They were mound-builders and limestone-excavators. Their technology was crude: flint blades, fire, and spears. Their language—if it was a language—was equally rudimentary. They appeared to communicate by vocalizing, but not often and almost never socially—that is, they signaled, but they didn’t converse.
Any deeper study of the diggers had been hampered by Isis’s toxic biosphere, by the impossibility of interacting with the diggers except through the intermediary of remensors or tractibles … and by the difficulty of knowing what went on inside their deeply tunneled mounds, where they spent a good portion of every day.
Zoe descended past the treetops into a cacophony of birdsong. Flowers like immense blue orchids dangled from the high limbs of the trees, not blossoms but a competing species, a saprophytic parasite, stamenate organs projecting from the blooms like pink fingers dusted with copper-red pollen.
She moved lower still, under the tree canopy and into a shade-dappled space where fern-like plants unfurled from the damp crevices between exposed tree roots. Not too low, Hayes reminded her, because a triraptor or a sun lizard might uncoil from some stump or hole and crush her remensor between its teeth. She hovered in the generous, shadowed space between two huge puzzle trees, wings whirring softly, and turned her attention to the digger colony.
The colony was old, well-established. It harbored nearly one hundred and fifty diggers by the last rough count. The population was supported by stands of fruit-bearing trees to the west, plentiful game, and a clear brook—more nearly a river in the rainy season—running out of the high Coppers. To the west was a meadow of sunny scrub weed where the diggers concentrated their excretions and buried their dead. The digger colony itself was a cluster of rock and red-clay mounds, each mound at least fifty meters wide, overgrown with scrub and fungal mycelia.
The digger-holes were narrow and dark, reinforced with a concrete-like substance the diggers made from an amalgam of clay or chalk and their own liquid wastes.
Two diggers were present in the clearing around the mounds, hunched over their work like bleached white pill bugs. One tended the communal fire, feeding windfall and dried leaves into the flames. The other scraped a point onto a length of wood, a spear, turning it at intervals over the fire. Their motion was laconic. Zoe wondered if they were bored. Flints and knapping rocks Uttered the hardpack soil.
“They’re not,” Hayes said, “beautiful animals.”
She had forgotten that he was beside her. She started at the sound of his voice: too close, too intimate. Her dragonfly remensor wobbled in the shade.
One of the diggers looked up briefly, black eyes swiveling. It was at least fifteen meters away.
“They are, though,” Zoe whispered (but why whisper?). “Beautiful, I mean. Not in some abstract way. Beautifully functional, beautifully adapted for what they do.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
She shrugged, another wasted gesture. The diggers were beautiful, and Zoe didn’t particularly care whether Hayes could see that or not.
A harsher, stronger evolution had shaped them. One of the diggers stood erect in the sunlight, and she appreciated the versatility Isis had built into it, a sort of living Swiss Army knife. Upright, the digger was a meter and a half tall. Its domed gray head projected from a sheath of flesh like a turtle’s head. Its eyes, black and immensely sensitive, rolled in rotary sockets. Its upper arms, the digging arms with their spade-shaped dactyls, hung laxly from high shoulder joints. One of its smaller manipulative arms grasped the new spear, multijointed thumbs wrapped around the wood. Its cartilaginous belly-plates expanded and contracted as it moved, giving it the look of something too flexible for its size, like a giant millipede.
The digger’s beak-shaped muzzle opened. It emitted a series of muted clicks, which its companion ignored. Talking to itself? “That’s Old Man,” Hayes informed her. “Pardon me?”
“The digger with the spear. We call him Old Man.” “You named the diggers?”
“A few of the most recognizable. ‘Old Man’ because of the whiskers. Long white curb-feelers. Everybody at Yambuku’s been here by remensor, most of us more than once, and Old Man pays us a return visit from time to time.”
“He comes to the station?” Why hadn’t this been in the reports? Degrandpre’s information triage, she supposed; zoological data sacrificed to production statistics.
“Every few days, ’long about dusk, he skulks around the perimeter of the station, checks us out. Stares at the tractibles if we have any running.”
“Then they’re curious about us.”
“Well, this one is. Maybe. Or maybe we’re just an obstacle on the way to his favorite fishing hole. You don’t want to jump to conclusions based on one individual’s behavior.”
Zoe flew her dragonfly remensor in a ragged circle, trying to attract the digger’s attention again. Old Man swiveled his eyes toward her instantly.
The sense of being seen was almost frightening. In her chair in the remensor cabin, Zoe shivered.
“Speaking of dusk,” Hayes said, “the nocturnal insectivores start hunting as soon as the shadows get long. We should head for home soon.”
But that’s where I am, Zoe thought. I am home.
FIVE
They called Hayes “the monk of Yambuku”—partly because he had been on Isis longer than almost anyone else, partly because his work kept him continuously busy. He was diligent about management chores but essentially thought of them as a distraction. What he relished were the rare moments—such as this one—when he found himself back in the lab, with no pressing concern beyond the microanatomy of Isian cells.
What life had achieved on Isis, it had achieved with DNA. Like Terrestrial life, Isian organisms used these long-chain molecules to store and alter hereditary information. But DNA was an encodable molecule, a blank book, and in these similar books, Earth and Isis had recorded very different histories.
There was no evidence of broad mass extinctions on Isis. Early in its history, the Isian stellar system had been as violent as the environment around any young star; cometary impacts had given Isis its water and organic molecules. But some later event, or perhaps the simple presence of an enormous gas giant twice the size of Jupiter in the outer system, had swept away a great deal of aboriginal rock and ice, at least as far out as the Isis system’s icy ring, its own Kuiper Belt. Life had emerged on a world far more placid than the primitive Earth.
Life on Isis was a longer, deeper river. Its narrative was slow and complexly exfoliated, punctuated not by ice ages or cometary impacts but by waves of predation and parasitism. The Isian ecology was an evolving, armed detente. Its weapons were formidable, its defenses ingenious.
Which made the planet, among other things, a vast new pharmacopeia. Much of the cost of maintaining Yambuku was paid for by Terrestrial pharmaceutical collectives under the Works Trust. And that was a problem, too. Everything that came out of Yambuku had to be justified to Trust accountants. There was no room here for pure science, as the Kuiper-born employees were made distinctly aware. Hayes supposed the Trusts specifically liked him because he hadn’t rotated back home and immediately published a score of articles in the independent academic journals. Giving away—as the Trusts saw it—what they had paid for.
He finished the work he was doing, microdissecting a bacterial entity that had been growing on the exterior seals, stored his results and tidied up the glove box for the afternoon shift.
He looked up as Elam entered the lab. By now, he had learned to recognize her footsteps. Yambuku had a staff of sixteen, most of them on yearly rotation, though some, chiefly himself and Elam Mather, had lived at Yambuku for most of five years now. Kuiper folk endured such close quarters far more easily than Terrans or Martians, which meant that most of the Yambuku hands were Kuiper born—although they came to Isis strictly as employees of the Trusts.