Which was fine, but it left her with nothing to do except monitor her own telltales, watch the cumulus clouds writhe up the distant peaks, and function-test the pack-mule tractibles.
She didn’t look forward to another night of darkness.
That afternoon, Tam Hayes contacted her by narrow-beam transmission from Yambuku. That was odd. The tight-beam antenna was a last-ditch redundancy, limited to line of sight and narrow in bandwidth. Clunky, voice-only, like an antique telephone line.
“This is off the record,” Hayes began. “Nobody’s eavesdropping, and nothing we say goes into the station’s memory. Zoe, are you in a safe place? I’m in the shuttle bay; I don’t have a remensor view.”
“Sitting in the shelter waiting for the wind to drop.” “Good. We have a lot to talk about.” “You start,” Zoe said.
He began by reading her the contents of Elam Mather’s message.
Zoe had entertained some of these suspicions herself. About the thymostat, anyway. “But it must have been functioning when I left Phoenix. The medical surveillance was extremely tight.”
She thought of Anna Chopra, the Terrestrial physician who had presided over her health during the long pre-launch months. A tall woman, gray-haired, a non-Family functionary from Djakarta, was it? Grim and wordless and quite dedicated.
“Maybe an act of sabotage,” Hayes suggested. “Some Family turf war working itself out.”
Maybe, but Family feuds were seldom so subtle. An accident, more likely.
“The point is,” Hayes went on, “you shouldn’t be out there by yourself with a dead ’stat.”
“If that’s all you wanted to say, you could have said it wideband.”
“Thought you might want to keep this private.”
“Meaning you think I might want to stay this way. Unregulated. Like a Kuiper woman.”
He left a silence in the distance between them. “Yes,” he said at last, “maybe. It’s your call, of course, Zoe.”
My call, she thought. My choice.
But it begged too many questions. The thymostat regulated personality: Am I the same person I was three months ago?
So hard, Zoe thought, to hold yourself in your hand, weigh yourself, render a judgment. She felt better. She felt worse. She said to Hayes, “You must have suspected something …”
“From time to time, but I’m Red Thorn; we don’t wear thymostats and I’ve never been sure what to expect from people who do. Elam’s been to Earth; she had better instincts.”
“There are different kinds of thymostats. Mainly, they regulate mood, but mine did more than that, Tam. It suppressed unpleasant memories. It also displaced sexual impulses and directed that energy into my work.”
“But you’re functioning without it.”
She reminded herself that no one could hear her. No one but Tam. “I feel like I’m on the edge all the time. Sleep is disturbed. I have mood swings. Sometimes this whole excursion seems futile and dangerous. Sometimes … I’m afraid.”
Another long pause. Wind rattled the shelter.
“Zoe, we have medical spares. We can fix you up.”
“No. I don’t want that.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’m not certain of anything. But I don’t want to go back to being … what I was.”
What I was for Theo. What I was for the Trusts.
Hayes said, “I’ll do everything in my power to keep this quiet. The risk is that Avrion Theophilus will look at your medical telemetry and figure it out for himself.”
Better that than facing him, Zoe thought. One look at me and he would know. He would see it in my eyes.
“In any case, you’re in no shape to spend another day in the field. I want you back here where I can look after you.”
“No,” Zoe said. “I’d rather finish this.”
“It’s not just the ’stat. I want you back here in case we’re forced to evacuate.”
“Evacuate Yambuku? Tam, is it that bad?” “Things change quickly.”
He described a series of cascading seal failures and filter-stack problems. Everything crumbling, Zoe thought. Everything falling apart. “Give me a day to think about it.”
“It’s another day’s worth of risk.”
“Nothing we do here is safe. Give me a day, Tam.”
“You don’t have to prove anything.”
“Just a day.”
A fresh torrent of rain battered the shelter. She imagined the tractibles squatting miserably in the open. Did tractibles experience misery? Did their sealed joints ache in the cold?
“Zoe, I have an alert here. We’ll talk again.”
Soon, she hoped. In the absence of his voice she felt doubly alone.
The squalls abated over the course of the day, followed by a cooling breeze from the west. Zoe had seen all sorts of Isian weather from the protected core of Yambuku, but you had to be outside— exposed—to appreciate the substance of the weather, its moods and subtleties.
Or maybe the failure of her thymostat had made her more sensitive.
More vulnerable.
Was this how the unregulated masses experienced the world? Everywhere she looked, Zoe seemed to find some shadow or echo of herself. In the tossing of the trees, the cascade of rainwater from leaf to leaf; in the cloudy daylight on the gorse, the sparkle of mica in ancient rocks. Mirrors.
We’re not born with souls, Zoe thought; they invade us from outside, make themselves out of shadow and light, noon and mid-She wondered whether Theo had arrived from orbit yet, whether he was already deconning at Yambuku.
Did Theo have a soul? Had a soul ever colonized the perfect body of Avrion Theophilus?
She scouted her perimeter during the long afternoon, ranging within a kilometer of the digger colony, though she saw none of the animals. She avoided their foraging territory and their funerary grounds. She didn’t want to alarm them; only, perhaps, leave a trace of her scent, a token of her presence.
She arrived back at camp well before sunset with her escort of spidery tractibles trailing behind her. The machines were mud-spattered and streaked with yellow pollen. One of them lagged badly. It had developed a limp.
Settled into her shelter for the night, she scrolled her own medical telemetry past her corneal display and requested an analgesic from the medical pack-mule to treat her various aches and itches.
High particulate content in the air—from forest fires in the far west—made the sunset long and gaudy. Zoe entered a few notes into her excursion log, made routine contact with Yambuku, and tried once more to sleep.
An alert roused her just past midnight. Tam’s voice was in her ear as she sat up into the disorienting darkness: “Zoe?”
“Yes, I’m here, let me find a light—” She found and activated the tiny photostorage cell next to her bedroll. A “firefly lamp,” they called it. About as bright.
Hayes went on, “We have major-malfunction tags on five of your tractibles—two of the packmules and three of the perimeter surveillors.”
“Something attacked them?”
“Apparently just mechanical interrupts, but it can’t be coincidental. I’m worried about the level of protection you’re getting.” “Hardware malfs? You’re sure?” “Nuts-and-bolts failures.”
“I’ll fetch the repair kit and turn on some field lamps. Where are the tractibles now?”
“On your doorstep. We brought them in as soon as they began to complain. But, Zoe, we’re getting strange telemetry from the remaining surveillors.”
“Company?”
“Hard to say. Nothing big. We have remensors covering for the robots. But I want you to be careful.”