Behemoth (15 page)

An old-fashioned couple, and proud of it. When they appeared in public—which they did often—they appeared together, and they stood out.

Public
doesn't exist here in Atlantis, of course. Public was left behind to fend for itself. Atlantis was the crème de la crème from the very beginning, only movers and shakers and those worker bees who cared for them, deep in the richest parts of the hive.

Down here, Jutta and Jakob don't get out much. The escape changed them. It changed everyone of course, humbled the mighty, rubbed their noses in their own failures even though, goddammit, they
still
made the best of it, adapted even to Doomsday, saw the market in lifeboats and jumped on board before anyone else. These days, mere survival is a portfolio to take pride in. But the Holtzbrinks have not availed themselves of even that half-assed and self-serving consolation.
β
ehemoth hasn't touched them in the flesh, not a single particle, and yet somehow it seems to have made them almost physically smaller.

They spend most of their time in their suite, plugged into virtual environments far more compelling than the confines of this place could ever be. They come out to get their meals, of course—in-suite food production is a thing of the past, ever since the rifters confiscated “their share” of the resource base—but even then, they retreat back into their quarters with their trays of cycler food and hydroponic produce, to eat behind closed doors. It's a minor and inoffensive quirk, this sudden desire for privacy from their peers. Patricia Rowan never gave it much thought until that day in the comm cave when Ken Lubin, in search of clues, had asked,
What about the fish? Perhaps they hitched a ride. Are the larvae planktonic?

And Jerry Seger, impatient with this turncoat killer posing as a deep thinker, dismissed him as she would a child:
If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.

Maybe it would have,
Rowan muses now.

The Holtzbrinks made their mark in pharmaceuticals, stretching back even to the days before gengineering. They've kept up with the times, of course. When the first hydrothermal ecosystems were discovered, back before the turn of the century, an earlier generation of Holtzbrinks had been there—reveling in new Domains, sifting through cladograms of freshly-discovered species, new microbes, new enzymes built to work at temperatures and pressures long thought impossibly hostile to any form of life. They cataloged the cellular machinery ticking sluggishly in bedrock kilometers deep, germs living so slowly they hadn't divided since the French Revolution. They tweaked the sulfur-reducers that choked to death on oxygen, coaxed them into devouring oil slicks and curing strange new kinds of cancer. The Holtzbrink Empire, it was said, held patents on half the Archaebacteria.

Now Patricia Rowan sits across from Jakob and Jutta in their living room, and wonders what else they might have patented in those last days on Earth.

“I'm sure you've heard the latest,” she says. “Jerry just confirmed it.
β
ehemoth's made it to Impossible Lake.”

Jakob nods, a birdlike gesture including shoulders as well as head. But his words carry denial: “No, I don't think so. I saw the stats. Too salty.” He licks his lips, stares at the floor. “
β
ehemoth wouldn't like it.”

Jutta puts a comforting hand on his knee.

He's a very old man, his conquests all in the past. He was born too early, grew too old for eternal youth. By the time the tweaks were available—every defective base pair snipped out, every telomere reinforced—his body had already been wearing out for the better part of a century. There's a limit to how much you can fix so late in the game.

Rowan gently explains. “Not in the lake itself, Jakob. Somewhere nearby. One of the hot vents.”

He nods and nods and will not look at her.

Rowan glances at Jutta; Jutta looks back, helplessness on her face.

Rowan presses on: “As you know, this wasn't supposed to happen. We studied the bug, we studied the oceanography, we chose this place very carefully. But we missed something.”

“Goddamn Gulf Stream shut down,” the old man says. His voice is stronger than his body, although not by much. “They said it would happen. Change all the currents. Turn England into goddamn Siberia.”

Rowan nods. “We've looked at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing seems to fit. I think maybe there might be something about
β
ehemoth itself that we're missing.” She leans forward slightly. “Your people did a lot of prospecting out around the Rim of Fire, didn't they? Back in the thirties?”

“Sure. Everyone was. Those bloody Archaea, it was the gold rush of the twenty-first.”

“Your people spent a lot of time on Juan de Fuca back then. They never encountered
β
ehemoth?”

“Mmmm.” Jakob Holtzbrink shakes his head. His shoulders don't move.

“Jakob, you know me. You know I've always been a staunch supporter of corporate confidentiality. But we're all on the same side here, we're all in the same boat so to speak. If you know anything, anything at all…”

“Oh, Jakob never did any of the actual research,” Jutta interjects. “Surely you know that, he was really more of a people person.”

“Yes, of course. But he also took a real interest in the cutting edge. He was always quite excited about new discoveries, remember?” Rowan laughs softly. “There was a time back there when we thought the man practically
lived
in a submarine.”

“I just took the tours, you know. Jutta's right, I didn't do any of the research. That was the gel-jocks, Jarvis and that lot.” For the first time, Jakob meets Rowan's eye. “Lost that whole team when
β
ehemoth broke out, you know. CSIRA was conscripting our people right across the globe. Just waltzed right in, drafted them out from under our noses.” He snorts. “Goddamn
greater good
.”

Jutta squeezes his knee. They glance at each other; she smiles. He puts his hand over hers.

His eyes drift back to the floor. Very gently, he begins nodding again.

“Jakob wasn't close to the research teams,” Jutta explains. “Scientists aren't all that good with people, as you know. It would be a disaster to let some of those people act as spokespersons, but they still resented the way Jakob presented their findings sometimes.”

Rowan smiles patiently. “The thing is, Jakob, I've been thinking. About
β
ehemoth, and how old it is—”

“Oldest goddamn life on the planet,” Jakob says. “The rest of us, we just dropped in later. Martian meteor or something. Bloody
β
ehemoth, it's the only thing that actually
started
here.”

“But that's the thing, isn't it?
β
ehemoth doesn't just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It predates
oxygen
. It's over four billion years old. And all the other really ancient bugs we've found, the Archaebacteria and the Nanoliths and so forth, they're still anaerobes to this day. You only find them in reducing environments. And yet here's
β
ehemoth, even older, and oxygen doesn't bother it at all.”

Jakob Holtzbrink stops rocking.

“Smart little bug,” he says. “Keeps up with the times. Has those, what do you call them, like
Pseudomonas
has—”

“Blachford genes. Change their own mutation rate under stress.”

“Right. Right. Blachford genes.” Jakob brings one hand up, runs it over a sparsely-haired and liver-spotted scalp. “It adapted. Adapted to oxygen, and adapted to living inside fishes, and now it's adapting to every other goddamn nook and cranny on the goddamn planet.”

“Only it never adapted to low temperature and high salinity in combination,” Rowan observes. “It never adapted to the single biggest habitat on Earth. The deep sea stumped it for billions of years. The deep sea would
still
be stumping it if the Channer outbreak hadn't happened.”

“What are you saying?” Jutta wonders, a sudden slight sharpness in her voice. Her husband says nothing.

Rowan takes a breath. “All our models are based on the assumption that
β
ehemoth has been in its present form for hundreds of millions of years. The advent of oxygen, hypotonic host bodies—all that happened in the deep, deep Precambrian. And we know that not much has changed since then, Blachford genes or no Blachford genes—because if it had,
β
ehemoth would have ruled the world long before now. We know it can't disperse through the abyss because it
hasn't
dispersed through the abyss, in all the millions of years it's had to try. And when someone suggests that maybe it hitched a ride in the ichthyoplankton, we dismiss them out of hand not because anybody's actually
checked
—who had the time, the way things were going?—but because if it
could
disperse that way, it
would
have dispersed that way. Millions of years ago.”

Jakob Holtzbrink clears his throat.

Rowan lays it on the table: “What if
β
ehemoth hasn't had millions of years? What if it's only had a few decades?”

“Well, that's—” Jutta begins.

“Then we're not sure of anything any more, are we? Maybe we're not talking about a few isolated relicts here and there. Maybe we're talking about epicenters. And maybe it's not that
β
ehemoth isn't
able
to spread out, but that it's only just now got started.”

That avian rocking again, and the same denial: “Nah. Nah. It's
old
. RNA template, mineralized walls. Big goddamned pores all over it,
that's
why it can't hack cold seawater. Leaks like a sieve.” A bubble of saliva appears at the corner of his mouth; Jutta absently reaches up to brush it away. Jakob raises his hand irritably, preempting her. Her hands drop into her lap.

“The pyranosal sequences. Primitive. Unique. That woman, that doctor: Jerenice. She found the same thing. It's
old
.”

“Yes,” Rowan agrees, “it's old. Maybe something changed it, just recently.”

Jakob's rubbing his hands, agitated. “What, some mutation? Lucky break? Damn unlucky for the rest of us.”

“Maybe some
one
changed it,” Rowan says.

There. It's out.

“I hope you're not suggesting,” Jutta begins, and falls silent.

Rowan leans forward and lays her hand on Jakob's knee. “I know how it was out there, thirty, forty years ago. It was a gold rush mentality, just as you said. Everybody and their organcloner was setting up labs on the rift, doing all kinds of in situ work—”

“Of course it was in situ, you ever try to duplicate those conditions in a
lab
—”

“But your people were at the forefront. You not only had your own research, you had your eye on everyone else's. You were too good a businessman to do it any other way. And so I'm coming to you, Jakob. I'm not making any claims or accusing anyone of anything, do you understand? I just think that if anyone in Atlantis might have any ideas about anything that might have happened out there, you'd be the one. You're the expert, Jakob. Can you tell me anything?”

Jutta shakes her head. “Jakob doesn't know anything, Patricia. Neither of us knows anything. And I
do
take your implication.”

Rowan keeps her eyes locked on the old man. He stares at the floor, he stares
through
the floor, through the deck plating and the underlying pipes and conduits, through the wires and fullerene and biosteel, through seawater and oozing, viscous rock into some place that she can only imagine. When he speaks, his voice seems to come from there.

“What do you want to know?”

“Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like
β
ehemoth, and tweak it?”

“More than you can count,” says the distant voice. This frail body it's using scarcely seems animate.

“Such as?”

“Targeted delivery. Drugs, genes, replacement organelles. Its cell wall, you've never seen anything like it. Nothing has. No immune response to worry about, slips past counterintrusion enzymes like they were blind and deaf. Target cell takes it right in, lyses the wall, COD. Like a biodegradable buckyball.”

“What else?”

“The ultimate pep pill. Under the right conditions the thing pumps out ATP so fast you could roll a car over single-handed. Makes mitochondria look like yesterday's sockeye. Soldier with
β
ehemoth in his cells might even give an exoskel a run for the money, if you feed him enough.”

“And if
β
ehemoth were tweaked properly,” Rowan amends.

“Aye,” whispers the old man. “There's the rub.”

Rowan chooses her words very carefully. “Might there have been any … less precise applications? MAD machines? Industrial terrorism?”

“You mean, like what it does now? No. W—someone would have to be blind and stupid and insane all at once to
design
something like that.”

“But you'd have to increase the reproductive rate quite a bit, wouldn't you? To make it economically viable.”

He nods, his eyes still on far-focus. “Those deep-rock dwellers, they live so slow you're lucky if they divide once a
decade
.”

“And that would mean they'd have to eat a lot more, wouldn't it? To support the increased growth rate.”

“Of course. Child knows that much. But that's not
why
you'd do it, nobody would do that because they
wanted
something that could—it would just be a, an unavoidable—”