The Descent Part 44

Ali watched their reactions as extensions of herself. She felt numb. Enraged. Paralyzed. Like her friends and comrades, she wanted to shout and kick at the sand and fall on her back. The treachery was beyond belief.

'Why have they done this?' someone cried.

'They must have left a note. An explanation.'

'Listen to you,' Gitner jeered. 'You sound like teenagers who just got jilted. This is business, people. A race for survival. Walker just jettisoned a bunch of empty stomachs. I'm surprised he didn't do it sooner.'

Ike came over from the cache site with a piece of paper in one hand, and Ali saw a row of numbers on it. 'Walker left a portion of the food and medicine. But the communications line is destroyed. And they took all their weapons.'

'They've left us here like a speed b.u.mp,' someone cried. 'A sacrificial offering to the hadals.'

Ali grabbed Ike's arm, and her expression made them pause. Suddenly her visitor in the middle of the night made sense. 'Do you believe in karma?' she asked Ike, and they followed her to the buried blanket of guns and knives'. It took less than a minute to dig it out. Then it took an hour to argue about who got which of the weapons.

'I don't get it,' Gitner said. 'Ike saves the guy. But then he gives the hardware to a nun?'

'It's not obvious?' said Pia. 'Ike's nun.' They all looked at Ali.

Ike detoured it. 'Now we have our chance.' He finished loading his sawed-off.

In the depot they picked through the boxes and cans. Walker had left more than expected, but less than they needed. Further, his men had plundered care packages sent down to the scientists by anxious families and friends. The interior of the sand fort was littered with little gifts and cards and snapshots. It added insult to the crime, and put the scientists into greater despair.

The scientists numbered forty-six. A careful accounting showed they had food for 1,334 man-days, or twenty-nine days at full rations. That could be stretched, it was agreed. By halving their daily intake, the food would last two months.

Their exploration was dead. All that remained was a race for survival. The expedition faced two choices. They could try to return to Z-3 - Esperanza - on foot. Or they could continue in search of the next cache, more supplies, and an exit from the subplanet.

Gitner was adamant: Esperanza was their only hope. 'That way, at least we're not dealing with a complete unknown,' he said. With two months' rations, they would have time enough to reach what was left of Cache III, splice the comm line together, and call in more supplies. He called anyone who did not agree a fool. 'We don't have a minute to waste,' he kept saying.

'What do you think?' they asked Ike.

'It's a c.r.a.pshoot,' he said.

'But which way should we go?'

Ali could tell that Ike had made up his mind. But he wanted no responsibility for their decisions, and grew quiet.

'There's nothing but hole to the west,' Gitner declared. 'Anyone that wants to go east, go with me.'

Ali was surprised when Ike turned crafty and bartered with Gitner over the weapons. He finally let go of the rifle and its ammunition and the radio and a knife for an extra fifty days' rations of MREs. 'If you don't mind,' he said, 'we'll just take a stab around this water.'

Now that he had the majority of the weapons, food, and followers, Gitner didn't mind at all. 'You're off your nut,' Gitner told Ike. 'What about the rest of you?'

'New territory,' said Troy, the young forensics expert.

'Ike's done okay so far,' said Pia.

Ali didn't defend her choice.

'Then we'll remember you,' Gitner said.

He quickly wrangled his crew together and got them packed for their journey, prodding them with the possibility that Walker might decide to reclaim what was left. There was little time for the two groups to say good-bye. People from each coalition were shaking hands, bidding one another to break a leg, promising to send rescue if they got out first.

Just before leaving, Gitner approached Ali with his new rifle. 'I think it's only fair that you give us your maps,' he said. 'You don't need them. We do.'

'My day maps?' Ali said. They were hers. She had created them with all the art in her, and saw them as an extension of herself.

'We need to remember all the landmarks possible.'

It was the first time Ali actively wished Ike would stand up for her, but he didn't. With everyone watching, she gave the tube of maps to Gitner. 'Promise to take care of them,' she asked. 'I'd like them back someday.'

'Sure.' Gitner offered no thanks, just hitched the tube into his backpack and started up the trail beside the river. His people followed. Besides Ali and Ike, only seven people stayed behind.

'Which way do we go?'

'Left,' said Ike. He was so sure.

'But Walker went right with the boats, I saw him,' Ali said.

'That could work,' Ike allowed. 'But it's backward.'

'Backward?'

'Can't you feel it?' Ike asked. 'This is a sacred s.p.a.ce. You always walk to the left around sacred places. Mountains. Temples. Lakes. That's just how it's done. Clockwise.'

'Isn't that some Buddhist thing?' said Pia.

'Dante,' said Ike. 'Ever read the Inferno? Each time they hit a fork, the party goes left. Always left. And he was no Buddhist.'

'That's it?' marveled a burly geologist. 'All these months we've been following a poem and your superst.i.tions?'

Ike grinned. 'You didn't know that?'

The first fifteen days they marched shoeless, like beachcombers. The sand was cool between their toes. They sweated under heavy packs. At night their thighs ached. Drifting on rafts had taken its toll.

Ike kept them in motion, but slowly, the pace of nomads. 'No sense in racing,' he said. 'We're doing fine.'

They learned the water. Ali dipped her headlamp underneath the surface, and she may as well have tried shining her light from the back of a mirror. She cupped the water in her palms and it was like holding time. The water was ancient.

'This water - it's been living here for over a half-million years,' the hydrologist Chelsea told her. It had a scent like the deep earth.

Ike stirred the sea with his hand and let a few drops onto his tongue. 'Different,' he p.r.o.nounced. After that, he drank from the sea without hesitation. He let the others make up their own minds, and knew they were watching closely to see if he sickened or his urine bled. Twiggs, the microbotanist, was especially attentive.

By the end of the second day, all were drinking the water without purifying it.

'It's delicious,' said Ali. Voluptuous, she meant, but did not want to say it out loud. It was somehow different from plain water, the way it slid on the tongue, its cleanness. She scooped a handful to her face and pulled it across the bones of her cheeks, and the sense of it lingered. It was all in her head, she decided. It had to do with this place.

One day they saw small sulfurous flashes along the black horizon. Ike said it was gunfire, maybe as much as a hundred miles away, on the opposite side of the sea. Walker was either making trouble or having it.

The water was their north. For nearly six months they had advanced with no foresight, trusting no compa.s.s, trapped in blind veins. Now they had the sea. For once they could antic.i.p.ate their geography. They could see tomorrow, and the day after that. It was not a straight destiny, there were bends and arcs, but for a change they could see as far as their vision reached, a welcome alternative to the maze of claustrophobic tunnels.

Although everyone was hungry, they were not famished, and the water was always there to comfort them. Two and three and four times a day, they would bathe away their sweat. They tied strings to their plastic cups and could scoop up a drink without bending or breaking stride. Ali's hair had grown long. She loosed it from its braid and let it hang, lush and clean.

They were pleased with Ike's regime. He did not drive them. If anyone tired, Ike took some of their load. Once when Ike went off to investigate a side canyon, some of them tried lifting his pack, and couldn't budge it. 'What does he have in there?' Chelsea asked. No one dared look, of course. That would have been like tampering with good luck.

When they turned their last light off at night, the beach gleamed with Early Cretaceous phosph.o.r.escence. Ali watched for hours as the sand pulsed against the inky sea, holding back the darkness. She had taken to lying on her back and imagining stars and saying prayers. Anything not to sleep.

Ever since Walker had overseen the ma.s.sacre, sleep meant terrible dreams. Eyeless women pursued her. In the name of the Father.

One night Ike woke her from a nightmare. 'Ali?' he said.

Sand was sticking to her sweat. She was panting. She clung to his hand.

'I'm okay,' she gasped.

'It's not quite that easy,' Ike breathed, 'with you.'

Stay, she almost said. But then what? What was she supposed to do with him now?

'Sleep,' said Ike. 'You let things get to you too much.'

Another week pa.s.sed. They were slowing. Their stomachs rumbled at night.

'How much longer?' they asked Ike.

'We're doing fine,' he heartened them.

'We're so hungry.'

Ike looked at them, judging. 'Not that hungry,' he said mildly, and it was cryptic. How hungry did they have to be? wondered Ali. And what was his relief?

'Where can Cache V be? We must be near.'

'What's the date?' said Ike. He knew they knew the next cylinders were not scheduled to be lowered for another six days. That didn't keep them from trolling hopefully for the cache signals. All of them had tiny cache locators built into their Helios wrist.w.a.tches. First Pia, then Chelsea, used up their watch batteries trying to get some signal. It was magical thinking. No one wanted to talk about what would happen if Walker and his pirates reached the cache before them.

The six days pa.s.sed, and still they didn't find the cache. They were covering only a few miles a day. Ike took on more and more of their weight. Ali found herself struggling with barely fifteen pounds on her back.

Ike recommended they ration themselves. 'Share one packet of MREs with two or three people,' he suggested. 'Or eat just one over a two-day period.' He never took away their food and rationed it for them, though.

They never saw him eat.

'What's he living on?' Chelsea asked Ali.

For twenty-three days Gitner led his castaways with eroding success. It seemed impossible, but in their second week they had somehow misplaced the river. One day it was there. The next it was just gone.

Gitner blamed Ali's day maps. He pulled the rolls of parchment from her leather tube and threw them on the ground. 'Good riddance,' he said. 'Nothing but science fiction.'

With the river gone, they had no more use for their water gear. They abandoned their survival suits in a rubbery pile of neoprene.

By the end of the third week, people were falling behind, disappearing.

A salt arch they were using as a bridge collapsed, plunging five into the void. Unbelievably, both of the expedition's two physicians suffered compound fractures of their legs. It was Gitner's call to leave them. Physician, heal thyself. It was two days before their echoing pleas faded in the tunnels behind.

As their numbers dwindled, Gitner relied on three advantages: his rifle, his pistol, and the expedition's supply of amphetamines. Sleep was the enemy. He still believed they would find Cache III, and that the comm lines could be repaired. Food ran low. Two murders soon followed. In both cases, a chunk of rock had been used and the victims' packs had been plundered.

At a fork in the tunnel, Gitner overrode the group's vote. Without a clue, he led them straight into a tunnel formation known as a spongework maze, or boneyard. At first they thought little of it. The porous maze was filled with pockets and linked cavities and stone bubbles that spread in every direction, forward and down and up and to the rear. It was like climbing through a ma.s.sive, petrified sponge.

'Now we're getting somewhere,' Gitner enthused. 'Obviously some gaseous dissolution ate upward from the interior. We can gain some elevation in a hurry now.'

They roped up, those still left, and started moving vertically through the pores and oviducts. But they tangled their ropes by following through the wrong hole. Friction braked their progress. Holes tightened, then gaped. Packs had to be handed up and through and across the interstices. It was time-consuming.

'We have to go back,' someone growled up to Gitner. He unroped so they could not pull on him, and kept climbing. The others unroped, too, and some became lost, to which Gitner said, 'Now we're reaching fighting weight.' They could hear voices at night as the lost ones tried to locate the group. Gitner just popped more speed and kept his light on.

Finally, Gitner was left with only one man. 'You screwed up, boss,' he rasped to Gitner.

Gitner shot him through the top of the head. He listened to the body slither and knock deeper and deeper, then turned and continued up, certain the spongework would lead him out of the underworld into the sun again. Somewhere along the way, he hung his rifle on an outcrop. A little farther on, he left his pistol.

At 0440 on November 15, the spongework stopped. Gitner reached a ceiling.

He pulled his pack around in front of him, and carefully a.s.sembled the radio. The battery level was near the red, but he figured it was good for one loud shout. With enormous exact.i.tude he attached the transmission tendrils to various features in the spongework, then sat on a marble strut and cleared his thoughts and throat. He switched the radio on.

'Mayday, mayday,' he said, and a vague sense of deja vu tickled at the back of his mind. 'This is Professor Wayne Gitner of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Helios Sub-Pacific Expedition. My party is dead. I am now alone and require a.s.sistance. I repeat, please a.s.sist.'

The battery died. He laid the set aside and took up his hammer and began clawing away at the ceiling. A memory that wouldn't quite take shape kept nagging at him. He just hit harder.

In mid-swing, he stopped and lowered the hammer. Six months earlier, he had listened to his own voice enunciating the very distress signal he had just sent. He had circled to his own beginning.

For some, that might have meant a fresh start.

For a man like Gitner, it meant the end.

22 - BAD WIND.

I sit leaning against the cliff while the years go by, till the green gra.s.s grows between my feet and the red dust settles on my head, and the men of the world, thinking me dead, come with offerings... to lay by my corpse.

-HAN SHAN, Cold Mountain, c. 640 CE The Dolomite Alps The scholars had been building toward this day since their first night together. For seventeen months, their journeys - Thomas's capriccios - had cast them across the globe like a throw of dice. At last they stood together again, or sat, for de l'Orme's castle perched high atop a limestone precipice, and it took very little exertion to get out of breath.

For once, Mustafah's emphysema gave him the advantage: he had an oxygen set, and could merely crank the airflow higher. Foley and Vera were sharing an Italian aspirin powder for their headaches. Parsifal, the astronaut, was making a bluff show of his athletic nature, but looked a bit green, especially as de l'Orme took them on a tour of the curving battlements overlooking the stepped crags and far plains.

'Don't like neighbors?' Gault asked. His Parkinson's had stabilized. Couched in a large wheelchair, he looked like a Pinocchio manipulated by naughty children.

'Isn't it wonderful?' said de l'Orme. 'Every morning I wake and thank G.o.d for paranoia.' He had already explained the castle's origins: a German Crusader had gone mad outside the walls of Jerusalem, and was exiled atop these rocks.

It was rather small for a castle. Built in a perfect circle on the very edge of the cliff, it almost resembled a lighthouse. They finished their tour. January was sitting where they'd left her, depleted by malaria, facing south to the sun with Thomas. Down below, lining the dead-end road, were their hired cars. Their drivers and several nurses were enjoying a picnic among the early flowers.

'Let's go inside,' said de l'Orme. 'At these heights, the sun feels very warm. But the slightest cloud can send the temperature plunging. And there's a storm coming.'

Thick logs blazing on the iron grate barely took away the room's chill. The dining hall was stark, walls bare, not even a tapestry or a boar's head. De l'Orme had no need for decorations.