never absolute; life touches life. The Works Trust had taken a troubled Earth back into space but could not repair the old civil and political wounds. Earth had retreated into a system of bureaucratic aristocracy; the Kuiper Republics were its unruly children, making pagan or puritan utopias of their icy strongholdsânobody cutting off his balls as a gesture of, for Godâs sake,
fealty
.
And yet, life touches life.
Take Tam Hayes. A true Kuiper orphan, excommunicated by the doctrinaire Red Thorns for signing up with a Works project.But signing up with the Trusts was the only way to reach Isis, distant Isis, fabled Isis, the Mandalay of the Republic. He had traded his history for a dream. And Zoe Fisher, as obedient a bottle baby as any that Earth had produced. No dreams allowed, not for that female gelding. But Isis had stitched them together somehow. It was obvious to everyone but themselves . . . certainly to Elam. Put them in the same room and Zoe orbited him like a sun; he followed her like a tractible antenna.
Elam didnât approve of Terrestrial/Kuiper liaisons; most of them didnât last . . . but here, she thought, was something Devices and Personnel might not have anticipated, a small wrench in the harsh human machinery of the Trusts.
Life, doing the unexpected.
She approved.
Maybe
she approved. But there were things Tam didnât know about Zoe, things Elam supposed she ought to tell him. She opened her scroll and began a message . . . she could send it after touchdown.
She wrote until her attention was attracted by a string of volcanic islands passing under the right wing, green to the rims of their ancient caldera. Reefs, not of coral but deposited by a wholly different community of limestone-fixing invertebrates, teased the shallow water into multicolored foam. The light was longer here, making valleys of the low swells. Had she slept? A crewman, passing, told her the shuttle was less than half an hour from docking and decon.
She adjusted her seat restraint, tucked her scroll away and closed her eyes again, thinking of Hayes and Zoe, of the tenacity of life, of the universal need to merge, combine, exfoliate . . . and of the vulnerability of life, too, and of the sea, of the large fish that eat the little fish, and of the long reach of the Earth.
The deep-sea stationâs head kacho was Freeman Li, a Terrestrial whom Elam had worked with both in training and on Isis. She liked him better than she did most Terrans: he was a flexiblethinker, a small barrel-chested dark-skinned man with Sherpa ancestry and family in the Martian airfarms. A fuss-and-worry type, but he usually worried to good effect.
He was worried now. He took Elam directly from decon to the nearest common room, a low-ceilinged, octagonal chamber between a microbiology lab and the engineering deck. Elam assumed she was under sea level here, but there was no way of knowing; the oceanic outpost was as tightly sealed as Marburg or Yambuku were. The stationâs distributed mass and deep anchoring prevented it from moving with the swell, though typhoons caused it to oscillate, or so she had been told, like a slow plumb bob. There was no motion now.
âIâll be frank with you, Elam,â Li said, absently stirring a cup of black tea. âWhen this happened, I told Degrandpre I wanted a complete evacuation. I still think thatâs what we should have doneâand ought to do. Whatever killed Singh and Devereaux and destroyed Pod Six acted far too quickly for us to play with it. And there are still no obvious candidates for causative agent. Lots of toxic agents down there, but much of that material is also sitting in glove-box arrays all over the station. Any agent unique to Pod Six could only have been a chemical isolate or extract, not live biota.â
âCaustic substances?â
âSome of them extremely caustic, yes, and all highly toxic. A significant release could easily have killed two men and
fealty
.
And yet, life touches life.
Take Tam Hayes. A true Kuiper orphan, excommunicated by the doctrinaire Red Thorns for signing up with a Works project.But signing up with the Trusts was the only way to reach Isis, distant Isis, fabled Isis, the Mandalay of the Republic. He had traded his history for a dream. And Zoe Fisher, as obedient a bottle baby as any that Earth had produced. No dreams allowed, not for that female gelding. But Isis had stitched them together somehow. It was obvious to everyone but themselves . . . certainly to Elam. Put them in the same room and Zoe orbited him like a sun; he followed her like a tractible antenna.
Elam didnât approve of Terrestrial/Kuiper liaisons; most of them didnât last . . . but here, she thought, was something Devices and Personnel might not have anticipated, a small wrench in the harsh human machinery of the Trusts.
Life, doing the unexpected.
She approved.
Maybe
she approved. But there were things Tam didnât know about Zoe, things Elam supposed she ought to tell him. She opened her scroll and began a message . . . she could send it after touchdown.
She wrote until her attention was attracted by a string of volcanic islands passing under the right wing, green to the rims of their ancient caldera. Reefs, not of coral but deposited by a wholly different community of limestone-fixing invertebrates, teased the shallow water into multicolored foam. The light was longer here, making valleys of the low swells. Had she slept? A crewman, passing, told her the shuttle was less than half an hour from docking and decon.
She adjusted her seat restraint, tucked her scroll away and closed her eyes again, thinking of Hayes and Zoe, of the tenacity of life, of the universal need to merge, combine, exfoliate . . . and of the vulnerability of life, too, and of the sea, of the large fish that eat the little fish, and of the long reach of the Earth.
The deep-sea stationâs head kacho was Freeman Li, a Terrestrial whom Elam had worked with both in training and on Isis. She liked him better than she did most Terrans: he was a flexiblethinker, a small barrel-chested dark-skinned man with Sherpa ancestry and family in the Martian airfarms. A fuss-and-worry type, but he usually worried to good effect.
He was worried now. He took Elam directly from decon to the nearest common room, a low-ceilinged, octagonal chamber between a microbiology lab and the engineering deck. Elam assumed she was under sea level here, but there was no way of knowing; the oceanic outpost was as tightly sealed as Marburg or Yambuku were. The stationâs distributed mass and deep anchoring prevented it from moving with the swell, though typhoons caused it to oscillate, or so she had been told, like a slow plumb bob. There was no motion now.
âIâll be frank with you, Elam,â Li said, absently stirring a cup of black tea. âWhen this happened, I told Degrandpre I wanted a complete evacuation. I still think thatâs what we should have doneâand ought to do. Whatever killed Singh and Devereaux and destroyed Pod Six acted far too quickly for us to play with it. And there are still no obvious candidates for causative agent. Lots of toxic agents down there, but much of that material is also sitting in glove-box arrays all over the station. Any agent unique to Pod Six could only have been a chemical isolate or extract, not live biota.â
âCaustic substances?â
âSome of them extremely caustic, yes, and all highly toxic. A significant release could easily have killed two men and
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