Bios by Robert Charles Wilson

flight. Zoe remained aware of the pressure of the chair against her buttocks,her solid presence in the remote-sensor chamber. But the images she saw were deep, rich, and stereoscopic. And she could hear clearly what the remensors heard: at this altitude, only a gentle rush of air; lower, perhaps the trickle of water, the cries of animals.
    Together, they flew across the glinting ribbon of the Copper River, named by Hayes’ predecessor for his Kuiper Clan. Large aviants and small predators had gathered to drink along the sandy shore, where slower waters pooled. She saw a herd of epidonts sunning themselves in the shallows. Beyond the river the forest canopy closed tight once more, seed trees and spore trees undulating like so much green linen toward the foothills of the Copper Mountain range.
    â€œIt’s all so familiar,” Zoe whispered.
    â€œMaybe it seems so.” Hayes’ voice came from the empty sky beside her. “From this height, it might almost be equatorial Earth. Easy to forget that Isis has a wildly different evolutionary history. Work we’ve done in the last six months suggests that life here remained unicellular far longer than it did on Earth. In Terrestrial organisms, the cell is a protein factory inside a protein fortress. Isian cells are all that but better defended, more efficient, far more complex. They synthesize a staggering array of organic chemicals and exist in far harsher environments. On the macroscopic level—in multicelled organisms—the functional difference is minor. The complexity is what matters. A carnivore is a carnivore and it relates to herbivores in the obvious way. Get down to the cellular level, the fundamental bios of the planet, and Isis looks a lot more alien. And more dangerous.”
    Zoe said, “I meant the terrain. I’ve flown this way in a thousand sims.”
    â€œSims are sims.”
    â€œSurvey-based sims.”
    â€œEven so. It’s different, isn’t it, when the landscape is alive under you?”
    Alive, Zoe thought. Yes, that was the difference. Even the best sims were only a sort of map. This was the territory itself, moving, changing. A passage in an ancient dialogue between life and time.
    Hayes escorted her lower. She saw his dragonfly remensor flash ahead of her, jewel-bright in the noon sun. The foothills lay ahead, wooded ridges etched with creeks. As the land rose, the forest changed from water-loving vine and cup plants and barrel trees to the smaller succulents that thrived in the stony upland soil. A dispersed ground cover opened fat emerald petals, like the blades of aloe vera. Zoe recited the Latin cognomens to herself, savoring the sound of them but wishing the Isian forest could have taken its common names from an Isian language, if there had ever been an Isian language. The closest equivalent was the cluck-and-mutter vocalizations of the diggers, and whether these constituted “language” in any meaningful sense was one of the questions Zoe hoped to answer.
    The digger colony itself, from the air, was exactly like its sims, a cluster of mud and daub mounds in a trampled clearance. Charred remnants of cook fires pocked the soil. Hayes circled the colony once, then descended in a slow spiral, watching the sky for predators attracted by the diggers’ refuse heaps. But the sky was clear. Impulsively, Zoe dropped ahead of him. Hayes didn’t rebuke her, and she was careful to stay within his security perimeter.
    She wanted to see the diggers.
    Only still images had been transmitted down the particle-pair link to Earth. She had seen multiple photographs, and more than that, images from a remote autopsy performed on a digger that had been killed by a predator, the carcass salvaged by tractible and dissected by surgical remensors. Bits of it were still preserved in Yambuku’s glove-box array—frozen blue and red tissue samples. Zoe had heard recordings of the diggers’ vocalizations and