here is no mistaking the signposts that point our way into Vitals. Do not expect (the signals warn us) to find within these covers a hard-argument SF novel such as Greg Bear once wrote. Do not expect Blood Music (1985), even though his new novel does deal with something like a hive mind; nor Eon (1985), for though Vitals does climax on a ship bigger than one can easily grasp in the mind's eye, that ship is a 2,000-foot condo cruiser similar to several now under construction, not a Rama from beyond the fields we know.
The first warning signal is the dust jacket, on which the word "thriller" appears lots and "science fiction" not at all. The second signal is the header for the first chapter (it reads: "May 28. San Diego, California"), in which we are given, in high day-after-tomorrow-porn technothriller style, the precise day and month that the action begins, but not the year. (Technothrillers are rather like the secret sciences and conspiracy-ridden governments that fill them: information is always owned by somebody, and is generally released to readers in feverish partial snippets, as though security had been breached.) All we can guess, from context, is that Vitals takes place early in the current century.
The third signal is the first sentence of the tale, as narrated by its main protagonist, Hal Cousins, an ambitious young scientist: "The last time I talked to Rob [he tells us], I was checking my luggage at Lindbergh Field to fly to Seattle and meet with an angel." If Vitals were going to
be pure SF, we would read "angel" as an open metaphor, leading us who knows where, into who knows what exogamy with tomorrow. But as the header has already told us we're reading a book cast in technothriller mode, we guess that the angel metaphor is reductive: that the angel here will prove
to be a donor of money. (We guess right.)
The fourth signal surfaces at the top of the second page of text, where we learn that Rob—who has just hung up on Hal after giving him a mocking, gnomic message, and who will be reported dead in less than a month—is in fact the narrator's twin brother. And we begin to sense that Greg Bear is playing a complex game of destabilization with us, and we begin to feel a premonitory tickle of dis-ease, the way birds sense a coming earthquake. Because we have passed through portals of SF and
technothriller, and we have entered the world of horror.
We remain there, with the twins.
Catching the duplicitous disease of twins
It is certainly not the case that no SF novel has ever featured twins, though in SF twins usually turn out to be avatars or mirrors of the protagonist, and function therefore as amplifiers of that protagonist hero's ultimate selfhood and power. Nor is it the case that no horror novel has ever not featured twins, though twins are very common indeed in that genre, where they generally serve as conduits from the past who surface into the protagonist's world in order to deform his future. Twins are termites of the scaffolding of the self in daylight, they are phagocytes of the world day. Their roots may lie in the chaos and old night of those aspects of reality we have not yet brought under control and therefore, self-deludingly, describe as being over with; but in truth they are bearers of a nausea of change to their other selves, and vicariously to all the readers of horror over the last two centuries or so of unrelenting historical transformation. Horror is a hook to draw the
future down. Twins carry the hook. Twins are contagious.
So it is, in Vitals.
Though their careers have been separate, Hal and Rob Cousins are both life scientists, both have concentrated on the dilemma of human aging, and both have come to a similar conclusion: that human aging is (very roughly: Bear is far more competent at making up science than this reviewer could dream of being) a function of our commensal intimacy with bacteria. Hal does not know what Rob has been up to; what he himself wants, as the novel opens, is to get a chance to analyze primitive cells from the ocean depths, cells which have not yet imported mitochondria into their operating systems; for it is through mitochondria, which were once autonomous bacteria, that instructions are conveyed to the cells they inhabit to begin dying.
Hal's angel, a computer billionaire, gives him some money, and access to the Pacific benthos; but after a chapter or two of deep-sea SF stuff (itself interspersed with technothriller sabotage stuff), Hal is barred from any further scientific spelunking, and his angel disappears from the book completely. Whether or not Hal was about to make a conceptual breakthrough weighs little in the end, because Vitals is not, as we've suggested, really SF at all. Vitals is horror, it is only
interested in the future insofar as the past has contaminated it, and (as we slowly learn) the main discoveries have already been made.
They were made in the 20th century.
Gunning for the 20th century
And (as we slowly learn) it is the 20th century—"You study the twentieth century long enough," says Hal at one point, "you want to pack a gun."—that governs Vitals, and shapes the world to come. Tormented by clues dropped by his brother, Hal gradually discovers a truth which Rob had discovered earlier: that in the 1930s a Russian scientist named Golokhov had encountered "the Little Mothers of the World"—the vast primitive bacterial communities which began to shape our destiny a billion years ago—and from this discovery learned two things: how to begin to modify human beings so that, one day, we might be immortal; and how, through associated processes, to "tag" human beings with bacterial agents which, on interacting with our vitals, brought us under control.
It is the second discovery whose consequences shape Vitals, somewhat to its detriment, as a great deal of time is spent tracing Hal's attempts to stay immune, and to work out just who among his colleagues and friends has already been tagged. The seemingly dead Rob, whose hints and traps shape Hal's writhing course forward into the new century, is both tagged and not tagged, victim and torturer, twin below and (ultimately) twin above.
But the saliva of machination that spoors the intimate twin-jousts pales, in the end, beside the underlying horror of Bear's vision. Golokhov, it turns out, has been tagging the 20th-century world for 70 years or more. Stalin is tagged, and other genocidal monsters; the American government is tagged; the illuminati of the era are tagged; the apparatchiks and the secret police and the neighborhood cops are tagged. Immortality (when it comes) will be owned by those who tag, by those
responsible for what the 20th century has done to the expression on the human face in history.
"Listen to Orwell, Grasshopper," Ben [a seemingly untagged colleague of Hal] said sententiously.
"What about Orwell?"
"The true and authentic voice of the twentieth century."
Ben drew quote marks in the air. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
Vitals may be something of a spatchcock tale: big head, tiny non-SF lungs, easily winded; but it is, all the same, a very modern and valiant 21st-century take on the nature of the past which shapes us still. And it deals with exactly the material that SF writers are almost certainly going to have to deal with, in retrospect, for some time to come. Like John Le Carre, whose recent novels transform the dead Cold War into a commedia dell'arte revel, Greg Bear and his colleagues have something dead and binding to deal with, as writers of responsibility: the last century.
There are lots of Twins down there to behead.
