Authors: Michael Swanwick

Vacuum Flowers (37 page)

BOOK: Vacuum Flowers

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She shook her head.

“I didn't think so.” He led her out of the snow to a grassy waiting area, with low benches and a scattering of lily ponds. They sat. “You have no idea how many times a shift I go through that line of drivel.”

“Obviously you don't intend doing this for the rest of your life,” Rebel said. “What are you, some kind of student?”

“That's right,” Curlew said, pleased. “Yeah, my family wanted to send me to the University of Faraway, for a degree in the mind arts, but I wanted to get into wetware design, so they're making me pay my own way through. Do you know anything about wetware design?”

“A little.”

“It's interesting stuff. They can do almost as much with their little machines as a wizard can with a modern mind art studio. But here's the interesting thing, the two sciences are incompatible! They don't even have a common language.” He shook his head wonderingly. “One of these days someone is going to merge the two, and then you'll have a model that'll
really
describe how thought works. That's when we'll really see things start to hop!”

Two young men were miserably kissing goodbye alongside a baggage cart. The emigrant was already dressed treehanger. Rebel had to look away, it was so sad. “You're an ambitious lad, sport.”

“Hey, I didn't say it had to be me doing the merging.” Curlew laughed. “But it won't be long before anybody with a background in both sciences will be able to name his own price. Tell you something else, whoever merges the arts, it's going to happen in the worlds. These System types are all so serious, and they all think they're hot, but they're not so hot at all. The real action is out in the worlds. That's where it's all happening.”

“Well,” Rebel said judiciously. “At least you get more variety out in the worlds.”

Curlew laughed at her deadpan understatement, and after a second she joined him. He took her hands in his and looked her boldly in the eyes. “You seem a little sad, if you don't mind my saying it. There's still an hour before the shuttle to Tirnannog, and we're not far from a branch Bank of Mimas. We could rent a consultation niche and â¦” He raised an eyebrow.

As gently as she could, Rebel told him no.

Watching his pretty little body walking away, Rebel had to sigh. First cigars, then empty-headed young men. Where would it end?

Rebel stood on the empty platform. She shifted in her foot rings, stared off into a perfectly black sky powdered with stars. The air was chill here, held in by subtle forces that had been explained to her, but which she did not understand. Far ahead, in the center of her vision, she saw a small black dot swelling, swallowing up stars. Her shuttle.

Out in the vacuum, a cluster of bright flowers grew from a holoflare support strut. They were tough little things, almost impossible to exterminate.

She glanced down at the coffin by her feet. The rest of her luggage had been put through ahead. She thought back to that last argument with Wyeth and wondered if he would ever forgive her. She laid a hand on the coffin and felt a chill only partly physical.

An emigration officer safety-leashed to a guiderail drifted up and stuck out his hand. She surrendered her passport and he popped it into a reader. “Rebel Eucrasia Mudlark,” he said in a bored voice. If the name meant anything to him, he didn't show it. He rapped the coffin with his knuckles, made sure it was latched firmly to the platform. “This your coldpack?”

“My husband's.”

“Aha.” The officer mumbled into his hand, then gave her back her passport. “Enjoy your trip.” He kicked away, leaving Rebel alone with her thoughts again.

With startling irrelevance, she thought of all those wyeths and rebels she was leaving behind in the System and wondered if any of them would ever find each other. She thought she might like to have children someday. Real ones, not just copies of herself.

Wyeth was going to be awfully angry a week from now when he woke up and discovered what she'd done to him.

He was going to be even angrier when he found that she'd timed it so they'd just make Tirnannog's passage through the transit ring. By the time he woke up, the last shuttle back to the System would be a matter of history.

Three passengers took up rings on the platform almost overhead.

He was going to be a lot of trouble anyway. A man like him was bound to stir up trouble wherever he went; it was in his nature. But Rebel didn't care. She was
glad
she had invoked his kink.

The shuttle was bigger now. It blotted out most of her vision. Rebel felt the urge to duck as it swelled up over her, but she kept her back straight.

She felt awfully small and alone, and not at all sure she was doing the right thing.

She was going home.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Marianne for naming the
Pequod
, undifferentiating cells, and seeding a stagnant drop of water, to Jack Dann for the scripture from Pushkin, to Bob Walters for supplying plesiosaurs and designing Wyeth's vacuum suit, to Greg Frost and Tim Sullivan for last-minute advice, to Tom Purdom for breakfast beer, to Gardner Dozois for the usual reasons, and to Virginia Kidd for patience. Financial support was provided by the M. C. Porter Endowment for the Arts. And a special debt of gratitude is owed Mario Rups, Ed Bryant, and Don Keller for irritating remarks.

About the Author

Michael Swanwick published his first story in 1980, adding him to a generation of new writers that included Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Since then he has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards, and received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years. He also has the pleasant distinction of having lost more major awards than any other science fiction writer.

Roughly one hundred fifty stories have appeared in
Amazing
,
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
,
Asimov's
,
Clarkesworld
,
High Times
,
New Dimensions
,
Eclipse
,
Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Interzone
, the
Infinite Matrix
,
Omni
,
Penthouse
,
Postscripts
,
Realms of Fantasy
, Tor.com,
Triquarterly
,
Universe,
and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies, and translated into Japanese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Czech, and French. Several hundred works of his flash fiction have also been published.

A prolific writer of nonfiction, Swanwick has published comprehensive studies of Hope Mirrlees and James Branch Cabell, as well as a book-length interview with Gardner Dozois. He has taught at the Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South writing workshops.

Swanwick is the author of nine novels, including
In the Drift
,
Vacuum Flowers
,
Stations of the Tide
,
The Iron Dragon's Daughter
,
Jack Faust
,
Bones of the Earth
,
The Dragons of Babel
, and
Dancing with Bears
. His short fiction has been collected in
Gravity's Angels
,
A Geography of Imaginary Lands
,
Moon Dogs
,
Tales of Old Earth
,
Cigar Box Faust and Other Miniatures
,
The Dog Said Bow Wow
, and
The Best of Michael Swanwick
. His most recent novel,
Chasing the Phoenix
, chronicles the adventures of confidence artists Darger and Surplus in post-Utopian China. He is currently at work on a third and final novel set in Industrialized Faerie.

He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. In 2016 he will appear as guest of honor at MidAmeriCon II, the World Science Fiction Convention.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Jesse Hayes

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3650-4

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com