by Wil McCarthy
At least there was wind, which I stood there and enjoyed for what seemed like a long time. Ten minutes? Twenty? Longer than I usually have, to stand around doing nothing. Eventually, the sliding door opened and closed, and Vaclav Lottick was there beside me, leaning on the railing, looking out on the cityscape with me.
“I don't need the whole song and dance,” I told him softly. “If it's easier, you can just give me the highlights.”
“It's easier,” he agreed, then paused, taking breath a few times. He was calmer now than before. “And I'm sorry for the delay. You know that mycora mutate quickly, right? Everyone knows that. A key strength, a key factor. The whole Mycosystem probably depends on this, or it would have died out long ago.”
“So I've heard.”
“Yes, well, what you probably haven't heard is that they're stealing data gene sequences from our own phages. Nothing major, nothing all that important, but the mechanism and its potential limitations are not known at this time.”
“Stealing gene sequences?” I repeated stupidly. My skin had gone cold and crawly. Mycora were not intelligent, not even alive, really. How could they steal?
“It's probably nothing,” Lottick said. “Statistically, the chance that they'll steal something important and actually be able to use it to their advantage is... Well, it's zero, basically. But we don't understand the mechanism, and that has a lot of people upset, and bringing pressure to bear. What if the Mycosystem gets hold of some of our environmental adaptations? What happens if they stumble on nuclear fission, or cascade fusion, or God help us all, they manage to copy some of our ladderdown designs?”
“I don't know,” I said, still cold. “What?”
He shrugged. “They eat the solar system, I guess. They eat the universe. It's not going to happen, Strasheim, but that's the worst-case scenario we've got to dance around. Hence the mission.”
“The starship?” I asked, puzzled but optimistic. Whatever the problem was, these people seemed to be on top of it. Sort of.
“The starship, yeah, right.” He chuckled, sounding tired. “We get it built, we fuel it up, we go on our merry way, every single person that wants to. That's not going to happen either. I know it's the party line, and maybe that's best for the time being, but the real goal of the program is to get our spores out to the neighboring stars before the Mycosystem beats us to it. Immune system fully established, deny the mycora a toehold even in the warm, bright spaces. But we've probably got a thousand years to worry about it, and a lot to keep us busy until then.”
“So what are we talking about?”
“The Louis Pasteur,” he said. “You may have heard about it here and there; the program is being accelerated in a big way. Ship is designed for inner system operation; high-temperature, high-radiation, also the t-balance hull — theoretically bloom-proof. But of course, ha ha, we're not going to test that here on Ganymede. The only way to test it is to fly it down there, into the Mycosystem, and see if anything eats it. We hope to do that soon, and if the testing goes well, we'll fly it all the way down to Earth and Mars and Luna. The thinking goes: even in the inner system, there are places too cold, dark, barren for mycora to bloom. If any serious cold-weather adaptations start appearing, the first signs of it will probably be there. So we drop a few detectors on some polar caps, and suddenly nobody's bothering us about this problem anymore. Not unless the detectors start screaming at us, which I don't think is going to happen.”
“Are these state secrets?” I asked, turning to look at his face. “Can I talk about this stuff?”
His look was disapproving. “There are no secrets, Mr. Strasheim. There's barely any state, and I didn't invite you up here to waste your time. If we didn't want you to talk about this, what would we want you for? To make shoes? You have skills which nobody else in the Immunity seems to possess. You're a commentator, an historian; you record simple facts in a way that's accessible to the public, even entertaining. That ability could be very useful for this project, if you're willing to lend it to us for a while.”
“It sounds fascinating,” I said sincerely. “I take it you want me to write an article?”
Lottick looked at me like I was somewhat stupider than he'd been expecting. “No, son. I thought we understood each other. I want you to go on the mission.”
TWO:
Wombs
Weightless in the solitude of a ballista car, I pondered. Thought of tunnels arching through the planet, of the cars being fired through them like signals through an optic fiber network. Of cavern cities and macroimmune systems and the nearly million people who comprised the only society I'd ever really known. I was eleven when we left the Earth.
I keep the lights off when I'm cannonballing, at least when I'm doing it alone, so there was nothing around me but the sound-absorbing padding of the walls, neither seen nor felt. The iconified images on my zee-spec might well have been the only light in the universe. I studied them.
Lottick had indeed hit the highlights in his brief speech. Under some unknown set of conditions, mycora could (absorb? scan? hack?) immunophages by an unknown process, and transcribe and adopt data gene sequences despite the supposed incompatibility of same. So little was understood about the phenomenon that the info packet, despite its reams of supporting data, occupied me for only about twenty minutes. Anyway, I was no doctor, and most of the jargon went right past me, leaving little more information than Lottick had given me verbally. Of more interest was the data on the ship itself; Louis Pasteur was at heart a light cargo ship, ladderdown-powered and capable of extended voyage at interplanetary velocities, though the mass of the “t-balance” hull coatings did cut into performance a bit. Normally crewed by four to five people, these ships, though Pasteur herself would carry six. Or seven, if I agreed to join them.
And that was the question, now, wasn't it? Could I do that, leave Ganymede behind, leave the whole Immunity behind to dive back into the warmth of the inner system? Protected from the mycora only by an experimental technology, protected from my crewmates only by a curtain-thin cabin wall? The ship's interior was slightly smaller than my tiny house in Philusburg, and the mission would last two hundred and eighty days, or just a hair over nine months. It sounded like a boarding school nightmare, a crowded, bickering nightmare of bunk-bed privacy and no possibility of escape. No possibility even of a walk to cool off, to let anxiety clear slowly from the air. How could we keep from murdering each other? God knew, such things had happened before.
My revulsion was so sharp and so immediate that I realized in a sudden, scharfblick moment that the decision was already made. Guess what, freunde, I would be going on the mission; these things would happen, would become my daily reality. And how could it be otherwise? I neither loved nor hated reporting; I was it. Always had been, even as an Earthly child, running around with a transcription palmtop and a mouthful of pestering questions. Cobblering was an uneasy compromise, something I could do well enough to be of use to others, but when offered the chance to serve mankind in my own true way, with my own true talents, could I refuse? Certainly not, I realized. Certainly not. So whatever the records may say, my journey began precisely at that moment.
The car sped on, hurtling now through the downward leg of the tunnel's parabola. I took the opportunity to flash in an update from my net channels, the four that I moderated and the four others to which I made daily contributions. Skimming the topic headers, sorting them into priority groups for later viewing. Not enough time to read them now, of course, not before landing, but I did compose a message of my own, a brief narration and video collage of the Louis Pasteur, its mission, and my own proposed role.
I flashed it out just as the lights came up, along with the warning chimes, as the ballista on the Philusburg end caught me in its decelerating grip. I fell softly against the padded wall and quickly began growing heavy, and then heavier, and heavier still, and then the pressure eased back just before it could grow uncomfortable, just before the need to breathe and the difficulty
of doing so could become alarming. Leaving me to drift to my feet at standard gravity, feather-light by the standards of my youth.
Light spilled into the car as it clamshelled open, releasing me onto the empty platform, and as I stepped away the vehicle sank into a recess in the tunnel wall, to be loaded onto the outbound ballista back to Ansharton. I looked around briefly at the mirrored walls, my own reflection distorted beyond recognition by the rounded contours, by the light pouring up from below. Finally, I found a slot to shove my debit card into, then mounted the escalator and rode it down to street level. Philusburg blossomed around me, a smaller town than Ansharton but in many ways a more energetic one, its sidewalks mobile, its buildings designed, in many cases, to change shape over the course of the day, taking advantage of shifts in the lighting conditions. My home, these past twenty years, a cavern-city of lead and iron and sparkling gold, and yes, I did love it. And do.
It was funny how different the houses all looked from one another. Nobody likes iron shingle all that much, it's true, but the waste metal has to go somewhere, and buildings have to be made of something, and in the end the crews simply click a house together from standard patterns, because they don't have the time to waste any more than you or I do. But in Philusburg, more and more residents were bucking the system and customizing, adding molded Tudor facings or shiny filligrees or little silver gargoyles, or whatever. They say time is the heaviest metal, and indeed only absurd sacrifice can bring these things about. But sacrifice gets to be a habit after a while. Even I had felt the pinch a few years back, and slapped a coat of paint on my little tin castle. Green.
I'd be passing it in a few minutes if I continued down the hauptstrasse, but it seemed I wouldn't have the factory job to worry about much longer, so once my feet hit the sidewalk I switched tracks and went the other way, not back to work but instead toward the sanitarium on the city's south end, near the archway to the agricultural district. There was someone I needed to see.
~~~
“Take those damn glasses off,” she said to me by way of greeting—about as friendly a reception as she'd been able to manage lately. Seeming never to notice that I'd been gone at all, seeming always to pick up in the middle of a conversation. But not any conversation that I remembered. A ribbon held back her hair, white on white.
So small, this room, and so sparse, and so very painfully clean. My fault, yes; I was always thinking I should at least bring her a plant, something dirty and alive to fill up the empty space beside the window, but there was the expense to consider, and the trouble...
“Momma,” I said to her, as cheerfully as I could manage, “you know they're not glasses. Nobody wears glasses anymore.”
She pinched her face up at that. “Bull crap. I see you all hiding behind these things, hiding your faces. Always poking and stabbing at the air like there were flies buzzing around, bothering you. But they're not.” Her eyes narrowed, studying my face with sullen accusation. “You're not going to poke at me, are you? I see these orderlies hiding behind their beards and their coke-bottle glasses, always poking and pointing. What are they hiding from, and who are they pointing at? It's annoying, and they look like fools. I'll speak to somebody about it, I really will.”
“Momma,” I said, the bright edge still on my voice, but duller now, “I don't work here. I'm John, I'm your son.”
“I know exactly who you are,” she snapped.
I wondered. My mother was almost ninety years old, physically still healthy enough, but mentally... “She's simply outlived her brain's ability to cope with new pathways,” as one of the nurses had put it, by which she meant that the neurodegenerative agent had not been identified and probably would not be. As if age made a human being any less entitled to dignity and health? I was genuinely afraid to ask for clarification on this point, genuinely afraid to be told that Momma was just too old, that no intervention could fix her. Or worse, that fixing her was too expensive, that nature had written her off and the Immunity was simply standing by, waiting for the sentence to be carried out. “We simply haven't the resources...”
We never did, never do. Christ, I couldn't even come up with a house plant. I resolved to remedy that, to fix what little I could in her life. It was, as we say, the least I could do.
“How are you, Momma?”
“I'm fine, I'm fine. Not dead yet.” She grimaced, shaking her head, patting the bed beside her to invite me to sit. “I sure outlived what I ever guessed I would. This is Jupiter, isn't it? Are we living on Jupiter?”
“On Ganymede, Momma. It's one of the moons.”
“Ganymede,” she said, testing the word, nodding slowly as if agreeing with the sound of it. “Yeah, okay. One of the moons. Philusburg, that's where we live. Are we still in Philusburg?”
“Yup,” I told her, smiling, sitting down on the bed now and patting her hand because I couldn't think of anything else to do, any other way to connect. God, but it drained me to visit here. Momma used to be smart, used to be able to talk backwards and write backwards and figure out which flavor of syrup would take the rust off an iron tile. She'd gotten us through the Evacuation, the whole family, by drawing the right conclusions and jumping at the right time and somehow making a grand adventure of it all. But then Avery had died in a bloom, and Patrice in a fire, and then my father simply failed to wake up one morning, and a little more had gone out of her each time. Sick. Momma was sick, and gradually getting sicker, and I'd taken much too long to figure it out. Sometimes I thought she was dead already, an empty shell of flesh and nerve, speaking only in echoes. How long ago should I have said goodbye?
“Momma,” I said to her then, in a strong voice that I hoped would penetrate, “I have to go away for a while. I have to go on a trip, and I won't be able to see you while I'm gone. I can send messages, though, and you can send messages back.”
She seemed to consider my words.
“I can talk to the staff about it,” I went on slowly. “I know you don't like the zee-spec, but that's okay; I can send you a plaintext or an audio mail, and someone can play it for you. And you can reply, if you want to.”
She was nodding, looking thoughtful, but the hand she raised was an instruction to silence. “Do you remember your father's accident?” she asked, a wise, distant glint in her eyes. “Wild parrots. He drove up into the mountains, and wild parrots ate his windshield wipers. Heaven knows, but those parrots have a serious appetite for rubber, and when he was driving back down, it rained and he couldn't see, and he crashed. Drove right into a tree, I think, though it may have been a rock.”
“I remember. It was a road sign he hit.”
Her brown eyes caught mine, held them. She was smiling. “I told him, man, you might have been the first person in the history of the world to ever be killed by parrots. What a funny thing that was. Killed by parrots, can you imagine? But he lived a long time after that. A long time. He used to love to tell that story.”
Yes, indeed he did. There had been a lot more to it, back then, though the exact details had tended to wander from one telling to the next. My father had been a systems analyst, “long for handyman” as he'd liked to say, though the Immunity had put him to work making shoes, same as me. “Shoes are important in low gravity,” he'd often said, “and not so easy to make well.”“Arthur always loved the mountains,” Momma went on, smiling fondly. “And the animals, and the sky. We didn't evacuate many animals with us, did we? Of course there wasn't much time, it's hard to blame us when the hills around the spaceport were literally dissolving, but I don't think your father was ever really happy after we left. He was never really the same.”
Yeah, losing a whole planet—and later a whole inner solar system—can do that to you. Hence the love even now—perhaps especially now—of that damned parrot story. See here, we really knew the Earth in our time there. I sighed. “Momma, we can talk about Dad if you want, but first I want you to listen to me. I have to go away. I have to go on a trip. Are you listening? Do you understand what I'm sayi
ng? Momma?”
Momma, Momma. I couldn't stop saying the word, though I never heard my own name in return anymore. Perhaps a need to remind her that I, too, was a part of her memories. Or maybe I was reminding myself, or maybe it's a lot more complex than that, or a lot simpler. Love is a twisted thing, not for us to decipher. She was my mother.
“I'm listening,” she said, the smile falling away. “You're going on a trip, all right. People go on trips sometimes; it's nothing to get bent up about. Is it a long trip? Far away?”
I nodded. “Yes, a long one. Almost a year.”
“Ah hah.” She paused, looked down. “I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I won't... I think I'm sick, you know. I think there's definitely something wrong with me. Maybe it's my memory, it does seem to play tricks, but that's not quite the same thing as feeling ill, if you know what I mean. Do you think I'll still be here when you get back? A year from now, well, that's a long time to the elderly.”
“Of course you will,” I said, too quickly. And compounded the error by patting her hand again.
And I knew then that Momma wasn't altogether gone, because she looked up sharply, snatching away her hand. “Don't you talk down to me, young fellow. I won't be talked down to like that, condescended to, you hear me? And take those damn glasses off. You look just exactly like a fool.”
~~~
