I listened to him, my mind racing. I'd thought Kevin and Rachel looked Nordic, big and blond. That Swede must have been their father.
"Those ova of mine you took, the way you stole Sarah's, and all the other women you've brought here—you don't use them for research."
"I have ample leftover embryonic material here for that." He started helping me onto the bed next to Steve. Now his face was undulating through my vision, as though I were seeing it in a wavy mirror. "Please understand, it's very expensive to run a laboratory up here. But the good I'm doing—"
"You're a criminal." I remembered the frightened eyes of the women upstairs and felt myself seething with anger.
"No! I am, in my special way, giving them back a small part of what they had taken away by people exactly like us. I'm providing them proof, living proof, their truths are still powerful."
He strolled over to the window and looked out. "The women come to me for my blessing whenever they hope to bear a child. They know that if they wish, I can cause their first child to be a descendant of their white deity Kukulkan. For them it is a sacred event."
"They believe that?" It was sickening. I felt a knot growing in my stomach, even as my hallucinations flashed ever bolder, bright rainbows that flitted about the room, then wound themselves around me.
"A great philosopher once said, All religions are true.' Who are we to judge?" He paused. "Let me try and explain something. Those patterns you see the women weaving on the fabrics down in Baalum, those patterns are actually just like the designs on that thousand-year-old pyramid. But though that pyramid had been buried and lost to them for so many years, they still made the designs all those years, because those symbols are a road map of their unseen world. Not the forest here where we are now, but their real world, where the gods dwell who rule the lightning bolts, the germination of corn." He was at the door, preparing to leave, but he paused. "They also understand the . . . special infants who come are miracles that must be returned. They receive but they also must give. Now they wish you to be part of that."
With that he closed the door with a swing of his long hair, a slam followed by a hard click.