Bios by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

had analyzed them for evidence of internal grammar. (The results were ambiguous at best.) She knew the diggers as well as an outside observer could know them. But she had never seen them in vivo.
    Hayes seemed to understand her excitement, her impatience. His dragonfly remensor hovered protectively nearby. “Just not too close, Zoe, and don’t ignore your telltales.”
    The diggers were the most widely distributed vertebrate species on Isis. They were found on both major continents and several ofthe island chains; their settlements were often complex enough to be detectable from orbit.
    They were mound-builders and limestone-excavators. Their technology was crude: flint blades, fire, and spears. Their language—if it was a language—was equally rudimentary. They appeared to communicate by vocalizing, but not often and almost never socially—that is, they signaled, but they didn’t converse.
    Any deeper study of the diggers had been hampered by Isis’s toxic biosphere, by the impossibility of interacting with the diggers except through the intermediary of remensors or tractibles . . . and by the difficulty of knowing what went on inside their deeply tunneled mounds, where they spent a good portion of every day.
    Zoe descended past the treetops into a cacophony of birdsong. Flowers like immense blue orchids dangled from the high limbs of the trees, not blossoms but a competing species, a saprophytic parasite, stamenate organs projecting from the blooms like pink fingers dusted with copper-red pollen.
    She moved lower still, under the tree canopy and into a shadedappled space where fern-like plants unfurled from the damp crevices between exposed tree roots. Not too low, Hayes reminded her, because a triraptor or a sun lizard might uncoil from some stump or hole and crush her remensor between its teeth. She hovered in the generous, shadowed space between two huge puzzle trees, wings whirring softly, and turned her attention to the digger colony.
    The colony was old, well-established. It harbored nearly one hundred and fifty diggers by the last rough count. The population was supported by stands of fruit-bearing trees to the west, plentiful game, and a clear brook—more nearly a river in the rainy season—running out of the high Coppers. To the west was a meadow of sunny scrubweed where the diggers concentrated their excretions and buried their dead. The digger colony itself was a cluster of rock and red-clay mounds, each mound at least fifty meters wide, overgrown with scrub and fungal mycelia.
    The digger-holes were narrow and dark, reinforced with a concrete-like substance the diggers made from an amalgam of clay or chalk and their own liquid wastes.
    Two diggers were present in the clearing around the mounds, hunched over their work like bleached white pill bugs. One tended the communal fire, feeding windfall and dried leaves into the flames. The other scraped a point onto a length of wood, a spear, turning it at intervals over the fire. Their motion was laconic. Zoe wondered if they were bored. Flints and knapping rocks littered the hardpack soil.
    â€œThey’re not,” Hayes said, “beautiful animals.”
    She had forgotten that he was beside her. She started at the sound of his voice: too close, too intimate. Her dragonfly remensor wobbled in the shade.
    One of the diggers looked up briefly, black eyes swiveling. It was at least fifteen meters away.
    â€œThey are, though,” Zoe whispered (but why whisper?). “Beautiful, I mean. Not in some abstract way. Beautifully
functional
, beautifully adapted for what they do.”
    â€œThat’s one way of looking at it.”
    She shrugged, another wasted gesture. The diggers
were
beautiful, and Zoe didn’t particularly care whether Hayes could see that or not.
    A harsher, stronger evolution had shaped them. One of the diggers stood erect in the sunlight, and she appreciated the versatility Isis had built into it,