Ian Arnstein leaned forward, face gone keen. "Your eyes are the same color as your sister's, aren't they?"

Lisketter peered at him. "Yes, yes," he said.

Ian hurried off to the hut where he'd slept, and came back with something in his hands. It was a wooden mask, of a face halfway between human and jaguar, the eyes inlaid with some polished stone. He held it up beside the one-handed man. The eyes of the living man were a shade of amber-green almost identical to the jade insets.

"I think we have something here," Alston said. She clapped Ian on the back. "Congratulations, Professor."

"What… what happened to the others?" Lisketter asked.

"The locals ate them," Alston said. Lisketter bent over abruptly and lost the food he'd just swallowed.

"Get him cleaned up, and handcuff him."

"Ma'am? What about the village?"

"Load everythin' we can use," she said. Her eyes swept over the buildings. "Then torch it."

"Why haven't they tried to stop us, Captain?" Lieutenant Ortiz asked, bringing his boat alongside. "They've got a lot of those canoes, and they did attack the schooner."

Alston nodded; she liked junior officers who tried to puzzle things out. "The Bentley was sitting still. We're moving without oars, making a funny sound, and we've got Toffler's ultralight flying overhead. At a guess, they're spooked. They'll fight eventually, though, when we get to their capital."

Another village was passing by on the north bank, much like all the others-including the crowd of armed Indians waiting at the landing. The chanting and war dances were pretty standard too. She did a quick calculation, counting huts and heads, focusing her binoculars to count the relative proportions of commoners and brightly bedecked men with elaborate weapons; also the number of adult males, women, children.

"Either I'm grossly overestimatin' the number of people per hut, or a lot of their menfolk are beating our time upriver," she said.

Toffler's ultralight came slanting in from the northwest, sun bright on the colorful striped fabric of its wings. The radio reports were brief and sketchy, just confirmation that Martha Cofflin and Lisketter were alive and captive. Now she could debrief him and get the videotapes; they might not have enough electricity for washing machines, but there was ample to charge a few batteries, thank God.

The ultralight sheened across the sky; it was as if suddenly reality had broken through the veil of myth. Men bore Martha toward a city where they worshiped a jaguar become human; but a man she knew flew overhead. She stood and waved, saw the wings waggle again in acknowledgment.

The chattering throng on the dirt roadway scattered like drops of mercury on dry ice. Porters threw away their burdens, men their spears, their screams shrill and loud enough to drown the buzzing little engine. Only a few of the caparisoned warriors followed them. Most grouped tightly around their leader's litter. Both halted to his command, and the heavy figure stepped forth, down a living staircase of bearers. He stood, arms akimbo, looking upward at the thing that flew five hundred feet above them.

Doesn't know what it is, of course, Martha thought. Aloud, in a murmur: "He can't really see it yet. Too alien. No scale, probably doesn't realize what size it is, maybe doesn't see that it's artificial, and yes, these priest-kings probably do hallucinogens of some sort. He's used to visions."

Toffler circled lower. He steered with one hand; the other held a video camera. Lower still, and suddenly the Olmec warriors realized-not what the flying thing was, but that a man was within it, and steering it. A few more of them fled, but their comrades brought those down with flung darts. The others raised a bristle of points around their lord. Lower still, and a rain of darts sprang up from their atlatls. Even with the spear-throwers they arched well below the aircraft, which circled away and banked. This time it came barely above the reach of the flung spears, straight down the roadway from the plateau citadel. The commander of the guards, a man with a jade plug in his lower lip and a headdress even more fantastically feathered than the rest, snapped an order. Bellowing surprise, the fat priest-king was bowled back into the covered litter. Half a dozen of the warriors threw themselves across him to put their bodies between him and harm. The rest crowded around the litter and its burden, casting darts, waving their rakes and spears and clubs, screaming defiance. Toffler soared above them, then brought the ultralight's nose up in a sharp climb. He circled once more, waggled his wings again, and circled higher.

The priest-king surged out of the litter, scattering the men who'd protected him with a shield of flesh. He roared something and slammed a fist into the face of the commander of his guards. The man reeled backward, fell, rose with his face a mask of blood. His overlord struck him again; the commander stood passively under the blows until the other man halted, panting. Then he went down on all fours and prostrated himself. So did the others; the big man kicked a few of them, then climbed back into his litter. The bearers heaved it upright, Martha's along with it, and trotted forward.

She watched the ultralight bank away to the southeast. "They're not far behind," she said quietly.

But what can they do?

"Run that by me again," Ian Arnstein said sharply.

The cassette whirred into reverse. The display unit was small, compact enough to be carried along in the boat. That rocked as several officers jostled slightly to see.

"Freeze that," he said. A book lay beside him; he picked it up and skimmed rapidly through the pages, each a little limp with the humidity. "Look."

He pointed; the picture was of one of the monumental Olmec stone heads. He brought it close to the flickering screen. "Pretty close resemblance, isn't it?"

Alston sighed and shook her head. "Well, there goes another theory." He looked a question at her. "There was speculation that those heads were signs of early contacts with the Old World-West Africa, specifically."

He looked at the picture. The features did look a little negroid, if you assumed that the depiction was realistic. But even so, the likeness to the heavy-featured man in the litter was unmistakable.

"Go on," she said.

"The archaeologists thought these heads were portrait-statues of Olmec rulers," Ian said. "From the looks of it, they were right for once. And now look at this."

He hit the fast-forward button, to the minute where the guards threw themselves over their ruler. "Does this suggest something?" he said.

"The Secret Service do the same with the president, up in the twentieth," an officer objected.

"Yes, but he doesn't beat them up afterward," Ian pointed out. "I think that's a significant datum."

"Proving that pudgy-face here is a son of a bitch?" Hendriksson asked.

"Proving he's an absolute ruler. I'd guess he was a god-king; it was a common pattern later in these Mesoamerican cultures. Common in a lot of very early civilizations, for that matter. Old Kingdom Egypt, or the Shang. We know they practice human sacrifice, too. So it's probably very tightly centralized… one royal or divine family that marries within its own boundaries, or maybe with the other Olmec principalities, if there are more than one. That would account for the unusual appearance, too."

"It's a thought," Alston said meditatively. "Possibly irrelevant even if accurate, but it is a thought." A slender black arm moved past him to touch the controls. "Let's take a look at the layout of that city."

Martha blinked as they came up the slope and over the crest. The single-minded determination that had leveled this plateau and covered it with the structures she saw was impressive. They climbed up a spur on the southern side, debouching onto a broad ceremonial avenue that stretched thousands of yards ahead. The surface was made of hard-pounded clay stained different colors, reds and greens and oranges, making patterns she could only guess at as they went by. Two of the giant stone heads like those she'd seen in museums flanked the entrance, twelve feet high and hulking in their brutal menace, but they were not the monochrome remnants of her day. Here they were painted: yellow spotted with brown for the faces, brilliant yellow-green for the eyes, crimson for the tight-fitting helmets. On either side of the avenue were rows of hexagonal basalt pillars on timber bases; beyond them stretched rectangular pools joined by covered stone drains; more drains led to fountains done in wood and clay.