No fish. No sharks. No octopi, no seaweed or stylish rocks with serpentine moray eels. Not much of an aquarium, actually, hardly worth anyone’s notice, but the opposite side of the tank had been set with long observation windows. With a jerk of surprise, I saw people beyond those windows, distorted by refraction and blurred by the ripples, wrapped in purple twilight and doubled up like loving couples.
As my eyes adjusted to the twilight glow beyond the main tank, I could discern that they wore dark hats or helmets, from which jutted white tubes and short, black pipes. I stepped to the opposite side of the catwalk, gripping the iron rails, and leaned to stare down into an adjoining tank, a narrow, rectangular pool filled with lavender liquid.
The people facing the windows were fully immersed. More puzzling, they were naked. They weren’t lovers; they were Siamese twins, seven pairs. Three were united at the abdomen, three at the hip. One pair joined at the temple required a special mask and goggles with three lenses. Their arms hung from rubber straps, the straps hooked to black, motorized levers that slowly exercised their limbs, up and down, in and out, like the long black fingers of a puppeteer.
I watched in horror, thinking they must be drowned corpses, arranged in an awful parody of modern art. No hoses supplied air to their noses and mouths. No bubbles rose from their masks. But their fingers twitched. Their limbs flexed weakly against the straps. They could not breathe, but they were alive.
The lavender pool smelled like a nursery, milky-sour and as nitrogenous as a soaked diaper. But these were adults, not children, chests hairy or breasts prominent, genitalia fully formed and flossed. I shaded my eyes to make out more detail. Regular rows of fleshy bumps studded their shoulders and backs. Each bump had a tiny dimple with one or two central black pits. Far too small to function as gills. Still, I thought I could see the pits opening and closing like little mouths.
In the main tank, pipes stretched from the black mounds to the steel wall below the windows. Small valves at the ends of the pipes sucked in clouds of white curds, like the floc surrounding the deep-sea vents. The curds flushed into the lavender pool, where they swirled around the twins like snow in a glass paperweight.
“Listeners 1,” Tammy’s map said. If these were the Listeners, what in hell could they possibly be listening to? How many others were there, on the ship or elsewhere? I tried to imagine Golokhov collecting unwanted children from around the globe, taking in the handicapped along with the firm, selecting with strange acuity for special talents, extraordinary patience. Creating a biological Shangri-la, a preserve where everyone had his or her (or its) place, doing something basically incomprehensible to the rest of the world, and certainly to me. An empire based on microbes.
Then it struck me. Golokhov had isolated the doubled figures from respiration. They did not suck oxygen from the water like fish; they did not use oxygen at all. They no longer relied on mitochondria to fuel their cells and tissues.
The Siamese twins had become anaerobes.
I can’t actually recall my thoughts at that moment. I imagine that I felt anger, indignation, even jealousy, but shock may have topped the list and blanked all the others.
The problem of our ancient reliance on mitochondria had been solved. But the solution seemed to be a passive, motionless slavery. Or the awful, endless hell of the prisoners on the top floor of Anthrax Central. Or the shriveled eccentricity of Mrs. Golokhova, who had suffered years of madness.
Lissa had warned me that what Rob and I were searching for was nasty. How right she was.
I straightened and looked for a ladder at the opposite end of the catwalk. There wasn’t one. A blind bulkhead blocked the way. I walked back to the middle, swiveled, my shoes grabbing at the grating, and knelt to peer through the blue water, into the lavender pool, at a steeper angle, to see if there was a gallery, a viewing area, on the other side of the conjoined twins. Between the water and the thick windows, I discerned a ribbon of some lighter color that might have been a floor. Then I made out a flat, ghostly figure like a damp paper cutout stuck to the glass, barely evident through the ripples and optical compression, the squeezing of sight lines.
It stood with arms folded.
I dropped to all fours on the catwalk.
A face steadied between two long waves in the main tank. It had a down-angled left eye, and its lips bent into an interested gape as it examined the twins. I had seen that face in a mirror so often, I thought I was catching an impossible reflection. But the image moved out of sight, walking or simply rippling away.
It was Rob.
It was Rob. I couldn’t believe my luck. He was still alive. I could speak to him and apologize. I felt a surge of something approaching ecstasy.
Then I remembered Ben waiting for Janie.
I got to my feet and wiped my eyes, ashamed at giving in so easily to this swindle of emotion.
“Who’s there?” a female voice called out behind me.
I turned and grabbed both handrails, fully expecting to feel another slug, the one that would blow through my ribs and kill me.
A woman with dark hair climbed onto the catwalk and stood in the dim blue light. I recognized Betty Shun, once again wearing an abbreviated black-knit dress and running shoes. A fire ax swung from one hand. For a moment, she seemed to know me. She relaxed and smiled, then studied my clothes, the cut on my cheek. She tensed.
“You!” she said. “How did you get this far?”
“Someone gave me a key,” I answered, smiling, but my armpits dripped. “How’s Owen?” I watched the ax head slow in its pendulum motion.
“I hope he rots in hell,” Betty said. “Come with me. You shouldn’t be up here.”
37
She waited for me at the bottom of the steep stairs, lips tight, ax held in a bloodless grip.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m not crazy.”
Shun nodded but did not seem to believe me. She pointed for me to go around the tank, around the forest of piping, opposite the way I had entered.
“I’d like to see Dr. Golokhov,” I said. “I’ve come through hell. I deserve at least that much.”
“Dr. Goncourt left the ship a week ago,” Betty said. She led me out of the tank room into the inner sanctum of the main lab, big clinical spaces with stainless-steel counters and sinks, incubators, sequencers, a phalanx of proteomizers linked to connection machines. All these rooms were deserted, but I saw unpacked crates waiting in a corner, stacks of DVD-RW disks in plastic drawers, journals, cardboard boxes full of textbooks.
“I’m really not sure how much you know,” Shun said. “I’ve just arrived here myself.”
“I know it all,” I said, my throat threatening to close.
“Well,” she said. “Many of the others have left. Dr. Goncourt paroled a lot of them as soon as Irina died in New York. No need to be so vigilant now.”
“Mrs. Golokhova?”
Betty nodded.
“I didn’t know her first name.”
Shun smiled. I had lied. There was a lot I did not know. “Dr. Goncourt has always planned to retire and pass on his operations to others. It’s important that there be continuity.”
“Where is he?”
