Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (17 page)

"Oh," Andrea said. And in a steadier voice than before, "Shut up, Ben."

Ben said, "I think I can reach the flashlight."

"It's not worth the risk," Ki said. "It's broken."

"You don't know that," Ben said. "You just like the fucking dark."

Andrea said, "Would we be able to see the Bloom? I didn't see anything before. I thought they live under the sand."

"She
was supposed to be guiding us," Ben said. "Now we know it's there, maybe we can see it. We're damn well close enough. And we can use the light to signal for help. Hell, I'm doing it."

Ki opened her mouth.
The board was clean,
she wanted to say,
there should be nothing here.
But she wasn't sure now if she knew exactly where they were or which way they were facing, as if rather than evicting them from her accustomed private darkness she had led them into its heart. So she listened instead, for his surprised grunt, the crack of crust breaking, the impossible roar of an entire ecology unfolding into life underneath her.

There was a quiet
click-click-click.
"It's dead," Ben said.

Ki shut her mouth. Whatever she might say, she feared would come out sounding too satisfied.

"Honestly," Andrea said, "if someone does find us, is there anything they can do?"

"If they have lights, or—" Ki felt herself blush. "—or a thermal scanner, then we could try jumping. It is arguably less risky if we know where the edge is, and how far. They could also give us a hand, use a pole or a rope to pull us out faster. That might improve our chances."

"Might," Ben echoed sourly.

"If someone does come, though, it better be in the next three hours."

"Why?" asked Andrea, "I mean, why soon? Apart from the fact that I
really
got to pee," with a try at a chuckle that scraped to a stop.

"A Bloom event, well, if you consider the colony a single creature, it wakes up, eats, moves, and goes back to sleep. But for the individual organisms that make up the colony, it's an entire lifecycle; whole generations feed, reproduce, and die. All that takes resources, energy, particularly when it moves far."

"And this one fucking
jumped,"
Ben said.

"So, that first night, the Bloom is a bit... subdued. That may be why we are still alive. But in the light and heat of the dawn, it becomes fully active. It wakes up."

"Wakes up
hungry."

"Think about something else," Ki said again.

"So who was Laura?" Andrea asked.

"Huh?"

"You said something before about Laura, and Doctor Ninurta being a rabbit's foot."

"Laur
ent,"
Ki said. "He was my research assistant."

"Was. Did he..."

"Stepped into it, out in the Western Groups," Ben said. "Setting up her damn equipment, wasn't he, Ninurta? Misjudged the edge of the Bloom and then
crunch, boom,
all she wrote.
She
was fine, outside the blast area."

"God."

"But it
wasn't
all she wrote, was it,
Doctor
Ninurta? Got a couple of papers out of it, huh?"

"Any scientist would have wanted—"

"What Laurent wanted was to go home to Earth and screw his girl until the two of them couldn't walk straight. I shipped out with him. Ninurta here worked with him every day, probably didn't know his first name. She took samples, afterward. With a fucking scraper."

"What part of 'shut up, Ben' wasn't clear?" Andrea said.

"The hell with shutting up," Ben said, and shouted, "Hey! Help!"

The sound ripped through Ki like a shockwave, tore her from herself; it was as if she was collapsing inward and reeling away at the same time. One part of her swirled down into a grinding, buzzing dimness threaded by low angry voices. The other part tried to fly in all directions at once and avoided falling only because it could not remember which way was down.

Ki could not tell if either part was here and now or three years seven months four days ago.

After a measureless moment, the shock rippled out through her fingers and toes. Epinephrine and norepinephrine, she thought—fight-or-flight and neither one is a damn option—and with that thought she was whole and here and now. She wasn't falling, not quite, and the low angry voices were real enough. "...

...going to wake it
up,"
Andrea was saying.

"It's not like it has ears," Ben said. And then, with an uncertain edge to his voice, "Right, Ninurta? It can't hear us, can it?"

"No," Ki said, and hoped the shake in her voice sounded like exasperation. "Maybe. We don't know."

"Because..." Ben said, much more softly, "Well, there was a story going around that when you are out here at night, you're screaming at the Blooms. Calling them names."

There were more neurotransmitters in the mix at that statement, but Ki was well familiar with the effects of these: embarrassment, shame, anger. She let the reaction swirl over her and away, and felt fully herself again. "It's unlikely that the Blooms detect sounds in the human range of hearing," she said. "But the Blooms
change.
I wouldn't bet my life on it."

There was a sort of gurgle from Ben. Ki's first thought was that he was choking, a flash of him coughing, off balance, putting out a hand. Even a spray of spit could be enough. But the gurgle returned: he was laughing.

"What?" she snapped.

"You know what Frandt down in transport was calling the Blooms? IEDs. Improvised Evolutionary Devices."

Andrea gave a nervous snort.

Ki said, "Not entirely inaccurate. But not funny."

"Yeah? Frandt ran into a couple of ex-marines at the canteen didn't think so, either. Beat the crap out of him."

"Now that's funny," Ki said. Frandt was the sort of man who couldn't walk past her without making some sort of comment to his companions, just loud enough for her to hear. She hoped they'd hurt him. She hoped that they'd left some scars.

"Still, it's a better name than 'Bloom.' Like it's some kind of fucking flower."

"Algal blooms on Earth," Ki said. "They kill off entire sections of ocean via toxins, gill damage, oxygen depletion."

Ben grunted.

"But it's not a very good analogy," Ki continued. "Algal blooms are anomalous and unsustainable events, probably anthropogenic. What the Yu Stigmergic Colonies do is natural, an adaptation to the limited resources of the plains. 'Bloom' was what the first landing team called them, before Yu started his study. He came up with 'Circle of Life.' " "Sarcastic motherfucker," Ben said. "Sarcastic
dead
motherfucker,"

"And our project, we gave them names," Ki said. She had the sudden urge to reach down and touch the dry cracked surface of the Bloom, so like her own ravaged skin.
Which one are you?
she thought again.

"That's Canopus," Andrea said.

"Can o'
what?"

"Speaking of names. Up there, Canopus. Alpha Carinae. The star. It's a supergiant, type F. Brightest absolute magnitude in our region of the galaxy. On Earth, you can only see it regularly from the southern hemisphere, like Australia where I'm from. I went to school in the EU. On break, first thing I'd do was go out and find Canopus.
Then
I'd feel like I was home. It's always been a guide star for navigation, since back in the days of sea travel. We still use it as a primary tracking point. It's just half a degree off the southern celestial pole here on Ardun."

"You're a pilot?" Ki asked, and was surprised at the sharpness in her voice.

"Navigator. Lead, second shift."

The sharpness was anger. "Then what the hell were you doing out here with
him?
"

"S'that supposed to mean?" Ben growled.

"Don't tell me you didn't know what he was after," Ki said.

"Just because I'm out from Earth doesn't mean I'm an idiot," Andrea said.

"You would... fuck," the word came out sibilant, clipped, like a hiss, "fuck
him,
just to take a walk?"

"To spend a night under alien stars, my first trip out? Yeah. It was worth it," Andrea said. "Until..."

"Where's Earth, then?" Ben asked.

A pause, and then, "A bit north of west. But Sol's already down, set an hour or two ago."

"Never should have fucking left." He grunted. "God, that hurts. Goddamn cramps."

"Be glad it's a warm night," Ki said.

"If it wasn't, I'd have found a spot inside, wouldn't
be
in this shit." His breath hissed. "Fucking leg."

"So, how did..." Andrea trailed off. "Ki. With you, I mean. What happened? I saw the news reports; that was when I was in school, about the accident, and how they... you know, the reconstructive surgery. But they didn't really explain what happened with the Bloom."

Ki could tell this story with her eyes closed. She closed them now, despite the dark.

"What do you know about the Blooms?"

"Not much, not from school; the Nav track at the Academy is all physics, mostly; I never really paid much attention in bio."

"Physics, then," Ki said. "You've got the concept of potential energy, right?"

"Rock and roll," Andrea said.

"Sorry?" Ki said.

Ben snorted, and swallowed. "I got that one in high school," he said. "Rock sitting on a hill, it's static, it's not doing anything, but it still has potential energy. Give it a nudge to get it going and that energy, you know, spills out, and the rock rolls down the hill."

"Huh. Well, when dormant, the Blooms are storing a tremendous amount of energy, by some estimates up to a Megajoule. That's the equivalent of a small bomb, so Frandt's IED joke wasn't far off."

"I saw the Yu videos," Andrea said. "He just... blew apart. But you..."

"Didn't. The Yu video doesn't have the frame-rate to show the individual stages clearly, though if you step through it, you can see that he wasn't really blown apart; he was
stripped down."
Ki knew every frame, could replay them against the dark in her head. "His own blood pressure created the spray. The process is optimized to reduce the subject down as efficiently as possible without losing elements outside the colony. We've got high-speed video of local fauna getting caught; it's beautiful, really." Ben grunted, and Andrea echoed, "Beautiful?"

"From an evolutionary point of view, the Bloom is extraordinary."

"You talk like it's an 'it.' I thought it was a 'them'?"

"Well, you're a 'them.' We all are, at a cellular level; a colony of differentiated but mutually dependent organisms, whose overall behavior emerges from reducible, stigmergic mechanisms."

"I'm sorry, I don't... stigmata?"

"Stigmergy is a form of self-coordination via indirect mechanisms. It's—"

"Ants," said Ben.

"Heh," Ki said.

"I sat through your damn welcome speech," he said. "It's like ants in an anthill. A colony."

"It's not a perfect analogy. The elements of a Bloom share some genetic material, but they can be considered separate species. The Portuguese Man o' War on Earth—"

"An ant is dumb," Ben plowed on, "but a bunch of ants can do stuff, solve complex problems, like..."

"Stripping a carcass," Ki said.

"So..." Andrea said. "You still didn't explain how you survived."

"We
gotta
talk about this?" Ben asked.

"Better than going crazy, waiting in the silence," Andrea said. "Anyway, it helps to understand. I was scared of deep space, before I went to the academy."

"You get used to the silence," Ki said.
And no understanding can save you in this darkness,
she thought. But the lecture was as much a part of her as her seamed skin. "There are three stages. First the coiltails penetrate the skin, providing access for the later stages. Then the spikes and grigs separate the subject into component pieces, get everything down to ground level. Finally, the vermiforms reduce the remaining elements. The stages pass quickly; a large animal, like a sharcoat or human, can be processed in fifteen to twenty seconds, flyers in as few as two or three."

" 'Component pieces,' " Ben muttered.

"But...?" Andrea said.

"Occasionally, very rarely, the initial phase is incomplete. The coiltails fire, but when they hit the subject's skin, they stop."

"Like, bounce off? But you, you're..."

Disfigured. Scarred. Taken. Ki opened her eyes; a scattering of stars, otherwise the blackness was the same either way.

"A coiltail looks somewhat like a bullet attached to a spring," she said.

"Like a fucking monster sperm," Ben said.

"Somewhat," Ki said. "The tail is literally a spring; the coiltails use it to launch them out of the ground at close to the speed of sound. And once in the subject's flesh, they spin the tail to expand the perforation—"

"Jesus, Ninurta, you could make an orgy at a ballgame sound boring. It's a dumdum bullet. A fucking frag grenade."

"Actually, 'an orgy at a ballgame' is a good analogy for the nominal case. When a Bloom is triggered, the individual organisms that make it up are squeezing in a whole lifetime of eating and breeding. In these anomalous events, however, the party never gets started. Instead, the coiltails brake on impact and swell like a cork, minimizing the release of fluids long enough for the subject to escape the circle."

"Escape?"

"Fly, or run, or crawl." She paused, squinted her eye against the twitch. "I did a bit of all three. It was two kilometers back to the base."

"Jesus." And a gasp-like sigh from Andrea.

"I kept falling over, couldn't understand it. Turns out I'd lost my toes. Is that colorful enough for you, Ben?"

"Did it hurt?" Andrea asked.

Ben barked a sort of laugh, cut it short.

"Not at first. It felt like... have you ever gone from a sauna to a cold pool? It was a bit like that. And the blow, it felt like something had grabbed me by every inch of skin and lifted me straight off the ground. My head was up; I could hear a landing shuttle, was looking for it. That saved my eyes; the cheek and orbital bones caught the worst of it."