He had wanted the stars but he had caught the Terrestrial disease, the unknowing of awkward truths.
He had lied to Zoe. Perhaps not as egregiously as Avrion Theophilus had lied to her—but he had abetted those lies.
He was out here saving Zoe, but he was also out here salvaging the tattered remains of his innocence. No points for that.
He reached the river at sunset. The sky was clean, deepening toward indigo, and the small moon was quartered at zenith. He wanted to cross the river before dark.
The recent rains had swollen the Copper. Water surged over the surface of the crude bridge the tractibles had built. Hayes stepped onto that fragile scaffolding and felt it sway beneath his weight. If the bridge collapsed, he would be trapped beneath the running water by the unbuoyant mass of his armor.
He switched on his helmet lamp and advanced slowly, watching the water, red-tinted with sunset and shimmering with the oily residue of decomposing plant life, as it washed over his boots. Servomotors labored to steady his balance. A reflection of the moon quivered in the current to his left like the image of a lidded eye. He thought of Zoe’s eyes, eyes shocked by the loss of her thymostat, newborn, wide but wary. Understanding at last the price she had paid for her sanity.
He remembered how she had felt beneath him, crying out with what might have been, God help her, her first shared orgasm. She had trembled like this bridge. Afterward he had felt faintly ashamed, as if he had taken advantage of her, forced the living heart of her out of a complex membrane of defenses.
He trudged up the far bank of the Copper with gluey mud clinging to his boots. The sky was darker now, the forest a black corridor. Fallen logs rotted along the riverbank, and to his right he saw some small animal hesitate in the beam of his helmet lamp, then dash into the undergrowth.
When he had passed some meters into the woods and was enclosed in the space carved out of the darkness by his helmet light, his radio crackled once and fell silent. This would not have been unusual, except that he had asked his armor to screen all messages unless they arrived on Zoe’s standard or emergency frequencies. In his exhaustion, it took him a moment to understand that this was what he had been waiting for.
Her signal must be weak. Obstructed by some obstacle perhaps, or they would have heard her back at Yambuku. He stood still in the midst of the forest, his boots sinking a little into the muddy path—he might lose her if he moved—and thumbed his own com controls. “Zoe? Zoe, it’s Tam Hayes. Can you hear me?”
No answer.
He waited sixty seconds—an eternity, the cat’s-eye moon sliding through the branches of the trees—and tried again.
This time her carrier frequency crackled alive and he heard her voice, eerily close, but confused, as if he had wakened her from a deep sleep. “Theo?”
“No, Zoe, it’s Tam. I’m coming for you, but I need to know where you are and how you’re doing.”
“Inside . . .” she murmured.
“Say again?”
“I’m inside a mound. Underneath. Under the ground.”
“Inside which mound, Zoe?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re all connected. It’s dark here.”
He didn’t like the way she sounded—weak, uncertain, almost delirious. But it was her voice. She was alive. “Zoe, how are you? Are you hurt?”
“How am I?” She was silent for a long moment. “Hot. It’s hot here. I can’t see.”
“Have they hurt you?”
“The diggers aren’t here. Not always, I mean.”
“Zoe, hang on. I’m coining to get you. Keep talking.”
But he lost contact with her as he started toward the next ridge.
As he walked through the night he caught fragments of Zoe’s carrier frequency, never long enough to rouse her attention.
For all its exquisitely tuned servomotors and ergonomic flourishes, the bioarmor had grown terribly heavy around him. He was aware of the enormous effort he expended carrying himself upslope as he approached the foothills of the Coppers, where the soil grew stony and he could turn, if he wished, and see the western plains unfolding under moonlight toward the distant sea. Without a defensive perimeter of tractibles and remensors he feared an attack from some large predator, but no such animal approached him; he was a formidable creature himself, he supposed, and his armor didn’t smell like food.
He contacted Yambuku once, to tell them that Zoe was alive and he had spoken to her. Dieter Franklin was manning the comm console. “Tam,” he said, “that’s good news, but we have problems.”
Hayes debated cutting the connection. There was only one problem he could deal with now, and that was the problem of Zoe. But Dieter was a friend, and Hayes let him talk.
“Your telemetry, for one. We have motors running hot in your left leg assembly. It’s not critical yet, you can scroll the diagnostics if you haven’t already, but it’s not a good sign. What you need to do, Tam, is to turn around and hope you get close enough to Yambuku that we can send one of the reserve tractibles to carry you back, if need be. We can try to do something about Zoe from orbit. The IOS has a few landable remensors it can launch.”
Hayes digested this information slowly. An overheating servo in his left leg . . . that would explain the extra weight he seemed to carry when he moved that foot, his tendency to list to port when his attention lapsed. But that wasn’t bad, considering Dieter’s first prediction that he would never reach the river. As for rescuing Zoe—
He said, “From orbit?”
“Because we’re evacuating Yambuku. The seals are lapsing faster than we can replace them, and our stores are running low. On top of that, Theophilus says the IOS is getting cagey with him; maybe something’s gone bad up there, too. We’re looking at a last shuttle lift in forty-eight hours.”
“Not enough time.”
“That’s the point. I’m trying to make your case with Theophilus. But he’s giving the orders, and he’s just about angry enough to write you off.”
“He wants Zoe back.” Her corpse, at least, Hayes did not add.
“Not as much as he wants to get off Isis. He’s Family and he’s very much in charge, but I think underneath all that he’s starting to get seriously frightened.”
“Thank you for the information, Dieter. Keep the core sterile. I’ll be back.”
He cut the connection before Dieter could respond.
Forty-eight hours.
If he started back now, he might make it.
“TAM? TAM?”
The voice had come. The voice had gone. Unless she had imagined it. It was easy to imagine things, here in the overheated dark.
The digger, coiling its multijointed body in a sinuous circle, had also come and gone. The digger had broken the membrane of her excursion suit, slitting it from sternum to crotch with one razorsharp claw, but carefully, drawing only a little blood. And then it had left her alone. To die, she had assumed, and she burned her firefly lamps recklessly, examining her body, waiting for the inevitable collapse of heart, lungs, liver, brain—because she was exposed at last to the Isian biosphere, microbes implanted beneath her skin by the animal’s filthy claw. But her blood had dried quickly in the hot, close air. Daubs of it congealed on her fingers. She did not sicken and she did not die.
She did, however, exhaust her supply of firefly lamps, simply because she had dreaded dying in the dark. As the last lamp burned, she had willed herself to die before it blinked out. But she did not die. Only passed out for a time, or slept.
And then was horribly awake again, confined in this lightless hole.
She tore off her air filter, because there was no reason now not to breathe the Isian air directly; at best, it might hasten her inevitable death.
And still, still, she did not die.
The impulse to escape, a kind of smoldering panic, overwhelmed her once more. She resigned herself to the darkness; it was only a matter of using her other senses, Zoe told herself, of making maps in her head. Once again she crawled
out of her cul-de-sac into a tunnel. She felt, but could not see, the mossy alien growths pressed against her exposed stomach, her breasts.
She crawled for an inestimable time, made several turns, tried to picture the labyrinth she had navigated as a map on parchment, an ancient mariner’s map, but the map dissolved in the heat and confusion; she couldn’t hold on to it.
She turned a corner and put her hand forward and touched the body of a digger. She froze in place, but the animal was evidently sleeping. Its fat, hollow scales, so useful for insulation, were splayed apart, radiating heat rather than conserving it. Without her air filter, the digger smelled pungent and close. The smell reminded her of a freshly manured farm field.
Zoe backed away. There wasn’t room to turn around in the narrow tunnel. She dreaded what she might encounter with her feet, dreaded discovering that her world had been reduced to a few yards of excavated subsoil, while her body stubbornly and stupidly refused to die.
She had thrown away her filter mask but retained the excursion suit’s headgear, and she was thankful for that when Tam Hayes spoke to her. Even if he was a hallucination, a fever dream, as she suspected he must be. It didn’t matter. She drank the sound of him like cool water.
For a time she was in Tehran, carrying laundry under the stars.
She had been given the job as punishment for some transgression she couldn’t remember, gathering the fetid, too-often-recycled smocks from the youngest inmates and carrying them in a plastic crate across the empty courtyard to the laundry shed—this in winter, and often late at night.
Her secret revenge was that she did not very much dislike the punishment. Distasteful as it was, because the younger children often soiled themselves or were ill, she relished the few free minutes under an open sky. Even in the cold, even in the dark. Perhaps especially then. The cold night air seemed somehow cleaner than the day’s, as if it had been carried by benevolent winds from a distant glacier. And the coldest nights were often the clearest. The stars shone above the pallid lights of the camp with all the purity of their fixed, indifferent light. Light born in fire and older than the seas. She was in this place by mistake; she had been made for the stars, and she yearned to join them in their cycles, as aloof as ancient kings.
Some nights she put down her fetid burden and stole a moment all her own, shivering and gazing at the sky.
She was there now. In the camp. Or among the stars. One or the other. She was hungry and confused.
But what if, Zoe thought reluctantly, what if she traveled to the stars and found nothing there but more mud and dismal heat and deadly cold and sickness and strangers who didn’t care whether she lived or died? What if she traveled all the way to the stars only to be buried in a hole in some alien ground?
What if, what if, what if?
Some nights she imagined that the stars could talk. She imagined that if she listened hard enough she would hear their voices, speaking a language as crisp and hard and colorful as gemstones.
She waited patiently to hear that timeless language and finally to understand it.
“Zoe!”
The voice again. Tam Hayes. Not the voice of the stars. But he was from the stars, wasn’t he? Or at least from the Kuiper Belt, where people spoke more freely than they did on Earth.
“Zoe, can you hear me?”
The functioning part of her headgear kept the line open, waiting for a response. She licked her lips. Her lips were dry. She had finished the last of the suit’s distilled water. Lately, in fact, she had taken to licking sour condensation from the damp ceiling of the tunnel.
“Tam,” she croaked.
“Zoe, I’m half a kilometer from the digger mounds. I want to try to triangulate your position. Are you currently in a safe place?”
Well, no, she was not in a safe place, but she took his intended meaning. “I don’t have to move. Not right away.”
“Good. I’m coming for you.”
“I don’t think you can find me.” She shook her head. “It’s dark here.”
“I understand that, Zoe. I’m coming.”
“Dark and close.”
The com connection crackled with static. Hayes asked, “What’s your physical condition?”
That was a difficult question to answer. She could not, of course, see herself. She had to rely on sensation, on touch. But first things first. “I’m contaminated. The excursion membrane is damaged. I’m breathing unfiltered air.”
There was no immediate answer. She imagined the dismay on his face, his mouth sagging at the corners. Would he cry for her? She might have cried herself if she hadn’t been so dry.
“But I’m alive,” she added.
“You’re better protected than you think. Avrion Theophilus says you have a heavily augmented immune system—little wetpack nano colonies monitoring your blood. It’s an untested system, but it seems to be working.”
Zoe thought about that. A D&P immune system. That would explain why she hadn’t died with her first unfiltered breath of this awful, stagnant air.
But Theo would have told her, wouldn’t he?
Theo wouldn’t have kept a secret like that. It was Theo, after all, who had rescued her from the orphan crib, when all her clonal sisters had slowly sickened and died.
She must have said at least some of this aloud, because Hayes responded. “Zoe, were you ever sick during that time in Tehran?”
She considered the question. Weak, yes; malnourished, certainly; numbed and frightened, always. But the fevers had left her alone, even the Brazzaville 3 that had sickened so many inmates that Zoe had been drafted into carrying bedpans, and eventually, bodies.
Theo had saved her.
Theo. Theo. Or maybe Theo had saved her before she even left the crêche. Maybe Theo had given her something to protect her.
But then why had her sisters died, each in her own way? They were a clonal pod, after all. Identical, at least genetically. Unless they were different inside. Different augmentation. Different immune packages. That was how they did it with clonal animals: perform various modifications on genetically identical mice. . . .
Then place them in a hostile environment.
See who survives.
One of my girls survived.
Bad thought, Zoe scolded herself. Bad, bad thought.
She called out for Tam, but the link was broken again.
Time passed. She couldn’t guess how much.
She was increasingly aware of the diggers, a great number of them by the sound, moving closer to her. She disliked the sound and the smell and the implicit threat. The noise drove her down the tunnel, where she fled by touch and by ear, scuttling in the dark until the digger-sounds were lost behind her, and resting only then, only then.
She knew they could have caught her if they wanted her. They were astonishingly fast and flexible in these tunnels of theirs. She presumed they did not want her, that they were ignoring her, that she was fleeing their ordinary and customary congregations.
But all the tunnels she followed seemed to bend gradually but steadily downward, until it came to her, a very bad thought indeed, that she was being gently herded deeper and deeper still into these vaults, farther and farther from the light.
“SIR.” AMRIT SEEGER, the junior communications chief, actually trembled in Degrandpre’s presence. Degrandpre had become so vigilant of infection that he had first mistaken the man’s shaking and sweating for fever. But it was only his dread of authority. Of Degrandpre’s magisterial power, such as it was. “Sir, I can’t do that.”
Degrandpre had come to the communications chamber personally. It was not a place he had often visited. Something about it appalled him, seemed antiquated and too large, all these winking glass appurtenances set into the wall like the monitor lamps of a seagoing battleship. The equipment in this room was perhaps the greatest technological achievement of the Devices and Personnel grandees, even greater in its way than the Higgs launches, maintaining a coherent and stable particle-pair link across h
undreds of light years—the Grail of simultaneity in a relativistic universe. A link to Earth. The voice of the Families themselves emanated from this room.
But it was a fragile link, narrow in bandwidth, a bottleneck. Degrandpre had invoked information triage often enough in the past, usually to make his custodial work aboard the IOS appear as efficient as possible. Now he had elected to close down the link entirely. This room was too close to the encroaching perimeter of contagion.
“Sir,” the engineer quavered, “they don’t even know—back home, I mean—they don’t know about the breach of Quarantine. We can’t break the link, certainly not before we generate a distress call.”
“And if we do that,” Degrandpre said, “what do you imagine would happen? We’re contaminated with an infectious agent that the Trusts would happily kill us all to contain. There won’t be a rescue mission, certainly not if we’re idiotic enough to broadcast a distress call.”
The engineer blinked at this logic. Trembling, Degrandpre imagined, under the weight of blasphemy. “Sir, the regulations—”
“Regulations are suspended for the duration of the emergency.” Degrandpre put his hand on the grip of his quirt, to make the matter official.
The engineer swallowed hard and left the communications chamber.
Alone in the room, Degrandpre located the main power switches—a bank of breakers that queried and recognized his thumbprints—and cut power to the complex of communications machineries embedded in the walls. Panels of indicator lights winked out. But that was not enough, not nearly enough.
He opened a deckplate over the phalanx of batteries (a battery of batteries, he thought senselessly) that provided a constant flow of uninterruptible current to the core of the particle-pair reactor, maintaining the delicate cohesion that was the beating heart of the link. He disconnected the cells manually, systematically, ignoring the alarm signals, until the overhead lights flickered and went dark in a last futile attempt to reroute power and preserve cohesion.
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