How High We Go in the Dark(6)

Yulia slowly descended using a metal ladder propped against the muddy lip of the cavern, her headlamp bobbing in the dark. Ice melt trickled on my head as I followed her lead, lowering my feet one step at a time into a void. I breathed into my coat sleeve, overpowered by the smell of rotten eggs, soil laden with newly released gas, microbes, and ancient dung.

“Here,” Yulia said, handing me a bandanna to tie around my nose as I touched down on rock. “The smell was ten times worse before we widened the opening. But smells mean science. A lot of these gases are produced by bacteria that have adapted to the permafrost. Some even have their own kind of antifreeze.”

Yulia turned on a string of lanterns suspended along the perimeter of the cavern—a shelter, a home, a tomb. Save for stalagmites and stalactites lining the floor and ceiling like a sound wave, the interior was largely smooth. Once, these walls had been open to the sky. I imagined Annie sitting at the entrance, savoring the meat of a fresh kill with her family over a fire. Perhaps they ate in silence, or maybe they told tales. Did Annie and the others sing? Did a funerary dirge echo off these walls?

“That’s where we found Clara,” Yulia said, pointing to a portion of bedrock that looked like it was stained with blood. “She was gone by the time we reached her.”

I knelt and ran my fingers along the darkened stone capillaries.

I wanted to ask if Clara had said anything about her family, though I knew it was more likely she was studying her resting place as she bled out, breathing in the Pleistocene epoch as consciousness faded. The remnants of a stone circle occupied much of the space, with a door-sized megalith at its center, carved repeatedly with the same design tattooed on Annie’s body. The ground around the pillar, the resting place for most of the recovered bodies, crawled with a series of dots and swirls, patterns resembling a code or a language that shouldn’t exist.

“These carvings,” I said, running my fingers over the exact edges. “It’s almost like they were made with a laser. I don’t see any chisel marks. Some of these lines are incredibly precise.”

“Related to cuneiform, but not quite. We sent photos of the walls to an archaeolinguistics professor at Oxford. He said the markings were impossible for the time period. What he could make out seemed to indicate that much of what’s surrounding us is something akin to high-level math.”

“You know, Clara always loved those documentaries about ancient aliens—how we had help building the pyramids, the legend of Atlantis having extraterrestrial origins. I told her there was always another explanation.” I’d chastised her for entertaining conspiracy theories from people with mail-order doctorates. But whenever I questioned her beliefs, she just rubbed her pendant, as if it held secrets only she knew. Sometimes I wondered if her fantasy and science fiction magazines, her UFO phase, or how she dragged me to a Bigfoot convention in Sacramento had made her a better scientist than me—maybe it was the reason she saw things in the dirt that no one else could.

Once we were back aboveground on the main interior of the crater, I trudged my way to Dave and his research team, my boots sinking into the mud. Dave was crouched over a stream, collecting water and sediment into plastic bags. His entire team looked like they had gone swimming in a swamp, their faces mottled with dirt.

“Like a snapshot,” Dave said, looking up. “All of it. It’s amazing what survives down here.”

“What are you looking for, exactly?” I asked.

“Best defense is a good offense,” Dave said. “Eventually, whatever is in this land will make its way to cities, to the ocean, to our food. We’ve been finding largely intact bacterial life. Annie and the other bodies contained incredibly well-preserved giant viruses we’ve never seen before. No luck reanimating anything ancient as of yet. The oldest sample we’ve made viable was a century-old smallpox strain—that’s why we’re on quarantine.”

“You’re trying to bring those ancient viruses back?”

“We need to understand what’s coming out of the ice as it melts,” Dave said. “Most of what we’re finding poses no threat to anything but amoebas, but that one percent of uncertainty is why I’m out here. The more we know about these pathogens, the better we’ll be able to defend against them in the unlikely event they become a problem. Kind of like ignoring history. You can try, but it’ll probably bite you in the ass later. The more we know about where our illnesses come from, the better we can prepare.”

“And if you bring something back that’s in the one percent?” I imagined prehistoric microbes crawling over Dave and his team, through their hair, inside every orifice, and suddenly became aware of a leak in my boots. I would have thought even a 1 percent risk would have warranted more funding for protective suits.

“We try to stop it from getting out or we prepare people,” he said. “We get the world to wake up and pay attention to the fact that all this ice melting and the millions of years of shit it contains has to go somewhere.” Dave reached for his belt buckle, twisted the metal square, pulled out a tiny flask and took a sip. “But the odds of us finding some completely foreign runaway pathogen that we don’t already know about are incredibly small.”

Later that day, I returned to the compound to continue my examination of Annie, carefully turning her over, cutting into the husk of her skin to prepare samples of tissue and bone marrow. Dave and his colleagues offsite were planning to run DNA and viral analyses.