The Descent

by Jeff Long

  Ike gripped his knife. The girl looked at the black blade, and Ali guessed what she was thinking. Raised hadal, she would immediately suspect the most murderous intention.

  Instead, Ike offered the knife to her. Ali watched the girl’s eyes cut back and forth from him to her. Perhaps she was recalling some kindness they had done for her, or a mercy shown. Perhaps she saw something in Ike’s face that belonged to her, a connection with her own mirror. Whatever her equation, she made her decision.

  The girl turned her head away for a moment. When she looked back, the barbarians were gone.

  I went down to the

  moorings of the mountains;

  The earth with its bars

  closed behind me forever;

  Yet You have brought up my

  life from the pit.

  —JONAH 2:6

  28

  THE ASCENT

  Like a fish with beautiful green scales, Thomas lay beached on the stone floor, mouth gaping, wordless, dying, surely. His strings were cut. Below the neck, he could not move a muscle or feel his body, which was a mercy, given the scorched wreckage left by Shoat’s bullet. And yet he was in agony.

  With every labored breath he could smell the burnt meat on his bones. Open his eyes, and his assassin hung before him. Close them, and he could hear his nations stubbornly waiting for his great transition. His greatest torment was that the fire had seared his larynx and he could not command his people to disperse.

  He opened his eyes and there was Shoat on the cross, teeth bared. They had done an exquisite job of it, driving the nails through the holes in his wrists, arranging small ledges for his buttocks and feet so that he would not hang by his arms and asphyxiate. The crucifix had been positioned at Thomas’s feet so that he could enjoy the human’s agony.

  Shoat was going to last for weeks up there. A hank of meat dangled at his shoulder so that he could feed himself. His elbows had been dislocated and his genitals mutilated; otherwise he was relatively intact. Decorations had been cut into his flesh. His ears and nostrils had been jingle-bobbed. Lest anyone think the prisoner had no owner, the symbol for Older-than-Old had been branded onto his face.

  Thomas turned his head away from the grim creation. They could not know that Shoat’s presence gave him no pleasure. Each view only enraged him more. It was this man who had been planting the contagion along the Helios expedition’s trail, yet Thomas could not interrogate him to learn the insidious details. He could not abort the genocide. He could not warn his children and send them fleeing into the deeper unknown. Finally, most enraging, he could not let go of this ravaged shell and cross into a new body. He could not die and be reborn.

  It was not for lack of new receptacles. For days now, Thomas had been surrounded by rings of females in every stage of pregnancy or new motherhood, and the smell of their scented bodies and breast milk was in the air. For a minute he saw not living women, but Stone Age Venuses.

  In the hadal tradition, they were overfed and gloriously pampered during their maternity. Like women of any great tribe, they wore wealth upon their naked bodies: plastic poker chips or coins from a dozen nations had been stitched together for necklaces, colored string and feathers and seashells had been woven into their hair. Some were covered in dried mud and looked like the earth itself coming to life.

  Their waiting was a form of deathwatch, but also of nativity. They were offering the contents of their wombs for his use. Those with newborns periodically held them aloft, hoping to catch his attention. Each mother’s greatest desire was that the messiah would enter her own child, even though it would mean his obliterating the soul already in formation.

  But Thomas was holding himself back. He saw no alternative. Shoat’s presence was a minute-by-minute reminder that the virus was out there, set to annihilate his people. To try and inhabit a developed mind meant risking his own memory. And what was the use of reincarnating into the body of an infant, if he was helpless to warn about the impending plague? No, he was better residing in this body. As a precaution, he—and January and Branch—had been vaccinated by a military doctor at that Antarctic base many months ago, when the presence of prion capsules was first being revealed. Even racked and paralyzed, this shot, burned shell was at least inoculated against the contagion.

  And so their king lay in a body that was a tomb, caught between choices. Death was sorrow. But as the Buddha had once said, birth was sorrow, too. Priests and shamans from throughout the hadal world went on drumming and murmuring. The children went on crying. Shoat went on writhing and mewling. Off to one side, the daughter of Isaac continued her fascination with the computer, tapping at keys endlessly, a monkey with a typewriter.

  Thomas closed his eyes against the nightmare he had become.

  After a week of climbing, Ike and Ali reached the serpentine sea. The last of the Helios rafts rested near the lip of its discharge, which plunged into a waterfall, miles deep. It circled in an eddy by the shore like a faithful steed. A single paddle was still lashed to one pontoon.

  “Climb in,” whispered Ike, and Ali gratefully lowered herself onto the rubber flooring. Ike had kept them moving almost constantly since their escape. There had been no time to hunt or forage, and she was weak with hunger.

  Ike pushed the raft out from shore, but did not begin paddling. “Do you recognize any of this?” he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “The trails go in every direction. I’ve lost my thread, Ali. I don’t know which way to go.”

  “Maybe this will help,” said Ali. She opened a thin leather sack tied around her waist, and drew out Shoat’s homing device.

  “It was you,” Ike said. “You stole it.”

  “Walker’s men kept beating Shoat. I thought they might kill him. This seemed like something we might need someday.”

  “But the code …”

  “He kept repeating a sequence of numbers in his delirium. I don’t know if it was the code or not, but I memorized it.”

  Ike squatted on his heels beside her. “See what happens.”

  Ali hesitated. What if it didn’t work? She carefully touched the numbers on the keypad and waited. “Nothing’s happening.”

  “Try again.”

  This time a red light flashed for ten seconds. The tiny display read ARMED. There was a single high-pitched beep, and the display read DEPLOYED. After that the red light died out.

  “Now what?” Ali despaired.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Ike said, and threw the box in the water. He fished out a square coin he’d found on the trail. It was very old, with a dragon on one side and Chinese calligraphy on the other. “Heads, we go left. Tails, right.” He gave it a flip.

  They climbed away from the luminescent waters of the sea and its rivers and streams into a dead zone separating their worlds. They had bypassed the region on their descent via the Galápagos elevator system, but Ike had dipped into this barrier zone on other travels. It was too deep for photosynthesis to support a surficial food chain, and yet too contaminated by the surface for the subplanetary biosphere to survive. Few animals passed up or down between those worlds, none by accident. Only the desperate crossed through this lifeless, tubular desert.

  Ike backed them away from the dead zone, found a cavity that Ali could capably defend, then went hunting. At the end of a week he returned with long strings of dried meat, and she did not ask its source. With these provisions, they reentered the dead zone.

  Their progress was hampered by boulder chokes, hadal fetishes, and booby traps. It was also made difficult by their gain in altitude. The air pressure was decreasing as they approached sea level. Physiologically they were climbing a mountain, and simple walking became an exertion. Where the path turned vertical and they had to scale cracks or inside tubes, Ali’s lungs sometimes felt near to bursting.

  She sat up gasping for air one night. After that, Ike employed an old Himalayan rule of thumb: climb high, sleep low. They would ascend through the tunnels to a hig
h point, then descend a thousand feet or so for the night. In that way, neither of them developed pulmonary or cerebral edema. Nevertheless, Ali suffered headaches and was visited by occasional hallucinations.

  They had no way to track time or chart their elevation. She found their ignorance liberating. With no calendar or hour to mark, she was forced into the moment. With every turn, they might see sunlight. But after a thousand turns without an end in sight, she relinquished that preoccupation, too.

  Next Thomas heard silence. The plainsong and chants and drumming, the sound of children, the talk of women: it had stopped. All was still. Everywhere the People were asleep, to all appearances exhausted by their vigil and rapture. Their silence was a relief to the ears of a trained monk.

  Quiet, he wanted to command the crucified lunatic. You’ll wake them.

  Only then did he hear the hiss of aerosol, the fine mist leaking from Shoat’s laptop computer. Thomas worked the air into his scarred lungs, then worked to thrust it out as a shout or a whistle. His people were never waking, though.

  He stared in horror at Shoat. Taking a bite of the meat hanging by his cheek, Shoat stared right back at him.

  Ike’s beard grew. Ali’s golden hair fell almost to her waist. They were not really lost, because they had started their escape with little idea where they were anyway. Ali found comfort in her prayers each morning, but also in her growing closeness with this man. She dreamed of him, even lying in his arms.

  One morning she woke to find Ike facing the wall in his lotus position, much the way she’d first seen him. In the blackness of the dead zone, she could make out the faint glow of a circle painted on the wall. It could have represented some aborigine’s dreamtime or a prehistoric mandala, but she knew from the fortress that it was a map. She entered Ike’s same contemplation, and the lines snaking and crossing one another within the circle took on dimension and direction. Their memory of the wall painting guided them for days to come.

  Badly lamed, Branch entered the ruins of the city of the damned. He had given up finding Ike alive. In truth, fevers and delirium and the poison on that hadal spear had harrowed him so that he could barely remember Ike at all. His wanderings wound deeper less from his initial search than because the earth’s core had become his moon, subtly pulling him into a new orbit. The myriad pathways had reduced to one in his mind. Now here he was.

  All lay still. By the thousands.

  In his confusion, he was reminded of a Bosnian night long ago. Skeletons lay tangled in final embrace. Flowstone had absorbed many of the dead back into the plastic floor. The putrescence had become an atmosphere all its own. Currents of stench whipped around building corners like squalls of rowdy ghosts. The one sound, besides the whistle of abyssal wind, was of water in canals slicing away at the city’s underbelly.

  Branch meandered through the apocalypse.

  In the center of the city he came to a hill studded with the ruins of an edifice. He scanned it through his night scope. There was a cross on top, and it held a body. The cross drew him as a childhood relic, a vestige of some Arthurian impulse.

  His bad leg, plus the closely packed dead, made the climb arduous. That reminded him of Ike, who had talked about his Himalayas with such love. He wondered if Ike might be somewhere around here, perhaps even on that cross.

  The creature on their crucifix had died much more recently than the rest of them, unkindly sustained by a shank of meat. Nearby, a Ranger’s sniper rifle lay broken in pieces beside a laptop computer. Branch couldn’t say whether he’d been a soldier or a scientist. One thing was certain, this was not Ike. He had been newly marked, and the grimace held a jumble of bad teeth.

  As he turned to leave, Branch noticed the corpse of a hadal dressed in a suit of regal jade. Unlike the others, this one was perfectly preserved, at least from the neck up. That curiosity led to another. The man’s face looked familiar to him. Bending closer, he recognized the priest. How could he have come to be here? It was he who’d called with information of Ike’s innocence, and Branch wondered if he’d descended to save Ike, too. What a shock hell must have been for a Jesuit. He stared at the face, straining to summon the good man’s name.

  “Thomas,” he suddenly remembered.

  And Thomas opened his eyes.

  NEW GUINEA

  They stood stock-still in the mouth of a nameless cave, with the jungle spread before them. All but naked, a little raving, Ali resorted to what she knew, and began to offer a hoarse prayer of thanks.

  Like her, Ike was blinded and shaken and afraid, not of the sun above the ropelike canopy, or of the animals, or of whatever waited for him out there. It was not the world that frightened him. Rather, he did not know who he was about to become.

  There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer—and no matter how many mountains he had left behind—it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

  Not trusting his voice, he circled Ali with his arms.