Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “We’re not so bad,” Elam said.

  Zoe stared. “Are you telepathic, too?”

  Elam laughed. “Hardly. It’s just not the first time I’ve worked with Terrestrials. You learn to recognize that expression, you know, that sort of—‘Oh, God, what next?’ ”

  Zoe allowed herself a smile.

  “Actually,” Elam added, “you’re adjusting very well for an Earth-bound hand.”

  “I’m not Earth-bound. Any more than you’re Kuiper-bound. I mean . . . we’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Good point. You’re right. We’re here. We’re not what we used to be.” She returned Zoe’s tentative smile. “I begin to understand what Tam sees in you.”

  Zoe blushed.

  Thinking: He sees something in me?

  She dreamed that night of her first home—not the horrid barracks in Tehran but the soft, cool Devices and Personnel creche of her baby years.

  The crêche was located deep in an American wilderness enclave. The crêche dome, green as crystal, seen from afar on picnic days, had glittered like a dewdrop on the rolling prairie grassland.

  The nursery wards and crêche pads had been as plush as velvet, all corners rounded, the air itself sweet-smelling and cool. And she had not known fear or doubt, not in the crêche. Each of the nannies, many of them wholly human, tended one special child, and they were stern but kind, fat ministering angels.

  She had changed her green jumper every morning and every afternoon, the simple cloth starched and bright. And she had looked forward to the evening bath, splashing with her sibs while lactating nannies with babies in their arms looked on indulgently from terraces above the steaming water.

  In her dream she was back in the bath pool, slapping waves at a yellow flotation ring. But the dream became disturbing when great, ancient trees—cycads or giant lycopods—erupted around the pool, a sudden forest. The voices of her sibs were instantly stilled. She was alone, shivering, naked in a woodland like no woodland she had ever seen. She climbed from the crêche pool onto a mossy shore. Black soil cushioned her feet; the rocks were dressed in velvety green liverwort. She didn’t know how she had come here or how to find her way home. She felt panic rising out of the clenched fist of her belly. Then a shade, a shape, appeared out of the humid fog. It was Avrion Theophilus, her own beloved Theo in his crisp Devices and Personnel uniform . . . but when she recognized him she turned away and ran, ran as fast she could run, ran uselessly while his footsteps thudded behind her.

  She woke in the dark.

  Her heart was hammering. It eased soon enough, but the sense of threat and electricity continued to vibrate through her body.

  Just a bad dream, Zoe thought.

  But she never had bad dreams.

  She pushed the nightmare out of her mind, thinking again of Tam Hayes, of how she had touched him so unselfconsciously in the common room, of the fabric of his shirt, of his eyes holding hers for a fraction of a moment.

  Something is wrong with me, she told herself again, oh God, as she reached between her legs and spread her labia with her fingers, finding the bump of her clitoris like a small, hard knot.

  The orgasm came quickly, a wave of fire. She bit her lip to keep from crying out.

  ELAM MATHER FELT her usual light-headedness as the shuttle lifted from Yambuku into a watery sky. Isis fell away beneath her, but not far enough; this was a suborbital flight, half a world’s journey to the damaged oceanic outpost. Several hours’ flying time at the best speed the cumbersome shuttle could make. Planets, she thought, were simply too large.

  The shuttle crew were IOS-based, and most of them were Kuiper-born, pleasant enough but not talkative. Elam settled down in an aisle seat by herself, her scroll tuned to one of the Terrestrial pop-novels occasionally dumped down the particle-pair link for the presumed edification of lonely outposters. This one (titled E. Quan’s Difficult Decision) was the story of a young girl from a mesomanagerial family, in love with a Family cousin who has mistaken her station in life. Alas, a tragedy. The young heir, on learning that he can’t decently marry our heroine, volunteers for an orchidectomy and the girl slinks back to her commune, chastened but wiser.

  What crap, Elam thought. In real life, the meeting would never happen; or if it did, there would be no question of a love affair. The aristocrat would fuck the prole and forget her name the next day. Certainly no such well-connected male would ever consent to an orchidectomy. Gelding was a way to keep the salarymen away from High Family daughters, no more and no less. Kachos like Degrandpre were proud of their scars, but that was only because they had been bred to a life of glorified servitude.

  The proles, the great unconsulted Terrestrial masses, simply fucked or married as best they could. And increased their numbers, though the various unchecked infertility viruses helped keep the population within limits.

  Elam had taken much of her schooling on Earth. She was not naive about the planet . . . unlike Tam Hayes, or even a D&P bottle baby like Zoe Fisher.

  She turned to the window, which wasn’t a window at all but a direct video feed from a cam on the outside of the multiplyinsulated shuttle. The continent fled westward beneath her. Isis looked heartbreakingly calm from this altitude. The snowcapped Copper Mountains had given way to broad alluvial plains, to prairie veined with sky-blue rivers. Clouds scrubbed the grasslands with shadow, and rivers broadened at last into swampy bays and salty inlets, the vast eastern littoral where seabirds wheeled in flocks large enough to be visible even from this altitude. All this more known than seen: mapped from orbit; glimpsed, if at all, from shuttle flights or through the eyes of long-range tractible remensors.

  Untouched, all this, Elam thought. In a sense, no part of Isis had ever been touched, certainly not by naked human skin. The planet was full of life, but this was life older than Earth’s by a billion years, more evolved but also more primitive, preserved from change by the absence of great waves of extinction, room for all, for all genera and every survival strategy save the human, the sentient, the Terrestrial. We’re such simple creatures, she thought; we can’t tolerate these finely honed phytotoxins, the countless microscopic predators shaped by a billion years of involution. Nothing in the armory of the human immune system could recognize or repel the invisible Isian armies.

  They lay siege to us, Elam mused. She thought of the bacterial colonies eroding the seals at Yambuku and of the algal films that might or might not have contributed to the deep-sea disaster. We don’t recognize them, but I do believe they recognize us. We build our walls, our barriers, but life talks to life. Life talks to life; that was the rule.

  The gray-blue continental shelf fell away behind the shuttle, and for a time there was only the ocean to see, cobalt-blue, wrinkled with white breakers; or the cloud tops, often turbulent, tropical storms winding up in the stark sunlight like watch springs coiled with lightning. In all the open sea there was no vessel or wake of a vessel, nothing human, not a nailed board or a bleached plastic bottle; nothing down there, she thought, but the alien krill, clumps of saltwater weed, wind-driven foam.

  She thought of the barriers between Isian and Terrestrial life, and then of the long quarantine between Earth and the Kuiper Republics, the dark days when Earth had lost so much of her population to the plagues and the Republics became truly independent, almost by default. The Republics were an alliance of the most remote and hostile environments mankind had ever settled—Kuiper bodies, asteroids, Oort mines, the Martian airfarms. The hydrogen/oxygen economies of the outer system had been severed from the smug water-wealth of Earth itself, humanity splitting like a parthenogenic cell, but the division was never absolute; life touches life. The Works Trust had taken a troubled Earth back into space but could not repair the old civil and political wounds. Earth had retreated into a system of bureaucratic aristocracy; the Kuiper Republics were its unruly children, making pagan or puritan utopias of their icy strongholds—nobody cutting off his balls as a gesture of, for God’s sake, fealty.

 
And yet, life touches life.

  Take Tam Hayes. A true Kuiper orphan, excommunicated by the doctrinaire Red Thorns for signing up with a Works project. But signing up with the Trusts was the only way to reach Isis, distant Isis, fabled Isis, the Mandalay of the Republic. He had traded his history for a dream. And Zoe Fisher, as obedient a bottle baby as any that Earth had produced. No dreams allowed, not for that female gelding. But Isis had stitched them together somehow. It was obvious to everyone but themselves . . . certainly to Elam. Put them in the same room and Zoe orbited him like a sun; he followed her like a tractible antenna.

  Elam didn’t approve of Terrestrial/Kuiper liaisons; most of them didn’t last . . . but here, she thought, was something Devices and Personnel might not have anticipated, a small wrench in the harsh human machinery of the Trusts.

  Life, doing the unexpected.

  She approved. Maybe she approved. But there were things Tam didn’t know about Zoe, things Elam supposed she ought to tell him. She opened her scroll and began a message . . . she could send it after touchdown.

  She wrote until her attention was attracted by a string of volcanic islands passing under the right wing, green to the rims of their ancient caldera. Reefs, not of coral but deposited by a wholly different community of limestone-fixing invertebrates, teased the shallow water into multicolored foam. The light was longer here, making valleys of the low swells. Had she slept? A crewman, passing, told her the shuttle was less than half an hour from docking and decon.

  She adjusted her seat restraint, tucked her scroll away and closed her eyes again, thinking of Hayes and Zoe, of the tenacity of life, of the universal need to merge, combine, exfoliate . . . and of the vulnerability of life, too, and of the sea, of the large fish that eat the little fish, and of the long reach of the Earth.

  The deep-sea station’s head kacho was Freeman Li, a Terrestrial whom Elam had worked with both in training and on Isis. She liked him better than she did most Terrans: he was a flexible thinker, a small barrel-chested dark-skinned man with Sherpa ancestry and family in the Martian airfarms. A fuss-and-worry type, but he usually worried to good effect.

  He was worried now. He took Elam directly from decon to the nearest common room, a low-ceilinged, octagonal chamber between a microbiology lab and the engineering deck. Elam assumed she was under sea level here, but there was no way of knowing; the oceanic outpost was as tightly sealed as Marburg or Yambuku were. The station’s distributed mass and deep anchoring prevented it from moving with the swell, though typhoons caused it to oscillate, or so she had been told, like a slow plumb bob. There was no motion now.

  “I’ll be frank with you, Elam,” Li said, absently stirring a cup of black tea. “When this happened, I told Degrandpre I wanted a complete evacuation. I still think that’s what we should have done—and ought to do. Whatever killed Singh and Devereaux and destroyed Pod Six acted far too quickly for us to play with it. And there are still no obvious candidates for causative agent. Lots of toxic agents down there, but much of that material is also sitting in glove-box arrays all over the station. Any agent unique to Pod Six could only have been a chemical isolate or extract, not live biota.”

  “Caustic substances?”

  “Some of them extremely caustic, yes, and all highly toxic. A significant release could easily have killed two men and triggered the biohazard alarm. But the damage to the pod itself, no, no single agent or combination of agents could conceivably have done that.”

  “As far as we know.”

  He shrugged. “You’re right. We don’t know. But we’re talking about chemical isolates at the microgram level.”

  “Any other problems, prior to the disaster?”

  “Pod Six had problems with algal gunk interfering with the samplers and sensor arrays. But don’t jump to conclusions, Elam. We’ve had much the same trouble all up and down the station, though it gets worse with depth. It would be a tremendous coincidence if both things happened simultaneously—a toxic release inside the pod and a compromised seal serious enough to collapse the structure itself.”

  “Whatever caused the watertight seals to break down might also have taken out the glove-box array.”

  “Maybe. Probably. And doesn’t that suggest to you a hazard of the first order?”

  She thought about it. “All we have that would make Pod Six unique is a heavy algal infestation in the sensor arrays?”

  “I don’t know about unique. It’s a matter of degree. But in the sense you mean, yes.”

  “Can I look at these organisms?”

  “Certainly.”

  Freeman Li had hedged Degrandpre’s bet by confining his staff to the upper two pods of the chain, where they could make a quick escape to the shuttle bay if the need arose. The remaining three pods had been closed and sealed. That cut into station productivity in general and interrupted at least two very promising research lines, but, Li said flatly, “That’s Degrandpre’s problem, not mine.”

  It was a laudably Kuiper-like sentiment, Elam thought.

  She followed him down a narrow access shaft to the lowermost of the occupied pods. The bulkheads caught her eye as she passed beneath them: immense steel pressure doors ready to snap shut in an unforgiving fraction of a second. In that awful Terrestrial novel, there had been a passage about a mouse walking into a trap. She had never seen a mouse or a mousetrap, but she imagined she knew how the animal felt.

  Precautions in the microbiology lab, never less than stringent under Freeman’s watch, had been tuned since the accident to a fine pitch. Until further notice, all Isian biota and isolates were to be treated as proven hot Level Five threats. In the lab’s secured anteroom, Elam donned the requisite pressurized suit with shoulderpack air and temperature controls. As did Li, and with his headgear in place he looked peculiar: hollow-eyed, somber. He guided her through the preliminary washdown, past similarly dressed men and women working at glove boxes of varying complexity, through yet another airlocked antechamber and into a smaller, unoccupied lab.

  Elam felt some of the terror she had first felt on entering a Level Five viral-research lab during her training on Earth. Of course, it had been worse then. She had been a naive Kuiper student raised on Crane Clan tales of the horrors of the Terrestrial plague years. The great divide between Earth and the Kuiper colonies had always been a biological chasm, deeper in its way than the simple distances of space. The Kuiper clans enforced a quarantine: no one was permitted to arrive or return from Earth unless he or she was scrubbed of all Terrestrial disease organisms, down to the cellular level. Terrestrial/Kuiper decon was grueling, physically difficult, and as lengthy as the long loop orbit from the inner system. There had never been an outbreak of Terrestrial disease on an inhabited Kuiper body; had there been, the settlement in question would have been instantly quarantined and decontaminated—hygiene protocols that would have been impractical on Earth, with its dense and mostly impoverished population.

  Elam had gone to Earth for her post-doc the way a fastidious social worker might consent to enter a leper colony: squeamishly, but with the best of intentions. She was inoculated for every imaginable microphage, prion, bacteria, or virus; nevertheless, she came down with a classic “fever of unknown origin” that persisted through the first month of her orientation before it finally yielded to a series of leukocyte injections. She had never been sick in her life before that day. Being sick, being infected with some invisible parasite, was . . . well, even worse than she had imagined.

  After that, her first attempt at sterile work had terrified her. The University of Madrid was a Devices and Personnel stronghold full of offworld students, mainly Martians but including several Kuiper expats like herself. Novices weren’t allowed in the same room with live infectious agents. She had already been introduced to anthrax, HIV, Nelson-Cahill 1 and 2, Leung’s Dengue, and the vast array of hemorrhagic retroviruses, but strictly by telepresence. Virus-handling of the kind required by Terrestrial fieldwork was infinitely more dangerous. Here were all the an
tique horrors of Earth, predators more subtle and tenacious than jungle animals and just as lively, still stalking the malnourished populations of Africa, Asia, Europe. Shepherd’s crooks and rainbow-colored protein loops, all brimming with death.

  Planetary ecology, she had thought. Ancient and unbelievably hostile. This was Tam’s bios made tangible, the involute residue of evolutionary eons.

  But at least Earth had accommodated mankind into the equation, for all the deadliness of its plagues. Isis had brokered no such deal.

  She watched as Li put his hands into a glove box. No telepresence here, either, barring the devices that translated his hand motions to the manipulators deep in the vault-like specimen barrels. A glove-box microcamera fed images to Li’s headgear and to a monitor where Elam could watch his work. The image of a linked group of living cells filled the screen.

  “This is the little bastard that’s been fouling our externals. Grows in colonies, a slimy blue film. And yes, there was an inert sample from this culture in Pod Six, but I can’t believe there’s any causal connection. As a matter of fact—”

  The image listed like a sinking ship. “Li? You’re losing focus.”

  “This gear is as old as the station. Degrandpre’s been sitting on our maintenance requests for more than a year. Afraid he’ll offend the budget people, the timid bastard. Hold on. . . . Better?”

  Yes, better. Elam peered at the organism on-screen, fighting an urge to hold her breath. The cell was multinucleated, its spiky protein coat notched like a cog in a clockwork. Mitochondrial bodies, more varied and complex than their Terrestrial counterparts, transited between the fat nuclei and the armored cell walls, sparking quick osmotic exchanges. None of the processes were as well understood as the microbiologists liked to pretend. Different bios, different rules.