ReVISIONS (26 page)

Altun Ha motioned for an apprentice to remove the brazier, lest Pacal attempt further mortification. “Tonight I go to sit by the new king's bedside, to soothe his dreams. He, too, doubts his worthiness of office.” He smiled. “It's contagious, perhaps. Get some sleep, boy.”

Pacal obeyed for a while. Then he rose from his bed, and walked the Temple halls. His aimless steps led him to the Repository. Flickering lights threw shadows on the walls storing the genomes of the 700,000 residents of Tikal. Though all the genomes had been sequenced, not all had been read. It was the difference between a library and a deepened scholar, between information and knowledge.

The genomes were organized by birth year and designated by engraved names: Kan-Xul, Lady Zak-lay, Uayeb, Mah-Cit, Yax-Ikal . . . and so on, across the vast wall, displaying the work of the last five cycles of Mayan scholarship. The implications of this knowledge were terrible and profound. Once knowing the trajectory of a life, Pacal's Order could prevent its fruition. For the sake of the larger society.

It was terrible. It was fair.

Just ahead in the dim hall was Master Altun's domain, a small stone cubicle with a simple chair and several digital machines. A light still burned, although the master was gone for the evening.

Gone for the evening.
It was as though Kina herself whispered in his ear. Pacal entered the master's room.

It took only a moment to find the data files for the next Temple ceremony. A person named Wac Chanil Ahau would meet the obsidian blade tomorrow.

Pacal glanced through the portal toward the Repository, but all remained quiet. Quickly, he scanned for the V-gene. He missed it the first time through. Hands slick with sweat, he keyed in a closer look at the genetic code, then scanned more deliberately for the telltale segment. Still nothing.

Xibalba held the heavens, and the Temple slept. Altun Ha could return at any moment, or the guards come checking, but Pacal persisted. Next he looked up the last person to require sacrifice, just a few days ago. No V-gene. Nor the one before that. He checked a dozen names.

Then, selecting the date of his investiture, he searched for the identity of the intended sacrifice. When the name appeared on the screen, he paused, his hands like claws on the keyboard. Here was a young woman who could not have the slightest violence in her. Her only unkindness had been her half smile, when he had wanted the full one. So he was to sever her neck for the crime of reading The Book. His world tipped out of balance.

In his intense concentration, he didn't notice that he had company. The master. Pacal looked up. No, not the master. It was Chel.

Chel moved to Altun Ha's machine and shut down the program. “So, then,” he said, “you know.”

Pacal could barely look at this young man that he thought he'd known, a man of the Temple's highest Order, his friend Chel—his corrupt friend.

“You would have been told before your investiture. It is the next level of initiation.”

“The initiation that began when I slept with a woman whom I am to murder?”

Chel closed his eyes for a moment. Then: “It is unusual. But Altun Ha doubts you.” He glanced away, saying the next thing with as much dignity as he could muster: “He saw your tears at Bahlum Kuk's ceremony.” Then, meeting Pacal's gaze, he added, “You have another chance. Kina will be your test of loyalty. Sometimes we must perform the ceremony on those we know. It does happen. We have to be professional.”

Pacal shoved past Chel into the Repository. “She has no violence gene. We're not saving society, we're ruining it.”

Chel caught up with him, grabbing Pacal's elbow and spinning him around. “Listen to me. The Temple is the glue that holds society together.” He pointed past the stone walls, toward the kingdom of jungle and temples. “How long before the masses run riot in the streets, overtaking the king, the Temple, all that keeps order? Even if they have no violence gene, they're doing a fine job of running riot.”

“So you cook up a story that we're doing a big job keeping society orderly?”

Chel shrugged. “It's working, isn't it?”

“By killing people who follow other religions?”

Chel frowned. “Who said we were? We read the genomes, but so far we can't figure out how
beliefs
are encoded.” He paused. “We're culling those
without
the V-gene.”

At Pacal's look of consternation, he went on: “Tikal needs to be strong. The Eastern army is only one predator. There's Calakmul and Uaxactun, both drooling at the prospect of our fields and temples.” He held up his hands against Pacal's objections. “How do you think Tikal stays strong? Through violence, that's how. Matching our strong warriors against theirs. Only a courageous people send their young fighters against invaders. We can't afford the gene variants that make us soft.”

Pacal leaned against the wall holding the genomic Repository. He rubbed at the etched name under his fingertips, thinking that all this should be erased. No one had the right to know so much. The notion surprised him. He was a scientist. He'd never thought there should be a limit to knowledge.

Chel put his hand on Pacal's shoulder.
“Soft
will kill us.”

“I think
hard
is killing us.”

“Go to bed, Pacal. We all have this reaction, at first. It's only natural.”

Pacal turned to leave, desperate to be alone, to turn off Chel's voice.

“One more thing,” Chel said. “About Kina. If you don't follow through with the ceremony, someone else will. You can't save her, any more than Altun Ha could save the king. The difference between Kina and Bahlum Kuk is that he knew he had to die for his city. Kina is not so wise.”

Pacal staggered off to his bed.

 

Close to dawn on his investiture day, Pacal had slept little. In the sweltering predawn, he sat alone on the altar at the head of the Temple stairs, where the massive stones pumped out their stored heat. The day that he had anticipated for so long now began to color the sky. But he would rather hurl himself down the endless stairs than wear the feathered mask.

Kina waited in the cells beneath the Temple, along with all the other innocents. She was one of Tikal's best, one of the soft ones. Pacal looked at the obsidian blade in his hand, its edge one molecule thick. Turning it on himself, his death would be swift. But it wouldn't save Kina.

Bird cries arose from the jungle, as they began their daily plea for mates, calling their songs to demonstrate their genetic superiority. And the female birds, what sequencers did they have, to judge worthiness?

“The ceremony is still hours away, my boy.”

Altun Ha stood in the portal, a mere shadow.

Without turning around Pacal said. “No, it's closer than that, really.” He had never said
no
to the master before, and its sound now charged the silence between them. Pacal turned to face his old teacher.

Altun Ha noted the black knife that Pacal held loosely at his side. “Do you love the girl that much?”

Balanced on the edge of the stairs, Pacal planned to tumble down before he would relinquish the blade to this man. “No. I love what she is.”

The old man drooped his head. When he raised it again, his face had sagged with age. “Oh, Pacal, I worried about you from the start. Yet I hoped . . .”

“Hoped? Hoped that I would follow in your steps, execute the peaceful?”

Altun Ha stepped forward, but Pacal shoved out a hand, warning him. Still, the old man advanced. “Give me the blade, son.”

Pacal felt tears welling. He clutched the knife so close to his chest that it nicked his tunic. “Why, Altun? Why not just develop a micro-reservoir of the kind of genes you want, and infuse them into the peaceful? Why kill them?” He waved his bladed hand at the Temple. “Is it just for showmanship? All this blood, just for show?” He was crying openly. And the tears this time were true, not some whipped-up allegiance to culture.

Altun Ha was close enough now that Pacal could see the anger hardening his features. “You of all people should know that keeping power requires a commitment to violence. You, Pacal, have the V-gene. As do I.” Seeing the expression on Pacal's face, he shook his head. “Why else were you drawn to this Order?”

The man's words ran into him, water through cold stone. “No,” Pacal whispered.

Altun Ha shook his head with infinite weariness.

“It's not a bad thing. We need it to do our job. Who else could stand to kill friends?” He looked down at the altar, perhaps remembering his own tests.

The sun sprayed its first light through the screen of the jungle, lighting up Altun Ha's face. Pacal saw him clearly for the first time in his life: the easy grace, the good will, the evil. But he was no worse than Pacal himself.

Altun Ha knew what was coming a moment before Pacal himself. A look of alarm, like a frightened bird, lit in his face for a moment, replaced by the shock of the blade slicing in, as Pacal threw his weight behind the thrust. Altun fell forward, collapsing on the altar, sheltering the blade with his body.

V-gene, indeed. Pacal had it, in full. As he trembled, sweat ran from his body, releasing the accumulated poisons. Every cell in his body was contaminated. And not just genetically, but by all that he had done, by the ceremonies he had witnessed, by the apologies he had made for his Order. Everything was overturned, like the Underworld crawling into the sky at night.

Leaving Altun Ha's body, he walked through the portal to the Temple's inner world. He paused at a fountain, rinsing the blood from his hands and arms. A few drowsy acolytes were now afoot, but hardly noted him. Pacal found himself walking into the lower reaches of the Temple near the holding cells. There he roused a guard and, pointing to the stairs and the upper levels, babbled of murder and evil.

It was no more than the truth.

 

Their only chance was to travel swiftly toward the encroaching army, hoping for asylum. Pacal and Kina paddled unceasingly through the morning, using not the great canals, but the waterways overhung with jungle, too shallow for power boats.

The river current was with them, flowing into the ocean, the great half circle gulf that separated the great peninsula lands from the northern lands. Kina had spoken of life on those vast plains, filled with bison and the tribes she called “close cousins,” but Pacal hardly cared. It was only for Kina that he paddled. Because her life should not be forfeit.

Before long they did encounter the Eastern forces, who let them pass because Kina had The Book, and could quote it. They looked askance at Pacal, but during the last few days he had learned to lie, among other things.

They came to the blue gulf, where Kina said they could paddle north, hugging the coast. Pacal would leave her now that she was safe. Surely he could no longer be her favorite. He hadn't changed as she'd hoped—in fact he had proved his violence. But he was unwilling to convert to a religion. Religion had ruined so much. Could the Eastern religion be far different?

As night fell, they made their camp on the beach. It was just an ordinary night, no great myth of antiquity. The stars poked through, their alignment a matter of indifference.

Kina drew near, opening The Book.

“Please, no preaching,” Waves hit the sand in a comforting drumbeat, healing his troubled thoughts.

Kina said, “It's not religion as you know it, Pacal. It's science.”

He sighed. She would preach no matter what.

She held the pages toward the campfire, illuminating a diagram. “The Tree of Life,” she said.

Pacal jerked away. “We had a tree of life in Tikal—the one that grows between the three worlds. It was full of rot. So is this one.”

Kina's smile dented one cheek. “That was a symbol. This one is a diagram.”

Pacal looked more closely. It looked like a tree, but it had tiny writing all over it.

“The Maya aren't the only ones that have been working on gene analysis. Across the ocean, our sisters and brothers have been working on genomes, too. All the genomes.” As Pacal took The Book in his hands, he peered more closely at the branches depicted there. Each one held not a leaf, but a species of plant or animal.

Kina went on, “They've finished it, Pacal. The Tree of Life. Look.” She sidled closer to him, pointing to the center page, one so large it had to be folded out.

“Here's what the genomes—all the genomes—teach us: the unique pattern of evolutionary branching. On these branches and twigs you can read the names of every creature, every plant known to us, and how closely each is related to each.” She looked at him squarely, without a zealot's fire, but with a firm resolve. “It's our kinship system. This is what we revere now. This is the new religion.”

“Haven't we had enough of religion?”

She shrugged, turning the pages of The Book, showing yet more diagrams, more details of the links between and among creatures. “Maybe it's not a real religion. But it's something to honor. We honor each other, because we're kin to each other. And to every living thing.” She stirred the fire, and it burned brighter. “The human genome isn't the only one that matters. It all matters. It's all part of a grand progression. We have to revere that.”

“Have to?”

“Well, it's nothing to spit at, anyway.”

The surf pounded, somehow louder now that it was cloaked in darkness. Pacal had to wonder if the lessons nature taught were violent or peaceful ones. He asked,

“With all this reverence, why are the Eastern armies trying to destroy Tikal?”

“They're not. They're protecting their boundaries from Tikal's armies. Eventually the Eastern tribes will bring news of The Book to Tikal. Maybe it will compete with the Temple. Maybe it won't.” She looked at him with mischievous dark eyes. “But meanwhile, you and I will be heading north to spread the word on the northern plains.”