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

TWELVE

Zoe slept late on the last morning of her three-day trial excursion. Her sleep had been irregular ever since the death of Elam Mather, shallow and florid with dreams, but exhaustion had tipped her into a black, dreamless unconsciousness. By the time she woke, her a.m. check-in from Yambuku was more than an hour late.

Are they letting me sleep, Zoe wondered, or had there been some new crisis, perimeter breach, disaster…? She toggled her corneal display and called up a status report. The customary Yambuku telechatter scrolled past, tractibles talking to tractibles, but her personal com line showed a yellow hold tag. She queried the system and got a prerecorded note from Tam Hayes. He was involved, he said, in a conference with the IOS’s kachos; he would talk to her shortly; in the meantime she might as well finish packing her campsite for the day’s hike.

She stepped out of the tent into morning sunlight, feeling vaguely abandoned.

Her trial excursion had been an unqualified success. All the peripherals—tent, tractibles, food and waste-management systems, com links—had functioned so flawlessly that the Yambuku engineers were frankly envious. There was still hope for the human presence on Isis, even if the first-generation outposts had begun to fail. She was fulfilling her mission goals, and better than that, she was in Isis, mobile in the bios, just a stone’s throw from the rushing Copper River…

And why did that seem such hollow consolation?

Something’s wrong with me, Zoe thought.

She deflated the tent walls, rolled the gel floors carefully and stored them on the back of a dog-sized cargo tractible. She packed her camp litter—empty food containers, a discharged power supply—although she could have buried it. The litter was sterile, but it would have been an intrusion, an insult to Isis.

Something’s wrong. Oh, nothing physical; her perimeters were intact; she was as invulnerable to the bios as a human being could be. But something less tangible than a virus or a prion had begun to turn and move inside her.

The forest glistened with last night’s rainfall. Water cycled from tier to tier of the tree canopy, overflowing from cupped leaves and flower chalices. In the shadowed spaces around the tree boles, the moisture had drawn out dozens of fungal fruiting bodies. Mold spores swirled in the westerly breeze, a fine sticky dust, like charcoal.

Should she speak to a doctor? If all went as planned, she would be back at Yambuku by nightfall. But her complaints were essentially minor—-restlessness, disturbed sleep, and a host of uneasy feelings, not the least of which was her sexual liaison with Tam Hayes. Mention that to a physician at Yambuku and she would be in for a battery of endocrine and neurotransmitter tests, and did she want that? “No,” she said aloud, the sound of her voice veiled by the suit filters but loud in the whispery glade. No, she didn’t want that, and not just because of the physical inconvenience. To be honest, she was changing in ways that were as tantalizing as they were disturbing.

Her feelings about Hayes, for instance. She understood human sexuality well enough; she had studied it extensively. Her bioregulators kept her on an even keel chemically, but she was hardly sexless; the tantra instructors at the Middle School had praised her skills. No: what was shocking was that she had actually allowed him to touch her, had wanted him to touch her, had relished his touch. The Devices and Personnel clinicians had told her she would never have a satisfying orgasm with another human being. Her years in Tehran had built up too many negative associational paths, and anyway, her bioregulation damped the necessary hormonal feedback loops. She simply could not experience pleasurable intercourse with an adult male. Or so they said.

So something was wrong. So she ought to alert a physician.

But she didn’t want to. A physician might fix her, and the odd thing—the really disturbingly odd thing—was that she didn’t want to be fixed.

If they fixed her she might not feel this shiver of anticipation at the sound of Tam’s voice, the sudden weightlessness when he offered a compliment, the shocking intimacy of his hand on her body.

Madness, of course, but it had something of the divine in it. She wondered if she had stumbled across some wisdom lost to the modern world, an archaic emotional vector hidden under the stern sexual gridmaps of the Families or the chimp-like copulations of the Kuiper Clans.

Maybe this was how the unregulated proles fell in love. Did “love” feel like this, she wondered, in the viral hotlands of Africa and Asia?

She dreaded the feeling. And she dreaded the idea that it might one day stop.

By noon, the camp was packed and ready. Still no word from Yambuku. She needed to leave within the hour or risk reaching the station after dark.

She left a call-me memo for Hayes with Dieter Franklin, who was monitoring her stats and vitals. Luckily the forest was calm this morning, no predators within her scannable radius, white clouds riding the meridian like slow boats on a tide.

She assembled her party of six-legged tractibles and set off westward. The path, beaten by machines in advance of her excursion, followed the shore of the Copper for a half-klick or so. This time of year, the river ran shallow. The water had pulled back from its banks to reveal stony fords, quiescent green pools, and silt dunes where a few venturous weeds had taken root. Automated insect remensors followed her in a cloud like circling gnats; some flew ahead, monitoring the route. The faint buzz of them was lost in the cacophony of bird and insect calls, all of which sounded alike to her, power lines buzzing in a heat wave.

Her excursion suit tunneled beads of sweat from her skin to the membrane’s surface, cooling her as she walked. Sunlight turned the membrane white. She glanced at her arms. She was as pale as a purebred daughter of some Nordic Family, aristocratic white.

She had not traveled more than a kilometer when Tam Hayes opened a direct link to her. About time, she thought.

“’Zoe? We’d like you to halt where you are for the time being.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Not if I want to be back before dark. You’ve been talking to the IOS all morning. Time doesn’t stop just because Kenyon Degrandpre is keeping you busy.”

“That’s the point. They want the excursion extended.”

They, she noted. Not we. Hayes didn’t approve. “What do you me an, extended?’’

“Specifically, they want you to turn back, cross the Copper at the mobile bridge and break camp on the east bank. Remensors wall, scout a path to the digger colony, and the tractibles will trail-blaze for you. Two days of traveling ought to put you just inside the animals’ food-gathering perimeter.

Which was absurd. “I can’t do fieldwork! We’re still testing the excursion gear!”

“Feeling at the IOS is that your gear passed all the tests.”

“This pushes the schedule by at least a month.”

“Somebody’s in a hurry, I guess.”

She supposed she knew why. The Oceanic Station had collapsed and all the other Isian outposts had suffered worrisome seal failures. Zoe’s excursion suit might be performing brilliantly, but without a staging platform like Yambuku, it was as useful as a rain-hat in a hurricane. The Trusts wanted to maximize the use of her before Yambuku had to be evacuated.

Cross the Copper River toward the foothills? Move deeper into the bios while Yambuku staggered toward collapse? Was she brave enough to do that?

“Personally,” Hayes said, “I’m opposed to the idea. I don’t have the authority to overrule it, but we can always find an anomaly in your gear and order you back for maintenance.”

“But the suit is flawless. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, I think Kwame Sen could be convinced to shade a graph or two if it came to an argument.”

She thought about it. “Tam, who gave this order? Was it Degrandpre?”

“He sanctioned it, but no, the order came from your D-and-P man—Avrion Theophilus.” Theo!

Surely Theo wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. She capped her doubts. “Keep Kwame honest. I’ll cross the river.”

“Zoe? Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.”

No.

“Well… I’m sending out three more tractibles with supplies and equipment. They should catch up with you by dusk. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re on immediate recall at the first sign of trouble. Any kind of trouble. Give me the word, I’ll cover it with the IOS.”

He added, “I’ll be watching,” which made her feel both strong and weak at once, and signed off.

Zoe gazed across the placid Copper. Her pack tractibles acknowledged a new set of orders from Yambuku by circling back behind her, ambling up the trail like dimly impatient dogs and waiting for her to follow.

The bridge over the Copper River was a string of logs spun together with strands of high-tensile monofilament and anchored at either end with spikes driven deep into the gravelly soil. It was sturdy enough, Zoe supposed, but makeshift, not meant to last. Mild as the seasons on Isis were, another few weeks would see monsoon rains swelling the Copper to its limits, and this small specimen of tractible engineering would be washed away and dispersed.

The bridge crossed the Copper at a broad and shallow place where, if she looked between the slats, she could see the polished river rocks and the quiet places where creatures not quite fish— they looked like overgrown tadpoles—swarmed and spawned. She could have forded the river here, she was certain, without any bridge at all. Some of her cargo tractibles did just that, managing the water with their javelin legs more surely than they could have navigated these loosely strung logs.

Across the river the trail was less obvious; it had not been as completely blazed as the path to the bridge. By their nature the tractibles passed delicately over the landscape; it took a great deal of mechanical effort to flatten a patch of grass, much less to clear away tangled undergrowth. She would have to proceed more carefully here. The excursion suit’s membrane was strong enough to resist tearing under any ordinary circumstance, but a sharp enough pressure—a knife blade with some strength behind it, a large predator’s claws, or a fall from a height—might open a seam.

She doubted she would have trouble with knives. As for predators, the tractibles and insect remensors would watch out for her. And in any case these rocky foothills were not as inviting a hunting ground as the savanna that stretched to the south and west. Triraptors were dangerous but uncommon here; the smaller, faster carnivores were about the size of house cats and easily frightened away from something as large and unfamiliar as a human being. That was perhaps one reason the digger colony had thrived here.

And as for heights—well, she would be reluctant to press far beyond the diggers’ rangeland, into the hills where the Copper River ran in narrow, fast channels among slate-sharp rocks. Short of that, she was confident of her footing. What was left to fear?

Any often thousand unsuspected events, Zoe thought. Not to mention her own state of mind.

Not that she felt bad. The opposite. Her moods had been mercurial, but right now she felt surprisingly good, felt solid, walking in the sunlight and swinging her arms with a freedom she hadn’t felt since creche. The trail followed a low ridge eastward; when the ridge rose high enough she was able to see the canopy of the forest sloping to the west, as dense and close as a well-kept secret. All of this touched her—she didn’t have a better word—in a way she had thought impossible, as if when she left Yambuku, she had not donned a protective membrane but stripped one away. She was as raw as a nerve; the simple blue sky made her want to weep with joy.

She could think of no explanation for these mood shifts … unless she was deregulating. Could that be? But thymostats were simple homeostatic machines; she had never heard of a bioregulator malfunction. Anyway, wouldn’t it have shown up on her medical telemetry?

Doesn’t matter, some traitorous part of her whispered. She was alive—truly alive for the first time in many years—and she liked it.

Liked it almost as much as she feared it.

She halted well before dusk at one of the potential campsites mapped into the tractibles’ memory. The ridgetop broadened here into a stony plateau, tufts of green succulents poking through the topsoil between slabs of glacial rock. Pitching the tent was easy— the tent was smart enough to do most of the work itself—but anchoring it proved more difficult. She drove stakes into stony cracks and soil-filled hollows, tethering her shelter the old-fashioned way. She queried Yambuku for a weather report, but nothing had changed since this morning: skies clear, winds calm. Isis was showing her gentle aspect.

She checked in with Dieter after a hasty meal. No real news, Dieter said, except that this Avrion Theophilus, the Devices and Personnel mystery man, was due down on the next shuttle.

Theo at Yambuku, Zoe thought.

Given her mood, she guessed that should have made her happy. She wondered why it didn’t.

The sun drifted behind the Copper Mountains. Zoe finished the ungainly process of eating through the excursion suit and was ready to make another assault on the citadel of sleep when an alert popped into her corneal display. The voice of Yambuku this time was Lee Reisman, who had taken over the shift from Dieter. “We have a large animal on your perimeter,’’ Lee said, then: “Oh! It’s a digger!”

She was instantly alert. “Is it approaching the tent?”

“No … according to the remensors, it’s holding about a hundred yards off your location. Tractibles are positioned to intercept it, but—”

“Leave it alone for now,” Zoe said.

“Zoe? This isn’t an appropriate time to initiate contact.”

“I just want a look.”

She climbed out of the tent, her vision augmented in the deepening dusk. Slate rocks radiated the day’s heat like embers. She had thought the digger might be hard to see, but she spotted it at once and increased the amplification in her membrane lenses accordingly.

It—make that he—was already a familiar presence: this was the digger Hayes had called “Old Man.” She recognized the white whiskers, the splay of tendrils under its eyes.

She looked at Old Man, and Old Man looked back at her.

It was, of course, impossible to read any emotion into that face, as much as the human mind wanted to try. We project ourselves onto other animals, Zoe thought; we see expression in the faces of cats and dogs; but the digger was as inscrutable as a lobster. The eyes, she thought. On any creature larger than a beetle, the eyes are the primary vehicle of expression; but the digger’s eyes were simple black ovals in a bed of bony flesh. Bubbles of ink. Windows through which some dim not-quite-sentience regarded her coolly.

“Old Man,” she whispered. The curious one.

Old Man blinked—a flash of silver over shimmering black— then turned and loped away.