Bloom

by Wil McCarthy

  Solid? Gellid? Formed only of slime or vapor or evil intention? Visually, there was no way to tell, though some of the forms reached kilometers high. Even clouds look solid from a distance.

  Clouds, yes. To my right, the sky roiled and billowed, white and silver and gray, dark gray in places on the bottom. A thrill of terror from my youth: storm clouds. Water vapor? Myco-vapor? A million million spores blowing in on the jet stream, waiting for a downdraft to carry them, blooming, to Earth? That was where I was, of course: Earth. Not my Earth, humanity's Earth, but the one that came after. The one we'd fled in horror so great it had shaped everything about us from that day forward.

  “Jesus,” I said, every hair on my body standing straight out.

  Baucum was right there with me, zee-spec configured to incorporate her into the simulation, her nude body tangled with mine, drifting with mine above the rock spire. She was wearing my zee-spec, looking blind, not seeing me or the horror around me, but rather the peaceful meadow of Ex-Philusburg.

  “You're invisible!” she laughed.

  “Baucum, are you insane?”

  “No, really, I can't see you.”

  I looked around me, trying not to shudder or grimace or scream. “This is your ideal environment?”

  Lightning flared from the clouds, crashed into distant spires of purple-rainbow fog. Answering flashes raced across the ground, skittering over the landscape, and through it, vanishing one by one over the jagged horizon.

  “Oh,” she said, smiling blindly at me, “it is a bit of a shock, I suppose. The end-product of several years' geekwork. Ideal? Not so much that as coveted. I told you, I want the Earth back. As much as you do.”

  “More,” I said, cringing. “You win. You want it more.”

  “You're so tense. I wish I could see you,” she said. Then, in a susprisingly keen imitation of Chris Dibrin's voice: “May I... meddle?”

  “What? Yeah, fine. Go ahead.”

  Her fingers danced in empty air for a while. Finally, her eyes rested on me.

  “Tsk. You look so horrified.”

  “I'd rather watch surgery. Really, can I turn this sim off?”

  She looked hurt. “I wanted to impress you. Yes, go ahead and close it. There's another file in there, called 'Waterfall.'“

  “Take my word for it,” I told her, “I'm impressed. The attention to detail is... impressive. Very.”

  I would have nightmares for a week, a month, the rest of my life, now that I knew what Hell must look like. I wiped the image, found the layer of controls and windows beneath it. Breathed a sigh of relief. Zee-specs are mostly all the same, but the defaults and preferences and menu and image layouts must be as unique and individual as the people who own them. Baucum's controls were not like mine, but they were obvious enough. I found and activated the “Waterfall” sim, which sprang to life around me.

  Again, I floated. Again, the sky above me was deep blue, with cumulus islands rolling across it, puffy white. This time, though, the jungle was green, terrestrial, safe. Sprinkled liberally with flowers, yes, but real ones, biogenic ones, evolved over billions of years like God intended. The surface beneath my feet was a pool of water wider than a house, churned by a cascade of water tumbling down black-rocky cliffs. The sight and sound of it soothed me instantly, ointment on the bruises of my soul. Faint music played, barely audible, seeming to originate from somewhere higher up on the cliff.

  “Is that better?” Baucum asked, eyeing me from arm's length.

  “Yes,” I told her. “Much. I thought my Mycosystem sim was bad.”

  “Oh, are you still working on that?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I can't get the dynamics right, though. Not like yours!”

  “Well, mine is a top-down fractal animation, not a cellular automaton. Very little of the underlying physics is actually modeled. The mycostructure is pure marshmallow, no internal chemistry.”

  “Well, it's effective. It's horrible.”

  “I do apologize for that. With long exposure we get inured to things, forget the shock value of them, but I suppose not everyone can gaze unflinching into the face of the Mycosystem.”

  “Yeah, well, I picked a hell of a place to spend the winter, then, didn't I?”

  “So it would appear,” she said, and smiled.

  I looked her up and down, then, relaxing tensed muscles, enjoying the zee-spec's interpretation of what she would look like if the lights were on and the lenses clear. Pink nipples, auburn pubic hair, smooth soft hips... God, it had been a long time. The best things in life, we used to say, are free. So why did I have the feeling there'd be hell to pay? Ah, well, payment would be rendered in due time. This was hardly the moment to worry about it.

  Baucum was tender as well as beautiful, understanding as well as skeptical. When we'd fallen together it had been with grace, enthusiasm, the gentle brushing aside of a deep mutual cowardice. Who'd have guessed? And now, to see her...

  “I'm very impressed,” I informed her, and was rewarded with another blush.

  “Cut it out, you,” she said, and pulled me close to stop my looking. And then kissed me, to quash my reply. And then...

  Well, you know what happened then.

  SEVENTEEN:

  Mars, the God of...

  The rapping on my cabin door was gentle but firm, clearly intended to wake me, but discreetly. Grunting, I hit the lights, took my zee-spec off the charging rack, swore when I saw the time. I popped the door open.

  Darren Wallich floated outside, trying hard to look polite and apologetic through the grin he was failing to suppress.

  I glared. “Yes?”

  “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but we needed a word in private. You know what this is about.”

  Pause. “Yeah.” Baucum's scent was still strong on my skin.

  “None of my business,” he hastened to say, holding up both hands to indicate his helplessness, “but it's not a large ship. Privacy does not come cheap.”

  “Right.”

  “I can't tell you your business.”

  “Right,” I said, more slowly. He was still smirking, still fighting it, still failing. Nice to know my life was so amusing.

  “Morale never stops being an issue, Strasheim. You appreciate that for every crewman who finds someone to... cohabitate with, there are three or four who don't? We seem to have a fairly polite group this time around, but even when open rivalries don't result—”

  “It won't happen again, sir.”

  He looked me over, the smirk faltering a little, guilt and sympathy struggling to take its place. “I have no jurisdiction over your personal life. I have no interest in meddling, particularly in affairs of the heart. My concern is purely for the mission.”

  “It won't happen again,” I repeated, letting more of the irritation creep into my voice. I'd known this was coming; despite our efforts to be quiet, I didn't for a moment suspect we'd fooled anyone. But I didn't have to like it.

  Wallich reached out and gripped my arm, a surprisingly warm and masculine gesture. I understand, freund, and approve, and envy your luck. But do the right thing. I sniffed, and finally nodded my understanding.

  “Baucum?”

  “Already talked to her. I think she likes you.”

  I colored. “Thanks. I'd guessed.”

  “More than she wants to, I mean. She seems off-guard and flustered. For whatever that's worth.”

  I could think of no reply.

  Wallich laughed. “All right. I'm glad we had this talk, Strasheim. That famed expressiveness! Sorry, again, to wake you like this, but I need you on shift an hour early anyway. We have maneuvers coming up.”

  “Mars?”

  “The one and only. Starts getting real from this point. No time for error. Do you need a shower to wake up?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, probably. Thirty minutes?”

  “You have fifteen,” he said, and laughed as if this were the funniest thing he'd heard all night.

  ~~~

 
; “Hi,” I said to Baucum as I took my seat.

  “Hi,” she returned without meeting my eyes.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yep. Busy, though.”

  It wasn't long before I discovered what she meant.

  The corridor for our Mars approach was narrow, requiring fanatic precision in both time and space, and for days ahead of time we had a series of burns scheduled to keep us locked on an ever-tightening course. How exactly a ship like ours could get off course I didn't fully understand, but it had to do with things like the resolution of our position and velocity measurements, which got worse the farther we drew from charted celestial objects, and was now improving steadily as we approached Mars.

  Here is how fast we were going: at three days out, the planet had been a speck under normal magnification. At two days, it was still a speck. At one day, it would still be a speck. We'd have slowed down a lot by then, sure, but by the time the planet had grown to the size of an eyeball, we'd be only an hour from our closest approach; from there on it would swell alarmingly, like a balloon about to burst, like a fist about to strike, until it filled half the sky, and then we'd be past it, and an hour after that it would be the size of an eyeball again. Wallich had walked me through the whole sequence, to be sure I understood. Probably, to be sure I wouldn't be surprised or panicky when it happened.

  That was under normal magnification, though. Under 1000x, the Red Planet was already showing off a lot of detail. Formerly red, I should say—even from this distance, the thumbnail-sized crescent looked decidedly pink, with scattered hints of yellow and purple. That made it seem real, somehow, not an image but a place, backlit, altered and perilous and directly in our path. The polar caps stood out clearly, not so much white as pale orange, water and CO2 ices scattered with whatever remained of the planet's primordial oxide dust.

  Safe havens. For all its menace, altered Mars was still the safest place in the inner system, safer by far than the space surrounding it. In space, there was no hiding from the endless sunlight.

  You could cover it up with data windows, though; Wallich kept asking me not only for real-time allocation data but for various sorts of predictions, and finally I was forced to open a graph table and geek up some primitive sims just to stay ahead of him. Even so, he had me busy working the numbers.

  “Strasheim: projected datastream for the attitude control system if we fire the main engine in five minutes?”

  “Well, somewhere between five and eight kilobits per, depending on what Lehne is doing. Sir.”

  What Lehne was doing created no small uncertainty in my calculations. Baucum was detecting an increasing assortment of spores and other nasties on the hull and in the space ahead, and while no direct action was ever taken as a result, Lehne kept the countermeasures hot, continually forcing changes in the allocation of power and data. The ship's autonomous inclination was to set resources at the level of Lehne's most outrageous demand, and to back off from this very slowly when pressed by other needs, which would have made sense if we were actually fighting off a bloom. But Wallich's was the station most in need, a situation the ship's computers didn't seem to want to believe, and every time I let my attention wander—easy enough with my chair hanging almost directly above Renata Baucum's—I'd soon find his Reproachful Captain tones dragging me back. No wonder he'd wanted a live person at my station!

  The first maneuver, an hour-long burn designed to slip us onto the approach corridor by reducing our velocity, came and went. In its wake came a number of trips to the wardroom to stretch and exercise a bit, trips to the head for the obvious reason, and to the galley to grab a few portable calories for the next big push. Since the last of the fruit, a pair of suspiciously soft and bruisy-looking melons, had been consigned to the recycler two days before, the clear favorites today were figure-eight “crumpels” of chewy Gladholder bread, and squeeze bulbs of the powdered electrolyte drink called “Tez,” which was apparently some sort of brand name. How quaint.

  So for half an hour or so, the bridge seemed more like an easygoing, zero-gravity cafe, and by agreement we all opened a window on the engine room and anchored it to the aft bulkhead, completely covering the hatchway. Thus, the ship became a single virtual space, losing some fifty percent of its length and yet somehow seeming a good deal roomier. Or maybe it was just the variety of it that appealed.

  I gather the perspective looked a lot less convincing from the other side; Davenroy and Rapisardi kept eyeing us and shaking their heads. Their dark rectangular niche was a lot smaller than the bridge, though, less busy and colorful, and they did seem to enjoy the sense of space and the proximity to someone besides each other.

  Baucum kept up her hull sweeps, and Lehne kept updating his countermeasure preparations, but since the engine covers were closed this was no longer such a big deal, which of course made my job go away almost completely. Wallich was also looking happier, his demanding side buried once more, replaced with smiles and ready laughter.

  “I had a saddleneck team working under me once,” he was saying, in response to some comment of Davenroy's, “swapping out the plumbing and wiring on one of the labs we couldn't afford to shut down at the time. Always underfoot, always pulling up the floor plates and shutting breakers off without warning anybody. And of course they were saying the same things about us, and if there's anyone in the worlds with zero awe for Immune science, those were the guys. Gotta love 'em, you've just gotta. Anyway, one of these guys—actually, it might have been a female, but one of them cut off the water drip to a zeolyte feed operation we'd been running all week, and I started, you know, chewing her out about it, so she just kind of looks at me and says, 'What, like it isn't wet enough already?'“

  Infectious, his laughter rippled through us all.

  “Was that before or after you got the tickle capacitor?” I asked.

  “Oh, years before,” he said seriously, eyeing my upside-down face, and then burst out laughing even harder. “I threw such a tantrum they... they put me on an Io orbital survey for five weeks. Which turned out to be a good thing, overall, but to this day I train the labbers to do their own re-mod. The shit's all snap-and-go anyway, right?”

  We laughed some more, finished our bread, finished our drinks. I talked to Baucum a little, but she seemed edgey, embarassed, reluctant to look up at me or respond to me unless pressed. Best to wait until a better semblance of privacy prevailed.

  The second burn approached. Work began to pick up again, Darren Wallich to get edgey.

  “Rapisardi,” he said, turning to face the false engine room, “How's the payload doing? You ready to drop some probes?”

  “Tube one is powered up,” Rapisardi affirmed. “I'll start running diagnostics once the burn is complete.”

  “That long?”

  Rapisardi clucked. “Unless you don't want me monitoring for contamination when Davenroy opens the engine covers, yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  Baucum's voice cut through: “Hold it, whoa! I just read a high-frequency radio pulse from the direction of the planet!”

  Radio pulse? Mycora didn't emit radio. Mycora ate radio signals. What could be emitting, way the hell down here? Nothing, I thought. Nothing that could survive the trip.

  “There goes another!” Baucum said, sounding delighted. Here was something unexpected, finally, something worthy of her analysis. “The source appears to be about half a degree off the limb of the planet.”

  “Orbital?” Wallich asked. He was loosening his straps, leaning forward in his chair.

  Baucum shrugged. “Off the surface, anyway. I can't get a doppler velocity fix without knowing the source frequency, and I can't measure range without a precise transmission time. The source is definitely outside the Martian atmosphere, though, at least twenty thousand kilometers. Possibly a lot more. I'm reading a third pulse. Lots of echoes!”

  “Are you recording?”

  “Oh, that's affirmative,” Baucum said, her fingers dancing in the air and on her pa
nel. “Sudhir and I have got to analyze this! It's not often we get an active radar ping so close to an infected planet. As in, never. In the echoes I'm seeing... several dense bodies out there, which is definitely not expected. A lot of diffuse mycostructure as well, much more than visual scans would indicate.”

  Several of us grumbled at this news. The empty space we were flying through was maybe not so empty?

  “It's got to be a human artifact,” Wallich said, sounding as though he were trying to convince himself of the fact.

  “Here's a fourth ping,” Baucum announced, ignoring the comment. “The waveform has smeared—something happening at the source. I'm detecting a bloom.”

  “Spectral analysis?”

  She frowned, fussed with invisible symbols. “Planetary backscatter shows a high concentration of metals, mostly aluminum and iron. Direct solar absorption is less conclusive. I would guess that we're looking at a class one blossom infest; many thousands of spores, triggered by the radio transmission and blooming more or less simultaneously. Yes, the object certainly was man-made. Probably around seven kilos, based on the growth pattern of the bloom.”

  “Point to it,” Wallich said.

  By agreement, we'd all pasted a 500X magnification Mars window over the bridge's forward bulkhead, and Baucum now undid her straps, reached forward over her console and laid a finger on the image. “There.”

  I looked, saw nothing at first but the meter-wide crescent of the planet, upturned like a pair of sinister, bruise-colored horns curving away from the flaming ball of the sun below. The curve's lower edge was jagged and rainbow-hazy, fading into whispy tendrils that reached well out into space. Infected Mars. Then I saw it: a tiny smudge, blue and green and ghostly looking, about the size of a rice grain hovering off the tip of one horn.