He held up a white pill. 'And this little angel's just to let me sleep.' He swallowed it. That sadness washed over her again, and suddenly she remembered. The sun! She had forgotten to get a final look at the sun. Too late now.
Ali felt a nudge at her right. 'Here, this is for you,' a slight man offered. He was holding out an orange. Ali accepted the gift with hesitant thanks.
'Thank that guy.' He pointed down the row to the stranger with tattoos. She leaned forward to get his attention, but the man didn't look at her.
Ali frowned at the orange. Was it a peace offering? A come-on? Did he mean for her to peel and eat it, or save it for later? Ali had the orphan's habit of attaching great meaning to gifts, especially simple gifts. But the more she contemplated it, the less this orange made sense to her.
'Well, I don't know what to do with this,' she complained quietly to her neighbor, the messenger. He looked up from a thick manual of computer codes, took a moment to recollect. 'It's an orange,' he said.
Far more than seemed right, it irritated her, the messenger's indifference, the idea of a gift, the fruit itself. Ali was keyed up, and knew it. She was frightened. For weeks her dreams had been filled with awful images of hell. She dreaded her own superstitions. With each step of the journey, she was certain her fears would ease. If only it weren't too late to change her mind! The temptation to retreat – to allow herself to be weak – was terrible. And prayer was not the crutch it had once been for her. That was concerning.
She was not the only anxious one. The chamber took on a moment-to-moment tension. Eyes met, then darted away. Men licked their lips, rubbed their whiskers, took bites at the air. She collected the tiny gestures into her own anxiety.
Ali wanted to put the orange down, but it would have rolled on the tray. The floor was too dirty. The orange had become a responsibility. She laid it in her lap, and its weight seemed too intimate. Following the instructions on the LCD, she buckled into the seat rig, and her fingers were trembling. She picked up the orange again and cupped her fingers around it and the trembling eased.
The wall display ticked down to three minutes.
As if signaled, the passengers began their final rites. A number of men tied rubber tubing around their biceps and gently slid needles into their veins. Those taking pills looked like birds swallowing worms. Ali heard a hissing sound, men sucking hard at aerosol dispensers. Others drank from small bottles. Each had his own compression ritual. All she had was this orange.
Its skin glistened in the darkness in her cupped hands. Light bent upon its color. Her focus changed. Suddenly it became a small round center of gravity for her.
A tiny chime sounded. Ali looked up just as the time display dissolved to zero. The chamber fell silent.
Ali felt a slight motion. The chamber slid backward on a track and stopped. She heard a metallic snap underfoot. Then the chamber moved down perhaps ten feet, stopped again, and there was another snap, this time overhead. They moved down again, stopped.
She knew from a diagram in The Nazca News what was happening. The chambers were coupling like freight cars, one atop another. Joined in that fashion, the entire assembly was about to be lowered upon a cushion of air, with no cables attached. She had no idea how the pods got hoisted back to the surface again. But with discoveries of vast new petroleum reserves in the bowels of the subplanet, energy was no longer an issue.
She craned to see through the big curved window. As they lowered one pod at a time, the window slowly acquired a view. The LCD said they were twenty feet underwater. The water turned dark turquoise, illuminated by spotlights. Then Ali saw the moon. Right through the water, a full white moon. It was the most beautiful sight. They dropped another twenty feet. The moon warped. It vanished. She held the round orange in her palms.
They dropped twenty feet more. The water turned darker. Ali peered through the window. Something was out there. Mantas. Giant manta rays were circling the shaft, drafting on strange muscular wings.
Twenty feet lower, the Plexiglas was replaced by solid metal. The window went black, a curved mirror. She looked down into her hands and breathed out. And suddenly her fear was gone. The center of gravity was right there, in her grasp. Could that be his gift? She looked down the row. The stranger had laid his head back against the chair. His goggles were lifted onto his forehead. His smile was small and contented. Sensing her, he turned his head. And gave her a wink.
They dropped. Plunged.
The initial surge of gravity made Ali grab for purchase. She grasped the armrests and slugged her head against the back of the seat. The sudden lightness set off biological alarms. Her nausea was instantaneous. A headache blossomed.
According to the LCD, they didn't slow. Their speed remained a constant, uncompromising 1,850 feet per minute. But the sensation started to even out. Ali started to feel her way inside the plummet. She managed to plant her feet and relax her grip and look around. The headache eased. The nausea she could handle.
Half the chamber had dropped asleep or into drugged semiconsciousness. Men's heads lolled upon their chests. Bodies dangled loosely against seat harnesses. Most looked pale, punch-drunk, or sick. The tattooed soldier seemed to be meditating. Or praying.
She made a rough calculation in her head. This wasn't adding up. At 1,850 feet per minute and a depth of 3.4 miles, the commute should have taken no more than ten or eleven minutes. But the literature described 'touchdown' as seven hours away. Seven hours of this?
The LCD altimeter soared into the minus thousands, then decelerated. At minus
14,347 feet, they braked to a halt. Ali waited for an explanation over the intercom, but none came. She glanced around at the asylum of half-dead fellow travelers and decided that information was pretty unnecessary, so long as they got where they were going.
The window came alive again. Outside the shaft's Plexi-glas wall, powerful lights illuminated the blackness. To Ali's awe, she was looking out upon the ocean floor. It might as well have been the moon out there.
The lights cut sharply at the permanent night. No mountains here. The floor was flat, white, scribbled with long odd script, tracks left by bottom-dwellers. Ali saw a creature treading delicately above the sediment upon stiltlike legs. It left tiny dots upon the blankness.
Farther out, another set of lights came on. The plain was littered with hundreds of inert cannonballs. Manganese nodules, Ali knew from her reading. There was a fortune in manganese out there, and yet it had been bypassed for the sake of far greater fortune deeper down.
The vista was like a dream. Ali kept trying to make sense of her place in this inhuman geography. But with each further step, she belonged less and less.
A gruesome fish with fangs and a greenish light bud for bait steered past the window. Otherwise it was lonely out there. Dreamless. She held the orange.
After an hour, the pod started down again, this time slower. As it descended, the ocean floor rose to eye and ceiling level, then was gone. There was a brief lighted glimpse of cored stone through the window. Then quickly the glass fell black and she was looking at herself again.
Now it begins, thought Ali, the edge of the earth. And it was like passing inside herself.
INCIDENT AT PIEDRAS NEGRAS
Mexico
Osprey crossed the bridge like a turista, on foot, wearing a daypack. He left the sunburned GIs behind their sandbags in Texas. On the Mexico side, nothing suggested an international border, no
