The Descent

In the far distance a detonation rumbled gently. She'd felt similar vibrations through her bedsprings all night. The incessant construction work was evident everywhere. It didn't take long to detect the man-made edges of this place. The neat right angles abutted raw rock. Pressure fissures spiderwebbed the asphalt. A patch of moss had grown heavy and peeled from the ceiling, exposing mesh and barbed wire and surging lasers overhead.

They reached a newly cut ring road girdling the city, and left behind the traffic jam of cyclists and workers. Picking up speed, they gained a view of the enormous hollow salt dome containing the colony. It was life in a bell jar here. The entire vault, measuring three miles across and probably a thousand feet high, was brightly lit. Up in the World, it would be approaching sunset. Down here, night never came. Nazca City's artificial sunlight burned twenty-four hours a day, Prometheus on a caffeine jag. Except for a catnap, sleep had been impossible last night. The group's collective excitement verged on the childlike, and she was caught up in their spirit of adventure. This morning, exhausted with their imagining, they were ready for the real thing.

Ali found her fellow travelers' last-minute preparations touching. She watched one rough-and-ready fellow across the aisle bent over his fingernails, clipping them just so, as if his mortal being depended on it. Last night, several of the youngest women, meeting for the first time, had spent the wee hours of the morning fixing one another's hair. A little enviously, Ali had listened to people placing calls to their spouses or lovers or parents, assuring them the subplanet was safe. Ali said a silent prayer for them all.

The buses stopped near a train platform and the passengers disembarked. If it hadn't been brand new, the train would have seemed old-fashioned. There was a boarding platform trimmed with iron rails painted black and teal. Farther along the track, the train was mostly freight and ore cars. Heavily armed soldiers patrolled the landings while workers loaded supplies onto flatcars at the rear.

The three front cars were elegant sleepers with aluminum panels on the outside and simulated cherrywood and oak in the hallways. Ali was surprised again at how much money was being plowed into development down here. Just five or six years ago, this had presumably been hadal grounds. The sleeper cars, on glistening tracks, declared how confident the corporate boards were of human occupation.

'Where are they taking us now?' someone grumbled publicly. He wasn't the only one. People had begun complaining that Helios was cloaking each stage of their journey in unnecessary mystery. No one could say where their science station lay.

'Point Z-3,' answered Montgomery Shoat.

'I've never heard of that,' a woman said. One of the planetologists, Ali placed her.

'It's a Helios holding,' Shoat replied. 'On the outskirts of things.'

A geologist started to unfold a survey map to locate Point Z-3. 'You won't find it on any maps,' Shoat added with a helpful smile. 'But you'll see, that really doesn't matter.' His nonchalance drew mutters, which he ignored.

Last evening, at a catered Helios banquet for the freshly arrived scientists, Shoat had been introduced as their expedition leader. He was a superbly fit character with bulging arm veins and great social energy, but he was curiously off-putting. It was more than the unfortunate face, pinched with ambition and spoiled with unruly teeth. It was a manner, Ali thought. A disregard. He traded on a thin repertoire of charm, yet didn't care if you were charmed. According to gossip Ali heard afterward, he was the stepson of C.C. Cooper, the Helios magnate. There was another son by blood, a legitimate heir to the Cooper fortunes, and that seemed to leave Shoat to take on more hazardous duties such as escorting scientists to places at the remote edges of the Helios empire. It sounded almost Shakespearean.

'This is our venue for the next three days,' he announced to them. 'Brand-new cars. Maiden voyage. Take your pick, any room. Single occupancy if you like. There's plenty of room.' He had the magnanimity of a man used to sharing with friends a house not really his. 'Spread out. Shower, take a nap, relax. Dinner is up to you. There's a dining car one back. Or you can order room service and catch a flick. We've spared no expense. Helios's way of wishing you – and me – bon voyage.'

No one pressed the issue of their destination any further. At 1730 a pleasant chime announced their departure. As if casting loose on a raft upon a gentle stream, the Helios expedition soundlessly coasted into the depths. The track looked level but was not, sloping almost secretly downward. As it turned out, gravity was the workhorse. Their engine was attached to the rear and would only be used to pull the cars back to this station. One by one, drawn by the earth itself, the cars left behind the sparkling lights of Nazca City.

They approached a portal titled Route 6. An extra, nostalgic 6 had been added with Magic Marker. In a different ink, someone else had attached a third 6. At the last minute a young biologist hopped down from the train and took a final quick snapshot, then ran to catch up again while the others cheered him. That made them all feel well launched. The train slid through a brief wall of forced air, a climate lock, and they passed inside.

Immediately the temperature and humidity dropped. Nazca City's tropical environment vanished. It was ten degrees colder in the rail tunnel, and the air was as dry as a desert. At last, Ali realized, they were entering the unabridged hell. No fire and brimstone here. It felt more like high chaparral, like Taos.

The tracks glittered as if someone had taken a polishing rag to them. The train began to pick up speed, and they all went to their rooms. In her berth, Ali found a wicker basket with fresh oranges, Tobler chocolate, and Pepperidge Farm cookies. The little refrigerator was stocked. Her bunk had a single red rose on the pillow. When she lay down, there was a video monitor overhead for watching any of hundreds of films. Old monster movies were her vice. She said her prayers, then fell asleep to Them and the hiss of tracks.

In the morning, Ali squeezed into the small shower and let the hot water run through her hair. She could not believe the amenities. Her timing with room service was just right, and she sat by the tiny window with her omelette and toast and coffee. The window was round and small, like a cabin port on a ship. She saw only blackness out there, and thought that explained the compressed view. Then she noticed ELLIS BULLETPROOF GLASS etched in small letters on the glass, and realized the whole train was probably reinforced against attack.

At 0900 their training resumed in the dining car. The first morning on the train was given to refresher courses in things like emergency medicine, climbing techniques, basic gun craft, and other general information they were supposed to have learned over the past few months. Most had actually done their homework, and the session was more like an icebreaker.

That afternoon, Shoat escalated their teachings. Slide projectors and a large video monitor were set up at one end of the dining car. He announced a series of presentations by expedition members on their various specialties and theories. Ali was enjoying herself. Show-and-tell, with iced shrimp and nachos.

The first two speakers were a biologist and a microbotanist. Their topic was the difference between troglobite, trogloxene, and troglophile. The first category truly lived in the troglo – or 'hole' – environment. Hell was their biological niche. The second, xenes, adapted to it, like eyeless salamanders. The third, troglophiles like bats and other nocturnal animals, simply visited the subterranean world on a regular basis, or exploited it for food or shelter.

The two scientists began arguing the merits of preadaptation, the 'predestination to darkness.' Shoat stepped to the front and thanked them. His manner was crisp, yet random. They were here on Helios's nickel. This was his show.

Through the remainder of the afternoon, various specialists were introduced and gave their remarks. Ali was impressed by the group's relative youth. Most had their doctorates. Few were older than forty, and some were barely twenty-five. People wandered in and out of the dining car as the hours wound on, but Ali sat through it all, fixing faces with names, drinking in the esoterica of sciences she'd never studied.

After a patio-type supper of hamburgers and cold beer, they had been promised a just-released Hollywood movie. But the machine would not work, and that was when Shoat stumbled. To this point, his day of orientation had featured scientists who were practiced speakers, or at least in command of their topics. Seeking to enliven the evening with a change of entertainment, Shoat tried something different.

'Since we're getting to know each other,' he announced, 'I wanted to introduce a guy we'll all come to depend on. We are extremely fortunate to have obtained him from the U.S. Army, where he was a famous scout and tracker. He has the reputation of being a Ranger's Ranger, a true veteran of the deep. Dwight,' he called. 'Dwight Crockett. I see you back there. Come on up. Don't be shy.'

Shoat's tracker was apparently not prepared for this attention. He balked, whoever he was, and after a minute Ali turned to see him. Of all people, the reluctant Dwight was that very same stranger she'd insulted on the Galápagos elevator yesterday. What on earth was he doing here? she wondered.

With all eyes on him now, Dwight let go of the wall and stood straight. He was dressed in new Levi's and a white shirt closed to the throat and buttoned at each wrist. His dark glacier glasses glittered like insect eyes. Sporting that awful Frankenstein haircut, he looked completely out of place, like those ranch hands Ali had sometimes seen in the hill country, troubled in human company, better left in their remote line shacks. The tattooing and scars on his face and scalp encouraged a healthy distance.

'Was I supposed to say something?' he asked from the back of the car.

'Come up here where everyone can see you,' Shoat insisted.

'Unreal,' someone whispered next to Ali. 'I've heard of this guy. An outlaw.'

Dwight kept his displeasure economical, the slightest shake of his head. When he finally came forward, the crowd parted. 'Dwight's the one you really want to hear from,' Shoat said. 'He never got around to graduate school, he doesn't have an academic specialty. But talk about authority in the field. He spent eleven years in hadal captivity. The last three years he's been hunting Haddie for the Rangers and Special Forces and SEALs. Now I've read your résumés, folks. Few of our group have

ever visited the subterranean world. None of us has ever gone beyond the electrified zones. But Ike here can tell us what it's like. Out there.' Shoat sat down. It was Ike's stage.

He stood before their patter of applause, and his awkwardness seemed endearing, a little pathetic. Ali caught a few of the murmured remarks about his scars and exploits. Deserter, she heard. Berserker. Cannibal. Slave runner. Animal. It was all traded breathlessly, in the superlative. Strange, she thought, how legends grew. They made him sound like a sociopath, and yet they were drawn to him, excited by the romance of his imagined deeds.

Dwight let them have their curiosity. The tracks sibilated in their growing silence, and people turned uncomfortable. Ali had seen it a hundred times, how Americans and Europeans chafed at silence. In contrast, Dwight was downright primal with his patience. Finally his reticence proved too much. 'Don't you have anything to say?' Shoat said.

Dwight shrugged. 'You know, I haven't had such an interesting day in a long time. You people know your stuff.' Ali wasn't prepared for that. None of them were. This odd brute had been sitting in the rear all afternoon, deliberately unremarkable, quietly getting educated. By them! It was enchanting.

Shoat was annoyed. Maybe this was supposed to have been a freak show. 'How about questions. Any questions?'

'Mr Crockett,' a woman from MIT started. 'Or is it Captain, or some other rank?'

'No,' he said, 'they busted me out. I don't have any rank. And don't bother with the

"mister," either.'

'Very well. Dwight, then,' the woman went on. 'I wanted to ask –'

'Not Dwight,' he interrupted. 'Ike.'

'Ike?'

'Go on.'

'The hadals have disappeared,' she said. 'Every day civilization pushes the night back a little further. My question, sir, is whether it's really so dangerous out there?'

'Things have a way of flying apart,' Ike said.

'Not that we'll be going out in harm's way,' the woman said. Ike looked at Shoat. 'Is that what this man told you?'

Ali felt uneasy. He knew something they didn't. On second thought, that wasn't saying much.

Shoat moved them along. 'Question?' he said.

Ali stood. 'You were their prisoner,' she said. 'Can you share a little about your experience? What did they do to you? What are the hadals like?'

The dining car fell silent. Here was a campfire story they could listen to all night. What a resource Ike could be to her, with his insights into the hadals' habits and culture. Why, he might even speak their language.

Ike smiled at her. 'I don't have a lot to say about those days.' There was disappointment.

'Do you think they're still out there somewhere? Is there any chance we might see one?' someone else asked.

'Where we're going?' Ike said. Unless Ali was wrong, he was provoking Shoat on purpose, dancing on the edge of information they were not yet supposed to have. Shoat's annoyance built.

'Where are we going?' a man asked.

'No comment,' Shoat answered for Ike.

'Have you been in our particular territory yourself?'

'Never,' Ike said. 'I used to hear rumors, of course. But I never believed they could be true.'

'Rumors of what?'

Shoat was checking his watch.

The train gave a soft lurch. They braked to a slow halt. People went to look through the small windows and Ike was forgotten, momentarily. Shoat stood on a chair. 'Grab your bags and personal effects, folks. We're changing trains.'

Ali shared an open flatcar with three men and freight, mostly heavy equipment parts. She sat against a John Deere crate labeled PLANETARIES, DIFFERENTIALS . One of the men had bad gas and kept grimacing in apology.

The ride was smooth. The artery was man-made, bored to a uniform twenty-foot diameter. The trackbed was crushed gravel sprayed with black oil. Overhead, bare bulbs bled down rusty light. Ali kept thinking of a Siberian gulag. Wires and pipes and cables veined the walls.

Cavities opened to the sides. They didn't see any people, just crawlers and loaders and excavators and pipe layers, piled rubber tires, and cement ties. The track made a slithery sound under their wheels, seamless. Ali missed the click-clack of rail joints. She remembered a train journey with her parents, falling asleep to the rhythm while the world passed by.

Ali gave one of her fresh apples to the man who was still awake. They'd been grown in the hydroponic gardens at Nazca City. He said, 'My daughter loves apples,' and showed her a picture.

'What a beautiful girl,' Ali said.

'Kids?' he asked.

Ali pulled a jacket over her knees. 'Oh, I don't think I could bear to leave a child,' she answered too quickly. The man winced. Ali said, 'I didn't mean it that way.'

The train was relentlessly gentle. It never slowed, never stopped. Ali and her neighbors improvised a latrine with privacy by pushing some of the crates together. They had a communal supper, each contributing some food.

At midnight the walls brightened from cinnamon to tan. Her companions were all sleeping when the train entered a band of marine fossils. Here exoskeletons, there ancient seaweeds, there a spray of tiny brachiopods. The bore-cutter had sheared the rich find with impunity.

'Did you see that, Mapes!' a voice yelled from a car ahead. 'Arthropoda!'

'Trilobitomorpha!' Mapes shrieked in ecstatic response from behind.

'Check those dorsal grooves! Pinch me!'

'Look at this one coming up, Mapes! Early Ordovician!'

'Ordovician, hell!' Mapes bellowed. 'Cambrian, man. Early. Very early. Look at that rock. Shit, maybe even late Precam!'

The fossils jumped and writhed and wove like a miles-long tapestry. Then the walls went blank again.

At three in the morning, they came upon the remains of their first ambush. At first it seemed like nothing more than a car accident.

The clues began with a long scrape mark on the left wall where a vehicle of some sort had struck the stone. Abruptly the mark leaped to the right wall, where it became a gouge, then ricocheted to the opposite side and back again. Someone had lost control.

The evidence became more violent, more puzzling. Broken fragments of stone mixed with headlight glass, then a torn section of heavy steel mesh.

The gashes and scrapes went on and on, left, then right.

Miles farther, the crazy bounce ended. All that remained of the reckless ride was a tangle of metal. The destroyed backhoe had been torn open.

They drifted past. The stone was scorched, but furrowed, too. Ali had seen war zones in Africa, and recognized the starred splatter print of an explosion.

Around the bend, they came on two white crosses planted Latino-style in a grotto

carved into the wall. Tufts of hair, rags, and animal bones had been nailed to the stone. The rags, she comprehended, were leather hides. Skins. Flayed skin. This was a memorial.

After that, miles passed in silence. Here it was at last – all their childhood legends of desperate fights waged against biblical mutants – before their eyes, unintended, where fate had given it. This was not a TV report that could be turned off. This was not a poet's inferno in a book that could be put back on the shelf. Here was the world they lived in now.

At around three, Ali fell asleep. When she woke, the stone was still in motion. The tunnel's smooth walls became less regular. Fractures appeared. Pressure cracks filigreed the ceiling. Crevices lurked like darkened closets. Ali saw a cardboard sign in the distance. WATTS GOLD, LTD. it announced. An arrow pointed at a secondary path branching off into the gloom. A few miles farther on, the wall breached upon another ragged hole. Ali looked inside, and lights sparkled far away in the darkness. B LOCKWICK CLAIM , a sign said. BEWARE OF DOG.

From there on, side roads and crude tunnels fed off every mile or so, sometimes identified as a camp or mining claim, anonymous and unwelcoming. A few were lit at their deepest points with tiny fires. Others were as dark as wells, forlorn. What kind of people gave themselves to such remoteness? H. G. Wells had gotten it right in his Time Machine. The underworld was peopled not with demons, but with proles.

Ali smelled the settlement long before they reached it. The smog was part petroleum, part unrefined sewage, part cordite and dust. Her eyes began watering. The air got thicker, then putrid. It was five o'clock in the morning.

The tunnel walls widened, then flew open upon a cavernous shaft steeping in pollution and overhung by bright turquoise cliffs lit, in a civic fashion, with several spotlights. Otherwise, Point Z-3, locally known as Esperanza, was dimly illuminated. The burden of darkness was evidently too much to overcome with their thin ration of electricity from Nazca City. Despite the cheerful Matisse-like cliffs, it did not look like a friendly home for the next year.

'Helios built a science institute here?' asked one of Ali's companions. 'Why bother?'

'I was expecting something a little more modern,' agreed another. 'This place doesn't look like it's heard of the flush toilet.'

The train coasted through an opening in a glittering briar patch of razor wire. It was like a city made of knife-sharp Slinkys. Concertina piled atop glittering concertina. The coils lay twenty feet high in places. The razor wire got more space than the settlement itself, which was simply a mob of tents on small platforms whittled into the descending hillside.

The train slowed upon a ridge that fell on the far side into a chasm.

Farther along the barrier, they saw a desiccated body suspended high on the outside section of an accordion snarl of wire. The creature's grimace was almost joyful. 'Hadal,' said a scientist. 'Must have been attacking the settlement.' They all craned to see. But the rags hanging from the body were American military. The soldier had been trying to climb his way in over the concertina. Something had been chasing him.

The railway ended in a bunker complex bristling with electric cannons. There was no question about its function. If the settlement came under attack, people were meant to come here. This train would be their last hope of exit.

A squalid settler in canvas pants made notes on a piece of paper as they rolled past. Except for the steel teeth, he might have been an extra in a hillbilly movie.

'How you doing?' one of Ali's companions called down. The settler spat.

The train slid inside the bunker and stopped. Immediately it was set upon by gangs of men with huge hands and bare feet. The workers were degraded, some scarcely recognizable as anatomically modern humans. It wasn't just the Hulk muscles and Abe

Lincoln brows and cheekbones and their guttural exchanges. They smelled different: a musk odor. And some of them had bone growing right through their flesh. Many had strips of burlap draped over their heads to protect them from the railyard's dim lighting. While Ali and the others climbed down from the flatcars, the yard workers cast off chains and straps and manually unloaded crates weighing hundreds of pounds. Ali was fascinated by their enormous strength and deformities. Several of the giants noticed her attention and smiled.

Ali walked along the flatcars between boxes and crates and earth-moving equipment. She joined a crowd on a flat landing dramatically perched at the rim of the great chasm. The landing was bordered with a stone rampart like those at Grand Canyon or Yosemite, but instead of viewing scopes along the wall, there were gun mounts and electric cannon. Far below, she saw the upper reaches of a path snaking back and forth along the ridge wall, sinking into pitch blackness.

Some of the locals were mingling with the expedition members. They had not washed in many months or years. The patches on their caked clothing looked more soldered on than sewn. They gaped with coal miners' eyes, brilliant white holes in their grime. Ali thought she saw mild insanity here, the sort that zoo animals fall into. The handles on their guns and machetes were shiny with use.

A famished-looking man with freshly scraped cheeks was delivering a welcome speech on behalf of the township. He was the mayor, Ali guessed. He proudly pointed out the turquoise cliffs, then launched upon a brief history of Esperanza, its first human habitation four years ago, the 'coming' of the railroad a year later, how the last attack – 'well over' two years ago – had been repulsed by local minutemen and about recent discoveries of gold, platinum, and iridium deposits. He then began a description of his town's future, the plans for cliff-front skyscrapers, a nuclear generator, round-the-clock lighting for the entire chamber, a professional security force, another tunnel for a second rail line, and one day maybe even their own elevator tube to the surface.

'Excuse me,' someone cut him off. 'We've come a long way. We're tired. Can you just tell us where the science station is?'

The mayor looked helplessly at the notes for his speech. Bits of tissue stuck to his shaving nicks. 'Science station?' he said.

'The research institute,' someone shouted.

Shoat stepped in front of the mayor. 'Go inside,' he told the scientists. 'We've arranged for hot food and clean water. In an hour, everything will be explained.'

'There is no science station,' Shoat told them. A howl went up.

Shoat waved them quiet. 'No station,' he repeated. 'No institute. No headquarters. No laboratories. Not even a base camp. It was all a fiction.'

The auditorium, deep within the bunker, exploded with curses and shouts. Though appalled by the deception, Ali had to give Shoat credit. The group's outrage verged on the homicidal, but he didn't cower.

'Just what are you doing?' a woman cried out.

'On behalf of Helios, I am protecting the greatest trade secret of all time,' Shoat responded. 'It's a matter of intellectual property. A matter of geographical possession.'

'What are you raving about?'

'Helios has spent vast sums to develop the information you're about to see. You've no idea how many other entities – corporations, foreign governments, armies – would kill for what will be revealed. This is the last great secret on earth.'

'Gibberish,' someone yelled. 'Just tell us where you're hijacking us to.'

Shoat never flinched. 'Meet the chief of Helios's cartography department,' he said, and opened a door on one wall.

The cartographer was a diminutive man with leg braces. His head was large for his body. He smiled automatically. Ali had not seen him on the train, and presumed he had arrived earlier to prepare for them. He cut the lights.

'Forget the moon,' he told them. 'Forget Mars. You're about to walk on the planet inside our planet.'

A video screen lit up. The first image was a still of a yellowed Mercator map. 'Here was the world in 1587,' he said. The cartographer's silhouette bobbed across the bottom of the large screen. 'Lacking facts, young Mercator plundered the accounts of Marco Polo, which were themselves based on plundered hearsay and folklore. Here, for instance' – he pointed at a misshapen Australia – 'was a total fabrication. A medieval hypothesis. Logic suggested that the continents in the north must be counterweighted by continents in the south, and so a mythical place called Terra Australis Incognita was invented. Mercator incorporated it on this map. And here's the marvel of it. Using this map, sailors found Australia.'

The cartographer pointed his pencil high. 'Up there is another landmark invented out of Mercator's imagination. They named it Polus Arcticus. Again, explorers discovered the Arctic by relying on the fiction of it. A hundred and fifty years later, the French cartographer Philippe Buache drew a gigantic – and equally imaginary – Antarctic Pole to counterweight Mercator's imaginary Arctic. And once again, explorers discovered it by using a map made of myth. So it is with hell and what you are about to see. You might say my mapping department has invented a reality for you to explore.'

Ali looked around. The one figure in the audience that struck her was Ike. Her fascination with him was becoming something of an enigma. At the moment he looked singularly odd, wearing sunglasses in a darkened room.

The old map became a large globe slowly revolving behind the cartographer. It was a satellite view, real-time. Clouds flocked against mountain ranges or moved across the blue oceans. On the night side, city lights flared like forest fires.

'We call this Level 1,' said the cartographer. The globe froze still with the vast Pacific facing them. 'Until World War II, we were sure the ocean floor was a huge flat surface, covered with a uniform thickness of sea mud. Then radar was invented, and there was quite a shock in store.'

The video image flickered.

'Lo and behold, it wasn't smooth.'

A trillion gallons of water vanished in an instant. They were left staring at the seafloor, drained of all water, its trenches and faults and seamounts like so many wrinkles and warts.

'At great cost, Helios has peeled the onion even deeper. We've consolidated an aerial-seismic mosaic of overlapping earth images. We took every piece of information from earthquake stations and sonic sleds towed behind ships and from oil drillers' seismographs and from earth tomographies collected over a ninety-five-year period. Then we combined it with satellite data measuring the heights of the ocean surface, reverse-albedo, gravity fields, geo-magnetics, and atmospheric gases. The methods have all been used before, but never all in combination. Here's the result, a series of delaminated views of the Pacific region, layer by layer.'

'Now we're getting somewhere,' one of the scientists grunted. Ali felt it herself. This was big.

'You've seen seafloor topographies before,' the cartographer said. 'But the scale was, at best, one to twenty-nine million. What our department has produced for Level 2 is almost equivalent to walking on the ocean bottom. One to sixteen.'

He tapped a button on his palm mouse, and the image magnified. Ali felt herself shrinking like Alice in Wonderland. A colored dot in the mid-Pacific soared and became a towering volcano.

'This is the Isakov Seamount, east of Japan. Depth 1,698 fathoms. A fathom, as you know, equals six feet. We use fathoms for depth readings, feet for elevations. You'll be using both. Fathoms for your position relative to sea level, and feet to measure the heights of cave ceilings and other subterranean features. Just remember to convert to fathoms when you're down there.'

Down there? thought Ali. Aren't we already?

The cartographer moved his mouse. Ali felt flung between canyon walls. Then the image threw them onto a plain of flattened sediment. They sped across it. 'Ahead lies the Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench.'

Suddenly they were plunging off the plain into a vertical chasm. They fell. 'Five thousand nine hundred seventy-one fathoms,' he said. 'That's 35,827 feet. Six-point-eight miles deep. The deepest known point on earth. Until now.'

The image flickered again. A simple drawing showed a cross-section of the earth's crust. 'Beneath the continents, the abyssal cavities are not exceptionally deep. They mostly exploit surficial limestone, which is readily eroded by water into such traditional features as sinkholes and caves. These have been the focus of public attention lately because they're close to home, underneath cities and suburbs. At last count, the combined military estimate of continental tunnels ran to 463,000 linear miles, with an average depth of only three hundred fathoms.

'Where you're going is considerably deeper. Beneath the ocean crust, we're dealing with a whole different rock from limestone, much newer in geological terms than the continental rock. Until a few years ago, it was presumed that the interior of ocean rock was nonporous and much too hot and pressurized to sustain life. Now we know better.

'The abyss beneath the Pacific is basalt, which gets attacked every few hundred thousand years by huge plumes of hydrogen-sulfide brine, or sulfuric acid, which snake up from deeper layers. This acid brine eats through the basalt like worms through an apple. We now believe there may be as many as six million miles of naturally occurring cavities in the rock beneath the Pacific, at an average depth of

6,100 fathoms. That's 36,600 feet below sea level, or six-point-nine miles.'

'Six million miles?' someone said.

'Correct,' said the cartographer. 'Very little of that is passable for human beings, naturally. But what is passable is more than enough. Indeed, what is passable seems to have been in use for thousands of years.'

Hadals, thought Ali, and heard the stillness all around her.

The screen filled with gray, shot through with squiggles and holes. The overall effect was of worms burrowing through a block of mud, surfacing and diving into the nether zone.

'The Pacific floor covers roughly 64,186,000 square miles. As you can see, it's riddled with these cavities, hundreds and thousands of miles of them. From Level 15, roughly four miles down, the density of rock and our limited technology drop our scale to 1:120,000. But we've still managed to count some eighteen thousand significant subterranean branches.

'They seem to dead-end or circle on themselves and go nowhere. All except one. We think this particular tunnel was carved by an acid plume relatively recently, less than a hundred thousand years ago, just moments in geological time. It appears to have welled up from beneath the Mariana Trench system, then corkscrewed east into younger and younger basalt. This tunnel goes from Point A – where we sit this morning – all the way across to Point B.' He walked from east to west across the front of the screen, pulling his pencil point across the entire Pacific territory. 'Point B lies at point-seven degrees north by 145.23 degrees east, just this side of the Mariana Trench system. There it dips deeper, beneath the Trench.

'Where it goes, we're not quite sure. It probably links with the Carolinian system west of the Philippines. A profusion of tunnels shoots throughout the Asian plate

systems, giving access to the basements of Australia, the Indonesian archipelago, China, and so on. You name it, there are doorways to the surface everywhere. We believe these connect with the sub-Pacific network here at Point B, but our scan is still in progress. It's a cartographic missing link for the moment, as the source of the Nile once was. But not for long. In less than a year, you are going to tell me where it leads.' It took Ali and the others a minute to catch up.

'You're sending us out there?' someone gasped.

Ali was staggered. She couldn't begin to grasp the enormity of the endeavor. Nothing January or Thomas had told her was preparation for this. She heard people breathing hard all around her. What could this mean, she wondered, a journey so audacious? Why send them all the way across to Asia? It was a stratagem of some sort, a geopolitical chess move. It reminded her less of Lewis and Clark's traverse than of the great expeditions of discovery once launched by Spain and England and Portugal.

It struck her. Their journey was meant to be a declaration, a pronunciamento. Wherever the expedition went, Helios would be asserting its domain. And the cartographer had just told them where they were going, beneath the Equator, from South America all the way to China.

In a flash, Ali saw the grand design.

Helios – Cooper, the failed President – intended to lay claim to the entire subbasement of the oceanic bowl. He was going to create a nation for himself. But a nation the size of the Pacific Ocean? She had to relay this information to January.

Ali sat in the darkness, gaping at the screen. It would be larger than all the nations on earth put together! Helios would own almost half the globe. What could you possibly do with such immense space? How could you manifest such power?

She was awed by the grandeur of it. Such imperial vision: it was virtually psychotic. And she and these scientists were to be the agents in gaining it.

Her neighbors were lodged in their own thoughts. Most were probably weighing the risks, adjusting their search goals, adapting to the vastness of the challenge, reckoning the odds.

'Shoat!' a man bellowed.

Shoat's face obligingly appeared at the podium light.

'No one said anything about this,' the man said.

'You did sign on for a year,' Shoat pointed out.

'You expect us to traverse the Pacific Ocean? A mile to three miles beneath the ocean floor? Through unexplored territory? Hadal territory?'

'I'll be with you every step of the way,' Shoat said.

'But no one's ever gone west of the Nazca Plate.'

'That's true. We'll be the first.'

'You're talking about being on the move for an entire year.'

'Precisely our reason for sending you a workout schedule over the last six months. All those climbing walls and StairMasters and heavy squats weren't for your cosmetic enhancement.'

Ali could sense the group calculating.

'You have no idea what's out there,' someone said.

'That's not exactly true,' Shoat said. 'We have some idea. Two years ago, a military reconnaisance probed some of the path. Basically they found the remains of a prehistoric passageway, a network of tunnels and chambers that are well marked and have been improved and maintained over a period of several thousand years. We think it may have been a kind of Silk Road for the Pacific abyss.'

'How far did the soldiers get?'

'Twenty-three miles,' Shoat answered. 'Then they turned around and came back.'

'Armed soldiers.'

Shoat was unflappable. 'They weren't prepared. We are.'

'What about hadals?'

'There hasn't been a sighting in over two years,' Shoat said. 'But just to be safe, Helios has hired a security force. They will accompany us every step of the way.'

A gentleman stood. He had Isaac Asimov muttonchops and black horn-rims, and had X'ed out the word 'Hi' on his name tag. Ali knew his face from the dust jackets of his numerous books: Donald Spurrier, a renowned primatologist. 'What about human limitations? Your projected route must be five thousand miles long.'

The cartographer turned to the glowing map. His finger traced a set of lines that ambled back and forth across the equatorial rhumb. 'In fact, with all the bends and turns and vertical loss and gain, a better estimate is eight thousand miles, plus or minus a thousand.'

'Eight thousand miles?' said Spurrier. 'In a single year? On foot?'

'For what it's worth, our train ride just gave us an easy thirteen hundred miles without a step.'

'Leaving a mere 6,700 miles. Are we supposed to run nonstop for a year?'

'Mother Nature is lending a hand,' the cartographer said.

'We've detected significant motion along the route,' Shoat said. 'We believe it's a river.'

'A river?'

'Moving from east to west. Thousands of miles long.'

'A theoretical river. You haven't seen it.'

'We'll be the first.'

Spurrier was no longer resisting. 'We won't go thirsty, then.'

'Don't you see?' Shoat said. 'It means we can float.' They were dazzled.

'What about supplies? How can we hope to carry enough for a year?'

'We start with porters. Every four to six weeks thereafter, we will be supplied by drill hole. Helios has already begun drilling supply holes for us at selected points. They will drill straight through the ocean floor to intersect our route, and lower food and gear. At those points, by the way, we'll have brief contact with the World. You'll be able to communicate with your families. We'll even be able to evacuate the sick or injured.'

It all sounded reasonable.

'It's radical. It's daring,' Shoat said. 'It's one year out of your lives. We could have spent it sitting on our butts in a hole like this. Instead, one year from now, we'll go down in history. You'll be writing papers and publishing books about this for the rest of your lives. It will cement your tenure, gain you chairs of departments, win you prizes and acclaim. Your children and grandchildren will beg you for the tale of what you're about to do.'

'This is a huge decision,' a man said. 'I need to consult my wife.' A general murmur agreed.

'I'm afraid the communications line is down.' It was a blatant lie, Ali could see it. But that was part of the price. He was drawing a line for them to step across. 'You may, of course, post mail. The next train back to Nazca City leaves two months from now.' Helios was playing hardball, a total embargo on information.

Shoat surveyed them with reptilian coolness. 'I don't expect everyone here tonight to be with us in the morning. You're free to return home, of course.' In two months' time, on the train. The expedition would have a tremendous head start on any leaks to the media. He looked at his watch.

'It's late,' he said. 'The expedition departs at 0600. That leaves only a few hours for you to sleep on your choices. That's enough, though. I'm a firm believer that each of us comes into this world with our decisions already made.'

The lights came up. Ali blinked. Everywhere, people were leaning forward onto seatbacks, rubbing their hands, making calculations. Faces were lit with excitement. Thinking fast, she looked for Ike's reaction to judge the proposition. But he had left while the lights were still off.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

– FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

10

DIGITAL SATAN

Health Sciences Center, University of Colorado, Denver

'She was caught in a nursing home near Bartlesville, Oklahoma,' Dr. Yamamoto explained to them. Thomas and Vera Wallach and Foley, the industrialist, followed the physician from her office. Branch came last, eyes protected by dark ski goggles, sleeves buttoned at each wrist to hide his burn scars.

'It was one of those homes that give adult children nightmares,' Dr. Yamamoto went on. She couldn't have been more than twenty-seven. Her lab coat was unbuttoned. Underneath it, a T-shirt read T HE LAKE CITY 50-M ILE ENDURANCE RUN. She exuded vitality and happiness, Branch thought. The wedding ring on her finger looked only a few weeks old.

They took an elevator up. A sign, supplemented with Braille, listed the floors by specialty. Primates occupied the basement. The upper floors were Psychiatry and Neurophysiology. They got off on the top floor, which bore no title, and started down another hallway.

'It turns out the administrator at this Bartlesville scam had served time for a variety of frauds and forgeries,' Dr. Yamamoto said. 'He's back in, I guess. I hope. A real prince. His so-called facility advertised itself as specializing in Alzheimer's patients. Behind the scenes, he kept the patients just barely alive in order to keep the Medicare/Medicaid checks coming in. Bed restraints, horrific conditions. No medical personnel whatsoever. Apparently our little intruder was able to hide there for over a month before a janitor finally noticed.'

The young doctor halted at a door with a keypad. 'Here we are,' she said, and gently entered the code. Long fingers. A soft, sure touch.

'You play violin,' Thomas guessed.

She was delighted. 'Guitar,' she confessed. 'Electric. Bass. I have a band, Girl Talk.

All guys, and me.'

She held the door for them. Immediately, Branch sensed the change in light and sound. No windows in here. No spill of sunbeams. The slight whistle of wind against brick quit. These walls were thick.

To the right and left, doorways opened onto rooms orbiting computer screens. A plaque read DIGITAL ADAM PROJECT, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE. Branch didn't see a single book.

Yamamoto's voice adjusted to the new quiet. 'Lucky for us it was the janitor who noticed,' she continued. 'The administrator and his gang of thieves would never have called the police. To make a long story short, the cops came. They were suitably horrified. At first they were sure it was animals. One of the cops used to trap coyotes and bobcats. He set out some old rusty leg traps.'

They reached a set of double doors. Another keypad. Different numbers, Branch noticed. They entered in stages: first a guard, then a scrub room, where Yamamoto helped them put on disposable green gowns and surgical masks and double pairs of latex gloves, then a main room with biotechs at work over test tubes and keyboards. She led them around gleaming banks of equipment and picked up her narrative.

'That night she came back for more. One of the traps caught her leg. The cops came roaring in. She was a complete surprise. They were not at all prepared. Barely four feet high and, even with her tibia and fibula broken in half, she still almost beat five grown men. She came very close to escaping, but they got her. We would have preferred a live specimen, of course.'

They came to a door labeled NIPPLES ALERT on a handwritten sheet.

'Nipples?' asked Vera.

Yamamoto noticed the sign and snatched it down. 'A joke,' she said. 'It's cold in there. The room is refrigerated. We call it the pit and the pendulums.'

Branch was gratified by her blush. She was a professional. What's more, she wanted to look professional to them. She led them through the door.

Inside, it was not as cold as Branch had expected. A wall thermometer read thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Very bearable for an hour or two of work. Not that anyone was in here. The work was all being done automatically.

Machinery susurrated, a steady rhythm. Shh. Shh. Shh. As though to quiet an infant. A number of lights pulsed with each hush.

'They killed her?' Vera asked.

'No, it wasn't that,' Yamamoto said. 'She was alive after they got the nets and rope on. But the trap was rusty. Sepsis set in. Tetanus. She died before we arrived. I brought her here in a footlocker packed with dry ice.'

There were four stainless-steel autopsy tables. Each held a block of blue gelatin. Each block was positioned against a machine. Each machine flashed a light every five seconds.

'We named her Dawn,' said Yamamoto.

They looked into the blue gelatin and there she was, her cadaver frozen and suspended in gel and cut crosswise into four sections.

'We were halfway through computerizing our digital Eve when the hadal came our way.' Yamamoto indicated a dozen freezer drawers along one wall. 'We put Eve back into storage and immediately went to work on Dawn. As you can see, we've quartered her body and bedded the four sections in gelatin. These machines are called cryomacrotomes. Glorified meat shavers. Every few seconds they cut a half-millimeter off the bottom of each gelatin block, and a synchronized camera photographs the new layer.'

'How long has it been here?' Foley asked.

It , not she, Branch noticed. Foley was keeping things impersonal. For his own part, Branch felt a connection. How could you not? The small hand had four fingers and a

thumb.

'Two weeks. It's just a function of the blades and cameras. In another few months we'll have a computer bank with over twelve thousand images. She'll end up as forty billion bytes of information stored on seventy CD-ROM disks. Using a mouse, you will be able to travel through a 3-D image of Dawn's interior.'

'And your purpose?'

'Hadal physiology,' Dr. Yamamoto said. 'We want to know how it differs from human.'

'Is there any way to accelerate your inquiry?' asked Thomas.

'We don't know what we're looking for, or even what questions to ask. As it is, we don't dare miss anything. There's no telling what might lie in the smallest detail.'

They separated and went to different tables. Through the translucent gel, Branch saw a pair of lower legs and feet. There was the place the trap had snapped her bones. The skin was fish white.

He found the head-and-shoulders section. It was like a bust in alabaster. The lids were half shut, exposing bleached blue irises. The mouth was slightly open. Working from the neck upward, the machine's pendulum was still at throat level.

'You've probably seen a lot like her,' Dr. Yamamoto spoke at his shoulder. Her voice was severe.

Branch cocked his head and looked closer, almost affectionately. 'They're all different,' he said. 'Kind of like us.'

He could tell she'd expected something coarse or stormy from him. Most people took one look at him and assumed he couldn't get enough of Haddie's blood.

The physician's voice softened. 'Judging by her teeth and the immaturity of her pelvic girdle,' she said, 'Dawn was probably twelve or thirteen years old. We could be way off on that, of course. We have nothing to compare her with, so we're simply guessing. Specimens have been very hard to get. You'd think after so much contact, so many killings, we'd be swimming in bodies.'

'That is odd,' said Vera. 'Do they decompose faster than normal mammal remains?'

'Depending on the exposure to direct sunlight. But the scarcity of good specimens has more to do with desecration.' Branch noticed that she did not look at him.

'You mean mutilation?'

'It's more than that.'

'Desecration, then,' said Thomas. 'That's a strong term.'

Yamamoto went over to the storage drawers and pulled out a long tray on rollers. 'I don't know, what do you call it?' A hideous animal lay on the metal, scorched black, teeth bared, dismembered, mutilated. It could have been eight thousand years old.

'Caught and burned one week ago,' she said.

'Soldiers?' asked Vera.

'Actually, no. This came from Orlando, Florida. A regular neighborhood. People are scared. Maybe it's a form of racial catharsis. There's this revulsion or anger or terror. People seem to feel they have to lay waste to these things, even after they've killed them. Maybe they think they're destroying evil.'

'Do you?' asked Thomas.

Her almond eyes were sad. Then disciplined. Either way, compassion or science, she did not.

'We offer rewards for undamaged specimens,' she told them. 'But this is about the best that comes in. This guy, for instance. He was captured alive by a group of middle-aged accountants and software engineers playing touch football at a suburban soccer field. By the time they got finished with him, he was a piece of charcoal.'

Branch had seen far worse.

'All around the country. All around the world,' she said. 'We know they're coming up into our midst. There are sightings and killings every hour, somewhere in metro and

rural America. Try to get a whole, undamaged cadaver in the lab, though. It's a real problem. It makes research very slow.'

'Why do you think they're coming up, Doctor? Seems like everyone has a theory.'

'None of us here has a clue,' Yamamoto said. 'Frankly, I'm not convinced the hadals are coming up in any greater numbers than they have historically. But it's safe to say that humans are more sensitized to the hadals' presence these days, and so we're seeing them more clearly. The majority of sightings are false, as with UFOs. A great number have been sightings of transients and freight riders and animals, even tree branches scratching at the window, not hadals.'

'Ah,' said Vera, 'it's all in our imagination?'

'Not at all. They're definitely here, hiding in our landfills, our suburban basements, our zoos, warehouses, national parks. In our underbelly. But nowhere near the numbers the politicians and journalists want us to believe. As far as invading us, come on. Who's invading who here? We're the ones sinking shafts and colonizing caves.'

'Dangerous talk,' said Foley.

'At a certain point, our hate and fear change us,' the young woman said. 'I mean, what kind of world do we want to raise our children in? That's important, too.'

'But if they're not appearing in any greater numbers than before,' argued Thomas,

'doesn't that throw out all the catastrophe theories we keep hearing, that a great famine or plague or environmental disaster is to blame for their coming among us?'

'That's one more thing our research may help answer. A people's history speaks through their bones and tissue,' said Yamamoto. 'But until we collect more specimens and expand our database, I can't tell you anything more than what the bodies of Dawn and a few of her brothers and sisters have told us.'

'Then we know almost nothing about their motivation?'

'Scientifically speaking, no. Not yet. But sometimes we – the staff and I – sit around and invent life stories for them.' The young doctor indicated her stainless-steel mausoleum. 'We give them names and a past. We try to understand how it must have been to be them.'

She touched the side of the cutting table with the hadal female's head. 'Dawn is easily our group's favorite.'

'This?' said Vera. But clearly she was charmed by the staff's humanity.

'Her youth, I guess. And the hard life she led.'

'Tell us her story, if you don't mind,' said Thomas. Branch looked at the Jesuit. Like Branch, he had a raw exterior that people misjudged. But Thomas felt an affinity for the creatures that was unfashionable at the moment. Branch thought it perfectly in character. Weren't all Jesuits liberation theologists?

The young woman looked uncomfortable. 'It's not really my place,' she said. 'The specialists haven't gone over the data yet, and anything we've made up is pure conjecture.'

'Just the same,' Vera said, 'we want to hear.'

'All right, then. She came from very deep, from an atmosphere rich in oxygen, judging by the relatively small rib cage. Her DNA shows a relevant difference from samples sent to us from other regions around the world. The consensus is that these hadals all evolved from Homo erectus , our own ancestor. It's common knowledge that we shared a mother and father long ago. But then the same can be said about us and orangutans, or lemurs, or even frogs. At some point we all share genesis.

'One surprise is how alike the hadals are to us. Another is how unalike they are to one another. Have you ever heard of Donald Spurrier?'

'The primatologist?' said Thomas. 'He was here?'

'Now I'm really embarrassed,' Yamamoto said. 'I'd never heard of him, but people told me later he's world-famous. Anyway, he stopped up to see our little girl one afternoon and essentially conducted an impromptu seminar for us. He told us that

Homo erectus spun off more variations than any other hominid group. We're one of the spin-offs. Hadals may be another. Erectus apparently migrated from Africa to Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the splinter groups possibly evolved into different forms around the world, before going into the interior. Again, I'm not an expert on such things.'

To Branch, Yamamoto's modesty was engaging, but a distraction. They were here today on business, to glean every possible clue that she and her colleagues had harvested from this hadal corpse. 'In great part,' Thomas said, 'you have just stated our purpose, to understand why we turn out the way we do. What more can you tell us?'

'There's a high concentration of radioisotopes in her tissue, but that's to be expected, coming from the subplanet, a stone cavity bombarded by mineral radiation from all directions. My own hunch is that radiation may help explain the mutations in their population. But please don't quote me on that. Who really knows why any of us turn out the way we do?'

Yamamoto passed a hand over the block of blue gel, as if stroking the monstrous face. 'To our eye, Dawn looks so primitive. Some of our visitors have remarked on what a throwback she is. They think she's so much closer to erectus and the Australopithecenes than we are. In fact, she is every bit as evolved as we are, just in a different direction.'

That had been one surprise for Branch. You expected stereotypes and racism and prejudices from the ordinary masses. But it was turning out that the sciences were just as rife with it. Indeed, intellectual biases – academic arrogance – helped explain why hell had gone undiscovered for so long.

'Dawn's dental formula is identical to yours and mine – and to hominid fossils three million years old: two incisors, one canine, two premolars, three molars.' Yamamoto turned to another table. 'The lower limbs are similar to ours, though hadal joints have more sponge in the bone, which suggests Dawn might have been even more efficient at walking than Homo sapiens sapiens. And she did a lot of that, walking. It's tough to see through the gel, but if you look hard, she put a lot of miles on those feet. The calluses are thicker than my thumbnail. Her arches have fallen. Somebody measured her: size eleven, quadruple wide.'

She moved to the next table, the thorax and upper arms. 'So far, few surprises here, either. The cardiovascular system is robust, if not perfectly healthy. The heart's enlarged, meaning she probably came up rapidly from minus four or five miles. Her lungs show chemical scarring, probably from breathing gases vented from the deeper earth. That's an old animal bite there.'

Yamamoto turned to the final table. It held the abdomen and lower arms. One hand was clenched, the other graceful. 'Again, it's hard to get a clear view. But the finger bones have a significant crook, midway between ape and human digits. That helps explain the stories we hear about hadals scaling walls and pulling themselves through underground nooks and crannies.'

Yamamoto gestured at the abdominal chunk. The blade had begun at the top and was shaving back and forth toward the pelvic area. The pubis had scant black hair, the start of womanhood.

'We did nail down part of her short, savage history. Before mounting her in gel and starting the cuts, we reviewed the MRI and CT images. Something about the pelvic saddle didn't look right, and I got the head of our Ob/Gyn department up for a look. He recognized the trauma right away. Rape. Gang rape.'

'What's this you're saying?' Foley asked.

'Twelve years old,' said Vera. 'Can you imagine? That explains why she came up, though.'

'How do you mean?' asked Yamamoto.

'The poor thing must have fled from the creatures that did this to her.'

'I didn't mean to suggest it was hadals who did this to her. We typed the sperm. It was all human. The injuries were very recent. We contacted the sheriff's department in Bartlesville, and they suggested we talk to the male attendants at the nursing home. The attendants denied it. We could take samples from them, but it wouldn't change anything. This kind of thing's not a crime. One group or another helped themselves to her. They had her locked in a refrigerated meat locker for several days.'

Again, Branch had seen worse.

'What a remarkable conceit civilization is,' said Thomas. His face looked neither angry nor sad, but seasoned. 'This child's suffering is ended. Yet, even as we speak, similar evil plays out in a hundred different places, ours upon them, theirs upon us. Until we can bring some sense of order to bear, the evil will continue to have a hiding place.'

He was speaking to the child's body, it seemed, perhaps reminding himself.

'What else?' Yamamoto asked herself aloud. She looked around at the body parts. They were at the abdominal quadrant. 'Her stool,' Yamamoto started again, 'was hard and dark and rank-smelling. A typical carnivore's stool.'

'What was her diet then?'

'In the last month before death?' said Yamamoto.

'I would have thought oat-bran muffins and fruit juices and whatever else one might scavenge in a geriatric kitchen. Foods with fiber and roughage, easy to digest,' suggested Vera.

'Not this gal. She was a meat-eater, no two ways about it. The police report was clear. The stool sample only confirmed it. Exclusively meat.'

'But where –'

'Mostly from the feet and calves,' said Yamamoto. 'That's how she went undetected for so long. The staff thought it was rats or a feral cat, and just applied ointments and bandages. Then Dawn would come back the next night and feed some more.'

Vera was silent. Yamamoto's little 'gal' had not exactly lent herself to cuddling.

'Not pretty, I know,' Yamamoto continued. 'But then she didn't have a pretty life.' The blade hissed, the block moved imperceptibly.'

'Don't get me wrong. I'm not justifying predation. I'm just not condemning it. Some people call it cannibalism. But if we're going to insist they're not sapiens, then technically it's no different from what mountain lions do to us. But these incidents do help explain why people are so scared. Which makes good, undamaged specimens that much harder to obtain. And deadlines impossible to meet. We're way behind.'

'Way behind whom?' asked Vera.

'Ourselves,' said Yamamoto. 'We've been handed deadlines. And we haven't made one yet.'

'Who's setting your deadlines?'

'That's the grand mystery. At first we thought it was the military. We kept getting raw computer models for developing new weapons. We were supposed to fill in the blanks – you know, tissue density, positions of organs. Generally provide distinctions between our species and theirs. Then we started getting memos from corporations. But the corporations keep changing. Now we're not even sure about them. For our purposes, it really doesn't matter. The light bill's getting paid.'

'I have a question,' Thomas said. 'You sound a little uncertain about whether Dawn and her kind are really a separate species. What did Spurrier have to say?'

'He was adamant that hadals are a different species, some kind of primate. Taxonomy's a sensitive subject. Right now Dawn is classified as Homo erectus hadalis

. He got upset when I mentioned the move to rename them Homo sapiens hadalis. In other words, an evolutionary branch of us. He said the erectus taxon is wastebasket

science. Like I said, there's a lot of fear out there.'

'Fear of what?'

'It runs against the current orthodoxy. You could get your funding cut. Lose your tenure. Not get hired or published. It's subtle. Everyone's playing it very safe for now.'

'What about you?' Thomas asked. 'You've handled this girl. Followed her dissection. What do you think?'

'That's not fair,' Vera scolded Thomas. 'She just got through saying how dangerous the times are.'

'It's okay,' Yamamoto said to Vera. She looked at Thomas. 'Erectus or sapiens? Let me put it this way. If this were a live subject, if this were a vivisection, I wouldn't do it.'

'So you're saying she's human?' asked Foley.

'No. I'm saying she's similar enough, perhaps, not to be erectus .'

'Call me a devil's advocate, certainly a layman,' Foley said. 'But she doesn't look similar to me.'

Yamamoto went over to her wall of drawers and pulled a lower tray out. It held a carcass even more grotesque than the ones they'd seen. The skin was wildly scarified. Body hair had grown rampant. The face was all but hooded with a cabbage-like dome of fleshy calcium deposits. Something close to a ram's horn had grown from the middle of the forehead.

She rested one gloved hand on the creature's rib cage. 'As I said, the idea was to find differences between our two species. We know there are differences. Those are obvious to the naked eye. Or seem to be. But so far all we've found are physiological similarities.'

'How can you say he's similar?' asked Foley.

'That's exactly the point. We were sent this specimen by our lab chief. Sort of a double-blind test to see what we'd come up with. Ten of us worked on the autopsy for a week. We compiled a list of almost forty distinctions from the average Homo sapiens sapiens. Everything from blood gases to bone structure to ophthalmic deformities to diet. We found traces of rare minerals in his stomach. He'd been eating clay and various fluorescents. His intestines glowed in the dark. Only then did the lab chief tell us.'

'Tell you what?'

'That this was a German soldier from one of the NATO task forces.'

Branch had known it was human from the start, but he let Yamamoto make her point.

'That can't be.' Vera began lifting and opening surgical cavities and pressing at the bony helmet. 'What about this?' she said. 'And this?'

'All residuals from his tour of duty. Side effects from the drugs he was told to take or from the geochemical environment in which he was serving.'

Foley was shocked. 'I've heard of some amount of modification. But never anything like this disfigurement.' Suddenly remembering Branch, he stopped himself.

'He does look demonic,' Branch commented.

'All in all, it was an instructive anatomy lesson,' Yamamoto said. 'Very humbling. I came away with one abiding thought. It doesn't matter if Dawn stems from erectus or sapiens. Go back far enough and sapiens is erectus .'

'Are there no differences, then?' Thomas asked.

'Many. Many. But now we've seen how many incongruities there are between one human and another. It's become an epistemological issue. How to know what we think we know.' She slid the drawer shut.

'You sound demoralized.'

'No. Distracted, perhaps. Derailed. Off track. But I'm convinced we'll start hitting real discrepancy in three to five months.'

'Oh?' said Thomas.

She went back to the table where Dawn's head and shoulders were slowly, very slowly feeding into the pendulum. 'That's when we'll begin entering the brain.'

Begin at the beginning... and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

– LEWIS CARROLL, Turtle Soup

11

LOSING THE LIGHT Between the Clipperton and Galápagos Fracture Zones

In groups of four, they were winched into the depths off the cliffs of Esperanza. Like great naval guns, a battery of five winches faced out along the chasm rim, motors roaring, their great spools of wire cable winding out. Freight and humanity alike rode the nets and platforms down. The chasm was over four thousand feet deep. There were no seat belts or safety instructions, only frayed come-along straps and oily chains and floor bolts to secure crates and machinery. The live cargo managed for itself.

The massive winch arms creaked and groaned. Ali got her pack nestled behind her, and hitched herself to the low railing with carabiners and a knot. Shoat came over with a clipboard in hand. 'Good morning,' she yelled into the roar and exhaust fumes. As he had predicted, a number of them had quit the game overnight. Five or six so far, but given Shoat's and Helios's manner, Ali had expected more to resign. Judging by Shoat's pleased grin, it seemed he had, too. She had never spoken with him. A sudden fear flashed through her other fears, that he might suddenly remove her from the expedition.

'You're the nun,' he said. You could never call the pinched face and hungry eyes disarming, but he was personable enough. He offered his hand, which was surprisingly thin, given the pumped biceps and thighs.

'I'm here as an epigrapher and linguist.'

'We need one of those? You kind of came out of nowhere,' he said.

'I didn't hear about the opportunity until late.' He studied her. 'Last chance.'

Ali looked around the deck and saw some of those who were staying. They looked ferocious, but forlorn, too. It had been a night of tears and rage and vows of a class-action suit against Helios. There had even been a fistfight. Part of the resentment, Ali realized, was that these people had made their minds up once, and

Shoat had forced them to do it again. 'I've made my peace,' Ali assured him.

'That's one way of putting it.' Shoat checked her name on the list.

The cables came taut overhead. The platform lifted. Shoat gave it a hearty shove and walked away as they went swinging into the abyss. One of Ali's companions shouted good-bye to the group of scientists staying behind.

The sound of the winch engines vanished high overhead. It was as if the lights of Esperanza had been flicked off. Suspended by a wire, they sank into blackness, slowly spinning. The overhang was stupendous. Sometimes the cliff wall was so far away their flashlights barely reached it.

'Live worm on a hook,' one of her neighbors said after the first hour. 'Now I know how it feels.'

That was it. Not another word was uttered by any of them all the way down. Ali had never known such emptiness.

Hours later, they neared the floor. Chemical runoff and human sewage had pooled in a foul marsh stretching along the base and extending beyond the light across the floor. The stench cut through Ali's dust mask. She gasped, then dumped the stench with disgust. Closer still, her skin prickled with the acidity.

The winch landed them with a bump on the edge of the beach of poisons. A hand – something meaty, but gnarled and missing two fingers – grabbed the railing in front of her. 'Bajarse, rápido,' the man barked. Rags hung from his head, perhaps to soak up his sweat or to shield him from their lights.

Ali unhooked herself and clambered off, and the character threw her pack off. Their platform started to rise. The last of her neighbors had to hop to the ground.

She looked around at this first wave of explorers. There were fifteen or twenty of them, standing in a clump and shining their flashlights. One man had drawn a big handgun and was aiming it vaguely toward the remoteness.

'Bad place to stand. Better move before something falls on your heads,' a voice said. They turned toward a niche in the rock. Inside sat a man, his assault rifle parked to one side. He had night glasses. 'Follow that trail.' He pointed. 'Keep going for about an hour. The rest of your people will catch up soon enough. And you, pendejo, the gunslinger. Put it back in your pants before someone gets shot.'

They did as he said. Lights wagging, they followed a trail that meandered around the cliff base. There was no chance of getting lost. It was the only trail.

A bleak fog hung across the floor. Rags of gas drifted at their knees. Small toxic clouds swirled at head level, blinding white in their headlamps. Here and there, licks of flame sprang up like St. Elmo's fire, then extinguished.

It was a swamp, deathly quiet. Animals had come here by the tens of thousands. Drawn by the spillage or non-native nutrients or, after a while, by the meat of earlier visiting animals, they had eaten and drunk here. Now their bones and decay spoiled among the rocks mile after mile.

Ali paused where two of the biologists were conversing by a pile of liquefying flesh and spiny bones. 'We know that spines and protective armor are the proof of expanding numbers of predators in an environment,' one explained to her. 'When predators begin devouring predators, evolution starts building body defenses. Protein is not a perpetual-motion machine. It has to begin somewhere. But no one's ever found where the hadal food chain begins.' At least to date, no one had found evidence of plants down here. Without plants, you had no herbivores; what you ended up with was an entire ecology based on meat.

His friend pried the jaws open to examine the teeth. Something scaly and clawed came crawling out, another invader species from the surface. 'Just the way I expected,' the friend said. 'Everything is hungry down here. Starved.'

Ali moved on and saw at least a dozen different sizes and shapes of skulls and rib cages, a brand-new menagerie that was not entirely new to her imagination. One set

of bones had the dimensions of a short snake with a large head. Something else had once transported itself on two legs. Another animal could have been a small frog with wings. None of it moved.

Soon Ali was sweating and breathing hard. She'd known there would be a period of adaptation to the trail, that it was going to take time to acclimate to the depths, to build up their quadriceps and adjust to new circadian rhythms. The stench of animal carcasses and the mining network's sewage didn't help. And an obstacle course of rusting cables, twisted rails, sudden ladders, and staircases made progress more difficult.

Ali reached a clearing. A group of scientists was resting at a stone bench. She got out of her pack and joined them. Farther on, the trail dropped in a deep, winding staircase. The masonry seemed old, fused with accretions. Ali looked around for carved inscriptions or other signs of hadal culture, but there was none.

'That's got to be the last of our people coming down,' a trekker said.

Ali followed his pointing finger. Like tiny comets, three points of light slowly descended in the darkness with silvery filaments for tails. Ali was surprised. For all the walking they'd done, the platforms were not so far away, maybe just a mile. Higher, at the edge of the rim, the town of Esperanza was visible against the black night, a dim bulb indeed. For a moment she saw the boomtown's painted cliffs. The bright blue color twinkled in the toxic mist like a wishing star, and so she made a wish. After their rest, the trail changed. The swamp receded. The reek of death fell away. The trail rose at a pleasant incline. They came to a ledge overlooking a flat plateau.

'More animals,' someone said.

'They're not animals.'

Once upon a time, in Palestine, people had made human sacrifices in the valley of Hinnon, later using the valley as a dumping ground for dead animals and executed prisoners. Cremation fires could be seen burning there night and day. With time Hinnon became Gehenna, which became the Hebrew name for the land of the dead. Ali had become something of a student of the literature of hell, and could not help wondering if they had stumbled upon some modern equivalent of Hinnon.

As they trekked onto the plateau, the image resolved itself. The bodies were simply men lying in an open-air camp. 'They must be our porters,' Ali said. She estimated a hundred or more men gathered here. Cigarette smoke mixed with their pungent body odor. Dozens of blue plastic drums shaped on one side to fit the human spine gave her a clue.

They had reached the rendezvous point. From here the expedition would truly launch. Like uninvited guests, the scientists waited at the edge of the encampment, not quite sure what came next. The porters did nothing to accommodate them. They went on lying about, sharing cigarettes and cups of hot drinks or sleeping on the bare ground. 'They look... tell me they didn't hire hadals,' a woman said.

'How could they hire hadals?' someone asked. 'We're not even sure they exist anymore.'

The porters' incipient horns and beetling brows and their body art, almost defective in its jailhouse shabbiness, had a certain pathos to it. Not that anyone would have pitied these men to their faces. They had the bricklike stare and keloid scars of a street gang. Their clothing was a mishmash of LA ghetto and the jungle. Some wore Patagonia shorts and Raiders caps, others wore loincloths with hip-hop jackets. Most carried knives. Ali saw machetes – but no vines. The blades were for protection, from the animals she'd been passing for the last hour, and possibly from any stray hostiles, but above all from one another.

They had fresh white plastic collars around their necks. She'd heard of convict labor and chain gangs in the subplanet, and maybe the collars were some sort of electronic shackles. But these men looked too physically similar, too familial, to be a collection of

prisoners. They must have come from the same tribe, the front end of a migration. They were indios, though Ali could not say from which region. Possibly Andean. Their cheekbones were broad and monumental, their black eyes almost Oriental.

A huge young black soldier appeared at their side. 'If you'll come this way,' he said,

'the colonel has hot coffee prepared. We just received a radio update. The rest of your group has touched down. They'll be here soon.'

Attached to his dogtag chain was a small steel Maltese cross, the official emblem of the Knights Templar. Recently revived through the largesse of a sports shoe manufacturer, the military religious order had become famous for employing former high school and college athletes with little other future. The recruitment had started at Promise Keepers and Million Man March rallies, and snowballed into a well-trained, tightly disciplined mercenary army for hire to corporations and governments.

In passing a knot of the indios, she saw a head rise; it was Ike. His glance at her lasted barely a second. She still owed him thanks for that orange in the Nazca elevator. But he returned his attention to the circle of porters, hunkering among them like Marco Polo.

Ali saw lines and arcs drawn on the stone in their midst, and Ike was shifting pebbles and bits of bone from one place to another. She thought they must be playing a game, then realized he was querying the indios, getting directions or gathering information. One other thing she saw, too. Near one foot, Ike had a small pile of carefully stacked leaves, clearly a last-minute purchase. She recognized them. He was a chewer of coca leaves.

Ali moved on to the soldiers' part of the camp. All was in motion here, men in camouflage uniforms bustling around, checking weapons. There were at least thirty of them, even quieter than the indios, and she decided the legend must be true about the mercenaries' vows of silence. Except for prayer or essential communication, speech was considered an extravagance among themselves.

Drawn by coffee fumes, the scientists found a stove perched on rocks and helped themselves, then started poking through the neatly arranged crates and plastic drums, looking for their equipment.

'You don't belong here,' the black soldier said. 'Please vacate the depot.' He moved to block them. They went around him and rooted deeper.

'It's okay,' someone told him, 'it's our stuff.'

The hunt turned unruly. 'My spectroscope!' someone announced triumphantly.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' a voice requested.

Ali barely heard him over the shouting and jostle of equipment.

A single gunshot cracked the air. The bullet had been aimed out from camp, angled toward the ground. Where it struck the bare bedrock fifty feet out, the round blossomed into a shower of splintered light.

Everyone stopped.

'What was that?' a scientist said.

'That,' announced the shooter, 'was a Remington Lucifer.' He was a tall man, clean-shaven, slim in the fashion of field officers. He wore a chest rig with a shoulder holster for his modest-sized pistol. He had black and charcoal-gray camouflaged SWAT pants bloused into lightweight boots. His black T-shirt looked clean. A pair of night glasses dangled at his throat.

'It is an ammunition specially developed for use in the subplanet. It is a .25-caliber round, made of hardened plastic with a uranium tip. Different levels of heat and sonic vibration shape its functional capabilities. It can create a devastating wound, break up into multiple fléchettes, or simply create a blinding distraction. This expedition marks the official debut for the Lucifer and other technologies.' The accent was Tennessee aristocracy.

Spurrier approached the soldier, muttonchops fluffed, hand outstretched. He had

delegated himself the scientists' spokesman. 'You must be Colonel Walker.'

Walker bypassed Spurrier's outstretched hand. 'We have two problems, people. First, those loads you have looted were packed by weight and balanced for carrying. Their contents have been carefully inventoried. I have a list of every item in every load. Every load is numbered. You have now set our departure back by a half hour while the loads are repacked.

'Problem two, one of my men made a request. You ignored it.' He met their eyes. 'In the future, you will please treat such requests as direct orders. From me.' He shut his holster case with a snap.

'Looting?' a scientist protested. 'It's our equipment. How can we loot ourselves? Just who's in charge here?'

Still wearing his pack, Shoat arrived. 'I see you've met,' he said, and turned to the group. 'As you know, Colonel Walker will be our chief of security. From here on out, he'll be in charge of our defense and logistics.'

'We have to ask him for permission to do science?' a man objected.

'This is an expedition, not your personal office,' said Shoat. 'The answer is yes. From now on, you'll need to coordinate your needs with the colonel's man, who will direct you to the proper shipment.'

'We're a group,' said Walker. With his uniform and trappings and his lean height, he had undeniable presence. In one hand he carried a Bible bound in matching camouflage. 'The group takes priority. You simply need to anticipate your individual requirements, and my quartermaster will assist you. For the sake of order, you'll have to speak with him at the end of each day. Not in the morning while we are packing, not in the middle of the day while we are on the trail.'

'I have to ask permission to get my own equipment?'

'We'll sort it out.' Shoat sighed. 'Colonel, is there anything else you'd like to add?' Walker sat on the edge of a rock with one boot planted. 'My job is hired gun,' he said.

'Helios brought me on to provide preservation for this enterprise.' He unfolded a sheaf of pages and held it up. 'My contract,' he said, skimming the clauses. 'It's got some rather unique features.'

'Colonel,' Shoat warned. Walker ignored him.

'Here, for instance, is a list of bonus payments that I get for each one of you who survives the journey.'

The colonel had their fullest attention. Shoat didn't dare interrupt.

'It reminds me a lot of a bounty,' said Walker. 'According to this, I get so much for every hand, foot, limb, ear, and/or eye that I deliver intact and healthy. That's your hands, your feet, your eyes.' He found the part. 'Let's see, at three hundred dollars per eye, that's six hundred per pair. But they're only offering five hundred per mind. Go figure.'

The outcry went up. 'This is outrageous.' Walker waved the contract like a white flag. 'You need to know something else,' he boomed out. They stilled, somewhat. 'I've put my time in down here, and it's time to smell the roses, if you will. Dabble in politics, maybe. Do some consulting work. Spend some downtime with my wife and kids. And that's where you come in.'

They drew quiet.

'You see,' said Walker, 'my aim is to get filthy rich off you people. I mean to collect every penny of this entire schedule of bonuses. Every eyeball, every testicle, every toe. Do you ever ask yourselves who you can really trust?'

Walker folded his contract and closed it in his daybook. 'Let me submit that the one thing in this world you can always trust is self-interest. And now you know mine.' Shoat was paying painful attention. The colonel had just threatened the expedition's union – and saved it. But why? wondered Ali. What was Walker's game?

He clapped the King James against his thigh. 'We are beginning a great journey into

the unknown. From now on, this expedition will operate within guidelines and the protection of my judgment. Our best protection will be a common set of ideas. A law. That law, people, is mine. From here on, we will observe tenets of military jurisprudence. In return, I will restore you to your families.'

Shoat's neck made a slow extension, turtle-like. His soldier of fortune had just declared himself the ultimate legal authority over the Helios expedition for the next year. It was the most audacious thing Ali had ever seen. She waited for the scientists to raise the roof with their protests.

But there was silence. Not one objection. Then Ali understood. The mercenary had just promised them their lives.

Like any expedition, they settled into themselves by inches. A pace developed.

Camp broke at 0800. Walker would read a prayer to his troops – usually something grim from Revelation or Job or his favorite, Paul to the Corinthians – The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light – before sending a half-dozen ahead to audit the risks. The scientists would follow. The porters brought up the rear, protected-driven, it was becoming evident – by the silent soldiers. The division of labor was succinct, the lines uncrossable.

The porters spoke Quechua, once the language of the Incas. None of the Americans spoke it, and their attempts to use Spanish were rebuffed. Ali tried her hand at it, but the indios were not disposed to fraternizing. At night the mercenaries patrolled their perimeter in three shifts, guarding less against hadal adversaries than against the flight of their own porters.

In those first weeks they rarely saw their scout. Ike had vaulted into the night of tunneling, and kept himself a day or two ahead of them. His absence created an odd yearning among the scientists. When they asked about his welfare, Walker was dismissive. The man knows his duty, he would say.

Ali had presumed the scout was part of Walker's paramilitary, but learned otherwise. He was not exactly a free agent, if that was the term. Apparently Shoat had purchased him from the US Army. He was essentially chattel, little different from his hadal days. Ike's mystery mounted, in part, Ali suspected, because people were able to attach their fantasies to him. She limited her own desires to eventually interviewing him about hadal ethnography, and possibly assembling a root glossary, though she could not get that orange out of her mind.

For the time being, Ike did what Walker termed his duty. He found them the path. He led them into the darkness. They all knew his blaze mark, a one-foot-high cross spray-painted on the walls in bright blue.

Shoat informed them the paint would begin degrading after a week. Again, it was an issue of his trade secrets. Helios was determined to throw any competitors off their scent. As one scientist pointed out, the disappearing paint would also throw them off their own scent. They would have no way of retracing their own footsteps.

To reassure them, Shoat held up a small capsule he described as a miniature radio transmitter. It was one of many he would be planting along the way, and would lie dormant until he triggered it to life with his remote control. He compared it to Hansel and Gretel's trail of crumbs, then someone pointed out that the crumbs Hansel dropped had all been eaten by birds. 'Always negative,' he griped at them.

In twelve-hour cycles, the team moved, then rested, then moved again. The men sprouted whiskers. Among the women, roots began to grow out, eyeliner and lipstick fell from daily fashion. Dr. Scholl's adhesive pads for blisters became the currency of choice, even more valuable than M&M's.

Ali had never been part of an expedition, but felt herself immersed in the tradition

of what they were doing. They could have been whalers setting sail, or a wagon train moving west. She felt as if she knew it all by heart.

For the first ten days their joints and muscles were in shock. Even those hardy athletes among them groaned in their sleep and struggled with leg cramps. A small cult built around ibuprofen, the anti-inflammatory pain tablet. But each day their packs got a little lighter as they ate food or discarded books that no longer seemed so essential. One morning, Ali woke up with her head on a rock and actually felt refreshed.

Their farewell tans faded. Their feet hardened. More and more, they could see in quarter-light and less. Ali liked the smell of herself at night, her honest sweat.

Helios chemists had infused their protein bars with extra vitamin D to substitute for lost sunshine. The bars were dense with other additives, too, boosters Ali had never heard of. Among other things, her night vision grew richer by the hour. She felt stronger. Someone wondered if the food bars might not contain steroids, too, eliciting a playful round of science nerds flexing their imaginary new musculatures for one another.

Ali liked the scientists. She understood them in a way Shoat and Walker never could. They were here because they had answered their hearts. They felt compelled by reasons outside themselves, for knowledge, for reductionism, for simplicity, in a sense for God.

Inevitably, someone came up with a nickname for their expedition. It turned out to be Jules Verne who most appealed to this bunch, and so they became the Jules Verne Society, soon shortened to the JV. The name stuck. It helped that for his Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne had chosen two scientists for his heroes, rather than epic warriors or poets. Above all, the JV liked the fact that Verne's small party of scientists had emerged miraculously intact.

The tunnels were ample. Their path looked groomed. Someone – apparently long ago – had cleared loose stones and chiseled corners to form walls and benches alongside the trail. It was hypothesized that the stonecutting might have been accomplished centuries ago by Andean slaves, for the joints and massive blocks were identical to masonry at Machu Picchu and in Cuzco. At any rate, their porters seemed to know exactly what the benches were for as they backed their heavy loads onto the old shelves.

Ali couldn't get over it. Miles went by, as flat as a sidewalk, looping right and left in easy bends, a pedestrian's delight. The geologists, especially, were astounded. The lithosphere was supposed to be solid basalt at these depths. Unbearably hot. A dead zone. But here was a virtual subway tunnel. You could sell tickets to this, one remarked. Don't worry, said his pal, Helios will.

One night they camped next to a translucent quartz forest. Ali heard tiny underworld creatures rustling, and the sound of water trickling through deep fissures. This was their first good encounter with indigenous animals. The expedition's lights kept the animals in hiding. But one of the biologists set out a recording device, and in the morning he played for them the rhythm of two- and three-chambered hearts: subterranean fish and amphibians and reptiles.

The nocturnal sounds were unsettling for some, raising the specter of hadal predators or of bugs or snakes with deadly venoms. For Ali, the nearness of life was a balm. It was life she had come in search of, hadal life. Lying on her back in the blackness, she couldn't wait to actually see the animals.

For the most part, their fields were sufficiently diverse to forestall professional competition. That meant they shared more than they bickered. They listened to one another's hypotheses with saintly patience. They put on skits at night. A harmonica player performed John Mayall songs. Three geologists started a barbershop routine, calling themselves the Tectonics. Hell was turning out to be fun.

Ali estimated they were making 7.2 miles per day on foot. At mile fifty they held a celebration, with Kool-Aid and dancing. Ali did the twist and the two-step. A paleobiologist got her into a complicated tango, and it was like being drunk under a full moon.

Ali was a riddle to them. She was a scholar, and yet this other thing, a nun. Despite her dancing, some of the women told her they feared she was deprived. She never gossiped, never joined in the girl talk when the going got raw. They knew nothing about her past lovers, but presumed at least a few. They declared their intention of finding out. You make me sound like a social disease, Ali said, laughing.

Don't worry, they said, you can still be repaired.

Inhibitions receded. Clothing opened. Wedding bands started to vanish.

The affairs unfolded in full view of the group, and sometimes the sex, too. There were some initial attempts at privacy. Grown men and women passed notes back and forth, held hands in secret, or pretended to discuss important business. Late at night Ali could hear people grunting like hippies among the stones and heaped packs.

In their second week, they came upon cave art that might have been lifted from Paleolithic sites at Altamira. The walls held beautifully rendered animals and shapes and geometric doodles, some no larger than postage stamps. They were alive with color. Color! In a world of darkness.

'Look at that detail,' breathed Ali.

There were crickets and orchids and reptiles, and nightmare concoctions that looked like something the geographer Ptolemy or Bosch might have drawn, beasts that were part fish or salamander, part bird and man, part goat. Some of the depictions used natural knobs in the rock for eye stems or gonads, or spalled divots for a hollow in the stomach, or mineral veins for horns or antennae.

'Turn off your light,' Ali told her companions. 'Here's how it would have looked by the flame of a torch.' She swam her hand back and forth across her headlamp, and in the flickering light the animals seemed to move.

'Some of these species have been extinct for ten thousand years,' a paleobiologist said. 'Some I never knew existed.'

'Who were the artists, do you think?' someone wondered.

'Not hadals,' said Gitner, whose specialty was petrology, the history and classification of rocks. He had lost a brother in the national guard several years ago, and hated the hadals. 'They're vermin who have burrowed into the earth. That's their nature, like snakes or insects.'

One of the volcano people spoke. With her shaved head and long thighs, Molly was a figure of awe to the porters and mercenaries. 'There might be another explanation here,' she said. 'Look at this.' They gathered beneath a broad section of ceiling she had been studying.

'Okay,' Gitner said, 'a bunch of stick figures and boobie dolls. So what?'

At first glance, that did seem to be the extent of it. Wielding spears and bows, warriors mounted wild attacks on one another. Some had trunks and heads made of twin triangles. Others were just lines. Crowded into one corner stood several dozen Venuses loaded with vast breasts and obese buttocks.

'These look like prisoners.' Molly pointed at a file of stick figures roped together.

Ali pointed at a figure with one hand on the chest of another. 'Is that a shaman healing people?'

'Human sacrifice,' muttered Molly. 'Look at his other hand.' The figure was holding something red in one outstretched hand. His hand was resting not on top of the figure's chest, but inside it. He was displaying a heart.

That evening, Ali transferred some of her sketches of the cave art onto her day map. She had conceived the maps as a private journal. But, once discovered, her maps

quickly became expedition property, a reference point for them all.

From her work on digs near Haifa and in Iceland, Ali came armed with the trappings of the trade. She had schooled herself in grids and contours and scale, and went nowhere without her leather tube for rolls of paper. She could wield a protractor with command, cobble together a legend from scratch. They were less maps than a timetable with places, a chronography. Down here, far beneath the reach of the GPS satellite, longitude and latitude and direction were impossible to determine. Their compasses were rendered useless by electromagnetic corruption. And so she made the days of the month her true north. They were entering territory without human names, encountering locations that no one knew existed. As they advanced, she began to describe the indescribable and to name the unnamed.

By day she kept notes. In the evening, while the camp settled, Ali would open her leather tube of paper and lay out her pens and watercolors. She made two types of maps, one an overview, or blueprint, of hell, which corresponded to the Helios computer projection of their route. It had dates with the corresponding altitudes and approximate locations beneath various features on the surface or the ocean floor.

But it was her day maps, the second type, that were her pride. These were charts of each day's particular progress. The expedition's photographs would be developed on the surface someday, but for now her small watercolors and line drawings and written marginalia were their memory. She drew and painted things that attracted her eye, like the cave art, or the green calcite lily pads veined with cherry-red minerals that floated in pools of still water, or the cave pearls rolled together like nests of hummingbird eggs. She tried to convey how it was like traveling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

Even the mercenaries and porters liked to look at her maps. People enjoyed watching their voyage come alive beneath her pen and brush. Her maps comforted them. They saw themselves in the minutiae. Looking at her work, they felt a sense of control over this unexplored world.

On June 22, her day map included a major piece of excitement. '0955, 4,506

fathoms,' it read. 'Radio signals.'

They had not yet broken camp that morning when Walker's communications specialist picked up the signals. The entire expedition had waited while more sensors were laid out and the long-wave transmission was patiently harvested. It took four hours to capture a message that was a mere forty-five seconds long when played at normal speed. Everyone listened. To their disappointment, it was not for them. Luckily, one woman was fluent in Mandarin. It was a distress signal sent from a People's Republic of China submarine. 'Get this,' she told them. 'The message was sent nine years ago.'

It got stranger.

'June 25,' Ali recorded, '1840, 4,618 fathoms: More radio signals.'

This time, after waiting for the long waves to pulse in through the basalt and mineral zones, what they received was a transmission from themselves. It was encrypted in their unique expedition code. Once they finished translating it, the message spoke of desperate starvation. 'Mayday... is Wayne Gitner... dead... am alone... assist...' The eerie part was that the dispatch was digitally dated five months in the future.

Gitner stepped forward and identified the voice on the tape as his own. He was a no-nonsense fellow, and indignantly demanded an explanation. One sci-fi buff suggested that a time warp might have been caused by the shifting geomagnetics, and suggested the message was a prophecy of sorts. Gitner said bullshit. 'Even if it was a time distortion, time only travels in one direction.'

'Yeah,' said the buff, 'but which direction? And what if time's circular?' However it had been done, people agreed it made for a good ghost story. Ali's map legend for that day included a tiny Casper ghost with the description 'Phantom Voice.'

Her maps noted their first genuine, live hadal life-form. Two planetologists spied it in a crevice and came racing to camp with their capture. It was a bacterial fuzz barely half an inch in diameter, a subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem, or SLIME in the parlance. A rock-eater.

'So?' said Shoat.

The discovery of a bacterium that ate basalt impeached the need for sunlight. It meant the abyss was self-sustaining. Hell was perfectly capable of feeding on itself.

On June 29 they reached a fossilized warrior. He was human and probably dated to the sixteenth century. His flesh had turned to limestone. His armor was intact. They guessed he had come here from Peru, a Cortes or Don Quixote who had penetrated this eternal darkness for Church, glory, or gold. Those with camcorders and still cameras documented the lost knight. One of the geologists tried to sample the sheath of rock encrusting the body, only to chip an entire leg off.

The geologist's accidental vandalism was soon exceeded by the group's very presence. In the space of three hours, the biochemicals of their combined respiration spontaneously generated a grape-green moss. It was like watching fire. The vegetation, spawned by the air from inside their bodies, rapidly colonized the walls and coated the conquistador. Even as they stood there, the hall was consumed with it. They fled as if fleeing themselves.

Ali wondered if, in passing this lost knight, Ike had seen himself.

INCIDENT IN GUANGDONG PROVINCE

People's Republic of China

It was getting dark, and this so-called 'miracle' city didn't exist on any maps.

Holly Ann wished Mr Li would drive a little faster. The adoption agency's guide wasn't much of a driver, or, for that matter, much of a guide. Eight cities, fifteen orphanages, twenty-two thousand dollars, and still no baby.

Her husband, Wade, rode with his nose plastered to the opposite window. Over the past ten days they'd crisscrossed the southern provinces, enduring floods, disease, pestilence, and the edges of a famine. His patience was in rags.

It was odd, everywhere the same. Wherever they visited, the orphanages had all been empty of children. Here and there they'd found wizened little deformities – hydrocephalic, mongoloid, or genetically doomed – a few breaths short of dying. Otherwise, China suddenly, inexplicably, had no orphans.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The adoption agency had advertised that China was jammed with foundlings. Female foundlings, hundreds of thousands of them, tiny girls exiled from one-child families that wanted a son. Holly Ann had read that female orphans were still sold as servants or as tongyangxi, child brides. If it was a baby girl you wanted, no one went home empty. Until us, thought Holly Ann. It was as if the Pied Piper had come through and cleaned the place out. And more than just orphans were missing. Children altogether. You saw evidence of them – toys, kites, streetside

chalkboards. But the streets were barren of children under the age of ten.

'Where could they have gone?' Holly Ann asked each night.

Wade had come up with a theory. 'They think we've come to steal their kids. They must be hiding them.'

Out of that observation had grown today's guerrilla raid. Surprisingly, Mr Li had agreed to it. They would drop in on an orphanage that was out of the way, and with no prior warning of their visit.

As night descended, Mr Li drove deeper through the alleyways. Holly Ann hadn't come exactly expecting pandas in rain forests and kung fu temples beneath the Great Wall, but this was like a madman's blueprint, with detours and dead ends all held together by electric wires and rusty rebar and bamboo scaffolding. South China had to be the ugliest place on earth. Mountains were being leveled to fill in the paddies and lakes. Rivers were being dammed. Strangely, even as these people leveled the earth, they were crowding the sky. It was like robbing the sun to feed the night.

Acid rain started hitting the windshield in sloppy kisses, yellowish and festering like spit. Deep coal mines honeycombed the hills in this district, and everyone burned the mines' product. The air reeked.

The asphalt turned to dirt. The sun dropped. This was the witching hour. They'd seen it in other cities. The policemen in green uniforms vanished. From doorways and windows and niches in the towering alley, eyes tracked the gweilo – white devils – and passed them on to more eyes.

The darkness congealed. Mr Li slowed, obviously lost. He rolled down his window and waved a man over from the sidewalk and gave him a cigarette. They talked. After a minute, the man got a bicycle and Mr Li started off again, with his guide holding on to the door. Here and there the bicyclist issued a command and Mr Li would turn down another street. Rain sprayed through the window into the back.

Side by side, the car and the bicyclist made turns for another five minutes. Then the man grunted and patted the rooftop. He detached from them and pedaled away.

'Here,' Mr Li announced.

'You're joking,' Wade said.

Holly Ann craned her neck to see through the windshield. Surrounded by barbed wire, the gray walls of a factory complex squatted before them in their harsh headlights. Bits of ominous black thread had been tied to the barbed wire, and the walls carried huge, ugly characters in stark red paint. Half-finished skyscrapers blocked her view to the rear. They had reached some sort of dead epicenter. In every direction, the stone-stillness radiated out from here.

'Let's get this over with,' Wade said, and got out of the car. He pulled at the gate. Concertina wire wobbled like quicksilver. Holly Ann's first impression gave way to another. This looked less like a factory than a prison. The barbed wire and inscriptions appeared to have one purpose: enclosure. 'What kind of orphanage is this?' she asked Mr Li.

'Good place, no problem,' he said. But he seemed nervous.

Wade banged at the industrial-style door. The brick-and-pig-iron decor dwarfed him. When no one answered, he simply turned the handle and the metal door opened. He didn't turn around to gesture yes or no. He just went inside. 'Great, Wade,' Holly Ann muttered.

Holly Ann got out. Mr Li's door stayed closed. She looked through the windshield and rapped on the glass. He looked up at her through his little cloud of tobacco smoke, eyes wishing her from his life, then reached under to turn off the ignition. The windshield wipers quit knocking back and forth. His image blurred with rain. He got out.

On second thought, she reached into the back and grabbed a packet of disposable diapers. Mr Li left the headlights on, but locked all the doors. 'Bandits,' he said.

Holly Ann led. The viciously stroked words loomed on either side of them. Now she saw the scorch marks where flames had lapped at the brick. The foot of the wall was coated with charred glass from Molotov cocktails. Who would assault an orphanage? The metal door was cold. Mr Li brushed past her and went into the blackness.

'Wait,' she said to him. But his footsteps receded down the hallway.

Reminding herself of her mission, Holly Ann stepped inside. She drew in a deep breath, smelling for evidence. Babies. She looked for cartoon figures or crayon squiggles or smudges of little handprints on the lower walls. Instead, long staccato patterns of holes and chips violated the plaster. Termites, she thought with disgust.

'Wade?' she tried again. 'Mr Li?' She continued down the hallway. Moss flowered in cracks. The doors were all gone. Each room yawned black. If there were windows, they had been bricked up. The place was sealed tight. Then she came to a string of Christmas lights.

It was the strangest sight. Someone had strung hundreds of Christmas lights – red and green and little white flashing lights, and even red chili-pepper lights and green frog lights and turquoise trout lights like those found in margarita restaurants back home. Maybe the orphans liked it.

The air changed. An odor infiltrated. The ammonia of urine. The smell of baby poop. There was no mistaking it. There were babies in here. For the first time in weeks, Holly Ann smiled. She almost hugged herself.

'Hello?' she called.

An infant voice bubbled in the darkness. Holly Ann's head jerked up. The tiny soul might as well have called her by name.

She followed the sound into a side room reeking of human waste and garbage. The twinkle of Christmas lights did not reach this far. Holly Ann steeled herself, then got down on her hands and knees, advancing through the pile by touch. The garbage was cold. It took all her self-control not to think about what she was feeling. Vegetable matter. Rice. Discarded flesh. Above all, she tried not to think about someone throwing away a live infant.

The floor canted down toward the rear. Maybe there had been an earthquake. She felt a slight current of air against her face. It seemed to be coming up from some deeper place. She remembered the coal mines around here. It was possible they'd built their city upon ancient tunnels that were now collapsing under the weight.

She found the baby by its warmth.

As if it had always been her own, as if she were collecting it from a cradle, she scooped up the bundle. The little creature was sour-smelling. So tiny. Holly Ann brushed her fingertips across the baby's belly: the umbilical cord was ragged and soft, as if freshly bitten. It was a girl, no more than a few days old. Holly Ann held the little body to her shoulder and listened. Her heart sank. Instantly she knew. The baby was ill. She was dying.

'Oh, darling,' she whispered.

Her heart was failing. Her lungs were filling. You could hear it. Not long now.

Holly Ann wrapped the infant in her sweater and knelt in the pile of putrid garbage, rocking her baby. Maybe this was how it was meant to be, a motherhood that lasted only a few minutes. Better than never at all, she thought. She stood and started back toward the hallway and Christmas lights.

A small noise stopped her. The sound had several parts, like a metal scorpion lifting its tail, poising to strike. Slowly Holly Ann turned.

At first the rifle and military uniform didn't register. She was a very tall and sturdy woman who had not smiled for many years. The woman's nose had been broken sideways long ago. Her hair must have been cut with a knife. She looked like someone who had been fighting – and losing – her entire life.

The woman hissed something at Holly Ann in a burst of Chinese. She made an angry

gesture, pointing at the bundle inside Holly Ann's sweater. There was no mistaking her demand. She wanted the infant returned to the sewage pile in that horrible room. Holly Ann recoiled, clutching the baby tighter. Slowly she raised the packet of disposable diapers. 'It's okay,' she assured the tall woman.

Like two different species, the women studied each other. Holly Ann wondered if this might be the infant's mother, and decided it couldn't possibly be.

Suddenly the Chinese woman scowled, and batted aside the diapers with her rifle barrel. She reached for the infant. Her peasant hand was thick and callused and manly.

In her entire life, Holly Ann had never made a fist in real anger, to say nothing of swinging one. Her first ever connected on the woman's thin mouth. It wasn't much of a punch, but it drew blood.

Holly Ann stepped back from her violence and wrapped both arms around the baby. The Chinese woman wiped the bead of blood from her mouth and thrust the rifle barrel out. Holly Ann was terrified. But for whatever reason, the woman relented with a whispered oath, and motioned with her rifle.

Holly Ann set off in the direction indicated. Surely Wade would appear at any minute. Money would change hands. They would leave this terrible place.

With the gun at her back, Holly Ann climbed over a pile of bricks and torn sandbags. They reached a set of stairs and started up. Something crunched underfoot like metal beetles. Holly Ann saw a deep layer of hundreds of bullet casings coated with wet verdigris.

They went higher, three stories, then five. Holding the child, Holly Ann managed to keep up the pace. She didn't have much choice. Suddenly the woman caught at Holly Ann's arm. They stopped. This time the rifle was aimed back down the stair shaft.

Far below, something was moving. It sounded like eels coiling in mud. The two women shared a look. For an instant they actually had something in common, their fear. Holly Ann softly armored the infant with her hand. After another minute the Chinese woman got them on the move again, faster this time.

They reached the top floor. The roof gaped open in violent patches, and Holly Ann caught snatches of stars. She smelled fresh air. They clambered over a small landslide of scorched wood and cinder blocks and approached a brightly lit doorway.

Bags of cement had been piled like sandbags as a barricade. The fronts had been slashed open and rainwater had soaked the spillage, turning it to hard knuckles of concrete. It was like climbing folds of lava.

Holly Ann struggled, one arm clutching the infant. Near the top, her head knocked against a cold cannon barrel pointing where they'd come from. Hands with broken fingernails reached down for her from the electric brilliance.

All the dramatics changed. It was like entering a besieged camp: soldiers everywhere, guns, blasted architecture, rain cutting naked through great wounds in the roof. To Holly Ann's enormous relief, Wade was there, sitting in a corner, holding his head.

Once the room might have been a small auditorium, or a cafeteria. Now the space was illuminated with Stalinist klieg lights and looked like Custer's Last Stand. Soldiers from the People's Liberation Army, mostly men in pea-green uniforms or black-striped camouflage, were all business among their weapons. They gave wide berth to Holly Ann. Several elites pointed at the baby inside her sweater.

In the distance, Mr Li was appealing to an officer who carried himself with the iron spine of a hero of the people. His crewcut was gray. He looked weary.

She went over to Wade. He was bleeding into both eyes from a laceration across the scalp line. 'Wade,' she said.

'Holly Ann?' he said. 'Thank God. Mr Li told them you were still below. They sent someone to find you.'

She avoided his bear hug. 'I have something to show you,' she announced quietly.

'It's very dangerous here,' Wade said. 'Something's going on. A revolution or something. I gave Li all our cash. I told him to pay anything, just get us out of here.'

'Wade,' she snapped. He wasn't listening to her.

A voice suddenly boomed in the back, where Mr Li stood. It was the officer. He was shouting at Holly Ann's rescuer, the tall woman. All around her, soldiers looked angry or ashamed for her. Obviously she had allowed some terrible breach. Holly Ann knew it had to do with this baby.

The officer unsnapped his leather holster and looked at her. He drew his pistol out.

'Good Lord,' Holly Ann murmured.

'What?' said Wade. He stood there like some bewildered monster. Useless.

It was her call. Holly Ann astonished herself. As the officer approached her, she started off to meet him halfway. They met in the center of the rubble-strewn room.

'Mr Li,' Holly Ann commanded.

Mr Li glared at her, but came forward.

'Tell this man I have selected my child,' she said. 'I have medicine in the car. I wish to go home now.'

Mr Li started to translate, but the officer abruptly chambered a round. Mr Li blinked rapidly. He was very pale. The officer said something to him.

'Put on floor,' Mr Li said to her.

'We have all the necessary permits,' she explained quite evenly. She said it directly to the officer. 'Out in our car, permits, understand? Passports. Documents.'

'Please you put on floor,' Mr Li repeated very softly. He pointed at her baby. 'That,'

he said, as if it were a dirty thing.

Holly Ann despised him. Despised China. Despised the God that allowed such things.

'She,' said Holly Ann. 'This girl goes with me.'

'Not good,' Mr Li softly pleaded.

'She will die otherwise.'

'Yes.'

'Holly Ann?' Wade loomed behind her.

'It's a baby, Wade. Our baby. I found her. On a pile of garbage. And now they want to kill her.' Holly Ann felt the infant stirring. The tiny fingernails pulled at her blouse.

'A baby?'

'No,' Mr Li said.

'I'm taking her home with us.'

Mr Li shook his head emphatically.

'Give them the money,' she instructed him.

Wade blustered foolishly. 'We're American citizens. You did tell them, didn't you?'

'This isn't for you,' Mr Li said. 'It's a trade. This for that.'

She could feel the infant's hunger, miniature lips groping for a nipple. 'A trade?' she demanded. 'Who are you trading with?'

Mr Li glanced nervously at the soldiers.

'Who?' she insisted.

Mr Li pointed at the ground. Through it. 'Them.' Holly Ann felt faint. 'What?'

'Our babies. Their babies. Trade.' The infant made a tiny sound.

Over Mr Li's shoulder, Holly Ann saw the officer aiming his gun. She saw a puff of color spit from the barrel.

Holly Ann barely felt the bullet. Her fall to earth was more like floating. All the way down, she held the child in safety.

Above her, violent shadows thundered. More guns went off. Her name roared out. She smiled and rested her head gently against the bundle at her shoulder. Little

no-name. No-luck. I belong to you. Before they could reach her, Holly Ann did the only thing left to do. She unveiled the daughter China had refused. Time to say good-bye.

In her search around the world for a child, Holly Ann had seen babies of every race and color. Her search had changed her forever, she thought. Black eyes or blue, kinky hair or straight, chocolate skin or yellow or brown or white, crooked, blind, or straight: none of that mattered.

As she opened the sweater wrapping the baby, Holly Ann fully expected to recognize her common humanity in this tiny being. Every infant was a chalice. That was her conviction. Until now.

Even dying, Holly Ann was able to kick the thing away from her.

Oh God, she cursed, and closed her eyes.

A sound like giants walking wakened her. She looked. It was not footsteps, but the old man carefully planting one shot at a time as he tracked the foundling.

Finally it was done. And she was glad.

...nature hath adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their view...

– JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver's Travels

12

ANIMALS

The July Tunnels

In a gut of coiled granite, the mortal fed.

The meat was still warm from life. It was more than food, less than sacrament. Flesh is a landmark, if you know its flavor. The trick was setting your clock, so to speak, then categorically marking the shifts in tone or odor, or changes in the skin and muscle and blood, as you moved through the territory. Memorize the particulars, and you could begin to orient yourself in a cartography based on raw flesh. In terms of taste, the liver was often most distinct, sometimes the heart.

He crouched in the pocket of darkness with this creature squeezed between his thighs, the chest cavity opened. He rummaged. Like a mariner finding north, he committed to memory the organs, their relative position and size and smell. He sampled different pieces, just a taste. Palmed the skull, lifted the limbs, ran his hands along the limbs.

He'd never encountered a beast quite like this one. Its uniqueness did not register as a new phylum or species. The kill barely registered at the level of language. And

yet it would permanently acquaint him. He would remember this creature in every detail.

Head held high to listen for intruders, he inserted his hands in the animal's hide and let his wonder run. He was utterly respectful. He was a student, no more. The animal was his teacher.

It was not just a matter of locating yourself east or south. Depth was sometimes far more consequential, and the consistency of flesh could serve as an altimeter of sorts. In the deep seas, such bathypelagic monsters as anglerfish were slow moving, with a metabolic rate as low as one percent of fish living near the surface. Their body tissue was watery, with little muscle and no fat. So it was at certain depths in the subplanet. Down some channels, you found reptiles or fish that were little more than vegetables with teeth. Even the ones that weren't poisonous weren't worth eating. Their food value verged on plain air. Even them he'd eaten.

Again, there were more reasons to hunt than filling your belly. With care you could plot a course, find a destination, locate water, avoid – or track – enemies. It made simple survival something more, a journey. A destiny.

The body spoke to him. He felt for eyes, found stems, tried to thumb open the lids, but they were sealed. Blind. The talons were a raptor's, with an opposing thumb. He had caught it drafting on the tunnel's breeze, but the wings were much too small for real flight.

He started at the top again. The snout. Milk teeth, but sharp as needles. The way the joints moved. The genitals, this one a male. The hip bones were abraded from scraping along the stone. He squeezed the bladder, and its liquid smelled sharp. He took one foot and pressed it against the dirt and felt the print.

All of this was done in darkness.

Finally, Ike was done. He laid the parts back inside the cavity and folded the arms across and pressed the body into a cleft in the wall.

They entered a series of deep trenches that resembled terrestrial canyons, but which had not been cut by the flow of water. These were instead the remains of seafloor spreading, fossilized here. They had found an ocean bottom – bone dry – 2,650 fathoms beneath the Pacific Ocean floor. That night they made camp near a huge coral bed stretching right and left into the darkness. It was like a Sherwood Forest made of calcified polyps. Great, oaklike branches reached up and out with green and blue and pink pastels and deep reds secreted, according to their geobotanist, by an ancestor of the gorgonian Corallium nobile. There were desiccated sea fans under their spreading limbs, so old their colors had leached to transparency. Ancient marine animals lay at their feet, turned to stone.

The expedition had been on its feet for over four weeks, and Shoat and Walker granted the scientists' request for an extra two days here. The scientists got hardly any sleep during their stay at the coral site. They would never pass this way again. Perhaps no human ever would. Frantically they harvested these traces of an alternate evolution. In lieu of carrying it with them, they arranged the material for digital storage on their hard disks, and the video cameras whirred night and day.

Walker brought in two winged animals. Still alive.

'Fallen angels,' he announced.

They were upside down, strung with parachute cord, still half-poisoned from sedative. A soldier had been bitten by one, and lay sick with dry heaves. You could tell which animal had delivered the bite; its left wing had been crushed by a boot.

They weren't really fallen angels, of course. They were demons. Gargoyles.

The scientists clustered around, goggling at the feeble beasts. The animals twitched. One shot a cherubic arc of urine.

'How did you manage this, Walker? Where did you get them?'

'I had my troops dope their kill. They were eating a third one of these things. All we had to do was wait for them to return and eat some more, and then go collect them.'

'Are there more?'

'Two or three dozen. Maybe hundreds. A flock. Or a hatch. Like bats. Or monkeys.'

'A rookery,' said one of the biologists.

'I've ordered my men to keep their distance. We've set a kill zone at the mouth of the subtunnel. We're in no danger.'

Shoat had apparently been in on it. 'You should smell their dung,' he said.

Several of the porters, on seeing the animals, murmured and crossed themselves. Walker's soldiers brusquely directed them away.

Live specimens of an unknown species, especially warm-blooded higher vertebrates, were not something that came walking into a naturalist's camp. The scientists moved in with tape measures and Bic pens and flashlights.

The longest one measured twenty-two rapturously colored inches. The rich orchid hues – purple mottling into turquoise and beige – was one more of those paradoxes of nature: what use was such coloration in the darkness?

The big one had lactating teats – someone squeezed out a trickle of milk – and engorged crimson labia. At first glance, the other seemed to have similar genitalia, but a Bic tip opened the folds to expose a surprise.

'What am I seeing here?'

'It's a penis, all right.'

'Not much of one.'

'Reminds me of a guy I used to date,' said one of the women.

But even as they bantered and joked, they were intently gleaning data from these bodies. The tall one was a nursing female, in heat. The other was a male with eroded three-cusp molars, callused foot pads and chipped claws, and ulcerated patches where his elbows and knees and shoulder bones had abraded against rock. That and other evidence of aging eliminated him as the female's 'son.' Perhaps they were mates. The female, at any rate, probably had one or more infants waiting for her to come home. The two animals revived from Walker's sedative in trembling bursts. They surfaced into full consciousness only to hit the shock of the humans' lights and sink into stupor again.

'Keep those ropes tight, they bite,' Walker said as the creatures shivered and struggled and lapsed back into semiconsciousness. They were diminutive. It didn't seem possible these could be the hadals who had slaughtered armies and left cave art and cowed eons of humans.

'They're not King Kong,' Ali said. 'Look at them, barely thirty pounds apiece. You'll kill them with those ropes.'

'I can't believe you destroyed her wing,' a biologist said to Walker. 'She was probably just defending her nest.'

'What's this,' Shoat retorted, 'Animal Rights Week?'

'I have a question,' Ali said. 'We're supposed to leave in the morning. What then? They're not house pets. Do we take them with us? Should we even have them here?' Walker's expression, pleased to begin with, drew in on itself. Clearly he thought her ungrateful. Shoat saw the change, and nodded at Ali as if to say Good work .

'Well, we've got them here now,' a geologist said with a shrug. 'We can't pass up an opportunity like this.'

They had no nets, cages, or restraining devices. While the animals were still relatively immobile, the biologists muzzled them with string and tied each to a pack frame with wings and arms outstretched, and feet wired together at the bottom. Their wingspread was modest, less than their height.

'Do they possess true flight?' someone asked. 'Or are they just aerial opportunists, drafting down from high perches?'

Over the next hour, such details were debated with great passion. One way or another, everyone agreed they were prosimians that had somehow tumbled from the family tree of primates.

'Look at that face, almost human, like one of those shrunken heads you see in the anthro exhibits. What's the cranial measurement on this guy?'

'Relative to body size, Miocene ape, at best.'

'Nocturnal extremists, just as I thought,' said Spurrier. 'And look at the rhinarium, this wet patch of skin. Like the tip of a dog's nose. I'm thinking lemuriforms here. An accidental colonizer. The subterranean eco-niche must have been wide open to them. They proliferated. Their adaptation radiated wildly. Species diversified. It only takes one pregnant female, you know, wandering off.'

'But frigging wings, for Pete's sake.'

The gargoyles had begun struggling again. It was a slow, blind writhing. One made a noise midway between a bark and a peep.

'What do you suppose they eat?'

'Insects,' one hazarded.

'Could be carnivorous – look at those incisors.'

'Are you going to talk all day? Or find out?' It was Shoat.

Before anyone could stop him, he pulled his combat knife, with its blood gutter and double-edged tip, and in one motion cut the male's head off.

They were stunned.

Ali reacted first. She pushed Shoat. He didn't have the size of Walker's athlete-warriors, but he was solid enough. She put more weight into her second shove, and this time got him backed off a step. He returned the push, open-handed against her shoulder. Ali staggered. Quickly, Shoat made a show of holding the knife out and away, like she might hurt herself on the blade. They faced each other. 'Calm yourself,' he said.

Later Ali would say her contrition. For the moment she was too full of fury at him and just wanted to knock him over. It took an effort to turn away from him. She went over to the beheaded animal. Surprisingly little blood came out of the neck stem. Next to it, the other one was bucking wildly, curved claws grabbing at the air.

The group's protest was mild. 'You're a wart, Montgomery,' one said.

'Get on with it,' Shoat said. 'Open the thing up. Take your pictures. Boil the skull. Get your answers. Then pack.' He started humming Willie Nelson: '"We're on the road again."'

'Barbaric,' someone muttered.

'Spare me,' said Shoat. He pointed his knife at Ali. 'Our Good Samaritan said it herself. They're not house pets. We can't bring them with us.'

'You knew what I meant,' Ali said to Shoat. 'We have to let them go. The one that's left.'

The remaining creature had quit struggling. It lifted its head and was attentively smelling them and listening to their voices. The concentration was unsettling.

Ali waited for the group to ratify her. No one did. It was her show alone.

All at once, Ali felt powerfully isolated from these people, estranged and peculiar. It was not a new feeling. She had always been a little different, from her classmates as a child, from the novitiates at St. Mary's, from the world. For some reason, she hadn't expected it here, though.

She felt foolish. Then it came to her. They had separated themselves from her because they thought it was her business. The business of a nun. Of course she would champion mercy. It made her ridiculous.

Now what? she asked herself. Apologize? Walk away? She glanced over at Shoat, who was standing beside Walker, grinning. Damned if she was going to lose to him.

Ali took out her Swiss Army knife and tried picking open a blade.

'What are you doing?' a biologist asked.

She cleared her throat. 'I'm letting her go,' she said.

'Ah, Ali, I don't think that's the best thing right now. I mean, the animal's got a broken wing.'

'We shouldn't have caught it in the first place,' she said, and went on picking at the knife. But the blade was stuck. Her fingernail broke on the little slot. This was going completely against her. She felt the tears welling in her eyes, and lowered her head so the hair would at least curtain out their view.

'You're in my way,' a voice said behind the crowd. There was an initial jostling, and then the circle abruptly opened up. Ali was even more surprised than the rest of them. It was Ike who stepped up beside her.

They had not seen him in over three weeks. He had changed. His hair was getting shaggy and the clean white shirt was gone, replaced with a filthy gray camo top. A half-healed wound marked one arm, and he had packed the ugly tear with red ochre. Ali stared at his arms, both of them covered with scars and markings and – along the inside of one forearm – printed text, like cheat notes.

He had lost or hidden his pack, but the shotgun and knife were in place, along with a pistol that had a silencer on it. He was wearing the bug-eyed glacier glasses, and smelled like a hunter. His shoulder came against her, and the skin was cool. In her relief, ever so slightly, Ali leaned against that sureness.

'We were starting to wonder if you'd gone country again,' Colonel Walker said.

Ike didn't answer him. He took the pocketknife from Ali's hand and flipped the blade open. 'She's right,' he said.

He bent over the remaining animal and, in an undertone that only Ali could hear, he said something soothing, but also formal, an address of some sort. Almost a prayer. The animal grew still, and Ali pried up a piece of the cord for Ike to cut.

Someone said, 'Now we'll see if these things can really fly.'

But Ike didn't cut the cord. He gave a quick nick to the animal's jugular vein. Gagged with wire, the small mouth gulped for air. Then it was dead.

Ike straightened and faced the group. 'No live catches.'

Without a second thought, Ali balled her fist and clipped him on the shoulder, for all the good it did. It was like slugging a horse, he was so hard. The tears were streaking her face. 'Why?' she demanded.

He folded her knife and solemnly returned it. 'I'm sorry,' she heard him whisper, but not to her. To Ali's astonishment, he was speaking to what he'd just killed. Then he straightened and faced the group.

'That was a waste of life,' he said to them.

'Spare me,' said Walker.

Ike looked directly at him. 'I thought you knew some things.'

Walker flushed. Ike turned to the rest of them. 'You can't stay here anymore,' he said. 'The others will come looking now. We need to keep going.'

'Ike,' said Ali, as the group dispersed. He faced her, and she slapped him.

Thus is the Devil ever God's ape.

– MARTIN LUTHER, Table Talke (1569)

13

THE SHROUD

Venice, Italy

'Ali has gone deeper,' January reported gravely, while the group waited in the vault. She had lost a great deal of weight, and her neck veins were taut, like strings holding her head to her bones. She sat on a chair, drinking mineral water. Branch crouched beside her, quietly thumbing through a Baedeker's guide to Venice.

This was the Beowulf Circle's first meeting in months. Some had been busy in libraries or museums; others had been hard at work in the field, interviewing journalists, soldiers, missionaries, anyone with experience of the depths. The quest had engaged them.

They were delighted to be in this city. Venice's winding canals led to a thousand secret places. The Renaissance spirit pleasantly haunted these sun-gorged plazas. The irony was that on a Sunday spilling over with light and church bells, they had come together in a bank vault.

Most of them looked younger, tanned, more limber. The spark was back in their eyes again. They were eager to share their findings with one another. January made hers first.

She had received Ali's letter only yesterday, delivered by one of the seven scientists who had quit the expedition and finally gotten free of Point Z-3. The scientist's tale, and Ali's dispatch, were disturbing. After Shoat and his expedition had departed, the dissidents had sulked for weeks, stranded among violent misfits. Male and female alike had been beaten and raped and robbed. At last a train had brought them back to Nazca City. Now aboveground, they were undergoing treatment for an exotic lithospheric fungus and various venereal diseases, plus the usual compression problems. But their misadventures paled next to the larger news they had brought out.

January summarized the Helios stratagem. Reading excerpts from Ali's letter, written right up to the hour of her descent from Point Z-3, she sketched out the plan to traverse beneath the Pacific floor and exit somewhere near Asia. 'And Ali has gone with them,' she groaned. 'For me. What have I done?'

'Can't blame yourself.' Desmond Lynch popped his briarwood cane against the tile floor. 'She got herself into it. We all did.'

'Thank you for the consolation, Desmond.'

'What can be the meaning of this?' someone asked. 'The cost must be prodigious, even for Helios.'

'I know C.C. Cooper,' January said, 'and so I fear the worst. He seems to be carving out a nation-state all his own.' She paused. 'I've had my staff investigating, and Helios is definitely preparing for a full-scale occupation of the area.'

'But his own country?' said Thomas.

'Don't forget,' January said, 'this is a man who believes the presidency was stolen from him by a conspiracy. He seems to have decided a fresh start is best. In a place where he can write all the rules.'

'A tyranny. A plutocracy,' said one of the scholars.

'He won't call it that, of course.' 'But he can't do this. It violates international laws.

Surely –'

'Possession is everything,' January said. 'Recall the conquistadores in the New World. Once they got an ocean between them and their king, they decided to set themselves up in their own little kingdoms. It threatened the entire balance of power.' Thomas was grim. 'Major Branch, surely you can intercept the expedition. Take your soldiers. Turn these invaders back before they spark more war.'

Branch closed his book. 'I'm afraid I have no authority to do that, Father.'

Thomas appealed to January. 'He's your soldier. Order him. Give him the authority.'

'It doesn't work that way, Thomas. Elias is not my soldier. He's a friend. As for authority, I've already spoken with the commander in charge of operational affairs, General Sandwell. But the expedition's crossed beyond the military frontier. And, as you pointed out, he doesn't want to provoke the war all over again.'

'What are all your commandos and specialists good for? Helios can slip some mercenaries into the wilderness, but not the US Army?'

Branch nodded. 'You're sounding like some of the officers I know. The corporations are running amok down there. We have to play by the rules. They don't.'

'We must stop them,' Thomas said. 'The repercussions could be devastating.'

'Even if we had the green light, it's probably too late,' January said. 'They have a two-month head start. And since their departure, we've heard nothing from them. We have no idea where they are exactly. Helios isn't sharing any information. I'm sick with worry. They could be in great danger. They could be walking into a nation of hadals.'

This led them to a discussion of where the hadals might be hiding, how many might still be alive, what their threat really was. In Desmond Lynch's opinion, the hadal population was sparse and scattered and probably in a third or fourth generation of die-off. He estimated their worldwide numbers at no more than a hundred thousand.

'They're an endangered species,' he declared.

'Maybe the population's retreated,' Mustafah, the Egyptian, ventured.

'Retreated? To where? Where is there to go?'

'I don't know. Deeper, perhaps? Is that possible? How deep does the underworld go?'

'I've been thinking,' said Thomas. 'What if their aim was to come out from the underworld? To make their place in the light?'

'You think Satan's looking for an invitation?' Mustafah asked. 'I can't think of many neighborhoods that would welcome such a family.'

'It would need to be a place no one else wants, or a place no one dares to go. A

desert, perhaps. A jungle. Real estate with a negative value.'

'Thomas and I have been talking,' Lynch said. 'After a certain point, where else can a fugitive hide, except in plain sight? And there may be evidence he's up to just that.' Branch was listening carefully.

'We've learned of a Karen warlord in the south of Burma, close to Khmer Rouge country,' Lynch said. 'It's said he was visited by the devil. He may have spoken with our elusive Satan.'

'The rumors may be nothing more than a forest legend,' Thomas qualified. 'But there's also a chance that Satan is attempting to find a new sanctuary.'

'If it's true, it would almost be wonderful,' said Mustafah. 'Satan bringing his tribes out from the depths, like Moses leading his people into Israel.'

'But how can we learn more?' said January.

'As you might imagine, the warlord will never come out of his jungle for us to interview,' said Thomas. 'And there are no cable links, no phone lines. The region has been gutted by atrocity and famine. It's one of those genocide zones, apocalyptic. Supposedly this warlord has turned the clock back to Year Zero.'

'Then his information is lost to us.'

'Actually,' Lynch said, 'I've decided to go into the jungle.'

January and Mustafah and Rau reacted with one voice. 'But you mustn't. Desmond, it's much too dangerous.'

If discovery was part of Lynch's goal, the adventure was another. 'My mind's made up,' he said, relishing their concern.

They were standing in a virtual cage, with a massive steel door and gleaming bars. Farther in, Thomas could make out walls of safe deposit boxes and more doors with complex lock mechanisms. Their discussion went on as they waited.

The scholars began presenting evidence. 'He would be like Kublai Khan or Attila,' Mustafah stated. 'Or a warrior king like Richard the First, summoning all of Christendom to march upon the infidel. A character of immense ambition. An Alexander or a Mao or a Caesar.'

'I disagree,' said Lynch. 'Why a great warrior emperor? What we're seeing is almost exclusively defensive and guerrilla. I'd say, at best, our Satan is someone more like Geronimo than Mao.'

'More like Lon Chancy than Geronimo, I should say,' a voice spoke. 'A character capable of many disguises.' It was de l'Orme.

Unlike the others, de l'Orme had not been restored by his months of detective work. The cancer was a flame in him, licking the flesh and bone away. The left side of his face was practically melting, the eye socket sinking behind his dark glasses. He belonged in a hospital bed. Yet because he looked so weak beside these marble pillars and metal bars, he seemed that much stronger, a one-lung, one-kidney Samson.

At his side stood Bud Parsifal and two Dominican friars, along with five carabinieri carrying rifles and machine guns. 'This way, please,' said Parsifal. 'We have little time. Our opportunity with the image lasts only an hour.'

The two Dominicans began whispering with great concern, obviously about Branch. One of the carabinieri set his rifle to the side and unlocked a door made of bars. As the group passed through, a Dominican said something to the carabinieri, and they blocked Branch's entrance. He stood before them, a virtual ogre dressed in a worn sports jacket.

'This man's with us,' January said to the Dominican.

'Excuse me, but we are the custodians of a holy relic,' the friar said. 'And he does not look like a man.'

'You have my oath he is a righteous man,' Thomas interrupted.

'Please understand,' the friar said. 'These are days of disquiet. We must suspect everyone.'

'You have my oath,' Thomas repeated.

The Dominican considered the Jesuit, his order's enemy. He smiled. His power was explicit now. He gestured with his chin, and the carabinieri let Branch through.

The troupe filed deeper into the vault, following Parsifal and the two friars into an even larger room. The room was kept dark until everyone was inside. Then the lights blazed on.

The Shroud hung before them, almost five meters high. From darkness to radiant display, it made a dramatic first impression. Just the same, even knowing its significance, the relic appeared to be little more than a long, unlaundered tablecloth that had seen too many dinner parties.

It was singed and scorched and patched and yellowed. Occupying the center, in long blotches like spilled food, lay the faint image of a body. The image was hinged in the middle, at the top of the man's head, to show both his front and back. He was naked and bearded.

One of the carabinieri could not contain himself. He handed his weapon to an understanding comrade and knelt before the cloth. One beat his breast and mumbled mea culpas.

'As you know,' the older Dominican began, 'the Turin Cathedral suffered extensive damage from a fire in 1997. Only through the greatest heroism was the sacred artifact itself rescued from destruction. Until the cathedral's renovation is complete, the holy sydoine will reside in this place.'

'But why here, if you don't mind?' Thomas asked lightly. Wickedly. 'From a temple to a bank? A place of merchants?'

The older Dominican refused to be baited. 'Sadly, the mafiosi and terrorists will stoop to any level, even kidnapping Church relics for ransom. The fire at Turin Cathedral was essentially an attempt to assassinate this very artifact. We decided a bank vault would be most secure.'

'And not the Vatican itself?' Thomas persisted.

The Dominican betrayed his annoyance with a birdlike tapping of his thumb against thumb. He did not answer.

Bud Parsifal looked from the Dominicans to Thomas and back again. He considered himself today's master of ceremonies, and wanted everything to go just right.

'What are you driving at, Thomas?' asked Vera, equally mystified.

De l'Orme chose to answer. 'The Church denied its shelter,' he explained. 'For a reason. The shroud is an interesting artifact. But no longer a credible one.'

Parsifal was scandalized. As current president of STURP – the semi-scientific Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc. – he had used his influence to obtain this showing. 'What are you saying, de l'Orme?'

'That it's a hoax.'

Parsifal looked like a man caught naked at the opera. 'But if you don't believe in it, why did you ask me to arrange all of this? What are we doing in here? I thought –'

'Oh, I believe in it,' de l'Orme reassured him. 'But for what it is, not for what you would have it be.'

'But it's a miracle,' the younger Dominican blurted out. He crossed himself, incredulous at the blasphemy.

'A miracle, yes,' de l'Orme said. 'A miracle of fourteenth-century science and art.'

'History tells us that the image is achieropoietos , not made by human hands. It is the sacred winding cloth.' The Dominican quoted, '"And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and laid it in his own new tomb."'

'That's your proof, a bit of scripture?'

'Proof?' interjected Parsifal. Nearly seventy, there was still plenty of the golden boy left in him. You could almost see him bulling through a hole in the line, forcing the play. 'What proof do you need? I've been coming here for many years. The Shroud of Turin Research Project has subjected this artifact to dozens of tests, hundreds of thousands of hours, and millions of dollars of study. Scientists, including myself, have applied every manner of skepticism to it.'

'But I thought your radiocarbon dating placed the linen's manufacture between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.'

'Why are you testing me? I've told you about my flash theory,' Parsifal said.

'That a burst of nuclear energy transfigured the body of Christ, leaving this image. Without burning the cloth to ash, of course.'

'A moderate burst,' Parsifal said. 'Which, incidentally, explains the altered radiocarbon dating.'

'A moderate burst of radiation that created a negative image with details of the face and body? How can that be? At best it would show a silhouette of a form. Or just a large blob of darkness.'

These were old arguments. Parsifal made his standard replies. De l'Orme raised other difficulties. Parsifal gave complicated responses.

'All I'm saying,' said de l'Orme, 'is that before you kneel, it would be wise to know to whom you kneel.' He placed himself beside the Shroud. 'It's one thing to know who the

shroud-man is not. But today we have a chance to know who he is. That's my reason for asking for this display.'

'The Son of God in human form,' said the younger Dominican.

The older Dominican cut a sideways glance at the relic. Suddenly his whole expression widened. His lips formed a thin O.

'As God is my Father,' the younger one said.

Now Parsifal saw it, too. And the rest of them, as well. Thomas couldn't believe his eyes.

'What have you done?' Parsifal cried out.

The man in the Shroud was none other than de l'Orme.

'It's you!' Mustafah laughed. He was delighted.

De l'Orme's image was naked, hands modestly crossed over his genitals, eyes closed. Wearing a wig and a fake beard. Side by side, the man and his image on the cloth were the same size, had the same short nose, the same leprechaun shoulders.

'Dear Christ in heaven,' the younger Dominican wailed.

'A Jesuit trick,' hissed the older.

'Deceiver,' howled the younger.

'De l'Orme, what in the world?' said Foley.

The carabinieri were excited by the sudden alarm. Then they compared man to image and put two and two together for themselves. Four promptly dropped to their knees in front of de l'Orme. One placed his forehead on the blind man's shoe. The fifth soldier, however, backed against the wall.

'Yes, it is me on this cloth,' said de l'Orme. 'Yes, a trick. But not of Jesuits. Of science. Alchemy, if you will.'

'Seize this man,' shouted the older Dominican. But the carabinieri were too busy adoring the man-god.

'Don't worry,' de l'Orme said to the panicked Dominicans, 'your original is in the next room, perfectly safe. I switched this one for the purpose of demonstration. Your reaction tells me the resemblance is all I'd hoped for.'

The older Dominican swung his wrathful gaze around the room and fastened the look of Torquemada upon that fifth carabiniere, haplessly backed against the wall.

'You,' he said.

The carabiniere quailed. So, thought Thomas, de l'Orme had paid the soldier to help spring this practical joke. The man was right to be frightened. He had just embarrassed an entire order.

'Don't blame him,' de l'Orme said. 'Blame yourself. You were fooled. I fooled you just the way the other shroud has fooled so many.'

'Where is it?' demanded the Dominican.

'This way, please,' de l'Orme said.

They filed into the next chamber, and Vera was waiting there in her wheelchair. Behind her, the Shroud was identical to de l'Orme's fake, except for its image. Here the man was taller and younger. His nose was longer. The cheekbones were whole. The Dominicans hurried to their relic and alternated between scrutinizing the linen for damage and guarding it from the blind trickster.

De l'Orme became businesslike. 'I think you'll agree,' he spoke to them, 'the same process produced both images.'

'You've solved the mystery of its production?' someone exclaimed. 'What did you use then, paint?'

'Acid,' another suggested. 'I've always suspected it. A weak solution. Just enough to etch the fibers.'

De l'Orme had their attention. 'I examined the reports issued by Bud's STURP. It became clear to me the hoax wasn't created with paint. There's only a trace of pigment, probably from painted images being held against the cloth to bless them.

And it was not acid, or the coloration would have been different. No, it was something else entirely.'

He gave it a dramatic pause.

'Photography.'

'Nonsense,' declared Parsifal. 'We've examined that theory. Do you realize how sophisticated the process is? The chemicals involved? The steps of preparing a surface, focusing an image, timing an exposure, fixing the end product? Even if this were a medieval concoction, what mind could have grasped the principles of photography so long ago?'

'No ordinary mind, I'll grant you that.'

'You're not the first, you know,' Parsifal said. 'There were a couple of kooks years ago. Cooked up some notion that it was Leonardo da Vinci's tomfoolery. We blew 'em out of the water. Amateurs.'

'My approach was different,' de l'Orme said. 'Actually, you should be pleased, Bud. It is a confirmation of your own theory.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Your flash theory,' said de l'Orme. 'Only it requires not quite a flash. More like a slow bath of radiation.'

'Radiation?' said Parsifal. 'Now we get to hear that Leonardo scooped Madame

Curie?'

'This isn't Leonardo,' de l'Orme said.

'No? Michelangelo then? Picasso?'

'Be nice, Bud,' Vera interrupted mildly. 'The rest of us want to hear it, even if you know it all already.'

Parsifal fumed. But it was too late to roll up the image and kick everyone out.

'We have here the image of a real man,' de l'Orme said, 'A crucified man. He's too anatomically correct to have been created by an artist. Note the foreshortening of his legs, and the accuracy of these blood trickles, how they bend where there are wrinkles in the forehead. And the spike hole in the wrist. That wound is most interesting. According to studies done on cadavers, you can't crucify a man by nailing his palms to a cross. The weight of the body tears the meat right off your hand.'

Vera, the physician, nodded. Rau, the vegetarian, shivered with distaste. These cults of the dead baffled him.

'The one place you can drive a nail in the human arm and hang all that weight is here.' He held a finger to the center of his own wrist. 'The space of Destot, a natural hole between all the bones of the wrist. More recently, forensic anthropologists have confirmed the presence of nail marks through precisely that place in known crucifixion victims.

'It is a crucial detail. If you examine medieval paintings around the time this cloth was created, Europeans had forgotten all about the space of Destot, too. Their art shows Christ nailed through the palms. The historical accuracy of this wound has been offered as proof that a medieval forger could not possibly have faked the Shroud.'

'Well, there!' said Parsifal.

'There are two explanations,' de l'Orme continued. 'The father of forensic anthropology and anatomy was indeed Leonardo. He would have had ample time – and the body parts – to experiment with the techniques of crucifixion.'

'Ridiculous,' Parsifal said.

'The other explanation,' de l'Orme said, 'is that this represents the victim of an actual crucifixion.' He paused. 'But still alive at the time the Shroud was made.'

'What?' said Mustafah.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'With Vera's medical expertise, I've managed to determine that curious fact. There's no sign of necrotic decay here. To the contrary, Vera has told me how the rib cage details are blurred. By respiration.'

'Heresy,' the younger Dominican hissed.

'It's not heresy,' said de l'Orme, 'if this is not Jesus Christ.'

'But it is.'

'Then you are the heretic, gentle father. For you have been worshiping a giant.'

The Dominican had probably never struck a blind man in his entire life. But you could tell by his grinding teeth how close he was now.

'Vera measured him. Twice. The man on the shroud measures six feet eight inches,'

de l'Orme continued.

'Look at that. He is a tall brute,' someone commented. 'How can that be?'

'Indeed,' said de l'Orme. 'Surely the Gospels would have mentioned Christ's enormous height.'

The elder Dominican hissed at him.

'I think now would be a good time to show them our secret,' de l'Orme said to Vera. He placed one hand on her wheelchair, and she led him to a nearby table. She held a cardboard box while he lifted out a small plastic statue of the Venus di Milo. It nearly slipped from his fingers.

'May I help?' asked Branch.

'Thank you, no. It would be better for you to stay back.'

It was like watching two kids unpack a science fair project. De l'Orme drew out a glass jar and a paintbrush. Vera smoothed a cloth flat on the table and put on a pair of latex gloves.

'What are you doing?' demanded the older Dominican.

'Nothing that will harm your Shroud,' de l'Orme answered.

Vera unscrewed the jar and dipped the brush in. 'Our "paint,"' she said.

The jar held dust, finely ground, a lackluster gray. While de l'Orme held the Venus by the head, she gently feathered on the dust.

'And now,' de l'Orme said, addressing the Venus, 'say cheese.'

Vera grasped the statue by its waist and held it horizontally above the cloth. 'It takes a minute,' she said.

'Please tell me when it starts,' de l'Orme said.

'There,' said Mustafah. For the image of the Venus was beginning to materialize on the fabric. She was in negative. Each detail became more clarified.

'If that doesn't beat all,' Foley said.

Parsifal refused to believe. He stood there shaking his head.

'The radiation heats and weakens the fabric on one side, creating an image. If I hold my statue here long enough, the cloth will turn dark. If I hold it higher, the image will be larger. Hold it high enough, and my miniature Venus becomes a giantess. That explains our giant Christ.'

'Our paint is a low-grade isotope, newtonium,' said Vera. 'It's found naturally.'

'And you painted yourself with it – your own nude – to create the forgery out there?' asked Foley.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'With Vera's help. She knows her male anatomy, I must say.' The older Dominican looked in danger of sucking the very enamel off his teeth.

'But it's radioactive!' Mustafah said.

'To tell the truth, the isotopes made my arthritis feel better for a few days after. I

thought maybe I'd stumbled on to a cure for a while there.'

'Nonsense,' Parsifal stormed in, as if remembering his hat. 'If this were the answer, we'd have detected radiation in our tests.'

'You would detect it on this cloth,' Vera admitted. 'But only because we spilled dust onto it. If I'd been careful not to touch the cloth, all you would detect is the visual image itself.'

'I've been to the moon and back,' said Parsifal. Whenever Parsifal fell back on his lunar authority, he was near the end of his rope. 'And I've never come across such a

mineral phenomenon.'

'The problem is that you have never been beneath the earth's surface,' said de l'Orme. 'I wish I could take credit for this. But miners have been talking about ghost images burnt onto boxes or the sides of their vehicles for years now. This is the explanation.'

'Then you admit there are only traces of it on the surface,' Parsifal declared. 'You say that man only recently found enough of your powder there to have an effect. So how could a medieval con artist get his hands on enough to coat an entire human body and create this image?'

De l'Orme frowned at the question. 'But I told you, this is not Leonardo.'

'What I don't understand' – Desmond Lynch rapped with his cane, excited – 'is why? Why go to such extremes? Is it all just a prank?'

'Again, it's all about power,' de l'Orme answered. 'A relic like this, in times so superstitious? Why, whole churches came into being around the drawing power of a single Cross splinter. In 1350, all of Europe was transfixed by the display of a supposed Veronica's veil. Do you know how many holy relics were floating around Christendom in those days? Crusaders were returning home with all manner of holy war loot. Besides bones and Bibles from martyrs and saints, there were the baby Jesus' milk teeth, his foreskin – seven of them, to be precise – and enough splinters to make a forest of True Crosses. Obviously this was not the only forgery in circulation. But it was the most audacious and powerful.

'What if someone suddenly decided to tap into this benighted Christian gullibility? He could have been a pope, a king, or simply an ingenious artist. What could be more powerful than a life-size snapshot of the entire body of Christ, depicting him just after his great test on the Cross and just before his disappearance into the Godhead? Done artfully, wielded cynically, such an artifact would have the ability to change history, to create a fortune, to rule hearts and minds.'

'Ah, come on,' Parsifal complained.

'What if that was his game?' de l'Orme postulated. 'What if he was attempting to infiltrate Christian culture through their own image?'

'He? His?' said Desmond Lynch. 'Who are you talking about?'

'Why, the figure in the Shroud, of course.'

'Very well,' growled Lynch. 'But who is the rascal?'

'Look at him,' de l'Orme said.

'Yes, we're looking.'

'It's a self-portrait.'

'The portrait of a trickster,' said Vera. 'He covered himself with newtonium and stood before a linen sheet. He deliberately perpetrated this artful dodge. A primitive photocopy of the son of God.'

'I give up. Are we supposed to recognize him?'

'He looks a little like you up there, Thomas,' someone joked. Thomas blew his cheeks out.

'Long hair, goatee. Looks more like your friend Santos,' someone teased de l'Orme.

'Now that you mention it,' de l'Orme mused, 'I suppose it could be any one of us.' It was turning into a game.

'We give up,' said Vera.

'But you were so close,' said de l'Orme.

'Enough,' barked Gault.

'Kublai Khan,' de l'Orme said.

'What?'

'You said it yourselves.'

'Said what?'

'Geronimo. Attila. Mao. A warrior king. Or a prophet. Or just a wanderer, little

different from us.'

'You're not serious.'

'Why not? Why not the author of the Prester John letters? The author of a Christ hoax? Perhaps even the author of the legends of Christ and Buddha and Mohammed?'

'You're saying...'

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'Meet Satan.'

Those new regions which we found and explored... we may rightly call a New World... a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa.

– AMERIGO VESPUCCI, on America

14

THE HOLE

The Colon Ridge Zone

'July 7,' Ali recorded. 'Camp 39: 5,012 fathoms, 79 degrees F. We reached Cache I

today.'

She looked up to gather in the scene. How to put this?

Mozart was flooding the chamber over Dolby speakers. Lights blazed with the glut of cable-fed electricity. Wine bottles and chicken bones littered the floor. A conga line of filthy, trail-hardened scientists was snaking across the tilted floor. To The Magic Flute.

'Joy!' she printed neatly.

The celebration rocked around her.

Until this afternoon it had been one vast, unspoken doubt that the cache would be here. Geologists had muttered that the feat was impossible, suggesting that the tunnels shifted about down here, as dodgy as snakes. But just as Shoat had promised, the penetrator capsules were waiting for them. The surface crews had punched a drill hole through the ocean floor and landed the cargo dead on target, at their exact elevation and place in the tunnels. A few meters to the right or left, or higher or lower, and everything would have been socketed in solid bedrock and irretrievable. Their retreat to civilization would have been vexed, to say the least, for their food was running low.

But now they had all the provisions and gear and clothing necessary for the next eight weeks, plus tonight's wine and loudspeakers for the opera and a holographic

'Bully for You' speech from C.C. Cooper himself. You are the beginning of history, his small laser ghost toasted them.

For the first time in almost five weeks, Ali could write on her day map their precise

coordinates: '107 degrees, 20 minutes W / 3 degrees, 50 minutes N.' On a traditional map of the surface, they were somewhere south of Mexico in blue, islandless water. An ocean-floor map placed them beneath a feature called the Colon Ridge, near the western edge of the Nazca Plate.

Ali took a sip of the Chardonnay that Helios had sent. She closed her eyes while the Queen of the Night sang her brokenhearted aria. Someone up top had a sense of humor. Mozart's magical underworld? At least they hadn't sent The Damnation of Faust.

The three forty-foot cylinders lay on their sides among the drill rubble, like tipped-over rocket ships. Their discarded hatch doors set among cables tangled in a steel rat's nest, salt water trickling down from a mile overhead. Various lines hung from the three-foot-wide hole in the ceiling, one for communications, two to feed them voltage from the surface, another dedicated to downloading compressed vid-mail from home. One of the porters sat beside the second electric cable, recharging a small mountain of batteries for their headlamps and flashlights and lab equipment and laptop computers.

Walker's quartermaster and various helpers were working overtime, sorting the shipment, stockpiling boxes, shouting out numbers. Helios had also delivered them mail, twenty-four ounces per person.

As part of her vow of poverty, Ali had grown used to only small portions of home news. Yet she was disappointed at how little mail January had sent her. As always, the note was handwritten on Senate letterhead. It was dated two weeks earlier, and the envelope had been tampered with, which possibly explained the sparse information it contained. January had learned of their secret departure from Esperanza, and was heartsick that Ali had chosen to go deeper.

'You belong... Where? Not out there, not unseen, not beyond my reach. Ali, I feel like you've taken something from me. The world was big enough without you slipping away like a shadow in the night. Please call or write me at first chance. And please return. If others are turning back, go with them.'

There was oblique mention of the Beowulf scholars' progress: 'Work proceeds on the dam project.' That was their code for the identification of Satan. 'As of yet, no location, few specifics, perhaps new terrain.' For some reason, January had included a few enhanced photographs of the Turin Shroud, with some three-dimensional computer images of the head. Ali didn't know what to make of that.

She looked around camp, and most had already rifled their care packages and eaten treats sent from home and shared the snapshots from their families and loved ones. Everyone had gotten something, it seemed, even the porters and soldiers. Only Ike appeared to have nothing. He kept busy with a new spool of candy-striped climbing rope, measuring it in coils and cutting and burning the tips.

Not all the news was good. In the far corner, a man was trying to talk Shoat into getting him extracted via the drill hole. Ali could hear him over the music. 'But it's my wife,' he kept saying. 'Breast cancer.'

Shoat wasn't buying it. 'Then you shouldn't have come,' he said. 'Extractions are only for life-and-death emergencies.'

'This is life and death.'

'Your life and death,' Shoat stated, and went back to uplinking with the surface, making his reports and getting instructions and feeding the expedition's collected data through a wet, dangling communications cable. They'd been promised a videophone line at each cache so people could call home, but so far Shoat and Walker had been monopolizing it. Shoat told them there was a hurricane on the surface and the drill rig was in jeopardy. 'You'll get your chance, if there's still time,' he said.

Despite the glitches and some serious homesickness, the expedition was in high spirits. Their resupply technology worked. They were loaded with food and supplies

for the next stage. Two months down, ten to go.

Ali squinted into their holiday of lights. The scientists looked jubilant tonight, dancing, embracing, downing California wines sent as a token of C.C. Cooper's appreciation, howling at the invisible moon. They also looked different. Filthy. Hairy. Downright antediluvian.

She'd never seen them this way. Ali realized it was because, for over a month, she had not really seen. Since casting loose of Esperanza, they had been dwelling in a fraction of their normal light. Tonight their twilight was at bay. Under the bright light she could see them, freckles, warts, and all. They were gloriously unbarbered and bewhiskered and smeared with mud and oil, as pale as grubs. Men bore old food in their beards. Women had rat's nests. They had started doing a cowboy line dance – to the birdcatcher Papageno singing 'Love's Sweet Emotion.'

Just then someone ambushed the opera and plugged in a Cowboy Junkies disc. The tempo slowed. Lovers rose, clenched, swayed on the rocky floor.

Ali's scanning arrived at Ike on the far side of the chamber.

His hair was growing out at last. With his cowlick and sawed-off shotgun, he reminded Ali of some farm kid hunting jackrabbits. The glacier glasses were a disconcerting touch; he was forever protecting what he called his 'assets.' Sometimes she thought the dark glasses simply protected his thoughts, a margin of privacy. She felt unreasonably glad he was there.

The moment her glance touched on him, Ike's head skated off to the other side, and she realized he'd been watching her. Molly and a few of Ali's other girlfriends had teased that he had his eye on her, and she'd called them wicked. But here was proof. Fair's fair, she thought, and spurred herself forward. There was no telling when he might vanish into the darkness again.

The wine had an extra kick to it, or the depths had lowered her inhibitions. Whatever, she made herself bold. She went directly to him and said, 'Wanna dance?' He pretended to have just noticed her. 'It's probably not a great idea,' he said, and didn't move. 'I'm rusty.'

He was going to make her work for this? 'Don't worry, I've had my tetanus shots.'

'Seriously, I'm out of practice.'

And I'm in practice? she didn't say. 'Come on.'

He tried one last gambit. 'You don't understand,' he said. 'That's Margo Timmins singing.'

'So?'

'Margo,' he repeated. 'Her voice does things to a person. It makes you forget yourself.'

Ali relaxed. He wasn't rejecting her. He was flirting. 'Is that right?' she said, and stayed right there in front of him. In the pale light of the tunnels, Ike's scars and markings had a way of blending with the rock. Here, lit brightly, they were terrible all over again.

'Maybe you would understand,' he reconsidered. Ike stood up, and the shotgun came with him; it had pink climber's webbing for a sling. He parked it across his back, barrel down, and took her hand. It felt small in his.

They went to where the others had cleared away rocks for a makeshift dance floor. Ali felt eyes following them. Paired with partners of their own, Molly and some of the other women were grinning like maniacs at her. Oddly, Ike had been designated part of their Ten Most Wanted list. He had an aura. It cut through the vandalized surface. People wondered about him. And here Ali was, getting first crack at him. She vamped like it was the prom, waving her fingers at them.

Ike acted smooth enough, but there was a young man's hesitation as he faced her and opened his arms. She hesitated, too. They got themselves arranged, and he was just as self-conscious about their physical touch as she was. He kept the bravado

smile, but she heard his throat clear as their bodies came together.

'I've been meaning to talk with you,' she said. 'You owe me an explanation.'

'The animal,' he guessed. His disappointment was blunt. He stopped dancing.

'No,' she said, and got them in motion again. 'That orange. Do you remember? The one you gave me on the ride down from the Galápagos?'

He backed off a step to get a look. 'That was you?' She liked that. 'Did I look so pathetic?'

'You mean like a rescue job?'

'If you want to put it that way.'

'I used to climb,' he said. 'That was always the biggest nightmare, getting rescued. You do your best to stay in control. But sometimes things slip. You fall,.'

'I was in distress, then.'

'Nah.' Now he was lying.

'So how come the orange?'

There was no particular answer she wanted here. Yet the circle needed completing. Something about that orange demanded accounting for, the poetry in it, his intuition that she had needed just such a preoccupation at just that moment. It had become something of a riddle, this gift from a man so raw and brutalized. An orange? Where had that come from? Perhaps he'd read Flaubert in his previous life, before his captivity. Or Durrell, she thought. Or Anaïs Nin. Wishful thinking. She was inventing him.

'There it was,' he said simply, and she got a sense he was delighting in her confusion.

'It had your name on it.'

'Look, I'm not trying to obsess here,' she said. Immediately his words about staying in control came drifting in. She faltered. He'd pegged her problem, cold. Control. 'It was just so right, that's all,' she murmured. 'It's been a mystery to me, and I never got a chance to say –'

'Strawberry blondes,' he interrupted.

'What?'

'I confess,' he said. 'You're an old weakness of mine.' He didn't qualify between the universe of blondes and the singularity of this one.

It took Ali's breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

'That's it, then,' she said. 'End of mystery.'

'Why say that?' he said.

This was turning out to be a nice dance.

'I like her singing,' she said.

He took in her long body. It was a quick glance. She saw it, and remembered his scrutiny of the periwinkles on her sundress. He said, 'You do live dangerously.'

'And you don't?'

'There's a difference. I'm not a dedicated, you know,' he faltered, 'a professional...'

'Virgin?' she boldly finished. The wine was talking. His back muscles reflexed.

'I was going to say "recluse."'

Ike pulled her tighter and stroked his front across hers, a languorous swipe that moved her breasts. It drew a small gasp out of her.

'Mister Crockett,' she scolded, and started to pull away. Instantly he let go, and his release startled her more. There was no time for elaborate decisions. Scapegoating the wine, she scooped him close again, got his hand seated at the hollow of her spine.

They danced without words for another minute. Ali tried to let herself be taken away by the music. But eventually the songs would stop and they would have to leave

the safety of this brightly lit floor and resume their investigation of the dark places.

'Now it's your turn to explain,' he said. 'Just how did you end up here?'

Unsure how much he really wanted to hear, she edited herself. He kept asking questions, and soon she found herself defining protolanguage and the mother tongue.

'Water,' she said, 'in Old German is wassar, in Latin aqua. Go deeper into the daughter languages, and the root starts to appear. In Indo-European and Amerind, water is hakw , in Dene-Caucasian kwa . The furthest back is haku, a computer-simulated proto-word. Not that anyone uses it anymore. It's a buried word, a root. But you can see how a word gets reborn through time.'

'Haku,' Ike said, though differently than she had, with a glottal stress on the first syllable. 'I know that word.'

Ali glanced at him. 'From them?' she asked. His hadal captors. Exactly as she'd hoped, he had a glossary in him.

He winced, as with a phantom pain, and she caught her breath. The memory passed, if that's what it was. She decided not to pursue it for the moment, and returned to her own tale, explaining how she had come to collect and decipher hadal glyphs and remnant text. 'All we need is one translator who can read their writings,' she said. 'It could unlock their whole civilization to us.'

Ike misunderstood. 'Are you asking me to teach you?' She kept her voice flat. 'Do you know how to, Ike?'

He clicked his tongue in the negative. Ali instantly recognized the sound from her time among the San Bushmen in southern Africa. That, too? she wondered. Click language? Her excitement was building.

'Even hadals don't know how to read hadal,' he said.

'Then you've never actually seen a hadal reading,' she clarified. 'The ones you met were illiterate.'

'They can't read hadal writings,' Ike repeated. 'It's lost to them. I knew one once. He could read English and Japanese. But the old hadal writing was alien to him. It was a great frustration for him.'

'Wait.' Ali stopped, dumbfounded. No one had ever suggested such a thing. 'You're saying the hadals read modern human languages? Do they speak our languages too?'