“You put Great Houses up high so they can see each other and talk back and forth. ‘Smoke and mirrors.’ Bonfires and pyrite. With one repeater, you could be talking to Aztec in fifteen minutes. But somebody’s gotta be here to answer the phone. “Why’s the atalaya so big? The architecture of power. Impress the hell out of people. The construction of it would have been an event people remembered. It’s monument-building. “And if that wall really is a serpent . . .” Hatcher and I looked at each other, dazzled by the show. I thought, This is how science gets done—by tossing ideas into the air like
...more
