They were ravenous. With no further ceremony, the vestiges of the Jules Verne Society opened the pouches and heated the ham and pineapple slices and filled their pinched stomachs. They made no attempt to ration themselves.
Ike occupied himself uncoiling one of his ropes. He declined the meal, but accepted some of their M&M's, though only the red ones. They didn't know what to make of that, their battle-scarred scout fussing over bits of candy.
'But they're no different from the yellow and blue ones,' Chelsea said.
'Sure they are,' Ike said. 'They're red.'
He tied one end of the rope to his waist. 'I'll trail the rope,' he said. 'If there's anything up there, I'll fix the line and you can come take a look.'
Armed with his headlamp and their only pistol, Ike stood on Spurrier's and Troy's shoulders and gave a hop to reach the lowest handhold. From there it was only another twenty feet to the top. He spidered up, grabbed the edge of the platform, and started to pull himself over. But he stopped. They watched him not move for a whole minute.
'Is something wrong?' asked Ali.
Ike pulled himself onto the platform and looked down at them. 'You better see this for yourself.'
He knotted loops in the rope to make them a ladder. One by one, they climbed up, weak, needing help. It was going to take more than one meal to restore their strength. Between themselves and the tower, ninety feet in, a ceramic army awaited them. Lifeless, yet alive.
They were hadal warriors made of glazed terra-cotta. Facing out toward intruders, they numbered in the hundreds, arranged in concentric circles around the tower, each statue bearing a weapon and a ferocious expression. Some still wore armor made of thin jade plates stitched with gold links. On most, time had stretched or broken the gold, and the plates had tumbled to their feet, leaving the hadal mannequins naked.
It was hard not to speak in a whisper. They were awestruck, intimidated. 'What have we stumbled into?' asked Pia.
Some brandished war clubs edged with obsidian chips, pre-Aztec. There were atlatls
– spear throwers – and stone maces with iron chains and handles. Some of the weaponry carried Maori-type geometrics, but had to predate Maori culture by fourteen thousand years. Spears and arrows made of abyssal reed had been fletched not with bird feathers but with fish spines.
'It's like the Qin tomb in China,' said Ali. 'Only smaller.'
'And seven times older,' said Troy. 'And hadal.'
They entered the circles of sentinels tentatively, setting their feet carefully, like t'ai chi students, so as not to disturb the scene. Those with film left took pictures. Ike drew his pistol and stalked from one to another, culling facts meaningful only to him. Ali simply wandered. Troy joined her, dazed.
'These furrows in the floor, they're filled with mercury,' he said, pointing to the network cut into the stone deck. 'And it's moving, like blood. What could be the meaning?'
It was fair to guess by the details that the statues had been built true to life. In that case, the warriors had averaged an extraordinary five feet ten inches – fifteen eons ago. As Troy pointed out, it was always a mistake to generalize too much from the looks of an army, for armies tended to recruit the healthiest and fittest specimens in a population. Even so, during the same Neolithic period the average H. sapiens male had stood five to eight inches shorter.
'Next to these guys, Conan the Barbarian would have been nothing more than a
mesomorphic runt leading a bunch of human pipsqueaks,' Troy said. 'It kind of makes you wonder. With their physical size and this level of social organization and wealth, why didn't the hadals just invade us?'
'Who says they didn't?' asked Ali. She went on studying the statues. 'What intrigues me is how flexed the cranial base is. And how straight the jaws are. Remember that head Ike brought in? The skull fit differently on the neck. I distinctly remember that. It extended forward, like a chimp's. And the jaw had a pronounced thrust forward.'
'I saw that, too,' Troy said. 'Are you thinking what I am?'
'Reversal?'
'Exactly. I mean, possibly.' Troy opened his hands. 'I mean, I don't know, Ali.'
In lay terms, a straight jaw – orthognathicism – was an evolutionary climb above the more primitive trait of a jutting jaw. Anthropology did not deal in terms of evolutionary ascent, however, any more than it recognized evolutionary decline. A straight jaw was called a 'derived' trait. Like all traits, it expressed an adaptation to environmental pressures. But evolutionary pressures were in constant flux, and could lead to new traits that sometimes resembled primitive ones. This was called reversal. Reversal was not a going backward, but rather a seeming to do so. It was not a return to the primitive trait, but a new derived trait that mimicked the primitive trait. In this case the hadals had evolved a straight jaw fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, as seen on these statues, but had apparently derived a jutting jaw that was highly simian and primitive in its look. For whatever reason, H. hadalis seemed to be in reversal.
For Ali, the significance lay in what this meant to hadal speech and cognition. A straight jaw provided a wider range of consonants, and an erect neck-skull structure – basicranial flexion – meant a lower larynx or voice box, and that meant more vowel range. The fact that fifteen-thousand-year-old hadal statues had straight jaws and an erect head, and Ike's trophy head did not, suggested problems with modern hadal speech, and possibly with his cognition. Ali remembered Troy's remarks about symmetry in the hadal brain, too. What if subterranean conditions had evolved Haddie from a creature capable of sculpting this fortress, firing these terra-cotta warriors, and plying the sea and rivers, into a virtual beast? Ike had said hadals could no longer read hadal script. What if they had lost their ability to reason? What if Satan was nothing more than a savage cretin? What if the Gitners and Spurriers of the world were right, and H. hadalis deserved no better treatment than a vicious dog? Troy was troubled. 'How could they reverse so quickly, though? Call it twenty thousand years. That's not time enough for such a pronounced evolution, is it?'
'I can't explain it,' Ali said. 'But don't forget, evolution is an answer to environment, and look at the environment. Radioactive rock. Chemical gases. Electromagnetic surges. Gravitational anomalies. Who knows? Simple inbreeding may be to blame.'
Ike was just ahead with Ruiz and Pia, examining three figures waving swords of fire, looking them in the face as if checking his own identity. 'Is something wrong?' Ali asked.