by Larry Baxter
"It's simple. It's a periodic table—a table of all known elements—rows are valance, atomic weight increases top to bottom, left to right. Mendeléev invented it in 1870 or something. Re-invented it, I guess you would have to say. I'm not the only one that re-invents Maya stuff. You had one of these charts on the wall in your high school chemistry class. Elements in the same column—or in this case, row—behave similarly. Top row is hydrogen, then helium, etc. On the bottom are the heavy elements. The Maya hadn't discovered the rare earths or the radioactives, so theirs is more like a partial version of Mendeléev's original than our modern tables. But the shape is unmistakable, except theirs is rotated and mirrored so it didn't exactly snap in."
"What does it mean?" asked a linguist.
"Each of the dot glyphs represents a different chemical. The big dots show which elements are represented in that chemical. It shows the chemical composition of the antiviral. It will help find the cure. There's still work to do, it looks like there's lots of carbon and hydrogen, and they go together in a lot of different ways. But with this, and the charge microscope pictures, we're getting close."
Teresa looked at the glyph with her head turned sideways. "That fits perfectly. Sonavagun. You did it again. The periodic table. Sonavagun. What a complicated way to represent a chemical compound, though."
"What else would you expect from a civilization that used fifty-seven symbols for a date?"
The room was silent for a minute as people gathered around and looked at the symbols and found that the periodic table fit seamlessly into the translation.
"Yes! That's it! Periodic table!" somebody announced.
"Hey, hey, everybody!" somebody else yelled. "Hey, get in here, it's a periodic table!"
People came running in from three different directions and news crews turned on their cameras. Reporters got quick refresher courses on high school chemistry from the researchers. Robert left through the back as Teresa was explaining to the room what had happened.
* * *
Teresa found him in the lab, helping to set up the bottling equipment. "Robert, bad news."
"What is it?"
"More cases. One is Miguel's son, Pépé. He's in isolation." She coughed spasmodically, her whole body shaking.
"Teresa, you should check into sick bay, your cough is getting worse."
"Oh, I'm fine, I always get a cold in the winter."
Robert felt a chill. "Come with me, I mean it. This will take ten minutes."
He led Teresa into the lab. A technician drew a cc of blood from her arm, decanted it into a test tube, added a staining agent, and placed the test tube into the centrifuge. For the next few minutes, the three people listened to the slow rising and falling audio tone, like a far off siren, as the centrifuge spun up to fifty thousand rpm and back down, separating the blood into its mass density fractions. Then the room was quiet; the loudest sound was from outside, small waves running up on the sandy shore. The technician removed the tube and with a small pipette carefully drew a sample from the center. She brushed a strand of blond hair from her face, deposited the sample on a glass slide and inserted the slide into the optical microscope.
The technician, her eye to the display and her fingers moving the micromanipulator controls, shook her head slightly. Then she turned, her young face drawn and sad, and shook her head again.
Robert asked, "What? What is it?"
The technician shook her head again, her eyes liquid. "The Austin virus. Early phase, but there's no mistake. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Robert felt as if a knife had been thrust into his stomach and twisted. He choked back a scream of anger.
He turned to Teresa and saw shock and confusion. She closed her eyes and her muscles contracted and she twisted her head from one side to the other, quickly, frantically, as if she could fling the virus out of her body. Then she opened her eyes and they showed quiet acceptance. She smiled at him and gave her shoulders a little shrug.
Robert could feel the blood rushing through his veins as if the flow had just increased. He felt like he was walking underwater as he went over to her and picked her up in his arms. Her arms closed around his neck and she said, softly, "It's all right. You'll fix it."
He pulled her close and watched his own tears slide down her face as she tucked her head into his neck and reached up and ruffled his hair and said even more softly, "You'll fix it. You always fix it."
Chapter 46
* * *
Hotel Austin, November 26, 2010
Robert strode into the translation room, still shaking. Three researchers were making notes on laptop computers and two more were working the Internet, their faces illuminated with the blue glow of the monitors.
"Doctor Welles has the virus," he said to the shocked workers. "We have just a few days to save her life. Where do we stand?"
"If there's a quick cure, it's here," said one. "We've just about finished the translation in the last few hours."
A man added, "We're getting to understand the man who wrote these records, Peloc, his name was. He's like Leonardo da Vinci, so incredibly brilliant. Every century there's a mind like da Vinci's, but a mind like Peloc's must come along once every thousand years."
The knife twisting in Robert's stomach eased off a bit. He asked, "Does it really look as if they figured out the cure?"
"Look here. This one panel, forty-two glyphs, is the core. Here's the story, with conventional notation, of the runner from Uxmal who arrives with a description of the disease in his backpack and the disease itself in his blood. He also brings the record of the progress of the disease in Uxmal, where thirty-five percent of the population is dead or dying and the remainder is abandoning the city for the safety of the jungle. The runner dies two days later and Peloc takes a sample of his blood. Here's the charge microscope image of the virus. This section shows the symptoms, look at the pictogram of a dead man with a protruding black tongue."
"Then the glyphs become non-conventional," said Robert.
"Yes." The researcher dragged over a large whiteboard covered with tiny lettering, which he stood near the glyphs. "Here's the translation so far. Peloc shows that the virus is different from any he has cataloged. Then he injects the blood of the dead runner into a dozen captives to have a test population."
"Jesus Christ," said Robert.
"It's all right, they're from another city. Then he looks for the antidote. He shows the composition of a hundred chemicals that have a reasonably good charge pattern. He tries these chemicals on the infected captives and sends his warriors out to round up more captives from Cobá. He goes through a hundred captives and a thousand chemicals in the next four months, but here he finds the answer."
"What? What is it?"
"That's the question. Whatever it is, it seems that it can't be depicted in the dot glyphs, it's probably not a simple chemical or compound, or at least Peloc had no way of knowing what its chemical composition was. Probably a long hydrocarbon chain, like you thought. It seems to be described in this group of a dozen new glyphs. Some we know, a tree, a leaf, a flower, a color, a unit of length."
"The length, how long?" asked Robert.
"It describes something about two hundred feet high."
"Not two hundred feet long?"
"No, high, we're pretty sure. Maybe a pyramid."
"What tree?"
"Don't know, but the leaf may be from the tree, the leaf drawn in this pictogram."
"Botanist," said Robert. "We got a botanist?"
"No," said a woman, catching the sense of excitement from Robert. "But I met a woman who teaches botany, she's down here at Playacar."
"Got her phone number?"
"No, but she's at the Reefs, I can find her."
"Do it now, please. Tell her we need her. Now. Tell her why. If she needs money, give it to her."
"Doctor Asher, it's past midnight!"
"Please."
She grabbed a phone and started dialing.
"You guys work
ing the Net?" asked Robert of the two men in front of computer monitors.
"Yessir, we scanned these glyphs into our website a day ago and we've been coordinating the translation from here. There are two hundred people on line right now. We're getting swamped."
"What've you got on the leaf?"
"We just figured it was a leaf an hour ago. Nothing's in yet."
Half an hour later, a security guard escorted a dark-haired, middle-aged woman into the room. She was wearing a black evening gown and a pearl necklace and looked a little out of place among the unwashed, bearded scientists.
"Did you need a botanist?" she said. "I'm Joyce Lord."
"Thanks for coming," said Robert. "Sorry if we dragged you away from anything."
"Nothing interesting. Terry said come as you are, it's important. I understand you're the group working on a cure for the Austin virus. I'd be happy to help any way I can."
"We're trying to find a bioactive substance that's described in these ancient Maya glyphs. Tell us about this leaf, this tree, this flower. We have a few clues, the leaf may come from the tree, the tree may be two hundred feet high, the flower may be somehow associated with the tree, and the color of the flower may be—what was it?"
"Blue, maybe violet," said a Net operator. "The color of the sky it says, but low in the sky, and opposite the sun. They seem to have many words for blue."
Joyce Lord stared at the glyphs and the whiteboard for a few minutes.
"There are no two hundred foot trees on this coast, of course. On the west coast you get bigger trees. I'd say in that habitat it would have to be eucalyptus, and eucalyptus can reach two hundred fifty feet."
The room grew quiet. "Go on," said Robert.
"Well, I don't think there are any flowering big trees in the Yucatán, or at least any with blue or purple flowers."
A few seconds passed. "But I think there's a flower which grows on a vine which prefers eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is not native, of course, but the flower prefers to live near the top of the canopy, hence it would now live on eucalyptus." She dug into her bag and consulted a well-thumbed field guide. "The flower is a bromeliad, probably Nidularium innocenti." She smiled. "Is that what you wanted?"
"God, I hope so," said Robert. "Could you stay on for a while?"
"Of course. I've been following your work on television, everybody has."
"One more thing. What are the chances that the flower could be an antiviral?"
"Flowers are one of the best chemical factories in nature, and the Maya would have the biologic effects pretty well cataloged, I would think."
"Get all that?" asked Robert.
The Net operators nodded. "The audio clip went out real time. Three people just checked in with a verification of the habitat, apparently the flower is quite common, at least on eucalyptus."
"OK, we'll go get 'em," said Robert, but he saw the impossibility of organizing the collection at night. "First light." He set his alarm watch for six A.M., sat in an upholstered chair and was instantly asleep.
Chapter 47
* * *
Hotel Austin, November 27, 2010
"Quiet!" roared Asher. "Sit down!"
The team, stunned into silence, looked at their normally-relaxed leader and sank into chairs. Robert's face was pinched, the eyes dark and red and sad.
"Are you online, Dr. Teppin?" Teppin's face moved into the monitor picture. "Right here," he said. "I couldn't conference in Dr. Spender, however. He has contracted the disease. I am sorry. Please go on with your briefing, and I'll record it here and forward it to CDC."
Robert faced the room. "Bad news, if you haven't heard. Dr. Welles is infected."
"Oh, my God, no!" said a scientist.
"We detected the disease last night. She is in isolation now, it is still in early prodrome phase. She has six or seven days of life, unless a cure is found. Unless we find a cure."
"How was she infected?"
"We have a dozen new cases, apparently seeded inland somehow, fifteen miles from Akumal in a Maya village. We can expect more new cases." Robert stopped talking and hung his head in defeat, his lips compressing, his eyes losing focus.
He raised his head again. "We have made excellent progress. The translation of the cave drawing is complete and accurate as of yesterday evening, according to our eight local experts and over two hundred translators helping on the Internet. The cave writing shows the chemicals in the antiviral. And it seems to say that a flower is the cure. The exact interpretation is not too clear, but we have to go full speed on this one. There's no other chance for Teresa."
"A flower? Any flower?" asked Gabor from his usual back row seat, speaking in an almost normal voice.
"Plants are sophisticated chemical factories," said Robert. We expected to find an antiviral in the form of an RNA strand, but complex proteins or amino acids can have a charge pattern which bonds preferentially to the Austin virus, deactivating it. We hired a new team member last night, a botanist, Joyce Lord. Joyce?"
Joyce Lord spoke. "Plants create a huge variety of proteins and amino acids, and the highest concentration is generally in the flower and near the outside layers of the root. In rhubarb, for example, the stems are edible but the blossoms are full of oxalic acid, quite toxic. Scientists have used viruses recently to alter the genetic code of flowers, perhaps the Maya have used flowers to alter the genetic code of the Austin virus."
A researcher raised a hand. "How would the flower control a virus? I thought the idea was usually to develop a vaccine, using killed virus cells to wake up our immune system."
"Not my field," said Lord. "Can anybody help?"
"That's true," said Margo Sanford. "As you know, the virus is shaped to bond with a receptor site on a host cell, in this case a human smooth muscle cell. In human blood, it wanders around until it is very close to the muscle cell. Then a combination of its shape and the distribution of its electric charges match with the host cell, like a key and a lock, and the virus is sucked in the last few microns and latches on. Then it shoots some nucleic acid into the muscle cell and the muscle cell is reprogrammed to build virus particles."
"That's what the charge microscope is good for," said Ed Reines. "It can show us the exact shape of the receptor site, like a cryoelectron microscope, but it can also show its charge distribution. You look for a receptor site with exactly opposite charges."
Sanford resumed, "Normally, the body's white blood cells surround a virus cell and digest it. But some viruses aren't recognized, and here the vaccine is used. The vaccine gets the white blood cells, or the T-cells, to attack the killed or weakened virus vaccine. The white cells win easily and generate antibodies that hang around in the blood for decades."
"Why doesn't that work for us?"
"The Austin virus's binding sites are hidden by its nailhead structure and the white cells can't find them. Very clever adaptation. We think the Maya must have cataloged most of the rain forest flowers and bark and root chemicals by charge microscope image, and just randomly found a molecule with the right shape and charge pattern to attract the Austin virus preferentially to the smooth muscle cell."
"Maybe not random," said Robert. "Perhaps the flower was attacked by a version of the virus and developed its own antibody. But go on with the botany, please, Joyce."
She resumed, "The Maya and most other native populations knew probably more than we do about the medicinal uses of plants; they used the rain forest as their pharmacy. The cave writing shows a flower and a chemical composition. The chemical is a fairly simple protein compound, found in concentrated form in a flower represented in this glyph from the cave. The flower is clearly a bromeliad, probably Nidularium innocenti. It has pink leaves, graceful slender stems, grows on a tree-climbing vine. The bloom is about nine inches across. We'll need to harvest the bloom. The habitat is the tropical rain forest, and it prefers large big-leaved trees as a host, particularly the eucalyptus. It likes a little sun. It blooms near the top of the tree. It is not common, b
ut where it has taken hold, it will be in high concentration."
"How do we find a few thousand of them in a hurry?" asked Robert.
"Hah. We find the vine?" asked Gabor, gaining volume and enthusiasm, "Climb the tree? Get the flower?"
"It looks like lots of other vines," said Joyce Lord. "Well need to find the bloom, it's unique. But it will be way up near the top of the canopy and difficult to spot from ground level. It could be more than two hundred feet up."
"Visible from the air? We'll use a helicopter!" announced Gabor in a loud voice.
"The air currents would shred the blooms," Joyce Lord answered. "They'll be rather fragile."
"Helicopters, go ahead and shred them," bellowed Gabor. "Pick up the flowers from the ground."
"The ground will be covered with eight to ten feet of heavy vegetation," said Joyce.
"We could mobilize a big group of Maya in a hurry, I think," offered a Mexican official, "But it will be a day or two to set it up."
"Get it started. Joyce, get him pictures of the bloom. Manuelo, warm up the helicopter and airlift him to the nearest village. Recruit some Maya. Lower them on a winch if there's no clearing. Take radios, we'll all tune to 840 MHz. Joyce, return here after you get him the pictures. Move," said Robert, and they left with several of the Maya, walking quickly.
"More ideas?" asked Robert.
The room was silent except for Bela and Bartok in the back, whispering together and gesturing with their hands. Several people turned to look as they both stood up, big smiles on their young, tanned faces. Bela spoke first. "We have these ultralight airplanes, you see. Slow, twenty-five mph. You can fly just ten feet above the trees."
"I am glad your mother is not with us," said Gabor. "I think she would not like this."
"We don't even know if the flower's extract will work yet," said Robert. "Don't do anything dangerous."