chosen his path a long time ago. After many hours the ascetic tired. It became time to rest.
He left the trail racing. One hand touched the rock wall. With an intelligence all their own, his fingertips found random purchase. Part of his brain changed direction and told the hand to pull, and his feet went with him. He could have been running still, but suddenly he was climbing at a gallop. He scuttled diagonally up the arched sides to a cavity near mid-ceiling, alongside the river.
He smelled the cavity to know what else had burrowed here, and when. Satisfied, he drew himself into the stone bubble. He wedged his limbs tight, socketed his spine just so, and said in full his night prayer, part supplication, part superstition. Some of the words were in a language that parents and their parents and their parents had spoken. Words that Kora had taught their daughter. Hallowed be Thy name, he thought.
The paladin did not close his eyes. But all the while his heart was slowing. His breathing almost stopped. He grew still. My soul to keep . The river flowed beneath him. He went to sleep.
Voices woke him, ricocheting off the river's skin. Human.
The recognition came slowly. In recent years he had purposely tried to forget this sound. Even in the mouths of quiet ones, it had a jarring discord. Bone-breaking in its aggression. Barging everywhere, like sunlight itself. It was no wonder that more powerful animals ran from them. It shamed him that he had once been part of their race, even if it had been over a half-century ago.
Here, speech was different. To articulate was just that, to join things together. Every precious space – every tube, every burrow, every gap and hollow – relied on its connection to another space. Life in a maze depended upon linkage.
Listen to humans, and their very speech denied the construct. Space addled them. With nothing above their heads, no stone to cap the world, their thoughts went flying off into a void more terrible than any chasm. No wonder they were invading willy-nilly. Man had lost his mind to heaven.
Gradually he filled his lungs, but the water smell was too powerful. No chance of scent. That left him echoes to reckon with. He could have left long before they arrived. He waited.
They arrived in boats. No point guards, no discipline, no caution, no protection for their women. Their lights were a river where a trickle would have sufficed. He squinted through a tiny hole between his fingers, insulted by their extravagance.
They poured beneath his cavity without a single glance up. Not one of them! They were so sure of themselves. He lay still in the ceiling in plain view, a coil of limbs, contemptuous of their self- assurance.
Their rafts strung through the tunnel in a long, random mass. He quit counting heads to focus instead on their weak and strays.
There was little to recommend them. They were slow, with dulled senses, and out of synch. Each conducted himself with little reference to the group. Over the next hour he watched different individuals imperil the group's safety by brushing the walls or casting aside bits of uneaten food. It was more than sign they were leaving to predators. They were leaving the taste of themselves. Every time one rambled his hand along the rock, he painted human grease on the wall. Their piss gave off a pungent signature. Short of opening their veins and lying down, they could have done nothing more to invite their own slaughter.
The ones with tiny hurts did nothing to disguise their pain. They advertised their vulnerabilities, offered themselves as the easiest quarry. Their heads were too big, and their joints were askew at the hips and knees. He couldn't believe that he had been born like them. One changed little bandages on her feet and threw the old bandages into the water, where they washed to shore. He could smell her details from up here.
There were many women among them. That was the unbelievable part. Chattering and oblivious. Unguarded. Ripe women. In such a fashion, Kora had come to him in the darkness, long ago.
After they had passed deeper with the river's current, he waited an hour for his eyes to recover from their lights. Muscle by muscle, he released himself from the cavity. He hung by one arm from its slight lip, listening not so much for stragglers as for other predators, for there would surely be those. Content, he let go and landed on the trail.
In darkness he moved among their refuse, sampling it. He licked the foil of a candy wrapper, sniffed the rock where they had rubbed against it. He nosed at the female's bandages, then took them into his mouth. This was the taste of humans. He chewed. He trailed them again, running along old paths worn into the shore stone, reaching them as they camped. He watched.
Many of them talked or sang to themselves, and it was like hearing the inside of their minds. Sometimes his Kora had sung like that, especially to their daughter. Repeatedly, individuals would wander from camp and place themselves within his reach. He sometimes wondered if they had sensed his presence and were attempting to sacrifice themselves to him. One night he stole through their camp while they slept. Their bodies glowed in the darkness. A lone female started as he slid past, and stared directly at him. His visage seemed horrifying to her. He backed away and she lost his image and sank back into sleep. He was nothing more than a fleeting nightmare.
It was difficult to keep from harvesting one. But the time wasn't right, and there was no sense in frightening them at this early stage. They were heading deeper into the sanctuary all on their own, and he didn't know their rationale for coming here yet.
And so he ate beetles, careful to mash them with his tongue lest they crunch.
Day by day, the river became their fever.
They made a flotilla of twenty-two rafts roped together, some lashed side by side, others trailing singly far behind, for the sake of solitude or mental health or science experiments or clandestine lovemaking. The large pontoon boats had a ten-man capacity, including 1,500 pounds of cargo. The smaller boats they used as dinghies to transport passengers from one polyurethane island to another during the day, or for floating hospital beds when people got sick, or for ranger duty, rigged with a machine gun and one of the battery-powered motors. Ike was given the only sea kayak.
There was not supposed to be weather down here. There could be no wind, no rain, no seasons: scientifically unfeasible. The subplanet was hermetically sealed, a near vacuum, they'd been told, its thermostat locked at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, its atmosphere motionless.
No thousand-foot waterfalls. No dinosaurs, for Christ-sake. Most of all, there was not supposed to be light.
But there was all of that. They passed a glacier calving small blue icebergs into the river. The ceilings sometimes rained with monsoon weight. One of the mercenaries was bitten by a plate-armored fish unchanged since the age of trilobites.
With increasing frequency, they entered caverns illuminated by a type of lichen that ate rock. In its reproductive stage, apparently, the lichen extended a fleshy stalk, or ascocarp, with a positive and negative electrical charge. The result was light, which attracted flatworms by the millions. These were eaten, in turn, by mollusks that traveled on to new, unlit regions. The mollusks excreted lichen spores from their guts. The spores matured to eat the new rock. Light spread by inches through the darkness.
Ali loved it. What excited the botanists was not just the production of light energy, but the decomposition of rock, a lichen by-product. Decomposed rock was soil, which meant vegetation, and animals. The land of the dead was very much alive.
The geologists were elated. The expedition was about to leave the Nazca Plate and traverse beneath the East Pacific Rise. Here the Pacific Plate was just being born as freshly extruded rock, which steadily migrated west with a conveyor-belt motion. It would take 180 million years for the rock to reach the Asian margin, there to be devoured – subducted – back into the earth's mantle. They were going to see the entire Pacific plate geology, from birth to death.
In the third week of August, they passed through the rise between the roots of a nameless seamount, an ocean-floor volcano. The seamount itself sat a mile overhead, serviced by these ganglia reaching deep into the mantle for supplies of live magma. The riverine walls became hot.
Faces flushed. Lips cracked. Those still carrying Chap-stick even used it on their splitting cuticles. By
