She ignored his sarcasm and did exactly that.
Dawn had reached the scattered island chains of the Western Sea. A dark plume of ejecta, like soot, trailed from an active volcano. The Greater Continental Mass wheeled into view, dense with temperate and boreal forests. Sunlight glinted from an ancient blue crater lake here, glanced off a fringe of polar ice there. Cloudtops white as cut diamonds.
And all of it as lethal as arsenic.
Her new home.
Two men and a woman shuffled into the room and occupied the conference table. Zoe continued to linger by the window. She didn’t need Degrandpre’s advice to keep quiet; she found crowded rooms intimidating.
Kenyon Degrandpre introduced the new arrivals as Tam Hayes, Elam Mather, and Dieter Franklin, all from Yambuku Station, all up on the latest shuttle.
Zoe recognized Hayes from photos. He was the Delta station manager and the Isis Project’s senior biologist—senior in status, not in age. Hayes was a relatively young man despite his five years on Isis rotation, handsome in a rough way. He needed a haircut, Zoe thought. His beard was Eke tangled copper. A typical disheveled Kuiper-born scientist, in other words. The other two weren’t much different.
Hayes thrust his hand at her. “Zoe Fisher! We were hoping to meet you.”
Zoe took his hand reluctantly. She didn’t like touching people. Hadn’t Hayes been briefed on that, or didn’t he care? Her hand disappeared into his meaty grip. “Dr. Hayes,” she murmured, concealing her uneasiness.
“Please, call me Tam. I gather we’ll be working together.”
“You can get to know each other later,” Degrandpre said. To Zoe: “Dr. Hayes and his people have been vetting proposed archival material for transmission to Earth.”
Zoe followed the exchange between Hayes and Degrandpre closely, trying to sort out the conflicts. The particle-pair link to Earth was such a narrow pipeline, so severely bandwidth-limited, that project downloads were hotly contested and had to undergo a kind of information triage. Degrandpre was the final arbiter. So here was Hayes, the Yambuku project leader, delivering an impatient summary of his group’s packet data, and Degrandpre playing the infuriating role of ultimate Trust bureaucrat: aloof, bored, skeptical. He fiddled with his stylus and crossed his legs and periodically asked Hayes to clarify some point that had been perfectly obvious to begin with. Finally he said, “Show me the visuals.” Holographs and photos were particularly expensive to transmit, but they took the place of voucher specimens and were often popular in the press back home.
A large central screen unfurled from the ceiling.
The images in the Yambuku packet were micrographs of viruses, bacteria, prions, and biologically active protein chains, all of them “ALC,” as Hayes put it: Awaiting Latin Cognomen. There was also a series of conventional photographs to illustrate a journal submission from one of his junior biologists. Degrandpre asked, “More exploding mice?”
Zoe had never heard the expression.
Judging by the look on his face, Hayes disliked it. “Live-animal exposures, yes.”
“Ramp them up, please, Dr. Hayes.”
Hayes used a handheld scroll to order up the images from the IOS’s central memory. Zoe caught Degrandpre glancing at her curiously. Gauging her reaction? If so, why?
Elam Mather, a thick-faced woman in lab grays, stood up to narrate the images. Her voice was strong and impatient.
“The concept here was to sort ambient Isian microorganisms through a series of micron filters in order to evaluate their lethality and mode of action. We took a sample of air from outside the station, near dusk on a calm, dry day. Meteorological notes are appended. Crude assay gave us a load of organic matter and the usual assortment of water droplets, silicate dust, and so forth. One sample was forced through a filter and injected into an isolation chamber, containing a clonal mouse of the CIBA-thirty-seven strain.”
An image came up on the screen.
Zoe looked at it, swallowed, and looked away.
“The result,” Elam Mather said, “was essentially the same as for unfiltered native air. Within minutes, the mouse had spiked a fever and before two hours had passed it was bleeding internally. Systemic collapse, bleedout and tissue deliquescence followed rapidly. More than a dozen foreign microbial species were cultured from the mouse’s blood; again, the usual suspects.
“The next sample went through a finer screening. On Earth, that would remove all spores and bacteria, but not viruses or prions.
“The second exposed mouse also died—obviously—but the onset of the toxemia was slightly more gradual. The outcome, however, was the same.”
A mix of fur and muscle tissue in a pool of deliquescent black liquid. The CIBA-37 mouse might as well have been popped into a food processor. Probably, Zoe thought, that would have been kinder.
The sight of the dead creature affected her more than she expected. Her throat constricted and she wondered if she might have to vomit.
She narrowed her eyes in order to avoid the rest of the photographs while pretending to look at them. The research duplicated, confirmed, and extended earlier work; there was nothing very novel about it. Either Degrandpre had wanted to see it himself, or he had wanted Zoe to see it.
Because I’m not a microbiologist, Zoe thought. He sees me as some pampered Terrestrial theoretician. As if I didn’t know what I was getting into!
“Even with microfine HEPA filtration, clonal mice eventually sickened after repeated exposure to native air. In this case, we’re looking at dusts and protein fragments perhaps triggering an allergenic reaction, not the full hemorrhagic blowout, but still a deadly hazard…”
The man named Dieter Franklin said laconically, “The planet is trying to kill us. But we proved that long ago. The surprising thing is how hard it’s trying to kill us.”
Degrandpre shot Zoe one more glance, as if to say, “You see? Isis will kill you if you let it.”
Zoe remained expressionless. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was afraid.
She ran into Tam Hayes in the cafeteria a day later.
The cafeteria was as spartan as every other chamber in the IOS—steel deck assembled by Turing constructors, welded seams exposed, the chairs and trestle tables flimsy and makeshift. This was inevitable in an environment where every manufactured object was either shipped in from Earth at obscene expense or pieced together by Turing factories on Isis’s Diemos-sized moon. At least the cafeteria had been decorated. Some artistic soul had grooved the flat inner walls with an assembly etcher, wasting time and energy, Zoe supposed, but not essential supplies. The far wall was a Celtic tapestry of knotted lines, with Kuiper clan signs worked discreetly into the design. Pretty enough, she thought, if vaguely subversive.
Unfortunately, the overhead lights were naked sulfur-microwave dots; they made the food look as bright and false as polystyrene.
“ ’Morning, Dr. Fisher.” Hayes came up behind her carrying a thermal bowl of glutinous flavinoid soup. “Mind if I join you?”
“Morning?” Dinnertime, by Zoe’s clock.
“I’m keeping Yambuku time. Sun’s just coming up over the lowlands, unless it’s raining. You’ll see it soon enough yourself.”
“I’m looking forward to it. I haven’t seen much from orbit.”
“They’re stingy with windows. But the live relays are almost as good.”
“I saw camera feeds back home.”
He nodded. “IOS fever. I know the feeling. Suffered from it myself once.” He settled into a chair opposite her. “You want the real thing. But Yambuku’s much the same, I’m afraid. Isis is right there under your feet, but you’re still utterly isolated from it. Sometimes I dream of walking outside—without excursion armor, I mean.” He added, “I envy you, Dr. Fisher. Sooner or later, you’ll have that experience.”