Bloom Read online

  That night, I pored over Lottick's files for nearly an hour, long enough to put together a more detailed mission description and flash it to my net channels to feed the curiosity there. Lottick's blatant flattery aside, I was not the only comentator or historian in the Immunity. Far from it. I can think of nine serious ones right off the top of my head (and you all know who you are), another twenty or thirty dabblers, and of course the thousands of contributors to the unmoderated channels.

  VR mail had been trickling in for me all day, messages of congratulation and commiseration and frank curiosity. I answered several of these at length, answered more with a form letter. There were some jealous inquiries as well. Why me, they wondered aloud? Why not someone else, someone perhaps with a more rugged or more technical background? One of these, though biting, was actually very funny, so I archived it and made a note to get in touch with its author, when I'd had time to build up the necessary reserve of wit.

  And then, as every evening, I read my net channels, perused city records, made a few discreet realtime calls, and flashed the comm network with info and opinion nuggets—the worlds according to John Strasheim.

  “...fourteen deaths last week, and only nine births, which is consistent with annual statistics. And yet, two-thirds of Immunity citizens remain unmarried, and more than half of those claim to be seeking romantic alliances without success. No surprise that the “Boff a Stranger” holiday proposal was shot down in council, but if we hope to stave off a slow extinction we had better find a way to get our men and women together outside of working hours. Or maybe we all just need to lower our standards a bit...”

  “...yet another warehouse robbery, this time for eight thousand g.u. in bismuth bar stock. How the perpetrators managed to carry it all away unnoticed is a mystery to this berichter, but sources indicate one or more city vehicles may have been involved...”

  “...in the Floral asteroids at the Main Belt's lower edge, Gladholder communities report a net food surplus for the twelfth consecutive year, despite near-record spore flux from the upper Mycosystem...”

  Et cetera. Finally, more tired even than usual, I fell gratefully into bed and drifted off at once.

  And burst awake half an hour later, fumbling the lights on and grabbing my zee-spec off the charging rack to send, in literal afterthought, a message to Vaclav Lottick, informing him that I'd considered his very kind offer, and had chosen to accept.

  THREE:

  Evolution's Admirers

  Originally headquartered in Radar Valley, a tiny dome town on the surface of Callisto, the Temples of Transcendent Evolution have managed over the past two decades to colonize nearly every corner of the Immunity, from the outposts of Saturn to the Five Cities of Ganymede. But in Innensburg, their branch temple was burned to the ground last year with magnesium flares and other sophisticated pyrotechnics, despite round-the-clock watches following three previous arson attempts.

  “It's an awful thing, human spite,” says longtime Temples spokeswoman Jeanine Proust, when I stop by the reconstruction site to interview her. The trademark binary cadeuceus emblem is already in place, raised gold on a burnished silver pillar, and Proust leans against it as she speaks, her body language protective and angry and tired. “The authorities avert their eyes, of course, or this couldn't have happened at all, much less gone unsolved. That building was raised and maintained by hands, you know, by loving human hands, and it contained thousands of g.u. in original artwork and fixtures, many of them originally from Earth itelf. The sentimental value alone is incalculable. How do you go about healing a loss like that?”

  “It's an awful thing, the Temples of Transcendent Evolution,” counters another source, an Innensburg resident who has asked to remain anonymous. “They want to 'commune,' they can bloody well do it someplace else, someplace where it isn't a bloody salt tablet stitched up in the wounds. Be a long time before we'll put up with that nonsense, believe you me. You've really got to wonder just who these people think they are.”

  At odds, of course, is the Temples' interest in TGL generally and the Mycosystem in particular. Not proper, one supposes, not healthy, although neither are the fear and divisiveness they so frequently inspire.

  The polite fiction these days is that we in the Immunity are all one people, united by one culture, one history. As the joke goes, our official language is English with a Swiss accent, and if there are racists or nationalists among us, they keep exceedingly quiet. And why not? Against the backdrop of the Mycosystem, what difference a human gene twisted this way or that? Even religious tolerance has come back into vogue; the western faiths quibble over similarities rather than differences, and seem to view the remaining animists and polytheists with, if not respect, at least a sort of good-natured neglect.

  The Temples are quite another matter; the organization's religious nature, which many feel to be a mask for quasi-legal scientific research, is seen as a provocation, a blatant stab at the moral foundations of our communities.

  “I'm not going to lie to you,” Jeanine Proust tells me with a defiant jutting of the chin. “Most of our members come to us because they sense a spiritual chasm in their lives, because they sense the proximity of a presence far greater than themselves, and they want to learn more. Yes, many are undereducated. Yes, many bring money along with them, and yes, we do funnel quite a lot of that into our research arm. Exploitation is a very subjective judgment, though, and we're no more guilty of it than any other large organization.

  “Like it or not, the Mycosystem is an enormous reality in our lives, and if the more established religions have no meaningful observations regarding that, then it is time for the established religions to give way to a more relevant paradigm. People come to us because unlike those religions of the past, we're the only ones willing to admit that there's an elephant in the living room.”

  Not strictly true—Rev. Stacia Holt's Creation Murmurs being the most prominent counterexample—but I let the point pass. “Some people,” I tell her instead, “accuse the Temples of going too far. The psychotropics, the fecundity rituals, the Confessions of Awe... Some suggest that the Mycosystem has become an object of actual worship among your followers.”

  She shakes her head. “No, I'm sorry, that would be stating it far too strongly. The spiritual implications of complexity on so vast a scale are simply not known. If a mycoric soul exists down there in that fractal wilderness, our apprehension of it must be fragmentary at best, though of course that doesn't stop us from trying. At this juncture we don't have enough information to worship the Mycosystem, or God, or anything really. It's a frontier that can only be explored when we're brave enough to let a bloom run its course, the occurrence of which seems very unlikely in the current climate. But this is all very easy for outsiders to misunderstand.”

  “I agree,” I say to her, fighting to hold my temper, my impartiality suddenly strained just a bit too far. “I doubt I've understood you at all. I don't see you people vacationing on Mars. I don't see you volunteering to die in a bloom. Isn't apprehending spiritual truths a little empty if it isn't backed up by actual deeds?”

  At this, she flashes a kind of disappointed smile—I've got her and she knows it. She seems as familiar with the question as she is uncomfortable, and when she speaks, it's in a humbler, almost apologetic tone. “Mr. Strahsheim, we have decades of study ahead of us. The Immunity focuses its energies in the wrong direction, in an aggressive and ultimately futile direction, and we would like to see that changed. But we aren't stupid, and we haven't transcended our inherent human/animal nature. We live upstairs from the very greatest of unknowns—the inner planets transformed almost beyond comprehension, the vacuum itself brought elaborately to life. Who can say what our place is in all of this? Is it so surprising, that deep down we're as afraid as you?”

  —from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure

  (c) 2101 by John Strasheim

  ~~~

  Back at the factory, I was greeted with hoots and catcalls as the guys
looked up from their machines. Schmidt, Billings, and Howe.

  “Hey!”

  “There he is, the Big Wheel himself!”

  “Hi, guys,” I said, ducking my head. My journalism hobby was well known, but it had never interfered with work before, and the drama of its doing so yesterday was as appealing to them as it was to me. More, probably, because they didn't have to go anywhere as a result.

  Julf Ernst, my shift supervisor for the last five years, stepped away from his paste-and-stich press, came forward and pumped my hand, a solicitous grin stretching out beneath his bushy moustache. Strasheim the visiting dignitary, yeah.

  “So what'd they say?” he asked.

  “I, uh, need a leave of absence.”

  “Yeah? Where're they sending you?”

  I snorted, amused to be able to shock him as deeply as I was about to. “Earth,” I said.

  He blinked.

  “I need ten months, starting immediately. They have some kind of new ship.”

  He blinked again. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  The machines had gone quiet, their operators all looking goggle-eyed at me.

  Ernst pumped my hand again. “Jesus. Well done, then. I always knew you'd leave us one day. I always said that, didn't I?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, although he never had.

  He cocked his head, a gesture which managed somehow to point to everything at once—the low ceiling, the rusted floor, the reeking vats of glue and rubber, the guys... “You gonna leave all this?”

  “Won't be easy,” I assured him.

  He nodded, approving of the remark. “One thing: you've got to have a drink with us after the shift. Down at the Engel.”

  The guys nodded. Yeah, yeah, mumble whatsis, drink at the Engel.

  “I'd like that,” I said. “What time should I meet you there?”

  “Meet?” Ernst quirked his face up. “I thought we'd all walk down there together. You know, after the shift.”

  I saw where that was heading, and moved to intercept. “I have to, ah, get my affairs in order. Close up the house, that sort of thing. I report for training first thing in the morning.”

  Ernst's expression was long-suffering and tired. “We had a big spike of orders come in on Monday, you know that. We're an hour and a half into a shift of twelve, for which you never called in late, and now I'm supposed to press out eighty-nine units with only four guys? Don't do this to me, Johnny boy.”

  “Do what? How are you going to manage tomorrow?”

  “We'll manage tomorrow. Get somebody in off another shift, I don't know. It's right now I'm worried about, Johnny. Nobody goes barefoot on this planet; that's a responsibility I take very seriously.”

  His face and voice were profoundly sincere, and the funny thing is, he was right. Ganymede was not a forgiving place, and the demands of life here did not allow for much error or idleness or want. People needed shoes, clothing, food, needed something every day, and somebody had to be there to provide it all. Nobody went barefoot, ever.

  That was how I got talked into spending one more day at the press. Julf Ernst could do that to you. It's why they made him supervisor, I guess.

  As promised, we all marched down to the Engel together when it was over and the eighty-nine pairs were drying on the rack. Didn't say much, though. The Engel, dark and moody as usual, had only a couple of patrons besides us, people eating dinner rather than drinking, so the silence got fairly oppressive as we stared at each other across the iron table and sipped our beers. It pained me—this was costing a good bit, probably three days' pay when all was said and done, and I really did appreciate the sentiment. The guys and I had worked together for most of a decade and a half, had spent twelve hours of six days of fifty-one weeks a year standing practically shoulder-to-shoulder. But when you got right down to it, apart from commenting on the quality of the beer we didn't really have all that much to say to each other.

  Hindsight filter: we could have talked about families, or politics, or money, or anything really. We just didn't. Didn't know how.

  It was Ernst who saved us, who single-handedly took on the burden of speech. He raised a hand, showed it to us, then pressed it to the table's faux-woodgrain surface and slid it around in a circle, as if feeling the texture of the metal.

  “Every surface,” he said, “is totally covered in macrophages. That's our line of defense. That's what separates us from Gladholders and dead Earthlings, what defines our whole society. We breathe these things, we totally trust them with our lives. Isn't that right, Johnny?”

  I supposed that it was.

  “Down in the Mycosystem,” he went on, his fat moustache waggling, “there are no macrophages. That's what defines its existence. That's why it's all turned to goo. You ask me, we're just not making enough macrophages. Immunize the whole solar system, that's what I say.”

  “I'm not sure it works that way,” I said uncertainly.

  “No?” He shrugged. “I've always wondered. I guess they would have done it by now if they thought they could. So what about this mission of yours? What's that about? You going to capture back some territory for us?”

  I shook my head, swallowed some dark, rich beer. “No, just a scouting mission. Placing some instruments.”

  “That's all?” He seemed surprised, disappointed. The guys grumbled their agreement with that sentiment.

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “Huh. Weird. You'd think if they were going to go to the trouble, it'd be for something more dramatic. But what do I know, right? Nothing. That's why I'm stuck in shoe heaven. Anyway, Johnny, we're surely going to miss you.”

  “Likewise,” I said.

  “You'll keep in touch?”

  “Yes. Actually, that's my job.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.”

  And that, sad to report, was about all the conversation we had in us that night. Herodotus, I hear, was no great conversationalist either.

  FOUR:

  A Capital Ship

  Base, town, factory, port, whatever Galileo may be, the first thing you notice about it is the peculiar nature of the cold. Warm air blasts through the corridors, drying the eyes and mucous membranes, roughing up the throat, and yet the walls... Touch them for a moment and the cool is refreshing, for longer, and you may lose some skin. Layered composite/ceramic nearly a meter thick, they are fine thermal insulators, but the temperature in the rock outside is barely seventy kelvins, and it seeps.

  Same goes for the floors and ceilings, so as I wandered in search of the shipyards that day, my feet and scalp were telling me I was cold, even as sweat drenched and stained the armpits of my shirt. Well, “wandered” is not really the right word, since a detailed map scrolled and swiveled on my zee-spec as I negotiated the hallways. But alongside it was a slow, plaintext news dump, with low-volume narration mumbling from the earpieces, and anyway I was taking the long way around, in no hurry and in fact under orders (well, suggestions) to gather information from any and all sources.

  “Whatever seems appropriate,” the message had said. “Whatever helps you do your job, do. We're paying for your judgment in these matters, so exercise it.”

  A light tour of Galileo, then, a bit of context for all that is to follow. Alas, there isn't much to tell. If you've been there, you know the town (factory? base?) is a rathole, a maze of tunnels and chambers that look and smell like they've been pummeled with hand tools and hosed down with oil. You get that sort of look when ten thousand residents, none of them permanent, pass through their work contracts here like boarding school students, unencumbered by love or respect for their surroundings. Too close to the equator here, too close to the surface. It's not that it feels unsafe—in fact, Galileo probably has the best Immune and Response systems in existence. It's not that there isn't enough money flowing through; the heavy elements on Ganymede are mainly imported through these very docks. It's not, as some have claimed, a lack of “feminine touch,” as something like a third of the residents are in
fact female.

  The problem is Galileo itself; remoteness is part of the identity of the place, part of its history. Never mind that it's as easy to reach now as any other part of Ganymede, and certainly much easier than Callisto or, God help us all, Titan. It just never has been “home” to anyone, and for that reason it never will be. Some places are just like that.

  Oh, all right, the place is not entirely without its charm. The food is mostly synthetic, don't ask me why, but an ethic of rebellion has taken hold of the culinary centers, leading to a cuisine which is certainly very different from anything else you're likely to see. Antinaturalism at its most refined; my lunch, eaten at a corner stand with twice as many diners as stools, consisted of chewy blue spheres with vaguely meatlike flavor, steeped in a sweet, translucent gravy that tasted chemical, medicinal. This was ladeled onto a mound of starchy pellets and served in an iron cup, with an oversized spoon and a glass of water and a napkin of dubious cleanliness. Good? No, not really. But different.

  Need I say more about the town itself? I think not. Eventually, I found my way to the relatively open spaces of the shipyard, where the ceilings were higher, the walls farther apart, the crowds less hurried and surly. It's a methodical business, the building and servicing of spaceships, and this was immediately apparent in the look and feel of the place. Large, complicated tools, pushed or carried with delicacy. Unexplained power cables running here and there, but stapled to the walls, out of the way of tripping feet. And signs everywhere, warning and exhorting. ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE, THIS MEANS YOU!!! CAUTION: LASER LIGHT. CAUTION: ELECTRIC FIELD. CAUTION: LIGHT FROM WELDING ARCS CAN DAMAGE YOUR EYE. There were even a few weirdly encouraging ones, such as PLEASE MOVE SAFELY, and WORK WITHOUT EATING MAY CAUSE DIZZINESS.

  True enough.

  The scale and clutter of the place were a bit daunting. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that the great shapes all around, in every hangar and chamber, surrounded by frames and trusses and hoists and quietly industrious people, were in fact real ships and not mockups or test articles or large pieces of support machinery. The strange openings in the ceiling were doors leading up into tunnels leading up into airlocks leading up into hard cold vacuum. I found the thought strangely sobering.