The Curiosity

The Curiosity

Stephen P. Kiernan

Dedication

To Chris,

my endlessly generous friend

Contents

PART I

Reclamation

CHAPTER 1

Candidate Berg

(Kate Philo)

I
was already wide-awake when they came for me. I lay on a metal bunk, in a gray-walled room with a whitewashed ceiling, while Billings and an ensign hurried toward me through the bulkheads. In a moment I would open the door to discovery, to love, to destruction. In those seconds just before, though, I sat with eyes wide.

Later, after everything had happened and people were seeking explanations, the talk went around that I had possessed knowledge of what was to come. Honestly. My sister, the ever-snarky Chloe, had plenty of wisecracks about that one. Since apparently I could see the future, she teased, I ought to be able to predict what her husband was buying for their anniversary that year. My impulse was to reply, “What you deserve: nothing,” but I corked it. Put me at the front of a biology lecture hall, I'm as collected as a game-show host. But Chloe's overconfidence makes me stifle myself, the classic younger sister's self-censorship. A catty comeback would have been as unlikely as me having premonitions about things which no one could have predicted.

The people who spread those rumors forget that I am a scientist down to my toes. High school honors back in Ohio, bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia, Ph.D. from Yale in molecular biology, a year each in cell research at Johns Hopkins and the Salk Institute. Hardly the crystal-ball type.

The conspiracy theorists were worse. Everything I did apparently revealed my circuitous strategy to mislead the entire world. They had Web pages for floating their possibilities, they had blogs, they dug through my trash. The plot was supposed to enrich me in some way, though exactly how was something no one ever explained.

These people need to find some healthier hobbies. If they spent half an hour in my presence, they would realize that the conspiracy idea was nonsense. Anyone who knew me before the inexplicable occurred would have said I felt happiest in a lab, could become infatuated with data, remained committed to the slow, incremental progress of sound research. I completely lacked the guile to con the world into filling my pockets.

Now that the media has decamped from my doorstep, now that the zealots are busy condemning someone else, now that the president no longer uses my name with contempt, I hope to reclaim those quiet habits that served me before the world went wild. Maybe they can preserve my wobbly sanity. Maybe they can mend my shattered heart.

Because love, honestly, was what motivated me. Love was both curiosity and its fulfillment. Love was the miracle everyone overlooked while fixating on an accident of science. Love, it pains me to say, love was a beautiful man rowing a little boat, alone, away from me, into the infinite.

But first there was adventure. The reason I was already awake that night in my cabin, quite logically, was that the ship had changed. I was passenger on a research vessel, a converted icebreaker, nineteen scientists, a crew of twelve. Also one journalist, annoying everyone a little but me most severely. That night there were high seas as we beat a course north, though admittedly once we'd put eight hundred miles between us and the Arctic Circle, there was not much farther north one could go, up on the frigid crown of the planet. It is an interesting sensation, feeling all the world beneath you. Like you are on the edge of things, away from the center, forgotten.

No wonder we were the ones to find something incredible there. No one else was looking.

Rough water that night meant the engines were laboring. They strained to climb a wave as the vessel tilted to stern, then whined as the ship pitched forward and raced down the pinnacle's other side. The tossing threw a pen off my desk; it rolled up and down the floor while I attempted to read in my bunk. The paper in my lap, a Norwegian study of iceberg migration, suffered from either shoddy data or sloppy translating. Also I was exhausted. In August that far north, the sun only sets for a few hours, so opportunities to sleep are precious. If not for that night's washing-machine weather, I would have been happily making z's. Sometimes the ship's speed did not match a wave's shape, so the vessel would belly flop in a trough, shuddering the length of its 181 feet.

In the small hours I managed to doze. I dreamed I was swaying in a hammock, in my Ohio childhood backyard. Chloe yelled at me from a tree overhead, something about trying harder. But we'd never had a hammock. All at once the ship stilled, the decks no longer heaving, the engines making a steadier thrum belowdecks. I awakened.

There it is. A perfectly obvious explanation. Also, because I awoke with a chill, I decided to dress warmly right away. Later, the media made much of the fact that I had put on my under-diving layer, snug navy-blue insulation instead of regular clothes, as if I'd known we'd soon be in the water. The simple truth is that I was cold and it was all I had clean. I did not even have fresh underwear.

The timing is curious to consider: Billings scrambling on his way while I search for a belt, his haste the opposite of my leisure. I am slender to a fault, almost no hips at all, breasts so small Chloe says I never really developed. The only way I have a shape is if I wear something around my waist. I could not find the belt for my diving suit, though. Finally I spotted it, coiled under my bunk. I threaded it through the suit loops while digging my feet into deck shoes. One glance at the mirror, I decided to throw a yellow T-shirt over the whole thing. The fact that the ensign and Billings entered the forward cabins just as I opened my door is not even coincidence. It is a foreseeable circumstance; they were coming to tell me precisely the news I was about to seek for myself.

No magic. No conspiracy. If we are ever to comprehend the subsequent chain of events, we must begin by shedding speculative nonsense. The facts are incredible enough. What we now know is that life does not end quite as permanently as we have always thought. We can keep a “dead” body alive indefinitely, breathing, its blood mechanically circulating, until the organs are procured for transplant. We can restart the heart of a person who has been “dead” from cardiac arrest for up to six minutes. Now, as a result of that night in the Arctic, we also know that temporary reanimation of a “dead” mammal is possible. Above all, we know that this achievement redefines human existence as radically as harnessing the power of the atom did in the 1940s.

May I say that it was amazing? That we uncovered solid truth in a vast empire of unknown? That we found something so arresting, it captured the attention of the world?

But that is not all. We also learned that these discoveries will affect the lives of scientists who venture with insufficient caution into such turbulent waters. There is no potential for salvaging a ruined professional reputation, but maybe the possibility exists for restoration of personal dignity. There is no way to bring back what has been lost, but maybe telling a tale of beauty is a form of mourning. Thus do I, as one member of the small society overwhelmed by these events, seek to set the record straight.

O
n that night—it was 2:12
A.M
. Greenwich Mean Time, and we were above eighty-three degrees latitude—I pulled open my cabin door just as Graham Billings had raised his hand to knock on it. I nearly walked into his knuckles. A uniformed sailor hovering at his elbow, Billings grinned that crooked British grin of his.

“Uncanny,” he said. “We were just coming to wake you. Brilliant.”

Graham Billings: respected plant biologist, chaired researcher at Oxford, happiest with a freshly poured pint, but also author of numerous papers involving incredibly painstaking work on plankton's role in the global food chain. His findings were reliable, his patience flabbergasting, his documentation unparalleled.

Billings was also my sole ally in the hostile work environment of that expedition. While I was technically his shipboard boss, he completely outranked me in publications, field experience, scientific prestige. I relied on his advice daily: which bays to try next, which bergs to investigate, which divers to assign to each crew. In the small hours we sat in the galley before spread-out maps, debating where to sail next. All through that journey Billings showed a bemused deference to my authority, which I repaid with unmasked respect. Best of all, he provided about half of us with a foolproof cure for seasickness: soggy rice washed down with mint tea. It proved so dependable we were all in his debt.

“Good morning, Dr. Billings. Ensign.” I nodded at them. “Why are we stopped?”

“A candidate berg, Dr. Philo. But how did you know we were coming to fetch you?”

“I didn't.” I brushed past him, tucking the T-shirt under the belt. “How large a sample?”

“Well, Doctor . . .” He hurried after me into the tiny officers' galley. “You know how hard it is to estimate before probing how much of the berg contains hard-ice—”

“How big, Billings?” I poured a mug of coffee. “Tell me.”

He drew up short, the ensign nearly stumbling into him from behind. “Well. The thing of it is.” He paused, opening his fingers wide, that grin turned up to one hundred watts. “If it's the real stuff, Kate, this would be one bloody whale. Easily three hundred meters per side.”

“The largest candidate berg ever found,” the ensign blurted.

During grad school my roommate was a junior city editor of the local paper, and she said her role in a crisis was to be its opposite. The bigger the story—plane crash or car pileup or political scandal—the more important it was for her to remain calm. Then reporters and photographers could be marshaled into an instant team, get the story's immediate angles, still start the press on time. I always valued that approach in my work, so much that it has become a kind of professional reflex: when someone blurts like that ensign did, I feel my inner magnetic field swing to the opposite pole.

“Probably just a big ice cube,” I said, shrugging.

Inside, of course, I fluttered.
This is exactly why we have come all this way.
We had bounced between the ports of Thule in Greenland and Alert in Canada, around the stark and lovely Queen Elizabeth Islands, then set a course due north, the last land left far behind, all in high iceberg season, week upon week despite the obvious hazards. A find like this was precisely why Carthage, the egotistical bastard, had hired me. I was too young for the job, inexperienced in fieldwork, utterly green in positions of command. But he had assays to attempt, grants to win, and if I may be so blunt, asses to kiss. Oh, he could commit the loftiest snobberies imaginable, but whenever it promised to enrich funding for his beloved Carthage Institute of Cellular Seeking, the genius scientist had that particular pucker perfected.

At least I have my dignity. I have my button, too. These days I live in a small corner of the country, my name a national synonym for deceit. But every night I go down to the docks, regardless of weather, to stand in silence, to think about a man I loved, a price I paid, while on a chain around my neck hangs a plain brown jacket button—my one memento from the whole escapade. Just a button, I know, a small souvenir, a nothing. Yet it is enough to remind me that I did right, that at his most vulnerable time I saved a man from the wolves of our society, so I make no apology. There on the dock I reach up, I touch my fingers to that button, I am proud.

W
hen Carthage offered me a job with his institute, I told myself that early astronauts probably felt much as I did: whatever their achievements in other fields, they had no credentials for walking on the moon. Who could? When you are that far ahead of anything anyone has done before, the idea of relevant experience is laughable. Besides, what person with a professionally inquisitive mind would turn down so rare an opportunity? It was a chance to work with one the more celebrated minds on earth, investigating the most vexing biological and ethical questions. That's why people like me were willing to decline tenure-track offers from major universities but would accept the offer of a man whose narcissism was as famous as his discoveries.

Curiosity, I should add, made me available personally as well as professionally. I had hugged my wonderful college sweetheart Dana good-bye a dozen years before, as he went off to medical school in Seattle and I began doctoral studies in New Haven.

It might as well have been love itself I bid farewell, the work was so demanding. When friends announced engagements, I researched my dissertation. While they nursed babies at 2
A.M
., I pulled all-nighters with a microscope. The gropings of grad school lacked depth and duration because the work was so relentless, everyone's future so uncertain. The few shallow occasions at professional conferences invariably collapsed from their own pointlessness before we even reached a hotel room.

My last real relationship had been with Wyatt, a law professor so newly divorced you could smell it on him like fresh paint. The more he insisted he was fine, over her, honestly, the more I saw how much healing time he still needed. When he called me by her name one morning, I knew to go. At least he had not done it in bed. Small consolation.