Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick Read Free Book Online

program they had. Made it sound real nice. I said sure.
    â€œThey was just getting into wetware then. Just recent bought up a batch of patents when Blaupunkt went belly-up. So anyway, the president puts the inductor band around my head and turns the damn thing on. Whoooeee! That was one hell of a ride, I’ll tell you. Even today, I blush to think on it. Imagine all the sex and pleasure you can take just slamming into you again and again, so intense you can’t hardly take it, and you want it to stop, only … not quite yet. Just a little bit longer before it becomes unbearable. Can you imagine that? Shit, you can’t imagine it at all.”
    â€œSo what happened?” Rebel asked.
    â€œWhat happened was somebody turned it off. Wow, did I feel awful! Kind of hungry and achy and thirsty all at once. My head was pounding, and I must’ve lost half the free water in my body.
    â€œThe president had put her clothes back on and left, a long time back. There was a couple of corporate guards giving me the hairy eyeball. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked them.
    â€œThey told me that the Reform Act had just gone into effect, and they didn’t need me anymore. Then they gave me the bum’s rush, and I was never in that office again in my life, let me tell you.
    â€œYou see what happened, don’t you? They’d kept me programmed up until the Act went through and I didn’t legally own my claims anymore. And because I’d signed that letter of intent, they all belonged to Deutsche Nakasone now. They never paid me a damn thing for them either. I went to the lawyers and they said it’s all legal. Or rather, to prove it wasn’t legal, I’d have to be a corporation myself. And I wasn’t, anymore.”
    After a long silence, he said, “Well, it’s all to the best, I imagine. A young man thinks with his gonads. An old man sees things more spiritual. I made my peace with God, and I take my solace from the Bible Gita now.”
    Rebel yawned then, and Wyeth said, “I think it’s time you turned in.”
    He showed her to a vacant hutch. It had room enough for two people to sit and talk, or for one to stretch out and sleep. There was a bit of wire by the doorframe, so she could tie up her helmet, and four looped hammock strings to sleep in. Nothing more.
    â€œBest break out your rebreather,” Wyeth said. She looked at him blankly. “From your helmet. Ventilation’s poor in this corner of the court, and your waste gases can build up while you sleep. Keep your mouthpiece in, and you can avoid waking up with a bad headache.”
    â€œOkay,” she said, and he kicked away. There was no window, and hanging her cloak over the doorway filled the hut with darkness. She stuffed her things into her helmet and slipped into the hammock strings. Hanging suspended, she bit down on the rebreather. Her breath sounded loud and slow within her skull.
    The outside noises were muffled within the hut, but constant. Music and faraway argument blended into each other. Buried deep within this human beehive, Rebel felt painfully alone and isolated. From somewhere distant she heard a dull clank-clank, clank-clank , someone hammering on the pipes to signal a neighbor. She had heard (though she couldn’t remember when or where) that the constellations of courts within the tanks had all been put up helter-skelter, pipes mated to existing pipes, forming monkey-bar tangles with no plan or formal structure. Only the lack of gravity kept it all from collapsing. But occasionally the stresses of everyday living—people slamming against their-hutches, kicking off from them, grabbing ropes tied to the frames—would cause whole groupings of court structures to shift. Torque forces would slowly swing the hutches together, crushing entire neighborhoods in a scream of buckling metal. And then the survivors would scavenge the rubble to build back into the space thus