Damn, I thought, now this is what you call a strong hallucination. As soon as the idea came to me, though, Maximon seemed to fade a bit, so I put it out of my mind. He might still come up with something of value. The thing was, there’s more in your mind than you realize. And when you’re in someone else’s mind, like I was, the whispers just keep on coming. And some of them strengthen into voices, and some of those solidify into, well, into something like I’d just seen. And some of those — not most, because then you’d be just another crazy person, but some-can be worth paying attention to. Especially in a place like this. Like everybody’s here in the old days, Chacal’s brain didn’t think hunches and insights came from within. They came from the smokers, like Maximon. And sometimes the smokers saw something in your head that you’d forgotten, or that you’d never noticed, but which was still something real.

“So,” Maximon asked, “how did you make your way to this glittering b’aktun?”

“I sent myself here,” I started to say, “into the skin of this hipball player, as you see-”

“What self is that?” he interrupted.

“Well, I mean, yes,” I said. “It’s not exactly my self, it’s that my memories, they got…” Damn. I tried the word pach’i, “printed,” like in a seal on wet clay: “They got printed and sent back here.”

“What are we in back of?” he asked.

“Well, that’s true,” I said, “we’re not really in back of anything, I mean, to here, earlier, than…”

I trailed off. “Llllll,” he went. It was the Mayan equivalent of “Hmm.”

“I still have Chacal’s brain,” I stammered out. “But it has the higher-level type of my twelfth-b’aktun memories, from Jed.” It was all the things that had happened to me, I explained, all the English and Spanish skills, the emotional habits, everything that made me think I was Jed DeLanda, and it had all been downloaded out of my head, encoded into a form somewhat like a holographic film image, and directed at a target brain, wiping out that brain’s own higher-level memories in the process. As far as current understanding of the universe went, it was the only possible process that was even close to time travel-a term that, by the way, we avoided, the way intelligence pros won’t use the word spy.

He took another monster inhale. Did he get it? I wondered. Or did it all sound like nonsense? Or did he know it all already? I can’t do this forever. Somehow-and Chacal’s reflexes were a phenomenon I’d come to heed, without understanding them-I felt the troop was getting restless. Wait, I signed behind me. The sense of motion on the hairs of my back faded and disappeared. One good thing around here was you could talk to the air and people wouldn’t think you were crazy, but just in tune with one of the folk of other levels, the Unheard, Unsmelled, and Unseen.

“So,” he asked, “are you Jed or Chacal?”

The words came out as smoke. Or, rather, what happened was, the smoke from his cigar contorted into a rising pillar of Ixian cursive glyphs, and at some point I noticed that I wasn’t hearing him speak, but just reading the vertical column.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was a question I’d been asking myself a bit lately, in a different way. At first, of course, I’d felt like I must still be pretty much like the Jed, for clarity let’s keep the convention and say Jed 1 — who’d stayed back-“back”-in 2012. But things happened to me, and I saw things, mainly disturbing things, and I did things-not all, or not even mainly good things. And I guess I’d changed because now, when I thought about the other Jed, the one we’re calling Jed 1, I thought of him as, well, not as a total dolt, maybe, but certainly as a lucky but clueless naif who wouldn’t know shit from Shinola, and it was only going to get more so, even if I got-hmm, I was going to use the word back again, but it’s bugging me. And, come to think of it, what does Shinola look like? Maybe I don’t know so much as I “And so,” he asked, “what ill chance has brought you into this vexed wilderness?”

“I came to plant a message in the Earthtoadess,” I said.

“You mean for your n’aax caan ”-the expression meant something like “favorite dominatrix” or “pussy-whipper prostitute”-“in the thirteenth b’aktun.”

Uh, right, I grunted. Should I offer him something? I wondered. What did we have with us? We’d brought jade celts worth about six hundred adolescent male slaves, just in case we had to trade our way out of something, but I didn’t think he’d want them.

“That Marena of yours, tia buena, ” he said, smacking his lips once.

I just nodded. How did he know about that? I wondered. Well, I guess he knows a lot. Not everything, like Jehova would, but still a lot. You’ve got to watch this guy around the ladies. I remembered something my mother had told me when I was six or so, how in her hometown in Honduras, back when her grandfather was young, one day all the men went off to fight the Spanish and left Maximon at home to protect the women, and then when the men came back, the women were all pregnant. So the men flayed Maximon alive, and hung his skin on a monkey-puzzle tree. But the women were so devastated that they made the men set up his effigy in the church. And then he didn’t stay dead for long anyway.

“So you need to find a quiet spot,” Maximon said.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Quiet for how long?

“Like, four b’aktuns,” I said. About fourteen hundred years.

He raised his head and, leisurely-ly, looked over his left shoulder, toward the west. You could just see a low orange smudge, not the sun but the reflection of Coixtlahuaca, the nearest of the hundreds of cities burning in sympathy with the destroyed capital, Teotihuacan. Lady Koh’s caravan was between us and the city, back almost half a k’intaak- that is, a jornada, a day’s journey. We couldn’t go much farther if we were going to come back and meet up with them before dawn. And we couldn’t be walking around like this in daylight, even if the daylight was going to be as dim as twilight. Some village bumpkins would still be alive somewhere, and they’d spot us, and the word would get back to one of the Puma Clan’s hit squads, and that would be it. They’d have our guts for G strings. On the other hand, if the gear was going to keep for thirteen centuries before Marena dug it up, it would have to be pretty damn out in the boonies. Dang, darn, damn.

“Lllll,” Maximon went. He took another drag and blew a smoke snake that read, with the formal, archaic voice of written Mayan, “I would try up yonder.” He pointed northeast with his lip toward a pair of twin mesas. “No one ventures there.” He used a continuing indefinite tense that meant not now, not before now, and not ever. “Even our grandfather Rucan 400 Shrieks”-that is, the east-going Whirlwind-“refuses to dance there.” I almost didn’t get the last part because as soon as I was reading each word, it would start dissolving.

“Okay, buen consejo. Thank you, senor.”

“No problemo,” he said. He said it orally this time, and in Spanish. And the abruptness suggested that the interview was over, but I hesitated.

“Yes?” he asked, a little impatiently.

“Oh, I was, I was just wondering if you over me might have noticed anything farther down the road.”

“You mean the road to Ix?”

“Well…” I said.

I was getting the feeling that he knew the answer already, and was asking me just to see how honest I was, or how I’d justify what I was doing.

“… yes,” I finished. It was supposed to be a secret-that is, when we got into the lowlands we were going to lead the people to Ix and not toward Palenque like Lady Koh had given out.

“You’d better watch out for the Pumas and the rest of the pack,” he said.

I know that, I thought. But I just clicked-an Ixian gesture that meant “yes”-and then, redundantly, nodded.

By pack he’d meant, like, “pack of cats.” That is, the remnants-numerous remnants, I should say-of the feline clans of Teotihucan and its hundreds of satellite cities. They’d regrouped after the unpleasantness and were out gunning for Lady Koh and anyone connected with her.