creature connected to another.
He played the fish for about ten minutes, though it didn't seem that long. It would take another, say, half hour to actually land the fish, but Ford didn't want to land it. He was too familiar with the end-game: the way the tarpon would veer toward the boat listing to one side, come up and make a deep belching sound like a blown horse, its gill rakes grayish from exhaustion and its muscles saturated with lactic acid from the long struggle. Even though he could have revived the fish, that final scene would have ruined it for him, so he pointed the rod tip at the tarpon, cupped the reel with his palm, and let the leader break at the tippet. Popular literature said the hook would corrode away within forty-eight hours—a ridiculous figure that he didn't believe. Ultimately, though, the hook would rust out and, in the meantime, the fish would have no trouble feeding.
The tarpon jumped once more, a strong jump, and was gone.
Tomlinson said sure, he understood what Ford was doing; dormitory chemistry had been his strong suit, and the only difference here was you just measured the precipitate, didn't swallow it or smoke it.
Ford said, 'Ah,' feeling that the Winkler Titration Method of determining oxygen content in water had somehow just been slandered. 'You've got it figured out already, huh?'
Tomlinson was combing his fingers through his long blond hair, peering at the 300-milliliter flask Ford held in his hand. 'What's to figure out? You fill the flask with water from the fish tank. You add the manganese solution, then treat it with an iodine base. Why else would you do that but so the manganese can combine with the oh-two to form a stable oxygen-manganese complex? Hell, Doc, a guy would have to be dumb not to see that.'
Ford had been doing the test for years, and it still wasn't clear to him why the manganese required iodine. He said, 'And that cloudy stuff in the flask, the precipitate, how would you measure that to determine how much oxygen is in the water?'
'That's supposed to give the oxygen content?' Tomlinson looked puzzled. 'How the hell can that be? It's not proportional, man. Situation like this, you got to deal in proportions. Need something else; a little kicker in there to free the iodine. What, you going to titrate a disproportional precipitate? Like barking up the wrong fucking tree, you ask me.'
'Well, you have to treat it with sulfuric acid first—' 'Right! Now how damn obvious, and I didn't even think of it. Got the ol' thinking cap on backward today, man—'
'And that dissolves the oxygen-manganese complex—' 'For sure, you don't have to say another word. Gives you free iodine in an amount proportional to the original amount of dissolved oh-two. Then you titrate it; probably use some kind of starch to make it easy to measure.'
'Well, starch, yeah, you can use starch—' 'Converts the whole business to iodine; probably a real pretty color, too, like violets or roses; you know, flowers. Goddamn, Doc, you know your business. I'll give you that.'
Feeling dumb, Ford said, 'Experience. I've been doing it for a long time.' Feeling mild shock, too. This was Tomlinson the drug casualty talking?
Normally, about this stage of the Winkler Titration Method, Ford referred to his notes so that he got all the steps straight. Now he forged on from memory so as not to disillusion Tomlinson . . . and maybe to save face, too. When he was finished, he looked up from his calculations and said, 'There's plenty of oxygen. Seven parts per million, which is high, but not too high. I've been testing the pH right along, and it's fine. So that leaves salinity, the amount of salt in the water. Cephalopods are very sensitive to changes in salinity.'
'I bet you got some kind of meter to test that. ' 'There's a thing called a refractometer, but mine's still on back-order. There's another way to determine salinity, though—'
'Hey! Couldn't you just figure out the density of the water? That ought to give you the salt content.'
Ford smiled patiently. 'That's a common mistake. Don't forget that water temperature has an effect—'
'Cross-graph it, man. Figure it all out on intersecting
curves. Of course water temperature has an effect on density, that goes without saying.'
Ford said, 'Right. I'm sorry I said it.'
They were sitting on the upper deck of the stilt house, Tomlinson talking away while Ford watched the moon drift out of the mangroves. He liked Tomlinson and he liked to hear him talk, but now he was mostly thinking about his fish tank, why he couldn't keep squid alive. Salinity had checked out at twenty-four parts per thousand, which was exactly the same as the salinity of the bay in which he had netted the squid. What could be wrong?
Tomlinson was saying 'Look at those big boomers down there, swimming round and round,' staring into the shark pen at the three cruising shapes. 'They got my mind in gear again, man. You and those sharks got my brain working for the first time since I left school. ' He lifted the bottle of beer to his lips. 'I don't know whether to thank you or file charges.'
'Huh?'
'Check it out: Yesterday I spent the whole day doing research. The whole day. Really humping it, too. Taking notes, cross-referencing, listening to Iron Butterfly.' He took another drink. 'Didn't take a whiz for about three hours straight.'
Ford heard enough of that to ask 'You find out why sharks in Africa swim counterclockwise when they're in captivity?'
'What? Naw, I should have checked on that; I coulda. This woman I know lives up on Captiva Island, she's got a computer. One of those laptops with a ten-meg hard drive and a telephone modem, so you can dial into these massive data banks, find out everything on just about any subject. But it wasn't sharks I was researching, it was the religious history of the Maya. The story you told about the freshwater sharks got me interested. Pagan deities, man. Ancient ceremonies. The influence of ancient religion on a specific modern culture. It's all part of philosophy and world history, my two chosen fields. Decided it was time for me to get back to work.'
Ford was listening now. 'You find much material?'
'A shitpot full, that's all. Coulda filled books, only this chick has a modem that receives at twelve hundred bauds and a crummy little printer that will only print at six hundred bauds. Don't you hate to borrow junk like that? Result: I couldn't print at all. Had to take notes like a crazy man. The old memory isn't what it used to be. Age does that, you know.'
'Age,' said Ford. Tomlinson was late thirties, tops. 'Right.'
'You said you worked in Masagua, but you ever hear much about the history: the Maya and the Spaniards and all that? It's crazy, bizarre; a fucking philosophical gold mine.'
Ford knew some of the history, but he said, 'No. Tell me.'
'Religious and racial genocide, that's what the Spaniards were into, man. This conquistador, Pedro de Alvarado, marches into the area now called Masagua with just over four hundred men. He's met by one of the two main tribes there, the Kache. The Kache were mostly farmers, hunters; working class, blue-collar types today. The Kache had about fifty thousand warriors, but they took one look at Alvarado with his long blond hair and decided he's the white god of Mayan mythology, Quetzalcoatl. Weird, huh?—the prophecy of a white god before they'd ever seen the Spaniards. Makes you wonder how much those Vikings got around. So the Kache surrender to Alvarado without a drop of blood being spilled. ' Tomlinson looked at Ford and held up two fingers. 'Important points for later reference: The blond god Quetzalcoatl, and the Kaches were too scared to fight.'
'Got it,' said Ford.
'The next tribe Alvarado decides to conquer is the Tlaxclen, way up in the mountains. The Tlaxclen have their workers, but they're mostly priests and architects, the keepers of the calendar. They're the descendants of the Maya who built the pyramids; the ones who invented the calendar. Remember—the classic period of the Maya was over by the time the Spaniards got there. Nearly all knowledge of glyph writing and pyramid building had been lost, but the Tlaxclen still knew the ceremonies; still knew the calendar.'
'I've heard about that calendar,' Ford said. 'Pretty complicated. It started fresh every fifty-two years.'
'Uh-huh, right. The Tlaxclen called that final year the Year of Seven Moons. Poetic damn people, weren't they? The Kache and the Tlaxclen traded, intermarried, got along just fine. Every year, on the summer solstice, both nations met in a really big ritual called the Ceremony of Seven Moons. It was what my old philosophy profs would have called a classic artifact of union. See, the Tlaxclen used this ceremony to hold the people together. Like what the Holy Grail might be to Christians, or like the sacred pipal tree where Sakyamuni got enlightenment and became Buddha. Something that kept things tight.
'Every year, a hundred thousand Maya or more participated. Very mystical; very complex. The Tlaxclen priests were the keepers of the faith because only they knew the incantations and how to read the signs.' Tomlinson looked at Ford. 'But maybe you know this stuff already, having lived there. '
