Greg Bear - Vitals

‘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.

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.