Phobos: Mayan Fear by Steve Alten Page A

channel for Kukulcan. Throw the heretic and his followers into the cenote!”
    The crowd amassed on the sacbe surges forward, driving Balam’s supporters over the edge of the sinkhole. Screams rend the night air.
    The Jaguar Priest grabs his mate by her wrist and jumps!
    Chilam Balam and Blood Woman plunge forty feet toward a surface already violated by hundreds of splashing bodies when time suddenly stops. The prophet stares, transfixed, at a droplet of water that hovers before his right eye. His bedazzled mind captures a snapshot of his soul mate’s horrified expression, her hair blown upward, each strand frozen in the moment—
    —as the cenote’s waters transform into a raging falls that flow down a serpent’s throat—Xibalba Be—the dark road to the underworld.
    The materializing wormhole inhales Chilam Balam and his followers into a parallel universe that, until seconds ago, never existed.

5

Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.
—STEPHEN HAWKING,

    “DOES GOD PLAY DICE?”

    PEKI’IN, ISRAEL
    MAY 3, 2047

    “ A hh!”
    Immanuel Gabriel’s azure eyes snap open. It takes him an unsettling moment before he realizes he is no longer Chilam Balam, that he is himself again, buried neck-deep in sand in front of the cave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.
    The graying eastern horizon soothes his nerves, the dim light revealing a lone figure standing by the carob tree. Dressed in a white robe, he could be Kukulcan’s twin, save for the lack of facial hair.
    “Jake?”
    “I’ve missed you, Manny. I’m glad you finally reached out to communicate.”
    “How did you get here? Are you even real, or is this another vision?”
    “I exist, though I am no longer part of the physical realm. What you see is the reflected light of my soul.”
    “Is that your way of telling me you’re dead?”
    “Existence as you know it is far different from the reality of the infinite world. But yes, I died on Xibalba.”
    Manny lays his head back, his eyes clouding with tears. “It’s my fault. I should have gone with you.”
    “No. I was the one who was wrong. I made your life miserable. Can you see it in your heart to forgive me?”
    “I forgive you, bro. I miss you.”
    “Our souls will always be entwined.”
    “I had a vision, Jake. It felt so real.”
    “The vision was not my doing. You channeled a prior life.”
    “Yeah, sure I did.”
    “Every human alive today has experienced at least one past life.”
    “Jake, no offense, but I’m still having a hard time believing we’re speaking, let alone—”
    “Reincarnation is not about believing. It is about understanding the very nature of the soul. The soul is eternal, a spark of the Creator that desires to exist in the Upper World. There’s a lot more to this, but the physical world was created for one purpose: so that each soul has an opportunity to earn its own eternal fulfillment. The process is known as Gilgul Neshamot. A soul descends upon the physical world because it needs to make a correction, sometimes from a sin committed in a past life. If a soul lives one lifetime without fulfilling its correction, it may return three more times to complete its tikkun, its spiritual repair.”
    “My soul, in a prior life, was Chilam Balam?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what is my purpose? What am I supposed to correct?”
    “The destruction of the world.”
    “The destruction of the world? Is that all? Hell, I ought to be able to handle that, no problem.”
    “Manny, this is a challenge you accepted the day you refused to join me on Xibalba. By remaining behind, you altered mankind’s future. In doing so, you also changed the past.”
    “You lost me.”
    “The physical universe has been caught in a time loop—a time loop created by a Doomsday device tested several years before our birth. Unbeknownst to its handlers, an anomaly was created. On December 21 in the year 2012, the anomaly appeared in the