After he hung up, Branch sat in the semidarkness. He could smell himself, the plasticized flesh, the stink of his doubt. He was useless here. That was their intent. He was supposed to stay quietly parked at the surface and wait while they took care of business. Now Branch could not wait.

Obtaining the ClipGal videos for the priest might have its value. But even if the physician put his finger on the culprit, it was too late to reverse Sandwell's decision. Most of the long-range patrols had already pa.s.sed beyond communication. Every hour put them deeper into the stone.

Branch got to his feet. No more hesitation. He had a duty. To himself. To Ike, who had no way to know what they had in mind for him.

Branch stripped off his uniform. It was like taking off his own skin; it could never be put on again after this.

What a peculiar thing a life was. Nearly fifty-two, he had spent more than three decades with the Army. What he was about to do should have seemed more difficult than this. Perhaps his fellow officers would understand and forgive him this excess. Maybe they'd just think he'd finally gone off his nut. Freedom was like that.

Naked, he faced the mirror, a dark stain upon the dark gla.s.s. His ruined flesh glistened like a pitted gem. He was sorry, suddenly, never to have had a wife or children. It would have been nice to leave a letter for someone, a last phone message. Instead he had this terrible companion, a broken statue in his looking gla.s.s.

He dressed in civilian clothing that barely fit, and took his rifle.

Next morning, no one wanted to report Branch AWOL.

Finally, General Sandwell got the word. He was furious and did not hesitate to issue the order. Major Branch was in on the conspiracy with Ike, he declared. 'They're both traitors. Shoot them on sight.'

16 - BLACK SILK.

It was a monstrous big river down there.

-MARK TWAIN, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Equator, West The paladin chased along the river's paths, devouring great distances. He had learned of yet more invasion, but this time along the ancient camino and nearing their final asylum. And so he had come to investigate this trespa.s.s, or destroy it, on behalf of the People.

He fought all memory. Suffered privations. Shed desire. Cast off grief. In service to the group, he gladly effaced his heart.

Some give up the world. For others, the world is taken away. Either way, grace comes in the moment. And so the paladin ran, seeking to erase all thoughts of his great love.

In her lifetime, the woman had borne him a child and learned her station and rightful duties and become mastered. Captivity had broken her mind and spirit. It had created a blank table for the Way to be written upon. Like him, she had recovered from the mutilations and initiations. On the merits of her nature, she had risen up from her lowly b.e.s.t.i.a.l status. He had helped create her, and, as happens, had come to love his creation. Now Kora was dead.

Stripped of clan, with his woman dead, he was rootless now and the world was vast. There were so many new regions and species to investigate, so many destinations calling to him. He could have forsaken the hadal tribes and gone deeper into the planet, or even returned to the surface. But he had chosen his path a long time ago.

After many hours the ascetic tired. It became time to rest.

He left the trail racing. One hand touched the rock wall. With an intelligence all their own, his fingertips found random purchase. Part of his brain changed direction and told the hand to pull, and his feet went with him. He could have been running still, but suddenly he was climbing at a gallop. He scuttled diagonally up the arched sides to a cavity near mid-ceiling, alongside the river.

He smelled the cavity to know what else had burrowed here, and when. Satisfied, he drew himself into the stone bubble. He wedged his limbs tight, socketed his spine just so, and said in full his night prayer, part supplication, part superst.i.tion. Some of the words were in a language that parents and their parents and their parents had spoken. Words that Kora had taught their daughter. Hallowed be Thy name, he thought.

The paladin did not close his eyes. But all the while his heart was slowing. His breathing almost stopped. He grew still. My soul to keep. The river flowed beneath him. He went to sleep.

Voices woke him, ricocheting off the river's skin. Human.

The recognition came slowly. In recent years he had purposely tried to forget this sound. Even in the mouths of quiet ones, it had a jarring discord. Bone-breaking in its aggression. Barging everywhere, like sunlight itself. It was no wonder that more powerful animals ran from them. It shamed him that he had once been part of their race, even if it had been over a half-century ago.

Here, speech was different. To articulate was just that, to join things together. Every precious s.p.a.ce - every tube, every burrow, every gap and hollow - relied on its connection to another s.p.a.ce. Life in a maze depended upon linkage.

Listen to humans, and their very speech denied the construct. s.p.a.ce addled them. With nothing above their heads, no stone to cap the world, their thoughts went flying off into a void more terrible than any chasm. No wonder they were invading w.i.l.l.y-nilly. Man had lost his mind to heaven.

Gradually he filled his lungs, but the water smell was too powerful. No chance of scent. That left him echoes to reckon with. He could have left long before they arrived. He waited.

They arrived in boats. No point guards, no discipline, no caution, no protection for their women. Their lights were a river where a trickle would have sufficed. He squinted through a tiny hole between his fingers, insulted by their extravagance.

They poured beneath his cavity without a single glance up. Not one of them! They were so sure of themselves. He lay still in the ceiling in plain view, a coil of limbs, contemptuous of their self-a.s.surance.

Their rafts strung through the tunnel in a long, random ma.s.s. He quit counting heads to focus instead on their weak and strays.

There was little to recommend them. They were slow, with dulled senses, and out of synch. Each conducted himself with little reference to the group. Over the next hour he watched different individuals imperil the group's safety by brushing the walls or casting aside bits of uneaten food. It was more than sign they were leaving to predators. They were leaving the taste of themselves. Every time one rambled his hand along the rock, he painted human grease on the wall. Their p.i.s.s gave off a pungent signature. Short of opening their veins and lying down, they could have done nothing more to invite their own slaughter.

The ones with tiny hurts did nothing to disguise their pain. They advertised their vulnerabilities, offered themselves as the easiest quarry. Their heads were too big, and their joints were askew at the hips and knees. He couldn't believe that he had been born like them. One changed little bandages on her feet and threw the old bandages into the water, where they washed to sh.o.r.e. He could smell her details from up here.

There were many women among them. That was the unbelievable part. Chattering and oblivious. Unguarded. Ripe women. In such a fashion, Kora had come to him in the darkness, long ago.

After they had pa.s.sed deeper with the river's current, he waited an hour for his eyes to recover from their lights. Muscle by muscle, he released himself from the cavity. He hung by one arm from its slight lip, listening not so much for stragglers as for other predators, for there would surely be those. Content, he let go and landed on the trail.

In darkness he moved among their refuse, sampling it. He licked the foil of a candy wrapper, sniffed the rock where they had rubbed against it. He nosed at the female's bandages, then took them into his mouth. This was the taste of humans. He chewed.

He trailed them again, running along old paths worn into the sh.o.r.e stone, reaching them as they camped. He watched.

Many of them talked or sang to themselves, and it was like hearing the inside of their minds. Sometimes his Kora had sung like that, especially to their daughter.

Repeatedly, individuals would wander from camp and place themselves within his reach. He sometimes wondered if they had sensed his presence and were attempting to sacrifice themselves to him. One night he stole through their camp while they slept. Their bodies glowed in the darkness. A lone female started as he slid past, and stared directly at him. His visage seemed horrifying to her. He backed away and she lost his image and sank back into sleep. He was nothing more than a fleeting nightmare.

It was difficult to keep from harvesting one. But the time wasn't right, and there was no sense in frightening them at this early stage. They were heading deeper into the sanctuary all on their own, and he didn't know their rationale for coming here yet. And so he ate beetles, careful to mash them with his tongue lest they crunch.

Day by day, the river became their fever.

They made a flotilla of twenty-two rafts roped together, some lashed side by side, others trailing singly far behind, for the sake of solitude or mental health or science experiments or clandestine lovemaking. The large pontoon boats had a ten-man capacity, including 1,500 pounds of cargo. The smaller boats they used as dinghies to transport pa.s.sengers from one polyurethane island to another during the day, or for floating hospital beds when people got sick, or for ranger duty, rigged with a machine gun and one of the battery-powered motors. Ike was given the only sea kayak.

There was not supposed to be weather down here. There could be no wind, no rain, no seasons: scientifically unfeasible. The subplanet was hermetically sealed, a near vacuum, they'd been told, its thermostat locked at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, its atmosphere motionless.

No thousand-foot waterfalls. No dinosaurs, for Christ-sake. Most of all, there was not supposed to be light.

But there was all of that. They pa.s.sed a glacier calving small blue icebergs into the river. The ceilings sometimes rained with monsoon weight. One of the mercenaries was bitten by a plate-armored fish unchanged since the age of trilobites.

With increasing frequency, they entered caverns illuminated by a type of lichen that ate rock. In its reproductive stage, apparently, the lichen extended a fleshy stalk, or ascocarp, with a positive and negative electrical charge. The result was light, which attracted flatworms by the millions. These were eaten, in turn, by mollusks that traveled on to new, unlit regions. The mollusks excreted lichen spores from their guts. The spores matured to eat the new rock. Light spread by inches through the darkness.

Ali loved it. What excited the botanists was not just the production of light energy, but the decomposition of rock, a lichen by-product. Decomposed rock was soil, which meant vegetation, and animals. The land of the dead was very much alive.

The geologists were elated. The expedition was about to leave the Nazca Plate and traverse beneath the East Pacific Rise. Here the Pacific Plate was just being born as freshly extruded rock, which steadily migrated west with a conveyor-belt motion. It would take 180 million years for the rock to reach the Asian margin, there to be devoured - subducted - back into the earth's mantle. They were going to see the entire Pacific plate geology, from birth to death.

In the third week of August, they pa.s.sed through the rise between the roots of a nameless seamount, an ocean-floor volcano. The seamount itself sat a mile overhead, serviced by these ganglia reaching deep into the mantle for supplies of live magma. The riverine walls became hot.

Faces flushed. Lips cracked. Those still carrying Chap-stick even used it on their splitting cuticles. By the thirtieth hour, they knew what it was like to be roasted alive.

Head draped with a red-and-white checkered cotton scarf, Ike warned them to keep covered. The NASA survival suits were supposed to wick their sweat to a second layer to circulate and cool. But the humidity inside their suits became unbearable. Soon everyone had stripped to underwear, even Ike in his kayak. Appendix scars, moles, birthmarks all went on display; later the revelations would fuel new nicknames.

Ali had never known thirst like this.

'How much longer?' a voice croaked from the line.

Ike grinned. 'Drink,' he said.

They moved on, mouths open. The batteries of their boat motors had run down. They paddled listlessly, spooning at the river.

At one point the tunnel wall became so hot, it glowed dull red. They could see raw magma through a gash opened in the wall. It arched and seethed like gold and blood, roiling in the planetary womb. Ali dared one glance and darted her face away and stroked on. Its hush was like a great geological lullaby.

The river looped around and through the volcano's searing root system. There were, as always, forks and false paths. Somehow, Ike knew which way to go.

The tunnel began to close on them. Ali was near the end of the line. Suddenly screams issued from the very back. She thought they were under attack.

Ike appeared, his kayak scooting upriver like a water bug. He pa.s.sed Ali's raft, then stopped. The walls had plasticized and bulged in on the tunnel, confining the very last raft on its upriver side.

'Who are they?' Ike asked Ali and her boatload.

'Walker's guys,' someone answered. 'There were two of them.'

The shouting on the far side of the opening was anonymous. The hemorrhaged stone made a noise like a ship's ribs cracking. The outer sheath of stone splintered, throwing shrapnel.

Walker and his boat of men came paddling from lower down. The colonel a.s.sessed the situation. 'Leave them,' he said.

'But those are your men,' Ike said.

'There's nothing to be done. It's already too narrow to get their raft through. They know to retreat if they get cut off.' The soldiers in Walker's boats were lockjawed with fear, veins snaky from wrist to shoulder.

'Well, that won't do,' Ike said, and shot upriver.

'Get back here!' Walker shouted after him.

Ike darted his kayak through the narrowing channel. The walls were deforming by the minute. Part of his checkered scarf touched the walls and caught fire. The hair on his head smoked. He popped through the maw at full speed.

The sides bloated in behind him. The bottom ten feet of the opening fused shut with a kiss. A gap remained open near the ceiling, but it was easily nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit through there. No one could conceivably climb through.

'Ike?' called Ali.

It was as if he had just changed into solid rock.

The new wall quickly choked back the river. Even as Ali's boat of people sat there, the river's bottom grew more exposed, inch by inch. The corridor was filling with steam. It was going to be a race to keep ahead of the deprivation.

'We can't stay here,' someone said.

'Wait,' Ali commanded. She added, 'Please.'

They waited and the riverbed drained lower. In another few minutes their raft would be sitting upon bare stone.

Ali's cracked lips parted. G.o.d the Father, she prayed. Let this one go free.

It was not like her. True devotion was not quid pro quo. You never cut deals with G.o.d. Once, as a child, she had pleaded for her parents' return. Ever since, Ali had decided to let be what was. Thy will be done.

'Let him live,' she murmured.

The walls did not open. This was not a fairy tale. The stone stayed welded.

'Let's go,' said Ali.

Then they heard a different sound. Dammed on the far side, the river had built height. Abruptly, a jet of water shot through the molten aperture at the top.

'Look!'

Like Jonah being vomited from the whale, one, then two men came blasting from the hole. Sheathed in water, they were protected from the scalding rock and thrown clear into the lower river.

The two soldiers staggered downstream through the thigh-deep water, weaponless, burned, naked. But alive. The raft of scientists returned and pulled the two bleating, shocked men onto their floor. 'Where's Ike?' Ali yelled to them, but their throats were too swollen to speak.

They looked to the hole of spouting water, and a shape sprang through the torrent. It was long and black with mottled gray, Ike's empty sea kayak. Next appeared his paddle. Ike came last.

He held onto the gunnel of his kayak, half cooked. When his strength returned, he emptied the craft of water and got himself in and came paddling down to them. He was burned, but whole, right down to his shotgun.

It had been the closest of calls, and he knew it. He took a deep breath, shook the water from his hair, and did his best to stop down the big grin. He looked each of them in the eye, last of all Ali.

'What are we waiting for?' he said.

Many hours later, the expedition finished its marathon beneath the seamount. They pulled onto a shoal of green basalt in cooling air. There was a small stream of clear water.

The two lucky soldiers were returned to Walker, naked. Their grat.i.tude to Ike was obvious. The colonel's shame at abandoning them was like a dangerous cloud.

For the next twenty hours, people slept. When they woke, Ike had stacked some rocks to pool the stream for them to drink. Ali had never seen him so happy.

'You made them wait,' he said to her.

In full view of the others, he kissed her on the lips. Maybe that was the safest way he could think to do it. She went along with it, even blushing.

By now, Ali was beginning to recognize the archangel inside Ike's sausage skin of scars and wild tattooing. The more she trusted him, the more she did not. He had an esprit, an air of immortality. She could see how each brush with great risk would serve to feed it, and how eventually even a kiss might destroy him.

Naturally, they called the river Styx.

The slow current lofted them. Some days they barely dipped a paddle, drifting with the flow. Hundreds of miles of sh.o.r.eline stretched by with elastic monotony. They named some of the more prominent landmarks, and Ali jotted the names down to enter onto her maps each night.

After a month of acclimation, their circadian rhythms were finally synched to the changeless night. Sleep resembled hibernation, profound crashes into dream, REMs practically shaking them. Initially they lapsed into ten-hour stretches, then twelve. Each time they closed their eyes, it seemed they slept longer. Finally their bodies settled on a communal norm: fifteen hours. After that much sleep, they would usually be good for a thirty-hour 'day.'

Ike had to teach them how to pace such a long waking cycle, otherwise they would have destroyed themselves with exhaustion. It took stronger muscles and thicker calluses and constant attention to respiration and food to stay mobile for twenty-four hours or more at a time.

If not for their watches, they would have sworn their biological clocks were the same as on the surface. There were many advantages to this new regimen. They were able to cover vastly more territory. Also, without the sun and moon to cue them, they began to live, in a sense, longer.

Time dilated. You could finish a five-hundred-page novel in a single sitting. They developed a craving for Beethoven and Pink Floyd and James Joyce, anything of magnum-opus length.

Ike tried to instill in them new awareness. The shapes of rocks, the taste of minerals, the holes of silence in a cavern: memorize it all, he said. They humored him. He knew his stuff, which took the burden off them. It was his job, not theirs. He went on trying. Someday you won't have your instruments and maps, he said. Or me. You'll need to know where you are with your fingertips, by an echo receding. Some tried to emulate his quiet manner, others his unspoken authority with things violent. They liked how he spooked Walker's solemn gunmen.

That he had been a mountaineer was obvious in his economy and care. From his big stone walls in Yosemite and his Himalayan mountains, Ike had learned to take the journey one inch at a time. Long before the underworld ever came into his life, Ali realized, it was the climbing that had shaped Ike's tactile perceptions. It came naturally to him to read the world through his fingertips, and Ali liked to think it had given him an edge even on his first accidental descent from Tibet. The irony was that his talent for ascent had become his vehicle for the abyss.