Vitals

by Greg Bear

  38

  AUGUST 21 • LEE STOCKING ISLAND, THE BAHAMAS

  I walked in late-morning brilliance toward the white-sand beach. A cool, moist breeze luffed at my hair and my fresh white shirt. A mass of towering gray clouds walled off the eastern ocean, and it was from the east that the wind blew.

  I had eaten a light breakfast of oatmeal in the resort restaurant, lubricating it with hot coffee, then had asked where the estate of Dr. Goncourt was located. The staff all knew of it. It was a mile away, a bellhop said, down a paved road toward the Atlantic side of Lee Stocking Island and through a private gate that was always open.

  I was free to do what I pleased, to leave the island—the men in gray had dropped me off with several thousand dollars in my pocket—or to stay and accept the invitation. Apparently, I was no longer a threat to anybody.

  On the island, Dr. Goncourt’s estate was famous for having the only private beach with its own stromatolites. Stromatolites made up one of the prime attractions on Lee Stocking Island.

  The house was medium in size, wood frame, concrete foundation, large windows with wooden shutters, mostly open. It blended in with the rustling palm trees. I avoided the house and walked straight toward the beach, as I had been instructed. It was ten o’clock.

  A blond woman in a swimsuit with a turquoise shawl draped over her legs sat in a lounge chair away from the driftwood and sea wrack of the high-water mark. A sun cap hid her face. As I approached, she heard the slap of my sandals, shaded her eyes, and half rolled in the chair to look back at me. She stood to meet me, without a touch of embarrassment or self-consciousness.

  “Hello, Hal,” she said.

  “Lissa,” I said. “Surprised?”

  “No,” she said. “Should I be?”

  “You did your best to kill me.”

  “Not my very best, obviously,” she said. “But now it’s over. A request was made, and Dr. Goncourt is waiting for you. I doubt you want to stay and chat with me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot, actually.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you not at all,” she said.

  “Rob would have loved to see this,” I said.

  “How considerate of you to think of your brother.”

  “We went through a lot of misery because of you. I hear somebody’s replacing Golokhov after all these years.”

  “Dr. Goncourt. Indeed.”

  “Are you guarding him?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t have long to live. We decided it would be best to let him work and save his dignity, away from the mess.”

  “Is it finished? The control, the tagging, the runners? The government is shivering like a big dog now, throwing it all off, don’t you think?”

  “Of course, Hal,” she said, as if humoring a child. “You can just walk out there, through the water. The waves are light. No more than a few minutes, though. He tires quickly, and we’re leaving soon for the mainland. We won’t stay for the storm.”

  “Moving to another estate? More hidden riches?”

  Lissa shrugged.

  I wanted to reach out and strangle her, or just touch her face, to discover whether she was a phantom. I could not be sure anything I saw was real.

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t do anything rash.” She lifted her arm and crooked it, then pointed her finger into the trees beside the house. I turned and saw four men in gray suits. Three of the men were young and athletic. The fourth was much older, in his seventies. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and Dockers. He was the man Ben had stared at in Anthrax Central.

  Stuart Garvey.

  I turned away then, hating the thought that Lissa would see me so confused. I stalked over the dry sand, onto the hard wet sand, then into the blue water. Stromatolites are not pretty, just stunted forests of little brown lumps in the water, surrounded by shifting sand. The brown towheads broke the gentle waves for thirty or forty feet before the ocean overtopped them.

  A thin old man with a shock of white hair knelt in the water, a canvas bag slung around one shoulder. He looked up as I sloshed closer. His face was pale, heavily wrinkled, but his eyes were bright. He did not seem to have suffered from the same affliction as Irina Golokhova, and in fact he looked at least a hundred years old, though still spry. His wrinkled, spotted, but otherwise normal hands stroked the damp upper round of a stromatolite. Algae clung to his fingers.

  He looked up. “Hello,” he greeted. “Are you a student of things biological? Do you know of these marvels?”

  “Dr. Golokhov?”

  He looked at me more critically. “Goncourt, please. Golokhov should have died decades ago.”

  “I’m Hal Cousins. You killed my brother,” I said.

  “Did I?” He made a regretful face. “I am sorry. I hope you will forgive me.”

  This reaction brought all the blood to my face, but it also took me by surprise. “You damned near killed me.”

  “How good that I failed,” he said with false gallantry.

  “Don’t tell me it was war. It was vicious stupidity.”

  “Perhaps it was,” he said. “Engendered by fear. Unimaginable, so much fear. You are one of the little human tumors, aren’t you? You and your brother. You both wanted to live forever.”

  “I still do.”

  “The Little Mothers watch over us all,” the old man said, and wiped his hands on his pants, leaving dark smears. “Sever the connections between the body and their ministrations, and you block far more than the path to old age. Have you ever felt fit and in tune? Life is good? Perhaps you have a mystical feeling of connection with Nature, with something higher? That is the voice of the Little Mothers. All the stresses and rewards of life are balanced, you are doing well, and they approve. To be judged and found wanting, that is painful. But take those voices away, and you soon lose all balance. We are far more than just brains encased in bone. Larger and older minds live inside our bodies and all around us, speaking in languages I have worked all my life to interpret.” He trailed his fingers in the water. “Perhaps we are only a dream the bacteria are having.”

  I couldn’t just let the arrogant old bastard babble. I wanted answers. For Rob, for Ben.

  “Did you make a deal with Stalin? How many people did you torture and kill?”

  Golokhov stuck out his jaw and looked down at the water.

  “You experimented with your wife, then you abandoned her!”

  “Yes. Irina.” He rubbed his nose, then his forehead, leaving a streak of slime on the pale, wrinkled skin. “I made her into a new kind of woman. I watched her for ten years. She was full of hatred and guile, uncaring, a cruel and unrepentant thief. I tried to fix my mistakes, and in time I reversed her ill effects . . . but I should have stopped there and destroyed my records. Too late. I had attracted the attention of beasts who were already hatred and greed made flesh. What will you do, Mr. Faust, who still wants to know so much? What beasts will you unleash when you cut all the strings?”

  “You still want me dead, don’t you?” I asked. “Why not just tell them to shoot me?”

  “Ah,” he said, and lifted his hands to the air, shaking them as if invoking a higher power.

  My anger flashed over. “You’re a coward,” I shouted. “You’d never just grab a gun and pull the trigger. You’re too fastidious.” I lifted my hand, targeting the back of his frail old neck. I didn’t care about the men on the beach.

  Golokhov looked up. A line of spit hung from the corner of his mouth. “I was a coward. I feared torture and death. I watched blood flow in rivers and corpses stack like cordwood. To save myself, I gave the monsters even more power . . . and the rivers became oceans. I set myself to bringing them down, and when they were defeated, I made it my duty to watch and guard, with the few resources left to me, to spare the world even more slaughter. How do you think this painfully cruel and inept species survived to see a new millennium? But I was a fool to think I could stop so many curious and im
moral children.” He wiped his mouth and washed his hands in the sea. “I hope your generation will do better.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said.

  He knelt in the lapping waves and returned his attention to the stromatolite. “You’re no better than Stalin or Beria,” I added. “You try to kill our brightest dreams. I want to enhance human life. But you gave us the City of the Dog Mothers.”

  He shuddered. For a moment I thought he was having a fit, but he flung aside his canvas bag, spun about in the blue water, and glared at me, the fiercest and most hate-filled look I ever hope to see.

  The face of a wrathful God as Blake might have drawn him before he tore up the paper and burned the pieces.

  “Yes, and there will be punishment!” he said. “Do you know what the message is? What little I have intercepted and translated over seven decades, the sum of all my good work on this Earth, in this forsaken century?” He reached down and patted the stromatolite between his knees. “All the Little Mothers whispering in our bowels and in the forests and jungles and in the oceans we are working so hard to destroy. They are not happy. They are not happy with us at all. We are a bitter disappointment to them. They wage all-out war against us now. It is a judgment none of us can withstand. Not those on the ship, not those on the shore. None. None. “

  He faced the gray wall of storm across the water.

  “How long do you think we have, young monster?” he asked, still trembling. “How long?”

  EPILOG

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (NO ADDRESSES, PLEASE)

  It’s been a little more than four months, and I’m still alive. Still sane—I think. Ben is alive. They must have gotten him off the ship. I wonder how he felt about not seeing Janie again.

  He sent me a copy of Life magazine; it came in the mail last Friday. From 1949, photos of the Waldorf Conference in New York. Communists for world peace. (How did he get my address? Once a spook.)

  I read the magazine wearing plastic gloves. There’s another picture of Rudy Banning. He’s standing next to Arthur Miller, and Miller is chuckling at something Rudy has just finished saying. It’s definitely Rudy.

  On a little Post-it, stuck next to the picture, Ben wrote, “No way they can fake this. Rethink everything. What Banning was doing, what Rob was doing. Who did I shoot?”

  And I am rethinking. I’ve tried to assemble a sequence of events and figure out who was running whom, and when.

  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

  YEAR BEFORE LAST

  June: Rob has treated himself to block bacterial connections, but I am ahead in my research at this point.

  August: Desperate, Rob takes a long shot, goes to Siberia.

  October: Rob contacts Banning, or does Banning go to him?

  December: Begins to be harassed (by Stuart Garvey and Irina, or Maxim?). Tagging effects only partly successful because of his self-treatment and altered gut bacteria. He appears to be getting more and more eccentric.

  LAST YEAR

  Late January: Rob on the outs with Lissa. (Lissa sent to stop Rob—or to convert him, recruit him?)

  Who is trying to tag Rob? Is it Lissa, working for Maxim Golokhov, or is it Irina Golokhova? Banning tries to get Rob to go to Callas and be trained. Rob refuses.

  February: Rob begins concerted research program to block Silk. At his lowest point . . . (Opens lab in office building in San Jose?)

  April: Tammy flees to Marquez. Marquez contacts Banning about Tammy’s story. Banning puts Rob in touch with Marquez and Tammy in Los Angeles. Rob builds lab in Marquez’s basement. Marquez likes the longevity angle, but is paranoid about government mind control—and Tammy’s story only makes his fears worse.

  May 28: Rob calls me in San Diego Airport. Gives me a warning.

  May 30: I visit Montoya, make my pitch, get approval for sub dive.

  June 6: Rob visits Ben Bridger.

  June 7: Bridger is arrested and taken to Metropolitan.

  June 8: Dr. Mauritz kills his wife.

  June 10: Bridger released.

  June 11: Bridger, Rob, and Banning go to Los Angeles.

  June 12: Marquez house is attacked. (Newspapers with story appear while I am at sea. Lissa shows me the story later, crashed Marine Corps helicopters—why? Is she asking me if I know, or does she know?)

  THE DIVE: On June 18, I go down in DSV. Sea Messenger food dosed. Dave Press tries to kill us both. Three die on Sea Messenger.

  June 19: Sea Messenger pulls into port in Seattle.

  June 20: Breakfast with Bloom and Shun, 9–10:30 a.m. Investigate specimens 11:30 a.m.–8 p.m. Dinner at Canlis 10–11:30 p.m.

  June 20:

  Noon, EST. Rob calls my cell phone from public phone in New Jersey. (Guessing at place and time.)

  2 p.m. EST. Ben and Rob meet Stuart Garvey outside Penn Station. Have lunch. Garvey takes them to Anthrax Central in downtown Manhattan 4:00 p.m. Irina tries to turn Rob. Recruit him? Ben shoots Rob in New York alley (2–3:00 a.m.?).

  June 21: 12:30 a.m. PST Lissa calls on cell phone to leave message about Rob’s death.

  June 21: 1 a.m. PST Last meeting with Montoya. I walk around Lake Union to Genetron lab, discover trashed specimens 2:30 a.m. PST.

  June 21: 3:20 a.m. PST I turn on my cell phones, take message from Rob, Lissa. Learn Rob is dead.

  June 27: Funeral in Coral Gables, Florida.

  June 29–August 8: I am in Berkeley.

  August 8: Promethean Conference. I meet Banning. Apartment fire and dog attack, hospital visit. Banning pays.

  August 8–9: Haight hotel room.

  August 9: I buy clothes, Banning and I meet with Callas, Lissa returns. I read several of Rob’s papers; City of Dog Mothers. Tagging attempt (can opener) partially successful that evening, late.

  Never got to test can opener.

  August 10: Second meeting with Callas, who turns us down. Smart lady.

  August 10: Thuringia—crazy old fake cop with signs of Golokhov’s immortality treatments—and trip to San Jose with Lissa to open Rob’s office/lab. It’s a trap. Lissa shoots car salesman.

  August 10–13: Lissa gives me supreme tagging and drives me out to desert hotel. Tells me to kill myself. Sounds like a good idea at the time.

  August 13: Ben Bridger and Rudy Banning rescue me, give me gallon of elixir, then haul me shitting and puking to airport in Arizona.

  August 13–14: Back to Anthrax Central. (My first time.)

  August 17: Assault on Lemuria.

  August 18: Meeting with Golokhov/Goncourt. Bad news about the Little Mothers.

  August 20: Return to Miami from Bahamas. Not much news about Lemuria. Go into hiding.

  I’ve worked out some of the history. Here it is, as far as I’ve gone. Open up the sealed brown paper envelope (hairs taped over the flap for security) and read. Wear gloves, though, ha-ha. Feel free to add your own details or correct me. It’s all up in the air, little or no documentation.

  I can’t trace all the threads and who is pulling them and when. It still doesn’t add up. Something’s missing, something itches at the back of my head.

  Why did Lissa shoot the skinny man in the herringbone suit?

  Why didn’t they change the combinations in Goncourt’s hospital aboard the Lemuria after Tammy went missing? I’m thinking maybe they didn’t know she was betraying them. Tammy was there to foil Banning and Rob.

  Why didn’t she? Who turned her? Rob?

  Was he working for Mrs. Golokhova and the government?

  Who ordered the gunship attack in LA? Probably Golokhov—but why? Why provoke his former allies? Was he that worried about Rob and Banning?

  Weird election this November, wasn’t it?

  Maxim Golokhov cooperated with the United States after the war. Everything else about him is murky until 1954, when he shows up in New York, but he must have been there to set up Thuringia and the other towns. Shipping tagged fruitcake all over the world.

  Irina Golokhova was cooperating with some branches of th
e federal government, and had been since at least the 1960s, after Maxim left her in Manhattan. To keep things secret, Stuart Garvey and his cohorts at the CIA destroyed Rudy’s reputation in 1992. Supposedly that’s when Rudy’s career falls apart.

  But Rudy is clearly not who he says he is.

  The picture that fell out of Rob’s envelope, me and Rob somewhere in Europe, maybe, I don’t remember the occasion. Just a simple memory lapse?

  Why would Golokhov distract himself from studying the Little Mothers? Did Golokhov think we would upset the balance of nature so badly? He already believed the bacteria had passed judgment and had it in for us.

  Do I believe that?

  Do you?

  My first instinct is to fight back. Cut all the strings. Time for us to grow up and go it alone. If the Little Mothers want to be abusive, I say we can play that game, too.

  But the fact is, I’m tired.

  I’m not sleeping well. I’m living in a crummy apartment in Los Angeles, Culver City actually. So now you know. The air conditioner is broken and I live out of Safeway cans. I shop for them in different stores, and I clean the can opener with boiling water and soap each time I use it.

  I still have my incomplete list of proteins, still think now and then of the shining path to the Long Haul. I remember the blue strips of paper in the package from Rob, slipped into the airmail envelope. Maybe they were the other half of the secret—Rob’s half. Maybe he was willing them to me in case he failed.

  Doesn’t matter. They’re gone now.

  I still convince myself I have the dream, that history hasn’t stolen my life from me. But I can’t work, can’t get work, and Mom has run out of money, she says.

  Then, last week, her phone was disconnected. I don’t have the cash to go see where she is or what she’s doing. I think she’s probably fine, but I don’t know why I think that.

  Owen Montoya is in the hospital. I read the headlines at a newspaper stand. A nervous breakdown. He tried to stab a visiting scientist.