Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Tam Hayes spoke. He was sitting beside her at the console, but his voice seemed to ring out of the bright blue sky. “We’ll take it slowly at first. Follow as close as you can. If you lose sight of my remensor, use the display target to find me. And don’t be afraid to ask questions. Ready, Zoe?”

  Stupidly, she nodded. But with his headset on he could see only her dragonfly remensor, a device identical to his own. “Ready,” she said belatedly. Her hand trembled on the guide stick. Her remensor quivered responsively in the sunlight.

  “Up to three thousand meters first. Give you the long view.”

  As quickly as that, Hayes’ remensor spiraled into a vertical ascent. Zoe promptly guided her own dragonfly upward, not following him slavishly but keeping pace, demonstrating her ability. In the upper left corner of her headset an altitude readout flickered ruby iridescence.

  At three thousand meters, they paused. The winds here were stronger, and the dragonfly remensors bobbed like hovering gulls.

  “Altitude is the best defense,” Hayes said. “Given the cost of these remotes, we prefer to keep them away from insectivores. The greatest danger is from aviants. Any large bird within a kilometer will toggle a heads-up alert, at least here in the open. Down in the canopy, things are trickier. Keep your distance from trees if at all possible, and stay at least five or six meters off the ground. Basically, stay sharp and watch the telltales.”

  She knew all this. “Where are we going?”

  “To the digger colony. Where else?”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  Zoe decided she liked this man Tam Hayes.

  The dragonfly remensors relayed only audiovisual information. As they moved westward, there was no physical sensation of flight. Zoe remained aware of the pressure of the chair against her buttocks, her solid presence in the remote-sensor chamber. But the images she saw were deep, rich, and stereoscopic. And she could hear clearly what the remensors heard: at this altitude, only a gentle rush of air; lower, perhaps the trickle of water, the cries of animals.

  Together, they flew across the glinting ribbon of the Copper River, named by Hayes’ predecessor for his Kuiper Clan. Large aviants and small predators had gathered to drink along the sandy shore, where slower waters pooled. She saw a herd of epidonts sunning themselves in the shallows. Beyond the river the forest canopy closed tight once more, seed trees and spore trees undulating like so much green linen toward the foothills of the Copper Mountain range.

  “It’s all so familiar,” Zoe whispered.

  “Maybe it seems so.” Hayes’ voice came from the empty sky beside her. “From this height, it might almost be equatorial Earth. Easy to forget that Isis has a wildly different evolutionary history. Work we’ve done in the last six months suggests that life here remained unicellular far longer than it did on Earth. In Terrestrial organisms, the cell is a protein factory inside a protein fortress. Isian cells are all that but better defended, more efficient, far more complex. They synthesize a staggering array of organic chemicals and exist in far harsher environments. On the macroscopic level—in multicelled organisms—the functional difference is minor. The complexity is what matters. A carnivore is a carnivore and it relates to herbivores in the obvious way. Get down to the cellular level, the fundamental bios of the planet, and Isis looks a lot more alien. And more dangerous.”

  Zoe said, “I meant the terrain. I’ve flown this way in a thousand sims.”

  “Sims are sims.”

  “Survey-based sims.”

  “Even so. It’s different, isn’t it, when the landscape is alive under you?”

  Alive, Zoe thought. Yes, that was the difference. Even the best sims were only a sort of map. This was the territory itself, moving, changing. A passage in an ancient dialogue between life and time.

  Hayes escorted her lower. She saw his dragonfly remensor flash ahead of her, jewel-bright in the noon sun. The foothills lay ahead, wooded ridges etched with creeks. As the land rose, the forest changed from water-loving vine and cup plants and barrel trees to the smaller succulents that thrived in the stony upland soil. A dispersed ground cover opened fat emerald petals, like the blades of aloe vera. Zoe recited the Latin cognomens to herself, savoring the sound of them but wishing the Isian forest could have taken its common names from an Isian language, if there had ever been an Isian language. The closest equivalent was the cluck-and-mutter vocalizations of the diggers, and whether these constituted “language” in any meaningful sense was one of the questions Zoe hoped to answer.

  The digger colony itself, from the air, was exactly like its sims, a cluster of mud and daub mounds in a trampled clearance. Charred remnants of cook fires pocked the soil. Hayes circled the colony once, then descended in a slow spiral, watching the sky for predators attracted by the diggers’ refuse heaps. But the sky was clear. Impulsively, Zoe dropped ahead of him. Hayes didn’t rebuke her, and she was careful to stay within his security perimeter.

  She wanted to see the diggers.

  Only still images had been transmitted down the particle-pair link to Earth. She had seen multiple photographs, and more than that, images from a remote autopsy performed on a digger that had been killed by a predator, the carcass salvaged by tractible and dissected by surgical remensors. Bits of it were still preserved in Yambuku’s glove-box array—frozen blue and red tissue samples. Zoe had heard recordings of the diggers’ vocalizations and had analyzed them for evidence of internal grammar. (The results were ambiguous at best.) She knew the diggers as well as an outside observer could know them. But she had never seen them in vivo.

  Hayes seemed to understand her excitement, her impatience. His dragonfly remensor hovered protectively nearby. “Just not too close, Zoe, and don’t ignore your telltales.”

  The diggers were the most widely distributed vertebrate species on Isis. They were found on both major continents and several of the island chains; their settlements were often complex enough to be detectable from orbit.

  They were mound-builders and limestone-excavators. Their technology was crude: flint blades, fire, and spears. Their language—if it was a language—was equally rudimentary. They appeared to communicate by vocalizing, but not often and almost never socially—that is, they signaled, but they didn’t converse.

  Any deeper study of the diggers had been hampered by Isis’s toxic biosphere, by the impossibility of interacting with the diggers except through the intermediary of remensors or tractibles . . . and by the difficulty of knowing what went on inside their deeply tunneled mounds, where they spent a good portion of every day.

  Zoe descended past the treetops into a cacophony of birdsong. Flowers like immense blue orchids dangled from the high limbs of the trees, not blossoms but a competing species, a saprophytic parasite, stamenate organs projecting from the blooms like pink fingers dusted with copper-red pollen.

  She moved lower still, under the tree canopy and into a shadedappled space where fern-like plants unfurled from the damp crevices between exposed tree roots. Not too low, Hayes reminded her, because a triraptor or a sun lizard might uncoil from some stump or hole and crush her remensor between its teeth. She hovered in the generous, shadowed space between two huge puzzle trees, wings whirring softly, and turned her attention to the digger colony.

  The colony was old, well-established. It harbored nearly one hundred and fifty diggers by the last rough count. The population was supported by stands of fruit-bearing trees to the west, plentiful game, and a clear brook—more nearly a river in the rainy season—running out of the high Coppers. To the west was a meadow of sunny scrubweed where the diggers concentrated their excretions and buried their dead. The digger colony itself was a cluster of rock and red-clay mounds, each mound at least fifty meters wide, overgrown with scrub and fungal mycelia.

  The digger-holes were narrow and dark, reinforced with a concrete-like substance the diggers made from an amalgam of clay or chalk and their own liquid wastes.

  Two diggers wer
e present in the clearing around the mounds, hunched over their work like bleached white pill bugs. One tended the communal fire, feeding windfall and dried leaves into the flames. The other scraped a point onto a length of wood, a spear, turning it at intervals over the fire. Their motion was laconic. Zoe wondered if they were bored. Flints and knapping rocks littered the hardpack soil.

  “They’re not,” Hayes said, “beautiful animals.”

  She had forgotten that he was beside her. She started at the sound of his voice: too close, too intimate. Her dragonfly remensor wobbled in the shade.

  One of the diggers looked up briefly, black eyes swiveling. It was at least fifteen meters away.

  “They are, though,” Zoe whispered (but why whisper?). “Beautiful, I mean. Not in some abstract way. Beautifully functional, beautifully adapted for what they do.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  She shrugged, another wasted gesture. The diggers were beautiful, and Zoe didn’t particularly care whether Hayes could see that or not.

  A harsher, stronger evolution had shaped them. One of the diggers stood erect in the sunlight, and she appreciated the versatility Isis had built into it, a sort of living Swiss Army knife. Upright, the digger was a meter and a half tall. Its domed gray head projected from a sheath of flesh like a turtle’s head. Its eyes, black and immensely sensitive, rolled in rotary sockets. Its upper arms, the digging arms with their spade-shaped dactyls, hung laxly from high shoulder joints. One of its smaller manipulative arms grasped the new spear, multijointed thumbs wrapped around the wood. Its cartilaginous belly-plates expanded and contracted as it moved, giving it the look of something too flexible for its size, like a giant millipede.

  The digger’s beak-shaped muzzle opened. It emitted a series of muted clicks, which its companion ignored. Talking to itself?

  “That’s Old Man,” Hayes informed her.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The digger with the spear. We call him Old Man.”

  “You named the diggers?”

  “A few of the most recognizable. ‘Old Man’ because of the whiskers. Long white curb-feelers. Everybody at Yambuku’s been here by remensor, most of us more than once, and Old Man pays us a return visit from time to time.”

  “He comes to the station?” Why hadn’t this been in the reports? Degrandpre’s information triage, she supposed; zoological data sacrificed to production statistics.

  “Every few days, ‘long about dusk, he skulks around the perimeter of the station, checks us out. Stares at the tractibles if we have any running.”

  “Then they’re curious about us.”

  “Well, this one is. Maybe. Or maybe we’re just an obstacle on the way to his favorite fishing hole. You don’t want to jump to conclusions based on one individual’s behavior.”

  Zoe flew her dragonfly remensor in a ragged circle, trying to attract the digger’s attention again. Old Man swiveled his eyes toward her instantly.

  The sense of being seen was almost frightening. In her chair in the remensor cabin, Zoe shivered.

  “Speaking of dusk,” Hayes said, “the nocturnal insectivores start hunting as soon as the shadows get long. We should head for home soon.”

  But that’s where I am, Zoe thought. I am home.

  THEY CALLED HAYES “the monk of Yambuku”—partly because he had been on Isis longer than almost anyone else, partly because his work kept him continuously busy. He was diligent about management chores but essentially thought of them as a distraction. What he relished were the rare moments—such as this one—when he found himself back in the lab, with no pressing concern beyond the microanatomy of Isian cells.

  What life had achieved on Isis, it had achieved with DNA. Like Terrestrial life, Isian organisms used these long-chain molecules to store and alter hereditary information. But DNA was an encodable molecule, a blank book, and in these similar books, Earth and Isis had recorded very different histories.

  There was no evidence of broad mass extinctions on Isis. Early in its history, the Isian stellar system had been as violent as the environment around any young star; cometary impacts had given Isis its water and organic molecules. But some later event, or perhaps the simple presence of an enormous gas giant twice the size of Jupiter in the outer system, had swept away a great deal of aboriginal rock and ice, at least as far out as the Isis system’s icy ring, its own Kuiper Belt. Life had emerged on a world far more placid than the primitive Earth.

  Life on Isis was a longer, deeper river. Its narrative was slow and complexly exfoliated, punctuated not by ice ages or cometary impacts but by waves of predation and parasitism. The Isian ecology was an evolving, armed detente. Its weapons were formidable, its defenses ingenious.

  Which made the planet, among other things, a vast new pharmacopeia. Much of the cost of maintaining Yambuku was paid for by Terrestrial pharmaceutical collectives under the Works Trust. And that was a problem, too. Everything that came out of Yambuku had to be justified to Trust accountants. There was no room here for pure science, as the Kuiper-born employees were made distinctly aware. Hayes supposed the Trusts specifically liked him because he hadn’t rotated back home and immediately published a score of articles in the independent academic journals. Giving away—as the Trusts saw it—what they had paid for.

  He finished the work he was doing, microdissecting a bacterial entity that had been growing on the exterior seals, stored his results and tidied up the glove box for the afternoon shift.

  He looked up as Elam entered the lab. By now, he had learned to recognize her footsteps. Yambuku had a staff of sixteen, most of them on yearly rotation, though some, chiefly himself and Elam Mather, had lived at Yambuku for most of five years now. Kuiper folk endured such close quarters far more easily than Terrans or Martians, which meant that most of the Yambuku hands were Kuiper-born—although they came to Isis strictly as employees of the Trusts.

  “Fresh download from the IOS,” Elam said, scroll in hand. “Do you want to look at it now or later?”

  He sighed and gave up his glove-box station to Tonya Cooper, a resident microbiologist who had been standing at a bench and tapping her foot impatiently. “We can do this over lunch, I hope?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  Elam brought her scroll to the lunchroom but set it aside while they ate. Food at Yambuku consisted of uninspiring nutrient chunks of various kinds, assembled from the subgrade output of the IOS’s gardens. “Compressed protein,” Elam called it, or less kindly, “compost.”

  “We need to find a more inert substance for the seals,” he said.

  “Is that possible?”

  He shrugged. “Ask the engineers. As it is, we’re spending more time on maintenance than on basic research. And running unnecessary risks.”

  Risking lives, he thought. Yambuku seemed eerily quiet without Mac’s roaring voice.

  Elam picked up the agenda and spread it out on the tabletop. Hayes scooted his chair closer.

  “Item one,” Elam said. “Zoe’s excursion suit is ready for the walkaround test, according to Tia and Kwame. Zoe, of course, can’t wait to take it out. What we want is a closely observed walk around the clearances, accompanied by a partner in conventional armor and with heavy tractible support.”

  “And what Zoe wants is to roam around the forest until she feels like coming back.”

  “You guessed.”

  He smiled. “I can talk her out of the long hike. And I’ll partner her for the excursion.”

  “Uh-huh.” Elam gave him a speculative look.

  “What does that mean—’uh-huh’?”

  “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 r
eason.”

  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.”