Port-au-Prince airport, struggling with a huge trunk full of cast-iron cookware. Hiram made the trunk light enough for his new employee (who speaks no English, but Hiram insists that spices are a universal language) to carry on one shoulder. At tonight's dinner, Howard tells me, Worchester insisted on visiting the kitchen to get the chef's recipe for chicken mole, but while he was back there he concocted some sort of flaming dessert in honor of our hosts.
By rights I ought to object to Hiram Worchester, who revels in his acedom more than any other man I know, but I find it hard to dislike anyone who enjoys life so much and brings such enjoyment to those around him. Besides, I am well aware of his various anonymous charities in Jokertown, though he does his best to conceal them. Hiram is no more comfortable around my kind than Tachyon is, but his heart is as large as the rest of him.
Tomorrow the group will fragment yet again. Senators Hartmann and Lyons, Congressman Rabinowitz, and Ericsson from WHO will meet with the, leaders of the PRI, Mexico's ruling party, while Tachyon and our medical staff visit a clinic that has claimed extraordinary success in treating the virus with laetrile. Our aces are scheduled to lunch with three of their Mexican counterparts. I'm pleased to say that Troll has been invited to join them. In some quarters, at least, his superhuman strength and near invulnerability have qualified him as an ace. A small breakthrough, of course, but a breakthrough nonetheless.
The rest of us will be traveling down to Yucatan and the Quintana Roo to look at Mayan ruins and the sites of several reported antijoker atrocities. Rural Mexico, it seems, is not as enlightened as Mexico City. The others will join us in Chichen Itza the following day, and our last day in Mexico will be given over to tourism.
And then it will be on to Guatemala... perhaps. The daily press has been full of reports on an insurrection down there, an Indian uprising against the central government, and several of our journalists have gone ahead already, sensing a bigger story than this tour. If the situation seems too unstable, we may be forced to skip that stop.
THE TINT OF HATRED
Part Two
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1986, MEXICO:
" I stand in El Templo de los Jaguares, the Temple of the Jaguars, in Chicken Itza. Under the fierce Yucatan sun the archway is impressive, two thick columns carved in the likeness of gigantic snakes, their huge, stylized heads flanking the entrance, their linked tails supporting the lintel."
"A thousand years ago, the guide books tell us, Mayan priests cheered the players in El Juego de Pelota, the ball court twenty-five feet below. It was a game that would be familiar to any of us. The players struck a hard rubber ball with their knees, elbows, and hips, scoring as the ball caromed through rings set in the long stone walls flanking the narrow field. A simple game, played for the glory of the god Quetzalcoatl, or Kukulcan, as those here called him. As his reward, the captain of the victorious team would be carried to the temple. The losing captain would behead his opponent with an obsidian knife, sending him into a glorious afterlife. A bizarre reward for conquest, by our standards. "Too different to be comfortable.
"I look out on this ancient place, and the walls are still brown with blood; not of Mayans, but of jokers. The wild card plague struck here late and virulently. Some scientists have hypothesized that the mind-set of the victim influences the virus; thus, from a teenager fascinated by dinosaurs, you get Kid Dinosaur. From an obese master chef such as Hiram Worchester, you get someone who can control gravity. Dr. Tachyon, when asked, has been evasive on the subject, since it suggests that the deformed jokers have somehow punished themselves. That's just the kind of emotional fodder that reactionaries such as fundamentalist preacher Leo Barnett, or a fanatic `prophet' such as Nur al-Allah, would use for their own purposes."
"Still, perhaps it's not surprising that in the ancestral lands of the Mayans, there have been no less than a dozen plumed serpents over the years: images of Kukulcan himself."
And here in Mexico, if those of Indian blood had final say, perhaps even the jokers would be well-treated, for the Mayans considered the deformed blessed by the gods. But those of Mayan descent don't rule.