Greg Bear: Vitals

The pilot released the passenger-side door and pointed to the edge of the pad. ‘Elevator and stairs over there. I’ll wait,’ and he smiled as if I were the most important man in the world. Next to his boss, of course.

As I walked toward the stairs, a breeze pricked the hair on my arms through my sleeves. Over my shoulder, I saw the pad crew, hooding the craft against salt spray.

Walking along the floating bridge to the beach, I had my first clear view of the house. Montoya’s mansion faced the cove with a thirty-foot-high window-wall. Six Dale Chihuly chandeliers hung behind the tinted glass, spaced evenly across the lobby like frozen purple and blue fireworks.

I had not spotted the house on the chopper’s approach, and now I understood why – the top was covered with patches of low forest, indistinguishable from much of the rest of the windswept island.

Betty Shun, Montoya’s personal assistant, walked across the beach as I reached the end of the bridge. About my age, give or take a couple of summers, she stood five and a half feet high. She had a pert, sensual, but not very pretty face capped by a mushroom of thick black hair. Her body was her prime asset and she knew it. A clinging black shift revealed many attractions, sculpted by much working out and, judging from the adipose structure of her round face, dietary determination. I sussed a fellow traveler, ready to grab life, shake it, and ask a few hard questions.

‘Dr Henry Cousins, I presume?’ Shun asked with a lovely lilt.

‘Hal,’ I corrected.

‘Hal. Welcome to Anson Island.’

The wall of glass and the mansion that lay hidden behind it bespoke a tasteful elegance that cared little for outward show. Montoya was no Trump or Vegas kingpin. Only from the cove did you know that a rich and powerful man spent time here.

‘Last week Owen hosted Gus Beck,’ Shun told me as we made the beachfront walk. ‘And Philip Castler the week before. He didn’t like what they had to say.’

‘Really? I’m shocked.’

Shun smiled. ‘So many wiseasses in this business,’ she said. ‘Be nice.’ I could sense her intelligence, competitive and fierce, like heat. I idled a stray masculine thought about conquest, then shut it off. Something about that face, that body. Shun, for all her charms, would be too spirited to stay with any man for long. At least, any man worth less than a billion dollars.

‘Gus was full of talk about uploading,’ she said. ‘You know, into silicon brains. I’ve never been much persuaded by that, have you?’

‘Not much,’ I agreed.

‘Philip was brilliant but far too vague. And he kept asking about money. That’s rude, and unnecessary. If Owen’s visionaries have their feet planted firmly on the Earth, money isn’t a problem.’

That was something I had learned long ago when going forth, hat in hand, to visit the Sternwoods of the world.

‘Owen and Philip had a bit of an argument, I’m sorry to say. Mr Castler went home red-faced and empty-handed.’ She smiled cheerfully, as if tallying sports scores.

Montoya had made his money off paper clips, or the equivalent in the cybernetic age: TeraSpin memory drives for home appliances, smaller, faster, cheaper, and denser than any others. Ten years ago he had been worth about a million dollars in stock – a few thousand in cash – and had lived in a ratty old Wallingford house west of the University of Washington. Now he was one of the richest men in a territory that on any financial map lay just a few degrees north of the Sultanate of Brunei.

I had never met so rich an angel, and I wondered what Montoya would be like. The last picture I had seen had been at least five years old. It is so easy to confuse the rich and the powerful with gods. Both can make or break you at a whim. The main difference is that our modern gods like to be called by their first names.

Shun reached up and straightened my collar as the tall glass doors slid aside. An odor of anise and crème de menthe filled the moist evening air.

‘Almost there.’ Dave shook my shoulder and waved his hand at the pinging depth gauge, then switched on the bottom-scan sonar. We were about a hundred feet above the seafloor. A sound-etched picture of the terrain danced in ghostly blue waves across the display. The screen showed a stack of parallel lines between two walls of rock. The lines vaguely resembled a long rib cage.

‘Is that a dead whale?’ I asked, shifting right and reaching out to touch the LCD screen.

‘I doubt it,’ Dave said. ‘We’re coming down right over it. Let’s take a look-see.’

‘Dead whales are cool,’ I said. ‘They’re like gas stations in the desert. Propagules move from corpse to corpse on the seafloor. Some get to the vents and set up shop for good.’

‘That’s one theory,’ Dave allowed. ‘But I still don’t think it’s a whale.’

He pulled a graduated lever and the DSV shuddered as we dropped most of our steel ballast. ‘We’ll try for ten pounds below neutral. “Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”‘ He pushed compressed air into the ballast tanks until we reached neutral buoyancy. Then he aimed the thrusters down and slowed our descent.

We hovered at about fifty feet, the sonar pinging insistently. He turned off the thrusters to avoid raising a cloud of silt.

‘Get that bottom light bar,’ he suggested.

I flipped the switch that turned on a bank of lights mounted directly below the pressure sphere.

‘I’m going to move some ballast forward.’ Dave pitched the nose down thirty degrees, giving us a wide-angle view of the bottom, and propelled us forward in controlled ‘flight,’ much more precise than weighted free fall. The DSV frame was equipped with a little railway system of steel weights that could be shifted fore and aft, or port and starboard, to adjust trim. This saved the sub from using thrusters, conserving power. The more power we kept in reserve, the longer we could stay on the bottom.

Dave thrust his hand into the data-glove box, a plastic cage containing a wire-lined black glove. With his left hand, he touched the instrument display and switched control of the lights to the glove. He expertly wriggled and pinched and twisted his fingers. The lights burned through a thin, whirling cloud of debris and flung brilliant white ovals on a small wooden fishing boat.

Not a whale after all.

‘It’s the Castle Rock II,’ he said with a dry chuckle. ‘An old wreck.’ The boat’s cabin thrust upright, intact after its long drop through the night, but the windows yawned broken and black like empty eye sockets. The crushed and splintered deck and hull showed the boat’s wooden ribs. ‘I thought I recognized it, but it’s been a couple of years. Field Number 37 should be a few hundred meters north, if we follow this shallow canyon. A little current today, but it seems to be on our side.’

I looked over the shattered hulk, lost in cold and perpetual dark, and wondered about the weather above. Would our recovery go smoothly? Last trip, we had spent three hours in foaming, choppy sea, our beacons flashing, before being hauled aboard the Sea Messenger.

All around us, the seafloor was covered with broken sheets of lava like lost pieces of a giant’s puzzle. The canyon walls, no more than fifty feet to either side, were not visible in the murk. The side-scanning sonar revealed that we were surrounded by what looked like columns in an ancient temple. Once, a lake of magma had pooled in the canyon and crusted over. Splits in the cap had allowed seawater to seep through and solidify the columns. The lava beneath the crust had then drained. As the molten basalt retreated, the sea had crushed the cap. Only the columns remained.