for Beethoven and Pink Floyd and James Joyce, anything of magnum-opus length.
Ike tried to instill in them new awareness. The shapes of rocks, the taste of minerals, the holes of silence in a cavern: memorize it all, he said. They humored him. He knew his stuff, which took the burden off them. It was his job, not theirs. He went on trying. Someday you won't have your instruments and maps, he said. Or me. You'll
need to know where you are with your fingertips, by an echo receding. Some tried to emulate his quiet manner, others his unspoken authority with things violent. They liked how he spooked Walker's solemn gunmen.
That he had been a mountaineer was obvious in his economy and care. From his big stone walls in Yosemite and his Himalayan mountains, Ike had learned to take the journey one inch at a time. Long before the underworld ever came into his life, Ali realized, it was the climbing that had shaped Ike's tactile perceptions. It came naturally to him to read the world through his fingertips, and Ali liked to think it had given him an edge even on his first accidental descent from Tibet. The irony was that his talent for ascent had become his vehicle for the abyss.
Often, before the others woke each morning, Ali would see him flickering off upon the black water, not a riffle in his wake. At such times she wishfully imagined this was the real man within him. The sight of him slipping monk-like into the wilderness made her think of the simple force of prayer.
He quit using paint and simply blazed the wall with a pair of chemical candles and went on. They would float past his cold blue crosses glowing above the waters like a neon JESUS SAVES . They followed him through the apertures and rock meatus. He would be waiting on a scarp of olivine or reefs of iron, or sitting in his night-colored kayak, holding on to an outcrop. Ali liked him at peace.
One day they drifted around a bend and heard an unearthly sound, part whistle, part wind. Ike had found a primitive musical instrument left by some hadal. Made of animal bone, it had three holes on top and one on the bottom. They beached, and some of the flute players took turns trying to make it work for them. One got a trickle of Bach out, another a bit of Jethro Tull.
Then they gave it back to Ike, and he played what the flute was meant for. It was a hadal song, with clots of melody and measured rhythm. The alien sound spellbound them, even the soldiers. This was what moved the hadals? The syncopation, the cheeps and trills and sudden grunts, and finally a muffled shout: it was an earth song, complete with animal and water sounds and the rumble of quakes.
Ali was mesmerized, but appalled, too. More than the tattoos and scars, the bone flute declared Ike's captivity. It was not just his proficiency and memory of the song, but also his obvious love for it. This alien music spoke to the heart of him.
When Ike was done, they clapped uncertainly.
Ike looked at the bone flute as if he'd never seen such a thing, then tossed it into the river. When the others had left, Ali fished along the bottom and retrieved the instrument.
They made a sport of sighting hadal footpaths. Where the caverns narrowed and the shore vanished, they spied foot- and handholds traversing above the waterline, linking the riverside beaches. They found strands of crude chains fixed to the walls, rusting away. One night, failing to find a shore to camp upon, they tied to the chains and slept on the rafts. Perhaps hadal boatmen had used the lengths of chain to haul upriver, or hadals had clambered barefoot across the links. One way or another, the ancient thoroughfare had clearly been connected.
Where the river widened, sometimes sprawling hundreds of meters across, the water seemed to stop and they sat nearly becalmed. At other times the river coursed powerfully. You could not call rapids what they occasionally ran. The water had a density to it, and the cascades poured with Amazon-like torpor. Portaging was seldom necessary.
At the end of each 'day,' the explorers relaxed by small 'campfires' consisting of a single chemical candle laid on the ground. Five or six people would gather around to share its colored light. They would sit on rocks and tell stories or mull over their own thoughts.
The past became more explicit. They dreamed more vividly. Their storytelling grew
richer. One evening, Ali was consumed by a memory. She saw three ripe lemons on the wooden cutting board in her mother's kitchen, right down to the sunlight spangling off their pores. She heard her mother singing while they rolled pie dough in a storm of flour. Such images occurred to her more frequently, more vividly. Quigley, the team's psychiatrist, thought the distracting intensity of their memories might be a form of dementia or mild psychotic episode.
The tunnels and caves were very quiet. You could hear the hungry flipping of pages as people read the paperback novels circulating among them like rumors. The tap-tap of laptop keyboards went on for hours as they recorded data or wrote letters for transmission at the next cache. Gradually the candles would dim and the camp would sleep.
Ali's map grew more dreamlike. In lieu of a definite east-west orientation, she resorted to what artists call a vanishing point. That way, all the features on her chart had the same reference point, even if it was arbitrary. Not that they were lost, in general. In very broad terms, they knew exactly where they were, a mile beneath the ocean floor, moving west by southwest between the Clipperton and Galapagos fracture zones. On maps showing seafloor topography, the region above was a blank plain.
On foot they had averaged less than ten miles a day. In their first two weeks on the river, they floated ten times that, almost 1,300 miles. At this rate, if the river continued, they would reach the underbelly of Asia within three months.
The dark water was not quite dark; it had a faint pastel phosphorescence. If they kept their lights off, the river would surface from the blackness as a phantom serpent, vaguely emerald. One of the geochemists opened his pants and demonstrated how, in drinking the water, they now pissed streams of faint light.
Aided by the river's subtle luminescence, the patient ones like Ali were able to see perfectly well in the surface equivalent of near-night. Light that had once seemed necessary now hurt her eyes. Even so, Walker insisted on strong lights for guarding their flanks, which tended to disrupt the scientists' experiments and observations.
The scientists took to floating their rafts as far as possible from the soldiers' spotlights. No one thought twice about their growing segregation from the mercenaries until the evening of their camp of the mandalas.
It had been a short day, eighteen easy hours with few features to remark on. The small armada of rafts rounded a bend, and a spotlight picked out a pale, lone figure on a beach in the distance. It could only be Ike at a campsite he had found for them, and yet he didn't answer their calls. As they drew closer, they saw he was sitting facing the rock wall in a classic lotus position. He was on a shelf above the obvious camp.
'What's this crap?' groused Shoat. 'Hey, Buddha. Permission to land.'
They came on shore like an invasion party, swarming from their rafts onto dry land, securing their hold. Ike was forgotten as people ran about claiming flat spots for their sleeping places, or helped unload the rafts. Only after the initial flurry did they return their attention to him.
Ali joined the growing crowd of onlookers. Ike's back was to them. He was naked. He hadn't moved.
'Ike?' Ali said. 'Are you okay?'
His rib cage rose and fell so faintly, Ali could barely detect the movement. The fingers of one hand touched the floor. He was much thinner than Ali had imagined. He had the collarbones of a mendicant, not a warrior, but his nakedness was not the source of their awe.
He had once been tormented: whipped, carved, even shot. Long, thin lines of surgical scar tissue bracketed his upper spine where doctors had removed his famous vertebral ring. This whole canvas of pain had been decorated – vandalized – with ink.
In their waving lights, the geometric patterns and animal images and glyphs and text were animated on his flesh.
'For pity's sake.' A woman grimaced.
His wickerwork of ribs and embellished skin and scars looked like history itself, terrible events laid one over another. Ali could not get the thought out of her head: devils had handled him.
'How long's he been sitting like this?' someone asked. 'What's he doing?'
