Vitals (9 page)

"All the specimens are here," I said, checking the inventory. "In I

that small tank--the one that's not at pressure--we have some shovel

I '

loads from the sediment that need to be analyzed. I doubt we grabbed (

any in faunal specimens intact, but we can preserve them and stain for ' cytoplasm and do some tube counts in the mud. Get some formalin and rose bengal."

Dan and Valerie focused on the scoop samples and a couple of shallow cores. I wanted them out of the way while I either silently mourned or, less likely, breathed a sigh of relief. I wiped the panels on the big steel transfer tanks and peered inside with a pocket flashlight. Straight from the briny deeps: shadowy masses ; that might have been clouds of sediment. Or ruined xenos. I knelt and squinted. Some forms were more than just fragments.

Shun stayed, but Bloom slipped out to answer a phone call.

I checked out the stats in the lab computer and made sure the

necessary conditions were being met: water at 3.5 degrees Celsius, high oxygen, 36 percent salinity, metal sulfides in medium traces.

"It's at 250 atmospheres," Valeric said.

"If we reduce the pressure, the xenos break down into slippery mush," I said to Betty Shun. "Their cell membranes--mostly lipids-melt like butter on a hot day. Deep down, where it's cold and heavy, the membranes are gelid."

I'd begun a culture of typical bacterial mats even before going out on the Sea Messenger, and now I harvested them from a container in the refrigerator and shot them with a plastic bottle straight into the pump chamber. I watched them spread in pale ribbons into the lab's central refrigerated tank.

"Very impressive," Betty Shun observed, laying a hand lightly on the big tank's cold acrylic. "I notice you just dumped in the bacteria. Why?"

"The bacteria adjust quickly. Their desaturase enzymes stop working under pressure, and that pumps up the unsaturated fatty acids in their cell walls, keeping them from getting too inflexible. Our larger specimens aren't so adaptable."

I asked Dan to help me connect the first transfer vessel to the big lab tank. We carried it to the worktable and connected it to the delivery chute, making sure the lock seals were tight. I checked the pressure-the vessel had lost about three atmospheres--and I dropped the pressure on the lab tank to match. Then I opened the inner doors and mixed the waters. Small chunks of sandy, dirty jelly floated past.

Like the man praying that the bottle falling through the liquor store bag was vermouth, not gin, I hoped these fragments were common xenos and not our fancy Vendobionts.

"It's soup," Dan said.

I looked accusingly at Shun. "I should have moved them myself." She did not react. No doubt she had dealt with personalities fiercer than mine.

I tilted the plastic baffle inside the transfer tank and gently encouraged

more contents to drift past the small acrylic port Dan switched on the main video camera and turned the monitor so I could see.

A frond undulated in the junction between the two tanks, still tinged with yellow.

"Alive?" Valerie asked.

"Probably not. At least the cells haven't ruptured," I said. "Let's salvage what we can."

Bloom came back and posted himself out of the way, in a corner.

Eight hours passed. I can always lose myself in lab work. I become something lovely and serene, a disembodied Spirit of Science. Tech Zombie, Julia once called me. I don't even need coffee--there's something about discovery that pumps me full of my own natural caffeine.

Shun was more patient than I expected--not that I paid her much attention for the first seven hours--but Bloom began to fidget after two, pace after three, and made his excuses after three and a half and stepped out once more.

We had our work cut out for us. These celebrity living fossils were dying or dead, and all their secrets were fading with them. We had to move fast.

First, I performed triage and used the manipulator to gently push fragments and clearly defunct organisms back into a specially prepared transfer tank. I set Valerie to doing proteomics on a few cc's of mush that I could not otherwise identify. That occupied her for several hours. She used the Applara Proteomizer--a machine the size of a large bread box, capable of doing whole protein analysis at the rate of five hundred amino acid components per minute.

I doubted these critters used more than a few thousand proteins. Your average protein is about a thousand amino acids long. In a few hours, we had a first-order list of the proteins in the mush, and some

hints as to the kind of genes and byproducts we would find when we ran the nucleic acids through a sequencer.

While Valerie worked, I spent an hour just staring at the intact organisms in the main tank. Shun stood shoulder to shoulder with me during much of that time, but she wisely kept silent.

If I was a flaming and driven Spirit, she was an unobtrusive shade--or the sword-bearing arm of my angel, Montoya. I didn't care. Nothing scared me more than failure.

The largest of our specimens, the frond, was a rubbery feather with many compressed ribs, its greenish mud color tinged with yellow. It was about twenty centimeters long, ten centimeters across at its widest point, and it looked like a leaf made of bubble wrap.

It was clearly colonial, fairly hardy in comparison to its companions, but, most important, it was still alive. My first guess was that it was made up of xenolike protists. Each saclike bump of its anatomy was an individual cell, anywhere from a few millimeters to a couple of centimeters in size.

Most modern cells are microscopic and need only one nucleus, the central computer and factory that contains the chromosomes. These cells were much larger than most modern cells. I supposed, in my intensity of speculation, that each of the components would have many nuclei, as xenos do, to speed creation and delivery of the necessary gene products--ribosomal RNA, proteins, etc.--across its comparatively far-flung cytoplasmic territory.

That would be familiar. That would be expected.

But when we carefully plucked a cell from the feather-fan colony, froze and micro-sliced it, then mounted it for the lab's little electron microscope, Dan reported that there were no nuclei whatsoever. The cell was a blob of jelly with unbounded circular chromosomes floating in a thick but simple membrane, and that in itself would make it a variety of bacteria or archaea, neither of which sequester their DNA in nuclei.

But the cell was supported by a micro tubule cytoskeleton, looking

like wads of glassy fibers under the microscope. Bacteria and archaea do not have cytoskeletons.

The sampled cell was as big as the tip of my pinky. Inspection of another cell showed us that there were bacteria of many different kinds living loose inside, screwing their way through the cytoplasmic gel. Some of these bacterial interlopers were large--millimeters in size, visible to the naked eye. They reminded me of extremophiles I had seen profiled in Science a few months before, the kind that clustered on the butts of ugly red Pompeii worms in vent communities.

The frond, then, was neither plant nor precisely animal, nor did it belong to any of the remaining three kingdoms of modern biology. Each big cell in my colonial critter was like an old-fashioned Western mining town. The bacterial hitchhikers were free to come and go, but mostly they stayed. I imagined they were like mine workers recruited from the town's ruffians, doing their jobs, but on occasion hogtying the boss and his wife, threatening the engineers (my imagination was fevered by lack of blood sugar), and forcing the lucrative mine owners to pay out caskets of gold, and not a sheriff in sight.

Lots of free-range cooperation between characters who might at any moment pull out six-guns and start blazing away at each other, then turn around the next moment And share a drink at the bar.

I laughed. Valerie and Betty blinked at me, owlish and exhausted. I looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty in the evening. We hadn't taken any breaks.

We were due.

The machines could run themselves. The tank would keep whatever was still alive happy. I looked at Valerie's tentative list of proteins from the mush and pursed my lips as if coming in for a smooch.

"Wow," I said.

"Good?" Betty asked.

"Phenomenal," I said. "There are no nuclei and no mitochondria in these cells. They are very primitive."

"That's good?"

"It's what I've been dreaming about for years," I said. "The bacteria in the cytoplasm are commensal, but not symbiotic--they help the cell respire and metabolize its food. But they're a long jump behind becoming mitochondria. Maybe hundreds of millions of years ..."

My arm flesh pricked up with goose bumps. "Jesus," I said, with all the reverence I am capable of. "We could be looking at ghosts from the Garden of Eden. And they haven't taken the Fall."

Dan had slumped over the Applara monitor. Valeric shook him awake and whispered something into his ear. He brightened.

"Dinner?" he murmured.

"It's on me," I said. I looked at Betty. "You should come, too. And Bloom, if he's still around." I felt magnanimous. Hell, I was punchy with glee.

"Tell Owen," Betty insisted.

I called Montoya on Betty's cell phone. He answered on the second buzz.

"Betty, I'm taking a shit. What is it?"

"This is Hal," I said. "It's fantastic. I've got news. I think I have the final clues." I took a deep breath. When tired, both Rob and I had a tendency to commit unwitting rhyme. Shall we visit Dr. Seuss?

"Good news, I hope," Montoya said. "Because up until now it's all been terrible."

"I've got a primitive cell. Primordial." Now I went out on a limb. "Of a kind we haven't seen for three billion years. With the blueprints for bacterial domination still fresh and all the players fairly naive."

"Tell me what that means when it's at home, Hal."

"I think I've got the list of RNA and protein products that bacteria use to take control of our genome."

"And what will you do with it?" Montoya asked patiently.

"Break some of the pathways, interrupt cell receptors, create new bacteria," I said, as if that were perfectly obvious. "Our cells won't be

told to shut down or age. They won't lose their ability to self-repair. They'll stay young."

"Fine. So you know how to fix us?"

"Not yet," I said. Miracles would take years, not days. "Based on earlier work, I need to find the five or ten more proteins that are triggered by hades to shut down youthful cell maintenance. They could be on this list. I need to sequence the free-floating chromosomes--less than a few million base pairs. I want to do some Southern Blot, some PCR, run homology tests. I'm sure we still have the same genes, somewhere, highly conserved."

"Congratulations, Hal," Montoya said. He did not sound enthused, but as he had said, so far the news had been all bad. "Put Betty on."

Coming down off my high, I handed the phone to Betty. She listened for a moment, then shut it and turned to me.

"Owen insists that dinner is on him. And after dinner he wants to see you. He's flying into Seattle."

Dan and Valerie high-fived me. Betty was more subdued, though I wouldn't learn why for five more hours.

Angels can be pipers, too.

Dinner at Canlis was elegant but quiet. The somber gray-stained wood and white tablecloths framed a terrific view of Lake Union. I could seldom afford to eat so well, but I was nervous and excited all at once, and the best I could do was share a champagne toast with Valerie and Dan and pick at my plate.

We shook hands and parted at midnight. Betty Shun drove me in her Lexus to one of Montoya's four Seattle residences, a penthouse

apartment on the top floor of a complex less than five blocks away. I catnapped during the short drive.

Betty woke me when she set the emergency brake in the underground garage. I jerked up in the seat. She was staring at me. Her face glowed pale violet in the garage's cruel fluorescence.

"I have one question," she said. "Why do you want to live a thousand years?"

I cocked my head to one side to work a crick out of my neck. "More is better than not enough," I said.

"Life is full of pain and disappointment. Why prolong the misery?"

"I don't believe life is all pain and misery," I said.

"I'm a Catholic," Betty Shun said, still searching my face with her eyes. "I know the world is bad. My grandmother is a Buddhist. She knows the world is illusion. I want to live a healthy life, a useful life, but I don't want to live forever. Something better is in the wings."

"I'm more of a Shintoist," I said. "I believe the living world is all around us, thinking and working all the time, and that all living things want to understand what's going on. We just don't live long enough to find out. And when we die, that's it. No second act."

"You will push out others not yet born," she said.

"If the world is full of pain, I'll be doing them a favor," I said testily. I wasn't up to a sophomoric debate at midnight, not after a hard and enlightening day's work.

Betty Shun blinked at me with her patented empty face and opened her door to get out.

Compared to the mansion on Anson Island, the penthouse was positively demure. Less than five thousand square feet, vaulted ceilings throughout, bedrooms suspended above a maple-floored workroom slash studio, with sixty feet of glassed-in sunporch currently fending off a spatter of early morning rain. It smelled of spearmint and tea roses.

Montoya met us on the sunporch and handed me a cup of very strong coffee.

"Explain it again," he demanded as Betty left us. "I've got five funerals to go to in the next week, and I can't keep it straight. I want to know where we're headed." He bit off his words angrily, but his face seemed calm. "I'm afraid of death, Dr. Cousins. You showed me a possible escape hatch. And I took the bait."

I sat stiff as ice on the lounge. I had no idea what he was driving at, but I did not like it.

"Sometimes I sample every dish on the menu," he said. "I blow money just to taste all the choices. Understand?"