Rowan lays it on the table: "What if ßehemoth hasn't had millions of years? What if it's only had a few decades?"

"Well, that's—" Jutta begins.

"Then we're not sure of anything any more, are we? Maybe we're not talking about a few isolated relicts here and there. Maybe we're talking about epicenters. And maybe it's not that ßehemoth isn't able to spread out, but that it's only just now got started."

That avian rocking again, and the same denial: "Nah. Nah. It's old. RNA template, mineralized walls. Big goddamned pores all over it, that's why it can't hack cold seawater. Leaks like a sieve." A bubble of saliva appears at the corner of his mouth; Jutta absently reaches up to brush it away. Jakob raises his hand irritably, pre-empting her. Her hands drop into her lap.

"The pyranosal sequences. Primitive. Unique. That woman, that doctor: Jerenice. She found the same thing. It's old."

"Yes," Rowan agrees, "it's old. Maybe something changed it, just recently."

Jakob's rubbing his hands, agitated. "What, some mutation? Lucky break? Damn unlucky for the rest of us."

"Maybe someone changed it," Rowan says.

There. It's out.

"I hope you're not suggesting," Jutta begins, and falls silent.

Rowan leans forward and lays her hand on Jakob's knee. "I know how it was out there, thirty, forty years ago. It was a gold rush mentality, just as you said. Everybody and their organcloner was setting up labs on the rift, doing all kinds of in situ work—"

"Of course it was in situ, you ever try to duplicate those conditions in a lab—"

"But your people were at the forefront. You not only had your own research, you had your eye on everyone else's. You were too good a businessman to do it any other way. And so I'm coming to you, Jakob. I'm not making any claims or accusing anyone of anything, do you understand? I just think that if anyone in Atlantis might have any ideas about anything that might have happened out there, you'd be the one. You're the expert, Jakob. Can you tell me anything?"

Jutta shakes her head. "Jacob doesn't know anything, Patricia. Neither of us knows anything. And I do take your implication."

Rowan keeps her eyes locked on the old man. He stares at the floor, he stares through the floor, through the deck plating and the underlying pipes and conduits, through the wires and fullerene and biosteel, through seawater and oozing, viscous rock into some place that she can only imagine. When he speaks, his voice seems to come from there.

"What do you want to know?"

"Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like ßehemoth, and tweak it?"

"More than you can count," says the distant voice. This frail body it's using scarcely seems animate.

"Such as?"