Bios (16 page)

Yambuku had never seemed so fragile.

His research notes lay untouched in his cabin. He was tempted
to go there now, but a last task awaited him, one he had been putting off. This Terrestrial D&P kacho was due down in the morning and would need fresh quarters. But there was only one vacancy at Yambuku, and that was the cabin Elam Mather had occupied.

Cleaning it out for Avrion Theophilus was a simple enough chore. No one on Isis owned anything substantial. The joke was, you came to Isis the way you came into the world: naked and afraid. And left the same way.

Elam had left rather differently, but she had taken nothing with her. Still, the sheets needed to be laundered and the wall screens cleared of personal displays.

Small work, but not work he relished. Nor could it be delegated. When a hand died, the station manager always cleared the cabin. He had done the same thing for Mac Feya. Any old hand would; it was one of the few customs the Isis Project had developed.

He let himself into the cabin with his master key.

Elam's desk light winked on as he stepped inside, then so did the wall screen—a live image of Isis relayed from orbit. Was this how Elam had liked to imagine herself, out of the toxic bios, above it all? Or had she simply preferred to take the long view?

He switched off the screen and dumped Elam's preferences back into the station pool. Then he collected and folded her sheets and took the issue garments from her shelves. All were of the uniform ultralight charcoal-colored cloth imported from Earth. He put them outside the door for a tractible robot to pick up. Elam's laundry would cycle interchangeably through the Yambuku housekeeping system; in a day or two, he might be sleeping on one of these same sheets.

Last, he used his scroll to open Elam's personal memory cache in Yambuku's core memory. Mac had left his filestack full of random notes to himself, letters home, indecipherable notes. Elam was tidier than that; likely all that remained to be cleared would be lists, schedules, and access numbers.

But when he asked for a global delete, one item came up redtagged.

It was a message, unfinished, and it was addressed to him.

Tam,

Currently skimming over the ocean on the way to meet Freeman Li. Realized we hadn't had an opportunity to talk lately. Can we get together as soon as I'm back? Until then, some thoughts.

No doubt you remember when I told you to steer clear of Zoe Fisher. Maybe I was wrong. (Shows how much my motherly advice is worth, I guess.) There is something special about that girl, I agree, but you have to understand, Tam—her specialness makes her dangerous. Maybe very dangerous.

And yes, I know she's innocent of any personal scheming. Just as obviously, though, she's a tool in some complicated Devices and Personnel power play. This is bad news for her, God knows, and might be trouble for you too, given the interest you've taken in her. Please don't be naive! The Trust uses people like Zoe Fisher the way you and I use toilet paper. The only thing that protects us here is distance, and even that might not protect us much longer. Isis isn't a republic; it's a Trust property. Never forget that.

This Avrion Theophilus is suddenly on a cargo manifest from Earth. Part of a plan—or worse, a plan gone wrong. Watch out for him, Tam. Trust Families don't send a fancy cousin like that on such a dangerous journey unless the stakes are very, very high. Maybe he only wants to make sure Zoe succeeds—that the excursion gear functions as promised—but even if that's so, it means there must be equally powerful people who want her to fail.

But here is the truly troublesome news: I think Zoe's bloodware has been tampered with.

Last night I found her in the cargo hold, about an hour after midnight. She thought she was alone, and she was crying. Quiet, helpless baby tears—you know the kind I mean. When
I asked her what was wrong, she blushed and mumbled something about a nightmare. What struck me was the way she said it, trying to sound casual, obviously attempting to brush me off, but weirdly sincere, too, as if a nightmare was a completely novel experience, something she had only read about in books. Which it might well be, given her D&P background.

Ask yourself, Tam: Why should a highly regulated bottle baby like Zoe Fisher suddenly suffer from nightmares? (Or fall in love, come to that!)

After I calmed down Zoe and chased her back to bed, I woke up Shel Kyne. Shel is a competent physician but he's irredeemably Terrestrial. He didn't even wonder why I was asking all these questions about Zoe's bloodware—just trotted out her charts, miffed at the hour but happy to be consulted. (I don't know about you Red Thorns, but among Rider Clan the unwarranted sharing of medical information is grounds for summary disenfranchisement. Earthlings!)

I asked, first, whether emotional instability might be a sign of a failing thymostat.

Yes, Shel tells me, that's certainly possible, though thymostatic disequilibrium can be subtle at the beginning; emotional volubility doesn't usually show up until some weeks or even months after the thymostat switches off.

So I asked him. Is there anything wrong with Zoe's regulator?

He smiled and said he didn't know.

Apparently Zoe is loaded with novel bloodware, most of it in genned gland sacs clustered around the abdominal aorta. These devices are so newfangled that Shel's instruments won't read them, and D&P didn't send blueprints. The most Shel can do is monitor her metabolites for the major neurotransmitters and regulatory chemistry. Zoe's serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and Substance P do look a little odd, apparently, and she's negative for most of the common reuptake inhibitors. But her regulatory bloodware is so unusual
that Shel can't decide if this is appropriate functioning or a major malfunction.

Shel suggested we ask Avrion Theophilus about it when he arrives. (I lied and said I would; I also advised Shel to keep quiet about it until I spoke to him again. You might want to edit his reports to the IOS in the next little while.)

So what does this mean?

It means, I suspect, that Zoe is off her thymostat, maybe for the first time in her life. In Kuiper terms, she's practically a newborn. A whole battery of new and difficult emotions to cope with, and she doesn't understand any of it. The Zoe Fisher you're so obviously falling in love with, Tam, is a brand-new Zoe Fisher. Fragile. Probably scared. And trying very hard to do the job she's been trained for.

I can't tell you what to do about any of this. I don't know.

My only useful advice: Keep your eyes open.

Watch your back.

I'll do the same. I'm saving this into my personal memory, because I don't want it drifting through Yambuku cyberspace. If all goes well, we can talk in person as soon as I'm back.

—Elam

P.S. Of course she likes you, you idiot! Many of us do. Myself included. Were you too dense to notice, or too polite to let on?

Idle curiosity.

Hayes read the message.

Then he read it again, enclosed in the silence of what had once been Elam's cabin, as night rolled over the long valleys and the canopied hills.

W
HEN THE RED-LIGHT
summons from the shuttle's quarantine module appeared on his scroll, Corbus Nefford was mildly scandalized. There had never been a medical crisis aboard the IOS during his health-management watch, and he fully intended that there never would be.

Admittedly, this didn't look good—an unexplained summons of the highest priority posted by Ken Kinsolving, day-watch quarantine medic, from the shuttle-bay lockdown. Dire as that sounded, however, it was probably only Kinsolving panicked by some crewman's gastritis attack or tension headache. The alternative was unthinkable.

But he found a guard stationed at the shuttle module's bulkhead door, and inside—

Inside, there was chaos.

Two nursing assistants sat plugged into remensor hoods, talking through their microphones in low, urgent tones. Kinsolving, gaunt in his drapery of medical whites, waved Nefford toward an empty
control bay. “Rios and Soto are dead,” he said flatly. “Raman is comatose and Mavrovik is intermittently lucid. We need help with palliative care and tissue samples—if you would, Manager.”

Kinsolving was a junior medic and not entitled to speak to Corbus Nefford quite so brusquely, but this was an emergency, after all. Nefford squirmed into the remensor chair. He had put on some weight since the last time he operated one of these rigs.

But one did what one must. What one was trained for, and thank God for his training; it supplanted the instinct to panic. He imagined his thymostat registering the sudden torrents of epinephrine, working to calm him without dulling his heightened alertness. Pathogens, he found himself thinking, Isian pathogens aboard the IOS: it was the nightmare he had hoped never to face. . . .

The remensor hood activated and he was suddenly inside the quarantine room with the victims. His arms had become the arms of a medical tractible and his eyes were its enhanced sensors. He oriented himself quickly. The quarantine chamber was claustrophobically small, never meant to be used as a hospital ward. Tractibles and remensors battled for floor space; Kinsolving's remensor rolled up next to him.

He identified the shuttle crewmen on their cots. Mavrovik, Soto, Raman, and Rios. Two male, two female. They had been the sole survivors of the oceanic disaster, a pilot and three crewmen who had shuttled up from the outpost shortly before its final collapse.

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!”