Vitals

by Greg Bear

  “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 hardheaded 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 forever without time. Like standing still forever. 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.

  8

  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 woolly 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 Wal-Mart 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 min
utes,” 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.