Vitals

by Greg Bear

  In the waiting room, I washed my face in a water fountain, sluicing away the blood. The crease wasn’t very big, little more than a bad shaving cut. It was already clotting.

  I wiped my hands on my pant legs. Swallowed hard.

  Belly of the beast again, but the safest place on the ship.

  The mural showed the Earth in a Dymaxion projection, the globe according to Buckminster Fuller, covered with wide irregular patches of green, red, and shades of blue, chiefly in the oceans. I found Lake Baikal—intense red. Another red patch surrounded the Bahamas, the waters where the Lemuria would commonly be sailing on better, more peaceful days. Small red dots in the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, western Canada, around the Galapagos and Peru, off the coast of Japan. A large kitty scratch of red lines hugged the northeast coast of Australia—encompassing the Great Barrier Reef, I guessed. Smaller patches and points near Sri Lanka, Borneo, and New Zealand. The map was void of words or labels.

  I was sure that the colors signified bacterial hot spots. Phone exchanges for the Little Mothers of the World. Ever since the 1920s, Maxim Golokhov had been listening for his message from the oldest minds on Earth.

  Right of the map stood a simple windowless double door and another combination lock. I used Tammy’s list once more, with some confidence. I twisted the handle, gathered what little genuine courage I had left, and walked through.

  Beyond lay an Olympic-sized pool, deserted. Crazy-quilt patterns of tiny waves reverberated across the opal blue surface. I walked along the pool’s edge, shoes squeaking on antislip coating like rubbery sandpaper. I sniffed, then leaned over the pool and sniffed again. No pervasive smell of chlorine. I dipped and tasted. Not saltwater, but I spat anyway. The pool was filled with untreated freshwater.

  Wouldn’t want to discourage our microbial friends.

  Tammy’s codes worked for all of the spaces forward of the pool. The clinic held massage and chiropractic tables, acupuncture and moxibustion stations with little chrome buckets filled with incense cones, exercise and recovery equipment, coordination test benches, hydrotherapy tubs, most of which could have been found in any good sports stadium. (The moxibustion seemed over the top, but who was I to judge?)

  A glass cabinet on the wall enclosed neat lines of opaque jars marked SKIN, NASAL PASSAGES, SCALP, RECTUM. Smaller labels on some narrowed their use: PRE-PUBESCENT, MENARCHE, >30. A tampon dispenser beside the cabinet bore the red label ATHLETIC REHAB ONLY.

  Open shelves supported tidy stacks of plastic-bagged and serial-numbered white-cotton panties, sports bras, jockstraps, and briefs. All very egalitarian and unisex. Post-Cold War, more up-to-date than Anthrax Central, and perhaps reflecting a new approach to a younger generation of recruits.

  Preparations were in place for a long stay with a select group of adapted and highly trained young bodyguards, runners, and circus performers. Golokhov’s Praetorians. I noted the room’s pleasant colors but saw no personal marks, no patterns of use or wear. The rooms had yet to be broken in.

  Large plastic beakers in the middle cultured a churning white-and-yellow ooze. A fan of pipes ascended from the beakers to the ceiling, then dropped to connect with soft-drink dispensers, a shower stall, a curtained colonics station.

  I pulled aside another long curtain and found a row of stainless-steel toilets. The bowls held the same milky fluid. Excreted germs must be reunited with their fellows, not sacrificed to a shipboard sewage-treatment plant.

  Or perhaps Dr. Goncourt did not want to unnecessarily pollute the waters around Lemuria.

  Against the back wall, inboard—I was trying to keep myself oriented—I saw the first signs of disorder, human habitation. Blue, green, and red backpacks had been tossed on the floor with some carelessness. I strolled along the line of packs, hands in my pockets. Smiling at the thought, I removed my jacket and bulletproof vest and laid them down at the end of the line. One of the team, now. Less obvious.

  The forward doors opened. I looked for a place to hide, but it was too late. Three young women entered and saw me. In their late teens or early twenties, cheerful, lithe, vivid with health, they wore orange-and-silver exercise togs, hair tied up with blue, red, and green stretchies. They walked briskly by with sidewise looks of puzzled recognition, smiled politely, then went to the benches.

  Chatting in low voices in accented English, with just a hint of self-conscious reserve, they taped sensor pads to each other’s arms and legs and shoulders, read the meters, and made notes on small clipboards. It seemed part of a familiar routine. No concern, no alarm at my presence.

  Another ordinary day, isolated from the chaos and death on the rest of the ship.

  I watched for a moment, feeling like a voyeur, then stepped toward the door through which they had entered. According to Tammy’s map, beyond were the makeup and prep rooms for the amphitheater, and a relatively large circular space, labeled “Listeners 1.”

  In the curving corridor outside, behind a half-open utility hatch with ventilation slats on the bottom, I heard sounds of water pumping and a low electrical hum. I opened the hatch.

  I was in some sort of long, high-ceilinged pump room. The inner arc of the circular space was a steel-walled tank at least forty feet in diameter. A male in his early thirties, big-shouldered, pug-nosed, dressed in orange togs with blue leggings, came around the tank’s curve, passed briefly behind a forest of feed pipes, then emerged into view again, penciling notes on a clipboard.

  He stopped when he saw me. Smiled shyly. Turned. Walked back the way he had come.

  The feeling of unreality intensified. In the heart of Golokhov’s new headquarters, I was unchallenged, maybe even welcome.

  I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, now jangling like a curtain of off-key wind chimes. A steep ladder ahead gave access to a catwalk over the steel tank. I climbed, dropping cautious glances down at the pump room. The tank was filled with shadow too deep to penetrate. Its black expanse yawned beneath a concave cap hanging by thick chains from the upper deck I-beams. Out of the darkness came a periodic slop and the tang of seawater, fresh not stagnant. An aquarium, possibly; I thought of the shattered glass tanks in Anthrax Central.

  My unfinished hypothesis poked me, like a knitting needle jamming a sensitive nerve. Little sparks of ideas, suspicions, fears. What the hell do I want to learn here?

  Delbarco had said she didn’t really want to know. She wanted to sleep nights. Too late, Breaker had said.

  Right.

  I came to a control panel mounted in the middle of the catwalk. I could make out vague labels, again in English: Lights. Microphone. Music.

  I flicked the switch marked Lights.

  The tank came alive with a deep blue-green glow. It wasn’t as deep as I had thought, shallow in fact, about shoulder high at the center, if the light wasn’t playing tricks. A sandy bottom supported mushroomlike black-and-green lumps, furry with strands of algae. The lumps resembled old heads of coral or overgrown tree stumps, jutting up around the perimeter like eroded snags in a drowned forest.

  No doubt about it. Golokhov liked to culture stromatolites. Colonies of cyanobacteria, eucaryotes, algae, building up thick layers over the centuries, making towheads in shallow water. Trunk lines for the Little Mothers.

  No fish. No sharks. No octopi, no seaweed or stylish rocks with serpentine moray eels. Not much of an aquarium, actually, hardly worth anyone’s notice, but the opposite side of the tank had been set with long observation windows. With a jerk of surprise, I saw people beyond those windows, distorted by refraction and blurred by the ripples, wrapped in purple twilight and doubled up like loving couples.

  As my eyes adjusted to the twilight glow beyond the main tank, I could discern that they wore dark hats or helmets, from which jutted white tubes and short, black pipes. I stepped to the opposite side of the catwalk, gripping the iron rails, and leaned to stare down into an adjoining tank, a narrow, rectangular pool filled with lavender liquid.

  The people facing the windows were fully imm
ersed. More puzzling, they were naked. They weren’t lovers; they were Siamese twins, seven pairs. Three were united at the abdomen, three at the hip. One pair joined at the temple required a special mask and goggles with three lenses. Their arms hung from rubber straps, the straps hooked to black, motorized levers that slowly exercised their limbs, up and down, in and out, like the long black fingers of a puppeteer.

  I watched in horror, thinking they must be drowned corpses, arranged in an awful parody of modern art. No hoses supplied air to their noses and mouths. No bubbles rose from their masks. But their fingers twitched. Their limbs flexed weakly against the straps. They could not breathe, but they were alive.

  The lavender pool smelled like a nursery, milky-sour and as nitrogenous as a soaked diaper. But these were adults, not children, chests hairy or breasts prominent, genitalia fully formed and flossed. I shaded my eyes to make out more detail. Regular rows of fleshy bumps studded their shoulders and backs. Each bump had a tiny dimple with one or two central black pits. Far too small to function as gills. Still, I thought I could see the pits opening and closing like little mouths.

  In the main tank, pipes stretched from the black mounds to the steel wall below the windows. Small valves at the ends of the pipes sucked in clouds of white curds, like the floc surrounding the deep-sea vents. The curds flushed into the lavender pool, where they swirled around the twins like snow in a glass paperweight.

  “Listeners 1,” Tammy’s map said. If these were the Listeners, what in hell could they possibly be listening to? How many others were there, on the ship or elsewhere? I tried to imagine Golokhov collecting unwanted children from around the globe, taking in the handicapped along with the firm, selecting with strange acuity for special talents, extraordinary patience. Creating a biological Shangri-la, a preserve where everyone had his or her (or its) place, doing something basically incomprehensible to the rest of the world, and certainly to me. An empire based on microbes.

  Then it struck me. Golokhov had isolated the doubled figures from respiration. They did not suck oxygen from the water like fish; they did not use oxygen at all. They no longer relied on mitochondria to fuel their cells and tissues.

  The Siamese twins had become anaerobes.

  I can’t actually recall my thoughts at that moment. I imagine that I felt anger, indignation, even jealousy, but shock may have topped the list and blanked all the others.

  The problem of our ancient reliance on mitochondria had been solved. But the solution seemed to be a passive, motionless slavery. Or the awful, endless hell of the prisoners on the top floor of Anthrax Central. Or the shriveled eccentricity of Mrs. Golokhova, who had suffered years of madness.

  Lissa had warned me that what Rob and I were searching for was nasty. How right she was.

  I straightened and looked for a ladder at the opposite end of the catwalk. There wasn’t one. A blind bulkhead blocked the way. I walked back to the middle, swiveled, my shoes grabbing at the grating, and knelt to peer through the blue water, into the lavender pool, at a steeper angle, to see if there was a gallery, a viewing area, on the other side of the conjoined twins. Between the water and the thick windows, I discerned a ribbon of some lighter color that might have been a floor. Then I made out a flat, ghostly figure like a damp paper cutout stuck to the glass, barely evident through the ripples and optical compression, the squeezing of sight lines.

  It stood with arms folded.

  I dropped to all fours on the catwalk.

  A face steadied between two long waves in the main tank. It had a down-angled left eye, and its lips bent into an interested gape as it examined the twins. I had seen that face in a mirror so often, I thought I was catching an impossible reflection. But the image moved out of sight, walking or simply rippling away.

  It was Rob.

  It was Rob. I couldn’t believe my luck. He was still alive. I could speak to him and apologize. I felt a surge of something approaching ecstasy.

  Then I remembered Ben waiting for Janie.

  I got to my feet and wiped my eyes, ashamed at giving in so easily to this swindle of emotion.

  “Who’s there?” a female voice called out behind me.

  I turned and grabbed both handrails, fully expecting to feel another slug, the one that would blow through my ribs and kill me.

  A woman with dark hair climbed onto the catwalk and stood in the dim blue light. I recognized Betty Shun, once again wearing an abbreviated black-knit dress and running shoes. A fire ax swung from one hand. For a moment, she seemed to know me. She relaxed and smiled, then studied my clothes, the cut on my cheek. She tensed.

  “You!” she said. “How did you get this far?”

  “Someone gave me a key,” I answered, smiling, but my armpits dripped. “How’s Owen?” I watched the ax head slow in its pendulum motion.

  “I hope he rots in hell,” Betty said. “Come with me. You shouldn’t be up here.”

  37

  She waited for me at the bottom of the steep stairs, lips tight, ax held in a bloodless grip.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m not crazy.”

  Shun nodded but did not seem to believe me. She pointed for me to go around the tank, around the forest of piping, opposite the way I had entered.

  “I’d like to see Dr. Golokhov,” I said. “I’ve come through hell. I deserve at least that much.”

  “Dr. Goncourt left the ship a week ago,” Betty said. She led me out of the tank room into the inner sanctum of the main lab, big clinical spaces with stainless-steel counters and sinks, incubators, sequencers, a phalanx of proteomizers linked to connection machines. All these rooms were deserted, but I saw unpacked crates waiting in a corner, stacks of DVD-RW disks in plastic drawers, journals, cardboard boxes full of textbooks.

  “I’m really not sure how much you know,” Shun said. “I’ve just arrived here myself.”

  “I know it all,” I said, my throat threatening to close.

  “Well,” she said. “Many of the others have left. Dr. Goncourt paroled a lot of them as soon as Irina died in New York. No need to be so vigilant now.”

  “Mrs. Golokhova?”

  Betty nodded.

  “I didn’t know her first name.”

  Shun smiled. I had lied. There was a lot I did not know. “Dr. Goncourt has always planned to retire and pass on his operations to others. It’s important that there be continuity.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dr. Goncourt?”

  “Golokhov.”

  She shook her head. “He no longer uses that name. It brings back bad memories.”

  “He put up quite a fight . . . didn’t he?”

  “You should know,” she said.

  “Who won?”

  “You did, of course,” Betty Shun said.

  “Of course. Who are the Siamese twins?”

  “They are Listeners. They were Dr. Goncourt’s main concern in the negotiations.”

  “Negotiations? You call all of that negotiations?”

  “Now they will stay and continue their work. The circus will go on, too.”

  “What are they listening for?”

  “The voice of the Little Mothers, so we’ve been told. But the Little Mothers speak slowly. Dr. Goncourt investigated life extension so he could live long enough to understand what they were saying.” She looked at me with a sad expression, as if to add, and look at all the trouble.

  “They’re listening to bacteria?”

  Betty Shun lifted one eyebrow. “Don’t we all, in our way? Isn’t that what you were telling Owen?”

  Out on the black ocean, rescue boats, fishing smacks, yachts, Coast Guard cutters, tugboats, even a big container ship, all converged on Lemuria with floodlights waving, outlining the huge hulk in the early dawn.

  Betty Shun left me in a flight lounge on the top deck of Aristos Tower, in the charge of two strong, tall young men in sweaters. They were polite but said little. When she returned, she took me aside, and whispered, “You are leaving now.”r />
  “What about the others?”

  “I don’t know anything about them.”

  “What about Ben Bridger?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe the boats will take them all away. You will use the helicopter.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “To meet with Dr. Goncourt,” Betty said. “It’s an honor, don’t you think?”

  I watched from the side window of the small business helicopter as it lifted off the pad. The two young men in gray accompanied me. I was leaving behind Delbarco, Breaker, Ben, Carson, Candle, and all the others, alive or dead, probably dead.

  I was sure I was being taken somewhere to die. The only consolation I had was that I would meet the greatest man of the twentieth century. My brother’s real murderer.

  I would be able to ask a few questions, and maybe, if he was kind, and if I was lucky, I would get a few answers.

  Part of me said it was a betrayal of all my past principles not to scream and shout and claw and hang on to every second of life, but a larger self had control now, and it was calm.

  And curious. Not even flying scared me. Do lambs count the butterflies as they’re tugged to the knife?

  No one noticed our departure. Everyone was too busy trying to figure out what in hell had happened aboard the world’s most sophisticated and expensive cruise ship. Why so many had died. I doubted anyone would ever get to see the hospital, the clinic, the labs, and the Listeners. Somehow the investigators would all be distracted, faked out, sent elsewhere. Or mysteriously killed.

  Silk would live on.

  The helicopter flew east. I asked the pilot where we were going.

  “Exuma Cays. Lee Stocking Island,” he said with a Russian accent. “A resort. Nice. You’ll like it.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “Pity you can’t stay for too long,” he added. “There’s a tropical depression brewing. Might even get a name soon.”