Robert Wilson - Bios

He swept Zoe up into his arms—cautiously, because she had become fragile. His uniform, pressed against her cheek, smelled of fresh laundry, of soap and steam-pressing.

She thought of him as a kind of king or prince. Of course he was not—he was only peripherally of the Families at all, a cousin’s nephew’s cousin, essentially a high functionary with the Devices and Personnel branch of the Trusts. He was a Theophilus, not a Melloch or a Quantrill or a Mitsubishi. But that didn’t matter. He had come to get her. Too late for Poe or Lin or Avita or Francesca. But not too late for Zoe.

“One of my girls survived,” he murmured, carrying her out into a Human Services mobile chnic. “One of my girls survived.”

When he tried to hand her to the doctors she clung to him so fiercely that she had to be sedated.

Zoe woke abruptly, numb with dread. There had been a sound … but it was only a rattle of thunder bouncing between the peaks of the high Coppers. Locally, the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

Dim light came through the polyplex shelter. Morning.

She felt shaky and tired. She opened the shelter and climbed out into the rain. Water sheeted off the granite outcrops and drenched the blades of the gorse-like plants that grew in the deep glacial scars. Pack-mule tractibles lurched comically about the campsite. Their legs found little purchase in the wet; periodically they folded their limbs and sat down like weary dogs.

Clouds tumbled up the Coppers in gusting billows. The forest steamed.

She selected a ration dispenser from the store aboard a nearby tractible and carried it back under cover. The rain had beaded on her excursion suit. She itched. The membrane kept her clean, even shuttled flakes of dead skin to its surface and shed them as sterile dust; nevertheless, she itched. The itch was intermittent, confined to her ribs and thighs, and was not a real problem—yet. But if it got worse … well, people had been known to claw themselves bloody in order to a cure an itch. Which, under the circumstances, wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

Eating was a chore. The ration tube had to be attached to the excursion suit’s face mask, which opened a sterile passage between mouth and food—agonizingly slowly. She compressed the ration tube by hand. The nutrient paste that oozed onto her tongue was fundamentally unappetizing and as perfectly textureless as mud. And never enough to convince her she had really eaten.

The rations also tended to pass through her body quickly, which presented her with another tedious and unpleasant problem.

By the time she finished with all this, the sky had begun to clear. The wind had grown gusty again, however; it dragged at the polyplex fabric and would no doubt be making life difficult for the robots and remensors.

She thought about calling Yambuku. Her check-in was due.

She thought about Theo, of how he had saved her from the orphan ranch, memories that had tumbled through her dreams like broken glass…

And her inexplicable dread of him.

She linked to Yambuku for her daily update and spoke briefly to Cai Connor, who was manning the excursion desk. No news and stay put: the winds would diminish overnight and then she could reconnoiter the digger colony before heading back.

Which was fine, but it left her with nothing to do except monitor her own telltales, watch the cumulus clouds writhe up the distant peaks, and function-test the pack-mule tractibles.

She didn’t look forward to another night of darkness.

That afternoon, Tam Hayes contacted her by narrow-beam transmission from Yambuku. That was odd. The tight-beam antenna was a last-ditch redundancy, limited to line of sight and narrow in bandwidth. Clunky, voice-only, like an antique telephone line.

“This is off the record,” Hayes began. “Nobody’s eavesdropping, and nothing we say goes into the station’s memory. Zoe, are you in a safe place? I’m in the shuttle bay; I don’t have a remensor view.”

“Sitting in the shelter waiting for the wind to drop.” “Good. We have a lot to talk about.” “You start,” Zoe said.

He began by reading her the contents of Elam Mather’s message.

Zoe had entertained some of these suspicions herself. About the thymostat, anyway. “But it must have been functioning when I left Phoenix. The medical surveillance was extremely tight.”

She thought of Anna Chopra, the Terrestrial physician who had presided over her health during the long pre-launch months. A tall woman, gray-haired, a non-Family functionary from Djakarta, was it? Grim and wordless and quite dedicated.

“Maybe an act of sabotage,” Hayes suggested. “Some Family turf war working itself out.”

Maybe, but Family feuds were seldom so subtle. An accident, more likely.

“The point is,” Hayes went on, “you shouldn’t be out there by yourself with a dead ’stat.”

“If that’s all you wanted to say, you could have said it wideband.”

“Thought you might want to keep this private.”

“Meaning you think I might want to stay this way. Unregulated. Like a Kuiper woman.”

He left a silence in the distance between them. “Yes,” he said at last, “maybe. It’s your call, of course, Zoe.”

My call, she thought. My choice.

But it begged too many questions. The thymostat regulated personality: Am I the same person I was three months ago?

So hard, Zoe thought, to hold yourself in your hand, weigh yourself, render a judgment. She felt better. She felt worse. She said to Hayes, “You must have suspected something …”

“From time to time, but I’m Red Thorn; we don’t wear thymostats and I’ve never been sure what to expect from people who do. Elam’s been to Earth; she had better instincts.”

“There are different kinds of thymostats. Mainly, they regulate mood, but mine did more than that, Tam. It suppressed unpleasant memories. It also displaced sexual impulses and directed that energy into my work.”

“But you’re functioning without it.”

She reminded herself that no one could hear her. No one but Tam. “I feel like I’m on the edge all the time. Sleep is disturbed. I have mood swings. Sometimes this whole excursion seems futile and dangerous. Sometimes … I’m afraid.”

Another long pause. Wind rattled the shelter.

“Zoe, we have medical spares. We can fix you up.”

“No. I don’t want that.”

“You’re certain?”

“I’m not certain of anything. But I don’t want to go back to being … what I was.”

What I was for Theo. What I was for the Trusts.

Hayes said, “I’ll do everything in my power to keep this quiet. The risk is that Avrion Theophilus will look at your medical telemetry and figure it out for himself.”

Better that than facing him, Zoe thought. One look at me and he would know. He would see it in my eyes.

“In any case, you’re in no shape to spend another day in the field. I want you back here where I can look after you.”

“No,” Zoe said. “I’d rather finish this.”

“It’s not just the ’stat. I want you back here in case we’re forced to evacuate.”

“Evacuate Yambuku? Tam, is it that bad?” “Things change quickly.”

He described a series of cascading seal failures and filter-stack problems. Everything crumbling, Zoe thought. Everything falling apart. “Give me a day to think about it.”

“It’s another day’s worth of risk.”

“Nothing we do here is safe. Give me a day, Tam.”

“You don’t have to prove anything.”

“Just a day.”

A fresh torrent of rain battered the shelter. She imagined the tractibles squatting miserably in the open. Did tractibles experience misery? Did their sealed joints ache in the cold?