the Clipperton Fracture Zone
Following Molly's death, they cast lower on the river, anxious to resume their sense of scientific control. The banks narrowed, the water quickened. Because they moved faster, they had more time to reach their destination, which was the next cache in early September. They began to explore the littoral regions bordering the river, sometimes staying in one place for two or three days.
The region had once abounded with life. In a single day they discovered thirty new plants, including a type of grass that grew from quartz and a tree that looked like something out of Dr. Seuss, with a stem that drew gases from the ground and synthesized them into metallic cellulose. A new cave orchid was named for Molly. They found crystallized animal remains. The entomologists caught a monstrous cricket, twenty-seven inches long. The geologists located a vein of gold as thick as a finger.
In the name of Helios, who held the patent rights on all such discoveries, Shoat collected their reports on disc each evening. If the discovery had special value, like the gold, he would issue a chit for a bonus payment. The geologists got so many they started using them like currency among the others, buying pieces of clothing, food, or extra batteries from those who had extras.
For Ali, the most rewarding thing was further evidence of hadal civilization. They found an intricate system of acequias carved into the rock to transport water from miles upriver into the hanging valley. In an overhang partway up a cliff lay a drinking cup made from a Neanderthal cranium. Elsewhere, a giant skeleton – possibly a human freak – lay in shackles solid with rust. Ethan Troy, the forensic anthropologist, thought the deeply incised geometric patterns on the giant's skull had been made at least a year before the prisoner's death. Judging by the cut marks around the entire skull, it seemed the giant had been scalped and kept alive as a showcase for their artwork.
They collected around a central panel emblazoned with ochre and handprints. In the center was a representation of the sun and moon. The scientists were astonished. 'You mean to say they worshiped the sun and moon? At fifty-six hundred fathoms!'
'We need to be cautious,' Ali said. But what else could this mean? What glorious heresy, the children of darkness worshiping light.
Ali got one photo of the sun and moon iconography, no more. When her flash billowed, the entire wall of pictographs – its pigments and record – lost color, turned pale, then vanished. Ten thousand years of artwork turned to blank stone.
Yet with the animals and handprints and sun and moon images burned away, they discovered a deeper set of engraved script.
A two-foot-long patch of letters had been cut into the basalt. In the abyssal shadows, the incisions were dark lines upon dark stone. They approached the wall tentatively, as if this too might disappear.
Ali ran her fingers along the wall. 'It might have been carved to be read. Like
Braille.'
'That's writing?'
'A word. A single word. See this character here.' Ali traced a y-tailed mark, then a backward E. 'And this. They're not capped. But look at the linear form. It's got the stance and the stroke of ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. Paleo-Hebrew, possibly. Probably older. Old Hebrew. Phoenician, whatever you want to call it.'
'Hebrew? Phoenician? What are we dealing with, the lost tribes of Israel?'
'Our ancestors taught hadals how to write?' someone said.
'Or else hadals taught us,' Ali said.
She could not take her fingertips from the word. 'Do you realize,' she whispered,
'man has been speaking for at least a hundred thousand years. But our writing goes back no further than the upper Neolithic. Hittite hieroglyphics. Australian aboriginal art. Seven, eight thousand years, tops.
'This writing has got to be at least fifteen or twenty thousand years old. That's two or three times older than any human writing ever found. These are linguistic fossils. We could be closing in on the Adam and Eve of language. The root origin of human speech. The first word.'
Ali was enraptured. Looking around, she could tell the others didn't understand. This was big. Human or not, it doubled or tripled the timeline of the mind. And she had no one to celebrate it with! Settle down, she told herself. For all her travels, Ali's was a paper world of linguists and bishops, of library carrels and yellow legal pads. She had occupied a quiet place that didn't allow celebration. And yet, just once, Ali wanted someone to knock the head off a bottle of champagne and douse her with bubbles, someone to gather her up for a wet kiss.
'Hold up your pen beside the letters for scale,' one of the photographers told her.
'I wonder what it says,' someone said.
'Who knows?' Ali said. 'If Ike's right, if this is a lost language, then even the hadals don't know. Look how they had it buried under more primitive images. I think it's lost all meaning to them.'
Returning to their rafts, for some reason, the name circled around on her. Ike. Her slow dancer.
On September 5, they found their first hadals. Reaching a fossilized shore, they unloaded their rafts and hauled gear to high ground and started to prepare for night. Then one of the soldiers noticed shapes within the opaque folds of flowstone.
By shining their lights at a certain angle, they could see a virtual Pompeii of bodies laminated in several inches to several feet of translucent plastic stone. They lay in the positions they had died in, some curled, most sprawled. The scientists and soldiers fanned out across the acres of amber, slipping now and then on the slick face.
Pieces of flint still jutted from wounds. Some had been strangled with their own entrails or decapitated. Animals had worked through all of them. Limbs were missing, chest and belly walls had been plundered. No question, this had been the end of a whole tribe or township.
Under Ali's sweeping headlamp, their white skin glittered like quartz crystal. For all the heavy bone in their brows and cheeks, and despite the obvious violence of their end, they were remarkably delicate.
H. hadalis – this variety, at any rate – looked faintly apelike, but with very little body hair. They had wide negroid noses and full lips, somewhat like Australian aborigines, but were bleached albino by the perpetual night. There were a few slight beards, little more than wispy goatees. Most looked no older than thirty. Many were children.
The bodies were scarred in ways that had nothing to do with sports or surgery: no appendectomy scars in this group, no neat smile lines around the knees or shoulders. These had come from camp accidents or hunts or war. Broken bones had healed crookedly. Fingers had been lopped off. The women's breasts hung slack, thinned and
stretched and unbeautiful, basic tools like their sharpened fingernails and teeth or their wide flattened feet or their splayed big toes for climbing.
Ali tried integrating them into the family of modern man. It did not help that they had horns and calcium folds and lumps distorting their skulls. She felt strangely bigoted. Their mutations or disease or evolutionary twist – whatever – kept her at arm's length. She was sorry to be walking on them, yet glad to have them safely encased in stone. Whatever had been done to them, she imagined they would have been capable of doing to her.
That night they discussed the bodies lying beneath their camp.
It was Ethan Troy who solved their mystery. He had managed to chip loose portions of the bodies, mostly of children, and held them out for the rest to see. 'Their tooth enamel hasn't grown properly. It's been disrupted. And all the kids have rickets and other long-limb malformations. And you only have to look to see their swollen stomachs. Massive starvation. Famine. I saw this once in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. You never forget.'
'You're suggesting these are refugees?' someone asked. 'Refugees from who?'
'Us,' said Troy.
