Hard to say.
She paused, hoping to divine some clue. Was there a breath of wind either way? There was not. Only the same stale, stinking air, hardly enough to fill her lungs. No sound. She thought perhaps the right-hand tunnel rose ever so slightly, and she turned in that direction.
Running into Theo’s arms.
“One of my children survived.” Running into Tam Hayes’ arms…
She woke hurting. Arms stiff, legs stiff, her head throbbing. Pressure all around her. And blind— No, it was the dark. The dark.
She had fallen asleep.
She cursed her carelessness—time had been wasted!—and fumbled for the next firefly lamp. She kept her eyes tightly closed as she worked her fingers, because she couldn’t see anything even if her eyes were open, and because with her eyes closed the darkness felt like a choice, her own chosen darkness, not something imposed by the weight of clay and stone around her. The warm darkness, perhaps, of sleep. Though she must not sleep again.
She scratched the lamp alight.
That was better. Only this endless tunnel to see, but the light was a blessing.
She crawled ahead a few meters—or maybe a lot of meters. There were no references here any longer, no time and no space. She might have traveled a great distance already, or she might be a scant few paces from her original cul-de-sac.
Bad thought.
The tunnel ahead of her began to widen. This was change at last, and the rush of hope she felt was intoxicating. She cautioned herself against it, but hope was like panic, irrepressible, a vast force no longer blocked by her thymostat.
The thymostat had been a kind of membrane too, Zoe thought—like her excursion suit, another barrier between herself and the world. Shutting out the viruses of panic and hope and love and despair. Lost now. She was naked and infected.
The tunnel continued to expand, became a larger chamber. She filled it with the sound of her labored breathing. Raised her hand and brought the light to bear. Lifted her eyes and saw—
—a dead end.
Another cul-de-sac.
She let her tears flow freely for a few precious minutes. The excursion suit, she thought idiotically, would recycle them.
She crawled back, sobbing intermittently, to the place where the tunnel branched.
How many lamps were left? Her memory was faulty; she was compelled to stop and count the remaining lamps with her fingers. One, two, three, four. Which meant that hours had passed since she left the chamber where she had been abandoned. She could even calculate the time, she supposed, if her mind were functioning a little more efficiently, if she had not lost an eternity to sleep.
Too much time, in any case. Too much time spent doubling her tracks.
She thought of open air. The memory was so vivid she could taste it. And sky, Zoe thought. Yes, and rain. And wind.
She heard faint sounds at the tunnel intersection. An exit missed? The sound of outside? But she had to be careful. She controlled her breathing. She put her head into the adjoining tunnel.
Where the black eyes of a digger regarded her coolly.
She held on to the firefly lamp even as the digger scuttled after her and clutched her ankles.
She hadn’t recognized the digger. It wasn’t Old Man. Absurd as that name was. This was simply an animal, or something as much insect as animal, long and too lithe in the close confinement of the tunnel, its thin body flexible, huge black eyes queasily mobile in their sockets, gripping claws tight as rings of tempered steel. She was shocked that she had ever found anything even faintly reminiscent of the human about these creatures. They were brutal but not even malevolent; their minds worked in strange, inhuman loops; whatever motivated them, she was opaque to it; their realm was not her realm.
It dragged her into another cul-de-sac—no, oh God, the same one, the one she had started from; she recognized the web on the wall—and rolled her over on her back.
Still she clutched the lamp. A small spark of sanity. The digger ignored it.
She closed her eyes, opened them.
The digger loomed over her. She supposed it was looking at her, though its eyes were as blank as bubbles of oil.
She looked back at it. Beneath her panic was a grim and wholly unexpected calm, an emotional deadness that was both relief and threat at once. A premature deadness … because she was almost certainly about to die.
The digger put one extended claw on her chest, on her sternum above her breasts.
She felt the pressure of it—enough to cause pain, perhaps enough to draw blood.
Then the digger began to slice at her excursion membrane, peeling away the broken material like pale, dead skin.
NINETEEN
All roads lead to Rome, Kenyon Degrandpre thought, and out here at the edge of the human diaspora he had become the embodiment of Rome, and down those roads marched all the bad news in the world, rank on serried rank.
Each new crisis demanded a fresh solution. The written emergency protocols had proved woefully inadequate.
The evacuation of Marburg, for instance. Clearly, the station manager was justified in calling the evac. Just as clearly, Degrandpre couldn’t sacrifice much more of the limited space aboard the IOS for a lengthy quarantine of fifteen individuals, any of whom might be vectoring some virulent microorganism. He resolved the conflict by housing the Marburg evacuees in a vacant engineering bay ordinarily used to launch Turing assemblers. Crude, cold, and uncomfortable quarters, but he ordered the chamber stocked with a week’s worth of food and water and equipped with sleeping mats, and considered himself generous for so doing. He also ordered the access doors double-sealed and declared the bay a Level Five hot zone pro tern.
And in his rare free moments—the calm, he imagined, of a falling object, a crystal goblet dropped from a tray before it strikes the floor—he was obliged to shuffle through routine Earth-bound particle-pair traffic to ensure that no hint of the ongoing crisis reached the wrong ears.
This paranoiac rant, for instance, from Yambuku’s resident planetologist, Dieter Franklin:
Mounting evidence suggests a mechanism of information exchange between physically unconnected living cells. Such a mechanism would allow a symbiosis that rides above the usual evolutionary process, a mechanism perhaps as significant as the ancient Terrestrial symbiosis of unicellular life and primitive mitochondria…
Whatever that meant.
The increasing efficiency of bacteriological attack on downstation seals and the penetration of supposedly inert barriers (a phenomenon shared across immense distances by otherwise unrelated organisms) led to the investigation of intracellular quantum events such as …
No, strike all that. “Bacterial attack” would raise an alarm back home. Feeling faintly guilty, but with the clinical determination of a man who has set about the grim task of ensuring his own survival, Degrandpre deleted the offending paragraph.
The proliferation of structurally unnecessary microtubules in a great variety of Isian unicells may ultimately explain this apparent action-at-a-distance. In the human brain, such structures mediate consciousness by operating as quantum devices, a single electron’s indeterminacy amplified, in effect, to become the central mechanism of vertebrate consciousness. Preliminary laboratory work (see appendix) suggests that Isian unicells not only sustain a similar quantum effect but can in fact create and preserve twin-state particle-pair coherency during the process of mitosis.