Robert Wilson - Bios

So what does this mean?

It means, I suspect, that Zoe is off her thymostat, maybe for the first time in her life. In Kuiper terms, she’s practically a newborn. A whole battery of new and difficult emotions to cope with, and she doesn’t understand any of it. The Zoe Fisher you’re so obviously falling in love with, Tam, is a brand-new Zoe Fisher. Fragile. Probably scared. And trying very hard to do the job she’s been trained for.

I can’t tell you what to do about any of this. I don’t know.

My only useful advice: Keep your eyes open. Watch your back.

I’ll do the same. I’m saving this into my personal memory, because I don’t want it drifting through Yambuku cyberspace. If all goes well, we can talk in person as soon as I’m back.

P.S. Of course she likes you, you idiot! Many of us do. Myself included. Were you too dense to notice, or too polite to let on?

Idle curiosity.

Hayes read the message.

Then he read it again, enclosed in the silence of what had once been Flam’s cabin, as night rolled over the long valleys and the canopied hills.

When the red-light summons from the shuttle’s quarantine module appeared on his scroll, Corbus Nefford was mildly scandalized. There had never been a medical crisis aboard the IOS during his health-management watch, and he fully intended that there never would be.

Admittedly, this didn’t look good—an unexplained summons of the highest priority posted by Ken Kinsolving, day-watch quarantine medic, from the shuttle-bay lockdown. Dire as that sounded, however, it was probably only Kinsolving panicked by some crewman’s gastritis attack or tension headache. The alternative was unthinkable.

But he found a guard stationed at the shuttle module’s bulkhead door, and inside—

Inside, there was chaos.

Two nursing assistants sat plugged into remensor hoods, talking through their microphones in low, urgent tones. Kinsolving, gaunt in his drapery of medical whites, waved Nefford toward an empty control bay. “Rios and Soto are dead,” he said flatly. “Raman is comatose and Mavrovik is intermittently lucid. We need help with palliative care and tissue samples—if you would, Manager.”

Kinsolving was a junior medic and not entitled to speak to Corbus Nefford quite so brusquely, but this was an emergency, after all. Nefford squirmed into the remensor chair. He had put on some weight since the last time he operated one of these rigs.

But one did what one must. What one was trained for, and thank God for his training; it supplanted the instinct to panic. He imagined his thymostat registering the sudden torrents of epinephrine, working to calm him without dulling his heightened alertness. Pathogens, he found himself thinking, Isian pathogens aboard the IOS: it was the nightmare he had hoped never to face…

The remensor hood activated and he was suddenly inside the quarantine room with the victims. His arms had become the arms of a medical tractible and his eyes were its enhanced sensors. He oriented himself quickly. The quarantine chamber was claustrophobically small, never meant to be used as a hospital ward. Tractibles and remensors battled for floor space; Kinsolving’s remensor rolled up next to him.

He identified the shuttle crewmen on their cots. Mavrovik, Soto, Raman, and Rios. Two male, two female. They had been the sole survivors of the oceanic disaster, a pilot and three crewmen who had shuttled up from the outpost shortly before its final collapse.

And they had brought something with them, apparently, although they had been in quarantine with no observable ill effects for, what was it, most of a month now? And didn’t Isian pathogens attack almost instandy? An Isian infectious agent with a long incubation period was unheard of—a threat almost too terrifying to contemplate.

He followed Kinsolving’s medical remensor to the bedside of the shuttle pilot, Mavrovik. Kinsolving had plugged fluids and hemostats into Mavrovik’s exposed arm. Nefford added a pulmonary tap to drain blood and fluid from the pilot’s lungs. Mavrovik had been disrobed and strapped to the cot. Beads of sweat, putrid and faintly yellow, trickled down his shaved skull to his pillow.

What Kinsolving had achieved here was a momentary homeostasis. Nefford plugged his own monitors into the shuttle pilot as the day-shift medic began to transfer control. When a moment of peace presented itself he asked, “How long have they been ill?”

“First obvious symptoms manifested about three hours ago. We had no real warning. Their blood gasses looked peculiar prior to that, but still within normal limits.”

Nefford turned to watch as two tractibles shifted the stiffening bodies of Rios, a woman, and Soto, a man, onto gurneys and wheeled them out of the room. There was a cold-storage facility with an autopsy chamber deep inside the quarantine boundary— staffed, of course, entirely by tractibles and remensors. The morgue was carefully maintained, although it hadn’t been used before today.

When he turned back he found Mavrovik’s eyes open, both pupils grossly dilated. Sweating inside his remensor hood, Nefford scrolled a survey of the patient’s vital signs. The list was appalling. Gross edema, internal bleeding as tissues softened catastrophically, kidneys necrotizing, liver function fading, pulse erratic, blood pressure so uncertain that even the hemostatic robots could barely maintain an acceptable count. Bottom line: Mavrovik was dying. In a hurry.

Kinsolving wheeled back, his tractible arms going limp as he disengaged from the remensor hood. “Do what you can for him,” he said flatly. “I’ll speak to Degrandpre.”

Better you than me, Nefford thought.

He assumed full life-support function as Kinsolving’s medical remensor fell silent.

Mavrovik was briefly stabilized, but that wouldn’t last. The trouble was, Nefford had no effective treatment for this disease— whatever it was—only palliatives, only bags of fresh artificial blood and coagulent nanobacters to seal the worst of the internal lesions. All useless in the long run. Mavrovik was being devoured by an entity Nefford could not even name, and soon enough it would do irreparable damage to Mavrovik’s heart or brain, and that would be that.

As if he had overheard the thought, Mavrovik gasped suddenly and surged against his restraints. Nefford flinched. Fortunately, his remensor ignored hasty autonomic impulses or he might have ripped an intravenous line out of the patient. How I must look to him, Nefford thought: a robotic head, a cow’s skull dipped in chromium, peering at him through ruby lenses. But Mavrovik’s eyes had closed; his lips moved, but he was talking to someone not present.

“Who are you?” the pilot demanded weakly, his throat thick with bloody granulae.

“Be still,” Nefford said. Corbus Nefford’s voice was relayed with ultimate fidelity through the remensor, that much of his bedside manner, at least, intact. He added a tranquilizer to the broth of chemicals in the shuttle pilot’s drip.

But Mavrovik would not be tranquil. “Look at them!” His lips were flecked with blood. “Look at them!”

“Calm down, Mr. Mavrovik. Don’t speak. Conserve your strength.”

“So many of them!”

Nefford sighed and tightened the restraints. This might be, was probably, Mavrovik’s final crisis. He pushed the flow of opiates. “Talking, all talking together.

Corbus Nefford had not been in the presence of a dying man since his medical apprenticeship in Paris. Death was the business of hospices and peasant medics, not of successful Family physicians. He had forgotten how hair-raising the process could be. He peeled back Mavrovik’s left eyelid, expecting to find the pupil fixed and dilated; instead, the pupil contracted promptly at the light. Then Mavrovik’s right eye opened and the pilot looked at Nefford with a sudden, frightening lucidity.