They sat around a table, and a servant came in with bowls of thick, hot soup. There were no forks, just spoons for the soup and knives to cut the fruit and cheese and prosciutto. The servant poured wine and then retreated, closing the doors behind him.
De l'Orme proposed a toast to their generous hearts and even more generous appetites. He was the host, but it was not really his party. Thomas had called this meeting, though no one knew why. Thomas had been brooding ever since arriving. They got on with the meal.
The food revived them. For an hour they enjoyed the company of their comrades. Most had been strangers at the outset, and their paths had intersected only rarely since Thomas had scattered them to the winds in New York City. But they had come to share a common purpose so strongly that they might as well have been brothers and sisters. They were excited by one another's tales, glad for one another's safety.
January recounted her last hour with Desmond Lynch in the Phnom Penh airport. He had been heading to Rangoon, then south, in search of a Karen warlord who claimed to have met with Satan. Since then, no one had heard a word from him.
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 Yucatan.'
'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.'
'The question is,' said Vera, 'does this overall decline reflect in all the hadals?'
'Satan,' said January. 'Above all, does it affect him?'
'Without having met him, I can't say for sure. But there is always a dynamic between a people and their leader. He's a mirror image of them. Kind of like God in reverse. We're an image of Him? How about Him as an image of us?'
'You're saying the leader isn't leading? That he's following his benighted masses?'
'Of course,' said Mustafah. 'Even the most isolated despot reflects his people. Otherwise he's just a madman.' He gestured at the space around them. 'No different from the knight who built this castle on top of a mountain in a rocky wilderness.'
'Maybe that's what he is,' said Vera. 'Isolated. Alienated. Segregated by his genius. Wandering the world, above and below, cut off from his own kind, trying to figure some way into our kind.'
'Are we so attractive to them?' January wondered.
'Why not? What if our light and civilization and intellectual and physical health is their salvation, so to speak? What if we represent paradise to them - or him - the way their darkness and savagery and ignorance represent our hell?'
'And Satan's tired of being Satan?' asked Mustafah.
'But of course,' Parsifal said. 'What could be more in keeping? The ultimate traitor. The Judas of all time. A serpent ascending. The rat jumping off the ship.'
'Or at least an intellect contemplating his own transformation,' said Vera. 'Anguishing over his direction. Trying to decide whether he really can bring himself to cut loose.'
'What's so wrong with that?' asked Foley. 'Wasn't that Christ's agony? Isn't that Buddha's conundrum? The savior hits his wall. He gets worn out being the savior. He gets tired of the suffering. It means our Satan is mortal, that's all.'
January opened her palms to them like pink fruit. 'Why get so fancy?' she asked. 'The theory works perfectly fine with a much simpler explanation. What if Satan came up to cut a deal? What if he wants to find someone like us as badly as we want to find him?'
Foley's pencil fanned a nervous yellow wing in the air. 'But that's what I've been thinking!' he said. 'In fact, I think he's already found us.'
'What?' three of them asked at once.
Even Thomas raised his eyes from his dark thoughts.
'If there's one thing I've learned as an entrepreneur, it is that ideas occur in waves. Ideas transcend intelligence. In different cultures. Different languages. Different dreams. Why should the idea of peace be any different? What if the notion of a treaty or a summit or a cease-fire occurred to our Satan even as it occurred to us?'
'But you conjecture he's found us.'
'Why not? We're not invisible. The Beowulf endeavor has been globetrotting for a year and a half. If Satan is half as resourceful as you say, he's heard of us. And yes, located us. And perhaps even penetrated us.'
'Absurd,' they cried. But hungered for more.
'Speak from the evidence,' said Thomas.
'Yes, the evidence,' said Foley. 'It's your own evidence, Thomas. Wasn't it you who proposed that Satan might contact a leader as desperate - and enigmatic and vilified - as himself? A leader like this jungle warlord Desmond Lynch went off to find. As I recall, you once suggested Satan might want to establish a colony of his own, on the surface, in plain sight as it were, in a country like Burma or Rwanda, a place so benighted and savage no one dares cross its borders.'
'You're proposing that I am Satan?' Thomas drolly asked.
'No. Not at all.'
'I'm relieved. Then who?'
Foley went for broke. 'Desmond.'
'Lynch?' belched Gault.
'I'm quite serious.'
'What are you talking about?' January protested. 'The poor man's vanished. He's probably been eaten by tigers.'
'Perhaps. But what if he had secreted himself in our midst? Listened to our thoughts? Waited for an opportunity like this, a chance to meet a despot and make his pact? I doubt he'd bid us a fond adieu before disappearing forever.'
'Absurd.'
Foley laid his yellow pencil neatly alongside of his pad. 'Look, we've agreed on several things. That Satan is a trickster. A master of anonymity. He survives through his disguises and deceptions. And he may have been trying to strike a bargain... for peace or a hiding place, it doesn't matter. All I know is that Senator January last saw Desmond alive, on his way into a jungle no one dares to enter.'
'Do you realize what you're saying?' asked Thomas. 'I chose the man myself. I've known him for decades.'
'Satan is patient. He has loads of time.'
'You're suggesting that Lynch played us along from the beginning? That he used us?'
'Absolutely.'
Thomas looked sad. Sad and decided. 'Accuse him yourself,' he said. He set his box on the table amid the fruit and cheeses. Beneath FedEx paperwork, it bore diplomatic seals printed in broken wax.
'Thomas, is this necessary?' January said, guessing.
'This was delivered to me three days ago,' said Thomas. 'It came via Rangoon and Beijing. Here's why I convened this meeting with all of you.'
Lynch's head had been dipped in shellac. He would not have been pleased with what it had done to his thick Scottish hair, normally parted at the right temple. Through the slightly parted lids they could see round pebbles.
'They scooped his eyes out and put in stones,' said Thomas. 'Probably while he was still alive. While he was alive, too, they probably made this.' He drew out a necklace of human teeth. 'There are plier marks on several.'
'Why are you showing us this?' January whispered.
Mustafah looked down at his plate. Foley's arms were limp upon the chair rests. Parsifal was astounded: he and Lynch had clashed over socialism. Now the bleeding heart's mouth was locked tight, the bushy eyebrows plasticized, and Parsifal realized he would wonder to his death about the courage of his own convictions. What a brave bastard, he was thinking.
'One other thing,' Thomas continued. 'A set of genitals was found inside the mouth. A monkey's genitals.'
'How dare you,' whispered de l'Orme. He could smell the death, sense it in the other's pall. 'Here, in my home, at our meal?'
'Yes. I've brought this into your home, at our meal. So that you will not doubt me.' Thomas stood, his big knuckles flat on the oak plank, the insulted head between his fists.
'My friends,' he said, 'we have reached the end.'
They could not have been more stunned if he had produced a second head.
'The end?' said Mustafah.
'We have failed.'
'How can you say such a thing?' Vera objected. 'After all we've accomplished.'
'Do you not see poor Lynch?' Thomas said, holding the head aloft. 'Can you not hear your own words? This is Satan?'
They did not answer. He set the horrible artifact back into the box.
'I'm as responsible as you,' Thomas told them. 'Yes, I spoke to the possibility of Satan visiting some despot tucked away in a remote wasteland, and that misled you. But isn't it just as possible Satan would have desired to meet and appraise a different kind of tyrant, say, the head of Helios? And because we met with Cooper at his research complex, does that mean another one of us must be Satan, perhaps even you, Brian? No, I think not.'
'Fine, I flew off the curve,' said Foley. 'One wild deduction should not impeach our search.'
'This entire endeavor is a wild deduction,' Thomas said. 'We've seduced ourselves with our own knowledge. We're no closer to knowing Satan than when we began. We are finished.'
'Surely not yet,' said Mustafah. 'There's still so much to know.'
Their faces all registered that sentiment.
'I can no longer justify the hardships and danger,' said Thomas.
'You don't need to justify anything,' challenged Vera. 'This has been our choice from the start. Look at us.'
Despite their ordeals and the assault of time, they were not the spectral figures Thomas had first collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sparked to action. Their faces were bronzed with exotic suns, their skin toughened by winds and the cold, their eyes lit with adventure. They had been waiting to die, and his call to arms had saved their lives.
'Clearly the group wants to keep going,' said Mustafah.
'I'm just starting in with new Olmec evidence,' Gault explained.
'And the Swedes are developing a new DNA test,' said Vera. 'I'm in daily contact. They think it suggests a whole new species branch. It's just a matter of months.'
'And there was another ghost transmission from the interior,' said Parsifal. 'From the Helios expedition. The date code was August 8, almost four months ago, I know. But that's still a full month more recent than anything else we've managed to receive. The digital string needs enhancement, and it's only a partial communication, something about a river. It's not much. But they're alive. Or were. Just months ago. We can't just cut loose from them, Thomas. They're depending on us.'
Parsifal's remark was not meant to be cruel, but it drove Thomas's chin down to his chest. Week by week, his face had been growing more hollowed. Haunted, it seemed, by what he had put in motion.
'And what about you?' January asked more gently. 'This has been your quest since before any of us came to know you.'
'My quest,' Thomas murmured. 'And where has that brought us?'
'The hunt,' said Mustafah, 'has intrinsic value. You knew that in the beginning. Whether we ever sighted our prey, much less brought him to earth, we were learning about ourselves. By fitting our own foot into Satan's tracks, we've come that much closer to dispelling ancient illusions. Touching the reality of what we really are.'
'Illusion? Reality?' said Thomas. 'We've lost Lynch to the jungle. Rau to his madness. And Branch to his quest. And sent a young woman to her death in the center of the earth. I've taken you from your families and homes. And every day we continue brings new risks.'
'But, Thomas,' said Vera, 'we volunteered.'
'No,' he said, 'I can no longer justify it.'