Behemoth

Ken Lubin reached out his hand. The gesture was absurd to the point of farce; that this torn and broken monster, gored, bleeding, could pretend to be in any position to offer assistance to others. Lenie Clarke stared for a long moment before she found the strength to take it.

Another chance, she reflected, pulling herself to her feet.

Even though we don't deserve one.

Epilog: Singular Hessian

Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.

Further predictions unreliable.

Acknowledgements

The usual gang of suspects, without whom I could never have pulled this off:

David Hartwell, my editor, nailed some serious structural problems with the first draft and helped me fix them. Moshe Feder took point through the day-to-day grind from delivery to rewrite to kicking-and-screaming to rending-of-garments to wracking, hysterical sobs, and finally to parturition

In what has become an a

But the fact that hardly anybody read the whole thing doesn't mean that lots of people didn't contribute to it. David Nickle offered advice, insights, and endless mockery throughout the process; his input proved so valuable I can almost overlook the fact that I had to get up at five thirty in the fucking morning and go ru

I owe many details of the helicopter crash scene to Gle

Parts of other people's life histories made their way into the story. Certain impressionistic details of the dog attack took their inspiration from wild canines encountered by one Rob Cu

Isaac Szpindel, MD, Ph.D., skilled in so many and varied endeavors that it makes me sick, helped me load Taka's lines with plausible medical chrome. Dave "the bioinformatician" Block answered numerous impertinent questions about artificial nucleotides and minimum genotype sizes. (Unfortunately, one of the things he taught me was that you can't cram a 1.1MB genotype into a cell 250nm across, which contradicts physical stats for ßehemoth already described in Maelstrom.) Major David Buck, of the New Zealand Defence Force, helped me out on the subject of Fuel Air Explosive ordnance. Steve Ballentine, Ha

You can't blame any of these good folks if this book sucks, since none of them were allowed to read it. (If it does suck, maybe that's why.) You can't even blame David Hartwell, who did read it, because the book would have sucked even harder without his input. You can only blame me, and you might as well since I've already got your money.

Well, fifty cents of it, anyway.

Notes and references

Once again it's time to trot out a variety of citations that will hopefully serve as a valuable educational resource, even though they're primarily intended to cover my ass against nitpickers.

If you have come late to this saga, you may not find the following references as complete as you'd like. Any real-world science elements introduced in Starfish and Maelstrom were cited at the end of those books; I don't repeat those citations here, even though many elements persist into ßehemoth. (I do, however, cite related research that has come out since Maelstrom was released, especially if it makes me look especially prescient in some way.) So if you're looking for my original sources on smart gels, «fine-tuning», or the Maelstrom Ecosystems, you'll have to go back and check the other books. You still may not find everything you're looking for, but you might at least make my Amazon numbers look a little less dismal.

There is a place in the middle of the North Atlantic where the currents stop dead, an eye in the middle of that great slow gyre revolving between Europe and North America[1]. It seemed like a reasonable spot to hide from lethal particles potentially borne on wind and water, so I put Atlantis there. The surrounding topography took some inspiration from a 2003 report on abyssal mineralogy [2]. Impossible Lake was inspired by the ultrasaline lens of heavy water described in the ground-breaking documentary series "Blue Planet" [3]. The failure of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream is increasingly likely in view of increased melt water discharge from the Arctic (e.g., [4,5]). And I know they don't actually figure into the plot anywhere, but Lenie Clarke worries about them on her way to the surface in Chapter One so it's fair game: giant squids now outmass the whole human race, and they're getting even bigger[6]!

We continue to discover life increasingly deep in the lithosphere. At last count, deep crustal rocks beneath the Juan de Fuca Ridge—yes, the very ridge from which ßehemoth escaped at the end of Starfish—have yielded evidence of heretofore unknown microbial lifeforms[7]. Water samples from boreholes 300 m below that seabed show depleted levels of sulphate: something down there is alive, unclassified, and consuming sulphur. There's no evidence that it would destroy the world if it ever reached the surface, but then again there's no evidence it wouldn't, either. I can always hope.

1 Van Dover, C.L., et al. 2002. Evolution and biogeography of deep-sea vent and seep invertebrates. Science 295: 1253–1257.

2 Rona, P.A. 2003. Resources of the sea floor. Science 299: 673–674.

3 British Broadcasting Corporation. 2001. The blue planet: a natural history of the ocean, Part 3: The Deep.

4 Peterson, B.J., et al. 2002. Increasing river discharge to the Arctic Ocean. Science 298: 2171–2173.

5 Weaver, A.J., and C. Hillaire-Marcel. 2004. Global warming and the next ice age. Science 304: 400–402.

6 Bildstein, T. 2002. Global warming is good (if you like calamari). Australasian Science, August 2002.

7 Cowen, J.P, et al. 2003. Fluids from Aging Ocean Crust That Support Microbial Life.Science 299: 120–123.