Bloom Read online

“As if that would help,” Baucum muttered. “The supposed 'right' to survival is not just a priority for most people, it's the only factor they're willing to consider, and never a thought for the rights of anything else. There used to be human beings who found importance, even sacredness, in literally everything around them. Not just the living things, either.”

  But Davenroy was shaking her head, almost mournfully, as if to indicate how very sorry she was that Baucum should be so dense. “Those people were turned to goo, dear. How sacred. The Mycosystem never took anyone's rights into account, it simply took the substance of their bodies for its own purposes. Nothing as destructive and useless as that will ever be 'sacred' to the people whose lives have been... devastated by it. Shame on you. Shame!”

  She was really angry, not faking it for dramatic effect but probably actually holding it back, or trying to. Her hands quivered. But now it was Baucum's turn to look superior.

  “You talk,” she said, “precisely as if the discovery of living humans in the Mycosystem had never happened.” Her look expanded to encompass me as well. “You've been complaining, John, about congenital flaws in Immune culture. Here's one for you: we hold to outmoded theories even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence. We look at the Mycosystem and we see 'scary goo,' and never mind about the information content of the spores we see sifting through it every second of every day. We call it 'mindless' without ever once attempting to interpret its signals, and when we see unambiguous signs of purposeful activity, we simply fail to integrate it. It doesn't jibe with what we know, so we do our best to ignore it.”

  “I haven't been ignoring it,” I said.

  Davenroy just snorted. “I find your use of the word 'unambiguous' very illuminating, dear. Really, your theory is very interesting, and when you have more than a few blurry images to support it, do let me know.”

  Davenroy had been moving in the direction of her cabin, and presently she entered it and pulled the door closed with a decisive click.

  Baucum and I eyed one another uncomfortably, and I was thinking, well, having precipitated this exchange I should probably precipitate its peaceful conclusion as well. Davenroy had always been a bit touchy on the subject of the Mycosystem, and Baucum, too, but they weren't ever going to see eye to eye without some more effective information sharing. So I said, “When she wakes up, would you like me to show her the cellular automaton stuff?”

  But before I'd even finished speaking, Baucum snapped, “Oh, just shut up, Strasheim.” And just like that, she kicked off and launched herself toward the bridge.

  ~~~

  You get used to crisis the same way you get used to anything else, and when I heard banging and voices outside my cabin door I fell awake and snapped the lights on, pausing only to snatch up my zee-spec before slamming the door open and tumbling out. This before I'd formed any conscious thought at all, the routine as automatic as a bodily function. Only when I was outside did I start to wonder what was going on.

  Davenroy and Baucum were facing each other across the wardroom; fierce, territorial animals looking as if they were about to tear each other apart. Actually, judging by the panting breaths and the disarray of Baucum's hair, that process might already have begun. Tosca Lehne peered out from the bridge hatchway, Rapisardi from his own cabin across from mine, and Wallich was in the middle of the room, between the two women.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Everyone calm down,” Wallich said, not to me but to Jenna Davenroy.

  “Oh, I don't think so,” Davenroy replied, and tried to launch herself past him. The quarters were way too cramped for that, though, and he caught her easily in the crook of his arm, slowing her. Their joined momentum carried them in Baucum's direction, but she slid out of the way, her angry eyes never leaving Davenroy.

  “Ha,” said Wallich stiffly. “Ha, ha, ha.” And then his face cleared and he said, “God damn it, what the hell's the matter with you two?”

  Davenroy stabbed an accusing finger at Baucum. “She was sabotaging the engine control software! I caught her at it, red handed!”

  “I was just looking,” Baucum fired back, clearly shaken but trying hard not to show it. “I wanted to see if that was a bomb, too.”

  “Rubbish!” Davenroy cried. “You were modifying the gain states. I have the before-and-after compare, and the time-synched image of your precious little fingers wiggling every time a change is logged. I used to think you couldn't possibly be our saboteur; no one would be stupid enough to plant someone as obvious as you. But then, it's generally a mistake to underestimate stupidity's power, isn't it?”

  “Hold on a minute,” Wallich protested, holding his hands up again, symbolically pushing the two women apart.

  I was about to add my voice to his, to explain that this was all a misunderstanding brought on by stress and fear and overcrowding, and we really should all have a chat session about it before things really got out of hand... But then I caught a look at Baucum's face, the set of her shoulders and the angle of her feet, and suddenly I knew it was all true.

  My first reaction was simple surprise: “But... My God, Baucum, you told me if you wanted to sabotage the ship we'd never know. Something invisible, microscopic.” I couldn't think what else to say to her, how to complete the thought.

  I suddenly felt very stupid, and her give-me-a-break expression didn't help a bit. “You believed me so easily,” she said. “You think I can do those things? Without triggering the Immune system? You think that's easier than simply planting a bug?”

  For a moment, no one moved, and it was Baucum herself who broke the spell. “Really, people, do you have any idea of the scale of the operation against you? I didn't let them recruit me, exactly, but I didn't turn them in for trying, either. Believe me, you don't want to know who it was that approached me.”

  “So what were you doing?” Wallich asked gravely.

  She shrugged, a miserably failed attempt at nonchalance. “Believe me, I'd like to get out of this as much as you, but I finally realized I couldn't continue failing to act. My consience betrays my survival instinct.”

  “That's unfortunate,” Sudhir Rapisardi observed dryly. Wallich laughed.

  “Renata,” I said, “What are you talking about?”

  You don't “step” in zero gravity the way you do on a planet, but you can move and pause in small increments, using feather-light touches of hands and feet to regulate the forward momentum2. <> In this way, I stepped out of my room and approached Baucum, cautiously and nonthreateningly.

  She looked hunted, though, tensing at the sight of me. “Stay away, Strasheim. You've already made this a lot harder than it needs to be.”

  “Made what harder? Sabotaging the engine? Did you really do that? My God, Baucum, why?”

  She shrugged. “I had to. You know, the Temples are not simply insane—they know a lot more about technogenic life than is generally believed. Their laboratories have reproduced the gross characteristics of all the major bloom types, including full-up transient megastructures, using cellular automata. They've even allowed actual spores to germinate in controlled environments. Off the inhabited worlds, obviously, but what better way to study an entity or phenomenon than to reproduce it directly? You want to learn about fires, you start one. I've always wondered why the Immunity shies away from this.”

  “How about 'abject horror?'“ Wallich asked with an uneasy grin. “I'm afraid you've got me genuinely flummoxed, Baucum. You're the saboteur? You're in league with the Temples? The Mycosystem is an 'entity?' I'll tell you, I'm half tempted to send you off to sleep and see if you wake up normal again.”

  Baucum shook her head, fanning long, unpinned hair out behind her. “Entity may have been a poor choice of words. The Mycosystem is not so much intelligent as genuinely divine, at least in an organizational sense. That may sound crazy, but it's the on
ly interpretation I haven't been able to rule out. I've done the math.”

  “Oh, it sounds crazy all right,” Wallich said. He looked around at the rest of us. “So, what are we going to do with this?”

  I knew exactly what he meant. There was no brig on this tiny crawl-space of a ship; even the cabin doors locked only from the inside, and feebly at that. And even if we somehow managed to confine her, Baucum would still be armed and dangerous unless we also relieved her of her zee-spec, which seemed an almost inhumanly cruel sensory deprivation. To leave her literally staring at blank walls, for months? Who wouldn't go crazy, living like that? And even then, she'd be only a few steps from the engine room, a few more from the bridge, and she'd be using the toilet as often as ever... Could she sabotage the mission by flushing down the wrong things? Possibly! We'd have to watch her closely, twenty-four hours a day.

  Really, the sensible thing to do was to put her out the airlock. That sounds awful, I know—I was shocked by the thought myself—but the obviousness of it was hard to ignore. Vacuum was all around us, all the time; our most plentiful resource. Never mind what it would do to those soft tissues I'd so recently admired.

  “Give her to the Mycosystem if she loves it so much,” Davenroy said. Her voice was now largely free of rancor, sounding kind of disbelieving and apologetic, as if the qualifier “assuming this isn't all some dreadful mistake” should certainly be assumed.

  Wincing as if needle-stung, Baucum cast her a cryptic look. “Be careful what you wish for, Davenroy.” A sheen of sweat had broken out on Baucum's forehead. Her skin looked gray. “The real problem with exponential growth is that until you hit the knee of the curve, the slope is shallow, practically flat. Unfortunately, this translates into a period of unavoidable suffering. I told myself I'd never use this thing—hard to let them put it in, otherwise!—and then I told myself it wouldn't hurt. Pretty lies.”

  “Thing?” I asked. “What thing? Are you in pain?”

  She winced again sharply, then offered me a grimace of a smile. “I had a stomach ulcer once. It feels about the same.”I was still chuttering forward, was now less than two meters from Baucum's right shoulder. Her face was even grayer and shinier now.

  “Why are you in pain?” I asked.

  The look she gave me was full of guilt and fear. “Temples labs have put a high priority on storage methods for technogenic spores. It's very difficult research, considering the... cost of failure, but recently they've been able to document safe, long-term storage at... room temperature. Or even body temperature. I'm sorry.”

  My skin went instantly clammy. Body temperature? Body temperature? “Are you saying you're full of spores?”

  “I'm sorry!” She cried suddenly. Tears quivered at the corners of her eyes. “The storage cyst is ruptured; I can't undo that. Oh God, Strasheim, I'm killing you. I didn't... I wasn't trying to fool you. I'm sorry! If things had been different...”

  She gasped, then screamed. Alarm klaxons sounded. Warning lights began to flash. Baucum's skin began to change color, and then to shimmer in an oil-on-water sort of way. She screamed again, and this time it sounded all wrong, like she was coughing up a lungful of dandelion fluff, or trying to.

  I don't want to tell this part of the story. Tug Jinacio's bloom was bad enough, the stuff of permanent nightmare, but I didn't know him. I'd never touched him.

  What... what happened next was that Wallich got around behind her, bracing his hands on the doorway of Tosca Lehne's cabin. “Open the airlock!” he shouted, to no one in particular. But Lehne was diving for the emergency locker, Davenroy and Rapisardi were trapped on the wrong side of danger, and I was right there, not a meter and a half from the controls. I'd like to say I took a moment to ponder the implications of this pending action, but in fact Baucum's skin had lost its smoothness, had developed an unmistakable powdery-vapory aura of rainbow-blossoming mycostructure, and I was more afraid of that than I can tell you, more afraid than if she were burning, or aiming a weapon, or anything.

  So I launched myself straight at the airlock, slapped the red button, then flailed out of the way with panicky movements as Wallich, firmly braced, put the soles of his shoes on Baucum's left side, against the as-yet-unmarred surface of her spacer blues, and shoved. She sailed, coughing and struggling, and then she was inside, banging off the walls, and I was moving one button down on the panel. She opened her eyes—what was left of them, anyway—and seemed to look right at me as the inner hatch closed, with her on the wrong side of it. My very own hand on the button that would kill her, and it seemed that she looked right at me, and knew.

  Do they say death by vacuum is quick? Painless? Do they really? God help me, I pressed the button. And that's all I can bring myself to say.

  It took us five minutes to clear away the pockets of visible infection Baucum had left before they cleared us away, but that was just the start, just the opening act of a drama that was to last seven hours and more. Wallich and Lehne and Rapisardi brought all their skills and knowledge into play, forcing them down through the arcane interfaces of the ship's Immune system while Davenroy cajoled and exhorted me into helping her wipe all the surfaces down with acids and solvents and trying our best to keep the ship running.

  I've kept most of the images, though I never got around to collaging them. I remember Wallich screaming at one point: “It's pierced the hull. This goddamn thread is growing right through the hull.” I remember Tosca Lehne hurriedly painting the spot with a welding torch until the bulkhead glowed red, and whether he knew what he was doing or not, the tactic seemed to work; they quickly found other things to be upset about.

  Meanwhile, something nasty had been growing in a corner by the shower, something class three and fecund, branchy with crystalline spikes. Resonating spikes, it turned out; the noise began as an air-leak hiss and rose slowly into a tinkling of clear, high tones. Soft fog then enfolded the mess, shaping and pressing on it, giving the sound an almost fricative quality, for a moment, like a human whisper. Short-lived, of course; the so-called “singing blooms,” stuff of bar-room legend, had never been recorded in action, and this one was no exception. By the time I'd gotten in for a clear look, Davenroy had splattered a witch's tit on the area and frozen it solid.

  Its last words were, and I quote, “Whuh, whuh, whuuuh.”

  We took another twenty minutes to clear away the mess, during which time another fistful of problems made themselves known. We could have used Tug Jinacio that morning, you bet, but then again we could have used Renata Baucum, too. The difference between seven people and six is not all that much, but knock it down to five and the house starts to feel more than a little bit empty. Did I love her? Hell, I'm not even sure I know what the word means. I wished she were still alive, wished she hadn't betrayed us, wished that she really were the woman I'd thought she was. I'd fallen in love with that woman, I guess.

  Agony, though: my hand on the button that killed her. I wished to God it wasn't so, wished to God the memory would leave me, but horror can only pile upon horror for so long before it saturates your ability to repress. Was it self-defense, that premeditated act of murder? Could I at least convince myself of that? Could I at least quiet the trembling of my hands?

  The evental victory for our side was a hollow one, as it turned out; not only had we used up damned near all of our emergency supplies, lost part of the food stores and damaged our recycler in an ill-considered attempt to sterilize it, but by the time we'd finally added all the new pathogens to our response library and gotten the Immune system locked down in a swarm-on-detection mode, it had become clear that we were not the only combatants. There were Gladholder phages still out and about, reproducing and mutating, occasionally hindering our efforts but more often helping, and putting together organized communications networks of their own as their collective mass began to approach that of our own Immune system.

  In the old days, there used to be a game called “golf,” which involved hitting a little white ball around on ridiculous
ly vast tracts of meadow and forest. Like any sport, it was often fiercely competitive, as remembered by a paper comic drawing pinned to the bridge door of Beluga, the dust barge that had Evacuated my family to Ganymede. In the picture, lines of black ink sketch out clouds drifting across an open sky, and beneath them the spectators at a golf tournament, fleeing madly as a gooey-looking and surprisingly animated bloom marches across the landscape toward them, pulling trees and fences down into a mess which, on close inspection, proves to be composed of little cartoon mushrooms with teeth. A lone golfer—perhaps the caricature of some actual person, as the initials J.P. are prominent on his cap—stands at the tee, preparing to strike his ball even as the mycora are lapping at the backs of his heels. He's aware of the danger, judging by the hunch of his shoulders and the manic set of his eyes, but by golly he's going to make the shot.

  “Looks like we're colonized,” Wallich observed, once the extent of the Gladholder phages' involvement had become clear. “Good luck getting us through quarantine.” He chuckled a little when he said this, the tone of it clearly indicating he didn't think we'd be getting home at all.

  So I surprised him by pantomiming a golpher's swing and recounting J.P.'s final words: “If this one doesn't make the green, I quit.”

  Wallich's laughter seemed to go on forever.

  TWENTY:

  The Spaces Between

  Mulch World had given way to grander demonstrations, had become one tiny component of a much larger and more intricate Mulch System, hot and cold and temperate planets swinging around a bright central star. I'd found ways to trick the cellular automaton rule base into generating phenomena analogous to gravity, heat radiation, and even a crude sort of solar wind, and together they produced an intricate dynamic as red TGL spores appeared on the surface of one world and gradually bloomed and seeded their way to others. Resolution had increased by a factor of twenty over earlier versions, and now the conversion of a planetary crust had taken on an eerie fractal beauty, as moire' patterns shuddered and melted one into the other, rock and biomass giving way to bloom giving way to voids and bubbles and short-lived pockets of mulch.