“Understood.”
A wind from the west turned leaves in the trees. The same wind no doubt carried her scent deeper into the forest. No, don’t think about that. “Tam?”
“Yes?”
“You grew up in the Kuipers. Red Thorn, you said?”
“Right. Red Thorn’s a big KB habitat in the Near Oorts, one of the oldest Kuiper settlements. Three-quarters G spin around the long axis, so I didn’t have to adapt much for Isis.”
“Happy childhood?”
There was a pause. “Happy enough.”
“Creche or biofamily?’’
“Bio. No creches in Red Thorn; we’re conservative.”
“You miss the habitat?”
“Often.”
He was being careful, she realized. Thinking of her, of her difficult childhood. “You know, it wasn’t as bad for me as you might think. Being a creche baby. Before Tehran, anyway. I liked being with my sisters, my nannies.”
“Miss it?”
“Some things you can’t get back. That feeling of… being where you belong.”
“Nobody belongs on Isis.”
The skin of her excursion suit was exquisitely sensitive, too much so. She startled at the touch of a falling leaf on her shoulder. “Zoe?”
“Sorry. False alarm. There’s a breeze up. Feels like it might rain soon.” She wondered why it should be easier to talk to Hayes through the com link than face-to-face. “I know what I must seem like to a Kuiper person. Raised the way I was, I mean.”
“None of us chose his childhood, Zoe.”
“Like one of those old-time Chinese aristocratic women, her feet crammed into tiny shoes—do you know what I mean? Bent into someone else’s idea of beauty or utility.”
“Zoe …” He paused. “Old Kuiper maxim: ‘A broken human being isn’t even a good tool.’ You couldn’t have survived the way you did without something solid at the center of you, something all your own.”
Now it was her turn to pause.
Theo used to say, You’re playing hide-and-seek, Zoe. Hiding from me again.
But Theo always ferreted out her secrets. Most of them.
Hayes said, “Quiet now, Zoe, just a while longer. The target turned your way again. The tractibles will lure it away, but don’t call attention to yourself. And switch off your night vision, please, Zoe. The lenses leak; your eyes are glowing like a cat’s.”
“You can see me?” She wasn’t sure she liked the idea. “I’m monitoring one of the remensors. Hush now. I’ll keep you updated.”
She sighed and switched off the photon multiplier. Instantly, the dark became absolute. She closed her eyes and listened.
The wind was stronger now. Clouds had obscured the stars. A cold front was pushing in from the west, according to this morning’s meteorological report. Raindrops began to spatter the forest canopy.
There was a rustling sound in the undergrowth, maybe a few meters away. Her pulse ramped up yet again.
Hayes said, “That’s a tractible, guarding your flank. I know you can’t see anything. But I need you to keep calm right now, to keep as still as you can.”
She couldn’t see the triraptor nosing through the forest but her excursion suit reported its scent—not the actual airborne molecules, of course, but an electronic tickling of the appropriate receptor cells, a faint echo of something acrid and bitter in her nose.
The animal was close. Night-hardened remensors buzzed around her. She heard, at last, the unmistakable sound of something alive and massive moving through the brush.
“Steady, Zoe.”
Theo had taught her better discipline than this. She opened her eyes wide and imagined she saw it, the triraptor—the eyes of it, at least, glinting in a last wash of starlight from the eastern sky, classic predator’s eyes, chrome-yellow and alert.
And gone.
“Keep still, Zoe.”
Chasing some spider tractible, no doubt. “A while longer.” The sounds retreated.
Cautiously, she turned her face up to the misting rain.
“I miss Elam,” she whispered.
“I know, Zoe. I do too.”
“We’re running out of time, aren’t we?”
“Let’s hope not.”
ELEVEN
Degrandpre had planned to give Avrion Theophilus the full tour of the IOS—when had there been such a guest as Avrion Theophilus?—but the Devices and Personnel man was having none of it.
“What I want to see this morning,” Theophilus had said mildly, “is your shuttle quarantine.”
And what a grand scion of the Families this Theophilus had turned out to be! Tall, bone-thin, gray-haired, aquiline of nose and fashionably pale of complexion. Degrandpre’s orchidectomy badge, which so impressed his subordinates, was nothing to this man but a servant’s tattoo. No doubt Theophilus had already sired a brood of young aristocrats, strapping creatures with blue eyes and immaculate teeth.
Admirable, powerful! And potentially very dangerous. Avrion Theophilus was a Devices and Personnel functionary of unknown rank who conducted himself with all the arrogance of a Works Trust official, and that in itself was deeply confusing.
The news from Earth was equally troubling. Hints of turmoil among the Houses and the Families, show trials, perhaps a purge in the Trusts. But news through the particle-pair link was heavily censored, and although this Theophilus must know far more about the crisis than anyone onboard the IOS did, he hadn’t volunteered to talk about it.
And Degrandpre dared not ask, for fear of seeming impertinent.
It was all so maddeningly ambiguous. Should he court the favor of Avrion Theophilus, or would that appear as a betrayal to his sponsors in the Works Trust? Was there a middle path?
An oppressive emotional atmosphere gripped the IOS, much as Degrandpre tried to minimize it. The loss of the Oceanic Station weighted heavily on staff even here; by all accounts, the surface personnel had grown brutally dispirited. Some saw it as the end of the human presence on Isis. And that it might well be, although this Theophilus seemed disturbingly indifferent. “Your orbital station needs some maintenance,” Theophilus remarked blandly. “The ring corridor is filthy, and the air isn’t much better.”
The walls were dirty, true. Cleaning servitors had lately been scavenged for the interferometer project; replacements had not yet arrived from the Turing factories. As for the smell—“We’ve had some trouble with the scrubbers in our waste-management stacks. Temporary, of course, but in the meantime … I apologize. One grows accustomed to it.”
“Perhaps not as easily as one might hope.”
Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace ill a single phrase. He promised to see to the problem, though he couldn’t imagine what he could do except bother the engineers yet again. No spares had arrived with the Higgs sphere, and he cynically wondered if replacements had been set aside to make room for the noble mass of Avrion Theophilus.
He escorted his guest as far as the massive bulkhead doors dividing Shuttle Quarantine from the rest of the IOS. Theophilus proceeded to inspect the seals and the rivet heads in minute detail, making Degrandpre wait. “As I’m sure you’re aware,” Degrandpre hinted, “these are the standard bulkheads; the sterile perimeter is inside.”
“Nevertheless, I want these bulkheads inspected daily. By qualified engineers.” At Degrandpre’s shocked expression he added, “I don’t think the Works Trust will disapprove, do you?”
Degrandpre palmed the admit button and the bulkhead door wheeled open. Inside, a single Kuiper-born medical engineer monitored the quarantine from a steel chair. The four survivors of the deep-sea disaster, a shuttle pilot and three junior marine exobiologists, had been languishing in containment for ten days now. A monitor image from the isolation chamber filled the screen above Degrandpre’s head: two men, two women, all haggard in lab whites except for the pilot, whose Trust uniform was still relatively crisp.