A dark-skinned woman in her thirties with lank black hair cut in an almost boyish bob stared back at me with dark, dark eyes.
Except for those eyes, and the length of the hair, it was Maya.
Or her brown-eyed mother.
Or a much-older sister.
Someone with Maya's face and fingerprints, but not her eyes.
Fingerprints couldn't be changed, but a simple set of contacts can change eye color.
I grabbed the flashlight and brought it and the laptop out to the fire. I wasn't going to play any games. I dropped down next to Maya where she knelt and held up the flashlight.
“Do you mind if I check your eyes?”
She looked puzzled but not suspicious. “Why?”
“Can I? Only take about ten seconds.”
“Very well.”
“Just stare at the fire.”
I leaned close and aimed the flash beam at her corneas from different angles. No sign of contacts. The jade color radiated from her irises.
I leaned back, not sure whether I was disappointed or relieved.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
I held up the laptop and showed her the screen. “Who is this woman?”
I was watching her eyes. I know I saw her pupils dilate in shock. Her mouth compressed to a tight line as she shifted her gaze to me.
“Where did you get that?” she said.
“It was just sent to me. It's—”
“You have been investigating me?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I started to before I sold off everything and followed you here. Just as a precaution. I mean, wouldn't you if—?”
“That was then. When did you get this?”
“Tonight. I wasn't looking for it but, you see, the investigator I hired keeps finding—”
Her eyes flashed as she shot to her feet, but in her voice I heard as much dismay as anger.
“You are impossible!”
She started to walk away so I chased after her.
“Maya, you've got to explain this.”
She said nothing, just kept walking toward the surf. I followed. I had to have an answer.
“Maya, there's a woman here from 1972 who's got your fingerprints and could be your twin except she'd be sixty-something now. I just want to know what's going on.”
She whirled on me and jabbed a finger at my face. The fading light flashed off her bared teeth.
“I explain nothing! My fingerprints? It is you who must explain, and I do not care to listen!”
“Maya—”
“No! No more from you! You came here to learn to see. I told you how the past taints your vision and so you must cut yourself off from your material burdens and from your old life. You told me you brought your little contraption to keep a record, and to reassure your family of your safety, but you use it to pry into my life!”
Somehow this had gotten turned around. Why was I on the defensive?
“Listen—”
“No! You listen! You do not trust! The Mother wants you healed, wants me to guide you to the light, but I cannot do it if you do not trust me!” Her anger faded as hurt crept into her voice. “After what we have been through together in the past two days, how can you still mistrust me?”
The question was a knife in my heart. Suddenly I felt like a heel.
“It's not that. It's just . . .” I pointed lamely to the laptop. “I have so many questions . . .”
“Questions about the wrong things. Questions that I do not answer now.”
“This picture . . .”
“Forget pictures, forget fingerprints. Do not look at me through your computer. Put all that aside and look at me through your heart, search for me with your spirit, force a ray of light into that blind eye—look at me that way and see if you do not trust me.”
“I do trust you, but—”
“There can be no ‘buts’ to trust!” She turned and resumed her flight. “If there is no trust, then I can do no more for you and we will end your journey here.”
“Maya, please!” I started after her again.
“Do not follow me. I have no more to say to you.”
Maya was leaving me. Icy spicules of fear rattled through my veins as I watched her retreating figure fade into the twilight. I was losing her. And I realized in that instant how much I did trust her . . . deeply and truly. Yes, I had bothersome unanswered questions, but I had let them overrule the testimony of the time we'd spent together, all the hours and minutes that told me she was here on a mission, and the mission was me. Why had I allowed that? What the hell was wrong with me?
I tried to call after her retreating figure but my voice cracked and crumbled. “Maya! What can I do to convince you?”
A shadow among the shadows now, she didn't speak, didn't turn.
With desperation clawing at my back, I ran down to the surf line and hurled my laptop into the ocean.
“There!” I called, my voice little more than a harsh rasp. “It's gone! I've cut the last tether to the old me. I'm completely cut off now. It's just me here. Me and you.”
I waited for a reply, or to see her emerge from the shadows.
“Maya?”
Where was she? I'd made my grand gesture. Wasn't that enough?
“Maya!”
But she was gone.
9
“Drink some of this,” Ambrosio said.
I'd returned to the fire to wait for Maya, but the hours dragged on and she didn't show. I was vaguely aware of a nearly full moon drifting through the sky and lighting a path across the water, but I was feeling too miserable to appreciate it.
I'd blown this, but good.
Ambrosio had been chattering away and I'd been answering him with monosyllables, so when he'd upped and left, I figured he didn't see much point in hanging with me either. But he returned with an old wine bottle. He popped the crumbling cork and offered me a taste.
I held it out to the fire and peered through the unlabeled green glass. Half full, but the dark, cloudy liquid inside didn't look like any wine I'd ever seen.
“What is it?”
“A special mixture. Ambrosio make it himself.”
Mayan moonshine, I thought. Okay. I could use a drink.
I took a swig, swallowed, and gagged.
“What is that?” I said after I stopped coughing. If I'd been hoarse before, I was really hoarse now.
Ambrosio took a swig of the foul-tasting stuff and passed the bottle back.
“Drink more. It will be good for you.”
I was about to refuse, then figured, why not? Besides, the aftertaste wasn't so bad. Something familiar in the mixture. I took another pull, and this time I didn't cough.
“What's in this?”
“Rum, herbs, tobacco—”
“Tobacco rum?” That was the familiar flavor. I'd chewed some Red Man in college. “That's a first for me. What else?”
“And teonancatl.”
“What's that mean?”
“‘The flesh of God.’”
“No, really.”
“It is true. Teonancatl are mushrooms that grew from drops of Quetzacoatl's blood that were spilled when thorns cut his feet as he walked the land.”
An uneasy feeling stole over me. “Mushrooms? They're not the psychedelic kind, are they?”
“Sidekick . . . sidekick . . . ?” Ambrosio said, trying to pronounce the unfamiliar syllables. “I do not understand this word.”
“They make you see things.”
His eyes lit. “Yes! They open your third eye! Help you see! You have had teonancatl before?”
“No,” I said, and handed the bottle back to him. “And it's a little late in life for me to start now.”
He thrust the bottle at me. “No. You must have more. It will be good for you.”
I waved him off, uneasy with the idea of psychedelic mushroom juice heading toward my nervous system. I'd smoked some pot in college—who hadn't?—but I'd never experienced anything even close
to a hallucination. All it had done was make me mellow, horny, and hungry. I prayed that was all Ambrosio's mixture would do. Things were already quite weird enough here in Mesoamerica. The thought of being an uptight middle-class American freaking out in the middle of nowhere terrified me.
Filled with foreboding, I sat and watched the fire, waiting for something to happen. After about five minutes, everything still seemed normal, so I decided the safest course would be to go to bed.
As I was rising to my feet, the flames turned blue.
I locked my knees and blinked, but they remained a bright, shimmering Prussian blue.
Okay, I told myself. You're getting a hallucinogenic effect. It's just an alteration in color perspective. A spectrum shift. No biggie. Nothing to be afraid of. Just stay calm. The worst thing you can do is panic.
And then I heard a sound, a low, slow rhythmic beat from deep within the planet, like the pulse of an enormous heart.
The All-Mother? Gaea?
No. Just an auditory hallucination, the result of suggestion, a response to all Maya's talk about those Mother myths.
Then a higher sound, a keening tone, joined by another even higher note that blended and harmonized with the first. Then another, and another, higher and lower, uniting in a glorious resonance.
I saw Ambrosio beyond the fire. His lips were moving but I could not hear a word. He seemed to glow . . . a faint light shimmered and pulsed along the outline of his body.
And then a force took hold of my head and began pulling it around to the right. I resisted but it was too strong. I feared my neck might break if I didn't give in. So I turned and found myself facing the village, its surrounding jungle, and the looming plateau behind it.
Everything—the huts, the people moving about, the trees beyond, even the plateau itself—glowed with its own color, its own shimmering aura. And I saw other lights, soft, self-contained glowing forms that wandered unseen and unsuspected among the people and the houses. And there, atop the plateau, the solitary tree flared like a beacon, shooting a beam of light into space, up, up, up, as far as I could see.
Then my head was being pulled again. This time I did not resist, and turned until I was facing the sea, and I saw how it was alive with lights swimming above and below the surface.
I sensed the endless cycle of life going on about me, the pangs of births, the exuberance of growth, the fears and pains of death, the sour odor of decay as nutrients are given back to the cycle so that it may continue into eternity.
Then I felt the earth move. Not like the earthquake of a few nights ago, not a shifting of the ground. More a sense of . . . direction. I could feel the earth turning beneath my feet. Quite literally, I could sense the angular momentum of its rotational spin. I could also sense its headlong rush through space as it revolved around the sun, and its movement with the solar system as our galactic arm pinwheeled around the galactic hub. I sensed the pull of the monstrous black hole feeding deep within that hub, heard the flaring stars and planets cry out as they were sucked into its ravenous maw. And I even sensed the grander wheeling trajectory of our entire galaxy along with its sister star clusters as they fled ground zero of the Big Bang.
All moving . . .
Moving too fast!
I stumbled over to a glowing palm tree and wrapped my arms around it. The incalculable momentum, the titanic forces pulling at me! I didn't know if I was going to be pressed into the earth or flung into space.
I squeezed my eyes shut and cried out for help, but my own voice was lost in the wailing tones that filled my ears. So I just hung on, for dear life, because I knew if I let go I'd be flung into interstellar space.
And then after what seemed like hours of desperate clinging, I felt touches . . . gentle hands on me, caressing my shoulders, delicate fingers running over my face. Gradually the sounds faded, the terrible sense of motion slowed, and I heard a distant voice, calling from the far end of a long corridor. A woman's voice. Maya's.
I fixed on the sound, concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else, and moved toward it.
“It is all right, Will . . . all right. You are safe and well here and I am with you. Nothing can happen to you while I am here. Do you hear me, Will? Do you?”
I moved closer and closer until I felt safe enough to open my eyes.
Dark. Night. My knees in cool sand. My face against a palm trunk. My arms around that trunk. And the world . . . stabilized.
“Maya?”
“I am here.”
I dared to free one arm from the tree and find her hand. She squeezed it reassuringly.
“God, what happened?”
“Ambrosio did a very bad thing,” she said, anger percolating beneath the words. “He gave you something he had no right to.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He thought he was helping you, but this is not your path. You are not ready for teonancatl. You still have too many walls. You are not yet in harmony.”
I finally released the tree and straightened up—cautiously. The universe seemed to have steadied around me, but the darkness had a strange hue. I faced Maya and saw a bright yellow aura around her, but it faded as soon as I tried to fix on it. I grabbed her other hand . . . to anchor me in case the planet threatened to hurl me into space again.
“You came back,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“I'm sorry if I offended you. I didn't mean to . . . I just . . . I can't seem to stop poking my fingers into the wounds.”
She pointed her chin toward the sand near her left knee where a black square glistened wetly in the moonlight. My laptop.
“You did not have to do that,” she said.
“You weren't listening. I had to show you.”
Deep inside I still wanted answers, but I refused to let the questions get in the way. I was going to go with this, just let it happen. With a normal lifespan ahead of me, it might be different. But with the way things stood now, how much did a few questions really matter?
She said, “It is ruined, I am afraid.”
Yes. Utterly. Sand and sea water were a lethal combination for microchips and disk drives. I'd cut myself off from Terziski and any further disquieting and distracting information about the various Maya Quennells wandering the globe, but I realized with a pang that my impulsive gesture had also cut my line of communication with Kelly.
I managed a brave shrug. “Three days before the full moon, right? I gather that's the make-or-break point?”
She nodded gravely. “Yes.”
Make or break . . . do or die . . . literally.
“I suppose I can do without it until then.”
She rose and pulled me to my feet.
“You must sleep. Rest up for tomorrow when you must claim your water tine.”
“Then you haven't given up on me.”
At last, a smile—a small one, but a smile nonetheless. “No. You warned me you would be difficult . . . I just never realized how difficult. You are the challenge of my life, Wilbur Cecil Burleigh. And I will not be turned from saving you.”
Did she really believe she could? Watching her, listening to her, I almost believed myself. Almost.
“Thank you, Maya.”
“Sleep,” she said, leaving me at the door to my hut. “We will go to La Mano Hundiendo at daybreak tomorrow, when the sea is most calm.”
I stepped inside and almost tripped over the little table that sat just within the doorway. I bit back a scream when I saw a shrunken head sitting on its moonlit surface. I turned to run . . . then realized it was only a coconut.
I had to sleep this off. The sooner I got my eyes closed, the better.
I waited until my heart slowed to a normal rhythm, then felt around in the dark of the hut until I found the hammock. As I eased myself into it, the swinging motion gave me a bad moment—I thought Ambrosio's potion was taking hold of me again—but I held on and soon it steadied.
But inside, I was anything but steady. The hallucinat
ions had shaken me, and still haunted me. I stared at the pale moonlit square of the doorway and hoped the rhythm of the waves and the insect Muzak would lullaby me to sleep.
I was just dozing off when a shadow crossed the doorway. “Wake up!”
Someone stood silhouetted in the moonlight. It had a male voice and I'd have said it was a male figure, but the outline was strangely irregular.
“Ambrosio?”
“Captain wants to see you.”
Not Ambrosio's voice. This was perfect English.
“Who?”
“The Captain, you fool! Get out here—on the double!”
Confused and a little dazed by the intrusion, I swung out of the hammock and stumbled to the door. The figure retreated as I approached, but when I stepped outside I wasn't in Mesoamerica anymore.
I was in a cavern of red stone, lit by . . . I couldn't find a light source—it was simply . . . lit. And the walls weren't really stone, they were soft and flexible. The floor sank a little under my feet, as if I were standing on a pillow.
My mouth went dry. Ambrosio's mushroom rum wasn't through with me yet. God, how was I going to get out of this?
“There you are!”
I turned and staggered back from the hideous figure looming over me. A vaguely humanoid mass of globular, blood-red tissue sat on some sort of throne where the hut had been. No mouth, no nose, just one huge eye in the center of its face. Blood oozed from its sloped shoulders where some sort of brass insignia had been pinned to its flesh . . . if you could call it flesh.
I stared in revulsion and it stared right back.
“You took your time getting here,” it said. “I wanted to meet you before it's too late.”
I didn't answer. What was the point? This was an hallucination. It had no mouth yet it was speaking to me. I wasn't actually hearing it— the words were taking form in my head.
But it seemed so real.
“What's the matter? You don't recognize me? Can't figure who I am? You named me.”