Free Bios by Robert Charles Wilson

and there was no sign that the excursion gear had worked less than perfectly, but Yambuku protocols called for a day in isolation while nanobacters monitored both of them for infection.
    Two bunks, a wall monitor, and a food-and-water dispenser: That was Quarantine. Zoe stretched out on one of the cots, reduced by these blank walls to something less glorious than she had been in the open air. Hayes filed a brief written report for the IOS’s archives, then ordered up a coffee.
    Zoe occupied herself by leafing through the six-month itinerary, the document Elam had already shown him. Hayes found himself trying to imagine Zoe as Elam had described her, as a D&P bottle baby lost for two years in some barbaric orphan factory, sole survivor of her brood group.
    Nothing quite so dramatic had happened to him, but he understood well enough the emotional consequences of exile and loneliness. Hayes had been born into the Red Thorn Clan, hardcore Kuiper Belt republicans one and all. Red Thorn bred a lot of Kuiper scientists, but he was the only one on the Isis Project—one of the very few Red Thorns on any kind of Trust-sponsored effort. A lot of Red Thorns had died in the Succession, and the clan’s opinion of the Trusts was roughly equivalent to a quail’s opinion of the snake that devours its eggs.
    When Hayes signed his Isis contract, he had been disowned by both clan and family. He was tired by then of Red Thorn extremismand would not have minded the excommunication, save that it included his mother—herself an Ice Walker, married to his father after a Kuiper potlatch in ‘26. Ice Walkers were equally hostile to the Trusts but were reputed to value family above all else. When his mother turned her back on him at the docks, she had been trembling with shame. He remembered the coral-blue jumper she had worn, possibly the soberest of all her bright-colored dresses. He had understood then that he might never see her again, that this humiliating operetta might be their last living contact.
    After that, putting his signature to a Family loyalty oath had seemed an act as degrading as wading through excrement.
    But it was the only road to Isis.
    How much worse, though, for Zoe, raised as a machine and brutalized when D&P fell out of favor. She had taken a loyalty oath, too, Hayes thought, but hers had been written in blood.
    She turned the last page of the itinerary. He saw her mouth congeal into a frown. “Bad news?”
    She looked up. “What? Oh—no! Not at all. Good news! Theo’s coming to visit.”
    Avrion Theophilus. Her teacher, Hayes thought. Her father. Her keeper.

T O A PREVIOUSLY Earth-bound oceanologist such as Freeman Li, the Isian seafloor was a combination of the familiar and the bizarre in unpredictable proportions.
    He would have recognized, perhaps on any similar planet, the pillowstone lava flows and the active volcanic vents—“black smokers” feeding the deep water with bursts of heat and blooms of exotic minerals. The powerful light of his benthic remensor picked out rainbow growths of bacterial mat on the surrounding seafloor, thermophyllic unicells in a thousand variations, almost as ancient as Isis herself. And this, too, was familiar. He had seen such things in the deep Pacific, years ago.
    Away from these landmarks, the Isian ocean floor was powerfully strange. Highly calciferous plants rose in towers and obelisks and structures that resembled mosques. Swimming or moving among them were forms both vertebrate and invertebrate, some of them large but most very small, shining silvery or pastel-pale under the unaccustomed light.
    Interesting as these creatures might be, it was the simple monocells Li had come to collect. Something in these most ancient forms of Isian life might provide a clue to the big questions: how life had evolved on Isis, and why, in all its eons-long exfoliation, that life had not produced anything that could reliably be called