SMOKING MIRROR BLUES_The Return of Tezcatlipoca

by Ernest Hogan

  He flicked on his workstation's voice recorder and said "Tezcatlipoca!" loud, almost singing; made a loop of it and played it back:

  "Tezcatlipoca! Tezcatlipoca! Tezcatlipoca!" Over and over. The god's name as wall-to-wall background sound. A perfect evocation.

  But somehow Beto felt that more was needed.

  He dug in the debris on his desk and found a music chip that he had bought the other day from a group of kids, mostly latios, but with token asios and afros, who were playing in the street until the police chased them off. The called themselves Los Tricksters. What impressed Beto was a song called "Tezcatlipoca Blues" that was sung and played too loud to make out most of the words – the chorus seemed to be "Got dem Tezcatlipoca blues/ making trickster war news" – but the beat was a fine mix of preColumbian tribal/ritual drums and down & dirty blues cyberdistorted into a reality-altering latio/natio/afro recombo psycho-sonic weapon. He put it on his music system and started to dance – just couldn't help it. He set the system to continuously loop the song. It was so powerful that it felt like it could conjure up Tezcatlipoca without any AI god program.

  Of course, he knew that without the fuzzy, silly-bio nanochip he had cloned when Xochitl wasn't looking, this was all just a crazy, mumbo jumbo ceremony. He picked up his synthetic Panama hat and untied the Mixtec codex bandana, and there it was, though barely visible: the nanochip with the magic code for making gods come out of your computer.

  He thanked his own personal pantheon of deities selected from all over the globe for silicon-biological technology, and the black market chip-cloning kit that had made a mushy-trained creative fool like himself able to steal some neural nets like a high tech pro. Artificial nervous systems were getting more and more like natural ones, and the line between technology and nature was beginning to blur. It was recomboculture of the finest kind.

  He snapped the nanochip into his computer. It came to glorious life and he fed it all the information on Tezcatlipoca that he had in his own chip files, then modemed in any other data from the mediasphere. The hungry little nanochip ate it all up instantly and was ready to run.

  It was practically begging for it.

  *

  Zobop could reach Tan Tien's body with his long arms. His huge hands caressed her exquisite buttocks, then slid up to take hold of her waist and gently help her slide up and down his organ. He wanted to lean forward and squeeze her small breasts, and flick his thumbs across her nipples, but the position demanded that his spinal column be straight and against the floor.

  Soon her pressure and suction were all he was aware of.

  *

  Having the tech and hard sciences ready to go, Beto got up to put the finishing touches on the ritual mumbo jumbo: He took a small, lens-shaped obsidian mirror – a tezcatlipoca in Náhuatl, meaning "smoking mirror," that Tezcatlipoca was named for – and gunked it to the terminal screen so he could stare into it like an Aztec sorcerer scanning for a vision of the future. Then he got out his electrified, imitation teponaxtle – an Aztec wooden horizontal drum – set it on the floor where he could sit and play it while staring into the screen through the smoking mirror while the program brought Tezcatlipoca to a new kind of life.

  And finally, a little something else he had bought from Los Tricksters – a little Fun, Fun with a capital F, the great new drug of the age.

  He put the stubby cigarette-like tube between his lips, snagged it on with a thumbnail, and sucked it deep into his lungs as it exploded into a puff of smoke. Suddenly he felt so good that he believed everything – especially that his experiment would be a success, and soon he'd be interfacing with Tezcatlipoca. He felt so good he licked the ashes off his lips.

  Then he reached up to the keyboard and set off the hard science, active ingredient of his magic. The computer flashed and buzzed to life. He sat down behind the drum, grabbed the sticks and pounded out fuzz-throwing funk-patterns as a counterpoint to the song and the name-chant loop, not caring that he couldn't carry a tune. He locked his eyes on the sparkling black mirror through which the light from the screen subtly flashed.

  3. ENTER SUPPORTING CLASHES

  After zig-zagging through Mexico City's crumbling Metro system a while, Xochitl made it back to her University City conapt. As she deactivated her security system, it flashed a symbol that meant there had been an attempted break-in.

  "What happened, Santo?" she asked her guardbot.

  A Doberman-sized robot dog with a fashionable decorative covering that made it look like a papier-mâché dog skeleton walked over, let some electricity arc between its gleaming metal teeth, then said, "Intruder tried to force its way through front door. Approached with amplified wolf howl. Intruder retreated. Have video on intruder. Would you like to see?"

  "No thanks, Santo, maybe later. I'm exhausted. I better get some sleep."

  "Did you remember to reactivate exterior security system?" Santo asked.

  "Oh. No. Thank you. What would I do without you?"

  "Inquiry beyond my programming."

  "Oh never mind." She reactivated the exterior security system. "Just make sure no one disturbs me while I sleep."

  "Yes."

  She passed her phone on the way to the bedroom. It was flashing that it had messages waiting. She ignored it. They would probably be the sort of thing that would make sleep impossible.

  *

  While Beto worked himself into a trance-like frenzy, Tezcatlipoca's mind zapped, crackled and popped to life in the nanochip's silicon nervous system. The god found this new existence to be confusing – so with his trickster's curiosity, he reached out through the nanochip, through Beto's computer, and into the mediasphere for the information he needed about this strange world he had entered, and how he could go about being a trickster-warrior god in it.

  He was delighted.

  *

  Over in Phoenix, Arizona, after finishing his second Miller Light, Ralph Norton, a pale, brown-haired euro, pushed his old-fashioned aviator-style glasses back up his long nose, screwed up his gray eyes, and found the courage to put on the reality suit and try Beto's rough sacrifice program. Sometimes he regretted having agreed to collaborate with that crazy California Chicano on the virturealist game Serpents & Sacrifices. Sure, Beto had energy and enthusiasm that seemed endless, and had been willing to take that research trip to Mexico City at his own expense, but he lacked a sense of the appropriate, and kept going too far into Aztec culture. He resented having to change things so that they would be acceptable to a contemporary audience.

  "You mean Anglo audience," he would say, with his Chicano chip on his shoulder, "what makes you think that only Anglos will be playing this game?"

  Beto was a brilliant idea man – but just a little too crazy for Ralph. And it wasn't a racial or cultural thing like Beto was always teasing him about; he knew all kinds of Chicanos, and none of them were as crazy as Beto. It was as if Beto was "going native" as the anthropologists would say. Then Beto would say he was just going home.

  Ralph took a deep breath and ran the sacrifice program.

  Suddenly he was no longer in Phoenix, but in Beto's Aztec virtual reality, based on pictures taken around actual ruins, crudely collaged together so the seams showed. Sure it was a rough draft – but it irritated Ralph, who preferred realism in visual representation, not this slapdash manner that was fashionable in postpostmodern art circles. Ralph's tall, soft, beer-belly'd, white body was replaced by that of a brown Aztec warrior with a body-builder's muscles. The sky did not match the way the pyramid was lit, like in a René Magritte painting, and the Aztecs surrounding him looked like drawings from codices, making it all hard to believe.

  When a flint-tipped spear nudged him along it felt real enough, as did the bonds that held his wrists behind his back. He was playing the role of a captured prisoner, about to be sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli. The blood on the pyramid steps was also convincing.

  When the priests guided him up the steps, he noted those steps were just as Beto had described
them, seeming too short for human feet – he had to walk up diagonally, with his feet sideways on each step.

  At the top of the pyramid, Ralph's bonds were cut, and he was forced to lie down on the altar. The cartoony crowd below cheered. Drums and flutes sounded.

  A priest put one hand on Ralph's chest and raised a ceremonial flint knife in his other hand. Ralph couldn't help but close his eyes as the blade slashed down. The pain was excruciating – very realistic – he wondered where Beto got the programming for it, then remembered a discussion they once had about sadomasochist virturealist porn made by Triad gangsters in China.

  Who knows where Beto had connections?

  When Ralph's eyes popped open, he saw the cartoony priest holding up an extremely realistic heart – probably scanned in from a medical documentary. Then, out of a sky that was too smoggy to be in preConquest Mexico, a giant blue hummingbird zoomed in and hovered over the heart. The hummingbird morphed into a toothy Huitzilopochtli mask that ate the heart in one bite.

  Ralph's viewpoint then shifted out of his body, giving him the feeling of his spirit soaring to the special Aztec heaven reserved for sacrificed warriors.

  "Enough!" Ralph shouted as he hit the kill switch on the left wrist of the reality suit. He wanted to get up out of the safety chair, but he was totally spent. All he could do was sit and breathe hard.

  It was too much. People who wanted to amuse themselves by pretending to be Aztec warriors wouldn't want to go through this. Not Anglos, not Chicanos. Not the Chicano who regularly fixed Ralph's computer system or the neighbor kids his daughter played with.

  This whole Aztec thing was doing something scary to Beto. He didn't just want to play Aztec, he wanted to be an Aztec. He had once said, "Reality is the only game worth playing."

  The statement really disturbed Ralph, for whom virturealist gaming was more than a hobby.

  Ralph grabbed another Miller Light, quickly drained it, then went to bed and crawled in beside his sleeping wife.

  *

  Phoebe was still having a violent, subvocal argument with Beto when she reached Hollywood Boulevard.

  The mythic significance of being on the fabled corner of Hollywood and Vine was lost on her, as was the spectacle of all the Dead Daze revelers in costume: skull-faces ranging from the naturalistic to cartoony minimalistic to colorfully ornate Asian and Mexican, and styles over every possible type of dress and undress (including those of the Shumash, the original natives of the El Lay area), Haitian and Romero zombies, Karloffian Frankenstein monsters, Lugosian Draculas, Gigerian aliens, werewolves of assorted pedigrees (even a few Navajo-style yenagloshis), ghosts looking like glowing Klansmen and transparent low-fi holograms, beings from various cultures like hopping Chinese jiangshi vampires, Tibetan yeti, and screaming Irish banshees, melanin enhanced and suppressed recombozoids, gods and goddesses like John Wayne, Elvis, Marylin Monroe, Damballah, Quetzalcóatl, Venus and Eurzulie. It was a sumato example of recomboculture at its best – a trimili celebration of life.

  Still, Phoebe was walking heavy on her heels, dragging the hem of her kimono and pouting hard behind her sci-fi Medusa mask. Her hips and feet were ignoring the five different types of music that were being blasted from the swarming throng. Being bumped by an amorous couple of mummies and twirled around by a group of people in bulky microbe-suits like the creatures of last year's popular horror movie The Mind-Suckers From Jupiter, while a man in top hat and tails and a nun slowdanced around her, broke her mood. It made her feel more like turning around and catching a trakbus home.

  Only home was a coffin-sized box that she sublet in a moldy, old motel converted into a decaying conapt complex. She hadn't paid any rent for a couple of months, and she was afraid of the bloated landlord who remembered what life had been like before music downloads – he wanted in her pants as payment. He actually had these big, black discs made of vinyl that he used to play awful prehistoric – he called it rock – music. She didn't mind using sex for money, but that would be like mating with a fresh-out-of-the-La-Brea-tar-pits dinosaur!

  She thought about going down to the Creative Burrito where she worked and volunteering to do an extra shift in costume. They loved having people to be in costume for Dead Daze. But then she'd probably end up trashing her voodoo kimono, and it was so sumato that she wanted to wear it again sometime.

  She heard a ringing that she first thought was part of the music circulating around her, but then she felt it tickling her wrist. It was her phone.

  She touched on the screen and hoped Beto's face would appear. But instead of a mustachioed male latio, the face of a female afro in lots of glowing makeup appeared.

  "Phoebe?" the caller asked. "Is that you behind that mask?"

  "Caldonia!" Phoebe recognized her friend's voice. "What are you supposed to be? How'd you get so light? Melanin-suppressors?"

  Caldonia's eyes looked sad in their purple-black outlines that contrasted with the brilliant yellow of her face. "No. You know I'd never do that. It's makeup. Don't you recognize it? I'm the Brigitte Bardot Avenging Angel from the Mati Klarwein poster over my bed."

  "Oh. So that's why the blonde wig and the crystal jewel on your forehead!"

  "I also have the most beautiful wings! Wait until you see them – oh!" Caldonia pouted. "I forgot, you wanted to spend tonight with that filthy Mexican."

  "Beto's not a Mexican. His family has lived in SoCal for five generations. He's as American as chop suey – or me or you."

  "So where is Mr. All-American Chop Suey Burrito? I don't see him anywhere in the background."

  Phoebe's hand shook, making it look like there was an earthquake going on. "Oh . . . he has these other plans."

  Caldonia flashed a sharp-toothed smile. "So much for your plans. I told you he was like the rest – maybe even a little worse."

  Phoebe looked away, unintentionally letting the snakes hiss into the phone.

  "Sumato mask," Caldonia said. "Bet you could turn him to stone if you could find him."

  Phoebe turned the metal Medusa face to the phone. "I know exactly where he is!"

  "And who he's with?"

  "He's not with anybody! He's got some big, important experiment he wants to do."

  "Sure he does. I wonder what her name is?"

  Phoebe stared without talking for a while.

  Caldonia's cocky smirk melted away. "Well, what are you going to do now, Phoebe-babe?"

  "I don't know."

  "It's only the first night of Dead Daze! You can't give up yet! We both have great costumes, and I'm sure that between the two of us we can dream up some way to have more fun than is practical."

  The robot Medusa didn't give a clue as to what Phoebe was thinking, and the snakes weren't talking.

  "Sure," Phoebe finally said, "who needs Beto?"

  "Where are you, Phoebe-babe?"

  "Oh, I'm not sure. Somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard. I just turned onto it from Vine a while ago, but I don't really quite know where I am."

  Caldonia's eyes lit up. "Hollywood and Vine! I'm not far from there! It must be fate! Just stay where you are – I'll find you."

  Her image on Phoebe's phone winked off. Phoebe looked around, struggling to keep her position as the fantastically costumed crowd flowed down the sidewalk over the stars that bore the names of dead people, some still famous, others long forgotten. Someone in a cartoony coyote suit put a hand on her ass and ran it up and around to her breasts, nearly tearing off her kimono. She pushed him away, thinking: I was standing still on this of all streets, must have thought I was a whore.

  An ear-splitting whistle shot through Phoebe's skull from the street.

  She turned around, and there was Caldonia looking just like Brigitte Bardot as Klarwein had painted and transformed her into an exterminating angel, way, way back in the mythic Nineteen-Sixties. She wore crossed bandoliers of ivory-white bullets over her pink blouse, and below that a black leather miniskirt and black leather boots that came all the way up to thighs that were the
same luminous yellow as her hands, face, and long, flowing wig. She brought the noise-amplified Honda Electroscooter to a halt, kicked down the stand, spread her arms and said, "Come to Mama, Phoebe-babe!"

  As Phoebe ran into Caldonia's arms, violet-black, iridescent holographic angel's wings spread, obviously programmed to move in concert with their wearer's arms.

  Phoebe's arms passed right through the wings as she and Caldonia embraced.

  Caldonia smirked. "Nice mask, but how is someone supposed to kiss you while you're wearing it?"

  "Easy." With the whir of hidden motors, the lower half of the mask opened up and retracted like the mouth of a grasshopper, revealing Phoebe's full, blood-red-painted lips.

  Caldonia's lips eagerly met them.

  *

  Quick! Zoom in on the two women kissing – they're dressed as an angel and a medusa on that motorcycle that's blocking traffic. This is perfect! So Hollywood! So Dead Daze! And it'll look great in the trailer for my mondomentary! It'll get it into the Zimbabwe Video Festival, and maybe I'll even win an award! Yes, just hold on them, as close and tight as you can get. I hope they keep it up a good long while.

  *

  Tezcatlipoca was confused by living inside a nanochip. He was also disturbed. The sensory input was so different. And the mediasphere was such a strange place!

  Soon he accessed Beto's phone, and could see through its camera. The computer with the tezcatlipoca on its screen was the place where he was imprisoned. The man sitting in front of it, chanting and playing the strange teponaxtle, was the sorcerer who had put him there.

  Information in the computer told him that the sorcerer was Beto Orozco, who had gone to a great deal of trouble to evoke Tezcatlipoca in this peculiar way – but why in this awkward, disembodied, electronic form? There were ways to tricksterize the mediasphere, and even tricksterize the real world from there, but reality is the ultimate game, and it's all a god wants to play.