The rivers are underground and the cenotes are natural holes from the surface, like wells, giving access to the underground water that runs through limestone caverns in the earth. Some are tiny, some immense. Life in the Yucatán would be difficult to impossible without them.
Would you touch it, Lucy? I asked.
“I’d be afraid, but I would.” I saw a trace of the little smile.
I didn’t know what to believe. I thought I might sleep on it. Soon. Jeb was wearing his serious look. “What’s all that got to do with someone in New York or Hong Kong now or in the future. Or, for that matter, in the past?”
“It’s subtle,” Lucy answered. “Like my uncle. I would have a problem arguing that the Maya are a lucky people, even before the ‘stinking people’ came – that’s one of the things we called the Spanish conquistadores when we met them—and smelled them. I think a good reading of history would draw the same conclusions regarding the whole human condition.”
“The Spanish didn’t destroy the civilization of the Maya the way they did the ones in Central México and Perú and elsewhere. I’m sure they would have, but we beat them to it. We did it to ourselves. Some time before the Spanish got here, we had decades of civil war that pretty much did it for the remnant of civilization we had left. We destroyed ourselves with jealous little city states, greedy kings, foolish fighting, bad luck, possibly too much touching of the Pol. It’s true that the Spanish religious zealots later put the cap on it by burning most of our books and art, but by that time we were all just farmers in the jungle. A few people, like our family, preserved what they could and, in our case, we had the Pol to worry about, and the long term duty to guard it that had somehow been imposed on us.”
“Maybe it’s only a hope, but what we get from our family’s oral tradition and from those who have thought about it, is that probabilities, chances, fortune, luck—whatever you want to call it—runs worse, not just for the Maya, but worldwide because this thing exists. Are we sure? No. But our best thinkers, who have been thinking about this for thousands of years, strongly think so.”
“I’m not one of those thinkers, so I can’t go into that in depth. I’m trained as an action person, an outside person. Out in the larger world, that is. I’m a doer and an operative by training, not a thinker or philosopher. I’m just parroting what I’ve been told.”
I’m quitting keeping track of the surprises coming out of this woman, I thought. I’ve lost count anyway.
“Each generation has a few of us scattered around,” she continued. “For instance, we had early warning of the conquistadores when they arrived in the Caribbean. We took their measure and knew we were all in for big trouble.”
“The same is true now, in a different way. There are some very rich and powerful people out there who don’t want to see any change. They would like to get hold of this thing and stash it away until after 2012 so it’s destruction can’t affect them and their wealth and power. Maybe it wouldn’t anyway, but they don’t want to take the chance. Some might want to touch it, thinking in their arrogance that their new luck would have to be the good kind. Maybe it would be, but probably not. They’re a bad bunch and will stay that way. Destroying the object won’t make evil disappear, it won’t generate goodness, but if it can skew us in the direction of good fortune, we might make it in the long run.”
“Why not destroy it now?” asked Jeb. “Why wait thirty some years?”
“Can’t do it,” Lucy said, shaking her head. It’s been tried and nothing happens. It has to be done at the realignment of the calendar. The legend is quite specific, and so is the calendar. This calendar is not just arbitrary. Astronomers are now calculating that in 2012 the sun will be aligned with the center of our galaxy – the Milky Way – for the first time in just shy of 26,000 years. In other words five Long Count cycles—25,630 years.”
“The Mayan idea of time is different. Time is circular. There are smaller circles within larger circles and they are within still larger circles and so on. The first creation date is calculated to be almost forty-two octillion years ago. Here, I’ll write that down.” She rummaged around in our box of stuff and pulled out a pencil.
Slowly, she wrote on the deck boards: ‘41,943,040,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years’. She smiled. “This is only approximate, you understand”
“That number takes us way way back, back beyond the Big Bang the scientists talk about now. That’s only fifteen billion years ago. Here, I’ll write it.” She wrote 15,000,000,000. “See, not so many zeros. And the scientists, too, say maybe there are cycles, many Big Bangs, one after the other, or sideways through black holes. Who knows? Maybe the thing in our Pol is a remnant from some other Big Bang cycle somehow, a cycle when the rules and laws of the universe were different. Maybe it came to earth with the giant meteor that hit Yucatán sixty-five million years ago, the one that destroyed the dinosaurs—that would be recent to the lobil—and it’s been floating around ever since. Who knows?”
“This present cycle’s starting date was, on the modern calendar, August 13, 3114 BC, and it will end December 21, 2012.”
This was actually getting pretty interesting, if weird, but I was losing it. Let’s take a little break, I mumbled. I think Lucy and Jeb were ready for a nap, too. I didn’t hear any objections, but I guess I wouldn’t have, being sound asleep.
When I woke, the sun was lower, Jeb was snoring and Lucy was in the wheelhouse laughing at something with Tío Sebi. I rubbed some ice on my face to wake up and clean some of the sweat off. Lucy saw me from the window and called to me to come on up. Well, ‘up’ was only two steps, so I made it all right. The Capitán and Lucy were eating tiny shrimp and other strange looking things with toothpicks stuck in them. I tried some shrimp and a few of the milder looking weirdities. They weren’t bad. I avoided the ones that looked like they still might bite.
“We’re ahead of schedule, so we’ll slow down and drop the nets for a while. With any luck, I’ll have almost a full catch by the time we get there. We already had half a catch when we picked you up in Veracruz. I can top it off and sell it in Campeche.” the Capitán said. “Tomorrow at dusk we’ll be there. In the afternoon, we’ll be close enough to radio, make sure all’s OK.” I decided not to get nervous at least until then.
Lucy took my hand. It felt good. “I’m glad you and Jeb are with me on this,” she said. “I couldn’t do it alone. We have other outside persons, operatives, but not enough of them. They are out there helping us or doing their thing.” I decided she could keep the hand, if she wanted. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do with it. I didn’t say so, though, Tío Sebi being so near and so big. “I know you are here for the money, Sam, but thank you anyway.” Sam, I thought. I don’t remember telling her one of my names was Sam. Well, ni modo, nothing for it, let it go.
Since it didn’t rain, the night on the deck was actually quite pleasant. The two crewmen, Eusebio and Humberto, had been working for Capitán Sebastián on this boat and others for most of their lives and had an unending supply of fish stories to tell. You never know with fish stories, but my guess was that some of these actually happened.
Eusebio told us about the first time he worked with Capitán Sebastián. He wasn’t a Capitán then, just a crewman. They were working on an old shrimp boat, the Lily Mac. It was on its last legs, rotting away. The motor was not too bad, but the hull and deck were mostly patches, and the equipment kept breaking down.
One day, around noon, they were fishing two or three miles out of Tuxpan, south of Tampico. Eusebio happened to be in front of the wheelhouse when the bow of the boat simply split in two,
