Ben and I went out on deck to get some fresh air. The biologists followed a few moments later. Spray from whitecaps and the bow wash put a salty chill into our bones, but to me it felt good. My stomach stopped its dog-settling turns, and I began to believe I might not disgrace myself in the next few hours.
Carson and Candle stuck with me as if they had a score to settle. Wanting some time alone, and sensing trouble in the air, Ben went forward.
I did not appreciate being abandoned and outnumbered.
“Damn, she’s big,” Carson said. He pulled a real-estate prospectus from his jacket pocket and spread it out against the wind. A cutaway of Lemuria covered three large panels. “Got this in Port Canaveral. Bel Canto Lines and American Sea Life Corporation . . . Isn’t she pretty? Cheapest condo available, one point five mil.”
Lemuria’s stern towered almost ninety feet above her waterline, not counting four terraced observation, restaurant, and exercise decks that added an additional seventy feet. Beyond the canted decks, swept by a stray wisp from a pearly bank of low cloud, rose the fourth tower, named Elite, a seagoing skyscraper topped by the spread jade green wings and ivory white dome of the aft concourse and Olympic gymnasium.
“No servant quarters?” Candle sniffed. “Why bother.”
“A crew of seven hundred, plus a population of one thousand three hundred live-aboard wage slaves, waiting to attend to your every need.”
“The other half,” Candle said. “Don’t you just love ’em?” She faced me with dark, critical eyes. “Your kind of people, Dr. Cousins.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ve been going around hat in hand, promising immortality to every billionaire you meet. Should be rich pickings in that crowd.” She jutted her chin toward the giant ship, jaw underslung in anger like a bulldog.
“Yeah,” Carson said. “Just what the world needs—immortal plutocrats.”
“My work is for everyone,” I said.
Candle shook her head. “How noble. How incredibly naive. I know how powerful men work. At NSA, we listen to their nasty little secrets all day long.”
“It’s our right,” I insisted. My palms started to sweat again. They were provoking that unfinished thought, that raw hypothesis I could barely make out. “Who’s going to tell us we can’t live as long as we want?”
“They are,” Candle said, pointing to the Lemuria. “Every rich son of a bitch, fat cat, church leader, yammering populist, self-righteous fascist, Communist, nationalist. They’ll call it a sin. They’ll make it illegal. But what they’ll really be saying is”—she pointed a tense finger into the breeze—“it’s wrong for everyone but me.”
“We’ll fight them,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” Candle said. She held on to the rail with one hand as the sea got heavier. “You’ll have lots of clients. You’ll charge them a fortune. I’ll lose, my children will lose. Everyone I know and care about. The same people who pay off the politicians will pay billions to stay alive. How much is life worth? To them it will be chump change. A hundred years of compound interest, and they’ll buy up the whole planet.”
“Just like they suck up all the money and the IPOs and the beautiful women,” Carson added.
“Careful,” Candle said, striking a pose. “They don’t get all the beautiful women.”
I could not tell whether they were genuinely pissed off or just ragging me. “We should stick to our task,” I said, but it came out as a mumble.
“You lanced this boil, and now we’re all going in to clean it out,” Carson said.
“Courage,” Candle said, to Carson, not to me.
“What I want to know is, what did you do to provoke them? Is this Golokhov jealous of you, or does he want to hog all the glory for himself?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Think he knows something you don’t?”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said, too loudly. “I do research in life extension. I go to private citizens who have money because the medical community closes ranks on the issue, and government refuses to consider the possibility—”
“Social security,” Carson muttered.
Candle gave me a pitying glance.
“How long do you want to live?” I asked. “Forty years? As long as someone in Bangladesh?”
“Chronovores,” Carson said in disgust. “Plutocrats gobbling the feast and leaving scraps for the rest of us.”
I knew it was hopeless, but I tried a new tack. “Would the government have ever done anything if we hadn’t been targeted? They’ve been pulling strings for decades, and maybe you’ve been helping them. Did you think about that? Maybe I did all of you a favor.”
Carson snorted. “Thank you for caring.”
Candle turned away with that same twist Julia had once used, assuming the same final, feminine posture that told me I was unworthy of any more fuss.
Once more I was a Jonah. I was to blame for everything. Why did this always happen when I took a cruise?
Suddenly, the tension broke. I had to laugh. The laugh was genuine, the best I had had since I was a kid watching cartoons on TV.
Candle and Carson stared at me pityingly.
What I felt was the fanciest kind of foolish, too foolish to be cynical. I knew I was wearing the ultimate bright-boy defense, a shit-eating grin. It was the only armor I had left, the only armor I had ever really owned.
I walked forward, wiping my eyes with my shirt cuff, relishing the wind from our passage. Ben squatted like a gray-blown Buddha near the bow, behind a windlass cover, contemplating a neatly coiled rope. An orange-and-white Coast Guard Sea King helicopter roared overhead, bearing down on Lemuria. Ben looked up and shielded his eyes against the eastern brightness. A second helicopter followed.
“Right on time,” he said. We watched them weave beside the ziggurat towers like mosquitoes around Madonna.
“Am I a bloody monster, Ben?” I asked, kneeling beside him.
