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.’

‘Jesus,’ Montoya said, and clenched his hand into a fist.

‘That’s the work I’ll be publishing in a few months, communication between E. coli and mitochondria in human intestinal cells. I’m leaving out the news about hades for now.’

‘We could just kill all our bacteria. Wipe them out with radiation or something. Live in a sterile environment.’

‘They tried that in the nineteen twenties, and it didn’t work,’ I said. ‘The fact is, we’re designed to die. The molecular clock also acts like a deadman switch. Without bacteria, we go on aging anyway – only faster. A certain amount of hades may serve double duty – if we’re active and productive, it may even reset the timer on the clock. It may also help repair genetic damage. Without hades, old viruses in our DNA start popping up and antagonizing our immune system. We become more prone to cancer or autoimmune disease.’

‘Like a time bomb,’ Montoya said. ‘Awful. I assume you’ve found a way to defuse it?’

‘I’m close. The solution isn’t simple, but it involves training bacteria to pump in just the right amount of hades, at the right times – not too much, and not too little. And we have to jam the tattletale signals from our mitochondria. I’m pretty sure I can fool our bacterial partners into turning back our clocks. We live longer – maybe a lot longer.’

Montoya flexed his fingers and compressed his lips with something like satisfaction. ‘Why go against the wisdom of nature?’ he asked softly, fixing me with a limpid stare. ‘Why live longer than the “judges” want us to?’

‘We’re big kids now. We made fire. We made antibiotics. Did the bacteria give us permission to go to the moon? We’re ready to take charge and be responsible for our own destiny. Screw the old ways.’

Montoya grinned. ‘I’ve never tried to think like a germ.’

‘I do it all the time,’ I said. ‘It’s enlightening.’

Montoya made a face. ‘A whole new view of human existence,’ he said. ‘Makes me dizzy.’

‘Not entirely new.’ I reached into my satchel and pulled out a list of the researchers whose work had helped me. ‘There are going to be a lot of Nobel prizes for these people in the next decade.’ I was taking another chance, but I would not work for a man who was always sniffing for someone more famous. Montoya had to believe that I really had the goods.

‘How about your Nobel?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘Not important,’ I said. ‘I’m in it for the long haul.’ Sometimes I whispered that phrase to myself to get to sleep at night, like counting sheep. The Long Haul. The Really Long Haul.

A butler – Swedish blond and about sixty years old – carried a tray of glasses and a bottle of 1863 Malmsey Madeira. He poured, and Montoya handed me a crystal glass.

‘Nobel prizes won’t be half of it,’ Montoya murmured. He narrowed his eyes as if about to fall asleep and leaned his head back. Here it was. My angel was about to pull out his flaming sword. ‘You have a compelling vision. How can I help you to get on with your work?’

I took out the pictures shot by the Alvin crew the month before. Montoya thumbed through and reversed them to look at my notes.

‘There are some deep places I’d like to visit,’ I said, ‘and some problems I’d like to solve. I’d like to do it in secret…Until I find out whether I’m a major-league idiot, or whether I’m really on the edge of a revolution.’

‘What will I get out of it?’

‘Nothing all to yourself,’ I said. ‘My work is for everybody. No patents, no marketing exclusives. I’m pretty hard-headed that way. But maybe – just maybe – you’ll get a crack at living a few hundred years longer. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand.’

Montoya lifted his finger and seemed to wag it in time to unheard music. His eyes got dreamy. ‘Eternity means for ever without time. Like standing still for ever. Did you know that?’

I shook my head. Philosophy has always been my weak point. Why argue about printed words when there are thousands of proteins and enzymes, the verbs and nouns of living biology, to memorize and understand?

‘You know what I want to do, Hal?’ Montoya asked. He stared out over the Plexiglas shield at the end of the porch and lifted his golden Madeira to the breaking waves. ‘I want to build a huge starship. I want to travel to other star systems, stand on new worlds, and party with all my friends on my millionth birthday. I want to dip my feet in the waters of unknown shores and help lovely, enthusiastic women become mothers.’

Montoya finished his glass in one big gulp. ‘I have all the money I need, Hal. I just don’t have enough time.’

By ten the next morning, I had a pledge from Owen Montoya for three million dollars.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Mary’s Triumph had managed to cruise between three massive chimneys. Outside, hydrogen sulfide had leaped from a stinking trace to levels toxic to humans. Where steam-boiler temperatures did not scald, life flourished. Tube worms gathered in weird bouquets between the chimneys. White crabs crawled through like ants in grass. No alien city would ever look so strange or so weirdly beautiful.

For a second, I spotted something gray and serpentine just beyond a nearly solid wall of tube worms. I tried to call it to Dave’s attention, but by the time he turned to look, it had faded like smoke. A current? A ribbon of bacterial floc scalded loose by a geyser?

‘We have about two hours,’ Dave reminded me. ‘Those chimneys have to be eighty feet high.’

‘That could happen in a few months down here.’

‘It’s still pretty damned wonderful. One of the biggest fields we’ve found.’ Dave shook his head. ‘But you’re not interested in tube worms.’

‘Not right now.’

Tube worms are born empty, then suck bacteria into their hollow guts and rely on them to process sulfides and provide all of their nourishment. They live about two and a half centuries, three at the most. Impressive, but they still take their marching orders from germs.

I wanted evidence from earlier times, when the host was still putting up a good fight and the bacteria were still flying their true colors.

‘Under the plume,’ I reminded Dave. ‘Let’s go east about a hundred yards. The walls seem to open up, and there are already fewer vents.’

‘So there are,’ Dave said, comparing the image from our forward-looking sonar with a terrain map made several months ago – a map, incidentally, that did not show Field 37.

He rechecked our position, triangulating between the pulses from the mother ship and the transponders on the seafloor, then pushed the stick forward. Two, three, four knots; a gentle glide through the forest, over tube worms and around spewing, roaring geysers.

We passed near enough to look up at a flange thrusting almost six feet from the side of a tall chimney. The bottom of the flange was painted with rippling, silvery pools. Superheated mineral-rich water, refusing to mix with the cooler local fluid, gathered under the flange’s rough surface and reflected our lights.

‘I get nervous around these puppies,’ Dave said. ‘Had one almost topple over on me when I was working for NOAA. Just clipped it with a manipulator arm, then, wham.’

‘That’s not common, is it?’ I asked.

‘Not very,’ Dave admitted. ‘But once is enough. Well, shit – I mean, dog poop – on it.’

That just didn’t sound like reliable Dave the Christian man, the steady pilot of NOAA DSVs. I gave him a concerned look, but he was too busy to notice.

We made our way between the long, winding canyon walls, pushing along at half a knot. The vents were behind us now, but wooly bacterial clumps fell all around, flashing in the lights. Bacteria coalesced into floc, carpeting the seafloor or being blown up into the megaplume, where they could be carried for miles, then sprinkle down like fake snow from an old Walmart Christmas tree.

‘Looks promising,’ Dave said. His arm twitched. The little sub tilted, and he corrected. ‘Poop.’

‘Focus,’ I said. The view outside was getting interesting. A thin, viscous silt covered the floor of the canyon. Ideal.

A long, segmented ribbon like a thick blade of grass floated in our lights. ‘There.’ I pointed. Dave had turned the thrusters to reduce our forward motion, and the ribbon greeted us with a frantic, gelatinous shimmy. Then – before I could take charge of the data glove on my side and extend the manipulator arm – the organism tore itself into spinning bits of jelly.

I watched the bits get lost in the floc.

‘Sorry,’ Dave said.

I was furious, and with little reason. How else could we slow down? How else could we maneuver to pluck this singular and interesting anomaly off the seafloor?

‘Some sort of cnidarian?’ Dave asked.

‘I don’t think so. Let’s rise a bit and descend on the next one with the thrusters up.’

‘All right.’

‘Just focus, please.’

His lips moved silently. I shifted my eyes from his face to the illuminated field beneath us, then back to his face.

We rose twenty feet and drifted down the narrow canyon. The walls dropped off. We passed a lava column, lonely and rugged. Everything was covered with silt and floc. There was no motion except for the fall of bacterial snow; still and empty, lost in a billennial quiet.

My hand twitched inside the glove. The manipulator responded with a grinding outward push.

‘Careful,’ Dave said.

I wanted to tell him screw you, but he was right. Easy does it. Focus.

Dave let rip with a long and heartfelt fart.

‘Jesus, I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

His stink filled the sphere. It was lush and green, like a jungle, but gassy, like corpse-bloat. I had never really smelled a fart quite like it, to tell the truth, and I wanted to gag.

‘I don’t feel very good,’ Dave said. ‘This is nothing like rice and pepper.’

My tickle of anger became a nettlelike scourge. Little sparks of resentment and frustration came and went like stinging fireflies. I could not focus. I glared at Dave, and he shot me a screw-faced look from the corner of his eye that totally grounded me.

We both turned away. We had been homing in before a fight. We couldn’t get up and circle and bristle in the pressure sphere, so we had just glared – then agreed to back down.

Sweat soaked my armpits.

The sub crept over the sea bottom. I took control of the lower bar of lights and fanned them out.

Something big, round, and long came into view, lying horizontal on the seafloor like a toppled ship’s mast. ‘What in hell is that?’ I asked, startled.

Dave practically jerked control of the lights from me, then chuckled. ‘That is a condominium dropped from heaven. Take a look.’

Clams, boring worms, polychaetes studded the mystery shape like maggots on a corpse.

‘It’s a log,’ Dave said. ‘We’re not that far from some big forests, the Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island.’

‘Right.’

A few tens of meters east, we came across another log. A chain drooling rivers and ponds of orange rust tied the log to at least seven more, all thick with life, all broken loose from a raft who knows how many years or even decades ago. It takes a long time for deep scavengers to move in on such riches, but when they do, organisms gather from miles around to share the feast.

We churned our way east a few more yards, following the rust rivers until they faded into the silt. I lifted the bar and spread the lights again. Dave did not object.

Ahead, dozens of little blobs wobbled on the ooze and sediment like dust bunnies under a kid’s bed. I rotated the entire light bar, flooding the seafloor with daylight glow. ‘There they are,’ I said. Xenos by the dozens cast long shadows. The DSV glided over them, lazy as a well-fed manta. Our lights picked out hundreds more, then thousands, jiggling on the silt. I could barely make out the blurred tracks of their slow, rolling movement.

‘Got ‘em,’ Dave said. ‘What next?’ Everything was fine again. The smell was going away or I was able to ignore it.

I kept moving the lights. Dave gently precessed the submarine.

‘See those?’ I asked. ‘Those fans…and over there, gelatinous mounds – way over there.’ I drew back the manipulator and armed its claw tip with a revolving suck tube. ‘What do they look like to you?’

‘Sea daisies?’ Dave asked, as if eager to confirm my hopes.

‘Some would call them that. A little yellow tinge in the lights. But they are not siphonophores. They’re something else.’

I sucked my lips, afraid I might just be looking at loose debris, deluding myself. But they were not debris. They were real.

‘I’ve never seen anything like them,’ Dave admitted. ‘They look like little squashed balloons.’

‘Swim pillows,’ I said. ‘Bubble wrap.’

Dave’s eyes were perfectly normal for this situation: wide with speculative interest. ‘They aren’t jellyfish or corals. And no algae – not this far down.’

‘Rack your brain,’ I said, giddy. ‘Think back. Way back. Think living fossils.’

‘Ediacara?’ Dave asked, and immediately shook his head: couldn’t be.

‘You got it,’ I said. My hands trembled.

The earliest known large fossils, from tens of millions of years before there were shelly or bony animals, are either lumpy bacterial colonies called stromatolites, or the peculiar formations that Adolf Seilacher named the Vendobionts. Another group name is Ediacara, from the Australian outcropping where type specimens were first found. These ancient life-forms had sat on the floors of shallow seas about six hundred million years ago. All they had left behind were sandy casts, impressions, little more than ghosts in stone. Until now.

I noted large chambers arranged radially or in grids, some rooted, some floating just above the seafloor. Mushroomlike bells; graceful, waving fronds; jointed blades; gelatinous air mattresses spreading over the silt. And all around them, perhaps their cousins and successors – possibly even their larvae, their propagules, the form which they assumed while spreading themselves to favored habitats – the xenos.

I was just guessing. I did not know whether xenos had any connection with these ancient marvels. But there they were – cozy chums at the bottom of the sea, just around the corner from Eden. If these were indeed the last Vendobionts, they had found a safe niche away from six hundred million years of evolution. Metazoan predators – our ancestors among them – had driven these ancients into hiding, forcing them into the ocean deeps.

I was getting way ahead of myself. Too much leaping and not enough looking, not enough science.

‘Is that a jellyfish – on a stalk?’ Dave asked.

Our lights were heating up the area, forcing some of the organisms to expel fluid and contract into wrinkled little raisins. ‘Dim the lights,’ I suggested.

Dave cranked down the rheostat. The seafloor became suffused in a golden glow, absolutely spectacular for mood. I wanted a room that color to sit and dream in. To dream of the Garden of Eden.

Nobody knows what the Ediacara organisms were, precisely, and where there is mystery, there is speculation, and where there is speculation, scientific careers can be made. Colleagues can debate, friendships can dissolve in argument. Wonders come and go and theories die a dozen deaths only to be resurrected and win the day. A possible connection between xenophyophores and the cushiony Vendobionts had hardly escaped notice. But nobody had crawled out on a limb as far as I had.

It certainly looked like a garden, an octopus’s garden, I started to hum, in the shade…

‘Are we there yet?’ Dave asked, tapping me on the shoulder.

I jerked, my reverie broken, and said breathlessly, ‘Yeah. Let’s circle – with the thrusters up. They look delicate. And let’s start the documentation.’

‘Video has been on for several minutes,’ Dave said. ‘I’ll get the Hasselblad. You blanket the scene with the digital camera. Here – let me lay down a photo grid.’ He paged through to the camera control display on the LCD, and squares of red light pulsed over the scene outside the sphere. Our cameras coordinated with the flashing grid.

We circled the garden, taking pictures for almost fifteen minutes.

‘Ow,’ Dave said, clutching his stomach.

I barely heard him.

‘Dog poop.’

‘Let’s collect,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ he said.

We moved into position to capture some of the smaller organisms. Somehow, breaking up the fans and bells seemed a sacrilege – but one we would no doubt commit.

I reached into my data glove and extended the manipulator arm, now tipped with a revolving suck tube. This was a special version of a tool used by earlier collectors to draw up specimens. Ours spun a small fan with variable pitch blades to pull water into a transparent acrylic tube.

I nudged the small tube up against a xeno in front of the DSV’s skids and fingered a small trigger. The fan spun. When the xeno crossed a photo detector, the fan cut off before it could squash the sandy blob against a mesh screen. Valves closed and capped the tube, and it rolled out of the way like a spent round in a gun.

Another tube was chambered, and, seconds later, another specimen – a segmented stalk – kinked and slipped neatly into the plastic prison. A third tube, and I had a small sea flower, each petal a separate cell covered with tiny hairs, like an arrangement of sea gooseberries.

Their jewel-like translucence gave me the final clue. These were not made of the tiny-celled tissues found in more familiar organisms. The sub’s golden light warped through thick cellular membranes with a peculiar refraction, like interference between two layers of glass. Lovely, oily little rainbows.

The Sea Messenger had eight pressurized drawers for keeping specimens alive. Recording temperature and pressure for each tube, I ejected them into the drawers.

Samples of ambient seawater were analyzed by a miniature NASA chemical lab, the data stored for transmission on the next uplink. Labs on board the mother ship would soon begin preparing aquarium inoculants.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ Dave asked.

I sucked up another specimen, chambered another tube. ‘They’re wonderful! I’ve never seen anything like them.’

Dave gave another groan. His face was pallid and green in the reflected light from the seafloor.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I feel really weird. I swear I didn’t eat any dessert.’

For a moment, making an effort, I forgot the manipulator arm and the precious specimens and sat up. ‘You look like you’ve got a chill.’ I reached out to touch Dave’s forehead. He batted my hand away.

‘Son of a turtle,’ he said.

‘Goddammit,’ I said, simultaneously, and I was suddenly, irrationally furious, as if a flashbulb of rudeness had gone off in my head. ‘Are you going to screw this up because of something you ate?’

He cringed and clutched his stomach, eyes going blank under another wave of pain. ‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain around me, buster,’ he said. ‘Grab your specimens and let’s get out of here. Quick!’ he growled.

I pulled back in my seat, jerked the arm toward the drawers, and spewed the last tubes out, one, two, three, into their receptacles. So many more to collect. But training and humanity beat science.

Dave looked bad. He drew his knees up in the chair.

A pungent, tropical odor filled the sphere. It wasn’t flatulence. It came from Dave’s sweat, from his skin, and it was starting to make me feel ill, too.

Topside was straight Up, eight thousand feet. Three hours minimum.

I took a last look at the Garden of Eden – what Mark McMenamin had called the Garden of Ediacara. Serene, untouched, isolated, downwind from the geyser spew, just as I had seen it in the photos – imagined it in my dreams – my triumph, the highlight of my exploring, perhaps the key to all my research…

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

‘Diddly,’ Dave muttered. His eyes went unfocused, wild, like an animal caught in a cage. He rapped his hand against the smooth inner surface of the sphere with a painful thwonk. The sphere was six inches thick – no risk of cracking it with bare knuckles. ‘It’s too…darned small in here,’ he said. ‘Colder than a witch’s tit,’ he added, eyes steady on mine, as if to receive applause, or criticism, for a dramatic performance.

Clearly not an experienced blasphemer. I stifled a laugh.

‘I can call you Hal, or Henry, can’t I?’ he asked, peppering the honey of sweet reason with sincerity.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Dave, we have to go up now.’

‘I got to ask you.’ He held out his hand, and the fingers twi??hed as if grasping something in the air between us. A little to the left, and he would have been strangling me. ‘I don’t really give a…horse’s patootie…I don’t give a dung heap if you know Owen Montoya. But did he ever give you a phone call?’

‘Yeah, I suppose he did. Dave –’

‘Did he ever tell you what to do with your life?’

This made no sense. ‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Did your Dad ever call you, long after he was dead?’

‘No,’ I said. This shook me, and I started to get really scared. My brother had asked me pretty much the same thing. ‘Why?’

‘Dog poop on them all. All the petty little bosses out there making their petty phone calls and telling me, of all people, what to do. Well, I don’t understand a petty word they’re saying, but they’re making me sick. Don’t you think that’s what it is?’

I didn’t think it was the hi-carb diet. ‘Dave, I can get us back. Just relax and let go of the stick.’

‘You don’t know diddly about this boat.’ He shook his head, flinging stinking drops of sweat against the inside of the pressure sphere.

My mouth hung open. I was on the furry edge of braying like a donkey, this was so utterly ridiculous.

With a dramatic shrug and a twist, Dave wrenched back on the stick. The aft thrusters reversed with a nasty clunk and churned up the silt below. Backwash shredded the delicate little garden. The golden lights glowed like sunset through the rising cloud of silt, and a few sparkling, dirty little jelly balls – xenos and bits of other creatures – exploded in front of the pressure sphere.

‘No! Dave, get a grip.’

‘Piddle on it,’ he said coldly. Then he let out a shriek that nearly burst my eardrums. He flailed, knocked loose the data-glove box – leaving it dangling from its connecting wires – and pushed the stick over hard right. The little sub started to respond, veering, but the autopilot kicked in.

A small female voice announced, ‘Maneuver too extreme. Canceled.’

‘Poop on you!’ Dave screamed. He let go of the stick. His thick-fingered fist struck my cheek and knocked me back. I shielded myself with my arm, and he pounded that a couple of times, then grabbed it with both hands, torquing it like he wanted to break it off and get at the rest of me.

‘Dave, Goddammit, stop!’ I yelled, really frightened now. Should I fight back against my pilot, knock him senseless, possibly kill him?

Did I really know how to surface all by myself?

He let go of my arm and seemed to reconsider. Then, with a last, final grunt, he yanked his control stick out of its socket and swung it around his head. Before I could raise my hands again, he crashed the stick hard against my temple. I grabbed my head with one hand and the stick with the other.

Dave wrenched the stick loose and screeched it against the inside surface of the pressure sphere. The metal end dug a shallow white groove in the acrylic. Not satisfied with that, he jabbed the stick into the sphere, scoring a pentagram of divots. He gave a doggy grin of delight, like a kid scrawling on walls with a Magic Marker. Then he delivered a frenzy of gouging blows, spittle and sweat flying.

I pushed back, ignoring the blood dripping onto my arm. Watching for an opening, I straightened and swung. He saw the punch coming and leaned. We scuffled like two kindergarteners. I bruised my knuckles against the top of the sphere, then connected solidly with the side of his jaw.

My hand exploded in pain.

Dave dropped the stick. It rattled to the bottom of the pressure sphere. He curled up like a bug in a killing bottle and moaned. Then he flung his head back, mouth agape, and gave the pitiful howl of a disappointed child. His hands jerked and shuddered.

Dave stopped howling and lay stiff and still.

The smell got worse.

I watched him warily, ready to fight again, then lost control, doubled over, and retched. There was only a little sour fluid in my stomach. It dribbled between my knees and under the seat. I noticed that the silvery air pocket beneath the sphere, trapped in the sub frame, was no bigger than the bubble in a carpenter’s level.

So much pressure.

I sat up, waiting for the sphere to split along the white gouge or punch through the divots.

The sub’s polite female voice spoke. ‘Please exert positive control to disengage autopilot.’

I did the calculations, weirdly precise in my panic. Two hundred and forty-four atmospheres outside. Twenty-four million seven hundred and twenty-three Pascals. Three thousand five hundred and eighty-five pounds per square inch. A four-door sedan parked on every square inch.

My head cleared. I wiped the blood from my cheek with the back of my hand and rubbed it against the fabric of my thermal suit. Training. Think.

I had my own control stick stowed beneath my chair. It could be pulled out, inserted into my chair’s socket, and engaged. I could take over Mary’s Triumph.

Dave let out a sigh and collapsed. He looked like one of those polyurethane foam mannequins ever-present in the galleys of ocean research vessels, carried to the bottom, squished in the deep and hauled back for laughs. I watched in horror. But he was just going limp, and that seemed worse: complete, total relaxation. His half-open eyes had a forgiving, indifferent gloss. They socketed in my direction as his head burrowed into his chest. Dave skewed over until the seat harness, still wrapped around his shoulder, brought him up short.

He looked dead.

Mary’s Triumph rotated above the seafloor. I reached beneath my seat and felt for the stick, detached it from its clips, raised it to inspect the connector, then tried to insert it into the control armature. Sweat spilled into my eyes. The stick wouldn’t go. I reached down with damp fingers and pinched the plastic plug away from the small socket. I was shaking so hard by then it took me almost a dozen tries to make the fit and push down hard enough to lock both the electrical and mechanical connectors.

I waggled the stick.

‘Autopilot control relinquished,’ Mary’s voice announced. ‘Shall we begin the return to the surface?’

I hadn’t been briefed on everything the autopilot could do; there hadn’t seemed any pressing need. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Yes. Please.’

I pushed on Dave with the tip of a finger. Inert. He had smashed the LCD screen and two of the smaller displays. It was the autopilot or nothing.

The sub still rotated.

‘Yes,’ I said, louder. ‘Go up.’

‘Answer clearly for voice activation.’

‘YES!’ I shouted. ‘GO UP!’

‘Beginning ascent to surface. Transmitting emergency signals.’

CHAPTER NINE

The water outside grew brighter. It was now a twilit gray. I wiped cold sweat from my eyes.

Dave stirred about ten minutes before we surfaced. I watched from my seat, ready to hit him again.

‘I feel sick,’ he moaned.

‘Sit still,’ I said.

He goggled at my bloody head. ‘Cripes, what happened?’

The good Christian was back.

‘You went nuts.’

His eyes looked sad, betrayed. ‘I did not,’ he said. ‘You tried to hit me.’

‘You broke your stick and gouged the sphere,’ I said. I wasn’t about to argue with the man, not after spending three hours trapped with him in a dark, stinking, wretched little ball.

Dave looked at the marks and divots. ‘We were collecting specimens,’ he said thickly.

‘Shut up.’

‘I can drive,’ he said.

‘You broke your stick. The autopilot’s in charge. Just shut up.’

Dave’s face showed guilt and disbelief.

We broke the surface and the beacons switched on automatically. Through the waves crashing over the sphere – just our luck, a rough sea – I tried to spot the mother ship. I couldn’t see a thing. Time to stand on top of the sub, by the mast, if only to get a breath of fresh air. I crawled back over the third, empty couch to undog the hatch.

‘It’s too rough out there,’ Dave said.

‘Screw you,’ I muttered, and crept into the tunnel, an L-shaped pipe barely two feet wide. Swearing, I knelt in the usual small puddle of water at the base of the tunnel, got to my feet, and crooked my arms to twist and spin more levers and wheels.

The hatch sighed and my ears popped. Spray showered down. I sucked in the cold sea air, incredibly sweet and alive. I searched for the Sea Messenger and found her at three o’clock, well over a thousand yards away.

I yelled into the wind and waved my arms. I didn’t dare crawl out any farther – Dave could close the hatch on me and take the sub down again. Lodging my leg, I held on to the mesh deck behind the pressure sphere.

Dave glared up at me through the bubble, still in his seat. He looked frightened. He was calling on the radio. That made sense, but I still wasn’t ready to forgive and forget. Sea Messenger should have been almost on top of us, responding to our emergency signal with her H-shaped crane lowered for retrieval and the rolling ramp extended like a tongue.

‘They aren’t answering,’ Dave shouted up through the tube. ‘Come back in and shut the hatch.’

‘No way!’ I shouted. ‘I’m staying out here.’

‘Look,’ he said, his voice hoarse and crackling, ‘This is a rough sea. If you’re staying out, get all the way out and shut the hatch or we’ll ship water and sink.’

The waves were pounding stronger than ever and the wind blew stinging spume off the whitecaps into my eyes. The ship’s lights were out and it was dusk. All the running and rigging lights should have been on, and the searchlights jabbing over the water, looking for us.

Nothing. Sea Messenger looked dead.

‘I’m going to bring us closer to the ship,’ Dave shouted. ‘And I’m closing the hatch, damn it!’

‘All right,’ I said. Reluctantly, I dropped down and dogged the top hatch. But I stayed in the tube, squeezing my back against the metal wall, still cold from the deep.

‘I’m really all right,’ Dave insisted, his voice hollow in the sphere. ‘I swear, I don’t know what happened.’

‘You tried to kill us.’

‘That can’t be right! I swear.’

I let it go. Dave moved over into my seat and tried to disengage the autopilot. There was something wrong, and at first it wouldn’t let him. He pulled up the touch pad and keyed in an override. The autopilot disengaged with a small chime.

Then Dave maneuvered with my stick.

The sub cut through the chop to avoid being overturned. We lurched like a bucket in a slow-motion paint shaker, with nauseating jerks and some rough slams. Standing in the tube in a rough sea could leave bruises for days. I climbed down into the sphere.

The sub bobbed up on a roller and we caught another glimpse of Sea Messenger. People ran along the upper deck toward the forecastle. The lights were still out. Another bob, and I saw a flash of brilliant yellow-orange near the stern, then five more, rapid.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked, as if once again Dave and I were partners trying to outguess the rest of the world.

‘Muzzle flash,’ he said. His face went gray. ‘What in hell?’

‘How do we get on the ship if they won’t grab us?’

‘We abandon the DSV, swim to the ship and use the stern ramp. More than likely a wave will wash us up.’

‘Or brain us,’ I said.

Dave did not disagree. ‘There’s a diving platform on the port side – if they have it down in these seas, which isn’t likely. We need to be out of the water fast.’

That was important. Immersed in the icy waters for ten or fifteen minutes, even in our silvery thermal suits, could be deadly.

‘It’s important we let them know what happened,’ Dave said.

‘That you went nuts down there?’ My teeth chattered.

The pilot seemed to accede to this scenario. ‘Your brain is not in charge,’ Dave said. He looked like a frightened little boy confessing something dire. ‘They can just ring you up and it’s all over.’

Dave Press’s mind was heading south, then north; he didn’t even know how to read the compass needle.

Abruptly, Sea Messenger lit up like a squid boat on parade: beacons, running lights. Broken ribbons of silver and red and green glinted off the waves. A searchlight beam swung out from the bridge through the moist air, and another switched on near the stern. They swept the water, then converged on Mary’s Triumph. Dave shielded his eyes.

‘Somebody finally woke up,’ he said. He wiped his face with his hands and stared at the palms, shaking his head forlornly. ‘That’s it for me. You coming?’

Dave pushed himself out of his seat and gave me a look as if he were going for coffee, did I want some, too?

‘You can’t swim from here,’ I said. Was that what he intended to do – abandon the sub and strike out for the mother ship? We were too far away, even for a strong swimmer, in this sea.

He grabbed an overhead bar and hauled himself upside down to the hatch, then, with expert grace striking in a plump guy, swung himself around and knelt on the third couch.

‘So long,’ he said. ‘Take my advice, for what it’s worth. Stay away from the telephone.’

Before I could react, he shinnied up the tube. I swore and went after him, but he was quick as a seal, out the hatch before I could grab an ankle.

That left me halfway in the tube, stuck at a precarious angle. My leg bent, and the sub lurched. For a moment, my upthrust knee jammed in the pipe and I couldn’t move. I struggled to drop back, and when that didn’t work, to crawl higher.

I had been tamped down like a cork in a bottle.

A wave washed in through the upper hatch and swamped me. Sputtering, I pressed on my thigh with both hands and shoved the knee down hard, painfully, past a welded steel join, then squirmed to grab a rung.

I poked up through the hatch. Twilight was leaving the western sky, a lovely orange fading into blue and then black. Stars filled the zenith, visible even through the spray from swooshing and bumping whitecaps.

Dave was nowhere to be seen. Another wave almost blinded me and spun the sub around. I palmed water from my eyes and blinked at the nightmare. The Sea Messenger had come about and was backing her screws two hundred yards to starboard, whipping the sea into dancing foam.

A flare shot up from the ship’s deck and arced over Mary’s Triumph. They knew where I was.

‘Get Dave!’ I shouted, and swung my arms over my head. ‘Man overboard!’

Another wave loomed, a greenie so high I could see the last of the daylight through it. It smashed over the sub’s tiny housing and slammed me against the metal lip. The hatch banged shut on my head and fingers. A bomb blast of pain brought on blind rage, and I slammed the hatch back once, caught it on the rebound, flung it back for a second bounce, and once more, with all my might.

Anger spent, fingers and head throbbing, I dropped and sealed the hatch. I wasn’t going to take any chances with the open sea. I trembled so hard I thought I’d vibrate around the inside of the sphere. For a moment I saw Dave in the water outside the sub, thrashing and drowning, but it was only a fat little twister of bubbles.

It was finished – I was going to die.

I caught myself moaning like a whipped dog, then, hearing water slosh in the bottom of the sphere, I remembered the specimens, locked safe in their drawers. My reason for being here, the reward for months of working the angel circuit.

I had survived a maniac sub driver, I was afloat, I still had the prize, the putative Apple, the Golden Fleece of the Gods.

Nobody had said it was going to be easy.

I fumbled with the ship-to-ship, changing frequencies, and finally a breathless voice answered.

‘Messenger here. Is that you, Dave?’

I recognized Jason, the controller and mission planner for the DSV. I pressed the mike switch. ‘It’s Hal. Dave flaked. He’s over the side. Get a Zodiac out there – he might still be afloat.’

‘Shit.’ Jason held his mike open and I thought I heard sobbing. ‘Are you driving the sub?’

‘She’s on autopilot.’

‘Hal, we have a bad situation. Someone’s shooting up the ship. We may have casualties. Hal?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Paul and Stan went aft about ten minutes ago. We can’t go back to the crane until they check in.’

‘Dave went nuts, Jason,’ I said, eager to make clear my own tale of woe. That seemed too much for him to absorb, and I decided to skip it for the time being. ‘Just get me back on the ship.’

‘I don’t know how long that will take. Hang on. We’ll do our best.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, and braced my hand against the inside of the pressure sphere. The sub almost rolled over.

I buckled myself in and gripped the mike like a lifeline.

CHAPTER TEN

Nadia herself bobbed in the water next to the DSV and tapped the frame with a grappling hook. I waved, and she gave me a strong chin-nod back, wet black hair peeking out from under her hood, black eyes distinct even behind the mask. She made the hook fast on a lift ring and swam out of sight. When she was done with the other hooks, she clambered up on the frame. I peered up over my shoulder to see her. Behind her rose the dark stern of the Sea Messenger, and the outline of the big red crane mounted aft of the helicopter pad. I saw Jason step into a little booth out of the weather, which was getting worse.

Then the rain sheeting down made seeing outside impossible. I felt the submarine rise from the waves, felt the waves hold us back, and with a jerk, the sub leaped out of the suck of the sea and swung in open air. Paul and Stan waited for me on the sled and prodded the Mary’s Triumph onto her skid. The sled withdrew into the stern with a grind of gears.

Nadia jumped down to help Jason fasten the sub to the docking frame. I climbed out of the hatch with her help.

‘We can’t find Dave,’ she said, her lips almost blue with cold. ‘Gary is out there now in a Zodiac.’ She looked ill, but stood straight and spoke clearly. I fell in love right then and there, with relief and admiration and more than my share of near-death giddiness.

‘I’m sorry. What happened?’

‘We’re a mess,’ Nadia said. She climbed the ladder out of the well.

‘Dave went a little nuts down there,’ I said. ‘He tried to kill me.’

She gave me a level look at the top of the ladder. ‘How do you mean, nuts?’

‘He tried to sabotage the sub. Ripped out the control stick and used it to punch the sphere.’

‘Jesus,’ she said, but she didn’t sound surprised. Maybe she was in shock. She leaned against the bulkhead. ‘Dr Mauritz slipped a gun on board. He killed Thomas and Sylvia. Paul and Stan tackled him right here, where we’re standing. He’s tied up in the sick bay.’

I had spoken with Mauritz for a couple of hours the day before yesterday. ‘That’s stupid,’ was all I could manage to say. I looked around and saw dark red spatters on the deck and across the bulkhead under an emergency light. Blood dripped from the light cage. The sight knocked me off-balance and I groped with my outstretched hand to find a clean space on the wall.

Nadia grabbed a towel from a deserted lab, returned to the passageway wiping her face and hair, and threw me an odd, blameful look.

I felt like a Jonah.

‘I can’t find Max,’ she said, and tossed the towel back into the lab. We both heard the helicopter at the same time. She turned away with an exhausted slump of her shoulders, eyelids drooping, and said, ‘That’ll be the Coast Guard.’

‘Nadia, I have specimens,’ I called out to her as she wobbled up the ladders to the bridge.

‘Fuck the specimens,’ she shouted. ‘People died, Hal! Don’t you get it?’ She paused at the top and her red-rimmed eyes bored into me. ‘Mauritz was looking for you. He wanted to kill you.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A 250-foot Coast Guard cutter pulled up alongside the Sea Messenger. The Bell helicopter strapped onto the pad had carried two FBI agents. They were currently gathering evidence and interviewing Stan and Paul.

Dr Mauritz was hauled up on deck in a stretcher, past the crew mess, strapped down securely and talking a mile a minute, trying to explain that he was all right, they could let him go now. Mauritz was big-domed and balding. He had a kind of aristocratic English accent, and frankly he looked like a mad scientist. But he sounded apologetic and confused.

He had put up a stiff fight. Stan and Paul had banged him around hard. His head was covered with bandages.

I didn’t know how long the specimens would last in the sub. I knew they’d be kept pressurized and at the proper temperature for at least another four hours – unless something went wrong. I didn’t want to take that chance, but I also did not want to seem an insensitive asshole. The mood on the ship, understandably, was not good.

I waited in the crew mess, sipping a Diet Coke.

The Jonah feeling is indescribable. It’s about nothing you’ve done personally. It’s about a shadow hanging over you, an unshakable association with shit that no one understands. There I was, the closest thing to an outsider on the Sea Messenger, right in the bull’s-eye. Why would Mauritz want to shoot me? He hardly knew me. Why would Dave Press want to drown me and wreck the DSV? The DSV was everybody’s baby. Pilots would cross swords for the privilege of taking Mary’s Triumph down to the vents.

None of it pieced together. Without a rational explanation, even the smartest of scientists reverts to a tribal suspicion of bad juju.

Exhaustion slammed up against emotional shock. I couldn’t keep myself from shivering. Alone in the mess, waiting for the agents to work their way down the list and talk to me, I worried about the specimens.

Jason came in and stared at me. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine.’

‘Owen called Captain Burke and asked about you. He said take care of you and your work. I moved your specimens over to the aquarium. They’re okay, I think.’

Unspoken, Jason was saying that what Montoya asked for, he got, even in the face of a police investigation. But Jason did not have to approve. ‘Owen knows about us, about the ship,’ he continued. ‘It’s on TV. You sure you’re all right?’

‘Thanks for moving them,’ I said, nodding like a fuzzy dog in a car’s rear window. I could have hugged him just for bringing good news.

‘What’d you find?’ he asked, and bit his lip, nodding along with me. We wobbled our heads, matching rhythm, and that was too weird. I stopped.

‘Xenos,’ I said.

‘Right. You were diving for xenos. Look like cnidarians to me, though. You sure you got what you were after? Dave grab them, or you?’

‘I used the suck tube,’ I said.

‘Do you know Dr Mauritz, off the ship?’ Jason asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why did Dave go overboard?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You didn’t hurt him and push him over, just to hide it? You didn’t fight, I mean, and hurt him. Self-defense?’

‘No. He did it all.’

‘Did he say he wanted to kill you?’

‘No, he just started…’ I sucked in my breath. ‘Trying to curse and not doing a very good job. Kind of funny, but scary, too. I better wait for the police. Don’t want this to seem rehearsed.’

‘Right,’ Jason said. He got up and stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘We found Max. He’s dead, too. Nadia’s severely shook.’

I just stared at him. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, as if it were all my fault.

‘Yeah.’

Jason left, and a tall man in a blue parka came in. He was forty or forty-five, dressed, beneath the unzipped parka, in a wool sweater and khaki cargo pants, damp with sea spray. He was an FBI agent out of the Seattle Bureau, he said. His name was Bakker and he asked a lot of questions, some of which did not make sense until I realized he didn’t know I had been on Mary’s Triumph when Mauritz flipped. As well, Agent Bakker had not been informed Dave Press was missing and presumed drowned.

The news seemed to confuse him, so he turned back his pages of notes and started over.

‘What in hell is a DSV?’ he asked.

By the end of the interview, I was ready to collapse. Bakker folded his notebook. None of the pieces fit for him, either. In his experience, scientists didn’t just go around killing each other.

After he left, I stretched out on the long, padded bench behind the main dining table and blacked out. I should have dreamed of falling through ink, this time without the bubble, drowning in endless, stinking night. Instead, I dreamed of being out in the desert, walking beside a guy with bushy white hair, wearing a long gray shirt.

CHAPTER TWELVE Seattle, Washington

The ship returned to the Port of Seattle the next morning and agents and Coast Guard investigators swarmed over her. Diligent men and women marched aboard and began stringing yellow tape and ribbon. A dozen agents with digital cameras and crime-lab kits took samples. We were instructed not to move anything, certainly not to remove anything.

Jason intervened with the agent in charge and he allowed Nadia and me to go down to the lab and check the specimens taken during the dive. We were accompanied by a young female agent, built a lot like Dave, I thought, her pant suit a size too small and stretched tight. She watched suspiciously from beneath a knit cap perched jauntily forward on neat cornrows, and asked a lot of questions.

She would not miss a trick, I judged.

Nadia did most of the talking. She had more color today, but her manner was cold and efficient, as if her emotions were running on a very low charge.

I was trying to figure out how to get my prizes off the Sea Messenger. The ship was likely to be impounded for days, and I had no idea what would happen to them over so much time. I just wanted to haul the containers off the Sea Messenger and get them over to the lab I was renting on southeast Lake Union. I was eager to get my critters stabilized in the proper inoculants, supplied with fresh seawater, and under reliable pressure.

Maybe it was a personal disconnect, like an emotional circuit breaker blowing, maybe it was shock. All I needed on this Earth, right now, was to document and describe the Vendobionts, if that’s what they were. Perform a few tests. Count their little fingers and toes.

It was not that I didn’t care about the rest. I just did not have a clue how I could help Nadia feel better, or do anything for Jason. I certainly did not feel responsible for what had happened, however strange the circumstances.

Maybe it was the Sea Messenger that was hexed.

I peered into my cabin. The plump agent in the too-tight suit stood there with two men in plain clothes – and I do mean plain, black suits and London Fogs.

My clothes, books, and computer were spread out on the bed, being violated.

‘Hello,’ I said.

The young agent had removed her cap and her cornrows were indeed perfect. She had the most intense and unreadable eyes, and the skin of her round face was an unblemished work of art.

‘We’re through with these,’ she said, and indicated the clothes on the bed. ‘But we’d like to keep these.’ She swung her hand – her whole upper body, as well – to indicate my computer and three textbooks.

‘The books are available on Amazon dot com,’ I said. ‘The computer contains private information. Unless you have a specific warrant, I’d like to take it with me. I’m not under suspicion, am I?’ I gathered up my few clothes and pointedly thrust them back into the travel bag, flopping over and pressing down sleeves and legs.

‘We need to establish relationships and circumstances,’ she said.

‘Am I a suspect?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘Do you have a warrant that lets you…’ I looked for the right legal words, then gave up. ‘Fumble through private documents?’

‘No,’ she said, eyes lidded with sublime nonchalance.

‘I’ll keep it neat and tidy, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if things change,’ I said, shaking a little at my presumption, and at hers. I tossed the computer and the books into the bag and zipped it shut.

I passed Nadia in the corridor as I rolled the bag on its wheels to the gangway. She was smoking a cigarette and looked dead on her feet. She glanced my way, then sharply looked aside and stubbed out her cigarette in a little can.

I had not seen her smoke before.

‘I won’t say it was a pleasure,’ she said.

I stopped and regarded her sadly, still buzzing from my anger in the cabin. I switched the bag handle to my right hand. ‘I feel like a goddamned Jonah,’ I said, and realized my eyes were watering. ‘Christ, what did I do?’

‘Nothing,’ Nadia said.

‘I have no idea why Dave went crazy in the sub, or why Mauritz wanted to kill me. I really don’t.’

She kept her face pointed toward the shadows and bleak gray concrete planes of the dock. I flashed on all the women who had ever stubbornly tried to put me aside or pigeonhole me, or blame me, with or without cause.

‘This is nuts,’ I said, and tugged my ridiculous little bag toward the gangway.

‘Betty Shun wants to talk with you,’ Nadia said, biting off the information like an insult. You’re being called to the principal’s office.

I looked back, eyes wide. She was lighting up another cigarette.

Our generation had taken up Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, reading cheap paperbacks, wearing black suits, and smoking cigarettes, like all the war-weary lemmings of the nineteen fifties, but without their excuses.

I felt sick.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After a bad night’s sleep on the fourth floor of the Homeaway, just blocks from the Genetron Building and my rented lab, I opened the curtains. Across Lake Union, morning fog slid over the rusty tanks and pipes and broad lawn of Gasworks Park. I stood there for five minutes, feeling fortunate.

I was no Jonah. It wasn’t me that was hexed. I had survived, and that meant I was lucky, maybe even on the right track in this great scheme of things. Only the FBI and a couple of murders were in my way, and that pissed me off.

Rob would have recognized my mood instantly. Prince Hal was not getting his way.

A cell-phone rang on the nightstand. Data phones in the U.S. had been screwed up for weeks with viruses. I carried four with me, on four different systems, just to make sure: a PalmSec, an InfoBuddy, and two standard Nokias.

It was the PalmSec that was beeping. The pert little a.m. triple-tone told me two things, that I had a call, and that it was before noon. I flipped open the jacket, keyed in my unlock, and answered. ‘Cousins.’

‘Dr Cousins, Betty Shun. How are you?’

‘Dandy,’ I said, and regretted the flippancy.

‘We’re very sad here,’ she said. ‘We’ve lost a lot of friends.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘We need to get together. I’ll bring along a man who also works for Owen. He wants to talk with you.’

‘When?’ I asked.

‘We’re in a car in front of your hotel. We’ll take you to the Crab Cart for breakfast.’

I had been given my marching orders. But I wanted to find out about my specimens. Time was running out.

As always.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Betty Shun stood in the lobby, dressed in a green-leather coat and green slacks. I turned and saw a blocky, balding man in his late forties push through the men’s room door, blowing on his hands. He made sure they were dry before he offered to shake.

‘Hal Cousins, this is Kelly Bloom,’ Betty introduced. Shun, Bloom, Press…I was seeing a pattern here, all members of the Monosyllabic Verb club. Bloom wore denim all over – denim pants, denim jacket with brass buttons, a blue-denim shirt. And Air Jordans, old but scrubbed clean.

‘Dr Cousins, first off, congratulations,’ Bloom said. ‘Let’s get out of here and go someplace quiet.’

They escorted me to the drive. I had expected a limousine or at the very least a BMW, but the car parked in front of the hotel lobby, beaded with rain and speckled with mud, was a mid-nineties Ford Taurus, conspicuously purple, with a dented right fender and scrape marks all along the driver’s side.

‘Yours?’ I asked Bloom. He grinned.

‘It’s going to be a long day, isn’t it?’ I asked Betty. She gave me a studied smile.

The Crab Cart was quiet and dark. In the back, under windows overlooking yachts at private moorings, the booths were separated by barriers of glass and wood. Betty ordered first, oatmeal and two eggs. Bloom had nothing, not even coffee, maintaining his ascetic posture. I ordered a bowl of Wheat Chex, toast, and a small crab omelet. Bloom smiled as I laced into my food. Betty ate half her oatmeal, both of her eggs, and patted her mouth fastidiously with the cloth napkin.

The questions began. Bloom spoke in a pillowy bass, with a gentle North Carolina accent. He kept his hands folded on the oak tabletop. ‘Do you know why anyone would want to kill you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re a private investigator, aren’t you?’

‘We both work with Owen’s security detail,’ Betty answered. She cocked her head at my raised eyebrow. ‘Did you think I was window dressing?’ She laughed, a tinkling trill. ‘Owen can afford much prettier, just not much smarter, or more cautious.’

‘Okay,’ Bloom said. ‘You understand we aren’t trying to go around the police investigation, and that we have no authority? You don’t have to answer.’

‘Decent of you to warn me,’ I said. The corporate Seattle way – a shakedown without the hard edge.

‘We try,’ Bloom said. ‘Owen wants to understand what happened. You were down in the DSV with Dave Press during the shooting on the Sea Messenger. Did you think Press was acting funny?’

‘He was acting scary,’ I said. ‘Not in the least funny.’

‘What did he do?’

‘I told the police, he was trying to curse and not doing a very good job of it.’

‘Was he asking inappropriate questions?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But that wasn’t so bad…I mean…’ I paused. ‘I never mentioned that to the police.’

Bloom shrugged. His shoulders strained at the denim jacket. ‘Did he talk about Mr Montoya?’

Bloom was new to Montoya’s staff, I guessed.

‘He asked how we’d met, like that. Nothing suspicious.’

‘He wondered what you were doing with Mr Montoya?’

‘He talked about my getting special privileges with regard to the dives, the submarine. Jealousy aboard the Sea Messenger.’

‘Jealousy involving Dr Mauritz?’

‘I suppose. But mostly it was just water cooler talk – you know.’

Bloom nodded, but he wasn’t satisfied. ‘Dr Mauritz did anonymous peer review on one of your scientific articles,’ he said. ‘He recommended it be rejected.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘But then, I wouldn’t, would I?’

‘Did he ever show any animosity?’

I heard it first as anonymosity. ‘Not to my face. He seemed pleasant, but we had very little contact.’

Betty Shun broke in. ‘This isn’t going anywhere. Dr Cousins, Owen had your specimens taken off the Sea Messenger and sent to your lab.’

‘You should have told me that right away,’ I said.

‘He made sure they were delivered to your postdocs and they’re being well taken care of.’

‘They’re in special pressurized containers,’ I said, my anger building. ‘They should have been transported in a powered van. We agreed, the specimens are incredibly delicate – the temperature down there makes their membranes –’

‘Everything was done according to your instructions,’ Shun said. ‘If you’d like, we’ll drive you over there.’

‘It’s just a short hike. I can go myself,’ I said through clenched teeth.

‘A car is faster,’ she said persuasively. ‘And Owen –’

‘Yes, yes. Owen wants a report.’

We drove to the old Genetron Building. It’s in a former power plant that was given a multimillion-dollar makeover when Genetron moved in. You can see the building, with its tall exhaust stacks, from the I-5 bridge. Genetron was sold to the Swiss-French pharmaceutical giant Novalis, which rented me lab space in the now-vacant facility for a good rate – and with guaranteed security.

The lobby was an expensive waste of blond wood and stainless-steel, with a cut-pile green carpet that matched Betty Shun’s leather jacket. A security guard checked my card and gave Shun and Bloom temporary passes. I showed them the way to the ground-floor lab, at the end of a long hall on the north end of the building.

‘Does he have to come along?’ I asked Shun, waving my hand at Bloom.

‘Yes.’

Bloom lifted his head as if sailing into a wind and winked at me.

‘The specimens may have been in poor condition,’ Betty said as we walked down the hall. ‘We could not tell if they were dead or alive. We did our best, at Owen’s request.’

‘Did Nadia or Jason help carry them over?’

‘No,’ Betty said. ‘Nadia is in police custody now.’

That took me completely by surprise. ‘Why?’

‘Under suspicion of tampering with the food on board the Sea Messenger.’

‘That’s stupid,’ I said.

‘We think so, too.’

‘Tampering how?’ Then I remembered the creamy pudding and its results. ‘Some of them ate a bad dessert, but –’

Bloom interrupted. ‘There was a lot of odd behavior on board the ship, from the very beginning of the cruise. Fights, arguments, irrational statements at odd moments.’

I had spent much of my time in my cabin. Not being very sociable – and having a lot of reading to catch up on.

‘Somebody could have put drugs in the food or water,’ Bloom concluded.

My lab filled two rooms, each about twenty feet square, connected by a white Dutch door. I had ordered special holding tanks for the specimens. Dan and Valerie, my two assistants, were pressurizing the tanks as we walked in.

Dan was a postdoc in oceanic microbiology, a tall, big-shouldered farmboy in appearance but a wizard with equipment. He looked up from the pressure gauge and gave me an unhappy shake of his head.

‘The specimens are pretty traumatized, Dr Cousins,’ he said.

I muttered under my breath.

Valerie stood back, arms folded across her bosom, hands gripping her shoulders, as if contemplating a relative’s coffin. ‘They look dead.’

I moved around Shun and Bloom and fluttered my hands for a moment, probably stuck my tongue between my teeth, trying to figure out where to begin. A steel box full of plastic tubes filled with foot-long core samples from our first and second dives was still on the loading cart. The metal tanks containing the specimens from the third dive had been stacked on the power bed and plugged in. They were still cold and seemed, at a quick glance through the fogged plastic panels, to be carrying Items of Interest.

Still, the damage was likely already done; how to minimize its effects?

‘These creatures didn’t look that alive to begin with,’ I suggested, hoping to break the tension and help Dan and Valerie relax. ‘They’re sedentary.’

Valerie shook her head again, tears welling. I wasn’t lying very effectively.

‘All the specimens are here,’ I said, checking the inventory. ‘In that small tank – the one that’s not at pressure – we have some shovel loads from the sediment that need to be analyzed. I doubt we grabbed any infaunal specimens intact, but we can preserve them and stain for cytoplasm and do some tube counts in the mud. Get some formalin and rose bengal.’

Dan and Valerie focused on the scoop samples and a couple of shallow cores. I wanted them out of the way while I either silently mourned or, less likely, breathed a sigh of relief.

I wiped the panels on the big steel transfer tanks and peered inside with a pocket flashlight. Straight from the briny deeps: shadowy masses that might have been clouds of sediment. Or ruined xenos. I knelt and squinted. Some forms were more than just fragments.

Shun stayed, but Bloom slipped out to answer a phone call.

I checked out the stats in the lab computer and made sure the necessary conditions were being met: water at 3.5 degrees Celsius, high oxygen, 36 percent salinity, metal sulfides in medium traces.

‘It’s at 250 atmospheres,’ Valerie said.

‘If we reduce the pressure, the xenos break down into slippery mush,’ I said to Betty Shun. ‘Their cell membranes – mostly lipids – melt like butter on a hot day. Deep down, where it’s cold and heavy, the membranes are gelid.’

I’d begun a culture of typical bacterial mats even before going out on the Sea Messenger, and now I harvested them from a container in the refrigerator and shot them with a plastic bottle straight into the pump chamber. I watched them spread in pale ribbons into the lab’s central refrigerated tank.

‘Very impressive,’ Betty Shun observed, laying a hand lightly on the big tank’s cold acrylic. ‘I notice you just dumped in the bacteria. Why?’

‘The bacteria adjust quickly. Their desaturase enzymes stop working under pressure, and that pumps up the unsaturated fatty acids in their cell walls, keeping them from getting too inflexible. Our larger specimens aren’t so adaptable.’

I asked Dan to help me connect the first transfer vessel to the big lab tank. We carried it to the worktable and connected it to the delivery chute, making sure the lock seals were tight. I checked the pressure – the vessel had lost about three atmospheres – and I dropped the pressure on the lab tank to match. Then I opened the inner doors and mixed the waters. Small chunks of sandy, dirty jelly floated past.

Like the man praying that the bottle falling through the liquor store bag was vermouth, not gin, I hoped these fragments were common xenos and not our fancy Vendobionts.

‘It’s soup,’ Dan said.

I looked accusingly at Shun. ‘I should have moved them myself.’ She did not react. No doubt she had dealt with personalities fiercer than mine.

I tilted the plastic baffle inside the transfer tank and gently encouraged more contents to drift past the small acrylic port. Dan switched on the main video camera and turned the monitor so I could see.

A frond undulated in the junction between the two tanks, still tinged with yellow.

‘Alive?’ Valerie asked.

‘Probably not. At least the cells haven’t ruptured,’ I said. ‘Let’s salvage what we can.’

Bloom came back and posted himself out of the way, in a corner.

Eight hours passed. I can always lose myself in lab work. I become something lovely and serene, a disembodied Spirit of Science. Tech Zombie, Julia once called me. I don’t even need coffee – there’s something about discovery that pumps me full of my own natural caffeine.

Shun was more patient than I expected – not that I paid her much attention for the first seven hours – but Bloom began to fidget after two, pace after three, and made his excuses after three and a half and stepped out once more.

We had our work cut out for us. These celebrity living fossils were dying or dead, and all their secrets were fading with them. We had to move fast.

First, I performed triage and used the manipulator to gently push fragments and clearly defunct organisms back into a specially prepared transfer tank. I set Valerie to doing proteomics on a few cc’s of mush that I could not otherwise identify. That occupied her for several hours. She used the Applara Proteomizer – a machine the size of a large bread box, capable of doing whole protein analysis at the rate of five hundred amino acid components per minute.

I doubted these critters used more than a few thousand proteins. Your average protein is about a thousand amino acids long. In a few hours, we had a first-order list of the proteins in the mush, and some hints as to the kind of genes and byproducts we would find when we ran the nucleic acids through a sequencer.

While Valerie worked, I spent an hour just staring at the intact organisms in the main tank. Shun stood shoulder to shoulder with me during much of that time, but she wisely kept silent.

If I was a flaming and driven Spirit, she was an unobtrusive shade – or the sword-bearing arm of my angel, Montoya. I didn’t care. Nothing scared me more than failure.

The largest of our specimens, the frond, was a rubbery feather with many compressed ribs, its greenish mud color tinged with yellow. It was about twenty centimeters long, ten centimeters across at its widest point, and it looked like a leaf made of bubble wrap.

It was clearly colonial, fairly hardy in comparison to its companions, but, most important, it was still alive. My first guess was that it was made up of xenolike protists. Each saclike bump of its anatomy was an individual cell, anywhere from a few millimeters to a couple of centimeters in size.

Most modern cells are microscopic and need only one nucleus, the central computer and factory that contains the chromosomes. These cells were much larger than most modern cells. I supposed, in my intensity of speculation, that each of the components would have many nuclei, as xenos do, to speed creation and delivery of the necessary gene products – ribosomal RNA, proteins, etc. – across its comparatively far-flung cytoplasmic territory.

That would be familiar. That would be expected.

But when we carefully plucked a cell from the feather-fan colony, froze and micro-sliced it, then mounted it for the lab’s little electron microscope, Dan reported that there were no nuclei whatsoever. The cell was a blob of jelly with unbounded circular chromosomes floating in a thick but simple membrane, and that in itself would make it a variety of bacteria or archaea, neither of which sequester their DNA in nuclei.

But the cell was supported by a microtubule cytoskeleton, looking like wads of glassy fibers under the microscope. Bacteria and archaea do not have cytoskeletons.

The sampled cell was as big as the tip of my pinky. Inspection of another cell showed us that there were bacteria of many different kinds living loose inside, screwing their way through the cytoplasmic gel. Some of these bacterial interlopers were large – millimeters in size, visible to the naked eye. They reminded me of extremophiles I had seen profiled in Science a few months before, the kind that clustered on the butts of ugly red Pompeii worms in vent communities.

The frond, then, was neither plant nor precisely animal, nor did it belong to any of the remaining three kingdoms of modern biology. Each big cell in my colonial critter was like an old-fashioned Western mining town. The bacterial hitchhikers were free to come and go, but mostly they stayed. I imagined they were like mine workers recruited from the town’s ruffians, doing their jobs, but on occasion hog-tying the boss and his wife, threatening the engineers (my imagination was fevered by lack of blood sugar), and forcing the lucrative mine owners to pay out caskets of gold, and not a sheriff in sight.

Lots of free-range cooperation between characters who might at any moment pull out six-guns and start blazing away at each other, then turn around the next moment –

And share a drink at the bar.

I laughed. Valerie and Betty blinked at me, owlish and exhausted. I looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty in the evening. We hadn’t taken any breaks.

We were due.

The machines could run themselves. The tank would keep whatever was still alive happy. I looked at Valerie’s tentative list of proteins from the mush and pursed my lips as if coming in for a smooch.

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘Good?’ Betty asked.

‘Phenomenal,’ I said. ‘There are no nuclei and no mitochondria in these cells. They are very primitive.’

‘That’s good?’

‘It’s what I’ve been dreaming about for years,’ I said. ‘The bacteria in the cytoplasm are commensal, but not symbiotic – they help the cell respire and metabolize its food. But they’re a long jump behind becoming mitochondria. Maybe hundreds of millions of years…’

My arm flesh pricked up with goose bumps. ‘Jesus,’ I said, with all the reverence I am capable of. ‘We could be looking at ghosts from the Garden of Eden. And they haven’t taken the Fall.’

Dan had slumped over the Applara monitor. Valerie shook him awake and whispered something into his ear. He brightened.

‘Dinner?’ he murmured.

‘It’s on me,’ I said. I looked at Betty. ‘You should come, too. And Bloom, if he’s still around.’ I felt magnanimous. Hell, I was punchy with glee.

‘Tell Owen,’ Betty insisted.

I called Montoya on Betty’s cell-phone. He answered on the second buzz.

‘Betty, I’m taking a shit. What is it?’

‘This is Hal,’ I said. ‘It’s fantastic. I’ve got news. I think I have the final clues.’ I took a deep breath. When tired, both Rob and I had a tendency to commit unwitting rhyme. Shall we visit Dr Seuss?

‘Good news, I hope,’ Montoya said. ‘Because up until now it’s all been terrible.’

‘I’ve got a primitive cell. Primordial.’ Now I went out on a limb. ‘Of a kind we haven’t seen for three billion years. With the blueprints for bacterial domination still fresh and all the players fairly naive.’

‘Tell me what that means when it’s at home, Hal.’

‘I think I’ve got the list of RNA and protein products that bacteria use to take control of our genome.’

‘And what will you do with it?’ Montoya asked patiently.

‘Break some of the pathways, interrupt cell receptors, create new bacteria,’ I said, as if that were perfectly obvious. ‘Our cells won’t be told to shut down or age. They won’t lose their ability to self-repair. They’ll stay young.’

‘Fine. So you know how to fix us?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. Miracles would take years, not days. ‘Based on earlier work, I need to find the five or ten more proteins that are triggered by hades to shut down youthful cell maintenance. They could be on this list. I need to sequence the free-floating chromosomes – less than a few million base pairs. I want to do some Southern Blot, some PCR, run homology tests. I’m sure we still have the same genes, somewhere, highly conserved.’

‘Congratulations, Hal,’ Montoya said. He did not sound enthused, but as he had said, so far the news had been all bad. ‘Put Betty on.’

Coming down off my high, I handed the phone to Betty. She listened for a moment, then shut it and turned to me.

‘Owen insists that dinner is on him. And after dinner he wants to see you. He’s flying into Seattle.’

Dan and Valerie high-fived me. Betty was more subdued, though I wouldn’t learn why for five more hours.

Angels can be pipers, too.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dinner at Canlis was elegant but quiet. The somber gray-stained wood and white tablecloths framed a terrific view of Lake Union. I could seldom afford to eat so well, but I was nervous and excited all at once, and the best I could do was share a champagne toast with Valerie and Dan and pick at my plate.

We shook hands and parted at midnight. Betty Shun drove me in her Lexus to one of Montoya’s four Seattle residences, a penthouse apartment on the top floor of a complex less than five blocks away. I catnapped during the short drive.

Betty woke me when she set the emergency brake in the underground garage. I jerked up in the seat. She was staring at me. Her face glowed pale violet in the garage’s cruel fluorescence.

‘I have one question,’ she said. ‘Why do you want to live a thousand years?’

I cocked my head to one side to work a crick out of my neck. ‘More is better than not enough,’ I said.

‘Life is full of pain and disappointment. Why prolong the misery?’

‘I don’t believe life is all pain and misery,’ I said.

‘I’m a Catholic,’ Betty Shun said, still searching my face with her eyes. ‘I know the world is bad. My grandmother is a Buddhist. She knows the world is illusion. I want to live a healthy life, a useful life, but I don’t want to live for ever. Something better is in the wings.’

‘I’m more of a Shintoist,’ I said. ‘I believe the living world is all around us, thinking and working all the time, and that all living things want to understand what’s going on. We just don’t live long enough to find out. And when we die, that’s it. No second act.’

‘You will push out others not yet born,’ she said.

‘If the world is full of pain, I’ll be doing them a favor,’ I said testily. I wasn’t up to a sophomoric debate at midnight, not after a hard and enlightening day’s work.

Betty Shun blinked at me with her patented empty face and opened her door to get out.

Compared to the mansion on Anson Island, the penthouse was positively demure. Less than five thousand square feet, vaulted ceilings throughout, bedrooms suspended above a maple-floored workroom slash studio, with sixty feet of glassed-in sunporch currently fending off a spatter of early morning rain. It smelled of spearmint and tea roses.

Montoya met us on the sunporch and handed me a cup of very strong coffee.

‘Explain it again,’ he demanded as Betty left us. ‘I’ve got five funerals to go to in the next week, and I can’t keep it straight. I want to know where we’re headed.’ He bit off his words angrily but his face seemed calm. ‘I’m afraid of death, Dr Cousins. You showed me a possible escape hatch. And I took the bait.’

I sat stiff as ice on the lounge. I had no idea what he was driving at, but I did not like it.

‘Sometimes I sample every dish on the menu,’ he said. ‘I blow money just to taste all the choices. Understand?’

I regarded him through bleary eyes. ‘No,’ I said.

‘I’m concerned – or rather, let’s say some people are concerned for me. Concerned about your involvement. You’re a mystery, Hal.’

His expression was one of wing-plucking curiosity. I wiped my damp palms on my pant legs.

‘Betty told me about your tiff with Mauritz before you went aboard Sea Messenger. You had quite an argument.’

‘We just said hello.’

Montoya ignored me. ‘Murder is following you around like a cloud of smoke.’ He gestured vaguely at my head with a crooked finger. ‘Bloom recommended I not even meet with you again.’

I balled up my fists and stood. ‘I’ve been completely straight with you, Mr Montoya.’

‘Owen, please.’ He scrutinized my fists with that same wing-plucking curiosity, then looked up at my eyes like a little boy wondering idly what this strange little package, so tightly wrapped, might contain.

‘I don’t know why Betty would lie to you.’

‘I have to believe my people.’

‘There has to be more. I deserve an explanation.’

Montoya seemed to lose all interest. I might have been fading to invisibility right on his porch.

I’ve never taken rejection well. Lies can drive me to fury. But something was deeply wrong, and if I were Montoya, considering what had happened and what his people were saying, perhaps I would feel the same way. I needed to get out of this rich man’s playhouse and do some detective work of my own. But the meeting wasn’t over, not as far as I was concerned.

‘Our agreement specifies I complete substantial ongoing research if for any reason you decide to cut off funding.’ I congratulated myself on getting that out without a single garbled syllable.

Montoya tapped his watch. ‘Time to sleep.’

He walked off the porch and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Bloom and Shun waited on the edge of the studio. Bloom was bent over examining an impressive collection of glass paperweights in a tall cabinet. Shun stood back a step or two with arms folded like a guilty schoolgirl.

‘I’m being sacked,’ I told them. ‘I could give him what he wants, but he won’t listen to me. He listens to people who lie.’

Bloom gave a comradely nod, lips turned down. ‘Sorry to hear it. I’m to escort you downstairs.’

‘The bum’s rush,’ I said.

‘Whatever.’

Betty started to hurry off. I grabbed her arm and Bloom grabbed mine, forcefully. We stood there for a moment, a little triangle of tension, with Betty not meeting my eyes, and Bloom trying to compel me to meet his. His grip tightened.

‘Who told you to lie?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t understand you,’ Betty Shun said.

‘I’m just a Jonah, you can do anything you want to me?’ Spelling it out like that, saying it out loud to others, shot the bolt home with knee-shaking strength. My voice squeaked.

‘They found Dave Press floating in the water off Vancouver,’ Bloom said, as if discussing the weather. ‘They said his head was bashed in. Maybe he hit something, maybe someone hit him.’

Betty Shun shook loose with a glare and Bloom pulled me, not very gently, to the door.

Aurora Avenue was black and shiny with rain. I had neither a coat nor an umbrella. I stood for a moment, watching the traffic dart past, hiss after hiss of wet tires on either side of the segmented gray-concrete barricade that divided the highway. I wasn’t used to a cold summer night, and I hated it, hated the city. I felt sick to my stomach, what little rich Canlis food I had eaten balling up in my gut.

Shivering, I banged on the condo’s glass door and asked the liveried doorman to call a taxi. He looked up from the copy of Red Herring on his podium as if I were one of the thin parade of homeless drifting north from Seattle Center. He returned his attention to the magazine.

I walked in the rain, making the fishhook around the south end of Lake Union, past the Center for Wooden Boats. I walked from there in wet silence the quarter mile or so to the glowing front of the Genetron Building.

Maybe, I thought…Maybe they had impounded the lab. I wouldn’t be able to get in. But nobody stopped me. I strolled past the sleepy-eyed guard, who hoisted his mug of coffee in salute when I displayed my ID.

I keyed myself into the lab.

We wait until our body tells us what to think and feel. Even in the hall, I had smelled something sour and salty, but had consciously denied the awareness, the despair.

Seawater slicked the floor. The proteomizer and the Perkin Elmer had been removed. The computers were also gone. The walls of the big pressurized tank were no longer frosted with moisture. Someone had unplugged it, then pried up the top and stirred the contents with a mop handle. The mop lay on the floor.

The Vendobionts were ghostly mush.

I threw up in the lab sink.

My ghastly early morning was not over. I stumbled the few blocks to the Homeaway, feeling and probably looking like a dead man, and let myself into my room. The suite was bright and tidy and the bed was square and perfect, the pastel floral pattern on the coverlet like a hug of civility and kindness. The room smelled clean. The bathroom shone white and bright, all the miniature shampoos and soaps laid out in wicker baskets on little folded face cloths and the gleaming white toilet lid sealed with a paper wrapper that proclaimed it sanitary.

The hotel room welcomed me and believed in me. Safe.

I stared at my open suitcase, dirty clothes in a plastic bag beside it. Time to start all over again. I could not just give up. Too much was at stake. The Long Haul. I had my little list of proteins, pitifully small, but it could lead to a new beginning.

Automatically, I took the four cell-phones from my suitcase and laid them out on the bed. Scanned their displays. Maybe another angel had called – maybe Mr Song was tired of drinking snake gall.

I had two messages on my main Nokia. I dialed in to retrieve them. The first was from Rob. He sounded far away.

‘Hal, can’t say much now, got to go, just wanted to tell you how sorry I am. We should have pooled our efforts. I tried to keep you out of it, but now they’ll probably try to get us both. We’re too much alike. Peas in a pod. I’ve learned silt is after you, too.’

That’s what it sounded like, digitally garbled, and that’s how I wrote it down. Silt.

‘Talk to K, please. I gave him a package for you. He’s a poor fucked-up son of a bitch, but he knows more than anybody. The package explains a lot, if you’re smart. Keep your eyes open.’ He made a dry chuckling sound, like a sick dog’s cough. ‘What I don’t understand is with all of the pain, why you’re still sane. Did you armor your brain?’

He sucked in his breath, and said, for the first time in my memory, ‘We’re not exactly friends, but I really do love you, Prince Hal.’

I balled up the counterpane with my clenching fist and dragged the three pillows against the nightstand.

The system told me I had a second message.

It was Lissa.

‘Hal, please phone your mom, I don’t have her number handy, and anyway I just don’t have the heart. I’m so sorry. The police in New York say Rob is dead. He was shot in an alley. Oh, Jesus, Hal, I can’t think straight, can’t think what to do. I can’t think at all.’

Think, think, think, like drops of silver on the tiny speaker.

She left her number and hung up. The system asked if I wanted to save or delete.

I clacked the Nokia shut. Stood. Turned left, turned right, surveying the room, the neutrality, the order. Fumbled for my PalmSec to look up Mom’s number in Coral Gables. Sat down on the bed and let out all my breath until the room got black. I couldn’t bring myself to make the call. What would I tell her? Did I really believe it, any of it?

That thing I had not done, tracking down Rob and finding out what troubled him, had come back to haunt me. Flesh is the unbreakable bond.

I sucked in some air and stared at the clock radio on the bed stand. It was three thirty in the morning and as I sat there, I wept like a terrified child in that clean and safe room, the world’s most rotten lie.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I had nowhere else to go. I locked the room door, connected the chain, turned the dead bolt, pushed an armoire up against the door (after jerking out the TV), and drew the thick curtains on the window.

I have always had high hopes for humanity. I’ve never given in to despair, no matter how hard life became. I just thought I knew the way of things and how they could stand against you and your dreams.

Now I was swinging over to the opposite side. I had completely underestimated how bad things could get. I had a strong feeling they were going to get a lot worse.

I don’t remember falling asleep. I awoke half on the bed, half off, and took a shower. First I checked the water, smelling it, rubbing it between my fingers, then letting it run for several minutes to make sure it wouldn’t scald.

I thought my situation over pretty thoroughly and drew some grim conclusions. Someone was out to kill us, Rob and me. I was lucky to be alive. Rob…Not so lucky.

The brain will wander through a forest of explanations and sometimes climb the likeliest tree, however naked and ugly it is. I found my tree. Someone had poisoned the food on board the Sea Messenger – perhaps with hallucinogens. I had spent most of the voyage in my cabin and had missed my dose.

Dave Press had gotten his dose, that was clear. And Mauritz.

Mauritz had gone mad and shot up the ship.

Maybe you did speak to Mauritz. Maybe you did get your dose and forgot all about everything – including killing Dave Press.

I shook my head in a violent quiver of disgust and pounded the wall. I was still naked and wet from the shower, and my hand left a damp print on the striped wallpaper.

In the opposite room, someone pounded back and shouted for me to sober up.

I rubbed my finger inside the Mr Coffee’s water reservoir and sniffed it, then checked the Seattle’s Best packet for pinpricks. Nothing suspicious – nothing I could see – but I decided against having coffee, anyway.

Betty Shun was involved, somehow, lying to her boss about my conversation with Mauritz. But why lie? She didn’t seem the type, didn’t seem to dislike me.

That made me wonder if the connective tissue, the center of it all, was actually Montoya, the rich god of Puget Sound.

I looked at the clock radio. One in the afternoon.

I pulled the armoire back into place, replaced the television, wiped the sweat out of my armpits with a wet washcloth, and got dressed.

Packed my bags.

Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

I opened the door, bags in hand, just as two men in suits lined up outside. The shorter and older had his hand in the air, balled into a knocking fist. He drew back, eyebrows raised, nostrils flaring. The other looked at me in some surprise and reached inside his jacket.

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