She checked in with Dieter after a hasty meal. No real news, Dieter said, except that this Avrion Theophilus, the Devices and Personnel mystery man, was due down on the next shuttle.
Theo at Yambuku, Zoe thought.
Given her mood, she guessed that should have made her happy. She wondered why it didn’t.
The sun drifted behind the Copper Mountains. Zoe finished the ungainly process of eating through the excursion suit and was ready to make another assault on the citadel of sleep when an alert popped into her corneal display. The voice of Yambuku this time was Lee Reisman, who had taken over the shift from Dieter. “We have a large animal on your perimeter,’’ Lee said, then: “Oh! It’s a digger!”
She was instantly alert. “Is it approaching the tent?”
“No … according to the remensors, it’s holding about a hundred yards off your location. Tractibles are positioned to intercept it, but—”
“Leave it alone for now,” Zoe said.
“Zoe? This isn’t an appropriate time to initiate contact.”
“I just want a look.”
She climbed out of the tent, her vision augmented in the deepening dusk. Slate rocks radiated the day’s heat like embers. She had thought the digger might be hard to see, but she spotted it at once and increased the amplification in her membrane lenses accordingly.
It—make that he—was already a familiar presence: this was the digger Hayes had called “Old Man.” She recognized the white whiskers, the splay of tendrils under its eyes.
She looked at Old Man, and Old Man looked back at her.
It was, of course, impossible to read any emotion into that face, as much as the human mind wanted to try. We project ourselves onto other animals, Zoe thought; we see expression in the faces of cats and dogs; but the digger was as inscrutable as a lobster. The eyes, she thought. On any creature larger than a beetle, the eyes are the primary vehicle of expression; but the digger’s eyes were simple black ovals in a bed of bony flesh. Bubbles of ink. Windows through which some dim not-quite-sentience regarded her coolly.
“Old Man,” she whispered. The curious one.
Old Man blinked—a flash of silver over shimmering black— then turned and loped away.
THIRTEEN
What Hayes had not told Zoe was that cascading seal failures had kept him busy most of the day. He could not help wishing that Mac Feya were still here to lend a hand—Mac had been good at patching seals. Barring the one that had killed him.
Lee, Sharon, and Kwame were more than competent engineers, but they were overtaxed and running on minimum sleep. For now, the situation had been stabilized—replacement seals installed and samples from the failed gaskets glove-boxed for analysis. Hayes had been following the work closely. Dieter Franklin took Hayes into his laboratory to look at adaptive changes in the bacteria feeding on the gaskets, the increasing density of fibrillary matter in the body of the cell, microtubules coiled like DNA where, a month ago, there had been only a few stray threads. The granular bodies on the cell surface were also novel, synthesizing and excreting highly polar molecules, digging into their environment. Dieter waved a hand at the screen he had called up: “It’s not the same organism we were looking at six months ago.”
“Same genome,” Hayes said. “Same organism.”
“Same genome, but it’s expressing itself in a radically different way.
“So it’s environmentally sensitive.”
“At the very least. Might as well say it’s trying to pry open the station and come inside.”
Dieter was Gamma Stone Clan, given to overstatement. “If they’re growing, it’s because we’re feeding them.”
“They’re dying as fast as they grow.”
True enough. Hayes had spent his share of time in excursion gear, scrubbing decayed bacterial mats from the station’s exposed surfaces. Kamikaze bacteria? “I don’t think they literally want to kill us, Dieter.”
“That might be a dangerous assumption to make.”
Hayes was famous for the hours he kept. People said he never slept.
Lately that had been all too true. He had personally supervised much of Zoe’s ongoing excursion, not to mention coordinating the seal repairs and a complete changeover on one of the big filter stacks. He was averaging four or five hours of sleep per night and was often grateful to get that much. Sleep deprivation had left him testy and hypersensitive. For the first time in his life, he envied the Terrestrial hands who wore thymostats. He had to make do with caffeinated drinks and willpower, the poor man’s equivalent.
It was late when he left Dieter Franklin’s laboratory. Almost everyone but the graveyard shift had retired for the night. At night, the station seemed both too large and too small—the echo of his footsteps came back to him as if from a vast space, but the sound was flat, contained: a dosed space. Every avenue a dead end.
Yambuku had never seemed so fragile.
His research notes lay untouched in his cabin. He was tempted to go there now, but a last task awaited him, one he had been putting off. This Terrestrial D P kacho was due down in the morning and would need fresh quarters. But there was only one vacancy at Yambuku, and that was the cabin Elam Mather had occupied.
Cleaning it out for Avrion Theophilus was a simple enough chore. No one on Isis owned anything substantial. The joke was, you came to Isis the way you came into the world: naked and afraid. And left: the same way.
Elam had left rather differently, but she had taken nothing with her. Still, the sheets needed to be laundered and the wall screens cleared of personal displays.
Small work, but not work he relished. Nor could it be delegated. When a hand died, the station manager always cleared the cabin. He had done the same thing for Mac Feya. Any old hand would; it was one of the few customs the Isis Project had developed.
He let himself into the cabin with his master key.
Elam’s desk light winked on as he stepped inside, then so did the wall screen—a live image of Isis relayed from orbit. Was this how Elam had liked to imagine herself, out of the toxic bios, above it all? Or had she simply preferred to take the long view?
He switched off the screen and dumped Elam’s preferences back into the station pool. Then he collected and folded her sheets and took the issue garments from her shelves. All were of the uniform ultralight charcoal-colored cloth imported from Earth. He put them outside the door for a tractible robot to pick up. Elam’s laundry would cycle interchangeably through the Yambuku housekeeping system; in a day or two, he might be sleeping on one of these same sheets.
Last, he used his scroll to open Elam’s personal memory cache in Yambuku’s core memory. Mac had left his filestack full of random notes to himself, letters home, indecipherable notes. Elam was tidier than that; likely all that remained to be cleared would be lists, schedules, and access numbers.
But when he asked for a global delete, one item came up red-tagged.
It was a message, unfinished, and it was addressed to him.
Tam,
Currently skimming over the ocean on the way to meet Freeman Li. Realized we hadn’t had an opportunity to talk lately. Can we get together as soon as I’m back? Until then, some thoughts.
No doubt you remember when I told you to steer clear of Zoe Fisher. Maybe I was wrong. (Shows how much my motherly advice is worth, I guess.) There is something special about that girl, I agree, but you have to understand, Tam— her specialness makes her dangerous. Maybe very dangerous.