He didn’t like the way she sounded—weak, uncertain, almost delirious. But it was her voice. She was alive. “Zoe, how are you? Are you hurt?”
“How am I?” She was silent for a long moment. “Hot. It’s hot here. I can’t see.”
“Have they hurt you?”
“The diggers aren’t here. Not always, I mean.”
“Zoe, hang on. I’m coining to get you. Keep talking.”
But he lost contact with her as he started toward the next ridge.
As he walked through the night he caught fragments of Zoe’s carrier frequency, never long enough to rouse her attention.
For all its exquisitely tuned servomotors and ergonomic flourishes, the bioarmor had grown terribly heavy around him. He was aware of the enormous effort he expended carrying himself upslope as he approached the foothills of the Coppers, where the soil grew stony and he could turn, if he wished, and see the western plains unfolding under moonlight toward the distant sea. Without a defensive perimeter of tractibles and remensors he feared an attack from some large predator, but no such animal approached him; he was a formidable creature himself, he supposed, and his armor didn’t smell like food.
He contacted Yambuku once, to tell them that Zoe was alive and he had spoken to her. Dieter Franklin was manning the comm console. “Tam,” he said, “that’s good news, but we have problems.”
Hayes debated cutting the connection. There was only one problem he could deal with now, and that was the problem of Zoe. But Dieter was a friend, and Hayes let him talk.
“Your telemetry, for one. We have motors running hot in your left leg assembly. It’s not critical yet, you can scroll the diagnostics if you haven’t already, but it’s not a good sign. What you need to do, Tam, is to turn around and hope you get close enough to Yambuku that we can send one of the reserve tractibles to carry you back, if need be. We can try to do something about Zoe from orbit. The IOS has a few landable remensors it can launch.”
Hayes digested this information slowly. An overheating servo in his left leg … that would explain the extra weight he seemed to carry when he moved that foot, his tendency to list to port when his attention lapsed. But that wasn’t bad, considering Dieter’s first prediction that he would never reach the river. As for rescuing Zoe—
He said, “From orbit?”
“Because we’re evacuating Yambuku. The seals are lapsing faster than we can replace them, and our stores are running low. On top of that, Theophilus says the IOS is getting cagey with him; maybe something’s gone bad up there, too. We’re looking at a last shuttle lift in forty-eight hours.”
“Not enough time.”
“That’s the point. I’m trying to make your case with Theophilus. But he’s giving the orders, and he’s just about angry enough to write you off.”
“He wants Zoe back.” Her corpse, at least, Hayes did not add.
“Not as much as he wants to get off Isis. He’s Family and he’s very much in charge, but I think underneath all that he’s starting to get seriously frightened.”
“Thank you for the information, Dieter. Keep the core sterile. I’ll be back.”
He cut the connection before Dieter could respond. Forty-eight hours.
If he started back now, he might make it.
TWENTY-ONE
“Tam? Tam?”
The voice had come. The voice had gone. Unless she had imagined it. It was easy to imagine things, here in the overheated dark.
The digger, coiling its multijointed body in a sinuous circle, had also come and gone. The digger had broken the membrane of her excursion suit, slitting it from sternum to crotch with one razor-sharp claw, but carefully, drawing only a little blood. And then it had left her alone. To die, she had assumed, and she burned her firefly lamps recklessly, examining her body, waiting for the inevitable collapse of heart, lungs, liver, brain—because she was exposed at last to the Isian biosphere, microbes implanted beneath her skin by the animal’s filthy claw. But her blood had dried quickly in the hot, close air. Daubs of it congealed on her fingers. She did not sicken and she did not die.
She did, however, exhaust her supply of firefly lamps, simply because she had dreaded dying in the dark. As the last lamp burned, she had willed herself to die before it blinked out. But she did not die. Only passed out for a time, or slept.
And then was horribly awake again, confined in this lightless hole.
She tore off her air filter, because there was no reason now not to breathe the Isian air directly; at best, it might hasten her inevitable death.
And still, still, she did not die.
The impulse to escape, a kind of smoldering panic, overwhelmed her once more. She resigned herself to the darkness; it was only a matter of using her other senses, Zoe told herself, of making maps in her head. Once again she crawled out of her cul-de-sac into a tunnel. She felt, but could not see, the mossy alien growths pressed against her exposed stomach, her breasts.
She crawled for an inestimable time, made several turns, tried to picture the labyrinth she had navigated as a map on parchment, an ancient mariner’s map, but the map dissolved in the heat and confusion; she couldn’t hold on to it.
She turned a corner and put her hand forward and touched the body of a digger. She froze in place, but the animal was evidently sleeping. Its fat, hollow scales, so useful for insulation, were splayed apart, radiating heat rather than conserving it. Without her air filter, the digger smelled pungent and close. The smell reminded her of a freshly manured farm field.
Zoe backed away. There wasn’t room to turn around in the narrow tunnel. She dreaded what she might encounter with her feet, dreaded discovering that her world had been reduced to a few yards of excavated subsoil, while her body stubbornly and stupidly refused to die.
She had thrown away her filter mask but retained the excursion suit’s headgear, and she was thankful for that when Tam Hayes spoke to her. Even if he was a hallucination, a fever dream, as she suspected he must be. It didn’t matter. She drank the sound of him like cool water.
For a time she was in Tehran, carrying laundry under the stars.
She had been given the job as punishment for some transgression she couldn’t remember, gathering the fetid, too-often-recycled smocks from the youngest inmates and carrying them in a plastic crate across the empty courtyard to the laundry shed—this in winter, and often late at night.
Her secret revenge was that she did not very much dislike the punishment. Distasteful as it was, because the younger children often soiled themselves or were ill, she relished the few free minutes under an open sky. Even in the cold, even in the dark. Perhaps especially then. The cold night air seemed somehow cleaner than the day’s, as if it had been carried by benevolent winds from a distant glacier. And the coldest nights were often the clearest. The stars shone above the pallid lights of the camp with all the purity of their fixed, indifferent light. Light born in fire and older than the seas. She was in this place by mistake; she had been made for the stars, and she yearned to join them in their cycles, as aloof as ancient kings.
Some nights she put down her fetid burden and stole a moment all her own, shivering and gazing at the sky.
She was there now. In the camp. Or among the stars. One or the other. She was hungry and confused.
But what if, Zoe thought reluctantly, what if she traveled to the stars and found nothing there but more mud and dismal heat and deadly cold and sickness and strangers who didn’t care whether she lived or died? What if she traveled all the way to the stars only to be buried in a hole in some alien ground?