Vitals (2 page)

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.

"They also serve who sit and wait," Dave said, adjusting the sub's trim. Motors whined starboard. "Sometimes we play chess."

"I hate chess," I confessed. "Time is precious and should be put to constructive use."

"Nadia warned me?"

Dave grinned.

Nadia Evans, the number one sub driver on the Sea Messenger, was sick in her bunk topside. A rich, creamy pudding past its prime had made eight of our crew very unhappy. Nadia had planned to take me on this dive, but a deep submersible, lacking a toilet, is no place for the shits.

Best to keep focused on where we were going and what we might see. Dropping into Planet Extreme. Eternal darkness and incredible pressure.

Still more than a mile below, at irregular intervals along the network of spreading trenches, massive underwater geysers spewed roiling plumes of superheated water, toxic sulfides, and deep-crust bacteria. Minerals in the flow accreted to erect chimne},s around the geysers. Some of the chimneys stood as tall as industrial smokestacks and grew broad horizontal fans like tree fungi. Sulfurous outflow fizzed through cracks and pores everywhere. Magma squeezed out of deeper cracks like black, grainy toothpaste, snapping like reptiles in combat. Close by, at depth, through the hydrophone, you could hear the vents hissing and roaring. Wags had named one huge chimney "Godzilla?"

Gargantuan Earth music.

Down there, the water is saturated with the deep's chemical equivalent of sunshine. Hydrogen sulfide soup feeds specialized bacteria, which in turn prop up an isolated food chain. Tube worms crest old lava flows and gather around the vents in sociable forests, like long, skinny, red-tipped penises. Royal little white crabs mosey through the waving stalks as if they have all the time there is. Long, lazy, rattail fish--deep-water vultures with big curious eyes--pause like question marks, waiting for death to drop their small ration of dinner.

I shivered. DSV pilots believe the cold keeps you alert. Dave coughed and took a swig of bottled water, then returned the bottle to the cup holder. Nadia had been much more entertaining: witty, pretty, and eager to explain her deep-diving baby.

The little sphere, just over two meters wide, filled with reassuring sounds: the ping of a directional signal every few seconds, hollow little beeps from transponders dropped months before, another ping from sonar, steady ticking, the sigh and whine of pumps and click of solenoids.

I rolled on my butt and bent the couch back into a seat, then doubled over to pull up my slippers--thick knitted booties, actually, with rubber soles. I stared between my knees at a shimmer of air trapped in the sub's frame below the sphere. The silvery wobble had been many times larger just forty minutes ago.

Two thousand feet. The outside pressure was now sixty atmospheres, 840 pounds per square inch. Nadia had described it as a Really Large Guy pogo-sticking all over your head. Inside, at one atmosphere, we could not feel it. The sphere distributed the pressure evenly. No bends, no tremors, no rapture of the deep. Shirtsleeve travel, almost. We wouldn't even need to spend time in a chamber when we surfaced.

The sub carried a load of steel bars, ballast to be dropped when we wanted to switch to near-neutral buoyancy. Dave would turn on the altimeter at about a hundred feet above the seafloor and let the ingots

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rip like little bombs. Sometimes the DSV held on to a few, slaying a little heavy, and pointed her thrusters down to hover like a helicopter. A little lighter, and she could "float," aiming the thrusters up to avoid raising silt.

An hour into the dive. Twenty-seven hundred feet. The sphere was getting colder and time was definitely speeding up.

"When did you meet Owen Montoya?" Dave asked. "A few weeks ago," I said. Montoya was a fascinating topic around the office water cooler: the elusive rich guy who employed everyone on the Sea Messenger.

"He must approve of what you're doing," Dave said.

"How's that?" '

"Dr. Mauritz used to have top pick for these dives." Stanley Mauritz was the Sea Messengers chief oceanographer and director of research, on loan to the ship from the Scripps Institution in exchange for Montoya's support of student research. "But you've had three in a row."

"Yeah," I said. The researchers on board Sea Messenger fought for equipment and resources just like scientists everywhere.

"Nadia's trying to keep the peace," Dave added after a pause.

"Sorry to upset the balance."

Dave shrugged. "I stay out of it. Let's do our check."

We used our separate turquoise monitor screens to examine different shipboard systems, focusing first on air. Mary's Triumph maintained an oxygen-enriched atmosphere at near sea-level pressure.

Dave raised his mike and clicked the switch. "Mary to Messenger. We're at one thousand meters. Systems check okay." '

The hollow voice of Jason, our shipboard dive master and controller, came back a few seconds later. "Read you, Mary."

"What's going on between Nadia and Max?" Dave asked with a leer. Max was science liaison for the ship. Rumors of their involvement had circulated for weeks. "Any hot and heavy?"

The question seemed out of character. "Nothing, at the moment,"

I guessed. "She's probably spending most of her time in the head." "What's Max got that I haven't?" Dave asked, and winked.

Max was twenty-seven years old, self-confident without being cocky, handsome, but smart and pleasant to talk to. His specialty was Vestirnentiferans--tube worms. Dave was not in Max's league, and neither was I, if it came right down to it.

"Enough about women," I suggested with a sour look. "I'm just getting over a divorce."

"Poor baby," Dave said. "No women, no chess. That leaves philosophy. Explain Kant or Hegel, choose one?"

I chuckled.

"We've got lots of time," Dave said, and put on a little boy's puzzled frown. "It's either read or play chess or get to know each other?" He fiddled with the touch pad mounted at the end of the couch arm and once again punched up the atmosphere readout. "Damn, is the pressure changing? It shouldn't be. My gut's giving me fits?"

I cringed.

Four thousand feet.

"I met Owen just once," Dave said. Everyone in Montoya's employ called him Owen, or Owen Montoya, never Mr. Montoya, and never "sir." "His people trust me to keep his expensive toy from getting snagged, but when he shook my hand, he didn't know who I was. He must meet a lot of people."

1 nodded. Montoya seemed to enjoy his privacy. Best not to divulge too much to the hired help. Still, I felt a small tug of pride that I had spent so many hours with this powerful and wealthy man, and had been told we were simpatico.

I had net all sorts of people rich and super rich on my quest for '

funding. Montoya had been the best of a mixed lot, and the only one '

who outright owned an oceanographic research ship and DSV. ,.

He was a whole lot more likable than Song Wu, the sixty-year-old

Chinese nightclub owner who had insisted ! try his favorite youth enhancer--serpent-bladder extract diluted in rice wine. That had been an experience, sitting in his living room, six hundred feet above

Hong Kong, watching Mr. Song squeeze a little sac of the oily green liquid into a glass while I tried to keep up a conversation with his sixteen-year-old Thai mistress. Mr. Song refused to spend a single square-holed penny until I gave snake gail a fair shake."

All the while, a withered feng shui expert in a gray-silk suit had danced around the huge apartment, whirling a cheap gold-painted ,"

cardboard dial over the marble floor tiles, babbling about balancing the forces of past and future.

"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 term perature 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 mega plume a vast nushroom of mineral rich flow rising over a vent field.

"That could be from the new one, Field 37," ! 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 some times 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 mega plume

"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 post docs 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. 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 tine 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.

1 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 colonies. She had hidden her boredom for a few years, excited to be married to a young tenure-track corner 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.