Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She scratched the lamp alight.

  That was better. Only this endless tunnel to see, but the light was a blessing.

  She crawled ahead a few meters—or maybe a lot of meters. There were no references here any longer, no time and no space. She might have traveled a great distance already, or she might be a scant few paces from her original cul-de-sac.

  Bad thought.

  The tunnel ahead of her began to widen. This was change at last, and the rush of hope she felt was intoxicating. She cautioned herself against it, but hope was like panic, irrepressible, a vast force no longer blocked by her thymostat.

  The thymostat had been a kind of membrane too, Zoe thought—like her excursion suit, another barrier between herself and the world. Shutting out the viruses of panic and hope and love and despair. Lost now. She was naked and infected.

  The tunnel continued to expand, became a larger chamber. She filled it with the sound of her labored breathing. Raised her hand and brought the light to bear. Lifted her eyes and saw—

  —a dead end.

  Another cul-de-sac.

  She let her tears flow freely for a few precious minutes. The excursion suit, she thought idiotically, would recycle them.

  She crawled back, sobbing intermittently, to the place where the tunnel branched.

  How many lamps were left? Her memory was faulty; she was compelled to stop and count the remaining lamps with her fingers. One, two, three, four. Which meant that hours had passed since she left the chamber where she had been abandoned. She could even calculate the time, she supposed, if her mind were functioning a little more efficiently, if she had not lost an eternity to sleep.

  Too much time, in any case. Too much time spent doubling her tracks.

  She thought of open air. The memory was so vivid she could taste it. And sky, Zoe thought. Yes, and rain. And wind.

  She heard faint sounds at the tunnel intersection. An exit missed? The sound of outside? But she had to be careful. She controlled her breathing. She put her head into the adjoining tunnel.

  Where the black eyes of a digger regarded her coolly.

  She held on to the firefly lamp even as the digger scuttled after her and clutched her ankles.

  She hadn’t recognized the digger. It wasn’t Old Man. Absurd as that name was. This was simply an animal, or something as much insect as animal, long and too lithe in the close confinement of the tunnel, its thin body flexible, huge black eyes queasily mobile in their sockets, gripping claws tight as rings of tempered steel. She was shocked that she had ever found anything even faintly reminiscent of the human about these creatures. They were brutal but not even malevolent; their minds worked in strange, inhuman loops; whatever motivated them, she was opaque to it; their realm was not her realm.

  It dragged her into another cul-de-sac—no, oh God, the same one, the one she had started from; she recognized the web on the wall—and rolled her over on her back.

  Still she clutched the lamp. A small spark of sanity. The digger ignored it.

  She closed her eyes, opened them.

  The digger loomed over her. She supposed it was looking at her, though its eyes were as blank as bubbles of oil.

  She looked back at it. Beneath her panic was a grim and wholly unexpected calm, an emotional deadness that was both relief and threat at once. A premature deadness . . . because she was almost certainly about to die.

  The digger put one extended claw on her chest, on her sternum above her breasts.

  She felt the pressure of it—enough to cause pain, perhaps enough to draw blood.

  Then the digger began to slice at her excursion membrane, peeling away the broken material like pale, dead skin.

  ALL ROADS LEAD to Rome, Kenyon Degrandpre thought, and out here at the edge of the human diaspora he had become the embodiment of Rome, and down those roads marched all the bad news in the world, rank on serried rank.

  Each new crisis demanded a fresh solution. The written emergency protocols had proved woefully inadequate.

  The evacuation of Marburg, for instance. Clearly, the station manager was justified in calling the evac. Just as clearly, Degrandpre couldn’t sacrifice much more of the limited space aboard the IOS for a lengthy quarantine of fifteen individuals, any of whom might be vectoring some virulent microorganism. He resolved the conflict by housing the Marburg evacuees in a vacant engineering bay ordinarily used to launch Turing assemblers. Crude, cold, and uncomfortable quarters, but he ordered the chamber stocked with a week’s worth of food and water and equipped with sleeping mats, and considered himself generous for so doing. He also ordered the access doors double-sealed and declared the bay a Level Five hot zone pro tem.

  And in his rare free moments—the calm, he imagined, of a falling object, a crystal goblet dropped from a tray before it strikes the floor—he was obliged to shuffle through routine Earth-bound particle-pair traffic to ensure that no hint of the ongoing crisis reached the wrong ears.

  This paranoiac rant, for instance, from Yambuku’s resident planetologist, Dieter Franklin:

  Mounting evidence suggests a mechanism of information exchange between physically unconnected living cells. Such a mechanism would allow a symbiosis that rides above the usual evolutionary process, a mechanism perhaps as significant as the ancient Terrestrial symbiosis of unicellular life and primitive mitochondria. . . .

  Whatever that meant.

  The increasing efficiency of bacteriological attack on downstation seals and the penetration of supposedly inert barriers (a phenomenon shared across immense distances by otherwise unrelated organisms) led to the investigation of intracellular quantum events such as . . .

  No, strike all that. “Bacterial attack” would raise an alarm back home. Feeling faintly guilty, but with the clinical determination of a man who has set about the grim task of ensuring his own survival, Degrandpre deleted the offending paragraph.

  The proliferation of structurally unnecessary microtubules in a great variety of Isian unicells may ultimately explain this apparent action-at-a-distance. In the human brain, such structures mediate consciousness by operating as quantum devices, a single electron’s indeterminacy amplified, in effect, to become the central mechanism of vertebrate consciousness. Preliminary laboratory work (see appendix) suggests that Isian unicells not only sustain a similar quantum effect but can in fact create and preserve twin-state particle-pair coherency during the process of mitosis.

  All this seemed wrongheaded and subtly threatening to Degrandpre, though he was hardly equipped to evaluate the scientific content. He skipped to the summary at the end of the document:

  One may speculate, perhaps not prematurely, about the possibilities inherent in a pseudoneural network connecting all Isian unicells, a biomass that (if one includes oceanic matter and the mineral-fixing bacteria distributed through the crust of the planet) is of truly staggering proportions. The increasingly successful biological attacks on the downstations might be seen by analogy as an autonomic reaction to the presence of a foreign body, in which breach strategies developed in the saline environment of the ocean and first used against the oceanic research station were slowly but effectively adapted for use against land-based outposts. . . .

  No, none of this would do.

  An incoming message chimed his scroll—tagged Highest Priority, of course; what else? Degrandpre ordered a quick global delete of the floating document. Dieter Franklin’s musings were promptly excised from the scroll, the mail queue, and the central memory. They would not, of course, be broadcast to Earth.

  The bad news this time—and it was very bad news indeed—was that Corbus Nefford had developed a fever.

  Degrandpre spoke to his medical manager through a two-way screen, full-scale image. Under the circumstances, a scroll connection would have been too formal. Never mind that he spoke from the safety of his temporary command quarters, lodged next to the aeroponic gardens. Never mind that he had already established four new precautionary zones, extending from the shuttle do
ck to include both adjoining pods and, of course, the Turing launch bays.

  He was shocked at the sight of Corbus Nefford strapped to a gurney with a saline drip tacked to his arm and Ken Kinsolving at his side. Remote tractibles bustled around the physician’s bedside, snuffling at his wrists with biotic and chemical sensors. Nefford had insisted he had something important to tell Kenyon Degrandpre and had refused to speak to intermediates. At the moment he looked barely capable of speaking at all.

  We are all lost, some part of Degrandpre whispered.

  He mustered his diplomatic skills. He didn’t want Nefford to see him flinch away from the screen.

  “What you have to understand,” Nefford managed to gasp, “is the slowness of it. . . .”

  The etiology of the disease, or Nefford’s own death? Each protracted; each agonizing. “Yes, go on,” Degrandpre said. All of this was being recorded by the IOS’s central memory for future reference. He wondered whether anyone would ever see it.

  “This disease isn’t like other Isian contagions. Not as virulent. It has an incubation period. That means it’s probably a single organism. Dangerous and subtle, but potentially controllable. Do you understand?”

  “I understand. You needn’t continue asking me that, Corbus.”

  “Dangerous, but potentially controllable. But quarantine isn’t working. We’re dealing with something very small here, maybe a prion, a bit of DNA in a protein jacket, maybe small enough to tunnel through the seals. . . .”

  “We’ll keep all that in mind, Corbus.” If any of us survive.

  “Manager,” Nefford gasped, his mouth working between syllables like a siphon with an air bubble trapped inside. “May I say ‘Kenyon’? We’re friends, aren’t we? In keeping with our respective positions in the Trust?”

  Hardly.

  “Of course,” Degrandpre said.

  “Maybe I won’t die.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “We can control this.”

  “Yes,” Degrandpre said.

  Nefford seemed on the verge of saying something more. But fresh red blood began to leak from his nose. Visibly disappointed, he closed his eyes and turned his head away. Kinsolving broke the video connection.

  “Ghastly,” Degrandpre murmured. He couldn’t seem to escape the word. It was lodged on his tongue. “Ghastly. Ghastly.”

  Nefford’s prophecy was correct. Engineering tractibles reported microscopic pinhole punctures in the seals separating the original quarantine chamber from the surrounding quarters.

  Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.

  He understood for the first time, or imagined he understood, his father’s religious impulse. The Families and their Trusts had finely divided and obsessively ordered the political and technological wilderness of Earth, each person and thing and process in its appropriate orbit in the social orrery; but outside the walls of the Families the wild still pressed close: proles, Martians, Kuiper clans; disease vectors breeding in the haunts of the underclasses; no conqueror but death, finally, and the cruel immensity of the universe. His father’s furtive Islam was, after all, an act of will, the ordering of the void into story and hierarchy, walled gardens of good and evil.

  The tragedy of Isis was the tragedy of walls made vain. Not only the physical walls. He thought of Corbus Nefford calling him a “friend.” He thought of the hygienic lies he broadcast to Earth on a daily basis.

  All vain. Very little could be salvaged now. Perhaps only his own life. Perhaps not even that.

  A summit with the pompous, fat chief engineer, Todd Solen.

  “As I see it,” Solen announced, “we have just one recourse. If we can’t put physical barriers between ourselves and the disease agent, whatever it is, we have to shut down Modules Three and Six, secure the bulkheads, and evacuate the atmosphere. Put a sector of hard vacuum between ourselves and the threat. Which ought to do the trick, unless this so-called virus has spread through the IOS already.”

  “The Marburg evacuees are in Module Six.”

  “Obviously. They’ll die if we depressurize the module. But they’ll die just as surely if we don’t. Disease aside, without access to our Turing bays or main shuttle docks, without spares or a comprehensive engineering sector, with our water circulation compromised and the food supply dependening entirely on what we can grow in the sun gardens—all considered, the IOS is an unsustainable environment. We can save as many people as we can fit into a single Higgs launcher. No more.

  Degrandpre felt the paralysis of utter failure.

  He asked, “Has it come to that?”

  The engineer was perspiring freely. He swabbed his forehead with a sleeve. “With all due respect, Manager, yes, it has come to that.”

  I will not render this decision, Degrandpre thought, under intimidation. He said, “It’s hot in here.”

  Solen blinked his bulging eyes. “Well—we’re recycling water from the cooling fins. There’s not much left for thermostatic control.”

  “Find a way to make it cooler in here, Mr. Solen.”

  “Yes, sir,” Solen said faintly.

  Too hot, too dry. The IOS itself was running a fever.

  Aaron Weber, the Marburg station manager currently isolated in the Turing bay—along with all fifteen of his staff—also took note of the heat.

  The air was dry, enervating, and it made even the large if poorly illuminated steel cavern of the Turing bay seem claustrophobic.

  Sleep proved difficult in the heat. The heat dried throat and nose, made clothing a nuisance and blankets intolerable. Several of the Kuiper-born scientists stripped and thought nothing of it, but Weber was more inhibited. He was reminded of his student dormitory in Kim Il Sung City during the long winters, blistering forced-air heat losing its moisture to glass windows crusted with ice. Nosebleeds at night, bloodstains on the pillow. The only recourse had been to open a window and risk freezing.

  Fully clothed, he nevertheless managed to sleep for an hour or so in the long shadow of a cargo manipulator, woke to the snoring of his quarantined comrades, slept again. . . .

  And woke with a faint, cool breeze on his cheek.

  Thinking of the dormitory window. Snow sliding under glass. The moving air soothed him.

  But the air here ought not to be moving.

  The breeze became a wind now, a brisk little indoor wind sweeping along the floor of the Turing bay with surprising vigor, picking up loose items rescued from the shuttle: here a foam cup, there a sheaf of printed paper.

  He sat upright, alarmed.

  That sound? That muted throbbing? He recognized it from the IOS launches, though it had never been so immediate: it was the sound of the machinery that opened the bay’s huge airlock.

  His ears exploded with pain as the atmospheric pressure abruptly dropped. When he opened his mouth the air spilled out of his throat in an involuntary exhalation that seemed never to end. He wanted to cry out, but his lungs collapsed like broken balloons.

  Lights blinked out around him. He saw bodies thrashing as they were thrown from the gaping lock. No noise now. Only the stars, pure and unmediated. The fixed and naked eye. First light.

  YESTERDAY’S RAINWATER DRIPPED from the forest canopy and left the trail mulchy and slick. Tam Hayes moved cautiously in his heavy biological armor. He had grown accustomed to the liquid sound of his footsteps in the decaying biomass, the regular whir of his servomotors. The sounds were peaceful, in a strange way.

  Throughout that long day he did not speak to Yambuku, although message alerts scrolled periodically through his heads-up. The silence was oddly soothing. Instead, he performed the slow and steady work of navigating his armor, pacing himself, monitoring his gear. He wanted to reach and preferably cross the Copper River by nightfall. If necessary he would sleep inside his armor,
simply freeze the servos and let the gel padding accommodate itself to his weight. But it would be better to keep moving. Dieter had been right, of course, about the bioarmor. He dared not depend on it. It would fail—in some small way or catastrophically; sooner or later.

  Much as he tried to pace himself, however, this was hard physical labor. The sweat poured out of him, some of it absorbed by the armor’s recyclers but most of it trapped between his body and the cool gel membrane, irritating his skin. He watched his footing as he walked, avoiding places where the mud seemed threateningly deep. He saw the sky reflected in leaf-strewn puddles, sunlight glistening on scummy water.

  And it occurred to him to wonder, from time to time, what he was doing out here.

  Searching for Zoe, of course, because he cared about Zoe. She was fragile but brutally persistent—he thought for a moment of a fern emerging from a poisonous windfall of volcanic ash. She had been subjected to cruelties that had killed four of her clone sisters, and she had survived—had followed Isis out of her captivity, just as Hayes had followed Isis away from his family and his clan.

  But we were both seduced, Hayes thought.

  Would Zoe have come here so willingly if she had known she was nothing more than a vehicle for the field testing of new Trust technologies? God help us, Hayes thought, she might have; but the Trust never offered her the choice. Lies wrapped in lies, everyone a party to some sin or other; knowledge hoarded and tightly held, because knowledge was power. The Terrestrial way.

  And I am out here, Hayes thought, out here in this peaceful toxic wilderness, to rescue her . . . but admit the truth: to rescue himself as well.

  The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say. Calm, aloof, an Ice Walker, his father’s potlatch wife. In some other century she might have been a Quaker.