by Wil McCarthy
Her thin smile collapsed into blankness and mild confusion.
“Do they hold your feet down? Provide adequate traction? Are they flexible despite their weight?”
“They're okay,” she said, puzzled, eyeing me with suspicion.
“I'm so very glad,” I told her. Their tapered-fan shape, like huge outspread toes, gave them away; they were, of course, Philusburg shoes. Mine.
Tug Jinacio let out a sudden laugh, and then Lehne and Davenroy joined in, and the look on Renata Baucum's face showed her understanding that the joke had gotten away from her, that she was somehow the butt of it after all. Creditably, her smile returned, and she favored me with a new look and message: Very good, sir. I'll be more careful next time.
Just then, Darren Wallich and another man arrived, set food trays down, occupied the table's last two seats.
“What's funny?” Wallich wanted to know. Jinacio and Davenroy just laughed a little harder, and Wallich seemed unable to keep from joining them.
“Hi!” I called out to the smaller man beside Wallich. “John Strasheim. Sudhir Rapisardi?”
“The same,” he admitted, and we shook hands across the table.
A “biophysicist,” Rapisardi had coordinated the design of the TGL detectors so central to Louis Pasteur's mission. I wondered how that must feel—having this nine-month party thrown more or less in his honor. I would have to remember to ask him sometime. Anyway, he was the last crew member I had to meet, so I told him: “I'm very pleased to meet you.” And meant it.
Baucum caught sight of something behind me. The laughter around us died. Heads turned.
“Sticks,” she muttered, scowling.
I turned to look. Indeed, a quartet of uniformed police had entered the cafeteria, and were strolling among the tables with no clear intention of sitting down. Two of them made a discreet but careful job of sweeping air, their sniff wands held out at waist level, ticking back and forth.
“What's happening?” I asked quietly.
“Security sweep,” Baucum said. “Looking for accidents.”
“I'm sorry?”
Captain Wallich, for once, had stopped laughing. “We've had some accidents,” he said to me. “And some vandalism beyond what's usual. Some higher-ups worry there may be a pattern to it, but this is, well, counterproductive for one thing. If some fool is monkeywrenching around here it won't be those guys who find it.”
“Vandalism of Louis Pasteur?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he agreed. “Sometimes not, but our bay does seem to have more than its share of problems. Do keep your eyes open, right?”
I was shaking my head, puzzled. “Who would do a thing like that? What's to be gained?”
“Oh, who the fuck knows.” Wallich dug into his food, not amused by this subject at all.
Eventually, the sticks finished their sweep and left the room the way they had come in. Looking for what, for the sharp, distinctive reek of guilt? Right. Looking for nothing, I decided; probably nothing more than a show of force, and misguided as such. Since when had anyone taken the sticks seriously? Get a real job, freund, if this were a police state they'd have hired somebody smarter than you.
Conversation slowly resumed.
“It does seem a little misguided,” I said to Wallich eventually, “strutting around like that. You'd think they'd have more subtlety.”
“Yes,” Renata Baucum agreed, her gray eyes hard and glittering. “You'd think so. Drop a spy or two in our midst, perhaps?”
She was looking at me strangely, some muddled combination of expectation, contempt, perhaps a hint of unease. Did she think I was a political spy? A stick? A saboteur?
Frowning back at her, I shifted in my seat. “Baucum, I'm recording you right now. Bits and pieces of this conversation will find their way into a collage, at the very least, and will be shared with thousands of readers. Does that make you uneasy?”
“Uneasy?” She considered the word, then nodded. “I'm uneasy that this mission has a reporter assigned to it, yes, particularly since our objectives are clearly political rather than scientific, aimed at pleasing both inactionist and exterminationist factions. A neat trick! Do you know what a mirrored door looks like? It looks like an open room. But it isn't; it's a closed room, with a mirror on the door. That's what I see whan I look at you.”
I blinked, snorted, not sure how to respond. “Am I supposed to apologize?”
The rest of the crew had gone silent, and were watching us with interest.
“You wouldn't know what you were apologizing for,” Baucum said. “Just never mind. Just forget it.”
I shook my head. “No, you brought this up. I'm listening.”
“And so are thousands of people,” she said, more quietly, almost whispering now. “That's my problem with you. Thousands of people are going to think whatever you tell them to think. That everything is safe, that changes to the status quo are unwelcome and dangerous? I mean, who are you, really?”
Sighing, I picked up my spoon and shoveled a load of gruel into my mouth. “I work in a shoe factory,” I said, before I'd quite finished chewing. “Sometimes, I tell people what I think. That's called 'enlightened discourse.'“
“I've seen your work,” she said, nodding slightly. “Very enlightened.”
Suddenly, she sat forward, leaning her elbows on the table. “Let me tell you a story, all right? It's about the word 'mycorum,' which came into use because when technogenic life first got away from us, the earliest examples filled the same ecological niche as most fungi. Decomposers, right? Start with a complex organic structure, then break it down, burn it up, use it to fuel the process of your own reproduction. The eat-bloom-spore cycle was nothing new—the mycora were just a good deal faster about it.”
I gestured politely for her to continue. “Yes? So?”
“So, when the Earth's biosphere was fully converted, there was nothing left to decompose. The mycora should have died, but they didn't. Instead, they very rapidly evolved photo- and chemosynthetic pathways which enabled them to use inorganic matter in their reproduction. Becoming like plants, only a great deal more versatile. In fact, they've done a much better job of vivifying the Earth than organic life ever did.”
“Do you admire them for it? In a Temples kind of way?” I asked, suppressing a shudder.
“Admire?” She scowled. “In a technical sense, yes, of course, but you're not going to trap me that easily. I'd like to have the Earth back as much as you, believe me, but its current tenants have been very effective in asserting their claim.”
I gave her a good hard look, watching my indicators to ensure I was recording a good image. “I may be a little dense, Baucum. What is your point?”
Her expression flared, not angry but impatient with me, with my presumed ignorance. “The point is that we still call them mycora. Their central functions have changed a trillion times more than our attitudes toward them. Such blindness may well be the death of us all.”
“And you think this is my fault?”
She looked down at her food, then back at me. “Your fault? No, I suppose, not really. But you're a part of—”
“I'm a symbol to you, planted here to annoy you. A door with a mirror on it, nothing more. Is that it?”
“Oh, fine,” she said, looking up at me again with angry eyes. I'd cornered her—not the best way to conduct an interview, or a conversation. “Fine. You're a real person, not a symbol, nobody at all is jerking your strings, and the attitudes of society are not your fault. And you have a real job, too, so maybe I'm just a bad person for opening my mouth. Are we finished?”
There was a silence about the table for several seconds.
Embarassed, I answered as mildly as I could: “If you like, yes. But if you need an audience for your ideas, I'm always avaliable.”
“How wonderful,” she said.
Darren Wallich stifled a laugh. Me? I returned to my dinner, thinking that somewhere along the line, someone should have tried a little harder to f
ind crew members who might actually get along. But who'd bother with such frivolities, when there was work to be done? Busy, always busy. That's life, eh?
~~~
After dinner, Tug Jinacio took me aside, stood with me in front of the big window overlooking the drydock bays.
“It isn't too late to back out,” he said, his voice noncommittal, managing to avoid any sort of implication. That I was unsafe? That I was cowardly? No, it came across as a simple statement of fact, in case the idea hadn't occurred to me.
I strove to match his tone. “I'm fine.”
“This t-balance stuff, you know there's been no testing of it. Likely it'll just fail for some reason. Possibly not, right, but I've got to live my life as though that's true. To do my job, I've got to make every unfavorable assumption.”
“My own incompetence included?”
His answering look was friendly, amused. “Competence I couldn't care less about. Not my worry. Captain wants you, Captain gets you. It's your calm that concerns me. Are you calm, John?”
Calm? How to answer a question like that? Say that I'd survived the end of the world, survived the journey here, survived the building and burrowing of the years that followed? Tell him that since that time I'd seen nothing alarming, done nothing alarming? That I wept at funerals, no matter the deceased's identity? He didn't want to know those things.
“Maybe,” I said to him, somehow not annoyed, “you should shove my head in a bucket of cold water, and see how I react. My guess is, I'd flail around like mad until I got loose, and then I'd throw a punch or two, and then probably back off and start screaming at you. But it's hard to say, really, until it happens. People are funny that way.”
He smiled. “That's not a bad answer. But not a complete one, either.”
“No?” I turned, looked out at the gray-black ships in their gray-black drydock berths. There'd be a man like Tug on each of these, a man responsible for bloom and fire safety, for emergency response in general. The vast majority would come from spacer backgrounds, rather than from the Response corps itself, but then none of these ships, in their local supply and survey runs, would ever face a danger like ours, would ever be quite so immediately in harm's way. This questioning, then, was not only warranted, but necessary.
“I'll tell you what,” I said. “If anything happens, I'll promise to put a high priority on staying out of your way. I think I can promise that much, at least.”
He nodded approvingly. “That's all I'm after, John. When things go sour, there isn't a lot of time to dick around. If I sense you're a liability, I'll have to add you to my list of problems. If not, you can be safely ignored, and I mean that in the kindest possible way. I have no objection, by the way, to carrying a reporter on the mission. I think it's probably a good idea.”
“Good?” I said, unduly flattered by the comment. “Why, exactly?”
“Hell, freund, if you can't answer that, maybe Captain's asked Herr Lottick for the wrong man.”
He clapped me on the shoulder and walked away. It hadn't been an insult, hadn't been delivered or received as one. You know how harsh words can cement a friendship? As if to say, you and I are close enough that these barbs won't come between us. That was what he sounded like.
I had to admire the trick; few people bothered with it anymore. Who, after all, had the time to practice?
SIX:
Sometimes They Get Out
“One quarter starboard yaw turn,” Darren Wallich called out. “Two-tenths gee-thrust on my command. Go! And... thrust vector aligned, intercept course, median consumption trajectory. Right on the average, people, give yourselves a gold star.”
Grunts of approval filled the bridge. Four stations here: one for Wallich, one for Tosca Lehne, one for Renata Baucum and, oddly enough, one for me as well. A crowded environment, and a confusing, visually cluttered one as well: metal bulkheads painted beige, covered here and there with text-covered white plastic and sprouting orange seats and dark gray control consoles. A bridge designed for zero gravity and not meant, particularly, to be understood at a glance. Since my actual seat was on the ceiling, and I didn't like to strap into it at Ganymedean surface gravity, I had conducted the drill standing up between the chairs of Lehne and Baucum, reaching up awkwardly for the controls, my arm a little stiff in the uniform which, after six days, I still hadn't quite got used to.
“Nobody's just a reporter on my ship,” Wallich had told me several times. “You can run the resource allocation oversight console. Veto authority over information systems and power allocation—any fool can handle that.”
Nice to know he had such confidence in me, but then, the job actually did appear necessary for the proper functioning of the ship. The allocation programs hiccupped rather more often in his rehearsals than they would in real life, but when I failed to compensate properly, the very best result would be a waste of fuel during maneuvers. The worst I wasn't so sure about, but it probably involved life support failures and reactor overloads and everyone winding up dead.
So how about that? With a few days' training, I could be an actual crew member on an actual interplanetary ship. My official rank was logged as “Spaceman Recruit,” though my pay was an officer's—actually, a bit more than I'd made as a cobbler.
“Captain?” said the voice of Jenna Davenroy over the intercom. She was crammed into the tiny engine room with Rapisardi, keeping the engines healthy. This seemed to involve keeping their uranium fuel at the proper temperature by regulating the flow of coolant through the three ladderdown reactors. The job seemed to frustrate them both.
“Go ahead, engine room,” Wallich said.
“Captain, I hear an alarm,” Davenroy said.
“Yes? What alarm? What's your status?”
“Not my alarm,” she corrected. “I hear it. Outside the ship, I think, in the hangar.”
“Outside? Ah, crap.” He chuckled. “Okay, fire drill. Everybody out, single file.”
I couldn't tell if he was joking or not, but the others worked their harnesses loose and struggled out of their seats, and I followed them out as they left.
Tug Jinacio alone had no assigned function during flight; his job was to wait around for an emergency—real or simulated—to happen, and then to spring instantly to proper action. Thus, he was at the main hatch before anyone else, working the latches, throwing it open, jumping boldly out onto the shipyard floor. The rest of us squeezed through behind him, twisting and ducking around the controls and protuberances of the modified cargo hold.
Outside, yes, there was an alarm bell going off—BING! BING! BING! BING! Not a fire but a bloom alarm. Hard-hatted workers ran here and there across the floor, doing who knows what. Security was here, as well, the pair of sticks Wallich had reluctantly called in as my reports drew larger and larger crowds of gawkers, who proved more and more difficult to send away. But the sticks didn't seem to know what to do. They stood looking around, waiting for something obvious to happen. Like me, they couldn't seem to tell if this was a drill.
I caught sight of a stranger, a helmetless and visorless man in street clothes, doing something up against a far wall. Urinating? No, dumping something out of a bottle, some milky liquid that splashed into one of the air vents there. Well, that sure didn't look right. Pointing, I shouted to the sticks, but they had seen the man already, and were hurrying toward him. Where had he come from? An ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE door?
Halfway there, the sticks halted. The man himself was backing slowly away from the wall, his attention focused on the air vent, on what was happening there. Smoke? Fire? Contamination?
Bloom.
I had lived two decades in the Immunity without ever seeing one up close. I'd seen them often in VR collage, of course, but how was I to know how completely the intervening technology blurred the experience? The air vent and the wall it was part of began to boil, their substance turning fluid, turning into rainbow-threaded vapor as the tiny, tiny mycora disassembled them molecule by molecule. The process was slower
than I would have expected, like watching a pool of spilled syrup ooze out across a table, but the immediacy, the reality of it had frozen me in my tracks. How vivid the colors, how crisp the lines and edges! I knew exactly what I was looking at: class one threaded bloom in early germination phase, about two minutes before fruiting began. Some structure already visible in the expanding fog, crystalline picks growing like needles from the drydock wall. I knew exactly what I was looking at, and yet it looked nothing like I would have expected. Nothing at all.
Had the man with the bottle caused this? No, of course not. What an absurd thought! Mycora had caused this, deadly spores riding the solar wind up from the Mycosystem, kicking around Jovian space probably for years before somehow finding their way in here. No human intervention involved, nor even possible. Why else have an Immunity at all?
Clearly, the man was fighting the bloom, as I would be doing if I'd had a better idea how to go about it. Tug Jinacio, of course, was hindered by no such ignorance. He sprinted for the nearest emergency locker, removing his Response helmet and dashing it against the glass, reaching for the equipment inside and running a double armload of it right up to the edge of the fecund area. The bottle man, apparently mesmerized, continued to back away slowly. The sticks, God bless them, turned tail and ran for the exit.
With my crewmates standing mutely around me, I watched Jinacio open a macrophage magnum and heave its powdery contents into the heart of the bloom. Watched him pick up another and another, repeating the process. But the phages seemed not to have any effect; the rainbow mist continued its slow expansion. An uncataloged pathogen? Jinacio changed tactics, started throwing witch's tits to freeze the area down, but the effect was not noticeably better, and I began to really worry, because if fruiting bodies were given a chance to form, spores would be blasted all over the inside of this hangar, and Galileo would have a problem like Galileo had never seen nor dreamt of.
