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 passengers 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 passed 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 passed 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 passed 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 assessed 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.