The Descent

by Jeff Long

  “Where could she have learned to speak it?”

  “That’s exactly the point,” said Mary Kay. “As far as humans go, there aren’t more than a handful of recaptures that speak it in the world. But Yammie was. It’s all on tape.”

  “She must have heard some recaptures then,” Parsifal said.

  “It’s more than simple mimicry, though. See that wall over there?”

  “Is that mud?” asked Vera.

  “Feces. Her own. Yammie used it to fingerpaint those symbols.”

  They all recognized the symbols as hadal.

  “We can’t figure out what they represent,” said Mary Kay. “I’m told that someone on a science expedition below the Pacific was starting to crack the code. An archaeologist. Van Scott or something. The expedition’s supposed to be a big secret. But one of the mining colonies leaked bits of the story. Only now the expedition’s disappeared.”

  “Van Scott. It wouldn’t be a woman, would it?” Vera asked. “Von Schade? Ali?”

  “That’s it. Then you know of her work?”

  “Not nearly enough,” said Vera.

  “She’s a friend,” Thomas explained. “We’re deeply concerned.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Parsifal said. “How could this young lady be mimicking an alphabet that humans have only just discovered exists? And aping a language that humans don’t speak?”

  “But she’s not mimicking or aping them.”

  “Are we to suppose the creatures of hell are channeling through this poor woman?”

  “Of course not, Mr. Parsifal.”

  “What then?”

  “This is going to sound awfully half-baked.”

  “After the nonsense we just witnessed out front?” said Parsifal. “Possession. Exorcism. I’m feeling pretty warmed up.”

  “In fact,” Mary Kay said, “Yammie seems to have become her subject. More precisely, the hadal has become her.”

  Parsifal gaped, then started to growl.

  “Listen.” Vera stopped him. “Just listen for a minute.”

  “Bud’s right,” Thomas protested. “We came all this way to hear such nonsense?”

  “We’re just trying to go where the evidence points us,” Mary Kay pleaded.

  “Let me get this straight. The soul from that thing,” said Parsifal, pointing at the decaying cranium, “jumped inside of this young woman?”

  “Believe me,” Mary Kay said, “none of us want to believe it, either. But something catastrophic happened to her. The charts spiked right before Yammie fell unconscious. We’ve gone over the video a thousand times. You see Yammie holding the EEG leads, and then she falls down. Maybe she conducted an electric current through her hands. Or the head conducted one into her. I know it sounds fantastic.”

  “Fantastic? Try lunatic,” Parsifal said. “I’ve had enough of this.” On his way out, he stopped by the sectioned skull. “You should clean your necropolis,” he declared to the roomful of people. “It’s no wonder you’re hatching such medieval rubbish.” He opened a magazine and dropped it over the hadal head, then stalked out. From the tent of glossy pages, the hadal eyes seemed to peer out at them.

  Mary Kay was trembling, shaken by Parsifal’s vehemence.

  “Forgive us,” Thomas said to her. “We’re used to one another’s passions and dramas. We sometimes forget ourselves in public.”

  “I think we should have some coffee,” Vera declared. “Is there a place we can collect our thoughts?”

  Mary Kay led them to a small conference room with a coffee machine. A monitor on the wall overlooked the laboratory. The smell of coffee was a welcome relief from the chemical and decay stench. Thomas got them all seated and insisted on serving them. He made sure Mary Kay got the first cup. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said.

  “Actually,” Rau said quietly after Parsifal was gone, “we shouldn’t be so surprised.”

  “And why not?” Thomas said.

  “We’re talking about old-fashioned reincarnation. If you go back in time, you find versions of the theory are almost universal. For twenty thousand years the Australian aborigines have tracked an unbroken chain of ancestors in their infants. You find it everywhere, in many peoples, from Indonesians to Bantus to Druids. You get thinkers like Plato and Empedocles and Pythagoras and Plotinus trying to describe it. The Orphic mysteries and the Jewish Cabala took a crack at it. Even modern science has investigated the activity. It’s quite accepted where I come from, a perfectly natural phenomenon.”

  “But I just can’t accept that, in a laboratory setting, this hadal’s soul passed into another person?”

  “Soul?” said Rau. “In Buddhism there’s no such thing as soul. They talk about an undifferentiated stream of being that passes from one existence to another. Samsara, they call it.”

  In part goaded by Thomas’s skepticism, Vera challenged the idea, too. “Since when does rebirth involve epileptic seizures, homicide, and cannibalism? You call this perfectly natural?”

  “All I can say is that birth doesn’t always happen without problems,” Rau said. “Why should rebirth? As for the devastation”—and he gestured at the TV view of destruction—“that may have to do with man’s limited capacity for memory. Perhaps, as Dr. Koenig described, memory is a matter of electrical wiring. But memory is also a maze. An abyss. Who knows where it goes?”

  “What was your question about lab animals, Rau?”

  “I was just trying to eliminate other possibilities,” he answered. “Classically, the transfer occurs between a dying adult and an infant or animal. But in this case the hadal had only this young woman at hand. And it found an occupied house, so to speak. Now it’s disabling Dr. Yamamoto’s memory in order to make room for itself.”

  “But why now?” asked Mary Kay. “Why all of a sudden, like this?”

  “I can only guess,” Rau said. “You told me your mechanical blade was about to dissect the hippocampus. Maybe this was the hadal memory’s way of defending itself. By invading new territory.”

  “It invaded her? That’s an odd way of putting it.”

  “You westerners,” said Rau, “you mistake reincarnation with a sociable act, like a handshake or a kiss. But rebirth is a matter of dominion. Of occupation. Of colonization, if you will. It’s like one country seizing land from another, and interposing its own people and language and government. Before long, Aztecs are speaking Spanish, or Mohawks are speaking English. And they start to forget who they once were.”

  “You’re substituting metaphors for common sense,” said Thomas. “It doesn’t get us any closer to our goal, I’m afraid.”

  “But think about it,” said Rau. He was getting excited. “A passage of continuous memory. An unbroken strand of consciousness, eons long. It could help explain his longevity. From man’s narrow historical perspective, it could make him seem eternal.”

  “Who’s this you’re talking about?” Mary Kay asked.

  “Someone we’re looking for,” Thomas said. “No one.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry.” After all she’d shared with them, her hurt was evident.

  “It’s a game we play,” Vera rushed to explain, “nothing more.”

  The video monitor on the wall behind them had no sound, or else they might have noticed the initial flurry of action in the laboratory. Mary Kay’s pager beeped and she looked down at it, then suddenly whirled in her chair to see the screen. “Yammie,” she groaned.

  People were rushing through the laboratory. Someone shouted at the monitor, a soundless cry. “What?” said Vera.

  “Code Blue.” And Mary Kay flew out the door. A half-minute later, she reappeared on the monitor.

  “What’s happening?” asked Rau.

  Vera turned her wheelchair to face the monitor. “They’re losing the poor girl. She’s in cardiac arrest. Look, here comes the crash wagon.”

  Thomas was on his feet, watching the screen intently. Rau joined him. “Now what?” he said.

  “Those are the shock
paddles,” Vera said. “To jump-start her heart again.”

  “You mean she’s dead?”

  “There’s a difference between biological and clinical death. It may not be too late.”

  Under Mary Kay’s direction, several people were shoving aside tables and wrecked machinery, making room for the heavy crash wagon. Mary Kay reached for the paddles and held them upright. To the rear, a woman was waving the electric plug in one hand, frantically casting around for an outlet.

  “But they mustn’t do that!” Rau cried.

  “They have to try,” said Vera.

  “Didn’t anyone understand what I was talking about?”

  “Where are you going, Rau?” Thomas barked. But Rau was alreadygone.

  “There he is,” said Vera, pointing at the screen.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” Thomas said.

  Still wearing his cowboy hat, Rau shouldered aside a burly policeman and made a sprightly hop over a spilled chair. They watched as people backed away from the stainless-steel table, exposing Yamamoto to the camera. The frail young woman lay still, tied and taped to the table, with wires leading off to machines. As Rau approached, Mary Kay stood her ground on the far side, shock paddles poised. He was arguing with her.

  “Oh, Rau!” Vera despaired. “Thomas, we have to get him out of there. This is a medical emergency.”

  Mary Kay said something to a nurse, who tried to lead Rau away by the arm. But Rau pushed her. A lab tech grabbed him by the waist, and Rau doggedly held on to the edge of the metal table. Mary Kay leaned to place the paddles. The last thing Vera saw on the monitor was the body arching.

  With Thomas pushing the wheelchair, they hurried to the laboratory, dodging cops, firemen, and staff in the hallway. They encountered a gurney loaded with equipment, and that consumed another precious minute. By the time they reached the lab, the drama was over. People were leaving the room. A woman stood at the door with one hand to her eyes.

  Inside, Vera and Thomas saw a man draped partway across the table, his head laid next to Yamamoto’s, sobbing. The husband, Vera guessed. Still holding the shock paddles, Mary Kay stood to one side, staring vacantly. An attendant spoke to her. When she didn’t respond, he simply took the paddles from her hands. Someone else patted her on the back, and still she didn’t move.

  “Good heavens, was Rau right?” whispered Vera. They wove through the wreckage as Yamamoto’s body was covered and lifted onto a stretcher. They had to wait for the stream of people to pass. The husband followed the bearers out.

  “Dr. Koenig?” said Thomas. Wires cluttered the gleaming table.

  She flinched at his voice, and raised her eyes to him. “Father?” she said, dazed.

  Vera and Thomas exchanged a concerned look.

  “Mary Kay?” Vera said. “Are you all right?”

  “Father Thomas? Vera?” said Mary Kay. “Now Yammie’s gone, too? Where did we go wrong?”

  Vera exhaled. “You had me scared,” she said. “Come here, child. Come here.” Mary Kay knelt by the wheelchair. She buried her face against Vera’s shoulder.

  “Rau?” Thomas asked, glancing around. “Now where did he go?”

  Abruptly, Rau burst from his hiding place in a heap of readout paper and piled cables. He moved so quickly, they barely knew it was he. As he raced past Vera’s wheelchair, one hand hooked wide, and Mary Kay grunted and bent backward in pain. Her lab jacket suddenly gaped open from shoulder to shoulder, and red marked the long slash wound. Rau had a scalpel.

  Now they saw the lab tech who had tried to pry Rau loose from the table. He sat slumped with his entrails across his legs.

  Thomas yelled something at Rau. It was a command of some kind, not a question. Vera didn’t know Hindi, if that’s what it was, and was too shocked to care.

  Rau paused and looked at Thomas, his face distorted with anguish and 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.