Bloom

by Wil McCarthy

  Louis Pasteur was coming together on Platform 28, and the zee map guided me there without error. Like the other ships, Pasteur was imprisoned in rigging and scaffolding. I'd seen her blueprints many times by now, and from what I could see she looked just like them. And yet... Well, there was still something odd, something vaguely disturbing about the look of her. The hull was bumpy, spiky, almost protozoan in appearance—that much I'd been prepared for. But the t-balance tactile camoflage, designed to trick technogenic lebenforms into thinking it part of their own substance, was clearly more than a simple coating of paint.

  How to describe it? The way it caught the light, the way it gleamed... Pictures do no justice. Rainbow-gray it was, like oil on water, except that it seemed to be made up of thousands of tiny dots, except that as I came closer, the dots broke up into millions of smaller dots, then millions more, smaller and smaller until it hurt the eye. They gave a vague impression of motion, like ants. Yes, I remember ants, remember looking down on their nests as they swarmed over some hapless insect, their bodies too tiny to make out individually, at least from a distance, so that the mass of them had the look of a living, boiling, fractal whole. T-balance looked a lot like that, in a way, although I understood at once that the motion was an illusion, that if I kept my head and eyes perfectly still the strangeness would evaporate, and the hull's coating would settle into a sort of wet, pointillist glaze.

  From a ramp on Pasteur's underside, behind the cables and scaffolding, voices emanated. I peered, drawing closer, and was able to make out faces: Vaclav Lottick and two men I didn't recognize, both dressed in eye-blue spacer coveralls. Lottick looked up, saw me.

  “Strasheim,” he said curtly. “Over here.”

  Yes, of course, I might have trouble picking out the right ship in the crowd.

  “I'd like you to meet someone,” he went on, nudging one of the other men out into the light. Then all three of them were picking their way through scaffolding, approaching me with hands extended. “Darren Wallich, John Strasheim. John Strasheim, Darren Wallich.”

  “Aha,” I said, nodding to the tall, pepper-haired man Lottick had indicated and accepting the handshake he offered. Firm, too firm. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  Darren Wallich was an Immunity type of some sort, a doctor, and would be Pasteur's captain when the time came. One of the six people I'd be sharing the next umpty-ump weeks with—I'd better be pleased to meet him.

  Wallich's face, draped loosely in the manner of faces entering their fifth or sixth decade, drew upward into an smile at my expression, as if aware of what I was thinking. Probably, he was thinking the same thing.

  “This other man is Tosca Lehne,” Lottick said to me, flapping a hand in the air between us as if trying to form some invisible connection. Maybe doing something meaningful on his zee-spec, or maybe not. It's hard not to notice that these devices, so rarely removed, have brought us a whole new body language, have encouraged us more than ever to speak with our hands, to sketch invisible lines in the air whether or not they'll be turned into real lines in the specs of our audience.

  “Hallo,” Lehne said to me, and I shook his hand as well. This man seemed more reluctant, more truculent. He was the inventor of t-balance, or one of the inventors, but I didn't know much more about him than that. His arms were thick and hairless, his jaw square, the pads of his hand disconcertingly soft. Too many years, I thought, of working only with abstractions, of lifting his weight against too little gravity. A hard, still-youthful body gone reluctantly to flab.

  “You don't sound happy,” I observed.

  “He doesn't like this idea much,” Wallich said, grinning. “Leaving home for the mission and all, but hey, I wanted to be sure we had the best possible job on the camoflage, so I suggested he come along with us to be sure. I bet that's worth a few extra minutes' cross-checking, eh?” He laughed.

  Tosca Lehne did not appear amused. Well, who could blame him? I wasn't thrilled at our prospects myself.

  “Well, we're happy to have both of you aboard,” Lottick said to Lehne and myself, in the same tone of official friendliness I'd heard back at his office. “This is a fine crew we're putting together, a fine crew. I couldn't put my trust in better hands.”

  His tone was not a bad one, I hasten to add. Manipulative, yes, but there was a conspiratorial edge to it as well, as if the manipulation were a private joke between the three of us.

  Wallich chuckled. “We can be spared, you mean.”

  “No.” Lottick grew more serious. “Not at all. Not at all.”

  “Some have better things to do,” Lehne muttered.

  Lottick eyed him for a moment, but seemed not to find the remark worthy of comment. Instead he turned, speaking now in lower, quicker tones. “Wallich, I've got six test batches to run this afternoon and only half a team to meter them. I've stayed too long already, so I'll be on my way posthaste. I'd like you to geek a sim for me, clean up the activity reports and flash them down priority, yes? I'll read them on the job.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Well, nice seeing you again,” Lottick said, nodding dismissively in my direction. “We have the highest confidence.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Wallich agreed. “We'll talk later in detail, if that's all right. Get to know each other, discuss your duties, all that sort of thing. Fair enough for you?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, whatever's convenient.”

  He pointed his hand, pistol style, his grin broadening. “I like that attitude. Whatever's convenient, ha ha. Mind if I archive that? Bang.” The thumb/hammer fell. Then, as he and Lottick turned away, “Vass, this is A-series, right? Fern loop blastoma, step rate unconstrained? God damn, you've got a fun night ahead of you. Here, I'll walk you as far as the foundry. I'm headed that way anyway.”

  “Blastoma shmastoma,” Muttered Lottick's receding voice. “Give me half a g.u. for every damn fool tumor snipe hunt I've wasted nights on and I'll buy this ship. Severs has a lecture coming, let me tell you.”

  “Oh, I can imagine well enough.”

  The sound of Wallich's laughter followed them out.

  I turned to Tosca Lehne. “Our captain, eh? He seems a bit... energetic. Funny. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but—”

  “Prosthetic,” Lehne said, staring after the two men.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That sense of humor, it's a tickle capacitor. Implanted, skull base. The man is a fish.”

  “A what?”

  Lehne waved a hand. “You know, cold-blooded. Slimy. He did it so people would like him better.”

  I blinked, puzzled. Clearly, I hadn't been following the science and medical channels closely enough. “Tickle capacitor. My god, that's amazing. And do they?”

  “Eh?”

  “Like him better?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess. He's captain, isn't he?”

  “My god, that's amazing. Can they do, well, for example, something like a conscience? Or a sense of self-worth? The social implications could be staggering.”

  “I don't know.”

  A shrug; no real response, no emotional engagement. The question didn't interest him. Well, I could see that Tosca Lehne wasn't going to be the easiest person in the worlds to talk to. Maybe Wallich was not the only one in need of prosthetic laughter. Thinking to try a different approach, to get Lehne talking about his work, I reached out to brush my fingers admiringly along Louis Pasteur's t-balance hull. I pulled them back immediately, stinging. Quick inspection showed that they were bleeding: little jewels of red beading out from dozens of tiny slash wounds, as if I'd touched a tangle of miniature razor blades. I gave a little grunt.

  “Careful,” Lehne said quietly. “It's sharp.”

  I showed him a surly grin. “So I see. You might have warned me.”

  He shrugged. “Didn't know you'd try to touch it. Yes, it's sharp—be careful. Also toxic, mildly radioactive. Don't eat. You know much about it?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Oh,” h
e said, and then just stood there eyeing me over. To his credit, he did look apologetic—not seeming to know quite what to make of me, what to say to me, what to do about me. I was not a part of his world.

  “You can explain it to me sometime,” I tried, smiling, I hoped, a bit more genuinely. “I'm very interested. Meanwhile, is the rest of the crew around? I feel I should get to know everyone before...”

  He was shaking his head. “No, not here right now. They come and go, busy, always busy, always busy. That's life, eh? Come to dinner tonight, that's where you can meet everyone. Man and woman's got to eat, right? Might as well synchronize. I'll tell you about t-balance sometime, if you really are interested. It's technical, but I'll tell it to you. Would you like to see the ship?”

  “Why I'm here,” I agreed.

  “Well, watch your head going in. Damn cargo hold, forced a redesign of the main airlock. Very urgent, that cargo hold, along with everything else. Accelerated schedule, no time to really fix anything. And for what? Dubious.”

  I shook my head. “I'm afraid I'm not following.”

  “Ah, never mind,” he said, turning away. “Nothing makes sense, they don't tell me things. This mission stinks, I know that much.”

  I've often thought I should have asked him to elaborate on that remark. Did he mean something beyond the obvious, beyond the danger and discomfort, beyond the arm-twisting that had apparently brought him here? I didn't ask. Instead, I let it roll off me, and followed him docilely into the ship.

  FIVE:

  For the Good Are Always the Merry

  Small, my god it is small, my god it is small... That was all I could think about as I sat down to dinner, all I had thought about all afternoon. Wallich had met with me, as promised, and it was all I could do to keep from telling him I quit, I couldn't do this, he would have to find somebody else. Rosenblum? Ancel? Oh, God, not Ancel. The thought of him smearing his boastful opinions all over the story, and then strutting and crowing at me about it for the rest of his life and mine... And they would get Ancell, too. Somehow, I knew they would. And so I held firm.

  But it was small; the ship's interior was like a bathroom with seven shower stalls and a street car cockpit wedged incongruously at one end, a utility closet wedged in at the other. I'd seen the plans, thought I was prepared, but this was crazy. I was crazy.

  Large and crowded, the cafeteria nonetheless had a little round table reserved for Louis Pasteur's crew, right beside the single large window overlooking the shipyards. A hell of a view, really; four half-completed ships were visible below, and two whole ones presumably drydocked for repairs. Louis Pasteur herself was not among them, but together they represented three sizes, four overall designs, six color schemes, and fully a quarter of Galileo's shipping tonnage. The shop floor was enormous, probably a full hectare sprawling some twenty meters below us, but still I felt claustrophobic.

  On my zee-spec, images threatened to crowd out the real world altogether: paired data gene sequences scrolling upward in tandem, the duplicate portions flashing like alarm lights; the Io Sengen and Innensburg mycorae, pulsing with false-color image enhancements and shifting annotations from the library tutorial; a map of the solar system, with Louis Pasteur's course charted out as a dotted white line swinging close by Mars, kissing the orbit of Earth and then finally rising back toward the Immunity, toward the cold and dark of the upper solar system.

  And of course, I had a media window cycling slowly and methodically through my own net channels as well. A reminder to myself: This is where you are going, and why. A danger, a mystery, a brass ring to be seized. Just stay cool and you'll be a part of it, be right there as it unfolds. Correspondent, berichter, official historian to the Immunity. Nine months of hell and you'll have it all.

  Beside me, Tosca Lehne snorted and banged a cup on the table. “Hey, Strasheim, she's talking to you.”

  “What?” I looked up, saw that Jenna Davenroy had been speaking to me from across the table. “I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.”

  Shaking loose a few stands of unruly, tin-colored hair, Davenroy rolled her eyes and stabbed pale fingers at the air. “I said, what are you reading? Pardon my nosiness, but what we read at the dinner table says an awful lot about us as people.”

  “Yeah,” Tug Jinacio chipped in, “Especially what we read when people are trying to meet us. Come on, give with it. Geek it over.”

  “It's nothing,” I assured them. “Just a little homework.”

  “Flash it to me,” Jinacio insisted, not quite rudely. His face looked as though he'd skipped a day shaving, though his short hair was immaculately brushed; the tone of voice matched this image perfectly, at once careless and deliberate and attentive. He seemed the sort of casual charmer who could hover at the edge of rudeness and never quite cross it. Probably common in his usual circles—he was a Response lieutenant, twice decorated, most recently in charge of a unit of eight rowdy veterans and a pair of trainees. I'd read through the bio an hour or two before, and found it impressive. Nobody called him by the name it gave: Christofolo. Nobody questioned his right to speak as he pleased.

  The woman, Jenna Davenroy, interested me less. A nuclear engineer a little over half my mother's age, she was slated to be Pasteur's ladderdown expert and chief propulsion monitor. Her bona fides seemed more academic in nature; she had rescued no children, but had apparently contributed to the body of knowledge that kept the lights on, the caverns warm. Just now she was nodding, agreeing with what Tug Jinacio had said.

  “What better way to get to know you than rifling through your private thoughts? Do please allow us.”

  The lines in her face were not numerous, but they cut deep, and moved readily when she talked. Her gaze was weighty.

  “Really, it's nothing,” I insisted, conscious suddenly of being the only one at the table not wearing spacer blues. But I flashed them copies of my windows.

  Jinacio whistled. Davenroy's eyebrows went up. “Cluttered,” she said, her tone amused but also oddly approving.

  I blushed and ducked my head. “I don't usually run so opaque; I'm just trying to psych myself up for this. I... I don't know. I saw the ship today.”

  “Ah,” Davenroy said, nodding, “a little anticipatory cabin fever. That's normal. I take it you haven't done ship time before?”

  I shuddered, my nostrils filling with the mingled scents of sweat and excrement, my ears with the moans of those who'd been confined too long to their bunks. Free movement shifts limited to four hours, day after day after day. “No,” I said quietly, “not since the Evacuation.”

  “Doesn't count. Conditions have improved a lot since then. Still, the zee is your friend; you should keep that in mind at all times. You don't dabble much in visual ideation, I take it? Most people don't.”

  “No,” I agreed, “I don't.”

  “But you have no specific objection to the practice?”

  I shrugged. Ideation was a habit, like sweets or stimulants or alcohol, not inherently deviant or harmful in and of itself. Useful in the arts and sciences of course, and practiced by many respectable citizens. And yet, most of the Immunity's ideators simply had too much time on their hands, and too little energy. Why change the world, or even yourself, when you could craft or purchase fantasy environments optimized to your taste and habits? Illegal spec mods aside, the eyes and ears could absorb a great many pleasurable stimuli—not so different, really, from listening to music or going out to the theater or flashing down the occasional VR drama. The temptation was an entirely natural one, and suspect for precisely that reason. Yes, I had done it from time to time, but not often. We had a society to run, now didn't we?

  “Oh, drink your tea,” she said, waggling a finger at me. “Staring at bulkheads for a few weeks will leave you a bit more open minded.”

  “Open minded? That's a funny phrase to use around this one, isn't it.” Another woman had arrived, and presently sat down beside Davenroy. I recognized her at once as Renata Baucum, the one Pasteur crew member whose exa
ct function I couldn't quite grasp. Veterinarian? Zoologist? Microbiologist? Her records hinted at all of these things.

  “Hallo,” I said to her, setting my cup down and extending a hand. “John Strasheim, mission correspondent. You're Baucum?”

  “Quite,” she said, flashing white, pointed teeth.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” I said. And meant it, too; she was rather more striking than her portfolio images had indicated, her long hair more silken, her jawline curving more gracefully. Well, who looked good in their ID holographs anyway? I smiled back. “I've been wondering about your job.”

  She blinked, tapping politely at the empty air between us. “Yes?”

  “Yeah. Well, I mean, what is it? What's your job title going to be?”

  “Oh, bioanalyst, I suppose.” She looked embarassed, maybe a little annoyed. Her eyes, too, were deeper and more piercing than the holograph had shown, coolly reflecting the spacer blue of her coveralls. “All the little lebenforms, I just love to see them tick. With any luck, I'll be entirely superfluous.” Her eyes traveled up and down, examining me. “And you, a berichter. How interesting. Or do you prefer 'correspondent?'“

  Despite the smile and the good-natured tone, she had managed through careful inflection to make clear that “berichter” and “superfluous” were linked concepts, that she was kind enough to speak with me, but that I shouldn't take it as any sort of sign of equality.

  Well.

  I inclined my head politely, to show that her message had been understood, and then, taking a moment to peek under the table, I matched her tone: “Those shoes you're wearing, miss. Are they comfortable?”