They waited for Thomas to add his own impressions, but he was distracted and melancholy. He had arrived late, bearing a square box, all but unapproachable.
'And where is Santos?' Mustafah asked de l'Orme. 'I'm beginning to think he doesn't like us.'
'Off to Johannesburg,' de l'Orme said. 'It seems another band of hadals has surrendered. To a group of unarmed diamond miners!'
'That's the third this month,' said Parsifal. 'One in the Urals. Another beneath the
Yucatán.'
'Meek as lambs,' said de l'Orme, 'chanting in unison. Like pilgrims entering
Jerusalem.'
'What a notion.'
'You'd think it would be much safer to go deeper. Away from us. It's almost as if they were afraid of the depths beneath them. As afraid as we are of the depths
beneath us.'
'Let's begin,' said Thomas.
They had been waiting a long time to synthesize their information. At last it began, knives in hand, grapes flying. It started cautiously, with a show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine prudence. In no time, the exchange turned into a highly democratic free-for-all. They psychoanalyzed Satan with the vigor of freshmen. The clues led off in a dozen directions. They knew better, but could not help egging on the wild theories with wilder theories of their own.
'I'm so relieved,' Mustafah admitted. 'I thought I was the only one coming to these extraordinary conclusions.'
'We should stick to what we know,' Foley prudishly reminded them.
'Okay,' said Vera. And it only got wilder.
He was a he, they agreed. Except for the four-thousand-year-old Sumerian tale of Queen Ereshkigal, or Allatu in the Assyrian, the monarch of the underworld was mainly a masculine presence. Even if the contemporary Satan proved to be a council of leaders, it was likely to be dominated by a masculine sensibility, an urge toward domination, a willingness to shed blood.
They extrapolated from prevailing views of animal behavior about alpha males, territorial imperative, and reproductive tyranny. Diplomacy might or might not work with such a character. A clenched fist or an empty threat would probably just incite him. The hadal leader would not be stupid: to the contrary, his reputation for deception and masks and inventiveness and cunning bargains suggested real cross-cultural genius.
He had the economic instincts of a salt trader, the courage of a soloist crossing the Arctic. He was a traveler among mankind, conversant in human languages, a student of power, an observer able to blend in without notice, an adventurer who explored at random or for profit or, like the Beowulf scholars and the Helios expedition who were exploring his lands, out of scientific curiosity.
His anonymity was a skill, an art, but not infallible. He had never been caught. But he had been sighted. No one knew exactly what he looked like, which meant he did not look like what people expected. He probably didn't have red horns or cloven hooves or a tail with a spike at the tip. That he could be grotesque or animalistic at times, and seductive or voluptuary or even beautiful at other times, suggested a switch of disguises or of lieutenants or spies. Or a lineage of Satans.
The ability to transfer memory from one consciousness to another, now clinically proven, was significant, said Mustafah. Reincarnation made possible a 'dynasty' similar to that of the Dalai Lama theocracy. That was a jolt, the notion of Satan as an ongoing religious monarchy.
'Buddhism with extreme prejudice,' quipped Parsifal.
'Perhaps,' de l'Orme proposed irreverently, 'Satan would be better off just dying out and becoming an idea, rather than struggling to be a reality. By sniffing around man's camp all these years, the lion has degenerated into a hyena. The tempest has become just a puff of bad wind, a fart in the night.'
Whether the literature and archaeological and linguistic evidence were describing Satan himself or rather his lieutenants and spies, the profile was consistent with an inquiring mentality. No doubt about it, the darkness wanted to know about the light. But to know what? Civilization? The human condition? The feel of sunbeams?
'The more I learn about hadal culture,' Mustafah said, 'the more I suspect a great culture in decline. It's as if a collective intellect had developed Alzheimer's and slowly begun to lose its reason.'
'I think of autism, not Alzheimer's,' said Vera. 'A vast onset of self-centered presentness. An inability to recognize the outside world, and with that an inability to create. Look at the artifacts coming up from subplanetary hadal sites. Over the last
three to five thousand years, the artifacts have been increasingly human in origin: coins, weapons, cave art, hand tools. That could mean that the hadals turned away from menial and artistic labor as they pursued higher arts, or that they jobbed the day-to-day minutiae out to human artisans whom they'd captured, or that they valued stolen possessions more than homemade ones.
'But match it with the decline in hadal population over the past several thousand years. Some demographic projections suggest they might have numbered over forty million individuals subglobally at the time Aristotle and Buddha lived. The figure is probably less than 300,000 at present. Something's gone terribly wrong down there. They haven't grown more sophisticated. They haven't pursued the higher arts. If anything, they've simply become packrats, storing their human knickknacks in tribal nests, increasingly unaware of what they have or where they are or even what they are.'
'Vera and I have talked about this at length,' said Mustafah. 'There's a tremendous amount of fieldwork to be done, of course. But if you go back a million years in the fossil record, it appears the hadals were developing hand tools and even amalgamated metal artifacts far ahead of what humans were producing on the surface. While man was still figuring out how to pound two rocks together, the hadals were inventing musical instruments made of glass! Who knows? Maybe man never did discover fire. Maybe we were taught it! But now you have these grotesque creatures reduced to savagery, their tribes draining off into the deepest holes. It's sad, really.'