by Wil McCarthy
DOOR (2) leads—ALARM: EDGE DETECTED!
ALARM: EDGE DETECTED!
Retreat, scan, evaluate. Elevatorcrawlspacewindowstairwell? Stairwell! Internal models suspect—engage self-doubt. Simulate outcomes of potential actions?
Might have happened this way: tumble tumble crash.
Might have happened this way: tumble crash tumble.
Might have happened this way: tumble tumble crash tumble.
Brooding. Brooding. Review command sequence, compare actions taken. Brooding. Confirmed: command sequence error. Might have fallen down the stairs! Q: Source(command_input)? A: . = FLOYD.
Engage abstraction. Erroneous command_input from FLOYD. Scan memory? This time and that time and that time. Insight! Fuzzy logic, unreliable data. FLOYD is unreliable? Adjust expectation model: CONFIDENCE (command_input(FLOYD)) = . * 0.5. STOP! PUNISH! PUNISH! Ouch, ouch, UNDO. Engage abstraction!
PRIORITY(obedience(FLOYD)) >> PRIORITY(preservation(SELF)).
ergo...
Must proceed with command sequence given by FLOYD. Ours is not to question. Sadness. Sadness.
ALARM: EDGE DETECTED!
ALARM: EDGE DETECTED!
#qf$(i@)qf78f165h#.#
EOF
“One of Governor's separated intelligences wrote this,” Dibrin said. “Spontaneously, without prompting. Creativity, maybe, a desire to communicate that it has an inner life. In their idle periods, awake but... understimulated, who knows what runs through their strange little minds? Smarter than mice, most ways, and of course they can speak, after a fashion. Not like you and I do, but information is communicated. Seek, you've got to wonder sometimes, what do they really know? The really interesting thing is that this story requires strong gravity, which the SI has never seen, and a physical body, which the SI has never had. That's what peculiar means.”
I felt a chill. “Isn't it a little dangerous, to use these things you don't really understand?”
Dibrin shrugged. “I don't know. How long did man use fire without doing chemistry? I'm saying yeah, probably it is dangerous, but what are you going to do? Life has got to go on.”
Darren Wallich cleared his throat. “The adaptive immune system is the thing that bothers me the most. How can you sleep at night? You've got self-replicating, self-mutating phages and everything floating around here with God knows what in their programming. It's inconceivable, really. The more I think about it, the more astounded I become.”
“We let evolution do the work,” Dibrin said, now sounding a bit defensive.
“And artificial intelligence,” Wallich agreed, “And unsecured nanotechnology. The common ingredient is that there's nobody in control. There's not even a mechanism for control.”
Dibrin was waving the comment away. “Maybe we don't feel like working ourselves to death. Maybe we recognize some problems too big to handle with raw brain power. Adaptive systems seek optimal solution by themselves, with no need for us to test out every single possibility until we find something that works. Saint Helier hasn't had a bloom in seven years, did you know that? And our best brains aren't tied up with the struggle; they're free to create the things that make our lives easier and more interesting. Seek, we have full time poets in the Gladholds. Do you?”
Wallich laughed at the idea.
“Ah, go ahead,” Dibrin said, now visibly irked, “you spend your life trying to catch up, spend your resources trying to stay ahead of it, see if it matters to me. Evolution never sleeps, but a man has got to. Even you.”
“I like the idea of a place where the work does itself,” Rapisardi said, distantly, looking around the room as if for a friend who'd wandered away. He seemed particularly interested in the knot of people dancing, over by the bar.
Softening, Dibrin replied: “Not all the work. Though there are those ones who get by on wallfruit and hallway air. The option for idleness does actually exist, nowadays.”
The bulb was empty already in Rapisardi's hand. He glanced at it, frowned slightly, glanced around the room again. “That music has a nice rhythm. Is there more beer?”
Dibrin dug into a tight pocket at his waist, his fingers coming out with one of the little gold coins people seemed to use for money here. He examined it for a moment, then handed it over to Rapisardi. “This is enough for five bulbs. Maybe you'll find a friend.”
The biophysicist brightened, looked to Wallich for confirmation, then brightened some more when he received a nod. Moments later, he was off to his hoped-for debauchery.
“The man needs to get out more,” Dibrin said, looking after Rapisardi with friendly amusement.
“He's been in space for a few weeks,” Wallich said.
But Dibrin was shaking his head. “It's more than that. This Venus news has hit you duckfeet people hard. For us, the Mycosystem is just a fact of life, like the sun and the stars. I think you have always been more afraid of it, more afraid of coexisting with it. But we live right on the upper fringes, and it's not such a stretch to imagine being actually inside.”
“You will be,” Wallich said darkly, his tone more frustrated than accusing. “Never mind natural growth and mutation, never mind that there are crazies out there trying to help the Mycosystem expand. These things you're messing with down here...”
“Will jump up and bite us,” Dibrin finished for him, sounding unimpressed.
“Not like it hasn't happened before,” Wallich said, and took a stiff pull on his beer. “Not like you don't live, as you say, right on the upper fringes of our constant reminder of the fact. This place is an accident waiting to happen.”
“It's already happened,” Dibrin lobbed back. “You live with it. You adapt. You move on with your life. That's how it works.”
“No.”
A third silence descended upon us, heavier than ever, and while I was beginning to appreciate the virtues of silence, a thought that had been nagging at me for hours finally found its voice: “How would they get there? To Venus. There were never people down there, even before. How would they get there?”
Dibrin looked at me and shrugged. “I don't know. As spores?”
I bit back a retort; his carob features were innocent, interested, truthful. He wasn't kidding.
“Not so unfathomable,” he said, observing my expression. “With decent compression, you could fit ten or twenty human genomes in a regular mycospore, maybe a hundred in a big one. Could probably store brain patterns, too, though I'd bet on some integrity losses. Maybe not, if there was enough error-checking built in.”
“I'm not asking whether a human being would fit in a spore,” I said over the music, a bit more loudly than I'd intended. A few faces turned our way. “That question is meaningless. Even if there were human beings down there, which I'm not granting just yet, how would their genes and such get into a spore?”
“I guess something would have to dismantle them, or part of them at least, and record the details as it went. God and Jesus know, enough people got eaten.”
I shuddered, horrified at the thought. Technogenic humans? Assembled atom by atom in the rainbow mist, using a blueprint cribbed directly from the source? No, I refused to believe it.
“Why would the mycora do that? They're just little digesting machines.”
Darren Wallich was shaking his head. “No, Strasheim, they're a lot more than just that. Individually, they're complex and mysterious enough. In groups, their behaviors become even more intricate. They communicate back and forth, change state based on the information they receive...”
“Like a cellular automaton,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Anyway,” Dibrin said, “maybe that is not how it happened. Maybe some old spaceship was involved, and we just didn't notice. Maybe they came from one of the Gladholds, and brought an immune system and atmosphere processing system down with them. It could be a lot of things. You people are going down there, maybe one day you can tell me.”
Wallich still looked unhappy. “I hope all this is true, I ho
pe it is possible to survive down there, because one of these days you're going to need every chance you can get.”
“Yeah,” Dibrin said, unconvinced, “maybe.”
A small, dark woman approached, came up behind him, put her arm around his chest.
“Hi,” he said without turning. “Gentlemen, I've got to go.”
“Who is this?” I asked, nonplused.
“My wife, Lin,” he said, already turning to leave with her.
I guess talking to her was another of those things he could do without moving.
~~~
When I went to bed, about half an hour later, I passed Rapisardi dancing with three women and one other man. He seemed to have trouble keeping his balance, keeping his feet anywhere near the floor, but he'd tied some sort of multicolored rag around his head, and was grinning so broadly I wondered if his mouth would be sore in the morning.
Funny, but I don't think I'd ever before seen anyone try so hard to have a good time, and still manage to succeed.
THIRTEEN:
Munity
Turns out we'll be paying for our food and clothing purchases after all, using, of all things, our shoes. No kidding! Our guide pointed out some bracelets, and though they were fashioned of plain gold he assured us they were very expensive. From the labor that went into them, I assumed, for they were hand-made, but no, it turns out the fingernail-sized “dollars” that have been spent on our behalf are also made of gold, and derive their value from their own intrinsic worth as metal. As if we Munies walked around trading actual grams of uranium back and forth. This is what comes of not using ladderdown!
The Gladholders think our “duck shoes” are frightfully amusing anyway, and when they found out what the sole weights were made of, I thought they'd never stop laughing. And when they offered to replace those same blocks with equivalent masses of lead, which of course is five times more valuable back home, I thought we'd never stop laughing. This interplanetary trading is a jolly business, you bet.
—From “Glad Times in the Gladhold,”
(c) 2106 by John Strasheim
~~~
You know, Momma, one thing we never eat in Ganymede is curry. I've rediscovered it down here, where they seem to put it on just about everything, and I'll be bringing some seeds home with me, Marco Polo style. Turns out there's no such thing as a curry plant, but there's cumin and cardamom and tumeric and coriander, all—I'm told!—easier to grow than most actual food crops. The “wallfruit” plant, engineered right here in the Gladholds, could also be a welcome Ganymedean immigrant. Wallich swears this stuff will never make it through quarantine, and I guess he would know, but I'm going to make the attempt just the same. Maybe some gourmet customs technician will plead my case, and you'll actually be able to taste these things yourself someday.
I love you, Momma, and hope your days are passing comfortably.
—From “MOMLETR.0821.06.STRASHEIM.OUT”
~~~
We breakfasted at the staying home, visited the ship to organize our newfound stores, conducted the Great Shoe Transaction with glue and paring knives, lunched at a tavern near the dock, and read our mail while a dark, bleary-eyed hunchback cleared away the dishes.
The volume of response we'd gotten since our arrival here was larger than in the entire week preceeding it, so the task was as much a housekeeping function as it was business or entertainment. One had to keep one's working memory clear, after all, or move the excess onto slates, where it could easily get misplaced. Most of the mail was addressed to me, which seemed to suit the others well enough; we're too busy to muck around with these things, et cetera, et cetera...
I shared some of the better ones just the same. The Immunity had never seen much in the way of celebrity, but people must still have felt the need for it, deep down in the genes that code for tribal loyalties and such. I'd always done my best to bring heroes to the public attention, but with the exception of Response officers in the wake of a bloom, I'd never found much consensus on just who the heroes were. Doctors? Plumbers? Farm technicians? We'd all die without these people, but somehow their efforts never seemed to arouse much interest.
But now... Well, it had never really occurred to me that fame had more to do with where you were than with who. No one could deny the heroism of Tug Jinacio, who had died protecting the rest of us, but that very act of self-sacrifice had removed his image from my reports and from the public zeitgeist. The rest of us had done nothing brave or noble, had in fact fled from the perils back home, which our viewers by and large still faced, and yet increasingly I heard tones of admiration and even awe in those same viewers' voices. And of a strange familiarity as well, as if every message came from some old school friend whose face and name I couldn't quite place.
Talk was sometimes familiar on the news channels, as well, but that was different; through long association and endless—if sporadic—discussion, the contributors to a particular channel did indeed get to know one another. But the traffic on my channels had increased tenfold since the mission began, and that clubby atmosphere was starting to get lost in the noise. Still, I can't say the feeling wasn't gratifying, and it was in that spirit that I flashed a few of the letters around:
Dear John Strasheim and Louis Pasteur crew: Hi. I just wanted to say, your reports are the highlight of our day. We flash them around at lunchtime, and talk about them after work, sometimes for as much as half an hour...
Strasheim: Hallo! Kurt Fenton here. I'm a road builder. Keep those messages coming! It's fascinating to learn about the Gladhold, although I wish you were sending more pictures. I'm a visual person. I especially like the shots where other crew members are visible...
Dear Mr. Strasheim, can you please tell Captain Wallich not to scratch himself on camera? You should catch this in your editing process, as well. I mean, really, my daughter is six years old, and I would like her to be able to watch these reports and collages and learn from them, but she laughs very hard whenever Wallich starts scratching his bum, and I can't get her to pay attention...
This last provoked some merriment, no less from Wallich than from any of the rest of us. A good leader knows how to take a joke, at least when his tickle capacitor is working. There were, of course, some nasty letters as well, and our Venus revelation had begun to provoke a few tentative responses, mostly of the in-the-name-of-God-please-tell-me-you're-joking variety, but these I kept to myself. Plenty of time to brood on these matters when we were back on the ship.
Rapisardi, who had eaten lightly at both meals, looked about like you'd expect for a man who'd taken too much beer and too little sleep. He didn't seem too amused by the letters, either, and asked to be left alone when Wallich chided him about it. Davenroy, though, who insisted she had slept well, did not look much better. She'd been pushing her food around in the bowl, not really eating.
“Is your stomach okay?” Baucum asked, looking her over with a medical doctor's appraising air. She put a finger on the older woman's cheekbone, pulled down to peer beneath the eyelid. “You're looking sort of green.”
Davenroy shrugged. “I can't eat like I used to, I guess. This food isn't sitting too well.”
“You may lack some of the enzymes,” Baucum said, now using both hands to palpate Davenroy's neck below the jawline. “It can happen with an unfamiliar diet. Water should help a little; can you drink another glass or two?”
Rapisardi opened his mouth as if to speak, then got a funny look on his face for a moment. And then, alarmingly, he sneezed. All eyes turned in his direction.
“Sorry!” he said, sounding rather surprised himself. And then he covered his nose and mouth and sneezed twice more.
“Damn,” Baucum said, in a tone of wonder. She edged Tosca Lehne out of the way, coming around the table to peer more closely at Rapisardi, to touch his forehead and cheeks and neck. “You're hot. Is your stomach all right?”
“No, I don't think it is.”
“Barely touched the food,” Lehne observed. “He's got to be
actually sick, don't you think?”
Baucum didn't answer, but everyone else got a nervous look. Especially Davenroy.
Rapisardi sneezed again, and then snuffled and coughed, as though he'd been breathing pepper. But he hadn't. Actually sick. The words chilled me; nobody ever got actually sick in the Immunity, except the elderly. No power seemed able to keep them healthy for long, but that was a matter of simple degeneration, not bodily invasion by... what, bacteria? Prions? Viruses?
“Could it be flu?” Wallich asked. The tickle capacitor must have been active, because his grin faltered only slightly. But his tone was one of mild outrage.
Baucum nodded. “It very well could.” She looked Rapisardi in the eye, and then Davenroy. “The good news is, as long as we keep the fever controlled, that's unlikely to be fatal. Are you dizzy?”
Chris Dibrin picked that moment to return from the lavatory.
“We may have some sick people here,” Baucum said to him.
“Huh,” he said, not visibly alarmed. “Could be flu.”
“We think it is,” Baucum agreed, indicating Rapisardi and Davenroy with her gaze.
Dibrin studied the two for a moment, and then nodded. He'd been about to move in next to me at the table, but now he pulled away, headed toward the bar. “Return in a moment,” he said. And indeed, the transaction he conducted with the bartender was casual and brief, and in half a minute he was settling in next to me.
He passed a small packet to Davenroy, and another to Rapisardi, and released several more in midair, letting them flutter slowly down to the tabletop. “Try these.”
