ROMANCE OF THE CENTURY

a GORP Visionary Adventure

Let's say you're born in the year 2000, one of the first children of the new millennium. You spend a great deal of your childhood reading about the legendary adventurers-the Marco Polos and the Richard Burtons and the like-and this breeds a desire for adventure in your heart. But you're living in an age in which the possibilities for this sort of trailblazing experience have been severely delimited. The attraction of adventure-travel has always been funded partly by the notion of testing oneself, partly by the allure of mystery, the unknown, and there seems little mystery left in the world. The managed nature areas of the twenty-first century provide a thin illusion of the original wild; the risk factor in such areas is almost nonexistent, though an element of danger is injected when one of the first models of robotic caretakers mistakes a sleeping camper for debris and renders him recyclable. The space program offers new frontiers, but your chances of becoming an astronaut are miniscule. Eventually you gravitate toward journalism, a profession that will allow you to indulge your passion for travel, if not for real exploration, and this leads you, in the autumn of 2026, to a place 560 miles off the coast of South Florida...

Mitchell is the biggest tropical storm of the season, a Force 5 hurricane, 700 miles wide and more than 30,000 feet high.

The radar image they showed you in Miami resembled an enormous throwing star with a hole at its center, spinning across the Caribbean. Up close, it's considerably more daunting, especially to someone cruising toward it in a twelve foot microjet, a tapered cylinder of spun glass composites so narrow, you're less flying the aircraft than wearing it. The outer wall of the storm, a patchwork of roiling gray and black cloud, looks as solid as a tidal wave and is lit from within by blooms of lightning. Bolts of red plasma rip from the cloud tops, fanning outward as they sheet toward the troposphere, leaving afterimages that hang for a second or two against the night sky like immense plumes of dark blood.

The computers have taken control of the microjet. You couldn't possibly manage the split-second maneuvers necessary to survive the windshifts inside Mitchell, but the sense of helplessness that comes with being a passenger and not a pilot amplifies your anxiety.

Your mouth is cottony, your heart is doing a speed-metal riff. But then the nose of the aircraft drops, arrowing downward, and as you penetrate the outer wall, adrenaline flushes away the chemicals of fear, and a shout is torn from your throat, merging with the whine of the jets and the roaring wind. Diving toward the eye is like being trapped inside a splinter of ice in a blender set on high and filled with whirling gray stuff-vibration is bone rattling. Detonations of lightning burn through the clouds on every side, and once a bolt shears through the hull inches from your face. If you were grounded, you'd be charcoal. For half a second the microjet appears encased in liquid light; the hull darkens automatically, preserving your eyesight.

Nearly a minute later, a period of time that seems much longer, you're spat forth into the eye and go sailing off into calm air 5,000 feet above the choppy, slateblue waters of the Caribbean.

The small jet engines beneath your wings, capable of providing upward and downward-as well as forward-thrust, cut back to minimum. Several dozen aircraft similar to yours are soaring about within the eye: transparent cylinders with swept-forward wings, their visibility enhanced by colored designs on the tail sections that identify the individual pilots. They look incredibly fragile against the massif of the storm wall. One by one they begin diving back toward the wall, or more precisely, toward the transition zone formed by turbulent wind and cloud grinding against the bubble of high pressure that forms the eye. The idea is to slip into the zone, much as a bodysurfer would propell himself into a cresting wave, and ride the nearly 250-mph wind that circulates within it.

Mitchell's transition zone is about 400 meters wide, a murky area filled with clouds that resemble gray floss, and slipping into it is roughly analogous to standing by a railroad track and grabbing onto a speeding train.

The instant you enter the zone, the cross-shear knocks you a thousand feet downward, and you come within a hair of going into a spin. The computers stabilize the craft at 3,800 feet. After thirty seconds of relatively uneventful flight, you guide the craft into the edge of the storm wall, a maneuver similar to that of a surfer shooting the curl. You ride the inner wall long enough to gain momentum, then slip back into the zone at 225 mph. Seconds later, another microjet breaks from the wall directly ahead of you, causing your craft to veer sharply away in order to avoid a collision. A green slash on the tail section identifies the pilot as Maiko Tachibana, the beautiful Japanese girl with whom you've been involved for the past six months. The computerized programs would not permit such a close call, thus you know she must have switched off her computers and buzzed you on purpose.

Furious, you disengage your own computers and follow her downward. You're thoroughly committed to paying her back in kind, and you ignore the warning light on the altimeter signifying that you've breached the 1500-foot mark.

You finally come to your senses when you see her dip below the three-hundred-foot mark, a height at which even the slightest cross-shear can send you into the waves below. You relinquish control to the computers, let them take the aircraft up to 2,000, and spend the rest of the flight taping your experience of the storm.

That night you're sitting at a corner table in the Last Supper Club, a storm surfer hangout in South Beach-its decor lent a morbid touch by the recordings of pilot fatalities that play over the walls-Maiko drops into the chair opposite. You've been dictating a voiceover to add to the tape you made inside Mitchell. Maiko hits the playback button and listens as you hold forth on your conviction that the concept of adventure has been pared down to risk-taking and many of those who call themselves adventurers are on a death trip. A smile touches the corners of her mouth. At length she turns off the recorder and says, "It must be tiresome... having all that perspective."

You disregard the comment. "What the hell were you trying to do out there?"

"Playing," she says. "I thought you wanted to play. Sorry."

You tell her that your notion of play doesn't include tempting fate unnecessarily. That while death is a potential consequence of the things you've chosen to do, you don't have a need to constantly flirt with dying.

The argument that ensues is vicious, vituperative, and ends with her storming off into the night. Even though you're still angry, you figure you'll work things out back at the hotel; but when you enter the room you've been sharing with her, you find a note.

It's quite a lengthy note, and it states that a relationship with you will prohibit her from exploring her limits, from experiencing things she needs to understand. She loves you, she says, but that's just not enough. She says you were right about her attitude toward death-there's something in her that yearns toward death, that makes her want to brush against it. But it's not, she claims, the morbid preoccupation you might suspect. It's something that nourishes her, something she requires in order to live. She's sorry, and she'll miss you.

You think that her position is thoroughly unreasonable, possibly psychotic, but as you sit there, feeling the dark particularity of her absence and the beginnings of a depression far more severe than you might have expected, you wish you were a bit more unreasonable yourself.

It's a long while before you see Maiko again. You spend the intervening years reporting on the various pastimes that have supplanted the previous century's forms of adventure travel. Most notable-at least with regard to its beneficial effect upon your career-is your coverage of the superbear hunts in the Alaskan wilderness. Thanks to Michael Crichton, humanity has been dissuaded from recreating dinosaurs; however, someone has been foolhardy enough to play around with grizzly DNA, creating an animal that is not only larger than ursus horriblis, but has cheetah-like speed. Despite all manner of high-tech protection, at the time you travel to Alaska, the score stands at superbears 212, humans 23. Though the sight of a fourteen-inch-long claw ripping through steel plate is undeniably exhilirating, few protests are raised when the creatures are isolated and rendered sterile.

Every so often, Maiko leaves a message on your computer and you respond, but nothing ever comes of this. Now and again you have news of her. She's doing 100,000-foot sky dives, surfing gigantic artifically induced waves in the Pacific, going caving in the pelagic depths. One day you learn that she's running marathons on the dark side of the moon, bounding 250 miles in a specially designed and exceptionally frail vacuum suit. Perhaps because you still associate the moon with romance, you book a flight the next day, hoping to catch up with her; but by the time you arrive she has gone back to Earth.

You've reserved an expensive, specially shielded suite on the surface, and that night you sit at the window, gazing at the sky. With nothing to dim and distort their brightness, the stars in their serene trillions are an incredible sight, here and there forming curdled masses of cold fire; but since you have no one to share the experience with, the moon seems a sterile place, and you don't stay long.

In the spring of 2054, shortly after your second rejuvenation treatment, you're invited to join an American Museum of Natural History's expedition to the vent fields adjoining the Axial Seamount Volcano, located 270 miles off the Oregon coast. It's the first such expedition to include non-scientists, and the idea has been floated that this might be the prelude to tourism on the ocean floor. When you arrive at the base that has been established at the 800-meter depth, you're surprised to find Maiko there. She, too, has received an invitation, courtesy of an uncle who chairs the museum board, and you have no doubt that she's been instrumental in your selection.

It's been twenty-eight years since you've seen her, but she looks about thirty. The training program, during which you adapt to breathing a liquid fluorocarbon compound (this prevents oxygen poisoning and the absorption of free gases, and allows you to descend to great depths and ascend with relative quickness), leaves little spare time, but nonetheless you manage to rekindle the relationship, and you begin to think there might be a future for the two of you.

The base of the volcanic slope is 8000 feet down and rises to a height of 4000 feet. As you descend to the ocean floor, you recieve intermittent injections of a compound containing trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), a substance found in deep-sea fishes that helps maintain water balance against the high salinity of the ocean and also assists pressure-sensitive proteins in your cells in overcoming pressure inhibition by removing dense water from charged molecules.

As you ascend, the compound will be extracted from your body by dialysis equipment aboard the cramped submersible that accompanies the expedition. But the breakdown product of TMAO, the substance that causes marine life to smell fishy, will remain in your system for several weeks thereafter until it is metabolized, thus ensuring that you will not be popular at parties.

Much of the descent is negotiated within the submersible, though at certain stages you are permitted outside, wearing a suit of layered kevlar and reinforced plate. It's a vast relief when the ocean bottom is reached and you're free to explore the hydrothermal vents at the base of the volcano. The vent that the scientists are most interested in is a black smoker called the Toadstool. Smokers are formed when the hot water issuing from a hydrothermal vent comes in contact with cold ocean water; the minerals contained in the vent water precipitate and form deposits on the surrounding rock. In the case of the Toadstool, these precipitates have created a mushroom-shaped chimney more than 100 feet tall, comprised largely of iron, copper, zinc, silver, lead, cobalt, and sulphur, from which a stream of dark particles is constantly spewing.

Lights have been set up all around the vent field at the base of the volcano. The helmet of your suit is designed to compensate for the hue of the fluorocarbon compound that fills it, and you've been told that what you will see is more or less natural color. Natural or not, what you're seeing is something right out of Jules Verne.

The twisting axial valley in which the vent field lies is a tortuous and hallucinatory terrain figured by caverns and expanses of rubble and smoking pillars, the Toadstool being the largest of these. Mussel beds encroach upon ivory-colored mats of bacteria that swirl gently in the current. Colonies of giant tubeworms, some of them eight feet long with bloody red palps at their tips, sprout from the sides of the smokers; clams the size of dinner plates are tucked into cracks. Amphipods (beach hoppers) scuttle about, feeding on the bacteria. Here and there you see pale octopi, crabs, and flat fish, probably members of the sole family. In sum it has the effect of a horrid yet beautiful garden in an outlying precinct of Hell. The silvery clad members of the expedition are busy with their various tasks, and you half-expect to see Nemo's Nautilus hovering nearby. Enhancing the otherworldliness of the place is the fact that whenever you move your hand in front of your face, you disturb the bioluminescent plankton that enrich the water and create a luminous track.

You're so absorbed in contemplation of the valley, you at first fail to notice that the keypad on your arm is registering a message-the head of the expedition is asking if you have seen Maiko; she's not responding.

The entire party begins to search for her, peering into caverns, up the sides of smokers. But knowing Maiko's lack of concern for limits, you make your way toward the nether reaches of the valley, to an area where the slope of the volcano planes away into a tumble or rocks and sand. With only your helmet light for illumination, your visibility is not good, maybe thirty feet.

Here in the open, as you plod up the slope of the volcano, you think you can feel something of the enormous weight of 250 atmospheres, and the gray murk around you seems an ominous curtain hiding unimaginable terrors. You tap out messages to Maiko, but there's no response. Then you spot a silvery figure in the dimness above. Crouched in a narrow cave mouth.

Maiko indicates that the send button on her keypad has malfunctioned, then gestures toward the deep, signaling that she's seen something. When you ask what it is she's seen, she holds her hands wide apart like a fisherman describing the one that got away. Through the face plate, her expression is charged with anxiety. A thrill runs across the muscles of your back, and you crouch down beside her, searching for movement in the featureless murk that surrounds you. It's nothing, you think. She was imagining things.

You send a message to the expedition head, saying that you've found Maiko and giving your location. You're just about to get to your feet when an enormous face-rather like a bulldog's face, flat, but with a mouth full of needle teeth-punches toward you out of the darkness, and you scramble back into the cave, electrified with fear. The body of the creature undulates past the cave mouth. An eel of some sort. It might have been a wolf eel, but they generally don't exceed ten feet in length, and this thing must be fifty feet long with a head the size of a living room. The eel makes another pass, and this time you're almost certain it's a wolf eel, one grown to mutant proportions.

Its face now reminds you of those fierce Tibetan deities hidden behind wooden screeens in temples in Kathmandu. You gather yourself and message the expedition head, telling her what has happened and warning her to keep away. The helmet of your suit contains a module that separates oxygen from carbon dioxide. Unlike the scrubbing systems of earlier decades, the module is able to reclaim the oxygen and it's not necessary to carry an extra oxygen supply. But the cadmium battery that powers the module needs to be recharged every three hours, and by your reckoning you and Maiko have been out nearly two and a half hours.

You'll need at least fifteen minutes to get back to the submersible-you hope the eel isn't too persistent.

The eel stays out of sight for the next twenty minutes, and with seventeen minutes of battery life remaining, you have no choice-you urge Maiko to her feet and begin the walk downslope to the valley and the submersible. It's scarcely a pleasant walk.

There's not much point in looking behind you-even if you saw the eel you could never avoid it in the open. Every step of the way you expect to feel those rapier teeth spitting your flesh. A chill articulates your spine, and you can hear the high-pitched whine of your circulatory system. But the eel doesn't put in a reappearance, and with three minutes to spare, you crawl through the submersible's lock and hook your suit up to the recharger.

Back at the 800-meter base, everyone's angry at Maiko. The various members of the expedition take turns chewing her out. She defends herself by saying that they knew who she was when they invited her along-it's not much of a defense, and though you keep your mouth shut, it's obvious to her how you feel.

Three nights later you're sitting in her cabin on the surface vessel that transported the two of you out from Seattle. You're holding another note, one you haven't bothered to read-you know more-or-less what it will say. You're not sure how you're going to handle this breakup. It hurts worse than the first time.

You're alone, you're in love, and you smell like a fish.

Forty-six years pass like forty-six heartbeats. You traverse the Martian poles, you spend a sixteen months with a crew building a colony in the asteroid belt, you sail the subterranean oceans of Europa. Maiko has utilized her fame as a daredevil to become a wealthy woman, marketing hundreds of products under the Tachibana name. You never stop thinking about her, but the thoughts are less urgent, more reminiscence than longing.

You've had your last rejuvenation treatment and you can expect another thirty, thirty-five years of hale life, then a swift decline-you're not sure how you want to spend those years. Some maniacs are attempting to surf giant storms in the atmosphere of Jupiter, but you're no longer attracted to this sort of thing. Maybe, you think, it's time to write the memoirs. Then you receive a message from Maiko, asking you to come to Phoebos, one of the moons of Mars. You're hesitant at first, but it's not as if you have anything better to do.

Maiko looks to be a beautiful woman in early middle age, and it's apparent that the old chemistry between you and her is still working. She intends to attempt the first circumnavigation of the Martian orbit in a solar sailer, and you're invited. The voyage will last more than six months, and the two of you will be isolated in a control cabin suspended from the join of the wings, a space not much larger than an old minivan. Sleeping cocoons double as mist showers-the entire cabin is a marvel of microengineering.

The sails, which have been constructed on Phoebos, are a latticework of reflective kevlar mounted on spines of wound carbon monotubing-like tens of square kilometers of silver blinds, paper-thin silvered strips about a half inch wide and a couple hundred yards long.

Microcomputers adjust each strip to optimize the amount of solar wind bouncing off them; this allows the pilot to tack against the solar wind by moving a simple control stick. The carbon monotubing is incredibly light and hundreds of times stronger than steel, consisting of molecular tubes of carbon atoms hundreds of times smaller than a human hair. Thousands of tubes are wound together into ropelike segments so that the supports resemble deep black laminated leather, but are rigid like a beetle shell-you could easily hold a 500foot rod of this material in one hand. These monorods form a structure similar to the skeleton bones of immense bat wings, with the kevlar strips stretched between them.

On paper, the voyage promises to be uneventful, six months of solitude and silence, but you realize that sooner or later Maiko will find a way to break the envelope. Once again you're hesitant, but only for a moment-it's time, you decide, to test your own limits, to learn what you've been missing.

A few minutes before midnight, A.D. 2199, the solar sails unfurl, invisible at first against the caliginous dark of space, but then, as the kevlar strips turn flat against the sun for maximum thrust, they seem to materialize from nowhere, surrounding you like walls of blinding ice. Mars recedes to a nearly featureless disc behind you-it might be the red seal on an enormous black document... a testament relating to some cosmic finality... a finality you feel in your heart.

A few ticks of the clock and you will have lived a century, and it occurs to you that you have misapprehended a good many things, that-for one-the difference you perceived between you and Maiko was merely a difference in terms. You recall a night beneath the ice of Europa; an hour spent on a rocky promontory in Alaska, listening to the rumbling of a hungry bear below; a drilling accident in the asteroid belt. At each of these times and others you were terrified, but over the years you have become familiar with the dimensions of terror, you have learned something of the black ground upon which it and all our illusions breed, and you think that this knowledge must be the same as what Maiko has been seeking-but she was a pilgrim in pursuit of it, while you were a simple student.

As you sit beside Maiko at the controls, the array of stars ahead look in their unwinking brilliance to be fragments of a design too large to discern, a diamond sutra written across the void and across every sand grain, every moment, every thought, an endless rhythm and its perfect resolve that repeats itself in the arc of each life. Part of what you're feeling, you recognize, is the high attendant upon the launch, but that doesn't invalidate it-the feeling is always there, waiting to be grasped. Maiko smiles.

You wonder at the strange history that has led you to this place and you want to tell her things she probably already understands. Then a soft gong sounds in the cabin. The century begins, and it seems you are born with it.