“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Paz. He was trying to concentrate on Amelia and Lola, to fix their location in his mind, so he could move to protect them when whatever was about to happen took place. For somethingwas about to happen: the queerness he had been feeling for the last few minutes (and was it really just minutes-surely it had been strange for a longer time) had turned to dread, and he felt something like madness plucking at the edges of his mind. He started to move toward his family. Cooksey drifted in his wake, still talking.
“Yes, it doesn’t makesense, not from our viewpoint, but perhaps there are others. There may be imperatives of which we know nothing, any more than the fig wasp does when she sacrifices her individual life for the preservation of her species. Studying the social insects gives one a somewhat different perspective about the survival of the individual, you know. In any case, when my family died, or was killed, I devoted a good deal of thought to the subject, descending at least partway into lunacy, as you might understand, being a family man yourself, but one thought did emerge that I rather fancied, which was thatsomething is trying to send us a message.”
“Something,” said Paz. He was now within a few yards of where Amelia and his wife lay, swathed in towels. Lola was rubbing her daughter’s hair. Zwick and Beth lay on one of the chaises, Scotty and Geli on the other. Jenny was standing, wrapped in a yellow towel, drying her hair with a green one. She was looking into the dark, dense foliage beyond the reach of the pool lights, as if waiting for something. Everything seemed to be moving too slowly, as it does in a dream. Behind him, Cooksey’s voice continued.
“Yes, the planet, for example, or its guardians, or the noetic sphere, however you want to describe it. You see at a certain point we decided that everything was dead, including us, and that it was perfectly all right to turn the entire substance of nature into some imaginary abstraction-power, or some idea of the nation, or race, or just at present it happens to be money. So let’s say thissomething has awakened after a long nap, not really long for something that’s been alive for four billion years, but long in our terms, and it noticed a little itch, a little raw spot, and it scratches idly, and that was the twentieth century, a hundred million dead from war and famine, but unfortunately we kept on, learning nothing, and now it’s a little more interested, because now we’re fiddling with the basic balancing mechanisms of the whole shebang. And now it turns out that great Pan wasn’t dead after all. Now he wakes up, not amongus, of course, because we’re dead, but among Moie’s people, and because of what happened to me I’m impelled, let’s say, to provide the impetus to bring him here.”
“And what does it all mean?” Paz asked, not because he thought Cooksey really knew, but to keep him talking as if his talking was a preface to whatever was going to happen and it had to wait until he was finished. Paz thought he needed a little more time. He also needed his bow and arrows. This was a new thought, and he felt his body turning away, being pulled back toward the Volvo. He lifted the rear hatch with some difficulty; for his hands seemed to have forgotten how to work the latch, and the whole vehicle seemed unhealthy in some way, hideous, something that should not exist. He walked back to the pool, holding the bow and the quiver of arrows. The last time Paz had actually shot a bow, the arrows had been tipped with suction cups. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with the things, only that it was necessary for him to have them in hand.
No one seemed to have moved; Cooksey seemed not to have finished, seemed to have been talking to the night. “…in any case, we could be seeing a new order of things, a nexus of some kind. We see this in evolution occasionally, a time or a place where speciation seems to move at an accelerated pace-we have no idea why. Now we may have a situation where a certain kind of unconscious evil is directly punished, a partial solution to the question of why bad things happen to good people and not the reverse. Someone gives an order and at the other end of a long chain of actors we have murder, destruction, rapine, the world ground to paste to change the registers in certain bank accounts. What would it be like if the hand that gave the order was then bitten off? Wouldthat change things, or are we so ungodly stupid that not eventhat would work. Or what if, as now, a child sacrifice were required? Wouldthat get our fucking attention?”
Cooksey’s voice had risen for this last phrase, but no one seemed to notice. Everyone was looking at Jaguar.
Twenty
Jaguar emerged soundlessly from the darkness and now stood full on the paved patio that surrounded the pool. He was a lot bigger than Paz had imagined, nearly the size of an African lion, but leaner and longer, much larger than a real jaguar. It shone as if illuminated from within, like a jack-o’-lantern, its black rosettes seeming to vibrate against their golden ground. Cooksey was now speechless, frozen, his mouth still open holding the shape of his last words. Paz wanted to yell at Lola to take the child and run, but his voice was somehow missing. He felt his hands withdraw an arrow from the quiver and nock it on the bowstring. The arrows were long and fletched with bright green parrot feathers, and tipped with points of milky stone, very sharp.
Jaguar glided across the pool patio to where Lola and Amelia lay. The child’s head was bent across her mother’s knees. Lola had been untangling Amelia’s wet hair with her fingers. Paz could see his daughter look into the topaz lanterns of the god’s eyes. She had a soft smile on her face. Lola was looking at the beast with what seemed to Paz to be casual polite interest, as if the girl were about to introduce a new and suitable playmate. Everyone else seemed to be fixed solidly in place, like the background figures in a classical painting, an effect augmented by their draped towels, their languid postures.
Paz decided that he had been wrong and that this was, in fact, a particularly vivid dream, and really, just like the ones he’d had so often in the recent past. There was his girl and there was the jaguar and it would take her as a sacrifice and everything would be better for everyone, the world would be made whole again by it, and he felt an odd stirring of pride that his daughter should be so honored. And here he contemplated the being of the girl herself, the lines of inheritance combined in her, the generations of Jews back to Jerusalem, and Africans back to Ife, and Spaniards back to wherever, Rome, Greece, the Gothic lands, Arabia, all the ancestors, studying in synagogues, serving the gods of Yoruba, serving the masters in the cane fields, conquering the infidels, worshipping Allah, all to produce the particularity of this gleaming child…
But now these portentous musings were interrupted by a swift movement near the pool. Jenny Simpson had dashed out of her place in the frieze and was hanging on Jaguar’s neck, tugging at the golden head, shouting “No, no. Stop it, leave her alone,” which Paz thought was absurd, she was treating him like a naughty puppy, and he felt vaguely annoyed at her for disturbing the stately aesthetics of the scene. Jaguar shuddered like a dog, flinging the young woman aside, casting her down on the paving with an audible thud. Paz heard a sound, a deep growl so low he thought it might be imaginary, like one of the false sounds one hears upon just falling into sleep.