Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Or they could just take over people who’d otherwise be about to die, and then help out their families or whatever to make it even … no, I don’t think that’s a problem without a workaround.”

  “So you still think the reason they’re not here is because there isn’t any future.”

  “Well … I don’t know,” I said.

  She had a slug of Fiji. There was a pause.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe you’re thinking about Max.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe there’s some other good explanation. In fact, there probably is. Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being such a fucking mom.”

  “That’s good. Mom does you credit.”

  “You know, the deal is,” she said, “when you have a child it’s like there’s no value on it. Somebody … some alien or god or whatever could come up to you and say, ‘Listen, if you give up your child I’ll cure cancer, and I’ll make everyone else live forever, and I’ll even eliminate all the suffering in the universe, ’ and you’d be like, no thanks.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “It’s some kind of chemical change. You turn into a life-support system for this other being.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Anyway, I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  “No, it’s fine,” she said. She finished off the Glen Moray.

  “Maybe the old Game’ll give us a clue about it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Speaking of which, there is still stuff to take care of with the Game. Right? Madison’s not going to be the last doom dude out there.”

  “No.”

  “You have to keep working it. You’re like in that Philip Dick story, with the Bureau of Precrime.”

  “I have to?”

  “Well, I know I’m not your boss right now. But I mean, you know, you’re James Bond. Except you don’t have to leave the office.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine, I just meant, that, you know, I’m not the only thing going anymore,” I said. “I mean, I think Tony and the gang, they’re getting pretty good, so, you know. They can take care of it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And LEON’s getting good,” I said. “The thing’ll be running itself in a few years. We won’t even know what it’s doing. I mean, it’ll be way too complicated for human beings to check.”

  “We’ll just have to trust LEON, then, right?”

  “Well, that’s another issue,” I said.

  I looked around. The sun was really getting belligerent. Somewhere, out in one of the alleys, somebody was vomiting. Loudly.

  “Isn’t this kind of a low-rent town for a classy dame like you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it does kind of get you down after a while, doesn’t it?”

  “Like after ten seconds.”

  “So why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’m not classy.”

  Pause. The vomiting diminuendoed out.

  “Listen,” she said, “I wanted to see you in person because I found out something that’s not too great and you’re going to be really mad.”

  “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

  “But you’ll have a right to be mad. You got really, really screwed.”

  “How? I bet I’m about to get arrested.”

  “No, it’s nothing like—okay, look, you know how the, the blood-lightning-making stuff, how there are two parts to it, and one of them’s like a sense-of-space-getting-rid-of or whatever part? The one that sounds like an aftershave?”

  “Old Steersman.”

  “Right,” she said. “Well, I did some digging around on that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And, and the, those Lotos people weren’t being—I mean, somebody told you and me both something different from the reality.”

  “Which is what?”

  “It’s not just a chemical.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a parasite.”

  Pause.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “It’s a critter, it produces some kind of psychoactive—it’s like those zombie snail things, with the worms in their eyes, you know, they make the snails climb up on things so that birds’ll eat them—”

  “Leucochloridium.”

  “Yeah. Or like, you know, that thing that makes mice stop being afraid of cats.”

  “Toxoplasmosis.”

  “Right. That’s why it had to be in a liquid, there were like really tiny little critters swimming around in there.”

  “Uh … huh,” I said. I was a little dizzy but I don’t think I visibly wobbled.

  “And that’s why it took so long to get the stuff ready, they had to clone them up out of some other thingie or something.”

  “Okay, well, what … look, what are they, exactly?”

  “The critters?”

  “Yeah, are they trematodes, are they protozoans, are—”

  “I don’t know.” She looked me in the eyes. I looked back. She looked down.

  “Why couldn’t they just isolate the psychoactive part of the secretions and just give us that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I guess that would have taken too long, or they didn’t know which compounds it was, or it had to combine with some human neurotransmitter, or … I don’t know. You know more about that kind of—”

  “Well then, okay, what are the symptoms, what’s their life cycle, what are the short-and long-term effects, what’s the prognosis—”

  “They say they’re working on a cure.”

  “A cure or a treatment? There isn’t even a cure for malaria yet.”

  “Maybe it’s just a treatment.”

  “Damn.”

  “If you can resist your impulse to go—well, I don’t know what you want to do, but I was afraid you might try to interrogate Dr. Lisuarte or something—”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “If you can hold off on that, as soon as I get out there”—she meant to the Stake—“I’m going to find out whatever else I can and call you… .”

  “You might make them nervous.”

  “I won’t. Trust me.”

  “What about Ashley2 and all the other people who took the stuff ?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to work on it and we’re going to find out and document whatever we can and I’m going to take it all to Lindsay, who I’m sure isn’t in on it because all these people always try to tell him as little as possible anyway, and then you and I are just going to deal with it. But I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. We’ll handle it.” Cono cono cono, I thought. I am so, so screwed. They really hung me out to dry, these, these people—I am so going to—

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Pause.

  “Well, otherwise you seem good,” she said. There was a bass note of impending closure in her tone.

  “You have to go?”

  “Well, I’m sure they’re done refueling.”

  Don’t push it, I thought. Forget it. Don’t fool yourself, don’t drive yourself crazy, don’t beg, don’t do any of those things. She’s busy. She really does have to work. She’s got a child. She’s got an empire to run. She’s got fish to fly and kites to fry. She’s corporate. She’s tightly scheduled. She’s living Xtra Large.

  “Hey, are you sure you’re all right?” Marena asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I can quit anytime.”

  “Very funny.”

  As one might have expected, there was another awkward pause. Was I smelling the vomit from out in the street, or was it just my inner landscape?

  “I’m feeling a little awkward here,” I said.

  “Sorry.” She looked down at the blue Formica tabletop.

  “It’s okay.” Damn it, Jed. You just rolled over, spread your legs, and said, ‘Please be rough.’ You pussy. Corny, stupid, pathetic pussy—

  “All right, look,” she said. “There’s another thing. I wasn’t going to mention this right now, but I should tell you that I’m thinking about getting married. Again.”

  Pause.

  “This would be to someone other than myself,” I said.

  “Uh, yeah. Yeah,
you don’t know him, he’s a neighbor in Woody Creek.”

  “Huh. Uh, well, congratulations.”

  “Save it, look, you know … I think, the deal is, I think the you-and-I thing is actually really terrific. But I don’t think you’re a settler-downer. Are you?”

  “Well, mmm, no, I settle—I mean, I’m not a settler, no.”

  “Girls need to settle,” she said. “I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s just a time-scale thing. Girls have a very short shelf life, and this whole Doom thing just made—I mean, look, girls just need all this stupid—you know, they don’t really care who it is as long as he’ll just, like, wear khaki shorts and, like, coach Max’s lacrosse team and stay awake during the day and go to bed at night, and, like, be boring—anyway, you know all this.”

  “Boring is hot,” I said.

  “Yeah, for girls of a certain age, it definitely is.”

  “Right.” Stupidly, I was feeling kind of not-in-a-good-way weightless. And maybe more about this Marena thing than about my new status as an infected host.

  “Anyway—look, just come out and we’ll talk about it when we have time to talk about it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Okay. I’d better go. I swear I’m going to make this right. Call me.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “I mean it.” She stood up.

  “I will,” I said. I stood up.

  She kissed me again. I didn’t entirely kiss back. She turned and walked into the indoor part of the restaurant. I looked over the balcony.

  Damn, I thought.

  The thing was, when I’d just met her, Marena had seemed like she was from some fresher, cooler planet close to the universe’s imaginary bright center. And I was like, don’t even fantasize about it, Jed. Not in a quintillion years. And then I’d thought she was turning out a bit like me under the gloss, and we were developing a rapport, and all the coolness was just an act. And now she was back to coolness, and I was thinking maybe it was the rapport that was an act. Or they were both acts, but she only did the rapport one at special command performances. Bitch. What you need—oh, there she is.

  She came out of the door twenty feet below me and walked out into Fort Street. She didn’t look up. Oops, no, she did. She waved. I waved. She turned away and let herself into the back of the X1. It pulled away. I sat back in the little uncomfortable chair.

  Well, that was … unbearably uncomfortable, I thought.

  Moth okay.

  Hell.

  Stupidly, intolerably, inevitably, I’d started thinking about this moment—it was after the Hippogriff incident and before we picked up the lodestone cross—when I was reading and Marena was asleep and dreaming with her eyes darting around behind her smooth lids. The window had been open and there was a medium-large sphinx moth in the room, flapping around the screen of my phone, and it landed on her forehead.

  “Spider,” she said, still 90 percent asleep but a little alarmed. “Get it away.”

  “It’s just a friendly moth,” I said in her ear.

  “Oh,” she said in this unconsciously little-girlish tone. “Moth okay. Friendly.” She rolled over toward me. It felt like having a baby daughter, somebody who absolutely trusts you—

  Fuck.

  You get a moment or two of absolute closeness, and then when it’s back to the dirty business of life as usual you get upset that it’s not still there, and then try to find that again and keep repeating the cycle, over and over without learning. There’s intimacy and distance and the ancient, perennial, insoluble, and cataclysmic disjunction between them, and you just keep—Fuck. You know this person inside out, you know how she orgasms, how she sleeps, and then in the morning you’re both just a pair of dirty fucks again, and you hate yourselves and each other for it. You’re pathetic. What did you expect? That you were going to ride off with her into the sunset in a maroon X1? It was just a nine-night stand. Or was it eight?

  Maybe I should go back out there, I thought. Maybe we’d get back into that same groove again. Isolation, nothing to do, bad-looking colleagues. You’ll be back in the sack again in one day. No big deal. These days it’s just in and out of grooves, she’ll give Woody the boot in—

  Except no. Don’t delude yourself. She was just gaming you to get you to work harder. Just volunteer for this suicide mission and you get to spend your last night before deployment with Miss Seoul. You maroon.

  And the worst thing about it is how conventional it all is. The stupid little fling, your stupid emotions, the unavoidable last awkward conversation, it’s corny and unremarkable. You’re worse than damaged, unstable, and semiautistic, Jedface. You’re ordinary. Skills or no skills. Money or no money. Game or no Game.

  And even when you play the Game, you’re not really playing it. It’s playing you. As was she. As does everybody.

  Loser.

  I took my hat off and wiped an installment of sweat out of the band. Frigid interstellar plasma winds whistled over my dome. Well, maybe you deserve it, I thought. You’re not even that great at the Game. You can’t even get to nine stones. Not even with the aid of a computer with a brain the size of the Orion Nebula. You can’t even finish an eight-stoner.

  I put my hat back on.

  Damn it.

  What the hell were those things, anyway?

  Hmm.

  Just one little solitaire game, I thought. Half an hour. Just play out that last position. No big deal. I can quit anytime. Go ahead, set your sights a little higher.

  I dug two plugs of tobacco out of the little bag in my other waist pocket and sneaked them into my mouth and masticated them into a big old quid. Okay. I got up, went inside past the noisy second-floor bar, down the stairs, and into the bathroom—the door said BAD BWOYS—and shot up with the fourth-from-last AirJet of my clandestine stash of hatz’ k’ik’. I spat out the quid of tobacco. God, I’m disgusting, I thought. Silly habit. Quids are for hicks. I rubbed tobacco juice into my stain, put myself back together, rubbed lukey water on my face, and went back to my mini-table.

  I opened my phone. That Ixian mural was still there. Damn, what was that thing? Snail, centipede, both, or neither? Well, whatevs. I clicked SACRIFICE. The game board came up. Just to feel independent, I closed down the Net connection. I didn’t need it this time anyway. By now I pretty much knew what was out there. I had facts at my fingertips. Too many facts. The hard thing is to comprehend the weights of those facts relative to each other. Like, “There’s a Sphecius wasp on the side of my rum glass” and “The universe contains about 4 × 1079 atoms” are both facts, but one is a lot more important than the other. Although I’m not saying which one.

  I started feeling the throbs, spreading from my left thigh, down into my foot, and up into my groin.

  “Now, this is the burning, the clearing,” I mumbled. I put up the last position from my last good game, the one that nailed Madison. I wasn’t even sure why I was going back into it, except that sometimes you want to finish playing out an alternate line to see who would have won. No matter how little you’re enjoying the show, past a certain point you stay in the theater to see how it ends.

  “Now I am borrowing the breath of today,” I said, “La hun Kawak, ka Wo, 10 Hurricane, 2 Toad, the nineteenth sun of the fifth uinal of the nineteenth tun of the nineteenth ka’tun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun.” I moved my eighth skull forward, toward 4 Ahau, up the western slope of that eroded mountain with the rusty dust, toward the cave in the sky with the echoing howls.

  [71]

  One of the distinctive effects of the Game drugs was that they seemed to create a separate place in your mind. You could take a break from a game and go about your regular life for days or weeks, and you wouldn’t feel like you were thinking about the game at all, but then when you took another shot of the stuff you’d click right back into where you were and go on playing without having to reorient yourself. I guess it wasn’t really much different from the feeling of watching a new episode of a TV show every week, or picking up a book where you lef
t off, or just playing Warcraft on your phone or whatever, except that it was more self-generated and orders of magnitude more intense. Anyway, even though on one level I knew I was sitting at this rickety table on a balcony in Belize City, when I focused on the board it was as though I was right back in the same place I’d been when I was looking for Madison, on the west side of that crumbling mountain, and with almost no effort I could imagine the warmth of the old sun on my back and hear the hiss of the clouds of brick-red dust sifting down around me, and as I moved my eighth skull forward the lucidity increased and it was almost as though I could feel the stone under my feet and smell the bone smoke in the wind. This way, I thought. He goes. I go. That way. I kept climbing, up past the dust into clouds of steam and then up past that, through a layer of clouds of ashes. I stumbled. The stairs had aged since the last time I’d come this way and they were almost too cracked and pitted to stand on, but on the mental equivalent of all fours I kept climbing, out of the ash and through clouds of ice shards into the frozen zone just below the shell of the sky, up onto the eroded terrace. The booming and bellowing were louder than before. The boulder was gone. For a second I tried to get a look at the coming worlds in the east, but they were still hidden behind the bulk of the mountain, and I crouched down again. The maw of the shaft in front of me had widened since 13 Dog 18 Tortoise, and as I felt my way down into it the stone crumbled around me, and the chasm opened out as I descended, and I could tell it was way too deep for skull #8. Go for it, I thought. No problem.