Bios (13 page)

He found Zoe in the prep room struggling into her excursion suit, Tia and Kwame tabbing the seams for her. Kuiper-born, the two had never learned to respect Terrestrial nudity taboos and they obviously didn't know or care why Zoe flinched at their touch. She looked at Hayes with a rescue-me expression.

He sent the two technicians down to the shuttle bay to give Lee Reisman a hand.

“Thank you,” Zoe said meekly. “Really, I can do this myself. They designed the gear that way. It just takes time.”

“Shall I leave too?”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“If you need help, ask.”

She drew on the leggings, the active membrane as limp as plastic film until it found and matched the contours of her skin; then it mapped itself in place, pinkly translucent, a second skin. She bent to pull on the more conventional hip boots, her small breasts bobbing.

She looked up, caught his eye and blushed conspicuously. Hayes wondered if he should turn away. What would a Terrestrial do?

She pulled her arms through the filmy torso membrane and said something too quiet for him to hear. He cleared his throat. “I'm sorry?”

“It would be faster if you sealed the tabs.”

He came across the room, recognizing his eagerness to touch her and suppressing it; she was easily frightened. . . . The tabs of the excursion suit were three bars of fleshy material where the seams met across the small of her back. He touched her skin where it dimpled against the curve of her spine and felt an odd sense of familiarity . . . she was practically a Kuiper woman, at least genetically, her genome sampled from the stock that had settled the
asteroids, hardy raw material for a new diaspora. . . . He sealed the garment gently and watched the membrane form itself to her body, heard her indrawn breath as the protective skin tightened over breasts, nipples, the base of her throat. Without the headgear, without the waste-management pack, she might have been naked. His hand lingered on the ridge of her hip, and she shivered but didn't object.

But when he raised his hand to touch her hair, she ducked her head away. Whispered, “Not there.”

“Why not?”

“Only where I'm protected.”

She wouldn't meet his eyes.

Was this what she wanted? Needed? He put his hands on her waist and drew her closer. “Protected,” she had said: protected against contact, he supposed, or against the idea of contact.

He wanted to tilt up her head and say something comforting. He might have, if the station alarm had not sounded.

Zoe gasped and backed away as if stung.

Hayes looked at the blinker on his pocket scroll. Something about the oceanic outpost. No details, but obviously more bad news.

It was the bios, Hayes thought, closing in on him again.

Z
OE WASN'T TRULY
alone in the forest. She was surrounded at all times by insect-sized remensors and larger, spiderlegged tractibles; and she was linked to Yambuku by extensive telemetry . . . but she
felt
alone, unspeakably alone, especially after midnight.

This was what she had been born for, this aloneness. Her hermetic impulse had been built into her DNA, the same gen mods the first Kuiper colonists had carried into the emptiness beyond Neptune—a race of monks, carving their hermitages out of frozen, starlit massifs. She was not afraid to be alone.

Which didn't mean she wasn't afraid.

She found herself frightened of a number of things.

She woke well after midnight in the darkness of her tent. The tent was a simple polymer-and-foam geodesic, designed not to protect her from the elements—her excursion suit did that—but to disguise her from the native wildlife. The excursion suit was a semiopen system; she carried food and water in sterile containers with
self-sealing nozzles, but she excreted the inevitable wastes—bluntly, piss, shit, and CO
₂
. Her wastes were scrubbed by the suit's processors and nanobacters, but even sterilized human waste was a magnet for Isian predators. Solid and liquid wastes could be contained and buried, but her breath and perspiration were harder to conceal. The tent helped, circulating external air slowly and bleeding her molecular signature through osmotic and HEPA filters.

But no system was perfect. The loss of the Ocean Station less than ten days ago had made that perfectly clear. Systems were imperfect, or imperfectly adapted to the Isian biosphere, which led to the unhappy thought that she might even now be attracting nocturnal predators that had evaded her perimeter defenses.

That hushed, woody rattle in the distance, for example, might be wind in the trees, or it might be. . . .

Bullshit.

She sat up, exasperated, all hope of sleep fled. She found it hard enough to rest in the excursion suit, which faithfully reported to her skin the pressure of every twig and pebble under the gel floor of the tent—but it was worse to be afflicted with the midnight jitters. An array of robotic remensors scanned her perimeter at all times for motion or telltale molecular signatures; nothing larger than a grub could sneak up on her. And her tent was, if not perfect, certainly grub-proof.

So to hell with nagging fears. She was just restless. She pulled on her protective leggings, opened the tent door and stepped out into the windy darkness of the cycad-like Isian forest.

The only ambient light came from a sprinkle of stars above the leaf canopy, but there was enough of it to give the suit's photon multiplier something to work with. The forest through her iris lenses appeared as a map of squat tree boles against a diffuse grid of wind-rippled foliage. Depthless, eerie. She adjusted her lenses to look for heat sources. And saw nothing more than a few roosting aviants and timid scavenger voles hardly larger than her thumb.

Nothing to lose sleep over. She turned her face to the sky again.

The brightest star wasn't a star at all. It was a planet, named Cronos by some unimaginative Terrestrial number-bender when it was detected a century ago: the Isian system's enormous gas giant,
currently at the aphelion of its looping orbit. Cronos had contributed to Isian geohistory by sweeping the system of its rocky and icy debris; comets were rare in the Isian sky. Less a Titan, Zoe thought, than a fat guardian angel.

Her inner-ear com link came alive, hissing faintly.

“Zoe?” Tam Hayes' voice. “Your telemetry puts you outside the tent and your pulse rate is up, so I assume you're awake.”

“I don't walk in my sleep, if that's what you mean.”

But she was immensely relieved to hear his voice.

“Restless?”

“A little. Is that a problem?”

“No problem.”

The smallness of his voice inside her head made her even more aware of her position, alone in an alien forest. True, Yambuku wasn't far away; but Yambuku was a sealed environment, a fragile bubble of Earth. She had left that bubble and she was outside of it, lost on Isis. On Isis, where there were no artificial lights, no roads, no amenities over the next horizon. Nothing over the horizon but more horizon, parallax to parallel; nothing between her and a planetary Level Five hot zone but a membrane a few molecules thick. Unsurprising then that Devices and Personnel had chosen to resurrect her genome from the old diaspora stock. Isis was at least as lonely as any barren Kuiper object. And much, much farther from home.

“Zoe?”

“I'm here.”

“We have a large animal paralleling your position, maybe fifty meters north-northwest. Nothing to worry about, but to avoid advertising your presence we'd like you to sit still for a few minutes.”

“Back to the tent?”

“We'll keep you outside and mobile for now. Though I do wish you'd checked in before taking a walk. Just stay put, please, and let the tractibles do their work.”

“Is this thing
stalking
me?”

“Probably just curious. Quiet, please.”

She listened into the darkness but heard nothing. What kind of large animal? Most likely a triraptor, she supposed. She pictured it:
eight-limbed, quadripedal, with four arms on its erect upper body and claws like tempered steel. Her excursion suit was tough enough to protect her from the bites of small animals and invertebrates but not from the industrial-strength carnage of a triraptor attack.

“Zoe?”

She whispered, “I thought you wanted me quiet.”

“We're okay as long as we don't shout. Can you make yourself comfortable out there?”

She scanned the ground, located a fallen tree trunk and sat down on it. Tiny insects from a disturbed nest swarmed over her footgear. Harmless things. She ignored them. “ ‘Comfortable' is relative. At least we can talk. Taking the night shift again?”

“Midnight to dawn, as long as you're on excursion.”

She was flattered, not to mention intimidated. She had been thinking—could not help thinking—of her encounter with Hayes in the prep room, how she had wept in his arms at the news of the oceanic tragedy, and how she had found her way to his cabin that night. Of the way he had touched her, eagerly but gently, a way she had never been touched by another human being.

And she had permitted it.

Encouraged it.

Dreaded it.

“Little scary out there? Your pulse rate's up again.”

She blushed—invisibly, thank God, unless the telemetry revealed that too. “It's just . . . dark a long way in every direction.”

“Understood.”

A wind from the west turned leaves in the trees. The same wind no doubt carried her scent deeper into the forest. No, don't think about that. “Tam?”

“Yes?”

“You grew up in the Kuipers. Red Thorn, you said?”

“Right. Red Thorn's a big KB habitat in the Near Oorts, one of the oldest Kuiper settlements. Three-quarters G spin around the long axis, so I didn't have to adapt much for Isis.”

“Happy childhood?”

There was a pause. “Happy enough.”

“Crêche or biofamily?”

“Bio. No creches in Red Thorn; we're conservative.”

“You miss the habitat?”

“Often.”

He was being careful, she realized. Thinking of her, of her difficult childhood. “You know, it wasn't as bad for me as you might think. Being a crêche baby. Before Tehran, anyway. I liked being with my sisters, my nannies.”

“Miss it?”

“Some things you can't get back. That feeling of . . . being where you belong.”

“Nobody belongs on Isis.”

The skin of her excursion suit was exquisitely sensitive, too much so. She startled at the touch of a falling leaf on her shoulder.

Zoe?

“Sorry. False alarm. There's a breeze up. Feels like it might rain soon.” She wondered why it should be easier to talk to Hayes through the com link than face-to-face. “I know what I must seem like to a Kuiper person. Raised the way I was, I mean.”

“None of us chose his childhood, Zoe.”

“Like one of those old-time Chinese aristocratic women, her feet crammed into tiny shoes—do you know what I mean? Bent into someone else's idea of beauty or utility.”

“Zoe . . .” He paused. “Old Kuiper maxim: ‘A broken human being isn't even a good tool.' You couldn't have survived the way you did without something solid at the center of you, something all your own.”

Now it was her turn to pause.

Theo used to say,
You're playing hide-and-seek, Zoe. Hiding from me again
.

But Theo always ferreted out her secrets.

Most of them.

Hayes said, “Quiet now, Zoe, just a while longer. The target turned your way again. The tractibles will lure it away, but don't call attention to yourself. And switch off your night vision, please, Zoe. The lenses leak; your eyes are glowing like a cat's.”

“You can see me?” She wasn't sure she liked the idea.

“I'm monitoring one of the remensors. Hush now. I'll keep you updated.”

She sighed and switched off the photon multiplier. Instantly, the dark became absolute. She closed her eyes and listened.

The wind was stronger now. Clouds had obscured the stars. A cold front was pushing in from the west, according to this morning's meteorological report. Raindrops began to spatter the forest canopy.

There was a rustling sound in the undergrowth, maybe a few meters away. Her pulse ramped up yet again.

Hayes said, “That's a tractible, guarding your flank. I know you can't see anything. But I need you to keep calm right now, to keep as still as you can.”

She couldn't see the triraptor nosing through the forest but her excursion suit reported its scent—not the actual airborne molecules, of course, but an electronic tickling of the appropriate receptor cells, a faint echo of something acrid and bitter in her nose.

The animal was close. Night-hardened remensors buzzed around her. She heard, at last, the unmistakable sound of something alive and massive moving through the brush.

“Steady, Zoe.”