by Larry Baxter
They looked at the nearby text for help with the problem and found none. The Austin virus glyphs were embedded in a description of a harvest ceremony. Artoz showed them around the site, pointing out more glyphs, but again they got no answers.
Finally Artoz said, "There is one more place, but it is not yet official."
"What do you mean?" asked Robert.
"Do you know about the ceremonial cave?"
"I've read about it," said Teresa. "A couple of miles to the north, a natural cave with some cave paintings but no glyphs. Discovered just last year. It was supposed to have been the reason that the city was sited here."
"A few months ago another guide and me, we found a side tunnel leading to another big room. This room has glyphs painted on the walls and paintings of jaguars and warriors. Nice, bright colors. I take you first thing tomorrow."
"Sounds good to me," said Robert. "But how about tonight? We can grab flashlights from the van."
"Overtime for sure," said Artoz, "All at the same low hourly rate. I am indeed a prince."
"Dr. Teppin," asked Robert, "are you still there?"
Teppin said, from Robert's shoulder, "Right here. I'd go with you, but the system has no penetration through rock or soil, maybe a few inches. Why don't you drop me back in the van."
Armed with flashlights and a digital camera, they walked north down a well-defined path for half an hour, carefully following Artoz' instructions to watch their feet so they did not step on a poisonous snake. Ducking under a low overhang, they walked into the cave. Badly faded images of ancient Maya celebrities decorated the walls. Artoz pointed out the Principal Bird Deity, Vucab Caquix, and Lady Blood, the young Underworld princess.
In the center of the room was a low round altar of some sort. The ceiling was blackened above the altar as if fire had been a part of the ceremony performed there. The cavern was natural limestone, evidenced by a small collection of stalactites and stalagmites. To one side, water dripped off a stalactite into a carved ceremonial bowl.
Artoz led them to the rear of the cave. On one side, under a low ceiling, was a pile of rubble. He went to his hands and knees and scraped it away, revealing a small aperture through which he disappeared. They followed him through a winding passage several hundred yards long, sometimes returning to hands and knees to scrape through a low spot, once wading through a cool stream of water. The temperature fell several degrees, actually getting into a comfortable zone. They emerged into a second larger limestone cave, painted with well-preserved bright figures of feathered warriors in some epic battle. The floor was an irregular assortment of tiny stalagmites and terraces of white and pink limestone deposits. On one side was an area of painted glyphs, about four feet wide and curving up to the peak of the ceiling ten feet off the floor as if rendered by some Maya Michelangelo. The paint, dark blue against the white limestone, was chipped and mottled with age, but readable, and the Austin virus glyph was again represented.
As Robert snapped photos, Teresa and Artoz discussed the translation, but made no progress and decided to wait for morning to look at all the pictures together and try to find some linkage. They worked their way back through the caves and walked back through Uxmal to the parking lot under a sky full of stars, with the surrealistic scene backlit by the rising full moon.
"Teresa?"
"Yes, O great white hunter?"
"Would you sing Stela by Starlight for us?"
"No sir, not without my backup band."
"Wait here, I'll call Cancún."
* * *
Robert closed his notebook. The heat of the sun at mid-morning seemed to slow his brain as well as make every movement difficult. He stood on the yellowed grass of one of the courtyards of the big Maya city. The ceremonial cenote, the fresh-water well, was behind him. It had been carved by the city architects as a perfect twenty-foot cylinder from the limestone ledge. To his right stood a fifteen-foot stela. To the left stood the main temple, a steeply stepped pyramid almost two hundred feet high. Near the top of the pyramid, a wide platform accommodated a large stone chacmool—the sacrificial table—a reclining figure holding a basin for the heart of the sacrifice. Dr. Teppin had opted for education today, so the weight of the satellite communications gear was not on Robert's back.
The tourists had arrived in force; platoons of them dressed in flip-flops and shorts and colorfully lettered white cotton T-shirts. One family group was looking noisily for a lost child, teenage boys climbed up and down the steeply sloped pyramids, senior citizens with parasols against the relentless sun held color lithographed guide books in three languages. Robert wandered over to the shade of the broad-leafed Baobab tree where Teresa and Artoz were sitting comfortably on a cool stone slab near the cenote, working on last night's photos and sipping bottled water.
"Hi, chief, pull up a monolith and sit down," said Teresa. "We may be on to something here."
"I think you will like this," said Artoz. "We have always thought that the travel between the old Maya cities was not too hard, and the sacbé, the sacred white roads, were well used. That would mean that the cities could specialize, some cities could do maybe pottery, and some cities could concentrate on the astronomical studies.
"Here is stela twenty-seven, with your special glyphs. We thought the stela was a description of the harvest ceremony. But here you see"—he gestured at a computer printout—"a triad of three unknown glyphs. And here from the cave is the same triad, near your Austin virus glyph and near the glyph for the city of Tulum repeated several times. The meaning seems to be quite clear."
Robert sipped a warm soda. "Not to me."
"The Maya are thanking the harvest god for an unusually good crop with none of the worms that ate most of the corn in some year before. And then they are thanking the city of Tulum for sending a yellow powder to sprinkle on the earth as the crops were growing. The powder helped the harvest god. And there's something here about a great shaman, Peloc, who cures the sick. We see his name also, just here."
"So Tulum is specialized for science?"
"Yes, it looks as if Tulum was the Maya university town."
"But the timing doesn't work, does it?" asked Teresa. "Tulum was supposedly built about 900 and this stela was carved in 820."
"Yes, you are correct. Perhaps Tulum was built earlier than that and new buildings were built over the old. That happened for many of the Maya cities. Possibly Tulum started with a cave, many cities started with a cave. Caves with running water. Caves were important because the Lords of the Dead lived there. Maybe Tulum had a cave which was covered by Tulum."
"Does it look as if Tulum sent the Austin antiviral, too?" asked Robert.
"It's not here, exactly, but I'd bet on it," said Teresa.
"Next stop, Tulum. I'm glad we got the free mileage on our vehicle."
"You pack up the stuff," said Teresa. "And I'll run over and get us some more bottled water for the trip."
Chapter 14
* * *
Uxmal, Mexico, June 16, 823
The funeral ceremony for the great King of Uxmal, Chortal the Parrot, brought the Maya from many miles around. They filled the vast quadrangle, they stood in serried array on the stepped sides of the Great Pyramid and the South Temple, and they brought maize and jewelry and carved jade statuettes to help send Chortal on his voyage.
The ceremony brought the people close to the gods, and the people always came in their finest dress, spoke in soft voices, and turned their faces to the sky as if they could glimpse the gods themselves.
But the ceremony was nothing like the extravagant tribute that had accompanied the interment of Chortal's predecessor, Xtabtal the Strong, only three cycles ago. Chortal had died of the disease of the black tongue, as had many others of the city, and the city elders were more interested in discovering the cure for the disease than in properly honoring a king who many thought should have been called Chortal the Stupid. Only five hundred warriors conducted the funeral, but they were impressive with the bone armor
and the colored feathers and the shields and spears.
The big fire seemed to please the crowd. But only one sacrifice was made—a shocking departure from protocol—and no ball game was played except by the small children who ran unchecked in large numbers up and down the ball field pretending to be Xbalanque or Moon Rabbit Batz.
One of the elders, a confidante of Chortal and the man who had urged him to enlist the assistance of the great savants of Tulum, sat near the top of the House of the Magician as the ceremony concluded, gazing into the sunset. He stared fixedly at the orange disk, then closed his eyes to find a sign in the green circle that danced in the dark brown sky. But no sign appeared.
The sun was setting almost in line with Pauahtun, the earth god as turtle, and Middleworld, the place where the sun descended to the underworld.
The symbolism was not lost on the elder. He felt the sun setting on Uxmal, on the Maya, the entire city descending to the underworld. The people were screaming in pain and dropping in the streets with the black tongue, who could blame the survivors for running into the jungle? The priests did not offer correct tribute to the Jaguar god, how were they to ensure that the sun would appear the next day? The civilization was disintegrating. They would awaken to darkness.
The elder knew just one fact that offered a ray of hope: Peloc, the mighty Peloc, the greatest savant of all, was said to be close to a cure for the black tongue.
Chapter 15
* * *
Austin, Texas, October 29, present day
The huge camouflage-painted tent was set up in a farmer's field, isolated from buildings and trees by half a mile in each direction. A light warm rain was falling. Nearby, hundreds of cars were parked on the dark red mud, flattening the remnants of the corn crop. At eight in the evening the sun had fallen, but the area was illuminated by the harsh yellow light from tripod-mounted sodium vapor lamps powered by a generator trailer behind the tent, and the air was perfumed with last week's still-fresh pig dung fertilizer. The scene had the aspect of a major military center, as several guardsmen stood with rifles slung upside-down against the rain, looking uncomfortable despite their non-regulation cowboy-style broad-brimmed hats and the mild temperature.
A half a mile towards the city, more guardsmen were moving stiffly in isolation gear. Their unprotected but immune dogs were patrolling the red zone boundary, a ten mile circle of concertina wire lit up with the same yellow light. Hydrophone installations in the Colorado River near Panther Hollow and Onion Creek picked up a few SCUBA divers strong enough to swim against the swift water and too impatient to wait out the quarantine. And a series of thirty-foot poles mounted remote-controlled infrared video cameras as a check on the proper behavior of the quarantine population.
Inside the tent, a young population making notes on yellow pads sat on a sea of folding metal chairs. They were listening to a gray-haired man in a white lab coat talking on an overloaded sound system. The speaker, Dr. Gary Spender, was describing the symptoms of the Austin virus to the several hundred hastily assembled medical staffers.
"The virus has a short incubation period. Two days. It then becomes contagious." Spender mopped perspiration from his forehead. "The first symptom is a black tongue, followed by swelling of the tongue and the throat so that the victim has difficulty breathing. Fever and convulsions are seen in about five days, and the patient usually becomes incoherent. Seven to ten days after contact the tongue develops lesions which bleed profusely. Somewhere in this course the victim dies of strangulation, or his life can be spared for another day by radical tracheotomy, surgically opening an airway through the trachea.
"If this is done, the victim dies a day later from massive pulmonary failure as the alveoli become involved, lose structure, and collapse into jelly, making the lungs completely inoperative. If the blood is oxygenated with a heart-lung machine, the victim's life can be unmercifully prolonged for another week or so, after which will come massive organ failure, usually starting with the kidneys, leading quickly to death."
"How is the disease vectored?" a doctor in the first row asked.
"We're still working on that one. Some of you will be helping. Right now we're pretty sure that it is airborne." A slight exhalation of breath from the audience. "And communicated by inhalation. That would naturally be a serious factor, except in this case it seems as if the airborne virus has a short life. One theory is that the virus needs water and can travel indefinitely airborne if it is immersed in a microscopic water droplet, as from a cough, but in a low humidity environment the life of this drop would be only seconds."
"How about a day like today, how long?"
"The humidity can approach a hundred percent in fog and rain. That would give the droplet an indefinitely long lifetime. But in practice, the droplet will probably be absorbed in a raindrop and fall to the earth."
"Any other carriers besides human?"
"Almost certainly," said Spender. "Just about all human viruses can be carried also by animals or birds. In fact, all human viruses originated with animals or birds. But we have a good test for the virus in blood, a microscope stain preparation, it works in minutes and appears reliable, and we have not found any animal or insect carriers nor have we been able to infect any lab animals to date. But tests are incomplete. So we will for now attempt to prevent animals from crossing the buffer zone.
"But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Let's get to the tactics. We have encircled the city, with a red zone radius of two to ten miles and a narrow quarantine buffer zone. Anything coming out of the red zone will be delayed for the incubation period, two days, plus a half-day margin. Medical personnel inside the buffer will wear full BL-4 isolation suits and work on four hour shifts."
A doctor in the second row whispered to his neighbor, "Beats internship by a mile. Four hours."
His neighbor replied with a smile, "I guess you've never been in a Racal suit. It will seem like four days by the time you're done. The usual shift in those things is two hours. Less, in hot weather."
Spender droned on, "The inner buffer zone will be surrounded with a ten- to twenty-mile yellow, or outer zone, with more relaxed precautions and more comfortable living conditions. Anyone moving out of the yellow zone is delayed for another three days to guard against an infection contracted inside the yellow zone. The buffer zones are in place and enforced but are not yet fully staffed. That's your job."
A listener in a white lab coat interrupted, "What will we have for laboratory facilities?"
"We have a six hundred square foot lab, just completed, two miles north in an old industrial space. It is built to BL-4, Biosafety Level Four, and it is available now for your use. It's got optical and X-ray fluorescence microscopes, incubators, Beckman Optima ultracentrifuges, inverted and light microscopes, Gravity sterilizer, walk-in incubator, spectrophotometer, Mettler balances and a cytocentrifuge. Plus, lots of other equipment."
"That should do it," said the listener.
"If there's any other equipment you need, just ask," said Spender. "We have an unlimited budget. Inside the city, the population is of course at extreme risk. We can't do much for anyone with the disease except make them as physically and mentally comfortable as possible. Right now, all we have is morphine and religion, but we keep running out of morphine. We have a full garrison of guardsmen inside in Racal suits, and we're moving the healthy population out as fast as possible within the time constraints of the quarantine.
"How many of you have not been checked out in Racal suits?" Five hands went up. "See me tomorrow morning, we'll set you up. They're the new version, double layers of soft vinyl, drinking water, fully sealed, autonomous air supply. Nothing gets through unless you rip it. Don't rip it."
Spender walked over to a wall-size topographical map with a pointer. "Transportation. The major highways all lead to quarantine parking areas like this one just outside the inner buffer zone. CDC is working on tightening the barrier now to make sure infiltration is zero or near zero.
"We h
ave no facilities to handle the expected number of patients in isolation, so we're having people stay in their cars as crude isolation chambers. They're parked on a fifty-yard grid, so they're reasonably well protected against airborne infection. The only good thing about this damned virus is the incubation period is so short we don't need much isolation time to find out who's healthy and who isn't."
A voice from the rear of the hall interrupted, "How many people are expected in isolation? How do we feed them?"
"We may get a peak of thirty thousand. We have patrols of guardsmen in biosuits to keep everyone where they belong, and we brought in every catering truck and airport food service truck in Texas to shuttle food to the cars."
"My God," whispered a listener. "Two days of airplane meals. I'd rather get the virus."
Dr. Spender went on. "The next few weeks will make your internship seem like summer camp. We're undermanned, underfed, exhausted. But we're in a major war. This thing has the potential to get away from us and put the entire population of the world in jeopardy. With the mortality rate of ninety-nine percent we won't lose everyone, but we'll come damn close."
A woman near the front stood up. "Dr. Spender, what about the survivors? What is their condition? Is there any common factor?"
"Youth helps a lot," answered the doctor. "Most are under the age of five, none are over thirty. Apparently a strong immune system can counterattack and repel the disease before irreversible damage. Maya ancestry helps. The survivors have completely recovered within two weeks."
The woman remained standing. "What is Washington's involvement? Is there national commitment to this effort, or are we on our own here?"