The Descent Part 28

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

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

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

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'With Vera's help. She knows her male anatomy, I must say.'

The older Dominican looked in danger of sucking the very enamel off his teeth.

'But it's radioactive!' Mustafah said.

'To tell the truth, the isotopes made my arthritis feel better for a few days after. I thought maybe I'd stumbled on to a cure for a while there.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Ah, come on,' Parsifal complained.

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

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

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

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

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

'Yes, we're looking.'

'It's a self-portrait.'

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

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

'He looks a little like you up there, Thomas,' someone joked.

Thomas blew his cheeks out.

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

'Now that you mention it,' de l'Orme mused, 'I suppose it could be any one of us.'

It was turning into a game.

'We give up,' said Vera.

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

'Enough,' barked Gault.

'Kublai Khan,' de l'Orme said.

'What?'

'You said it yourselves.'

'Said what?'

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

'You're not serious.'

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

'You're saying...'

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

14 - THE HOLE.

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

-AMERIGO VESPUCCI, on America The Colon Ridge Zone 'July 7,' Ali recorded. 'Camp 39: 5,012 fathoms, 79 degrees F. We reached Cache I today.'

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

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

'Joy!' she printed neatly.

The celebration rocked around her.

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

But now they had all the provisions and gear and clothing necessary for the next eight weeks, plus tonight's wine and loudspeakers for the opera and a holographic 'Bully for You' speech from C.C. Cooper himself. You are the beginning of history, his small laser ghost toasted them.

For the first time in almost five weeks, Ali could write on her day map their precise coordinates: '107 degrees, 20 minutes W / 3 degrees, 50 minutes N.' On a traditional map of the surface, they were somewhere south of Mexico in blue, islandless water. An ocean-floor map placed them beneath a feature called the Colon Ridge, near the western edge of the Nazca Plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'This is life and death.'

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

Despite the glitches and some serious homesickness, the expedition was in high spirits. Their resupply technology worked. They were loaded with food and supplies for the next stage. Two months down, ten to go.

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

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

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

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

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

The moment her glance touched on him, Ike's head skated off to the other side, and she realized he'd been watching her. Molly and a few of Ali's other girlfriends had teased that he had his eye on her, and she'd called them wicked. But here was proof.

Fair's fair, she thought, and spurred herself forward. There was no telling when he might vanish into the darkness again.

The wine had an extra kick to it, or the depths had lowered her inhibitions. Whatever, she made herself bold. She went directly to him and said, 'Wanna dance?'

He pretended to have just noticed her. 'It's probably not a great idea,' he said, and didn't move. 'I'm rusty.'

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

'Seriously, I'm out of practice.'

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

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

'So?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He backed off a step to get a look. 'That was you?'

She liked that. 'Did I look so pathetic?'

'You mean like a rescue job?'

'If you want to put it that way.'

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

'I was in distress, then.'

'Nah.' Now he was lying.

'So how come the orange?'

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

'There it was,' he said simply, and she got a sense he was delighting in her confusion. 'It had your name on it.'

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

'Strawberry blondes,' he interrupted.