'If you please,' de l'Orme said to his aide.
Santos lifted a wooden box onto the table, brought out from it a thick scroll, and began to unroll it delicately. 'Here is the original table,' said de l'Orme. 'It is housed here in the museum.'
'This is why we were brought to New York?' complained Parsifal.
'Please, compare for yourselves,' said de l'Orme. 'As you can see, the photo duplicates the original at a scale of one-to-one. What I wish to demonstrate is that seeing is not believing. Santos?'
The young man drew on a pair of latex gloves, produced a surgical scalpel, and bent over the original.
'What are you doing?' an emaciated man squeaked in alarm. His name was Gault, and Ali would later learn that he was an encyclopedist of the old Diderot school, which believed that all things could be known and arranged alphabetically. 'That map is irreplaceable,' he protested.
'It's all right,' de l'Orme said. 'He's simply exposing an incision we've already made.' The excitement of an act of vandalism in front of their eyes woke them up. Everyone came close to the table. 'It is a secret the cartographer built into his map,' de l'Orme said. 'A well-kept secret. If not for a blind man's bare fingertips, it might never have been discovered. There is something quite wicked about our reverence for antiquity. We've come to treat the thing itself with such care that it has lost its original truth.'
'But what's this?' someone gasped.
Santos was inserting his scalpel into the parchment where the cartographer had painted a small forested mountain with a river issuing from its base.
'Because of my blindness, I'm allowed certain dispensations,' de l'Orme said. 'I touch things most other people may not. Several months ago, I felt a slight bump at this place on the map. We had the parchment X-rayed, and there seemed to be a ghost image underneath the pigment. At that point we performed surgery.'
Santos opened a tiny hidden door. The mountain lifted upon hinges made of thread. Underneath lay a crude but coherent dragon. Its claws embraced the letter B.
'The B stands for Beliar,' said de l'Orme. 'Latin for 'Worthless.' Another name for Satan. This was the manifestation of Satan concurrent with the making of the Peutinger Table. In the Gospel of Bartholomew, a third-century tract, Beliar is dragged up from the depths and interrogated. He gives an autobiography of the fallen angel.'
The scholars marveled at the mapmaker's ingenuity and craft. They congratulated de l'Orme on his detective work.
'This is insignificant. Trivial. The mountain on this doorway lies in the karst country of the former Yugoslavia. The river coming from its base is probably the Pivka, which emerges from a Slovenian cave known today as Postojna Jama.'
'The Postojna Jama?' Gault barked in recognition. 'But that was Dante's cave.'
'Yes,' said de l'Orme, and let Gault tell them himself.
'It's a large cave,' Gault explained. 'It became a famous tourist attraction in the thirteenth century. Nobles and landowners would tour with local guides. Dante visited while researching –'
'My God,' said Mustafah. 'For a thousand years the legend of Satan was located right here. But how can you call this trivial?'
'Because it leads us nowhere we've not already been,' said de l'Orme. 'The Postojna Jama is now a major portal for traffic going in and out of the abyss. The river has been dynamited. An asphalt road leads into the mouth. And the dragon has fled. For a thousand years this map told us where he once resided, or possibly where one of his doorways into the subplanet lay. But now Satan has gone elsewhere.'
Thomas took over again.
'Here before us is another example of why we can't stay in our homes, believing we know the truth. We must unlearn our instincts, even as we depend on them. We must put our hands on what is untouchable. Listen for his motion. He's out there, in old books and ruins and artifacts. Inside our language and dreams. And now, you see, the evidence will not come to us. We must go to it, wherever it is. Otherwise we're merely looking into mirrors of our own invention. Do you understand? We must learn his language. We must learn his dreams. And perhaps bring him into the family of man.' Thomas leaned on the table. It gave a slight groan beneath his weight. He looked at Ali. 'The truth is, we must go out into the world. We must risk everything. And we must not return without the prize.'
'Even if I believed in your historical Satan,' Ali said, 'it's not my fight.'
The meeting had adjourned. Hours had passed. The Beowulf scholars had gone off, leaving her alone with January and Thomas. She felt weary and electrified at the
same time, but tried to show only a smooth face. Thomas was a cipher to her. He was making her a cipher to herself.
'I agree,' Thomas replied. 'But your passion for the mother tongue helps us in our fight, you see. And so our interests marry.'
She glanced at January. Something was different in her eyes. Ali wanted an ally, but what she saw was obligation and urgency. 'What is it you want from me?'
What Thomas next told her went beyond daring. He was toying with a yellowed globe, and now let it spin to a halt. He pointed at the Galapagos Islands. 'Seven weeks from now, a science expedition is to be inserted through the Pacific floor into the Nazca Plate tunnel system. It will consist of roughly fifty scientists and researchers who have been recruited mostly from American universities and laboratories. For the next year, they'll be operating out of a state-of-the-art research institute based on the Woods Hole model. It's said to be located at a remote mining town. We're still working to learn which mining town, and if the science station even exists. Major Branch has been helpful, but even military intelligence can't make heads or tails out of why Helios is underwriting the project and what they're really up to.'
'Helios?' Ali said. 'The corporation?'
'It's actually a multinational cartel comprising dozens of major businesses, totally diversified,' January said. 'Arms manufacture to tampons to computers. Baby formula, real estate, car assembly plants, recycled plastics, publishing, plus television and film production, and an airline. They're untouchable. Now, thanks to their founder, C.C. Cooper, their agenda has taken a sharp turn. Downward into the subplanet.'
'The presidential candidate,' Ali said. 'You served in the Senate with him.'
'Mostly against him,' January said. 'He is a brilliant man. A true visionary. A closet fascist. And now a bitter and paranoid loser. His own party still blames him for the humiliation of that election. The Supreme Court eventually tossed out his charges of election fraud. As a result, he sincerely believes the world's out to get him.'
'I haven't heard a thing about him since his defeat,' said Ali.
'He quit the Senate and returned to Helios,' January said. 'We were sure that was the end of him, that Cooper would quietly go back to making money. Even the people who watch such things didn't notice for a while. C.C. was using shells and proxies and dummy corporations to snap up access rights and tunneling equipment and subsurface technology. He was cutting deals with governments of nine different Pacific Rim nations to joint-venture the drilling operations and provide labor, again hidden behind numerous layers. The result is that while we've been pacifying the regions underneath our cities and continents, Helios has gotten the jump on everyone else in suboceanic exploration and development.'
'I thought the colonization was under international auspices,' said Ali.
'It is,' said January, 'within the boundaries of international law. But international law hasn't caught up with nonsovereign territories. Offshore, the law is still catching up with subterranean discoveries.'
'I didn't understand this either,' said Thomas. 'It turns out that subterranean territory beneath the oceans is still like the Wild West, subject to the whims of whoever occupies it. Recall the British tea company in India. The fur companies in North America. The American land companies in Texas. In the case of the Pacific Ocean, that means a huge expanse of country beyond international reach.'
'Which translates as opportunity for a man like C.C. Cooper,' said January. 'Today Helios owns more seafloor drill holes than any other entity, governmental or otherwise. They lead in hydroponic agricultural methods. They own the latest technology for enhanced communications through
