background projections. 'Bienvenidos al Parque Arqueolуgico Olmeca! Aquн es San Lorenzo, la casa de las cabezas colosales y el lugar de la cultura Madre de las civilizaciones Mexicanas! Que id-ioma prefieren? Espaсol. Nahuatl. Inglйs. Japonйs. Mandarнn. Cantonйs. Swahili.' The chirpy voice ran down a cornucopia of translation possibilities.
The place looked like a ruin, two reasonably modern whitewashed buildings stuck on the edge of the clearing with doors hanging ajar and windows shattered, three thatched palapas fallen into disrepair. A herd of cattle grazed among the mounds, which were themselves nothing much to look at, nothing like what she expected of the ancient and magnificent home of the mother culture of the Mexican civilizations.
But the technology worked just fine.
Eleanor gave her a tug. They followed a path across the ruins toward the larger of the two whitewashed buildings. Every few meters 3-D nesh projections flashed on and began their fixed lec-ture-and-display: the old ruins came to life, if nesh could be called life or perhaps more correctly only the simulation of life.
Poles stuck in the ground were the storehouses for the treasure-the knowledge, the reconstruction of the past. Between them, quartered, angled, huge image displays whirled into being: here, a high plaza topped with a palace built of clay with a stone stele set upright in front; there, one of the great stone heads watching out across a reconstructed plaza with the quiet benevolence of a ruler whose authority rests on his unquestioned divinity; suddenly and all of a piece, the entire huge clearing flowering into being to reveal the huge complex, plaza, steps, temples, and courtyards paved with green stone, as it might have looked three thousand years before during the fluorescence of this earliest of the great Mesoamerican civilizations.
Eleanor yanked her inside the building. Rose stumbled over the concrete threshold and found herself in a dilapidated museum, long since gone to seed with the collapse of the tourist trade in nesh reconstructions of ancient sites. All that investment, in vain once the novelty had worn off and people stopped coming. Most tourists took their vacations upstairs, these days. Mere human history couldn't compete with the wonders of the solar system and the adventure promised by the great net, and affordable prices, that opened out into human and Chapelli space.
The museum had been abandoned, maybe even looted. Empty cases sat on granite pedestals; tarantulas crowded along the ceiling; a snake slithered away through a hole in the floor.
'Shit,' swore Eleanor again. 'Did it have bands? Did you notice?'
'Did what have bands?'
'The snake. Goddess above, you ever taken any eco courses? There are poisonous snakes here. Real poisonous snakes.' Dropping Rose's wrist, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle. Rose clapped hands over her ears, but Eleanor did not repeat the whistle. Her ears still itched and with her fingers there in such proximity, Rose could not help but scratch them but it only made them sting more. She yanked her hands away and clutched the damp hem of her shift, curling the loose spinsil fabric around her fingers, gripping hard.
A trap in the floor opened, sliding aside, and a ladder unfolded itself upward out of the hole. Moments later a head emerged which resolved itself into a woman dressed in an expensive business suit, solar gold knee-length tunic over plaid trousers; the tunic boasted four narrow capelets along its shoulders. She also wore tricolor hair, shoulder length, all of it in thin braids of alternating red, black, and gold-the team colors of the most recent Solar Cup champions. Rose knew her fashionable styles, since in her father's set fashion was everything, and to wear a style six months out of date was to invite amused pity and lose all one's invitations to the best and most sunny parties. This woman was fashionable.
Two men, dressed in utility suits, followed the woman up from the depths. Both carried tool cases.
'Eleanor,' said the businesswoman. They touched palms, flesh to flesh, by which Rose saw-though it already seemed likely given her entrance-that this was the real woman and not her nesh analogue. 'All has gone as planned?'
'I'm afraid not. The Ra is disabled, but we seem to have run into some competition.' She gestured toward the two men. 'Go quickly. We'll need to transfer the array to our hover before they can call in reinforcements.' They hurried out the door.
'And this one?' asked the businesswoman. 'Is this another of your ugly puppies?'
Rose wanted desperately to ask, What are you going to do with me? but the phrase stuck in her throat because it sounded so horribly like a line in one of her dad's acties. Maybe she sweated more, because of nerves, but who could tell in this heat?
'When the operation is over, we can let her go.' Eleanor spoke almost apologetically. 'I just wanted her out of the way in case there are complications. And she's a good rabbit to keep in the hat, in case there are complications. She's the daughter of the actor.'
'Oh!' the businesswoman crooked one eyebrow in surprised admiration. 'Oh! Well, I mean, there was so much publicity about it. She's not nearly as pretty. And that-' She stopped herself, although her hand brushed her own cheek in the place the mark stood on Rose's face. She lowered the hand self-consciously. 'Vasil Veselov is your father?'
Rose didn't know what to say. She nodded.
The businesswoman waved invitingly toward the trap. 'Put her in the basement.'
Eleanor took hold of Rose's wrist again and pulled her toward the extruded ladder.
'Go on.'
A touch of cool air drifted up from the hole, quickly subsumed in the heat. Rose glanced toward the businesswoman, now making calculations on a slate; she had apparently forgotten about her partner and Rose, much less the great actor.
'Go on.' Eleanor snapped her fingers. 'Go.'
Rose climbed down. Beneath lay a basement consisting of a corridor and six storerooms. Water beads like the sweat of the earth trickled down the concrete walls. Eleanor shoved her along to the end of the row where a door stood ajar. Waving Rose in, she began to push the door shut.
'What are you going to do with me?' Rose demanded, finally succumbing to the cliche.
'Nothing with you. You're a nice kid, Rose, unlike those obnoxious spoiled brats who have nothing better to do with their time than waste it circling the Earth as if that somehow makes them more especial than the rest of humanity. Like they're paying for it! What a sick advertising stunt! I didn't want you to get hurt.'
'What did you mean about keeping a rabbit in the hat?'
'Planning for contingencies. It doesn't matter. Anyway, I really admire your father. Sheh.' She gave a breathy whistle. 'I had a holo of him in my room when I was younger. You'll be free to go in an hour or so.'
'What's going on?' This request, Rose knew, would be followed by the Bad Guy telling all, because Bad Guys always told all. They could never resist the urge to reveal their diabolical plans.
Eleanor slammed the door shut-not because of anger but because the door wasn't hung true and was besides swollen from moisture and heat and that was the only way to get it to shut. Left alone in the room, Rose tested the door at once, but it didn't budge. She stuck her ear to the keyhole but heard nothing, not even footsteps. At least the itching had begun to subside. Finally, she turned and surveyed her prison.
It was an ugly room with concrete rebar walls, a molding ceiling sheltering two timid tarantulas in one corner, and a floor made up of peeling rectangles of some mottled beige substance. The tarantulas made her leery, but she didn't fear them; she knew quite a bit about their behavior after living on the set of Curse of the Tarantula. The rest of the room disquieted her more. The floor wasn't level, and the tiles hadn't been well laid, leaving gaps limned with a powdery white dust. Two old cots made up of splintery wood supports with sun-faded, coarse burlap stretched between stood side by side.
Ugly puppies.
She winced, remembering the businesswoman's casual words. In one corner someone had set up a shrine on an old plastic table, one of whose legs had been repaired with duct tape. Two weedy-looking bouquets of tiny yellow-and-white flowers resting crookedly in tin pots sat one on either side of a plastic baby doll with brown hair, brown eyes, and painted red lips. The doll was dressed in a lacy robe, frayed at the hem and dirty along the right sleeve, as though it had been dragged through dirt. A framed picture of the same doll, or one just like it, lay at its feet, showing the doll sitting on a similar surface but almost smothered by offerings of flowers and faded photographs of real children, some smiling, some obviously ill, one apparently dead. Someone had written at the bottom of the picture, in black marker in crude block letters, El Nino Doctor. Doctor Baby Jesus.
Rose knew something about the Kristie-Anne religion. Jesus was the god-person-man they prayed to,
