The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  “Forget the movie, campers,” Gerber says. “Here’s the real story.” He taps a pen on the lower screen, which shows what looks like a simple 3-D grid. “This new little trick should save days of scanning.”

  Dr. Kate, bless her sweet bum, leans for a closer look. “What have you got here?”

  “A matrix of the iceberg’s interior. I was tinkering online and stole two ideas I found—a parking garage CAD system and a layout scheme for archaeological digs. Now we’ll know more exactly where we find hard-ice, and where there are deposits of our tiny carbon formerly-alives so we can fetch them easier and with fewer samples damaged.”

  “So what does it show us?” she says, still bent forward. Am I supposed to look at the screen with her perched like that? Right.

  Gerber punches keys and clicks his mouse, and the screen changes dramatically enough that the good doctor straightens. “Holy cow,” she says.

  He pulls his ponytail forward, checking the split ends. “Yeah, not half bad.”

  He’s displaying an outline of the entire berg, with green lines in a perfect grid throughout and white veins where hard-ice runs through the ordinary kind. It looks like ore in a mine. Here and there, red stripes ribbon the hard-ice. “That’s your potential reanimation material,” Gerber explains. “Carbon. Presto.”

  “This is fantastic,” Dr. Kate says. “It will sharpen documentation, too.”

  “Amazing what some guys can accomplish with the right tunes playing. Hey, people.” He’s speaking into his headset now. “Hold there a second. Hold, team.”

  The men on the iceberg stand still while Gerber taps at his keyboard. “We got garbage data on that last core, fellas. Walk it back and re-sound, would you?”

  We can’t hear the reply, it’s in his headphones only. Gerber watches the men retracing their steps and smirks. “Billings, you have my deepest sympathy, but it was junk data. Try it again.” He grins at us. “All right: please. Pretty please.”

  The men wrestle the scanner backward, and Gerber taps keys. “Same deal, dammit. Let’s rerun again.” There’s an edge in his voice. He listens a moment. “Don’t blame me, dude, I don’t know. Has one of you goons got your thumb over the lens?”

  He listens, then frowns. “What I am receiving is solid carbon for that section. Every bit of it. Ditto the four above it and five of the surrounding twelve.”

  Dr. Kate taps Gerber’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  He waves dismissively at the screen, where amid the green grid there is now a block of solid red. “The reading here is that the entire cubic foot is full of carbon. Which is as likely as throwing a shovel at a coal mine and finding a flawless diamond.”

  “May I?” Dr. Kate holds out her hands and Gerber places the headset in them. She fits it over her head, keeping her fingertips on the earpieces. “Billings, instead of the usual pattern, could you guys please run one cube north?”

  I watch the monitor as they hoist the scanner onto a new spot. Despite the moon suits, their body language reveals reluctance and annoyance.

  “See?” Gerber points at his screen. There’s red again, a solid block. “That one is full of carbon, too. Dammit, I debugged this stuff all the way through yesterday. Maybe the sonogram is down. What’s the wind chill out there tonight anyway?”

  “One more to the north, would you please?”

  She’s listening now, concentrating on what they say.

  “Shit, there’s a third row,” Gerber says. He throws a pen against the table. “I hate what the cold does to my equipment.”

  She holds up one finger to silence him. “How deep are we scanning now?” She listens again. “Really? The underside?” She smiles. “Excellent work, gentlemen. I am going to suit up, and I’d like Squad Three on this one. Let’s say full gear in forty minutes, on my mark of 4:18, GMT. That’s all for now. Way to go, guys.”

  Gerber is looking up at her like a baby bird waiting to be fed. She hands the headphones back to him.

  “I need you to be my shipboard brains, Gerber. Save the scan data real time, and back it up on two hard drives, okay? In the water we’ll go full video, with snapshot captures on my marks. I want this recovery sequence unimpeachable.”

  “You don’t think it’s the equipment?”

  She laughs, one high note. “Gerber, don’t you get it? I don’t know if it’s a seal, or immature beluga, or shark. But something big is frozen in there. Really big.”

  “It’s so exciting,” Gerber deadpans. He tilts his head at me. “I’ll alert the media.”

  Dr. Kate has closed her eyes and I can imagine the wheels turning. Then she turns to a technician across the room. “Please inform the captain that we are harvesting from this berg immediately. Someone call Carthage to keep him posted.”

  Gerber snorts. “Always we must feed the beast.”

  But if she hears, it does not show when she pauses at the door. It’s a thing you can observe, how Dr. Kate calms herself. Like soothing a baby, maybe, or comforting a dog in a thunderstorm, she pulls herself together. But this time it doesn’t work. The excitement is heightened by her restraint. And it is nothing but lovely.

  “One more thing. Tell the galley to start feeding everyone ice cream. We are going to need a ton of freezer space.”

  She hurries out, I can hear her footsteps on the steel floor, and I’m left wondering: How did she know to come to the bridge right when the ice turned up? How did she know to wear diving clothes before the scans had begun? Usually Billings supervises the scans from the control room. Why did she send him out tonight instead?

  Gerber plays his cursor back and forth over the red blocks. “Come out, come out, whatever you are.”

  I move next to him. “Any guesses?”

  “None.” He scratches his head. “Hell of a big shrimp?”

  “I’m going to make coffee,” I say, and stroll off toward the galley—only partly because I want to keep alert. Truth be told, a trip to the galley also means I’ll pass the suiting room, maybe glimpse the good doctor wrestling her sweet bones into a nice, snug dive outfit.

  I mean, it’s not like she’s given me anything else to think about.

  CHAPTER 3

  Not Bad

  (Erastus Carthage)

  You stand at the railing knowing that they do not believe you: scientists, researchers, lab rats from across the country. Funders, bless their wallets. Underlings, too, those predoctoral peons who serve well as exploitable implements but get underfoot like so many neglected cats. And the media, any demonstration would be wasted without at least a few reporters to gawk and scrawl.

  “Are we ready?” you call in the direction of the speakerphone.

  “Just one moment more, Dr. Carthage,” replies the chief postdoctoral fellow, a red-haired Yalie whose future depends on situations like this. If there is any benefit to life in the academy, it is the subservience of young men and women who know that a single letter of concern in their file, one rumor of falsified lab results, so much as a whisper of faint praise by you at the major conventions, and their career at this scientific altitude is over. Instead of working with leading minds in splendid labs, they’ll be teaching freshman biology at some dead-end college in nowhere America. For those with lofty aspirations, anxiety about your whims is a splendid motivator; their fear is your security.

  The team works behind glass that runs the width of the room. It was costly, that window, but you designed this lab as much for display as for research. You imagined a day like this, you dreamed of it. Yet now that it has arrived, it feels less like a granted wish than like an inevitability. Reason and inquiry prevail once again.

  Some tasks take place under lab hoods, because one can never be certain which germs might also enjoy reentering the living world. Team members wear white coats, per your instructions, but since the staff labors in jeans on ordinary days, the coats are purely for show. But then, the whole exercise serves that same purpose—this morning’s demonstration, the conference this afternoon with yo
u delivering the keynote. Until your ideas take firmer hold in the public mind, and funding becomes reliably perpetual, everything is for effect. After all, once the discovery occurs, science is mostly theater.

  You are not remotely nervous. The lab has replicated this process nine times in front of an audience. Plus twenty-two assays before the first paper appeared, with a long list of coauthors and your name at the top. Where it rightly belongs.

  Thomas—your untitled and unpaid assistant, butler, secretary, shadow, and man Friday—has performed the day’s introductions, provided coffee, stroked the egos to the perfect heat. For the moment your role is figurehead. Master of ceremonies.

  “Are we ready?” you repeat.

  “We’re on the last parameters, sir,” comes the reply.

  You consult your watch. Six minutes past the hour, the precise interval after the scheduled start that you believe sharpens an audience’s curiosity. So your patter begins.

  “Gentlemen . . . and lady.” You nod at the Post reporter. “Thank you for coming today. We are pleased to demonstrate recent accomplishments by the Carthage Institute for Cellular Seeking. Today we will reanimate . . . which is it, Doctor, copapod or krill?”

  “Krill,” replies the speakerphone. The technicians wear masks, again purely for appearances, but making it impossible to tell who is speaking.

  You knew the answer anyway, of course. There is no piece of this demonstration that lacks for preparation. You could have been a choreographer.

  “The Euphausia superba,” you inform the audience, “an excellent creature. Low in the food chain, the biomass of this Antarctic species exceeds five hundred million tons, roughly double the biomass of all human beings.”

  “We’re ready now, sir,” the speaker declares.

  “Permit me to provide a context,” you begin. The next four minutes contain the view-from-space version of everything you have learned over the past thirty-six years.

  “Let us begin with the familiar: plants. They make these.” From a side table you pick up a sunflower seed and display it for all. “Appears dead. Contains life. We are so accustomed to these little dormant packages, we scarcely register that they possess all the materials necessary to become alive.”

  You replace the seed and show them a pinecone. “This comes from a lodgepole pine, a western evergreen that can grow to one hundred and sixty feet. Yet this cone will open to release seeds only upon experiencing a temperature of one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. After a volcano or forest fire, this is the species that restores a scorched countryside by creating a carpet of green. Certain extreme conditions are necessary to reveal its inner life power.”

  You place the cone exactly where it was, ready for the next presentation. A glance at Thomas shows him focused entirely on you, though he has heard this speech on countless prior occasions. He does serve at times, doesn’t he?

  You continue: “In addition to plants, there are four other forms of life on this planet. Four, and each one has a phase of apparent death which is disproven by life that eventually results. Let us first consider the bacterium, which works similarly to seeds. It awaits favorable conditions—especially moisture, temperature, and a host—and then experiences a rebirth. Next are fungi such as mushrooms, whose latency we recognize every time we add hot water to seemingly lifeless yeast. The third kind, protists such as amoebas, reproduce identically, such that it is impossible to tell which is offspring and which is the original, confounding the concept of any particular entity dying.”

  You have wandered along the great window, hands holding your lapels, appearing to pace absently though you have synchronized your motion and speech so that you arrive precisely at the last word. At the far end, you halt.

  “This shallow perception of mortality also extends to the remaining life-form, the animals. You think you know when they live and die. But today we shall change your minds, as we reanimate Euphausia by finding the seedlike mechanisms within.”

  They shift in their seats. You can tell it is not a matter of getting comfortable, but of growing anxiety. You like it.

  “One caveat,” you say, raising a hand. “Today contains merely one portion of a five-phase process.” You count on your fingers. “First, reclamation, which includes finding and identifying a viable sample. Second, reanimation, which you will witness momentarily. Third, recovery, in which the specimen gains function. Fourth, plateau, in which it achieves equilibrium. Fifth, frenzy, which, as you observe, will speak for itself.”

  You wave your arm. “Commence the exercise.”

  As the lights dim and the overhead comes on, the eyes of every person present go to the screen. It is that simple. They follow and obey. The Yalie is explaining hard-ice now, how it forms under stupendous pressure, coupled with the most bitter weather this planet’s climate can conjure. This was the first of your discoveries, nature’s cryogenics. No need to ponder why species would develop this survival mechanism, turning their corpses into seeds for a future time. No need to become all Darwinian about it. Already the audience members begin to believe; their fixed stares at the overhead screen prove it.

  “Excuse me.” The heir to a defunct newspaper fortune has raised his hand. His last check ran nicely into six figures; you remember the exact feel of him placing it, folded discreetly in half, into your palm. “How old is the sample we are seeing today?”

  “About seventy years,” the postdoc answers. He places a sliver of ice into the animating vessel. “This specimen was dead, in the traditional sense, before anyone in this room was born.”

  Thomas, schooled by you in seizing opportunity, steps forward. “This hard-ice discovery occurred in a calving of Antarctic shelf three years ago. Funding for that mission came from a benefactor who is here today. The specimen has been stored at one hundred and twenty degrees below zero. This particular find has proven to be one of the more reliable for reanimation.”

  Well done, Thomas, you think, nicely wordsmithed. In truth, all hard-ice samples perform equally regardless of age or origin. But none of the ants in this audience could understand the professional publications, so there is no harm in encouraging a funder to believe his ice is special. You would praise Thomas for cleverness, but you do not praise.

  “When hard-ice forms,” the postdoc continues, “any creatures in the water undergo extremely rapid freezing—so fast that the usual crystals of ice do not form. That speed leaves cells intact, and with unique chemical properties, namely abundant oxygen and glucose. Everything is preserved as it was when alive. Our challenge is to guide it back. Observe.”

  The screen displays a microscope zooming in, a blur of gray-white ice, and then, with arresting clarity, dozens of tiny frozen sea creatures.

  “Is that an electron microscope?” asks the woman from the Post. You could give her a lollipop for naïveté.

  “Naw,” a technician says. “You could find one like it in any high school lab.”

  You make a mental note to have Thomas scold that imbecile. If it’s a second offense, he will be fired. Nothing about this process should appear easy or offhand.

  “You can see that these formerly living objects are perfectly preserved,” the postdoc continues. “Like seeds waiting to find the right soil. Now we perform two tasks simultaneously: providing the thawing bath, and galvanizing the samples with electricity and magnetic forces. Think primordial ooze, but instead of millions of years of randomization, we have precise chemistry, and instead of a lightning strike, we provide highly calibrated amperage.”

  Technicians scurry to and fro. Thomas answers another question from the newspaper brat. A congressman’s staffer wants to know what all of this costs.

  “It varies from sample to sample,” Thomas replies, “because the expense of procuring hard-ice fluctuates widely. Extraction involves sea voyages lasting months, sonar-scanning hundreds of bergs to find a vein, then mining specimens out of submerged ice, all without compromising the material. That’s the expensive part. Reanimating creatures ba
ck here, comparatively, is about as costly as turning on the lights.”

  “Today’s krill, for example,” the congressman’s pet persists. “How much did it cost to find the material, bring it here, store it, and now reanimate it?”

  “This institute,” you interject, doing your best at that moment not to look at Thomas, “has the luxury of receiving private funding, which grants us the liberty of keeping our financial information also private. The point is not to avoid accountability, but to cultivate flexibility and responsiveness to findings, in stark contrast with today’s typically rigid governmental funding of the sciences. We are following the model Peter Marshall used in Great Britain seventy years ago. Operating a private lab enabled him to identify the electron transport mechanism in mitochondria when no one else was able.”

  “Didn’t he win the Nobel for that?” asks the newspaper heir.

  You hold your hands out, give a little bow.

  “We’re ready,” calls the postdoc. That is your cue. You reach into your pocket for a stopwatch and hold it at arm’s length. They all glance, but return their eyes to the projection screen. They do not want to miss the mystery. They want to shed their skepticism. They want, in some inexplicable way, for you to become the hand of God.

  “Please watch closely,” the postdoc says. He lowers a skim of ice, thin as a piece of paper, into the warm bath. It dissolves immediately. The screen overhead divides, one side showing the bath, the other displaying a technician’s hand on a black dial. He turns it clockwise. “We are now adding a weak electric current and a powerful magnetic field.”

  You start the stopwatch. And barely suppress the joy in your throat.

  The water shows an agitation so small it could be a trick, the eye manufacturing what it wants to see. An expectant silence possesses the room. You love this moment, the anticipation. Then, ever so slowly, one krill unbends from its cold prison.

  “Recovery,” you explain, and at that the hand on the dial cranks hard to the right. Instantly the water is full of activity, krill opening and closing like inchworms stretching to reach the next leaf. Several seem to move, in a straight line that indicates a purpose or destination. Two bump each other, then veer away. Another jumps clear out of the microscope’s field of vision.