The Descent

'It's these  two, I have  no doubt,' Ike  said. He held up the paired leather patches  with the linked circles of scar tissue. 'I tracked them tracking him. They  took  him  together, one from the front, one from above.'

'And then you found them.'

'Yes.'

'And you couldn't bring them back to us?'

The  absurdity  shocked him. 'Hadals?' he said.

Now she understood. This hadn't been  a  murder.  He'd  told  her  the  first  time.  Fresh kill. It  hit her. 'Hadals?' she said. 'There  were  hadals? Here?'

'Not anymore.'

'Don't try  to placate me,' she said. 'I want to know.'

'We're in their house now. What do you expect?'

'But Shoat told us it was uninhabited through this tunnel.'

'Blind faith.'

'And you haven't told anybody?'

'I took care of the problem. Now we're  clear again.'

Part  of  her  was  glad.  Live  hadals!  Dead  now.  'What  did  you  do?'  she  asked  quietly, not sure she really  wanted the details.

He  chose  not  to  give  any.  'I  left  them  in  a  way  that  will  speak  to  any  others.  We won't have  trouble.'

'Then where  do these  come from?' she asked, pointing at his collection.

'Other places. Other  times.'

'But you think there  may  be more.'

'Nothing   organized.   Not   in   any   numbers.   They're   just   drifters.    Wanderers. Opportunists.'

She was shaken. 'Do you carry  these  around with you everywhere?'  she asked.

'Think  of  it  as  taking  their  driver's  license  or  dogtag.  It  helps  me  get  the  bigger picture.  Movement.  Migrations.  I  learn  from  them,  almost  like  they  were  talking  to me.' He held one patch to his nose and smelled. Then he licked  it.  'This  one  came  from very  deep. You can tell by  the cleanness of him.'

'What are you talking about?'

He offered it to her, and she turned her head.  'Have  you  ever  eaten  range-fed  beef? It  tastes  different from a cow that's been eating  grain  and  hormones.  Same  here.  This guy had never  eaten  sunlight.  He'd  never  been  to  the  surface.  Never  eaten  an  animal that had gone up top. It  was probably his first time away  from the tribe.'

'And you killed him,' she said. He looked at her.

'You  have  no  idea  how  brutal  this  looks,'  she  said.  'Dear  God.  What  did  they  do  to you?'

He  shrugged.  In  the  span  of  one  heartbeat,  he  had  fallen  a  thousand  miles  away from her. 'I'll find him,' he said.

'Who?'

He pointed at the raised scars on his arm. 'Him,' he said.

'You said that was your  name.'

'It was. His name was my  name. I had no name except  for his.'

'Whose?'

'The one who owned me.'

Four days  farther  on, they  found Shoat's river.

Ike  had been sent ahead. He was waiting  for  the  expedition  at  a  chamber  filled  with thunder.  They  had  been  hearing  it  for  days.  In  the  center  of  the  floor  lay  a  great vertical  shaft,  shaped  at  top  like  a  funnel.  A  city  block  wide,  the  hole  roared  up  at them.

The  walls sweated.  Small streams  sluiced into the maw. They  girdled the  rim,  trying to  see  the  bottom.  Their  lights  illuminated  a  deep,  polished  throat.  The  stone  was calcareous  serpentine  with  green  mottling.  Ike  lowered  a  headlamp  on  a  rope.  Two hundred  meters  down,  the  tiny  light  skipped  and  skidded  sideways  on  an  invisible current.

'I'll be damned,' Shoat said. 'The river.'

'You didn't expect  it to be here?' someone said.

Shoat  grinned.  'Nobody  knew.  Our  cartography  department  gave  it  a  one-in-three chance.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  the  most  logical  way  to  explain  the  continuum  in their data.'

'We came all this way  on a wild guess?'

Shoat  gave   a   happy-go-lucky   shrug.   'Kick   off   your   shoes,'   he   said,   'no   more backpacks. No more hoofing it. From here, we float.'

'I think we should first study  the situation,' one of the hydrologists said.  'We  have  no idea what's down there.  What's the river's  profile? How fast does it run? Where does it go?'

'Study  it from the boats,' Shoat said.

The  porters  did  not  arrive  for  another  three  hours.  Since  leaving  Cache  I,  they  had been freighted with double loads for double pay, some carrying in  excess  of  a  hundred and fifty pounds. They  deposited their cargo in a dry  area and went over  to a  separate chamber, where  Walker had arranged a hot meal for them.

Ali  came  across  to  Ike,  where  he  was  rigging  lines  into  the  hole.  At  their  parting  on the   dance  floor,  she'd  been   drunk   and  brimming  with  curiosity   and,  ultimately, repulsion.  Now  she  was  as  sober  as  a  pebble,  and  the  repulsion  had  abated.  'What happens with them?' she asked, referring to the porters.  'Everyone's  wondering.'

'End of the road,' he said. 'Shoat's retiring them.'

'They're  going  home?  The  colonel's  been  hunting  the  runaways  down,  and  now they're  all being turned loose?'

'It's Shoat's show,' Ike  said.

'Will they  be okay?'