Bloom

by Wil McCarthy

  There were other surprises awaiting our enemies as well, engine mods and Immune system mods and even a change to the running and landing lights. I wanted to ask more about these, both for posterity's sake and for my own curiosity, but actually I was starting to have my hands full with allocation. Davenroy's reactor control sims ate a more or less steady diet of time and energy, data and memory, but Wallich and Rapisardi were all over the place, and the computer, with no insight or understanding of its own, was having a hard time sifting priorities. I was intervening now several times a minute, throwing this or that item to the bottom of the queue, or bumping up job requests that kept getting postponed.

  In a way, too, I was contributing to the morass, because every time I let my attention wander over to the bioanalysis functions I'd find myself asking questions, the answering of which threw still more demands on the allocation system at the very times I wasn't there monitoring it. But I could hardly give the practice up; presently, another replication event ticked over in that same tiny square of hull, and then yet another.

  I captured the details of the events as best I could, and thought hard about waking Lehne up no matter what Wallich said. I didn't like this one bit. But then again, a glance at the chronometer showed I had only a couple of minutes to wait before the “natural” start of his shift. I glanced at Wallich, who was deeply engrossed in disagreeing with Rapisardi about something-or-other, and decided to hold my peace.

  Time and resource constraints certainly didn't warrant our taking any gratuitous science measurements, but I did it anyway, somehow fitting it in with all the rest. Not that I really knew what I was doing, but it sure seemed like somebody ought to be handling this, and I, more than anyone else at least, could be spared for the effort. Maybe posterity would be grateful. Maybe there'd be a story or two in it for me. Or maybe it was a flagrant waste of time, but at least the ghost of Baucum would be silent. Murderess or no, she really would have wanted this data, and the pressure of that want seemed to compel me, somehow, to action.

  I looked “up,” though, and noticed Lehne settling into his station, so I suspended what I was doing and flashed some key pointers to his board.

  “Hi,” I said. “There's a hot spot on the hull you need to have a look at. Five replications so far.”

  “Five?” He blanched. “Why didn't you wake me?”

  “I was about to.”

  “Hmm.”

  He fell into the task with the sort of bone-deep dedication only mortal danger can bring. We'd all adopted a sort of business-as-usual facade where blooms were concerned, to save energy if for no other reason—you simply can't maintain a state of panic indefinitely. But the danger was real, and under other circumstances would certainly have been kick-and-scream material.

  Lehne requested additional data, and I provided it. The engines, I noted, had come on at some point without my being aware of it, and behind me I heard Wallich and Rapisardi talking about going to “DP-1” attitude. Damn, but the time was racing! I glanced up at an exterior window, saw the crescent Earth swollen now to very nearly the size of a golf ball. Again, not any Earth I remembered, but a yellow-pink tumble of technogenic excess, its atmosphere and surface contours blurring out into space with dust-bunny vagueness. No sheen of ocean, no ripply jacket of continental rock, no sign at all, really, of planet-smooth surfaces. Except at the polar caps, which looked much as I supposed they always had, and as out of place on that infected globe as steaming jungles would be on the surface of Ganymede. Still, the sight of them cheered me, reassured me that even this far down, the Mycosystem's rule was not absolute. Not yet, anyway.

  I only got a moment to look, because Lehne's work dumped an additional burden on the already-strained allocation system, which threatened an outright collapse if I didn't wade in with some authoritative instructions. But dutifully, thinking of Momma's last-ever request, I waved at her homeworld just the same. Had she been younger and more fit, would she have volunteered for this expedition? I found it difficult to imagine otherwise. So if there were such things as ghosts, perhaps hers was here as well, silently watching the Earth go by. Or bickering with the ghost of Baucum, maybe, or feeding rubber to the ghosts of my father's dear departed parrots.

  My moment of looking ended. After that, the normal rules of chronolgy were suspended for a while as we dug deeper and deeper into our instruments and jobs, communicating only as needed for that purpose. Then at some point the flow of time resumed, jarringly —Louis Pasteur shuddered, and I looked up sharply, frightened for a moment before I recognized the sound and feel of payload release. Rapisardi had opened up tubes five and six, launching the mines. Or were they live detectors, destined for the planet's surface? No, surely it was still too early for that. But we had only seven tubes left to fire, four of which were indispensibly vital to our mission; even there, at ten probes per tube and one tube per planetary and lunar pole, we'd be spreading our resources desperately thin.

  Another of Baucum's warning systems came alive.

  “We're being pinged,” I said.

  “Got it,” Wallich agreed.

  I had a window open on our “best guess” courses for the enemy ships, whose positions changed suddenly as automated processes digested the radar data.

  The ping came again, a red warning light on my board, a shrinking, kidney-shaped outline on the threat display. Shrinking again as the probe let out another radar yelp, and then contracting to a single diffuse dot as the readings changed, optical sensors picking up glints of sunlight on a target now dozens of times larger and less dense.

  The threat of bloom brought home again, made clear, made current in minds that had worked hard at forgetting it. Look where I am, Momma! Look where the hell I am!

  “I need to purge the hull,” Lehne warned.

  Wallich grunted without looking up. “HF sweat?”

  “Don't think so, we're nearly out. Better be a hydroxide wash, very alkaline, minimum exposure time.”

  “You sure that's wise?”

  “No. All we've got on hand, though...”

  So they went ahead and did it, breaking the process down into four or five hardware calls and dumping them into the job queue at maximum priority. It was among the worst things they might possibly have done. I raised my voice in protest... too late. The system, finally overloaded beyond its ability to cope, coughed up an error message and seized. A buzzer sounded, and red warning lights—physical diodes on the surfaces of every control panel—came on.

  “System crash!” I shouted. “Damn it!”

  “Restart!” Wallich snapped at me.

  No, I wanted to say, really? Is that what we do when the computer seizes? But what I actually said was, “Aye, sir, I'm on it.”

  On a spaceship of any sort, cycling power on the central processor is a big deal. On a spaceship of our sort, in the middle of a battle in the middle of a planetary flyby in the middle of the goddamn Mycosystem, it's a calamity begging to happen. Life support, propulsion, guidance and nav... everything feeds through the information system. Manual backups are available, sure, but to fall back on them you have to trust human minds and senses to accomplish feats they simply aren't equipped for. It's an unspoken rule, a simple fact of life: without the processor you're dead.

  I reached for the Main Power switch high on the allocation board, flipped up its clear plastic shield, and pressed it. There was a confirmation switch in an even less accessible location, up under the bottom of the panel, but I found and depressed it by feel, grateful suddenly for all the hours of disassembly and reassembly Wallich had forced on me in recent weeks. It came to me that I knew, literally, the position not only of every control, but of every screw and wire and circuit block inside the thing.

  The lights went out. Absolute silence is as alien aboard a ship as freezing vacuum is in a cavern city. Absolute darkness, too, but that was mitigated by the zee-spec; exterior windows vanished instantly, along with the virtual controls and indicators that comprised most of the bridge's work
ing surfaces, the various status windows and interlinks, and what have you. The purely internal stuff, though, the time and date stamp and direction indicators and personal windows (e.g., the tiny Mulch System sim, running solo, isolated from the ship's computer and still iterating away slowly in a corner of my vision) remained, sparing us the awful sense of having been struck blind.

  “Sweet God of Mercy!” Sudhir Rapisardi's voice exclaimed nonetheless. Others were echoing the sentiment, and turning on their zee-specs' power-hungry work lamps, as I reached for the switches in reverse order to bring the power back on. There was no fumbling, no uncertainty. Practice makes perfect.

  You never notice that background hum and whine of electrical conduits until the moment it stops, or the moment it starts back up. Relief washed over me with that sound, and then as the air blowers kicked back on I permitted myself the luxury of being afraid. Of noticing how afraid I was, I should say. The lights came on grudgingly, first a warm glow here and there and then washes of color as circuits closed and capacitors charged up. A small window opened in the exact center of the allocation board, short and wide and full of text:

  SYSTM RSTRT: SCANNING FUNCTION SPACE

  SYSTM RSTRT: LOADING DSCRPTOR STACK

  SYSTM START: ALLOCTNG FUNCTION SPACE

  OPR. CMPLTE: 00:02:26.81

  “Report,” Wallich demanded quietly.

  “Two and a half minutes to system restore,” I answered.

  He paused for a moment, fitting appropriate words around his next question: “How... did this happen to us?”

  “Task loading,” I said simply. “The allocation system juggles a hundred jobs just sitting there, and we kept throwing more crap at it. Processing capacity is not infinite, and I don't think the ship was really designed to do most of the stuff we're asking of it right now.”

  He paused again, and then said, “This can't happen again. I mean it. Preventive measures?”

  Half the lights still hadn't come on, the control panels were still dead, and in the strange lighting I took several seconds to realize he was still looking at me. The fact the he was behind me and upside down didn't help my recognition any.

  I considered the question for a moment. Loss of the information system had, I think, hurled us into a kind of freezing panic, a sense that our jobs were going undone while dangers piled up outside the hull, and if we didn't do something right now we'd... what? Panic's most dangerous seduction is its cool mimicry of logic, its quiet insistence on sudden, inappropriate action. But there are other forces at work in a human mind, in a trained mind, and there come points in your life when you're faced with an unfamiliar task, an unfamiliar decision, and you realize you're it, you're on the hook, you're the one and only person in a position to set things right.

  Flash of childhood memory: a game of capture the flag, the enemy pinned down by laser fire, hit sensors screaming back there among the trees, the gym teacher turning to me in exasperation. “Get the flag, John.” The implication clear in his voice: you're good enough, you're fast enough, you're bloody well it, so what's the holdup? Go, go!

  I went.

  “Captain,” I said, “you can't keep shunting your trajectory calculations onto shipboard processors. That goes for everyone—if you can solve a problem locally, do it. A zee-spec isn't that slow, and it hasn't got a whole ship to run in its spare time. Push-pull windows are fine, but be careful that what you're pushing is static data and not incomplete calculation blocks. Especially blocks with timers on them. Also—please!—don't force the priority flag on your requests. All that does is tell the ship that everything is more important than everything else, which is meaningless. Let the priority queue do its job, and let me do mine.”

  Shockingly, Wallich laughed. “Well said, berichter. Anything else?”

  “Well, not really, except to use common sense. Your brain is for thinking, and your zee is for calculating. The ship is just an I/O device.”

  Wallich laughed again, longer and harder this time. And then he stopped.

  “Time to full function?”

  “Eighty seconds.”

  “Well. Damn. It's hard just to sit here, eh?”

  Nobody commented. It was the understatement of the week.

  “Status?”

  “Forty seconds.”

  “Lehne, that alkaline sweat is your top priority. Davenroy, I want reaction control thrusters just as soon as possible. We're going to Deploy One attitude in a few minutes and any schedule slip means we slow down even more. Nobody wants that, right? Strasheim: status.”

  “Twenty seconds, sir, and this is exactly what I'm talking about. You've got a timer hanging right in front of your face. Also, I think we should stagger our initial jobs on five-second intervals to give the system a chance to adjust. We could go bow-to-stern, so Lehne's request goes in first.”

  “Okay,” Wallich said with manic amusement, “you heard the man. Start your clock when he says go.”

  “Go.”

  The control panels came back to life. There were grunts and sighs of relief, the sounds of people opening windows and getting back to work, hitting the allocation system one by one, but not as hard as before. Not quite. The first coherent thing I heard was Lehne's voice cursing softly, and then the words: “Stands to reason we'd encounter novel species down here. Close to the sun, close to the planet. Stands to reason we'd not be prepared for every possible thing.”

  “What,” Wallich asked, his voice still tight and giddy, “spores eating through the hull?”

  “Yes sir,” Lehne replied, “I'm afraid they are.”

  ~~~

  Slowly, he forgot to say. Initial panic gave way to a much slower, deeper sense of dread as the unknown mycorum, still restricted to a tiny patch of hull, gradually blunted the t-balance defenses there, stripping them away uncertainly, atom by atom, to feed its own bottomless appetite. Replication events were soon to frequent to draw comment. They had become a fact of life, of which, according to Lehne's calculations, we had about six days left. That's painfully slow for a bloom, I'll agree, but painfully quick for a sentence of death. Once we lost hull integrity, we'd be patching holes and fighting blooms and trying to hold the ship's systems together for another few precious moments, and it didn't really matter what got us first, because something surely would.

  The good news was that Lehne was able to push the deadline back a day and a half by sweating out the last of our hydrofluoric acid. So we had a whole week to live, if nothing else went wrong. Which was about as likely as ever.

  Still hard on our tail, the enemy ships closed alarmingly as we fired our last deceleration burn. They seemed to have misjudged, though—the closure was not quite fast enough to bring them to us before deployment time. Had they misjudged our maximum deployment speed? Presumed we'd be following the same profile we had at Mars? If so, the error was a critical one; they were still lagging by thousands of kilometers as we spun and danced, shooting payload tubes seven and eight off at Earth's north pole, nine and ten at its south, and then two more at the poles of Luna.

  Leaving only the final tube: lucky thirteen. If we fired that, we'd be left with no more bombs to shoot, no more mines to lay. From there on, we'd be relying on the really improvised weapons. In a way, the notion was almost charming.

  We passed right between Earth and Luna, slashing through cobwebby filaments of mycostructure that seemed almost to connect the two bodies. As they passed into full sunlight, showing off their round faces to us, it was hard not to stare, mesmerized, looking for some familiar detail. We'd all been here only two decades before. Could whole worlds be erased in twenty years? Apparently so. The moon was like a yellow-white sea sponge, its deficient chemistry supporting only silicate lebenforms and yet still riotously alive, shot through with fibers and voids, recursive with fractal structures that hurt to look at, punishing the eye that lingered too long. The “radar surface” of the planet, Wallich said, was some eight hundred kilometers higher than the virgin regolith had been, back in our moo
nbase days. That's a lot of expansion for a body that small. “The moon,” he said, “has become a cheese puff. Not only would it float in water, it would dissolve.”

  “Latent organophillic spores,” Lehne countered, “would consume the water. Not float in it. Not dissolve.”

  Wallich waved a dismissive hand. “Whatever. It's a puff.”

  As for the Earth itself, it resembled nothing so much as the back of some monstrous caterpillar. Horned, fuzzy, its surface undulating with a speed that, while not directly apparent to the eye, brought visible changes between one hurried glance and the next. I could see pockets of atmosphere clinging all around, but in places the landscape shot right out of it, narrow translucent peaks jutting far out into space. Peaks? Tentacles, maybe—they too waved back and forth in sluggish progression.

  Tasting the vacuum of space, the sizzle of solar wind, the tenuous mycostructure drifting all around? Reaching for us, feeling for us? Well, maybe. My instrument readings showed a spreading cone of disaster in Louis Pasteur's wake, shattered mycofilaments spilling apart into angry clouds, but if the planet itself was aware of our passage, it gave little sign.

  Not so the enemy ships; they pinged and pinged at us, closing the gap but seeming frantic, enraged. Our lead, slender as it was, had proved sufficient to foil their primary mission of keeping us away from here, keeping us from deploying our little spies. Even now, the detectors were probably striking the surface of Luna, screaming down through the atmosphere of Mother Earth. Some would no doubt shatter or burn—we were right at the maximum deployment speed—but the devices, Rapisardi insisted, were tough. They had to be.

  Funny how the rush of completing our mission had whizzed right by me. We were done. We were free to leave, to fire up the engines and blast straight for home. Or try, anyway.