Marena wouldnt tell me exactly what they were planning to do. But I figured it wasnt conventional sci-fi time travel, because I was pretty sure that was impossible. From the way she hemmed and hedged, it sounded like it would be some kind of remote viewing, which couldnt be very active or dangerous. I guess I imagined myself sitting comfortably in Taros lab, enjoying a quintisensory VR feed from some counterpart in ancient Mayaland as he watched two adders playing the full nine-stone version of the Sacrifice Game. No problem.
Marena said that the idea of my trying out for Sics position in what they called the Count Chocula Projectapparently all Warren black ops were named after breakfast cerealshad already occurred to her. She said shed even mentioned me as a backup. But the Kerr-space people had said Sic had some advantages over me. I asked what they were. She said mental stability was probably one of them. Another was that hed already conducted a few wet tests. She wouldnt give me any more details about what they were planning.
She said shed talk to Taro about it and that I should either go back to work or take some Vicos and calm down. We talked again that day at 8:40 p.M., on the phone. She said she was having dinner at Lindsays compound, and that shed put in a word for me. I said thanks. I took the Vicodin. Taro called at eleven. He said Marena had asked him about it and that hed been thinking about it too. He said he couldnt tell me any more about the project. He said hed put in a word for me.
I stayed up all night agonizing. I was back at the lab at 7:00 A.M. Sic wasnt there. I kept asking to challenge him to a game. A2 said theyor Theydidnt even want me to talk to him anymore. Maybe They were afraid Id kill him. I managed to get back to work on the Game. But of course I couldnt focus.
The next day, the thirty-first, Marena told me theyd got me a trial, which could get me into the candidate pool. That evening, the Stakes Morons, now over twenty thousand strong, gathered in the Hyperbowl to watch the current prophet give his fireside chat on a six-story video screen. Afterward, there was a sing-along with the Tabernacle Choir Road Show. I really, really wanted to go but somehow I just didnt make it. I stayed in and checked on the home front. Things in Indiantown werent good. About half the people I knew from there were still unaccounted for. Instead of quartering the displaced in other cities, which had caused problems after Katrina, FEMA had built a single refugee center at Camp Blanding, which now had over two million inhabitants.
On the blogs, BitterOldExGreenBeretCracker was going on about how the Nation of Islam was behind the attacks because Wednesday had been predicted as the second coming of a mad scientist named Yakub, who I guess was sort of like their Antichrist. Hell Rot was saying that the polonium particles had been dispersed with some kind of smog-seeding system that was way too complicated for any independent hacker/terrorist/whatever to design, and that the attack had almost certainly been engineered by a big government, probably our own. Hes probably a bit, somewhat, slightly right, I thought. The trouble with conspiracies isnt that there arent any. There are plenty. But for every real conspiracy behind X situation there are a few thousand untrue theories, some of which are even started by the actual conspirators. There are so many half-truths camouflaging the real ones that even decades later theres almost no way to sort out what actually happened. Except maybe this time …
Testing started on the second. Id thought it would be something that if I worked hard I could do better than someone else. Instead it turned out to be already out of my hands. That is, it was all about the way I was already. It started with six hours of medical and cardiovascular-fitness tests. We determined that aside from having a life-threatening disability I was in B+ shape, not because I wanted to be or because I liked exercise, but because if youre a bleeder youre either in decent shape or dead. There were fourteen hours of basic mental tests, including memory (easy), sequence and spatial puzzles (almost as easy), linguistic exams (still pretty easy), emotional sampling (which I assumed I failed as usual), and interpersonal skills like trying to tell if someone on video was lying or not (utterly incomprehensible). They did a new emotional-assessment sort of thing where they wired me up and played videos of sick children and gut-shot dogs, like I was Alex DeLarge. Then there were personalized tests, including a whole expanded-polygraph thing where, as far as I could tell, they were trying to determine how committed I was and what my motivations were. God knows what the results were on that one. I wasnt sure how honest I needed to be about my real motivation. I mean, my motivation aside from saving the day. Not that I didnt care about Doom Soon. I mean, who wouldnt? But that wasnt my personal reason. And neither was Marena. That is, of course I thought she was kind of hot, and its a natural urge to want to be the hero. Right? Well, if she needed to go out with somebody major, fine, this was my way to be major, not just rich major but total hero major, absolute Dudley Do-Right major, so that anything else I ever did, no matter how rotten, wouldnt matter. But that wasnt my main motivation either.
The fact was, I already had my own agenda. And Id had it practically since birth. Have you heard about those people who were one of a set of twins, and one was aborted or absorbed or eaten early in the pregnancy, and when they grow up, even if they dont know about it, they always say they feel theyre missing someone? I dont have that, but Ive always had this feeling that Im looking for something Ive lost. I figure about three-fifths of my dreams are about running around looking for something. Or someplace, rather. Its not something small. Its somewhere that ought to be around the corner but never is. And now I was finally drawing a bead on the little gray personal demons Id been swatting at for my whole glum-ass life. I wanted the books back, I wanted my beaten, maimed, raped, infected, abandoned, and all-but-deceased culture back, and I wanted it right the hell now. Corny but true. Suppose you were a child exile from some trashed place, say Atlantis or the Warsaw Ghetto or Krypton or Bosnia or Guatemala or wherever, and before your parents sent you away they gave youas a kind of γνωρισματων, that is, a birth tokena couple of pieces out of an old wooden jigsaw puzzle. Theyre worn around the edges, but the colors of their cryptic bits of picture are still deep and festive. And youve carried them with you through your whole life, but as much as youd stared at them you only had vague guesses about what the image they were part of might be. And now you heard that somebody had the picture, or at least some of it. What would you do? What would Jesus do? What would anybody do?
Well, what I was going to do was, I was going to get myself chosen over Sic, I was going to go through the Kerr-space thing. I was going to deal with whatever I had to deal with. And I was going to bring back my whole goddamn civilization, all soaked up in the little 1,534-cubic-centimeter sponge of my own brain.
[17]
On Wednesday the fourth, Marena called and said to be ready early on Friday morning to meet the great man. It was the final hurdle. One would have thought hed have wanted to sign off on me, or not, before theyd gone through the effort and expense of the testing. But Lindsay Warren was one of those people whod be wasting his time if he stooped to pick up dropped thousand-dollar bills. Clearing me on everything else first was just standard procedure, the way they used to make dinner for Louis XIV in each of his hunting lodges every day, just in case he stopped by.
Marena confided that as of now, the plan was still for Sic to go. Stability and social skills beat brilliance every time. And Sic had model looks. Well, Patagonia-catalog-model looks. Still, there were three people who still had to vote on me-versus-Sic: Lindsay, somebody named Snow, and somebody named Ezra Hatch. Theyd tip the result one way or another. I didnt know how Boyle or Michael Weiner had voted. Or Marena, for that matter. Although she liked me, I thought. And Taro … well, Taro thoughtokay, fine, he knewthat I was a bit of a flake. But hed probably come through. But Boyle hated me. And Weinershitzel hated me. So it was probably two against two so far. Well, Lindsay probably really had eight votes anyway. The thing wasand if t
here are any kids out there, please at least consider this bit of duffery wisdomnothing ever happens just on the merits. Even when youre talking about something like, say, last-ditch doomsday-aversion, its still mainly about whether they like you or not, how good-looking you are, what secret societies you werent in back in New Haven, and whether or not your name ends in a vowel. The usual.
I spent two days agonizing. On Friday morning, Laurence Boyle met Marena and me in a low, wide, blank room in the Stakes R&D Temporary Facility #4, a bunkerish building under the stadium. He was all put together at 7:06 A.M., with a tab-closure collar that made his head look like it was being squoze out of a tube and a dark last-of-the-three-piece-suits. We scuffed past rows of cubicles, each with a cubicle trog keying away. A few of them were playing eXtreme Foosball at a break area in the center. They stared at Marena like she was Queen Amygdala.
These rooms go down two more levels? Boyle asked or said. Its all programming and testing for the Battlefield Air Targeting System?
Thats a UAV, right? Marena asked without the sense of really caring.
Yep, Boyle said. He hosted us into a big glass-lined elevator with a green-suited guard in it.
Right now were right under the west sideline of the multipurpose play field, Boyle said to me. Dutifully, I nodded and glanced at my you-are-here map:
BELIZE OLYMPIC HYPERBOWL
Good morning, Julie Andrews chirped. Stupidly, I looked around. Please grasp one of the padded safety handrails as we begin our ascent. I realized it was the elevator talking, in a voice fleshy enough to fool a blind vocal coach.
Sir? Marena asked the Elevator Goon. Do you think you could please, uh, shut that woman the heck off? Thanks. Her voice sounded dulled. Over breakfast, or I should say between gulps of espresso, shed said shed just found out her friend Yu Shih had died in a fire in Vero Beach.
We began our ascent. It was dark outside the glass and then light fell around us as we rose out of the ground into the interior of a titanic inverted ellipsoid cone. I was very reluctantly impressed.
We are now entering the Hyperbowl Stadium Seating Area, Julie said. There was an odd perspectival effect as our transparent box oozed up toward the directrix, as though the rows of stairs above us were both advancing and receding. Despite myself I actually did grasp one of the padded safety handrails. On the far side of the SofTurf field four tall athletes in Day-Glo green sweats were kicking around an illuminated soccer ball. My nose grazed the window and left a little spotted smudge.
Thats Mohammed Mâzandar right down there, the guard dude said. I figured out, a little on the late side, that he was talking to me.
Who? I asked.
The forward, he said like I was a two-year-old.
I must have given him a blank look.
The basketball player, he said. He pointed down at the far-off red giants.
Oh, I said. Great. Chinga tu madre, I thought. Whats with this automatic assumption between guy types that all anybody with a Y chromosome is going to be even remotely interested in is team sports? Do I come up to you, a total stranger, and say, Hey, buddy, can you believe Natalia Zhukova won that EEC Interzonal yesterday? Seventeen g takes f5, g takes f5, eighteen h-Rook to g1? Unbelievable!
Although maybe I wouldnt feel that way if Id been even remotely jocked out in school instead of being a flash-bruising little redskin geek
We are now at the first seating level, Mary Poppins said.
Sorry, Im trying to turn this down, the lease-a-cop said, messing with the control screen. For a second I thought I saw it say that one of the functions was self CLEAN.
When completed, the Belize Hyperbowl will seat over a hundred and eighty-five thousand fans, making it the third-largest sports spectatorship facility on the globe. Thats progress, I thought. I guess if you build it, theyll show up. Unless its the set for Waterworld.
So look, Marena said, you know not to use cuss words around Elder Lindsay, right?
Oh, sure, I said. And Ill take that especially seriously coming from Ms. Cloacamouth. You know, I grew up around these people. I mean, the LDS.
Hes a bit of a holy roller, she said. Supposedly when he was an archdeacon he converted more people than anybody else, ever.
Great. I was getting the feeling that this meeting was going to be a little more decisive than shed let on.
We are now at Level Fourteen, the Sound of Muzak said as we came to what was actually Level Thirteen or, in another system, Bolgia One.
Welcome to the VVIP SkyBox.
We oozed to a stop. There was a pause, and more pause. Finally there was an A-flat synthesound and the boxs north wall slid open with a powerfully understated and probably unnecessary hiss.
The rest of the ring-shaped building was still in the last phase of construction, but this room was all ready for the cover of Interior Design, done up in brass and blond wood like a press box at a classy 1930s racetrack. On our left a seamless sweep of glass looked out into the field, and the receding rings of tens of thousands of desolate green seats generated a sort of vertigo that made me want to pitch myself through the bulletproof Perspex and roll all the way down to the end zone. Below the window an angled desk topped with a single long plasma touch screen ran the length of the room, with at least fifty windows streaming away on it, stocks, commodities, football games, surveillance cameras, shots of construction at other parts of the site, Good Morning America, a Special Miss Universe Pageant, and a shot of one of the riots in India, which had grown from the one Id handicapped back at Taros lab into region-wide chaos. One of the windows had the sound on and Anne-Marie Chippertwits voice bubbled out of it: Orlando, she said. The After-math. A city searches for meaning.
There wasnt anyone around. It was one of those odd limbo moments. Marena drifted toward the far end. I followed. The elevator guy stayed at the door. Behind him, the elevator doors shut slowly, paused, as such doors do, before closing completely, and then sucked together into an airtight seal.
I looked away from the window and tried to focus on the shelves. Wow, I thought. Id pictured Lindsay Warren as kind of a corncob Bond villain. But the thing is, at least in the movies Ken Adams worked on, the Bond villains all had really good taste. Dr. No had a Goya, Scalamanga had a yellow-jade Teotihuacan mask in his foyer … but the decor in Lindsays offices was so tacky it made Carl Varney look like Palladio. Most of it was sports memorabilia, autographed footballs and hurleys and jerseys and balls and bats and pucks. I noticed a pair of little old cracked brown mittens signed Jack Dempsey, with a framed photo of the infamous Long Count leaning behind them. There was a plaque on the wall that said all the wood in here was salvaged from old shipwrecks in the Gulf of Honduras, and a plaque on the floor that said its pink granite tiles had been retrieved from the lobby of One Liberty Plaza after it burned down on 9/11. We fetched up at the north end of the room, at what seemed to be Lindsay Warrens personal desk, although it couldnt have been his main one since it was too low-tech and uncluttered, or rather all the clutter was more mementi. There was a model of an F-17 Hornet, an ancient gold plastic Nabisco two-in-one compass and magnifying glass, and a cut-Lucite trophya pyramid embedment, as they call it in the tradewith the words
etched on it and a little flock of real honeybees suspended inside. Next to that there was a Rawlings baseball encased in a beveled-glass pyramid. MARK MCGWIRE #70, the pyramid screamed in Bradley Hand Bold. It was that cagado three-million-dollar baseball. For the price of this baseball, you can save thirty thousand AIDS babies. The wall treatment ran toward humanitarian awards and honorary degrees and framed articles from the Financial Times. One showed a giant family portrait, a huge clan of happy, healthy all-American types with teeth, all ranked in front of a façade I recognized. With Huge Gift, Utah Researchers to Study Neural Diseases, the headline said. I read the caption under t
he photo:
Lindsay R. Warren, a Salt Lake City businessman and son of Korean War ace Ephraim Stick Warren, who gave $1.5 billion for research on Alzheimers and other pathologies of the nervous system, is seen here with his family. Mr. Warren is at right, holding three of his eighteen grandchildren, next to his wife, Miriam. His family gathered in front of the Salt Lake City hospital that bears his name.
There were pictures of Lindsay Warren with Gerald Ford, Michael Jordan, Bush I, Bush II, Tiger Woods, the Osmond Family, Gladys Knight, James Woolsey, and Bono. There was even one of a young him standing in front of a USO truck with John Wayne, Vicki Carr, and Ronald Reagan. You almost expected to see him in a group shot with J. Edgar Hoover, Jesus Christ, and the five original Marx Brothers. Below the photos there was a shelf crowded with Colt Peacemakers and old 1911s and other patriotic handguns. All but one of them were dutifully fitted with trigger locks. The exception was a Beeman/FWB C8822-CO2 rapid-fire air pistol, nestled on aqua velvet in an open cryptomeria-wood box. It had a gold Olympics medallion inset in the grip, with a pyrographed inscription: In Grateful Appreciation from His Excellency Juan Antonio Samaranch 24/2/02. I looked back down the long room toward the door wed come in and, yep, there was a metal-and-plasticine trap-target hung on the wall with a close group of 0.177-caliber holes edging into the bulls-eye. Cowboys. Rednecks from Planet Kolob. Who even cares about marksmanship anymore? These days even squirt guns have laser sights.
Brian D'Amato Page 24