Read Online Bios by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

caretaker’s gesture, then went to bed.
    Zoe was excited over her first walkabout. She was restrained during the suit-up, but Hayes knew by the color in her cheeks and the flash in her eyes that she had imagined this moment for years.
    The memory of Mac Feya rose up to dim his own excitement. Zoe’s excursion suit was impossibly flimsy. Elam was right: this wasn’t an improved bioarmor, it was a whole catalog of new technologies . . . carefully hoarded, he supposed, by the gnomes of Devices and Personnel. And yes, if it worked, it would transform the human presence on Isis.
    Zoe was ready and waiting by the time he had sealed himself into his infinitely more cumbersome bioarmor. She appeared limber and free by comparison, with nothing riding her body but a semitransparent membrane, a pelvic sheath to recycle wastes, a breathing apparatus that hugged her mouth, and a pair of substantial boots.
    Elam Mather, supervising from well within the sterile core, reviewed their telemetry and cleared them to leave the station. They had already advanced through three layers of semi-hot exterior-ring cladding; now the final door, a tall steel atmosphere lock, slid open on naked daylight.
    Not sunlight. A solid overcast hid the sun and made the nearby forest shadowy and forbidding. Zoe stepped past Hayes in his massive armor and stood in the clearing, looking ridiculously vulnerable.She looked, in fact, almost naked. Her excursion suit gave her features a ruddy glow but concealed nothing.
    Her arms and shoulders moved without restraint. Her upper body was supple, small taut muscles moving under blemishless skin. Her breasts were compact and firm. Hayes feared for her, but Zoe was fearless. She moved awkwardly at first, the leg and pelvic gear hampering her stride, but with a coltish, obvious joy.
    â€œSlowly, Zoe,” he warned her. “This is a telemetry exercise, not a picnic.”
    She came to a stop, hands out, chin uplifted. “Tam! Do you feel it?”
    â€œFeel what?”
    She was practically giddy. “The rain!”
    The rain had begun imperceptibly—at least to Hayes—a gentle mist rolling out of the west. Raindrops spattered the dry clearance and rattled the leaves of the forest. Droplets began to bead on Zoe’s second skin. Dewdrops. Jewel-like. Toxic.
    Hayes had never been to Earth. The biotic barrier was simply too steep; it would have meant countless inoculations and immunesystem tweaks, not to mention a grueling whole-body decon when he moved back into Kuiper space. But he was a human being, and a billion years of planetary evolution had been written into his body. He understood Zoe’s pleasure. Warm rain on human skin: What was it like? Not like a shower in the scrub room, he thought—judging by Zoe’s helpless grin.
    She turned and moved precipitously toward the wooded perimeter, arms loose at her sides. Vine trees looped bay-green leaves above her head. In the wet shade, she was almost invisible. Hayes watched in consternation as she leaned down and plucked a vivid orange puffball from the mossy duff of the forest floor. The fungus dusted the air with spores.
    The danger was glaringly self-evident. A single one of those spores could kill her in a matter of hours. A cloud of them wreathed Zoe’s head, and she laughed through the respirator with childish delight.
    He walked to her, as fast as his armor would permit. “Zoe! Enough of that. You’ll overload the decon chamber.”
    â€œIt’s alive,” she marveled. “All of it! I can
feel
it! It’s as alive as we are!”
    â€œI’d kind of like to keep it that way, Zoe.”
    She grinned, and silver rain pooled at her feet.
    He coaxed her in at last, after a half-hour’s stroll around the station perimeter. Back inside, Zoe had finished showering by the time Hayes finally struggled out of his armor. He joined her in the quarantine chamber. Decontamination was agonizingly thorough