quickly became expedition property, a reference point for them all.
From her work on digs near Haifa and in Iceland, Ali came armed with the trappings of the trade. She had schooled herself in grids and contours and scale, and went nowhere without her leather tube for rolls of paper. She could wield a protractor with command, cobble together a legend from scratch. They were less maps than a timetable with places, a chronography. Down here, far beneath the reach of the GPS satellite, longitude and latitude and direction were impossible to determine. Their compasses were rendered useless by electromagnetic corruption. And so she made the days of the month her true north. They were entering territory without human names, encountering locations that no one knew existed. As they advanced, she began to describe the indescribable and to name the unnamed.
By day she kept notes. In the evening, while the camp settled, Ali would open her leather tube of paper and lay out her pens and watercolors. She made two types of maps, one an overview, or blueprint, of hell, which corresponded to the Helios computer projection of their route. It had dates with the corresponding altitudes and approximate locations beneath various features on the surface or the ocean floor.
But it was her day maps, the second type, that were her pride. These were charts of each day's particular progress. The expedition's photographs would be developed on the surface someday, but for now her small watercolors and line drawings and written marginalia were their memory. She drew and painted things that attracted her eye, like the cave art, or the green calcite lily pads veined with cherry-red minerals that floated in pools of still water, or the cave pearls rolled together like nests of hummingbird eggs. She tried to convey how it was like traveling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.
Even the mercenaries and porters liked to look at her maps. People enjoyed watching their voyage come alive beneath her pen and brush. Her maps comforted them. They saw themselves in the minutiae. Looking at her work, they felt a sense of control over this unexplored world.
On June 22, her day map included a major piece of excitement. '0955, 4,506
fathoms,' it read. 'Radio signals.'
They had not yet broken camp that morning when Walker's communications specialist picked up the signals. The entire expedition had waited while more sensors were laid out and the long-wave transmission was patiently harvested. It took four hours to capture a message that was a mere forty-five seconds long when played at normal speed. Everyone listened. To their disappointment, it was not for them. Luckily, one woman was fluent in Mandarin. It was a distress signal sent from a People's Republic of China submarine. 'Get this,' she told them. 'The message was sent nine years ago.'
It got stranger.
'June 25,' Ali recorded, '1840, 4,618 fathoms: More radio signals.'
This time, after waiting for the long waves to pulse in through the basalt and mineral zones, what they received was a transmission from themselves. It was encrypted in their unique expedition code. Once they finished translating it, the message spoke of desperate starvation. 'Mayday... is Wayne Gitner... dead... am alone... assist...' The eerie part was that the dispatch was digitally dated five months in the future.
Gitner stepped forward and identified the voice on the tape as his own. He was a no-nonsense fellow, and indignantly demanded an explanation. One sci-fi buff suggested that a time warp might have been caused by the shifting geomagnetics, and suggested the message was a prophecy of sorts. Gitner said bullshit. 'Even if it was a time distortion, time only travels in one direction.'
'Yeah,' said the buff, 'but which direction? And what if time's circular?' However it had been done, people agreed it made for a good ghost story. Ali's map legend for that day included a tiny Casper ghost with the description 'Phantom Voice.'
Her maps noted their first genuine, live hadal life-form. Two planetologists spied it in a crevice and came racing to camp with their capture. It was a bacterial fuzz barely half an inch in diameter, a subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem, or SLIME in the parlance. A rock-eater.
'So?' said Shoat.
The discovery of a bacterium that ate basalt impeached the need for sunlight. It meant the abyss was self-sustaining. Hell was perfectly capable of feeding on itself.
On June 29 they reached a fossilized warrior. He was human and probably dated to the sixteenth century. His flesh had turned to limestone. His armor was intact. They guessed he had come here from Peru, a Cortes or Don Quixote who had penetrated this eternal darkness for Church, glory, or gold. Those with camcorders and still cameras documented the lost knight. One of the geologists tried to sample the sheath of rock encrusting the body, only to chip an entire leg off.
The geologist's accidental vandalism was soon exceeded by the group's very presence. In the space of three hours, the biochemicals of their combined respiration spontaneously generated a grape- green moss. It was like watching fire. The vegetation, spawned by the air from inside their bodies, rapidly colonized the walls and coated the conquistador. Even as they stood there, the hall was consumed with it. They fled as if fleeing themselves.
Ali wondered if, in passing this lost knight, Ike had seen himself.
INCIDENT IN GUANGDONG PROVINCE
People's Republic of China
It was getting dark, and this so-called 'miracle' city didn't exist on any maps.
Holly Ann wished Mr Li would drive a little faster. The adoption agency's guide wasn't much of a driver, or, for that matter, much of a guide. Eight cities, fifteen orphanages, twenty-two thousand dollars, and still no baby.
Her husband, Wade, rode with his nose plastered to the opposite window. Over the past ten days they'd crisscrossed the southern provinces, enduring floods, disease, pestilence, and the edges of a famine. His patience was in rags.
It was odd, everywhere the same. Wherever they visited, the orphanages had all been empty of children. Here and there they'd found wizened little deformities – hydrocephalic, mongoloid, or genetically doomed – a few breaths short of dying. Otherwise, China suddenly, inexplicably, had no orphans.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The adoption agency had advertised that China was jammed with foundlings. Female foundlings, hundreds of thousands of them, tiny girls exiled from one-child families that wanted a son. Holly Ann had read that female orphans were still sold as servants or as tongyangxi, child brides. If it was a baby girl you wanted, no one went home empty. Until us, thought Holly Ann. It was as if the Pied Piper had come through and cleaned the place out. And more than just orphans were missing. Children altogether. You saw evidence of them – toys, kites, streetside
chalkboards. But the streets were barren of children under the age of ten.
'Where could they have gone?' Holly Ann asked each night.
Wade had come up with a theory. 'They think we've come to steal their kids. They must be hiding them.'
Out of that observation had grown today's guerrilla raid. Surprisingly, Mr Li had agreed to it. They would drop in on an orphanage that was out of the way, and with no prior warning of their visit.
As night descended, Mr Li drove deeper through the alleyways. Holly Ann hadn't come exactly expecting pandas in rain forests and kung fu temples beneath the Great Wall, but this was like a madman's blueprint, with detours and dead ends all held together by electric wires and rusty rebar and bamboo scaffolding. South China had to be the ugliest place on earth. Mountains were being leveled to fill in the paddies and lakes. Rivers were being dammed. Strangely, even as these people leveled the earth, they were crowding the sky. It was like robbing the sun to feed the night.
Acid rain started hitting the windshield in sloppy kisses, yellowish and festering like spit. Deep coal
