Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Degrandpre switched on a hand lamp.

  Working by lamplight, he pulled the three coaxial lines that were the link’s last source of energy. Deep in the supercooled com core, photons that had resonated with their Terrestrial twins for years began to decohere; information was scattered in a sudden entropic collapse, and the IOS was alone.

  The Isis Orbital Station maintained a semblance of life. Shipments of replacement parts from the lunar Turing factories arrived with clockwork regularity, docked at the few remaining live bays and transferred their cargo to waiting tractibles. The station’s holds filled with finished goods and raw materials that would never be put to use.

  Of the nearly one thousand crew who had escaped quarantine, fifteen at most would find a berth on the sole escape vessel: a small Higgs sphere embedded by Turing tractibles in a cometary body and parked at an Isian Lagrange point. Fifteen, coincidentally, was the number of section managers plus Kenyon Degrandpre, the general manager. Two of the original section managers, including Corbus Nefford, had been lost to disease or general quarantine. Their replacements were guaranteed a berth.

  Degrandpre understood the possibility of insurrection from the excluded crew, and indeed he had found his hand straying to the holster of his quirt more often in the last few days. But most of the crew were Terrestrial and sufficiently disciplined to carry on even in the face of this disaster. Degrandpre had encouraged them to believe in the possibility of rescue and they seemed grateful for the lie.

  Once he had ordered the preparation of the escape launch, a sort of numb quiescence overtook the station. Degrandpre spent the last night in his cabin with a guard detail posted at the door, his first uninterrupted sleep in seventy-two hours. He dreamed of a steel labyrinth with shrinking corridors, and then of his father’s greenhouses, dewy and warm in the winter afternoons.

  Odd, he thought, waking to the chime of his scroll, how the psyche salvages calm from disaster. Dreamlike, these nautilus chambers of normalcy, when the IOS was in fact a crippled and doomed environment. The crisis was acute but somehow lazy, the way a sailing vessel damaged belowdecks betrays itself first with the gentlest of lists.

  The scroll chimed again, an incoming message tagged highpriority. He debated ignoring it. What could be urgent when the end of everything was already in progress? He was facing, at best, a life in exile among the Kuipers. He could never return to a vengeful Earth, nor even to Mars, with its prisons and its extradition treaties. He wasn’t a criminal—or so he insisted to himself—but the Families would see it differently. The Families would hang him, given a chance.

  He picked up the scroll, his fingers suddenly numb with dread.

  “Sir.” It was Leander of Medical. “We have a stack of calls from Yambuku demanding immediate evacuation. Avrion Theophilus wants to speak to you directly.”

  And the last thing Kenyon Degrandpre wanted was some Family cousin pulling rank on him. God, not now. “Tell Theophilus I can’t take his call. But clear them for the evacuation.”

  “And dock them—?”

  “At the last Turing bay. And declare quarantine. Keep them in the shuttle, if possible.”

  “You mean—indefinitely?”

  Yes, indefinitely; more precisely, until the escape module was launched—did he have to spell this out? “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes.” Leander’s voice grew flat. “Reports of sickness in the Delta pod.” A dormitory pod adjoining Engineering. “We sealed the bulkheads at once, of course, but—”

  He shrugged.

  Degrandpre understood the rest.

  No guarantees.

  THE OUTER RING of the ground station was hot, according to nanosensors embedded in the walls. Yambuku had lost its first perimeter of defense. Wholesale failure, Dieter Franklin insisted, could not be far behind.

  Avrion Theophilus took the planetologist to the small launchcontrol room above the core—“the aerie,” Franklin called it—to discuss their options.

  Dieter Franklin had the slightly mad look of a man condemned to death. Condemned, and resigned to it. He spoke too freely. But Theophilus listened.

  “There have been sporadic seal failures since the ground stations were first constructed. But nothing like this. We’re looking at a massive, concentrated attack.” The planetologist frowned. “Think of Isis as a killer. She wants in. She wants us. Until now, she’s been fumbling with a set of keys, chemical compounds, trying to find one that fits the lock. It was a long and frustrating effort and it led us to believe we were relatively safe. But now she has the key. The killer has the key, and all she has to do is use it, patiently open the doors one by one, because it’s too late to change the locks.” He summarized: “Basically, we’re fucked.”

  “So you agree that we ought to evacuate.”

  “It’s the only way we can continue to draw breath.” He took a drink from a cup of coffee—that bitter substance the station crew was pleased to call coffee. “However, we have two people in the field.”

  “Hayes.”

  “Tam Hayes and Zoe Fisher. Last I heard, she was still alive.”

  “Trapped under the digger mounds.”

  “Admittedly.”

  “By your own logic, we can’t do any more for them without putting us all at risk.”

  “We’re already just about as ‘at risk’ as a human being can get. That’s not the point, sir.”

  “I’ve already demanded evac and I’ve already offered to monitor their situation from orbit. Give me another recommendation.”

  “We’re obliged to take as many people out of harm’s way as we can. So we evacuate the station, but we leave it up and running. Nanos and tractibles can monitor the core for at least a few days. We can maintain contact with Hayes from the IOS, and if by some miracle he or Zoe make it back to Yambuku we can send the shuttle for them. I wouldn’t care to calculate the odds on any of this succeeding. But it costs us nothing.”

  Theophilus cupped his hands. “You call Isis ‘she.’ She wants in, you said. Do you have any idea why she wants in?”

  The tall planetologist shrugged. “Maybe she’s curious. Or maybe she’s hungry.”

  Theophilus’s scroll chimed; he glanced at it. A summons from the communications room. He headed for the door.

  “Sir?” Dieter Franklin said.

  Theophilus looked over his shoulder. “I’ll consider your recommendation, Mr. Franklin. For now, the matter is closed.”

  TAM HAYES, HIS left foot dragging and his servomotors flashing yellow overheat warnings in his corneal display like slow fireworks, arrived at the clearing around the digger mounds.

  Sunlight came out of the hazy east with a humid intensity. The forest canopy breathed vapor like a sleepy dragon. Trails of fog wound down from the high Copper Mountain range in ghostly rivers.

  Hayes moved cautiously in his ponderous bioarmor. At least five diggers (and more, perhaps, hidden in the tree perimeter or away from the mounds) watched him enter the clearing. He carried attached to his armor an electric quirt and a pistol loaded with rubberized bullets. So far, however, the diggers had maintained a respectful distance from him. They seemed neither alarmed nor hostile—only watchful. If, that is, he was interpreting their poised silences correctly. Their heads swiveled like radar dishes. Standing erect, they reminded Hayes of photographs he had seen: prairie dogs taking the sun. Sunlight glittered on their blank eyes.

  He had kept open his channel to Zoe. She did not speak often, often ignored his calls, but he was comforted by the faint sound of her breathing.

  The recent rain had softened the ground here, too. He saw a great number of digger tracks leading into and out of the low mound openings. He examined several of the mounds until he found a distinctive double groove in the drying mud, a track that might have been left by the heels of Zoe’s excursion outfit if she had been dragged inside by her wrists.

  Somewhere down there—down that slanting ramp into this warren of ancient excavations—somewhere down there was Zoe.r />
  He was equipped with weapons and a powerful helmet lamp. He would gladly have followed.

  But there was no way his bulky bioarmor would fit through that narrow hole.

  He called Yambuku and asked for Avrion Theophilus.

  Dieter Franklin came on first. He briefed Hayes on the situation at Yambuku: loss of shell integrity, the sterile core threatened, evacuation imminent “if those assholes on the IOS would pay attention to us for a fucking minute.” By the time Hayes and Zoe reached the downstation, it would almost certainly be empty. “But we’ll leave the light on for you. As long as the core is still sterile—and it ought to last a few days more—you can radio the IOS for a pick-up. Understand, Tam?”

  “Put a candle in the window for us, Dieter.”

  “Count on it.”

  “Now hand me to Theophilus.”

  Master Avrion Theophilus announced his presence on-line. Hayes said, “I have a question for you, Theo.”

  He imagined Theophilus wincing at the name. Zoe called him Theo, but Zoe was privileged, his surrogate daughter. Technically, Hayes ought to address him as “Master Theophilus.” Theo was a good Family man.

  “Speak,” Theophilus said.

  “Zoe’s been talking now and then. I don’t believe you picked up any of this at Yambuku. She has a limited radio perimeter.”

  “Correct.”

  “She’s lucky to have those immune enhancements, Theo. They’re the only thing keeping her alive.”

  “Lucky indeed. Make your point, Mr. Hayes.”

  “She’s just curious, Theo . . . you being sort of a father to her and all. When she went into that orphan crib, did she already have this blood gear?”

  There was a pause. The silence, Hayes supposed, of Theo’s conscience. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. That may be what helped her survive.”

  “But not her clone sisters.”

  “Her clonal sisters had been fitted with other forms of augmentation.”

  “So it was an experiment. Put five rats in a cage and give them all smallpox, that sort of thing.”

  “Considering your situation, Mr. Hayes, I’ll forgive the judgmental tone. The Tehran facility would not have been my first choice for the girls. Political circumstances forced our hand. However, yes, her confinement there ultimately served a scientific purpose.”

  “She thinks you rescued her. You might as well have raped her yourself.”

  “What we’re discussing is a Family matter. You should have abandoned this kind of moral high-handedness when you left the Kuipers. Family values aren’t open to question.”

  “Give the microphone back to Dieter,” Hayes said. “Theo.”

  More of the diggers came out of the shadows now, though they continued to give Hayes a wide berth. He hoped not to anger them. They might take their revenge on Zoe—if they were capable of such thoughts.

  Dieter Franklin came on-line again, belatedly. “You’re just making trouble for yourself, Tam.”

  “I have plenty already. Theo still listening?”

  “Master Theophilus has left the communication room, if that’s what you mean. But this conversation is a matter of record.”

  “Dieter, I have a question. The bioarmor—it’s sort of a miniature downstation, right? I mean, it has a series of perimeters around a sterile core.”

  “In a way. Big shell for the heavy processing and to house the servomotors, gel insulation under that; at the bottom a layer of primary containment about as thick as your skin.”

  “So how much of it can I take off?”

  “Say again, Tam?”

  “How much of this armor can I strip and still have any kind of protection?”

  The silence this time was longer. Hayes looked again at the mound entrance before him. Dark as a badger hole. Narrow as a sewer pipe.

  “Conservatively,” Dieter said, “none. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I’m not an engineer. I’ll get Kwame in here if you like.”

  “You know this gear as well as Kwame does.”

  “I take no responsibility—”

  “I’m not asking you to. The responsibility is all mine. Answer the question.”

  “Well . . . if you strip off the hard shell, you probably won’t die immediately. You’d need the helmet, though for the air scrubbers. And you’d be standing there in a plastic wrapper about as strong as aluminum foil. Best case, it might hold off the native microorganisms for a couple of hours before you go hot. If you scrape your elbow, of course, all bets are off. Tam, this is a fundamentally stupid idea.”

  “I need to go in after her.”

  “Both of you will die.”

  “As may be,” Hayes said. He hands were already on the latches of his boots.

  Dieter Franklin caught up to Avrion Theophilus in the hallway outside the comms room. “Master Theophilus, I want to apologize on behalf of Tam Hayes.”

  “It’s not your apology to make, Mr. Franklin.”

  “Sir, I trust this won’t interfere with our plans. That is, if he does make it back to Yambuku somehow, we will send a shuttle for him . . . won’t we?”

  “Family business,” Theophilus said briskly. “You needn’t worry about it.”

  ALONE IN THE sooty courtyard of the orphan crib, Zoe listened to the winter stars.

  She listened with her eyes closed, because she couldn’t see. She listened with her arms at her sides, because her arms were too heavy to move. She breathed through her mouth, because the air was thick and stank of strange animals.

  Maybe she wasn’t in the courtyard at all . . . but here were the stars, voices like a faraway church choir on a cold night, voices like a train whistle bent across a prairie. Voices like snowflakes whispering at a bedroom window. Voices like the yellow light that shines out of the homes of strangers.

  It was good not to be alone. Zoe shivered with the fever that had lately overtaken her and tried to focus on the sound of the stars. She knew she was eavesdropping on a vast and impossibly ancient conversation, none of it quite comprehensible but all of it radiant with significance, a foreign language so complex and so lovely that it exuded meaning the way a blossom drips nectar.

  There was a closer voice too, but that one was more disturbing, because that voice spoke to her directly, spoke with the voice of her own memories, touched her and marveled at her, just as she marveled at the stars.

  “Tam?”

  “I’m coming,” he said. He said it more than once. And something else. Something about her excursion gear. Her tool kit.

  She found it difficult to pay attention. She would rather listen to the stars.

  She said once, mistakenly, “Theo?” Because she was back in the orphan crêche again, a dream.

  “No,” Hayes said. “Not Theo.”

  The nearest voice was warm and enclosing, and it came to her disguised as a memory of Dieter Franklin.

  Here was the gangly planetologist right in front of her, lit from within, his ribs and elbows obvious even under the rough blue Yambuku service uniform. “This is the answer,” he told Zoe eagerly, “the answer to all those old questions. We’re not alone in the universe, Zoe. But we’re damned near unique. Life is almost as old as the universe itself. Nanocellular life, like the ancient Martian fossils. It spread through the galaxy before Earth was born. It travels on the dust of exploded stars.”

  This was not really Dieter talking, but some other agent talking to Zoe through her memory of Dieter. She knew that. It might have been frightening. But she wasn’t afraid. She listened carefully.

  “I would explain this to you more fully, little one, but you don’t have the words. Look at it this way. You’re a living, conscious entity. And so are we all. But not in the same way. Life flourishes everywhere in the galaxy, even in the hot and crowded core of it, where the ambient radiation would kill an animal like yourself. Life is supple and adaptable. Consciousness arises . . . well, almost everywhere. Not your kind of consci
ousness, though. Not animals, born in ignorance and living for a brief time and dying forever. That’s the peculiarity, not the rule.”

  “I can hear the stars talking,” Zoe said.

  “Yes. We all can, all the time. They’re mostly planets, not stars. Planets such as Isis. Often very different physically, but all of them filled with life. All of them talking.”

  “But not Earth,” Zoe divined.

  “No. Not Earth. We don’t know why. The grain of life that found your sun must have been damaged in some way. You grew wild, Zoe. Wild and alone.”

  “Like an orphan.”

  Dieter—the Dieter-thing—smiled sadly. “Yes. Exactly like an orphan.”

  But it wasn’t really Dieter talking.

  It was Isis.

  “Zoe, the beacon.”

  This was Tam’s voice, his radio voice.

  She opened her eyes reflexively but saw nothing. Sweat ran in itchy courses down her forehead and her cheeks. Her mouth was ridiculously dry, as dry as wood, her tongue thick and clumsy.

  “Zoe, can you hear me?”

  She croaked an acknowledgment. Her stomach hurt. Her feet were numb. She was as cold as she had ever been, colder than on the coldest winter night in Tehran, colder than the core of a Kuiper body spinning through space. Her sweat was cold, and the salt of it burned her eyes. She tasted it on her cracked lips.

  “Zoe, I need you to listen to me. Listen to me.”

  She nodded uselessly, imagining for a moment that she was blind and he was here with her. But that was only his radio voice.

  “Zoe, you should have an RF beacon on your tool belt. The RF beacon, Zoe, remember? On your tool belt. About the size of a personal scroll. Can you activate it?”

  The radio beacon. But why? He knew she was here. They could even talk.

  “I can’t find you without a little help. Activate the beacon and I can follow it.”