Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The bridge over the Copper River was a string of logs spun together with strands of high-tensile monofilament and anchored at either end with spikes driven deep into the gravelly soil. It was sturdy enough, Zoe supposed, but makeshift, not meant to last. Mild as the seasons on Isis were, another few weeks would see monsoon rains swelling the Copper to its limits, and this small specimen of tractible engineering would be washed away and dispersed.

  The bridge crossed the Copper at a broad and shallow place where, if she looked between the slats, she could see the polished river rocks and the quiet places where creatures not quite fish—they looked like overgrown tadpoles—swarmed and spawned. She could have forded the river here, she was certain, without any bridge at all. Some of her cargo tractibles did just that, managing the water with their javelin legs more surely than they could have navigated these loosely strung logs.

  Across the river the trail was less obvious; it had not been as completely blazed as the path to the bridge. By their nature the tractibles passed delicately over the landscape; it took a great deal of mechanical effort to flatten a patch of grass, much less to clear away tangled undergrowth. She would have to proceed more carefully here. The excursion suit’s membrane was strong enough to resist tearing under any ordinary circumstance, but a sharp enough pressure—a knife blade with some strength behind it, a large predator’s claws, or a fall from a height—might open a seam.

  She doubted she would have trouble with knives. As for predators, the tractibles and insect remensors would watch out for her. And in any case these rocky foothills were not as inviting a hunting ground as the savanna that stretched to the south and west. Triraptors were dangerous but uncommon here; the smaller, faster carnivores were about the size of house cats and easily frightened away from something as large and unfamiliar as a human being. That was perhaps one reason the digger colony had thrived here.

  And as for heights—well, she would be reluctant to press far beyond the diggers’ rangeland, into the hills where the Copper River ran in narrow, fast channels among slate-sharp rocks. Short of that, she was confident of her footing.

  What was left to fear?

  Any of ten thousand unsuspected events, Zoe thought. Not to mention her own state of mind.

  Not that she felt bad. The opposite. Her moods had been mercurial, but right now she felt surprisingly good, felt solid, walking in the sunlight and swinging her arms with a freedom she hadn’t felt since creche. The trail followed a low ridge eastward; when the ridge rose high enough she was able to see the canopy of the forest sloping to the west, as dense and close as a well-kept secret. All of this touched her—she didn’t have a better word—in a way she had thought impossible, as if when she left Yambuku, she had not donned a protective membrane but stripped one away. She was as raw as a nerve; the simple blue sky made her want to weep with joy.

  She could think of no explanation for these mood shifts . . . unless she was deregulating. Could that be? But thymostats were simple homeostatic machines; she had never heard of a bioregulator malfunction. Anyway, wouldn’t it have shown up on her medical telemetry?

  Doesn’t matter, some traitorous part of her whispered. She was alive—truly alive for the first time in many years—and she liked it.

  Liked it almost as much as she feared it.

  She halted well before dusk at one of the potential campsites mapped into the tractibles’ memory. The ridgetop broadened here into a stony plateau, tufts of green succulents poking through the topsoil between slabs of glacial rock. Pitching the tent was easy—the tent was smart enough to do most of the work itself—but anchoring it proved more difficult. She drove stakes into stony cracks and soil-filled hollows, tethering her shelter the oldfashioned way. She queried Yambuku for a weather report, but nothing had changed since this morning: skies clear, winds calm. Isis was showing her gentle aspect.

  She checked in with Dieter after a hasty meal. No real news, Dieter said, except that this Avrion Theophilus, the Devices and Personnel mystery man, was due down on the next shuttle.

  Theo at Yambuku, Zoe thought.

  Given her mood, she guessed that should have made her happy.

  She wondered why it didn’t.

  The sun drifted behind the Copper Mountains. Zoe finished the ungainly process of eating through the excursion suit and was ready to make another assault on the citadel of sleep when an alert popped into her corneal display. The voice of Yambuku this time was Lee Reisman, who had taken over the shift from Dieter. “We have a large animal on your perimeter,” Lee said, then: “Oh! It’s a digger!”

  She was instantly alert. “Is it approaching the tent?”

  “No . . . according to the remensors, it’s holding about a hundred yards off your location. Tractibles are positioned to intercept it, but—”

  “Leave it alone for now,” Zoe said.

  “Zoe? This isn’t an appropriate time to initiate contact.”

  “I just want a look.”

  She climbed out of the tent, her vision augmented in the deepening dusk. Slate rocks radiated the day’s heat like embers. She had thought the digger might be hard to see, but she spotted it at once and increased the amplification in her membrane lenses accordingly.

  It—make that he—was already a familiar presence: this was the digger Hayes had called “Old Man.” She recognized the white whiskers, the splay of tendrils under its eyes.

  She looked at Old Man, and Old Man looked back at her.

  It was, of course, impossible to read any emotion into that face, as much as the human mind wanted to try. We project ourselves onto other animals, Zoe thought; we see expression in the faces of cats and dogs; but the digger was as inscrutable as a lobster. The eyes, she thought. On any creature larger than a beetle, the eyes are the primary vehicle of expression; but the digger’s eyes were simple black ovals in a bed of bony flesh. Bubbles of ink. Windows through which some dim not-quite-sentience regarded her coolly.

  “Old Man,” she whispered. The curious one.

  Old Man blinked—a flash of silver over shimmering black—then turned and loped away.

  WHAT HAYES HAD not told Zoe was that cascading seal failures had kept him busy most of the day. He could not help wishing that Mac Feya were still here to lend a hand—Mac had been good at patching seals. Barring the one that had killed him.

  Lee, Sharon, and Kwame were more than competent engineers, but they were overtaxed and running on minimum sleep. For now, the situation had been stabilized—replacement seals installed and samples from the failed gaskets glove-boxed for analysis. Hayes had been following the work closely. Dieter Franklin took Hayes into his laboratory to look at adaptive changes in the bacteria feeding on the gaskets, the increasing density of fibrillary matter in the body of the cell, microtubules coiled like DNA where, a month ago, there had been only a few stray threads. The granular bodies on the cell surface were also novel, synthesizing and excreting highly polar molecules, digging into their environment. Dieter waved a hand at the screen he had called up: “It’s not the same organism we were looking at six months ago.”

  “Same genome,” Hayes said. “Same organism.”

  “Same genome, but it’s expressing itself in a radically different way.”

  “So it’s environmentally sensitive.”

  “At the very least. Might as well say it’s trying to pry open the station and come inside.”

  Dieter was Gamma Stone Clan, given to overstatement. “If they’re growing, it’s because we’re feeding them.”

  “They’re dying as fast as they grow.”

  True enough. Hayes had spent his share of time in excursion gear, scrubbing decayed bacterial mats from the station’s exposed surfaces. Kamikaze bacteria? “I don’t think they literally want to kill us, Dieter.”

  “That might be a dangerous assumption to make.”

  Hayes was famous for the hours he kept. People said he never slept.

  Lately that had been all too true. He had personally supervised mu
ch of Zoe’s ongoing excursion, not to mention coordinating the seal repairs and a complete changeover on one of the big filter stacks. He was averaging four or five hours of sleep per night and was often grateful to get that much. Sleep deprivation had left him testy and hypersensitive. For the first time in his life, he envied the Terrestrial hands who wore thymostats. He had to make do with caffeinated drinks and willpower, the poor man’s equivalent.

  It was late when he left Dieter Franklin’s laboratory. Almost everyone but the graveyard shift had retired for the night. At night, the station seemed both too large and too small—the echo of his footsteps came back to him as if from a vast space, but the sound was flat, contained: a closed space. Every avenue a dead end.

  Yambuku had never seemed so fragile.

  His research notes lay untouched in his cabin. He was tempted to go there now, but a last task awaited him, one he had been putting off. This Terrestrial D&P kacho was due down in the morning and would need fresh quarters. But there was only one vacancy at Yambuku, and that was the cabin Elam Mather had occupied.

  Cleaning it out for Avrion Theophilus was a simple enough chore. No one on Isis owned anything substantial. The joke was, you came to Isis the way you came into the world: naked and afraid. And left the same way.

  Elam had left rather differently, but she had taken nothing with her. Still, the sheets needed to be laundered and the wall screens cleared of personal displays.

  Small work, but not work he relished. Nor could it be delegated. When a hand died, the station manager always cleared the cabin. He had done the same thing for Mac Feya. Any old hand would; it was one of the few customs the Isis Project had developed.

  He let himself into the cabin with his master key.

  Elam’s desk light winked on as he stepped inside, then so did the wall screen—a live image of Isis relayed from orbit. Was this how Elam had liked to imagine herself, out of the toxic bios, above it all? Or had she simply preferred to take the long view?

  He switched off the screen and dumped Elam’s preferences back into the station pool. Then he collected and folded her sheets and took the issue garments from her shelves. All were of the uniform ultralight charcoal-colored cloth imported from Earth. He put them outside the door for a tractible robot to pick up. Elam’s laundry would cycle interchangeably through the Yambuku housekeeping system; in a day or two, he might be sleeping on one of these same sheets.

  Last, he used his scroll to open Elam’s personal memory cache in Yambuku’s core memory. Mac had left his filestack full of random notes to himself, letters home, indecipherable notes. Elam was tidier than that; likely all that remained to be cleared would be lists, schedules, and access numbers.

  But when he asked for a global delete, one item came up redtagged.

  It was a message, unfinished, and it was addressed to him.

  Tam,

  Currently skimming over the ocean on the way to meet Freeman Li. Realized we hadn’t had an opportunity to talk lately. Can we get together as soon as I’m back? Until then, some thoughts.

  No doubt you remember when I told you to steer clear of Zoe Fisher. Maybe I was wrong. (Shows how much my motherly advice is worth, I guess.) There is something special about that girl, I agree, but you have to understand, Tam—her specialness makes her dangerous. Maybe very dangerous.

  And yes, I know she’s innocent of any personal scheming. Just as obviously, though, she’s a tool in some complicated Devices and Personnel power play. This is bad news for her, God knows, and might be trouble for you too, given the interest you’ve taken in her. Please don’t be naive! The Trust uses people like Zoe Fisher the way you and I use toilet paper. The only thing that protects us here is distance, and even that might not protect us much longer. Isis isn’t a republic; it’s a Trust property. Never forget that.

  This Avrion Theophilus is suddenly on a cargo manifest from Earth. Part of a plan—or worse, a plan gone wrong. Watch out for him, Tam. Trust Families don’t send a fancy cousin like that on such a dangerous journey unless the stakes are very, very high. Maybe he only wants to make sure Zoe succeeds—that the excursion gear functions as promised—but even if that’s so, it means there must be equally powerful people who want her to fail.

  But here is the truly troublesome news: I think Zoe’s bloodware has been tampered with.

  Last night I found her in the cargo hold, about an hour after midnight. She thought she was alone, and she was crying. Quiet, helpless baby tears—you know the kind I mean. When I asked her what was wrong, she blushed and mumbled something about a nightmare. What struck me was the way she said it, trying to sound casual, obviously attempting to brush me off, but weirdly sincere, too, as if a nightmare was a completely novel experience, something she had only read about in books. Which it might well be, given her D&P background.

  Ask yourself, Tam: Why should a highly regulated bottle baby like Zoe Fisher suddenly suffer from nightmares? (Or fall in love, come to that!)

  After I calmed down Zoe and chased her back to bed, I woke up Shel Kyne. Shel is a competent physician but he’s irredeemably Terrestrial. He didn’t even wonder why I was asking all these questions about Zoe’s bloodware—just trotted out her charts, miffed at the hour but happy to be consulted. (I don’t know about you Red Thorns, but among Rider Clan the unwarranted sharing of medical information is grounds for summary disenfranchisement. Earthlings!)

  I asked, first, whether emotional instability might be a sign of a failing thymostat.

  Yes, Shel tells me, that’s certainly possible, though thymostatic disequilibrium can be subtle at the beginning; emotional volubility doesn’t usually show up until some weeks or even months after the thymostat switches off.

  So I asked him. Is there anything wrong with Zoe’s regulator?

  He smiled and said he didn’t know.

  Apparently Zoe is loaded with novel bloodware, most of it in genned gland sacs clustered around the abdominal aorta. These devices are so newfangled that Shel’s instruments won’t read them, and D&P didn’t send blueprints. The most Shel can do is monitor her metabolites for the major neurotransmitters and regulatory chemistry. Zoe’s serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and Substance P do look a little odd, apparently, and she’s negative for most of the common reuptake inhibitors. But her regulatory bloodware is so unusual that Shel can’t decide if this is appropriate functioning or a major malfunction.

  Shel suggested we ask Avrion Theophilus about it when he arrives. (I lied and said I would; I also advised Shel to keep quiet about it until I spoke to him again. You might want to edit his reports to the IOS in the next little while.)

  So what does this mean?

  It means, I suspect, that Zoe is off her thymostat, maybe for the first time in her life. In Kuiper terms, she’s practically a newborn. A whole battery of new and difficult emotions to cope with, and she doesn’t understand any of it. The Zoe Fisher you’re so obviously falling in love with, Tam, is a brand-new Zoe Fisher. Fragile. Probably scared. And trying very hard to do the job she’s been trained for.

  I can’t tell you what to do about any of this. I don’t know.

  My only useful advice: Keep your eyes open.

  Watch your back.

  I’ll do the same. I’m saving this into my personal memory, because I don’t want it drifting through Yambuku cyberspace. If all goes well, we can talk in person as soon as I’m back.

  —Elam

  P.S. Of course she likes you, you idiot! Many of us do. Myself included. Were you too dense to notice, or too polite to let on?

  Idle curiosity.

  Hayes read the message.

  Then he read it again, enclosed in the silence of what had once been Elam’s cabin, as night rolled over the long valleys and the canopied hills.

  WHEN THE RED-LIGHT summons from the shuttle’s quarantine module appeared on his scroll, Corbus Nefford was mildly scandalized. There had never been a medical crisis aboard the IOS during his health-management watch, and he fully intended
that there never would be.

  Admittedly, this didn’t look good—an unexplained summons of the highest priority posted by Ken Kinsolving, day-watch quarantine medic, from the shuttle-bay lockdown. Dire as that sounded, however, it was probably only Kinsolving panicked by some crewman’s gastritis attack or tension headache. The alternative was unthinkable.

  But he found a guard stationed at the shuttle module’s bulkhead door, and inside—

  Inside, there was chaos.

  Two nursing assistants sat plugged into remensor hoods, talking through their microphones in low, urgent tones. Kinsolving, gaunt in his drapery of medical whites, waved Nefford toward an empty control bay. “Rios and Soto are dead,” he said flatly. “Raman is comatose and Mavrovik is intermittently lucid. We need help with palliative care and tissue samples—if you would, Manager.”

  Kinsolving was a junior medic and not entitled to speak to Corbus Nefford quite so brusquely, but this was an emergency, after all. Nefford squirmed into the remensor chair. He had put on some weight since the last time he operated one of these rigs.

  But one did what one must. What one was trained for, and thank God for his training; it supplanted the instinct to panic. He imagined his thymostat registering the sudden torrents of epinephrine, working to calm him without dulling his heightened alertness. Pathogens, he found himself thinking, Isian pathogens aboard the IOS: it was the nightmare he had hoped never to face. . . .

  The remensor hood activated and he was suddenly inside the quarantine room with the victims. His arms had become the arms of a medical tractible and his eyes were its enhanced sensors. He oriented himself quickly. The quarantine chamber was claustrophobically small, never meant to be used as a hospital ward. Tractibles and remensors battled for floor space; Kinsolving’s remensor rolled up next to him.

  He identified the shuttle crewmen on their cots. Mavrovik, Soto, Raman, and Rios. Two male, two female. They had been the sole survivors of the oceanic disaster, a pilot and three crewmen who had shuttled up from the outpost shortly before its final collapse.