The Descent Part 41

'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 ma.s.sacre. 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 h.o.m.os 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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.

20 - DEAD SOULS.

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 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.i.s.sed 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 alt.i.tude 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.

Gla.s.s! 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 gla.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed the question around the skybox room. What if this hadal crawling across the frosty gra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce. BioSphere without the suns.h.i.+ne, 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 thras.h.i.+ng about on the dying gra.s.s and fading hash marks was part of the first batch to be processed.

Here, where Y.A. t.i.ttle 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 bas.e.m.e.nt of the Roman Coliseum ruins. The holding pens were in progress. Alleyways wound between t.i.tanium cages. Ultimately the old arena surface and all its cages would be covered over with eight floors of laboratory s.p.a.ce. 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 d.a.m.ned,' de l'Orme commented. 'In the s.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.n 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 gra.s.s 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. n.o.body 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 const.i.tute 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-fas.h.i.+oned R-and-D. We're building a truth machine. Now we'll get the facts on what really makes them tick.'