Robert Wilson - Bios

The tragedy of Isis was the tragedy of walls made vain. Not only the physical walls. He thought of Corbus Nefford calling him a “friend.” He thought of the hygienic lies he broadcast to Earth on a daily basis.

All vain. Very little could be salvaged now. Perhaps only his own life. Perhaps not even that.

A summit with the pompous, fat chief engineer, Todd Solen.

“As I see it,” Solen announced, “we have just one recourse. If we can’t put physical barriers between ourselves and the disease agent, whatever it is, we have to shut down Modules Three and Six, secure the bulkheads, and evacuate the atmosphere. Put a sector of hard vacuum between ourselves and the threat. Which ought to do the trick, unless this so-called virus has spread through the IOS already.”

“The Marburg evacuees are in Module Six.”

“Obviously. They’ll die if we depressurize the module. But they’ll die just as surely if we don’t. Disease aside, without access to our Turing bays or main shuttle docks, without spares or a comprehensive engineering sector, with our water circulation compromised and the food supply depending entirely on what we can grow in the sun gardens—all considered, the IOS is an unsustainable environment. We can save as many people as we can fit into a single Higgs launcher. No more.

Degrandpre felt the paralysis of utter failure.

He asked, “Has it come to that?”

The engineer was perspiring freely. He swabbed his forehead with a sleeve. “With all due respect, Manager, yes, it has come to that.”

I will not render this decision, Degrandpre thought, under intimidation. He said, “It’s hot in here.”

Solen blinked his bulging eyes. “Well—we’re recycling water from the cooling fins. There’s not much left for thermostatic control.”

“Find a way to make it cooler in here, Mr. Solen.” “Yes, sir,” Solen said faintly.

Too hot, too dry. The IOS itself was running a fever.

Aaron Weber, the Marburg station manager currently isolated in the Turing bay—along with all fifteen of his staff—also took note of the heat.

The air was dry, enervating, and it made even the large if poorly illuminated steel cavern of the Turing bay seem claustrophobic.

Sleep proved difficult in the heat. The heat dried throat and nose, made clothing a nuisance and blankets intolerable. Several of the Kuiper-born scientists stripped and thought nothing of it, but Weber was more inhibited. He was reminded of his student dormitory in Kim II Sung City during the long winters, blistering forced-air heat losing its moisture to glass windows crusted with ice. Nosebleeds at night, bloodstains on the pillow. The only recourse had been to open a window and risk freezing.

Fully clothed, he nevertheless managed to sleep for an hour or so in the long shadow of a cargo manipulator, woke to the snoring of his quarantined comrades, slept again…

And woke with a faint, cool breeze on his cheek.

Thinking of the dormitory window. Snow sliding under glass. The moving air soothed him.

But the air here ought not to be moving.

The breeze became a wind now, a brisk little indoor wind sweeping along the floor of the Turing bay with surprising vigor, picking up loose items rescued from the shuttle: here a foam cup, there a sheaf of printed paper.

He sat upright, alarmed.

That sound? That muted throbbing? He recognized it from the IOS launches, though it had never been so immediate: it was the sound of the machinery that opened the bay’s huge airlock.

His ears exploded with pain as the atmospheric pressure abruptly dropped. When he opened his mouth the air spilled out of his throat in an involuntary exhalation that seemed never to end. He wanted to cry out, but his lungs collapsed like broken balloons.

Lights blinked out around him. He saw bodies thrashing as they were thrown from the gaping lock. No noise now. Only the stars, pure and unmediated. The fixed and naked eye. First light.

Yesterday’s rainwater dripped from the forest canopy and left the trail mulchy and slick. Tam Hayes moved cautiously in his heavy biological armor. He had grown accustomed to the liquid sound of his footsteps in the decaying biomass, the regular whir of his servomotors. The sounds were peaceful, in a strange way.

Throughout that long day he did not speak to Yambuku, although message alerts scrolled periodically through his heads-up. The silence was oddly soothing. Instead, he performed the slow and steady work of navigating his armor, pacing himself, monitoring his gear. He wanted to reach and preferably cross the Copper River by nightfall. If necessary he would sleep inside his armor, simply freeze the servos and let the gel padding accommodate itself to his weight. But it would be better to keep moving. Dieter had been right, of course, about the bioarmor. He dared not depend on it. It would fail—in some small way or catastrophically; sooner or later.

Much as he tried to pace himself, however, this was hard physical labor. The sweat poured out of him, some of it absorbed by the armor’s recyclers but most of it trapped between his body and the cool gel membrane, irritating his skin. He watched his footing as he walked, avoiding places where the mud seemed threateningly deep. He saw the sky reflected in leaf-strewn puddles, sunlight glistening on scummy water.

And it occurred to him to wonder, from time to time, what he was doing out here.

Searching for Zoe, of course, because he cared about Zoe. She was fragile but brutally persistent—he thought for a moment of a fern emerging from a poisonous windfall of volcanic ash. She had been subjected to cruelties that had killed four of her clone sisters, and she had survived—had followed Isis out of her captivity, just as Hayes had followed Isis away from his family and his clan.

But we were both seduced, Hayes thought.

Would Zoe have come here so willingly if she had known she was nothing more than a vehicle for the field testing of new Trust technologies? God help us, Hayes thought, she might have; but the Trust never offered her the choice. Lies wrapped in lies, everyone a party to some sin or other; knowledge hoarded and tightly held, because knowledge was power. The Terrestrial way.

And I am out here, Hayes thought, out here in this peaceful toxic wilderness, to rescue her … but admit the truth: to rescue himself as well.

The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say. Calm, aloof, an Ice Walker, his father’s potlatch wife. In some other century she might have been a Quaker.

He had wanted the stars but he had caught the Terrestrial disease, the unknowing of awkward truths.

He had lied to Zoe. Perhaps not as egregiously as Avrion Theophilus had lied to her—but he had abetted those lies.

He was out here saving Zoe, but he was also out here salvaging the tattered remains of his innocence. No points for that.

He reached the river at sunset. The sky was clean, deepening toward indigo, and the small moon was quartered at zenith. He wanted to cross the river before dark.

The recent rains had swollen the Copper. Water surged over the surface of the crude bridge the tractibles had built. Hayes stepped onto that fragile scaffolding and felt it sway beneath his weight. If the bridge collapsed, he would be trapped beneath the running water by the unbuoyant mass of his armor.

He switched on his helmet lamp and advanced slowly, watching the water, red-tinted with sunset and shimmering with the oily residue of decomposing plant life, as it washed over his boots. Servomotors labored to steady his balance. A reflection of the moon quivered in the current to his left like the image of a lidded eye. He thought of Zoe’s eyes, eyes shocked by the loss of her thymostat, newborn, wide but wary. Understanding at last the price she had paid for her sanity.