Now it was fun. The strike of the fish and the first jump were always the most fun, but, in the moment of their occurring, the shock was too close to terror. He would enjoy that moment later, when his legs stopped shaking, when his motor reflexes returned, when he didn't have to remind himself to breathe. Now, though, he could relax a little and take inventory. The line was his conduit to the fish; a sort of sensory filament that joined him, for a very short time, with that which he admired but could never truly be a part of nor fully understand. That's what he liked best about it. By putting his fingertips on the line, he could feel the fish, almost as if he were touching it. The tarpon was shaking its head now. Now the great tail was surging, banging the line as torque increased . . . now it was ascending, stretching the line so that it whined in the summer calm, and Ford could feel it all, one creature connected to another.
He played the fish for about ten minutes, though it didn't seem that long. It would take another, say, half hour to actually land the fish, but Ford didn't want to land it. He was too familiar with the end-game: the way the tarpon would veer toward the boat listing to one side, come up and make a deep belching sound like a blown horse, its gill rakes grayish from exhaustion and its muscles saturated with lactic acid from the long struggle. Even though he could have revived the fish, that final scene would have ruined it for him, so he pointed the rod tip at the tarpon, cupped the reel with his palm, and let the leader break at the tippet. Popular literature said the hook would corrode away within forty-eight hours—a ridiculous figure that he didn't believe. Ultimately, though, the hook would rust out and, in the meantime, the fish would have no trouble feeding.
The tarpon jumped once more, a strong jump, and was gone.
Tomlinson said sure, he understood what Ford was doing; dormitory chemistry had been his strong suit, and the only difference here was you just measured the precipitate, didn't swallow it or smoke it.
Ford said, "Ah," feeling that the Winkler Titration Method of determining oxygen content in water had somehow just been slandered. "You've got it figured out already, huh?"
Tomlinson was combing his fingers through his long blond hair, peering at the 300-milliliter flask Ford held in his hand. "What's to figure out? You fill the flask with water from the fish tank. You add the manganese solution, then treat it with an iodine base. Why else would you do that but so the manganese can combine with the oh-two to form a stable oxygen-manganese complex? Hell, Doc, a guy would have to be dumb not to see that."
Ford had been doing the test for years, and it still wasn't clear to him why the manganese required iodine. He said, "And that cloudy stuff in the flask, the precipitate, how would you measure that to determine how much oxygen is in the water?"
"That's supposed to give the oxygen content?" Tomlinson looked puzzled. "How the hell can that be? It's not proportional, man. Situation like this, you got to deal in proportions. Need something else; a little kicker in there to free the iodine. What, you going to titrate a disproportional precipitate? Like barking up the wrong fucking tree, you ask me."
"Well, you have to treat it with sulfuric acid first—" "Right! Now how damn obvious, and I didn't even think of it. Got the ol' thinking cap on backward today, man—"
"And that dissolves the oxygen-manganese complex—" "For sure, you don't have to say another word. Gives you free iodine in an amount proportional to the original amount of dissolved oh-two. Then you titrate it; probably use some kind of starch to make it easy to measure."
"Well, starch, yeah, you can use starch—" "Converts the whole business to iodine; probably a real pretty color, too, like violets or roses; you know, flowers. Goddamn, Doc, you know your business. I'll give you that."
Feeling dumb, Ford said, "Experience. I've been doing it for a long time." Feeling mild shock, too. This was Tomlinson the drug casualty talking?
Normally, about this stage of the Winkler Titration Method, Ford referred to his notes so that he got all the steps straight. Now he forged on from memory so as not to disillusion Tomlinson . . . and maybe to save face, too. When he was finished, he looked up from his calculations and said, "There's plenty of oxygen. Seven parts per million, which is high, but not too high. I've been testing the pH right along, and it's fine. So that leaves salinity, the amount of salt in the water. Cephalopods are very sensitive to changes in salinity."
"I bet you got some kind of meter to test that. " "There's a thing called a refractometer, but mine's still on back-order. There's another way to determine salinity, though—"
"Hey! Couldn't you just figure out the density of the water? That ought to give you the salt content."
Ford smiled patiently. "That's a common mistake. Don't forget that water temperature has an effect—"
"Cross-graph it, man. Figure it all out on intersecting
curves. Of course water temperature has an effect on density, that goes without saying."
Ford said, "Right. I'm sorry I said it."
They were sitting on the upper deck of the stilt house, Tomlinson talking away while Ford watched the moon drift out of the mangroves. He liked Tomlinson and he liked to hear him talk, but now he was mostly thinking about his fish tank, why he couldn't keep squid alive. Salinity had checked out at twenty-four parts per thousand, which was exactly the same as the salinity of the bay in which he had netted the squid. What could be wrong?
Tomlinson was saying "Look at those big boomers down there, swimming round and round," staring into the shark pen at the three cruising shapes. "They got my mind in gear again, man. You and those sharks got my brain working for the first time since I left school. " He lifted the bottle of beer to his lips. "I don't know whether to thank you or file charges."
"Huh?"
"Check it out: Yesterday I spent the whole day doing research. The whole day. Really humping it, too. Taking notes, cross-referencing, listening to Iron Butterfly." He took another drink. "Didn't take a whiz for about three hours straight."
Ford heard enough of that to ask "You find out why sharks in Africa swim counterclockwise when they're in captivity?"
"What? Naw, I should have checked on that; I coulda. This woman I know lives up on Captiva Island, she's got a computer. One of those laptops with a ten-meg hard drive and a telephone modem, so you can dial into these massive data banks, find out everything on just about any subject. But it wasn't sharks I was researching, it was the religious history of the Maya. The story you told about the freshwater sharks got me interested. Pagan deities, man. Ancient ceremonies. The influence of ancient religion on a specific modern culture. It's all part of philosophy and world history, my two chosen fields. Decided it was time for me to get back to work."
Ford was listening now. "You find much material?"
"A shitpot full, that's all. Coulda filled books, only this chick has a modem that receives at twelve hundred bauds and a crummy little printer that will only print at six hundred bauds. Don't you hate to borrow junk like that? Result: I couldn't print at all. Had to take notes like a crazy man. The old memory isn't what it used to be. Age does that, you know."
"Age," said Ford. Tomlinson was late thirties, tops. "Right."
"You said you worked in Masagua, but you ever hear much about the history: the Maya and the Spaniards and all that? It's crazy, bizarre; a fucking philosophical gold mine."
Ford knew some of the history, but he said, "No. Tell me."
"Religious and racial genocide, that's what the Spaniards were into, man. This conquistador, Pedro de Alvarado, marches into the area now called Masagua with just over four hundred men. He's met by one of the two main tribes there, the Kache. The Kache were mostly farmers, hunters; working class, blue-collar types today. The Kache had about fifty thousand warriors, but they took one look at Alvarado with his long blond hair and decided he's the white god of Mayan mythology, Quetzalcoatl. Weird, huh?—the prophecy of a white god before they'd ever seen the Spaniards. Makes you wonder how much those Vikings got around. So the Kache surrender to Alvarado withou
t a drop of blood being spilled. " Tomlinson looked at Ford and held up two fingers. "Important points for later reference: The blond god Quetzalcoatl, and the Kaches were too scared to fight."
"Got it," said Ford.
"The next tribe Alvarado decides to conquer is the Tlaxclen, way up in the mountains. The Tlaxclen have their workers, but they're mostly priests and architects, the keepers of the calendar. They're the descendants of the Maya who built the pyramids; the ones who invented the calendar. Remember—the classic period of the Maya was over by the time the Spaniards got there. Nearly all knowledge of glyph writing and pyramid building had been lost, but the Tlaxclen still knew the ceremonies; still knew the calendar."
"I've heard about that calendar," Ford said. "Pretty complicated. It started fresh every fifty-two years."
"Uh-huh, right. The Tlaxclen called that final year the Year of Seven Moons. Poetic damn people, weren't they? The Kache and the Tlaxclen traded, intermarried, got along just fine. Every year, on the summer solstice, both nations met in a really big ritual called the Ceremony of Seven Moons. It was what my old philosophy profs would have called a classic artifact of union. See, the Tlaxclen used this ceremony to hold the people together. Like what the Holy Grail might be to Christians, or like the sacred pipal tree where Sakyamuni got enlightenment and became Buddha. Something that kept things tight.
"Every year, a hundred thousand Maya or more participated. Very mystical; very complex. The Tlaxclen priests were the keepers of the faith because only they knew the incantations and how to read the signs." Tomlinson looked at Ford. "But maybe you know this stuff already, having lived there. "
Ford said, "Keep going. It's getting good."
"Oh, man, it gets better and better. See, the Maya fascination with time, numbers, astronomy was all related to their dependency on agriculture. It was their religion, trying to predict the weather, trying to control the growing seasons. Appease the gods; stuff like that. Scratch any religion, and you come up with the day-to-day fears of its followers. The Maya were nature worshippers, worshippers of the seasons. Hell, supposedly the only time they copulated was in the spring. The Aztecs sacrificed as many as twenty thousand people in a single day, but the Maya didn't go in for that. Even before killing an animal, they had to whisper the prayer 'I have need' to explain themselves to the gods. Piss off the gods, and they'd send bad weather, destroy the crops."
Ford said, "So Alvarado attacked the peaceful Tlaxclen priests."
"Right. But here's the clincher: He forced about ten thousand Kache warriors to go with him and help fight. Maybe the Kache still thought he was Quetzalcoatl. No one knows, but they followed him. It was a long march into the mountains; took them several days to get there, and Alvarado only carried enough food for his own men. The Kache warriors were starving, and Alvarado told them they had to eat the bodies of their enemies. Can you picture it? The Maya weren't pacifists, but they weren't murderers either. Now they were being forced into cannibalism. It was bloodbath time. Human butchery. A monk traveling with the army described in writing how children were killed and roasted in Alvarado's presence; how men were murdered just so their hands and feet—the tenderest parts—could be eaten. When Alvarado confronted the Tlaxclen priests at this mountain lake—"
"Ojo de Dios," Ford put in. "That's the name of the lake: God's Eye."
"The Eye of God, yeah—jeez, I love the names people give stuff down there. Anyway, when Alvarado got to the lake, the Tlaxclen sent out six thousand warriors. They wore cotton shirts and feathers and blew conch-shell trumpets to make sure they didn't take this Spanish geek by surprise. Honorable to the end, man. Six thousand spears against armored soldiers on horseback and ten thousand Kache warriors. Bummer odds, but the Tlaxclen still fought. When the priests saw the slaughter, they began to throw their religious artifacts into the lake. Stone calendars and tablets. Legend says there was a big stone star chart with emeralds marking constellations. They didn't want Alvarado to have them; that would have been sacrilege, man.
"Apparently this lake is real deep, and the stuff was never found. Alvarado looked, too. He'd heard about those emeralds. People have searched ever since, but no luck—probably because there were a bunch of earthquakes in the years following the conquest.
"Anyway, the Tlaxclen were enslaved. So were the Kache, for that matter. But because the Kache had helped the conquistadors, they were of a slightly higher rank than the Tlaxclen. The Kache were given better food, better jobs; they were given the bulk of the land when the Spaniards pulled out. Hell, the Spaniards didn't want it. No gold in Masagua, right? So the Kache became the ruling, upper class. Now, you'd think the Kache would've treated the Tlaxclen pretty good. Like out of remorse. But they didn't. It's one of those perverse quirks of human nature that we end up hating people who have seen us humiliated. Plus, the Tlaxclen had added to the humiliation by fighting the Spaniards, and the Kache despised them for it. They became even crueler than Alvarado."
Tomlinson was combing his fingers through his hair, excited. "Do you see the significance of all this, Doc? Goddamn, it's as amazing as it is tragic. Within the space of a couple of weeks, the two-thousand-year-old social and religious foundations of an entire people were destroyed. The Kache had been defeated by a handful of men, surrendered without a fight. They had not only murdered their brothers, but they had eaten the corpses. Humiliation like that doesn't just last for a few years, it lasts for generations; hundreds of years.
"The Tlaxclen went from high priests to slaves, and at the hands of their own people. The Ceremony of Seven Moons—the thing that had always united them—was lost, then Catholicism was forced on them. But here's the thing that interests me—" He slid forward in his chair. "One of the Tlaxclen priests decided the religion and the ceremonies of his people should be recorded. This priest was a smart dude, man. He saw what was going on around him, and he knew this wasn't just some minor defeat his people had suffered. It was for all time. So he confided in one of the Spanish monks. Musta been a couple years after the conquest; one of them, you know, had to learn the other's language. And this monk wrote it all down. Of course, even the Tlaxclen had probably lost the secrets of Mayan glyph writing by this time—this was way after the Mayan Classic Period, like I said. But, from what I read, the monk may have gotten the whole story, step by step, on the ceremonies, religion, philosophy.
Everything. He compiled it into a book, ink on parchment, called the Kin Qux Cho. I translate that as Rituals of the Lake.
Ford looked at him. "You can read Mayan?"
Tomlinson seemed slightly offended. "Goddamn, I spent the whole day poring over that stuff. Who wouldn't pick up a little? Besides the written Mayan was translated into phonetic archaic Spanish; it's maybe two hundred words, and those are mostly nouns. What's to learn?"
"Oh," said Ford. "That's all it is." He knew only a handful of people familiar with written Mayan, and only one who could read archaic Spanish—Pilar. He said, "And I thought it was hard."
"You want something hard, try reading those Mayan glyphs. It's gonna take me at least a week just to figure out their damn calendar. They had three different systems: the Calendar Round—that's the fifty-two-year cycle—the Sacred Round, and the Vague Year, all computed on a vigesimal count, which is a snap, but everything over the number ten is in glyphs, which is a bummer, man. "
"Now you want to learn how to read Mayan glyphs? I don't get it, Tomlinson. What's the point?"
"The Kin Qux Cho, man. The book, that's the point. It was written four hundred and fifty years ago, but no one even knew what it was until about eight years ago. Some graduate student discovered it while going through the archives there in the museum, but the damn Masaguan government immediately took control of it. No one's had a look at it since. No one knows for sure what's in it; it's all speculation. See, the way I see it, the descendants of the Kache probably still run the country, the upper class—"
"They don't think of themselves as Kache or Tlaxclen anymore, Tomlinson�
�except for maybe some of the mountain people."
"It doesn't matter what they call themselves. They're still Kache, and they still must have one hell of a sense of shame about what happened to them. Why else would they put that book under wraps? Why else would they be so afraid of their past? Do you see the damn irony, Doc? It hit me yesterday when I was out on my boat meditating. Sitting there drifting, watching the sunset, and all of a sudden, bam, there it was. These people are acting out the whole conquest scene over and over again. Like punishing themselves in utter damn humiliation. The fighting, the revolutions, killing their own kind—just like when Alvarado came. And they're still following the white god, Quetzalcoatl, only now Quetzalcoatl goes under a couple of names, like the Soviet Union and the good old U.S. of A." Tomlinson was nodding, feet moving, pleased with himself. "What a study, man. Parallel the religion and philosophy of pre-Alvarado Maya with the Maya of today. Take pure data four hundred and fifty years old, juxtapose it with current data. See what little quirks survived. Genetic memory, man, don't sell it short. That stuff runs deep in an isolated race. Find out if they haven't incorporated some of the old religion in with their Catholicism—"
"Oh, they have, they have," said Ford. "I've seen it. They burn candles before old Mayan carvings. They hold crucifixes but chant in Tlaxclen."
"See! It's all falling into place, Doc. Meeting you, hearing about those sharks, my brain coming back to life. It's like preordained, man. Don't doubt for a second that everything in this world happens at exactly the right time. It all falls into place, just waiting on us to come along. I know. " Tomlinson looked at the horizon and sniffed. "Karma's my business. Now I just need to get my hands on a copy of that damn book."
"You make it sound like it won't be easy." Speaking as if uninformed, but Ford knew that it wouldn't be easy. Now, in fact, it might be impossible.
"Maybe not. But academicians stick together, man. Flash the right credentials, see the right people. The Masaguan government will have to release that book someday."
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