Robert Wilson - Bios

He remembered how she had felt beneath him, crying out with what might have been, God help her, her first shared orgasm. She had trembled like this bridge. Afterward he had felt faintly ashamed, as if he had taken advantage of her, forced the living heart of her out of a complex membrane of defenses.

He trudged up the far bank of the Copper with gluey mud clinging to his boots. The sky was darker now, the forest a black corridor. Fallen logs rotted along the riverbank, and to his right he saw some small animal hesitate in the beam of his helmet lamp, then dash into the undergrowth.

When he had passed some meters into the woods and was enclosed in the space carved out of the darkness by his helmet light, his radio crackled once and fell silent. This would not have been unusual, except that he had asked his armor to screen all messages unless they arrived on Zoe’s standard or emergency frequencies. In his exhaustion, it took him a moment to understand that this was what he had been waiting for.

Her signal must be weak. Obstructed by some obstacle perhaps, or they would have heard her back at Yambuku. He stood still in the midst of the forest, his boots sinking a little into the muddy path—he might lose her if he moved—and thumbed his own com controls. “Zoe? Zoe, it’s Tam Hayes. Can you hear me?” No answer.

He waited sixty seconds—an eternity, the cat’s-eye moon sliding through the branches of the trees—and tried again.

This time her carrier frequency crackled alive and he heard her voice, eerily close, but confused, as if he had wakened her from a deep sleep. “ Theo?”

“No, Zoe, it’s Tam. I’m coming for you, but I need to know where you are and how you’re doing.”

“Inside …” she murmured.

“Say again?”

“I’m inside a mound. Underneath. Under the ground.” “Inside which mound, Zoe?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re all connected. It’s dark here.”

He didn’t like the way she sounded—weak, uncertain, almost delirious. But it was her voice. She was alive. “Zoe, how are you? Are you hurt?”

“How am I?” She was silent for a long moment. “Hot. It’s hot here. I can’t see.”

“Have they hurt you?”

“The diggers aren’t here. Not always, I mean.”

“Zoe, hang on. I’m coining to get you. Keep talking.”

But he lost contact with her as he started toward the next ridge.

As he walked through the night he caught fragments of Zoe’s carrier frequency, never long enough to rouse her attention.

For all its exquisitely tuned servomotors and ergonomic flourishes, the bioarmor had grown terribly heavy around him. He was aware of the enormous effort he expended carrying himself upslope as he approached the foothills of the Coppers, where the soil grew stony and he could turn, if he wished, and see the western plains unfolding under moonlight toward the distant sea. Without a defensive perimeter of tractibles and remensors he feared an attack from some large predator, but no such animal approached him; he was a formidable creature himself, he supposed, and his armor didn’t smell like food.

He contacted Yambuku once, to tell them that Zoe was alive and he had spoken to her. Dieter Franklin was manning the comm console. “Tam,” he said, “that’s good news, but we have problems.”

Hayes debated cutting the connection. There was only one problem he could deal with now, and that was the problem of Zoe. But Dieter was a friend, and Hayes let him talk.

“Your telemetry, for one. We have motors running hot in your left leg assembly. It’s not critical yet, you can scroll the diagnostics if you haven’t already, but it’s not a good sign. What you need to do, Tam, is to turn around and hope you get close enough to Yambuku that we can send one of the reserve tractibles to carry you back, if need be. We can try to do something about Zoe from orbit. The IOS has a few landable remensors it can launch.”

Hayes digested this information slowly. An overheating servo in his left leg … that would explain the extra weight he seemed to carry when he moved that foot, his tendency to list to port when his attention lapsed. But that wasn’t bad, considering Dieter’s first prediction that he would never reach the river. As for rescuing Zoe—

He said, “From orbit?”

“Because we’re evacuating Yambuku. The seals are lapsing faster than we can replace them, and our stores are running low. On top of that, Theophilus says the IOS is getting cagey with him; maybe something’s gone bad up there, too. We’re looking at a last shuttle lift in forty-eight hours.”

“Not enough time.”

“That’s the point. I’m trying to make your case with Theophilus. But he’s giving the orders, and he’s just about angry enough to write you off.”

“He wants Zoe back.” Her corpse, at least, Hayes did not add.

“Not as much as he wants to get off Isis. He’s Family and he’s very much in charge, but I think underneath all that he’s starting to get seriously frightened.”

“Thank you for the information, Dieter. Keep the core sterile. I’ll be back.”

He cut the connection before Dieter could respond. Forty-eight hours.

If he started back now, he might make it.

“Tam? Tam?”

The voice had come. The voice had gone. Unless she had imagined it. It was easy to imagine things, here in the overheated dark.

The digger, coiling its multijointed body in a sinuous circle, had also come and gone. The digger had broken the membrane of her excursion suit, slitting it from sternum to crotch with one razor-sharp claw, but carefully, drawing only a little blood. And then it had left her alone. To die, she had assumed, and she burned her firefly lamps recklessly, examining her body, waiting for the inevitable collapse of heart, lungs, liver, brain—because she was exposed at last to the Isian biosphere, microbes implanted beneath her skin by the animal’s filthy claw. But her blood had dried quickly in the hot, close air. Daubs of it congealed on her fingers. She did not sicken and she did not die.

She did, however, exhaust her supply of firefly lamps, simply because she had dreaded dying in the dark. As the last lamp burned, she had willed herself to die before it blinked out. But she did not die. Only passed out for a time, or slept.

And then was horribly awake again, confined in this lightless hole.

She tore off her air filter, because there was no reason now not to breathe the Isian air directly; at best, it might hasten her inevitable death.

And still, still, she did not die.

The impulse to escape, a kind of smoldering panic, overwhelmed her once more. She resigned herself to the darkness; it was only a matter of using her other senses, Zoe told herself, of making maps in her head. Once again she crawled out of her cul-de-sac into a tunnel. She felt, but could not see, the mossy alien growths pressed against her exposed stomach, her breasts.

She crawled for an inestimable time, made several turns, tried to picture the labyrinth she had navigated as a map on parchment, an ancient mariner’s map, but the map dissolved in the heat and confusion; she couldn’t hold on to it.

She turned a corner and put her hand forward and touched the body of a digger. She froze in place, but the animal was evidently sleeping. Its fat, hollow scales, so useful for insulation, were splayed apart, radiating heat rather than conserving it. Without her air filter, the digger smelled pungent and close. The smell reminded her of a freshly manured farm field.

Zoe backed away. There wasn’t room to turn around in the narrow tunnel. She dreaded what she might encounter with her feet, dreaded discovering that her world had been reduced to a few yards of excavated subsoil, while her body stubbornly and stupidly refused to die.