Vitals (40 page)

"How good that I failed," he said with false gallantry.

"Don't tell me it was war. It was vicious stupidity."

"Perhaps it was," he said. "Engendered by fear. Unimaginable, so much fear. You are one of the little human tumors, aren't you? You and your brother. You both wanted to live forever."

"I still do."

"The Little Mothers watch over us all," the old man said, and wiped his hands on his pants, leaving dark smears. "Sever the connections between the body and their ministrations, and you block far more than the path to old age. Have you ever felt fit and in tune? Life is good? Perhaps you have a mystical feeling of connection with Nature, with something higher? That is the voice of the Little Mothers. All the stresses and rewards of life are balanced, you are doing well, and they approve. To be judged and found wanting, that is painful. But take those voices away, and you soon lose all balance. We are far more than just brains encased in bone. Larger and older minds live inside our bodies and all around us, speaking in languages I have worked all my life to interpret." He trailed his fingers in the water. "Perhaps we are only a dream the bacteria are having."

I couldn't just let the arrogant old bastard babble. I wanted answers. For Rob, for Ben.

"Did you make a deal with Stalin? How many people did you torture and kill?"

Golokhov stuck out his jaw and looked down at the water.

"You experimented with your wife, then you abandoned her!"

"Yes. Irina." He rubbed his nose, then his forehead, leaving a streak of slime on the pale, wrinkled skin. "I made her into a new kind of woman. I watched her for ten years. She was full of hatred and guile, uncaring, a cruel and unrepentant thief. I tried to fix my mistakes, and in time I reversed her ill effects ... but I should have stopped there and destroyed my records. Too late. I had attracted the attention of beasts who were already hatred and greed made flesh. What will you do, Mr, Faust, who still wants to know so much? What beasts will you unleash when you cut all the strings?"

"You still want me dead, don't you?" I asked. "Why not just tell them to shoot me?"

"Ah," he said, and lifted his hands to the air, shaking them as if invoking a higher power.

My anger flashed over. "You're a coward," I shouted. "You'd never just grab a gun and pull the trigger. You're too fastidious" I lifted my hand, targeting the back of his frail old neck. I didn't care about the men on the beach.

Golokhov looked up. A line of spit hung from the corner of his mouth. "I was a coward. I feared torture and death. I watched blood flow in rivers and corpses stack like cordwood. To save myself, I gave the monsters even more power... and the rivers became oceans. I set myself to bringing them down, and when they were defeated, I made it my duty to watch and guard, with the few resources left to me, to spare the world even more slaughter. How do you think this painfully cruel and inept species survived to see a new millennium? But I was a fool to think I could stop so many curious and immoral children." He wiped his mouth and washed his hands in the sea. "I hope your generation will do better."

"No, you don't," I said.

He knelt in the lapping waves and returned his attention to the stromatolite. "You're no better than Stalin or Beria," I added. "You try to kill our brightest dreams. I want to enhance human life. But you gave us the City of the Dog Mothers."

He shuddered. For a moment I thought he was having a fit, but he flung aside his canvas bag, spun about in the blue water, and glared at me, the fiercest and most hate-filled look I ever hope to see.

The face of a wrathful God as Blake might have drawn him before he tore up the paper and burned the pieces,

"Yes, and there will be punishment!" he said. "Do you know what the message is? What little I have intercepted and translated over seven decades, the sum of all my good work on this Earth, in this forsaken century?" He reached down and patted the stromatolite between his knees. "All the Little Mothers whispering in our bowels and in the forests and jungles and in the oceans we are working so hard to destroy. They are not happy. They are not happy with us at all. We are a

bitter disappointment to them. They wage all-out war against us now. It is a judgment none of us can withstand. Not those on the ship, not those on the shore. None. None."

He faced the gray wall of storm across the water.

"How long do you think we have, young monster?" he asked, still trembling. "How long?"

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (NO ADDRESSES, PLEASE)

It's been a little more than four months, and I'm still alive. Still sane-- I think. Ben is alive. They must have gotten him off the ship. I wonder how he felt about not seeing Janie again.

He sent me a copy of Life magazine; it came in the mail last Friday. From 1949, photos of the Waldorf Conference in New York. Communists for world peace. (How did he get my address? Once a spook.)

I read the magazine wearing plastic gloves. There's another picture of Rudy Banning. He's standing next to Arthur Miller, and Miller is chuckling at something Rudy has just finished saying. It's definitely Rudy.

On a little Post-it, stuck next to the picture, Ben wrote, "No way they can fake this. Rethink everything. What Banning was doing, what Rob was doing. Who did I shoot?"

And I am rethinking. I've tried to assemble a sequence of events and figure out who was running whom, and when.

Here's what I've got so far:

YEAR BEFORE LAST

June: Rob has treated himself to block bacterial connections, but I am ahead in my research at this point.

August: Desperate, Rob takes a long shot, goes to Siberia.

October: Rob contacts Banning, or does Banning go to him?

December: Begins to be harassed (by Stuart Garvey and Irina, or Maxim?). Tagging effects only partly successful because of his self-treatment and altered gut bacteria. He appears to be getting more and more eccentric.

LAST YEAR

Late January: Rob on the outs with Lissa. (Lissa sent to stop Rob--or to convert him, recruit him?)

Who is trying to tag Rob? Is it Lissa, working for Maxim Golokhov, or is it Irina Golokhova? Banning tries to get Rob to go to Callas and be trained. Rob refuses.

February: Rob begins concerted research program to block Silk. At his lowest point... (Opens lab in office building in San Jose?) April: Tammy flees to Marquez. Marquez contacts Banning about Tammy's story. Banning puts Rob in touch with Marquez and Tammy in Los Angeles. Rob builds lab in Marquez's basement. Marquez likes the longevity angle, but is paranoid about government mind control--and Tammy's story only makes his fears worse.

May 28: Rob calls me in San Diego Airport. Gives me a warning.

May 30: I visit Montoya, make my pitch, get approval for sub dive.

June 6: Rob visits Ben Bridger.

June 7: Bridger is arrested and taken to Metropolitan.

June 8: Dr. Mauritz kills his wife.

June 10: Bridger released.

June 11: Bridger, Rob, and Banning go to Los Angeles.

June 12: Marquez house is attacked. (Newspapers with story appear while I am at sea. Lissa shows me the story later, crashed Marine Corps helicopters--why? Is she asking me if I know, or does she know?)

THE DIVE: On June 18,1 go down in DSV. Sea Messenger food dosed. Dave Press tries to kill us both. Three die on Sea Messenger.

June 19: Sea Messenger pulls into port in Seattle.

June 20: Breakfast with Bloom and Shun, 9-10:30 A.M. Investigate specimens 11:30 a.m.-8 P.M. Dinner at Canlis 10-11:30 P.M.

June 20:

Noon, EST. Rob calls my cell phone from public phone in New Jersey. (Guessing at place and time.)

2 p.m. EST. Ben and Rob meet Stuart Garvey outside Penn Station. Have lunch. Garvey takes them to Anthrax Central in downtown Manhattan 4:00 P.M. Irina tries to turn Rob. Recruit him? Ben shoots Rob in New York alley (2-3:00 a.m. ?).

June 21: 12:30 A.M. PST Lissa calls on cell phone to leave message about Rob's death.

June PST Last meeting with Montoya. I walk around Lake Union to Genetron lab, discover trashed specimens

2:30 A.M. PST.

June 21: 3:20 A.M. PST I turn on my cell phones, take message from Rob, Lissa. Learn Rob is dead.

June 27: Funeral in Coral Gables, Florida.

June 29--August 8:1 am in Berkeley.

August 8: Promethean Conference. I meet Banning. Apartment fire and dog attack, hospital visit. Banning pays.

August 8-9: Haight hotel room.

August 9:1 buy clothes, Banning and I meet with Callas, Lissa returns. I read several of Rob's papers; City of Dog Mothers. Tagging attempt (can opener) partially successful that evening, late.

Never got to test can opener.

August 10: Second meeting with Callas, who turns us down. Smart lady.

August 10: Thuringia--crazy old fake cop with signs of Golokhov's immortality treatments--and trip to San Jose with Lissa to open Rob's office lab It's a trap. Lissa shoots car salesman.

August 10-13: Lissa gives me supreme tagging and drives

me out to desert hotel. Tells me to kill myself. Sounds like a good idea at the time.

August 13: Ben Bridger and Rudy Banning rescue me, give me gallon of elixir, then haul me shitting and puking to airport in Arizona.

August 13-14: Back to Anthrax Central. (My first time.)

August 17: Assault on Lemuria.

August 18: Meeting with Golokhov/Goncourt. Bad news about the Little Mothers.

August 20: Return to Miami from Bahamas. Not much news about Lemuria. Go into hiding.

I've worked out some of the history. Here it is, as far as I've gone. Open up the sealed brown paper envelope (hairs taped over the flap for security) and read. Wear gloves, though, ha-ha. Feel free to add your own details or correct me. It's all up in the air, little or no documentation.

I can't trace all the threads and who is pulling them and when. It still doesn't add up. Something's missing, something itches at the back of my head.

Why did Lissa shoot the skinny man in the herringbone suit?

Why didn't they change the combinations in Goncourt's hospital aboard the Lemuria after Tammy went missing? I'm thinking maybe they didn't know she was betraying them. Tammy was there to foil Banning and Rob.

Why didn't she? Who turned her? Rob?

Was he working for Mrs. Golokhova and the government?

Who ordered the gunship attack in LA? Probably Golokhov--but why? Why provoke his former allies? Was he that worried about Rob and Banning?

Weird election this November, wasn't it?

Maxim Golokhov cooperated with the United States after the war. Everything else about him is murky until 1954, when he shows up in New York, but he must have been there to set up Thuringia and the other towns. Shipping tagged fruitcake all over the world.

Irina Golokhova was cooperating with some branches of the federal government, and had been since at least the 1960s, after Maxim left her in Manhattan. To keep things secret, Stuart Garvey and his cohorts at the CIA destroyed Rudy's reputation in 1992. Supposedly that's when Rudy's career falls apart.

But Rudy is clearly not who he says he is.

The picture that fell out of Rob's envelope, me and Rob somewhere in Europe, maybe, I don't remember the occasion. Just a simple memory lapse?

Why would Golokhov distract himself from studying the Little Mothers? Did Golokhov think we would upset the balance of nature so badly? He already believed the bacteria had passed judgment and had it in for us.

Do I believe that?

Do you?

My first instinct is to fight back. Cut all the strings. Time for us to grow up and go it alone. If the Little Mothers want to be abusive, I say we can play that game, too.

But the fact is, I'm tired.

I'm not sleeping well. I'm living in a crummy apartment in Los Angeles, Culver City actually. So now you know. The air conditioner is broken

and I live out of Safeway cans. I shop for them in different stores, and I clean the can opener with boiling water and soap each time I use it.

I still have my incomplete list of proteins, still think now and then of the shining path to the Long Haul. I remember the blue strips of paper in the package from Rob, slipped into the airmail envelope. Maybe they were the other half of the secret--Rob's half. Maybe he was willing them to me in case he failed.

Doesn't matter. They're gone now.

I still convince myself I have the dream, that history hasn't stolen my life from me. But I can't work, can't get work, and Mom has run out of money, she says.

Then, last week, her phone was disconnected. I don't have the cash to go see where she is or what she's doing. I think she's probably fine, but I don't know why I think that.

Owen Montoya is in the hospital. I read the headlines at a newspaper stand. A nervous breakdown. He tried to stab a visiting scientist.

I keep waking up late at night. I'm having dreams about Rob, frequent and nasty. He's chasing me. He blames me for his death. He's mad that Lissa had sex with me. I try to tell him it wasn't my fault, and he just gives me his most infuriating smile.

My phone bills scare me. (I can't pay them, but someone is paying them, because the phone hasn't been cut off.) I'm making longdistance calls to numbers I don't know, and if I try calling them again, I'm not recognized, or I get answering machines, or a modem line and all I hear is an electronic raspberry.

The last few weeks I've been answering so many dead calls. I pick up, and nobody's there. Just silence, or a hum from another galaxy.

I can't just let it ring.

Maybe it's part of this election, thousands of political phone banks, they dial hundreds of numbers at once, I answer, my voice triggers the computer to bring in an operator, but all of the operators are busy... That sort of thing. Common, really. Nothing to worry about.

But eighty or ninety a day? To a guy with an unlisted number, who isn't registered to vote and has a lousy credit rating? I forget who I am some days, the phone cuts away so many chunks of my time.

Last night around midnight I answered on the third ring. This time there was a voice on the line, but I can't remember whether I was awake or asleep.