Robert Wilson - Bios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She put her hand on his arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hayes gave her a wary look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Away from her work.

Away from Tam Hayes.

Away from her life.

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