Bios (22 page)

Fully clothed, he nevertheless managed to sleep for an hour or so in the long shadow of a cargo manipulator, woke to the snoring of his quarantined comrades, slept again. . . .

And woke with a faint, cool breeze on his cheek.

Thinking of the dormitory window. Snow sliding under glass. The moving air soothed him.

But the air here ought not to be moving.

The breeze became a wind now, a brisk little indoor wind sweeping along the floor of the Turing bay with surprising vigor, picking up loose items rescued from the shuttle: here a foam cup, there a sheaf of printed paper.

He sat upright, alarmed.

That sound? That muted throbbing? He recognized it from the IOS launches, though it had never been so immediate: it was the sound of the machinery that opened the bay's huge airlock.

His ears exploded with pain as the atmospheric pressure abruptly dropped. When he opened his mouth the air spilled out of his throat in an involuntary exhalation that seemed never to end. He wanted to cry out, but his lungs collapsed like broken balloons.

Lights blinked out around him. He saw bodies thrashing as they were thrown from the gaping lock. No noise now. Only the stars, pure and unmediated. The fixed and naked eye. First light.

Y
ESTERDAY'S RAINWATER DRIPPED
from the forest canopy and left the trail mulchy and slick. Tam Hayes moved cautiously in his heavy biological armor. He had grown accustomed to the liquid sound of his footsteps in the decaying biomass, the regular whir of his servomotors. The sounds were peaceful, in a strange way.

Throughout that long day he did not speak to Yambuku, although message alerts scrolled periodically through his heads-up. The silence was oddly soothing. Instead, he performed the slow and steady work of navigating his armor, pacing himself, monitoring his gear. He wanted to reach and preferably cross the Copper River by nightfall. If necessary he would sleep inside his armor, simply freeze the servos and let the gel padding accommodate itself to his weight. But it would be better to keep moving. Dieter had been right, of course, about the bioarmor. He dared not depend on it. It would fail—in some small way or catastrophically; sooner or later.

Much as he tried to pace himself, however, this was hard physical labor. The sweat poured out of him, some of it absorbed by the armor's recyclers but most of it trapped between his body and the cool gel membrane, irritating his skin. He watched his footing as he walked, avoiding places where the mud seemed threateningly deep. He saw the sky reflected in leaf-strewn puddles, sunlight glistening on scummy water.

And it occurred to him to wonder, from time to time, what he was doing out here.

Searching for Zoe, of course, because he cared about Zoe. She was fragile but brutally persistent—he thought for a moment of a fern emerging from a poisonous windfall of volcanic ash. She had been subjected to cruelties that had killed four of her clone sisters, and she had survived—had followed Isis out of her captivity, just as Hayes had followed Isis away from his family and his clan.

But we were both seduced, Hayes thought.

Would Zoe have come here so willingly if she had known she was nothing more than a vehicle for the field testing of new Trust technologies? God help us, Hayes thought, she might have; but the Trust never offered her the choice. Lies wrapped in lies, everyone a party to some sin or other; knowledge hoarded and tightly held, because knowledge was power. The Terrestrial way.

And I am out here, Hayes thought, out here in this peaceful toxic wilderness, to rescue her . . . but admit the truth: to rescue himself as well.

The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say. Calm, aloof, an Ice Walker, his father's potlatch wife. In some other century she might have been a Quaker.

He had wanted the stars but he had caught the Terrestrial disease, the unknowing of awkward truths.

He had lied to Zoe. Perhaps not as egregiously as Avrion Theophilus had lied to her—but he had abetted those lies.

He was out here saving Zoe, but he was also out here salvaging the tattered remains of his innocence. No points for that.

He reached the river at sunset. The sky was clean, deepening toward indigo, and the small moon was quartered at zenith. He wanted to cross the river before dark.

The recent rains had swollen the Copper. Water surged over the surface of the crude bridge the tractibles had built. Hayes stepped onto that fragile scaffolding and felt it sway beneath his weight. If the bridge collapsed, he would be trapped beneath the running water by the unbuoyant mass of his armor.

He switched on his helmet lamp and advanced slowly, watching the water, red-tinted with sunset and shimmering with the oily residue of decomposing plant life, as it washed over his boots. Servomotors labored to steady his balance. A reflection of the moon quivered in the current to his left like the image of a lidded eye. He thought of Zoe's eyes, eyes shocked by the loss of her thymostat, newborn, wide but wary. Understanding at last the price she had paid for her sanity.

He remembered how she had felt beneath him, crying out with what might have been, God help her, her first shared orgasm. She had trembled like this bridge. Afterward he had felt faintly ashamed, as if he had taken advantage of her, forced the living heart of her out of a complex membrane of defenses.

He trudged up the far bank of the Copper with gluey mud clinging to his boots. The sky was darker now, the forest a black corridor. Fallen logs rotted along the riverbank, and to his right he saw some small animal hesitate in the beam of his helmet lamp, then dash into the undergrowth.

When he had passed some meters into the woods and was enclosed in the space carved out of the darkness by his helmet light, his radio crackled once and fell silent. This would not have been unusual, except that he had asked his armor to screen all messages unless they arrived on Zoe's standard or emergency frequencies. In his exhaustion, it took him a moment to understand that this was what he had been waiting for.

Her signal must be weak. Obstructed by some obstacle perhaps,
or they would have heard her back at Yambuku. He stood still in the midst of the forest, his boots sinking a little into the muddy path—he might lose her if he moved—and thumbed his own com controls. “Zoe? Zoe, it's Tam Hayes. Can you hear me?”

No answer.

He waited sixty seconds—an eternity, the cat's-eye moon sliding through the branches of the trees—and tried again.

This time her carrier frequency crackled alive and he heard her voice, eerily close, but confused, as if he had wakened her from a deep sleep.
“Theo?”

“No, Zoe, it's Tam. I'm coming for you, but I need to know where you are and how you're doing.”

“Inside . . .” she murmured.

“Say again?”

“I'm inside a mound. Underneath. Under the ground.”

“Inside which mound, Zoe?”

“I don't know. I think they're all connected. It's dark here.”

He didn't like the way she sounded—weak, uncertain, almost delirious. But it was her voice. She was alive. “Zoe, how are you? Are you hurt?”

“How am I?” She was silent for a long moment. “Hot. It's hot here. I can't see.”

“Have they hurt you?”

“The diggers aren't here. Not always, I mean.”

“Zoe, hang on. I'm coining to get you. Keep talking.”

But he lost contact with her as he started toward the next ridge.

As he walked through the night he caught fragments of Zoe's carrier frequency, never long enough to rouse her attention.

For all its exquisitely tuned servomotors and ergonomic flourishes, the bioarmor had grown terribly heavy around him. He was aware of the enormous effort he expended carrying himself upslope as he approached the foothills of the Coppers, where the soil grew stony and he could turn, if he wished, and see the western plains unfolding under moonlight toward the distant sea. Without a defensive
perimeter of tractibles and remensors he feared an attack from some large predator, but no such animal approached him; he was a formidable creature himself, he supposed, and his armor didn't smell like food.

He contacted Yambuku once, to tell them that Zoe was alive and he had spoken to her. Dieter Franklin was manning the comm console. “Tam,” he said, “that's good news, but we have problems.”

Hayes debated cutting the connection. There was only one problem he could deal with now, and that was the problem of Zoe. But Dieter was a friend, and Hayes let him talk.

“Your telemetry, for one. We have motors running hot in your left leg assembly. It's not critical yet, you can scroll the diagnostics if you haven't already, but it's not a good sign. What you need to do, Tam, is to turn around and hope you get close enough to Yambuku that we can send one of the reserve tractibles to carry you back, if need be. We can try to do something about Zoe from orbit. The IOS has a few landable remensors it can launch.”

Hayes digested this information slowly. An overheating servo in his left leg . . . that would explain the extra weight he seemed to carry when he moved that foot, his tendency to list to port when his attention lapsed. But that wasn't bad, considering Dieter's first prediction that he would never reach the river. As for rescuing Zoe—

He said, “From orbit?”

“Because we're evacuating Yambuku. The seals are lapsing faster than we can replace them, and our stores are running low. On top of that, Theophilus says the IOS is getting cagey with him; maybe something's gone bad up there, too. We're looking at a last shuttle lift in forty-eight hours.”

“Not enough time.”

“That's the point. I'm trying to make your case with Theophilus. But he's giving the orders, and he's just about angry enough to write you off.”

“He wants Zoe back.” Her corpse, at least, Hayes did not add.

“Not as much as he wants to get off Isis. He's Family and he's
very much in charge, but I think underneath all that he's starting to get seriously frightened.”

“Thank you for the information, Dieter. Keep the core sterile. I'll be back.”

He cut the connection before Dieter could respond.

Forty-eight hours.

If he started back now, he might make it.

“T
AM? TAM
?”

The voice had come. The voice had gone. Unless she had imagined it. It was easy to imagine things, here in the overheated dark.

The digger, coiling its multijointed body in a sinuous circle, had also come and gone. The digger had broken the membrane of her excursion suit, slitting it from sternum to crotch with one razorsharp claw, but carefully, drawing only a little blood. And then it had left her alone. To die, she had assumed, and she burned her firefly lamps recklessly, examining her body, waiting for the inevitable collapse of heart, lungs, liver, brain—because she was exposed at last to the Isian biosphere, microbes implanted beneath her skin by the animal's filthy claw. But her blood had dried quickly in the hot, close air. Daubs of it congealed on her fingers. She did not sicken and she did not die.