Jed? I asked. Im Jed DeLanda, too, you know. You and I are like twins.
I am not Jed.
Uh-oh, I thought.
As you above, I started to say, but 2 Jeweled Skulls right hand opened and rotated slightly to the left, and from Chacal I knew it was a sign for silence, and my mouth snapped shut with Pavlovian speed. 2 Jeweled Skull looked past me, toward the hunchback.
The guards on either side of me eased back a bit on their haunches. The hunchback waddled toward me and stopped about three arms away. He studied me. I tried not to flinch. Somewhere in Chacal I was sure I knew his name. He had little stunted talonish arms like a T. rexs, with syndactyl fingers on his right hand, and a permanently grinning mouth with jutting upper teeth spaced nearly a tooths width apart from each other. Its got to be some kind of Morquio syndrome, I thought. How old is he? He looked old, but people dont live past forty with a case like that. Do they? Cripes, what the hell was his name? It was 10 Smoking Caterpillar, or ˝ Mock Turtle, or something. Oh, okay. Got it. Its 3 Blue Snail. He was an ajway, that is, sort of like a family priest, only priest sounds like hes part of a big organization, and this guy was a private contractor. Maybe shamans a little closer, except that it sounds like some Siberian dude with antlers. How about theurgist? Or is that too fancy? No, lets go with it. Okay. Anyway, I was pretty sure he3 Blue Snail, the Harpy theurgistwas the owner of the tenor voice. Yeah. Definitely. I even pulled some images of him dancing around at a first-burning ceremony. At least I was starting to learn how to access Chacals memories. The trick seemed to be to think in Cholan, not the twenty-first-century variety but the current Ixian dialect, and then not to try too hard, just to let word association do the work
3 Blue Snail set his fan of tobacco leaves down in a dish, picked up something else, stood up to his full height, and was still for a minute. No one seemed to breathe, least of all me, and I could hear the blood in my ears. I realized he was sniffing the air.
Something else is going on here, I thought. Not that I knew how these people behaved normally. But there was a definite sense that they were being cautious about something, and it was something other than me. It was like we were in someone elses house and didnt want to be overheard. But still, this is 2 Jeweled Skulls audiencia or throne room or whatever, isnt it? Or maybe not, maybe were in some sort of temporary place … and anyway, my showing up when I did must have thrown everybody off their game a little.
From what I could get out of Chacals head … well, it was tricky. But to oversimplify, if Ix were England in the 1450s, the Ocelots would be like the House of Lancaster. They were still in charge of everything, but they were unpopular and hemorrhaging wealth. 2JSs Harpies would be like the House of York, who had been subordinate for a long time but were gaining strength and making noises about taking over. Then there were also three other royal houses in Ix. Two of them favored the Harpies, but the other, the Vampire Bat House, was inseparably allied with the Ocelots.
So the Ocelots are probably using the botch-up on the mul as an excuse to come after the Harpies. Okay. Use that.
3 Blue Snail turned around in place, and turned around again, whirling, I guess, but very slowly, slower than a Sufi dervish, which is pretty slow. Each time he passed one of the four directional pointsthat is, AITISB, northeast, southwest, and so onhe tapped once on a sort of clay drum in his left hand, using a sort of thimble on his index finger. He was listening for echoes, I guess, or rather for hostile uayob who might be spying on us, animal doppelgängers or disembodied eyes or homunculi or whatever. His eyes searched the twelve corners of the room, moving independently from each other, which was pretty disconcerting. And it didnt seem like one was a wandering eye either. Instead it looked like he could actually control it and focus on two widely separated objects at once, like a chameleon. Finally he stopped, bent down, picked up a fresh tobacco leaf, and used it as a spoon to scoop up some kind of powder or ashes out of the dish. He threw one leaf full over his right shoulder, one over his head, behind, one over his left shoulder, and one in front. There was another pause, and then he tapped the side of his drum with a sharp wakeuppy sound. Either from Chacal, or just because it was obvious, I knew it meant we were all clear and that I was expected to look back at 2 Jeweled Skull. I managed to do it. Focus on the thing on the bridge of his nose, I thought. Not on his eyes
Why did you choose me and not the sky-born kalomte? 2 Jeweled Skull asked, in Ixian. He meant 9 Fanged Hummingbird. 2 Jeweled Skull and his peers were ahau popob, lords of the mat, but, like I think I said, the kalomte was more like emperor or warlord.
We didnt, I said in Ixian. We wantedwe were looking for 9 Fanged Hummingbird. It wasit was an accident. I said the last word in English because there wasnt any Ixian word for accident, or chance, or any of those things.
Why did you choose this sun? he asked, meaning this date.
We chose this time because we found it in a codex … that is, a Game record in a screenfold book.
Pause. He didnt say he didnt understand, but I had the feeling his English wasnt quite up to code. He had to have less of me inside him than I did. If that makes any sense. Maybe he just hadnt gotten the brain-wipe section of the program, the way Chacal had. Hes still more himself. Not that even Chacal got wiped enough, of course. And maybe hed only gotten a tiny bit of me after that. Although even that would probably be more than enough for most people. I said the sentence over again in Ixian.
And have you crouched beneath ahau-na Koh? he asked.
What? Like, have I met her? I asked. No, no, we just read about her in the Codex.
Pause. I thought that next he was going to ask why we had chosen this particular city, instead of some other, but he didnt. Maybe as far as he was concerned, Ix was the center of the universe, and no one could want to be anywhere else. Whats weird, I thought, is that he doesnt seem too surprised by all this. Or rather he seems violated and upset, natch … but it felt like the idea that I came from what wed call the future wasnt a big deal to him. I guess around here the future was more like a place. In fact, I suppose uayob, or souls or whatever, from the future and the past turn up around here all the time
What will you recompense me for my ranking son? he asked.
What? I wondered. Im responsible for his sons death?
Hell. That didnt sound good.
Had they substituted 2 Jeweled Skulls son for me on the mul? Thats got to be it. Damn. Good job, Jedediah. Youre really getting these folks to like you. Rulers do tend to be touchy about their firstborn. Do I apologize? How? I under you dont understand, I said.
You disrespect me over you, he said.
No, I great-respect you, I gurgled. I apologize, but I dont understand. And I really, really dont, I thought. Fuck.
I know things that can help us, I said. Two lights from now theres going to be a firestorm in the northwest. I switched to English. A volcanic eruption
We above you all know this already, he said. The Ocelots adders warned against it twenty lights ago. You underneath me offer nothing.
Oh, I thought. Okay. Great. There goes my big prophet routine. So much for the Connecticut Yankee. Well, fine, me caigo en la mar. What else have we got to put on the table? Okay. Lets try another prepared Contingency Speech. I said:
I underneath you
Will pay this debt somehow,
I can build you
A puppet that throws
Giant javelins,
Hipballs that
Burst into fire,
Or perfectly
Rounded pot
We over you
Do not need help
From a reeking thing,
2 Jeweled Skull said.
Evidently I was too polluted even to deal with.
I switched to English. I can help us
defend ourselves against the Ocelots, I said. You can become the kalomte. Look in my memories. Look for gunpowder. We can whip some up in a few days, just dig some guano out of those caves on the north side and leach out the nitrates
He tilted his head in a way that shut me up before I even knew it meant You have our permission to be silent.
You are talking with sand in your mouth, he said. The overlords of this baktun will not allow those things.
What? I thought. Luddite alert. Wait, I started to say
Ximaleech tul kooch mix-baal, he said. You are walking as though there is nothing in your back-rack. It was one of those idioms you understand right away. Basically, it meant, It seems you dont have anything to offer.
Ill take your world to mine, I said, and rebirth it there. Ill give your descendants their names again, their time, their history, everything.
Baax-tiaal chokoj upol? he asked. Why should I care about that? It wasnt really a question.
As you above me say, I said automatically. But
Then I allow you to take back your Jed.
Uh-oh.
Hes got to know I cant do that, I thought. Doesnt he? Or maybe he really did only get a few bits of my mind. Or maybe his egos just too big to accept it. Or does he even really know what I am? Maybe he really thinks Im just some kind of creepy imp who snuck into his ear. Well …
But you above me could learn from it, I said.
Call your reflection out of my skin now, 2 Jeweled Skull said. Deep in his composed voice there was a sense of a stifled shudder. Hes grossed out, I thought. He feels dirty. Having me in there disqualifies him. He thinks hes going to be kept out of the goddamn Celestial VIP Lodge or whatever. Oh cripes oh cripes. Should I just fess up that hes stuck with me? No, hell just go even more bananashit. Time to lie like linoleum.
I will, but it will take me time, I said.
Pain like a snapping banjo string shot from my stomach up to my left eye. It was something in Chacals nervous system twisting out of alignment at the thought of keeping secrets from his greatfathermother. The idea of lying to this guy just wasnt in Chacals gestalt. Hold still, for Gods sake, dont twitch but dont hold your breath, either, just breathe, breathe …
How soon will this be done? 2 Jeweled Skull asked.
It cant be done without the right preparations, I said, half in Ixian and half in English. We have to offer to the right … I need to find a certain kind of herb. Yeah, eleven secret herbs and spices, I thought. Hell believe that, all right.
I felt his eyes palpating my skin, looking for a flutter, a shiver …
What will you need? he asked.
I said if he gave me paper and a brush I could sketch it out for him. Anything to stall, I thought. Ill draw a catapult too. Maybe a crossbow. Stranger engines for the brunt of war. Get him interested in those, and hell forget about
Remove your uay worm from my stomach now. Finished.
Finished was what you said when you were done with a subject. It was like saying full stop.
I hesitated. I repeated the lie. He looked at me.
When he was a child, Chacal had believed that 2 Jeweled Skull could smell his thoughts through dirt walls, that on moonless nights, in the shape of something like a harpy eagle, 2 Jeweled Skull would glide over their villages and scrutinize his thralls sleeping bodies through the smoke vents in the roofs of their houses, guarding them, but also ready to swoop through the roof and scratch out a betrayers eyes. And even now it wasnt like Chacals mind quite disbelieved it. I felt like a career army sergeant trying to lie to a five-star general.
2 Jeweled Skullor now that we know him a little better, why dont we just call him 2JSmust have given some kind of a signal, because all at once there was another person in the room, a nondescript middle-aged man with a plain gray turban and no particular markings that I could read. He had a thin, junior-high-school physical-education teachers face, like a Maya version of the elder George Bush. Somehow hed just materialized out of the left-hand wall. I figured out that hed crouched in from a hidden door through a slit in the feather tapestries. He squatted and set down a round tripedal tray on the floor an arm in front of me. There was a thing on the tray. He turned to 2 Jeweled Skull and held his right wrist on his left breast with his arm parallel to the floor. It was almost like an ancient Roman salute or the old French military salute. Maybe it was some sort of universal cultural constant. I stared at the thing in the tray. It was a steaming hot black wobbling bulbous shape, like a whole boiled eggplant.
Oh, boy, I said in English. Cajun fetus?
I got zero reaction. Some people take themselves so seriously.
The new guy picked up the Thing with his free hand. It had some kind of tube-and-nozzle on it. There was an instant of disorientation, and before I realized that the guards had picked me up and bent me over into the Eternal Position, there was an electrosnake wriggling up my anus EEEOOOWUUGHFFFFF!!!
Eeeyah. Boofed on the first date.
I actually saw stars, and even in accurate constellations. There was Draco, Scorpio, the Dumbbell Nebula was right over there … and then it was already over, except for the trickle of hot liquid between my legs and a heat spreading from my intestines out onto my skin.
Whoa. Thatll put some hair on your eyeballs.
The guards let me collapse flat-out prone into the red sea.
Thank you, sir, may I have another? I said, my breath raising a puff of petals.
They waited. I waited. We didnt wait very long. Drug enemas work almost instantly. Thered been a vogue for taking Kwhich is a synthetic tranquilizer popular among vets that makes humans feel really, really perkyup the ass at gay clubs in the 1990s. Id only done it a couple of timesokay, sixteen timesbut it really was something; you went from blah to rah in under twenty seconds. Anyway, I could already feel gravity subsiding.
And when you take your twin ixnokol mak out of my stomach, 2JS asked, will the rot still burn through my head?
It took me a minute to get what he meant. Ixnokol mak meant something like malicious uay, or maybe parasitic worm, intelligent variety of. Supposedly the idea of demonic possession is a cultural universal, so that wasnt so surprising. But by the rot in his head … well, not to put too fine a point on it, he meant cancer.
Damn. If he didnt pick up all of Jeds memories, whyd he have to get that one?
The deal was, as I may have mentioned, the downloading process wasnt entirely benign. Basically, the luon beams would have hit the targetthat is, Chacals brainwith around forty thousand mrads, about the equivalent of three hundred thousand current chest X-rays. Because their wavelength would be tuned to neuronal tissues, they wouldnt cause skin cancer or leukemia. But brain and possibly spinal tumors would start forming that same day. Dr. Lisuarte had said that within seven or eight months, even if the target wasnt predisposed to cancer, the growth would be severe enough to inhibit normal functioning. The odds of my living more than a year would be under one in fifty. So I was already on a pretty tight clock. And 2JSwell, he wouldnt have gotten such a big dose, but he was probably still in trouble. He was going to die, maybe not in nine months, but not of old age either. Id guess hed have less than five years. Okay, what do I do, lie? No. Prevaricate.
Jeds uay has been given to ours. To both of us. As a servant. And it will bring us huge advantages. Jed had to come here to protect us and our descendants.
Silence.
Damn, that was lame, I thought. I was feeling as swollen and sore as a big tourniqueted foot. Id expected whatever theyd shot me up with to numb me into cretinism, but instead it was doing the opposite. It was a sensitizer. The petals under my thighs had hardened into stone chips, and the air currents curling over me felt like strips of sharkskin.
&n
bsp; Tell your xcarec-uay to stop wearing me.
I will, I said, but I cant do it right here right now. I dont have the right tools. Keep it simple, I thought. My good hand involuntarily slid over the petals on the floor and it felt like a herd of giant hissing cockroaches was stampeding under my palm.
How? he asked.
Its a mental thing, there are procedures for it, but it takes training. Christ, I thought, now Im trying to sell this guy on talk therapy.
And then not what? he asked. He meant what if that didnt work.
Well, then, if I get my memories back to 2012, Ill be able to do it from there. I said it again in Ixian. He didnt answer. I rattled on a bit. Just as you above me must see in Jeds uay, I need to be preserved in gel, that is, in a colloid, that is, a liquid that becomes hard, the way copal sap transfigures into crystals.
Silence. Darn.
The bitumen suspension … will preserve the connections in my brain sufficiently for them to be copied, I quoted, in English, from Taros project summary. That is, I said in Ixian, it will keep my souls from escaping. My bolonob.
Brian D'Amato Page 39