Robert Wilson - Bios

But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.

The digger was very quick. It drew back the tree branch it was hefting before Zoe could begin to flinch.

No, not like this, she thought. It shouldn’t be like this—

“Zoe?”

Hayes’ voice was distant and irrelevant.

No time to step back, take shelter behind the tractibles. The tractibles had begun to move, but slowly. More systems failing? The digger raised its left upper forearm, the club secure in its gripping hand. She saw the downward swing of it with frozen clarity.

The impact blurred everything. She fell through the windy night.

Although he had prayed he would never have to do it, containing biological contamination aboard the Isis Orbital Station was the first task for which Kenyon Degrandpre had been trained. The crisis and its thousand details occupied all his attention. And that was infinitely better than allowing himself to consider the long-term consequences of the outbreak.

He summoned all five of the station’s senior managers, including Leander of Medical (replacing the quarantined Corbus Nefford) and Sullivan of Foodstuffs and Biota. They were a motley collation of Trust outriders—all of them competent managers, none of them Family except by the most distant and tenuous connection. Degrandpre himself had such a connection; his maternal greatgrandfather had been a Corbille. But the birth was unregistered and hence irrelevant.

His first order of business had been to contain the quarantine pod, and he had done that. Before today the IOS had been a sterile zone, isolated from Isis by the hard vacuum beyond its walls. Now the IOS was itself a breached environment, an apple into which a dangerous worm had gnawed.

The isolation ward had become a Level Five hot zone, contained on its perimeter by fiat Level Four zones—these were the exterior medical chambers, such as the one in which Corbus Nefford was currently trapped—and by Level One, Two, and Three precautionary zones beyond that, i.e., the engineering pod and a maintenance space where Turing assemblers were prepared for launch.

The problem was, there was very little redundancy aboard the IOS. The size and weight restrictions imposed by the mechanics of the Higgs launches narrowed the margin of error to a fine line. Even at peak efficiency, the IOS had always been one or two critical failures away from wholesale shutdown. Without the machine shop, and with access restricted to the Turing launchers—

But no; that was tomorrow’s problem.

Solen of Engineering said, “We’re looking at how to relocate critical functions as far as possible from the hot pod. The farms, thank God, are about as far from quarantine as you can get, a hundred eighty degrees of the circle. We’re setting up a temporary clinic for injuries outside the agriculture perimeter; disease cases, if any, go directly to the quarantine perimeter.”

Degrandpre pictured the IOS in his mind, a necklace of ten gray pearls spinning in a void. No, nine gray pearls and one black: infected, infectious. He would have to move his own quarters closer to the farms.

Certainly the new Turing gens would have to wait; it meant another delay for the D P interferometer project, but that was unavoidable. The grand plan to use Isis as a staging base for further Higgs launches depended on a stable Isian outpost—to be defended at all costs. Without the IOS, Degrandpre thought, the Trusts will lose the stars, at least for the foreseeable future.

His most immediate problem, though, was not contagion, but fear. The fact of the outbreak in Quarantine could hardly be hidden from the fifteen-hundred-plus crew of the orbital station, each of whom was painfully aware of being locked in a metal canister without plausible hope of escape. An emergency Higgs launch, Solen told him blandly, would save ten or twelve people depending on their combined mass.

“Motivate your workers,” Degrandpre said, “but don’t terrify them. Emphasize that these are extraordinary precautions we’re taking, that there has been no contamination outside the quarantine chamber.”

Leander of Medical said, “They know that, Manager, but they also have the example of the ground stations before them. The suspicion is that once contamination occurs, there’s no certain way to contain it.”

“Tell them we’re talking about one organism here, not the whole Isian biosphere.”

“One organism? Is that true?”

“Possibly. Keeping order is more important than telling the truth.”

The meeting moved on briskly, working through Degrandpre’s prepared agenda. So far, so good: the contagion had been contained, food and water supplies were safe, and other essential functions remained in good shape. The IOS was still a safe environment.

What had been stolen from them by the event in Quarantine was their sense of security. We have always been fragile, Degrandpre thought. But never as fragile as now.

Degrandpre ordered his communications manager to stay behind when the others left.

“I want all outbound messages routed through my office for approval, including routine housekeeping. Let’s not alarm the Trusts prematurely.”

The communications manager, a bony Terrestrial woman named Nakamura, shifted her weight uncomfortably. “That’s highly unusual,” she said—letting him know, Degrandpre supposed, that she wouldn’t cover for him if the Trusts eventually brought a complaint.

Young woman, he thought, that is the least of your problems. He noted her objection and dismissed her.

There was nothing here the Families needed to know, at least not right away. Above all else, the Trusts feared the consequences of importing an Isian pathogen to Earth. Alarm them, and the Trusts might well impose an extended quarantine … or even refuse to dock a Higgs module returned from Isis, leaving the survivors to drift until they starved.

Degrandpre didn’t relish the prospect of becoming one more frozen planetisimal, entombed in a sort of artificial Kuiper body, a cometary mausoleum arcing through endless orbits of the sun.

H e spoke to Corbus Nefford through a video link.

The station’s chief physician was clearly frightened. His uniform was ringed with perspiration; his face was pale and doughy, his eyes perpetually too wide. Degrandpre imagined the man’s thymostat pressed to its limits, synthesizing regulatory molecules at a feverish pitch.

“It’s absurd,” Nefford insisted, “at a time like this, that I should be confined here …”

“I don’t doubt it, Corbus. But that’s the way the containment protocols are written.”

“Written by pedantic theorists who obviously don’t understand—”

“Written by the Trusts. Watch your language, Doctor.”

Nefford’s narrow eyebrows and small mouth contracted petulantly, as if, Degrandpre thought, someone had tightened his stitches. The station’s former managing physician seemed on the verge of tears, not a good omen. “You don’t understand. These people died so quickly.”

“They died in Quarantine, yes?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you should be safe enough.”

“All I want is to put some distance between myself and the contamination. Is that so unreasonable? Everyone else is huddling near the gardens, I understand. Why should I be used this way?” “It’s not your decision, Doctor.”