by M. G. Harris
“Do you consider yourself an Englishman?” asks Carlos Montoyo, “Or a Mexican?”
There’s an expectant silence. “Not sure, really,” I reply. “My mother is half-Irish. My father was Mexican. I don’t know about English, but British: yes. There’s this test we have: who do you support in cricket? I’d be English by that test, I suppose.”
Blanco Vigores nods, smiling. “I remember cricket. Do you still play?”
“You remember cricket?” I ask. “When did you see it?”
“I wasn’t always blind, young Josh. This darkness, and the solitude it brings, descended slowly, generously, allowing me time to bid farewell to all the graces of a life blessed by sight.”
There’s an uncomfortable pause. I don’t really understand what the old guy is on about. I guess he misses his sight – who wouldn’t?
Montoyo says, “Blanco Vigores travelled once in the outside world, much as I do now. Before we built our aircraft, the Muwan. He travelled by the old methods.”
Vigores grins, showing his almost translucent teeth. “Propeller airplane, steamboat, even an airship. Those were the heroic days of travel. When one dressed in one’s best.”
I want to know more about the Muwan. I promised Benicio I’d keep quiet about our joy-ride, but I can still ask questions about its history.
“It means sparrow-hawk,” the chief tells me.
I nod uh huh, pretending not to know.
“We built the first one in the year you call 19 . . .” (and here he takes a moment to make the conversion from the Mayan calendar) “. . . 1952. Your grandfather and his nephew were both engineers on the project. Doubtless the source of young Benicio’s own talent.”
Lizard Paw watches me for a second, then tells the others, “You’re making pleasantries. Isn’t it obvious that Joshua wants to know why he’s here?”
Something’s going on between these guys, but I can’t tell what. Lorena leans forward and tells Lizard Paw, “You have no manners. Let the boy eat.”
I stop chewing, anxious.
“No,” I say. “Tell me now. Please.”
Again there’s a long silence. No one seems to want to be the first to speak.
Eventually, Rodolfo Jaguar does. Conversationally, he asks, “Did you ever read the letters of Hernan Cortez to his emperor, Charles V?”
I shake my head.
Jaguar seems disappointed, even scornful. “A pity. Not to know about the world that went before, the civilization destroyed by the conquista, seems a shame for a young Mexican.”
“Wasn’t Moctezuma the Aztec Emperor,” I say, “the one who surrendered Mexico City to the conquistador Cortez?”
“Indeed, yes.”
“I thought the Aztecs were enemies of all the other peoples of Mexico.”
“Ah, yes. But with the fall of the Aztecs, our fate, too, was sealed.”
“But I thought that the Mayan empire was already in decline. Hadn’t most of the Mayan cities already been deserted by 1000 AD? Hundreds of years before Cortez arrived. That’s what my dad told me.”
Again, silence. Since they’re saying nothing, I throw in another question. “Why exactly did the Maya desert the cities?”
But no one answers. It’s as though I haven’t spoken. Instead, Montoyo begins to talk.
“Your cousin told you about the codices, yes? And that each codex has a guardian, the Bakab.”
Nodding, I swallow my last piece of chicken taco.
Montoyo continues. “It’s simple, Josh. You must complete the mission of your father and grandfather. You must find the codex, return it to us.”
“Why?” I ask the question calmly, no fuss. There’s been a lot of talk about how I have to find this codex. Well, I know why I want the codex – to get the NRO and Mexican police to leave my friends alone. But if this end of the world thing is real, I guess I have to face up to it, sooner or later.
“The best way to answer that, Josh, is to show you.”
Montoyo takes what looks like a remote control from a drawer in the table, activates the lights. Simultaneously the wall lights fade to black. And about one metre above the table, a small point of light appears and hovers. It expands to the point where we see that the light is itself composed of thousands of even tinier pinpricks of light. Like a miniature universe expanding, the lights rush apart, swirling away from each other until the entire spectacle has expanded to fill a space almost as long as the table.
“It’s the Milky Way galaxy,” Montoyo says helpfully. Although that’s perfectly obvious, even to me.
The image expands, zooming in on one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, presumably closing in on our own sun. One of the pinpricks of light begins to shine more intensely.
“Our sun,” says Montoyo. “Situated on the inner rim of the Orion Arm. From now on we’ll look at the galaxy only from this vantage point: our own. From Earth.”
Rodolfo Jaguar blows out the table candles. I catch sight of Blanco Vigores staring impassively at the table. He’s hardly spoken. Seems pretty rough to exclude him in this way, but I guess he’s heard it all before.
“In the sky, there is a triangle of stars known as the ‘summer triangle’.” (A triangle is drawn slowly in the hologram above.) “Vega, Deneb and Altair.”
I stare at the projection, baffled. What’s this got to do with anything? I glance at Montoyo. I guess my confusion shows.
“Astronomers use it as a pointer to this dark band you see beyond, known as the Great Rift. In fact, this dark band is a distant dust cloud.”
Ah . . . now I’m getting it. “The Great Rift,” I say, remembering the Calakmul letter. “Xibalba be . . . the Black Road.”
In the twinkling holographic light I notice that everyone at the table – except Blanco Vigores – has turned to me.
“Exactly so,” Montoyo says. I detect a hint of pride, which I’m not sure I deserve.
“I didn’t work it out,” I say. “Camila did. My half-sister. She thought that the Great Rift crossing the sky to Polaris is some galactic event, something that the ancient Maya knew about. And some disaster will happen then.”
“Well,” Montoyo says, “basically, she’s right.”
I gasp. “How could she be?”
Lizard Paw remarks, “Seems you doubt it. Why?”
“There’s going to be this massive cosmic disaster,” I say, “and our scientists don’t know about it? But the ancient Mayans did – how do you work that out?”
“Fundamentally,” says Montoyo, “there are two ways to know that something is going to happen. One is to have scientific tools to measure things, make predictions. The other is to predict an event that happens regularly. Something that’s happened before. Like knowing the equinox is coming, or a solar eclipse. The ancient Maya were capable only of the latter kind.”
“So whatever this thing is that’s coming . . . it’s happened before?”
Montoyo nods. “That’s it exactly. And the ancient Maya knew about it, because they remembered. From long, long before the dawn of Mayan culture. Didn’t you ever wonder why an ancient civilization had the need for such big numbers? Only three things are counted in such high numbers – very small things like atoms, very big things like stars . . . and time. It’s why the Long Count calendar ends when it does – the date beyond which they could predict or foresee . . . nothing.”
“So the cosmic cataclysm thingy . . . what is it?”
“Did you know,” begins Lorena, “that cosmologists consider that a massive gamma ray burst from the explosion of a nearby star as one of the greatest threats to life on Earth? The radiation, when it hit us, would be lethal.”
I feel a ripple of energy pass through me. The hairs on my arms prickle my skin.
For the first time I’m actually a little scared.
“Wouldn’t it be headline news, though,” I say hopefully, “if a star nearby was going that way?”
“Correct,” Lorena says. “Those are the stars we can see. But in the core of the galax
y, every so often there’s a mega explosion. And the energy from that explosion can join up with interstellar magnetic fields, travelling through the galaxy at near light speed in a sort of wave-like volley.”
I’m speechless. “That doesn’t sound good. . .” I say.
“Physicists call it a superwave,” Lorena continues slowly. “A burst of deadly radiation. The kind of thing that’s caused extinctions in the past.”
I’m aware of sweat trickling down my back. It feels icy. I glance at Montoyo. He’s just nodding, very calmly.
Montoyo says, “The Maya had records, or memory – of this kind of event. They refer to it as the Black Road meeting the Heart of Sky. This only happens once every 25,800 years – the time taken for the precession of the equinoxes. Can you guess when the next event is due to happen?”
I just stare. I haven’t understood what they mean by precession of the equinoxes. But I can guess when the next event is due.
The twenty-second of December, 2012.
How could the guys in Ek Naab have worked this out, and no one else on Earth?
“Others do know,” Lorena says. “It’s just that at levels that count, no one listens. Think about global warming. Scientists have been warning that the earth is heating up for decades. But only now are governments actually taking it seriously.”
Montoyo continues. “One physicist has predicted that a cosmic burst in the galactic core might result in a volley of wave energy gathering as it radiates across the galaxy. He’s predicted that such events have occurred before. And that they have caused extinction-level events. Ice ages, for example. Another researcher has correctly interpreted the configuration of the sky at 22 December, 2012 as a time when our sun will lie at the centre of the Dark Rift.”
As he speaks, the holographic image appears to melt, shifting and changing to represent each of the positions Montoyo mentions.
Chief Sky Mountain takes over. “What the ancient Maya knew, Josh, and what we know from the three codices we have, is that this was the configuration of the sky when a massive wave of radiation from the galactic core is thought to have wreaked havoc on our planet.”
“The Ix Codex tells you about the actual 2012 thing, right?” Montoyo replies. “That’s right.”
“But it’s lost.”
“It was lost to Ek Naab in 653 AD by the actions of a traitor.”
“That’s what the Calakmul letter is about,” I say. “We worked out that much.”
“Well, ever since, a Bakab from your family has sought it. Your grandfather. . .”
I interrupt Montoyo to ask, “But if the book was lost, at least the knowledge of what was in it should have been retained. Right?”
“Wrong,” Lizard Paw says sharply. “The text of the codices were indecipherable until the nineteenth century. The Books of Itzamna are written in code. By the time this code was solved, no one alive had seen the Ix Codex.”
“The knowledge in the Book of Ix,” Lorena says, “can truly be said to be lost in the mists of time.”
The chief continues. “Until Aureliano tracked it down. He came across a rumour that, like other ancient Mayan books, it had made a journey across the Atlantic Ocean, and resided in the jealously-guarded collection of the reknowned British Mayan archaeologist Sir Eric Thompson.”
“In Saffron Walden,” I say, remembering what Montoyo told me.
I’m still concentrating on the stars above, watching as a tiny star in the galactic core begins to swell, until, glowing with dazzling intensity, it explodes. A wave of energy radiates outward, still miniscule and far from our planet. But then it seems to collect momentum, eventually passing through our own solar system as a gigantic pulse. The image of Earth is magnified as the wave hits it.
“So what happens when the wave hits?” I ask, transfixed.
The chief replies, “That’s unknown.”
“But probably . . . what?”
“Well, the good news is that our simulations suggest the energy levels won’t be enough to deliver a lethal dose of radiation.”
I can’t prevent myself letting out a sigh of relief. The others are still, however, tense.
Then the chief drops his payload.
“The bad news is that the energy may be enough and of the correct nature to deliver a massive electromagnetic pulse.”
From his tone, I guess that this is a Very Bad Thing.
“A pulse of energy that will erase and eradicate all known computer systems. Every computer on the planet will cease to function, simultaneously.”
Lorena says, “Think just for a minute about the implications, Josh.”
“If this electromagnetic pulse hits Earth,” she continues, “it will be as though the ‘world memory’ were erased.”
“People on life support machines will die,” says Montoyo, looking me straight in the eye. “Airplanes will fall out of the sky, or crash. Hospital records, social security and employee records, bank accounts details; all erased. Overnight, everyone will become non-persons, as far as the state goes. Non-persons, owning nothing, earning nothing, with no rights to anything provided by the state. And the state? What state? Food companies won’t be able to make deliveries. Money supplies will go to hell. People will kill each other for food and fuel. Cities will become bloodbaths.”
I feel like leaving right there and then. What can I do about a massive event like that? What can anyone do? If this galactic superwave is real, seems to me that we’re all goners.
I guess my expression gives me away, because Chief Sky Mountain tells me, “It’s not hopeless. Itzamna made provision for this in his four codices. Each one teaches of advanced technologies. We’ve used this knowledge to build and conceal the city around you. The fourth – the Ix Codex, as you’ve already guessed – deals exclusively with the technology to protect the ‘world memory’ from the event of 2012.”
“And that’s where I come in?”
Montoyo and the chief seem relieved that I’m starting to buy into this.
“We know exactly where your grandfather, Aureliano, went,” the chief admits. “He was in England, meeting with Thompson, a British archaeologist whom he believed possessed the codex. Then he flew back. It’s our understanding that Aureliano had the Ix Codex at that time. We lost contact with him when his Muwan was somewhere over the state of Veracruz in Mexico, near the mountain range of Orizaba. We think that his craft experienced difficulties. He must have landed it, or tried to.”
“Then what?” I ask.
Montoyo shrugs. “One theory is that he was shot down, crashed maybe, somewhere in the mountains.”
“For forty years we sent people to the surrounding villages in Orizaba,” the chief says, “trying to piece together the truth from witnesses. The Muwan was seen, in the air and in chunks on the ground. Where the wreckage was moved to – and by whom – that’s where we lost the trail.”
As I’m trying to picture my grandfather’s final journey, it strikes me that both he and my father were last seen flying a Muwan. The crash, wherever it happened, was not the end of Aureliano.
“And my grandfather?”
“He simply vanished,” says Montoyo.
Like mist.
At the back of my mind, something’s not quite right. In my dream, my grandfather died near water. Choking, surrounded by a swirl of fragrant smoke. The dream told me about the Bakab Ix long before I heard about it in Ek Naab.
The dream must mean something.
“My grandfather died near water,” I tell them. “I dreamt it.”
They’re silent for a moment. “Montoyo told us,” Lorena says in a kind voice. “And it’s interesting that your father had the same dream.”
“The dream is real,” says Vigores, not looking up from his food.
I turn to the old man. “How do you know?”
“Sometimes we receive information through dreams. I’ve lived long enough to learn the truth of this.”
“Is there water in Veracruz?” I ask.
“Lot
s of it,” says Lorena. “There are rivers, lakes and the ocean.”
“Then that’s where he died,” I say. “In Veracruz.”
There’s a long pause. “Veracruz. . .” says Lorena, “is rather large. And we’ve always suspected that Aureliano died there. As for the wreckage of his Muwan, we may have a precise location. Recently, one of our scientists developed a machine to detect the remaining pieces of the downed Muwan. The core of the engine contains a device that emits a type of radiation,” Lorena says. “We sent our pilots to look for it.”
“Your grandfather had the Ix Codex with him when he crashed. We think there’s a good chance that it’s with the wreckage,” says the chief.
“The wreckage is in a museum in the state of Veracruz. Not on display,” says Lorena. “Of course – it’s covered with Mayan symbols but clearly, it’s modern. The story was even leaked into the papers recently – maybe you saw? But the Mexican government intervened and made the witnesses say that it was a hoax.”
“Here’s what we need you to do, Josh,” the chief tells me. “You have to get into the room where the wreckage is stored, see what else they’ve recovered from the site. If the Ix Codex is there, only you can touch it. To anyone else, it is certain death.”
“Death . . . how?” I ask.
“We don’t know. Each codex has its own unique protection. As your father’s son, you will be immune.”
I nod, slowly. “And . . . I just have to believe this?”
“There’s no way to prove it to you,” admits Montoyo.
“What is required is an act of faith,” says Blanco Vigores. I’m surprised to hear him speak after his long silence. He looks in my direction. “And I warn you, hesitation will cost you everything.”
The chief explains how I’m to get into the museum. He places a small aluminium briefcase on the table. Inside, a collection of devices are encased in granite-coloured foam to keep them in position. I can’t help thinking it’s just like Mission: Impossible.
My mission (should I choose to accept), is to break into the museum at night (using a lock-dissolving device), to avoid the laser security by spraying a dry mist that will light up the beams, then use a blueprint of the museum to get into the locked storeroom where they keep the Muwan wreckage.
