Elam Mather, supervising from well within the sterile core, reviewed their telemetry and cleared them to leave the station. They had already advanced through three layers of semi-hot exterior-ring cladding; now the final door, a tall steel atmosphere lock, slid open on naked daylight.
Not sunlight. A solid overcast hid the sun and made the nearby forest shadowy and forbidding. Zoe stepped past Hayes in his massive armor and stood in the clearing, looking ridiculously vulnerable. She looked, in fact, almost naked. Her excursion suit gave her features a ruddy glow but concealed nothing.
Her arms and shoulders moved without restraint. Her upper body was supple, small taut muscles moving under blemishless skin. Her breasts were compact and firm. Hayes feared for her, but Zoe was fearless. She moved awkwardly at first, the leg and pelvic gear hampering her stride, but with a coltish, obvious joy.
“Slowly, Zoe,” he warned her. “This is a telemetry exercise, not a picnic.”
She came to a stop, hands out, chin uplifted. “Tam! Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
She was practically giddy. “The rain!”
The rain had begun imperceptibly—at least to Hayes—a gentle mist rolling out of the west. Raindrops spattered the dry clearance and rattled the leaves of the forest. Droplets began to bead on Zoe’s second skin. Dewdrops. Jewel-like. Toxic.
Hayes had never been to Earth. The biotic barrier was simply too steep; it would have meant countless inoculations and immune-system tweaks, not to mention a grueling whole-body decon when he moved back into Kuiper space. But he was a human being, and a billion years of planetary evolution had been written into his body. He understood Zoe’s pleasure. Warm rain on human skin: What was it like? Not like a shower in the scrub room, he thought—judging by Zoe’s helpless grin.
She turned and moved precipitously toward the wooded perimeter, arms loose at her sides. Vine trees looped bay-green leaves above her head. In the wet shade, she was almost invisible. Hayes watched in consternation as she leaned down and plucked a vivid orange puffball from the mossy duff of the forest floor. The fungus dusted the air with spores.
The danger was glaringly self-evident. A single one of those spores could kill her in a matter of hours. A cloud of them wreathed Zoe’s head, and she laughed through the respirator with childish delight.
He walked to her, as fast as his armor would permit. “Zoe! Enough of that. You’ll overload the decon chamber.”
“It’s alive,” she marveled. “All of it! I can feel it! It’s as alive as we are!”
“I’d kind of like to keep it that way, Zoe.” She grinned, and silver rain pooled at her feet.
H e coaxed her in at last, after a half-hour’s stroll around the station perimeter. Back inside, Zoe had finished showering by the time Hayes finally struggled out of his armor. He joined her in the quarantine chamber. Decontamination was agonizingly thorough and there was no sign that the excursion gear had worked less than perfectly, but Yambuku protocols called for a day in isolation while nanobacters monitored both of them for infection.
Two bunks, a wall monitor, and a food-and-water dispenser: That was Quarantine. Zoe stretched out on one of the cots, reduced by these blank walls to something less glorious than she had been in the open air. Hayes filed a brief written report for the IOS’s archives, then ordered up a coffee.
Zoe occupied herself by leafing through the six-month itinerary, the document Elam had already shown him. Hayes found himself trying to imagine Zoe as Elam had described her, as a D P bottle baby lost for two years in some barbaric orphan factory, sole survivor of her brood group.
Nothing quite so dramatic had happened to him, but he understood well enough the emotional consequences of exile and loneliness. Hayes had been born into the Red Thorn Clan, hardcore Kuiper Belt republicans one and all. Red Thorn bred a lot of Kuiper scientists, but he was the only one on the Isis Project—one of the very few Red Thorns on any kind of Trust-sponsored effort. A lot of Red Thorns had died in the Succession, and the clan’s opinion of the Trusts was roughly equivalent to a quail’s opinion of the snake that devours its eggs.
When Hayes signed his Isis contract, he had been disowned by both clan and family. He was tired by then of Red Thorn extremism and would not have minded the excommunication, save that it included his mother—herself an Ice Walker, married to his father after a Kuiper potlatch in ’26. Ice Walkers were equally hostile to the Trusts but were reputed to value family above all else. When his mother turned her back on him at the docks, she had been trembling with shame. He remembered the coral-blue jumper she had worn, possibly the soberest of all her bright-colored dresses. He had understood then that he might never see her again, that this humiliating operetta might be their last living contact.
After that, putting his signature to a Family loyalty oath had seemed an act as degrading as wading through excrement.
But it was the only road to Isis.
How much worse, though, for Zoe, raised as a machine and brutalized when D P fell out of favor. She had taken a loyalty oath, too, Hayes thought, but hers had been written in blood.
She turned the last page of the itinerary. He saw her mouth congeal into a frown. “Bad news?”
She looked up. “What? Oh—no! Not at all. Good news! Theo’s coming to visit.”
Avrion Theophilus. Her teacher, Hayes thought. Her father. Her keeper.
SIX
To a previously Earth-bound oceanologist such as Freeman Li, the Isian seafloor was a combination of the familiar and the bizarre in unpredictable proportions. He would have recognized, perhaps on any similar planet, the pillowstone lava flows and the active volcanic vents—“black smokers” feeding the deep water with bursts of heat and blooms of exotic minerals. The powerful light of his benthic remensor picked out rainbow growths of bacterial mat on the surrounding seafloor, thermophyllic unicells in a thousand variations, almost as ancient as Isis herself. And this, too, was familiar. He had seen such things in the deep Pacific, years ago.
Away from these landmarks, the Isian ocean floor was powerfully strange. Highly calciferous plants rose in towers and obelisks and structures that resembled mosques. Swimming or moving among them were forms both vertebrate and invertebrate, some of them large but most very small, shining silvery or pastel-pale under the unaccustomed light.
Interesting as these creatures might be, it was the simple mono-cells Li had come to collect. Something in these most ancient forms of Isian life might provide a clue to the big questions: how life had evolved on Isis, and why, in all its eons-long exfoliation, that life had not produced anything that could reliably be called sentience.
Behind this lurked the larger question, the question Li had chewed over so often with the Yambuku planetologist Dieter Franklin, the question so central and so perplexing that it began to seem unanswerable: Are we alone?
Life was hardly a novelty in the universe. Isis was testament to that, and so were the even dozen biologically active worlds that had been detected by planetary interferometer. Life was, if not inevitable, at least relatively common in the galaxy.
But there had not been, for all of mankind’s attentive listening, any intelligible signal, any evidence of nonhuman space travel, any hint of a star-spanning civilization. We expand into a void, Li thought. We call out, but no one answers.
We are unique.