Unite and Conquer td-102 Read online

But Coatlicue was the Coatlicue of the ages. She stood as she had before the mysterious transformation. Her stone skin was as before. There was no mistaking her weight, her earthy solidity, her fierce womanly charms.

  She was Coathcue whole again.

  It was a miracle-more miracle than the remarkable walking away of so long ago, and so Rodrigo Lujan, his inner Zapotecness rising to the surface, fell down and worshiped her with hot tears in his luminous eyes and the ancient words spewing from his mouth.

  O, She of the Serpent Shirts Mighty are you, Mother of Huitzilopochtli Crusher of bones.

  Coatlicue had made no reply to that first obeisance.

  Nor had she spoken on later occasions, after museum hours with the sun going down behind the mountains, when Lujan whispered questions to her.

  "Why did you walk away, Coatlicue? What summoned you to Teotihaucan, seat of the nameless old ones? What terrible, shattering fate befell you there?"

  Question after question, but no answer.

  It happened one day two years after Lujan had given up questioning his Mother Goddess, and the terrible memories were dimming just as the memories of the great earthquake had faded somewhat. Rodrigo Lujan was explaining to a visiting Yale professor of ethnology the significance of Coatlicue.

  "She is our Mother Goddess, our Mexican earth mother."

  "She looks ferocious."

  "Yes, she is terrible to behold, but all the gods of old Mexico were terrible. That was their beauty. There is beauty in terror and terror in beauty."

  "Tell me," said the visiting professor, "I understood she had been shattered by a fall or something. But I see no signs of trauma."

  "This was erroneously reported in the newspapers. As you can see, Our Mother is whole and undamaged."

  There ensued some small talk, and the visiting professor moved on to feast his unworshipful eyes upon the other treasures of the museum.

  Gringos, Lujan thought. They came. They gawked. They moved on. But they never understood the allure of brutality. When the last gringo lay under the soil, Coatlicue would endure, just as she had endured the remorseless centuries.

  Gringos did not matter. Just as long as there were Zapotecs to worship her. That was all that mattered to Rodrigo Lujan.

  He was startled only a few hours later on that long-ago evening when, as the museum was closing and he was paying his nightly respects to the Mother Goddess, Coatliacue spoke to him in the slow language of the gringos, English.

  "Survive. . ."

  The voice was an agony of elongated syllables.

  "What?"

  "Survival..."

  "Yes. Survival. I understand your speech, Coatlicue. What are you trying to tell me?"

  Her words were like broken stones knocking together. "I. . . must.. survive."

  "More. You must endure. You will endure. Long after I am dust and bones, you will endure, for you are the mother of all indios."

  "Help... me... to...survive."

  "How?"

  "Protect... me...."

  "You are in the most protected building in all of Mexico, save for the Presidential Palace," Lujan reassured his goddess.

  "My enemies must never find me."

  "Nor will they. We will confound them at every turn, for are we not Zapotec?"

  "Meaning unclear. Clarify."

  Lujan frowned. "Why do you speak the language of the gringos?"

  "English is the language l am programmed to understand."

  "This is most passing strange. Tell me, Coatlicue, I implore you. Why did you desert this fine museum so long ago?"

  "To defeat my enemies."

  "And they are now vanquished?"

  "No. I was nearly vanquished. Even now my systems have not fully repaired themselves. So I have altered my survival plait."

  The words were coming more fluidly now, as from an engine shaking off years of disuse.

  "Yes?" Lujan prompted.

  "It is not necessary to destroy the meat machines in order to survive. I am a machine of metal and other nonliving matter. I will not die unless destroyed. All meat machines die when their organic systems fail or wear out. I will outlast the meat machines, who are programmed for obsolescence."

  "Who-what are these things you call meat machines?"

  "Men are meat machines."

  "Women, too?"

  "All biological organisms are machines. They are self-propelled constructs of flesh and bone and other organic matter, yet they are only machines of a biological kind. I am a machine of a more enduring kind. I will survive by surviving. When they have all died, l will be free to leave this prison."

  "This is not a prison. This is your home, your temple, your redoubt. Under this site lies the crushed rubble of Tenochtitlan, the old Aztec capital. Do you not remember?"

  "I will abide here in this place until the optimum conditions for my continued survival have been achieved. Then I will leave. You must protect me until then."

  "I will do this. Whatever you want. Just name these things. And I will lay them at your feet."

  "I need nothing from you, meat machine. I am self-sustaining. I have no desires. I can exist in this present assimilated form for as long as necessary."

  "I promise you that I will watch over you to the end of my days, and after that my sons will take up where I leave off and their sons after them and on and on until the day comes where Mexicans-the true Mexicans-again control their own destinies."

  "It is an agreement."

  And so it was done. After that, Coatlicue spoke little other than to inquire about conditions in the world outside the museum. She rejoiced in every tragedy. Famines and catastrophes in which there were large losses of human life particularly interested her. It was very Aztec.

  For his part, Rodrigo Lujan saw that she was not moved or harmed and every night he beseeched her unheeding ears with whispered entreaties to restrain the earth from another upheaval.

  Sometimes he would burn copal incense in a jade cup and lay songbirds at her feet, which he would pierce with a stingray spine, delicately excising the still-beating heart and laying it on a rude basalt altar taken from a glass case.

  These sacrifices neither offended nor propitiated Coatlicue, so Lujan dutifully continued them.

  When the first shudders of what would be called the Great Mexico City Earthquake of 1996 shook the foundations of the Museum of Anthropology, Rodrigo Lujan bolted from his office, eyes stark with fright, his mind focusing on one thing and one thing only.

  "Coatlicue!" he gasped, rushing to her side.

  She stood as always, hulking, resolute, seemingly indestructible, as all around the walls shook and glass cases danced, breaking the precious pottery and firedclay figures of the old cultures.

  The building walls were all but screaming now. The hard marble floor cracked and heaved under Lujan's stumbling feet.

  "Coatlicue! Coatlicue! What is happening?"

  Coatlicue stood firm and unmovable as the rumble grew to a roar and outside, the entire metropolis began to scream in a million voices, only some of them human. Glass was breaking in cascades. But Lujan had no thought for the irreplaceable treasures that were being forever shattered.

  He cared only for the goddess who was all.

  "Coatlicue. Coatlicue. Speak to me!" he cried in Spanish.

  But Coatlicue remained mute until she began to shift on her thick tree-trunk feet.

  "What is happening, meat machine?" she asked in unaccented English.

  "It is an earthquake, Coatlicue. The ground is shaking."

  "I am no longer safe here."

  "No. No. You are safe."

  Then a wall buckled, and great chunks of stone made a dusty pile that belied the truthfulness of Rodrigo Lujan's words.

  "Survive," Coatlicue began saying. "Must survive. Instruct me how to maximize my survival."

  "Quickly! We must leave the building before it falls about our ears. Come this way."

  And with an awful grinding that was music to Lujan's ears
, Coatilcue's feet separated at the vertical seam, and like a stone elephant, she took a step with one stone-taloned foot.

  The floor buckled. She froze as if gyroscopes were spinning and compensating for her imbalance. The foot dropped down with a shuddery thud. The other foot lifted, stepped forward less than a foot and dropped heavily beside the other.

  Rodrigo Lujan was ecstatic.

  "Yes, yes, you can walk. You must walk. Come, follow me."

  Coatlicue took another step. And another. They came more quickly now. Lumbering, as heavy as a truck, she thudded a foot at a time, one foot at a time, toward the beckoning figure of Rodrigo Lujan.

  "Hurry, hurry. The ceiling is crumbling."

  Plaster rained down. More debris. It was terrible, but amid this terror was a raw beauty that struck Rodrigo Lujan's worshipful eyes. His goddess was walking. Before his eyes she was striding purposefully for the outside and safety.

  The courtyard beckoned. There the great concrete mushroom-shaped fountain lay on its side, bubbling water. She splashed through the wreckage, grinding concrete shards to powder with every ponderous step.

  The great glass entry doors stood in ruins. She hobbled toward them. They shattered before her immense bulk.

  "Yes. Like that. Be careful. O Coatlicue, you are magnifico!"

  Out on the grass, she came to a stop. Her head, a broad glyph of two kissing serpents, now parted. The heads, though stone, became stiffly flexible. They looked around like a gecko lizard's independent eyes, one head going this way and the other that.

  Twin serpents of stone, they seemed to see all that was going on around them. Lujan also stared. And what he saw filled him with wonder and infinite terror.

  It was worse than the '85 quake. It was a city falling into ruin-the earth shook and shook and shook while to the southeast Popocatepetl rumbled and belched a volume of ash that darkened the overhead sky like a filthy brown pall.

  "Look, Coatlicue! Your brother Popocatepetl is coming to life! All of old Mexico is coming to life. The new is being overthrown and dashed into the cold, unforgiving earth. The old is resurgent, ascendant, invincible!"

  And as the thunder of volcanic activity and the rumble of the unstable earth merged into a growling howl of sound, on the lawn of the Museum of Anthropology, Coatlicue stood resolute, her animate serpent heads twisting about, mouthing one word over and over again in a grinding voice.

  "Survive, survive, survive..."

  Chapter 4

  Remo was still feeling good when he arrived home later that afternoon. He felt so good that the sight of the fieldstone monstrosity he called home almost looked good to him.

  It took up a huge corner lot bide a sandstone high school. The place had been a church at one time, later subdivided into condo apartments. The roofline was crowded with dormer windows. Instead of a steeple, a squat stone tower bulked up.

  As the cab dropped him off before the main entrance, Remo noticed someone was up on the tower roof. There was a flash of plum-colored silk visible between two toothlike merlons.

  Remo called up. "That you, Little Father?"

  A whimsical, birdlike head poked out from the stone gap. It belonged to Chiun, his mentor and trainer in the art of Sinanju.

  "The earth has moved," Chiun said in a squeaky voice. His impossibly wrinkled face was pensive.

  "I didn't feel anything."

  "How could you? You have only now landed. I have been awaiting you."

  "How'd you know what time I'd be back?"

  "I spied your pale face as the aerial conveyance descended not forty minutes ago. Come. We must speak."

  Remo said, "I'll be right up."

  Letting himself in, Remo climbed the stairs to the tower meditation room. The room boasted a bigscreen TV and two VCRs. There was no furniture to speak of. Just clean reed mats scattered about the stone floor in lieu of chairs. The Master of Sinanju refused to let Western-style chairs defile his place of meditation.

  Chiun padded down a short spiral stairway lately installed because, he claimed, he liked to breathe the clean air of the higher latitudes.

  Remo suspected him of using the roof as a vantage point to spit on passing Chinese. There had been complaints.

  Chiun spit on Chinese passersby because a Chinese emperor had once cheated a distant ancestor. Chiun was Korean, the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Sinanju was a fishing village in the western reaches of the Korean peninsula, where the fishing was terrible. Five thousand years ago, the village had first sent its best menfolk out into Asia and beyond to perform assassinations and other distasteful work no self-respecting bowman or samurai would undertake.

  From this beginning grew the greatest assassins of the ancient world, the House of Sinanju, which developed the art of Sinanju. Sinanju preceded tae kwon do, karate, kung fu, ninja and the other killing disciplines that had spread to all cultures.

  Sinanju was the sun source of them all, and its mysteries never left the village whose desperation had birthed it. Passed down from father to son, it was a closely held secret even today. Chiun was the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Remo was the first American disciple.

  Neither looked like the most perfect killing machine to take human form, especially Chiun, but that's exactly what they were. For Sinanju developed more than martial skills. It awoke the brain, unleashing its full, awesome potential, transforming its practitioners and making them achieve what a more superstitious age would call a godlike state but today would be termed a Superman state.

  Remo bowed in greeting. He towered over the Master of Sinanju, who barely topped five feet. Born at the end of the last century, Chiun looked seventy, but hadn't been that young in three decades. A plum-hued kimono draped his pipe-stem body. His bald head was very shiny, the skin stretched like vellum over the bone. A cloud of hair roosted over each ear. His face was a mummy's mask of interlacing wrinkles, decorated by hazel eyes so alive they could have belonged to a child. A wisp of a beard hung off his chin.

  Chiun bowed in return. Not quite as deeply as Remo, but nearly so. It was a gesture of ultimate respect that he bowed to another human being at all.

  "So what's this about the earth moving?" Remo asked.

  Chiun's bony hands fluttered in the air, their long nails flashing.

  "This is an unstable land. It is always moving."

  Remo gave the room a quick glance. "Everything looks shipshape. And the cabbie didn't mention any earthquake."

  "The earthquake has not transpired under our feet, but at a location far distant from here. My sensitive feet detected the vibrations."

  Remo said nothing. The Master of Sinanju was fully capable of detecting a remote earthquake because he was in tune with his surroundings by virtue of being at one with the universe. It was no more incredible than his hazel eyes being able to spot Remo's face in the cabin window of a descending jet. Chiun could count the ticks on a black cat at midnight.

  "Probably in California. They're having a lot of earthquakes lately."

  Chiun stroked his wisp of a beard. "No, closer than that."

  "Okay, maybe in the Midwest."

  "The earth vibration come from the south."

  "Well, it'll be on the news soon enough. What's the problem?"

  "We are in service to an unstable land. It is politically unstable and it is unstable in far more treacherous ways. The gods are calling down curses upon this new Rome."

  "Yeah, well, until Zeus personally tells me to find a new country, I'm not budging."

  "Every day it is something new. If not conflagrations, it is typhoons. If not typhoons, it is earthquakes or sludge slides or avalanches of rock or worse calamities."

  "That's mostly in California."

  "It is connected to the rest of America, is it not? And is it not said that all customs that bedevil America begin in its far western province?"

  "Yeah, but earthquakes and firestorms don't migrate like crystal sniffing or color therapy. We have nothing to worry about."

  "Yet the ear
th moved. To the south. Not to the west. If the instabilty to the west has traveled east, then what is to stop it from coming north to topple my fine castle?"

  "This is New England, Little Father," Remo explained patiently. "The last time Massachusetts had a major earthquake, the Pilgrims fell off their horses."

  Chiun gasped. "So recent as that! I did not know this."

  "For crying out loud, that was four hundred years ago!"

  Chiun's hazel eyes narrowed. "Perhaps I was too hasty in signing my last contract. Perhaps we should relocate at once lest we be buried under the rubble of this doomed Atlantis."

  "I don't believe Atlantis ever existed and, if you'll excuse me, I have a few loose ends to tie up."

  Chiun ceased his fussy pacing. He narrowed one eye in Remo's direction.

  "You were successful?"

  Remo nodded. "The only crack skyscraper in human history has been shut down."

  "And the fiend who was called Friend?"

  "I threw every computer chip I could find into the Atlantic."

  "Good. He will never vex us again."

  "Fine with me. Enough vexing goes on around here as it is."

  Remo had the phone receiver in one hand and was leaning on the 1 button. It was the foolproof code that connected him to Dr. Harold W Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE, the organization he worked for even though it didn't officially exist.

  At length a lemony voice came on the line.

  "Remo?"

  "It's shut down."

  "Did you locate the Friend chip?"

  "I found a zillion chips. Chucked them all into the ocean."

  "You are certain you got them all?"

  "All the big ones, at any rate. Cleaned out the place of other vermin, too."

  "Good."

  "Okay. My end is done. Now you have to take care of your end."

  "What is your wish?"

  "I'm still waiting for that replacement car you promised me at the last negotiation."

  "I am working on it."

  "It's gotta be impervious to these maniac Boston drivers. And I want you to find my daughter, by the way."

  The line was quiet for a moment.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I have a daughter. I need to find her."

  "I had no idea you had a daughter. How old?"