Robert Wilson - Bios

Dieter Franklin was silent for a time.

He said at last, “Even so, Tam. It’s a bad bet.”

“I know it’s a bad bet.”

“Because Yambuku won’t be here much longer. That’s the obvious conclusion no one wants to draw. Look at the Oceanic Station. Look at Marburg. It’s the bios, Tam, working out strategies, learning how to corrupt our seals and our locks. Synthesizing solvents and spreading the knowledge, sharing it somehow. Five years ago, that biohazard armor was good enough to protect you. Today … it’s the next best thing to fucking useless.”

Hayes toggled the atmosphere lock. Overhead, a series of fans began to create positive pressure. An alarm sounded. Dieter Franklin fled the room.

Hayes pulled on his helmet.

Pain. Double vision. Zoe felt herself being dragged, the heels of her boots bumping against impediments. She was suffering from concussion, she thought vaguely, or worse, from some cranial injury from which she wouldn’t recover. She smelled impossible things: burning rubber, ammonia, rotting food; and when she closed her eyes she saw pinwheels and flares. I She was terribly nauseated but dared not vomit. The excursion suit would process the mess, but probably not before she choked to death.

She was awake, or perhaps not: consciousness ebbed; time J passed in gusts, like the wind.

She struggled—briefly—when she realized the diggers were dragging her into one of their mounds, away from starlight and firelight and into the rocky, claustrophobic dark. The mound entrance was narrow. The diggers spindled their sickeningly mobile bodies and entered one at a time; Zoe was dragged by her extended arms, helpless, over the rocky Hp and into a tunnel encrusted with digger excretions. The air was thick with an unfamiliar stench, spicy and foul at once, like cardamom and rotted food. She wondered if she would asphyxiate here. In the dark.

And for the first time in her life, Zoe felt panic.

She had not panicked even in the cold dormitories of the orphan crib; her thymostat had suppressed any violent emotion and left only a hollow, pervasive sadness, the aching knowledge of her captivity and abandonment. What she felt now was worse. There was no advantage to struggle but she felt she must struggle. The need to fight obliterated thought, became a madness rising out of the meat of her. She tried to suppress the scream that rose from her chest but the effort was futile; the scream erupted and continued without reason or volition. She kicked and pulled at the coral-sharp claws that held her wrists and ankles. But these animals were complacently strong. All light vanished. There was only darkness now, and compulsive motion, and the enclosing walls of the tunnel. And the sound of her sobbing.

She woke again—alone, exhausted beyond fear.

Was she blind? No. It was only the darkness of the diggers’ mound. Above ground it might be noon or midnight. Here, it was always dark.

But at least she was alone, at least for now. She moved, stretched tentatively … found a rocky ceiling just above her head, too close to allow her to stand, curving to arm’s-length walls and a floor somehow softer (but damper) than the entrance tunnel had been. The silence beat at her ears. The only audible sounds were the rattle of her breath inside the suit’s filter and the rasp of her movements. If she had a light—

But she did! She did have a light. Several, in fact: the firefly lamps strapped to her tool belt, the tool belt she had been using to mend the tractibles.

Stupid, stupid, languishing in the blackness when she could have been seeing! She fumbled at her belt almost fearfully, and indeed some of the small lamps had torn away during her struggle, but some of them remained, as small as bullets and with an activator built into each base. She extracted one and thumbed its switch.

The light it emitted was faint but welcome. Order was restored; she was in a place with contours and dimensions—a rounded pressed-earth hollow glistening with damp. The floor was carpeted with a pale, almost translucent growth through which small mandibled insects crawled, and on the wall there was the gauzy nest of some spider-like creature, a mass of cotton-floss thread to which the mummified bodies of insects adhered.

The firefly lamp was good for an hour or two. There were seven more remaining on her belt; she counted them with her fingers. She would have to be careful.

But of course she couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. No food. No water. She had some water reserves in her suit, which would recycle her urine, too, but that was an open loop and good for maybe a day or two at most without exterior replenishment. Basically, she needed to get to her base camp, find food and water and maybe a working tractible, then head back to Yambuku.

Resources, Zoe thought. She was perhaps not thinking very clearly; her head ached horribly where the digger had clubbed her, and when she touched her temple she felt a plump bruise under the excursion suit’s membrane. Resources: what did she have that she could use to her advantage? Telemetry, communication … the thought of talking to Tam Hayes was so enticing she almost wept. But when she called up her corns protocol there was no carrier— nothing from Yambuku, wide- or narrow-band, which meant that her gear was damaged, or theirs was, or perhaps the digger mound was blocking radio transmissions.

She wondered then how far below the surface she had been carried. She didn’t know—no one knew—how deep these tunnels ran. There had been a few seismic-imaging experiments conducted by remotely operated tractibles near the digger mounds, enough to suggest that the warrens were extensive and complexly interconnected. The digging might have gone on for centuries, might have reached down kilometers below the topsoil… But no, that was a bad thought. Impermissible. She felt panic rising like a lump in her throat. Daylight might be a kilometer away, but it also might be just an inch above this sealed chamber. She had no way of knowing and she instructed herself not to think about it.

She held her breath for a moment and listened carefully. Was she alone? A tunnel roughly as wide as her shoulders was the only entrance to this cul-de-sac. The firefly lamp would not illuminate that space beyond a meter or so; she saw only that the tunnel was circular and that it rose at a gentle angle, perhaps twenty degrees of slope. Listen. She held herself still and tried to calm the pulsing of blood in her ears. Listen. But the silence was absolute. Surely a digger traversing these tunnels would betray itself by the sound of its passage, claws on soil packed as hard as rock. There was no such sound. Good.

Maybe it was daytime, Zoe thought, and the diggers were outside gathering food. She tried to scroll a clock, but her corneal display seemed to be broken. Another effect of the blow to her head perhaps.

She hesitated for what might have been a moment or an hour, eyeing the crawl space suspiciously, reluctant to exchange this relatively spacious cell for the cramped enclosure of the tunnel. But then the firefly lamp began to sputter and dim, and anything, Zoe thought, anything would be better than more darkness.

She plucked another lamp from her belt and struck it, but it wouldn’t light. It was broken.

Her fingers shook as she worked the next lamp free. This one, when she pressed it, sprang brightly to life. She sighed her relief.

But that left only five more lamps … and none or all of them might have gone bad.

Now, Zoe, she thought. Go now.

She held the firefly lamp in her right hand and lay down on her stomach. The albino moss felt cool beneath her suit membrane. She would have to advance with her arms in front of her, squirming more than crawling, using her boots for traction. And what if she lost herself in this maze? What if all her firefly lamps burned out, one by one? Could she even take another one from her belt in such a narrow space?