The Descent

'He did,' said Ike. 'He was a genius. A leader. The rest are... much less than him.'

'You knew him?' Her pulse raced. Who else could he be speaking of except the historical Satan?

Ike stopped. He was looking at her, or through her, with those impenetrable glacier glasses. She couldn't begin to read his thoughts. 'Ike?'

'Why are you doing this?'

'I have a secret.' She wanted to trust him. They were still touching, and that seemed a good start. 'What if I told you my purpose was to get a positive identification of that man, whatever he is? To get more information about him. A description of his face. Clues to his behavior. Even to meet him.'

'You won't.' Ike's voice sounded dead.

'But anything's possible.'

'No,' he said. 'I mean you won't. By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn't be you anymore.'

She brooded. He knew something, but wasn't telling. 'You're making him up,' she declared. It was peevish, a last resort.

The dancers flowed around them.

Ike held out one arm. Turned just so in the light, Ali could see the raised scars where a glyph had been branded in the flesh. To the naked eye, the scars lay hidden beneath more superficial markings. She touched them with her fingertips... the way a hadal might in complete darkness. 'What does it mean?' she asked.

'It's a claim mark,' he said. 'The name they gave me. Beyond that, I don't have a

clue. And the thing is, the hadals don't, either. They just imitate drawings their ancestors left a long time ago.'

Ali traced her fingers across the scarring. 'What do you mean by a claim mark?'

He shrugged, regarding the arm as if it belonged to someone else. 'There's probably a better term for it. That's what I call them. Each clan has its own, and then each member his own.' He looked at her. 'I can show you others,' he said.

Ali kept her expression calm. Inside, she was ready to shout. All this time, her quest had held Ike for its answer. Why had no one else asked this man these questions in years past? Perhaps they had, and he hadn't been ready.

'Wait, let me get my notebook.' She could barely contain herself. Here was the beginning of her glossary. The start of a Rosetta stone. By cracking the hadal code, she would open a whole new language to human understanding.

'Notebook?' he said.

'To draw the markings.'

'But I have them with me.'

'You have what?'

He started to unbutton his pocket, then stopped. 'You're sure about this?' She stared impatiently at the pocket, willing it to fly open. 'Yes.'

He pulled out a small packet of leather patches, each roughly the size of a baseball card, and handed them to her. They had been sliced in a neat rectangle and tanned to stay soft. At first Ali thought the leather was vellum of some kind, and that Ike had used them to trace or write on. There were faint colored designs on one side. Then she saw that the colors came from tattooing, and the weltlike ridges were keloid scars, and there were tiny, pallid hairs. It was skin, all right. Human skin. Hadal skin. Whatever this was. Ike did not see her misgivings; he was too busy arranging the strips on her still, cupped palms. He gave a running commentary, intent, even scholarly. 'Two weeks old,' he said of one. 'Notice the twisted serpents. I've never come across that motif. You can feel them twining together, very skillful, whoever incised him.'

He laid a pair of patches side by side. 'These two I got off a fresh kill. You can tell from the linked circles, they'd been travelers from a long way off, from the same region. It's a pattern I used to see on Afghans and Pakis. Captures, you know. Down beneath the Karakoram.'

Ali was staring as much at him as at the skin pieces. She had never been squeamish, but she was stilled by his collection.

'Now here's the shape of a beetle, can you make that out? See how the wings are just opening? That's a different clan from others I've known, closed wings, wings wide. And this one here has got me stumped, it's nothing but dots. Footprints, maybe? A counting of time? Seasons? I don't know.

'Obviously this is a cave-fish design. See the light stalks dangling in front of its mouth? I've eaten fish like that. They're easy to catch by hand in shallow pools. Wait for the light to flash, then grab them by the stalks. Like pulling carrots or onions.'

He set down the last of his patches. 'Here's some of the geometries you see on the borders of their mandalas. They're pretty standard for down here, a way to ritually enclose the outer circle and hold in the mandala's information. You've seen them on the walls. I'm hoping someone in our bunch can figure them out. We've got a lot of smart people here.'

'Ike.' Ali stopped him. 'What do you mean "fresh kill"?'

Ike picked up the two patches she was referring to. 'A day old. Maybe two.'

'I mean, what. What was killed? A hadal?'

'One of the porters. I don't know his name.'

'We're missing a porter?'

'More like ten or twelve,' Ike said. 'You haven't noticed? In twos and threes, over the past week. They're sick of Walker's bullying.'

'Does anyone else know?' No one had remarked on this to her. It signified a whole other level of the expedition, one that was darker and more violent than she – or the other scientists – had comprehended.

'Of course. That's a lot of hands to lose.' Ike could have been talking about animals in a mule train. 'Walker's got more of his troops patrolling the rear than the front. He keeps sending them off to catch one of the runaways. He wants to make an example.'

'To punish them? For quitting a job?'

Ike looked queerly at her. 'When you're running a string of men,' he said, 'one runaway can turn you inside out. The whole bunch can come apart on you. Walker knows that. What he can't seem to get through his skull, though, is that by the time they run away, it's too late to keep them. If they were mine,' he added frankly, 'it would be different.'

The stories about Ike's slaving were true then. In some capacity or another, he'd ruled over his fellow captives. She could try his dark alleys another time. 'And so they caught one of the runaways,' Ali stated.

'Walker's guys?' Ike stopped. 'They're mercenaries. Herd mentality rules. They're not going to spread themselves out or search deep. They're afraid. They drop an hour behind, stay clustered, come back in again.'

That left one option, as far as Ali could see. It made her sad. 'You did it then?' she said.

He frowned, not understanding.

'Killed the porter,' she said.

'Why would I do that?'

'You just said, to make an example. For Colonel Walker.'

'Walker,' Ike snorted. 'He'll have to do his own killing.' She was relieved. For a moment.

'This poor fella didn't make it far,' Ike said. 'I doubt any of them did. I found him mostly rendered.'

Rendered? That was something you did to slaughtered cattle. Again, Ike was matter-of-fact.

'What are you talking about?' she asked. Had one of the escaped porters turned psychotic?

'It's these two, I have no doubt,' Ike said. He held up the paired leather patches with the linked circles of scar tissue. 'I tracked them tracking him. They took him together, one from the front, one from above.'

'And then you found them.'

'Yes.'

'And you couldn't bring them back to us?'

The absurdity shocked him. 'Hadals?' he said.

Now she understood. This hadn't been a murder. He'd told her the first time. Fresh kill. It hit her. 'Hadals?' she said. 'There were hadals? Here?'

'Not anymore.'

'Don't try to placate me,' she said. 'I want to know.'

'We're in their house now. What do you expect?'

'But Shoat told us it was uninhabited through this tunnel.'

'Blind faith.'

'And you haven't told anybody?'

'I took care of the problem. Now we're clear again.'

Part of her was glad. Live hadals! Dead now. 'What did you do?' she asked quietly, not sure she really wanted the details.

He chose not to give any. 'I left them in a way that will speak to any others. We won't have trouble.'

'Then where do these come from?' she asked, pointing at his collection.

'Other places. Other times.'

'But you think there may be more.'

'Nothing organized. Not in any numbers. They're just drifters. Wanderers. Opportunists.'

She was shaken. 'Do you carry these around with you everywhere?' she asked.

'Think of it as taking their driver's license or dogtag. It helps me get the bigger picture. Movement. Migrations. I learn from them, almost like they were talking to me.' He held one patch to his nose and smelled. Then he licked it. 'This one came from very deep. You can tell by the cleanness of him.'

'What are you talking about?'

He offered it to her, and she turned her head. 'Have you ever eaten range-fed beef? It tastes different from a cow that's been eating grain and hormones. Same here. This guy had never eaten sunlight. He'd never been to the surface. Never eaten an animal that had gone up top. It was probably his first time away from the tribe.'

'And you killed him,' she said. He looked at her.

'You have no idea how brutal this looks,' she said. 'Dear God. What did they do to you?'

He shrugged. In the span of one heartbeat, he had fallen a thousand miles away from her. 'I'll find him,' he said.

'Who?'

He pointed at the raised scars on his arm. 'Him,' he said.

'You said that was your name.'

'It was. His name was my name. I had no name except for his.'

'Whose?'

'The one who owned me.'

Four days farther on, they found Shoat's river.

Ike had been sent ahead. He was waiting for the expedition at a chamber filled with thunder. They had been hearing it for days. In the center of the floor lay a great vertical shaft, shaped at top like a funnel. A city block wide, the hole roared up at them.

The walls sweated. Small streams sluiced into the maw. They girdled the rim, trying to see the bottom. Their lights illuminated a deep, polished throat. The stone was calcareous serpentine with green mottling. Ike lowered a headlamp on a rope. Two hundred meters down, the tiny light skipped and skidded sideways on an invisible current.

'I'll be damned,' Shoat said. 'The river.'

'You didn't expect it to be here?' someone said.

Shoat grinned. 'Nobody knew. Our cartography department gave it a one-in-three chance. On the other hand, it was the most logical way to explain the continuum in their data.'

'We came all this way on a wild guess?'

Shoat gave a happy-go-lucky shrug. 'Kick off your shoes,' he said, 'no more backpacks. No more hoofing it. From here, we float.'

'I think we should first study the situation,' one of the hydrologists said. 'We have no idea what's down there. What's the river's profile? How fast does it run? Where does it go?'

'Study it from the boats,' Shoat said.

The porters did not arrive for another three hours. Since leaving Cache I, they had been freighted with double loads for double pay, some carrying in excess of a hundred and fifty pounds. They deposited their cargo in a dry area and went over to a separate chamber, where Walker had arranged a hot meal for them.

Ali came across to Ike, where he was rigging lines into the hole. At their parting on the dance floor, she'd been drunk and brimming with curiosity and, ultimately, repulsion. Now she was as sober as a pebble, and the repulsion had abated. 'What happens with them?' she asked, referring to the porters. 'Everyone's wondering.'

'End of the road,' he said. 'Shoat's retiring them.'

'They're going home? The colonel's been hunting the runaways down, and now they're all being turned loose?'

'It's Shoat's show,' Ike said.

'Will they be okay?'

This was no place to cut men, two months out from the nearest civilization. But Ike saw no reward in arousing her indignation all over again. 'Sure,' he said. 'Why not?'

'I thought they'd been guaranteed employment for a year.'

He hooked a coil of rope with one hand and busied himself with knots. 'We've got worries of our own,' he advised. 'They're about to become a powder keg. Once they figure out we're ditching them, it's a matter of time before they go for us.'

'For us?' she started. 'For revenge?'

'It's more basic than that,' Ike said. 'They'll want our weapons. Our food. Everything. From a strictly military point of view – Walker's view – the expeditious thing would be to frag them and be done with it.'

'He would never dare,' Ali said.

'You don't see it?' he asked. 'The porters are segregated from the rest of us now. That side cave is a cage with no door. They can only come out one at a time, and that makes them easy targets if they get tired of being cooped up.'

Ali couldn't believe this other, meaner layer to the expedition. 'He's not going to shoot them, is he?'

'No need. By the time they finally decide to poke their heads out, we'll probably be long gone down the river.'

All over again, the quartermaster opened the loads and laid out the supplies from Cache I. One of his first tasks was to distribute specially made survival suits to the soldiers and scientists. Made by Jagged Edge Gear for NASA, the suits were constructed of a ripstop fabric that was waterproof but land-friendly. He issued the suits in sizes from small to extra large. A wiry mercenary ran them through the basics.

'You can walk in it, climb in it, sleep in it. If you fall overboard, pull this emergency ring and the suit will self-inflate. It preserves your body heat. It keeps you dry. And it's shark-proof.'

Someone made a joke about a magic suit of armor.

The suits were a composite of rubbery shorts, sleeveless vests, and skintight oversuits. The fabric was night-striped with charcoal gray and cobalt blue. As the scientists tried on their elastic clothing, the unsettling effect was of tigers on two feet. There were a few wolf whistles, male and female.

They tried lowering a video camera to examine the lowest reaches of the shaft. When that didn't work, Walker sent down his crash dummy: Ike.

Not so many years before, a trail must have led from the chamber down to the river. Ike had already spent part of a day looking for it. But along the most likely tunnel, there was a boulder-choke triggered by recent tremors. Hadal evidence was everywhere – carved pillars, washed-out wall paintings, spouts to lift streamlets, rocks piled to divert them – but no suggestion that the hole had ever been used the way they were about to use it, to access the river from straight above.

Ike rappelled into the stone throat, feet braced against the veined rock. At the bottom of the first rope, a hundred meters down, he peeked upward through the falling water. They were watching him, waiting to see what would happen.

The shaft gave way to a void. Ike had no warning. His feet were suddenly pumping

against the blackness. He halted, dangling in a vast, quiet bubble of night.

Casting around with his light beam, he found the river fifty feet below. He had descended into a long, winding geological cupola. Its vaulted ceiling hung above the flat river surface. Strangely, the thunderous noise stopped the moment he left the shaft. It was practically silent here. He could hear the water slithering past, little more.

If not for his rope leading up through it, the shaft hole might have disappeared among all the other gnarled features above and around him. The walls and ceiling were scaled with igneous puzzles. It was a complicated space with one logic – the river.

He let himself down the line and locked off within reach of the water. It ran smooth as black silk. Tentatively, Ike reached his fingertips against it. Nothing leaped up to bite him. The current was firm. The water felt cool and heavy. It had no smell. If it had come from the Pacific Ocean, it was no longer sea water; the journey inward had filtered any salt from it. It was delicious.

He made his report on a short-range radio that Walker had given him. 'It looks fine to me,' he said.

They lowered like spiders on silk threads. Some required coaxing for the rappel, including several of the soldiers. Clients, thought Ike.

The launch was tricky.

The rafts were roped down with their pontoons fully inflated and the seats and floor assembled. They reminded Ike of lifeboats descending from a doomed ship.

The river swept away their first attempt. Luckily, no one was in it.

At Ike's instruction, the next raft was suspended just above the water while a team of boatmen rappelled down on five other ropes. They might have been puppets on strings, all hanging in the air. On the count of three, the crew pendulumed into the dangling raft just as it touched the water. Two men didn't release from their ropes quickly enough, and ended up swinging back and forth above the river while the raft drifted on. The others grabbed paddles and began digging at the water toward a huge polished natural ramp not far downstream.

The operation smoothed out once a small motor was lowered and attached to one of the rafts. The motorized boat gave them the ability to circle in the water and collect passengers and bags of gear hanging on a dozen different ropes. Some of the scientists proved to be quite competent with the ropes and craft. Several of Walker's forbidding avengers looked seasick. Ike liked that. The playing field was growing more level.

It took five hours to convey their tons of supplies down the shaft. A small flotilla of rafts ferried the cargo to shore. Except for the one raft, and the sacrifice of their porters, the expedition had lost nothing. There was general contentment about their streamlining. The Jules Verne Society was feeling able and sanctioned, as though they could handle anything hell had to throw at them.

Ali dreamed of the porters that night. She saw their faces fading into blackness.

Send forth the best ye breed – Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need.

– RUDYARD KIPLING, 'The White Man's Burden'

15

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

Little America, Antarctica

January had expected a raging white hell with hurricanes and Quonset huts. But their landing strip was dry, the windsock limp. She had pulled a lot of strings to get them here today, but wasn't quite sure what to expect. Branch could only say that it had to do with the Helios expedition. Events were developing that could affect the entire subplanet.

The plane parked swiftly. January and Thomas exited down the Globemaster's cargo ramp, past forklifts and bundled GIs. 'They're waiting,' an escort told them. They entered an elevator. January hoped it meant an upper-story room with a view. She wanted to watch this immense land and eternal sun. Instead they went down. Ten stories deep, the doors opened.

The hallway led to a briefing room, dark and silent inside. She had thought the room empty. But a voice near the front said, 'Lights.' It was spoken like a warning. When the lights came on, the room was full. With monsters.

At first she thought they were hadals cupping hands over eyes. But one and all were American officers. In front of her, a captain's jarhead haircut revealed lumps and corrugations on a skull the shape and size of a football helmet.

As a congresswoman, she had chaired a subcommittee investigating the effects of prolonged tours of duty into the interior. Now, surrounded by officers of her own Army, she saw for herself what 'skeletal warp' and osteitis deformans really meant: an exile among their peers. January reached for the term: Paget's disease. It sent skeletal tissue into an uncontrolled cycle of breakdown and growth. The cranial cavity was not affected, and motion and agility were uncompromised. But deformity was rampant. She quickly searched for Branch, but for once he was indistinguishable from the crowd.

'Welcome to our distinguished guests, Senator January and Father Thomas.' At the podium stood a general named Sandwell, known to January as an intriguer of extraordinary energy. His reputation as a field commander was not good. In effect, he had just warned his men to beware the politician and priest now in their midst. 'We were just beginning.'

The lights went out. There was audible relief, men relaxing back into their chairs again. January's eyes adjusted to the darkness. A large video screen was glowing aqua blue on one wall. Maps came up, a seafloor topo, then a wireframe view of the Pacific, then a close-up.

'To summarize,' Sandwell said, 'a situation has developed in our WestPac sector, at a border station numbered 1492. These are commanding officers of sub-Pacific bases, and they are gathered here to receive our latest intelligence and to take my orders.' January knew that was for her benefit. The general was declaring that he had determined a course of action. January was not annoyed. She could always influence the outcome, if need be. The fact that she and Thomas were even in this room was a testament to her powers.

'When one of our patrols was first reported missing, we assumed they had come under attack. We sent a rapid response unit to locate and assist the patrol. The rapid

response unit went missing, too. And then the lost patrol's final dispatch reached us.' Regret pulled at January. Ali was out there, beyond the lost patrol. Concentrate, she commanded herself, and focused on the general.

'It's called a message in a bottle,' Sandwell explained. 'One patrol member, usually the radioman, carries a thermopylae box. It continuously gathers and digitizes video images. In case of an emergency, it can be triggered to transmit automatically. The information is thrown into geological space.

'The problem is, different subterranean phenomena retard our frequencies at different rates. In this case, the transmission bounced off the upper mantle and came back up through basalt that was folded. In short, the transmission was lost in stone for five weeks. Finally we intercepted the message wave at our base above the Mathematician Seamounts. The transmission was badly degraded with tectonic noise. It took us another two weeks to enhance with computers. As a consequence, fifty-seven days have passed since the initial incident. During that time we lost three more rapid response units. Now we know it was no attack. Our enemy is internal. He is one of us. Video, please.'

'Final Dispatch – Green Falcon' a title read. A dateline jumped up, lower right. ClipGal/ML1492/07-03/2304:34.

Whispering, January translated for Thomas. 'Whatever it is, we're about to see something from the McNamara Line station 1492 at the Clipperton/Galápagos tunnel on July 3, starting at fifty-six minutes before midnight.'

Heat signatures pooled out from the blackness on screen. Seven souls. They looked disembodied.

'Here they are,' said Sandwell. 'SEALs. Based out of UDT Three, WestPac. A routine search-and-destroy.'

The patrol's heat signatures resolved on screen. Hot-green souls metamorphosed into distinct human bodies. As they approached the cameras, the SEALs' faces took on individual personalities. There were a few white kids, a couple of blacks, a Chinese-American.

'These are edited clips taken from the lipstick video worn by the radio operator. They're putting on their light gear. The Line is very close now.'

'The Line' was shorthand for a robot perimeter first conceived during the Vietnam War, an automatic Maginot Line that would serve as a countrywide tripwire. Here, in remote parts of the underworld, the technology seemed to be holding the peace. There had been next to no trespassing for over three years.

The screen flared to a lighter blue. Triggered by motion detectors, the first band of lights – or the last, depending on which direction one was traveling, inward or out – automatically flipped on from recesses in the tunnel walls. Even wearing their dark goggles, the SEALs hunched and turned their faces away. Had they been hadals, they would have fled. Or died. That was the idea.

'I'll fast-forward through the next two hundred yards,' Sandwell said. 'Our point of interest lies at the mouth.'

As Sandwell fast-forwarded, the platoon seemed to speed through ribs of light. With each successive zone they entered, more lights snapped on, and the zone behind them went dark. It was like zebra stripes. The carefully woven combinations of light and other electromagnetic wavelengths were blinding and generally lethal to life-forms bred in darkness. As the subplanet was being pacified, choke points like this one had been outfitted with arrays of lights – infrared, ultraviolet, and other photon transmitters – plus sensor-guided lasers, to 'keep the genie bottled.' Evidence of the genie began to appear. Sandwell resumed normal speed.

Bones and bodies littered the deadly bright avenue, as if a vicious battle had been fought here. In full view, spotlit by the megawatt of electricity, the hadal remains were almost uninteresting. Few had any coloration to their skins and hides. Even their

hair lacked color. It was not white, even, just a dead, parched hue similar to lard.

As the patrol neared the tunnel's far end – what Sandwell had termed the mouth – attempts at sabotage became obvious. Lights had been broken, or blocked with primitive tools, or plugged with stones. The hadal sappers had paid a high price for their efforts. The SEALs came to a halt. Just ahead, where the tunnel mouth turned black, lay true wilderness.

January swallowed her suspense. Something bad was about to happen.

'Anybody see it?' Sandwell asked the room. No one replied. 'They walked right past it,' he said. 'Just the way they were supposed to.'

Again he fast-forwarded. At high speed, the troops took off their packs and began their janitorial duties, replacing parts and lightbulbs in the walls and ceiling, and lubricating equipment and recalibrating lasers. The on-screen clock raced through seven minutes.

'Here's where they find it,' Sandwell said. The video slowed.

A group of SEALs had clustered around a spur of rock, obviously discussing a curiosity. The radioman approached, and his lipstick video camera gave a view of a small cylinder the size of a little finger. It was lodged in a crevice in the rock. 'There it is,' Sandwell announced.

There was no soundtrack, no voices. One of the SEALs reached for the cylinder. A second tried to caution him. Abruptly, one man fell backward. The rest simply slumped to the ground. The lipstick camera spun madly, and came to rest – sideways

– upon a view of someone's boot. The boot twitched once, no more.

'We've timed it,' Sandwell said. 'It took less than two seconds – one-point-eight, to be exact – for seven men to die. Of course, it was in its concentrated form at release. But even weeks later and three miles away, after dispersing on the air current, it took just over two seconds – two-point-two – to kill our rapid response units. In other words, it is nearly instantaneous. With a one-hundred-percent mortality rate.'

'What is this?' Thomas hissed at January. 'What is this man talking about?'

'I have no idea,' she muttered.

'Here it is again, slower, with more detail.'

Frame by frame, Sandwell showed them the death scene from the cylinder onward. This time, the finger-length of metal tube revealed its parts: a main body, a small glass hood, a tiny light. Magnified, the SEAL's fingers reached in. The tiny light bead changed colors. The cylinder delivered the faintest burst of an aerosol spray. Men fell to the ground, as slowly as drowned sailors. This time, January was able to see evidence of the biological violence. One of the black kids twisted his face to the camera, mouth gulping, and his eyes were gone. A man's hand swept past the lens, blood whipping from the nails. Once again the boot twitched and something, a human liquid, seeped from the lace holes.

Gas, January recognized. Or germs. But so fast-acting?

The officers caught up with the information in a single leap. CBW – chemical and biological warfare – was the part of their training they least wanted to engage in the field. But here it was.

'Once more,' Sandwell said.

'Impossible, absolutely impossible,' an officer said. 'Haddie doesn't have anywhere near this kind of capability. They're Neolithic throwbacks. They barely have the sophistication to make fire. They acquire weaponry, they don't invent it. Spears and booby traps, that's their creative limit. You can't tell me they're manufacturing CBs.'

'Since then,' Sandwell continued, disregarding him, 'we've found three more capsules just like it. They have detonators designed to be triggered by a coded radio command. Once placed, they can only be neutralized with the proper signal. Tamper with it, and you saw what happens. And so we leave them untouched. Here's a video of the most recent cylinder. It was discovered five days ago.'

This time the players were dressed in biochem suits. They moved with the slowness of astronauts in zero gravity. The dateline was different. It said ClipGal/Rail/09-01/0732:12. The camera angle shifted to a fracture in the cave wall. One of the suited troops started to insert a shiny stick into the crack. It was a dental mirror, January saw.

The next angle focused on an image in the mirror. 'This is the backside of one of the capsules,' Sandwell said.

The lettering was complete this time, though upside down. There was a tiny bar code, and an identification in English script. Sandwell froze the image. 'Right side up,' he ordered. The camera angle pivoted. SP-9, the lettering said, followed by USDoD.

'It's one of ours?' a voice asked.

'The "SP" designates a synthetic prion, manufactured in the laboratory. Nine is the generation number.'

'Is that supposed to be good news or bad news?' someone said. 'The hadals aren't manufacturing the contagion that's killing us. We are.'

'The Prion-9 model has an accelerant built in. On contact with the skin, it colonizes almost instantly. The lab director compared it to a supersonic black plague.' Sandwell paused. 'Prion-9 was tailored for the theater in case things got out of hand down below. But once they built the prion, it was decided that nothing could get so out of hand to ever use it. Simply put, it's too deadly to be deployed. Because it reproduces, small amounts have the potential to expand and fill an environmental niche. In this case, that niche is the entire subplanet.'

A hand closed on January's arm with the force of a trap. The pain of Thomas's grip traveled up her bone. He let go. 'I'm sorry,' he whispered, and took his hand away. January knew better than to interrupt a military briefing. She did it anyway. 'And what happens when this prion fills its niche and decides to jump to the next niche? What about our world?'

'Excellent question, Senator. There is some good news with the bad. Prion-9 was developed for use in the subplanet exclusively. It only lives – and only kills – in darkness. It dies in sunlight.'

'In other words, it can't jump its niche. That's the theory?' She let her skepticism hang.

Sandwell added, 'One other thing. The synthetic prion has been tested on captive hadals. Once exposed, they die twice as fast as we do.'

'Now there's an edge for you,' someone snorted. 'Nine-tenths of a second.' Captive hadals? Tests? January had never heard of these things.

'Last of all,' Sandwell said, 'all remaining stocks of this generation have been destroyed.'

'Are there other generations?'

'That's classified. Prion-9 was going to be destroyed anyway. The order arrived just days after the theft. Except for the contraband cylinders already in the subplanet, there are no more.'

A question came from the dark room. 'How did the hadals get their hands on our ordnance, General?'

'It's not the hadals who planted the prion in our ClipGal corridor,' Sandwell snapped.

'We have proof now. It was one of us.'

The video screen came on again. January was certain he was replaying the first tape. It looked to be the same black tunnel, disgorging the same disembodied heat signatures. The hot green amoebas became bipedal. She checked the dateline. The images came from Line station number 1492. But the date was different. It read

06/18. This video had been shot two weeks earlier than the SEAL patrol.

'Who are these people?' a voice asked.

The heat signatures took on distinct faces. A dozen became two dozen, all strung

out. They weren't soldiers. But with their night glasses on, it was impossible to say exactly who or what they were. The first array of tunnel lights automatically engaged. And suddenly the figures on screen could be seen yelling happily and stripping their glasses off and generally acting like civilians on a holiday.

Their Helios uniforms were dirty, but not tattered or badly worn. January made a quick calculation. At this point, the expedition had been in its second month of trekking.

'Look,' she whispered to Thomas.

It was Ali. She had a pack on and looked healthy, if thin, and better fit than some of the men. Her smile was a thing of beauty. She passed the wall camera with no idea that it was taping her.

Without turning her head, January noticed a change in the soldiers around her. In some way, Ali's smile testified to their nobility.

'The Helios expedition,' Sandwell said for those who did not know.

More and more people filled the screen. Sandwell let his commanders appreciate the whole potpourri. Someone said, 'You mean to say one of them planted the cylinders?' Again Sandwell set them straight. 'I repeat, it was one of us.' He paused. 'Not them. Us. One of you.'

January fastened upon Ali's image. On screen, the young woman knelt by her pack and unrolled a thin sleeping pad on the stone and shared a candy with a friend. Her small communion with her neighbors was endearing.

Ali finished her preparations, then sat on her pad and opened a foil packet with a folded washcloth and cleaned her face and neck. Finally she folded her hands and exhaled. You could not mistake her contentment. At the end of her day, she was satisfied with her lot. She was happy.

Ali glanced up, and January thought she was praying. But Ali was looking at the lights in the tunnel ceiling. It verged on worship. January felt touched and appalled at the same time. For Ali loved the light. It was that simple. She loved the light. And yet she had given it up. All for what? For me, thought January.

'I know that son of a bitch.' It was one of the ClipGal commanders speaking.

At center screen, a lean mercenary was issuing orders to three other armed men.

'His name's Walker,' the commander said. 'Ex-Air Force. Jockeyed F-16s, then quit to go into business for himself. He got a bunch of Baptists killed on that colony venture south of the Baja structure. The survivors sued him for breach of contract. Somehow he ended up in my neighborhood. I heard Helios was hiring muscle. They got themselves a cluster-fuck.'

Sandwell let the tape run another minute without comment. Then he said, 'It's not

Walker who planted the prion capsules.' He froze the image. 'It's this man.'

Thomas gave a start, all but imperceptible. January felt the shock of recognition. She looked at his face quizzically, and his eyes skipped to hers. He shook his head. Wrong man. She returned her attention to the image on screen, searching her memory. The vandalized figure was no one she knew.

'You're mistaken,' a soldier stated matter-of-factly from the audience. January knew that voice.

'Major Branch?' Sandwell said. 'Is that you, Elias?'

Branch stood up, blocking part of the screen. His silhouette was thick and warped and primitive. 'Your information is incorrect. Sir.'

'You do recognize him then?'

The image frozen on screen was a three-quarters profile, tattooed, hair trimmed with a knife. Again January sensed Thomas's recoil. A click of teeth, a shift in breathing. He was staring at the screen. 'Do we know this man?' she whispered. Thomas lifted his fingers: No.

'You've made a mistake,' Branch repeated.

'I wish we had,' said Sandwell. 'He's gone rogue, Elias. That's the fact.'

'No sir,' Branch declared.

'It's our own fault,' Sandwell said. 'We took him in. The Army gave him sanctuary. We presumed he had returned to us. But it's very possible he never quit identifying with the hadals who had captured him. You've all heard of the Stockholm syndrome.' Branch scoffed. At his superior officer. 'You're saying he's working for the devil?'

'I'm saying he appears to be a psychological refugee. He's trapped between two species, preying on each. The way I look at it, he's killing my men. And taking aim at the whole subplanet.'

'Him,' breathed January. Now the shock was hers. 'Thomas, he's the one Ali wrote us about just before leaving Point Z-3. The Helios scout.'

'Who?' asked Thomas.

January drew the name from her mental bank. 'Ike. Crockett,' she whispered. 'A recapture. He escaped from the hadals. Ali said she was hoping to interview him, get his remembrances of hadal life, enlist his knowledge. What have I gotten her involved with?'

'Judging by his work so far,' Sandwell continued, 'Crockett is attempting to lay a belt of contagion along the entire sub-Pacific equator. With one signal he can trigger a chain reaction that will wipe out every living thing in the interior, human, hadal, and otherwise.'

'Give me your proof,' Branch insisted stubbornly. 'Show me one clip or one picture of Ike planting CBs.' January heard heartbreak mixed in with his defiance. Branch had some connection with this character on screen.

'We have no pictures,' Sandwell said. 'But we've retraced the original batch of stolen Prion-9. It was stolen from our West Virginia chemical weapons depot. The theft occurred the same week that Crockett visited Washington, D.C. The same week he was to face a court-martial and a dishonorable discharge, and then fled. Now four of those cylinders have been discovered in the very same corridor he's guiding the Helios expedition through.'

'If the contagion goes off, he dies too,' said Branch. 'That's not Ike. He wouldn't kill himself. Anyone who knows him can tell you. He's a survivor.'

'In fact, that's our clue,' Sandwell said. 'Your protégé had himself immunized.' There was silence.

'We interviewed the physician who administered the vaccine,' Sandwell went on. 'He remembered the incident, and for good reason. Only one man has ever been immunized against Prion-9.'

A photograph flashed on the screen. It showed a medical release form. Sandwell let them have a minute with it. There was a doctor's name and address at the top. And at the bottom, a plain signature. Sandwell read it aloud: 'Dwight D. Crockett.'

'Shit,' grunted one of the commanders.

Branch was stubborn in his loyalty. 'I dispute your proof.'

'I know this is difficult,' Sandwell said to him.

Men stirred uneasily, January noticed. Later she would learn that Ike had taught many of them, saved some of them.

'It's imperative that we find this traitor,' Sandwell told them. 'Ike has just made himself the most wanted man on earth.'

January raised her voice. 'Let me understand,' she said. 'The only person immune to this plague, today, is the man who is planting it?'

'Affirmative, Senator,' Sandwell said. 'But not for long. In order to contain the prion release, we've closed the entire ClipGal corridor with explosives. We're evacuating the subplanet within a two-hundred-mile radius, including Nazca City. No one goes back in again until they get vaccinated. We start with you, gentlemen. We have medics waiting for you in the next room. Senator, and Father Thomas, you're both welcome

to be vaccinated too.'

Before January could decline, Thomas accepted. He glanced at her. 'In case,' he said. A map filled the screen. It zoomed in on a vein within the earth. 'This is the Helios expedition's projected trajectory,' the general continued. 'There's probably no way we can catch them from behind, meaning we have to intercept them from the side or the front. The problem is, we know where they've been, but not exactly where they're going.

'The Helios cartel has agreed to share information about the expedition's projected course. Over the next months, we'll be working closely with their mapping department to try to pinpoint the explorers. Meanwhile, we hunt.'

'We're going to commit all possible assets. I want squads sent out. Exit points covered. We'll flush him out. We'll lay traps. We'll wait for him. And when he's located, you're to shoot him dead. On sight. That order comes from the top. I repeat, kill on sight. Before this renegade can kill us.'

Sandwell faced them. 'Now is the time to ask yourselves, is there any man here who cannot deal with the mission as described?'

He was asking one man alone. They all knew it. Their silence waited for Branch to recuse himself. He did not.

New Guinea

The phone call at 0330 woke Branch in his berth. He slept little anyway. Two days had passed since the commanders had returned to their bases and begun harrowing the depths to find Ike. Branch, however, was assigned to mission control at SouthPac's New Guinea headquarters. It had been dressed up as a humanitarian gesture, but was fundamentally a way to neutralize him. They wanted Branch's insights into their prey, but did not trust him to kill Ike. He didn't blame them.

'Major Branch,' a voice said on the phone. 'This is Father Thomas.'

Ever since the briefing, Branch had been expecting a call from January. His connection was with her, not with her Jesuit confidant. He'd been surprised when the senator brought the man to their Antarctic meeting, and was not pleased to hear his voice. 'How did you find me?' he asked.

'January.'

'This probably isn't the best phone line to be using,' Branch rankled. Thomas disregarded him. 'I have information about your soldier Crockett.' Branch waited.

'Someone is using our friend.'

Our friend? thought Branch.

'I've just returned from visiting the physician who administered the vaccine.' Branch listened. Hard.

'I showed him a photo of Mr Crockett.'

Branch screwed the phone tighter against his ear.

'I think we can agree he has a rather distinctive look. But the physician had never seen Crockett in his life. Someone forged his signature. Someone posed as him.'

Branch eased his grip. 'Is it Walker then?' That had been his first suspicion.

'No,' said Thomas. 'I showed him Walker's photo. And photos of each of his hired gunmen. The physician was adamant. It was none of them.'

'Then who?'

'I don't know. But something isn't right here. I'm trying to obtain photos of all the expedition members to show him. The Helios corporation is proving less than accommodating. In fact, the Helios representative told me there's officially no such expedition.'

Branch made himself sit on the edge of the fiberglass bed rack. It was difficult to be

calm. What was this priest's game? Why was he playing detective with an Army physician? And placing phone calls in the middle of the night like this, trumpeting Ike's innocence? 'I don't have photos, either,' said Branch.

'It occurred to me that another source of images might be that video General

Sandwell played for us. It seemed to have a lot of faces.' So that was it. 'You want me to get it for you.'

'Perhaps the physician could pick his man from the crowd.'

'Then ask Sandwell.'

'I have. He's no more forthcoming than the corporation itself. In fact, I suspect he's something other than what he pretends to be.'

'I'll see what I can do,' Branch said. He didn't commit himself to the theory.

'Is there any chance of stopping the search for Crockett, or at least stalling it?'

'Negative. Hunter-killer teams have been inserted. They're going deep, a month each. Beyond recall.'

'Then we need to move quickly. Send that video to the senator's office.'

After he hung up, Branch sat in the semidarkness. He could smell himself, the plasticized flesh, the stink of his doubt. He was useless here. That was their intent. He was supposed to stay quietly parked at the surface and wait while they took care of business. Now Branch could not wait.

Obtaining the ClipGal videos for the priest might have its value. But even if the physician put his finger on the culprit, it was too late to reverse Sandwell's decision. Most of the long-range patrols had already passed beyond communication. Every hour put them deeper into the stone.

Branch got to his feet. No more hesitation. He had a duty. To himself. To Ike, who had no way to know what they had in mind for him.

Branch stripped off his uniform. It was like taking off his own skin; it could never be put on again after this.

What a peculiar thing a life was. Nearly fifty-two, he had spent more than three decades with the Army. What he was about to do should have seemed more difficult than this. Perhaps his fellow officers would understand and forgive him this excess. Maybe they'd just think he'd finally gone off his nut. Freedom was like that.

Naked, he faced the mirror, a dark stain upon the dark glass. His ruined flesh glistened like a pitted gem. He was sorry, suddenly, never to have had a wife or children. It would have been nice to leave a letter for someone, a last phone message. Instead he had this terrible companion, a broken statue in his looking glass.

He dressed in civilian clothing that barely fit, and took his rifle. Next morning, no one wanted to report Branch AWOL.

Finally, General Sandwell got the word. He was furious and did not hesitate to issue the order. Major Branch was in on the conspiracy with Ike, he declared. 'They're both traitors. Shoot them on sight.'

It was a monstrous big river down there.

– MARK TWAIN, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

16

BLACK SILK

The Equator, West

The paladin chased along the river's paths, devouring great distances. He had learned of yet more invasion, but this time along the ancient camino and nearing their final asylum. And so he had come to investigate this trespass, or destroy it, on behalf of the People.

He fought all memory. Suffered privations. Shed desire. Cast off grief. In service to the group, he gladly effaced his heart.

Some give up the world. For others, the world is taken away. Either way, grace comes in the moment. And so the paladin ran, seeking to erase all thoughts of his great love.

In her lifetime, the woman had borne him a child and learned her station and rightful duties and become mastered. Captivity had broken her mind and spirit. It had created a blank table for the Way to be written upon. Like him, she had recovered from the mutilations and initiations. On the merits of her nature, she had risen up from her lowly bestial status. He had helped create her, and, as happens, had come to love his creation. Now Kora was dead.

Stripped of clan, with his woman dead, he was rootless now and the world was vast. There were so many new regions and species to investigate, so many destinations calling to him. He could have forsaken the hadal tribes and gone deeper into the planet, or even returned to the surface. But he had chosen his path a long time ago. After many hours the ascetic tired. It became time to rest.

He left the trail racing. One hand touched the rock wall. With an intelligence all their own, his fingertips found random purchase. Part of his brain changed direction and told the hand to pull, and his feet went with him. He could have been running still, but suddenly he was climbing at a gallop. He scuttled diagonally up the arched sides to a cavity near mid-ceiling, alongside the river.

He smelled the cavity to know what else had burrowed here, and when. Satisfied, he drew himself into the stone bubble. He wedged his limbs tight, socketed his spine just so, and said in full his night prayer, part supplication, part superstition. Some of the words were in a language that parents and their parents and their parents had spoken. Words that Kora had taught their daughter. Hallowed be Thy name, he thought.

The paladin did not close his eyes. But all the while his heart was slowing. His breathing almost stopped. He grew still. My soul to keep . The river flowed beneath him. He went to sleep.

Voices woke him, ricocheting off the river's skin. Human.

The recognition came slowly. In recent years he had purposely tried to forget this sound. Even in the mouths of quiet ones, it had a jarring discord. Bone-breaking in its aggression. Barging everywhere, like sunlight itself. It was no wonder that more powerful animals ran from them. It shamed him that he had once been part of their race, even if it had been over a half-century ago.

Here, speech was different. To articulate was just that, to join things together. Every precious space – every tube, every burrow, every gap and hollow – relied on its connection to another space. Life in a maze depended upon linkage.

Listen to humans, and their very speech denied the construct. Space addled them. With nothing above their heads, no stone to cap the world, their thoughts went flying off into a void more terrible than any chasm. No wonder they were invading willy-nilly. Man had lost his mind to heaven.

Gradually he filled his lungs, but the water smell was too powerful. No chance of scent. That left him echoes to reckon with. He could have left long before they arrived. He waited.

They arrived in boats. No point guards, no discipline, no caution, no protection for their women. Their lights were a river where a trickle would have sufficed. He squinted through a tiny hole between his fingers, insulted by their extravagance.

They poured beneath his cavity without a single glance up. Not one of them! They were so sure of themselves. He lay still in the ceiling in plain view, a coil of limbs, contemptuous of their self-assurance.

Their rafts strung through the tunnel in a long, random mass. He quit counting heads to focus instead on their weak and strays.

There was little to recommend them. They were slow, with dulled senses, and out of synch. Each conducted himself with little reference to the group. Over the next hour he watched different individuals imperil the group's safety by brushing the walls or casting aside bits of uneaten food. It was more than sign they were leaving to predators. They were leaving the taste of themselves. Every time one rambled his hand along the rock, he painted human grease on the wall. Their piss gave off a pungent signature. Short of opening their veins and lying down, they could have done nothing more to invite their own slaughter.

The ones with tiny hurts did nothing to disguise their pain. They advertised their vulnerabilities, offered themselves as the easiest quarry. Their heads were too big, and their joints were askew at the hips and knees. He couldn't believe that he had been born like them. One changed little bandages on her feet and threw the old bandages into the water, where they washed to shore. He could smell her details from up here.

There were many women among them. That was the unbelievable part. Chattering and oblivious. Unguarded. Ripe women. In such a fashion, Kora had come to him in the darkness, long ago.

After they had passed deeper with the river's current, he waited an hour for his eyes to recover from their lights. Muscle by muscle, he released himself from the cavity. He hung by one arm from its slight lip, listening not so much for stragglers as for other predators, for there would surely be those. Content, he let go and landed on the trail.

In darkness he moved among their refuse, sampling it. He licked the foil of a candy wrapper, sniffed the rock where they had rubbed against it. He nosed at the female's bandages, then took them into his mouth. This was the taste of humans. He chewed. He trailed them again, running along old paths worn into the shore stone, reaching them as they camped. He watched.

Many of them talked or sang to themselves, and it was like hearing the inside of their minds. Sometimes his Kora had sung like that, especially to their daughter. Repeatedly, individuals would wander from camp and place themselves within his reach. He sometimes wondered if they had sensed his presence and were attempting to sacrifice themselves to him. One night he stole through their camp while they slept. Their bodies glowed in the darkness. A lone female started as he slid past, and stared directly at him. His visage seemed horrifying to her. He backed away and she lost his image and sank back into sleep. He was nothing more than a fleeting nightmare.

It was difficult to keep from harvesting one. But the time wasn't right, and there was no sense in frightening them at this early stage. They were heading deeper into the sanctuary all on their own, and he didn't know their rationale for coming here yet.

And so he ate beetles, careful to mash them with his tongue lest they crunch.

Day by day, the river became their fever.

They made a flotilla of twenty-two rafts roped together, some lashed side by side, others trailing singly far behind, for the sake of solitude or mental health or science experiments or clandestine lovemaking. The large pontoon boats had a ten-man capacity, including 1,500 pounds of cargo. The smaller boats they used as dinghies to transport passengers from one polyurethane island to another during the day, or for floating hospital beds when people got sick, or for ranger duty, rigged with a machine gun and one of the battery-powered motors. Ike was given the only sea kayak.

There was not supposed to be weather down here. There could be no wind, no rain, no seasons: scientifically unfeasible. The subplanet was hermetically sealed, a near vacuum, they'd been told, its thermostat locked at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, its atmosphere motionless.

No thousand-foot waterfalls. No dinosaurs, for Christ-sake. Most of all, there was not supposed to be light.

But there was all of that. They passed a glacier calving small blue icebergs into the river. The ceilings sometimes rained with monsoon weight. One of the mercenaries was bitten by a plate-armored fish unchanged since the age of trilobites.

With increasing frequency, they entered caverns illuminated by a type of lichen that ate rock. In its reproductive stage, apparently, the lichen extended a fleshy stalk, or ascocarp, with a positive and negative electrical charge. The result was light, which attracted flatworms by the millions. These were eaten, in turn, by mollusks that traveled on to new, unlit regions. The mollusks excreted lichen spores from their guts. The spores matured to eat the new rock. Light spread by inches through the darkness.

Ali loved it. What excited the botanists was not just the production of light energy, but the decomposition of rock, a lichen by-product. Decomposed rock was soil, which meant vegetation, and animals. The land of the dead was very much alive.

The geologists were elated. The expedition was about to leave the Nazca Plate and traverse beneath the East Pacific Rise. Here the Pacific Plate was just being born as freshly extruded rock, which steadily migrated west with a conveyor-belt motion. It would take 180 million years for the rock to reach the Asian margin, there to be devoured – subducted – back into the earth's mantle. They were going to see the entire Pacific plate geology, from birth to death.

In the third week of August, they passed through the rise between the roots of a nameless seamount, an ocean-floor volcano. The seamount itself sat a mile overhead, serviced by these ganglia reaching deep into the mantle for supplies of live magma. The riverine walls became hot.

Faces flushed. Lips cracked. Those still carrying Chap-stick even used it on their splitting cuticles. By the thirtieth hour, they knew what it was like to be roasted alive. Head draped with a red-and-white checkered cotton scarf, Ike warned them to keep covered. The NASA survival suits were supposed to wick their sweat to a second layer to circulate and cool. But the humidity inside their suits became unbearable. Soon everyone had stripped to underwear, even Ike in his kayak. Appendix scars, moles, birthmarks all went on display; later the revelations would fuel new nicknames.

Ali had never known thirst like this.

'How much longer?' a voice croaked from the line. Ike grinned. 'Drink,' he said.

They moved on, mouths open. The batteries of their boat motors had run down. They paddled listlessly, spooning at the river.

At one point the tunnel wall became so hot, it glowed dull red. They could see raw

magma through a gash opened in the wall. It arched and seethed like gold and blood, roiling in the planetary womb. Ali dared one glance and darted her face away and stroked on. Its hush was like a great geological lullaby.

The river looped around and through the volcano's searing root system. There were, as always, forks and false paths. Somehow, Ike knew which way to go.

The tunnel began to close on them. Ali was near the end of the line. Suddenly screams issued from the very back. She thought they were under attack.

Ike appeared, his kayak scooting upriver like a water bug. He passed Ali's raft, then stopped. The walls had plasticized and bulged in on the tunnel, confining the very last raft on its upriver side.

'Who are they?' Ike asked Ali and her boatload.

'Walker's guys,' someone answered. 'There were two of them.'

The shouting on the far side of the opening was anonymous. The hemorrhaged stone made a noise like a ship's ribs cracking. The outer sheath of stone splintered, throwing shrapnel.

Walker and his boat of men came paddling from lower down. The colonel assessed the situation. 'Leave them,' he said.

'But those are your men,' Ike said.

'There's nothing to be done. It's already too narrow to get their raft through. They know to retreat if they get cut off.' The soldiers in Walker's boats were lockjawed with fear, veins snaky from wrist to shoulder.

'Well, that won't do,' Ike said, and shot upriver.

'Get back here!' Walker shouted after him.

Ike darted his kayak through the narrowing channel. The walls were deforming by the minute. Part of his checkered scarf touched the walls and caught fire. The hair on his head smoked. He popped through the maw at full speed.

The sides bloated in behind him. The bottom ten feet of the opening fused shut with a kiss. A gap remained open near the ceiling, but it was easily nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit through there. No one could conceivably climb through.

'Ike?' called Ali.

It was as if he had just changed into solid rock.

The new wall quickly choked back the river. Even as Ali's boat of people sat there, the river's bottom grew more exposed, inch by inch. The corridor was filling with steam. It was going to be a race to keep ahead of the deprivation.

'We can't stay here,' someone said.

'Wait,' Ali commanded. She added, 'Please.'

They waited and the riverbed drained lower. In another few minutes their raft would be sitting upon bare stone.

Ali's cracked lips parted. God the Father, she prayed. Let this one go free.

It was not like her. True devotion was not quid pro quo. You never cut deals with God. Once, as a child, she had pleaded for her parents' return. Ever since, Ali had decided to let be what was. Thy will be done.

'Let him live,' she murmured.

The walls did not open. This was not a fairy tale. The stone stayed welded.

'Let's go,' said Ali.

Then they heard a different sound. Dammed on the far side, the river had built height. Abruptly, a jet of water shot through the molten aperture at the top.

'Look!'

Like Jonah being vomited from the whale, one, then two men came blasting from the hole. Sheathed in water, they were protected from the scalding rock and thrown clear into the lower river.

The two soldiers staggered downstream through the thigh-deep water, weaponless, burned, naked. But alive. The raft of scientists returned and pulled the two bleating,

shocked men onto their floor. 'Where's Ike?' Ali yelled to them, but their throats were too swollen to speak.

They looked to the hole of spouting water, and a shape sprang through the torrent. It was long and black with mottled gray, Ike's empty sea kayak. Next appeared his paddle. Ike came last.

He held onto the gunnel of his kayak, half cooked. When his strength returned, he emptied the craft of water and got himself in and came paddling down to them. He was burned, but whole, right down to his shotgun.

It had been the closest of calls, and he knew it. He took a deep breath, shook the water from his hair, and did his best to stop down the big grin. He looked each of them in the eye, last of all Ali.

'What are we waiting for?' he said.

Many hours later, the expedition finished its marathon beneath the seamount. They pulled onto a shoal of green basalt in cooling air. There was a small stream of clear water.

The two lucky soldiers were returned to Walker, naked. Their gratitude to Ike was obvious. The colonel's shame at abandoning them was like a dangerous cloud.

For the next twenty hours, people slept. When they woke, Ike had stacked some rocks to pool the stream for them to drink. Ali had never seen him so happy.

'You made them wait,' he said to her.

In full view of the others, he kissed her on the lips. Maybe that was the safest way he could think to do it. She went along with it, even blushing.

By now, Ali was beginning to recognize the archangel inside Ike's sausage skin of scars and wild tattooing. The more she trusted him, the more she did not. He had an esprit, an air of immortality. She could see how each brush with great risk would serve to feed it, and how eventually even a kiss might destroy him.

Naturally, they called the river Styx.

The slow current lofted them. Some days they barely dipped a paddle, drifting with the flow. Hundreds of miles of shoreline stretched by with elastic monotony. They named some of the more prominent landmarks, and Ali jotted the names down to enter onto her maps each night.

After a month of acclimation, their circadian rhythms were finally synched to the changeless night. Sleep resembled hibernation, profound crashes into dream, REMs practically shaking them. Initially they lapsed into ten-hour stretches, then twelve. Each time they closed their eyes, it seemed they slept longer. Finally their bodies settled on a communal norm: fifteen hours. After that much sleep, they would usually be good for a thirty-hour 'day.'

Ike had to teach them how to pace such a long waking cycle, otherwise they would have destroyed themselves with exhaustion. It took stronger muscles and thicker calluses and constant attention to respiration and food to stay mobile for twenty-four hours or more at a time.

If not for their watches, they would have sworn their biological clocks were the same as on the surface. There were many advantages to this new regimen. They were able to cover vastly more territory. Also, without the sun and moon to cue them, they began to live, in a sense, longer.

Time dilated. You could finish a five-hundred-page novel in a single sitting. They developed a craving for Beethoven and Pink Floyd and James Joyce, anything of magnum-opus length.

Ike tried to instill in them new awareness. The shapes of rocks, the taste of minerals, the holes of silence in a cavern: memorize it all, he said. They humored him. He knew his stuff, which took the burden off them. It was his job, not theirs. He went on trying. Someday you won't have your instruments and maps, he said. Or me. You'll

need to know where you are with your fingertips, by an echo receding. Some tried to emulate his quiet manner, others his unspoken authority with things violent. They liked how he spooked Walker's solemn gunmen.

That he had been a mountaineer was obvious in his economy and care. From his big stone walls in Yosemite and his Himalayan mountains, Ike had learned to take the journey one inch at a time. Long before the underworld ever came into his life, Ali realized, it was the climbing that had shaped Ike's tactile perceptions. It came naturally to him to read the world through his fingertips, and Ali liked to think it had given him an edge even on his first accidental descent from Tibet. The irony was that his talent for ascent had become his vehicle for the abyss.

Often, before the others woke each morning, Ali would see him flickering off upon the black water, not a riffle in his wake. At such times she wishfully imagined this was the real man within him. The sight of him slipping monk-like into the wilderness made her think of the simple force of prayer.

He quit using paint and simply blazed the wall with a pair of chemical candles and went on. They would float past his cold blue crosses glowing above the waters like a neon JESUS SAVES . They followed him through the apertures and rock meatus. He would be waiting on a scarp of olivine or reefs of iron, or sitting in his night-colored kayak, holding on to an outcrop. Ali liked him at peace.

One day they drifted around a bend and heard an unearthly sound, part whistle, part wind. Ike had found a primitive musical instrument left by some hadal. Made of animal bone, it had three holes on top and one on the bottom. They beached, and some of the flute players took turns trying to make it work for them. One got a trickle of Bach out, another a bit of Jethro Tull.

Then they gave it back to Ike, and he played what the flute was meant for. It was a hadal song, with clots of melody and measured rhythm. The alien sound spellbound them, even the soldiers. This was what moved the hadals? The syncopation, the cheeps and trills and sudden grunts, and finally a muffled shout: it was an earth song, complete with animal and water sounds and the rumble of quakes.

Ali was mesmerized, but appalled, too. More than the tattoos and scars, the bone flute declared Ike's captivity. It was not just his proficiency and memory of the song, but also his obvious love for it. This alien music spoke to the heart of him.

When Ike was done, they clapped uncertainly.

Ike looked at the bone flute as if he'd never seen such a thing, then tossed it into the river. When the others had left, Ali fished along the bottom and retrieved the instrument.

They made a sport of sighting hadal footpaths. Where the caverns narrowed and the shore vanished, they spied foot- and handholds traversing above the waterline, linking the riverside beaches. They found strands of crude chains fixed to the walls, rusting away. One night, failing to find a shore to camp upon, they tied to the chains and slept on the rafts. Perhaps hadal boatmen had used the lengths of chain to haul upriver, or hadals had clambered barefoot across the links. One way or another, the ancient thoroughfare had clearly been connected.

Where the river widened, sometimes sprawling hundreds of meters across, the water seemed to stop and they sat nearly becalmed. At other times the river coursed powerfully. You could not call rapids what they occasionally ran. The water had a density to it, and the cascades poured with Amazon-like torpor. Portaging was seldom necessary.

At the end of each 'day,' the explorers relaxed by small 'campfires' consisting of a single chemical candle laid on the ground. Five or six people would gather around to share its colored light. They would sit on rocks and tell stories or mull over their own thoughts.

The past became more explicit. They dreamed more vividly. Their storytelling grew

richer. One evening, Ali was consumed by a memory. She saw three ripe lemons on the wooden cutting board in her mother's kitchen, right down to the sunlight spangling off their pores. She heard her mother singing while they rolled pie dough in a storm of flour. Such images occurred to her more frequently, more vividly. Quigley, the team's psychiatrist, thought the distracting intensity of their memories might be a form of dementia or mild psychotic episode.

The tunnels and caves were very quiet. You could hear the hungry flipping of pages as people read the paperback novels circulating among them like rumors. The tap-tap of laptop keyboards went on for hours as they recorded data or wrote letters for transmission at the next cache. Gradually the candles would dim and the camp would sleep.

Ali's map grew more dreamlike. In lieu of a definite east-west orientation, she resorted to what artists call a vanishing point. That way, all the features on her chart had the same reference point, even if it was arbitrary. Not that they were lost, in general. In very broad terms, they knew exactly where they were, a mile beneath the ocean floor, moving west by southwest between the Clipperton and Galápagos fracture zones. On maps showing seafloor topography, the region above was a blank plain.

On foot they had averaged less than ten miles a day. In their first two weeks on the river, they floated ten times that, almost 1,300 miles. At this rate, if the river continued, they would reach the underbelly of Asia within three months.

The dark water was not quite dark; it had a faint pastel phosphorescence. If they kept their lights off, the river would surface from the blackness as a phantom serpent, vaguely emerald. One of the geochemists opened his pants and demonstrated how, in drinking the water, they now pissed streams of faint light.

Aided by the river's subtle luminescence, the patient ones like Ali were able to see perfectly well in the surface equivalent of near-night. Light that had once seemed necessary now hurt her eyes. Even so, Walker insisted on strong lights for guarding their flanks, which tended to disrupt the scientists' experiments and observations.

The scientists took to floating their rafts as far as possible from the soldiers' spotlights. No one thought twice about their growing segregation from the mercenaries until the evening of their camp of the mandalas.

It had been a short day, eighteen easy hours with few features to remark on. The small armada of rafts rounded a bend, and a spotlight picked out a pale, lone figure on a beach in the distance. It could only be Ike at a campsite he had found for them, and yet he didn't answer their calls. As they drew closer, they saw he was sitting facing the rock wall in a classic lotus position. He was on a shelf above the obvious camp.

'What's this crap?' groused Shoat. 'Hey, Buddha. Permission to land.'

They came on shore like an invasion party, swarming from their rafts onto dry land, securing their hold. Ike was forgotten as people ran about claiming flat spots for their sleeping places, or helped unload the rafts. Only after the initial flurry did they return their attention to him.

Ali joined the growing crowd of onlookers. Ike's back was to them. He was naked. He hadn't moved.

'Ike?' Ali said. 'Are you okay?'

His rib cage rose and fell so faintly, Ali could barely detect the movement. The fingers of one hand touched the floor. He was much thinner than Ali had imagined. He had the collarbones of a mendicant, not a warrior, but his nakedness was not the source of their awe.

He had once been tormented: whipped, carved, even shot. Long, thin lines of surgical scar tissue bracketed his upper spine where doctors had removed his famous vertebral ring. This whole canvas of pain had been decorated – vandalized – with ink.

In their waving lights, the geometric patterns and animal images and glyphs and text were animated on his flesh.

'For pity's sake.' A woman grimaced.

His wickerwork of ribs and embellished skin and scars looked like history itself, terrible events laid one over another. Ali could not get the thought out of her head: devils had handled him.

'How long's he been sitting like this?' someone asked. 'What's he doing?'

The crowd was subdued. There was something immensely powerful about this outcast. He had suffered enclosure and poverty and deprivation in ways they could not fathom. And yet that spine was as straight as a reed, that mind intent on transcending it all. Clearly he was at prayer.

Now they saw that the wall he was facing contained rows of circles painted onto the rock. Their lights bleached the circles faint and colorless. 'Hadal stuff,' a soldier said dismissively.

Ali went closer. The circles were filled with lightly drawn lines and scrawls, mandalas of some kind. She suspected that in darkness they would glow. But trying to glean information from them with so many lights on was useless.

'Crockett,' snapped Walker, 'get control of yourself.' Ike's strangeness was starting to frighten people, and Ali suspected the colonel was intimidated by the extent of Ike's mute suffering, as if it detracted further from his own authority.

When Ike did not move, he said, 'Cover that man.'

One of his men went forward and started to drape Ike's clothing over his shoulders.

'Colonel,' the soldier said, 'I think he might be dead. Come feel how cold he is.'

Over the next few minutes the physicians established that Ike had slowed his metabolism to a near standstill. His pulse registered less than twenty beats, his breathing less than three cycles per minute. 'I've heard of monks doing this,' someone said. 'It's some kind of meditation technique.'

The group drifted off to eat and sleep. Later that night, Ali went to check on him. It was just a courtesy, she told herself. She would have appreciated someone checking on her. She climbed the footholds to his shelf and he was still there, back erect, fingertips pressed to the ground. Keeping her light off, she approached him to drape his shirt across his shoulders, for it had fallen off. That was when she discovered the blood glazing his back. Someone else had visited Ike, and run a knife blade across the yoke of his shoulders.

Ali was outraged. 'Who did this?' she demanded in an undertone. It could have been a soldier. Or Shoat. Or a group of them.

His lungs suddenly filled. She heard the air slowly release through his nose. As in a dream, he said, 'It's all the same.'

*

When the woman parted from her group and went up a side chute away from the river, he thought she had gone to defecate. It was a racial perversity that the humans always went alone like this. At their moment of greatest vulnerability, with their bowels open and ankles trapped by clothing and clouds of odor spreading through the tunnel, just when they most needed their comrades gathered around for protection, each insisted on solitude.

But to his surprise, the female didn't void her bowels. Rather, she bathed.

She started by shedding her clothing. By the light of her headlamp, she brought her pubis to a lather with the soap bar and sleeved her palms around each thigh and ran them up and down her legs. She didn't come close to the fatted Venuses so dear to certain tribes he had observed. But neither was she bony. There was muscle in her buttocks and thighs. The pelvic girdle flared, a solid cup for childbearing. She emptied

a bottle over her shoulders and the water snaked along her contours. Right then, he determined to breed her.

Perhaps, he reasoned, Kora had died in order to make way for this woman. Or she was a consolation for Kora's death, provided by his destiny. It was even possible she was Kora, passed from one vessel to this next. Who could say? In search of a new home, souls were said to dwell in the stone, hunting ways through the cracks.

She had the unblemished flesh of a newborn. Her frame and long limbs were not without promise. Daily life could be severe, but the legs, especially, suggested an ability to keep up. He imagined the body with rings and paint and scars, once he had his way. If she survived the initiation period, he would give her a hadal name that could be felt and seen but never spoken, just as he had given many others names. Just as he had himself been given a name.

The acquisition could occur in several ways. He could lure her. He could seize her. Or he could simply dislocate one of her legs and bear her off. If all else failed, she would make good meat.

In his experience, temptation was most preferable. He was adroit, even artistic about it, and his status among hadals reflected it. Several times, near the surface, he had managed to entice small groups into his handling. Ensnare one, and she – or he – could sometimes be used to draw others. If it was a wife, her husband sometimes followed. A child generally guaranteed at least one parent. Religious pilgrims were easy. It was a game for him.

He stayed inert in the shadows, listening for others who might have been drawn here, human or otherwise. Assured of their seclusion, he finally made his move. In English.

'Hello?' He lofted the words furtively. He did nothing to disguise his desire.

She had turned for a second bottle of water, and at his voice she paused. Her head rotated left and right. The word had come from behind, but she was judging more than its direction. He liked her quickness of mind, her ability to sift the opportunities as well as the dangers.

'What are you doing out there?' the woman demanded. She was sure of herself. She made no attempt to cover herself. She faced upslope, nude, overt, blazing white. Her nakedness and beauty were tools for her.

'Watching,' he said. 'I've been watching you.'

Something in her carriage – the line of her neck, the arch of her spine – accepted the voyeurism. 'What do you want?'

'What do I want?' What would she want to hear so deep in the earth? He was reminded of Kora. 'The world,' he said. 'A life. You.'

She took it in. 'You're one of the soldiers.'

He let her own desires pronounce her. She had been watching the soldiers watch her, he realized. She had fantasized about them, though probably no one of them in particular. For she had not asked his name, only his occupation. His anonymity appealed to her. It would be less complicating. Very probably she had gone off alone like this hoping to lure just such a one here.

'Yes,' he said. He did not lie to her. 'I was a soldier once.'

'So, are you going to let me see you?' she asked, and he could tell it was not a great need. The unknown was more primary. Good lassie, he thought.

'No,' he said. 'Not yet. What if you told?'

'What if I told?' she asked.

He could smell her change. The potent smell of her sex was beginning to fill the small chamber.

'They would kill me,' he said. She turned out the light.

Ali could tell that hell was starting to get to them.

This was Jonah's vista, the beast's gut as hollowed earth. It was the basement of their souls. As children they had all learned it was forbidden to enter this place, short of God's damnation. Yet here they were, and it scared them.

Perhaps not unnaturally, it was her they began to turn to. Men and women, scientists and soldiers, began seeking her out to make their confessions. Freighted with myths, they wanted out from their burden of sins. It was a way of keeping their sanity. Strangely, she was not prepared for their need.

It was always done singly. One of them would drift back or catch her alone in camp. Sister, they would murmur. A minute before, they had called her Ali. But then they would say Sister, and she would know what they wanted of her: to become a stranger to them, a loving stranger, nameless, all-forgiving.

'I'm not a priest,' Ali told them. 'I can't absolve you.'

'You're a nun,' they would say, as if the distinction were meaningless. And then it would start, the recitation of fears and regrets, their weaknesses and rancor and vendettas, their appetites and perversions. Things they dared not speak aloud to one another, they spoke to her.

In ecumenical parlance, it was now called reconciliation. Their hunger for it astonished her. At times, she felt trapped by their autobiographies. They wanted her to protect them from their own monsters.

Ali first noticed Molly's condition during an afternoon poker game. It was just the two of them in a small raft. Molly showed a pair of aces. That was when Ali saw her hands.

'You're bleeding,' she said.

Molly's smile wavered. 'No big deal. It comes and goes.'

'Since when?'

'I don't know.' She was evasive. 'A month ago.'

'What happened? This looks terrible.'

There was a hole scraped in the flesh of each palm. Some of the meat looked cored out. It wasn't an incision, but it wasn't an ulcer, either. It looked eaten by acid, except acid would have cauterized the wound.

'Blisters,' said Molly. Her eyes had developed dark circles. She kept her scalp shaved short out of habit, but it no longer suggested bountiful good health.

'Maybe one of the docs should take a look,' Ali said. Molly closed her fists. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'

'I was just concerned,' said Ali. 'We don't have to talk about it.'

'You were implying something's wrong.' Molly's eyes began to bleed.

Taking no chances, the team's physicians quarantined the two women in a raft tugged a hundred yards behind the rest.

Ali understood. The possibility of some exotic disease had the expedition in a state of terror. But she resented Walker's soldiers watching them with sniperscopes. She was not allowed a walkie-talkie to communicate with the group because Shoat said they would only use it to beg and wheedle. By the morning of the fourth day, Ali was exhausted.

A quarter-mile to the front, a dinghy detached from the flotilla and started back toward her. Time for the daily house call. The doctors were wearing respirators and paper scrubs and latex gloves. Ali had called them cowards yesterday, and was sorry now. They were doing their best.

They drifted close and nodded to Ali. One flashed his light on Molly. Her beautiful lips were cracked. Her lush body was withering. The ulcerations had spread over her body. She turned her head from their light.

One of the physicians came into Ali's boat. She got into theirs, and the other doctor

paddled her a short distance away to talk.

'We can't make sense of it,' he said. His voice was muffled by the respirator. 'We did the blood test again. It could still turn out to be an insect venom, or an allergic reaction. Whatever it is, you don't have it. You don't have to be out here with her.'

Ali ignored the temptation. No one else would volunteer, they were too frightened. And Molly could not be alone. 'Another transfusion,' Ali said. 'She needs more blood.'

'We've given her five pints already. She's like a sieve. We may as well pour it into the water.'

'You've given up?'

'Of course not,' the doctor said. 'We'll all keep fighting for her.'

The doctor paddled her back to the quarantine raft. Ali felt cold and wooden. Molly was going to die.

As they paddled away, the physicians discarded their protective garments. They tore the paper suits from their limbs, stripped away their latex gloves, and left them like skins floating on the current.

Molly's wounds deepened. She began to sweat a rank grease through her pores. They put her on antibiotics, but that didn't help. A fever set in. Ali could feel its heat just by leaning across her.

Another time, Ali opened her eyes and Ike was sitting in his gray and black kayak alongside the quarantine raft, for all the world a killer whale bobbing on slow currents. He was not wearing the requisite scrubs and respirator, and his disregard was a small miracle to Ali. He tied his kayak to them and slipped from it onto the raft.

'I came to see you,' he said to her. Molly lay asleep between Ali's legs.

'It's in her lungs,' Ali reported. 'She's suffocating on fungus.'

Ike slipped one hand beneath Molly's cropped head and raised it gently and bent down. Ali thought he meant to kiss her. Instead, he sniffed at her open mouth. Her teeth were stained red. 'It won't be long,' he said, as if that were a mercy. 'You should say prayers for her.'

'Oh, Ike,' sighed Ali. Suddenly she wanted to be held, but could not bring herself to ask for it. 'She's too young. And this isn't the right place. She asked me what will happen to her body.'

'I know what to do,' he said, and did not elaborate. 'Has she told you how this happened?'

'No one knows,' said Ali.

'She does,' he said.

Later, Molly confessed. There was none of that Sister, Sister for her. At first it seemed like a joke. 'Hey, Al,' she opened. 'Wanna hear something off the wall?'

Small spasms clenched and unclenched the woman's long body. She strained to get control, at least from the neck up.

'Only if it's good,' Ali kidded. You had to be like that with Molly. They were holding hands.

'Well,' said Molly, and her small grin flickered on, then off. 'About a month ago, I

guess, I started this thing.'

'Thing?' said Ali.

'Yeah. You know, what do they call it? Sex.'

'I'm listening.' Ali waited for a punchline. But Molly's eyes were desperate.

'Yes,' whispered Molly. Now Ali understood.

'I thought he was a soldier,' Molly said. 'That first time.'

Ali let Molly orchestrate the tale. Sin was burial. Salvation was excavation. If Molly needed help with the shovel work, Ali would step in.

'He was in the shadows,' said Molly. 'You know the colonel's rules against soldiers fraternizing with us infidels. I had no idea which one he was. I don't know what came

over me. Pity, I guess. I pitied him. So I gave him darkness, I let him be anonymous. I

let him have me.'

Ali was not at all shocked. Taking a nameless soldier seemed perfectly Molly-like. Her bravado was legend. 'You made love,' said Ali.

'We fucked,' Molly corrected. 'Hard. Okay?' Ali waited. Where was the guilt?

'It wasn't the only time,' said Molly. 'Night after night, I went out into the darkness, and he was always there, waiting for me.'

'I understand,' said Ali, but did not. She saw no sin here. Nothing to reconcile.

'Finally it was like curiosity killed the cat. Who's Prince Charming, right? I had to know.' Molly paused. 'So one night I turned on my light.'

'Yes?'

'I shouldn't have done that.' Ali frowned.

'He wasn't one of Walker's soldiers.'

'One of the scientists,' said Ali.

'No.'

'Well?' Whom did that leave?

Molly's jaw tightened with the fever. She began shivering.

After a minute, Molly opened her eyes. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I've never seen him before.'

Ali accepted that at the level of denial. If Molly was hiding from her lover's secret identity, then it seemed to be part of Ali's task as confessor, in this case, to ferret out the incubus. 'You know, that's impossible,' she said. 'There are no strangers in this group. Not after four months.'

'I know. That's what I'm saying.' She was, Ali saw, horrified.

'Describe him to me,' Ali said. 'Before your light.' Together they would build the character. And then turn on the light.

'He smelled... different. His skin. When he was in my mouth. He tasted different. You know how a man has this taste? White or black or brown, it doesn't matter. His juices. His tongue. The breath from his lungs. They have this... flavor.'

Ali listened. Clinically.

'He didn't. My midnight man. It wasn't like he was a blank. But it was different. Like he had more earth in his blood. Darkness. I don't know.'

That didn't help much. 'What about his body? Was there anything that distinguished him? Body hair? The size of his muscles?'

'While I had him between my legs?' Molly said. 'Yeah. I could feel his scars. He's been through the wringer. Old wounds. Broken bones. And someone had cut patterns into his back and arms.'

There was only one among them like Molly had just described. It occurred to Ali that Molly might be trying to hide his identity from her. 'And when you turned on the light –'

'My first thought was a wild animal. He had stripes and spots. And pictures and lettering.'

'Tattoos,' Ali said. Why prolong it? But this was Molly's confession.

Molly nodded yes. 'It all happened in an instant. He knocked the light from my hand. Then he disappeared.'

'He was afraid of your light?'

'That's what I thought. Later I remembered something. In that first second, I said a name out loud. Now I think it was the name that made him run. But he wasn't afraid.'

'What name, Molly?'

'I was wrong, Ali. It was the wrong name. They just looked alike.'

'Ike,' stated Ali. 'You said his name because it was him.'

'No.' Molly paused.

'Of course it was.'

'It wasn't. But I wish to God it had been. Don't you see?'

'No. You thought it was him. You wanted it to be him.'

'Yes,' Molly whispered. 'Because what if it wasn't?' Ali hesitated.

'That's what I'm saying,' Molly groaned. 'What I had between my legs...' She winced at the memory. 'Someone's out there.'

Ali lifted her head back suddenly. 'A hadal! But why didn't you tell us before now?' Molly smiled. 'So you could tell Ike?' she said. 'And then he would have gone hunting.'

'But look,' said Ali. She swept her hand at the ruination. 'Look what he gave to you.'

'You don't get it, kid.'

'Don't tell me. You fell in love.'

'Why not? You have.' Molly closed her eyes. 'Anyway, he's gone. Safe from us. And now you can't tell anyone, can you, Sister?'

Ike was there for the end.

Molly gasped with birdlike breaths. Grease sweated from her pores. Ali kept washing her body with water scooped from the river.

'You should rest,' Ike said. 'You've done your best.'

'I don't want to rest.'

He took the cup from her. 'Lie down,' he said. 'Sleep.'

When she woke hours later, Molly was gone. Ali was groggy with fatigue. 'Did the docs come for her?' she asked hopefully.

'No.'

'What do you mean?'

'She's gone, Ali. I'm sorry.'

Ali got quiet. 'Where is she, Ike? What have you done?'

'I put her in the river.'

'Molly? You didn't.'

'I know what I'm doing.'

For an instant, Ali suffered a dreadful loneliness. It should not have happened this way. Poor Molly! Doomed to drift forever in this world. No burial? No ceremony? No chance for the rest of us to say farewell? 'Who gave you that choice?'

'I was trying to make things easier for you.'

'Tell me one thing,' she said coldly. 'Was Molly dead when you put her in?'

She wanted to punish him for his strangeness, and the question genuinely shook him. 'Murder?' he said. 'Is that what you think?'

Before her eyes, Ike seemed to fall away from her. A look crossed his face, the horror of a freak faced with his own mirror.

'I didn't mean that,' she said.

'You're tired,' he said. 'You've had enough.'

He got into his kayak and took the paddle and pulled at the river. The darkness covered him. She wondered if this was how it felt to go mad.

'Please don't leave me alone,' she murmured.

After a minute she felt a tug. The rope came taut. The raft began moving. Ike was towing her back to human society.

INCIDENT AT RED CLOUD

Nebraska

The third time the witches started fiddling with him, Evan didn't fight.

He just lay as still as he could, and tried not to smell them. One held him around the chest from behind while the others took turns working at him. She kept whispering something in his ear. It was mumbo-jumbo, in circles. He thought of old Miss Sands, with her rosary beads. But this one had breath that smelled like roadkill.

Evan locked his eyes on the stars spread above the cornfield. Fireflies meandered between constellations. With all his might, he fastened on the North Star. Whenever they let him loose, that would be his beacon home again. In his mind he saw the back door, the stairs, the door to his room, the quilt upon his bed. He would wake in the morning. This would be nothing but a bad dream.

The night lay as black as engine oil. There was no moon, and the yard lights lay a mile away, barely a twinkle between the stalks. The first half hour his kidnappers had been mere silhouettes, dark cutouts against the stars. They were naked. He could feel their flesh. Smell it. Their titties were long and tubular, like in the old National Geographics lying boxed in the cellar. Their ratty hair moved like black snakes against the stars.

Evan was pretty sure they weren't American. Or Mexican. He knew a little Spanish from the seasonal workers, and the old lady's chant wasn't that. He decided they were witches. A cult. You heard about such things.

It was a comfort of sorts. He'd never given much thought to witches. Vampires, yes. And the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, and werewolves, and flesh-eating zombies. And hadals, of course, though this was Nebraska, so safe the militias had disbanded. But witches? Since when did witches hurt you?

And yet they scared him. He scared himself. In his whole eleven years of life, Evan had never imagined such feelings down there. What they were doing felt good. But it was forbidden. If his mom and dad ever found out, they'd bust.

Part of him felt this wasn't fair. He shouldn't have been so late bicycling home. Still, it wasn't his fault the witches had jumped up along the county road. He'd pedaled away as fast as a fox, but even afoot they'd run him down. It wasn't his fault they'd brought him to the middle of this field to do things to him.

The problem was, he'd been raised to be accountable. It was his pleasure. And it was dirty. Sniggering about boobies and panties after school was one thing. This was different. Staying late after baseball was his fault. And taking pleasure, that was really his fault. They were gonna bust.

In the initial moments of stripping him bare, the witches had ripped his shirt, shredded it. Evan couldn't reconcile that. It was a new shirt, and the destruction scared him more than their animal strength or the hunger they'd gone at him with. His mom and sisters were forever mending clothes and ironing them. They would never have ripped a shirt to tatters and tossed it in the dirt. Or done these other things. Never.

He didn't know exactly what was happening to him. It was the dirty thing you weren't supposed to talk about, that was plain enough. Copulation. But what precisely the act consisted of, that was the mystery. In daylight, he could have seen what was involved. This was more like wrestling with a blindfold on. So far, most of his information had come through touch and smell and sounds. The newness and power of

the sensation confused him. He was ashamed to have cried out in front of women, mortified that it involved his unit.

They'd done it twice now, like milking a cow. The first time, Evan had been alarmed. There was no fighting off the bodily release. It felt like heat shooting out of his spine. Afterward, the mess lay as hot and thick as blood on his belly and chest.

Afraid they'd be disgusted with him, Evan started to apologize. But the whole bunch of them had thronged around him, dipping their fingers into his wet spots. It was almost like church. But instead of crossing themselves, they smeared it between their legs. So that's how it's done, he thought.

It went beyond his whole world of knowledge. For some reason, Evan was reminded of a science video he'd seen, in which a praying mantis female ate her mate when the act was over. That was reproduction. Until now he'd been mystified by the terrible consequences of doing it. Now the notion of punishment following the sin made perfect sense. No wonder people did it in the darkness.

Evan wanted them to quit, but secretly he didn't, too. Certainly the cluster of night women wanted more. After the first time, thinking it was over, he'd asked, 'Can I please go home now?' His words had agitated them. If grasshoppers or beetles could talk, this was how they'd sound, clicking and muttering and smacking their lips. It didn't make any sense to him, but he got the gist. He was staying. They went at him again. And again.

This third time was proving troublesome. Maybe an hour passed. Their rubbing and yanking and spitting on him didn't seem to be working. He sensed their frustration. The one holding him from behind went on with her singsong chanting and rocking.

'I'll be a good boy,' he assured her in an exhausted whisper. She patted his cheek with a callused palm. It was like being petted with a stick.

Evan genuinely wanted to help out. What they didn't know was that he had an arithmetic test in the morning. He was supposed to be studying.

Gradually his eyes adjusted to the night. Their pale skin took on a faint glow. He could begin to see them. He and his buddies had all seen TV shows with bikini girls, and several had big brothers with Playboys. It wasn't as if he had no clue what a woman's body looked like. But these women had no sunshine in them, no joy. They were all business. Evan felt like he was the center of a farm task, like the cow. Or like the hogs his dad butchered each winter. Like a beast at harvesting. They'd been at him for hours.

There might have been five of them, or as many as a dozen. They kept leaving and returning. The witches moved with watery grace, close to the ground, as if the sky were a weight. The cornstalks rustled. They orbited him like bleached white moons. Their stench ebbed, then surged.

They took turns, arguing over him in insect syllables. Each seemed to have a different idea about manipulating him. Evan had grown used to the one by his head. She seemed to be the oldest. Her chest wall had the feel of a washboard against his ear. Evan grew passive against her, and the arm relaxed. She wasn't unkind, just firm. Her skinny arm was a marvel, a few sinews covered with skin, but as strong as baling wire. When some of the others slapped or prodded him, she clucked at them, annoyed. One, smaller than the rest, was taking lessons from the others. Evan decided she was the youngest, maybe his own age. They urged her to mount him a couple of times, but she was awkward and Evan didn't know what was expected of him. She seemed as frightened as he was. He gravitated to her in his thoughts.

He couldn't see their faces exactly, and didn't want to. This way he could imagine himself surrounded by neighbor ladies and his teachers and some of the girls at school. He added the pretty waitress at the Surf and Turf downtown. He attached familiar masks to these benighted faces looming overhead, and it consoled him. It let him have names for each.

What ruined his conjuring was their smell. Even Mrs. Peterson, the halfwit who sat in the park all day, would never have let herself get foul like this. These women stank. They were rancid and unwashed, and smelled worse than a stockyard. The dung crusting their flanks had the grassy sweetness of cow manure. When they muttered at him, he could smell deep inside their throats.

He was greasy with their juices and saliva. That was another shock, how wet they were between their legs. Nothing in his friends' centerfolds had prepared him for that. Or for their greed and hunger. Periodically one dipped her head, and it felt warm and soft down there, like the hot compresses his grandma used to make.

Their hands and fingers were as dry as lizard skin. They'd rubbed him raw, but the hurt was largely numbed by his fatigue. He lay in their center, and it seemed the stars wheeled in a great circle over him.

Crickets sang. An owl swooped by. Evan suddenly wondered if the witches might be the reason so many dogs and cats had disappeared over the last month. Maybe the animals had run off. Another thought came to him. What if they'd been eaten? A gust of wind rattled the corn rows. He shivered.

The witches entered a rhythm around him. It was like a dance, though they were kneeling or hunkered down on their heels. He set himself adrift on the pulse of their motions, the chant, their hands and mouths. Evan grew hopeful when several whispered approvingly. All at once he found himself approaching that same loss of control as before. He tried not to grunt, but it was too much.

Abruptly the blood heat of liquid spattered across his chest. Evan winced at the salty spray. Tasted it. And frowned.

This time it was the heat of real blood.

In the same instant, a rifle shot ruptured the quiet. Something, a body, flopped heavily across Evan's thighs.

'Evan, boy,' a voice commanded across the corn rows. His father! 'Lie down.'

The sky cracked open. A ragged volley of deer rifles, shotguns, varmint pistols, and old revolvers shattered the constellations. Bullets slapped apart the corn leaves. The gunfire rattled like popcorn.

Evan lay still on his back. It was like drifting on a raft. Staring up at the Milky Way. What he would remember most was not the shooting, or the men yelling, or the witches scattering. Not the headlights careening through the walls of green corn, or the pitchfork lifting that young hadal girl into the wildly lit, raddled sky, where he saw the slight stub of a tail on her rump and her grub-like pallor and her face, the chimp's eyes, the yellow teeth. Not the rack-rack of shotgun shells getting chambered. Not his father standing high overhead and lifting his head up to the stars to bellow like a bull. No. What he would remember was the old woman by his head, how just before they shot the bones from her face, she bent down and kissed him by the ear. It was the kind of thing a grandma did.

The Aztecs said that... as long as one of them was left he would die fighting, and that we would get nothing of theirs because they would burn everything or throw it into the water.

– HERNÁN CORTÉS, Third Dispatch to King Charles V of Spain

17

FLESH

West beneath

the Clipperton Fracture Zone

Following Molly's death, they cast lower on the river, anxious to resume their sense of scientific control. The banks narrowed, the water quickened. Because they moved faster, they had more time to reach their destination, which was the next cache in early September. They began to explore the littoral regions bordering the river, sometimes staying in one place for two or three days.

The region had once abounded with life. In a single day they discovered thirty new plants, including a type of grass that grew from quartz and a tree that looked like something out of Dr. Seuss, with a stem that drew gases from the ground and synthesized them into metallic cellulose. A new cave orchid was named for Molly. They found crystallized animal remains. The entomologists caught a monstrous cricket, twenty-seven inches long. The geologists located a vein of gold as thick as a finger.

In the name of Helios, who held the patent rights on all such discoveries, Shoat collected their reports on disc each evening. If the discovery had special value, like the gold, he would issue a chit for a bonus payment. The geologists got so many they started using them like currency among the others, buying pieces of clothing, food, or extra batteries from those who had extras.

For Ali, the most rewarding thing was further evidence of hadal civilization. They found an intricate system of acequias carved into the rock to transport water from miles upriver into the hanging valley. In an overhang partway up a cliff lay a drinking cup made from a Neanderthal cranium. Elsewhere, a giant skeleton – possibly a human freak – lay in shackles solid with rust. Ethan Troy, the forensic anthropologist, thought the deeply incised geometric patterns on the giant's skull had been made at least a year before the prisoner's death. Judging by the cut marks around the entire skull, it seemed the giant had been scalped and kept alive as a showcase for their artwork.

They collected around a central panel emblazoned with ochre and handprints. In the center was a representation of the sun and moon. The scientists were astonished. 'You mean to say they worshiped the sun and moon? At fifty-six hundred fathoms!'

'We need to be cautious,' Ali said. But what else could this mean? What glorious heresy, the children of darkness worshiping light.

Ali got one photo of the sun and moon iconography, no more. When her flash billowed, the entire wall of pictographs – its pigments and record – lost color, turned pale, then vanished. Ten thousand years of artwork turned to blank stone.

Yet with the animals and handprints and sun and moon images burned away, they discovered a deeper set of engraved script.

A two-foot-long patch of letters had been cut into the basalt. In the abyssal shadows, the incisions were dark lines upon dark stone. They approached the wall tentatively, as if this too might disappear.

Ali ran her fingers along the wall. 'It might have been carved to be read. Like

Braille.'

'That's writing?'

'A word. A single word. See this character here.' Ali traced a y-tailed mark, then a backward E. 'And this. They're not capped. But look at the linear form. It's got the stance and the stroke of ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. Paleo-Hebrew, possibly. Probably older. Old Hebrew. Phoenician, whatever you want to call it.'

'Hebrew? Phoenician? What are we dealing with, the lost tribes of Israel?'

'Our ancestors taught hadals how to write?' someone said.

'Or else hadals taught us,' Ali said.

She could not take her fingertips from the word. 'Do you realize,' she whispered,

'man has been speaking for at least a hundred thousand years. But our writing goes back no further than the upper Neolithic. Hittite hieroglyphics. Australian aboriginal art. Seven, eight thousand years, tops.

'This writing has got to be at least fifteen or twenty thousand years old. That's two or three times older than any human writing ever found. These are linguistic fossils. We could be closing in on the Adam and Eve of language. The root origin of human speech. The first word.'

Ali was enraptured. Looking around, she could tell the others didn't understand. This was big. Human or not, it doubled or tripled the timeline of the mind. And she had no one to celebrate it with! Settle down, she told herself. For all her travels, Ali's was a paper world of linguists and bishops, of library carrels and yellow legal pads. She had occupied a quiet place that didn't allow celebration. And yet, just once, Ali wanted someone to knock the head off a bottle of champagne and douse her with bubbles, someone to gather her up for a wet kiss.

'Hold up your pen beside the letters for scale,' one of the photographers told her.

'I wonder what it says,' someone said.

'Who knows?' Ali said. 'If Ike's right, if this is a lost language, then even the hadals don't know. Look how they had it buried under more primitive images. I think it's lost all meaning to them.'

Returning to their rafts, for some reason, the name circled around on her. Ike. Her slow dancer.

On September 5, they found their first hadals. Reaching a fossilized shore, they unloaded their rafts and hauled gear to high ground and started to prepare for night. Then one of the soldiers noticed shapes within the opaque folds of flowstone.

By shining their lights at a certain angle, they could see a virtual Pompeii of bodies laminated in several inches to several feet of translucent plastic stone. They lay in the positions they had died in, some curled, most sprawled. The scientists and soldiers fanned out across the acres of amber, slipping now and then on the slick face.

Pieces of flint still jutted from wounds. Some had been strangled with their own entrails or decapitated. Animals had worked through all of them. Limbs were missing, chest and belly walls had been plundered. No question, this had been the end of a whole tribe or township.

Under Ali's sweeping headlamp, their white skin glittered like quartz crystal. For all the heavy bone in their brows and cheeks, and despite the obvious violence of their end, they were remarkably delicate.

H. hadalis – this variety, at any rate – looked faintly apelike, but with very little body hair. They had wide negroid noses and full lips, somewhat like Australian aborigines, but were bleached albino by the perpetual night. There were a few slight beards, little more than wispy goatees. Most looked no older than thirty. Many were children.

The bodies were scarred in ways that had nothing to do with sports or surgery: no appendectomy scars in this group, no neat smile lines around the knees or shoulders. These had come from camp accidents or hunts or war. Broken bones had healed crookedly. Fingers had been lopped off. The women's breasts hung slack, thinned and

stretched and unbeautiful, basic tools like their sharpened fingernails and teeth or their wide flattened feet or their splayed big toes for climbing.

Ali tried integrating them into the family of modern man. It did not help that they had horns and calcium folds and lumps distorting their skulls. She felt strangely bigoted. Their mutations or disease or evolutionary twist – whatever – kept her at arm's length. She was sorry to be walking on them, yet glad to have them safely encased in stone. Whatever had been done to them, she imagined they would have been capable of doing to her.

That night they discussed the bodies lying beneath their camp.

It was Ethan Troy who solved their mystery. He had managed to chip loose portions of the bodies, mostly of children, and held them out for the rest to see. 'Their tooth enamel hasn't grown properly. It's been disrupted. And all the kids have rickets and other long-limb malformations. And you only have to look to see their swollen stomachs. Massive starvation. Famine. I saw this once in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. You never forget.'

'You're suggesting these are refugees?' someone asked. 'Refugees from who?'

'Us,' said Troy.

'You're saying man killed them?'

'At least indirectly. Their food chain was ruptured. They were fleeing. From us.'

'Nuts,' scoffed Gitner, lying on his back on a sleeping pad. 'In case you missed it, those are Stone Age points sticking out of them. We had nothing to do with it. These guys got killed by other hadals.'

'That's beside the point,' said Troy. 'They were depleted. Famished. Easy prey.'

'You're right,' Ike said. He didn't often enter group discussions, but he had been following this one intently. 'They're on the move. The whole world of them. This is their diaspora. They've scattered. Gone deep to avoid our coming.'

'What's it matter?' said Gitner.

'They're hungry,' said Ike. 'Desperate. That matters.'

'Ancient history. This bunch died a long time ago.'

'Why do you say that?'

'The accretion of flowstone. They're covered in it. At least five hundred years'

worth, probably more like five thousand. I haven't run my calculations yet.' Ike went over to him. 'Let me borrow your rock hammer,' he said.

Gitner shoved it into Ike's hand. These days he seemed chronically fed up. Their endless debate about hadal links to humanity gnawed at what little good humor he'd ever had. 'Do I get it back?' he said.

'Just a loaner,' Ike said, 'while we sleep.' He walked over and placed it flat next to the wall and walked away.

In the morning, Gitner had to borrow another hammer to cut his free. Overnight the hammer had been covered with a sixteenth of an inch of clear flowstone.

It was a matter of simple arithmetic. The refugees had been slain no more than five months ago. The expedition was following the trail of their flight. And it was very near to fresh.

Even the mercenaries had come to depend on Ike's infallible sense of danger. Somehow the word got around about his climbing days, and they nicknamed him El Cap for the monolith in Yosemite. It was a dangerous attachment, and it annoyed Ike even more than it annoyed their commander. Ike didn't want their trust. He dodged them. He stayed out of camp more and more. But Ali could see his effect, all the same. Some of the boys had tattooed their arms and faces like Ike's. A few started going barefoot or slinging their rifles across their backs. Walker did what he could to stem the erosion. When one of his ghetto warriors got caught sitting cross-legged at prayer, Walker put him on sentry duty for a week.

Ike resumed his habit of staying a day or so ahead of the expedition, and Ali missed his eccentricities. She woke early, as always, but no longer saw his kayak plying out into the tubular wilderness while the camp still slept. She had no proof he was growing more remote from them, or her. But his absences made her anxious, especially as she was falling asleep at night. He had opened a gap in her.

On September 9 they detected the signal for Cache II. They had crossed the international date line without knowing it. They reached the site, but there were no cylinders awaiting them. Instead they found a heavy steel sphere the size of a basketball lying on the ground. It was attached to a cable dangling from the ceiling a hundred feet overhead.

'Hey, Shoat,' someone demanded. 'Where's our food?'

'I'm sure there's an explanation,' Shoat said, but was clearly baffled.

They unbolted the curved casing. Inside, seated in poly-foam, was a small keypad with a note. 'To the Helios Expedition: Supply cylinders are ready for penetration at your prompt. Key in the first five numerals of pi, in reverse, then follow with pound sign.' They guessed it was a precaution to safeguard their food and supplies from any possible hadal piracy.

Shoat needed someone to write down pi for him, then keyed it in. He tapped the pound key, and a small red light changed to green. 'I guess we wait,' he said.

They made camp on the bank and took turns spotlighting the underside of the drill hole. Shortly after midnight, one of Walker's sentinels called out. Ali heard the scraping of metal. Everyone gathered and shone their lights upward, and there it was, a silvery capsule sinking toward them on a glittering thread. It was like watching a rocketship land. The group cheered.

The cylinder sizzled on touching the river, then slowly lowered onto its side and the cable looped in a tangle in the water. Its metal sheath was blued with scorch marks. They mobbed it, only to fall back from its heat.

None of the penetrators at Cache I had been seared this way. It meant the cylinder had passed through some kind of volcanic zone, probably a tendril of the Magellan Seamounts. Ali could smell the sulfur smoking on its skin.

'Our supplies,' someone lamented. 'They're getting cooked inside.'

They made a bucket brigade, passing plastic bottles up and down the line to splash on the cylinder. The metal steamed, colors pulsing from one thermal complexion to another. Gradually it cooled enough for them to cog off the bolts. They got their knives into the seams and pried the hatch loose and threw open the doorway.

'God, what's that stink?'

'Meat. They sent us meat?'

'The heat must have started a fire in there.'

Lights stabbed at the interior. Ali looked over shoulders, and it was hard to see for the smoke and stench and heat pouring through the hatch.

'Good Lord, what have they sent us?'

'Are those people?' she asked.

'They look like hadals.'

'How can you say that? They're too burned to tell,' someone said. Walker pushed to the front, Ike and Shoat right behind him.

'What is this, Shoat?' Walker demanded. 'What is Helios up to?'

Shoat was rattled. 'I have no idea,' he said. For once Ali believed him.

There were three bodies inside, strapped one above the other in a makeshift cradle of nylon webbing. While the cylinder was vertical, they would have been suspended in the harnesses like smoke jumpers.

'Those are uniforms,' someone said. 'Look here, U.S. Army.'

'What do we do? They're all dead.'

'Unbuckle them. Get them out.'

'The buckles are melted shut. We'll have to cut them out. Let it cool off some more.'

'What were they doing in there?' one of the physicians wondered to Ali.

The dead limbs lolled. One man had bitten off his tongue, and the flap of muscle lay on his chin. Then they heard a moan. It came from below the hatch opening, where the third man hung suspended and out of their reach.

Without a word, Ike vaulted into the smoking interior. He straddled the bodies at hatch level and slashed at the webbing, clearing out the dead first. Crawling deeper, he got the third man cut free and dragged him to the hatch, where a dozen hands finished the extraction.

Ali and a few others were tending the dead, laying bits of burned clothing across their faces. The man uppermost in the cylinder, where the heat and fire would have been worst, had shot himself through the mouth. The middle man had strangled on a strap now fused into his neck. Their clothing had caught fire, leaving them dressed only in their harnesses and strapped with weapons. Each bore a pistol, a rifle, and a knife.

'Check these scopes out.' A geologist was sweeping the river with one of the soldier's rifles. 'These things are rigged for sniper work at night. What were they coming to hunt?'

'We'll take those,' Walker said, and his mercenaries collected all the other weapons. Ali helped lay the third man on the ground, then stood back. His lungs and throat had been seared. He was coughing up a clear serous fluid, and his temperature control was shot. He was dying. Ike knelt beside him, along with the doctors and Walker and Shoat. Everyone was watching.

Walker peeled back a piece of charred cloth. '"First Cavalry,"' he read, and looked at

Ike. 'These are your people. What are they sending Rangers down for?'

'I have no idea.'

'You know this man?'

'I don't.'

The doctors covered the burned man with a sleeping bag and gave him water to drink. The man opened his one good eye. 'Crockett?' he rasped.

'Guess he knows you,' Walker said. The whole camp stood breathless.

'Why did they send you?' Ike asked.

The man tried to form the words. He struggled beneath the sleeping bag. Ike gave him more water.

'Closer,' said the soldier.

Ike leaned in. He bent to hear.

'Judas,' the man hissed.

The knife drove straight up through the sleeping bag.

The fabric or pain spoiled the assassin's thrust. The blade skipped along Ike's rib cage but did not enter. The soldier had enough strength for a second slash across Ike's back, then Ike caught his wrist.

Walker and Shoat and the doctors fell back from the attack. One of the mercenaries reacted with three quick shots into the burned man's thorax. The body bounced with each round.

'Cease fire!' Walker yelled. It was over that fast.

The only sound was the water flowing.

The expedition stared in disbelief. No one moved. They had seen the attack and heard the soldier's whispered word.

Ike knelt in their midst, dumbfounded. He still held the assassin's wrist in one hand, and the gash along his ribs flowed red. He looked around at them, bewildered. Suddenly, a terrible keening noise rose up from him.

Ali didn't expect that. 'Ike?' she said from the ring of onlookers. No one dared go

closer.

Ali stepped out from the circle and went to him. 'Stop it,' she said. They had depended on his strength for so long that his frailty endangered them. Before their eyes, he was coming undone.

He looked at her, then fled.

'What was that all about?' someone muttered.

For lack of shovels, they drifted the bodies out into the river. Many hours later, two more cylinders were lowered to them, each filled with cargo. They ate. Helios had sent them a feast for a hundred people: smoked rainbow trout, veal in cognac, cheese fondue, and a dozen different kinds of bread, sausages, pasta, and fruit. The crisp green lettuce in the salad brought tears of joy. It was, said a note, meant to celebrate C.C. Cooper's birthday. Ali suspected otherwise. Ike was meant to be dead, and this banquet was in effect a wake.

The attempt on Ike's life had no explanation or context or justice. What made it all the more irrational was that Ike was their most valued member. Even the mercenaries would have voted for him. With him as scout, they had felt like the Chosen People, destined to exit the wilderness on the heels of their tattooed Moses. But now he had been labeled a traitor, and was inexplicably marked for death.

The communications cable to the surface had been fried by the magma zone overhead, and so the expedition had only conjecture and superstition to fall back upon. In a way they all felt targeted, for in their experience Ike had been the best of men, and he was being punished for sins they had never known. It felt as though a great storm had opened upon them. The group's response was a little worry, then a lot of denial and bravado.

'It was a matter of time,' said Spurrier. 'Ike was going to come unwrapped sooner or later. You could see it coming. I'm surprised he held up this long.'

'What does that have to do with anything?' Ali snapped.

'I'm not saying he brought it down on himself. But the man's definitely in torment. He's got more ghosts than a graveyard.'

'What do you do to get the U.S. Army on your case?' Quigley, the psychiatrist, wondered. 'I mean that was a suicide mission. They don't throw good men away on nothing.'

'And that "Judas" stuff? I thought once the court-martial was over, they were finished with you. Talk about bad luck. The guy's a born outcast.'

'It's like the whole world's against him.'

'Don't worry about him, Ali,' said Pia, for whom love had come in the form of

Spurrier. 'He'll be back.'

'I'm not so sure,' Ali said. She wanted to blame Shoat or Walker, but they seemed genuinely disoriented by the incident. If Helios had meant to kill Ike, why not use their own agents? Why involve the U.S. Army? And why would the Army involve itself with doing Helios' bidding? It made no sense.

While the rest slept, Ali walked from the light of their camp. Ike had not taken his kayak or his shotgun, so she searched on foot with her flashlight. His footprints loped along the bank's mud.

She was furious with the group's smugness. They had depended on Ike for everything. Without him, they might be dead or lost. He had been true to them, but now, when he needed them, they were not true to him.

We were his ruin. She saw that now. They had doomed Ike with their dependence. He would have been a thousand miles away if not for their weakness and ignorance and pride. That's what had kept him bound to them. Guardian angels were like that. Doomed by their pathos.

But blaming the group was a dodge, Ali had to admit. For it was her weakness, her

ignorance, her pride that had bound Ike – not to them, but to her. The group's well-being was merely a collateral benefit. The uncomfortable truth was that he had promised himself to her.

Ali sorted her thoughts as she picked her way along the river. In the beginning Ike's allegiance to her had been unwanted, a vexation. She had buried the fact of his devotion under a heap of her own fictions, satisfying herself that he pursued the depths for reasons of his own, for his fabled lost lover or for revenge. Maybe that had been so in the beginning, but it no longer was. She knew that. Ike was here for her.

She found him in a field of night, no light, no weapon. He was sitting faced toward the river in his lotus position, his back bare to any enemies. He had cast himself onto the mercy of this savage desert.

'Ike,' she said.

His shaggy head stayed poised and still. Her light cast his shadow onto the black water, where it was immediately forfeit. What a place, she thought. Darkness so hungry it devoured other darkness.

She came closer and took off her backpack. 'You missed your own funeral,' she joked. 'They sent a feast.'

Not a motion. Even his lungs did not move. He was going deep. Escaping.

'Ike,' she said. 'I know you can hear me.'

One of his hands rested in his lap; the fingertips of his other hand touched the ground with all the weight of an insect.

She felt like a trespasser. But this wasn't contemplation she was invading, it was the start of madness. He couldn't win, not by himself.

Ali approached from one side. From behind he looked at peace. Then she saw that his face was drawn. 'I don't know what's going on,' she said. He was resisting her within his statue stillness. His jaw was clenched.

'Enough,' she said, and opened her pack and pulled out the medical kit. 'I'm cleaning those cuts.'

Ali started brusquely with the Betadine sponge. But she slowed. The flesh itself slowed her. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the calluses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. He had been harrowed. Every mark was the mark of use.

It disconcerted her. She had known the damned in many of their incarnations, as prisoners and prostitutes and killers and banished lepers. But she had never met a slave. Such creatures weren't supposed to exist in this age.

Ali was surprised at how well his shoulder fit in her hand. Then she recovered herself with a tidy pat. 'You'll survive,' she told him.

She walked a little distance away and sat down. For the rest of that night, she lay curled in a ball with his shotgun, protecting Ike while he finished returning to the world.

Am not I

A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?

– WILLIAM BLAKE, 'The Fly'

18

GOOD MORNING

Health Sciences Center, University of Colorado, Denver

Yamamoto emerged from the elevator with a smile.

'Morning!' she sang to a janitor mopping up a roof leak.

'I don't see no sun,' he grumbled.

They had an old-fashioned blizzard raging out there, four-foot drifts, minus nine degrees. They were under siege. She would have the lab to herself today.

Yamamoto found last night's guard still on duty, asleep. She sent him off to the dorm to get some rest and hot food. 'And don't come back until this afternoon,' she said. 'I can hold down the fort myself. No one's coming in anyway.'

She was like that these days, mother to the world. Her hair was thicker, her cheeks in constant bloom. She hummed to the Womb, as her husband called it. Three more months.

The Digital Satan project was nearing completion. The lab was getting downright gamy with fast-food wrappers, sixty-four-ounce soda cups recycled as pencil holders, and mummified birthday leftovers. The bulletin board was bushy with doctored snapshots of lab personnel, excerpts of articles, and, most recently, employment notices for positions here and abroad.

She entered without double-gloving or a surgical mask. All kinds of lab rituals had fallen by the wayside, yet another sign that the project was getting short. Vials lay couched on a Taco Bell box. Someone had made a mobile of the computer chips they'd fried over the months.

Machine Two pumped out its endless hush-hush-hush nursery-room rhythm. Except for the head, a young hadal female had just disappeared from existence, bones and all. Yet now she could be resurrected with a CD-ROM and a mouse. She was about to become electronically immortal. Wherever there was a computer, there could be a physical manifestation of Dawn. In a sense, her soul was truly in the machine.

For several weeks now, Yamamoto had been beset with awful dreams of Dawn. The hadal girl would be falling off a cliff or getting swept out to sea, and she would be reaching for help. Others in the lab related similar nightmares. Separation anxiety, they self-diagnosed. Dawn had been part of the gang. They were all going to miss her. All that remained was the upper two-thirds of the hadal's cranium. It was slow going. Machine Two was calibrated to make the finest slices possible. The brain offered their most interesting exploration. Hopes remained high that they might actually unravel the sensory and cognition process – in effect, making the dead mind speak. All they had to do for the next ten weeks was baby-sit a glorified bologna slicer. Patience was a matter of Diet Pepsi and ribald jokes.

Yamamoto approached the metal table. The top of the girl's cranium was pale white inside the block of frozen blue gel. It looked like a moon suspended in a square of outer space. Electrodes fed out from the top and sides of the gel. At the base, the blade sliced. The camera fired.

The machine had pared away the lower jaw, then worked back and forth across the upper teeth and into the nasal cavity. Externally, most of the flared, batlike nose and all of the stretched, fringed earlobes were gone now. In terms of internal structures, they'd shaved through most of the medulla oblongata leading up from the spinal cord, and reduced most of the cerebellum – which controlled motor skills – at the base of the skull to digital bits. No lesions or abnormalities so far. For a necrotic brain, all systems were remarkably intact, practically viable. Everyone was marveling. Hope I'm that healthy after I die, someone had joked.

Things were just starting to get interesting. From around the country, neurosurgeons and brain and cognition specialists had begun calling or E-mailing on a daily basis to keep updated. Certain parts of the brain, like the cerebellum they'd just passed, were fairly standard mammalian anatomy. They explained what made the animal an animal, but did little to fill in what made the hadal a hadal.

No longer would Dawn be just so much subterranean animal carcass. From the limbic system upward, she would once again become her own person. A personality might emerge, a rational process, clues to her speech, her emotions, her habits and instincts. In short, they were about to peek out through Dawn's cranial window and glimpse her worldview. It was tantamount to landing a spacecraft on another planet. More than that, this was like interviewing an alien for the first time and asking for her thoughts.

Yamamoto feathered through the electrodes, sorting the right-side wires, laying them out neatly on the table. It was still a slight mystery why Dawn seemed to be generating a slight electrical pulse. Her chart should have showed a flat-line, but every now and then an irregular spike would jump up. This had been going on for months. It was a fact that, if you waited long enough, electrodes would eventually detect vital signs even from a bowl of Jell-O.

Yamamoto moved around the table to the left side and fanned out the wires on her palm. It was almost like braiding a child's hair. She paused to peer down into the gel block at what was left of the hadal face.

'Good morning,' she said. The head opened its eyes.

Rau and Bud Parsifal found Vera in a western clothing store in Denver International terminal, trying on cowboy hats. One could not have invented a more perfect antidote to the darkness on everyone's mind. Everyone had an opinion, a fear, a solution. No one knew where any of it was going down there, what they might find, what kind of world their children were going to grow up in. But here, in this gigantic, sweeping, tentlike terminal saturated with sunlight and open space, you could forget all that and simply eat ice cream. Or try on cowboy hats.

'How do I look?' Vera asked.

Rau patted his briefcase in applause. Parsifal said, 'Lord spare us.'

'Did you come together?' she asked.

'London via Cincinnati,' said Parsifal.

'Mexico City,' said Rau. 'We bumped into each other in the concourse.'

'I was afraid no one was going to make it,' Vera said. 'As it is, we may be too late.'

'You called, we came,' said Parsifal. 'Teamwork.' His paunch and hated bifocals made the gallantry that much more charming.

Rau checked his watch. 'Thomas arrives within the hour. And the others?'

'Elsewhere,' said Vera, 'in transit, incommunicado, occupied. You've heard about

Branch, I suppose.'

'Has he lost his mind?' Parsifal said. 'Running off into the subplanet like that. Alone. Of all people, you'd think he'd know what the hadals are capable of.'

'It's not them I'm worried about.'

'Please not that "the enemy is us" business.'

'You don't know about the shoot-to-kill order then?' Vera asked. 'All the armies got it. Interpol has it.'

Parsifal squinted at her. 'What's this? Shoot Branch?'

'January's done what she can to revoke it. But there's a certain General Sandwell who has a vindictive streak. It's peculiar. January's trying to find out more about this general.'

'Thomas is furious,' Rau added. 'Branch was our eyes and ears in the military. Now we're left guessing what the armies may be up to.'

'And who may be planting the virus capsules.'

'Nasty business,' muttered Parsifal.

They met Thomas at his gate, straight from Hong Kong. The gaunt cubic angles of his face formed a mass of shadows, deepening his Abe Lincoln features. Otherwise, for a man who'd just been expelled from China, he looked remarkably refreshed. He glanced around at his greeting party. 'A cowboy hat?' he said to Rau.

'When in Rome...' Rau shrugged.

They proceeded to the exit, grouped around Vera's wheelchair, catching up on one another's news.

'Mustafah and Foley?' asked Vera. 'They're okay?'

'Tired,' said Thomas. 'We were detained in Kashi for several days. In Xinjiang province. Our cameras and journals were confiscated, our visas revoked. We are officially personae non gratae.'

'What in the world were you doing out there, Thomas?'

'I wanted to examine a set of Caucasian mummies and some of their writing fragments. Four millennia old. Germanic script. Tocharian, to be exact. In Asia!'

'Mummies in the Chinese outback,' Parsifal fumed. 'Cryptic writings. What will that tell us?'

'This time I have to agree with you,' said Vera. 'It does seem remote from our mission. Sometimes I wonder just what it is I'm really doing. For the past three months you've had me reviewing abstracts on mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Tell me how data on placental samples from New Guinea gets us any closer to identifying a primordial tyrant?'

'In this instance, the mummies and their Indo-European script would seem to prove that Caucasian nomads influenced Chinese civilization four thousand years ago,' Thomas said.

'And they expelled you for that?' Parsifal said. He fogged the glass with his breath and drew a crucifix. 'Or did the Commies catch you giving last rites to the mummies?'

'Something far more dangerous is my guess,' Rau said to the group. 'If I'm correct, Thomas, you were proving that Chinese civilization did not develop in isolation. The likelihood that early Europeans may have helped germinate their culture is extremely threatening to the Chinese. They're a very proud people, these children of the Middle Kingdom.'

'But again, what does that have to do with us?' asked Vera.

'Everything, perhaps,' Rau ventured. 'The notion that a great civilization might be modified or even inspired by the enemy or by a lesser race or by barbarians is highly relevant.'

'Plain English will do just fine, Rau,' Parsifal grumbled.

Thomas remained silent. He seemed to be enjoying their guesswork.

'What if human civilization didn't develop in isolation? What if we had mentors?'

'What do you have in mind, Rau?' Parsifal said. 'Martians?'

'A little more down to earth.' Rau smiled. 'Hadals.'

'Hadals!' Parsifal said. 'Our mentors?'

'What if the hadals helped create our civilization through the eons? What if they

cultivated our benighted ancestors, exposed to mankind its own native intelligence?'

'Haddie was our nursemaid? Those savages?'

'Careful,' said Rau. 'You're starting to sound like the Chinese with their barbarians.'

'Is that it?' Vera asked Thomas. 'You were looking at China as a paradigm for early human civilization?'

'Something like that,' Thomas said.

'And so you traveled ten thousand miles, and went to jail, all to prove a theory?'

'A bit more, actually. I had a hunch, and it bore out. As I suspected, the Caucasian texts in Xinjiang weren't written in Tocharian script. Nor in any other human language. The reports were all wrong. Mustafah and Foley and I took one look at the mummies and knew. You see, the mummies were tattooed with hadal symbols. These Caucasian nomads were operating as agents. Or messengers. They were transporting documents into ancient China. Documents written in some form of hadal script. If only we could read it!'

'But again,' Parsifal said, 'so what? That was four thousand years ago. And we can't read it.'

'Four thousand years ago, someone sent these people on a mission to China,' Thomas said. 'Aren't you a little curious? Who sent them?'

A van took them to the medical center. At the entrance to the Rende Research Wing, they entered into a crush of cops and television cameras. A phalanx of university representatives were taking turns offering themselves to the wolves. Frost billowed from every mouth. Apparently the logic behind an outdoor press conference in midwinter was that it would be brief.

'Again, I urge you to use common sense,' a deanlike figure was soothing the lenses.

'There's no such thing as possession.'

A pretty news anchor, soaked from the thighs down with snowmelt, shouted from the crowd. 'Dr. Yaron, are you denying reports that the university medical center is conducting exorcism as a treatment at the present time?'

A bearded man with a white grin leaned into the microphone. 'We're waiting,' he said. 'The guy with the chicken and holy water still hasn't showed up.'

The cops at the sliding glass doors weren't about to let anyone in. Vera's medical ID was no help. Finally Parsifal flashed some old NASA credentials. 'Bud Parsifal!' one said. 'Hell, yes, come in.' They all wanted to shake his hand. Parsifal was radiant.

'Spacemen,' Vera whispered to Rau.

Inside the lab wing, the activity was equally manic, if less frenzied. Specialists were studying charts, X rays, and film images or mousing at computer models. Portable phones lay trapped on shoulders as people read data from screens or clipboards. Business suits intermixed with shoulder holsters and surgical scrubs of various colors. The hubbub reminded Vera of the aftermath of a natural disaster, an emergency room stretched beyond capacity.

They paused by a group watching a video. On screen, a young woman was bent over a block of blue gel on a steel table. 'That's Dr. Yamamoto,' Vera whispered to Rau and Parsifal. 'Thomas and I met her last time.'

'Here she goes,' a man in the group said. He had a stopwatch in one hand. 'Three, two, one. And... boom.' Yamamoto abruptly stiffened on screen, then sank to her knees. For a moment she sat on her heels, staring, then tumbled to one side and went into violent spasms. The Beowulf scholars continued walking.

Other rooms held other screens and images: the bottom of a skull seemed to blossom open; a cursor arrow navigated up arteries, strayed upon neural arms, a highway of dreams and impulses.

Vera knocked at an open door. A blond woman in a lab smock was hunched over a microscope. 'I'm looking for a Dr. Koenig,' Vera said. The woman looked over, then came rushing to Vera with arms wide.

'Vera, you're back. Yammie told me you visited months ago.'

Vera introduced them. 'Mary Kay was one of my star pupils, when I could get her attention. Always off on triathlons and rock climbs. We could never keep up with her.'

'The old days,' said Mary Kay, probably all of thirty year's old. Judging by the place, medicine had become the exclusive domain of the young and fit.

'You picked a bad time to visit, though,' she said. 'The entire facility's up in arms. Government agencies all over the place. The FBI.' The purple circles under the young doctor's eyes were her testimony. Whatever this emergency was, she'd been hard at it for many hours.

'Actually, we heard something was happening,' Vera said. 'We've come to learn everything possible. If you can spare a few minutes.'

'Of course I can. Let me finish one thing. I was about to run through some of the early stuff.'

'Put me to work,' Vera insisted.

Grateful, Mary Kay handed Vera a folded EEG readout. 'These are the charts for day one of our hadal prep, almost a year ago. I've synched the video to 2:34 P.M., when they first quartered the body. If you don't mind, track the graph while they make the cuts. There should be some activity when the saw goes through. I'll tell you when.'

She tapped a button on her keyboard. The frozen image started playing. 'Okay,' said

Mary Kay. 'Ready? They're about to sever the legs. Now.'

It looked like a butcher's bandsaw on screen. Workers manipulated the long rectangle of blue gel sideways. Two of them lifted away a section after it passed through the saw.

'Nothing,' Vera said. 'No response on the chart. Flat.'

'Here goes the head section. Anything?'

'No response. Not a bump,' said Vera.

'Just what is it we're supposed to be looking for?' Parsifal asked.

'Activity. A pain response. Anything.'

'Mary Kay,' said Vera, 'why are you looking for life signs in a dead hadal?'

The physician looked helplessly at Vera. 'We're considering certain possibilities,' she said, and it was clear the possibilities were unorthodox.

She ushered them down the wing, talking as they went. 'Over the past fifty-two weeks, our computer-anatomy division has been sectioning a hadal specimen for general study. The project leader was Dr. Yamamoto, a noted pathologist. She was working alone in the lab on Sunday morning when this happened.'

They entered a large room that reeked of chemicals and dead tissue. Rau's first impression was that a bomb had exploded. Big machines lay tipped on their sides. Wires had been pulled from ceiling panels. Long strips of industrial carpet lay ripped from the floor. Crime scene people and scientists alike wanted answers from what was left.

'A security guard found Dr. Yamamoto crouching in the far corner. He called for help. That was his last radio dispatch. We located him hanging from the pipes above the ceiling. His esophagus was torn out. By hand. Yammie was lying in the corner. Naked. Bleeding. Unresponsive.'

'What happened?'

'At first we thought someone had broken in to either burgle or sabotage the premises, and that Lindsey had been assaulted. But as you can see, there are no windows, and only the one door. The door wasn't tampered with, which raised concerns that some hadals might have climbed through the vent system with the aim of destroying our database. We were studying hadal anatomy, after all. The project was underwritten with DoD grants. Arms makers have been clamoring for our tissue information to refine their weapons and ammunition.'

'Where's Branch when we need him?' Rau said. 'I've never heard of hadals doing such a thing. An attack like this, it implies such sophistication.'

'Anyway, that's what we thought at first,' Mary Kay continued. 'You can imagine the uproar. The police came. We started to transport Yammie on a gurney. Then she regained consciousness and escaped.'

'Escaped?' said Parsifal. 'She was still frightened of the intruder?'

'It was terrible. She was wrecking machines. She slashed two guards with a scalpel. They finally shot her with a dart gun. Like a wild animal. That's when she lost the child.'

'Child?' Vera asked.

'Yammie was seven months pregnant. The sedative or stress or activity... she miscarried.'

'How dreadful.'

They reached an eight-foot-long autopsy table. Vera had seen the human body insulted in a hundred different ways, shattered by trauma, wasted with disease and famine. But she was unprepared for the slight young woman with Japanese features who lay stretched out, covered with blankets, her head a Medusa-like riot of electrode patches and wires. It looked like a torture in progress. Her hands and feet had been tied down with a makeshift arrangement of towels, rubber tubing, and duct tape. The autopsy table's usual occupants did not require such restraints.

'Finally, one of the detectives sorted out the fingerprints and identified our culprit,'

said Mary Kay. 'Yammie did it.'

'Did what?' murmured Vera.

'You mean it was her?' said Rau. 'Dr. Yamamoto killed the guard?'

'Yes. His throat tissue was under her nails.'

'This woman?' Parsifal snorted. 'But those machines must weigh a ton each.' To one side, Thomas's face was shadowed with dark thoughts.

'Why would she do such a thing?' asked Rau.

'We're baffled. It may be related to a grand mal, though her husband said she has no history of epilepsy. It could be a psychotic rage no one ever suspected. The one video monitor she didn't manage to demolish shows her falling into unconsciousness, men getting up and destroying the machines used for cutting tissue. The target of her anger was very specific, these machines, as if she was avenging herself for a great wrong.'

'And killing the guard?'

'We don't know. The killing took place off camera. According to the security guard's radio report, he found her in a fetal position. She was clutching that.' Mary Kay pointed to a desktop.

'Good lord,' said Vera.

Parsifal walked over to the desk. Here was the source of the stench. What remained of a hadal head had been positioned between a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup and the Denver Yellow Pages. The blue gel that had once encased it was mostly thawed. The liquid seeped down into the desk's drawers.

The lower half of the face and skull had been lopped away by the machine's blades so cleanly that the creature seemed to be materializing from the flat desktop. Its black hair was smeared flat upon the misshapen skull. A dozen small burr holes sprouted electrode wires. After so many months preserved from air, it was now in a state of rapid decomposition.

More disconcerting than the decay and missing jaws were the eyes. The lids were wide open. The eyes bulged, pupils fixed in a seemingly furious stare. 'He looks pissed,' said Parsifal.

'She,' commented the physician. 'The protruding eyes are a symptom of hyperthyroidism. Not enough iodine in the diet. She probably came from a region

deficient in basic minerals like salt. A lot of hadals look like that.'

'What would prompt anyone to embrace such a thing?' asked Vera.

'That's what we asked ourselves. Had Yammie started to identify subconsciously with her specimen? Did something trigger a personality reaction? Identification, sublimation, conversion. We went through all the possibilities. But Yammie was always so even. And never happier than now. Pregnant, fulfilled, loved.' Mary Kay tucked the blanket around Yamamoto's neck, brushed the hair back from her forehead. A long bruise was surfacing above her eyes. In her frenzy, the woman must have flung herself against the machines and walls.

'Then the seizures returned. We hooked her up to an EEG. You've never seen anything like it. A neurological storm, more like a tempest. We induced a coma.'

'Good,' said Vera.

'Except it didn't work. We keep getting activity. Something seems to be eating its way through the brain, short-circuiting tissue as it goes. It's like watching a lightning bolt in slow motion. The big difference here is that the electrical activity isn't general. You'd think an electrical overload would be brain-wide. But this is all being generated from the hippocampus, almost selectively.'

'The hippocampus, what is that, please?' Rau asked.

'The memory center,' Mary Kay answered.

'Memory,' Rau repeated softly. 'And had this hippocampus been dissected by your machine yet?'

They all looked at Rau. 'No,' said Mary Kay. 'In fact, the blade was just approaching it. Why?'

'Just a question.' Rau peered around the room. 'Also, were you keeping laboratory animals in this room?'

'Absolutely not.'

'I thought not.'

'What do animals have to do with it?' Parsifal said.

But Rau had more questions. 'In clinical terms, Dr Koenig, at its most basic, what is memory?'

'Memory?' said Mary Kay. 'In a nutshell, memory is electric charges exciting biochemicals along synaptic networks.'

'Electric wires,' Rau summarized. 'That's what our past reduces to?'

'It's much more complicated than that.'

'But essentially true?'

'Yes.'

'Thank you,' Rau said. They waited for his conclusion, but after a few moments it became clear he was deep in contemplation.

'What's strange,' said Mary Kay, 'is that Yammie's brain scans are showing nearly two hundred percent of the normal electrical stimulus in a human brain.'

'No wonder she's short-circuiting,' Vera said.

'There's something else,' said Mary Kay. 'At first it looked like a big jumble of brain activity. But we're starting to sort it all out. And it looks like we're tracking two distinct cognitive patterns.'

'What?' said Vera. 'That's impossible.'

'I don't follow you,' said Parsifal.

Mary Kay's voice grew small. 'Yammie's not alone in there,' she said.

'One more time, please,' Parsifal demanded.

'You have to understand,' Mary Kay said, 'none of this is for public disclosure.'

'You have our word,' said Thomas.

She stroked Yamamoto's arm. 'We couldn't make sense out of the two cognitive patterns. But then, a few hours ago, something happened. The seizures stopped. Completely. And Yammie began to speak. She was unconscious, but she started

talking.'

'Excellent,' said Parsifal.

'It wasn't in English, though. It wasn't anything we'd ever heard.'

'What?'

'We happened to have an intern in the room. He'd served as a Navy medic in sub-Mexico. Apparently the military plants microphones in remote recesses. He'd heard some of the recordings and thought he recognized the sound.'

'Not hadal,' said Parsifal. Confusion aggravated him.

'Yes.'

'Rubbish.' Parsifal's face was turning red.

'We obtained a tape of hadal voices from the DoD's library, top secret. Then we compared it with Yammie's speech. It wasn't identical, but it was close enough. Apparently, human vocal cords need practice to handle the consonants and trills and clicks. But Yammie was speaking their language.'

'Where could she have learned to speak it?'

'That's exactly the point,' said Mary Kay. 'As far as humans go, there aren't more than a handful of recaptures that speak it in the world. But Yammie was. It's all on tape.'

'She must have heard some recaptures then,' Parsifal said.

'It's more than simple mimicry, though. See that wall over there?'

'Is that mud?' asked Vera.

'Feces. Her own. Yammie used it to fingerpaint those symbols.' They all recognized the symbols as hadal.

'We can't figure out what they represent,' said Mary Kay. 'I'm told that someone on a science expedition below the Pacific was starting to crack the code. An archaeologist. Van Scott or something. The expedition's supposed to be a big secret. But one of the mining colonies leaked bits of the story. Only now the expedition's disappeared.'

'Van Scott. It wouldn't be a woman, would it?' Vera asked. 'Von Schade? Ali?'

'That's it. Then you know of her work?'

'Not nearly enough,' said Vera.

'She's a friend,' Thomas explained. 'We're deeply concerned.'

'I still don't understand,' Parsifal said. 'How could this young lady be mimicking an alphabet that humans have only just discovered exists? And aping a language that humans don't speak?'

'But she's not mimicking or aping them.'

'Are we to suppose the creatures of hell are channeling through this poor woman?'

'Of course not, Mr Parsifal.'

'What then?'

'This is going to sound awfully half-baked.'

'After the nonsense we just witnessed out front?' said Parsifal. 'Possession. Exorcism. I'm feeling pretty warmed up.'

'In fact,' Mary Kay said, 'Yammie seems to have become her subject. More precisely, the hadal has become her.'

Parsifal gaped, then started to growl.

'Listen.' Vera stopped him. 'Just listen for a minute.'

'Bud's right,' Thomas protested. 'We came all this way to hear such nonsense?'

'We're just trying to go where the evidence points us,' Mary Kay pleaded.

'Let me get this straight. The soul from that thing,' said Parsifal, pointing at the decaying cranium, 'jumped inside of this young woman?'

'Believe me,' Mary Kay said, 'none of us want to believe it, either. But something catastrophic happened to her. The charts spiked right before Yammie fell unconscious. We've gone over the video a thousand times. You see Yammie holding the EEG leads, and then she falls down. Maybe she conducted an electric current

through her hands. Or the head conducted one into her. I know it sounds fantastic.'

'Fantastic? Try lunatic,' Parsifal said. 'I've had enough of this.' On his way out, he stopped by the sectioned skull. 'You should clean your necropolis,' he declared to the roomful of people. 'It's no wonder you're hatching such medieval rubbish.' He opened a magazine and dropped it over the hadal head, then stalked out. From the tent of glossy pages, the hadal eyes seemed to peer out at them.

Mary Kay was trembling, shaken by Parsifal's vehemence.

'Forgive us,' Thomas said to her. 'We're used to one another's passions and dramas. We sometimes forget ourselves in public.'

'I think we should have some coffee,' Vera declared. 'Is there a place we can collect our thoughts?'

Mary Kay led them to a small conference room with a coffee machine. A monitor on the wall overlooked the laboratory. The smell of coffee was a welcome relief from the chemical and decay stench. Thomas got them all seated and insisted on serving them. He made sure Mary Kay got the first cup. 'I know it sounds crazy,' she said.

'Actually,' Rau said quietly after Parsifal was gone, 'we shouldn't be so surprised.'

'And why not?' Thomas said.

'We're talking about old-fashioned reincarnation. If you go back in time, you find versions of the theory are almost universal. For twenty thousand years the Australian aborigines have tracked an unbroken chain of ancestors in their infants. You find it everywhere, in many peoples, from Indonesians to Bantus to Druids. You get thinkers like Plato and Empedocles and Pythagoras and Plotinus trying to describe it. The Orphic mysteries and the Jewish Cabala took a crack at it. Even modern science has investigated the activity. It's quite accepted where I come from, a perfectly natural phenomenon.'

'But I just can't accept that, in a laboratory setting, this hadal's soul passed into another person?'

'Soul?' said Rau. 'In Buddhism there's no such thing as soul. They talk about an undifferentiated stream of being that passes from one existence to another. Samsara, they call it.'

In part goaded by Thomas's skepticism, Vera challenged the idea, too. 'Since when does rebirth involve epileptic seizures, homicide, and cannibalism? You call this perfectly natural?'

'All I can say is that birth doesn't always happen without problems,' Rau said. 'Why should rebirth? As for the devastation' – and he gestured at the TV view of destruction – 'that may have to do with man's limited capacity for memory. Perhaps, as Dr. Koenig described, memory is a matter of electrical wiring. But memory is also a maze. An abyss. Who knows where it goes?'

'What was your question about lab animals, Rau?'

'I was just trying to eliminate other possibilities,' he answered. 'Classically, the transfer occurs between a dying adult and an infant or animal. But in this case the hadal had only this young woman at hand. And it found an occupied house, so to speak. Now it's disabling Dr. Yamamoto's memory in order to make room for itself.'

'But why now?' asked Mary Kay. 'Why all of a sudden, like this?'

'I can only guess,' Rau said. 'You told me your mechanical blade was about to dissect the hippocampus. Maybe this was the hadal memory's way of defending itself. By invading new territory.'

'It invaded her? That's an odd way of putting it.'

'You westerners,' said Rau, 'you mistake reincarnation with a sociable act, like a handshake or a kiss. But rebirth is a matter of dominion. Of occupation. Of colonization, if you will. It's like one country seizing land from another, and interposing its own people and language and government. Before long, Aztecs are speaking Spanish, or Mohawks are speaking English. And they start to forget who they once

were.'

'You're substituting metaphors for common sense,' said Thomas. 'It doesn't get us any closer to our goal, I'm afraid.'

'But think about it,' said Rau. He was getting excited. 'A passage of continuous memory. An unbroken strand of consciousness, eons long. It could help explain his longevity. From man's narrow historical perspective, it could make him seem eternal.'

'Who's this you're talking about?' Mary Kay asked.

'Someone we're looking for,' Thomas said. 'No one.'

'I didn't mean to pry.' After all she'd shared with them, her hurt was evident.

'It's a game we play,' Vera rushed to explain, 'nothing more.'

The video monitor on the wall behind them had no sound, or else they might have noticed the initial flurry of action in the laboratory. Mary Kay's pager beeped and she looked down at it, then suddenly whirled in her chair to see the screen. 'Yammie,' she groaned.

People were rushing through the laboratory. Someone shouted at the monitor, a soundless cry. 'What?' said Vera.

'Code Blue.' And Mary Kay flew out the door. A half-minute later, she reappeared on the monitor.

'What's happening?' asked Rau.

Vera turned her wheelchair to face the monitor. 'They're losing the poor girl. She's in cardiac arrest. Look, here comes the crash wagon.'

Thomas was on his feet, watching the screen intently. Rau joined him. 'Now what?'

he said.

'Those are the shock paddles,' Vera said. 'To jump-start her heart again.'

'You mean she's dead?'

'There's a difference between biological and clinical death. It may not be too late.' Under Mary Kay's direction, several people were shoving aside tables and wrecked machinery, making room for the heavy crash wagon. Mary Kay reached for the paddles and held them upright. To the rear, a woman was waving the electric plug in one hand, frantically casting around for an outlet.

'But they mustn't do that!' Rau cried.

'They have to try,' said Vera.

'Didn't anyone understand what I was talking about?'

'Where are you going, Rau?' Thomas barked. But Rau was already gone.

'There he is,' said Vera, pointing at the screen.

'What does he think he's doing?' Thomas said.

Still wearing his cowboy hat, Rau shouldered aside a burly policeman and made a sprightly hop over a spilled chair. They watched as people backed away from the stainless-steel table, exposing Yamamoto to the camera. The frail young woman lay still, tied and taped to the table, with wires leading off to machines. As Rau approached, Mary Kay stood her ground on the far side, shock paddles poised. He was arguing with her.

'Oh, Rau!' Vera despaired. 'Thomas, we have to get him out of there. This is a medical emergency.'

Mary Kay said something to a nurse, who tried to lead Rau away by the arm. But Rau pushed her. A lab tech grabbed him by the waist, and Rau doggedly held on to the edge of the metal table. Mary Kay leaned to place the paddles. The last thing Vera saw on the monitor was the body arching.

With Thomas pushing the wheelchair, they hurried to the laboratory, dodging cops, firemen, and staff in the hallway. They encountered a gurney loaded with equipment, and that consumed another precious minute. By the time they reached the lab, the drama was over. People were leaving the room. A woman stood at the door with one hand to her eyes.

Inside, Vera and Thomas saw a man draped partway across the table, his head laid next to Yamamoto's, sobbing. The husband, Vera guessed. Still holding the shock paddles, Mary Kay stood to one side, staring vacantly. An attendant spoke to her. When she didn't respond, he simply took the paddles from her hands. Someone else patted her on the back, and still she didn't move.

'Good heavens, was Rau right?' whispered Vera. They wove through the wreckage as Yamamoto's body was covered and lifted onto a stretcher. They had to wait for the stream of people to pass. The husband followed the bearers out.

'Dr. Koenig?' said Thomas. Wires cluttered the gleaming table.

She flinched at his voice, and raised her eyes to him. 'Father?' she said, dazed. Vera and Thomas exchanged a concerned look.

'Mary Kay?' Vera said. 'Are you all right?'

'Father Thomas? Vera?' said Mary Kay. 'Now Yammie's gone, too? Where did we go wrong?'

Vera exhaled. 'You had me scared,' she said. 'Come here, child. Come here.' Mary

Kay knelt by the wheelchair. She buried her face against Vera's shoulder.

'Rau?' Thomas asked, glancing around. 'Now where did he go?'

Abruptly, Rau burst from his hiding place in a heap of readout paper and piled cables. He moved so quickly, they barely knew it was he. As he raced past Vera's wheelchair, one hand hooked wide, and Mary Kay grunted and bent backward in pain. Her lab jacket suddenly gaped open from shoulder to shoulder, and red marked the long slash wound. Rau had a scalpel.

Now they saw the lab tech who had tried to pry Rau loose from the table. He sat slumped with his entrails across his legs.

Thomas yelled something at Rau. It was a command of some kind, not a question. Vera didn't know Hindi, if that's what it was, and was too shocked to care.

Rau paused and looked at Thomas, his face distorted with anguish and bewilderment.

'Thomas!' cried Vera, falling from her chair with the wounded physician in her arms. In the one instant Thomas took his eyes from the man, Rau vanished through the doorway.

The suicide was aired on national television that evening. Rau couldn't have timed it better, with national media already gathered for the university's press conference in the street below. It was simply a matter of training their cameras on the roofline eight stories above.

With a fiery Rocky Mountain sunset for a backdrop, the SWAT cops edged closer and closer to Rau's swaying form, guns leveled. Aiming their acoustic dishes, sound crews on the ground picked up every word of the negotiator's appeal to the cornered man. Telephoto lenses trained on his twisted face, tracked his leap. Several quick-thinking cameramen utilized the same bounce technique, a quick nudge up, to self-edit the impact.

There was no doubt the former head of India's parliament had gone insane. The hadal head cradled in his arms was all the proof anyone needed. That and the cowboy hat.

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.

– RUDYARD KIPLING, The Jungle Book

19

CONTACT

Beneath the Magellan Rise,

176 degrees west, 8 degrees north

The camp woke to tremors on the last day of summer.

Like the rest, Ali was asleep on the ground. She felt the earthquake work deep inside her body. It seemed to move her bones.

For a full minute the scientists lay on the ground, some curling in fetal balls, some clutching their neighbors' hands or embracing. They waited in awful silence for the tunnel to close upon them or the floor to drop away.

Finally some wag yelled out, 'All clear. It was just Shoat, damn him. Wanking again.' They all laughed nervously. There were no more tremors, but they had been reminded of how minuscule they were. Ali braced for an onset of confessions from her fragile flock.

Later in the morning, several in a group of women she was rafting with could smell what was left of the earthquake in the faint dust hanging above the river. Pia, one of the planetologists, said it reminded her of a stonecutters' yard near her childhood home, the smell of cemetery markers being polished and sandblasted with the names of the dead.

'Tombstones? That's a pleasant thought,' one of the women said.

To dispel the sense of omen, Ali said, 'See how white the dust is? Have you ever smelled fresh marble just after a chisel has cut it?' She recalled for them a sculptor's studio she had once visited in northern Italy. He had been working on a nude with little success, and had begged Ali to pose for him, to help draw the woman out from his block of stone. For a time he had pursued her with letters.

'He wanted you to pose naked?' Pia was delighted. 'He didn't know you were a nun?'

'I was very clear.'

'So? Did you?'

Suddenly, Ali felt sad. 'Of course not.'

Life in these dark tubes and veins had changed her. She had been trained to erase her identity in order to allow God's signature upon her. Now she wanted desperately to be remembered, if only as a piece of sculpted marble.

The underworld was having its effect on others, too. As an anthropologist Ali was naturally alive to the entire tribe's metamorphosis. Tracking their idiosyncrasies was like watching a garden slowly grow rampant. They adopted peculiar touches, odd ways of combing their hair, or rolling their survival suits up to the knee or shoulder. Many of the men had started going bareback, the upper half of their suits hanging from their waists like shed skin. Deodorant was a thing of the past, and you barely noticed the body smells, except for certain unfortunates. Shoat, particularly, was known for his foot odor. Some of the women braided each other's hair with beads or shells. It was just for fun, they said, but their concoctions got more elaborate each

week.

Some of the soldiers lapsed into gang talk when Walker wasn't around, and their weapons suddenly flowered with scrimshaw. They carved animals or Bible quotes or girlfriends' names onto the plastic stocks and handles. Even Walker had let his beard grow into a great Mosaic bush that had to be a garden spot for the cave lice that plagued them.

Ike no longer looked so much different from the rest of them. After the incident at Cache II, he had made himself more scarce. Many nights they never saw him, only his little tripod of glowing green candles designating a good campsite. When he did surface, it was only for a matter of hours. He was retreating into himself, and Ali didn't know how to reach him, or why it should matter so much to her. Maybe it was that the one in their group who most needed reconciliation seemed most resistant to it. There was another possibility, that she had fallen in love. But that was unreasonable, she thought.

On one of Ike's rare overnights at camp, Ali took a meal to him and they sat by the water's edge. 'What do you dream?' she asked. When his brow wrinkled, she added,

'You don't have to tell me.'

'You've been talking with the shrinks,' he said. 'They asked the same thing. It's supposed to be a measure of fluency, right? If I dream in hadal.'

She was unsettled. They all wanted a piece of this man. 'Yes, it's a measure. And no, I haven't talked with anyone about you.'

'So what do you want?'

'What you dream about. You don't have to tell me.'

'Okay.'

They listened to the water. After a minute, she changed her mind. 'No, you do have to tell me.' She made it light.

'Ali,' he said. 'You don't want to hear it.'

'Give,' she coaxed.

'Ali,' he said, and shook his head.

'Is it so bad?'

Suddenly he stood up and went over to the kayak.

'Where are you going?' This was so strange. 'Look, just drop it. I was prying. I'm sorry.'

'It's not your fault,' he said, and dragged the boat to water.

As he cut his way down the river, it finally dawned on her. Ike dreamed of her.

On September 28 they homed in on Cache III.

They had been picking up increasingly strong signals for two days. Not sure what other surprises Helios might have in store, still uncertain what the Ranger assassins had been up to, Walker told Ike to stay behind while he sent his soldiers in advance. Ike made no objections, and drifted his kayak among the scientists' rafts, silent and chagrined to be off point for a change.

Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats. The waterfall rifled down a shield of olive stone from heights too high to see, beating up a mist that threw rainbows in their lights. The scientists ran their rafts onto shore and disembarked. Some quirk in the cul-de-sac's acoustics rendered the roar into a wall of white noise.

Walker came over. 'The rangefinder reads zero,' he reported. 'That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we've got is this waterfall.'

Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level.

There was nothing but water overhead, and it was leaking through the ocean floor. '

'They've got to be here,' said Shoat.

'You've been carrying your own rangefinder around,' Walker said. 'Let's see if that works any better.'

Shoat backed away and grasped at the flat leather pouch strung around his neck. 'It won't work for this kind of thing,' he said. 'It's a homing device, specially made for the transistor beacons I'm planting along the way. For an emergency only.'

'Maybe the cylinders hung up on a shelf,' someone suggested.

'We're looking,' said Walker. 'But these rangefinders are calibrated precisely. The cylinders should be within two hundred feet. We haven't seen a sign of them. No cables. No drill scars. Nothing.'

'One thing's certain,' said Spurrier. 'We're not going anywhere until those supplies are found.'

Ike took his kayak downriver to investigate smaller strands. 'If you find them, leave them. Don't touch them. Come back and tell us,' Walker instructed him. 'Somebody's got you in their crosshairs, and I don't want you close to our cargo when they pull the trigger.'

The expedition broke into search parties, but found nothing. Frustrated, Walker put some of his mercenaries to work shoveling at the coarse sand in case the cylinders had burrowed under. Nothing. Tempers began to fray, and few wanted to hear one fellow's calculations about how to ration what little food remained until they reached the next cache, five weeks farther on.

They suspended the search to have their meal and rejuvenate their perspective. Ali sat with a line of people, their backs against the rafts, facing the waterfall. Suddenly Troy said, 'What about there?' He was pointing at the waterfall.

'Inside the water?' asked Ali.

'It's the one place we haven't looked.'

They left their food and walked across to the edge of the tributary feeding from the waterfall's base, trying to see through the mist and plunging water. Troy's hunch spread, and others joined them.

'Someone has to go in,' Spurrier said.

'I'll do it,' said Troy.

By now Walker had come over. 'We'll take it from here,' he said.

It took another quarter-hour to prepare Walker's 'volunteer,' a huge, sullen teenager from San Antonio's West Side who'd lately started branding himself with hadal glyphs. Ali had heard the colonel tongue-lashing him for godlessness, and this scout duty was obviously a punishment. The kid was scared as they tied him to the end of a rope. 'I don't do waterfalls,' he kept saying. 'Let El Cap do it.'

'Crockett's gone,' Walker shouted into the noise. 'Just keep to the wall.'

Hooded in his survival suit, wearing his night-vision glasses more as diving goggles than for the low lux boost, the boy started in, slowly atomizing in the mist. They kept feeding rope into the waterfall, but after a few minutes there was no more tow on the line. It went slack.

They tugged at the rope and ended pulling the whole fifty meters back out. Walker held the end up. 'He untied himself,' Walker shouted to a second 'volunteer.' 'That means there's a hollow inside. This time, don't untie. Give three tugs when you reach the chamber, then attach it to a rock or something. The idea is to make a handline, got it?'

The second soldier set off more confidently. The rope wormed in, deeper than the first time. 'Where's he going in there?' Walker said.

The line came taut, then seized harder. The belayer started to complain, but the rope suddenly yanked from his hands and its tail whipped off into the mist.

'This isn't tug-of-war,' Walker lectured his third scout. 'Just anchor your end. A few

moderate pulls will signal us.' In the background, several mercenaries were amused. Their comrades in the mist were having some fun at the colonel's expense. The tension relaxed.

Walker's third man stepped through the curtain of spray and they started to lose sight of him. Abruptly he returned. Still on his feet, he came hurtling from the mist, backpedaling in a frenzy.

It happened quickly. His arms flailed, beating at some unseen weight on his front, suggesting a seizure. Backward momentum drove him into the crowd. People spilled to the sand. He landed deep in their midst, among their legs, and he spun spine up and arched, heaving away from the ground. Ali couldn't see what happened next.

The soldier let loose a deep bellow. It came from his core, a visceral discharge.

'Move away, move away,' Walker yelled, pistol in hand, wading through the crowd. The soldier sagged, facedown, but kept twitching. 'Tommy?' called a troop.

Brutally, Tommy came erect, what was left of him, and they saw that his face and torso had been ripped to scraps. The body keeled over backward.