Bios (15 page)

Her excursion suit tunneled beads of sweat from her skin to the membrane's surface, cooling her as she walked. Sunlight turned the membrane white. She glanced at her arms. She was as pale as a purebred daughter of some Nordic Family, aristocratic white.

She had not traveled more than a kilometer when Tam Hayes opened a direct link to her. About time, she thought.

“Zoe? We'd like you to halt where you are for the time being.”

“Can't,” she said. “Not if I want to be back before dark. You've been talking to the IOS all morning. Time doesn't stop just because Kenyon Degrandpre is keeping you busy.”

“That's the point. They want the excursion extended.”

They
, she noted. Not
we
. Hayes didn't approve. “What do you mean, extended?”

“Specifically, they want you to turn back, cross the Copper at the mobile bridge and break camp on the east bank. Remensors will scout a path to the digger colony, and the tractibles will trailblaze for you. Two days of traveling ought to put you just inside the animals' food-gathering perimeter.”

Which was absurd. “I can't do fieldwork! We're still testing the excursion gear!”

“Feeling at the IOS is that your gear passed all the tests.”

“This pushes the schedule by at least a month.”

“Somebody's in a hurry, I guess.”

She supposed she knew why. The Oceanic Station had collapsed
and all the other Isian outposts had suffered worrisome seal failures. Zoe's excursion suit might be performing brilliantly, but without a staging platform like Yambuku, it was as useful as a rainhat in a hurricane. The Trusts wanted to maximize the use of her before Yambuku had to be evacuated.

Cross the Copper River toward the foothills? Move deeper into the bios while Yambuku staggered toward collapse? Was she brave enough to do that?

“Personally,” Hayes said, “I'm opposed to the idea. I don't have the authority to overrule it, but we can always find an anomaly in your gear and order you back for maintenance.”

“But the suit is flawless. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, I think Kwame Sen could be convinced to shade a graph or two if it came to an argument.”

She thought about it. “Tam, who gave this order? Was it Degrandpre?”

“He sanctioned it, but no, the order came from your D-and-P man—Avrion Theophilus.”

Theo!

Surely
Theo
wouldn't let anything bad happen to her.

She capped her doubts. “Keep Kwame honest. I'll cross the river.”

“Zoe? Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.”

No
.

“Well . . . I'm sending out three more tractibles with supplies and equipment. They should catch up with you by dusk. And as far as I'm concerned, you're on immediate recall at the first sign of trouble. Any kind of trouble. Give me the word, I'll cover it with the IOS.”

He added, “I'll be watching,” which made her feel both strong and weak at once, and signed off.

Zoe gazed across the placid Copper. Her pack tractibles acknowledged a new set of orders from Yambuku by circling back behind her, ambling up the trail like dimly impatient dogs and waiting for her to follow.

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.

W
HAT
H
AYES 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 much 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.