Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  And they had brought something with them, apparently, although they had been in quarantine with no observable ill effects for, what was it, most of a month now? And didn’t Isian pathogens attack almost instantly? An Isian infectious agent with a long incubation period was unheard of—a threat almost too terrifying to contemplate.

  He followed Kinsolving’s medical remensor to the bedside of the shuttle pilot, Mavrovik. Kinsolving had plugged fluids and hemostats into Mavrovik’s exposed arm. Nefford added a pulmonary tap to drain blood and fluid from the pilot’s lungs. Mavrovik had been disrobed and strapped to the cot. Beads of sweat, putrid and faintly yellow, trickled down his shaved skull to his pillow.

  What Kinsolving had achieved here was a momentary homeostasis. Nefford plugged his own monitors into the shuttle pilot as the day-shift medic began to transfer control. When a moment of peace presented itself he asked, “How long have they been ill?”

  “First obvious symptoms manifested about three hours ago. We had no real warning. Their blood gasses looked peculiar prior to that, but still within normal limits.”

  Nefford turned to watch as two tractibles shifted the stiffening bodies of Rios, a woman, and Soto, a man, onto gurneys and wheeled them out of the room. There was a cold-storage facility with an autopsy chamber deep inside the quarantine boundary—staffed, of course, entirely by tractibles and remensors. The morgue was carefully maintained, although it hadn’t been used before today.

  When he turned back he found Mavrovik’s eyes open, both pupils grossly dilated. Sweating inside his remensor hood, Nefford scrolled a survey of the patient’s vital signs. The list was appalling. Gross edema, internal bleeding as tissues softened catastrophically, kidneys necrotizing, liver function fading, pulse erratic, blood pressure so uncertain that even the hemostatic robots could barely maintain an acceptable count. Bottom line: Mavrovik was dying. In a hurry.

  Kinsolving wheeled back, his tractible arms going limp as he disengaged from the remensor hood. “Do what you can for him,” he said flatly. “I’ll speak to Degrandpre.”

  Better you than me, Nefford thought.

  He assumed full life-support function as Kinsolving’s medical remensor fell silent.

  Mavrovik was briefly stabilized, but that wouldn’t last. The trouble was, Nefford had no effective treatment for this disease—whatever it was—only palliatives, only bags of fresh artificial blood and coagulent nanobacters to seal the worst of the internal lesions. All useless in the long run. Mavrovik was being devoured by an entity Nefford could not even name, and soon enough it would do irreparable damage to Mavrovik’s heart or brain, and that would be that.

  As if he had overheard the thought, Mavrovik gasped suddenly and surged against his restraints. Nefford flinched. Fortunately, his remensor ignored hasty autonomic impulses or he might have ripped an intravenous line out of the patient. How I must look to him, Nefford thought: a robotic head, a cow’s skull dipped in chromium, peering at him through ruby lenses. But Mavrovik’s eyes had closed; his lips moved, but he was talking to someone not present.

  “Who are you?” the pilot demanded weakly, his throat thick with bloody granulae.

  “Be still,” Nefford said. Corbus Nefford’s voice was relayed with ultimate fidelity through the remensor, that much of his bedside manner, at least, intact. He added a tranquilizer to the broth of chemicals in the shuttle pilot’s drip.

  But Mavrovik would not be tranquil. “Look at them!” His lips were flecked with blood. “Look at them!”

  “Calm down, Mr. Mavrovik. Don’t speak. Conserve your strength.”

  “So many of them!”

  Nefford sighed and tightened the restraints. This might be, was probably, Mavrovik’s final crisis. He pushed the flow of opiates.

  “Talking, all talking together. . . .”

  Corbus Nefford had not been in the presence of a dying man since his medical apprenticeship in Paris. Death was the business of hospices and peasant medics, not of successful Family physicians. He had forgotten how hair-raising the process could be. He peeled back Mavrovik’s left eyelid, expecting to find the pupil fixed and dilated; instead, the pupil contracted promptly at the light. Then Mavrovik’s right eye opened and the pilot looked at Nefford with a sudden, frightening lucidity.

  “You have to understand this,” Mavrovik said. He rasped the words through a lace of bloody sputum. Like a dead man talking, Nefford thought. Well, close enough. “There are thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. Talking to each other. Talking to me!”

  Nefford felt trapped by the sheer earnestness of this declamation. He was aware of the patient’s plummeting vascular pressure, capillaries weakened by the disease bleeding out in a massive, whole-body collapse. Mavrovik’s face was banded with blue and black, as if he had been beaten with a stick. The whites of his eyes were shot through with scarlet. Mavrovik’s brain must be bleeding too, Nefford thought; this monologue could hardly be sane. But he heard himself ask, “Thousands of what, Mr. Mavrovik?”

  “Worlds,” Mavrovik said, gently now, as if to himself.

  Corbus Nefford did not, of course, believe in ghosts. He was a technician of the Families—in his own way, a scientist. Only low people and peasants were frightened of ghosts or spirits. Nefford was frightened only of the Trusts. He had seen the damage they could inflict.

  Nevertheless he found himself regarding the dying man with something approaching superstitious dread.

  Mavrovik laughed—a terrible sound; it brought up bubbles of pink fluid. Robotic aspirators sucked his mouth and throat clean. His arms flexed against his restraints, as if he wanted to reach up, to grasp Nefford—Nefford’s remensor—and draw him closer.

  Horrible thought.

  “We’re their orphans!” Mavrovik explained.

  His last words.

  Raman died too, more quietly, at about the same time. With the deaths the quarantine room grew calmer, though frantic activity continued—the drawing of blood and tissue samples, the containment of the bodies, periodic cloudbursts of liquid sterilants and gases.

  When Mavrovik’s corpse was finally bagged and taken away, Nefford allowed himself to draw a long breath. He wheeled his remensor back into its dock and removed himself from the hood.

  He had been with the remensor so long that his own body felt clumsy and unfamiliar. He had been sweating freely; his clothing was soaked; he recoiled at his own stink. He wanted a long drink of water and a hot bath. Probably he should have been hungry—he had missed breakfast—but the thought of food was repellent.

  He found Kinsolving waiting for him near the bulkhead door. Nefford asked, “Did you talk to Degrandpre?”

  “I paged his scroll . . .”

  “Paged his scroll?” An event like this called for a personal conference. Nefford would have done it himself if he hadn’t been busy with Mavrovik.

  “Manager Degrandpre was already aware of the emergency. I asked to meet with him. But he had already issued an order expanding the perimeter of the quarantine.” Kinsolving delivered this information meekly, as if he expected to be beaten for it.

  “Expanding the perimeter? I don’t understand.”

  “Quarantine extends all the way to the bulkhead doors. The entire module is sealed tight.” Kinsolving bowed his head. “No one is allowed to leave until further notice. And that includes us.”

  THE DREAMS WERE very bad.

  Rain came down on the polyplex shelter in drumming bursts. Wind gusts confused the support tractibles, which woke Zoe periodically with false alarms, misinterpreting the whipping wind as the movement of some ghostly predator. Zoe fell in and out of shallow sleep.

  She was, of course, still alone. She was as alone as the first lungfish to drag itself out of the shallows. And that should have been all right. The men and women who first sailed to the reefs of the solar system, squandering their lives inside lightless ice caverns—they had been alone too.

  But isolation meant many things.

  Zoe had known people
who longed for isolation and people who dreaded it. On Earth a person was never truly alone, and it was easy to project a whole spectrum of fears and hopes into that unobtainable void, a vacuum full of self. It meant freedom, or shamelessness, or absolution, or the simple loss of all direction.

  Fantasies.

  Alone, Zoe thought, is listening to this rain batter the small membrane between herself and toxic nature. Alone meant memories swollen into nightmares.

  In her dreams she was in Tehran.

  According to the Trust doctors, these memories had been safely buried. But whatever was wrong with her seemed to have let slip the leash. Whenever she closed her eyes the awful images came roaring back.

  The orphan crêche was a cinderblock dungeon spread across acres of oily gravel and ringed with lethal glass-wire fences. It was, like most of the charity creches scattered across Asia and Europe, a leftover from the plague century. It might once have been a humanitarian project, one of the great Social Works of the first Trusts, but it had become little more than a collector for the state brothels. Lately its resident managers had realized that they could expand their personal profit margin by renting their charges on the public market, or at least that segment of the market too impoverished or ill to patronize the licensed pleasuredromes.

  The drawback was that the inmates at the Tehran West Quad Educational Collective—as the sign above the gate proclaimed it—weren’t offered the kind of medical supervision required even in a bargain-basement, licensed brothel. Nor were its customers, mainly manual laborers from the local Trust factories ringing the city, carefully screened.

  Zoe had arrived with her pod of genetically identical sisters, Francesca and Poe and Avita and Lin, shipped from their birth crêche by orbital cargo transport, hungry and bewildered. At first the Farsi-speaking nurse had fed them protein soups and dressed them in warm if graceless smocks and patiently endured their demands for home. But after a day or two of this, they were transferred to the dormitories.

  And the horror began.

  Memory swept through Zoe’s dreams like a winter gale.

  Everyone was used, and everyone died.

  Francesca died first, of a fever that wracked her body for five long February days, until she turned her emaciated body to the cinderblock wall and simply ceased to breathe.

  This is wrong, Zoe remembered herself thinking. We were made to go to the stars. This is wrong.

  Poe and Lin died together when a fierce hemorrhagic contagion—the nurses called it Brazzaville 3, which it may have been—swept the dormitories. Zoe, in her despair, had not felt much grief at the passing of three of her sisters. She was selfishly grateful that the brothel trade had diminished out of fear of the plague. Unfortunately the food supply had diminished too, and that wasn’t good. There had been talk of quarantine; the whole West Quarter of the city was practically deserted for the next six months.

  But the disease passed in time. Zoe and Avita were among the souls not harvested.

  Zoe grew closer to her only remaining pod sister, and it affected her more powerfully when Avita died, almost randomly, of some disease born of malnutrition and neglect. She is my mirror, Zoe thought, gazing at Avita’s corpse during the long hours before the hygiene crew came to collect it. When I die, Zoe thought—and she had supposed it would be a matter of months, at most—when I die, this is how I will look. Like a soft clay statue, pale and shiny and indifferent.

  She missed Avita and Francesca and Lin and Poe. The other inmates were often cruel to her, and her white-masked minders casually despised her, and she thought death might not be so terrible, really, certainly no worse than living on and on inside these walls.

  Then Theo came to Tehran.

  Something had happened, something political, something in the High Families. She remembered Avrion Theophilus from the crêche. He had stopped by once a month to survey the pods, and he had been partial to the five small sisters, often stroking Zoe’s hair while the nannies ducked their heads at him and dull-witted tractibles brought him tea and sugar cakes, which he shared. He had always looked so resplendent in his black uniform, and he looked resplendent now, in Tehran, but darker, angrier, shouting at the orphan keepers, who cringed away from him. He cursed the obscenties of the dormitory, the frigid showers, the assignation rooms with their coarse and filthy blankets.

  He swept Zoe up into his arms—cautiously, because she had become fragile. His uniform, pressed against her cheek, smelled of fresh laundry, of soap and steam-pressing.

  She thought of him as a kind of king or prince. Of course he was not—he was only peripherally of the Families at all, a cousin’s nephew’s cousin, essentially a high functionary with the Devices and Personnel branch of the Trusts. He was a Theophilus, not a Melloch or a Quantrill or a Mitsubishi. But that didn’t matter. He had come to get her. Too late for Poe or Lin or Avita or Francesca. But not too late for Zoe.

  “One of my girls survived,” he murmured, carrying her out into a Human Services mobile clinic. “One of my girls survived.”

  When he tried to hand her to the doctors she clung to him so fiercely that she had to be sedated.

  Zoe woke abruptly, numb with dread. There had been a sound . . . but it was only a rattle of thunder bouncing between the peaks of the high Coppers. Locally, the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

  Dim light came through the polyplex shelter. Morning.

  She felt shaky and tired. She opened the shelter and climbed out into the rain. Water sheeted off the granite outcrops and drenched the blades of the gorse-like plants that grew in the deep glacial scars. Pack-mule tractibles lurched comically about the campsite. Their legs found little purchase in the wet; periodically they folded their limbs and sat down like weary dogs.

  Clouds tumbled up the Coppers in gusting billows. The forest steamed.

  She selected a ration dispenser from the store aboard a nearby tractible and carried it back under cover. The rain had beaded on her excursion suit. She itched. The membrane kept her clean, even shuttled flakes of dead skin to its surface and shed them as sterile dust; nevertheless, she itched. The itch was intermittent, confined to her ribs and thighs, and was not a real problem—yet. But if it got worse . . . well, people had been known to claw themselves bloody in order to a cure an itch. Which, under the circumstances, wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

  Eating was a chore. The ration tube had to be attached to the excursion suit’s face mask, which opened a sterile passage between mouth and food—agonizingly slowly. She compressed the ration tube by hand. The nutrient paste that oozed onto her tongue was fundamentally unappetizing and as perfectly textureless as mud. And never enough to convince her she had really eaten.

  The rations also tended to pass through her body quickly, which presented her with another tedious and unpleasant problem.

  By the time she finished with all this, the sky had begun to clear. The wind had grown gusty again, however; it dragged at the polyplex fabric and would no doubt be making life difficult for the robots and remensors.

  She thought about calling Yambuku. Her check-in was due.

  She thought about Theo, of how he had saved her from the orphan ranch, memories that had tumbled through her dreams like broken glass. . . .

  And her inexplicable dread of him.

  She linked to Yambuku for her daily update and spoke briefly to Cai Connor, who was manning the excursion desk. No news and stay put: the winds would diminish overnight and then she could reconnoiter the digger colony before heading back.

  Which was fine, but it left her with nothing to do except monitor her own telltales, watch the cumulus clouds writhe up the distant peaks, and function-test the pack-mule tractibles.

  She didn’t look forward to another night of darkness.

  That afternoon, Tam Hayes contacted her by narrow-beam transmission from Yambuku. That was odd. The tight-beam antenna was a last-ditch redundancy, limited to line of sight and narrow in bandwidth. Clunky, voice-only, like an antique telephone line
.

  “This is off the record,” Hayes began. “Nobody’s eavesdropping, and nothing we say goes into the station’s memory. Zoe, are you in a safe place? I’m in the shuttle bay; I don’t have a remensor view.”

  “Sitting in the shelter waiting for the wind to drop.”

  “Good. We have a lot to talk about.”

  “You start,” Zoe said.

  He began by reading her the contents of Elam Mather’s message.

  Zoe had entertained some of these suspicions herself. About the thymostat, anyway. “But it must have been functioning when I left Phoenix. The medical surveillance was extremely tight.”

  She thought of Anna Chopra, the Terrestrial physician who had presided over her health during the long pre-launch months. A tall woman, gray-haired, a non-Family functionary from Djakarta, was it? Grim and wordless and quite dedicated.

  “Maybe an act of sabotage,” Hayes suggested. “Some Family turf war working itself out.”

  Maybe, but Family feuds were seldom so subtle. An accident, more likely.

  “The point is,” Hayes went on, “you shouldn’t be out there by yourself with a dead ‘stat.”

  “If that’s all you wanted to say, you could have said it wideband.”

  “Thought you might want to keep this private.”

  “Meaning you think I might want to stay this way. Unregulated. Like a Kuiper woman.”

  He left a silence in the distance between them. “Yes,” he said at last, “maybe. It’s your call, of course, Zoe.”

  My call, she thought. My choice.

  But it begged too many questions. The thymostat regulated personality: Am I the same person I was three months ago?

  So hard, Zoe thought, to hold yourself in your hand, weigh yourself, render a judgment. She felt better. She felt worse. She said to Hayes, “You must have suspected something . . .”

  “From time to time, but I’m Red Thorn; we don’t wear thymostats and I’ve never been sure what to expect from people who do. Elam’s been to Earth; she had better instincts.”