Buch lesen: «Labyrinth»

Prologue

Corn Blossom choked on the first sip of the potion and her eyes filled with tears. Despite the harsh, bitter taste, she had to drink every drop. The eleven-year-old brushed aside her tears and took another, bigger swallow from the shaman’s feather-decorated gourd.

From the ledge on which she stood, the far side of the canyon was a wall of black, topped by a starry sweep of sky. Trapped heat came off the distant rock in waves, pulsing through the breathless night. Her clan made its home in a broad hollow high in the canyon face, carved over millennia by wind-driven sand. Light from the communal firepit flickered over their flat-sided, mud-brick dwellings.

Hundreds of feet below, the rustling sounds grew much louder. Something crashed through the dry grass and chapparal on the canyon floor. Something huge and powerful. Drawing strength from their fear, Corn Blossom’s people began to chant and beat drums with sticks, this to drown out the terrifying noises. Like her, they had painfully bloated bellies and their lips were cracked and bleeding.

The rain had stopped two winters past, rain the clan depended upon to grow squash, corn and beans in the canyon, and on the mesa directly above the cave. As the stockpiles of food in their stone-lined pits dwindled, Corn Blossom’s people scavenged far and wide, but there was no game left in the canyon, and the fish had vanished along with the river. They were reduced to eating grass and insects. A world that had been lush and full of promise had become a wasteland of suffering and slow death. Dust storms divided the day, and at night the blistering air spawned hungry demons.

Neighboring settlements in the other galleries along the canyon’s cliffs had already been abandoned, the long ladders discarded, the dark window openings and doorways of vacant houses like the eye sockets and drop-jawed maws of piled skulls.

The people who left the canyon were never heard from again. No trace of them was ever found. No campsites. No clothing. No bones. To spend even one night on the canyon floor meant destruction. Under the light of the full moon, Corn Blossom’s own father had disappeared like a curl of smoke.

Before descending the ladder to face and fight the evil that was bedeviling them, he had given her a necklace, his most prized possession. As she drained the last of the shaman’s potion, she tightly squeezed the small white shells between her fingers. In Corn Blossom’s world, before the coming of Colombus, before Heisenberg, Einstein and Rutherford, all events were connected, like the string of beads around her neck. In 1300 A.D., coincidence didn’t exist; everything that happened had a cause. It was a logic born of ignorance. Of desperation. Of fear.

Logic said something had brought this calamity upon her people. It said such causes could be addressed, disastrous outcomes averted by human action. Of the ten young girls in her encampment, Corn Blossom was the brightest, the happiest, the quickest. Cherished by all. Logic said only she could appease the angry gods, because it was her life, her joy, they coveted.

As the herbal concoction took effect, Corn Blossom swayed on the balls of her feet. She felt light enough to lift off and float free of the earth. Then she began to dance to the drums, her bare feet shuffling in the dust, eyes burning from the potion and the shifting pall of smoke.

After she had made a number of slow circuits around the firepit, the shaman led her to the domed rock that jutted from the lip of their ledge like a bowsprit.

Corn Blossom climbed to the crest of the rock and looked back at her mother, her sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Their drumming and chanting was mixed with sobbing and shrill cries. She loved them, and she loved the world as she remembered it, before the rain stopped falling. For the return of that happy time, no sacrifice was too great. She turned away from the familiar faces, her heart aching.

Arms spread wide, Corn Blossom closed her eyes and jumped into the dark.

The shaman had promised her no pain.

He was almost right.

The wind whipping past her ears drowned out the drumbeats and the screams of sorrow. When her head hit the sloping cliff some fifty feet down, there was an instant of sharp discomfort, then her unconscious body started to tumble and bounce. She never felt the impact with the canyon floor.

At daybreak when her people climbed down, they found no body. The only footprints in the sand were theirs.

SOME SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS later, in the spring of 1992, a Korean war-surplus 6x6 stopped on the same canyon floor. The river flowed cloudy and green in a deep channel along the foot of Corn Blossom’s cliff. Among the ten tourists sitting in the bench seats on the truck bed was a stocky black woman in her late twenties. She aimed her 35 mm camera at the high cleft. The telephoto zoom lens revealed a double row of deserted structures partially hidden in shadow.

A thirteenth century high-rise, Dr. Mildred Wyeth thought, snapping the shutter. She wished she could have seen the view from up there. But that was impossible because the archaeological site, like the others in the canyon, was off-limits to nonmembers of the Hopi tribe, who owned the land.

Other shutters clicked around her, like spastic castanets.

With the long lens Mildred picked out the hand- and footholds chipped into the nearly vertical bedrock—the commute to and from the canyon bottom had been perilous, to say the least.

The canyon’s vanished residents had been a vigorous, athletic people with no fear of heights. A stark contrast to Mildred’s fellow passengers, who preferred to have their life experiences spoon-fed to them while sitting down. Her companions for the day included four Japanese men in Bermuda shorts; an impatient German couple who had brought along enough food for six, but had offered to share none of it; and three portly, middle-aged American ladies in brand-new, pastel bill-caps, T-shirts, daypacks and hiking shoes.

Mildred would’ve much rather explored the canyon on foot or horseback, but the constraints of a week-long holiday and a lengthy itinerary made that impossible. It was her first real vacation in a long time, and she had crammed it full of interesting things to do. Perhaps too full, it turned out.

Though Mildred was a medical doctor, she didn’t have a client practice. She worked for a university-affiliated, cryogenic research company. Her field of expertise was cellular crystallization, one of the major obstacles to successful reanimation of living tissue from deep cold.

The basic problem was biophysical. When the cells of most animals were frozen, their watery fluids turned to ice, which expanded to burst or crush vital, cellular components. Only a handful of species had cells that could withstand freezing, and those species revived on their own when warmed. The cells of these unique creatures contained a sugar called trehalose, which acted like antifreeze, lowering the crystallization temperature. Mildred had already verified that the transplant life of dissected, refrigerated rat hearts could be extended by many days when stored in a trehalose solution. Her ongoing research tested ways the sugar could be introduce into living bodies, and the effects of different concentrations during freezing.

Mildred was passionate about her work, which she believed would ultimately change the way all human disease was fought. Once the cryogenic process was perfected, dying patients could be safely stored until science found cures, however long that took.

While Mildred and the others snapped photos of the ruins, the sour-faced Hopi driver-tour guide probed his ear with a wooden matchstick. He wore a straw cowboy hat and his gray-streaked black hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. No cab separated him from his passengers; the 6x6 had a floorplan like a bus, only without a roof or side walls to obstruct the views.

When the shutter-clicking slowed, the driver tucked the grooming tool back in his hat band and spoke into a hand microphone. His slow drawl came out of a loudspeaker screwed to the truck bed’s wooden rails. “That settlement’s number eleven on your list,” he informed them. “We call it the Castle because it’s so high up, and because folks think it looks like one. It was first excavated in 1928, by archaeologists from the University of California at Berkeley. The buildings are from the Pueblo Three Period, from 1050 to 1300 A.D. Our ancient ones lived up there for more than five hundred years.”

By “our,” he meant Hopi.

From her advance reading on the subject, Mildred knew there were few hard facts about the cliff people of the canyon. They had drawn symbols on the rocks, but had left no written language to explain them. It was assumed that extended drought, which the area was prone to, had driven them away. Where they had gone and what had happened to them was anybody’s guess. The Navajo, who had lived nearby for millennia, referred to the cliff people as “our ancient enemies.” The Hopi and Navajo had been enemies for as long as anyone could remember, so the Hopi concluded they were related to the cliff people.

Mildred tuned out her guide. Aside from parroting terms and theories devised by social scientists to fill doctoral theses, he had nothing new to say about the missing residents, or their erased culture. Looking up at the abandoned site, Mildred felt a profound sense of loss, and of tragedy. Looking up at the ruins, she was certain that what had happened to the cliff people could never happen to her own, immensely more powerful civilization. Mildred believed in human progress and the perfectability of knowledge, a juggernaut of scientific truth rolling ever forward, ever faster.

She was dead wrong on all counts, of course.

Numbers alone didn’t guarantee immunity from extinction. Nor did the weight of accumulated scientific knowledge. A century would pass before she saw the awful truth with her own eyes: That a juggernaut of progress could fly apart in an instant and take everything with it.

The final site on the tour was a half mile down-canyon, on the other side of a freestanding spire almost as tall as the mesa. Shutters snapped, but feebly this time; the pile of rocks on a low slope was hardly scenic.

“Those are the ruins of an old cabin, number twelve on your list,” the guide said. “The woman who lived in it spent her whole life in this canyon. She was born here. She never married. She died in that hut at age 109 in the 1930s. People believe she was the last of a long, unbroken line of powerful witches. They say she spoke with the spirits of our ancient ones, and that while she was alive her magic spells kept the canyon’s demons sleeping. Some folks say they still do.”

Mildred perked up. There was very little in the academic literature about the spiritual beliefs, or supposed beliefs, of the canyon’s lost people.

“What demons?” she asked him.

“Man-eaters,” he said matter-of-factly. “Folks say they’ve always been here. No one’s sure whether the drought makes them, or whether they bring the drought with them when they come. The two are kind of a package deal. Legends say the demons are born hungry, out of the hot, still air. They only hunt at night. They love the dark. Lucky for us, we haven’t had a serious drought in a long time.”

“What are they supposed to look like?”

“No one knows. No one who has ever seen one has survived to talk about it.”

Before the guide could elaborate further, the German couple started complaining loudly about the biting flies rising from nearby stands of scrub laurel. When the other passengers chimed in, the show was over. Smiling for the first time all day, the guide cranked up the 6x6 and drove on, crossing and recrossing the meandering stream as the canyon grew ever wider. On the other side of a broad meadow, the rutted dirt track intersected a paved road.

A mile down the two-lane highway, they reached cultivated fields and widely spaced, ramshackle trailers and cinder-block houses of riverside farms that gradually gave way to the outskirts of a small New Mexico town. Little Pueblo had an aroma all its own: part fertilizer, part Mexican spices, part grain silo.

The driver stopped the 6x6 in the parking lot of the Rest Easy Motel, where the trip had begun five hours ago. As his passengers rose to their feet, he said, “If you’re looking for an authentic Native American meal tonight, try the fry bread tacos at Lupita’s, off the town square. They’re the real deal. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my auntie.”

Mildred had two more national parks to hit before her flight home on the weekend. And even though she did have time to stop and eat, dinner at Lupita’s was out of the question. She’d peeked in the café window earlier, while waiting for the tour to start. The pillowy, golden brown fry bread dripped with artery-plugging grease.

When Mildred left sleepy, pungent Little Pueblo in her rental car that afternoon, she was sure she’d seen the last of the place.

She was wrong about that, too.