The Descent Part 25

Once the room might have been a small auditorium, or a cafeteria. Now the s.p.a.ce was illuminated with Stalinist klieg lights and looked like Custer's Last Stand. Soldiers from the People's Liberation Army, mostly men in pea-green uniforms or black-striped camouflage, were all business among their weapons. They gave wide berth to Holly Ann. Several elites pointed at the baby inside her sweater.

In the distance, Mr Li was appealing to an officer who carried himself with the iron spine of a hero of the people. His crewcut was gray. He looked weary.

She went over to Wade. He was bleeding into both eyes from a laceration across the scalp line. 'Wade,' she said.

'Holly Ann?' he said. 'Thank G.o.d. Mr Li told them you were still below. They sent someone to find you.'

She avoided his bear hug. 'I have something to show you,' she announced quietly.

'It's very dangerous here,' Wade said. 'Something's going on. A revolution or something. I gave Li all our cash. I told him to pay anything, just get us out of here.'

'Wade,' she snapped. He wasn't listening to her.

A voice suddenly boomed in the back, where Mr Li stood. It was the officer. He was shouting at Holly Ann's rescuer, the tall woman. All around her, soldiers looked angry or ashamed for her. Obviously she had allowed some terrible breach. Holly Ann knew it had to do with this baby.

The officer unsnapped his leather holster and looked at her. He drew his pistol out.

'Good Lord,' Holly Ann murmured.

'What?' said Wade. He stood there like some bewildered monster. Useless.

It was her call. Holly Ann astonished herself. As the officer approached her, she started off to meet him halfway. They met in the center of the rubble-strewn room.

'Mr Li,' Holly Ann commanded.

Mr Li glared at her, but came forward.

'Tell this man I have selected my child,' she said. 'I have medicine in the car. I wish to go home now.'

Mr Li started to translate, but the officer abruptly chambered a round. Mr Li blinked rapidly. He was very pale. The officer said something to him.

'Put on floor,' Mr Li said to her.

'We have all the necessary permits,' she explained quite evenly. She said it directly to the officer. 'Out in our car, permits, understand? Pa.s.sports. Doc.u.ments.'

'Please you put on floor,' Mr Li repeated very softly. He pointed at her baby. 'That,' he said, as if it were a dirty thing.

Holly Ann despised him. Despised China. Despised the G.o.d that allowed such things.

'She,' said Holly Ann. 'This girl goes with me.'

'Not good,' Mr Li softly pleaded.

'She will die otherwise.'

'Yes.'

'Holly Ann?' Wade loomed behind her.

'It's a baby, Wade. Our baby. I found her. On a pile of garbage. And now they want to kill her.' Holly Ann felt the infant stirring. The tiny fingernails pulled at her blouse.

'A baby?'

'No,' Mr Li said.

'I'm taking her home with us.'

Mr Li shook his head emphatically.

'Give them the money,' she instructed him.

Wade bl.u.s.tered foolishly. 'We're American citizens. You did tell them, didn't you?'

'This isn't for you,' Mr Li said. 'It's a trade. This for that.'

She could feel the infant's hunger, miniature lips groping for a nipple. 'A trade?' she demanded. 'Who are you trading with?'

Mr Li glanced nervously at the soldiers.

'Who?' she insisted.

Mr Li pointed at the ground. Through it. 'Them.'

Holly Ann felt faint. 'What?'

'Our babies. Their babies. Trade.'

The infant made a tiny sound.

Over Mr Li's shoulder, Holly Ann saw the officer aiming his gun. She saw a puff of color spit from the barrel.

Holly Ann barely felt the bullet. Her fall to earth was more like floating. All the way down, she held the child in safety.

Above her, violent shadows thundered. More guns went off. Her name roared out.

She smiled and rested her head gently against the bundle at her shoulder. Little no-name. No-luck. I belong to you. Before they could reach her, Holly Ann did the only thing left to do. She unveiled the daughter China had refused. Time to say good-bye.

In her search around the world for a child, Holly Ann had seen babies of every race and color. Her search had changed her forever, she thought. Black eyes or blue, kinky hair or straight, chocolate skin or yellow or brown or white, crooked, blind, or straight: none of that mattered.

As she opened the sweater wrapping the baby, Holly Ann fully expected to recognize her common humanity in this tiny being. Every infant was a chalice. That was her conviction. Until now.

Even dying, Holly Ann was able to kick the thing away from her.

Oh G.o.d, she cursed, and closed her eyes.

A sound like giants walking wakened her. She looked. It was not footsteps, but the old man carefully planting one shot at a time as he tracked the foundling.

Finally it was done.

And she was glad.

12 - ANIMALS.

...nature hath adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their view...

-JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver's Travels The July Tunnels In a gut of coiled granite, the mortal fed.

The meat was still warm from life. It was more than food, less than sacrament. Flesh is a landmark, if you know its flavor. The trick was setting your clock, so to speak, then categorically marking the s.h.i.+fts in tone or odor, or changes in the skin and muscle and blood, as you moved through the territory. Memorize the particulars, and you could begin to orient yourself in a cartography based on raw flesh. In terms of taste, the liver was often most distinct, sometimes the heart.

He crouched in the pocket of darkness with this creature squeezed between his thighs, the chest cavity opened. He rummaged. Like a mariner finding north, he committed to memory the organs, their relative position and size and smell. He sampled different pieces, just a taste. Palmed the skull, lifted the limbs, ran his hands along the limbs.

He'd never encountered a beast quite like this one. Its uniqueness did not register as a new phylum or species. The kill barely registered at the level of language. And yet it would permanently acquaint him. He would remember this creature in every detail.

Head held high to listen for intruders, he inserted his hands in the animal's hide and let his wonder run. He was utterly respectful. He was a student, no more. The animal was his teacher.

It was not just a matter of locating yourself east or south. Depth was sometimes far more consequential, and the consistency of flesh could serve as an altimeter of sorts. In the deep seas, such bathypelagic monsters as anglerfish were slow moving, with a metabolic rate as low as one percent of fish living near the surface. Their body tissue was watery, with little muscle and no fat. So it was at certain depths in the subplanet. Down some channels, you found reptiles or fish that were little more than vegetables with teeth. Even the ones that weren't poisonous weren't worth eating. Their food value verged on plain air. Even them he'd eaten.

Again, there were more reasons to hunt than filling your belly. With care you could plot a course, find a destination, locate water, avoid - or track - enemies. It made simple survival something more, a journey. A destiny.

The body spoke to him. He felt for eyes, found stems, tried to thumb open the lids, but they were sealed. Blind. The talons were a raptor's, with an opposing thumb. He had caught it drafting on the tunnel's breeze, but the wings were much too small for real flight.

He started at the top again. The snout. Milk teeth, but sharp as needles. The way the joints moved. The genitals, this one a male. The hip bones were abraded from sc.r.a.ping along the stone. He squeezed the bladder, and its liquid smelled sharp. He took one foot and pressed it against the dirt and felt the print.

All of this was done in darkness.

Finally, Ike was done. He laid the parts back inside the cavity and folded the arms across and pressed the body into a cleft in the wall.

They entered a series of deep trenches that resembled terrestrial canyons, but which had not been cut by the flow of water. These were instead the remains of seafloor spreading, fossilized here. They had found an ocean bottom - bone dry - 2,650 fathoms beneath the Pacific Ocean floor. That night they made camp near a huge coral bed stretching right and left into the darkness. It was like a Sherwood Forest made of calcified polyps. Great, oaklike branches reached up and out with green and blue and pink pastels and deep reds secreted, according to their geobotanist, by an ancestor of the gorgonian Corallium n.o.bile. There were desiccated sea fans under their spreading limbs, so old their colors had leached to transparency. Ancient marine animals lay at their feet, turned to stone.

The expedition had been on its feet for over four weeks, and Shoat and Walker granted the scientists' request for an extra two days here. The scientists got hardly any sleep during their stay at the coral site. They would never pa.s.s this way again. Perhaps no human ever would. Frantically they harvested these traces of an alternate evolution. In lieu of carrying it with them, they arranged the material for digital storage on their hard disks, and the video cameras whirred night and day.

Walker brought in two winged animals. Still alive.

'Fallen angels,' he announced.

They were upside down, strung with parachute cord, still half-poisoned from sedative. A soldier had been bitten by one, and lay sick with dry heaves. You could tell which animal had delivered the bite; its left wing had been crushed by a boot.

They weren't really fallen angels, of course. They were demons. Gargoyles.

The scientists cl.u.s.tered around, goggling at the feeble beasts. The animals twitched. One shot a cherubic arc of urine.

'How did you manage this, Walker? Where did you get them?'

'I had my troops dope their kill. They were eating a third one of these things. All we had to do was wait for them to return and eat some more, and then go collect them.'

'Are there more?'

'Two or three dozen. Maybe hundreds. A flock. Or a hatch. Like bats. Or monkeys.'

'A rookery,' said one of the biologists.

'I've ordered my men to keep their distance. We've set a kill zone at the mouth of the subtunnel. We're in no danger.'

Shoat had apparently been in on it. 'You should smell their dung,' he said.

Several of the porters, on seeing the animals, murmured and crossed themselves. Walker's soldiers brusquely directed them away.

Live specimens of an unknown species, especially warm-blooded higher vertebrates, were not something that came walking into a naturalist's camp. The scientists moved in with tape measures and Bic pens and flashlights.

The longest one measured twenty-two rapturously colored inches. The rich orchid hues - purple mottling into turquoise and beige - was one more of those paradoxes of nature: what use was such coloration in the darkness?

The big one had lactating teats - someone squeezed out a trickle of milk - and engorged crimson l.a.b.i.a. At first glance, the other seemed to have similar genitalia, but a Bic tip opened the folds to expose a surprise.

'What am I seeing here?'

'It's a p.e.n.i.s, all right.'

'Not much of one.'

'Reminds me of a guy I used to date,' said one of the women.

But even as they bantered and joked, they were intently gleaning data from these bodies. The tall one was a nursing female, in heat. The other was a male with eroded three-cusp molars, callused foot pads and chipped claws, and ulcerated patches where his elbows and knees and shoulder bones had abraded against rock. That and other evidence of aging eliminated him as the female's 'son.' Perhaps they were mates. The female, at any rate, probably had one or more infants waiting for her to come home.

The two animals revived from Walker's sedative in trembling bursts. They surfaced into full consciousness only to hit the shock of the humans' lights and sink into stupor again.

'Keep those ropes tight, they bite,' Walker said as the creatures s.h.i.+vered and struggled and lapsed back into semiconsciousness. They were diminutive. It didn't seem possible these could be the hadals who had slaughtered armies and left cave art and cowed eons of humans.

'They're not King Kong,' Ali said. 'Look at them, barely thirty pounds apiece. You'll kill them with those ropes.'

'I can't believe you destroyed her wing,' a biologist said to Walker. 'She was probably just defending her nest.'

'What's this,' Shoat retorted, 'Animal Rights Week?'

'I have a question,' Ali said. 'We're supposed to leave in the morning. What then? They're not house pets. Do we take them with us? Should we even have them here?'

Walker's expression, pleased to begin with, drew in on itself. Clearly he thought her ungrateful. Shoat saw the change, and nodded at Ali as if to say Good work.

'Well, we've got them here now,' a geologist said with a shrug. 'We can't pa.s.s up an opportunity like this.'

They had no nets, cages, or restraining devices. While the animals were still relatively immobile, the biologists muzzled them with string and tied each to a pack frame with wings and arms outstretched, and feet wired together at the bottom. Their wingspread was modest, less than their height.

'Do they possess true flight?' someone asked. 'Or are they just aerial opportunists, drafting down from high perches?'

Over the next hour, such details were debated with great pa.s.sion. One way or another, everyone agreed they were prosimians that had somehow tumbled from the family tree of primates.

'Look at that face, almost human, like one of those shrunken heads you see in the anthro exhibits. What's the cranial measurement on this guy?'