Vitals

Shun was more patient than I expected – not that I paid her much attention for the first seven hours – but Bloom began to fidget after two, pace after three, and made his excuses after three and a half and stepped out once more.

We had our work cut out for us. These celebrity living fossils were dying or dead, and all their secrets were fading with them. We had to move fast.

First, I performed triage and used the manipulator to gently push fragments and clearly defunct organisms back into a specially prepared transfer tank. I set Valerie to doing proteomics on a few cc’s of mush that I could not otherwise identify. That occupied her for several hours. She used the Applara Proteomizer – a machine the size of a large bread box, capable of doing whole protein analysis at the rate of five hundred amino acid components per minute.

I doubted these critters used more than a few thousand proteins. Your average protein is about a thousand amino acids long. In a few hours, we had a first-order list of the proteins in the mush, and some hints as to the kind of genes and byproducts we would find when we ran the nucleic acids through a sequencer.

While Valerie worked, I spent an hour just staring at the intact organisms in the main tank. Shun stood shoulder to shoulder with me during much of that time, but she wisely kept silent.

If I was a flaming and driven Spirit, she was an unobtrusive shade – or the sword-bearing arm of my angel, Montoya. I didn’t care. Nothing scared me more than failure.

The largest of our specimens, the frond, was a rubbery feather with many compressed ribs, its greenish mud color tinged with yellow. It was about twenty centimeters long, ten centimeters across at its widest point, and it looked like a leaf made of bubble wrap.

It was clearly colonial, fairly hardy in comparison to its companions, but, most important, it was still alive. My first guess was that it was made up of xenolike protists. Each saclike bump of its anatomy was an individual cell, anywhere from a few millimeters to a couple of centimeters in size.

Most modern cells are microscopic and need only one nucleus, the central computer and factory that contains the chromosomes. These cells were much larger than most modern cells. I supposed, in my intensity of speculation, that each of the components would have many nuclei, as xenos do, to speed creation and delivery of the necessary gene products – ribosomal RNA, proteins, etc. – across its comparatively far-flung cytoplasmic territory.

That would be familiar. That would be expected.

But when we carefully plucked a cell from the feather-fan colony, froze and micro-sliced it, then mounted it for the lab’s little electron microscope, Dan reported that there were no nuclei whatsoever. The cell was a blob of jelly with unbounded circular chromosomes floating in a thick but simple membrane, and that in itself would make it a variety of bacteria or archaea, neither of which sequester their DNA in nuclei.

But the cell was supported by a microtubule cytoskeleton, looking like wads of glassy fibers under the microscope. Bacteria and archaea do not have cytoskeletons.

The sampled cell was as big as the tip of my pinky. Inspection of another cell showed us that there were bacteria of many different kinds living loose inside, screwing their way through the cytoplasmic gel. Some of these bacterial interlopers were large – millimeters in size, visible to the naked eye. They reminded me of extremophiles I had seen profiled in Science a few months before, the kind that clustered on the butts of ugly red Pompeii worms in vent communities.

The frond, then, was neither plant nor precisely animal, nor did it belong to any of the remaining three kingdoms of modern biology. Each big cell in my colonial critter was like an old-fashioned Western mining town. The bacterial hitchhikers were free to come and go, but mostly they stayed. I imagined they were like mine workers recruited from the town’s ruffians, doing their jobs, but on occasion hog-tying the boss and his wife, threatening the engineers (my imagination was fevered by lack of blood sugar), and forcing the lucrative mine owners to pay out caskets of gold, and not a sheriff in sight.

Lots of free-range cooperation between characters who might at any moment pull out six-guns and start blazing away at each other, then turn around the next moment –

And share a drink at the bar.

I laughed. Valerie and Betty blinked at me, owlish and exhausted. I looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty in the evening. We hadn’t taken any breaks.

We were due.

The machines could run themselves. The tank would keep whatever was still alive happy. I looked at Valerie’s tentative list of proteins from the mush and pursed my lips as if coming in for a smooch.

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘Good?’ Betty asked.

‘Phenomenal,’ I said. ‘There are no nuclei and no mitochondria in these cells. They are very primitive.’

‘That’s good?’

‘It’s what I’ve been dreaming about for years,’ I said. ‘The bacteria in the cytoplasm are commensal, but not symbiotic – they help the cell respire and metabolize its food. But they’re a long jump behind becoming mitochondria. Maybe hundreds of millions of years…’

My arm flesh pricked up with goose bumps. ‘Jesus,’ I said, with all the reverence I am capable of. ‘We could be looking at ghosts from the Garden of Eden. And they haven’t taken the Fall.’

Dan had slumped over the Applara monitor. Valerie shook him awake and whispered something into his ear. He brightened.

‘Dinner?’ he murmured.

‘It’s on me,’ I said. I looked at Betty. ‘You should come, too. And Bloom, if he’s still around.’ I felt magnanimous. Hell, I was punchy with glee.

‘Tell Owen,’ Betty insisted.

I called Montoya on Betty’s cell-phone. He answered on the second buzz.

‘Betty, I’m taking a shit. What is it?’

‘This is Hal,’ I said. ‘It’s fantastic. I’ve got news. I think I have the final clues.’ I took a deep breath. When tired, both Rob and I had a tendency to commit unwitting rhyme. Shall we visit Dr Seuss?

‘Good news, I hope,’ Montoya said. ‘Because up until now it’s all been terrible.’

‘I’ve got a primitive cell. Primordial.’ Now I went out on a limb. ‘Of a kind we haven’t seen for three billion years. With the blueprints for bacterial domination still fresh and all the players fairly naive.’

‘Tell me what that means when it’s at home, Hal.’

‘I think I’ve got the list of RNA and protein products that bacteria use to take control of our genome.’

‘And what will you do with it?’ Montoya asked patiently.

‘Break some of the pathways, interrupt cell receptors, create new bacteria,’ I said, as if that were perfectly obvious. ‘Our cells won’t be told to shut down or age. They won’t lose their ability to self-repair. They’ll stay young.’

‘Fine. So you know how to fix us?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. Miracles would take years, not days. ‘Based on earlier work, I need to find the five or ten more proteins that are triggered by hades to shut down youthful cell maintenance. They could be on this list. I need to sequence the free-floating chromosomes – less than a few million base pairs. I want to do some Southern Blot, some PCR, run homology tests. I’m sure we still have the same genes, somewhere, highly conserved.’

‘Congratulations, Hal,’ Montoya said. He did not sound enthused, but as he had said, so far the news had been all bad. ‘Put Betty on.’

Coming down off my high, I handed the phone to Betty. She listened for a moment, then shut it and turned to me.

‘Owen insists that dinner is on him. And after dinner he wants to see you. He’s flying into Seattle.’

Dan and Valerie high-fived me. Betty was more subdued, though I wouldn’t learn why for five more hours.

Angels can be pipers, too.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dinner at Canlis was elegant but quiet. The somber gray-stained wood and white tablecloths framed a terrific view of Lake Union. I could seldom afford to eat so well, but I was nervous and excited all at once, and the best I could do was share a champagne toast with Valerie and Dan and pick at my plate.

We shook hands and parted at midnight. Betty Shun drove me in her Lexus to one of Montoya’s four Seattle residences, a penthouse apartment on the top floor of a complex less than five blocks away. I catnapped during the short drive.

Betty woke me when she set the emergency brake in the underground garage. I jerked up in the seat. She was staring at me. Her face glowed pale violet in the garage’s cruel fluorescence.

‘I have one question,’ she said. ‘Why do you want to live a thousand years?’

I cocked my head to one side to work a crick out of my neck. ‘More is better than not enough,’ I said.

‘Life is full of pain and disappointment. Why prolong the misery?’

‘I don’t believe life is all pain and misery,’ I said.

‘I’m a Catholic,’ Betty Shun said, still searching my face with her eyes. ‘I know the world is bad. My grandmother is a Buddhist. She knows the world is illusion. I want to live a healthy life, a useful life, but I don’t want to live for ever. Something better is in the wings.’

‘I’m more of a Shintoist,’ I said. ‘I believe the living world is all around us, thinking and working all the time, and that all living things want to understand what’s going on. We just don’t live long enough to find out. And when we die, that’s it. No second act.’

‘You will push out others not yet born,’ she said.

‘If the world is full of pain, I’ll be doing them a favor,’ I said testily. I wasn’t up to a sophomoric debate at midnight, not after a hard and enlightening day’s work.

Betty Shun blinked at me with her patented empty face and opened her door to get out.

Compared to the mansion on Anson Island, the penthouse was positively demure. Less than five thousand square feet, vaulted ceilings throughout, bedrooms suspended above a maple-floored workroom slash studio, with sixty feet of glassed-in sunporch currently fending off a spatter of early morning rain. It smelled of spearmint and tea roses.

Montoya met us on the sunporch and handed me a cup of very strong coffee.

‘Explain it again,’ he demanded as Betty left us. ‘I’ve got five funerals to go to in the next week, and I can’t keep it straight. I want to know where we’re headed.’ He bit off his words angrily but his face seemed calm. ‘I’m afraid of death, Dr Cousins. You showed me a possible escape hatch. And I took the bait.’

I sat stiff as ice on the lounge. I had no idea what he was driving at, but I did not like it.

‘Sometimes I sample every dish on the menu,’ he said. ‘I blow money just to taste all the choices. Understand?’

I regarded him through bleary eyes. ‘No,’ I said.

‘I’m concerned – or rather, let’s say some people are concerned for me. Concerned about your involvement. You’re a mystery, Hal.’

His expression was one of wing-plucking curiosity. I wiped my damp palms on my pant legs.

‘Betty told me about your tiff with Mauritz before you went aboard Sea Messenger. You had quite an argument.’

‘We just said hello.’

Montoya ignored me. ‘Murder is following you around like a cloud of smoke.’ He gestured vaguely at my head with a crooked finger. ‘Bloom recommended I not even meet with you again.’

I balled up my fists and stood. ‘I’ve been completely straight with you, Mr Montoya.’

‘Owen, please.’ He scrutinized my fists with that same wing-plucking curiosity, then looked up at my eyes like a little boy wondering idly what this strange little package, so tightly wrapped, might contain.

‘I don’t know why Betty would lie to you.’

‘I have to believe my people.’

‘There has to be more. I deserve an explanation.’

Montoya seemed to lose all interest. I might have been fading to invisibility right on his porch.

I’ve never taken rejection well. Lies can drive me to fury. But something was deeply wrong, and if I were Montoya, considering what had happened and what his people were saying, perhaps I would feel the same way. I needed to get out of this rich man’s playhouse and do some detective work of my own. But the meeting wasn’t over, not as far as I was concerned.

‘Our agreement specifies I complete substantial ongoing research if for any reason you decide to cut off funding.’ I congratulated myself on getting that out without a single garbled syllable.

Montoya tapped his watch. ‘Time to sleep.’

He walked off the porch and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Bloom and Shun waited on the edge of the studio. Bloom was bent over examining an impressive collection of glass paperweights in a tall cabinet. Shun stood back a step or two with arms folded like a guilty schoolgirl.

‘I’m being sacked,’ I told them. ‘I could give him what he wants, but he won’t listen to me. He listens to people who lie.’

Bloom gave a comradely nod, lips turned down. ‘Sorry to hear it. I’m to escort you downstairs.’

‘The bum’s rush,’ I said.

‘Whatever.’

Betty started to hurry off. I grabbed her arm and Bloom grabbed mine, forcefully. We stood there for a moment, a little triangle of tension, with Betty not meeting my eyes, and Bloom trying to compel me to meet his. His grip tightened.

‘Who told you to lie?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t understand you,’ Betty Shun said.

‘I’m just a Jonah, you can do anything you want to me?’ Spelling it out like that, saying it out loud to others, shot the bolt home with knee-shaking strength. My voice squeaked.

‘They found Dave Press floating in the water off Vancouver,’ Bloom said, as if discussing the weather. ‘They said his head was bashed in. Maybe he hit something, maybe someone hit him.’

Betty Shun shook loose with a glare and Bloom pulled me, not very gently, to the door.

Aurora Avenue was black and shiny with rain. I had neither a coat nor an umbrella. I stood for a moment, watching the traffic dart past, hiss after hiss of wet tires on either side of the segmented gray-concrete barricade that divided the highway. I wasn’t used to a cold summer night, and I hated it, hated the city. I felt sick to my stomach, what little rich Canlis food I had eaten balling up in my gut.

Shivering, I banged on the condo’s glass door and asked the liveried doorman to call a taxi. He looked up from the copy of Red Herring on his podium as if I were one of the thin parade of homeless drifting north from Seattle Center. He returned his attention to the magazine.

I walked in the rain, making the fishhook around the south end of Lake Union, past the Center for Wooden Boats. I walked from there in wet silence the quarter mile or so to the glowing front of the Genetron Building.

Maybe, I thought…Maybe they had impounded the lab. I wouldn’t be able to get in. But nobody stopped me. I strolled past the sleepy-eyed guard, who hoisted his mug of coffee in salute when I displayed my ID.

I keyed myself into the lab.

We wait until our body tells us what to think and feel. Even in the hall, I had smelled something sour and salty, but had consciously denied the awareness, the despair.

Seawater slicked the floor. The proteomizer and the Perkin Elmer had been removed. The computers were also gone. The walls of the big pressurized tank were no longer frosted with moisture. Someone had unplugged it, then pried up the top and stirred the contents with a mop handle. The mop lay on the floor.

The Vendobionts were ghostly mush.

I threw up in the lab sink.

My ghastly early morning was not over. I stumbled the few blocks to the Homeaway, feeling and probably looking like a dead man, and let myself into my room. The suite was bright and tidy and the bed was square and perfect, the pastel floral pattern on the coverlet like a hug of civility and kindness. The room smelled clean. The bathroom shone white and bright, all the miniature shampoos and soaps laid out in wicker baskets on little folded face cloths and the gleaming white toilet lid sealed with a paper wrapper that proclaimed it sanitary.

The hotel room welcomed me and believed in me. Safe.

I stared at my open suitcase, dirty clothes in a plastic bag beside it. Time to start all over again. I could not just give up. Too much was at stake. The Long Haul. I had my little list of proteins, pitifully small, but it could lead to a new beginning.

Automatically, I took the four cell-phones from my suitcase and laid them out on the bed. Scanned their displays. Maybe another angel had called – maybe Mr Song was tired of drinking snake gall.

I had two messages on my main Nokia. I dialed in to retrieve them. The first was from Rob. He sounded far away.

‘Hal, can’t say much now, got to go, just wanted to tell you how sorry I am. We should have pooled our efforts. I tried to keep you out of it, but now they’ll probably try to get us both. We’re too much alike. Peas in a pod. I’ve learned silt is after you, too.’

That’s what it sounded like, digitally garbled, and that’s how I wrote it down. Silt.

‘Talk to K, please. I gave him a package for you. He’s a poor fucked-up son of a bitch, but he knows more than anybody. The package explains a lot, if you’re smart. Keep your eyes open.’ He made a dry chuckling sound, like a sick dog’s cough. ‘What I don’t understand is with all of the pain, why you’re still sane. Did you armor your brain?’

He sucked in his breath, and said, for the first time in my memory, ‘We’re not exactly friends, but I really do love you, Prince Hal.’

I balled up the counterpane with my clenching fist and dragged the three pillows against the nightstand.

The system told me I had a second message.

It was Lissa.

‘Hal, please phone your mom, I don’t have her number handy, and anyway I just don’t have the heart. I’m so sorry. The police in New York say Rob is dead. He was shot in an alley. Oh, Jesus, Hal, I can’t think straight, can’t think what to do. I can’t think at all.’

Think, think, think, like drops of silver on the tiny speaker.

She left her number and hung up. The system asked if I wanted to save or delete.

I clacked the Nokia shut. Stood. Turned left, turned right, surveying the room, the neutrality, the order. Fumbled for my PalmSec to look up Mom’s number in Coral Gables. Sat down on the bed and let out all my breath until the room got black. I couldn’t bring myself to make the call. What would I tell her? Did I really believe it, any of it?

That thing I had not done, tracking down Rob and finding out what troubled him, had come back to haunt me. Flesh is the unbreakable bond.

I sucked in some air and stared at the clock radio on the bed stand. It was three thirty in the morning and as I sat there, I wept like a terrified child in that clean and safe room, the world’s most rotten lie.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I had nowhere else to go. I locked the room door, connected the chain, turned the dead bolt, pushed an armoire up against the door (after jerking out the TV), and drew the thick curtains on the window.

I have always had high hopes for humanity. I’ve never given in to despair, no matter how hard life became. I just thought I knew the way of things and how they could stand against you and your dreams.

Now I was swinging over to the opposite side. I had completely underestimated how bad things could get. I had a strong feeling they were going to get a lot worse.

I don’t remember falling asleep. I awoke half on the bed, half off, and took a shower. First I checked the water, smelling it, rubbing it between my fingers, then letting it run for several minutes to make sure it wouldn’t scald.

I thought my situation over pretty thoroughly and drew some grim conclusions. Someone was out to kill us, Rob and me. I was lucky to be alive. Rob…Not so lucky.

The brain will wander through a forest of explanations and sometimes climb the likeliest tree, however naked and ugly it is. I found my tree. Someone had poisoned the food on board the Sea Messenger – perhaps with hallucinogens. I had spent most of the voyage in my cabin and had missed my dose.

Dave Press had gotten his dose, that was clear. And Mauritz.

Mauritz had gone mad and shot up the ship.

Maybe you did speak to Mauritz. Maybe you did get your dose and forgot all about everything – including killing Dave Press.

I shook my head in a violent quiver of disgust and pounded the wall. I was still naked and wet from the shower, and my hand left a damp print on the striped wallpaper.

In the opposite room, someone pounded back and shouted for me to sober up.

I rubbed my finger inside the Mr Coffee’s water reservoir and sniffed it, then checked the Seattle’s Best packet for pinpricks. Nothing suspicious – nothing I could see – but I decided against having coffee, anyway.

Betty Shun was involved, somehow, lying to her boss about my conversation with Mauritz. But why lie? She didn’t seem the type, didn’t seem to dislike me.

That made me wonder if the connective tissue, the center of it all, was actually Montoya, the rich god of Puget Sound.

I looked at the clock radio. One in the afternoon.

I pulled the armoire back into place, replaced the television, wiped the sweat out of my armpits with a wet washcloth, and got dressed.

Packed my bags.

Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

I opened the door, bags in hand, just as two men in suits lined up outside. The shorter and older had his hand in the air, balled into a knocking fist. He drew back, eyebrows raised, nostrils flaring. The other looked at me in some surprise and reached inside his jacket.

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