Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  She shifted again. For a second I thought she was just going to stand up and leave, and that would be it. Instead, she said: “And so, you next to me wager that 2 Jeweled Skull will win his hipball game against the Ocelots?” She meant that she thought the Harpies were going to lose—fairly or otherwise—and would get run out of Ix.

  “Ma’ lo’ yanil,” I said. That is, “No problem.” “Win or no win, the Harpies will stay. And the Ocelots will run.” The idea was to let her think that my superhuman knowledge had provided 2JS with enough firepower to hold off the Ocelots.

  As you might guess, there was another interminable pause. Well, at least she didn’t just keep babbling like your average chica perica.

  “You came here for the Steersman, not for me,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say. Well, maybe that’s it, I thought. I’m getting thrown out. Back to Square Zero.

  Instead, Koh said: “Your hometimers have forgotten how to seat a cycle.”

  I clicked yes.

  “But the ahaus you suckle would like to midwife a lineage of new suns. After the suns of the thirteenth b’ak’tun have died out.”

  “I would like to help start another cycle,” I said.

  “And why?” she asked. “Are you going back?”

  “I want to try,” I said, half-avoiding the question. I thought she was going to ask me how I was planning to do that, but instead she just took the answer as a “yes” and asked: “Bax ten tex kaabet?” That is, “why do you want to [go through all this]?”

  “Everyone wants to protect his family.”

  “And do you next to me have family there?”

  “I have—people whom I think of as foster family.” Or at least I have a few half-friends on the web, I thought. I guess Koh knew I was pushing it. Still, she didn’t pursue the thought.

  “And if your hometimers do survive,”

  Would they still forget us?

  Would they observe all the days of our namings,

  The days of our dyings?

  Will they forget how we planted, and raided,

  And built, and bore children?

  Will they sometimes sing a song with our names in it?

  Will they remember?”

  “I will arrange for them to remember your lineage, and to suckle your uay on your deathdays.”

  “But you told me they only offer poor things.”

  “Not necessarily,” I gestured.

  “And you said your hometimers are dishonorable,” she said. There wasn’t really an Ixian word for “evil,” and even if there had been, “dishonorable” would have been worse.

  When did I say that? I wondered. Huh. “In many ways they’ll be worse than people are now,” I said. “But in some ways you over me might say they are better.”

  “And so you want me to play a nine-stone Game. And you think just by watching you could learn to play it in two lights.” “Two lights” was an idiom, like saying “You think you could learn it overnight.”

  “I under you do not think that.”

  “Then what else do you next to me and I have to do here?”

  “I under you request a reading,” I said.

  “But I next to you have already read for you.”

  “But I want to exchange something larger this time,” I said. I told her that I could tell her almost anything she wanted to know about anything that would be explored or discovered or created through all the next four b’ak’tuns.

  “I know enough already to make me sorry I know it,” she said. It wasn’t clear whether she meant the things I’d told her about, or the things she’d already known, or both.

  “Then let me tell you something that will help you. Let me give you something.”

  “You already gave me the shape of the sun.”

  “Let me give you something that would put honey into your followers’ ch’anac.” That is, something that would help out the regular folks.

  “I next to you … we could build any number of yet-unseen devices,” I said.

  “Like what?” she signed. She put down the fly whisk.

  “What about captive rollers?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” she gestured.

  I started to explain about wheels. I told her how they were like rollers, but with a stick through the center, and how great wheelbarrows were, and I started to draw one, but then she said they already had them here, and she sent the Penguiness out for an example. I didn’t know what to think. But the dwarf brought back a little yellow wooden jaguar with a respectable wheel on each of its feet. Koh said that toys with this feature were pretty popular among the elite, but they weren’t to be allowed out of the house where the public could see them. As far as I could tell, this wasn’t because regular folks might get the idea that wheels would be useful, but because someone might copy them and use them to gather a following. That person could go to some other city, impress everybody with his gadgets, promote himself as a great sorcerer, and ultimately become a problem for the aristocracy. The wheel could become another magic cult object, the center of another order, like the knife or fire or the closely guarded secret of the concave mirror—or, of course, the Game drugs. And besides, Koh said—and I’m paraphrasing pretty freely here—there were so many roundhousers around these days that there wasn’t any need for wheelbarrows anyway. If you wanted to move something heavy, you just got the plebes to drag it.

  It was frustrating, but I dropped the subject. It was like this one time when I was giving this very Park Avenue-type girl a ride up to New Haven in my van, and I mentioned that she ought to learn to drive. “What if I hadn’t been going up today?” I’d asked.

  “I’d ring up some other boy and gotten him to drive me,” she’d said. “And then I’d fuck him.”

  Well, okay, I thought, forget wheels for transportation. What about just for dinnerware?

  I started to tell her about potter’s wheels. The thing was, just to be frank, when you talked about the dinnerware around here, I mean here in Mesoamerica, you had to admit that, yes, some of the painting was awesome, but the shape was always just a little bit borkly. Anybody turning out perfectly round pots would cause a sensation. But as Koh caught on to what I was saying, she came back with the same objection. That is, the Synods would say that whoever had created the new pots was some kind of inordinately powerful sorcerer, and they’d immediately send out hit squads to get rid of him. And even if that didn’t happen and the wheel-thrown stuff caught on, it would doom thousands of potter families to starvation, since they’d never be capable of making the change. I guess it was basically the same rationale behind how we—I mean, we Maya or Teotihuacanos or any of the big-city Mesoamerican civilizations—didn’t use bows and arrows, even though the Too-Talls used them. It was like the whole samurai cult-of-the-sword thing, how Tokugawa figured that if decent guns got into Japan they’d wobble the power structure even if the shogunate got hold of them first. So he and his successors confiscated firearms and gunpowder, shut the Portuguese traders out of most of Japan, and basically kept the place as backward as possible for another two hundred and fifty years.

  “We cannot use those things here,” she said. “Finished.”

  Hell. I was running out of ideas. This was one eventuality we hadn’t rehearsed for back at the Stake.

  “Then do it just to throw out a fresh ball,” I said. It was like saying “Throw in the bet for the pot” in poker, just to see what the other hands were. Do it on a bet, do it on a dare, do it for the sheer ineffable fuck of it.

  “You think I’m not curious about your level,” she said. I didn’t answer. “But I am curious. But curiosity is of the teaser, the torturer.” That is, her being curious would hurt people she had no reason to hurt.

  Well, at least that suggests she’s got some empathy in there, I thought. Doesn’t it? The thing is—although in general I don’t want to make sweeping statements about humanity in general, not because I’m wrong but just because they’ve all already been made—the thing is, either you’re a person with a head for empathy or, much more often, you’re not. And either she was the first type or we were fucked, and t
hat was all there was to it.

  Okay, think.

  Empathy just as a concept was a little abstract to express in Ixian. You had to frame it in the language of family.

  Okay, here goes.

  “I know … ,” I said, “I know that if you were on the road and you saw someone strangling a five-rounder”—that is, about a three-year-old—“you would want to stop it. Even if it was his child, even if the child was scab-possessed and inauspiciously born, even if he had every right to kill it, you would still want to stop him, and if you had the power to—that is, if you could stop him, you would.”

  “Your hometimers are not on our road,” she said.

  “They are. By then scores of scores of scores of scores of them will all be your descendants, or descendants of your sisters, your brothers, because …”

  I trailed off. I looked up at her. Her eyes were still looking past me, over my head.

  “They are dying,” I said, “they will be dying, and just before they die they’ll wonder why nobody cared to help them, and if they knew that I under you and you could have saved them and decided not to, they would wonder why, and if we told them, it wouldn’t be a good enough …”

  I trailed off. Those never-to-be-born tears were welling up again somewhere a bit behind my eyeballs. And I was gasping, I was short of breath, and even almost stuttering like I used to do in English when I got panicked when I was little. Damn it, Jed, keep it together, keep it to—

  “I next to you have made my decision,” Koh said,

  “Too many suns have already been born

  And too many are coming.

  All corn-fleshed people will end with the sun

  On 4 Overlord, 3 Yellow.

  Maybe someday after that some new heir of Iztamna will come along,

  Maybe he’ll model new lineages from some other material,

  Maybe from jade.”

  She paused and then started to say “Ca’ek,” “Finished,” but I interrupted her.

  “WAIT,” I said—well, let’s say I shouted—“wait, you DO NOT have, you”—Tone it down, Jed, I thought—“you far over me do not have the authority to decide that for them. Not even if your decision is correct.”

  “No,” she said, “it is that I don’t have the right to prolong their time on the zeroth level, even if I could.”

  “No, you do, it—you want to save them, but you think you shouldn’t, or rather you know you shouldn’t, but if what I’ve seen can add anything to what you’ve seen—that is, I’ve been in both places, and I’ve seen things that …”

  Damn. I lost track of what I was saying. I started again:

  “If I know one thing—and it’s not even a good thing, but it’s true—it’s that you’re allowed to do whatever you want.”

  Since I’d already broken almost every other rule of decorum, I looked into her eyes. Her eyes opened wide and bulged—no, wait, that wasn’t it. She’d shut her eyes, but her eyelids had been painted with white lead, so they looked like they were still open and pupil-less, like they’d been drawn by Harold Gray in Little Orphan Annie.

  Whew. That was a little shock. Shocklet. Damn, had she not blinked this whole time? Well, if she had, I’d missed it. Okay.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I just looked at her false eyes. I guess she hadn’t wanted to look down, or to lash out at me, as she had a right to, so instead she’d just shut down.

  Come on, Jed. Come up with something.

  “I underneath you challenge you to look at me,” I said. It was like saying “I dare you to hit me.” Still, I felt like I needed it, I needed a scrap of eye contact that wasn’t just about dominance. Anyway, maybe it was just sheer fighting spirit—as I think I mentioned, around here you’d do anything on a dare—but she opened her eyes and looked back.

  [51]

  When I was at Nephi K-12—and I realize there’s really never any good time to break up a narrative, and that even if there were this wouldn’t be it, but still, as they used to say, dear and thrice-indulgent reader, let us pause for just a moment—there was a perennial substitute teacher who worked the lower grades, a large, ancient lady who remembered when the grandsons of the pioneers came to school barefoot and who was a dissertation-worthy storehouse of premedia entertainments. She knew what there was to know about yarn puppets, fancy needlework, and folding dolls, and especially parlor games—Forfeits, Charades, the terrifying ritual of apple bobbing, Pass-the-Slipper, Snapdragon, and Shadow Buff—a whole lost world from endless dim evenings before the REA. And anyway one Friday afternoon she cut a row of three pairs of tiny eyeholes in an old white bedsheet and had us tape it up over the wide doorway into what they called the cubbyhole room. Half the class of twenty-four went behind the sheet, and three of them came up and peered out at the rest of us from behind the eyeholes. And each of us in turn went up close to the sheet, and looked directly into their eyes, and tried to guess who was looking back. It had turned out that it was almost impossible, that—except in the case of Jessica Gunnerson, a nearalbinic ginger whose irises were the same aniline violet as the methanolated ink on the last and lightest copy out of the ditto machine—you couldn’t tell who it was. Without seeing more of the face, you couldn’t tell whether it was your best friend or your worst enemy, you couldn’t tell what funny faces that person might be making at you, you couldn’t even tell whether it was a boy or a girl. It was disturbing enough so that decades later I might be looking into, say, some young lady’s eyes, attempting to connect on some at least supra-animalistic level, or to convey a scintilla of commitment or, at worst, a trace amount of honesty, and I’d be feeling that yes, she was being straight with me because I was looking right into the limpid depths of her windows into the whatever, and then out of nowhere I’d remember that stupid guessing game and suddenly her pupils would look like just two cutout holes with just blank transgalactic vacuity behind them, and that cut-loose feeling would swell up between us, that sense of being adrift in the mechanistic cosmos not just without any communication with another being but with no possibility of any communication with any other being now or in the future or even in the past, and everything would just turn to mierditas refritos. And now—I mean, right now in AD 664—I was at it again, I was looking into Lady Koh’s eyes, and I was hoping more than desperately that I could see something there, some shred of magic or spirit or at least indeterminacy, some sign that she and I were both more or less real and conscious and autonomously volitional and in the same space at the same time. As I think I said, Lady Koh’s face was about as inexpressive as any I’ve encountered, and I’ve seen some stony ones, across about ten thousand chessboards, Go boards, and Hold ’Em tables, but her eyes had something else to them, something liquefacient and vortical, like Cléo de Mérode’s. Her irises were so dark that you couldn’t see where the pupils started, but you could still see that they were two different colors of black, like in an Ad Reinhardt painting, that the left eye was colder and the right eye was warmer … I thought it was raining outside and then I realized I was hearing blood swashing through my ears.

  Come on, I thought. I know you’re in there. Come on.

  Forty beats went by. I thought I saw something in her blank face, something like maybe she was biting her tongue, some kind of pain that wasn’t quite concealable, and then I decided I’d probably imagined it.

  Eighty beats.

  This doesn’t need to be a rape-like moment. Let’s turn it into a lovemakinglike moment. Okay?

  At the hundred-and-twentieth beat there was a click in my back, a vertebra resettling, and I got an urge to pull my eyes away and managed not to. Just keep at it, Jed. Now I felt like we were a couple of sumos exerting a half-ton or so of pressure on each other in the middle of the dohyo. Come on, I thought. No need to wrestle. Come on. Hold it. Hold. Please, Nonexistent Dude, just this one time, let there be something there. Please. Please.

  “It is because I do care for them as my children that I do not want them to have to toil through the zeroth level,” Koh’s voice said, sounding about a mile away. She didn’t look away.

  “The zer
oth level is the only level,” I choked out.

  “If that is true it is just as well,” she said.

  “No, no, no, no, it is not just as well, they want to … they want to spend as many days with each other as they can.”

  “So they are greedy and afraid.”

  “No, no, not—no, they’re like a family going together to a festival.”

  “And what is there to see at the festival?” she asked. I guess she meant that the fun wears off after a while.

  “That’s why they want to have new children,” I said, “to see it fresh, that … what I and you are saying here is b’ach na tok.” That is, this whole thing is ridiculous.

  “Yes, it is,” she clicked.

  “And if the suns do go on,” I said, “if a new race of suns … who knows what could happen after that? I and you could play the Game four hundred score times and we wouldn’t know. Maybe something will happen in the ten scoreth b’ak’tun, in the hundred scoreth b’ak’tun, that will make it all worthwhile… .”