Serpent

conducting an autopsy. At .first glance the profiles appear identical, but upon further examination I detect subtle differences, mostly around the jaw and mouth but on the cranium as well. How am I doing, Sherlock?'

'You not only see but you also observe, my dear Watson.'

'Elementary, my dear fellow. Who drew these sketches? They are works of art in themselves.'

'The esteemed Dr. Chi. A man of varied talents.'

'I saw enough of the good professor not to be surprised at anything he does. How do you happen to have them?'

'Chi showed them to me when I was at Harvard. He asked me to run them by you. He remembered your background in archaeology before you switched to biology. But mostly he wanted a fresh eye.' Trout leaned his long body back and laced his fingers behind his head. 'I'm an ocean geologist. I can take this stuff and make all the pretty pictures I want to, but it doesn't make any sense to me.'

Gamay pulled a chair up beside her husband.

'Look at it this way, Paul. It's no different from somebody handing you a rock from the bottom of the ocean. What's the first thing you'd ask?'

'Easy. Where they got it.'

'Bravo.' She pecked him on the cheek. 'The same thing applies in archaeology. Mayan studies wasn't my area of expertise before I switched to marine biology, but here's my first question to you. Where did these glyphs come from?'

Trout tapped the screen. 'This one here is from the site Chi calls MIT Where you first ran into the chicleros.'

Gamay felt a frisson along her spine at the reminder of beating sun, jungle rot, and unshaven, unfriendly men. 'What about the others?'

'All from different locations Chi has visited.'

'What made him pick these, aside from the fact that they are almost identical?'

'Location. Each face was from an observatory carved with the frieze showing the boats that may or may not be Phoenician.'

'Intriguing.'

'Uhhuh. The professor thought so. The boat theme tied them together.'

'What's it all mean?'

'I don't know,' he said with a shrug. 'I'm afraid that's the extent of my Meso-american expertise.'

'Why don't we call Professor Chi?'

'Just tried. He wasn't in his Mexico City office. They said he was there earlier but would be unavailable.'

'Don't t tell me. They said he was in the field.'

Trout nodded. .'I left a message.'

'Don't hold your breath now that he's got his HumVee back. What about Orville?'

'The nutty professor? Exactly what I had in mind. First I wanted to run this stuff by you in case you had any inspiration.'

'Call Linus Orville. That's my inspiration.'

Trout flipped through his card file and punched out a number. When Orville answered Trout put him on the speaker phone.

'Ah, Mulder and Scully' Orville said, referring to the FBI characters in the popular TV program. 'How are things with the X-Files?'

In the most serious tone he could muster, Trout said, 'We've uncovered solid proof that those mysterious carved boats are from the lost continent of Mu.'

'You're kidding!' Orville replied breathlessly.

'Yeah, I'm kidding. I just like to say the word Mu.'

'Well, moo to you, too, Mulder. Now please tell me the real reason you called.'

'We need your opinion on those sketches Professor Chi left with Paul,' Gamay said.

'Oh, the Venus glyphs.'

'Venus?'

'Yes, the series of eight. Each figure represents an incarnation of the god Venus.'

Gamay looked at the grotesque profiles with their protruding jaws and foreheads. 'Ugh. I've always thought of the goddess of love as a delicate maiden drifting out of the sea foam on a scallop shell.'

'That's because you've been brainwashed. by Botticelli's vision and wasted your time on classical studies before you got out of the Temple of Doom game. The Mayan Venus was a male. '

'How chauvinistic.'

'Only to a point. The Maya were firm believers in equal opportunity when it came to human sacrifice. Venus symbolized Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan. The feathered serpent. It's all tied in. The analogy of birth and rebirth. Like Quetzalcoatl, Venus disappears for part of its cycle only to reappear.'

'I get it,' Trout said. 'The Maya decorated their temples with representations of the god to make him happy so he'd come back.'

'There was some of that, yeah, toadying up to the big guy. You have to understand how architecture was worked into theft religion. Mayan buildings were often fixed on key points like the solstice and equinox or where Venus appears and disappears. A celestial calculator. in other words.'

Gamay said, 'Professor Chi compared the observatory tower at the MIT site to a computer's hardware, the inscriptions on its side to software. He felt that it was only part of the whole picture, the way one circuit is part of a computer.'

'Yes, he ran that theory by me, but your carved tower has a long way to go before it becomes an IBM clone.'

'Still, it's possible that the tower and the others were part of a unified plan?' Gamay persisted.

'Don't get me wrong. The Maya were incredibly sophisticated and always manage to surprise. They often lined up palace doorways and streets to point to the sun and stars at various times of the year. You see, predicting the movements of Venus would give the priests tremendous power. The Venus god told the farmers about important dates like planting, harvest, and rainy season. The Caracol at Chichen Itza has windows that line up with Venus at various points on the horizon.'

'There are no boat inscriptions on the Caracol, as far as I know,' Gamay said.

'Only on those eight temples the glyphs came from. Venus disappears for eight days during its cycle. A scary thing if you were depending on the planet for important decisions. So the priests tossed a few maidens into a well, did some creative bloodletting, and everything was peachy again. Speaking of bloodletting, I've got a class in five minutes. Can we resume this fascinating discussion later?'

Gamay wasn't through. 'You say Venus disappears for eight days and that there are eight temples we know of with the boat carvings. Coincidence?'

'Chi didn't think so. Got to go. Can't wait to tell the class about the Musters.'

The phone clicked off. Paul picked up a yellow legal pad.

'That was edifying. Let's go over what we have. We've got eight temple observatories. Each one was built to chart the movements of Venus.' Trout made a note. 'These structures were also dedicated toward a single theme, the arrival of boats that could have been Phoenician, bearing great treasure. A wild guess. The observatories and Venus have something to do with the treasure.'

Gamay agreed. She took the notebook and drew eight circles at random. 'Say these are the temples.' She drew lines connecting the circles and stared at her doodles for a moment. 'There's something here,' she said.

Paul looked at the scribbles and shook his head. 'Looks like a flat-footed spider.'

'That's because we're thinking in earthbound terms. Look.' She drew two stars near the edge of the page. 'Rise above the earth. Let's say this is Venus at its extreme points on the horizon. That temple I saw at MIT had two slot-like openings like an archer's port in a castle. Here's what you would see if you drew a line from the window to one extreme of Venus. Now I'll do it out the other window.' Satisfied with her artwork, she drew lines from each observatory to the Venus points.

She stuck the rough grid she'd produced under Paul's nose.

'Now it looks like the mouth of an alligator about ready to have dinner,' he said.

'Maybe. Or a hungry serpent.'