'Perhaps,' de l'Orme proposed irreverently, 'Satan would be better off just dying out and becoming an idea, rather than struggling to be a reality. By sniffing around man's camp all these years, the lion has degenerated into a hyena. The tempest has become just a puff of bad wind, a fart in the night.'
Whether the literature and archaeological and linguistic evidence were describing Satan himself or rather his lieutenants and spies, the profile was consistent with an inquiring mentality. No doubt about it, the darkness wanted to know about the light. But to know what? Civilization? The human condition? The feel of sunbeams?
'The more I learn about hadal culture,' Mustafah said, 'the more I suspect a great culture in decline. It's as if a collective intellect had developed Alzheimer's and slowly begun to lose its reason.'
'I think of autism, not Alzheimer's,' said Vera. 'A vast onset of self-centered presentness. An inability to recognize the outside world, and with that an inability to create. Look at the artifacts coming up from subplanetary hadal sites. Over the last
three to five thousand years, the artifacts have been increasingly human in origin: coins, weapons, cave art, hand tools. That could mean that the hadals turned away from menial and artistic labor as they pursued higher arts, or that they jobbed the day-to-day minutiae out to human artisans whom they'd captured, or that they valued stolen possessions more than homemade ones.
'But match it with the decline in hadal population over the past several thousand years. Some demographic projections suggest they might have numbered over forty million individuals subglobally at the time Aristotle and Buddha lived. The figure is probably less than 300,000 at present. Something's gone terribly wrong down there. They haven't grown more sophisticated. They haven't pursued the higher arts. If anything, they've simply become packrats, storing their human knickknacks in tribal nests, increasingly unaware of what they have or where they are or even what they are.'
'Vera and I have talked about this at length,' said Mustafah. 'There's a tremendous amount of fieldwork to be done, of course. But if you go back a million years in the fossil record, it appears the hadals were developing hand tools and even amalgamated metal artifacts far ahead of what humans were producing on the surface. While man was still figuring out how to pound two rocks together, the hadals were inventing musical instruments made of glass! Who knows? Maybe man never did discover fire. Maybe we were taught it! But now you have these grotesque creatures reduced to savagery, their tribes draining off into the deepest holes. It's sad, really.'
'The question is,' said Vera, 'does this overall decline reflect in all the hadals?'
'Satan,' said January. 'Above all, does it affect him?'
'Without having met him, I can't say for sure. But there is always a dynamic between a people and their leader. He's a mirror image of them. Kind of like God in reverse. We're an image of Him? How about Him as an image of us?'
'You're saying the leader isn't leading? That he's following his benighted masses?'
'Of course,' said Mustafah. 'Even the most isolated despot reflects his people. Otherwise he's just a madman.' He gestured at the space around them. 'No different from the knight who built this castle on top of a mountain in a rocky wilderness.'
'Maybe that's what he is,' said Vera. 'Isolated. Alienated. Segregated by his genius. Wandering the world, above and below, cut off from his own kind, trying to figure some way into our kind.'
'Are we so attractive to them?' January wondered.
'Why not? What if our light and civilization and intellectual and physical health is their salvation, so to speak? What if we represent paradise to them – or him – the way their darkness and savagery and ignorance represent our hell?'
'And Satan's tired of being Satan?' asked Mustafah.
'But of course,' Parsifal said. 'What could be more in keeping? The ultimate traitor. The Judas of all time. A serpent ascending. The rat jumping off the ship.'
'Or at least an intellect contemplating his own transformation,' said Vera.
'Anguishing over his direction. Trying to decide whether he really can bring himself to cut loose.'
'What's so wrong with that?' asked Foley. 'Wasn't that Christ's agony? Isn't that Buddha's conundrum? The savior hits his wall. He gets worn out being the savior. He gets tired of the suffering. It means our Satan is mortal, that's all.'
January opened her palms to them like pink fruit. 'Why get so fancy?' she asked.
'The theory works perfectly fine with a much simpler explanation. What if Satan came up to cut a deal? What if he wants to find someone like us as badly as we want to find him?'
Foley's pencil fanned a nervous yellow wing in the air. 'But that's what I've been thinking!' he said. 'In fact, I think he's already found us.'
'What?' three of them asked at once.
Even Thomas raised his eyes from his dark thoughts.
'If there's one thing I've learned as an entrepreneur, it is that ideas occur in waves. Ideas transcend intelligence. In different cultures. Different languages. Different dreams. Why should the idea of peace be any different? What if the notion of a treaty or a summit or a cease-fire occurred to our Satan even as it occurred to us?'
'But you conjecture he's found us.'
'Why not? We're not invisible. The Beowulf endeavor has been globetrotting for a year and a half. If Satan is half as resourceful as you say, he's heard of us. And yes, located us. And perhaps even penetrated us.'
'Absurd,' they cried. But hungered for more.
'Speak from the evidence,' said Thomas.
'Yes, the evidence,' said Foley. 'It's your own evidence, Thomas. Wasn't it you who proposed that Satan might contact a leader as desperate – and enigmatic and vilified
– as himself? A leader like this jungle warlord Desmond Lynch went off to find. As I recall, you once suggested Satan might want to establish a colony of his own, on the surface, in plain sight as it were, in a country like Burma or Rwanda, a place so benighted and savage no one dares cross its borders.'
'You're proposing that I am Satan?' Thomas drolly asked.
'No. Not at all.'
'I'm relieved. Then who?'
Foley went for broke. 'Desmond.'
'Lynch?' belched Gault.
'I'm quite serious.'
'What are you talking about?' January protested. 'The poor man's vanished. He's probably been eaten by tigers.'
'Perhaps. But what if he had secreted himself in our midst? Listened to our thoughts? Waited for an opportunity like this, a chance to meet a despot and make his pact? I doubt he'd bid us a fond adieu before disappearing forever.'
'Absurd.'
Foley laid his yellow pencil neatly alongside of his pad. 'Look, we've agreed on several things. That Satan is a trickster. A master of anonymity. He survives through his disguises and deceptions. And he may have been trying to strike a bargain... for peace or a hiding place, it doesn't matter. All I know is that Senator January last saw Desmond alive, on his way into a jungle no one dares to enter.'
'Do you realize what you're saying?' asked Thomas. 'I chose the man myself. I've known him for decades.'
'Satan is patient. He has loads of time.'
'You're suggesting that Lynch played us along from the beginning? That he used us?'
'Absolutely.'
Thomas looked sad. Sad and decided. 'Accuse him yourself,' he said. He set his box on the table amid the fruit and cheeses. Beneath FedEx paperwork, it bore diplomatic seals printed in broken wax.
'Thomas, is this necessary?' January said, guessing.
