might be interested to hear.

Vergillia, seeing her staring at the dust columns, mistook evasiveness for interest. “You are witnessing a very elegant use of resources,” she said. “The waste dust is shot out into one of two areosynchrous orbits, where it forms mirror clouds which reflect additional sunlight down to the surface. Total insolation is thus increased by nearly ten percent.”

All this while, Stilicho kept talking. “The ice asteroids approach from the leading edge of Mars and hit the surface with the force of fusion bombs—”

“Since the orbit is not permanent, there is slow but inevitable loss of dust, which must then be replenished—”

“Not only does the impact fragment the upper regolith, but the buried bacteria and spores are distributed through the shattered permafrost by explosive—”

They were like two machines that could not be turned off. Their overlapping babblings ebbed and crested toform surges of pure abrasive noise that were all but unbearable. And through it all, that irritating quality of Vergillia’s voice ran, like fingernails dragged across slate.

“Shut up!” Rebel shouted. “God damn it, I don’t want your programming! I’m not going to become a citizen! I despise all of you! Is that straightforward enough, or do you want me to be more explicit?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. “Well,” Vergillia said at last. “Perhaps you need more time to consider.”

Right then, something swam into focus in Rebel’s memory, and she was finally able to place Vergillia’s voice.

She understood why that tone of bland assurance, with just that accent delivered in just that flat cadence, set her teeth on edge.

The woman sounded just like Eucrasia’s mother.

The tunnels bored deep into the dead rock of Deimos were long, straight, and perfectly round, drilled with simpleminded undeviancy. Even weighted down by Wyeth’s dozen crates of possessions and her own two, the slight gravity made it hard to walk. They drifted deep into the moon, past lighting towers spaced so there were stretches of gloom between harsh brilliancies. Rebel felt as if she were moving through the faraway childhood her mother had so proudly hated. These were the grey and black rockscapes she had heard of so often. These rapidly moving citizens in grey were the same people her mother had despised so guiltily.

“You will note the perfect roundness of the tunnels,”

Stilicho said. “All our spaces are multipurpose. What is a dormitory today may be grain storage tomorrow. A

corridor may become a conduit for water or industrial chemicals or even bacterial seed stock, depending on need. Nothing is dedicated solely to human comfort.”

Eucrasia’s mother had told stories of people drowning in a sudden flood of creosote or of molasses, when thecitizen-comptroller operating the gates had pulled the wrong switch. Rebel glanced over her shoulder. It was a long way to the nearest exit. “It doesn’t sound like a very appealing way to live.”

“You must understand that when Mars has been terraformed, we will all move to the surface, and Deimos will be abandoned. It would make no sense to waste effort on temporary quarters.”

Ahead a group of noncitizens—all heavily wetpainted—were installing a failsafe gate. As Vergillia and Stilicho strode forward, the work gang scattered to get out of their way. Eucrasia’s mother had also told stories of what happened to those who got in the way of programmed citizens. “When will Mars be ready, then?”

“Two hundred and eighty years.”

They came to a train station. Without her guides, Rebel would not have known. To her it was just the unmarked junction of two tunnels, by which a drab crowd of citizens and a few programmed outsiders stood. Then, from a crosstube, a metal worm floated into view. Its blind front eased to a halt, and doors sighed open. Vergillia and Stilicho helped Rebel load her bundle of cartons into the freight section, and then they all entered a transit car.

Rebel hooked feet and hands through the appropriate rings. The car filled to capacity.

A bell chimed, and the doors closed. The train leaped forward in a horrid burst of acceleration, and the lights went off. In the pitch darkness, with bodies pressing on her from all sides, Rebel felt Eucrasia’s claustrophobia rise up. “What’s wrong?” she cried. “What happened to the lights?”

“Lights are not necessary here,” Stilicho said. “The People never waste resources unnecessarily.”

The train flew into the black and lightless rock.

Rebel was still feeling weak and a little helpless when they arrived at the day’s designated dormitory niches.

Some quarter of them were in use. People came and went constantly. “Diamond blue seventeen,” Stilicho said.

“Remember that.”

“Your leader’s niche is beside it. Diamond blue eighteen,” Vergillia added.

“Oh, good,” Rebel said. The niches were small, with a sleeping space scooped from one rock wall. The crates nearly filled one niche completely, much to her guides’

amusement. “How do I close the door?”

“Door?” asked Vergillia.

Stilicho said, “Do not worry about your possessions.

With a few exceptions such as yourself, all noncitizens allowed into Deimos are rigidly programmed. There is no theft here.”

“I meant for privacy.”

“Privacy?”

Shaking her head wearily, Rebel said, “Listen, it’s been fun. Thanks for your help. Now why don’t you two just leave me alone for a while?” She sat down in the sleeping space. The rock smelled faintly of olive oil and machine lubricant. “Go away.”

“Perhaps,” Stilicho said in a concerned voice, “you don’t understand how badly new citizens are needed for the great task—”

“My mother was a citizen,” Rebel said angrily. “Did you know that?”

They looked at her.

“Yeah, she was born right here on Deimos. She was brought up in one of your creche collectives. Took citizenship at age ten. Did everything she was supposed to do, and got reprogrammed once a year. She was just like you, you know that?”

“I don’t—”

But Rebel talked through the reply, driven by a near-hysteria born of exhaustion. “Here’s the interesting part. She was on an ice asteroid seeding crew, just like you want me for, okay? She was on the green team, so she was in on it from the beginning. Went to Saturn orbital and was on the team that negotiated the deal with the ice butchers.” The citizens were staring at her in flat amazement. “So she was your quintessential constant citizen, right? Only it’s—what?— maybe a two-year trek from Saturn to Mars, even with early acceleration and a solar sail rig. So there was time for personality drift. The green team stavka thought there wasn’t enough opportunity for unshared experience for individualization to occur. So they weren’t vigilant enough.

“Okay, so the asteroid is passing through the belts, and there’s an unscheduled breakdown. Kills half the green team. The big tunneler needs parts and a major overhaul from the nearest industrial Kluster. My mother is on the buying collective, makes the score, returns.

“One of the fitters the Kluster sent out was my father. He was a big guy, very competent, sure of himself, quiet. A

hell of a guy. The kind that people admire. And my mother fell in love with him. You see that? She didn’t know what was happening at first, ’cause citizens don’t fall in love, right? How could they? By the time she realized what had happened, she was so far gone she didn’t want to come back. He smiled at her, and she went with him. Back at the Kluster, she took industrial asylum, and the green team had to go on without her.” Rebel’s throat was dry. She coughed into her hand. “So you see what I’m saying? I know all about you. I heard all about your tricks when I was a kid. I know what you’re selling, and I’m not buying any. Okay?”

Stilicho turned stiffly and bounded away. Vergillia hesitated long enough to say, “I am sorry that your mother was a sex-criminal and deprived you of your birthright.

But that does not excuse you for rudeness.”

Then she too was gone.

The stone was cool under Rebel’s back and vibrated with the subsonic rumble of faraway digging machines. Her stomach was queasy, and her head ached. Eucrasia’s memories had come back to her totally. There was much in Eucrasia’s past that she hadn’t had occasion to think about, but it was all there, and accessible to her.

But along with the dread weight of Eucrasia’s memories came unexpected insight. She realized now why her mother had filled her childhood with pointless droning stories about the corridors of Deimos, about quiet misery and bleak sameness and unending work. She understood her mother’s sudden flares of dark anger, her randomly-applied prohibitions, her sourceless punishments. They had all been her faltering, uninformed attempts to immunize Eucrasia against People’s Mars. To foster a hard independence that would ensure she never returned to the moon of her mother’s birth, never surrendered to its citizenship program.

And yet here she was, in these same tired old tunnels.

This is not my past, Rebel thought. This guilt is not mine.

And yet lying in this doorless niche, with citizens moving briskly by and occasionally glancing in with cool impersonal curiosity, the coughs and growls of distant machines bouncing down stone walls, Rebel felt like crying.

After a while, she did.

The clamor of voices echoed about the communal dining hall. The chamber was huge, as high as it was wide, and the hundreds of tables and benches and thousands of diners didn’t come near to filling it. High over Rebel’s place an enormous conduit gaped, water stains trailing from its lip. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the distantentryway, wondering how many here would make it to the nearest failsafe lock were that distant citizen-comptroller to suffer a single instant’s inattention.

Scattered here and there among the grey citizens, conversing, were several hundred orange Comprise (and one silent one who studied Rebel with dead insectoid stare) and the rarer multicolored brightness of Constance’s work crew. The chatter was light, and there was constant motion between tables. Wyeth slipped into the bench holes beside her. “How was your day?” Rebel asked.

“We managed to empty out the orchid, anyway.” A

pierrot set a tray before Wyeth, and he picked up the food tongs. “It was awful. I spent all my time keeping Little Miss Bloodthirsty from killing people. She wanted to give the orchid villagers an hour’s notice and then pump out the air.”

“No!”

“What is so remarkable?” Rosebuds latched her tray to the table and took the place beside Wyeth. Freeboy and a noncitizen Rebel didn’t recognize—he wore a zebra-striped cloak and a red vest with twin rows of brass buttons—took places opposite her. “Share it with us all.”

“A private joke,” Wyeth said easily. “Hallo, Freeboy.

Who’s your friend?”

“Bors is my name, sir.” Flash of white teeth. Bors’ hair was done up in long, thin braids, their ends contained in silver static balls. He wore a slim, noncommittal line of yellow paint across his brow. “I am a commercial traveler in vintage information from the Republique Provisionnelle d’Amalthea, of the unaligned Jovian satellites.”

Wyeth introduced himself and Rebel, and then said,

“You’ve come a long way.”

“And a long way yet to go. My coldship is bound for Earth in another day. Deimos is only a side-trip for me, a bit of mining technology transfer that was too profitable to resist.”

Freeboy, who had been listening impatiently, abruptly leaned forward and said to Rebel, “Hey! You’ll never guess who’s taken on citizenship today. You want to try and guess?” Confused, Rebel shook her head. Freeboy leaned back, looking smug. “Your little friend Maxwell, that’s who.”

“Maxwell?” Rebel said. Freeboy nodded. “Slim, dark, irresponsible, hedonistic kid? Are we talking about the same guy?”

“It does seem hard to credit,” Wyeth said. “This was voluntary, you say?”

“Oh yeah, he wanted it all right. He said—”

“This is all very interesting,” Rosebuds said. “Now I have something I’d like you all to see.” She slid her tray aside and started dealing out cards from a deck of holographic flats. She laid down an image of Mars as it appeared in prehuman times, red and lifeless, then covered it with a second card. The planet wavered, then blurred with storms. The icecaps were darkened by a light dustfall of Phobic matter, and shrank. A single glint of green showed within the crater of Olympus Mons. “You see the progress we’re making. The Olympus eden is a showcase microecology, a sample of what all Mars will be like eventually, and is not yet available for colonization.”

Swiftly she laid down further cards. “Fifty years from now, a hundred, one fifty. At this point most of the permafrost has melted, and the atmosphere is thick enough for humans equipped with rebreathers. But we will not be satisfied. Two hundred years.” Mottled green covered the floating sphere. There were thin clouds. “Three hundred.”

The entire planet was transformed. Gentle green stretched from polar region to polar region. Here and there tiny lakes were pinpricks of glacial blue.

“You will note that there are no oceans. The Martian ecology will be more delicate and at the same time more supportive of human life than the Terran ecology. While the oceans of Earth make its ecosphere incredibly stable, they also waste most of Earth’s resources on marine life.

The total colonizable land area of Mars will be equal to that of Earth, and it will all be put to the service of the People.”

“I really don’t see the benefit of terraforming a planet,”

Rebel said dubiously. “For that kind of effort you could build thousands of city cans, or seed I don’t know how many comets.”

“A planetary surface is the best place for an expanding postindustrial culture. The air is free, to begin with. There is so much land area that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to charge rent. You’d just live wherever you wanted.

Croplands in a functioning ecosphere are self-irrigating and self-fertilizing. In fact, everything takes vastly less effort on a planetary surface.” She laid down more cards.

“Here is a vision of the croplands. Here is a vision of the treelands. Here is a vision of one of the larger lakes. The opposite shore is barely visible, it is so large. Within the lake will be fish, eels, mussels. On its verges, rice, wetwheat, cranberries. Here is a vision of the parklands…”

“That’s a really primitive structure you got there,”

Freeboy said. “You’ve got a one-to-one transference of Terran ecologies, you see? But with a little thought you could adapt ocean fish, squids, maybe revert a few land plants to lakeweeds, set up a lichen bridge across the surface, and before you know it you’ve got a much more interesting and complex system going. Why haven’t your people whomped up something like that?”

“Look about you,” Rosebuds said. “How many plants do you see? We cannot afford to devote resources to the support industries a bioengineering economy requires.

And yet, as you say, the need is great. You will find thatthere is much for you to do when you take on citizenship.”

“No, no, not me!” Freeboy held up his hands, laughing.

“I’m going back to Hibrasil with all the money I earned on this swing through the System, and then some. Matter of fact, I just made a bundle on the currency exchange today.”

“You didn’t exchange outside currency for People’s credit?” Bors looked concerned.

“Is there a problem?” Freeboy asked, the smile dying on his face.

“Our social systems are built to support the ideal of the selfless, communal citizen,” Rosebuds said. “Since the amassing of private wealth is destructive to the personality, we have ways of discouraging it. That is why, for example, we are assigned new living quarters daily.

When you have to move all that you own once a day, you learn to retain only that which has true value. Similarly, our economy has an engineered inflation rate of ten thousand percent daily.”

Freeboy turned to Bors. “What does that mean?”

“It means that People’s credit has to be spent immediately. Otherwise it disappears. If you’ve held on to it for an hour, it’s practically worthless.”

Freeboy stood, pale with outrage. “I…” He shook a finger at Wyeth. “All I went through working for you! And… I…”

He choked and, turning away, fled.

Turning over another card, Rosebuds said, “This is a vision of the living quarters we will share in the new civilization.”

Wyeth reached out, put a hand over the cards. “What I’d really like to talk about is your attitude toward the Comprise. I’ve been watching, and it’s obvious to me that you’re not taking proper precautions against them. I’ve even seen some using your data ports. You obviously have no appreciation of how dangerous they are.”

“The People cannot be in danger,” Rosebuds said, “since we cannot be corrupted.” She swept up her holographic flats and stood. “I can see, however, that none of you has a true interest in citizenship as yet. We shall discuss the matter further at a later time.” She left, and two more citizens came along to take her place and the one beside it.

“Have you used the facilities here yet?” Bors asked Rebel, smiling.

“Oh, God! The first time I sat down on a crapper and a man came up and sat down beside me, I almost died. And then he saw me turning red, and wanted to know what the problem was.” Rebel laughed, and Bors and Wyeth joined her.

The citizens looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” one said, and when Rebel tried to explain, “But where is the humor in that?”

Rebel simply shook her head.

A few minutes later the new citizens took their trays and left. “People come and go so quickly around here,” Rebel marveled.

“That’s because mealtime is the only chance they get to socialize,” Bors said. “Every hour of their day is spent constructively. If they’re not working, they’re studying. If they’re not working or studying, they’re asleep. This is the only chance they get to simply talk.”

“You seem to know a lot about the subject.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I?” Bors said, pleased.

When Rebel led Wyeth back to diamond blue seventeen, he glanced quickly at his crates and said, “Snug, isn’t it?”

Then, in his warrior voice: “Listen, I want to do a little poking around in the public data base, see how thoroughly the Comprise have infiltrated it. Why don’t you wait here for me? I won’t be long.”

Rebel knew better than to argue with Wyeth’s warriorpersona. She sat down in the sleepspace. There was nothing to do here save listen to the constant light-gravity scuffle of citizens in the hall. After ten minutes of that she began to appreciate the motivating power of boredom.

Given the chance, she would gladly have volunteered to scrape vacuum flowers, just to have something to do.

Rosebuds appeared in the doorway. She stood there silently, her cloak open.

“He’s not here,” Rebel said grimly. “And you can’t have him, anyway.”

Doffing her cloak, Rosebuds stepped within. She left her boots by the door and sat beside Rebel. “I didn’t come here for him.” She put a hand on Rebel’s knee. “The Stavka is very concerned about you. I informed them that you were brought up by a renegade, and they were worried that this may have made you anti-sex, possessive, and private.” Her hand slid up Rebel’s thigh.

The woman’s tone was so matter-of-fact that it was not until she started to peel away Rebel’s cache-sexe that Rebel realized what she was talking about. With a startled cry she cringed back in the sleepspace, tugging her clothing up and raising knees to chin so that her legs formed a barrier between them. “Hey! Wait a minute, I’m not into that kind of—”

“We could tell,” Rosebuds said. “That is one reason we sent you a woman. To help in your healing. You are depriving yourself of many modes of pleasure needlessly.”

“Yeah, well, Wyeth will be back in a minute, so maybe you’d better go.”

“There’s room for him as well. Perhaps that would be the quickest way of freeing you from your possessiveness.”

She raised a leg and gently ran her foot up the side of Rebel’s body, tweaking her earlobe between first and second toes. “Pleasure is communal. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”

“But I don’t want to enjoy myself!” Rebel cried. “Not that way! All I want is Wyeth and… and…”

“This isn’t working,” Rosebuds said scornfully. “Look at you. You are so fearful. Do you think I am going to take you by force? Let me tell you something, I see how you sneer at the great dream of terraforming and at the People. You think our lives are constricted, but they are not half so narrow as your own. The citizenship program makes us full human beings. A citizen understands duty, sex, work, pleasure, friendship, and sacrifice, and welcomes them all. I have been down to the surface five times, and that is a very dangerous place. I have been as close to death as I am to you now, and I never once showed fear. You laugh at the People because we are all the same. But we are heroes, every one of us. I am one, and I know!”

She pulled on her boots and left.

When Wyeth returned, they made love. It was a sweaty, desperate lovemaking, and Rebel put all she had into it. I am not afraid, she told herself, and I am not missing any pleasure. At the moment of climax, as she squeezed Wyeth tight inside her and dug her nails so deeply into the flesh of his back that they drew blood, he groaned into her ear,

“I love you.”

“Hah? What?” she said blankly.

“I love you.” Lying weak and exhausted beside her, Wyeth brushed her cheek with his own. “I really do.”

“What are you talking about?” This was all too ludicrous to be real. “Which one of you? Or should I say, how many?”

“Listen to me.” Wyeth rolled atop her, gazed straight into her eyes. “I… don’t think that love is a matter of persona, of personality. I think it goes deeper than that.”

His fist thumped his chest. “I love you, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. I think I would love you no matter who I was.”

Silent and unblinking, Rebel looked at him until she felt her eyes sliding out of focus, and blinked and had to say something. “Why are you telling me this now?”

She didn’t accent that last word, but it hovered between them, cold and harsh as truth itself. There couldn’t be much time left to her.

Eucrasia’s memories had returned, and the persona could not be far behind. And then Rebel would be melted down, back into the ocean of soul, and exist no more.

“Why now?” she repeated. Maybe it didn’t matter to him who she was—Rebel or Eucrasia. Bitter thought.

He read her eyes. “It’s not Eucrasia. It’s not this body.

There will never be anyone for me but you. Listen. I know that you’re… going away soon, and I don’t want you to—God, I don’t know how to say it—I don’t want you to dissolve without ever knowing that I love you. I don’t think I could bear it. Is that too greedy of me? Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

In a storm of happiness and misery, she hugged him to her and held him tight so that he couldn’t see her face, her tears. When he started to talk again, she silenced him the only way she could think of, and they were making love again.

All through it, she loved him so much she had to bite her tongue to keep from telling him. She was afraid that if she spoke the words they would split her wide open. She loved Wyeth more now than she ever had, and she loved him most of all for lying to her. Because of course she didn’t believe a word of what he’d said.

But it was nice that he’d said it.

That night Eucrasia appeared to her in the form of a rotting corpse. Her fingers ended in chrome scalpels, and when she opened her mouth, hypodermic syringes slid from the flesh like rows of lamprey teeth. “Go back,” Rebelsaid. Eucrasia raised a grey hand in graceful gesture, and razor racks stung across Rebel’s face.

For a shocked instant, Rebel stood her ground, staring through a haze of blood globules, and then Eucrasia lifted her other hand, and Rebel turned and kicked away.

She fled down an endless tangle of stone tunnels, falling up some and struggling down others. Time and again the necromantic horror behind her reached out lazily to slash the soles of her feet. She was trailing blood, and throbbed with pain from the knees downward. It seemed to her that she was fleeing through the arteries of a vast body, a dead body, a body of dead stone, and that the body was her own.

With this insight, she found herself paralyzed and strapped to a gurney within a niche of New High Kamden’s rose maze.

Eucrasia’s face loomed over her. The wetsurgical paint was cracked and dry, the cheeks taut, and the mouth slightly agape with the tightening of the flesh. Eyes dry and sightless. She leaned close and, breath sweet with putrefaction, spoke.

But when Rebel finally awoke, all she could remember was that Eucrasia had told her truths that she dared not accept.