Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “You miss the habitat?”

  “Often.”

  He was being careful, she realized. Thinking of her, of her difficult childhood. “You know, it wasn’t as bad for me as you might think. Being a crêche baby. Before Tehran, anyway. I liked being with my sisters, my nannies.”

  “Miss it?”

  “Some things you can’t get back. That feeling of . . . being where you belong.”

  “Nobody belongs on Isis.”

  The skin of her excursion suit was exquisitely sensitive, too much so. She startled at the touch of a falling leaf on her shoulder.

  Zoe?

  “Sorry. False alarm. There’s a breeze up. Feels like it might rain soon.” She wondered why it should be easier to talk to Hayes through the com link than face-to-face. “I know what I must seem like to a Kuiper person. Raised the way I was, I mean.”

  “None of us chose his childhood, Zoe.”

  “Like one of those old-time Chinese aristocratic women, her feet crammed into tiny shoes—do you know what I mean? Bent into someone else’s idea of beauty or utility.”

  “Zoe . . .” He paused. “Old Kuiper maxim: ‘A broken human being isn’t even a good tool.’ You couldn’t have survived the way you did without something solid at the center of you, something all your own.”

  Now it was her turn to pause.

  Theo used to say, You’re playing hide-and-seek, Zoe. Hiding from me again.

  But Theo always ferreted out her secrets.

  Most of them.

  Hayes said, “Quiet now, Zoe, just a while longer. The target turned your way again. The tractibles will lure it away, but don’t call attention to yourself. And switch off your night vision, please, Zoe. The lenses leak; your eyes are glowing like a cat’s.”

  “You can see me?” She wasn’t sure she liked the idea.

  “I’m monitoring one of the remensors. Hush now. I’ll keep you updated.”

  She sighed and switched off the photon multiplier. Instantly, the dark became absolute. She closed her eyes and listened.

  The wind was stronger now. Clouds had obscured the stars. A cold front was pushing in from the west, according to this morning’s meteorological report. Raindrops began to spatter the forest canopy.

  There was a rustling sound in the undergrowth, maybe a few meters away. Her pulse ramped up yet again.

  Hayes said, “That’s a tractible, guarding your flank. I know you can’t see anything. But I need you to keep calm right now, to keep as still as you can.”

  She couldn’t see the triraptor nosing through the forest but her excursion suit reported its scent—not the actual airborne molecules, of course, but an electronic tickling of the appropriate receptor cells, a faint echo of something acrid and bitter in her nose.

  The animal was close. Night-hardened remensors buzzed around her. She heard, at last, the unmistakable sound of something alive and massive moving through the brush.

  “Steady, Zoe.”

  Theo had taught her better discipline than this. She opened her eyes wide and imagined she saw it, the triraptor—the eyes of it, at least, glinting in a last wash of starlight from the eastern sky, classic predator’s eyes, chrome-yellow and alert.

  And gone.

  “Keep still, Zoe.”

  Chasing some spider tractible, no doubt.

  “A while longer.”

  The sounds retreated.

  Cautiously, she turned her face up to the misting rain.

  “I miss Elam,” she whispered.

  “I know, Zoe. I do too.”

  “We’re running out of time, aren’t we?”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  DEGRANDPRE HAD PLANNED to give Avrion Theophilus the full tour of the IOS—when had there been such a guest as Avrion Theophilus?—but the Devices and Personnel man was having none of it.

  “What I want to see this morning,” Theophilus had said mildly, “is your shuttle quarantine.”

  And what a grand scion of the Families this Theophilus had turned out to be! Tall, bone-thin, gray-haired, aquiline of nose and fashionably pale of complexion. Degrandpre’s orchidectomy badge, which so impressed his subordinates, was nothing to this man but a servant’s tattoo. No doubt Theophilus had already sired a brood of young aristocrats, strapping creatures with blue eyes and immaculate teeth.

  Admirable, powerful! And potentially very dangerous. Avrion Theophilus was a Devices and Personnel functionary of unknown rank who conducted himself with all the arrogance of a Works Trust official, and that in itself was deeply confusing.

  The news from Earth was equally troubling. Hints of turmoil among the Houses and the Families, show trials, perhaps a purge in the Trusts. But news through the particle-pair link was heavily censored, and although this Theophilus must know far more about the crisis than anyone onboard the IOS did, he hadn’t volunteered to talk about it.

  And Degrandpre dared not ask, for fear of seeming impertinent.

  It was all so maddeningly ambiguous. Should he court the favor of Avrion Theophilus, or would that appear as a betrayal to his sponsors in the Works Trust? Was there a middle path?

  An oppressive emotional atmosphere gripped the IOS, much as Degrandpre tried to minimize it. The loss of the Oceanic Station weighted heavily on staff even here; by all accounts, the surface personnel had grown brutally dispirited. Some saw it as the end of the human presence on Isis. And that it might well be, although this Theophilus seemed disturbingly indifferent. “Your orbital station needs some maintenance,” Theophilus remarked blandly. “The ring corridor is filthy, and the air isn’t much better.”

  The walls were dirty, true. Cleaning servitors had lately been scavenged for the interferometer project; replacements had not yet arrived from the Turing factories. As for the smell—“We’ve had some trouble with the scrubbers in our waste-management stacks. Temporary, of course, but in the meantime . . . I apologize. One grows accustomed to it.”

  “Perhaps not as easily as one might hope.”

  Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase. He promised to see to the problem, though he couldn’t imagine what he could do except bother the engineers yet again. No spares had arrived with the Higgs sphere, and he cynically wondered if replacements had been set aside to make room for the noble mass of Avrion Theophilus.

  He escorted his guest as far as the massive bulkhead doors dividing Shuttle Quarantine from the rest of the IOS. Theophilus proceeded to inspect the seals and the rivet heads in minute detail, making Degrandpre wait. “As I’m sure you’re aware,” Degrandpre hinted, “these are the standard bulkheads; the sterile perimeter is inside.”

  “Nevertheless, I want these bulkheads inspected daily. By qualified engineers.” At Degrandpre’s shocked expression he added, “I don’t think the Works Trust will disapprove, do you?”

  Degrandpre palmed the admit button and the bulkhead door wheeled open. Inside, a single Kuiper-born medical engineer monitored the quarantine from a steel chair. The four survivors of the deep-sea disaster, a shuttle pilot and three junior marine exobiologists, had been languishing in containment for ten days now. A monitor image from the isolation chamber filled the screen above Degrandpre’s head: two men, two women, all haggard in lab whites except for the pilot, whose Trust uniform was still relatively crisp.

  Theophilus asked the medical engineer pointed and knowledgeable questions about quarantine procedures, redundancy, failsafes, alarm systems. Degrandpre took note but could infer nothing from the exchange . . . except that perhaps Devices and Personnel had grown nervous about the sterile status of the IOS.

  But there had never been any question of that. Yes, it would be disastrous if there were an outbreak aboard the orbital station. The steel necklace of the IOS contained and nurtured nearly fifteen hundred human souls, and there was no plausible escape route for most of them; the planet below was universally toxic and the single spare Higgs launcher reserved for emergencies would carry a mere handful of manager
s at best. But there had never been even the hint of such a threat. Shuttles from Isis passed through the sterilizing vacuum of space, and cargo and passengers were rigorously quarantined and scrutinized. As the medical engineer patiently explained. And further explained. And continued to explain, until Degrandpre was forced to express his hope that the senior manager from Earth wasn’t overwhelmed by all this perhaps unnecessary detail.

  “Not at all,” Theophilus said crisply. “Standard quarantine is ten days?”

  The medical engineer nodded.

  “And when will this one be finished?”

  “Just a few hours from now, and no sign of contagion, nothing at all. They’ve been through a lot, these four; they’re looking forward to release.”

  “Give them another week,” Avrion Theophilus said.

  “Master Theophilus,” Degrandpre asked, “is there anything else you would like to see? The gardens perhaps, or the medical facilities?”

  “Isis,” Theophilus said.

  They always want a window. “I can recommend the view from the docking bays.”

  “Thank you, but I’ll be needing a closer look than that.”

  Degrandpre frowned. “Closer? You mean . . . you want to visit a ground station?”

  Theophilus nodded.

  My God, Degrandpre thought. He’ll kill himself. On top of everything else, this grand, stupid Family cousin will kill himself, and the Families will blame me.

  ZOE SLEPT LATE on the last morning of her three-day trial excursion. Her sleep had been irregular ever since the death of Elam Mather, shallow and florid with dreams, but exhaustion had tipped her into a black, dreamless unconsciousness. By the time she woke, her A.M. check-in from Yambuku was more than an hour late.

  Are they letting me sleep, Zoe wondered, or had there been some new crisis, perimeter breach, disaster . . . ? She toggled her corneal display and called up a status report. The customary Yambuku telechatter scrolled past, tractibles talking to tractibles, but her personal com line showed a yellow hold tag. She queried the system and got a prerecorded note from Tam Hayes. He was involved, he said, in a conference with the IOS’s kachos; he would talk to her shortly; in the meantime she might as well finish packing her campsite for the day’s hike.

  She stepped out of the tent into morning sunlight, feeling vaguely abandoned.

  Her trial excursion had been an unqualified success. All the peripherals—tent, tractibles, food and waste-management systems, com links—had functioned so flawlessly that the Yambuku engineers were frankly envious. There was still hope for the human presence on Isis, even if the first-generation outposts had begun to fail. She was fulfilling her mission goals, and better than that, she was in Isis, mobile in the bios, just a stone’s throw from the rushing Copper River. . . .

  And why did that seem such hollow consolation?

  Something’s wrong with me, Zoe thought.

  She deflated the tent walls, rolled the gel floors carefully and stored them on the back of a dog-sized cargo tractible. She packed her camp litter—empty food containers, a discharged power supply—although she could have buried it. The litter was sterile, but it would have been an intrusion, an insult to Isis.

  Something’s wrong. Oh, nothing physical; her perimeters were intact; she was as invulnerable to the bios as a human being could be. But something less tangible than a virus or a prion had begun to turn and move inside her.

  The forest glistened with last night’s rainfall. Water cycled from tier to tier of the tree canopy, overflowing from cupped leaves and flower chalices. In the shadowed spaces around the tree boles, the moisture had drawn out dozens of fungal fruiting bodies. Mold spores swirled in the westerly breeze, a fine sticky dust, like charcoal.

  Should she speak to a doctor? If all went as planned, she would be back at Yambuku by nightfall. But her complaints were essentially minor—restlessness, disturbed sleep, and a host of uneasy feelings, not the least of which was her sexual liaison with Tam Hayes. Mention that to a physician at Yambuku and she would be in for a battery of endocrine and neurotransmitter tests, and did she want that? “No,” she said aloud, the sound of her voice veiled by the suit filters but loud in the whispery glade. No, she didn’t want that, and not just because of the physical inconvenience. To be honest, she was changing in ways that were as tantalizing as they were disturbing.

  Her feelings about Hayes, for instance. She understood human sexuality well enough; she had studied it extensively. Her bioregulators kept her on an even keel chemically, but she was hardly sexless; the tantra instructors at the Middle School had praised her skills. No: what was shocking was that she had actually allowed him to touch her, had wanted him to touch her, had relished his touch. The Devices and Personnel clinicians had told her she would never have a satisfying orgasm with another human being. Her years in Tehran had built up too many negative associational paths, and anyway, her bioregulation damped the necessary hormonal feedback loops. She simply could not experience pleasurable intercourse with an adult male.

  Or so they said.

  So something was wrong. So she ought to alert a physician.

  But she didn’t want to. A physician might fix her, and the odd thing—the really disturbingly odd thing—was that she didn’t want to be fixed.

  If they fixed her she might not feel this shiver of anticipation at the sound of Tam’s voice, the sudden weightlessness when he offered a compliment, the shocking intimacy of his hand on her body.

  Madness, of course, but it had something of the divine in it. She wondered if she had stumbled across some wisdom lost to the modern world, an archaic emotional vector hidden under the stern sexual gridmaps of the Families or the chimp-like copulations of the Kuiper Clans.

  Maybe this was how the unregulated proles fell in love. Did “love” feel like this, she wondered, in the viral hotlands of Africa and Asia?

  She dreaded the feeling. And she dreaded the idea that it might one day stop.

  By noon, the camp was packed and ready. Still no word from Yambuku. She needed to leave within the hour or risk reaching the station after dark.

  She left a call-me memo for Hayes with Dieter Franklin, who was monitoring her stats and vitals. Luckily the forest was calm this morning, no predators within her scannable radius, white clouds riding the meridian like slow boats on a tide.

  She assembled her party of six-legged tractibles and set off westward. The path, beaten by machines in advance of her excursion, followed the shore of the Copper for a half-klick or so. This time of year, the river ran shallow. The water had pulled back from its banks to reveal stony fords, quiescent green pools, and silt dunes where a few venturous weeds had taken root. Automated insect remensors followed her in a cloud like circling gnats; some flew ahead, monitoring the route. The faint buzz of them was lost in the cacophony of bird and insect calls, all of which sounded alike to her, power lines buzzing in a heat wave.

  Her excursion suit tunneled beads of sweat from her skin to the membrane’s surface, cooling her as she walked. Sunlight turned the membrane white. She glanced at her arms. She was as pale as a purebred daughter of some Nordic Family, aristocratic white.

  She had not traveled more than a kilometer when Tam Hayes opened a direct link to her. About time, she thought.

  “Zoe? We’d like you to halt where you are for the time being.”

  “Can’t,” she said. “Not if I want to be back before dark. You’ve been talking to the IOS all morning. Time doesn’t stop just because Kenyon Degrandpre is keeping you busy.”

  “That’s the point. They want the excursion extended.”

  They, she noted. Not we. Hayes didn’t approve. “What do you mean, extended?”

  “Specifically, they want you to turn back, cross the Copper at the mobile bridge and break camp on the east bank. Remensors will scout a path to the digger colony, and the tractibles will trailblaze for you. Two days of traveling ought to put you just inside the animals’ food-gathering perimeter.”

  Whic
h was absurd. “I can’t do fieldwork! We’re still testing the excursion gear!”

  “Feeling at the IOS is that your gear passed all the tests.”

  “This pushes the schedule by at least a month.”

  “Somebody’s in a hurry, I guess.”

  She supposed she knew why. The Oceanic Station had collapsed and all the other Isian outposts had suffered worrisome seal failures. Zoe’s excursion suit might be performing brilliantly, but without a staging platform like Yambuku, it was as useful as a rainhat in a hurricane. The Trusts wanted to maximize the use of her before Yambuku had to be evacuated.

  Cross the Copper River toward the foothills? Move deeper into the bios while Yambuku staggered toward collapse? Was she brave enough to do that?

  “Personally,” Hayes said, “I’m opposed to the idea. I don’t have the authority to overrule it, but we can always find an anomaly in your gear and order you back for maintenance.”

  “But the suit is flawless. You said so yourself.”

  “Oh, I think Kwame Sen could be convinced to shade a graph or two if it came to an argument.”

  She thought about it. “Tam, who gave this order? Was it Degrandpre?”

  “He sanctioned it, but no, the order came from your D-and-P man—Avrion Theophilus.”

  Theo!

  Surely Theo wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.

  She capped her doubts. “Keep Kwame honest. I’ll cross the river.”

  “Zoe? Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes.”

  No.

  “Well . . . I’m sending out three more tractibles with supplies and equipment. They should catch up with you by dusk. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re on immediate recall at the first sign of trouble. Any kind of trouble. Give me the word, I’ll cover it with the IOS.”

  He added, “I’ll be watching,” which made her feel both strong and weak at once, and signed off.

  Zoe gazed across the placid Copper. Her pack tractibles acknowledged a new set of orders from Yambuku by circling back behind her, ambling up the trail like dimly impatient dogs and waiting for her to follow.