Greg Bear - Vitals

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, as always. Prince Hal, indeed.

I flew to Seattle.

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.’

‘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.’

‘Um.’

‘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, semicelebrity, beggar-scientist, mendicant, dreamer, fool. Prince Hal, my coat, my vehicle, for ever 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.