Spiral

They questioned him about the penicillin for hours. But nothing more. Nothing about the cylinder that had been in his finger.

Over the next hours, his certainty grew until it was rock-solid. They did not know. They did not know what he had possessed. Liam Connor had not told them.

A few days after, he saw Connor briefly. They had brought him up for a few minutes of sunlight. Connor stood by the railing. Their eyes met. Connor shook his head almost imperceptibly. He glanced toward the sea. To say I threw it overboard.

Kitano nodded back, then turned and looked away, saying with his countenance that he understood, that it was over. That the Uzumaki was now at the bottom of the ocean.

But what Kitano thought was: He still has it.

SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER DAY 1

MONDAY, OCTOBER 25

THE CRAWLERS IN THE GARDEN

1

LIAM CONNOR LOVED CORNELL. HE HAD TAUGHT AT THE university for more than half a century and expected full well to die shuffling between the Arts Quad and the Big Red Barn. Cornell was a chimera, both a member of the Ivy League and the New York state agricultural school. Nabokov wrote Lolita here, and Feynman started his scribbling about quantum electrodynamics, but Cornell was also a place where you could get your wheat checked for smut or your cow autopsied.

The campus was perched on a hill overlooking the city of Ithaca, population twenty-nine thousand, tucked between a pair of glacier-carved gorges. It was founded in 1865 by the millionaire and philanthropist Ezra Cornell, founder of Western Union and a freethinker who believed that the practical sciences should be taught with the same zeal as the classics. Cornell had made his money on the telegraph, the new communication technology that had remade society as fundamentally as would the Internet one hundred and fifty years later. He used his fortune to create a new kind of university, utterly different from the religion- and tradition-bound schools of the era: “An institution where any person could find instruction in any study,” a quote that would become the school’s motto. Coed and nondenominational from the day it opened, the university graduated its first female student in 1873 and its first African American in 1897. Liam was proud of the university’s heritage-he had a deep appreciation and respect for the underdog. A person’s value, he believed, was set by who they were, not by how others treated them. For eight centuries, the Irish had been treated as little more than apes by the British, and Liam never forgot it.

LIAM’S LABORATORIES WERE TUCKED AWAY IN THE BASEMENT of the Physical Sciences Building, a new glass, steel, and stone structure in the center of campus wedged between the old façades of Rockefeller and Baker halls. This evening he stood in the middle of his lab, a pair of silver, sharp-point #5 tweezers in his hand. The old Irishman was eighty-six years old, dressed in brown dungarees, a gray sweater, and old white sneakers. During his sixty years at Cornell, Liam had put together one of the most unusual and diverse collections of living fungi on the planet. The Gardens of Decay, as he called them, consisted of ten thousand postage stamp-sized plots of different mycological species laid out on a square grid, a mottled menagerie of yellows, greens, and grays, like farmland seen from thirty thousand feet. They occupied three large custom-built granite-topped tables, each almost nine feet across and weighing half a ton. To count all the species, ticking off one a second, would take hours, a testament to the power and fecundity of evolution.

Each of the tiny plots was labeled by a pair of letters and a three-digit number. Plot #HV-324 was Hemileia vastatrix, the rust fungus that invaded the British coffee plantations in Ceylon in 1875. Within a few years it decimated the crops and turned England into a nation of tea drinkers. A few rows over was Aspergillus niger, which was used for, among other things, the making of smokable chandoo opium during the height of the opium trade.

Next to it was Entomophthora muscae, the “fly destroyer” fungus, very tricky to grow in culture. It first invades the nervous system of the common housefly. Somehow-no one knew exactly how-E. muscae commands the fly to crawl to the highest place it can find and die there with its tail pointed skyward. After consuming the fly’s innards for food, E. muscae uses the fly’s lifeless husk as a launching pad, firing billions of spores skyward, each spore another fly massacre in the making.