Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Paradise” was his father’s name for it. In biblical mythology, paradise was a garden called Eden; the Edenic world was cultivated, perfect. When humankind fell from grace, the garden succumbed to anarchy.

  On the IOS the garden was even more central, as delicate and vital as a transplanted heart. It supplied most of the station’s nutritional needs; it recycled wastes; it cleansed the air. Because the garden was both indispensable and fragile, it was, at least in Degrandpre’s eyes, the paradise of the Old Testament restored: orderly, calculated, organic, and precise.

  The gardeners, in their buff fatigues, acknowledged his presence by staying out of his way. He walked the garden tiers slowly, pausing in a glade of tall tomato plants to savor the smell and the leaf-green light.

  He had entered the Works with much of his father’s idealism still intact. Humanity had endured a wild Earth for too long. The price had been uncontrolled population growth, climatic devolution, disease.

  Kuiper radicals accused Earth of wallowing in stasis. Nonsense, Degrandpre thought. How long would a Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm last if it failed to regulate its ice and oxygen mining? How long could the IOS, for instance, sustain itself in a state of anarchy? But there was nothing special about the surface of Earth; the issues were the same, only broader, more diffuse. Consider Isis itself: a garden never cultivated. Beautiful, as freshly arrived Kuiper enthusiasts never failed to point out. And fundamentally hostile to human life.

  He passed through the vegetable gardens and climbed a flight of stairs to a terrace where delicately engineered fruit vines thrived near the light. Gardeners and slim white tractibles moved like angels among the lush foliage, and he savored the patient sound of dripping water. Home, Degrandpre found himself thinking: five years now since he’d seen it, and God knows what had gone on during his absence. The disastrous North African Aquifer Initiative had nearly cost him his career; he had called in every outstanding favor just to save his Works card. He had accepted the Isis rotation to demonstrate his adaptability. It was the only post of any responsibility he had been offered.

  And he hadn’t done badly here. But too much time had passed too slowly, and he felt the separation from Earth more keenly than he had expected. It was as if his body registered on the cellular level every inch of the vast distance the Higgs launcher had transected; he was, after all, so far from home that the sunlight falling on these vines would not reach Beijing or Boston or the south of France within his lifetime. His only real connection with the planet of his birth was the particle-pair link—a thin reed indeed.

  But one to which he was obliged to attend. His weekly report was due. He would have to let the Trusts know that one of their engineers had died.

  Bad luck. Or bad management. Or Kuiper adventurism gone wrong. Yes, that was it.

  By midday, he had queued his report for transmission and was tending to other business. A summit of section managers arrived bearing grievances: unfair tractible allotment and resource utilization, the usual departmental jealousies. The Turing factories on Isis’s small moon had fallen short of productivity goals, though another two factory units had been genned. The question was one of balance. No one would get what he wanted, but that was inevitable. The IOS was an economy of scarcity.

  The good news was that no truly critical shortages were pressing, Turing productivity had increased even if it had not met expectations, and the IOS’s life-support systems remained in good shape. Most of the bad news came from the Surface Projects manager, who reported a rash of seal failures, maintenance calls, and diminished redundancy, particularly from the continental and deep-sea outposts. (The small arctic station reported only routine maintenance.) This was potentially troublesome, since the downstations used a daunting variety of exotic materials imported from home; bringing stores and spares back to capacity would take some cargo shuffling on the part of the Trusts, never an easy sell. But, all in all, things could be worse.

  He soothed the junior managers with promises, dismissed them at last and went to his cabin.

  Alone.

  He hated the social isolation of the IOS, but the answer to that problem, as always, was discipline. That was the mistake the Trusts had made more than a century ago, tinkering with the genes of Kuiper volunteers rather than teaching them the practical arts of self-discipline.

  The wall of his cabin showed a relay view of Isis, blue on black velvet. He was supremely tired of it. He switched the display to a neutral white luminescence, keyed to dim as he fell asleep.

  His personal scroll chirped, waking him early.

  The waiting message was tagged amber, important but not urgent. Degrandpre let it wait while he showered and dressed. Then he dispatched a small personal tractible to bring breakfast from the galley.

  He took up the scroll reluctantly. The message was return traffic from the Works Trust. Perfunctory regrets on the Macabie Feya death. Revised launch schedules. Revised cargo inventories, projected six months forward.

  And in the tail of the message, a small but lethal sting.

  An “observer” had been written into the next personnel rotation. A Personnel and Devices observer, a man named Avrion Theophilus.

  Terrifyingly, the man’s rank wasn’t specified.

  On Earth, a man without a title was either very poor or very powerful. A peasant or a Family man.

  And peasants didn’t come to Isis.

  ZOE CAME TO the common room to witness the burning of Macabie Feya’s body.

  Tam Hayes had called the downstation staff to Yambuku’s common room, which was large enough for Zoe to join the crowd without feeling unduly claustrophobic. Hayes had cleared one wall and converted the surface panel into a screen with a view of the western clearances, where remote tractibles had assembled a bier of native wood for the body to lie on. The effect was like watching through a big picture window. But in fact the common room was at the heart of the sterile core of Yambuku, insulated from Isis by onionskin layers of hot-zone laboratories and tractible bays.

  Mac Feya, contaminated beyond rescue, hadn’t made it farther into the station than the tractible bay. His body was compromised with Isian organisms beyond number; it had become, in effect, a supremely dangerous piece of biological waste. Elam Mather had used a medical remote to sedate and anesthetize Mac as he died, a grim but thankfully brief process; she had then extracted key tissue samples and processed them into the glove-box array before she returned the body to the clearing.

  Zoe didn’t look at the body too closely. Mac Feya’s bioarmor had been stripped for salvage and he had been draped with a white sheet in an attempt to lend some dignity to his corpse. But the body was obviously deliquescing under the shroud, digested by Isian microorganisms and processed with eerie speed into a syrupy black liquid. Just like a CIBA-37 mouse, Zoe thought. She sat rigidly in her chair and tried not to take this death as an omen. A warning perhaps:The Isian biosphere would not be trifled with. But there was nothing malignant here, no deliberate attack on human life. The problem was not Isis, but humanity. We’re fragile, Zoe thought; we evolved in a younger and less competitive biological domain. We’re infants here.

  When the first probes reached Isis, there had been a keen effort to protect the planet from human contamination. But there was not a Terrestrial organism the Isian biosphere couldn’t contain and devour, its immense array of enzymes and poisons quickly corrupting the fragile protein envelopes of Earth-based life. The death of Macabie Feya was simply Isis acting as Isis must.

  “The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”

  Zoe looked away from the body to the forest canopy beyond the bier. The trees were sinuous, thin-boled, raising their limbs like great green hands. This, after all, was her realm, or soon would be. She had trained most of her life for protracted isolation in the Isian woodlands. If a native species had been named, she could name it; she could even supply tentative binomials for new species within a broad range of genera. But
this was not a textbook, a file-stack, or a walkthrough simulation. The reality of it was suddenly overwhelming, even from the cloistered safety of the common room: real breezes shaking the foliage, real shadows eclipsing the forest floor. She had come within a few thin walls of Isis—at last, at last.

  And in the midst of death. Real death. The depth of emotion in the room was daunting. Dieter Franklin had lowered his head to disguise tears; Elam Mather was openly weeping, and she wasn’t the only one.

  Two mysteries, Zoe thought. Isis and grief. Of the two, she understood Isis better. How would she feel if someone close to her had died? But there was no one close to her. There never had been. Only Theo, as severe and aloof as some black-winged bird, her teacher and savior. What if it were Theo’s body out there? Would she weep? Zoe had wept often when she was young, especially during her dimly remembered time at the Tehran orphan crêche. From which Theo had saved her. Without Theo . . . well, without Theo, she would be lost.

  Free, some traitorous part of her whispered.

  The thought was disturbing.

  Tam Hayes, tall and somber in his Yambuku fatigues, read a brief but dignified eulogy. Then a young biochemist named Ambrosic, the last Reformed Mormon at Yambuku now that Mac was gone, offered a formal prayer for the dead.

  On some hidden cue, the attending tractibles doused the bier with hydrocarbon compounds and ignited it with a jet of flame. An external microphone relayed the sound with horrible fidelity, the whoosh of ignition and the slow crackle of the burning wood.

  The heat lofted Macabie Feya’s ashes high into the Isian sunlight. Wind carried away the smoke. His phosphates would fertilize the soil, Zoe thought. Season by season, atom by atom, the bios would have the whole of him.

  Zoe had been sent to Isis specifically for the deep-immersion project, but until the day she would step out of the station, she was a Yambuku hand and had to find a niche for herself. She was neither a microbiologist nor an engineer, but there was plenty of ordinary scutwork to do—filter changes, cargo inventory, scheduling—and she made herself available for all these duties. And day by day, as the shock of Mac Feya’s death eased, she felt herself becoming . . . what? If not a member of the Yambuku family, at least a welcome accessory.

  Today, a week since the funeral, Zoe had invested eight hours on cargo inventory, which meant lots of physical labor even with the freight tractibles helping. She took a quiet dinner in the refectory and retired to her cabin. More than anything, she wanted a hot shower and an early bed . . . but she had only just dialed the water temperature when Elam Mather knocked at the door.

  Elam was dressed in after-duty clothes—loose buff shorts and blouse—and her smile seemed genuinely friendly. “I’ve got tomorrow’s duty roster. Thought you might want a quick look. Or just to talk. Are you busy?”

  Zoe invited her in. Zoe’s cabin was small, a bedroll and a desk and one wall with a screen function. Once a month or so, compressed edits of Terrestrial entertainment were fed down the particle-pair link from Earth. Tonight most of the station hands were screening the new Novosibersk Brevities in the common room. Zoe had linked her screen to an outside camera and the only show she wanted to see was the sleepy crescent of Isis’s moon as it fled across the southern stars.

  Elam entered the room as she entered all rooms, brusquely, arms at her sides, tall even by Kuiper standards. “I’m not much for light entertainment,” she said. “Guess you’re not either.”

  Zoe wasn’t sure how to react. Elam didn’t flaunt her rank, but she was one of Yambuku’s key people, second only to Tam Hayes himself. Back home, it all would have been clear. Junior managers had deferred to her and she had deferred to her seniors—and everyone deferred to Family. Simple.

  Elam dropped the roster sheets on Zoe’s desk. “It’s a desert around here when the entertainment package comes in.”

  “They say this one has good dancing.”

  “Uh-huh. Sounds like you’re about as enthusiastic as I am. I’m just an old Kuiper fossil, I guess. Where I come from, dancing is something you do, not something you watch.”

  Zoe couldn’t think of an answer. She didn’t dance.

  Elam glanced at the active wall screen. Zoe had maxed the resolution, creating the illusion that her cabin had lost one wall and was open to the Isian night. Yambuku’s perimeter lights picked out the nearest trees, starkly bright against the velvet-dark forest. “No offense, Zoe, but you’re like a ghost sometimes. You’re here, but all your attention is out there.”

  “It’s what I’m trained for.”

  Elam frowned and looked away.

  Zoe added, “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Excuse me? Oh—no, Zoe. Nothing wrong. Like I say, I’m just an old Kuiper fossil.”

  “You read my personnel file,” Zoe guessed.

  “Some of it. Part of the job.”

  “I know how it must sound. Sole survivor of a clonal pod, designed for Isis duty, lost in an orphan crib for three years, mild aversion to human contact. Freakish, and I guess. . . very Terrestrial. But I’m really—”

  She began to say, no different from anyone else. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Even on Earth, she had stood a little apart. And it was part of her qualification for the job.

  “—trying hard to fit in here.”

  “I know,” Elam said. “And I appreciate it. I want to apologize if we’ve been slow about breaking the ice. Mostly it’s what happened to Mac, nothing to do with your history.”

  Zoe noted the qualifier. Mostly. But that was fair. The majority of the scientists at Yambuku were Kuiper-born. The old-time Commonwealth Settlement Ministry had populated the first Kuiper Body settlements with citizens gen-engineered for long isolation and the claustrophobically tight conditions in the water mines. Unfortunately, it had been a faulty sequence-swap. The undetected bug in their altered genome had been unexpected, late-life neurological decay, a congenital nerve-sheath plaque difficult to cure or contain. Of that generation of Kuiper settlers, those who survived the rigors of first settlement had died screaming in inadequate clinical facilities far from Earth. Only a hasty program of sequencepatching had saved their children from the same fate. Most of them.

  Kuiper veterans would tell you they feared heavy-handed Terrestrial gene-tinkering aimed at population control, not the process itself. But family history made it a ticklish issue. Zoe was a clonal birth whose life had been designed and tailored for Trust duty. Her Kuiper-born colleagues must find that distasteful.

  “What I’m saying, Zoe, is that none of that matters much. Because you’re one of us now. You have to be. We’re sitting at the bottom of a hostile biological ocean, and Yambuku is a bathysphere. One leak and it’s over for all of us. In that kind of environment, we can’t afford anything less than mutual trust.”

  Zoe nodded. “I understand. I’m doing my best, Elam. But I’m not . . . good with people.”

  Elam touched her arm, and Zoe forced herself not to flinch. The older woman’s hand was warm, dry, rough.

  “What I’m trying to say is, if you need a friend, I’m here.”

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry if this sounds rude. I look forward to working with you. But . . . I don’t want a friend.”

  Elam smiled. “That’s okay. I didn’t say ‘want.’ ”

  The days passed, each day a step closer to her liberation from the confinement of Yambuku. Outside, a week of rain gave way to vivid sunshine. The station’s device shop processed Zoe’s excursion suit, duplicating its files and testing its capacities, green-lighting its function inventory item by item. Zoe spent the lag time patiently, learning the first names of Yambuku’s sixteen current residents. Of these, she was most comfortable with Elam Mather and Tam Hayes, the device-shop engineers Tia and Kwame and Paul, and the planetologist Dieter Franklin.

  “We’re close to a go-ahead on your excursion technology,” Tam Hayes told her. “The technicians are impressed. We were told to expect something novel. This is more than novel.”

&
nbsp; Zoe pushed a cargo cart down the long windowless enclosure of the south quarter. The cart’s wheels rattled against the brushed-steel floor. She tried to imagine how this place must have looked when the tractibles and Turing constructors were assembling it. A metal catacomb attended by mechanical spiders, steel and metacarbon panels lofting down from orbit on guided parachutes.

  Today was mainly sunny and warm, according to Hayes. Not that she could tell from the timeless monotony of this walkway. “Days like this,” Hayes said, “we often send the dragonfly remensors out.”

  Zoe looked up from her work.

  Hayes said, “Interested?”

  Yes, very much.

  “Your file says you can handle this kind of remote. Is that correct?”

  Zoe adjusted the headset to fit her skull. “Yes.”

  “And you know the terrain?”

  “From simulations.”

  “Okay. We’ll call this a training jaunt. Just keep me in sight at all times and do as I say.”

  Yambuku operated its telepresence devices from a console room no larger than Zoe’s cabin. She was aware of Tam Hayes in the chair next to hers. In Yambuku’s ultraclean environment, odors became more intense. She could smell him—a clean smell, soap and laundered cotton and his own unique scent, like spring hay. And, alas, herself: nervous, eager. She activated the headset and the room fell away from her awareness—though not the scent.

  Hayes activated the remote, and two dragonfly remensors rose from a bay at the periphery of the shuttle dock into the still noon air.

  The remensors’ fragile wings glistened with photoelectric chiton cells, microscopic prisms. Their elongated bodies curled downward for stability as the devices hovered in place.

  Zoe, wrapped in the headset and hands on the controls, saw what her remensor saw: Yambuku from a height, and the wooded rift valley infinitely deep and wide beyond it, an unbroken canopy of green dappled with gentle cloud shadows.

  Her heart hammered. Another wall had fallen. Between herself and Isis there were many walls, but every day fewer, and soon enough, none; soon enough, only the insensible membrane of her excursion suit. The two realms, her Terrestrial ecology of blood and tissue and the deep Isian biosphere, would come as close to physical contact as technology permitted. She longed to touch her new world, to feel its breezes on her body. The feeling was startling in its intensity.