The Fifth Harmonic (26 page)

The path
is
marked—if you call steps carved into the rock marked—but the climb is steep, and more often than not the whereabouts of the next step isn't obvious.

And the energy boost from the IV infusion is fading.

And my right leg is a molten lead weight.

I'm drenched with sweat, leaking the fluids I've so recently absorbed, filled with dread and yet strangely comfortable on this night so laden with expectation, no longer feeling apart from but a part of this place.

I see octets of spider eyes glinting from the shadows, I hear the sensuous rub of anaconda and poisonous fer-de-lance, the scurries and whispers of tiny night things, I sense the foliage around me coming alive and writhing to a primal rhythm beyond my auditory threshold, plucking at my clothing, inviting me to join their dance to the beat of the heart of the world.

Is all this the sum of my disease—fever, delirium, metastatic madness—or am I climbing into some sort of altered reality? I can't tell. Dehydration and its attendant electrolyte imbalances can do strange things to your brain, make you rammy, see things that aren't there, converse with people long dead.

I think I see Kelly sitting on one of the steps above me, but she disappears when I near. I see my parents, both dead now, frowning as they
appraise the doomed, wounded, disheveled being their son has become. They fade too, replaced by Terziski holding a picture of the brown-eyed Maya-faced woman. I don't stop. I climb right through him, I leave them all behind, hauling upward, ever upward like an old, old man with a ruined leg, using vines and branches as banisters to take the steps one at a time—raise the good leg, drag up the bad, raise the good . . .

Until the bad leg will no longer support itself and I must crawl, conquering each step on hands and knees.

Light floods from on high. I look up and see the full moon, Gaea's barren daughter as Maya calls her, cresting the hill, and never in my life has she been so clear, so intolerably bright, so frighteningly close that I can trace each mountain and crater on her sad, wounded face.

I'm late. I should be there now, on the plateau, arranging myself and my tines as Maya directed. If I miss the moon's zenith point . . .

Only twenty feet to go. I must double my efforts to reach the top on time, but I can't move. The tines are now leaden weights in my pockets. I have no reserves to call on. Aching with exhaustion and the heartbreaking sense of defeat, I look up and see someone standing on the steps above me, blocking my way.

You idiot
, he says.
Look at you—risking life and limb to haul your sorry ass and a bunch of metal doodads up a hillside in the middle of nowhere. For what? For nothing. Because you know damn well that's what will happen up there—nothing!

I stare at him and mouth the word, “Who?”

But he ignores my question and laughs.

A “Fifth Harmonic”? A “new level of consciousness”—give me a break, will you? Admit it, Willy boy. In your heart of hearts you know this is an empty exercise, the last act of a puerile symbolic rebellion against the science that failed you. So okay, you've made your point, and now it's time to cut the crap, get real, and find some modicum of comfort in what little time is left to you.

I recognize him now. The old me . . . fuller featured, better hydrated, better nourished. Was that what I was like? I hope not. The old Will doesn't seem to understand what's happened here in Mesoamerica. Maybe he's right that no new level of consciousness will be waiting for me up there. But that's not the point.

What is the point, then, Willie boy?

I'm not exactly sure. I have no double-blind, randomized, statistically significant answer to that. In other words, I don't
know
what will happen up there.

But I do know that I began this journey a week ago with a stranger named Maya. I know that this stranger has now become the center of my rapidly contracting universe. And I know that my journey will be concluded not with “some modicum of comfort,” but atop this plateau.

Completing the journey I began with Maya—
that
is the end. If it proves to be a means to something else, wonderful—I am more than ready to be made whole again, to reach a new level of consciousness. But if nothing else happens, I will have no regrets. What I've seen and felt and learned on the path to this point is justification enough.

So, no matter what it takes, I will finish what I began.

And I know even the old Will must appreciate that.

“Get out of my way,” I mouth, and he fades from sight.

Desperation fires my limbs. From somewhere in my wasted system I extract new strength and resume my crawl. The twenty vertical feet seem like twenty stories, but I don't look up. I look no farther than the next step. One step at a time, each its own Everest. Conquer one, and then the next, and the one after that . . .

And then there are no more steps. A flat, barren expanse of volcanic granite stretches before me. Toward the rear I see a tall tree with a slim, straight, branchless trunk, topped by a dome of leaves glowing silver in the moonlight. A ceiba tree, a silk-cotton tree . . . Maya's World Tree.

I'm here. On the plateau. I've made it.

I look over my shoulder at the world below, nearly day-bright under this brilliant moon. I see the roofs of the village, the white stripe of beach, and the glittering ocean beyond it. And on that beach, at the waterline, a lone tiny figure. Somehow I know it's Maya, standing there alone, watching . . . waiting.

I know she can't see me, but I wave. It's all I can do to lift my arm. Then I turn and start to drag myself across the rock. I try to recall Maya's instructions.

Not far from the edge is a large circle carved into the rock. You will find
it in the shadow of the leaves of the World Tree.

With my eyes I follow the impossibly long line of the ceiba's trunk shadow across the rock to the splotch of black cast by its leaves.

Not far? Not for a walking man, perhaps. But a continent away for this crawling man.

I aim for the leaf shadow. The rough granite, still warm from the oven of the day, tears at my palms and forearms, and wears the knees of my pants. I struggle to within half a dozen feet of the shadow and stop, just about in. I listen to the harsh rattle of air struggling through my constricting throat and swear I've got no more to give . . . can't move another inch.

I collapse flat on my belly, panting, gulping sobbing breaths as I try to slide myself across the rock. I reach out, clawing ahead, certain that I can't advance another inch . . .

And feel my hand slide down a grooved wall. I lift my head. I'm there. A circular concavity, ten feet or so across, carved out of the living rock, stretches ahead of me. But only partly in shadow—more than half of its circular expanse is moonlit.

Maya's words rush back at me.

You must be positioned before the shadow of the World Tree flees the circle.

From the looks of things, that won't be long—I can almost see the shadow moving away. With a final desperate burst of strength I force myself ahead, roll down the six-inch edge, and crawl to the center of the depression. Along the way I find what feel like peg holes carved into the rock.

Two lines of holes cross at the center of the circle. They point to the four corners of the world. You must reach the center . . .

I do. I find where the lines cross, and slump there. Made it.

. . . and place a tine in a hole at each of the four corners. The fire tine must face the east . . .

I fish the tines out of my pockets and hold them up. The moonlight does strange things to them . . . the colors look odd, subtly altered. I glance around. I know where the Pacific is, so I insert the fire tine in a peg hole of the line heading the opposite way.

. . . the air tine faces north, the earth tine south, and the water tine west. Do not place them too far from the center. They must remain within easy reach.

Done, done, and done. I look and see the World Tree shadow
hovering on the edge of the depression. Have to hurry.

Then you must lie naked on your back, touching the fire tine with your left hand, the air tine with your right, the earth and water tines with your feet.

I shrug off my clothes, stretch out on my back, and position myself according to Maya's instructions. I lay there under the moon and stars, spread eagled in the concavity like a plucked chicken in a skillet.

The moon is so bright it blots out the stars. And it's so silent here—the night sounds have faded away.

I turn my head and watch the last traces of the World Tree's shadow slide clear of the circle . . . and as it does, I feel a tingle in my right hand and see the air tine begin to glow.

Or is it just a trick of the moonlight?

I feel a similar tingle in my left hand and see the fire tine pulsing with a red light. I'm too weak to lift my head to check the other tines, but by the tingle in my feet I assume they're glowing as well.

And then I hear a sound . . . no,
sounds
. High-pitched notes, ringing softly in the night, just this side of my auditory threshold. It's the tines. They're ringing. I close my eyes to better focus on the sounds. I reach for them and find them, draw them closer. And as they near, they blend, harmonizing into a single glorious resonance. I open my eyes—

And cry out!

The moon has moved closer! It hovers over me, moving closer still, taking over the whole of the sky. I feel I could reach out and touch it if only I had the strength.

It draws closer still until I fear it will crush me. I feel the tug of its gravity, pulling me from the depression, but I grip the tines and hang on. And then I feel another force, this one pushing against my back, forcing my body upward until I'm stretched and bowed like some live insect pinned to a board. I can hold on no longer. The force from behind is ripping through my spine, erupting through my chest. I'm dying, I must be dying.

I scream into the vault of the night—

And then . . .

I am elsewhere.

I see nothing now, but have a sense of a huge void yawning
around me, and I am falling through it. I feel as if I've left my body, and I wonder if this is death, if I am going to gaze from above at the empty shell of my body and then move off into that fabled tunnel of light.

But this lasts for only a heartbeat or two, then the void collapses and I am in a very crowded place, if I can call whatever this is a
place
, and I am still falling.

And now I realize that I am still in my body, truly
inside
my body, falling through it, completely aware of this organism that has housed me since conception.

Completely
aware . . . not merely through the ordinary senses that filter through the conscious and subconscious, but in other ways that I never imagined possible.

Is this the new level of awareness Maya mentioned? Is this the Fifth Harmonic?

Whatever this is called, I am aware of every organ, every tissue, every cell in my body.

More than aware, I am
here
. I see the cells, I hear them, I feel them, and it's too much, too much, too much—the detail, the noise, the incessant activity, like being thrust into the center of an infinite hive of manic adrenalized bees, so much more than I can absorb or comprehend or tolerate. I must cut back the overwhelming input, shut down the feeds, and narrow my focus . . .

I constrict my awareness until I am outside a single cell. I press up against its soft translucent membrane like a street urchin outside a bakery window. I watch the raw nutrients around me slip through to the cytoplasm, I hear the rhythm of the organelles within as they assemble their assigned proteins and package them for export.

I too slip through the membrane, gliding past the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum toward the nucleus where I see the switchbacked coils of DNA arranged within, so close, so clear I can count the base pairs on the helixes.

I'm frightened. I don't understand this. What's happening to me? Am I losing my mind? Is this another hallucination, a late aftereffect of Ambrosio's teonancatl juice?

But I seem to be in control here, and that eases my fears somewhat. I loosen the reins—just a little—on my awareness and gradually
open myself to more cells and tissues. And as I do I become aware of a sound, growing in volume, ethereal, musical, yet distinctly unlike the tones I heard from the tines. These are sung by voices, tiny yet not high-pitched, hundreds, thousands, millions of voices, growing, swelling, not in my ears but in my consciousness. Myriad tiny voices, yet I feel I can pick out each one and hear its note.

And as I sift through the tones that make up this chorus, I pick out sounds of discord. Some only mildly off key, others harsh and atonal, grating voices that sour the harmony.

I isolate two discordant subchoruses echoing from opposite directions. I home in on one and flow there. As I near the source I sense increased activity, mounting steadily until I find myself in a war zone. My defense mechanisms are out in force: macrophages, the huge voracious cells that gobble up bacteria, viruses, and anything else they come across that doesn't belong, are rushing back and forth, attacking and digesting microbial invaders, protecting my repair mechanisms as they tend to the task of reconstructing landscapes of severely mangled tissue.

I realize I'm in my right calf where my cells are struggling to undo the damage done by the shark's teeth.

Struggling is the word. The defenders and the builders cannot work at full capacity. They're crying out to the rest of my body for the raw materials they need to manufacture the proteins for healing, reconstruction, and defense, but they're not receiving them. I search for a way to help, to increase the flow of nutrients to the war zone. I open the arterioles feeding the area; this increases the blood supply, but that's not the problem. The blood itself is depleted of nutrients. They're being siphoned off somewhere else.

And I know where.

I home in on the other discordant notes. These are louder, and originate at the other end of my body. I move toward the sound, aware of its source, dreading to face it, yet knowing I must.