– 13 –
On December 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar runs down. The age of Hans — according to the calculations of the Mayan sorcerer-sages — is over.
Nobody tells Hans, so he doesn’t expire.
Nobody tells the jaguars, or their decaying orbit, either, so they don’t finish up their fall.
Ixchel circles the earth, and muses, chewing on the remnant of a seraph’s wing.
“I’m not,” she says, “I mean, I don’t think, I mean, I’m not going to catch on fire. Either.”
“Oh?” says Yohl.
“I’m going to roll up into a ball to minimize my surface area,” Ixchel says. “instead. And think cold thoughts. Then I will warm up, but I will not catch on fire.”
“That should work,” agrees Bahlum.
“Yeah. It should,” confirms the jaguar named Chan.
. . .
The jaguars fall, as they have fallen. They circle the world, in their degenerating orbit, cold, majestic, and alone. They spin around our tiny, fragile planet and its thin coat of air and warmth. They know, as we should know, that life is tentative; that the odds are constantly working against it, trying to unravel everything that we are.
. . .
And if you wonder why the world lives yet, what with the little wooden boy and all;
And the end of the year 2012, and the end of the age of Hans;
And the strangelets, the seraphs, and the nuclear bombs —
Well, the world is a dirty, wicked thing, and it strives always to cave in: to close in on itself, about itself, like a crumpled map, and ruin its every bright and perfect thing. It would gladly devour its bright hopes, its dreams, its wonders — us — and leave nothing behind to make more;
But because there are magical jaguars, catapulted skyward by Mayan sages, in a decaying orbit around the Earth, life is certain to continue. Because there are magical jaguars, something is certain to remain; and something will always be reborn.
That is the Mayans’ gift.
![[The Wicked God of Space]](http://books.hitherby.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Icon_Space1.png "Wicked God of Space"){kind=icon}
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