Bloom Read online

  He licked his lip and nodded. “The cellular automaton project, yes.”

  “You know about it?”

  He managed to look both sheepish and admonitory. “It's a small ship, Strasheim.”

  “Ah. Right. Well, anyway, I seem to be having a problem simulating the mycora. They just don't seem to want to do very much, besides eat and die. I can't find a rule-set that lets them, you know, bloom, without letting the rocks and everything bloom right along with them.”

  “Yes.” He looked thoughtful. “I can see that. It makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it. But who's to say you should have only one set of rules? Living things, even technogenic ones, behave quite differently from inanimate matter. A rock is just a rock; drop it and it falls. With a living thing, that is not necessarily so. Not reliably so.”

  “A different physics for life than for non-life?” I asked, somehow vaguely offended by the idea. I must have made a face, too, because he laughed.

  “Think of it as a genome, not a physics. Living things carry their behavior with them in genetic codes. My genes tell me what to eat, what to mate with. Possibly they also tell me to avoid places that are too crowded or too empty, you see? I don't violate the laws of physics, but neither do I fall down like a rock. And neither do I behave as you do, or as Darren Wallich does, and my offspring, when I have them, will carry my genome, not yours or his.”

  Right, okay. That kicked off a whole series of ideas I was eager to try, so I thanked Rapisardi and disconnected.

  A genome, yes. A mutable, copyable behavioral standard, the mycoric equivalent of a blueprint and an ethical code and a sense and record of identity. And of course there were spores, which carried the genome but did not actually execute it...

  When my go-to-sleep alarm sounded an hour later, I switched it off and kept right on working.

  ~~~

  The fresh fruit started going bad the next day, and we gorged on it, as if determined to be sick of it by the time it left us for good. The last of our video mail trickled in as well, and the messages were viewed by one and all, over and over again. We needed to be sick of that as well, because there wouldn't be any more of it until we climbed back up into the asteroid belt again.

  Our text and audio mail, though, had continued to grow. Far from being severed, our connection to the home worlds seemed to grow stronger every day. And more trivial, too; for every informative article or well-considered question, there were a dozen silly, faux-personal notes cluttering up the stream. It's amazing how quickly that stops being cute and starts being a waste of your time. The problem would only get worse, so I initiated a screening protocol that would weed out the obvious dribble and send form-letter replies automatically, without our having to so much as look. But the remaining mail and news volume were still formidable, and most of it required at least cursory examination.

  This was not the greatest obstacle to our “interactive” model of communication, though; data rate was. Our outgoing ration had been cut yet again, and would continue to shrink with ridiculous speed over the next few days until it bottomed out at only seven hundred bytes per day. Of which my ration would be a mere twenty-nine.

  “Popular myth to the contrary,” Rapisardi explained gently when I complained about this, “mycora do not feed on ambient heat. Heat simply means the random vibration of atoms, and harnessing this is called 'entropy reversal,' which is actually a physical impossibility. Now, forming a chemical bond does release energy, which the mycora can store for later use, for example in breaking a bond elsewhere. The distinction between chemical and mechanical processes blurs to almost nil at the nanoscale , so that energy may be transferred efficiently, as if through fine springs and pulleys. And Brownian motion does facilitate this process, as it facilitates all chemistry. But the thermodynamic loss is still significant. There is, as I'm sure you have heard, no free lunch.

  “So what is lunch? What do the mycora eat? Once, it was organic matter, just as you and I eat organic matter. Now, very often, it is a combination of inorganic matter and light, and this is where much of our problem originates. Many mycora, not most but a good fraction of them, contain a photon-abosrbing molecule called melanophyll which is sensitive to long-wavelength radiation such as infra-red or, in some cases, microwaves.

  “Unfortunately, our high-gain communications to the Immunity are in that very form, and as we descend ever further into the Mycosystem, this becomes dangerous. We want not to feed the mycora, or arouse them in any way, so we must emit radiation of much longer wavelength, meaning radio, and at a much lower power, meaning about twenty watts as opposed to several hundred, and of course, as always, at an ever-longer range. All of which reduce our data rate. I maintain that we shouldn't be transmitting anything at all, but I am overridden in this. The risks are impossible to estimate, at least for now. So be thankful for your ration, mein freund; if I have my way, it might yet shrink to zero.”

  Well. I'm sure you'll understand, there's a certain frustration in hiring on as a mission correspondent and then not being allowed to correspond. I was by no means the only victim, though; if anything, Wallich was the hardest hit. More than I, more than anyone, he'd made a habit of being in both places at once, but in the Immunity the increasing time lag had made an observer of him, and the loss of visual data had reduced him to mere nagging, and now, finally, even that was evaporating. But he gathered what news he could, requested small blocks of data when he could, and otherwise busied himself on the zee, cautiously tuning and updating the specifications of our onboard Immune system, providing maxmum advantage against the latest human-modified strains.

  “Plus,” he noted, “I've found traces of the Gladholder immune system lingering here and there, so I'm going to see if I can wipe 'em out.” Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

  My own little world was coming along beautifully, thanks to Rapisardi's suggestions. Let There Be Light, and there was. Let There Be Genome and Temperature and Buoyancy, and there were. Let the Spores of Mycora be Immune to Gravity, and they were. This last was difficult to justify, since spores were little masses every bit as subject to the laws of physics as anything else, but I knew little of the processes that actually did lift them off planetary surfaces. “Convection” and “solar wind” were the appropriate buzzwords, but just how those would translate into cellular automaton rules I had no idea.

  Anyway, the real action was in genomes. I had them up to twenty genes, now, little data bytes specifying whether a mycorum would photosynthesize, whether it could eat rock, whether it could survive in vacuum, and more esoteric things like its programmed lifespan and its preferred number of mycoric neighbors. The results, so far, were remarkably satisfying.

  Hanging out in the wardroom that afternoon, I put some finishing touches on the model, dropped a spore in, and watched the fireworks. The spore, a dark blue dot, fell down through blackness until encountering the upper atmosphere of Mulch World, whereupon it woke up and converted itself to a red dot, which settled—much more slowly—to the planet's surface. Instantly, green mulch flared red where the mycorum touched it, and spores began to boil out of the wound, some of them firing straight out into space, others skittering through the atmosphere, then germinating and settling back down again to form new infection sites.

  The blooms spread, flickered, twitched. Where they reached down to bare rock they stopped, finding the barrier at first impenetrable, but the daytime surface of Mulch World was reddening, the patches of green growing growing smaller and smaller in agonized spasms. Technically, mulch could reproduce, could bathe in sunlight and slowly convert rock into biomass, but its growth rate was so vastly smaller the mycora's that I might as well never have built in the capability at all.

  Gradually, the night side began to succumb as well, sparing only the polar caps. Structure began to form on the surface—towers and fountains and fields of flowery fruiting bodies. The planet's crust grew thinner, redder, and then suddenly it was gone. The last bits of non-polar rock vanished, the mycor
a a thick, living layer in place of a crust, lower surface sizzling and dying against the yellow molten interior itself, which solidified into new rock, which was eaten again, leaving the mycora to be killed again...

  And the growth and flowering of my pocket Mycosystem ground to a halt, its underside locking forever into this trivial oscillation while the upper strata slowly froze, became static. The polar caps remained pristine, little yarmulkes of white against the red and yellow of the converted planet.

  Crap. Still no dynamic endurance, still no sign of the bloom-without-end that was the real Mycosystem. Crap, crap. I threw away the sim log, archived the rule base, and closed the whole thing up, suddenly weary of it. I called up my Philusburg sim instead, and got to work clearing away still more of the buildings. Grass! I wanted lots and lots of green grass!

  I hadn't gotten very far, though, when an alarm klaxon split through me like the end of the world: WONNNNK! WONNNNK! So loud I didn't recognize it, so sudden that at first I didn't know what had happened, just jerked to alertness, cursing elaborately. I wiped my windows, going fully transparent for the first time in days.

  The lights had gone red.

  Fear shot through me, momentarily paralyzing, and then I was fumbling at the latch, popping the cabin door open, hurling myself out into the wardroom. After a while, you get to know where the handholds are. I grabbed one, swinging my path around toward the bridge, and let go. Grabbed another one as I passed through the hatchway, to keep me from flying right into the back of Darren Wallich's chair.

  “What's happening?” I was saying. “What's happening, what's happening?”

  Every imaginable spacecraft emergency was flashing through my mind: decompression. Fire. Bloom. Life support failure. This last, for some reason, struck a particular note of fear. Was the air too thin? Did I detect a hint of odor that shouldn't be there?

  Baucum, who was on station, turned toward me, the look on her face not particularly comforting. Not panicked either, though, and I took at least a small measure of courage from this.

  “What's up?” Tosca Lehne asked from the hatchway behind me.

  Baucum grimaced. “I've got a confirmed live contact on the hull. No evidence of replication yet.”

  Live contact. Confirmed. Not a spore, but a solitary live mycorum. Ergo, says the brilliant reporter's mind, we have entered the Mycosystem. No evidence of replication, ergo the t-balance is working, the hull not dissolving into foam or powder or whatever the hell it would dissolve into if mycora were eating it. Into mycora, yes. Baucum not losing her composure, so for now the prognosis is good. This is, after all, expected. And yet, the alarm had sounded...

  “Take your seats, gentlemen,” Wallich said curtly, not bothering to face us. We complied. “Still just the one contact, Baucum?”

  “Negative, I have a second. Make that three. Spores, this time.”

  “Acknowledged. Rapisardi, any sign of contamination in the engine nozzles?”

  From the zee: “Nothing yet, Captain.”

  And Jenna Davenroy's voice: “I'm closing the covers, sir.”

  Sir, Captain. Yes. Easy to forget that, easy to let discipline grow lax, the work environment informal. But this was serious business, wasn't it? Deadly serious, a thin metal hull holding in our atmosphere, holding out the radiation and vacuum of space, and the pathogens. There were a million ways to go wrong, and only a handful of ways not to.

  Okay, these are not exactly profound revelations, I admit it. But the obvious does not always hit us on a gut level until that scharfblick moment when we look around and really realize our circumstances. As in, allow them to become real for us. I'd done a good job of burying that line of thought, of conveniently forgetting that the Mycosystem was more than a sim geeked up on the zee.

  “Seven confirmed contacts,” Baucum said. “Eight.”

  Wallich grunted, acknowledging. Then, in a kind of slow, thoughtful tone: “Immune system to stage two alert, please. Skin capacitors and heat pipes on standby.”

  “Aye sir,” said Lehne.

  “Finding any problems with the t-balance?”

  “Negative.”

  “Still at eight contacts, sir. I think we passed through a cloud of them.”

  “Right,” Wallich said, “Well, we could be at the top of an upwelling zone. Let me know if you register anything else. That goes double for you, Rapisardi. Strasheim?”

  It took me a moment to recognize my own name, another moment to fall into the smooth, military precision I saw happening around me. “Yes, sir?”

  “Shut down the communication system, please. Power allocation to zero. Transfer it all to Lehne.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and set about complying.

  “That's 'aye, sir,'“ he corrected.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Lehne? Drop skin temperature ten degrees on the sunward side. I'd like you to heat the hull to four hundred kelvins in fifteen seconds, and not just where the contacts are registered. Full discharge, everywhere, and I don't want skin conductance affected. Clear?”

  “Aye,” Lehne said, working invisible controls. “Heat pipes engaged. Capacitor safety off. Hull temperature dropping.”

  “Clear and pull.”

  Lehne nodded. “Clear. Pull. Capacitors discharged.”

  The steady red glow of the cabin lights flickered for a moment, and then returned as steady as ever.

  “Zero contacts on the hull, sir,” Baucum reported.

  I wasn't the only one breathing a sigh of relief.”Excellent. Lehne, how necessary was that?”

  A pause, then the breathy harrumphing of Lehne's voice. “Not necessary, sir. Nominal function on t-balance. You don't... want to mess with the skin conditions unless necessary.”

  “Right. Well, at least we've got the drill down in case we need it. Well done, people.” He sounded brisk, perfunctory, as if he didn't mind if we weren't listening. Speaking more to himself than to us. Trying to reassure himself. The final responsibility was, after all, his own.

  From the zee, Rapisardi's voice: “Captain, I read a contact event on engine cover one.”

  “Contact event on the hull,” Baucum added. “Two contacts. Three.”

  Wallich paused and harrumphed, himself, before asking, “Lehne, your recommendation?”

  “Do nothing.”

  “Baucum, Rapisardi? Any objection?”

  “No.”

  “None, sir.”

  Neither voice sounded enthusisatic.

  “Davenroy,” Wallich said, “I want you ready to open those covers and throttle up on about a millisecond's notice. Is that clear?”

  “My finger is resting on the button,” Davenroy's voice replied.

  I turned, saw Wallich nodding to me. He looked resigned. “Right. Well, we're in it now, aren't we?”

  In it. Yes. It seemed a totally new idea, unthinkable: the Mycosystem no longer below us somewhere, but all around, a deep spherical layer wrapped around the sun, as real and affecting as ocean or atmosphere. My mind, grappling with the concept, reduced it to cartoon: a translucent Mycosphere, enormous, its upper boundary rippling with our penetration, its lower one far below, the haze of it obscuring the yellow smiley face of Sol at the center. And ourselves? A single pixel plunging down through the ripples. Green, for mulch.

  “You might want to look outside,” Baucum said. “Three o'clock high, twenty degrees. We have a visitor.”

  Oh. Reluctantly, I turned and opened a round exterior window, anchoring it to the bulkhead beside me. Where Baucum was pointing, there hung a... smudge? Cloud? No, of course, it was a transient megastructure, a diffuse bloom of loosely interacting mycora, massing maybe twenty or a hundred kilograms smeared across thousands of cubic kilometers of space. The inner system was full of these. Probes launched down into the Mycosystem became these, blooming and spreading and exploding into molecule-thin lattices of technogenic life, less dense than smoke and yet structurally rigid enough to hold their fantastic shapes as the solar wind tumbled them upwa
rd.

  For a while, anyway—nothing lasted long in the Mycosystem. Soon, in hours or days or possibly weeks, that smudge would break apart into countless quadrillions of individual mycora, or collapse into a handful of fruiting bodies and then swell to bursting with spores.

  “Well looky there,” Wallich said. “Range?”

  “Too far to triangulate optically,” Baucum said. “You want an active ping?”

  Wallich laughed at that. “No, certainly not.”

  The shape grew. I had to realign my thinking; I'd assumed we were heading in the same direction we were pointing, but of course we weren't under power anymore, and our orientation probably had more to do with antenna alignment than anything else.

  My breath caught. I was suddenly, keenly aware of the smallness of the bridge, of the ship itself. The thinness of the hull, and the hugeness of the thing before us. And still the shape was growing, approaching, threatening to engulf. Not like the clouds of Earth, or of Jupiter, or of the cavern skies of Ganymede. Not amorphous, not fluid, but iceberg-jagged and yet somehow springy-looking, soft and resilient as a sponge, and yet so diffuse it was barely there at all. A smearing of the starscape, a haze of scattered sunlight, yellow-white against the blackness. There was detail to the haze, though—direct gaze made it seem lumpy, marbled, while the corners of the eye saw it as spirals and lattices, shot through with glints of rainbow color.

  Still growing, now almost the size of my outstretched hand, but then suddenly it was shrinking again, moving down and to the right. We were passing it. Passing it by a wide berth, by hundreds of kilometers. Not even close to it, and yet dwarfed.

  “I want a watch officer on duty at all times,” Wallich said softly, “With active course schematic and the bulkheads on transparent. If anything... visible... falls anywhere near our path, I'm to be informed immediately.”