Her excursion suit tunneled beads of sweat from her skin to the membrane’s surface, cooling her as she walked. Sunlight turned the membrane white. She glanced at her arms. She was as pale as a purebred daughter of some Nordic Family, aristocratic white.
She had not traveled more than a kilometer when Tam Hayes opened a direct link to her. About time, she thought.
“’Zoe? We’d like you to halt where you are for the time being.”
“Can’t,” she said. “Not if I want to be back before dark. You’ve been talking to the IOS all morning. Time doesn’t stop just because Kenyon Degrandpre is keeping you busy.”
“That’s the point. They want the excursion extended.”
They, she noted. Not we. Hayes didn’t approve. “What do you me an, extended?’’
“Specifically, they want you to turn back, cross the Copper at the mobile bridge and break camp on the east bank. Remensors wall, scout a path to the digger colony, and the tractibles will trail-blaze for you. Two days of traveling ought to put you just inside the animals’ food-gathering perimeter.
Which was absurd. “I can’t do fieldwork! We’re still testing the excursion gear!”
“Feeling at the IOS is that your gear passed all the tests.”
“This pushes the schedule by at least a month.”
“Somebody’s in a hurry, I guess.”
She supposed she knew why. The Oceanic Station had collapsed and all the other Isian outposts had suffered worrisome seal failures. Zoe’s excursion suit might be performing brilliantly, but without a staging platform like Yambuku, it was as useful as a rain-hat in a hurricane. The Trusts wanted to maximize the use of her before Yambuku had to be evacuated.
Cross the Copper River toward the foothills? Move deeper into the bios while Yambuku staggered toward collapse? Was she brave enough to do that?
“Personally,” Hayes said, “I’m opposed to the idea. I don’t have the authority to overrule it, but we can always find an anomaly in your gear and order you back for maintenance.”
“But the suit is flawless. You said so yourself.”
“Oh, I think Kwame Sen could be convinced to shade a graph or two if it came to an argument.”
She thought about it. “Tam, who gave this order? Was it Degrandpre?”
“He sanctioned it, but no, the order came from your D-and-P man—Avrion Theophilus.” Theo!
Surely Theo wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. She capped her doubts. “Keep Kwame honest. I’ll cross the river.”
“Zoe? Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.”
No.
“Well… I’m sending out three more tractibles with supplies and equipment. They should catch up with you by dusk. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re on immediate recall at the first sign of trouble. Any kind of trouble. Give me the word, I’ll cover it with the IOS.”
He added, “I’ll be watching,” which made her feel both strong and weak at once, and signed off.
Zoe gazed across the placid Copper. Her pack tractibles acknowledged a new set of orders from Yambuku by circling back behind her, ambling up the trail like dimly impatient dogs and waiting for her to follow.
The bridge over the Copper River was a string of logs spun together with strands of high-tensile monofilament and anchored at either end with spikes driven deep into the gravelly soil. It was sturdy enough, Zoe supposed, but makeshift, not meant to last. Mild as the seasons on Isis were, another few weeks would see monsoon rains swelling the Copper to its limits, and this small specimen of tractible engineering would be washed away and dispersed.
The bridge crossed the Copper at a broad and shallow place where, if she looked between the slats, she could see the polished river rocks and the quiet places where creatures not quite fish— they looked like overgrown tadpoles—swarmed and spawned. She could have forded the river here, she was certain, without any bridge at all. Some of her cargo tractibles did just that, managing the water with their javelin legs more surely than they could have navigated these loosely strung logs.
Across the river the trail was less obvious; it had not been as completely blazed as the path to the bridge. By their nature the tractibles passed delicately over the landscape; it took a great deal of mechanical effort to flatten a patch of grass, much less to clear away tangled undergrowth. She would have to proceed more carefully here. The excursion suit’s membrane was strong enough to resist tearing under any ordinary circumstance, but a sharp enough pressure—a knife blade with some strength behind it, a large predator’s claws, or a fall from a height—might open a seam.
She doubted she would have trouble with knives. As for predators, the tractibles and insect remensors would watch out for her. And in any case these rocky foothills were not as inviting a hunting ground as the savanna that stretched to the south and west. Triraptors were dangerous but uncommon here; the smaller, faster carnivores were about the size of house cats and easily frightened away from something as large and unfamiliar as a human being. That was perhaps one reason the digger colony had thrived here.
And as for heights—well, she would be reluctant to press far beyond the diggers’ rangeland, into the hills where the Copper River ran in narrow, fast channels among slate-sharp rocks. Short of that, she was confident of her footing. What was left to fear?
Any often thousand unsuspected events, Zoe thought. Not to mention her own state of mind.
Not that she felt bad. The opposite. Her moods had been mercurial, but right now she felt surprisingly good, felt solid, walking in the sunlight and swinging her arms with a freedom she hadn’t felt since creche. The trail followed a low ridge eastward; when the ridge rose high enough she was able to see the canopy of the forest sloping to the west, as dense and close as a well-kept secret. All of this touched her—she didn’t have a better word—in a way she had thought impossible, as if when she left Yambuku, she had not donned a protective membrane but stripped one away. She was as raw as a nerve; the simple blue sky made her want to weep with joy.
She could think of no explanation for these mood shifts … unless she was deregulating. Could that be? But thymostats were simple homeostatic machines; she had never heard of a bioregulator malfunction. Anyway, wouldn’t it have shown up on her medical telemetry?
Doesn’t matter, some traitorous part of her whispered. She was alive—truly alive for the first time in many years—and she liked it.
Liked it almost as much as she feared it.
She halted well before dusk at one of the potential campsites mapped into the tractibles’ memory. The ridgetop broadened here into a stony plateau, tufts of green succulents poking through the topsoil between slabs of glacial rock. Pitching the tent was easy— the tent was smart enough to do most of the work itself—but anchoring it proved more difficult. She drove stakes into stony cracks and soil-filled hollows, tethering her shelter the old-fashioned way. She queried Yambuku for a weather report, but nothing had changed since this morning: skies clear, winds calm. Isis was showing her gentle aspect.