'Tombstones? That's a pleasant thought,' one of the women said.
To dispel the sense of omen, Ali said, 'See how white the dust is? Have you ever smelled fresh marble just after a chisel has cut it?' She recalled for them a sculptor's studio she had once visited in northern Italy. He had been working on a nude with little success, and had begged Ali to pose for him, to help draw the woman out from his block of stone. For a time he had pursued her with letters.
'He wanted you to pose naked?' Pia was delighted. 'He didn't know you were a nun?'
'I was very clear.'
'So? Did you?'
Suddenly, Ali felt sad. 'Of course not.'
Life in these dark tubes and veins had changed her. She had been trained to erase her identity in order to allow God's signature upon her. Now she wanted desperately to be remembered, if only as a piece of sculpted marble.
The underworld was having its effect on others, too. As an anthropologist Ali was naturally alive to the entire tribe's metamorphosis. Tracking their idiosyncrasies was like watching a garden slowly grow rampant. They adopted peculiar touches, odd ways of combing their hair, or rolling their survival suits up to the knee or shoulder. Many of the men had started going bareback, the upper half of their suits hanging from their waists like shed skin. Deodorant was a thing of the past, and you barely noticed the body smells, except for certain unfortunates. Shoat, particularly, was known for his foot odor. Some of the women braided each other's hair with beads or shells. It was just for fun, they said, but their concoctions got more elaborate each
week.
Some of the soldiers lapsed into gang talk when Walker wasn't around, and their weapons suddenly flowered with scrimshaw. They carved animals or Bible quotes or girlfriends' names onto the plastic stocks and handles. Even Walker had let his beard grow into a great Mosaic bush that had to be a garden spot for the cave lice that plagued them.
Ike no longer looked so much different from the rest of them. After the incident at Cache II, he had made himself more scarce. Many nights they never saw him, only his little tripod of glowing green candles designating a good campsite. When he did surface, it was only for a matter of hours. He was retreating into himself, and Ali didn't know how to reach him, or why it should matter so much to her. Maybe it was that the one in their group who most needed reconciliation seemed most resistant to it. There was another possibility, that she had fallen in love. But that was unreasonable, she thought.
On one of Ike's rare overnights at camp, Ali took a meal to him and they sat by the water's edge. 'What do you dream?' she asked. When his brow wrinkled, she added,
'You don't have to tell me.'
'You've been talking with the shrinks,' he said. 'They asked the same thing. It's supposed to be a measure of fluency, right? If I dream in hadal.'
She was unsettled. They all wanted a piece of this man. 'Yes, it's a measure. And no, I haven't talked with anyone about you.'
'So what do you want?'
'What you dream about. You don't have to tell me.'
'Okay.'
They listened to the water. After a minute, she changed her mind. 'No, you do have to tell me.' She made it light.
'Ali,' he said. 'You don't want to hear it.'
'Give,' she coaxed.
'Ali,' he said, and shook his head.
'Is it so bad?'
Suddenly he stood up and went over to the kayak.
'Where are you going?' This was so strange. 'Look, just drop it. I was prying. I'm sorry.'
'It's not your fault,' he said, and dragged the boat to water.
As he cut his way down the river, it finally dawned on her. Ike dreamed of her.
On September 28 they homed in on Cache III.
They had been picking up increasingly strong signals for two days. Not sure what other surprises Helios might have in store, still uncertain what the Ranger assassins had been up to, Walker told Ike to stay behind while he sent his soldiers in advance. Ike made no objections, and drifted his kayak among the scientists' rafts, silent and chagrined to be off point for a change.
Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats. The waterfall rifled down a shield of olive stone from heights too high to see, beating up a mist that threw rainbows in their lights. The scientists ran their rafts onto shore and disembarked. Some quirk in the cul-de-sac's acoustics rendered the roar into a wall of white noise.
Walker came over. 'The rangefinder reads zero,' he reported. 'That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we've got is this waterfall.'
Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level.
There was nothing but water overhead, and it was leaking through the ocean floor. '
'They've got to be here,' said Shoat.
'You've been carrying your own rangefinder around,' Walker said. 'Let's see if that works any better.'
Shoat backed away and grasped at the flat leather pouch strung around his neck. 'It won't work for this kind of thing,' he said. 'It's a homing device, specially made for the transistor beacons I'm planting along the way. For an emergency only.'
'Maybe the cylinders hung up on a shelf,' someone suggested.
'We're looking,' said Walker. 'But these rangefinders are calibrated precisely. The cylinders should be within two hundred feet. We haven't seen a sign of them. No cables. No drill scars. Nothing.'
'One thing's certain,' said Spurrier. 'We're not going anywhere until those supplies are found.'
Ike took his kayak downriver to investigate smaller strands. 'If you find them, leave them. Don't touch them. Come back and tell us,' Walker instructed him. 'Somebody's got you in their crosshairs, and I don't want you close to our cargo when they pull the trigger.'
The expedition broke into search parties, but found nothing. Frustrated, Walker put some of his mercenaries to work shoveling at the coarse sand in case the cylinders had burrowed under. Nothing. Tempers began to fray, and few wanted to hear one fellow's calculations about how to ration what little food remained until they reached the next cache, five weeks farther on.
They suspended the search to have their meal and rejuvenate their perspective. Ali sat with a line of people, their backs against the rafts, facing the waterfall. Suddenly Troy said, 'What about there?' He was pointing at the waterfall.