Greg Bear - Vitals

‘That could happen in a few months down here.’

‘It’s still pretty damned wonderful. One of the biggest fields we’ve found.’ Dave shook his head. ‘But you’re not interested in tube worms.’

‘Not right now.’

Tube worms are born empty, then suck bacteria into their hollow guts and rely on them to process sulfides and provide all of their nourishment. They live about two and a half centuries, three at the most. Impressive, but they still take their marching orders from germs.

I wanted evidence from earlier times, when the host was still putting up a good fight and the bacteria were still flying their true colors.

‘Under the plume,’ I reminded Dave. ‘Let’s go east about a hundred yards. The walls seem to open up, and there are already fewer vents.’

‘So there are,’ Dave said, comparing the image from our forward-looking sonar with a terrain map made several months ago – a map, incidentally, that did not show Field 37.

He rechecked our position, triangulating between the pulses from the mother ship and the transponders on the seafloor, then pushed the stick forward. Two, three, four knots; a gentle glide through the forest, over tube worms and around spewing, roaring geysers.

We passed near enough to look up at a flange thrusting almost six feet from the side of a tall chimney. The bottom of the flange was painted with rippling, silvery pools. Superheated mineral-rich water, refusing to mix with the cooler local fluid, gathered under the flange’s rough surface and reflected our lights.

‘I get nervous around these puppies,’ Dave said. ‘Had one almost topple over on me when I was working for NOAA. Just clipped it with a manipulator arm, then, wham.’

‘That’s not common, is it?’ I asked.

‘Not very,’ Dave admitted. ‘But once is enough. Well, shit – I mean, dog poop – on it.’

That just didn’t sound like reliable Dave the Christian man, the steady pilot of NOAA DSVs. I gave him a concerned look, but he was too busy to notice.

We made our way between the long, winding canyon walls, pushing along at half a knot. The vents were behind us now, but wooly bacterial clumps fell all around, flashing in the lights. Bacteria coalesced into floc, carpeting the seafloor or being blown up into the megaplume, where they could be carried for miles, then sprinkle down like fake snow from an old Walmart Christmas tree.

‘Looks promising,’ Dave said. His arm twitched. The little sub tilted, and he corrected. ‘Poop.’

‘Focus,’ I said. The view outside was getting interesting. A thin, viscous silt covered the floor of the canyon. Ideal.

A long, segmented ribbon like a thick blade of grass floated in our lights. ‘There.’ I pointed. Dave had turned the thrusters to reduce our forward motion, and the ribbon greeted us with a frantic, gelatinous shimmy. Then – before I could take charge of the data glove on my side and extend the manipulator arm – the organism tore itself into spinning bits of jelly.

I watched the bits get lost in the floc.

‘Sorry,’ Dave said.

I was furious, and with little reason. How else could we slow down? How else could we maneuver to pluck this singular and interesting anomaly off the seafloor?

‘Some sort of cnidarian?’ Dave asked.

‘I don’t think so. Let’s rise a bit and descend on the next one with the thrusters up.’

‘All right.’

‘Just focus, please.’

His lips moved silently. I shifted my eyes from his face to the illuminated field beneath us, then back to his face.

We rose twenty feet and drifted down the narrow canyon. The walls dropped off. We passed a lava column, lonely and rugged. Everything was covered with silt and floc. There was no motion except for the fall of bacterial snow; still and empty, lost in a billennial quiet.

My hand twitched inside the glove. The manipulator responded with a grinding outward push.

‘Careful,’ Dave said.

I wanted to tell him screw you, but he was right. Easy does it. Focus.

Dave let rip with a long and heartfelt fart.

‘Jesus, I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

His stink filled the sphere. It was lush and green, like a jungle, but gassy, like corpse-bloat. I had never really smelled a fart quite like it, to tell the truth, and I wanted to gag.

‘I don’t feel very good,’ Dave said. ‘This is nothing like rice and pepper.’

My tickle of anger became a nettlelike scourge. Little sparks of resentment and frustration came and went like stinging fireflies. I could not focus. I glared at Dave, and he shot me a screw-faced look from the corner of his eye that totally grounded me.

We both turned away. We had been homing in before a fight. We couldn’t get up and circle and bristle in the pressure sphere, so we had just glared – then agreed to back down.

Sweat soaked my armpits.

The sub crept over the sea bottom. I took control of the lower bar of lights and fanned them out.

Something big, round, and long came into view, lying horizontal on the seafloor like a toppled ship’s mast. ‘What in hell is that?’ I asked, startled.

Dave practically jerked control of the lights from me, then chuckled. ‘That is a condominium dropped from heaven. Take a look.’

Clams, boring worms, polychaetes studded the mystery shape like maggots on a corpse.

‘It’s a log,’ Dave said. ‘We’re not that far from some big forests, the Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island.’

‘Right.’

A few tens of meters east, we came across another log. A chain drooling rivers and ponds of orange rust tied the log to at least seven more, all thick with life, all broken loose from a raft who knows how many years or even decades ago. It takes a long time for deep scavengers to move in on such riches, but when they do, organisms gather from miles around to share the feast.

We churned our way east a few more yards, following the rust rivers until they faded into the silt. I lifted the bar and spread the lights again. Dave did not object.

Ahead, dozens of little blobs wobbled on the ooze and sediment like dust bunnies under a kid’s bed. I rotated the entire light bar, flooding the seafloor with daylight glow. ‘There they are,’ I said. Xenos by the dozens cast long shadows. The DSV glided over them, lazy as a well-fed manta. Our lights picked out hundreds more, then thousands, jiggling on the silt. I could barely make out the blurred tracks of their slow, rolling movement.

‘Got ‘em,’ Dave said. ‘What next?’ Everything was fine again. The smell was going away or I was able to ignore it.

I kept moving the lights. Dave gently precessed the submarine.

‘See those?’ I asked. ‘Those fans…and over there, gelatinous mounds – way over there.’ I drew back the manipulator and armed its claw tip with a revolving suck tube. ‘What do they look like to you?’

‘Sea daisies?’ Dave asked, as if eager to confirm my hopes.

‘Some would call them that. A little yellow tinge in the lights. But they are not siphonophores. They’re something else.’

I sucked my lips, afraid I might just be looking at loose debris, deluding myself. But they were not debris. They were real.

‘I’ve never seen anything like them,’ Dave admitted. ‘They look like little squashed balloons.’

‘Swim pillows,’ I said. ‘Bubble wrap.’

Dave’s eyes were perfectly normal for this situation: wide with speculative interest. ‘They aren’t jellyfish or corals. And no algae – not this far down.’

‘Rack your brain,’ I said, giddy. ‘Think back. Way back. Think living fossils.’

‘Ediacara?’ Dave asked, and immediately shook his head: couldn’t be.

‘You got it,’ I said. My hands trembled.