Lincoln brows and cheekbones and their guttural exchanges. They smelled different: a musk odor. And some of them had bone growing right through their flesh. Many had strips of burlap draped over their heads to protect them from the railyard's dim lighting. While Ali and the others climbed down from the flatcars, the yard workers cast off chains and straps and manually unloaded crates weighing hundreds of pounds. Ali was fascinated by their enormous strength and deformities. Several of the giants noticed her attention and smiled.
Ali walked along the flatcars between boxes and crates and earth-moving equipment. She joined a crowd on a flat landing dramatically perched at the rim of the great chasm. The landing was bordered with a stone rampart like those at Grand Canyon or Yosemite, but instead of viewing scopes along the wall, there were gun mounts and electric cannon. Far below, she saw the upper reaches of a path snaking back and forth along the ridge wall, sinking into pitch blackness.
Some of the locals were mingling with the expedition members. They had not washed in many months or years. The patches on their caked clothing looked more soldered on than sewn. They gaped with coal miners' eyes, brilliant white holes in their grime. Ali thought she saw mild insanity here, the sort that zoo animals fall into. The handles on their guns and machetes were shiny with use.
A famished-looking man with freshly scraped cheeks was delivering a welcome speech on behalf of the township. He was the mayor, Ali guessed. He proudly pointed out the turquoise cliffs, then launched upon a brief history of Esperanza, its first human habitation four years ago, the 'coming' of the railroad a year later, how the last attack – 'well over' two years ago – had been repulsed by local minutemen and about recent discoveries of gold, platinum, and iridium deposits. He then began a description of his town's future, the plans for cliff-front skyscrapers, a nuclear generator, round-the-clock lighting for the entire chamber, a professional security force, another tunnel for a second rail line, and one day maybe even their own elevator tube to the surface.
'Excuse me,' someone cut him off. 'We've come a long way. We're tired. Can you just tell us where the science station is?'
The mayor looked helplessly at the notes for his speech. Bits of tissue stuck to his shaving nicks. 'Science station?' he said.
'The research institute,' someone shouted.
Shoat stepped in front of the mayor. 'Go inside,' he told the scientists. 'We've arranged for hot food and clean water. In an hour, everything will be explained.'
'There is no science station,' Shoat told them. A howl went up.
Shoat waved them quiet. 'No station,' he repeated. 'No institute. No headquarters. No laboratories. Not even a base camp. It was all a fiction.'
The auditorium, deep within the bunker, exploded with curses and shouts. Though appalled by the deception, Ali had to give Shoat credit. The group's outrage verged on the homicidal, but he didn't cower.
'Just what are you doing?' a woman cried out.
'On behalf of Helios, I am protecting the greatest trade secret of all time,' Shoat responded. 'It's a matter of intellectual property. A matter of geographical possession.'
'What are you raving about?'
'Helios has spent vast sums to develop the information you're about to see. You've no idea how many other entities – corporations, foreign governments, armies – would kill for what will be revealed. This is the last great secret on earth.'
'Gibberish,' someone yelled. 'Just tell us where you're hijacking us to.'
Shoat never flinched. 'Meet the chief of Helios's cartography department,' he said, and opened a door on one wall.
The cartographer was a diminutive man with leg braces. His head was large for his body. He smiled automatically. Ali had not seen him on the train, and presumed he had arrived earlier to prepare for them. He cut the lights.
'Forget the moon,' he told them. 'Forget Mars. You're about to walk on the planet inside our planet.'
A video screen lit up. The first image was a still of a yellowed Mercator map. 'Here was the world in 1587,' he said. The cartographer's silhouette bobbed across the bottom of the large screen. 'Lacking facts, young Mercator plundered the accounts of Marco Polo, which were themselves based on plundered hearsay and folklore. Here, for instance' – he pointed at a misshapen Australia – 'was a total fabrication. A medieval hypothesis. Logic suggested that the continents in the north must be counterweighted by continents in the south, and so a mythical place called Terra Australis Incognita was invented. Mercator incorporated it on this map. And here's the marvel of it. Using this map, sailors found Australia.'
The cartographer pointed his pencil high. 'Up there is another landmark invented out of Mercator's imagination. They named it Polus Arcticus. Again, explorers discovered the Arctic by relying on the fiction of it. A hundred and fifty years later, the French cartographer Philippe Buache drew a gigantic – and equally imaginary – Antarctic Pole to counterweight Mercator's imaginary Arctic. And once again, explorers discovered it by using a map made of myth. So it is with hell and what you are about to see. You might say my mapping department has invented a reality for you to explore.'
Ali looked around. The one figure in the audience that struck her was Ike. Her fascination with him was becoming something of an enigma. At the moment he looked singularly odd, wearing sunglasses in a darkened room.
The old map became a large globe slowly revolving behind the cartographer. It was a satellite view, real-time. Clouds flocked against mountain ranges or moved across the blue oceans. On the night side, city lights flared like forest fires.
'We call this Level 1,' said the cartographer. The globe froze still with the vast Pacific facing them. 'Until World War II, we were sure the ocean floor was a huge flat surface, covered with a uniform thickness of sea mud. Then radar was invented, and there was quite a shock in store.'
The video image flickered.
'Lo and behold, it wasn't smooth.'
A trillion gallons of water vanished in an instant. They were left staring at the seafloor, drained of all water, its trenches and faults and seamounts like so many wrinkles and warts.
'At great cost, Helios has peeled the onion even deeper. We've consolidated an aerial-seismic mosaic of overlapping earth images. We took every piece of information from earthquake stations and sonic sleds towed behind ships and from oil drillers' seismographs and from earth tomographies collected over a ninety-five-year period. Then we combined it with satellite data measuring the heights of the ocean surface, reverse-albedo, gravity fields, geo-magnetics, and atmospheric gases. The methods have all been used before, but never all in combination. Here's the result, a series of delaminated views of the Pacific region, layer by layer.'
'Now we're getting somewhere,' one of the scientists grunted. Ali felt it herself. This was big.
'You've seen seafloor topographies before,' the cartographer said. 'But the scale was, at best, one to twenty-nine million. What our department has produced for Level 2 is almost equivalent to walking on the ocean bottom. One to sixteen.'
He tapped a button on his palm mouse, and the image magnified. Ali felt herself shrinking like Alice in Wonderland. A colored dot in the mid-Pacific soared and became a towering volcano.
'This is the Isakov Seamount, east of Japan. Depth 1,698 fathoms. A fathom, as you know, equals six feet. We use fathoms for depth readings, feet for elevations. You'll be using both. Fathoms for your position relative to sea level, and feet to measure the heights of cave ceilings and other subterranean features. Just remember to convert to fathoms when you're down there.'
Down there? thought Ali. Aren't we already?
The cartographer moved his mouse. Ali felt flung between canyon walls. Then the image threw them onto a plain of flattened sediment. They sped across it. 'Ahead lies the Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench.'
Suddenly they were plunging off the plain into a vertical chasm. They fell. 'Five thousand nine hundred seventy-one fathoms,' he said. 'That's 35,827 feet. Six-point-eight miles deep. The
