by Larry Baxter
* * *
Cambridge, October 25, present day
Robert Asher moved the joystick and his viewpoint moved with it. He jockeyed up to a decorated wall covered with symbols and admired the flowing, complex, almost amusing design of the glyphs. Whoever designed this language was more interested in art than in economy of representation. He lifted the joystick handle and soared into space. The breath left his lungs. He regained control and arranged a soft landing on the top of the big pyramid. The view was spectacular. The city's architecture was like the written language, with more attention to aesthetics than to efficiency.
Just below him the priest was laying out a selection of sharp implements and a limp, glassy-eyed young woman was being tied to a marble table. Robert jetted away and flew down to the marketplace, a large open square at the periphery of the city clogged with vendors of fruits and vegetables, jewelers with objects of jade and basalt and obsidian, and women with sacks of provisions over their shoulders. He was astonished with the detail of the scene. It was obviously computer-generated, as the faces when they moved broke up into triangles, blocky three-dimensional representations, and the motion was a little jerky, but it was miles better than any other virtual reality trip he had taken. He removed the helmet and snapped back to actual reality.
"Very impressive," he said, handing her the helmet. "Spectacular graphics. Who did this?"
"Isn't that excellent?" said Teresa. "Some of our people and some computer graphics guys at MIT are working on it."
"Where were we? You were in the middle of their history. Was that a religious ceremony on the pyramid? It looked like it was going to get bloody."
"Yes, well, the priests convinced the hoi polloi that only the priests could keep the gods in control, and they needed high temples to do it because the gods were way up there. The first Mexican culture to make their mark, edifice-wise, was the Olmec. They built massive monuments, they designed a calendar, and they drew hieroglyphics and created some truly beautiful art, elegant jade sculpture. They invented the concept of zero before the fifth-century Hindu and well before twelfth century Europe. The big city was Teotihuacán." She gestured to the wall. "There's an artist's reconstruction. The main street was the Avenue of the Dead, one hundred fifty feet wide, two miles long. The architecture, the use of space, the forms and angles were spectacular, the Romans should have seen it. The Pyramid of the Sun was over two hundred feet high. A quarter of a million people lived in Teotihuacán."
"What happened to them?"
"The Maya took over around AD three hundred. Their big city was Tikal, it has an even larger pyramid. The Maya were expert in math, astronomy, and physics. But they were pretty violent. Human sacrifice was popular as a way to placate the angry gods. Then they became warlike and their civilization started to deteriorate, with each city ruled by warriors and at war with its neighbors. And then the Maya sort of disappeared. About AD nine hundred, they all started abandoning the cities. Nobody knows why, but the consensus is a major war or agricultural failure of some kind. What was left of the Maya civilization was decimated by the Spanish Conquest, and by the new diseases the conquerors brought with them."
"Maybe we have some more clues, now," said Robert. "It looks as if the Austin virus is easily the deadliest killer in history, potentially much worse than the Black Plague. They're trying to keep it confined to Austin, but if it breaks out we all could be in trouble unless a cure is found. If the Austin virus was really in Maya Mexico in the ninth century, that could have been the reason the Maya died off."
"But I thought they had an antiviral, if you read the glyph correctly."
"After they identified a candidate antiviral charge image, they would need to synthesize the drug. Or maybe they could have found it occurring naturally in the rain forest. But they'd need a high enough quantity to treat millions of people. The timing, or the production schedule, may have been such that the antiviral saved only ten or fifteen percent of the population. Or, from what you tell me about the culture being unfriendly, they may have withheld the cure to teach their enemies a lesson."
"Makes sense."
"Teresa," said Robert. "To change the subject slightly, I need a Maya expert to join an expedition to Mexico, the Yucatán, to track down these glyphs. Do you think you might be interested?"
"Just science? I have a jealous boyfriend."
Robert felt his mood slip down a notch or two. Boyfriend. Damn.
"But he might let me go, if I call him a lot and if it's not just you and me on the expedition. His name is Armand. He'll probably want to meet you. He might want to go with us, except he really hates the heat."
"Well, tell him I'm no threat, I have a girlfriend." Robert grinned at her, trying to sell the lie. "And we'll have at least one more field person, hopefully a local. If it's OK with Armand, what do you think?"
She nibbled on an orange pencil and looked at him with her disturbing blue-purple eyes as if she understood all of his faults. Could she read him this easily? Was this entire concept ridiculous?
"What's your actual position at B.U.?" she said, finally.
"Confusing. My undergrad degree is in physics, my grad studies in molecular biology. Then I got into electronics and instrumentation. They call me a staff scientist, but I think they use me for anything confusing that nobody else wants to do. Our department does industrial consulting, mostly for the biotech firms."
"All the glyphs in Uxmal have been photographed. I have prints. Why go there?"
"Are there enough untranslated glyphs so we could maybe find the medical references we need from the photos?"
She thought a minute. "I don't think so. But what do you expect to find down there?"
"I'm not sure. But the stakes are high, and it's a new angle. Maybe the fact that we're looking for a medical history will give us a different slant on translating the unknown glyphs."
She nodded agreement. "Would we fly down? I haven't flown in a while. I guess driving down would take too long, though?"
"Probably four days instead of four hours. Is flying a problem for you?"
"I hope not. Maybe. Have to get through it. Fear of flying. No, wait, more like fear of crashing. No, fear of the thirty seconds between when the plane stops flying and starts crashing. Behaving in an unfeminine manner. Screaming a lot."
"What about if I promised not to tell anyone?"
"I don't know, I suppose it might be all right. I'd have to check with my boss. I can probably get away right now. Can your project pay for it? We don't have much funding. Can I take some photos for my manuscript? How long would we be gone?"
"I think I can get funded. We'd need to spend a day or two in one of the coastal cities putting a team together and collecting equipment. I guess the Austin virus is scaring the pants off everyone in the medical field and funds are available for any long shot program. I don't know how long we'd be gone, maybe a couple of weeks."
"I hardly ever get offered all-expense-paid trips to Mexico. Sign me up, I think. Provided, of course, Armand is OK with it. And my boss; I'll find out." She glanced out the window. "Another thing. Dark is happening outside. The official quitting hour is happening inside. We could grab some of these books and walk down to the Square for some latté. Or something else trendy. While I fill you in on Maya history."
"Done. Is Sam Adams trendy?"
Teresa stood and pulled a selection of books from the wall and filled a nylon shoulder bag. Robert admired the pleasant curves under the white slacks. Armand, huh? Well, who cares, she seems nervous, unapproachable. Sure knows the Maya, though.
"This should do. We'll continue your education in Ancient History 101."
* * *
The mis-named triangular-shaped Harvard Square was the center of social life for academic Cambridge. Teresa found an establishment with both latté and Sam Adams, not an easy task even in cosmopolitan Cambridge, and they spread out some books on a small table in the corner.
"Here's your homework, Robert Asher," she advis
ed. "Von Daniken. Ancient spacemen invade earth. Did you know that the Roman-era Turks dug underground cities to escape the ancient spacemen? Total wild-eyed fantasy, but there are probably a few glimmers of truth hidden in the corners. And, heck, your whole project is a little fantastic. But interesting. Here's another potboiler, Mysteries of the Ancient World. It asks some interesting questions like"—she turned to the first page—"'Who carved the Great Sphinx, five thousand years before the Egyptian Kingdom?' and 'How did the gigantic stones get to Stonehenge?' and, of course 'How did the primitive Easter Islanders move twenty-five-ton statues onto pedestals constructed hundreds of years earlier?' Or the weight award, six hundred ton stones at Baalbek?"
"Tell me."
"Same thesis. Same explanation. Those old guys were smart. Why do we have the arrogance to assume civilization and intelligence and knowledge all follow an upward curve, with us at the pinnacle? We're finding more and more evidence of early civilizations with spectacular achievements, all blown away by earthquakes, tidal waves, meteorites, or diseases. In the more scholarly tradition, we have Coe's Breaking the Maya Code." Read all of these, there may be a quiz."
"Those first two don't look particularly scientific."
"You bring me a fantastic story about Maya microscopes, you get science fiction. Besides, we don't have a clear direction, right? We need to keep our options open, throw a big net."
"Tell me about the glyphs."
"We've been working on a translation for a while. The early linguists who were trying to translate Maya glyphs would always start by assuming they were pictographs, picture-writing. Chinese has a few pictographs, like the character shan, mountain, which looks like a three-peaked mountain. But try to write, say, 'you can't really mean it' in pictographs. It doesn't work."
"Makes sense. What does work?"
"Well, these linguists thought written languages all evolved from pictographs to ideographs, symbols representing ideas, to the final evolution which was phonetics, symbols representing the sounds of the spoken language. Letters in the written English language more or less represent the sounds of the spoken language. Early linguists made the usual error of assuming that because the old guys were old they weren't smart, and they got stuck trying to decode the Maya language as pictographs. But it turns out that almost all known writing is phonetic, or mostly phonetic.
"When did they start translating Maya? Did somebody find a Rosetta stone, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics?" he asked, trying not to look at her disturbing eyes.
"It wasn't that easy. People have been trying to translate Maya since 1850. Hundreds of people helped, using the stone carvings and a few tree-bark books, codices. For a hundred years they went down blind alleys, but starting in 1970 or so, they started to make some good progress. In comparison, the Egyptian hieroglyphics were translated by one person in about ten years. It's not that the Maya inscriptions were any more difficult, just that the hieroglyphic translator had a better dictionary to work with and he didn't get caught in blind alleys."
"This has all been fairly recent, then."
"The civilization was missing, for a while. When the Maya Empire collapsed in the eleventh century, it returned to jungle. Then a Spanish Dragoon rediscovered Palenqué in the eighteenth century. He sent back a report with engravings of Maya art and writing, and it got more explorers started. They cleared trees, excavated some buildings, and brought back more examples of the writing, including codexes, books written on flattened tree-bark. More people joined the effort to translate. The calendar was translated pretty quickly, and the number system, and the writing was correctly thought to be a chronicling of the history of the Maya. And a lot of the glyphs were pictographs, like the glyph for a king would be a pictograph so even the common people could read it. But not much progress was made on translating the bulk of the glyphs."
"Why not?"
"Tricky. Finally in the 1970s, the researchers started to crack the language. By then, there were more than a hundred people working on the problem."
"Pretty good crowd."
Then in 1980, some American explorers discovered a huge cave system down near the border with Belize. The ancient Maya thought caves were the entrance to the Underworld, a place to be feared and respected. The caves were the homes of the Xibalban, the lords of death. And they may have been right, one young archaeologist was killed by a lightning bolt on a pyramid in Chichén Itzá just after exploring Maya caves."
"Did the Americans get zapped by the lords of death, too?" Robert asked.
"Well, no, actually. They found that the caverns were covered with glyphs and murals and made some major contributions to the translation. In the decade of the eighties, the percentage of properly translated glyphs went from twenty percent to eighty percent, and since then we've picked up another ten percent or so." She glanced at her watch. "Half past ten already. Time to call it a night."
"Thanks, this has been helpful. I'm starting to think that the Maya could really have developed the charge microscope."
"I continue to think you're seriously sanity-challenged."
"But you'll go, right? You think?"
"I think. I'd like to get some pictures. I'll help with your translation until it hits a dead end. Don't tell anybody what we're doing, the department already thinks I'm missing an oar or two."
Chapter 10
* * *
Boston, October 25, present day
Robert, freshly showered after his morning commute, trotted up three flights of stairs and knocked on Dr. Teppin's office door.
"Good morning, come on in, sit down. Good, we have to do some planning. I guess you hit it off with Dr. Welles, she just called me to see if you were an axe murderer or anything."
"You didn't give me away, did you? She's still coming?"
"Hmmm, do I detect a shade of concern in your voice?"
"Well, she does seem to be perfect for the job. She knows the Maya language."
"She did tell me that she was coming." Robert felt as if the queen of the senior prom had accepted his invitation to the dance.
Teppin unfolded a laptop computer from an arm of his wheelchair. "Did you see my new toy? It has a high-resolution display, GPS navigation and mapping, and high-speed wireless Net access. One excellent thing that happened with this computer revolution, wheelchair life got much more interesting."
"How long have you been in a wheelchair?"
"Since I was twenty. Traffic light on Route Two. The truck that hit our car never even slowed down; the driver was asleep. We went from a family of four to a family of one half in a millisecond. The next year, they made the traffic light into an overpass."
"I can't think what it must have been like, the loss."
Teppin thought for a minute, his eyes far away. "It was a bad year. A bad decade. Better, now. You live in Boston, do you not?"
"Yes, well, third-floor apartment in Brighton."
"You are unmarried, right?"
"Right."
"Engaged?"
"Nope, not even close. I've dedicated my life to science, at least until I meet Mrs. Right."
"That did not happen yesterday, hmmm?"
"She is impressive. But she made a point about having a serious boyfriend. I think I made her nervous."
Teppin gazed out the window in silence for a moment. "I have seen you running on the Esplanade. You are fast. I used to run on the Concord High School track team. Now I run sometimes when I dream."
"I do about twenty miles a week, when everything's working. It's my favorite way to commute."
"Yes. Stick with it. Do a few miles for me. One other thing. Normally, a field trip like this would require communications to home base on about a bi-weekly schedule. But I would like to tie you in more tightly, and use both video and audio communications."
"How would it work?"
"I have a camera, a microphone, and a speaker on my computer. If we give you a portable Net video camera and a microphone and speaker, I can look through your eyes, listen
through your ears. Run with you."
"How big would it be?"
"About this big," said Teppin, pulling a black box with shoulder straps, about the size of a dictionary, out from under his chair. "The latest thing from PictureTel. It has a remotely positionable camera, so I can look around, and a steerable microphone. It has lithium ion batteries that last twenty hours between charges."
"How does it connect?"
"There is a 650 MHz radio link to the central station, it has about an eight mile range. You can also take a few of these radio intercom headsets on the same frequency, so if there's a group of you that needs to keep in touch they wear them."
"How does the central station get hooked up? Phone line?"
"Too slow. The central station communicates by satellite. It is about the size of a breadbox. The central station is, I think the satellite is bigger. You kids know how big a breadbox is?"
"About the size of a computer monitor, sir?"
"Right. Just pull out the antenna, plug it in, and set it up with a view of the southern sky. Electronics does the rest. When are you leaving?"
"Day after tomorrow, I think. If Teresa's OK with it."
"Teresa?"
"Dr. Welles."
"Have a nice flight. And have good luck. Very good luck."
Chapter 11
* * *
Cancún, October 27, present day
Robert and Teresa were settled in on the tenth floor of the three-hundred-room Hotel de Finca at Cancún. The hotel featured four bars and five pools. It was located on the narrow, hotel-infested strip of sand separating the lagoon from the sea. The airplane had deposited them at the Cancún airport two hours earlier, and they had agreed to go out for dinner at 7:00. Teresa checked out her wardrobe to see if it had survived the trip. She slipped on the white linen dress and inspected the fit critically in the mirror. The new Teva sandals seemed like the appropriate footwear.