Greg Bear: Vitals

‘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 megaplume, 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 sometimes 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 megaplume.

‘Nadia tells me you’re looking for new kinds of xenos,’ Dave said. ‘Ugly little spuds.’

‘Interesting little spuds,’ I said.

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 postdocs 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. ‘I’ll 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 colonics. She had hidden her boredom for a few years, excited to be married to a young tenure-track comer 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.

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 antiprogressive 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.