Amazon Carlos J Cortes Category:  Science Fiction Publisher: Bantam ISBN-10:  0553591622 Type: Fiction Pages: 496 ISBN-13: 9780553591620 Miles below the Congo Ituri Forest, an ancient secret waits to be born. Set in the impenetrable jungles of the African Congo, this fast-paced debut tells the tale of a world poised for ecological crisis–and the secret that could save it. From corporate profiteers to the natives who’ve been expecting them, here is a story that asks if man and nature are fated to clash–or if the right man can break the cycle. Heir to a mining dynasty, geologist Paul Reece has chosen a simple life over the scheming opportunism of the International Mining Company. But when IMC approaches him about their mysterious discovery miles beneath the rain forest, Paul is compelled to set aside the sordid event that drove him from his legacy. For the project requires not only a brilliant engineer but one gutsy enough to descend 20,000 feet of solid rock–into the heart of a miracle. With Paul’s expertise, IMC can unearth a windfall–unless Paul decides to bury them first. But Paul isn’t alone in his quest. Congo’s mystics have prepared for this day. Paul doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s been chosen to pilot a mission that will decide the fate of humanity. Excerpt This can't be happening. Ken Avery stuck his fists deep into the oilskin's pockets and stared at the yellow-clad figures swarming around the drill-head. Streams of water dripped from the brim of his sou'wester, blurring his vision. The men glared at the spinning rod. Someone had painted a depth marker on the tube as a reference, but the white blur didn't show more than negligible progress: a paltry four inches in forty-eight hours. Ken could have sworn they were willing it to advance, but the steel pipe revolved doggedly without sinking any deeper. A large man separated from the group and approached Ken with a sour expression fixed on his puffy face. “Now what, boss? Another bit?” Mark asked with the lilt of an Irish accent. “I've run out of ideas.” The eyes of the crew pivoted in his direction. After all, he was the geologist, the corporation's wonder boy with all the answers. Now, he had none. One of the roustabouts swore, kicking at the revolving tube. Mark tilted his head toward the tents. “Any news from the brass?" “Nope, same as before. Keep drilling.” Ken’s orders were to extract a core sample from the soil at a precise point, less than three feet across. It was a simple procedure: a hollow tube fronted by a drill bit pierces the earth with the help of lubricant slurry. The tube fills with sludge and debris. The product is a mud column, an extruded rod of pliable earth with information from the subterranean layers. The depth? That was the clincher; 18,000 feet was the previous world record. They had passed that mark over a week ago. The head office never gave Ken many details. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but whatever it was they hadn’t found it. Yet. Every day at 16:00 local time, 08:00 in Texas, IMC mandarins could read his report on the contents of the core bit, or so far, the lack of it, as they sipped hot cups of Java in cool, plush offices while the damn hole ate $20,000 diamond cutters like they were cotton candy. Ken moved closer to the derrick, sinking into the red clay. Slimy mud oozed up the sides of his boots. The heat-humidity-sweat combination was unbearable. Every pocket and pore were packed full of Congo mud. He looked up as a bolt of lighting ripped the sky, followed almost at once by a clap of thunder that vibrated through his chest. The whole project had been a bitch from the beginning and the odd tightness in his gut told him it was far from over. Kendrew back his upper lip and blew off the drop of rain dangling from the tip of his nose. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve this cursed assignment;he was no friend of God, but neither His declared enemy. Ken peered past the sheets of rain and the powerful arc lights. The jungle seemed almost solid, a jumble of lianas and shrubs beneath stands of umbrella trees and hardwoods. He reached under his hat. His scalp still felt strange without hair. After the headshakes and smiles at his ponytail when he arrived, he had presumed the driller’s crew cuts were a macho thing, a clannish livery. Now he knew better. After the first week, Ken’s hair had matted into an uncomfortable tangle of red clay and drilling slurry, a mess no amount of soap and rainwater could clear. There had been only one solution. Ken joined the clan and shaved his head. “We've two bits left,” Mark added. “When those two are gone, we'll have to drill with our dicks.” Ken didn't know what to say. The cutting head’s sophisticated micro-turbines, powered by the slurry’s awesome pressure, had secured the record depth but each bit had been worn down, smooth and shiny, burnished like a new coin. “You must have some idea about what's down there,” Mark insisted. “What am I supposed to tell the men?” “Keep drilling.” After the first drilling-head failure, someone suggested a tenacious basalt layer lay beneath. However, that wouldn't account for the condition of the bit. Ken ruled out Diorite and Nephritic Jade, both prevalent in the area. Each bit was of a special alloy encrusted with a new generation of industrial grade diamond, much harder than either of the other minerals. They should have gone through anything underground like a hot knife through butter. But they didn’t. Now Ken worried because the roughnecks, men familiar with harrowing working conditions, were spooked by the cutter’s inexplicable behavior. In normal circumstances, the men stayed under cover after their grueling shifts——sleeping, having a beer, playing cards, watching a DVD. But not now. Now, they huddled around the spinning tube and stared at the depth gauge. # In the solid jungle, the roughly circular clearing produced a well of soaring green walls blazing under the harsh light of mercury projectors. But the glossy walls of exuberant greenery changed to impenetrable darkness scant inches beyond the light where, on the forked branch of a towering bubinga tree, a naked pygmy huddled. The tiny man, clutching a drab satchel to his chest, squatted immobile but for his bright eyes, which darted between the roughnecks and the drilling rig. His skin, gleaming like burnished ebony, blended into the wet bark so well that even in plain view an untrained eye would have missed him. When he took to the trees after the men cleared the jungle to set up their machine, his four-foot six frame had been better padded and clothed: a simple loincloth tied with a supple thong around his waist. But rain and a meager diet had taken its toll. His once thick lips had shrunk on a gaunt face and his loincloth was long gone; prolonged exposure to the persistent rain had rotted it away. Not that it worried him; his attention was riveted on the drama slowly simmering twenty feet below. He pursed his lips, tried to blow a bubble and repressed an urge to laugh about his predicament. His pack was depleted and he hadn’t napped in forty-eight long hours, but he wouldn’t dream of closing his eyes now that the fun was about to start. Jereh stirred and gripped the stout branch tighter. He checked the white smudge on the pipe, then glanced past the engineer. Jereh eyed the group of roughnecks and the rig’s cabin where the operator controlled torsion and drilling speed. He had been in the trees for weeks, moving between spots to mark and record the different phases of the core-drilling. The skin on his shoulders, legs, and back was peeling. He would resemble a molting hyena when he returned to his village at Mongwange and gave his report to Leon Kibassa. At the beginning of his vigil, thirty-five long days ago, Jereh had fashioned a cone-shaped cape with long bracken that he tied around his head. Twice, when he had ventured to the ground, Jereh had passed for foliage when the roughnecks were within a couple of yards-- an advantage of being small--although at almost five-foot he towered over most of his tribesmen. But the constant wetness at the dome of his head had softened his skin and exfoliated his scalp, exposing the bone despite frequent applications of okapi grease. A cap from an elephant's ear leaf helped for a while, but it amplified every droplet, and Jereh needed his hearing unimpaired. He dug into his shoulder bag for a piece of duiker jerky and froze when he detected movement. Without altering his position, he picked up a slug and popped it in his mouth. No sense in wasting protein, he reasoned. At least water was no problem. He could drown by sticking out his tongue. On the other side of the clearing, a narrow tunnel entrance opened between stands of Albizia and Celtis. Jereh stared into the blackness, straining his eyes to see the contour of a gray mass. “Hunwa.” He rolled his tongue around the Masaba word. “Hunwa, my friend, the greed of men stands in the way of your final rest.” The old elephant had arrived four days ago. The drilling crew hadn’t noticed. The path to the elephant’s graveyard bisected the clearing, smack through the middle of the rig. Jereh could sense the animal’s bewilderment. The elephant was old and had sunk in the mud. He would die there. He fingered a panga’s handle. “I’ll help you, my friend. I’ll end your suffering soon.” Jereh tensed. A subtle vibration. A minute change of pitch in the whine of the turbines. He dropped six feet to another branch and leaped sideways to a nearby tree, an observation point closer to the tent with the assay table. He gazed at the white line. The shaft had dropped a quarter inch. The crew hadn’t noticed. Too subtle for them. He appraised the fastest route to a branch over the samples tent and the spot where he'd cut a tiny slit in the waxed canvas. From a pouch around his neck, Jereh picked the last of the khat, made a small wad, and pushed it into his mouth. Feeling the rush, Jereh pressed with his tongue and placed the mush inside his lower lip. Then he reached back in the bag, retrieved a high-speed camera and snapped off several frames. # Ken mopped his face with a soggy rag. He blinked. The white mark had disappeared. Alarm bells blared as the pipe plummeted and the brakes slammed into the gear head. With feverish urgency, the men attacked the tube with tongs and oversized power wrenches, unscrewing sections as the steel tube returned from the depths. When the end surfaced at last, Ken heaved the yard-long front coring section and sprinted toward the samples tent, the crew right behind. Under the glare of the inspection lights, the men stared in silence at the mud-streaked cylinder, as pirates before a chest. The rain stopped and the sudden quiet sounded exaggerated. “Your shift, Pedro,” Ken said, handing a blunted chisel to the man. “You open it.” Pedro inserted the blade in the side groove of the canister, twisting and levering it as he worked along the seam. With a wet slurping sound, the container split in two, displaying the contents of the core. The chisel dropped from Pedro's hand. “Santa Madre de Dios!” He stepped back and made the sign of the cross.

Bookspotcentral
Paul Reece in Carlos J. Cortes’s phenomenal debut novel reminescent of Michael Crichton’s books, Perfect Circle, is the heir to the IMC (International Mining Corporation), where his grandfather, Hugh Reece, is the president. IMC has located a magnetic anamoly in the jungles of the Congo, and they will spare no expense to investigate it, even if it means drilling over four miles down into the earth’s crust. Hugh wants his grandson Paul, a brilliant engineer, to pilot an AMP (Autonomous Manned Probe), down the shaft to explore and get samples from a strange artifact they found there, and have obtained core samples from, that contains technology that could revolutionize many industries and result in untold wealth for the corporation. Hugh Reece’s problem is to find Paul, who has had a falling out with his grandfather, and to convince him to come back into the fold.

The attempt to retrieve the secrets the artifact holds has been labeled Project Isis because it combines elements of science and elements that could, because of their advanced technological nature, almost be considered to be magical, and Isis was the “goddess of magic.” The land that IMC drills on is in Ituri, a national park in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), leased by the French company Gecamines. IMC is there ostensibly to search for uranium deposits, though a satellite they partially purchased and sent into orbit identified the area as one that interested the corporation because of its high electromagnetic emissions. They spend literally billions of dollars just to buy the equipment they need, grease the local authorities with bribes, and construct a small city in the jungle for the workers necessary for the project to live in - all without knowing the full potential of what may be buried far below them.

Paul has distanced himself from IMC when the novel opens, living in the remote village of Colquizate in the Honduras with his girlfriend, Carmen. He’s found a rich vein of opals in a cave that could be worth $20 million, and he likes the new life he’s living. He’s been away from his grandfather’s and IMC’s influence for two years, and is enjoying his independence immensely. That’s because his grandfather, Hugh, is a scheming SOB who ruined much of Paul’s past happiness in an attempt to continue the Reece bloodline at all costs.

Hugh learned that Paul was sterile, so schemed to have Paul’s then wife, Susan, “implanted with a throughbred Reece embryo,” and Walter, Paul’s father, “agreed to supply his seed.” Paul, who was away much of the time on mining ventures for the corporation., knew nothing of this until a plane carrying both Walter and Susan (which Walter was piloting) crashed into a canyon and they died. Susan was giving Paul’s father oral sex at the time. Paul obtained “a copy of Susan’s autopsy and the biopsies, which confirmed the paternity of the fetus she was carrying, Paul’s father.” No wonder Paul wanted to put distance between himself and his grandfather - but first, he got a measure of revenge by exposing an environmental accident IMC was the cause of in Bangladesh, that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

The only person at IMC who knew that Paul was living at Colquizate is Milford, the chief technical officer and mining engineer. Paul trusts him, and it is he who tells Hugh and the rest of IMC’s board that he’ll try to convince Paul to cooperate in Project Isis:

“IMC and all of us in this room betrayed him,” Milford reminded them. “He’s been manipulated, used, and insulted. I’m in this hideous den of iniquity with you, but I’ll have to live with that.” Milford rubbed his forehead and seemed to reach a decision. “I’ll speak to Paul.”

Milford does talk Paul into piloting the AMP, but the chief technical officer has an agenda of his own - he is a CIA agent, and is really using Paul and IMC for his own gain. The CIA has been closely monitoring all of the messages about Project Isis, and the mining operation in Ituri, and knows what has been discovered in the core samples, and that they would result in drastic improvements in many industries. They want to gain control of the artifact, and don’t care if they have to slaughter everybody at the mining operation after the AMP surfaces and make it look like a rebel force committed the atrocities if it means they can possess the samples brought up by Paul.

Okay, what is so important about this artifact that would cause billions to be spent on trying to recover samples from it, and the CIA to be willing to launch an operation to forcibly take it for themselves, and ostensibly for the USA?

What IMC found are two spheres, one inside of the other one. The core sample and report on it that IMC first show Paul is worth the expense and intrigue on its own. The sample shows a four inch thick black band with another band joined to it: “blue-grey speckled material followed, with lighter inclusions and shiny dots, round and spaced with artificial symetry.” The materials resemble neoprene and reinforced concrete, but they are something much more. And the inclusions (buckyballs and buckytubes) in the material are perhaps the most significant and important discoveries of all, but the information about those is kept hidden from Paul until later in the novel. As Aaron Greenburg, deputy director of intelligence for the CIA, tells CIA Director Scott Foust:

“The sample brought back to the surface contains two sophisticated materials: a type of rubber and a metal. The rubber is precious. It hardens with heat. As a refractory material it’s miles ahead of our best ceramics. IMC will make a mint out of the patents and licenses. The metal falls under a different category. According to our source’s report, it’s not so much the alloy that’s unusual but the way it’s made.”
“What’s so strange about it?”
“It’s like foam: almost weightless, but with the strength of titanium.”

Greenburg goes on to say the second substance could “revolutionize many industries,” and that with it, they could “build aircraft at a fraction of their current weight, which would use less fuel and be much cheaper to operate.”

Regarding the inclusions, the flecks in the material that are called buckyballs and buckytubes - they are potential energy sources that could be a solution to the world’s energy problems. A report that Paul eventually sees describes the inclusions and their properties:

Buckeyballs-types #BB1 and #BB2:
BB#1 displays a strong luminescence without local temperature increase or apparent energy source.
BB#2 is highly transparent but shares atomic weight, mass, and other properties with aluminum.
Role of these structures and nature of the phenomena: unknown.

Buckytubes-types #BT1 and BT2:
BT#1 performs like a superconductor at room temperature.
BT#2, under the transmission electron microscope, displays a compound cylinder/conical shape (one end) much wider than the other. Computer simulation suggests gas moelcules may be accelerated by these tubular structures.
Role of these structures and nature of the phenomena: unknown.

Paul is a bit of an idealist, not driven solely by greed, a lust for money and/or power. He’d like for whatever might be found to benefit not just the USA, but all nations of the world. That, alone, puts him at odds with both IMC and the CIA. On top of that, the native pygmies and other tribes have prophecies about the artifact, and seem to know everything about it and even more information as to its origins and what the discovery of it means to the fate of mankind than anyone else involved with it, and they want Paul to work with them to make sure the prophecies are fulfilled and mankind can survive the cataclysmic earth changes desined to come.

Dr. Shermaine Mosengwo, a “high executive at Gecamines with political connections,” supposedly at the drilling site solely to monitor what is going on and inform Gecamines if she thinks IMC is after anything besides uranium, is really there to get Paul to help fulfill the afore-mentioned ancient prophecies. Paul travels with her to a native village where he meets with Leon Kibassa, a mysterious and mystical pygmy who tells him that pygmies were the first men, even in America, and that he wants Paul to recover from the artifact “the colors of the rainbow”:

“From the room - or spere, if you want - you must rescue our inheritance, the legacy of our forebears: the colors of the rainbow. Then you must share them with your brothers. That’s all.”

So, how good is Perfect Circle? I think it’s a very well written, page-turning novel, for the most part. The plot, the desire of the CIA to claim the samples from the artifact, the motivations of Paul, Hugh, Milford, Shermaine, etc., seemed to me to be plausible in the context of the possibility that an alien artifact may be discovered some day that will have alloys and/or advanced technology that might revolutionize many industries and make life on earth better.

Even when Paul eventually meets Nestor, a sort of hybrid between alien and human in Nepal, I could accept that, and the description of him was pretty cool. What I didn’t especially like is that after Paul’s encounter with Nestor, the rest of the novel seemed kind of rushed to me. Paul is made into a type of Noah, with a role that now includes preserving people from the diverse races of mankind on a mountaintop.

The idea in itself is interesting, but if the novel was going to go in this direction, I was thinking as I read, then go all out, and detail what happens as well as everything that happened before was detailed. The novel is relatively long, at 482 pages, so maybe there was a concern that its length might prevent it from getting a wider audience. But, personally, I was enjoying the book and the length of it didn’t bother me at all.

Still, though I would have liked to have seen this part of the novel developed further, on the whole I thought Perfect Circle kicked ass. It’s a very good book, especially for a debut novel. Carlos J. Cortes has his second book coming out in the Fall of 2009, and it’ll be called The Prisoner. If it’s anywhere close to being as good as Perfect Circle, it’ll be a book that will be well worth checking out, like this one.


Harriet Klausner
Hugh Reece, President of International Mining Corporation, regrets what he did that drove his heir grandson Paul away. He knows the Congo discovery needs Paul as the lead field geologist opening the shaft and going down the four miles into the earth to discover what is there. The firm contacts the estranged Paul who, though he remains irate with IMC and his grandpa, agrees to invesitgate.

However, as Paul and his crew prepare for the inner earth journey, the Congolese natives who have lived here for generations, know what he will find. They have been waiting for this day and believe Paul is the chosen one to rapel down the chute to either save or destroy civilization as the west knows it.

This is an exhilarating brisk science fiction thriller with echoes of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The story line is fast-paced from the moment Paul reaches the Congo and never slows down. However, it is the strong characterizations especially the flawed and remorseful Hugh and the angry Paul who bring a human frailty to the PERFECT CIRCLE.