“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 th
e 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.
TO 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.
But there had not been, for all of mankind’s attentive listening, any intelligible signal, any evidence of nonhuman space travel, any hint of a star-spanning civilization. We expand into a void, Li thought. We call out, but no one answers.
We are unique.
He stowed his cargo of bacterial scrapings in the remensor’s hold and turned back to the surface. He had other work to do. He was the Oceanic Station’s chief manager, and this excursion by telepresence had been a guilty pleasure. There were reports to be filed, complaints to be heard. All the dreary business of a Works Trust enterprise to be hacked away like an infestation of barnacles, until it inevitably grew back.
The remensor rose like a steel bubble toward the surface. He watched the seafloor drop away but felt no sensation of motion, only his own stiff spine pressing the back of the chair in the telepresence room. Running the remensor was so absorbing that he tended to forget to shift position; he always left these expeditions with his chronic lumbar pains acting up.
He reached the point at which daylight became perceptible, the waters around him turning indigo, then sunset-blue, then turbulent green. The floating Oceanic Station was in sight, a distant chain of pods and anchors like a string of pearls dangling from the hand of the sea, when the alarm began to sound.
Li handed over the remensor controls to his assistant, Kay Feinn, and scanned the situation report flashing on the remensor room’s main screen before he attended to his own rapidly flashing scroll.
General shutdown, barriers up, contamination detected in Pod Six. The lowermost of the Oceanic Station’s laboratory units had gone hot. It took him another ten minutes trolling for information before the engineering crew determined that yes, the pod had apparently gone hot, and no, the two men trapped inside it at the time of the alarm weren’t responding to repeated calls. Telemetry from the affected pod had also failed; the structure was closed and blank. The electronic failures were particularly perplexing. Faced with locked doors and no input, the engineering people weren’t sure what the next step ought to be.
Li knew what it ought to be: He ordered the station’s shuttle prepped for emergency evacuation in case of further problems. He told his comms crew to alert the IOS and ask for its advice. He was trying to put through a personal call to Kenyon Degrandpre when Kay, still wearing the telepresence gear, said, “I think you should look at this.”
“Not a good time.” Obviously.
“I’m down at Pod Six,” Kay said. “Look.”
He canceled the call and climbed back into the telepresence chair.
Pod Six had been disastrously compromised—that much was obvious from the alarm sequence—but Li couldn’t see any physical damage from the perspective of the submersible remensor.
Multiple beams of light thatched the ridges of Pod Six’s external sensor array, revealing nothing. Huge translucent invertebrates—Freeman’s staff called them “church bells”—drifted toward the remensor in great numbers, attracted by the light; but they were a harmless nuisance, mindlessly trawling the warm equatorial water for organelles. A flock of church bells could hardly have shut down an entire laboratory.
“Kay, what am I supposed to see?”
The two men trapped in the compromised pod were Kyle Singh, a Kuiper microbiologist, and Roe Devereaux, a Terrestrial marine biologist. Even if they had survived the initial biohazard, whatever it was, they might not survive the electrical failure. Even in Isis’s warm equatorial seas, Pod Six was deep enough to shed heat quickly. And the air recyclers would already have been overloaded, revved by the alarm protocols into toxic-emergency mode.
But almost certainly, Freeman thought, the men inside were dead by now. Pod Six was home to the deep-sea alkaloid inventory. Lots of hot organisms were down there, and if something had gotten out of the glove boxes and into their air supply, Devereaux and Singh would have toxed out almost immediately. Below Six, there was only the anchor line and the blind deeps of the Isian sea. The water here glowed an inky turquoise, circulating in a thermopause between the habitat of the pressure-loving church bells and the busy phytochemistry of the shallows. Plankton-like monocells and snowflake colonies of bacteria sifted down from the surface waters, a blizzard feeding the biologically rich benthic zones.
The pod seemed intact, if dark. Devereaux had been complaining of algal films clouding the pod windows and external arrays. But none of that was visible to Freeman.
“Circle right,” Kay said emotionlessly. “I thought I saw some outgassing at a window seal. Maybe we should get an engineer in here.”
He played the remensor’s narrow beams across a porthole-like circle of augmented glass.
There. Motion. In the lamplight, a string of rising pearls. Bubbles. Air.
Li’s stomach contracted with a more personal fear. This wasn’t an overpressure vent or a ballast exchange. Kay was right. This was a leak.
He handed back the remensor gear, called the ops room, and told the crisis manager to have his men stand by the decouplers. “And keep the ballast detail alert in case we destabilize.” A fully breached Pod Six would have to be cut loose or it would drag down the rest of the pods with it. It was a worst-case scenario: Drop the breached pod, hope the tube seals held, and try to keep the whole chain from going pendulum.
Then he took back the telepresence chair and moved the remensor away from the crippled pod, catching a second trail of air in the columns of his lights. More leaks; God, he thought, the lab was a fucking sieve!
And found himself watching with numb panic as the pod began to collapse on itself—quickly and utterly silently. Bimetallic seams geysered froth, then twisted inward, hemispheres of steel torn into ragged blades. There was no sound—his remensor wasn’t equipped for it—but the shock must have been tremendous; the remensor bounced hard before it steadied, im
ages ghosting and fragmenting in Freeman’s vision. A tremor traveled up the pod chain and rattled the floor under him.
He ordered an emergency disconnect and watched it happen. Explosive bolts severed the pod from the rest of the station. Fragments of debris—polyester cushions, glove-box lattices, aggregates of clothing that might or might not have contained bodies—separated from tangled metal and churned toward the surface. The bulk of the pod simply sank, caught in its own anchor chains, as if a vast hand had reached up to claim it.
Church bells, faintly iridescent, darted through the roiling water and fled into the deeps.
Kenyon Degrandpre hailed a transit tractible to the orbital station’s ops room as soon as news of the disaster reached him. He was afraid of what he might learn, but he mustn’t let that cloud his judgment. Deal with events now; leave consequences for later.
He found the operations center crowded with junior managers competing for console space. He sent away everyone of less than command status except for the engineers and told the communications crew to stay at their posts pending further orders. Better to have them begging for bathroom breaks than getting underfoot. He kept four subordinates with him and ordered the main screen cleared of everything but traffic from the damaged oceanic outpost.
Where everyone must be very busy. Only the standard telemetry channels were active. Even there, the damage was obvious. The deepest section of the undersea pod chain had imploded only minutes after a biohazard alarm shut it down. Obviously the two events were related, but how? With the pod itself lost, answers might be hard to come by. Not that anyone was looking very hard for answers; the outpost was working frantically to restore its own stability now that it had jettisoned the damaged lab. Degrandpre wondered whether the jettison had been truly necessary or whether Freeman Li might be covering something up, but his engineers assured him it was an act of self-preservation. Still. . . .