And he hadn’t done badly here. But too much time had passed too slowly, and he felt the separation from Earth more keenly than he had expected. It was as if his body registered on the cellular level every inch of the vast distance the Higgs launcher had transected; he was, after all, so far from home that the sunlight falling on these vines would not reach Beijing or Boston or the south of France within his lifetime. His only real connection with the planet of his birth was the particle-pair link—a thin reed indeed.
But one to which he was obliged to attend. His weekly report was due. He would have to let the Trusts know that one of their engineers had died.
Bad luck. Or bad management. Or Kuiper adventurism gone wrong. Yes, that was it.
By midday, he had queued his report for transmission and was tending to other business. A summit of section managers arrived bearing grievances: unfair tractible allotment and resource utilization, the usual departmental jealousies. The Turing factories on Isis’s small moon had fallen short of productivity goals, though another two factory units had been genned. The question was one of balance. No one would get what he wanted, but that was inevitable. The IOS was an economy of scarcity.
The good news was that no truly critical shortages were pressing, Turing productivity had increased even if it had not met expectations, and the IOS’s life-support systems remained in good shape. Most of the bad news came from the Surface Projects manager, who reported a rash of seal failures, maintenance calls, and diminished redundancy, particularly from the continental and deep-sea outposts. (The small arctic station reported only routine maintenance.) This was potentially troublesome, since the down-stations used a daunting variety of exotic materials imported from home; bringing stores and spares back to capacity would take some cargo shuffling on the part of the Trusts, never an easy sell. But, all in all, things could be worse.
He soothed the junior managers with promises, dismissed them at last and went to his cabin.
Alone.
He hated the social isolation of the IOS, but the answer to that problem, as always, was discipline. That was the mistake the Trusts had made more than a century ago, tinkering with the genes of Kuiper volunteers rather than teaching them the practical arts of self-discipline.
The wall of his cabin showed a relay view of Isis, blue on black velvet. He was supremely tired of it. He switched the display to a neutral white luminescence, keyed to dim as he fell asleep.
His personal scroll chirped, waking him early. The waiting message was tagged amber, important but not urgent. Degrandpre let it wait while he showered and dressed. Then he dispatched a small personal tractible to bring breakfast from the galley.
He took up the scroll reluctantly. The message was return traffic from the Works Trust. Perfunctory regrets on the Macabie Feya death. Revised launch schedules. Revised cargo inventories, projected six months forward.
And in the tail of the message, a small but lethal sting.
An “observer” had been written into the next personnel rotation. A Personnel and Devices observer, a man named Avrion Theophilus.
Terrifyingly, the man’s rank wasn’t specified.
On Earth, a man without a title was either very poor or very powerful. A peasant or a Family man.
And peasants didn’t come to Isis.
FOUR
Zoe came to the common room to witness the burning of Macabie Feya’s body. Tam Hayes had called the downstation staff to Yambuku’s common room, which was large enough for Zoe to join the crowd without feeling unduly claustrophobic. Hayes had cleared one wall and converted the surface panel into a screen with a view of the western clearances, where remote tractibles had assembled a bier of native wood for the body to He on. The effect was like watching through a big picture window. But in fact the common room was at the heart of the sterile core of Yambuku, insulated from Isis by onionskin layers of hot-zone laboratories and tractible bays.
Mac Feya, contaminated beyond rescue, hadn’t made it farther into the station than the tractible bay. His body was compromised with Isian organisms beyond number; it had become, in effect, a supremely dangerous piece of biological waste. Elam Mather had used a medical remote to sedate and anesthetize Mac as he died, a grim but thankfully brief process; she had then extracted key tissue samples and processed them into the glove-box array before she returned the body to the clearing.
Zoe didn’t look at the body too closely. Mac Feya’s bioarmor had been stripped for salvage and he had been draped with a white sheet in an attempt to lend some dignity to his corpse. But the body was obviously deliquescing under the shroud, digested by Isian microorganisms and processed with eerie speed into a syrupy black liquid. Just like a CIBA-37 mouse, Zoe thought. She sat rigidly in her chair and tried not to take this death as an omen. A warning perhaps:The Isian biosphere would not be trifled with. But there was nothing malignant here, no deliberate attack on human life. The problem was not Isis, but humanity. We’re fragile, Zoe thought; we evolved in a younger and less competitive biological domain. We’re infants here.
When the first probes reached Isis, there had been a keen effort to protect the planet from human contamination. But there was not a Terrestrial organism the Isian biosphere couldn’t contain and devour, its immense array of enzymes and poisons quickly corrupting the fragile protein envelopes of Earth-based life. The death of Macabie Feya was simply Isis acting as Isis must.
“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”
Zoe looked away from the body to the forest canopy beyond the bier. The trees were sinuous, thin-boled, raising their limbs like great green hands. This, after all, was her realm, or soon would be. She had trained most of her life for protracted isolation in the Isian woodlands. If a native species had been named, she could name it; she could even supply tentative binomials for new species within a broad range of genera. But this was not a textbook, a file-stack, or a walkthrough simulation. The reality of it was suddenly overwhelming, even from the cloistered safety of the common room: real breezes shaking the foliage, real shadows eclipsing the forest floor. She had come within a few thin walls of Isis —at last, at last.
And in the midst of death. Real death. The depth of emotion in the room was daunting. Dieter Franklin had lowered his head to disguise tears; Elam Mather was openly weeping, and she wasn’t the only one.
Two mysteries, Zoe thought. Isis and grief. Of the two, she understood Isis better. How would she feel if someone close to her had died? But there was no one close to her. There never had been. Only Theo, as severe and aloof as some black-winged bird, her teacher and savior. What if it were Theo’s body out there? Would she weep? Zoe had wept often when she was young, especially during her dimly remembered time at the Tehran orphan creche. From which Theo had saved her. Without Theo … well, without Theo, she would be lost.
Free, some traitorous part of her whispered.
The thought was disturbing.
Tam Hayes, tall and somber in his Yambuku fatigues, read a brief but dignified eulogy. Then a young biochemist named Ambrosic, the last Reformed Mormon at Yambuku now that Mac was gone, offered a formal prayer for the dead.