Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “That sounds right to me,” I said.

  “You’re involved with corn futures, right?” Boyle asked.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Well, good,” he said. “So you’re in the same boat we are.”

  I kind of nodded.

  “You know, though, some of Taro’s work is proprietary.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said. “I’m not using any of Taro’s work in my own trading.” It wasn’t entirely true, but on the other hand I’d never signed anything beyond the usual university research papers. And that was a long time ago, before we’d even changed the Game layout the first time. And also, Warren was definitely using some stuff I’d come up with, things I’d clued Taro in on years after the school gig.

  “We were talking about the big problems, though,” Lindsay said. “Let’s get back to that. Everything in that Codex thing is bad. And it’s all happened.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But not everything you foresee with the Game on a day-to-day basis happens. With a lot of things, at least, so far, it’s helped people stay out of trouble. Isn’t that right?”

  “Right,” Lindsay said.

  “So the hope is that the 4 Ahau date will be just like that,” I said. “On a bigger scale. If the Game operates well, if it describes the event more specifically, then it shouldn’t be anything unavertable.” Was that a real word? I wondered. Never mind. Move on. “Especially since it’s almost certainly going to be anthropogenic. I mean, since it’s likely to be caused by people. It’s just the last link in a chain.”

  “A chain of what?”

  “Of cause and effect. That is—well, what we think it is, the Game is a reading-ahead of a web of catastrophe that spreads outward from the point in space-time where the Game was played.”

  “You’re saying what you’re calling a web, that these disasters, they have the same ultimate cause.”

  “That’s right. It’s not just that they have features in common. It’s that they’re part of a larger process. It’s as though they were battles in a single continuing war. That’s why there aren’t any natural disasters in the Codex. And the Game doesn’t work very well on natural events. On weather, it only does a little better than the programs that the Air Force Weather Agency uses. It’s just about the human world.”

  “So if some really big asteroid had slammed into the earth or, or something of the sort, something unpredictable … then what?”

  “I’d say that might have thrown the process off the track. And they wouldn’t have foreseen that. But that didn’t happen. Whatever process they identified is still going on.”

  “Got it.”

  “So the point is, it’s not that they foresaw that there would be a Disney World. It’s that they knew that a progression had been set in motion that would require that sort of a pilgrimage center to be roughly in that location at this particular time, in order to keep things together—”

  “But still, that doesn’t tell us what we need to know,” Boyle said. Shut up, Boil Face, I thought. “What we need to know is whether a nine-stone version would really allow us to head off whatever’s coming.”

  Lindsay’s eyes were on Boyle for a second, so I glanced at Marena. She looked back like, yes, Boyle’s a jerk, he’ll stab us in the back in a second, in fact he’ll shoot us in the back from a long distance and make it look like somebody else did it, and then—

  “Well, it’s just a hugely high percentage,” Marena said. “There’s no hundred-percent guarantee. But like the report should say, I’ve had Taro’s math checked by two outside labs and they both said it seems pretty sound.”

  “Look at it this way,” I said. “The four-stone version of the Game that we’re playing now works pretty well on human events within, say, three days. A nine-runner game would work one thousand and twenty-four times better, so in terms of advance warning—”

  “Let’s just take that as a yes,” Lindsay said.

  There was a pause. Lindsay looked at Marena. I looked at Marena. She looked back at Lindsay. I looked back at Lindsay.

  “So then they knew how to do all this back then, and we don’t,” he said.

  I nodded. I took a sip of the hot chocolate. Ahh. Bland but still welcome.

  “And that’s a sockdolager of a skill set. Ain’t it? Back then, your people had the bulge on everybody. The Maya back then, they could write their own ticket. Right?”

  “Well, I guess,” I said. Had I gotten any foam on my upper lip? I wondered. “They did very well for a very long time. But of course, it didn’t go on forever.” Marena’s eyes caught mine. A little less soft sell, they said. Idiot.

  “That’s just what I’m drivin’ at,” Lindsay said. As quickly and discreetly as possible, I sort of wiped my upper lip with my lower one. “If the Maya knew so darn much, then why didn’t they take over the whole world?”

  “Maybe just knowing how isn’t enough,” I said. “Or maybe they would have, but for some reason they, they lost the knack.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe just because the Game was a specialized skill. Maybe they tried to keep it too secret.”

  “So they didn’t let other people draw water from the well,” he said.

  “Very possibly,” I said. “Anyway, you know, technologies fall out of use all the time. Like when the first people came to Tasmania like ten thousand years ago or whatever, they had pottery and seagoing canoes and fishing nets and a lot of other things. But by the time of their first contact with outsiders they’d forgotten how to make them. They’d even forgotten how to start fires. They had to wait for lightning to hit a tree and then they’d carry the coals around.”

  “So it’s just like today, nobody knows how to make a real ice-cream soda anymore,” Lindsay said. “Right?”

  “Definitely,” Boyle said.

  “Also,” I said, “the ancient Maya’s priorities may not have been the same as ours. They may not have wanted to take over the world.”

  “Well, even today, not everybody wants to take over the world,” Marena said. “For instance, I don’t.”

  “Righty right,” Lindsay said. He shot his left cuff back and looked at his watch, a silver Oyster Perpetual on a brown calfskin band. Like, instead of looking at the digital time readout, which was right there in a window on the live tabletop, and which like all computer timers these days was synchronized with the cesium-decay clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, which is accurate to within a picosecond a century, he had to go out of his way to read a vastly less precise time measurement off a mechanical movement that hasn’t really changed since the eighteenth century. I watched the second hand sweeping from two to three. Finally, he decided what time it was.

  “Well, it’s about five of,” he said. “We’d better be movin’ out.” He looked back at me. “Maybe we’ll jaw about this all later on.”

  “Great,” I said. I was about to try to say something either wishy-washy or stupid, but Marena saved me.

  “Well, anyway, Jed, I have to justify my existence here for a few minutes,” she said. One could tell that she meant they were going to vote on me right now. She started steering me toward the door.

  “Hold your horses a sec,” Lindsay said. “Jus’ let me give you a copy of this thing. I’m handing ’em out like beechnuts these days, but I can’t help myself. First-time-father’s pride.” He took a little pigskin case from the top of a short stack on the table and flipped it open. Inside was a dedicated e-book, which he signed across the screen with a sort of silver Swiss Army multithing with a stylus on it. He handed it to me.

  “Oh, great, thanks,” I said. His signature was in dark blue, with gold sparkles permanently coursing through it like bulbs in an old theater marquee, and it took me a second to read the title graphics underneath:

  TEAM SPIRIT™:

  COACHING SECRETS of MOSES, JESUS,

  LOMBARDI, and JACKSON

  The timeless teamwork wisdom that will give you that “Leg Up—”

  Both on the competition and in your family and spiritual life

  By International Entrepreneur Lindsay R. Warren

  With an Introduc
tion by Dr. Stephen Covey, Ph.D.

  I started scrolling through the text to show how interested I was. “Harnessing the Power of Pain,” one chapter heading said. Little ads kept popping up in the corners, for audiovisual versions of the book, children’s versions, subliminal versions, related teaching materials, courses and seminars and spiritual resorts and corporate retreats and motivational posters and indium energy bracelets and a large selection of something called “incentives.” Creeds for the credulous section, I thought. Easy Answers for New People. Harnessing the Power of Self-Delusion—

  “God bless,” Lindsay said.

  We had to crush hands all around again before I could leave. I slunk back out through the empty rooms. Hell, I thought. They hate me. I looked like a papisongo in there. And I sounded like two papisongos. They’re voting for Sic. Hell, hell, hell.

  The SkyBox was empty. Anne-Marie’s voice was still burbling out of a speaker somewhere, going on about how the once (presumably) happy-go-lucky city of Orlando was now all death and devastation. “But the long-term social and economic effects … are only beginning,” she said. I drifted over to the window. Sheesh, the place was frugging monstrous. You could drop two Salt Lake Cosmodomes in here and still have room left for the Taj Mahal and some pizza. The funicular track was even with the zero-yard line, and so from here the field was perfectly symmetrical, and some optical illusion made it seem like the enormous oval was tipping up toward you. I indulged in another slug of chocolate, put the mug down, and spread my hands on the desktop, trying to stay steady.

  żY ahora que? Now what?

  “Hi,” Marena said behind me. And even before I turned around, just from the sound of her voice, I knew it was a go. I’m in, I thought. I’m going to get to see it. I’m there. I was that Dawn of Man Australopithecine Dude in 2001, tossing up that Zarathustran femur. I was Marie Curie squinting down at that 0.0001-gram speck that was brighter than the sun. I was the New Prometheus. What a feeling.

  I turned. She made a double thumbs-up.

  [19]

  Campeche, Mexico, is a yellow city in the Yucatán with the gulf on the wrong side. Calle 59 was narrow and hot with bus horns and a sewage smell. What they were now calling rakjano music—which I guess is basically Ozomatli at four hundred beats per minute—throbbed out of a likely-looking bodega. I went in and got four six-packs of Shasta Tamarindo, five bags of de la Rosa malvaviscos, that is, marshmallows, five big candles, and a carton of 555s, all in a real brown paper bag like in the old days. I walked back across the street and into a little door in the south side of the Iglesia de San Francisco. The façade and most of the nave had been built in 1694, but it had just been repainted, for what must have been at least the hundredth time, so that it looked like it had grown a new layer of birch bark. It had that cool stony waxy myrrh scent inside and before I could catch myself I dipped my hand in a font and crossed my heart. And hope to die, I thought. My name’s Jesus, Son o’ God, take and suck, this is my cod. Peace! Goddamn childhood conditioning. Padre Manuda was still standing at the altar, trying out a new sound system—bought with our money, I guessed—but he had the main amp too close under the hanging microphone and when he hit a high note it picked up the reverb off the pink-washed stone walls. He didn’t look at me. I passed a pair of ancient nuns with cornets and big white bibs, two of few remaining members of the once numerous sisterhood of Poor Clares. From what I could gather, over the last few hundred years the order had driven itself almost out of business by refusing to compromise on the austerities issue. Supposedly they were pretty hard-core, and the nuns spent all their time not speaking, kneeling on stone floors, eating barley gruel, and fisting each other. The only other customers were two old Tzotzil women in wool scarves and cotton three-web huipiles, spanking white and embroidered with green and red toad-and-Earthlord patterns. Workday wear. Four mangy pigeons fluffered around the vault.

  I walked up the nave to the second transept and stopped in front of a newish retablo dedicated to Saint Teresa of Ávila, who, as I think I mentioned, was a patroness of the Sacrifice Game. She’s also the patron saint of chess and headaches, which must keep her pretty busy. I ground one of the candles onto a spike, lit it with No Way’s Zippo, and laid the other four next to it. I turned into the right transept and went into a little side chapel.

  The room was taken up by a cream-colored cracquelured casket, closed on the top but with windows on the sides: “El mero ataúd della santísima Abadesa Soledad,” as the priest had put it, “the very coffin of the blessed Abbess Soledad.” It had turned out she was something of an off-the-books local saint. It was just the two of us in here. I crouched down, and even though I’ve had a real problem with nuns since my Sisters of Charity days, I had to resist the urge to kneel. The glass had sagged over the centuries, but you could still just see a little skully head like a five-year-old’s, cupped in a web of opus araneum lace, with bisque skin like strudel dough pulling back from projecting gray teeth. The notion of chickening out crossed and recrossed my mind, but I did the what-the-fuck trick and got over it. Basically you just repeat “What the fuck, the world is shit” to yourself over and over, with conviction. You don’t even have to do any special breathing.

  I left. I walked around the chancel rail and up the other side, behind the altar. I really am being silly, I thought. They’re not trying to put something over on me. Why would they bother? Especially with anything this elaborate. Still, it didn’t hurt to be sure. This is just a dry run anyway, I thought. Controlled conditions. It’s not a big deal. Don’t be scared. Guarde sus pantalones.

  Okay.

  There was a little steel door at the end of the south transept, and, like I owned the place, I opened it and went into the old rectory hall. At the far end of the hall there was a courtyard and, on the far side of that, a wing that used to be Convento de la Orden de las Damas Pobres. I took a route I’d rehearsed a few times, up eighteen tiny zigzag stairs to the second floor, which was just a long low hall with five little doors on each side.

  Grgur was slouching outside cell #4, poking at a military-looking laptop. He was wearing a polo shirt and seafoam-gray Ralph Lauren slacks, like he was the assistant manager of a cruise line. I waved. He nodded, glowering. I’m glad he’s joined us, I thought. He really brightens up the place. The various gadgets spread out in the hall included two thirty-inch monitors, two boxes that looked like big speakers, a four-foot steel rod with a handle on it, and two things on tripods that looked like ordinary portable radar dishes, that is, shallow Plexiglas parabolas about thirty inches across, with big cylindrical sponge-covered boxes out in front where the microphone would be. I edged around Grgur into the tiny white room. The little window was open and letting in flies, but the place was still like a moldy sauna. There was a camp cot, a cheap new crucifix on the wall, an electrocardiogram reader, and an IV rig. Terror. Whoa. The combination of rig, cot, and whitewash triggered this flash from when I was six and in the hospital in San Cristóbal—

  Squelch that.

  The cell was also crowded with people. Taro and his Ashley, that is, the one they called Ashley2, not, as I had first thought, Ashley Thieu, to distinguish her from the other Ashleys, were sitting on the floor messing with a workstation and Marena and Dr. Lisuarte were talking in the arch by the window. Hitch, the cameraman—we called him that because he was an aspiring director who looked a bit like a young, Hispanic Alfred Hitchcock—was gaffing a microphone to the top of the door frame. I offered my snacks around, but nobody wanted any. I fished out the last surviving box of Shasta. The thing had an autocooler on it—“ĄEstá Frigorífica!” it said—and I was worried that it was going to taste all defanged and updated, but … no!, it still had that bitter Cold War Apollo-era ultraviolet aftertang, the great taste of basic esters and aldehydes before the flavorists got too clever. Could you even get this stuff in the States anymore? Dr. L said we had to get going and this was as good a time as any.

  I said okay.

  Yikes, yikes. Okay. Chill. Be a mensch, for Christ’s sake. I deshoed
and sat cross-legged on the cot. Supposedly it was in the same orientation of the original pallet, and the crucifix was in the same spot as Sor Soledad’s would have been when she died here. Of course, in a way it was overkill. We didn’t really need to do this here. The point in real space—whatever that is—where this room had been in those days was millions of miles away by now, so theoretically I could have been back at the Stake, or in the lab in Orlando, or anywhere. But the feeling was that it would be less disorienting if I was in the same place now as I would be back then, with the same weight of mud brick and plaster all around me, the same courtyard outside, and the noises of the same city. Although of course back then there were more sheep and goats around here than people. And it would be the same time of day, but not the same time of the year.

  “You don’t mind if I’m here, do you?” Marena asked.

  I said no and that I used to like watching my mom pluck chickens.