This was not really Dieter talking, but some other agent talking to Zoe through her memory of Dieter. She knew that. It might have been frightening. But she wasn’t afraid. She listened carefully.
“I would explain this to you more fully, little one, but you don’t have the words. Look at it this way. You’re a living, conscious entity. And so are we all. But not in the same way. Life flourishes everywhere in the galaxy, even in the hot and crowded core of it, where the ambient radiation would kill an animal like yourself. Life is supple and adaptable. Consciousness arises … well, almost everywhere. Not your kind of consciousness, though. Not animals, born in ignorance and living for a brief time and dying forever. That’s the peculiarity, not the rule.”
“I can hear the stars talking,” Zoe said.
“Yes. We all can, all the time. They’re mostly planets, not stars. Planets such as Isis. Often very different physically, but all of them filled with life. All of them talking.”
“But not Earth,” Zoe divined.
“No. Not Earth. We don’t know why. The grain of life that found your sun must have been damaged in some way. You grew wild, Zoe. Wild and alone.”
“Like an orphan.”
Dieter—the Dieter-thing—smiled sadly. “Yes. Exactly like an orphan.”
But it wasn’t really Dieter talking. It was Isis.
“Zoe, the beacon.” This was Tam’s voice, his radio voice.
She opened her eyes reflexively but saw nothing. Sweat ran in itchy courses down her forehead and her cheeks. Her mouth was ridiculously dry, as dry as wood, her tongue thick and clumsy.
“Zoe, can you hear me?”
She croaked an acknowledgment. Her stomach hurt. Her feet were numb. She was as cold as she had ever been, colder than on the coldest winter night in Tehran, colder than the core of a Kuiper body spinning through space. Her sweat was cold, and the salt of it burned her eyes. She tasted it on her cracked lips.
“Zoe, I need you to listen to me. Listen to me.”
She nodded uselessly, imagining for a moment that she was blind and he was here with her. But that was only his radio voice.
“Zoe, you should have an RF beacon on your tool belt. The RF beacon, Zoe, remember? On your tool belt. About the size of a personal scroll. Can you activate it?”
The radio beacon. But why? He knew she was here. They could even talk.
“I can’t find you without a little help. Activate the beacon and I can follow it.”
Her signal bouncing off the positioning satellites, talking back to Tam’s helmet. Yes, that would work. Wincing, she reached around her torn excursion suit, exploring the tool belt with her fingers. Her fingers were as awkward as parade balloons, and there was moss slime, or something, all over her torso. She expected the beacon to have been lost in all her useless crawling, but no, here it was, a small box, slippery when it came out of its holster.
“I have it,” she managed. Crude, her human voice.
“Can you activate it for me?”
She fumbled with the device until she found the indentation on the side. She touched it repeatedly until the beacon came to life.
It chirped—one small sound to let her know it was working. And a light came on, a tiny red indicator on the face of the unit.
Small as it was, it was nevertheless a light. Zoe held it up to her face, basking in the sensation of vision. Faint, precious spark! It illuminated, if poorly, anything within a centimeter or so of the beacon. Beacon indeed.
She put her hand next to the light.
She didn’t like what she saw.
“Got it,” Tam said. “Loud and clear. Hang on, Zoe. Not long now.”
The stars—or at least their planets—were alive and had been talking to themselves (singing to themselves, Zoe understood) for billions of years.
Isis, disguised as her memory of Dieter Franklin, sang her a soothing song. A nursery song. Something her nannies had once sung to her, a silly rhyme about the seashore. If you put a shell to your ear you can hear the sea.
Consciousness, Isis told her, is born in the small things of the universe, though no small thing is itself conscious. The trick life learned, Isis explained, was to sustain a ghostly contact when one cell divided into two, a quantum equivalency of electron pairs suspended in microtubules, “like the particle-pair link that connects you to Earth.”
Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose. We see the stars, after all, Zoe thought. We just can’t hear them.
Animal consciousness, Isis said, is a rare event in the universe. Cherished for its rarity. The galactic bios welcomed home its orphans. Isis was sad that so many had died needlessly—brief nickers here of Macabie Feya, Elam Mather—but that was unpreventable, an autonomic reflex of the Isian bios; an action as involuntary as the beating of Zoe’s heart, and just as difficult to moderate. But Isis was doing her best.
“I’m not dead,” Zoe noted.
“You’re different, little one.”
Different enough to survive?
One of my girls survived.
Isis was silent on the subject.
TWENTY-SIX
Too late, Kenyon Degrandpre thought. He marched, head high, down the ring corridor of the crippled IOS. Too late.
Look at me, he thought. Look at me in my uniform, crisp and neat. The ring corridor was virtually empty—large numbers of the crew had elected to die discreetly, in their cabins—but the few he passed still regarded him with a frightened deference. His hand was on his quirt, just in case. But the enlightened manager seldom stoops to corporal punishment.
He walked stiffly, formally, toward the last of the docking bays, where the escape vehicle waited to take him away from the IOS, to the Higgs vessel. He was conscious of his footsteps, rhythmic and proportioned. He did not veer to the left or to the right. He walked in the middle of the ring corridor, its corrugated walls equidistant from his braced shoulders. He slouched only at the low bulkhead doors.
He passed through a section of crew quarters. Each crewman had private quarters, cloistered steel cubicles hardly larger than university carrels and equipped with folding beds. Some of these doors were open, and in some of the rooms Degrandpre passed he saw men and women inert on their cots, blood crusting on their noses and lips. Occasionally he heard a moan, a scream. Most of the doors were closed. Most of the crew had chosen to perish in privacy.
“Slow,” Corbus Nefford had called this disease. Slow in its incubation perhaps, by the yardstick of Isian microorganisms. But not in its final effect. From first symptoms to death, three or four hours might elapse. Not more.
The survivors he passed wore a blank, shocked look. They had not died, but expected to; or believed against all reason in some imminent rescue, a miraculous reversal of fate.
But Degrandpre believed in that, too. He found himself finally unable to contemplate the possibility of his own death. Not when he had gone to such obscene lengths to prevent it: the multiple quarantines, the killing of the Marburg evacuees, the breaking of the particle-pair link to Earth. No: In the end he must survive, else all was meaningless.