"So you don't take seriously theories that space aliens taught early native peoples in the Americas to build step-pyramid temples?" Annja asked lightly.

His brow creased slightly.

Oh, dear¸ she thought. That sounded patronizing, didn't it?

"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I was only being facetious."

He smiled and bobbed his head. "Of course, of course. And of course I do not. Nor do I believe anyone – whether intrepid Polynesian navigators or ancient Egyptians – taught my ancestors to do so, either. A step pyramid, any pyramid, is the simplest structure possible. You place a smaller square of blocks on top of a slightly larger one. Even if one uses undressed stones, just piles natural rocks on one another, they will achieve an angle of repose to produce a rough pyramid of sorts."

"And the temples?"

"For all our cultural and physiological differences, we're the same organism – and forgive me, please, Señorita Creed, for telling you what you no doubt abundantly know. I suspect a fascination with the heavens is hardwired into our species. The sky, after all, is the one realm of natural Earth that is inaccessible to us. So a belief that gods must dwell there springs naturally to our minds. The urge to be closer to them, so they can better hear our pleas and complaints, drives us to high places. How many cultures boast stories of priests and shamans climbing high mountains in search of revelations? And getting them.

"So the urge to build high places – artificial mountains – for communing with the gods is universal, as well. When you combine that with the equally universal desire of rulers to express their power and intimidate rivals – and their own subjects, usually – by building vast monuments – " he shrugged "The worldwide prevalence of pyramid-shaped temples becomes not at all mysterious, and requires no diffusion whatever."

"So you reject the notion of pre-Columbian contact between American natives and Old World outsiders?" Annja asked.

His laugh surprised her. They had come into a large hall, in the midst of which rose a replica Mayan temple, with bas-reliefs seeming to writhe up its heavy square columns of poured concrete. He led her inside. Groups of visitors, mostly tourists by their dress and accents, clumped around pools of illumination under the watchful obsidian gaze of security guards. These squat, dark men, despite their European khaki uniforms, reminded Annja of Nahua statues themselves.

"Not in the slightest. Indeed, recent discoveries in North and South America make it abundantly clear that there was much traffic between the so-called Old World and the so-called New. Archaeologists in South America have possessed evidence for years of continuing contact with the Pacific peoples dating hundreds of years before the Europeans. Sadly, the tendency of North American archaeologists for years was to dismiss such evidence blithely. After all, who were we but mere natives?"

"It's true," Annja said. "Too true. I'm sorry."

"But you didn't do it, did you?"

"No. I was always something of a rebel against the established order in the orphanage school." She had made a point to establish her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage early in her correspondence with young Dr. Márquez. She had long ago learned that even fairly secular Latin Americans related more readily to Catholics. Not that she was communicant, or even considered herself Catholic, but she felt small inclination to raise that point.

And then I became a student of science, she thought. Did that transform me into a reflex defender of a different established order? A lot of her colleagues still ridiculed any notion of pre-Columbian contact across either ocean as chariots-of-the-gods rubbish.

He nodded. "Well, then. Not guilty. It pleases me to live in a time, Ms. Creed, in which such questions are beginning to be frankly examined by science, rather than reflexively ridiculed and explained away."

"Me, too," she said.

They came to a major clump of tourists sporting shorts revealing legs like uncooked sausages. From their mutterings Annja thought they were German, although she understood little of the language despite her gifts for learning tongues. She also knew that despite her own Anglo-American prejudices concerning body-mass index, these stout middle-aged and elderly men and women could more than likely hike her straight into the ground. Fit as she had always been, on her few side trips to Germany and Austria she had grown accustomed to finding herself halfway up a trail to some mountaintop castle or another, laboring along with her tongue all but hanging out, only to be passed at effortless speed by parties of jovial Germans of all shapes, sizes and ages.

Dr. Márquez steered Annja to the side so she could see what had the tourists so fascinated. "Now, here we have a fine specimen of the famous Mayan calendar," he said, beaming as if he'd invented it.

Propped atop a black stone pedestal in a blaze of yellowish light was a thick wheel of yellowish rock. Its center showed an angry-looking face missing a nose. Rings of intricately carved glyphs radiated outward from it.

"There are actually three distinct Mayan calendars," Márquez said. "There is a 365-day calendar, the Haab', which describes a standard solar year. There is the Long Count calendar, which is the one that involves all the controversy. This, though, is the calendar the Maya themselves most used – the Tzolk'in, the Sacred Round. It depicts a 260-day cycle."

"Which recurs throughout Mesoamerican cultures," Annja said.

Márquez nodded. "Just so. This is what people usually mean when they talk about the Mayan calendar."

"But the Long Count – "

"Is the one that involves the so-called prophecy," Márquez stated.

He ushered her onward to a less crowded niche containing a tombstone-shaped slab. "This stela was unearthed in the Yucatán four years ago. It makes use of Long Count dating."

It showed two vertical rows of glyphs indecipherable to Annja. Fascinated as she was by the whole broad scope of archaeology and anthropology – all of humanity and its multiplex history – she specialized in Middle Age and Renaissance Europe. The Chimayó dig team had welcomed her involvement in large part because the early New Mexican colonists, cut off from almost all contact with Europe for most of their history, retained many aspects of culture long archaic in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. As a matter of fact the language still spoken in the high mountains of the north resembled sixteenth-century Spanish, just as the speech of certain mountain populations in the southeastern U.S. retained much of Elizabethan English.

"The Long Count was based upon cycles of just under four hundred years," Márquez said, "each called a b'ak'tun. The current b'ak'tun,the thirteenth, began on September 6, 3114 B.C., in our Julian calendar. It ends on December 21, 2012, although there's a certain amount of wiggle room, amounting to a week or two."

"Thus the end of the world," Annja said.

He grinned. "You might think so."

"What do you think?"

"What I thinkis that the makers of the calendars on which some people base end-of-the-world prophecies didn't see any particular reason to project more than half a millennium into their future. In fact I like to think their funding ran out."

Annja laughed.

"You must be familiar with the phenomenon."

"Oh, yes."

"Stargazing and astronomical calculations were a monopoly of the Mayan state. As in most of the world's more complex cultures, particularly the Chinese, calculating dates and astronomical events wasn't just an important activity, but a major source and mainstay of power. The public literally couldn't get rid of the state – though individual components, such as emperors, could be and were replaced – because then they'd have to do without vital knowledge. Both key ritual knowledge, such as the timing of eclipses, as well as when, in a given year, crops needed to be planted. So, long before the vaunted computer revolution of our own lifetimes, knowledge was, in fact, power."