Dakii continued down this new pa.s.sage, mumbling under his breath Finally, he stopped beside a large tubby and pointed. "Father."
Nate grabbed the flashlight back from Anna. He dropped to his knees, shining his light inside, oblivious to the questing root hairs that wrapped around his wrist.
Within the ma.s.s of roots lay a shadowy figure. Nate moved his light over its form. Curled in a fetal position on the soft loamy floor was a gaunt naked frame, a pale man. His face was covered by a thick beard, his hair
396.
tangled with roots. Nate focused on the face hidden beneath the beard. He was not entirely sure it was his father.
As he stared, the man inhaled sharply, mechanically, and exhaled, wafting root hairs from his lips. Still alive!
Nate turned. "I have to get him out of there:"
"Is it your father?" Anna asked.
"I . . . I"m not sure:" Nate pointed to the bone knife tucked in Kouwe"s belt. The professor pa.s.sed it over to him.
Nate stood and hacked into the root ma.s.s.
Dakii cried out, reaching to stop him, but Kouwe blocked the tribesman. "Dakii, no! Leave Nate be:"
Nate fought through the outer cords of woody roots. It was like the husk surrounding some nut. Beneath this layer was a ma.s.s of finer web-bings and draperies of rootlets and thready hairs.
Once through, Nate saw the roots penetrated the man"s body, growing into it as if it were soil. It must be how the Yagga sustained its specimens, feeding them, supporting organ systems, delivering nutrients.
Nate hesitated. Would he harm the man, kill him, if he hacked the root"s attachments? If this was indeed some type of suspended animation, would its interruption trigger a ma.s.sive systems failure?
Shaking his head, Nate slashed through the roots. He would take his chances. Left alone, the man wouldsurely die a fiery death.
Once the body was free of the root hairs, Nate tossed the knife aside, grabbed the man by the shoulders, and hauled him into the pa.s.sage. The last clinging roots broke away, releasing their prey.
In the tunnel, Nate collapsed beside the man. The naked figure choked and gasped. Many of the tiny rootlets and hairs squiggled from his body, dropping away like leeches. Blood flowed from some spots where larger rootlets had penetrated. Suddenly the man seized, contracting, back arch-ing, head thrown back.
Nate cradled the man in his arms, not knowing what to do. The thrashings continued for a full minute.
Kouwe helped to restrain the man and prevent further injury.
The figure jerked into a final convulsion, then collapsed with a mighty gasp.
Nate exhaled with relief when the man"s chest continued to rise and fall. Then the eyes fluttered open and stared up at him. Nate knew those eyes. They were his own eyes.
"Nate?" the figure asked in a dry husky voice.
Nate fell atop the figure. "Dad!"
"Am . . . am I dreaming?" his father asked coa.r.s.ely.
Nate was too choked to speak. He helped his father, who was light as a pillow, all skin and bones, to sit. The tree had been sustaining him, but just barely.
Kouwe bent down to help. "Carl, how are you feeling?"
Nate"s father squinted at the professor, then a look of recognition spread across his face. "Kouwe? My G.o.d, what"s going on?"
"It"s a long story, old friend:" He helped Nate get his father on his feet. Too frail to move on his own, Carl Rand clung to Nate and Kouwe. "Right now, though, we have to get you out of this d.a.m.n place:"
Nate stared at his father, tears streaming down his face. "Dad. . :"
"I know, son," he said hoa.r.s.ely and coughed.
There was no time for a proper reunion now, but Nate wasn"t going to let another moment go by without saying the words he had regretted with-holding the day his father left for this expedition. "I love you, Dad:"
The arm around his shoulder tightened, a small squeeze of affection and love. A familiar gesture. Family.
"We should fetch the others," Anna said. "And head out of here:"
"Nate, why don"t you stay with your father here?" Kouwe suggested "Rest. We can collect you both on the way out."
Dakii shook his head. "No. We not come back this way." He waved his arm. "Other way to go:" Nate frowned. "We should stay together anyway."
"And I can handle myself," Carl argued hoa.r.s.ely. He glanced back to the cubbyhole. "Besides, I"ve been resting here long enough:"
Kouwe nodded.
With the matter settled, they began to climb toward the surface. Kouwe gave a thumbnail sketch of their situation. Nate"s father only lis-tened, leaning more and more heavily upon them as they walked. The only words his father spoke during the discourse were at the mention of Louis Favre and what he had done.
"The G.o.dd.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.d:"
Nate smiled, hearing a bit of the old fire in his father"s voice.
When they reached the surface, it was obvious the two Rangers had been busy. They had all the Ban-ali gathered. Each bore packs full of nuts and weapons.
Nate and his father remained in the entrance, while Kouwe explained about the addition to their team and what they had found below. "Dakii says there"s an escape route through the root"s tunnel:"
"Then we"d best hurry," Sergeant Kostos said. "We have less than thirty minutes, and we want to be as far away from here as possible:"
Camera joined them, her weapon on her shoulder. "All set at our end. We have a couple dozen of those nut pods and four canteens of the sap:"
"Then let"s haul a.s.s," Kostos said.
7:32 1?M,.
As they wound through the root tunnels, Kouwe stayed with Dakii, peri-odically glancing back at the trail of Indians and Americans. Watching Sergeant Kostos help Nate with his father, Kouwe wished he had had time to rig up a stretcher, but right now every minute was critical.
Though Sergeant Kostos believed the subterranean tunnels would shield them from the worst of the napalm"s fiery blast, he clearly feared the maze"s integrity. "The rock here is riddled and weakened by the roots. The explosions could bring the roof down atop our heads or trap us here. We need to be well clear of these tunnels before those bombs go off."
So they hurried. Not only for their own sake, but for the world. Inside their packs, they carried the fate of thousands, if not millions-the nut pods of the Yagga, the suppressant for the virulent human prion. The cure to the plague.
They could not be trapped down here.
Glancing over a shoulder, Kouwe again checked the party. The dark tunnels, the softly glowing lichens,the dreadful cubbies with their cap-tured specimens . . . all made Kouwe nervous. This deep in the system, both walls and ceilings ran wild with roots, zigzagging everywhere, cross-ing, dividing, fusing.
Everywhere were the mounds of ubiquitous root hairs, waving and probing toward any pa.s.serby. It made the walls look furry, like a living thing, constantly moving and bristling.
Behind Kouwe, the others looked equally wary, even the Indians. The line of men and women ran out of sight around a curve in the twisting pa.s.sage. Back at the end, pulling up the rear, was Private Camera.
She kept a watch behind them-where Tor-tor and the giant black jaguar followed. It had taken some coaxing to encourage the two cats inside, but Nate had finally been successful in luring Tor-tor. "I"m not going to leave Manny"s cat here to die," Nate had argued. "I owe it to my friend to save him:"
Once Tor-tor entered, the large female jaguar had followed.
Camera remained alert, her weapon ready, in case the wild cat decided it needed a snack while traveling.
Dakii paused at the intersection of trails. Sergeant Kostos grumbled, but they dared not force a faster pace. It would be easy to get lost down here. They depended on Dakii"s memory.
The tribesman selected a path and led the others. The tunnel descended steeply. Kouwe stared at the low roof. They must be a hundred yards underground . . . and going deeper still. But oddly, instead of the air growing more dank, it seemed to freshen.
After a few minutes, the tunnel leveled out and made a sharp turn, emptying into a huge cavern. The tunnel opening was halfway up one wall of the chamber. A thin trail continued along the nearest wall, a stony lip high above the bowled floor. Dakii stepped out onto the trail.
Kouwe followed, gaping at the room. The chamber had to be a half mile across. Through the center of the chamber, a ma.s.sive root stalk, as thick around as a giant redwood, penetrated from the roof and continued down through the floor like a great column.
"It"s the Yagga"s taproot again," Nate said, coming up beside them. "We must have circled back to it:"
From the main root, thousands of branches spread like tree limbs in all directions, toward other pa.s.sages.
"There must be miles and miles of tunnels," Kouwe said. He studied the taproot. The giant tree above must be but a tiny fraction of the plant"s true ma.s.s. "Can you imagine the number of species encased down here? Suspended in time?"
"The tree must have been collecting its specimens for centuries," Nate"s father mumbled beside his son.
"Maybe even longer," Kouwe warned. "Maybe as far back as when these lands first formed:"
"Back to the Paleozoic," Nate murmured. "If so, what might be out there in that vast biological storehouse?"
"And what might still be living?" Anna added.
Kouwe cringed. It was both a wondrous and frightening thought. He waved Dakii onward. The sight was too terrible to stare at any longer, and time was running down for both them and the world. They wound along the lip as it circled the chamber. Dakii led them to another opening, back into the tunnel maze again. Though they left the chamber behind, Kouwe"s mind dwelled on the mystery there. His feet slowed, and he found himself marching near Nate and Carl. Sergeant Kos-tos was on the other side.
"When I studied anthropology," Kouwe said, "I read many myths of trees. The maternal guardian. A caretaker, a storehouse of all wisdom. It makes me wonder about the Yagga. Has man crossed its path before?"
"What do you mean?" Nate asked.
"Surely this tree wasn"t the only one of its kind. There must have been others in the past. Maybe these myths are some collective memory of ear-lier human encounters with this species:"
He recognized the doubt in Nate"s eyes and continued, "Take, for example, the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden. A tree whose fruit has all the knowledge in the world, but whose consumption curses those who eat of it. You could draw a parallel to the Yagga. Even when I saw Carl trussed up among the roots, it reminded me of another Biblical tale. Back in the thirteenth century, a monk who had starved himself seeking visions from G.o.d told a tale of seeing Seth, the son of Adam, returning to Eden.
There, the young man saw the Tree of Knowledge, now turned white. It clutched Cain in its roots, some penetrating into his brother"s flesh:"
Nate frowned.
"The parallels here seem particularly apt," Kouwe finished.
Noticeably quiet for several yards, Nate was clearly digesting his words. Finally he spoke. "You could be on to something. The tunnel through the Yagga"s trunk is not manmade, but a natural construct. The tunnels had to have formed as the tree grew. But why would the tree do so unless its ancestors had encountered man before and had evolved these features in kind?"
"Like an ant tree has adapted for its six-legged soldiers," Kouwe added.
Nate"s father roused. "And the evolution of the Ban-ali here, their genetic enhancements," Carl rasped.
"Have such improvements of the species happened before? Could the tree have played a critical role in human evolution? Is that why we remember it in our myths?"
Kouwe"s brow crinkled. He had not extrapolated that far. He stared behind the others to where the giant cat stalked. If the Yagga were capable of enhancing the jaguar"s intelligence, could it have done the same to us in the distant past? Could humans owe their own intellect to an ancestor of this tree? A chilling thought.
A silence fell over the others.
In his head, Kouwe reviewed the history of this valley. The Yagga must have grown here, collecting specimens in its hollow root system for cen-turies: luring them in with its musk, offering shelter, then capturing them and storing them in its cubbies. Eventually man entered the valley-a wandering clan of Yanomamo-and discovered the tree"s tunnels and the wonders of its healing sap. Lured in, they were captured as surely as any other species and slowly changed into the Ban-all, the Yagga"s human ser-vants. Since that time, the Ban-ali must have brought other species to the tree-feeding the root tofurther expand its biological database.
And left unchecked, where would it have led? A new species of man, as Carl had feared after the stillborn birth of Gerald Clark"s baby? Or maybe something worse-a hybrid like the piranhas and locusts?
Kouwe squinted at the twisting pa.s.sages, suddenly glad it was all going to burn.
Dakii called from up ahead. The tribesman pointed to a side tunnel. From the pa.s.sage, a slight glow shone. A dull roar echoed back to them.
"The way out," Kouwe said.
1 7:49 PM.
Nate hurried as best he could with his father.
Sergeant Kostos growled constantly under his breath on the other side, counting off the minutes until the bombs blew.
It would be a close call.
The group sped toward the sheen of moonlight flowing from ahead. The roaring grew in volume, soon thundering. Around a corner, the end of the tunnel appeared, and the source of the noise grew clear.
A waterfall tumbled past the entrance, the rush of water aglow with moonlight and star shine.
"The tunnel must open into the cliff face that leads to the lower val-ley," Kouwe said.
They followed Dakii to the tunnel"s damp exit. The rushing water rumbled past the threshold. The tribesman pointed down. Steps. In the narrow s.p.a.ce between the waterfall and the cliff, a steep, wet staircase had been carved into the stone, winding back and forth in narrow switchbacks, down to the lower valley.