by Wil McCarthy
The Temples ships, alas, had other ideas. It seemed they had a backup plan, a secondary mission to punish us for our supposed crime. They hadn't got close enough yet to spray, or shoot, or whatever the hell it was they were going to do, but sooner or later we would have to change course, and then...
“At this point,” Wallich said with admirable reserve, “our basic options are to stop and fight, which seems sort of pointless, or to turn back up and run for home, which seems, well, overly optimistic for a number of reasons. We're not licked yet, though; the other option is to turn down and head for the sun. The lower border of the Mycosystem is a hell of a lot closer than the upper one right now.”
“Won't we melt?” I asked, horrifed.
He shrugged. “Down between the orbits of Venus and Mercury, that's where TGL starts to fry. It's hot down there, yeah, but we should be able to cook all the crap off us before the ship actually starts to come apart.”
A window opened up, showing Davenroy's face. “What about radiation?”
“A bigger threat,” Wallich admitted. His hands fluttered, jabbing and pointing. “We're close to solar minimum right now, but if we pick up a mag storm then yeah, it's all over. Cosmic ray shielding is not going to hold up against a proton flare at that range.”
“We don't get these lebenforms off the hull, it's all academic,” Lehne said. “I say we go. Sterilize. Then figure out what to do next.”
“We may not have enough fuel to return home,” Davenroy pointed out. She did some fidgeting and pointing of her own. “Well, maybe enough to reach the Gladholds. It'll be close.”
“Will the Temples ships follow us down?” Rapisardi asked. He was still a disembodied voice, which for some reason I found strikingly annoying at that moment.
“Only one way to find out,” Wallich said, grinning and chuckling in that way of his. “Are we all on board for this? Are we 'go?'“
“Affirmative,” Lehne said without hesitation.
Rapisardi's affirmation followed close behind, and then, more reluctantly, Davenroy's. Wallich turned to me. “Well, berichter, what do you say? We'll be closer to the sun than anyone's ever gone before. Closer even than those poor bastards on Venus. Hell of a story, that.”
I snorted, trying to be amused. “We've already got a hell of a story, Darren. I was sort of hoping to take it home now and show it off.”
He reached a hand up and nudged the back of my seat's headrest. “Come on, let's go to the sun. It'll be fun.”
Fun? Well, maybe it would at that. More fun than certain death, anyway.
“What the hell,” I said.
And down we went.
The Temples zealots, only momentarily thrown off by the change of trajectory, followed us in. Of course.
TWENTY-TWO:
Heart of Brightness
So where does all this leave us? Which of the available futures will we choose for ourselves? To sail away on bright starship flames, leaving our birthplace to rot in peace? To carry the fight downward, extending the Immunity's reach into the Gladhold and beyond? Or will we continue to cower here under the ice, waiting patiently for the other shoe to drop?
This much we know: that it isn't simply our lives at stake, but the very biology that supports them.
—from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure
(c) 2101 by John Strasheim
~~~
Mulch System swept around me, taking advantage of reduced demands on the information system, running now at maximum speed, its movements blurring into irregular spasms like the innards of some enormous hyperventillating animal. Running unheeded—every couple of minutes it would freeze or die out or lock into an infinite loop, and I would glance up and, with a manual flourish, cast a dozen or a hundred or a million new spores into the fray, bringing it temporarily back to life. Other than that, though, I pretty well ignored it. I was reading my mail.
Slow data rates or no, I'd been inattentive this past week, and the messages had really begun to pile up. Many seemed happily unaware of our difficulties, e.g.:
Dear Strasheim, please send pictures of the Earth you know we all miss it very much. I will look forward to meeting you when you return to the Immunity, I hope you will agree to visit Callisto we don't all live in Ganymede you know...
Others seemed merely to have got delayed, looping for God knows how long in some glitchy network before escaping to a transmission queue:
J.S.: Good luck entering Mycosystem. Please inform crew our thoughts go with. History will mark your courage this day! Live people in Mycosystem? Surely some error in Gladholder science. Soon you will know, though, yes?
Well, sadly, no. Even with all the computer trouble, I had managed to capture some decent images and science readings during the flyby, but Louis Pasteur's camera dots simply didn't have the resolution to pick up surface features. Nothing smaller than a good-sized city, anyway, and if there were any of those about, my pictures gave no evidence. Just these ropy, snaky, cloud-diffuse images of a complexity that brought a woozy, stood-too-quickly feeling to my head. Images in the ultra-violet were the worst.
Were there people down there among those headache whorls? Had they seen us go by, a brightish star across the nightscape, with lesser lights swarming after it in pursuit? Had they seen the meteor trails of our detectors raining down on the polar caps? The Gladholder findings were still difficult to accept, equally difficult to refute. It seemed natural enough that yeah, we should somehow be able to gauge the truth of the matter down here, but I guessed there was a limit to what five beleaguered people in a failing boat could accomplish. Maybe next time, freund.
Still other messages were profoundly clueless, perhaps written by children (although years of experience had taught me to be wary of that assumption), and some seemed to have been addressed to another reality altogether. Charitably, they might somehow have been mangled in transit. A few messages, though, seemed to target my own thoughts with precision:
Pasteur: Temples deny foreknowledge, blame splinter group for attacking ships. So your assessment of enemy identity appears largely correct. Trying to negotiate, they say, but more blooms, turmoil here. Details unimportant—mission accomplished. Good luck inner system. Do not bring back souvenir!
Pasteur: Spacecom advises, consider trajectory carefully viz. fuel. Duh. Stay well. Have tried thermal cycling to foil infection? Immunity recommends as treatment last resort.
Pasteur: Housekeeping tip, increase atmospheric CO2 & H2O to slow metabolism, reduce food intake. Plan now, avert shortage; mission duration not known. Remember to note what it's like down there; do not forget you are pioneers.
We'd been losing the originator info on all the messages lately, so it was hard to say who was sending these. I might almost have suspected Vaclav Lottick, the messages were so clueful and direct, but he'd always addressed his queries and orders and complaints to Wallich. I suspect I'd stopped existing for him the moment I shook his hand in the shipyards at Galileo. Something in the clipped, precise style of the messages reminded me of fellow berichter Warren Ancell, but he and I had never really gotten along. Had we?
I resolved to investigate the matter if I ever returned home. Somebody was definitely owed a night on the town, and overtime be damned. I would have liked to reply, even just a couple of bytes of feedback for that welcome voice, and for the folks back home who'd made us a part of their lives, but the rest of the crew had ganged up to force my agreement in switching the transmitters off.
“Loss of countermeasure reserves,” Lehne had said. “Why risk making things worse? We can still heat the hull, okay, fine, but on the down cycle, residual warmth just accelerates growth. Marginal net gain, and we risk attention from active mycostructures. Tickle the spores with radio waves, that's not going to help one bit.”
“Anyway,” Wallich added, “Why give the Temples a fix on our position? For once we've got the advantage: we see the sunlight reflecting off them, brighter every day, while they're looking almost straight down the corona t
o see us. We want to stay lost in the glare if we can help it.”
And Rapisardi: “I'd have to cut your data ration anyway, due to the increase in range.”
“Plus it drains the battery,” Davenroy had concluded. And that was that.
Anyway, it seemed there wasn't that much mail after all. Scanning plaintext was a lot faster than wading through audiovisual recordings, that was for sure. Suddenly bored, I waved the mail window closed, and then exited from Mulch System, back into my cabin. Well, of course, I'd been in the cabin all along. The sensation of having traveled somehow was difficult to shake, though; the ideator's VR can be a very real place if you let it, which is probably why we Munies avoid it so assiduously.
Not long before that day, the cabins had been guarded territory, closed doors marking off the boundaries of a largely illusory privacy. Since the Earth flyby, though, some strange, unspoken consensus had been reached that the doors would mostly remain open. We were, in all probability, going to die together in the next few days, and against the terrible intimacy of that, it seemed absurd to hide behind walls just to sleep and scratch ourselves and whatnot.
So once my zee-spec lenses had gone transparent, I could see clear across the wardroom into Rapisardi's cabin. He, too, seemed lost in VR somewhere; he was angled at forty-five degrees to my vertical, and facing the side of his cabin rather than the doorway, but from what I could see his eyes looked fixed on distant objects. His hands wandered through the air, doing God knows what. Not working equations, certainly. Maybe it was a dance.
There's sometimes a delayed reaction to reality on emergence from VR; the colors aren't quite as bright, the sounds not quite as crisp, and the brain can be surprisingly reluctant to accept the degradation as anything other than a mistake.3 <
This is my long-winded way of saying I felt like talking to Rapisardi, and didn't mind disturbing him to do it.
“What are you reading?” I called out to him in a loud voice. “Hey, Sudhir.”
He looked around blindly for a moment.
“Sudhir.”
Resignedly, he motioned windows closed, turned to face me.
“What are you reading,” I asked again.
“Oh. Well. It's a... well, it's a sim I'm writing.” He looked embarassed.
“Ideation?” I asked with a conspiratorial smile.
The suggestion appeared to make him uncomfortable. “It's not that, no. Architecture, I suppose you could say. I'm hypothesizing, well, a null-gravity city.”
“What, in orbit or something?”
“Yes, very high orbit, either around Jupiter or around the sun. The idea being to minimize gravitational gradient. For true microgravity, you understand?”
I didn't, but I nodded anyway, encouraging him to go on.
He still looked embarassed. “Well, you know, I got the idea in St. Helier. Three centigee is not much, but even that minimal gravity had forced innumerable design compromises. In true microgravity the place could have looked like the inside of a stomach, wrinkled and folded back on itself many times, for, you see, maximum usable surface area. Ceilings are such a frightful waste.”
“So you're doing away with them,” I said, politely amused. “You think people will want to live that way?”
He seemed to shrink back into himself. “It's just an amusement, freund. Some people might choose it, yes, but irrelevantly, because no one is going to build this city. I'm simply bored.”
“Build it yourself,” said Darren Wallich.
Rapisardi and I turned to see him filling the hatchway between bridge and wardroom.
“Pardon?” said Rapisardi.
“Build it yourself,” Wallich repeated. “If we ever get back home, it's not inevitable that we fall back into our old ruts. You could change careers, become a city planner. Put some finance together, who knows what you could accomplish?”
“The Immunity needs me.”
Wallich laughed. “The Immunity is getting along without you right now, freund. They'll manage.”
“Do you plan to change jobs?” I asked him.
He frowned, rolled his tongue around inside his mouth for a few moments. “Well, that would be tough to say. I've never been sure exactly what my job is.”
“Doctor?” I prompted. “Technical lead? Spaceship captain?”
“Hell, I've done a lot more than just that.”
Looking at his expression when he said that, not grouchy or boastful but just sort of quietly self-satisfied, I felt a stab of envy. Since the age of fifteen, Immune society had never found any use for me outside the shoe factory. As if running a paste-and-stitch press were somehow my only talent? And then I blinked, remembering where I was. Oh yeah. Mission correspondent. Lucky me: I had one other talent, and it had brought me here.
Wallich, who was of course only about two meters away, caught something in my expression then. He must have interpreted it pretty well, because what he said was: “You know I've been meaning to say, Strasheim, you did an okay job back there. You might just have a future crewing spaceships.”
I snorted. “Lucky me. I'm having so much fun on this little expedition of yours. Thank you, though. The sentiment is... appreciated. I'm afraid I've been seriously neglecting my other job.”
He shrugged. “No transmitter.”
“No, but I can still record. I brought along fifty blank slates in my personal baggage, and so far I've only used twelve.”
Wallich leaned back, crossed his arms. “Okay, we'll use the rest of them. What'd you have in mind?”
“Well, I've interviewed every member of the crew but you. Would you mind answering a couple of questions?”
“Are you recording right now?”
“Yes.”
I wished he hadn't asked that; his whole manner changed, going stiff and self-conscious and distinctly non-photogenic. Playing to the cameras was one thing when he had a job to hide behind, quite another when he was simply supposed to be himself. I knew the syndrome well. Thinking it best to disarm him now, I said, “Don't worry, I'll block out the face to protect your identity.”
He laughed, relaxing a little. “Yeah, great. Sure, okay, I'll answer some questions. I was born in Maine, evacuated right after my twenty-eighth birthday. Spent five years as a busboy and five more as a bartender before the sky fell down.”
“Really? I wouldn't have expected that.”
“What, bartending? I used to love it. You spent a lot of time with your hands wet, washing glasses and stuff, but people just loved you. Everyone loves a bartender. Even teetotalers. I was working my way through school, though. Wasn't going to do it forever.”
“What did you expect to do instead?”
He frowned again. “You know, I'm not really sure. In the last few years, there, job descriptions had gotten sort of surreal. Bioprogrammer, system reductivist, stuff like that. But I was majoring in organic chemistry.”
“Convenient,” I said.
“Not really. Half my class were stoned to death in the riots.”
“Oh. I'm sorry.”
He laughed. “Yeah, poor me. Truth be told, I haven't thought about that stuff in years; it was sort of lost in the shuffle at Evacuation time. I figured out early that things weren't getting any better, so I packed a bag and drove six hours to the spaceport. Didn't even call my parents. I was one of the first thousand Evacuees, so early that there were still empty seats on my flight.”
I waved a hand at him, indicating that that was about enough on the Evacuation. We all had our sad tales to tell, and nobody much wanted to listen. Hope for the future, that was what
people tuned in for. That and bedroom scandal. I switched gears abruptly: “When did you have the tickle capacitor implanted? And why? That must still be a very rare procedure.”
“It is,” he agreed, laugh lines creasing deeply. “There've only been five, of which I was second. Happened four years ago. As for why, all I can say is people respond to me better this way.” He grinned broadly. “I feel better, too.”
Time to take a risk. “You must know how annoying it is at times. Does it bother you?”
This time his laugh was sly. “Sure. But I could say and do the exact same things my old way, and I assure you, you'd be a lot more annoyed. Some people are just born without a funny bone, and the world is not sympathetic. So I took matters into my own hands.”
“That's a very enlightened stance,” I said sincerely. “I'm sure a lot of people would just have blamed the world and gone about their business.”
“I'm sure a lot of people do,” he agreed.
“So what does it feel like? Has your whole personality changed?”
He shook his head. “No, I'm exactly the same inside. It feels almost exactly the same as being tickled. It isn't funny, per se, but it makes it a lot easier to laugh at other things. I'm poised on the brink of it all the time.”
“Don't you get used to that, eventually?”
“Nope. The unit works on multiple overlapping cycles, so at a given time I never know what the sensation level is going to be. If I'm in a bad enough mood the unit can sometimes exacerbate it, like when you punch people out for trying to cheer you up, but I always have the option of disabling it. I don't suppose it's much like a real sense of humor, but it gets me by.”