“Looks like our gunk,” Elam said.
“Pardon me?”
“Bacterial slimes on the external seals.”
“Like this?”
“Well, not exactly. Yours are ocean dwellers, ours are airborne. I don’t recognize those granular bodies in the miotic canali. But the way they lock together is awfully familiar. Um, Li, you’re losing the image again.”
Freeman Li said, uncharacteristically, “Fuck!” His shoulders straightened sharply. There was a pause. The image swam into an unrecognizable meshwork of colored pixels, and this time it didn’t resolve.
Then Li said in a brittle tone, “Leave the chamber, Elam.”
There was a sudden hissing sound she couldn’t identify. Elam felt the first touch of real fear now—a tingle in her jaw, a dull roar in her ears. “Li, what is it?”
He didn’t answer. Under his protective gear, he had begun to tremble.
Instantly, her mouth went dry. “God, Li—”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
She moved without thinking. Her lab reflexes weren’t fresh but they were deeply ingrained. He hadn’t asked her for help; he had issued an order, on the authority of whatever it was he’d seen in the glove box.
She ran for the lab door, but it was already gliding shut, a slab of oiled steel. Ceiling fans roared to life, producing negative pressure and drawing possibly contaminated air up into series of HEPA and nano filters. A siren began to wail through the pod. It sounded, Elam thought madly, like a screaming child. She moved toward the door as the gap narrowed, knowing even as she ran that the margin of time was impossibly thin; she was already, in effect, sealed inside.
She turned, gasping, as the bulkhead slid into place. The pod was airtight now. The fans stopped, though the siren continued to shriek.
Freeman Li had taken his hands away from the glove box. Something had peeled away patches of his suit and gloves, turned the impermeable membranes into scabs of onionskin. Whole sections of raw flesh were exposed and beginning to blister.
So impossibly fast!
He tore off his goggles. His face was a mask of blood, nostrils gushing freely, his eyes already scarlet with burst capillaries.
He said something incomprehensible—it might have been her name—and collapsed to the floor.
Elam’s heart raced. She didn’t scream, because it seemed to her that the siren was already screaming on her behalf, that all the dread in the world had been summed into that awful noise. The floor of the pod seemed to slip sideways; she sat down hard on her tailbone a scant meter from Freeman Li’s twitching corpse.
She put her fingers to her own nose, drew them back and looked blankly at the bright red spots of blood.
So this is death, she thought. All this red mess. So untidy. She closed her eyes.
THE SPIN OF the IOS was fortuitously timed. Kenyon Degrandpre was at his small office viewport and looking in the right direction when the latest Higgs sphere arrived.
The effect wasn’t spectacular. He had seen it before. A flash in the starry sky, that was all, brief as summer lightning: a scatter of photons and energetic particles, and then the afterglow, a blue Cherenkov halo. A Higgs launch tortured the vacuum around itself, forcing virtual particles into unequivocal existence. It was not simply a journey but, in its way, an act of creation.
The Higgs sphere with its carefully shielded cargo was of course invisible at this distance, a speck in the greater darkness, still half a million miles away. Rendezvous tugs had already left the IOS to retrieve it, the sphere’s transponder announcing its location and condition. But of course it had arrived exactly where it was expected. Higgs translations were accurate to within a fraction of a kilometer.
The Works Trust had supplied Degrandpre with a cargo manifest; he held it in his hand. Aboard that invisible spacecraft were a number of unfamiliar and ominous things. Radical new genetic algorithms for the Isian Turing factories. Small robotic probes to be launched into the outer system. And, far from least, the new man, the “observer,” the cipher, the threat: Avrion Theophilus. Degrandpre’s rather dated Book of the Families described Theophilus as a high-level Devices and Personnel officer, loosely connected to the Psychology Branch as well as a distant relative of the Quantrills and the Atlanta Somersets. Which might mean . . . well, anything.
Degrandpre turned to his scroll and called up Zoe Fisher’s file, scanning it again for clues. Apart from the obvious connection with Theophilus—he had been her case manager—there was no hint of his hidden agenda. Or of hers, assuming that this Zoe Fisher really was some kind of D&P dog-in-the-manger. He couldn’t imagine what Terrestrial dispute might turn on the fate of one bottle baby, for all her fine new technology and linguistic skills. But history had often enough turned on smaller fulcrums: a bullet, a microbe, a misplaced word.
Restless, he called Ops for an update on the Turing manifests. What came back through his scroll was the sound of confusion, until Rosa Becker, his second-shift supervisor, picked up a voice link. “Sir, we’re having problems with our telemetry.”
Degrandpre closed his eyes. God, no. Please. Not now. “What telemetry?”
“Telemetry from the deep-sea outpost. It’s gone. We’re blank here—the station’s just off the map.”
“Tell me it’s satellite malfunction.”
“Only if we lost all our redundancies at once . . .” A pause, another crackle of hurried conversation. “Correction. We have a single shuttle upbound from the pod chain. Reporting survivors on board. But that’s all.”
“What do you mean, that’s all?”
“According to the pilot . . .” Another pause. “No other survivors. Just wreckage.”
Just wreckage.
Freeman Li’s nightmare had come true.
“Sir?”
And mine, Degrandpre thought.
“I want that shuttle quarantined indefinitely,” he said, facing the immediate threat, postponing his own fear. “And sound the stations. We’re on full alert.”
But he felt like a dead man.
The occasion was Zoe’s first solo excursion, the final systems test before she attempted a daylong hike to the Copper River. Tam Hayes left his work—gene-mapping the monocell cultures—and crossed the core quad to the north wing, where Zoe was already suiting up.
His thoughts careened between Zoe’s excursion and his research. In both cases, mysteries outnumbered certainties. Cellular genetics on Isis would remain a puzzle for years, Hayes was certain. The biochemical machinery was infuriatingly complex. What to make of organelles that also led independent lives outside their parent cells, that reproduced as retroviruses? Or the tiled complexities of microtubules ringing the cell walls? Every question begged a thousand more, most of them concerning Isian paleobiology, a field of study that barely existed. Apart from a couple of glacial core samples and Freeman Li’s work with thermophyllic bacteria, there wasn’t any hard data, only conjecture. All those unbroken years of evolutionary recomplication had obviously bred ancient parasitisms deep into the mechanism of life—every energy exchange, every selective ionization, every release of ATP was a fossilized act of predation. Complex symbiotic partnerships had arisen the way mountains rise from the clash of tectonic plates. Out of conflict, collaboration; out of chaos, order. The mysteries.
His mother had trained him in the Mysteries, had taken him to chapel every month. Both Red Thorns and Ice Walkers were primarily Old Deists, a faith much given to philosophizing. The monthly sermons had gone over his head, but he thought often of the annual invocation in the observatory chamber. He had been taken into that cold, domed space to count constellations like rosary beads while the warm bodies of the congregation pressed against him, voices joined in hymns as his mother clutched his hand so tightly it hurt. Was it entirely his fault, then, that he had fallen in love with the stars?
The Red Thorns had thought so.
He found Zoe in the prep room struggling into her excursion suit, Tia and Kwame tabbing the seams for
her. Kuiper-born, the two had never learned to respect Terrestrial nudity taboos and they obviously didn’t know or care why Zoe flinched at their touch. She looked at Hayes with a rescue-me expression.
He sent the two technicians down to the shuttle bay to give Lee Reisman a hand.
“Thank you,” Zoe said meekly. “Really, I can do this myself. They designed the gear that way. It just takes time.”
“Shall I leave too?”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
“If you need help, ask.”
She drew on the leggings, the active membrane as limp as plastic film until it found and matched the contours of her skin; then it mapped itself in place, pinkly translucent, a second skin. She bent to pull on the more conventional hip boots, her small breasts bobbing.
She looked up, caught his eye and blushed conspicuously. Hayes wondered if he should turn away. What would a Terrestrial do?
She pulled her arms through the filmy torso membrane and said something too quiet for him to hear. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry?”
“It would be faster if you sealed the tabs.”
He came across the room, recognizing his eagerness to touch her and suppressing it; she was easily frightened. . . . The tabs of the excursion suit were three bars of fleshy material where the seams met across the small of her back. He touched her skin where it dimpled against the curve of her spine and felt an odd sense of familiarity . . . she was practically a Kuiper woman, at least genetically, her genome sampled from the stock that had settled the asteroids, hardy raw material for a new diaspora. . . . He sealed the garment gently and watched the membrane form itself to her body, heard her indrawn breath as the protective skin tightened over breasts, nipples, the base of her throat. Without the headgear, without the waste-management pack, she might have been naked. His hand lingered on the ridge of her hip, and she shivered but didn’t object.
But when he raised his hand to touch her hair, she ducked her head away. Whispered, “Not there.”
“Why not?”
“Only where I’m protected.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Was this what she wanted? Needed? He put his hands on her waist and drew her closer. “Protected,” she had said: protected against contact, he supposed, or against the idea of contact.
He wanted to tilt up her head and say something comforting. He might have, if the station alarm had not sounded.
Zoe gasped and backed away as if stung.
Hayes looked at the blinker on his pocket scroll. Something about the oceanic outpost. No details, but obviously more bad news.
It was the bios, Hayes thought, closing in on him again.
PART
TWO
ZOE WASN’T TRULY alone in the forest. She was surrounded at all times by insect-sized remensors and larger, spiderlegged tractibles; and she was linked to Yambuku by extensive telemetry . . . but she felt alone, unspeakably alone, especially after midnight.
This was what she had been born for, this aloneness. Her hermetic impulse had been built into her DNA, the same gen mods the first Kuiper colonists had carried into the emptiness beyond Neptune—a race of monks, carving their hermitages out of frozen, starlit massifs. She was not afraid to be alone.
Which didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid.
She found herself frightened of a number of things.
She woke well after midnight in the darkness of her tent. The tent was a simple polymer-and-foam geodesic, designed not to protect her from the elements—her excursion suit did that—but to disguise her from the native wildlife. The excursion suit was a semiopen system; she carried food and water in sterile containers with self-sealing nozzles, but she excreted the inevitable wastes—bluntly, piss, shit, and CO2. Her wastes were scrubbed by the suit’s processors and nanobacters, but even sterilized human waste was a magnet for Isian predators. Solid and liquid wastes could be contained and buried, but her breath and perspiration were harder to conceal. The tent helped, circulating external air slowly and bleeding her molecular signature through osmotic and HEPA filters.
But no system was perfect. The loss of the Ocean Station less than ten days ago had made that perfectly clear. Systems were imperfect, or imperfectly adapted to the Isian biosphere, which led to the unhappy thought that she might even now be attracting nocturnal predators that had evaded her perimeter defenses.
That hushed, woody rattle in the distance, for example, might be wind in the trees, or it might be. . . .
Bullshit.
She sat up, exasperated, all hope of sleep fled. She found it hard enough to rest in the excursion suit, which faithfully reported to her skin the pressure of every twig and pebble under the gel floor of the tent—but it was worse to be afflicted with the midnight jitters. An array of robotic remensors scanned her perimeter at all times for motion or telltale molecular signatures; nothing larger than a grub could sneak up on her. And her tent was, if not perfect, certainly grub-proof.
So to hell with nagging fears. She was just restless. She pulled on her protective leggings, opened the tent door and stepped out into the windy darkness of the cycad-like Isian forest.
The only ambient light came from a sprinkle of stars above the leaf canopy, but there was enough of it to give the suit’s photon multiplier something to work with. The forest through her iris lenses appeared as a map of squat tree boles against a diffuse grid of wind-rippled foliage. Depthless, eerie. She adjusted her lenses to look for heat sources. And saw nothing more than a few roosting aviants and timid scavenger voles hardly larger than her thumb.
Nothing to lose sleep over. She turned her face to the sky again.
The brightest star wasn’t a star at all. It was a planet, named Cronos by some unimaginative Terrestrial number-bender when it was detected a century ago: the Isian system’s enormous gas giant, currently at the aphelion of its looping orbit. Cronos had contributed to Isian geohistory by sweeping the system of its rocky and icy debris; comets were rare in the Isian sky. Less a Titan, Zoe thought, than a fat guardian angel.
Her inner-ear com link came alive, hissing faintly.
“Zoe?” Tam Hayes’ voice. “Your telemetry puts you outside the tent and your pulse rate is up, so I assume you’re awake.”
“I don’t walk in my sleep, if that’s what you mean.”
But she was immensely relieved to hear his voice.
“Restless?”
“A little. Is that a problem?”
“No problem.”
The smallness of his voice inside her head made her even more aware of her position, alone in an alien forest. True, Yambuku wasn’t far away; but Yambuku was a sealed environment, a fragile bubble of Earth. She had left that bubble and she was outside of it, lost on Isis. On Isis, where there were no artificial lights, no roads, no amenities over the next horizon. Nothing over the horizon but more horizon, parallax to parallel; nothing between her and a planetary Level Five hot zone but a membrane a few molecules thick. Unsurprising then that Devices and Personnel had chosen to resurrect her genome from the old diaspora stock. Isis was at least as lonely as any barren Kuiper object. And much, much farther from home.
“Zoe?”
“I’m here.”
“We have a large animal paralleling your position, maybe fifty meters north-northwest. Nothing to worry about, but to avoid advertising your presence we’d like you to sit still for a few minutes.”
“Back to the tent?”
“We’ll keep you outside and mobile for now. Though I do wish you’d checked in before taking a walk. Just stay put, please, and let the tractibles do their work.”
“Is this thing stalking me?”
“Probably just curious. Quiet, please.”
She listened into the darkness but heard nothing. What kind of large animal? Most likely a triraptor, she supposed. She pictured it: eight-limbed, quadripedal, with four arms on its erect upper body and claws like tempered steel. Her excursion suit was tough enough to protect her
from the bites of small animals and invertebrates but not from the industrial-strength carnage of a triraptor attack.
“Zoe?”
She whispered, “I thought you wanted me quiet.”
“We’re okay as long as we don’t shout. Can you make yourself comfortable out there?”
She scanned the ground, located a fallen tree trunk and sat down on it. Tiny insects from a disturbed nest swarmed over her footgear. Harmless things. She ignored them. “ ‘Comfortable’ is relative. At least we can talk. Taking the night shift again?”
“Midnight to dawn, as long as you’re on excursion.”
She was flattered, not to mention intimidated. She had been thinking—could not help thinking—of her encounter with Hayes in the prep room, how she had wept in his arms at the news of the oceanic tragedy, and how she had found her way to his cabin that night. Of the way he had touched her, eagerly but gently, a way she had never been touched by another human being.
And she had permitted it.
Encouraged it.
Dreaded it.
“Little scary out there? Your pulse rate’s up again.”
She blushed—invisibly, thank God, unless the telemetry revealed that too. “It’s just . . . dark a long way in every direction.”
“Understood.”
A wind from the west turned leaves in the trees. The same wind no doubt carried her scent deeper into the forest. No, don’t think about that. “Tam?”
“Yes?”
“You grew up in the Kuipers. Red Thorn, you said?”
“Right. Red Thorn’s a big KB habitat in the Near Oorts, one of the oldest Kuiper settlements. Three-quarters G spin around the long axis, so I didn’t have to adapt much for Isis.”
“Happy childhood?”
There was a pause. “Happy enough.”
“Crêche or biofamily?”
“Bio. No creches in Red Thorn; we’re conservative.”