Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But the most immediate question was whether the biohazard had been successfully contained—or whether it might spread.

  Degrandpre ordered coffee for all hands in the ops room, then waited with unconcealed impatience for Li—a Terrestrial, at least—to find time for a direct uplink.

  Waiting, he felt impotent. This would enrage his superiors on Earth, no matter what happened next. He would have to red-flag a report to the Families and accept whatever responsibility he couldn’t dodge. And in the meantime—

  In the meantime, he could only pray that the event would be contained.

  A junior brought him coffee. The coffee was synthetic and tasted like ashes steeped in well water, but he had drained two cups by the time Li appeared on the screen at last, his Trust uniform disheveled and perspiration-stained. Li’s skin was as classically dark as Degrandpre’s was classically pale; both men would have been considered moderately handsome on Earth, though not in the Kuiper settlements, where a sort of muwallad brown was the fashionable skin color.

  Li said without preamble, “I want a full evacuation of the Oceanic Station.”

  Degrandpre blinked. “You know you don’t have the authority—”

  “Manager, I’m sorry, but time is important. Whatever it was that took out Pod Six, it affected the men first, the electrical systems second, and then the structural integrity of the pod itself—all in less than an hour. I don’t want to lose any more staff.”

  “According to our telemetry, the problem was contained. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please share it with me.”

  “With all due respect, I don’t have evidence of anything! All I know for certain is that one of my laboratories is at the bottom of the ocean and two of my men are dead. At the time of the accident, they had bacterial plaques in their glove box. I don’t know if that contributed to the problem or not, but we have similar organisms in just about every glove box in the station. If it constitutes a threat—”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No, I can’t, which is precisely why—”

  “You’re suggesting we abandon an extremely valuable resource because of one accident and your own surmise.”

  “We can always reoccupy the station.”

  “At an enormous expense in resources and work hours.”

  “Manager . . . do you really want to assume that risk?”

  The bastard was trying to protect himself in case of more trouble. Degrandpre imagined Li testifying at a Trust inquiry: Although I requested an evacuation in unequivocal terms. . . .

  “Just give me any hard information you happen to have, Dr. Li, and we’ll proceed from there.”

  Li bit his lip but knew better than to argue. “If you’ve been monitoring our telemetry, you know as much as I do. The pod went bad this morning. No communication from the crew, only the hazard siren. I ordered the bulkheads sealed. The pod’s electrical and life-support systems shut down shortly thereafter, for reasons unknown. An hour after that, the pod lost hull integrity and collapsed under pressure. That’s all we know.”

  “Have you recovered any of the wreckage?”

  “We don’t have enough tractibles or excursion gear to recover solid wreckage.”

  “All right. Make the shuttle bay ready for evacuation, but wait for my order. In the meantime, try to gather at least some portion of any evidence that happens to be floating on the surface. Don’t bring anything substantial past quarantine, but archive samples for the glove boxes.”

  “For the record, I strongly recommend evacuating the station now and conducting any investigation by remote.”

  “Noted. Thank you for your opinion. Please do as I say.”

  He gave the com control to a subordinate.

  When the initial report had been filed and the cleanup delegated—and in the absence of further alarms—Degrandpre put his assistant in charge and issued orders to alert him if the situation deteriorated.

  By the clock, he hadn’t eaten for nearly ten hours—nor, in deference, had anyone else in the ops room. He ordered a shift change and meals by tractible for anyone staying on duty.

  Then he walked to the command commissary, where he found Corbus Nefford dining calmly on braised peppers and basmati rice. The gardens grew a limited range of spices and the IOS biosynthesized others, but Nefford’s dish smelled strikingly of fresh garlic and basil.

  The physician regarded him with undisguised pleasure. “Join me, Manager?”

  Weary, Degrandpre found a chair opposite Nefford. “I assume you’ve heard.”

  “About the incident at the Oceanic Station? A little.”

  “Because I would prefer not to talk about it.”

  “The crisis is over?”

  “Yes.” Was that wishful thinking? “The crisis is over.”

  “Two lives lost?”

  “You’re as well-informed as I am, apparently. Now talk about something else, Corbus, or be quiet and let me eat.” The service tractible waited for his order. He was hungry but he asked for something light—a salad with protein strips.

  The chastened physician was briefly silent before a new subject came to mind: “There are fresh Turing gens from Earth, I hear.”

  “You’re a font of good news. I didn’t know you took an interest in engineering.”

  “Only as it affects my future, Manager. Possibly even yours.”

  “New Turing gens? I don’t remember agreeing to a gen switch . . . or are these next year’s algorithms?”

  “Brand-new gens, apparently, but Engineering tells me they came with a priority tag.”

  “We’re having a hard enough time meeting maintenance schedules as it is. We’ll have to modify our quotas, unless this is an efficiency fix.”

  “Devices and Personnel wants our Turing factories manufacturing parts for a planetary interferometer.”

  “Nonsense. They floated that idea years ago. Oh, it will have to be done eventually . . . a survey of the local stars, possibly even Higgs launches from the Isis system . . . but not in the near future.” An Isian interferometer would be able to image worlds undetectable from the Terrestrial system. But all that was theoretical and would likely remain so for a long time. Rapid expansion into the galaxy wasn’t a policy of the Works Trust or of the Families. The only voices calling for an increase in the pace of exploration—with all the fiscal sacrifice that would entail—came from dissident elements in Devices and Personnel.

  Unless—

  Could Devices and Personnel have become powerful enough to order new Turing gens? Would the Works Trust really sit still for that?

  He had been away from Earth too long to guess.

  “Manager?”

  Nefford was almost salivating for a reaction. Degrandpre declined to give him one. “I’m sorry, Corbus. I was thinking of something else.”

  The physician’s features collapsed into disappointment.

  “You’ll excuse me,” Degrandpre said, standing.

  “Manager, what about your meal?”

  “Have it sent to my quarters.”

  Eight hours later, there had been no new development in the outpost crisis. Even Freeman Li had begun to calm down, no longer demanding an immediate evac, only pushing for a “contingency plan,” not an unreasonable request. Degrandpre agreed to keep the shuttle bays on standby and ordered an immediate investigation, sending the Kuiper woman Elam Mather from Yambuku to the oceanic outpost to oversee the process. She was a competent worker in her own way, and as an outpost scientist, she would have the skills to supervise cleanup and isolation ops.

  After a long session spent briefing the section managers, he returned to his cabin to sort through a stack of recent transmissions from Earth. And yes, Corbus Nefford had been correct; here was an order specifying broad new protocols for the Turing factories, shunting valuable raw material into this scheme to build a largescale imaging interferometer. Devices and Personnel wanted a functioning planetary imager established before the end of the decade, plus a host of s
econdary probes to identify small asteroids and Kuiper objects that might ultimately serve as Higgs launchers. Madness! But the Works Trust was cooperating and Degrandpre could hardly resist; the loss of the oceanic lab had already stained his record.

  There was a time when he might have enjoyed this kind of intrigue. When he thought he was good at it. But the forces at work here were vast, impersonal, Hegelian. He would be crushed, or he would not; the outcome was beyond his control.

  Unless—

  Buried in the filestack of communiques he found a secured order to begin Zoe Fisher’s fieldwork “with all possible speed.” He took it at first for a Devices and Personnel addendum, but it wasn’t; it came with a Works seal. He was taken aback: Rushing the Fisher woman’s walkabout might well produce another casualty, another stain on Degrandpre’s fragile career record.

  And a setback for the radicals of Devices and Personnel? Was that what the Works Trust wanted?

  This was delicate indeed. The order looked innocuous. The only odd thing about it was that it concerned a Devices and Personnel project but lacked the D&P imprimatur. Significant or not?

  One thing was certain. The Fisher woman mattered a great deal, to all sorts of people. She was, as his father used to say, a hinge that bears great weight. Her life—or her death—would surely affect his own.

  ZOE HURRIED TO the common room as soon as she heard the news. She found most of the Yambuku family already gathered there—grimly huddled together, many of them, while the main plasma screen displayed fragments of telemetry from the oceanic outpost. She had gone to bed early and was asleep when the first news broke; by the time the all-hands alert sounded, Singh and Devereaux were already confirmed dead, their lab crushed and swallowed by the equatorial sea.

  Isis had killed them, Hayes would say . . . though Zoe couldn’t bring herself to think of the accident in those terms. Isis wasn’t the enemy. She believed that fiercely. The enemy was carelessness, or ignorance, or the unexpected.

  Singh and Devereaux had both rotated through Yambuku during their orientation. Most of the Yambuku staff had known them. With the exception of the secretive IOS technicians and the upperechelon kachos, everyone on Isis duty knew everyone else, especially the handful of downstation crew, the surface dwellers. Yambuku mourned Singh and Devereaux just as the staff of the oceanic labs must have mourned Macabie Feya.

  Three deaths in the time I’ve been here, Zoe thought. We’re like soldiers in a battle zone. We watch each other die.

  Tonya Cooper had collapsed onto the shoulder of Em Vya, a junior phytochemist. Both wept quietly. Zoe felt a swelling grief of her own; she hadn’t met the dead men but she supposed it must have been an awful death, to be crushed under the brutal weight of the ocean—like Macabie Feya, she thought, lost to the lonely immensities of Isis.

  Tam Hayes stood silently in the east corner of the room, next to the large global map of Isis. The globe had been one of Mac Feya’s spare-time projects, she remembered Elam saying. A work of art, assembled from Yambuku’s redundant supplies—a bubble of handblown silicaflow, physical features read from survey maps in the IOS’s archives and etched onto the globe’s surface by an assembly tractible. The globe was ice-blue and frost-gray, faintly translucent. She watched Hayes spin the bubble in order to locate the oceanic labs, an infinitesimally small speck in the glassy turquoise of the southern equatorial sea. She joined him, following along as he traced a useless path to the nearest substantial land, a chain of volcanic islands appended to the Great Western Continent like a crooked finger, five thousand kilometers away. Zoe felt she could read his thoughts: in all that strange blue immensity, more death. . . .

  She put her hand on his arm.

  The gesture was impulsive, and she didn’t realize at first that she had done it. Her shock unfolded slowly. Hayes seemed not to notice, though he looked up when she pulled away.

  The sleeve of his shirt had felt warm, as warm as his body.

  “We’re losing,” he said. “My God, Zoe. Gigadollars to bring us here, to keep us here, and we’re losing to the planet.” Unasked, he returned the touch, put his hand on her shoulder, and Zoe was simultaneously aware of a number of things: the scent of him, the murmur of the room, the midnight whisper of the station’s homeostatics. Seen from outside, Yambuku would be a bubble of yellow light in a moonless dark, the forest’s vacant rooms and random corridors reaching to the mountains, the sea. “It goes beyond coincidence. Maybe Dieter’s paranoia is justified. The planet’s peeling away our defenses, prying us open. Much more of this and they’ll shut us down, conduct research by tractible. . . .”

  “It was an accident,” Zoe managed to say. Idiotic, she thought.

  “The Trusts don’t care. The Families don’t care.”

  But I care, Zoe thought. And so does he, though he doesn’t want to say it so baldly.

  Elam Mather came across the room dressed in crumpled sleep fatigues, her eyes full of worry and an active scroll in her hand. “More news from the IOS,” she said.

  Hayes gave her a wary look.

  “They’re shuttling me out to the sea lab,” Elam explained. “To what’s left of it. They want me to find out what happened.”

  The crew drifted out of the common room as it became obvious that the crisis had stabilized. Zoe, alert now and full of caffeine, sat at a conference table, bathed in the wan light of the active wall displays.

  She waited until Jon Jiang, the night-shift engineer, gave her a baleful nod and left the room. Truly alone—and feeling almost furtive—she switched the large west-wall display away from its static readout mode to monitor the view from an exterior camera.

  Cool outside tonight, according to the status crawl at the top of the display. Twenty-one degrees Celsius, winds from the westnorthwest averaging five klicks per hour. Stars glittered like garnets in the heavy sky, obscured by a cirrus haze.

  She felt strange. She couldn’t name the way she felt.

  She was reminded of the way she had felt years ago when Theo had come to save her from the bleak hallways and morbid stone chambers of the Tehran orphan creche. That contradictory mixture of feelings: dread of the future, dread of this tall stranger in his crisp black uniform, and at the same time a nervous elation, a sweet suspicion of freedom.

  Her memories of Tehran had been “smoothed”—the medical word—until they were distorted and affectless. She knew only that her jailers had raped and starved her sisters and had used her own body as they pleased. She didn’t forgive them, but her rage was muted; most of her tormentors would have died in the riots of’40, in the fire that had swept out of the industrial slums and swallowed the creche complex. They were dead, and she was alive; better still, she had been given back the special destiny for which she had been born: the stars.

  Why, then, did she shiver at every touch of the material world? She had shivered, outside in her excursion suit, at the first cool drop of Isian rain on her shoulder. And she had shivered at the touch of Tam Hayes’ broad, rough hand.

  I don’t like to be touched. How often in her life had she repeated that small mantra? It was a legacy, the medical ontogenists had told her, of the Tehran years. An aversion too deep to root out, and anyway, where she was going, there would be no one to touch her; no one human, at least, during her alone time in the Isian wilderness.

  But then why was she looking at the night sky with her eyes full of tears? Why did her hand stray repeatedly to her shoulder where Tam Hayes had touched her, as if to shelter that ghost of his warmth?

  Why had memory begun to well out of her like some dark subterranean spring?

  She knew only that something was wrong with her. And that she mustn’t tell anyone. If they suspected she was ill, they would send her back to the IOS, probably back to Earth.

  Away from her work.

  Away from Tam Hayes.

  Away from her life.

  Two days passed. The crisis at the oceanic outpost had been contained; the mood at Yambuku lightened somewhat, though Z
oe noticed the biohazard people keeping their scrolls open on their desks, alert for news. She spent a morning doing a simulation walk through the lush terrain west of the Copper River, then took her lunch into the prep room of the docking bay, watching the maintenance crew ready the shuttle for Elam’s suborbital flight across the ocean.

  Maintenance was an Engineering duty. Lee Reisman, Sharon Carpenter, and Kwame Sen waved at Zoe from the bay, and Kwame in particular stole a number of more frequent glances at her. Was he attracted to her? Sexually attracted? The thought was unsettling. Zoe had studied with peers at the D&P facilities back home, but most of her classmates were heterosexual women or junior male aristocrats sporting orchidectomy badges. And Zoe hadn’t cared. The medical team had taught her a broad range of masturbation sutras, because that was expected to be her permanent sexual modality. It should have been enough.

  But these days she was masturbating almost nightly, and when she did . . . well, as often as not, she thought of Tam Hayes.

  Elam Mather entered the prep room and joined Zoe at the table, pushing aside a stack of checklists to make room for her coffee cup. The older woman nodded at her abstractedly but said nothing, only gazed at the shuttle work. Kwame kept his glances to himself.

  Zoe said, “I hope you have a safe trip.”

  “Hm? Oh. Well, don’t wish me luck. It’s bad luck, wishing people luck.”

  It was the sort of bewildering thing Kuiper people were apt to say. Certainly, Zoe had read all the histories; she could recount the founding of the Republics as well as any schoolchild in the system. But none of that dry knowledge had prepared her for the reality of a Kuiper-dominated community like Yambuku—the frightening fluidity of rank, the unabashed sexuality. Kuiper males were never gelded, no matter what their station in life, and the result was rather like being caged with zoo animals; these people made no secret of their urges, their assignations, their copulations. . . .