Come along with me, okay?” She put her cigar down
(somebody removed it) and squeezed his hand hard. “Give up this whole business here as a bad job. Come away with me, babes, and I’ll give you the stars.”
Wyeth smiled wanly. “Sunshine, we’ll be old before any of those dyson worlds reach even the first star. Even Proxima Centauri is a good fifty years away.”
The elevator stopped, and they stepped out into a lobby with polished marble and coral floors. Orange orchids drooped from onyx pillars. “So? We’ll be old together under an alien sun. Come on, don’t tell me that your sense of adventure is entirely dead.” They walked down a long hall between rows of granite elephants.
“It’s not that, you know it isn’t. But Earth is starting to slip into the System. They bought a dozen cislunar cities, and they’ve got an enclave on the moon. Soon they’ll be everywhere. Conflict is inevitable. I’ve got to be here when it happens.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. Rebel, we’ve gone over and over this. This isn’t just some whim of mine—it’s my duty. It’s my purpose.”
“Wyeth, people don’t have purposes—machines have purposes. People just are. Come on, gang, you’re the mystic, you know that.” But looking deep into his eyes, she saw that he simply wasn’t listening.
He was not going to come with her.
Rebel’s face was numb, stung by sudden cold loss.
Wyeth paused to touch open a pair of enormous burnished doors. They opened upon sculptured meadowlands, an impressionistic Jovian sky. Rebel ducked her head, stared down at her feet flashing forward and back. Wyeth ran after her and caught her by the wrist.
She wheeled.
“Stay,” he urged her. “We’ve been poor together. We can do it again.”
Rebel shook her head sullenly. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all.”
Again Wyeth hurried to catch up with her. “What, then?”
“I won’t destroy my life for you,” she muttered. “I mean, you know me, I’d give up everything for you if I had to. But not this way, not just because you want to have everything your own way.”
“I’m not asking you to—oh, what’s the use of talking? If I could, I’d go with you. But I can’t. It’s simply not my choice.” Rebel stopped before a second pair of doors, and Wyeth reached out to touch them open.
“Thank you,” Rebel said coldly.
Then, as Wyeth stared at her open-mouthed with outrage, she stepped inside and closed the doors in his face.
“Stars, please.” Rebel lay in a mossy cleft atop a bare rock hilltop, wind playing gently over her. This was her favorite room, the only one, in fact, that didn’t strike her as being incredibly ugly, with the special vulgarity of new wealth. She’d had it modeled after the Burren. The sky blackened, then lit up with the kind of fierce starscape that simply could not be seen from the surface of Earth. The Milky Way was a river of diamond chips spanning the sky, each icy star almost too bright and perfect for the eye to bear. Rebel ground the back of her head into the moss.
She felt as if every cell in her body were dead and ruptured, a small moan of grey agony.
After a while Wyeth stopped pounding on the door.
There were small blue gentians growing in the cracks of the rocks. Rebel poked one with a fingertip, left it unpicked. She wasn’t going to stay with Wyeth. She wasn’t.
A shooting star sped across the sky, chiming softly.
“No calls, please.” Rebel stared blindly up, trying to think. She could feel her life branching into two possible directions, and they were both bleak and meaningless.
Another star chimed across the sky, then a third. After a pause, the Pleiades blossomed with dozens of shooting stars, tinkling like a celestial wind chime. “I said no more calls, thank you!”
The sky jumped. Stars rippled, as if stirred by gigantic tidal forces, and then faded away.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. Rebel sat up and stared uncomprehendingly as the sky folded into featureless planes—blank white walls, floors, ceiling, all so uniformly pure they blended one into another. In the center, kneeling on a small red prayer rug, was an emaciated woman in white. Her head was bowed, hood down, revealing a bald skull. Then the woman looked up.
Cold eyes. A hard face painted with crystalline white lines.
“You are a difficult woman to contact,” she said. “Your defenses against intrusion are almost certainly better than you know.”
“Snow—or Shadow, or whoever or whatever you are—I am not in the mood for your clever little games today, so why don’t you just go bugger off, huh? I mean, Earth’s already got everything it wanted from me.” Then, bitterly,
“Everybody did.”
“I am not acting on behalf of Earth.”
“Oh?” Rebel said before she could catch herself.
“Things are changing. You know that. Major political and cultural shifts are in the offing. One minor effect is that as Earth moves into human space, it values my network’s services less. At the same time, the new wyeths have been giving us a great deal of difficulty. We’ve had to become more discreet, less accessible. Less effective.”
It made Rebel feel odd, knowing that Wyeth existed in a hundred temporary incarnations throughout Amalthea’s Bureau d’Espionnage. He was, she had learned, as common a tool now as Bors. It pleased Wyeth to think of himself translated to the status of a natural force, constantly harassing the Comprise with his blend of dry humor, fanaticism, and mystic insight. Rebel was not so sure. “Okay, look,” she said. “Just tell me what you want and what you’ll give for it, and I’ll say no, and you’ll go away, okay?”
Snow nodded coolly. “That is fair. You must understand that what I and other members of my net value most is the merger of thought into the cool flow of information. At peak moments, one loses all sense of personal identity and simply exists within the fluid medium of knowledge. If Earth would accept us into the Comprise, we would go. But so long as Earth finds us at all useful as we are…” She shrugged.
One hand slid from her cloak to stab the air by her side, and the sky about her filled with a montage of images froma few of the Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark dramas current throughout both Inner and Outer Systems. Here an idealized image of her served as altar for a goat sacrifice at Retreat. Here she was killing (with great zest and implausible weapons) an endless supply of island Comprise, rendered for effect into shaggy ithyphallic brutes with small red eyes. There, engaged in slow philosophical debate with Earth’s mediator—a young man of Apollonian proportions, both arms intact—at the down station hospitality shed. “We have analyzed discrepancies in these dramatizations, as well as in the many interviews with you and the other principals of your affair on Earth.”
Here came Wyeth on a glider to snatch her from the path of a raging fire. She slammed a sword through an adversary’s eye, laughing, and leaped into Wyeth’s arms.
“They’re not exactly accurate, you know,” Rebel said dryly. “Even the interviews were scripted by corporate midmanagement. For publicity purposes.”
“I am aware of that.” Snow made an impatient gesture.
“What interests me is the lapse that appears in your interview with Earth’s mediator when the visual splice patching is edited out.” The sky filled with a single scene
(Snow retreated to the horizon on small insert), a jerky hyperrealistic front view of the girlchild speaking. This was from the recording that had been made directly from Rebel’s memories during proceedings in the Courts of the Moon. She saw the girlchild flicker abruptly to one side.
“That gap there. We have run an integration of all peripheral data and are now convinced that what has been edited out is something Earth said regarding its rise to consciousness.”
Rebel nodded. “Yeah, I remember that. The court ruled that it was culturally dangerous information and had it suppressed. Is that what you’re after?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Your wyeths and bors think of group intelligences as diseases that might grow to ravish the body politic of human space, with themselves as antibodies. But you yourself are a dyson worlder, you know what varieties of organisms may live within the human body. Not all are germs. Most are neutral. Some are even symbiotes. If we knew how Earth rose to consciousness, we might use that information to combine into small entities of, say, no more than eighty comprise each. A being of that size might live quietly within any major city, too small to be of any threat to your race. It wouldn’t dare grow any larger for fear of detection.” Now the sky filled with enormous images of glistening diatoms, paramecia tumbling by green volvox