“Fresh download from the IOS,” Elam said, scroll in hand. “Do you want to look at it now or later?”
He sighed and gave up his glove-box station to Tonya Cooper, a resident microbiologist who had been standing at a bench and tapping her foot impatiently. “We can do this over lunch, I hope?”
“Don’t see why not.”
Elam brought her scroll to the lunchroom but set it aside while they ate. Food at Yambuku consisted of uninspiring nutrient chunks of various kinds, assembled from the subgrade output of the IOS’s gardens. “Compressed protein,” Elam called it, or less kindly, “compost.”
“We need to find a more inert substance for the seals,” he said.
“Is that possible?”
He shrugged. “Ask the engineers. As it is, we’re spending more time on maintenance than on basic research. And running unnecessary risks.”
Risking lives, he thought. Yambuku seemed eerily quiet without Mac’s roaring voice.
Elam picked up the agenda and spread it out on the tabletop. Hayes scooted his chair closer.
“Item one,” Elam said. “Zoe’s excursion suit is ready for the walkaround test, according to Tia and Kwame. Zoe, of course, can’t wait to take it out. What we want is a closely observed walk around the clearances, accompanied by a partner in conventional armor and with heavy tractible support.”
“And what Zoe wants is to roam around the forest until she feels like coming back.”
“You guessed.”
He smiled. “I can talk her out of the long hike. And I’ll partner her for the excursion.”
“Uh-huh.” Elam gave him a speculative look.
“What does that mean—’uh-huh’?”
“How much do you know about our Zoe?”
“The basics. She’s clonal stock from the old genome collection, raised by Devices and Personnel.”
“She is a device, the way they see it. Put it together, Tam. Think of it from the Trust’s point of view. They don’t give a shit about the linguistic nuances of the diggers or the taxonomies of Isian flora. She’s here for some other reason.”
He didn’t share her fascination with Terrestrial politics. “Devices and Personnel doing another little dance with the Works Trust?”
“More than that, I suspect. The two factions have always been rivals, but Devices and Personnel has been in eclipse since the turn of the century. I suspect they see Isis as their chance to steal a march on the Works bureaucracy. If Zoe’s excursion technology performs as promised, it’s practically a revolution—we can expand the human presence on Isis way beyond what it is now.”
“Elam, we can’t even keep our external seals clean.”
“And that’s the point. Zoe’s device isn’t just a new technology, it’s a dozen new technologies—high-efficiency osmotic filters, stress-resistant thin-film polymers more biologically inert than anything we have … it’s a coup d’etat.”
“High praise.”
“No, I mean literally. The Works Trust has been foundering on Isis for two decades, and the problems only get worse. If Devices and Personnel can step in and make Isis a paying proposition in one swift stroke, they might garner enough Council support to oust the WT hardliners.”
All this left Hayes feeling impatient and uncomfortable. “Earth politics, Elam. What does it mean to us?”
“If it works, it means we get a whole new crop of kachos with new priorities. Best case. In the long run, it might mean permanent settlements. It might mean Isis gets rapidly strip-mined for its biological and genetic resources. It would almost certainly mean a lot less Kuiper involvement.”
“Would it?”
“’Well, why are we here? Partly because the Works people can exploit our scientific savvy without being beholden to Devices and Personnel. Partly because we’re accustomed to living and working in small groups in enclosed environments. If Devices and Personnel is prepared to open up Isis to anyone with one of their environmental interfaces—and if they can do that without a humiliating liaison with the Kuiper Republics —then they blow the Works Trust out of the water. And us besides. Not to mention the future of genuine science on this planet. They won’t disseminate knowledge, they’ll patent everything they learn. And bypass us on the way to the stars.”
“You suppose Zoe is aware of all this?”
“Zoe is a cat’s-paw. She thinks it’s all an exozoology project. But Devices and Personnel owns her. Read her file again—the fine print. She was decanted and raised in a high-class D and P creche until the age of twelve. Then, suddenly, she was dumped into a Tehran orphan ranch along with four clonal siblings.”
“A lot of people get shunted off-line like that. Bureaucracy.”
“Yeah. But check the date. August of thirty-two—the Works Trust has half the high staff of D and P arrested for sedition. A power struggle. September of thirty-two, Zoe and sibs are dumped in Tehran. January of thirty-five—another staff shake-up, this time in the Works Trust itself. A bunch of Devices and Personnel kachos are reinstated, hauled back from the rehab farms and declared heroes. March, of thirty-five, D and P collects Zoe from the orphan farm.”
“Just Zoe?”
“Her sibs didn’t survive. Iranian orphan farms aren’t exactly the Lunar Hilton. All Zoe knows is that she was rescued. They bought her loyalty, cheap.”
“Cheap for them. It must have been traumatic for her.”
“Can’t you tell?”
He nodded. “She’s not exactly well-socialized.”
“She’s a victim and a tool, raised on promises and theory and thymostats and bullshit. Some advice? Don’t get attached.”
I’m not attached, Hayes thought. To anything. “She’s a long way from home, Elam.”
“Not as far as you might think. She has a keeper, a Devices and Personnel kacho named Avrion Theophilus. He was her trainer, her teacher, and her surrogate father after Tehran. And according to this agenda, he’s coming to Isis.”
Night fell, reflected on a dozen screens throughout Yambuku. Hayes had a session with Dieter Franklin. The tall planetologist drank too much coffee and took his pet theories, something about the microtubule structure of Isian microcells, out for a walk. It was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep Hayes up past midnight.
The station was quieter after dark. Curious, Hayes thought, how we all pace ourselves to these circadian rhythms, even though the Isian day-clock ran a couple of hours slow. He walked the corridors of the core once around, a caretaker’s gesture, then went to bed.
Zoe was excited over her first walkabout. She was restrained during the suit-up, but Hayes knew by the color in her cheeks and the flash in her eyes that she had imagined this moment for years.
The memory of Mac Feya rose up to dim his own excitement. Zoe’s excursion suit was impossibly flimsy. Elam was right: this wasn’t an improved bioarmor, it was a whole catalog of new technologies … carefully hoarded, he supposed, by the gnomes of Devices and Personnel. And yes, if it worked, it would transform the human presence on Isis.
Zoe was ready and waiting by the time he had sealed himself into his infinitely more cumbersome bioarmor. She appeared Ember and free by comparison, with nothing riding her body but a semitransparent membrane, a pelvic sheath to recycle wastes, a breathing apparatus that hugged her mouth, and a pair of substantial boots.