At least her hands were free. Zoe touched a finger to the identity pad of the monitor.
Avrion Theophilus appeared at once. Theo was an older man, well into the first decade of his second century. His hair was white but thick, his skin pale but supple. He greeted her in High English, causing the Kuiper-born technicians to exchange uneasy looks.
He apologized for the interruption. “I wanted to wish you luck, not that you need it. Time is short, I know.”
Too short. Or not short enough. Zoe couldn’t name the odd hollowness she felt in her stomach. “Thank you.”
She wished he could be here to say good-bye in person. She missed her mentor. She had left him more than a year ago, in a sun garden on Diemos. Theo couldn’t come to Phoenix because he would have brought his intestinal flora with him. Phoenix was clean—at the moment, the cleanest inhabited environment in the system; Zoe’s own benign bacteria and other biological hitchhikers had been systematically eradicated, replaced where necessary with sterile nanobacters. Even the technicians from the disease-free Kuiper colonies had been deconned for service on Phoenix.
“Be brave, little one,” Theo said. “It looks crowded there.”
The chamber was crowded, crowded with technicians as close as cattle in a pen, all of them waiting impatiently for Zoe to finish her conversation. “They treat me as if I’m radioactive,” she whispered.
“You’re not. But they will be, if they don’t evacuate on schedule. I don’t doubt it makes them nervous. We ought to let them get on with their work.”
“I’m glad you called.” It was good to see him again, his High Family face so calm and proud. Avrion Theophilus was the only human being Zoe had ever fully trusted, and the hardest part of this mission—at least so far—had been her separation from Theo. Was that a paradox? She had been bred and regulated to endure solitude. But Theo was different. He wasn’t ordinary people. He was … well, Theo.
The closest thing to a father she had ever known.
“Travel safely, Zoe.” He seemed to hesitate. “You know I envy you.”
“I wish you could come with me.”
“Someday. With any luck, someday soon.”
That was cryptic, but Zoe didn’t ask what he meant. Theo had always wanted to see Isis. And in a sense, he was going with her. You can’t take much baggage across the bridge to the stars, Theo used to say. But memories were massless, and her memories of Theo were deeply held. She wanted to tell him so, but her throat closed on. the words.
He gave her an encouraging smile and as suddenly as that, was gone. A technician took the monitor away.
Time ebbed quickly now. The journeyrig’s containment ring snapped shut around her throat, immobilizing her head. This part would be uncomfortable, though she had rehearsed it a number of times; she would have to endure paralytic confinement and absolute darkness, at least until the medical system was activated and the suit began to flood her body with narcotic and anxiolytic molecules. I will sleep, Zoe thought, inside this steel box.
She waited for the massive helmet, dark and enclosing. Her heart hammered at the cage of her ribs.
The remaining technical staff, Anna Chopra among them, left Phoenix in a small armada of reaction rockets.
Anna had not forgotten her small act of defiance, though she wished she could. It had been, of course, stupid. A gesture, a whim, without utility, and in all likelihood without consequence. She was tempted to confess and have done with it; better an early euthanasia than another ten years in a geriatric ward.
Although … she took a deep and private pleasure at having, finally, at her age, a secret worth keeping.
Had she done the girl a favor? She had thought so when she applied scalpel to flesh, but she doubted it now. When Zoe Fisher woke up without her neurochemical safety net, the change would not be obvious. It would take weeks, perhaps months, for her neural receptors to perceive and react to the absence of the thymostat. Symptoms would set in gradually, maybe gradually enough for Zoe to adapt to the unregulated life. She might even learn to like herself that way. But sooner or later, the Trusts would find her out. Her thymostat would be replaced, and whatever new essence Zoe had distilled in herself would be drained away. And that would be that.
But, still… everything born had to die, the Trusts perhaps excluded, and if life meant anything, then even a brief life was better than none. Deep inside herself, Anna liked the idea of this Zoe Fisher, this Devices and Personnel bottle baby, wrenched out of the grip of the Trusts even for a day.
Do something, Zoe, Anna thought. Do something gaudy or foolish or grand. Weep, fall in love, write poetry. Look wild-eyed at this new world of yours.
She adjusted her cabin screen to the exterior view of Phoenix, already a faint point of light in a well of empty space. She had decided she wanted to see the launch—the bright bloom of the fusion event, the brilliant aurora as it faded.
Comatose and immobilized, Zoe became one more inert object to be ferried by tractible into the deep core of the launch facility and harnessed inside the payload sphere, which was suspended in turn by enormous pylons from the cored massif of rock and ice. Lenses of exotic matter surrounded the sphere like huge octagonal crystals. The lenses would be destroyed along with the rest of Phoenix, but only in the femtoseconds after they had served their purpose.
The cometary body was rigged for induced-field fusion. Neither Zoe nor the tractible robots were aware of the countdown ticking away in Phoenix’s supercooled processor arrays. The detonation would be triggered by processors in the payload capsule itself as soon as the fail-safe sequences were satisfied.
It was the third interstellar launch this Terrestrial year, each launch as costly as creating an entire new Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm. A measurable fraction of the solar system’s economic output had been channeled into this project. Not since the ancient days of Apollo and Soyuz had exploration been so enormously difficult to manage and finance.
All irreversible now. Microswitches poised for months fell at last into their final alignment.
Zoe slept, and if she dreamed, she dreamed only of motion, a separation as ponderous as the calving of glaciers.
In her dreams, the light was fiercely bright.
PART ONE
ONE
Decanted unconscious into the almost windowless environment of the Isis Orbital Station, Zoe longed for a glimpse of her new world. Wanted it so badly, in fact, that she was contemplating a serious breach of protocol.
She could prompt the image of Isis onto any local screen, of course. And she had seen such images for much of her life, often daily—images either relayed to Sol from the IOS or captured by the planetary interferometer.
But that wasn’t enough. She was here, after alclass="underline" scant hundreds of kilometers from the surface of the planet itself, Low Isis Orbit. She had traveled farther in an instant than a conventional spacefarer could hope to travel in a lifetime. She had arrived at the very edge of the human diaspora, the dizzying brink of the abyssal deeps, and she deserved a direct look at the planet that had drawn her so far from home—didn’t she?