The Descent

by Jeff Long

  Farther out, another set of lights came on. The plain was littered with hundreds of inert cannonballs. Manganese nodules, Ali knew from her reading. There was a fortune in manganese out there, and yet it had been bypassed for the sake of far greater fortune deeper down.

  The vista was like a dream. Ali kept trying to make sense of her place in this inhuman geography. But with each further step, she belonged less and less.

  A gruesome fish with fangs and a greenish light bud for bait steered past the window. Otherwise it was lonely out there. Dreamless. She held the orange.

  After an hour, the pod started down again, this time slower. As it descended, the ocean floor rose to eye and ceiling level, then was gone. There was a brief lighted glimpse of cored stone through the window. Then quickly the glass fell black and she was looking at herself again.

  Now it begins, thought Ali, the edge of the earth. And it was like passing inside herself.

  INCIDENT AT PIEDRAS NEGRAS

  MEXICO

  Osprey crossed the bridge like a turista, on foot, wearing a daypack. He left the sunburned GIs behind their sandbags in Texas. On the Mexico side, nothing suggested an international border, no barricade, no soldiers, not even a flag.

  By arrangement with the local university, a van was waiting. To Osprey’s great surprise, his driver was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She had skin like dark fruit, and brilliant red lipstick. “You are the butterfly man?” she asked. Her accent was like a musical gift.

  “Osprey,” he stammered.

  “It’s hot,” she said. “I brought you a Coca-Cola.” She offered him a bottle. Hers was beaded with condensation. Lipstick circled the tip.

  While she drove, he learned her name. She was an economics student. “Why are you chasing the mariposa?” she asked. Mariposa was the Mexican term for the monarch butterfly.

  “It’s my life,” he answered.

  “Your whole life?”

  “From childhood. Butterflies. I was drawn by their movements and colors. And their names. Painted Ladies! Red Admirals! Question Marks! Ever since, I’ve followed them. Wherever the mariposas migrate, I go with them.”

  Her smile made his heart squeeze.

  They passed a shantytown overlooking the river. “You go south,” she said, “they go north. Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Hondurans. And my own people, too.”

  “They’ll try to cross over tonight?” Osprey asked. He looked past their white cotton pants and decaying tennis shoes and cheap sunglasses to glean hints of ancient tribes, Mayan, Aztec, Olmec. Once upon a time, their ancestors might have been warriors or kings. Now they were paupers, driftwood aiming for land.

  “They kill themselves trying to leave their origins. How can they resist?”

  Osprey glanced across the Rio Grande’s coil of brown, poisoned water at the butt side of America. Heated to mirage, the buildings and billboards and power lines did seem to offer hope—provided you could factor out the necklace of razor wire glittering in the middle distance, and the sparkle of binoculars and video lenses overseeing the passage. The van continued along the river.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To the highlands around Mexico City. They roost in the mountain fir stands through the winter. In the spring they’ll return this way to lay their eggs.”

  “I mean today, Mr. Osprey.”

  “Today. Yes.” He fumbled with his maps.

  She stopped suddenly. They had reached a place overcome by orange and black wings. “Incredible,” Ada murmured.

  “It’s their rest stop for the night,” Osprey said. “Tomorrow they’ll be gone. They travel fifty miles every day. In another month, all of the masses of monarchs will reach their roost.”

  “They don’t fly at night?”

  “They can’t see in the darkness.” He opened the van door. “I may take an hour,” he apologized. “Perhaps you should return later.”

  “I’ll wait for you, Mr. Osprey. Take your time. When you’re finished, we can have dinner, if you’d like.”

  If I’d like? Dazed, Osprey took his rucksack and gently closed the door behind him.

  Remembering his purpose, he headed west into the sinking sun. His inquiry dealt with the monarchs’ age-old migration path. Danaus plexippus laid its eggs in North America, then died. The young emerged with no parents to guide it, and yet each year flew thousands of miles along the same ancestral route to the same destination in Mexico. How could this be? How could a creature that weighed less than half a gram have a memory? Surely memory weighed something. What was memory? There was no bottom to the mystery for Osprey. Year after year, he collected them alive. While they wintered, he studied them in his laboratory.

  Osprey unzipped his daypack and took out a bundle of folded white boxes, the same kind that Chinese food comes in. He assembled twelve, leaving their tops open. His task was simple. He approached a cluster of hundreds, held a box out, and two or three alighted inside. He closed the box.

  After forty minutes, Osprey had eleven boxes dangling by their wire handles from a string around his neck. Hurrying, badly distracted by the girl in the van, he trotted across a sagging depression toward the final cluster. The depression gave way. With monarchs clinging to his arms and head, he plunged through a hole in the ground.

  The fall registered as a clatter of rocks, then sudden darkness.

  Consciousness returned in bits. Osprey struggled to take stock. He was in pain, but could move. The hole was very deep, or else night had arrived. Luckily he hadn’t lost his rucksack. He opened it and found his flashlight.

  The beam was a source of both comfort and distress. He found himself lying at the pit of a limestone sinkhole, battered but unbroken. There was no sign of the hole he’d fallen through. And his landing had crushed several boxes of his beloved monarchs. For a moment, that was more defeating than the fall itself.

  “Hello,” he called out several times. There was no one down here to hear him, but Osprey hoped his voice might carry through the hole somewhere overhead. Perhaps the Mexican woman would be looking for him. He had a momentary fantasy that she might fall through the hole and they could be trapped together for a night or two. At any rate, there was no response.

  Finally he pulled himself together, stood up, dusted himself off, and got on with trying to find an exit. The sinkhole was cavernous, its walls riddled with tubular openings. He poked his light into a few, thinking one of them must surely lead to the surface. He chose the largest.

  The tube snaked sideways. At first he was able to crawl on his knees. But it narrowed, forcing him to leave his daypack. At last he was reduced to muscling forward on elbows and belly, careful to scoot his flashlight and the remaining five boxes of live butterflies ahead of him.

  The porous walls kept tearing his clothing and hooking his trouser cuffs. The rock cut his arms. He knocked his head, and sweat stung his eyes. He was going to emerge in tatters, reeking, farcical. So much for dinner, he thought.

  The tube grew tighter. A wave of claustrophobia took his breath. What if he got wedged inside this place? Trapped alive! He calmed himself. There was no room to turn around, of course. He could only hope the artery led somewhere more reasonable.

  After an awkward, ten-foot wrestling match, with both arms above his head and pushing mightily with his toes, Osprey emerged into a larger tunnel.

  His spirits soared. A faint footpath was worn into the rock. All he had to do was follow it out. “Hello,” he called to his left and right. He heard a slight rattling noise in the distance. “Hello?” he tried again. The noise stopped. Seismic goblins, he shrugged, and started off in the opposite direction.

  Another hour passed, and still the path had not led him out. Osprey was tired, aching, and hungry. Finally he decided to reverse course and explore the path’s other end. The trail went up and down, then came to a series of forks he hadn’t seen before. He went one way, then another, with increasing frustration. At last he reached a tubular opening similar to th
e one that had brought him here. On the chance it might return him to the original chamber, Osprey set his butterflies and light on the ledge and crawled inside.

  He’d gotten only a short distance when, to his great annoyance, the rock snagged his ankle again. He yanked to free himself, but the ankle stayed caught. He tried to see behind him, but his body filled the opening.

  That was when he felt the tube move. It seemed to slip forward an inch or so, though he knew it was his body sliding backward. The disturbing thing was, he hadn’t moved a muscle.

  Now he felt a second motion, this time a tug at his ankle. It was no longer possible to blame the rock for catching his cuff. This was something organic. He could feel it getting a better grip on his leg. The animal, whatever it was, suddenly began pulling him back.

  Osprey desperately tried holding on to the rock, but it was like falling down a slippery chimney. His hands slid across the surface. He had enough presence of mind to hold on to his light and the boxes of butterflies. Then his legs cleared the tube, and in the next instant his body and head popped free. He dropped to the tunnel floor in a heap. One of his boxes fell open and three butterflies escaped, drifting erratically through his light beam.

  He whipped the flashlight around to fend off the animal. There in his cone of light stood a live hadal. Osprey shouted his alarm just as it fled from his light. Its whiteness startled him most of all. The bulging eyes gave it an aspect of enormous hunger, or curiosity.

  The hadal ran one way, Osprey the other. He covered fifty yards before his light beam illuminated three more hadals crouching in the tunnel’s far depths. They turned their heads from his light, but didn’t budge.

  Osprey cast his flashlight back the way he’d come. Not far enough away prowled four or five more of the white creatures. He swung his head back and forth, awestruck by his predicament. He took his Swiss Army knife from a pocket and opened its longer blade. But they came no closer, repulsed by his light.

  It seemed utterly fantastic. He was a lepidopterist. He dealt with animals whose existence depended on sunshine. The subplanet had nothing to do with him. Yet here he was, caged beneath the ground, faced with hadals. The terrible fact bore down on him. The weight of it exhausted him. Finally, unable to move in either direction, Osprey sat down.

  Thirty yards to his right and left, the hadals settled in, too. He flipped his light from side to side for a while, thinking that was keeping them at bay. At last it became apparent the hadals weren’t interested in coming any closer for the time being. He positioned the flashlight so that its beam cast a ball of light around him. While the three monarchs that had escaped from his box fluttered in the light, Osprey began calculating how long his battery might last.

  He stayed awake as long as possible. But the combination of fatigue, his fall, and adrenaline hangover finally mastered him. He dozed, bathed in light, clutching his pocketknife.

  He woke dreaming of raindrops. They were pebbles thrown by the hadals. His first thought was that the pebbles were meant to torment him. Then he realized the hadals were trying to break his lightbulb. Osprey grabbed the flashlight to shield it. He had another thought. If they could throw pebbles, they could probably throw rocks big enough to hurt or kill him—but they hadn’t. That was when he understood they meant to capture him alive.

  The waiting went on. They sat at the edges of his light. Their patience was depressing. It was so utterly unmodern, a primitive’s patience, unbeatable. They were going to outlast him, he had no doubt at all about that.

  Hours turned into a day, then two. His stomach rumbled with hunger. His tongue dried in his mouth. He told himself it would be better this way. Without food or water, he might start hallucinating. The last thing he wanted was to be lucid in the end.

  As time passed, Osprey did his best not to look at the hadals, but eventually his curiosity took over. He turned his light on one group or the other, and gathered their details. Several were naked except for rawhide loin strings. A few wore ragged vests made of some kind of leather. All were male, as he could tell by their penis sheaths. Each sported a sheath made from an animal horn, jutting from his groin, and tied erect with twine, like those worn by New Guinea natives.

  It was easy to anticipate the end. His battery began to fail. To either side, the hadals had moved closer. The light faded to a dim ball. Osprey shook the flashlight hard, and the beam brightened momentarily, and the hadals withdrew another five or ten yards. He sighed. It was time. C’est la vie. He chuckled, and laid the blade along his wrist.

  He could have waited until the last instant of light before making the cuts, but feared they might not be done well. Too shallow, and it would simply be a painful nip at the nerves. Too deep, and the veins might convulse and close off. He needed to get the strokes right, while he could still see.

  He pulled evenly. Blood jumped from the steel. It leaped out of him. In the shadows, he heard the hadals murmur.

  Carefully he switched the knife to his left hand and did the opposite wrist. The knife fell from his grip. After a minute he felt cold. The pain at the end of each arm turned to a dull ache. His blood spread on the stone floor. It was impossible to separate the dying light from his fading vision.

  Osprey laid his head back against the wall. His thoughts settled. Increasingly, a vision of the beautiful Mexican woman had begun visiting him. Her face had come to replace his butterflies, all of whom had died because his light was not enough. He had arranged each monarch beside him, and as he slumped sideways, their wings lay like orange and black tissue on the ground.

  Off in the distance, the hadals were chirping and clicking to one another. Their agitation was obvious. He smiled. They’d won, but they’d lost.

  The light shrank. It died. Her face rose in the darkness. Osprey let out a low moan. The blackness pillowed him.

  On the brink of unconsciousness, he felt the hadals pounce on him. He smelled them. Felt them grabbing at him. Tying his arms with rope. Too late, he realized they were binding tourniquets above his wounds. They were saving his life. He tried to fight, but was too weak.

  In the weeks ahead, Osprey returned to life slowly. The stronger he got, the more pain he had to endure. He was carried sometimes. Occasionally they forced him to walk blindly down the tunnels. In pitch darkness, he had to rely on every sense but sight. Some days they simply tortured him. He could not imagine what they were doing to him. Captivity tales swirled in his head. He began to rave, and so they cut his tongue out. That was near the end of his sanity.

  It was beyond Osprey’s comprehension that the hadals summoned one of their finest artisans to peel the upper layers of skin, no more, from tip to tip of each shoulder and down to the base of his spine. Under the artisan’s direction, the wound was salted to prepare his canvas. Its seasoning took days, requiring more abrasion, more salt. Finally an outline of veins and border was applied in black, and left to grow over. After another three days, a rare blend of bright ochre powder was laid on.

  By that time, Osprey’s wish had come true. He was mad from pain and deprivation. His insanity had nothing to do with the hadals freeing him to roam in their tunnels. If madness was the password, then most of their human captives would have been free. Who could understand such creatures? Human quirks and fallibilities were a constant source of puzzlement.

  Osprey’s freedom was a special case. He was allowed to go wherever his whim took him. No matter which band he strayed behind, they made sure to feed him, and it was considered meritorious to protect him from dangers and guide him along the trail. He was never given supplies to carry. He carried no claim mark or brand. No one owned him. He belonged to everyone, a creature of great beauty.

  Children were brought to see him. His legend spread quickly. Wherever he went, it was known that this was a holy man, captured with small houses of souls around his neck.

  Osprey would never know what the hadals had painted into the flesh of his back. It would have pleased him no end. For, every time he moved, with every breath
he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

  The frontier is the outer edge

  of the wave—the meeting-

  point between savagery

  and civilization … the

  line of most rapid and

  effective Americanization.

  The wilderness masters

  the colonist.

  —FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER,

  The Significance of the Frontier in American History

  9

  LA FRONTERA

  THE GALÁPAGOS RIFT SYSTEM,

  LATITUDE 0.55°N

  Promptly at 1700 hours, the expeditionaries boarded their electric buses. They were loaded with handouts and booklets and notebooks numbered and marked Classified, and were sporting pieces of Helios clothing. The black SWAT-style caps had proved especially popular, very menacing. Ali contented herself with a T-shirt with the Helios winged-sun logo printed on the back. With scarcely a purr, the buses eased from the walled compound out onto the street.

  Nazca City reminded Ali of Beijing, with its hordes of bicyclists. At rush hour in a boomtown with streets so narrow, the bikes were faster than their buses. They had jobs to get to. Through her window, Ali took in their faces, their Pacific Rim races, their humanity. What a feast of souls!

  Declassified maps showed boom cities like Nazca as veritable nerve cells reaching tendrils out into the surrounding space. The attractions were simple: cheap land, mother lodes of precious minerals and petroleum, freedom from authority, a chance to start over. Ali had come expecting glum fugitives and desperadoes with no other place to go. But these were the faces of college-educated office workers, bankers, entrepreneurs, a motivated service sector. As a port city of the future, Nazca City was said to have the potential of San Francisco or Singapore. In four years it had become the major link between the equatorial subplanet and coastal cities up and down the western side of the Americas.