penicillin during the Korean War, another in the blood and plasma industry, before going on to 'dabble' in civil rights and underwrite numerous martyrs. He was arguing with the astronaut Bud Parsifal. Ali recollected his tale: after teeing off on the moon, Parsifal had gone searching for Noah's Ark upon Mount Ararat, discovered geological evidence of the Red Sea parting, and pursued a legion of other crazy riddles. Clearly the Beowulf Circle was a crew of misfits and anarchists.
Finally they had gone full circle. It was Thomas's turn. 'I am lucky to have such friends,' he said to her. Ali was astonished. The others were listening, but his words were for her. 'Such souls. Over many years, during my travels, I've enjoyed their company. Each of them has labored to bend mankind away from its most destructive ideas. Their reward' – he wryly smiled – 'has been this calling.'
He used that word, calling. It was no coincidence. Somehow he had learned that this nun was faltering in her vows. The calling had not faded, but changed.
'We've lived long enough to recognize that evil is real, and not accidental,' Thomas went on. 'And over the years we've attempted to address it. We've done this by supporting one another, and by joining our various powers and observations. It's that simple.'
It sounded too simple. In their spare time, these old people fought evil.
'Our greatest weapon has always been scholarship,' Thomas added.
'You're an academic society, then,' Ali stated.
'Oh, more like a round table of knights,' Thomas said. There were a few smiles. 'I
wish to find Satan, you see.' His eyes met Ali's, and she saw that he was serious. They
all were.
Ali couldn't help herself. 'The Devil?' This group of Nobel laureates and scholars had made evil incarnate into a game of hide-and-seek.
'The Devil,' Mustafah, the Egyptian, wheezed. 'That old wives' tale.'
'Satan,' January corrected, for Ali's benefit.
They were all concentrating on Ali now. No one questioned her presence among them, which suggested she was already well known to them. Now Thomas's recitation of her Saudi plans and the pre- Islamic glyphs and her protolanguage quest took on force. These people had been studying her. She was getting head-hunted. What was going on here? Why had January brought her into this? 'Satan?' she said.
'Absolutely,' January affirmed. 'We're dedicated to the idea. The reality.'
'Which reality would that be?' Ali asked. 'The nightmarish demon of malnourished, sleep-deprived monks? Or the heroic rebel of Milton?'
'Hush,' said January. 'We may be old, but we're not silly. Satan is a catchall term. It gives identity to our theory of a centralized leadership. Call him what you want, a maximum leader, a caudillo. A Genghis Khan or Sitting Bull. Or a council of wise men, or warlords. The concept is sound. Logical.'
Ali retreated into silence.
'It's a word, no more, a name,' Thomas said to her. 'The term Satan signifies a historical character. A missing link between our fairy tale of hell and the geological fact of it. Think about it. If there can be a historical Christ, why not a historical Satan? Consider hell. Recent history tells us that the fairy tales had it all wrong, and yet right. The underworld is not full of dead souls and demons, yet it has human captives and an indigenous population that was – until recently – savagely defending its territory. Now, despite thousands and thousands of years of being damned and demonized in human folklore, the hadals seem very much like us. They have a written language, you know,' he said. 'At least they did, once upon a time. The ruins suggest they had a remarkable civilization. They may even have souls.'
Ali couldn't believe a priest was saying such things. Human rights were one thing; the ability to know grace was something entirely different. Even if the hadals proved to have some genetic link with humans, their capacity for souls was theologically unlikely. The Church did not acknowledge souls in animals, not even among the higher primates. Only man qualified for salvation. 'Let me understand,' she said. 'You're looking for a creature named Satan?'
No one denied it.
'But why?'
'Peace,' said Lynch. 'If he is a great leader, and if we can come to understand him, we may forge a lasting peace.'
'Knowledge,' said Rau. 'Think what he might know, where he might lead us.'
'And if he's merely the equivalent of an ancient war criminal,' said the soldier Elias,
'then we can seek justice. And punishment.'
'One way or another,' said January, 'we're striving to bring light to the darkness. Or darkness to the light.'
It sounded so naive. So youthful. So seductive and abundant with hope. Almost, thought Ali, plausible – hypothetically. And yet, a Nuremberg trial for the king of hell? Then she saddened. Of course they would be attracted to tilting at windmills. Thomas had drawn them back into the world, just as they were dying out from it.
'And how do you propose to find this creature – being, entity – whatever he is?' she asked. It was meant to be a rhetorical question. 'What chance do you have of finding an individual fugitive when the armies can't seem to find any hadals at all? I keep hearing that they may even be extinct.'
'You're skeptical,' Vera said. 'We wouldn't have it any other way. Your skepticism is crucial. You'd be useless to us without it. Believe me, we were just like you when
Thomas first presented his idea. But here we are, years later, still coming together when Thomas calls.'
Thomas spoke. 'You asked how do we hope to locate the historical Satan? Like reaching into mud, we must feel around and then pull him loose.'
'Scholarship,' said the mathematician Hoaks. 'By revisiting excavations and reexamining the evidence, we compile a more careful picture. Like a behavioral profile.'
'I call it a unified theory of Satan,' said Foley. He had a businessman's mind, given to strategy and output. 'Some of us visit libraries or archaeological sites or science centers around the world. Others conduct interviews, debrief survivors, cultivate leads. In this way we hope to outline psychological patterns and identify any weaknesses that might be useful in a summit conference. Who knows, we may even be able to construct a physical description of the creature.'
'It sounds like such... an adventure,' said Ali. She didn't want to offend anyone.
'Look at me,' Thomas said. There was a trick of light. Something. Suddenly he seemed a thousand years old. 'He's down there. Year after year, I've failed to locate him. We can no longer afford that.'
Ali wavered.
'That's the dilemma,' said de l'Orme. 'Life's too short for doubt, and yet too long for faith.'
Ali recalled his excommunication, and guessed it had been excruciating.
'Our problem is that Satan hides in plain view,' de l'Orme said. 'He always has. He hides within our reality. Even our virtual reality. The trick, we're learning, is to enter the illusion. In that way, we hope to find him out. Would you please show Mademoiselle von Schade our little photo?' he asked his assistant.
Santos spread out a long roll of glossy Kodak paper. It showed an image of an old map. Ali had to stand to see its details. Most of the group gathered around.
'The others have had the benefit of several weeks to examine this photo,' de l'Orme explained. 'It's a route map known as the Peutinger Table. Twenty-one feet long by one foot high in the original. It details a medieval network of roads seventy thousand miles long that ran from the British Isles to India. Along the road were stage stops, spas, bridges, rivers, and seas. Latitude and longitude were irrelevant. The road itself was everything.'
The archaeologist paused. 'I had asked you all to try to find anything out of the ordinary on the photo. I particularly directed your attention to the Latin phrase 'Here be dragons,' midcenter on the map. Did anyone notice anything unusual in that region?'
'It's seven-thirty in the morning,' someone said. 'Please teach us our lesson so we may eat our breakfast.'
