Zoe had known people who longed for isolation and people who dreaded it. On Earth a person was never truly alone, and it was easy to project a whole spectrum of fears and hopes into that unobtainable void, a vacuum full of self. It meant freedom, or shamelessness, or absolution, or the simple loss of all direction.
Fantasies.
Alone, Zoe thought, is listening to this rain batter the small membrane between herself and toxic nature. Alone meant memories swollen into nightmares.
In her dreams she was in Tehran.
According to the Trust doctors, these memories had been safely buried. But whatever was wrong with her seemed to have let slip the leash. Whenever she closed her eyes the awful images came roaring back.
The orphan creche was a cinderblock dungeon spread across acres of oily gravel and ringed with lethal glass-wire fences. It was, like most of the charity creches scattered across Asia and Europe, a leftover from the plague century. It might once have been a humanitarian project, one of the great Social Works of the first Trusts, but it had become little more than a collector for the state brothels. Lately its resident managers had realized that they could expand their personal profit margin by renting their charges on the public market, or at least that segment of the market too impoverished or ill to patronize the licensed pleasuredromes.
The drawback was that the inmates at the Tehran West Quad Educational Collective—as the sign above the gate proclaimed it— weren’t offered the kind of medical supervision required even in a bargain-basement, licensed brothel. Nor were its customers, mainly manual laborers from the local Trust factories ringing the city, carefully screened.
Zoe had arrived with her pod of genetically identical sisters, Francesca and Poe and A vita and Lin, shipped from their birth creche by orbital cargo transport, hungry and bewildered. At first the Farsi-speaking nurse had fed them protein soups and dressed them in warm if graceless smocks and patiently endured their demands for home. But after a day or two of this, they were transferred to the dormitories.
And the horror began.
Memory swept through Zoe’s dreams like a winter gale.
Everyone was used, and everyone died.
Francesca died first, of a fever that wracked her body for five long February days, until she turned her emaciated body to the cinderblock wall and simply ceased to breathe.
This is wrong, Zoe remembered herself thinking. We were made to go to the stars. This is wrong.
Poe and Lin died together when a fierce hemorrhagic contagion—the nurses called it Brazzaville 3, which it may have been— swept the dormitories. Zoe, in her despair, had not felt much grief at the passing of three of her sisters. She was selfishly grateful that the brothel trade had diminished out of fear of the plague. Unfortunately the food supply had diminished too, and that wasn’t good. There had been talk of quarantine; the whole West Quarter of the city was practically deserted for the next six months.
But the disease passed in time. Zoe and Avita were among the souls not harvested.
Zoe grew closer to her only remaining pod sister, and it affected her more powerfully when Avita died, almost randomly, of some disease born of malnutrition and neglect. She is my mirror, Zoe thought, gazing at Avita’s corpse during the long hours before the hygiene crew came to collect it. When I die, Zoe thought—and she had supposed it would be a matter of months, at most—when I die, this is how I will look. Like a soft clay statue, pale and shiny and indifferent.
She missed Avita and Francesca and Lin and Poe. The other inmates were often cruel to her, and her white-masked minders casually despised her, and she thought death might not be so terrible, really, certainly no worse than living on and on inside these walls.
Then Theo came to Tehran.
Something had happened, something political, something in the High Families. She remembered Avrion Theophilus from the creche. He had stopped by once a month to survey the pods, and he had been partial to the five small sisters, often stroking Zoe’s hair while the nannies ducked their heads at him and dull-witted tractibles brought him tea and sugar cakes, which he shared. He had always looked so resplendent in his black uniform, and he looked resplendent now, in Tehran, but darker, angrier, shouting at the orphan keepers, who cringed away from him. He cursed the obscenties of the dormitory, the frigid showers, the assignation rooms with their coarse and filthy blankets.
He swept Zoe up into his arms—cautiously, because she had become fragile. His uniform, pressed against her cheek, smelled of fresh laundry, of soap and steam-pressing.
She thought of him as a kind of king or prince. Of course he was not—he was only peripherally of the Families at all, a cousin’s nephew’s cousin, essentially a high functionary with the Devices and Personnel branch of the Trusts. He was a Theophilus, not a Melloch or a Quantrill or a Mitsubishi. But that didn’t matter. He had come to get her. Too late for Poe or Lin or Avita or Francesca. But not too late for Zoe.
“One of my girls survived,” he murmured, carrying her out into a Human Services mobile chnic. “One of my girls survived.”
When he tried to hand her to the doctors she clung to him so fiercely that she had to be sedated.
Zoe woke abruptly, numb with dread. There had been a sound … but it was only a rattle of thunder bouncing between the peaks of the high Coppers. Locally, the rain had slowed to a drizzle.
Dim light came through the polyplex shelter. Morning.
She felt shaky and tired. She opened the shelter and climbed out into the rain. Water sheeted off the granite outcrops and drenched the blades of the gorse-like plants that grew in the deep glacial scars. Pack-mule tractibles lurched comically about the campsite. Their legs found little purchase in the wet; periodically they folded their limbs and sat down like weary dogs.
Clouds tumbled up the Coppers in gusting billows. The forest steamed.
She selected a ration dispenser from the store aboard a nearby tractible and carried it back under cover. The rain had beaded on her excursion suit. She itched. The membrane kept her clean, even shuttled flakes of dead skin to its surface and shed them as sterile dust; nevertheless, she itched. The itch was intermittent, confined to her ribs and thighs, and was not a real problem—yet. But if it got worse … well, people had been known to claw themselves bloody in order to a cure an itch. Which, under the circumstances, wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.
Eating was a chore. The ration tube had to be attached to the excursion suit’s face mask, which opened a sterile passage between mouth and food—agonizingly slowly. She compressed the ration tube by hand. The nutrient paste that oozed onto her tongue was fundamentally unappetizing and as perfectly textureless as mud. And never enough to convince her she had really eaten.
The rations also tended to pass through her body quickly, which presented her with another tedious and unpleasant problem.
By the time she finished with all this, the sky had begun to clear. The wind had grown gusty again, however; it dragged at the polyplex fabric and would no doubt be making life difficult for the robots and remensors.
She thought about calling Yambuku. Her check-in was due.
She thought about Theo, of how he had saved her from the orphan ranch, memories that had tumbled through her dreams like broken glass…
And her inexplicable dread of him.
She linked to Yambuku for her daily update and spoke briefly to Cai Connor, who was manning the excursion desk. No news and stay put: the winds would diminish overnight and then she could reconnoiter the digger colony before heading back.