Zoe adjusted the headset to fit her skull. “Yes.”
“And you know the terrain?” From simulations.’’
“Okay. We’ll call this a training jaunt. Just keep me in sight at all times and do as I say.”
Yambuku operated its telepresence devices from a console room no larger than Zoe’s cabin. She was aware of Tam Hayes in the chair next to hers. In Yambuku’s ultraclean environment, odors became more intense. She could smell him—a clean smell, soap and laundered cotton and his own unique scent, like spring hay. And, alas, herself: nervous, eager. She activated the headset and the room fell away from her awareness—though not the scent.
Hayes activated the remote, and two dragonfly remensors rose from a bay at the periphery of the shuttle dock into the still noon air.
The remensors’ fragile wings glistened with photoelectric chiton cells, microscopic prisms. Their elongated bodies curled downward for stability as the devices hovered in place.
Zoe, wrapped in the headset and hands on the controls, saw what her rernensor saw: Yambuku from a height, and the wooded rift valley infinitely deep and wide beyond it, an unbroken canopy of green dappled with gentle cloud shadows.
Her heart hammered. Another wall had fallen. Between herself and Isis there were many walls, but every day fewer, and soon enough, none; soon enough, only the insensible membrane of her excursion suit. The two realms, her Terrestrial ecology of blood and tissue and the deep Isian biosphere, would come as close to physical contact as technology permitted. She longed to touch her new world, to feel its breezes on her body. The feeling was startling in its intensity.
Tam Hayes spoke. He was sitting beside her at the console, but his voice seemed to ring out of the bright blue sky. “We’ll take it slowly at first. Follow as close as you can. If you lose sight of my remensor, use the display target to find me. And don’t be afraid to ask questions. Ready, Zoe?”
Stupidly, she nodded. But with his headset on he could see only her dragonfly remensor, a device identical to his own. “Ready,” she said belatedly. Her hand trembled on the guide stick. Her remensor quivered responsively in the sunlight.
“Up to three thousand meters first. Give you the long view.”
As quickly as that, Hayes’ remensor spiraled into a vertical ascent. Zoe promptly guided her own dragonfly upward, not following him slavishly but keeping pace, demonstrating her ability. In the upper left corner of her headset an altitude readout flickered ruby iridescence.
At three thousand meters, they paused. The winds here were stronger, and the dragonfly remensors bobbed like hovering gulls.
“Altitude is the best defense,” Hayes said. “Given the cost of these remotes, we prefer to keep them away from insectivores. The greatest danger is from aviants. Any large bird within a kilometer will toggle a heads-up alert, at least here in the open. Down in the canopy, things are trickier. Keep your distance from trees if at all possible, and stay at least five or six meters off the ground. Basically, stay sharp and watch the telltales.”
She knew all this. “Where are we going?”
“To the digger colony. Where else?”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Zoe decided she liked this man Tam Hayes.
The dragonfly remensors relayed only audiovisual information. As they moved westward, there was no physical sensation of flight. Zoe remained aware of the pressure of the chair against her buttocks, her solid presence in the remote-sensor chamber. But the images she saw were deep, rich, and stereoscopic. And she could hear clearly what the remensors heard: at this altitude, only a gentle rash of air; lower, perhaps the trickle of water, the cries of animals.
Together, they flew across the glinting ribbon of the Copper River, named by Hayes’ predecessor for his Kuiper Clan. Large aviants and small predators had gathered to drink along the sandy shore, where slower waters pooled. She saw a herd of epidonts sunning themselves in the shallows. Beyond the river the forest canopy closed tight once more, seed trees and spore trees undulating like so much green linen toward the foothills of the Copper Mountain range.
“It’s all so familiar,’’ Zoe whispered.
“Maybe it seems so.” Hayes’ voice came from the empty sky beside her. “From this height, it might almost be equatorial Earth. Easy to forget that Isis has a wildly different evolutionary history.
Work we’ve done in the last six months suggests that life here remained unicellular far longer than it did on Earth. In Terrestrial organisms, the cell is a protein factory inside a protein fortress. Isian cells are all that but better defended, more efficient, far more complex. They synthesize a staggering array of organic chemicals and exist in far harsher environments. On the macroscopic level—in multicelled organisms—the functional difference is minor. The complexity is what matters. A carnivore is a carnivore and it relates to herbivores in the obvious way. Get down to the cellular level, the fundamental bios of the planet, and Isis looks a lot more alien. And more dangerous.”
Zoe said, “I meant the terrain. I’ve flown this way in a thousand suns.”
“Sims are sims.”
“Survey-based sims.”
“Even so. It’s different, isn’t it, when the landscape is alive under you?”
Alive, Zoe thought. Yes, that was the difference. Even the best sims were only a sort of map. This was the territory itself, moving, changing. A passage in an ancient dialogue between life and time.
Hayes escorted her lower. She saw his dragonfly remensor flash ahead of her, jewel-bright in the noon sun. The foothills lay ahead, wooded ridges etched with creeks. As the land rose, the forest changed from water-loving vine and cup plants and barrel trees to the smaller succulents that thrived in the stony upland soil. A dispersed ground cover opened fat emerald petals, like the blades of aloe vera. Zoe recited the Latin cognomens to herself, savoring the sound of them but wishing the Isian forest could have taken its common names from an Isian language, if there had ever been an Isian language. The closest equivalent was the cluck-and-mutter vocalizations of the diggers, and whether these constituted “language” in any meaningful sense was one of the questions Zoe hoped to answer.
The digger colony itself, from the air, was exactly like its sims, a cluster of mud and daub mounds in a trampled clearance. Charred remnants of cook fires pocked the soil. Hayes circled the colony once, then descended in a slow spiral, watching the sky for predators attracted by the diggers’ refuse heaps. But the sky was clear. Impulsively, Zoe dropped ahead of him. Hayes didn’t rebuke her, and she was careful to stay within his security perimeter.
She wanted to see the diggers.
Only still images had been transmitted down the particle-pair link to Earth. She had seen multiple photographs, and more than that, images from a remote autopsy performed on a digger that had been killed by a predator, the carcass salvaged by tractible and dissected by surgical remensors. Bits of it were still preserved in Yambuku’s glove-box array—frozen blue and red tissue samples. Zoe had heard recordings of the diggers’ vocalizations and had analyzed them for evidence of internal grammar. (The results were ambiguous at best.) She knew the diggers as well as an outside observer could know them. But she had never seen them in vivo.
Hayes seemed to understand her excitement, her impatience. His dragonfly remensor hovered protectively nearby. “Just not too close, Zoe, and don’t ignore your telltales.”
The diggers were the most widely distributed vertebrate species on Isis. They were found on both major continents and several of the island chains; their settlements were often complex enough to be detectable from orbit.