Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I kept saying we needed to get more serious about the dosage. Lisuarte kept holding back. Around April 4 I started to get the feeling that we might already be too late. Or we would be very shortly. It was just a feeling, but I didn’t like that date LEON had flagged, April 20. This wasn’t the first time the date had come up. And each time it felt to me like it had a gray halo around it. And it wasn’t just because it was Columbine Day. It had the sense of a point of no return. Maybe the Doomster was going to use another timed virus, set to go symptomatic on 4 Ahau, and was going to release it into the population on the twenty-eighth. Or maybe it was a conventional bomb or some other chain reaction that got triggered that day. Whatever it was, it felt like our zero hour might be right now. It might even have been yesterday. It was time for the D word. Drastic.

  It’s easy to steal from someone who trusts you. Fooling Dr. Lisuarte would have been hard. But Taro had access to the dope fridge, too, and his lab wasn’t exactly the world’s tightest ship. And now Ashley2 and I were, well, we had a little thing going on, what with Marena’s absence and A2’s husband being stranded in Beijing Province and the world going all Dawn of the Dead on us and everything. It was kind of a boffery of convenience. A2 wasn’t the sort of person one would notice or anything, but actually if you got her glasses and lab coat off and put her in a dim room, she could pass for Ziyi Zhang’s chunkier twin. She was trying to learn the Game—she was about the worst player in the place—and I was giving her special lessons with benefits. It wasn’t a big deal, except I got her saving me fractions of the Game drugs out of her own doses. As of today, I had about 480 extra mgs—the topolytic component had to be in liquid form, so the stuff was in tiny 40 mg scintillation vials—and I’d loaded 300, ten of my standard doses, into an AirJet helium tube. There weren’t any cameras in the isolation room—not that I could find, anyway, and anyway things still weren’t quite that uptight around here. Yet. I detaped the little steel cylinder from my underarm, slid it down under my elastic waist-thing to my right, nontobaccoed inner thigh, and squoze the button. There was a sound like slowly unscrewing a cold Shasta bottle and a feeling like a shard of ice materializing in my great saphenous vein and then melting away.

  If I’d dosed it right, in twenty minutes it would bring me up to roughly one-fifth of the amount that we’d calculated Lady Koh had taken during her last game with Jed2. Of course, she’d had a lifetime to build up her tolerance. The Lotoslanders had said this much could be fatal or that it might blow out my hippocampus. But they were worryworts. Anyway, if I start having a seizure, Lisuarte’s staff ’ll rush in and sedate me and nurse me back to normal. They can do anything these days. Right? Anyway, we’ve got bigger problems. Focus.

  I moved the first of my nine skulls to April 28 and displaced LEON’s seed. Take that, glassbrain. THINKING, his File window said. I looked around from my new location. Or rather, “looked” is a bit of a misleading word because now that I was feeling the blood lightning sizzling through my arteries I was really seeing, if you could call it that, with all those little shivers and flutterings, feeling that every atom of my body had a paired particle on the game board. Maybe it’s like the way blind people with those implanted cameras and glossopharyngeal electrodes see with their tongues—

  BEEP.

  LEON moved two forward, toward the center.

  Hmm.

  I moved my skull forward. There was that feeling of climbing stairs, of both expansion and contraction. It’s hard to describe, but emotionally it’s like what it would feel like if you’d spent, say, your whole life in a single small city, and you knew your way around but you’d never looked at a map of the place, and now you were climbing, say, a high radio tower that they’d just put up in the center of town, and for the first time you looked down at your hometown from high overhead. In a few seconds you’d understand things you never realized were even there to understand. You’d see that places that had seemed far away from each other were close together, streets that you’d assumed were perpendicular were actually disturbingly off-angle, parks that you thought were squares were actually irregular trapezoids, familiar buildings that had seemed huge were smaller than less familiar ones that had seemed small, and it would all be a new, different order of understanding, not something you could ever get from just living in the place even if you lived there another hundred lifetimes.

  The trouble with this picture, though, is that it sounds as though it might be exhilarating, or even fun. But it’s not, it’s just scary. It was especially scary this time, of course. But it’s always scary. Your apprehension increases with your perception. And in fact it has to.

  When I’d read about Lady Koh’s animals, it didn’t surprise me as much as it seemed to have surprised Jed2. Really, I’d been using myself as a monkey all this time. That is, to really play the runner, that is, the skulls, you have to have some fear there. Even if you’re playing for a client you don’t much care about, you have to scare yourself. You need to look around you the way a prey animal does, seeing a predator in every shadow. And as your field of understanding widens, instead of feeling more powerful, your fear increases. It becomes fear not just for yourself but for your fellow prey animals, the members of your herd that you now see are all around you and too numerous to count. Instead of spotting escape routes you realize how many prey animals surround you and how far it is to any safe haven. You start comprehending how unlikely and contingent your consciousness is, and the farther you get up that staircase, that sense of tenuousness just keeps increasing. You start seeing more of the present, and more of the past, and then even some of the future, and then more possible futures and possible pasts—all the trillions of times you weren’t born, for instance—and then even counterfactual presents and nonexistent futures and impossible worlds, universes where light is slow and local and gravity is fast and far-reaching, where two plus two equals one, or even where two plus two equals, say, grapefruit. And it’s not intriguing. It’s terrifying.

  But if you can get past the vertigo of all that, you do start to notice a few patterns. I minimized the game board window on the video wall and took a squint at the scrolling swarms of raw information. Right now LEON was sifting through data relating to people with the same names and making sure they were assigned to the right individual. And by data, I mean all data—occupations, genealogies, online and RL webs of acquaintance, credit reports, purchases, school records, birthdays, photos, hobbies acknowledged and inferred, browser histories, haplotype estimates, cross-references, medical data, an Iguazu of facts, near facts, and falsities in every language on earth, human and machine. I was seeing the closest available thing to what God would see, even closer than what Google sees, since what Google looks at is determined by whatever all these not-too-bright human beings are looking for. Any really purposeful data mining has to be a lot more selective. You need to focus. And I don’t mean focus on some little detail, like in a word search. It’s more like those Magic Eye pictures, where you need to focus a couple of feet below the surface of the paper, and if you can keep from getting distracted by all the little squiggles, you start seeing a shape—or rather, it’s more accurate to call it a space than a shape, since you’re really seeing only the space, that is, if you only use one eye you can’t see it at all—and if you can keep focusing on that shape, it coalesces out of the noise, it gets rounder and deeper and smoother, and at some point you start to realize what it is. As the Steersman’s dust soaked into my nervous system, it was as though I was slowly opening my second eye; I was beginning to make out an outline of something in the east, and now the muscles of my iris were slowly focusing out beyond the cataract of names and dates and amounts and all the other quintillions of grains of garbage that constitute the monstrous world, and I was almost beginning to see what it was, something made up of all those things but not really of them at all, something direful looming up ahead.

  [68]

  LEON moved. I moved. He moved. I moved, toward the shape. It felt like it might be a ruined pyramid or a dead volcano, but it was horribly e
roded, full of fissures and debris flows. And there was something odd just a little below the peak, a protuberance like a gigantic wart. LEON moved.

  Hmm.

  I moved, plodding through the blizzard of data. All this noise and so little signal, I thought. It was like TV snow in your eyes. He moved. Hmm. Not this. Not that. It was getting harder to feel my way forward. Fewer and fewer solid spots in the swamp.

  He moved. Hypothetical moves faded in and out of clarity ahead of me. I moved. Now it felt as though I was climbing high, irregular, eroded steps. There were big shapes around, but I couldn’t see them, or rather I couldn’t visualize them, since it’s not really like you can see the landscape of the Game anyway, it’s more like you get an inner sense of it. Maybe it’s like that blind mountain climber who keeps setting all those records in Tibet. Since he can’t get a view of things all at once, he has to grab bits of information sequentially, feeling his way along traverses between shapeless heights and gaping unknowns, and then assemble an interior model of the route, laboriously and one-dimensionally, like stringing beads. The steps rose toward 4 Ahau. He moved. I moved. Up, up. Come on. A sound, or rather a feeling like the memory of a sound, came from somewhere near the apex, a faint irregular murmur that reminded me of something I’d heard a long time ago, something—hmm. The memory was on the tip of my mental tongue but I couldn’t quite bring it up. Don’t worry about it. Focus. Now I was starting to sense that there was a hollow near the peak of the cone, something like what we call a k’otb’aj in Ch’olan, a cave-in-the-sky. LEON moved, trying to force me back down the slope. I brought in another skull and set it down. He countermoved. Hmm. He goes, I go, he goes … okay. I moved up the slope.

  He moved. I moved. Up, up. It felt as though there was rusty red stone, like Badlands pumice, crumbling under my feet. Up. There was already a sense of being way above the tree line. He moved. I moved. Up. Now it was so high that not even the condors came here. I was on the west side of the mountain, where there was still some warmth from the wrinkled sun. It was a different sun, not the daily sun. It was the sun of the b’ak’tun, the 394-year sun, which wouldn’t reach its zenith until 4 Ahau. And, since we were on the other side of the world—the reflected side, you could say—it was rising in the west.

  Up, up. He goes, I go. I moved.

  Ahhh.

  There was a pause.

  It was as though I was on a level landing or plateau, or what you’d call a tablero if you interpreted the mound as the ruin of a Teotihuacan-style mul. Not far ahead there was a wide opening in the level shelf, a ragged, lopsided oval with a hint of a deep shaft slanting down into the mountain, and then just beyond it the next rise of the mountain, the talud, sloped up at a gentle angle … and then, at the edge of the next tablero, it was as though I could just make out a gigantic gibbous boulder, dull orange in the low nonlight. I tapped my way forward. He goes. I go. Okay.

  The sound got louder, or I should say the feeling of sound intensified. It was a deep bleating, a fleshy trumpeting, and it definitely came from the pit. And somehow you could tell from the curve of the echoes that the cave was bigger inside than that mountain was outside, and that even so it was crowded with beings. They were like bats but not bats. They might be hanging in family clusters, it seemed, like bats, or at least clustering in families, and you could tell there were as many of them as there are bats in a big cave, in fact more, uncountable trillions of them, even. But they didn’t sound like bats. They were bigger. And somehow I got a sense that they were hairless. What were they? The sound reminded me of something, something from my childhood, but it wasn’t a Guatemala thing, it was something—oh, okay. Got it.

  It was the Eumetopias jubatus. Around the third year I was living with them, the Řdegârds brought me along on a church trip to San Francisco and then to Seattle, and then on the way back the bus stopped at the Sea Lion Caves, which is a privately owned roadside attraction near a town called Florence on the Oregon coast. In the spring there are about three hundred Steller’s sea lions gathering and mating on the rock shelves. You take this elevator down from the cliff scarp, and then you go through this passage in the limestone to this rock-hewn balcony that looks out over the grotto, with the waves the equivalent of about three stories below you and the cave roof about ten stories above, and you try to make some sense out of all these churning hummocks of fat and bone. The cows shriek as the two-thousand-pound bulls mount them, and the bachelor and dominant bulls bellow at each other for hours on end, and the roars resonate and echo off the wet stone. These days, when you think loud and terrifying sound, you think man-made, jackhammers dismantling a mountaintop, monster jets warming their engines, artillery and explosions and whatever. But even though the sound of that cave is 100 percent natural—in fact it probably hasn’t changed for millions of years, in fact it’s probably not much different from the booming leks of, say, dxatrimas or ankylosaurs, or herds of pentaceratopsians—it was still as horrifying as any sound you’ll ever hear, something one almost can’t bear and certainly can’t forget. I inched forward. Something in the sound made it seem that the beings were stirring, stretching their wings, getting ready to swarm out when this sun was buried on 4 Ahau. They’d stream out almost endlessly, through tuns and k’atuns and bundles of bundles of b’ak’tunob, and they’d spread over the world and grow, and live. If you haven’t watched bats leave a big cave, I can’t describe it, and if you have there’s no need to describe it. But the scariest thing about it is how endless they seem. You think that inside the earth, it’s all just bats.

  I felt my way around the opening. By now I could tell that all the bleatings and bellowings had too much variance and repetition to be random, and I paused on that square for a minute, trying to make out what they were saying.

  Well, it was some language, all right, I thought. But not one I’d heard, in fact I’d bet it wasn’t even a human language, in fact some of the syllables reminded me of the curse language the howler monkeys use when … Hmm. If I could hear it a little more clearly, if I could stay here a little longer, I almost think I could figure it out … but LEON had moved again, and LEON didn’t stop thinking while my clock was running, and the sun was inching west toward 4 Ahau, and I HAVE TO MOVE ON, I thought, and I pushed my eighth skull forward two squares, trying not to respond too defensively. Don’t let LEON get the initiative back, I thought. Now I was past the pit, at a point where it was as though I could look up at the boulder hanging over me. From here you couldn’t believe it was still supported by something. If it ever slid off its perch and rolled down, it’d pop me like a tick under a steel boot heel. But more importantly, it would plug up that cave mouth, and those guys would never, ever get out. LEON moved one square back. I moved one square forward, to where it felt like I was reaching up, feeling its base.

  Whoa.

  The rock moved. Terror. I recoiled in the chair, contracting into a little ball as though the stone was already crashing down on me, and then after a while, when it was clear I was still around, I felt for the stone again. It was still there, wherever there is, the giant stone was poised on its center of gravity, it was just wobbling slowly in the wind on its tiny fulcrum. It was a rocking stone, like the Pagoda of the Golden Boulder at Kyaiktiyo, in Myanmar, which seems to be sliding off its perch. In fact, you can’t believe it hasn’t fallen already. But it’s been there for at least two thousand years, and that’s just using historical records. I could feel that the stone was just a tiny bit off balance, that it was leaning just a weensy bit this way, west, that it wanted to fall down onto the mouth of the cave and block it up forever, and then as I groped closer it was as though I could feel a single pebble jammed into the cleft between the boulder and the rock shelf. And then it was as though I could feel there was a filament or a thread tied around the pebble and stretching off, as untwangably taut as a piano’s C8 string, out into the empty space to my left, and I understood that the whole thing was a deadfall trap, a Wile E. Coyoteish rig like the traps the Paiutes used to set to crush gophers and desert foxes. And fo
r some reason I understood that it was as though somebody far away was holding the far end of the wire and was getting ready to pull it and jerk out the pebble and tip the boulder crashing down into the shaft. And the only way to keep that from happening, so whatever was inside could leave the cave on schedule, was to find the bastard holding that string—the Doomster—and keep him from pulling it.

  I leaned back in the Ergo Chair and yanked on a clump of my blessedly regrowing hair. I could barely feel it. I tried touching my nose, but I couldn’t tell I was touching it without peeking. Getting numb, I thought. Damn, I’m messed up. I leaned forward again and it was as though I could reach out and touch the wire. It was too thin to see, or rather to imagine seeing, but there was still a grayness about it that meant it was stretching off north-by-northwest, out into the black quadrant but close to the white one. I rubbed my head again, stepping back, and it was as though I could almost see the wire stretching away overhead to where it vanished in the haze above the Pacific. Alaska? I wondered. Can’t tell from here. I felt it again. There was no way to attach a pulley to it or slide down along the string or anything like that, and not just because it was imaginary—although it was, of course, as convincing as it all was seeming to me at the moment—but because the Game doesn’t work that way. It would be like suddenly deciding that your rook could jump diagonally. I’d have to go overland, as it were. Was. Is. I raced down the northern stairs and bore northwest across the plain. LEON trailed after me. I jumped forward again. He followed. Sometimes I thought that I could just sense the wire high overhead. Which meant that so far the latest hunch felt right, and that our guy—and by the way we’d already decided to assume it was a guy, since chicks generally aren’t so into genocide—had some connection to the Pacific Northwest. Not that that narrows things down enough, of course. It’s like saying “Asian food.” The search engines gathered another few thousand terabytes of data. Damn it, I need tougher math on this stuff. More stochastics. Better curve fitting. Maybe some kind of Kolmogorovian-ass constraining function. Still, he’s got to be in there. At this point there’s hardly anyone who’s entirely off the grid. In order to be completely undocumented in the online universe you’d almost have to be a newborn child in some hunter-gatherer tribe up in the mountains in New Guinea. And then you wouldn’t be the Doomster anyway. Our guy’d have to have some technical skills. There was almost no way he hadn’t been enrolled in a half-decent high school within the last forty years. Even if he’d been homeschooled, he’d be registered with a provincial education department or a state department of education. So that already limits it down to a measly billion or so souls, out of a world population of 6.8. With the Pacific Northwest thing, it takes it down to, say, thirty million. No problem.