The Descent Part 36

'Those are uniforms,' someone said. 'Look here, U.S. Army.'

'What do we do? They're all dead.'

'Unbuckle them. Get them out.'

'The buckles are melted shut. We'll have to cut them out. Let it cool off some more.'

'What were they doing in there?' one of the physicians wondered to Ali.

The dead limbs lolled. One man had bitten off his tongue, and the flap of muscle lay on his chin. Then they heard a moan. It came from below the hatch opening, where the third man hung suspended and out of their reach.

Without a word, Ike vaulted into the smoking interior. He straddled the bodies at hatch level and slashed at the webbing, clearing out the dead first. Crawling deeper, he got the third man cut free and dragged him to the hatch, where a dozen hands finished the extraction.

Ali and a few others were tending the dead, laying bits of burned clothing across their faces. The man uppermost in the cylinder, where the heat and fire would have been worst, had shot himself through the mouth. The middle man had strangled on a strap now fused into his neck. Their clothing had caught fire, leaving them dressed only in their harnesses and strapped with weapons. Each bore a pistol, a rifle, and a knife.

'Check these scopes out.' A geologist was sweeping the river with one of the soldier's rifles. 'These things are rigged for sniper work at night. What were they coming to hunt?'

'We'll take those,' Walker said, and his mercenaries collected all the other weapons.

Ali helped lay the third man on the ground, then stood back. His lungs and throat had been seared. He was coughing up a clear serous fluid, and his temperature control was shot. He was dying. Ike knelt beside him, along with the doctors and Walker and Shoat. Everyone was watching.

Walker peeled back a piece of charred cloth. '"First Cavalry,"' he read, and looked at Ike. 'These are your people. What are they sending Rangers down for?'

'I have no idea.'

'You know this man?'

'I don't.'

The doctors covered the burned man with a sleeping bag and gave him water to drink. The man opened his one good eye. 'Crockett?' he rasped.

'Guess he knows you,' Walker said. The whole camp stood breathless.

'Why did they send you?' Ike asked.

The man tried to form the words. He struggled beneath the sleeping bag. Ike gave him more water.

'Closer,' said the soldier.

Ike leaned in. He bent to hear.

'Judas,' the man hissed.

The knife drove straight up through the sleeping bag.

The fabric or pain spoiled the a.s.sa.s.sin's thrust. The blade skipped along Ike's rib cage but did not enter. The soldier had enough strength for a second slash across Ike's back, then Ike caught his wrist.

Walker and Shoat and the doctors fell back from the attack. One of the mercenaries reacted with three quick shots into the burned man's thorax. The body bounced with each round.

'Cease fire!' Walker yelled.

It was over that fast.

The only sound was the water flowing.

The expedition stared in disbelief. No one moved. They had seen the attack and heard the soldier's whispered word.

Ike knelt in their midst, dumbfounded. He still held the a.s.sa.s.sin's wrist in one hand, and the gash along his ribs flowed red. He looked around at them, bewildered.

Suddenly, a terrible keening noise rose up from him.

Ali didn't expect that. 'Ike?' she said from the ring of onlookers. No one dared go closer.

Ali stepped out from the circle and went to him. 'Stop it,' she said. They had depended on his strength for so long that his frailty endangered them. Before their eyes, he was coming undone.

He looked at her, then fled.

'What was that all about?' someone muttered.

For lack of shovels, they drifted the bodies out into the river. Many hours later, two more cylinders were lowered to them, each filled with cargo. They ate. Helios had sent them a feast for a hundred people: smoked rainbow trout, veal in cognac, cheese fondue, and a dozen different kinds of bread, sausages, pasta, and fruit. The crisp green lettuce in the salad brought tears of joy. It was, said a note, meant to celebrate C.C. Cooper's birthday. Ali suspected otherwise. Ike was meant to be dead, and this banquet was in effect a wake.

The attempt on Ike's life had no explanation or context or justice. What made it all the more irrational was that Ike was their most valued member. Even the mercenaries would have voted for him. With him as scout, they had felt like the Chosen People, destined to exit the wilderness on the heels of their tattooed Moses. But now he had been labeled a traitor, and was inexplicably marked for death.

The communications cable to the surface had been fried by the magma zone overhead, and so the expedition had only conjecture and superst.i.tion to fall back upon. In a way they all felt targeted, for in their experience Ike had been the best of men, and he was being punished for sins they had never known. It felt as though a great storm had opened upon them. The group's response was a little worry, then a lot of denial and bravado.

'It was a matter of time,' said Spurrier. 'Ike was going to come unwrapped sooner or later. You could see it coming. I'm surprised he held up this long.'

'What does that have to do with anything?' Ali snapped.

'I'm not saying he brought it down on himself. But the man's definitely in torment. He's got more ghosts than a graveyard.'

'What do you do to get the U.S. Army on your case?' Quigley, the psychiatrist, wondered. 'I mean that was a suicide mission. They don't throw good men away on nothing.'

'And that "Judas" stuff? I thought once the court-martial was over, they were finished with you. Talk about bad luck. The guy's a born outcast.'

'It's like the whole world's against him.'

'Don't worry about him, Ali,' said Pia, for whom love had come in the form of Spurrier. 'He'll be back.'

'I'm not so sure,' Ali said. She wanted to blame Shoat or Walker, but they seemed genuinely disoriented by the incident. If Helios had meant to kill Ike, why not use their own agents? Why involve the U.S. Army? And why would the Army involve itself with doing Helios' bidding? It made no sense.

While the rest slept, Ali walked from the light of their camp. Ike had not taken his kayak or his shotgun, so she searched on foot with her flashlight. His footprints loped along the bank's mud.

She was furious with the group's smugness. They had depended on Ike for everything. Without him, they might be dead or lost. He had been true to them, but now, when he needed them, they were not true to him.

We were his ruin. She saw that now. They had doomed Ike with their dependence. He would have been a thousand miles away if not for their weakness and ignorance and pride. That's what had kept him bound to them. Guardian angels were like that. Doomed by their pathos.

But blaming the group was a dodge, Ali had to admit. For it washer weakness, her ignorance, her pride that had bound Ike - not to them, but to her. The group's well-being was merely a collateral benefit. The uncomfortable truth was that he had promised himself to her.

Ali sorted her thoughts as she picked her way along the river. In the beginning Ike's allegiance to her had been unwanted, a vexation. She had buried the fact of his devotion under a heap of her own fictions, satisfying herself that he pursued the depths for reasons of his own, for his fabled lost lover or for revenge. Maybe that had been so in the beginning, but it no longer was. She knew that. Ike was here for her.

She found him in a field of night, no light, no weapon. He was sitting faced toward the river in his lotus position, his back bare to any enemies. He had cast himself onto the mercy of this savage desert.

'Ike,' she said.

His s.h.a.ggy head stayed poised and still. Her light cast his shadow onto the black water, where it was immediately forfeit. What a place, she thought. Darkness so hungry it devoured other darkness.

She came closer and took off her backpack. 'You missed your own funeral,' she joked. 'They sent a feast.'

Not a motion. Even his lungs did not move. He was going deep. Escaping.

'Ike,' she said. 'I know you can hear me.'

One of his hands rested in his lap; the fingertips of his other hand touched the ground with all the weight of an insect.

She felt like a trespa.s.ser. But this wasn't contemplation she was invading, it was the start of madness. He couldn't win, not by himself.

Ali approached from one side. From behind he looked at peace. Then she saw that his face was drawn. 'I don't know what's going on,' she said. He was resisting her within his statue stillness. His jaw was clenched.

'Enough,' she said, and opened her pack and pulled out the medical kit. 'I'm cleaning those cuts.'

Ali started brusquely with the Betadine sponge. But she slowed. The flesh itself slowed her. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the calluses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. He had been harrowed. Every mark was the mark of use.

It disconcerted her. She had known the d.a.m.ned in many of their incarnations, as prisoners and prost.i.tutes and killers and banished lepers. But she had never met a slave. Such creatures weren't supposed to exist in this age.

Ali was surprised at how well his shoulder fit in her hand. Then she recovered herself with a tidy pat. 'You'll survive,' she told him.

She walked a little distance away and sat down. For the rest of that night, she lay curled in a ball with his shotgun, protecting Ike while he finished returning to the world.

18 - GOOD MORNING.

Am not I A fly like thee?

Or art not thou A man like me?

-WILLIAM BLAKE, 'The Fly'

Health Sciences Center, University of Colorado, Denver

Yamamoto emerged from the elevator with a smile.

'Morning!' she sang to a janitor mopping up a roof leak.

'I don't see no sun,' he grumbled.

They had an old-fas.h.i.+oned blizzard raging out there, four-foot drifts, minus nine degrees. They were under siege. She would have the lab to herself today.

Yamamoto found last night's guard still on duty, asleep. She sent him off to the dorm to get some rest and hot food. 'And don't come back until this afternoon,' she said. 'I can hold down the fort myself. No one's coming in anyway.'

She was like that these days, mother to the world. Her hair was thicker, her cheeks in constant bloom. She hummed to the Womb, as her husband called it. Three more months.

The Digital Satan project was nearing completion. The lab was getting downright gamy with fast-food wrappers, sixty-four-ounce soda cups recycled as pencil holders, and mummified birthday leftovers. The bulletin board was bushy with doctored snapshots of lab personnel, excerpts of articles, and, most recently, employment notices for positions here and abroad.

She entered without double-gloving or a surgical mask. All kinds of lab rituals had fallen by the wayside, yet another sign that the project was getting short. Vials lay couched on a Taco Bell box. Someone had made a mobile of the computer chips they'd fried over the months.

Machine Two pumped out its endless hush-hush-hush nursery-room rhythm.

Except for the head, a young hadal female had just disappeared from existence, bones and all. Yet now she could be resurrected with a CD-ROM and a mouse. She was about to become electronically immortal. Wherever there was a computer, there could be a physical manifestation of Dawn. In a sense, her soul was truly in the machine.

For several weeks now, Yamamoto had been beset with awful dreams of Dawn. The hadal girl would be falling off a cliff or getting swept out to sea, and she would be reaching for help. Others in the lab related similar nightmares. Separation anxiety, they self-diagnosed. Dawn had been part of the gang. They were all going to miss her.

All that remained was the upper two-thirds of the hadal's cranium. It was slow going. Machine Two was calibrated to make the finest slices possible. The brain offered their most interesting exploration. Hopes remained high that they might actually unravel the sensory and cognition process - in effect, making the dead mind speak. All they had to do for the next ten weeks was baby-sit a glorified bologna slicer. Patience was a matter of Diet Pepsi and ribald jokes.

Yamamoto approached the metal table. The top of the girl's cranium was pale white inside the block of frozen blue gel. It looked like a moon suspended in a square of outer s.p.a.ce. Electrodes fed out from the top and sides of the gel. At the base, the blade sliced. The camera fired.

The machine had pared away the lower jaw, then worked back and forth across the upper teeth and into the nasal cavity. Externally, most of the flared, batlike nose and all of the stretched, fringed earlobes were gone now. In terms of internal structures, they'd shaved through most of the medulla oblongata leading up from the spinal cord, and reduced most of the cerebellum - which controlled motor skills - at the base of the skull to digital bits. No lesions or abnormalities so far. For a necrotic brain, all systems were remarkably intact, practically viable. Everyone was marveling. Hope I'm that healthy after I die, someone had joked.

Things were just starting to get interesting. From around the country, neurosurgeons and brain and cognition specialists had begun calling or E-mailing on a daily basis to keep updated. Certain parts of the brain, like the cerebellum they'd just pa.s.sed, were fairly standard mammalian anatomy. They explained what made the animal an animal, but did little to fill in what made the hadal a hadal.

No longer would Dawn be just so much subterranean animal carca.s.s. From the limbic system upward, she would once again become her own person. A personality might emerge, a rational process, clues to her speech, her emotions, her habits and instincts. In short, they were about to peek out through Dawn's cranial window and glimpse her worldview. It was tantamount to landing a s.p.a.cecraft on another planet. More than that, this was like interviewing an alien for the first time and asking for her thoughts.

Yamamoto feathered through the electrodes, sorting the right-side wires, laying them out neatly on the table. It was still a slight mystery why Dawn seemed to be generating a slight electrical pulse. Her chart should have showed a flat-line, but every now and then an irregular spike would jump up. This had been going on for months. It was a fact that, if you waited long enough, electrodes would eventually detect vital signs even from a bowl of Jell-O.

Yamamoto moved around the table to the left side and fanned out the wires on her palm. It was almost like braiding a child's hair. She paused to peer down into the gel block at what was left of the hadal face.

'Good morning,' she said.

The head opened its eyes.

Rau and Bud Parsifal found Vera in a western clothing store in Denver International terminal, trying on cowboy hats. One could not have invented a more perfect antidote to the darkness on everyone's mind. Everyone had an opinion, a fear, a solution. No one knew where any of it was going down there, what they might find, what kind of world their children were going to grow up in. But here, in this gigantic, sweeping, tentlike terminal saturated with sunlight and open s.p.a.ce, you could forget all that and simply eat ice cream. Or try on cowboy hats.

'How do I look?' Vera asked.

Rau patted his briefcase in applause. Parsifal said, 'Lord spare us.'

'Did you come together?' she asked.

'London via Cincinnati,' said Parsifal.