by James Morrow
“The Eaters shoot it off!”
“Who does have Zolmec?” asked Vaxcala.
“We do!”
“Who are you?”
“Quetzalians!”
“Where is Quetzalia?”
“Tell us!”
“Where flogging is a fiction!” shouted Vaxcala.
“Assassination a legend!” the parish fired back.
“Kidnapping a myth!”
“Torture a vanished nightmare!”
“Thieves are unknown!”
“Warriors unnamed!”
“Rapists unthinkable!”
“We are without prisons!”
“Penalties!”
“Weapons!”
“Revenge!” Now Vaxcala was dancing, throwing herself up and down in a practiced frenzy, screaming “Praised be Iztac! Praised be Tolca!”
And the crowd screamed back, “Praised be Tolca! Praised be Chimec!”
“Are you ready, followers?” She stopped dancing. “Are you ready to cast your sins, your biophotonic sins, into the river made of hate?”
“Yes!” said four hundred voices.
“Are you ready to tame your instincts and appease your teeth? Are you ready to show Chimec, god of the human brain, the black humming pitch that pastes your dreams together?”
“Yes!”
Until now Francis could believe the night was real. His faith evaporated the moment Vaxcala began pulling off the top of her head.
But it was truly happening. The high priestess was reaching up, was smoothing back glossy loops of hair, was pressing the sides of her skull between rigid fingers and tight palms.
She glided her hands upward, as if removing a helmet. The chitzal scar parted, revealing her rutted hemispheres.
Now, slowly, synchronously, each worshiper did likewise, and four hundred brains lay naked under the stars.
“To the temple!” Vaxcala exhorted.
Brainpans in hand, the crowd surged forward. As Francis rushed to join, old words emerged from his memory. “The Temple of Tolca is all around us.” Now he knew what Mouzon Thu had meant. The temple was the wall!
In their rapture the pilgrims took no notice of the craniumed trespasser among them, even as he started up the hundred stone steps. Minutes later Francis walked where he had never walked before. The road atop the wall was punctured by intricately carved hatchways, and into these Vaxcala’s flock now plunged. He thought: I’ve scored too many blasphemies to stop now. Firming his grip on the lantern, he followed the faithful down.
THE TEMPLE’S FIRST LEVEL was a network of corridors, winding around themselves and doubling back like the thwarting halls of a tomb. Without the boost of starlight, Francis’s lantern grew suddenly impotent, and he advanced by groping. He was aware of shapes moving all about him, Quetzalians darting to secret destinations, and of something odder still. Sounds. Not human sounds, though there were many scurrying footsteps and paper-thin whispers in the air, but efficient drones, whirrs, buzzes, and hums. If sharks could purr, he thought, they would sound like the Temple of Tolca.
The floor was descending. Francis pursued tilted tunnels to blank walls, turning as his instincts bade, until at last he felt dirt under his feet.
A feeble light shone not more than ten meters ahead, enshrouding a man who faced sideways. The man’s dress and deportment seemed unfitting for a Zolmec service, but Francis still guessed he was Quetzalian. Closer inspection proved otherwise. The stranger was not Quetzalian. He was not even a stranger.
Burne was back! Rushing to meet his friend, Francis instead met something hard and glassy that bruised his chin and bounced him to the ground. The lantern flew from his hand, contacting the wall with enough clout to explode the globe, spatter the oil, kill the flame, and further darken the corridor.
No way to greet a friend, Burne! Francis remained prone for a minute, nose to dirt, then rolled over and blinked back at the invisible wall and the phosphorescent image it contained.
Burne was behind glass. To be precise: he was behind transpervium, that muting substance Francis knew so well. Small wonder Burne could not see his friend or hear his shouts of “You bastard, it’s me!” Nor was Francis surprised that Burne could not intuitively sense his presence, for the archeologist was understandably committing all his senses to the dazzlingly pretty and entirely naked Quetzalian woman who had just turned up at his feet.
Burne prefaced his passion by removing his pack, then his shirt. He dived on the woman. Her goosebumps grew.
Francis crouched in the darkness and played voyeur. This had to be a first for church.
Strange: the woman’s face was a void. Logic said she could not be enjoying this moment, but she was not revolted either. Her mind was evidently elsewhere, probably on Burne’s pack, toward which she rolled an eye, extended an arm. A searching hand moved through the pack until it found what it wanted, a vitreousteel cage.
Francis jumped with the ecstasy of a boy finding his lost spaniel at the pound. Knowing the Cortexclavus was safe made him laugh, but then, shocked, he anticipated the purpose to which it would be put.
The woman pulled the cage across grass, across skin, bringing it to rest on Burne’s lower back. She opened it and reached for the silent, hungry inhabitant. Legs rowing back and forth in the air, antennae working up and down, proboscis already swirling, the corkscrew beetle felt itself abducted by taut fingers, then freed on a scrumptious pudding of flesh.
A scream followed, barbed and bloody, enough to shatter the dead it woke. It is one thing, Francis thought, to be stabbed, and another to be drilled, to have your flesh augered out of you like wood out of a plank. The blood was a geyser.
He got to his feet, hoping somehow to rescue his friend. He banged upon ungiving glass. Looking to his left, then his right, he saw that the wall did not span the entire corridor but instead bent a full ninety degrees at each edge. The transpervium made not just a barrier but a structure, a—
And suddenly he knew where he was. Three opochs ago, burrowing through dirt, Francis and his friends had surfaced on the opposite sides of such slabs. The blind sides. Sides enclosing a vacant room. Sides enclosed by a wall so hollow that the magnecar’s machscope had been deceived into proclaiming open ground above.
He raced to his left, turned, then squeezed himself between transpervium and stone. As he wiggled, heart thudding, face on the cold window, eyes on the dying man, he could hear the temple’s hums grow louder. The transpervium turned again, Francis rounded the corner, and everything became clear.
First he noticed a machine, droning efficiently: here beside these sacred corridors, within this hidden chapel, the forbidden held sway. It was an obelisk of technology, the height of an upended magnecar, with twinkling lights and glowing wires. Francis had seen one before, not a real one but a picture in a Nearth volume called Yesterday’s Tomorrow. It was an old-fashioned holovision projector.
The space arks, Eden Two and Eden Three, had been loaded to their gunwales with the things. They were a safeguard against boredom, a pillar against ennui, an escape from the neuroses that come so naturally to anyone who knows his fate is to mature and die in a big tin drum rolling through nothing.
Best of all, the images they produced were fictions of the purest sort, less actual than Vicarious or Planet of the Interchangeable Genitalia. The transpervium structure into which the magnecar had bored was not a room at all but a three-dimensional screen—a holovision screen. Burne was not being slaughtered! The screen housed pictures—terribly believable, terribly intense pictures, but pictures just the same. Relief and gratitude jetted out of Francis like semen.
From a blue cone at the projector’s top came a continuous beam of coherent light. The beam evidently carried not Burne’s murder but the thought of Burne’s murder, a thought neatly sorted into a billion biophotonic bits, tiny chunks of life traveling invisibly until they penetrated the screen and reassembled themselves into a vivid flow of images.
Where had the thought originated?
No film, no tape, no software of any kind fed into the holojector.
Francis turned from the screen, which now displayed a man writhing in a lake of blood and a gleeful woman standing over him, getting dressed. He followed the beam to its source, looked down the twinkling lights, and saw for the first time a shape resting in shadows at the base of the holojector. It was a dazzlingly pretty woman: Burne’s victim and murderer.
Ticoma sat on a fat red cushion, acknowledging the screen with a rapt stare, as if the image would vaporize the minute she abandoned concentration. The fantasy, clearly, came from her. It started in the naked brain, climbed to the electrode that jutted from the great cerebral commissure like a meat thermometer, then traveled along clear, rubbery wires to the projector. The noxious imaginings next materialized inside the screen, where, entering the dreamer’s eyes, they inspired new and even more noxious imaginings in turn. A perfect circle.
Francis resolved to let her be. He tiptoed across the floor, reached the far side of the machine, and slipped into a triangular doorway.
HE WAS NOW in one corner of an architectural marvel, a room huge enough to breed morgs in, with a tripartite vaulted ceiling that apparently reached all the way to the top of the wall. The place was vacant but for the surly idols who gripped torches and stood guard along ten surfaces, and featureless but for the triangular doorways that opened from ten corners. He wondered: How many such rooms does the temple contain? Several thousand, if the wall runs all the way from the Ripsaw Mountains to the southern jungles.
Curiosity erect, Francis circled the decagon. At every doorway his furtive glance confirmed that a holojector and its companion screen occupied the chapel beyond. He circled again, this time slowly. He moved past scenes of horror and dread, past voyeurs eyeing their innermost evils and Toms Peeping at their own depravities, and every time he stopped to watch.
Inside one screen a man was caning his son for deliberately inverting an ashtray. The adjacent chapel contained a family argument that went as far as accusations of sexual infidelity; it climaxed with the wife dropping her husband down a well. The next drama over, featured a dog who specialized in digging up flower gardens. Suddenly the animal struck a land mine. The air rained sections of dog.
The fantasies got grimmer as Francis advanced. In the fifth chapel, two speeding lipoca wagons collided on a stone bridge. Both drivers were equally guilty, but nothing could inhibit the older one, a pleasant-faced man, from first locating blame in the younger, a pimply teen-age girl, and next devising a punishment incongruent with the crime, a punishment that included raping her to death and flinging her body off the bridge into the brook below.
In the sixth chapel, a little boy shivered with envy as parental affection was heaped upon a recently delivered baby. When everyone had gone to bed, the boy entered the nursery, kidnapped his sister, and buried her alive in an unmarked grave behind the smokehouse.
In the seventh chapel, Francis saw the lipoca wagons crash again, only this time the teen-ager was writing the script. She spoke a throaty incantation over her lipoca, and the gentle creature became a spitting, rabid carnivore. It exploded from its harness, charged straight for the pleasant-faced man. Jumping free of his cart, he crossed the bridge and did not get ten meters down the road before he was gored to death by the long, serrated tusks that grew magically from the lipoca’s nostrils.
The eighth chapel was empty.
The penultimate drama was set in an elementary-school classroom. By the time Francis arrived, the presiding instructor had grown weary of children who talked incessantly, wouldn’t talk to her, failed to follow directions, followed directions to a fault, seemed unable to express themselves, expressed themselves too copiously, and picked their noses. She brightened her day by taking a drum of lantern oil, opening it, splashing the contents liberally, striking a match, and setting her responsibilities on fire.
Francis entered the last chapel. Somehow he knew what coincidence would bring. He arrived near the climax, just as Mool was telling Tez how wretched he felt about destroying her father and how he wouldn’t do it again.
Tez’s laugh jumped from the screen. “Yes, but there is only one way to guarantee you’ll never do it again.” She grabbed his sash. “Come with me.”
The scene shifted to the funnel-shaped operating theater where Tez and Francis first met. On the table an anesthetized girl suffered from peritonitis. A balding surgeon with a fine obsidian scalpel was about to rid her of her appendix. Mool in tow, Tez entered, saw the scalpel, wrenched it away. Making a pathetic effort to break free, Mool tripped over his own panicked feet. He hit the floor and stopped moving. Tez followed him down.
The surgery that ensued was unorthodox and cruel, the messiest open-heart job Tez had ever done, but afterward she rose grinning. She had just performed a successful death.
The scene curdled. Its figures became a grotesque tableau. There was the surgeon, knife in hand, lips locked in a vile smirk. There was the sprawled patient, a nauseating crimson cave in his chest. And there was the heart, fine, perfect, undiseased, and sitting in the middle of the floor like a dog’s dinner.
Francis was not surprised when a tarnish came, then total blackness as the image melted and seeped away. He had once seen the murder of an innocent boy transmute into this same gelatinous bile. At last he knew the river’s source. The Quetzalians let their poisoned dreams go down into the earth, flow into the moat, and pass from their lives forever.
Throughout the fantasy Tez, the real Tez, sat still, never once altering the ceramic tautness of her face. She didn’t notice when Francis stumbled over to one edge of the screen and squeezed himself behind it. She didn’t even notice when he studied her for a moment with a look of betrayal and disgust.
Hypocrites! Francis thought as he started down the corridor. “Hypocrites!” he whispered as he weaved around corners and shot past great dull stones, his pounding legs carrying him higher, higher. “Hypocrites!” he screamed aloud as he reached the top of the wall, ran to its edge, and vomited into the river made of hate.
13
“HYPOCRITES?” SAID TEZ. “No, that’s the wrong word entirely.”
“You’re angry,” Francis informed her.
She seemed not to hear. “You violated our temple, and now you’ve taken on obligations.”
“Obligations?”
“Such as trying to understand why Zolmec isn’t hypocrisy.”
“Then what is it?” His questions were hostile.
At least he’s talking, Tez thought. That’s a gain over the past two days.
After church Tez had come home to find Francis sitting in the tapestried parlor. He sat beside dark dragons, suffered under dark thoughts. Four wine bottles, two of them open and empty, formed a fence between the lovers.
“I visited your Black Mass in the wall tonight,” Francis said in a wobbly voice. “Revolting.”
Sarcasm was the only tone she could find. “Revolting? You mean like guzzling two bottles of wine?”
Whereupon Francis snatched an unopened bottle, thought twice, snatched its twin, and went and locked himself for thirty-two hours in his study, sulking without recess. He slept on the floor. Two mornings later, entering the sunny breakfast room, he decided to lower his pride and ask whether they had eggs. This caused a long conversation neither of them wanted to have about eggs, followed by a longer conversation they both wanted to have about religion.
It was in her court. “Hypocrisy, Francis, is behaving inconsistently with one’s professed beliefs. What you saw in the temple was fantasy, not action. At worst my race can be accused of behaving inconsistently with its dreams.”
He didn’t know where to begin. Had he owned ten mouths, he would have said ten things at once. He settled on: “But what you dream is so horrible!”
“To deny the shadow-half of the human inheritance, to pretend that we do not all of us have unprintable impulses—that is hypocrisy.” She began boiling water for tea. “You’re right—Quetzalian fantasies a
re horrible. Why not? Thoughts have no cutting edge. They leave the world as they found it.”
“But surely there are mental effects. Thinking such things has got to be unhealthy, especially for the children.”
“That’s a plausible hypothesis, certainly. Maybe you and my brother would like to thrash it out in the Vij Memorial Arena sometime. But if health worries you, please recall that the human race was sick long before the Temple of Tolca went up. Zolmec is strong medicine, but sometimes you have to get worse before you get well. We are dealing with the species that tortures, so let’s not pussyfoot around. Let’s not worry about wrinkles or dinner parties or what the neighbors think.”
The idea caught Francis by surprise. Its logic compelled him. “Another form of homeopathy,” he mused.
“Shall we give the sickness a name? Some of us are epileptics and some hemophiliacs but all of us are carnivores. Touch your cuspid roots. Much too big—an evolutionary memory. When we had those fighting canines we probably used them as the jaguar does. Today we are Nature’s great paradox, the predator with silly teeth.” Her words gushed out with rapidity and precision, as if this speech had been building in her for opochs.
“We lost our weapons, but not the urge to use them. So we built fake ones—spears and guns. Zolmec fights fire with fire, technology with technology.” She removed the kettle from the firemoss stove, lowered a bag of herbs into the misty water.
Francis touched his cuspid roots. “But a world without passion, Tez—you’re heading toward sterility!”
“You think there’s no passion here? We have our arts, and our loves, and we have hates, too.”
“Still…there must be a change in your overall makeup.”
“Indeed! After hundreds of services the average Quetzalian has a very special makeup: peaceable, vulnerable, incapable of doing harm. You might think we would expect such persons to attend the rites only infrequently, not every opoch. But if you miss once or twice, then why not twenty times, fifty times? And after that, what are you? An Earthling? A neurovore? That’s why we must make Zolmec as glamorous as possible.”
