Bios by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

away.
    Zoe added, “Did I say something wrong?”
    â€œExcuse me? Oh—no, Zoe. Nothing wrong. Like I say, I’m just an old Kuiper fossil.”
    â€œYou read my personnel file,” Zoe guessed.
    â€œSome of it. Part of the job.”
    â€œI know how it must sound. Sole survivor of a clonal pod, designed for Isis duty, lost in an orphan crib for three years, mild aversion to human contact. Freakish, and I guess. . . very
Terrestrial
. But I’m really—”
    She began to say,
no different from anyone else
. But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Even on Earth, she had stood a little apart. And it was part of her qualification for the job.
    â€œâ€”trying hard to fit in here.”
    â€œI know,” Elam said. “And I appreciate it. I want to apologize if we’ve been slow about breaking the ice. Mostly it’s what happened to Mac, nothing to do with your history.”
    Zoe noted the qualifier.
Mostly
. But that was fair. The majority of the scientists at Yambuku were Kuiper-born. The old-time Commonwealth Settlement Ministry had populated the first Kuiper Body settlements with citizens gen-engineered for long isolation and the claustrophobically tight conditions in the water mines. Unfortunately, it had been a faulty sequence-swap. The undetected bug in their altered genome had been unexpected, late-life neurological decay, a congenital nerve-sheath plaque difficult to cure or contain. Of that generation of Kuiper settlers, those who survived the rigors of first settlement had died screaming in inadequate clinical facilities far from Earth. Only a hasty program of sequencepatching had saved their children from the same fate. Most of them.
    Kuiper veterans would tell you they feared heavy-handed Terrestrial gene-tinkering aimed at population control, not the process itself. But family history made it a ticklish issue. Zoe was a clonalbirth whose life had been designed and tailored for Trust duty. Her Kuiper-born colleagues must find that distasteful.
    â€œWhat I’m saying, Zoe, is that none of that matters much. Because you’re one of us now. You have to be. We’re sitting at the bottom of a hostile biological ocean, and Yambuku is a bathysphere. One leak and it’s over for all of us. In that kind of environment, we can’t afford anything less than mutual trust.”
    Zoe nodded. “I understand. I’m doing my best, Elam. But I’m not . . . good with people.”
    Elam touched her arm, and Zoe forced herself not to flinch. The older woman’s hand was warm, dry, rough.
    â€œWhat I’m trying to say is, if you need a friend, I’m here.”
    â€œThank you. And I’m sorry if this sounds rude. I look forward to working with you. But . . . I don’t want a friend.”
    Elam smiled. “That’s okay. I didn’t say ‘want.’ ”
    The days passed, each day a step closer to her liberation from the confinement of Yambuku. Outside, a week of rain gave way to vivid sunshine. The station’s device shop processed Zoe’s excursion suit, duplicating its files and testing its capacities, green-lighting its function inventory item by item. Zoe spent the lag time patiently, learning the first names of Yambuku’s sixteen current residents. Of these, she was most comfortable with Elam Mather and Tam Hayes, the device-shop engineers Tia and Kwame and Paul, and the planetologist Dieter Franklin.
    â€œWe’re close to a go-ahead on your excursion technology,” Tam Hayes told her. “The technicians are impressed. We were told to expect something novel. This is more than novel.”
    Zoe pushed a cargo cart down the long windowless enclosure of the south quarter. The cart’s wheels rattled against the brushed-steel floor. She tried to imagine how this place must have looked when the tractibles and Turing constructors were assembling it. A metal catacomb attended by mechanical spiders, steel and