AZTECHS

by Lucius Shepard

  Childers had said that we would rest for an hour, but an hour went by and he did not return. My buzz was starting to mellow, so I did another syrette and felt that sweet heart-slamming rush heat my blood, boil away superfluous brain cells. I watched the world reorder into a map of strategic points and values. I heard Zee mumbling, but I was too exultant to care. Eventually I turned to him. His cheeks were sunken, gray. Dark crescents beneath his eyes, but the eyes remained vital, black lakes in a desert of flesh.

  “So you are a soldier now,” he said in a cracked voice.

  This didn’t seem to require a response.

  Frankie, who had likely registered the sound of human speech, came scuttling down from whatever he had been doing atop the rock and pointed his lens at Zee.

  “You will be a fine soldier,” Zee said. “But whose soldier will you be?”

  Wearily, Lupe hauled herself up to a sitting position. She looked at me, then averted her eyes. She leaned close to Zee and said, “Last night when the rider came to Dennard—I thought you said your father couldn’t see us.”

  Very weakly, a whisper, he said, “They are drawn to death.”

  Lupe leaned closer, as if to kiss him. “They’re independent of the AI…your father?”

  “Let him die,” I said. Death was something I was coming to respect in that it offered—as it had to Dennard—new possibilities for triumph.

  A creaky syllable escaped Zee’s lips. It sounded like “gay.” His mouth remained open. So did his eyes.

  Lupe felt for a pulse under his jaw and jerked her hand away. “Eddie,” she said, and when I remained silent, she shouted, “Goddamn it, Eddie! Are you in there?”

  “What?” I said. I think the shout engaged me on some military level, that I associated shouts with battle mode.

  “You got to do somethin’, man!” she said. “That puto Childers is gon’ kill our ass. You got to help me, Eddie!”

  Her use of the imperative, too, engaged me. She seemed to be in command. “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know!” She pushed herself away from Zee’s body. “The riders. Maybe we can use the riders.”

  I waited.

  “If they’re independent of Montezuma,” she said, “maybe we can get ’em to come help us.”

  “How?”

  “That shit you shootin’ make you stupid? Think of somethin’!”

  A glistening in Zee’s left eye caught my attention. As I watched, it became a glitter. Lupe saw it and backed farther away. Within a few seconds, grains of glittering sand began to pour from the eye and down Zee’s cheek, forming into a little heap beside him, about the size of an anthill.

  Lupe crossed herself.

  Once the last grains had issued from the eye, the glittering pile started to flow away from the rock, slowly at first, but gathering speed, until it seemed to zip off toward the south like a little silver snake and was gone. During most of the process I never twitched. No pile of sand was going to kick Sammy’s ass—I intended to outface whatever danger it presented. But just before the silver snake picked up speed, acting on impulse, I sliced down with the edge of my left hand, chopping off its tail. I would like to believe the Eddie Poe component of my personality penetrated to the heart of the situation and caused me to act; but in truth I think it was a macho Sammy move that proved to be a brilliant stupidity. The sand grains pushed delicately against my hand, filmed over the palm, and then became inert.

  “Scoop ’em up!” Lupe told me, staring at the inch of sand trapped against my hand.

  I was not inclined to obey her.

  “Dumbass…!” She came to crouch beside me, and using the blade of a penknife she produced from her hip pocket, she carefully lifted them and deposited them on a pocket handkerchief made of the same red silky material as her blouse. Then she knotted the handkerchief and held it out to me. “Take it!” she said.

  “What for?” I said.

  “Eddie.” She pushed her face into mine. “If your pale gringo ass is listenin’, try and hear what I’m tellin’ you, okay? In the handkerchief there’s about a million little machines. I don’t know why the hell they didn’t swarm all over you. Maybe ’cause they come out of Zee, maybe they know you or somethin’. But if you throw ’em on Childers, maybe it’ll fuck him up. Now take the goddamn handkerchief!”

  I took it and stuffed it into my shirt pocket.

  “You not gon’ say nothin’?” Lupe jabbed two fingers at my chest. “You jus’ gonna sit there?”

  I made no reply, busy examining the potentials of the situation. The idea of going up against Childers with a pocket hanky containing a gram of machine dust did not strike me as wise.

  Lupe tried to slap me, but I caught her wrist, squeezed until she cried out. I released her and she pushed herself to a safe distance. A tear held at the corner of her eye, flashing like a live crystal, then slid down her cheek.

  “Please, Eddie! Please listen to me.”

  Her weepy tone did not move me, but then she grew angry again, and though her voice was still freighted with a weaker emotion, I was swayed to listen.

  “Goddamn you!” she shouted. “We gotta kill this son of a bitch, Eddie! Y’gotta help me!” She got to her knees, cradling her sore wrist. “You wan’ me to tell you I love you? That do it for ya? I don’t wanna deal with it, I don’t fuckin’ need it! But it’s true—I love you! I do! Y’hear that, man? I fuckin’ love you, okay?”

  Beneath the layers of falsity that muffled Lupe’s soul was something I had never seen before, a palpable force made visible—it seemed—by her admission of love. Was it love I saw? I don’t know. It could have been another of Lupe’s games, the operation of some primal falsity. But whatever it was, it was very strong, and its strength along with Lupe’s anger not only impressed itself on Sammy, it spoke to the flickering remnant of Eddie Poe and joined those two parts of me in a unity of purpose. Lupe seemed to be changing, acquiring the potency of an emblem, an icon, a soldier’s reason for sacrifice. Her eyes were as depthless a medium as the black stuff of the riders. Her cheeks taut with strain, her red lips parted. All her weakness and lying substance appeared to be dissolving away like a skin being shed, revealing a new creature beneath. What I felt for her, Eddie Poe’s infantile love and Sammy’s chemically sculpted, perverted samurai honor, combined to form a dutiful passion. If Zee had been around, I could have told him whose soldier I was now.

  As we walked from afternoon into evening Childers’ mood was buoyant—Zee’s death had been a sort of “Oh, well” event for him—and he told us stories about Guatemala. How his platoon had joined up with a larger force of pro-government Guatemalan troops to overrun a rebel village, killing everyone. After the victory they had found a huge vat of homemade beer—the marines squabbled with the Guatemalans over possession of the beer, and eventually they slaughtered them as well. He told us how Sammy had watched the souls of the dead rise from the battlefield and how he had seen strange anthropomorphic creatures in the jungle invisible to normal eyes. They were slender, very fast, their skins imbued with a chameleonlike quality that allowed them to blend in against the backdrop of bark and foliage. A member of his platoon had killed one, but they had been unable to preserve it. Insects had eaten everything but the bones. Childers had kept a fragment of bone and when he had it analyzed, it proved to be the relic of a human child.

  “The citizens might say we shot us a regular kid,” Childers said. “What do they know? You spend time in Guatemala, you come to learn that strange is normal in a place like that. The idea that kids could go mutant living in a jungle, it fits in with all the rest.”

  Frankie scooted ahead, shooting him as he talked, and Childers struck a pose, flexing his biceps.

  “One time,” said Childers, “we took some R&R in San Francisco de Juticlan, this garbage heap of a town on the Rio Dulce, right on the edge of the jungle. The town had grown out over the river. All these shanties set on stilts, connected by walkways. Most of the people living there w
ere hookers. Pimps, bartenders, gamblers, and hookers—that’s all there were. We’d been fighting Angolans the last couple of weeks. Tough bastards. They weren’t great soldiers, but they were great killers, and we needed a party. We took over this mega-shanty out from the shore. Two stories, with dozens of interconnected rooms. We lit the place up. Threw all the local tough guys in the river and got working with the women. So anyway, I’m in a room with my senorita—the bitch couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but she was an animal! And I heard Jago yell. Jago Wharton. One of my buddies. About six, seven of us found his room and busted in. He was lying on the bed, looking up into a corner of the ceiling and screaming. Terrified. We looked up to what he saw, and Christ! His whore was hanging upside down from the tin roof. Like a goddamn spider. She had black marks on her face—like her skin was splitting open and something was forcing its way out. Somebody shot her, and we pulled Jago together. I don’t know what the hell the hooker was. Some kind of witch, maybe. We figured there must be more around, so we gathered up the rest of the hookers and examined them. Found four others just like the first. We were going to shoot them, but Jago”—Childers laughed—“he goes, ‘No, man! Don’t kill ’em!’ And he starts telling us what an amazing ride the first one was giving him before she went into spider mode. It was unreal, he said. So we took turns screwing the other four. We watched them close so they couldn’t pull any of their spider shit, and Jago was right. The bitches must have been triple-jointed. You could bend them any fucking way.” He laughed again—airily, lightly. “Almost any fucking way.”

  I tried to marry the things I had begun to see—halos around objects, phantom gassy shapes in mid-air, and so forth—to Childers’ stories. Would these mild hallucinations evolve into wild distortions of reality? Would I start seeing what Childers wanted me to see? It was hard to believe that he had actually seen the things he said he had, and I suspected that Sammy living at close quarters and under stress might come to see whatever they wanted to see. Such a quality would make the job easier on the conscience, but it didn’t exactly prepare you for a return to civilian life. Then maybe there was something to the stories, maybe the world was many worlds that all interfaced in places such as Guatemala, and only Sammy knew their secrets.

  I had no opportunity that night to introduce the dust in Lupe’s handkerchief into Childers’ bloodstream, and I’m not sure I would have taken the opportunity if one had presented itself—it might have been our only chance, but it was too much of a long shot, and I preferred to wait for a significant opening. Soon Childers either ran out of stories or of the urge to tell them, and we went in silence across the moonlit sand. Whenever we stopped to rest, he would sit far away from us or go out of sight completely. During these breaks Lupe made crazy suggestions about what we should do and urged me to come up with my own, but I ignored her and concentrated on focusing myself. I couldn’t imagine a scenario that did not involve a physical confrontation with Childers, and I wanted to be ready.

  Sunrise brought us to the top of a ridge overlooking a lake of glittering machines with a village of adobe huts on the far shore, a few miles distant. The eastern sky was striped with bands of glowing agate, and the crimson sun was warped by heat haze into a convoluted figure, an Aztec Rose painting the hillsides and silhouetting the saguaro against a pale indigo sky. Childers stared at the village through binoculars for a long time, then handed the binoculars to me. There were thirty-one of the huts. Their shapes were strangely modern, as if they were hotel bungalows designed to reflect a native motif. People moved through the dusty streets. Indians. Most wearing white robes. I spotted a man on horseback. The horse was fashioned of a gray metal that looked to have the flexibility of flesh. Its eyes were raised obsidian ovals and it had obsidian decorations on its face and flanks. The man was holding a long-bladed spear in his right hand; from his left dangled the body of a whiplike black animal with a flat head that appeared vaguely feline. The scene had an atmosphere of ordinary process, but its details were almost entirely exotic, and that dissonance made me uneasy.

  “This is it,” Childers said, taking back the binoculars.

  Lupe, who had sunk to her knees, said, “The AI?”

  Childers paid her no mind. “All right,” he said to me. “I want you to listen.”

  My sergeant, my enemy. As he spoke I studied the coarse map of his features, trying to read its micro-expressions, and I concluded that for all his bravado, Childers was afraid.

  “We’re going in,” he said. “Give me any trouble, I’ll kill you both. Bang! Just like that. No hesitation. Hear what I’m saying?”

  I nodded.

  He ported his rifle and gave me a cold, steady look. “Whatever you think of me, I’m the good guy here.” He gestured at the village. “That thing out there has a plan for us. For all of us. It wants us gone. That’s how it intends to guarantee its security. The Carbonells had the right idea. Montezuma wants to take our strength. It wants to be left alone, to do whatever it wants without human intervention. The easiest way to get rid of us is to turn us all into zoned-out freaks like Zee. Is that what you want? I don’t think so. You want the right to screw up your life on your own. You don’t need a goddamn machine to do it for you. So if you want to keep that right, if you want to return to El Rayo and be Eddie Poe again, then you better remember—I’m the good guy. I’m the hero. You’ve got two choices. You can die, or you can be a hero, too. Personally, I don’t care which choice you make. I’ve got a job to do—that’s all I care about. But you’ve got some thinking ahead of you.”

  To the north, several riders were moving along a ridgeline, and Childers tracked them for a second or two. “Fuck,” he said distantly, as though speaking to himself. “I don’t pull it off, the whole world’s going to look like this.”

  I thought about that, about a world in which you lived on the shore of a machine lake in the light of the Aztec Rose, and rode steel horses in pursuit of shadowy beasts with whiplike tails. It didn’t seem so bad, and yet Childers’ words about self-determination stirred my blood. I had no real belief in the concept—as far as I could tell free will was as illusory as the patch of dark mist that currently troubled my vision. You made the best of what life handed you, yet you never really understood what you’d been handed. For that moment, however, I wanted to believe in it.

  “They should nuke the motherfucker,” said Childers. “So what if the economy collapses! It’s the only sure way.”

  He dragged the butt of his rifle in the sand and studied the depression it had made. Frankie scuttled close to get an angle on his face, and I realized how many people must be watching our act. Did they believe we were actors in an End-of-the-World skit? Or were they on the edge of their seats, recognizing that their fate might be up for grabs. Most of them were probably just tripping on the imagery, or thinking about switching to the soccer game, or hoping Lupe and me would get nasty before they had to go to work.

  Childers flipped his rifle into the air and caught it by the barrel with his strong right hand. He grinned so hugely, his sergeant’s stripes almost disappeared into the leathery folds of his skin. “Aw, hell! Let’s go have some fun!” he said.

  No one noticed Childers enter the village. He set about exploring the place, and the Indians in their white robes would have walked right into him if he hadn’t stepped out of their way. But they saw Lupe and me as we approached and came out to meet us on the edge of the machine sea. They all had smiles like Zee, and their speech was rife with platitude and beatific evasion. They were, I decided, the blessed. They had exchanged the illusion of free will for the illusion of peace. They treated us as if we were long-lost members of the tribe, touching us gently, offering food and drink, letting us bathe, and finally ushering us to our own bungalow, a structure not of clay but of reddish brown stone shaped by tools that had left no mark, and inside a cool dark space with a white bed and a kitchen and soft chairs. Then they left us alone. Exhausted, Lupe fell out on the bed. Frankie perched beside her and be
gan displaying footage of our journey on the wall. I sat in one of the chairs, wondering if the village was Montezuma’s demonstration model of machine bliss, what he would do for mankind, or if it was simply a casual, off-handed thing, the AI’s way of dealing with some ants he had discovered in his back yard. My mind was thronged with images from old films about evil computers who had attempted to enslave humanity, but Childers’ notion that the AI wanted to be left alone seemed a much more reasonable representation of what an intelligent machine would want. If Montezuma had played geopolitical and corporate chess in order to position himself so he could then convert the world to that ol’ time religion with a brand new twist…well, that made sense, too. Religion had always been the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal, its effectiveness tested over the millennia, and the AI’s version, enforced by its microscopic apostles, would be lapse-proof, heretic-proof. Once in the fold, you’d be there for good. Maybe Childers was the good guy, I thought. Maybe I should be helping him instead of plotting to kill him.

  Late that afternoon, Lupe sat up in the bed and said, “Shit! Eddie, c’mere!” Then, to Frankie, she said, “Play that last section back.”

  The images on the wall flickered backwards, steadied, then rolled forward. Frankie’s footage showed Childers walking away from the camera into a defile of yellowish rock—it resembled the landscape close to the big boulder beneath which Zee had died. Childers moved along the defile for a couple of hundred yards, then stopped and began stripping off his clothes. He glanced back toward the camera, and Frankie ducked into cover, the footage showing a close-up of a rock. When Frankie peeked out again, a naked Childers was exercising. Doing Tai Chi. I saw nothing that would have excited Lupe. But then his movements became more extreme, and I understood what she had reacted to—Childers’ body was changing as he worked out, expanding and contracting with the fluidity of a serpent’s body. The camera zoomed in on his face. There were distinct glitters in his eyes that did not appear to be the result of reflected light.