最近读的科幻奇幻中短篇（2014年4月5日）

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  双重生命 2014-04-09 14:26:12

  赞！

  簇（Bloom）可以看到网文吗？

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  三丰SF (三丰SF) 统阶 2014-04-09 19:57:05

  resnick这是到处和人合作写文啊

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  husy（狐习） (《冰与火之歌》译者) 楼主 2014-04-09 20:02:23

  赞！ 簇（Bloom）可以看到网文吗？ 赞！ 簇（Bloom）可以看到网文吗？ 双重生命

  有kindle和ipad上的电子书，不过是付费的

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  husy（狐习） (《冰与火之歌》译者) 楼主 2014-04-09 20:03:13

  resnick这是到处和人合作写文啊 resnick这是到处和人合作写文啊 三丰SF

  哈哈，这两位很有好基友的感觉

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  三丰SF (三丰SF) 统阶 2014-04-09 20:20:58

  欧美这些短篇小说，创意和构思怎样先不说，写作技巧真的都是练过磨过的。

  我看过数字，Clarkesworld每个月600-700的投稿量，录用大概3-4篇，这竞争激烈得……

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  Onion (back from a pipe dream) 2014-04-09 21:20:40

  resnick这是到处和人合作写文啊 resnick这是到处和人合作写文啊 三丰SF

  好像有一个小说集就叫mike resnick和他的朋友们,里边都是他跟别人合作的小说

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  兔子等着瞧 统阶 2014-04-10 14:15:29

  有kindle和ipad上的电子书，不过是付费的 有kindle和ipad上的电子书，不过是付费的 husy（狐习）

  过一段能找到免费版本应该

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  菲菲丽莎 (ZB，让我们装得更专业！) 2014-04-10 17:29:57

  赞！ 簇（Bloom）可以看到网文吗？ 赞！ 簇（Bloom）可以看到网文吗？ 双重生命

  这篇？ BLOOM

  Gregory Norman Bossert

  Greg Bossert lives in Marin County, California, under a vast untidy heap of pixels, audio samples, and words, and spends his weekdays wrestling with the same at Lucasfilm. This is his fifth story for Asimov's. He wrote the original draft over a dark silent night at the 2010 Clarion Writers' Workshop, and would like to gratefully acknowledge the help from his Clarion colleagues in finding the human story in a strange and alien landscape, where fear and hope alike can...

  ===============================

  "It's very simple," Ki Ninurta said into the darkness, as quietly as her torn voice would allow. "If you take another step, you die. We all die. So we wait." "No fucking way it's a CoL," Ben said, out of the black. "Cawl?" Andrea said. "I thought you said it—" "Cee-Oh-Ell. Circle of Life. A Yu Stigmergic Colony. A Bloom." Ki said. No response from Andrea. Ki thought the Earth woman was about four meters to her right, and a step or two ahead. Ben was in between them, a little closer to her than to Andrea. And a few meters behind; that was the scary part. If he was over the edge of the Bloom, she must be halfway to the center. "No fucking way," he said again. "I can smell it," Ki said. "The hell you can." She could. It was unmistakable underneath the normal spice and bite of Ardun's atmosphere, unforgettable. It was yeast and vinegar and semen-stained sheets. It was fecundity and decay. It was—she could see the glowing digits of her watch— three years, seven months, four days, twelve hours, thirty-four minutes. A sniff, and Andrea in a small voice, "I can smell it too." Another sniff, and another, and Ki felt a chill. "Do not cry. Water, salt are secondary triggers," she snapped. "I can't stop," Andrea said. "They initiate the second phase: mycorrhizal spikes and the grigs. They'll have a bit of difficulty getting through the skin without the coiltails softening you up first. That might give you a second or two more before they rip you apart." "I said I'm sorry." "Quiet," Ki said, and over her, Ben said, "Fuck sake, Ninurta, the hell good that's gonna do? Lay off her." A tremulous inhale from Andrea, but she said, "I caught them. The tears, I mean, I think I caught them all." "We'd already know," Ki said, "if you hadn't." silence

  The flashlight was somewhere behind Ki and Ben; she'd heard it hit and roll when Ben had dropped it, saw the flash as it went dark. Loose connection. Or bad design. There was a lot of that with their equipment, which was half military surplus and half donation-in-kind from sponsors. Great way to dump unwanted inventory, that: grateful thanks from the university, maybe an honorary degree for the sponsor's CEO, and they were out here fifty light years away with a flashlight not fit for a backyard sleepover. Her right ear itched, where the lab-grown skin attached to the cartilage. silence

  "I'm going to back up," Ben said. "I'll step into my footsteps." "And you're going to do that how? It's pitch dark," Ki said. "I don't recommend feeling around for them." "I jump backward, then, hard as I can. I can't be more than a meter or two into the Bloom, yeah? I can jump clear." "All three of us are probably inside the edge. You just broke through first. And anyway, pulling your foot out of the crust is as likely to trigger the Bloom as anything else." "We gotta do something," Ben said. "Like I said before, we wait for someone to notice that we are missing and come looking for us with a thermal scanner. It's the only rational option." Ben grunted. "We didn't sign out," he said. He sounded defensive; Ki was, amongst other things, the project's safety officer. She would love to call him out on that idiocy, but... "Neither did I," Ki said. "Oh," Andrea said, very quietly. "It's a small base," Ki said. "And there's just a handful of crew down off of Andrea's ship. Someone will figure it out." silence

  "Why aren't we dead already?" Andrea asked, her voice steadier. "I mean, the way we hear it back on Earth, the Blooms of Ardun, one wrong step and..." "Ask her," Ben said. "She's the fucking expert. And the fucking guinea pig, huh, Ninurta? And the whatchacallit, the lucky rabbit's foot. But that only works for her, I guess. Sure didn't help Laurent." "It's complicated," Ki said. silence

  "I checked the board," Ben said. "Before I brought her out. This whole area's supposed to be clear, everything between the lab complex and the ridge." "Blooms move. You know that. She's from offworld, she's got an excuse," Ki replied. "Blooms creep. Like, a few meters, maybe a few dozen meters a day. I oughta know, I do the stats for the betting pool." Ki hissed, though she'd known about it. A hundred people on planet, give or take, didn't leave a lot of space for secrets. She said, "We don't really know anything about this world. People who think they understand an exoplanet get dead." "There was nothing within half a klick. It's your fucking board." Ben's voice tremored, threatened to crack. "Shhhh," Ki said. "Calm." She took a slow deep breath. The reek of the Bloom was too familiar, too intimate; those three years seven months four days should have dulled that memory. The dreams were sharp, though, when she let herself sleep. The dark, the smell was so familiar, whether from memory or dream. Which one are you? she thought, of the Bloom. silence

  Ki was crouched, left foot a little ahead of the right, left hand on her foot, right arm across her leg. Her heels were down; if she'd been up on her toes, like Earth people did, she'd have gone over already. She was from Gennissea, 22 percent higher gravity, and the corresponding level of common sense. It had taken her about five minutes to settle into that position, trying to keep her weight constant, keep her feet from shifting. "If either of you are still standing, you should try to—" "I'm down," Ben said. "Squatting." "Me too." "Huh," Ki grunted. "Keep your heels down." silence

  "Why didn't you bring a scanner?" Ki asked. "Even if you did check the board, you should have been prepared." "You got a lab full of that crap for the taking. Us assistants, we gotta check them out," Ben said. "I didn't want it in the log. Out at night, with a visitor, that's the kind of shit ends up in your personnel record. Why the hell didn't you bring a scanner?" Ki ran her tongue between her lip and teeth. Her ear itched like hell. "The scanners really aren't that effective after midnight; the heat signature has dissipated too much. The tracking board is more reliable." "Yeah, right," Ben said, and snorted like he was going to spit. An audible swallow. "Damn, this thing stinks." silence

  "I have to pee," Andrea said. "Hold it," Ben said. "I always have to pee after sex," Andrea said, like an accusation. "Jesus, Ann." "Andrea." "Jesus, bitch." "He's right. Hold it," Ki said, flatly. She didn't need that in her head, the two of them lying on the talcum-soft sand; images that wrapped and clung and left her half blind with something that was part longing but mostly anger. She'd been dodging those images ever since she had run into the two of them on the ridge an hour ago. She had been lost in that bitter blindness as she led the little group back to base, not absolutely sure where they were, until Ben had taken a step that crunched and left them, all three, in that darkness. "Think about something else," she said. "No, seriously. What were you doing here without a scanner?" Ben said. "As I said, the scanners aren't—" "Bullshit. You get on my case about the scanner, you must think they're good for something. I went through your safety lecture my first day on-planet. Scarred into my damn memory, you standing up there looking like roadkill, telling us how dangerous this place can be. As if you weren't proof enough. And you always saying how much worse it is in the dark, when everyone knows you're out here walking around every damn night." And in a bad imitation of Ki's Gennissea accent, he said, " 'A walk out on the surface without careful preparation is suicide.' " Ki's eyelid twitched, tugged with every heartbeat. She willed the silence back, her faithful companion across the dark watchful dunes, but Ben went on. "You think you're safe out here, now you're got some Bloom in you? Or are you just too smart to get caught, when it's a death wish for us normal people?" It wasn't just their voices; she could smell them under the fetor of the Bloom: a human and therefore alien odor of sweat and must and fear. The urge to flee that intrusion, to keep stepping forward toward understanding or oblivion, was suddenly so strong she almost shook with it. But that urge was as familiar as the dark and the silence. "No," she said. "Oh," Andrea said. And in a steadier voice than before, "Shut up, Ben." silence

  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. silence

  "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. silence

  "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. silence

  "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." silence

  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. silence

  "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..." silence

  "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." silence

  "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. silence

  "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?" silence

  "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." Ki's neck cramped, a sudden stabbing pain, a pull to the right. She clamped her jaws. "Later, it hurt," she said. "On the way back. And despite the coiltails plugging the wounds, I started to lose blood, got dizzy. If they hadn't picked me up on a tracking camera, I'd have bled out within sight of the base." "And then?" "After that, well, if you saw the coverage, you know as much as I. They sedated me and pulled out the coiltails, one at a time. Four thousand, three hundred and four, though some broke apart during removal. I have pieces still in there, little pockets of alien DNA. They pumped fluids in me as fast I was leaking them out, until they could regrow a skin. You can see how well that worked." "Not here in the dark," Andrea said, gently. silence

  Ben said, "There's something she's not telling you." "About the Blooms?" "About the sharcoats." Ki shut her eyes again. "The sharcoats, they're kind of like giant sheep, yeah? Only green. And carnivorous. But still, they're herd animals." "I've seen videos," Andrea said. "So, up in the ridges, the big males, they lead the herd, watch for predators, find the best crap to eat, look for sharcoat babes, whatever the hell it is that makes a boss sharcoat happy. The juvenile males stay in the back, far away from the leaders as they can get, with the old and crippled and sick ones straggling along afterward. And the moms and babies, they're clumped up in the middle, safety in numbers, you know?" "You seem to know," Andrea said. "What is it, another betting pool on the sharcoats?" "I told you I was a research assistant. That's what I do, fly a drone, track the herds. Anyway, down here on the plains, it's different. The herd goes backward; the alpha males in the rear, old ones first. And the cripples, yeah, Ninurta? You know why?" Ki's eyelid twitched to her heartbeat. "Because the fucking Blooms aim. They take the one or two nearest the center. If they kill something outside the Circle, it doesn't do the colony any good. The herd goes backward out here because the ones that go first are expendable." "So?" Andrea asked. "So maybe it won't get all of us. If we just jump for it, maybe some of us will make it." "You're the one who broke through the crust, Ben," Ki said. "You want to take that chance?" silence

  "I didn't think so," Ki said. silence

  "Which one is Canopus?" Ki asked. "Huh? Uh, it's up... um. Okay, see those three stars at ten o'clock, make a sort of triangle? Reddish one on the lower left?" "Yes." "Follow that arrow down to the horizon. That bright white one is Canopus." "So that's south?" "Yup." "Sasquatch, Yeti, Nessie, Chupacabra," Ben said. "What?" "The Southern Group," Ki said. "Like I said, we named the Blooms. My great contribution to exobiology so far. If that's south, and that ridge ahead of us is the one west of the Base, then we're much closer to the Southern Group. But..." "Yeah," Ben said. "This bastard leapt. The betting pool, it's about which Bloom moves the farthest, which way they go. And the Southern Group—" "Moves very slowly," Ki said. She tilted her head a few centimeters each way, slowly, watching the stars slip in and out from behind the ridge, trying to get a bearing. They were further east than she had thought. "The Eastern Group is divided into two genetically related subgroups." "Jubjub and Borogove, they move all the time, but not very far," Ben said. "And then there's Tove, Bandersnatch, Snark, and—" "Boojum," Ki said. "That one is, uh, is yours? I remember that, from the reports." Andrea said, not quite a question. "That one is mine," Ki said. "That group, they can cover ground," Ben said. "They average twenty, thirty meters during feeding. Snark made the largest move yet recorded, almost two hundred meters, after catching a pregnant sharcoat. But Snark was half a kilometer north of the ridge this morning." "It's Boojum," Ben said. "We can't be certain," Ki said, though her heart said otherwise with every racing beat. "Boojum's been weird ever since you stepped in it. The thing caught some of your crazy." "There is a possibility that—" "It's fucking Boojum. And you're immune. That motherfucker already took a bite, and spat you out." silence

  "Ki, why you?" Andrea asked. Ben snorted, swallowed, said nothing. Nor did Ki. silence

  "What I meant was, Ki, why did you survive? Why did the Bloom stop and not, you know, take you?" "We don't know. Not enough data points. Not with humans, anyway." "How many other people have..." Her voice shook for a second. "How many survived?" "None. Out of eight human subjects, I am the only survivor." "Oh." "There are three recorded incidents of sharcoats surviving attack. Same behavior as with me; the coiltails fired, but stopped in the dermal layer. Sharcoats have a heavy layer of blubber under the skin; it helps them maintain water, like a camel's hump, but it also protects them in one of these events. They survived, where I would not have, not without aid. It's possible the aborted attacks have something to do with sexual reproduction; an exchange of genetic material if the subject is later taken by a different Bloom. That's just a hypothesis." "So, if this is Boojum, wouldn't it be done with you? Wouldn't it want you to survive, then, to get caught by another Bloom? Does it know you?" "It doesn't know us," Ben said. "It's just a hypothesis," Ki repeated. "Anyway, this could be Snark. Could be something new." silence

  "It's pretty fucking obvious," Ben said. "What is?" Andrea asked. Ki knew what was coming. "Why she's the only one that didn't get eaten. She's a fucking ET. A Gennissean. Seven generations, now? Eight? Under that crazy giant star, and that gravity. You think the Blooms are a textbook example of evolution, take a look at her. You want a data point? All seven humans died." silence

  "Asshole," Andrea said. "Ki, I'm so sorry. I just don't get it." silence

  "Actually, it is plausible," Ki said. "The gene pool on the original Gennissea colony was limited, and as Ben says, there are significant environmental stresses on my homeworld. Island populations tend toward extreme genetic drift. Like the Blooms: they're genetic islands, always changing, always drifting toward something new. Boojum has changed since my encounter; Ben's right about that as well. "But the variation on Gennissea is within the range of pre-Expansion Earth, and so far I haven't found any markers that might explain my survival. Earthers and Gennissans are still the same species; we can still interbreed." "Wasn't going to happen even before your accident," Ben said. "I hope it takes you first, Ben," Andrea said. "Never should have left," Ben said again, his voice distant, as if he was speaking up into the stars. "Ki, what I meant was, I don't understand why you stay here. The colony is so small, and everything else is so alien. Doesn't it just remind you... I mean, how can you get past what happened when it's always right in your face?" Ki laughed, too sharp and loud for safety. "In my face is right. Not likely to forget, am I, when it's literally under my skin. Everywhere is alien to me now." But before the silence could take hold again, she added, "You came out, out from Earth, out from the base, even though you know the dark is dangerous. Why was that?" silence

  "Because..." Andrea said, very quietly. "To see Canopus in that dark, and know everywhere is home. Ki, it was worth it. Even this." And then, "They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care, they pursued it with, um..." Ki's breath hung; her chest rang like a bell. "They pursued it with forks and hope; they threatened its life with a railway-share; they charmed it with smiles and soap." "What the hell?" Ben said. "It's a poem," Andrea said, "about searching for something you can't—" "Shitshitshit," Ben said, too loud. "Something just moved. Under my goddamn foot." "Sssh," Ki hissed. "It's the grigs, molting. During the night after a move, they go through larval stages before taking their adult form." She tilted her wrist, checked the time. "Getting late." They were facing west; the sun would be behind them. In Ardun's thin, dry air, dawn came fast, with little warning, and the ridges in front of them were beginning to take on form. silence

  "We should try calling," Ki said. "You said you wouldn't risk it," Ben said, his voice still loud, and shaky. "I lied," Ki said. "What you said before, about me out here at night, walking the valleys and screaming at the Blooms.... It's true." Neither Ben nor Andrea said anything. Ki almost laughed into that silence; she thought that if she had done so, it would have been her first laugh without bitterness since her Bloom. "Calling them names? Yes, calling them the names we gave them. You know what I shouted? 'Here I am. Come and get me.' " silence

  Andrea said, "I understand." "I don't need your pity," Ki said. "You're the bravest person I've ever met," Andrea said. Ki had no reply to that. But before they could lapse back into the silence, Ben snorted. " 'Here I am, come and get me' works for me," he said. "Now I'm thinking we're too far east for the base sensors to pick us up, but what the hell, huh?" They all shouted. silence

  "No one is coming," Ben said. His voice was dry, cracked but calmer. "We gotta do something, and it's gotta be soon." Ki took a deep breath, held the scent of Bloom and planet and human swirling in her lungs. She thought of island genetics. Stigmergy and emergence. She breathed out again. "Here's something else I didn't tell you," she said. "When you are really lonely... not the sort of loneliness you can have on Earth, or any of the settled planets, or on a ship; there's always something familiar there, that can trick you into thinking you're part of something. When you are out here on the edge, in the damn dropshadow of human space, and everything that connected you to your species has been stripped down by something you will never truly understand, because it is truly alien, and you don't even have that hope..." She reached up and scratched her damn ear, rubbed her eye. Nothing happened, beyond a brief respite from the itching. "When you are really lonely," she started again, more quietly, "you aren't sad. You don't sit around and pity yourself. You don't need people. You don't need anything." She could see the ridge in front of them now, no detail, just a basic sense of line and plane. "But you want. You want everything, with a desire so clear and pure it burns like anger, so intense that you have to scream it into the dark every night. Every minute..." Three years, seven months, four days, fifteen hours, nineteen minutes. "Every moment, you burn with it." silence

  Ki could see her own hand, a dark cutout against the surface grown pale in the rising light. There was a line in the dust, a subtle flattening of the texture, an edge. The dawn would wash it out in a few minutes, but in the dim flat light she could see an edge running behind her to curve around the lump that was Ben. Andrea was a shadow against shadow beyond him, no more than a meter inside the circle. Or maybe she was imagining that line. If she wasn't, the center of the Bloom was there. silence

  The shape that was Andrea moved: a glint of an eye, a curve of cheekbone pale and pure and whole. Ki stood up slowly. The dawn broke behind her ravaged face, rimmed her hair into a flower of fire. She said, "Andrea, I think, I hope, you do understand. I can't get past what happened, and I don't want to. I can only go through it." "Oh, Ki," Andrea said. She sounded sad. Ki thought of a cool pool after the heat. Forks and hope, she thought. The center was there. Boojum, love, is that you? It's me. "Back." Back out of the circle, she meant. Back to your ship. Back out of the dark, back home where Canopus was far away in a familiar sky. Ki jumped toward the center, arms flung wide like an embrace. Ben fell backward toward the edge; the foot caught in the crust spinning him sideways, arms flailing, face twisted in fear. Andrea rose up, arched in a graceful curve, not away but toward Ki, one hand up to catch the sun, the other stretched to pull Ki back. For a moment, the three of them hung in the alien light, in silence.

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  双重生命 2014-04-10 17:35:56

  这篇？ BLOOM Gregory Norman Bossert Greg Bossert lives in Marin County, Californi 这篇？ BLOOM Gregory Norman Bossert Greg Bossert lives in Marin County, California, under a vast untidy heap of pixels, audio samples, and words, and spends his weekdays wrestling with the same at Lucasfilm. This is his fifth story for Asimov's. He wrote the original draft over a dark silent night at the 2010 Clarion Writers' Workshop, and would like to gratefully acknowledge the help from his Clarion colleagues in finding the human story in a strange and alien landscape, where fear and hope alike can... =============================== "It's very simple," Ki Ninurta said into the darkness, as quietly as her torn voice would allow. "If you take another step, you die. We all die. So we wait." "No fucking way it's a CoL," Ben said, out of the black. "Cawl?" Andrea said. "I thought you said it—" "Cee-Oh-Ell. Circle of Life. A Yu Stigmergic Colony. A Bloom." Ki said. No response from Andrea. Ki thought the Earth woman was about four meters to her right, and a step or two ahead. Ben was in between them, a little closer to her than to Andrea. And a few meters behind; that was the scary part. If he was over the edge of the Bloom, she must be halfway to the center. "No fucking way," he said again. "I can smell it," Ki said. "The hell you can." She could. It was unmistakable underneath the normal spice and bite of Ardun's atmosphere, unforgettable. It was yeast and vinegar and semen-stained sheets. It was fecundity and decay. It was—she could see the glowing digits of her watch— three years, seven months, four days, twelve hours, thirty-four minutes. A sniff, and Andrea in a small voice, "I can smell it too." Another sniff, and another, and Ki felt a chill. "Do not cry. Water, salt are secondary triggers," she snapped. "I can't stop," Andrea said. "They initiate the second phase: mycorrhizal spikes and the grigs. They'll have a bit of difficulty getting through the skin without the coiltails softening you up first. That might give you a second or two more before they rip you apart." "I said I'm sorry." "Quiet," Ki said, and over her, Ben said, "Fuck sake, Ninurta, the hell good that's gonna do? Lay off her." A tremulous inhale from Andrea, but she said, "I caught them. The tears, I mean, I think I caught them all." "We'd already know," Ki said, "if you hadn't." silence The flashlight was somewhere behind Ki and Ben; she'd heard it hit and roll when Ben had dropped it, saw the flash as it went dark. Loose connection. Or bad design. There was a lot of that with their equipment, which was half military surplus and half donation-in-kind from sponsors. Great way to dump unwanted inventory, that: grateful thanks from the university, maybe an honorary degree for the sponsor's CEO, and they were out here fifty light years away with a flashlight not fit for a backyard sleepover. Her right ear itched, where the lab-grown skin attached to the cartilage. silence "I'm going to back up," Ben said. "I'll step into my footsteps." "And you're going to do that how? It's pitch dark," Ki said. "I don't recommend feeling around for them." "I jump backward, then, hard as I can. I can't be more than a meter or two into the Bloom, yeah? I can jump clear." "All three of us are probably inside the edge. You just broke through first. And anyway, pulling your foot out of the crust is as likely to trigger the Bloom as anything else." "We gotta do something," Ben said. "Like I said before, we wait for someone to notice that we are missing and come looking for us with a thermal scanner. It's the only rational option." Ben grunted. "We didn't sign out," he said. He sounded defensive; Ki was, amongst other things, the project's safety officer. She would love to call him out on that idiocy, but... "Neither did I," Ki said. "Oh," Andrea said, very quietly. "It's a small base," Ki said. "And there's just a handful of crew down off of Andrea's ship. Someone will figure it out." silence "Why aren't we dead already?" Andrea asked, her voice steadier. "I mean, the way we hear it back on Earth, the Blooms of Ardun, one wrong step and..." "Ask her," Ben said. "She's the fucking expert. And the fucking guinea pig, huh, Ninurta? And the whatchacallit, the lucky rabbit's foot. But that only works for her, I guess. Sure didn't help Laurent." "It's complicated," Ki said. silence "I checked the board," Ben said. "Before I brought her out. This whole area's supposed to be clear, everything between the lab complex and the ridge." "Blooms move. You know that. She's from offworld, she's got an excuse," Ki replied. "Blooms creep. Like, a few meters, maybe a few dozen meters a day. I oughta know, I do the stats for the betting pool." Ki hissed, though she'd known about it. A hundred people on planet, give or take, didn't leave a lot of space for secrets. She said, "We don't really know anything about this world. People who think they understand an exoplanet get dead." "There was nothing within half a klick. It's your fucking board." Ben's voice tremored, threatened to crack. "Shhhh," Ki said. "Calm." She took a slow deep breath. The reek of the Bloom was too familiar, too intimate; those three years seven months four days should have dulled that memory. The dreams were sharp, though, when she let herself sleep. The dark, the smell was so familiar, whether from memory or dream. Which one are you? she thought, of the Bloom. silence Ki was crouched, left foot a little ahead of the right, left hand on her foot, right arm across her leg. Her heels were down; if she'd been up on her toes, like Earth people did, she'd have gone over already. She was from Gennissea, 22 percent higher gravity, and the corresponding level of common sense. It had taken her about five minutes to settle into that position, trying to keep her weight constant, keep her feet from shifting. "If either of you are still standing, you should try to—" "I'm down," Ben said. "Squatting." "Me too." "Huh," Ki grunted. "Keep your heels down." silence "Why didn't you bring a scanner?" Ki asked. "Even if you did check the board, you should have been prepared." "You got a lab full of that crap for the taking. Us assistants, we gotta check them out," Ben said. "I didn't want it in the log. Out at night, with a visitor, that's the kind of shit ends up in your personnel record. Why the hell didn't you bring a scanner?" Ki ran her tongue between her lip and teeth. Her ear itched like hell. "The scanners really aren't that effective after midnight; the heat signature has dissipated too much. The tracking board is more reliable." "Yeah, right," Ben said, and snorted like he was going to spit. An audible swallow. "Damn, this thing stinks." silence "I have to pee," Andrea said. "Hold it," Ben said. "I always have to pee after sex," Andrea said, like an accusation. "Jesus, Ann." "Andrea." "Jesus, bitch." "He's right. Hold it," Ki said, flatly. She didn't need that in her head, the two of them lying on the talcum-soft sand; images that wrapped and clung and left her half blind with something that was part longing but mostly anger. She'd been dodging those images ever since she had run into the two of them on the ridge an hour ago. She had been lost in that bitter blindness as she led the little group back to base, not absolutely sure where they were, until Ben had taken a step that crunched and left them, all three, in that darkness. "Think about something else," she said. "No, seriously. What were you doing here without a scanner?" Ben said. "As I said, the scanners aren't—" "Bullshit. You get on my case about the scanner, you must think they're good for something. I went through your safety lecture my first day on-planet. Scarred into my damn memory, you standing up there looking like roadkill, telling us how dangerous this place can be. As if you weren't proof enough. And you always saying how much worse it is in the dark, when everyone knows you're out here walking around every damn night." And in a bad imitation of Ki's Gennissea accent, he said, " 'A walk out on the surface without careful preparation is suicide.' " Ki's eyelid twitched, tugged with every heartbeat. She willed the silence back, her faithful companion across the dark watchful dunes, but Ben went on. "You think you're safe out here, now you're got some Bloom in you? Or are you just too smart to get caught, when it's a death wish for us normal people?" It wasn't just their voices; she could smell them under the fetor of the Bloom: a human and therefore alien odor of sweat and must and fear. The urge to flee that intrusion, to keep stepping forward toward understanding or oblivion, was suddenly so strong she almost shook with it. But that urge was as familiar as the dark and the silence. "No," she said. "Oh," Andrea said. And in a steadier voice than before, "Shut up, Ben." silence 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. silence "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. silence "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. silence "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." silence 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. silence "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..." silence "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." silence "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. silence "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?" silence "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." Ki's neck cramped, a sudden stabbing pain, a pull to the right. She clamped her jaws. "Later, it hurt," she said. "On the way back. And despite the coiltails plugging the wounds, I started to lose blood, got dizzy. If they hadn't picked me up on a tracking camera, I'd have bled out within sight of the base." "And then?" "After that, well, if you saw the coverage, you know as much as I. They sedated me and pulled out the coiltails, one at a time. Four thousand, three hundred and four, though some broke apart during removal. I have pieces still in there, little pockets of alien DNA. They pumped fluids in me as fast I was leaking them out, until they could regrow a skin. You can see how well that worked." "Not here in the dark," Andrea said, gently. silence Ben said, "There's something she's not telling you." "About the Blooms?" "About the sharcoats." Ki shut her eyes again. "The sharcoats, they're kind of like giant sheep, yeah? Only green. And carnivorous. But still, they're herd animals." "I've seen videos," Andrea said. "So, up in the ridges, the big males, they lead the herd, watch for predators, find the best crap to eat, look for sharcoat babes, whatever the hell it is that makes a boss sharcoat happy. The juvenile males stay in the back, far away from the leaders as they can get, with the old and crippled and sick ones straggling along afterward. And the moms and babies, they're clumped up in the middle, safety in numbers, you know?" "You seem to know," Andrea said. "What is it, another betting pool on the sharcoats?" "I told you I was a research assistant. That's what I do, fly a drone, track the herds. Anyway, down here on the plains, it's different. The herd goes backward; the alpha males in the rear, old ones first. And the cripples, yeah, Ninurta? You know why?" Ki's eyelid twitched to her heartbeat. "Because the fucking Blooms aim. They take the one or two nearest the center. If they kill something outside the Circle, it doesn't do the colony any good. The herd goes backward out here because the ones that go first are expendable." "So?" Andrea asked. "So maybe it won't get all of us. If we just jump for it, maybe some of us will make it." "You're the one who broke through the crust, Ben," Ki said. "You want to take that chance?" silence "I didn't think so," Ki said. silence "Which one is Canopus?" Ki asked. "Huh? Uh, it's up... um. Okay, see those three stars at ten o'clock, make a sort of triangle? Reddish one on the lower left?" "Yes." "Follow that arrow down to the horizon. That bright white one is Canopus." "So that's south?" "Yup." "Sasquatch, Yeti, Nessie, Chupacabra," Ben said. "What?" "The Southern Group," Ki said. "Like I said, we named the Blooms. My great contribution to exobiology so far. If that's south, and that ridge ahead of us is the one west of the Base, then we're much closer to the Southern Group. But..." "Yeah," Ben said. "This bastard leapt. The betting pool, it's about which Bloom moves the farthest, which way they go. And the Southern Group—" "Moves very slowly," Ki said. She tilted her head a few centimeters each way, slowly, watching the stars slip in and out from behind the ridge, trying to get a bearing. They were further east than she had thought. "The Eastern Group is divided into two genetically related subgroups." "Jubjub and Borogove, they move all the time, but not very far," Ben said. "And then there's Tove, Bandersnatch, Snark, and—" "Boojum," Ki said. "That one is, uh, is yours? I remember that, from the reports." Andrea said, not quite a question. "That one is mine," Ki said. "That group, they can cover ground," Ben said. "They average twenty, thirty meters during feeding. Snark made the largest move yet recorded, almost two hundred meters, after catching a pregnant sharcoat. But Snark was half a kilometer north of the ridge this morning." "It's Boojum," Ben said. "We can't be certain," Ki said, though her heart said otherwise with every racing beat. "Boojum's been weird ever since you stepped in it. The thing caught some of your crazy." "There is a possibility that—" "It's fucking Boojum. And you're immune. That motherfucker already took a bite, and spat you out." silence "Ki, why you?" Andrea asked. Ben snorted, swallowed, said nothing. Nor did Ki. silence "What I meant was, Ki, why did you survive? Why did the Bloom stop and not, you know, take you?" "We don't know. Not enough data points. Not with humans, anyway." "How many other people have..." Her voice shook for a second. "How many survived?" "None. Out of eight human subjects, I am the only survivor." "Oh." "There are three recorded incidents of sharcoats surviving attack. Same behavior as with me; the coiltails fired, but stopped in the dermal layer. Sharcoats have a heavy layer of blubber under the skin; it helps them maintain water, like a camel's hump, but it also protects them in one of these events. They survived, where I would not have, not without aid. It's possible the aborted attacks have something to do with sexual reproduction; an exchange of genetic material if the subject is later taken by a different Bloom. That's just a hypothesis." "So, if this is Boojum, wouldn't it be done with you? Wouldn't it want you to survive, then, to get caught by another Bloom? Does it know you?" "It doesn't know us," Ben said. "It's just a hypothesis," Ki repeated. "Anyway, this could be Snark. Could be something new." silence "It's pretty fucking obvious," Ben said. "What is?" Andrea asked. Ki knew what was coming. "Why she's the only one that didn't get eaten. She's a fucking ET. A Gennissean. Seven generations, now? Eight? Under that crazy giant star, and that gravity. You think the Blooms are a textbook example of evolution, take a look at her. You want a data point? All seven humans died." silence "Asshole," Andrea said. "Ki, I'm so sorry. I just don't get it." silence "Actually, it is plausible," Ki said. "The gene pool on the original Gennissea colony was limited, and as Ben says, there are significant environmental stresses on my homeworld. Island populations tend toward extreme genetic drift. Like the Blooms: they're genetic islands, always changing, always drifting toward something new. Boojum has changed since my encounter; Ben's right about that as well. "But the variation on Gennissea is within the range of pre-Expansion Earth, and so far I haven't found any markers that might explain my survival. Earthers and Gennissans are still the same species; we can still interbreed." "Wasn't going to happen even before your accident," Ben said. "I hope it takes you first, Ben," Andrea said. "Never should have left," Ben said again, his voice distant, as if he was speaking up into the stars. "Ki, what I meant was, I don't understand why you stay here. The colony is so small, and everything else is so alien. Doesn't it just remind you... I mean, how can you get past what happened when it's always right in your face?" Ki laughed, too sharp and loud for safety. "In my face is right. Not likely to forget, am I, when it's literally under my skin. Everywhere is alien to me now." But before the silence could take hold again, she added, "You came out, out from Earth, out from the base, even though you know the dark is dangerous. Why was that?" silence "Because..." Andrea said, very quietly. "To see Canopus in that dark, and know everywhere is home. Ki, it was worth it. Even this." And then, "They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care, they pursued it with, um..." Ki's breath hung; her chest rang like a bell. "They pursued it with forks and hope; they threatened its life with a railway-share; they charmed it with smiles and soap." "What the hell?" Ben said. "It's a poem," Andrea said, "about searching for something you can't—" "Shitshitshit," Ben said, too loud. "Something just moved. Under my goddamn foot." "Sssh," Ki hissed. "It's the grigs, molting. During the night after a move, they go through larval stages before taking their adult form." She tilted her wrist, checked the time. "Getting late." They were facing west; the sun would be behind them. In Ardun's thin, dry air, dawn came fast, with little warning, and the ridges in front of them were beginning to take on form. silence "We should try calling," Ki said. "You said you wouldn't risk it," Ben said, his voice still loud, and shaky. "I lied," Ki said. "What you said before, about me out here at night, walking the valleys and screaming at the Blooms.... It's true." Neither Ben nor Andrea said anything. Ki almost laughed into that silence; she thought that if she had done so, it would have been her first laugh without bitterness since her Bloom. "Calling them names? Yes, calling them the names we gave them. You know what I shouted? 'Here I am. Come and get me.' " silence Andrea said, "I understand." "I don't need your pity," Ki said. "You're the bravest person I've ever met," Andrea said. Ki had no reply to that. But before they could lapse back into the silence, Ben snorted. " 'Here I am, come and get me' works for me," he said. "Now I'm thinking we're too far east for the base sensors to pick us up, but what the hell, huh?" They all shouted. silence "No one is coming," Ben said. His voice was dry, cracked but calmer. "We gotta do something, and it's gotta be soon." Ki took a deep breath, held the scent of Bloom and planet and human swirling in her lungs. She thought of island genetics. Stigmergy and emergence. She breathed out again. "Here's something else I didn't tell you," she said. "When you are really lonely... not the sort of loneliness you can have on Earth, or any of the settled planets, or on a ship; there's always something familiar there, that can trick you into thinking you're part of something. When you are out here on the edge, in the damn dropshadow of human space, and everything that connected you to your species has been stripped down by something you will never truly understand, because it is truly alien, and you don't even have that hope..." She reached up and scratched her damn ear, rubbed her eye. Nothing happened, beyond a brief respite from the itching. "When you are really lonely," she started again, more quietly, "you aren't sad. You don't sit around and pity yourself. You don't need people. You don't need anything." She could see the ridge in front of them now, no detail, just a basic sense of line and plane. "But you want. You want everything, with a desire so clear and pure it burns like anger, so intense that you have to scream it into the dark every night. Every minute..." Three years, seven months, four days, fifteen hours, nineteen minutes. "Every moment, you burn with it." silence Ki could see her own hand, a dark cutout against the surface grown pale in the rising light. There was a line in the dust, a subtle flattening of the texture, an edge. The dawn would wash it out in a few minutes, but in the dim flat light she could see an edge running behind her to curve around the lump that was Ben. Andrea was a shadow against shadow beyond him, no more than a meter inside the circle. Or maybe she was imagining that line. If she wasn't, the center of the Bloom was there. silence The shape that was Andrea moved: a glint of an eye, a curve of cheekbone pale and pure and whole. Ki stood up slowly. The dawn broke behind her ravaged face, rimmed her hair into a flower of fire. She said, "Andrea, I think, I hope, you do understand. I can't get past what happened, and I don't want to. I can only go through it." "Oh, Ki," Andrea said. She sounded sad. Ki thought of a cool pool after the heat. Forks and hope, she thought. The center was there. Boojum, love, is that you? It's me. "Back." Back out of the circle, she meant. Back to your ship. Back out of the dark, back home where Canopus was far away in a familiar sky. Ki jumped toward the center, arms flung wide like an embrace. Ben fell backward toward the edge; the foot caught in the crust spinning him sideways, arms flailing, face twisted in fear. Andrea rose up, arched in a graceful curve, not away but toward Ki, one hand up to catch the sun, the other stretched to pull Ki back. For a moment, the three of them hung in the alien light, in silence. ... 菲菲丽莎

  Thx very much！

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  EvanDream 2014-04-10 17:46:57

  太好了 多谢

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