Bios (12 page)

It was a laudably Kuiper-like sentiment, Elam thought.

She followed him down a narrow access shaft to the lowermost of the occupied pods. The bulkheads caught her eye as she passed beneath them: immense steel pressure doors ready to snap shut in an unforgiving fraction of a second. In that awful Terrestrial novel, there had been a passage about a mouse walking into a trap. She had never seen a mouse or a mousetrap, but she imagined she knew how the animal felt.

Precautions in the microbiology lab, never less than stringent under Freeman's watch, had been tuned since the accident to a fine pitch. Until further notice, all Isian biota and isolates were to be treated as proven hot Level Five threats. In the lab's secured anteroom, Elam donned the requisite pressurized suit with shoulderpack air and temperature controls. As did Li, and with his headgear in place he looked peculiar: hollow-eyed, somber. He guided her through the preliminary washdown, past similarly
dressed men and women working at glove boxes of varying complexity, through yet another airlocked antechamber and into a smaller, unoccupied lab.

Elam felt some of the terror she had first felt on entering a Level Five viral-research lab during her training on Earth. Of course, it had been worse then. She had been a naive Kuiper student raised on Crane Clan tales of the horrors of the Terrestrial plague years. The great divide between Earth and the Kuiper colonies had always been a biological chasm, deeper in its way than the simple distances of space. The Kuiper clans enforced a quarantine: no one was permitted to arrive or return from Earth unless he or she was scrubbed of all Terrestrial disease organisms, down to the cellular level. Terrestrial/Kuiper decon was grueling, physically difficult, and as lengthy as the long loop orbit from the inner system. There had never been an outbreak of Terrestrial disease on an inhabited Kuiper body; had there been, the settlement in question would have been instantly quarantined and decontaminated—hygiene protocols that would have been impractical on Earth, with its dense and mostly impoverished population.

Elam had gone to Earth for her post-doc the way a fastidious social worker might consent to enter a leper colony: squeamishly, but with the best of intentions. She was inoculated for every imaginable microphage, prion, bacteria, or virus; nevertheless, she came down with a classic “fever of unknown origin” that persisted through the first month of her orientation before it finally yielded to a series of leukocyte injections. She had never been sick in her life before that day. Being sick, being infected with some invisible parasite, was . . . well, even worse than she had imagined.

After that, her first attempt at sterile work had terrified her. The University of Madrid was a Devices and Personnel stronghold full of offworld students, mainly Martians but including several Kuiper expats like herself. Novices weren't allowed in the same room with live infectious agents. She had already been introduced to anthrax, HIV, Nelson-Cahill 1 and 2, Leung's Dengue, and the vast array of hemorrhagic retroviruses, but strictly by telepresence. Virus-handling of the kind required by Terrestrial fieldwork was
infinitely more dangerous. Here were all the antique horrors of Earth, predators more subtle and tenacious than jungle animals and just as lively, still stalking the malnourished populations of Africa, Asia, Europe. Shepherd's crooks and rainbow-colored protein loops, all brimming with death.

Planetary ecology, she had thought. Ancient and unbelievably hostile. This was Tam's bios made tangible, the involute residue of evolutionary eons.

But at least Earth had accommodated mankind into the equation, for all the deadliness of its plagues. Isis had brokered no such deal.

She watched as Li put his hands into a glove box. No telepresence here, either, barring the devices that translated his hand motions to the manipulators deep in the vault-like specimen barrels. A glove-box microcamera fed images to Li's headgear and to a monitor where Elam could watch his work. The image of a linked group of living cells filled the screen.

“This is the little bastard that's been fouling our externals. Grows in colonies, a slimy blue film. And yes, there was an inert sample from this culture in Pod Six, but I can't believe there's any causal connection. As a matter of fact—”

The image listed like a sinking ship. “Li? You're losing focus.”

“This gear is as old as the station. Degrandpre's been sitting on our maintenance requests for more than a year. Afraid he'll offend the budget people, the timid bastard. Hold on. . . . Better?”

Yes, better. Elam peered at the organism on-screen, fighting an urge to hold her breath. The cell was multinucleated, its spiky protein coat notched like a cog in a clockwork. Mitochondrial bodies, more varied and complex than their Terrestrial counterparts, transited between the fat nuclei and the armored cell walls, sparking quick osmotic exchanges. None of the processes were as well understood as the microbiologists liked to pretend. Different bios, different rules.

“Looks like
our
gunk,” Elam said.

“Pardon me?”

“Bacterial slimes on the external seals.”

“Like this?”

“Well, not exactly. Yours are ocean dwellers, ours are airborne. I don't recognize those granular bodies in the miotic canali. But the way they lock together is awfully familiar. Um, Li, you're losing the image again.”

Freeman Li said, uncharacteristically, “Fuck!” His shoulders straightened sharply. There was a pause. The image swam into an unrecognizable meshwork of colored pixels, and this time it didn't resolve.

Then Li said in a brittle tone, “Leave the chamber, Elam.”

There was a sudden hissing sound she couldn't identify. Elam felt the first touch of real fear now—a tingle in her jaw, a dull roar in her ears. “Li, what is it?”

He didn't answer. Under his protective gear, he had begun to tremble.

Instantly, her mouth went dry. “God, Li—”

“
Get the fuck out of here!
”

She moved without thinking. Her lab reflexes weren't fresh but they were deeply ingrained. He hadn't asked her for help; he had issued an order, on the authority of whatever it was he'd seen in the glove box.

She ran for the lab door, but it was already gliding shut, a slab of oiled steel. Ceiling fans roared to life, producing negative pressure and drawing possibly contaminated air up into series of HEPA and nano filters. A siren began to wail through the pod. It sounded, Elam thought madly, like a screaming child. She moved toward the door as the gap narrowed, knowing even as she ran that the margin of time was impossibly thin; she was already, in effect, sealed inside.

She turned, gasping, as the bulkhead slid into place. The pod was airtight now. The fans stopped, though the siren continued to shriek.

Freeman Li had taken his hands away from the glove box. Something had peeled away patches of his suit and gloves, turned the impermeable membranes into scabs of onionskin. Whole sections of raw flesh were exposed and beginning to blister.

So impossibly fast!

He tore off his goggles. His face was a mask of blood, nostrils gushing freely, his eyes already scarlet with burst capillaries.

He said something incomprehensible—it might have been her name—and collapsed to the floor.

Elam's heart raced. She didn't scream, because it seemed to her that the siren was already screaming on her behalf, that all the dread in the world had been summed into that awful noise. The floor of the pod seemed to slip sideways; she sat down hard on her tailbone a scant meter from Freeman Li's twitching corpse.

She put her fingers to her own nose, drew them back and looked blankly at the bright red spots of blood.

So this is death, she thought. All this red mess. So untidy. She closed her eyes.

T
HE SPIN OF
the IOS was fortuitously timed. Kenyon Degrandpre was at his small office viewport and looking in the right direction when the latest Higgs sphere arrived.

The effect wasn't spectacular. He had seen it before. A flash in the starry sky, that was all, brief as summer lightning: a scatter of photons and energetic particles, and then the afterglow, a blue Cherenkov halo. A Higgs launch tortured the vacuum around itself, forcing virtual particles into unequivocal existence. It was not simply a journey but, in its way, an act of creation.

The Higgs sphere with its carefully shielded cargo was of course invisible at this distance, a speck in the greater darkness, still half a million miles away. Rendezvous tugs had already left the IOS to retrieve it, the sphere's transponder announcing its location and condition. But of course it had arrived exactly where it was expected. Higgs translations were accurate to within a fraction of a kilometer.

The Works Trust had supplied Degrandpre with a cargo manifest;
he held it in his hand. Aboard that invisible spacecraft were a number of unfamiliar and ominous things. Radical new genetic algorithms for the Isian Turing factories. Small robotic probes to be launched into the outer system. And, far from least, the new man, the “observer,” the cipher, the threat: Avrion Theophilus. Degrandpre's rather dated
Book of the Families
described Theophilus as a high-level Devices and Personnel officer, loosely connected to the Psychology Branch as well as a distant relative of the Quantrills and the Atlanta Somersets. Which might mean . . . well, anything.

Degrandpre turned to his scroll and called up Zoe Fisher's file, scanning it again for clues. Apart from the obvious connection with Theophilus—he had been her case manager—there was no hint of his hidden agenda. Or of hers, assuming that this Zoe Fisher really was some kind of D&P dog-in-the-manger. He couldn't imagine what Terrestrial dispute might turn on the fate of one bottle baby, for all her fine new technology and linguistic skills. But history had often enough turned on smaller fulcrums: a bullet, a microbe, a misplaced word.

Restless, he called Ops for an update on the Turing manifests. What came back through his scroll was the sound of confusion, until Rosa Becker, his second-shift supervisor, picked up a voice link. “Sir, we're having problems with our telemetry.”

Degrandpre closed his eyes. God, no. Please. Not now. “What telemetry?”

“Telemetry from the deep-sea outpost. It's gone. We're blank here—the station's just off the map.”

“Tell me it's satellite malfunction.”

“Only if we lost all our redundancies at once . . .” A pause, another crackle of hurried conversation. “Correction. We have a single shuttle upbound from the pod chain. Reporting survivors on board. But that's all.”

“What do you mean, that's
all?”

“According to the pilot . . .” Another pause. “No other survivors. Just wreckage.”

Just wreckage.

Freeman Li's nightmare had come true.

“Sir?”

And mine, Degrandpre thought.

“I want that shuttle quarantined indefinitely,” he said, facing the immediate threat, postponing his own fear. “And sound the stations. We're on full alert.”

But he felt like a dead man.

The occasion was Zoe's first solo excursion, the final systems test before she attempted a daylong hike to the Copper River. Tam Hayes left his work—gene-mapping the monocell cultures—and crossed the core quad to the north wing, where Zoe was already suiting up.

His thoughts careened between Zoe's excursion and his research. In both cases, mysteries outnumbered certainties. Cellular genetics on Isis would remain a puzzle for years, Hayes was certain. The biochemical machinery was infuriatingly complex. What to make of organelles that also led independent lives outside their parent cells, that reproduced as retroviruses? Or the tiled complexities of microtubules ringing the cell walls? Every question begged a thousand more, most of them concerning Isian paleobiology, a field of study that barely existed. Apart from a couple of glacial core samples and Freeman Li's work with thermophyllic bacteria, there wasn't any hard data, only conjecture. All those unbroken years of evolutionary recomplication had obviously bred ancient parasitisms deep into the mechanism of life—every energy exchange, every selective ionization, every release of ATP was a fossilized act of predation. Complex symbiotic partnerships had arisen the way mountains rise from the clash of tectonic plates. Out of conflict, collaboration; out of chaos, order. The mysteries.

His mother had trained him in the Mysteries, had taken him to chapel every month. Both Red Thorns and Ice Walkers were primarily Old Deists, a faith much given to philosophizing. The monthly sermons had gone over his head, but he thought often of the annual invocation in the observatory chamber. He had been taken into that cold, domed space to count constellations like rosary
beads while the warm bodies of the congregation pressed against him, voices joined in hymns as his mother clutched his hand so tightly it hurt. Was it entirely his fault, then, that he had fallen in love with the stars?

The Red Thorns had thought so.