Bios

TEN

Zoe wasn’t truly alone in the forest. She was surrounded at all times by insect-sized remensors and larger, spider-legged tractibles; and she was linked to Yambuku by extensive telemetry … but she felt alone, unspeakably alone, especially after midnight.

This was what she had been born for, this aloneness. Her hermetic impulse had been built into her DNA, the same gen mods the first Kuiper colonists had carried into the emptiness beyond Neptune—a race of monks, carving their hermitages out of frozen, starlit massifs. She was not afraid to be alone. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. She found herself frightened of a number of things. She woke well after midnight in the darkness of her tent. The tent was a simple polymer-and-foam geodesic, designed not to protect her from the elements—her excursion suit did that—but to disguise her from the native wildlife. The excursion suit was a semi-open system; she carried food and water in sterile containers with self-sealing nozzles, but she excreted the inevitable wastes— bluntly, piss, shit, and C0₂. Her wastes were scrubbed by the suit’s processors and nanobacters, but even sterilized human waste was a magnet for Isian predators. Solid and liquid wastes could be contained and buried, but her breath and perspiration were harder to conceal. The tent helped, circulating external air slowly and bleeding her molecular signature through osmotic and HEP A filters.

But no system was perfect. The loss of the Ocean Station less than ten days ago had made that perfectly clear. Systems were imperfect, or imperfectly adapted to the Isian biosphere, which led to the unhappy thought that she might even now be attracting nocturnal predators that had evaded her perimeter defenses.

That hushed, woody rattle in the distance, for example, might be wind in the trees, or it might be…

Bullshit.

She sat up, exasperated, all hope of sleep fled. She found it hard enough to rest in the excursion suit, which faithfully reported to her skin the pressure of every twig and pebble under the gel floor of the tent—but it was worse to be afflicted with the midnight jitters. An array of robotic remensors scanned her perimeter at all times for motion or telltale molecular signatures; nothing larger than a grub could sneak up on her. And her tent was, if not perfect, certainly grub-proof.

So to hell with nagging fears. She was just restless. She pulled on her protective leggings, opened the tent door and stepped out into the windy darkness of the cycad-like Isian forest.

The only ambient light came from a sprinkle of stars above the leaf canopy, but there was enough of it to give the suit’s photon multiplier something to work with. The forest through her iris lenses appeared as a map of squat tree boles against a diffuse grid of wind-rippled foliage. Depthless, eerie. She adjusted her lenses to look for heat sources. And saw nothing more than a few roosting aviants and timid scavenger voles hardly larger than her thumb.

Nothing to lose sleep over. She turned her face to the sky again.

The brightest star wasn’t a star at all. It was a planet, named Cronos by some unimaginative Terrestrial number-bender when it was detected a century ago: the Isian system’s enormous gas giant, currently at the aphelion of its looping orbit. Cronos had contributed to Isian geohistory by sweeping the system of its rocky and icy debris; comets were rare in the Isian sky. Less a Titan, Zoe thought, than a fat guardian angel.

Her inner-ear com link came alive, hissing faintly.

“Zoe?” Tam Hayes’ voice. “Your telemetry puts you outside the tent and your pulse rate is up, so I assume you’re awake.”

“I don’t walk in my sleep, if that’s what you mean.”

But she was immensely relieved to hear his voice.

“Restless?”

“A little. Is that a problem?” “No problem.”

The smallness of his voice inside her head made her even more aware of her position, alone in an alien forest. True, Yambuku wasn’t far away; but Yambuku was a sealed environment, a fragile bubble of Earth. She had left that bubble and she was outside of it, lost on Isis. On Isis, where there were no artificial lights, no roads, no amenities over the next horizon. Nothing over the horizon but more horizon, parallax to parallel; nothing between her and a planetary Level Five hot zone but a membrane a few molecules thick. Unsurprising then that Devices and Personnel had chosen to resurrect her genome from the old diaspora stock. Isis was at least as lonely as any barren Kuiper object. And much, much farther from home.

“Zoe?”

“I’m here.”

“We have a large animal paralleling your position, maybe fifty meters north-northwest. Nothing to worry about, but to avoid advertising your presence we’d like you to sit still for a few minutes.”

“Back to the tent?”

“We’ll keep you outside and mobile for now. Though I do wish you’d checked in before taking a walk. Just stay put, please, and let the tractibles do their work.”

“Is this thing stalking me?”

“Probably just curious. Quiet, please.”

She listened into the darkness but heard nothing. What kind of large animal? Most likely a triraptor, she supposed. She pictured it: eight-limbed, quadripedal, with four arms on its erect upper body and claws like tempered steel. Her excursion suit was tough enough to protect her from the bites of small animals and invertebrates but not from the industrial-strength carnage of a triraptor attack.

“Zoe?”

She whispered, “I thought you wanted me quiet.”

“We’re okay as long as we don’t shout. Can you make yourself comfortable out there?”

She scanned the ground, located a fallen tree trunk and sat down on it. Tiny insects from a disturbed nest swarmed over her footgear. Harmless things. She ignored them. “ ‘Comfortable’ is relative. At least we can talk. Taking the night shift again?”

“Midnight to dawn, as long as you’re on excursion.”

She was flattered, not to mention intimidated. She had been thinking—could not help thinking—of her encounter with Hayes in the prep room, how she had wept in his arms at the news of the oceanic tragedy, and how she had found her way to his cabin that night. Of the way he had touched her, eagerly but gently, a way she had never been touched by another human being.

And she had permitted it.

Encouraged it.

Dreaded it.

“Little scary out there? Your pulse rate’s up again.” She blushed—invisibly, thank God, unless the telemetry revealed that too. “It’s just… dark a long way in every direction.”

“Understood.”

A wind from the west turned leaves in the trees. The same wind no doubt carried her scent deeper into the forest. No, don’t think about that. “Tam?”

“Yes?”

“You grew up in the Kuipers. Red Thorn, you said?”

“Right. Red Thorn’s a big KB habitat in the Near Oorts, one of the oldest Kuiper settlements. Three-quarters G spin around the long axis, so I didn’t have to adapt much for Isis.”

“Happy childhood?”

There was a pause. “Happy enough.”

“Creche or biofamily?’’

“Bio. No creches in Red Thorn; we’re conservative.”

“You miss the habitat?”

“Often.”

He was being careful, she realized. Thinking of her, of her difficult childhood. “You know, it wasn’t as bad for me as you might think. Being a creche baby. Before Tehran, anyway. I liked being with my sisters, my nannies.”

“Miss it?”

“Some things you can’t get back. That feeling of… being where you belong.”

“Nobody belongs on Isis.”

The skin of her excursion suit was exquisitely sensitive, too much so. She startled at the touch of a falling leaf on her shoulder. “Zoe?”

“Sorry. False alarm. There’s a breeze up. Feels like it might rain soon.” She wondered why it should be easier to talk to Hayes through the com link than face-to-face. “I know what I must seem like to a Kuiper person. Raised the way I was, I mean.”

“None of us chose his childhood, Zoe.”

“Like one of those old-time Chinese aristocratic women, her feet crammed into tiny shoes—do you know what I mean? Bent into someone else’s idea of beauty or utility.”

“Zoe …” He paused. “Old Kuiper maxim: ‘A broken human being isn’t even a good tool.’ You couldn’t have survived the way you did without something solid at the center of you, something all your own.”

Now it was her turn to pause.

Theo used to say, You’re playing hide-and-seek, Zoe. Hiding from me again.

But Theo always ferreted out her secrets. Most of them.

Hayes said, “Quiet now, Zoe, just a while longer. The target turned your way again. The tractibles will lure it away, but don’t call attention to yourself. And switch off your night vision, please, Zoe. The lenses leak; your eyes are glowing like a cat’s.”

“You can see me?” She wasn’t sure she liked the idea. “I’m monitoring one of the remensors. Hush now. I’ll keep you updated.”

She sighed and switched off the photon multiplier. Instantly, the dark became absolute. She closed her eyes and listened.

The wind was stronger now. Clouds had obscured the stars. A cold front was pushing in from the west, according to this morning’s meteorological report. Raindrops began to spatter the forest canopy.

There was a rustling sound in the undergrowth, maybe a few meters away. Her pulse ramped up yet again.

Hayes said, “That’s a tractible, guarding your flank. I know you can’t see anything. But I need you to keep calm right now, to keep as still as you can.”

She couldn’t see the triraptor nosing through the forest but her excursion suit reported its scent—not the actual airborne molecules, of course, but an electronic tickling of the appropriate receptor cells, a faint echo of something acrid and bitter in her nose.

The animal was close. Night-hardened remensors buzzed around her. She heard, at last, the unmistakable sound of something alive and massive moving through the brush.

“Steady, Zoe.”

Theo had taught her better discipline than this. She opened her eyes wide and imagined she saw it, the triraptor—the eyes of it, at least, glinting in a last wash of starlight from the eastern sky, classic predator’s eyes, chrome-yellow and alert.

And gone.

“Keep still, Zoe.”

Chasing some spider tractible, no doubt. “A while longer.” The sounds retreated.

Cautiously, she turned her face up to the misting rain.

“I miss Elam,” she whispered.

“I know, Zoe. I do too.”

“We’re running out of time, aren’t we?”

“Let’s hope not.”

ELEVEN

Degrandpre had planned to give Avrion Theophilus the full tour of the IOS—when had there been such a guest as Avrion Theophilus?—but the Devices and Personnel man was having none of it.

“What I want to see this morning,” Theophilus had said mildly, “is your shuttle quarantine.”

And what a grand scion of the Families this Theophilus had turned out to be! Tall, bone-thin, gray-haired, aquiline of nose and fashionably pale of complexion. Degrandpre’s orchidectomy badge, which so impressed his subordinates, was nothing to this man but a servant’s tattoo. No doubt Theophilus had already sired a brood of young aristocrats, strapping creatures with blue eyes and immaculate teeth.

Admirable, powerful! And potentially very dangerous. Avrion Theophilus was a Devices and Personnel functionary of unknown rank who conducted himself with all the arrogance of a Works Trust official, and that in itself was deeply confusing.

The news from Earth was equally troubling. Hints of turmoil among the Houses and the Families, show trials, perhaps a purge in the Trusts. But news through the particle-pair link was heavily censored, and although this Theophilus must know far more about the crisis than anyone onboard the IOS did, he hadn’t volunteered to talk about it.

And Degrandpre dared not ask, for fear of seeming impertinent.

It was all so maddeningly ambiguous. Should he court the favor of Avrion Theophilus, or would that appear as a betrayal to his sponsors in the Works Trust? Was there a middle path?

An oppressive emotional atmosphere gripped the IOS, much as Degrandpre tried to minimize it. The loss of the Oceanic Station weighted heavily on staff even here; by all accounts, the surface personnel had grown brutally dispirited. Some saw it as the end of the human presence on Isis. And that it might well be, although this Theophilus seemed disturbingly indifferent. “Your orbital station needs some maintenance,” Theophilus remarked blandly. “The ring corridor is filthy, and the air isn’t much better.”

The walls were dirty, true. Cleaning servitors had lately been scavenged for the interferometer project; replacements had not yet arrived from the Turing factories. As for the smell—“We’ve had some trouble with the scrubbers in our waste-management stacks. Temporary, of course, but in the meantime … I apologize. One grows accustomed to it.”

“Perhaps not as easily as one might hope.”

Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace ill a single phrase. He promised to see to the problem, though he couldn’t imagine what he could do except bother the engineers yet again. No spares had arrived with the Higgs sphere, and he cynically wondered if replacements had been set aside to make room for the noble mass of Avrion Theophilus.

He escorted his guest as far as the massive bulkhead doors dividing Shuttle Quarantine from the rest of the IOS. Theophilus proceeded to inspect the seals and the rivet heads in minute detail, making Degrandpre wait. “As I’m sure you’re aware,” Degrandpre hinted, “these are the standard bulkheads; the sterile perimeter is inside.”

“Nevertheless, I want these bulkheads inspected daily. By qualified engineers.” At Degrandpre’s shocked expression he added, “I don’t think the Works Trust will disapprove, do you?”

Degrandpre palmed the admit button and the bulkhead door wheeled open. Inside, a single Kuiper-born medical engineer monitored the quarantine from a steel chair. The four survivors of the deep-sea disaster, a shuttle pilot and three junior marine exobiologists, had been languishing in containment for ten days now. A monitor image from the isolation chamber filled the screen above Degrandpre’s head: two men, two women, all haggard in lab whites except for the pilot, whose Trust uniform was still relatively crisp.

Theophilus asked the medical engineer pointed and knowledgeable questions about quarantine procedures, redundancy, fail-safes, alarm systems. Degrandpre took note but could infer nothing from the exchange … except that perhaps Devices and Personnel had grown nervous about the sterile status of the IOS.

But there had never been any question of that. Yes, it would be disastrous if there were an outbreak aboard the orbital station. The steel necklace of the IOS contained and nurtured nearly fifteen hundred human souls, and there was no plausible escape route for most of them; the planet below was universally toxic and the single spare Higgs launcher reserved for emergencies would carry a mere handful of managers at best. But there had never been even the hint of such a threat. Shuttles from Isis passed through the sterilizing vacuum of space, and cargo and passengers were rigorously quarantined and scrutinized. As the medical engineer patiently explained. And further explained. And continued to explain, until Degrandpre was forced to express his hope that the senior manager from Earth wasn’t overwhelmed by all this perhaps unnecessary detail.

“Not at all,” Theophilus said crisply. “Standard quarantine is ten days?”

The medical engineer nodded.

“And when will this one be finished?”

“Just a few hours from now, and no sign of contagion, nothing at all. They’ve been through a lot, these four; they’re looking forward to release.”

“Give them another week,” Avrion Theophilus said.

“Master Theophilus,” Degrandpre asked, “is there anything else you would like to see? The gardens perhaps, or the medical facilities?”

“Isis,” Theophilus said.

They always want a window. “I can recommend the view from the docking bays.”

“Thank you, but I’ll be needing a closer look than that.”

Degrandpre frowned. “Closer? You mean … you want to visit a ground station?”

Theophilus nodded.

My God, Degrandpre thought. He’ll kill himself. On top of everything else, this grand, stupid Family cousin will kill himself, and the Families will blame me.

TWELVE

Zoe slept late on the last morning of her three-day trial excursion. Her sleep had been irregular ever since the death of Elam Mather, shallow and florid with dreams, but exhaustion had tipped her into a black, dreamless unconsciousness. By the time she woke, her a.m. check-in from Yambuku was more than an hour late.

Are they letting me sleep, Zoe wondered, or had there been some new crisis, perimeter breach, disaster…? She toggled her corneal display and called up a status report. The customary Yambuku telechatter scrolled past, tractibles talking to tractibles, but her personal com line showed a yellow hold tag. She queried the system and got a prerecorded note from Tam Hayes. He was involved, he said, in a conference with the IOS’s kachos; he would talk to her shortly; in the meantime she might as well finish packing her campsite for the day’s hike.

She stepped out of the tent into morning sunlight, feeling vaguely abandoned.

Her trial excursion had been an unqualified success. All the peripherals—tent, tractibles, food and waste-management systems, com links—had functioned so flawlessly that the Yambuku engineers were frankly envious. There was still hope for the human presence on Isis, even if the first-generation outposts had begun to fail. She was fulfilling her mission goals, and better than that, she was in Isis, mobile in the bios, just a stone’s throw from the rushing Copper River…

And why did that seem such hollow consolation?

Something’s wrong with me, Zoe thought.

She deflated the tent walls, rolled the gel floors carefully and stored them on the back of a dog-sized cargo tractible. She packed her camp litter—empty food containers, a discharged power supply—although she could have buried it. The litter was sterile, but it would have been an intrusion, an insult to Isis.

Something’s wrong. Oh, nothing physical; her perimeters were intact; she was as invulnerable to the bios as a human being could be. But something less tangible than a virus or a prion had begun to turn and move inside her.

The forest glistened with last night’s rainfall. Water cycled from tier to tier of the tree canopy, overflowing from cupped leaves and flower chalices. In the shadowed spaces around the tree boles, the moisture had drawn out dozens of fungal fruiting bodies. Mold spores swirled in the westerly breeze, a fine sticky dust, like charcoal.

Should she speak to a doctor? If all went as planned, she would be back at Yambuku by nightfall. But her complaints were essentially minor—-restlessness, disturbed sleep, and a host of uneasy feelings, not the least of which was her sexual liaison with Tam Hayes. Mention that to a physician at Yambuku and she would be in for a battery of endocrine and neurotransmitter tests, and did she want that? “No,” she said aloud, the sound of her voice veiled by the suit filters but loud in the whispery glade. No, she didn’t want that, and not just because of the physical inconvenience. To be honest, she was changing in ways that were as tantalizing as they were disturbing.

Her feelings about Hayes, for instance. She understood human sexuality well enough; she had studied it extensively. Her bioregulators kept her on an even keel chemically, but she was hardly sexless; the tantra instructors at the Middle School had praised her skills. No: what was shocking was that she had actually allowed him to touch her, had wanted him to touch her, had relished his touch. The Devices and Personnel clinicians had told her she would never have a satisfying orgasm with another human being. Her years in Tehran had built up too many negative associational paths, and anyway, her bioregulation damped the necessary hormonal feedback loops. She simply could not experience pleasurable intercourse with an adult male. Or so they said.

So something was wrong. So she ought to alert a physician.

But she didn’t want to. A physician might fix her, and the odd thing—the really disturbingly odd thing—was that she didn’t want to be fixed.

If they fixed her she might not feel this shiver of anticipation at the sound of Tam’s voice, the sudden weightlessness when he offered a compliment, the shocking intimacy of his hand on her body.

Madness, of course, but it had something of the divine in it. She wondered if she had stumbled across some wisdom lost to the modern world, an archaic emotional vector hidden under the stern sexual gridmaps of the Families or the chimp-like copulations of the Kuiper Clans.

Maybe this was how the unregulated proles fell in love. Did “love” feel like this, she wondered, in the viral hotlands of Africa and Asia?

She dreaded the feeling. And she dreaded the idea that it might one day stop.

By noon, the camp was packed and ready. Still no word from Yambuku. She needed to leave within the hour or risk reaching the station after dark.

She left a call-me memo for Hayes with Dieter Franklin, who was monitoring her stats and vitals. Luckily the forest was calm this morning, no predators within her scannable radius, white clouds riding the meridian like slow boats on a tide.

She assembled her party of six-legged tractibles and set off westward. The path, beaten by machines in advance of her excursion, followed the shore of the Copper for a half-klick or so. This time of year, the river ran shallow. The water had pulled back from its banks to reveal stony fords, quiescent green pools, and silt dunes where a few venturous weeds had taken root. Automated insect remensors followed her in a cloud like circling gnats; some flew ahead, monitoring the route. The faint buzz of them was lost in the cacophony of bird and insect calls, all of which sounded alike to her, power lines buzzing in a heat wave.

Her excursion suit tunneled beads of sweat from her skin to the membrane’s surface, cooling her as she walked. Sunlight turned the membrane white. She glanced at her arms. She was as pale as a purebred daughter of some Nordic Family, aristocratic white.

She had not traveled more than a kilometer when Tam Hayes opened a direct link to her. About time, she thought.

“’Zoe? We’d like you to halt where you are for the time being.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Not if I want to be back before dark. You’ve been talking to the IOS all morning. Time doesn’t stop just because Kenyon Degrandpre is keeping you busy.”

“That’s the point. They want the excursion extended.”

They, she noted. Not we. Hayes didn’t approve. “What do you me an, extended?’’

“Specifically, they want you to turn back, cross the Copper at the mobile bridge and break camp on the east bank. Remensors wall, scout a path to the digger colony, and the tractibles will trail-blaze for you. Two days of traveling ought to put you just inside the animals’ food-gathering perimeter.

Which was absurd. “I can’t do fieldwork! We’re still testing the excursion gear!”

“Feeling at the IOS is that your gear passed all the tests.”

“This pushes the schedule by at least a month.”

“Somebody’s in a hurry, I guess.”

She supposed she knew why. The Oceanic Station had collapsed and all the other Isian outposts had suffered worrisome seal failures. Zoe’s excursion suit might be performing brilliantly, but without a staging platform like Yambuku, it was as useful as a rain-hat in a hurricane. The Trusts wanted to maximize the use of her before Yambuku had to be evacuated.

Cross the Copper River toward the foothills? Move deeper into the bios while Yambuku staggered toward collapse? Was she brave enough to do that?

“Personally,” Hayes said, “I’m opposed to the idea. I don’t have the authority to overrule it, but we can always find an anomaly in your gear and order you back for maintenance.”

“But the suit is flawless. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, I think Kwame Sen could be convinced to shade a graph or two if it came to an argument.”

She thought about it. “Tam, who gave this order? Was it Degrandpre?”

“He sanctioned it, but no, the order came from your D-and-P man—Avrion Theophilus.” Theo!

Surely Theo wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. She capped her doubts. “Keep Kwame honest. I’ll cross the river.”

“Zoe? Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.”

No.

“Well… I’m sending out three more tractibles with supplies and equipment. They should catch up with you by dusk. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re on immediate recall at the first sign of trouble. Any kind of trouble. Give me the word, I’ll cover it with the IOS.”

He added, “I’ll be watching,” which made her feel both strong and weak at once, and signed off.

Zoe gazed across the placid Copper. Her pack tractibles acknowledged a new set of orders from Yambuku by circling back behind her, ambling up the trail like dimly impatient dogs and waiting for her to follow.

The bridge over the Copper River was a string of logs spun together with strands of high-tensile monofilament and anchored at either end with spikes driven deep into the gravelly soil. It was sturdy enough, Zoe supposed, but makeshift, not meant to last. Mild as the seasons on Isis were, another few weeks would see monsoon rains swelling the Copper to its limits, and this small specimen of tractible engineering would be washed away and dispersed.

The bridge crossed the Copper at a broad and shallow place where, if she looked between the slats, she could see the polished river rocks and the quiet places where creatures not quite fish— they looked like overgrown tadpoles—swarmed and spawned. She could have forded the river here, she was certain, without any bridge at all. Some of her cargo tractibles did just that, managing the water with their javelin legs more surely than they could have navigated these loosely strung logs.

Across the river the trail was less obvious; it had not been as completely blazed as the path to the bridge. By their nature the tractibles passed delicately over the landscape; it took a great deal of mechanical effort to flatten a patch of grass, much less to clear away tangled undergrowth. She would have to proceed more carefully here. The excursion suit’s membrane was strong enough to resist tearing under any ordinary circumstance, but a sharp enough pressure—a knife blade with some strength behind it, a large predator’s claws, or a fall from a height—might open a seam.

She doubted she would have trouble with knives. As for predators, the tractibles and insect remensors would watch out for her. And in any case these rocky foothills were not as inviting a hunting ground as the savanna that stretched to the south and west. Triraptors were dangerous but uncommon here; the smaller, faster carnivores were about the size of house cats and easily frightened away from something as large and unfamiliar as a human being. That was perhaps one reason the digger colony had thrived here.

And as for heights—well, she would be reluctant to press far beyond the diggers’ rangeland, into the hills where the Copper River ran in narrow, fast channels among slate-sharp rocks. Short of that, she was confident of her footing. What was left to fear?

Any often thousand unsuspected events, Zoe thought. Not to mention her own state of mind.

Not that she felt bad. The opposite. Her moods had been mercurial, but right now she felt surprisingly good, felt solid, walking in the sunlight and swinging her arms with a freedom she hadn’t felt since creche. The trail followed a low ridge eastward; when the ridge rose high enough she was able to see the canopy of the forest sloping to the west, as dense and close as a well-kept secret. All of this touched her—she didn’t have a better word—in a way she had thought impossible, as if when she left Yambuku, she had not donned a protective membrane but stripped one away. She was as raw as a nerve; the simple blue sky made her want to weep with joy.

She could think of no explanation for these mood shifts … unless she was deregulating. Could that be? But thymostats were simple homeostatic machines; she had never heard of a bioregulator malfunction. Anyway, wouldn’t it have shown up on her medical telemetry?

Doesn’t matter, some traitorous part of her whispered. She was alive—truly alive for the first time in many years—and she liked it.

Liked it almost as much as she feared it.

She halted well before dusk at one of the potential campsites mapped into the tractibles’ memory. The ridgetop broadened here into a stony plateau, tufts of green succulents poking through the topsoil between slabs of glacial rock. Pitching the tent was easy— the tent was smart enough to do most of the work itself—but anchoring it proved more difficult. She drove stakes into stony cracks and soil-filled hollows, tethering her shelter the old-fashioned way. She queried Yambuku for a weather report, but nothing had changed since this morning: skies clear, winds calm. Isis was showing her gentle aspect.

She checked in with Dieter after a hasty meal. No real news, Dieter said, except that this Avrion Theophilus, the Devices and Personnel mystery man, was due down on the next shuttle.

Theo at Yambuku, Zoe thought.

Given her mood, she guessed that should have made her happy. She wondered why it didn’t.

The sun drifted behind the Copper Mountains. Zoe finished the ungainly process of eating through the excursion suit and was ready to make another assault on the citadel of sleep when an alert popped into her corneal display. The voice of Yambuku this time was Lee Reisman, who had taken over the shift from Dieter. “We have a large animal on your perimeter,’’ Lee said, then: “Oh! It’s a digger!”

She was instantly alert. “Is it approaching the tent?”

“No … according to the remensors, it’s holding about a hundred yards off your location. Tractibles are positioned to intercept it, but—”

“Leave it alone for now,” Zoe said.

“Zoe? This isn’t an appropriate time to initiate contact.”

“I just want a look.”

She climbed out of the tent, her vision augmented in the deepening dusk. Slate rocks radiated the day’s heat like embers. She had thought the digger might be hard to see, but she spotted it at once and increased the amplification in her membrane lenses accordingly.

It—make that he—was already a familiar presence: this was the digger Hayes had called “Old Man.” She recognized the white whiskers, the splay of tendrils under its eyes.

She looked at Old Man, and Old Man looked back at her.

It was, of course, impossible to read any emotion into that face, as much as the human mind wanted to try. We project ourselves onto other animals, Zoe thought; we see expression in the faces of cats and dogs; but the digger was as inscrutable as a lobster. The eyes, she thought. On any creature larger than a beetle, the eyes are the primary vehicle of expression; but the digger’s eyes were simple black ovals in a bed of bony flesh. Bubbles of ink. Windows through which some dim not-quite-sentience regarded her coolly.

“Old Man,” she whispered. The curious one.

Old Man blinked—a flash of silver over shimmering black— then turned and loped away.

THIRTEEN

What Hayes had not told Zoe was that cascading seal failures had kept him busy most of the day. He could not help wishing that Mac Feya were still here to lend a hand—Mac had been good at patching seals. Barring the one that had killed him.

Lee, Sharon, and Kwame were more than competent engineers, but they were overtaxed and running on minimum sleep. For now, the situation had been stabilized—replacement seals installed and samples from the failed gaskets glove-boxed for analysis. Hayes had been following the work closely. Dieter Franklin took Hayes into his laboratory to look at adaptive changes in the bacteria feeding on the gaskets, the increasing density of fibrillary matter in the body of the cell, microtubules coiled like DNA where, a month ago, there had been only a few stray threads. The granular bodies on the cell surface were also novel, synthesizing and excreting highly polar molecules, digging into their environment. Dieter waved a hand at the screen he had called up: “It’s not the same organism we were looking at six months ago.”

“Same genome,” Hayes said. “Same organism.”

“Same genome, but it’s expressing itself in a radically different way.

“So it’s environmentally sensitive.”

“At the very least. Might as well say it’s trying to pry open the station and come inside.”

Dieter was Gamma Stone Clan, given to overstatement. “If they’re growing, it’s because we’re feeding them.”

“They’re dying as fast as they grow.”

True enough. Hayes had spent his share of time in excursion gear, scrubbing decayed bacterial mats from the station’s exposed surfaces. Kamikaze bacteria? “I don’t think they literally want to kill us, Dieter.”

“That might be a dangerous assumption to make.”

Hayes was famous for the hours he kept. People said he never slept.

Lately that had been all too true. He had personally supervised much of Zoe’s ongoing excursion, not to mention coordinating the seal repairs and a complete changeover on one of the big filter stacks. He was averaging four or five hours of sleep per night and was often grateful to get that much. Sleep deprivation had left him testy and hypersensitive. For the first time in his life, he envied the Terrestrial hands who wore thymostats. He had to make do with caffeinated drinks and willpower, the poor man’s equivalent.

It was late when he left Dieter Franklin’s laboratory. Almost everyone but the graveyard shift had retired for the night. At night, the station seemed both too large and too small—the echo of his footsteps came back to him as if from a vast space, but the sound was flat, contained: a dosed space. Every avenue a dead end.

Yambuku had never seemed so fragile.

His research notes lay untouched in his cabin. He was tempted to go there now, but a last task awaited him, one he had been putting off. This Terrestrial D P kacho was due down in the morning and would need fresh quarters. But there was only one vacancy at Yambuku, and that was the cabin Elam Mather had occupied.

Cleaning it out for Avrion Theophilus was a simple enough chore. No one on Isis owned anything substantial. The joke was, you came to Isis the way you came into the world: naked and afraid. And left: the same way.

Elam had left rather differently, but she had taken nothing with her. Still, the sheets needed to be laundered and the wall screens cleared of personal displays.

Small work, but not work he relished. Nor could it be delegated. When a hand died, the station manager always cleared the cabin. He had done the same thing for Mac Feya. Any old hand would; it was one of the few customs the Isis Project had developed.

He let himself into the cabin with his master key.

Elam’s desk light winked on as he stepped inside, then so did the wall screen—a live image of Isis relayed from orbit. Was this how Elam had liked to imagine herself, out of the toxic bios, above it all? Or had she simply preferred to take the long view?

He switched off the screen and dumped Elam’s preferences back into the station pool. Then he collected and folded her sheets and took the issue garments from her shelves. All were of the uniform ultralight charcoal-colored cloth imported from Earth. He put them outside the door for a tractible robot to pick up. Elam’s laundry would cycle interchangeably through the Yambuku housekeeping system; in a day or two, he might be sleeping on one of these same sheets.

Last, he used his scroll to open Elam’s personal memory cache in Yambuku’s core memory. Mac had left his filestack full of random notes to himself, letters home, indecipherable notes. Elam was tidier than that; likely all that remained to be cleared would be lists, schedules, and access numbers.

But when he asked for a global delete, one item came up red-tagged.

It was a message, unfinished, and it was addressed to him.

Hayes read the message.

Then he read it again, enclosed in the silence of what had once been Flam’s cabin, as night rolled over the long valleys and the canopied hills.

FOURTEEN

When the red-light summons from the shuttle’s quarantine module appeared on his scroll, Corbus Nefford was mildly scandalized. There had never been a medical crisis aboard the IOS during his health-management watch, and he fully intended that there never would be.

Admittedly, this didn’t look good—an unexplained summons of the highest priority posted by Ken Kinsolving, day-watch quarantine medic, from the shuttle-bay lockdown. Dire as that sounded, however, it was probably only Kinsolving panicked by some crewman’s gastritis attack or tension headache. The alternative was unthinkable.

But he found a guard stationed at the shuttle module’s bulkhead door, and inside—

Inside, there was chaos.

Two nursing assistants sat plugged into remensor hoods, talking through their microphones in low, urgent tones. Kinsolving, gaunt in his drapery of medical whites, waved Nefford toward an empty control bay. “Rios and Soto are dead,” he said flatly. “Raman is comatose and Mavrovik is intermittently lucid. We need help with palliative care and tissue samples—if you would, Manager.”

Kinsolving was a junior medic and not entitled to speak to Corbus Nefford quite so brusquely, but this was an emergency, after all. Nefford squirmed into the remensor chair. He had put on some weight since the last time he operated one of these rigs.

But one did what one must. What one was trained for, and thank God for his training; it supplanted the instinct to panic. He imagined his thymostat registering the sudden torrents of epinephrine, working to calm him without dulling his heightened alertness. Pathogens, he found himself thinking, Isian pathogens aboard the IOS: it was the nightmare he had hoped never to face…

The remensor hood activated and he was suddenly inside the quarantine room with the victims. His arms had become the arms of a medical tractible and his eyes were its enhanced sensors. He oriented himself quickly. The quarantine chamber was claustrophobically small, never meant to be used as a hospital ward. Tractibles and remensors battled for floor space; Kinsolving’s remensor rolled up next to him.

He identified the shuttle crewmen on their cots. Mavrovik, Soto, Raman, and Rios. Two male, two female. They had been the sole survivors of the oceanic disaster, a pilot and three crewmen who had shuttled up from the outpost shortly before its final collapse.

And they had brought something with them, apparently, although they had been in quarantine with no observable ill effects for, what was it, most of a month now? And didn’t Isian pathogens attack almost instandy? An Isian infectious agent with a long incubation period was unheard of—a threat almost too terrifying to contemplate.

He followed Kinsolving’s medical remensor to the bedside of the shuttle pilot, Mavrovik. Kinsolving had plugged fluids and hemostats into Mavrovik’s exposed arm. Nefford added a pulmonary tap to drain blood and fluid from the pilot’s lungs. Mavrovik had been disrobed and strapped to the cot. Beads of sweat, putrid and faintly yellow, trickled down his shaved skull to his pillow.

What Kinsolving had achieved here was a momentary homeostasis. Nefford plugged his own monitors into the shuttle pilot as the day-shift medic began to transfer control. When a moment of peace presented itself he asked, “How long have they been ill?”

“First obvious symptoms manifested about three hours ago. We had no real warning. Their blood gasses looked peculiar prior to that, but still within normal limits.”

Nefford turned to watch as two tractibles shifted the stiffening bodies of Rios, a woman, and Soto, a man, onto gurneys and wheeled them out of the room. There was a cold-storage facility with an autopsy chamber deep inside the quarantine boundary— staffed, of course, entirely by tractibles and remensors. The morgue was carefully maintained, although it hadn’t been used before today.

When he turned back he found Mavrovik’s eyes open, both pupils grossly dilated. Sweating inside his remensor hood, Nefford scrolled a survey of the patient’s vital signs. The list was appalling. Gross edema, internal bleeding as tissues softened catastrophically, kidneys necrotizing, liver function fading, pulse erratic, blood pressure so uncertain that even the hemostatic robots could barely maintain an acceptable count. Bottom line: Mavrovik was dying. In a hurry.

Kinsolving wheeled back, his tractible arms going limp as he disengaged from the remensor hood. “Do what you can for him,” he said flatly. “I’ll speak to Degrandpre.”

Better you than me, Nefford thought.

He assumed full life-support function as Kinsolving’s medical remensor fell silent.

Mavrovik was briefly stabilized, but that wouldn’t last. The trouble was, Nefford had no effective treatment for this disease— whatever it was—only palliatives, only bags of fresh artificial blood and coagulent nanobacters to seal the worst of the internal lesions. All useless in the long run. Mavrovik was being devoured by an entity Nefford could not even name, and soon enough it would do irreparable damage to Mavrovik’s heart or brain, and that would be that.

As if he had overheard the thought, Mavrovik gasped suddenly and surged against his restraints. Nefford flinched. Fortunately, his remensor ignored hasty autonomic impulses or he might have ripped an intravenous line out of the patient. How I must look to him, Nefford thought: a robotic head, a cow’s skull dipped in chromium, peering at him through ruby lenses. But Mavrovik’s eyes had closed; his lips moved, but he was talking to someone not present.

“Who are you?” the pilot demanded weakly, his throat thick with bloody granulae.

“Be still,” Nefford said. Corbus Nefford’s voice was relayed with ultimate fidelity through the remensor, that much of his bedside manner, at least, intact. He added a tranquilizer to the broth of chemicals in the shuttle pilot’s drip.

But Mavrovik would not be tranquil. “Look at them!” His lips were flecked with blood. “Look at them!”

“Calm down, Mr. Mavrovik. Don’t speak. Conserve your strength.”

“So many of them!”

Nefford sighed and tightened the restraints. This might be, was probably, Mavrovik’s final crisis. He pushed the flow of opiates. “Talking, all talking together.

Corbus Nefford had not been in the presence of a dying man since his medical apprenticeship in Paris. Death was the business of hospices and peasant medics, not of successful Family physicians. He had forgotten how hair-raising the process could be. He peeled back Mavrovik’s left eyelid, expecting to find the pupil fixed and dilated; instead, the pupil contracted promptly at the light. Then Mavrovik’s right eye opened and the pilot looked at Nefford with a sudden, frightening lucidity.

“You have to understand this,” Mavrovik said. He rasped the words through a lace of bloody sputum. Like a dead man talking, Nefford thought. Well, close enough. “There are thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. Talking to each other. Talking to me!

Nefford felt trapped by the sheer earnestness of this declamation. He was aware of the patient’s plummeting vascular pressure, capillaries weakened by the disease bleeding out in a massive, whole-body collapse. Mavrovik’s face was banded with blue and black, as if he had been beaten with a stick. The whites of his eyes were shot through with scarlet. Mavrovik’s brain must be bleeding too, Nefford thought; this monologue could hardly be sane. But he heard himself ask, “Thousands of what, Mr. Mavrovik?”

“Worlds,” Mavrovik said, gently now, as if to himself.

Corbus Nefford did not, of course, believe in ghosts. He was a technician of the Families—in his own way, a scientist. Only low people and peasants were frightened of ghosts or spirits. Nefford was frightened only of the Trusts. He had seen the damage they could inflict.

Nevertheless he found himself regarding the dying man with something approaching superstitious dread.

Mavrovik laughed—a terrible sound; it brought up bubbles of pink fluid. Robotic aspirators sucked his mouth and throat clean. His arms flexed against his restraints, as if he wanted to reach up, to grasp Nefford—Nefford’s remensor—and draw him closer.

Horrible thought.

“We’re their orphans!” Mavrovik explained. His last words.

Raman died too, more quietly, at about the same time. With the deaths the quarantine room grew calmer, though frantic activity continued—the drawing of blood and tissue samples, the containment of the bodies, periodic cloudbursts of liquid sterilants and gases.

When Mavrovik’s corpse was finally bagged and taken away, Nefford allowed himself to draw a long breath. He wheeled his remensor back into its dock and removed himself from the hood.

He had been with the remensor so long that his own body felt clumsy and unfamiliar. He had been sweating freely; his clothing was soaked; he recoiled at his own stink. He wanted a long drink of water and a hot bath. Probably he should have been hungry— he had missed breakfast—but the thought of food was repellent.

He found Kinsolving waiting for him near the bulkhead door. Nefford asked, “Did you talk to Degrandpre?”

“I paged his scroll…”

“Paged his scroll?” An event like this called for a personal conference. Nefford would have done it himself if he hadn’t been busy with Mavrovik.

“Manager Degrandpre was already aware of the emergency. I asked to meet with him. But he had already issued an order expanding the perimeter of the quarantine.” Kinsolving delivered this information meekly, as if he expected to be beaten for it.

“Expanding the perimeter? I don’t understand.”

“Quarantine extends all the way to the bulkhead doors. The entire module is sealed tight.” Kinsolving bowed his head. “No one is allowed to leave until further notice. And that includes us.”

FIFTEEN

The dreams were very bad-Rain came down on the polyplex shelter in drumming bursts. Wind gusts confused the support tractibles, which woke Zoe periodically with false alarms, misinterpreting the whipping wind as the movement of some ghostly predator. Zoe fell in and out of shallow sleep.

She was, of course, still alone. She was as alone as the first lungfish to drag itself out of the shallows. And that should have been all right. The men and women who first sailed to the reefs of the solar system, squandering their lives inside lightless ice caverns— they had been alone too.

But isolation meant many things.

Zoe had known people who longed for isolation and people who dreaded it. On Earth a person was never truly alone, and it was easy to project a whole spectrum of fears and hopes into that unobtainable void, a vacuum full of self. It meant freedom, or shamelessness, or absolution, or the simple loss of all direction.

Fantasies.

Alone, Zoe thought, is listening to this rain batter the small membrane between herself and toxic nature. Alone meant memories swollen into nightmares.

In her dreams she was in Tehran.

According to the Trust doctors, these memories had been safely buried. But whatever was wrong with her seemed to have let slip the leash. Whenever she closed her eyes the awful images came roaring back.

The orphan creche was a cinderblock dungeon spread across acres of oily gravel and ringed with lethal glass-wire fences. It was, like most of the charity creches scattered across Asia and Europe, a leftover from the plague century. It might once have been a humanitarian project, one of the great Social Works of the first Trusts, but it had become little more than a collector for the state brothels. Lately its resident managers had realized that they could expand their personal profit margin by renting their charges on the public market, or at least that segment of the market too impoverished or ill to patronize the licensed pleasuredromes.

The drawback was that the inmates at the Tehran West Quad Educational Collective—as the sign above the gate proclaimed it— weren’t offered the kind of medical supervision required even in a bargain-basement, licensed brothel. Nor were its customers, mainly manual laborers from the local Trust factories ringing the city, carefully screened.

Zoe had arrived with her pod of genetically identical sisters, Francesca and Poe and A vita and Lin, shipped from their birth creche by orbital cargo transport, hungry and bewildered. At first the Farsi-speaking nurse had fed them protein soups and dressed them in warm if graceless smocks and patiently endured their demands for home. But after a day or two of this, they were transferred to the dormitories.

And the horror began.

Memory swept through Zoe’s dreams like a winter gale.

Everyone was used, and everyone died.

Francesca died first, of a fever that wracked her body for five long February days, until she turned her emaciated body to the cinderblock wall and simply ceased to breathe.

This is wrong, Zoe remembered herself thinking. We were made to go to the stars. This is wrong.

Poe and Lin died together when a fierce hemorrhagic contagion—the nurses called it Brazzaville 3, which it may have been— swept the dormitories. Zoe, in her despair, had not felt much grief at the passing of three of her sisters. She was selfishly grateful that the brothel trade had diminished out of fear of the plague. Unfortunately the food supply had diminished too, and that wasn’t good. There had been talk of quarantine; the whole West Quarter of the city was practically deserted for the next six months.

But the disease passed in time. Zoe and Avita were among the souls not harvested.

Zoe grew closer to her only remaining pod sister, and it affected her more powerfully when Avita died, almost randomly, of some disease born of malnutrition and neglect. She is my mirror, Zoe thought, gazing at Avita’s corpse during the long hours before the hygiene crew came to collect it. When I die, Zoe thought—and she had supposed it would be a matter of months, at most—when I die, this is how I will look. Like a soft clay statue, pale and shiny and indifferent.

She missed Avita and Francesca and Lin and Poe. The other inmates were often cruel to her, and her white-masked minders casually despised her, and she thought death might not be so terrible, really, certainly no worse than living on and on inside these walls.

Then Theo came to Tehran.

Something had happened, something political, something in the High Families. She remembered Avrion Theophilus from the creche. He had stopped by once a month to survey the pods, and he had been partial to the five small sisters, often stroking Zoe’s hair while the nannies ducked their heads at him and dull-witted tractibles brought him tea and sugar cakes, which he shared. He had always looked so resplendent in his black uniform, and he looked resplendent now, in Tehran, but darker, angrier, shouting at the orphan keepers, who cringed away from him. He cursed the obscenties of the dormitory, the frigid showers, the assignation rooms with their coarse and filthy blankets.

He swept Zoe up into his arms—cautiously, because she had become fragile. His uniform, pressed against her cheek, smelled of fresh laundry, of soap and steam-pressing.

She thought of him as a kind of king or prince. Of course he was not—he was only peripherally of the Families at all, a cousin’s nephew’s cousin, essentially a high functionary with the Devices and Personnel branch of the Trusts. He was a Theophilus, not a Melloch or a Quantrill or a Mitsubishi. But that didn’t matter. He had come to get her. Too late for Poe or Lin or Avita or Francesca. But not too late for Zoe.

“One of my girls survived,” he murmured, carrying her out into a Human Services mobile chnic. “One of my girls survived.”

When he tried to hand her to the doctors she clung to him so fiercely that she had to be sedated.

Zoe woke abruptly, numb with dread. There had been a sound … but it was only a rattle of thunder bouncing between the peaks of the high Coppers. Locally, the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

Dim light came through the polyplex shelter. Morning.

She felt shaky and tired. She opened the shelter and climbed out into the rain. Water sheeted off the granite outcrops and drenched the blades of the gorse-like plants that grew in the deep glacial scars. Pack-mule tractibles lurched comically about the campsite. Their legs found little purchase in the wet; periodically they folded their limbs and sat down like weary dogs.

Clouds tumbled up the Coppers in gusting billows. The forest steamed.

She selected a ration dispenser from the store aboard a nearby tractible and carried it back under cover. The rain had beaded on her excursion suit. She itched. The membrane kept her clean, even shuttled flakes of dead skin to its surface and shed them as sterile dust; nevertheless, she itched. The itch was intermittent, confined to her ribs and thighs, and was not a real problem—yet. But if it got worse … well, people had been known to claw themselves bloody in order to a cure an itch. Which, under the circumstances, wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

Eating was a chore. The ration tube had to be attached to the excursion suit’s face mask, which opened a sterile passage between mouth and food—agonizingly slowly. She compressed the ration tube by hand. The nutrient paste that oozed onto her tongue was fundamentally unappetizing and as perfectly textureless as mud. And never enough to convince her she had really eaten.

The rations also tended to pass through her body quickly, which presented her with another tedious and unpleasant problem.

By the time she finished with all this, the sky had begun to clear. The wind had grown gusty again, however; it dragged at the polyplex fabric and would no doubt be making life difficult for the robots and remensors.

She thought about calling Yambuku. Her check-in was due.

She thought about Theo, of how he had saved her from the orphan ranch, memories that had tumbled through her dreams like broken glass…

And her inexplicable dread of him.

She linked to Yambuku for her daily update and spoke briefly to Cai Connor, who was manning the excursion desk. No news and stay put: the winds would diminish overnight and then she could reconnoiter the digger colony before heading back.

Which was fine, but it left her with nothing to do except monitor her own telltales, watch the cumulus clouds writhe up the distant peaks, and function-test the pack-mule tractibles.

She didn’t look forward to another night of darkness.

That afternoon, Tam Hayes contacted her by narrow-beam transmission from Yambuku. That was odd. The tight-beam antenna was a last-ditch redundancy, limited to line of sight and narrow in bandwidth. Clunky, voice-only, like an antique telephone line.

“This is off the record,” Hayes began. “Nobody’s eavesdropping, and nothing we say goes into the station’s memory. Zoe, are you in a safe place? I’m in the shuttle bay; I don’t have a remensor view.”

“Sitting in the shelter waiting for the wind to drop.” “Good. We have a lot to talk about.” “You start,” Zoe said.

He began by reading her the contents of Elam Mather’s message.

Zoe had entertained some of these suspicions herself. About the thymostat, anyway. “But it must have been functioning when I left Phoenix. The medical surveillance was extremely tight.”

She thought of Anna Chopra, the Terrestrial physician who had presided over her health during the long pre-launch months. A tall woman, gray-haired, a non-Family functionary from Djakarta, was it? Grim and wordless and quite dedicated.

“Maybe an act of sabotage,” Hayes suggested. “Some Family turf war working itself out.”

Maybe, but Family feuds were seldom so subtle. An accident, more likely.

“The point is,” Hayes went on, “you shouldn’t be out there by yourself with a dead ’stat.”

“If that’s all you wanted to say, you could have said it wideband.”

“Thought you might want to keep this private.”

“Meaning you think I might want to stay this way. Unregulated. Like a Kuiper woman.”

He left a silence in the distance between them. “Yes,” he said at last, “maybe. It’s your call, of course, Zoe.”

My call, she thought. My choice.

But it begged too many questions. The thymostat regulated personality: Am I the same person I was three months ago?

So hard, Zoe thought, to hold yourself in your hand, weigh yourself, render a judgment. She felt better. She felt worse. She said to Hayes, “You must have suspected something …”

“From time to time, but I’m Red Thorn; we don’t wear thymostats and I’ve never been sure what to expect from people who do. Elam’s been to Earth; she had better instincts.”

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

“But you’re functioning without it.”

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

Another long pause. Wind rattled the shelter.

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

“No. I don’t want that.”

“You’re certain?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Evacuate Yambuku? Tam, is it that bad?” “Things change quickly.”

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

“It’s another day’s worth of risk.”

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

“You don’t have to prove anything.”

“Just a day.”

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

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

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

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

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

More vulnerable.

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

We’re not born with souls, Zoe thought; they invade us from outside, make themselves out of shadow and light, noon and mid-She wondered whether Theo had arrived from orbit yet, whether he was already deconning at Yambuku.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something attacked them?”

“Apparently just mechanical interrupts, but it can’t be coincidental. I’m worried about the level of protection you’re getting.” “Hardware malfs? You’re sure?” “Nuts-and-bolts failures.”

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

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

“Company?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heads up, Zoe.”

She looked up sharply.

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

Diggers had surrounded the clearing.

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

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

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

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

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

“No. No, Tam, don’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re not hostile.”

“You can’t know that.”

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

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

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

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

“Wait.”

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

“Zoe—”

“Quiet!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Zoe?”

Hayes’ voice was distant and irrelevant.

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

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

SIXTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

But no; that was tomorrow’s problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One organism? Is that true?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H e spoke to Corbus Nefford through a video link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They died in Quarantine, yes?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you should be safe enough.”

“All I want is to put some distance between myself and the contamination. Is that so unreasonable? Everyone else is huddling near the gardens, I understand. Why should I be used this way?” “It’s not your decision, Doctor.”

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

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

With fear.

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

SEVENTEEN

The evacuation of Marburg took a day and a half. The field station was a twin of Yambuku, set deep in the Lesser Boreal Continent’s temperate forest. Like Yambuku, it was situated in a cleared perimeter, its rigorously sterile core contained inside layers of increasing biohazard. Its biologically hot outer walls were scrubbed daily by maintenance tractibles, or should have been—lately the tractibles had begun to malfunction; the bays were full of machinery demanding maintenance, and bacterial films had compromised three of the station’s exit locks. When the shuttle dock seals began to show similar wear, the station man-Shoe Clan virologist named Weber, called for general evac.

The call was not well-received by the IOS. Apparently Marburg’s shuttle would be routed to a secondary bay that was being set up for prolonged quarantine. Weber ascribed this to Terrestrial paranoia, though he feared it might signal something worse.

But there was no postponing the evac. Weber loved Isis and had worked hard to make Marburg a going concern. But he was also a realist. Postpone the evacuation much longer and people would begin to die.

The Oceanic Station had already collapsed. The Isis Polar Station, anchored in the glacial wasteland of the planet’s northern ice cap, reported no significant problems and continued to operate on a day-to-day basis.

Yambuku, however, was on the brink of total breakdown.

Avrion Theophilus burst through the shuttle-bay doors from de-con, brushed aside his courtesy detail, and marched direcdy to Yambuku’s remote-ops room.

His full-dress Devices and Personnel uniform drew a few stares from the otherwise distracted downstation crew. He was accustomed to that, at least from the Kuiper-born. In civilization it would have been considered ridiculously gauche, the peasant’s impulse to stare. But Yambuku wasn’t civilization.

He found the station manager, Tam Hayes, coming off a long remensor session. Hayes looked groggy, unshaven. Theophilus took him aside. “We need a place to talk.”

I gather she’s injured,” Theophilus said.

“It looks that way.”

“Out of contact.”

“Verbal contact, certainly. We’re still getting some telemetry, but it’s intermittent. The fault may be with our antenna array. Remensors are down, too, and the excursion tractibles are dead. All of them.”

“But Zoe is not.”

“No. To the best of our knowledge, Zoe is not.” “We have good telemetry up to the point at which she was attacked?”

“Yes.”

“Forwarded to Earth?”

“Forwarded to the IOS, at least. Degrandpre bottlenecks traffic to Earth.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

Hayes blinked. “Believe me, that’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Have the satellites located her?”

“To within a meter of the digger colony, but the atmosphere’s too cloudy for any kind of visual confirmation.” “Not good enough,” Theophilus said.

They had come to the small shuttle-control chamber above the core. It was occupied only during launches—a good place for a private conversation. Hayes was in a hurry to get back to the remote-ops room; Zoe was alive, and he meant to bring her back to Yambuku. Right now Avrion Theophilus was only an obstacle, and the man’s peremptory manner made Hayes clench his fists.

He said, “Are you worried about Zoe or about her excursion technology?”

“The technology has already proven itself, don’t you think? The fact that she might yet be alive despite a wild-animal attack is evidence of that.”

“Because if it’s Zoe you’re worried about, it might be best if you let me get back to the business of bringing her home.”

“Not all the novel technology is in her excursion suit, Dr. Hayes.”

“Excuse me?”

“She’s a package. It isn’t just the interface. She’s augmented internally, do you understand? She has an entirely artificial immune system riding on top of her natural immunity. Microscopic nano-factories stapled to her abdominal aorta. If the suit is breached, we need to know that. There’s much more we can learn from her even if she dies in the field.”

“You’re saying she might survive even if the suit is breached?”

“For a time, at least. It might be difficult to retrieve her body, given the situation here. But if we can—”

“Fuck you,” Hayes said.

He didn’t want to retrieve Zoe’s body. He had a better plan.

Dieter Franklin came into the staging bay as Hayes was suiting up.

Hayes’ standard bioarmor was clumsy and immense compared to the gear Zoe had worn. A sterile core wrapped in steel and flexiglass and nanofilters. Hayes had just sealed the massive leggings when the inner door slid open.

“You can’t be serious,” Franklin said. “Lee Reisman said you were raving about an emergency excursion. I told her you were smarter than that. Tell me I wasn’t lying.”

“I’m bringing her back.”

“Slow down a fucking minute and think about this! You’re planning to cross the Copper River in a suit of armor that can sustain you for, what, two days maximum?—when it’s working properly. And at a time when every piece of machinery we’ve sent into the field is either dead or failing and we can’t even keep our own seals intact.”

“She’s alive, maybe injured.”

“If she’s alive, she needs a functioning ground station to come home to. You’re more useful to her here. Not out in the mud with a hot servomotor, or worse, dividing everybody’s attention and costing us resources we can’t afford.”

“I owe her—”

“Nothing you owe her is worth suicide. And that’s what this is, you know it. Odds are, you’ll end up as a few kilograms of compost inside a broken steel shell. And Zoe will end up right where she is.”

Hayes wound a layer of insulation around his waist, forcing himself to slow down, do it right. “She was a fucking test platform, Dieter. D-and-P doesn’t give a shit about the diggers. Zoe thought she was here to do social studies, but she was a test platform.”

Dieter Franklin nodded slowly. “For the excursion suit. Elam suspected as much.”

“Elam suspected. But I knew.”

Franklin said nothing. Hayes tried to focus his attention on his armor, working the procedures, sealing bands of pneumostatic plastic over his rib cage. He wished Elam were here to read him his checklist.

“You knew?”

“I saw all the D-and-P memos. Little communiques to the Yambuku manager. No details, but enough that I should have realized it was her gear that mattered. She was a nicking test platform, Dieter, and I let her walk out there in all her glorious ignorance.”

“You need to think about this. She has good gear, but it’s not breach-proof. “We can’t be sure she’s still alive.”

Next, the soft inner helmet. “She has more than the suit. She’s been internally modified. She has a heavily augmented immune system. Even if her suit’s damaged, she might survive long enough for us to get her back here. Maybe long enough to save her life.”

Dieter Franklin was silent for a time.

He said at last, “Even so, Tam. It’s a bad bet.”

“I know it’s a bad bet.”

“Because Yambuku won’t be here much longer. That’s the obvious conclusion no one wants to draw. Look at the Oceanic Station. Look at Marburg. It’s the bios, Tam, working out strategies, learning how to corrupt our seals and our locks. Synthesizing solvents and spreading the knowledge, sharing it somehow. Five years ago, that biohazard armor was good enough to protect you. Today … it’s the next best thing to fucking useless.”

Hayes toggled the atmosphere lock. Overhead, a series of fans began to create positive pressure. An alarm sounded. Dieter Franklin fled the room.

Hayes pulled on his helmet.

EIGHTEEN

Pain. Double vision. Zoe felt herself being dragged, the heels of her boots bumping against impediments. She was suffering from concussion, she thought vaguely, or worse, from some cranial injury from which she wouldn’t recover. She smelled impossible things: burning rubber, ammonia, rotting food; and when she closed her eyes she saw pinwheels and flares. I She was terribly nauseated but dared not vomit. The excursion suit would process the mess, but probably not before she choked to death.

She was awake, or perhaps not: consciousness ebbed; time J passed in gusts, like the wind.

She struggled—briefly—when she realized the diggers were dragging her into one of their mounds, away from starlight and firelight and into the rocky, claustrophobic dark. The mound entrance was narrow. The diggers spindled their sickeningly mobile bodies and entered one at a time; Zoe was dragged by her extended arms, helpless, over the rocky Hp and into a tunnel encrusted with digger excretions. The air was thick with an unfamiliar stench, spicy and foul at once, like cardamom and rotted food. She wondered if she would asphyxiate here. In the dark.

And for the first time in her life, Zoe felt panic.

She had not panicked even in the cold dormitories of the orphan crib; her thymostat had suppressed any violent emotion and left only a hollow, pervasive sadness, the aching knowledge of her captivity and abandonment. What she felt now was worse. There was no advantage to struggle but she felt she must struggle. The need to fight obliterated thought, became a madness rising out of the meat of her. She tried to suppress the scream that rose from her chest but the effort was futile; the scream erupted and continued without reason or volition. She kicked and pulled at the coral-sharp claws that held her wrists and ankles. But these animals were complacently strong. All light vanished. There was only darkness now, and compulsive motion, and the enclosing walls of the tunnel. And the sound of her sobbing.

She woke again—alone, exhausted beyond fear.

Was she blind? No. It was only the darkness of the diggers’ mound. Above ground it might be noon or midnight. Here, it was always dark.

But at least she was alone, at least for now. She moved, stretched tentatively … found a rocky ceiling just above her head, too close to allow her to stand, curving to arm’s-length walls and a floor somehow softer (but damper) than the entrance tunnel had been. The silence beat at her ears. The only audible sounds were the rattle of her breath inside the suit’s filter and the rasp of her movements. If she had a light—

But she did! She did have a light. Several, in fact: the firefly lamps strapped to her tool belt, the tool belt she had been using to mend the tractibles.

Stupid, stupid, languishing in the blackness when she could have been seeing! She fumbled at her belt almost fearfully, and indeed some of the small lamps had torn away during her struggle, but some of them remained, as small as bullets and with an activator built into each base. She extracted one and thumbed its switch.

The light it emitted was faint but welcome. Order was restored; she was in a place with contours and dimensions—a rounded pressed-earth hollow glistening with damp. The floor was carpeted with a pale, almost translucent growth through which small mandibled insects crawled, and on the wall there was the gauzy nest of some spider-like creature, a mass of cotton-floss thread to which the mummified bodies of insects adhered.

The firefly lamp was good for an hour or two. There were seven more remaining on her belt; she counted them with her fingers. She would have to be careful.

But of course she couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. No food. No water. She had some water reserves in her suit, which would recycle her urine, too, but that was an open loop and good for maybe a day or two at most without exterior replenishment. Basically, she needed to get to her base camp, find food and water and maybe a working tractible, then head back to Yambuku.

Resources, Zoe thought. She was perhaps not thinking very clearly; her head ached horribly where the digger had clubbed her, and when she touched her temple she felt a plump bruise under the excursion suit’s membrane. Resources: what did she have that she could use to her advantage? Telemetry, communication … the thought of talking to Tam Hayes was so enticing she almost wept. But when she called up her corns protocol there was no carrier— nothing from Yambuku, wide- or narrow-band, which meant that her gear was damaged, or theirs was, or perhaps the digger mound was blocking radio transmissions.

She wondered then how far below the surface she had been carried. She didn’t know—no one knew—how deep these tunnels ran. There had been a few seismic-imaging experiments conducted by remotely operated tractibles near the digger mounds, enough to suggest that the warrens were extensive and complexly interconnected. The digging might have gone on for centuries, might have reached down kilometers below the topsoil… But no, that was a bad thought. Impermissible. She felt panic rising like a lump in her throat. Daylight might be a kilometer away, but it also might be just an inch above this sealed chamber. She had no way of knowing and she instructed herself not to think about it.

She held her breath for a moment and listened carefully. Was she alone? A tunnel roughly as wide as her shoulders was the only entrance to this cul-de-sac. The firefly lamp would not illuminate that space beyond a meter or so; she saw only that the tunnel was circular and that it rose at a gentle angle, perhaps twenty degrees of slope. Listen. She held herself still and tried to calm the pulsing of blood in her ears. Listen. But the silence was absolute. Surely a digger traversing these tunnels would betray itself by the sound of its passage, claws on soil packed as hard as rock. There was no such sound. Good.

Maybe it was daytime, Zoe thought, and the diggers were outside gathering food. She tried to scroll a clock, but her corneal display seemed to be broken. Another effect of the blow to her head perhaps.

She hesitated for what might have been a moment or an hour, eyeing the crawl space suspiciously, reluctant to exchange this relatively spacious cell for the cramped enclosure of the tunnel. But then the firefly lamp began to sputter and dim, and anything, Zoe thought, anything would be better than more darkness.

She plucked another lamp from her belt and struck it, but it wouldn’t light. It was broken.

Her fingers shook as she worked the next lamp free. This one, when she pressed it, sprang brightly to life. She sighed her relief.

But that left only five more lamps … and none or all of them might have gone bad.

Now, Zoe, she thought. Go now.

She held the firefly lamp in her right hand and lay down on her stomach. The albino moss felt cool beneath her suit membrane. She would have to advance with her arms in front of her, squirming more than crawling, using her boots for traction. And what if she lost herself in this maze? What if all her firefly lamps burned out, one by one? Could she even take another one from her belt in such a narrow space?

No, she realized, not without dislocating her shoulder.

She backed off, removed her tool belt and slipped it over one shoulder. That way she could reach the remaining lamps, if need be.

Five lamps. Say, six or seven hours of light, if they all worked. And then—?

Another bad thought. She put it out of her mind and squirmed once more into the tunnel.

There was just enough space for her to lift herself on her elbows and inch forward, scrabbling with boots and knees in a sort of crab-crawl. She was grateful for the ubiquitous pale moss beneath her; it cushioned her knees and elbows where the vulnerable suit membrane might have torn or eroded.

The firefly lamp illuminated a narrow circular space perhaps a meter or two ahead of her. I need a plan, she thought. (Perhaps she said some of this aloud. She tried not to, but the gap between thought and word had narrowed and she caught the occasional echo of her own hoarse whisper coming back to her out of the distance. Giving herself away, she feared. But still, the animals hadn’t returned.)

A plan, she thought again. Here was a maze, and somewhere the minotaur. She decided that whenever she came to a fork in the tunnel she would always take the path that led upward, or if both paths were equivalent she would take the right-turning branch. That way she would eventually reach the surface, or at least be able (but please don’t let it happen) to back out of a dead end and retrace her route.

She could do that, she decided, even if, God forbid, she used up all her lamps. Even in the dark, she could do that.

The dark returned when her current lamp flickered and dimmed. Too soon, surely. How far had she come? She couldn’t guess. A long way, it seemed, but not far enough. The tunnel had not branched, not even once. Or perhaps, horrible thought, the diggers made new tunnels and sealed old ones; maybe she would reach a final wall and— No. Bad thought.

She fumbled another firefly lamp into her hand and pressed the base. To her immense relief, it flickered to life. Another hour lost. Bad thought, bad thought.

She had been imagining, vividly, what she would do when she got back to Yambuku—peel off her excursion membrane, stand under a hot shower, wash her hair, eat, drink sparkling water from tall crystal tumblers—when she came to a branching tunnel.

The first. Or was it the first? Here in this small arc of light it was hard to estimate time, to distinguish between events imagined and events actual. She had planned this, but had she already attempted it? She didn’t know. Nevertheless, Zoe thought, stick to plan. Did the left branch show an upward slope, or should she keep to the right?

Hard to say.

She paused, hoping to divine some clue. Was there a breath of wind either way? There was not. Only the same stale, stinking air, hardly enough to fill her lungs. No sound. She thought perhaps the right-hand tunnel rose ever so slightly, and she turned in that direction.

Running into Theo’s arms.

“One of my children survived.” Running into Tam Hayes’ arms…

She woke hurting. Arms stiff, legs stiff, her head throbbing. Pressure all around her. And blind— No, it was the dark. The dark.

She had fallen asleep.

She cursed her carelessness—time had been wasted!—and fumbled for the next firefly lamp. She kept her eyes tightly closed as she worked her fingers, because she couldn’t see anything even if her eyes were open, and because with her eyes closed the darkness felt like a choice, her own chosen darkness, not something imposed by the weight of clay and stone around her. The warm darkness, perhaps, of sleep. Though she must not sleep again.

She scratched the lamp alight.

That was better. Only this endless tunnel to see, but the light was a blessing.

She crawled ahead a few meters—or maybe a lot of meters. There were no references here any longer, no time and no space. She might have traveled a great distance already, or she might be a scant few paces from her original cul-de-sac.

Bad thought.

The tunnel ahead of her began to widen. This was change at last, and the rush of hope she felt was intoxicating. She cautioned herself against it, but hope was like panic, irrepressible, a vast force no longer blocked by her thymostat.

The thymostat had been a kind of membrane too, Zoe thought—like her excursion suit, another barrier between herself and the world. Shutting out the viruses of panic and hope and love and despair. Lost now. She was naked and infected.

The tunnel continued to expand, became a larger chamber. She filled it with the sound of her labored breathing. Raised her hand and brought the light to bear. Lifted her eyes and saw—

—a dead end.

Another cul-de-sac.

She let her tears flow freely for a few precious minutes. The excursion suit, she thought idiotically, would recycle them.

She crawled back, sobbing intermittently, to the place where the tunnel branched.

How many lamps were left? Her memory was faulty; she was compelled to stop and count the remaining lamps with her fingers. One, two, three, four. Which meant that hours had passed since she left the chamber where she had been abandoned. She could even calculate the time, she supposed, if her mind were functioning a little more efficiently, if she had not lost an eternity to sleep.

Too much time, in any case. Too much time spent doubling her tracks.

She thought of open air. The memory was so vivid she could taste it. And sky, Zoe thought. Yes, and rain. And wind.

She heard faint sounds at the tunnel intersection. An exit missed? The sound of outside? But she had to be careful. She controlled her breathing. She put her head into the adjoining tunnel.

Where the black eyes of a digger regarded her coolly.

She held on to the firefly lamp even as the digger scuttled after her and clutched her ankles.

She hadn’t recognized the digger. It wasn’t Old Man. Absurd as that name was. This was simply an animal, or something as much insect as animal, long and too lithe in the close confinement of the tunnel, its thin body flexible, huge black eyes queasily mobile in their sockets, gripping claws tight as rings of tempered steel. She was shocked that she had ever found anything even faintly reminiscent of the human about these creatures. They were brutal but not even malevolent; their minds worked in strange, inhuman loops; whatever motivated them, she was opaque to it; their realm was not her realm.

It dragged her into another cul-de-sac—no, oh God, the same one, the one she had started from; she recognized the web on the wall—and rolled her over on her back.

Still she clutched the lamp. A small spark of sanity. The digger ignored it.

She closed her eyes, opened them.

The digger loomed over her. She supposed it was looking at her, though its eyes were as blank as bubbles of oil.

She looked back at it. Beneath her panic was a grim and wholly unexpected calm, an emotional deadness that was both relief and threat at once. A premature deadness … because she was almost certainly about to die.

The digger put one extended claw on her chest, on her sternum above her breasts.

She felt the pressure of it—enough to cause pain, perhaps enough to draw blood.

Then the digger began to slice at her excursion membrane, peeling away the broken material like pale, dead skin.

NINETEEN

All roads lead to Rome, Kenyon Degrandpre thought, and out here at the edge of the human diaspora he had become the embodiment of Rome, and down those roads marched all the bad news in the world, rank on serried rank.

Each new crisis demanded a fresh solution. The written emergency protocols had proved woefully inadequate.

The evacuation of Marburg, for instance. Clearly, the station manager was justified in calling the evac. Just as clearly, Degrandpre couldn’t sacrifice much more of the limited space aboard the IOS for a lengthy quarantine of fifteen individuals, any of whom might be vectoring some virulent microorganism. He resolved the conflict by housing the Marburg evacuees in a vacant engineering bay ordinarily used to launch Turing assemblers. Crude, cold, and uncomfortable quarters, but he ordered the chamber stocked with a week’s worth of food and water and equipped with sleeping mats, and considered himself generous for so doing. He also ordered the access doors double-sealed and declared the bay a Level Five hot zone pro tern.

And in his rare free moments—the calm, he imagined, of a falling object, a crystal goblet dropped from a tray before it strikes the floor—he was obliged to shuffle through routine Earth-bound particle-pair traffic to ensure that no hint of the ongoing crisis reached the wrong ears.

This paranoiac rant, for instance, from Yambuku’s resident planetologist, Dieter Franklin:

Mounting evidence suggests a mechanism of information exchange between physically unconnected living cells. Such a mechanism would allow a symbiosis that rides above the usual evolutionary process, a mechanism perhaps as significant as the ancient Terrestrial symbiosis of unicellular life and primitive mitochondria…

Whatever that meant.

The increasing efficiency of bacteriological attack on downstation seals and the penetration of supposedly inert barriers (a phenomenon shared across immense distances by otherwise unrelated organisms) led to the investigation of intracellular quantum events such as …

No, strike all that. “Bacterial attack” would raise an alarm back home. Feeling faintly guilty, but with the clinical determination of a man who has set about the grim task of ensuring his own survival, Degrandpre deleted the offending paragraph.

The proliferation of structurally unnecessary microtubules in a great variety of Isian unicells may ultimately explain this apparent action-at-a-distance. In the human brain, such structures mediate consciousness by operating as quantum devices, a single electron’s indeterminacy amplified, in effect, to become the central mechanism of vertebrate consciousness. Preliminary laboratory work (see appendix) suggests that Isian unicells not only sustain a similar quantum effect but can in fact create and preserve twin-state particle-pair coherency during the process of mitosis.

All this seemed wrongheaded and subtly threatening to Degrandpre, though he was hardly equipped to evaluate the scientific content. He skipped to the summary at the end of the document:

One may speculate, perhaps not prematurely, about the possibilities inherent in a pseudoneural network connecting all Isian unicells, a biomass that (if one includes oceanic matter and the mineral-fixing bacteria distributed through the crust of the planet) is of truly staggering proportions. The increasingly successful biological attacks on the downstations might be seen by analogy as an autonomic reaction to the presence of a foreign body, in which breach strategies developed in the saline environment of the ocean and first used against the oceanic research station were slowly but effectively adapted for use against land-based outposts…

No, none of this would do.

An incoming message chimed his scroll—tagged Highest Priority, of course; what else? Degrandpre ordered a quick global delete of the floating document. Dieter Franklin’s musings were promptly excised from the scroll, the mail queue, and the central memory. They would not, of course, be broadcast to Earth.

The bad news this time—and it was very bad news indeed—was that Corbus Nefford had developed a fever.

Degrandpre spoke to his medical manager through a two-way screen, full-scale image. Under the circumstances, a scroll connection would have been too formal. Never mind that he spoke from the safety of his temporary command quarters, lodged next to the aeroponic gardens. Never mind that he had already established four new precautionary zones, extending from the shuttle dock to include both adjoining pods and, of course, the Turing launch bays.

He was shocked at the sight of Corbus Nefford strapped to a gurney with a saline drip tacked to his arm and Ken Kinsolving at his side. Remote tractibles bustled around the physician’s bedside, snuffling at his wrists with biotic and chemical sensors. Nefford had insisted he had something important to tell Kenyon Degrandpre and had refused to speak to intermediates. At the moment he looked barely capable of speaking at all.

We are all lost, some part of Degrandpre whispered.

He mustered his diplomatic skills. He didn’t want Nefford to see him flinch away from the screen.

“What you have to understand,” Nefford managed to gasp, “is the slowness of it…”

The etiology of the disease, or Nefford’s own death? Each protracted; each agonizing. “Yes, go on,” Degrandpre said. All of this was being recorded by the IOS’s central memory for future reference. He wondered whether anyone would ever see it.

“This disease isn’t like other Isian contagions. Not as virulent. It has an incubation period. That means it’s probably a single organism. Dangerous and subtle, but potentially controllable. Do you understand?”

“I understand. You needn’t continue asking me that, Corbus.”

“Dangerous, but potentially controllable. But quarantine isn’t working. We’re dealing with something very small here, maybe a prion, a bit of DNA in a protein jacket, maybe small enough to tunnel through the seals. …”

“We’ll keep all that in mind, Corbus.” If any of us survive.

“Manager,” Nefford gasped, his mouth working between syllables like a siphon with an air bubble trapped inside. “May I say ‘Kenyon’? We’re friends, aren’t we? In keeping with our respective positions in the Trust?”

Hardly.

“Of course,” Degrandpre said. “Maybe I won’t die.” “Perhaps not.” “We can control this.” “Yes,” Degrandpre said.

Nefford seemed on the verge of saying something more. But fresh red blood began to leak from his nose. Visibly disappointed, he closed his eyes and turned his head away. Kinsolving broke the video connection.

“Ghastly,” Degrandpre murmured. He couldn’t seem to escape the word. It was lodged on his tongue. “Ghastly. Ghastly.”

Nefford’s prophecy was correct. Engineering tractibles reported microscopic pinhole punctures in the seals separating the original quarantine chamber from the surrounding quarters.

Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.

He understood for the first time, or imagined he understood, his father’s religious impulse. The Families and their Trusts had finely divided and obsessively ordered the political and technological wilderness of Earth, each person and thing and process in its appropriate orbit in the social orrery; but outside the walls of the Families the wild still pressed close: proles, Martians, Kuiper clans; disease vectors breeding in the haunts of the underclasses; no conqueror but death, finally, and the cruel immensity of the universe. His father’s furtive Islam was, after all, an act of will, the ordering of the void into story and hierarchy, walled gardens of good and evil.

The tragedy of Isis was the tragedy of walls made vain. Not only the physical walls. He thought of Corbus Nefford calling him a “friend.” He thought of the hygienic lies he broadcast to Earth on a daily basis.

All vain. Very little could be salvaged now. Perhaps only his own life. Perhaps not even that.

A summit with the pompous, fat chief engineer, Todd Solen.

“As I see it,” Solen announced, “we have just one recourse. If we can’t put physical barriers between ourselves and the disease agent, whatever it is, we have to shut down Modules Three and Six, secure the bulkheads, and evacuate the atmosphere. Put a sector of hard vacuum between ourselves and the threat. Which ought to do the trick, unless this so-called virus has spread through the IOS already.”

“The Marburg evacuees are in Module Six.”

“Obviously. They’ll die if we depressurize the module. But they’ll die just as surely if we don’t. Disease aside, without access to our Turing bays or main shuttle docks, without spares or a comprehensive engineering sector, with our water circulation compromised and the food supply depending entirely on what we can grow in the sun gardens—all considered, the IOS is an unsustainable environment. We can save as many people as we can fit into a single Higgs launcher. No more.

Degrandpre felt the paralysis of utter failure.

He asked, “Has it come to that?”

The engineer was perspiring freely. He swabbed his forehead with a sleeve. “With all due respect, Manager, yes, it has come to that.”

I will not render this decision, Degrandpre thought, under intimidation. He said, “It’s hot in here.”

Solen blinked his bulging eyes. “Well—we’re recycling water from the cooling fins. There’s not much left for thermostatic control.”

“Find a way to make it cooler in here, Mr. Solen.” “Yes, sir,” Solen said faintly.

Too hot, too dry. The IOS itself was running a fever.

Aaron Weber, the Marburg station manager currently isolated in the Turing bay—along with all fifteen of his staff—also took note of the heat.

The air was dry, enervating, and it made even the large if poorly illuminated steel cavern of the Turing bay seem claustrophobic.

Sleep proved difficult in the heat. The heat dried throat and nose, made clothing a nuisance and blankets intolerable. Several of the Kuiper-born scientists stripped and thought nothing of it, but Weber was more inhibited. He was reminded of his student dormitory in Kim II Sung City during the long winters, blistering forced-air heat losing its moisture to glass windows crusted with ice. Nosebleeds at night, bloodstains on the pillow. The only recourse had been to open a window and risk freezing.

Fully clothed, he nevertheless managed to sleep for an hour or so in the long shadow of a cargo manipulator, woke to the snoring of his quarantined comrades, slept again…

And woke with a faint, cool breeze on his cheek.

Thinking of the dormitory window. Snow sliding under glass. The moving air soothed him.

But the air here ought not to be moving.

The breeze became a wind now, a brisk little indoor wind sweeping along the floor of the Turing bay with surprising vigor, picking up loose items rescued from the shuttle: here a foam cup, there a sheaf of printed paper.

He sat upright, alarmed.

That sound? That muted throbbing? He recognized it from the IOS launches, though it had never been so immediate: it was the sound of the machinery that opened the bay’s huge airlock.

His ears exploded with pain as the atmospheric pressure abruptly dropped. When he opened his mouth the air spilled out of his throat in an involuntary exhalation that seemed never to end. He wanted to cry out, but his lungs collapsed like broken balloons.

Lights blinked out around him. He saw bodies thrashing as they were thrown from the gaping lock. No noise now. Only the stars, pure and unmediated. The fixed and naked eye. First light.

TWENTY

Yesterday’s rainwater dripped from the forest canopy and left the trail mulchy and slick. Tam Hayes moved cautiously in his heavy biological armor. He had grown accustomed to the liquid sound of his footsteps in the decaying biomass, the regular whir of his servomotors. The sounds were peaceful, in a strange way.

Throughout that long day he did not speak to Yambuku, although message alerts scrolled periodically through his heads-up. The silence was oddly soothing. Instead, he performed the slow and steady work of navigating his armor, pacing himself, monitoring his gear. He wanted to reach and preferably cross the Copper River by nightfall. If necessary he would sleep inside his armor, simply freeze the servos and let the gel padding accommodate itself to his weight. But it would be better to keep moving. Dieter had been right, of course, about the bioarmor. He dared not depend on it. It would fail—in some small way or catastrophically; sooner or later.

Much as he tried to pace himself, however, this was hard physical labor. The sweat poured out of him, some of it absorbed by the armor’s recyclers but most of it trapped between his body and the cool gel membrane, irritating his skin. He watched his footing as he walked, avoiding places where the mud seemed threateningly deep. He saw the sky reflected in leaf-strewn puddles, sunlight glistening on scummy water.

And it occurred to him to wonder, from time to time, what he was doing out here.

Searching for Zoe, of course, because he cared about Zoe. She was fragile but brutally persistent—he thought for a moment of a fern emerging from a poisonous windfall of volcanic ash. She had been subjected to cruelties that had killed four of her clone sisters, and she had survived—had followed Isis out of her captivity, just as Hayes had followed Isis away from his family and his clan.

But we were both seduced, Hayes thought.

Would Zoe have come here so willingly if she had known she was nothing more than a vehicle for the field testing of new Trust technologies? God help us, Hayes thought, she might have; but the Trust never offered her the choice. Lies wrapped in lies, everyone a party to some sin or other; knowledge hoarded and tightly held, because knowledge was power. The Terrestrial way.

And I am out here, Hayes thought, out here in this peaceful toxic wilderness, to rescue her … but admit the truth: to rescue himself as well.

The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say. Calm, aloof, an Ice Walker, his father’s potlatch wife. In some other century she might have been a Quaker.

He had wanted the stars but he had caught the Terrestrial disease, the unknowing of awkward truths.

He had lied to Zoe. Perhaps not as egregiously as Avrion Theophilus had lied to her—but he had abetted those lies.

He was out here saving Zoe, but he was also out here salvaging the tattered remains of his innocence. No points for that.

He reached the river at sunset. The sky was clean, deepening toward indigo, and the small moon was quartered at zenith. He wanted to cross the river before dark.

The recent rains had swollen the Copper. Water surged over the surface of the crude bridge the tractibles had built. Hayes stepped onto that fragile scaffolding and felt it sway beneath his weight. If the bridge collapsed, he would be trapped beneath the running water by the unbuoyant mass of his armor.

He switched on his helmet lamp and advanced slowly, watching the water, red-tinted with sunset and shimmering with the oily residue of decomposing plant life, as it washed over his boots. Servomotors labored to steady his balance. A reflection of the moon quivered in the current to his left like the image of a lidded eye. He thought of Zoe’s eyes, eyes shocked by the loss of her thymostat, newborn, wide but wary. Understanding at last the price she had paid for her sanity.

He remembered how she had felt beneath him, crying out with what might have been, God help her, her first shared orgasm. She had trembled like this bridge. Afterward he had felt faintly ashamed, as if he had taken advantage of her, forced the living heart of her out of a complex membrane of defenses.

He trudged up the far bank of the Copper with gluey mud clinging to his boots. The sky was darker now, the forest a black corridor. Fallen logs rotted along the riverbank, and to his right he saw some small animal hesitate in the beam of his helmet lamp, then dash into the undergrowth.

When he had passed some meters into the woods and was enclosed in the space carved out of the darkness by his helmet light, his radio crackled once and fell silent. This would not have been unusual, except that he had asked his armor to screen all messages unless they arrived on Zoe’s standard or emergency frequencies. In his exhaustion, it took him a moment to understand that this was what he had been waiting for.

Her signal must be weak. Obstructed by some obstacle perhaps, or they would have heard her back at Yambuku. He stood still in the midst of the forest, his boots sinking a little into the muddy path—he might lose her if he moved—and thumbed his own com controls. “Zoe? Zoe, it’s Tam Hayes. Can you hear me?” No answer.

He waited sixty seconds—an eternity, the cat’s-eye moon sliding through the branches of the trees—and tried again.

This time her carrier frequency crackled alive and he heard her voice, eerily close, but confused, as if he had wakened her from a deep sleep. “Theo?”

“No, Zoe, it’s Tam. I’m coming for you, but I need to know where you are and how you’re doing.”

“Inside …” she murmured.

“Say again?”

“I’m inside a mound. Underneath. Under the ground.” “Inside which mound, Zoe?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re all connected. It’s dark here.”

He didn’t like the way she sounded—weak, uncertain, almost delirious. But it was her voice. She was alive. “Zoe, how are you? Are you hurt?”

“How am I?” She was silent for a long moment. “Hot. It’s hot here. I can’t see.”

“Have they hurt you?”

“The diggers aren’t here. Not always, I mean.”

“Zoe, hang on. I’m coining to get you. Keep talking.”

But he lost contact with her as he started toward the next ridge.

As he walked through the night he caught fragments of Zoe’s carrier frequency, never long enough to rouse her attention.

For all its exquisitely tuned servomotors and ergonomic flourishes, the bioarmor had grown terribly heavy around him. He was aware of the enormous effort he expended carrying himself upslope as he approached the foothills of the Coppers, where the soil grew stony and he could turn, if he wished, and see the western plains unfolding under moonlight toward the distant sea. Without a defensive perimeter of tractibles and remensors he feared an attack from some large predator, but no such animal approached him; he was a formidable creature himself, he supposed, and his armor didn’t smell like food.

He contacted Yambuku once, to tell them that Zoe was alive and he had spoken to her. Dieter Franklin was manning the comm console. “Tam,” he said, “that’s good news, but we have problems.”

Hayes debated cutting the connection. There was only one problem he could deal with now, and that was the problem of Zoe. But Dieter was a friend, and Hayes let him talk.

“Your telemetry, for one. We have motors running hot in your left leg assembly. It’s not critical yet, you can scroll the diagnostics if you haven’t already, but it’s not a good sign. What you need to do, Tam, is to turn around and hope you get close enough to Yambuku that we can send one of the reserve tractibles to carry you back, if need be. We can try to do something about Zoe from orbit. The IOS has a few landable remensors it can launch.”

Hayes digested this information slowly. An overheating servo in his left leg … that would explain the extra weight he seemed to carry when he moved that foot, his tendency to list to port when his attention lapsed. But that wasn’t bad, considering Dieter’s first prediction that he would never reach the river. As for rescuing Zoe—

He said, “From orbit?”

“Because we’re evacuating Yambuku. The seals are lapsing faster than we can replace them, and our stores are running low. On top of that, Theophilus says the IOS is getting cagey with him; maybe something’s gone bad up there, too. We’re looking at a last shuttle lift in forty-eight hours.”

“Not enough time.”

“That’s the point. I’m trying to make your case with Theophilus. But he’s giving the orders, and he’s just about angry enough to write you off.”

“He wants Zoe back.” Her corpse, at least, Hayes did not add.

“Not as much as he wants to get off Isis. He’s Family and he’s very much in charge, but I think underneath all that he’s starting to get seriously frightened.”

“Thank you for the information, Dieter. Keep the core sterile. I’ll be back.”

He cut the connection before Dieter could respond. Forty-eight hours.

If he started back now, he might make it.

TWENTY-ONE

“Tam? Tam?”

The voice had come. The voice had gone. Unless she had imagined it. It was easy to imagine things, here in the overheated dark.

The digger, coiling its multijointed body in a sinuous circle, had also come and gone. The digger had broken the membrane of her excursion suit, slitting it from sternum to crotch with one razor-sharp claw, but carefully, drawing only a little blood. And then it had left her alone. To die, she had assumed, and she burned her firefly lamps recklessly, examining her body, waiting for the inevitable collapse of heart, lungs, liver, brain—because she was exposed at last to the Isian biosphere, microbes implanted beneath her skin by the animal’s filthy claw. But her blood had dried quickly in the hot, close air. Daubs of it congealed on her fingers. She did not sicken and she did not die.

She did, however, exhaust her supply of firefly lamps, simply because she had dreaded dying in the dark. As the last lamp burned, she had willed herself to die before it blinked out. But she did not die. Only passed out for a time, or slept.

And then was horribly awake again, confined in this lightless hole.

She tore off her air filter, because there was no reason now not to breathe the Isian air directly; at best, it might hasten her inevitable death.

And still, still, she did not die.

The impulse to escape, a kind of smoldering panic, overwhelmed her once more. She resigned herself to the darkness; it was only a matter of using her other senses, Zoe told herself, of making maps in her head. Once again she crawled out of her cul-de-sac into a tunnel. She felt, but could not see, the mossy alien growths pressed against her exposed stomach, her breasts.

She crawled for an inestimable time, made several turns, tried to picture the labyrinth she had navigated as a map on parchment, an ancient mariner’s map, but the map dissolved in the heat and confusion; she couldn’t hold on to it.

She turned a corner and put her hand forward and touched the body of a digger. She froze in place, but the animal was evidently sleeping. Its fat, hollow scales, so useful for insulation, were splayed apart, radiating heat rather than conserving it. Without her air filter, the digger smelled pungent and close. The smell reminded her of a freshly manured farm field.

Zoe backed away. There wasn’t room to turn around in the narrow tunnel. She dreaded what she might encounter with her feet, dreaded discovering that her world had been reduced to a few yards of excavated subsoil, while her body stubbornly and stupidly refused to die.

She had thrown away her filter mask but retained the excursion suit’s headgear, and she was thankful for that when Tam Hayes spoke to her. Even if he was a hallucination, a fever dream, as she suspected he must be. It didn’t matter. She drank the sound of him like cool water.

For a time she was in Tehran, carrying laundry under the stars.

She had been given the job as punishment for some transgression she couldn’t remember, gathering the fetid, too-often-recycled smocks from the youngest inmates and carrying them in a plastic crate across the empty courtyard to the laundry shed—this in winter, and often late at night.

Her secret revenge was that she did not very much dislike the punishment. Distasteful as it was, because the younger children often soiled themselves or were ill, she relished the few free minutes under an open sky. Even in the cold, even in the dark. Perhaps especially then. The cold night air seemed somehow cleaner than the day’s, as if it had been carried by benevolent winds from a distant glacier. And the coldest nights were often the clearest. The stars shone above the pallid lights of the camp with all the purity of their fixed, indifferent light. Light born in fire and older than the seas. She was in this place by mistake; she had been made for the stars, and she yearned to join them in their cycles, as aloof as ancient kings.

Some nights she put down her fetid burden and stole a moment all her own, shivering and gazing at the sky.

She was there now. In the camp. Or among the stars. One or the other. She was hungry and confused.

But what if, Zoe thought reluctantly, what if she traveled to the stars and found nothing there but more mud and dismal heat and deadly cold and sickness and strangers who didn’t care whether she lived or died? What if she traveled all the way to the stars only to be buried in a hole in some alien ground?

What if, what if, what if?

Some nights she imagined that the stars could talk. She imagined that if she listened hard enough she would hear their voices, speaking a language as crisp and hard and colorful as gemstones.

She waited patiently to hear that timeless language and finally to understand it.

“Zoe!”

The voice again. Tam Hayes. Not the voice of the stars. But he was from the stars, wasn’t he? Or at least from the Kuiper Belt, where people spoke more freely than they did on Earth.

“Zoe, can you hear me?”

The functioning part of her headgear kept the line open, waiting for a response. She licked her lips. Her lips were dry. She had finished the last of the suit’s distilled water. Lately, in fact, she had taken to licking sour condensation from the damp ceiling of the tunnel.

“Tam,” she croaked.

“Zoe, I’m half a kilometer from the digger mounds. I want to try to triangulate your position. Are you currently in a safe place?”

Well, no, she was not in a safe place, but she took his intended meaning. “I don’t have to move. Not right away.” “Good. I’m coming for you.”

“I don’t think you can find me.” She shook her head. “It’s dark here.”

“I understand that, Zoe. I’m coming.” “Dark and close.”

The com connection crackled with static. Hayes asked, “What’s your physical condition?”

That was a difficult question to answer. She could not, of course, see herself. She had to rely on sensation, on touch. But first things first. “I’m contaminated. The excursion membrane is damaged. I’m breathing unfiltered air.”

There was no immediate answer. She imagined the dismay on his face, his mouth sagging at the corners. Would he cry for her? She might have cried herself if she hadn’t been so dry.

“But I’m alive,” she added.

“You’re better protected than you think. Avrion Theophilus says you have a heavily augmented immune system—little wetpack nano colonies monitoring your blood. It’s an untested system, but it seems to be working.”

Zoe thought about that. A D P immune system. That would explain why she hadn’t died with her first unfiltered breath of this awful, stagnant air.

But Theo would have told her, wouldn’t he?

Theo wouldn’t have kept a secret like that. It was Theo, after all, who had rescued her from the orphan crib, when all her clonal sisters had slowly sickened and died.

She must have said at least some of this aloud, because Hayes responded. “Zoe, were you ever sick during that time in Tehran?”

She considered the question. Weak, yes; malnourished, certainly; numbed and frightened, always. But the fevers had left her alone, even the Brazzaville 3 that had sickened so many inmates that Zoe had been drafted into carrying bedpans, and eventually, bodies.

Theo had saved her.

Theo. Theo. Or maybe Theo had saved her before she even left the creche. Maybe Theo had given her something to protect her.

But then why had her sisters died, each in her own way? They were a clonal pod, after all. Identical, at least genetically. Unless they were different inside. Different augmentation. Different immune packages. That was how they did it with clonal animals: perform various modifications on genetically identical mice…

Then place them in a hostile environment.

See who survives.

One of my girls survived.

Bad thought, Zoe scolded herself. Bad, bad thought. She called out for Tam, but the link was broken again.

Time passed. She couldn’t guess how much.

She was increasingly aware of the diggers, a great number of them by the sound, moving closer to her. She disliked the sound and the smell and the implicit threat. The noise drove her down the tunnel, where she fled by touch and by ear, scuttling in the dark until the digger-sounds were lost behind her, and resting only then, only then.

She knew they could have caught her if they wanted her. They were astonishingly fast and flexible in these tunnels of theirs. She presumed they did not want her, that they were ignoring her, that she was fleeing their ordinary and customary congregations.

But all the tunnels she followed seemed to bend gradually but steadily downward, until it came to her, a very bad thought indeed, that she was being gently herded deeper and deeper still into these vaults, farther and farther from the light.

TWENTY-TWO

“Sir.”

Amrit Seeger, the junior communications chief, actually trembled in Degrandpre’s presence. Degrandpre had become so vigilant of infection that he had first mistaken the man’s shaking and sweating for fever. But it was only his dread of authority. Of Degrandpre’s magisterial power, such as it was. “Sir, I can’t do that.”

Degrandpre had come to the communications chamber personally. It was not a place he had often visited. Something about it appalled him, seemed antiquated and too large, all these winking glass appurtenances set into the wall like the monitor lamps of a seagoing battleship. The equipment in this room was perhaps the greatest technological achievement of the Devices and Personnel grandees, even greater in its way than the Higgs launches, maintaining a coherent and stable particle-pair link across hundreds of light years—the Grail of simultaneity in a relativistic universe. A link to Earth. The voice of the Families themselves emanated from this room.

But it was a fragile link, narrow in bandwidth, a bottleneck. Degrandpre had invoked information triage often enough in the past, usually to make his custodial work aboard the IOS appear as efficient as possible. Now he had elected to close down the link entirely. This room was too close to the encroaching perimeter of contagion.

“Sir,” the engineer quavered, “they don’t even know—back home, I mean—they don’t know about the breach of Quarantine. We can’t break the link, certainly not before we generate a distress call.”

“And if we do that,” Degrandpre said, “what do you imagine would happen? We’re contaminated with an infectious agent that the Trusts would happily kill us all to contain. There won’t be a rescue mission, certainly not if we’re idiotic enough to broadcast a distress call.”

The engineer blinked at this logic. Trembling, Degrandpre imagined, under the weight of blasphemy. “Sir, the regulations—”

“Regulations are suspended for the duration of the emergency.” Degrandpre put his hand on the grip of his quirt, to make the matter official.

The engineer swallowed hard and left the communications chamber.

Alone in the room, Degrandpre located the main power switches—a bank of breakers that queried and recognized his thumbprints—and cut power to the complex of communications machineries embedded in the walls. Panels of indicator lights winked out. But that was not enough, not nearly enough.

He opened a deckplate over the phalanx of batteries (a battery of batteries, he thought senselessly) that provided a constant flow of uninterruptible current to the core of the particle-pair reactor, maintaining the delicate cohesion that was the beating heart of the link. He disconnected the cells manually, systematically, ignoring the alarm signals, until the overhead lights nickered and went dark m a last futile attempt to reroute power and preserve cohesion.

Degrandpre switched on a hand lamp.

Working by lamplight, he pulled the three coaxial lines that were the link’s last source of energy. Deep in the supercooled com core, photons that had resonated with their Terrestrial twins for years began to decohere; information was scattered in a sudden entropic collapse, and the IOS was alone.

The Isis Orbital Station maintained a semblance of life. Shipments of replacement parts from the lunar Turing factories arrived with clockwork regularity, docked at the few remaining live bays and transferred their cargo to waiting tractibles. The station’s holds filled with finished goods and raw materials that would never be put to use.

Of the nearly one thousand crew who had escaped quarantine, fifteen at most would find a berth on the sole escape vessel: a small Higgs sphere embedded by Turing tractibles in a cometary body and parked at an Isian Lagrange point. Fifteen, coincidentally, was the number of section managers plus Kenyon Degrandpre, the general manager. Two of the original section managers, including Corbus Nefford, had been lost to disease or general quarantine. Their replacements were guaranteed a berth.

Degrandpre understood the possibility of insurrection from the excluded crew, and indeed he had found his hand straying to the holster of his quirt more often in the last few days. But most of the crew were Terrestrial and sufficiently disciplined to carry on even in the face of this disaster. Degrandpre had encouraged them to believe in the possibility of rescue and they seemed grateful for the lie.

Once he had ordered the preparation of the escape launch, a sort of numb quiescence overtook the station. Degrandpre spent the last night in his cabin with a guard detail posted at the door, his first uninterrupted sleep in seventy-two hours. He dreamed of a steel labyrinth with shrinking corridors, and then of his father’s greenhouses, dewy and warm in the winter afternoons.

Odd, he thought, waking to the chime of his scroll, how the psyche salvages calm from disaster. Dreamlike, these nautilus chambers of normalcy, when the IOS was in fact a crippled and doomed environment. The crisis was acute but somehow lazy, the way a sailing vessel damaged below decks betrays itself first with the gentlest of lists.

The scroll chimed again, an incoming message tagged high-priority. He debated ignoring it. What could be urgent when the end of everything was already in progress? He was facing, at best, a life in exile among the Kuipers. He could never return to a vengeful Earth, nor even to Mars, with its prisons and its extradition treaties. He wasn’t a criminal—or so he insisted to himself—but the Families would see it differently. The Families would hang him, given a chance.

He picked up the scroll, his fingers suddenly numb with dread.

“Sir.” It was Leander of Medical. “We have a stack of calls from Yambuku demanding immediate evacuation. Avrion Theophilus wants to speak to you directly.”

And the last thing Kenyon Degrandpre wanted was some Family cousin pulling rank on him. God, not now. “Tell Theophilus I can’t take his call. But clear them for the evacuation.”

“And dock them—?”

“At the last Turing bay. And declare quarantine. Keep them in the shuttle, if possible.”

“You mean—indefinitely?”

Yes, indefinitely; more precisely, until the escape module was launched—did he have to spell this out? “Is there anything else?”

“Yes.” Leander’s voice grew flat. “Reports of sickness in the Delta pod.” A dormitory pod adjoining Engineering. “We sealed the bulkheads at once, of course, but—”

He shrugged.

Degrandpre understood the rest. No guarantees.

TWENTY-THREE

The outer ring of the ground station was hot, according to nanosensors embedded in the walls. Yambuku had lost its first perimeter of defense. Wholesale failure, Dieter Franklin insisted, could not be far behind.

Avrion Theophilus took the planetologist to the small launch-control room above the core—“the aerie,” Franklin called it—to discuss their options.

Dieter Franklin had the slightly mad look of a man condemned to death. Condemned, and resigned to it. He spoke too freely. But Theophilus listened.

“There have been sporadic seal failures since the ground stations were first constructed. But nothing like this. We’re looking at a massive, concentrated attack.” The planetologist frowned. “Think of Isis as a killer. She wants in. She wants us. Until now, she’s been fumbling with a set of keys, chemical compounds, trying to find one that fits the lock. It was a long and frustrating effort and it led us to believe we were relatively safe. But now she has the key. The killer has the key, and all she has to do is use it, patiently open the doors one by one, because it’s too late to change the locks.” He summarized: “Basically, we’re rucked.”

“So you agree that we ought to evacuate.”

“It’s the only way we can continue to draw breath.” He took a drink from a cup of coffee—that bitter substance the station crew was pleased to call coffee. “However, we have two people in the field.”

“Hayes.”

“Tam Hayes and Zoe Fisher. Last I heard, she was still alive.”

“Trapped under the digger mounds.”

“Admittedly.”

“By your own logic, we can’t do any more for them without putting us all at risk.”

“We’re already just about as ‘at risk’ as a human being can get. That’s not the point, sir.”

“I’ve already demanded evac and I’ve already offered to monitor their situation from orbit. Give me another recommendation.

“We’re obliged to take as many people out of harm’s way as we can. So we evacuate the station, but we leave it up and running. Nanos and tractibles can monitor the core for at least a few days. We can maintain contact with Hayes from the IOS, and if by some miracle he or Zoe make it back to Yambuku we can send the shuttle for them. I wouldn’t care to calculate the odds on any of this succeeding. But it costs us nothing.”

Theophilus cupped his hands. “You call Isis ‘she.’ She wants in, you said. Do you have any idea why she wants in?”

The tall planetologist shrugged. “Maybe she’s curious. Or maybe she’s hungry.”

Theophilus’s scroll chimed; he glanced at it. A summons from the communications room. He headed for the door.

“Sir?” Dieter Franklin said.

Theophilus looked over his shoulder. “I’ll consider your recommendation, Mr. Franklin. For now, the matter is closed.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Tam Hayes, his left foot dragging and his servomotors flashing yellow overheat warnings in his corneal display like slow fireworks, arrived at the clearing around the digger mounds.

Sunlight came out of the hazy east with a humid intensity. The forest canopy breathed vapor like a sleepy dragon. Trails of fog wound down from the high Copper Mountain range in ghostly rivers.

Hayes moved cautiously in his ponderous bioarmor. At least five diggers (and more, perhaps, hidden in the tree perimeter or away from the mounds) watched him enter the clearing. He carried attached to his armor an electric quirt and a pistol loaded with rubberized bullets. So far, however, the diggers had maintained a respectful distance from him. They seemed neither alarmed nor hostile—only watchful. If, that is, he was interpreting their poised silences correctly. Their heads swiveled like radar dishes. Standing erect, they reminded Hayes of photographs he had seen: prairie dogs taking the sun. Sunlight glittered on their blank eyes.

He had kept open his channel to Zoe. She did not speak often, often ignored his calls, but he was comforted by the faint sound of her breathing.

The recent rain had softened the ground here, too. He saw a great number of digger tracks leading into and out of the low mound openings. He examined several of the mounds until he found a distinctive double groove in the drying mud, a track that might have been left by the heels of Zoe’s excursion outfit if she had been dragged inside by her wrists.

Somewhere down there—down that slanting ramp into this warren of ancient excavations—somewhere down there was Zoe.

He was equipped with weapons and a powerful helmet lamp. He would gladly have followed.

But there was no way his bulky bioarmor would fit through that narrow hole.

H e called Yambuku and asked for Avrion Theophilus.

Dieter Franklin came on first. He briefed Hayes on the situation at Yambuku: loss of shell integrity, the sterile core threatened, evacuation imminent “if those assholes on the IOS would pay attention to us for a fucking minute.” By the time Hayes and Zoe reached the downstation, it would almost certainly be empty. “But we’ll leave the light on for you. As long as the core is still sterile— and it ought to last a few days more—you can radio the IOS for a pick-up. Understand, Tam?”

“Put a candle in the window for us, Dieter.”

“Count on it.”

“Now hand me to Theophilus.”

Master Avrion Theophilus announced his presence on-line. Hayes said, “I have a question for you, Theo.”

He imagined Theophilus wincing at the name. Zoe called him Theo, but Zoe was privileged, his surrogate daughter. Technically, Hayes ought to address him as “Master Theophilus.” Theo was a good Family man.

“Speak,” Theophilus said.

“Zoe’s been talking now and then. I don’t believe you picked up any of this at Yambuku. She has a limited radio perimeter.” “Correct.”

“She’s lucky to have those immune enhancements, Theo. They’re the only thing keeping her alive.”

“Lucky indeed. Make your point, Mr. Hayes.”

“She’s just curious, Theo … you being sort of a father to her and all. When she went into that orphan crib, did she already have this blood gear?”

There was a pause. The silence, Hayes supposed, of Theo’s conscience. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. That may be what helped her survive.”

“But not her clone sisters.”

“Her clonal sisters had been fitted with other forms of augmentation.”

“So it was an experiment. Put five rats in a cage and give them all smallpox, that sort of thing.”

“Considering your situation, Mr. Hayes, I’ll forgive the judgmental tone. The Tehran facility would not have been my first choice for the girls. Political circumstances forced our hand. However, yes, her confinement there ultimately served a scientific purpose.”

“She thinks you rescued her. You might as well have raped her yourself.”

“What we’re discussing is a Family matter. You should have abandoned this kind of moral high-handedness when you left the Kuipers. Family values aren’t open to question.”

“Give the microphone back to Dieter,” Hayes said. “Theo.”

More of the diggers came out of the shadows now, though they continued to give Hayes a wide berth. He hoped not to anger them.

They might take their revenge on Zoe—if they were capable of such thoughts.

Dieter Franklin came on-line again, belatedly. “You’re just making trouble for yourself, Tam.”

“I have plenty already. Theo still listening?”

“Master Theophilus has left the communication room, if that’s what you mean. But this conversation is a matter of record.”

“Dieter, I have a question. The bioarmor—it’s sort of a miniature downstation, right? I mean, it has a series of perimeters around a sterile core.”

“In a way. Big shell for the heavy processing and to house the servomotors, gel insulation under that; at the bottom a layer of primary containment about as thick as your skin.”

“So how much of it can I take off?”

“Say again, Tam?”

“How much of this armor can I strip and still have any kind of protection?”

The silence this time was longer. Hayes looked again at the mound entrance before him. Dark as a badger hole. Narrow as a sewer pipe.

’’Conservatively, Dieter said, “none. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Answer the question.”

“I’m not an engineer. I’ll get Kwame in here if you like.” “You know this gear as well as Kwame does.” “I take no responsibility—”

“I’m not asking you to. The responsibility is all mine. Answer the question.”

“Well… if you strip off the hard shell, you probably won’t die immediately. You’d need the helmet, though for the air scrubbers. And you’d be standing there in a plastic wrapper about as strong as aluminum foil. Best case, it might hold off the native microorganisms for a couple of hours before you go hot. If you scrape your elbow, of course, all bets are off. Tam, this is a fundamentally stupid idea.”

“I need to go in after her.”

“Both of you will die.”

“As may be,” Hayes said. He hands were already on the latches of his boots.

Dieter Franklin caught up to Avrion Theophilus in the hallway outside the comms room. “Master Theophilus, I want to apologize on behalf of Tam Hayes.”

“It’s not your apology to make, Mr. Franklin.”

“Sir, I trust this won’t interfere with our plans. That is, if he does make it back to Yambuku somehow, we will send a shuttle for him … won’t we?”

“Family business,” Theophilus said briskly. “You needn’t worry about it.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Alone in the sooty courtyard of the orphan crib, Zoe listened to the winter stars. She listened with her eyes closed, because she couldn’t see. She listened with her arms at her sides, because her arms were too heavy to move. She breathed through her mouth, because the air was thick and stank of strange animals.

Maybe she wasn’t in the courtyard at all… but here were the stars, voices like a faraway church choir on a cold night, voices like a train whistle bent across a prairie. Voices like snowflakes whispering at a bedroom window. Voices like the yellow light that shines out of the homes of strangers.

It was good not to be alone. Zoe shivered with the fever that had lately overtaken her and tried to focus on the sound of the stars. She knew she was eavesdropping on a vast and impossibly ancient conversation, none of it quite comprehensible but all of it radiant with significance, a foreign language so complex and so lovely that it exuded meaning the way a blossom drips nectar.

There was a closer voice too, but that one was more disturbing, because that voice spoke to her directly, spoke with the voice of her own memories, touched her and marveled at her, just as she marveled at the stars.

“Tam?”

“I’m coming,” he said. He said it more than once. And something else. Something about her excursion gear. Her tool kit.

She found it difficult to pay attention. She would rather listen to the stars.

She said once, mistakenly, “Theo?” Because she was back in the orphan creche again, a dream. “No,” Hayes said. “Not Theo.”

The nearest voice was warm and enclosing, and it came to her disguised as a memory of Dieter Franklin.

Here was the gangly planetologist right in front of her, lit from within, his ribs and elbows obvious even under the rough blue Yambuku service uniform. “This is the answer,” he told Zoe eagerly, “the answer to all those old questions. We’re not alone in the universe, Zoe. But we’re damned near unique. Life is almost as old as the universe itself. Nanocellular life, like the ancient Martian fossils. It spread through the galaxy before Earth was born. It travels on the dust of exploded stars.”

This was not really Dieter talking, but some other agent talking to Zoe through her memory of Dieter. She knew that. It might have been frightening. But she wasn’t afraid. She listened carefully.

“I would explain this to you more fully, little one, but you don’t have the words. Look at it this way. You’re a living, conscious entity. And so are we all. But not in the same way. Life flourishes everywhere in the galaxy, even in the hot and crowded core of it, where the ambient radiation would kill an animal like yourself. Life is supple and adaptable. Consciousness arises … well, almost everywhere. Not your kind of consciousness, though. Not animals, born in ignorance and living for a brief time and dying forever. That’s the peculiarity, not the rule.”

“I can hear the stars talking,” Zoe said.

“Yes. We all can, all the time. They’re mostly planets, not stars. Planets such as Isis. Often very different physically, but all of them filled with life. All of them talking.”

“But not Earth,” Zoe divined.

“No. Not Earth. We don’t know why. The grain of life that found your sun must have been damaged in some way. You grew wild, Zoe. Wild and alone.”

“Like an orphan.”

Dieter—the Dieter-thing—smiled sadly. “Yes. Exactly like an orphan.”

But it wasn’t really Dieter talking. It was Isis.

“Zoe, the beacon.” This was Tam’s voice, his radio voice.

She opened her eyes reflexively but saw nothing. Sweat ran in itchy courses down her forehead and her cheeks. Her mouth was ridiculously dry, as dry as wood, her tongue thick and clumsy.

“Zoe, can you hear me?”

She croaked an acknowledgment. Her stomach hurt. Her feet were numb. She was as cold as she had ever been, colder than on the coldest winter night in Tehran, colder than the core of a Kuiper body spinning through space. Her sweat was cold, and the salt of it burned her eyes. She tasted it on her cracked lips.

“Zoe, I need you to listen to me. Listen to me.”

She nodded uselessly, imagining for a moment that she was blind and he was here with her. But that was only his radio voice.

“Zoe, you should have an RF beacon on your tool belt. The RF beacon, Zoe, remember? On your tool belt. About the size of a personal scroll. Can you activate it?”

The radio beacon. But why? He knew she was here. They could even talk.

“I can’t find you without a little help. Activate the beacon and I can follow it.”

Her signal bouncing off the positioning satellites, talking back to Tam’s helmet. Yes, that would work. Wincing, she reached around her torn excursion suit, exploring the tool belt with her fingers. Her fingers were as awkward as parade balloons, and there was moss slime, or something, all over her torso. She expected the beacon to have been lost in all her useless crawling, but no, here it was, a small box, slippery when it came out of its holster.

“I have it,” she managed. Crude, her human voice.

“Can you activate it for me?”

She fumbled with the device until she found the indentation on the side. She touched it repeatedly until the beacon came to life.

It chirped—one small sound to let her know it was working. And a light came on, a tiny red indicator on the face of the unit.

Small as it was, it was nevertheless a light. Zoe held it up to her face, basking in the sensation of vision. Faint, precious spark! It illuminated, if poorly, anything within a centimeter or so of the beacon. Beacon indeed.

She put her hand next to the light.

She didn’t like what she saw.

“Got it,” Tam said. “Loud and clear. Hang on, Zoe. Not long now.”

The stars—or at least their planets—were alive and had been talking to themselves (singing to themselves, Zoe understood) for billions of years.

Isis, disguised as her memory of Dieter Franklin, sang her a soothing song. A nursery song. Something her nannies had once sung to her, a silly rhyme about the seashore. If you put a shell to your ear you can hear the sea.

Consciousness, Isis told her, is born in the small things of the universe, though no small thing is itself conscious. The trick life learned, Isis explained, was to sustain a ghostly contact when one cell divided into two, a quantum equivalency of electron pairs suspended in microtubules, “like the particle-pair link that connects you to Earth.”

Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose. We see the stars, after all, Zoe thought. We just can’t hear them.

Animal consciousness, Isis said, is a rare event in the universe. Cherished for its rarity. The galactic bios welcomed home its orphans. Isis was sad that so many had died needlessly—brief nickers here of Macabie Feya, Elam Mather—but that was unpreventable, an autonomic reflex of the Isian bios; an action as involuntary as the beating of Zoe’s heart, and just as difficult to moderate. But Isis was doing her best.

“I’m not dead,” Zoe noted.

“You’re different, little one.”

Different enough to survive?

One of my girls survived.

Isis was silent on the subject.

TWENTY-SIX

Too late, Kenyon Degrandpre thought. He marched, head high, down the ring corridor of the crippled IOS. Too late.

Look at me, he thought. Look at me in my uniform, crisp and neat. The ring corridor was virtually empty—large numbers of the crew had elected to die discreetly, in their cabins—but the few he passed still regarded him with a frightened deference. His hand was on his quirt, just in case. But the enlightened manager seldom stoops to corporal punishment.

He walked stiffly, formally, toward the last of the docking bays, where the escape vehicle waited to take him away from the IOS, to the Higgs vessel. He was conscious of his footsteps, rhythmic and proportioned. He did not veer to the left or to the right. He walked in the middle of the ring corridor, its corrugated walls equidistant from his braced shoulders. He slouched only at the low bulkhead doors.

He passed through a section of crew quarters. Each crewman had private quarters, cloistered steel cubicles hardly larger than university carrels and equipped with folding beds. Some of these doors were open, and in some of the rooms Degrandpre passed he saw men and women inert on their cots, blood crusting on their noses and lips. Occasionally he heard a moan, a scream. Most of the doors were closed. Most of the crew had chosen to perish in privacy.

“Slow,” Corbus Nefford had called this disease. Slow in its incubation perhaps, by the yardstick of Isian microorganisms. But not in its final effect. From first symptoms to death, three or four hours might elapse. Not more.

The survivors he passed wore a blank, shocked look. They had not died, but expected to; or believed against all reason in some imminent rescue, a miraculous reversal of fate.

But Degrandpre believed in that, too. He found himself finally unable to contemplate the possibility of his own death. Not when he had gone to such obscene lengths to prevent it: the multiple quarantines, the killing of the Marburg evacuees, the breaking of the particle-pair link to Earth. No: In the end he must survive, else all was meaningless.

To that end he modulated his steps and crossed the thick steel threshold of the emergency dock with an apparent calm. Only the sweat rolling down his cheeks betrayed him. The sweat bothered him, as his physical weakness bothered him. If he wasn’t ill, was he mad? Was illness madness?

He arrived shortly after the appointed time and was disappointed to find only three of his senior managers waiting in the prep room, a small chamber linked directly to the escape vessel. Leander, Solen, and Nakamura. The others, Leander explained, were ill.

But we have escaped it, Degrandpre told them. The virus hasn’t entered our bodies; or if it has, it has been weakened to such a degree that our bodies can defend themselves.

After all, he thought. Here I am.

He used his senior manager’s key to unlock and activate the escape vehicle. The process was not dramatic. A heavy door slid open. Beyond it was the cramped interior of the escape craft, acceleration couches arrayed in a circle, no flight controls; this was a kind of enormous tractible, capable of one intelligent act, docking with the Higgs sphere.

Leander said, “I feel like a coward.”

“There’s no cowardice in this. There’s nothing more for us to do.”

Nakamura hesitated at the threshold. “Manager,” she quavered, “I’m not well.”

“None of us are well. Get in or stay out.”

The escape vehicle lurched away from the IOS and followed a looping route to the Higgs launcher, waiting at the L-5 between Isis and her small moon.

The Higgs vehicle was embedded in an icy planetisimal, deposited here by a tractible tug some seven years ago. Remains of the tractible thrusters still dotted the object, blackened nozzles like rusty sculptures set in a dark stone garden. The wholly automated launch complex noted the proximity of the escape vehicle and negotiated docking protocols with it.

The smaller vessel docked successfully. Inside the planetisimal, lights flickered on in anticipation of human presence. Temperatures in its narrow corridors bumped up to twenty-one degrees centigrade. Medical tractibles lined up at the docking hatches in case of need.

The launch complex queried the escape module repeatedly, but received no intelligible answer.

After a time, as if disappointed by the nonappearance of an expected guest, the launch complex darkened itself once more. Habitat chambers cooled to ambient. Liquid water was returned to ice vessels for storage.

Supercooled processors clocked time with infinite patience. Isis prowled on in the orbit of its sun, and no human voices spoke.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Tam Hayes’ helmet light was good for at least a day and a half. More than likely, the lamp would outlast him, would continue to burn while his corpse cooled—or, perhaps, heated, nursing a furious brood of Isian microorganisms. So far, however, he was intact.

He forced his way through the narrow digger tunnels. The sheer fragility of his stripped-down excursion armor and the size of his helmet obliged him to move slowly. He had been most afraid of an attack from the diggers—he was horribly vulnerable—but the animals had kept their distance outside and were nowhere visible inside the mound complex. There was, however, much evidence of their recent presence. He passed loculi and cul-de-sacs filled with food, carefully categorized—here a cache of seeds; there a mound of fruit fermenting in the heat. Down other tributary tunnels he saw motion just beyond the range of his lamp, a squirming that might have been sex, or birth, or child-rearing, or a barn dance.

He followed his beacon and kept his com. link up, listening as Zoe’s occasional monologues veered toward incoherency.

The Yambuku shuttle must have left for the obstinately silent IOS by now. Tam Hayes and Zoe Fisher were the last people on the continent. Outside the mound tunnels, over the long western steppes and the temperate forest and the spires of the Copper Mountain range, night was falling.

Despite her fever, despite her frequent lapses into unconsciousness, Zoe heard the voice of Isis more clearly now.

Heard it, or at least understood it. She knew (and she tried to tell Hayes, in her lucid moments) how the consciousness of Isis rode on the planet’s bios; how every living cell, from the most ancient thermophyllic bacteria to the specialized cells in the black eye of a digger, hosted the entity Isis. Cells lived and died, evolved, formed communities, became fish and birds and animals; none of these things knew Isis or was controlled by Isis. Isis rode on their mechanism the way the contents of a book ride on the ink-stained leaves of paper.

“It’s only,” she whispered to Tam Hayes—to someone— Theo, perhaps—“it’s only when animal consciousness reaches a certain complexity that Isis can interact with it. The diggers. They’re not really very smart. They’re ninety-percent animal. But they have a little bit of Isis in them. They can hear her, a little.”

And:

“It’s why none of the SETI projects ever found anything. The galaxy is full of life, and it is talking—oh God, Tam, if you could hear the voices! Old, old voices, older than Earth! But we couldn’t listen. There’s an Isis, but there’s no Earth. Whatever spores of life fertilized Earth back when Earth was hot and new, they were broken—the link was broken, the quantum coherency life learned to carry between the stars was broken, lost. Earth grew wild and alone. When primates learned the trick of consciousness, of neurons talking to neurons the way planets talk to planets, making consciousness out of quantum events—when that happened, there was nothing to get in the way of our evolution, no Earth, only Earthlings.”

And hadn’t she felt it? Hadn’t she felt something of the kind when she carried the filthy laundry under the winter stars? This was wrong, all the torture and silences and hostility and the slaughterhouse of human history, this was wrong; but what was right? What was so dear and so utterly lost that she ached at the absence of it?

“Why do people worship gods, Tam?”

Because we’re descended from them, Zoe thought. We’re their mute and crippled offspring, in all our millions.

She coughed and felt the wetness of blood on her hand.

Somewhere in these catacombs of mud and dung, Tam Hayes was scrabbling toward her.

Hayes, listening to Zoe’s babbling in the earpiece of his helmet, wondered how much of this she had picked up from Dieter Franklin. How much was her own delirium? How much might even be true?

But there was too much of Zoe in it. She needed the idea of Isis, he thought, the idea of a community of worlds, because she had never been truly welcome in any world of her own. The crippled orphan was Zoe, not humanity.

This long tunnel, like a central corridor, coiled deeper into the earth. Hayes imagined a spiral carved into the stony darkness by countless generations of diggers. Veering around obstacles, lurching with idiot persistency toward the bedrock.

Water-rich, almost transparent plants thrived on the moisture at the tunnel’s floor. Hayes wondered at their metabolism: lightless, mineral-driven. The plants gushed sticky fluid under the weight of his gloves.

Zoe’s delusion. The sky talking to her. Well, he understood the feeling. He had looked at the stars often enough, had climbed up through the Red Thorn sun gardens to a port observatory and watched the sky wheeling around him, the sun no more than an especially bright star among all the carousel stars. That had been one of his mother’s convictions, that the bios linked all things, from kangaroos to Martian microfossils. It was a religious belief, part of her Ice Walker upbringing. He had rejected it along with the rest of the Kuiper Belt’s patchwork ideologies—half puritan, half libertine.

But he had believed it when he watched the stars. He knew what it was to feel meaning beyond the limit of his comprehension, the stars a vast city he could never enter, a republic in which he could never claim citizenship.

He felt a cool wetness under the arch of his left leg and knew abstractly that he must have compromised the delicate core of his protective membrane. Just like Zoe. But he didn’t have her immune augmentation. He would have to hurry.

No need for caution now.

Maybe she could use his helmet to find her way out.

She was tempted to give up.

Isis couldn’t save her—not her natural body, which was dying despite all her augmentation, under attack from too many unfamiliar microorganisms. She might have withstood a single infection, or two, or even three; but she was besieged now by organisms beyond number, weakened by hunger and thirst.

But Isis cherished her and would not let her go. Zoe—the pattern of her—could be sustained indefinitely in the dense matrix of the Isian bios. That was how Isis was talking to her, viral entities slipping into her nervous system, making fresh Isian cells out of Terrestrial neurons. Killing her, but remembering her. Imagining her. Dreaming her. Still, she waited for Tam.

When he reached her at last, he was deeply feverish.

He had forgotten, in all his desperate haste, why he was here— found himself aware only of the tunnel and its pressure on his knees and neck, the weight of soil above his head, the strangeness and the terror of it. And when that knowledge weighted too heavily, he would breathe slowly and fight the panic of confinement, the panic that threatened to overwhelm and suffocate him.

And when his hands ceased trembling and his legs regained the power of motion, he pressed on. Following the beacon leading him to Zoe.

Strange how she had come to mean so much to him, this Terrestrial orphan with a failed thymostat. How he had invested in her so many of his hopes and so much of his fear, and how she had led him into this labyrinth under Isis.

He imagined he was climbing, not crawling … that the brightness in the corridor before him was something more than the glare of his helmet lamp.

Zoe’s vision was failing, along with her other functions, but she saw at least faintly Tam’s light burning out of the darkness as he approached.

She blinked her eyes, a sticky sensation.

H e knew when he saw her that what he had suspected was true: was beyond rescue.

The bios had been working hard at her.

She sat with her spine against the curved wall of the cul-de-sac, her excursion membrane as tattered as an old flag. There was dried blood on her belly, the color of sooty brick. Fungus had attacked her exposed skin, growing in swollen circles of blue or stark white.

Even the albino moss had begun to feed on her, rising to the moisture of her in lush, trailing fingers. Her boots were buried in it.

She watched him unlatch and remove his helmet. The beam of the helmet’s lamp—so bright!—flashed wildly about the cul-de-sac. It shone on the ceiling of impacted clay and animal matter, on the gauzy insect web full of mummified husks, on the delicate bulbs of moss. He was offering his helmet to her, with all its rebreathing apparatus and water reserves and gaudy, glorious light.

The generosity of the act was heartbreaking.

But she waved away the gift. Too late, too late.

Hayes understood the gesture. He was saddened, but he set the helmet aside, its light aimed steadily now at the ceiling. With each breath he drew more Isian microorganisms into his lungs, not that it mattered. He summoned his strength and fit his body next to Zoe’s in the cramped space of the alcove. No fear of contact now. Life touches life, as Elam used to say.

Heat radiated from Zoe, the heat of fever and the heat of parasitical infection. But her lips, when he touched them, were cool. Cool as the rim of a bucket of water drawn from a deep and mossy well.

He said, “I do hear them. The stars.” But she was past listening.

The diggers avoided their store of strange-smelling meat until it had decomposed into a more familiar mass of diffuse enzymatic tissues, ripe with life. The smell became rich, then exotic, then irresistible.

Coiling into the meat chamber, one by one and one after another, they feasted for days.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Isis Orbital Station wheeled through its circuit of the planet, crippled but functional. Spaceborne tractibles fetched water and oxygen from Turing extractors on the moon’s icy poles, replacing the small but inevitable losses of recycling. Lately many human bodies had been discovered by the housekeeping tractibles, and these too had been recycled for their nutrients. Flush with fresh sources of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and trace elements, the gardens thrived. Sun panels cast their glow on dense hedgerows of kale and lettuce, a bounty of tomatoes and cucumbers.

Avrion Theophilus had taken refuge in the gardens while the others died—Dieter Franklin, Lee Reisman, Kwame Sen, and everyone who had shuttled up from Yambuku, victims of the slow virus that had infiltrated the station.

The virus continued to tunnel through bulkhead seals in search of nourishment, but after a time, it found none; after a time, all its spores lay dormant.

Below, on the planet’s surface, Marburg and Yambuku were deserted, and Theophilus had ignored the increasingly desperate pleas from the arctic outpost as its perimeters, too, were breached.

All dead now; and, to his horror, he had found the escape craft missing, the particle-pair link to Earth permanently broken.

And yet he lived.

He had insisted on traveling to Isis with the same immune-system modifications his Trust had given Zoe Fisher. The wetware protected him quite effectively from, at least, the single organism that had infiltrated the IOS.

He was alive, and likely to continue living. But he was alone.

He moved through the filtered light of the gardens, patrolling restlessly among the silent tractibles and succulent green leaves. He talked to himself, because there was no one else to talk to. He wondered aloud and repeatedly whether anyone would come, whether he would be rescued, or whether he would be left here; whether he would go mad after a month or a year of isolation, or whether his thymostat would keep him obstinately sane.

There would be time enough to know all the answers. Time and more time.

His shadow followed him through the corridors of the IOS like a lost dog.

He waited, but no one came.