by Jeff Long
* Always wear backcountry survival beacons in case of rock slide, earthquake, flood, or animal attack. Always carry backup light sources.
Happy hunting!
3
BENEATH THE NORTH PACIFIC FLOOR
They paused in their great walkabout, lightless, nine of them, resting on their haunches. The last in line, Li, idly fiddled with the growths covering his head. His fingers toyed with the coral-like horns, tracing the bumps and buds that boiled from his skull. Every day the configuration was a little different, a little more advanced. Like their long journey, his helmet of bone was relentlessly building upon itself.
Up the line, one of them groaned quietly. For three days he’d been trying to pass a stone in his urine. No one suggested slowing down for him. Each of them had suffered torments along the way, and you kept up for the sake of the band. You just did. Pain couldn’t kill you, and there was too much territory to cover with too little time. They were in a footrace against the hordes of man.
Li didn’t need his nose anymore to smell the human trespass. You could taste it in the air. The rancid stench breathed through the living tunnels. For days now, he and his comrades had been picking up traces of the colonial advance. Sewage and chemicals poisoned the subterranean waters that flowed down to them. It burned their skin and roiled their stomachs. Man was a curse. A weed.
He wished he could lead their little band away from the civilization looming ahead. For almost two years they had been picking their way through the remotest arms of the deepest mazes, keeping one step ahead of the mushrooming colonies. Before it was too late, before the hordes completely overran the warren of tunnels shooting through this part of the planet, they were visiting what remained of the People, to bear witness.
In one collapsed city after another, Li and his comrades had clambered among painted acropolises, and coliseums carved in one piece from the bedrock, and spires whittled from stalagmites, and passageways decorated with cryptic lettering and images. Where rivers had cut underground canyons, they had walked between giant statues of kings whose names were probably lost forever. Ancient canals had worn away to broad mineral deltas. What you took from the stone returned to the stone.
The faintest tap-tap of an insect’s feet came to Li’s ear. Slowly, still squatting, he turned to face the wall. As his eyesight had atrophied, or rather altered, his other senses had sharpened. He could smell the difference in minerals. He could feel shapes by the sound of his voice bouncing back. He could sense colors without seeing them.
It came again, that slight tap-tap, the cautious telegraph of escape. The insect sensed his presence. Too late. With a swift motion, Li trapped it under his cupped palm.
He removed it carefully, still alive, and let the details tell him what kind of insect this was. It mattered. Some carried bizarre toxins in their vessels. Inside their bodies, some had barbs built that released during digestion. This one was harmless. It had the familiar length and weight of a common cave beetle. Coleoptera bailey, he had named the species.
With a flick of a finger, he killed it. He broke off the wings and the head with its long antennae, opened the body, and stripped out its innards. The meat and shell crunched between his teeth, nutlike. Yes, beetle, definitely.
They were constantly on the prowl for such snacks. Insects, lizards, fish, snakes: anything that had survived the plague, and wasn’t poisonous, fueled their pilgrimage. Living off the land had changed their metabolism. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the bunch of them. They slept three hours a night. Every five days or so, Li laid a hard little turd, which he saved and dried and contributed to the rare campfire.
He had found the rhythm of the depths. Here was home. Unfortunately, not enough of them felt the same way. They were the ones pulling their dark voyage back to the light. Surrendering to nostalgia. It was a useless, one-way longing, though. They were forgotten by now. And there was still so much to record down here. But the majority ruled, and that was that. In these outlands, cohesion was everything. Dissent was death.
“Light,” their leader warned up ahead.
The coral man shielded his eyes. A blue penlight clicked on. It burned too brightly for a minute, or seemed to, then dimmed to a bearable round bead.
“John,” said his neighbor.
John Li took away his hands. He blinked at the sight ahead.
Dressed in rags, or loincloths, some of them, his comrades looked like a row of monstrosities. In fact they were, lusus naturae, freaks of nature…bearded, shaggy haired, bearing satchels and backpacks and scratched, battered tubes and boxes housing their scientific instruments. Every man sported sores, fungal rot, spider and sand-lice bites, scars in various stages of healing, bruises, and the burn marks they’d gotten while crossing an intramarginal hot zone. What really made them birds of a feather, though, were their deformities.
The depths had grown on them in more ways than one. Even as they had acclimated over the months to the darkness and isolation and endless hunger, even as they had acquired some sense of the flora, fauna, geology, and lost culture of this realm, even as Li and others had fallen in love with it, the subterranean world had quietly been at work infecting them.
They had come prepared, or so they’d thought. But their motion sensors had proved useless, for there were no large animals, much less hadals, left to defend against. Their radiation badges and gas detectors had alerted them to the defined dangers, but not the undefined ones. They had learned the hard way that there were rare gases, acids, salts, and liquids never classified by man. Once they got back to the surface with their discoveries, the table of elements was going to grow another few appendages. In short, the explorers had unwittingly become guinea pigs in the Subterrain. For what it was worth, they weren’t the first. The hadals had been enduring—indeed, celebrating—these and other mutations for millennia.
Skeletal warp, it was called. Osteitis deformans, or Paget’s disease. Skeletal tissue went wild, raging through cycles of breakdown and rampant growth. As a result, Li and his companions all had misshapen skulls and bizarrely shaped horns. The good news was that the disease was not a cancer. The bone growth didn’t invade their cranial cavities. It didn’t impair their intellect.
The bad news was that, in varying degrees and shapes, NASA’s North Pacific Subterrain Exploration team number two had turned into a pack of elephant men. Or a flock of fiends. Or a gaggle of gargoyles. They had made a game of it, sitting in the darkness, cracking each other up. A pride of ogres. A murder of monsters. A drift of demons. A sleuth of brutes. Maybe, Li thought, the bone growths had impaired their intellect after all.
Li preferred the term “charm,” used for goldfinches, or better yet, “watch,” as in a watch of nightingales. Personally he saw nothing ugly about their metamorphoses. It was a mark of passage. God’s way of speaking through your body. But Li understood the group’s black humor. Underneath all the quiet joking, they were terrified. Most had families out there. One version of them had gone down into the earth, and another version was about to come out. Would their children and wives still recognize them?
“The station can’t be far now,” said their leader, Watts. He had a Medusa head of calcium serpents. Next to him, holding the penlight, Childs—who knew more sheep jokes than any other man alive—had a unicorn shaft growing from his forehead. In the orb of blue light, Watts rolled up his dog-eared maps.
They were describing a huge two-year circle, returning to their departure point, the Sitka Station beneath Baranof Island, off the Alaskan shore. If not for circling back upon themselves, their maps would have been useless. They only knew where they’d been, not where they were going. GPS didn’t work down here. Magnetic north got fouled by gremlins in the Subterrain: strange, wandering electromagnetic fields. Most radars couldn’t penetrate this deep. Only low-frequency radio waves worked, though even they were subject to still unexplained anomalies.
“We don’t need to do this, you know,” said a half-naked biologist wearing Adidas runni
ng shorts.
“We know, Bill,” someone said.
“We can still go back,” said Bill. “Down. Deeper.”
“Bill, we voted.”
“But think about it,” Bill said, “think about the things waiting for us.”
It was true. Who could say what else lay in the far tunnels? They had sampled just a tiny fraction of the underworld. They had found strangeness and beauty, like in a dream.
Li remembered. They had crossed a bottle green desert made of ground limestone, fine as powdered sugar, with little tongues of flame for flowers: a hot five days of trekking.
Braced for more and more fierce heat, because the inner earth was supposed to be a place of fiery rock, they had descended instead into cold zones with ice that threatened to clog the passageways. The ice came from glaciers dyed pink and orange, whole fields of crevassed glaciers filled with plankton, yes, plankton carried from ancient, now buried seas. Still alive, too. Thaw the ice and they wriggled about under the microscope.
In one tunnel they had walked barefoot upon an anaerobic moss that was the largest living life-form on the planet, miles long and eons old.
They had found the bones of bizarre animals that could have wandered straight out of—or into—a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The species variation was incredible. The mutation rate was off the scale.
Somehow evolution had superaccelerated down here. More astonishing yet, acquired traits got passed along as inherited traits. The trend ran counter to all that was Darwinian. It verged on Lamarck’s theory, which held that giraffes stretching their necks for food would have offspring with longer necks. No one had bought that idea for almost two hundred years. But here it was, a menagerie of proofs, in effect, that pigs could fly. Or hadals, apparently, some of them. Wings. Webbed feet. Scales. Claws. You name it. Remarkable, truly.
And then there were the ancient cities melting away as minerals invaded, and the seemingly endless network of paths, lanes, stairways, and bridges over black rivers…the architecture of a once great people. And their bodies and bones. Tens of thousands of them, unceremoniously felled by the plague and left unburied. In the beginning, Li and a few others had attempted mass graves. But there were too many remains and it took too much energy, and future colonists would only excavate the bones to grind for animal feed and fertilizer.
For that very reason, when four of their members had drowned in a river accident eighteen months ago, they’d gone to great lengths to mark their graves as human. Li was pretty sure even that wouldn’t stop the colonists, though. Everything was getting ransacked down here. Progress was the watchword. It was Manifest Destiny all over again, except this time the Wild West was four miles deep and perforated the crust of the entire earth.
What more might be waiting for them deeper? More gold, more glory, more species, more cities. Someone else would have to find out. Team two of NASA’s Subterrain Exploration was going home.
No one replied to Joe. It was over. At some point it had to be over.
Li had to restrain himself. Like Joe, he would have been happy to stay under for years to come, meandering and exploring. But unlike Joe, he had not fought when the group voted to turn around and finally start their retreat. For months he had been hearing the yearning when they murmured in their sleep. You could not fight heartache. Yes, their grand exploration was drawing to a close.
Their team of geologists, biologists, and a botanist had been dispatched to map and catalog regions lying beneath the northern third of the North Pacific Ocean. Sooner than later, like it or not, the stone frontier was going to be occupied and stripped of its natural resources. Like true field scientists, even the Republicans among them had come to wish this dark wilderness could be preserved as it was.
There were wonders down here that defied their combined sciences, a design whose shape and purpose Li had merely glimpsed in this darkness. He had always prided himself on his atheism. It was a measure of his rational mind. How ironic then that this literal, physical hell should usher God into his life.
He had always disliked those scientist-believers who couldn’t seem to come down on one side or the other of the issue, the types who rigorously arrived at a big bang theory, for instance, and then conceded it might represent the divine spark. To him such gymnastics amounted to intellectual schizophrenia. To superstition dressed in wire-rim glasses.
Yet here he was, swept away like some Biology 101 student by the balance and symmetry and mystery of it all. Just when science had finally nailed together a tidy explanation for the workings of the planet, this other planet inside the planet had wrecked the whole neat scheme. Humans, meet your long-lost cousins. It was like suddenly meeting a secret roommate who has been sharing your skin with you since birth. Most troubling. In such close quarters, sharing this chunk of rock circling the sun, how could they never have met?
In the old days, mapmakers had concocted fictional continents called Australia and Antarctica to serve as counterweights to real continents. And then the fictional continents had become real ones. Such was this, a secret mirror reflecting the unknown to the known, an inner world that inverted the outer world, a dark truth to match the sunlit one above, a perfect balance of stone, air, and animals.
The yin/yang of his revelation embarrassed Li, and so he had not spoken about it to anyone else on the expedition. Indeed, for a time he dismissed his notion of harmony as a cosmological itch born of his Chinese-American heritage. But then Li discovered he wasn’t the only one thinking such thoughts, nor the first, not by a long shot. He had found his notion confirmed, exactly confirmed, written in stone. Carved in it. By hadals.
Not being a cryptographer or archeologist, Li had no definite idea what the hadals had been communicating with their glyphs, writings, and other cave art. Like the others, he had snapped photos of the more remarkable examples, and speculated on the meaning of this or that rune or symbol. Underneath their bloody-mindedness, the hadals had apparently been a whimsical race. They had left stylized depictions of flowers, animals, the sun and moon, along with murals and tableaux of wars waged and humans sacrificed, their hearts pulled out, their heads chopped off, their skins flayed. Very Aztec.
Then one day Li had found something that took him beyond the superficial, and turned his universe upside down. Or inside out. There, cut into the base of a high obelisk, was a yin/yang symbol. It was unmistakable, the circle enclosing conjoined opposites…and yet probably fifteen to twenty thousand years older than the Chinese sign.
That had been the beginning of his sympathy for the devil, so to speak. He was doing his best not to get carried away with it. Only a fool would romanticize the hadals as noble savages. Everywhere Li looked, he had found a culture built on slavery and murder. Even at the height of their civilization, they had used humankind as their cattle. In their pictograms, in statuary, in the iron chains and shackles and cages used to secure human prisoners, in the drinking cups made of human skulls, the hadals had celebrated sadism and bloodletting and predation.
And yet, at the same time, only a fool would ignore the civilization they had built down here, so far from the sun, one might almost say so far from God. For two years now, the ghosts of the hadals had been speaking to him, not with their sad piles of preserved flesh and bones, but with the glory of their ruins.
While humankind had still been figuring how to put iron in the fire and seeds in the ground, the hadals were sculpting domed monuments to emperors. Their Michelangelos were engraving magnificent bas-reliefs, their da Vincis were inventing, their Newtons were arriving at basic truths. Li had found math equations etched into slabs overgrown with yellow and blue lichen. Yes, whole theorems, using hadal numbers and symbols!
In this perpetual night, dynasties had replaced other dynasties while their cousins, H. sapiens, were still loping about on the surface terrifying the mastodons to death. While man was just beginning to daub ochre bison onto cave ceilings, the history of the hadal empire had been written and forgotten. And not only the history
of their empire, but also of their religion. Because Li was convinced they had worshipped a single deity.
The rest of his team refused to grant the hadals a god. It was still an affront to them that an offshoot of H. erectus had preceded man in every aspect. That the evidence now showed human civilization had probably leaked to the surface world, borne by escaped slaves. That man was not the first. How could it be that mutants, mere hominids, these slope-browed primitives, these living fossils, could have been our superiors, ever? God was the answer, or so the politicians and evangelists—more and more they were the same—would have you believe. Something had to distinguish us from them, and so people had fastened on to monotheism as the grand event that had catapulted humans past hadals.
But Li had walked through huge structures that could only have been cathedrals and temples at one time. Even after all these eons, their acoustics were crisp and precise. A voice at the front carried through the whole chamber. Whose voice but a hadal bishop’s or rabbi’s or imam’s or rinpoche’s?
And how else did you explain the presence of the same recurring glyphs and images and spirals carved in the walls leading to the most impressive buildings in each hadal city? Prehistoric graffiti, his scientific companions said, dismissing it. God, Li knew. The hadals had found the sacred down here. How could they not? Who else but God could have created—and hidden—a world of such beauty and wonders? The only question in Li’s mind was what kind of god they had worshipped, a dark one or a light one, or one that embraced it all, including the crickets.
“A little more,” Watts said to them. He stood. The rest of them stood. Their coral branches of horns scratched against the tunnel ceiling. After two years of walking, they were all leg muscle.
Bill stayed squatting. He wasn’t going any farther with them. It would mean the end of him eventually. There were no hadals to dodge. But somewhere in the darkness a rock slide or a swift current of black water or an insect with venom had his name on it. Or he would simply starve. No one argued with him. He no longer existed. They walked past him. Not one so much as murmured a good-bye.