Robert Wilson - Bios

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.

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.”