"Bios" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

SEVEN

Zoe hurried to the common room as soon as she heard the news. She found most of the Yambuku family already gathered there—grimly huddled together, many of them, while the main plasma screen displayed fragments of telemetry from the oceanic outpost. She had gone to bed early and was asleep when the first news broke; by the time the all-hands alert sounded, Singh and Devereaux were already confirmed dead, their lab crushed and swallowed by the equatorial sea.

Isis had killed them, Hayes would say … though Zoe couldn’t bring herself to think of the accident in those terms. Isis wasn’t the enemy. She believed that fiercely. The enemy was carelessness, or ignorance, or the unexpected.

Singh and Devereaux had both rotated through Yambuku during their orientation. Most of the Yambuku staff had known them. With the exception of the secretive IOS technicians and the upper-echelon kachos, everyone on Isis duty knew everyone else, especially the handful of downstation crew, the surface dwellers.

Yambuku mourned Singh and Devereaux just as the staff of the oceanic labs must have mourned Macabie Feya.

Three deaths in the time I’ve been here, Zoe thought. We’re like soldiers in a battle zone. We watch each other die.

Tonya Cooper had collapsed onto the shoulder of Em Vya, a junior phytochemist. Both wept quietly. Zoe felt a swelling grief of her own; she hadn’t met the dead men but she supposed it must have been an awful death, to be crushed under the brutal weight of the ocean—like Macabie Feya, she thought, lost to the lonely immensities of Isis.

Tam Hayes stood silently in the east corner of the room, next to the large global map of Isis. The globe had been one of Mac Feya’s spare-time projects, she remembered Elam saying. A work of art, assembled from Yambuku’s redundant supplies—a bubble of handblown silica now, physical features read from survey maps in. the ICS’s archives and etched onto the globe’s surface by an assembly tractible. The globe was ice-blue and frost-gray, faintly translucent. She watched Hayes spin the bubble in order to locate the oceanic labs, an infinitesimally small speck in the glassy turquoise of the southern equatorial sea. She joined him, following along as he traced a useless path to the nearest substantial land, a chain of volcanic islands appended to the Great Western Continent like a crooked finger, five thousand kilometers away. Zoe felt she could read his thoughts: in all that strange blue immensity, more death, …

She put her hand on his arm.

The gesture was impulsive, and she didn’t realize at first that she had done it. Her shock unfolded slowly. Hayes seemed not to notice, though he looked up when she pulled away.

The sleeve of his shirt had felt warm, as warm as his body.

“We’re losing,” he said. “My God, Zoe. Gigadollars to bring us here, to keep us here, and we’re losing to the planet.” Unasked, he returned the touch, put his hand on her shoulder, and Zoe was simultaneously aware of a number of things: the scent of him, the murmur of the room, the midnight whisper of the station’s homeostatics. Seen from outside, Yambuku would be a bubble of yellow light in a moonless dark, the forest’s vacant rooms and random corridors reaching to the mountains, the sea. “It goes beyond coincidence. Maybe Dieter’s paranoia is justified. The planet’s peeling away our defenses, prying us open. Much more of this and they’ll shut us down, conduct research by tractible. …”

“It was an accident,” Zoe managed to say. Idiotic, she thought.

“The Trusts don’t care. The Families don’t care.”

But I care, Zoe thought. And so does he, though he doesn’t want to say it so baldly.

Elam Mather came across the room dressed in crumpled sleep fatigues, her eyes full of worry and an active scroll in her hand. “More news from the IOS,” she said.

Hayes gave her a wary look.

“They’re shuttling me out to the sea lab,” Elam explained. “To what’s left of it. They want me to find out what happened.”

The crew drifted out of the common room as it became obvious that the crisis had stabilized. Zoe, alert now and full of caffeine, sat at a conference table, bathed in the wan light of the active wall displays.

She waited until Jon Jiang, the night-shift engineer, gave her a baleful nod and left the room. Truly alone—and feeling almost furtive—she switched the large west-wall display away from its static readout mode to monitor the view from an exterior camera.

Cool outside tonight, according to the status crawl at the top of the display. Twenty-one degrees Celsius, winds from the west-northwest averaging five klicks per hour. Stars glittered like garnets in the heavy sky, obscured by a cirrus haze.

She felt strange. She couldn’t name the way she felt.

She was reminded of the way she had felt years ago when Theo had come to save her from the bleak hallways and morbid stone chambers of the Tehran orphan creche. That contradictory mixture of feelings: dread of the future, dread of this tall stranger in his crisp black uniform, and at the same time a nervous elation, a sweet suspicion of freedom.

Her memories of Tehran had been “smoothed”—the medical word—until they were distorted and affectless. She knew only that her jailers had raped and starved her sisters and had used her own body as they pleased. She didn’t forgive them, but her rage was muted; most of her tormentors would have died in the riots of’40, in the fire that had swept out of the industrial slums and swallowed the creche complex. They were dead, and she was alive; better still, she had been given back the special destiny for which she had been born: the stars.

Why, then, did she shiver at every touch of the material world? She had shivered, outside in her excursion suit, at the first cool drop of Isian rain on her shoulder. And she had shivered at the touch of Tam Hayes’ broad, rough hand.

I don’t like to be touched. How often in her life had she repeated that small mantra? It was a legacy, the medical ontogenists had told her, of the Tehran years. An aversion too deep to root out, and anyway, where she was going, there would be no one to touch her; no one human, at least, during her alone time in the Isian wilderness.

But then why was she looking at the night sky with her eyes full of tears? Why did her hand stray repeatedly to her shoulder where Tam Hayes had touched her, as if to shelter that ghost of his warmth?

Why had memory begun to well out of her like some dark subterranean spring?

She knew only that something was wrong with her. And that she mustn’t tell anyone. If they suspected she was ill, they would send her back to the IOS, probably back to Earth.

Away from her work.

Away from Tam Hayes.

Away from her life.

Two days passed. The crisis at the oceanic outpost had been contained; the mood at Yambuku lightened somewhat, though Zoe noticed the biohazard people keeping their scrolls open on their desks, alert for news. She spent a morning doing a simulation walk through the lush terrain west of the Copper River, then took her lunch into the prep room of the docking bay, watching the maintenance crew ready the shuttle for Elam’s suborbital flight across the ocean.

Maintenance was an Engineering duty. Lee Reisman, Sharon Carpenter, and Kwame Sen waved at Zoe from the bay, and Kwame in particular stole a number of more frequent glances at her. Was he attracted to her? Sexually attracted? The thought was unsettling. Zoe had studied with peers at the D P facilities back home, but most of her classmates were heterosexual women or junior male aristocrats sporting orchidectomy badges. And Zoe hadn’t cared. The medical team had taught her a broad range of masturbation sutras, because that was expected to be her permanent sexual modality. It should have been enough.

But these days she was masturbating almost nightly, and when she did … well, as often as not, she thought of Tam Hayes.

Elam Mather entered the prep room and joined Zoe at the table, pushing aside a stack of checklists to make room for her coffee cup. The older woman nodded at her abstractedly but said nothing, only gazed at the shuttle work. Kwame kept his glances to himself.

Zoe said, “I hope you have a safe trip.”

“Hmm? Oh. Well, don’t wish me luck. It’s bad luck, wishing people luck.”

It was the sort of bewildering thing Kuiper people were apt to say. Certainly, Zoe had read all the histories; she could recount the founding of the Republics as well as any schoolchild in the system. But none of that dry knowledge had prepared her for the reality of a Kuiper-dominated community like Yambuku—the frightening fluidity of rank, the unabashed sexuality. Kuiper males were never gelded, no matter what their station in life, and the result was rather like being caged with zoo animals; these people made no secret of their urges, their assignations, their copulations…

“We’re not so bad,” Elam said.

Zoe stared. “Are you telepathic, too?”

Elam laughed. “Hardly. It’s just not the first time I’ve worked with Terrestrials. You learn to recognize that expression, you know, that sort of—‘Oh, God, what next?’ Zoe allowed herself a smile.

“Actually,” Elam added, “you’re adjusting very well for an Earth-bound hand.”

“I’m not Earth-bound. Any more than you’re Kuiper-bound. I mean … we’re here, aren’t we?”

“Good point. You’re right. We’re here. We’re not what we used to be.” She returned Zoe’s tentative smile. “I begin to understand what Tam sees in you.”

Zoe blushed.

Thinking: He sees something in me?

She dreamed that night of her first home—not the horrid barracks in Tehran but the soft, cool Devices and Personnel creche of her years.

The creche was located deep in an American wilderness enclave. The creche dome, green as crystal, seen from afar on picnic days, had glittered like a dewdrop on the rolling prairie grassland.

The nursery wards and creche pads had been as plush as velvet, all corners rounded, the air itself sweet-smelling and cool. And she had not known fear or doubt, not in the creche. Each of the nannies, many of them wholly human, tended one special child, and they were stern but kind, fat ministering angels.

She had changed her green jumper every morning and every afternoon, the simple cloth starched and bright. And she had looked forward to the evening bath, splashing with her sibs while lactating nannies with babies in their arms looked on indulgently from terraces above the steaming water.

In her dream, she was back in the bath pool, slapping waves at a yellow flotation ring. But the dream became disturbing when great, ancient trees—cycads or giant lycopods—erupted around the pool, a sudden forest. The voices of her sibs were instantly stilled. She was alone, shivering, naked in a woodland like no woodland she had. ever seen. She climbed from the creche pool onto a mossy shore. Black soil cushioned her feet; the rocks were dressed in velvety green liverwort. She didn’t know how she had come here or how to find her way home. She felt panic rising out of the clenched fist of her belly. Then a shade, a shape, appeared out of the humid fog. It was Avrion Theophilus, her own beloved Theo in his crisp Devices and Personnel uniform … but when she recognized him she turned away and ran, ran as fast she could run, ran uselessly while his footsteps thudded behind her.

She woke in the dark.

Her heart was hammering. It eased soon enough, but the sense of threat and electricity continued to vibrate through her body.

Just a bad dream, Zoe thought.

But she never had bad dreams.

She pushed the nightmare out of her mind, thinking again of Tam Hayes, of how she had touched him so unselfconsciously in the common room, of the fabric of his shirt, of his eyes holding hers for a fraction of a moment.

Something is wrong with me, she told herself again, oh God, as she reached between her legs and spread her labia with her fingers, finding the bump of her clitoris like a small, hard knot.

The orgasm came quickly, a wave of fire. She bit her lip to keep from crying out.