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  I had been bracing against the sides of Jinacio's cabin, my back on one gray-white padded wall and my feet on the other, but now I moved, aligned myself with Baucum's body once more, so that I hung before her in the doorway, close enough to touch.

  “I'm no tool of the state,” I told her mildly. “Whatever you may think, your theories and findings are of as much interest to me as any other aspect of this mission. Unusual perspectives are a great help in communication, especially of complex ideas.”

  Her face tightened. “So I'm useful, then. How flattering.”

  “Hey,” I said, frowning at her tone, “be nice. If you want to reduce it to those terms, I can't stop you, but understand that I can't use you without your using me right back. Equal and opposite reaction, or something like that. You want a voice for your ideas, well, I'm it, so quit spitting in my face. It works a lot better if we're friends.”

  She let go of the doorframe and drifted back a bit, her face a cipher, unreadable. “You want a friend, Strasheim? Fine, I'm your friend. The Game of Life is my gift to you. Play around with it, let me know what you think, and we'll talk about it some time over a nice cup of tea. Let's see... tomorrow I'm visiting with Gladholders, and the day after that is thrust ops again. Are you free on Thusday?”

  I tried to return her inscrutable look, to match the gruff neutrality of her tone. “Yeah, whatever. It's a date.”

  She kicked away and was gone.

  I checked my system clock, down in the corner of my vision: fifteen thirteen. Baucum and I had missed our thirty-minute goal by a good forty percent. Well, I wouldn't tell Wallich if she didn't.

  ELEVEN:

  Gladholders

  Our approach into the Floral Asteroids was a cautious thing—thirty-odd hours under power, with constant, kicky adjustments to the thrust vector. Whang whang! Interplanetary space was very empty down here, even in the thick of the so-called asteroid belt, but moving at hundreds of kilometers per second, you'd better believe we worried about hitting something. Wallich assured me that a chip of rock the size of a fingernail clipping could reduce us all to component atoms. I believed him, but the fact that we were as often as not steering toward such objects, employing our deceleration thrust against them, was not a source of confidence. “What better defense than a hot, hot stream of engine plasma?”

  Hmm.

  Our destination, a midsized asteroid named Saint Helier (pronounced “heel-yehr”), swelled to fist size from nothing in the space of a couple of hours, but as we continued to slow, it took the whole rest of the day to fill up a hundred and seventy degrees of sky. We were expected, of course; a weeks-long sleet of communications had preceeded our approach, and continued now as we applied for an orbit license and docking permit, and received final instructions on where and how to complete the tryst.

  Not that this exchange was any picnic; while officially a dialect of English, the Gladholder language is really a kind of mystery loaf, baked from a planet's worth of linguistic leftovers. In plaintext it's like a chain of story problems and jokeless punchlines in someone else's job jargon, and out loud you're lucky to catch every other word in the blur. Still, in my years of amateur journalism I'd had occasion to peek at some Gladholder net channels, and reading and posting to them from Louis Pasteur I was able to confirm that Lottick's people had called ahead for us, and that some sort of charity had in fact been arranged. Which was good, because our only alternative was to turn back for home on a much slower, much thriftier trajectory than the one that had brought us here.

  The rock itself was the color of coal, and from the outside gave little evidence of habitation. Its night face was covered in black rectangles, its dayside splashed with the silver of parabolic mirrors, dipping down into natural craters as if pooling there, liquid. And even when Saint Helier filled half the sky, blocking out half the stars, we hung motionless before it for quite some time, nearly forty-five minutes, while Wallich sorted out final details with a disembodied voice, with many repetitions and requests for clarification crossing the vacuum between them.

  “What? No, six people, and the cargo will not be unloaded. What? Repeat, please!”

  His sense of humor kicked in only occasionally, and even then with a kind of strained chuckle. Not nervous, exactly, but not really thrilled about this whole undertaking. The bother, the delay, the uncertainty... People were dying back home. Would the Gladholders really come across for us? Intersocietal trade was by no means unheard of, but neither was it common. The cost involved was just too absurd. And of course someone had tried to bloom Louis Pasteur the last time it sat in a dock, so maybe he was nervous after all. Maybe all of us were.

  We weren't orbiting Saint Helier, but rather hovering above it, mild thrust counteracting its sub-ludicrous gravity, and when final docking clearance arrived, it was something of a surprise when a shiplock irised open right below us, barely a hundred meters away, not concealed in any way but simply hard to see against the dark surface. Not the last such surprise we were to encounter that day.

  Under Wallich's supervision, the ship eased itself slowly down into the docking berth. There was a bumping noise, and then the soft, solid clang of metal on metal as the mooring latches closed, and the boarding tube ground its spiral walls out to the proper dimensions to mate our hatches with theirs.

  “Pop the outer hatch, please,” Wallich said to Rapisardi, who had temporarily taken over Tug Jinacio's doorman duties.

  “I copy,” Rapisardi replied. “Opening the hatch now.”

  And then, suddenly, alarm bells were going off all over the ship.

  “The hull is reacting,” Lehne said, his tone more disbelieving than afraid.

  Renata Baucum, though, flinched away from her instruments, her pinned-back hair bobbing not-quite-weightlessly. Turning, she shouted: “I'm getting replication events in the main airlock! Close it! Close it!”

  “Close it!” Wallich echoed. One hand went to the arm of his chair, gripping tightly.

  “Copy! Closing outer hatch! Where is the decon? Did anything get inside? My God, where is the decon?”

  “Nothing got inside,” Baucum said, a bit more calmly.

  But Tosca Lehne, red-faced and frightened, shook his head. “Doesn't matter. Inner hatch isn't t-balanced. No protection. Something nasty got in there, it can eat through to the crew compartments.”

  Wallich grunted, stabbing at the air with his free hand. “Right. Getting us out of here. Control, kindly release the mooring clamps—we've picked up a bug of some sort. Repeat, release the mooring clamps so we can blast clear.”

  Pause.

  “What? That's ridiculous. Release the clamps, please.”

  Pause.

  Wallich touched his chin, his ear, listening impatiently. “Describe the phage, please. Phages, right, whatever. Uh huh. Surface structure? Uh huh. Baucum, is replication in the airlock tapering off?”

  “Yeah,” Baucum said, “significantly.”

  Pause. More stabbing and poking.

  Wallich's face appeared in a small window on my zee-spec. “Well, Pasteurites, it seems that ruckus was the local immune system equalizing with ours. Some sort of adaptive onboard library sniffing out our phages. I dunno, sounds schädlich to me, but they claim it's normal enough. So, I'd like a volunteer to please open up that inner hatch.”

  “I'm here already,” Rapisardi said reluctantly.

  “Would you do the honors, then?”

  “Copy, I'm opening the hatch.”

  “You see anything?”

  “No.”

  “Baucum? Any suspicious activity?”

  “It seems to have stopped. Our phages have gone a little twitchy, but the only activity is theirs.”

  Wallich grinned. “Right, well, as advertised. Care to walk inside, Rapisardi? Take a breath? I can't order you, but I'm asking nicely. Ha ha.”

  Pause. “All right, yes. I'm doing it. I'm in the airlock. It seems perfectly normal in here.”

  “Okay. We'll give it a few minutes
to see if you explode or anything, and then we open that outer hatch and go, uh, shopping. Any objections?”

  I could think of a few, but then again, three weeks of close quarters and nutrient pap were arguing the need for fresh air. I suppose we were all thinking that, because despite the nervous, precarious feel of things, nobody spoke up. The minutes passed, and finally Wallich gave the order, and the hatch was opened. The moment was a bit more unnerving than I'd been ready for, but also exciting, exhilarating. A chance to get out of this feculent container, yes, but more than that—the opening of a gateway to the truly exotic. Gladholders! A hollow asteroid, its gravity barely a tenth of Ganymedean normal, a two hundredth of a gee.

  “Hallo,” we could hear Rapisardi saying. “Yes, nice to meet you. Yes!”

  A voice mumbled replies, indistinguishable as we threw off our safety harnesses and leaped from our seats.

  “Easy!” Wallich was saying. “Easy, single file, no pushing!” But he was laughing and jostling as he said it, as eager as any of us to get outside and see. We could simply have opened an exterior window on the zee-spec and walked it around to the hatch for an easy view, of course, but none of us did, which should tell you something about our frazzled state of mind.

  Davenroy met us in the wardroom, and Renata Baucum, who was in the lead, stopped and bowed and motioned for her to precede us—an awkward, silly, slidey set of motions in this asteroidal gravity. Davenroy, who'd been busy at her station for forty of the last forty-eight hours, brushed past her with only the most minute gesture of acknowledgment. And then her attention was all on the walking; the downward slope of the ramp was like the incline of a swimming pool, impossible to follow without bobbing and floating, toes touching down only occasionally, and then in near-frictionless glissando. Only by bracing her hands against the protruding cargo hold was Davenroy able to complete the operation with any grace at all.

  Baucum followed her out, and then Lehne, and myself, and Wallich. The walking was difficult, our Ganymedean shoes entirely unsuited to the task. The cargo bulkhead was an enormous help, though—something to hold, to push against, to follow along. Maybe Gladholders made lower ceilings than ours, and walked around spiderlike with all four limbs splayed out, clinging simultaneously to wall and ceiling. I couldn't help but grin at the image.

  Behind me, I heard Wallich sealing the airlock, heard the beeps and squawks that announced the security system's activation.

  Outside the ship was a docking tube, and outside of that was... well, a port complex, obviously. Very much like Galileo in some ways, except for the junk, and the many little children, and the fact that there were plants growing all over everything, gray/blue/green/black vines and stalks and shoots and fat clusters of leaves making mosaics of every wall. Yeah, and there was no sense of up. You know that old Dutch artist, Maurtis Escher? The guy with the tesselating shapes and the visual riddles and the inside-out architectural drawings that hurt your brain to look at? Stairs going nowhere, stuff like that. Hew the walls a little rougher, put a jungle and a junkyard and a kindergarten class in it, and that would be Saint Helier's spaceport to a decimal point.

  It took a moment to realize that the creatures leaping wall to wall were human children, laughing, barefoot and minimally dressed. More interested in movement than dignity, they put all four limbs to work in their clamberings and brachiations, playing “tag” or “follow the leader” or “king of the top” or some such. Humans are primates, oh yes, and our long arboreal past bubbles right to the surface in low gravity. Unless for some reason we retain a planar environment, and weigh ourselves down with heavy, tank-tread shoes...

  Once upon a time, reduced gravity was supposed to make humans a taller, thinner, more elfin race. The truth turned out a bit less glamorous, as more and more of our children were born with crooked spines, curving limbs, clubbed feet... Hypogravitic osteo deformans. The man Rapisardi was talking to was a classic example of the syndrome, a hunched figure half a head shorter than myself, looking young enough either to have been born in St. Helier, or at least to have done most of his growing here. Growing twisted, like an old tree. But he was handsome in spite of the deformity, and possessed of a sort of archetypal grace. The primate thing again, probably. And oh, was he ever dark! You get used to thinking of the Immunity as a heterogeneous society, diverse, full of everything, but when was the last time you saw a young man with skin the color of a good stout beer? The body was swathed in patterned, irridescent fabrics of yellow and blue. And there was an Asian cast to his eyes, and a grin framing straight, yellow-white teeth.

  Check my image archive sometime; the file is LPASTEUR/GH1DIB0001. Nothing compares to that first look, that first shock of foreignness. The most striking feature, though, were his toes, which were as long and thick and straight as a double row of thumbs. Never a shoe on those feet, never a moment's burden. Seeing them then, I felt a moment of obscure envy; Earth was nothing to this young man, not a memory, not even an architectural legacy.

  “Heyyo,” the man said brightly. “Ahn behalfde gavnoffice, aloha wekkome teh San Heelyer. Ma nom wa Chris Dibrin, kai I am lok to assist you. How you doeng?”

  To his credit, Rapisardi was attempting to reply for us all. “We're fine, thank you, and very eager to examine your trade goods. We have no food!”

  The man—Dibrin?—smiled and nodded. “Yeh, yeh, tre been, amigos. Canno comprend a sinnle word. German ye parolas? Englesh, ah ah. Permeht ye I take libert? Ahm, excuse.” He pointed at Rapisardi's zee-spec, with body language indicating he found it both interesting and funny, a kind of technological clown hat. “Big lens. Inface, program, inout, yes? Er. May I meddle?”

  Rapisardi, hesitant, looked to Darren Wallich.

  “Well hey there, partner!” Wallich said in a phony accent native to neither the Immunity nor the Gladhold. He reached for a long-fingered hand, shook it vigorously. “You want to meddle with this man's zee-spec. In what manner, exactly? And why, for the purpose of translation?”

  “Translation,” Dibrin echoed, striving admirably to match Wallich's inflection. Oh, the harm we do in jest!

  And then, suddenly, my zee was going nuts on me—varicolored characters and ideographic icons filling up the whole of my view, scrolling down from top to bottom and then starting again at the top, new text overwriting the old in three-dimensional nonsense palimpsest. Dizzying, really, and in this gravity that was no small thing—lose your feet and you could be quite some time regaining them. But then, all at once, my view went black, then white, and then cleared altogether.

  “Gomen, neh?” Dibrin said, his smile now looking a bit sheepish. “Wa any mas bien?”

  And on my zee-spec, right below Dibrin's face, appeared the plaintext: “I'm sorry, eh? Is this any better?”

  A soft exhalation went up from all of us. This man, this bare-eyed, specless, twenty-year-old boy, had probed our operating systems, tailored a translation program to run on them, flashed it to us through security overrides, and configured our task managers to run the thing in realtime without any explicit activation commands on our part. Like magic, this highly invasive procedure, like finding your house suddenly full of someone else's furniture. And he'd done it in seconds, with barely a twitch of his hands.

  “Ouch!” Rapisardi cried, in alarm rather than actual pain. “Hey! What and how? No, you may not meddle!”

  “I'm sorry,” Dibrin said, still sheepish. Well, the zee-spec said it in response to his jabbering. “I thought it would save time, but that was probably very rude of me. Like touching, yes? You people don't like to touch.”

  “What?” Wallich said, off balance for once.

  “I'm sorry,” Dibrin repeated, his eyes going shifty, his face taking on an expression of genuine worry. “Making a mess of this, I told them I wasn't the one to talk. Look, Governor's office sent me down here to escort you Munies around, make sure you didn't walk out an airlock or anything. But I'm technical, see? Literally technical, like, full of technology. Wires. You don't do that eith
er, and I told them, hey, look, I'm going to fucking freak those guys out. And it happened. See how good I am at predicting?”

  Well.

  We stood there gawking. What else to do? Low gravity, Escher walls covered with vines and dark, chattering children, and this alien man talking right into our eyeballs whether we liked it or not.

  Full of wires? Neural direct was one of many technologies spawned in Earth's final decades, now very much out of favor. Or so I'd thought! And that programming trick, so far beyond human capacity; the product, surely, of artificial intelligence, another idea left behind on the blooming carcass of Earth. There was only the question of how the deed was done: communication via some faux telepathy, radio or IR or something? Or were they inside him, sterile nuggets of machine thought glittering in the chaos of his organic brain? Neither possibility was especially comforting.

  “What's your customs procedure here?” Wallich wanted to know. “I was expecting to dock with some sort of quarantine facility.”

  Dibrin frowned, tapped his ear. “Customs? You mean inspection? It's handled. Passive sensors, scouting microscopia, like that. Shouldn't trouble your ship's systems any, though do let us know, er, if any problems should arise. Been nine years since a Munie ship ever came to St. Helier, so maybe you never know.”

  “Munie?” I asked, intrigued by the term. I'd come across it once or twice in sifting Gladholder net traffic, but never in clear enough context to realize its meaning: Us, the peculiar inhabitants of the upper system.

  Now Dibrin looked embarassed. “Apologies, sir, and meaning no disrespect.”

  I grunted, half-amused. “It's a derogatory term, then?”

  He smiled at me, or maybe grimaced. I could see yellow around the whites of his eyes, threaded delicately with blue and red. An unpleasant, vaguely fishy smell came off his breath. A human smell, I should say. “Derogatory, no. Munies, four-eyes, duckfeet, the people upstairs... It's just something to say. Why, what do you call us?”