Warren Murphy: Unite and Conquer

Gringos, Lujan thought. They came. They gawked. They moved on. But they never understood the allure of brutality. When the last gringo lay under the soil, Coatlicue would endure, just as she had endured the remorseless centuries.

Gringos did not matter. Just as long as there were Zapotecs to worship her. That was all that mattered to Rodrigo Lujan.

He was startled only a few hours later on that long-ago evening when, as the museum was closing and he was paying his nightly respects to the Mother Goddess, Coatliacue spoke to him in the slow language of the gringos, English.

"Survive. . ."

The voice was an agony of elongated syllables.

"What?"

"Survival..."

"Yes. Survival. I understand your speech, Coatlicue. What are you trying to tell me?"

Her words were like broken stones knocking together. "I. . . must.. survive."

"More. You must endure. You will endure. Long after I am dust and bones, you will endure, for you are the mother of all indios."

"Help... me... to...survive."

"How?"

"Protect... me...."

"You are in the most protected building in all of Mexico, save for the Presidential Palace," Lujan reassured his goddess.

"My enemies must never find me."

"Nor will they. We will confound them at every turn, for are we not Zapotec?"

"Meaning unclear. Clarify."

Lujan frowned. "Why do you speak the language of the gringos?"

"English is the language l am programmed to understand."

"This is most passing strange. Tell me, Coatlicue, I implore you. Why did you desert this fine museum so long ago?"

"To defeat my enemies."

"And they are now vanquished?"

"No. I was nearly vanquished. Even now my systems have not fully repaired themselves. So I have altered my survival plait."

The words were coming more fluidly now, as from an engine shaking off years of disuse.

"Yes?" Lujan prompted.

"It is not necessary to destroy the meat machines in order to survive. I am a machine of metal and other nonliving matter. I will not die unless destroyed. All meat machines die when their organic systems fail or wear out. I will outlast the meat machines, who are programmed for obsolescence."

"Who-what are these things you call meat machines?"

"Men are meat machines."

"Women, too?"

"All biological organisms are machines. They are self-propelled constructs of flesh and bone and other organic matter, yet they are only machines of a biological kind. I am a machine of a more enduring kind. I will survive by surviving. When they have all died, l will be free to leave this prison."

"This is not a prison. This is your home, your temple, your redoubt. Under this site lies the crushed rubble of Tenochtitlan, the old Aztec capital. Do you not remember?"

"I will abide here in this place until the optimum conditions for my continued survival have been achieved. Then I will leave. You must protect me until then."

"I will do this. Whatever you want. Just name these things. And I will lay them at your feet."

"I need nothing from you, meat machine. I am self-sustaining. I have no desires. I can exist in this present assimilated form for as long as necessary."

"I promise you that I will watch over you to the end of my days, and after that my sons will take up where I leave off and their sons after them and on and on until the day comes where Mexicans-the true Mexicans-again control their own destinies."

"It is an agreement."

And so it was done. After that, Coatlicue spoke little other than to inquire about conditions in the world outside the museum. She rejoiced in every tragedy. Famines and catastrophes in which there were large losses of human life particularly interested her. It was very Aztec.

For his part, Rodrigo Lujan saw that she was not moved or harmed and every night he beseeched her unheeding ears with whispered entreaties to restrain the earth from another upheaval.

Sometimes he would burn copal incense in a jade cup and lay songbirds at her feet, which he would pierce with a stingray spine, delicately excising the still-beating heart and laying it on a rude basalt altar taken from a glass case.

These sacrifices neither offended nor propitiated Coatlicue, so Lujan dutifully continued them.

When the first shudders of what would be called the Great Mexico City Earthquake of 1996 shook the foundations of the Museum of Anthropology, Rodrigo Lujan bolted from his office, eyes stark with fright, his mind focusing on one thing and one thing only.

"Coatlicue!" he gasped, rushing to her side.

She stood as always, hulking, resolute, seemingly indestructible, as all around the walls shook and glass cases danced, breaking the precious pottery and firedclay figures of the old cultures.

The building walls were all but screaming now. The hard marble floor cracked and heaved under Lujan's stumbling feet.

"Coatlicue! Coatlicue! What is happening?"

Coatlicue stood firm and unmovable as the rumble grew to a roar and outside, the entire metropolis began to scream in a million voices, only some of them human. Glass was breaking in cascades. But Lujan had no thought for the irreplaceable treasures that were being forever shattered.

He cared only for the goddess who was all.

"Coatlicue. Coatlicue. Speak to me!" he cried in Spanish.

But Coatlicue remained mute until she began to shift on her thick tree-trunk feet.

"What is happening, meat machine?" she asked in unaccented English.

"It is an earthquake, Coatlicue. The ground is shaking."

"I am no longer safe here."

"No. No. You are safe."

Then a wall buckled, and great chunks of stone made a dusty pile that belied the truthfulness of Rodrigo Lujan's words.

"Survive," Coatlicue began saying. "Must survive. Instruct me how to maximize my survival."

"Quickly! We must leave the building before it falls about our ears. Come this way."

And with an awful grinding that was music to Lujan's ears, Coatilcue's feet separated at the vertical seam, and like a stone elephant, she took a step with one stone-taloned foot.

The floor buckled. She froze as if gyroscopes were spinning and compensating for her imbalance. The foot dropped down with a shuddery thud. The other foot lifted, stepped forward less than a foot and dropped heavily beside the other.

Rodrigo Lujan was ecstatic.

"Yes, yes, you can walk. You must walk. Come, follow me."

Coatlicue took another step. And another. They came more quickly now. Lumbering, as heavy as a truck, she thudded a foot at a time, one foot at a time, toward the beckoning figure of Rodrigo Lujan.

"Hurry, hurry. The ceiling is crumbling."

Plaster rained down. More debris. It was terrible, but amid this terror was a raw beauty that struck Rodrigo Lujan's worshipful eyes. His goddess was walking. Before his eyes she was striding purposefully for the outside and safety.

The courtyard beckoned. There the great concrete mushroom-shaped fountain lay on its side, bubbling water. She splashed through the wreckage, grinding concrete shards to powder with every ponderous step.

The great glass entry doors stood in ruins. She hobbled toward them. They shattered before her immense bulk.

"Yes. Like that. Be careful. O Coatlicue, you are magnifico!"

Out on the grass, she came to a stop. Her head, a broad glyph of two kissing serpents, now parted. The heads, though stone, became stiffly flexible. They looked around like a gecko lizard's independent eyes, one head going this way and the other that.

Twin serpents of stone, they seemed to see all that was going on around them. Lujan also stared. And what he saw filled him with wonder and infinite terror.

It was worse than the '85 quake. It was a city falling into ruin-the earth shook and shook and shook while to the southeast Popocatepetl rumbled and belched a volume of ash that darkened the overhead sky like a filthy brown pall.