The Lost Island

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.”

Gideon looked at him. The leader of EES did indeed look stricken.

Glinn raised his eyes again. “Gideon, I failed — but the project did not. This drug will change the world. We succeeded. It was messy and cruel. But it worked. And the fact is…we still need you.”

Gideon waited. He knew this was coming.

“The time has come. For our final project.”

“The meteorite.”

“Yes. The meteorite was a giant seed. I planted it. And now I must uproot it. It’s an alien life-form that threatens the earth. The time to act is now.”

Gideon turned to Garza. “And you? What’s your take on this?”

“I’m in,” Garza replied in his gruff voice. “Eli’s telling the truth: he’s a changed man. Otherwise I wouldn’t have signed back on. This seed is as dangerous as Eli says it is. I’ll be mission co-leader. No more secret orders, no more vetoes from on high, no more my-way-or-the-highway. This is to be a team effort.”

“What about the funding?” Gideon asked Glinn.

“You recall I told you EES was going to take a small percentage of profits from the drug in lieu of a royalty? We worked out another deal with the foundation. Instead, we accepted a single, onetime payment: just one percent of what the foundation estimates will be realized in the first year of the drug’s distribution. Financed by a generous benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous.”

“And how much is that?”

“A little over a billion dollars.”

Gideon shook his head.

“We have the money,” Garza said. “We have the knowledge and the technology. We’re the only ones who have a hope of defeating this thing. And we’ll be doing it as partners — you included.”

“Why me?”

“You know why,” Glinn said. “You’re the yin to my yang. You don’t know why you do what you do, you have no discipline, you don’t think things through, and you ignore logic. And yet you always seem to make the right choice. You’re an intuitional genius. Temperamentally and intellectually, you are my exact opposite — and that is precisely why we need you. Or we will fail. We have no time left. We need to move. I want you to come with us right now.”

A very long silence ensued. It stretched into a minute, two minutes. Finally, Gideon stood up, went to the stove, picked up the pan with the beautifully prepared goose, and dumped it in the garbage. Despite all he’d been through — despite the heartbreaks and danger and suffering and mortification he had tried so hard to put behind him — somehow he had known this would happen; that Glinn would be back…and that he would be ready.

He grabbed his coat. “Lead the way.”