All this seemed wrongheaded and subtly threatening to Degrandpre, though he was hardly equipped to evaluate the scientific content. He skipped to the summary at the end of the document:
One may speculate, perhaps not prematurely, about the possibilities inherent in a pseudoneural network connecting all Isian unicells, a biomass that (if one includes oceanic matter and the mineral-fixing bacteria distributed through the crust of the planet) is of truly staggering proportions. The increasingly successful biological attacks on the downstations might be seen by analogy as an autonomic reaction to the presence of a foreign body, in which breach strategies developed in the saline environment of the ocean and first used against the oceanic research station were slowly but effectively adapted for use against land-based outposts…
No, none of this would do.
An incoming message chimed his scroll—tagged Highest Priority, of course; what else? Degrandpre ordered a quick global delete of the floating document. Dieter Franklin’s musings were promptly excised from the scroll, the mail queue, and the central memory. They would not, of course, be broadcast to Earth.
The bad news this time—and it was very bad news indeed—was that Corbus Nefford had developed a fever.
Degrandpre spoke to his medical manager through a two-way screen, full-scale image. Under the circumstances, a scroll connection would have been too formal. Never mind that he spoke from the safety of his temporary command quarters, lodged next to the aeroponic gardens. Never mind that he had already established four new precautionary zones, extending from the shuttle dock to include both adjoining pods and, of course, the Turing launch bays.
He was shocked at the sight of Corbus Nefford strapped to a gurney with a saline drip tacked to his arm and Ken Kinsolving at his side. Remote tractibles bustled around the physician’s bedside, snuffling at his wrists with biotic and chemical sensors. Nefford had insisted he had something important to tell Kenyon Degrandpre and had refused to speak to intermediates. At the moment he looked barely capable of speaking at all.
We are all lost, some part of Degrandpre whispered.
He mustered his diplomatic skills. He didn’t want Nefford to see him flinch away from the screen.
“What you have to understand,” Nefford managed to gasp, “is the slowness of it…”
The etiology of the disease, or Nefford’s own death? Each protracted; each agonizing. “Yes, go on,” Degrandpre said. All of this was being recorded by the IOS’s central memory for future reference. He wondered whether anyone would ever see it.
“This disease isn’t like other Isian contagions. Not as virulent. It has an incubation period. That means it’s probably a single organism. Dangerous and subtle, but potentially controllable. Do you understand?”
“I understand. You needn’t continue asking me that, Corbus.”
“Dangerous, but potentially controllable. But quarantine isn’t working. We’re dealing with something very small here, maybe a prion, a bit of DNA in a protein jacket, maybe small enough to tunnel through the seals. …”
“We’ll keep all that in mind, Corbus.” If any of us survive.
“Manager,” Nefford gasped, his mouth working between syllables like a siphon with an air bubble trapped inside. “May I say ‘Kenyon’? We’re friends, aren’t we? In keeping with our respective positions in the Trust?”
Hardly.
“Of course,” Degrandpre said. “Maybe I won’t die.” “Perhaps not.” “We can control this.” “Yes,” Degrandpre said.
Nefford seemed on the verge of saying something more. But fresh red blood began to leak from his nose. Visibly disappointed, he closed his eyes and turned his head away. Kinsolving broke the video connection.
“Ghastly,” Degrandpre murmured. He couldn’t seem to escape the word. It was lodged on his tongue. “Ghastly. Ghastly.”
Nefford’s prophecy was correct. Engineering tractibles reported microscopic pinhole punctures in the seals separating the original quarantine chamber from the surrounding quarters.
Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.
He understood for the first time, or imagined he understood, his father’s religious impulse. The Families and their Trusts had finely divided and obsessively ordered the political and technological wilderness of Earth, each person and thing and process in its appropriate orbit in the social orrery; but outside the walls of the Families the wild still pressed close: proles, Martians, Kuiper clans; disease vectors breeding in the haunts of the underclasses; no conqueror but death, finally, and the cruel immensity of the universe. His father’s furtive Islam was, after all, an act of will, the ordering of the void into story and hierarchy, walled gardens of good and evil.
The tragedy of Isis was the tragedy of walls made vain. Not only the physical walls. He thought of Corbus Nefford calling him a “friend.” He thought of the hygienic lies he broadcast to Earth on a daily basis.
All vain. Very little could be salvaged now. Perhaps only his own life. Perhaps not even that.
A summit with the pompous, fat chief engineer, Todd Solen.
“As I see it,” Solen announced, “we have just one recourse. If we can’t put physical barriers between ourselves and the disease agent, whatever it is, we have to shut down Modules Three and Six, secure the bulkheads, and evacuate the atmosphere. Put a sector of hard vacuum between ourselves and the threat. Which ought to do the trick, unless this so-called virus has spread through the IOS already.”
“The Marburg evacuees are in Module Six.”
“Obviously. They’ll die if we depressurize the module. But they’ll die just as surely if we don’t. Disease aside, without access to our Turing bays or main shuttle docks, without spares or a comprehensive engineering sector, with our water circulation compromised and the food supply depending entirely on what we can grow in the sun gardens—all considered, the IOS is an unsustainable environment. We can save as many people as we can fit into a single Higgs launcher. No more.
Degrandpre felt the paralysis of utter failure.
He asked, “Has it come to that?”
The engineer was perspiring freely. He swabbed his forehead with a sleeve. “With all due respect, Manager, yes, it has come to that.”
I will not render this decision, Degrandpre thought, under intimidation. He said, “It’s hot in here.”
Solen blinked his bulging eyes. “Well—we’re recycling water from the cooling fins. There’s not much left for thermostatic control.”
“Find a way to make it cooler in here, Mr. Solen.” “Yes, sir,” Solen said faintly.
Too hot, too dry. The IOS itself was running a fever.
Aaron Weber, the Marburg station manager currently isolated in the Turing bay—along with all fifteen of his staff—also took note of the heat.