Robert Wilson - Bios

“You have to understand this,” Mavrovik said. He rasped the words through a lace of bloody sputum. Like a dead man talking, Nefford thought. Well, close enough. “There are thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. Talking to each other. Talking to me!

Nefford felt trapped by the sheer earnestness of this declamation. He was aware of the patient’s plummeting vascular pressure, capillaries weakened by the disease bleeding out in a massive, whole-body collapse. Mavrovik’s face was banded with blue and black, as if he had been beaten with a stick. The whites of his eyes were shot through with scarlet. Mavrovik’s brain must be bleeding too, Nefford thought; this monologue could hardly be sane. But he heard himself ask, “Thousands of what, Mr. Mavrovik?”

“Worlds,” Mavrovik said, gently now, as if to himself.

Corbus Nefford did not, of course, believe in ghosts. He was a technician of the Families—in his own way, a scientist. Only low people and peasants were frightened of ghosts or spirits. Nefford was frightened only of the Trusts. He had seen the damage they could inflict.

Nevertheless he found himself regarding the dying man with something approaching superstitious dread.

Mavrovik laughed—a terrible sound; it brought up bubbles of pink fluid. Robotic aspirators sucked his mouth and throat clean. His arms flexed against his restraints, as if he wanted to reach up, to grasp Nefford—Nefford’s remensor—and draw him closer.

Horrible thought.

“We’re their orphans!” Mavrovik explained. His last words.

Raman died too, more quietly, at about the same time. With the deaths the quarantine room grew calmer, though frantic activity continued—the drawing of blood and tissue samples, the containment of the bodies, periodic cloudbursts of liquid sterilants and gases.

When Mavrovik’s corpse was finally bagged and taken away, Nefford allowed himself to draw a long breath. He wheeled his remensor back into its dock and removed himself from the hood.

He had been with the remensor so long that his own body felt clumsy and unfamiliar. He had been sweating freely; his clothing was soaked; he recoiled at his own stink. He wanted a long drink of water and a hot bath. Probably he should have been hungry— he had missed breakfast—but the thought of food was repellent.

He found Kinsolving waiting for him near the bulkhead door. Nefford asked, “Did you talk to Degrandpre?”

“I paged his scroll…”

“Paged his scroll?” An event like this called for a personal conference. Nefford would have done it himself if he hadn’t been busy with Mavrovik.

“Manager Degrandpre was already aware of the emergency. I asked to meet with him. But he had already issued an order expanding the perimeter of the quarantine.” Kinsolving delivered this information meekly, as if he expected to be beaten for it.

“Expanding the perimeter? I don’t understand.”

“Quarantine extends all the way to the bulkhead doors. The entire module is sealed tight.” Kinsolving bowed his head. “No one is allowed to leave until further notice. And that includes us.”

The dreams were very bad-Rain came down on the polyplex shelter in drumming bursts. Wind gusts confused the support tractibles, which woke Zoe periodically with false alarms, misinterpreting the whipping wind as the movement of some ghostly predator. Zoe fell in and out of shallow sleep.

She was, of course, still alone. She was as alone as the first lungfish to drag itself out of the shallows. And that should have been all right. The men and women who first sailed to the reefs of the solar system, squandering their lives inside lightless ice caverns— they had been alone too.

But isolation meant many things.

Zoe had known people who longed for isolation and people who dreaded it. On Earth a person was never truly alone, and it was easy to project a whole spectrum of fears and hopes into that unobtainable void, a vacuum full of self. It meant freedom, or shamelessness, or absolution, or the simple loss of all direction.

Fantasies.

Alone, Zoe thought, is listening to this rain batter the small membrane between herself and toxic nature. Alone meant memories swollen into nightmares.

In her dreams she was in Tehran.

According to the Trust doctors, these memories had been safely buried. But whatever was wrong with her seemed to have let slip the leash. Whenever she closed her eyes the awful images came roaring back.

The orphan creche was a cinderblock dungeon spread across acres of oily gravel and ringed with lethal glass-wire fences. It was, like most of the charity creches scattered across Asia and Europe, a leftover from the plague century. It might once have been a humanitarian project, one of the great Social Works of the first Trusts, but it had become little more than a collector for the state brothels. Lately its resident managers had realized that they could expand their personal profit margin by renting their charges on the public market, or at least that segment of the market too impoverished or ill to patronize the licensed pleasuredromes.

The drawback was that the inmates at the Tehran West Quad Educational Collective—as the sign above the gate proclaimed it— weren’t offered the kind of medical supervision required even in a bargain-basement, licensed brothel. Nor were its customers, mainly manual laborers from the local Trust factories ringing the city, carefully screened.

Zoe had arrived with her pod of genetically identical sisters, Francesca and Poe and A vita and Lin, shipped from their birth creche by orbital cargo transport, hungry and bewildered. At first the Farsi-speaking nurse had fed them protein soups and dressed them in warm if graceless smocks and patiently endured their demands for home. But after a day or two of this, they were transferred to the dormitories.

And the horror began.

Memory swept through Zoe’s dreams like a winter gale.

Everyone was used, and everyone died.

Francesca died first, of a fever that wracked her body for five long February days, until she turned her emaciated body to the cinderblock wall and simply ceased to breathe.

This is wrong, Zoe remembered herself thinking. We were made to go to the stars. This is wrong.

Poe and Lin died together when a fierce hemorrhagic contagion—the nurses called it Brazzaville 3, which it may have been— swept the dormitories. Zoe, in her despair, had not felt much grief at the passing of three of her sisters. She was selfishly grateful that the brothel trade had diminished out of fear of the plague. Unfortunately the food supply had diminished too, and that wasn’t good. There had been talk of quarantine; the whole West Quarter of the city was practically deserted for the next six months.

But the disease passed in time. Zoe and Avita were among the souls not harvested.

Zoe grew closer to her only remaining pod sister, and it affected her more powerfully when Avita died, almost randomly, of some disease born of malnutrition and neglect. She is my mirror, Zoe thought, gazing at Avita’s corpse during the long hours before the hygiene crew came to collect it. When I die, Zoe thought—and she had supposed it would be a matter of months, at most—when I die, this is how I will look. Like a soft clay statue, pale and shiny and indifferent.

She missed Avita and Francesca and Lin and Poe. The other inmates were often cruel to her, and her white-masked minders casually despised her, and she thought death might not be so terrible, really, certainly no worse than living on and on inside these walls.

Then Theo came to Tehran.

Something had happened, something political, something in the High Families. She remembered Avrion Theophilus from the creche. He had stopped by once a month to survey the pods, and he had been partial to the five small sisters, often stroking Zoe’s hair while the nannies ducked their heads at him and dull-witted tractibles brought him tea and sugar cakes, which he shared. He had always looked so resplendent in his black uniform, and he looked resplendent now, in Tehran, but darker, angrier, shouting at the orphan keepers, who cringed away from him. He cursed the obscenties of the dormitory, the frigid showers, the assignation rooms with their coarse and filthy blankets.