Bloom

by Wil McCarthy

  And then his tickle capacitor must have lurched into high gear, because in spite of everything, he laughed. “Ha ha! Ha ha!” It was sort of ugly to watch, undignified, ill-befitting a ship's captain, and I would have told him so if the alarm buzzers hadn't come alive to shatter the peace for good.

  ~~~

  Receiver alarm. We'd been pinged. Before we'd even taken our seats, our “battlestations,” as Wallich called them with full irony, the trajectory analysis program had refined its estimates, and when the second ping came it refined them still further, and then another buzzer sounded. Proximity alarm.

  Hindsight filter: when something is coming straight at you, even when you have a clear view of it you'll generally have a tough time judging range and velocity without an active ping. Particularly when you're not sure about the size of the object, as we surely were not. As it turned out, based on something called “radar cross-sections” we'd made an implicit assumption that the enemy ships were about the size of Louis Pasteur, where in fact they were a good deal smaller. Too, in our observations they'd always accelerated at under 0.1 gee, without ever informing us they were capable of more than twice that. We didn't know all this right away—what we knew was that the threat window's “time-to-contact” chronometer had jumped from four hours to two with the first ping, and then to 1:08 with the second.

  There was a collective drawing of breath.

  The threat window came alive with gas plumes; the enemy ships and their swarm of attendant remotes were firing their engines, and firing them hard.

  “Well, here we go,” Wallich said, the tremor in his voice betraying not fear but humor, a manic giggle he couldn't quite suppress. “Rapisardi, get ready with that final payload tube. We're going to have to roll out the welcome mat in about fifteen minutes.”

  Third ping. Time-to-contact: 0:57. But the radar probe was already blooming, its signature smearing as it shot out tendrils of hungry mycostructure. Shot them out fast. Technogenic life, I knew, existed in a realm two or three or even four orders of magnitude faster than its organic predecessors, and down here at the very lower reaches of the Mycosystem it seemed one more order had been gained. Sunlight: bright, swollen, hot with proton radiation. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, yeah, and the bloom that exploded out of that little probe must have been very close to death indeed.

  The tendrils snaking out of it had grown dozens of kilometers in only a few seconds, grown them mainly downward in the direction of the sun so that they looked like fingers reaching out for Louis Pasteur, looked like they might actually make it across that gulf... But then a tenth of the way across, the probe ran out of mass, the bloom's expansion halting as suddenly as it had begun, leaving behind a structure larger and more intricate than a trans-meg, damn near as large as the flower end of a Veller body. I wondered at the chemistry involved, wondered that atoms and molecules could be made to rearrange themselves so quickly and so completely.

  I'd done an experiment as a child, once, peeling an orange in a remote corner of the house, well away from Momma. Her nose was well tuned to the smell of oranges, and if you peeled one she'd come over and demand a third of it as “fruit tax.” This time, determined to hide it from her and so, sneakily, to escape taxation, I was surprised instead to hear her call out “Somebody's eating oranges!” Right away, with no delay at all. Those atoms and molecules of orange had diffused through the air, somehow finding their way around corners, down hallways and staircases and straight into Momma's nose in a mere fraction of a second. So who knew, really, how fast these things could go?

  “Ships are releasing some sort of spray in our direction,” Lehne cautioned.

  “Complementin?”

  “Unknown. Microscopic particles in water solution, definitely. Haptens. Probably it's complementin.”

  “Time to contact?”

  “Uh, twenty minutes.”

  “Okay,” Wallich said, still suppressing that laugh, “Davenroy, please engage the engines. Rapisardi, vent reserve tank two, stat.”

  Now there was a tactic you had to love: taking a third of our precious water supply and dumping it overboard into space. I opened an exterior window as the engines groaned themselves awake, and then the dump valve was open and the water was tumbling out behind us, big globs breaking up into droplets, falling away slowly, some of them blasting into high-velocity mist as they contacted the engine exhaust. The dump went on for thirty seconds, and by the end of it the space behind us was sizzling both in visual and on the threat board, little abortive blooms seizing up the hydrogen and oxygen and then halting when they found no other building blocks, no precious carbon or nitrogen or sulfur, no metals except dissolved impurities in the water itself.

  The idea, I guess, was to give the complementin something to hit, something to slow it down or deflect it so less could get through to strike us. Seemed fairly half-baked to me, but I supposed it was better than nothing, and that, meine freunde, was the entire measure of our battle plan.

  Somewhere around that point, the threat board went nuts. Another bloom back among the enemy ships, a big one this time. Not a drone, not a probe, but one of the actual ships was converting—its t-balance somehow, alarmingly, failing to protect it. And then in a flash I knew why, knew what was happening: the ships were accelerating into their own complementin spray, getting more of the stuff on themselves than they were ever likely to get on us.

  The realization shocked me to my core—they weren't just angry, weren't just willing to sacrifice, they were desperate to keep us away from that heat barrier. There must have been dozens of safer, saner options available to them, but this was the one they'd chosen, the one they'd determined was most likely to stop us here and now. Talk about half-baked tactics! What could drive them to such an extreme? I mean, they were fanatics, yes, obviously, but even fanatics would normally try to maximize their advantage, to minimize their loss.

  What was it they thought they were protecting? Their homes and families? The people on Earth and Venus? The Mycosystem itself?

  Baucum had admired the Mycosystem, I knew. Not loved it, maybe, but respected its power and intricacy, its longevity in the face of mathematical improbability. Very nearly divine, she'd said, almost her dying words. Because the system never reached a halt state? Because unlike cellular automaton models, it steered clear of extinction and crystallization and simple repetition, stayed locked in a state of eternal chaotic growth? Mulch System could only do that if you intervened manually. Even random-number fuzz was not sufficient to keep it alive; somehow, it needed the intervention of a conscious hand.

  Cold tendrils lapped up and down my spine. Did the Mycosystem need a guiding hand as well? Did it have a guiding hand? Jesus, the computing ability of a cubic millimeter of bloom exceeded the combined might of all the calculating machines human beings had ever built. And in the Gladholds there were already computers smarter than mice, computers capable of conceptualizing their own existence, of writing stories about themselves.

  My God.

  “Davenroy,” Wallich said, “wait five seconds and then cut the engines. Strasheim, watch your goddamn board. If you let that system crash again I'll nail your head to the wall.”

  “You want to beat on him, be quick about it,” Lehne countered, eyeing the chronometer, “or lose your chance for good.”

  Reluctantly, I drew my attention to the allocation system for a few precious seconds. It was a mess. Everyone was quietly panicking, doing exactly what I'd told them not to, so in disgust I wiped the job stack clean and set everything on a first-come-first-serve basis. Frightfully inefficient, yes, but also very unlikely to fail or crash.

  “Davenroy,” Wallich said, “switch the engines to oxygen production and go to attitude program E-1. Paint the sky with it, stat.”

  Here was another freaky idea: normally the engines laddered their uranium fuel down to iron and hydrogen, and then cascaded the hyrdogen back up to iron again, releasing the theoretical maximum energy from every single atom.
But if you were willing to eat the energy loss, you could tune the thing to produce any element you wanted. Atomic oxygen, for example, which could react with complementin molecules, damaging or neutralizing them. Which could even oxidize unsuspecting mycora, gifting them with an atom or two of building material but wreaking structural harm far out of proportion with that slim benefit. The engine spat out “ionized” nuclei, I'd been told, nuclei almost completely devoid of electrons, which made them very reactive indeed, possibly reactive enough even to blast damaging microflaws into a t-balance hull. As weapons go this was better, at least, than water. But it wasted fuel, another vital and irreplaceable resource. We were throwing our own lifeblood in the enemy's face, hoping somehow to buy enough time to reach the heat barrier without...

  Damn it, there were too many distractions here. I tried to reconstruct my fragile chain of thought: math and the philosophy of fear. Was the Mycosystem somehow responsible for its own maintenance? Did it possess that inward-looking eye, that self-knowledge that permitted it to guide its own destiny? I shook my head; the question was probably unanswerable, certainly irrelevant at the moment. Of key importance was that the Temples of Transcendent Evolution must believe it was true. And they must have believed, somehow, that we still respresented a terrible threat, to the Mycosystem, to the flow and balance of life—all life?—in the solar system.

  “Hey,” I asked of no one in particular, “what would happen if you triggered a ladderdown reaction in the sun?”

  “Ladderdown?” Davenroy's voice answered. “Nothing, why?”

  “Cut the chatter,” Wallich advised.

  “What about cascade fusion?” I pressed.

  “Well, that would liberate a store of fusion energy all at once, and leave a cool lump of iron where there used to be hot hydrogen and helium. How big a reaction are we talking about, dear?”

  “Like from one of our detector packages.”

  Everyone stopped for a moment. That thought had registered.

  “What are you getting at, Strasheim?” Davenroy asked.

  “How big would the explosion be?”

  “The inverted field,” Rapisardi said, “forms an infinitessimally thin sphere just over three hundred meters in diameter. That might cut through as many as ten-to-the-thirtieth atoms.”

  “Less than that in the photosphere, I would think,” Davenroy told him. “Still, you'd release the energy of thousands—possibly millions—of solar flares.”

  “Doing what to the Mycosystem?” I asked. No one had an answer for me.

  Scharfblick, the awakening, the moment when it all becomes obvious. I had the answer: it would murder the Mycosystem. Not destroy every single mycorum, certainly; it seemed to me that even if the sun exploded there'd still be shelter available behind the planets, or in the outer system, or wherever. Some spores would survive, fall back in, start blooming. But the continuity would have been interrupted, the hideous clockwork precision kicked all to pieces. The guiding hand burned away, leaving only mindless matter behind, the festering corpse of the Temples' pet demigod. Maybe another mind would arise from the wreckage, or maybe not, but either way the original mycodeity would be lost.

  Deicide. God-murder.

  Was it true? Could it really happen that way? I didn't know and didn't care; in a them-or-us situation, I was certainly going to pick 'us.' Given a choice between the death of the Mycosystem and the death of the Immunity, there was no choice. The point was that the Temples must also know this, must also see this as obvious, even if they didn't agree with it. The self-sacrificing martyrs in those enemy ships believed it, believed that we Pasteurites had both the power and the motive to strike. Here was a threat worth countering, a cause—in their minds—worth dying for. Here was a more or less logical explanation for all that had happened to us. I'd heard no others.

  And maybe—the thought chilled me right through—we could actually follow through on the threat. Lottick would probably demand this of us, if the question were posed. A chance to end it all, a chance to drive the system toward a halt state we could deal with. No more refugee existence, no more bowing down before the might of our enemy, waiting grimly for the tide to turn against us again.

  “Strasheim, what's going on with my system requests? Watch your damn board, man!”

  “No time,” I said, and dove straight into Mulch System. The automaton rules needed only a little tweaking, here and here and here. Testing: no. Testing again: no. This wasn't working the way I'd hoped it would. But still, the effect I wanted was so simple...

  “Strasheim!”

  Tweak and tweak and then test again. And again. Oh, I thought, this rule's interfering with the expansion. Do I need it? No? I tried another, slightly different rule set. Yeah, well, close enough. Simple enough. Looks like a flare to me, baby.

  “Strasheim, what the hell is wrong with you? What are you hammering the computer with?”

  “Captain,” I said without exiting Mulch System, “slave your zee-spec to mine. Scratch that; everyone slave your zee-specs to mine. I have something very important to show you.”

  “Have you lost your mind, Strasheim?”

  “Nope. I may have finally found it. Let me know when you're in.”

  “Christ. Okay, I'm in.”

  “In.”

  “In.”

  “Me too. What's this about?”

  “Okay,” I said, “welcome to Mulch System. The big yellow thing is the sun, the little green speck is us, and the little red-brown balls are all planets. This one—” I flicked on a pointing arrow “—similar to Mercury, is Mulchury, behind which our simulated Louis Pasteur is hiding. Note all the red stuff swirling around—that's TGL. Lot's of it. Now, when we trigger a million-strength solar flare...”

  I activated the new rules, watched gravity switch off in one corner of the sun. A huge blob of yellow material, not true star stuff but the same generic “hot” that filled the cores of planets, splurted out into the system, tearing out mycostructure, liquefying planetary surfaces. It didn't take any hard-core mathematical analysis to see things dying out—it was evident everywhere, even in the places the erzatz flare hadn't touched. The data-rich waves that should be sweeping the system end-to-end, reflecting and refracting and endlessly mutating, driving new spurts of growth and decline and growth again, fell apart into paroxysms. Stains of red gave way swiftly to brown and green, mulch and bare rock taking over.

  The system flickered, gasped, collapsed into localized patterns of simple oscillation. It would have died out anyway, sooner or later, but Wallich and the others didn't know that, and anyway in this case the death was very clearly precipitated by the flare. Again, it didn't take a genius to see that. But there were four of them here.

  I zoomed in on Louis Pasteur, ran the sequence again at much higher magnification. Mulchury the size of a house, brown and smooth, untouched by technogenic contagion. The viewer's eye looking along the equator, past the tiny green spaceship-dot to the blank wall far beyond, light-years beyond. All at peace, and then storms of yellow suddenly sweeping the planet, a wall of yellow astronomically huge, breaking apart into threads and whorls and roaring by, leaving the dayside a melted ruin, the nightside scathed only here and there by lashes of solar fire. Pasteur herself escaping untouched.

  I ran it again, this time focusing on the giant planet Johnpiter, which, along with its moons, weathered the upper reaches of the storm without serious harm. Surface habitats were probably in trouble, but there would be time to evacuate those. Down below the ice, all would be safe and secure.

  I had grave doubts about the scientific veracity of the sim; the underlying physics bore little resemblance to those of the real universe. Probably, the details were utterly wrong. Maybe Pasteur wouldn't survive, maybe Jupiter and the Gladholds wouldn't. Maybe the whole Mycosystem wouldn't die out like this. Probably not, I guessed. But the sim was just a visual aid, just a rapid, visceral demonstration of what almost certainly was true: that we had, within our grasp, the power not only
to tear the heart out of the Mycosystem, but to blast away the bulk of its body as well. Lottick's plan was a feeble joke by comparison, spitballs against a raging elephant.

  “This,” I said, not giving anyone a chance to speak, “is almost certainly what the Temples are afraid of. This is what they're trying to prevent. There are solid reasons to believe that the Mycosystem is intelligent, is self-aware. Renata Baucum believed it, enough to give up her life, and whether or not we believe it, or even care, the Temples seem inclined to act on this theory as if it were God's own truth. And on ourselves as if we were the servants of absolute evil.”

  Set at maximum speed, the sim ran quickly. We'd all been in here twenty or thirty seconds, no more, and rather than invite scrutiny, invite questions whose answers I didn't know or didn't like, I released everyone's zee-specs and closed up Mulch System. It had served its purpose.

  Exiting back into reality, I became aware of a lump under my leg, something caught between my seat and myself. I fished it out: the Gladholder fear doll. Slick and squidgy in my hand, its blank face a leather parody of terror.

  “I'm afraid,” it insisted quietly. But that was a lie, a recording; if there were machines that could feel, this was surely not one of them, and its mimicry served only to cheapen the genuine product. Fear? What the hell did it know? Outrage seized me for a moment, and with an angry flick I sent the thing spinning away.

  Darren Wallich began to laugh.

  “Cut it out!” I shouted, turning to him, glaring him down. “Turn that damn thing off! It's time for a command decision. Humorless, no tickling. I mean it.”

  I had no right to speak to him that way. I didn't try to excuse it, and still don't. But for some reason he listened, and complied. The change in his face was marked and immediate, muscles loosening here, tightening there, worry lines furrowing his brow.