– spear throwers – and stone maces with iron chains and handles. Some of the weaponry carried Maori-type geometrics, but had to predate Maori culture by fourteen thousand years. Spears and arrows made of abyssal reed had been fletched not with bird feathers but with fish spines.
'It's like the Qin tomb in China,' said Ali. 'Only smaller.'
'And seven times older,' said Troy. 'And hadal.'
They entered the circles of sentinels tentatively, setting their feet carefully, like t'ai chi students, so as not to disturb the scene. Those with film left took pictures. Ike drew his pistol and stalked from one to another, culling facts meaningful only to him. Ali simply wandered. Troy joined her, dazed.
'These furrows in the floor, they're filled with mercury,' he said, pointing to the network cut into the stone deck. 'And it's moving, like blood. What could be the meaning?'
It was fair to guess by the details that the statues had been built true to life. In that case, the warriors had averaged an extraordinary five feet ten inches – fifteen eons ago. As Troy pointed out, it was always a mistake to generalize too much from the looks of an army, for armies tended to recruit the healthiest and fittest specimens in a population. Even so, during the same Neolithic period the average H. sapiens male had stood five to eight inches shorter.
'Next to these guys, Conan the Barbarian would have been nothing more than a
mesomorphic runt leading a bunch of human pipsqueaks,' Troy said. 'It kind of makes you wonder. With their physical size and this level of social organization and wealth, why didn't the hadals just invade us?'
'Who says they didn't?' asked Ali. She went on studying the statues. 'What intrigues me is how flexed the cranial base is. And how straight the jaws are. Remember that head Ike brought in? The skull fit differently on the neck. I distinctly remember that. It extended forward, like a chimp's. And the jaw had a pronounced thrust forward.'
'I saw that, too,' Troy said. 'Are you thinking what I am?'
'Reversal?'
'Exactly. I mean, possibly.' Troy opened his hands. 'I mean, I don't know, Ali.'
In lay terms, a straight jaw – orthognathicism – was an evolutionary climb above the more primitive trait of a jutting jaw. Anthropology did not deal in terms of evolutionary ascent, however, any more than it recognized evolutionary decline. A straight jaw was called a 'derived' trait. Like all traits, it expressed an adaptation to environmental pressures. But evolutionary pressures were in constant flux, and could lead to new traits that sometimes resembled primitive ones. This was called reversal. Reversal was not a going backward, but rather a seeming to do so. It was not a return to the primitive trait, but a new derived trait that mimicked the primitive trait. In this case the hadals had evolved a straight jaw fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, as seen on these statues, but had apparently derived a jutting jaw that was highly simian and primitive in its look. For whatever reason, H. hadalis seemed to be in reversal.
For Ali, the significance lay in what this meant to hadal speech and cognition. A straight jaw provided a wider range of consonants, and an erect neck-skull structure – basicranial flexion – meant a lower larynx or voice box, and that meant more vowel range. The fact that fifteen-thousand-year-old hadal statues had straight jaws and an erect head, and Ike's trophy head did not, suggested problems with modern hadal speech, and possibly with his cognition. Ali remembered Troy's remarks about symmetry in the hadal brain, too. What if subterranean conditions had evolved Haddie from a creature capable of sculpting this fortress, firing these terra-cotta warriors, and plying the sea and rivers, into a virtual beast? Ike had said hadals could no longer read hadal script. What if they had lost their ability to reason? What if Satan was nothing more than a savage cretin? What if the Gitners and Spurriers of the world were right, and H. hadalis deserved no better treatment than a vicious dog? Troy was troubled. 'How could they reverse so quickly, though? Call it twenty thousand years. That's not time enough for such a pronounced evolution, is it?'
'I can't explain it,' Ali said. 'But don't forget, evolution is an answer to environment, and look at the environment. Radioactive rock. Chemical gases. Electromagnetic surges. Gravitational anomalies. Who knows? Simple inbreeding may be to blame.'
Ike was just ahead with Ruiz and Pia, examining three figures waving swords of fire, looking them in the face as if checking his own identity. 'Is something wrong?' Ali asked.
'They're not like this anymore,' Ike said. 'They're similar, but they've changed.' Ali and Troy looked at each other.
'How do you mean?' Ali thought he would speak to some of the physical differences she and Troy had noticed.
Ike raised his hands to the entire tableaux. 'Look at this. This is – this was – greatness. Magnificence. In all my time among them, there was never any hint of that. Magnificence? Never.'
They spent the rest of the first day and the next exploring. Flowstone oozed from doorways, collapsing sections. Deeper in, they found a wealth of relics, most of them human. There were ancient coins from Stygia and Crete mixed with American buffalo
nickels and Spanish doubloons minted in Mexico City. They found Coke bottles, Japanese baseball cards, and a flintlock. There were books written in dead languages, a set of samurai armor, an Incan mirror, and, beneath that, figurines and clay tablets and bone carvings from civilizations long forgotten. One of their strangest discoveries was an armillary, a Renaissance-era teaching device with metal spheres inside one another to depict planetary revolutions. 'What in God's name is a hadal doing with something like this?' Ruiz wanted to know.
What kept drawing them back was the circular platform with its army surrounding the stone spire. However priceless the human artifacts were, scattered through the fortress, they were mundane compared with the tower display. On the second morning, Ike found a series of hidden nubbins on the tower itself. Using these, he made a daring, unprotected ascent to the top of the column.
They watched him balance atop the spire. For the longest time he just stood there. Then he called down for them to turn off their lights. They sat in the darkness for half an hour, bathed by the faintly incandescent floor.
When he roped down again, Ike looked shaken.
'We're standing on their world,' he said. 'This whole platform is a giant map. The spire was built as a viewing station.'
They glanced around at their feet, and all they saw were wiggling cutmarks on a flat, unpainted surface. But through the afternoon, Ike led them one at a time up the ropes and they saw with their own eyes. By the time he took Ali up for her view, Ike had made the trip six times and was becoming familiar with parts of the map. Ali found the top flat and small, just three feet square. Apparently no one but Ike had felt comfortable standing on top, so he had rigged a pair of loops for people to sit in while hanging alongside. Ali hung beside Ike, sixty feet up, while her night vision adapted.
'It's like a giant sand mandala, but without the sand,' Ike said. 'It's weird how I keep running across pieces of mandalas down here. I'm talking about places like sub-Iran or under Gibraltar. I thought Haddie must have kidnapped a bunch of monks and put them to work decorating. But now I see.'
And so did she. In a giant circle all around her, the platform beneath them began to radiate ghostly colors.
'It's some kind of pigment worked into the stone,' said Ike. 'Maybe it was visible at ground level at one time. I like the idea of an invisible map, though. Probably commoners like us would never have had access to this knowledge. Only the elite would have been permitted to come up here and get the whole picture.'
The longer she waited, the more her vision adjusted. Details clarified. The incisions flowing with mercury became tiny rivers veining across the surface. Lines of turquoise and red and green intertwined and branched in wild patterns: tunnels.
'I think that big stain mark is our sea,' said Ike.
The black shape lay quite close to the tower base. Paths threaded in from far-flung regions. If this was reality, then there were whole worlds down here. Whether they had once been known as provinces
