Oh, right. Ix Ruinas. Michaeld said this was one of the palaces.
I flayed the damp sleeping bag off my person and sat up. It looked like everybody else was outside. The room was a big old Maya audiencia, a receiving room, about fifty feet long by nine deep and twenty feet high at the apex, with a single high doorway in the center of the western long side. The door was covered with a purple-blue nylon tarpaulin. In the Classic period thered been a big mural on the back wall, and there was still about 20 percent of it left. You could just make out a little figure on the left, walking up some stairs, and then, faintly, a temple on the right with Earthtoadess volutes streaming out, but lately, that is, in the last few decades, water had been seeping in and it had washed away most of the stucco there. Still, the room was pretty dry at this season. Anas advance team had shoveled out the bat guano, but you could still smell it. Theyd also prestashed most of the equipment in here, and the whole north third of the room was stacked with sections of oil-drilling rods, flexible conveyor tubes, boxes of drill bits, four Honda 90 hp motors, six Volvo jacks, and a pair of big yellow cases that held two tunneling-and-sampling robots, courtesy of Schlumberger Oilfield Services, one of which had been rigged with lights and video. The place looked like a pre-Columbian chop shop. Closer to the sleeping zone there were two silent gas generators and a bevy of power conditioners, a skein of fat cables snaking out the door and north toward Mound A, two medium-size lab freezers, a vacuum box, a vacuum packaging machine, rolls of aluminum foil for carbon 14 samples, a thirty-inch glove box, an as-yet-unpacked air-line system, two water pumps, a pressurizer (all available from Lab Safety Supply), boxes that held two stone saws and their circular blades (also Schlumberger), and the usual archaeological stuffshovels, spades, label printers, light boxes, rolls of bubble wrap, packing boxes, work lights, LED probe lights, brushes, brooms, and sifting traysbasically enough gear to keep a whole graduate-study and summer-internship program busy out here for a decade, not that any real scholarly research was actually going to happen. Well never use half this stuff, I thought. Well, next time, dont do
Wait.
TONTODID.
Hmm. DON TOD IT …
DONT DO IT.
Id tried to warn myself.
Hell.
Dont go back to the old days. Dont trust these people. Dont go through with this madness. Dont do it.
Hmm.
I lay there wondering, squinting at a tall trapezoid of blue light, a nylon tarpaulin stretched across the single door of the ancient room. My teeth chattered a little. Dont do it why? Couldnt I have been just a little more specific? Because its an abomination before God? Because its unpleasant? Because Id be missing the season finale of Gossip Girl?
Good going, I thought. It takes my subconscious four days to solve one Junior Jumble. Couldve done it on my phone in between four and six seconds.
And now tonight Ive got my appointment with a dead guy.
Yahora que, what can you do about it now? Bail out? Run off into the bush with No Way and sneak south into Honduras? Fake a nervous breakdown? Just say no?
No wonder Tony Sic hadnt seemed so upset when he found out I was going instead of him. Id felt really sheepish about it, and then hed seemed all philosophical and unfazed. Maybe hed been having second thoughts. Jed, youre an idiot, idiot
Squelch that. Unproductive.
Whew. Okay. Lets pick up the pieces. Time to Awaken the Giant Within.
I scratched my ankle, found a blue Patagonia Capilene sock that during the night had crawled from the foot of my bag past my head and out onto my inflatable mattressy thing. Inside the sock were five little rubber-banded bundles of foil packets. I found the General Foods Espresso Viennese, tore the thing open with my canine tooth, and poured a shower of powder onto my tongue. Yuck. Okay. I washed it down with two marshmallows. I opened two big PDI Super Sani-Cloth Germicidal Wipes, Proven Effective Against Tuberculosis, Salmonella, SARS, and HIV, and ran them over as much of my face and body as I could reach without spraining something. Next I found a packet that said No Need to Brush in big ice-blue letters. I ToothToweled my thirty-one teeth and ran the other side of the paste-impregnated paper over my wooly old tongue. The fourth packet held a four-by-six-inch square of gauze soaked with Skin So Soft, which neutralized the drying effects of the germicides. I tore a new Hartz Advanced Care 3 in 1 Control Flea Collar out of its wrapper and buckled it around my right knee. Arthropod bites and hćmophilia dont go together too well. I bunched all the junk into a ball, put the ball in a pocket, screwed my earbud into my left canal, and crawled through the tarpaulins lower right flap.
Care for a cuppa? Michael asked, mercifully not on the earbud. He, Lisuarte, and Boy Commando were sitting on a ground cloth, like it was a picnic. I didnt see No Way, but hed said hed snoop around. I said thanks but Id had some. It sounded like an invitation, though, so I squatted next to them. We were in the shade of a long building that had been the west side of an eighty-yard quadrangle that Michael said was probably part of the Ixian Ocelot Clans mens palace. The other buildings were covered with shrubs and just looked like small ridges, and the building wed set up in wouldnt have been noticeable, either, if the ES people hadnt cleared out the doorway. The area that had been the courtyard looked like it had been planted with corn a few years ago. But now it was overgrown with nettles and ferns. The whole compound was about halfway up a once-terraced mountainside, a quarter mile uphill from the river and about a hundred yards south of the sites biggest pyramidwhich the great Sylvanus Morley had called Mound A and which we now, with better epigraphy, knew had been the Ocelots mul. But with all the leafage you couldnt see either the river or the mul or, except in patches, the sky.
There was a big open OtterBox next to Michael, filled with packets of jellies and honey and juice boxes and corn chips and protein bars and stuff, and I picked out a Land O Lakes TravelPak and a half-liter foil-covered paper brick of Undine, which I guess was the latest thing in positron-enriched all-sports superwater. My last Ziploc, the one with my many-hued meds n vitamins, was still in my left hand, but I managed to peel the little Mylar tab off the box top. There was a puff-adder hiss as the little canister of CO2 inside shot its wad and instantly cooled the liquid down to thirty-two filling-cracking degrees. I poured my pills into my mouth, started to drink, found that my left hand was stuck to the frozen condensate on the outside of the box, peeled it off, picked the box up again, got the now-congealing cluster of capsules down with two-thirds of the heavy water or light water or whatever it was. Michaels hand handed me something. It was a granola bar. I pushed it out of the wrapper and crunched into it. Bring it! the wrapper said,
And thats what we did. We brought 50% more protein to the table than our traditional granola bars. This way, you wont have to worry about where you get your strength from, just where it will take you. At Bear Naked Granola, we believe true strength is seeing every finish line as the next starting point. So go ahead, set your sights a little higher. Its not important how far away your goal isjust that youre moving toward it. This is the granola that gets you there.
Excellent, I thought. I drank the remaining third of the box of water, crushed the box around the wrappers and the baggie, and dropped the wad in the Leave No Traces bag.
Ow, Marenas voice said somewhere. You cunt. I looked a little more carefully out into the milpa. Ana and Marena were fighting out in the middle of the field. No, they were practicing hup kwon do or something. Ana was teaching Marena some new and devastating low-body shin kick. Americas Bloodiest Psycho Dyke Catfight Videos, I thought. El video mas sangriento de lucha-libre de marimachas. Spick Chix Kick Dix. Mistress Ana, She-Jackal of Abu Ghraib
Cornstarch? Michael asked.
Excuse me? I thought. Excuse me? I asked.
He pointed to an open box of Argo. I looked at it. Boy, the Corn Maiden had really slimmed down at some point o
ver the last couple of decades.
Why? I asked.
Oh, sometimes I give it to people who arent used to hiking, he said. They tend to get chafed about the tender bits.
Oh, I said. Right. Uh, no, thanks.
Did you just eat that thing of butter? Boy Commando asked me.
Huh? I asked. I looked down at the empty foil wrapper. Oh … well …
Like, straight? Boy asked. You just eat plain butter?
Uh … I guess you cant take the Third World out of the Indian.
Hey, he said, I bet you cant tell me how many cigs Ive got left in this pocket. He tapped his left breast.
No, I cant, I said. Im not a remote viewer.
We have two mung-sprout pita pockets left, Michael said.
I said no thanks again and asked where the designated latrina was. He pointed to the southern side of the field. I creaked upright and headed over.
Cover your traces, Anas voice said out of my ear. Thanks, I nodded. Tortillera. I dont care how many contras you blew away for Bill Casey. I scrubbled forward, slipping a bit. My guess about Ana was that she was one of probably a lot of women whod been in the marines and wanted to run combat-level missions, and then when the U.S. wouldnt let them theyd quit in a huff and hired themselves out either to more swinging countries or to the private sector. Anyway, she sure had a big chip on each shoulder. Damn. I was having some trouble getting a second Wet One out of its packet. Shoulda just stood in sleeping bag. Person packet. Pick a peck of pita people packets
My ear buzzed. System on, I said. The system came on.
Its Kozo, Michael said. Good news, check this out.
I shuffled back and crouched into the audiencia. Hitch and Boy Commando were just inside the doorway, tinkering with audio stuff. Michael and Lisuarte were in the back, hunched over a monitor.
We got a heads-up from the home office, Michael said. I sat down. You know about the markings in the ahaus niche? he asked.
Yes, I said. Id memorized them, as I was sure he knew.
Right. Well, the recoronation, the katun-seating ritual, that was at dawn on the twentieth, right? In 664.
Exactolutely, I said. At the downloading wed be shooting for twenty minutes before sunrise, when 9 Fanged Hummingbird would be inside the niche, waiting to emerge and show himself to the assembly in the plaza.
Remember the San Martín thing? he asked.
Yes, I said.
Max says hi, Marena said. I hadnt seen her come in. We said hi back. She relayed the messages, signed off, and slid her phonea new, clunkier, encrypted one, with a black caseinto a little Velcro pocket on her sleeve.
Sorry, Marena said. Whats San Martín again?
Its a volcano on the coast of Veracruz, Michael said. There was an eruption there right around the target date.
Oh, yeah, she said. Right.
WellI was telling Jedthe dendrochronology couldnt really pin the date down, he said. But the Connecticut Yankee Department just came through with something aces, he said. Have a squiz at this. He spun the monitor around to face me. It showed the first line of a scan out of some English liturgical document:
I touched TRANSCRIPTION:
kalendis aprilibus[,] postridie quinque panum
multiplicationem [,] anno consecrationis
praesulis nostri wilfredi[,] anno domini
DCLXIV[,] indictione V …
Hmm. Okay, whatever. I hit ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY SRM/CFSU:
[Chronicles, Columcille (Abbey, Iona Island, Scottish Hebrides):]
On the Kalends of April, the day after the multiplication of the five loaves, in the year of the consecration of our bishop Wilfred, the year of the Lord 664, the 5th indiction, the following envoyed to Oswiu Lord [of Northumbria]: We do petition in thy charity for relief from the burdens of our donative for the space of sixty days[,] as the Lord of Hosts has visited upon our flock warnings of the sins of the Earth and the coming apace of the Court of Judgment[,] as[: ] First[,] that seven mornings ago, on the third Lords Day after the imposition of ashes [i.e., March 24, 664 CE] our novices ending their devotions at matins [about 7:15 A.M.] were alarmed by thunderclaps as of a summer storm[,] although the vault was clear. Second[,] that the following day before prime [noon], Paulus pastor [of Iona] and also of other hamlets on the coast and [accompanying a number of] palmers [i.e., refugees] making on foot the long journey descended upon this Abbey in great terror and affliction applying for alms[,] only lamentations echoing their mouths as they thought themselves abandoned by our redeemer[,] as before matins [about 5 A.M.] a ferocious wave as of the trunk of Leviathan had descended upon all the strands of the West[,] followed by two further like [waves] and then uncounted [waves] of decreasing severity[,] such that the docks of both towns and all vessels of nets and trade were destroyed[,] four free burghers and nineteen souls [i.e., serfs] were drowned[,] and an unknown number starved and starving, and Gods mercy be on them
Isnt that a kicker? Michael asked. That means we can date the eruption down to the hour.
Uh I started to say.
Great, Ana said, sounding unconvinced. Shed come over, too, and was reading over my shoulder. Out beyond the blue door-flap the day had darkened. There was a little grunt of thunder.
How long does a wave take to get across the ocean? Marena asked.
Uh, Irelands like, uh, five thousand miles from Veracruz, the wave would have gone about four hundred miles per hour, I said. Right? So if
They worked that out, Michael said. The main eruption was athang on. It was at about four thirty A.M. on March twenty-second. Local time.
Thats really something, I said.
Yeah, awesome, Marena said.
Also, you know, Michael said, Taro says the old guys didnt predict this thing before it happened. You know, the Sacrifice Game doesnt work well on natural events.
Not unless the adder knows a lot about natural events, I said.
Right.
Did they say they were sure that people in Ix would feel it? I asked.
They say it was an eight point five, he said. You would have felt it in Panama.
Right.
Also, you know, that eclipse is only a few weeks later.
Right.
He meant a total eclipse of the sun that had been visible in the area on what wed now call May 1, AD 664. It was also visible in Europe, and its even in Bede. Of course, the Maya sun adders would have known about the eclipse. In fact, theyd probably calculated it to within an hour. But these days we knew it within a second, so that might give me an edge.
Anyway, thats two predictions you can make good on, Michael said.
Thats great work, I said.
Michael laid a bigger monitor flat on the floor between us. You ready to look at what weve got on the site? he asked with the air of someone whod been up early and working while some others of us had been asleep. I nodded. Heres the latest subsurface map. A three-dimensional view of the reconstructed city of Ix came up on the screen. You could see layers of soil, rock, and water under the green wire-frame buildings. Marena and Ana sat down. No Way stood over us.
The great thing about this software is you can select for density and some chemicals, Michael said. So thisll show just the rock and not much else. He highlighted and deleted everything below 2.6 g/cm3, which is roughly the density of limestone. What was left looked like a flat-topped abscessed sea sponge, sprinkled on top with the tumbled blocks of the temples and palaces, surrounded by clouds of specks and chips and shards. Id already decided that maybe Michael had a little more to him than youd think from just his TV personality, but now I was almost getting impressed.
Right. Now, this is the current cavern system. Whic
h we visualize by mapping all the subterranean open space as a solid body. He deleted everything with a density over 1.25 kg/m3 or a temperature over sixty degrees. All that was left was a purple semitransparent structure like a many-holed scholars rock. He started it rotating slowly.
Was that all processed in the last two hours? I asked.
Yessir, he said. Isnt that beaut?
I said yes. It was pretty amazing, in a nerdy way. In the nineties, in the early days of ground-penetrating radar, you had to drag around a dish the size of a tire, but now one little antenna at the top of Mound A was giving us a batsear view of the whole subterranean landscape out to nearly a two-mile radius. It made the best fish-finding sonar look like poking the water with a stick.
Now, it seems that in the tenth baktun, the caves were more extensive, he said. A lot of its collapsed pretty recently. Geologically speaking. Within the last few hundred years. Then, all right, were going to move farther west under the mountain. See? Thats a chain of caves underneath. Apparently these lower ones are still active. That means theyre wet and forming.
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