THE MAYAN GLYPH

by Larry Baxter

  "Last week, yes. Not the easiest thing I've done in my life. I think they were numb, Al and Joyce were close. And his kids, God, how he loved his kids. I suppose I shouldn't talk about him in the past tense."

  "It's all right."

  "I guess. Where are we going?"

  "Up route three sixty, past Bull Creek. We're giving up on thirty square miles of pretty crowded real estate, but I think the residents should all be cleared out. It should be all right. We'll park there for a day to make sure the evacuation is under control, then we move again, back another twenty miles. Bastrop, Thorndale, Spicewood, Wimberly. Live around here?"

  "Waukegan, Illinois," said Scheinfeld.

  "Jeez, I used to live in Waukegan," said the driver, grinding his way into sixth gear. "Sorry, I haven't driven one of these rigs since Jimmy Carter was shelling peanuts in the White House. No synchro. We're all amateurs, National Guard. My day job is plumbing. Well, you guys are pros, I guess."

  "Speaking of the National Guard, where's George Hapwell Theslie? I haven't seen him lately," said Scheinfeld. "I kind of miss his inspirational speeches, in a way."

  Spender answered, "He had a family emergency, he said. The rumor is that he got a flight up to British Columbia right after the night we lost six people."

  "Our George? I can't believe it."

  They passed a group of motorcyclists heading into the city, wearing respirators, baseball caps, and rubber gloves. Looters. The young gang members thought they'd be safe with the gloves and masks. As Spender turned to watch, the group headed off the road single file and into the tree line, hoping to avoid the guard.

  Spender keyed his radio. "This is Spender. I'm in the last vehicle, we're heading up the ramp to three sixty now. You drivers should all have the new site map. Make sure you keep separation as you park, the grid is on fifty yard spacing. Drive slowly and carefully near the site, the ground is a little rough and we don't want to dump any isolation trailers."

  He put down the radio as if it weighed ten pounds. "Geez, I'm beat. I can hardly talk."

  "Gary?" said Scheinfeld, his voice suddenly hoarse. "That's what Al said…"

  "Oh, Christ," said Spender. "My tongue feels thick. Look at it for me." He turned to Scheinfeld and stuck out his tongue.

  "Gary, I'm sorry. It's black."

  "Stop the truck," said Spender. He stepped down to the asphalt. His shoulders sagged; his arms seemed to be too heavy to hold up. He lifted his head with an effort. "I'm sorry, guys. You need to check into isolation at Bull Creek. Until then, keep the windows closed and the blower fan off. I'll be in the back. Tell Carla for me. Keep up the fight."

  They heard the door open and close, and they looked at each other. The heavy despair showed in their eyes.

  Chapter 45

  * * *

  Hotel Austin, November 23, 2010

  At breakfast, several Maya came quietly into the hotel and listened with the news people and the staff to the report. Baker announced an explosion of cases in the Yucatán and a major setback in Austin, Texas where the isolation zone was moved back again. He also said that a new case was reported in El Paso and thirty-five city blocks had been evacuated and burned.

  Robert felt his heart tearing inside him. They were losing. The Government of the United States was losing. His species was losing. He wandered aimlessly from the production and lab spaces, where he felt competent to help but where nothing was happening, to the translation room where he did not feel competent to help but where everyone was busy. Bela and Bartok were talking together, comparing glyphs.

  The researchers were interrupted by the lobby door slamming closed with a noise like a pistol shot. Robert spun to find five security guards filing in, shamefaced, holsters empty. They were followed by Hector, the big man from the camp, with a bandage on his forehead, and two other Hispanic men with ragged beards, bush hats, dirt-stained clothing and semiautomatic rifles. Hector was carrying another big man.

  Robert felt a flash of anger at himself, he had screwed up. Not enough security, just Kiraly, probably dead, now. The facility should have been guarded, fenced off. The Colombians had found them so easily, disarmed them so easily.

  What were they waiting for? When would they shoot? He had wrecked their drug warehouse, caused the deaths of two of their men, and caused them to lose millions of dollars worth of cocaine and heroin. He looked in their faces for the anger and saw, instead, fear. But how could they be afraid? And why just the four of them? They had brought twenty-five troops for this raid. And who was the big man, unconscious—one of their security people? But he was dressed like the other Columbians.

  He glanced at a disturbance from the breakfast room. The news people were catching it all on video. What a profession, they behaved as if they were bulletproof. He almost expected Makeup to rush in and apply a little lipstick to the visitors.

  One of the men spoke. "So, Dr. Robert Asher?"

  "Yes."

  "You are really a doctor?"

  "Yes." Robert got suddenly angry at the cat and mouse game. "Why can't you believe that? Want my résumé? Don't play games." He braced for a shot. Hector looked capable of any act, it would come from there. But the big man looked afraid, and he carried his rifle by the stock, finger nowhere near the trigger, as if it was an embarrassment to him.

  The man spoke again. "Hector, drop him." The big man dropped to the floor and rolled over on his back, muscle tone like a rag doll, mouth gaping open to reveal a black tongue. He was breathing noisily, with effort. It was Ernesto Diaz.

  "You have met Ernesto Raoul Porfirio Diaz, I think. I am Rojas. You are working on a way to cure the disease of the black tongue?"

  "Yes."

  "When will you have a cure?"

  Margo Sanford, still wearing a bandage on her cheek, took a step forward. "Dr. Asher, don't give these jerks the time of day."

  Robert felt the synapses uncurl, felt his muscles loosen, felt the tightness in his chest smooth out. "Within a few days we may have something to try, but it is still far from certain. It is maybe a thousand to one long shot. What do you want?" But he thought he already knew.

  "We are just here to wish you luck, Dr. Asher. We understand you found the cure in the Tulum cave?"

  "Yes, in a room that the Maya used as a laboratory."

  "Amazing."

  No one spoke for a moment and Robert could feel the tension of the twenty medical researchers watching the drama. What was going on? But the visitors still did not seem aggressive, and their red-rimmed eyes were still afraid. It did seem like a cry for help.

  The tension was dissolved by Hector, who suddenly looked stricken and asked, "Toilet?"

  Robert gestured and the man shambled quickly out of the room.

  "Could you put the guns down, please?" Robert asked the remaining three Colombians. "Is there something you want from us?"

  "Many of my men have the black tongue," said Rojas. "One is dead. I am afraid we too will be sick. You may keep Ernesto Raoul Porfirio Diaz for us. Tell us when you have the cure, we will be in contact twice a day. Good luck."

  Hector returned, the Columbians left the room, and conversation started instantly. "Robert, were those the guys you beat up in the cave?"

  "Masks, everyone," he said. "Clear the room. Two men, get biosuits and a gurney, take him to isolation. Wash everything down. These people are from the same organization that we found in the cave."

  Robert called Kiraly on the cell phone.

  "Yes, I let a few of them through, they didn't look too dangerous. I was just about to pull back, the rest of these people are hurting badly. What's happening there?"

  Robert filled him in. Kiraly said the troops seemed to be packing up to break camp and the ammo had been packed up and shifted to a van heading south. But the effort had slowed, the remaining people were mostly lying down. He would keep an eye on them for a few minutes longer and then come back in.

  * * *

  Robert resumed his random walk through the useless produ
ction lab and the impotent translation facility. The graph of virus mortality, updated daily, continued its exponential increase. In the analytic laboratory, a new arrival was assembling a familiar piece of equipment. Robert recognized his charge microscope, but slimmed down and motorized. His Van de Graaf generator had been replaced with a miniaturized high voltage supply, and the talcum powder seemed to have been replaced with a toner-paper handling stage borrowed from an office copier. Very nice.

  "Hi, I'm Robert Asher."

  The technician turned around and smiled. "Of course, Dr. Asher, it's an honor to meet you. I'm Ed Reines; Dr. Teppin sent me down with the latest version of your microscope. It's working great. How did you figure it out, anyway?"

  "Nothing to it," said Robert. "The Maya didn't bother to file a US patent, so the whole field was clear. How's it working?"

  "About the same as your prototype, but we've automated it so anybody can use it, and we get a plain paper output. We built twenty of this version, they're all being used to help in the Austin virus effort. I guess you're stalled, down here, on trying to find the ancient Maya solution?"

  "We're real close, but we're definitely stalled right now."

  "How can I help?"

  Robert looked at the charge microscope and thought for a minute. "The Uxmal glyph showed the charge microscope image of the virus molecule, next to another column of glyphs which we haven't translated. One possibility is that the second column shows the charge microscope image of the antiviral."

  "So, can we work backwards from the charge image to the molecular structure of the antiviral?" asked Reines.

  "That's going to be tough. But if we did stumble on something that had the same image, we could test it as an antiviral. Worth a shot, anyway. A long shot. Can you stick around and maybe get lucky?"

  "Happy to help. Get me samples of anything you want tested."

  Teresa appeared in the door. "Robert, there you are," she said. "Got a minute?"

  "Of course."

  "I need somebody to talk this over with. Somebody who isn't too close to the problem. Wanna do lunch?"

  "Sure. The usual place?"

  They sat down at one of the long tables in what would become the hotel coffee shop. A large alabaster chandelier seemed out of place in the unpainted wallboard room with the raw plywood flooring. Looking through the double doors to the translation room, Palladian windows gave a view through the palms to the Caribbean Sea, whitecapped today as the trade winds had returned. Big puffy clouds sailed the horizon. As he watched, a gull landed on the railing, looking for a free lunch.

  Robert studied the drawn look on Teresa's face and wondered about their relationship. He had felt guilty at not being attentive to her, but he was overloaded with the details of managing their task force and at the same time trying to contribute to the solution. And she seemed to be equally preoccupied, or worse, as she had the responsibility of untangling the glyphs.

  The lunch committee had provided a buffet today: stacks of tortillas, refried beans, onions, tomatoes, spiced ground beef, green peppers and two different types of salsa—too hot and much too hot. The buffet bar served bottled water, juice, and coffee. They built their tortilla roll-ups and moved to a table where they were alone at this early forenoon hour.

  "How do you feel, Robert?" she asked, looking at him closely.

  "Oh, you know, depressed, worried—the usual. And I care a lot about you and we don't have time for each other. How about yourself? You look burned out. Your eyes are all blurry."

  "Right after this, I'll sleep for a week. I feel a little afraid, but the pressure drives everything else down so it doesn't really register. I have friends in El Paso, they don't answer the phone but they're not on anybody's list yet. I don't know if we can continue at this pace. Everything seems sort of hollow and ringing. And now I'm catching some stupid cold." She cleared her throat.

  "And we thought it was going to be a few days at the beach."

  "Those days at Cancún seem like a year ago. Damn you, I love you a whole lot. I am still strongly attracted to you. But I'm all twisted up inside. I don't think I'll get unsnarled until this situation resolves." She smiled with one side of her mouth. "I have to solve this damn puzzle. Then I'd like us to get back together. Soon."

  "Second the motion. Second both motions."

  "Bela and Bartok are really getting into the language, they're picking it up faster than I can believe. Would you like to learn Maya? Give us a hand?"

  "Hey, I'm well into my fourth decade. Those boys are mere children, their brain cells haven't been filled up yet. Mine are all loaded with useless information. Would you like to know Pee Wee Reese's lifetime batting average?"

  "Robert, help us now, we need it. You have a way of coming up with the answer, of seeing things differently. Like in the cave, when you untangled yourself from the pipes. Or the welding helmet you used as a, what, disguise?"

  "I was thinking of the old pirates, they dressed up in strange things before a battle to upset the opposition. But that was sort of a blunder, the little window closed and I couldn't see too well."

  "See, even your blunders work out OK. We need you.

  "I'd like to help if I can."

  "We're stuck on a group of glyphs with a different pattern than either date glyphs or normal syllabic glyphs, and I think it's because we're too close to the problem…trying to make the answer come out like something we're familiar with."

  "If you want somebody who isn't familiar with anything, I'd be as good as you can get. What's my job?"

  She led him back to the room with the walls covered with the glyph photographs, still busy with nearly a dozen people and a computer operator who was coordinating the international effort on the Net.

  "Here, this is the group we're having trouble with. Look around and let your mind free associate. The ones we don't have translations for are circled, we call them dot glyphs. They look something like the date symbols, the long count, but much more complicated. They seem to be nouns, describing something, maybe a chemical. Maybe something to do with the antiviral."

  Robert pulled up a chair and stared fixedly at the glyphs for half an hour. They bent and twisted like Rorschach patterns, flipped back and forth like optical illusions, snapped in and out like 3D simulations. The repeated shape, a complex array of little dots, was hauntingly familiar. He almost had it, and then it slipped further away. He looked away for many minutes and then looked back. There! No, gone again—like a dream, like snow, foggy, melting in a warm rain. No rain since that drizzle last week, if it just stays dry we should be in good shape here. But not so dry in the mountains, or in Texas, they had rain in Texas. Poor people.

  He closed his eyes. He used to play blindfold chess, after a while it hadn't seemed to matter much whether he looked at the real chessboard or the image in his brain. He called up the starting position, the chessboard with its array of thirty-two chess pieces, looking like different size dots from the top view. Maybe the glyphs were a Maya chess game. Count the dots in your head: seven wide, eighteen high, but an incomplete array. He tried playing chess with the seven by eighteen array and got nowhere. He tried checkers and Go. Nothing. Abacus? No. Binary numbers? No. Hadamard transform? No. He opened his eyes and looked at the glyph again. Escher. Figure. Ground. Bird. Fish. Stairway up. Stairway down.

  Size, try size. It represented something a mile across. Troop formation? No. Fifty feet across? Football formation? No. Small, try small. A diagram of a molecule? Too rectangular.

  The answer was there somewhere, around some twisted corner. That shape. Two complete columns of eighteen dots, with two incomplete columns of fourteen and four dots on its left side, and three incomplete columns raggedly arrayed on its right side. Sure, he knew the shape. No problem. It was…was…

  Don't think of the glyph. Clear the mind, let the unconscious work. Blank screen. Think of something else, like a New York City taxicab. The noise in the room faded. He brought in the image from way back in his memory and tur
ned it around, a yellow Checker, or maybe, sure, a '57 DeSoto with the enormous tail fins that started somewhere near the front door. Dented, big chrome bumper, "XYZ Cab Co $0.50 First Mile $0.15 Each Additional Mile" clumsily screen-printed on the door. Rusty coathanger for a radio antenna. Big, powerful image—it drove out the glyph with its tenuous explanation hovering at the edge of his conscious; playful glyph, coltishly skittering away if he got close; maybe he could sneak up under cover of a big noisy New York taxi.

  He pretended that the taxi was all he would ever be interested in all day, that the taxi was his only priority until dinner; taxi, hum de de hum, la la la, taxi, and then he blinked and burst the taxi like a soap bubble in a fraction of a millisecond, his visual field stripped clean, bare, except for…the glyph. Exposed. Embarrassed to be seen in public without clothes, but having nowhere to hide. Robert got a good, clear look. Gotcha. Nailed you, you sneak.

  So obvious, now. The periodic table, but mirrored and rotated from the version every high school chemistry class had on the wall, with dots representing chemical elements the same way that dots represented Maya numbers. Missing a few elements, like the lanthanides and the actinides, and what was the element down at the lower left? Radon, something like that. Those old guys weren't all that clever, couldn't come up with radon.

  Clearly, each of the untranslated glyphs represented a chemical compound. All the known elements were posted but only a few were highlighted by their size; those were the elements that made up the compound. It was a complicated, verbose, awkward way to represent chemical compounds, but their calendars were worse, a date took practically an entire stela. They probably loved chiseling obsidian.

  "Periodic table," he said quietly. He thought about the implications. The technical background for that discovery took the Europeans another five centuries.

  Teresa saw his smile and sat down. "What?" she whispered. There was something in the tone of their quiet words that stilled conversation in the room and drew the others closer to listen.