Robert Wilson - Bios

“Slow,” Corbus Nefford had called this disease. Slow in its incubation perhaps, by the yardstick of Isian microorganisms. But not in its final effect. From first symptoms to death, three or four hours might elapse. Not more.

The survivors he passed wore a blank, shocked look. They had not died, but expected to; or believed against all reason in some imminent rescue, a miraculous reversal of fate.

But Degrandpre believed in that, too. He found himself finally unable to contemplate the possibility of his own death. Not when he had gone to such obscene lengths to prevent it: the multiple quarantines, the killing of the Marburg evacuees, the breaking of the particle-pair link to Earth. No: In the end he must survive, else all was meaningless.

To that end he modulated his steps and crossed the thick steel threshold of the emergency dock with an apparent calm. Only the sweat rolling down his cheeks betrayed him. The sweat bothered him, as his physical weakness bothered him. If he wasn’t ill, was he mad? Was illness madness?

He arrived shortly after the appointed time and was disappointed to find only three of his senior managers waiting in the prep room, a small chamber linked directly to the escape vessel. Leander, Solen, and Nakamura. The others, Leander explained, were ill.

But we have escaped it, Degrandpre told them. The virus hasn’t entered our bodies; or if it has, it has been weakened to such a degree that our bodies can defend themselves.

After all, he thought. Here I am.

He used his senior manager’s key to unlock and activate the escape vehicle. The process was not dramatic. A heavy door slid open. Beyond it was the cramped interior of the escape craft, acceleration couches arrayed in a circle, no flight controls; this was a kind of enormous tractible, capable of one intelligent act, docking with the Higgs sphere.

Leander said, “I feel like a coward.”

“There’s no cowardice in this. There’s nothing more for us to do.”

Nakamura hesitated at the threshold. “Manager,” she quavered, “I’m not well.”

“None of us are well. Get in or stay out.”

The escape vehicle lurched away from the IOS and followed a looping route to the Higgs launcher, waiting at the L-5 between Isis and her small moon.

The Higgs vehicle was embedded in an icy planetisimal, deposited here by a tractible tug some seven years ago. Remains of the tractible thrusters still dotted the object, blackened nozzles like rusty sculptures set in a dark stone garden. The wholly automated launch complex noted the proximity of the escape vehicle and negotiated docking protocols with it.

The smaller vessel docked successfully. Inside the planetisimal, lights flickered on in anticipation of human presence. Temperatures in its narrow corridors bumped up to twenty-one degrees centigrade. Medical tractibles lined up at the docking hatches in case of need.

The launch complex queried the escape module repeatedly, but received no intelligible answer.

After a time, as if disappointed by the nonappearance of an expected guest, the launch complex darkened itself once more. Habitat chambers cooled to ambient. Liquid water was returned to ice vessels for storage.

Supercooled processors clocked time with infinite patience. Isis prowled on in the orbit of its sun, and no human voices spoke.

Tam Hayes’ helmet light was good for at least a day and a half. More than likely, the lamp would outlast him, would continue to burn while his corpse cooled—or, perhaps, heated, nursing a furious brood of Isian microorganisms. So far, however, he was intact.

He forced his way through the narrow digger tunnels. The sheer fragility of his stripped-down excursion armor and the size of his helmet obliged him to move slowly. He had been most afraid of an attack from the diggers—he was horribly vulnerable—but the animals had kept their distance outside and were nowhere visible inside the mound complex. There was, however, much evidence of their recent presence. He passed loculi and cul-de-sacs filled with food, carefully categorized—here a cache of seeds; there a mound of fruit fermenting in the heat. Down other tributary tunnels he saw motion just beyond the range of his lamp, a squirming that might have been sex, or birth, or child-rearing, or a barn dance.

He followed his beacon and kept his com. link up, listening as Zoe’s occasional monologues veered toward incoherency.

The Yambuku shuttle must have left for the obstinately silent IOS by now. Tam Hayes and Zoe Fisher were the last people on the continent. Outside the mound tunnels, over the long western steppes and the temperate forest and the spires of the Copper Mountain range, night was falling.

Despite her fever, despite her frequent lapses into unconsciousness, Zoe heard the voice of Isis more clearly now.

Heard it, or at least understood it. She knew (and she tried to tell Hayes, in her lucid moments) how the consciousness of Isis rode on the planet’s bios; how every living cell, from the most ancient thermophyllic bacteria to the specialized cells in the black eye of a digger, hosted the entity Isis. Cells lived and died, evolved, formed communities, became fish and birds and animals; none of these things knew Isis or was controlled by Isis. Isis rode on their mechanism the way the contents of a book ride on the ink-stained leaves of paper.

“It’s only,” she whispered to Tam Hayes—to someone— Theo, perhaps—“it’s only when animal consciousness reaches a certain complexity that Isis can interact with it. The diggers. They’re not really very smart. They’re ninety-percent animal. But they have a little bit of Isis in them. They can hear her, a little.”

And:

“It’s why none of the SETI projects ever found anything. The galaxy is full of life, and it is talking—oh God, Tam, if you could hear the voices! Old, old voices, older than Earth! But we couldn’t listen. There’s an Isis, but there’s no Earth. Whatever spores of life fertilized Earth back when Earth was hot and new, they were broken—the link was broken, the quantum coherency life learned to carry between the stars was broken, lost. Earth grew wild and alone. When primates learned the trick of consciousness, of neurons talking to neurons the way planets talk to planets, making consciousness out of quantum events—when that happened, there was nothing to get in the way of our evolution, no Earth, only Earthlings.”

And hadn’t she felt it? Hadn’t she felt something of the kind when she carried the filthy laundry under the winter stars? This was wrong, all the torture and silences and hostility and the slaughterhouse of human history, this was wrong; but what was right? What was so dear and so utterly lost that she ached at the absence of it?

“Why do people worship gods, Tam?”

Because we’re descended from them, Zoe thought. We’re their mute and crippled offspring, in all our millions.

She coughed and felt the wetness of blood on her hand.

Somewhere in these catacombs of mud and dung, Tam Hayes was scrabbling toward her.

Hayes, listening to Zoe’s babbling in the earpiece of his helmet, wondered how much of this she had picked up from Dieter Franklin. How much was her own delirium? How much might even be true?

But there was too much of Zoe in it. She needed the idea of Isis, he thought, the idea of a community of worlds, because she had never been truly welcome in any world of her own. The crippled orphan was Zoe, not humanity.

This long tunnel, like a central corridor, coiled deeper into the earth. Hayes imagined a spiral carved into the stony darkness by countless generations of diggers. Veering around obstacles, lurching with idiot persistency toward the bedrock.