The recent rain had softened the ground here, too. He saw a great number of digger tracks leading into and out of the low mound openings. He examined several of the mounds until he found a distinctive double groove in the drying mud, a track that might have been left by the heels of Zoe’s excursion outfit if she had been dragged inside by her wrists.
Somewhere down there—down that slanting ramp into this warren of ancient excavations—somewhere down there was Zoe.
He was equipped with weapons and a powerful helmet lamp. He would gladly have followed.
But there was no way his bulky bioarmor would fit through that narrow hole.
H e called Yambuku and asked for Avrion Theophilus.
Dieter Franklin came on first. He briefed Hayes on the situation at Yambuku: loss of shell integrity, the sterile core threatened, evacuation imminent “if those assholes on the IOS would pay attention to us for a fucking minute.” By the time Hayes and Zoe reached the downstation, it would almost certainly be empty. “But we’ll leave the light on for you. As long as the core is still sterile— and it ought to last a few days more—you can radio the IOS for a pick-up. Understand, Tam?”
“Put a candle in the window for us, Dieter.”
“Count on it.”
“Now hand me to Theophilus.”
Master Avrion Theophilus announced his presence on-line. Hayes said, “I have a question for you, Theo.”
He imagined Theophilus wincing at the name. Zoe called him Theo, but Zoe was privileged, his surrogate daughter. Technically, Hayes ought to address him as “Master Theophilus.” Theo was a good Family man.
“Speak,” Theophilus said.
“Zoe’s been talking now and then. I don’t believe you picked up any of this at Yambuku. She has a limited radio perimeter.” “Correct.”
“She’s lucky to have those immune enhancements, Theo. They’re the only thing keeping her alive.”
“Lucky indeed. Make your point, Mr. Hayes.”
“She’s just curious, Theo … you being sort of a father to her and all. When she went into that orphan crib, did she already have this blood gear?”
There was a pause. The silence, Hayes supposed, of Theo’s conscience. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. That may be what helped her survive.”
“But not her clone sisters.”
“Her clonal sisters had been fitted with other forms of augmentation.”
“So it was an experiment. Put five rats in a cage and give them all smallpox, that sort of thing.”
“Considering your situation, Mr. Hayes, I’ll forgive the judgmental tone. The Tehran facility would not have been my first choice for the girls. Political circumstances forced our hand. However, yes, her confinement there ultimately served a scientific purpose.”
“She thinks you rescued her. You might as well have raped her yourself.”
“What we’re discussing is a Family matter. You should have abandoned this kind of moral high-handedness when you left the Kuipers. Family values aren’t open to question.”
“Give the microphone back to Dieter,” Hayes said. “Theo.”
More of the diggers came out of the shadows now, though they continued to give Hayes a wide berth. He hoped not to anger them.
They might take their revenge on Zoe—if they were capable of such thoughts.
Dieter Franklin came on-line again, belatedly. “You’re just making trouble for yourself, Tam.”
“I have plenty already. Theo still listening?”
“Master Theophilus has left the communication room, if that’s what you mean. But this conversation is a matter of record.”
“Dieter, I have a question. The bioarmor—it’s sort of a miniature downstation, right? I mean, it has a series of perimeters around a sterile core.”
“In a way. Big shell for the heavy processing and to house the servomotors, gel insulation under that; at the bottom a layer of primary containment about as thick as your skin.”
“So how much of it can I take off?”
“Say again, Tam?”
“How much of this armor can I strip and still have any kind of protection?”
The silence this time was longer. Hayes looked again at the mound entrance before him. Dark as a badger hole. Narrow as a sewer pipe.
’’Conservatively, Dieter said, “none. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Answer the question.”
“I’m not an engineer. I’ll get Kwame in here if you like.” “You know this gear as well as Kwame does.” “I take no responsibility—”
“I’m not asking you to. The responsibility is all mine. Answer the question.”
“Well… if you strip off the hard shell, you probably won’t die immediately. You’d need the helmet, though for the air scrubbers. And you’d be standing there in a plastic wrapper about as strong as aluminum foil. Best case, it might hold off the native microorganisms for a couple of hours before you go hot. If you scrape your elbow, of course, all bets are off. Tam, this is a fundamentally stupid idea.”
“I need to go in after her.”
“Both of you will die.”
“As may be,” Hayes said. He hands were already on the latches of his boots.
Dieter Franklin caught up to Avrion Theophilus in the hallway outside the comms room. “Master Theophilus, I want to apologize on behalf of Tam Hayes.”
“It’s not your apology to make, Mr. Franklin.”
“Sir, I trust this won’t interfere with our plans. That is, if he does make it back to Yambuku somehow, we will send a shuttle for him … won’t we?”
“Family business,” Theophilus said briskly. “You needn’t worry about it.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Alone in the sooty courtyard of the orphan crib, Zoe listened to the winter stars. She listened with her eyes closed, because she couldn’t see. She listened with her arms at her sides, because her arms were too heavy to move. She breathed through her mouth, because the air was thick and stank of strange animals.
Maybe she wasn’t in the courtyard at all… but here were the stars, voices like a faraway church choir on a cold night, voices like a train whistle bent across a prairie. Voices like snowflakes whispering at a bedroom window. Voices like the yellow light that shines out of the homes of strangers.
It was good not to be alone. Zoe shivered with the fever that had lately overtaken her and tried to focus on the sound of the stars. She knew she was eavesdropping on a vast and impossibly ancient conversation, none of it quite comprehensible but all of it radiant with significance, a foreign language so complex and so lovely that it exuded meaning the way a blossom drips nectar.
There was a closer voice too, but that one was more disturbing, because that voice spoke to her directly, spoke with the voice of her own memories, touched her and marveled at her, just as she marveled at the stars.
“Tam?”
“I’m coming,” he said. He said it more than once. And something else. Something about her excursion gear. Her tool kit.
She found it difficult to pay attention. She would rather listen to the stars.
She said once, mistakenly, “Theo?” Because she was back in the orphan creche again, a dream. “No,” Hayes said. “Not Theo.”
The nearest voice was warm and enclosing, and it came to her disguised as a memory of Dieter Franklin.
Here was the gangly planetologist right in front of her, lit from within, his ribs and elbows obvious even under the rough blue Yambuku service uniform. “This is the answer,” he told Zoe eagerly, “the answer to all those old questions. We’re not alone in the universe, Zoe. But we’re damned near unique. Life is almost as old as the universe itself. Nanocellular life, like the ancient Martian fossils. It spread through the galaxy before Earth was born. It travels on the dust of exploded stars.”