Excavation (35 page)

Denal translated. “He welcomes us. Says we come in time to help.”

“Help with what?”

“Hauling wood back to town. Last night, at the feast, the many campfires burned their stores.”

Sam groaned, his head still pounding slightly from his hangover. “Emissaries of the gods, or not, I guess we're expected to earn our keep.” Sam took up a position beside Kamapak, taking up one of the many shoulder straps used to haul the sled. Denal was beside him.

Maggie walked ahead, helping to clear chunks of volcanic stone and make a path.

With six men acting as oxen, dragging the sled proved easier than Sam expected. Still, one of the men passed Sam a few leaves of a coca plant. When chewed, the cocaine in
the leaves helped offset the altitude effects…and his hangover. Sam found his head less achy. He wondered if the leaves might help Norman's fever and pain.

Feeling better now, Sam conversed with the shaman as he hauled on the sled. Denal translated.

Sam's inquiry about children was met with the same consternation. “The temple receives our children from our women's bellies. This close to
janan pacha
”—again a nod to the towering volcanic cone to the south—“the god, Con, has blessed our people. Our children are his children now. They live in
janan pacha
. Gifts to Con.”

Maggie had been listening and glanced back. Sam shrugged at her. Con was one of the gods of the northern tribes. In stories, he had epic battles with Pachacamac, creator of the world. But it was said that it was the god, Con, who created man upon this earth.

“This temple,” Sam asked, speaking around his wad of bittersweet leaves. “May we see it.”

The shaman's eyes narrowed. He shook his head vehemently. “It is forbidden.”

From the man's strong rebuff, Sam did not pursue the matter.
So much for being emissaries of the god of thunder
, he thought. It seemed Illapa was not high on this village's totem pole.

Maggie slipped back to Sam's side. She whispered, “I was thinking about Denal's observation about the missing children and got to thinking about the village's makeup. There is another element of this society that is missing, too.”

“Who?”

“Elders. Old people. Everyone we've seen has been roughly the same age…give or take twenty years.”

Sam's feet stumbled as he realized Maggie was right. Even the shaman could not be much older than Sam. “Maybe their life expectancy is poor.”

Maggie scowled. “Life is pretty insulated here. No major
predators, unless you count those things down in the deep caves.”

Sam turned to Kamapak and, with Denal's help, questioned him about the missing old folk.

His answer was just as cryptic. “The temple nurtures us. The gods protect us.” From the singsong way the words were spoken, it was clearly an ancient response. And apparently an answer to most questions. When Maggie made her own inquiries—into health care and illness among the members—she received the same answer.

She turned to Sam. “It seems the old, the young, the frail, and the sick end up there.”

“Do you think they're being sacrificed?”

Maggie shrugged.

Sam pondered her words, then turned to Denal, trying a different tack on this conversation. “Try describing those creatures we saw in the caves.”

The boy frowned, tiring of his role as translator, but he did as Sam asked. The shaman's brows grew dark with the telling. He called a halt to the sled. His words were low with a hint of threat as Denal translated. “Do not speak of those who walk through
uca pacha
, the underworld. They are
mallaqui
, spirits, and it is ill to whisper of them.” With those words, the shaman waved the sled on.

Sam glanced at the volcanic mountain to the south. “Heaven up there, and hell below us. All the spiritual realms of the Inca joined in this one valley. A
pacariscas
, a magical nexus.”

“What do you think it means?” Maggie said.

“I don't know. But I'll be glad when Uncle Hank arrives.”

Soon the team of haulers and their load of wood reached the village's edge. By now it was well past noon, and the workers tossed off their harnesses and began meandering into the village proper. The spread of homes once again was full of chattering and happy people. It seemed even the workers in the field had returned for a midday rest.

Sam, Maggie, and Denal wandered back to their own shelters. Ahead, Sam noticed that the women who had been cooking at the stove were now spooning out roasted corn and stew into stone bowls. He smiled, suddenly realizing how hungry he was.

“We should wake Norman,” Maggie said. “He should try an' eat.”

Denal ran ahead. “I get him,” the boy called back.

Maggie and Sam took their places in line before the stove. Other ovens around the village also steamed into the air, like mini volcanic vents. Like most Incan townships, this village was broken into distinct
ayllu
, extended family units or groupings. Each
ayllu
had its own open-air kitchen. Among the Incas, meals were always eaten outdoors, weather permitting.

Reaching the head of the line, Sam was handed a bowl of steaming stew topped by a ladle of mashed roasted corn. Poked into it was a small chunk of dried meat,
charqui
, jerked llama steak.

Sam was sniffing at it when Denal burst from the nearby doorway and hurried toward them, his boyish face drawn and serious.

“What is it?” Maggie asked.

“He gone,” Denal glanced around the area. “I find his blanket and straw all messed up.”

“Messed up?” Sam asked.

Denal swallowed hard, clearly worried and scared. “Like he fighting someone.”

Maggie glanced to Sam. “Before we panic,” he said, “let's simply ask.” Sam waved Denal back to the pregnant women dishing stew. The boy interrupted her serving.

Denal spoke rapidly. The woman nodded, a smile growing on her face. When Denal turned to Sam, he was not sharing her smile.

“They take Norman to the temple.”

By late afternoon, Joan found herself ensconced with a young monk in one of the many laboratory cubicles deep in the heart of the Abbey. Faithful to his word, the abbot had left orders that Joan be treated as a guest. So her request to observe the Abbey's researchers at work was grudgingly allowed—though her personal guard dog was never far away. Even now, Joan could see Carlos through the observation window. He rested one palm on his holstered pistol.

A young monk named Anthony drew back her attention. “Of course, we all have our own personal theories,” he said matter-of-factly, his English fluent. “It is not as if we let our faith cloud our experimentation. The abbot always says our faith should withstand the vigors of science.”

Joan nodded and leaned a bit closer to the man. They now stood before a bank of computers and monitors. Several technicians worked a few cubicles down, dressed the same as they were, in sterile white lab suits, but otherwise they were alone.

Anthony logged onto the computer. Near his elbow was a tray of minute samples of the Incan metal, row after row of miniscule gold teardrops embedded in plastic wells. Fresh from the freezer, a slight fog of dry ice still clung to the tray. She had learned the lab was trying to learn the nature of the metal in an attempt to accelerate their desired goal of bringing Christ back to earth. They had already developed methods to rid the metal of contaminating impurities, heightening the miraculous abilities of the substance.

Joan studied the teardrop samples. To test her own theory, she needed one of those pearls of gold. But how? The samples were so close, but with so many eyes watching, the tray might as well have been locked behind iron bars. Joan tightened her fists, determined not to fail in her mission. She needed just a moment's distraction. Taking a deep breath,
she readied herself.

“I'm almost set,” the young monk said, working at the keyboard.

And so was she.

Joan leaned her left breast more firmly against his shoulder as she peered at the tray. She had picked Anthony as her guide because of the youth's age; clean-shaven and dark-haired, he could not be much older than twenty. But besides his impressionable age, she had selected him from all the others for another reason. When she had first entered the labs, guarded by Carlos, Joan had noticed how the young man's eyes had widened in appreciation. She saw how his gaze had settled upon her breasts, then darted away. Back at Johns Hopkins, she had taught enough undergraduates to recognize when one seemed interested in more than just a scholarly education. Usually, she gently rebuffed any advances, but now she would exploit these feelings. Cloistered here among the monks, Joan suspected this youth could be easily unnerved by the attentions of a woman—and from the youth's reaction now, she had been proven right.

Anthony swallowed hard, his cheeks reddening. He pulled away slightly from her touch.

Joan took the advantage. She slid onto the neighboring stool, one hand crossing to rest on the youth's knee. “I'd be most interested in hearing your own theories, Anthony. You've been here a while. What do you think of
el Sangre del Diablo
?” She squeezed his knee ever so slightly.

Anthony glanced back to the glass partition, toward Carlos. Her hand was hidden from view by their bodies. The young monk did not pull away this time, but his face was almost a shade of purple. He sat frozen, stiff as a statue. If Joan's hand had wandered any higher up his leg, she expected she would have discovered exactly how stiff the young man was.

She had spent the entire afternoon brushing against him,
touching him, whispering close to his ear. With gentle cajoling and urging, she had finally guided him to this last lab, where actual samples of the mysterious metal were being analyzed. Now the truly tricky part began.

Joan tilted her head, attentive to the young monk. “So tell me, what do you think the metal is, Anthony?”

He almost choked on his words, “Maybe nan…nanobots.”

Now it was Joan's turn to startle, her hand slipping away from his knee. “Excuse me?”

Anthony nodded rapidly, relaxing slightly, now able to discourse on familiar territory. “Several of us…the younger researchers among us…think maybe the metal is actually some dense accumulation of nanobots.”

“As in nanotechnology?” Joan said. She had read a few theoretical articles that had discussed the possibility of building subcellular machines—nanobots—that could manipulate matter at the molecular or even atomic level. A recent article published in
Scientific American
described a crude first attempt to construct such microscopic robots by scientists at UCLA. In her mind, she remembered her own electron microscope scan of the metal: the tiny particulate matrix linked together by hooklike appendages. But nanobots? Impossible. The youth here had obviously been reading too much science fiction.

“Come see,” Anthony said, suddenly excited to be able to show off for his audience. He reached to the tray and lifted one of the pellets of metal with a pair of stainless-steel tweezers. He fed it into the machine before him. “Electron crystallography,” he explained. “It's our own design here. It can isolate one unit of the metal's crystalline structure and construct a three-dimensional picture. Just watch.” He tapped a monitor screen with the tweezers.

Joan leaned closer, fishing out her eyeglasses, forgetting for the moment her seduction of the young monk. When
she had asked Anthony to show her the metal, she hadn't meant such a
close
look. But now the scientist in Joan was intrigued.

An image appeared on the screen, in crisp detail, rotating slowly to show all surfaces. Joan recognized it. A single microscopic particle of the metal. It was octagonal in shape with six threadlike appendages: one on top, one on bottom, and four radiating out from midsection. At the end of each were four tiny clawed hooks, like sparrow's talons.

Anthony pointed to the screen with the tip of a pen. “In overall shape and architecture, it bears a clear resemblance to a hypothesized nanobot proposed by Eric Drexler in his book
Engines of Creation
. He theorized a molecular machine in two sections:
computer
and
constructor
. The nanobot's brain and brawn, so to speak.” He tapped at the central octagonal core. “Here's the central processor, its programmed brain, surrounded by six nodes, or constructors, that manipulate the arms.” The young monk moved his pointer along to the thin talonlike hooks. “Here is what Drexler called its molecular positioners.”

Joan frowned. “And you think this thing can actually manipulate matter at the molecular level?”

“Why not?” Anthony said. “We have enzymes in our bodies right now that act as natural
organic
nanobots. Or take the mitochondria inside our cells…those organelles are no more than microscopic power stations, manipulating matter at the atomic level to produce ATP, or energy, for our cells. Even the thousands of viruses in nature are forms of molecular machines.” He glanced to her. “So you see, Mother Nature has already succeeded. Nanobots already exist.”