Robert Wilson - Bios

She had thrown away her filter mask but retained the excursion suit’s headgear, and she was thankful for that when Tam Hayes spoke to her. Even if he was a hallucination, a fever dream, as she suspected he must be. It didn’t matter. She drank the sound of him like cool water.

For a time she was in Tehran, carrying laundry under the stars.

She had been given the job as punishment for some transgression she couldn’t remember, gathering the fetid, too-often-recycled smocks from the youngest inmates and carrying them in a plastic crate across the empty courtyard to the laundry shed—this in winter, and often late at night.

Her secret revenge was that she did not very much dislike the punishment. Distasteful as it was, because the younger children often soiled themselves or were ill, she relished the few free minutes under an open sky. Even in the cold, even in the dark. Perhaps especially then. The cold night air seemed somehow cleaner than the day’s, as if it had been carried by benevolent winds from a distant glacier. And the coldest nights were often the clearest. The stars shone above the pallid lights of the camp with all the purity of their fixed, indifferent light. Light born in fire and older than the seas. She was in this place by mistake; she had been made for the stars, and she yearned to join them in their cycles, as aloof as ancient kings.

Some nights she put down her fetid burden and stole a moment all her own, shivering and gazing at the sky.

She was there now. In the camp. Or among the stars. One or the other. She was hungry and confused.

But what if, Zoe thought reluctantly, what if she traveled to the stars and found nothing there but more mud and dismal heat and deadly cold and sickness and strangers who didn’t care whether she lived or died? What if she traveled all the way to the stars only to be buried in a hole in some alien ground?

What if, what if, what if?

Some nights she imagined that the stars could talk. She imagined that if she listened hard enough she would hear their voices, speaking a language as crisp and hard and colorful as gemstones.

She waited patiently to hear that timeless language and finally to understand it.

“Zoe!”

The voice again. Tam Hayes. Not the voice of the stars. But he was from the stars, wasn’t he? Or at least from the Kuiper Belt, where people spoke more freely than they did on Earth.

“Zoe, can you hear me?”

The functioning part of her headgear kept the line open, waiting for a response. She licked her lips. Her lips were dry. She had finished the last of the suit’s distilled water. Lately, in fact, she had taken to licking sour condensation from the damp ceiling of the tunnel.

“Tam,” she croaked.

“Zoe, I’m half a kilometer from the digger mounds. I want to try to triangulate your position. Are you currently in a safe place?”

Well, no, she was not in a safe place, but she took his intended meaning. “I don’t have to move. Not right away.” “Good. I’m coming for you.”

“I don’t think you can find me.” She shook her head. “It’s dark here.”

“I understand that, Zoe. I’m coming.” “Dark and close.”

The com connection crackled with static. Hayes asked, “What’s your physical condition?”

That was a difficult question to answer. She could not, of course, see herself. She had to rely on sensation, on touch. But first things first. “I’m contaminated. The excursion membrane is damaged. I’m breathing unfiltered air.”

There was no immediate answer. She imagined the dismay on his face, his mouth sagging at the corners. Would he cry for her? She might have cried herself if she hadn’t been so dry.

“But I’m alive,” she added.

“You’re better protected than you think. Avrion Theophilus says you have a heavily augmented immune system—little wetpack nano colonies monitoring your blood. It’s an untested system, but it seems to be working.”

Zoe thought about that. A D P immune system. That would explain why she hadn’t died with her first unfiltered breath of this awful, stagnant air.

But Theo would have told her, wouldn’t he?

Theo wouldn’t have kept a secret like that. It was Theo, after all, who had rescued her from the orphan crib, when all her clonal sisters had slowly sickened and died.

She must have said at least some of this aloud, because Hayes responded. “Zoe, were you ever sick during that time in Tehran?”

She considered the question. Weak, yes; malnourished, certainly; numbed and frightened, always. But the fevers had left her alone, even the Brazzaville 3 that had sickened so many inmates that Zoe had been drafted into carrying bedpans, and eventually, bodies.

Theo had saved her.

Theo. Theo. Or maybe Theo had saved her before she even left the creche. Maybe Theo had given her something to protect her.

But then why had her sisters died, each in her own way? They were a clonal pod, after all. Identical, at least genetically. Unless they were different inside. Different augmentation. Different immune packages. That was how they did it with clonal animals: perform various modifications on genetically identical mice…

Then place them in a hostile environment.

See who survives.

One of my girls survived.

Bad thought, Zoe scolded herself. Bad, bad thought. She called out for Tam, but the link was broken again.

Time passed. She couldn’t guess how much.

She was increasingly aware of the diggers, a great number of them by the sound, moving closer to her. She disliked the sound and the smell and the implicit threat. The noise drove her down the tunnel, where she fled by touch and by ear, scuttling in the dark until the digger-sounds were lost behind her, and resting only then, only then.

She knew they could have caught her if they wanted her. They were astonishingly fast and flexible in these tunnels of theirs. She presumed they did not want her, that they were ignoring her, that she was fleeing their ordinary and customary congregations.

But all the tunnels she followed seemed to bend gradually but steadily downward, until it came to her, a very bad thought indeed, that she was being gently herded deeper and deeper still into these vaults, farther and farther from the light.

“Sir.”

Amrit Seeger, the junior communications chief, actually trembled in Degrandpre’s presence. Degrandpre had become so vigilant of infection that he had first mistaken the man’s shaking and sweating for fever. But it was only his dread of authority. Of Degrandpre’s magisterial power, such as it was. “Sir, I can’t do that.”

Degrandpre had come to the communications chamber personally. It was not a place he had often visited. Something about it appalled him, seemed antiquated and too large, all these winking glass appurtenances set into the wall like the monitor lamps of a seagoing battleship. The equipment in this room was perhaps the greatest technological achievement of the Devices and Personnel grandees, even greater in its way than the Higgs launches, maintaining a coherent and stable particle-pair link across hundreds of light years—the Grail of simultaneity in a relativistic universe. A link to Earth. The voice of the Families themselves emanated from this room.

But it was a fragile link, narrow in bandwidth, a bottleneck. Degrandpre had invoked information triage often enough in the past, usually to make his custodial work aboard the IOS appear as efficient as possible. Now he had elected to close down the link entirely. This room was too close to the encroaching perimeter of contagion.

“Sir,” the engineer quavered, “they don’t even know—back home, I mean—they don’t know about the breach of Quarantine. We can’t break the link, certainly not before we generate a distress call.”