Vitals. Greg Bear

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       CHAPTER SEVEN

      Montoya listened to my presentation for two hours. We broke for a quick dinner – crab cakes and stir-fried vegetables, served with an excellent Oregon pinot gris. We were studying each other, and neither of us was willing to reveal too much. Looking a little glazed, he called a break at ten p.m. Betty Shun appeared to take me on a tour of the house while Montoya fielded some phone calls.

      The glass wall fronted the east wing. The west wing ended in a boat launch built into the native rock of another cove. It easily doubled what had at first seemed merely huge. The floor plan of Montoya’s Fortress of Solitude had to total a hundred thousand square feet – two and a third acres, topped by wind-winnowed forest, the air-conditioner vents camouflaged as tree stumps and the condensers as moss-covered boulders.

      ‘Don’t try to take this tour on your own, Dr Cousins,’ Shun warned me on the clay floor of an indoor tennis court. ‘Without a permission wand, you’ll be locked in the first room you enter.’ She held up a tiny plastic bar. ‘Security will have to come and save you.’ She looked at her wristwatch. ‘Owen doesn’t need a wand. The house recognizes him on sight. His steps, his voice –’

      ‘His DNA?’

      She smiled and tapped her watch. ‘Owen should be ready now. We are exactly a hundred and fifteen feet from him, as the laser flies.’ She gave me a look that might have spoken volumes, but I was unable to open, much less read, any of them. ‘Why were you let go from your last research job?’

      ‘At Stanford?’

      She nodded.

      ‘Money ran out in my department. I was junior.’

      ‘Wasn’t there some dispute?’

      ‘A few of the faculty disagreed with my work. But my papers still get published, Ms Shun. I am still a reputable scientist.’

      ‘Owen is fond of oddball thinking, and even fonder of tweaking academic whiskers. But I hate to see him disappointed, Dr Cousins.’

      ‘Hal.’

      She shook her head politely; keep it business. ‘Owen needs something to commit to. Something solid.’

      Betty Shun left me with Montoya on the west wing’s biggest porch, overlooking the boat cove. It was eleven-thirty. We talked pleasantries for a while and listened to the splash of the waves, blankets over our legs, sipping from chilled glasses of draft beer, our heads warmed by radiant heaters. Did I like baseball? Montoya owned a baseball team in Minneapolis. I conversed as much about baseball as I could, having read USA Today in the Hotel W that afternoon.

      Then Montoya drew back to our main topic.

      ‘You don’t say much about reduced caloric intake,’ he said. ‘According to most experts, that’s the only antiaging technique proven to work.’

      ‘It’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ I said.

      ‘You haven’t sunk your harpoon yet, Hal. I need to know more – much more.’ He smiled wearily. Make or break.

      I put my glass on the center table and leaned forward. ‘The real problem is that we breathe. We respire. We accumulate poisons over time because of the way we burn fuel. We’re part of a vast biological conspiracy, billions of years old, and we have to shake ourselves loose and grab the reins.’

      ‘You’ve experimented on yourself, haven’t you?’ Montoya asked.

      ‘I’d rather keep some things confidential until we firm up a relationship.’

      ‘You have experimented,’ he said, brooking no dissent. ‘You’ve injected yourself with virus shells delivering modified genes, but nobody knows which genes, nobody on my payroll, anyway.’

      ‘I’ve taken one or two things beyond the theoretical stage,’ I admitted.

      Montoya lifted his eyes to meet mine. ‘And?’

      ‘Obviously, I didn’t screw it up too badly. I’m still here. But it’s just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Until I know why individual obsolescence took hold a few billion years ago, I’m still going to grow old and die. And so will you.’

      I was still being vague, and I knew it. The sweat under my armpits chafed.

      ‘So far we’ve been dancing around the center. It’s been a great dance, but I need something more. I’ve signed your NDA, Hal.’ Montoya smiled, putting on the patented charm that had brought him so far in the business world. ‘Give me a hint what’s behind door number one. It’ll be worth a few days on my ship, gratis. I’ll put that in writing, too, if you want.’

      ‘No need,’ I said, swallowing.

      ‘I’m all ears. I have all night.’

      ‘It won’t take that long,’ I said, mentally arranging my cue cards. This was probably going to be the most important speech of my life. ‘I start by altering a few genes in E. coli, common gut bacteria.’ I tapped my abdomen. ‘Then I modify a few of my own genes…‘

      ‘Radical gene therapy,’ Montoya mused.

      ‘Some call it that,’ I said. ‘But it’s just baby steps to solving an ancient murder mystery. Who designed us to die, and why? It turns out we’re being betrayed by cellular organelles, little organs, called mitochondria. Mitochondria make ATP. ATP is the molecule our cells use to store and release energy. Once upon a time, mitochondria were bacteria. We know that because they have their own little loops of DNA, like bacterial chromosomes.’