Use of this excerpt from BLOOM by WIl McCarthy may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: copyright ©1998 by WIl McCarthy. All Rights Reserved.

That my first meeting with Vaclav Lottick went poorly goes without saying. The most powerful man in the solar system, yes, you can believe he had better things to do than exchange small talk with me. And yet, certain business can be conducted in no other way.

He looked up and smiled when his secretary, a quiet, efficient man, ushered me inside the office. Everything beige and cream and shiny, not quite sterile in appearance but compact, and clean. Very clean. The windows' light was from behind Lottick, highlighting every stray hair, and the desk lamp seemed designed to show off the lines in his face. A pale man, nearly bald, his rumpled smock no longer white. Even his zee-spec was an older model, blocky, folding his ears back, weighing on the bridge of his nose, leaving his features to sag that much more.

"John Strasheim, hi," he said, rising from his chair and extending a hand. "Thanks for coming on such short notice."

Shaking his hand, I shrugged. "Happy to help, I guess. What can I--"

"Take a seat, then. Set to receive a flash?"

"Sure."

His thick fingers danced in the space between us. My receiving light went on, and the air before me came alive with information, image windows and text windows and schematic windows rastering in and then shrinking to icons as my spec compressed them in working memory. It was too quick to see much in the way of detail. Pictures of blooms, I thought. Pictures of mycora. Well, what else would one expect from the Immunity's head of research?

I sat.

"I've seen your work," he said to me, his voice vaguely approving. "And read it. Funny, how nobody seems to be doing that sort of thing anymore."

"You're talking about Innensburg?"

He nodded. Behind the zee-spec, his eyes were bright green. "Yes, Innensburg. I survey your net channels from time to time, but it was that piece that really caught my eye. About as close as we have to a regional history, and plaintext was a...curiously appropriate choice of medium. Very astute. I stayed up all night reading it."

"Thank you," I said, nodding once to accept the compliment. Then I smiled politely, waiting. Whatever he'd invited me here to discuss, this wasn't it.

He studied me for a moment, then relaxed, turning off the charm like a lamp he no longer needed. "All right, then."

His fingers stroked the air, manipulating symbols and menus I couldn't see. One of my image icons began to flicker. I touched and expanded it, moved the resulting window to the lower right corner of my vision. It was a video loop, false-color, depicting a complex mycorum which replicated itself in slow motion, over and over again. Not quite crablike, not quite urchinlike, not quite organic in appearance. A tiny machine, like a digger/constructor but smaller than the smallest bacterium, putting copies of itself together with cool precision, building them up out of nothing, out of pieces too small for the micrograph to capture. In short, a pretty typical piece of technogenic life. At the bottom of the window scrolled a horizontal code ribbon showing, in a series of brightly colored blocks, what was presumably the data gene sequence which dictated both the mycorum's structure and behavior.

"This," Lottick said, "is Io Sengen 3a, a sulphurated mycorum with unknown environmental tolerance. Gave us a scare a while back when we thought it could replicate in the volcanic flows on Io, but that turned out to be a false alarm. Now we're concerned again, for different reasons."

"Okay." I nodded, waiting for more, not yet sure why he was telling me this.

"You know that mycora mutate quickly, right? Everyone knows that. A key strength, a key factor. The whole Mycosystem probably depends on this, or it would have died out long ago."

"So I've heard."

"Yes, well, what you probably haven't heard is that they're stealing data gene sequences from our own phages. Nothing major, nothing all that important, but the mechanism and its potential limitations are not known at this time."

"Stealing gene sequences?" I repeated stupidly. My skin had gone cold and crawly. Mycora were not intelligent, not even alive, really. How could they steal?

"It's probably nothing," Lottick said. "Statistically, the chance that they'll steal something important and actually be able to use it to their advantage is...well, it's zero, basically. But we don't understand the mechanism, and that has a lot of people upset. Including me. What if the Mycosystem gets hold of some of our environmental adaptations? What happens if they stumble on nuclear fission, or cascade fusion, or, God help us all, they manage to copy some of our ladderdown designs?"

"I don't know," I said, still cold. "What?"

He shrugged. "They eat the solar system, I guess. They eat the universe. It's not going to happen, Strasheim, but that's the worst-case scenario we've got to work to. Hence the mission."

"The starship?" I asked, puzzled but optimistic. Whatever the problem was, these people seemed to be on top of it. Sort of.

"The starship, yeah, right." He chuckled, sounding tired. "We get it built, we fuel it up, we go on our merry way, every single person who wants to. That's not going to happen either. I know it's the party line, and maybe that's best for the time being, but the real goal of the program is to get our spores out to the neighboring stars before the Mycosystem beats us to it. Immune system fully established, deny the mycora a toehold even in the warm, bright spaces. But we've probably got a thousand years to worry about it, and a lot to keep us busy until then."

"So what are we talking about?"

"The Louis Pasteur," he said. "You may have heard about it here and there; the program is being accelerated in a big way. Ship is designed for inner-system operation--high-temperature, high-radiation, also the t-balance hull--theoretically bloom-proof. But of course, ha ha, we're not going to test that here on Ganymede. The only way to test it is to fly it down there, into the Mycosystem, and see if anything eats it. We hope to do that soon, and if the testing goes well, we'll fly it all the way down to Earth and Mars and Luna. The thinking goes: even in the inner system, there are places too cold, dark, barren for mycora to bloom. If any serious cold-weather adaptations start appearing, the first signs of it will probably be there. So we drop a few detectors on some polar caps, and suddenly we don't have to worry about this problem anymore. Not unless the detectors start screaming at us, which I don't think is going to happen."

"Are these state secrets?" I asked, turning to look at his face. "Can I talk about this stuff?"

His look was disapproving. "There are no secrets, Mr. Strasheim. There's barely any state, and I didn't invite you up here to waste your time. If we didn't want you to talk about this, what would we want you for? You have skills which nobody else in the Immunity seems to possess. You're a commentator, an historian; you record simple facts in a way that's accessible to the public, even entertaining. That ability could be very useful for this project, if you're willing to lend it to us for a while."

"It sounds fascinating," I said sincerely. "I take it you want me to write an article?"

Lottick looked at me as if I were somewhat stupider than he'd been expecting. "No, son. I thought we understood each other. I want you to go on the mission."

BLOOM BY WIL MCCARTHY IS COMING SOON IN HARDCOVER TO A BOOKSTORE NEAR YOU.