Part 39 (1/2)

'Didn't anyone understand what I was talking about?'

'Where are you going, Rau?' Thomas barked. But Rau was already gone.

'There he is,' said Vera, pointing at the screen.

'What does he think he's doing?' Thomas said.

Still wearing his cowboy hat, Rau shouldered aside a burly policeman and made a sprightly hop over a spilled chair. They watched as people backed away from the stainless-steel table, exposing Yamamoto to the camera. The frail young woman lay still, tied and taped to the table, with wires leading off to machines. As Rau approached, Mary Kay stood her ground on the far side, shock paddles poised. He was arguing with her.

'Oh, Rau!' Vera despaired. 'Thomas, we have to get him out of there. This is a medical emergency.'

Mary Kay said something to a nurse, who tried to lead Rau away by the arm. But Rau pushed her. A lab tech grabbed him by the waist, and Rau doggedly held on to the edge of the metal table. Mary Kay leaned to place the paddles. The last thing Vera saw on the monitor was the body arching.

With Thomas pus.h.i.+ng the wheelchair, they hurried to the laboratory, dodging cops, firemen, and staff in the hallway. They encountered a gurney loaded with equipment, and that consumed another precious minute. By the time they reached the lab, the drama was over. People were leaving the room. A woman stood at the door with one hand to her eyes.

Inside, Vera and Thomas saw a man draped partway across the table, his head laid next to Yamamoto's, sobbing. The husband, Vera guessed. Still holding the shock paddles, Mary Kay stood to one side, staring vacantly. An attendant spoke to her. When she didn't respond, he simply took the paddles from her hands. Someone else patted her on the back, and still she didn't move.

'Good heavens, was Rau right?' whispered Vera. They wove through the wreckage as Yamamoto's body was covered and lifted onto a stretcher. They had to wait for the stream of people to pa.s.s. The husband followed the bearers out.

'Dr. Koenig?' said Thomas. Wires cluttered the gleaming table.

She flinched at his voice, and raised her eyes to him. 'Father?' she said, dazed.

Vera and Thomas exchanged a concerned look.

'Mary Kay?' Vera said. 'Are you all right?'

'Father Thomas? Vera?' said Mary Kay. 'Now Yammie's gone, too? Where did we go wrong?'

Vera exhaled. 'You had me scared,' she said. 'Come here, child. Come here.' Mary Kay knelt by the wheelchair. She buried her face against Vera's shoulder.

'Rau?' Thomas asked, glancing around. 'Now where did he go?'

Abruptly, Rau burst from his hiding place in a heap of readout paper and piled cables. He moved so quickly, they barely knew it was he. As he raced past Vera's wheelchair, one hand hooked wide, and Mary Kay grunted and bent backward in pain. Her lab jacket suddenly gaped open from shoulder to shoulder, and red marked the long slash wound. Rau had a scalpel.

Now they saw the lab tech who had tried to pry Rau loose from the table. He sat slumped with his entrails across his legs.

Thomas yelled something at Rau. It was a command of some kind, not a question. Vera didn't know Hindi, if that's what it was, and was too shocked to care.

Rau paused and looked at Thomas, his face distorted with anguish and bewilderment.

'Thomas!' cried Vera, falling from her chair with the wounded physician in her arms.

In the one instant Thomas took his eyes from the man, Rau vanished through the doorway.

The suicide was aired on national television that evening. Rau couldn't have timed it better, with national media already gathered for the university's press conference in the street below. It was simply a matter of training their cameras on the roofline eight stories above.

With a fiery Rocky Mountain sunset for a backdrop, the SWAT cops edged closer and closer to Rau's swaying form, guns leveled. Aiming their acoustic dishes, sound crews on the ground picked up every word of the negotiator's appeal to the cornered man. Telephoto lenses trained on his twisted face, tracked his leap. Several quick-thinking cameramen utilized the same bounce technique, a quick nudge up, to self-edit the impact.

There was no doubt the former head of India's parliament had gone insane. The hadal head cradled in his arms was all the proof anyone needed. That and the cowboy hat.

19 - CONTACT.

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.

-RUDYARD KIPLING, The Jungle Book Beneath the Magellan Rise, 176 degrees west, 8 degrees north

The camp woke to tremors on the last day of summer.

Like the rest, Ali was asleep on the ground. She felt the earthquake work deep inside her body. It seemed to move her bones.

For a full minute the scientists lay on the ground, some curling in fetal b.a.l.l.s, some clutching their neighbors' hands or embracing. They waited in awful silence for the tunnel to close upon them or the floor to drop away.

Finally some wag yelled out, 'All clear. It was just Shoat, d.a.m.n him. w.a.n.king again.' They all laughed nervously. There were no more tremors, but they had been reminded of how minuscule they were. Ali braced for an onset of confessions from her fragile flock.

Later in the morning, several in a group of women she was rafting with could smell what was left of the earthquake in the faint dust hanging above the river. Pia, one of the planetologists, said it reminded her of a stonecutters' yard near her childhood home, the smell of cemetery markers being polished and sandblasted with the names of the dead.

'Tombstones? That's a pleasant thought,' one of the women said.

To dispel the sense of omen, Ali said, 'See how white the dust is? Have you ever smelled fresh marble just after a chisel has cut it?' She recalled for them a sculptor's studio she had once visited in northern Italy. He had been working on a nude with little success, and had begged Ali to pose for him, to help draw the woman out from his block of stone. For a time he had pursued her with letters.

'He wanted you to pose naked?' Pia was delighted. 'He didn't know you were a nun?'

'I was very clear.'

'So? Did you?'

Suddenly, Ali felt sad. 'Of course not.'

Life in these dark tubes and veins had changed her. She had been trained to erase her ident.i.ty in order to allow G.o.d's signature upon her. Now she wanted desperately to be remembered, if only as a piece of sculpted marble.

The underworld was having its effect on others, too. As an anthropologist Ali was naturally alive to the entire tribe's metamorphosis. Tracking their idiosyncrasies was like watching a garden slowly grow rampant. They adopted peculiar touches, odd ways of combing their hair, or rolling their survival suits up to the knee or shoulder. Many of the men had started going bareback, the upper half of their suits hanging from their waists like shed skin. Deodorant was a thing of the past, and you barely noticed the body smells, except for certain unfortunates. Shoat, particularly, was known for his foot odor. Some of the women braided each other's hair with beads or sh.e.l.ls. It was just for fun, they said, but their concoctions got more elaborate each week.

Some of the soldiers lapsed into gang talk when Walker wasn't around, and their weapons suddenly flowered with scrimshaw. They carved animals or Bible quotes or girlfriends' names onto the plastic stocks and handles. Even Walker had let his beard grow into a great Mosaic bush that had to be a garden spot for the cave lice that plagued them.

Ike no longer looked so much different from the rest of them. After the incident at Cache II, he had made himself more scarce. Many nights they never saw him, only his little tripod of glowing green candles designating a good campsite. When he did surface, it was only for a matter of hours. He was retreating into himself, and Ali didn't know how to reach him, or why it should matter so much to her. Maybe it was that the one in their group who most needed reconciliation seemed most resistant to it. There was another possibility, that she had fallen in love. But that was unreasonable, she thought.

On one of Ike's rare overnights at camp, Ali took a meal to him and they sat by the water's edge. 'What do you dream?' she asked. When his brow wrinkled, she added, 'You don't have to tell me.'

'You've been talking with the shrinks,' he said. 'They asked the same thing. It's supposed to be a measure of fluency, right? If I dream in hadal.'

She was unsettled. They all wanted a piece of this man. 'Yes, it's a measure. And no, I haven't talked with anyone about you.'

'So what do you want?'