by Bill Schutt
There was no mystery as to who had killed the man lying on the ground. Alan was proud to have done it—and to have done so with his bare hands. Boulle and Cousteau found it necessary to hold him off at least fifteen feet away from the body, for the anthropologist had refused to stop spitting on it.
The blood was already settling into the palms of the dead man’s hands, paling their upper surfaces noticeably and accentuating a curious wound. Mac lifted the left hand and knelt in for a closer look. The man had recently developed a severe case of psoriasis, on and around second-degree burns that had healed badly, forming tumor-like keloids. The left side of his neck, where broken vertebrae pushed up against the skin, was similarly scarred and diseased, as was the same side of his face.
“Flash burns from Hiroshima,” said Nesbitt, verifying the conclusion Mac was coming to. She added, “He barely survived it.”
“Which only means they should have made the bomb bigger!” shouted Alan.
Mac stood up, glaring at Nesbitt. “Who the hell is this guy?”
“Name’s Kitano Hata.”
“What? You gotta be—”
“The name’s Black Sun!” Alan called out. “He’s Black Sun, of Harbin!”
“No,” Mac said. “How can this be?”
“The man’s a true genius,” Nesbitt tried to explain. “He had ideas about using magnetic lensing to map individual atoms along the entire structure of a chromosome. If anyone could help us to do more than merely break the genetic code, but to actually read it and understand it, then it was Hata.”
“You know something, Nora? My mother used to tell me, when she wondered what I would grow up to be, ‘Show me the company you keep, and I’ll tell you what you are.’”
Seeming to believe that more violence might soon erupt, McQueen stepped between Nesbitt and Mac. “This man on the ground was under the personal protection of General MacArthur,” the private said.
“Point noted,” Mac replied. The history of it filled him with revulsion. The Japanese microbiologist known as “Black Sun” was arrested in 1945 for his commanding role in human experimentation at the Unit 731 biological weapons facility in China. His team had proved to be even more efficient at industrialized extermination than Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. Not a single prisoner survived to provide testimony. The populations of almost every neighboring town had also disappeared. But Black Sun and his colleagues preserved all of their notebooks and specimens, in a move that was self-damning, and at the same time their salvation. MacCready knew that MacArthur had been instrumental in buying immunity from prosecution for Black Sun and at least two of the other most monstrous of his ilk. It was done so America could transfer Japan’s bioweapons technology to . . . Well, now you at last know where to, Mac told himself. The general is, if nothing else, decisive. Were Hamlet written about General MacArthur—or Nora Nesbitt, for that matter—it would only have been a one-act play.
“You do realize, Nora, that some of MacArthur’s own men were among the prisoners exterminated during the Unit 731 experiments?”
Nesbitt made a conscious effort to slow down her breathing, like a volcano biding her time. “And I hope you realize how, at war’s end, the Russians abducted a lot of German bioweaponeers over to their side,” she said calmly. “So why do you think they did that? To satisfy their own intellectual curiosity? You think that’s why they’re interested in this island?”
“Nobody required you to embrace a monster!” Mac said.
“And no one told your people to kill the man who could have kept us decades ahead of the Russians. I had my plan for him. I had my orders.”
“I think you’ve just lost your right to say another word, Nora.”
“What?”
“With that last line,” Mac answered, just as Alan hawked a big one—hawked it an impressive seventeen feet, onto the dead man’s face.
“Will you stop that?” Mac called out to Alan, then turned his wrath again toward Nora. “The kindest thing I can say about this beast on the ground is that Alan should not be wasting his good American spit on its grave. And that’s the kindest thing.”
“Not when the future of us all is in the balance!” said the Plum Island scientist. “And if I may say so, we’re talking about a resource that can be used to speed up rates and modes of evolution—for crop plants or against crop diseases or anything else—into any direction anyone may desire. And if I may also say so, this has too many tempting possibilities for weaponization. It all comes down to, do unto the other fella as he would do unto you and do it first. So, if it ever comes down between them and us—”
“Stop right there,” Yanni said, and Nesbitt stopped. “Not that I don’t trust you, Nora, but can you give me your gun?”
“Why?”
“First, because I don’t trust you. Second, ’cause it looks to me like you plan to keep on talking.”
That the best brains in Russia would soon be focused on Dmitri Chernov’s problem offered only some small consolation. He had been around long enough to know what governments do. He expected that those making the actual decisions would listen for a little while to what Admiral Isakov, theoretician Keldysh, and the other scientists had to say. They would immediately examine the problem, find the plan that must inevitably work out worst—then do it.
Knowing that his presence on the island was no longer a secret, he risked a phone call to his contact on the isle of Kos, who then relayed the message through Cyprus. Even if the line to Kos was intercepted and MacCready’s side already knew the code words, there was nothing in it that the Yanks did not already know or that he was really afraid to let be known. Now that the Americans seemed to have a very good idea what he and the others were seeking at Santorini, Dmitri supposed that they would try everything short of war to thwart Russia and grab the golden key for themselves. He thought about Alexi, and about the creatures that killed him, and—That woman, Yanni. What was she doing? And how? Talking with them?
“We’ll know fairly soon,” he told himself. According to Kos, ships were coming. The nearest were already known to him by name. They were two thoroughly refurbished heavy cruisers, upgraded with radar-guided guns, and they were making their way from Croatia, down along Italy’s east coast. He thought about Alexi, and the creatures that killed him, and he wanted the Kraken dead.
Along the path from Fira to the towering rocks of Monolithos, he had visited a farmer who was said to have filtered samples of the vent water, and planted the solid, scarlet residue among some grapevines. In the very same way that the strange fertilizer had changed other farms, the vines now looked different from any Dmitri had seen before. They grew quickly into ground-hugging spirals, and changes in their leaves also seemed more optimally adapted to conserving water on volcanic soil that tended to drain far too quickly to make plant-based agriculture practical. But now that the plants’ very expression of genes seemed somehow redirected, farmers began to think in terms of one day creating a flourishing wine industry on an island infamous for its scarcity of water. He thought of Alexi, and the creatures that killed him.
The changes Dmitri had seen in the spiral vines had occurred in no more than two generations of plants. The samples of leaves and stems, roots, and red-stained soil he collected were sure to excite even the maniacal Lysenko, but as the sun began to set behind him, he thought only of Alexi.
The arrival of the Russians was anticipated, and Mac had planned for it. Like a chess game, the path always zigged and zagged several steps ahead, based upon multiple (mostly predictable) adversarial moves.
The murder of an American asset by one of Mac’s own handpicked team members had rendered the path ahead exceptionally difficult to see. He had allowed himself no more than two minutes for the adrenaline to rush through and dissipate, then decided, If the road ahead divides in dark and dangerous woods, get off the path and make a new road.
From now on, no matter where they went on the island, there was little hope of actually remaining hidden from Dmitri or the reserv
es that were undoubtedly being sent to aid him. Russia’s paranoia would see to that. As Mac often reminded himself, the Russians had earned their paranoia the hard way. If pessimism could be harvested, he supposed the Soviet Union would be the world’s breadbasket.
As for what additional reserves Team America could expect, Nesbitt had remained angry and tight-lipped, as if to answer, “There are none.”
Mac had decreed, even if there might be no adequate hiding place, that they needed to break camp and move. This was one of only three points on which he and Nesbitt agreed: certainly they could not camp out in the Catalina, nor could they let the Greeks know about Kitano Hata. And just as certainly they could not take Hata with them. Even before the sun had set low enough to turn the lagoon gold, Hata was beginning to bloat, emitting dead man’s belches.
“The quarry’s been mostly abandoned since they built the Suez Canal,” Boulle said. “Bury him under the figs and it should be centuries before anyone sees him again.”
When they tamped down and raked Hata’s unmarked grave over with branches, they had another moment of strange revelation. The same quake that almost kept Bishop Marinatos from landing had brought down a small landslide from a quarry cliff, and along with it, kitchen utensils and flatware from long ago. McQueen ran up excitedly to Pierre Boulle and Alan Tse-lin. The two fossil hunters were crouched down and being assisted by Mac in a hurried last-minute attempt to protect the bonobo grave site by slathering on a shell of plaster mixed with dirt.
Aside from being made of bronze, the fork McQueen found would not have looked out of place in a modern kitchen drawer. The designs on a sliver from a terra-cotta plate immediately told a different story.
“How old is that stuff?” McQueen asked.
“Around here, they call this pottery and its people Minoan,” Boulle said. “Older than King Tut.”
“What happened to them?”
“Gone,” Mac said, and spread a last handful of brown plaster over the skull of Boulle’s “beautiful lady.”
Then another thought struck him. “Private, you wanna bet the owner of that fork you’re holding thought it would last forever? It, his whole town, the civilization of his children’s grandchildren’s children: people still think it will last forever—airplanes, skyscrapers, and roads. One day it’s all gone—gone to archaeology and paleontology, if there’s anyone to dig it up.”
“Gee, thanks, sir,” said the private. “Have any other cheery thoughts like that?”
“Depends,” Boulle answered for Mac. “What else did you dig out of the dirt?”
Mac looked up at a long-forgotten shard and guessed, “Man’s destiny?”
Boulle stood up and gently examined a broken plate McQueen had been holding. He looked beyond the bonobo grave and out to sea, with eyes that seemed suddenly very old. “Wish we had time to finish the excavation,” he lamented. “But that’s the bad thing about paleontology and archaeology: The present is always getting in the way of the past.”
5.33 Million b.c.
The Lost World of Mediterranean Canyon
Four Years after First Contact
Life treated the clan of Proud One’s daughter fairly well. At first they trekked north to the parched foothills at the mount of Santorini. A drought eventually turned them south along a string of oases that led to the mountains of Crete, where they settled in a deep valley. There they found a waterfall and seasonal forests, in a land that seemed to shift at whim between two personalities: torrential rains and desert. During the years following the expulsion from fertile marshlands, the monsters that had killed Seed’s mother did not pursue; they lived on only in nightmares, and in tribal injunctions against venturing south of Crete.
The clan’s first home was a shaded hillside standing above the valley floor, where they discovered mushroom-shaped trees capped with large, leafy umbrellas. The umbrella mosses provided shelter from the brutal night rains of fall and winter.
Each spring, the clan of Seed became a migratory animal. The Cretan waterfall that sustained them shrank to a trickle; the night rains stopped. The trees pulled into themselves and ceased producing fruit. North, at the quaking mount of Santorini, the rains came softly and only in summer, and Seed’s clan could eat freely of the beasts and plants at the foothills. The mountain provided only one oasis, but it was enough. Here, far from the reach of the cephalopods, they came upon a miracle of rare design, flowing from a cleft in a vertical rock face.
They made their seasonal encampment near the cleft, along a hot stream that flowed red. And they drank of the red water. And they ate of the plants that grew in it, and any beast that swam in it. And they were changed.
In distant futurity, even MacCready and Nesbitt could only make a guess at how the extremely rare microbe somehow smoothed out or sped up the process of evolution. Only technology far beyond their initial encounter with the strain would be able to reveal that this intensely symbiotic organism, once it became involved in genetic feedback with the afflicted, did indeed—in accordance with Mac and Nesbitt’s best guess—mimic the mathematical projection of probability curves pointing toward either beneficial or harmful change, and blocking (usually) the latter.
Much as MacCready could not possess knowledge of DNA’s structure—and even less so, the language with which to describe an infection that entered living tissue like an army of little bio-computers, reworking even sperm and ovum—the bonobos and the cephalopods had no real understanding of what was happening to them, and to every other organism that had come into contact with the red waters. And so it came to pass that with every rapidly evolving lineage along the Mediterranean canyon’s lakes and streams, the infection sooner or later went with them. It dwelt in the neural networks of the cephalopod canal builders. It sped the biological arms race that allowed small mollusks to flitter away like birds, rendering them able to escape invertebrate relatives that were filling the very same niches that had, on the continents above, been occupied by hyenas and serpents. The microbe traveled in the electrifying musculature of the elephantine snail. It ran deep within the giant’s mound-building prey and penetrated the genome of every newly evolved tree and beast of the canyon.
Through race memories and the inevitable clashes of ancestral cultures, from long-enduring myths that would provide a somewhat random record of prehistoric times, it could never be clear that a luxuriant marsh whose edge was often lined with tentacles lived on forever in apocalyptic tales. Few people of the mid-twentieth century—and least of all MacCready—would have believed that Bishop Marinatos’s dragons of Eden and Revelation had been rooted in a biological reality, or that an ancient fear of waters flowing red had equally real beginnings. Few of the Stone-throwers who ventured into the Nile canyon ever lived long enough to flee again south.
Still . . . life continued to treat Seed’s clan well despite the need to migrate with shifting rain patterns across the desert between Santorini and Crete.
One summer night, at the mount of Santorini’s red cleft, the rains did not come until very late and Seed observed the moon rising. She tried to reach out toward it, and remembered doing so when her clan lived high above the night clouds and the canyon floor. It had been a marvel to her, back then: how the moon passed over the tallest highland mountain without scraping it; from this she was reminded that hoping to touch the moon was a foolish endeavor.
The rains arrived unusually late the next night as well, and for several nights thereafter not at all. Thoughts of travel beyond the cleft, to the top of the mountain, began to gnaw at her. She nurtured a desire to go one day, for no better reason than merely to see what was up there. Maybe if she traveled high enough, she might even touch the moon.
After many a night in which the rains did not arrive until shortly before dawn, Seed waded early one evening across a shallow pool near the cleft, enjoying the water as it swirled around her legs. But most of all she enjoyed a certain apprehension and simultaneous giddiness at the realization that two males had joined her. Unlike th
e ancestral bonobos, this lineage preferred to take only one mate for a lifetime. She was nearing the time of choice, and there were many potential suitors.
Like their ancestors, these bonobos were a matriarchal society. A dozen of the clan’s leaders arrived at the pool and looked where Seed was looking, up at the stars.
“What are they?” a young female signed.
“Holes in the sky?” the star watcher guessed. Seed recalled looking up at the sun through an umbrella leaf, bitten through by tiny red slugs. This, she imagined, might be something like that: holes in a great black tent of leaves, holes in a firmament, with the light shining through.
The matriarchs turned their gaze higher, toward the mountaintop and the setting moon.
“Up there, go?” one of them said.
“What if we find more monsters?” signed another.
But the leaders had decided: “No. Stay, now. Some other day—we go up.”
It did not matter. The idea was planted. The increasingly curious species would inevitably explore, not because they were expelled from one place to another, but because they were beginning to seek.
On this night, it was as if the future had decided it was time to hold back the rains, and make a personal appearance. The bonobos were already infected, each to one degree or another. From the moment Seed feasted upon the contaminated fruits of a canyon oasis, and upon the red pond berries beneath the cleft, her new microscopic allies had begun their work, extending her life, sharpening her senses.
The child of Proud One stared up at the stars, spread like dust across the night. She never could know anything more about them, in what would prove to be nearly a century and a half of life. Tonight the stars of the Big Dipper were not yet drawn together into a pattern; they were still spread across the entire dome of the sky. For the child of Proud One, they burned against a backdrop of constellations no human eye would ever see.
