Vitals by Greg Bear

Author:Greg Bear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Longevity, Science Fiction, Immortality, Conspiracy, Suspense fiction, Thrillers, Biotechnology, Immortalism, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345435286
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2002-01-02T21:21:35.728000+00:00

"You pass through the most horrible gates to escape death." The caretaker sighed like a little girl. "I remember the days we worked together, how he tended to me during my transition, and learned from my example to change his treatments, to avoid the most obvious side effects. He was wrong to leave me here. I could have helped him listen to the Little Mothers. That's the important thing, isn't it?"

"Listen to them--where?"

"Downstairs. In the tanks. Everything else we did was wrong. He drove me to this. Maxim was wrong."

Melon's eyebrow twitched. "Time's a-wasting," he said.

"Tell me about my errors," Rob insisted, his face as intensely focused as a cat's over a bowl of cream. "He must have done more work, more research. How can we avoid making his early mistakes?"

The caretaker looked up at Melon.

"Fuck this," Melon said. He pushed his gun against Rob's neck. "How do you block the tagging?"

Rob blinked. We were on a knife edge and he was discovering courage.

"How?" Melon insisted.

The caretaker held up her hand. However small, this gesture made Melon back down--but only for a moment. "Will you work with us?" she asked. "It is obvious we have so much information to share."

Rob looked pained and shook his head adamantly. "Never," he said.

"Give them what they want!" I shouted.

"They don't need me," Rob said. "This is a charade."

"We had to try," the caretaker said. "We are not monsters, you know." She faced the wall of pictures, head tilted to the right, then the left. She seemed to have tuned us all out.

"Tell them," I said to Rob. "Give them something!"

Melon waved his little gun. "Let's do it," he said. The caretaker swung around on her tiny feet and glided out of the small office.

We got up from our chairs and returned to the main corridor, where Stuart was waiting.

"Ready?" he asked me.

We all came to a wide doorway and stopped. Beyond lay a room that might have been an abandoned Turkish bath, slick gray surfaces rising into long benches against the walls. Seven blue-gray tile basins, as big as double-wide bathtubs, held the center in two rows of three, and one in the middle, forming an H. Dark, pudding-thick liquid spiraled in the tubs, stirred by hidden paddles. Long hoses connected to aerators hung off the far sides of each tub. I could hear small bubbling sounds. The room was mostly in shadow.

"Take off your clothes," the caretaker said.

The air smelled faintly of jungle. Seawater in an old tide pool. Fresh sweat on Janie's arms on a sunny day. I could not identify all the

26 I

odors rising from the tubs, but they scared me more than the mephitis of rotting corpses or the gravy-tang of spilled blood.

I watched for a lapse of attention and put on an act--not much acting needed, really--that would suggest a mark about to lose his cool. A mark is someone who is all too aware he will soon be meat. Lieutenant JG Mark Wasserman changed his name as we flew into Laos because that was how we used to designate those who would soon be dead.

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