Degrandpre pictured the IOS in his mind, a necklace of ten gray pearls spinning in a void. No, nine gray pearls and one black: infected, infectious. He would have to move his own quarters closer to the farms.
Certainly the new Turing gens would have to wait; it meant another delay for the D P interferometer project, but that was unavoidable. The grand plan to use Isis as a staging base for further Higgs launches depended on a stable Isian outpost—to be defended at all costs. Without the IOS, Degrandpre thought, the Trusts will lose the stars, at least for the foreseeable future.
His most immediate problem, though, was not contagion, but fear. The fact of the outbreak in Quarantine could hardly be hidden from the fifteen-hundred-plus crew of the orbital station, each of whom was painfully aware of being locked in a metal canister without plausible hope of escape. An emergency Higgs launch, Solen told him blandly, would save ten or twelve people depending on their combined mass.
“Motivate your workers,” Degrandpre said, “but don’t terrify them. Emphasize that these are extraordinary precautions we’re taking, that there has been no contamination outside the quarantine chamber.”
Leander of Medical said, “They know that, Manager, but they also have the example of the ground stations before them. The suspicion is that once contamination occurs, there’s no certain way to contain it.”
“Tell them we’re talking about one organism here, not the whole Isian biosphere.”
“One organism? Is that true?”
“Possibly. Keeping order is more important than telling the truth.”
The meeting moved on briskly, working through Degrandpre’s prepared agenda. So far, so good: the contagion had been contained, food and water supplies were safe, and other essential functions remained in good shape. The IOS was still a safe environment.
What had been stolen from them by the event in Quarantine was their sense of security. We have always been fragile, Degrandpre thought. But never as fragile as now.
Degrandpre ordered his communications manager to stay behind when the others left.
“I want all outbound messages routed through my office for approval, including routine housekeeping. Let’s not alarm the Trusts prematurely.”
The communications manager, a bony Terrestrial woman named Nakamura, shifted her weight uncomfortably. “That’s highly unusual,” she said—letting him know, Degrandpre supposed, that she wouldn’t cover for him if the Trusts eventually brought a complaint.
Young woman, he thought, that is the least of your problems. He noted her objection and dismissed her.
There was nothing here the Families needed to know, at least not right away. Above all else, the Trusts feared the consequences of importing an Isian pathogen to Earth. Alarm them, and the Trusts might well impose an extended quarantine … or even refuse to dock a Higgs module returned from Isis, leaving the survivors to drift until they starved.
Degrandpre didn’t relish the prospect of becoming one more frozen planetisimal, entombed in a sort of artificial Kuiper body, a cometary mausoleum arcing through endless orbits of the sun.
H e spoke to Corbus Nefford through a video link.
The station’s chief physician was clearly frightened. His uniform was ringed with perspiration; his face was pale and doughy, his eyes perpetually too wide. Degrandpre imagined the man’s thymostat pressed to its limits, synthesizing regulatory molecules at a feverish pitch.
“It’s absurd,” Nefford insisted, “at a time like this, that I should be confined here …”
“I don’t doubt it, Corbus. But that’s the way the containment protocols are written.”
“Written by pedantic theorists who obviously don’t understand—”
“Written by the Trusts. Watch your language, Doctor.”
Nefford’s narrow eyebrows and small mouth contracted petulantly, as if, Degrandpre thought, someone had tightened his stitches. The station’s former managing physician seemed on the verge of tears, not a good omen. “You don’t understand. These people died so quickly.”
“They died in Quarantine, yes?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then you should be safe enough.”
“All I want is to put some distance between myself and the contamination. Is that so unreasonable? Everyone else is huddling near the gardens, I understand. Why should I be used this way?” “It’s not your decision, Doctor.”
“I’ve worked in clean environments all my life. I’m a Family physician! I maintain health! I don’t perform autopsies! I’m not accustomed to this degree of, of…”
Nefford trailed off, swiping his forehead on his sleeve. The managing physician was sick.
With fear.
Let it be fear, Degrandpre thought. For once, he envied his father’s stubborn faith. A prophet to pray to. Here, there was no prophet, no Mecca, no Jerusalem. No paradise or forgiveness, no margin of error. Only a devil. And the devil was fecund, the devil was alive.
SEVENTEEN
The evacuation of Marburg took a day and a half. The field station was a twin of Yambuku, set deep in the Lesser Boreal Continent’s temperate forest. Like Yambuku, it was situated in a cleared perimeter, its rigorously sterile core contained inside layers of increasing biohazard. Its biologically hot outer walls were scrubbed daily by maintenance tractibles, or should have been—lately the tractibles had begun to malfunction; the bays were full of machinery demanding maintenance, and bacterial films had compromised three of the station’s exit locks. When the shuttle dock seals began to show similar wear, the station man-Shoe Clan virologist named Weber, called for general evac.
The call was not well-received by the IOS. Apparently Marburg’s shuttle would be routed to a secondary bay that was being set up for prolonged quarantine. Weber ascribed this to Terrestrial paranoia, though he feared it might signal something worse.
But there was no postponing the evac. Weber loved Isis and had worked hard to make Marburg a going concern. But he was also a realist. Postpone the evacuation much longer and people would begin to die.
The Oceanic Station had already collapsed. The Isis Polar Station, anchored in the glacial wasteland of the planet’s northern ice cap, reported no significant problems and continued to operate on a day-to-day basis.
Yambuku, however, was on the brink of total breakdown.
Avrion Theophilus burst through the shuttle-bay doors from de-con, brushed aside his courtesy detail, and marched direcdy to Yambuku’s remote-ops room.
His full-dress Devices and Personnel uniform drew a few stares from the otherwise distracted downstation crew. He was accustomed to that, at least from the Kuiper-born. In civilization it would have been considered ridiculously gauche, the peasant’s impulse to stare. But Yambuku wasn’t civilization.
He found the station manager, Tam Hayes, coming off a long remensor session. Hayes looked groggy, unshaven. Theophilus took him aside. “We need a place to talk.”
I gather she’s injured,” Theophilus said.
“It looks that way.”
“Out of contact.”
“Verbal contact, certainly. We’re still getting some telemetry, but it’s intermittent. The fault may be with our antenna array. Remensors are down, too, and the excursion tractibles are dead. All of them.”