Vitals

by Greg Bear

  “I don’t feel so good,” I said. “What was in that elixir besides Ex-Lax and ipecac?”

  “Desperation and hope,” Candle said. “We’re learning a lot. I wish they’d put us on the case years earlier.”

  “Let’s go over this thing now,” Breaker said. “You’ve been briefed about Washington. The President may be in remission, but he still refuses to sign the necessary papers. That limits us. The Vice President is in Israel, the Speaker is God knows where, so the Secretary of Defense is in charge of our operation for the time being. Everyone else in the White House is sicker than dogs. The director of the FBI committed suicide this afternoon at 3:00 p.m. The new director of the CIA has sanctioned our operation, but substantial portions of the Agency are still resistant and may be considered either turncoat or thoroughly tagged. Emergency review is under way at the Pentagon, but we’re going to take some initiative and make our move on Lemuria before it’s finished.” Breaker turned to me. “Here’s the serving suggestion. You’ll go with them into the Lemuria to provide expertise. Mr. Bridger will accompany you. You’ve both had lots of experience with Silk operations. Someone will be assigned to protect you.”

  “How do you know whether or not they’ll be tagged?” I asked.

  Ben clutched the single album from Mrs. Golokhova’s collection and approached the broad window.

  “I appreciate your concern, Dr. Cousins,” Breaker said. “I am going to spend the next few hours smoothing the way with the reluctant folks in Washington. A few old-guard agents and politicos, not tagged or run by Silk, still hate to think we’re going to dredge up all this carefully buried toxic waste. I’ve argued that you should be part of the cleanup, because you know what to look for.”

  “We hope he does,” Candle said.

  “There’ll be two marine architects with ship plans here before midnight. That’s all we’re going to tell you about the operation until you’re under way,” Breaker said. “But be assured, there is more.”

  “We could take her in port, now,” Ben said, looking wistfully through the plate glass.

  “We’ll follow procedures,” Breaker said.

  “Just like in Nam,” Ben said. “Your procedures could cost a lot of lives.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Breaker said. “But that’s the way it’s going to be. You can opt out now if you want.” He left the room. Ben went to the refrigerator to drag out a six-pack of Cokes, pulled one from its plastic circle, and fell back into a chair. He tapped the album with a row of fingers and lifted an eyebrow my way. Something to show me.

  Candle and Carson folded their arms and stood staring at me as if I were some curious bug. “Why immortality?” Carson asked critically.

  “We’ll discuss that later,” Candle said. “We need to know all the receptors you’ve blocked. We’ve searched your papers, but you never published all the details.”

  We sat around a glass-top table in the middle of the suite’s living room. They opened their valises and pulled out stacks of paper, all stamped TOP SECRET HIGHEST, all edged with finger-zip incendiary strips.

  “You’re going to learn some things here that go beyond top secret,” Candle said. “I’ll personally track you and claim your testicles if you ever reveal this, ever, to anyone, in any way.”

  I held back a wisecrack. She was in no mood for flippancy, and I was tired. “All right,” I said.

  She delivered her speech crisply, with no discernible emotion. “NSA has been studying the potential for biological encryption. Our division is tasked to learn whether genomically coded messages can be or are being sent into our country in birds, insects, plants, or bacteria. We analyzed bacterial genomes in samples sent from major metropolitan centers and detected non-aleatory genomic alteration, which we prefer not to call mutations, in three hundred different varieties of common gut bacteria. We determined these alterations involved intelligent intervention. In twenty-five of thirty alterations, an internal self-modification scheme was mathematically demonstrated. We eliminated outside intelligence as the cause and invoked the possibility of interior genomic intelligence.”

  “You can do that, I mean, confirm that?” I asked.

  “I can’t, personally,” she said with regret.

  “But you know what it means?”

  “It implies that bacteria can modify themselves worldwide in less than ten years. Call it evidence of coordinated genomic shift, call it microbial ‘thought,’ call it whatever you want, but people I trust, brilliant people, tell me it’s real.”

  The Little Mothers of the World, I thought.

  “The other alterations we reluctantly interpreted as human intervention, by potentially unfriendly forces, on a huge scale. In addition, we determined that the outside changes were not done to encrypt language-based signals, but to alter gene function in common human microbes, with the aim of having them produce novel substances, either to cause illness in targeted military or civilian populations, or to induce large-scale psychoses. A lot of grumpy biologists in our employ huffed and puffed and tried to blow our house down. We survived their assault, but just barely. When all of your shit hit the fan”—she gave me a cold grin—“our stock rose in the Agency.”

  “Many thanks,” Carson said wryly.

  “How long ago was the work done?” I asked.

  “That’s not important,” Candle said.

  “It is to me,” I said.

  “Five months ago, we brought it to the attention of the director of NSA. She passed it on to appropriate agencies. It lingered in their in-baskets, too obscure and crazy to act on, until two months ago.” Candle kept her dark eyes on me, one eyelid twitching. “Three Marine helicopters blew up some houses in Los Angeles. Someone decided it was time to find out what in hell was going on and put a stop to it. Now it’s your turn. Tell us what you’ve done.”

  I told them most of what I knew about the secrets of bacterial/gut interaction, how to immunize or reshape the major varieties, how to adjust one’s interior ecology to thwart or subvert seventy years of human mischief. I did not mention the insertion of altered genes into my intestinal cells. I doubted that would be useful to them; and I did not want to have them experimenting on those who might not be informed, who might not even be volunteers.

  Candle made notes on special sheets of paper equipped with genome maps for several types of bacteria, and a highly condensed chart of the human genome. When we were done, she called a well-deserved break.

  Ben sat in an overstuffed chair, slurping back his third Coke and listening, brows knit, as if he might be planning another book.

  “Watch your testicles,” I warned him.

  “She’s a tiger,” he agreed. The hotel suite was temporarily empty except for Ben and me. He had inserted his finger into a specific page in the album. Now he let it flop open on his lap.

  “How much do we really know, Hal?” he asked, and tapped a photo in the upper corner of the right-hand page.

  I leaned over. The picture showed five people in suits posed stiffly in front of a curtain.

  “So?” I said.

  “This must have been taken by a Russian photographer and passed on to Golokhov’s people. Mrs. Golokhova pasted it in with all these other photos, but this is the last album she compiled, I think. There was a big Communist Party–sponsored conference in New York in 1949, the ‘Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace.’ Also known as the Waldorf Conference. Bigwigs and celebrities came from all over the world to attend. Pre-McCarthy, of course. I think there was coverage in Life magazine. “

  “So who are they?”

  He ran his finger over the photo. “The fellow on the left is a novelist, Alexander Fadeyev. He was head of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Just another Colonel Klink in Stalin’s zoo—’I see nothing, I hear nothing!’ Next to him is Norman Mailer, the original Stormin’ Norman, and Jewish of course. This guy is Arthur Miller, also Jewish. Married Marilyn Monroe, who some say slept with John F. Kennedy. Between them is Dmitri Shostakovich
. Pretty good composer, struggled with Stalin for years. But this guy on the right, with the Windsor hairdo—who do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, irritated. But the profile of the fifth man in the picture had already caught my eye. I picked up the album, held it closer. The nose, the eyebrows, the stance . . .

  I felt my hands get sweaty, instant anxiety.

  “What do we really know, Hal?” Ben asked. “Who’s running whom around here? You tell me.”

  The fifth man looked a lot like Rudy Banning. A few years younger, but otherwise unmistakable.

  “Nineteen forty-nine,” I said. “You sure?”

  “Look at Mailer,” Ben said. “Just an ambitious sprout. And Miller, all that black hair. Absolutely, that picture is from New York in 1949.”

  “They could have retouched it.”

  “Hal, she glued that picture into the album in 1949 or 1950. It’s part of a sequence from the conference. I’ll bet Maxim Golokhov was there, making plans with his American contacts.”

  “It could be a fake.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I met Ben’s gaze. “Still going in?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Ben answered, and clapped the album shut.

  Outside, Florida’s balmy night brought out constellations of mercury and sodium lamps over all the shopping centers, parking lots, apartment complexes, and restaurants that served Port Canaveral and the cruise ships, and in particular, the Lemuria. The big ship’s display and running lights came on last. She looked like a row of ziggurats dressed up as Christmas trees. A bare dozen of the windows in the four towers were illuminated; only a few of the ship’s condos had been sold and occupied.

  At nine, Breaker returned with the marine architects. They spread rolled sheets of plans on the table. Each of us would carry a small map showing our proposed routes through the ship. They judged Tammy’s key codes to be unreliable. We would find other ways of getting into Golokhov’s sanctuary. Still, Ben handed me a copy of Tammy’s sketch map and the codes. I folded it and stuffed it in my pocket.

  We were still operating with a hodgepodge of assets and personnel. We would “borrow” a cabin cruiser from Port Canaveral’s private marina. Ten Marines would accompany us. Others would board Lemuria from at least two and possibly four Coast Guard helicopters. In addition, if the details could be worked out, two cutters from the Coast Guard station would join in the fun.

  Ben listened with a long, sober expression. Rob’s original crazy scheme was going to be carried out, but on a grander scale than any of us had hoped.

  I was getting pumped—a kind of delayed shock reaction. Something was going on deep in my head but I couldn’t drag it out into daylight. To compensate, to find some solid ground, I fantasized about confronting Maxim Golokhov. I wanted to rifle his clandestine laboratories and maybe grab a few clues. He owed me.

  Everyone there owed me. I blamed their ignorance and intransigence for all I had been through, and for Rob’s death. I would carry on for the both of us. Rob’s memory deserved that much.

  Despite all I had seen and survived, I was still a fool for the Long Haul.

  Delbarco and Breaker brought in sleeping bags still in plastic wrappers, more white towels for the bathroom, stinking of fresh disinfectant, and a box of MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, not gourmet and not fresh, packaged in 1997.

  Carson caught me studying the back of my hand.

  “Any puckering, Dr. Cousins?” he asked.

  I closed the hand into a fist. “No,” I said.

  36

  AUGUST 19 • THE ATLANTIC OCEAN/LEMURIA

  The sixty-foot cabin cruiser bounced through three- and four-foot waves, following the Lemuria on the open Atlantic. Dawn was a faraway glow as yellow as lemon ice cream over the dark gray sea.

  “The Eagle has landed,” Breaker said. He walked forward, bracing his hand against the stained walnut burl bulkhead of the forward bunk room, and sat on a padded bench next to Delbarco and across from me and Ben. “The President has finished detagging. He is with us.”

  Candle and Carson sat slumped against the rear bulkhead, behind a small table. Three of our ten Marines, two young men and a woman, sat stiffly on luxurious leather swivel chairs, dressed in desert-style camouflage that I doubted would be effective on a cruise ship. They steadied their helmets in their laps and listened closely to all we said, with a focus and intensity that impressed me.

  I was working on my third cup of black coffee. I had felt like hell since waking up, dizzy and disoriented, over four hours ago.

  Breaker watched the distance close between our boat and the giant cruise ship. “We’re not going to get everything we asked for. Washington’s in more of an uproar than ever. Secrecy is shot; some senator went to the ship’s owners and told them we’re on our way. By the time we get there, we’re hoping Coast Guard contingents will have already secured cooperation from the captain and crew. We’ll board after they’ve taken control.”

  Nobody commented on appearances. We were all marked by the singular effects of both the ocean chop and another round of elixir, incorporating yet more modified bacteria, incubating phages eager to express antisense messenger RNA. We were high-tech seasick in a bad way, cranky and touchy, and nobody could tell us what we would find in the bowels of the floating city.

  Lemuria was now five miles ahead and cruising south-southeast at about fifteen knots. Carson and Candle grew more tense as the day brightened.

  Ben and I went out on deck to get some fresh air. The biologists followed a few moments later. Spray from whitecaps and the bow wash put a salty chill into our bones, but to me it felt good. My stomach stopped its dog-settling turns, and I began to believe I might not disgrace myself in the next few hours.

  Carson and Candle stuck with me as if they had a score to settle. Wanting some time alone, and sensing trouble in the air, Ben went forward.

  I did not appreciate being abandoned and outnumbered.

  “Damn, she’s big,” Carson said. He pulled a real-estate prospectus from his jacket pocket and spread it out against the wind. A cutaway of Lemuria covered three large panels. “Got this in Port Canaveral. Bel Canto Lines and American Sea Life Corporation . . . Isn’t she pretty? Cheapest condo available, one point five mil.”

  Lemuria’s stern towered almost ninety feet above her waterline, not counting four terraced observation, restaurant, and exercise decks that added an additional seventy feet. Beyond the canted decks, swept by a stray wisp from a pearly bank of low cloud, rose the fourth tower, named Elite, a seagoing skyscraper topped by the spread jade green wings and ivory white dome of the aft concourse and Olympic gymnasium.

  “No servant quarters?” Candle sniffed. “Why bother.”

  “A crew of seven hundred, plus a population of one thousand three hundred live-aboard wage slaves, waiting to attend to your every need.”

  “The other half,” Candle said. “Don’t you just love ’em?” She faced me with dark, critical eyes. “Your kind of people, Dr. Cousins.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ve been going around hat in hand, promising immortality to every billionaire you meet. Should be rich pickings in that crowd.” She jutted her chin toward the giant ship, jaw underslung in anger like a bulldog.

  “Yeah,” Carson said. “Just what the world needs—immortal plutocrats.”

  “My work is for everyone,” I said.

  Candle shook her head. “How noble. How incredibly naive. I know how powerful men work. At NSA, we listen to their nasty little secrets all day long.”

  “It’s our right,” I insisted. My palms started to sweat again. They were provoking that unfinished thought, that raw hypothesis I could barely make out. “Who’s going to tell us we can’t live as long as we want?”

  “They are,” Candle said, pointing to the Lemuria. “Every rich son of a bitch, fat cat, church leader, yammering populist, self-righteous fascist, Communist, nationalist. They’ll call it a sin. They’ll make
it illegal. But what they’ll really be saying is”—she pointed a tense finger into the breeze—“it’s wrong for everyone but me.”

  “We’ll fight them,” I said.

  “No, you won’t,” Candle said. She held on to the rail with one hand as the sea got heavier. “You’ll have lots of clients. You’ll charge them a fortune. I’ll lose, my children will lose. Everyone I know and care about. The same people who pay off the politicians will pay billions to stay alive. How much is life worth? To them it will be chump change. A hundred years of compound interest, and they’ll buy up the whole planet.”

  “Just like they suck up all the money and the IPOs and the beautiful women,” Carson added.

  “Careful,” Candle said, striking a pose. “They don’t get all the beautiful women.”

  I could not tell whether they were genuinely pissed off or just ragging me. “We should stick to our task,” I said, but it came out as a mumble.

  “You lanced this boil, and now we’re all going in to clean it out,” Carson said.

  “Courage,” Candle said, to Carson, not to me.

  “What I want to know is, what did you do to provoke them? Is this Golokhov jealous of you, or does he want to hog all the glory for himself?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Think he knows something you don’t?”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said, too loudly. “I do research in life extension. I go to private citizens who have money because the medical community closes ranks on the issue, and government refuses to consider the possibility—”

  “Social security,” Carson muttered.

  Candle gave me a pitying glance.

  “How long do you want to live?” I asked. “Forty years? As long as someone in Bangladesh?”