Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “I’m not worried, I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah. You’re my friend.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but I’m feeling a little affectionate,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll talk about that later.”

  “Right.” Callous mask, I thought. Callous mask! Callous mask!

  Like I said, I’d been in a constant state of terror a lot of the time lately, first during the Disney World Horror, of course, like everybody else, and then because of the 4 Ahau thing. And then when I got over that it was already time to worry about what kind of trouble I might get into back in Olde Mayaland. It was like there was this chunk of ice in my stomach that had been melting for more than a month but still never went away. But even so, for the last couple of weeks I’d also, contradictorily, been raging to just get on that luon beam and get it over with. I’d wanted to be Jed2, that is, the one of me who ended up back there. And now I was starting to feel like I wanted to be the me who stayed here, in the twenty-first century, even if there wasn’t a lot of future in it. Just because of Marena. Although really, come on, Jed, you’re dreaming. What makes you think she’s all that into you? She’s a little red Corvette. Let things happen or not happen. Okay? Okay.

  Lisuarte crouched back in the door. “Everything looks fine,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said. Calm down, Jed.

  “Okay.” She and Marena levered the Toilet down onto the pile of sandbags behind my head. “Just ease back a bit. Lift up. Good.” She guided my head into the ring and set it in place with her gobs of putty. “Is that too snug?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. Just as snug as a rug in a jug. Slugbug shrug gl—

  “Okay. Let’s start going through this. You think you can concentrate?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay,” Marena said. I’d requested that she do the Q&A again, and everybody agreed. She paused, listening to her earbud. “Taro says hi,” she said. Back at the Stake he and the CTP team were feeding her the questions and evaluating the readouts of my responses.

  I said hi.

  “All right, it’s T minus twenty seconds, let’s start recording,” Lisuarte said. She touched her phone and there was a discreet rising hum as the magnets zooming around my head accelerated to full speed. I focused on the equinoctal starscape through the dwarf-size doorway. You could just see Comet Ixchel, an unimpressive blue smear across Capricorn.

  “Everything’s go,” Lisuarte said.

  “Okay, Jed,” Marena said. “First question. What’s nine factorial?”

  “Uh, hang on. 362,880.”

  “What day is this?”

  “It’s March twentieth, 2012,” I said. Confusingly, even though we’d been referring to our D-Day today as Freaky Friday, it wasn’t a Friday. “That’s One Earthtoadess, 12 Dark Egg. And in—”

  “Okay. What’s in the news today?”

  “Well … there’s a big project where all the terminally ill people in Florida are all making farewell videos, and they’re all going to be in this big sort of museum. And about eight thousand of them are like, children.” Oops, I thought. She’s a mom. Don’t talk about dead children. Although Max is fine, but still. They worry. Except it was no wonder that slipped out, I’d watched a couple of the movies earlier in the day, out of a stupid sense of duty, I suppose, and they were still preying on my mind. I mean, it was the kind of thing that would break the heart of Joe Stalin himself. I changed the subject.

  “The U.S., uh, it’s basically slipping into a kind of Chinese-style totalitarianism,” I said. “There’s a checkpoint on, like, every corner. And there’s the Operation Freedom Bill, which got passed yesterday, that centralizes control of the armed forces in the executive branch.” She didn’t say anything so I kept going. “The rationale behind this is that all these different divisions of the military were shooting at each other, and there were about five times as many fatalities just from that as there were from the attack itself, so … and it basically gets rid of habeas corpus, so, you know, one is planning to move to Sweden. And there’s still a big waiting list for platelets so in Tampa and Miami there’s a blood riot almost every night. And the No-Go Zone is now officially a national monument, so it’s now the world’s largest qarafa.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “That’s like, a city of the dead. A necropolis. Cancelled and made permanently taboo.”

  “Okay. What’s Abuja the capital of ?”

  “Huh? Oh, uh … Nigeria?”

  “Spell kaleidoscope.”

  “K, A, L,” I said. “Uh, I, D, O, S, C, O, P, E.”

  Instead of telling me whether I was right or wrong—which didn’t much matter anyway—she paused, listening to someone back at the Stake.

  “Okay, they say that looks good,” she said. Evidently all my little thought-lets were coming through okay. And as of now they were already boring through quadrillions of Planck units of space-time at one foot per nanosecond. But of course, I hadn’t and wouldn’t feel anything or experience anything of the trip, any more than you feel anything when you make a phone call and a digital double of your voice shoots into outer space and caroms off two satellites and ends up on the other side of earth.

  “Now, we’re going to go through mission profile one more time,” Marena said.

  “Right.” They wanted it to be the absolute last thing I’d forget, even if the tumors set in early. Oh, did I forget to mention that? The downloading had a problem side-effect: 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s brain would absorb so much gamma radiation that it would develop some serious cancers in it within a year. We figured I’d have about eight months back there to learn the Game and get the information sent back to the twenty-first century. After that—

  “Okay,” she said. “Thirteen?”

  [26]

  “First, play along with their routine,” I said.

  “Right,” Marena said.

  The idea was that the most important thing, even if I was confused or disoriented when I took over 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s body, was not to panic, and to let his automatics—his habits of movement and gesture and so on—take over. That should be enough to carry me through the rest of the reseating ceremony. Then, when I got back to the sweatbath or sleeping house—or harem, one hoped—or whatever, I’d have time to rest up and get my wits together.

  “Twelve?”

  “If you must, name the blast date and hype up yourself.”

  This meant that if I slipped up somewhere, or something else went wrong and I felt threatened, I’d deliver a speech that Michael and I had written forecasting the eruption of San Martín, sixteen hours after the seating. The speech also stressed that the audience was in dire danger and that I was the only person who’d be able to save them from the darkness once it happened. It was a decent piece of Ch’olan verse and we were pretty proud of it.

  “Eleven.”

  “Just bond with your crew and it’s easy livin’,” I said. The idea behind this one was that the main thing I should do first, once the rituals were over and I went back to the daily business of ordering people around, was to bond with my staff. “You’ll be like a mafia chief,” Michael had said, “running things through a few key people. So even if you don’t know what’s going on, or what to say, you ought to be able to engage them enough to find out and relearn the behavior.” We’d rehearsed a lot of phrases like “Tell me over you what you think about X,” or, if they asked me about something, “What would you under me do about it if I were away?” That sort of thing.

  “Ten.”

  “Learn the nine-stone Game and play through it again.”

  That is, I needed to learn how they managed to play the Game with nine runners, and then I also should try, if possible, to re-create the Game that had been recorded in the Codex Nurnburg. If I managed that, I might be able to work out what would happen on 12/21/12, and they—the Chocula team—wouldn’t even have to get the Game working again. They’d just act on my notes.

  This sounded a little ambitious to me, though. I was confident I could learn a lot more about the Game, and Michael and company
were confident that the Game had been fairly common, even if it was an upper-class secret, like writing. But I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to play if I were using somebody else’s gray matter.

  When I’d gotten this job, I’d thought it was the motivation tests that had done it. But later, Taro had said it was the calendrical savant thing. According to Taro, the CTP lab said that that sort of skill could transfer to the host brain and give me an extra edge in picking up the nine-stone Game in a short time. It was a good thing for them that I’d shown up, I thought. Basically the CTP people had said that my consciousness should be able to work with almost whatever material it found. Supposedly, if the target brain was of at least normal intelligence, he’d get enough mental architecture from me to be able to think effectively in all the ways I knew how to think. That is, he’d have some Game skills, some above-average memory, and might even be able to do some of my idiocomputo tricks. “And if the guy turns out to be a dummy,” Lisuarte had said, “you’ll probably just feel like you’re always a little drowsy. But you should still be able to make good decisions, because you’ll still be yourself with your own habits of thought.” It seemed to me that she was projecting more confidence than they really had. Still, from the evidence we had, 9FH didn’t sound like a dummy. And he sounded tough. Well, he was in for a surprise. And then oblivion. Poor bastard.

  “Nine.”

  “Write down all you know and you’re doing fine.”

  “Eight.”

  “Find a good dry spot for the message crate.”

  After a bit of study I had a pretty good map in my head of Alta Verapaz and, to a coarser level of detail, of all Mesoamerica. We’d singled out eighty-two areas on the map that were dry, diggable, and where there wouldn’t be any development, mining, archaeological excavation, or even deep tillage—not in the rest of the pre-Colonial era or in the Colonial or modern ones. When I buried my notes, packed in wax, salt, and rubber, I could be pretty sure that nothing would disturb them for thirteen hundred years.

  “Seven.”

  “Make a magnetite cross we can see up in heaven.”

  I’d be burying the notes in the center of an imaginary cross about five hundred feet wide. Each point of the cross would be a cluster of at least twenty pounds of magnetite or meteoric iron—lodestones—also sealed in wax. In a few hours—back here in 2012, that is, as soon as we’d finished the download—three data-mapping Spartacus satellites would go off-line for normal traffic and start scanning. For safety they’d look in a zone covering almost all of Mesoamerica, from the twenty-fifth parallel, which runs through Monterrey, Mexico, all the way down to the twelfth, which runs through Managua. When one of them spotted the electromagnetic signature of the cross pattern, an ES helicopter would take off with a crew of excavators to dig up the notes and bring them back to Michael’s staff at the Stake. If it all went perfectly, they’d be looking at the stuff in less than twenty-four hours.

  “Six,” she said.

  “Scope out a tomb with a ton of bricks.”

  This was the start of the second part of the operation, the Amber Tomb. In case the notes couldn’t cover everything—that is, if it turned out that the Game was too much of a skill and not enough of a describable procedure—we still had another chance, although it was much more of a long shot. It was the reason we had all the stuff ready in the palace. If we were lucky, my brain would be coming back, carefully plasticized. And in order to protect it, I needed to find a burial chamber I could wall off from inside, so that rival kings or tomb robbers or whoever couldn’t possibly get to it. Hence the phrase ton of bricks.

  “Five.”

  “Find the eight gel components so you will revive.”

  I’d be preserving my brain, and incidentally my body—or, to be strict about it, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s body and brain, but my mind—in a quick-setting colloid. It was something Alcor had been working on for decades as an alternative to cryonics, but it was just in the last few years that they’d started getting good results. Back at the Stake we’d watched some rather un-PC videos of the procedure working on macaques. And I have to say, the critters seemed just fine, once they got used to their new bodies.

  Anyway, Warren Labs had adapted the recipe to the sort of low-tech—well, let’s say nontech—tools and ingredients I’d be able to find. We’d also made up a separate mnemonic rhyme for the eight ingredients—bitumen, beeswax, alcohol, copal resin, and a few other things—and another longer rhyme for the refining and mixing procedures. I guessed they’d make me go over that again later on. Anyway, in my last few days at the Stake I’d made the stuff from scratch four times and only screwed up one batch. I was the Iron Chef on the stuff. No problem.

  “Four.”

  “Rig the counterweight bags to close off the door.”

  “Three.”

  “Seal your notes, rig the lid bags, and be sure to pee.”

  That is, just for safety I should leave a second copy of the Game notes in the tomb. The counterweight bags were to bring the stone lid slowly down over the casket. And the third item was there because we didn’t want any fluids besides blood contaminating the colloid.

  “Two.”

  “Heat the gel, poke the sandbags, and send off your crew.”

  “One.”

  “Just open two veins and you’re nearly done.”

  I wasn’t wild about this part.

  “Zero.”

  “Get under the gel and you’ll wake up a hero.”

  I wasn’t crazy about this part either. I’d have to weight myself down with sandbags, including one tied to my head, lean back in the lukewarm goo, let my head fall under the surface, exhale, count backward from ten, and inhale.

  “Good,” Marena said. “All right, let’s move on. Name three Fellini movies.”

  “Uh, Satyricon, La Strada, Roma—no, scratch the last one, I like 8˝—”

  “Repeat this number backward: 9049345332.”

  “2335439409,” I said.

  “Very good.”

  “I’ll take Zambian numismatics for ten thousand, Alex.”

  “I’m asking the questions here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “If you painted each side of a tetrahedron either red or blue, how many distinct color patterns could you make?”

  “Um, five.”

  “So, can you tell us a little about your mother?”

  Hell, I thought. I knew something like this was coming. Lisuarte had mentioned that when they were looking over the charts of the other download—that is, the one for the Soledad test—they’d decided they wanted to get a little more emotion out of me on the next round. Light up a few more layers of the old hippocampus. Well, whatevs. I started telling her how my mother had taught me about the Game, and how we got into trouble with the fincas, and maybe it was the drugs or the mood or something, but somehow I realized I was just babbling on and on about how I’d been in the hospital and I’d heard about how there’d been an arrest up in T’ozal, and how it was all my fault. Todo por mi culpa. All my fault, all my fault, damn it. Damn. It.

  “Los Sorreanos están un grande calamidad,” I’d said. I remember it was morning, because they’d given me white-bread toast. “The Sorreanos are in big trouble.”

  “Diciendo debido a Teniente Xac?” that nice Sor Elena asked, ever so casually. “You mean because of Lieutenant Xac?”

  Of course, I was a dopey, eager seven-year-old. I guess I’d forgotten how I wasn’t supposed to say … or maybe I was just too angry, or I just wanted the attention, or I wanted to be important. “Mi padre y Tío Xac van a quemarse la casa Sorreano,” I said. “My father’s with Uncle Xac and they’re going to burn the Sorreanos’ house down.”

  Damn, damn, damn. Todo por mi culpa. I focused through the door at Homam, that is, Zeta Pegasus, which was just coming up through a little predawn glow in the lower left. It’s not a bright star, but it’s a nice yellow in that rather desolate part of the sky between Formalhaut and Vega. I realized I’d stopped talking. There was a pause.

  “Okay,” Marena said, maybe about two decibels more softly than usual. “Right. Please solve for x: x
cubed times five over x squared plus seven x equals zero.”

  The Q&A went on for another hour. At three forty-five, Lisuarte suggested we take a one-minute break. Although we were still uploading, of course. Marena gave me a sip of Undine through a straw.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess I should … hmm.”

  It didn’t make sense to say good-bye, since, as far as anyone around me could see, I’d be staying right here. After the Q&A I wouldn’t even be going to sleep. I’d just pull my head out of this metal anus and climb down off this dirt pile. And the I that would stay here wouldn’t notice anything.

  But if I was the I that was going to find myself back there … hmm …

  “I’d like to say good-bye on behalf of my identical twin,” I said.