Bios (5 page)

Degrandpre stepped into the small medical station and stripped unselfconsciously. Like his uniform, his body was an expression of rank and class. He was nearly hairless, his excess body fat chelated
away, his musculature defined but not boastful. He wore a Works Trust tattoo on his left shoulder. His slender penis dangled over the faint scar of his orchidectomy, another badge of rank. He stepped quickly into the diagnostic nook.

Nefford sat attentively at his monitor, never so gauche as to speak before he was addressed.

Machinery hummed behind Degrandpre's back, a whisper of hummingbird wings. He said, “Of course you've heard about the death.”

The physician nodded. “A suit breach, I gather. Tragic for the Yambuku staff. I suppose they'll have to replace the armor.”

“Not to mention the engineer.”

“Macabie Feya. Arrived thirty months ago. Healthy as a horse, but they all are, at least when they first set foot on the IOS. He caused the accident himself, I hear.”

“He was in open air in poorly prepped protective gear. In that sense, yes, he brought it on himself. But fault has a way of rising up the ranks.”

“Surely no one could blame you, Manager.”

“Thank you for the unconvincing show of support. Of course we both know better.”

“It's not an ideal world.”

“We've lost two assets that will be expensive to replace. There's no way to finesse that. However, Yambuku is far from crippled. They can still make vehicular excursions, most of their tractibles are in decent shape, and they have at least one suit of bioarmor that can be brought up to specification fairly quickly. Basic research won't be interrupted.”

“And,” Nefford said, “they have the new gear that Fisher woman brought with her.”

“Is that common knowledge?”

“For better or worse. The IOS is a village. People talk.”

“Too much and too often.” But Degrandpre expected a certain amount of gossip from Corbus Nefford. Because he was a physician and a section manager, Nefford's rice bowl was virtually ensured.
He could risk saying things others might keep to themselves. “What Zoe Fisher brought with her is an unproven technology foisted on us by a rogue branch of the Trusts. The Fisher woman comes with a vade mecum from Personnel and Devices, and she's putting herself directly in harm's way. That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone's part.”

The doctor nodded absently, whispering into his scroll. “The diagnostic's finished. Step down, please.”

Degrandpre dressed himself, still thinking aloud. “Personnel and Devices act like they can shuffle our priorities at will. I doubt the Works commissioners will put up with this kind of arrogance much longer. In the meantime, I'd like Zoe Fisher to survive at least until I'm safely back in Beijing. It's not my battle, frankly.” Had he overstepped? “This is privileged, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Not galley gossip, in other words.”

“You know you can trust me, Kenyon.” He used the given name not as an impertinence but with downcast eyes, to ingratiate.

“Thank you,
Corbus.”
A gentle rebuke. “So? Am I healthy?”

Nefford turned with visible relief to his desktop. “Your bone calcium is excellent, your musculature is stable, and your accumulated radiation exposure is well within tolerance. But next time, I want a blood sample.”

“Next time, you may have one.”

Once every calendar month, Degrandpre walked the circumference of the orbital station, from docking bays to sun garden, his left hand on the holster of his quirt.

He thought of the walkthrough as a way of staying in touch with the IOS. Keeping the maintenance crew on their toes, citing Works staff for uniform violations—in general, making his presence felt. (In the case of dress-code infringements, he had long ago given up on the Kuiper and Martian scientists; he considered himself lucky if they remembered to dress at all.) Problems that seemed
distant from his chambers loomed larger from the deckplates. And he liked the exercise.

Invariably, he started his inspection at the dimly lit cargostorage spaces of Ten Module and finished back at Nine, the garden. He liked to linger in the garden. If he had been asked, he might have said he enjoyed the filtered sunlight, pumped from fixed collectors in the IOS's hub, or the moist air, or the earthy smell of the aeroponic suspensions. And all that was true. But not all of the truth.

To Kenyon Degrandpre, the garden was a kind of pocket paradise.

He had loved gardens even as a child. For the first twelve years of his life he had lived with his father, a senior manager at the Cultivar Collection in southern France. The Collection's greenhouses ranged over thousands of acres of rolling pastureland, foundations tilted to the southern sky, a city of damp glass walls and hissing aerators.

“Paradise” was his father's name for it. In biblical mythology, paradise was a garden called Eden; the Edenic world was cultivated, perfect. When humankind fell from grace, the garden succumbed to anarchy.

On the IOS the garden was even more central, as delicate and vital as a transplanted heart. It supplied most of the station's nutritional needs; it recycled wastes; it cleansed the air. Because the garden was both indispensable and fragile, it was, at least in Degrandpre's eyes, the paradise of the Old Testament restored: orderly, calculated, organic, and precise.

The gardeners, in their buff fatigues, acknowledged his presence by staying out of his way. He walked the garden tiers slowly, pausing in a glade of tall tomato plants to savor the smell and the leaf-green light.

He had entered the Works with much of his father's idealism still intact. Humanity had endured a wild Earth for too long. The price had been uncontrolled population growth, climatic devolution, disease.

Kuiper radicals accused Earth of wallowing in stasis. Nonsense,
Degrandpre thought. How long would a Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm last if it failed to regulate its ice and oxygen mining? How long could the IOS, for instance, sustain itself in a state of anarchy? But there was nothing special about the surface of Earth; the issues were the same, only broader, more diffuse. Consider Isis itself: a garden never cultivated. Beautiful, as freshly arrived Kuiper enthusiasts never failed to point out. And fundamentally hostile to human life.

He passed through the vegetable gardens and climbed a flight of stairs to a terrace where delicately engineered fruit vines thrived near the light. Gardeners and slim white tractibles moved like angels among the lush foliage, and he savored the patient sound of dripping water. Home, Degrandpre found himself thinking: five years now since he'd seen it, and God knows what had gone on during his absence. The disastrous North African Aquifer Initiative had nearly cost him his career; he had called in every outstanding favor just to save his Works card. He had accepted the Isis rotation to demonstrate his adaptability. It was the only post of any responsibility he had been offered.

And he hadn't done badly here. But too much time had passed too slowly, and he felt the separation from Earth more keenly than he had expected. It was as if his body registered on the cellular level every inch of the vast distance the Higgs launcher had transected; he was, after all, so far from home that the sunlight falling on these vines would not reach Beijing or Boston or the south of France within his lifetime. His only real connection with the planet of his birth was the particle-pair link—a thin reed indeed.

But one to which he was obliged to attend. His weekly report was due. He would have to let the Trusts know that one of their engineers had died.

Bad luck. Or bad management. Or Kuiper adventurism gone wrong. Yes, that was it.

By midday, he had queued his report for transmission and was tending to other business. A summit of section managers arrived
bearing grievances: unfair tractible allotment and resource utilization, the usual departmental jealousies. The Turing factories on Isis's small moon had fallen short of productivity goals, though another two factory units had been genned. The question was one of balance. No one would get what he wanted, but that was inevitable. The IOS was an economy of scarcity.

The good news was that no truly critical shortages were pressing, Turing productivity had increased even if it had not met expectations, and the IOS's life-support systems remained in good shape. Most of the bad news came from the Surface Projects manager, who reported a rash of seal failures, maintenance calls, and diminished redundancy, particularly from the continental and deep-sea outposts. (The small arctic station reported only routine maintenance.) This was potentially troublesome, since the downstations used a daunting variety of exotic materials imported from home; bringing stores and spares back to capacity would take some cargo shuffling on the part of the Trusts, never an easy sell. But, all in all, things could be worse.

He soothed the junior managers with promises, dismissed them at last and went to his cabin.

Alone.

He hated the social isolation of the IOS, but the answer to that problem, as always, was discipline. That was the mistake the Trusts had made more than a century ago, tinkering with the genes of Kuiper volunteers rather than teaching them the practical arts of self-discipline.

The wall of his cabin showed a relay view of Isis, blue on black velvet. He was supremely tired of it. He switched the display to a neutral white luminescence, keyed to dim as he fell asleep.

His personal scroll chirped, waking him early.

The waiting message was tagged amber, important but not urgent. Degrandpre let it wait while he showered and dressed. Then he dispatched a small personal tractible to bring breakfast from the galley.

He took up the scroll reluctantly. The message was return traffic from the Works Trust. Perfunctory regrets on the Macabie Feya death. Revised launch schedules. Revised cargo inventories, projected six months forward.

And in the tail of the message, a small but lethal sting.

An “observer” had been written into the next personnel rotation. A Personnel and Devices observer, a man named Avrion Theophilus.

Terrifyingly, the man's rank wasn't specified.

On Earth, a man without a title was either very poor or very powerful. A peasant or a Family man.

And peasants didn't come to Isis.

Z
OE CAME TO
the common room to witness the burning of Macabie Feya's body.

Tam Hayes had called the downstation staff to Yambuku's common room, which was large enough for Zoe to join the crowd without feeling unduly claustrophobic. Hayes had cleared one wall and converted the surface panel into a screen with a view of the western clearances, where remote tractibles had assembled a bier of native wood for the body to lie on. The effect was like watching through a big picture window. But in fact the common room was at the heart of the sterile core of Yambuku, insulated from Isis by onionskin layers of hot-zone laboratories and tractible bays.

Mac Feya, contaminated beyond rescue, hadn't made it farther into the station than the tractible bay. His body was compromised with Isian organisms beyond number; it had become, in effect, a supremely dangerous piece of biological waste. Elam Mather had used a medical remote to sedate and anesthetize Mac as he died, a
grim but thankfully brief process; she had then extracted key tissue samples and processed them into the glove-box array before she returned the body to the clearing.

Zoe didn't look at the body too closely. Mac Feya's bioarmor had been stripped for salvage and he had been draped with a white sheet in an attempt to lend some dignity to his corpse. But the body was obviously deliquescing under the shroud, digested by Isian microorganisms and processed with eerie speed into a syrupy black liquid. Just like a CIBA-37 mouse, Zoe thought. She sat rigidly in her chair and tried not to take this death as an omen. A warning perhaps:The Isian biosphere would not be trifled with. But there was nothing malignant here, no deliberate attack on human life. The problem was not Isis, but humanity. We're fragile, Zoe thought; we evolved in a younger and less competitive biological domain. We're infants here.

When the first probes reached Isis, there had been a keen effort to protect the planet from human contamination. But there was not a Terrestrial organism the Isian biosphere couldn't contain and devour, its immense array of enzymes and poisons quickly corrupting the fragile protein envelopes of Earth-based life. The death of Macabie Feya was simply Isis acting as Isis must.

“The planet doesn't hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”

Zoe looked away from the body to the forest canopy beyond the bier. The trees were sinuous, thin-boled, raising their limbs like great green hands. This, after all, was her realm, or soon would be. She had trained most of her life for protracted isolation in the Isian woodlands. If a native species had been named, she could name it; she could even supply tentative binomials for new species within a broad range of genera. But this was not a textbook, a file-stack, or a walkthrough simulation. The reality of it was suddenly overwhelming, even from the cloistered safety of the common room: real breezes shaking the foliage, real shadows eclipsing the forest floor. She had come within a few thin walls of Isis—at last, at last.