The Descent Read online

  Sandwell was unapologetic. “You need to be careful,” he said. “If you decide to do this, they’ll mount a search for you. And the first people they’ll interrogate are the ones closest to you. My advice: Don’t compromise them. Don’t call Branch. He’s got enough problems.”

  “I should just disappear?”

  Sandwell smiled. “You never really existed anyway,” he said.

  There is nothing more

  powerful than this

  attraction toward an abyss.

  —JULES VERNE,

  Journey to the Center of the Earth

  7

  THE MISSION

  MANHATTAN

  Ali entered in sandals and a sundress, as if they were a magic spell to hold back the winter. The guard ticked her name off a list and complained she was early and without her party, but passed her through the station. He gave some rapid-fire directions. Then she was alone, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to herself.

  It was like being the last person on earth. Ali paused by a small Picasso. A vast Bierstadt Yellowstone. Then she came to a banner for the main exhibit declaring THE HARVEST OF HELL. The subtitle read “Twice Reaped Art.” Devoted to artifacts of the underworld, most of the exhibit’s objects had been brought back to the surface by GIs and miners. All but a few had been stolen from humans and brought into the subplanet to begin with, thus “twice reaped.”

  Ali had come well ahead of her engagement with January, in part to enjoy the building, but mostly to see for herself what Homo hadalis was capable of. Or, in this case, what he was not capable of. The show’s gist was this: H. hadalis was a man-sized packrat. The creatures of the subplanet had been plundering human inventions for eons. From ancient pottery to plastic Coke bottles, from voodoo fetishes to Han Dynasty ceramic tigers, to an Archimedean-type water screw, to a sculpture by Michelangelo long thought destroyed.

  Among the artifacts made by humans were several made from them. She came to the notorious “Beachball” made of different-colored human skins. No one knew its purpose, but the sac—once inflated, now fossilized as a perfect sphere—was especially offensive to people because it so coldly exploited the races as mere fabric.

  By far the most intriguing artifact was a chunk of rock that had been pried from some subterranean wall. It was inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphics that verged on calligraphy. Obviously, because it was included in this “twice reaped” display, the curators had judged it to be human graffiti that had been taken down into the abyss. But as Ali stood pondering the slab of rock, she wondered. It did not look like any writing she had ever seen.

  A voice found her. “There you are, child.”

  “Rebecca?” she said, and turned.

  The woman facing her was like a stranger. January had always been invincible, an Amazon with that ample embrace and taut black skin. This person looked deflated, suddenly old. With one hand locked upon her cane, the senator could only open one arm to her. Ali swiftly bent to hug her, and felt the ribs in her back.

  “Oh, child,” January whispered happily, and Ali laid her cheek against the hair cropped short and gone white. She breathed in the smell of her.

  “The guards told us you’ve been here an hour,” January said, then spoke to a tall man who had trailed behind her. “Isn’t it what I predicted, Thomas? Always charging out ahead of the cavalry, ever since she was a child. It’s not for nothing they called her Mustang Ali. She was a legend in Kerr County. And you see how beautiful she is?”

  “Rebecca,” Ali rebuked her. January was the most modest woman on earth, yet the worst braggart. Childless herself, she had adopted several orphans over the years, and they had all learned to endure these explosions of pride.

  “Oblivious, I’m telling you,” January went on. “Never looked in a mirror. And when she entered the convent, it was a dark day. Strong Texas boys, she had them weeping like widows under a Goliad moon.” And January, too, Ali recalled of that day. She had wept while she drove, apologizing again and again for not understanding Ali’s calling. The truth was that Ali no longer understood it herself.

  Thomas stayed out of it. For the moment, this was the reunion of two women, and he kept himself incidental. Ali acquired him with a single glance. He was a tall, rangy man in his late sixties, with a scholar’s eyes and yet a hard-beaten frame. He was unfamiliar to Ali, and though he was not wearing a collar, she knew he was a Jesuit: she had a sense for them. Perhaps it was their shared oddity.

  “You must forgive me, Ali,” January said. “I told you this would be a private meeting. But I’ve brought some friends. Of necessity.”

  Now Ali saw two more people circulating through the far end of the exhibit, a slight blind man attended by a large younger man. Several more elderly people entered a far door.

  “Blame me, this was my doing.” Thomas offered his hand. Apparently, Ali’s reunion was at an end. She had thought the entire day belonged to her and January, but there was business looming. “I’ve wanted to meet you, more than you know. Especially now, before you started out for the Arabian sands.”

  “Your sabbatical,” the senator said. “I didn’t think you’d mind my telling.”

  “Saudi Arabia,” Thomas added. “Not the most comfortable place for a young woman these days. The sharia is in full enforcement since the fundamentalists took over and slaughtered the royal family. I don’t envy you, a full year draped in abaya.”

  “I’m not thrilled with the prospect of being dressed like a nun,” Ali agreed.

  January laughed. “I’ll never understand you,” she said to Ali. “They give you a year off, and back you go to your deserts.”

  “But I know the feeling,” Thomas said. “You must be eager to see the glyphs.” Ali grew more wary. This was not something she had written or told to January. To January, Thomas explained, “The southern regions near Yemen are especially rich. Proto-Semitic pictograms from the Saudis’ ahl al-jahiliya, their Age of Ignorance.”

  Ali shrugged as if it were common enough knowledge, but her radar was up now. The Jesuit knew things about her. What more? Could he know of her other reason for this year away, the step back she had taken from her final vows? It was a hesitation the order took seriously, and the desert was as much a stage for her faith as for her science. She wondered if the mother superior had sent this man covertly to guide her, then dismissed the thought. They would never dare. It was her choice to make, not some Jesuit’s.

  Thomas seemed to read her misgivings. “You see, I’ve followed your career,” he said. “I’ve dabbled in the anthropology of linguistics myself. Your work on Neolithic inscriptions and mother languages is—how to put this?—elegant beyond your years.”

  He was being careful not to flatter her, which was wise. She was not easily courted.

  “I’ve read everything I could find by you,” he said. “Daring stuff, especially for an American. Most of the protolanguage work is being done by Russian Jews in Israel. Eccentrics with nowhere to go. But you’re young and have opportunities everywhere, yet still you choose this radical inquiry. The beginning of language.”

  “Why do people see it as so radical?” Ali asked. He had spoken to her heart. “By finding our way back to the first words, we reach back to our own genesis. It takes us that much closer to the voice of God.”

  There, she thought. In all its naïveté. The core of her search, mind and soul. Thomas seemed deeply satisfied. Not that she needed to satisfy him.

  “Tell me, as a professional,” he asked, “what do you make of this exhibit?”

  She was being tested, and January was in on it. Ali went along with them for the moment, cautiously. “I’m a little surprised,” she ventured, “by their taste for sacred relics.” She pointed at strands of prayer beads originally from Tibet, China, Sierra Leone, Peru, Byzantium, Viking Denmark, and Palestine. Next to them was a display case with crucifixes and calligrams and chalices made of gold and silver. “Who would think they’d collect such exquisitely delicate work? This is more w
hat I would expect.”

  She passed a suit of twelfth-century Mongolian armor, pierced and still stained with blood. Elsewhere there were brutally used weapons and armor, and devices of torture … though the display literature reminded viewers that the devices had been human to begin with.

  They stopped in front of a blow-up of the famous photo of a hadal about to destroy an early reconnaissance robot with a club. It represented modern mankind’s first public contact with “them,” one of those events people remember ever after by where they were standing or what they were doing at the moment. The creature looked berserk and demonic, with hornlike growths on his albino skull.

  “The pity is,” Ali said, “we may never know who the hadals really were before it’s too late.”

  “It may already be too late,” January offered.

  “I don’t believe that,” Ali said.

  Thomas and January traded a look. He made up his mind. “I wonder if we might discuss a certain matter with you,” he said. Immediately, Ali knew this was the purpose of her entire visit to New York, which January had arranged and paid for.

  “We belong to a society,” January now started to explain. “Thomas has been collecting us from around the world for years. We call ourselves the Beowulf Circle. It is quite informal, and our meetings are infrequent. We come together at various places to share our revelations with one another and to—”

  Before she could say more, a guard barked, “Put that down.”

  There was a sudden commotion as guards rushed down. At the center of their alarm were two of those people who had come in behind Thomas and January. It was the younger man with long hair. He was hefting an iron sword from one of the displays.

  “It is for me,” his blind companion apologized, and accepted the heavy sword into his open palms. “I asked my companion, Santos—”

  “It’s all right, gentlemen,” January told the guards. “Dr. de l’Orme is a renowned specialist.”

  “Bernard de l’Orme?” Ali whispered. He had parted jungles and rivers to uncover sites throughout Asia. Reading about him, she had always thought of him as a physical giant.

  Unconcerned, de l’Orme went on touching the early Saxon blade and leather-wrapped handle, seeing it with his fingertips. He smelled the leather, licked the iron.

  “Marvelous,” he pronounced.

  “What are you doing?” January asked him.

  “Remembering a story,” he answered. “An Argentine poet once told of two gauchos who entered a deadly knife fight because the knife itself compelled them.”

  The blind man held up the ancient sword used by man and his demon both. “I was just wondering about the memory of iron,” he said.

  “My friends,” Thomas welcomed his sleuths, “we should begin.”

  Ali watched them materialize from the darkened library stacks. Suddenly, Ali felt only half dressed. In Vatican City, winter was still scourging the brick streets with sleet. By contrast, her little Christmas holiday in New York City was feeling downright Roman, as balmy as late summer. But her sundress served to emphasize these old people’s fragility, for they were cold despite the warmth outside. Some wore fashionable ski parkas, while others shivered in layers of wool or tweed.

  They gathered around a table made of English oak, cut and polished before the era of great cathedrals. It had survived wars and terrors, kings, popes, and bourgeoisie, and even researchers. The walls were massed with nautical charts drawn before America was a word.

  Here was the set of gleaming instruments Captain Bligh had used to guide his castaways back to civilization. A glass case held a stick-and-shell map used by Micronesian fishermen to follow ocean currents between islands. In the corner stood the complicated Ptolemaic astrolabe that had been used in Galileo’s inquisition. Columbus’s map of the New World occupied a corner of one wall, raw, exotic; painted upon a sheepskin, its legs used to indicate the cardinal directions.

  There was also a large blow-up of Bud Parsifal’s famous snapshot from the moon showing the great blue pearl in space. Rather immodestly, the former astronaut took a position immediately beneath his photo, and Ali recognized him. January stayed by her side, now and then whispering names, and Ali was grateful for her presence.

  As they seated themselves, the door opened and a final addition limped in. Ali at first thought he was a hadal. He had melted plastic for skin, it seemed. Darkened ski goggles were strapped to his misshapen head, sealing out the room light. The sight startled her, and she recoiled, never having seen a hadal, alive or dead. He took the chair next to her, and she could hear him panting heavily.

  “I didn’t think you were going to make it,” January said to him across Ali.

  “A little trouble with my stomach,” he replied. “The water, maybe. It always takes me a few weeks to adjust.”

  He was human, Ali realized. His shortness of breath was a common symptom of veterans freshly returning to higher altitudes. She’d never seen one so physically marauded by the depths.

  “Ali, meet Major Branch. He’s something of a secret. He’s with the Army, sort of an informal liaison with us. An old friend. I found him in a military hospital years ago.”

  “Sometimes I think you should have left me there,” he bantered, and offered his hand to Ali. “Elias will do.” He grimaced at her, then she saw it was a smile—without lips. The hand was like a rock. Despite the bull-like muscles, it was impossible to tell his age. Fire and wounds had erased the normal landmarks.

  Besides Thomas and January, Ali counted eleven of them, including de l’Orme’s protégé, Santos. Except for her and Santos and this character beside her, they were old. All told, they combined almost seven hundred years of life experience and genius—not to mention a working memory of all recorded history. They were venerable, if somewhat forgotten. Most had left the universities or companies or governments where they had distinguished themselves. Their awards and reputations were no longer useful. Nowadays they lived lives of the mind, helped along by their daily medicines. Their bones were brittle.

  The Beowulf Circle was a strange gang of paladins. Ali surveyed the chilly bunch, placing faces, remembering names. With little overlap, they represented more disciplines than most universities had colleges to contain.

  Again, Ali wished for something besides this sundress. It hung upon her like an albatross. Her long hair tickled her spine. She could feel her body beneath the cloth.

  “You might have told us you would be taking us from our families,” grumbled a man whose face Ali knew from old Time magazines. Desmond Lynch, the medievalist and peacenik. He had earned a Nobel Prize for his 1952 biography of Duns Scotus, the thirteenth-century philosopher, then had used the prize as a bully pulpit to condemn everything from the McCarthy witch-hunts to the Bomb and, later, the war in Vietnam. Ancient history. “So far from home,” he said. “Into such weather. And at Christmas!”

  Thomas smiled at him. “Is it so bad?”

  Lynch made himself look deadly behind his briarwood cane. “Don’t be taking us for granted,” he warned.

  “You have my oath on that,” said Thomas more soberly. “I’m old enough not to take one heartbeat for granted.”

  They were listening, all of them. Thomas moved from face to face around the table. “If the moment were not so critical,” he said, “I would never trespass upon you with a mission so dangerous. But it is. And I must. And so we are here.”

  “But here?” a tiny woman asked from a child’s wheelchair. “And in this season? It does seem so … un-Christian of you, Father.”

  Vera Wallach, Ali recalled. The New Zealand physician. She had single-handedly defeated the Church and banana republicans in Nicaragua, introducing birth control during the Sandinista revolution. She had faced bayonets and crucifixes, and still managed to bring her sacrament to the poor: condoms.

  “Yes,” growled a thin man. “The hour is godforsaken. Why now?” He was Hoaks, the mathematician. Ali had noticed him toying with a map that inverted the continental she
lves and gave a view of the surface from inside the globe.

  “But it’s always this way,” said January, countering the ill humor. “It’s Thomas’s way of imposing his mysteries on us.”

  “It could be worse,” commented Rau, the untouchable, another Nobel winner. Born to the lowest caste in Uttar Pradesh, he had still managed the climb to India’s lower house of Parliament. There he had served as his party’s speaker for many years. Later, Ali would learn, Rau had been on the verge of renouncing the world, shedding his clothes and name, and throwing himself onto the pathway of saddhus living day to day by gifts of rice.

  Thomas gave them several more minutes to greet one another and curse him. In whispers to Ali, January went on describing various characters. There was the Alexandrian, Mustafah, of a Coptic family that extended on his mother’s side to Caesars. Though Christian, he was an expert on sharia, or Islamic law, one of the few to ever be able to explain it to westerners. Saddled with emphysema, he could speak only in short bursts.

  Across the table sat an industrialist named Foley, who had made several side fortunes, one in penicillin during the Korean War, another in the blood and plasma industry, before going on to “dabble” in civil rights and underwrite numerous martyrs. He was arguing with the astronaut Bud Parsifal. Ali recollected his tale: after teeing off on the moon, Parsifal had gone searching for Noah’s Ark upon Mount Ararat, discovered geological evidence of the Red Sea parting, and pursued a legion of other crazy riddles. Clearly the Beowulf Circle was a crew of misfits and anarchists.

  Finally they had gone full circle. It was Thomas’s turn. “I am lucky to have such friends,” he said to her. Ali was astonished. The others were listening, but his words were for her. “Such souls. Over many years, during my travels, I’ve enjoyed their company. Each of them has labored to bend mankind away from its most destructive ideas. Their reward”—he wryly smiled—“has been this calling.”