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.
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, selfcleaning, 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.
Jasmin Chopra was the first of the salvage crew to board the IOS. Terrestrial born, she could trace her lineage back through both Revolutions. One of her ancestors, Anna Chopra, had even been tried and executed as a provocateur after a long life of apparently dutiful service to les Families anciennes.
But that wasn’t why Jasmin was here. She was here because she had conducted two salveur crews through the deadly ruins of KB47 and reclaimed several tonnes of exotic-matter Higgs-lens fragments without a single casualty. She was older now—pushing fifty Terrestrial years—but she had volunteered early for the Isis mission and used her status for maximum leverage. And here she was, farther from home than human beings had been for a chaotic century and a half.
After the station’s docking seals were judged intact and the internal pressure raised a couple of millibars, Jasmin Chopra became the first of the salveurs to cross the threshold.
She didn’t fear contagion. She was equipped with a biostat capable of digesting, poisoning, dissolving, cauterizing, or otherwise killing any foreign material that chanced to enter her body. She shuddered, in fact, at the thought of the adventurers who had died here or on the planet’s surface, their defenses against the Isian bios as frail as kites in a windstorm. Nor was she afraid of what she might find aboard the station. As she expected, any extant human remains had been tidied up by housekeeping tractibles and funneled into the nitrogen cycle. Given its history, the IOS was almost supernaturally clean.
Clean, but eerie. Everywhere there was evidence of life abandoned almost in mid-thought—clothing left where it had dropped, old-fashioned scrolls scattered on desktops, even loose paper documents fluttering in the ventilation drafts. Energy-starved tractibles mobbed her legs like lonesome puppies.
Her initial survey of the continuously pressurized portion of the IOS brought her at last to the tiered sun garden.
The agro tractibles had been diligent in their long tasks, but not much remained. The herb-and-spice aeroponics tanks must have lost power at some critical juncture. All they had lately raised was a crop of dust. On the larger and more complex vegetable tiers, everything had died but the kale and tomato plants. These had gone on, year after year, surviving draught and power failures, seeding themselves into the perpetually washed amalgam beds, growing yellow and reedy and brittle with the accumulating scarcity of micronutrients—but growing.
The persistence of life, Jasmin thought. How it gets into things.
The true wild lay below, on the planet’s surface.
Jasmin wasn’t the first to set foot there, however, even discounting the original research teams. That privilege was reserved for the young and photogenic: specifically, Jak and Elu Reys, twin Martian paleontologists who looked like lean angels as they took their first breath of Isian air, so full of strange new scents. The moment was recorded for broadcast back to its intended Terrestrial audience.
Jasmin left the shuttle after the others, a deferential act but also her preference. She was a salveur, not a scientist. Her concern was to see whether a new work station could be constructed from the weathered remains of Yambuku or whether it would be best to start from scratch. At least we have one advantage, she thought. We can walk in the open air, actually touch the planet. We’re so profoundly augmented that we could even drink the local water—given a little judicious filtering of native toxins. We can, if need be, build log cabins and live like pioneers.
But for now she was content to slip down the shuttle ramp into a meadow of blowsy seed pods under a hot noon sky. A gusty wind plucked at her hair. For one euphoric moment she was tempted to shed her clothes and run naked into the reef of trees beyond the slope of this ridge. She was as impulsive as that poor treasonous ancestor of hers.
No one had spoken yet. The only sound was the wind. Wind turning the grasses in slow swells, wind out of the west and freshening.
She closed her eyes, and it seemed to Jasmin Chopra that she heard the sound of voices on the wind—a whisper of speechless conversation. We are here, she thought, and the wind whispered, We are here. This all seems somehow familiar, she thought, and the wind said, We know you. We remember you.
Strange.
She walked a little way across the meadow until she could see a part of the old Trust station, Yambuku, rising past the canopy of trees. Its shuttle-bay dome was cracked and covered with green creepers; it had been reclaimed by the wild.
A brittle echo of the human presence on Isis. The bios is strong, Jasmin thought. We have a lot to learn.
Robert Charles Wilson, Bios
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