“Quiet!” The Great Speaker turned his head, fixing his attention on the eastern horizon. “Oh yes,” he said slowly. “There you are. Peekaboo. I see you.”
Mal followed the line of his gaze but could see nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It was the exact same view as before: the lake, the far-off shore, the folds of hill beyond.
“Come on, then,” the Great Speaker said. “It’s time we had this reunion. Long overdue, I’d say.”
“Sir,” said Tlanextic, “is there trouble? Perhaps we should get you inside, down to one of the command bunkers. You’ll be safe there.”
“No, it’s not trouble, colonel. At least, nothing I can’t handle. I think what’s coming could be called an official delegation.”
Reston was looking eastward too, and Mal could tell he was anxious, even though there was no obvious threat.
Then she spotted them — a trio of tiny dots in midair, dark against the shimmering hazy blue of the sky.
Some kind of aircraft?
They came closer, growing in size. They were moving fast, quicker even than an aerodisc could travel.
They were…
People?
Three of them.
Winged.
Flying.
The hairs on the back of Mal’s neck stood on end.
“Colonel Tlanextic?” said the Great Speaker. “I’d recommend you don’t do anything rash or precipitous. You’ll regret it. Just stay where you are. That applies to all of you. Be calm. Show due deference.”
He spread out his arms.
“Gods are coming.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Same Day
They descended, landed.
All three were unusually tall, like the Great Speaker, and were kitted out in sleek versions of traditional Aztec dress. The pairs of wings, attached to them by ornate harnesses, were rigid arcs of metal which swivelled on pivots, for steering and braking. The shoulder-mounted units from which they sprouted were clearly what lent the wearers the power of flight. They gave off a familiar faint hum; portable neg-mass generators.
The wings stowed themselves automatically as the three men landed, retracting and folding neatly away behind their wearers’ spines. The neg-mass units fell silent. The three looked around at the group assembled on the terrace. One of them, the tallest and by some margin the handsomest, bestowed a look of recognition on Reston — a slightly frowning one, as if surprised or puzzled to see him. Hesitantly, warily, Reston returned it. It was obvious to Mal that they knew each other, and some of Reston’s recent conversation with the Great Speaker began to make sense. These were the people they were talking about, the ones Reston had had a run-in with in the rainforest.
But who were they?
And how come they had personal antigrav capability? That wasn’t possible, as far as Mal was aware. The Japanese had expended huge amounts of time, money and resources on trying to scale down the size of neg-mass technology from its original specifications. They hadn’t managed to by much, and if they couldn’t, no one could. The dream of individual flight had yet to become a reality. Except, here it was.
The Great Speaker turned his head, looking at each of the three arrivals in turn. Finally he said, “Well, well, well. It was inevitable, I suppose. You left me alone for long enough. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.”
“I wish,” said the tallest.
“Oh, so that’s how it’s to be, is it?”
“No, I apologise. It was a cheap shot.”
“So you’ve come to kiss and make up. Or am I to view this visitation in a more sinister light? As a prelude to something worse?”
“It all depends.”
“On?”
“How you choose to play things.”
“It’s been a long time. Can’t we simply let bygones be bygones?”
“I’d be glad to. But some deeds are hard to overlook, or forgive.”
“Such as?”
“What you’ve been up to in our absence, for starters,” growled another of the three. This one was superbly muscled and completely hairless, with a belligerent jut to his jaw.
“You don’t like what I’ve done with the place?” The Great Speaker put a hand to his chest in the manner of someone mortally offended. “And here was I thinking I’d been an exemplary caretaker. Preserving the legacy. Making the most of what we’d started. Maximising on the potential.”
“This was never what we envisioned,” said the third of the flying men. “A worldwide dictatorship based on conquest and terror — that was never the plan. Quite the opposite.”
“Then perhaps you should have thought about that before you all flounced off and left me to it. If you’d been really committed to the project, you’d have stayed on and helped see it through. Instead, you abandoned me here on my own. That gave me carte blanche to continue as I saw fit. You can’t hold me solely accountable for how everything’s turned out. You’re to blame, too, by walking away.”
“You’ve interfered with the climate,” said the first, sidestepping the Great Speaker’s accusation.
“Wouldn’t you have?” the Great Speaker said affably. “The planet needed warming up. Who in their right mind would want to live in the Arctic Circle, or even a temperate zone, if there didn’t have to be one? Thanks to me, hundreds of thousands of square miles of permafrost and tundra is now fertile land, freed up for agricultural use. I’ve helped feed the world. Besides, these are the kind of temperatures I’m used to. Call me sentimental, but I wanted to make earth more like good old Tamoanchan — more like home.”
“You’ve not shared all the knowledge, as we agreed. You were meant to introduce further technology in stages, as and when mankind was ready.”
“So I’ve held a few items back? So what? There’s plenty to keep the humans going as it is, and they have fun reverse-engineering and customising what they’ve already got. If you ask me, they’re not to be trusted with the full repertoire of what’s available. They’re such little tinkerers. They might misuse it.”
“Use it against you, you mean?” said the hairless, hostile one. “To overthrow you?”
“That’s one possibility. Or against each another. They’re their own worst enemies, humans are. They need an eye kept on them at all times, to stop them recklessly abusing and harming their own kind. That’s one of the many beneficial functions this Empire of mine performs. It brings peace and stability.”
“Stability?” said the handsome one. “They murder one another and call it sacrifice.”
“A necessary evil. Our original scheme, as it stood, was a recipe for anarchy. You realise that, don’t you, Quetzalcoatl? You were going to hand the humans everything we have, with few limitations in place. They’re an innately irresponsible lot. They’d have ended up destroying themselves in no time. Without me, without the curbs and vetoes I’ve imposed, it’s a safe bet that there wouldn’t now be an Earth for you to come back to. You’d be standing on a charred, devastated ball of rock, another lifeless satellite of the sun. You should be thanking me for making the best of the hand you dealt me, which was, if I may say, an unenviable one. Instead, you come swanning back after an inordinately lengthy absence and you have the nerve to act all superior and judgemental.”
“I’ve been no such thing,” said the one the Great Speaker had called Quetzalcoatl. “I’ve been quite reasonable, I feel. So far.”
“Typical. That ‘so far.’ That’s just like you. Can’t help yourself, can you? Such self-righteousness. Such forbearance. The great and mighty Plumed Serpent, who thinks he’s so much better than the rest of us, so pure and untainted. Yet beneath that ‘I’m so perfect’ exterior, you’re just as venal, just as calculating, just as fallible.”
“You can’t provoke me.”
“Oh, but I can,” said the Great Speaker. “I know how. I know precisely which buttons to push. As I once proved, didn’t I, brother?”
Brother? thought Mal. She looked from the Great Speaker to Quetzalcoatl and back again. She could see Reston doing the same, and he was as taken aback as she was. If the Great Speaker was Quetzalcoatl’s brother…