Part 24 (1/2)

Inevitably, someone came up with a nickname for their expedition. It turned out to be Jules Verne who most appealed to this bunch, and so they became the Jules Verne Society, soon shortened to the JV. The name stuck. It helped that for his Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne had chosen two scientists for his heroes, rather than epic warriors or poets. Above all, the JV liked the fact that Verne's small party of scientists had emerged miraculously intact.

The tunnels were ample. Their path looked groomed. Someone - apparently long ago - had cleared loose stones and chiseled corners to form walls and benches alongside the trail. It was hypothesized that the stonecutting might have been accomplished centuries ago by Andean slaves, for the joints and ma.s.sive blocks were identical to masonry at Machu Picchu and in Cuzco. At any rate, their porters seemed to know exactly what the benches were for as they backed their heavy loads onto the old shelves.

Ali couldn't get over it. Miles went by, as flat as a sidewalk, looping right and left in easy bends, a pedestrian's delight. The geologists, especially, were astounded. The lithosphere was supposed to be solid basalt at these depths. Unbearably hot. A dead zone. But here was a virtual subway tunnel. You could sell tickets to this, one remarked. Don't worry, said his pal, Helios will.

One night they camped next to a translucent quartz forest. Ali heard tiny underworld creatures rustling, and the sound of water trickling through deep fissures. This was their first good encounter with indigenous animals. The expedition's lights kept the animals in hiding. But one of the biologists set out a recording device, and in the morning he played for them the rhythm of two- and three-chambered hearts: subterranean fish and amphibians and reptiles.

The nocturnal sounds were unsettling for some, raising the specter of hadal predators or of bugs or snakes with deadly venoms. For Ali, the nearness of life was a balm. It was life she had come in search of, hadal life. Lying on her back in the blackness, she couldn't wait to actually see the animals.

For the most part, their fields were sufficiently diverse to forestall professional compet.i.tion. That meant they shared more than they bickered. They listened to one another's hypotheses with saintly patience. They put on skits at night. A harmonica player performed John Mayall songs. Three geologists started a barbershop routine, calling themselves the Tectonics. h.e.l.l was turning out to be fun.

Ali estimated they were making 7.2 miles per day on foot. At mile fifty they held a celebration, with Kool-Aid and dancing. Ali did the twist and the two-step. A paleobiologist got her into a complicated tango, and it was like being drunk under a full moon.

Ali was a riddle to them. She was a scholar, and yet this other thing, a nun. Despite her dancing, some of the women told her they feared she was deprived. She never gossiped, never joined in the girl talk when the going got raw. They knew nothing about her past lovers, but presumed at least a few. They declared their intention of finding out. You make me sound like a social disease, Ali said, laughing.

Don't worry, they said, you can still be repaired.

Inhibitions receded. Clothing opened. Wedding bands started to vanish.

The affairs unfolded in full view of the group, and sometimes the s.e.x, too. There were some initial attempts at privacy. Grown men and women pa.s.sed notes back and forth, held hands in secret, or pretended to discuss important business. Late at night Ali could hear people grunting like hippies among the stones and heaped packs.

In their second week, they came upon cave art that might have been lifted from Paleolithic sites at Altamira. The walls held beautifully rendered animals and shapes and geometric doodles, some no larger than postage stamps. They were alive with color. Color! In a world of darkness.

'Look at that detail,' breathed Ali.

There were crickets and orchids and reptiles, and nightmare concoctions that looked like something the geographer Ptolemy or Bosch might have drawn, beasts that were part fish or salamander, part bird and man, part goat. Some of the depictions used natural k.n.o.bs in the rock for eye stems or gonads, or spalled divots for a hollow in the stomach, or mineral veins for horns or antennae.

'Turn off your light,' Ali told her companions. 'Here's how it would have looked by the flame of a torch.' She swam her hand back and forth across her headlamp, and in the flickering light the animals seemed to move.

'Some of these species have been extinct for ten thousand years,' a paleobiologist said. 'Some I never knew existed.'

'Who were the artists, do you think?' someone wondered.

'Not hadals,' said Gitner, whose specialty was petrology, the history and cla.s.sification of rocks. He had lost a brother in the national guard several years ago, and hated the hadals. 'They're vermin who have burrowed into the earth. That's their nature, like snakes or insects.'

One of the volcano people spoke. With her shaved head and long thighs, Molly was a figure of awe to the porters and mercenaries. 'There might be another explanation here,' she said. 'Look at this.' They gathered beneath a broad section of ceiling she had been studying.

'Okay,' Gitner said, 'a bunch of stick figures and b.o.o.bie dolls. So what?'

At first glance, that did seem to be the extent of it. Wielding spears and bows, warriors mounted wild attacks on one another. Some had trunks and heads made of twin triangles. Others were just lines. Crowded into one corner stood several dozen Venuses loaded with vast b.r.e.a.s.t.s and obese b.u.t.tocks.

'These look like prisoners.' Molly pointed at a file of stick figures roped together.

Ali pointed at a figure with one hand on the chest of another. 'Is that a shaman healing people?'

'Human sacrifice,' muttered Molly. 'Look at his other hand.' The figure was holding something red in one outstretched hand. His hand was resting not on top of the figure's chest, but inside it. He was displaying a heart.

That evening, Ali transferred some of her sketches of the cave art onto her day map. She had conceived the maps as a private journal. But, once discovered, her maps quickly became expedition property, a reference point for them all.

From her work on digs near Haifa and in Iceland, Ali came armed with the trappings of the trade. She had schooled herself in grids and contours and scale, and went nowhere without her leather tube for rolls of paper. She could wield a protractor with command, cobble together a legend from scratch. They were less maps than a timetable with places, a chronography. Down here, far beneath the reach of the GPS satellite, longitude and lat.i.tude and direction were impossible to determine. Their compa.s.ses were rendered useless by electromagnetic corruption. And so she made the days of the month her true north. They were entering territory without human names, encountering locations that no one knew existed. As they advanced, she began to describe the indescribable and to name the unnamed.

By day she kept notes. In the evening, while the camp settled, Ali would open her leather tube of paper and lay out her pens and watercolors. She made two types of maps, one an overview, or blueprint, of h.e.l.l, which corresponded to the Helios computer projection of their route. It had dates with the corresponding alt.i.tudes and approximate locations beneath various features on the surface or the ocean floor.

But it was her day maps, the second type, that were her pride. These were charts of each day's particular progress. The expedition's photographs would be developed on the surface someday, but for now her small watercolors and line drawings and written marginalia were their memory. She drew and painted things that attracted her eye, like the cave art, or the green calcite lily pads veined with cherry-red minerals that floated in pools of still water, or the cave pearls rolled together like nests of hummingbird eggs. She tried to convey how it was like traveling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helict.i.tes threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely G.o.d would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

Even the mercenaries and porters liked to look at her maps. People enjoyed watching their voyage come alive beneath her pen and brush. Her maps comforted them. They saw themselves in the minutiae. Looking at her work, they felt a sense of control over this unexplored world.

On June 22, her day map included a major piece of excitement. '0955, 4,506 fathoms,' it read. 'Radio signals.'

They had not yet broken camp that morning when Walker's communications specialist picked up the signals. The entire expedition had waited while more sensors were laid out and the long-wave transmission was patiently harvested. It took four hours to capture a message that was a mere forty-five seconds long when played at normal speed. Everyone listened. To their disappointment, it was not for them.

Luckily, one woman was fluent in Mandarin. It was a distress signal sent from a People's Republic of China submarine. 'Get this,' she told them. 'The message was sent nine years ago.'

It got stranger.

'June 25,' Ali recorded, '1840, 4,618 fathoms: More radio signals.'

This time, after waiting for the long waves to pulse in through the basalt and mineral zones, what they received was a transmission from themselves. It was encrypted in their unique expedition code. Once they finished translating it, the message spoke of desperate starvation. 'Mayday... is Wayne Gitner... dead... am alone... a.s.sist...' The eerie part was that the dispatch was digitally dated five months in the future.

Gitner stepped forward and identified the voice on the tape as his own. He was a no-nonsense fellow, and indignantly demanded an explanation. One sci-fi buff suggested that a time warp might have been caused by the s.h.i.+fting geomagnetics, and suggested the message was a prophecy of sorts. Gitner said bulls.h.i.+t. 'Even if it was a time distortion, time only travels in one direction.'

'Yeah,' said the buff, 'but which direction? And what if time's circular?' However it had been done, people agreed it made for a good ghost story. Ali's map legend for that day included a tiny Casper ghost with the description 'Phantom Voice.'

Her maps noted their first genuine, live hadal life-form. Two planetologists spied it in a crevice and came racing to camp with their capture. It was a bacterial fuzz barely half an inch in diameter, a subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem, or SLIME in the parlance. A rock-eater.

'So?' said Shoat.

The discovery of a bacterium that ate basalt impeached the need for sunlight. It meant the abyss was self-sustaining. h.e.l.l was perfectly capable of feeding on itself.

On June 29 they reached a fossilized warrior. He was human and probably dated to the sixteenth century. His flesh had turned to limestone. His armor was intact. They guessed he had come here from Peru, a Cortes or Don Quixote who had penetrated this eternal darkness for Church, glory, or gold. Those with camcorders and still cameras doc.u.mented the lost knight. One of the geologists tried to sample the sheath of rock encrusting the body, only to chip an entire leg off.

The geologist's accidental vandalism was soon exceeded by the group's very presence. In the s.p.a.ce of three hours, the biochemicals of their combined respiration spontaneously generated a grape-green moss. It was like watching fire. The vegetation, sp.a.w.ned by the air from inside their bodies, rapidly colonized the walls and coated the conquistador. Even as they stood there, the hall was consumed with it. They fled as if fleeing themselves.

Ali wondered if, in pa.s.sing this lost knight, Ike had seen himself.

INCIDENT IN GUANGDONG.

PROVINCE.

People's Republic of China It was getting dark, and this so-called 'miracle' city didn't exist on any maps.

Holly Ann wished Mr Li would drive a little faster. The adoption agency's guide wasn't much of a driver, or, for that matter, much of a guide. Eight cities, fifteen orphanages, twenty-two thousand dollars, and still no baby.

Her husband, Wade, rode with his nose plastered to the opposite window. Over the past ten days they'd crisscrossed the southern provinces, enduring floods, disease, pestilence, and the edges of a famine. His patience was in rags.

It was odd, everywhere the same. Wherever they visited, the orphanages had all been empty of children. Here and there they'd found wizened little deformities - hydrocephalic, mongoloid, or genetically doomed - a few breaths short of dying. Otherwise, China suddenly, inexplicably, had no orphans.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The adoption agency had advertised that China was jammed with foundlings. Female foundlings, hundreds of thousands of them, tiny girls exiled from one-child families that wanted a son. Holly Ann had read that female orphans were still sold as servants or as tongyangxi, child brides. If it was a baby girl you wanted, no one went home empty. Until us, thought Holly Ann. It was as if the Pied Piper had come through and cleaned the place out. And more than just orphans were missing. Children altogether. You saw evidence of them - toys, kites, streetside chalkboards. But the streets were barren of children under the age of ten.