Bios (8 page)

“How much do you know about our Zoe?”

“The basics. She's clonal stock from the old genome collection, raised by Devices and Personnel.”

“She
is
a device, the way they see it. Put it together, Tam. Think of it from the Trust's point of view. They don't give a shit about the linguistic nuances of the diggers or the taxonomics of Isian flora. She's here for some other reason.”

He didn't share her fascination with Terrestrial politics. “Devices
and Personnel doing another little dance with the Works Trust?”

“More than that, I suspect. The two factions have always been rivals, but Devices and Personnel has been in eclipse since the turn of the century. I suspect they see Isis as their chance to steal a march on the Works bureaucracy. If Zoe's excursion technology performs as promised, it's practically a revolution—we can expand the human presence on Isis way beyond what it is now.”

“Elam, we can't even keep our external seals clean.”

“And that's the point. Zoe's device isn't just a new technology, it's a dozen new technologies—high-efficiency osmotic filters, stress-resistant thin-film polymers more biologically inert than anything we have . . . it's a coup d'etat.”

“High praise.”

“No, I mean
literally
. The Works Trust has been foundering on Isis for two decades, and the problems only get worse. If Devices and Personnel can step in and make Isis a paying proposition in one swift stroke, they might garner enough Council support to oust the WT hardliners.”

All this left Hayes feeling impatient and uncomfortable. “Earth politics, Elam. What does it mean to us?”

“If it works, it means we get a whole new crop of kachos with new priorities. Best case. In the long run, it might mean permanent settlements. It might mean Isis gets rapidly strip-mined for its biological and genetic resources. It would almost certainly mean a lot less Kuiper involvement.”

“Would it?”

“Well, why are we here? Partly because the Works people can exploit our scientific savvy without being beholden to Devices and Personnel. Partly because we're accustomed to living and working in small groups in enclosed environments. If Devices and Personnel is prepared to open up Isis to anyone with one of their environmental interfaces—and if they can do that without a humiliating liaison with the Kuiper Republics—then they blow the Works Trust out of the water. And us besides. Not to mention the future of genuine science on this planet. They won't disseminate knowledge,
they'll
patent
everything they learn. And bypass us on the way to the stars.”

“You suppose Zoe is aware of all this?”

“Zoe is a cat's-paw. She thinks it's all an exozoology project. But Devices and Personnel owns her. Read her file again—the fine print. She was decanted and raised in a high-class D and P crêche until the age of twelve. Then, suddenly, she was dumped into a Tehran orphan ranch along with four clonal siblings.”

“A lot of people get shunted off-line like that. Bureaucracy.”

“Yeah. But check the date. August of thirty-two—the Works Trust has half the high staff of D and P arrested for sedition. A power struggle. September of thirty-two, Zoe and sibs are dumped in Tehran. January of thirty-five—another staff shake-up, this time in the Works Trust itself. A bunch of Devices and Personnel kachos are reinstated, hauled back from the rehab farms and declared heroes. March, of thirty-five, D and P collects Zoe from the orphan farm.”

“Just Zoe?”

“Her sibs didn't survive. Iranian orphan farms aren't exactly the Lunar Hilton. All Zoe knows is that she was rescued. They bought her loyalty, cheap.”

“Cheap for them. It must have been traumatic for her.”

“Can't you tell?”

He nodded. “She's not exactly well-socialized.”

“She's a victim and a tool, raised on promises and theory and thymostats and bullshit. Some advice? Don't get attached.”

I'm not attached, Hayes thought. To anything. “She's a long way from home, Elam.”

“Not as far as you might think. She has a keeper, a Devices and Personnel kacho named Avrion Theophilus. He was her trainer, her teacher, and her surrogate father after Tehran. And according to this agenda, he's coming to Isis.”

Night fell, reflected on a dozen screens throughout Yambuku. Hayes had a session with Dieter Franklin. The tall planetologist
drank too much coffee and took his pet theories, something about the microtubule structure of Isian microcells, out for a walk. It was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep Hayes up past midnight.

The station was quieter after dark. Curious, Hayes thought, how we all pace ourselves to these circadian rhythms, even though the Isian day-clock ran a couple of hours slow. He walked the corridors of the core once around, a caretaker's gesture, then went to bed.

Zoe was excited over her first walkabout. She was restrained during the suit-up, but Hayes knew by the color in her cheeks and the flash in her eyes that she had imagined this moment for years.

The memory of Mac Feya rose up to dim his own excitement. Zoe's excursion suit was impossibly flimsy. Elam was right: this wasn't an improved bioarmor, it was a whole catalog of new technologies . . . carefully hoarded, he supposed, by the gnomes of Devices and Personnel. And yes, if it worked, it would transform the human presence on Isis.

Zoe was ready and waiting by the time he had sealed himself into his infinitely more cumbersome bioarmor. She appeared limber and free by comparison, with nothing riding her body but a semitransparent membrane, a pelvic sheath to recycle wastes, a breathing apparatus that hugged her mouth, and a pair of substantial boots.

Elam Mather, supervising from well within the sterile core, reviewed their telemetry and cleared them to leave the station. They had already advanced through three layers of semi-hot exterior-ring cladding; now the final door, a tall steel atmosphere lock, slid open on naked daylight.

Not sunlight. A solid overcast hid the sun and made the nearby forest shadowy and forbidding. Zoe stepped past Hayes in his massive armor and stood in the clearing, looking ridiculously vulnerable.
She looked, in fact, almost naked. Her excursion suit gave her features a ruddy glow but concealed nothing.

Her arms and shoulders moved without restraint. Her upper body was supple, small taut muscles moving under blemishless skin. Her breasts were compact and firm. Hayes feared for her, but Zoe was fearless. She moved awkwardly at first, the leg and pelvic gear hampering her stride, but with a coltish, obvious joy.

“Slowly, Zoe,” he warned her. “This is a telemetry exercise, not a picnic.”

She came to a stop, hands out, chin uplifted. “Tam! Do you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

She was practically giddy. “The rain!”

The rain had begun imperceptibly—at least to Hayes—a gentle mist rolling out of the west. Raindrops spattered the dry clearance and rattled the leaves of the forest. Droplets began to bead on Zoe's second skin. Dewdrops. Jewel-like. Toxic.

Hayes had never been to Earth. The biotic barrier was simply too steep; it would have meant countless inoculations and immunesystem tweaks, not to mention a grueling whole-body decon when he moved back into Kuiper space. But he was a human being, and a billion years of planetary evolution had been written into his body. He understood Zoe's pleasure. Warm rain on human skin: What was it like? Not like a shower in the scrub room, he thought—judging by Zoe's helpless grin.

She turned and moved precipitously toward the wooded perimeter, arms loose at her sides. Vine trees looped bay-green leaves above her head. In the wet shade, she was almost invisible. Hayes watched in consternation as she leaned down and plucked a vivid orange puffball from the mossy duff of the forest floor. The fungus dusted the air with spores.

The danger was glaringly self-evident. A single one of those spores could kill her in a matter of hours. A cloud of them wreathed Zoe's head, and she laughed through the respirator with childish delight.

He walked to her, as fast as his armor would permit. “Zoe! Enough of that. You'll overload the decon chamber.”

“It's alive,” she marveled. “All of it! I can
feel
it! It's as alive as we are!”

“I'd kind of like to keep it that way, Zoe.”

She grinned, and silver rain pooled at her feet.

He coaxed her in at last, after a half-hour's stroll around the station perimeter. Back inside, Zoe had finished showering by the time Hayes finally struggled out of his armor. He joined her in the quarantine chamber. Decontamination was agonizingly thorough and there was no sign that the excursion gear had worked less than perfectly, but Yambuku protocols called for a day in isolation while nanobacters monitored both of them for infection.

Two bunks, a wall monitor, and a food-and-water dispenser: That was Quarantine. Zoe stretched out on one of the cots, reduced by these blank walls to something less glorious than she had been in the open air. Hayes filed a brief written report for the IOS's archives, then ordered up a coffee.

Zoe occupied herself by leafing through the six-month itinerary, the document Elam had already shown him. Hayes found himself trying to imagine Zoe as Elam had described her, as a D&P bottle baby lost for two years in some barbaric orphan factory, sole survivor of her brood group.

Nothing quite so dramatic had happened to him, but he understood well enough the emotional consequences of exile and loneliness. Hayes had been born into the Red Thorn Clan, hardcore Kuiper Belt republicans one and all. Red Thorn bred a lot of Kuiper scientists, but he was the only one on the Isis Project—one of the very few Red Thorns on any kind of Trust-sponsored effort. A lot of Red Thorns had died in the Succession, and the clan's opinion of the Trusts was roughly equivalent to a quail's opinion of the snake that devours its eggs.

When Hayes signed his Isis contract, he had been disowned by both clan and family. He was tired by then of Red Thorn extremism
and would not have minded the excommunication, save that it included his mother—herself an Ice Walker, married to his father after a Kuiper potlatch in ‘26. Ice Walkers were equally hostile to the Trusts but were reputed to value family above all else. When his mother turned her back on him at the docks, she had been trembling with shame. He remembered the coral-blue jumper she had worn, possibly the soberest of all her bright-colored dresses. He had understood then that he might never see her again, that this humiliating operetta might be their last living contact.

After that, putting his signature to a Family loyalty oath had seemed an act as degrading as wading through excrement.

But it was the only road to Isis.

How much worse, though, for Zoe, raised as a machine and brutalized when D&P fell out of favor. She had taken a loyalty oath, too, Hayes thought, but hers had been written in blood.

She turned the last page of the itinerary. He saw her mouth congeal into a frown. “Bad news?”

She looked up. “What? Oh—no! Not at all. Good news! Theo's coming to visit.”

Avrion Theophilus. Her teacher, Hayes thought. Her father. Her keeper.

T
O
A PREVIOUSLY
Earth-bound oceanologist such as Freeman Li, the Isian seafloor was a combination of the familiar and the bizarre in unpredictable proportions.

He would have recognized, perhaps on any similar planet, the pillowstone lava flows and the active volcanic vents—“black smokers” feeding the deep water with bursts of heat and blooms of exotic minerals. The powerful light of his benthic remensor picked out rainbow growths of bacterial mat on the surrounding seafloor, thermophyllic unicells in a thousand variations, almost as ancient as Isis herself. And this, too, was familiar. He had seen such things in the deep Pacific, years ago.

Away from these landmarks, the Isian ocean floor was powerfully strange. Highly calciferous plants rose in towers and obelisks and structures that resembled mosques. Swimming or moving among them were forms both vertebrate and invertebrate, some of them large but most very small, shining silvery or pastel-pale under the unaccustomed light.

Interesting as these creatures might be, it was the simple monocells Li had come to collect. Something in these most ancient forms of Isian life might provide a clue to the big questions: how life had evolved on Isis, and why, in all its eons-long exfoliation, that life had not produced anything that could reliably be called sentience.

Behind this lurked the larger question, the question Li had chewed over so often with the Yambuku planetologist Dieter Franklin, the question so central and so perplexing that it began to seem unanswerable: Are we alone?

Life was hardly a novelty in the universe. Isis was testament to that, and so were the even dozen biologically active worlds that had been detected by planetary interferometer. Life was, if not inevitable, at least relatively common in the galaxy.