Robert Wilson - Bios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks like our gunk,” Elam said.

“Pardon me?”

“Bacterial slimes on the external seals.”

“Like this?”

“Well, not exactly. Yours are ocean dwellers, ours are airborne. I don’t recognize those granular bodies in the miotic canali. But the way they lock together is awfully familiar. Um, Li, you’re losing the image again.”

Freeman Li said, uncharacteristically, “Fuck!” His shoulders straightened sharply. There was a pause. The image swam into an unrecognizable meshwork of colored pixels, and this time it didn’t resolve.

Then. Li said in a brittle tone, “Leave the chamber, Elam.”

There was a sudden hissing sound she couldn’t identify. Elam felt the first touch of real fear now—a tingle in her jaw, a dull roar in her ears. “Li, what is it?”

He didn’t answer. Under his protective gear, he had begun to tremble.

Instantly, her mouth went dry. “God, Li—”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

She moved without thinking. Her lab reflexes weren’t fresh but they were deeply ingrained. He hadn’t asked her for help; he had issued an order, on the authority of whatever it was he’d seen in the glove box.

She ran for the lab door, but it was already gliding shut, a slab of oiled steel. Ceiling fans roared to life, producing negative pressure and drawing possibly contaminated air up into series of HEP A and nano filters. A siren began to wail through the pod. It sounded, Elam thought madly, like a screaming child. She moved toward the door as the gap narrowed, knowing even as she ran that the margin, of time was impossibly thin; she was already, in effect, sealed inside.

She turned, gasping, as the bulkhead slid into place. The pod was airtight now. The fans stopped, though the siren continued to shriek.

Freeman Li had taken his hands away from the glove box. Something had peeled away patches of his suit and gloves, turned the impermeable membranes into scabs of onionskin. Whole sections of raw flesh were exposed and beginning to blister.

So impossibly fast!

He tore off his goggles. His face was a mask of blood, nostrils gushing freely, his eyes already scarlet with burst capillaries.

He said something incomprehensible—it might have been her name—and collapsed to the floor.

Elam’s heart raced. She didn’t scream, because it seemed to her that the siren was already screaming on her behalf, that all the dread in the world had been summed into that awful noise. The floor of the pod seemed to slip sideways; she sat down hard on her tailbone a scant meter from Freeman Li’s twitching corpse.

She put her fingers to her own nose, drew them back and looked blankly at the bright red spots of blood.

So this is death, she thought. All this red mess. So untidy. She closed her eyes.

The spin of the IOS was fortuitously timed. Kenyon Degrandpre was at his small office viewport and looking in the right direction when the latest Higgs sphere arrived, the effect wasn’t spectacular. He had seen it before. A flash in the starry sky, that was all, brief as summer lightning: a scatter of photons and energetic particles, and then the afterglow, a blue Cherenkov halo. A Higgs launch tortured the vacuum around itself, forcing virtual particles into unequivocal existence. It was not simply a journey but, in its way, an act of creation.

The Higgs sphere with its carefully shielded cargo was of course invisible at this distance, a speck in the greater darkness, still half a million miles away. Rendezvous tugs had already left the IOS to retrieve it, the sphere’s transponder announcing its location and condition. But of course it had arrived exactly where it was expected. Higgs translations were accurate to within a fraction of a kilometer.