Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I called Todd Rosenthal at Naples Motorsports. He was an early owl and he picked up his business line.

  “Okay, I’ll take the ’Cuda,” I said. It was a Metalflake Aztec Red 1970 hemi collapsible hardtop, 383 block, all-original metal, new electronics, numbers-matching monster that I’d had my eye on for a while, and I’d dickered it down to only $290K. He said he’d have it and the papers trucked over by 9:00 A.M. so that I wouldn’t have time for second thoughts. Click.

  Ahhhhh. That’s the ticket. Doing my bit to make the world a better place. Wouldn’t want to let some cracker show monkey get his hooks on a work of art like that. I already had a ’73 Road Runner parked outside, and another Barracuda in the Villanuevas’ garage, but I hadn’t quite reached Plymouth saturation. I have kind of bad taste. It’s more fun than the other kind. Okay, now what? Maybe a little oceanfront property. Just a medium-size island, a loaf of bread, a jug of Squirt, a twenty-thousand-gallon reef tank, a five-thousand-gallon Jacuzzi, a couple of J-porn starlets, and a Vatnajökull Glacier of pure Colombian rock. Simple pleasures. Oriental vixens desire liquidity. No problemo.

  Naturally, the rush didn’t last. Two hours later I was still in my special spot on the floor, blinking up at the overhead screens, doing a reading for a client—one of the few I’d never had the heart to blow off—named Mother Flor de Mayo, from the Grace Rural School. She was wondering whether to finally retire this year.

  “żPodré caminar después de la operación?” her old voice asked over the speakerphone.

  “Déme un momento,” I said. I was having some trouble because her surgery was scheduled for the morning, and for some reason the Game had always seemed to work better on things that happened later in the day. “Estoy dispersando estas semillas amarillas y las semillas negras—”

  Codex. The word had popped up in the high-priority Google Search window on my trading screen. I clicked it up. Usually if anything comes in it’s from a pretty obscure post, like the Foundation for Ancient Mesoamerican Research or the Cyberslugs Webring, but this was an article in Time:

  An Ancient Book …

  Whoa. Tzam lic.

  That is, that sheet lightning under the skin.

  An Ancient Book with Modern Relevance

  Comes to Light in Germany

  The “Codex Nurnberg”—an eighty-page Mayan book that has been gathering dust and speculation in that city’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum since the 1850s—has, finally, been read.

  The lead photo showed the top half of a page from a Maya codex, a delicate drawing of what they call Waterlily Jaguar sitting in a field of Classic-period-style glyphs. That is, the forms were pre-900 AD.

  Ni modos. No way, I thought.

  “ż Joaquinito? żEstá allí?” Mother Flor’s voice asked.

  “żMadre? Perdóneme,” I said. “No estoy teniendo mucha suerte con las calaveras esta noche. żUsted piensa que podría venir mańana y la intentaremos otra vez?”

  She said of course, dear. I said thanks and clicked off.

  En todos modos.

  I blew up the picture of the Codex—which, since the release of that pinnacle of human achievement called the Logitech laser mouse, I could do just by waving a finger—and zoomed in on the number glyphs. Hmm. The calligraphy looked a little post-Classic to me. It didn’t look like a forgery, though. Forgeries are usually either way bad or way too good. And from what I’d heard the Nurnberg book had a pretty clear provenance. People had been coming up with schemes for reading it for at least fifty years. Maybe it was a post-Classic copy of a Classic text—

  Huh.

  One of the date groups looked a little unsettling. I blew it up and enhanced it. It was fuzzy, but it seemed to be 7 Quetzal, 7 Snatch-bat, 12.19.17.7.7, that is, June 2, 2010 AD, which was the date of the particle accelerator implosion at the Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca in Oaxaca. Two members of a Tzotzil Zapatista group had gone to prison for sabotage, for supposedly somehow causing the thing, although I and every other right-thinking person thought they weren’t guilty. Aerial views of the blast site showed a shallowly scooped-out area over a half-mile across, lined with sand that had been fused into dark-green obsidian.

  Hmm …

  After it arrived in Europe from the New World, the fig-tree-bark pages of the book—possibly written more than a thousand years ago—fused together over the centuries into what amounts to one solid brick. Researchers were unable, until now, to separate the accordion-folded pages due to the Mayan technique of priming the pages with gluelike compounds made from animal hides. The solution: the Scanning Tunneling Acoustic Microscope, or STAM, which “sees” ink through stuck pages.

  “This is the biggest thing in our field since the discovery of the palaces at Cancuen in 2000,” gushed Professor Michael Weiner, a researcher in Mesoamerican Studies at the University of Central Florida and director of the decipherment project. “Only a few scraps of Mayan literature survived the Conquest,” he said, referring to the Spanish invasion of America that started around AD 1500.

  Oh, that conquest of America.

  The Codex (much of the contents of which will be published next year in the prestigious Journal of Ethnographic Science) is one of only four other Mayan “books” known to have survived the hands of Catholic religious authorities.

  Weiner and his research team so far remain silent as to the exact content of the book’s glyphic text. However, rumors have spread through the tight-knit community of Mayan scholars that the book contains a drawing of a cross-shaped “divination layout,” a sort of game used to predict the future, and a string of eerily accurate predictions of actual catastrophic events, many of which occurred centuries after the book was written.

  The Mayans, who flourished in Central America between AD 200 and their mysterious downfall around AD 900, were a highly advanced civilization with a complex writing system and a mastery of mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and engineering, as evidenced by the massive pyramids they built from Honduras to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, now a chic vacation destination. More mysterious and unsettling was their unique spiritual life, which involved bloodletting rituals and human sacrifice, as well as an intricate system of interlocking calendars, which tracked starry events and predicted earthly ones far into the future. At least one of these dates has long been familiar to Mayan scholars and, in the last few years, has become known to many nonspecialists as well: December 21, 2012, or, as it is more popularly known, Four Ahau.

  They meant Kan Ahau, Ox K’ank’in, or 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowness, 13.0.0.0.0. The old End of the World bolazo again. Dolts.

  Maybe I should mention that I’d had a pretty big attitude problem about that date since about the seventh grade. People always asked me about it and I had to keep explaining that saying it’s a doomsday thing was a huge, huge overinterpretation. The twenty-first was an important day, no question, but not necessarily the end of anything, let alone everything. It’s only a big deal because there are a lot of deeply spiritual cretins out there, and they’re disappointed by the lack of disasters at the turn of the Christian millennium and the fact that 9/11 took their gurus completely by surprise. So they’re looking for another convenient deadline. Any time the world’s going to end, church pledges go up. Because, you know, why save? It’s an old scam ever young.

  If you happen to be even one-eighth Native American, you already know how these airheads keep coming up to you and acting like you’ve got some kind of spiritual aura. If there’s an Indian character in a movie, chances are twenty to one that he’s got ESP at least, and probably telekinesis, hands of healing, and, somewhere, a third eye. And the 2012 thing is the worst. Everybody’s got a different interpretation, and the only common denominator between them is that they’re all wrong. The Maya tracked an asteroid that’s going to crash into the earth on that date. The Maya left their cities and flew to Venus and that’s the ETA of their return flight. The Maya knew that on that date there’d be a major earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a plague, a flash ice age, a drop in the sea level, or all five. They knew that on that date
the earth’s poles would reverse. On that date our yellow sun’s going to go out and a blue sun will take its place. Quetzalcoatl is going to reemerge out of the transdimensional vortex in a jade-green flying saucer. The all-flowering oneness of the universal sea-sky-earth-goddess-truth is going to autopropagate through the cosmic oom. Time will get back in its bottle. Aurochs and mastodons will stampede down I-95. The Lost Continent of Mu will rise up out of the Galápagos Fracture Zone. The true Madhi, Joseph Smith Jr., will appear on the Golan Heights wearing a U2 T-shirt. Shirley MacLaine will shed her human form and reveal herself as Minona/Minerva/Mama Cocha/Yoko/Mori/Mariammar MbabamuwanaMinihaha. Scarlett Johansson will give birth to a snow-white bison. The NASDAQ will hit 3,000. Pigs will fly, beggars will ride, boys will be boys …

  Although, on the other hand, you had to admit that the exactness of the date, 12/21/12, does have a sinister specificity about it that gives you a queasy feeling. I mean, it’s not like Nostradamus, where it’s so vague you can make up anything and it seems to fit. Of course, we, I mean, we Maya, had always been pretty sure of ourselves.

  This is the long-awaited last date of the Long Count, the Mayans’ astonishingly accurate ritual calendar, which can be precisely correlated to days in the Christian one. A year from now, on this date, the current cycle of Mayan time comes to an end.

  Weiner is dismissive of doomsday scenarios. “We weren’t planning to release this until a year or so from now, after the twenty-first,” he says. “People can get ridiculous, and besides, we wanted to finish the research.” However, he says, “With all the speculation about the comet, we thought we’d release some of the interesting Ixchel-related findings.”

  Could the Mayans have timed their calendar to the appearances of Comet Ixchel? Its discoverers at Swinburne University, in New South Wales, who named their find after a Mayan goddess, clearly think so. Soon to be visible to the naked eye, Ixchel has a 5,125-year periodicity—or orbit—around the sun, meaning it was last seen in 3011 BC—Year One of the Mayan long-count calendar. If any ancient people could have honed in on its return, that people were the Mayans. Determined doomsayers will need to find some other threat: The ball of rock and frozen gases will miss the earth by at least fifty thousand miles.

  For the 2.3 million Mayans still living in Central America, the date betokens something nearer home: The twenty-first has also been set as a limit for talks in the renewed treaty effort between the small Central American state of Belize, a British protectorate, and the Republic of Guatemala, which in 2010, for the fourth time in a hundred years of disagreement, again claimed Belize as its twenty-third state, or departamento.

  If the opportunity passes, the day might bring another era of disaster to the Mayans—but a resolution could begin a new era of peace in the troubled region.

  U.S. efforts to aid the peace process have been complicated by the fact that the Mexican government has blamed a 2010 accelerator explosion in the Oaxacan city of Huajapan de León—in which over 30,000 people were killed—on Zapatistist indigenous-rights groups, Indian revolutionaries operating out of Guatemala and Belize. But if the region is not stabilized, there’s also media trouble ahead: Many observers fear that the International Olympic Committee might favor other sites than Belize for the 2020 Summer Games.

  What clues are there in the Codex Nurnberg? Along with the astronomical data usual to Mayan texts, the book is said to mention both the date of the accelerator blast and a celestial event that could well be Comet Ixchel. Predicting the future based on images of “year-bearers” in the images of rabbits, centipedes …

  Whoa.

  The old squirt of tzam lic under my left thigh. Something wasn’t right about that last word. Centipedes.

  I couldn’t get a grip on what it was, though, and of course the harder I tried the more it slipped away. Come back to that one later.

  … centipedes, blue deer, and green jaguars may seem a bit far-fetched. Interpretation will be, to say the least, a long and difficult process.

  Aside from the Codex, does the divination game itself have anything to teach us? Professor Taro Mora, a physicist and specialist in prediction models who has been studying Mayan games with Weiner’s help, clearly thinks so. Mora, a spry sixty-eight-year-old who spends most of his eighteen-hour days “teaching computers to teach themselves,” waxes enthusiastic over its potential.

  “There is much to learn from ancient approaches to science,” Mora says. “Just as we are using Go [an ancient Japanese strategy game] to help computers develop basic consciousness, we may use other games to teach them other things.”

  Way to go, Tar babe. That’s the way to wax, if you want to wax at all.

  Asked whether the game held any insights about the world’s eventual end, Mora joked, “No, but if the universe does disappear, at least we will know the Maya were on to something.”

  Could the End Date foretell an unhappy event for the Mayan region, or even for the entire world? And if so, what should we do about it?

  Many people’s answer seems to be, “When on Mayan time, do as the Mayans do.” Thousands of visitors from all over the world, and from all walks of life, are already planning trips to Chichén Itzá and other popular Mayan sites, waiting to salute the comet, greet the dawn, and ask the old gods for another five thousand-plus years for humanity. And while most of us wouldn’t go that far, we should be willing to entertain the possibility that the mysterious Mayans had far-reaching spiritual insights into their future—and, possibly, our own.

  Pendejos, I thought. Morons.

  No, wait. I’m the moron.

  The minute—well, the decade—that I leave Taro alone, he comes up with the goods. I felt like I’d held a stock for thirty years and sold it just before it took off.

  Well, I thought, I certainly can’t just wait until you decide to publish. I need to see that game board this minute. This second. This picosecond.

  I searched up Taro’s page. It said he was at the University of Central Florida, and that the lab was now being sponsored by grants from the UCF Corporate Exchange Program. And funding for the UCFCEP—as I found with only minimal snooping—had come from the catastrophe modeling team of the Simulated Trades Division of the Warren Investment Group. I remembered the company because it was a big employer in Salt Lake, and I’d seen in Barron’s that it had had some ethics problems with an alternate-energy thing a few years ago. Well, whatever.

  I tried Taro’s old filter password. It still worked and got me into his personal box. I couldn’t come up with some other excuse for writing, so I just wrote that I’d seen the article and wondered if I could come by soon, like, say, later today. “Send,” I said. It sent.

  Estas bien. I switched the screens to tank monitor mode. It said the Gulf tank was low on calcium, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. Maybe he won’t write back, I thought. No, he would. One of the good things about now is how you can lose track of someone for years and then get back in touch in a trice. Or even a half a trice. Except you also need to come up with more excuses.

  Hmm. 4 Ahau. 12/21/12. So it’s a big deal again.

  Well, just wait until the twenty-second. Nothing gets old faster than an apocalypse that didn’t happen.

  Right?

  [4]

  The Barracuda had a new live windshield, and on the drive up to Orlando I checked out Taro’s new sponsor, the Warren Group. It turned out the chairman and CEO was Lindsay Warren, this big developer and philanthropist in Salt Lake City who’d built the stadia for the Winter Olympics in 2002. I used to go to hospitals named after him. He’d probably been funding Taro’s work since back in the FARMS days. “The Warren Family of Companies” was definitely one of the fastest-growing conglomerates in the U.S. Four years ago, though, they’d been close to bankruptcy, and from what I could find it wasn’t clear exactly what had bailed them out. Maybe they’d gotten huge so fast by using the Game.

  Warren had its tentacles in all sorts of fields, from the esoteric to the stiflingly mundane. They made sports equipment and memorabilia. They developed motiv
ational tools, human resource management systems, “beliefspace software,” and interactive entertainment, anything and everything for a whole new centuryful of consumers with a whole lot of free time. Right now they were pushing this thing they called “Sleekers,” which seemed to be some kind of low-friction wheelless shoe/skate that glided on specially treated asphalt. They also did aerospace and research contracting. In ’08 one of their commercial labs had made headlines with the announcement that they had created a so-called desktop wormhole. The trendiest thing they mentioned was something called Consciousness Transfer Protocol, which people said was going to be bigger than the Human Genome Project but which was at least a decade off. Still, in their last annual report it looked as though their cash cow was entertainment construction—halls of fame, the eXtreme ParX franchise, and what they called socioimagineering. “The Warren Group is the leading developer of Intentional Communities (‘ICs’),” their site said. Apparently the division had started out on the reenactments circuit, people endlessly fighting the Civil War, and then they produced a lot of those Renaissance fair things, and then they got the contract to build the year-round Star Trek community, and now just a decade later they’d just reached 95 percent occupancy (or “communityship”) on a ten-square-mile development called Erewhynn, about fifty miles north of Orlando. It was supposed to be like an eighteenth-century Cotswolds village. The citizens went to classes on handcrafts and Scottish dialects, and they put on Michaelmas and Maying festivals and the whole shitterie. Then there was another big IC called Blue Lagoon Reef, on its own island in the Bahamas. There was a new feudal Japan spread in northern California. And there were big plans brewing in Latin America and the Far East. A site called Warren Sucks said that the company wanted to develop boutique countries with their own currencies and constitutions, that it was piggybacking on the retribalization movement to get into politics and indoctritainment and rewire our brains, and that, basically, it sucked.