The Descent Part 37

'Mexico City,' said Rau. 'We b.u.mped into each other in the concourse.'

'I was afraid no one was going to make it,' Vera said. 'As it is, we may be too late.'

'You called, we came,' said Parsifal. 'Teamwork.' His paunch and hated bifocals made the gallantry that much more charming.

Rau checked his watch. 'Thomas arrives within the hour. And the others?'

'Elsewhere,' said Vera, 'in transit, incommunicado, occupied. You've heard about Branch, I suppose.'

'Has he lost his mind?' Parsifal said. 'Running off into the subplanet like that. Alone. Of all people, you'd think he'd know what the hadals are capable of.'

'It's not them I'm worried about.'

'Please not that "the enemy is us" business.'

'You don't know about the shoot-to-kill order then?' Vera asked. 'All the armies got it. Interpol has it.'

Parsifal squinted at her. 'What's this? Shoot Branch?'

'January's done what she can to revoke it. But there's a certain General Sandwell who has a vindictive streak. It's peculiar. January's trying to find out more about this general.'

'Thomas is furious,' Rau added. 'Branch was our eyes and ears in the military. Now we're left guessing what the armies may be up to.'

'And who may be planting the virus capsules.'

'Nasty business,' muttered Parsifal.

They met Thomas at his gate, straight from Hong Kong. The gaunt cubic angles of his face formed a ma.s.s of shadows, deepening his Abe Lincoln features. Otherwise, for a man who'd just been expelled from China, he looked remarkably refreshed. He glanced around at his greeting party. 'A cowboy hat?' he said to Rau.

'When in Rome...' Rau shrugged.

They proceeded to the exit, grouped around Vera's wheelchair, catching up on one another's news.

'Mustafah and Foley?' asked Vera. 'They're okay?'

'Tired,' said Thomas. 'We were detained in Kashi for several days. In Xinjiang province. Our cameras and journals were confiscated, our visas revoked. We are officially personae non gratae.'

'What in the world were you doing out there, Thomas?'

'I wanted to examine a set of Caucasian mummies and some of their writing fragments. Four millennia old. Germanic script. Tocharian, to be exact. In Asia!'

'Mummies in the Chinese outback,' Parsifal fumed. 'Cryptic writings. What will that tell us?'

'This time I have to agree with you,' said Vera. 'It does seem remote from our mission. Sometimes I wonder just what it is I'm really doing. For the past three months you've had me reviewing abstracts on mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Tell me how data on placental samples from New Guinea gets us any closer to identifying a primordial tyrant?'

'In this instance, the mummies and their Indo-European script would seem to prove that Caucasian nomads influenced Chinese civilization four thousand years ago,' Thomas said.

'And they expelled you for that?' Parsifal said. He fogged the gla.s.s with his breath and drew a crucifix. 'Or did the Commies catch you giving last rites to the mummies?'

'Something far more dangerous is my guess,' Rau said to the group. 'If I'm correct, Thomas, you were proving that Chinese civilization did not develop in isolation. The likelihood that early Europeans may have helped germinate their culture is extremely threatening to the Chinese. They're a very proud people, these children of the Middle Kingdom.'

'But again, what does that have to do with us?' asked Vera.

'Everything, perhaps,' Rau ventured. 'The notion that a great civilization might be modified or even inspired by the enemy or by a lesser race or by barbarians is highly relevant.'

'Plain English will do just fine, Rau,' Parsifal grumbled.

Thomas remained silent. He seemed to be enjoying their guesswork.

'What if human civilization didn't develop in isolation? What if we had mentors?'

'What do you have in mind, Rau?' Parsifal said. 'Martians?'

'A little more down to earth.' Rau smiled. 'Hadals.'

'Hadals!' Parsifal said. 'Our mentors?'

'What if the hadals helped create our civilization through the eons? What if they cultivated our benighted ancestors, exposed to mankind its own native intelligence?'

'Haddie was our nursemaid? Those savages?'

'Careful,' said Rau. 'You're starting to sound like the Chinese with their barbarians.'

'Is that it?' Vera asked Thomas. 'You were looking at China as a paradigm for early human civilization?'

'Something like that,' Thomas said.

'And so you traveled ten thousand miles, and went to jail, all to prove a theory?'

'A bit more, actually. I had a hunch, and it bore out. As I suspected, the Caucasian texts in Xinjiang weren't written in Tocharian script. Nor in any other human language. The reports were all wrong. Mustafah and Foley and I took one look at the mummies and knew. You see, the mummies were tattooed with hadal symbols. These Caucasian nomads were operating as agents. Or messengers. They were transporting doc.u.ments into ancient China. Doc.u.ments written in some form of hadal script. If only we could read it!'

'But again,' Parsifal said, 'so what? That was four thousand years ago. And we can't read it.'

'Four thousand years ago, someone sent these people on a mission to China,' Thomas said. 'Aren't you a little curious? Who sent them?'

A van took them to the medical center. At the entrance to the Rende Research Wing, they entered into a crush of cops and television cameras. A phalanx of university representatives were taking turns offering themselves to the wolves. Frost billowed from every mouth. Apparently the logic behind an outdoor press conference in midwinter was that it would be brief.

'Again, I urge you to use common sense,' a deanlike figure was soothing the lenses. 'There's no such thing as possession.'

A pretty news anchor, soaked from the thighs down with snowmelt, shouted from the crowd. 'Dr. Yaron, are you denying reports that the university medical center is conducting exorcism as a treatment at the present time?'

A bearded man with a white grin leaned into the microphone. 'We're waiting,' he said. 'The guy with the chicken and holy water still hasn't showed up.'

The cops at the sliding gla.s.s doors weren't about to let anyone in. Vera's medical ID was no help. Finally Parsifal flashed some old NASA credentials. 'Bud Parsifal!' one said. 'h.e.l.l, yes, come in.'

They all wanted to shake his hand. Parsifal was radiant.

's.p.a.cemen,' Vera whispered to Rau.

Inside the lab wing, the activity was equally manic, if less frenzied. Specialists were studying charts, X rays, and film images or mousing at computer models. Portable phones lay trapped on shoulders as people read data from screens or clipboards. Business suits intermixed with shoulder holsters and surgical scrubs of various colors. The hubbub reminded Vera of the aftermath of a natural disaster, an emergency room stretched beyond capacity.

They paused by a group watching a video. On screen, a young woman was bent over a block of blue gel on a steel table. 'That's Dr. Yamamoto,' Vera whispered to Rau and Parsifal. 'Thomas and I met her last time.'

'Here she goes,' a man in the group said. He had a stopwatch in one hand. 'Three, two, one. And... boom.' Yamamoto abruptly stiffened on screen, then sank to her knees. For a moment she sat on her heels, staring, then tumbled to one side and went into violent spasms. The Beowulf scholars continued walking.

Other rooms held other screens and images: the bottom of a skull seemed to blossom open; a cursor arrow navigated up arteries, strayed upon neural arms, a highway of dreams and impulses.

Vera knocked at an open door. A blond woman in a lab smock was hunched over a microscope. 'I'm looking for a Dr. Koenig,' Vera said. The woman looked over, then came rushing to Vera with arms wide.

'Vera, you're back. Yammie told me you visited months ago.'

Vera introduced them. 'Mary Kay was one of my star pupils, when I could get her attention. Always off on triathlons and rock climbs. We could never keep up with her.'

'The old days,' said Mary Kay, probably all of thirty year's old. Judging by the place, medicine had become the exclusive domain of the young and fit.

'You picked a bad time to visit, though,' she said. 'The entire facility's up in arms. Government agencies all over the place. The FBI.' The purple circles under the young doctor's eyes were her testimony. Whatever this emergency was, she'd been hard at it for many hours.

'Actually, we heard something was happening,' Vera said. 'We've come to learn everything possible. If you can spare a few minutes.'

'Of course I can. Let me finish one thing. I was about to run through some of the early stuff.'

'Put me to work,' Vera insisted.

Grateful, Mary Kay handed Vera a folded EEG readout. 'These are the charts for day one of our hadal prep, almost a year ago. I've synched the video to 2:34 P.M., when they first quartered the body. If you don't mind, track the graph while they make the cuts. There should be some activity when the saw goes through. I'll tell you when.'

She tapped a b.u.t.ton on her keyboard. The frozen image started playing. 'Okay,' said Mary Kay. 'Ready? They're about to sever the legs. Now.'

It looked like a butcher's bandsaw on screen. Workers manipulated the long rectangle of blue gel sideways. Two of them lifted away a section after it pa.s.sed through the saw.

'Nothing,' Vera said. 'No response on the chart. Flat.'

'Here goes the head section. Anything?'

'No response. Not a b.u.mp,' said Vera.

'Just what is it we're supposed to be looking for?' Parsifal asked.

'Activity. A pain response. Anything.'

'Mary Kay,' said Vera, 'why are you looking for life signs in a dead hadal?'

The physician looked helplessly at Vera. 'We're considering certain possibilities,' she said, and it was clear the possibilities were unorthodox.

She ushered them down the wing, talking as they went. 'Over the past fifty-two weeks, our computer-anatomy division has been sectioning a hadal specimen for general study. The project leader was Dr. Yamamoto, a noted pathologist. She was working alone in the lab on Sunday morning when this happened.'

They entered a large room that reeked of chemicals and dead tissue. Rau's first impression was that a bomb had exploded. Big machines lay tipped on their sides. Wires had been pulled from ceiling panels. Long strips of industrial carpet lay ripped from the floor. Crime scene people and scientists alike wanted answers from what was left.

'A security guard found Dr. Yamamoto crouching in the far corner. He called for help. That was his last radio dispatch. We located him hanging from the pipes above the ceiling. His esophagus was torn out. By hand. Yammie was lying in the corner. Naked. Bleeding. Unresponsive.'

'What happened?'

'At first we thought someone had broken in to either burgle or sabotage the premises, and that Lindsey had been a.s.saulted. But as you can see, there are no windows, and only the one door. The door wasn't tampered with, which raised concerns that some hadals might have climbed through the vent system with the aim of destroying our database. We were studying hadal anatomy, after all. The project was underwritten with DoD grants. Arms makers have been clamoring for our tissue information to refine their weapons and ammunition.'

'Where's Branch when we need him?' Rau said. 'I've never heard of hadals doing such a thing. An attack like this, it implies such sophistication.'

'Anyway, that's what we thought at first,' Mary Kay continued. 'You can imagine the uproar. The police came. We started to transport Yammie on a gurney. Then she regained consciousness and escaped.'

'Escaped?' said Parsifal. 'She was still frightened of the intruder?'

'It was terrible. She was wrecking machines. She slashed two guards with a scalpel. They finally shot her with a dart gun. Like a wild animal. That's when she lost the child.'

'Child?' Vera asked.

'Yammie was seven months pregnant. The sedative or stress or activity... she miscarried.'

'How dreadful.'

They reached an eight-foot-long autopsy table. Vera had seen the human body insulted in a hundred different ways, shattered by trauma, wasted with disease and famine. But she was unprepared for the slight young woman with j.a.panese features who lay stretched out, covered with blankets, her head a Medusa-like riot of electrode patches and wires. It looked like a torture in progress. Her hands and feet had been tied down with a makeshift arrangement of towels, rubber tubing, and duct tape. The autopsy table's usual occupants did not require such restraints.

'Finally, one of the detectives sorted out the fingerprints and identified our culprit,' said Mary Kay. 'Yammie did it.'

'Did what?' murmured Vera.

'You mean it was her?' said Rau. 'Dr. Yamamoto killed the guard?'

'Yes. His throat tissue was under her nails.'

'This woman?' Parsifal snorted. 'But those machines must weigh a ton each.'

To one side, Thomas's face was shadowed with dark thoughts.

'Why would she do such a thing?' asked Rau.

'We're baffled. It may be related to a grand mal, though her husband said she has no history of epilepsy. It could be a psychotic rage no one ever suspected. The one video monitor she didn't manage to demolish shows her falling into unconsciousness, men getting up and destroying the machines used for cutting tissue. The target of her anger was very specific, these machines, as if she was avenging herself for a great wrong.'

'And killing the guard?'

'We don't know. The killing took place off camera. According to the security guard's radio report, he found her in a fetal position. She was clutching that.' Mary Kay pointed to a desktop.

'Good lord,' said Vera.

Parsifal walked over to the desk. Here was the source of the stench. What remained of a hadal head had been positioned between a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup and the Denver Yellow Pages. The blue gel that had once encased it was mostly thawed. The liquid seeped down into the desk's drawers.

The lower half of the face and skull had been lopped away by the machine's blades so cleanly that the creature seemed to be materializing from the flat desktop. Its black hair was smeared flat upon the misshapen skull. A dozen small burr holes sprouted electrode wires. After so many months preserved from air, it was now in a state of rapid decomposition.

More disconcerting than the decay and missing jaws were the eyes. The lids were wide open. The eyes bulged, pupils fixed in a seemingly furious stare. 'He looks p.i.s.sed,' said Parsifal.

'She,' commented the physician. 'The protruding eyes are a symptom of hyperthyroidism. Not enough iodine in the diet. She probably came from a region deficient in basic minerals like salt. A lot of hadals look like that.'