Vitals (38 page)

"Is that what I'm after?" I asked myself. "Forgiveness and a few bits of charity from the Master?"

Gloom descended, and I had no way of knowing whether it was genuine or a bacterially induced fake. "Travel to the stars. Fill the universe with human flesh. White human flesh. White-boy dreams, Imperial destiny. All clean and healthy and Spin and Marty and ... shit"

I heard voices. I wasn't alone. I looked around the corner, tripped over a gap in the tile, and stumbled into the open.

In the corridor beyond, three stewards and a Coast Guard enlisted man were going through the pockets of a body. They rolled it over, swearing monotonously under their breaths. Beyond them, five big guys in business suits caromed down the hall like drunks, but their eyes were steady and predatory. The enlisted man and one steward saw them coming, spun about to abandon their catch, and noticed me. They hunched and didn't even signal each other, but as a team

brandished a pistol and a fancy hunting rifle covered with scrollwork. The enlisted man got off a round before I could do anything more than flinch. The shot creased my cheek. I shouted and turned, somehow ended up on my hands and knees, and picked myself off the deck. Another slug went through my pant leg. I ran, skidding on tile as I rounded the corner.

Adrenaline cleared my head like a blast of stinging cold water. Screw the Long Haul. I wanted to live another few seconds, please God, please Mother. I hid in a fire-station alcove, shivering, until I heard someone coming, then burst from my cover like a stupid pheasant. The steward, less than ten yards away, had aimed his rifle in anticipation, but before he could fire again, I was through a passageway feed, into the opposite spaces.

Somehow, I had ended up back by the unmounted brass plaque. I touched my cheek, brought my fingers away bloody, and looked into the corridor where I had seen the hunters and their kill. The body remained, its face a red mass. It had been joined by two others. I picked up the plaque to use as a weapon, or a shield, and studied the engraved map. Left. I was sure of it; the hospital was on this floor and inboard, to my left.

The first heavy door to the private spaces was intact and locked. I shivered at the sound of voices, a rifle butt rhythmically tapping the walls. A painful crack and ricochet.

I took Tammy's papers from my pocket, read them quickly, punched in an entry code, and waited for the little LED to flash red, red, no luck. I was sure that would happen, and I would be dead soon.

It flashed red. I tried another number. The voices were in the passageway.

"Did you see that bastard go down? Christ, got him right through the spine."

"Better than paint balls

"Yeah, more splash."

Laughter, Two guys out in the woods, hunting for me and whatever else they could flush from cover.

Red, red.

I lifted the paper to my eyes, studied the blurry copy of Tammy's diagram. This was a rear door, I guessed, used by staff in the medical center. I found the door on her crude map and tried to make out the combination. She had been writing with her left hand. The scrawl of fourteen numbers was hard to understand, but I took a guess and punched it in, the buttons clicking into place above each integer. The buttons popped out on the tenth number. Confused, I angrily slapped the frame, then punched in four more.

"Whoops! Gotcha," someone called with ringing cheer.

The light flashed green.

I fumbled the handle. Grabbed it again. Something snicked and clacked behind me: well-oiled gunmetal. The door was heavy and opened slowly.

I pushed through the gap. Saw at the end of the short hall a white steward's jacket and a pasty damp face with a five o'clock shadow, glint of ornately decorated rifle swinging down.

Click.

"Ah, fuck. Wait up, stupid!"

A hand clutching a pistol poked around the corner and fired. The slug caught me in my side, glanced off the bulletproof vest over my ribs, blasted paint and metal from the bulkhead, and shoved me like a bully's big hard fist through the door.

I tugged the door shut and pushed the lock home, then jerked at the pound of a rifle butt. In one frantic turn, as I stood away from the door, I saw what could have been a gray-carpeted hallway in any well-funded modern hospital or university building: closed office doors, cork bulletin boards (still virginal and bare) mounted on freshly painted beige walls, and at the end, a sitting or waiting room with two utilitarian blue couches, two red chairs, a table, and a wall-spanning mural.

1 caught my breath. Touched the vest through the hole in my jacket, felt the compressed groove beneath the fabric, poked my finger through the exit hole.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three ... Inspected the pattern of gray-and-black marks on the back of my sleeve, from the bullet's near impact and the spray of paint chips.

Five one thousand, six one thousand, seven ... Lifted my calf to inspect the hole in my pants.

"Fucking amateur," I said, and giggled harshly.

Nothing outside.

Then, against the door, five staccato bangs, loud as horse kicks-bullets. They were trying to shoot through the door. No marks on the inside, not even a reverse dimple. Thick and armored. The back of my head hurt. I had slammed it back against the wall in surprise.

Another thump on the door, soft and frustrated.

Eight one thousand, nine.

The room was silent but for the ticking of a clock on the wall. I stood with my back to the wall for several minutes, listening, waiting for my heart to slow, and that was all I heard. My heart, and the soft ticking of the big clock. Time passing. I couldn't believe I was still alive. I could feel the pain in my cheek like a small, hot brand.

In the waiting room, I washed my face in a water fountain, sluicing away the blood. The crease wasn't very big, little more than a bad shaving cut. It was already clotting.

I wiped my hands on my pant legs. Swallowed hard.

Belly of the beast again, but the safest place on the ship.

The mural showed the Earth in a Dymaxion projection, the globe according to Buckminster Fuller, covered with wide irregular patches of green, red, and shades of blue, chiefly in the oceans. I found Lake Baikal--intense red. Another red patch surrounded the Bahamas, the waters where the Lemuria would commonly be sailing on better, more peaceful days. Small red dots in the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, western Canada, around the Galapagos and Peru, off the coast of

Japan. A large kitty scratch of red lines hugged the northeast coast of Australia--encompassing the Great Barrier Reef, I guessed. Smaller patches and points near Sri Lanka, Borneo, and New Zealand. The map was void of words or labels.

I was sure that the colors signified bacterial hot spots. Phone exchanges for the Little Mothers of the World. Ever since the 1920s, Maxim Golokhov had been listening for his message from the oldest minds on Earth.

Right of the map stood a simple windowless double door and another combination lock. I used Tammy's list once more, with some confidence. I twisted the handle, gathered what little genuine courage I had left, and walked through.

Beyond lay an Olympic-sized pool, deserted. Crazy-quilt patterns of tiny waves reverberated across the opal blue surface. I walked along the pool's edge, shoes squeaking on antislip coating like rubbery sandpaper. I sniffed, then leaned over the pool and sniffed again. No pervasive smell of chlorine. I dipped and tasted. Not saltwater, but I spat anyway. The pool was filled with untreated freshwater.

Wouldn't want to discourage our microbial friends.

Tammy's codes worked for all of the spaces forward of the pool. The clinic held massage and chiropractic tables, acupuncture and moxibus tion stations with little chrome buckets filled with incense cones, exercise and recovery equipment, coordination test benches, hydrotherapy tubs, most of which could have been found in any good sports stadium. (The moxibustion seemed over the top, but who was I to judge?)

A glass cabinet on the wall enclosed neat lines of opaque jars marked SKIN, NASAL PASSAGES, SCALP, RECTUM. Smaller labels on some narrowed their use: PRE-PUBESCENT, MENARCHE, >30. A tampon dispenser beside the cabinet bore the red label ATHLETIC

REHAB ONLY.

Open shelves supported tidy stacks of plastic-bagged and serial numbered white-cotton panties, sports bras, jockstraps, and briefs. All very egalitarian and unisex. Post-Cold War, more up-to-date than

Anthrax Central, and perhaps reflecting a new approach to a younger generation of recruits.

Preparations were in place for a long stay with a select group of adapted and highly trained young bodyguards, runners, and circus performers. Golokhov's Praetorians. I noted the room's pleasant colors but saw no personal marks, no patterns of use or wear. The rooms had yet to be broken in.

Large plastic beakers in the middle cultured a churning white and-yellow ooze. A fan of pipes ascended from the beakers to the ceiling, then dropped to connect with soft-drink dispensers, a shower stall, a curtained colonies station.

I pulled aside another long curtain and found a row of stainless steel toilets. The bowls held the same milky fluid. Excreted germs must be reunited with their fellows, not sacrificed to a shipboard sewage treatment plant.

Or perhaps Dr. Goncourt did not want to unnecessarily pollute the waters around Lemuria.

Against the back wall, inboard--I was trying to keep myself oriented--I saw the first signs of disorder, human habitation. Blue, green, and red backpacks had been tossed on the floor with some carelessness. I strolled along the line of packs, hands in my pockets. Smiling at the thought, I removed my jacket and bulletproof vest and laid them down at the end of the line. One of the team, now. Less obvious.

The forward doors opened. I looked for a place to hide, but it was too late. Three young women entered and saw me. In their late teens or early twenties, cheerful, lithe, vivid with health, they wore orange-and silver exercise togs, hair tied up with blue, red, and green stretchies. They walked briskly by with sidewise looks of puzzled recognition, smiled politely, then went to the benches.

Chatting in low voices in accented English, with just a hint of self conscious reserve, they taped sensor pads to each other's arms and

legs and shoulders, read the meters, and made notes on small clipboards. It seemed part of a familiar routine. No concern, no alarm at my presence.

Another ordinary day, isolated from the chaos and death on the rest of the ship.

I watched for a moment, feeling like a voyeur, then stepped toward the door through which they had entered. According to Tammy's map, beyond were the makeup and prep rooms for the amphitheater, and a relatively large circular space, labeled "Listeners 1."

In the curving corridor outside, behind a half-open utility hatch with ventilation slats on the bottom, I heard sounds of water pumping and a low electrical hum. I opened the hatch.

I was in some sort of long, high-ceilinged pump room. The inner arc of the circular space was a steel-walled tank at least forty feet in diameter. A male in his early thirties, big-shouldered, pug-nosed, dressed in orange togs with blue leggings, came around the tank's curve, passed briefly behind a forest of feed pipes, then emerged into view again, penciling notes on a clipboard.

He stopped when he saw me. Smiled shyly. Turned. Walked back the way he had come.

The feeling of unreality intensified. In the heart of Golokhov's new headquarters, I was unchallenged, maybe even welcome.

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, now jangling like a curtain of off-key wind chimes. A steep ladder ahead gave access to a catwalk over the steel tank. I climbed, dropping cautious glances down at the pump room. The tank was filled with shadow too deep to penetrate. Its black expanse yawned beneath a concave cap hanging by thick chains from the upper deck I-beams. Out of the darkness came a periodic slop and the tang of seawater, fresh not stagnant. An aquarium, possibly; I thought of the shattered glass tanks in Anthrax Central.

My unfinished hypothesis poked me, like a knitting needle

33 I

jamming a sensitive nerve. Little sparks of ideas, suspicions, fears. What the hell do I want to learn here?

Delbarco had said she didn't really want to know. She wanted to sleep nights. Too late, Breaker had said.

Right.

I came to a control panel mounted in the middle of the catwalk. I could make out vague labels, again in English: Lights. Microphone. Music.

I flicked the switch marked Lights.

The tank came alive with a deep blue-green glow. It wasn't as deep as I had thought, shallow in fact, about shoulder high at the center, if the light wasn't playing tricks. A sandy bottom supported mushroom like black-and-green lumps, furry with strands of algae. The lumps resembled old heads of coral or overgrown tree stumps, jutting up around the perimeter like eroded snags in a drowned forest.

No doubt about it. Golokhov liked to culture stromatolites. Colonies of cyanobacteria, eucaryotes, algae, building up thick layers over the centuries, making towheads in shallow water. Trunk lines for the Little Mothers.

No fish. No sharks. No octopi, no seaweed or stylish rocks with serpentine moray eels. Not much of an aquarium, actually, hardly worth anyone's notice, but the opposite side of the tank had been set with long observation windows. With a jerk of surprise, I saw people beyond those windows, distorted by refraction and blurred by the ripples, wrapped in purple twilight and doubled up like loving couples.

As my eyes adjusted to the twilight glow beyond the main tank, I could discern that they wore dark hats or helmets, from which jutted white tubes and short, black pipes. I stepped to the opposite side of the catwalk, gripping the iron rails, and leaned to stare down into an adjoining tank, a narrow, rectangular pool filled with lavender liquid.

The people facing the windows were fully immersed. More puzzling, they were naked. They weren't lovers; they were Siamese twins,

3 }2

seven pairs. Three were united at the abdomen, three at the hip. One pair joined at the temple required a special mask and goggles with three lenses. Their arms hung from rubber straps, the straps hooked to black, motorized levers that slowly exercised their limbs, up and down, in and out, like the long black fingers of a puppeteer.