Greg Bear - Vitals

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.

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.’