by Wil McCarthy
The mirror, okay. From inside the asteroid, it didn't look like much, just a bowl-shaped crater reflecting the blackness of sky that surrounded the sun's (quite seriously swollen) glare. We looked out on it through an observation port in its rim, a round window as tall as a person, made of glass five centimeters thick. Real silicon glass, yes; I guess they have a lot of it here. Anyway, it was only by looking for similar ports across the crater rim—of which there were several at uneven intervals—that I was able to get any real sense of scale. This, at least, was impressive; as Wallich had intimated earlier, the mirror was about the size of Innensburg, maybe two kilometers from end to end, and you could have fit a city block on the circular thing hanging from cables at its center.
The chamber and window were large enough for all of us to look out together, but Dibrin's attention quickly settled on the flat video monitors built into the opposite wall.
“They're using the telescope,” he said, sounding pleased. “Venus images again. Look, you can really see the huts!”
On the screens, sure enough, were blurry, wavery images of what looked like thatched domes, the sort of thing primitive humans had once inhabited. They clumped together in rough, roughly concentric circles, little villages with clearings at their centers. On Venus? I must have heard him incorrectly.
“Huts?” I asked. “On Venus?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Hey, you can even see the people. The planet must be at conjunction; this is an exceptionally clear shot.”
“People?” Renata Baucum asked.
“On Venus?” Jenna Davenroy added. God, we sounded like a bunch of idiots. But how else were we supposed to sound? Through the wavers and shimmers, the images on the wall screens were clear enough: little knots of nude people walking around between the huts. The ground beneath them was yellow and smooth-looking, like plastic. A less magnified image showed the surrounding area, a red/brown/purple mass of mycostructure, picks and blossoms and feather urchins and a thousand shapes less easily labeled, with that little yellow clearing sitting there in the middle of it, dotted with huts.
Could “hut” be just another mycoric blueprint, a random, meaningless shape put together by trillions of technogenic automata? More like a brain coral than a wasp's nest, with structure synergistic, rather than planned? But there were people walking around down there. Not on Earth. Not even on Earth, where I might have some vague possibility of believing it, but on Venus, where I certainly could not.
“What kind of trick are you pulling, here?” Wallich asked, easily, not concerned or affronted or anything.
But Dibrin frowned. “Trick? Excuse, please?”
Baucum touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Please, honestly. Are these actual telescope images?”
“Of course.”
“Real time?”
“Yes.”
“Of Venus?”
Dibrin flared. “Yes, Venus! Seek, are you people deaf? There are humans living on Venus. The primordial atmosphere is gone, the air has been thinning out for decades, and now it's apparently habitable. New discovery, but we've been shouting about it for weeks. Munies, always so busy, so distracted. Don't you listen to the news?”
Evidently not. Mine were some of the few news channels that paid the Gladhold any attention at all, but if a story this big could escape me... Had I been that unobservant? Gladholder news passed through a lot of wire and other hardware on its way to me. Had some portion of it been... misplaced along the way?
“And Earth?” Sudhir Rapisardi asked, looking pale and stunned. “Are the rumors true?”
Dibrin's scowl eased. He waved a hand at the monitors. “Like that? It looks like that on Earth, too, but we knew about that three years ago. Three years. Is that how your rumors go? Slow!”
“My God,” someone said.
Indeed. How had people gotten there? What did they eat? How did they survive, down there in the thick of the bloom to end all blooms? The words “Mycosystem” and “extermination” were all but synonymous.
“It looks the same on both planets,” Dibrin said gently, now finally aware that he was breaking bad news. Or was it good news? The whole concept was too alien, too horrid and slippery for the mind to get much of a grip on. “I can translate a report for you, if you like.”
I nodded stupidly. “Yes. I'd like that very much.”
“May I... meddle?”
I hesitated, then nodded again. “Please do.”
It only took him a moment to flash the file to me, and he never moved a muscle. I was watching.
“Thank you,” I said when he'd finished. “I'll read it later.” Much later, probably; it would take time for all this to settle. And how was it the Immunity had missed out on so hugely significant a discovery? Were we just too wrapped up in our own concerns? The rumors about Earth had never received much credence, even among the gullible—it was too obviously impossible, like saying there were people living on the surface of the sun. But here the evidence was; had we stopped even looking at the stars and planets? The Gladhold was a lot closer to the bodies of concern, though, and they did have these huge mirrors lying around. Were they looking simply because they had the equipment, because it was easy for them to look? But why hadn't I heard about it?
“How does the telescope work?” Rapisardi demanded.
Finally, I thought to begin recording.
“Deformable mirror,” Dibrin replied, now looking out through the window, gesturing at it. “Not one piece, I think, but millions of pieces, trillions of pieces, under independent control. You use part of it to focus sunlight for power generation, but here at perihelion there's lots of excess capacity. Too bright to use it all for that. Look down at the mirror surface, you see how it sort of shimmers in places? They're probably doing twenty different things with it right now, little pieces focusing in all different directions. Like little flowers, yes, turning their small faces toward the sun, toward the stars... These mirrors have been used as weapons, too, though the last rock that tried it got blockaded for twelve years.”
“Nanoscale components?” Wallich coughed. “The mirrorlets have to be larger than a wavelength of light, right, but the pieces that drive them are smaller?”
“Um, I guess so.”
“God damn.”
Wallich, who had spent his life wiping out small things, looked about as unamused as a person could. The contrast was interesting; it would make a fine clip in the next collage.
~~~
The walk back was quiet, disturbed by little more than the sounds of our breathing. And the sounds of the Gladhold, yes, the chattering and laughter of thousands of people. Here they had abandoned the idea of caverns, of individual buildings in large, open spaces with a stony sky looming overhead. It seemed to me that would make even more sense in this trivial gravity, but instead the emphasis was on corridors and doorways, straight lines, walls of dark, smooth-polished rock. Few of the spaces so connected were actually rectangular—the geode forms seemed much more St. Helier's style—and Gladholders did seem to have a better handle than Munies on exploitation of the third dimension.
But walking around in the Five Cities provided a sense of openness, freshness, and here the opposite held true. The inside out “buildings” were the open spaces, while the connecting corriders felt close, crowded. And so many children! They spilled from doorways, giving glimpses of the households beyond—high-ceilinged chambers, terraced off into many levels, furnished with riotous assortments of plant and animal life. Bamboo and birds! It didn't seem very homey to me.
This was hardly the focus of my attention, though.
People on Venus?
The idea should have been horrible, laughable, shattering. It was all of those things, I guess, but mostly it was just too large and slippery to grasp. Should I feel some sense of righteous triumph, that death had not completely conquered the inner system after all? Should I feel empathy, sympathy for the humans so imprisoned? Either reaction would imply some degree of understanding, which I certain
ly lacked.
One thing was clear: if we were to believe and accept this finding, our worldview would have to disintegrate. The Mycosystem I knew did not allow for this sort of anomaly. What sort of Mycosystem did? I found, to my surprise, that I didn't really want to know. Would I mourn the mindless Mycosystem that had eaten my world? I might, if something even more sinister took its place. Something bright, capable, purposeful? No. Surely, buried in our work or no, we would have known about that long ago if it were true.
So that was my first reaction: denial. Aggressive apathy.
Tosca Lehne seemed more upset, though, seemed often on the edge of tears as we leaped and vaulted our way through the endless corridors. Tears for whom? I found I didn't want to know that, either.
Wallich and Davenroy seemed less affected, seemed to believe the whole thing was some sort of mistake. Well, maybe it was. Rapisardi was lost in his zee-spec, fingers in constant motion. Assessing plausibilities? Working equations? Escaping into some ideator's fantasy? Baucum just looked subdued, as if she were applying serious thought to the problem but hadn't reached any conclusions yet.
In a way, that made me feel worse. Was her mind more open than mine? I didn't want to think so.
The only person unaffected was, of course, Dibrin. It wasn't news to him, wasn't a sudden revelation. In fact, I had the impression that even when it was news, the announcement hadn't knocked the stuffing out of him the way it had us. His Mycosystem must be a very different place from mine, different even from Baucum's. What did he know that we didn't?
“It's always up to something,” he answered when I put the question to him. “It's a devious one, that Mycosystem.”
“Devious?”
He backpedaled: “Not in a deliberate sense. I mean in an evolutionary one. It's always trying something new. Forms, behaviors, the mycora themselves...”
“We used to think,” I told him, “that they were stealing gene sequences out of our Immune system. It was a pretty unsettling thought, but then it turned out to be the result of human meddling.”
“That happens sometimes here, as well,” he said, then cocked his head at me. “Are you recording this conversation?”
“It's my job. Yes. Does it bother you?”
“No, I guess not,” he said. And nothing more.
“So you have meddlers here as well?” I probed. “People experimenting with living mycora?”
Reluctantly: “Sometimes. It's illegal, harsh penalties, but people are... curious animals.”
“This Venus thing is a much more shocking revelation,” I said. “I really don't know what to make of it.”
“Huh,” he said.
I guess the recording bothered him after all, because prying further comment out of him proved all but impossible.
~~~
There's a sharp, special bite to the weariness that comes from exertion in low gravity. You're not working your muscles very hard, individually, but there's still inertia to fight, and you wind up using all your muscles for it, including the ones you didn't know you had. And shocking news brings its own kind of tired, as well.
Dibrin guided us to what he called a “staying home,” where we could eat and sleep and such for the thirteen hours until our uranium fuel nodule was delivered and installed. I'd expected something like a hotel, airy and full of plants, but the entrance to the place turned out to be through an unmarked doorway into a cramped, surprisingly ordinary-looking tavern. Except for the crowding and the noise, fifteen or twenty patrons all jabbering at one another, this might easily have been Ganymede. Or Earth. I guess these places have been the same for centuries, and little things like moving to a different planet aren't going to have much effect.
The staying home itself was on the next level up, access to which was via a ladder that led into a small, cube-shaped chamber with doors on all four walls and flat, dim lights on its ceiling. Men's and women's communal sleeping and sanitary facilities, as indicated by pictograms of toilets and bunk beds and human beings with and without breasts. Hmm.
Sudhir Rapisardi noted that though he was tired, he'd come off sleep shift only seven hours before, and wouldn't mind a drink or two in the pub downstairs. What did we say?
“We could all probably use one,” Wallich allowed, though he himself had been up for at least a day.
“Screw,” Tosca Lehne muttered, still looking stricken and miserable. “I need sleep. Have fun without me.”
Baucum and Davenroy echoed that sentiment, and quickly retreated together into the washroom, while Lehne opened up the men's sleeping quarters. They looked a bit bigger than I'd feared, at least, and none of the ten or so beds looked occupied or disturbed, insofar as I could see them before the door slid closed again.
So Dibrin and Wallich and Rapisardi and I went back downstairs again, and found a little table for ourselves on one of the tavern's many terraces. No chairs, but in this gravity it was plenty comfortable to stand. And the music was nice, if a bit jangly and odd.
“You men drink beer?” Dibrin asked. We allowed that we did, yes, sometimes, and so he drifted off to the bar to order some for us.
Wallich's grin had returned, if weakly.
“This mission's a bit of a strain on that tickle capacitor,” I said to him.
He shrugged. “Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it isn't. Some days, it's almost painful.”
“So what do you think of this Venus business?” Rapisardi asked, quietly, as though he were afraid of being overheard. In fact, the music was very effective at drowning him out, so that I had to lean close to understand him.
“I don't know,” Wallich said. “It's hard to say how that could be. It's hard to say what we saw, right? It could be... well, a lot of things. I look and I see human beings running around, but that doesn't mean that's really what's down there. I mean, you see flowers and pin cushions and maybe bunny rabbits and stuff in that mess, too, but it's just goop. Strasheim, have you read that report yet?”
I shook my head.
“Flash it to me?”
“Sure.”
While I was doing this, Dibrin returned with our beer, which came in clear, teardrop-shaped plastic bulbs. Big bulbs, probably three hundred cc's, almost twice as much beer as a Ganymedean stein would hold. Well, when in Rome... That thought just reminded me that maybe there were still people in Rome, and I didn't want to think about that. So I took a pull on the beer, which tasted just fine.
“Hard day?” Dibrin asked, taking a drink from his own bulb.
“Hard lifetime,” Rapisardi said, and both Dibrin and Wallich laughed at that.
We stood for a while in silence.
“You know,” I finally said, “If news this big can escape our attention, something is definitely wrong. There should probably be a lot better communication between the Immunity and the Gladhold.”
“Gladholds,” Dibrin corrected. “Seek, there are hundreds; we're loosely confederated at best. But yeah, sure, I think it's always better to talk. Would you still be on this mission of yours if you'd had this news earlier?”
I thought about that, shrugged. I really didn't know.
But Wallich said, “Our basic problem hasn't changed.”
I thought about that, as well. If people were surviving down there, bloomless, unconsumed, couldn't we survive, as well? The Innensburg bloom argued against it, ditto the death of my brother in his smaller, less dramatic contagion. Or the death of Tug Jinacio, for that matter, or the hundreds of other bloom deaths that the Immunity had racked up over the years. With people like the bottle man running around, how long might it be before the mycora learned to wipe us out?
Wallich was right, our mission was as imperative as ever—the risk of Mycosystem expansion was impossible to calculate, but the consequences were, in essence, infinitely bad. Mankind needed a warning system, needed that little bit of extra time to... what? Launch the starship? Protect itself in some way, certainly. Once morning came and our fuel arrived, we'd be off, just the same as before.
<
br /> Meanwhile, though, it was just as well to sit here drinking beer. Or so reason informed us; internally, some subliminal sense of guilt was hard to avoid.
More silence for a while, again broken by me: “Dibrin, you, uh, you seem to have artificial intelligences in your head. Is that so?”
He nodded. “Yes. In my spine, actually.” He patted the back of his neck. “It helps me think much faster. Which is good.”
“But are they really your thoughts?”
At this, he frowned. “Are you recording this?”
“No. Does it make a difference?”
“I guess not. About the thoughts, whether they're mine, I think that depends on how you define 'me.' Am I my brain? My body? Am I the sum of my parts? The thoughts blend seamlessly. The brain evolves to work with the assistants, and also the assistants evolve to work with the brain. If you took the machinery away, I would be crippled. My brain would no longer function in a healthy way. So yes, all the thoughts are mine, by my perception of that word. You get a separated intelligence, not an assistant but a self-contained entity, and its behavior is not governed that way. They can be somewhat peculiar at times.”
“Peculiar how?” I asked.
He pursed his lips, seemed to consider for a moment. “May I flash you a short plaintext?”
“All right.”
He did this, once again quickly and without moving. I opened the document.
HUMAN ERROR, A Fiction
LOOK_FOR_OBJECT. 2 DOORS down HALLWAY, ENTER, LOOK_FOR_OBJECT, it does. Punishment/reward sieves through learning nets, squeaking wheel, skewed camera-eye, pause and recalibrate. The itch must be scratched, has been scratched, O_fucking_kay! Searching, searching; this brings happiness.
BUT
BUT
BUT