Robert Wilson - Bios

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

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

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

And yet, life touches life.

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

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

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

Life, doing the unexpected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Caustic substances?”

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

“As far as we know.”

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

“Any other problems, prior to the disaster?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Can I look at these organisms?”

“Certainly.”

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

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

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

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