Bios (18 page)

“You start,” Zoe said.

He began by reading her the contents of Elam Mather's message.

Zoe had entertained some of these suspicions herself. About the thymostat, anyway. “But it must have been functioning when I left Phoenix. The medical surveillance was extremely tight.”

She thought of Anna Chopra, the Terrestrial physician who had presided over her health during the long pre-launch months. A tall woman, gray-haired, a non-Family functionary from Djakarta, was it? Grim and wordless and quite dedicated.

“Maybe an act of sabotage,” Hayes suggested. “Some Family turf war working itself out.”

Maybe, but Family feuds were seldom so subtle. An accident, more likely.

“The point is,” Hayes went on, “you shouldn't be out there by yourself with a dead ‘stat.”

“If that's all you wanted to say, you could have said it wideband.”

“Thought you might want to keep this private.”

“Meaning you think I might want to stay this way. Unregulated. Like a Kuiper woman.”

He left a silence in the distance between them. “Yes,” he said at last, “maybe. It's your call, of course, Zoe.”

My call, she thought. My choice.

But it begged too many questions. The thymostat regulated personality: Am I the same person I was three months ago?

So hard, Zoe thought, to hold yourself in your hand, weigh
yourself, render a judgment. She felt better. She felt worse. She said to Hayes, “You must have suspected something . . .”

“From time to time, but I'm Red Thorn; we don't wear thymostats and I've never been sure what to expect from people who do. Elam's been to Earth; she had better instincts.”

“There are different kinds of thymostats. Mainly, they regulate mood, but mine did more than that, Tam. It suppressed unpleasant memories. It also displaced sexual impulses and directed that energy into my work.”

“But you're functioning without it.”

She reminded herself that no one could hear her. No one but Tam. “I feel like I'm on the edge all the time. Sleep is disturbed. I have mood swings. Sometimes this whole excursion seems futile and dangerous. Sometimes . . . I'm afraid.”

Another long pause. Wind rattled the shelter.

“Zoe, we have medical spares. We can fix you up.”

“No. I don't want that.”

“You're certain?”

“I'm not certain of anything. But I don't want to go back to being . . . what I was.”

What I was for Theo. What I was for the Trusts.

Hayes said, “I'll do everything in my power to keep this quiet. The risk is that Avrion Theophilus will look at your medical telemetry and figure it out for himself.”

Better that than facing him, Zoe thought. One look at me and he would know. He would see it in my eyes.

“In any case, you're in no shape to spend another day in the field. I want you back here where I can look after you.”

“No,” Zoe said. “I'd rather finish this.”

“It's not just the ‘stat. I want you back here in case we're forced to evacuate.”

“Evacuate Yambuku? Tam, is it that bad?”

“Things change quickly.”

He described a series of cascading seal failures and filter-stack problems. Everything crumbling, Zoe thought. Everything falling apart. “Give me a day to think about it.”

“It's another day's worth of risk.”

“Nothing we do here is safe. Give me a day, Tam.”

“You don't have to prove anything.”

“Just a day.”

A fresh torrent of rain battered the shelter. She imagined the tractibles squatting miserably in the open. Did tractibles experience misery? Did their sealed joints ache in the cold?

“Zoe, I have an alert here. We'll talk again.”

Soon, she hoped. In the absence of his voice she felt doubly alone.

The squalls abated over the course of the day, followed by a cooling breeze from the west. Zoe had seen all sorts of Isian weather from the protected core of Yambuku, but you had to be outside—exposed—to appreciate the substance of the weather, its moods and subtleties.

Or maybe the failure of her thymostat had made her more sensitive.

More vulnerable.

Was this how the unregulated masses experienced the world? Everywhere she looked, Zoe seemed to find some shadow or echo of herself. In the tossing of the trees, the cascade of rainwater from leaf to leaf; in the cloudy daylight on the gorse, the sparkle of mica in ancient rocks. Mirrors.

We're not born with souls, Zoe thought; they invade us from outside, make themselves out of shadow and light, noon and midnight.

She wondered whether Theo had arrived from orbit yet, whether he was already deconning at Yambuku.

Did Theo have a soul? Had a soul ever colonized the perfect body of Avrion Theophilus?

She scouted her perimeter during the long afternoon, ranging within a kilometer of the digger colony, though she saw none of the animals. She avoided their foraging territory and their funerary
grounds. She didn't want to alarm them; only, perhaps, leave a trace of her scent, a token of her presence.

She arrived back at camp well before sunset with her escort of spidery tractibles trailing behind her. The machines were mudspattered and streaked with yellow pollen. One of them lagged badly. It had developed a limp.

Settled into her shelter for the night, she scrolled her own medical telemetry past her corneal display and requested an analgesic from the medical pack-mule to treat her various aches and itches.

High particulate content in the air—from forest fires in the far west—made the sunset long and gaudy. Zoe entered a few notes into her excursion log, made routine contact with Yambuku, and tried once more to sleep.

An alert roused her just past midnight. Tam's voice was in her ear as she sat up into the disorienting darkness: “Zoe?”

“Yes, I'm here, let me find a light—” She found and activated the tiny photostorage cell next to her bedroll. A “firefly lamp,” they called it. About as bright.

Hayes went on, “We have major-malfunction tags on five of your tractibles—two of the packmules and three of the perimeter surveillors.”

“Something attacked them?”

“Apparently just mechanical interrupts, but it can't be coincidental. I'm worried about the level of protection you're getting.”

“Hardware malfs? You're sure?”

“Nuts-and-bolts failures.”

“I'll fetch the repair kit and turn on some field lamps. Where are the tractibles now?”

“On your doorstep. We brought them in as soon as they began to complain. But, Zoe, we're getting strange telemetry from the remaining surveillors.”

“Company?”

“Hard to say. Nothing big. We have remensors covering for the robots. But I want you to be careful.”

The air outside was crisp and moist. A few stars adorned the sky. That nondescript one high in the northern quarter was Sol, if Zoe remembered her Isian constellations correctly. Cronos rode the hazy horizon.

Camp lights flared on, momentarily blinding her. She drew a deep breath. The filter of her excursion suit sterilized the ambient air but didn't warm it. A breath of Isis cooled her throat.

She retrieved a tool kit from one of the damaged pack-mule tractibles and scrolled the machine's telltales. Her corneal display listed multiple joint dysfunctions. A lubricant problem perhaps? She disassembled a ball-and-socket connector and found it fouled with what looked like mustard-yellow slime.

“Something got into the joint,” she told Hayes. “Something biological. It must be eating the teflons.”

There was no immediate answer. She wiped the joint clean with an absorbent cloth and locked it back into place. A temporary fix at best, but maybe she could patch one or two tractibles well enough to get herself and her essential equipment back to Yambuku. . . .

“Heads up, Zoe.”

She looked up sharply.

The field lamps cast a searing white radiance all around her, a glow that faded into the dark of the forest beyond the meadow. She shaded her eyes and scanned the perimeter. Recognizable shapes began to disentangle themselves from the darkness.

Diggers had surrounded the clearing.

They stood at the perimeter of the meadow, spaced maybe five meters apart—twenty or more of them, some on four legs, some reared back on their hind pair. A few were armed with firehardened spears. Their black eyes glittered in the harsh light.

Her first reaction was fear. Her pulse ramped up and her palms began to sweat. These were animals, after all, like the lions she had once seen in a Trust preserve, but larger and vastly more strange. Cunning, unpredictable. The hint of intelligence that had made
them seem so nearly human was less endearing in this windy darkness. There was intelligence here, certainly, but also a host of instincts purely Isian, purely unfathomable.

Thank God, they weren't advancing. Maybe the camp lights had attracted them. (Though what if those lights failed? What if a new set of malfunctions brought the full weight of the dark down on her?)

Or maybe these fears were a product of her thymostatic disorder. Systems failing inside and out, Zoe thought. But I was made for this. I was made for this. They're aware of me now, as I am aware of them. We see each other.

Hayes' voice erupted in her ear. “Stay still, Zoe, and we'll send one of the surviving tractibles into the forest, maybe draw their attention away from you. We have remensors nearby but the wind is making it hard to keep them airborne.”

“No. No, Tam, don't.”

“Excuse me?”

“They're not hostile.”

“You can't know that.”

“I'm not under attack. Something like this had to happen sooner or later.”

“But not tonight. And you're coming home tomorrow.”

“Tam, I may not get another chance. This is their first reallife encounter with a human being. Most likely they'll look me over for a while and just get bored. Keep the functioning tractibles ready, but don't make enemies.”

“I'm not proposing to slaughter them, Zoe. Just—”

“Wait.”

Movement on the perimeter. Zoe turned her head. One of the diggers had stepped out of rank. Its gait was two-legged, forelimbs raised, a fight-or-flight posture. It carried a sturdy branch in one hand. It stepped closer to the polyplex shelter, until Zoe recognized the array of white whiskers around the animal's muzzle. “It's Old Man!”

“Zoe—”

“Quiet!”

The moment was fragile. Zoe stood slowly from the place where she had crouched beside the tractible and took an infinitesimal step of her own toward Old Man. What must he think I am? An animal, an enemy? A freakish reflection of himself?

She held out her arms—empty hands, weaponless and clawless.

Hayes must have had at least one remensor nearby, because he had seen the motion too. “Three meters, Zoe. Closer than that, I herd him away. If any of the rest of them move, I want you next to the shelter, where we can protect you. Understand?”

She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.

She took several bold steps forward. The digger reared up like a startled centipede. Its black eyes rolled in their sockets. Zoe slowed but didn't stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.

But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.

The digger was very quick. It drew back the tree branch it was hefting before Zoe could begin to flinch.

No, not like this, she thought. It shouldn't be like this—

“Zoe?”

Hayes' voice was distant and irrelevant.

No time to step back, take shelter behind the tractibles. The tractibles had begun to move, but slowly. More systems failing? The digger raised its left upper forearm, the club secure in its gripping hand. She saw the downward swing of it with frozen clarity.

The impact blurred everything. She fell through the windy night.

A
LTHOUGH HE HAD
prayed he would never have to do it, containing biological contamination aboard the Isis Orbital Station was the first task for which Kenyon Degrandpre had been trained. The crisis and its thousand details occupied all his attention. And that was infinitely better than allowing himself to consider the long-term consequences of the outbreak.

He summoned all five of the station's senior managers, including Leander of Medical (replacing the quarantined Corbus Nefford) and Sullivan of Foodstuffs and Biota. They were a motley collation of Trust outriders—all of them competent managers, none of them Family except by the most distant and tenuous connection. Degrandpre himself had such a connection; his maternal greatgrandfather had been a Corbille. But the birth was unregistered and hence irrelevant.