Читать книгу: «Vitals»
Vitals
Greg Bear
For Poul Anderson,
my friend, who decided
long ago not to
Our bodies are made of cells. Mitochondria are the parts of our cells that generate the energy-rich molecules we use every instant of our lives.
Billions of years ago, mitochondria were bacterial invaders, parasites of early cells. They joined forces with their hosts; now they are essential.
‘My mitochondria compose a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a large, motile colony of bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons, for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.’
– Lewis Thomas, ‘Organelles as Organism’, 1974
‘We love Comrade Stalin more than Mommy and Daddy. May Comrade Stalin live to be one hundred! No, two hundred! No, three hundred!’
– Song sung by Soviet children, early 1950s
Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;
You’ve played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill:
Walk sober off; before a sprightlier age
Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage:
Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease,
Whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.
Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Epigraph
PART ONE HAL COUSINS
CHAPTER ONE San Diego, California May 28
CHAPTER TWO The Juan de Fuca Trench June 18
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE Seattle, Washington
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Coral Gables, Florida June 27
CHAPTER NINETEEN Berkeley, California July
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE San Francisco
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Thuringia, California
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX San Jose, California
PART TWO BEN BRIDGER
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN El Cajon, California June 6
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT San Diego/El Cajon June 10-11
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE San Diego/Los Angeles
PART THREE HAL COUSINS
CHAPTER THIRTY Imperial Valley, California August 10
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE South-Central California
PART FOUR BEN BRIDGER
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Manhattan June 20
PART FIVE HAL COUSINS
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Arizona August 13
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Manhattan The Jenner Building, ‘Anthrax Central’ 8:00 P.M. August 14
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Port Canaveral, Florida August 17
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX The Atlantic Ocean/Lemuria August 18
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Lee Stocking Island, The Bahamas August 20
EPILOGUE Southern California (no addresses, please)
Acknowledgments
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE HAL COUSINS
CHAPTER ONE San Diego, California May 28
The last time I talked to Rob, I was checking my luggage at Lindbergh Field to fly to Seattle and meet with an angel. My cell-phone beeped and flashed Nemesis, code for my brother. We hadn’t spoken in months.
‘Hal, has Dad called you?’ Rob asked. He sounded wrung out.
‘No,’ I said. Dad had died three years ago in a hospital in Ann Arbor. Cirrhosis of the liver. He had choked on his own blood from burst veins in his esophagus.
‘Somebody called and it sounded like Dad, I swear,’ Rob said.
Mom and Dad had divorced ages ago. Mom was living in Coral Gables, Florida, and would have nothing to do with our father even when he was dying. Rob had stood the death watch in the hospice. Before I could hop a plane to join them, Dad had died. He had stopped his pointless cursing – dementia brought on by liver failure – and gone to sleep and Rob had left the room to get a cup of coffee. When he had returned, he had found our father sitting up in bed, head slumped, his stubbled chin and pale, slack chest soaked in blood like some hoary old vampire. Dad had died even before the nurses checked in. Sixty-five years old.
It had been a sad, bad death, the end of a rough road on which Dad had deliberately hit every bump. My brother had taken it hard.
‘You’re tired, Rob,’ I said. The airport, miles of brushed steel and thick green-edged glass, swam like a fish tank around me.
‘That’s true,’ he replied. ‘Aren’t you?’
I had been in Hong Kong just the night before. I hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. I can never sleep in a plane over water. A haze of names and ridiculous meetings and a stomach ache from French airline food were all I had to show for my trip. I felt like a show dog coming home without a ribbon.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m doing fine.’
Rob mumbled on for a bit. Work was not going well. He was having trouble with his wife, Lissa, a blond, leggy beauty more than a few steps out of our zone of looks and charm. He sounded as tired as I was and even more confused. I think he was holding back about how bad things were. I was his younger brother, after all. By two minutes.
‘Enough about me,’ he said. ‘How goes the search?’
‘It goes,’ I said.
‘I wanted to let you know.’ Silence.
‘What?’ I hated mystery.
‘Watch your back.’
‘What’s that mean? Stop screwing around.’
Rob’s laugh sounded forced. Then, ‘Hang in there, Prince Hal.’
He called me that when he wanted to get a rise out of me.
‘Ha,’ I said.
‘If Dad phones,’ he said, ‘tell him I love him.’
He hung up. I stood in a corner of the high, sunny lobby with the green glass and blinding white steel all around, then cursed and dialed the cell-phone number – no go – and all his other numbers.
Lissa answered in Los Angeles. She told me Rob was in San Jose, she didn’t have a local number for him, why? I told her he sounded tired and she said he had been traveling a lot. They hadn’t been talking much lately. I spoke platitudes in response to her puzzlement and hung up.
Some people believe that twins are always close and always know what the other is thinking. Not true, not true at all for Rob and me. We fought like wildcats from the time we were three years old. We believed we were twins by accident only and we were in this long road race separately, a fair fight to the finish, but not much fraternizing along the way.
Yet we had separately chosen the same career path, separately become interested in the same aspects of medicine and biology, separately married great-looking women we could not keep. I may not have liked my twin, but I sure as hell loved him.
Something was wrong. So why didn’t I cancel my flight and make some attempt to find him, ask him what I could do? I made excuses. Rob was just trying to psych me out, as always. Prince Hal, indeed.
I flew to Seattle.
CHAPTER TWO The Juan de Fuca Trench June 18
We dropped in a long, slow spiral, wrapped in a tiny void as shiny and black as a bubble in obsidian, through eight thousand feet of everlasting night. I had a lot of time to think.
Looking to my right, over my shoulder, I concentrated on the pilot’s head bent under the glow of a single tensor lamp. Dave Press rubbed his nose and pulled back into shadow. It was my third dive this trip, but the first with Dave as pilot. We were traveling alone, just the two of us, no observer or backup. Our deep submersible, Mary’s Triumph, descended at a rate of forty-four feet every minute, twenty-seven hundred feet every hour.
Dave leaned forward again, whistling tonelessly.
I narrowed my vision to fuzzy slits and imagined Dave’s head was all there was. Just a head, my eyes, a thousand feet of ocean above, and more than a mile of ocean below. For a few seconds I felt like little black Pip, tossed overboard from one of Ahab’s whaleboats, dog-paddling for hours on the tumbling rollers. Pip changed. He became no lively dancing cabin boy but a solemn, prophetic little thing, thinly of this world, all because of a long swim surrounded by gulls and sun. What was that compared to where we were, encased in a plastic bubble and dropped into the world’s biggest bottle of ink? Pip had had a bright, cheery vacation.
One hundred and eighty minutes to slip down into the trench, two hundred minutes to return, between three hundred and four hundred minutes on the bottom, if all went well. A twelve-hour journey down to Hell and back, or Eden, depending on your perspective.
I was hoping for Eden. Prince Hal Cousins, scientist, supreme egotist, prime believer in the material world, frightened of the dark and no friend of God, was about to pay a visit to the most primitive ecologies, searching for the fountain of youth. I was on a pilgrimage back to where the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had taught us how to die. I planned to reclaim that fruit and run some tests.
This blasphemy seemed fair exchange for so many millions of bright-eyed, sexy, and curious generations getting old, wrinkled, and sick. Turning into ugly, demented vegetables.
Becoming God’s potting soil.
A mile and a half below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, humans are unexpected guests in a murky and ancient dream. Down there, nestled in the cracks of Earth’s spreading skin, islands of heat and poisonous stink poke up from shimmering chasms flocked with woolly white carpets of bacteria.
These are the best places on Earth, some scientists believe, to look for Eden – the Beginning Place.
I zoned out. Napped for a few minutes, woke up with a start, clonked my head on the back of the metal-mesh couch. I was not made for submarines. Dave tapped his finger on the control stick.
‘Most folks are too excited to sleep down here,’ he said. ‘Time goes by pretty quickly.’
‘Nervous reaction,’ I said. ‘I don’t like tight places.’
Dave grinned, then returned his attention to the displays. ‘Usually we see lots of things outside – pretty little magic lanterns of the deep. Kind of deserted today. Too bad.’
I looked up at the glowing blue numbers on the dive chronometer. One hour? Two?
Just thirty minutes.
All sense of time had departed. We were still in the early stages of the dive. I sat up in the couch and stretched my arms, bent at the elbows. My silvery thermal suit rustled.
I liked Dave. I like most people, at first. Dave was in his late thirties, reputedly a devout Christian, short and plump, with stringy blond hair, large intelligent green eyes, thick lips, and a quick, casual smile. He seemed a steady and responsible guy, good with machinery. He had once driven DSVs for the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. Just a month ago, he had signed on with the Sea Messenger to pilot Owen Montoya’s personal research submarine, his pricey and elegant little toy, Mary’s Triumph.
It was cold outside the acrylic pressure sphere: two degrees above freezing. Chill had crept into the cabin and the suits barely kept us comfortable. I avoided brushing my hands against the two titanium frame beams that passed aft through the sphere. They were covered with dew.
Dave grunted expressively and squirmed in his seat, not embarrassed, just uncomfortable. ‘Sorry.’
My nostrils flared.
‘Go ahead and let it out,’ Dave suggested. ‘It’ll clear.’
‘I’m comfy,’ I said.
‘Well, you’ll have to put up with me. Rice and macaroni last night, lots of pepper.’
‘I eat nothing but fish before a dive. No gas.’ That sounded geeky and Boy Scout, but I was in fact comfortable. Be prepared.
‘I’m trying to lose weight,’ Dave confessed. ‘High-carb diet.’
‘Um.’
‘A few more lights?’ Dave asked. He toggled a couple of switches and three more tensor lamps threw white spots around the sub’s controls. He turned their focused glare away from two little turquoise screens crammed with schematics and scrolling numbers: dutiful reports from fuel cells and batteries, the onboard computer, transponder navigation, fore and aft thrusters. When we were at depth, a third, larger overhead screen – now blank – could switch between video from digital cameras and images from side-scanning sonar.
All we could hear from outside, through the sphere and the hull, was the ping of active sonar.
Everything nominal, but I was still apprehensive. There was little risk in the DSV, so Jason the controller and dive master had told me before my first plunge. Just follow the routine and your training.
I wasn’t afraid of pain or discomfort, but I anticipated a scale of life that put all risk in a new perspective. Every new and possibly dangerous adventure could prematurely cap a span not of fourscore and ten, but of a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years…
So far, this was just an itch, an attitude I was well aware needed adjustment. It hadn’t yet reached the level of phobia.
At twenty-nine years of age, I worked hard to avoid what Rob had once called the syndrome of Precious Me. I could always rely on Rob to provide sharp insight. In truth, part of me might have welcomed a little vacation. The void might be a pleasure compared to the anxious, egocentric perplexity of my recent existence: divorced, cell-phone guru for radio talk shows, semicelebrity, beggar-scientist, mendicant, dreamer, fool. Prince Hal, my coat, my vehicle, for ever and ever.
Spooky.
‘You look philosophical,’ Dave said.
‘I feel useless,’ I said.
‘Me too, sometimes. This baby practically drives herself,’ Dave said. ‘You can help me do a routine check in ten. Then we’ll make our report to Mother.’
‘Sure.’ Anything.
I rolled and adjusted the couch to lie on my stomach, Cousteau-style, closer to the chill surface of the bubble. My breath misted the smooth plastic, a spot of fog in the surreal darkness. Experimentally, I raised my digital Nikon, its lens hood wrapped in rubber tape to avoid scratching the sphere. I looked at the camera screen, played with the exposure, experimented with pixel density and file size.
‘They also serve who sit and wait,’ Dave said, adjusting the sub’s trim. Motors whined starboard. ‘Sometimes we play chess.’
‘I hate chess,’ I confessed. ‘Time is precious and should be put to constructive use.’
Dave grinned. ‘Nadia warned me.’
Nadia Evans, the number one sub driver on the Sea Messenger, was sick in her bunk topside. A rich, creamy pudding past its prime had made eight of our crew very unhappy. Nadia had planned to take me on this dive, but a deep submersible, lacking a toilet, is no place for the shits.
Best to keep focused on where we were going and what we might see. Dropping into Planet Extreme. Eternal darkness and incredible pressure.
Still more than a mile below, at irregular intervals along the network of spreading trenches, massive underwater geysers spewed roiling plumes of superheated water, toxic sulfides, and deep-crust bacteria. Minerals in the flow accreted to erect chimneys around the geysers. Some of the chimneys stood as tall as industrial smokestacks and grew broad horizontal fans like tree fungi. Sulfurous outflow fizzed through cracks and pores everywhere. Magma squeezed out of deeper cracks like black, grainy toothpaste, snapping like reptiles in combat. Close by, at depth, through the hydrophone, you could hear the vents hissing and roaring. Wags had named one huge chimney ‘Godzilla.’
Gargantuan Earth music.
Down there, the water is saturated with the deep’s chemical equivalent of sunshine. Hydrogen sulfide soup feeds specialized bacteria, which in turn prop up an isolated food chain. Tube worms crest old lava flows and gather around the vents in sociable forests, like long, skinny, red-tipped penises. Royal little white crabs mosey through the waving stalks as if they have all the time there is. Long, lazy, rat-tail fish – deep-water vultures with big curious eyes – pause like question marks, waiting for death to drop their small ration of dinner.
I shivered. DSV pilots believe the cold keeps you alert. Dave coughed and took a swig of bottled water, then returned the bottle to the cup holder. Nadia had been much more entertaining: witty, pretty, and eager to explain her deep-diving baby.
The little sphere, just over two meters wide, filled with reassuring sounds: the ping of a directional signal every few seconds, hollow little beeps from transponders dropped months before, another ping from sonar, steady ticking, the sigh and whine of pumps and click of solenoids.
I rolled on my butt and bent the couch back into a seat, then doubled over to pull up my slippers – thick knitted booties, actually, with rubber soles. I stared between my knees at a shimmer of air trapped in the sub’s frame below the sphere. The silvery wobble had been many times larger just forty minutes ago.
Two thousand feet. The outside pressure was now sixty atmospheres, 840 pounds per square inch. Nadia had described it as a Really Large Guy pogo-sticking all over your head. Inside, at one atmosphere, we could not feel it. The sphere distributed the pressure evenly. No bends, no tremors, no rapture of the deep. Shirtsleeve travel, almost. We wouldn’t even need to spend time in a chamber when we surfaced.
The sub carried a load of steel bars, ballast to be dropped when we wanted to switch to near-neutral buoyancy. Dave would turn on the altimeter at about a hundred feet above the seafloor and let the ingots rip like little bombs. Sometimes the DSV held on to a few, staying a little heavy, and pointed her thrusters down to hover like a helicopter. A little lighter, and she could ‘float,’ aiming the thrusters up to avoid raising silt.
An hour into the dive. Twenty-seven hundred feet. The sphere was getting colder and time was definitely speeding up.
‘When did you meet Owen Montoya?’ Dave asked.
‘A few weeks ago,’ I said. Montoya was a fascinating topic around the office water cooler: the elusive rich guy who employed everyone on the Sea Messenger.
‘He must approve of what you’re doing,’ Dave said.
‘How’s that?’
‘Dr Mauritz used to have top pick for these dives.’ Stanley Mauritz was the Sea Messenger’s chief oceanographer and director of research, on loan to the ship from the Scripps Institution in exchange for Montoya’s support of student research. ‘But you’ve had three in a row.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. The researchers on board Sea Messenger fought for equipment and resources just like scientists everywhere.
‘Nadia’s trying to keep the peace,’ Dave added after a pause.
‘Sorry to upset the balance.’
Dave shrugged. ‘I stay out of it. Let’s do our check.’
We used our separate turquoise monitor screens to examine different shipboard systems, focusing first on air. Mary’s Triumph maintained an oxygen-enriched atmosphere at near sea-level pressure.
Dave raised his mike and clicked the switch. ‘Mary to Messenger. We’re at one thousand meters. Systems check okay.’
The hollow voice of Jason, our shipboard dive master and controller, came back a few seconds later. ‘Read you, Mary.’
‘What’s going on between Nadia and Max?’ Dave asked with a leer. Max was science liaison for the ship. Rumors of their involvement had circulated for weeks. ‘Any hot and heavy?’
The question seemed out of character. ‘Nothing, at the moment,’ I guessed. ‘She’s probably spending most of her time in the head.’
‘What’s Max got that I haven’t?’ Dave asked, and winked.
Max was twenty-seven years old, self-confident without being cocky, handsome, but smart and pleasant to talk to. His specialty was Vestimentiferans – tube worms. Dave was not in Max’s league, and neither was I, if it came right down to it.
‘Enough about women,’ I suggested with a sour look. ‘I’m just getting over a divorce.’
‘Poor baby,’ Dave said. ‘No women, no chess. That leaves philosophy. Explain Kant or Hegel, choose one.’
I chuckled.
‘We’ve got lots of time,’ Dave said, and put on a little boy’s puzzled frown. ‘It’s either read or play chess or get to know each other.’ He fiddled with the touch pad mounted at the end of the couch arm and once again punched up the atmosphere readout. ‘Damn, is the pressure changing? It shouldn’t be. My gut’s giving me fits.’
I cringed.
Four thousand feet.
‘I met Owen just once,’ Dave said. Everyone in Montoya’s employ called him Owen, or Owen Montoya, never Mr Montoya, and never ‘sir.’ ‘His people trust me to keep his expensive toy from getting snagged, but when he shook my hand, he didn’t know who I was. He must meet a lot of people.’
I nodded. Montoya seemed to enjoy his privacy. Best not to divulge too much to the hired help. Still, I felt a small tug of pride that I had spent so many hours with this powerful and wealthy man, and had been told we were simpatico.
I had met all sorts of people rich and superrich on my quest for funding. Montoya had been the best of a mixed lot, and the only one who outright owned an oceanographic research ship and DSV.
He was a whole lot more likable than Song Wu, the sixty-year-old Chinese nightclub owner who had insisted I try his favorite youth enhancer – serpent-bladder extract diluted in rice wine. That had been an experience, sitting in his living room, six hundred feet above Hong Kong, watching Mr Song squeeze a little sac of the oily green liquid into a glass while I tried to keep up a conversation with his sixteen-year-old Thai mistress. Mr Song refused to spend a single square-holed penny until I gave snake gall a fair shake.
All the while, a withered feng shui expert in a gray-silk suit had danced around the huge apartment, whirling a cheap gold-painted cardboard dial over the marble floor tiles, babbling about balancing the forces of past and future.
‘You know Owen personally?’ Dave asked.
‘Not well.’
Mary’s Triumph leveled and alerted us with a tiny chime. Dave adjusted the trim again. The sub’s thermometers had detected a temperature rise. The sea map display clicked on between us and a small red X appeared, marking where we had encountered warmer water. We had just crossed into a megaplume, a vast mushroom of mineral-rich flow rising over a vent field.
‘That could be from the new one, Field 37,’ I guessed. I looked at the printed terrain map pasted between us, dotted with known vent fields in green, and six red vents roaring away along a recent eruption.
‘Maybe,’ Dave said. ‘Could also be Field 35. We’re four klicks east of both, and they swivel this time of year.’
The world’s seawater – all the world’s seawater – is processed through underwater volcanic vents every few million years. The ocean seeps through the sediment and porous rock, hitting magma sometimes only a few miles below the crust. Deep-ocean geysers spew back the water superheated to the temperature of live steam – well over 350 degrees Celsius. But at pressures in excess of 250 atmospheres, the water stays liquid and rises like smoke from a stack, cooling and spreading, warm and rich enough to be detected this high above the field: a megaplume.
‘Nadia tells me you’re looking for new kinds of xenos,’ Dave said. ‘Ugly little spuds.’
‘Interesting little spuds,’ I said.
Nearly every dive in these areas found xenos – xenophyophores, the single-celled tramps of the seafloor, some as big as a clenched fist. Xenos are distantly related to amoebae and resemble scummy bath sponges. They use sand as ballast, glue their waste into supports, and coat their slimy exteriors with debris as they roll around on the ocean floor. Their convoluted, tube-riddled bodies hide many passengers: isopods, bacteria, predatory mollusks. True monsters, but wonderful and harmless.
‘What’s so interesting about xenos?’ Dave asked.
‘I have a snapshot taken by some postdocs two months ago. They found what they called “sea daisy fields” north of the new vents, but they didn’t have a good fix on the position because one of the transponders had stopped sending. I examined a frozen specimen two months ago at the University of Washington, but it was all busted up, membranes ruptured. A specimen in formalin was nothing but gray pudding.’
Dave had already gotten a briefing on our dive. This was telling him nothing more than what he knew already. ‘Yuck,’ he said. ‘So what’s it to Owen?’
‘Right.’ I smiled.
Dave lifted his eyebrows. ‘I’ll just mind my own business and drive,’ he said, and rubbed his finger under his nose. ‘But I do have a master’s in ocean biochemistry. Maybe I can render some expert assistance when the time comes.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
‘Is Owen interested in immortality? That’s what I’ve heard,’ Dave said.
‘I really don’t know.’ I closed my eyes and pretended to nap. Dave didn’t disturb me when he ran his check at five thousand feet. I don’t think he liked my attitude any more than I liked his.
Owen Montoya wanted to be a wallflower at the Reaper’s ball. That’s what had brought us together.
Set the Wayback machine, Sherman.
CHAPTER THREE
Three weeks before, a slender little blue helicopter, bright as a fresh bug, had buzzed me over Puget Sound to Anson Island. It was six o’clock on a Northwestern spring evening and the weather was gloriously lovely. I felt more alive than I had in a year, since the divorce from Julia.
I am normally a nervous flier, especially in choppers, but the young, square-jawed pilot, his eyes wrapped in metallic blue shades, was reassuringly deft, and I was too busy enjoying the view.
‘I was wearing my powder-blue suit,’ Philip Marlowe tells us in The Big Sleep, ‘with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it…I was calling on four million dollars.’
I wore a black cotton sports jacket and pants, wrinkled white-cotton dress shirt with black tie, high black socks, shiny black brogues – that much was the same – and I was calling on forty billion dollars. Owen Montoya could have bought and sold the Sternwoods a hundred times over, even accounting for inflation.
I had worn that same outfit when visiting other angels, financial backers visionary enough or cracked enough – sometimes I had a hard time telling which – to spend small fortunes on a microbiological Ponce de Leon. I hadn’t done too badly; my fancy footwork had kept me funded for the past five years.
I was no fraud. If the angels were smart, they sensed that I almost had the goods. If they were stupid – like Mr Song – they bought futures in snake-bladder extract.
I was very close. Just a little cash and a lot of very hard work, and I could jump the wall around Eden and find the ultimate treasure: vim and vigor for a thousand or ten thousand years, maybe longer, barring accidents or geological upheaval.
It was an amazing thought, and it never failed to give me chills.
The chopper performed a smooth bank to the north, and we flew over Blakely Point on Bainbridge Island. East of our flight path, midway between Bainbridge and Seattle, a cruise ship posed like a serene and well-fed lady on the fine ripples of the blue sea, her bow nosing into a bank of golden fog. Passengers gathered on a glassed-in observation deck below the soaring bridge, swam in three sparkling silver pools, spun around an open-air dance floor amidships. The kind of vacation Julia loved. At the end, she had started going on vacations without me.
Julia had ultimately found my talk about as exciting as a course in colonics. She had hidden her boredom for a few years, excited to be married to a young tenure-track comer at Stanford, a guy who regularly published little letters in Nature and longer discursions in The Journal of Age Research. But the gap in our minds, our educations, eventually wore her down. She complained she could not –
Enough of that shit. No way to spend eternity, moping over the past.
Two white-and-green car ferries plied the waters with more purpose and energy, their wakes crisscrossed by sailboats, catamarans, and cabin cruisers. Rich and powerful sailors everywhere, but how many had heard of me? How many would even care to listen to my ideas? Not many. They were like sheep running toward the slaughter chute, happily shaking their woolly heads, baa, baa.
I gritted my teeth and tried to enjoy the sunset doing a King Midas on the sound.
Thirty minutes out of Seattle, the chopper dropped a few hundred feet to circle a medium-sized island, lightly dotted with big, old, frame houses. We rounded a thinly wooded point to hover above a wide, deep cove. I squinted to riddle the mystery of a square, flat-topped floating object anchored a few hundred feet from the shingle-and-sand beach. Not a houseboat…
The golden glare off its white deck dimmed as we circled, and I made out a landing circle. It was a helipad, mounted high above the water on immense pontoons.
‘It’s a hundred feet on each side,’ the pilot told me, smiling with impersonal pride. ‘Equipped with refueling tanks, an automated weather station, and a repair shed. Impressive, isn’t it? The island association refused Owen permission to put a landing field on his property.’ He winked at such antiprogressive attitudes. ‘Owen floated one instead.’
I clenched my fists, but the pilot expertly, and with barely a judder, brought the little dragonfly down in the precise center of the landing circle. He waved to an attendant and switched off the engine. The blades slowed with a disappointed trill as two men in gray overalls clamped the rails to the deck.
The pilot released the passenger-side door and pointed to the edge of the pad. ‘Elevator and stairs over there. I’ll wait,’ and he smiled as if I were the most important man in the world. Next to his boss, of course.
As I walked toward the stairs, a breeze pricked the hair on my arms through my sleeves. Over my shoulder, I saw the pad crew, hooding the craft against salt spray.
Walking along the floating bridge to the beach, I had my first clear view of the house. Montoya’s mansion faced the cove with a thirty-foot-high window-wall. Six Dale Chihuly chandeliers hung behind the tinted glass, spaced evenly across the lobby like frozen purple and blue fireworks.
I had not spotted the house on the chopper’s approach, and now I understood why – the top was covered with patches of low forest, indistinguishable from much of the rest of the windswept island.
Betty Shun, Montoya’s personal assistant, walked across the beach as I reached the end of the bridge. About my age, give or take a couple of summers, she stood five and a half feet high. She had a pert, sensual, but not very pretty face capped by a mushroom of thick black hair. Her body was her prime asset and she knew it. A clinging black shift revealed many attractions, sculpted by much working out and, judging from the adipose structure of her round face, dietary determination. I sussed a fellow traveler, ready to grab life, shake it, and ask a few hard questions.
‘Dr Henry Cousins, I presume?’ Shun asked with a lovely lilt.
‘Hal,’ I corrected.
‘Hal. Welcome to Anson Island.’
The wall of glass and the mansion that lay hidden behind it bespoke a tasteful elegance that cared little for outward show. Montoya was no Trump or Vegas kingpin. Only from the cove did you know that a rich and powerful man spent time here.
‘Last week Owen hosted Gus Beck,’ Shun told me as we made the beachfront walk. ‘And Philip Castler the week before. He didn’t like what they had to say.’
‘Really? I’m shocked.’
Shun smiled. ‘So many wiseasses in this business,’ she said. ‘Be nice.’ I could sense her intelligence, competitive and fierce, like heat. I idled a stray masculine thought about conquest, then shut it off. Something about that face, that body. Shun, for all her charms, would be too spirited to stay with any man for long. At least, any man worth less than a billion dollars.
‘Gus was full of talk about uploading,’ she said. ‘You know, into silicon brains. I’ve never been much persuaded by that, have you?’
‘Not much,’ I agreed.
‘Philip was brilliant but far too vague. And he kept asking about money. That’s rude, and unnecessary. If Owen’s visionaries have their feet planted firmly on the Earth, money isn’t a problem.’
That was something I had learned long ago when going forth, hat in hand, to visit the Sternwoods of the world.
‘Owen and Philip had a bit of an argument, I’m sorry to say. Mr Castler went home red-faced and empty-handed.’ She smiled cheerfully, as if tallying sports scores.
Montoya had made his money off paper clips, or the equivalent in the cybernetic age: TeraSpin memory drives for home appliances, smaller, faster, cheaper, and denser than any others. Ten years ago he had been worth about a million dollars in stock – a few thousand in cash – and had lived in a ratty old Wallingford house west of the University of Washington. Now he was one of the richest men in a territory that on any financial map lay just a few degrees north of the Sultanate of Brunei.
I had never met so rich an angel, and I wondered what Montoya would be like. The last picture I had seen had been at least five years old. It is so easy to confuse the rich and the powerful with gods. Both can make or break you at a whim. The main difference is that our modern gods like to be called by their first names.
Shun reached up and straightened my collar as the tall glass doors slid aside. An odor of anise and crème de menthe filled the moist evening air.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Almost there.’ Dave shook my shoulder and waved his hand at the pinging depth gauge, then switched on the bottom-scan sonar. We were about a hundred feet above the seafloor. A sound-etched picture of the terrain danced in ghostly blue waves across the display. The screen showed a stack of parallel lines between two walls of rock. The lines vaguely resembled a long rib cage.
‘Is that a dead whale?’ I asked, shifting right and reaching out to touch the LCD screen.
‘I doubt it,’ Dave said. ‘We’re coming down right over it. Let’s take a look-see.’
‘Dead whales are cool,’ I said. ‘They’re like gas stations in the desert. Propagules move from corpse to corpse on the seafloor. Some get to the vents and set up shop for good.’
‘That’s one theory,’ Dave allowed. ‘But I still don’t think it’s a whale.’
He pulled a graduated lever and the DSV shuddered as we dropped most of our steel ballast. ‘We’ll try for ten pounds below neutral. “Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”‘ He pushed compressed air into the ballast tanks until we reached neutral buoyancy. Then he aimed the thrusters down and slowed our descent.
We hovered at about fifty feet, the sonar pinging insistently. He turned off the thrusters to avoid raising a cloud of silt.
‘Get that bottom light bar,’ he suggested.
I flipped the switch that turned on a bank of lights mounted directly below the pressure sphere.
‘I’m going to move some ballast forward.’ Dave pitched the nose down thirty degrees, giving us a wide-angle view of the bottom, and propelled us forward in controlled ‘flight,’ much more precise than weighted free fall. The DSV frame was equipped with a little railway system of steel weights that could be shifted fore and aft, or port and starboard, to adjust trim. This saved the sub from using thrusters, conserving power. The more power we kept in reserve, the longer we could stay on the bottom.
Dave thrust his hand into the data-glove box, a plastic cage containing a wire-lined black glove. With his left hand, he touched the instrument display and switched control of the lights to the glove. He expertly wriggled and pinched and twisted his fingers. The lights burned through a thin, whirling cloud of debris and flung brilliant white ovals on a small wooden fishing boat.
Not a whale after all.
‘It’s the Castle Rock II,’ he said with a dry chuckle. ‘An old wreck.’ The boat’s cabin thrust upright, intact after its long drop through the night, but the windows yawned broken and black like empty eye sockets. The crushed and splintered deck and hull showed the boat’s wooden ribs. ‘I thought I recognized it, but it’s been a couple of years. Field Number 37 should be a few hundred meters north, if we follow this shallow canyon. A little current today, but it seems to be on our side.’
I looked over the shattered hulk, lost in cold and perpetual dark, and wondered about the weather above. Would our recovery go smoothly? Last trip, we had spent three hours in foaming, choppy sea, our beacons flashing, before being hauled aboard the Sea Messenger.
All around us, the seafloor was covered with broken sheets of lava like lost pieces of a giant’s puzzle. The canyon walls, no more than fifty feet to either side, were not visible in the murk. The side-scanning sonar revealed that we were surrounded by what looked like columns in an ancient temple. Once, a lake of magma had pooled in the canyon and crusted over. Splits in the cap had allowed seawater to seep through and solidify the columns. The lava beneath the crust had then drained. As the molten basalt retreated, the sea had crushed the cap. Only the columns remained.
Dave pushed Mary’s Triumph backward with a few spurts of the thrusters. I could make out the fishing boat’s name, just as Dave remembered it, painted in a broken arc on the smashed stern.
‘Let’s go east,’ Dave said. ‘And up a bit. The boat dragged a few lines behind her when she went down.’
CHAPTER FIVE
We met in the mansion’s Great Room, as Betty Shun described it, almost sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. This was the room that smelled of anise and crème de menthe. Skylights hidden in the forest above dropped the day’s last filtered green light on a broad mahogany desk covered with magazines, newspapers, and a small laptop computer. Couches upholstered in rich yellow fabric awaited our attentions, like the laps of generous houris. The furniture floated on a velvety-smooth mauve carpet accented by white moons and antique yellow suns.
Betty Shun introduced us and gave Montoya a packet she had printed out a few minutes earlier. Then she left, wagging her finger and saying, with a smile, ‘You boys be good.’
Montoya held out his hand. I gripped it and judged it, which is always unfair and completely natural: skin moist, pressure light. A polite handshake. He was good looking in a rugged way, with a short, pushed-up nose and probing black eyes. His cheeks had been pocked by youthful acne and a thin black nubbin of beard adorned his chin. His smile was quick but shy. His clothes fit loose but well, and his sandals were old friends, worn and comfortable. Montoya would not have impressed anyone had they met him on a street corner.
He invited me to sit at a long, ornate brass and maple bar.
‘Welcome to the Fortress of Solitude,’ he said. ‘I’m the butler. Betty is really Supergirl. Coffee now, wine with dinner at eight, Madeira for dessert, and late-night chat, if you’d care to stay.’ He went behind the bar. ‘What’s your jolt?’
‘Latte,’ I said. ‘Please.’
Montoya had sold TeraSpin three years earlier and spent most of his time serving on the boards of charities. He had given grants and funded scholarships for more than sixty universities around the world.
He stood before the professional espresso machine and hummed the theme from The Empire Strikes Back as the valve roared and spat. Having my milk steamed by one of the world’s wealthiest men was intriguing. I thought there was a touch of ennui in his eyes, but it’s easy to overanalyze the rich. Maybe he looked that way because he had been disappointed so often.
‘Did Betty tell you about Gus and Phil?’ Montoya asked as he poured foam and hot milk from the small steel pitcher.
‘She did,’ I said.
Being around Gus Beck made me nervous. He was twitchy and far too brilliant. I never knew when he might erupt in a fit of righteous technical criticism. Phil Castler was just the opposite – old-world gracious, fierce in debate but otherwise mild and self-effacing.
Montoya sprinkled cocoa over the peak, handed me my latte, and came around the bar carrying another mug filled with plain black coffee. He sat on the stool next to mine. ‘And?’
I smiled. ‘Uploading into cyberspace, living in a computer or a robot brain, immortalized in hardware, in silicon…’
‘Makes you laugh?’ Montoya asked, sipping.
‘No. I just don’t think it’ll happen in time for me and thee.’
‘Tell me why,’ Montoya asked primly.
‘The devil is in the details. The mind is the body. Gus is still back with Descartes in believing they can be separated.’
‘Explain.’
‘Downloading the brain’s patterns isn’t enough. Everything you know and think is embedded in your neurons, but your consciousness is in the cells of your entire body. Your mind is really a complex of brains, with major contributions from the nervous and immune systems. The flesh is intelligent, all flesh, and all of it contributes to your personality at one level or another. Take the body away, and you become near-beer, bitter without the kick.’
Montoya chuckled and looked away, rubbing one hand on his breast. ‘Why not capture the state of each cell, each neuron, in a computer? A super MRI machine could do something like that, right?’
‘Each one of our cells is like a huge factory with thousands of machines and workers. What the cells do, the decisions they make, how they live, contributes to what you think and how you behave. We won’t capture that much detail in any artificial memory in our lifetime. Even if we could, one human being would probably fill all the computer capacity on Earth.’
Montoya nodded. ‘What about Castler – sending in nano-machines and cleaning up an aging body?’
Easy questions so far. ‘It’s a good scheme, quite possible, but how old are you, Owen?’
‘Forty-five,’ he said.
‘You’ll be ninety before nanotech is proven and safe. Fifty years creeps up awfully fast.’
I was playing down the prospect of Phil’s success a little; thirty years was not unlikely.
‘You’re not just saying that to get me to fund you?’
‘I think Gus and Phil are brilliant. I encourage you to fund them both. But their ideas are longer-term.’
‘They hate being told that,’ Montoya said. He looked at me squarely. ‘How are your theories any more convincing?’
‘I won’t turn you into a corpsicle and hope somebody knows how to fix you in a hundred years. I won’t shave you down neuron by neuron, then upload you into some memory bank no one has even begun to design. I can begin to increase our life span in the next few years, with minimal intervention. If you and I want to stay young and healthy longer,’ I said, closing in, ‘our only hope is medical maintenance, keeping our bodies vigorous. Specifically, mitochondrial chromosome adjustment.’
‘Beck turned red when I told him I was meeting with you,’ Montoya said. ‘He said you were insufferably arrogant. He said you were re-hashing theories proven wrong back in the nineteen twenties. I thought about asking Betty to fetch him a spit-cup.’
‘There’s a lot of passion there,’ I said. Gus and Phil were my rivals and might have called me a fool once or twice, but they deserved a modicum of respect, even from a man as wealthy as Montoya.
‘I agree, they’re way off track,’ Montoya said. ‘They’ll never see the promised land. I’ve read your papers. I like them. Tell me more.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘That’s new,’ Dave said, swiveling the DSV and shining our upper bank of floods on a clump of tube worms. Beyond the worms, the sub’s lights shimmered through white clouds like old, chalky paint: a bacteria-rich spring, small in diameter but productive.
‘Let’s see.’ He sidled the sub in a few meters. I pulled down my data glove, feeling the plastic limiter box click into place, guided a sensor-laden mechanical arm, and pushed a probe into the spring outflow.
‘Shove it, shove that old rectal thermometer right into the Earth’s fundament,’ Dave said with another leer. He wasn’t funny. ‘Eighty-six degrees Celsius,’ he said.
‘Congratulations.’
‘I’m just the pilot,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘You’re the researcher. You’ll get the credit.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Montoya listened to my presentation for two hours. We broke for a quick dinner – crab cakes and stir-fried vegetables, served with an excellent Oregon pinot gris. We were studying each other, and neither of us was willing to reveal too much. Looking a little glazed, he called a break at ten p.m. Betty Shun appeared to take me on a tour of the house while Montoya fielded some phone calls.
The glass wall fronted the east wing. The west wing ended in a boat launch built into the native rock of another cove. It easily doubled what had at first seemed merely huge. The floor plan of Montoya’s Fortress of Solitude had to total a hundred thousand square feet – two and a third acres, topped by wind-winnowed forest, the air-conditioner vents camouflaged as tree stumps and the condensers as moss-covered boulders.
‘Don’t try to take this tour on your own, Dr Cousins,’ Shun warned me on the clay floor of an indoor tennis court. ‘Without a permission wand, you’ll be locked in the first room you enter.’ She held up a tiny plastic bar. ‘Security will have to come and save you.’ She looked at her wristwatch. ‘Owen doesn’t need a wand. The house recognizes him on sight. His steps, his voice –’
‘His DNA?’
She smiled and tapped her watch. ‘Owen should be ready now. We are exactly a hundred and fifteen feet from him, as the laser flies.’ She gave me a look that might have spoken volumes, but I was unable to open, much less read, any of them. ‘Why were you let go from your last research job?’
‘At Stanford?’
She nodded.
‘Money ran out in my department. I was junior.’
‘Wasn’t there some dispute?’
‘A few of the faculty disagreed with my work. But my papers still get published, Ms Shun. I am still a reputable scientist.’
‘Owen is fond of oddball thinking, and even fonder of tweaking academic whiskers. But I hate to see him disappointed, Dr Cousins.’
‘Hal.’
She shook her head politely; keep it business. ‘Owen needs something to commit to. Something solid.’
Betty Shun left me with Montoya on the west wing’s biggest porch, overlooking the boat cove. It was eleven-thirty. We talked pleasantries for a while and listened to the splash of the waves, blankets over our legs, sipping from chilled glasses of draft beer, our heads warmed by radiant heaters. Did I like baseball? Montoya owned a baseball team in Minneapolis. I conversed as much about baseball as I could, having read USA Today in the Hotel W that afternoon.
Then Montoya drew back to our main topic.
‘You don’t say much about reduced caloric intake,’ he said. ‘According to most experts, that’s the only antiaging technique proven to work.’
‘It’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ I said.
‘You haven’t sunk your harpoon yet, Hal. I need to know more – much more.’ He smiled wearily. Make or break.
I put my glass on the center table and leaned forward. ‘The real problem is that we breathe. We respire. We accumulate poisons over time because of the way we burn fuel. We’re part of a vast biological conspiracy, billions of years old, and we have to shake ourselves loose and grab the reins.’
‘You’ve experimented on yourself, haven’t you?’ Montoya asked.
‘I’d rather keep some things confidential until we firm up a relationship.’
‘You have experimented,’ he said, brooking no dissent. ‘You’ve injected yourself with virus shells delivering modified genes, but nobody knows which genes, nobody on my payroll, anyway.’
‘I’ve taken one or two things beyond the theoretical stage,’ I admitted.
Montoya lifted his eyes to meet mine. ‘And?’
‘Obviously, I didn’t screw it up too badly. I’m still here. But it’s just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Until I know why individual obsolescence took hold a few billion years ago, I’m still going to grow old and die. And so will you.’
I was still being vague, and I knew it. The sweat under my armpits chafed.
‘So far we’ve been dancing around the center. It’s been a great dance, but I need something more. I’ve signed your NDA, Hal.’ Montoya smiled, putting on the patented charm that had brought him so far in the business world. ‘Give me a hint what’s behind door number one. It’ll be worth a few days on my ship, gratis. I’ll put that in writing, too, if you want.’
‘No need,’ I said, swallowing.
‘I’m all ears. I have all night.’
‘It won’t take that long,’ I said, mentally arranging my cue cards. This was probably going to be the most important speech of my life. ‘I start by altering a few genes in E. coli, common gut bacteria.’ I tapped my abdomen. ‘Then I modify a few of my own genes…‘
‘Radical gene therapy,’ Montoya mused.
‘Some call it that,’ I said. ‘But it’s just baby steps to solving an ancient murder mystery. Who designed us to die, and why? It turns out we’re being betrayed by cellular organelles, little organs, called mitochondria. Mitochondria make ATP. ATP is the molecule our cells use to store and release energy. Once upon a time, mitochondria were bacteria. We know that because they have their own little loops of DNA, like bacterial chromosomes.’
He watched me intently. ‘Respiration…seems pretty important. Breathing, using oxygen, right?’
I nodded.
‘So why do we let old bacteria do that for us?’
‘Mitochondria used to live free, a few billion years ago. Then they invaded primitive host cells, became parasites. Eventually, the hosts – our one-celled ancestors – found that the invaders had a talent. They were eight times better at converting sugar molecules into ATP. We formed a symbiotic partnership. The mitochondria became essential. Now, we can’t live without them.’
‘And mitochondria tell us when to grow old and die?’
‘They have a big say.’
He pinched and tugged his earlobe. ‘Explain.’
‘The mitochondria turn state’s evidence. Kind of a fifth column. They monitor our stress levels, track our physical and mental health, and pass that information on to tiny bacteria hiding in our tissues.’
‘We have germs in our tissues?’ Montoya asked, frowning. ‘Doesn’t the immune system clean them out?’
‘Some bacteria burrow deep and hide out for years. They trigger diseases like atherosclerosis – clogging the arteries.’
‘So what if I just spend my life relaxing? No stress.’
‘Everything we do causes different kinds of stress,’ I said. ‘You can’t stay healthy without some stress. But if we fail at our job, if we’re unlucky in love, if we get sick, if we’re feeling angry or frustrated or sad, our bodies fill with stress hormones. Bacteria and viruses mount challenges to our immune system, and the immune system is more likely to fail. But even if the immune system doesn’t fail, over time, for some reason, we don’t recover as quickly. We accumulate genetic errors in our cells. We deteriorate. We get weaker. The mitochondrial network reads these signs and reports to the deep-tissue bacteria, and the whole conspiracy tattles to the bugs in our gut. The bugs, in turn, tell the mitochondria to work less efficiently. That’s the ultimate cause of aging. Together, they act as judge, jury, and ultimately, executioner.’
‘That’s a lot to swallow all at once,’ Montoya said. ‘I’m skeptical about bacteria communicating and cooperating. Don’t they just grow and eat randomly?’
‘What kind of toothbrush do you use?’ I asked.
Montoya shook his head, puzzled. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Just tell me.’
‘A Sonodyne. I’ve got a big investment in the company.’
‘It uses high-frequency vibrating bristles, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘There are over five hundred different kinds of bacteria in our mouths,’ I said. ‘Not all of them cause cavities. Some repel or destroy their disease-causing cousins. A healthy mouth is more like the Amazon jungle than a Listerine commercial.’
Montoya puffed into his palm and sniffed the result. ‘Do I offend?’ he asked, smiling.
I smiled back. ‘Not at all. But some of them stick to each other and cement themselves to your teeth. After a while, they build up layers of bacterial architecture on your enamel. Dentists call it plaque. It’s a community of cooperating bacteria of many different kinds – a biofilm. The Sonodyne vibrates the biofilm until it falls apart – breaks the cement the bacteria use to fasten to the teeth. In essence, you’re demolishing their houses and shaking them up so bad they can’t even talk.’
‘Look, Ma, no cavities,’ Montoya said.
‘Other bacterial communities colonize your skin, your mucus membranes, and, of course, your gut, where they perform essential digestive services.’ I could sense myself overstepping the bounds of what my angel might want to hear. ‘There are so many bacteria in your intestines that even people who are starving excrete feces – made up mostly of bacteria.’
‘Wow,’ Montoya said. ‘Gossip in the big germ city. But if we’re so important to them, why try to bring us down?’
‘A herd of antelopes sheds the old and tired to make way for the young and fit. Lions prune the herd like a rosebush. The lions may act like killers, but actually they’re partners with a big investment in the health of the herd. Bacteria are more than just important partners – they’re the most successful predators of all. We’re their herd. Aging and death is one way to keep the herd fresh and healthy.’
‘So, how do bacteria cause aging?’ Montoya asked, leaning forward and moving his tongue over his lips.
‘Bacteria in our gut produce quantities of a tiny protein I call hades.’ Now I was really sweating. ‘Our tissues open special receptors, coded for in genes I believe once came from mitochondrial chromosomes. Hades creeps in. It winds up a molecular clock days or weeks after we’re born. With each tick of the clock, the bacteria increase the amount of hades they import into our tissues. Hades alters the way mitochondria work – jams them up, makes them convert ATP with less efficiency. We accumulate the resulting oxidants and free radicals, byproducts of respiration that damage our DNA. Our cells can’t repair the damage. We start to lose our youthful resilience. We grow old.’
Montoya held up his hand and rubbed a few small, liver-colored patches on the back. ‘Age spots,’ he said. ‘And I’m not that old. So what’s in it for the bacteria?’
‘There’s a pot of gold waiting for them. Eventually, we get so weak, so full of genetic errors, that disease or cancer finishes us off. Then, the bacteria have an orgy. They feast like retainers eating a dead king.’
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