Vitals

by Greg Bear

  “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 forever. 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 at 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 effort
s. 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.

  16

  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.

  I watched this questing hand with somber fascination. They had guns. They had the look of sworn peace officers.

  They thought I might be dangerous.

  “Going somewhere?” the taller man asked, suddenly cracking a smile. To this TV cop wit, no good answer popped to mind. I stared back and lowered my suitcases.

  “I’m Detective Tom Finn, Seattle Police Department, Homicide. This is Detective Keeper. Are you Henry Cousins?”

  I nodded.

  “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Cousins.” Finn entered the room, gave it an innocent, hands-off once-over, saw nothing that interested him (though he did bend down beside the ripped-out TV cable and go tsk), and invited me to come downtown.

  Keeper helped me with my bags.

  17

  I’ve led a straight-and-narrow sort of life; I’ve never been arrested. No drugs, no shoplifting, no embezzlement. My worst sin has been bullheaded and egotistical stubbornness. Crime once passed me unseen in the night. I used to feel protected, even privileged. But in the last few days, I had dropped through an unseen trapdoor into a low place where nasty things happen all the time, and the police take an unwanted interest in your affairs.

  If I had had any doubts about that before, I had none now.

  Finn and Keeper drove me downtown and escorted me to an interrogation room at the end of a long, busy hall on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building. The room was eight feet by twelve, pale vanilla and tan, with a sturdy wooden table and four plastic chairs. No half-silvered peep mirror, only an empty corkboard and a small, barred window. They left me alone for a few minutes while they gathered their papers. I looked around, sad and jittery, getting a headache from no breakfast.

  I looked through the barred window onto a sunny stone plaza. It was dotted with courthouse workers on break, sitting cross-legged or with arms slung back on benches, reading newspapers and drinking Starbucks. Transients napped in rough but civic comfort on a miniscule triangle of lawn. The view through that window, minus the bars, was a postcard of peace and justice, if not equality, for all.

  Detective Finn came back first and began with a little catch-up. “The Kitsap County Coroner just ruled Dave Press’s death an accident. He drowned. Head injuries occurred postmortem.”

  Keeper entered with a can of Diet Pepsi and shoved it at me. No sugar, just caffeine to ramp up jitters. I had no idea what that meant: a little grilling, just between friends?

  “Dr. Mauritz shot and killed his wife before he joined you on the Sea Messenger.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “We found her last night,” Finn said. “The shipboard murders are a federal problem, but this one’s in our jurisdiction, and the FBI is giving us the reins. The questions keep piling up.”

  Keeper took a seat and hunched forward like a gargoyle in a Haggar suit.

  “Murder on a ship full of scientists doesn’t make sense,” Finn continued. “You were nowhere near the Sea Messenger when Mauritz started shooting. But do you have any idea why Press jumped overboard?”

  “He was acting strange throughout most of the dive,” I said.

  “What sort of strange?”

  “Trying to swear.
Erratic behavior. Finally, he got violent.”

  “Some sort of rapture of the deep? Both of you, maybe?”

  “Just him. I don’t know about rapture. I don’t think so.”

  Finn paced. “Some of the crew claimed they were poisoned and that explains their irrational behavior. Were you poisoned?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Is that a definite no?”

  “I felt fine. I got mad at Press when he started acting weird, fought him off when he tried to sink the sub . . . but that’s all.”

  “You hit him?”

  “He was landing the blows.” I pointed to the bandage on my temple. “I brought the DSV back to the surface after he conked out. I was scared out of my wits, but I felt fine. Really.”

  Finn kept staring. He rotated his hand, go on.

  “Anyway, Press was unconscious or in a funk. I thought he could be dead, but he seemed to recover once we surfaced. Then he—”

  “What did he say to you, Dr. Cousins?”

  I thought back. “He asked if Owen Montoya had ever phoned me. He seemed to think it was significant.”

  “Did Montoya talk to him, maybe tell him something before the ship left port?”

  “I doubt it. What difference would it make?”

  Finn smiled and tilted his head. “Montoya’s assistant said you exchanged angry words with Dr. Mauritz. You deny that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody else saw you talk with Mauritz until the second day of the voyage. Was that conversation friendly?”

  “We said hello.”

  “What do you know about a man named AY3000?” Finn lifted a page on his small stack. “That apparently is his legal name.”

  “He changed it from Jack Scholl,” I said. “He comes to conferences on nanotechnology and longevity research.”

  “Why did he change his name?”

  “A stunt. Philosophy, I guess. AY stands for Apollo Year 3000, dating from the first moon landing, approximating his hoped-for life span.”

  “I see,” Finn said.

  AY suffered from prostate cancer and had not looked good the last time I saw him. Still, he kept his hopes high.