Robert Wilson - Bios

Today, a week since the funeral, Zoe had invested eight hours on cargo inventory, which meant lots of physical labor even with the freight tractibles helping. She took a quiet dinner in the refectory and retired to her cabin. More than anything, she wanted a hot shower and an early bed … but she had only just dialed the water temperature when Elam Mather knocked at the door.

Elam was dressed in after-duty clothes—loose buff shorts and blouse—and her smile seemed genuinely friendly. “I’ve got tomorrow’s duty roster. Thought you might want a quick look. Or just to talk. Are you busy?”

Zoe invited her in. Zoe’s cabin was small, a bedroll and a desk and one wall with a screen function. Once a month or so, compressed edits of Terrestrial entertainment were fed down the particle-pair link from Earth. Tonight most of the station hands were screening the new Novosibersk Brevities in the common room. Zoe had linked her screen to an outside camera and the only show she wanted to see was the sleepy crescent of Isis’s moon as it fled across the southern stars.

Elam entered the room as she entered all rooms, brusquely, arms at her sides, tall even by Kuiper standards. “I’m not much for light entertainment,” she said. “Guess you’re not either.”

Zoe wasn’t sure how to react. Elam didn’t flaunt her rank, but she was one of Yambuku’s key people, second only to Tam Hayes himself. Back home, it all would have been clear. Junior managers had deferred to her and she had deferred to her seniors—and everyone deferred to Family. Simple.

Elam dropped the roster sheets on Zoe’s desk. “It’s a desert around here when the entertainment package comes in.”

“They say this one has good dancing.”

“Uh-huh. Sounds like you’re about as enthusiastic as I am. I’m just an old Kuiper fossil, I guess. Where I come from, dancing is something you do, not something you watch.”

Zoe couldn’t think of an answer. She didn’t dance.

Elam glanced at the active wall screen. Zoe had maxed the resolution, creating the illusion that her cabin had lost one wall and was open to the Isian night. Yambuku’s perimeter lights picked out the nearest trees, starkly bright against the velvet-dark forest. “No offense, Zoe, but you’re like a ghost sometimes. You’re here, but all your attention is out there.”

“It’s what I’m trained for.”

Elam frowned and looked away.

Zoe added, “Did I say something wrong?”

“Excuse me? Oh—no, Zoe. Nothing wrong. Like I say, I’m just an old Kuiper fossil.”

“You read my personnel file,” Zoe guessed.

“Some of it. Part of the job.”

“I know how it must sound. Sole survivor of a clonal pod, designed for Isis duty, lost in an orphan crib for three years, mild aversion to human contact. Freakish, and I guess … very Terrestrial. But I’m really—”

She began to say, no different from anyone else. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Even on Earth, she had stood a little apart. And it was part of her qualification for the job.

“—trying hard to fit in here.”

“I know,” Elam said. “And I appreciate it. I want to apologize if we’ve been slow about breaking the ice. Mostly it’s what happened to Mac, nothing to do with your history.”

Zoe noted the qualifier. Mostly. But that was fair. The majority of the scientists at Yambuku were Kuiper-born. The old-time Commonwealth Settlement Ministry had populated the first Kuiper Body settlements with citizens gen-engineered for long isolation and the claustrophobically tight conditions in the water mines. Unfortunately, it had been a faulty sequence-swap. The undetected bug in their altered genome had been unexpected, late-life neurological decay, a congenital nerve-sheath plaque difficult to cure or contain. Of that generation of Kuiper settlers, those who survived the rigors of first settlement had died screaming in inadequate clinical facilities far from Earth. Only a hasty program of sequence-patching had saved their children from the same fate. Most of them.

Kuiper veterans would tell you they feared heavy-handed Terrestrial gene-tinkering aimed at population control, not the process itself. But family history made it a ticklish issue. Zoe was a clonal birth whose life had been designed and tailored for Trust duty. Her Kuiper-born colleagues must find that distasteful.

“What I’m saying, Zoe, is that none of that matters much. Because you’re one of us now. You have to be. We’re sitting at the bottom of a hostile biological ocean, and Yambuku is a bathysphere. One leak and it’s over for all of us. In that kind of environment, we can’t afford anything less than mutual trust.”

Zoe nodded. “I understand. I’m doing my best, Elam. But I’m not… good with people.”

Elam touched her arm, and Zoe forced herself not to flinch. The older woman’s hand was warm, dry, rough.

“What I’m trying to say is, if you need a friend, I’m here.”

“Thank you. And I’m sorry if this sounds rude. I look forward to working with you. But… I don’t want a friend.”

Elam smiled. “That’s okay. I didn’t say ‘want.’ ”

The days passed, each day a step closer to her liberation from the confinement of Yambuku. Outside, a week of rain gave way to vivid sunshine. The station’s device shop processed Zoe’s excursion suit, duplicating its files and testing its capacities, green-lighting its function inventory item by item. Zoe spent the lag time patiently, learning the first names of Yambuku’s sixteen current residents. Of these, she was most comfortable with Elam Mather and Tam Hayes, the device-shop engineers Tia and Kwame and Paul, and the planetologist Dieter Franklin.

“We’re close to a go-ahead on your excursion technology,” Tam Hayes told her. “The technicians are impressed. We were told to expect something novel. This is more than novel.”

Zoe pushed a cargo cart down the long windowless enclosure of the south quarter. The cart’s wheels rattled against the brushed-steel floor. She tried to imagine how this place must have looked when the tractibles and Turing constructors were assembling it. A metal catacomb attended by mechanical spiders, steel and metacarbon panels lofting down from orbit on guided parachutes.

Today was mainly sunny and warm, according to Hayes. Not that she could tell from the timeless monotony of this walkway. “Days like this,” Hayes said, “we often send the dragonfly remensors out.”

Zoe looked up from her work.

Hayes said, “Interested?”

Yes, very much.

“Your file says you can handle this kind of remote. Is that correct?”

Zoe adjusted the headset to fit her skull. “Yes.”

“And you know the terrain?” From simulations.’’

“Okay. We’ll call this a training jaunt. Just keep me in sight at all times and do as I say.”

Yambuku operated its telepresence devices from a console room no larger than Zoe’s cabin. She was aware of Tam Hayes in the chair next to hers. In Yambuku’s ultraclean environment, odors became more intense. She could smell him—a clean smell, soap and laundered cotton and his own unique scent, like spring hay. And, alas, herself: nervous, eager. She activated the headset and the room fell away from her awareness—though not the scent.

Hayes activated the remote, and two dragonfly remensors rose from a bay at the periphery of the shuttle dock into the still noon air.

The remensors’ fragile wings glistened with photoelectric chiton cells, microscopic prisms. Their elongated bodies curled downward for stability as the devices hovered in place.

Zoe, wrapped in the headset and hands on the controls, saw what her rernensor saw: Yambuku from a height, and the wooded rift valley infinitely deep and wide beyond it, an unbroken canopy of green dappled with gentle cloud shadows.