“Other than your brother?” Felz said. “There are two others, both Americans. I’m sorry, Jesus—there’s one. There were three at first, but…”
“But?”
Felz held up a hand. “We’ll get to that. Right now there’s only your brother and Dr. Hugo Toy, the molecular biologist.”
“That’s it? Two people?”
Felz nodded. “Their vital signs monitors indicate they’re both alive and… functional? Sorry, I don’t know a better word. So them, plus the test subjects. Two Labrador retrievers, various reptile species, guinea pigs, and of course, the bees.”
Luke nodded. “Okay, so here’s the billion-dollar question: why are they down there at all?”
Felz’s face held the look of a boy with a secret so monumental that holding it in caused him physical pain.
“What we’ve discovered appears to exist beyond all explication.”
10.
FELZ OPENED A DOOR, which led into a small lab dominated by a steel bench. A hum filled the air. It held an uneven cadence, the odd chirp or hiccup, the way a computer sounds when it’s processing huge amounts of data.
Felz walked to an upright black box. It had the dimensions of a hotel fridge, with a keypad on its front.
“It still amazes me that access could be so simple,” he said. “Five years ago, we’d have had to pass through an armed checkpoint, a titanium door, a retinal scan, a blood serum scan, and a body-cavity search just to fill out the requisition forms to look at what I’m about to show you. The Hesperus exists because of this… but we don’t know what this is. So in that way, it’s like leaving the Hope Diamond in a bus station locker: as long as nobody really understands its value, it’s perfectly safe where it is.”
Felz entered a pass code. The lock on the black box disengaged. He cracked the lid. A stream of supercooled air escaped.
Luke leaned forward, dimly aware of the throbbing tension in his chest.
“I really don’t think security matters much, anyway,” Felz said, more to himself than to Luke. “I’m not sure anyone could move it, even if they wanted to.”
“Why?” Luke asked.
“Because,” Felz said softly, “it’s exactly where it wants to be.”
The cooler contained a single sealed petri dish. Felz reached for it with great reverence, fear, or some combination of both.
“You need to keep it that cold?” Luke asked.
Felz gave a tepid smile. “We don’t know. It seems unwise to place it in an environment conducive to growth. I mean, we don’t want it growing. Not yet.”
He set the petri dish on the lab bench. The lid was fogged. The condensation evaporated, the glass clearing by degrees.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” said Felz.
11.
MAGNIFICENT was one word for it.
But mundane also came to mind.
A gelatinous blob the size of a robin’s egg. It looked like a glob of partially set Jell-O. Not one of the colorful flavors, either. A drab nothing color—the color you’d get if you scraped a billion thumbprints off a million windowpanes and collected them into a ball.
“What is it?”
“It’s resistant to categorization,” said Felz. “Every standard test—DNA cataloguing, cellular identity, chemical pattern bonding… all inconclusive. No matches to any known flora, fauna, DNA structures, or chemical compounds. It’s… well, like I said, uncategorizable.”
“Is there a name for it?”
“Formally? Scientifically? Nothing yet,” Felz said. “It’s known internally as Specimen 1-G. We’ve had a few other specimens in hand, but they vanished.”
Vanished. Luke hated that particular word.
“What do you mean?” he said. “They died or…?”
Felz shook his head. “No. They just disappeared and… evanesced. Vaporized. Gone away. Informally, your brother and I have a name for it. Ambrosia, after the Greek word for nectar of the gods. Initially it was lying on a bed of agar gel—the standard petri dish base. Microbial growth does not destroy the gel structure, as microorganisms are unable to digest agar. But this specimen did something to the agar. It, well… harmonized it, I guess you could say.”
“You mean ate it?”
“No, no, it added the agar to itself. Transmuted the agar to make more of itself. The sample used to be much smaller. There’s nothing left of the agar, and its mass has been added to the ambrosia. It would be the equivalent of, oh, I don’t know—say instead of eating a loaf of bread, you somehow added the loaf to your body. Changed its cell structure to mimic your own, retained its shape and size, and ended up with a new appendage exactly resembling that loaf.” Felz pointed. Luke followed his finger—which he noticed was trembling. “If you look carefully, you can see it’s started to do the same to the dish.”
Luke noted a slight depression in the petri dish, as if it’d been eaten away by acid. He imagined the ambrosia eating through the glass, then the cooler and the floor until it plopped into one of the nitrogen-filled bladders, assimilating the gas somehow, making itself bigger, spreading across the bottom of the Hesperus like a tenacious weed.
“Is it some kind of parasite? Or something from the fossil age?”
“It’s something much more than that,” said Felz. “If it’s primitive, I suppose it would be in the way sharks are: they were perfectly built from the start, so they never needed to evolve. But sharks are common. They’re of this world. This thing is infinitely more complex.”
“What do you mean—it’s alien?”
Felz didn’t answer. Luke realized that the specimen wasn’t quite as lusterless as it’d seemed at first. It sparkled. The shimmer reminded Luke of marbles. Marbles in a mesh sack, each one glossed by the sun. The marbles he’d played with as a child.
Luke leaned in to get a better look. Veins of light streaked through the ambrosia’s interior. Coin-bright shafts of light, like zaps of lightning but more colorfuclass="underline" reds and violets and emeralds and incandescent whites.
So transfixing. Luke could watch it all day and night…
Felz squeezed Luke’s elbow. “Hey. You shouldn’t look at it for too long. It’s got a strange way about it.”
Dull anger hived in Luke’s stomach. He wanted to look some more, but Felz—the killjoy bastard—was intent on stopping him.
“I’m okay,” Luke said. “I’m fine, damn it.” Luke snapped back to himself. He smiled sheepishly at Felz. “I’m sorry.”
Felz returned the dish to the cooler. “It’ll pass. It’s one of the effects the ambrosia possesses.”
“So where the hell did it come from?” Luke asked, half knowing already.
Felz pointed downward. “The deep.”
“How did you—?”
“Four years ago a pollack ship, the Olympiad, was bottom-trawling twenty miles north of here,” Felz said. “Their winch broke, so to avoid damaging the net the captain charted a course for the Mariana Trench. It’s so deep that the ship could circle safely until the winch was fixed. When the net was dragged up, it was full of by-catch—that is, marine life they hadn’t set out to capture. They found a lantern fish, a species that commonly dwells several miles beneath the surface. It was still alive, which was the first shock. Lantern fish live in darkness, under tremendous pressure. If they swim toward the surface, the lessened pressure pulls their body apart. Not only that, but the sunlight attacks their flesh like acid. The only way to study lantern fish, or anything that dwells at those depths, is to do so in their habitat. Which is why so little is known about them.”