bewilderment.
'Thomas!' cried Vera, falling from her chair with the wounded physician in her arms. In the one instant Thomas took his eyes from the man, Rau vanished through the doorway.
The suicide was aired on national television that evening. Rau couldn't have timed it better, with national media already gathered for the university's press conference in the street below. It was simply a matter of training their cameras on the roofline eight stories above.
With a fiery Rocky Mountain sunset for a backdrop, the SWAT cops edged closer and closer to Rau's swaying form, guns leveled. Aiming their acoustic dishes, sound crews on the ground picked up every word of the negotiator's appeal to the cornered man. Telephoto lenses trained on his twisted face, tracked his leap. Several quick-thinking cameramen utilized the same bounce technique, a quick nudge up, to self-edit the impact.
There was no doubt the former head of India's parliament had gone insane. The hadal head cradled in his arms was all the proof anyone needed. That and the cowboy hat.
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.
– RUDYARD KIPLING, The Jungle Book
19
CONTACT
Beneath the Magellan Rise,
176 degrees west, 8 degrees north
The camp woke to tremors on the last day of summer.
Like the rest, Ali was asleep on the ground. She felt the earthquake work deep inside her body. It seemed to move her bones.
For a full minute the scientists lay on the ground, some curling in fetal balls, some clutching their neighbors' hands or embracing. They waited in awful silence for the tunnel to close upon them or the floor to drop away.
Finally some wag yelled out, 'All clear. It was just Shoat, damn him. Wanking again.' They all laughed nervously. There were no more tremors, but they had been reminded of how minuscule they were. Ali braced for an onset of confessions from her fragile flock.
Later in the morning, several in a group of women she was rafting with could smell what was left of the earthquake in the faint dust hanging above the river. Pia, one of the planetologists, said it reminded her of a stonecutters' yard near her childhood home, the smell of cemetery markers being polished and sandblasted with the names of the dead.
'Tombstones? That's a pleasant thought,' one of the women said.
To dispel the sense of omen, Ali said, 'See how white the dust is? Have you ever smelled fresh marble just after a chisel has cut it?' She recalled for them a sculptor's studio she had once visited in northern Italy. He had been working on a nude with little success, and had begged Ali to pose for him, to help draw the woman out from his block of stone. For a time he had pursued her with letters.
'He wanted you to pose naked?' Pia was delighted. 'He didn't know you were a nun?'
'I was very clear.'
'So? Did you?'
Suddenly, Ali felt sad. 'Of course not.'
Life in these dark tubes and veins had changed her. She had been trained to erase her identity in order to allow God's signature upon her. Now she wanted desperately to be remembered, if only as a piece of sculpted marble.
The underworld was having its effect on others, too. As an anthropologist Ali was naturally alive to the entire tribe's metamorphosis. Tracking their idiosyncrasies was like watching a garden slowly grow rampant. They adopted peculiar touches, odd ways of combing their hair, or rolling their survival suits up to the knee or shoulder. Many of the men had started going bareback, the upper half of their suits hanging from their waists like shed skin. Deodorant was a thing of the past, and you barely noticed the body smells, except for certain unfortunates. Shoat, particularly, was known for his foot odor. Some of the women braided each other's hair with beads or shells. It was just for fun, they said, but their concoctions got more elaborate each
week.
Some of the soldiers lapsed into gang talk when Walker wasn't around, and their weapons suddenly flowered with scrimshaw. They carved animals or Bible quotes or girlfriends' names onto the plastic stocks and handles. Even Walker had let his beard grow into a great Mosaic bush that had to be a garden spot for the cave lice that plagued them.
Ike no longer looked so much different from the rest of them. After the incident at Cache II, he had made himself more scarce. Many nights they never saw him, only his little tripod of glowing green candles designating a good campsite. When he did surface, it was only for a matter of hours. He was retreating into himself, and Ali didn't know how to reach him, or why it should matter so much to her. Maybe it was that the one in their group who most needed reconciliation seemed most resistant to it. There was another possibility, that she had fallen in love. But that was unreasonable, she thought.
On one of Ike's rare overnights at camp, Ali took a meal to him and they sat by the water's edge. 'What do you dream?' she asked. When his brow wrinkled, she added,
'You don't have to tell me.'
'You've been talking with the shrinks,' he said. 'They asked the same thing. It's supposed to be a measure of fluency, right? If I dream in hadal.'
She was unsettled. They all wanted a piece of this man. 'Yes, it's a measure. And no, I haven't talked with anyone about you.'
'So what do you want?'
'What you dream about. You don't have to tell me.'
'Okay.'
They listened to the water. After a minute, she changed her mind. 'No, you do have to tell me.' She made it light.
'Ali,' he said. 'You don't want to hear it.'
'Give,' she coaxed.
'Ali,' he said, and shook his head.
'Is it so bad?'
Suddenly he stood up and went over to the kayak.
'Where are you going?' This was so strange. 'Look, just drop it. I was prying. I'm sorry.'
'It's not your fault,' he said, and dragged the boat to water.
As he cut his way down the river, it finally dawned on her. Ike dreamed of her.
On September 28 they homed in on Cache III.
They had been picking up increasingly strong signals for two days. Not sure what other surprises Helios might have in store, still uncertain what the Ranger assassins had been up to, Walker told Ike to stay behind while he sent his soldiers in advance. Ike made no objections, and drifted his kayak among the scientists' rafts, silent and chagrined to be off point for a change.
Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats. The waterfall rifled down a shield of olive stone from heights too high to see, beating up a mist that threw rainbows in their lights. The scientists ran their rafts onto shore and disembarked. Some quirk in the cul-de-sac's acoustics rendered the roar into a wall of white noise.
Walker came over. 'The rangefinder reads zero,' he reported. 'That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we've got is this waterfall.'
Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level.
