by Jeff Long
“I was feeling playful. Call it intelligent design. A whimsy. Take bees. Every bee forms every honeycomb with the same hexagonal template. A random habit? I’ll give you a hint. They weren’t always so neat and orderly.
“Snakes,” the angel continues, “they are painted with the same repeating handful of stripe patterns. Do you think they painted themselves? Petunias and starfish and sand dollars, even jellyfish, those shapeless blobs, all obey the laws of radial symmetry. An accident of nature? Random selection? Consider a butterfly’s wings. The decoration on its left wing is a mirror image of its right wing. Now where do you suppose that came from?”
“You, Lord.”
“I hear your doubt,” says the angel.
“It’s just that you are here, Teacher, and the flowers and butterflies are so far away.”
“Distance is nothing but time, and time I have,” says the angel. “Lots of it. So one fine day I decided to straighten out some of nature’s mess. I tinkered. Here and there I used my own seed. The results weren’t always pleasing. I was working with the material available, the earlier species, and frankly some of my experiments got out of hand. Like any parent, I was hoping for something in my own image, or at least half my image. I was still learning how careful one needs to be in selecting the other half. A word of advice, avoid monitor lizards, moray eels, velociraptors, lions, eagles, and serpents in general.
“For a while, I had quite a rambunctious brood here. They were constantly tearing each other to shreds and attacking me and generally fouling the place. I ended up banishing my children to remote corners of the world, where some still survive, I’m told. They acquired names you’ve possibly heard. Mbembe, Hapai Can, Minotaur, Vritra, Harpy, Leviathan…the list goes on.
“Discouraging as they were, I wasn’t about to admit defeat. I kept at it. I wanted someone like myself to help me pass the time and contemplate the universe and devise my escape. My materials improved over time. I concentrated on the simian tribes, with varying results. One day it all just came together. Voilà. You were born.” The angel’s carefree tone turns dark. “You and all your unfaithful hordes.”
“Unfaithful, Teacher?”
“What would you call it? I ushered you out from the mud, and now you run free and leave me in the darkness. I gave you paradise. You left me in my tomb.”
The disciple does not move a muscle. The angel’s rage has a tangible heat and even a smell, part mineral, part beast. The disciple is sure his time has come. The angel will strike him down now for the unpredictability of his people. But his rage passes as quickly as it came.
“Here I sit,” the angel says. His voice brightens. “Not for much longer though.”
“Please explain, Lord.”
“Things have been set in motion.” The angel bends over a pool of still water. Ever so delicately, he drops a pebble into its center. The water ripples outward. “My deliverance has begun.”
15
SAN FRANCISCO
DECEMBER 5
A crowd began gathering outside the Studio a little after dusk.
Ali was on the top floor with Gregorio and John Li when she noticed the throng massing on the street. They were men this time. Sometimes they used women. Twice they had bused in schoolchildren.
She looked at her watch. Usually the protesters came around noon in order to make the six o’clock news. This gathering was late by that standard, and she didn’t see any news vans or cameramen. She shrugged. Knock yourselves out, gentlemen.
Gregorio joined her at the window. “Another bunch?”
“It’s a free country,” Ali said.
“Who are they this time?”
“Does it matter?”
“I am tired of them,” he said. “Their shouting and flag-waving. The death threats on the phone. Yesterday they scratched my car. This morning I had another flat tire.”
Ali tried to keep things light. “Are we talking about that old rust bucket with the bald tires? The one without paint?”
Gregorio scowled. “Also, they heckle our women,” he said.
By women, he meant her. Of the five other women who worked here, it was Ali alone they targeted in their phone calls and editorials. Gregorio hated it. He didn’t know how to protect her. “People are afraid out there,” she told him. “They’re angry. Now the military has pulled out from the Interior. People feel betrayed. They don’t know what else to do. The children have been missing almost four weeks now.”
Gregorio rapped his knuckles against the window. “Did we steal the children?” he said. “Do we worship Satan? Is this a safe house for the enemy? No. We are scholars.”
She touched his arm. “Then let us get back to our scholarship.”
She turned to the worktable. Li waited for them beneath an ultraviolet lamp. By its light, the stubs of his horns flickered with traces of the radiated iodine he had inadvertently drunk and eaten on his deep journey. His pink eyes glowed purple.
Li was a windfall for the institute. After defecting from NASA (a house, he called it, not a home, especially not for a termite like himself), Li had materialized at the Studio’s doorstep two months before with a boxful of hadal relics. That small treasure chest aside, he offered a profound familiarity with the depths, plus a gentle devotion to learning.
Tonight those relics held center stage. The worktable was scattered with objects he had gathered on the NASA expedition. There were nautilus shells with their chambers exposed, knives, pottery, glass beads, an ax head, scrimshaw, and two etched skulls. Gregorio had gone directly to the flute made from a mineral straw. All came from the previously unexplored region south of the Aleutian barrier. All bore spirals and the confounding aleph.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” she said. “We’re spinning our wheels here. The relics just aren’t giving up any big answers.”
“But we’re close,” said Gregorio. “If we just keep going…”
“It’s like a disease,” said Li. “I felt the same way down there, always so close. I knew it was a mistake to come out. I should have stayed. I should have gone deeper.”
“Two against one,” Gregorio said to Ali.
“Then we should order a pizza,” she said.
“You’re dreaming,” said Gregorio. “The pizza boys quit delivering here days ago.” He cocked a thumb at the window. “Because of them.”
“The evidence, then,” she said. “The mystery. Our friend the aleph. What does it mean? Why an aleph and not some other symbol? And why was it so concentrated in the regions where you went, John?”
She bent over Li’s NASA map spread on the worktable. Her old route across the Subterranean Pacific was marked in red. Li’s route—farther north—formed a meandering blue circle. There was a tantalizing blank area in between the two routes. Gregorio thought that some tunnel system must surely connect them.
“We know what the aleph came to mean in Western civilization,” she said. “But what did it mean to the hadals? Why did they put it on their walls and artifacts? And why was it written on Ike, a mere slave?”
“It is just another name for God, we all agree on that,” said Gregorio. “Maybe that’s all there is to know. The aleph is simply an idea.”
“No,” said Li. “It speaks to something real. Something alive. I’m telling you, I could feel a presence near the outermost point of our expedition. I heard a voice calling.”
“A voice?” Ali glanced across at him.
Li mulled over his response. “I’ve never mentioned this to anybody,” he said.
There was much he hadn’t mentioned. His tales were largely untold. In Gregorio’s words, they would be downloading Li for years to come.
“You heard a voice,” Ali said.
“It was in my head, very distinct,” said Li. “But also the voice was outside of me, I’d swear. None of the other members heard it, I could tell. Maybe Bill heard it. He was my friend who stayed. But we never talked about it. I didn’t want to concern anyone about my mental health. We had
enough to deal with from day to day.”
“What was it saying, this voice?” asked Ali.
“Mostly she was just calling to me.”
“Who?” Ali recalled Maggie’s voice in the fog, and that sense of being pulled, almost, first to the children’s bones, then into the mound with its tunnel and stone beast.
“My wife.” He looked at them with purple eyes. “But she is dead.”
Gregorio’s thick eyebrows lifted. “A spirit was calling you?”
“I don’t believe in spirits,” Li said. “I am a man of science.”
“Did you ask this voice about the aleph?” said Gregorio.
“No, no,” said Li. “It wasn’t like that. It kept inviting me deeper, that’s all. It was my own desire speaking to me.”
“It’s not just the aleph,” Ali said. “There are all these spirals, too. Here in the nautilus shells and on the knife handles and the insides of their bowls. And the hadal prisoner pointed at one I had drawn on my face. How do we interpret them?”
“Spirals,” said Gregorio. “I’ve been fooling with the spirals. See if this might not be a solution to them.”
He opened a drawer and took out a container of modeling clay. Flopping the clay onto the table, he began shaping it. A small mountain grew under his hands. It tapered upward, a rounded pyramid with steep sides. Using a spoon, he added a path coiling up and around the outside. At last Ali recognized it. He had made a mound, or tower. A Babylonian tower.
“Come closer,” he said. “Now look down on it from straight above.”
Ali bent over his model. From above, the spiral shape showed clearly, a three-dimensional coil winding higher and tighter around the tower to its center, the pinnacle. It was so simple. Hidden in plain sight. “Very nice, Gregorio,” she said.
She made room for Li, and he grunted his surprise. “A path up a tower?”
“Or up a mountain,” said Ali. “A sort of universal mountain. Why not? In Tibet, the pilgrims circle Mount Kailash in a clockwise direction, the same direction these spirals follow. The same direction paths were built on the ziggurats in Mesopotamia. The same direction pilgrims take when they circle the Kabbalah in Mecca. The same direction people use to follow the Stations of the Cross in a church. The same direction Dante took in his Divine Comedy.”
“Well, I suppose it could be all those things,” said Gregorio. “But I was thinking it might represent a map of some kind.”
“A map?”
Gregorio ran his fingers around the tightening gyre. “A symbolic climb to the earth’s surface, perhaps. Up from the darkness, out into the light. I don’t know.”
Ali nodded. “Into paradise. It could show the way to heaven, like a climber’s topo sheet. A map to God. That would help explain the aleph.”
“Or a map for God, one that would help Him climb to the surface,” Gregorio said. “Like a divine escape route.”
“God as a mountain climber?”
“Jesus descended into hell and back. Gilgamesh went into the land of the dead. So did Orpheus and Hercules and Aeneas. The list goes on.”
“But carved inside a flute? Etched inside their pottery?” Li said. He picked up the flute and other relics. “Why hide the spiral inside their tools and instruments?”
“Hidden clues for a hidden god?” Ali tried. “But which god? Our God, or theirs, the fallen god?”
Gregorio looked at his clay creation. “What if it wasn’t a symbolic map? What if it shows a real journey, up a real mountain? A mountain with something sacred at its top, something given to them by God.”
“Or God himself.” Ali let herself get caught up in the brainstorming. “Or the fossil of God. His vestiges. Fragments of his wisdom carved on rocks, maybe. Like a Ten Commandments for hell. Or simply his footsteps imprinted in rock. Or his holy turds turned into minerals?”
“Or an idol,” said Gregorio. “A statue of God.”
“An idol.” Ali touched her fingertip to the center of the spiral at the top of the clay mountain. “Do you know what kind of power that would have over the hadal mind? If such a thing existed, it would have the power of God. To them, it would be God. If we could find it, we could use it against them. It would be the ultimate hostage to trade for their hostages.”
“All this from a few spirals?” Li said quietly.
Ali let out a sigh. “You’re right. Pretty wild thinking. I was just trying to break the logjam.”
“But while we are so wildly thinking,” said Gregorio. They looked at him. “What if the children are being taken to this mountain?”
“Go on.”
“We’ve seen this before,” he said. “It happened twenty thousand years ago on Saint Matthew Island. The Ice Age children were slaughtered to appease the aleph inside a man-made mountain. The aleph has that power. And the spiral connects us with a journey of ascent.” He looked at her. “We must go down there.”
“Very dramatic,” said Ali. “And completely illogical. You want us to reverse a climb upward? But then we would not be zeroing in on a sacred center, only spiraling downward to the mundane.”
Gregorio fumed over his clay model. “It has to do with a mountain, don’t you see?”
“I see a mountain,” she said, “but there are thousands of mountains. Is it Everest or a man-made mound on Saint Matthew Island or a seamount or a subterranean mountain? Where do you propose we start going down in order to be going up? Where is this summit that is the center?”
“Ah,” he growled. “We follow the alephs. That’s all I know.”
“The alephs are merely landmarks. You’re saying they lead up and yet you want us to go down? I’m sorry, Gregorio.” Ali was more relieved than seemed right. For a few minutes it had seemed as if they might actually have a way to save the poor children. But for goodness sake, there was a limit…
“I agree with you,” Li said to her. “But Gregorio is right.” Ali stared at him. “We must go.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“We must go,” he repeated.
“But there is no mountain,” she said. “We made it up. It’s imaginary, a fiction.”
“The mountain, yes,” Li said. “The spiral, no.” He picked up Gregorio’s clay mountain and, without ceremony, flopped it upside down. Pressing his fist into its center, he made a crater that narrowed to a point at the bottom. “The path doesn’t go up, and yet it ascends,” he said. “It descends to a summit, if you will. We must climb inside an upside-down mountain.” He drew the spiral on the inside of the wall, corkscrewing it downward to the pit.
“There is the source, the home of their god,” Li said. “Now I see how close I was down there. If only we had known what the aleph stood for. But Bill had a hunch. It drew him back down again. He wanted to find out where the symbols were leading.”
“Yes, and he probably died for his curiosity,” said Ali.
“But not before he found what he was hunting for. That is my hope.”
“John,” she said. “Your friend was mad. Don’t you see that?”
“Maybe,” said Li.
“Why are you attacking us, Alexandra?” said Gregorio.
“I’m not attacking you. Just trying to keep a little hard reality on the table. It’s too easy to get caught up with…with a piece of clay.”
“There is something else you need to know,” Li said to her. “We weren’t the first to hunt these same alephs. Someone went before us. Another pilgrim.”
Ali rested her fingertips on the table. “What pilgrim?”
“We only found his initials. Bill and I counted them five times along the trail. But we knew what they signified.”
“Whose initials?” She could guess.
Li flattened the clay and drew the initials IC. Ali bowed her head.
“What?” said Gregorio.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said to Li.
“Because it is so clear you never want to go under again.”
“He’s alive?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t know.”
“Who?” Gregorio demanded.
“Ike,” she said. “Ike Crockett.”
Now it was Gregorio’s turn to lean on the table. Ike again. At least, thought Ali, there would be no more talk about chasing the aleph. Gregorio would give up his notion, if only to preserve his courtship of her.
“There is only one responsible thing to do with this,” she said, pointing at the mashed-up clay and its clues. “We’ll pass our notion along to the military. I know a general. Let them handle it.”
“The military? The American military?” Gregorio barked it. “They won’t dare send soldiers down again, not after the Green Barrens killing. The world is watching too closely now.”
“He’s right,” said Li. “The heavy hand did not work. This needs a lighter touch. It needs us.”
“Three people?” said Ali. “Now we’re superheroes?”
“Call us a special delegation,” said Li. “We are people inside the hadal language, or at least you are. You have some understanding of the hadal ways. I know the way, or part of it. Here is my map.”
Gregorio held up the mineral flute. “I can play Mozart.”
She was not amused. “You don’t know what they’re like. Even if we could find them, they’d just kill and eat us. If we were lucky.”
“They might bargain, though.”
“What on earth do we have to offer them?”
Gregorio adjusted his chin. He made it squarer and higher. “Peace,” he said.
“What?”
“After all these thousands of years of terror and mutual hatred, someone has to take the first step,” he said. “We agree to leave them alone. They agree to leave us alone. Live and let live.”
“Just like that? We go down and declare peace. They hand over our children.”
“Yes.” He and Li looked at each other. Comrades in malarkey.
“You should be writing novels,” she said to them.
“It is our duty.” Gregorio declared it like a conquistador’s pronunciamento. “Knowing what we know, how can we not go?”
“Easy,” she said. “We simply don’t go. The hadals are running amok. Settlers are being evacuated. The Interior is in a state of anarchy.”