Subterrestrial

by McBride, Michael

  The dead marine life on the beach wasn’t a true cross-section of endemic species, as one would expect to find in the aftermath of an oil spill or other human-caused disaster. There were no fowl or crustaceans, no bony fish or mammals. Only sharks and rays—species from the Chondrichthyes class of cartilaginous fishes—had been washed ashore by the tide. Physiologically, they were unique from the vast majority of sea life in one critical way: they were osmotic conformers, which means they had no physical means of adapting to changes in salinity. Their cells had the same salt content as their specific habitat. In that way they remained in a perpetual state of equilibrium with their environment, and people could sleep well at night knowing there would be no sharks swimming upstream into estuaries and rivers, like their similarly vicious predatory brethren, the crocodilians.

  The carcasses had demonstrated no evidence of cellular lysis—which occurs when water rapidly enters cells by osmosis, causing them to swell and pop—as one would expect to find with a dramatic increase in salinity. There had been a degree of plasmolysis—the result of water moving out of the cells—although that could have been caused by the ordinary dehydration of being on dry land. Not that she would have expected to find anything so overt with animals as large as the nurse and lemon sharks she’d first seen on the beach, but with other osmoconformers, especially those as delicate as coral, the physical expression would be unmistakable.

  Schools of damselfish and Chromis swirled around the reef in a gold-and-blue cloud. Groupers and bass squatted low to the ground, their wild patterns camouflaging them in their surroundings. Squirrelfish and wrasses darted in and out of the gaps between hard corals, while gobies and lizardfish kicked up bursts of sand as they scooted along the sea floor.

  From a distance, everything appeared normal. Octocorals stood from the reef like underwater cacti amid forests of wavering kelp. It wasn’t until she was nearly upon it that she saw the film of sludge on the live rock and the biological matter clinging to it like gobs of snot.

  The arms of the anemones had shriveled and become brittle. The tiny polyps living inside the coral protruded stiffly from their holes. The ordinarily green and gold brain corals were already turning brown. Crabs plucked the remains of dead fan worms and feather dusters from their tubes.

  It was exactly as she’d feared. There must have been an abrupt decrease in both salinity and temperature to cause such rapid and extensive desiccation of the reef. She’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t think of a single reason for such a startling climactic change.

  She took pictures for documentation’s sake, and then swam back to the boat. Surely by now her students had gathered the necessary data to corroborate her observations. And she needed the European Space Agency to update its SMOS imagery if she hoped to determine if this was a local phenomenon or if the other aberrations suggested a broader global problem. If that were the case, the implications would be terrifying.

  Calder breached the surface and climbed up the boat’s ladder. She was already talking when she removed her regulator.

  “Tell me you have my data.”

  Remy stared at her with a curious expression she couldn’t interpret. He inclined his head to his left, toward where a man she’d never seen before stood next to Crystal, watching her make notations on her tablet. He wore a custom-tailored black suit and Italian-leather shoes. His hair was so blond it looked silver and was slicked back from his angular forehead. He had eyes so blue they drew the attention from his hawklike nose and thin lips.

  A much larger yacht was moored beside the Tiburón. The captain wore a crisp white uniform and stood like a statue on the flybridge with his hands clasped behind his back. She’d been so focused on the reef that she’d been oblivious to its approach.

  “Dr. Calder?” The man’s voice was reedy and effeminate. “Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Reinhard Thyssen and I have a proposition for you.”

  II

  Kokolopori Reserve

  3.1 Miles East of Boende

  Democratic Republic of the Congo

  0.281° S, 20.876° E

  The mist clung to the canopy as dense as smoke. Sunbirds and tits chittered out of sight. A light rain fell from the gray sky. It beaded on the broad leaves of the ramón trees and strangler figs, swelling into droplets that pattered the ferns and detritus. Red- and blue-headed agamid lizards lapped water from the flowering bromeliads and skittered through the trees on a network of lianas so thick they seemed to have ensnared the entire rain forest in a giant green spider web.

  Dr. Emily Hart sat on her customary stump and listened to the clamor of the rain on the tarp stretched overhead. She tucked her long blonde hair behind her ears and slid her glasses up onto the top of her head. It was in moments like this, when the rain drove away the mosquitoes and an almost sleepy aura of tranquility crept down from the mountains, that she realized there was nowhere in the world she’d rather be. Granted, a long, hot shower and a respite from the infernal heat and humidity would be nice, but they were luxuries she could live without if it meant she could do what she loved.

  She returned her video camera to its Pelican case and removed her tablet. That was enough work for one day. It was far more enjoyable to watch the shadows of the bonobos swing through the canopy without the lens separating them. Their whistles and shrieks carried to the ground, where hunched bonobos were silhouetted among the ferns, tenderly grooming one another and making contented grunting sounds.

  This was only her sixth month in Kokolopori and already she’d been accepted into the community. She’d learned to recognize the primates’ vocalizations and their meanings, everything from their high hoots and food calls to their threat barks and laughter that sounded almost human, which wasn’t all that surprising, considering they are humankind’s closest living relative on the evolutionary tree. Although they look like skinny chimpanzees with hair like Gene Simmons, their intelligence, empathy, and ability to communicate more closely resembled that of their modern hominin descendants.

  Bonobos were found only in the Congo Basin of Central Africa, on a narrow swath of land about the size of Massachusetts. They last shared a common ancestor with Homo sapiens seven million years ago, yet after spending so much time in their midst, Hart had come to think of them in terms that could only be considered human. Individuals had their own personalities, their own way of interacting with the community as a whole and subsets within it. Their facial expressions and mannerisms betrayed their moods. They even had a sense of humor. She’d stopped thinking of them as primates and had started seeing them as little hairy people, almost like hobbits. Granted, they were little hairy people who ate bugs out of one another’s hair and had coitus out in the open whenever the mood struck, but every culture had its eccentricities.

  Hart took a swig of warm water from her canteen and laid out her dinner, just as she did every night. As usual, she had fufu—a large ball of dough made from cassava flour—and spicy peanut soup into which to dunk the fufu. She tore off a piece, rolled it between her palms, and swirled it in the soup, all the while watching the tree line at the edge of the clearing.

  There was an excited high-pitched screech from the canopy followed by crashing through the vegetation.

  A pair of eyes peered out at her from behind the bushes.

  “I see you, Tamu.”

  The eyes vanished, only to appear from behind the red flowers of a heliconia shrub several seconds later.

  “Peekaboo.”

  The bonobo made a guttural laughing sound and bounded away again. The swaying branches betrayed his location, yet still she wouldn’t have seen his black face in the shadows were it not for his pink lips.

  “Peekaboo.”

  When he appeared again, she smiled and held up a wad of fufu.

  The bonobo stepped tentatively from the forest on his hind legs. He walked with his arms at his sides, his knees bent, and his belly thrust forward.

  “Come on over, Tamu.” Hart patted the rock bes
ide her. “I brought your favorite.”

  He’d only been recently weaned when she had arrived and was the first to take a genuine interest in her. She had no doubt it was initially only because of the food and the fact that he hadn’t learned to be wary of humans yet, but by now she liked to think that he looked forward to their evening rendezvous as much as she did.

  The name Tamu came from the Swahili word for “sweet.” It hadn’t taken him long to recognize his name, after which his vocabulary expanded at an exponential rate. She designed a lexigram application on her tablet, which allowed her to communicate with him using a checkerboard of simple images that corresponded to English words. His comprehension wasn’t at the conversational level by any stretch of the imagination, but the rate at which he assimilated the language was phenomenal.

  Tamu climbed up onto the rock beside her and squatted with his knees tucked to his chest. He averted his eyes bashfully, then reached blindly toward her and stroked her shoulder. When he finally looked up at her, there was a toothy grin on his face. She held out the dough. He plucked it from her fingers, swirled his whole hand in the soup, and thrust his fist into his mouth.

  Hart smiled and ruffled his hair. She set her tablet on the camera case where he could reach it.

  “How was your day, Tamu?”

  His fingers were long and clumsy, not to mention covered with soup. He tapped the nail of his index finger on one of the twenty-five squares. It was green with a yellow clover in the center.

  “Good,” the computerized voice said.

  “What did you do, Tamu?”

  He pressed an icon that looked like a tree with a chimney—“Tree house”—and another with a red apple on a yellow background—“Apple.”

  “Did you eat an apple in the tree house, Tamu?”

  He tapped the button with a black Y on a white background.

  “Yes.”

  The tree house was a series of platforms and rope bridges that early researchers had used for surreptitious, naturalistic observation. It was built into the upper canopy on top of the ridge to the east and overlooked nearly the entire preserve.

  “That sounds like a lot of fun, Tamu.”

  He hopped down, dunked the remainder of the fufu in the soup, and held it up to her face. She took a tiny nibble from the lone area she could see that didn’t have any of his hair on it.

  “Mmm. Thank you, Tamu.”

  He beamed, thrust the remainder into his mouth, and climbed up into her lap. She wrapped her arms around him and nuzzled his neck.

  Tamu abruptly stiffened and cocked his head to the canopy.

  “What is it, Tamu?”

  He leaped down and screamed at the top of his lungs. The entire rain forest erupted with the screams. He bolted for the forest and scaled the buttress roots of a kapok tree into the canopy. The branches whipped violently and rained leaves onto the ground.

  Hart stood and walked out from beneath her shelter into the drizzle. She looked up in time to see a helicopter streak past overhead, so low it barely cleared the treetops.

  She balled her hands into fists so tight her nails bit into her palms.

  The screams of the bonobos grew increasingly distant by the second until all she could hear was the whupp-whupp-whupp of the chopper.

  She ran to where she’d parked her vehicle, a golf cart with an electric engine that couldn’t get above fifteen miles per hour. She pressed the pedal and cranked the wheel. Detritus fired from the rear tires. By the time they gained traction, the cart was bounding down the rutted road with branches raking through the paint and muddy water splashing over the hood.

  The conservation center was a rectangular wooden construct with a peaked thatch roof. It served as both the office of the conservancy and home to half a dozen researchers at any given time. It was situated in the middle of a grassy clearing roughly two miles from where she’d left Tamu and another five from the only real entrance to the preserve, which was guarded day and night by villagers trained by the Mbandaka police force. By the time she arrived, she was so furious she could hardly see straight.

  The rotor wash flattened the grass and blew straw from the roof as the helicopter settled to the ground. The forest at the edge of the clearing positively shook. The spotted Ankole-Watusi cattle grazing at the far edge of the field stood stock-still, watching nervously from beneath their massive horns.

  Hart skidded to a stop, jumped out, and grabbed her rifle from behind the seat of the golf cart.

  The blades whined and started to slow. The side door opened and a man in a suit hopped out. He ducked his head and strode toward the front of the building. The local woman who cooked their meals emerged from the building with an orphaned bonobo in a sling across her chest.

  “Go back inside, Niclèche,” Hart said. She seated the Remington against her shoulder and moved to intercept the man. “That’s far enough!”

  The man stopped and shielded his eyes against the ferocious wind. His silver hair was long on top and stood from his head like quills. He studied her through eyes of an unnatural shade of blue for a long moment. His face looked sharp enough to split wood and he wore a suit that probably cost more than the conservation center’s annual budget. He smiled in a manner that was meant to disarm, but it only caused her to tighten her finger on the trigger.

  The blades slowed to a halt and the rain again fell heavily upon them The man slicked back his hair in a practiced motion and cocked his head like a vulture.

  “What in the name of God are you thinking flying that thing in here like that? You scared the hell out of the animals and risked undoing all of our efforts! You think they aren’t still traumatized by the Congo wars?”

  “I hope you’ll pardon my intrusion, Dr. Hart. The rapidly evolving nature of the situation has regrettably forced me to sacrifice decorum for the sake of expediency.”

  She kept her expression neutral so as not to betray her surprise that he knew who she was.

  “State your business and be on your way.”

  “I should think our conversation would be considerably more civil if you were to lower your weapon.”

  “This part of the world isn’t necessarily known for its civility.”

  “Then by all means, allow me to get right to the point. There’s a photograph in the front pocket of my vest. I’m going to reach inside my jacket and get it for you.”

  Hart lowered the gun from the man’s face, but kept it aimed at center mass, in case she needed to fire in a hurry. The fact that he knew who she was, while she’d never seen him before in her life, unnerved her. The only people who showed up at the preserve without going through the proper channels were the kind who’d slaughter or capture the bonobos and do unthinkable things to those who stood in their way.

  His long, delicate fingers disappeared under his lapel and materialized with a picture pinched between his extended index and middle fingers. He held it up and waved it at her.

  Hart crossed the clearing, snatched it from his hand, and quickly retreated out of his reach. She stared at him down the length of the barrel for several seconds, then glanced down at the picture and quickly back up at him.

  This time she couldn’t hide the surprise on her face.

  The man smiled.

  “I trust it won’t take you very long to pack.”

  III

  Hang Sơn Đoòng

  Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam

  17°27′25″ N, 106°17′15″ E

  The Garden of Edam—a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the biblical garden from which all life sprung—was dying.

  Five million years ago, surface water seeped through minute facture lines in the limestone beneath the dense Vietnamese jungle. It dissolved the minerals in the rock and formed a subterranean river. Eons of erosion caused debris to accumulate in the river faster than the current could sweep it away, and an island of stone grew in the darkness. Continued decay contributed to what was known as cantilever failure: an oval-shaped section of the roof collapsed
and exposed the underground terrain to light for the first time. Soil and seeds blew down from the jungle and took root in the 850-foot cone of rubble. An entirely new jungle proliferated nearly five hundred feet below the surface, where it remained hidden until a team of British cavers discovered it mere years ago.

  Trey Payton wished more than anything he’d been among the first who crawled from the dark warrens and into this biome seemingly ripped right out of the Cretaceous Period. Even now he half expected to see pterodactyls soaring over the hundred-foot canopy of Hopea, Madhuca, and broad-leaved evergreen trees, streaking through the mist, or feathered reptiles slinking through the ferns and fan palms. The sight never ceased to amaze him. After spending twenty-four hours climbing and crawling through utter and complete darkness with only a helmet light as a guide, entering the Garden of Edam was an almost spiritual experience. It felt like cheating to belay himself directly down into the cave through the hole in the forest floor, but that was the only viable ingress thanks to the flooding.

  This was his fifth incursion into Hang Sơn Đoòng, the largest system of caves in the world. It was a 5.6-mile maze of flowstone mountains, valleys, and stunning limestone formations carved by the Rao Thuong River that always made Payton feel as though he were exploring another planet. Entire city blocks could fit comfortably inside the tunnels, at least during the winter. In the spring, the water level rose so high that the labyrinth flooded and limited passage to those willing to take their lives into their own hands.

  He’d never seen flooding like this, though. Water flowed freely from both the north and south egresses, spilling out into the jungle with such force that it uprooted generations-old trees and tore a swath of destruction through the forest. There was no access from either end without scuba gear, and even then the river was raging so high and fast that attempting to negotiate the pitfalls and bottlenecks in the pitch-black would be suicidal.