They rode on and came to a carnival.
It was located where the orchid grew closest to the tanks.
One long vine, in fact, had been disentangled and tied to an airlock; people traveled along it, following the holiday music to where a clearing had been chopped inside the plant.
From outside, the carnival looked like a ramshackle collection of huts and frames caught in the tangled growth.
Within, it was bright with flowers and strings of paper lanterns. Tank towners in cloaks as garish as jungle moths flitted to and fro. Lengths of flash-dried vine had been lashed together to make dueling cages, booths for astrologers and luck-changers, lovers’ mazes, gambling wheels and huckster tables. Artisans were painting panels for a centrifuge ride, conjuring up kings, bulls, starships, and reapers.
A singlestick duel was in progress by the main gate. The samurai glanced at it with interest as they entered.
“Look!” Wyeth drew Rebel into a booth where fairgoers threw waterballs at a distant bozo. “Give me three!” He flung the first with too much force, and it broke into tiny drops that splattered past the clown like rain. The bozo jeered, and Wyeth threw again. This time the ball exploded into a thousand spherelets in the bozo’s face.
“Ah, that felt good!”
When the barker floated him the last waterball, Wyeth winked at the bozo and smashed it into his own face.
Nearby fairgoers laughed in astonishment. Away from the paper lanterns, their eyes were shadowy and their faces pale masks.
Wyeth and Rebel wandered past simple games of rigged chance to hucksters selling jams and candies, carved wooden astronauts, bright straw dolls and dark barrel men. “Right here!” a barker cried. “Yes, yes, yes!” Rebel bought a sugar skull and bit into it. Red jelly oozed from one eye socket. She stared at it in dismay, then laughed.
She was considering some silver bells with toe-ribbonswhen she was struck with sudden unease. Looking up, she saw Wyeth holding a luminous apple the size of a cherry tomato.
“Seven hours?” Wyeth said. “Seven hours Kluster for an apple?”
The huckster was a little man with spidery arms and legs, a lopsided grin, and a crazy look to his dark eyes. He sang:
“Awake, arise, pull out your eyes, And hear what time of day.
And when you have done, pull out your tongue And see what you can say!”
Then, speaking to Wyeth, “Ah, but the shyapple is no ordinary fruit; no, it has a worm at its heart.”
“What does the worm do?”
“Why it eats, sir. It eats and excretes, until it drowns in its own liquor.” He plucked the apple from Wyeth’s fingers. “You must swallow it whole: core, pips, and aye.
Like thus.
“What did I dream? I do not know; The fragments fly like chaff.
Yet strange my mind was tickled so I cannot help but laugh.”
Then, speaking again, “My name is Billy Bejesus and I live in a tree. If I’m not there yet, why then that must be me.” He tumblesaulted over in the air, kicking his heels.
Appalled and intrigued, Wyeth turned to Rebel. “Can you make any sense of this madman’s ranting?”
“Don’t touch those things! Don’t you know a shyapple when you see one?” Big-eyed, Wyeth shook his head.
“They’re mind alterers. By the sound of it, this lot is just directed hallucinogens, but a shyapple can be prepared to do almost anything—to give you a skill, to make you mad, to bring you sanity. Some are prepared so they’ll negate themselves after a few hours, and others are… permanent.
You wouldn’t want to put one in your mouth without knowing what it does, first.”
“Really? Chemical wetprogramming?” Wyeth rubbed a fingertip over the bright skin, held it to his nose, and sniffed gingerly. “How does it work?”
“Well, the shyapple is just a matrix. It’s the worm that’s altered according to what effects are desired. It’s…
injected with a virus that… When the shyapple’s center liquifies, the virus undergoes explosive growth and…” She faltered to a stop. “No. It’s gone now. I used to know, but it’s all gone.” And yet it was—she sensed—vitally important in some way.
“I never heard of them before.” Wyeth held a shyapple to his eyes, admiring the translucent skin, the candy-red shimmer, its full-to-bursting juiciness. “Where did they come from, I wonder? Why did they show up here all of a sudden?”
Rebel shook her head helplessly.
“You’ve got what? Three crates there?” Billy Bejesus’s grin was luminescent. “I’ll take them all. Treece. Arrange the details and see that these things are taken back to the sheraton.”
They floated on. Rebel lingered at a jewelry display, examining a tray of religious pins: stars, crosses, swastikas, and the like. She bought a white scallop shell and pinned it to the collar of her cloak. “Now I can wipe off this face paint,” she said. “People will assume I’m some sort of religious fanatic.” Oddly enough, her sense of unease was stronger than ever.
“Good thinking. Though if I were you, I’d find out what your pin stands for. Might save you an embarrassing conversation somewhere down the line.”
They were floating hand in hand before an enormous mesh sphere, watching the cockfights, when Wyeth said in his leader voice, “Crap. Come on. We’ve got to get back tothe sheraton.” He tugged Rebel toward the gate. Their bodyguard materialized around them.
“What’s the trouble?” Rebel asked.
“Constance is talking with the Comprise.”
All the way back to the sheraton, Rebel’d had the uneasy feeling that someone was following her, a shadowy presence flitting through the leaves and vines that was never there when she looked back over her shoulder, but returned the instant she looked away. Here, in the bright-lit rooms of the complex, that sense faded but did not go entirely away. There was somebody outside coming for her.
“Heisen’s body was never found,” Wyeth said when she mentioned this to him. “He very well could be coming for you. That’s half the reason I’ve assigned you a permanent guard.”
“What’s the other half?”
“We’re going in to deal with them now.” He slipped a bracelet from his wrist, one of a pair of thick ivory bands lined with silver. “Here. Put this on. It monitors the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Samurai stepped aside as Wyeth slammed through the doors to the center ring’s main conference room. There, under a holographic sky, Constance sat on the edge of a red lacquered bridge. She was dabbing her feet in the goldfish stream. Several Comprise stood by, listening to her talk. Scattered among the topiary bushes were her team with the tools of their trade—fermenters, chimeric sequence splicers, microbial bioreactors and the like—demonstrating lab techniques while Comprise in identical coveralls clustered about them, like patches of orange mist. Wyeth’s face hardened into granite slabs.
“All right, Moorfields!”
Constance leaped to her feet. “Oh!” She blinked. “Youstartled me, Mr. Wyeth.”
“I’ll do worse than that to you.” Wyeth glowered at her from the bank. “Just what do you think you’re doing? Why have you moved your lab and people from the third ring?”
“Well, I had to. I wanted to chat with the Comprise, and I was told there was some silly rule against their leaving the central ring.”
Some hundred Comprise dotted the room. Several drifted over, into a loose semicircle about Wyeth and Rebel, studying them gravely but saying nothing. “Clear the treehangers out,” Wyeth ordered. Samurai moved in and started escorting the bioengineers away. “Have two people programmed legal, one Londongrad and one People’s Mars, and send them here.” To Constance,
“You’ll find that Kluster law is extremely legalistic, and People’s law is informal and rational. Between them, I expect that if you step out of line again, I can hang you for treason.”
“Treason! Surely you’re joking.”
“I am very serious.”
Constance shook her head, clasped her hands, let them fall. “But we were just exchanging scientific information.”
“Oh? What information did they give you?”
“We were on the preliminaries, just swapping basics.
Talking shop. You know.”