Robert Wilson - Bios

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!