12.19.19.17.16
DECEMBER 17, 2012
TWENTY-EIGHT
CHEL STOOD ALONE IN THE LOBBY OF THE GETTY RESEARCH building, watching the afternoon sun shine into the glass oculus in the courtyard outside. On the summer solstice, at high noon, the sun would be directly aligned with the oculus, a design mirroring some of the astrology-based architecture of the ancients. This was the bastion of Maya scholarship she’d convinced the Getty board they had to have—that to ignore the most sophisticated civilization in the New World was an historical crime.
It turned out the crime was perpetrated by the Maya themselves.
For centuries, the conquistadores had accused the indigenous people of cannibalism, as evidence of their own moral superiority; missionaries explained burning ancient Maya texts by invoking it; Spanish kings used it to claim land. This blood libel hadn’t stopped during the conquest—even in
She was about to hand the enemies of her people the proof they’d sought. The Aztecs had dominated Mexico for three centuries in the post-classic, made art and architecture and revolutionized trade patterns across Mesoamerica. But if you asked most people what they knew about the Aztecs, cannibalism and human sacrifice were the only answers you’d get. Now the same would be true for the Maya; all of Chel’s ancestors’ accomplishments would disappear into the shadow of this discovery. They’d be nothing more than people who worshipped praying mantises for eating the heads of their mates. They’d be the people who sacrificed children and ate their remains.
“It’s been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.”
Stanton had followed her to the lobby. He’d stayed at the museum with them overnight while she, Victor, and Rolando reconstructed the final portion of the codex. Chel was grateful he had; even after everything they’d discovered, his presence here was somehow a comfort.
“There’s evidence of cannibalism in every civilization,” he said. “On the island of Papua New Guinea, in North America, the Caribbean, Japan, central Africa, from the time all our ancestors lived there. Pockets of genetic markers in human DNA all over the world suggest that, early on, all our ancestors ate human corpses.”
Chel looked back into the oculus. The stacks of the library were just visible below, thousands of rare volumes, sketches, and photographs from around the world. Each one with its own complicated history.
“Have you heard of Atapuerca?” Stanton asked.
“In Spain?”
“A site there is where they discovered the oldest prehuman remains in Europe,” he told her. “Gran Dolina. They found skeletons of children who’d been eaten. The conquistadores’ ancestors were doing it long before yours were. To be desperate enough to do unthinkable things to feed your family is to be human. Since the beginning of history, people have done what they had to do to survive.”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, as dusk gathered, Stanton sat with Chel, Rolando, and Victor, perched on the stools scattered around the lab where they’d been working virtually nonstop. He tried to take in the words the king had spoken to the scribe:
I and my closest minions have gained such power from feasts on flesh, having consumed more than twenty men in the three hundred suns past. Now Akabalam has divined that he wishes to concentrate the strength of ten men in every man of our great nation.
Stanton pictured the ancient kitchen in which they stood. It was eerily reminiscent of the slaughterhouses and rendering facilities he had been investigating for a decade. The line between cannibalism and the disease was clear: Mad cow happened because farmers fed their cows the brains of other cows; VFI happened because a desperate king fed prion-infected human brains to his people.
“It really could’ve survived that long in the tomb?” Rolando asked.
“Prions could survive millennia,” Stanton explained. “And it could have been lying in wait inside that tomb. That place was a time bomb.”
That Volcy had set off, no doubt. He’d gone into a tomb, stirred up the dust, and then touched his eyes.
Victor said, “Paktul suggests that only those who ate human meat became sick. Presumably you don’t think Volcy was a cannibal, so how did VFI become airborne?”
“A prion is prone to mutation,” Stanton told them. “It was born to change. A thousand years concentrated in that tomb, it became something else, something even more potent.”
He scanned the page for another passage.
Jaguar Imix and his retinue consumed the flesh of men for many moons in good graces of the gods without being cursed. But whatever god protected them before does so no longer.
They now understood the genesis of the disease, but even Stanton didn’t know exactly how to use the information. Were there answers in the tomb itself ? Two days ago, armed with this, he would’ve tried to convince CDC to authorize a wide search for Kanuataba. He’d called Davies—now back working at the Prion Center—and told him what they’d found. But there were no experiments the team could run using this information. Stanton thought about emailing Cavanagh, but even if she could get past her anger with him, they still didn’t have an exact location to send the team. The Guatemalans would
And according to the news reports, CDC had things closer to home to worry about: People were slipping out of L.A. by land, air, and sea, and the quarantine wouldn’t hold much longer. Finding the original source would hardly be Atlanta’s top priority. Words written a thousand years ago would not convince them.
“If Paktul and the three children founded Kiaqix,” Rolando said, “I don’t understand why the myth said it was an Original Trio. There are four of them.”
“The oral history isn’t sacrosanct,” Chel said. “There are so many different versions, and they get passed down across so many generations, it’s not hard to imagine them losing a person in the translation.”
Stanton was only half listening now. Something about the sections he’d just been reading stuck in his mind, and he studied them again. In each passage, the king was proud of how long he and his men had been eating human flesh and the power it had given them. Three hundred suns. For almost a year before the king fed his commoners human meat, he and his men engaged in cannibalism, and they’d clearly eaten brains. So why hadn’t they gotten sick? Had the brains they’d eaten been completely free of prion?
Stanton pointed this out to the team. “Within a month of when the human meat is introduced into the food supply for everyone else,” he said, “it makes everyone—including the king and his men—sick.”
“What happened?” Rolando asked.
“Something changed.”
“Like what?” Chel asked.
“The ancients believed bad things happened when the gods weren’t honored,” Rolando said, invoking Paktul’s claim that whatever once protected the king did no longer. “Many indigenas would still tell you disease is a result of the gods’ anger.”
“Well, I would tell you disease is the result of mutated proteins,” Stanton said. “And I don’t believe in
