Free Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick Page B

to kill him sooner or later.”
    â€œNo, really,” Rebel insisted. “I mean, like the kidney troubles, he gets them from the calcium depletion right? You watch him for any length of time, and you see that he gets muscle cramps, his breathing gets irregular.… So why hasn’t he had that corrected?”
    They were nearing the shell. The temperature was cooler here, up against the outside of the tank. Wyeth paused, took a narrow sideway, and Rebel followed. “It’s not correctable. You live a year or so in weightlessness, and you reach the point of no return. It can’t be reversed. Slow down, we make a turn soon.”
    â€œBut it would be so simple. You could tailor a strain of coraliferous algae to live in the bloodstream. In the first phase they’re free-swimming, and in the second they colonize the bone tissue. When they die, they leave behind a tiny bit of calcium.”
    â€œCoral reefs in the bones?” Wyeth sounded bemused.
    â€œThat’s how we do it back home.”
    â€œYou come from an interesting culture, Sunshine,” Wyeth said. “You’ll have to tell me all about it someday. But right now … here we are.” The corridor they had entered was completely shuttered and lit only by nightblooms. Scattered trash gathered in long drifts unbroken by the passage of traffic. They were the only people in sight. Silently, Wyeth moved down the corridor, looking for a particular door. When he found it, he stopped and rattled a wall. “This is King Wismon’s court. He’s got something we need.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œA bootleg airlock.”

4
    LONDONGRAD
    â€œYou’re too late. I’m afraid. You’ll simply have to go away.”
    Eyes closed, King Wismon floated in the center of his court. In stark contrast to the skinny young rude boys who had ushered Rebel and Wyeth through twisty passages to the court and who now stood guard over them, Wismon was enormously fat. His was the kind of fat that is only possible in a zero-gee environment. Even in half gravity the weight of his bloated flesh would have strained his heart, pulled his internal organs out of place, stressed muscle and bone, and threatened to collapse his lungs. His arms were unable to touch around the vast curve of his stomach, and his skin was mottled with patches of blotchy red. His crotch was buried under doughlike billows of leg and belly, rendering him an enormous, sexless sphere of flesh.
    â€œWe have to be gone before the police front comes by again!” Rebel held forward her wrists. “We can pay!”
    Without opening his eyes, Wismon said, “I have been paid for use of my airlock five times today. That is enough. The lock is the basis of whatever small affluence I have—I don’t want to draw attention to it. The secret of a good scam is not to get greedy.”
    â€œHallo, Wismon,” Wyeth said. “No time for an old friend?”
    The fat man’s eyes popped open. They were bright and glittery and dark. “Ah! Mentor! Forgive me for not recognizing you—I was asleep.” He waved an ineffectual little arm at the rude boys. “Leave. This man is a brother under the skull. He won’t harm me.”
    The rude boys backed away, suspicious but obedient. They disappeared.
    For an instant Eucrasia’s technical skills came back to Rebel, and in a flash of insight she read the eyes, the facial muscles, that weird, smirking grin.… This was not a human being. This was a mind that had been reshaped and restructured. The play of intelligence behind those dark eyes was too fast, too intuitive, too perceptive to be human. Its mental life would be a perpetual avalanche of perception and deduction that would crush a normal human persona.
    Rebel realized all this in an instant, and in that same instant saw that Wismon had been studying her. Slowly, solemnly, he winked one eye. To Wyeth, he said, “For