Subterrestrial (5 page)

The treetops twirled below his feet as he lowered himself down. His hands burned on the rope, and he was already dripping with sweat. He tried not to think about the fact that a fall from this height would be fatal or that his climbing harness felt like it was cutting right through his groin. Instead, he focused on the browning leaves and the barren gray trunks encircling the debris cone where the water had risen clear up into the lower third of the forest. While their reaction to the water wasn’t necessarily abnormal, the speed at which the trees were dying was.

He’d been at home in Chicago, where he taught evolutionary biology at the Johann Brandt Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, when he was first alerted to the sudden and extreme flooding. Minh Duan, his liaison at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, had sent him satellite imagery and photos he’d personally taken while looking down into Edam from the forest above. They were well outside of the monsoon season and hadn’t experienced any excessive rainfall or unseasonable weather patterns. It was as though the planet had simply sprung a leak in the middle of the Quảng Bình Province.

Branches passed on either side before closing around him. Barwings and laughing thrushes chittered and swooped through the canopy as he descended into an almost magical world of perpetual twilight. The smell was earthy and damp, although beneath it he detected a scent that reminded him of low tide. He dropped down into the soft loam and steadied the rope for Duan, who zipped down the line once Payton was off.

Duan was a speleologist who specialized not only in the study and exploration of karst formations, but in the morphological adaptations of cave-dwelling organisms as well, which dovetailed nicely with Payton’s specialty. An environment like the Garden of Edam was a once-in-a-lifetime find. It was a unique habitat simultaneously part of and separate from both the cave system and the surrounding jungle. Troglophiles like cave crickets and pseudoscorpions lived side-by-side with their ordinary insect counterparts. Bats and common avian species coexisted in this unique transition zone, but it was the flora that exhibited the most amazing evolutionary adaptations Payton had seen, especially over such a relatively short period of time.

Castanopsis hystrix
, an evergreen tree related to the birch family, was endemic to the jungle overhead. Down here, however, it had mutated into a deciduous tree. Not only that, it grew thinner and sparser yet no less vibrant than its progenitors, a mere tenth of a mile straight up. The species had adapted to less light and water, and, in doing so, had essentially become an entirely new subspecies. This place was positively filled with similar examples of evolutionary triumph that existed nowhere else in the world, but if they couldn’t keep Edam from dying, then millions of years of struggle would all be for naught.

“You smell that?” Duan asked. “It smells like bad fish.”

Payton wasn’t quite ready to share his hypothesis. It sounded ridiculous, even to him, but he could think of no other plausible explanation. He’d recognized it in the satellite images of the alluvial fan formed by the overflow from the southern egress of the tunnel system, the faint white edges around the devastation.

He heard what sounded like thunder from the outside world. It echoed inside the chamber with a faint thrum he could feel in his chest. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was have to climb that rope back to the surface with rain beating down on him. He looked up to see the ferocious wind tearing through the trees encircling the hole.

The river had risen a good thirty feet up the slope, submerging ferns and washing away the topsoil to reveal the bare limestone rubble, converting the debris cone into an island. The current was so strong he could barely wade in past his knees amid the gray trunks of the dying trees. He wrapped his arm around one to maintain his balance while he took off his backpack and removed a collection cup.

“Catch.”

He tossed his backpack to Duan, who crouched uphill, examining what looked like a pile of dead millipedes with the tip of a stick.

Payton bent as low as he could and thrust his hand down into the water. It was bitterly cold and immediately caused his fingers to stiffen. He jerked his hand back out and slogged up onto dry land with the brown water sloshing in the cup.

Duan handed him his backpack and picked up one of the millipedes.

“It is
sấy khô
. . . dried out . . . how do you say it?”

“Desiccated?”

“Right. All of the inside fluid pulled out.”

“What causes something like that?” Payton asked, although he already knew the answer. He sat beside Duan and removed the testing equipment from his pack. He filled four vials with the collected water, dripped several drops of various test solutions into each, and watched them change color. They were so dark he didn’t even need to compare them to the cards included with the kit. He’d picked up a complete aquarium test kit and a hydrometer from a pet store on the way to the airport and familiarized himself with each of the tests on the interminable plane ride. Rather than an acidic pH level as one would expect to find in a karst environment, the color change indicated the water was basic, closer to that of a rift environment. The ammonia was high—as he’d anticipated—as a consequence of the increased amount of dead biological matter, but the nitrite and nitrate levels were disproportionately low, suggesting that the bacteria that fed upon the ammonia and filtered it from the water were either performing at suboptimal levels or present in insufficient numbers. It was the hydrometer that would conclusively prove his theory, though. And, if he was right, he was about to change science’s fundamental understanding of the world in ways he could neither predict nor entirely comprehend.

He poured the remainder of the water into the plastic chamber of the hydrometer and watched the needle rise up the axis and settle on a specific gravity reading, which indicates the concentration of salt in the water in parts per thousand. Fresh stream water should read 1.005, at most, while marine environments fell between 1.020 and 1.025. This sample read 1.015. Somehow, a large quantity of saltwater was being forced up through the ground and into the subterranean river. It was the dramatic increase in salinity that was killing the plant life and the bacteria that filtered out the ammonia. It was also the source of the smell and the white discoloration he’d recognized on the satellite images, but they were twelve miles from the South China Sea and a half mile above sea level. How had so much seawater been pumped into the Rao Thuong, and where in the name of God had it come from?

There was a buzzing sound overhead.

Payton looked up and saw a man sliding down their rope at a rapid click. High above him, a helicopter hovered over the treetops.

The man crashed through the branches and slowed his momentum at the very last moment. He alighted on the ground and disconnected his harness in one easy motion. He strode straight toward them in a suit and tie that were so incongruent with his surroundings that he might as well have been an apparition stepping out of another dimension.

Payton stood and watched the man approach.

“Dr. Payton,” the man said, extending his hand. “My name is Reinhard Thyssen. Please forgive me for my rather dramatic entrance. I’m here to make you the offer of a lifetime.”

Payton couldn’t seem to find any words to respond. He shook the proffered hand and stared into the man’s eyes. They were so blue that he couldn’t seem to look away from them.

Thyssen inclined his head toward the colored vials and the hydrometer on the ground.

“Excellent. I see you’ve already rationalized the nature of the situation. Exactly what I would have expected of you, Dr. Payton.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“I’ve studied your work. Your paper on the metabolic adaptations of the naked mole-rat was revelatory.”

“How did you find me? How did you know I was here?”

Payton realized he was still shaking the man’s hand and quickly released it.

“All of the questions you could ask, and that’s what you want to know?”

The man smiled patiently, as though he were talking to a child.

“Why?”

The man tapped the side of his nose.

“That’s the real question, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll find the answer illuminating.”

Payton raised his eyebrows in expectation and gestured for the man to proceed.

“What would you say if I told you this wasn’t the only subterranean environment of this nature on the planet?”

“I’d say you were playing the odds.”

“Aah, too true. But what if I told you this new one had been until recently entirely self-contained and, unlike this one, capable of supporting higher orders of life?”

Payton glanced over his shoulder at Duan, who appeared every bit as wary, but there was no disguising the excitement on his face. He turned back to the man and asked the question he’d been waiting his entire life to ask.

“How much higher?”

Bering Sea

1.2 Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°36′44″ N, 168°05′21″ W

Ahiga Nabahe had never been so cold in his life. Even with the thermal compression undergarments, snow pants, and down parka they’d given him on the private plane to Nome, he felt as though he was on the verge of succumbing to frostbite. He shivered at the sight of so much snow assailing the windshield of the helicopter and the chunks of ice riding the cold black ocean below him. The wind bit his ears, even with the over-the-ear headphones that the pilot, who wore reflective silver sunglasses and an impassive expression, had passed back over his shoulder the moment Nabahe climbed from the frozen tarmac into a silver-and-red Temsco chopper with what looked like skis for landing gear. That might only have been an hour ago, but already it felt like he’d spent an eternity in this arctic wasteland.

Twenty-four hours ago, he’d been sitting on the back porch of his little bungalow in Yuma, Arizona, with an iced tea in one hand and a joint in the other, reveling in the sensation of the desert sun on his skin. The glaucoma wasn’t nearly as bad as it was before the surgery, but he’d lived with it long enough to know how to fake it, at least well enough to keep the disability checks coming and maintain his membership at Club Medical Marijuana. He’d felt guilty about it for a while, at least until the economy tanked and pretty much everyone he knew lost their jobs and began suckling from the government teat. Besides, nearly going blind in his mid-thirties wasn’t half as unfair as being terminated from his teaching position because of it. Granted, the HR people at Northern Arizona University hadn’t come right out and said it, but he’d been able to see their faces well enough to recognize that they’d been coached through the process of his dismissal by the school’s legal counsel, who were undoubtedly listening on the other end of the speaker phone, the light from which even a blind man could plainly see. Not that it mattered so much anymore. He’d found a way to let go of the hard feelings and move on with his life, which he could now devote to his research.

In his previous life, he’d taught sociocultural anthropology to kids who found his culture exotic and fascinating. It was a surreal experience teaching about the Native American peoples as though their history were separate from that of the United States. He didn’t think of the stories passed down through the generations as folklore, nor did he see the travails of his lineage as some sort of mythology. There’d been times when he was lecturing his classes that he felt like a big phony, a caricature dancing for their amusement. They found the oral traditions of the Hopi and Zuni, even his native Navajo, laughable. With their narrow worldviews, they couldn’t accept the idea that myths were firmly rooted in fact. They couldn’t see what he was trying to teach them with their eyes glued to their iPhones and iPads, even though it was staring them right in the face.

It was this almost casual diminishment of what he thought of as his life’s work that contributed to him spending more time in the field trying to figure out if by some slim chance that it was he who was actually wrong, that the stories his grandmother had made him memorize as a boy were merely fabrications sewn from generations of resentment and despair. So he’d set out to discover the truth, which was hidden in the most remote locations across the continent, from the red sands of the Sonoran Desert to the burial mounds of Virginia and the Rocky Mountains from Alberta to Alamosa.

The vast majority of tribes had committed their history to record in the form of pictograms painted on cave walls and petroglyphs carved directly into the stone. It was a history in pictures meant to accompany the oral traditions passed down through their bloodlines, like illustrations for a children’s book. There were stories of good times and bad, of the triumph of victory and the heartbreak of loss, of times of bounty and famine, of celebration and death, and of gods and monsters. And while few tribes lived together in harmony, all of their tales were essentially the same, especially when it came to the stories of their creation.

He’d expected to find legends of birth from chaos, like the Sumerians and Babylonians, or
ex nihilo
—out of nothing—like the major modern monotheistic religions. Instead, he’d found a strange commonality that defied coincidence. Theirs was a shared origin of emergence, of dwelling in the deep darkness inside the earth before crawling out into the daylight. He’d compared hundreds of primitive drawings and carvings and sought out the corresponding oral traditions from those who could still sing them and found fewer contradictions among stories told by senile old women than there were in the Good Book. So few, in fact, that he’d been left with a single course of action. If he wanted to find the truth, there was only one place to go.

Down.

“Where do you think he’s going to land?” the woman beside him asked. Her nose and cheeks were bright red and she looked like she was part lion with the fur fringe around the hood of her parka. “We’ve been over water for half an hour.”

Nabahe’s teeth chattered when he spoke.