She remained still, body quivering with anticipation, swaying out over the uttermost edge of the cliff.
“You have the courage to face death. But do you have the courage to face life? Do the most courageous thing of all. Step back from the edge. Turn around. And come with me. Please.”
For another moment, she remained motionless. And then — slowly — she turned around and took an unsteady step toward him, and another. Quickly, Gideon grabbed her hand, pulled her in, and hugged her tightly as if to prevent her changing her mind.
Clutching her to him, he turned away, looking back toward the conflagration. The island was being utterly consumed by the firestorm, sweeping away everything in its path. It was leapfrogging from tree to tree, gobbets of burning debris starting to drop around them like snow, starting fires everywhere. It would be on top of them within moments. Where could they go? Back down the cliffs into the necropolis? But the fire had cut off that route of escape and was now closing in on three sides, backing them up against the cliff. The minutes he’d spent convincing Amiko not to hurl herself over the edge had eaten up precious time. Already the heat of the fire was becoming unbearable and he could hardly breathe…
…And then he heard a thudding sound above the roar of the fire. The shadow of a chopper appeared, low and slow. It went into a hover; a rope ladder dropped. Gideon grasped it and pushed Amiko up ahead of him even as the flames swirled around. Just before they pulled him in after her, he glanced back and got a final glimpse of the island: it had turned into a rotating tower of flame.
Epilogue
Gideon knew that the chopper that had brought him to his remote cabin in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico would eventually return. And almost a month later to the day, it did. Just as he finished preparing his single meal of the day — roasted wild goose breast in a ginger and black truffle emulsion — he heard the thwap of rotors.
Turning off the heat, he went to the door of his cabin. Coming in over the trees, the helicopter settled down in a nearby grassy meadow, flattening the long grass. The door opened and a wheelchair lift lowered Glinn in his all-terrain chair onto the ground. Garza appeared a moment later, and they both crossed the meadow to the cabin door.
Gideon held open the door.
They entered in silence. Glinn rolled over to one side while Garza took a seat in a leather chair. Gideon seated himself at the table. He was surprised to see Garza back with Glinn, but said nothing.
Glinn finally said: “How was your latest visit to the doctor?”
Gideon glanced down at his hands as he shook his head.
“Nothing at all?”
“They don’t know why I keep going back, asking for one MRI after another. They think I’m a little crazy.” He paused. “The lotus may work on broken bones and damaged limbs. But maybe not on a condition like mine. What I have is congenital — it can’t be undone.”
“Have patience — and faith.”
Gideon said coldly: “And you? I saw you gnawing on that lotus in the helicopter while we were evacuating the island. Where’d you find it, anyway?”
“When the Cyclops returned to the camp a second time, it had your drysack in one hand. A few specimens fell out as it attacked. I rather selfishly took one for myself.”
“Lot of good it did you.”
A moment passed. Glinn and Garza exchanged looks. And then — slowly, rather painfully — Glinn rose from the wheelchair, took a step, and another, gripping onto the table for support, and made his way without further assistance to an empty chair. He eased himself down into it, grimacing slightly.
“Oh, my God,” Gideon murmured.
“Yes. I’m feeling stronger — and healthier — by the day. And that resulted from my one crude and selfish attempt at self-medication. Now some of the best minds in the world are working on the drug. They’ve been able to propagate the lotus, they’ve sequenced its DNA, and now it’s only a matter of time before they isolate and analyze the active agents in it. It’s a unique organism, eukaryotic, very ancient, evidently a type of myxogastrid or slime mold that lives part of its life cycle as a single cell and part as a complex multicellular organism. They feel confident they will eventually crack the code.”
“I’m happy for you,” Gideon replied in an astringent tone.
A pause. “Gideon, I owe you a most profound apology.”
Gideon remained silent.
“I’m responsible for this disaster. I ask your forgiveness for…the unforgivable.”
“The unforgivable,” Gideon repeated.
“Yes. I blame myself for—”
All of a sudden, the rage, the frustration, all the feelings that he had spent the last few weeks trying to put behind him, came boiling to the surface. “You selfish bastard,” he said with quiet vehemence, rising from his chair and stepping toward Glinn, hands unconsciously balling into fists. Garza moved to step between them, but Glinn motioned him to stay where he was.
“After the way you screwed up that meteorite job, sinking a ship and causing the death of over a hundred people, a normal person might have taken stock. Reconsidered his assumptions. Maybe even have acquired a little humility. But not you. You’re too egotistical, too sure you’re right. You’ve no appreciation of your own shortcomings or the basic unpredictability of things. Oh, you’re a champ when it comes to plotting out a course of action. But your system is hardly fail-safe. You’re too arrogant to consider your failings. This time, instead of sinking a ship, you destroyed an island. You killed a being, the last of his kind, and caused the extinction of a race. Because of you, more people died. And here you are: back again.” He paused and said: “God damn you.”
Gideon stood there, staring at Glinn. The man’s face was, as usual, unreadable. A blank. But then it slowly paled, the lines wavering.
“A perfect example of this,” Gideon said, in something closer to a normal voice, “is what happened to Amiko. Last I heard, she was running an Outward Bound program in Patagonia. After that, she fell off the map.”
“We’re trying to locate her,” said Glinn, weakly. “We want to help her.”
“Help her? You did this to her,” said Gideon bitterly. “You knew about her inner turmoil when you hired her and leveraged it against her. When you killed the Cyclops, you killed part of her. She loved that creature. But the human cost didn’t matter to you. Just like you used my own condition against me, allowing me to hope against hope that the mission might cure me. But guess what? The thing’s still in here!” He pointed at his head. “You’ve never learned. Never. And you never will.”
Gideon halted, breathing hard. Glinn’s face had undergone a remarkable change — white, beaded with sweat, creased with anguish.
“You’re wrong, Gideon,” Glinn replied. “I’ve spent the last month coming to grips with my crimes. I made terrible mistakes, did terrible things. The death of the Cyclops. The destruction of the island. Lost lives, ruined hopes. It has been an agony for me to accept what I’ve done.”
Gideon said nothing.
“Somehow, ironically, my starting to heal made me face up to who I am. Face my own fallibility, my own weaknesses. My basic philosophy was wrong. No amount of computing power or predictive work can kill the Black Swan. There’s always something impossible to predict. Like a live Cyclops. I’ve been an arrogant fool.”