Yvette told him: “Our question is whether you can govern without her acting as the public façade.”
“Which is why I rely on you. I expect your counsel, even the wheedling you will employ to get me to act against my best interests. But ultimately, any decision made is mine. I would sincerely suggest that you do not, shall we say, innovate in the implementation. To do so will have the most unfortunate consequences.”
“Where do you see Port Authority heading in the next year?” Yvette asked.
“I intend on making Port Authority into a finely tuned machine. Instead of this hodgepodge of chaos you call an economy we need to direct people into maximizing production. I’ve heard individuals wondering if the colony will survive. Complaining that birth rates are low. That a ship may never come back from Solar System.”
“And you will change that?”
“All females of breeding age will be pregnant. All people with skills necessary for the survival of this colony will be placed in jobs that maximize overall survivability. These Wild Ones? The ones out mining and living in the bush? They will be rounded up as they come in, confined, and put to work on construction projects for the good of the colony.”
“What about freedom?” Trish blurted.
Benteen turned his icy eyes on hers. “The concept is the ultimate lie. Humans have never been free. Not even when they were roaming hunters stalking the ancient forests on Earth. They were bound by the tyranny of their stomachs, the constant need to feed themselves. To find shelter and craft clothing and tools and to dig roots. The only thing that has changed is the rise of the state, which is most efficient when, like the Corporation, it places every individual in a position that best serves the whole.”
“And how do we address you?” Yvette asked. “Call you Tamarland? Mr. Benteen?”
“Director shall suffice.”
“Very well, Director,” Shig told him. “I think we understand the situation perfectly. Further, we’ll put your mind at rest by telling you that neither Yvette, Trish, nor I will seek to hinder you in your bid to make Port Authority into this finely functioning machine. In fact, if you will repair to the Supervisor’s office, Yvette will bring you the personnel files so that you can begin making your changes.”
“Shig?” Trish couldn’t help but ask.
He gave her one of his benevolent smiles. “Just follow orders, Trish. No need for any of us to get hurt. We are no longer in charge; the Director is.”
“Turns out you’re a lot smarter man than I thought you were,” Benteen told him. “I thought you’d stand on some silly principle, and I’d have to knock some heads to bring you to your senses.”
“Knocking heads, as you say, would serve no purpose since in the end you would win. Sometimes principles must be tested. Other times they stand on their own. Now, if I could make a suggestion, it might behoove you to make an announcement tonight at Inga’s. Explain the new government, how you see it functioning, and the new direction you envision for Port Authority. I can have Two Spot make the announcement.”
“There will be no announcements. No grand proclamations. Better that I work behind the scenes for a while. No need to shock the system.”
“As you wish,” Shig said, standing. “Now, come. Let’s get you situated in your new office.”
Trish gaped. What the hell are Shig and Yvette doing? Just giving up?
She fought to swallow down her tight throat. They weren’t even putting up a fight.
“Why is it that I don’t trust you?” Benteen asked suddenly.
“It’s not a matter of trust,” Yvette told him. “With your skills you could disable the three of us before Trish could pull her pistol. After that you could torture us until we’d beg for death. So, fine, the government’s yours. I’ll repeat this yet again: It’s not like we wanted the job in the first place.”
“And,” Shig added, “you are right. The economy is chaotic. It could indeed be organized to be much more efficient. When you ask, we promise to give you the best advice we can. You have our word. Nor will we raise a hand against you. In the end it will be what it will be.”
Trish fought to keep from gagging, thinking, Shig, there’re times when asking me to trust you is like asking me to cut off my leg.
Benteen, still skeptical, stood. “All right, let’s get to work. The first necessity of social control is a census and registration that identifies every individual. That will be followed by a comprehensive list of property and possessions. As soon as everyone has a number, and we know their locations, we can begin assessing how best to manage their lives.”
Yvette led the man out the door, headed toward the Supervisor’s office.
As she did, Trish made a face at Shig to communicate her dismay.
In return all she got was a knowing wink, and a whispered, “Go home. Pack your bags.”
56
Ta-thunk, ta-thunk, ta-thunk.
Talina was conscious of the sound as she hung weightless in a deep, thick blackness so intense and concentrated it was almost solid.
Ek’way. The ancient Maya words formed out of nothingness. The Black Transformer-Dreamer, an almost starless place of total darkness Talina’s ancestors had observed at the zenith of the night sky when the Milky Way lay flat on the southern horizon.
She floated there in free fall, locked in the dream, on the flimsy horizon between death and life, only to drift into deeper darkness as her soul was devoured by blackness and sucked down into Xibalba.
Ta-thunk, ta-thunk, ta-thunk. As she was swallowed, the rhythmic monotony reassured her—and with it came the awareness that she was hearing the beat of her heart. She clung to each beat with desperation. A final link to identity.
As her eyes trained on the sucking black, she saw the first slight glow, yellowish, barely more than a mirage in the ink black. The smudge of yellow morphed, shifted, almost as though seen through a watery surface.
Clinging to her heartbeat she watched it. Confused. Intrigued. Slightly fearful.
The yellow blob began to match the rhythm, pulsing slightly with each beat. As it did, the sunflower-bright yellow dulled into a smoky orange, four-sided with rounded corners. It continued to pulse with the beat of her heart.
The dirty smudge shifted, clarified, turned into lines and images. It separated into a tri-part design. An oval with a central dot formed at the bottom, the top two thirds separated by a wavering line. On the right Talina could make out eight dots. One dot was centrally located in the field in the left.
She knew it: the Way glyph, pronounced “wh-eye” in Maya. The hieroglyph that communicated transformation. Spirit possession. Animal companionship. All happening in a dream state.
The act of becoming something different.
The glyph that had named the Maya king. The glyph that had landed right-side up and unbroken the day she’d broken the pot.
Recognition triggered a sense of unease.
Around her, the darkness began to waver. Each ta-thunk of her heart sent out ripples to roll through the blackness in waves that rebounded like corrupt echoes from the eternal night.
A chill stole into her flesh. Faint stirrings of something in the consuming dark tickled lightly across her skin.
Talina could sense the malevolence that permeated the endless black as the glyph glowed orange and wavered in time to the beat of her heart.
She tried to flee, struck out, kicked her legs. To no effect. She continued to hang in the viscous black, floating in freefall as fear and terror formed in the emptiness around her.
Ta-thunk, ta-thunk, ta-thunk-thunk.
The beat had changed, slightly irregular.
Was it her eyes, or did she perceive a graying, a flicker of image spawned out of the darkness?
She could see a floor now. Hard stone and flat. Low walls bounded it on either side to the height of her waist. From that po
int the sides sloped up at a forty-five-degree angle only to end in vertical walls at the top. Above them stood a temple that overlooked the ballcourt.
Yes, that was what it was. A Mesoamerican ballcourt. The place where the ancient game of pitz was played.
As it solidified into stone before her, Talina knew this place. Had stood on this very spot as a child with her mother: the great ballcourt at Copan.
Ta-thunk, ta-thunk. A pause. Ta-thunk, ta-thunk.
Amorphous and colorful shadows batted the Way glyph each time her heart beat. Blurred shadows, they moved and seemed to bleed color. As if being brought into focus, the fuzzy images sharpened into athletic young men wearing remarkable wooden yokes around their waists and exotic headgear. Streaks of yellow, red, orange, and blue became feathers bedecking the headdresses and breechcloths. Talina recognized scarlet macaw, the brilliant iridescent feathers from a Latin American quetzal, the striking yellow from parrots, all flowing behind as the players leaped and lunged.
The glyph had changed, too, and was now a large rubber ball that the players batted between them. Each player darted, contorted, smacked the ball with his hips, only to have it bounce, ta. And be batted back, thunk, by an opponent’s sudden leap as he threw his body in front of the flying orb.
Ta-thunk, ta-thunk, ta-thunk-thunk. The sounds of the ball bouncing from the stone, hitting hips, rebounding, grew louder and louder.
Talina could feel it now. Each ta-thunk reverberated on the sounding drum of the very stone—echoed through the heart of the earth, thundering and melting into the heartbeat of Creation.
. . . She feels the moment it happens.
They have awakened the Lords of Xibalba.
Talina senses the Lords of Death stirring, coming by twos as they emerge from the ebbing darkness. First come the high rulers of Xibalba: Lord One Death and Lord Seven Death. Behind them appear the lesser gods: Blood Gatherer; Scab Stripper; the demon of Pus; the demon of Jaundice; then she sees Bone Scepter and Skull Scepter whose powers emaciate and waste human beings. The demons of Filth and Woe arrive, followed by Wing and then Packstrap, who murder travelers on lonely roads.
In order of rank, the gods of Xibalba ascend to take their places in the high temple overlooking the ballcourt.
The Lords of Xibalba assemble so for one reason: At the end of the game someone will be sacrificed. The Lords will feed on that person’s blood, drink the sacred itz, the sap of life. They will roast the person’s heart. Strip the bloody flesh from arms and legs, suck the brain from the skull. And in the end they will hang the bones as trophies of the sacrifice.
They are watching Talina now, postures indicating a building anticipation.
I am the sacrifice!
Talina tries to turn, to run, but she discovers that she has become rooted in place.
The ballcourt play accelerates as her heart beats frantically, the ball a flying blur. The impacts, like a staccato, become furious as the brightly colored ball players move faster and faster.
Remarkably, they gyrate, slide, and contort their bodies as they slam their hips into the flying ball.
She sees it happen: A player—bedecked in quetzal feathers who plays for the Lords of Death—leaps into the air, twists his hip to the right, and hammers the ball with his yoke.
Talina’s heart stops. Silence fills the ballcourt as the ball sails high. Then a thunk as it bounces on the slanted side of the court. It hits the vertical wall above with another thunk. And neatly flies through the center of the scoring ring that protrudes like a sideways basketball hoop from the high wall.
Time freezes.
Talina stares in disbelief.
A moment passes and she hears sounds of delight rise from the Lords of Death.
Talina tries to cry out, finds her lungs as paralyzed as the rest of her. Tears well and leak from her eyes, sobs are stillborn in her throat.
The players are turning now, their colors shifting as they lean forward at the waist, and the feathered headdresses flair out into expanding collars around their necks.
The ball has rolled down the incline; it bounces from the ballcourt floor and is once again the Way glyph. It glows in meaning: transformation, animal possession, and the dreamer who experiences both.
A scream finally breaks through Talina’s fear.
She looks up from the glyph to see the final morphing of the players. They are now quetzals, their feathers turned into patterns of color that stream down their sides. They are racing toward her with fully flared collars. Their eyes are gleaming, dark, and lustrous. They are the eyes of the Lords of Death.
She recognizes them now. The closest has a bullet wound in his head. Her quetzal, the demon who lives in her gut. And there is the mate, with its crushed neck: The quetzal who tried to kill her in her house. And Whitey, Flash, Leaper, and Diamond. All are rushing toward her.
Her body suffers a brutal impact. She is lifted, shaken. Demon has his teeth in her right shoulder. Her right leg is grabbed by Leaper, her left by Diamond. More jaws fasten on her torso.
She experiences the pain—the sheer terror and disbelief of popping bones, her skin pierced by a hundred teeth. The crushing and tearing of her muscles.
The last sound is the ta-thunk, ta-thunk of her heart.
And then silence.
57
For two days now Talina Perez had lain in a stupor. Or maybe it was a coma. Dortmund hadn’t the first clue about how to tell the difference. For all he knew, the woman might have been dying.
From the moment aboard Vixen when he’d been told that his carefully constructed quarantine plans for the exploration of Capella III were suddenly obsolete, to his landfall at Port Authority, his subsequent extradition to Corporate Mine, and final escape to this desolate and remote speck, Dortmund had felt he was spiraling down into a whirlwind. No sooner had he recognized one insanity, then his feet had been knocked out from beneath him, and he was precipitated into an even more incomprehensible situation.
He’d been tossed like a blown leaf, twisted this way and that, to finally settle here, on this patch of bare rock. Adrift in wilderness on an alien world. And now that he finally had time to catch his breath, it was to face the gloomy knowledge that he had no clue about what to do next.
That reality hit home again as he stared at Talina Perez’s slack features, watched her uneven breathing as she lay under the sheet that he and Kylee had just placed over her body.
All those years of study, his degrees and learned papers, the hypotheses offered and models built and tested, theories established, and exalted positions and accolades achieved, and he hadn’t a clue as to how to deal with his situation at Rork Springs.
He and Kylee had taken turns caring for Talina. They’d spooned water into the woman’s mouth to keep her hydrated. Fed her soup. And while she would swallow the liquids they placed on her tongue, she hadn’t come back to consciousness.
Instead, as now, her eyes twitched under the closed lids, the pace of her breathing would change, and tortured sounds would remain partially muted in her throat.
Then had come his horror that morning when he walked in and Kylee was bent over Talina, her lips locked with the woman’s in what appeared to be a passionate kiss. The tongue-in-mouth kind.
“What are you doing?”
Kylee pulled back, shot a look across the room at Dortmund. “We’re helping.”
“That wasn’t the kind of kiss a little girl should give to an older woman. And what do you mean, we?”
“Rocket, Flash, and me. We’re helping her. She needs more of what we know if she’s going to fight off Whitey.”
“You sound crazy. As if, what? You’re going to awaken her? Who do you think you are, some sort of prince and she’s Sleeping Beauty?”
“Who’s Sleeping Beauty?”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you fairy tales?”
“She told me organic chemistry.”
Impossible child. Just another layer to the madness in which he now found himself. Walking over to the bed, he sniffed, pulled the sheet down. Winced. The woman had fouled herself.
“You going to help me, or what?” Kylee demanded as she struggled to undo Talina’s belt.
“I’m not a nurse.”
“See anybody else around here who can do it?”
“Can you fix the radio?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can call Port Authority and have them come get her and treat her.”
“I think I’ll let a chokeya bush kill you when we go down to the garden in a little bit. Can’t you, like, help me with anything around here? Are all men as worthless as you back in Solar System?”
Chastened, he managed. Driven to it by the girl’s scorn. He simply shut off his mind. Tried not to think about what he was doing. Ignored the warm wetness on his fingers and denied the odor of urine and feces as he tugged her coveralls down. He tried to avert his eyes from the somnolent woman’s nudity.
He let Kylee do the intimate sponging.
But in the end, they had the woman cleaned, her soiled pants in the wash, and she was resting quietly under a blanket.
Only after they were through did he manage to ask, “How did you know to make a diaper with that towel?”
Kylee’s disbelieving alien-blue eyes fixed on his. “I had little brothers and sisters. Babies need changing. Didn’t you ever have to change a baby?”
“Never was around one,” he told her as they walked out through the main room and into the day. “Not that that was ever an option.”
“Why not?”
Standing outside the dome, sniffing the curiously scented air, he leaned his head back and tried to forget the smell of human excrement. Let Capella’s rays warm and symbolically cleanse his face.
Then he glanced down at the girl. “I married once. He was a colleague. We authored papers together. Not that I didn’t have romances when I was young. I just never . . .” His voice trailed off as he remembered back through the years. How the hell had everything ended in acrimony?
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