The Descent

That was when they caught sight of the hadal.

She was squatting in the sand where Tommy had carried her, mouth and hands and dugs brilliant with blood and their lights, blinded, as white as the abyssal fish they had seen. Ali's view lasted just a fraction of a second. A thousand years old, that creature. How could such a withered thing accomplish the butchery they had just seen?

With a cry, the crowd fell away from the apparition. Ali was knocked to the ground and pummeled by the stampede. Above her, soldiers fumbled at their weapons. A boot glanced off her head. Overhead, Walker came crashing through the frantic herd, more shadow than man among the wheeling lights, his handgun blazing.

The hadal leaped – impossibly – twenty feet onto the shield of olive stone. In the strobing patchwork of lights, she was ghastly white and rimed, it seemed, with scales or filth. This was the repository for the mother tongue? Ali was confused. Over the past months they had humanized the hadals in their discussions, but the reality was more like a wild animal. Her skin was practically reptilian. Then Ali realized it was skin cancer, and the hadal's flesh was ulcerated and checkered with scabs.

Walker was fearless, running alongside the wall and firing at the scampering hadal. She was making for the waterfall, and Ali guessed it was the sound that was her compass. But the stone grew slick with spray or the holds were polished off or Walker's bullets were striking the mark. She fell. Walker and his men closed in around her, and all Ali could see were eruptions of light from muzzle flash.

Dazed from the kick, Ali crawled to her feet and started over to the cluster of excited soldiers. She understood from their jubilation that this was the first live hadal any of them had ever seen, much less fought. Walker's crack team of mercenaries were no more familiar with the enemy than she was.

'Back to the boats,' Walker told her.

'What are you going to do?'

'They've taken our cylinders,' he said.

'You're going in there?'

'Not until we've pacified the waterfall.'

She saw soldiers prepping the bigger miniguns mounted to their rafts. They were eager and grim, and she dreaded their enthusiasm. From her passages through African civil wars, Ali knew firsthand that once the juggernaut got loose, it was irrevocable. This was happening too quickly. She wanted Ike here, someone who knew the territory and could measure the colonel's hot backlash. 'But those two boys are still inside.'

'Madam,' Walker answered, 'this is a military affair.' He motioned, and one of the mercenaries escorted her by the arm to where the last of the scientists were entering their boats. Ali clambered aboard and they pushed off from shore and watched the

show at a distance.

Walker trained all their spotlights on the waterfall, illuminating the tall column so that it looked like a vast glass dragon clinging to the rock, respirating. He directed them to open fire into the water itself.

Ali was reminded of the king who tried to order the ocean's waves to stop. The water swallowed their bullets. The white noise devoured their gunfire, turning it into strings of snapping firecrackers. They laid on with their gunfire, and the water tore open in liquid gouts, only to heal instantly. Some of the special uranium-tipped Lucifer rounds struck the surrounding walls, clawing divots in the stone. A soldier fired a rocket into the bowels of the fall, and the trunk belched outward, revealing a nebulous gap inside. Moments later the gap sealed shut as more water poured down.

Then the waterfall began to bleed.

Under potent spotlight beams, the waters hemorrhaged. The tributary bloomed red, and the color fanned unevenly to midriver and carried downstream. Ali thought that if the gunfire didn't draw Ike, surely the blood trail would. She was frightened by the magnitude of what Walker had done. Gunning down the murderous hadal was one thing. But he had, seemingly, just opened the veins of a force of nature. He had unleashed something here, she could feel it.

'What in God's name was inside there?' someone gasped.

Walker deployed his soldiers with hand signals. Sleek in their survival suits, they flanked the waterfall, scurrying like insects. The rifles in their hands were remarkably still and steady, and each soldier was little more than the moving parts of his weapon. Half of Walker's contingent entered the mist from each side of the tributary. While the scientists watched from bobbing rafts, the other half zeroed in on the waterfall, ready to pump more rounds into it.

Several minutes passed. A man reappeared, glistening in his amphibian neoprene. He shouted, 'All clear!'

'What about the cylinders?' Walker yelled to him.

The soldier said, 'In here,' and Walker and the rest of his men got off their bellies and went into the waterfall without a word to their charges.

At last the scientists paddled back to shore. Some were terrified that more hadals might come leaping at them, or shied from the blood they'd seen and stayed in the rafts. A handful went to the dead hadal for a closer look, Ali included. Little remained. The bullets had all but turned the creature inside out.

Ali went with five others inside the waterfall. Since the spray had already soaked her hair, she didn't bother pulling her hood up. There was the slightest of trails hugging the wall, and as they squeezed along it above the pool of water, the waterfall became a veil backlit by the spotlights. Deeper, the spotlights turned to liquid orbs, and finally the waterfall was too thick to allow any light. Its noise muffled all sounds from the outside. Ali turned on her headlamp and kept edging between the water and rock. They reached a globular grotto inside.

All three of their missing cylinders lay by the entrance, heaped with hundreds of yards of thick cable. Fully loaded, each of the cylinders weighed over four tons; it must have taken enormous effort to drag them into this hiding place. Two of the cables, Ali saw, ran upward into the waterfall. That suggested their communications lines might be intact.

Under the badly abraded black stencil declaring HELIOS, the name NASA surfaced in ghostly letters along one cylinder's side. The outer sheathing was pitted and gashed with bullet and shrapnel tracks, but was unruptured. A soldier kept clearing his eyes of water spray as he worked on opening its hatch door. The hadals had tried to force entry with boulders and iron rods, but had only managed to break off many of the thick bolts. The hatches were all in place. Ali climbed around the mass of cables and saw that the first body she came across was Walker's volunteer, the big teenager from

San Antonio. They had torn his throat out by hand. She braced herself for more carnage.

Deeper in, Walker's men had laid chemical lights on ledges and stuck them into niches in the wall, casting a green pall through the entire chamber. Smoke from explosions hung like wet fog. The soldiers were circulating among the dead. Ali blinked quickly at the dense piles of bone and flesh, and raised her eyes to quell her sickness. There were many bodies in here. In the green light, the walls appeared to be sweating with humidity, but the sheen was blood. It was everywhere.

'Watch the broken bone ends,' one of the physicians warned her. 'Poke yourself on one of those, you could get a nasty infection.'

Ali forced herself to look down, if only to place her feet. Limbs lay scattered. The worst of it were the hands, beseeching.

Several soldiers glanced over at Ali with great hollows for eyes. Not a trace of their earlier zeal remained. She was drawn to their contrition, thinking they were appalled by their deed. But it was more awful than that.

'They're all females,' muttered a soldier.

'And kids.'

Ali had to look closer than she wanted to, past the painted flesh and the beetle-browed faces. Only minutes before, they had been a roomful of people outwaiting the humans outside. She had to look for their sex and their fragility, and what the soldiers said was true.

'Bitches and spawn,' one jived, trying to vitiate the shame. But there were no takers. They didn't like this: no weapons, not a single male. A slaughter of innocents.

Above them, a soldier appeared at the mouth of a secondary chamber and began waving his arm and shouting. It was impossible to hear him with the waterfall behind them, but Ali overheard a nearby walkie-talkie. 'Sierra Victor, this is Fox One. Colonel,' an excited voice reported, 'we got live ones. What d'you want us to do?'

Ali saw Walker straighten from among the dead and reach for his own walkie-talkie, and she guessed what his command would be. He had already lost three men. For the sake of conservation, he would simply order the soldiers to finish the job. Walker lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. 'Wait!' she yelled, and rushed down to him.

She could tell he knew her intent. 'Sister,' he greeted.

'Don't do it,' she said.

'You should go outside with the others,' he told her.

'No.'

Their impasse might have escalated. But at that moment a man bellowed from the entrance and everyone turned. It was Ike, standing on top of the cylinders, the water sheeting from him. 'What have you done?'

Hands lifted in disbelief, he descended from the cylinders. They watched him come to a body, and kneel. He set his shotgun to one side. Grasping the shoulders, he lifted her partway from the ground and the head lolled, white hair kinky around the horns, teeth bared. The teeth had been filed to sharp points.

Ike was gentle. He brought the head upright and looked at the face and smelled behind her ear, then laid her flat again.

Next to her lay a hadal infant, and he carefully cradled it in his arms as if it were still alive. 'You have no idea what you've done,' he groaned to the mercenaries.

'This is Sierra Victor, Fox One,' Walker murmured into the walkie-talkie. His hand was cupped to it, but Ali heard him. 'Open fire.'

'What are you doing?' she cried, and grabbed the radio from the colonel. Ali fumbled with the transmit button. 'You hold your fire,' she said, and added, 'damn you.'

She let go of the transmit button and they heard a small confused voice saying,

'Colonel, repeat. Colonel?' Walker made no effort to wrestle back the walkie-talkie.

'We didn't know,' one boy said to Ike.

'You weren't here, man,' said another. 'You didn't see what they done to Tommy. And look at A-Z. Tore his throat out.'

'What did you expect?' Ike roared at them. They grew subdued. Ali had never seen him ferocious before. And where did this voice come from?

'Their babies?' Ike thundered. They backed away from him.

'They were hadals,' said Walker.

'Yes,' Ike said. He held the shattered child at arm's length and searched the small face, then laid the body against his heart. He picked up his shotgun and stood.

'They're beasts, Crockett.' Walker spoke loudly for everyone to hear. 'They cost us three men. They stole our cylinders and would have opened them. If we hadn't attacked, they would have looted our supplies and that would have been our death.'

'This,' Ike said, clutching the dead child, 'this is your death.'

'We are deep beyond –' Walker started.

'You've killed yourselves,' Ike said more quietly.

'Enough, Crockett. Join the human race. Or go back to them.'

The walkie-talkie in Ali's hand spoke up again, and she held it up for Ike to hear as well. 'They're starting to move around. Say again. Should we open fire or not?'

Walker snatched the walkie-talkie from her, but Ike was equally fast. Without hesitation, he pointed his sawed-off gun at the colonel's face. Walker's mouth twisted in his beard.

'Give me that baby,' she said to Ike, and took the little body. 'We have other things to do. Don't we, Colonel?'

Walker looked at her, eyes huge with rage. He made up his mind. 'Hold your fire,' he snarled into the walkie-talkie. 'We're coming for a look.'

The stone floor buckled underfoot, and she had to skirt deep plunge holes. They climbed a slick incline to the higher, smaller chamber. The deadly hail of gunfire had not reached this far except as ricochets, which had done damage enough. They passed several more bodies before gaining the high floor.

The survivors were huddled in a pocket, and they seemed able to feel the light beams against their skin. Ali counted seven of them, two very young. They were mute, moving only when someone trained a headlamp on them for too long. 'No more?' Ike asked the soldiers guarding them.

'Them. They tried to get away.' The man indicated another eleven or twelve, sprawled near a duct.

The hadals kept their faces away from the light, and the mothers sheltered their young. Their flesh gleamed. The markings and scars undulated as their muscles shifted.

'Are they fatties, or what?' a mercenary said to Walker.

Several of the females were indeed obese. More correctly, they were steatopygic, with enormous surpluses of fat in their buttocks and breasts. To Ali's eye, they were identical to Neolithic Venuses carved from stone or painted on walls. They were magnificent in their size and decoration, and their greased and plaited hair. Here and there, Ali caught sight of the apelike brows and low foreheads, and again it was hard to reconcile them as quite human.

'These are sacred,' Ike said. 'They're consecrated.'

'You make them sound like vestal virgins,' Walker scoffed.

'It's just the opposite. These are their breeders. The pregnant and new mothers. Their infants and children. They know their species is going extinct. These are their racial treasure. Once the women conceive, they're brought into communal coveys like this. It's like living in a harem.' He added, 'Or a nunnery. They're cared for and watched over and honored.'

'Is there a point to this?'

'Hadals are nomadic. They make seasonal rounds. When they move, each tribe keeps its women in the center of the line for protection.'

'Some protection,' a soldier spoke up. 'We just turned their next generation into hamburger.'

Ike didn't reply.

'Wait,' said Walker. 'You're saying we intersected the middle of their line?' Ike nodded.

'Which means the males are off to either end?'

'Luck,' Ike said. 'Bad luck. I don't think we want to be here when they catch up.'

'All right,' Walker said. 'You've had your look. Let's get this over with.' Instead, Ike walked into the midst of the hadals.

Ali couldn't hear Ike's words distinctly, but heard the rise and fall of his tone and occasional tongue clicks. The females responded with surprise, and so did the soldiers aiming their rifles at them. Walker cut a glance at Ali, and suddenly she feared for Ike's life. 'If even one tries to run,' Walker told his men, 'you are to open fire on the whole pack.'

'But the Cap's in there,' a boy said.

'Full auto,' Walker warned grimly.

Ali left Walker's side and went out to Ike, placing herself in the line of fire. 'Go back,' Ike whispered.

'I'm not doing this for you,' she lied. 'It's for them.'

Hands reached up to touch Ike and her. The palms were rough, the nails broken and encrusted. Ike hunkered among them, and Ali let different ones grab her hands and smell her. His claim mark was of special interest. One wall-eyed ancient held on to his arm. She stroked the scarified nodes and questioned him. When Ike answered her, she drew away with revulsion, it seemed. She whispered to the others, who grew agitated and scrambled to get distance from him. Still perched on his toes, Ike hung his head. He tried another few phrases, and their fright only increased.

'What are you doing?' Ali asked. 'What did you tell them?'

'My hadal name,' said Ike.

'But you said it was forbidden to speak it out loud.'

'It was, until I left the People. I wanted to find out how bad things really are with me.'

'They know you?'

'They know about me.'

From the hadals' loathing, it was clear his reputation was odious. Even the children were afraid of him. 'This isn't good,' Ike said, eyeing the soldiers. 'We can't stay here. And if we leave –'

The walkie-talkie announced that two of the cylinders had been opened and Shoat had a communications line in operation. Ali could see by his face that Walker wanted to be shed of this business. 'Enough,' Walker said.

'Just leave them,' Ali said to him.

'I'm a man who lives by his word,' Walker replied. 'It was your friend Crockett who declared the policy. No live catches.'

'Colonel,' Ike said, 'killing the hadal is one thing. But I've got a human in this bunch. Shoot her down, and that would be murder, wouldn't it?'

Ali thought he was bluffing to buy time, or else talking about her. But he reached among the hadals and grabbed the arm of a creature who had been hiding behind the others. She gave a shriek and bit him, but Ike dragged her out, pinning her arms and hoisting her free. Ali had no chance to see her. The others clutched at her legs, and Ike kicked at them and backed away. 'Move,' he grunted to Ali. 'Run while we can.'

The hadals set up a piercing wail. Ali was certain they were about to rush after Ike and whatever it was he'd just kidnapped from them. 'Move,' shouted Ike, and she ran

to the soldiers, who opened a way for her and Ike and his catch. She tripped and fell. Ike stumbled across her.

'In the name of the Father,' Walker intoned. 'Light 'em up.'

The soldiers opened fire on the survivors. The noise was deafening in the small chamber, and Ali closed her ears with both palms. The killing lasted less than twelve seconds. There were a few mop-up shots, then the gunfire was over and the room stank with gas vented from their guns. Ali heard a woman still screaming, and thought they'd wounded one or were torturing her.

'This way.' A soldier grabbed her. He was taking care of her. She knew him from his confessions, Calvino, an Italian stallion. His sins had been a pregnant girlfriend, a theft, little more.

'But Ike –'

'The colonel said now,' he said, and Ali saw a brawl in progress against the back wall, with Ike near the bottom of the pile. In the corner lay their little massacre. All for nothing, she thought, and let the soldier lead her away, back to the grotto floor, out through the waterfall.

For the next few hours, Ali waited by the mist. Each time a soldier came out, she questioned him about Ike. They avoided her eyes and gave no answer.

At last Walker emerged. Behind him – guarded by mercenaries – came Ike's save. They had bound the female's arms with rope and taped her mouth shut. Her hands were covered with duct tape, and she had wire wrapped around her neck as a leash. Her legs were shackled with comm-line cable. She'd been cut and was smeared with gore.

For all that, she walked like a queen, as naked as blue sky. She was not a hadal, Ali realized.

Below the neck, most Homos of the last hundred thousand years were virtually the same, Ali knew. She focused on the cranial shape. It was modern and sapiens. Except for that, there was little else to pronounce the girl's humanness.

Every eye watched the girl. She didn't care. They could look. They could touch. They could do anything. Every glance, every insult made her more superior to them. Her tattoos put Ike's to shame. They were blinding, literally. You could barely see her body for the details. The pigment that had been worked into her skin all but obliterated its natural brown color. Her belly was round, and her breasts were fat, and she shook them at one soldier, who pumped his head in and out with a downtown rhythm. There was no indication she spoke English or any other human language. From head to toe, she had been embellished and engraved and bejeweled and painted. Every toe was circled with a thin iron ring. Her feet were flat from a lifetime of walking barefoot. Ali guessed she was no more than fourteen.

'We have been advised by our scout,' Walker said, 'that this child may know what lies ahead. We leave. Immediately.'

Excluding the loss of Walker's three mercenaries, it seemed they had escaped without consequence from Cache III. They had acquired another six weeks of food and batteries, and had made a hasty uplink with the surface to let Helios know they were still in motion.

There was no sign of pursuit, despite which Ike pushed them thirty hours without a camp. He scared them on. 'We're being hunted,' he warned.

Several of the scientists who wanted to resign and return the way they'd come, chief among them Gitner, accused Ike of collaborating with Shoat to force them deeper.

Ike shrugged and told them to do whatever they wanted. No one dared cross that line.

On October 2, a pair of mercenaries bringing up the rear vanished. Their absence was not noticed for twelve hours. Convinced the men had stolen a raft and were

making a renegade bid to return home, Walker ordered five soldiers to track and capture them. Ike argued with him. What caused the colonel to reverse his order was not Ike, but a message over the walkie-talkie. The camp stilled, thinking the missing pair might be reporting in.

'Maybe they just got lost,' one of the scientists suggested.

Layers of rock garbled the transmission, but it was a British voice coming over the radio. 'Someone made a mistake,' he told them. 'You took my daughter.' The wild child made a noise in her throat.

'Who is this?' Walker demanded.

Ali knew. It was Molly's midnight lover.

Ike knew. It was the one who had led him into darkness once upon a time. Isaac had returned.

The radio went silent.

They cast downriver and did not make camp for a week.

Every lion comes from its den, All the serpents bite;

Darkness hovers, earth is silent, As their maker rests in lightland.

– 'The Great Hymn to Aten,' 1350 BC

20

DEAD SOULS

San Francisco, California

Headfirst, the hadal drew himself from the honeycomb of cave mouths. He panted feebly, starved, dizzy, rejecting his weakness. Rime coated the perfect round openings of concrete pipes. The fog was so cold.

He could hear the sick and dying in the pyramided tunnels. The illness was as lethal as a sweep of plague or a poisoned stream or the venting of some rare gas through their arterial habitat.

His eyes streamed pus. This air. This awful light. And the emptiness of these voices. The sounds were too far away and yet too close. There was too much space. Your thoughts had no resonance here. You imagined something and the idea vanished into nothingness.

Like a leper, he draped hides over his head. Hunched inside the tattered skin curtains, he felt better, more able to see. The tribe needed him. The other adult males had been killed off. It was up to him. Weapons. Food. Water. Their search for the messiah would have to wait.

Even given the strength to escape, he would not have tried, not while children and women still remained here alive. All together they would live. Or all together they would die. That was the way. It was up to him. Eighteen years old, and he was now their elder.

Who was left? Only one of his wives was still breathing. Three of his children. An image of his infant son rose up – as cold as a pebble. Aiya. He made the heartbreak into rage.

The bodies of his people lay where they had pitched or reeled or staggered. Their corruption was strange to see. It had to be something in this thin, strangling air. Or the light itself, like an acid. He had seen many corpses in his day, but none so quickly gone to rot this way. A single day had passed here, and not one could be salvaged for meat.

Every few steps, he rested his hands on his knees to gasp for breath. He was a warrior and hunter. The ground was as flat as a pond top. Yet he could scarcely stand on his feet! What a terrible place this was. He moved on, stepping over a set of bones. He came to a ghostly white line and lifted his drape of rags, squinting into the fog. The line was too straight to be a game trail. The suggestion of a path raised his spirits. Maybe it led to water.

He followed the line, pausing to rest, not daring to sit down. Sit and he would lie, lie and he would sleep and never wake again. He tried sniffing the currents of air, but it was too fouled with stench and odors to detect animals or water. And you couldn't trust your ears for all the voices. It seemed like a legion of voices pouring down upon him. Not one word made sense. Dead souls, he decided.

At its end, the line hit another line that ran right and left into the fog. Left, he chose, the sacred way. It had to lead somewhere. He came to more lines. He made more turns, some right, some left... in violation of the Way.

At each turn he pissed his musk onto the ground. Just the same, he grew lost. How could this be? A labyrinth without walls? He berated himself. If only he had gone left at every turn as he had been taught, he would have inevitably circled to the source, or at least been able to retrace his path by backtracking right at every nexus. But now he had jumbled his directions. And in his weakened condition. And with the tribe's welfare dependent on him alone. It was precisely times like these that the teachings were for.

Still hopeful of finding water or meat or his own scents in the bizarre vegetation, he went on. His head throbbed. Nausea racked him. He tried licking the frost from the spiky vegetation, but the taste of salts and nitrogen overruled his thirst. The ground vibrated with constant movement.

He did everything in his power to focus on the moment, to pace his advance and curtail distracting thoughts. But the luminous white line repeated itself so relentlessly, and the altitude was so severe, that his attention naturally meandered. In that way, he failed to see the broken bottle until it was halfway through the meat of his bare foot.

He cut his shriek before it began. Not a sound came out. They'd schooled him well. He took the pain in. He accepted its presence like a gracious host. Pain could be his friend or it could be his enemy, depending on his self-control.

Glass! He had prayed for a weapon, and here it was. Lowering his foot, he held the slippery bottle in his palms and examined it.

It was an inferior grade, intended for commerce, not warfare. It didn't have the sharpness of black obsidian, which splintered into razor shards, or the durability of glass crafted by hadal artisans. But it would do.

Scarcely believing his good fortune, the young hadal threw back his rag-headdress and willed himself to see in the light. He opened to it, braced by the pain in his foot, marrying to the agony. Somehow he had to return to his tribe while there was still

time. With his other senses scrambled by the foulness and tremors and voices in this place, he had to make himself see.

Something happened, something profound. In casting off the rags covering his misshapen head, it was as if he broke the fog. All illusion fell away and he was left with this. On the fifty-yard line of Candlestick Park, the hadal found himself in a dark chalice at the pit of a universe of stars.

The sight was a horror, even for one so brave. Sky! Stars! The legendary moon!

He grunted, piglike, and twisted in circles. There were his caves in the near distance, and in them his people. There lay the skeletons of his kin. He started across the field, crippled, limping, eyes pinned to the ground, desperate. The vastness all around him sucked at his imagination and it seemed he must tumble upward into that vast cup spread overhead.

It got worse. Floating above his head he saw himself. He was gigantic. He raised his right hand to ward off the colossal image, and the image raised its right hand to ward him off.

In mortal terror, he howled. And the image howled. Vertigo toppled him.

He writhed upon the cleated grass like a salted leech.

'For the love of Christ,' General Sandwell said, turning from the stadium screen. 'Now

he's dying. We're going to end up with no males.'

It was three in the morning and the air was rich with sea, even indoors. The creature's howl lingered in the room, piped in over an expensive set of stereo speakers.

Thomas and January and Foley, the industrialist, peered through night-vision binoculars at the sight. They looked like three captains as they stood at the broad plate-glass window of a skybox perched on the rim of Candlestick Park. The poor creature went on flopping about in the center of the arena far below them. De l'Orme politely sat to one side of Vera's wheelchair, gathering what he could from their conversation.

For the last ten minutes they'd been following the hadal's infrared image in the cold fog as he stole along the grid lines, left and right at ninety-degree angles, seduced by the linearity or chasing some primitive instinct or maybe gone mad. And then the fog had lifted and suddenly this. His actions made as little sense magnified on the live-action video screen as in the miniature reality below.

'Is this their normal behavior?' January asked the general.

'No. He's bold. The rest have stuck close to the sewer pipes. This buck's pushed the limit. All the way to the fifty.'

'I've never seen one live.'

'Look quick. Once the sun hits, he's history.' The general was dressed tonight in a pair of pressed corduroys and a multi-blue flannel shirt. His Hush Puppies padded silently on the thick Berber. The Bulova was platinum. Retirement suited him, especially with Helios to land in.

'You say they surrendered to you?'

'First time we've seen anything like it. We had a patrol out at twenty-five hundred feet below the Sandias. Routine. Nothing ever comes up that high anymore. Then out of nowhere this bunch shows up. Several hundred of them.'

'You told us there are only a couple dozen here.'

'Correct. Like I said, we've never seen a mass surrender before. The troops reacted.'

'Overreacted, wouldn't you say?' said Vera.

The general gave her his gallows dimple. 'We had fifty-two when they first arrived. Less than twenty-nine at last count yesterday. Probably fewer by now.'

'Twenty-five hundred feet?' said January. 'But that's practically the surface. Was it an invasion party?'

'Nope. More like a herd movement. Females and young, mostly.'

'But what were they doing up here?'

'Not a clue. There's no communicating with them. We've got the linguists and supercomputers working full speed, but it might not even be a real language they speak. For our purposes tonight, it's just glorified gibberish. Emotional signing. Nothing informational. But the patrol leader did say the group was definitely heading for the surface. They were barely armed. It was almost like they were looking for something. Or someone.'

The Beowulf scholars paused. Their eyes passed the question around the skybox room. What if this hadal crawling across the frosty grass of Candlestick Park had been embarked on a quest identical to their own, to find Satan? What if this lost tribe really had been searching for its missing leader... on the surface?

For the past week they had been discussing a theory, and this seemed to fit. It was Gault and Mustafah's theory, the possibility that their Satanic majesty might actually be a wanderer who had made occasional forays to the surface, exploring human societies over the eons. Images – mostly carved in stone – and oral tradition from peoples around the world gave a remarkably standard portrait of this character. The explorer came and went. He popped up out of nowhere and disappeared just as readily. He could be seductive or violent. He lived by disguise and deception. He was intelligent, resourceful, and restless.

Gault and Mustafah had cobbled the theory together while in Egypt. Ever since, they had carried on a discreet phone campaign to convince their colleagues that the true Satan was unlikely to be found cowering in some dark hole in the subplanet, but was more apt to be studying his enemy from within their very midst. They argued that the historical Satan might spend half his time down below among hadals, and the other half among man. That had raised other questions. Was their Satan, for instance, the same man throughout the ages, undying, an immortal creature? Or might he be a series of explorers, or a lineage of rulers? If he traveled among man, it seemed likely he resembled man. Perhaps, as de l'Orme had proposed, he was the character in the Shroud. If so, what would he look like now? If it was true that Satan lived among man, what disguise would he be wearing? Beggar, thief, or despot? Scholar, soldier, or stockbroker?

Thomas rejected the theory. His skepticism was ironic at times like this. After all, it was he who had launched them on this convoluted whirlwind of counter-intuitions and upside-down explanations. He had enjoined them to go out into the world and locate new evidence, old evidence, all the evidence. We need to know this character, he had said. We need to know how he thinks, what his agenda consists of, his desires and needs, his vulnerabilities and strengths, what cycles he subconsciously follows, what paths he is likely to take. Otherwise we will never have an advantage over him. That's how they had left it, at a standstill, the group scattered.

Foley looked from Thomas to de l'Orme. The gnomelike face was a cipher. It was de l'Orme who had forced this meeting with Helios and dragged every Beowulf member on the continent in with him. Something was up. He had promised it would affect the outcome of their work, though he refused to say how.

All of this went over Sandwell's head. They did not speak one word of Beowulf's business in front of him. They were still trying to judge how much damage the general had done to them since going over to Helios five months ago.

The skybox was serving as Sandwell's temporary office. The Stick, as he affectionately called it, was in serious makeover. Helios was creating a $500 million biotech research facility in the arena space. BioSphere without the sunshine, he quipped. Scientists from around the country were being recruited. Cracking the

mysteries of H. hadalis had just entered a new phase. It was being compared to splitting the atom or landing on the moon. The hadal thrashing about on the dying grass and fading hash marks was part of the first batch to be processed.

Here, where Y.A. Tittle and Joe Montana had earned fame and fortune, where the Beatles and Stones had rocked, where the Pope had spoken on the virtues of poverty, taxpayers were funding an advanced concentration camp. Once completed, it was designed to house five hundred SAFs – Subterranean Animal Forms – at a time. At its far end, the playing field was beginning to look like the basement of the Roman Colosseum ruins. The holding pens were in progress. Alleyways wound between titanium cages. Ultimately the old arena surface and all its cages would be covered over with eight floors of laboratory space. There was even a smokeless incinerator, approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, for disposing of remains.

Down on the field, the hadal had begun crawling toward the stack of concrete culverts temporarily housing his comrades. The Stick wouldn't be ready for nonhuman tenants for another year.

'Truly a march of the damned,' de l'Orme commented. 'In the space of a week, several hundred hadals have become less than two dozen. Shameful.'

'Live hadals are as rare as Martians,' the general explained. 'Getting them to the surface alive and intact – before their gut bacteria curdles or their lung tissues hemorrhage or a hundred other damn things – it's like growing hair on rock.'

There-had been isolated cases of individual hadals living in captivity on the surface. The record was an Israeli catch: eighty-three days. At their present rate, what was left of this group of fifty wasn't going to last the week.

'I don't see any water. Or food. What are they supposed to be living on?'

'We don't know. That's the whole problem. We filled a galvanized tub with clean water, and they wouldn't touch it. But see that Porta Potti for the construction workers? A few of the hadals broke in the first day and drank the sewage and chemicals. It took 'em hours to quit bucking and shrieking.'

'They died, you're saying.'

'They'll either adapt or die,' the general said. 'Around here, we call it seasoning.'

'And those other bodies lying by the sidelines?'

'That's what's left of an escape attempt.'

From this height the visitors could see the lower stands filled with soldiers and ringed with miniguns trained on the playing field. The soldiers wore bulky oversuits with hoods and oxygen tanks.

On the giant screen, the hadal male cast another glance at the night sky and promptly buried his face in the turf. They watched him clutch at the grass as if holding on to the side of a cliff.

'After our meeting, I want to go closer,' said de l'Orme. 'I want to hear him. I want to smell him.'

'Out of the question,' said Sandwell. 'It's a health issue. Nobody goes in. We don't want them getting contaminated with human diseases.'

The hadal crawled from the forty to the thirty-five. The pyramid of culvert pipes stood near the ten. Farther on, he began navigating between skeletons and rotting bodies.

'Why are the remains lying in the open like that?' Thomas asked. 'I should think they constitute a health hazard.'

'You want a burial? This isn't a pet cemetery, Father.'

Vera turned her head at the tone. Sandwell had definitely crossed over. He belonged to Helios. 'It's not a zoo, either, General. Why bring them here if you're just going to watch them fester and die?'

'I told you, old-fashioned R-and-D. We're building a truth machine. Now we'll get the facts on what really makes them tick.'

'And what's your part in it?' Thomas asked him. 'Why are you here? With them. Helios.'

The general bridled. 'Operational configuration,' he growled.

'Ah,' said January, as if she had been told something.

'Yes, I've left the Army. But I'm still manning the line,' Sandwell said. 'Still taking the fight to the enemy. Only now I'm doing it with real muscle behind me.'

'You mean money,' said January. 'The Helios treasury.'

'Whatever it takes to stop Haddie. After all those years of being ruled by globalists and warmed-over pacifists, I'm finally dealing with real patriots.'

'Bullshit, General,' January said. 'You're a hireling. You're simply helping Helios help itself to the subplanet.'

Sandwell reddened. 'These rumors about a start-up nation underneath the Pacific? That's tabloid talk.'

'When Thomas first described it, I thought he was being paranoid,' said January. 'I thought no one in their right mind would dare rip the map to shreds and glue the pieces together and declare it a country. But it's happening, and you're part of it, General.'

'But your map is still intact,' a new voice said. They turned. C.C. Cooper was standing in the doorway. 'All we've done is lift it and expose the blank tabletop. And drawn a new land where there was no land before. We're making a map within the map. Out of view. You can go on with your affairs as if we never existed. And we can go on with our affairs. We're stepping off your merry-go-round, that's all.'

Years ago, Time magazine had mythologized C.C. Cooper as a Reaganomic whiz kid, lauding his by-the-bootstraps rise through computer chips and biotech patents and television programming. The article had artfully neglected to mention his manipulation of hard currency and precious resources in the crumbling Soviet Union, or his sleight of hand with hydroelectric turbines for the Three Gorges dam project in China. His sponsorship of environmental and human-rights groups was constantly being shoveled before the public as proof that big money could have a big conscience, too.

In person, the entrepreneurial bangs and wire rims looked strained on a man his age. The former senator had a West Coast vitality that might have played well if he'd become President. At this early hour, it seemed excessive.

Cooper entered, followed by his son. Their resemblance was eerie, except that the son had better hair and wore contacts and had a quarterback's neck muscles. Also, he did not have his father's ease among the enemy. He was being groomed, but you could see that raw power did not come naturally to him. That he had been included in this morning's meeting – and that the meeting had been offered in the deep of night, while the city slept – said much to Vera and the others. It meant Cooper considered them dangerous, and that his son was now supposed to learn about dispatching one's opponents away from public view.

Behind the two Cooper men came a tall, attractive woman in her late forties, hair bobbed and jet black. She had invited herself along, that was clear. 'Eva Shoat,' Cooper said to the group. 'My wife. And this is my son, Hamilton. Cooper.' As distinct from Montgomery, Vera realized. The stepson, Shoat.

Cooper led his entourage to the table and joined the Beowulf scholars and Sandwell. He didn't ask their names. He didn't apologize for being late.

'Your country-in-progress is a renegade,' said Foley. 'No nation steps out of the international polity.'

'Says who?' Cooper asked agreeably. 'Forgive my pun. But the international polity may go to the devil. I'm going to hell.'

'Do you realize the chaos this will bring?' January asked. 'Your control of ocean shipping lanes alone. Your ability to operate without any oversight. To violate

international standards. To penetrate national borders.'

'But consider the order I'll bring by occupying the underworld. In one fell swoop, I return mankind to its innocence. This abyss beneath our feet will no longer be terrifying and unknown. It will no longer be dominated by creatures like that.' He pointed at the stadium video. The hadal was lapping its own vomit from the turf. Eva Shoat shuddered.

'Once our colonial strategy begins, we can quit fearing the monsters. No more superstitions. No more midnight fears. Our children and their children will think of the underworld as just another piece of real estate. They'll take holidays to the natural wonders beneath our feet. They'll enjoy the fruits of our inventions. They'll own the untapped energy of the planet itself. They'll be free to work on Utopia.'

'That's not the abyss man fears,' Vera protested. 'It's the one in here.' She touched the ribs above her heart.'

'The abyss is the abyss,' said Cooper. 'Light one and you light the other. We'll all be better for this, you'll see.'

'Propaganda.' Vera turned her head in distaste.

'Your expedition,' Thomas said. He was angry tonight. 'Where have they gone?'

'I'm afraid the news isn't good,' said Cooper. 'We've lost contact with the expedition. You can imagine our concern. Ham, do you have our map?'

Cooper's son opened his briefcase and produced a folded bathymetric map showing the ocean floor. It was creased and marked with a dozen different pens and grease pencils. Cooper traced his finger helpfully across the latitudes and longitudes. 'Their last known position was west-southwest of Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands. That could change, of course. Every now and then we harvest dispatches from the bedrock.'

'You're still hearing from them?' asked January.

'In a sense. For over three weeks now, the dispatches have been nothing but bits and pieces of older communications sent months ago. The transmissions get mangled by the layers of stone. We end up with echoes. Electromagnetic riddles. It only suggests where they were weeks ago. Where they are today, who can say?'

'That's all you can tell us?' asked January.

'We'll find them.' Eva Shoat suddenly spoke up. She was fierce. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying. Cooper cut a glance at her.

'You must be worried sick,' Vera sympathized. 'Montgomery is your only child?' Cooper narrowed his eyes at Vera. She nodded to him. Her question had been phrased deliberately.

'Yes,' said Eva, then looked at her husband's son. 'I mean no. I'm worried. I'd be worried if it were Hamilton down there. I should never have allowed Monty to go.'

'He chose it himself,' Cooper tautly observed.

'Only because he was desperate,' Eva snapped back. 'How else could he compete in this family?'

Vera saw Thomas across the table, rewarding her with the slightest hint of a smile. She had done well.

'He wanted to be part of things,' Cooper said.

'Yes, part of this,' Eva said, throwing her hand at the skybox view.

'And I've told you, Eva, he is a part of it. You have no idea how important his contribution will be.'

'My son had to risk his life to be important to you?' Cooper disengaged. It was an old argument, obviously.

'What precisely is this, Mr Cooper?' Foley asked.

'I told you,' said Sandwell. 'A research facility.'

'Yes,' said January, 'a place to season your hadal captives. By the way, General, are you aware the term was once used about African slaves arriving in this country?'

'You'll have to excuse Sandy,' Cooper said. 'He's a recent acquisition, still adapting to

the language and life on campus. I assure you, we're not creating a population of slaves.'

Sandwell bristled, but kept silent.

'Then what do you need live hadals for? What is it you're researching?' Vera asked. Cooper steepled his fingers gravely. 'We're finally starting to collect longer-term data on the colonization,' he said. 'Soldiers were the first group to go down in any numbers. Six years later, they're the first to show real side effects. Alterations.'

'The bony growths and cataracts?' said Vera. 'But we've seen those since the beginning. The problems go away with time.'

'This is different. In the last four to ten months we've been monitoring an outbreak of symptoms. Enlarged hearts, high-altitude edemas, skeletal dysplasia, acute leukemia, sterility, skin cancer. The horning and bone cancers have come charging back. The most disturbing development is that we're starting to see these symptoms among the veterans' newborns. For five years we've had nothing but normal births. Now, suddenly, their newborns are displaying morbid defects. I'm talking about mutations. The infant mortality rate has soared.'

'Why haven't I heard of this?' January asked suspiciously.

'For the same reason Helios is rushing to find a cure. Because once the public finds out, every human inside the planet is going to evacuate. The interior is going to be left without security forces, without a labor force, without colonists. You can imagine the setback. After so much effort and investment, we could lose the whole subplanet to whatever this is. Helios doesn't want that to happen.'

'What's going on?'

'In twenty-five words or less? The subplanet is changing us.' Cooper gestured at the creature on the stadium screen. 'Into that.'

Eva Shoat laid a hand upon her long throat. 'You knew this, and you let my son go down?'

'The effects aren't universal,' said Cooper. 'In the veteran populations, the split is roughly fifty-fifty. Half show no effect. Half display these delayed mutations. Hadal physiologies. Enlarged hearts, pulmonary and cerebral edema, skin cancer: those are all symptoms that hadals develop when they come to the surface. Something is switching on and off at the DNA level. Altering the genetic code. Their bodies begin producing proteins, chimeric proteins, which alter tissues in radically different ways.'

'You can't predict which half of the population will develop the problems?' asked

Vera.

'We don't have a clue. But if it's happening to six-year veterans, it's eventually going to happen to four-month miners and settlers.'

'And Helios has to find a solution,' observed Foley. 'Or else your empire beneath the sea will be a ghost town before it ever starts.'

'In vulgar terms, precisely.'

'Obviously, you think there's a solution in the hadal physiology itself,' Vera said. Cooper nodded. 'Genetic engineers call it "cutting the Gordian knot." We have to resolve the complexities. Sort out the viruses and retroviruses, the genes and phenotypes. Examine the environmental factors. Map the chaos. And so Helios is building a multibillion-dollar research campus here, and importing live hadals for research purposes. To make the subplanet safe for humans.'

'But I don't understand,' said Vera. 'It seems to me research and development would be a thousand times less complicated down below. Among other things, why stress your guinea pigs by transporting them to the surface? You could build this same facility at a subterranean station for a fraction of the cost. You'll need to pressurize the entire laboratory to subplanetary levels. Why not just study the hadals down there? There would be no transportation costs. The mortality rate would be far lower. And you could test your results on colonists in the field.'

'That's not an option,' de l'Orme said. 'Or it won't be soon.' They all turned to him.

'Unless he brings up a sample population of hadals, there won't be any hadals to sample soon. Isn't that the idea, Mr Cooper?'

'No idea what you're talking about,' Cooper said.

'Perhaps you could tell us about the contagion,' de l'Orme said. 'Prion-9.'

Cooper appraised the little archaeologist. 'I know what you know. We've learned that prion capsules are being planted along the expedition's route. But Helios has nothing to do with it. I won't ask you to believe me. I don't care if you do or not. It's my people who are at risk down there. My expedition. Except for your spy,' he added,

'the von Schade woman.' January's expression hardened.

'What's this about a contagion?' Eva demanded.

'I didn't want to worry you any more,' Cooper said to his wife. 'A deranged ex-soldier has attached himself to the expedition. He's lacing the route with a synthetic virus.'

'My God,' his wife whispered.

'Despicable,' hissed de l'Orme.

'What was that?' Cooper said.

De l'Orme smiled. 'The individual planting this contagion is named Shoat. Your son, madam.'

'My son?'

'He's being used to deliver a synthetic plague. And your husband sent him.' The assembly gawked at the archaeologist. Even Thomas was dismayed.

'Absurd,' Cooper blustered.

De l'Orme pointed in the direction of Cooper's son. 'He told me.'

'I've never seen you in my life,' Hamilton replied.

'True as it goes, no more than I've seen you.' De l'Orme grinned. 'But you told me.'

'Lunatic,' Hamilton said under his breath.

'Ach,' chided de l'Orme. 'We've talked about that sharp tongue before. No more humiliating the wife at cocktail parties. And no more fists with her. We agreed. You were to work on governing your anger, yes? Containing your tide.'

The young man drained gray beneath his Aspen tan.

De l'Orme addressed them all. 'Over the years, I've noticed that the birth of a son sometimes tempers a wild young man. It can even mark his return to the faith. So when I heard of the baptism of Hamilton's son, your grandson, Mr Cooper, I had an idea. Sure enough, it seems fatherhood changed our spoiled young sinner. He has thrown himself onto the Rock with that special fervor of a lost man found. For over a year now, Hamilton's kept away from his heroin chic and his expensive call girls and he has cleansed himself weekly.'

'What are you talking about?' Cooper demanded.

'Young Cooper has developed a taste for the holy wafer,' said de l'Orme. 'And you know the rules. No Eucharist before confession.'

Cooper turned to his son with horror. 'You spoke to the Church?' Hamilton looked afflicted. 'I was speaking to God.'

De l'Orme tipped his head with mock acknowledgment.

'But what about the confidence between penitent and confessor?' marveled Vera.

'I left the cloth long ago,' de l'Orme explained. 'But I kept my friendships and personal connections. It was simply a matter of anticipating this venal man's mea culpa, and then installing myself in a small booth on certain occasions. Oh, we've talked for hours, Hamilton and I. I've learned much about the House of Cooper. Much.'

The elder Cooper sat back. He stared out the skybox window into the night, or at his

own image in the glass.

De l'Orme continued. 'The Helios strategy is this: for disease to rage through the interior in one vast hurricane of death. The corporate entity can then occupy a world conveniently sterilized of all its nasty life-forms. Including hadals. That's why Helios is preserving a population up here. Because they're about to kill everything that breathes down below.'

'But why?' Thomas asked.

De l'Orme gave the answer. 'History,' he said. 'Mr Cooper has read his history. Conquest is always the same. It's much easier to occupy an empty paradise.'

Cooper gave a sulfurous glance at his foolish son.

De l'Orme continued. 'Helios obtained the Prion-9 from a laboratory under contract to the Army. Who obtained it for Helios is blatantly obvious. General Sandwell, it was also you who recruited the soldier Dwight Crockett. That's how Montgomery Shoat could be immunized under a scapegoat's name.'

'Monty's been immunized?' his mother said.

'Your son is safe,' said de l'Orme. 'At least from the disease.'

'Who controls the release of the contagion?' Vera asked Cooper. 'You?' Cooper snorted.

'Montgomery Shoat,' guessed Thomas. 'But how? Are the capsules programmed to release automatically? Is there a remote control? A code? How does it happen?'

'You mean how can you stop it?'

'For God's sake, tell them,' Eva said to her husband.

'It can't be stopped,' Cooper said, 'That's the whole truth. Montgomery coded the trigger device himself. He's the only one who knows what the electronic sequence is. It's a mutual safeguard. This way his mission can't be compromised by anyone. Not you,' he said to Thomas, then added bitterly, 'and not an indiscreet son. And we, in our haste, can't trigger the virus before he determines the time is ripe.'

'Then we have to find him,' said Vera. 'Give us your map. Show us where the cylinders have been placed.'

'This?' Cooper slapped at the map. 'It's merely a projection. Only the people on the expedition know where they've been. Even if you could find him, I doubt Montgomery remembers where he placed the capsules along a ten-thousand-mile path.'

'How many are there?'

'Several hundred. We mean to be thorough.'

'And trigger devices?'

'Just the one.'

Thomas studied Cooper's face.

'What is your calendar for genocide? When does Shoat mean to start the plague?'

'I told you. When he decides the time is ripe. Naturally, he'll need the expedition's services for as long as possible. They provide him transportation, food, company, protection. He's not suicidal. He's not a kamikaze. He insisted on being vaccinated. He has a strong sense of survival. And ambition. I'm sure, when the time comes, he won't hesitate to finish the job.'

'Even if it means killing off the expedition. Your people. And every human colonist and miner and soldier down there.'

Cooper did not answer.

'What have you made our son into?' Eva said. Cooper looked at her. 'Your son,' he said.

'Monster,' she whispered back. Just then, Vera said, 'Look.'

She was staring at the video screen. The hadal had reached the piled sewer pipes. He was pulling himself upright before the dark, round openings. The video screen showed him forty feet tall. His bare rib cage, scored with old wounds and ritual

markings; bucked in quick, pumping waves. The creature was vocalizing, that much was evident.

Sandwell went over and rotated the round button on the wall. The audio feed came over the speakers. It sounded like the hooting and huffing of a captured ape.

A face had appeared at the mouth of one sewer pipe. Then other faces surfaced at other openings. Crusted and wet with their own filth, they came out from their cement burrows and fell upon the ground at the hadal's feet. There were only nine or ten of them left.

The hadal's voice changed. He was singing now, or praying. Beseeching or offering. To his own image, of all things. To the video screen. The others, women and their young, began to ululate.

'What's he doing?'

Still singing, the hadal took a child from one of the females and cradled it in his arms. He made a sacramental motion, as if tracing ashes on its head or throat, it was hard to see. Then he set the child aside and took another that was held up to him and repeated his gesture. 'He's cutting their throats,' January realized.

'What!'

'Is that a knife?'

'Glass,' said Foley.

'Where did he get glass?' Cooper roared at the general.

An emaciated female stood before the butcher hadal. She cast her head back and opened her arms wide and it took her killer a minute to find the artery and saw her throat open. A second female stood.

Voice by voice, their song was dying.

'Stop him,' Cooper shouted at Sandwell. 'The bastard's killing off my pack.' But it was too late.

Love is duty. He took in the crook of his arm his own son, as cold as a pebble. He cried out the name of the messiah. Weeping, he made the cut and held his final child while it bled down his breast. At last he was free to join his own blood with theirs.

BOOK THREE

GRACE

Inter Babiloniam et Jerusalem nulla pax est sed guerra continua....

Between Babylon and Jerusalem there is no peace, but continual war....

– ST BERNARD, The Sermons

21

MAROONED

The sea, 6,000 fathoms

No one had ever dreamed such a place.

The geologists had spoken about ancient paleo-oceans buried beneath the continents, but only as hypothetical explanations for the earth's wandering poles and gravity anomalies. The paleo-oceans were mathematical fancies. This was real. Abruptly – on October 22 – it was there, motionless, calm. Men and women who had been racing downriver for their lives stopped. They climbed from their rafts and joined comrades standing agape upon the pewter-colored sand. The water spread before them, an enormous flat crescent. The slightest of waves licked at the shore. The surface was smooth. Their lights skimmed from it.

They had no idea the shape or size of the water body. They sent their laser beams pulsing upward, searching for a ceiling that finally measured a half-mile overhead. As for the length of the sea, the surface bent. All they could say with certainty was that the horizon lay twenty miles distant, with no obstructions in between and no end in sight.

The path split right and left around the sea. No one knew which led where. 'There's

Walker's footprints,' someone said, and they followed them.

Farther down the beach, they found their fourth cache. Side by side, the three cylinders lay as neat as merchandise. Walker's men had reached the site hours earlier and stockpiled the contents within a makeshift firebase. Sand had been heaped into a circular berm with entrenching shovels. Machine guns were trained on fields of fire. The scientists approached on foot. One of the mercenaries came out and put a hand up. 'That's close enough,' he said.

'But it's us,' a woman said.

Walker appeared. 'The depot is off limits,' he informed them.

'You can't do that,' someone shouted.

'We're in a state of high alert,' Walker said. 'Our highest priority is the protection of food and supplies. If we were attacked and you were inside our perimeter, there would be chaos. This is the wisest course. We've located a campsite for you on the opposite side of that rock fall over there. The quartermaster has issued your rations and mail.'

'I need to see the girl,' Ali said.

'Off limits, I'm afraid,' Walker said. 'She's been classified a military asset.'

The way he said it was odd, even for Walker. 'Who's classified her?' Ali asked.

'Classified.' Walker blinked. 'She has valuable information about the terrain.'

'But she speaks hadal dialect.'

'I plan to teach her English.'

'That will take too long. We can help, Ike and me. I've assembled glossaries before.' This was her chance to dig into the raw language.

'Thank you for your enthusiasm, Sister.'

Walker pointed at twenty bubble-wrapped bottles lying in the sand. 'Helios sent whiskey. Drink it or pour it out. Either way, it stays here. We're not taking liquid weight with us.'

Only afterward would the scientists realize the whiskey was part of Walker's plan. That night they sulked and drank. Their estrangement from the mercenaries had been building for months. The massacre had made the divide even wider. Now they were two camps. The bottles passed freely.

'We're ninety-eight-pound weaklings down here,' someone complained.

'How much more can we take?' a woman asked.

'By God, I'm ready to go home,' Gitner announced.

Ali saw the mood and decided to stay clear of it. The group was pungent with fear and grief and confusion. She went looking for Ike to share thoughts, only to find him propped among the rocks with his own bottle. Walker had turned him loose, though without his guns. She was mildly disappointed in Ike. Stripped of his weapons, he seemed impotent, more dependent on his ability to commit mayhem than was right.

'What are you drinking for?' she demanded. 'Tonight of all nights.'

'What's wrong with tonight?' he said.

'We're coming apart. Look around.'

In the distance, Walker's militia had set up strobe lights to defend their walls. In the foreground, in staccato silhouette, drunken dancers were doing dance moves and shedding their clothes. But there was no music. You could hear arguing and despair and lovers grinding each other into the hard sand. It sounded like August in a ghetto.

'We were too big to start with,' Ike commented. Ali stared at him. 'You're not concerned?'

He tipped the bottle, wiped his mouth. 'Sometimes you just have to go with it,' he said.

'Don't give up on us, Ike.' He looked away.

Ali wandered to an isolated spot midway between the two camps and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, she was awakened by a hand clamped across her mouth.

'Sister,' a man whispered.

She felt a heavy bundle thrust into her hands.

'Hide it.'

He left before Ali could say a word.

Ali laid the bundle beside her and unfolded it. She felt through the contents with her hands: a rifle and pistol, three knives, a sawed-off shotgun that could only belong to Ike, and boxes of ammunition. Forbidden fruit. Her visitor could only have been a soldier, and she felt certain it was one of the burned ones Ike had brought to safety. But why the guns?

Fearful that Walker was putting her through some kind of test, Ali almost returned the bundle of weapons to the fire base. She went to ask Ike's opinion, but he had passed out. Finally she buried the shadowy inheritance beneath a cliff wall.

Early in the morning, Ali woke to a phosphorescent sea fog blanketing the beach. In the quiet, she felt, rather than heard, footsteps padding through the sand. She stood and made out figures stealing through the fog, specters hauling treasure. As one came close, she saw it was a soldier, who gestured for her to be quiet and sit down. She knew him slightly, and for him had copied a short verse from Saint Teresa of Avila, her favorite mystic. This morning he didn't meet her eyes.

She sat down and stayed mute as the last of them filed past. They were headed toward the water, but even then she didn't guess. It was only after a few minutes, when no one else appeared, that she got up and walked to the shoreline and saw their lights dwindling smoothly across the still black sea.

She thought Walker must have sent out a dawn reconnaissance of some kind. But

there were no rafts left on the sand; Ali walked back and forth, looking for their boats, sure she had misplaced their location. The pontoon tracks were clear, though. The rafts had all been taken.

'Wait,' she called after the lights. 'Hello.'

It was an absurd mistake. They had forgotten her.

But if it was a mistake, why had that soldier motioned her to sit down again? It was part of a plan, she realized. They had meant to leave her.

The shock emptied her. She'd been left. Marooned.

Ali's sense of loss was immediate and overpowering, similar to that time, long ago, when a sheriff's deputy had come to her house to break the news of her parents' accident.

The sound of coughing reached through the fog, and the full truth came to her. She had not been abandoned alone. Walker had forsaken everyone not under his immediate command.

Tripping in the sand, she rushed across the beach and found the scientists scattered where their debauch had dropped them, still asleep. They woke reluctantly, and refused to believe her. Five minutes later, as they stood on the edge of the sea, where their rafts had been lying, the awful fact seeped in.

'What's the meaning of this?' roared Gitner.

'They've stranded us? Where's Shoat? He'd better have an explanation.' But Shoat was gone, too. And the feral girl.

'This can't be happening.'

Ali watched their reactions as extensions of herself. She felt numb. Enraged. Paralyzed. Like her friends and comrades, she wanted to shout and kick at the sand and fall on her back. The treachery was beyond belief.

'Why have they done this?' someone cried.

'They must have left a note. An explanation.'

'Listen to you,' Gitner jeered. 'You sound like teenagers who just got jilted. This is business, people. A race for survival. Walker just jettisoned a bunch of empty stomachs. I'm surprised he didn't do it sooner.'

Ike came over from the cache site with a piece of paper in one hand, and Ali saw a row of numbers on it. 'Walker left a portion of the food and medicine. But the communications line is destroyed. And they took all their weapons.'

'They've left us here like a speed bump,' someone cried. 'A sacrificial offering to the hadals.'

Ali grabbed Ike's arm, and her expression made them pause. Suddenly her visitor in the middle of the night made sense. 'Do you believe in karma?' she asked Ike, and they followed her to the buried blanket of guns and knives'. It took less than a minute to dig it out. Then it took an hour to argue about who got which of the weapons.

'I don't get it,' Gitner said. 'Ike saves the guy. But then he gives the hardware to a nun?'

'It's not obvious?' said Pia. 'Ike's nun.' They all looked at Ali.

Ike detoured it. 'Now we have our chance.' He finished loading his sawed-off.

In the depot they picked through the boxes and cans. Walker had left more than expected, but less than they needed. Further, his men had plundered care packages sent down to the scientists by anxious families and friends. The interior of the sand fort was littered with little gifts and cards and snapshots. It added insult to the crime, and put the scientists into greater despair.

The scientists numbered forty-six. A careful accounting showed they had food for

1,334 man-days, or twenty-nine days at full rations. That could be stretched, it was agreed. By halving their daily intake, the food would last two months.

Their exploration was dead. All that remained was a race for survival. The expedition faced two choices. They could try to return to Z-3 – Esperanza – on foot. Or they could continue in search of the next cache, more supplies, and an exit from the subplanet.

Gitner was adamant: Esperanza was their only hope. 'That way, at least we're not dealing with a complete unknown,' he said. With two months' rations, they would have time enough to reach what was left of Cache III, splice the comm line together, and call in more supplies. He called anyone who did not agree a fool. 'We don't have a minute to waste,' he kept saying.

'What do you think?' they asked Ike.

'It's a crapshoot,' he said.

'But which way should we go?'

Ali could tell that Ike had made up his mind. But he wanted no responsibility for their decisions, and grew quiet.

'There's nothing but hole to the west,' Gitner declared. 'Anyone that wants to go east, go with me.'

Ali was surprised when Ike turned crafty and bartered with Gitner over the weapons. He finally let go of the rifle and its ammunition and the radio and a knife for an extra fifty days' rations of MREs. 'If you don't mind,' he said, 'we'll just take a stab around this water.'

Now that he had the majority of the weapons, food, and followers, Gitner didn't mind at all. 'You're off your nut,' Gitner told Ike. 'What about the rest of you?'

'New territory,' said Troy, the young forensics expert.

'Ike's done okay so far,' said Pia. Ali didn't defend her choice.

'Then we'll remember you,' Gitner said.

He quickly wrangled his crew together and got them packed for their journey, prodding them with the possibility that Walker might decide to reclaim what was left. There was little time for the two groups to say good-bye. People from each coalition were shaking hands, bidding one another to break a leg, promising to send rescue if they got out first.

Just before leaving, Gitner approached Ali with his new rifle. 'I think it's only fair that you give us your maps,' he said. 'You don't need them. We do.'

'My day maps?' Ali said. They were hers. She had created them with all the art in her, and saw them as an extension of herself.

'We need to remember all the landmarks possible.'

It was the first time Ali actively wished Ike would stand up for her, but he didn't. With everyone watching, she gave the tube of maps to Gitner. 'Promise to take care of them,' she asked. 'I'd like them back someday.'

'Sure.' Gitner offered no thanks, just hitched the tube into his backpack and started up the trail beside the river. His people followed. Besides Ali and Ike, only seven people stayed behind.

'Which way do we go?'

'Left,' said Ike. He was so sure.

'But Walker went right with the boats, I saw him,' Ali said.

'That could work,' Ike allowed. 'But it's backward.'

'Backward?'

'Can't you feel it?' Ike asked. 'This is a sacred space. You always walk to the left around sacred places. Mountains. Temples. Lakes. That's just how it's done. Clockwise.'

'Isn't that some Buddhist thing?' said Pia.

'Dante,' said Ike. 'Ever read the Inferno? Each time they hit a fork, the party goes left. Always left. And he was no Buddhist.'

'That's it?' marveled a burly geologist. 'All these months we've been following a poem and your superstitions?'

Ike grinned. 'You didn't know that?'

The first fifteen days they marched shoeless, like beachcombers. The sand was cool between their toes. They sweated under heavy packs. At night their thighs ached. Drifting on rafts had taken its toll.

Ike kept them in motion, but slowly, the pace of nomads. 'No sense in racing,' he said. 'We're doing fine.'

They learned the water. Ali dipped her headlamp underneath the surface, and she may as well have tried shining her light from the back of a mirror. She cupped the water in her palms and it was like holding time. The water was ancient.

'This water – it's been living here for over a half-million years,' the hydrologist

Chelsea told her. It had a scent like the deep earth.

Ike stirred the sea with his hand and let a few drops onto his tongue. 'Different,' he pronounced. After that, he drank from the sea without hesitation. He let the others make up their own minds, and knew they were watching closely to see if he sickened or his urine bled. Twiggs, the microbotanist, was especially attentive.

By the end of the second day, all were drinking the water without purifying it.

'It's delicious,' said Ali. Voluptuous, she meant, but did not want to say it out loud. It was somehow different from plain water, the way it slid on the tongue, its cleanness. She scooped a handful to her face and pulled it across the bones of her cheeks, and the sense of it lingered. It was all in her head, she decided. It had to do with this place.

One day they saw small sulfurous flashes along the black horizon. Ike said it was gunfire, maybe as much as a hundred miles away, on the opposite side of the sea. Walker was either making trouble or having it.

The water was their north. For nearly six months they had advanced with no foresight, trusting no compass, trapped in blind veins. Now they had the sea. For once they could anticipate their geography. They could see tomorrow, and the day after that. It was not a straight destiny, there were bends and arcs, but for a change they could see as far as their vision reached, a welcome alternative to the maze of claustrophobic tunnels.

Although everyone was hungry, they were not famished, and the water was always there to comfort them. Two and three and four times a day, they would bathe away their sweat. They tied strings to their plastic cups and could scoop up a drink without bending or breaking stride. Ali's hair had grown long. She loosed it from its braid and let it hang, lush and clean.

They were pleased with Ike's regime. He did not drive them. If anyone tired, Ike took some of their load. Once when Ike went off to investigate a side canyon, some of them tried lifting his pack, and couldn't budge it. 'What does he have in there?' Chelsea asked. No one dared look, of course. That would have been like tampering with good luck.

When they turned their last light off at night, the beach gleamed with Early Cretaceous phosphorescence. Ali watched for hours as the sand pulsed against the inky sea, holding back the darkness. She had taken to lying on her back and imagining stars and saying prayers. Anything not to sleep.

Ever since Walker had overseen the massacre, sleep meant terrible dreams. Eyeless women pursued her. In the name of the Father.

One night Ike woke her from a nightmare. 'Ali?' he said.

Sand was sticking to her sweat. She was panting. She clung to his hand.

'I'm okay,' she gasped.

'It's not quite that easy,' Ike breathed, 'with you.'

Stay, she almost said. But then what? What was she supposed to do with him now?

'Sleep,' said Ike. 'You let things get to you too much.'

Another week passed. They were slowing. Their stomachs rumbled at night.

'How much longer?' they asked Ike.

'We're doing fine,' he heartened them.

'We're so hungry.'

Ike looked at them, judging. 'Not that hungry,' he said mildly, and it was cryptic. How hungry did they have to be? wondered Ali. And what was his relief?

'Where can Cache V be? We must be near.'

'What's the date?' said Ike. He knew they knew the next cylinders were not scheduled to be lowered for another six days. That didn't keep them from trolling hopefully for the cache signals. All of them had tiny cache locators built into their Helios wristwatches. First Pia, then Chelsea, used up their watch batteries trying to get some signal. It was magical thinking. No one wanted to talk about what would happen if Walker and his pirates reached the cache before them.

The six days passed, and still they didn't find the cache. They were covering only a few miles a day. Ike took on more and more of their weight. Ali found herself struggling with barely fifteen pounds on her back.

Ike recommended they ration themselves. 'Share one packet of MREs with two or three people,' he suggested. 'Or eat just one over a two-day period.' He never took away their food and rationed it for them, though.

They never saw him eat.

'What's he living on?' Chelsea asked Ali.

For twenty-three days Gitner led his castaways with eroding success. It seemed impossible, but in their second week they had somehow misplaced the river. One day it was there. The next it was just gone.

Gitner blamed Ali's day maps. He pulled the rolls of parchment from her leather tube and threw them on the ground. 'Good riddance,' he said. 'Nothing but science fiction.'

With the river gone, they had no more use for their water gear. They abandoned their survival suits in a rubbery pile of neoprene.

By the end of the third week, people were falling behind, disappearing.

A salt arch they were using as a bridge collapsed, plunging five into the void. Unbelievably, both of the expedition's two physicians suffered compound fractures of their legs. It was Gitner's call to leave them. Physician, heal thyself. It was two days before their echoing pleas faded in the tunnels behind.

As their numbers dwindled, Gitner relied on three advantages: his rifle, his pistol, and the expedition's supply of amphetamines. Sleep was the enemy. He still believed they would find Cache III, and that the comm lines could be repaired. Food ran low. Two murders soon followed. In both cases, a chunk of rock had been used and the victims' packs had been plundered.

At a fork in the tunnel, Gitner overrode the group's vote. Without a clue, he led them straight into a tunnel formation known as a spongework maze, or boneyard. At first they thought little of it. The porous maze was filled with pockets and linked cavities and stone bubbles that spread in every direction, forward and down and up and to the rear. It was like climbing through a massive, petrified sponge.

'Now we're getting somewhere,' Gitner enthused. 'Obviously some gaseous dissolution ate upward from the interior. We can gain some elevation in a hurry now.' They roped up, those still left, and started moving vertically through the pores and oviducts. But they tangled their ropes by following through the wrong hole. Friction braked their progress. Holes tightened, then gaped. Packs had to be handed up and through and across the interstices. It was time-consuming.

'We have to go back,' someone growled up to Gitner. He unroped so they could not pull on him, and kept climbing. The others unroped, too, and some became lost, to which Gitner said, 'Now we're reaching fighting weight.' They could hear voices at night as the lost ones tried to locate the group. Gitner just popped more speed and kept his light on.

Finally, Gitner was left with only one man. 'You screwed up, boss,' he rasped to

Gitner.

Gitner shot him through the top of the head. He listened to the body slither and knock deeper and deeper, then turned and continued up, certain the spongework would lead him out of the underworld into the sun again. Somewhere along the way, he hung his rifle on an outcrop. A little farther on, he left his pistol.

At 0440 on November 15, the spongework stopped. Gitner reached a ceiling.

He pulled his pack around in front of him, and carefully assembled the radio. The battery level was near the red, but he figured it was good for one loud shout. With enormous exactitude he attached the transmission tendrils to various features in the spongework, then sat on a marble strut and cleared his thoughts and throat. He switched the radio on.

'Mayday, mayday,' he said, and a vague sense of déjà vu tickled at the back of his mind. 'This is Professor Wayne Gitner of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Helios Sub-Pacific Expedition. My party is dead. I am now alone and require assistance. I repeat, please assist.'

The battery died. He laid the set aside and took up his hammer and began clawing away at the ceiling. A memory that wouldn't quite take shape kept nagging at him. He just hit harder.

In mid-swing, he stopped and lowered the hammer. Six months earlier, he had listened to his own voice enunciating the very distress signal he had just sent. He had circled to his own beginning.

For some, that might have meant a fresh start. For a man like Gitner, it meant the end.

I sit leaning against the cliff while the years go by, till the green grass grows between my feet and the red dust settles on my head, and the men of the world, thinking me dead, come with offerings... to lay by my corpse.

– HAN SHAN, Cold Mountain, c. 640 CE

22

BAD WIND

The Dolomite Alps

The scholars had been building toward this day since their first night together. For seventeen months, their journeys – Thomas's capriccios – had cast them across the globe like a throw of dice. At last they stood together again, or sat, for de l'Orme's castle perched high atop a limestone precipice, and it took very little exertion to get out of breath.

For once, Mustafah's emphysema gave him the advantage: he had an oxygen set, and could merely crank the airflow higher. Foley and Vera were sharing an Italian aspirin powder for their headaches. Parsifal, the astronaut, was making a bluff show of his athletic nature, but looked a bit green, especially as de l'Orme took them on a tour of the curving battlements overlooking the stepped crags and far plains.

'Don't like neighbors?' Gault asked. His Parkinson's had stabilized. Couched in a large wheelchair, he looked like a Pinocchio manipulated by naughty children.

'Isn't it wonderful?' said de l'Orme. 'Every morning I wake and thank God for paranoia.' He had already explained the castle's origins: a German Crusader had gone mad outside the walls of Jerusalem, and was exiled atop these rocks.

It was rather small for a castle. Built in a perfect circle on the very edge of the cliff, it almost resembled a lighthouse. They finished their tour. January was sitting where they'd left her, depleted by malaria, facing south to the sun with Thomas. Down below, lining the dead-end road, were their hired cars. Their drivers and several nurses were enjoying a picnic among the early flowers.

'Let's go inside,' said de l'Orme. 'At these heights, the sun feels very warm. But the slightest cloud can send the temperature plunging. And there's a storm coming.'

Thick logs blazing on the iron grate barely took away the room's chill. The dining hall was stark, walls bare, not even a tapestry or a boar's head. De l'Orme had no need for decorations.

They sat around a table, and a servant came in with bowls of thick, hot soup. There were no forks, just spoons for the soup and knives to cut the fruit and cheese and prosciutto. The servant poured wine and then retreated, closing the doors behind him. De l'Orme proposed a toast to their generous hearts and even more generous appetites. He was the host, but it was not really his party. Thomas had called this meeting, though no one knew why. Thomas had been brooding ever since arriving. They got on with the meal.

The food revived them. For an hour they enjoyed the company of their comrades. Most had been strangers at the outset, and their paths had intersected only rarely since Thomas had scattered them to the winds in New York City. But they had come to share a common purpose so strongly that they might as well have been brothers and sisters. They were excited by one another's tales, glad for one another's safety. January recounted her last hour with Desmond Lynch in the Phnom Penh airport. He had been heading to Rangoon, then south, in search of a Karen warlord who claimed to have met with Satan. Since then, no one had heard a word from him.

They waited for Thomas to add his own impressions, but he was distracted and melancholy. He had arrived late, bearing a square box, all but unapproachable.

'And where is Santos?' Mustafah asked de l'Orme. 'I'm beginning to think he doesn't like us.'

'Off to Johannesburg,' de l'Orme said. 'It seems another band of hadals has surrendered. To a group of unarmed diamond miners!'

'That's the third this month,' said Parsifal. 'One in the Urals. Another beneath the

Yucatán.'

'Meek as lambs,' said de l'Orme, 'chanting in unison. Like pilgrims entering

Jerusalem.'

'What a notion.'

'You'd think it would be much safer to go deeper. Away from us. It's almost as if they were afraid of the depths beneath them. As afraid as we are of the depths

beneath us.'

'Let's begin,' said Thomas.

They had been waiting a long time to synthesize their information. At last it began, knives in hand, grapes flying. It started cautiously, with a show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine prudence. In no time, the exchange turned into a highly democratic free-for-all. They psychoanalyzed Satan with the vigor of freshmen. The clues led off in a dozen directions. They knew better, but could not help egging on the wild theories with wilder theories of their own.

'I'm so relieved,' Mustafah admitted. 'I thought I was the only one coming to these extraordinary conclusions.'

'We should stick to what we know,' Foley prudishly reminded them.

'Okay,' said Vera. And it only got wilder.

He was a he, they agreed. Except for the four-thousand-year-old Sumerian tale of Queen Ereshkigal, or Allatu in the Assyrian, the monarch of the underworld was mainly a masculine presence. Even if the contemporary Satan proved to be a council of leaders, it was likely to be dominated by a masculine sensibility, an urge toward domination, a willingness to shed blood.

They extrapolated from prevailing views of animal behavior about alpha males, territorial imperative, and reproductive tyranny. Diplomacy might or might not work with such a character. A clenched fist or an empty threat would probably just incite him. The hadal leader would not be stupid: to the contrary, his reputation for deception and masks and inventiveness and cunning bargains suggested real cross-cultural genius.

He had the economic instincts of a salt trader, the courage of a soloist crossing the Arctic. He was a traveler among mankind, conversant in human languages, a student of power, an observer able to blend in without notice, an adventurer who explored at random or for profit or, like the Beowulf scholars and the Helios expedition who were exploring his lands, out of scientific curiosity.

His anonymity was a skill, an art, but not infallible. He had never been caught. But he had been sighted. No one knew exactly what he looked like, which meant he did not look like what people expected. He probably didn't have red horns or cloven hooves or a tail with a spike at the tip. That he could be grotesque or animalistic at times, and seductive or voluptuary or even beautiful at other times, suggested a switch of disguises or of lieutenants or spies. Or a lineage of Satans.

The ability to transfer memory from one consciousness to another, now clinically proven, was significant, said Mustafah. Reincarnation made possible a 'dynasty' similar to that of the Dalai Lama theocracy. That was a jolt, the notion of Satan as an ongoing religious monarchy.

'Buddhism with extreme prejudice,' quipped Parsifal.

'Perhaps,' de l'Orme proposed irreverently, 'Satan would be better off just dying out and becoming an idea, rather than struggling to be a reality. By sniffing around man's camp all these years, the lion has degenerated into a hyena. The tempest has become just a puff of bad wind, a fart in the night.'

Whether the literature and archaeological and linguistic evidence were describing Satan himself or rather his lieutenants and spies, the profile was consistent with an inquiring mentality. No doubt about it, the darkness wanted to know about the light. But to know what? Civilization? The human condition? The feel of sunbeams?

'The more I learn about hadal culture,' Mustafah said, 'the more I suspect a great culture in decline. It's as if a collective intellect had developed Alzheimer's and slowly begun to lose its reason.'

'I think of autism, not Alzheimer's,' said Vera. 'A vast onset of self-centered presentness. An inability to recognize the outside world, and with that an inability to create. Look at the artifacts coming up from subplanetary hadal sites. Over the last

three to five thousand years, the artifacts have been increasingly human in origin: coins, weapons, cave art, hand tools. That could mean that the hadals turned away from menial and artistic labor as they pursued higher arts, or that they jobbed the day-to-day minutiae out to human artisans whom they'd captured, or that they valued stolen possessions more than homemade ones.

'But match it with the decline in hadal population over the past several thousand years. Some demographic projections suggest they might have numbered over forty million individuals subglobally at the time Aristotle and Buddha lived. The figure is probably less than 300,000 at present. Something's gone terribly wrong down there. They haven't grown more sophisticated. They haven't pursued the higher arts. If anything, they've simply become packrats, storing their human knickknacks in tribal nests, increasingly unaware of what they have or where they are or even what they are.'

'Vera and I have talked about this at length,' said Mustafah. 'There's a tremendous amount of fieldwork to be done, of course. But if you go back a million years in the fossil record, it appears the hadals were developing hand tools and even amalgamated metal artifacts far ahead of what humans were producing on the surface. While man was still figuring out how to pound two rocks together, the hadals were inventing musical instruments made of glass! Who knows? Maybe man never did discover fire. Maybe we were taught it! But now you have these grotesque creatures reduced to savagery, their tribes draining off into the deepest holes. It's sad, really.'

'The question is,' said Vera, 'does this overall decline reflect in all the hadals?'

'Satan,' said January. 'Above all, does it affect him?'

'Without having met him, I can't say for sure. But there is always a dynamic between a people and their leader. He's a mirror image of them. Kind of like God in reverse. We're an image of Him? How about Him as an image of us?'

'You're saying the leader isn't leading? That he's following his benighted masses?'

'Of course,' said Mustafah. 'Even the most isolated despot reflects his people. Otherwise he's just a madman.' He gestured at the space around them. 'No different from the knight who built this castle on top of a mountain in a rocky wilderness.'

'Maybe that's what he is,' said Vera. 'Isolated. Alienated. Segregated by his genius. Wandering the world, above and below, cut off from his own kind, trying to figure some way into our kind.'

'Are we so attractive to them?' January wondered.

'Why not? What if our light and civilization and intellectual and physical health is their salvation, so to speak? What if we represent paradise to them – or him – the way their darkness and savagery and ignorance represent our hell?'

'And Satan's tired of being Satan?' asked Mustafah.

'But of course,' Parsifal said. 'What could be more in keeping? The ultimate traitor. The Judas of all time. A serpent ascending. The rat jumping off the ship.'

'Or at least an intellect contemplating his own transformation,' said Vera.

'Anguishing over his direction. Trying to decide whether he really can bring himself to cut loose.'

'What's so wrong with that?' asked Foley. 'Wasn't that Christ's agony? Isn't that Buddha's conundrum? The savior hits his wall. He gets worn out being the savior. He gets tired of the suffering. It means our Satan is mortal, that's all.'

January opened her palms to them like pink fruit. 'Why get so fancy?' she asked.

'The theory works perfectly fine with a much simpler explanation. What if Satan came up to cut a deal? What if he wants to find someone like us as badly as we want to find him?'

Foley's pencil fanned a nervous yellow wing in the air. 'But that's what I've been thinking!' he said. 'In fact, I think he's already found us.'

'What?' three of them asked at once.

Even Thomas raised his eyes from his dark thoughts.

'If there's one thing I've learned as an entrepreneur, it is that ideas occur in waves. Ideas transcend intelligence. In different cultures. Different languages. Different dreams. Why should the idea of peace be any different? What if the notion of a treaty or a summit or a cease-fire occurred to our Satan even as it occurred to us?'

'But you conjecture he's found us.'

'Why not? We're not invisible. The Beowulf endeavor has been globetrotting for a year and a half. If Satan is half as resourceful as you say, he's heard of us. And yes, located us. And perhaps even penetrated us.'

'Absurd,' they cried. But hungered for more.

'Speak from the evidence,' said Thomas.

'Yes, the evidence,' said Foley. 'It's your own evidence, Thomas. Wasn't it you who proposed that Satan might contact a leader as desperate – and enigmatic and vilified

– as himself? A leader like this jungle warlord Desmond Lynch went off to find. As I recall, you once suggested Satan might want to establish a colony of his own, on the surface, in plain sight as it were, in a country like Burma or Rwanda, a place so benighted and savage no one dares cross its borders.'

'You're proposing that I am Satan?' Thomas drolly asked.

'No. Not at all.'

'I'm relieved. Then who?'

Foley went for broke. 'Desmond.'

'Lynch?' belched Gault.

'I'm quite serious.'

'What are you talking about?' January protested. 'The poor man's vanished. He's probably been eaten by tigers.'

'Perhaps. But what if he had secreted himself in our midst? Listened to our thoughts? Waited for an opportunity like this, a chance to meet a despot and make his pact? I doubt he'd bid us a fond adieu before disappearing forever.'

'Absurd.'

Foley laid his yellow pencil neatly alongside of his pad. 'Look, we've agreed on several things. That Satan is a trickster. A master of anonymity. He survives through his disguises and deceptions. And he may have been trying to strike a bargain... for peace or a hiding place, it doesn't matter. All I know is that Senator January last saw Desmond alive, on his way into a jungle no one dares to enter.'

'Do you realize what you're saying?' asked Thomas. 'I chose the man myself. I've known him for decades.'

'Satan is patient. He has loads of time.'

'You're suggesting that Lynch played us along from the beginning? That he used us?'

'Absolutely.'

Thomas looked sad. Sad and decided. 'Accuse him yourself,' he said. He set his box on the table amid the fruit and cheeses. Beneath FedEx paperwork, it bore diplomatic seals printed in broken wax.

'Thomas, is this necessary?' January said, guessing.

'This was delivered to me three days ago,' said Thomas. 'It came via Rangoon and

Beijing. Here's why I convened this meeting with all of you.'

Lynch's head had been dipped in shellac. He would not have been pleased with what it had done to his thick Scottish hair, normally parted at the right temple. Through the slightly parted lids they could see round pebbles.

'They scooped his eyes out and put in stones,' said Thomas. 'Probably while he was still alive. While he was alive, too, they probably made this.' He drew out a necklace of human teeth. 'There are plier marks on several.'

'Why are you showing us this?' January whispered.

Mustafah looked down at his plate. Foley's arms were limp upon the chair rests.

Parsifal was astounded: he and Lynch had clashed over socialism. Now the bleeding heart's mouth was locked tight, the bushy eyebrows plasticized, and Parsifal realized he would wonder to his death about the courage of his own convictions. What a brave bastard, he was thinking.

'One other thing,' Thomas continued. 'A set of genitals was found inside the mouth. A monkey's genitals.'

'How dare you,' whispered de l'Orme. He could smell the death, sense it in the other's pall. 'Here, in my home, at our meal?'

'Yes. I've brought this into your home, at our meal. So that you will not doubt me.' Thomas stood, his big knuckles flat on the oak plank, the insulted head between his fists.

'My friends,' he said, 'we have reached the end.'

They could not have been more stunned if he had produced a second head.

'The end?' said Mustafah.

'We have failed.'

'How can you say such a thing?' Vera objected. 'After all we've accomplished.'

'Do you not see poor Lynch?' Thomas said, holding the head aloft. 'Can you not hear your own words? This is Satan?'

They did not answer. He set the horrible artifact back into the box.

'I'm as responsible as you,' Thomas told them. 'Yes, I spoke to the possibility of Satan visiting some despot tucked away in a remote wasteland, and that misled you. But isn't it just as possible Satan would have desired to meet and appraise a different kind of tyrant, say, the head of Helios? And because we met with Cooper at his research complex, does that mean another one of us must be Satan, perhaps even you, Brian? No, I think not.'

'Fine, I flew off the curve,' said Foley. 'One wild deduction should not impeach our search.'

'This entire endeavor is a wild deduction,' Thomas said. 'We've seduced ourselves with our own knowledge. We're no closer to knowing Satan than when we began. We are finished.'

'Surely not yet,' said Mustafah. 'There's still so much to know.' Their faces all registered that sentiment.

'I can no longer justify the hardships and danger,' said Thomas.

'You don't need to justify anything,' challenged Vera. 'This has been our choice from the start. Look at us.'

Despite their ordeals and the assault of time, they were not the spectral figures Thomas had first collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sparked to action. Their faces were bronzed with exotic suns, their skin toughened by winds and the cold, their eyes lit with adventure. They had been waiting to die, and his call to arms had saved their lives.

'Clearly the group wants to keep going,' said Mustafah.

'I'm just starting in with new Olmec evidence,' Gault explained.

'And the Swedes are developing a new DNA test,' said Vera. 'I'm in daily contact. They think it suggests a whole new species branch. It's just a matter of months.'

'And there was another ghost transmission from the interior,' said Parsifal. 'From the Helios expedition. The date code was August 8, almost four months ago, I know. But that's still a full month more recent than anything else we've managed to receive. The digital string needs enhancement, and it's only a partial communication, something about a river. It's not much. But they're alive. Or were. Just months ago. We can't just cut loose from them, Thomas. They're depending on us.'

Parsifal's remark was not meant to be cruel, but it drove Thomas's chin down to his chest. Week by week, his face had been growing more hollowed. Haunted, it seemed, by what he had put in motion.

'And what about you?' January asked more gently. 'This has been your quest since before any of us came to know you.'

'My quest,' Thomas murmured. 'And where has that brought us?'

'The hunt,' said Mustafah, 'has intrinsic value. You knew that in the beginning. Whether we ever sighted our prey, much less brought him to earth, we were learning about ourselves. By fitting our own foot into Satan's tracks, we've come that much closer to dispelling ancient illusions. Touching the reality of what we really are.'

'Illusion? Reality?' said Thomas. 'We've lost Lynch to the jungle. Rau to his madness. And Branch to his quest. And sent a young woman to her death in the center of the earth. I've taken you from your families and homes. And every day we continue brings new risks.'

'But, Thomas,' said Vera, 'we volunteered.'

'No,' he said, 'I can no longer justify it.'

'Then leave,' came de l'Orme's voice.

Out the window behind his head, dark thunderheads were piling for an afternoon storm. His face was positively radiant with the reflected flames. His tone was stern.

'You may hand the torch on,' he told Thomas, 'but you may not extinguish it.'

'We're too damned close, Thomas,' January said.

'Close to what?' Thomas asked. 'Among us, we have over five hundred years of combined scholarship and experience. And where have we gotten with it in a year and a half of searching?' He dropped the strand of Lynch's teeth into the box, like so many rosary beads. 'That one of us is Satan. My friends, we've looked into the dark water so long it has become a mirror.'

A streak of lightning lanced between two limestone towers in the middle distance. Its thunder cracked through the room. Down below, the hired drivers and nurses fled for the cars just as a mountain squall attacked.

'You can't stop us, Thomas,' said de l'Orme. 'We have our own resources. We have our own imperatives. We'll follow the path you opened to us, wherever it may lead.' Thomas closed the box and rested his fingers on the cardboard.

'Follow it then,' he said. 'This pains me to say. But from this day on you follow your path without the blessing and imprimatur of the Holy Father. And you follow it without me. My friends, I lack your strength. I lack your conviction. Forgive me my doubt. May God bless you.' He picked up the box.

'Don't go,' whispered January.

'Good-bye,' he said to them, and walked into the storm.

It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery....

– JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

23

THE SEA

Beneath the Mariana and

Yap Trenches, 6,010 fathoms

The sea stretched on. They had been walking for twenty-one days. Ike kept them on a short leash. He set the pace, resting every half hour, circulating among them like Gunga Din, filling their water bottles, congratulating them on their endurance. 'Man, where were you guys when I needed you on Makalu?' he would say.

Next to Ike, the strongest was Troy, the forensics kid, who'd probably been watching Sesame Street at the time Ike was battling his Himalayan peaks. He did a fine job trying to be Ike-like, solicitous and useful. But he was wearing down, too. Sometimes Ike posted him at the front, a place of trust, his way of honoring the boy. Ali decided the best help she could be was to walk with Twiggs, whom everyone else wanted to hogtie and leave. From the moment he woke, the man whined and begged and committed petty thefts. The microbotanist was a born panhandler. Only Ali could deal with him. She treated him like a teenage novitiate with pimples. When Pia or Chelsea marveled at her patience, Ali explained that if it wasn't Twiggs, it would be someone else. She had never seen a tribe without a scapegoat.

Their tents were history. They slept on thin sleeping pads as a pretense of their former civilization. Only three of them had sleeping bags, because the three pounds of weight had proven too much for the rest. When the temperature cooled, they pressed together and draped the bags over their collective body. Ike rarely slept with them. Usually he took his shotgun and wandered away, returning in the morning.

On one such morning, before Ike came in from his night patrolling, Ali woke and walked down to the sea to clean her face. A boggy mist had come in off the water, but she could see to place her feet on the phosphorescent sand. Just as she was about to skirt a large boulder, she heard noises.

The sounds were delicate and bony. Instantly she knew this was not English, probably not human. She listened more keenly, then gently worked ahead several more steps to the flank of the boulder and kept herself hidden.

There seemed to be two figures down there. In silence she listened to the voices murmur and click and slowly dial her into a different horizon of existence. There was no question they were hadals.

She was breathless. One sounded little different from the water lightly lapping against the shore. The other was less joined at the vowels, more cut and dried at the edges of his word strings. They sounded polite or old. She stepped from around the rock to see them.

There weren't two, but three. One was a gargoyle similar to those that Shoat and Ike had killed. It was perched upon the very skin of the water, hands flat, while its wings fanned languidly up and down. The other two appeared to be amphibians, or close to it, like fishermen who have no memory but the sea, half man, half fish. One lay on his side on the sand, feet in the water, while the other drifted in repose. They had the sleek heads and large eyes of seals, but with sharpened teeth. Their flesh was slick and white, with small black hairs fletching their backs.

She had been afraid they would flee. Abruptly she was afraid they would not.

One of the amphibians stirred and twisted to see her, showing his thick pizzle. It was erect. He'd been stroking himself, she realized. The gargoyle flexed his mouth like a baboon, and the dental arcade looked vicious.

'Oh,' Ali said foolishly.

What had she been thinking, to come here alone?

They watched her with the composure of philosophers in a glen. One of the

amphibians went ahead and finished his thought in their soft language, still looking at her.

Ali considered running back to the group. She set one foot behind her to turn and go. The gargoyle cut the briefest of side glances at her.

'Don't move,' muttered Ike.

He was hunkered on top of the boulder to her left, balanced on the balls of his feet. The pistol in one hand hung relaxed.

The hadals didn't speak anymore. They had that peculiar Oriental ease with long silences. The one went on stroking himself with apelike bemusement, not at all self-conscious or purposeful. There was nothing to hear but the water licking sand, and the skin sound of the one fondling himself.

After a while, the gargoyle cast one more glance at Ali, then pushed forward against the water's surface and departed on slow wings, never rising more than a few inches above the sea. He diagonaled into the mist and was gone.

By the time Ali brought her attention back to the amphibians, one had vanished. The last one – the masturbator – reached a state of boredom and quit. He slid below the water, and it was as if he had been drawn into a mouth. The lips of the sea sealed over him.

'Did that really happen?' Ali asked in a low voice. Her heart was pounding. She started forward to verify the handprints in the sand, to confirm the reality.

'Don't go near that water,' Ike warned her. 'He's waiting for you.'

'He's still there?' Her Zen hadals, lurking? But they were so pacific.

'You want to back up, please. You're making me nervous, Sister.'

'Ike,' she suddenly bubbled, 'you can understand them?'

'Not a word. Not these.'

'There are others?'

'I keep telling you, we're not alone.'

'But to actually see them...'

'Ali, we've been passing among them the whole time.'

'Ones like those?'

'And ones you don't want to know about.'

'But they looked so peaceful. Like three poets.' Ike tsk'ed.

'Then why didn't they attack us?' she said.

'I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. It's almost like they knew me.' He hesitated. 'Or you.'

Branch lagged, weary.

He kept cutting their trail, but their spoor wandered, or else he did. It was likely him, he knew. Insect bites had made him sick, and the best thing would be to find a burrow and wait until the fever passed. With so much human presence around, he didn't trust the burrowing, though.

To stop would be to attract predators from many miles around. If one found him convalescing in a cubbyhole, it would be all over. And so Branch kept on his feet.

A lifetime of wounds hampered his pace. Delirium sapped his attention. He felt very old. It seemed as though he'd been voyaging since the beginning of time.

He came to a narrow sinkhole with a skinny rivulet trickling down. Rifle across his back, Branch roped into the abyss. At the bottom, he pulled the line and coiled it and moved on. He was new to this region, but was not a neophyte.

He came upon a woman's skeleton. Her long black hair lay by the skull, which was unusual, because it made good cordage when braided. That it had been left told him there were many more such humans available. That was good. Predators would be less prone to hunt him.

Through the day, Branch found more evidence of humans: whole skeletons, ribs, a footprint, a dried patch of urine, or the distinctive smell of H. sapiens in hadal dung. Someone had scratched his name on the wall, along with a date. One date from only two weeks before gave him hope.

Then he found the blubbery pile of survival suits, of which a number had been speared or hacked. To a hadal, the neoprene suits would seem like supernatural skins or even live animals. He rummaged through the pile and dressed in one that was whole and fit.

Shortly afterward, Branch found the rolls of paper with Ali's maps. He raced through them in chronological order. At the end, someone else's hand had scrawled in Walker's treachery at the sea, and the group's dispersal. It all came together for him, why this band had become separated and vulnerable, why Ike was nowhere to be found among them. Branch saw now where he needed to go, that subterranean sea. From there he might find more signs. Ali's chronicle made perfect sense to him. He took the maps and went on.

A day later, Branch realized he was being stalked.

He could actually smell them on the airstream, and that disturbed him. It meant they had to be close, for his nose was not keen. Ike would have sensed them long before. Again he felt old.

He had the same two choices every animal does, fight or flight. Branch ran.

Three hours later he reached the river. He saw the trail leading along the water, but it was too late for that. He faced around, and there were four of them fanning out in the talus above, as pale as larvae.

A slender spear – reed tipped with obsidian – shattered on the rock next to him. Another pierced the water. It would have been easy to shoot the one youngster nearing on his left. That still would have left three, and the same necessity for what he now did.

The leap was clumsy, impaired by his rifle and the tube of maps wrapped in waterproofing. He had meant to strike open water, but his right foot caught a stone. He heard his right knee snap. He clung to the rifle, but dropped the maps on shore. Momentum alone carried him into the current. The current sucked him under.

For as long as he could hold his breath, Branch let the river have him. At last he triggered the survival suit and felt its bladders fill. He was buoyed to the surface like a cork.

The fastest hadal was still tracking him alongside the river. The moment Branch's head popped above water, the hadal made a hurried cast.

The spear lodged deep just as Branch fired a burst from underwater, and the water chopped upward in long rooster tails. The hadal spun, was killed, and hit the water flat.

The river flowed on, taking him around bends and crooks, away from the danger. For the next five days, Branch had the dead hadal for company as they both drifted to the sea. The river was like a mother, impartial to her children's differences. He drank her water. His fever cooled.

The spear fell out of him eventually.

Parasitic eels gently sucked at him. They took his blood, but his wound stayed clean. Somewhere along the way, he got his knee back in joint.

With all that pain, it was no wonder he dreamed so much as he drifted to the sea. Back along the riverbank, a monstrosity, painted and inked and ridged with scars, picked up the tube of maps. He unrolled them from the waterproofing and pinned their corners with rocks while hadals gathered around. They had no eye for such things. But Isaac could see the care and detail the cartographer had lavished on these pages. 'There is hope,' he said in hadal.

For days they had been remarking on a nebulous gleam the color of milk, occupying the rump of their horizon. They thought it might be a cloudbank or steam from a waterfall or perhaps a beached iceberg. Ali feared they were suffering collective hunger delusions, for they'd begun stumbling on the trail and talking to themselves. No one imagined a seaside fortress carved from phosphorescent cliffs.

Five stories high, its walls were as smooth as Egyptian alabaster. It had been whittled from solid rock. Beerstone, Twiggs told them. The Romans used to quarry it in ancient Britain. Westminster Abbey was made of it. A creamy white calcite, it came out of the ground as soft as soap and over the years dried to a hardness perfect for sculpting. He adored it for its pollen residues.

Long ago, hadals had skinned away the face of this wall, denuding its softer stone to cut out a complex of rooms and ramparts and statues, all of one piece. Not one block or brick had been added to it, a single huge monument.

Three times as broad as it was tall, the dwelling was empty and largely in collapse. It breasted the sea and was clearly a bulwark anchoring the commerce of some great vanished empire. You could see what was left of stone docks and pier slips submerged an inch beneath the water.

Even weak with hunger, they were beguiled. They wandered through the warren of rooms looking across the night sea and, to the fortress's rear, onto the crags below. Stairs had been cut into the cliff sides, seemingly thousands of them, leading off into new depths.

Whoever – or whatever – the hadals had built this defensive monster against, it was not humans. Ali estimated the fortress dated back at least fifteen thousand years, probably more. 'Man was still chipping flint in caves while this hadal civilization was engaged in riverine trade across thousands of miles. I doubt we were much of a threat to them.'

'But where did they go?' Troy asked. 'What could have destroyed them?'

As they wandered through the crumbling hulk, they encountered a people from another time. The fortress rooms and parapets were built to Homo scale, with ceilings planed at a remarkably standard six feet.

The walls held traces of engraved images and script and glyphs, and Ali pronounced the writings even older than what they had seen before. She was sure no epigrapher had ever laid eyes on such script.

Deep in the cavernous interior stood a freestanding column, rising twenty meters into a large domed chamber in the heart of the building. A high platform separated them from the spire's base. They made a complete circuit around the immense room, following the narrow walkway and shining their lights on the spire's upper section. There were no doors or stairways leading onto the platform.

'The spire could be a king's tomb,' said Ali.

'Or a castle keep,' said Troy.

'Or a good old-fashioned phallic symbol,' said Pia, who was there because her lover, the primatologist Spurrier, trusted Gitner even less than he trusted Ike. 'Like a Siva rock, or a pharaoh's obelisk.'

'We need to find out,' Ali said. 'It could be relevant.' Relevant, she did not say, to her search for the missing Satan.

'What do you propose, growing wings?' asked Spurrier. 'There are no stairs.'

With a pencil-thin beam of light, Ike traced a set of handholds carved into the upper half of the platform's circular wall. He opened his hundred-pound pack and laid out the contents, and they all took a peek.

'You're still carrying rope?' marveled Ruiz. 'How many coils do you have in there?' Ali saw a pair of clean socks. After all these months?

'Look at all those MREs,' said Twiggs. 'You've been holding out on us.'

'Shut up, Twiggy,' Pia said. 'It's his food.'

'Here, I've been waiting,' said Ike. He handed around the food packets. 'That's the last of them. Happy Thanksgiving.' And it was, November 24.

They were ravenous. With no further ceremony, the vestiges of the Jules Verne Society opened the pouches and heated the ham and pineapple slices and filled their pinched stomachs. They made no attempt to ration themselves.

Ike occupied himself uncoiling one of his ropes. He declined the meal, but accepted some of their M&M's, though only the red ones. They didn't know what to make of that, their battle-scarred scout fussing over bits of candy.

'But they're no different from the yellow and blue ones,' Chelsea said.

'Sure they are,' Ike said. 'They're red.'

He tied one end of the rope to his waist. 'I'll trail the rope,' he said. 'If there's anything up there, I'll fix the line and you can come take a look.'

Armed with his headlamp and their only pistol, Ike stood on Spurrier's and Troy's shoulders and gave a hop to reach the lowest handhold. From there it was only another twenty feet to the top. He spidered up, grabbed the edge of the platform, and started to pull himself over. But he stopped. They watched him not move for a whole minute.

'Is something wrong?' asked Ali.

Ike pulled himself onto the platform and looked down at them. 'You better see this for yourself.'

He knotted loops in the rope to make them a ladder. One by one, they climbed up, weak, needing help. It was going to take more than one meal to restore their strength. Between themselves and the tower, ninety feet in, a ceramic army awaited them. Lifeless, yet alive.

They were hadal warriors made of glazed terra-cotta. Facing out toward intruders, they numbered in the hundreds, arranged in concentric circles around the tower, each statue bearing a weapon and a ferocious expression. Some still wore armor made of thin jade plates stitched with gold links. On most, time had stretched or broken the gold, and the plates had tumbled to their feet, leaving the hadal mannequins naked.

It was hard not to speak in a whisper. They were awestruck, intimidated. 'What have we stumbled into?' asked Pia.

Some brandished war clubs edged with obsidian chips, pre-Aztec. There were atlatls

– spear throwers – and stone maces with iron chains and handles. Some of the weaponry carried Maori-type geometrics, but had to predate Maori culture by fourteen thousand years. Spears and arrows made of abyssal reed had been fletched not with bird feathers but with fish spines.

'It's like the Qin tomb in China,' said Ali. 'Only smaller.'

'And seven times older,' said Troy. 'And hadal.'

They entered the circles of sentinels tentatively, setting their feet carefully, like t'ai chi students, so as not to disturb the scene. Those with film left took pictures. Ike drew his pistol and stalked from one to another, culling facts meaningful only to him. Ali simply wandered. Troy joined her, dazed.

'These furrows in the floor, they're filled with mercury,' he said, pointing to the network cut into the stone deck. 'And it's moving, like blood. What could be the meaning?'

It was fair to guess by the details that the statues had been built true to life. In that case, the warriors had averaged an extraordinary five feet ten inches – fifteen eons ago. As Troy pointed out, it was always a mistake to generalize too much from the looks of an army, for armies tended to recruit the healthiest and fittest specimens in a population. Even so, during the same Neolithic period the average H. sapiens male had stood five to eight inches shorter.

'Next to these guys, Conan the Barbarian would have been nothing more than a

mesomorphic runt leading a bunch of human pipsqueaks,' Troy said. 'It kind of makes you wonder. With their physical size and this level of social organization and wealth, why didn't the hadals just invade us?'

'Who says they didn't?' asked Ali. She went on studying the statues. 'What intrigues me is how flexed the cranial base is. And how straight the jaws are. Remember that head Ike brought in? The skull fit differently on the neck. I distinctly remember that. It extended forward, like a chimp's. And the jaw had a pronounced thrust forward.'

'I saw that, too,' Troy said. 'Are you thinking what I am?'

'Reversal?'

'Exactly. I mean, possibly.' Troy opened his hands. 'I mean, I don't know, Ali.'

In lay terms, a straight jaw – orthognathicism – was an evolutionary climb above the more primitive trait of a jutting jaw. Anthropology did not deal in terms of evolutionary ascent, however, any more than it recognized evolutionary decline. A straight jaw was called a 'derived' trait. Like all traits, it expressed an adaptation to environmental pressures. But evolutionary pressures were in constant flux, and could lead to new traits that sometimes resembled primitive ones. This was called reversal. Reversal was not a going backward, but rather a seeming to do so. It was not a return to the primitive trait, but a new derived trait that mimicked the primitive trait. In this case the hadals had evolved a straight jaw fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, as seen on these statues, but had apparently derived a jutting jaw that was highly simian and primitive in its look. For whatever reason, H. hadalis seemed to be in reversal.

For Ali, the significance lay in what this meant to hadal speech and cognition. A straight jaw provided a wider range of consonants, and an erect neck-skull structure – basicranial flexion – meant a lower larynx or voice box, and that meant more vowel range. The fact that fifteen-thousand-year-old hadal statues had straight jaws and an erect head, and Ike's trophy head did not, suggested problems with modern hadal speech, and possibly with his cognition. Ali remembered Troy's remarks about symmetry in the hadal brain, too. What if subterranean conditions had evolved Haddie from a creature capable of sculpting this fortress, firing these terra-cotta warriors, and plying the sea and rivers, into a virtual beast? Ike had said hadals could no longer read hadal script. What if they had lost their ability to reason? What if Satan was nothing more than a savage cretin? What if the Gitners and Spurriers of the world were right, and H. hadalis deserved no better treatment than a vicious dog? Troy was troubled. 'How could they reverse so quickly, though? Call it twenty thousand years. That's not time enough for such a pronounced evolution, is it?'

'I can't explain it,' Ali said. 'But don't forget, evolution is an answer to environment, and look at the environment. Radioactive rock. Chemical gases. Electromagnetic surges. Gravitational anomalies. Who knows? Simple inbreeding may be to blame.'

Ike was just ahead with Ruiz and Pia, examining three figures waving swords of fire, looking them in the face as if checking his own identity. 'Is something wrong?' Ali asked.

'They're not like this anymore,' Ike said. 'They're similar, but they've changed.' Ali and Troy looked at each other.

'How do you mean?' Ali thought he would speak to some of the physical differences she and Troy had noticed.

Ike raised his hands to the entire tableaux. 'Look at this. This is – this was – greatness. Magnificence. In all my time among them, there was never any hint of that. Magnificence? Never.'

They spent the rest of the first day and the next exploring. Flowstone oozed from doorways, collapsing sections. Deeper in, they found a wealth of relics, most of them human. There were ancient coins from Stygia and Crete mixed with American buffalo

nickels and Spanish doubloons minted in Mexico City. They found Coke bottles, Japanese baseball cards, and a flintlock. There were books written in dead languages, a set of samurai armor, an Incan mirror, and, beneath that, figurines and clay tablets and bone carvings from civilizations long forgotten. One of their strangest discoveries was an armillary, a Renaissance-era teaching device with metal spheres inside one another to depict planetary revolutions. 'What in God's name is a hadal doing with something like this?' Ruiz wanted to know.

What kept drawing them back was the circular platform with its army surrounding the stone spire. However priceless the human artifacts were, scattered through the fortress, they were mundane compared with the tower display. On the second morning, Ike found a series of hidden nubbins on the tower itself. Using these, he made a daring, unprotected ascent to the top of the column.

They watched him balance atop the spire. For the longest time he just stood there. Then he called down for them to turn off their lights. They sat in the darkness for half an hour, bathed by the faintly incandescent floor.

When he roped down again, Ike looked shaken.

'We're standing on their world,' he said. 'This whole platform is a giant map. The spire was built as a viewing station.'

They glanced around at their feet, and all they saw were wiggling cutmarks on a flat, unpainted surface. But through the afternoon, Ike led them one at a time up the ropes and they saw with their own eyes. By the time he took Ali up for her view, Ike had made the trip six times and was becoming familiar with parts of the map. Ali found the top flat and small, just three feet square. Apparently no one but Ike had felt comfortable standing on top, so he had rigged a pair of loops for people to sit in while hanging alongside. Ali hung beside Ike, sixty feet up, while her night vision adapted.

'It's like a giant sand mandala, but without the sand,' Ike said. 'It's weird how I keep running across pieces of mandalas down here. I'm talking about places like sub-Iran or under Gibraltar. I thought Haddie must have kidnapped a bunch of monks and put them to work decorating. But now I see.'

And so did she. In a giant circle all around her, the platform beneath them began to radiate ghostly colors.

'It's some kind of pigment worked into the stone,' said Ike. 'Maybe it was visible at ground level at one time. I like the idea of an invisible map, though. Probably commoners like us would never have had access to this knowledge. Only the elite would have been permitted to come up here and get the whole picture.'

The longer she waited, the more her vision adjusted. Details clarified. The incisions flowing with mercury became tiny rivers veining across the surface. Lines of turquoise and red and green intertwined and branched in wild patterns: tunnels.

'I think that big stain mark is our sea,' said Ike.

The black shape lay quite close to the tower base. Paths threaded in from far-flung regions. If this was reality, then there were whole worlds down here. Whether they had once been known as provinces or nations or frontiers, the gaping cavities stood like air sacs within a great round lung.

'What's happening?' Ali gasped. 'It's coming alive.'

'Your eyes are still catching up,' Ike said. 'Just wait. It's three-dimensional.'

The flatness suddenly swelled with contours and depth. The color lines no longer overlapped but had levels all their own, dipping and rising among other lines.

'Oh,' Ali murmured, 'I feel like I'm falling.'

'I know. It opens and opens and opens. It's all in the art. Somehow, Himalayan cultures must have plagiarized it a long time ago. Now the Buddhists use it just to draw blueprints for Dharma palaces. Meditate long enough, and the geometries turn into an optical illusion of a building. But here you get the original intent. A map of the whole inner earth.'

Even the black blot of the sea had dimensions. Ali could see its flat surface and, underneath it, the jagged contours of its floor. The river lines looked suspended in midspace.

'I'm not sure how to read this thing. There's no north-south, no scale,' said Ike. 'But there's a definite logic here. Look at the coastline of our sea. You can pretty much see how we came.'

It was different from the way she had been drawing her own maps. Lacking compass bearings, the maps she continued to make were projections of her westward desire, essentially a straight line with bends. These lines were more languorous and full. Now she could see how tightly she had been disciplining her fear of this space. The subterranean world was practically infinite, more like the sky than the earth.

The sea was shaped like an elongated pear. Ali tried in vain to distinguish any features along the right-hand route Walker had taken. Other than extrapolating that rivers intersected his route, she couldn't read its hazards.

'This spire must represent the map's center, this fortress,' Ali said. 'An X to mark the spot. But it's not actually touching the sea. In fact the sea is some distance away.'

'That had me stumped, too,' Ike said. 'But you see how all the lines converge here, at the spire? We've all looked outside and there isn't that kind of convergence. The trail we came on continues following the shoreline. And one path leads down from the back, a single path. Now I'm thinking we're just a spot on one of many roads.' He pointed to where a single green line departed from the sea. 'That spot on that road.'

If Ike was right, and if the map's proportions were true, then their party had covered less than a fifth of the sea's circumference.

'Then what could this spire represent?' Ali asked.

'I've been thinking about it. You know the adage, all roads lead to...' He let her finish it.

'Rome?' she breathed. Could it be?

'Why not?' he said.

'The center of ancient hell?'

'Can you stand on top for a minute?' Ike asked her. 'I'll hold your legs.'

Ali worked her knees onto the meter-wide apex, and then got to her feet. From that extra height, she saw all the lines drawing in toward her feet. Abruptly she had the sensation of enormous power. It was as if, for a moment, the entire world fused in her. The center was here, and it could only be the one center, their destination. Now she understood why Ike had descended so shaken.

'While you're up there,' Ike said, his hands firm upon her legs, 'tell me if you see the map differently.'

'The lines are more distinct,' she said. With nothing to hold on to, nothing at her back or front, the panorama surged in toward her. The great web of lines seemed to be lifting higher. Suddenly it was as if she were not looking down, but up.

'Dear God,' she said.

The spire had become the pit.

She was seeing the world from deep within. Her head began spinning.

'Get me down,' she pleaded, 'before I fall.'

'I have something to show you,' Ike said to her that night. More? she thought. The afternoon's revelations had exhausted her. He seemed happy.

'Can't it wait until tomorrow?' she asked. She was tired. Hours had passed, and she was still reeling from the map's optical illusion. And she was hungry.

'Not really,' he said.

They had made camp within the colonnaded entry, where a stream of pure water

issued from an eroded spout. Their hunger was telling. Another day of explorations had weakened them. The ones who had climbed atop the spire were weakest. They lay on the ground, mostly curled around their empty stomachs. Pia was holding Spurrier, who suffered from migraines. Troy sat with Ike's pistol facing the sea, his head slumped, halfway to sleep. From here on, things were going to get no better.

Ali changed her mind. 'Lead on,' she said.

She took Ike's hand and got to her feet. He led her inside and to a secret passage. It contained its own flight of carved stairs.

'Go slow,' he said. 'Save your strength.'

They reached a tower jutting above the fortress. They had to crawl through another hidden duct to more stairs. As they climbed up the final stretch of narrow steps, she saw a rich, buttery light above. He let her go in first.

In a room overlooking the sea, Ike had lit scores of oil lamps. They were small clay leaves that cupped the oil and fed it along a groove to the flame at one tip.

'Where did you find these?' she asked. 'And where did the oil come from?'

In one corner stood three large earthenware amphorae that might well have been salvaged from an ancient Greek shipwreck.

'It was all buried in storage vaults under the floor. There's got to be fifty more of these jars down there,' he said. 'This must have been something like a lighthouse. Maybe there were others like it farther along the shore, a system of relay stations.'

A single lamp might have been enough to let her see her fingertips. In their hundreds, the lamps turned the room to gold. She wondered how it would have looked to hadal ships drifting upon the black sea twenty thousand years ago.

Ali sneaked a look at Ike. He had done this for her. The light was hurting his eyes a little, but he didn't shield them from her.

'We can't stay here,' he said, wiping at his tears. 'I want you to come with me.' He was trying not to squint. What was beautiful to her was painful to him. She was tempted to blow out some of the lamps to ease his discomfort, but decided he might be insulted.

'There's no way out,' she said. 'We can't go on.'

'We can.' He gestured at the endless sea. 'It's not hopeless, the paths go on.'

'And what about the others?'

'They can come, too. But they've given up. Ali, don't give up.' He was fervent. 'Come with me.'

This was for her alone, like the light.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You're different. I'm like them, though. I'm tired. I want to stay here.'

He twisted his head away.

'I know you think I'm being complacent,' she said.

'We don't have to die,' Ike said. 'No matter what happens to them, we don't have to die here.' He was adamant. It did not escape her that he spoke to her as 'we.'

'Ike,' she said, and stopped. She had fasted in her day, and knew it was too soon for the euphoria to be addling her. But her sense of contentment was rich.

'We can get out of here,' he urged.

'You've brought us as far as we can go,' she said. 'You've done everything we set out to do. We've made our discoveries. We know that a great empire once existed down here. Now it's over.'

'Come with me, Ali.'

'We have no food.'

His eyes shifted ever so slightly, a side glance, nothing more. He said nothing, but something about his silence contradicted her. He knew where there was food? It jarred her.

His canniness darted before her like a wild animal. I am not you, it said. Then his

glance straightened and he was one of them again.

She finished. 'I'm grateful for what you've accomplished for us. Now we just want to come to terms with where we've gotten in our lives. Let us make our peace,' she said.

'You have no reason to stay here anymore. You should go.'

There, she thought. All of her nobleness in a cup. Now it was his turn. He would resist gallantly. He was Ike.

'I will,' he said.

A frown spoiled her brow. 'You're leaving?' she blurted, and immediately wished she hadn't. But still, he was leaving them? Leaving her?

'I thought about staying,' he said. 'I thought how romantic it would be. I imagined how people might find us ten years from now. There would be you. And there would be me.'

Ali blinked. The truth was, she'd imagined the same scene.

'And they would find me holding you,' he said. 'Because that's what I would do after you died, Ali. I would hold you in my arms forever.'

'Ike,' she said, and stopped again. Suddenly she was incapable of more than monosyllables.

'That would be legal, I think. You wouldn't be Christ's bride after you died, right? He could have your soul. I could have what was left.'

That was a bit morbid, yet nonetheless the truth. 'If you're asking my permission,' she said, 'the answer is yes.' Yes, he could hold her. In her imagination, it had been the other way around. He had died first and she had held him. But it was all the same concept.

'The problem is,' he continued, 'I thought about it some more. And to put it bluntly, I decided it was a pretty raw deal for me.'

She let her gaze drift around the glowing room.

'I'd get you,' he answered himself, 'too late.'

Good-bye, Ike, she thought. It was just a matter of saying the words now.

'This isn't easy,' he said.

'I know.' Vaya con Dios.

'No,' he said. 'I don't think you do.'

'It's okay.'

'No, it's not,' he said. 'It would break my heart. It would kill me.' He licked his lips. He took the leap. 'To have waited too late with you.'

Her eyes sprang upon him.

Her surprise alarmed him. 'I should be able to say it, if I'm going to stay,' he defended himself. 'Can't I even say that much?'

'Say what, Ike?' Her voice sounded far away to her.

'I've said enough.'

'It's mutual, you know.' Mutual? That was the best she could offer?

'I know,' he said. 'You love me, too. And all God's creatures.' He crossed himself, gently mocking.

'Stop,' she said.

'Forget it,' he said, and his eyes closed in that marauded face. It was up to her to break this impasse.

No more ghosts. No more imagination. No more dead lovers: her Christ, his Kora.

As her hand reached out, it was like watching herself from a great distance. They might have been someone else's fingers, except they were hers. She touched his head. Ike recoiled from her touch. Instantly, Ali could see how sure he was she pitied him. Once upon a time, with a face untarnished and young, that might not have been a consideration. But he was wary and filled with his own repulsiveness. Naturally he would distrust a touch.

Ali had not done this forever, it seemed. It could have felt clumsy or foolish or false.

If she had contrived it in any way, given the slightest thought to it beforehand, it would have failed. Which was not to say her hands were steady as she opened her buttons and slid her shoulders bare. She let the clothing drop, all of it.

Nude, she felt the warmth of the lamps on her flesh. From the corner of her eye, she saw the light from twenty eons ago turn her into gold.

As they moved into each other, she thought that here was one hunger at least that no longer had to go begging.

Chelsea's scream woke them.

It had become her habit to wash her hair at the edge of the sea early each morning.

'Another fish in the water,' Ali murmured to Ike. She had been dreaming of orange juice and birdsong – a mourning dove – and the smell of oak smoke on the hill-country air. Ike's arms fit around her just so. It was a shame to spoil the new day with a false alarm.

Then more shouts rose up to them in the tower. Ike lifted from the floor and leaned out the window, his back dented and pockmarked and striped with text and images and old violence.

'Something's happened,' he said, and grabbed his clothes and knife.

Ali followed him down the stairs, the last to reach the group gathered on the shore. They were shivering. It wasn't cold, but they had less fat on them these days. 'Here's Ike,' someone said, and the group parted.

A body was floating upon the sea. It lay there as quiet as the water.

'It's not hadal,' Spurrier was saying.

'He was a big guy,' said Ruiz. 'Could he be one of Walker's soldiers?'

'Walker?' said Twiggs. 'Here?'

'Maybe he fell off one of the rafts and drowned. And then floated here.'

He had glided in to shore like a ship with no crew, headfirst, faceup, bleached dead white by the sea. His limp arms wafted in the current. The eyes were gone.

'I thought it was driftwood and started out to get it,' Chelsea said. 'Then it got closer.'

Ike waded into the water and hunched over the body with his back to them. Ali thought she saw the glint of his knife. After a minute he returned to them, towing the body.

'It's one of Walker's, all right,' he said.

'A coincidence,' said Ruiz. 'He was bound to drift ashore somewhere.'

'Here, though, of all places? You'd think he would have sunk. Or rotted. Or been eaten.'

'He's been preserved,' Ike said.

Ali saw what the others seemed not to see, an incision in one of the man's thighs where Ike had probed.

'You mean something in the water?' said Pia.

'No,' Ike said. 'They did it some other way.'

'The hadals?' said Ruiz.

'Yes,' Ike said.

'The currents. Chance...'

'He was delivered to us.'

The group needed a long minute to absorb the fact.

'But why?' asked Troy.

'It must be a warning,' Twiggs said.

'They're telling us to go home?' Ruiz laughed.

'You don't understand,' Ike quietly told them. 'It's an offering.'

'They're making a sacrifice to us?'

'I guess if you want to put it that way,' Ike said. 'They could have eaten him

themselves.' They fell silent.

'They're giving us a dead man for food?' whimpered Pia. 'To eat?'

'The question is why,' Ike said, staring across the dark sea. Twiggs was affronted. 'They think we're cannibals?'

'They think we probably want to live.'

Ike did a horrible thing. He did not push the body back out to sea. Instead he waited.

'What are you waiting for?' Twiggs demanded. 'Get rid of it.' Ike didn't say anything. He just waited some more.

It was appalling, the temptation.

Finally Ruiz said, 'You've misjudged us, Ike.'

'Don't insult us,' Twiggs said.

Ike ignored him. He waited for the group. Another minute passed. They glared at him. Nobody wanted to say yes and nobody wanted to say no, and he wasn't going to say it for them. Even Ali did not reject the idea out of hand.

Ike was patient. The dead soldier bobbed slightly beside him. He was patient, too. They were all thinking similar thoughts, she was sure, wondering what it would taste like and how long it would last and who would do the deed. In the end, Ali took it one step further, and that was their answer. 'We could eat him,' she said. 'But when he was finished, what then?'

Ike sighed.

'Exactly,' said Pia after a few seconds.

Ruiz and Spurrier closed their eyes. Troy shook his head ever so slightly.

'Thank heavens,' said Twiggs.

They languished in the fortress, too weak to do much except shuffle outside to pee. They shifted about on their sleeping pads. It was not comfortable, lying around on your own bones.

So this is famine, thought Ali. A long wait for the ultimate poverty. She had always prided herself on her gift for transcending the moment. You gave up your worldly attachments, but always with the knowledge you could return to them. There was no such thing with starving. Deprivation was monotonous.

Before their strength dwindled anymore, Ali and Ike shared two more nights in the tower room among the lighted lamps. On November 30, they descended to the makeshift camp with finality. After that she was too lightheaded to climb the stairs again.

The starvation made them very old and very young. Twiggs, especially, looked aged, his face hollowed and jowls hanging. But also they resembled infants, curled in upon their stomachs and sleeping more and more each day. Except for Ike, who was like a horse in his need to stay on his feet, their catnaps reached twenty hours.

Ali tried to force herself to work, to stay clean, say her prayers, and continue to draw her day maps. It was a matter of getting God's daily chaos in order.

On the morning of December 2, they heard animal noises coming from the beach. Those who could sit struggled upright. Their worst fear was coming true. The hadals were coming for them.

It sounded like wolves loping into position. You could hear whispered snatches of words. Troy began to totter off in search of Ike, but his legs wouldn't work well enough. He sat down again.

'Couldn't they wait?' Twiggs moaned softly. 'I just wanted to die in my sleep.'

'Shut up, Twiggs,' hissed one of the geologists. 'And turn out those lights. Maybe they don't know we're here.'

The man got to his feet. In the preternatural glow of stone, they all watched him

stagger across to a porthole near the doorway. With the stealth of an intruder, he cautiously lifted his head to the opening. And slid back down again.

'What did you see?' Spurrier whispered. The geologist was silent.

'Hey, Ruiz.' Finally, Spurrier crawled over. 'Christ, the back of his head's gone!' At that instant the assault commenced.

Huge shapes poured in, monstrous silhouettes against the gleaming stone.

'Oh, dear God!' screamed Twiggs.

If not for his cry in English, they would have been shredded with gunfire. Instead there was a pause.

'Hold your fire,' a voice commanded. 'Who said "God"?'

'Me,' pleaded Twiggs. 'Davis Twiggs.'

'That's impossible,' said the voice.

'It could be a trap,' warned a second.

'It's just us,' said Spurrier, and shined his light on his own face.

'Soldiers,' cried Pia. 'Americans!'

Lights snapped on throughout the room.

Shaggy mercenaries ranged right and left, still crouched, ready to shoot. It was hard to say who was more surprised, the debilitated scientists or the tattered remains of Walker's command.

'Don't move, don't move,' the mercenaries shouted at them. Their eyes were rimmed with red. They trusted nothing. Their rifle barrels darted like hummingbirds, searching for enemy.

'Get the colonel,' said a man.

Walker was carried in, seated on a rifle held on each side by soldiers. To Ali, he looked starved, until she saw his blood. The knifed-open rags of his pant legs showed dozens of bits of obsidian embedded in the flesh and bone. It was pain that had hollowed his face out. His faculties were unimpaired, though. He took in the room with a raptor's eye.

'Are you sick?' Walker demanded.

Ali saw what he saw, gaunt men and women barely able to sit. They looked like scarecrows.

'Just very hungry,' said Spurrier. 'Do you have food?'

Walker considered them. 'Where's the rest of you?' he said. 'I recall more than just nine of you.'

'They went home,' said Chelsea, prone beside her chessboard. She was looking at

Ruiz's body. Now they could see that the geologist had been sniped through the eye.

'They're going back the way we came,' said Spurrier.

'The physicians, too?' Walker said. For a moment he was hopeful.

'It's just us now,' said Pia. 'And you.'

He surveyed the room. 'What is this place, a shrine?'

'A way station,' Pia said. Ali hoped she would stop there. She didn't want Walker to know about the circular map, or the ceramic soldiers.

'We found it two weeks ago,' Twiggs volunteered.

'And you're still here?'

'We ran out of food.'

'It looks defensible,' Walker said to a lieutenant in burned clothing. 'Set your perimeters. Secure the boats. Bring in the supplies and our guest. And remove that body.'

They set Walker on the ground against one wall. They were careful, but laying his legs out was an agony for him.

Mercenaries began arriving from the beach with heavy loads of Helios food and supplies. Not one retained the look of the immaculate crusaders Walker had

assiduously groomed. Their uniforms were in rags. Some were missing their boots. There were leg wounds and head injuries. They stank of cordite and old blood. Their beards and greasy locks made them look like a motorcycle gang.

Their veneer of religious vocation had rubbed away, leaving tired, angry, frightened gunmen. The rough way they dumped the wetbags and boxes spoke volumes. Their escape attempt was not going well.

After a few minutes, Walker returned his attention to the scientists. 'Tell me,' he said, 'how many people did you lose along the way?'

'None,' said Pia. 'Until now.'

Walker made no apology as the geologist Ruiz was dragged from the room by the heels. 'I'm impressed,' he said. 'You managed to come hundreds of miles through a wilderness without a single casualty. Unarmed.'

'Ike knows what he's doing,' said Pia.

'Crockett's here?'

'He's exploring,' Troy quickly inserted. 'He goes off days at a time. He's looking for

Cache V. For food.'

'He's wasting his time.' Walker turned his head to the black lieutenant. 'Take five men,' he said. 'Locate our friend. We don't need any more surprises.'

The soldier said, 'You don't hunt that man, sir. Our troops have had enough, the last month.'

'I will not have him roaming at large.'

'Why are you doing this?' Ali demanded. 'What's he done to you?'

'It's what I've done to him that's the problem. Crockett's not the sort to forgive and forget. He's out there watching us right now.'

'He'll run off. There's nothing here for him anymore. He said we've given up.'

'Then why the tears?'

'You don't have to do this,' Ali told him softly.

Walker grew brisk. 'No live catches, Lieutenant, do you hear me? Crockett's first commandment.'

'Yes sir,' the lieutenant breathed out. He tagged five of his men and they started into the building.

After the search team left, Walker closed his eyes. A soldier pulled a knife from his boot sheath and slit open a box of MREs and gestured at the scientists. It was up to Troy to feebly carry packets to his comrades. Twiggs kissed his, then tore it open with his teeth.

Ali's first bite of processed military spaghetti was delicious. She made her bites small. She sipped her water.

Twiggs vomited. Then started over again.

The room was beginning to fill up. More wounded were brought in. Two men mounted a machine gun at the window. All told, including herself and her comrades, Ali counted fewer than twenty-five people remaining from the original hundred and fifty who had started the journey.

Walker opened his bloodshot eyes. 'Bring everything inside,' he ordered. 'The boats, too. They're vulnerable, and they announce our presence.'

'But there's twelve of them out there.' Fifteen less than they'd started with, Ali realized. What had happened out there?

'Bring them in,' said Walker. 'We're going to fort up a few days. This is the answer to our prayers, a toehold in this evil place.'

The soldier's pig eyes disagreed. He threw his salute. Walker's hold was slipping.

'How did you find us?' Pia asked.

'We saw your light,' said Walker.

'Our light?'

Ike's oil lamps, thought Ali. It had been her secret with him. A beacon to the world.

'You found Cache V,' said Spurrier.

'Haddie got half,' said Walker.

'Call it the devil's due,' said a voice, and Montgomery Shoat entered the room.

'You? You're still alive?' said Ali. She couldn't hide her distaste. Being abandoned by the soldiers was one thing. But Shoat was a fellow civilian, and had known Walker's dirty scheme. His betrayal felt worse.

'It's been quite the excursion,' said Shoat. He had a black eye and yellow bruises along one cheek, obviously from a beating. 'Haddie's been picking us to pieces for weeks. And the boys have been working double-time to fit me in. I'm starting to think we may not complete our grand tour of the sub-Pacific.'

Walker was in no mood for a court jester. 'Is this coastline inhabited?'

'I've only seen three of them,' Ali said.

'Three villages?'

'Three hadals.'

'That's all? No villages?' Walker's black beard parted in a smile. 'Then we've lost them, thank the Lord. They'll never be able to track us across open water. We're safe. We have food for another two months. And we have Shoat's homing device.'

Shoat wagged a finger at the colonel. 'Ah-ah,' he said. 'Not yet. You agreed. Three more days to the west. Then we'll talk about retreat.'

'Where's the girl?' asked Ali. As more of the mercenaries came in, she saw the clawed hands and hadal ears and pieces of male and female genitalia dangling from their belts and rucksacks and rifles. Yeats's poem echoed in her mind: The center cannot hold;... The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned....

'I misjudged her,' Walker rasped. He needed morphine. Ali suspected what the soldiers had probably done with it.

'You killed her,' Ali said.

'I should have. She's been useless to me.' He gestured, and two soldiers dragged the feral girl in and tied her to the wall nearby.

The first thing Ali noticed was her smells. The girl had a raw odor, fecal and musky and layered with sweat. Her hair smelled like smoke and filth. Blood and snot streaked the duct tape.

'What has been done to this child?'

'She's been an ungodly temptation to my men,' Walker answered.

'You allowed your men –'

Walker peered at her. 'So righteous? You're no different, though. Everyone wants something from this creature. Go ahead, extract your glossary from her, Sister. Just don't leave this room without permission.'

Troy stood and draped his jacket on the girl's shoulders. The girl backed away from his chivalry, then opened her legs as far as the ropes would allow, and pumped her groin at him. Troy backed away.

'I wouldn't fall in love with that one, boy.' Walker laughed. 'Ferae naturae. She's wild by nature.'

Ali and Troy went to feed the girl.

'What you doing?' a soldier demanded.

'Taking off this duct tape,' Ali said. 'How else can she eat?'

The soldier gave a hard yank at the tape, and snatched his hand away. The girl all but garroted herself on the wire, lunging for him. Ali fell back. Laughter sprinkled the room. 'All yours,' he said.

The feeding needed caution. Ali spoke to her with a low voice, enunciating their names, and trying to disarm her. The food was noxious to the girl, but she took it. At one point she spit the applesauce out and made some elaborate complaint, which emerged with extraordinary softness. It wasn't just the volume that was soft, but the

formal delivery. For all her ferocity, the girl sounded almost pious. She seemed to be speaking to the food, or discoursing on it. Her temperament was sophisticated, not savage.

When she was done, the girl lay back on the rock floor and closed her eyes. There was no transition between the meal and sleeping. She took what she could get.

Two days passed. Ike still did not show himself. Ali sensed he was somewhere close, but the search teams came up empty.

The soldiers beat Shoat senseless, trying to pry loose the secret of his homing-device code. His stubbornness drove them to a fury, and they only stopped when Ali placed her body across Shoat's. 'Kill him and you'll never learn the code,' she told them. Nursing Shoat added to her duties, for she was already taking care of Walker and several other soldiers. But someone had to do it. They were still God's creatures.

Walker wavered in and out of fever. He railed in tongues in his sleep. The soldiers exchanged dark looks. The room filled with deadly intent, and Ali grew more and more concerned. The only good news was that Ike was nowhere to be found.

On the second night, Troy bravely tried to stop a mercenary from taking the girl outside to some waiting friends. The soldiers gave him a pistol-whipping that would have gone on but for the girl's laughter, and her strangeness made them lose interest in hitting Troy. Much later she was returned to the room, sweaty and with her mouth duct-taped. Still bleeding himself, Troy helped Ali bathe the girl with a bottle of water.

'She's carried children,' Troy observed in a low voice. 'Have you seen that?'

'You're mistaken,' Ali said.

But there among the tattooed zebra lines and hatch-marks hid the stretch marks of pregnancy. Her areolae were dark. Ali had missed the signs.

On the third night, the mercenaries came for the girl again. Hours later she was returned, semiconscious. While she and Troy washed the girl, Ali quietly hummed a tune. She wasn't even aware of it until Troy said, 'Ali, look!'

Ali raised her eyes from the yellowing bruises on the child's pelvic saddle. The girl was staring at her with tears running down her cheeks. Ali lifted the hum into words.

'Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come,' she softly sang. ''Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home.'

The girl began sobbing. Ali made the mistake of taking the child in her arms. The kindness triggered a terrible storm of kicking and thrashing and rejection. It was a horrible enlightening moment, for now Ali knew the girl had once had a mother who had sung that song.

All night Ali spent with the captive, watching her. In her fourteen years the girl had experienced more of womanhood than Ali had in thirty-four. She had been married, or mated. She appeared to have borne a child. And so far she had kept her sanity through brutal mass rapes. Her inner strength was amazing.

Next morning Twiggs needed to go to the bathroom for his first time since the starvation. Being Twiggs, he did not ask the soldiers' permission to leave the room. One of the mercenaries shot him dead.

That spelled the end of what little freedom the rest of them had. Walker ordered the scientists bound, wired, and removed to a deeper room. Ali was not surprised. For some time now, she had known their execution was imminent.

And darkness was upon the face of the Deep

– GENESIS 1:2

24

TABULA RASA

New York City

The hotel suite was dark except for the blue flicker of the TV.

It was a riddle: television on, volume off, in a blind man's room. Once upon a time, de l'Orme might have orchestrated such a contradiction just to confound his visitors. Tonight he had no visitors. The maid had forgotten to turn off her soaps.

Now the screen showed the Times Square ball as it descended toward the deliriously happy mob.

De l'Orme was browsing his Meister Eckhart. The thirteenth-century mystic had preached such strange things with such common words. And in the bowels of the Dark Ages, so boldly.

God lies in wait for us. His love is like a fisherman's hook. No fish comes to the fisherman that is not caught on his hook. Once it takes the hook, the fish is forfeit to the fisherman. In vain it twists hither and thither – the fisherman is certain of his catch. And so I say of love. The one who hangs on this hook is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth, eyes and heart are bound to be God's. And the more surely caught, the more surely you will be freed.

No wonder the theologian had been condemned by the Inquisition and excommunicated. God as dominatrix! More dizzying still, man freed of God. God freed of God. And then what? Nothingness. You penetrated the darkness and emerged into the same light you had left in the first place. Then why leave in the first place? de l'Orme wondered. For the journey itself? Is that the best we have to do with ourselves? These were his thoughts when the phone rang.

'Do you know my voice, yes or no?' asked the man on the far end.

'Bud?' said de l'Orme.

'Great... my name,' Parsifal mumbled.

'Where are you?'

'Huh-uh.' The astronaut sounded sluggish. Drunk. The Golden Boy?

'Something's troubling you,' de l'Orme said.

'You bet. Is Santos with you?'

'No.'

'Where is he?' Parsifal demanded. 'Or do you even know?'

'The Koreas,' said de l'Orme, not exactly certain which one. 'Another set of hadals has surfaced. He's recording some of the artifacts they brought with them. Emblems of a deity stamped into gold foil.'

'Korea. He told you that?'

'I sent him, Bud.'

'What makes you so sure he's where you sent him?' Parsifal asked.

De l'Orme took his glasses off. He rubbed his eyes and opened them, and they were

white, with no retina or pupil. Distant fireworks streaked his face with sparks of color. He waited.

'I've been trying to call the others,' Parsifal said. 'All night, nothing.'

'It's New Year's Eve,' said de l'Orme. 'Perhaps they're with their families.'

'No one's told you.' It was an accusation, not a question.

'I'm afraid not, whatever it is.'

'It's too late. You really don't know? Where have you been?'

'Right here. A touch of the flu, I haven't left my room in a week.'

'Ever heard of The New York Times? Don't you listen to the news?'

'I gave myself the solitude. Fill me in, if you please. I can't help if I don't know.'

'Help?'

'Please.'

'We're in great danger. You shouldn't be at that phone.'

It came out in a tangle. There had been a great fire at the Metropolitan Museum's Map Room two weeks ago. And before that, a bomb explosion in an ancient cliffside temple library at Yungang in China, which the PLA was blaming on Muslim separatists. Archives and archaeological sites in ten or more countries had been vandalized or destroyed in the past month.

'I've heard about the Met, of course. That was everywhere. But the rest of this, what connects them?'

'Someone's trying to erase our information. It's like someone's finishing business. Wiping out his tracks.'

'What tracks? Burning museums. Blowing up libraries. What purpose could that serve?'

'He's closing shop.'

'He? Who are you talking about? You don't make sense.'

Parsifal mentioned several other events, including a fire at the Cambridge Library housing the ancient Cairo genizah fragments.

'Gone,' he said. 'Burned to the ground. Defaced. Blown to pieces.'

'Those are all places we've visited over the last year.'

'Someone has been erasing our information for some time now,' said Parsifal. 'Until recently they've been small erasures mostly, an altered manuscript here, a photo negative disappearing there. Now the destruction seems more wholesale and spectacular. It's like someone's trying to finish business before clearing out of town.'

'A coincidence,' said de l'Orme. 'Book burners. A pogrom. Anti-intellectuals. The lumpen are rampant these days.'

'It's no coincidence. He used us. Like bloodhounds. Turned us loose on his own trail. Had us hunt him. And now he's backtracking.'

'He?'

'Who do you think?'

'But what does it accomplish? Even if you were right, he merely erases our footnotes, not our conclusions.'

'He erases his own image.'

'Then he defaces himself. What does that change?' But even as he spoke, de l'Orme felt wrong. Were those distant sirens or alarms tripping in his own head?

'It destroys our memory,' said Parsifal. 'It wipes clean his presence.'

'But we know him now. At least we know everything the evidence has already shown. Our memory is fixed.'

'We're the last testimony,' said Parsifal. 'After us, it's back to tabula rasa.'

De l'Orme was missing pieces of the puzzle. A week behind closed doors, and it was as if the world had changed orbit. Or Parsifal had.

De l'Orme tried to arrange the information. 'You're suggesting we've led our foe on a tour of his own clues. That it's an inside job. That Satan is one of us. That he – or she?

– is now revisiting our evidence and spoiling it. Again, why? What does he accomplish by destroying all the past images of himself? If our theory of a reincarnated line of hadal kings is true, then he'll reappear next time with a different face.'

'But with all his same subconscious patterns,' said Parsifal. 'Remember? We talked about that. You can't change your fundamental nature. It's like a fingerprint. He can try to alter his behavior, but five thousand years of human evidence has made him identifiable. If not to us, then to the next Beowulf gang, or the next. No evidence, no discovery. He becomes the invisible man. Whatever the hell he is.'

'Let him rampage,' de l'Orme said. He was speaking as much to Parsifal's agitation as about their hadal prey. 'By the time he finishes his vandalism, we'll know him better than he knows himself. We're close.'

He listened to Parsifal's hard breathing on the other end. The astronaut muttered inaudibly. De l'Orme could hear wind lashing the telephone booth. Close by, a sixteen-wheel truck blatted down through lower gears. He pictured Parsifal at some forlorn pit stop along an interstate.

'Go home,' de l'Orme counseled.

'Whose side are you on? That's what I really called about. Whose side are you on?'

'Whose side am I on?'

'That's what this whole thing is about, isn't it?' Parsifal's voice trailed off. The wind invaded. He sounded like a man losing mind and body to the storm.

'Your wife has to be wondering where you are.'

'And have her end up like Mustafah? We've said goodbye. She'll never see me again. It's for her own good.'

There was a bump, and then scratching at de l'Orme's window. He drew back into his presumption of darkness, put his spine against the corduroy sofa. He listened. Claws raked at the glass. And there, he tracked it, the beat of wings. A bird. Or an angel. Lost among the skyscrapers.

'What about Mustafah?'

'You have to know.'

'I don't.'

'He was found last Friday, in Istanbul. What was left of him was floating in the underground reservoir at Yerebatan Sarayi. You really don't know? He was killed the same day a bomb was found in the Hagia Sofia. We're part of the evidence, don't you see?'

With great, concentrated precision, de l'Orme laid his glasses on the side table. He felt dizzy. He wanted to resist, to challenge Parsifal, to make him retract this terrible news.

'There's only one person who can be doing this,' said Parsifal. 'You know it as well as

I do.'

There was a minute of relative silence, neither man speaking. The phone filled with blizzard gales and the beep-beep of snowplows setting off to battle the drifted highways. Then Parsifal spoke again. 'I know how close you two were.' His lucidity, his compassion, cemented the revelation.

'Yes,' de l'Orme said.

It was the worst falseness he could imagine. The man's obsession had guided them. And now he had disinherited them, body and spirit. No, that was wrong, for they'd never been included in his inheritance to begin with. From the start, he had merely exploited them. They had been like livestock to him, to be ridden to death.

'You must get away from him,' said Parsifal.

But de l'Orme's thoughts were on the traitor. He tried to configure the thousands of deceptions that had been perpetrated on them. A king's audacity! Almost in admiration, he whispered the name.

'Louder,' said Parsifal. 'I can't hear you over the wind.'

'Thomas,' de l'Orme said again. What magnificent courage! What ruthless deception! It was dizzying, the depths of his plotting. What had he been after then? Who was he really? And why commission a posse to hunt himself down?

'Then you've heard,' shouted Parsifal. His blizzard was getting worse.

'They've found him?'

'Yes.'

De l'Orme was astounded. 'But that means we've won.'

'Have you lost your mind?' said Parsifal.

'Have you lost yours? Why are you running? They've caught him. Now we can interview him directly. We must go to him immediately. Give me the details, man.'

'Caught him? Thomas?'

De l'Orme heard Parsifal's confusion, and he felt equally dumbfounded. Even after so many months spent treating the hadal as a common man, Satan's mortality did not come naturally. How could one catch Satan? Yet here it was. They had accomplished the impossible. They had transcended myth.

'Where is he? What have they done with him?'

'Thomas, you mean?'

'Yes, Thomas.'

'But Thomas is dead.'

'Thomas?'

'I thought you said you knew.'

'No,' groaned de l'Orme.

'I'm sorry. He was a great friend to us all.'

De l'Orme digested the consequences, but still he didn't understand.

'They killed him?'

'They?' shouted the astronaut. Was Parsifal not hearing him, or were they stumbling on each other's meaning?

'Satan,' enunciated de l'Orme. His thoughts raced. They'd killed the hadal Caesar? Didn't the fools know Satan's value? In his mind's eye, de l'Orme saw some frightened young soldier with a high school education emptying his rifle clip into the shadows, and Thomas tumbling from the darkness into the light, dead.

But still de l'Orme did not understand.

'Yes, Satan,' said Parsifal. His voice was growing indistinguishable from the noise of his tempest. 'You do understand. My same conclusion. Mustafah. Now Thomas. Satan. Satan killed them.'

De l'Orme frowned. 'You said they found him, though. Satan.'

'No. Thomas,' clarified Parsifal. 'They found Thomas. A Bedouin goatherder came on him this afternoon. He was lying among the rocks near St. Catherine's monastery. He had fallen – or been pushed – from one of the cliffs on Mount Sinai. It's obvious who killed him. Satan did. He's hunting us down, one by one. He knows our patterns. Our daily lives. Our hiding places. While we were profiling him, the bastard was profiling us.'

At last de l'Orme understood what Parsifal was telling him. Thomas was not the deceiver. It was someone even closer to him.

'Are you still there?' asked Parsifal.

De l'Orme cleared his throat. 'What have they done with Thomas's body?' he asked.

'Whatever desert monks do to their dead. Probably not much in the way of preservation. They want to get him into the ground as soon as possible. He'll be buried on Wednesday. There at the monastery.' He paused. 'You're not going, are you?'

So much to plan. So little, really. De l'Orme knew exactly what needed to happen next.

'It's your head,' said Parsifal.

De l'Orme set the phone back in its cradle.

Savannah, Georgia

She woke in her bed to ancient dreams, that she was young again and beaux pursued her. The many became few. The few became one. In her dreams she was alone, like now, but alone differently, an ache in men's hearts, a memory that would never end. And this one man would never stop searching for her, even if she was lost in herself, even if she grew old.

She opened her eyes and the room was awash in moonbeams.

The coarse linen curtains stirred with a breeze. Crickets sang in the grass off her porch. The window had come open.

A tiny light looped and spiraled in the room, a firefly.

'Vera,' said a man from the dark corner.

She jerked, and the glasses flew from her fingers.

A burglar, she thought. But a burglar who knew her name? Who spoke it so sadly?

'Who is it?' she said.

'I have been watching you sleep,' he said. 'In this light, I see the little girl your father must have loved.'

He was going to kill her. Vera could hear the determination in his tenderness.

A form rose in the moon shadows. Released of his weight, the wicker chair creaked in its weave, and he stepped forward.

'Who are you?' she asked.

'Parsifal didn't call you?'

'Yes.'

'Didn't he tell you?'

'Tell me what?'

'Who I am.'

A winter chill settled on her.

Parsifal had called yesterday, and she had cut short his roadside augury. The sky is falling, that's all she could make of his nonsense. Indeed, his burst of paranoid advice and omens had finally accomplished what Thomas had failed to do: convinced her their quest for the monster was a monster itself.

It had struck her that their search for the king of darkness was autogenetic, brought to life from nothing more real than their idea of it. In retrospect, their search had been feeding on itself for months, on its own clues and predictions and fancy scholarship. Now it was beginning to feed on them. Just as Thomas had warned, the quest had become dangerous. Their enemies were not the tyrants and would-be tyrants, the C.C. Coopers of the world, or their fabled Satan of the underworld. Rather, the enemy was their own overheated imaginings.

She had hung up on Parsifal. Repeatedly. He had called back several times, ranting and raving, sounding like a Yankee carpetbagger trying to scare her off the plantation. I'm staying put, she told him.

He had been right then.

Her wheelchair sat next to her nightstand. She did not try to talk him out of the murder. She did not question his method or test for his sadism. Maybe he would be swift and businesslike. So you die in bed after all, she thought to herself.

'Did he sing songs to you?' the man asked.

Vera was trying to arrange her courage and thoughts. Her heart was racing. She wanted to be calm.

'Parsifal?'

'Your father, I meant.'

His question distracted her. 'Songs?'

'Before you went to sleep.'

It was an invitation. She took it. She closed her eyes and threw herself into the search. It meant ignoring the crickets and penetrating her jackhammer heartbeat and descending into remembrances she had thought were gone forever. But there he was, and yes, it was night, and he was singing to her. She laid her head back on the pillow, and his words made a blanket and his voice promised shelter. Papa, she thought.

The floorboard squeaked.

Vera regretted that. If not for the sound, she would have stayed with the song. But the wood returned her to the room. Up through the heart she came, back into the land of crickets and moonbeams.

She opened her eyes and he was there, barehanded, with the firefly spinning a crooked halo high above his head. He was reaching for her like her lover. And then his face entered the light and she said, 'You?'

St. Catherine's Monastery, Jabal Musa (Mt Sinai)

De l'Orme arranged the cups and placed the loaf of bread. The abbot had provided him a meditation chamber, the sort enjoyed for thousands of years by men and women seeking spiritual wisdom.

Santos would be charmed. He loved coarseness and simplicity. The wine jug was clay. The table's planks had been hewn and nailed at least five centuries ago. No curtain in the window. No glass, even. Dust and insects were your prayer mates. Like words from the Bible, a bolt of sunlight stabbed the darkness of his cell. De l'Orme felt its warmth upon his face. He felt it travel east to west across his cheeks. He felt it setting.

It was cool this high, especially compared with the desert heat on his ride in. The road was no longer so good. De l'Orme had suffered its potholes. Because tourists no longer came here in such abundance, there was less reason to maintain the asphalt. The Holy Lands didn't pull them in like they used to. The revelation of hell as a common network of tunnels had achieved what hell itself could not, the end of spiritual fear. The death of God at the hands of existentialism and materialism had been grievous enough. Now the death of Supreme Evil had turned the landscape of afterlife into a cheap haunted house. From Moses to Mohammed to Augustine, the carnies had been good for their day, but no one was buying it anymore.