But he had believed it when he watched the stars. He knew what it was to feel meaning beyond the limit of his comprehension, the stars a vast city he could never enter, a republic in which he could never claim citizenship.
He felt a cool wetness under the arch of his left leg and knew abstractly that he must have compromised the delicate core of his protective membrane. Just like Zoe. But he didn’t have her immune augmentation. He would have to hurry.
No need for caution now.
Maybe she could use his helmet to find her way out.
She was tempted to give up.
Isis couldn’t save her—not her natural body, which was dying despite all her augmentation, under attack from too many unfamiliar microorganisms. She might have withstood a single infection, or two, or even three; but she was besieged now by organisms beyond number, weakened by hunger and thirst.
But Isis cherished her and would not let her go. Zoe—the pattern of her—could be sustained indefinitely in the dense matrix of the Isian bios. That was how Isis was talking to her, viral entities slipping into her nervous system, making fresh Isian cells out of Terrestrial neurons. Killing her, but remembering her. Imagining her. Dreaming her. Still, she waited for Tam.
When he reached her at last, he was deeply feverish.
He had forgotten, in all his desperate haste, why he was here— found himself aware only of the tunnel and its pressure on his knees and neck, the weight of soil above his head, the strangeness and the terror of it. And when that knowledge weighted too heavily, he would breathe slowly and fight the panic of confinement, the panic that threatened to overwhelm and suffocate him.
And when his hands ceased trembling and his legs regained the power of motion, he pressed on. Following the beacon leading him to Zoe.
Strange how she had come to mean so much to him, this Terrestrial orphan with a failed thymostat. How he had invested in her so many of his hopes and so much of his fear, and how she had led him into this labyrinth under Isis.
He imagined he was climbing, not crawling … that the brightness in the corridor before him was something more than the glare of his helmet lamp.
Zoe’s vision was failing, along with her other functions, but she saw at least faintly Tam’s light burning out of the darkness as he approached.
She blinked her eyes, a sticky sensation.
H e knew when he saw her that what he had suspected was true: was beyond rescue.
The bios had been working hard at her.
She sat with her spine against the curved wall of the cul-de-sac, her excursion membrane as tattered as an old flag. There was dried blood on her belly, the color of sooty brick. Fungus had attacked her exposed skin, growing in swollen circles of blue or stark white.
Even the albino moss had begun to feed on her, rising to the moisture of her in lush, trailing fingers. Her boots were buried in it.
She watched him unlatch and remove his helmet. The beam of the helmet’s lamp—so bright!—flashed wildly about the cul-de-sac. It shone on the ceiling of impacted clay and animal matter, on the gauzy insect web full of mummified husks, on the delicate bulbs of moss. He was offering his helmet to her, with all its rebreathing apparatus and water reserves and gaudy, glorious light.
The generosity of the act was heartbreaking.
But she waved away the gift. Too late, too late.
Hayes understood the gesture. He was saddened, but he set the helmet aside, its light aimed steadily now at the ceiling. With each breath he drew more Isian microorganisms into his lungs, not that it mattered. He summoned his strength and fit his body next to Zoe’s in the cramped space of the alcove. No fear of contact now. Life touches life, as Elam used to say.
Heat radiated from Zoe, the heat of fever and the heat of parasitical infection. But her lips, when he touched them, were cool. Cool as the rim of a bucket of water drawn from a deep and mossy well.
He said, “I do hear them. The stars.” But she was past listening.
The diggers avoided their store of strange-smelling meat until it had decomposed into a more familiar mass of diffuse enzymatic tissues, ripe with life. The smell became rich, then exotic, then irresistible.
Coiling into the meat chamber, one by one and one after another, they feasted for days.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Isis Orbital Station wheeled through its circuit of the planet, crippled but functional. Spaceborne tractibles fetched water and oxygen from Turing extractors on the moon’s icy poles, replacing the small but inevitable losses of recycling. Lately many human bodies had been discovered by the housekeeping tractibles, and these too had been recycled for their nutrients. Flush with fresh sources of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and trace elements, the gardens thrived. Sun panels cast their glow on dense hedgerows of kale and lettuce, a bounty of tomatoes and cucumbers.
Avrion Theophilus had taken refuge in the gardens while the others died—Dieter Franklin, Lee Reisman, Kwame Sen, and everyone who had shuttled up from Yambuku, victims of the slow virus that had infiltrated the station.
The virus continued to tunnel through bulkhead seals in search of nourishment, but after a time, it found none; after a time, all its spores lay dormant.
Below, on the planet’s surface, Marburg and Yambuku were deserted, and Theophilus had ignored the increasingly desperate pleas from the arctic outpost as its perimeters, too, were breached.
All dead now; and, to his horror, he had found the escape craft missing, the particle-pair link to Earth permanently broken.
And yet he lived.
He had insisted on traveling to Isis with the same immune-system modifications his Trust had given Zoe Fisher. The wetware protected him quite effectively from, at least, the single organism that had infiltrated the IOS.
He was alive, and likely to continue living. But he was alone.
He moved through the filtered light of the gardens, patrolling restlessly among the silent tractibles and succulent green leaves. He talked to himself, because there was no one else to talk to. He wondered aloud and repeatedly whether anyone would come, whether he would be rescued, or whether he would be left here; whether he would go mad after a month or a year of isolation, or whether his thymostat would keep him obstinately sane.
There would be time enough to know all the answers. Time and more time.
His shadow followed him through the corridors of the IOS like a lost dog.
He waited, but no one came.
EPILOGUE
For one hundred and fifty years—almost to the month since its abandonment—the Isis Orbital Station navigated its rounds. Solar-powered (and still quite active despite the failure of nearly half its photon exchangers), self-monitoring, self-cleaning, it had waited with apparently infinite patience for its salvagers to arrive.
From a distance, it seemed unchanged. Up close, age and damage had left more obvious marks.