The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  “Plateau,” you tell them.

  The woman from the Post puts one hand on her chest. “Oh my God.”

  It never fails to thrill you. These tiny beings that appeared to be dead . . . there is no other way to phrase it but that you are bringing them back to life. The krills’ motion rises in tempo. It looks like play. As their activity continues, you cannot resist projecting all sorts of emotions onto them: exuberance at being alive again, comfort at being warm, delight at encountering others of their species. One day might it be possible to mate two reanimated krill?

  Now the energy shifts. Their motions grow frantic, violence on a microscopic scale. You announce: “Frenzy.”

  Perhaps they are living the krill’s version of the most fulfilling life they can, because they know at any moment it will end. Or perhaps they are panicking, for the same reason. If only they had consciousness, if only they could communicate.

  Eventually the energy decays on the screen. The creatures slow in their motion. Finally they stop, save one whose extremities twitch like a just-dead beetle. Then it, too, goes still. You click the stopwatch loudly, and with a flourish, so that everyone notices.

  “Whew,” says the newspaper scion. “Amazing.”

  “Now then.” You squint at the watch’s dial. “Two-hundred-and-fifty-point-seven-seven seconds.”

  Flabbergasting. The longest yet for a krill, by forty seconds. Your modifications to the chemical bath have proven groundbreaking. The staffers know better than to show it. They are all business. You make eye contact with Thomas. He is smiling behind his hand.

  “Yes,” you continue, “and since this particular species of krill lives for an average of four days, that means we restored vitality to these creatures for the equivalent of 1.21 percent of its life span.”

  Thomas forces down his grin. “If we did that with a human of an average life expectancy, we would be bringing him back from the dead for twenty-one days.”

  “Of course”—you place the stopwatch on a shelf—“no one is talking about doing anything with humans. We have many smaller life-forms with which to experiment first.”

  “Can you do it again?” asks the Post reporter. “Can you reanimate these same krill a second time?”

  Thomas shakes his head. “Once is all.”

  She looks about herself. “So now they’re really dead?”

  “Still . . .” Thomas smirks. “Two hundred and fifty point seven seven. Not bad.”

  Like apostles they precede you into the conference center, the select group who witnessed the demonstration this morning. Now they will proselytize on your behalf. Thus do the disciples of reanimation grow in number and fervor.

  Outside the hall there is the usual crush: admirers, self-promoters, and media. Thomas does his part, pulling you forward no matter who has your ear. Or sleeve . . . this woman is actually holding your sleeve. Does she have any idea for how long your project just reanimated a krill? No, she just tugs away like a mongrel with a rag.

  “Sarah Bartlett, UCLA,” she brays. “Cell just accepted my paper questioning the ethics of your work, for the next issue. I want you to know there’s nothing personal—”

  You circle your wrist to twist her hand away. “Of course not. Likewise if I called your work immoral, you wouldn’t be offended either.”

  Bartlett persists like a gnat. “If I were attempting to redefine mortality, I would expect at least a little criticism. Questioning is what gives science its energy—”

  “Discovery is what gives science its energy,” Thomas interrupts, “and Dr. Carthage has somewhere to be.” He draws you on and the woman falls back into the general clamor. An amusing idea enters your mind: should you travel with a flyswatter?

  Finally you reach the conference room, a windowless rectangle. Appalling to note how the architecture of functionality has created such featureless caves. Hundreds of chairs stand arrayed in rows. Urns of coffee and trays of bland Danishes line the back wall. At the podium, Bergdahl notices you and accelerates his presentation.

  “In flash freezing, the rapidity of temperature reduction prevents large water crystals from forming, thus preventing cell membrane damage.” He shows a slide of two cells, one cold but intact, the other irreparably ruptured.

  What he has not said, this tenured Columbia University bio-savant, is that no one has been able to freeze tissues rapidly enough in the lab. They all burst. Only nature, with the intensity of cold, winds, and iceberg collisions, can form hard-ice. That is why you bear the bankrupting expense of polar searching.

  “In some species,” Bergdahl continues, glancing your way, then back to his notes, “cryobiologists observe that dying creatures produce glycols instantaneously, as certain frogs do during hibernation, lowering their tissues’ freezing point.”

  Thomas inspects your suit, brushing away invisible lint. Bergdahl finishes, applause applause. Stepping offstage, he veers toward you, but something in your demeanor detours him toward the coffee.

  Thomas hands your bio to the man who will introduce you, then scurries off to load your presentation into the projector’s computer. The introduction begins, you have three minutes to clear your thoughts. Believers are easy. Doubters require work. For them you have data, stories, and a film. It shows an immature shrimp, for nine seconds, tossing in a laboratory dish. But this is no ordinary shrimp, nor any typical nine seconds. This film captured the first successful reanimation. Now—attacked by scientists, criticized by zealots, hailed by drug companies, seized upon by the families of the thousands of people who are cryogenically frozen, alternately praised and feared by politicians—this video darling is changing the world. On the Internet its hits number in the millions. If only you could have charged a dime for each one . . .

  Thomas returns, his brow furrowed. He knows better than to interrupt you at this moment. But he is holding a chirping cell phone. You nod and he lifts it beside your ear.

  “This is Carthage.” The voice on the other end is singsong amid the static. “Slower,” you say. The voice describes a candidate berg, the largest ever, ribboned with hard-ice, scans showing block upon block of carbon. The biggest, the richest, etc., etc.

  Your introduction is nearly finished. The man at the podium is listing your publications, next will be your awards, and then you’re on. If the find is even half the size described, then the revolution has begun. You will need more labs, more researchers, more funding. A seal or immature whale? How can the Swedish academy ignore that? A trickle of sweat runs down your ribs.

  The voice on the phone requests instructions. “Why are you asking me?” you reply. “Gad. What about that woman I put on board to supervise? What was it, Philbert? . . . Right, Philo. Tell her to harvest the primary find and ignore the rest. Send regular updates to my people at the center. Do you really need me to tell you these things?”

  You turn from the phone. “Thomas, take care of these damn people, will you?”

  He closes the phone, bowing in wordless apology.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says your introducer, “welcome Dr. Erastus Carthage.”

  A third of the crowd gives you a standing ovation, another third claps politely, and the remainder sits with faces of stone. It’s amusing how they segregate, as when the president addresses Congress. Onstage the microphone is set for the height of your introducer, about four inches too low. Probably no one in human history has ever sanitized the mike stand. The count of sweaty hands palming it over the years must number in the thousands, but there is no alternative. You cannot bend at a moment like this. You raise it so you can stand at full height. You resist the urge to wipe your hand on your pants.

  Still, what you have on your side is reason, impeccable techniques, dozens of successful reanimations, the whole grand payoff of the scientific method. Who needs confidence when you are backed by all human thought since the Enlightenment?

  “Good afternoon,” you say, arms wide as though you held a beach ball. This is your signature move, practiced before a mi
rror, your gesture for the multitudes. “I am so glad to be here. I am so glad to see you.”

  You bow toward the group that did not applaud. “All of you.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Preparing to Plunge

  (Kate Philo)

  The singular thing that everyone failed to tell me about was beauty. Work? Oh, they crowed about that: so many hours in basement labs you lose track of whether it’s morning or night, much less the day of the week. The loneliness of a new idea, when all preexisting thought is allied against you. The bitter politics of academics, where generosity is fatal, forgiveness impossible. The potential for good work to be plagiarized and great work dismissed. The reality that you will never experience anything remotely approaching wealth. When I sought early career advice, no one left out those ingredients.

  My father used to say, I love him for this, “Kate, aren’t you too smart for science?”

  Once during what turned out to be the last fall of his life, he surprised me with an unexpected visit at grad school. I was lecturing, deep in the thylakoid membrane’s role in photosynthesis, thrilled as always to be in front of a classroom, even a large hall like that, when I glanced up to spot him standing at the back. A small, round man with a foot-wide grin, my dad. To have him see me in that light . . . well, I am grateful that it happened before he died.

  That night we did New Haven, touring its modest graces amid perpetual hard times, ate a fine meal he insisted on buying me, then kissed good-bye at his hotel. But it wasn’t enough, because the next day my father stopped by the lab on his way to the airport. I was working at a hood with safety glasses on. He hugged me hello, then lifted the plastic shields from my face. “My daughter is way too pretty for this nonsense.”

  Was some of it nonsense? Of course. Orals, comps, mandatory reading lists, they were all created to scare away the uncommitted, even if some of those people had the best minds. Much of it was lonely, too, your nearest confidants nonetheless your competitors for jobs and grants, your dissertation topic a multiyear gamble over your future. Persistence, that was the paramount virtue. Also knowing your place.

  Beauty, though? Beauty they forgot to mention. Yet in science, I see it all the time. Some days it is all I see. Ever since I thumbed my first slide onto a microscope in fifth grade, a rectangle of hard glass I’d dipped into pond water that looked lifeless and smelled of decay. Yet under magnification it displayed a realm so varied and energetic I felt dwarfed. They were busy, those little beings, whatever they were. Paramecia, I suppose, algae and a few larvae. Because they revealed whole worlds of life I’d known nothing about, they sparked my earliest curiosity. They were miracles.

  So, in subsequent years, were the students. Most doctoral candidates pay their way by teaching underclassmen. My peers moaned constantly about the time consumed by preparing lectures, grading papers, holding office hours. All that effort would be better spent in the lab, they said. I was the opposite: energized by the young minds, compelled by their interest, excited to show them not what I knew but how I felt about wanting to find something out.

  Had it not meant throwing away the years I’d already invested, had it not meant a victory for Chloe’s claim that I was neither smart nor committed enough to complete a Ph.D., I would have been more than happy to stay right there, teaching undergraduates. Seeing a young mind grab hold of a difficult idea, wrestle with it, then eventually brighten with understanding, that was the only nostalgia I felt as my career advanced. Even at Hopkins, where the brains around me were as honed by exertion as the biceps of weight lifters, still I sometimes yearned to stand before a bunch of kids and explain why oxygen was brilliant.

  My recompense was learning the many facets of beauty, how it occurs in patterns from tiny to giant. Pull the plug on a bathtub drain, there’s an elegance to how the liquid runs out, a tidy efficiency worked out between gravity and water molecules and the shape of the pipes—but that’s not all. The spiraling water looks just like a weather satellite’s image of a hurricane, bearing down on the Gulf Coast some rain-drenched September day. What’s more, they both replicate the spiral of galaxies, the same shape responding to similar forces, identical laws, although one is a draining of soap bubbles and the other a cascade of stars.

  It’s true with ice, too. A century ago a man in Vermont named Bentley invented a method of photographing snowflakes and enlarging the images. That’s where the no-two-alike idea originated. I’ve seen his photos, in a book my high school physics teacher lent me years ago. There is beauty beyond doubt, one amazing hexagon after another. But that’s just one kind of interesting ice. There’s the groan of slabs grinding one another in springtime river melts. There are filigrees like ferns on the bathroom window on frosty evenings after your shower. There are icicles, glaciers, jinglers in your cocktail. There is hard-ice, the secret ace of water’s countless forms.

  Of course it’s important to know what H2O is, what its uses may be, how it sustains life, what pollution or neglect can cause. There is a whole lexicon on the physics of ocean waves, the potential to generate electricity using tides, the nutrient depletion of soil erosion, the natural irrigation of rain. But my science, if I ran the world, would never lose sight of the other part of the equation. The beauty.

  Squad Three is ready to dive. I stand with them on deck. Dawn came hours ago, as it does this far north in August. I’m in my black scuba suit, insulation layers beneath, I’ve poured warm water down the neck opening to make my body heat last longer. The dive team is all work, underwater saws and drills strapped to the rusty, red platform, lights and regulators, checking their masks to make certain no bit of skin, however small, is exposed. They are as fidgety as horses before a race.

  Billings paces on deck in his parka. Normally after an all-nighter he’d sleep through extraction, but not this time.

  “Don’t play any games with calving,” he shouts over the arctic wind. “You do not want to deal with fragments.”

  Communicating this way reminds me of college parties, bellowing over the stereo. I nod in answer. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Are you taking small samples, too?”

  Half listening as I review the crew’s preparations, I shake my head.

  “Won’t Carthage shit himself, though?” Billings leans in. “He could do decades of work with the other veins in this berg.”

  My regulator hisses, I tap the mouthpiece silent. “I can’t risk losing a unique find just to collect trinkets.”

  “There are a good fifty studies in this iceberg, all priceless. If not for this seal or whatever, you’d be ecstatic over those trinkets.”

  I tug my gloves on snug, snapping the fabric at my wrists. “Are you saying we let this go so we can collect the little stuff?”

  “Bloody hell, Kate, listen to me.”

  I turn to him then, unaware that he was growing angry. “Go ahead.”

  “You know perfectly well how much I have carried that twit over the years, how many times I dove in freezing water to extract samples he took credit for, how many bloody papers I’m listed as third author even though I did all the work.”

  It is the longest speech I have ever heard on deck. “We all know Carthage. What’s your point?”

  “The seal will be his. He’ll hog it all. But that could leave the other work for me. If Carthage wakes a large animal, he won’t care about shrimp anymore. Maybe I could claim my own bit of terrain.”

  I look down into my face mask for an answer. In any lab on land, Billings would be in charge instead of me. I am in his debt, too, for helping me throughout this voyage. Even this reach of ocean was his idea, when I was inclined to chart a course west. But if I screw up the primary extraction, Carthage will destroy not just me but the career of every person on the dive team.

  “Hey, campers,” Gerber squawks in my earpiece. “What’s the holdup out there?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “We’re fine.” Then I face the squad to yell over the wind. “Okay, crew, let’s cut this big thing wi
th a nice margin so we don’t lose anything important. Squad Two should prep for seventy minutes from now, to mine for small samples.”

  Diving masks nod up and down the row. Billings makes a dignified bow; he leads Squad Two. I pull the mask over my face, climb on the platform. The team follows in the awkward walk of flippers, like so many penguins about to plunge off their floe.

  As everyone grips the chain-link railing for balance, I turn back for a look. I remember that moment now, with all that has happened, as a traveler a century ago might have recalled her steamship pulling away from the pier: here comes an unfamiliar culture, a different language, a new world. Gerber stands at the tech room window, his hair a crazy halo, flashing us a peace sign. On the bridge above, the captain speaks from one side of his mouth. A winch groans and the deck crane hoists our platform off the deck, dangles it in the windy air between ship and iceberg, then eases us into the water.

  The ocean presses on my calves, then my hips, upward. This close to the berg, there are no waves to topple me. Only the water, taking my shape. Can there be anything more intimate? The shock of the cold doesn’t hit till we’re up to our necks. I start my watch’s chrono function—time, after oxygen, being the most valuable commodity here.

  “Mark,” I call to Gerber, which he repeats in my earpiece so I know he’ll have snapped a photo of the team being lowered into the sea.

  Then the water is over my mask, I’m immersed completely. So I do what I always do in that first moment: tilt my head back and let out a long exhale. It leaves the regulator in one fat bubble, which hurries upward like a helium balloon released by a child on a summer’s day. Beauty.

  CHAPTER 5