Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “ Yeah.”

  “Hey, speaking of that, do we have doomsday insurance?”

  “Dude, I know it’s all ridiculous,” she said. “It’s a corporation.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “Okay, the first thing is, on the hćmophilia thing, do you know whether any of those medications counteract any known psychiatric medications?”

  “I’m told not,” I said.

  “Are you currently taking any medications that are not on the prescription list you gave us?”

  “No.”

  “Any other drugs?”

  “Caffeine.”

  “We don’t have to put that in.”

  “Like, fifteen cups a day.”

  “Hmm. I’ll leave it out anyway. But you really ought to ease up a little.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Right.” She scribbled a notation on her screen. “Um, the other thing is there’s another medical item. It says that when you got to the U.S., they classified you, um, they list you as having ‘posttraumatic stress disorder presenting as similar to Asperger’s.’ ”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Does that still affect your behavior?”

  “Well, not in a dysfunctional way, as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Why, do I seem weird?”

  “Not to me,” she said, “no, but, you know, that’s me.”

  “Hmm. Well, I can seem weird. So they tell me. They say I’m more interested in objects than people.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I’m not interested in objects either.”

  “So what are you interested in?”

  “Wait, what’s the difference again? People are the things that move around and say stuff, right?”

  “I’ll just tell them I’ve asked you about it and you’re okay,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s fine. I have a syndrome myself.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s called Laurin-Sandrow syndrome.”

  “Is that serious?” I asked.

  “No, it’s a very mild instance. It’s undetectable.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “How are you guys doing?” Boyle’s voice asked. We turned. He and Taro had come over.

  “We’re done,” Marena said.

  “Is Tony Sic around?”

  “He’s at that Care Space thing,” she said.

  “How are you doing with the four stones?” Taro asked me.

  “Not so well,” I said. Oops, I thought. Watch it. These are your employers, Jeddo. You’re supposed to radiate an aura of cautious optimism. “I do have another idea, though,” I started to say. “Maybe—”

  “I am thinking that we would need to use five stones even to get a handle on the problem,” Taro said.

  “How can we get a what, a nine-stone game going?” Boyle asked.

  “We would not even know where to start,” Taro said. “Each stone—each new stone is like putting another wheel on the Enigma machine.”

  I didn’t think Boyle got the reference. “We have to keep moving,” he said to Taro, leading him toward the stairs. Marena went with them. “Text me when you’re done down here,” she said to me. I made a little wave.

  I sat back down.

  Hmm.

  Something odd was going on. What was Tony Sic doing again? Oh, right. He was in the Care Space.

  It sounded kind of familiar to me. Maybe I’d been to a Care Space at some point. It had to be some sort of children’s hospital or outpatient center. One of Lindsay Warren’s nonprofits. Back in Salt Lake, maybe? Except that didn’t quite have the right ring to it. That is, I wasn’t associating it with the hćmo thing.

  Maybe it’s the Stake’s day care center. Does Sic have kids? He didn’t say he didn’t. Hmm.

  Except that didn’t ring right either. It felt like Care Space had to do with something else, something more abstract. Something mathematical.

  I put another plug in my cheek. Say what you want about nicotine, but it does light a fire under a few gray cells.

  The Care Space thing reminded me of something else. Two things. Something from last night that I didn’t know and didn’t check out. Freaky Friday? Somebody’d mentioned Freaky Friday. Which was what? It was just a dumb comedy movie that they remade as an even dumber comedy movie. Something that was going to happen on a Friday? Maybe that was just some local festival. Think about that one later. What else happened last night that was odd? Besides everything.

  Well, it was a little odd when Taro brought up time travel at the end of that conversation. Or rather, it wasn’t odd for Taro. Like a lot of math people, he and I had always talked about stuff like that. He gets speculative. But there had been something that seemed odd about it at the time. What was it? Taro said there wasn’t any future. Because there weren’t any time travelers. Okay. And then Boyle asked … right. He asked whether that wasn’t because of Novikov.

  Hmm. Well, the thing was, I happened to know what Novikov was. It was the Novikov self-consistency principle, which was a way to do time manipulations without the old and discredited many-universes theory. Basically it was a theorem about how time travel didn’t necessarily cause physical contradictions. But how come Boyle knew about it? He wasn’t a math person. He was kind of a dullard, in fact. And nobody questioned him on it either. And for that matter, why didn’t somebody object that maybe time travel was impossible? Even that Michael Weiner guy let it go by. And he was looking for ways to put in his two cents.

  And something else, some reference I didn’t get and hadn’t checked up on—

  Care Space. No. Kerr space.

  Roy Kerr.

  Kerr spacetime.

  Firefox, I clicked. Kerr space, I Googled. There were thousands of hits. I clicked the first one.

  Kerr Black Holes as Wormholes, Wikipedia said. Because of its two event horizons, it might be possible to avoid hitting the singularity of a spinning black hole, if the black hole had a Kerr metric.

  Dios perro, I thought. God dog.

  No es posible, no es posible.

  A little tingle started down in my lower back. It wasn’t a tzam lic twinge, it was just the normal cold goose bumpy sizzle you get with a major revelation.

  SSC, I thought, out of nowhere. A1 had said something like “The SSC was running.”

  What does SSC stand for? Okay. Secondary School Certificate, Societas Sanctae Crucis, Species Survival Commission, but, really …

  Hah. Superconducting supercollider.

  Holy shit, I thought.

  That’s it. That’s it. Holy shit. Shit. It. It …

  Taro wasn’t just going off on some tangent of hypotheticals the way he does. He was continuing something. They’d been talking together about time travel before. No es posible, I thought.

  I flicked my phone to the Stake map and hit TARO. His purple dot was nowhere in sight. How dare he turn off his dot? I wondered. Maybe he was in some secret, undottable part of the facility. Hell. I tried MARENA. Her blue dot came up in the dormitory-soon-to-be-hotel, probably in her room. So whatever Taro and Tony and Boyle were doing, she wasn’t doing it with them. Hmm. I got up, walked, too fast, to the exit, ran up the stairs—the elevators weren’t working yet—and dashed out into the sun, across the tarred lot, and into the dorm. The long hall was crowded with doughy, clean-cut Saints types bustling in and out of rooms with loads of unfashionable laundry. A plane-load of them had landed this morning and more were coming in every hour. On the Stake LAN portal page—under “Other Important Information”—it had warned us not to call them refugees because they were Americans. I pushed through to Marena’s door. I banged on it. No answer. I highlighted her dot and touched URGENT.

  I waited. Her voice came on.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It’s urgent,” I panted.

  “I’m in the shower.”

  “I’m serious. Really. Really.”

  “Hang on.”

  Two minutes later she opened the door. She was in a big tacky green Marriott Amenities bathrobe, with a green towel around her head like a feather headdress. Her face was wet. Any other time it would have bee
n sexy enough to be distracting. I just said I had, had, had to talk to her, ultraprivately.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said. Like me, and like a lot of Asians, and I guess more and more people these days, her instinct when she wanted privacy wasn’t to go into some little room and shut the door, but rather to go outside where you could see nobody was listening. She led me past the break room and the laundry room and out the back side of the building, trailing the bottom six inches of her robe in the dust. We were in a shady sort of nook between the building’s vinyl siding and a six-foot stack of rebar.

  “Okay, what’s the big deal?” she asked.

  My lungs were stuttering, like I was back at Nephi K-12 calling Jessica Gunnison for a date. Okay, go for it, Jed. Say something.

  “Well, I was thinking about this Kerr space business,” I said.

  “What about it?” she asked. At least she didn’t pretend not to know about it.

  “Just that, you know, if you really wanted to learn how the old guys played that game, you’d have to ask them.”

  “So how would you suggest we do that?” she asked. It was hard to hear her over the rasp of another turboprop coming in for a landing.

  “Maybe you guys have a time machine,” I said. Damn, I thought, that didn’t really sound very casual. Not really.

  “Are you kidding?” Marena asked. She peeled the towel off her hair. For a little person she really had a lot of hair, and now that it was swollen and spiked up she looked kind of like a cuter Troll doll. “Time machines don’t work. Do they?”

  “Doesn’t that depend on what you do with them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not a—it’s a Freaky Friday thing,” I said.

  “Who told you about Freaky Friday?”

  “That means, they’re not going to send any physical object.”

  She dropped the towel on the ground and ran her hands back through her hair, sculpting it into a big dangling flipper. She looked into my eyes. In her nearer eye the lower rim of the brown-and-gold iris was in direct sunlight, so you could see how it was a flattened torus over a dark hollow. I looked down into her pupil, hoping for a flicker or a dilation or something that would … but the thing is, people think that the eyes are windows into the soul, but actually they’re just as mute and opaque as anything else.

  Her phone buzzed somewhere. As her hand went into her pocket to turn it off, she broke the stare-down. “I said I’d call Max right now,” she said.

  “They’re just sending a wave or whatever, the SSC makes a, a naked singularity or a wormhole or something, and then it’s going to, you’re going to rewire somebody’s head back there.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Well … I guess you have cracked a physics book once or twice, haven’t you?”

  I said something or other, but it probably came out like mush because most of my head was busy tumbling into a swirlpool of expanded potential.

  In one of the oldest Arthur stories Merlin had a chess set with pieces that moved by themselves and, even more impressively, never lost a game. These days, most of us who’ve lived to see such things have also seen them grow and mature, so it’s no wonder we take them for granted. But one time, in 1998, I showed my old Excalibur 2400 to an eighty-plus-year-old chess-addicted Maya sun adder in Santa Eulalia—which is way up in the Huehuetenango Highlands, totally the backside of beyond—and you could feel the full force of the onrush of technology in the fear and excitement in his eyes, and the way he kept playing and playing the thing, sitting on a Pemex Oil box outside the bodega, clicking it through one old Ruy López after another, losing game after game, way into the night. Finally I just left the thing with him, along with a year’s supply of AAs. And now I was feeling that rush myself, that whole moon-landing, DNA-solving, radium-refining wonderment. Son of a bitch, I thought. Son of two bitches.

  She’d turned and walked out of the little nook, past the rebar and into a canyon between a giant backhoe and a cement mixer in matching apotropaic stripes. I followed.

  “And Tony Sic’s going to go,” I said.

  “Go where?”

  “Go back.”

  “Back to, like, olden times?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not exactly—”

  “Just loan me the thing for a minute,” I said. “I promise I’ll bring it back before I leave.” Fuck Sic, I thought. Sick fuck. Fick suck. That smug outdoorsy bastard. He’s going to see it. He’s going to know what it was like. And I’m not. FUCK! People say that sex, greed, and fear are the three biggest motivators, but actually jealousy is. None of the others are even close.

  “Listen,” I said. “Seriously. I can do this much better than that guy. I clobbered him on three-stone, I know infinitely more than he does—you know, the stuff he has to study, I knew it cold when I was five.”

  There was a short, brutish pause. Another helicopter whipped by to the west, patrolling the border.

  “Look,” she said. She sat down on a plug of newly cast concrete, crossed one invisible leg over the other, and, with a Dietrichy set of motions, lit a Camel. I stood, trying not to pace in circles like I do. Come on, Jed, get it together. Have at least a drop of sangfroid. She knows you want it, but you don’t have to let her know how much.

  “It’s not just me running this,” she said. “Whatever’s going to happen with Tony is already in the pipeline—”

  “Also I know I can pick up anything about the Game,” I said. I noticed my hands were waving around in front of my face and got them into my pockets. “No matter how complicated it turns out. Anything.”

  “You don’t know what’s involved. I don’t know what’s involved.” She took a long drag. She exhaled. “Anyway, now I’m in trouble.”

  “I don’t care what’s involved,” I said. Involved indeed. Please. “I’ve got a billion times the motivation to do it right. I’ve got more motivation than the, than the, I don’t know, than the, than the whole Lee Strasberg Institute.”

  “I’m sure that’s true.”

  “Yes, it is.” In fact I’d give my right testicle, I thought. And my right arm, right eye, right leg, and right brain. All my nondominant—

  “Anyway, now that I’ve told you, I have to commit seppuku.” She dropped her cigarette and toed it into the gravel with a size-six bright-green complimentary-Crocs-shod foot. It was an eloquent old gesture and she did it with some assurance.

  “Would it help if I begged you?” I asked. “I’ll beg you. It’s got to be me.” So much for cool.

  “Let’s see what things look like in a few hours when we’re not running on fumes,” she said. She ran her hands up over her cheeks like she was rehearsing a facelift. “ You know, it’s not easy to get people to change their whole—”

  “Please,” I said. “It’s got to be me.”

  [16]

  On 9 Death’s-head, 19 Whiteness, 11.14.18.12.6, or Friday, November 8, 1518, when the soi-disant Army of New Spain marched up the wide eastern causeway into Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital was the fourth-largest city in the world, a canal city like a clean, gridded Venice in the center of the lake that then covered sixty square miles of central Mexico. In the best eye-witness account, Bernal Díaz, one of Cortés’s lieutenants, said that the gleaming pastel palaces and pyramids rising out of the water “seemed like an enchanted vision from the realm of Amadis, and indeed some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream.”

  Now, The Tale of Amadis of Gaul was a King Arthur knockoff written in 1508 by a mediocrity named García Ordońez de Montalvo, and really, it’s a pretty run-of-the-mill popular romance, the then-equivalent of Tom Clancy, and an easy target a long time before Cervantes spoofed it. And the fact that this mercenary twerp was thinking about something like that as he helped initiate the largest episode of genocide in the history of the planet is truly beyond revolting.

  But the worst part, the real chingo of it, is that in fact it actually was like a fantastic romance. The Conquest, or at least the first part of it, really did partake of the period’s fabulous epic tales of derring-do. The Spanish actually did voyage to this incredible place, penetrate
a splendid and fierce empire, meet exotic people, torture them, triumph against overwhelming odds, and become vastly wealthy. They got to live their dream, and that was the problem. Humans have a way of actualizing their hallucinations, and the thing to really watch out for is when people take their passion and, as Irene Cara says, make it happen. Still, at that moment, when I realized—dimly, as it turned out—what they were going to do, I wasn’t thinking about that sort of thing either. I’d passed into the lands of Amadis, into the Dream Dimension of Unlimited Possibility where the galaxy reverses its polarity, Lolita whispers in your ear, and Moby Dick rises out of the sea.