Bios

ONE

Decanted unconscious into the almost windowless environment of the Isis Orbital Station, Zoe longed for a glimpse of her new world. Wanted it so badly, in fact, that she was contemplating a serious breach of protocol.

She could prompt the image of Isis onto any local screen, of course. And she had seen such images for much of her life, often daily—images either relayed to Sol from the IOS or captured by the planetary interferometer.

But that wasn’t enough. She was here, after all: scant hundreds of kilometers from the surface of the planet itself, Low Isis Orbit. She had traveled farther in an instant than a conventional spacefarer could hope to travel in a lifetime. She had arrived at the very edge of the human diaspora, the dizzying brink of the abyssal deeps, and she deserved a direct look at the planet that had drawn her so far from home—didn’t she?

In the old days, astronomers had talked about “first light”—the fresh view through a brand-new optical instrument. Zoe had looked at Isis through every kind of optical instrument, barring her own eyes. Now she wanted that direct view, her own personal first light.

Instead, she had spent three days in the IOS’s infirmary under useless observation and a week haunting her assigned cabin while waiting for a place on the duty roster. Ten days from decantation, ten days without orders, agenda, or more than a brief word from management. She had seen to date only the gently concave walls and steel floors of her cubby and the recovery ward in Medical. The sole official communications she had received were a list of meal hours, an access code, her residence number, and a name badge.

Consequently, Zoe summoned her courage and scheduled an appointment with Kenyon Degrandpre, the outpost manager. She was awed at her own impertinence. Probably she should have talked to her section chief first… but no one had told her who her section chief was or how to find him.

The Isis Orbital Station had been assembled from the shells of early model Higgs spheres in a ring-of-pearls configuration. The maps posted on the corridor walls reminded Zoe of the benzene rings illustrated in chemistry texts, with the outpost’s fusion bottles and heat exchangers projecting like complex side chains from the symmetrical core. On the morning of her appointment with Degrandpre, Zoe left her tiny cabin at the bottom of Habitat Seven and walked the ring corridor a kilometer spinward, nearly half the total circumference of the IOS. The ring corridor smelled of hot metal and cycled atmosphere, like a Kuiper habitat, but without the ever-present tang of ice in the air. Bulkhead doors loomed like massive guillotine blades; the gangways were narrow and possessed arm nor windows. This place was not as emotionally and culturally blank as Phoenix had been, but neither was it a typical Kuiper world, full of color and noisy with children. The Terrestrial esthetic prevailed: linear functionality, enforced by strict cargo limitations.

Windows were a luxury, Zoe supposed. According to the IOS plan she’d reviewed on her terminal, the project manager’s office possessed one of the station’s few accessible direct-view windows, a wedge of three-inch-thick polarized glass set into the exterior wall. The rest of the station’s windows were tiny ports cut into the docking bays, an area for which Zoe was not yet authorized. But that was irrelevant, she told herself. She had business with Degrandpre. The window was just… a perquisite.

From the name, she had expected someone almost Family—weren’t there Degrandpres among the Brazilian landholders?—but Kenyon Degrandpre was not a handsome or an imposing man. A manager of some rank, but never Family. His head was too long, his nose too flat. Zoe’s experience with the upper echelons of the Trusts had taught her that handsome managers might be capable of a certain generosity; ugly men—although Degrandpre didn’t quite fit that description either, at least not by Terrestrial standards—were more likely to read regulations and nurse grudges. She knew for a fact, had known all her life, that rigid personalities were a staple in the bureaucracies of the Trusts. But surely the man who managed the Isis Orbital Station, in effect the Isis Project itself, must be more flexible. Mustn’t he?

Maybe not. Degrandpre raised his big head briefly and waved Zoe to a chair, but his attention remained on his desktop.

Zoe stood near the window instead. It wasn’t much of a window. She supposed the brutal payload limitations of the Higgs launchers made even this small luxury prohibitively expensive. Still, here was her first genuinely direct view of the planet below. Un-mediated light, Zoe thought excitedly. First light.

The IOS had just crossed the planet’s terminator. The long light of dawn picked out clouds in vivid chiaroscuro. Across the dark zone, lightning nickered, embers on velvet.

Zoe had seen planets before. She had seen Earth from orbit, a view not dissimilar. She’d spent a year on Europa learning pressure lab technique, and the vast orb of Jupiter had filled more of the sky far more dramatically.

But this was Isis. That glitter of sunlight came from a star not Earth’s. Here was a living world that had never seen a naked human footprint, a world strange and alive, rich with biology; a swarming waterdrop orbiting a foreign sun. As lovely as Earth. And infinitely more deadly.

“Is there an issue,” Degrandpre said at last, “or have you come to stare? You wouldn’t be the first, Citizen Fisher.”

Degrandpre’s voice had the bite of Terrestrial authority. His English was finely honed. Zoe thought she heard a touch of Beijing Elite School in the understated consonants.

She took a breath. “I’ve been here ten days. Apart from the Habitat Seven physical regime director and the cafeteria staff, I haven’t spoken to anyone in authority. I don’t know who to report to. The people who are supposed to oversee my work directly are all on-planet—which is where I ought to be.”

Degrandpre tapped his stylus and sat back in his chair. His clothing was sere gray, the inevitable kacho uniform, a stiff black collar framing his thick peasant neck. Wooden chair, wooden desk, a plush, carpet, and a multilayered dress uniform; all of this would have been shipped from Earth, at an expense Zoe shuddered to consider. He asked, “Do you feel neglected?”

“No, not neglected. I just wanted to make certain—”

“That we haven’t forgotten you.”

“Well … yes, Manager.”

Degrandpre continued to tap his stylus against the desktop, a sound that made Zoe think of ice cracking in a warm glass. He seemed as much amused as irritated. “Let me ask you this, Citizen Fisher. In an outpost of this size, with every gram accounted for and every sou budgeted, do you really suppose people get lost?”

She reddened. “I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”

“In the last six weeks, we’ve conducted four shuttle exchanges with, the downstations. Each exchange calls for lengthy quarantine and elaborate sterile docking protocols. Flights are scheduled months m advance. You people arrive thinking the Higgs launch was the bottleneck and that a trip downside must be a holiday jaunt by comparison. Not so. I’m aware of your presence and your purpose, and you have a place, obviously, on the rotation Est. But our first priority has to be resupply and maintenance. You must understand that.”

But you knew I was coming, Zoe thought. Why didn’t the schedule reflect that? Or had there been delays she didn’t know about? “Beg pardon, Manager Degrandpre, but I haven’t even seen an agenda. When am I scheduled to drop?”

“You’ll be notified. Is that all?”

“Well… yes, sir.” Now that she’d looked through the window.

Degrandpre eyed his rapidly scrolling desktop. “I have a delegation from Yambuku waiting outside. People you’ll be working with. You might as well stay and listen. Meet your colleagues.” He said this as if he had made a grand concession. Planned, of course, in advance. It was one of those kacho maneuvers the bureaucrats loved so much. Surprise the opposition; never be surprised.

Zoe said, “Yambuku?”

“Downstation Delta. Delta is called Yambuku; Gamma is Marburg.”

“Yambuku” and “Marburg” were the first identified strains of the hemorrhagic fever that had devastated twenty-first-century Earth. A microbiologist’s joke. Most likely a Kuiper microbiologist’s joke. The Terrestrial sense of humor was limited in that department.

“Sit,” Degrandpre said. “Pay attention. Try not to talk. You may continue looking out the window if you like.”

She ignored his sarcasm and did exactly that.

Dawn had reached the scattered island chains of the Western Sea. A dark plume of ejecta, like soot, trailed from an active volcano. The Greater Continental Mass wheeled into view, dense with temperate and boreal forests. Sunlight glinted from an ancient blue crater lake here, glanced off a fringe of polar ice there. Cloudtops white as cut diamonds.

And all of it as lethal as arsenic.

Her new home.

Two men and a woman shuffled into the room and occupied the conference table. Zoe continued to linger by the window. She didn’t need Degrandpre’s advice to keep quiet; she found crowded rooms intimidating.

Kenyon Degrandpre introduced the new arrivals as Tam Hayes, Elam Mather, and Dieter Franklin, all from Yambuku Station, all up on the latest shuttle.

Zoe recognized Hayes from photos. He was the Delta station manager and the Isis Project’s senior biologist—senior in status, not in age. Hayes was a relatively young man despite his five years on Isis rotation, handsome in a rough way. He needed a haircut, Zoe thought. His beard was Eke tangled copper. A typical disheveled Kuiper-born scientist, in other words. The other two weren’t much different.

Hayes thrust his hand at her. “Zoe Fisher! We were hoping to meet you.”

Zoe took his hand reluctantly. She didn’t like touching people. Hadn’t Hayes been briefed on that, or didn’t he care? Her hand disappeared into his meaty grip. “Dr. Hayes,” she murmured, concealing her uneasiness.

“Please, call me Tam. I gather we’ll be working together.”

“You can get to know each other later,” Degrandpre said. To Zoe: “Dr. Hayes and his people have been vetting proposed archival material for transmission to Earth.”

Zoe followed the exchange between Hayes and Degrandpre closely, trying to sort out the conflicts. The particle-pair link to Earth was such a narrow pipeline, so severely bandwidth-limited, that project downloads were hotly contested and had to undergo a kind of information triage. Degrandpre was the final arbiter. So here was Hayes, the Yambuku project leader, delivering an impatient summary of his group’s packet data, and Degrandpre playing the infuriating role of ultimate Trust bureaucrat: aloof, bored, skeptical. He fiddled with his stylus and crossed his legs and periodically asked Hayes to clarify some point that had been perfectly obvious to begin with. Finally he said, “Show me the visuals.” Holographs and photos were particularly expensive to transmit, but they took the place of voucher specimens and were often popular in the press back home.

A large central screen unfurled from the ceiling.

The images in the Yambuku packet were micrographs of viruses, bacteria, prions, and biologically active protein chains, all of them “ALC,” as Hayes put it: Awaiting Latin Cognomen. There was also a series of conventional photographs to illustrate a journal submission from one of his junior biologists. Degrandpre asked, “More exploding mice?”

Zoe had never heard the expression.

Judging by the look on his face, Hayes disliked it. “Live-animal exposures, yes.”

“Ramp them up, please, Dr. Hayes.”

Hayes used a handheld scroll to order up the images from the IOS’s central memory. Zoe caught Degrandpre glancing at her curiously. Gauging her reaction? If so, why?

Elam Mather, a thick-faced woman in lab grays, stood up to narrate the images. Her voice was strong and impatient.

“The concept here was to sort ambient Isian microorganisms through a series of micron filters in order to evaluate their lethality and mode of action. We took a sample of air from outside the station, near dusk on a calm, dry day. Meteorological notes are appended. Crude assay gave us a load of organic matter and the usual assortment of water droplets, silicate dust, and so forth. One sample was forced through a filter and injected into an isolation chamber, containing a clonal mouse of the CIBA-thirty-seven strain.”

An image came up on the screen.

Zoe looked at it, swallowed, and looked away.

“The result,” Elam Mather said, “was essentially the same as for unfiltered native air. Within minutes, the mouse had spiked a fever and before two hours had passed it was bleeding internally. Systemic collapse, bleedout and tissue deliquescence followed rapidly. More than a dozen foreign microbial species were cultured from the mouse’s blood; again, the usual suspects.

“The next sample went through a finer screening. On Earth, that would remove all spores and bacteria, but not viruses or prions.

“The second exposed mouse also died—obviously—but the onset of the toxemia was slightly more gradual. The outcome, however, was the same.”

A mix of fur and muscle tissue in a pool of deliquescent black liquid. The CIBA-37 mouse might as well have been popped into a food processor. Probably, Zoe thought, that would have been kinder.

The sight of the dead creature affected her more than she expected. Her throat constricted and she wondered if she might have to vomit.

She narrowed her eyes in order to avoid the rest of the photographs while pretending to look at them. The research duplicated, confirmed, and extended earlier work; there was nothing very novel about it. Either Degrandpre had wanted to see it himself, or he had wanted Zoe to see it.

Because I’m not a microbiologist, Zoe thought. He sees me as some pampered Terrestrial theoretician. As if I didn’t know what I was getting into!

“Even with microfine HEPA filtration, clonal mice eventually sickened after repeated exposure to native air. In this case, we’re looking at dusts and protein fragments perhaps triggering an allergenic reaction, not the full hemorrhagic blowout, but still a deadly hazard…”

The man named Dieter Franklin said laconically, “The planet is trying to kill us. But we proved that long ago. The surprising thing is how hard it’s trying to kill us.”

Degrandpre shot Zoe one more glance, as if to say, “You see? Isis will kill you if you let it.”

Zoe remained expressionless. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was afraid.

She ran into Tam Hayes in the cafeteria a day later.

The cafeteria was as spartan as every other chamber in the IOS—steel deck assembled by Turing constructors, welded seams exposed, the chairs and trestle tables flimsy and makeshift. This was inevitable in an environment where every manufactured object was either shipped in from Earth at obscene expense or pieced together by Turing factories on Isis’s Diemos-sized moon. At least the cafeteria had been decorated. Some artistic soul had grooved the flat inner walls with an assembly etcher, wasting time and energy, Zoe supposed, but not essential supplies. The far wall was a Celtic tapestry of knotted lines, with Kuiper clan signs worked discreetly into the design. Pretty enough, she thought, if vaguely subversive.

Unfortunately, the overhead lights were naked sulfur-microwave dots; they made the food look as bright and false as polystyrene.

“ ’Morning, Dr. Fisher.” Hayes came up behind her carrying a thermal bowl of glutinous flavinoid soup. “Mind if I join you?”

“Morning?” Dinnertime, by Zoe’s clock.

“I’m keeping Yambuku time. Sun’s just coming up over the lowlands, unless it’s raining. You’ll see it soon enough yourself.”

“I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t seen much from orbit.”

“They’re stingy with windows. But the live relays are almost as good.”

“I saw camera feeds back home.”

He nodded. “IOS fever. I know the feeling. Suffered from it myself once.” He settled into a chair opposite her. “You want the real thing. But Yambuku’s much the same, I’m afraid. Isis is right there under your feet, but you’re still utterly isolated from it. Sometimes I dream of walking outside—without excursion armor, I mean.” He added, “I envy you, Dr. Fisher. Sooner or later, you’ll have that experience.”

“Call me Zoe.” He obviously preferred Kuiper-style informality or he wouldn’t be here talking to her.

He offered his hand—again. She took it reluctantly. His hand was dry; hers was moist. He said, “I’m Tam.”

She knew all about him from her prep reading. Hayes ran Yambuku from the ground. He was a technical manager and microbiologist, exiled from some puritanical Kuiper colony because he had dared to sign a contract with the Trusts.

He was thirty-five years old. Real years: he hadn’t taken rejuvenation treatments. Zoe found herself drawn to the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, amiable contour maps. Like Theo’s eye lines, but less harsh, less etched.

“You envy me,” she said, “but Kenyon Degrandpre seems to think I’m doomed.”

“Well, Degrandpre… IOS politics mean nothing to me, but Degrandpre is old Terrestrial stock. No insult intended. He’s a manager, a kacho. He’d be happy if nothing ever changed here. Keep the equilibrium, balance the books, save face, that’s his agenda. Don’t expect sympathy from Kenyon Degrandpre.”

“It seemed like he was trying to frighten me.”

“Did it work?”

He meant the remark jokingly, but Zoe was startled. Because, yes. She was frightened.

She was, now that she came to admit it, so frightened that the food stuck in her throat and her stomach clenched like a fist. More frightened than she had thought possible. “Zoe?” Hayes frowned across the table. “Are you all right?” She controlled herself. “Yes.”

Just waiting for her thymostat to do its work, to wash her in some soothing bath of neurotransmitters. It would happen, Zoe was sure, if she was only patient enough. The fear would go away, and she would be normal again.

TWO

Traveling back to the surface of Isis was ordinarily a tedious process, at least in calm weather—and better tedious than exciting—but the shuttle had barely broken the cloud layer when Tam Hayes discovered he had a crisis waiting for him. Not that a crisis was unusual at Yambuku, either. But this crisis might prove lethal.

Hayes had left Macabie Feya in charge of the station. Mac was an accomplished engineer, a Reformed Mormon, Needle Clan out of Kuiper Body 22, with a genius for micro and Turing devices and as fine a grasp of sterile technique as a Kuiper education could provide. He was also an old Yambuku hand with two years’ station time behind him, and he should have known better than to venture outside with uncertified armor. But that was exactly what Mac had done, and he had got himself into trouble out in open air.

A scatter of cirrus ran high across the western steppes. The shuttle skimmed through overcast into watery daylight. Winds were light, though a distant storm cell dropped curtains of rain a dozen kilometers north of the river valley. Eastward, the Copper Mountain range was all but invisible in an upwash of cloud; a few fingers of sunlight touched the emerald foothills. Yambuku was situated in a relatively dry forested incline in the heart of the Western Continent, but Isis was everywhere a wet world. The rains came almost daily and winds were often a problem, complicating shuttle schedules and shutting down mobile remotes.

Hayes moved up next to the shuttle’s reserve pilot, who nodded curtly. “Not much in the way of details so far, Dr. Hayes. They’re pretty busy with this. I gather Mac Feya was outside the station doing maintenance and he suffered some kind of suit breach … not a full breach, but they’re hung up on decon, plus he’s stuck in place with an armor malfunction.”

“Just get me there,” Hayes said.

“Doing our best.”

Yambuku’s docking bay was the largest structure associated with the station. A domed vault rising above the station’s sterile core, it opened for the shuttle’s vertical landing and closed, agonizingly slowly, over the landing pad. The Isian atmosphere was evacuated and flushed with sterile air from the exchange stacks; then the chamber was triple-washed with aerosol sterilants, ultraviolet light, and radiant heat not much less searing than the reentry burn had been. During the interminable washdown, Hayes spoke with Cai Connor, ops chief while Hayes was absent and Mac was incapacitated.

Connor, an organic chemist, was almost as seasoned a hand as Mac Feya. Hayes didn’t doubt she was handling the emergency at least as well as he would have, but he heard the catch of anxiety in her voice. “Contact with Mac is sporadic. We have remote tractibles with him, but he’s noncooperative. The decon is going to be tricky at best, and we don’t want to force a joint and open another breach—”

“Take a breath, Cai. From the beginning, please. All I know is that Mac was out on a maintenance excursion.”

“It was another seal failure, this one on the south tractible bay. You know how these ring faults have been driving Mac crazy. Frankly, he shouldn’t have gone out. The alpha excursion suit was hung up in maintenance, so he took the beta unit even though it hasn’t been through a refit since the last walkabout. I guess it needed it. He was at the bay door taking samples from the bad seal and laying down a caulk bead when a servo in his right leg overheated. Suit homeostasis went crazy, then that system locked too. Big, big cascade failure. The servomotor fused a hole through the exterior armor, and the inner seal may or may not have been breached—we have contradictory telemetry on that. But it for sure cooked Mac’s leg above the knee. He’s in pain even with the suit feeding him analgesics, and the analgesics are about to run out. Plus, he’s incoherent, so we can’t count on him cooperating with any rescue effort.”

Hayes winced. God help Mac, riveted to the ground by a bad motor, seared and in pain, not knowing—and this must be the worst of it—whether his bioperimeter was intact or whether he was already, in effect, a dead man. “Cai, how deep in maintenance is the alpha suit?”

“Hang on.” She consulted someone away from the transducer. “I fast-tracked it as soon as Mac’s alarms sounded. It’s been through preliminary diagnostics and looks okay, but none of the deep testing has gone ahead.”

“Pull it out and prep it.”

“That might not be wise.”

“Prep it, Cai, thank you. And get the tunnel out here.”

“Okay, it’s happening.” She sounded relieved to have him back in charge, despite her misgivings. “You’re about twenty minutes away from confirmation.”

“I want the armor prepped as soon as I’m through the tunnel. In the meantime, do whatever you were doing—keep Mac as calm as possible and have the tractibles handy with a chordal brace. And relay his telemetry, let me see if I can make sense of it.”

“Yes,” she said promptly. Station rank was informal. Cai, a Kuiper freewoman of the purest sort, would never call him “Sir,” the way Terrestrial scientists inevitably did. But he heard the deference in her voice.

And felt the burden of responsibility shift squarely onto his own shoulders.

The new hand—Zoe Fisher, the bottle baby whose novel excursion suit was still deep in stowage, unfortunately—came forward from the passenger cabin. She was solemn, frowning. “Is there anything I can do?”

“You can keep out of the way.” It was the first thing that came to mind.

She nodded once and left the cabin. Hang on, Mac, Hayes thought.

Yambuku didn’t need another tutelary death. Isis had claimed too many lives already.

Isis’s day averaged three hours longer than Earth’s, and its axial tilt was less acute, the seasons milder. The sun hovered above the Copper Mountains as Hayes, encased in an impossibly bulky mass of bio armor, left Yambuku. The surrounding forest was already dense with shadow; the long Isian nightfall was about an hour away.

A vast swath of vegetation had been cleared around the ground station, the soil burned and salted with long-lasting herbicides. Yambuku, its core and its four coaxial rings, sat embedded in this blackened wasteland like a lost pearl. The burn zone prevented native plants from overgrowing the station’s pressed-aggregate walls, fouling the exits and weakening the seals. But it reminded Hayes of something else: the empty space between a fortress and a bailey; a field of fire.

It did nothing to deter airborne microorganisms—probable cause of the continuing seal failures—and already the weeds were beginning to make advances, green creepers twining out of the forest canopy like tentative fingers.

Hayes, sweating inside his isolation suit, felt the familiar sensation of being in the landscape but not of it. Every sensation—the crackle of scorched soil under his feet, the whisper of wind-tossed leaves—was relayed by suit sensors. His touch was blunted by the armor’s fat gloves, sensitive and versatile though they were; his field of vision was blinkered, his sense of smell nonexistent. This river valley was as lush and wild as a summer garden, but he could never enter it except as proxy, robot, half-man.

It would, of course, kill him at the first opportunity.

He passed the curved wall of the station, rising like a limestone cliff in the slanting sunlight, and reached the area outside the tractible port where Macabie Feya was trapped in his malfunctioning armor.

The problem was instantly obvious. Mac’s right leg had burned out below the hip, leaving a flaring, blackened gap in the outer shield. Primary and secondary hydraulics were hopelessly damaged below the waist. He was locked in place, frozen in an awkward crouch.

The accident had happened almost eight hours ago. The suit itself had tourniqueted the leg and would even, if necessary, provide CPR and cardiostimulants; it was a good machine, even with its torso systems terminally cooked. But eight hours was a long time to be injured and alone. And the suit’s modest reservoir of analgesics and narcotics was close to exhaustion.

Hayes approached his injured friend cautiously. The suit’s legs might be locked down, but the powerful arms remained mobile. If Mac panicked, he could inflict serious damage.

Two land-duty tractibles rolled out of the way as Hayes came closer, cams glancing between Hayes and Macabie. Their eyes, of course, were Yambuku’s eyes. Elam’s eyes, in fact: Elam Mather was working the remotes. And how calm it all seemed in the late afternoon quiet, aviants chattering high in the trees, a black noon-bug ambling across the ash-dark clearance like some tiny Victorian banker. Hayes cleared his throat. “Mac? Can you hear me?”

His voice was relayed by radio to Mac’s headset. We hear the insects more clearly than we hear each other, Hayes thought. Two solitudes, semaphores across a microbiotic ocean.

There was no answer beyond the low hum of the carrier. Mac must have slipped back into unconsciousness.

Hayes was close enough now to examine the suit breach. The suit was multilayered, its hydraulics and motors normally operating in isolation from both their moist human cargo and the abrasive Isian biosphere. The overheat had peeled back the outer layer of flexarmor like foil, exposing a tangle of burned insulation and leaking blue fluids—a robot’s wound. The soft nugget of Mac Feya lay deeper inside, hidden but horribly endangered.

Hayes needed Mac’s cooperation—or else he needed Mac safely unconscious. He queried Elam about the telemetry.

“Far as I can tell, Tam, his vitals are as stable as we can expect. You want me to tell the suit to lighten his narcs?”

“Take his drip down just a notch, please, Elam.”

“Sure you don’t want to splint him first?”

“I’m already on it.”

He unhooked a body brace from the nearest tractible and began linking it to Mac’s upper-body armor. The tractibles could have done this themselves if they had been larger or more flexible. But this was Isis, and some Terrestrial kacho had written weight and size limitations into the robot inventory without thinking much about the practical consequences. Hayes worked from behind Mac, socketing the brace into chordal ports, the brace exchanging protocols with the suit’s surviving electronics.

The link was almost complete when Mac woke up.

His scream rang through Hayes’ helmet, a sound he did not immediately identify with his friend Macabie Feya. It was an inhuman roar, overwhelming the audio transducers. Elam shouted over it: “His vitals are spiking! He’s not stable—you have to override his armor now!”

Grimly, Hayes forced the last brace connector into its socket on Mac’s thrashing armor.

He was still trying to latch the device when Mac’s elbow butted into him.

Hayes staggered backward, hurt and breathless. His armor was bulky but in its own way fragile, designed to protect him from the biosphere, not from physical attack. His ribs hurt, the breath was knocked out of him, and he heard the suit alarm clamoring for his attention.

“Tam, you have an outer-layer breach! Get back in the airlock, stat!”

“Mac,” Hayes said.

The engineer’s wordless keening dropped to a lower note. “Mac, you can hear me, can’t you?” Elam : “Don’t do this, Tam!”

“Mac, listen. You’re doing fine. I know you’re worried, and I know you’ve been out here too long, and I know you’re in pain. We’re about ready to haul you inside. But you have to relax, keep still a little longer.”

There was a response this time, something about being “fucking trapped.”

“Listen to me,” Hayes said. He took a cautious step forward, keeping himself within Mac’s visual range, gloves forward and open. “There’s a brace on you, but it’s not socketed up. I have to make the connection before we can take you inside.”

Elam, still hammering him: “I cannot guarantee your suit integrity unless you get back here now!”

He took another step closer.

“I think you broke one of my ribs, Mac. Take it easy, all right? I know it hurts. But we’re almost home, buddy.”

Mac croaked something repetitive, choking on the words. “You understand me, Mac?”

There was a silence he took for assent. Hayes grasped the brace jack in one glove, taking advantage of what he hoped was a moment of lucidity.

Mac reared back as the connection was made. Then the brace electronics overrode his voluntary functions, clamping his arms at his sides in full static lockdown. The motion must have been painful. Mac howled at his sudden new helplessness, an awful sound.

Two small tractibles approached, clasped the wings of the brace, and tilted it neatly backward. Now Mac was a wheeled vehicle, already rolling toward the tractible bay’s outer decon chamber. Hayes kept pace, ignoring Elam’s voice in his ear, staying where Mac could see him, keeping the injured man company until the bay doors rolled down on the deepening blue of the Isian dusk.

Hayes put his helmet against Mac’s as the harsh station lights came up.

Mac whispered. The words—as nearly as Hayes could make out—were, “Too late.”

He kept his helmet against Mac’s as the decon began, caustic antiseptics misting from the ceiling in a pale green rain. Mac stared back at him through moist glass.

Hayes gave him a thumbs-up, hoping the insincerity of it wasn’t ridiculously obvious.

Mac’s eyes were blank and bloodshot. His pores leaked blood in ruby teardrops. Tissue deliquescence and bleedout had already begun.

Macabie Feya was dying, and there was nothing Hayes could do about it.

THREE

On top of everything else, there was the question of how to spin this unfortunate death. The problem preoccupied Kenyon Degrandpre as he reported for his monthly medical evaluation. He was eager to speak to the doctor. Not that he was ill. But the senior medical manager—Corbus Nefford, a Boston-born physician with a long career in the Trusts—was also the closest thing to a friend Degrandpre had found aboard the IOS. Nefford, unlike the cold-world barbarians who dominated the scientific crew, understood the rules of civil discourse. He was friendly but mindful of the subtleties of rank, deferential but seldom distastefully toadying. Nefford possessed a chubby, aristocratic face that must have served him well in the professional sweepstakes back home; he looked like a Family cousin even in his modest physician’s smock.

Degrandpre stepped into the small medical station and stripped unselfconsciously. Like his uniform, his body was an expression of rank and class. He was nearly hairless, his excess body fat chelated away, his musculature defined but not boastful. He wore a Works Trust tattoo on his left shoulder. His slender penis dangled over the faint scar of his orchidectomy, another badge of rank. He stepped quickly into the diagnostic nook.

Nefford sat attentively at his monitor, never so gauche as to speak before he was addressed.

Machinery hummed behind Degrandpre’s back, a whisper of hummingbird wings. He said, “Of course you’ve heard about the death.”

The physician nodded. “A suit breach, I gather. Tragic for the Yambuku staff. I suppose they’ll have to replace the armor.” “Not to mention the engineer.”

“Macabie Feya. Arrived thirty months ago. Healthy as a horse, but they all are, at least when they first set foot on the IOS. He caused the accident himself, I hear.”

“He was in open air in poorly prepped protective gear. In that sense, yes, he brought it on himself. But fault has a way of rising up the ranks.”

“Surely no one could blame you, Manager.”

“Thank you for the unconvincing show of support. Of course we both know better.”

“It’s not an ideal world.”

“We’ve lost two assets that will be expensive to replace. There’s no way to finesse that. However, Yambuku is far from crippled. They can still make vehicular excursions, most of their tractibles are in decent shape, and they have at least one suit of bioarmor that can be brought up to specification fairly quickly. Basic research won’t be interrupted.”

“And,” Nefford said, “they have the new gear that Fisher woman brought with her.”

“Is that common knowledge?”

“For better or worse. The IOS is a village. People talk.”

“Too much and too often.” But Degrandpre expected a certain amount of gossip from Corbus Nefford. Because he was a physician and a section manager, Nefford’s rice bowl was virtually ensured.

He could risk saying things others might keep to themselves. “What Zoe Fisher brought with her is an unproven technology foisted on us by a rogue branch of the Trusts. The Fisher woman comes with a vade mecum from Personnel and Devices, and she’s putting herself directly in harm’s way. That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part.”

The doctor nodded absently, whispering into his scroll. “The diagnostic’s finished. Step down, please.”

Degrandpre dressed himself, still thinking aloud. “Personnel and Devices act like they can shuffle our priorities at will. I doubt the Works commissioners will put up with this kind of arrogance much longer. In the meantime, I’d like Zoe Fisher to survive at least until I’m safely back in Beijing. It’s not my battle, frankly.” Had he overstepped? “This is privileged, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Not galley gossip, in other words.”

“You know you can trust me, Kenyon.” He used the given name not as an impertinence but with downcast eyes, to ingratiate.

“Thank you, Corbus.” A gentle rebuke. “So? Am I healthy?”

Nefford turned with visible relief to his desktop. “Your bone calcium is excellent, your musculature is stable, and your accumulated radiation exposure is well within tolerance. But next time, I want a blood sample.”

“Next time, you may have one.”

Once every calendar month, Degrandpre walked the circumference of the orbital station, from docking bays to sun garden, his left hand on the holster of his quirt.

He thought of the walkthrough as a way of staying in touch with the IOS. Keeping the maintenance crew on their toes, citing Works staff for uniform violations—in general, making his presence felt. (In the case of dress-code infringements, he had long ago given up on the Kuiper and Martian scientists; he considered himself lucky if they remembered to dress at all.) Problems that seemed distant from his chambers loomed larger from the deckplates. And he liked the exercise.

Invariably, he started his inspection at the dimly lit cargo-storage spaces of Ten Module and finished back at Nine, the garden. He liked to linger in the garden. If he had been asked, he might have said he enjoyed the filtered sunlight, pumped from fixed collectors in the IOS’s hub, or the moist air, or the earthy smell of the aeroponic suspensions. And all that was true. But not all of the truth.

To Kenyon Degrandpre, the garden was a kind of pocket paradise.

He had loved gardens even as a child. For the first twelve years of his life he had lived with his father, a senior manager at the Cultivar Collection in southern France. The Collection’s greenhouses ranged over thousands of acres of rolling pastureland, foundations tilted to the southern sky, a city of damp glass walls and hissing aerators.

“Paradise” was his father’s name for it. In biblical mythology, paradise was a garden called Eden; the Edenic world was cultivated, perfect. When humankind fell from grace, the garden succumbed to anarchy.

On the IOS the garden was even more central, as delicate and vital as a transplanted heart. It supplied most of the station’s nutritional needs; it recycled wastes; it cleansed the air. Because the garden was both indispensable and fragile, it was, at least in Degrandpre’s eyes, the paradise of the Old Testament restored: orderly, calculated, organic, and precise.

The gardeners, in their buff fatigues, acknowledged his presence by staying out of his way. He walked the garden tiers slowly, pausing in a glade of tall tomato plants to savor the smell and the leaf-green light.

He had. entered the Works with much of his father’s idealism still intact. Humanity had endured a wild Earth for too long. The price had been uncontrolled population growth, climatic devolution, disease.

Kuiper radicals accused Earth of wallowing in stasis. Nonsense, Degrandpre thought. How long would a Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm last if it failed to regulate its ice and oxygen mining? How long could the IOS, for instance, sustain itself in a state of anarchy? But there was nothing special about the surface of Earth; the issues were the same, only broader, more diffuse. Consider Isis itself: a garden never cultivated. Beautiful, as freshly arrived Kuiper enthusiasts never failed to point out. And fundamentally hostile to human life.

He passed through the vegetable gardens and climbed a flight of stairs to a terrace where delicately engineered fruit vines thrived near the light. Gardeners and slim white tractibles moved like angels among the lush foliage, and he savored the patient sound of dripping water. Home, Degrandpre found himself thinking: five years now since he’d seen it, and God knows what had gone on during his absence. The disastrous North African Aquifer Initiative had nearly cost him his career; he had called in every outstanding favor just to save his Works card. He had accepted the Isis rotation to demonstrate his adaptability. It was the only post of any responsibility he had been offered.

And he hadn’t done badly here. But too much time had passed too slowly, and he felt the separation from Earth more keenly than he had expected. It was as if his body registered on the cellular level every inch of the vast distance the Higgs launcher had transected; he was, after all, so far from home that the sunlight falling on these vines would not reach Beijing or Boston or the south of France within his lifetime. His only real connection with the planet of his birth was the particle-pair link—a thin reed indeed.

But one to which he was obliged to attend. His weekly report was due. He would have to let the Trusts know that one of their engineers had died.

Bad luck. Or bad management. Or Kuiper adventurism gone wrong. Yes, that was it.

By midday, he had queued his report for transmission and was tending to other business. A summit of section managers arrived bearing grievances: unfair tractible allotment and resource utilization, the usual departmental jealousies. The Turing factories on Isis’s small moon had fallen short of productivity goals, though another two factory units had been genned. The question was one of balance. No one would get what he wanted, but that was inevitable. The IOS was an economy of scarcity.

The good news was that no truly critical shortages were pressing, Turing productivity had increased even if it had not met expectations, and the IOS’s life-support systems remained in good shape. Most of the bad news came from the Surface Projects manager, who reported a rash of seal failures, maintenance calls, and diminished redundancy, particularly from the continental and deep-sea outposts. (The small arctic station reported only routine maintenance.) This was potentially troublesome, since the down-stations used a daunting variety of exotic materials imported from home; bringing stores and spares back to capacity would take some cargo shuffling on the part of the Trusts, never an easy sell. But, all in all, things could be worse.

He soothed the junior managers with promises, dismissed them at last and went to his cabin.

Alone.

He hated the social isolation of the IOS, but the answer to that problem, as always, was discipline. That was the mistake the Trusts had made more than a century ago, tinkering with the genes of Kuiper volunteers rather than teaching them the practical arts of self-discipline.

The wall of his cabin showed a relay view of Isis, blue on black velvet. He was supremely tired of it. He switched the display to a neutral white luminescence, keyed to dim as he fell asleep.

His personal scroll chirped, waking him early. The waiting message was tagged amber, important but not urgent. Degrandpre let it wait while he showered and dressed. Then he dispatched a small personal tractible to bring breakfast from the galley.

He took up the scroll reluctantly. The message was return traffic from the Works Trust. Perfunctory regrets on the Macabie Feya death. Revised launch schedules. Revised cargo inventories, projected six months forward.

And in the tail of the message, a small but lethal sting.

An “observer” had been written into the next personnel rotation. A Personnel and Devices observer, a man named Avrion Theophilus.

Terrifyingly, the man’s rank wasn’t specified.

On Earth, a man without a title was either very poor or very powerful. A peasant or a Family man.

And peasants didn’t come to Isis.

FOUR

Zoe came to the common room to witness the burning of Macabie Feya’s body. Tam Hayes had called the downstation staff to Yambuku’s common room, which was large enough for Zoe to join the crowd without feeling unduly claustrophobic. Hayes had cleared one wall and converted the surface panel into a screen with a view of the western clearances, where remote tractibles had assembled a bier of native wood for the body to He on. The effect was like watching through a big picture window. But in fact the common room was at the heart of the sterile core of Yambuku, insulated from Isis by onionskin layers of hot-zone laboratories and tractible bays.

Mac Feya, contaminated beyond rescue, hadn’t made it farther into the station than the tractible bay. His body was compromised with Isian organisms beyond number; it had become, in effect, a supremely dangerous piece of biological waste. Elam Mather had used a medical remote to sedate and anesthetize Mac as he died, a grim but thankfully brief process; she had then extracted key tissue samples and processed them into the glove-box array before she returned the body to the clearing.

Zoe didn’t look at the body too closely. Mac Feya’s bioarmor had been stripped for salvage and he had been draped with a white sheet in an attempt to lend some dignity to his corpse. But the body was obviously deliquescing under the shroud, digested by Isian microorganisms and processed with eerie speed into a syrupy black liquid. Just like a CIBA-37 mouse, Zoe thought. She sat rigidly in her chair and tried not to take this death as an omen. A warning perhaps:The Isian biosphere would not be trifled with. But there was nothing malignant here, no deliberate attack on human life. The problem was not Isis, but humanity. We’re fragile, Zoe thought; we evolved in a younger and less competitive biological domain. We’re infants here.

When the first probes reached Isis, there had been a keen effort to protect the planet from human contamination. But there was not a Terrestrial organism the Isian biosphere couldn’t contain and devour, its immense array of enzymes and poisons quickly corrupting the fragile protein envelopes of Earth-based life. The death of Macabie Feya was simply Isis acting as Isis must.

“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”

Zoe looked away from the body to the forest canopy beyond the bier. The trees were sinuous, thin-boled, raising their limbs like great green hands. This, after all, was her realm, or soon would be. She had trained most of her life for protracted isolation in the Isian woodlands. If a native species had been named, she could name it; she could even supply tentative binomials for new species within a broad range of genera. But this was not a textbook, a file-stack, or a walkthrough simulation. The reality of it was suddenly overwhelming, even from the cloistered safety of the common room: real breezes shaking the foliage, real shadows eclipsing the forest floor. She had come within a few thin walls of Isis —at last, at last.

And in the midst of death. Real death. The depth of emotion in the room was daunting. Dieter Franklin had lowered his head to disguise tears; Elam Mather was openly weeping, and she wasn’t the only one.

Two mysteries, Zoe thought. Isis and grief. Of the two, she understood Isis better. How would she feel if someone close to her had died? But there was no one close to her. There never had been. Only Theo, as severe and aloof as some black-winged bird, her teacher and savior. What if it were Theo’s body out there? Would she weep? Zoe had wept often when she was young, especially during her dimly remembered time at the Tehran orphan creche. From which Theo had saved her. Without Theo … well, without Theo, she would be lost.

Free, some traitorous part of her whispered.

The thought was disturbing.

Tam Hayes, tall and somber in his Yambuku fatigues, read a brief but dignified eulogy. Then a young biochemist named Ambrosic, the last Reformed Mormon at Yambuku now that Mac was gone, offered a formal prayer for the dead.

On some hidden cue, the attending tractibles doused the bier with hydrocarbon compounds and ignited it with a jet of flame. An external microphone relayed the sound with horrible fidelity, the whoosh of ignition and the slow crackle of the burning wood.

The heat lofted Macabie Feya’s ashes high into the Isian sunlight. Wind carried away the smoke. His phosphates would fertilize the soil, Zoe thought. Season by season, atom by atom, the bios would have the whole of him.

Zoe had been sent to Isis specifically for the deep-immersion project, but until the day she would step out of the station, she was a Yambuku hand and had to find a niche for herself. She was neither a microbiologist nor an engineer, but there was plenty of ordinary scutwork to do—filter changes, cargo inventory, scheduling—and she made herself available for all these duties. And day by day, as the shock of Mac Feya’s death eased, she felt herself becoming … what? If not a member of the Yambuku family, at least a welcome accessory.

Today, a week since the funeral, Zoe had invested eight hours on cargo inventory, which meant lots of physical labor even with the freight tractibles helping. She took a quiet dinner in the refectory and retired to her cabin. More than anything, she wanted a hot shower and an early bed … but she had only just dialed the water temperature when Elam Mather knocked at the door.

Elam was dressed in after-duty clothes—loose buff shorts and blouse—and her smile seemed genuinely friendly. “I’ve got tomorrow’s duty roster. Thought you might want a quick look. Or just to talk. Are you busy?”

Zoe invited her in. Zoe’s cabin was small, a bedroll and a desk and one wall with a screen function. Once a month or so, compressed edits of Terrestrial entertainment were fed down the particle-pair link from Earth. Tonight most of the station hands were screening the new Novosibersk Brevities in the common room. Zoe had linked her screen to an outside camera and the only show she wanted to see was the sleepy crescent of Isis’s moon as it fled across the southern stars.

Elam entered the room as she entered all rooms, brusquely, arms at her sides, tall even by Kuiper standards. “I’m not much for light entertainment,” she said. “Guess you’re not either.”

Zoe wasn’t sure how to react. Elam didn’t flaunt her rank, but she was one of Yambuku’s key people, second only to Tam Hayes himself. Back home, it all would have been clear. Junior managers had deferred to her and she had deferred to her seniors—and everyone deferred to Family. Simple.

Elam dropped the roster sheets on Zoe’s desk. “It’s a desert around here when the entertainment package comes in.”

“They say this one has good dancing.”

“Uh-huh. Sounds like you’re about as enthusiastic as I am. I’m just an old Kuiper fossil, I guess. Where I come from, dancing is something you do, not something you watch.”

Zoe couldn’t think of an answer. She didn’t dance.

Elam glanced at the active wall screen. Zoe had maxed the resolution, creating the illusion that her cabin had lost one wall and was open to the Isian night. Yambuku’s perimeter lights picked out the nearest trees, starkly bright against the velvet-dark forest. “No offense, Zoe, but you’re like a ghost sometimes. You’re here, but all your attention is out there.”

“It’s what I’m trained for.”

Elam frowned and looked away.

Zoe added, “Did I say something wrong?”

“Excuse me? Oh—no, Zoe. Nothing wrong. Like I say, I’m just an old Kuiper fossil.”

“You read my personnel file,” Zoe guessed.

“Some of it. Part of the job.”

“I know how it must sound. Sole survivor of a clonal pod, designed for Isis duty, lost in an orphan crib for three years, mild aversion to human contact. Freakish, and I guess … very Terrestrial. But I’m really—”

She began to say, no different from anyone else. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Even on Earth, she had stood a little apart. And it was part of her qualification for the job.

“—trying hard to fit in here.”

“I know,” Elam said. “And I appreciate it. I want to apologize if we’ve been slow about breaking the ice. Mostly it’s what happened to Mac, nothing to do with your history.”

Zoe noted the qualifier. Mostly. But that was fair. The majority of the scientists at Yambuku were Kuiper-born. The old-time Commonwealth Settlement Ministry had populated the first Kuiper Body settlements with citizens gen-engineered for long isolation and the claustrophobically tight conditions in the water mines. Unfortunately, it had been a faulty sequence-swap. The undetected bug in their altered genome had been unexpected, late-life neurological decay, a congenital nerve-sheath plaque difficult to cure or contain. Of that generation of Kuiper settlers, those who survived the rigors of first settlement had died screaming in inadequate clinical facilities far from Earth. Only a hasty program of sequence-patching had saved their children from the same fate. Most of them.

Kuiper veterans would tell you they feared heavy-handed Terrestrial gene-tinkering aimed at population control, not the process itself. But family history made it a ticklish issue. Zoe was a clonal birth whose life had been designed and tailored for Trust duty. Her Kuiper-born colleagues must find that distasteful.

“What I’m saying, Zoe, is that none of that matters much. Because you’re one of us now. You have to be. We’re sitting at the bottom of a hostile biological ocean, and Yambuku is a bathysphere. One leak and it’s over for all of us. In that kind of environment, we can’t afford anything less than mutual trust.”

Zoe nodded. “I understand. I’m doing my best, Elam. But I’m not… good with people.”

Elam touched her arm, and Zoe forced herself not to flinch. The older woman’s hand was warm, dry, rough.

“What I’m trying to say is, if you need a friend, I’m here.”

“Thank you. And I’m sorry if this sounds rude. I look forward to working with you. But… I don’t want a friend.”

Elam smiled. “That’s okay. I didn’t say ‘want.’ ”

The days passed, each day a step closer to her liberation from the confinement of Yambuku. Outside, a week of rain gave way to vivid sunshine. The station’s device shop processed Zoe’s excursion suit, duplicating its files and testing its capacities, green-lighting its function inventory item by item. Zoe spent the lag time patiently, learning the first names of Yambuku’s sixteen current residents. Of these, she was most comfortable with Elam Mather and Tam Hayes, the device-shop engineers Tia and Kwame and Paul, and the planetologist Dieter Franklin.

“We’re close to a go-ahead on your excursion technology,” Tam Hayes told her. “The technicians are impressed. We were told to expect something novel. This is more than novel.”

Zoe pushed a cargo cart down the long windowless enclosure of the south quarter. The cart’s wheels rattled against the brushed-steel floor. She tried to imagine how this place must have looked when the tractibles and Turing constructors were assembling it. A metal catacomb attended by mechanical spiders, steel and metacarbon panels lofting down from orbit on guided parachutes.

Today was mainly sunny and warm, according to Hayes. Not that she could tell from the timeless monotony of this walkway. “Days like this,” Hayes said, “we often send the dragonfly remensors out.”

Zoe looked up from her work.

Hayes said, “Interested?”

Yes, very much.

“Your file says you can handle this kind of remote. Is that correct?”

Zoe adjusted the headset to fit her skull. “Yes.”

“And you know the terrain?” From simulations.’’

“Okay. We’ll call this a training jaunt. Just keep me in sight at all times and do as I say.”

Yambuku operated its telepresence devices from a console room no larger than Zoe’s cabin. She was aware of Tam Hayes in the chair next to hers. In Yambuku’s ultraclean environment, odors became more intense. She could smell him—a clean smell, soap and laundered cotton and his own unique scent, like spring hay. And, alas, herself: nervous, eager. She activated the headset and the room fell away from her awareness—though not the scent.

Hayes activated the remote, and two dragonfly remensors rose from a bay at the periphery of the shuttle dock into the still noon air.

The remensors’ fragile wings glistened with photoelectric chiton cells, microscopic prisms. Their elongated bodies curled downward for stability as the devices hovered in place.

Zoe, wrapped in the headset and hands on the controls, saw what her rernensor saw: Yambuku from a height, and the wooded rift valley infinitely deep and wide beyond it, an unbroken canopy of green dappled with gentle cloud shadows.

Her heart hammered. Another wall had fallen. Between herself and Isis there were many walls, but every day fewer, and soon enough, none; soon enough, only the insensible membrane of her excursion suit. The two realms, her Terrestrial ecology of blood and tissue and the deep Isian biosphere, would come as close to physical contact as technology permitted. She longed to touch her new world, to feel its breezes on her body. The feeling was startling in its intensity.

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 rash 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 suns.”

“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 shade-dappled 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 scrub weed 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 were 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 Uttered 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.

FIVE

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 taxonomies of Isian flora. She’s here for some other reason.”

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.”

“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 creche 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 Ember 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 immune-system 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.

H e 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 the 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.

SIX

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 mono-cells 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 pupped 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, images 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…

But the most immediate question was whether the biohazard had been successfully contained—or whether it might spread.

Degrandpre ordered coffee for all hands in the ops room, then waited with unconcealed impatience for Li—a Terrestrial, at least—to find time for a direct uplink.

Waiting, he felt impotent. This would enrage his superiors on Earth, no matter what happened next. He would have to red-flag a report to the Families and accept whatever responsibility he couldn’t dodge. And in the meantime—

In the meantime, he could only pray that the event would be contained.

A junior brought him coffee. The coffee was synthetic and tasted like ashes steeped in well water, but he had drained two cups by the time Li appeared on the screen at last, his Trust uniform disheveled and perspiration-stained. Li’s skin was as classically dark as Degrandpre’s was classically pale; both men would have been considered moderately handsome on Earth, though not in the Kuiper settlements, where a sort of muwallad brown was the fashionable skin color.

Li said without preamble, “I want a full evacuation of the Oceanic Station.”

Degrandpre blinked. “You know you don’t have the authority—”

“Manager, I’m sorry, but time is important. Whatever it was that took out Pod Six, it affected the men first, the electrical systems second, and then the structural integrity of the pod itself—all in less than an hour. I don’t want to lose any more staff.”

“According to our telemetry, the problem was contained. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please share it with me.”

“With all due respect, I don’t have evidence of anything! All I know for certain is that one of my laboratories is at the bottom of the ocean and two of my men are dead. At the time of the accident, they had bacterial plaques in their glove box. I don’t know if that contributed to the problem or not, but we have similar organisms in just about every glove box in the station. If it constitutes a threat—”

“You can’t know that.”

“No, I can’t, which is precisely why—”

“You’re suggesting we abandon an extremely valuable resource because of one accident and your own surmise.”

“We can always reoccupy the station.”

“At an enormous expense in resources and work hours.”

“Manager … do you really want to assume that risk?”

The bastard was trying to protect himself in case of more trouble. Degrandpre imagined Li testifying at a Trust inquiry: Although I requested an evacuation in unequivocal terms…

“just give me any hard information you happen to have, Dr. Li, and we’ll proceed from there.”

Li bit his lip but knew better than to argue. “If you’ve been monitoring our telemetry, you know as much as I do. The pod went bad this morning. No communication from the crew, only siren. I ordered the bulkheads sealed. The pod’s electrical and life-support systems shut down shortly thereafter, for reasons unknown. An hour after that, the pod lost hull integrity and collapsed under pressure. That’s all we know.”

“Have you recovered any of the wreckage?”

“We don’t have enough tractibles or excursion gear to recover solid wreckage.”

“All right. Make the shuttle bay ready for evacuation, but wait for my order. In the meantime, try to gather at least some portion of any evidence that happens to be floating on the surface. Don’t bring anything substantial past quarantine, but archive samples for the glove boxes.”

“For the record, I strongly recommend evacuating the station now and conducting any investigation by remote.”

“Noted. Thank you for your opinion. Please do as I say.”

He gave the com control to a subordinate.

When the initial report had been filed and the cleanup delegated—and in the absence of further alarms—Degrandpre put his assistant in charge and issued orders to alert him if the situation deteriorated.

By the clock, he hadn’t eaten for nearly ten hours—nor, in deference, had anyone else in the ops room. He ordered a shift change and meals by tractible for anyone staying on duty.

Then he walked to the command commissary, where he found Corbus Nefford dining calmly on braised peppers and basmati rice. The gardens grew a limited range of spices and the IOS biosynthesized others, but Nefford’s dish smelled strikingly of fresh garlic and basil.

The physician regarded him with undisguised pleasure. “Join me, Manager?”

Weary, Degrandpre found a chair opposite Nefford. “I assume you’ve heard.”

“About the incident at the Oceanic Station? A little.” “Because I would prefer not to talk about it.” “The crisis is over?”

“Yes.” Was that wishful thinking? “The crisis is over.” “Two lives lost?”

“You’re as well-informed as I am, apparently. Now talk about something else, Corbus, or be quiet and let me eat.” The service tractible waited for his order. He was hungry but he asked for something light—a salad with protein strips.

The chastened physician was briefly silent before a new subject came to mind: “There are fresh Turing gens from Earth, I hear.”

“You’re a font of good news. I didn’t know you took an interest in engineering.”

“Only as it affects my future, Manager. Possibly even yours.”

“New Turing gens? I don’t remember agreeing to a gen switch … or are these next year’s algorithms?”

“Brand-new gens, apparently, but Engineering tells me they came with a priority tag.”

“We’re having a hard enough time meeting maintenance schedules as it is. We’ll have to modify our quotas, unless this is an efficiency fix.”

“Devices and Personnel wants our Turing factories manufacturing parts for a planetary interferometer.”

“Nonsense. They floated that idea years ago. Oh, it will have to be done eventually … a survey of the local stars, possibly even Higgs launches from the Isis system … but not in the near future.” An Isian interferometer would be able to image worlds undetectable from the Terrestrial system. But all that was theoretical and would likely remain so for a long time. Rapid expansion into the galaxy wasn’t a policy of the Works Trust or of the Families. The only voices calling for an increase in the pace of exploration—with all the fiscal sacrifice that would entail—came from dissident elements in Devices and Personnel.

Unless—

Could Devices and Personnel have become powerful enough to order new Turing gens? Would the Works Trust really sit still for that?

He had been away from Earth too long to guess.

“Manager?”

Nefford was almost salivating for a reaction. Degrandpre declined to give him one. “I’m sorry, Corbus. I was thinking of something else.”

The physician’s features collapsed into disappointment. “You’ll excuse me,” Degrandpre said, standing. “Manager, what about your meal?” “Have it sent to my quarters.”

Eight hours later, there had been no new development in the outpost crisis. Even Freeman Li had begun to calm down, no longer demanding an immediate evac, only pushing for a “contingency plan,” not an unreasonable request. Degrandpre agreed to keep the shuttle bays on standby and ordered an immediate investigation, sending the Kuiper woman Elam Mather from Yambuku to the oceanic outpost to oversee the process. She was a competent worker in her own way, and as an outpost scientist, she would have the skills to supervise cleanup and isolation ops.

After a long session spent briefing the section managers, he returned to his cabin to sort through a stack of recent transmissions from Earth. And yes, Corbus Nefford had been correct; here was an order specifying broad new protocols for the Turing factories, shunting valuable raw material into this scheme to build a large-scale imaging interferometer. Devices and Personnel wanted a functioning planetary imager established before the end of the decade, plus a host of secondary probes to identify small asteroids and Kuiper objects that might ultimately serve as Higgs launchers. Madness! But the Works Trust was cooperating and Degrandpre could hardly resist; the loss of the oceanic lab had already stained his record.

There was a time when he might have enjoyed this kind of intrigue. When he thought he was good at it. But the forces at work here were vast, impersonal, Hegelian. He would be crushed, or he would not; the outcome was beyond his control.

Unless—

Buried in the filestack of communiques he found a secured order to begin Zoe Fisher’s fieldwork “with all possible speed.” He took it at first for a Devices and Personnel addendum, but it wasn’t; it came with a Works seal. He was taken aback: Rushing the Fisher woman’s walkabout might well produce another casualty, another stain on Degrandpre’s fragile career record.

And a setback for the radicals of Devices and Personnel? Was that what the Works Trust wanted?

This was delicate indeed. The order looked innocuous. The only odd thing about it was that it concerned a Devices and Personnel project but lacked the D P imprimatur. Significant or not?

One thing was certain. The Fisher woman mattered a great deal, to all sorts of people. She was, as his father used to say, a hinge that bears great weight. Her life—or her death—would surely affect his own.

SEVEN

Zoe hurried to the common room as soon as she heard the news. She found most of the Yambuku family already gathered there—grimly huddled together, many of them, while the main plasma screen displayed fragments of telemetry from the oceanic outpost. She had gone to bed early and was asleep when the first news broke; by the time the all-hands alert sounded, Singh and Devereaux were already confirmed dead, their lab crushed and swallowed by the equatorial sea.

Isis had killed them, Hayes would say … though Zoe couldn’t bring herself to think of the accident in those terms. Isis wasn’t the enemy. She believed that fiercely. The enemy was carelessness, or ignorance, or the unexpected.

Singh and Devereaux had both rotated through Yambuku during their orientation. Most of the Yambuku staff had known them. With the exception of the secretive IOS technicians and the upper-echelon kachos, everyone on Isis duty knew everyone else, especially the handful of downstation crew, the surface dwellers.

Yambuku mourned Singh and Devereaux just as the staff of the oceanic labs must have mourned Macabie Feya.

Three deaths in the time I’ve been here, Zoe thought. We’re like soldiers in a battle zone. We watch each other die.

Tonya Cooper had collapsed onto the shoulder of Em Vya, a junior phytochemist. Both wept quietly. Zoe felt a swelling grief of her own; she hadn’t met the dead men but she supposed it must have been an awful death, to be crushed under the brutal weight of the ocean—like Macabie Feya, she thought, lost to the lonely immensities of Isis.

Tam Hayes stood silently in the east corner of the room, next to the large global map of Isis. The globe had been one of Mac Feya’s spare-time projects, she remembered Elam saying. A work of art, assembled from Yambuku’s redundant supplies—a bubble of handblown silica now, physical features read from survey maps in. the ICS’s archives and etched onto the globe’s surface by an assembly tractible. The globe was ice-blue and frost-gray, faintly translucent. She watched Hayes spin the bubble in order to locate the oceanic labs, an infinitesimally small speck in the glassy turquoise of the southern equatorial sea. She joined him, following along as he traced a useless path to the nearest substantial land, a chain of volcanic islands appended to the Great Western Continent like a crooked finger, five thousand kilometers away. Zoe felt she could read his thoughts: in all that strange blue immensity, more death, …

She put her hand on his arm.

The gesture was impulsive, and she didn’t realize at first that she had done it. Her shock unfolded slowly. Hayes seemed not to notice, though he looked up when she pulled away.

The sleeve of his shirt had felt warm, as warm as his body.

“We’re losing,” he said. “My God, Zoe. Gigadollars to bring us here, to keep us here, and we’re losing to the planet.” Unasked, he returned the touch, put his hand on her shoulder, and Zoe was simultaneously aware of a number of things: the scent of him, the murmur of the room, the midnight whisper of the station’s homeostatics. Seen from outside, Yambuku would be a bubble of yellow light in a moonless dark, the forest’s vacant rooms and random corridors reaching to the mountains, the sea. “It goes beyond coincidence. Maybe Dieter’s paranoia is justified. The planet’s peeling away our defenses, prying us open. Much more of this and they’ll shut us down, conduct research by tractible. …”

“It was an accident,” Zoe managed to say. Idiotic, she thought.

“The Trusts don’t care. The Families don’t care.”

But I care, Zoe thought. And so does he, though he doesn’t want to say it so baldly.

Elam Mather came across the room dressed in crumpled sleep fatigues, her eyes full of worry and an active scroll in her hand. “More news from the IOS,” she said.

Hayes gave her a wary look.

“They’re shuttling me out to the sea lab,” Elam explained. “To what’s left of it. They want me to find out what happened.”

The crew drifted out of the common room as it became obvious that the crisis had stabilized. Zoe, alert now and full of caffeine, sat at a conference table, bathed in the wan light of the active wall displays.

She waited until Jon Jiang, the night-shift engineer, gave her a baleful nod and left the room. Truly alone—and feeling almost furtive—she switched the large west-wall display away from its static readout mode to monitor the view from an exterior camera.

Cool outside tonight, according to the status crawl at the top of the display. Twenty-one degrees Celsius, winds from the west-northwest averaging five klicks per hour. Stars glittered like garnets in the heavy sky, obscured by a cirrus haze.

She felt strange. She couldn’t name the way she felt.

She was reminded of the way she had felt years ago when Theo had come to save her from the bleak hallways and morbid stone chambers of the Tehran orphan creche. That contradictory mixture of feelings: dread of the future, dread of this tall stranger in his crisp black uniform, and at the same time a nervous elation, a sweet suspicion of freedom.

Her memories of Tehran had been “smoothed”—the medical word—until they were distorted and affectless. She knew only that her jailers had raped and starved her sisters and had used her own body as they pleased. She didn’t forgive them, but her rage was muted; most of her tormentors would have died in the riots of’40, in the fire that had swept out of the industrial slums and swallowed the creche complex. They were dead, and she was alive; better still, she had been given back the special destiny for which she had been born: the stars.

Why, then, did she shiver at every touch of the material world? She had shivered, outside in her excursion suit, at the first cool drop of Isian rain on her shoulder. And she had shivered at the touch of Tam Hayes’ broad, rough hand.

I don’t like to be touched. How often in her life had she repeated that small mantra? It was a legacy, the medical ontogenists had told her, of the Tehran years. An aversion too deep to root out, and anyway, where she was going, there would be no one to touch her; no one human, at least, during her alone time in the Isian wilderness.

But then why was she looking at the night sky with her eyes full of tears? Why did her hand stray repeatedly to her shoulder where Tam Hayes had touched her, as if to shelter that ghost of his warmth?

Why had memory begun to well out of her like some dark subterranean spring?

She knew only that something was wrong with her. And that she mustn’t tell anyone. If they suspected she was ill, they would send her back to the IOS, probably back to Earth.

Away from her work.

Away from Tam Hayes.

Away from her life.

Two days passed. The crisis at the oceanic outpost had been contained; the mood at Yambuku lightened somewhat, though Zoe noticed the biohazard people keeping their scrolls open on their desks, alert for news. She spent a morning doing a simulation walk through the lush terrain west of the Copper River, then took her lunch into the prep room of the docking bay, watching the maintenance crew ready the shuttle for Elam’s suborbital flight across the ocean.

Maintenance was an Engineering duty. Lee Reisman, Sharon Carpenter, and Kwame Sen waved at Zoe from the bay, and Kwame in particular stole a number of more frequent glances at her. Was he attracted to her? Sexually attracted? The thought was unsettling. Zoe had studied with peers at the D P facilities back home, but most of her classmates were heterosexual women or junior male aristocrats sporting orchidectomy badges. And Zoe hadn’t cared. The medical team had taught her a broad range of masturbation sutras, because that was expected to be her permanent sexual modality. It should have been enough.

But these days she was masturbating almost nightly, and when she did … well, as often as not, she thought of Tam Hayes.

Elam Mather entered the prep room and joined Zoe at the table, pushing aside a stack of checklists to make room for her coffee cup. The older woman nodded at her abstractedly but said nothing, only gazed at the shuttle work. Kwame kept his glances to himself.

Zoe said, “I hope you have a safe trip.”

“Hmm? Oh. Well, don’t wish me luck. It’s bad luck, wishing people luck.”

It was the sort of bewildering thing Kuiper people were apt to say. Certainly, Zoe had read all the histories; she could recount the founding of the Republics as well as any schoolchild in the system. But none of that dry knowledge had prepared her for the reality of a Kuiper-dominated community like Yambuku—the frightening fluidity of rank, the unabashed sexuality. Kuiper males were never gelded, no matter what their station in life, and the result was rather like being caged with zoo animals; these people made no secret of their urges, their assignations, their copulations…

“We’re not so bad,” Elam said.

Zoe stared. “Are you telepathic, too?”

Elam laughed. “Hardly. It’s just not the first time I’ve worked with Terrestrials. You learn to recognize that expression, you know, that sort of—‘Oh, God, what next?’ Zoe allowed herself a smile.

“Actually,” Elam added, “you’re adjusting very well for an Earth-bound hand.”

“I’m not Earth-bound. Any more than you’re Kuiper-bound. I mean … we’re here, aren’t we?”

“Good point. You’re right. We’re here. We’re not what we used to be.” She returned Zoe’s tentative smile. “I begin to understand what Tam sees in you.”

Zoe blushed.

Thinking: He sees something in me?

She dreamed that night of her first home—not the horrid barracks in Tehran but the soft, cool Devices and Personnel creche of her years.

The creche was located deep in an American wilderness enclave. The creche dome, green as crystal, seen from afar on picnic days, had glittered like a dewdrop on the rolling prairie grassland.

The nursery wards and creche pads had been as plush as velvet, all corners rounded, the air itself sweet-smelling and cool. And she had not known fear or doubt, not in the creche. Each of the nannies, many of them wholly human, tended one special child, and they were stern but kind, fat ministering angels.

She had changed her green jumper every morning and every afternoon, the simple cloth starched and bright. And she had looked forward to the evening bath, splashing with her sibs while lactating nannies with babies in their arms looked on indulgently from terraces above the steaming water.

In her dream, she was back in the bath pool, slapping waves at a yellow flotation ring. But the dream became disturbing when great, ancient trees—cycads or giant lycopods—erupted around the pool, a sudden forest. The voices of her sibs were instantly stilled. She was alone, shivering, naked in a woodland like no woodland she had. ever seen. She climbed from the creche pool onto a mossy shore. Black soil cushioned her feet; the rocks were dressed in velvety green liverwort. She didn’t know how she had come here or how to find her way home. She felt panic rising out of the clenched fist of her belly. Then a shade, a shape, appeared out of the humid fog. It was Avrion Theophilus, her own beloved Theo in his crisp Devices and Personnel uniform … but when she recognized him she turned away and ran, ran as fast she could run, ran uselessly while his footsteps thudded behind her.

She woke in the dark.

Her heart was hammering. It eased soon enough, but the sense of threat and electricity continued to vibrate through her body.

Just a bad dream, Zoe thought.

But she never had bad dreams.

She pushed the nightmare out of her mind, thinking again of Tam Hayes, of how she had touched him so unselfconsciously in the common room, of the fabric of his shirt, of his eyes holding hers for a fraction of a moment.

Something is wrong with me, she told herself again, oh God, as she reached between her legs and spread her labia with her fingers, finding the bump of her clitoris like a small, hard knot.

The orgasm came quickly, a wave of fire. She bit her lip to keep from crying out.

EIGHT

Elam Mather felt her usual light-headedness as the shuttle lifted from Yambuku into a watery sky. Isis fell away beneath her, but not far enough; this was a suborbital flight, half a world’s journey to the damaged oceanic outpost. Several hours’ flying time at the best speed the cumbersome shuttle could make. Planets, she thought, were simply too large.

The shuttle crew were IOS-based, and most of them were Kuiper-born, pleasant enough but not talkative. Elam settled down in an aisle seat by herself, her scroll tuned to one of the Terrestrial pop- novels occasionally dumped down the particle-pair link for the presumed edification of lonely outposters. This one (titled E. Quern’s Difficult Decision) was the story of a young girl from a mesomanagerial family, in love with a Family cousin who has mistaken her station in life. Alas, a tragedy. The young heir, on learning that he can’t decently marry our heroine, volunteers for an orchidectomy and. the girl slinks back to her commune, chastened but wiser. What crap, Elam thought. In real life, the meeting would never happen; or if it did, there would be no question of a love affair. The aristocrat would fuck the prole and forget her name the next day. Certainly no such well-connected male would ever consent to an orchidectomy. Gelding was a way to keep the salarymen away from High Family daughters, no more and no less. Kachos like Degrandpre were proud of their scars, but that was only because they had been bred to a life of glorified servitude.

The proles, the great unconsulted Terrestrial masses, simply fucked or married as best they could. And increased their numbers, though the various unchecked infertility viruses helped keep the population within limits.

Elam had taken much of her schooling on Earth. She was not naive about the planet… unlike Tam Hayes, or even a D P bottle baby like Zoe Fisher.

She turned to the window, which wasn’t a window at all but a direct video feed from a cam on the outside of the multiply-insulated shuttle. The continent fled westward beneath her. Isis looked heartbreakingly calm from this altitude. The snowcapped Copper Mountains had given way to broad alluvial plains, to prairie veined with sky-blue rivers. Clouds scrubbed the grasslands with shadow, and rivers broadened at last into swampy bays and salty inlets, the vast eastern littoral where seabirds wheeled in flocks large enough to be visible even from this altitude. All this more known than seen: mapped from orbit; glimpsed, if at all, from shuttle flights or through the eyes of long-range tractible remensors.

Untouched, all this, Elam thought. In a sense, no part of Isis had ever been touched, certainly not by naked human skin. The planet was full of life, but this was life older than Earth’s by a billion years, more evolved but also more primitive, preserved from change by the absence of great waves of extinction, room for all, for all genera and every survival strategy save the human, the sentient, the Terrestrial. We’re such simple creatures, she thought; we can’t tolerate these finely honed phytotoxins, the countless microscopic predators shaped by a billion years of involution. Nothing in the armory of the human immune system could recognize or repel the invisible Isian armies.

They lay siege to us, Elam mused. She thought of the bacterial colonies eroding the seals at Yambuku and of the algal films that might or might not have contributed to the deep-sea disaster. We don’t recognize them, but I do believe they recognize us. We build our walls, our barriers, but life talks to life. Life talks to life; that was the rule.

The gray-blue continental shelf fell away behind the shuttle, and for a time there was only the ocean to see, cobalt-blue, wrinkled with white breakers; or the cloud tops, often turbulent, tropical storms winding up in the stark sunlight like watch springs coiled with lightning. In all the open sea there was no vessel or wake of a vessel, nothing human, not a nailed board or a bleached plastic bottle; nothing down there, she thought, but the alien krill, clumps of saltwater weed, wind-driven foam.

She thought of the barriers between Isian and Terrestrial life, and then of the long quarantine between Earth and the Kuiper Republics, the dark days when Earth had lost so much of her population to the plagues and the Republics became truly independent, almost by default. The Republics were an alliance of the most remote and hostile environments mankind had ever settled—Kuiper bodies, asteroids, Oort mines, the Martian airfarms. The hydrogen/ oxygen economies of the outer system had been severed from the smug water-wealth of Earth itself, humanity splitting like a parthenogenic cell, but the division was never absolute; life touches life. The Works Trust had taken a troubled Earth back into space but could not repair the old civil and political wounds. Earth had retreated into a system of bureaucratic aristocracy; the Kuiper Republics were its unruly children, making pagan or puritan Utopias of their icy strongholds—nobody cutting off his balls as a gesture of, for God’s sake, fealty.

And yet, life touches life.

Take Tam Hayes. A true Kuiper orphan, excommunicated by the doctrinaire Red Thorns for signing up with a Works project.

But signing up with the Trusts was the only way to reach Isis, distant Isis, fabled Isis, the Mandalay of the Republic. He had traded his history for a dream. And Zoe Fisher, as obedient a bottle baby as any that Earth had produced. No dreams allowed, not for that female gelding. But Isis had stitched them together somehow. It was obvious to everyone but themselves … certainly to Elam. Put them in the same room and Zoe orbited him like a sun; he followed her like a tractible antenna.

Elam didn’t approve of Terrestrial/Kuiper liaisons; most of them didn’t last… but here, she thought, was something Devices and Personnel might not have anticipated, a small wrench in the harsh human machinery of the Trusts.

Life, doing the unexpected.

She approved. Maybe she approved. But there were things Tam didn’t know about Zoe, things Elam supposed she ought to tell him. She opened her scroll and began a message … she could send it after touchdown.

She wrote until her attention was attracted by a string of volcanic islands passing under the right wing, green to the rims of their ancient caldera. Reefs, not of coral but deposited by a wholly different community of limestone-fixing invertebrates, teased the shallow water into multicolored foam. The light was longer here, making valleys of the low swells. Had she slept? A crewman, passing, told her the shuttle was less than half an hour from docking and decon.

She adjusted her seat restraint, tucked her scroll away and closed her eyes again, thinking of Hayes and Zoe, of the tenacity of life, of the universal need to merge, combine, exfoliate … and of the vulnerability of life, too, and of the sea, of the large fish that eat the little fish, and of the long reach of the Earth.

The deep-sea station’s head kacho was Freeman Li, a Terrestrial whom Elam had worked with both in training and on Isis. She liked him better than she did most Terrans: he was a flexible thinker, a small barrel-chested dark-skinned man with Sherpa ancestry and family in the Martian airfarms. A fuss-and-worry type, but he usually worried to good effect.

He was worried now. He took Elam directly from decon to the nearest common room, a low-ceilinged, octagonal chamber between a microbiology lab and the engineering deck. Elam assumed she was under sea level here, but there was no way of knowing; the oceanic outpost was as tightly sealed as Marburg or Yambuku were. The station’s distributed mass and deep anchoring prevented it from moving with the swell, though typhoons caused it to oscillate, or so she had been told, like a slow plumb bob. There was no motion now.

“I’ll be frank with you, Elam,” Li said, absently stirring a cup of black tea. “When this happened, I told Degrandpre I wanted a complete evacuation. I still think that’s what we should have done—and ought to do. Whatever killed Singh and Devereaux and destroyed Pod Six acted far too quickly for us to play with it. Arid there are still no obvious candidates for causative agent. Lots of toxic agents down there, but much of that material is also sitting in glove-box arrays all over the station. Any agent unique to Pod Six could only have been a chemical isolate or extract, not live biota.”

“Caustic substances?”

“Some of them extremely caustic, yes, and all highly toxic. A significant release could easily have killed two men and triggered the biohazard alarm. But the damage to the pod itself, no, no single agent or combination of agents could conceivably have done that.”

“As far as we know.”

He shrugged. “You’re right. We don’t know. But we’re talking about chemical isolates at the microgram level.”

“Any other problems, prior to the disaster?”

“Pod Six had problems with algal gunk interfering with the samplers and sensor arrays. But don’t jump to conclusions, Elam. We’ve had much the same trouble all up and down the station, though it gets worse with depth. It would be a tremendous coincidence if both things happened simultaneously—a toxic release inside the pod and a compromised seal serious enough to collapse the structure itself.”

“Whatever caused the watertight seals to break down might also have taken out the glove-box array.”

“Maybe. Probably. And doesn’t that suggest to you a hazard of the first order?”

She thought about it. “All we have that would make Pod Six unique is a heavy algal infestation in the sensor arrays?”

“I don’t know about unique. It’s a matter of degree. But in the sense you mean, yes.”

“Can I look at these organisms?”

“Certainly.”

Freeman Li had hedged Degrandpre’s bet by confining his staff to the upper two pods of the chain, where they could make a quick escape to the shuttle bay if the need arose. The remaining three pods had been closed and sealed. That cut into station productivity in general and interrupted at least two very promising research lines, but, Li said flatly, “That’s Degrandpre’s problem, not mine.”

It was a laudably Kuiper-like sentiment, Elam thought.

She followed him down a narrow access shaft to the lowermost of the occupied pods. The bulkheads caught her eye as she passed beneath them: immense steel pressure doors ready to snap shut in an unforgiving fraction of a second. In that awful Terrestrial novel, there had been a passage about a mouse walking into a trap. She had never seen a mouse or a mousetrap, but she imagined she knew how the animal felt.

Precautions in the microbiology lab, never less than stringent under Freeman’s watch, had been tuned since the accident to a fine pitch. Until further notice, all Isian biota and isolates were to be treated as proven hot Level Five threats. In the lab’s secured anteroom, Elam donned the requisite pressurized suit with shoulderpack air and temperature controls. As did Li, and with his headgear in place he looked peculiar: hollow-eyed, somber. He guided her through the preliminary washdown, past similarly dressed men and women working at glove boxes of varying complexity, through yet another airlocked antechamber and into a smaller, unoccupied lab.

Elam felt some of the terror she had first felt on entering a Level Five viral-research lab during her training on Earth. Of course, it had been worse then. She had been a naive Kuiper student raised on Crane Clan tales of the horrors of the Terrestrial plague years. The great divide between Earth and the Kuiper colonies had always been a biological chasm, deeper in its way than the simple distances of space. The Kuiper clans enforced a quarantine: no one was permitted to arrive or return from Earth unless he or she was scrubbed of all Terrestrial disease organisms, down to the cellular level. Terrestrial/Kuiper decon was grueling, physically difficult, and as lengthy as the long loop orbit from the inner system. There had never been an outbreak of Terrestrial disease on an inhabited Kuiper body; had there been, the settlement in question would have been instantly quarantined and decontaminated—hygiene protocols that would have been impractical on Earth, with its dense and mostly impoverished population.

Elam. had gone to Earth for her post-doc the way a fastidious social worker might consent to enter a leper colony: squeamishly, but with the best of intentions. She was inoculated for every imaginable necrophage, prion, bacteria, or virus; nevertheless, she came down with a. classic “fever of unknown origin” that persisted through the first month of her orientation before it finally yielded to a series of leukocyte injections. She had never been sick in her life before that day. Being sick, being infected with some invisible parasite, was … well, even worse than she had imagined.

After that, her first attempt at sterile work had terrified her. The University of Madrid was a Devices and Personnel stronghold full of offworld students, mainly Martians but including several Kuiper expats like herself. Novices weren’t allowed in the same room with live infectious agents. She had already been introduced to anthrax, HIV, Nelson-Cahill 1 and 2, Leung’s Dengue, and the vast array of hemorrhagic retroviruses, but strictly by telepresence. Virus-handling of the kind required by Terrestrial fieldwork was infinitely more dangerous. Here were all the antique horrors of Earth, predators more subtle and tenacious than jungle animals and just as lively, still stalking the malnourished populations of Africa, Asia, Europe. Shepherd’s crooks and rainbow-colored protein loops, all brimming with death.

Planetary ecology, she had thought. Ancient and unbelievably hostile. This was Tam’s bios made tangible, the involute residue of evolutionary eons.

But at least Earth had accommodated mankind into the equation, for all the deadliness of its plagues. Isis had brokered no such deal.

She watched as Li put his hands into a glove box. No telepresence here, either, barring the devices that translated his hand motions to the manipulators deep in the vault-like specimen barrels. A glove-box microcamera fed images to Li’s headgear and to a monitor where Elam could watch his work. The image of a linked group of living cells filled the screen.

“This is the little bastard that’s been fouling our externals. Grows in colonies, a slimy blue film. And yes, there was an inert sample from this culture in Pod Six, but I can’t believe there’s any causal connection. As a matter of fact—”

The image listed like a sinking ship. “Li? You’re losing focus.”

“This gear is as old as the station. Degrandpre’s been sitting on our maintenance requests for more than a year. Afraid he’ll offend the budget people, the timid bastard. Hold on… Better?”

Yes, better. Elam peered at the organism on-screen, fighting an urge to hold her breath. The cell was multinucleated, its spiky protein coat notched like a cog in a clockwork. Mitochondrial bodies, more varied and complex than their Terrestrial counterparts, transited between the fat nuclei and the armored cell walls, sparking quick osmotic exchanges. None of the processes were as well understood as the microbiologists liked to pretend. Different bios, different rules.

“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 HEP A 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.

NINE

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. Fie 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.