Vitals

by Greg Bear

  “Nanotechnology . . . that’s the little bitty stuff, electronics and such, isn’t it?” Finn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sci-fi bull,” Keeper said with a superior smile.

  “Was AY3000 an investor in your research?”

  “AY has a little money. He was a small investor, until last year. I guess I wasn’t moving fast enough. He found someone more convincing.” I looked at Finn through a short silence, then added, “He’s a gentle, intelligent old man.”

  “Mr. Montoya is also an investor?”

  “He was.”

  “This AY3000 made threatening phone calls to a number of colleagues, including Dr. Mauritz, starting early last week. But he never left San Francisco. Is he still one of your professional contacts?”

  “I haven’t spoken to him in months. Are there other crimes I don’t know about?” I asked.

  “The little light finally switches on,” Keeper said from his corner.

  “Quite a few,” Finn said. “And no connection but the victims’ interests. Biology. Genetics. Oceanography. Two in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on June 7. Dr. Mauritz’s wife, June 8. One in Palo Alto, June 17. You used to live in Palo Alto, didn’t you?”

  “I left ten months ago.”

  “Divorced?” Keeper asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “From the former Julia Merrivale,” Keeper said.

  “Yeah.”

  “She took you to the cleaners,” Keeper said.

  “She got the house.”

  Keeper whistled. “In Palo Alto. Worth how much?”

  Finn shook his head, and Keeper turned away with a smile. “All the victims but Mauritz’s wife were doing biological research, related one way or another to yours, as near as I can tell,” Finn said. “But I’m no expert. To me, it’s all buzzwords and jargon.”

  “Biology can seem that way at times.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “I truly don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

  “And now your brother, shot to death in New York,” Finn said.

  I cleared my throat. “I still have to tell our mother.”

  “What’s going on, Dr. Cousins?” Finn took a deep breath. “Somebody trying to scare scientists, or discredit them, maybe? Radical Greens, animal rights freaks?”

  “I don’t torture kittens or puppies.”

  “Any other threats you’re aware of?”

  “I’ve never been threatened,” I said.

  “Nobody ever tried to call you?” Finn asked.

  “Other than my brother, no.”

  “He didn’t threaten you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did he say anything unusual?”

  “Yes.”

  Finn’s face filled with patient encouragement.

  “He asked if our father had talked to me. Our father is dead. My brother seemed tired.” I looked from Finn to Keeper and back to Finn in the warm, stuffy room, a lump rising in my throat. It was certainly no place and no time to start crying.

  Finn pulled up another sheet of paper and scanned it with his pale blue eyes. “A lot of odd behavior. We’re getting nowhere trying to find a motive.”

  “I doubt Nadia Evans did anything,” I said.

  “She is attractive, isn’t she?” Finn said.

  “Was Mauritz jealous of her?” Keeper asked.

  Finn was not impressed by this question, either. He waved it aside, arranged his papers on the table, and pulled a chair close to mine before sitting. He clasped his hands earnestly.

  “How would you induce coordinated, malicious behavior?” he asked. “Surely not with food poisoning.”

  “Hypnosis,” Keeper suggested, clasping his knee with big rough-skinned hands. Finn scowled ever so slightly and Keeper tilted his hands back, giving it up.

  “Was there food poisoning?” I asked, trying to get into the spirit of this peculiar tête-à-tête.

  “The FBI lab says no. The food on the ship was free of bugs or toxins. Besides, Mrs. Mauritz was dead before you put out to sea.”

  “Drugs?” I asked. I did not want to reveal my earlier line of thinking, so I played as if this were all new to me.

  Finn didn’t seem to mind my reversing the roles. “No drugs we can find.” He faced the window, resigned to futility.

  I began to feel for the first time that I might be more a source of information than a suspect. Keeper, however, was still trying to keep up the pressure with a baleful stare.

  “The feds seem to have put this on a back burner,” Finn said. “Our Seattle shoes walk us only so far. I can’t be concerned with crimes at sea or in other states, except where they tell us something about our own single, lonely murder. Dr. Mauritz, frankly, is a pitiful specimen, a mental case. No memory of what happened on the ship or at his house. We’ll prosecute, and maybe the feds will prosecute, but I doubt it will give anyone satisfaction.”

  “I wish I could help,” I said.

  “So do I,” Finn said, and waved his arm in dismissal. “You’re free to go, Doctor. Sorry about your brother. It’s a crazy old world out there. If you learn anything interesting, we’d appreciate a heads-up.”

  “Live long and prosper, Spock,” Keeper cracked from his corner, with a wicked little smile.

  18

  CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA • JUNE 27

  Lissa threw her broad black sun hat on the dark maple dining table. “God damn it all to hell,” she muttered, and lifted her fingers as if to drag on a cigarette. She tapped her lips, pink, with long nails a tasteful shade of pearl, and gave me a flicking, sidewise glance, to see what I thought of her manners, not that she cared. “He deserved better. He deserved a lot better.”

  I could not disagree. Never in my life had I felt the impact of mortality so strongly, not even when Dad died. I had just buried my genetic double.

  At our mother’s insistence, Rob had been encased in a ridiculous waterproof Aztec Bronze casket. At the funeral, under the hideous sun, we had watched the shiny sealed tub of pickled meat drop into a seven-foot pit backhoed from Florida limestone.

  Mom sat in the den wailing gently into a black-rayon handkerchief, surrounded by her bridge-club ladies with whom she shared soap-opera gossip and grocery bags full of paperback romances.

  I could not get out of my head the time I had punched Rob in the nose in the middle of a heated argument about who would get to date a certain girl. We had been eighteen years old. We had stood beside this very maple dining table, words getting hotter and hotter, each convinced the other was over the line and in need of severe correction. I had moved first and caught him completely by surprise. Rob had dropped like a sack of beans.

  His nose had bled like a sonofabitch all over the floor.

  Right now, I wanted to crawl into a deep hole and pull the hole in after me. But I could not help checking out Lissa.

  Women complain that men are all alike. That’s not true. We just share some common goals. In the middle of my shame and my grief, and with my mother sobbing in the other room, I appraised my brother’s estranged wife, his widow, and knew that at twenty-six years of age she was about as prime as a beautiful woman could get.

  It’s useless reining in all the horses in one’s herd. They just kick the fence harder when death is in the air.

  “Have you heard anything?” Lissa asked, drawing back a pale wisp of hair. She seemed to want to keep her elbows crooked and her hands near her face. She had quit smoking, I guessed, some months ago, but the urge was on her with feline tenacity.

  “No,” I said.

  I had gone to the funeral home and signed the proper forms. Their driver had received my brother from air freight at the Miami airport, delivered him to the stainless-steel tables, and made sure all the proper chemicals were injected. There had been an autopsy in New York. No one had wanted an open casket anyway.

  I would have given anything for a few minutes alone with a living Rob. I wanted one last chance to apologize for a few things, not the least of
them that sucker punch in the nose.

  “I’d give anything to apologize to him,” Lissa said, making me jump at our synchrony. She looked straight at me. Brown eyes a little small, topped by squared-off and serious wheat-colored eyebrows in a head also a tad small in its average measurements, considering the dimensions of her body. These disparities, framed by that casual but orderly butter blond hair, made her even more sensual.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “We did some things to each other that weren’t very kind, and I feel the need to confess. To him. How sorry I am.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Your mother . . .” she said, looking in the direction of the quiet sobbing in the other room. Lissa grimaced as if at the rasp of fingernails on a blackboard.

  “Her son,” I said, defending our mother against this disturbing beauty, who had put Rob through the wringer in a way I never could.

  “No arrests,” she said.

  “No arrests,” I confirmed.

  We picked from trays of finger sandwiches and vegetables on Rob’s behalf and sipped punch, and when most of the people had gone and Mother was in the bathroom, tidying up, I cracked two cold beers in the shadowy kitchen and gave one to the funeral director, a black-haired guy with admirable cheekbones, younger than me by a couple of years.

  Lissa had gone somewhere else for the moment. I actually did not notice her leaving.

  “Funerals are the worst in hot weather,” the funeral director confided. “We feel so alive in the heat. That hurts us in the twilight hours, when the air cools and we’re reminded of the long, deep earth.”

  I had little time to respond to his surreal burst of eloquence. Lissa came into the kitchen with Mother on her arm.

  “Lissa tells me they were thinking about getting together again,” Mom said, as if it mattered, as if that peculiar, possibly kind little white lie could make any difference, stuck as Rob was in a waterproof Aztec Bronze casket in the long, deep earth.

  We watched Mother thank the funeral director. I accompanied him outside to where the limo was parked, behind the garage.

  He removed his jacket and slung it across the front bench seat in the Lincoln. “Sometimes,” he said, “mothers give me a tip when the service is over and the caterers have departed. I have to return it with graceful apologies.” He smiled and shook his head with sad understanding.

  He must have thought I was a stronger sort, able to listen to his professional tales with amused objectivity. I hated his guts. He had seen Rob dead.

  All I could do, lying in our old bedroom, the last room we had shared together, listening to the nighttime breezes blow through the backyard palms and dance invisibly across Florida, was imagine the very worst.

  They cut him open and took out his mangled brain, then stuffed it back. Or maybe they didn’t bother and his head is empty. Either way, the toy will never run again.

  That boy will never run again.

  In the early morning, I woke from dreams of impossibly devious plumbing in huge bathrooms and went down the hall to relieve myself. I saw my mother sitting with Lissa in the battered and frayed rattan chairs in the living room. They must have been up all night. They were talking about Rob. Mom had her back to me.

  “How they fought,” she was saying for the ten thousandth time. “Sometimes when their father was away, I didn’t dare even reach between them, they were like two wildcats. When they were three, they loved for me to read to them. The only way I could make them stop fighting was take out some picture books. I’d say, ‘Break it up, cut it loose. Shall we visit Dr. Seuss?’ And they would come running like nothing was wrong and sit on my knees.”

  Lissa looked up and saw me standing in the hall, my BVDs tented by a piss hard-on. I felt like a ten-year-old boy caught doing the rude. Her eyes widened a fraction, then, with a slow blink, she looked away and resumed her vigil with Mom.

  Women do hang together.

  19

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA • JULY

  The requests for interviews stopped coming. The Sea Messenger disaster became old news, and old news without a juicy update is deeper than history, darker than forgotten. Mauritz had gone crazy and shot up a ship, crew members had acted strangely, Dave Press had drowned, a few biologists had been murdered, including Rob. Other than Mauritz, no arrests, no suspects. End of the trail.

  I slipped quietly away from Coral Gables and returned to the West Coast. I cleaned out my small apartment in Oakland, a shabby, temporary place at best, and wiped away a few obvious traces. No forwarding mail, and I canceled my cell phones.

  I needed time and a place to think. Under an assumed name, I rented a mother-in-law apartment in Berkeley, which was, on any given sunny summer morning, literally in the shadow of the beautiful white Claremont Hotel. My landlady was an elderly artist who thought it lovely to have a scientist living and thinking over her garage. She shared the main house with two younger female companions with short hair and no patience for men. I came to her highly recommended by a professor of microbiology at San Francisco State University, a Fellow Traveler who had hidden radicals far more controversial than me in the 1970s.

  I called my mother now and then—from a pay phone.

  I felt invisible. It was frustrating, but it was also reassuring.

  My life became quiet for a few weeks, a breather before my first meeting with K, Lissa’s return, and what I call Hell Week.

  Reclining in a worn easy chair, looking through the apartment’s tiny bay window at the banana trees spreading under the broken milky panes of the old greenhouse, I mulled over the suspect proteins from the Vendobionts.

  The greenhouse sat cater-cornered to the garage, behind a big old 1920 half-timber house, hidden from my view by junipers and haunted by the staccato tap-and-whisper of the nice old lady’s slippers.

  I was slowly coming to the conclusion that what I had in my little list—and it was all I had—was enough. The list would guide me to where I really needed to look in the labyrinth of chemical pathways that constitute the biography of a human cell.

  But whom did these proteins talk to when they were at work? What chemical messages did they intercept or promote over the decades of a human life? Without live specimens of Vendobionts, I had no solid way of knowing. I could guess at a thousand real possibilities, but guessing has never been my style.

  When the view of the greenhouse palled, and peace turned to stagnant boredom, I walked across the street, between trash-can-sized concrete auto barricades, and a few blocks west to the University of California at Berkeley. I sat in the library and kept up with the journals. I used a library computer to log onto the Internet and look over the latest preprints.

  But it was an uncharacteristically quiet month in my area of interest. Reading in the library was not the cure I needed.

  I thought about Nothing too much, and sadness was no friend. I needed a lab, rigorous conversations with colleagues, connections with companies doing deep genomics. I needed more specimens. I needed to work with my hands, which have always guided and encouraged the deeper muses of my brain.

  So I opened up again. I put in a phone, wrote letters, and took walks around the campus and the streets near my apartment. I put out a few feelers for lab space, through my microbiologist friend, and watched them all come back rejected. Lab space was tight and my résumé was too mysterious.

  My paper on mitochondrial communication with gut bacteria was put through another peer review (so I heard) and rejected. All my ties to science were being cut, and my tracks erased.

  I was finally reduced to wandering through the campus biotech centers and the supercomputer lab, filled with longing, trying to imagine myself respectable, fully funded, with a nice complement of postdocs to fetch and carry and argue with me on my weaker points.

  After a few weeks, my bank account was perilously low. I shopped and ate sparingly and imagined that by cutting back on food I was slowing my own senescence. For a few days, I convinced myself I was my own lab,
my own experiment, and made notes to that effect—charting weight loss, ups and downs of mood. I counted shed hairs in the drain catch of the small shower.

  Making thin lemonade out of old and bitter lemons.

  AY3000 had starved himself for twenty years. His sex drive had dropped to zero. Bettina, his wife, had not found that a major inconvenience. Reduced caloric intake worked on rats and may have increased the life span of survivors of concentration camps. AY had been the crazy inspiration for so many of us. And now he was dying and calling up people and making threats—hardly an encouraging example as I went to bed hungry.

  I was on the edge of losing heart. I had already lost perspective. My letters went unanswered, my phone calls got me nowhere.

  Curing aging is not respectable in some quarters. We’re only tourists in the land of the living, many believe. Living too long is against God’s law. Who would suppose that liberal academics, even scientists, secretly fear the wrath of Jehovah?

  I wondered what Rob would think of me now. In my solitude I was becoming gentler and more introspective.

  I needed my brother to give me a good punch in the nose.

  On one of my infrequent trips to the Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue, I saw two lean, wiry men standing near a bus stop. They wore gray sports coats and gray slacks. Their hair was dark brown and close-cut and their faces long and theatrical. They looked light on their feet; they might have been actors or circus performers. One wore a beret. The other glanced at me through small, wire-rimmed sunglasses as I walked by, then nudged the other, who nudged him back. Together, they studiously ignored me.

  Nothing unusual for Berkeley.

  The grocery smelled of expensive fresh peaches in fir boxes and bags of bulk carrots and dish soap and a thousand other domestic necessities. I bought four apples, four bananas, two cans of frozen orange juice, a pound of turkey ham, two loaves of bread, a bag of rice, mayonnaise, and some olives. I sorted through my change and spilled a few pennies onto the dirty linoleum floor. I picked them up, straightened, and added the necessary six cents to my twenty.