Vacuum Flowers (29 page)

Someone slapped her. It stung. Startled, she focused on the leader and saw the calm, happy afterglow of violence settle on his face and under it—yes, it was Bors, all right. “Librarian!” he repeated. “Are your programs run yet?”

“Uh … yeah,” she said shakily. She knew how to run now. Her legs trembled with the desire to be off and away. She heard an ugly bird-sound just outside. A rook.

“Librarian, you are not part of our team, but we will still be relying on your programming. So you've got to be tested. I want you to run to the Portal Dolmen. If you get there by sunset, I'll know your skills have taken hold.”

She knew what sunset was. She knew what the Portal Dolmen was. “But that's twelve miles away!”

“Then you'd better get started, hadn't you?”

She ran. It was amazing the kind of speed you could make when you knew what you were doing. Rebel was following what had been a road once but had now largely melted into the rock. The broken roadbed made better running, though, for the bedrock tended to fracture in long slabs that would occasionally snap underfoot, and then only her uncanny reflexes kept her from twisting her ankle. Also, off the road the low stone walls were everywhere, curving twistily over bare rock and even looping over the largest boulders. Impossible as it seemed, people must have lived here long ago and found some use for the land worth their marking off parcels of it as their own.

The road twisted and steepened, and she adjusted her heartbeat in compensation. It felt like the rock was spinning underfoot, and herself perfectly motionless. She ran with her cloak's chameleoncloth liner inward, and from a distance must've looked like an immense bat flapping crippled along the ground. The patch of cloud that could not be looked at directly was lower than it had been. That meant it was growing late. Now and then she slowed to a walk, and twice she rested. But running was best, for it kept her from thinking.

A dark circle appeared on the rock before her, as sudden and unexpected as a meteor strike. Than it was gone behind her, but another appeared, and then another. They came in clusters, and then the first drop of water struck her face, and it was raining.

She knew all about rain—it was on the earth skills wafer—but knowing was not experience. The drops came down like pebbles, smashing against her head and forming rivulets that ran into her eyes, blinding her. Worse, the wind drove the rain in sudden gusts that slammed into her and left her gasping for air. She couldn't run now, but strode forward with cloak wrapped tight and hood up. When she looked up, she couldn't see mountains or sea at all. They had vanished in greyness.

The road crested, and she pushed forward. Not far from the top of the ridge was a wedge-shaped gallery grave—she sensed it on the map. It was half hidden by a patch of gorse, but she found it anyway, four flat uprights forming a kind of box, with a fifth stone as lid. The cairn of stones that had covered it and the bones it had sheltered were gone long ago, and there was enough of a gap where it had been broken into for her to climb within. She huddled there, out of the rain, clutching knees to chin.

The cloak was wool and, even wet, kept her warm. What was bad was not the gloom or the rattling thunder of rain on stone (the wafer hadn't included the knowledge that rain made noise), but the solitude that left her time to think of Wyeth.

She had known, the instant that she opened her eyes and saw a strange woman in red, that Wyeth was not at Retreat. He'd've been there to greet her. She had known that there was going to be no good news of him, and she had wanted to put off the learning of the bad for as long as possible. She'd refused to recognize the dark premonition that was growing within her.

Now, though, she could not help but think about it.

It was a long time before the rain slowed, then stopped, and she could climb from the wedge of rocks. She went back to the road, started walking again. Then running.

It rained three more times before she reached the Portal Dolmen.

Day was darkening when she came to a high and windy place, barren even by local standards, and stopped. The sky behind her was yellow where it touched the rock. She stared blankly about the flat expanses for a time before spotting the Portal Dolmen.

It was huge, two upright slabs supporting a canted third, like a giant's table falling to ruin. Slowly, she followed her shadow to it. Two more slabs of rock lay nearby, the missing sides of what was just another wedge grave denuded of its cairn, though an enormous one. It looked like a gateway, and she gingerly stepped through it, half expecting to be suddenly transported through the dimensions into another, mystic land.

Bors snickered. “You're on time, Librarian, but only just.”

Startled, she whirled about. Bors had come up behind her silently. He slowly sat down on a fallen slab, smiling sardonically. Behind him stood two of his wolverines. They watched her with interest. “Listen,” Rebel said. “Listen, I want to know where Wyeth is.” Her hands were cold. She stuck them in her armpits, hunching forward slightly. The sense of futility that had struck her on the road rose up again now, stronger than before. “He's not here, is he?”

“No.”

“He never was supposed to be, was he?” Eucrasia had lived through disappointment this bitter before and knew that the best way to handle it was to shunt it off into anger. But Rebel lacked the strength of will for that.

“He was supposed to be here when we arrived. But he's late.” Bors looked serious now. He squinted off into distant clouds that were the exact color of the rocks. Rebel felt her internal map intensify; to the east and south, the Burren bordered Comprise. But the map contained no details, just a sense of great numbers.

Bors muttered, “Actually, he's extremely late.”

She slept with the wolverines that night in a small cave, all huddled together for warmth because Bors wouldn't permit a fire. The next morning he gave her some salt fish to eat on the way and sent her back to Retreat, saying, “We don't need you until Wyeth shows up. And what we do in the meantime is none of your business. Go back. We'll find you when we need you.”

She returned more slowly than she had come, arriving as late afternoon was fading to dusk. The devotees were bringing in their currachs from the sea and their carts from the peat bogs. Some were preparing an evening meal. In the dining hut, Rebel sat through a long prayer in a language she didn't know and then ate something whose flavor did not register. Ommed spoke to her, and she answered vaguely.

Afterward, she went back to her hut. She crawled inside, put down her library, sat on the sleeping ledge. “Well,” she sighed, “I'm home.”

Not long after, somebody clapped politely at the door. Rebel called a welcome, and a young devotee entered. He was as hairless as the rest, but not so starved looking. Kneeling before her, head down, he murmured, “This devotee is named Susu. It is an ancient word meaning ‘gossip.'”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Rebel snapped. “Don't grovel like that. Here.” She slid over on the ledge, patted the rock beside her. “Sit down, relax, and tell me whatever it is you came here to say.”

“I …” the young man began. He blushed. “This devotee has not been here long. It has not yet learned fully to abase itself.” Then, abruptly, he looked her full in the face with eyes a preternatural blue and took her hands in his. “The community has seen your sorrow and discussed it. If you could use the solace there is to be found in flesh, this one has come to offer you its service.”

“Jesus!” she said. But he was awfully handsome, and she didn't pull her hands away from him. After a while, she said, “Well, maybe that would be the best thing to do.”

Susu was the hottest thing she had ever taken to bed. He was perfectly solemn, but his attention to her desires was complete, and he obviously knew more about sex than she did. He did not strive to give himself pleasure, but to give pleasure to her. He was like some impossible combination of athlete, dancer, and geisha. He brought her to the edge of orgasm and then kept her there, frozen on the edge of ecstasy, until she completely lost track of where her body left off and his began.

Finally, shuddering, Rebel grasped Susu tightly about the waist, clutched his bald head with both hands, and rode her pleasure to stillness. “Jeeze,” she said, when she could talk again. “You're really something, you know that?”

His face was beautiful, a mask of holy calm. “This devotee is the least of your slaves.”

“No, I mean really.” She laughed, and said jokingly, “Are all the devotees as good at this as you?”

Susu looked at her with that astonishingly flat openness. “Of course. What did you think we were here for?”

“Well, uh.” What was it Ommed had said? “Submission to God, right?”

“Submission takes many forms.” He knelt before her, knees apart, hands behind back, eyes downcast. “Submission to the bodies of strangers is one of the more important sacraments.”

“What?”

“Do you command explanation?” Taking her silence for consent, Susu said, “The universe is made in the image of God. That much is self-evident, isn't it?” He looked up, waited for Rebel's not very confident nod. “Think of it! The universe is one, pure, whole and holy, and united. But we experience it only through opposites and extremes.” He held up his two hands, cupped, empty. “Hot and cold. Pleasure and pain. Joy and sorrow. Cock and fig. These are all local illusions—we cannot see the galaxy for the stars. But how can creatures born into illusion see beyond and through these opposites into unity? By ignoring them? But they are
there
, they will not go away. We embrace the opposites of experience, we welcome the extremes of ecstasy and of pain, and we unite them both within ourselves. We repeatedly experience the sacraments of lust and submission both as men and women, and in the end, the self is destroyed, and all differentiation, and we break through into the unity that is here all along.”

The boy's eyes were afire with visionary intensity. He was starting to grow erect again. But he was not looking at her, but upward into the unseen. “It is as if we are all born with poison in our bellies, and to purify our bodies must gorge ourselves on more and more of the poison, until we are forced to vomit it all up.”

“Um, well.” Rebel had been going to ask him to stay the night. Now, though … She'd never really thought of herself as a purgative. “Maybe you'd better run on. I think I hear your little buddies starting the evening prayers.”

Lying abed, trying to sleep, she listened to the devotees chanting. It was a lovely sound, deep and profoundly pure. From the midst of the chant arose cries and gasps that might have been orgasmic, but might equally well have been pain. She could not tell which. They went on and on, and she fell asleep before they had ceased.

Rebel did not sleep with anyone from Retreat again. It made her feel unclean knowing that any and all of the devotees were available to her, and that they would do whatever she desired. Sometimes she wondered if this uneasiness she felt were not actually a form of attraction, one she dared not give in to for fear of losing herself forever to the extremes of experience.

Instead, she explored the Burren. Every day she ran out onto the rock, stretching her muscles, growing used to Earth. Sometimes she looked for the tiny purple gentians that hid in the cracks or the giant elk that the Comprise were supposed to have restored to the land. Sometimes a pair or triplet of wolverines came for new skills—they were too suspicious to come singly, without someone to guard them while they were opened up—and they would talk. But the news was always the same. Wyeth was later than expected. Bors was still waiting.

Sooner or later, Bors would not be willing to wait.

In Retreat, she took on some of the easier chores, tending the goats and (with the devotees' own skills chips) performing minor surgery. She befriended a devotee who was in transition between male and female, face plump with extra calories, persona placid with neuroprogrammers, and (Li let her look when she asked) crotch covered over with chrysalid scab, beneath which the reproductive organs had been reverted to undifferentiated cells and were in the process of reforming into new configurations. For the transition phase, Li was excused from the religious disciplines of Retreat and was free to guide Rebel about. For her part, Rebel appreciated the fact that Li never tried to seduce her.

One afternoon, after two days' hard rain, Li clapped at Rebel's door and called, “Come out! The rain's stopped and the turlough is full.'

“What are you going on about?” Rebel said crankily, but she came, following Li's slow waddle up the paths above Retreat. The rocks were already growing dry, though the plants poking from the water-filled cracks were cold and wet.

They went a mile or so up a path Rebel had followed dozens of times before. Li giggled and refused to answer when Rebel demanded to know where they were headed. Finally they topped a rise and looked down over dark land, just barely lightened by the last rays of a low sun. There was a silvery, shimmering stillness filling the valley bottom that had not been there before. “My God,” Rebel said. “It's a lake.” She felt sickened by the immensities of air and water moisture that something like this required. Everything about this planet, it seemed, was monstrous.

“God is miraculous,” Li agreed happily, and gestured with both hands. “The water flows down from all sides and gathers at the bottom. But the rock is porous, and there are caverns that open into the lowest part of the turlough. The lake will be gone by morning.”

Weeks passed.

There came a day when the wolverines returned. It was a joyously beautiful morning with a weird blue sky overhead, the rock just slightly overwarm to the touch. Rebel rounded a corner of Retreat and found one of the pack pissing on a wall. He grinned a greeting. Not far beyond, another wolverine was caressing a devotee's face with her knife. “What if I wanted to slit your eyelids?” she crooned. “Would you let me do that, too?” The point glided over a cheek, barely breaking skin, leaving behind a fine line of straightest red.