Bloom

by Wil McCarthy

  “Fly right through,” said Toscsa Lehne. “T-balance really does work. You'd never even feel it.”

  “Yeah?” Wallich grinned. “Bet your life on it?”

  Well, naturally nobody took him up on that.

  SIXTEEN:

  The TGL Garden

  Entrd Mycstm. Lvly scnry. Wsh U wr here!

  ~~~

  Hello? This is your mother. I just found out your big trip is to Earth. Shame on you, not telling a thing like that! I had to hear it from another patient. Your letters... Well, I can't make much sense of them, but I'm certain the word “Earth” was never mentioned. They say the thought is what counts. Thinking is important. True terrible. Say hello to the Earth for me, all right? And hurry back. Get that thing away from me. Yes, I'm finished now.

  ~~~

  Momma, Hi! Will wave @ Earth 4U luv John!

  ~~~

  GNRL NOTICE ATTN CHRIS DIBRIN ST HELIER GOV OFFICE: Occurs to me our data rate to St Helier about 9X data rate to Jupiter. Can set up a relay? Compressed data stream, not encrypted, public channel OK. You owe no favors, but we need an ally. What say?

  ~~~

  Attention John Strasheim, Immune Ship Louis Pasteur Communications Officer: I've brought your request up with Governor and received grudging permission to comply. Monies are owed already, he remonstrates. Very glad to hear you survived Mycosystem entry. I admit I had my doubts! Further communications to me may be indexed &CHDBSH8091 for faster routing. Relay queue messages should be indexed &W=G&XXXXSH8094. Further requests are likely to be denied, but I and my devil microscopic helpers will do what we can. Wishing you best fortune down there.

  ~~~

  &CHDBSH8091 Thanks.

  ~~~

  &W=G&XXXXSH8094 Hallo Immunity via Gladhold! Treacherous spaces above and below, many spores, but we survive, a bubble of Immunity in the warm and bright. Mycosystem is a visible thing—enclosed please find “stroke vector” sketch of transient megastructure. More and more of these, and the sun so close! Next stop Mars, about which more later.

  ~~~

  “I think I'm ready to learn about t-balance,” I said to Tosca Lehne as we sat alone together on the invisible bridge. Bloom watch: walls blanked on the zee, replaced with starscape. A black disc eclipsing the body of Sol, leaving the corona shining around it, brighter than the entire sun as seen from Jupiter. Unreal. Nothing was real but our own two selves, bent weightlessly into invisible chairs, the pressure of strap and cushion the only sign of Louis Pasteur holding out the infinite emptiness. For me, anyway—Lehne himself was on instrument duty, with probably no outside view at all.

  “Yeah?” Lehne yeahed, looking askance at me. “Sudden interest?”

  I shook my head. “Not sudden, no. Convenient. I've needed to know, and here we both are with time on our hands. Since I have to squeeze our entire experience down to single paragraphs, I want to be sure I'm even more aware of the details than before. It's... important to know the totality whose essence I'm trying to capture, you see?”

  “T-balance is a detail?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He pursed his lips reproachfully. “Not a detail, Strasheim. This mission wasn't conceived until Wallich read my second paper. I am the inventor of my own prison.”

  “Shiptime:” I quoted, “jail, with the possibility of suffoctaion.”

  “Right,” Lehne said, unsmiling.

  “You're not happy about being here.”

  “No. You may think you volunteered, but I don't think I did. No one else available. Indispensability as the chief condition of our lives. Busy, always busy, and no one there to pick up the slack. That's life, eh? That's life in the Immunity.”

  “You don't enjoy your work, then?”

  “No, I do.”

  “But you wish you had more help? Some assistants? I'm not clear on what you're trying to say.”

  Lehne shrugged, looking resigned to his tension. “Wishing the fate of the future didn't rest so heavily on every set of shoulders. Clearer? Lottick asked me to go on the mission, and I told him I would. But he wasn't telling all he knew, and that frightened me. Still does, and now there's spy bugs in the allocation console, and traces of Gladholder immune system lingering in the air and food that Wallich can't seem to get rid of.”

  Having no response to that, I switched topics and prompted: “You were going to tell me about t-balance.”

  He turned, faced me fully. The corona's glare reflected from his zee-spec lenses, pink and yellow navigation lines criscrossing the starscape behind him. A frail, angry human, soaring alone through empty space.

  “Heavy metals,” he said, “forced into organic-like nanostructure. Electrophoresis, epitaxy, shock cooling so the atoms never get a chance to displace. Very difficult to manufacture, but it looks like TGL to the TGL, even though really it's heavy metals. Knowing it was toxic, they'd dismantle, form cysts around the fragments, use them for nucleation anchors. A platform to grow from, permanent because unusable for any other purpose. But they don't know. Don't have the means to figure it out. Electron holes here and here and here, they see, and they know it must be a piece of mature mycostructure, neue erbauen verboten, so they stay away. Mycosystem has immune responses of its own, but you can trick it at its roots, tell it you are an immune response.”

  “A sort of Trojan Horse approach, then?”

  “More than that,” he said. “A horse made of eighty trillion Trojan soldiers, sticking their arms out and saying, 'Hi, I'm Trojan like you. Everything is fine, but for God's sake back off before you screw something up.'“

  “Huh. And the Trojans buy this?”

  Lehne shrugged. “So far. Maybe not forever. Geek a sim, it only tells so much. Trojans get angry, though, they'll be choking on actinides, dying and dying until they finally break through. Meanwhile we fight back—chemicals, vacuum phages, heat pipes... Makes them angrier, of course. Hope for a shadow to hide in, out of the sunlight. Cool off, freeze them out. If not, hope they can live without you up in the Immunity, because they'll have to.”

  I grimaced. “Ah, yes. The ever-present risk of death.”

  “Always.”

  “Did you ever guess you'd be in this situation?”

  “This?” For once, Lehne cracked a smile. “Your basic Balkan farmboy doesn't expect to leave home. Having left, for Jupiter no less, he doesn't expect to return. No, the Balkan farmboy lives in perpetual amazement at his surroundings, at his fate. How did this happen? I have a son, did I tell you that?”

  “No,” I said, interested.

  He nodded, starlight and cartoon lines trailing through his hair. “Two years old next month. His mom runs the skylights at Ansharton. I miss both.”

  “I should think so!”

  “I'll sit my son down someday, tell him: don't get too comfortable, boy. Don't get too sure. One day you'll wake up surprised, and never the same after that.”

  “Damn,” I said, looking down suddenly.

  “What? Trans-meg incoming?”

  “Two,” I said, watching them grow, measuring them against the navigation marks. MARS, a fat red arrow said, pointing out a faint red dot. The trans-megs, already thumb-sized, seemed to fire directly at us from a point just ahead of the planet in its dotted-line orbit. But as I watched and measured, I saw that they would miss us, that both structures would sail by hundreds of kilometers beneath my unsupported feet.

  “Accurate?” Lehne asked mildly.

  “Nah, they'll miss. But they give me the willies just the same.”

  “Imagine that.”

  ~~~

  “Lehne doesn't seem too happy,” I told Renata Baucum later that day.

  She working on one of the wardroom's fold-out exercise machines, a confusion of pulleys and cables and stretchy rubber tubing, and wearing—incongurously—the green “body wrap” dress she'd picked up in St. Helier. Its lower corners kept creeping up, weightless, but friction and concealed pins held the garment together, revealing her calves and nothing more. S
weat had begun to glisten there, and on her brow and shoulders and around the edges of her zee-spec lenses.

  “You know anyone who is?” she said back. Pull, twist, release. Pull, twist, release.

  No, I thought, I don't. But what I said was, “I'm glad he's with us. He seems to know what he's about.”

  “You know anyone who doesn't?”

  “What I mean is, he seems very aware of the capabilities and limitations of t-balance. We can fly right through a trans-meg, he says, and that makes me feel better, because we passed nine of them on my watch today. Tomorrow it may be twenty, or fifty, or a thousand, and sometime it may not be possible to avoid them all. We're moving pretty fast.”

  “Personally,” Baucum said, “I'd like a closer look with the instruments. Nobody really knows what the trans-megs do, what they're for. Their computational capacity has got to be staggering, and they interact with each other in peculiar ways. Sometimes they luff and tack like sails, riding the solar wind until they collide. That wouldn't occur by chance, not as often as it's been observed.”

  I frowned. I'd seen a couple of the structures quiver and quake as they sailed by, as if they were about to fly apart at the sight of us. But they hadn't flown apart, and couldn't really see us. Right?

  “You think they're intelligent?”

  “I think they're alive, yes. I know they are, and in terms of the number of subunits and the linkage between them, the complexity is comparable to ours, to any higher animal's. But for all that, they're just components in a larger system.”

  “I always figured they were just goop,” I said.

  “Yeah. So is hemoglobin.”

  Pull, twist, release. Pull, twist, release.

  “I wonder if the Gladholders have any information about it. Maybe I should ask Dibrin.”

  She sniffed. “A bureaucrat. Possibly a saboteur bureaucrat.”

  “Come on, he's our friend.”

  “We barely met him.”

  Suddenly, I was angry. “So what? What difference does that make? I'm sick to death of this idea that friendship is work, that it's some grand project that comes together over months or years or decades. Knowing someone for a long time doesn't mean you're their friend, and meeting someone for the first time doesn't mean you aren't. Everything is work for us. Everything is a process. We're a sad, sick, demented people, you know that? We could stand to improve.”

  Baucum stopped pulling on the ropes. “I didn't mean anything. I didn't intend to... upset...” She seemed at a loss, wholly unprepared for my outburst. “Talk to Dibrin, sure, if you think it'll help.”

  “Why wouldn't it?” I went on, more gently but still riding the scharfblick channel, the sudden realtime stream of self-awareness, neither welcome nor especially resisted. “Where's the harm? We've built ourselves into a state of perpetual crisis where every action has to be weighed and justified. It excuses a lot, excuses us from having to be happy, from having to wonder why we aren't. God, how we trivialize that! What a low priority we assign it! Happiness is a vice to us, a guilty indulgence we save up for, pay for afterward, keep to ourselves like a dirty secret.”

  I took my zee-spec off, waved it at her. “I have idealized virtual environments on this thing. Does that shock you? I don't care! When I get back, I'm going to tell everyone to spend an evening playing around in virtual reality. Just so they'll know. Just so they'll know, for once in their lives, what it's like to feel free, unencumbered, to be met with unconditional acceptance and yes, even love. And there's a problem for you, isn't there? Who has the energy for that? It's like we've inverted the whole point of living, placed risk reduction ahead of the very things we're trying not to risk. But we're still going to die, aren't we? Childless, overworked, unaware of the wider universe and without even love to soothe the pain. Especially without love. I always thought Tosca Lehne was a bit of a social cripple, but he has a wife and family. Did you know? He's unhappy now because he had to leave them, but when he gets back...”

  I paused, studied Baucum's shocked expression. Well, good, let her be shocked. The outburst surprised me as well, but it felt good, liberating, to slip in past her defenses, right past her wit and verve and self-control to touch some inner surface she didn't want to admit was there.

  “We're all such cowards,” I said quietly, “afraid to die, afraid to slow down, afraid to reach for the person beside us and say 'I love you.' It's pathetic.”

  “John,” Baucum murmured, “you surprise me. I didn't know.”

  And then suddenly she was off the exercise seat and drifting into my arms, grasping, holding, pressing her lips against me, and I wanted to protest: no, stop, that wasn't what I meant! But then I wasn't so sure, and then my cabin door was open and we were tumbling inside, and then...

  You know what happened then.

  ~~~

  Later, what seemed like a long time later, we drifted together in warm darkness. Feeling good, feeling languidly and luxuriously alive. This was a thing worth protecting.

  “I had no idea there was such a passionate man in there,” Baucum whispered, tapping me on the chest.

  The admission surprised. Not passionate? I? I, who spent the wee hours prowling for news, foregoing food and sleep in the ongoing effort to bring people closer together? Who took the trouble to cajole and query actual human beings at every turn, to sniff out each story's emotional crux? Who had agreed to this stinking mission for almost no reason at all, for nothing more than ambition and vanity and pure love of the chase?

  “I thought I knew just how you were going to be,” she went on, “servant of the status quo, asking everyone how proud we were to be working for the right side. I think you were supposed to be that way, expected to, I mean, but you know, people are hard to model. In closed environments, all sorts of buried traits come to the fore that nobody's ever seen or anticipated.”

  “And hidden assets,” I whispered, fondling.

  She giggled. “And those, yes. I didn't realize how much I... How much... It's been a long time.”

  “For most of us, I think. I keep saying it's a health issue. Have I told you about 'Boff a Stranger' day?”

  “Stranger?” she said, pushing at me playfully. “Weren't you just the one preaching instant friendship?”

  “Well, you seem friendly enough.”

  “Humph.”

  We drifted in silence for a while. Baucum's mock indignation was fine, it was fun, but I did still feel some sting in the idea that she'd thought me a shill or puppet of the system. And passionless! Was the error hers, or did I really come across that way? She was the aloof insider, after all; I was just here to tell the tale.

  “I'm not receiving instructions, you know,” I finally told her. “Doing my thing, I've caused my share of trouble over the years. I doubt my involvement would have been encouraged, or even allowed, if there were really all these ugly secrets lying around.”

  “Hmm. Unless the invitation was given specifically to throw off suspicion.”

  “Suspicion of what?”

  “I don't know. But if something's going on back home, you're pretty well out of the way of it, wouldn't you say?”

  I snorted. “What is it with you, Renata? There's plenty to worry about down here without making stuff up. You should learn to unwind a little.”

  “I thought I just did!”

  Our skins are ignorant, blushing even in darkness. But you can feel the heat.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “I know what you mean,” she agreed. We brushed against a wall, drifted away again. “Would it surprise you to learn I keep idealized environments too? Not just here on the ship, but for years. A dirty secret, like you said. I'm telling you this in confidence.”

  “Your secrets are safe. And yes, I am surprised. Can you flash one to me?”

  She giggled again. “I have a better idea, berichter: trade zee-specs with me.”

  The request gave me pause. Trade zee-specs? It seemed a shocking intimacy, moreso than what had h
appened already. Some things were not for sharing! But I felt her arms moving behind me, working symbols and windows, and then the zee-spec was lifting off her face and it seemed like she was smiling and there really was no good way to refuse. I opened up Ex-Philusburg, now simply a meadow-floored cavern some three kilometers across, with erzatz blue sky shining above, then removed the zee-spec and handed it over, accepting hers in return.

  It was warm, and smelled of her. The view through the lenses dark at first, and then a smear of meaningless colors as it settled into place, and then finally an image snapping sharply into focus as the beams locked onto my pupils.

  I gasped.

  Red sandstone beneath my feet, the sky above an azure blue, deep and clear and impossibly distant, wholly unlike the cavern lights of home. The horizon shimmered with rainbow color, pillars and streamers of living fog fading up into the blue of atmosphere, while all around was an eye of yellow in a riotous field of whites and blues and purples.

  Momentarily overwhelmed, I struggled to make sense of this, to gauge the distances, to interpret the shapes. I stood on a pillar of rock, maybe three meters across and ten times as high. More properly, I hovered—my body hung weightless and nude, bare feet brushing air several centimeters above the rock. Below, all around, stood truck-sized huts of yellow fiber, rising out of a rippled yellow surface that looked like wet rubber. Fires smoked from little stone-lined pits. Doorways beckoned. And in the distance...

  Not fields, not forests, not jungles or deserts, but... something else. Something clearly alive, breathing, pulsing, moving in organic fits and spasms. Not one thing, not even a million things, but an infinity of them—mounds upon mounds, branches upon branches, flowers upon flowers upon flowers... And things more disturbing than that, things like eyes and mouths and tentacles, like slimy pools filled with wriggling forms, like bristly brain-coral reefs sprouting fish, snakes, monsters, from penile stalks of quivering meat. Suggestions of form, only, like animal shapes glimpsed in cloud.