here. SOUTH, I read off a green sign. Wrong color for South, I thought. I was going too fast to look around but I moved the rearview mirror from side to side. No cars coming up behind me, at least not fast. I looked at the gas. Enough, I somewhere knew the needle pointed to. Jed’s mind seemed to think that the night watcher bloods, I mean, the police, might be relatively easy to shake because no matter what bonuses they were getting they’d still only assign a couple of people to the case. But I also had a large, well-funded private organization after me, which is a lot more serious. I figured I’d cruise as far as possible for about four-hundred-score beats and then change cars. No sweat, as they say these days. I started pulling at the last layer of magically clear cloth that was still stuck to my right hand. I watched the yellow speed indicator clicking up through these people’s gangly base-ten numerals, up through a sort of sky or ceiling that Jed’s mind called the Invisible Gardol Shield, 67, 71, 79, 83, 97. I touched the CRUISE glyph at 94 and held on to the steering plate like a child on its mother’s back, feeling the speed of twenty Mixtec runners.
Score, I said to myself. Goal.
Game.
FOUR
(108)
I left the U.S. heading backward on the so-called “Maya Diaspora” illegal-immigration route that Jed had once sponsored, from Miami to San Antonio and then male-handward along what they called the Pan-American Sacbe through the resettled Teotihuacan and finally Belize City. I was able to utilize some of the fruits of Jed’s paranoia. Before leaving Florida, I rolled someone from a pastless clan-I think they call them Homeless People here-for his revolting but correctly sized clothing, picked up a semifake passport from Jed 1 ’s anonymous safe at a storage warehouse, and even found that he had set up a Dominican Republic account under a false name that would let me withdraw cash from Western Union ATMs using a code, and not a card-and after a bit of bullying, Jed’s dying consciousness gave me the code. I kept up my pentadaily call to what Jed 1 had called his Secret Server, to keep it from spilling the beans. One of Jed 1 ’s old Zeta contacts-I gambled on his being okay because it was one of a few that he’d never mentioned or entered on any keyboard-sold me some other papers and five very small explosive devices, which we FedExed, disguised as printer cartridges, to another Zeta guy in Ladyville, Belize.
Getting from Orlando to Belmopan used up five suns. By the time I dug in there, a jornada from the Stake, I’d become familiar enough with English and Spanish to interact with the domeheads without making Jed-in-Me interpret-he’d had a big advantage over me when he was my guest, of course, because he already spoke a decayed dialect of Chorti-and I even stopped bumping into people on the sidewalk. I’d been trying to pass them on the sunward side, what they’d call the British side. But people here went around things clockwise, as they called it. And there were other things that were hard to get used to. Car fart, or exhaust as they euphemistically called it, was one thing I could never handle, even though I’d slept in killing valleys filled in a fog of burning gangrene. Exhaust was soaked into everything, in the water and in the food. On the other hand there were the splendid things. I got so amazed by the Wal-Mart in Monterrey that I wasted hours just walking around in it. First it was the amount and variety of sheer things that got me, and then it was the goods themselves, rolls of turquoise foil and mats of fur cut, I thought, from giant blue deer that lived on the verso of the world in a place Jed’s brain said was called China-and televisions and carnival glass and so on-but finally the oddest thing for me was the way the same complex object could be flawlessly repeated over and over, like it was one of those demons that used to live in the hills, who could be in different places at the same time. Metal bothered me, so I got a complete set of thirty-four Ming Tsai white ceramic knives. Then I found the upscale malls, and for a while I couldn’t keep myself from buying all sorts of red- striped clothing at Versace and Richard James, until I realized it was making me stand out too much. So I forced myself to blend in, to dress for the hunt. I got my tattoos back as compensation, so I could wear some of my old power-glyphs inside, on my skin. The tattoo artist loved some of the designs so much he wanted to keep them, but I explained they were secret and if he let them out, I’d have to come back and eat him. I got my hair extended again. My hotel room started filling up with jewelry and exotic mock-weapons and sports equipment and gadgets from Sharper Image and Lifestyle Innovations. Eventually I realized that for some reason all the stuff that I thought was the most expensive, turquoise, jade, amber, ivory, jet, pyrite-all those things-were now the cheapest substances of all thanks to the new alchemy. Color, matter, and place were all worth nothing, and that had turned the people into cowards, only half alive.
I bought a thigh-top magic book and got Jed’s fading memories working on hacking into the Warren files again, but I couldn’t manage to do much. Jed-in-Me felt almost gone. And I didn’t have any tsam lic to help me crack the passwords. Finally I gave up. That Marena’s going to have to do this stuff, I thought. Even if I have to boil her feet.
So instead, I focused on blending in. Food around now had been hard to get used to. Most of the foods I liked were easy to find, turkey, peanuts, chilies, tortillas, tequila-although they were all quite different, all uniform, with no souls. Corn was gigantic and sweet but they had only one kind on the ear. You could get the sacred blue strain-in fact, anyone could get it-but only in shards of broken tortillas. I found I could get venison and some fish and shellfish, but that dog, bats, locusts, and axolotl, and of course people, were almost unobtainable. When I did catch and cook up a stray dog, its flesh was gamy and festering with internal boils. Pet dogs were better but harder to capture, and still had that all-pervading taste of petroleum-which was the most unpleasant thing about the final hotun. The entire time, since I’d found myself in the hospital, there wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t hear and smell an engine digesting somewhere, on the streets, in the walls, overhead, whatever. So generally I stuck to turkey. There was even a kind of sacrificial festival for birds, with even the lower clans eating big fat birds, with divination by something they called the wishbone and the cranberry sauce standing in for blood.
I scattered my white blood a few times, with professionals from sex castes. Tony Sic’s mutilated foreskinless penis was much less sensitive than mine had been, even with all the scars mine had from the offerings. Anyway, it wasn’t safe, since I had to execute and dispose of them, so I gave it up.
The U.S.-increasingly an outcast state anyway-had had to recall ambassadors and shut down embassies in all of Latin America and in several countries around the world. Troops were being asked to leave their bases in over fifty countries. Another domino falling. Two weeks ago the UN had passed a resolution condemning the U.S.’s actions. The next domino. However, following the UK’s lead, Belize had not passed a resolution condemning the U.S. With this as something of an excuse, two days ago Guatemala had demanded that Belize break off ties with the UK. Belize, knowing that would make them vulnerable to a Guate invasion, refused. Now, it seemed that the Guates were poised to cross into Belize at its southern and southeastern borders.
Among other countries, Guatemala was demanding that all U.S. military advisers leave the country. And the U.S. State Department was in crisis mode about it, since Belize was still a British protectorate, the borders were closed and the militaries of both countries were on full alert. I was by now understanding more and more about Jed’s life and world and I wondered whether the conflict meant that Lindsay would have to cancel his planned Neo-Teo opening party at the NeoMayaLand Hyperbowl in Belize, less than two jornadas from the Guatemala border-or whether the dispute was something Lindsay wanted to make happen.
The newscasters mentioned that there were reports that officials in the stricken villages had received anonymous tips that something disastrous was going to happen-probably, it was said, from someone within the Drug Enforcement Administration who didn’t agree with the policy.
And, in astronomical news, there was a new Herbig Ae/Be star in the Pleiades.
Jed’s memories gave me four hundred times four hundred ways of keeping out of sight. I worked out a good approach, a very direct one, low tech for today’s post-high-tech world, and crossed what was now the border of the Stake well ahead of time. I hid out in a dry wash near a hot water pipe from the power plant, in a foundation for a cooling tank that wouldn’t begin construction until the next b’aktun, which meant never.
Even when I’d been hiding out in Texas KOA kampgrounds, I learned from police broadcasts that while there
