by Wil McCarthy
What happened next I can describe in detail only because my zee-spec was recording at the time. My own memory is of screaming and jostling and running, nothing more, but of course the clear, steady images show that I must have been standing there watching as the bottle man stepped up behind Tug Jinacio and pushed him bodily into the bloom. Tug's body did not come apart at once into threads and dust, but his skin had gone rainbow-crystalline with mycoric frost before he'd even hit the floor, and of course he never did rise. Did my recording capture the full depth and character of his scream? It was a quiet thing, mewling and pathetic with surprise. How can this have happened to me? How can this fate be mine? This pain, this PAIN, how can it be mine?
In my dreams I hear a scream sometimes that is like the one I recorded, in the same way that the actual bloom was like the VR collages that had supposedly prepared me for it. That Jinacio suffered in the twelve seconds of his death goes without saying, but the images are not on file. God, I owe him that much, at least.
Again, I have no memory of the bottle man speaking, but in my private records he turns toward us, his expression frantic with remorse and fear and rage. “They're bombs,” he says tightly. “I can't let you do this. However human it may be, it's monstrous to destroy what you don't understand.”
And then, whether through accident or miscalculation or deliberate suicide, he steps a little too far to the left, catches the edge of the bloom, and dies elaborately. Maybe I should ask other witnesses what they remember of these events. Maybe these things simply have no place in the mammalian brain, no means of being recognized or stored, or maybe I'm just blessed with a poor memory. I don't really care.
My recollection rejoins that of the zee-spec as Darren Wallich crowds into my view, grabbing me by the shoulders and shoving me up the ramp, into the Louis Pasteur's open hatch. “...not going to get through the t-balance,” he was saying, “but if the roof collapses we're over and done with. Get aboard! Get aboard! Damn it, I'm not going to tell you again!”
At least the scaffolding was gone, the ship bare and gleaming in its peculiar way. I did as I was told, and the hatch was closed behind me.
No windows in Louis Pasteur—have I mentioned that?—but there were camera dots embedded in the hull which could assemble a visual image and project it through a zee-spec. Somehow, I was coherent enough to manage this task, and so was watching as the exit portal irised open in the ceiling above us. Our ladderdown reactors hissed to life. Propulsion came online. The world shuddered. I even reached up to my console and adjusted the memory allocations as our landing feet broke contact with the floor. She starts—she moves—she seems to feel/The thrill of life along her keel! After that it was the clanging of shiplocks, the roar of engines, the press of acceleration as we fled the interior of Ganymede for the safety of the cold and dark outside.
“I hope the sticks got out okay,” I said in an even tone, to no one in particular. And after that a lot of us were crying.
~~~
The wisdom of assigning reporters to hazardous space missions may be a subject for debate, but I'll point out that I was the first to know what was going on, once we'd made orbit and had a chance to get communications set up. About an hour, I'd say, though it may have been less.
A quick tour of the Galileo daily records, still unfolding as I perused them, revealed that our bloom had in fact been the second of four that occurred within the space of an hour. All were now under control in a Final Alert freezedown, with two pathogens identified and catalogued for future Immune response. Cleanup crews were sterilizing the areas, and repairs were expected to commence within 48 hours. Considering the seriousness of the event, casualties had been light—only twelve fatalities thus far—but material damage estimates had already exceeded two million g.u., enough to feed the entire Immunity for a week.
Even more disturbing was the news on a lot of the talk channels:
...if it isn't the Temples I'll kiss the bloom with my own two lips...
...spokeswoman denies involvement. My ass! I read unauthorized access by Temples members in the vicinities of all four events...
...police raids on a pair of Temples laboratories have already taken place. Authorities can “neither confirm nor rule out” some form of human assistance in the initiation of these blooms. How they could transport the spores I have no idea...
I thought of the bottle man, and shivered. What kind of bottle had it been? What kind of contents? Technogenic life was very nearly a universal solvent, capable of disassembling almost anything. Our knowledge of any given mycorum's inner structure came solely via the phages that absorbed and destroyed it, and occasionally from direct microscopic assay of the remaining fragments. You couldn't simply pack a bunch of live mycora into a bottle and carry them around with you, even assuming you could safely collect them...
There was also a crazy-ass statement from the Temples of Transcendent Evolution themselves, echoed to most of the news channels on the network:
The events of this afternoon are tragic and regretable. However, no such action has been sanctioned nor shall be sanctioned by this organization, which is humanitarian and gnostic in nature. It is possible that human beings are partly responsible for what has happened, and if the parties involved—if any—are affiliated with the Temples in any way we shall certainly get to the bottom of it. We revile malice in any form, and offer our full cooperation with any investigation.
However, a possible motivation for this attack—if in fact an attack has occurred—has become known to us. It concerns the Louis Pasteur and its supposed mission of discovery; one or more persons claiming a close connection with this endeavor have favored us with an anonymous message—detailed and credible within our ability to determine—indicating that the “detectors” to be seeded across sterile portions of the inner planets are in fact ladderdown explosive devices intended to devastate the surfaces of these worlds.
Little is known about the physical and psychical workings of the Mycosystem, and such an attack, in addition to its grave moral repugnance, could have severe repercussions throughout the solar system. It is possible that today's events represent an attempt by desperate persons to prevent this tragedy from occurring. If so, we can only lament that we were not approached earlier, so that a more clement solution to the crisis could be found.
Well.
I flashed summaries of this information to the rest of the crew, and could not resist linking my zee-spec to a ship-internal camera dot to record and downlink a brief news channel commentary of my own:
John Strasheim here. Listen, citizens, none of this makes sense, even to those of us who were there. Please, let's burn no Temples tonight.
Eventually, Vaclav Lottick got ahold of us, using a full VR conference channel in realtime flash. “Pasteur, Lottick here!” His face, when it appeared before me, was glistening, flushed with rage. “It's the goddamn Temples. I knew we should have been suppressing that organization, I just knew it. Reply!”
“Pasteur here, go ahead,” said Wallich, and suddenly my view of him, seated on what was for me the ceiling, was blocked by a mosaic of imaged faces: Wallich's own, and mine, and Baucum's, and Tosca Lehne's. Another window showed a distorted view of Davenroy and Rapisardi in the tiny, dimly lit engine room. None of us were actually looking at the cameras, so our images scattered around Lottick's own in a messy jumble that seemed interested in everything but him.
As it turned out, Lottick's information sources were even better than mine. You'd kind of hope so, wouldn't you? What he said was, “We've got two very bad mycora on the loose. Blooms are controlled in Galileo, but the same pathogens are starting to crop up in the Five Cities. Immune system primed for them, but goddamn are they tough to fight off. Early analysis shows they contain the entire genomes of a number of our latest macrophages, and a whole lot of other crap besides. We know how they're doing it, at least: it's goddamn human intervention. The splice marks are plain as a letter of confession!”
“Come again?” W
allich said, though of course he must have heard perfectly well.
“Somebody,” Lottick snarled, “has been modifying and breeding these things right under our noses. Somebody, yeah. It's the Temples. What about those goddamn 'probe packages' they launch into the Mycosystem two, three times a year? What about those? Are they sending their best results back down to the source? This is bad, Wallich, this is very bad. Don't you dare land that ship.”
“Why not?” asked Baucum, sounding at that moment about as flustered as I felt.
Lottick's face darkened further. “Why not? I thought we understood each other. One, Louis Pasteur was almost certainly the target of these attacks. Or one of the targets, anyway. Set her down, and you're just stupidly asking to be a threat to yourselves and others. Not on my say-so, you're not. Two, somebody is directing the evolution of these mycora. We've been treating severe cold adaptation and other upper-system threats as extreme longshots, but wouldn't you say the odds suddenly look a lot better? We've made a huge investment in that ship, and right now I'd say it's safer inside the damn Mycosystem than it is here at home.”
“We don't have any food aboard,” Wallich pointed out.
Outraged, Lottick made a face. “Well boo hoo, Wallich. Some of us down here don't have functioning bodies anymore. You've got a pap synthesizer and a water tank, and you took fuel and cargo three days ago, and as far as I'm concerned that means you're fully operational. I want those goddamn detectors in place and online as soon as goddamn possible, before we wake up one morning two meters deep in goo. That's your mission. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, perfectly,” Wallich shot back. “But I still say we're undersupplied. I don't think we even have enough oxygen, unless we want to ladder it out of our fuel supply. There is no margin aboard this ship, and I won't fly her like this.”
“So fine. So get supplies from the goddamn Gladholders for all I care. You are not to set that ship down, and I doubt you're particularly safe even in orbit. Whatever you do, do without excessive delay. Look around you, Wallich; we may be too late already.”
“Understood,” Wallich said thoughtfully, his grin creeping back into place. “But you're right, we could pass through the Floral asteroids on our way down. That's probably a fairly workable idea.”
And so that fateful voyage was born three weeks premature, amid pain and terror and an almost lethal lack of planning. And rather a lot of unfinished business, yes. Small mercy, but at least I'd never told Momma about the plant I'd been meaning to buy her; she and I would, as per her prediction, never see each other again.
SEVEN:
Speed
In a gravitational sense, the Gladhold is far, far below us, so much so that it would take three years to fall that far, assuming we nulled out the heliocentric velocity we started with, namely Jupiter's. But canceling that orbital velocity would ladder a mere gram of uranium, even counting the energy required to escape Jupiter in the first place. What's planned here is somewhat more intense: burning half our fuel supply all in a shot, flinging Louis Pasteur sunward on a “beeline” trajectory that intercepts the Floral asteroids in just twenty-three days—a new all-time human speed record. And then, God willing, burning the other half to stop us when we get there.
Our inner-system schedule is similarly compressed: Earth on day 43, as opposed to 151 in the original flight plan. Alas, we'll be paying for this performance in our final burn, which will take over seven months to return us to the Immunity. A kilogram of uranium seems like a lot when you just want to power a city, but down there it's like feeding the family on a single tangerine.
—from Rrrrrrrrrrocket Ride
(c) 2106 by John Strasheim
~~~
Things were still in a state of disarray, nobody really sure what was aboard and what wasn't, who did and did not know of our departure, when Davenroy lit the engines up. Life was a messy conference call, a crowding of fear-stinking bodies, a hunt for checklists and air filters and velcro strips to hold things down when the weightlessness returned. Thrust surprisingly heavy, about twice the gravity we'd all got used to at Galileo, and there I was, hanging from my seat straps, feeling the blood pool lightly in my head.
The worst of it was that my allocation duties were quickly done with, and everyone else seemed to have a job to do. So it was that I pulled up an external window and a navigation graphic, had time to correlate the two, and made the announcement:
“Our orbit takes us right past the starship. I mean, right past it.”
“Departure conic,” Darren Wallich said distractedly, his eyes on instruments I couldn't see. “'Orbit' usually means you're not still under thrust.”
“Not by my dictionary,” I fired back, unaccountably annoyed at the contradiction.
“Possibly. But learn the language while you're here, right?”
“Anyway,” I continued, “Our departure conic looks like it'll bring us very close, like within a couple of kilometers. It should be coming over the horizon right about now.”
“Coming over the limb,” Wallich corrected. And chuckled.
Oh, this was going to be a fun voyage.
But now everyone started stabbing at the air, pulling up exterior-view windows to see what I was talking about. Here is what these windows showed: a circular opening in space, a hole not only through the ship's hull but through chairs, instrument panels, and people—a hole looking out at focus infinity, no matter what was in the way. Not so hard on the eye, really, but it takes getting used to, especially the way it tracks head but not eye movements. Turn to look at someone, and suddenly there are stars showing through where a face or a heart should be.
Or in this case, the limb of Ganymede showing through, with the stars unwinking above it. In one direction, the stripey beige face of Jupiter staring down, not nearly as big or imposing at this distance as you'd think. In the other, a scattering of smaller moons, faint crescents in the light of a too-distant sun. Below, the gray, cratered, raked-looking surface of home, lifeless and cold, the ice just one more hard, rocky mineral in its crust. And there, coming over the horizon right beside Renata Baucum's head, a tiny but unmistakable gleam of metal. The starship.
“Not much to look at,” Tosca Lehne observed.
True enough—what I saw was a long, skinny barbell, mirror-bright and all but featureless. But smaller gleams surrounded it, crew pods and construction boats strung on just-visible lanyards like insects caught in a web, and these provided some sense of scale as we approached. Big, very, just over a kilometer long and about a fifth that wide at the flared ends. The end pieces themselves would probably have fit in the main cavern at Philusburg, but you'd have to slice the central shaft into ten or twelve sections and squeeze them in over flattened buildings before you'd even get close to fitting the whole structure in.
Surface details gradually became visible as the ship's image swelled—hatches and and umbillical sockets and painted signs too tiny to make out. But still the overall impression was of smoothness, featurelessness, as with an old-style aircraft or submarine. It didn't particularly look years away from completion, but I supposed that smooth metal skin could well have been hollow inside, not so much a ship as a ship's empty jacket.
“Captain Wallich,” I said, after making sure I was recording a good image both of him and of the approaching structure, “Since I lack the vocabulary, would you like to say a few words about this for our viewers back home?”
“A few words?” He seemed fazed for a moment, but then chuckled and loosened slightly. “That's right, we have an audience on board, don't we. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that object out there is your starship. One of these days a name will stick to it, probably when its mission is better defined, but for now 'Starship' will do. Maybe we'll just end up calling it that, ha ha.”
“For those of us less familiar with the project, Captain,” I prodded, “what are those flared structures at the ends?”
He nodded, still a bit nervous and annoyed. One of my crew has died today,
berichter. Push too hard and you'll wind up very unhappy. “Uh, yes. The aft planchet is the propulsion focus. If you look, you'll see it's curved sort of like a flashight mirror, only what it's reflecting are gamma rays. The forward one is the cabin shield, so the crew and cargo don't fry. You can't see it from here, but there's a smaller planchet forward of the cabin as well, for debris and cosmic rays. Going that fast, a speck of dust is like a bomb.”
“And what's the crew size expected to be?”
“Good question, freund.”
“Not everyone, though. Not the whole Immunity.”
He sighed. “Not unless we liquefy them, no. Crew module's about the size of an apartment building, cargo spaces included. How many do you think it will hold?”
His chuckle was on the humorless side.
“So what, exactly, is the purpose of the vehicle?” I pressed. “If it's not going to carry us all away, as many people seem to believe, then what's it intended to carry?”
“Spores,” Wallich said curtly. “Our spores, for a new Immunity. If we ever need to run away, we need a safe place to run to, right? Before the Mycosystem catches up with us? But there absolutely will be human crew and colonists aboard, people who are alive and working in the Immunity right now. I'm not aware of the number or nature of the slots, but I imagine anyone will have the right to try out for one.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. With a little cut and paste, that sequence would collage nicely. Would Lottick object to my breaking party line on the starship issue? Did it matter? If my judgment was what he wanted, my judgment was what he would get. Not like he could do much about it at this point, anyway. The starship flashed by, huge for a few moments, its closest range only a few times greater than its length, and moving past at over five kilometers a second. And then it was behind us, shrinking away like a warning shot over the limb of Ganymede.
