I was in the north, I said. I dont have to answer all this, I thought. Im going to get peeved in a minute
How far north?
Farther than from here to Ix, I said. Oops, I thought. That wasnt what I meant to say.
You went farther than the Bone Ocean? She meant the deserts north of the lake country.
I was about to gesture whatever again and then thought I was just coming off as a sniveling, evasive little twerp. So I clicked Yes.
What was it like there?
It was different from here or Ix, I said.
How different?
Very different. I sounded far away from myself.
But it was more different than very different.
I paused. What the hell, I thought. You are correct, I said. It was different in ways that are unpaintable. That is, they were impossible to imagine.
That seemed to hold her for a second.
And who was your first father? she asked.
Pause. Damn, I thought. Shes getting too close. And no wonder. Youre chatting away like some giggly girl after two drags on a banano. God damn it, Jed head, shut up. I managed not to answer.
The pause stretched on. A hundred and twenty beats. Two hundred. Finally, against my better judgment, I looked up.
Uh-oh. I looked down.
I thought Id seen a flash of something dangerous in her face. Not angry, but dangerous.
Damn it. She knows youre hiding something. Something serious. Maybe shed caught some microexpression. Watch out. You could disappear in here. The Harpy trading clan was rich, but it didnt have much influence in Teotihuacan. Even if the Orb Weavers might have political problems, they could still crush us like a chigger.
Who was the smoker who first lit the face of your mother? she asked.
I told her Chacals mothers naming day. I had the urge to say more but I used my tongue to stuff a bit of my inside upper lip into a spot between two projecting tooth inlays and pulled on it until it hurt, and I stayed quiet. It was a trick of Chacals. God damn it, what the hell was in that shit? It had to be a dissociative, some salvia divinorum derivative, or tetrodotoxin, even, or well, whatever it is, you can beat it. Easily. Remember, the main thing about truth serum is, it doesnt really work. At best its just logorrhea serum. Just screw your courage to the sticky spot. And just dont have any more of that hot chocolate. I bit my lip thing again.
Ouch.
The Penguin Woman waddled into my field of vision. She slid one of her stubby digits through a string loop in the screen that divided me from Koh and edged to one side. The screen went with her, folding up like an accordion. Now Lady Koh and I were really in the same space, and the change was startling, as though instead of just collapsing the screen the Penguin Woman had ripped my clothes off. Now I could see that the dark side of Lady Kohs face wasnt a tattoo but her natural color. That is, she was piebald. The right side was the color of the concentrated melatonin, like in a mole, that is, almost black. The upper part of her face wasnt blue, like 2JSs model. It was just normal Maya skin color, although like all upper-caste womens it was pale from being kept out of the sun. Maybe there had been some tattooing, but just to improve the border between the two zones. The line was a little too smooth and sinuous to be natural. Shed shown signs, 2JS had said. No kidding. And hed mentioned that she was related to Janaab Pacal, the ahau of Lakamha, that is, Palenque. And he has eleven fingers, right? Maybe the vitiligo or whatever was somehow related to the polydactyly. Its not all that far out. Anyway, its better than having a Hapsburg lip. Or Hanoverian hćmophilia. She breathed in and I got a glimpse of two front teeth inlaid with what looked like emeralds.
The dwarfess tied the folded screen to the wall and then, it seemed, melted away, probably into one of her rabbit holes. Chacals eyes did the polite thing and looked down again at the matting.
Koh asked,
When did you last touch your father? And when
Did you last touch your mother?
Who was the smoker who blew ashes over her?
When was her darkness?
Why did you wander away and not stay
At their feet, at the hearthstones?
There was a strange feeling in my throat. No, more in my chest. Damn it, I thought. Shes reading me. Empath bitch. And Id thought I had my game face on. Id been off-guard and now she was on the scent.
Okay. Slow down. First think, then think again, then speak.
There were, you above me, there were scores of reasons, I said.
Where is your mother? And where is your father?
And where is your garden?
Hadnt she asked me that before? I wondered. I was getting a gentle sort of buzz. Youre slipping, Jedster, I thought. Keep it together. I pulled harder on my shred of lip. The bland taste of blood spread over my tongue. I didnt answer.
When did you last see your own younger sisters,
Your own older sisters?
Where did you last see your own little brothers,
Your own older brothers?
When was your milpa last burned? Is it cleared?
Is it seeded and weeded?
Who sweeps your granary there? Is it thatched?
Is it clean for the harvest?
Who watches out for the grackles? Who bundles
Your stack of tortillas?
Who sings your names in the square when the grandchildren
Circle the bonfire?
When you come home with a sore on your back,
Who will rub it with mint oil?
When you walk home in the night, in the chill,
Who will wait in the dooryard?
I couldnt answer.
Id never cried as Chacal, and in fact I couldnt remember any moment in Chacals life when hed cried, not since the first hipball initiations, anyway. Where he grew up, you cry, you die. For all I knew he couldnt even force his eyes to cry anymore. Hed beaten it out of them. But his eyes still had that feeling of being about to cry, when the fluid around your eyeballs sours and heats and pressure builds up. Damn it, I thought. Get it together. I stared at the geranium petal. It was longer than the others, standing upright on a twisted tail, like a seahorse.
You want to tell me something, Kohs voice said. Or had I just thought she said it? Get it together.
I sat up straighter and snuck a look at her on the way up. If I could have taken a photograph of her face, Id bet it would have looked as blank as before. But in person, somehow she seemed to be looking at me with indulgence, with sympathy, almost with a smile. Maybe it was all in her eyes. Or maybe it was a slight inclination of the head. Or maybe she was intentionally emitting some kind of pheromone
There is something else inside you, she said.
I pulled harder on my lip flap. As you above me say, I gestured. I glanced up. She was staring right at me. As I think I said, eye contact was a big deal around here. It was like in An Officer and a Gentleman, when Louis Gossett Jr. is all like, Dont you eyeball me, recruit! Use your peripheral vision! I looked down again.
Answers are also great-grandchildren of questions, Koh said. I think she meant, basically, that if I didnt want to tell her anything, how could I expect her to count my suns?
I under you am unpracticed at speaking, but I do want to see them counted, I said. That is, I dont want to chat, I want you to start playing the Game right the hell now.
I under you am too poor to reciprocate your bundle, she said. Basically, Take back your goddamn feathers and everything else and get out of my shop. She looked away and to her left, to the west, signifying the past. That is, This interview is in the past. Were done.
The suns I want to count are very few, I said. And they light you too. That is, Youre doomed, witch bitch. Your days are numbered in single digits, and if you dont get on with the show we all m
ight as well
There was a sound like someone snapping a pencil in the desk behind you in second grade. I looked up. She was looking back, but differently this time.
Animal trainers say that the difference between wolves and dogs is that dogs look at you and wolves look through you. A dog looks into your eyes and empathizes. She wasnt looking into my eyes. She was looking through me.
She means me harm, I thought. Need to get out of here. Automatically, I shifted my weight, getting ready to stand up. But instead of just shifting like it ought to, my weightmy point of balance, I guess youd saysloshed heavily forward and back, like an inflatable kiddie pool full of green slime. My legs had fallen asleep and buzzed, painfully. Cripes, Ive had it, I thought. Shes going tohell, maybe Id better just lunge forward, grab her throat, try tono. There are probably guards watching. Just get it together and leave in a dignified hurry. I uncrossed my sleeping legs as slowly as if I were trying not to set off a motion alarm. I shifted my weight forward and moved my hands down to push off the floor. Okay. On three. A la uno, á la
Koh screamed.
My eyes locked onto her face. It was stretched back into a gaping terrified grin. Sclera showed all around her irises and her emerald tooth inlays glinted like a row of compound eyes. The shriek ran up and down the scale, an eardrumscraping Fay Wray spew of absolute terror and agony, the sound youd make as you felt a jaguars fangs slide into the back of your neck. I recoiled, or thought I did, but nothing moved. I realized I was sitting in exactly the same position. I was paralyzed.
Policemen learn to shout Freeze! with enough authority that people really do freeze. But the problem is they dont always stay frozen for long. This was different. Something about the combination of the dope in the chocolate and the scream had triggered some kind of tonic immobility, a primeval reaction like marsupials can get if they hear the sound of a predator and dont see an escape route.
Hain chama, Koh said. Take this.
She leaned forward and reached out with her light arm. She held a single tzite-tree seed between her first and second fingers, like a Go stone.
My right fist entered my field of vision. I watched it glide slowly under her hand and open, palm up. The seed dropped into it. It closed and returned to its perch on my thigh. I looked up. Somewhere, two of my cervical vertebrae crackled, loudly.
I resettled into position. I was dizzy. I looked down and back up at her. Her face was back to its placid default state. Oddly, I didnt feel angry. I just felt deflated.
When you are asleep, they can do many things to you, she said. She meant that she could freeze me again if she wanted, and could torture me, and get me to tell her whatever she wanted to know. Vee haff ways, et cetera.
Id never thought of myself as an especially brave person. Stilland maybe it was Chacals ball nerves coming through, or maybe I was just tired, but I just said two words:
Bin el.
That is, Proceed. And I think I managed to say it with a convincing measure of insouciance. I felt that old toughness, or heart, or courage or whatever, flowing back into my system. Go for it, cabrona. Like the granola bar says, bring it on.
She didnt blink. Her face had the monstrous inexpressiveness of, say, Kenny Trans, the time he cleaned me out with air in the final table of the 2010 Commerce Casino No Limit Hold Em Tournament.
Actan cha ui alal, she said, finally. That is, roughly, Beat it.
Well, maybe I will, I thought, and then almost before Id thought it, everything seemed to turn around in my head and I felt this flood of cosmic frustration. Great, I thought. Id been working this room for hours already andhell. I mean, where could I go, anyway? You cant hide from a global holocaust. And I couldnt hide from my brain tumors, either. What was I going to do, sneak around Teotihuacan and try to scrounge up the drugs some other way? Walk into the red temple precinct and try to bribe it out of them? Not bloody likely. Id get picked up by the Swallowtail Stasi and processed into carne molida. Hell, hell, hell. Something told meand I hate to appeal to that old intuition chestnut, but at least this time something really, really told methat this was the closest shot I was going to get.
You are doomed here, I said. And I did come here to help you. I know things you would never be able to find out yourself. And I know that Razor City has very few suns left.
And what is your name? she asked.
I got a little shiver, for some reason, maybe just from her tone, and I think she saw the waves of gooseflesh over my arms. All the time Id been here, Id been dealing with people who used what they thought was magic all the time. And still Id never run into anythingunless you count the Game, which doesnt countthat you could really call magic, or ESP, or even a hard-to-explain level of coincidence or intuition. And Im sure that however Koh had paralyzed me, it wouldnt count as supernatural. But it was enough to keep me in a state of creeped-outedness.
Chill, Jed, I thought for the googleth time. Shes not a witch. I snuck a look at her. If she was surprised, she wasnt showing it. Her eyes raked over me. I looked down at the floor again.
Hell, I thought. Just roll the damn dice.
Caba ten Joachim Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda, I said. The Spanish sounded weird here. I thought I saw a tiny flicker deep in her eyes, like maybe Id caught her attention.
And what sun lighted your naming? she asked.
The sun 11 Howler, 4 Whiteness, in the fifth uinal of the first tun of the eighteenth katun of the thirteenth baktun.
There was a pause, but not such a long one as youd think.
Who was your mother? she asked. And who was your father?
My mother was Flor Tizac Maria Mixoc DeLanda, of the Cholan, and my father was Bernardo Koyi Xul Simon DeLanda, of the Tozil.
And who are your smokers, your protectors?
I told her the names of Jeds gods, Santa Teresa and Maximón. I gave him his Mayan name, Mam.
And when did you leave your dooryard? she asked.
13 Imix, 4 Mol, in the fifth uinal of the eleventh tun of the eighteenth katun of the eleventh baktun. That is, September 2, 1984, the day my parents sent me to the hospital in Xacan.
Pause.
Well, good for you, Jed, I thought. Thats the second time youve spilled your guts to somebody on this trip. Mix a dollop of loneliness and a pinch of tongue-loosening narcotics and it gets tough to be cagey
And how did you come here? Koh asked.
I rode here on a waterfall of light, I said. Or rather, I was the waterfall. What the hell am I babbling about? I wondered. Thats not a good metaphor. Oh, well, let it go.
So, she said,
Then, in your time, have our kin gone unfed?
Have our smokers gone hungry?
There was a quality in her voice ofwell, I hesitate to mention it, because it makes her sound like a downer, and so far, at least, she was the opposite, in fact being in the same room with her felt oddly energizing, like holding a sharp machete or a high-caliber handgunbut her voice had this undertone of incredible sadness, as though shed seen more of the world than any single person could have, let alone someone her age, as though shed watched millions of beings pass from childhood enthusiasm into ever-greater disappointments and finally into antemorbid terror.
Do your hometimers still sing their names?
Do they still perfume their skeletons?
Do our home smokers still suckle on slaves blood?
And do they protect you?
Its true that my contemporaries have forgotten some of their obligations, I said. It sounded lame when it came out. In fact it sounded even lamer than it sounds in English. Still, some of your descendants do still suckle your smokers on the altars, on the hilltops. Even if they do not remember their names, they try to suckle them all.
And what do they suckle them on?
Well … I thought. Not humans, anyway. Most of them are impoverished, I said.
It sounds as though they let their ancestors go hungry.
They do what they can.
And so your world is rotting underneath you.
Yes, I thought, in the twenty-first century, things really are falling apart. Ignoring the falconer, shuffling off to Bethlehem, its so bad even the worst lack all conviction.
It may be, I said. But it does not have to be that way.
Then why are you here? Whose path do you scout?
She meant who was I working for. I was about to say 2 Jeweled Skull, but then I thought why go through all that again and just said Marena Park.
And then why did the Ix-ahau Maran Ah Pok decide to send you here? Koh asked.
We saw you in a book, I said. One of the books recording the Game you played on 9 Overlord, 13 Gathering survived to our katun. I saw the book on 2 Were-Jaguar, 2 Yellowribs, in the nineteenth katun of the thirteenth baktun.
Brian D'Amato Page 61