The Descent Part 20

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

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

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

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

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

'Ike?'

'Go on.'

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

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

'Not that we'll be going out in harm's way,' the woman said.

Ike looked at Shoat. 'Is that what this man told you?'

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

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

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

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

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

There was disappointment.

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

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

Shoat's annoyance built.

'Where are we going?' a man asked.

'No comment,' Shoat answered for Ike.

'Have you been in our particular territory yourself?'

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

'Rumors of what?'

Shoat was checking his watch.

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

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

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

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

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

'What a beautiful girl,' Ali said.

'Kids?' he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

'Check those dorsal grooves! Pinch me!'

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

'Ordovician, h.e.l.l!' Mapes bellowed. 'Cambrian, man. Early. Very early. Look at that rock. s.h.i.+t, maybe even late Precam!'

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

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

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

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

The gashes and sc.r.a.pes went on and on, left, then right.

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

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

Around the bend, they came on two white crosses planted Latino-style in a grotto carved into the wall. Tufts of hair, rags, and animal bones had been nailed to the stone. The rags, she comprehended, were leather hides. Skins. Flayed skin. This was a memorial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The settler spat.

The train slid inside the bunker and stopped. Immediately it was set upon by gangs of men with huge hands and bare feet. The workers were degraded, some scarcely recognizable as anatomically modern humans. It wasn't just the Hulk muscles and Abe Lincoln brows and cheekbones and their guttural exchanges. They smelled different: a musk odor. And some of them had bone growing right through their flesh. Many had strips of burlap draped over their heads to protect them from the railyard's dim lighting. While Ali and the others climbed down from the flatcars, the yard workers cast off chains and straps and manually unloaded crates weighing hundreds of pounds. Ali was fascinated by their enormous strength and deformities. Several of the giants noticed her attention and smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

'The research inst.i.tute,' someone shouted.

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

'There is no science station,' Shoat told them.

A howl went up.

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

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

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

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

'What are you raving about?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The video image flickered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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