I snuck a look at Koh. She was looking at me with one eye and keeping her other on the pede. Whoa, I thought. It can be disconcerting to talk to people who have a wandering eye. But unlike someone with the medical condition Koh could apparently control her eyes independently. I looked back at the board. Nothing happened for another eternity or two. Just when I felt like everything had ended and we were all mummified in our spots, Koh seemed to move. I looked up at her. Nothing. I looked back at the centipede. Something was wrong.
The centipede tensed, as though she sensed enemies. She whipped her head to the left and then to the right, snapped her maxillae twice, and then seemed to panic. She ran clockwise, and then counterclockwise, over the red land, over the yellow land, out to the eighth baktun, and then turned right and dashed into the black land, and then ran back again over the white land and the yellow land, way, way out this time, into the thirteenth baktun, and back and forth, pastward, futureward, crossing the present over and over until finally, in the center of the north quadrant, on 14 Night, she dug in and spun around and around counterclockwise. For some reason a word scrolled across my mind: INSANE. On the twenty-eighth spin she seemed to come to a decision and froze, her tail raised. Her antennae quivered. Her legs drummed preternaturally fast. Theres an Ixian expression that says youll never move faster than when you shiver at your death.
The centipede took four halting steps north, then six slow steps southeast, and shuddered to a stop on a bin that, with the numerical stones, signified 12 Motion, 5 Turquoise, in the seventh katun of the twelfth baktun, or December 3, 1773. It was the year of the earthquake that destroyed Antigua when it was the capital of Guatemala. Should I mention it? Or did Koh already know? I decided not to volunteer anything. The centipede moved forward again, staggering, if you can stagger with forty-two legs, until she came to on 2 Etznab, 1 Kankin, 2 Razor, 1 Yellowribs, two days from the end date.
Evidently shed been poisoned by the monkey, or by whatever the monkey had been raised on. She writhed, curled, uncurled, flipped over onto her back, curled and uncurled, and flopped onto her stomach. She bit at the base of her left 18th leg. Bits of white flesh swelled out through cracks in her exoskeleton. Mist sprayed from her fangs as she pumped neurotoxins into the air. She flipped onto her back again, clawing at herself. A seam opened in the center of her back and widened, the cuticle unzipping segment by segment. She was molting.
Arthropods molt using peristaltic waves. A molting spider looks like a lone hand pushing its way out of a glove. Insects tend to tear off one piece at a time. A centipede flexes and extends, like a foot shrugging off a slipper. Usually the molt reveals a complete fresh exterior, and its as though the creature has been reborn. I remembered that someonemaybe my mother, or maybe Chacals motherhad said that if we could shed our skins wed be able to live forever.
Now, though, this centipede was trying to molt when she wasnt ready. There was no new exoskeleton under the one she was shedding, just raw liner cells oozing bubbles of hemolymph. Basically, she was skinning herself alive. She twisted and flopped against the stone, obviously in agony. Curls of chitinous shell separated and dropped to the stone with shreds of white flesh stuck to their undersides. The ventral sides of her last two segments seemed to be moving, or kneading, maybe, and then they fell apartbut the pieces were moving, no, they were little things moving, maggots, maybe? No, they were hundreds of tiny translucenty-white centipedes, each only about the size of a bit of shaved dried coconut from some old-fashioned ice-cream snowball dessert. I thought I remembered that Scolopendra laid eggs, but evidently this type was different. The little guys crawled and spread and wriggled and clustered around the gobbets of their mothers flesh, lapping up ichor. Finally the mother curled into a ring, gnawing at herself until she was just a soggy tangle on 9 Skull, 11 Wind, in the white quadrant of the board. Eventually only her antennae were still moving, drawing slow figure eights in the air. Within another thousand beats, the kids had stopped too. Kohs fingers came down out of the sky. Her nails closed on the tattered centipede. She picked her upthe pede was as stiff as a burnt strip of baconand put the opal runner down in her place. She swept up the bits of the monkey and the loose bits of the pede with a new cotton cloth. The dwarf held out a clay box. Koh wrapped the remains of both animals in the cloth, laid the bundle in the box, and spoke briefly to it in two languages. The dwarf took the box away, presumably for dignified entombment. Before I knew what she was doing Koh had already taken away the large standing stones and started laying out the skulls, that is, pebbles, on the bins where the creatures had been, counting again in that old language. It seemed that she paused for several minutes between each stone and the next, and I had to keep reminding myself that she was moving at normal speed and I was just thinking faster.
Even so, the actual combat between the creatures had still happened so fast I barely saw it. But not only had Koh seen it all, she remembered the entire tangle of paths that the centipede and monkey had taken, and remembered it perfectly. She traced it with a chain of markers, using different shapes of pebbles on the spots of different events, a flat oval on the bin where the centipede first struck, a wedge where the monkey died, and a near-perfect sphere on the site of the centipedes death. It was one of the most singular mental feats Id ever seen, and Id seen a few. To me the whole thing had been 80 percent blur. I bet she could have watched a ten-minute video of balls bouncing around on a billiard table and then sketched every frame.
Finally, Koh tapped the board five times and emptied out a bag of little stones. They were all different. Some were flattened on one side like gum-drops. Each represented a planet or a major star. She selected the cast of characters that would currently be overhead and put back the rest. She laid out tonights skyscape on the board, slightly differently this time, with the Last Lord of the Night bowing down to the west and the birth of Sun Vanquisher, that is, Venus, in the east. The stone she used to represent the moon was a smooth spheroid hydrophane, a water opal. In Europe, in the Middle Ages, they called it the Eye of the World.
Koh said:
Now blackward I salute the cave of the dead,
Now yellowward I salute the cave of the breathing,
Now redward I salute the cave of the unborn,
Now whiteward I salute the cave of never at all.
Now I am scattering yellow seeds, black seeds,
And now I am scattering
White skulls and red skulls,
And this is your own blue-green skull,
Your own namesake,
And now we are moving.
She brought down a green stone and tapped it forward, walking down into the west, up into the east, and back to the crossroads, up the side of the Crocodile Tree, past the Four Hundred Boys, that is, the Pleiades, and along the long white road of the snakes stomach, past the hearthstones, that is, the belt of Orion, and then south toward Sirius and Mirzam, what we called the Second Lord of the Night, leaving a trail of stones behind her through the convolutions of time. She moved fast, but I followed it with no problem. In fact, even though Chacals brain didnt have the Game connections my Jed one had had, I was coming up with solutions to stuff Id screwed up in my old games. And it didnt even exactly feel like I was thinking more clearly. It was something different, a feeling specific to the topolytic drug. It wasnt like flying through space, but like having all space conflated, or with the whole world balled up in your hand, so that if you just turned it slightly youd be wherever … or maybe it was more as though the world were a deck of cards, so that you could bring distant spaces together just by reshuffling, you could plop Ceylon into the middle of Oklahoma or pour the Trifid Nebula into this room.
Koh set down nine white pebbles and started them hunting the runner. It came to the sun eight days from now, the day of the eclipse. She said there was a faint gray smell there, and that there was also a kii for me on that day. The word meant a ploy or a strategy, a way
to turn things my way. The kii had a two-part name: chaat ha anachan.
The first word, chaat, meant the Northwest Wind, which was dry, hot, and coded black. Or it could mean just wind in general. The second word, anachan, meant a mortuary town, that is, a Mexican-style miniature city of the dead. Wed passed hundreds of them on the long trudge inland from San Martín. Other than that, the dust was too thick, as she put it, for her to see anything more clearly.
Wind in a cemetery, I thought. Hmm.
Five suns, fourteen suns, and thirty suns,
Fifty-five suns, ninety-one suns, one hundred suns …
When shed made twenty placements, Koh took up the first one and continued, like the way a solo mountain climber sets a safety line, climbs up past it, sets another, and then climbs down to remove the first. Id thought she might use tongs to move a piece on the far side of the board, but instead she leaned way out over it. I got a half eyeful of décolletage. Mmmm. Some things never change. I was feeling like I wouldnt mind another Kiss of the Spider Woman. Maybe the light-and-dark thing was kind of cute, in a way. What was wrong with her? Was it just hyperpigmentation? You could get extra melanin from hormonal imbalances. Or was it really vitiligo? Melasma? Addisons disease? Hćmochromatosis? Angina? Xeroderma pigmentosum? Zero-sum game
Zero suns, Koh said. Shed come to the date that corresponded to the spot where the monkey was killed. But she didnt stop. Instead, and without hesitation, she kept on placing stones, as though the centipede was still chasing the monkey through in some Kaluza-Kleinian collapsed dimension. Some of the bins nearly filled up with pebbles. If there had been only one or two runners I could have followed it. But as I think Ive said, each new runner increased the difficulty many times over. A nine-stone game isnt just one stone harder than an eight-stone game. It wasnt even nine times harder. It was 9!, that is, 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2, or 362,880 times harder.
14, 51, 124, 245, Koh whispered. She read ahead and then reversed. She backtracked all the way to 5 Kaban, 15 Chen, 8.14.17.7.17, the date identified in the Codex as the collapse of A Kaakan, that is, El Mirador, and then turned around and continued along the path into the future, moving ahead 394 days, to the edge of the red quadrant and the founding date of Ix. There was something about the pattern of the hooked path she took, the way it wove back and forth and from point to point like a Maurer rose, and the way it kept repeating itself at different scales as it expanded to wider and wider angles … but it always had the same curve to it, a sort of hook, and there was something about that hooking curve that seemed to slice through the mushroom cloud of effects and strike, like a knife on a peach pit, on causes.
When we come to a place and a sun that are strange to me, Koh said, I will tell you the things I read there, and you will tell me their names.
I clicked that I would. The system she was talking about wasnt unusual. In fact there were already precedents in the protocol of the Game. For instance a client might ask the adder whats likely to happen on a trip hes taking. If hes talking about a place that hes visited but the adder hasnt, the adder will try to intuit the outlines but ask the client to clarify particulars along the way.
Three hundred ninety-five, five hundred six, she said. She moved ahead one bundle of fifty-two solar years and then another and another and another. Tzam lic crackled under my skin like static voltage around a Van de Graaff globe. Koh described the Jewel Cities imploding into the jungle, and I imagined them like a backward film of silent red Chinese skyrockets against a green sky. Ix, Axcalamac, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, Palenque, Kaminaljuyú, Ti akal, Uaxactun, and Tonil all dissolved in the wave of dissolution that spread from the ruins of the Teotihuacano empire. Her fingers jumped ahead, setting a skull-kernel on the next square at each silent beat, leaving a widening wake, but a wake ahead of the line of seeds, the feather-hairs of the board weaving into crystals of history. New cities sprouted in the north, Kan Ec, Pink Mountain, Tula, Flint Lake, Chichén, Kabah, Narrow-Never-Empty-Well, Uxmal, and Mayapán. Later, after the beginning of the tenth baktun, new clusters of pyramids crystallized in the lake again, near the center of the board but south and west of the ruins of Teotihuacan: Tlaxcala, Tenochtitlán, and a hundred other towns of the Triple Alliance. Files of soldiers streamed like conqueror ants out of the capitals and over Mesoamerica. I snuck a look at Koh. She was straining, carrying me through history like she was surfing a lava flow with me riding on her back. If you play competitive chess or Go, or probably even if you compete at Neo-Teo or whatevers the latest nontrivial computer game, you know the feeling, the mental agony of keeping that many balls in the air. Even if youre an athlete, its the same. You make that final effort and you think you cant do it and then you do, you go through that wall and get it up there, but then theres no way to bring it down, and you panic and yell for a spotter. Koh held thousands of eventualities in her mind and watched them spread out from her alter-ego-stone, and on each move, she chose one of them. Canoes the size of towns slid up out of the sea into the red bottom of the board. She saw the tarpon men again and saw blackberry boils erupting out of square miles of tan skin, lungs throbbing with pustules, bodies dying and spoiling too fast to bury. She moved up to 1518, the year Hernán Cortés reached Mexico City, only a few miles from the ruins of Teotihuacan. The white cities in the center of the lake shriveled in a burst of flame. She moved again.
Nine Wind, ten thought, sixteenth katun, she said. That was February 4, AD 1525. The lake dried into mud and blew away in storms of dust.
He almost destroys us, she said.
Who? I asked.
She described a tarpon-scaled giant with an orange beard.
I said I knew who it was.
Who is it? she gestured.
Pedro de Alvarado.
[53]
Koh repeated the name. There was something chilling about hearing it here, now, in her voice.
Now we are slaves, she said. I focused back on the board. Now it was as big as the entire Western Hemisphere, and populations rolled over the continents like loose beads in a platter. She described cities that doubled in size every few peace seasons, like ground fungi, and dark double roots with wet, giant worms slithering over them. I told her what I guessed she was imagining and she repeated the word: Railroads. She moved from December 24, 1917, into 1918, on the dates of the earthquakes that had destroyed Ciudad Guatemala. She described the roots multiplying, and gnarling and sprouting and oozing bitumen. Dark running ticks would crawl over them, sucking the Earthtoadesss blood, and the trees would shrivel in their breath. After the ninth katun of the last baktun the stinking ticks multiplied into vast enameled herds, red and blue and yellow, and some of them sprouted wings. I told her I thought she was imagining roads and cars and airplanes. She described clusters of quartz crystals that grew overnight, and vomited white flies over the cracked blue-green bowl. I wasnt sure what she meant by that. She set her sapphire down on 11 Howler, 4 Whiteness, in the fifth uinal of the first tun of the eighteenth katun of the thirteenth and last baktun.
Your name-day, she said. I clicked Correct.
She moved it to February 4, 1976the day of the last big Guate city earthquakeand then farther out into the last baktun. Eleven Motion, Koh said. A blowgun-snake with mouth and anus joined vomits a dust-mote into the God of Zeros fire, and the sands fuse to crystal knives. The Maya date corresponded to June 2, 2009, the day of the collider blast in Huajapan de Léon. I started to tell her a little bit about it, but she moved on, tapping her lead opal outward, to 6 Razor, 6 Yellowribs.
They fight themselves here, she said, in the game-city in the northern coral flats.
Disney World, I said.
And what exactly will happen on that sun?
I described the day as well as possible.
She moved on. We came to the edge of the world at the extreme west rim of the
board and the bin named 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowribs, that is, December 21, 2012, at the limit of time.
A hidden ahau turns his men against his own, she said. He has a crooked skull.
I clicked yes. Still, that didnt seem like a lot of information.
No, wait, she said. He is not an ahau. He is only using an ahaus voice. His name is Trumpet Vine.
Whoa, I thought. Well, thats pretty specific in its way. The only problem was that Id never heard of anything named Trumpet Vine.
Hmm.
The Ixian term shed used, taal chaconib, meant something like hummingbird chocolate flower. And it definitely meant trumpet vine, Campsis radicans. But the thing was, the word was more common as an adjective, as an idiom for a salmon-pink color. That is, one thinks of trumpet vines as red, but the wild species we had was pink, or salmon pink. So maybe she just meant light red.
Brian D'Amato Page 66