Her signal bouncing off the positioning satellites, talking back to Tam’s helmet. Yes, that would work. Wincing, she reached around her torn excursion suit, exploring the tool belt with her fingers. Her fingers were as awkward as parade balloons, and there was moss slime, or something, all over her torso. She expected the beacon to have been lost in all her useless crawling, but no, here it was, a small box, slippery when it came out of its holster.
“I have it,” she managed. Crude, her human voice.
“Can you activate it for me?”
She fumbled with the device until she found the indentation on the side. She touched it repeatedly until the beacon came to life.
It chirped—one small sound to let her know it was working. And a light came on, a tiny red indicator on the face of the unit.
Small as it was, it was nevertheless a light. Zoe held it up to her face, basking in the sensation of vision. Faint, precious spark! It illuminated, if poorly, anything within a centimeter or so of the beacon. Beacon indeed.
She put her hand next to the light.
She didn’t like what she saw.
“Got it,” Tam said. “Loud and clear. Hang on, Zoe. Not long now.”
The stars—or at least their planets—were alive and had been talking to themselves (singing to themselves, Zoe understood) for billions of years.
Isis, disguised as her memory of Dieter Franklin, sang her a soothing song. A nursery song. Something her nannies had once sung to her, a silly rhyme about the seashore. If you put a shell to your ear you can hear the sea.
Consciousness, Isis told her, is born in the small things of the universe, though no small thing is itself conscious. The trick life learned, Isis explained, was to sustain a ghostly contact when one cell divided into two, a quantum equivalency of electron pairs suspended in microtubules, “like the particle-pair link that connects you to Earth.”
Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose. We see the stars, after all, Zoe thought. We just can’t hear them.
Animal consciousness, Isis said, is a rare event in the universe. Cherished for its rarity. The galactic bios welcomed home its orphans. Isis was sad that so many had died needlessly—brief flickers here of Macabie Feya, Elam Mather—but that was unpreventable, an autonomic reflex of the Isian bios; an action as involuntary as the beating of Zoe’s heart, and just as difficult to moderate. But Isis was doing her best.
“I’m not dead,” Zoe noted.
“You’re different, little one.”
Different enough to survive?
One of my girls survived.
Isis was silent on the subject.
TOO LATE, KENYON Degrandpre thought.
He marched, head high, down the ring corridor of the crippled IOS.
Too late.
Look at me, he thought. Look at me in my uniform, crisp and neat. The ring corridor was virtually empty—large numbers of the crew had elected to die discreetly, in their cabins—but the few he passed still regarded him with a frightened deference. His hand was on his quirt, just in case. But the enlightened manager seldom stoops to corporal punishment.
He walked stiffly, formally, toward the last of the docking bays, where the escape vehicle waited to take him away from the IOS, to the Higgs vessel. He was conscious of his footsteps, rhythmic and proportioned. He did not veer to the left or to the right. He walked in the middle of the ring corridor, its corrugated walls equidistant from his braced shoulders. He slouched only at the low bulkhead doors.
He passed through a section of crew quarters. Each crewman had private quarters, cloistered steel cubicles hardly larger than university carrels and equipped with folding beds. Some of these doors were open, and in some of the rooms Degrandpre passed he saw men and women inert on their cots, blood crusting on their noses and lips. Occasionally he heard a moan, a scream. Most of the doors were closed. Most of the crew had chosen to perish in privacy.
“Slow,” Corbus Nefford had called this disease. Slow in its incubation perhaps, by the yardstick of Isian microorganisms. But not in its final effect. From first symptoms to death, three or four hours might elapse. Not more.
The survivors he passed wore a blank, shocked look. They had not died, but expected to; or believed against all reason in some imminent rescue, a miraculous reversal of fate.
But Degrandpre believed in that, too. He found himself finally unable to contemplate the possibility of his own death. Not when he had gone to such obscene lengths to prevent it: the multiple quarantines, the killing of the Marburg evacuees, the breaking of the particle-pair link to Earth. No: In the end he must survive, else all was meaningless.
To that end he modulated his steps and crossed the thick steel threshold of the emergency dock with an apparent calm. Only the sweat rolling down his cheeks betrayed him. The sweat bothered him, as his physical weakness bothered him. If he wasn’t ill, was he mad? Was illness madness?
He arrived shortly after the appointed time and was disappointed to find only three of his senior managers waiting in the prep room, a small chamber linked directly to the escape vessel. Leander, Solen, and Nakamura. The others, Leander explained, were ill.
But we have escaped it, Degrandpre told them. The virus hasn’t entered our bodies; or if it has, it has been weakened to such a degree that our bodies can defend themselves.
After all, he thought. Here I am.
He used his senior manager’s key to unlock and activate the escape vehicle. The process was not dramatic. A heavy door slid open. Beyond it was the cramped interior of the escape craft, acceleration couches arrayed in a circle, no flight controls; this was a kind of enormous tractible, capable of one intelligent act, docking with the Higgs sphere.
Leander said, “I feel like a coward.”
“There’s no cowardice in this. There’s nothing more for us to do.”
Nakamura hesitated at the threshold. “Manager,” she quavered, “I’m not well.”
“None of us are well. Get in or stay out.”
The escape vehicle lurched away from the IOS and followed a looping route to the Higgs launcher, waiting at the L-5 between Isis and her small moon.
The Higgs vehicle was embedded in an icy planetisimal, deposited here by a tractible tug some seven years ago. Remains of the tractible thrusters still dotted the object, blackened nozzles like rusty sculptures set in a dark stone garden. The wholly automated launch complex noted the proximity of the escape vehicle and negotiated docking protocols with it.
The smaller vessel docked successfully. Inside the planetisimal, lights flickered on in anticipation of human presence. Temperatures in its narrow corridors bumped up to twenty-one degrees centigrade. Medical tractibles lined up at the docking hatches in case of need.
The launch complex queried the escape module repeatedly, but received no intelligible answer.
After a time, as if disappointed by the nonappearance of an expected guest, the launch complex darkened itself once more. Habitat chambers cooled to ambient. Liquid water was returned to ice vessels for storage.
Supercooled processors clocked time with infinite patience. Isis prowled on in the orbit of its sun, and no human voices spoke.
TAM HAYES’ HELMET light was good for at least a day and a half. More than likely, the lamp would outlast him, would continue to burn while his corpse cooled—or, perhaps, heated, nursing a furious brood of Isian microorganisms.
So far, however, he was intact.
He forced his way through the narrow digger tunnels. The sheer fragility of his stripped-down excursion armor and the size of his helmet obliged him to move slowly. He had been most afraid of an attack from the diggers—he was horribly vulnerable—but the animals had kept their distance outside and were nowhere visible inside the mound complex. There was, however, much evidence of their recent presence. He passed loculi and cul-de-sacs filled with food,
carefully categorized—here a cache of seeds; there a mound of fruit fermenting in the heat. Down other tributary tunnels he saw motion just beyond the range of his lamp, a squirming that might have been sex, or birth, or child-rearing, or a barn dance.
He followed his beacon and kept his com link up, listening as Zoe’s occasional monologues veered toward incoherency.
The Yambuku shuttle must have left for the obstinately silent IOS by now. Tam Hayes and Zoe Fisher were the last people on the continent. Outside the mound tunnels, over the long western steppes and the temperate forest and the spires of the Copper Mountain range, night was falling.
Despite her fever, despite her frequent lapses into unconsciousness, Zoe heard the voice of Isis more clearly now.
Heard it, or at least understood it. She knew (and she tried to tell Hayes, in her lucid moments) how the consciousness of Isis rode on the planet’s bios; how every living cell, from the most ancient thermophyllic bacteria to the specialized cells in the black eye of a digger, hosted the entity Isis. Cells lived and died, evolved, formed communities, became fish and birds and animals; none of these things knew Isis or was controlled by Isis. Isis rode on their mechanism the way the contents of a book ride on the ink-stained leaves of paper.
“It’s only,” she whispered to Tam Hayes—to someone—Theo, perhaps—“it’s only when animal consciousness reaches a certain complexity that Isis can interact with it. The diggers. They’re not really very smart. They’re ninety-percent animal. But they have a little bit of Isis in them. They can hear her, a little.”
And:
“It’s why none of the SETI projects ever found anything. The galaxy is full of life, and it is talking—oh God, Tam, if you could hear the voices! Old, old voices, older than Earth! But we couldn’t listen. There’s an Isis, but there’s no Earth. Whatever spores of life fertilized Earth back when Earth was hot and new, they were broken—the link was broken, the quantum coherency life learned to carry between the stars was broken, lost. Earth grew wild and alone. When primates learned the trick of consciousness, of neurons talking to neurons the way planets talk to planets, making consciousness out of quantum events—when that happened, there was nothing to get in the way of our evolution, no Earth, only Earthlings.”
And hadn’t she felt it? Hadn’t she felt something of the kind when she carried the filthy laundry under the winter stars? This was wrong, all the torture and silences and hostility and the slaughterhouse of human history, this was wrong; but what was right? What was so dear and so utterly lost that she ached at the absence of it?
“Why do people worship gods, Tam?”
Because we’re descended from them, Zoe thought. We’re their mute and crippled offspring, in all our millions.
She coughed and felt the wetness of blood on her hand.
Somewhere in these catacombs of mud and dung, Tam Hayes was scrabbling toward her.
Hayes, listening to Zoe’s babbling in the earpiece of his helmet, wondered how much of this she had picked up from Dieter Franklin. How much was her own delirium?
How much might even be true?
But there was too much of Zoe in it. She needed the idea of Isis, he thought, the idea of a community of worlds, because she had never been truly welcome in any world of her own. The crippled orphan was Zoe, not humanity.
This long tunnel, like a central corridor, coiled deeper into the earth. Hayes imagined a spiral carved into the stony darkness by countless generations of diggers. Veering around obstacles, lurching with idiot persistency toward the bedrock.
Water-rich, almost transparent plants thrived on the moisture at the tunnel’s floor. Hayes wondered at their metabolism: lightless, mineral-driven. The plants gushed sticky fluid under the weight of his gloves.
Zoe’s delusion. The sky talking to her. Well, he understood the feeling. He had looked at the stars often enough, had climbed up through the Red Thorn sun gardens to a port observatory and watched the sky wheeling around him, the sun no more than an especially bright star among all the carousel stars. That had been one of his mother’s convictions, that the bios linked all things, from kangaroos to Martian microfossils. It was a religious belief, part of her Ice Walker upbringing. He had rejected it along with the rest of the Kuiper Belt’s patchwork ideologies—half puritan, half libertine.
But he had believed it when he watched the stars. He knew what it was to feel meaning beyond the limit of his comprehension, the stars a vast city he could never enter, a republic in which he could never claim citizenship.
He felt a cool wetness under the arch of his left leg and knew abstractly that he must have compromised the delicate core of his protective membrane. Just like Zoe. But he didn’t have her immune augmentation. He would have to hurry.
No need for caution now.
Maybe she could use his helmet to find her way out.
She was tempted to give up.
Isis couldn’t save her—not her natural body, which was dying despite all her augmentation, under attack from too many unfamiliar microorganisms. She might have withstood a single infection, or two, or even three; but she was besieged now by organisms beyond number, weakened by hunger and thirst.
But Isis cherished her and would not let her go. Zoe—the pattern of her—could be sustained indefinitely in the dense matrix of the Isian bios. That was how Isis was talking to her, viral entities slipping into her nervous system, making fresh Isian cells out of Terrestrial neurons. Killing her, but remembering her. Imagining her. Dreaming her. Still, she waited for Tam.
When he reached her at last, he was deeply feverish.
He had forgotten, in all his desperate haste, why he was here—found himself aware only of the tunnel and its pressure on his knees and neck, the weight of soil above his head, the strangeness and the terror of it. And when that knowledge weighted too heavily, he would breathe slowly and fight the panic of confinement, the panic that threatened to overwhelm and suffocate him.
And when his hands ceased trembling and his legs regained the power of motion, he pressed on. Following the beacon leading him to Zoe.
Strange how she had come to mean so much to him, this Terrestrial orphan with a failed thymostat. How he had invested in her so many of his hopes and so much of his fear, and how she had led him into this labyrinth under Isis.
He imagined he was climbing, not crawling . . . that the brightness in the corridor before him was something more than the glare of his helmet lamp.
Zoe’s vision was failing, along with her other functions, but she saw at least faintly Tam’s light burning out of the darkness as he approached.
She blinked her eyes, a sticky sensation.
He knew when he saw her that what he had suspected was true: Zoe was beyond rescue.
The bios had been working hard at her.
She sat with her spine against the curved wall of the cul-de-sac, her excursion membrane as tattered as an old flag. There was dried blood on her belly, the color of sooty brick. Fungus had attacked her exposed skin, growing in swollen circles of blue or stark white.
Even the albino moss had begun to feed on her, rising to the moisture of her in lush, trailing fingers. Her boots were buried in it.
She watched him unlatch and remove his helmet. The beam of the helmet’s lamp—so bright!—flashed wildly about the cul-desac. It shone on the ceiling of impacted clay and animal matter, on the gauzy insect web full of mummified husks, on the delicate bulbs of moss. He was offering his helmet to her, with all its rebreathing apparatus and water reserves and gaudy, glorious light.
The generosity of the act was heartbreaking.
But she waved away the gift. Too late, too late.
Hayes understood the gesture. He was saddened, but he set the helmet aside, its light aimed steadily now at the ceiling. With each breath he drew more Isian microorganisms into his lungs, not that it mattered. He summoned his strength and fit his body next to Zoe’s in the cramped space of the alcove. No fear of contact now. Life touches life, as Elam us
ed to say.
Heat radiated from Zoe, the heat of fever and the heat of parasitical infection. But her lips, when he touched them, were cool. Cool as the rim of a bucket of water drawn from a deep and mossy well.
He said, “I do hear them. The stars.”
But she was past listening.
The diggers avoided their store of strange-smelling meat until it had decomposed into a more familiar mass of diffuse enzymatic tissues, ripe with life. The smell became rich, then exotic, then irresistible.
Coiling into the meat chamber, one by one and one after another, they feasted for days.
THE ISIS ORBITAL Station wheeled through its circuit of the planet, crippled but functional.
Spaceborne tractibles fetched water and oxygen from Turing extractors on the moon’s icy poles, replacing the small but inevitable losses of recycling. Lately many human bodies had been discovered by the housekeeping tractibles, and these too had been recycled for their nutrients. Flush with fresh sources of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and trace elements, the gardens thrived. Sun panels cast their glow on dense hedgerows of kale and lettuce, a bounty of tomatoes and cucumbers.
Avrion Theophilus had taken refuge in the gardens while the others died—Dieter Franklin, Lee Reisman, Kwame Sen, and everyone who had shuttled up from Yambuku, victims of the slow virus that had infiltrated the station.
The virus continued to tunnel through bulkhead seals in search of nourishment, but after a time, it found none; after a time, all its spores lay dormant.
Below, on the planet’s surface, Marburg and Yambuku were deserted, and Theophilus had ignored the increasingly desperate pleas from the arctic outpost as its perimeters, too, were breached.
All dead now; and, to his horror, he had found the escape craft missing, the particle-pair link to Earth permanently broken.
And yet he lived.
He had insisted on traveling to Isis with the same immunesystem modifications his Trust had given Zoe Fisher. The wetware protected him quite effectively from, at least, the single organism that had infiltrated the IOS.