by Wil McCarthy
He snickered, as if at some private thought.
“What's the first thing you're going to do,” I asked, “if you ever get back home?”
“The first? Decontamination.”
“Well, okay, the second.”
“Quarrantine.”
I chuckled with him. “All right, look, you've been released and you're out on the street and you're a totally free man. You can do whatever you want. So what do you choose?”
“The tavern,” Rapisardi called out.
Wallich smiled. “Tavern. Hmm. Actually, I think I'd take a nice hot bath, dress up in my fanciest clothes, and head straight for work. It just kills me, thinking how mucked up things must be getting back there without me.”
“So much for not falling into the old ruts.”
“Well, yeah. But I do like my work, you have to remember.”
“Because it's important?”
He laughed. “Because I am, I think.”
“Aha,” I said, pouncing on that. “The truth at last: we have a power monger in our midst. Does it please you to boss people around?”
“Oh, immensely,” he said, and winked.
“Great,” I acknowledged, in my this-is-the-end-of-the-interview tone. “Well, that was very helpful. Thank you very much.”
“Is that it?” he asked, surprised.
“For now, yeah. It usually works out better if I ask questions in multiple sittings. I get more spontaneity that way. The viewers like it, anyway.” Plus, this didn't seem to be heading in a particularly exciting direction. I'd try him again in a different, less reflective mood.
“Well hell,” Wallich said, still grinning, “I could have mailed you that stuff. Ask me something hard.”
“Well, all right, one more. What do you think is going on with this mission? Why do you think all this stuff is happening to us?”
That gave him pause. He clucked a few times, then said, slowly, “There's nothing like a mystery to bring out the extremes in people. Whatever you don't know, well, people just fill that in with whatever they want most to believe. In a way, it's the classic problem pioneers have always faced—every mystery we strip away knocks over one more superstition, one more convenient or comforting belief, and are people grateful about that? Not the ones that stand to lose from it.”
“So you think this is all about money? Or power?”
“Well, probably not as simple as that. The Immunity's applecart is a precarious load, and I guess people aren't eager to see it tipped, even for a good cause.”
“I see. Can I quote you on that, next time we see Lottick?”
He laughed.
Jenna Davenroy, who had appeared in the engine room hatchway, spoke up: “Let's go back to the part about him being annoying.”
We all laughed at that, until Lehne, whose sleeping feet stuck partway out his cabin door, growled for us to quiet down, at which point we laughed all the harder.
I suppose it seems sort of shocking in retrospect, all of us sitting around like that, not minding the ship. That's the one advantage of running out of options, I guess: when anything you do is more likely to hurt than help, goofing off becomes a pretty viable plan.
Not to mention an okay way to spend your final hours, much better than working yourself—literally—to death.
~~~
Later that day, Lehne and I were on the bridge. There wasn't much to do except watch the hull slowly erode, which was a lot like watching grass grow, but the outside view, at least, had changed. Transient megastructures seemed to be features mainly of the upper Mycosystem; down here the bulk of our encounters were with objects Lehne called “Veller bodies”—tangled strands of TGL structure a thousand kilometers long, ten or fifty or a hundred wide, with long tails pointed down at the sun and whispy, flowerlike appendages pointed up at interplanetary space. At any given time there were hundreds of these things visible, transparent as smoke but glowing spectrally in the sunlight, and if you caught one just right, the stars shining through it would turn into patterns of little white rings.
Every now and then, a petal would break off of one of the flowers and tumble—very, very slowly—in the general direction of up. I asked Lehne if these would go on to become trans-megs, but he denied it.
“Melt away in an hour,” he said. “Ten trillion little solar sails pushing data spore packages. Some of them might link up again later. Probably will, but the trans-megs supposedly accrete mostly from material falling down. Spores, dust, comets... Doesn't take more than a couple of inner-system passes to ablate comets away to nothing, brake the constituents with light pressure. Nothing escapes but spores; net mass transfer is downward. Over geologic time, this should prove significant.”
Hmm.
From the wardroom, I thought I heard Davenroy's voice, grunting loudly about something.
Fiddling with camera dots, I managed to pull up an image of Venus, whose orbit we would shortly be crossing. The planet was nowhere near us, fully forty degrees ahead in its orbit, but it hadn't slipped behind the sun, and wouldn't if we stayed on this trajectory, and I was aware that our current vantage gave us a full fifty-percent view of the daylit planet. From above, from the Immunity or the Gladholds, the planet would never appear as anything more than a sliver, so the opportunity was unique, and worth taking advantage of.
The image was blurry, highly magnified, highly filtered. I found myself grateful for this, because I didn't at all like what I saw. If Earth was a basketball covered in moss, well, Venus was covered in marbles and golf balls and dinner forks, and mold. Barely resembling a sphere, it looked more like some sort of virus or bacillus or unusually lumpy protozoan than a planet. I found myself with fresh questions about the Gladholder telescope image—it had shown an expanse of flat ground surrounded by towering jungle, and here I saw nothing like that. If there were humans down there, in all that lumpy fog and slime, I couldn't imagine where they might be standing.
“Gravity'd crush those structures,” Lehne noted, “If they weren't so light. Hard to imagine. Maybe it all started on Earth. Probably did. But this is the heart of it, right here. Warm, bright, plenty of raw material... Planet's almost the size of Neptune these days. Used to be the size of Earth. Mass hasn't changed.”
Hmm.
“Where are the people?” I asked.
I hadn't expected an answer, but he'd pasted the image on the same spot of wall that I had, and he pointed to it, indicating a crease where two of the great lumps came together. “Here,” he said.
“Really? How do you know?”
“Coordinates the Gladholders gave. It's in your own report. Been a couple of weeks, though; might have changed quite a bit since then.”
The mind boggled. Even these enormous structures were fleeting in nature, yes, rising like bubbles from the planet's tarry surface, swelling, bursting, swelling again as the weeks rolled past. Behavior that seemed ordered, even planned, but was in fact built up through waves of individual, disconnected, microscopic action. “Emergent behavior,” Baucum had called it. There were features like that in Mulch System, too, sun bonnets and twig cutters and a dozen other repeating structures, far more intricate than the gliders and flashers of Conway's Game of Life and yet rising up in exactly the same way, over and over again until the simulation shuddered to a halt.
But Venus was real. No reset button, no variable parameters. Those bubbles, some nearly the size of Ganymede, were at least as solid and physical as the sun's corona, that superheated atmosphere criscrossed with lines of magnetic force which, even with the solar disc occluded, was easily the brightest object in the sky.
Good old sun. There was one thing the mycora couldn't eat, sure enough, and if anything was going to save our lives this week, that ball of fusion heat was it. We'd be skirting just below the orbit of Mercury, sweeping south of the solar equator on a trajectory that would pop us, after a couple of engine burns, right out of the ecliptic plane, where (Wallich said) nine-hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine on
e-millionths of the Mycosystem's mass was concentrated, and into the much sparser medium of Northern Space. Our momentum would then carry us, over a period of months, back to the ecliptic plane somewhere above the orbit of Mars, and if all went well we would fire our motors with sufficient impulse to bring us back into plane permanently, and circularize the orbit to prevent our tumbling right back down into the Mycosystem.
If all went well.
I checked the threat window, saw the enemy ships' estimated ranges marching steadily downward. Must have fired their engines again, put on even greater speed. Did their plans—or their fuel supply—leave any possibility for their own survival? Certainly, Baucum's example showed a blunt willingness to die, and it looked like they weren't going to repeat their earlier mistake, giving us the chance to pull some unexpected maneuver and slip once more from their grasp. Too, their weapons—at least the ones we'd seen—relied on the Mycosystem itself to do the dirty work, so they were not going to let us cross the heat barrier. They were going to catch us as just as early as they could. They were going to catch us—I crunched some numbers—in a little over six hours.
Somehow, it was comforting to have a figure.
“They're going to catch us tomorrow morning,” I said to Lehne.
“Yup,” he agreed.
“Been nice knowing you, I guess.”
He shook his head. “Not over yet. Got off Earth, didn't you? Got back down here, made it this far. That makes you one of the luckiest people that ever lived, so keep in mind. Me, I plan on getting home.”
I had to admire the sentiment, if not the rigor of the supporting logic. “Do you have a picture of your family?” I asked, struck with the sudden desire to see the faces that inspired such optimism.
“Sure.” He poked the air between us, slid a finger sideways. My receiving light came on and the picture appeared, compressed to an icon in my lower-right quadrant.
I opened it, and the family appeared in a larger window, three-dimensional and fully colored behind the cartoon frame, but static, unmoving as statues, their smiles frozen. Funny, I'd hardly ever seen Tosca Lehne smile, but there in the picture he looked about as happy as I've ever seen anyone look, not posed or stagey but caught, it seemed, in the middle of a funny story. He faced forward, shoulders square, confronting the world directly. His wife stood in front, nearly facing him with her body but looking over one shoulder at the camera. She wasn't pretty, exactly, but she had a round, kind face that appealed in less superficial ways. DORIS ELAINE, the annotation named her. The gleam of love was there in here eyes, subtle but quite unmistakable.
One of her hands rested lightly on her husband's chest, the other on the shoulder of the boy, FRANK TOSCA, standing between them. Two years old? Four? I'd long ago lost my ability to figure the ages of children, but this one appeared slightly bored, slightly irritated, shrinking away a bit from his mother's hand. His eyes were on something behind me, something not terribly interesting, but I saw he was leaning backward, putting weight against the warmth of his parents' bodies. They had all dressed up for the occasion, in flimsy, uncomfortable clothes of the sort people almost never wore in the Immunity. But they looked nice.
It was, in all, a perfectly ordinary holograph, of the sort you used to see all the time. Most of human nature, I think, is encapsulated in pictures like these.
“I can see why you're eager to live,” I said.
He smiled at the compliment. “You worry too much, Strasheim. There are patterns in life. Not everything happens for a purpose, but purpose arises from the things that happen. Key is to blend yourself with patterns that include the things you want. That's called happiness.”
Hmm. I'd have to think about that. I closed the family portrait and looked back at Venus, at the patterns and purposes unfolding there. I wondered, not for the first time, why Wallich wasn't up here admiring the view with us. Not that he couldn't do just as well from his cabin, I supposed, but it was so much easier when you had direct access to the controls...
But then Davenroy's voice drifted forward again, groaning, yelping, louder than before and twice as difficult to ignore, and suddenly I knew what Wallich was up to.
“You want to play some chess?” I asked Lehne.
He agreed, then proceeded to flatten me four games out of four. “You want to try a different game?” he finally asked, not apologetic or condescending, just making the offer.
“Do you know 'twenty questions?'“
“Heard of it.”
“Think of a word or object.”
“Okay.”
“Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
He shrugged. “Neither.”
“Is it a mycorum?”
“Yes.”
I sighed. “Maybe we don't have to play a game. We could just sit here and... appreciate being alive.”
“Suits me,” Lehne said, and so for a while that was exactly what we did. Until a red URGENT MESSAGE light flashed on my zee-spec, that is, and Sudhir Rapisardi's face appeared center-screen, looking stricken.
“We have a problem,” he said. “A big one. I think the Temples of Transcendent Evolution have maybe been correct all along!”
TWENTY-THREE:
The Vector to Hell
I wasn't at all sure what to make of a comment like that. The Temples were right? Right about what, about killing innocent people?
“Right about what?” Lehne asked.
Rapisardi's face flushed darker. “After Strasheim teased me about ideation, I decided I really should go back and do some real work. It bothered me that I had such an easy time making weapons from those detectors. Just a simple code change! It really shouldn't have been that easy, and there were parts of the code that I didn't personally geek. Some other people, some of Lottick's people, stepped in to customize it for compatibility with Louis Pasteur's control systems. That was where I found it. Listen, an inversion of the ladderdown function about the B axis will turn the field inside-out—that's what makes a bomb—and I found that two of the landing control system's feedback loops could be adjusted to interfere constructructively, in a way that would produce exactly this effect.”
“I'm not sure I understand,” I said.
He waved his hands impatiently. “When the detectors do their thing, logging a replication event, these loops will creep closer into phase. After fifty events, enough to be sure what's really happening, the wave peaks match almost perfectly. After that, there's one more failsafe: the low-frequency alarm pulse directed at listening posts in the Immunity. The, ah, intended purpose of detector the package.
“These pulses are logged by neighboring units, and if a detector has already received a neighbor's pulse at the time its control loops fall into close phase, its sensors are placed into a sleep mode, and the unit awaits a coded confirmation signal from the Immunity. Once this is received, the control loops fall completely into phase, and the inversion of the power source occurs. This tampering is subtle and clever and very clearly not accidental. I really can't see how they accomplished this without my noticing, but be that as it may, I'm afraid the Temples' hysteria was well founded: we've been dropping live munitions into the heart of the Mycosystem. If the proper signals are sent, you'll end up with hydrogen, iron, and enough waste heat to sterilize the entire Earth.”
Oh. Huh. So we were on an offensive mission after all? I should have felt stunned, I suppose. Betrayed, misused, whatever. But I guess I'd known all along that there was something schädlich going on, what with all the spies and sabotage and ambushes and such, so in truth I felt almost no surprise at all. In a way, it made perfect sense, being exactly the sort of plan men like Vaclav Lottick would cook up: hit the Mycosystem hard, weaken it, then move a strong Immune system in over the rubble and attempt to establish permanent beachheads. Yeah. It was also exactly the sort of plan that would set off waves of panic in the general public if they heard about it. As Wallich had said, no matter how bad the status quo, people tended to take a dim view of its violent upset.
And why not? We'd seen first-hand what the Mycosystem could do when irritated, when alerted to the presence of a few foreign molecules. Who knew how it might react to the loss of whole planets? And then, of course, there was this business about those planets still possibly being inhabited. That might still be a trick, intended to throw us off-balance. If so, it had worked beautifully. But then again, it might be true, and in that case, Louis Pasteur had been the instrument of genocide, or at least the threat of genocide. But with the public alerted to the Gladholders' discovery, who would dare set off those bombs now?
Maybe that's why the Mycosystem did it, I thought disjointedly. Hostages, human shields. Maybe it was just protecting itself. But that was absurd, of course. Doubly absurd, because even if the Mycosystem had been capable of formulating theories and then acting on them with such a deeply human insight, it still couldn't know Pasteur's true mission, when we had not known it ourselves.
So that left only one question: had Darren Wallich been in on the secret?
As if on cue, he appeared in the hatchway, his hair and uniform in disarray.
“I heard,” he said.
I studied him, looked hard at the eyes behind his zee-spec lenses. “Did you know about this, sir?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I did not. I assume Lottick must have, though. The fact that he didn't tell me...” he trailed away.
I couldn't find any trace of guile there, couldn't pin any particular suspicion on him. He'd known Lottick well, worked closely with him, but so had a lot of people. It didn't have to mean anything. I decided, for the moment, to believe him.
I did see a more personal shame in those eyes, though, a sharp embarassment at having been caught, hypocritically, with his pants down. And Davenroy's. Yeah, really, like we weren't going to hear?
“I don't care who you've been sleeping with,” I told him truthfully. Anything that increased the net comfort level of the universe was no worry of mine. I wished them both well. But I could see his mortification, his voiceless insistence that he didn't know how it had happened, that it surely wouldn't happen again.
