The Fifth Harmonic (20 page)

“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 hallucinations 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.”

And suddenly I knew—here, ripped from my subconscious by teonancatl juice, was the horror that had taken over my life, the one I'd anthropomorphized into . . .

“Captain Carcinoma.”

“The one and only. Your worst nightmare, in the flesh. The new ruler of your kingdom.”
It raised a limb that vaguely resembled an arm.
“The King is dead! Long live the King!”

I didn't know what to do. How do you handle a bad trip? Maya wasn't around to talk me down as she had before, so I was on my own. I vaguely remembered hearing something about how fighting it could make things worse, so I tried to play along.

“King of what?” I said.

It swept its arm toward the cavern behind me.
“Of all I survey.”

I turned and found that the cavern had changed to a Mayan village. As I watched, tumor people with globular flesh like the Captain but dressed in Mayan clothing were invading the village, killing the inhabitants and taking over their huts while Mayan warriors armed with bows and spears stood by and did nothing. The new inhabitants then began to remodel the seized huts into hideous, misshapen domes with no trace of symmetry. The once quaint, orderly community was being changed into a travesty. And still the Mayan guards did nothing. They patrolled the perimeter of the village, but let the tumor people pass in and out at will.

“See how easy it is?”
Captain Carcinoma said.
“Your guards are helpless against my offspring. They are too terrified to try to stop them.”

Here in a Mayan microcosm was what was going on in my body: The Maya warriors were my immune system; they could have killed off the deadly tumor cells as soon as they appeared, but they've been programmed to fight
invaders
. Since the tumor consists of mutated cells from my own body, they don't see them as invaders.

“They're not terrified,” I said. “They'd whip your ass if they recognized you as a threat. But since you come from me, they consider your cells brothers. They don't realize that their brothers are backstabbing psychos. Just like you.”

“How dare you!”

“Well, what would you call self-immolation?” I said, turning to face the Captain. I'd been playing along with the hallucination, but now genuine anger was rising like the tide. Why not let him have it with both barrels? “You're an idiot.”

The Captain laughed, an awful sound, booming yet strangled.
“Name-calling won't help you. You're doomed and you know it.”

“And you're not? You and your cells are useless. You're parasites. You do nothing but feed and grow and divide.”

“And we divide so much faster than your cells. That is our strength. That is why our victory is assured. We are a new breed. A master race. We are overrunning you. We will bury you!”

“And when you've choked off the channel that allows nutrients into the system, when your offspring finally seal off the tube that lets oxygen reach the bloodstream that feeds them, what will happen then?”