Bios

PROLOGUE

The regulator lay deep in the flesh of the girl’s upper arm, a pale egg in a capillary nest. Anna Chopra pared away the tissue with careful strokes of the hemostatic scalpel. Her small, expert hands wanted to tremble. She willed them to be steady.

This was, she knew, an act of sabotage. She was performing a surgical intervention without consent; worse, she was interfering with an instrument of the Trusts. Violating the law, if not, perhaps, her Hippocratic oath.

She was alone with the unconscious and sedated girl, and that had been part of the temptation. In any operating theater on Earth, she would have been surrounded by colleagues and students. On Earth, one was always surrounded. Here, at least for the moment, she was surrounded only by mute machinery and surgical tools dangling on coiled wire in the near-weightless environment. No audience, hence no witnesses: she was trustworthy, or so the Trusts believed.

The thymostat had been installed in the girl’s arm years ago. It had gone about its business flawlessly and showed no sign of failing now. “The thermostat of the soul,” her professor at Calcutta had called the common bioregulator. It was, in effect, an artificial gland, monitoring blood levels and maintaining self-synthesized doses of n euro transmitters and inhibitors—leveling moods, sustaining alertness, suppressing fatigue. Anna Chopra wore one herself, as did most Terrestrial technicians and managers.

But this girl—young woman really, though she looked like an infant from the perspective of Anna’s seventy years—this Zoe Fisher was different. Zoe Fisher was a creation of the Devices and Personnel branch of the Trusts. She had been bred and modulated for her work on the distant world of Isis. She was, essentially, a human machine. Her bioregulation was spectacularly thorough; Anna, did not doubt that the girl’s every bad dream and brief ecstasy had been monitored, calculated, and soothed by this small but complex thymostat well before she learned to speak.

The bioregulator had put tendrils—samplers and drips—into the brachial artery and the ulnar collaterals. Anna Chopra severed the connections neatly and professionally, watching as the remnant pieces, self-suturing, merged into the artery’s pulsing wall. The thymostat itself, about the size of a robin’s egg and plump with blood, she pushed into the intake of a waste-disposal chute. Stray blood droplets drifted toward a gurgling air drain.

Why this small act of sabotage, why now? Maybe because a life rime of obedience had left Anna Chopra feeling stale and futile. Maybe because this girl reminded Anna of her sisters, three of whom had been sold into the state brothels in Madras as a result of her family’s financial reverses.

Brothel inmates were happy, everyone said—thoroughly trained and exhaustively bioregulated.

Young Zoe Fisher had probably never been near a brothel. But she was just as surely a slave, and her thymostat might as well have been a leg iron or a steel collar. Since she left Earth, Anna Chopra had met many technicians from the Kuiper Republics, none of whom wore regulators of any kind, and she had come to envy their spontaneity, their wealth of moods, their rawness. She might have been such a person herself, given the opportunity. Given another lifetime.

Let the Trusts find out what happened when one of their marionettes woke up without its strings.

Oh, most likely the theft would be detected and a new regulator installed. But maybe not. Zoe Fisher was bound for Isis—the farthest outpost of human exploration, far beyond even the isolated kibbutzim of the Kuiper Republics. A frontier, where the power of the Trusts was limited.

Anna Chopra closed the incision and sealed it with a gel rich in regenerative nanobacters. Finished with her act of sabotage— and instantly guilty about what she had done—Anna proceeded to her real work, rotating the girl’s unconscious body in its surgical sling, cutting into the abdominal muscles to replace a depleted blood filter. Zoe was full of new technology, mainly immune-system enhancers of a kind Anna had never seen before. Bloody white biomodules clustered around the abdominal aorta like insect eggs on milkweed. Anna ignored these mysterious devices; she replaced the defective renal filter and closed the muscle tissue with more gel.

And was finished. She instructed the anesthistat, a hulking black tractible robot, to bring Zoe up to a natural sleep state and maintain the analgesic drip. At last she stripped off her gloves and stepped back from the surgical sling.

Now her hands began to shake in earnest. Anna’s seventy years were about half the average lifetime of a senior manager or a member of the Families, but she was a mere Level Three technician and her telomerases were rapidly running out. According to her career schedule, she would be in a Terrestrial geriatric hospice before the end of the decade. Where she could allow her hands to tremble freely while she waited for degenerative disease or quota euthanasia to end her life—her functional, perfect life as a good citizen of the Trusts and servant of the Families.

Barring the occasional act of defiance.

She glanced reflexively over her shoulder, but of course there was no one to witness her criminal act. This small cometary object—they called it Phoenix—was very nearly uninhabited now. All but the vital staff had left in preparation for the Higgs launch. Nor was physical evidence a problem. Before very long, nothing would remain of Phoenix but scattered radioactive particles and Cherenkov radiation.

Embers and ashes. The thought was soothing, somehow. Her rapidly beating heart began to slow. All that persisted, Anna told herself, were embers and ashes, sparks and dust.

It was the Kuiper technicians who had named this planetisimal “Phoenix.” Even a small world, they insisted, ought to have a name before it ceased to exist.

Phoenix rolled around the sun well beyond the orbit of Neptune and above the plane of the solar ecliptic—the desert of the solar system. In a matter of hours now, Phoenix would die in the most dramatic possible fashion. And when Phoenix vanished from the solar system, so would Zoe Fisher.

The technicians suiting Zoe for the launch seemed in awe of tier, though they had rehearsed this act countless times. In awe, at least, of the forces to which Zoe would soon be subjected. If they could, Zoe thought, they would write their names on her body, like twentieth-century war pilots autographing a missile.

But she was not a missile. She was simply cargo. Five and a half feet and one hundred and thirty pounds of cargo. No different from the three other human beings, several hundred clonal mouse and pig embryos, and sundry supplies also bound for Isis. Soon enough, they would all be loaded into the catacombs of the Higgs sphere buried in the icy core of Phoenix.

The pre-launch supervisor—he was one of those long-faced Terrestrial kachos who serviced starships and their cargo but would never dare dream of riding one himself—approached Zoe where she sat half-embedded in her armor. His lips were pursed into a frown. “There’s a call for you, Citizen Fisher.”

This late in the launch sequence, Zoe thought, it must be someone with a great deal of clout, someone highly placed in the Trusts or at least—dare she hope?—in the Devices and Personnel branch. The lower half of her body was already entombed in the bulky journeyrig, steel sheaths too massive to lift, under any kind of spin, without the help of powerful hydraulics. She felt like a knight-errant about to be winched onto her horse. Helpless. “Who is it?”

“Your D-and-P man from the Diemos installation.”

Theo. Of course. She grinned. “Float me a monitor, please.”

He made a sour face but brought her a screen. The suiting room was cramped, but so was every chamber inside the cometary fragment. Much of Phoenix had been excavated to contain the fusion launcher and payload, the small world’s water-rich debris vectored off to reclamation points nearer the sun. These pressurized chambers were essentially makeshift—why waste labor on a habitat meant to be vaporized? The room around her was as stark as the Turing constructors had left it, medical and technical gear strapped randomly to the flat white walls.

At least her hands were free. Zoe touched a finger to the identity pad of the monitor.

Avrion Theophilus appeared at once. Theo was an older man, well into the first decade of his second century. His hair was white but thick, his skin pale but supple. He greeted her in High English, causing the Kuiper-born technicians to exchange uneasy looks.

He apologized for the interruption. “I wanted to wish you luck, not that you need it. Time is short, I know.”

Too short. Or not short enough. Zoe couldn’t name the odd hollowness she felt in her stomach. “Thank you.”

She wished he could be here to say good-bye in person. She missed her mentor. She had left him more than a year ago, in a sun garden on Diemos. Theo couldn’t come to Phoenix because he would have brought his intestinal flora with him. Phoenix was clean—at the moment, the cleanest inhabited environment in the system; Zoe’s own benign bacteria and other biological hitchhikers had been systematically eradicated, replaced where necessary with sterile nanobacters. Even the technicians from the disease-free Kuiper colonies had been deconned for service on Phoenix.

“Be brave, little one,” Theo said. “It looks crowded there.”

The chamber was crowded, crowded with technicians as close as cattle in a pen, all of them waiting impatiently for Zoe to finish her conversation. “They treat me as if I’m radioactive,” she whispered.

“You’re not. But they will be, if they don’t evacuate on schedule. I don’t doubt it makes them nervous. We ought to let them get on with their work.”

“I’m glad you called.” It was good to see him again, his High Family face so calm and proud. Avrion Theophilus was the only human being Zoe had ever fully trusted, and the hardest part of this mission—at least so far—had been her separation from Theo. Was that a paradox? She had been bred and regulated to endure solitude. But Theo was different. He wasn’t ordinary people. He was … well, Theo.

The closest thing to a father she had ever known.

“Travel safely, Zoe.” He seemed to hesitate. “You know I envy you.”

“I wish you could come with me.”

“Someday. With any luck, someday soon.”

That was cryptic, but Zoe didn’t ask what he meant. Theo had always wanted to see Isis. And in a sense, he was going with her. You can’t take much baggage across the bridge to the stars, Theo used to say. But memories were massless, and her memories of Theo were deeply held. She wanted to tell him so, but her throat closed on. the words.

He gave her an encouraging smile and as suddenly as that, was gone. A technician took the monitor away.

Time ebbed quickly now. The journeyrig’s containment ring snapped shut around her throat, immobilizing her head. This part would be uncomfortable, though she had rehearsed it a number of times; she would have to endure paralytic confinement and absolute darkness, at least until the medical system was activated and the suit began to flood her body with narcotic and anxiolytic molecules. I will sleep, Zoe thought, inside this steel box.

She waited for the massive helmet, dark and enclosing. Her heart hammered at the cage of her ribs.

The remaining technical staff, Anna Chopra among them, left Phoenix in a small armada of reaction rockets.

Anna had not forgotten her small act of defiance, though she wished she could. It had been, of course, stupid. A gesture, a whim, without utility, and in all likelihood without consequence. She was tempted to confess and have done with it; better an early euthanasia than another ten years in a geriatric ward.

Although … she took a deep and private pleasure at having, finally, at her age, a secret worth keeping.

Had she done the girl a favor? She had thought so when she applied scalpel to flesh, but she doubted it now. When Zoe Fisher woke up without her neurochemical safety net, the change would not be obvious. It would take weeks, perhaps months, for her neural receptors to perceive and react to the absence of the thymostat. Symptoms would set in gradually, maybe gradually enough for Zoe to adapt to the unregulated life. She might even learn to like herself that way. But sooner or later, the Trusts would find her out. Her thymostat would be replaced, and whatever new essence Zoe had distilled in herself would be drained away. And that would be that.

But, still… everything born had to die, the Trusts perhaps excluded, and if life meant anything, then even a brief life was better than none. Deep inside herself, Anna liked the idea of this Zoe Fisher, this Devices and Personnel bottle baby, wrenched out of the grip of the Trusts even for a day.

Do something, Zoe, Anna thought. Do something gaudy or foolish or grand. Weep, fall in love, write poetry. Look wild-eyed at this new world of yours.

She adjusted her cabin screen to the exterior view of Phoenix, already a faint point of light in a well of empty space. She had decided she wanted to see the launch—the bright bloom of the fusion event, the brilliant aurora as it faded.

Comatose and immobilized, Zoe became one more inert object to be ferried by tractible into the deep core of the launch facility and harnessed inside the payload sphere, which was suspended in turn by enormous pylons from the cored massif of rock and ice. Lenses of exotic matter surrounded the sphere like huge octagonal crystals. The lenses would be destroyed along with the rest of Phoenix, but only in the femtoseconds after they had served their purpose.

The cometary body was rigged for induced-field fusion. Neither Zoe nor the tractible robots were aware of the countdown ticking away in Phoenix’s supercooled processor arrays. The detonation would be triggered by processors in the payload capsule itself as soon as the fail-safe sequences were satisfied.

It was the third interstellar launch this Terrestrial year, each launch as costly as creating an entire new Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm. A measurable fraction of the solar system’s economic output had been channeled into this project. Not since the ancient days of Apollo and Soyuz had exploration been so enormously difficult to manage and finance.

All irreversible now. Microswitches poised for months fell at last into their final alignment.

Zoe slept, and if she dreamed, she dreamed only of motion, a separation as ponderous as the calving of glaciers.

In her dreams, the light was fiercely bright.