Robert Charles Wilson lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is one of the leading Canadian SF writers. His first SF novel, The Hidden Place, appeared in 1986 and his seventh, Mysterium (1994), won a Philip K. Dick Award. His big breakthrough novel however was Darwinia (1998). Bios (1999) is his most recent novel and he published his first collection, The Perseids, all SF stories set in Toronto, in 2000. In an interview a couple of years ago, he said: “I’ve been reading some of the British and Australian hard SF—Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan. I tend to like the hard SF, because it seems to me disciplined in a certain way. We can do all kinds of things in SF, but these guys keep us honest…. I admire that kind of disciplined work. In some ways it’s the heart of the field. We need it there, even if that’s not what interests us at the time—even if we’re exploring over here, writing more humanist SF, more poetic SF, we need that solid core of hard SF” (from Challenging Destiny #7 ). It seems to me this gives a good idea of Wilson’s stance as a writer of SF.
“The Dryad’s Wedding” is a prequel to Wilson’s novel, Bios, and is a tale of strange adventures on an alien planet in the distant future. It was published in the paperback anthology Star Colonies, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin A. Greenberg, and John Helfers . Its lush setting and moody concentration on the inner life of the central character remind me of the fiction of Brian Aldiss, perhaps his Hothouse series.
Chaia Martine was nineteen years old. In seven days she would marry the man she had been married to once before, in another life. And she suspected that something was terribly wrong with her.
Not the familiar something. She was actually thirty-five years old, not nineteen. She felt nineteen because nineteen years ago her skull had been fractured by a falling tree in a fierce summer storm. She had lain in the flooded Copper River for almost an hour before her rescuers reached her, and had lost so much dura mater and brain tissue that her memories could not be saved. The Humantown clinic had salvaged her body, but not her mind. She had had to wear diapers and learn to walk and talk all over again, as nano-bacters built her a new cerebral hemisphere from fetal stem cells out of the colony’s medical reserves. She had almost died and had been born a second time—awkwardly, painfully. Yes, certainly, that was wrong with her. (And problem enough for one person, Chaia thought.)
But that didn’t explain why she sometimes heard the voice of the forest calling her name. And it didn’t explain, above all else, the way the spiders had assembled themselves into the shape of a man.
The spider incident happened in a glade uphill from the Copper River. The Copper was a gentle river now, herds of epidonts grazing peacefully at the grasses and faux-lilies that grew along the banks. Chaia loved the look of it, at least at the end of a placid Isian summer. (She was inevitably nervous, frightened on some fundamental physiological level, whenever mountain rains made the river run fast and white.) This glade was one of Chaia’s private places, a place she came to be alone, away from the crowds and confusing expectations of Humantown, away from the hovering mystery of her once-and-future husband Gray McInnes. Standing, she could watch the river unfold like a perfect blue ribbon into the western prairies.
For the most part she was enclosed here, wrapped in green shade. Chaia was not now and never had been afraid of the Isian forest. Guardian remensors, small as sandflies, flew a twenty-meter perimeter around her wherever she went. They would warn her if any dangerous animal—a triraptor or a digger—came too close; they would sting and bite the creature if it attempted to stalk her.
There were Isian insects in the glade, a great many of them, but Chaia wasn’t troubled by insects. Her skin exuded pheromones that repelled the most dangerous species. If one should somehow chance to bite, her enhanced immune system would quickly neutralize the poison. In fact, she had grown familiar with the insect population of the glade, some species of which she had studied in her bios and taxonomy classes. She often spent a lazy afternoon here doing nothing more than watching the bugs: the black noonbugs, like tiny pompous cartoon men, rolling balls of sticky fungal spores; or the diogenes flies, with their pollen sacs like miniature Victorian lanterns.
The spiders were less obvious but no less plentiful. They were called “spiders” because they resembled a namesake Terrestrial insect Chaia had never seen (or could not remember seeing, though she had once, in her lost life, lived on Earth). They looked like button-sized, rust-red marbles equipped with a radial mass of legs. The spiders were harvesters, cutting leaves and taking the fragments back to their ground nests, which rose like ankle-high pyramids from the forest floor.
She was not ordinarily aware of the spiders—they passed through the fallen leaves and green reeds as lightly as idle thoughts—but today they were numerous and active, as if vying for her attention. Chaia sat on a fallen log and watched, fascinated, as they marched among the damp thread-mosses, gathering in pale clumps and clinging together.
This was unusual behavior, and Chaia supposed it must reflect some event of great significance in the spider universe, a mass mating or the founding of a new colony. She lifted her feet so that she would not inadvertently disturb the complex protocols of the creatures.
A breeze from the west rattled the long brella leaves above her head. Chaia was due back at Humantown for the evening meal (and a wedding rehearsal at the Universalist chapel), but that was still two hours away. Her afternoon was her own, and she meant to spend it doing absolutely nothing useful or productive. She watched the spiders gather in the glade, watched them idly at first but then with increasing attention, until it became obvious that what was happening here was not, perhaps, wholly natural.
Still, the feverish activity of the insects fascinated her. Spiders poured into the glade from several directions and several nests at once, parade lines of them. They avoided Chaia systematically but gathered before her in lacy sheets, stacked one atop another until the combined mass of their pale bodies took on a smoked-glass color and they rose in a seething mound to half her own height.
Carefully—disquieted but not yet terrified—Chaia stood and took a step backward. The spider-mass moved in response, shifting its borders until it became (and now Chaia’s fear began to intensify) a nearly human shape. The spiders had made a man. Well, not a man, exactly, but a human form, neither male nor female, really just the suggestion of a torso, arms, a head. The head was the most detailed part of the spider-sculpture. Its eyes were a shadowed roundness, its nose a pale protruberance.
Chaia was about to flee the glade when the spider-thing opened its uncertain mouth and spoke.
The voice was very faint, as if the massed insects had enclosed a volume of air in a kind of leaky lung, expelling moist breezes through vocal cords made of insect parts or dried reeds. Or perhaps only Chaia heard the voice; she thought this was possible. But the spider-thing spoke, and the awful thing about this was, Chaia recognized its voice.
She hadn’t heard it for a long time. But she had heard it often when she was younger, in the woods, in her dreams. She called it the voice of the forest because it had no real name, and she never spoke of it because she knew, somehow, she mustn’t.
“Chaia,” the spider-thing whispered.
It knew her name. It had always known her name. It had called her name from wind-tossed trees, from the rippling flow of the Copper River. She sensed an uneasiness in the voice, an anxiety, an unfulfilled need.
“Chaia,” the spider-thing said. (The voice of the forest said.)
That was all. That was enough.
Then the man-shaped mass began to lose its form, to collapse into a collection of mere insects, thousands of them flowing like water at her feet, and she thought she heard the voice say, “No, not like this, not this.” Chaia tried to answer it, to say something, because surely a sound of her own would disperse the hallucination (it must be a hallucination) and jolt the forest back to reality. But her throat was as dry and breathless as a sealed room. Her courage collapsed; she turned and ran downhill until she found the trail to Human-town, a cloud of guardian remensors following her like agitated gnats; ran all the way back with the forest singing in her ears, certain that something was wrong with her, that some part of her was deeply and permanently broken… and how could she bring herself to marry Gray McInnes, how could she even have contemplated it, when she was probably not even sane?
Humantown had been established half a century ago, deep in the arboreal hinterland of the Great Western Continent. It was the first truly successful human settlement on Isis. But it was not, strictly speaking, the first.
There had been human beings on Isis more than a century earlier. That had been when the great Trusts ruled the Earth, when the outer solar system had been a checkerboard of independent republics (Mars, the asteroids, the Uranian moons, and the Kuiper kibbutzim), when a single interstellar launch had consumed a significant fraction of the system’s gross economic product. People had come to Isis because Isis was one of the few biologically active worlds within practical reach, and because it seemed so invitingly Earth-like in its size, mass, climate, and atmosphere.
The problem: Isis was toxic.
It was, in fact, deadly. Its biosphere had evolved far before the Earth’s, and without the periodic massive diebacks that punctuated Terrestrial evolution. The Isian ecology was deeply complex, driven by predation and parasitism. The Isian equivalents of viruses, bacteria, and prions made short work of any unprotected Terrestrial organic matter. From an Isian point of view, human beings were nothing more than an ambulatory buffet of choice long-chain proteins waiting passively to be devoured.
The first settlers—scientists living in the sterile cores of multilayered biohazard facilities—had underestimated the virility of the Isian bios. They had died. All of them, including thousands in the Isian orbital station, when their defenses were breached. Lovely as she was, Isis was also a murderess.
Humanity had not returned to the planet for a hundred years, by which time the oligarchy of the Trusts had collapsed and a gentler regime controlled the Earth.
And still, no unprotected human being could survive more than a few minutes in the Isian bios. But protection had grown more subtle, less intrusive. Chaia, for instance, possessed immune system prostheses clustered in genned sacs around her abdominal aorta; countless genetic fixes had hardened her cellular barriers against Isian invasion as well. With periodic upgrades, she could live here indefinitely.
She felt as if she had lived here all her life. She was not a true Isian, like the babies born in Humantown, because she had lived another life on Earth; but that life was lost to her. All she remembered was Isis. She knew the forests and uplands around Humantown intimately because they were her cradle and her home. She knew the wildlife. She knew the town itself, almost too well. And she knew the people.
She knew there was no one she could talk to about the spiders.
Humantown had grown up above an S-curve in the Copper River, a ploughed terrace dotted with simple Turing-fabricated structures. It was fenced to keep dangerous wild animals away, but the fence recognized Chaia and opened to admit her (chiming “Welcome, Chaia Martine!” from a hidden sonodot). Chaia suppressed her anxiety as she walked down dusty Main Street. She passed the hardware shelter, where Gray McInnes wrote Turing protocols for the assembly robots; she was obscurely relieved not to see him there. She passed the health center where she had spent her first five years under the care of her trauma-mother Lizabeth Chopra and a half-dozen surrogate fathers in the form of therapists and doctors. She passed the Universalist Chapel, where all the religious people except Orthodox Jews and Reform Mormons gathered once a week to worship… then she turned back, rang the rectory bell, and told Clergyman Gooding to cancel tonight’s rehearsal. She wasn’t feeling well, she said. No, nothing serious. A headache. She just needed to lie down.
Then she walked up Main Street, past Reyes Avenue where her own small private shelter stood, and down a back lane through a stand of cultivated brella trees where children played with brightly-colored mentor robots, and then—surprising herself—through the fence and out into the wild-wood once more.
Dusk was slow on Isis. Sunsets lingered. The forest grew shadows as Chaia walked. She would be missed at the evening meal at the town kitchen, but perhaps Rector Gooding would make excuses for her.
That would not prevent Gray McInnes (wonderful, patient, enduring Gray) from seeking her out. And she wouldn’t be at home, but she didn’t think Gray would be terribly surprised at that. Chaia often went walking late in the woods and had even spent some nights there. After all, she had her remensors to protect her; the Humantown computers could pinpoint her location if some need arose. Would Gray follow her into the woods? No, she thought, not likely. He understood her periodic need to be alone. He understood all her quirks. If Gray had a fault, it was this relentless understanding. It suggested he still thought of her as a kind of invalid, as if she were the original Chaia Martine he had married back on Earth, only suffering from a long-term amnesia.
But she was not that Chaia Martine. She was only the sum of what she had been on Isis. Plus a few random delusions.
She followed an old path up the foothills above the human settlement and the river. She had no destination in mind, at least not consciously; but she walked for more than an hour, and when she awoke to herself she saw lights in the distance. Glaring portable flarelights, much brighter than the setting sun. This was a remote research site, an abandoned digger complex where the planetary ecologist Werner Eastman had excavated a nest of ancient tunnels.
She came out of the woods into a blizzard of light and sound.
Most of the heavy work here had been done by construction and mining robots. The huge yellow machines still roamed the site, sectioning the earth with a delicacy that belied their great size and noise. They sorted what they found, excreting chipped flint and knapping stones into neat mesh trays.
Werner and his two apprentices should have been finished for the night, but they seemed absorbed in their work, huddling in a polyplex shelter over some choice discovery. Chaia simply stood at the edge of the excavation, peering down the steeply terraced border into a layer of resected tunnels like limestone wormtracks. A cooling breeze tangled her long hair.
Werner must have noticed her at some point. She looked up from her thoughts and he was there, gazing at her with a gentle concern. “Hello, Chaia. Come to watch?”
“Not really. Just…walking.”
“Late for that, isn’t it? You’ll be missing dinner.”
“I felt restless.”
She liked Werner Eastman. He was an old Isis hand, dedicated to his work. A tall man, graying at the temples after at least two juvenation cycles. He was older than Humantown itself, though still young by Terrestrial standards. He had been one of her surrogate fathers.
They had drifted apart in recent years. Werner disapproved of her marriage to Gray McInnes. He felt that Gray was taking advantage of her, exploiting the fact of his prior marriage to that other Chaia Martine, the one who had died in the Copper River. Gray wanted everything to slide back in time to the way it had been before, Werner insisted. And that was maybe true, Chaia thought. But she couldn’t forget or ignore Gray’s many kindnesses. And Gray, after all, had been the only courtier in her brief new life. The only one not repelled or at least dismayed by her strangeness, her awkward in-betweenness.
But Werner meant no harm. His concern had always touched her, even when she considered it misplaced. She said, “You’re working late, too.”
“Yes. Well, we found something quite interesting in the lower excavations. Care to have a look?”
She agreed, but only to be polite. What could be interesting, except to a specialist, about these old digger tunnels? She had seen diggers often enough—live ones, clutching crude spears in their manipulating arms. They were occasionally dangerous, but nothing about them inspired her curiosity. They were not truly sentient, though they manufactured simple levers and blades. In fact they were emotionally affectless, bland as turtles. She couldn’t imagine befriending a digger, even the way she might befriend an ordinary animal. They had no true speech. They lived in tunnels lined with hardened excreta, and their diet consisted of rotting carrion and a few roots and vegetables. If food was scarce, they would devour their own young.
Werner took her to the shelter where the day’s discoveries were laid out on a table. Here were the usual simple flint tools, the kind Werner had been cataloguing since Chaia was young. But a few other items, too. The ones he had called “interesting.” Bits of corroded metal. (Diggers weren’t metalworkers.) This one, for instance, clotted with clay, looked like the kind of firefly lamp every colonist carried in his pouch. Here, a sort of buckle. Chipped fragments of glass.
“Humans made these,” Chaia said, an odd uneasiness haunting her.
“Yes. But they’re old. They date from the first Isian settlement, almost two hundred years ago.”
“What are they doing in these old digger tunnels?”
“That’s the interesting question, isn’t it? But we also found this.”
Werner reached into a specimen box and withdrew something already washed free of its embedding mud and clay, something smooth and white.
A jawbone.
A human jawbone.
“My God,” Chaia breathed.
Werner began to explain what the jawbone represented… something about the first research colonists who had occupied the modern site of Humantown, and how one of them must have ventured into the digger colony when it was still active, or had been carried there, or…
But Chaia didn’t really hear him.
The jawbone—dead, motionless on the table—spoke to her.
Werner went on talking. Werner couldn’t hear.
But Chaia heard it quite plainly.
“Chaia,” the jawbone said.
And Chaia fainted.
There is a phenomenon in the universe called, loosely, “sentience.” It occurs in quasi-homeostatic systems of a certain complexity. Human beings are an example of such a system. Certain of their machines are also sentient. Elsewhere in the known universe, sentience is elusive.
Chaia, dreaming, remembered this much from her bios textbooks.
She dreamed of herself, of her brain regrown from fetal stem cells. Sentience requires communication. Nerve cells talk to nerve cells. They talk electrically; they talk chemically. Her fresh, new neurons had exfoliated into a mind.
“Mind,” the textbooks said, was what happened in the gaps between the neurons. Signals were exchanged or inhibited. But the space between neurons is essentially empty. “Mind” was a hollowness where patterns bloomed and died.
Like flowers growing between the stars.
What were the places that mind could live? In a human nervous system. In the countless virtual gates of a quantum computer. And—and—
But the dream-thought drifted away, a pattern that had blossomed and withered before she could grasp it.
She woke to find Gray McInnes at her bedside, frowning.
She said, idiotically, “Am I sick?”
(Because of course she was sick; that was why she heard voices….)
But Gray shook his head reassuringly. “Overtired, or so the therapist tells me. I guess you’ve been under a lot of stress. The wedding plans and all. What were you doing out in the wildwood?”
His expression was open and guileless, but she heard an accusation. “Just walking. Thinking.”
He smiled. “The nervous bride?”
“Maybe some of that.”
She turned her head. She was home, in her own shelter. They hadn’t put her in the clinic, which was a good sign. Through the bedroom window she could see a patch of sky, clouds racing out of the west. When those clouds broke against the flanks of the Copper Mountains there would surely be rain. Summer was over.
Gray brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. His hand was gentle. He smelled warm and solid. He was a big man, robust, stocky in the way that distinguished Earth-born colonists from their Martian or Kuiper-born colleagues. Chaia always felt tiny next to him.
He said, “The doctor gave you something. You’ll probably want to sleep some more.”
Chaia wondered whether it was Gray she loved or just his constant presence—the reassurance of him, like a favorite chair or a familiar blanket. She dreaded hurting him.
But how could she go through with the wedding, when she was probably not even sane? How much longer could she pass among people and pretend to be normal? They would notice, soon enough; Gray would notice first, was perhaps even now in that first awful stage of discovery, the warmth of him hiding a kernel of repugnance….
“Close your eyes,” he said, smoothing her forehead.
Cloud shadows stole across the room.
He stayed with her that night.
Humantown’s particle-pair communications link with Earth had lately downloaded a series of fresh entertainments, and Gray picked one to watch while Chaia dimmed the ambient light. The videostory was called The American’s Daughter and was set in the wild years of the twentieth century, when there were hundreds of quasi-independent Terrestrial nation-states and not even the moon had been settled. Gray, a history buff, pointed out some factual errors the producers had missed or ignored—the robotic servant that carried messages between the President’s daughter and the penniless alchemy student was almost certainly an anachronism, for instance.
The story was placed in North America, with most of the conventional settings of an histoire americain: huge concrete buildings, pavement streets crowded with beggars and bankers, a cathedral, a “factory,” a carnival. The story ended with a reunion, supposedly in New York City, but Chaia thought the buildings looked like the old city of Brussels, gently morphed to more closely resemble a twentieth-century city.
Gray turned to her curiously when she remarked on it. “What do you know about Brussels?”
“Well, I—” She was suddenly puzzled. “I guess I must have seen pictures.”
Brussels.
A place on Earth.
But it had seemed so familiar. She just…well, recognized it.
Remembered it.
When had she seen Brussels? Can you remember a place you’ve never been? Or was this another neurological tic, like seeing spiders turn into people, like hearing jawbones talk?
Chaia’s mood darkened. Gray stayed with her, and she was grateful for his company. But when they went to bed she turned her back to him, nestled against his big body in a way that meant she was ready to sleep. Only sleep. Or try to sleep.
Soon he was snoring. Chaia, restless, opened her eyes and watched the pebble-sized moon dart across the sky beyond the window. She thought of “lunacy,” an old English word that had figured in The American’s Daughter. After “Luna,” the Earth’s moon, linked in ancient mythology to madness, strangeness, the uncertainties of great distances and time.
Isis was a stepping stone to the stars.
Star travel was not a simple business even today. Interstellar launches were more efficient than the original Higgs translations of two hundred years ago, but they still consumed enormous resources—in the energy and materials necessary to produce the exotic-matter Higgs lenses; and in sheer real estate, each launch requiring the conversion to its nascent energy of an entire small asteroid or Kuiper body. And all of that would take you no farther than the nearest thousand stars.
But from Isis, a living world at the periphery of the human diaspora, a thousand new stars became (at least theoretically) accessible. Isis didn’t have the industrial base to support even a single outward-bound Higgs launch, not yet, but the time would come. Already self-reproducing Turing factories had colonized the icy fringes of the Isian system, building planetary interferometers to scout likely stars. Already, remensors and industrial robots had begun digging into selected cometary bodies, hollowing them out for the Higgs launches that would happen, if all went well, in fifty or a hundred years. Chaia herself might well live another hundred or two hundred years; she might see some of these great public works come to fruition.
In the meantime the daily work of Humantown went on: tending robots, harvesting food and medicinals from the wilderness, writing and revising Turing protocols, making sense of the strange Isian bios. And the simple work of living. Making love, making babies; growing up, even dying.
Getting married.
In the morning she went to the Universalist chapel with Gray for a brief rehearsal: essentially a walk up the aisle, a feigned exchange of yubiwa (finger rings made of gold mined from the mountains by robots), the pronunciation of the banns. Weddings were a Terrestrial custom; relations among Martians and Kuiper folk were more fluid, less formal. Not that a Universalist ceremony was exactly formal. Universalism was not even really a religion in the old sense. Its only dogma was a prescribed humility in the face of the mysteries of the natural world, the unfathomables of ultimate beginning and ultimate end. Its icon was a black circle: the abyss, the primordial singularity; the infinitely receding spacetime of a black hole.
Chaia walked listlessly through the rehearsal. She noticed, but could not bring herself to care, when Gray exchanged glances with Rector Gooding, their expressions reflecting—what? Disappointment? Doubt? Had she been too restrained, too distant? Maybe it would be better if Gray came to doubt her sincerity. Then maybe he could set aside the quest that had consumed him for almost twenty years: to recreate and remarry the woman he had married once on Earth, the other Chaia Martine, her old shadow-self.
After the rehearsal she pled fatigue and left Gray at the chapel. She would go home and rest, she said. A lie. Instead she went to see Werner Eastman, determined to confront the mystery of her madness before she married Gray McInnes and perhaps widowed him again, a fate he hardly deserved.
“How much do you know about the first Isian colonists?” Werner asked, sipping coffee from a shiny blue mug.
He wasn’t at the tunnel excavation today. He was in his laboratory in the medical-biological complex, a large space strewn with Isian bones and fossils, insects killed and mounted on card stock, loose terminal scrolls with cladistic charts sketched onto them. There was another human skull section on the table in front of him. Chaia carefully avoided looking at it, lest it call her name.
“Not much,” she said. “Just what you learn in school. They weren’t hardened against the bios. They died.”
“More or less correct. Did you know one of the original research stations was located just west of here? The ruins were cleared for farmland thirty years ago—the old hands wanted to preserve it as a historical site, but we were outvoted. We saved what we could from the antique data-storage systems, however, anything that hadn’t been hopelessly corrupted by weather and time.”
“Do you know who that is?” Chaia asked, meaning the skull fragment that lingered in her peripheral vision like a warning sign.
“I think so,” Werner said. He sounded pleased with himself at this bit of detective work—he had obviously been ransacking the archives. “I think what we have here are the remains of a young Terrestrial woman named Zoe Fisher.”
Chaia didn’t recognize the name, though perhaps she had heard it once long ago—it seemed familiar in that faraway fashion.
“Zoe Fisher,” Werner continued, “was out in the wild-wood testing new isolation and immune-enhancement technologies when the research station lost its perimeters and went hot. She missed the evacuation. She was abandoned on Isis, captured by the local diggers and carried into their warren, where she died and was presumably devoured.”
The diggers didn’t like fresh meat. They preferred their victuals predigested by decay enzymes. Ghastly, Chaia thought. She imagined, far too vividly, that early explorer, Zoe Fisher, lost in the woods with no hope of rescue, the toxic bios slowly but certainly eroding her defenses.
(Had it been raining back then? It was raining today: gently, on Humantown, and fiercely, far up the foothills of the Copper Mountains. The first explorers had never even felt the touch of Isian rain on their skin. Without their barriers of steel and latex and smartgels they had been horribly vulnerable; a single drop of rain contained enough Isian disease vectors to kill one of them literally within minutes.)
She thought of Zoe Fisher, lost in the rain, dragged unwilling into the deep and foul complexities of the digger tunnels. The picture was almost too vivid in her mind, too painfully close.
“An awful way to die,” Chaia said.
“She was delirious at the end. In a way, almost happy.”
Delirious, Chaia thought. Like me. “How do you know that?”
“She was in sporadic radio contact with another colonist. Some fragments of her dialogue were stored to local cyberspace and recovered when we archived the ruins. Zoe Fisher thought the bios of the planet had somehow entered her mind—that is, she believed she was talking to Isis itself. And not just Isis. All the living worlds of the galaxy, linked by some kind of shadowy quantum connection on the cellular level.”
Chaia was startled.
The bios, she thought. The voice of the forest. Had the voice of the forest spoken to Zoe Fisher, down there in the darkness of the digger middens?
She said carefully, “Could there be any truth to that?”
Werner smiled. “I doubt it. We have some evidence that DNA-based life spread through the galaxy in a slow panspermia—at least that’s the prevailing theory. But as far as we know, the only objects that can communicate at greater than relativistic speed are highly-engineered particle-pair links. Certainly not microscopic unicells.”
She had dreamed, had she not, of the way a mind grows out of the chemically-charged spaces between neurons? Well, how else might a mind grow? In the bios of a planet? In the stew of virtual particles seething in the vacuum between the stars?
“But it’s possible,” she whispered, “isn’t it?”
“Well, no, probably not. Zoe Fisher wasn’t a biologist or a physicist, and she wasn’t exactly presenting a scientific thesis. But she was an orphan, and she talked about Earth as an ‘orphan planet,’ cut off somewhere from the galactic bios. Essentially, she was talking about herself. She imagined she’d found the family she’d never had, even if it was a family of inconceivably vast intelligences.”
But that’s glib, Chaia thought. That’s not the whole story. It can’t be.
Nor was any of this the reason she had come to see Werner Eastman. He sat patiently, sharing the room with her, waiting for her to speak. The silence grew weighty until at last she confessed: “I’m worried about Gray. What I might be doing to him.”
Werner’s expression softened. He became a kind of father again, and she felt unbearably young and unbearably lonely next to him. “Chaia,” he said. “Maybe you should be worried about yourself.”
“No…it’s Gray.” She pictured Gray the way she had seen him last night, curled in bed, vulnerable for all his husky size. “He lost me once….”
“Chaia, that’s not true. I know Gray sees it that way. The Chaia Martine you used to be… the woman who almost died in the river…Gray loved her deeply. He’s never abandoned the hope that some part of her would resurface in you. But that’s simply not going to happen. You’re what that Chaia Martine might have been, if she had been born and raised on Isis. That’s all, and it ought to be enough. If he loved you on that basis, I would bless the marriage. But what moves Gray is a combination of loss and guilt. He misses his wife, and he blames himself because he couldn’t save her from the river. He thinks he should have been out there with her in that awful storm, tying down beacon pylons. Well, he can’t go back and rescue her. So he’s doing the next best thing. He’s marrying the woman he will always think of, on some level, as Chaia’s ghost.”
“No one has ever been nicer to me than Gray.”
“And he’ll go on being nice to you, year after year, and concealing his disappointment, year after year. And you deserve better than that.”
Maybe. But Werner had failed to grasp the subtlety, the nuance of her relationship with Gray. I am not a diagram, she thought. I’m not one of your cladistic charts.
“I think my memory’s coming back,” she said, surprising herself.
“Pardon me?”
“My memory of Earth. Of being that other Chaia Martine.”
Gray shook his head sadly. “It can’t happen, Chaia. It’s even less plausible than the idea of talking planets.”
“I saw Brussels in a videostory last night. And I recognized it. Not, you know, from a photograph or a book. I knew I’d been there. I had walked those streets.”
“Brussels? On Earth?”
It sounded ridiculous—another delusion—but she blushed and nodded.
“Chaia, that couldn’t be a genuine memory.”
“Why not?”
“I was one of your therapists, remember? You ought to read your own file more closely. Chaia Martine was born and lived in Brisbane. She was educated in the Emigre Academy in Near Earth Orbit from the age of ten, then traveled to the Kuper Belt for pre-Isian training. She couldn’t have seen Brussels because she was never there.”
An Isian day is slightly longer than the Terrestrial day. The circadian rhythms of the colonists had been adjusted to suit. Still, something in the ancient human biology took notice of the discrepancy. Afternoons were long; nights could be endless.
Chaia went to bed alone, far later than she had planned. Her head was throbbing. A thousand half-formed ideas flickered through her mind. She fell asleep almost inadvertently, between one fevered notion and the next.
A rattle of thunder woke her deep in the belly of the night.
Storms came hard out of the west this time of year, rolling over the basinlands toward the spine of the continent. Wind whispered around the facets of her personal shelter.
You ought to read your own file more closely, Werner had said. But she never had, had she? She had explicitly avoided learning very much about the Chaia Martine who had once inhabited this body, the Terrestrial woman who had married Gray McInnes once long ago… not because she was incurious but because that woman was dead, and it was better, her therapists had insisted, not to disturb her ghost, not to confuse the issue of her own fragile identity.
But perhaps some ghosts needed disturbing.
Sleepless, Chaia took her personal scroll into her lap and addressed the Humantown archives.
She had been trained in archival management and it was simple enough for her to scroll into the medical and personnel records and root out Chaia Martine’s detailed curriculum vitae. Chaia Martine— that Chaia Martine—had been groomed from birth for Isis duty. Biologically, she was the daughter of a Catalonian peasant couple who bartered a half-dozen viable embryos to the State Service in exchange for tax relief. She had been decanted in Brisbane and educated under the Colonial Necessities Act; her specialty had been agricultural genning and management, a skill lost to her now. She had met and married the young Gray McInnes at the orbital Emigre Academy.
And she had never been to Brussels.
Could there have been an unscheduled or unrecorded vacation? Well, perhaps so; but she doubted it. The State Service kept excellent records, especially in the case of a duty ward like Chaia Martine. If Chaia Martine had seen Brussels without registering the journey in her daily records, it represented a triumph of intrigue.
But Chaia Martine was nobody’s rebel. She gave every evidence of being happy in her work. The prospect of traveling to Isis had apparently pleased her enormously. As had her marriage to Gray McInnes.
Then had come the Higgs translation, her first year on the planet, the terrible storm, her stupid heroism, lashing beacon pylons against the wind when the robots were disabled, and inevitably suffering for it—dying for it, essentially, when her skull was split and (according to the medical record) “large portions of the left and right parietal and occipital lobes were completely obliterated, with attendant massive blood loss and the penetration of untreated river water through the pontine and lumbar cisterns.”
They could have let her body die, but enough of Chaia Martine remained intact that triage protocols dictated a cerebral rebuild. And thus the new Chaia Martine was born. With Gray McInnes, no doubt, weeping at her bedside.
Gray had avoided her assiduously for the first twelve years of her new life, because she had been, neurologically, a child—maturing in her adult body more rapidly than any normal child, but a child nevertheless. But he had remained loyal to her.
A loyalty born of guilt and grief, if Werner Eastman was to be believed.
But Gray loves me, Chaia thought. She had seen it a thousand times, in the way he looked at her, the way he held her. A love complete and forgiving and therefore terrible in its weight.
She scrolled deeper into the archives now, searching the name Zoe Fisher.
Zoe, the doomed colonist who had died in the digger warrens. Yes, here was Zoe, the records fragmentary, rescued from decaying atomic memory abandoned for years or pieced together from Terrestrial records equally incomplete. But enough to sense the shape of Zoe Fisher, a clonal baby raised in the hothouse politics of twenty-second-century Earth, young, fragile, terribly naive. Zoe Fisher, born into a Devices and Personnel crèche in North America; lost for a time in the brothels of Tehran; educated in Paris, Madrid, Brussels—
Brussels.
Fat drops of rain pelted her face. Chaia hardly noticed them. The rain was bad, but the rain would inevitably get worse. A ridge of low pressure was flowing from the west, moisture from the equatorial oceans breaking against the Copper Mountains like a vast, slow wave.
She walked as if in a trance and found herself once more in the wildwood.
Had she been dreaming? Walking in her sleep? She was alone in the forest, well before dawn in the rainy dark. The darkness was nearly absolute; even with her corneal enhancements she could see only the scrim of foliage around her, and a glint that must have been the Copper River far down a slope of rock and slipgrass.
It was dangerous to be out at night in this weather. The rain and wind made it impossible for her insect-sized guardian remensors to follow her. She could not even say where she was or how she had come here, except that it looked like, now that she thought of it, the glade, her private glade where she came to be alone—the glade where she had seen the spiders take a human shape.
The spiders.
Chaia heard a rustly movement behind her.
She turned, knowing what she must expect to see.
She was not afraid this time; or if she was, the fear was submerged in a thousand other incomprehensible feelings. She turned and saw the looming bulk of something as large as herself. It glistened in the rain that rushed from the forest canopy leaf-by-leaf, reflecting the firefly lamps she wore on her clothing. Its darkness was a deep amber darkness, and it smelled earthy and familiar.
She understood, now, that this was not something the spiders had done. The spiders were simply a vehicle. They were moved by something else, something vastly larger, something which had taken Zoe Fisher to its incomprehensible breast a hundred years ago and had recreated her now for some dire and essential purpose.
The creature spoke.
And Chaia Martine, at last, was ready to listen.
Gray McInnes found her in the glade a little before dawn, shivering and semiconscious; he carried her back through the wind-tossed forest to Humantown, to the infirmary, where she was dressed in warm hospital whites and put to bed with graduated doses of some gentle anxiolytic drug.
Chaia slept long and hard, oblivious to the wild wind beating at the shelters of Humantown.
She was aware, periodically, of the doctors at her bedside, of Gray (from time to time) or Werner Eastman, and once she thought she saw her therapy-mother Lizabeth Chopra, though nowadays Lizabeth worked in the orbital station a hundred miles above the Isian equator, so this must have been a dream.
She dreamed constantly and copiously. She dreamed about the ten million worlds of the Galactic Bios.
Zoe had explained all this to her in the glade above the Copper River.
Before the Earth was born, simple unicellular life had swept across the galaxy in a slow but inexorable panspermia. It was life doing what life always did, adapting to diverse environments, hot and frozen worlds, the icy rings of stars or their torrid inner planets. And all of this life carried within it something Zoe called a “resonance,” a connection that linked every cell to every sibling cell in the way coherent subatomic particles linked Isis to Earth.
Life was pervasive, and life was a medium (immense, invisible) in which, in time, minds grew. Minds like flowers in a sunny meadow, static but ethereally beautiful.
Chaia was awake when the doctor (it was Dr. Plemyanikov, she saw, who wore a beard and sang tenor at the weekly Universalist services) told her he would be taking a sample of her cerebrospinal fluid for analysis.
She felt the needle in her neck just as the robotic anasthistat eased her back into dreamtime.
You have to warn them , Zoe Fisher insisted.
The walls of the clinic rattled with rain.
When she woke again, she found that the drugs, or something, had enhanced her sense of hearing. She could hear the rain battering the clinic with renewed intensity. She could hear the blood pulsing through her body. She could hear a cart rattling down the corridor outside her room. And she could hear Dr. Plemyanikov in the corridor with Werner Eastman, discussing her case.
— The contamination must have taken place during her initial injuries, Plemyanikov said, almost twenty years ago ….
She opened her eyes sleepily and saw that Gray McInnes was with her, occupying a chair at her bedside. He smiled when he found her looking at him. “The doctors tell me you’ve been sick.”
— Some microorganism we didn’t manage to flush out of her body after she was rescued from the river all those years ago, something almost unimaginably subtle and elusive. Lying dormant, or worse, riding on her neurological rebuild, feeding on it. A miracle it didn’t kill her….
The minds that grew on and between the living worlds of the galaxy were sentient, but it was not a human sentience— it was nothing like a human sentience. Human sentience was a novelty, an accident. Once the minds of the Bios understood this, understood that mind could grow inside the bodies of animals, they regretted the deaths Isis had imposed on her first colonists and had attempted some small restitution by absorbing the mind of Zoe Fisher.
Gray McInnes took Chaia’s hand and smiled. “You should have told me you were having problems.”
— Once we localized and identified the infectious agent, it was simple enough to engineer a cure ….
Zoe Fisher had lived inside the Isian bios for more than a century, without body or location, preserved as a ghost, or a specimen, or an ambassador, or a pet—or some combination of all these things. She had even learned to control the local bios a little, in ways that never would have occurred to its native minds. The spiders, for instance, that had spoken to Chaia, or the delicately manipulated unicells that had invaded Chaia’s broken skull and had made her meeting with Zoe possible.
“Chaia, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Because the doctors say they can cure—”
— cure the dementia —
The meeting was important, because humanity needed to know that it was expanding into territory already occupied by minds hugely strange and not necessarily benign, minds diffuse and achingly beautiful but so different from human minds that their motives and desires could not always be predicted. The history of the future would be the history of the interaction between mankind and the Bios, between orphaned humanity and its ancient progenitors.
Gray said, “I couldn’t sleep because of the storm. Too many bad memories, I guess. So I headed for the robotics bay to get a little work done. I saw the light in your shelter, but when I knocked and no one answered…”
— In fact, Plemyanikov said, we’ve already administered a vaccine ….
It was all alive with voices: the spaces between the stars, the spaces between any two living cells. The things that live there are the Lords of the Bios, Zoe had said, but they’re invisible to human beings, and you have to tell people, Chaia, tell people about the Bios, warn people….
“So I had the Humantown computer locate you, and I knew there was something wrong because you were out in the woods in a storm—God knows why—”
— She was rapidly approaching a crisis, and if Gray McInnes hadn’t brought her out of the rain —
“But this time,” Gray said, unable to conceal his pleasure, the gratification that welled out of him like fast white river water, “this time I wasn’t too late.”
— Fortunately the vaccine is already doing its work —
And something lurched inside Chaia, the voices fading now, even Zoe’s strange and urgent voice, the voice of the forest, growing dim and oddly distant, and the word cure hung in her consciousness like a bright unpleasant light, and she struggled against the watery pressure of the sedatives and tried to tell Gray what was wrong, why they mustn’t cure her, but all she could manage was “No, not like this, not this,” before the tide of drugs took her and she slept again.
The storm broke during the night. By morning the winds had gentled. The air was cool, and the clouds were rag-ends and afterthoughts in the blue Isian sky.
It had been postponed a month while Chaia recovered, but in the end the wedding was a simple and pretty ceremony.
The vaccine had flushed the infection from her body. Her hallucinations were as distant now as bad dreams, fading memories, feverish delusions, and she knew who she was: she was Chaia Martine, nothing more, and she was marrying the man who loved her.
She walked up the aisle with Gray McInnes—good and loyal Gray, who had finally saved her from the river. Rector Gooding stood beneath the black circle that was the symbol of the Mysteries and said the binding words. Then Gray took the golden yubiwa from a filigreed box, and he placed one ring on her finger and she placed one on his, and they kissed.
She was fully recovered, the doctors had told her. She was sane now. The delusions were finished, and she recognized them as symptoms of her lingering illness, refractions of half-learned history, a peculiarly Isian madness that had ridden into her brain when she was opened to the planet like a broken egg.
She left the church with Gray at her side, flower petals strewn at her feet, and she thought nothing of the spider that had nested at the side of the rectory, or the sound of the wind in the brella trees, or the white clouds that moved through the clearing sky like the letters of an unknown language.