Island in the Sea of Time (53 page)

The village swarmed with cadets and sailors making ready. The ultralight was drawn up, Toffler overseeing as fuel was pumped into the tanks from cans brought along.

“Full gear today,” she went on. “And be ready for—”

Voices broke in, shouting—a group of the perimeter guards were hustling someone along. Not a local; he was dressed in the tattered remains of shorts and T-shirt. He stumbled and jerked as one of the cadets behind him prodded at him with a spearpoint. Alston frowned; then her face relaxed for a moment into carnivore anticipation as she saw the man had only one hand. Hers twitched to take the long hilt of the
katana.

Finish the job,
she thought. Then, scolding herself:
Of course not. We’ll take him home, give him a fair trial, and hang him right next to his sister, if we can. Still
. . .

David Lisketter stumbled to a halt before her. He was plastered in mud, his thin face blotched with insect bites that also covered much of his body. The green-yellow eyes were staring behind smeared spectacles. At last they blinked and focused somewhat.

“Captain . . . Alston,” he said.

“David Lisketter,” she said. “You are under arrest for robbery, assault with intent to kill, complicity in first-degree murder, and kidnapping. Oh, yes, and high treason, too.”

He straightened. “All right,” he mumbled. “But Pamela, they’ve got Pamela, and Ms. Cofflin too. I saw.”

“Saw what?”

“Canoes, big double canoes, two of them.”

Alston made a motion with her hand. “Get the Arnsteins.”

The cadets pushed him into the shade, and someone brought food and water. He wolfed the dry cassava bread and drank in gulping heaves. Ian and Doreen came up and hovered. Lisketter’s account of the attack on the
Bentley
was disjointed; he’d seen only glimpses as he swam downstream and hauled himself out among the trees.

“They wouldn’t
listen,
” he said, again and again. “I tried the Mayan words from the dictionary, and I thought they recognized a few—‘east,’ ‘sea,’ a few—but they kept talking so fast. And then they grabbed me, grabbed all of us, and they kept pointing to my eyes and shining lights in them and they wouldn’t let go. I had to shoot, I had to!”

Ian Arnstein leaned forward, face gone keen. “Your eyes are the same color as your sister’s, aren’t they?”

Lisketter peered at him. “Yes, yes,” he said.

Ian hurried off to the hut where he’d slept, and came back with something in his hands. It was a wooden mask, of a face halfway between human and jaguar, the eyes inlaid with some polished stone. He held it up beside the one-handed man. The eyes of the living man were a shade of amber-green almost identical to the jade insets.

“I think we have something here,” Alston said. She clapped Ian on the back. “Congratulations, Professor.”

“What . . . what happened to the others?” Lisketter asked.

“The locals ate them,” Alston said. Lisketter bent over abruptly and lost the food he’d just swallowed.

“Get him cleaned up, and handcuff him.”

“Ma’am? What about the village?”

“Load everythin’ we can use,” she said. Her eyes swept over the buildings. “Then torch it.”

 

“Why haven’t they tried to stop us, Captain?” Lieutenant Ortiz asked, bringing his boat alongside. “They’ve got a
lot
of those canoes, and they did attack the schooner.”

Alston nodded; she liked junior officers who tried to puzzle things out. “The
Bentley
was sitting still. We’re moving without oars, making a funny sound, and we’ve got Toffler’s ultralight flying overhead. At a guess, they’re spooked. They’ll fight eventually, though, when we get to their capital.”

Another village was passing by on the north bank, much like all the others—including the crowd of armed Indians waiting at the landing. The chanting and war dances were pretty standard too. She did a quick calculation, counting huts and heads, focusing her binoculars to count the relative proportions of commoners and brightly bedecked men with elaborate weapons; also the number of adult males, women, children.

“Either I’m grossly overestimatin’ the number of people per hut, or a lot of their menfolk are beating our time upriver,” she said.

Toffler’s ultralight came slanting in from the northwest, sun bright on the colorful striped fabric of its wings. The radio reports were brief and sketchy, just confirmation that Martha Cofflin and Lisketter were alive and captive. Now she could debrief him and get the videotapes; they might not have enough electricity for washing machines, but there was ample to charge a few batteries, thank God.

 

The ultralight sheened across the sky; it was as if suddenly reality had broken through the veil of myth. Men bore Martha toward a city where they worshiped a jaguar become human; but a man she knew flew overhead. She stood and waved, saw the wings waggle again in acknowledgment.

The chattering throng on the dirt roadway scattered like drops of mercury on dry ice. Porters threw away their burdens, men their spears, their screams shrill and loud enough to drown the buzzing little engine. Only a few of the caparisoned warriors followed them. Most grouped tightly around their leader’s litter. Both halted to his command, and the heavy figure stepped forth, down a living staircase of bearers. He stood, arms akimbo, looking upward at the thing that flew five hundred feet above them.

Doesn’t know what it is, of course,
Martha thought. Aloud, in a murmur: “He can’t really
see
it yet. Too alien. No scale, probably doesn’t realize what size it is, maybe doesn’t see that it’s artificial, and yes, these priest-kings probably do hallucinogens of some sort. He’s used to visions.”

Toffler circled lower. He steered with one hand; the other held a video camera. Lower still, and suddenly the Olmec warriors realized—not what the flying thing was, but that a man was within it, and steering it. A few more of them fled, but their comrades brought those down with flung darts. The others raised a bristle. of points around their lord. Lower still, and a rain of darts sprang up from their atlatls. Even with the spear-throwers they arched well below the aircraft, which circled away and banked. This time it came barely above the reach of the flung spears, straight down the roadway from the plateau citadel. The commander of the guards, a man with a jade plug in his lower lip and a headdress even more fantastically feathered than the rest, snapped an order. Bellowing surprise, the fat priest-king was bowled back into the covered litter. Half a dozen of the warriors threw themselves across him to put their bodies between him and harm. The rest crowded around the litter and its burden, casting darts, waving their rakes and spears and clubs, screaming defiance. Toffler soared above them, then brought the ultralight’s nose up in a sharp climb. He circled once more, waggled his wings again, and circled higher.

The priest-king surged out of the litter, scattering the men who’d protected him with a shield of flesh. He roared something and slammed a fist into the face of the commander of his guards. The man reeled backward, fell, rose with his face a mask of blood. His overlord struck him again; the commander stood passively under the blows until the other man halted, panting. Then he went down on all fours and prostrated himself. So did the others; the big man kicked a few of them, then climbed back into his litter. The bearers heaved it upright, Martha’s along with it, and trotted forward.

She watched the ultralight bank away to the southeast. “They’re not far behind,” she said quietly.

 

“Run that by me again,” Ian Arnstein said sharply.

The cassette whirred into reverse. The display unit was small, compact enough to be carried along in the boat. That rocked as several officers jostled slightly to see.

“Freeze that,” he said. A book lay beside him; he picked it up and skimmed rapidly through the pages, each a little limp with the humidity. “Look.”

He pointed; the picture was of one of the monumental Olmec stone heads. He brought it close to the flickering screen. “Pretty close resemblance, isn’t it?”

Alston sighed and shook her head. “Well, there goes another theory.” He looked a question at her. “There was speculation that those heads were signs of early contacts with the Old World—West Africa, specifically.”

He looked at the picture. The features
did
look a little negroid, if you assumed. that the depiction was realistic. But even so, the likeness to the heavy-featured man in the litter was unmistakable.

“Go on,” she said.

“The archaeologists thought these heads were portrait-statues of Olmec rulers,” Ian said. “From the looks of it, they were right for once. And now look at this.”

He hit the fast-forward button, to the minute where the guards threw themselves over their ruler. “Does this suggest something?” he said.

“The Secret Service do the same with the president, up in the twentieth,” an officer objected.

“Yes, but he doesn’t beat them up afterward,” Ian pointed out. “I think that’s a significant datum.”

“Proving that pudgy-face here is a son of a bitch?” Hendriksson asked.

“Proving he’s an absolute ruler. I’d guess he was a god-king; it was a common pattern later in these Mesoamerican cultures. Common in a lot of very early civilizations, for that matter. Old Kingdom Egypt, or the Shang. We know they practice human sacrifice, too. So it’s probably very tightly centralized . . . one royal or divine family that marries within its own boundaries, or maybe with the other Olmec principalities, if there are more than one. That would account for the unusual appearance, too.”

“It’s a thought,” Alston said meditatively. “Possibly irrelevant even if accurate, but it
is
a thought.” A slender black arm moved past him to touch the controls. “Let’s take a look at the layout of that city.”

 

Martha blinked as they came up the slope and over the crest. The single-minded determination that had leveled this plateau and covered it with the structures she saw was impressive. They climbed up a spur on the southern side, debouching onto a broad ceremonial avenue that stretched thousands of yards ahead. The surface was made of hard-pounded clay stained different colors, reds and greens and oranges, making patterns she could only guess at as they went by. Two of the giant stone heads like those she’d seen in museums flanked the entrance, twelve feet high and hulking in their brutal menace, but they were not the monochrome remnants of her day. Here they were painted: yellow spotted with brown for the faces, brilliant yellow-green for the eyes, crimson for the tight-fitting helmets. On either side of the avenue were rows of hexagonal basalt pillars on timber bases; beyond them stretched rectangular pools joined by covered stone drains; more drains led to fountains done in wood and clay.

Around the pools were statues by the score, each in its cleared space; the brooding thick-lipped heads, birds of prey, jaguars and men in every possible degree of merging. Nor was that the only type of merging depicted: one huge statue showed a gigantic jaguar copulating with a supine human female. The same theme was repeated over and over again on the vividly painted carved stelae of flat stone and stucco that covered the sides of the low earth mounds marking the axis of the avenue and its side streets. The woman gave birth, and the race of jaguar-faced infants was swept up by men in elaborate headdresses like those of the warriors around her.

She thought of the labor needed to haul stone hundreds of miles through these swampy alluvial lowlands, to carve it into these intricate shapes with nothing better than rock and wood for tools, to heap up these thousands of tons of earth, to gnaw hard tropical woods into shape . . .

Atop the mounds were buildings, their exteriors lavish with colored stucco and carving. In the doorways and open sides stood more people, including women of the same flat-featured massiveness as the priest-king. Banners of colored cloth and woven feathers streamed from the buildings; the women were bright with jewelry of colored stone and cloth. The smell was surprisingly clean for a preindustrial city, none of the sewer reek she’d experienced traveling in some Third World areas . . .
but then, they have those drains.

The knowledge wasn’t particularly comforting. The Romans had had excellent sewers as well, and look at
their
taste in entertainment.

 

“Well, here’s the sticking point,” Hendriksson said.

Alston nodded, looking ahead. A line of canoes stood from bank to bank of the river; beyond them, faint in the hazy distance, she could see the flat outline of the plateau where the Olmec city stood. She estimated their crews at six to seven hundred men, mostly naked brown peasants with spears and clubs; some two hundred of the feather-clad warriors she’d decided to call jaguar knights made up the center of the array. Most of those were on the two big catamarans that made up the center of the opposing host. Their chanting and the boom of their drums was loud in her ears, louder somehow than the droning putter of engines. Light glittered off the glass and painted wood of their weapons, a different sight from the metallic gleam from the American forces.

Silence fell, save for the jungle noises. Sweat trickled down out of the foam-rubber padding of her helmet, stinging in her eyes; she licked it off her lips. The inflated fabric of the boat dimpled under her hand.
Well, I certainly can’t fight a naval engagement.
The inflatable boats were simply too vulnerable and the odds too steep.
The problem with technological surprise is that it’s only a surprise once
. After that, a determined opponent could usually figure out some countertactic.
On the other hand, we need to survive the next couple of hours
. Drums beat louder, and the native canoes began to surge forward. There was a time when you had to expend an asset.

“Mr. Toffler,” she said into the microphone. “Now, if you please. The two big craft.”