But when he raised his hand to touch her hair, she ducked her head away. Whispered, “Not there.” “Why not?”
“Only where I’m protected.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Was this what she wanted? Needed? He put his hands on her waist and drew her closer. “Protected,” she had said: protected against contact, he supposed, or against the idea of contact.
He wanted to tilt up her head and say something comforting. Fie might have, if the station alarm had not sounded.
Zoe gasped and backed away as if stung.
Hayes looked at the blinker on his pocket scroll. Something about the oceanic outpost. No details, but obviously more bad news.
It was the bios, Hayes thought, closing in on him again.
PART TWO
TEN
Zoe wasn’t truly alone in the forest. She was surrounded at all times by insect-sized remensors and larger, spider-legged tractibles; and she was linked to Yambuku by extensive telemetry … but she felt alone, unspeakably alone, especially after midnight.
This was what she had been born for, this aloneness. Her hermetic impulse had been built into her DNA, the same gen mods the first Kuiper colonists had carried into the emptiness beyond Neptune—a race of monks, carving their hermitages out of frozen, starlit massifs. She was not afraid to be alone. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. She found herself frightened of a number of things. She woke well after midnight in the darkness of her tent. The tent was a simple polymer-and-foam geodesic, designed not to protect her from the elements—her excursion suit did that—but to disguise her from the native wildlife. The excursion suit was a semi-open system; she carried food and water in sterile containers with self-sealing nozzles, but she excreted the inevitable wastes— bluntly, piss, shit, and C02. Her wastes were scrubbed by the suit’s processors and nanobacters, but even sterilized human waste was a magnet for Isian predators. Solid and liquid wastes could be contained and buried, but her breath and perspiration were harder to conceal. The tent helped, circulating external air slowly and bleeding her molecular signature through osmotic and HEP A filters.
But no system was perfect. The loss of the Ocean Station less than ten days ago had made that perfectly clear. Systems were imperfect, or imperfectly adapted to the Isian biosphere, which led to the unhappy thought that she might even now be attracting nocturnal predators that had evaded her perimeter defenses.
That hushed, woody rattle in the distance, for example, might be wind in the trees, or it might be…
Bullshit.
She sat up, exasperated, all hope of sleep fled. She found it hard enough to rest in the excursion suit, which faithfully reported to her skin the pressure of every twig and pebble under the gel floor of the tent—but it was worse to be afflicted with the midnight jitters. An array of robotic remensors scanned her perimeter at all times for motion or telltale molecular signatures; nothing larger than a grub could sneak up on her. And her tent was, if not perfect, certainly grub-proof.
So to hell with nagging fears. She was just restless. She pulled on her protective leggings, opened the tent door and stepped out into the windy darkness of the cycad-like Isian forest.
The only ambient light came from a sprinkle of stars above the leaf canopy, but there was enough of it to give the suit’s photon multiplier something to work with. The forest through her iris lenses appeared as a map of squat tree boles against a diffuse grid of wind-rippled foliage. Depthless, eerie. She adjusted her lenses to look for heat sources. And saw nothing more than a few roosting aviants and timid scavenger voles hardly larger than her thumb.
Nothing to lose sleep over. She turned her face to the sky again.
The brightest star wasn’t a star at all. It was a planet, named Cronos by some unimaginative Terrestrial number-bender when it was detected a century ago: the Isian system’s enormous gas giant, currently at the aphelion of its looping orbit. Cronos had contributed to Isian geohistory by sweeping the system of its rocky and icy debris; comets were rare in the Isian sky. Less a Titan, Zoe thought, than a fat guardian angel.
Her inner-ear com link came alive, hissing faintly.
“Zoe?” Tam Hayes’ voice. “Your telemetry puts you outside the tent and your pulse rate is up, so I assume you’re awake.”
“I don’t walk in my sleep, if that’s what you mean.”
But she was immensely relieved to hear his voice.
“Restless?”
“A little. Is that a problem?” “No problem.”
The smallness of his voice inside her head made her even more aware of her position, alone in an alien forest. True, Yambuku wasn’t far away; but Yambuku was a sealed environment, a fragile bubble of Earth. She had left that bubble and she was outside of it, lost on Isis. On Isis, where there were no artificial lights, no roads, no amenities over the next horizon. Nothing over the horizon but more horizon, parallax to parallel; nothing between her and a planetary Level Five hot zone but a membrane a few molecules thick. Unsurprising then that Devices and Personnel had chosen to resurrect her genome from the old diaspora stock. Isis was at least as lonely as any barren Kuiper object. And much, much farther from home.
“Zoe?”
“I’m here.”
“We have a large animal paralleling your position, maybe fifty meters north-northwest. Nothing to worry about, but to avoid advertising your presence we’d like you to sit still for a few minutes.”
“Back to the tent?”
“We’ll keep you outside and mobile for now. Though I do wish you’d checked in before taking a walk. Just stay put, please, and let the tractibles do their work.”
“Is this thing stalking me?”
“Probably just curious. Quiet, please.”
She listened into the darkness but heard nothing. What kind of large animal? Most likely a triraptor, she supposed. She pictured it: eight-limbed, quadripedal, with four arms on its erect upper body and claws like tempered steel. Her excursion suit was tough enough to protect her from the bites of small animals and invertebrates but not from the industrial-strength carnage of a triraptor attack.
“Zoe?”
She whispered, “I thought you wanted me quiet.”
“We’re okay as long as we don’t shout. Can you make yourself comfortable out there?”
She scanned the ground, located a fallen tree trunk and sat down on it. Tiny insects from a disturbed nest swarmed over her footgear. Harmless things. She ignored them. “ ‘Comfortable’ is relative. At least we can talk. Taking the night shift again?”
“Midnight to dawn, as long as you’re on excursion.”
She was flattered, not to mention intimidated. She had been thinking—could not help thinking—of her encounter with Hayes in the prep room, how she had wept in his arms at the news of the oceanic tragedy, and how she had found her way to his cabin that night. Of the way he had touched her, eagerly but gently, a way she had never been touched by another human being.
And she had permitted it.
Encouraged it.
Dreaded it.
“Little scary out there? Your pulse rate’s up again.” She blushed—invisibly, thank God, unless the telemetry revealed that too. “It’s just… dark a long way in every direction.”