Spiral (4 page)

“Jesus. You tell me everything, you bastard. Right now.”

Kitano didn’t speak, and in a fury now, Liam struck him again and again. It was strangely quiet in the room, no cries. Kitano took the blows silently.

“Tell me, you goddamn psychopath.”

Kitano didn’t answer. He was limp, his eyes half closed. Liam was holding him up by his collar. When he finally released him, Kitano fell to the floor. Liam stood over him, breathing hard, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Not moving, Kitano looked back up at him with glassy eyes.

Liam tried to calm down, sort it all out. He and Kitano were alone. The guard was on deck. Everyone was still on deck, Liam was sure, mesmerized by the size and spectacle of an atomic explosion.

Kitano stirred. He tried to stand but then fell back against the wall. He shook his head, trying to get his wits about him, attempted again to stand. He saw Liam, the cylinder.

Liam held up the cylinder. “It’s in here, isn’t it? The Uzumaki?”

Kitano slumped back, defeated. Neither spoke. Liam watched him, the man’s hands still cuffed together, finger missing. The blood dripped steadily from Kitano’s hand, forming a sticky pool on the floor. He was bleeding to death. Liam could stand here another five minutes and Kitano would bleed out. He would die. He should let him die. Liam wrapped his fingers around the cylinder, held it tight. “You goddamn bastard.”

Finally Kitano said, “Kill me.”

“What?”

“Kill me. I want to die. I failed. Please. Kill me.”

LIAM WAS ALONE ON THE DECK OF THE USS
NORTH DAKOTA
.
It was past two a.m.

He looked down at the small brass cylinder in his hand.

He’d spent the last six hours in debriefings with Willoughby and his lieutenants, helping them prepare a communiqué to MacArthur describing the events leading to the destruction of the
Vanguard
. A second communiqué covered everything that he had discovered: that penicillin made you vulnerable to full-on infection. The vulnerability could persist for weeks, even years. Within hours, the Uzumaki takes over your GI tract. Transmission by fecal matter or stomach juices: vomiting, perhaps even spit. Once it is in your lungs, the spores spread from your breath. No known cure. The mycotoxins attack your sanity, producing mania, hallucinations, then suicidal and homicidal urges. Later, they attack your organs, causing internal hemorrhaging. Within a day, you are mad. Within a week, you are dead. You live only long enough to infect those around you, a walking biological time bomb.

He had told them about confronting Kitano after the explosion, finding him wounded, having bitten off his own finger, trying to kill himself, trying to bleed to death.

They had fought. Liam had subdued him and then gone for help.

That was the story he’d told.

He hadn’t told them about the small brass cylinder in his hand.

Throw it overboard
, he thought.
Toss it over. To the bottom of the sea with it
.

Toss it, you dumb Irish bastard
.

WHEN KITANO AWOKE, HE WAS IN THE INFIRMARY. HE WAS
strapped down. He was alone. His finger was bandaged, missing the top two joints.

The cylinder was gone. He expected the MPs to come, interrogate him, torture him. Tear at his body until he’d told them everything about the Uzumaki.

But it never happened.

They questioned him about the penicillin for hours. But nothing more. Nothing about the cylinder that had been in his finger.

Over the next hours, his certainty grew until it was rock-solid. They did not
know
. They did not know what he had possessed. Liam Connor had not told them.

A few days after, he saw Connor briefly. They had brought him up for a few minutes of sunlight. Connor stood by the railing. Their eyes met. Connor shook his head almost imperceptibly. He glanced toward the sea. To say
I threw it overboard
.

Kitano nodded back, then turned and looked away, saying with his countenance that he understood, that it was over. That the Uzumaki was now at the bottom of the ocean.

But what Kitano thought was:
He still has it
.

SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER

DAY 1
MONDAY, OCTOBER 25

THE CRAWLERS IN THE GARDEN

1

LIAM CONNOR LOVED CORNELL. HE HAD TAUGHT AT THE
university for more than half a century and expected full well to die shuffling between the Arts Quad and the Big Red Barn. Cornell was a chimera, both a member of the Ivy League and the New York state agricultural school. Nabokov wrote
Lolita
here, and Feynman started his scribbling about quantum electrodynamics, but Cornell was also a place where you could get your wheat checked for smut or your cow autopsied.

The campus was perched on a hill overlooking the city of Ithaca, population twenty-nine thousand, tucked between a pair of glacier-carved gorges. It was founded in 1865 by the millionaire and philanthropist Ezra Cornell, founder of Western Union and a freethinker who believed that the practical sciences should be taught with the same zeal as the classics. Cornell had made his money on the telegraph, the new communication technology that had remade society as fundamentally as would the Internet one hundred and fifty years later. He used his fortune to create a new kind of university, utterly different from the religion- and tradition-bound schools of the era: “An institution where any person could find instruction in any study,” a quote that would become the school’s motto. Coed and nondenominational from the day it opened, the university graduated its first female student in 1873 and its first African American in 1897. Liam was proud of the university’s heritage—he had a deep appreciation and respect for the underdog. A person’s value, he believed, was set by who they were, not by how others treated them. For eight centuries, the Irish had been treated as little more than apes by the British, and Liam never forgot it.

LIAM’S LABORATORIES WERE TUCKED AWAY IN THE BASEMENT
of the Physical Sciences Building, a new glass, steel, and stone structure in the center of campus wedged between the old façades of Rockefeller and Baker halls. This evening he stood in the middle of his lab, a pair of silver, sharp-point #5 tweezers in his hand. The old Irishman was eighty-six years old, dressed in brown dungarees, a gray sweater, and old white sneakers. During his sixty years at Cornell, Liam had put together one of the most unusual and diverse collections of living fungi on the planet. The Gardens of Decay, as he called them, consisted of ten thousand postage stamp–sized plots of different mycological species laid out on a square grid, a mottled menagerie of yellows, greens, and grays, like farmland seen from thirty thousand feet. They occupied three large custom-built granite-topped tables, each almost nine feet across and weighing half a ton. To count all the species, ticking off one a second, would take hours, a testament to the power and fecundity of evolution.

Each of the tiny plots was labeled by a pair of letters and a three-digit number. Plot #HV-324 was
Hemileia vastatrix
, the rust fungus that invaded the British coffee plantations in Ceylon in 1875. Within a few years it decimated the crops and turned England into a nation of tea drinkers. A few rows over was
Aspergillus niger
, which was used for, among other things, the making of smokable
chandoo
opium during the height of the opium trade.

Next to it was
Entomophthora muscae
, the “fly destroyer” fungus, very tricky to grow in culture. It first invades the nervous system of the common housefly. Somehow—no one knew exactly how—
E. muscae
commands the fly to crawl to the highest place it can find and die there with its tail pointed skyward. After consuming the fly’s innards for food,
E. muscae
uses the fly’s lifeless husk as a launching pad, firing billions of spores skyward, each spore another fly massacre in the making.

Liam dug into one of the plots with his tweezers, uncovering a plastic bottle cap half covered with a grayish growth. He held it up to the light, his hand shaking slightly. The specimen was like most of the fungi in Liam’s gardens: a saprobe, or feeder on the dead. They fed on the fallen, from plants to people, and Liam was expanding their definition of food. With a combination of trial, error, and genetic engineering, he was teaching them to feed on the detritus of modern society, to break down everything from credit cards to corn husks.

“Pop-pop?” Dylan said.

Liam looked up at his redheaded nine-year-old great-grandson. “Yes?”

“What’s the difference between elephants and blueberries?”

Liam said, “Haven’t a clue.”

“They’re both blue, except for the elephant. What did Tarzan say when he saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”

“Tell me.”

“ ‘Here come the elephants.’ What did Jane say when she saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”

“Enlighten me.”

“She said, ‘Here come the blueberries.’ She was color-blind.”

They both laughed. Dylan had a thing for elephant jokes. “Pop-pop? You know pretty much everything, right?”

Liam turned to face him. “I know a few things,” he said.

“How do you know if a girl is … you know. Interested.”

Liam raised his eyebrows. “A woman’s smiles are hard to read, for a woman’s secrets are many indeed.”

“Come on. No rhymes.”

He put down his tweezers. “Well. Let’s see … How do you know? With your great-grandmother Edith, God rest her, it was simple. It was how she stood. She’d bend her leg, her right leg, so that her foot was on its toe. Then her heel would rotate in small circles. She claimed to find me as attractive as a spotted newt, but her heel said otherwise.”

“You’re making this up, aren’t you? You’re telling stories.”

“If I’m lying, I’ll hang in a tree, but her heel twisted for—”

“—none but me,” Dylan finished, laughing.

Liam brightened, glad to see Dylan light of heart. Since the car accident with his mom nearly a year before, he’d had a tough time of it, brushing up against death at an age when he should be engaged with grasshoppers and multiplication tables. Liam fretted about him, picturing himself gone just when the boy needed him most.

But maybe Dylan was finally turning a corner.

In the gardens, a MicroCrawler came running, barely a blur as it zipped down one of the packed-dirt passageways between the rows of fungal plots. The Crawler stopped and used its razor-sharp silicon legs to slice off a sample of fungus. It headed for the corner of the table, where it loaded the sample into a device that analyzed it for RNA and protein expression. The spider-sized silicon-and-metal micro-robots called MicroCrawlers were tenders of the gardens. There were fourteen in all, each smaller than a dime, watched by a camera overhead and directed by a computer in the corner. Dylan was in love with the little robots, gave them all names.

Liam looked at Dylan. “Who’s the girl?”

“Just someone. And I didn’t notice anything with her heel.”

“They’re all different. But they all do something. When you look at her, what does she do?”

“Her eyes get funny. Like she’s squinting.”

“
Hmmm
. That could go either way. What else?”

“She makes fists.”

“Are her thumbs on the inside or outside?”

“Inside.”

“Well, then, my boy, you are golden.”

Dylan smiled.

“Okay. Why do elephants paint the undersides of their feet yellow?”

Dylan worked it over. “You got me. No idea.”

“So they can hide upside down in bowls of custard.”

“That’s stupid.”

Liam shrugged. “Have you ever found an elephant in your custard?”

“No.”

“Then it clearly works.”

Dylan laughed, then focused on a spot a few feet away. “Pop-pop? Something’s wrong with Mickey.”

Mickey the MicroCrawler stood motionless a few rows over, frozen in place like a statue. Liam leaned over, nudged the Crawler with his tweezers.
“Hmmm.”
Liam picked it up, acutely conscious of its tiny silicon legs, edges as sharp as a scalpel. He dropped the Crawler in his palm and poked it again with his tweezers. Nothing. He flipped Mickey onto its back and immediately saw the problem. “See that little black spot? The control circuit burned out. Jake said they’d had trouble with this batch.”

“He can’t fix it?”

“Nope.”

“He’s completely, utterly dead?”

“Afraid so.”

Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen one die before.”

“Crawlers are robust little buggers, but they’re not immortal. Nothing is.” Liam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What do you say we give Mickey a proper sendoff?”

Liam went to his computer, the Crawler still in hand. He clicked his way to iTunes and queued up the old Irish dirge “Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire.” He gave Dylan a wiggle of his eyebrows, but Dylan suddenly looked serious.

The dirge picked up:

My rider of the bright eyes
What happened to you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart
When I bought your fine clothes
.
A man the world could not slay
.

“Let’s find you a nice spot,” he said to Mickey. He chose a diminutive patch of earth near the center of the gardens. He dropped the Crawler there, on its back, legs in the air. Liam noted the coordinates of the plot where he had placed Mickey and typed them into the computer.

Dylan watched closely. “What are you doing, Pop-pop?”

“Patience, little man. Some things can’t be rushed.”

Three MicroCrawlers appeared, zipping along the grid of passageways that cut between the plots like rows in a farmer’s field. They arrived at Mickey’s location and immediately began tossing aside bits of dirt, digging a hole. Within seconds they had created a cavity large enough to hold their fallen comrade. Then they descended on him, tearing off his silicon legs, his head, ripping him thoroughly and completely apart.

Dylan was spellbound. “Oh, wow. This is so freaky.”

“Keep watching.” The Crawlers tossed Mickey’s assorted bits into the tiny grave. Next came two more Crawlers, which disgorged their contents onto Mickey, vomiting up tiny water droplets filled with spores.

“Pop-pop? You made a fungus that can break down a Crawler? How?”

Liam smiled. “I borrowed genes from a bacterium that makes an acid. It can etch silicon.” He used his tweezers to dig at a nearby plot. Inside was an older Crawler, half gone, covered with a thin film of fuzzy growth. “See? Not bad, eh?”

Dylan watched with a focus reserved for the weightiest of matters.

Back at the original site, the MicroCrawlers began filling the hole, and after a few seconds Mickey the Crawler was almost entirely covered. They patted down the earth with their silicon legs and skittered away. All that was left was a quarter-sized lump of soft earth and a solitary leg poking up like a tiny blade of silver grass.

“And that’s that. Except it’s not. A couple of months from now, Mickey will be thoroughly broken down to its atomic bits. Ready for another go.”

“But he won’t be Mickey anymore. He’s dead.”

“I like to think he’s still alive,” Liam said. “A bit of his aliveness in everything. Now. Back to boy-girl relationships. What’s the latest with your mom’s boyfriend?”

Dylan pulled his gaze away from the tiny grave.

“Mark? He’s history.”

Liam whistled. “That was quick. What happened?”

“She said he wasn’t right.”

“What do you think?”

“He wasn’t right.”

“Then off with his head.”

Dylan turned and looked at his great-grandfather. “What about Jake?”

“For your mother?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Hmmm.”
Liam placed his hands on the table. Jake. Jake Sterling. It was a scenario he’d considered many times. “I don’t think he’s your mom’s type.”

“Why not?”

“No reason. Just not.”

He tried to be straight with Dylan whenever he could. Dylan was a smart kid, understood more of the world than most kids his age. But this was something beyond his reach.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE WITH MAGGIE OUTSIDE
of Clark Hall in the brisk autumn night. She stood waiting by her car, in jeans and a brown pullover sweater, looking lovely, as always, her blond-red hair framing bright, intelligent eyes, a small upturned nose, and pale lips.