So impossibly fast!
He tore off his goggles. His face was a mask of blood, nostrils gushing freely, his eyes already scarlet with burst capillaries.
He said something incomprehensible—it might have been her name—and collapsed to the floor.
Elam’s heart raced. She didn’t scream, because it seemed to her that the siren was already screaming on her behalf, that all the dread in the world had been summed into that awful noise. The floor of the pod seemed to slip sideways; she sat down hard on her tailbone a scant meter from Freeman Li’s twitching corpse.
She put her fingers to her own nose, drew them back and looked blankly at the bright red spots of blood.
So this is death, she thought. All this red mess. So untidy. She closed her eyes.
NINE
The spin of the IOS was fortuitously timed. Kenyon Degrandpre was at his small office viewport and looking in the right direction when the latest Higgs sphere arrived, the effect wasn’t spectacular. He had seen it before. A flash in the starry sky, that was all, brief as summer lightning: a scatter of photons and energetic particles, and then the afterglow, a blue Cherenkov halo. A Higgs launch tortured the vacuum around itself, forcing virtual particles into unequivocal existence. It was not simply a journey but, in its way, an act of creation.
The Higgs sphere with its carefully shielded cargo was of course invisible at this distance, a speck in the greater darkness, still half a million miles away. Rendezvous tugs had already left the IOS to retrieve it, the sphere’s transponder announcing its location and condition. But of course it had arrived exactly where it was expected. Higgs translations were accurate to within a fraction of a kilometer.
The Works Trust had supplied Degrandpre with a cargo manifest; he held it in his hand. Aboard that invisible spacecraft were a number of unfamiliar and ominous things. Radical new genetic algorithms for the Isian Turing factories. Small robotic probes to be launched into the outer system. And, far from least, the new man, the “observer,” the cipher, the threat: Avrion Theophilus. Degrandpre’s rather dated Book of the Families described Theophilus as a high-level Devices and Personnel officer, loosely connected to the Psychology Branch as well as a distant relative of the Quantrills and the Atlanta Somersets. Which might mean … well, anything.
Degrandpre turned to his scroll and called up Zoe Fisher’s file, scanning it again for clues. Apart from the obvious connection with Theophilus—he had been her case manager—there was no hint of his hidden agenda. Or of hers, assuming that this Zoe Fisher really was some kind of D P dog-in-the-manger. He couldn’t imagine what Terrestrial dispute might turn on the fate of one bottle baby, for all her fine new technology and linguistic skills. But history had often enough turned on smaller fulcrums: a bullet, a microbe, a misplaced word.
Restless, he called Ops for an update on the Turing manifests. What came back through his scroll was the sound of confusion, until Rosa Becker, his second-shift supervisor, picked up a voice link. “Sir, we’re having problems with our telemetry.”
Degrandpre closed his eyes. God, no. Please. Not now. “What telemetry?”
“Telemetry from the deep-sea outpost. It’s gone. We’re blank here—the station’s just off the map.” “Tell me it’s satellite malfunction.”
“Only if we lost all our redundancies at once …” A pause, another crackle of hurried conversation. “Correction. We have a single shuttle upbound from the pod chain. Reporting survivors on board. But that’s all.”
“What do you mean, that’s all?”
“According to the pilot…” Another pause. “No other survivors. Just wreckage.” Just wreckage.
Freeman Li’s nightmare had come true.
“Sir?”
And mine, Degrandpre thought.
“I want that shuttle quarantined indefinitely,” he said, facing the immediate threat, postponing his own fear. “And sound the stations. We’re on full alert.”
But he felt like a dead man.
The occasion was Zoe’s first solo excursion, the final systems test before she attempted a daylong hike to the Copper River. Tam Hayes left his work—gene-mapping the monocell cultures—and crossed the core quad to the north wing, where Zoe was already suiting up.
His thoughts careened between Zoe’s excursion and his research. In both cases, mysteries outnumbered certainties. Cellular genetics on Isis would remain a puzzle for years, Hayes was certain. The biochemical machinery was infuriatingly complex. What to make of organelles that also led independent lives outside their parent cells, that reproduced as retroviruses? Or the tiled complexities of microtubules ringing the cell walls? Every question begged a thousand more, most of them concerning Isian paleobiology, a field of study that barely existed. Apart from a couple of glacial core samples and Freeman Li’s work with thermophyllic bacteria, there wasn’t any hard data, only conjecture. All those unbroken years of evolutionary recomplication had obviously bred ancient parasitisms deep into the mechanism of life—every energy exchange, every selective ionization, every release of ATP was a fossilized act of predation. Complex symbiotic partnerships had arisen the way mountains rise from the clash of tectonic plates. Out of conflict, collaboration; out of chaos, order. The mysteries.
His mother had trained him in the Mysteries, had taken him to chapel every month. Both Red Thorns and Ice Walkers were primarily Old Deists, a faith much given to philosophizing. The monthly sermons had gone over his head, but he thought often of the annual invocation in the observatory chamber. He had been taken into that cold, domed space to count constellations like rosary beads while the warm bodies of the congregation pressed against him, voices joined in hymns as his mother clutched his hand so tightly it hurt. Was it entirely his fault, then, that he had fallen in love with the stars?
The Red Thorns had thought so.
He found Zoe in the prep room struggling into her excursion suit, Tia and Kwame tabbing the seams for her. Kuiper-born, the two had never learned to respect Terrestrial nudity taboos and they obviously didn’t know or care why Zoe flinched at their touch. She looked at Hayes with a rescue-me expression.
He sent the two technicians down to the shuttle bay to give Lee Reisman a hand.
“Thank you,” Zoe said meekly. “Really, I can do this myself. They designed the gear that way. It just takes time.”
“Shall I leave too?”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “If you need help, ask.”
She drew on the leggings, the active membrane as limp as plastic film until it found and matched the contours of her skin; then it mapped itself in place, pinkly translucent, a second skin. She bent to pull on the more conventional hip boots, her small breasts bobbing.
She looked up, caught his eye and blushed conspicuously. Hayes wondered if he should turn away. What would a Terrestrial do?
She pulled her arms through the filmy torso membrane and said something too quiet for him to hear. He cleared his throat. I m sorry?
“It would be faster if you sealed the tabs.”
He came across the room, recognizing his eagerness to touch her and suppressing it; she was easily frightened… The tabs of the excursion suit were three bars of fleshy material where the seams met across the small of her back. He touched her skin where it dimpled against the curve of her spine and felt an odd sense of familiarity … she was practically a Kuiper woman, at least genetically, her genome sampled from the stock that had settled the asteroids, hardy raw material for a new diaspora… He sealed the garment gently and watched the membrane form itself to her body, heard her indrawn breath as the protective skin tightened over breasts, nipples, the base of her throat. Without the headgear, without the waste-management pack, she might have been naked. His hand lingered on the ridge of her hip, and she shivered but didn’t object.