Bear, Greg - Vitals
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VITALS
by GREG BEAR (2002)
[VERSION 2.1 (Feb 20 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.]
Our bodies are made of cells. Mitochondria are the parts of our cells that generate the
energy-rich molecules we use every instant of our lives.
Billions of years ago, mitochondria were bacterial invaders, parasites of early cells. They
joined forces with their hosts; now they are essential.
"My mitochondria compose a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I
suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in
this way, I could be taken for a large, motile colony of bacteria, operating a complex system of
nuclei, micro tubules, and neurons, for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and
running, at the moment, a typewriter."
--Lewis Thomas, "Organelles as Organism," 1974
"We love Comrade Stalin more than Mommy and Daddy. May Comrade Stalin live to be one hundred!
No, two hundred! No, three hundred!"
--Song sung by Soviet children, early 1950s
1
MAY 28
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
The last time I talked to Rob, I was checking my luggage at Lindbergh Field to fly to Seattle
and meet with an angel. My cell-phone beeped and flashed Nemesis, code for my brother. We hadn't
spoken in months.
"Hal, has Dad called you?" Rob asked. He sounded wrung out.
"No," I said. Dad had died three years ago in a hospital in Ann Arbor. Cirrhosis of the
liver. He had choked on his own blood from burst veins in his esophagus.
"Somebody called and it sounded like Dad, I swear," Rob said.
Mom and Dad were divorced and Mom was living in Coral Gables, Florida, and would have nothing
to do with our father even when he was dying. Rob had stood the death watch in the hospice. Before
I could hop a plane to join them, Dad had died. He had stopped his pointless cursing -- dementia
brought on by liver failure -- and gone to sleep and Rob had left the room to get a cup of coffee.
When he had returned, he had found our father sitting up in bed, head slumped, his stub bled chin
and pale, slack chest soaked in blood like some hoary old vampire. Dad was dead even before the
nurses checked in. Sixty five years old.
It had been a sad, bad death, the end of a rough road on which Dad had deliberately hit every
bump. My brother had taken it hard.
"You're tired, Rob," I said. The airport, miles of brushed steel and thick green-edged glass,
swam like a fish tank around me.
"That's true," he replied. "Aren't you?"
I had been in Hong Kong just the night before. I hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. I can
never sleep in a plane over water. A haze of names and ridiculous meetings and a stomachache from
French airline food were all I had to show for my trip. I felt like a show dog coming home without
a ribbon.
"No," I lied. "I'm doing fine."
Rob mumbled on for a bit. Work was not going well. He was having trouble with his wife,
Lissa, a blond, leggy beauty more than a few steps out of our zone of looks and charm. He sounded
as tired as I was and even more confused. I think he was holding back about how bad things were. I
was his younger brother, after all. By two minutes.
"Enough about me," he said. "How goes the search?"
"It goes," I said.
"I wanted to let you know." Silence.
"What?" I hated mystery.
"Watch your back."
"What's that mean? Stop screwing around."
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Rob's laugh sounded forced. Then, "Hang in there, Prince Hal."
He called me that when he wanted to get a rise out of me. "Ha," I said.
"If Dad phones," he said, "tell him I love him."
He hung up. I stood in a corner of the high, sunny lobby with the green glass and blinding
white steel all around, then cursed and dialed the cell-phone number -- no go -- and all his other
numbers.
Lissa answered in Los Angeles. She told me Rob was in San Jose, she didn't have a local
number for him, why? I told her he sounded tired and she said he had been traveling a lot. They
hadn't been talking much lately. I spoke platitudes in response to her puzzlement and hung up.
Some people believe that twins are always close and always know what the other is thinking.
Not true, not true at all for Rob and me. We fought like wildcats from the time we were three
years old. We believed we were twins by accident only and we were in this long road race
separately, a fair fight to the finish, but not much fraternizing along the way.
Yet we had separately chosen the same career path, separately become interested in the same
aspects of medicine and biology, separately married great-looking women we could not keep. I may
not have liked my twin, but I sure as hell loved him.
Something was wrong. So why didn't I cancel my flight and make some attempt to find him, ask
him what I could do? I made excuses. Rob was just trying to psych me out. Prince Hal, indeed.
I flew to Seattle.
2
JUNE 18
THE JUAN DE FUCA TRENCH
We dropped in a long, slow spiral, wrapped in a tiny void as shiny and black as a bubble in
obsidian, through eight thousand feet of everlasting night. I had a lot of time to think.
Looking to my right, over my shoulder, I concentrated on the pilot's head bent under the glow
of a single tensor lamp. Dave Press rubbed his nose and pulled back into shadow. It was my third
dive this trip, but the first with Dave as pilot. We were traveling alone, just the two of us, no
observer or backup. Our deep submersible, Mary's Triumph, descended at a rate of forty-four feet
every minute, twenty seven hundred feet every hour.
Dave leaned forward again, whistling tonelessly.
I narrowed my vision to fuzzy slits and imagined Dave's head was all there was. Just a head,
my eyes, a thousand feet of ocean above, and more than a mile of ocean below. For a few seconds I
felt like little black Pip, tossed overboard from one of Ahab's whaleboats, dog-paddling for hours
on the tumbling rollers. Pip changed. He became no lively dancing cabin boy but a solemn,
prophetic little thing, thinly of this world, all because of a long swim surrounded by gulls and
sun. What was that compared to where we were, encased in a plastic bubble and dropped into the
world's biggest bottle of ink? Pip had had a bright, cheery vacation.
One hundred and eighty minutes to slip down into the trench, two hundred minutes to return,
between three hundred and four hundred minutes on the bottom, if all went well. A twelve hour
journey down to Hell and back, or Eden, depending on your perspective.
I was hoping for Eden. Prince Hal Cousins, scientist, supreme egotist, prime believer in the
material world, frightened of the dark and no friend of God, was about to pay a visit to the most
primitive ecologies, searching for the fountain of youth. I was on a pilgrimage back to where the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had taught us how to die. I planned to reclaim
that fruit and run some tests.
This blasphemy seemed fair exchange for so many millions of bright-eyed, sexy, and curious
generations getting old, wrinkled, and sick. Turning into ugly, demented vegetables.
Becoming God's potting soil.
A mile and a half below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, humans are unexpected guests in a
murky and ancient dream. Down there, nestled in the cracks of Earth's spreading skin, islands of
heat and poisonous stink poke up from shimmering chasms flocked with woolly white carpets of
bacteria.
These are the best places on Earth, some scientists believe, to look for Eden -- the
Beginning Place.
I zoned out. Napped for a few minutes, woke up with a start, clonked my head on the back of
the metal-mesh couch. I was not made for submarines. Dave tapped his finger on the control stick.
"Most folks are too excited to sleep down here," he said. "Time goes by pretty quickly."
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"Nervous reaction," I said. "I don't like tight places."
Dave grinned, then returned his attention to the displays. "Usually we see lots of things
outside -- pretty little magic lanterns of the deep. Kind of deserted today. Too bad."
I looked up at the glowing blue numbers on the dive chronometer. One hour? Two?
Just thirty minutes.
All sense of time had departed. We were still in the early stages of the dive. I sat up in
the couch and stretched my arms, bent at the elbows. My silvery thermal suit rustled.
I liked Dave. I like most people, at first. Dave was in his late thirties, reputedly a devout
Christian, short and plump, with stringy blond hair, large intelligent green eyes, thick lips, and
a quick, casual smile. He seemed a steady and responsible guy, good with machinery. He had once
driven DSVs for the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, part of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. Just a month ago, he had signed on with the Sea Messenger to
pilot Owen Montoya's personal research submarine, his pricey and elegant little toy, Mary's
Triumph.
It was cold outside the acrylic pressure sphere: two degrees above freezing. Chill had crept
into the cabin and the suits barely kept us comfortable. I avoided brushing my hands against the
two titanium frame beams that passed aft through the sphere. They were covered with dew.
Dave grunted expressively and squirmed in his seat, not embarrassed, just uncomfortable.
"Sorry."
My nostrils flared.
"Go ahead and let it out," Dave suggested. "It'll clear."
"I'm comfy," I said.
"Well, you'll have to put up with me. Rice and macaroni last night, lots of pepper."
"I eat nothing but fish before a dive. No gas." That sounded geeky and Boy Scout, but I was
in fact comfortable. Be prepared.
"I'm trying to lose weight," Dave confessed. "High-carb diet."
"Umm."
"A few more lights?" Dave asked. He toggled a couple of switches and three more tensor lamps
threw white spots around the sub's controls. He turned their focused glare away from two little
turquoise screens crammed with schematics and scrolling numbers: dutiful reports from fuel cells
and batteries, the onboard computer, transponder navigation, fore and aft thrusters. When we were
at depth, a third, larger overhead screen -- now blank -- could switch between video from digital
cameras and images from side-scanning sonar.
All we could hear from outside, through the sphere and the hull, was the ping of active
sonar.
Everything nominal, but I was still apprehensive. There was little risk in the DSV, so Jason,
the controller and dive master, had told me before my first plunge. Just follow the routine and
your training.
I wasn't afraid of pain or discomfort, but I anticipated a scale of life that put all risk in
a new perspective. Every new and possibly dangerous adventure could prematurely cap a span not of
fourscore and ten, but of a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years... So far, this was
just an itch, an attitude I was well aware needed adjustment. It hadn't yet reached the level of
phobia.
At twenty-nine years of age, I worked hard to avoid what Rob had once called the syndrome of
Precious Me. I could always rely on Rob to provide sharp insight. In truth, part of me might have
welcomed a little vacation. The void might be a pleasure compared to the anxious, egocentric
perplexity of my recent existence: divorced, cell-phone guru for radio talk shows, semi celebrity
beggar-scientist, mendicant, dreamer, fool. Prince Hal, my coat, my vehicle, forever and ever.
Spooky.
"You look philosophical," Dave said.
"I feel useless," I said.
"Me too, sometimes. This baby practically drives herself," Dave said. "You can help me do a
routine check in ten. Then we'll make our report to Mother."
"Sure." Anything.
I rolled and adjusted the couch to lie on my stomach, Cousteau style, closer to the chill
surface of the bubble. My breath misted the smooth plastic, a spot of fog in the surreal darkness.
Experimentally, I raised my digital Nikon, its lens hood wrapped in rubber tape to avoid
scratching the sphere. I looked at the camera screen, played with the exposure, experimented with
pixel density and file size.
"They also serve who sit and wait," Dave said, adjusting the sub's trim. Motors whined
starboard. "Sometimes we play chess."
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"I hate chess," I confessed. "Time is precious and should be put to constructive use."
"Nadia warned me."
Dave grinned.
Nadia Evans, the number one sub driver on the Sea Messenger, was sick in her bunk topside. A
rich, creamy pudding past its prime had made eight of our crew very unhappy. Nadia had planned to
take me on this dive, but a deep submersible, lacking a toilet, is no place for the shits.
Best to keep focused on where we were going and what we might see. Dropping into Planet
Extreme. Eternal darkness and incredible pressure.
Still more than a mile below, at irregular intervals along the network of spreading trenches,
massive underwater geysers spewed roiling plumes of superheated water, toxic sulfides, and deep-
crust bacteria. Minerals in the flow accreted to erect chimneys around the geysers. Some of the
chimneys stood as tall as industrial smokestacks and grew broad horizontal fans like tree fungi.
Sulfurous outflow fizzed through cracks and pores everywhere. Magma squeezed out of deeper cracks
like black, grainy toothpaste, snapping like reptiles in combat. Close by, at depth, through the
hydrophone, you could hear the vents hissing and roaring. Wags had named one huge chimney
"Godzilla."
Gargantuan Earth music.
Down there, the water is saturated with the deep's chemical equivalent of sunshine. Hydrogen
sulfide soup feeds specialized bacteria, which in turn prop up an isolated food chain. Tube worms
crest old lava flows and gather around the vents in sociable forests, like long, skinny, red-
tipped penises. Royal little white crabs mosey through the waving stalks as if they have all the
time there is. Long, lazy, rattail fish -- deep-water vultures with big curious eyes -- pause like
question marks, waiting for death to drop their small ration of dinner.
I shivered. DSV pilots believe the cold keeps you alert. Dave coughed and took a swig of
bottled water, then returned the bottle to the cup holder. Nadia had been much more entertaining:
witty, pretty, and eager to explain her deep-diving baby.
The little sphere, just over two meters wide, filled with reassuring sounds: the ping of a
directional signal every few seconds, hollow little beeps from transponders dropped months before,
another ping from sonar, steady ticking, the sigh and whine of pumps and click of solenoids.
I rolled on my butt and bent the couch back into a seat, then doubled over to pull up my
slippers -- thick knitted booties, actually, with rubber soles. I stared between my knees at a
shimmer of air trapped in the sub's frame below the sphere. The silvery wobble had been many times
larger just forty minutes ago.
Two thousand feet. The outside pressure was now sixty atmospheres, 840 pounds per square
inch. Nadia had described it as a Really Large Guy pogo-sticking all over your head. Inside, at
one atmosphere, we could not feel it. The sphere distributed the pressure evenly. No bends, no
tremors, no rapture of the deep. Shirtsleeve travel, almost. We wouldn't even need to spend time
in a chamber when we surfaced.
The sub carried a load of steel bars, ballast to be dropped when we wanted to switch to near-
neutral buoyancy. Dave would turn on the altimeter at about a hundred feet above the seafloor and
let the ingots rip like little bombs. Sometimes the DSV held on to a few, slaying a little heavy,
and pointed her thrusters down to hover like a helicopter. A little lighter, and she could
"float," aiming the thrusters up to avoid raising silt.
An hour into the dive. Twenty-seven hundred feet. The sphere was getting colder and time was
definitely speeding up.
"When did you meet Owen Montoya?" Dave asked.
"A few weeks ago," I said. Montoya was a fascinating topic around the office water cooler:
the elusive rich guy who employed everyone on the Sea Messenger.
"He must approve of what you're doing," Dave said.
"How's that?"
"Dr. Mauritz used to have top pick for these dives." Stanley Mauritz was the Sea Messengers
chief oceanographer and director of research, on loan to the ship from the Scripps Institution in
exchange for Montoya's support of student research. "But you've had three in a row."
"Yeah," I said. The researchers on board Sea Messenger fought for equipment and resources
just like scientists everywhere.
"Nadia's trying to keep the peace," Dave added after a pause.
"Sorry to upset the balance."
Dave shrugged. "I stay out of it. Let's do our check."
We used our separate turquoise monitor screens to examine different shipboard systems,
focusing first on air. Mary's Triumph maintained an oxygen-enriched atmosphere at near sea-level
pressure.
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Dave raised his mike and clicked the switch. "Mary to Messenger. We're at one thousand
meters. Systems check okay."
The hollow voice of Jason, our shipboard dive master and controller, came back a few seconds
later. "Read you, Mary."
"What's going on between Nadia and Max?" Dave asked with a leer. Max was science liaison for
the ship. Rumors of their involvement had circulated for weeks. "Any hot and heavy?"
The question seemed out of character. "Nothing, at the moment," I guessed. "She's probably
spending most of her time in the head."
"What's Max got that I haven't?" Dave asked, and winked.
Max was twenty-seven years old, self-confident without being cocky, handsome, but smart and
pleasant to talk to. His specialty was Vestimentiferans -- tube worms. Dave was not in Max's
league, and neither was I, if it came right down to it.
"Enough about women," I suggested with a sour look. "I'm just getting over a divorce."
"Poor baby," Dave said. "No women, no chess. That leaves philosophy. Explain Kant or Hegel,
choose one?"
I chuckled.
"We've got lots of time," Dave said, and put on a little boy's puzzled frown. "It's either
read or play chess or get to know each other." He fiddled with the touch pad mounted at the end of
the couch arm and once again punched up the atmosphere readout. "Damn, is the pressure changing?
It shouldn't be. My gut's giving me fits?"
I cringed.
Four thousand feet.
"I met Owen just once," Dave said. Everyone in Montoya's employ called him Owen, or Owen
Montoya, never Mr. Montoya, and never "sir." "His people trust me to keep his expensive toy from
getting snagged, but when he shook my hand, he didn't know who I was. He must meet a lot of
people."
I nodded. Montoya seemed to enjoy his privacy. Best not to divulge too much to the hired
help. Still, I felt a small tug of pride that I had spent so many hours with this powerful and
wealthy man, and had been told we were simpatico.
I had met all sorts of people -- rich and super rich -- on my quest for funding. Montoya had
been the best of a mixed lot, and the only one who outright owned an oceanographic research ship
and DSV.
He was a whole lot more likable than Song Wu, the sixty-year-old Chinese nightclub owner who
had insisted I try his favorite youth enhancer -- serpent-bladder extract diluted in rice wine.
That had been an experience, sitting in his living room, six hundred feet above Hong Kong,
watching Mr. Song squeeze a little sac of the oily green liquid into a glass while I tried to keep
up a conversation with his sixteen-year-old Thai mistress. Mr. Song refused to spend a single
square-holed penny until I gave snake gall a fair shake.
All the while, a withered feng shui expert in a gray-silk suit had danced around the huge
apartment, whirling a cheap gold-painted cardboard dial over the marble floor tiles, babbling
about balancing the forces of past and future.
"You know Owen personally?" Dave asked.
"Not well."
Mary's Triumph leveled and alerted us with a tiny chime. Dave adjusted the trim again. The
sub's thermometers had detected a temperature rise. The sea map display clicked on between us and
a small red X appeared, marking where we had encountered warmer water.
We had just crossed into a mega plume -- a vast mushroom of mineral rich flow rising over a
vent field.
"That could be from the new one, Field 37," I guessed. I looked at the printed terrain map
pasted between us, dotted with known vent fields in green, and six red vents roaring away along a
recent eruption.
"Maybe," Dave said. "Could also be Field 35. We're four klicks east of both, and they swivel
this time of year."
The world's seawater -- all the world's seawater -- is processed through underwater volcanic
vents every few million years. The ocean seeps through the sediment and porous rock, hitting magma
some times only a few miles below the crust. Deep-ocean geysers spew back the water superheated to
the temperature of live steam -- well over 350 degrees Celsius. But at pressures in excess of 250
atmospheres, the water stays liquid and rises like smoke from a stack, cooling and spreading, warm
and rich enough to be detected this high above the field: a mega plume.
"Nadia tells me you're looking for new kinds of xenos," Dave said. "Ugly little spuds."
"Interesting little spuds," I said.
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Nearly every dive in these areas found xenos -- xenophyophores, the single-celled tramps of
the seafloor, some as big as a clenched fist. Xenos are distantly related to amoebae and resemble
scummy bath sponges. They use sand as ballast, glue their waste into supports, and coat their
slimy exteriors with debris as they roll around on the ocean floor. Their convoluted, tube-riddled
bodies hide many passengers: isopods, bacteria, predatory mollusks. True monsters, but wonderful
and harmless. "What's so interesting about xenos?" Dave asked.
"I have a snapshot taken by some post-docs two months ago. They found what they called 'sea
daisy fields' north of the new vents, but they didn't have a good fix on the position because one
of the transponders had stopped sending. I examined a frozen specimen two months ago at the
University of Washington, but it was all busted up, membranes ruptured. A specimen in formalin was
nothing but gray pudding."
Dave had already gotten a briefing on our dive. This was telling him nothing more than what
he knew already. "Yuck," he said. "So what's it to Owen?"
"Right." I smiled.
Dave lifted his eyebrows. "Just mind my own business and drive," he said, and rubbed his
finger under his nose. "But I do have a master's in ocean biochemistry. Maybe I can render some
expert assistance when the time comes."
"I hope so," I said.
"Is Owen interested in immortality? That's what I've heard." Dave said.
"I really don't know." I closed my eyes and pretended to nap. Dave didn't disturb me when he
ran his check at five thousand feet. I don't think he liked my attitude any more than I liked his.
Owen Montoya wanted to be a wallflower at the Reaper's ball.
That's what had brought us together.
Set the Wayback machine, Sherman.
Three weeks before, a slender little blue helicopter, bright as a fresh bug, had buzzed me
over Puget Sound to Anson Island. It was six o'clock on a Northwestern spring evening and the
weather was gloriously lovely. I felt more alive than I had in a year, since the divorce from
Julia.
I am normally a nervous flier, especially in choppers, but the young, square-jawed pilot, his
eyes wrapped in metallic blue shades, was reassuringly deft, and I was too busy enjoying the view.
"I was wearing my powder-blue suit," Philip Marlowe tells us in The Big Sleep, "with dark
blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks
on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it... I was calling on
four million dollars!"
I wore a black-cotton sports jacket and pants, wrinkled white cotton dress shirt with black
tie, high black socks, shiny black brogues that much was the same and I was calling on forty
billion dollars.
Owen Montoya could have bought and sold the Sternwoods a hundred times over, even accounting
for inflation.
I had worn that same outfit when visiting other angels, financial backers visionary enough or
cracked enough -- sometimes I had a hard time telling which -- to spend small fortunes on a
microbiological Ponce de Leon. I hadn't done too badly; my fancy footwork had kept me funded for
the past five years.
I was no fraud. If the angels were smart, they sensed that I almost had the goods. If they
were stupid -- like Mr. Song -- they bought futures in snake-bladder extract.
I was very close. Just a little cash and a lot of very hard work, and I could jump the wall
around Eden and find the ultimate treasure: vim and vigor for a thousand or ten thousand years,
maybe longer, barring accidents or geological upheaval.
It was an amazing thought, and it never failed to give me chills.
The chopper performed a smooth bank to the north, and we flew over Blakely Point on
Bainbridge Island. East of our flight path, midway between Bainbridge and Seattle, a cruise ship
posed like a serene and well-fed lady on the fine ripples of the blue sea, her bow nosing into a
bank of golden fog. Passengers gathered on a glassed-in observation deck below the soaring bridge,
swam in three sparkling silver pools, spun around an open-air dance floor amidships. The kind of
vacation Julia loved. At the end, she had started going on vacations without me.
Julia had ultimately found my talk about as exciting as a course in colonies. She had hidden
her boredom for a few years, excited to be married to a young tenure-track corner at Stanford, a
guy who regularly published little letters in Nature and longer discursions in The Journal of Age
Research. But the gap in our minds, our educations, eventually wore her down. She complained she
could not -- Enough of that shit. No way to spend eternity, moping over the past.
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Two white-and-green car ferries plied the waters with more purpose and energy, their wakes
crisscrossed by sailboats, catamarans, and cabin cruisers. Rich and powerful sailors everywhere,
but how many had heard of me? How many would even care to listen to my ideas? Not many. They were
like sheep running toward the slaughter chute, happily shaking their woolly heads, baa, baa.
I gritted my teeth and tried to enjoy the sunset doing a King Midas on the sound.
Thirty minutes out of Seattle, the chopper dropped a few hundred feet to circle a medium-
sized island, lightly dotted with big, old frame houses. We rounded a thinly wooded point to hover
above a wide, deep cove. I squinted to riddle the mystery of a square, flat-topped floating object
anchored a few hundred feet from the shingle-and-sand beach. Not a houseboat... The golden glare
off its white deck dimmed as we circled, and I made out a landing circle. It was a helipad,
mounted high above the water on immense pontoons.
"It's a hundred feet on each side," the pilot told me, smiling with impersonal pride.
"Equipped with refueling tanks, an automated weather station, and a repair shed. Impressive, isn't
it? The island association refused Owen permission to put a landing field on his property." He
winked at such anti-progressive attitudes. "Owen floated one instead."
I clenched my fists, but the pilot expertly, and with barely a judder, brought the little
dragonfly down in the precise center of the landing circle. He waved to an attendant and switched
off the engine. The blades slowed with a disappointed trill as two men in gray overalls clamped
the rails to the deck.
The pilot released the passenger-side door and pointed to the edge of the pad. "Elevator and
stairs over there. I'll wait," and he smiled as if I were the most important man in the world.
Next to his boss, of course.
As I walked toward the stairs, a breeze pricked the hair on my arms through my sleeves. Over
my shoulder, I saw the pad crew, hooding the craft against salt spray.
Walking along the floating bridge to the beach, I had my first clear view of the house.
Montoya's mansion faced the cove with a thirty foot-high window-wall. Six Dale Chihuly chandeliers
hung behind the tinted glass, spaced evenly across the lobby like frozen purple-and-blue
fireworks.
I had not spotted the house on the chopper's approach, and now I understood why -- the top
was covered with patches of low forest, indistinguishable from much of the rest of the windswept
island.
Betty Shun, Montoya's personal assistant, walked across the beach as I reached the end of the
bridge. About my age, give or take a couple of summers, she stood five and a half feet high. She
had a pert, sensual, but not very pretty face capped by a mushroom of thick black hair. Her body
was her prime asset and she knew it. A clinging black shift revealed many attractions, sculpted by
much working out and, judging from the adipose structure of her round face, dietary determination.
I sussed a fellow traveler, ready to grab life, shake it, and ask a few hard questions.
"Dr. Henry Cousins, I presume?" Shun asked with a lovely lilt.
"Hal," I corrected.
"Hal. Welcome to Anson Island."
The wall of glass and the mansion that lay hidden behind it bespoke a tasteful elegance that
cared little for outward show. Montoya was no Trump or Vegas kingpin. Only from the cove did you
know that a rich and powerful man spent time here.
"Last week Owen hosted Gus Beck," Shun told me as we made the beachfront walk. "And Philip
Castler the week before. He didn't like what they had to say."
"Really? I'm shocked."
Shun smiled. "So many wise asses in this business," she said. "Be nice." I could sense her
intelligence, competitive and fierce, like heat. I idled a stray masculine thought about conquest,
then shut it off. Something about that face, that body. Shun, for all her charms, would be too
spirited to stay with any man for long. At least, any man worth less than a billion dollars.
"Gus was full of talk about uploading," she said. "You know, into silicon brains. I've never
been much persuaded by that, have you?"
"Not much," I agreed.
"Philip was brilliant but far too vague. And he kept asking about money. That's rude, and
unnecessary. If Owen's visionaries have their feet planted firmly on the Earth, money isn't a
problem."
That was something I had learned long ago when going forth, hat in hand, to visit the
Sternwoods of the world.
"Owen and Philip had a bit of an argument, I'm sorry to say. Mr. Castler went home red-faced
and empty-handed." She smiled cheerfully, as if tallying sports scores.
Montoya had made his money off paper clips, or the equivalent in the cybernetic age: TeraSpin
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memory drives for home appliances, smaller, faster, cheaper, and denser than any others. Ten years
ago he had been worth about a million dollars in stock -- a few thousand in cash -- and had lived
in a ratty old Wallingford house west of the University of Washington. Now he was one of the
richest men in a territory that on any financial map lay just a few degrees north of the Sultanate
of Brunei.
I had never met so rich an angel, and I wondered what Montoya would be like. The last picture
I had seen had been at least five years old. It is so easy to confuse the rich and the powerful
with gods. Both can make or break you at a whim. The main difference is that our modern gods like
to be called by their first names.
Shun reached up and straightened my collar as the tall glass doors slid aside. An odor of
anise and crème de menthe filled the moist evening air.
"Almost there." Dave shook my shoulder and waved his hand at the pinging depth gauge, then
switched on the bottom-scan sonar. We were about a hundred feet above the seafloor. A sound-etched
picture of the terrain danced in ghostly blue waves across the display. The screen showed a stack
of parallel lines between two walls of rock. The lines vaguely resembled a long rib cage.
"Is that a dead whale?" I asked, shifting right and reaching out to touch the LCD screen.
"I doubt it," Dave said. "We're coming down right over it. Let's take a look-see."
"Dead whales are cool," I said. "They're like gas stations in the desert. Propagules move
from corpse to corpse on the seafloor. Some get to the vents and set up shop for good."
"That's one theory," Dave allowed. "But I still don't think it's a whale."
He pulled a graduated lever and the DSV shuddered as we dropped most of our steel ballast.
"We'll try for ten pounds below neutral. 'Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.'" He pushed
compressed air into the ballast tanks until we reached neutral buoyancy. Then he aimed the
thrusters down and slowed our descent.
We hovered at about fifty feet, the sonar pinging insistently. He turned off the thrusters to
avoid raising a cloud of silt.
"Get that bottom light bar," he suggested.
I flipped the switch that turned on a bank of lights mounted directly below the pressure
sphere.
"I'm going to move some ballast forward." Dave pitched the nose down thirty degrees, giving
us a wide-angle view of the bottom, and propelled us forward in controlled "flight," much more
precise than weighted free fall. The DSV frame was equipped with a little railway system of steel
weights that could be shifted fore and aft, or port and starboard, to adjust trim. This saved the
sub from using thrusters, conserving power. The more power we kept in reserve, the longer we could
stay on the bottom.
Dave thrust his hand into the data-glove box, a plastic cage containing a wire-lined black
glove. With his left hand, he touched the instrument display and switched control of the lights to
the glove. He expertly wriggled and pinched and twisted his fingers. The lights burned through a
thin, whirling cloud of debris and flung brilliant white ovals on a small wooden fishing boat.
Not a whale after all.
"It's the Castle Rock II," he said with a dry chuckle. "An old wreck." The boat's cabin
thrust upright, intact after its long drop through the night, but the windows yawned broken and
black like empty eye sockets. The crushed and splintered deck and hull showed the boat's wooden
ribs. "I thought I recognized it, but it's been a couple of years. Field Number 37 should be a few
hundred meters north, if we follow this shallow canyon. A little current today, but it seems to be
on our side."
I looked over the shattered hulk, lost in cold and perpetual dark, and wondered about the
weather above. Would our recovery go smoothly? Last trip, we had spent three hours in foaming,
choppy sea, our beacons flashing, before being hauled aboard the Sea Messenger.
All around us, the seafloor was covered with broken sheets of lava like lost pieces of a
giant's puzzle. The canyon walls, no more than fifty feet to either side, were not visible in the
murk. The side-scanning sonar revealed that we were surrounded by what looked like columns in an
ancient temple. Once, a lake of magma had pooled in the canyon and crusted over. Splits in the cap
had allowed seawater to seep through and solidify the columns. The lava beneath the crust had then
drained. As the molten basalt retreated, the sea had crushed the cap. Only the columns remained.
Dave pushed Mary's Triumph backward with a few spurts of the thrusters. I could make out the
fishing boat's name, just as Dave remembered it, painted in a broken arc on the smashed stern.
"Let's go east," Dave said. "And up a bit. The boat dragged a few lines behind her when she
went down."
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We met in the mansion's Great Room, as Betty Shun described it, almost sixty feet long and
thirty feet wide. This was the room that smelled of anise and crème de menthe. Skylights hidden in
the forest above dropped the day's last filtered green light on a broad mahogany desk covered with
magazines, newspapers, and a small laptop computer. Couches upholstered in rich yellow fabric
awaited our attentions, like the laps of generous houris. The furniture floated on a velvety-
smooth mauve carpet accented by white moons and antique yellow suns.
Betty Shun introduced us and gave Montoya a packet she had printed out a few minutes earlier.
Then she left, wagging her finger and saying, with a smile, "You boys be good."
Montoya held out his hand. I gripped it and judged it, which is always unfair and completely
natural: skin moist, pressure light. A polite handshake. He was good-looking in a rugged way, with
a short, pushed-up nose and probing black eyes. His cheeks had been pocked by youthful acne and a
thin black nubbin of beard adorned his chin. His smile was quick but shy. His clothes fit loose
but well, and his sandals were old friends, worn and comfortable. Montoya would not have impressed
anyone had they met him on a street corner.
He invited me to sit at a long, ornate brass and maple bar.
"Welcome to the Fortress of Solitude," he said. "I'm the butler. Betty is really Supergirl.
Coffee now, wine with dinner at eight, Madeira for dessert, and late-night chat, if you'd care to
stay." He went behind the bar. "What's your jolt?"
"Latte," I said. "Please."
Montoya had sold TeraSpin three years earlier and spent most of his time serving on the
boards of charities. He had given grants and funded scholarships for more than sixty universities
around the world.
He stood before the professional espresso machine and hummed the theme from The Empire
Strikes Back as the valve roared and spat. Having my milk steamed by one of the world's wealthiest
men was intriguing. I thought there was a touch of ennui in his eyes, but it's easy to overanalyze
the rich. Maybe he looked that way because he had been disappointed so often.
"Did Betty tell you about Gus and Phil?" Montoya asked as he poured foam and hot milk from
the small steel pitcher.
"She did," I said.
Being around Gus Beck made me nervous. He was twitchy and far too brilliant. I never knew
when he might erupt in a fit of righteous technical criticism. Phil Castler was just the opposite -
- old-world gracious, fierce in debate but otherwise mild and self-effacing.
Montoya sprinkled cocoa over the peak, handed me my latte, and came around the bar carrying
another mug filled with plain black coffee. He sat on the stool next to mine. "And?"
I smiled. "Uploading into cyberspace, living in a computer or a robot brain, immortalized in
hardware, in silicon..."
"Makes you laugh?" Montoya asked, sipping.
"No. I just don't think it'll happen in time for me and thee."
"Tell me why," Montoya asked primly.
"The devil is in the details. The mind is the body. Gus is still back with Descartes in
believing they can be separated."
"Explain."
"Downloading the brain's patterns isn't enough. Everything you know and think is embedded in
your neurons, but your consciousness is in the cells of your entire body. Your mind is really a
complex of brains, with major contributions from the nervous and immune systems. The flesh is
intelligent, all flesh, and all of it contributes to your personality at one level or another.
Take the body away, and you become near-beer, bitter without the kick."
Montoya chuckled and looked away, rubbing one hand on his breast. "Why not capture the state
of each cell, each neuron, in a computer? A super MRI machine could do something like that,
right?"
"Each one of our cells is like a huge factory with thousands of machines and workers. What
the cells do, the decisions they make, how they live, contributes to what you think and how you
behave. We won't capture that much detail in any artificial memory in our lifetime. Even if we
could, one human being would probably fill all the computer capacity on Earth."
Montoya nodded. "What about Castler -- sending in nanomachines and cleaning up an aging
body?"
Easy questions so far. "It's a good scheme, quite possible, but how old are you, Owen?"
"Forty-five," he said.
"You'll be ninety before nanotech is proven and safe. Fifty years creeps up awfully fast."
I was playing down the prospect of Phil's success a little; thirty years was not unlikely.
"You're not just saying that to get me to fund you?"
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"I think Gus and Phil are brilliant. I encourage you to fund them both. But their ideas are
longer-term."
"They hate being told that," Montoya said. He looked at me squarely. "How are your theories
any more convincing?"
"I won't turn you into a corpsicle and hope somebody knows how to fix you in a hundred years.
I won't shave you down neuron by neuron, then upload you into some memory bank no one has even
begun to design. I can begin to increase our life span in the next few years, with minimal
intervention. If you and I want to stay young and healthy longer," I said, closing in, "our only
hope is medical maintenance, keeping our bodies vigorous. Specifically, mitochondrial chromosome
adjustment."
"Beck turned red when I told him I was meeting with you," Montoya said. "He said you were
insufferably arrogant. He said you were rehashing theories proven wrong back in the 1920s. I
thought about asking Betty to fetch him a spit-cup."
"There's a lot of passion there," I said. Gus and Phil were my rivals and might have called
me a fool once or twice, but they deserved a modicum of respect, even from a man as wealthy as
Montoya.
"I agree, they're way off track," Montoya said. "They'll never see the promised land. I've
read your papers. I like them. Tell me more."
"That's new," Dave said, swiveling the DSV and shining our upper bank of floods on a clump of
tube worms. Beyond the worms, the sub's lights shimmered through white clouds like old, chalky
paint: a bacteria-rich spring, small in diameter but productive.
"Let's see." He sidled the sub in a few meters. I pulled down my data glove, feeling the
plastic limiter box click into place, guided a sensor-laden mechanical arm, and pushed a probe
into the spring outflow.
"Shove it, shove that old rectal thermometer right into the Earth's fundament" Dave said with
another leer. He wasn't funny. "Eighty-six degrees Celsius," he said.
"Congratulations."
"I'm just the pilot," he said matter-of-factly. "You're the researcher. You'll get the
credit."
Montoya listened to my presentation for two hours. We broke for a quick dinner -- crab cakes
and stir-fried vegetables, served with an excellent Oregon pinot gris. We were studying each
other, and neither of us was willing to reveal too much. Looking a little glazed, he called a
break at 10:00 P.M. Betty Shun appeared to take me on a tour of the house while Montoya fielded
some phone calls.
The glass wall fronted the east wing. The west wing ended in a boat launch built into the
native rock of another cove. It easily doubled what had at first seemed merely huge. The floor
plan of Montoya Fortress of Solitude had to total a hundred thousand square feet -- two and a
third acres, topped by wind-winnowed forest, the air conditioner vents camouflaged as tree stumps
and the condensers as moss-covered boulders.
"Don't try to take this tour on your own, Dr. Cousins," Shun warned me on the clay floor of
an indoor tennis court. "Without a permission wand, you'll be locked in the first room you enter."
She held up a tiny plastic bar. "Security will have to come and save you." She looked at her
wristwatch. "Owen doesn't need a wand. The house recognizes him on sight. His steps, his voice--"
"His DNA?"
She smiled and tapped her watch. "Owen should be ready now. We are exactly 115 feet from him,
as the laser flies." She gave me a look that might have spoken volumes, but I was unable to open,
much less read, any of them. "Why were you let go from your last research job?"
"At Stanford?"
She nodded.
"Money ran out in my department. I was junior."
"Wasn't there some dispute?"
"A few of the faculty disagreed with my work. But my papers still get published, Ms. Shun. I
am still a reputable scientist."
"Owen is fond of oddball thinking, and even fonder of tweaking academic whiskers. But I hate
to see him disappointed, Dr. Cousins."
"Hal."
She shook her head politely; keep it business. "Owen needs something to commit to. Something
solid."
Betty Shun left me with Montoya on the west wing's biggest porch, overlooking the boat cove.
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