Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Okay, wait—,” I started to say.

  “No, it’s great,” she said. “It’s nostalgic. It’s part of your whole retro-sixties thing.”

  “Mnff,” I said. “Unh, unh.” It sounded pretty stupid. I was trying to be halfway cool about this, but of course she liked to see me losing it. She flexed her rock-climber gluteus medius and whatever together and for some reason I got this image of myself being sucked into a sort of celestial car wash on textured conveyor belts with all these different kinds of foam brushes working me over. I noticed her bouldering finger was a few phalanges up my—hmm, culo? Servant’s entrance? Moaning Myrtle?—anyway, she was way in there, not, so far as I could tell, out of technique, but just for a better grip, like I was a bowling ball. I started sneaking one hand down between us, but she pulled it away and repositioned it on her shoulder.

  “I’ll deal with the man in the kayak,” she said, “you just better pump me like an oil rig. Okay?”

  “You’re so romantic.”

  “Romantic equals girly.”

  I followed instructions. She readjusted me so that we were both focusing on that same spot, that vertex of the delta. She released an inchoate sound. Ah, involuntary vocalization. My favorite.

  “That’s great,” she said, “just stay with that angle.” We clicked into a bit of a rhythm. I guess speed isn’t usually considered a goal of contemporary erotic activity, but sometimes the hottest thing is just to get whatever it is the hell over with, especially at a time like this when I’d been building up all this fear and trembling over the last few weeks. In fact—and maybe I forgot to mention it—I really was pretty much absolutely terrified all the time now, with my teeth permanently on the verge of really, truly chattering. So instead of much of a pleasure event, what we really had here, on my end, anyway, was a long buildup of agony and a sudden and total, if transitory, release from it. “Okay, now!” she said. “Rrrrrsh! You bitch!” There was that familiar flash of the photo of the Hindenberg on the Led Zeppelin cover, oh, the humanity, and the crest-and-ebb of that old sound-beyond-sound:

  nghnghnghnghnghbbbbBWOMP!!!zhwoooohzhngzhzhng …

  Damn. Well, that was an orgasm, all right.

  Ow. She bit my ear. “Ow,” I said.

  “Sorry,” Marena said.

  Little Elvis had left the building.

  She pushed up on my chest with her super strength, rolled me out of the way—great, now we were both mud people—and peeled herself off me like an authoritarian school nurse yanking off a Band-Aid.

  Whew. I’d been hosed down, soaped up, scrubbed, rubbed, brushed, dried, hot-waxed, hand-buffed, and towed to the lot and sold for 40 percent under list.

  “Golly,” she said, “I think I had a fallopian orgasm.”

  “Uh … yeah, I felt that,” I said. Is there such a thing? I wondered. “Uh … that …” I trailed off. My overprobed brain felt like it had gotten a shot of about ten ccs of dopamine. “Sorry,” I said finally. “I’m sneechless. Speechless.”

  “Okay, how about one more time?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve got a bag of super blues, we’ll get you started again in two minutes.”

  “Well, okay.” Qué pistola, I thought.

  “Gimmie that.” She pulled up the end of the newfangled male cleanliness device and twisted it, making a little balloonful of—żQué debe llamarle? Leche? Néctar? Pearl Jam? My whatever stretched until, just before we had a real injury to deal with, adhesive plastic separated from skin.

  “Yeeowch,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Ow.” She swatted her back with an impressively flexible arm. “Damn.” The mosquitoes were starting to find us.

  “How do you get the glue off ?” I asked “Is there—”

  “Hang on,” she said. I realized our earbuds were beeping.

  “Heads up, full team, this is Keelorenz,” Ana’s voice said. “We’re getting some movement on the GR that we don’t like. Sound off and come in.”

  Boy Commando, Michael, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, and Hitch all said they were here. There was a pause and No Way’s voice came on. “Capisce, Shigeru here,” he said grudgingly.

  “System on,” I said. “Copy, Pen-Pen here.”

  “Copy, Asuka here,” Marena said. “Please say specifics.”

  “They’re on foot,” Ana said. “It’s ten to fifteen units. Patrol size. They’re twenty clicks off, but I still want to move everything up three hours. So we hit Mound A now. Then if they do come through we’ll still have time for step one. So everybody get back to base. Understood?”

  “We copy,” Marena said. “Give us two minutes. System off.” She paused. “Let’s rock ’n’ road.”

  [25]

  “I’d like to thank the Academy,” Marena said, looking down the staircase toward her imaginary audience. “And thanks to Steven and James and Francis and Marty, and especially to the circle. The trusted ones.” She raised her arms above her head in a born-to-win pose. “I’m queen of the world!”

  “Somebody’s going to see or hear you up there,” Dr. Lisuarte said.

  “Sorry,” Marena said. She climbed down.

  Lisuarte, Hitch, Michael, and I, and a few piles of Otter cases and transformers, receivers, monitors, and cameras, were all squatting on the lower landing of the Ocelot’s pyramid, with the door of the ahau’s niche behind us. We faced southeast across a shallow alluvial valley about two miles in diameter. You could just see a white squiggle of the river, segmented by tree trunks, and on the opposite bank, the outlines of a few of the closer hills, which had all once been mulob. Behind them the ring of natural hills rose up to the cleft peak of San Enero.

  As I think I mentioned, the Ocelot’s mul was the highest pyramid in this part of Guatemala. According to Morley’s survey it had originally been gigantic, almost as large as the so-called Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan. But locust trees had grown from between its stones, and the valley had silted up around it, and the temple at its peak—which would have been thirty feet above us—had been dismantled, so it wasn’t the commanding hulk it once must have been.

  Sun adders from the village had been burning copal and chocolate bars up here, and clumps of Ibarra wrappers and broken stoneware crunched under our feet.

  “I’ll be inside,” Marena said. She went into the little doorway behind us.

  “Okay, Jed, first we’d like you to orient yourself,” Dr. Lisuarte said. “Visually.”

  “Right,” I said. The nearly full moon was still low and yellowish. Bloody Rabbitess—the rabbit the Maya see in the moon, with its ears at Mare Fecunditatis and Mare Nectaris—was in her house, that is, there was a lunar halo, meaning rain was coming. But it cast enough light for me to follow instructions. I looked around for a minute.

  “I think I’ll remember where I am,” I said.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Lisuarte said.

  I went in first. The trapezoidal doorway was just big enough for one small person to crouch through without using his/her hands. There was that bottomless smell of old stone, or rather, since most stone is pretty old, I should say that smell of stone that’s been hanging out in the same place for a while. Marena was tapping at her workstation. Her face was lit blue on one side by a laptop screen and red on the other by the weak astronomy lamps that Hitch used for low-light-level video. The room was about nine feet deep and five feet wide, with a spacious five-foot ceiling. Three of the four main walls had been carved with glyphs, but about 60 percent of them were now unreadable. Michael had said they’d been in better shape the first time he’d been here, in 1994, but since then the acid rain had seeped in and given the limestone cancer de piedra. There was a sort of ambry or niche in the back wall, which, according to Michael, had been an entrance to the now rubble-filled interior stairs. With the three of us, and its tangle of boxes and cables, and the Toilet—that is, the head-scanner ring, which weighed about a hundred and ninety pounds and hung on a cable hoist screwed into anchors in the ceiling—it was a tight fit but not unbearable. Good thing there’s no room for Michael, I thought. And it’s a blessing Ogre isn’t here. In fact, he wasn’t up here at all, come to think of
it. Maybe Marena’d gotten the message that he creeped me out. Anyway, supposedly he and Boy Commando and No Way were going to go out later and try to get a closer look at that in-marching patrol, or whatever they were.

  Lisuarte took my head in her latex hands, eased me back into a reclining slump on an inflatable incline, and stuffed a sandbag under my neck so that I could see the sky through the door. I noticed that Hitch had mounted one of his tiny video cameras right above it, in the crook of the ceiling. She taped on the body electrodes and respiration gauges, clamped the blood-oxygen thingy on my right ring finger, slipped a blood-pressure cuff on my other hand, shot me full of a few drugs and tracking metals and whatever while I

  stared at the carved glyphs above the doorway. Some of the inscriptions went back to the early 500s, but the first one we were personally interested in was just to the right of the door. It was dated 11 Earth Rattler, 5 Quail, 9.10.11.9.17, that is, June 15, AD 644. The date followed a verbal phrase that Michael had interpreted as announcement of the death of 14 Fog Lizard, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s uncle and the previous ahau. Then, half out of my sight, there was a block of text dated one uinal after that, on July 5. It commemorated 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s seating, or you might say enthronement or accession, at the age of twenty-four, as the patriarch of the Ocelot House and the ahau of Ix. The third inscription that concerned us was on the back wall, and I couldn’t see it from here. But it was dated one k’atun—that is, about twenty years—after that, on 3 Earth Rattler, 5 Rainfrog, and it commemorated 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s second seating, or reinstatement as K’alomte’ Ixob and Ahau Pop Ixob, that is, Warlord of Ix and Lord of the Mat. In his first k’atun of rule he’d presided over Ix’s second period of major expansion. He’d recorded victories over the sites known as Ixtutz and Sakajut and taken one of their ahaus captive. And, obviously, he’d stayed in power. Before his second seating, he would have held a vigil in this room, probably for at least two full days, before emerging at dawn on the twentieth—the day of the vernal equinox—to show himself to the people. This was the moment we were aiming for. Then there were two more dynastic inscriptions, also on the back wall. They were too damaged to reconstruct except for the dates. The first was 13 Sea Rattler, 9 Yellowness, 9.11.12.5.1, which was Saturday, November 19, AD 664. And the last was an 8 Hurricane, 10 Jeweled Owl date, probably May 13, AD 692. The only other readable part of the last inscription was the word weave or weaving , but it wasn’t clear whether it was a verb or a name.

  “Ikari, give us your status, please,” Ana said.

  “All his vitals are fine,” Lisuarte’s voice said. I supposed my nonvitals were the usual litany of disaster. “We’re set.”

  “Okay, we’re recording,” Hitch said.

  “Okay, up-top team, you’re good to go,” Ana’s voice said. She and Boy Commando were somewhere near the base of the pyramid, probably lying in the mud and smearing their faces with camo paint.

  “Let’s roll,” Michael’s voice said.

  Roll. Please. Roll your own, for God’s sake. This whole thing seemed a lot more elaborate than it needed to be. From my POV, anyway. For that matter, this wasn’t even the main event. And we didn’t need to do it here. We could have run this whole download thing back at the Stake and it would have been a lot easier. Still, we needed to be out here anyway—since, the moment the downloading was over, we were going to start excavating those tombs. Really, we were here to dig. Still, like with the nun-snatch test, the idea was to put me in the same place in order to minimize my possible confusion on the other end.

  Confusion, I thought. Let’s hope that’s my biggest problem.

  “How are you?” Marena asked me.

  “Pen-Pen is ready,” I said. And scared phlegmless.

  “Okay, Michael?” she said.

  Don’t do it.

  “Righty right,” Michael said over the earbuds in his TV voice. “Ohhh … KAY. Right now it’s twelve oh two A.M., and we’ll be narrowcasting for three hours and eighteen minutes. So all personnel, please take care of whatever personal matters you need to attend to.” Cállate el pico, I thought. Shut up. Shutupshutup—

  No, hold on there a second, Jed. Be nice. Remember, he’s sixty, he’s working hard, he’s probably sweating all over …

  “We’ll be shooting for March twentieth, AD 664,” Weiner went on. “Same bat-time, same bat-infested ahau’s niche, and roughly just thirteen hundred and forty-seven years and eleven months and twenty-eight days and twenty-two hours and zero minutes back into the good ol’ days.”

  Great, I thought, now, SHUT … THE FUCK … UP … SHUT … FUCK … SHUCK … FUT—

  “You done?” Marena asked him.

  “Go for it,” Michael said. “Keep the f—”

  “Okay, I’m cutting the GC channels,” she said. My earphones clicked. Off the air at last. Thank God.

  “Okay,” Lisuarte said. “We’ve got about four minutes of system checks and then we’ll start the Q and A.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Lisuarte crawled out the door so she could watch the rundown on the big monitor. Or maybe it was because somehow Marena let her get the message that we had a little thing going on. Girls chat.

  Marena kneed over and kissed me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m good. No. I’m unstoppable.”

  “Godless.”

  “ Yeah.”

  “Uh, you know to watch out for parasitic diseases, right?” she asked. “Try to just drink boiled water or at least really cold well water.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I’d been over it a hundred times.

  “They’ll have some kind of tea from willow bark for quinine. Right? They’ll have insect repellents. Uh, try to get more protein in your diet than the rest of them had. You can eat turkey bones.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Oh, and they’ll have pine-bark tea for vitamin C, you should try to get a lot of that.”

  “I just hope that general wellness is my biggest problem.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe they’ll decide I’m a brujo and feed me to the catfish.”

  “Well, but, maybe they’ll turn out to be great. The living Maya are the nicest people on the planet, right?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” It’s true, we’re too nice, I thought. It’s no wonder everyone’s been taking advantage of us for five hundred years. We’re always like, sure, come on in, sit down, have a tamale, rape my sister—

  “Anyway, you’re not going to pick any fights or anything, right?”

  “I’ll be good.”

  “Nothing grandiose either. Don’t try to reform the system. No trying to take over the continent or anything.”

  “Well, that probably didn’t happen anyway,” I said. “As far as we know, nobody took over the continent during that period.”

  “Uh, right,” she said. “Actually, I still don’t get that. That Nabokov thing.”

  “Novikov.” She meant the Novikov self-consistency principle.

  “Right.”

  “Well, it just means that I’m not going to do anything that contradicts what we already know. About the past.”

  “Yeah, okay, but, the part I don’t get is, you know, if you’ve already done everything you did back there, then, why don’t we just dig up those caves now and skip sending you back?”

  “Then I won’t have done it. No Way asked me about that, too, and—”

  “That’s the part I don’t get. I feel like, that we’d still have, you know, a grandfather problem.”

  “Well, it’s like—hmm. It’s like, as far as we’re concerned, like, you and me here, the past is just a historical record. Right? So I can go back and do a lot of stuff back there, but nothing I do is going to change the history we know about now. Although luckily we don’t know much about this city, or, really, this whole area anyway. So, you know, my range of activity isn’t terribly constricted.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but, so, like, say you go back and invent gunpowder. That’d change the record.”

  “No, no … I might do that. But if I did, gunpowder didn’t really take off ba
ck there. Not enough for us to know about it, anyway. Maybe I did that, and then people used it for a while and forgot about it, and anything people wrote down about it got lost. That could happen. And then, suppose, tomorrow you find some twelve-hundred-year-old jar of gunpowder around here. That would be very possible.”

  “I don’t know … that still doesn’t, uh …”

  “It’s easier to understand if you just go through the equations,” I said. “Explaining it in English … you know, it’s like trying to fold an origami rhinoceros beetle out of a Post-it note.”

  “Well, okay, so I’ve got some homework to do.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”