Five one thousand, six one thousand, seven . . .
Lifted my calf to inspect the hole in my pants.
“Fucking amateur,” I said, and giggled harshly.
Nothing outside.
Then, against the door, five staccato bangs, loud as horse kicks—bullets. They were trying to shoot through the door. No marks on the inside, not even a reverse dimple. Thick and armored. The back of my head hurt. I had slammed it back against the wall in surprise.
Another thump on the door, soft and frustrated.
Eight one thousand, nine.
The room was silent but for the ticking of a clock on the wall. I stood with my back to the wall for several minutes, listening, waiting for my heart to slow, and that was all I heard. My heart, and the soft ticking of the big clock. Time passing. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. I could feel the pain in my cheek like a small, hot brand.
In the waiting room, I washed my face in a water fountain, sluicing away the blood. The crease wasn’t very big, little more than a bad shaving cut. It was already clotting.
I wiped my hands on my pant legs. Swallowed hard.
Belly of the beast again, but the safest place on the ship.
The mural showed the Earth in a Dymaxion projection, the globe according to Buckminster Fuller, covered with wide irregular patches of green, red, and shades of blue, chiefly in the oceans. I found Lake Baikal—intense red. Another red patch surrounded the Bahamas, the waters where the Lemuria would commonly be sailing on better, more peaceful days. Small red dots in the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, western Canada, around the Galapagos and Peru, off the coast of Japan. A large kitty scratch of red lines hugged the northeast coast of Australia—encompassing the Great Barrier Reef, I guessed. Smaller patches and points near Sri Lanka, Borneo, and New Zealand. The map was void of words or labels.
I was sure that the colors signified bacterial hot spots. Phone exchanges for the Little Mothers of the World. Ever since the 1920s, Maxim Golokhov had been listening for his message from the oldest minds on Earth.
Right of the map stood a simple windowless double door and another combination lock. I used Tammy’s list once more, with some confidence. I twisted the handle, gathered what little genuine courage I had left, and walked through.
Beyond lay an Olympic-sized pool, deserted. Crazy-quilt patterns of tiny waves reverberated across the opal blue surface. I walked along the pool’s edge, shoes squeaking on antislip coating like rubbery sandpaper. I sniffed, then leaned over the pool and sniffed again. No pervasive smell of chlorine. I dipped and tasted. Not saltwater, but I spat anyway. The pool was filled with untreated freshwater.
Wouldn’t want to discourage our microbial friends.
Tammy’s codes worked for all of the spaces forward of the pool. The clinic held massage and chiropractic tables, acupuncture and moxibustion stations with little chrome buckets filled with incense cones, exercise and recovery equipment, coordination test benches, hydrotherapy tubs, most of which could have been found in any good sports stadium. (The moxibustion seemed over the top, but who was I to judge?)
A glass cabinet on the wall enclosed neat lines of opaque jars marked SKIN, NASAL PASSAGES, SCALP, RECTUM. Smaller labels on some narrowed their use: PRE-PUBESCENT, MENARCHE, >30. A tampon dispenser beside the cabinet bore the red label ATHLETIC REHAB ONLY.
Open shelves supported tidy stacks of plastic-bagged and serial-numbered white-cotton panties, sports bras, jockstraps, and briefs. All very egalitarian and unisex. Post-Cold War, more up-to-date than Anthrax Central, and perhaps reflecting a new approach to a younger generation of recruits.
Preparations were in place for a long stay with a select group of adapted and highly trained young bodyguards, runners, and circus performers. Golokhov’s Praetorians. I noted the room’s pleasant colors but saw no personal marks, no patterns of use or wear. The rooms had yet to be broken in.
Large plastic beakers in the middle cultured a churning white-and-yellow ooze. A fan of pipes ascended from the beakers to the ceiling, then dropped to connect with soft-drink dispensers, a shower stall, a curtained colonics station.
I pulled aside another long curtain and found a row of stainless-steel toilets. The bowls held the same milky fluid. Excreted germs must be reunited with their fellows, not sacrificed to a shipboard sewage-treatment plant.
Or perhaps Dr. Goncourt did not want to unnecessarily pollute the waters around Lemuria.
Against the back wall, inboard—I was trying to keep myself oriented—I saw the first signs of disorder, human habitation. Blue, green, and red backpacks had been tossed on the floor with some carelessness. I strolled along the line of packs, hands in my pockets. Smiling at the thought, I removed my jacket and bulletproof vest and laid them down at the end of the line. One of the team, now. Less obvious.
The forward doors opened. I looked for a place to hide, but it was too late. Three young women entered and saw me. In their late teens or early twenties, cheerful, lithe, vivid with health, they wore orange-and-silver exercise togs, hair tied up with blue, red, and green stretchies. They walked briskly by with sidewise looks of puzzled recognition, smiled politely, then went to the benches.
Chatting in low voices in accented English, with just a hint of self-conscious reserve, they taped sensor pads to each other’s arms and legs and shoulders, read the meters, and made notes on small clipboards. It seemed part of a familiar routine. No concern, no alarm at my presence.
Another ordinary day, isolated from the chaos and death on the rest of the ship.
I watched for a moment, feeling like a voyeur, then stepped toward the door through which they had entered. According to Tammy’s map, beyond were the makeup and prep rooms for the amphitheater, and a relatively large circular space, labeled “Listeners 1.”
In the curving corridor outside, behind a half-open utility hatch with ventilation slats on the bottom, I heard sounds of water pumping and a low electrical hum. I opened the hatch.
I was in some sort of long, high-ceilinged pump room. The inner arc of the circular space was a steel-walled tank at least forty feet in diameter. A male in his early thirties, big-shouldered, pug-nosed, dressed in orange togs with blue leggings, came around the tank’s curve, passed briefly behind a forest of feed pipes, then emerged into view again, penciling notes on a clipboard.
He stopped when he saw me. Smiled shyly. Turned. Walked back the way he had come.
The feeling of unreality intensified. In the heart of Golokhov’s new headquarters, I was unchallenged, maybe even welcome.
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, now jangling like a curtain of off-key wind chimes. A steep ladder ahead gave access to a catwalk over the steel tank. I climbed, dropping cautious glances down at the pump room. The tank was filled with shadow too deep to penetrate. Its black expanse yawned beneath a concave cap hanging by thick chains from the upper deck I-beams. Out of the darkness came a periodic slop and the tang of seawater, fresh not stagnant. An aquarium, possibly; I thought of the shattered glass tanks in Anthrax Central.
My unfinished hypothesis poked me, like a knitting needle jamming a sensitive nerve. Little sparks of ideas, suspicions, fears. What the hell do I want to learn here?
Delbarco had said she didn’t really want to know. She wanted to sleep nights. Too late, Breaker had said.
Right.
I came to a control panel mounted in the middle of the catwalk. I could make out vague labels, again in English: Lights. Microphone. Music.
I flicked the switch marked Lights.
The tank came alive with a deep blue-green glow. It wasn’t as deep as I had thought, shallow in fact, about shoulder high at the center, if the light wasn’t playing tricks. A sandy bottom supported mushroomlike black-and-green lumps, furry with strands of algae. The lumps resembled old heads of coral or overgrown tree stumps, jutting up around the perimeter like eroded snags in a drowned forest.
No doubt about it. Golokhov liked to culture stromatolites. Colonies of cyanobacteria, eucaryotes, algae, building up thick layers over the centuries, making towheads in shallow water. Trunk lines for the Little Mothers.
