Bios

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “There are different kinds of thymostats. Mainly, they regulate mood, but mine did more than that, Tam. It suppressed unpleasant memories. It also displaced sexual impulses and directed that energy into my work.”

  “But you’re functioning without it.”

  She reminded herself that no one could hear her. No one but Tam. “I feel like I’m on the edge all the time. Sleep is disturbed. I have mood swings. Sometimes this whole excursion seems futile and dangerous. Sometimes . . . I’m afraid.”

  Another long pause. Wind rattled the shelter.

  “Zoe, we have medical spares. We can fix you up.”

  “No. I don’t want that.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I’m not certain of anything. But I don’t want to go back to being . . . what I was.”

  What I was for Theo. What I was for the Trusts.

  Hayes said, “I’ll do everything in my power to keep this quiet. The risk is that Avrion Theophilus will look at your medical telemetry and figure it out for himself.”

  Better that than facing him, Zoe thought. One look at me and he would know. He would see it in my eyes.

  “In any case, you’re in no shape to spend another day in the field. I want you back here where I can look after you.”

  “No,” Zoe said. “I’d rather finish this.”

  “It’s not just the ‘stat. I want you back here in case we’re forced to evacuate.”

  “Evacuate Yambuku? Tam, is it that bad?”

  “Things change quickly.”

  He described a series of cascading seal failures and filter-stack problems. Everything crumbling, Zoe thought. Everything falling apart. “Give me a day to think about it.”

  “It’s another day’s worth of risk.”

  “Nothing we do here is safe. Give me a day, Tam.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything.”

  “Just a day.”

  A fresh torrent of rain battered the shelter. She imagined the tractibles squatting miserably in the open. Did tractibles experience misery? Did their sealed joints ache in the cold?

  “Zoe, I have an alert here. We’ll talk again.”

  Soon, she hoped. In the absence of his voice she felt doubly alone.

  The squalls abated over the course of the day, followed by a cooling breeze from the west. Zoe had seen all sorts of Isian weather from the protected core of Yambuku, but you had to be outside—exposed—to appreciate the substance of the weather, its moods and subtleties.

  Or maybe the failure of her thymostat had made her more sensitive.

  More vulnerable.

  Was this how the unregulated masses experienced the world? Everywhere she looked, Zoe seemed to find some shadow or echo of herself. In the tossing of the trees, the cascade of rainwater from leaf to leaf; in the cloudy daylight on the gorse, the sparkle of mica in ancient rocks. Mirrors.

  We’re not born with souls, Zoe thought; they invade us from outside, make themselves out of shadow and light, noon and midnight.

  She wondered whether Theo had arrived from orbit yet, whether he was already deconning at Yambuku.

  Did Theo have a soul? Had a soul ever colonized the perfect body of Avrion Theophilus?

  She scouted her perimeter during the long afternoon, ranging within a kilometer of the digger colony, though she saw none of the animals. She avoided their foraging territory and their funerary grounds. She didn’t want to alarm them; only, perhaps, leave a trace of her scent, a token of her presence.

  She arrived back at camp well before sunset with her escort of spidery tractibles trailing behind her. The machines were mudspattered and streaked with yellow pollen. One of them lagged badly. It had developed a limp.

  Settled into her shelter for the night, she scrolled her own medical telemetry past her corneal display and requested an analgesic from the medical pack-mule to treat her various aches and itches.

  High particulate content in the air—from forest fires in the far west—made the sunset long and gaudy. Zoe entered a few notes into her excursion log, made routine contact with Yambuku, and tried once more to sleep.

  An alert roused her just past midnight. Tam’s voice was in her ear as she sat up into the disorienting darkness: “Zoe?”

  “Yes, I’m here, let me find a light—” She found and activated the tiny photostorage cell next to her bedroll. A “firefly lamp,” they called it. About as bright.

  Hayes went on, “We have major-malfunction tags on five of your tractibles—two of the packmules and three of the perimeter surveillors.”

  “Something attacked them?”

  “Apparently just mechanical interrupts, but it can’t be coincidental. I’m worried about the level of protection you’re getting.”

  “Hardware malfs? You’re sure?”

  “Nuts-and-bolts failures.”

  “I’ll fetch the repair kit and turn on some field lamps. Where are the tractibles now?”

  “On your doorstep. We brought them in as soon as they began to complain. But, Zoe, we’re getting strange telemetry from the remaining surveillors.”

  “Company?”

  “Hard to say. Nothing big. We have remensors covering for the robots. But I want you to be careful.”

  The air outside was crisp and moist. A few stars adorned the sky. That nondescript one high in the northern quarter was Sol, if Zoe remembered her Isian constellations correctly. Cronos rode the hazy horizon.

  Camp lights flared on, momentarily blinding her. She drew a deep breath. The filter of her excursion suit sterilized the ambient air but didn’t warm it. A breath of Isis cooled her throat.

  She retrieved a tool kit from one of the damaged pack-mule tractibles and scrolled the machine’s telltales. Her corneal display listed multiple joint dysfunctions. A lubricant problem perhaps? She disassembled a ball-and-socket connector and found it fouled with what looked like mustard-yellow slime.

  “Something got into the joint,” she told Hayes. “Something biological. It must be eating the teflons.”

  There was no immediate answer. She wiped the joint clean with an absorbent cloth and locked it back into place. A temporary fix at best, but maybe she could patch one or two tractibles well enough to get herself and her essential equipment back to Yambuku. . . .

  “Heads up, Zoe.”

  She looked up sharply.

  The field lamps cast a searing white radiance all around her, a glow that faded into the dark of the forest beyond the meadow. She shaded her eyes and scanned the perimeter. Recognizable shapes began to disentangle themselves from the darkness.

  Diggers had surrounded the clearing.

  They stood at the perimeter of the meadow, spaced maybe five meters apart—twenty or more of them, some on four legs, some reared back on their hind pair. A few were armed with firehardened spears. Their black eyes glittered in the harsh light.

  Her first reaction was fear. Her pulse ramped up and her palms began to sweat. These were animals, after all, like the lions she had once seen in a Trust preserve, but larger and vastly more strange. Cunning, unpredictable. The hint of intelligence that had made them seem so nearly human was less endearing in this windy darkness. There was intelligence here, certainly, but also a host of instincts purely Isian, purely unfathomable.

  Thank God, they weren’t advancing. Maybe the camp lights had attracted them. (Though what if those lights failed? What if a new set of malfunctions brought the full weight of the dark down on her?)

  Or maybe these fears were a product of her thymostatic disorder. Systems failing inside and out, Zoe thought. But I was made for this. I was made for this. They’re aware of me now, as I am aware of them. We see each other.

  Hayes’ voice erupted in her ear. “Stay still, Zoe, and we’ll send one of the surviving tractibles into the forest, maybe draw their attention away from you. We have remensors nearby but the wind is making it hard to keep them airborne.”

  “No. No, Tam, don’t.”

  “Excuse me?”


  “They’re not hostile.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I’m not under attack. Something like this had to happen sooner or later.”

  “But not tonight. And you’re coming home tomorrow.”

  “Tam, I may not get another chance. This is their first reallife encounter with a human being. Most likely they’ll look me over for a while and just get bored. Keep the functioning tractibles ready, but don’t make enemies.”

  “I’m not proposing to slaughter them, Zoe. Just—”

  “Wait.”

  Movement on the perimeter. Zoe turned her head. One of the diggers had stepped out of rank. Its gait was two-legged, forelimbs raised, a fight-or-flight posture. It carried a sturdy branch in one hand. It stepped closer to the polyplex shelter, until Zoe recognized the array of white whiskers around the animal’s muzzle. “It’s Old Man!”

  “Zoe—”

  “Quiet!”

  The moment was fragile. Zoe stood slowly from the place where she had crouched beside the tractible and took an infinitesimal step of her own toward Old Man. What must he think I am? An animal, an enemy? A freakish reflection of himself?

  She held out her arms—empty hands, weaponless and clawless.

  Hayes must have had at least one remensor nearby, because he had seen the motion too. “Three meters, Zoe. Closer than that, I herd him away. If any of the rest of them move, I want you next to the shelter, where we can protect you. Understand?”

  She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.

  She took several bold steps forward. The digger reared up like a startled centipede. Its black eyes rolled in their sockets. Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.

  But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.

  The digger was very quick. It drew back the tree branch it was hefting before Zoe could begin to flinch.

  No, not like this, she thought. It shouldn’t be like this—

  “Zoe?”

  Hayes’ voice was distant and irrelevant.

  No time to step back, take shelter behind the tractibles. The tractibles had begun to move, but slowly. More systems failing? The digger raised its left upper forearm, the club secure in its gripping hand. She saw the downward swing of it with frozen clarity.

  The impact blurred everything. She fell through the windy night.

  ALTHOUGH HE HAD prayed he would never have to do it, containing biological contamination aboard the Isis Orbital Station was the first task for which Kenyon Degrandpre had been trained. The crisis and its thousand details occupied all his attention. And that was infinitely better than allowing himself to consider the long-term consequences of the outbreak.

  He summoned all five of the station’s senior managers, including Leander of Medical (replacing the quarantined Corbus Nefford) and Sullivan of Foodstuffs and Biota. They were a motley collation of Trust outriders—all of them competent managers, none of them Family except by the most distant and tenuous connection. Degrandpre himself had such a connection; his maternal greatgrandfather had been a Corbille. But the birth was unregistered and hence irrelevant.

  His first order of business had been to contain the quarantine pod, and he had done that. Before today the IOS had been a sterile zone, isolated from Isis by the hard vacuum beyond its walls. Now the IOS was itself a breached environment, an apple into which a dangerous worm had gnawed.

  The isolation ward had become a Level Five hot zone, contained on its perimeter by fiat Level Four zones—these were the exterior medical chambers, such as the one in which Corbus Nefford was currently trapped—and by Level One, Two, and Three precautionary zones beyond that, i.e., the engineering pod and a maintenance space where Turing assemblers were prepared for launch.

  The problem was, there was very little redundancy aboard the IOS. The size and weight restrictions imposed by the mechanics of the Higgs launches narrowed the margin of error to a fine line. Even at peak efficiency, the IOS had always been one or two critical failures away from wholesale shutdown. Without the machine shop, and with access restricted to the Turing launchers—

  But no; that was tomorrow’s problem.

  Solen of Engineering said, “We’re looking at how to relocate critical functions as far as possible from the hot pod. The farms, thank God, are about as far from quarantine as you can get, a hundred eighty degrees of the circle. We’re setting up a temporary clinic for injuries outside the agriculture perimeter; disease cases, if any, go directly to the quarantine perimeter.”

  Degrandpre pictured the IOS in his mind, a necklace of ten gray pearls spinning in a void. No, nine gray pearls and one black: infected, infectious. He would have to move his own quarters closer to the farms.

  Certainly the new Turing gens would have to wait; it meant another delay for the D&P interferometer project, but that was unavoidable. The grand plan to use Isis as a staging base for further Higgs launches depended on a stable Isian outpost—to be defended at all costs. Without the IOS, Degrandpre thought, the Trusts will lose the stars, at least for the foreseeable future.

  His most immediate problem, though, was not contagion, but fear. The fact of the outbreak in Quarantine could hardly be hidden from the fifteen-hundred-plus crew of the orbital station, each of whom was painfully aware of being locked in a metal canister without plausible hope of escape. An emergency Higgs launch, Solen told him blandly, would save ten or twelve people depending on their combined mass.

  “Motivate your workers,” Degrandpre said, “but don’t terrify them. Emphasize that these are extraordinary precautions we’re taking, that there has been no contamination outside the quarantine chamber.”

  Leander of Medical said, “They know that, Manager, but they also have the example of the ground stations before them. The suspicion is that once contamination occurs, there’s no certain way to contain it.”

  “Tell them we’re talking about one organism here, not the whole Isian biosphere.”

  “One organism? Is that true?”

  “Possibly. Keeping order is more important than telling the truth.”

  The meeting moved on briskly, working through Degrandpre’s prepared agenda. So far, so good: the contagion had been contained, food and water supplies were safe, and other essential functions remained in good shape. The IOS was still a safe environment.

  What had been stolen from them by the event in Quarantine was their sense of security. We have always been fragile, Degrandpre thought. But never as fragile as now.

  Degrandpre ordered his communications manager to stay behind when the others left.

  “I want all outbound messages routed through my office for approval, including routine housekeeping. Let’s not alarm the Trusts prematurely.”

  The communications manager, a bony Terrestrial woman named Nakamura, shifted her weight uncomfortably. “That’s highly unusual,” she said—letting him know, Degrandpre supposed, that she wouldn’t cover for him if the Trusts eventually brought a complaint.

  Young woman, he thought, that is the least of your problems. He noted her objection and dismissed her.

  There was nothing here the Families needed to know, at least not right away. Above all else, the Trusts feared the consequences of importing an Isian pathogen to Earth. Alarm them, and the Trusts might well impose an extended quarantine . . . or even refuse to dock a Higgs module returned from Isis, leaving the survivors to drift until they starved.

  Degrandpre didn’t relish the prospe
ct of becoming one more frozen planetisimal, entombed in a sort of artificial Kuiper body, a cometary mausoleum arcing through endless orbits of the sun.

  He spoke to Corbus Nefford through a video link.

  The station’s chief physician was clearly frightened. His uniform was ringed with perspiration; his face was pale and doughy, his eyes perpetually too wide. Degrandpre imagined the man’s thymostat pressed to its limits, synthesizing regulatory molecules at a feverish pitch.

  “It’s absurd,” Nefford insisted, “at a time like this, that I should be confined here . . .”

  “I don’t doubt it, Corbus. But that’s the way the containment protocols are written.”

  “Written by pedantic theorists who obviously don’t understand—”

  “Written by the Trusts. Watch your language, Doctor.”

  Nefford’s narrow eyebrows and small mouth contracted petulantly, as if, Degrandpre thought, someone had tightened his stitches. The station’s former managing physician seemed on the verge of tears, not a good omen. “You don’t understand. These people died so quickly.”

  “They died in Quarantine, yes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you should be safe enough.”

  “All I want is to put some distance between myself and the contamination. Is that so unreasonable? Everyone else is huddling near the gardens, I understand. Why should I be used this way?”

  “It’s not your decision, Doctor.”

  “I’ve worked in clean environments all my life. I’m a Family physician! I maintain health! I don’t perform autopsies! I’m not accustomed to this degree of, of . . .”

  Nefford trailed off, swiping his forehead on his sleeve. The managing physician was sick.

  With fear.

  Let it be fear, Degrandpre thought. For once, he envied his father’s stubborn faith. A prophet to pray to. Here, there was no prophet, no Mecca, no Jerusalem. No paradise or forgiveness, no margin of error. Only a devil. And the devil was fecund, the devil was alive.

  THE EVACUATION OF Marburg took a day and a half.