The Descent Page 17

  He used that word, calling. It was no coincidence. Somehow he had learned that this nun was faltering in her vows. The calling had not faded, but changed.

  “We’ve lived long enough to recognize that evil is real, and not accidental,” Thomas went on. “And over the years we’ve attempted to address it. We’ve done this by supporting one another, and by joining our various powers and observations. It’s that simple.”

  It sounded too simple. In their spare time, these old people fought evil.

  “Our greatest weapon has always been scholarship,” Thomas added.

  “You’re an academic society, then,” Ali stated.

  “Oh, more like a round table of knights,” Thomas said. There were a few smiles. “I wish to find Satan, you see.” His eyes met Ali’s, and she saw that he was serious. They all were.

  Ali couldn’t help herself. “The Devil?” This group of Nobel laureates and scholars had made evil incarnate into a game of hide-and-seek.

  “The Devil,” Mustafah, the Egyptian, wheezed. “That old wives’ tale.”

  “Satan,” January corrected, for Ali’s benefit.

  They were all concentrating on Ali now. No one questioned her presence among them, which suggested she was already well known to them. Now Thomas’s recitation of her Saudi plans and the pre-Islamic glyphs and her protolanguage quest took on force. These people had been studying her. She was getting head-hunted. What was going on here? Why had January brought her into this? “Satan?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” January affirmed. “We’re dedicated to the idea. The reality.”

  “Which reality would that be?” Ali asked. “The nightmarish demon of malnourished, sleep-deprived monks? Or the heroic rebel of Milton?”

  “Hush,” said January. “We may be old, but we’re not silly. Satan is a catchall term. It gives identity to our theory of a centralized leadership. Call him what you want, a maximum leader, a caudillo. A Genghis Khan or Sitting Bull. Or a council of wise men, or warlords. The concept is sound. Logical.”

  Ali retreated into silence.

  “It’s a word, no more, a name,” Thomas said to her. “The term Satan signifies a historical character. A missing link between our fairy tale of hell and the geological fact of it. Think about it. If there can be a historical Christ, why not a historical Satan? Consider hell. Recent history tells us that the fairy tales had it all wrong, and yet right. The underworld is not full of dead souls and demons, yet it has human captives and an indigenous population that was—until recently—savagely defending its territory. Now, despite thousands and thousands of years of being damned and demonized in human folklore, the hadals seem very much like us. They have a written language, you know,” he said. “At least they did, once upon a time. The ruins suggest they had a remarkable civilization. They may even have souls.”

  Ali couldn’t believe a priest was saying such things. Human rights were one thing; the ability to know grace was something entirely different. Even if the hadals proved to have some genetic link with humans, their capacity for souls was theologically unlikely. The Church did not acknowledge souls in animals, not even among the higher primates. Only man qualified for salvation. “Let me understand,” she said. “You’re looking for a creature named Satan?”

  No one denied it.

  “But why?”

  “Peace,” said Lynch. “If he is a great leader, and if we can come to understand him, we may forge a lasting peace.”

  “Knowledge,” said Rau. “Think what he might know, where he might lead us.”

  “And if he’s merely the equivalent of an ancient war criminal,” said the soldier Elias, “then we can seek justice. And punishment.”

  “One way or another,” said January, “we’re striving to bring light to the darkness. Or darkness to the light.”

  It sounded so naïve. So youthful. So seductive and abundant with hope. Almost, thought Ali, plausible—hypothetically. And yet, a Nuremberg trial for the king of hell? Then she saddened. Of course they would be attracted to tilting at windmills. Thomas had drawn them back into the world, just as they were dying out from it.

  “And how do you propose to find this creature—being, entity—whatever he is?” she asked. It was meant to be a rhetorical question. “What chance do you have of finding an individual fugitive when the armies can’t seem to find any hadals at all? I keep hearing that they may even be extinct.”

  “You’re skeptical,” Vera said. “We wouldn’t have it any other way. Your skepticism is crucial. You’d be useless to us without it. Believe me, we were just like you when Thomas first presented his idea. But here we are, years later, still coming together when Thomas calls.”

  Thomas spoke. “You asked how do we hope to locate the historical Satan? Like reaching into mud, we must feel around and then pull him loose.”

  “Scholarship,” said the mathematician Hoaks. “By revisiting excavations and reexamining the evidence, we compile a more careful picture. Like a behavioral profile.”

  “I call it a unified theory of Satan,” said Foley. He had a businessman’s mind, given to strategy and output. “Some of us visit libraries or archaeological sites or science centers around the world. Others conduct interviews, debrief survivors, cultivate leads. In this way we hope to outline psychological patterns and identify any weaknesses that might be useful in a summit conference. Who knows, we may even be able to construct a physical description of the creature.”

  “It sounds like such … an adventure,” said Ali. She didn’t want to offend anyone.

  “Look at me,” Thomas said. There was a trick of light. Something. Suddenly he seemed a thousand years old. “He’s down there. Year after year, I’ve failed to locate him. We can no longer afford that.”

  Ali wavered.

  “That’s the dilemma,” said de l’Orme. “Life’s too short for doubt, and yet too long for faith.”

  Ali recalled his excommunication, and guessed it had been excruciating. “Our problem is that Satan hides in plain view,” de l’Orme said. “He always has. He hides within our reality. Even our virtual reality. The trick, we’re learning, is to enter the illusion. In that way, we hope to find him out. Would you please show Mademoiselle von Schade our little photo?” he asked his assistant.

  Santos spread out a long roll of glossy Kodak paper. It showed an image of an old map. Ali had to stand to see its details. Most of the group gathered around.

  “The others have had the benefit of several weeks to examine this photo,” de l’Orme explained. “It’s a route map known as the Peutinger Table. Twenty-one feet long by one foot high in the original. It details a medieval network of roads seventy thousand miles long that ran from the British Isles to India. Along the road were stage stops, spas, bridges, rivers, and seas. Latitude and longitude were irrelevant. The road itself was everything.”

  The archaeologist paused. “I had asked you all to try to find anything out of the ordinary on the photo. I particularly directed your attention to the Latin phrase ‘Here be dragons,’ midcenter on the map. Did anyone notice anything unusual in that region?”

  “It’s seven-thirty in the morning,” someone said. “Please teach us our lesson so we may eat our breakfast.”

  “If you please,” de l’Orme said to his aide.

  Santos lifted a wooden box onto the table, brought out from it a thick scroll, and began to unroll it delicately. “Here is the original table,” said de l’Orme. “It is housed here in the museum.”

  “This is why we were brought to New York?” complained Parsifal.

  “Please, compare for yourselves,” said de l’Orme. “As you can see, the photo duplicates the original at a scale of one-to-one. What I wish to demonstrate is that seeing is not believing. Santos?”

  The young man drew on a pair of latex gloves, produced a surgical scalpel, and bent over the original.

  “What are you doing?” an emaciated man squeaked in alarm. His name was Gault, and Ali would later learn that he was an encyc
lopedist of the old Diderot school, which believed that all things could be known and arranged alphabetically. “That map is irreplaceable,” he protested.

  “It’s all right,” de l’Orme said. “He’s simply exposing an incision we’ve already made.”

  The excitement of an act of vandalism in front of their eyes woke them up. Everyone came close to the table. “It is a secret the cartographer built into his map,” de l’Orme said. “A well-kept secret. If not for a blind man’s bare fingertips, it might never have been discovered. There is something quite wicked about our reverence for antiquity. We’ve come to treat the thing itself with such care that it has lost its original truth.”

  “But what’s this?” someone gasped.

  Santos was inserting his scalpel into the parchment where the cartographer had painted a small forested mountain with a river issuing from its base.

  “Because of my blindness, I’m allowed certain dispensations,” de l’Orme said. “I touch things most other people may not. Several months ago, I felt a slight bump at this place on the map. We had the parchment X-rayed, and there seemed to be a ghost image underneath the pigment. At that point we performed surgery.”

  Santos opened a tiny hidden door. The mountain lifted upon hinges made of thread. Underneath lay a crude but coherent dragon. Its claws embraced the letter B.

  “The B stands for Beliar,” said de l’Orme. “Latin for ‘Worthless.’ Another name for Satan. This was the manifestation of Satan concurrent with the making of the Peutinger Table. In the Gospel of Bartholomew, a third-century tract, Beliar is dragged up from the depths and interrogated. He gives an autobiography of the fallen angel.”

  The scholars marveled at the mapmaker’s ingenuity and craft. They congratulated de l’Orme on his detective work.

  “This is insignificant. Trivial. The mountain on this doorway lies in the karst country of the former Yugoslavia. The river coming from its base is probably the Pivka, which emerges from a Slovenian cave known today as Postojna Jama.”

  “The Postojna Jama?” Gault barked in recognition. “But that was Dante’s cave.”

  “Yes,” said de l’Orme, and let Gault tell them himself.

  “It’s a large cave,” Gault explained. “It became a famous tourist attraction in the thirteenth century. Nobles and landowners would tour with local guides. Dante visited while researching—”

  “My God,” said Mustafah. “For a thousand years the legend of Satan was located right here. But how can you call this trivial?”

  “Because it leads us nowhere we’ve not already been,” said de l’Orme. “The Postojna Jama is now a major portal for traffic going in and out of the abyss. The river has been dynamited. An asphalt road leads into the mouth. And the dragon has fled. For a thousand years this map told us where he once resided, or possibly where one of his doorways into the subplanet lay. But now Satan has gone elsewhere.”

  Thomas took over again.

  “Here before us is another example of why we can’t stay in our homes, believing we know the truth. We must unlearn our instincts, even as we depend on them. We must put our hands on what is untouchable. Listen for his motion. He’s out there, in old books and ruins and artifacts. Inside our language and dreams. And now, you see, the evidence will not come to us. We must go to it, wherever it is. Otherwise we’re merely looking into mirrors of our own invention. Do you understand? We must learn his language. We must learn his dreams. And perhaps bring him into the family of man.”

  Thomas leaned on the table. It gave a slight groan beneath his weight. He looked at Ali. “The truth is, we must go out into the world. We must risk everything. And we must not return without the prize.”

  “Even if I believed in your historical Satan,” Ali said, “it’s not my fight.”

  The meeting had adjourned. Hours had passed. The Beowulf scholars had gone off, leaving her alone with January and Thomas. She felt weary and electrified at the same time, but tried to show only a smooth face. Thomas was a cipher to her. He was making her a cipher to herself.

  “I agree,” Thomas replied. “But your passion for the mother tongue helps us in our fight, you see. And so our interests marry.”

  She glanced at January. Something was different in her eyes. Ali wanted an ally, but what she saw was obligation and urgency. “What is it you want from me?”

  What Thomas next told her went beyond daring. He was toying with a yellowed globe, and now let it spin to a halt. He pointed at the Galápagos Islands. “Seven weeks from now, a science expedition is to be inserted through the Pacific floor into the Nazca Plate tunnel system. It will consist of roughly fifty scientists and researchers who have been recruited mostly from American universities and laboratories. For the next year, they’ll be operating out of a state-of-the-art research institute based on the Woods Hole model. It’s said to be located at a remote mining town. We’re still working to learn which mining town, and if the science station even exists. Major Branch has been helpful, but even military intelligence can’t make heads or tails out of why Helios is underwriting the project and what they’re really up to.”

  “Helios?” Ali said. “The corporation?”

  “It’s actually a multinational cartel comprising dozens of major businesses, totally diversified,” January said. “Arms manufacture to tampons to computers. Baby formula, real estate, car assembly plants, recycled plastics, publishing, plus television and film production, and an airline. They’re untouchable. Now, thanks to their founder, C.C. Cooper, their agenda has taken a sharp turn. Downward into the subplanet.”

  “The presidential candidate,” Ali said. “You served in the Senate with him.”

  “Mostly against him,” January said. “He is a brilliant man. A true visionary. A closet fascist. And now a bitter and paranoid loser. His own party still blames him for the humiliation of that election. The Supreme Court eventually tossed out his charges of election fraud. As a result, he sincerely believes the world’s out to get him.”

  “I haven’t heard a thing about him since his defeat,” said Ali.

  “He quit the Senate and returned to Helios,” January said. “We were sure that was the end of him, that Cooper would quietly go back to making money. Even the people who watch such things didn’t notice for a while. C.C. was using shells and proxies and dummy corporations to snap up access rights and tunneling equipment and subsurface technology. He was cutting deals with governments of nine different Pacific Rim nations to joint-venture the drilling operations and provide labor, again hidden behind numerous layers. The result is that while we’ve been pacifying the regions underneath our cities and continents, Helios has gotten the jump on everyone else in suboceanic exploration and development.”

  “I thought the colonization was under international auspices,” said Ali.

  “It is,” said January, “within the boundaries of international law. But international law hasn’t caught up with nonsovereign territories. Offshore, the law is still catching up with subterranean discoveries.”

  “I didn’t understand this either,” said Thomas. “It turns out that subterranean territory beneath the oceans is still like the Wild West, subject to the whims of whoever occupies it. Recall the British tea company in India. The fur companies in North America. The American land companies in Texas. In the case of the Pacific Ocean, that means a huge expanse of country beyond international reach.”

  “Which translates as opportunity for a man like C.C. Cooper,” said January. “Today Helios owns more seafloor drill holes than any other entity, governmental or otherwise. They lead in hydroponic agricultural methods. They own the latest technology for enhanced communications through rock. Their labs have created new drugs to help them push the depths. They’ve approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago, as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics. While the rest of the world’s been tiptoeing into their planetary basements, Helios has spent bi
llions on research and development, and is poised to exploit the frontier.”

  “In other words,” Thomas said, “Helios isn’t sending these scientists down out of the goodness of its heart. The expedition is top-loaded with earth sciences and biology. The object of the expedition is to expand knowledge about the lithosphere and learn more about its resources and life-forms, especially those that can be exploited commercially for energy, metallurgy, medicine, and other practical uses. Helios has no interest in humanizing our perception of the hadals, and so the anthropology component is very small.”

  At the mention of anthropology, Ali started. “You want me to go? Down there?”

  “We’re much too old,” January said.

  Ali was stunned. How could they ask such a thing of her? She had duties, plans, desires.

  “You should know,” Thomas said to Ali, “the senator didn’t choose you. I did. I’ve been watching you for years, following your work. Your talents are exactly what we need.”

  “But down there …” She had never conceived herself on such a journey. She hated the darkness. A year without sun?

  “You would thrive,” said Thomas.

  “You’ve been there,” Ali said. He spoke with such authority.

  “No,” said Thomas. “But I’ve traveled among the hadals by visiting their evidence in ruins and museums. My task has been complicated by eons of human superstition and ignorance. But if you go back far enough in the human record, there are glimpses of what the hadals were like thousands of years ago. Once upon a time they were more than these degraded, inbred creatures we reckon with today.”

  Her pulse was hammering. She wanted not to be excited. “You want me to locate the hadals’ leader?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then what?”

  “Language is everything.”

  “Decipher their writings? But only fragments exist.”

  “Down there, I’m told, glyphs are abundant. Miners blow up whole galleries of them every day.”

  Hadal glyphs! Where could this lead?

  “A lot of people think the hadals have died off. That doesn’t matter,” said January. “We still have to live with what they were. And if they’re merely in hiding somewhere, then we’ve got to know what they’re capable of—not just their savagery, but the greatness they once aspired to. It’s clear they were once civilized. And if the legend is true, they fell from their own grace. Why? Could such a fall be lying in wait for mankind?”