by Jeff Long
After that, Ali was given a diet of insects and small fish. She forced it down. The trek went on. Her legs ached at night from striking against rocks. Ali welcomed the pain. It was a way not to mourn for a while. Perhaps if she’d been carrying arrows like the mercenaries were, it would have been possible not to mourn at all. But the reality was always there, waiting. Ike was dead.
At last they reached the remains of a city so old it was more like a mountain in collapse. This was their destination. Ali knew because they finally took off her blindfold and she was able to walk without being guided.
Weary, frightened, mesmerized, Ali picked her way higher. The city was up to its neck in a tropical glacier of flowstone, which spun off a faint incandescence. The result was less light than gloom, and that was enough. Ali could see that the city lay at the bottom of an enormous chasm. A slow mineral flood had all but swallowed much of the city, but many of the structures were erect and honeycombed with rooms. The walls and colonnades were embellished with carved animals and depictions of ancient hadal life, all of it blended in subtle arabesques.
Debauched by time and geological siege, the city was nevertheless inhabited, or at least in use. To Ali’s shock, thousands of hadals—tens of thousands, for all she knew—had come to rest in this place. Here lay the answer to where the hadals had gone. From around the world, they had poured down to this sanctuary. Just as Ike had said, they were in flight. This was their exodus.
As the war party threaded through the city, Ali saw toddlers resting against their mothers’ thighs, exhausted with flu. She looked, but there were very few infants or aged in the listless mob. Weapons of all types lay on the ground, apparently too heavy to lift.
In their listlessness, the hadals imparted a sense of having reached the end of the earth. It had always been a mystery to Ali why refugees—no matter what race—stopped where they did, why they didn’t keep going on. There was a fine line between a refugee and a pioneer; and it had to do with momentum once you crossed a certain border. Why had these hadals not continued deeper? she wondered.
They climbed a hill in the center of the city. At the top, the remnants of a building stood above the amberlike flowstone. Ali was led into a hallway that spiraled within the ruins. Her prison cell was a library. They left her alone.
Ali looked around, astounded by the treasury. This was to be her hell, then, a library of undeciphered text? If so, they’d matched the wrong punishment with her. They had left a clay lamp for her like those Ike had lit. A small flame twitched at the snout of oil.
Ali started to explore by its light, but wasn’t careful enough carrying it, and the flame guttered out. She stood in the darkness, filled with uncertainty, scared and lonely. Suddenly the journey caught up with her, and she simply lay down and fell asleep.
When Ali woke, hours later, a second lamp was flickering in the room’s far corner. As she approached the flame, a figure rose against the wall, wrapped in rags and a burlap cloak. “Who are you?” a man’s voice demanded. He sounded weary and spiritless, like a ghost. Ali rejoiced. Clearly he was a fellow prisoner. She wasn’t alone!
“Who are you?” she asked, and folded the man’s hood back from his face.
It was beyond belief. “Thomas!” she cried.
“Ali!” he grated. “Can it be?”
She embraced him, and felt the bones of his back and rib cage.
The Jesuit had the same furrowed face as when she’d first met him at the museum in New York. But his brow had thickened and he had weeks of grizzled beard, and his hair was long and gray and thick with filth. Crusted blood matted his hair. His eyes were unchanged. They’d always been deeply traveled.
“What have they done to you?” she asked. “How long have you been here? Why are you in this place?”
She helped the old man sit, and brought water for him to drink. He rested against the wall and kept patting her hand, overjoyed. “It’s the Lord’s will,” he kept repeating.
For hours they exchanged their stories. He had come looking for her, Thomas said, once news of the expedition’s disappearance reached the surface. “Your benefactor, January, was tireless in reminding me of the Beowulf group’s responsibilities to you. Finally I decided there was only one thing to do. Search for you myself.”
“But that’s absurd,” said Ali. A man his age, and all alone.
“And yet, look,” said Thomas.
He’d descended from a tunnel in Javanese ruins, praying against the darkness, guessing at the expedition’s trajectory. “I wasn’t very good at it,” he confessed. “In no time I got lost. My batteries wore down. I ran out of food. When the hadals found me, it was more an act of charity than capture. Who can say why they didn’t kill me? Or you?”
Ever since, Thomas had languished among these mounds of text. “I thought they’d leave my bones here among the books,” he said. “But now you’re here!”
In turn, Ali told of the expedition’s sad demise. She related Ike’s self-immolation in the hadal fortress. “But are you sure he died?” Thomas asked.
“I saw it myself.” Her voice caught. Thomas expressed his condolences.
“It was God’s will,” Ali recovered. “And it was His will that led us here, to this library. Now we shall attempt to accomplish the work we were meant for. Together we may come closer to the original word.”
“You are a remarkable woman,” Thomas said.
They set about the task with acute focus, grouping texts and comparing observations. At first delicately, then avidly, they examined the books, leaves, codices, scrolls, and tablets. None of it was shelved neatly. It was almost as if the mass of writings had accumulated here like a pile of snowflakes. Setting the lamp to one side, they burrowed into the largest pile.
The material on top was the most current, some in English or Japanese or Chinese. The deeper they worked, the older the writings were. Pages disintegrated in Ali’s fingers. On others, the ink had foxed through layer after layer of writings. Some books were locked tight with mineral seep. But much of it yielded lettering and glyphs. Luckily the room was spacious, because they soon had a virtual tree of languages laid out on the floor, pile by pile of books.
At the end of five days, Ali and Thomas had excavated alphabets no linguist had ever seen. Stepping back from their work, it was obvious to Ali they’d barely made a dent in the heaped writings. Here lay the beginnings of all literature, all history. In a sense, it promised to contain the beginnings of memory, human and hadal both. What might lie at its center?
“We need to rest. We need to pace ourselves,” Thomas cautioned. He had a bad cough. Ali helped him to his corner, and forced herself to sit, too. But she was excited.
“Ike told me once, the hadals want to be like us,” she said. “But they’re already like us. And we’re like them. This is the key to their Eden. It won’t give them back their ancient regime. But it can bind them, and give them concordance as a people. It can bridge the gap between them and us. This is the beginning of their return to the light. Or at least of the sovereignty of their race. Maybe we can find a mutual language. Maybe we can make a place for them among us. Or they can make a place for us among them. But it all starts here.”
The torture of Walker’s men began. Their screams drifted up to Ali and Thomas. Periodically the sounds tapered off. After a night of silence, Ali was certain the men had died. But then the screaming started again. With pauses, it would go on for many days.
Before they could continue their scholarship, Ali and Thomas received a visitor. “He’s the one I told you about,” she whispered to him. “He leads them, I think.”
“You might be right about him,” Thomas said. “But what does he want with us?”
The monster approached with a plastic tube marked HELIOS. It was badly scratched. Ali immediately recognized her map case. He went directly to her, and she could smell fresh blood on him. His feet were bare. He shook out the roll of maps and opened them. “These came into my possession,” he said in his crisp
English.
Ali wanted to ask how, but thought better of it. Obviously, Gitner and his band of scientists had failed to escape. “They’re mine,” she said.
“Yes, I know. The soldiers told me. Also, I’ve studied the maps, and your authorship is clear. Unfortunately they’re not real maps, but only your approximation of things. They show how your expedition proceeded in general. I need more. Details. Detours. Side trips. Diversions. And camps, every camp, every night. Who was in them, who wasn’t. I need everything. You have to re-create the entire expedition for me. It’s crucial.”
Ali glanced at Thomas, fearful. How could she possibly remember it all? “I can try,” she said.
“Try?” The monster was smelling her. “But your very existence depends on your memory. I would do more than try.”
Thomas stepped forward. “I’ll help her,” he volunteered.
“Help her quickly, then,” the monster said. “Now your life depends on it, too.”
On February 11, at 1420 hours and 9,856 fathoms, they reached a cliff overlooking a valley. It was not the bottom of the pit; you could see a gaping hole in the far distance. But it was a geological pause in that abyss they had been following.
Before she tried again to martyr herself, Ike tied his nameless daughter to a horn of rock along the wall. Then he flopped on his stomach along the edge to get a view of the land and sort through his options.
It had the shape and size of a crater, lit with a sienna gloom. Veins of luminous minerals spidered through the encircling walls, and the fog was lambent, flickering like tongues. He could make out the architecture of this enormous hollow, two or three miles across, and its honeycombed walls and the vast, intricate city it cupped.
Five hundred meters beneath his perch, the city occupied the entire floor. It was at once magnificent and destitute. From this height he could clearly see the whole obsolete metropolis.
Spires and pyramids stood in ruins. In the distance, one or two towering structures rose nearly as high as the rim, though their tops had crumbled away. Canals had harrowed the avenues deep, carving meandering canyons. Much was in collapse or flooded or had been overrun with flowstone. Several giant stalactites had grown so heavy they had fallen from the invisible ceiling and speared buildings.
It took Ike time to adjust to the scale of this place. Only then did he begin to distinguish the multitudes. They were so numerous and packed together and enfeebled that all he saw at first was a broad stain upon the floor. But the stain had a slight motion to it, like the slow agitation of glaciers. Here and there, winged creatures launched from cliffside aeries, darting through the fog.
In effect, the refugees were camping not in but atop the old city. He couldn’t make out individual figures from this distance, but he guessed there had to be thousands down there. Tens of thousands. He had been right about the sanctuary.
They must have come from throughout the planet to this single place. Even though Ike had guessed they were migrating to a central location, their numbers astounded him. Haddie was a solitary race, as willing to demolish one another as their enemy, prone to wandering in small, paranoid packs. He’d decided there were probably no more than a few thousand left in the entire subplanet. There had to be fifty times that right here. For them to have gathered this way, and in apparent armistice, it had to be like the end of the world.
Their abundance was good news and bad. It all but guaranteed that Ali would end up in the refugee horde, if she was not already among them. Ike had devised no specific gambit, but had been relying on a much smaller mob to deal with. Finding her from a distance was going to be impossible, and infiltrating them a lengthy nightmare. Just locating her could take months. And all the while he would have to tend the hostage, his daughter. The prospect threw him into a downward spiral. He looked at his watch—Troy’s watch—and noted the time and date and altitude.
He heard the pad of feet, and started to rise up, knife in hand. He had time to see a rifle butt. Then it axed into his face, he felt it clip his temple, and all the brawl went out of him.
By the time Ike revived, he was bound hand to foot with his own rope. He pried his eyes open. His captor was waiting, seated five feet away, barefoot and in rags, sighting on Ike’s face through a U.S. Army night-vision sniperscope. A pair of binoculars hung from his neck. Ike sighed. The Rangers had finally hounded him to earth.
“Wait,” Ike said. “Before you shoot.”
“Sure,” said the man, his face still burrowed behind the rifle and sight.
“Just tell me why.” What had he done to deserve their vengeance?
“Why what, Ike?” The executioner lifted his head.
Ike was thunderstruck. This was no Ranger.
“Surprise,” Shoat said. “I didn’t think it was possible, either, an ordinary joe trumping the great Ike Crockett. But you were easy. Talk about bragging rights. I mug Superman and get the girl.”
Ike couldn’t think of what to say. He looked across at his daughter. Shoat had tightened her bonds. That was significant. He hadn’t shot the girl outright.
Bearded and emaciated, Shoat had not lost his daft grin. He was very pleased with himself. “In certain ways,” he said, “we’re the same guy, you and me. Bottom feeders. We can live off other people’s shit. And we always make sure we know where the back door is. Back at the presidio, I was ready, just like you.”
Ike’s face ached from the rifle butt, but what hurt most was his pride. “You tracked me?” he said.
Shoat patted the rifle with the sniperscope. “Superior technology,” he said. “I could see you from a mile off, clear as day. And once you netted our little bird, things were even easier. I don’t know, Ike, you got slow and you got sloppy. Maybe you’re getting old. Anyhoo”—he glanced behind him over the precipice—“we’ve reached the heart of the matter, haven’t we?”
While Shoat talked, Ike gathered the few clues. A rucksack sat against the wall, half empty. Over near the watchful girl, Shoat had scattered the plastic refuse from a single military rations packet. It told Ike he had been unconscious long enough to be tied, and for Shoat to finish a meal. More important, the man had come alone; there was just one pack and the remains of one MRE. And the MRE meant he was not feeding off the land, probably because he didn’t know how to.
Obviously, Shoat had foraged through the destroyed fortress and found a few essentials: the rifle, some MREs. Ike was mystified. The man had his ticket home; why pursue the depths?
“You should have taken a raft or just started walking,” Ike said. “You could have been partway out of here.”
“I would have, but someone took my most vital asset.” He lifted the leather pouch that hung from his neck like an amulet. Everyone knew it held his homing device. “It guarantees my exit. I didn’t even know it was gone until I needed it. When I opened the pouch, there was only this.” He unlaced the top and shook out a flat jade plate.
Sure enough, Ike saw, someone had stolen his device and replaced it with a piece of antique hadal armor. “Now you want me to guide you out,” he guessed.
“I don’t think that would work very well, Ike. How far could we get before Haddie found us? Or you did me in.”
“What do you want then?”
“My box. That would be nice.”
“Even if we found it, what’s that do for you now?” With or without his homing device, the hadals could still find the man. And Ike could, too.
Shoat smiled cryptically and aimed the jade plate like a TV remote control. “It lets me change the channel.” He made a click sound. “Hate to sound like Mr. Zen, but you’re just an illusion, Ike. And the girl. And all of them down there. None of you exists.”
“But you do?” Ike wasn’t taunting him. This was a key to Shoat’s strangeness.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m like the prime mover. The first cause. Or the last. When all of you are gone, I’ll still be around.”
Shoat knew something, or thought he did, but Ike couldn’t begin to guess wh
at. The man had recklessly followed them into the center of the abyss, and now, surrounded by the enemy, had waylaid his only possible ally in getting out. He could have shot them from a distance at any time over the past several weeks. Instead, he’d saved them for something. There was a logic at work here. Shoat was smart and sane, and dangerous. Ike blamed himself. He’d underestimated the man.
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Ike said. “I didn’t take your box.”
“Of course not. I’ve thought a lot about it. Walker’s boys wouldn’t have bothered with any tricks. They would have just put a bullet through me. You would have, too. So it was someone else, someone who needed to keep the theft quiet. Someone who thinks she knows my code. I’ve got it figured out, Ike. Who it was, and when she took it.”
“The girl?”
“You think I’d let that wild animal close to me? No. I mean Ali.”
“Ali? She’s a nun.” Ike snorted to deride the notion. But who else could it be?
“A very bad nun. Don’t deny it, Ike. I know she’s been playing hide-the-snake with you. I can tell these things, I’ve got good people sense.”
Ike watched him. “So you followed me to follow her.”
“Good boy.”
“I didn’t find her, though.”
“Actually, Ike, you did.”
Shoat grabbed a loop of rope and dragged him to the edge. He draped his binoculars around Ike’s neck, and cautiously loosened the rope binding Ike’s hands to his feet, then backed away, aiming his pistol.
“Take a look,” Shoat announced. “Someone you know is down there. Her and our two-bit warlord. His satanic majesty. The guy who ran off with her.”
Ike wrestled to a sitting position. The news of Ali energized him. His hands were numb from the ropes, but he managed to paw the binoculars into place. He scanned up and down the canals and choked avenues and ruins lit green by the night vision. “Look for a spire, then go left,” Shoat instructed.