Bloom Read online

  The conversion process was inexorable, but unstable; still, always, the system eventually died. Or locked into perpetual oscillations, yes, but my physical laws now included semirandom “quantum” perturbations that tended to disrupt these loops, casting them back into chaos. But what perturbation could reverse entropy on so grand a scale? None, of course. Mulch System was durable only in a state of extinction.

  I'd covered this failure by simply slowing down the clock speed. Now the patterns could march on for hours or even days before collapsing, and by interrupting and restarting the sims while they were still healthy, I could create the illusion of stable, perpetual chaos. Once I'd figured out I could “improve” the experiment without actually tracking down and fixing its congenital flaws, I decided to go whole hog: increase magnification by two orders and move the whole operation into a virtual cavern a hundred times larger than Philusburg. Worlds the size of houses, boiling with endless varieties of contagion and countercontagion... It wasn't exactly beautiful, but its violence was grand, sweeping, and entirely virtual.

  So I moved in.

  Great idea, right? We were three days out from Mars, still five away from Earth, when they sent someone in to see me. Oh, I'd been doing my job and everything, filling that chair on the bridge for fourteen hours of every twenty-four, keeping a window open on the real world, but it didn't take a genius to figure out where my attention was focused, and unfortunately I was surrounded by four geniuses. I'd been spending the off-duty hours alone in my cabin, and it was here that Jenna Davenroy came to visit, knocking and knocking on the door until finally I was forced to open it.

  “Yes?” I asked the tiny figure she presented in the tiny my-eye window I'd opened.

  “I'm slaving my zee-spec to yours,” she said by way of greeting. “If you'd be so kind as to flash me a copy of the sim you're inhabiting...”

  I thought about this for a while.

  “Strasheim,” she said, “it's really a lot easier if you just let me in. The alternative is confiscation of your zee. Do you want that?”

  Sighing, I opened and worked the appropriate menus. Cabin-wall camera dots recorded her image, flashing color and spatial data to processors in my zee. A shadow figure appeared before me in Mulch System Cavern, rezzed in with fractal detail, and finally faded from black to color. Jenna Davenroy had entered the sim.

  It was several seconds before she spoke. Her initial reaction, looking around, was one of pure startlement, fading slowly into distaste, and then finally a sort of slow, grudging admiration.

  “You made all this?” she asked.

  I nodded, shrugged.

  “Cellular automata?”

  “Yes.” The rusty, disused sound of my voice surprised me a little.

  She looked around some more, drifting out under one of the roiling, fluid, tower-sprouting planets to admire it from directly below. The real Davenroy probably hadn't moved, or hadn't moved much, but here in VR space she could do as she pleased, unbounded by trivialities like inertia unless she willed it. She'd stopped, as they say, on a dime.

  “You have an eye for detail,” she said, looking up at the planet's south polar cap. “Mountains jutting through the ice, and turbulence in the atmosphere around them. Is this Earth?”

  “Mulch World,” I said.

  The lines in her face deepened for a moment. “Oh. I see. We've... been a bit worried about you, Strasheim. I confess, I thought you were just sort of whacking off in here. I didn't realize you were working. System usage should have been a clue, I guess; you're slopping a lot of computation off into the ship's data system.”

  “I wouldn't call it work.”

  She eyed me. “You do yourself an injustice, John. This is really quite impressive.”

  “It doesn't function correctly,” I said, “and anyway the hard parts were finished weeks ago. I'm just hiding in here. You were right.”

  “Would you like to talk about it?” She moved closer, drifting like a ghost. But not too much closer.

  I shrugged, held out the virtual paper telegram I'd created to represent the mail message the sanitarium had sent. Davenroy drifted closer, accepted it, examined it.

  Dear John Strasheim:

  This is to inform you regretfully of the death of your mother Lorena Ann Strasheim at 0218 on the third of December. No suffering on her part is indicated. Concomitant with last will and testament stipulations, remains have been laddered down at South Reactor Five. Our sympathies are with you at this difficult time.

  “Oh,” Davenroy said, reading the thing, “oh, my goodness, I had no idea.”

  I smiled wanly. “They used her to light the city. It's a pretty thought, in a way, but also more than a little bit horrible. She's cut right out of the cycle of life. She's a lump of iron now. Waste metal.”

  Davenroy sounded shocked. “This must have happened right after the battle. Strasheim, I'm so sorry!”

  “It's been a big month for death,” I said, shrugging.

  She composed herself, handed the massless, textureless paper back to me. “You should have said something, dear, you really should. I mean, my goodness, you came to talk to me after Jinacio died. Do you realize how important a gesture that was? The pain of loss is at its most unbearable when we think it's gone unnoticed.”

  I turned to look at her. “You never knew my mother, dear, and you never liked Renata Baucum. You don't know a thing about what I've lost. I barely know it myself.”

  With that, I skidded back, stopped, pretended to busy myself with an examination of Mulch World's moon in its slow, stately orbit.

  “We can spare your full attention for the moment,” Davenroy said after a while. “Under the circumstances, I think the duty roster can be adjusted. But keep the larger circumstance in mind, will you? Even under the best conditions, we couldn't afford to run three crew members short for the Earth flyby.”

  I turned to look at her, paused, nodded slowly. “I do understand that, yes.”

  “Have you shed tears, Strasheim?”

  I choked back an embarassed laugh. “Swollen eyelids don't show up well in VR, I guess. At times I've done little else. It's my mother we're talking about.”

  “And your lover.”

  I winced. “I, uh, don't know. About that.”

  “No?”

  “I don't think I knew her. I'm actually sure that I didn't. What she's done is... incomprehensible.”

  Davenroy grunted. “Yes, it is that. Who can say what was in her mind? Suicide takes a great deal of conviction, of course; murder perhaps even more. She must have thought she was protecting something important.”

  At this, we both looked around at Mulch System, at the infected planets and the viscid, fingery haze just barely visible in the spaces between them. Important, yeah.

  After that, neither of us spoke for about a minute. It was, in a strange way, the most soothing and intimate part of our conversation that day. I treasure it still, one of those rare reminders that the people around us really can be caring and kind, if you let them. “Soul markers,” I call these moments.

  “I... didn't mean to start an argument,” I said finally. “It isn't... easy to talk. I'll be fine, I'm sure, but right now the whole idea just has me confused. Death? What the hell is that? What address do I mail to?”

  “I understand perfectly,” Davenroy replied, her tone lightly admonishing. I took the hint: who in the Immunity was a stranger to loss? The last ten years had been quiet, busy, reasonably safe, and we'd all worked hard to project that veneer of normalcy, that feeling that there was nothing weird about living as we did, where we did. It wasn't hard; the hysterical types had died out early, leaving behind only those who could function, only those who could survive the trip, hollow out the caves... But the hurt was still there, always there. You don't lose a world without hurt.

  I tried to think of a suitable reply, but Davenroy worked some menus and winked out of view before I could frame one. I heard my cabin door closing, the sound surprisingly near and imm
ediate. I and my grief were dismissed.

  Overhead, Mulch World's moon passed into eclipse, the meters-wide body of the planet blocking out the sun's yellow light. Almost as suddenly, the moon's ruddy mycoric glow gave way to lifeless green, as if a flame had guttered and gone out.

  ~~~

  SELF PORTRAIT: ARTIST ON A BAD DAY

  Black, fade to shot of Mulch System whirling in the distance, against a huge but indistinct background of cavern stone, range indeterminate. Cue music: Also Sprach Zarathustra, fade, overlay with Zellinger compose-on-demand fractal Null Progress. The effect is jarring, indicative of malfunction.

  Zoom in on the Artist, sitting cross-legged in empty space, surrounded by palm-sized VR windows apparently fixed with respect to his saggital axis. His hair unkempt and maybe a bit too long, at odds with the blue spacer uniform he wears. On the shoulder, prominent, one service patch: PASTEUR, MYCOSYSTEM MISSION ONE. Embroidered beneath the words, a stylized image of the ship itself.

  Turn, pan until we are behind the Artist, then zoom to look over his shoulder. Closeup on the windows. Several of these display only text, green on black in one of the boxy 24-pin nostalgia fonts, of which a close examination reveals sorted lists of cellular automaton rules which flicker one-by-one, with visible effects mirrored in the behavior of Mulch System in the distance and in fragmentary high-magnification images on the other windows. The Artist's fingers intrude, manipulating symbols, popping text lines out and moving them to other places. These movements, while indicative of frustration, are nonetheless slow and deliberate.

  Cut to an image of the Artist's face, tired and annoyed with his creation, and with an underlying sadness that seems unrelated, and then we pull back rapidly to observe him from greater distance. Surrounded by his cloud of flat, rectangular, vanishingly thin windows, he seems to be following a complex trajectory through Mulch System. Our view of him holds constant as sun and planets whirl about. Within thirty seconds the path has begun to repeat, and we see it for what it is: a figure-eight with the sun at one focus and empty space at the other, aphelion just outside the orbit of the fourth planet, now aswirl with the reds and yellows of infection.

  Cut to the Artist's face, expression unchanged.

  Cut to the windows, two of which now display the images of human faces. Women: one elderly and one in middle-adulthood. Both smiling, but there is a sterile quality to the images, and presently they both fade to two-dimensions, and then to black and white, and then to pure black. We pull back slightly to reveal additional windows, giving up their old images to present more faces. Men and women this time, and children, and then aerial views of old cities, continents, and finally the planet Earth itself. One by one, the images flatten and fade. The Artist's fingers intrude, frantically this time, as if to interrupt the disappearing process, but no visible effect is produced.

  Cut to the Artist's face, now showing traces of anger.

  Cut to Mulch System, seen from a great distance. The central star is the color of ice backlit with yellow.

  Cut to the windows, still black. In the center of each, a tiny image resolves: the Protestant cross, a three-dimensional projection with the color and texture of wood. No human image is crucified there.

  Cut to the Artist's face. The anger has deepened, and there is now skepticism in the expression as well, of the give-me-a-break variety. He finds the image insulting, a trivialization.

  Cut to a cartoon image, two-dimensional and brightly colored in the style of 20th-century animators: a flowing-haired, white-robed caricature of God, his staff resting on crossed knees, manipulates lines of text in a flat VR window, then checks an image of Earth in another window, and nods with satisfaction.

  Artist's face: partly amused, partly accusatory, mostly just tired and sad. There is no “up” in this weightless place, but he looks to the solar north, perpendicular to the orbits of the planets. He holds up his hands and shrugs expectantly, as if to say, Well, does omnipotence coupled with a failure to intervene imply disinterest, or active malice?

  Clearly, the Artist holds some complex and unresolved feelings. Look angle enables us to see, for the first time, a black arm band around his left bicep. Red glare reflects from his skin as a contaminated planet flashes by and we pull back rapidly to reveal a Mulch System flickering out predictable patterns, red against green against brown. The compelling fractal intricacy of it is gone, replaced with simple iteration as waves of color circle the planets over and over, the spaces between them empty.

  The music jars discordantly.

  Cartoon image: God, angered, breaking the staff across his knee.

  Artist, sitting cross-legged in empty space: his expression now resigned, weary, stopping just short of bitterness. Mulch System is not working, real life is not working, and God is unavailable for comment. The windows are scattered flat beneath the Artist, as if on a solid floor. All fifteen on them show nothing but static.

  Pull back slowly. The music ends and we... Fade to black.

  TWENTY-ONE:

  Honor Thy Mother

  A little piece of Baucum seemed to have slipped through my skin to infect me; upon emergence from my VR hibernation, not only did I take over the simplest of her bridge functions, such as monitoring the top-level Immune system alarms, but I pestered Wallich with a series of detailed questions about the maximum resolving power of the camera dots embedded in Louis Pasteur's hull.

  “What's this about?” he finally asked me, impatient because he'd taken over several Baucum-tasks as well, in addition to his already-formidable load.

  I shrugged, uncertain how to phrase my reply. I tried: “The Earth flyby is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe large-scale TGL structures in a planetary environment, and possibly signs of human habitation as well.”

  “And you want a closer look?”

  “Absolutely. Don't you?”

  My use of the Immuno-jargon and mindset must at least have been adequate, because Wallich sighed and took a minute out to help me put together a sensor schedule. Really, it was a lot like building cellular automaton rules, except that the final result would be real, non-imaginary data from a system that actually worked, that actually kept itself perpetually out of the twin equillibria of repetition and death. That had done so for the last twenty years, anyway.

  Tosca Lehne was still asleep in his cabin, and needed fresh for the challenges ahead, but Earth was already the size of my thumbnail in a 4X view. An hour before, it had been the size of my pinkie-nail in 10X, and since that time the hull had logged a hundred thousand new spores, and seven replication events. Two of these occurred in the same square millimeter of hull and were therefore cause for suspicion and concern, but Wallich assured me the matter could wait for Lehne's attention when he came in.

  Meanwhile, Wallich himself was struggling to plot the courses of our five pursuing vessels and their attendant swarm. We really were going to press ahead with the probe deployment, and they really were going to intervene with lethal force, and so predicting where they would be and then arranging to be somewhere else ourselves was a top priority. They hadn't gained on us appreciably since Mars, hadn't seemed even to try all that hard, but of course our probes could only stand so much impact force, so much atmospheric heating, and thus we were obligated to shed about twenty percent of our speed in the next couple of hours, if our deployment was going to be successful. This would give the Temples' ships a fine window in which to pounce. Well, not pounce, really, so much as fail to slow down when we did. They'd close on our vessel with ever-greater relative velocity, taking advantage of our distraction, screaming in from behind with their motors off, no telltale iron-hydrogen plumes to give them away...

  “But space is big,” Wallich said, not dismissing the threat but not surrendering to it, either. “Even close to the planet, even inside the orbit of the moon, there's plenty of room to get lost in. To hit us they need pinpoint precision; to escape we only need a millimeter. Less than that, really, and there are a lot of millimeters o
ut there.”

  “They're not shooting,” I pointed out, “they're spraying. You've said yourself, it doesn't take much to damage the t-balance.”

  He grinned. “I said that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, hell, who listens to me?”

  We all did, actually, but I let the point ride. For once Wallich's good humor seemed genuine, infectious, and I was inclined to follow along.

  Rapisardi, alas, did not seem to share the feeling. “We should simply escape,” he said, a disembodied voice from the engine room.

  “Should we?” Wallich mused, unfazed. “All right, let's do that. But let's put some detectors down while we're at it, right?”

  “You're enjoying this,” Rapisardi accused.

  Wallich didn't deny it. “I have more to do, freund. Idle hands do the devil's work, which in this case means undermining morale. Have you checked the plasma focus capacitance like I asked?”

  “It's eight-twenty mF. You're not going to get any sort of killing stroke out of that unless the enemy is close enough to spit on.”

  “Well, hope springs eternal. You can adjust the focal radius manually now, yes?”

  “Yes, but...”

  It went on like that for a while. Evidently there had been some significant customization of Pasteur's housekeeping and control software. Nothing that could make warship of her, of course, but it sounded as though some routine functions had been subverted to distinctly non-peaceful use. We were going, for example, to seed the path behind us with Rapisardi's modified probes, now turned to service as ladderdown space mines. I gathered this wasn't expected to help, as the Temples ships could easily ping the space ahead of them and steer appropriately, but the psychological value, to us and to them, would be considerable: look here, Pasteur is no helpless target!