Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  Most days, it seems that would have been a mercy.

  Wishing one were no longer alive, he has said to Aden, is not the same as being suicidal. Jeremiah isn’t suicidal. So, there’s another mercy he’s been denied.

  The seafloor was littered with the bones of dinosaurs that had been exposed by the slow process of marine erosion. On his first dive, he’d been amazed at this graveyard, not yet consumed with the problem of how the fossils would be disinterred and brought to the surface. That day, he could only gawk. Scorpion fish and black seabream had dashed by the porthole, scales flashing in the glare of the Sunfish’s forward lighting array. Jeremiah had hardly noticed them. He’d only had eyes for the petrified remains of those dragons that had lived and died and turned to stone. The jigsaw puzzle of an ecosystem he would have the chance to put together.

  He had not yet realized that his curiosity is a curse.

  That the curiosity of all humanity is, and forevermore will be, a curse.

  “If you would see someone, then maybe—” Aden said, days before this day. An attempt at beginning a conversation they’ve had more times than he can recall, and that

  always ends the same way. So, this time, he goes directly to the end, interrupting her.

  “—nothing would change. I wouldn’t forget.”

  She’s watched him with her shark eyes, and sometimes he’s surprised how much emotion those blank, empty orbs are capable of conveying. I want to help , they say. I desperately want to help. You can’t see that. You won’t. But I do.

  He forces himself to pick up the jawbone again, squinting at it beneath the lab’s fluorescent lights. This left mandible is no longer than his hand, the delicate marriage of dentary, splenial, surangular, angular, a few serrate teeth still in their sockets, and so forth. No matter how many times he examines this bone—or any of the dinosaur bones from that limestone at the bottom of the sea—he is amazed at their diminutive size. Here in his palm is the left side of a jaw from an allosaur, but the jaw is hardly twelve centimeters from end to end. Still, it is almost identical to that of an adult Allosaurus, a theropod with a skull averaging over eighty centimeters.This tiny jaw was the result of insular dwarfism, a population of dinosaurs that had adapted to life on one of the archipelago’s islands, to its limited resources. The same was true of the sauropods, brachiosaurs and diplodocids whose mainland counterparts included the largest land animals ever. The limestone had piled up over hundreds of thousands of years, entombing an unprecedented assortment of miniature dinosaur species, as well as mammals uncharacteristically large for the Mesozoic, some—both carnivores and herbivores—as big as full-grown Great Danes. And there had been enormous crocodiles, too. So, herewas a lost world entirely turned on its head. It had not been an environment where the “ruling reptiles” ruled.

  “If you would only try harder,” Aden said.

  “I need to you back off,” he told her. “I know you mean well, but I really don’t need to hear this shit all over again.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I can live this way.”

  “You didn’t see—”

  “I’ve seen photographs. I’ve seen some of the specimens.”

  You weren’t down there that day. You didn’t see what I saw. You cannot imagine. You’re a foolish, naïve bitch if you think you can. But he knew better to say any of this aloud, and he still has enough self control not to do so.

  Their gods are not our own.

  Their idols . . .

  Aden turned her head toward the windows, winding a strand of her long bluish hair about an index finger. Jeremiah had to tap the invisible Dazzler hanging above the bed three times before it had flickered to life and called up the weather. Nothing there to lift his spirits. The rain wouldn’t last much longer, and then the scorching May heat would go back to baking the city again. The local report gave way to a thread on the Canadian drought, and he tapped the Dazzler three times before it whirred and shut off.

  “Not a goddamn thing in this place works,” he muttered, and Aden only laughed.

  “I have to run depth trials today,” she said. “Out past the Farallons, off Mussel Flat. Sometimes, I think I’ll just keep swimming. Sometimes, it’s hard to turn back. You know. Sometimes.”

  But she always does. And he knows she always will. Because that’s how the germliners put her together. Aden is a creature straddling two worlds, belonging truly to neither. She needed the companionship of other people, fully human people as surely as she needed her precious hours in the sea.

  But, still, “Sometimes, I know I’d be better off,” she says quietly.

  The jaw in his palm is a gem, priceless, the end product of natural selection working its magic down countless generations to make giants into midgets. The bone was almost the same color as Aden’s eyes. This one piece had taken two weeks to free from its rocky prison. It would be years before all the material collected off the coast of Kolone Island was prepared, and maybe decades before it was all described. He’d published three papers so far, one based on this very mandible: Microsaurophaganx inexpectatus, the “unexpected tiny lizard-eater.” That the allosaurid had fed mainly on lizards was only conjecture, but Jeremiah had liked the name.

  After that abbreviated conversation, days before this day, he and Aden had fucked. Despite his sluggish libido, it was always easier than talking, easier than facing the truth that whatever there had been between them was fading away, evaporating, and soon she’d be gone, and it would only be him in the shitty Tenderloin apartment. She straddled him, and as soon as he slipped inside her, the stubby rudimentary pelvic fins on either side of her labia has closed tightly around the shaft of his cock. It’s a sensation he’s never grown accustomed to, and one that has never ceased to elicit a moment of panic. But, also, which has never ceased to make him harder. Like her eyes and her teeth, it made a primal act much more so. It made the act almost savage. There was an undeniable thrill, knowing that she could rip his throat out as easy as he might bite through a stalk of celery; he’s seen video of sharks mating. He placed his hands on either side of her ass, careful because the vagaries of her genome meant randomly distributed patches of minute, sandpaper- rough denticles along her spine, buttocks, and thighs. Shagreen. She’s drawn his blood more times than he can recall.

  When she reached orgasm, her black eyes rolled back to the whites, and she dug her fingertips—entirely devoid of nails— into his shoulders.

  You’ll come back, he thought. Not to me, no. But you’ll always come back.

  She’d been late to the docks, and had almost missed the big blue SWATH ferrying the research team to the Farallons.

  He’d spent the rest of the day tangled in the sheets, listening to the rain.

  Today, Jeremiah sets the Microsaurophaganx jaw back into it foam cradle and rubs his eyes. In five or ten minutes, Galton and Loeuff will be back from lunch, and he’ll no longer have the lab to himself, the luxury of being alone with his demons. He’ll have to at least make an effort to appear as though he’s working. He’s gotten fairly good at the pantomime. Good at participating in conversations that only seem to hold his attention. Good at going through a plethora of quantitative motions. If anyone’s noticed, they’ve not said so. Jeremiah has even learned to navigate departmental administrative meetings with a minimum of actual participation. It’s an inevitable consequence of existing ever more in dreams, the prevailing symptom of his dreamsickness.

  He looks away from the jaw, at the pages of paper stacked up neatly next to the fossil’s container. He’s always preferred writing in cursive on actual paper, with actual ink, a habit as expensive as it is impractical. To his knowledge, he’s the only person with whom he is acquainted who even knows cursive. As a child, he taught himself from an old textbook.

  His neat handwriting, sepia on white, the beginnings of a monograph on one of the Istrian fauna’s two dwarf sauropods:. . . prominent deltoid crest extend
s down the lateral margin of the bone from near the proximal end . . .

  “What the hell did you see down there?”

  And he’d replied, “Look at the fucking tapes, okay. The fucking cameras saw more than I did.”

  Then he’d vomited on the deck.

  He and an Italian grad student from Monfalcone had been finishing up with the mapping of Quadrant 18 when the hole— The Hole—had come into view. The submersible’s pilot radioed topside and been advised to proceed with caution, as the sensors were reading unpredictable currents in the area.

  The hole had been about fifty yards in diameter, a freakishly perfect circle punched through the layers of fossiliferous limestone.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Fuck all if I know,” the pilot had said. “Some sort of sinkhole, maybe?”

  “Not with a perimeter that regular.”

  Whatever else it was, Jeremiah recognized it as a chance to view a perfect stratigraphic cross-section of the bone bed. He’d consulted the pilot, who’d reluctantly consulted the mother vessel far above them, which had very reluctantly given them permission to enter the hole. “Exercise extreme caution. We’re getting some weird turbidity readings along the rim.” That’s exactly the word the relay had used. Weird. The crew’s three hybrid escorts—which included Aden—had been ordered not to accompany the Sunfish. It was just too risky, and the hole might exceed their depth limits. He hadn’t yet known Aden back then. Back then, he’d still harbored the revulsion at hybrids that most people felt.

  When we venture in that unfamiliar sea, we trust blindly in those who guide us, believing that they know more than we do.

  Do we? Do we do that?

  The submersible had moved forward, then slipped over the edge. The hole had obligingly swallowed them in a single gulp. How long had it been waiting, indescribably patient and hungry. Insatiable.

  “How deep is this thing?” he’d asked the pilot.

  “Give me a moment. I think the fathometer is acting up.”

  “Is it the transducer?” the graduate student had asked.

  “No idea,” the pilot had replied.

  But Jeremiah had been too occupied with the procession of horizontal strata beyond the porthole as the submersible sank deeper into the hole, and so, effectively, deeper into time. Alternating limestone, sandstone, thin lenses of what looked like greywacke. The Horizon-D4 camera jacks hummed, tracking his most subtle eye movements. He felt hardly any dread at all, in those first few minutes, despite the worried tone of the grad student and the pilot’s consternation at what seemed to be malfunctioning sonar. But for Jeremiah, this was a windfall. The expedition had budgeted thousands of dollars to extract core samples, and here he was getting all that data free of charge and without the costly days spent drilling.

  He’d only half heard the pilot when she’d said, “It’s almost like this drop doesn’t have a bottom.” Jeremiah had only half heard her nervous laughter. It had taken the Sunfish’s first collision with the wall of the hole to get his attention.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Were getting some sort of vertical pulse . . .” and then the pilot had braced herself and told them all to double check their harnesses.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  The bottom had fallen out beneath them, and the submersible fell as though there were only air beneath it.

  Loeuff comes in, but not Galton. “He’s got that meeting with the exhibit team,” the anatomist had reminded Jeremiah.

  “Probably won’t get out until three or so. You know, the board still wants to use this as an opportunity for a press conference, to get the herpetosapients into the public eye, the artifacts, all of it.”

  Herpetosapients. Jeremiah had been the one to coin that term, just as he’d invented Microsaurophaganx inexpectatus and would be christening the macronarian sauropod described in his handwritten notes Istriasauros petricola. Sometimes, it seemed all this nomenclature was no more than latter-day sorcery, struggling to keep the monsters at bay. Talismans to bind the night pressing in at him.

  It was a time of dark dreams. They washed in like flotsam on the night . . . So, take this night, and wrap it around me like a sheet.

  “I’ll be out until Sunday,” Aden said before leaving the apartment.“Four days of playing keep-your-distance with Great Whites.”

  A regular family reunion, he thought. It was a vicious thought. The ugly sort of shit he kept buried deep down to gnaw at no one but himself.

  They built temples to their gods.

  We build temples, and so did they.

  The Sunfish had tilted violently to port, and the pilot had cursed and wrestled with the controls as the vessel plunged into the abyss.

  “We’re going to die down here,” the grad student had squeaked. He had. He had actually fucking squeaked. Like a goddamn mouse. Jeremiah had wanted to slap the sorry son of a bitch.

  “No one’s going to die,” Jeremiah had said, instead. “Nowshut up and try not to piss yourself. Unless you already have.”

  The poly-titanium/cobalt hull had begun to groan, then, and the graduate student was babbling in Italian about blowing the ballast tanks. Never mind they had almost four-days of life support for a three-man crew. The pilot growled that she wasn’t fucking dropping ballast. Several seconds later, the aft hydraulic propulsor had gone offline. The voice interface with the Sunfish’s AI crackled, popped, and both the screens crashed. The submersible took another hard blow as it slammed a second time against the wall of the hole. The way the craft had shuddered, Jeremiah felt it in his bones and teeth and behind his eyes. The pilot had frantically switched over to manual ops, her fingers dancing a tarantella across the pad of old-fashioned toggles.

  . . . if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim . . .

  Jeremiah had turned back to the blur of strata beyond the eighteen-centimeter thick forward-facing port. There had been nothing else reasonable he could do, and it was better than giving in to panic. It would be better, if these were his last moments, to see that which he would die to have seen.

  “He knows,” says Loeuff, “how strongly you feel about releasing any information on that shit before all the dating is finished. But he says no one’s listening. They want to put the goddamn skull on display. The skull and the hull shards.”

  Jeremiah laughed, making a great show of examining his notes for the sauropod paper. “You know they’re never going to get military clearance to display that shit. I’m still surprised the specimens haven’t been spirited away to some secret goddamn NSA bunker somewhere. And there’s our non-disclosure—”

  “I think they mean to ignore that.”

  “Well, I’m not ignoring it. I’m not that keen to vanish into the fucking detention camps. Anyway, before the day’s over, I expect they’ll get a polite reminder from D.C. of the arrangement.”

  Loeuff shrugs, takes a seat at one of the prep stations, and goes back to work on one of the mammalian skulls. In life, it would have looked something like a small hyena, that animal. It would have preyed on dinosaurs.

  Only four minutes and forty seconds after the Sunfish had entered the hole, the submersible settled on the rocky seafloor. All things considered, touchdown had been surprisingly forgiving. A jolt, but definitely not the jolt that Jeremiah had expected. By then, the motors had powered down, the cabin was bathed in the scarlet wash of the emergency lights, and the pilot had managed the release of a beeper buoy. Two of the 5k-watt spots were still running, as was video. If the fathometer was to be trusted (and many of the vessel’s instruments were on the fritz), the submersible had come to rest more than one hundred and five meters below the opening of the hole. But they hadn’t landed on stone.

  “Guys,” said the grad student, pointing, “someone please tell me that isn’t what it looks like . . . please.”

  At the bottom, the hole had widened from fifty
yards to almost seventy-five. Below and all around the Sunfish, the spots reflected off a dull battleship-grey metallic surface. It was perfectly flat, that plane interrupted only by a smattering of rubble that had fallen from above, possibly dislodged by their descent.

  Why isn’t it buried under silt from slumping and mass wasting?

  That had actually been Jeremiah’s first thought. Not, Whatthe fuck is that thing. Not even wonder or momentary disbelief.

  Why isn’t it buried?

  While they’d waited on the retrieval detail, while the pilot worried over her machine, he and the student had done all they could do. They’d used the two manipulator arms to gather as many samples as there was space remaining in the containers to hold them. These had included the fragments of a basicranium, frontal, right zygomatic arch, and several teeth that would be the first hint of Jeremiah’s “herpetosapients.” There was enough spare energy in the cells to run the drill for just two minutes, and so they’d also recovered shavings and chips of the metallic substrate.

  Almost an hour had passed before either of them had noticed the pattern in the metal. Or, rather, before the loops and swirls and angles had begun to add up to an image.

  Their gods are not our own.

  A Sistine Chapel crafted by minds that were not the minds of human beings.