Bios (2 page)

Avrion Theophilus appeared at once. Theo was an older man, well into the first decade of his second century. His hair was white but thick, his skin pale but supple. He greeted her in High English, causing the Kuiper-born technicians to exchange uneasy looks.

He apologized for the interruption. “I wanted to wish you luck, not that you need it. Time is short, I know.”

Too short. Or not short enough. Zoe couldn't name the odd hollowness she felt in her stomach. “Thank you.”

She wished he could be here to say good-bye in person. She missed her mentor. She had left him more than a year ago, in a sun garden on Diemos. Theo couldn't come to Phoenix because he would have brought his intestinal flora with him. Phoenix was clean—at the moment, the cleanest inhabited environment in the system; Zoe's own benign bacteria and other biological hitchhikers had been systematically eradicated, replaced where necessary with
sterile nanobacters. Even the technicians from the disease-free Kuiper colonies had been deconned for service on Phoenix.

“Be brave, little one,” Theo said. “It looks crowded there.”

The chamber
was
crowded, crowded with technicians as close as cattle in a pen, all of them waiting impatiently for Zoe to finish her conversation. “They treat me as if I'm radioactive,” she whispered.

“You're not. But
they
will be, if they don't evacuate on schedule. I don't doubt it makes them nervous. We ought to let them get on with their work.”

“I'm glad you called.” It was good to see him again, his High Family face so calm and proud. Avrion Theophilus was the only human being Zoe had ever fully trusted, and the hardest part of this mission—at least so far—had been her separation from Theo. Was that a paradox? She had been bred and regulated to endure solitude. But Theo was different. He wasn't ordinary people. He was . . . well,
Theo
.

The closest thing to a father she had ever known.

“Travel safely, Zoe.” He seemed to hesitate. “You know I envy you.”

“I wish you could come with me.”

“Someday. With any luck, someday soon.”

That was cryptic, but Zoe didn't ask what he meant. Theo had always wanted to see Isis. And in a sense, he
was
going with her. You can't take much baggage across the bridge to the stars, Theo used to say. But memories were massless, and her memories of Theo were deeply held. She wanted to tell him so, but her throat closed on the words.

He gave her an encouraging smile and as suddenly as that, was gone. A technician took the monitor away.

Time ebbed quickly now. The journeyrig's containment ring snapped shut around her throat, immobilizing her head. This part would be uncomfortable, though she had rehearsed it a number of times; she would have to endure paralytic confinement and absolute darkness, at least until the medical system was activated and
the suit began to flood her body with narcotic and anxiolytic molecules. I will sleep, Zoe thought, inside this steel box.

She waited for the massive helmet, dark and enclosing. Her heart hammered at the cage of her ribs.

The remaining technical staff, Anna Chopra among them, left Phoenix in a small armada of reaction rockets.

Anna had not forgotten her small act of defiance, though she wished she could. It had been, of course, stupid. A gesture, a whim, without utility, and in all likelihood without consequence. She was tempted to confess and have done with it; better an early euthanasia than another ten years in a geriatric ward.

Although . . . she took a deep and private pleasure at having, finally, at her age, a secret worth keeping.

Had she done the girl a favor? She had thought so when she applied scalpel to flesh, but she doubted it now. When Zoe Fisher woke up without her neurochemical safety net, the change would not be obvious. It would take weeks, perhaps months, for her neural receptors to perceive and react to the absence of the thymostat. Symptoms would set in gradually, maybe gradually enough for Zoe to adapt to the unregulated life. She might even learn to like herself that way. But sooner or later, the Trusts would find her out. Her thymostat would be replaced, and whatever new essence Zoe had distilled in herself would be drained away. And that would be that.

But, still . . . everything born had to die, the Trusts perhaps excluded, and if life meant anything, then even a brief life was better than none. Deep inside herself, Anna liked the idea of this Zoe Fisher, this Devices and Personnel bottle baby, wrenched out of the grip of the Trusts even for a day.

Do something, Zoe, Anna thought. Do something gaudy or foolish or grand. Weep, fall in love, write poetry. Look wild-eyed at this new world of yours.

She adjusted her cabin screen to the exterior view of Phoenix, already a faint point of light in a well of empty space. She had
decided she wanted to see the launch—the bright bloom of the fusion event, the brilliant aurora as it faded.

Comatose and immobilized, Zoe became one more inert object to be ferried by tractible into the deep core of the launch facility and harnessed inside the payload sphere, which was suspended in turn by enormous pylons from the cored massif of rock and ice. Lenses of exotic matter surrounded the sphere like huge octagonal crystals. The lenses would be destroyed along with the rest of Phoenix, but only in the femtoseconds after they had served their purpose.

The cometary body was rigged for induced-field fusion. Neither Zoe nor the tractible robots were aware of the countdown ticking away in Phoenix's supercooled processor arrays. The detonation would be triggered by processors in the payload capsule itself as soon as the fail-safe sequences were satisfied.

It was the third interstellar launch this Terrestrial year, each launch as costly as creating an entire new Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm. A measurable fraction of the solar system's economic output had been channeled into this project. Not since the ancient days of
Apollo
and
Soyuz
had exploration been so enormously difficult to manage and finance.

All irreversible now. Microswitches poised for months fell at last into their final alignment.

Zoe slept, and if she dreamed, she dreamed only of motion, a separation as ponderous as the calving of glaciers.

In her dreams, the light was fiercely bright.

D
ECANTED UNCONSCIOUS INTO
the almost windowless environment of the Isis Orbital Station, Zoe longed for a glimpse of her new world. Wanted it so badly, in fact, that she was contemplating a serious breach of protocol.

She could prompt the image of Isis onto any local screen, of course. And she had seen such images for much of her life, often daily—images either relayed to Sol from the IOS or captured by the planetary interferometer.

But that wasn't enough. She was
here
, after all: scant hundreds of kilometers from the surface of the planet itself, Low Isis Orbit. She had traveled farther in an instant than a conventional spacefarer could hope to travel in a lifetime. She had arrived at the very edge of the human diaspora, the dizzying brink of the abyssal deeps, and she deserved a direct look at the planet that had drawn her so far from home—didn't she?

In the old days, astronomers had talked about “first light”—the fresh view through a brand-new optical instrument. Zoe had
looked at Isis through every kind of optical instrument, barring her own eyes. Now she wanted that direct view, her own personal first light.

Instead, she had spent three days in the IOS's infirmary under useless observation and a week haunting her assigned cabin while waiting for a place on the duty roster. Ten days from decantation, ten days without orders, agenda, or more than a brief word from management. She had seen to date only the gently concave walls and steel floors of her cubby and the recovery ward in Medical. The sole official communications she had received were a list of meal hours, an access code, her residence number, and a name badge.

Consequently, Zoe summoned her courage and scheduled an appointment with Kenyon Degrandpre, the outpost manager. She was awed at her own impertinence. Probably she should have talked to her section chief first . . . but no one had told her who her section chief was or how to find him.

The Isis Orbital Station had been assembled from the shells of early model Higgs spheres in a ring-of-pearls configuration. The maps posted on the corridor walls reminded Zoe of the benzene rings illustrated in chemistry texts, with the outpost's fusion bottles and heat exchangers projecting like complex side chains from the symmetrical core. On the morning of her appointment with Degrandpre, Zoe left her tiny cabin at the bottom of Habitat Seven and walked the ring corridor a kilometer spinward, nearly half the total circumference of the IOS. The ring corridor smelled of hot metal and cycled atmosphere, like a Kuiper habitat, but without the ever-present tang of ice in the air. Bulkhead doors loomed like massive guillotine blades; the gangways were narrow and possessed neither charm nor windows. This place was not as emotionally and culturally blank as Phoenix had been, but neither was it a typical Kuiper world, full of color and noisy with children. The Terrestrial esthetic prevailed: linear functionality, enforced by strict cargo limitations.

Windows were a luxury, Zoe supposed. According to the IOS plan she'd reviewed on her terminal, the project manager's office
possessed one of the station's few accessible direct-view windows, a wedge of three-inch-thick polarized glass set into the exterior wall. The rest of the station's windows were tiny ports cut into the docking bays, an area for which Zoe was not yet authorized. But that was irrelevant, she told herself. She had business with Degrandpre. The window was just . . . a perquisite.

From the name, she had expected someone almost Family—weren't there Degrandpres among the Brazilian landholders?—but Kenyon Degrandpre was not a handsome or an imposing man. A manager of some rank, but never Family. His head was too long, his nose too flat. Zoe's experience with the upper echelons of the Trusts had taught her that handsome managers might be capable of a certain generosity; ugly men—although Degrandpre didn't quite fit that description either, at least not by Terrestrial standards—were more likely to read regulations and nurse grudges. She knew for a fact, had known all her life, that rigid personalities were a staple in the bureaucracies of the Trusts. But surely the man who managed the Isis Orbital Station, in effect the Isis Project itself, must be more flexible. Mustn't he?

Maybe not. Degrandpre raised his big head briefly and waved Zoe to a chair, but his attention remained on his desktop.

Zoe stood near the window instead. It wasn't much of a window. She supposed the brutal payload limitations of the Higgs launchers made even this small luxury prohibitively expensive. Still, here was her first genuinely direct view of the planet below. Unmediated light, Zoe thought excitedly.
First
light.

The IOS had just crossed the planet's terminator. The long light of dawn picked out clouds in vivid chiaroscuro. Across the dark zone, lightning flickered, embers on velvet.

Zoe had seen planets before. She had seen Earth from orbit, a view not dissimilar. She'd spent a year on Europa learning pressure lab technique, and the vast orb of Jupiter had filled more of the sky far more dramatically.

But this was
Isis
. That glitter of sunlight came from a star not
Earth's. Here was a living world that had never seen a naked human footprint, a world strange and alive, rich with biology; a swarming waterdrop orbiting a foreign sun. As lovely as Earth. And infinitely more deadly.

“Is there an issue,” Degrandpre said at last, “or have you come to stare? You wouldn't be the first, Citizen Fisher.”

Degrandpre's voice had the bite of Terrestrial authority. His English was finely honed. Zoe thought she heard a touch of Beijing Elite School in the understated consonants.

She took a breath. “I've been here ten days. Apart from the Habitat Seven physical regime director and the cafeteria staff, I haven't spoken to anyone in authority. I don't know who to report to. The people who are supposed to oversee my work directly are all on-planet—which is where I ought to be.”

Degrandpre tapped his stylus and sat back in his chair. His clothing was sere gray, the inevitable kacho uniform, a stiff black collar framing his thick peasant neck. Wooden chair, wooden desk, a plush carpet, and a multilayered dress uniform; all of this would have been shipped from Earth, at an expense Zoe shuddered to consider. He asked, “Do you feel neglected?”

“No, not neglected. I just wanted to make certain—”

“That we haven't forgotten you.”

“Well . . . yes, Manager.”

Degrandpre continued to tap his stylus against the desktop, a sound that made Zoe think of ice cracking in a warm glass. He seemed as much amused as irritated. “Let me ask you this, Citizen Fisher. In an outpost of this size, with every gram accounted for and every sou budgeted, do you really suppose people get
lost?”