Free Bios by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

sentience.
    Behind this lurked the larger question, the question Li had chewed over so often with the Yambuku planetologist Dieter Franklin, the question so central and so perplexing that it began to seem unanswerable: Are we alone?
    Life was hardly a novelty in the universe. Isis was testament to that, and so were the even dozen biologically active worlds that had been detected by planetary interferometer. Life was, if not inevitable, at least relatively common in the galaxy.
    But there had not been, for all of mankind’s attentive listening, any intelligible signal, any evidence of nonhuman space travel, any hint of a star-spanning civilization. We expand into a void, Li thought. We call out, but no one answers.
    We are unique.
    He stowed his cargo of bacterial scrapings in the remensor’s hold and turned back to the surface. He had other work to do. He was the Oceanic Station’s chief manager, and this excursion by telepresence had been a guilty pleasure. There were reports to be filed, complaints to be heard. All the dreary business of a Works Trust enterprise to be hacked away like an infestation of barnacles, until it inevitably grew back.
    The remensor rose like a steel bubble toward the surface. He watched the seafloor drop away but felt no sensation of motion, only his own stiff spine pressing the back of the chair in the telepresence room. Running the remensor was so absorbing that he tended to forget to shift position; he always left these expeditions with his chronic lumbar pains acting up.
    He reached the point at which daylight became perceptible, the waters around him turning indigo, then sunset-blue, then turbulent green. The floating Oceanic Station was in sight, a distant chain of pods and anchors like a string of pearls dangling from the hand of the sea, when the alarm began to sound.

    Li handed over the remensor controls to his assistant, Kay Feinn, and scanned the situation report flashing on the remensor room’s main screen before he attended to his own rapidly flashing scroll.
    General shutdown, barriers up, contamination detected in Pod Six. The lowermost of the Oceanic Station’s laboratory units had gone hot. It took him another ten minutes trolling for information before the engineering crew determined that yes, the pod had apparently gone hot, and no, the two men trapped inside it at the time of the alarm weren’t responding to repeated calls. Telemetry from the affected pod had also failed; the structure was closed and blank. The electronic failures were particularly perplexing. Faced with locked doors and no input, the engineering people weren’t sure what the next step ought to be.
    Li knew what it ought to be: He ordered the station’s shuttle prepped for emergency evacuation in case of further problems. He told his comms crew to alert the IOS and ask for its advice. He was trying to put through a personal call to Kenyon Degrandpre when Kay, still wearing the telepresence gear, said, “I think you should look at this.”
    â€œNot a good time.” Obviously.
    â€œI’m down at Pod Six,” Kay said. “Look.”
    He canceled the call and climbed back into the telepresence chair.
    Pod Six had been disastrously compromised—that much was obvious from the alarm sequence—but Li couldn’t see any physical damage from the perspective of the submersible remensor.
    Multiple beams of light thatched the ridges of Pod Six’s external sensor array, revealing nothing. Huge translucent invertebrates—Freeman’s staff called them “church bells”—drifted toward the remensor in great numbers, attracted by the light; but they were a harmless nuisance, mindlessly trawling the warm equatorial waterfor organelles. A flock of church bells could hardly have shut down an entire laboratory.
    â€œKay, what am I supposed to see?”
    The two men trapped in the compromised pod were Kyle Singh, a Kuiper microbiologist, and Roe