I moved out my ninth skull. The abyss widened, and already I could tell it was larger than any cave on earth. Maybe it would be like rappelling down a methane icefall into one of the miles-wide bubbles in the interior of some Saturnian moon. Even so, the ninth stone had a solid link to the eighth, and I crawled down and down, toward the center of the sphere, into the roaring vortex. The beings whirled around me, almost but never quite grazing me, the way bats will rush past you if you stand in the mouth of a cave at sundown. You smell their sour guano smell, you feel the whipping air, and you hear the soft roar of their wings like a storm of leather leaves, and they always, always miss you … but the things around me were bigger than bats, and slower, and somehow … gentler, I guess, and winglessand of course bats, to us anyway, are silent, and these things were deafeningly loud. Maybe this was where Dantes mind had gone, I thought, when he imagined the luxuriosi in their infernal hurricane. As my internal eyes adapted to the gloom the presences became clearer, and without seeing individuals I began to make out their motion, which was more like sea creatures, although now they didnt look like sea lions. They were more like beluga whales with their domed brows and taut white skin … but then their curled spines made them look like hunchbacks, or maybe they were more like dwarfs, with short bodies and huge heads … but then they had short fat tails, and only rudimentary buds for armslike tadpoles, maybe, just morphing into toads?except they had ears, and throbbing hearts visible through their translucent skin, and swelling eyes darting behind closed lids, like
They were embryos.
They were the aaanob, the aftercomers, the spirits of the unborn.
No wonder there were millions and quintillions and near infinities of them. There were whole populations of the future in here, all the men and women who would be born after 4 Ahau and who would never have been born if that boulder had fallen and blocked the shaft. Now, when the sun of the baktun reached its zenith on 4 Ahau, it would shine down the shaft into this cave and light up the multitudes of aaanob. The ether in the great cave would heat and expand, and inexorably, irresistibly, theyd be carried up and out of the shaft, and wave after wave of them would spread over the earth. I remembered what Jed2 had said, that Lady Koh had said about how the people of the zeroth level had three caves: the Cave of the Dead, which was on the other side of the world, in the west, and then the Cave of the Breathing, which is of course what we would call the world, and then, here, the Cave of the Unborn.
I watched. I listened. Suddenly, I realized something about them: that they were happy.
The shades of potential consciousnesses were playing. Or, to use an obsolescent word, they were frolicking. They swam in knots, chasing each other, like otters. They bumped hips like dancers in a 1970s disco. They spun around and around out of sheer delight in the motion.
Slowly, like my inner eyes, my internal ears adapted, and the cacophony of howls almost began to make sense. The first thing I realized was that they werent roaring at each other. They were calling out to me, specifically me, in the ur-language babies know, and now I could make out what they were saying:
LEAVE US HERE!
YOU! FLESH DROPPER! PLEASE LEAVE US HERE!
WE DONT WANT TO LEAVE!
WE DONT WANT TO LIVE IN THE SUN!
COVER US UP!
DROP THE STONE OVER US!
PROTECT US!
HIDE US!
DROP THE STONE!!!
There wasnt even one of them who wanted to be born.
Still, I couldnt stay here. At some point, even in a solo game, you have to make a move, and it was as though my ninth skull was straining against the edges of its square. I climbed four squares up the blue-green axis, up through the striated years, out of the cave and into cold air, doggishly shaking off the amniotic mist. I could still hear the aaanob screaming behind me, begging me to help them stay unborn, away from the world of pain. My last skull climbed and climbed and came to a small flat green jade block, about the size of home plate, and I realized that now the thin air was cloudless. I stood and looked around. The planes of time rotated below me, white, black, yellow, and red. Id reached the summit.
Can I get you anything else, honey? the waitress asked in her soft voice.
Uh, could I get another triple espresso? I asked. And another shot of Cruzan?
Sure thing, honey. She rolled off. I stretched and resettled myself. That dog was still barking out there, in a howly voice like Desert Dogs. I watched the little scene loop in my mind a few times, the last few minutes of the last night Id sneaked out to his cage, when I knew my stepbrothers were going to torture him to death the next morning, and Id given him water and petted him for a while through the wire, and then finally when it was clear that the sun wouldnt wait I got a strap from my backpack and found a stick of chromed metal from some car trimming, and I tied the strap around his neck with the stick through it and twisted it around. The strap sank deep into his luxuriant ruff, but he was oddly quiet, trembling but not struggling, so that I was quite sure he knew what I was doing. He was dead in less than a minute, curled up with an expression of frozen gratitude. The waitress came back. I had a sip of rum, a slug of espresso, and, just to spite Marena, a marshmallow.
Ahh. Better.
I looked back down at the board, where I was still standing on the turquoise center square, at the peak of the inverted mountain. I blinked around. Below me the storms had calmed and the dust was settling over the plains. Four staircases, or paths or arteries or whatever, led down from the block. The northeast path stretched off over coasts crusted with corroded mill towns and through whitecaps and silver gulfs over undersea canyons, under strings of giant aluminum aircraft and out past stained limestone cities, off into the fast ice, and then floe ice, and then field ice. A hot-tar smell of the recent past wafted up on my left and I turned ninety degrees counterclockwise, toward the northwest. There were dunes of cinders and puffs of radioactive ash, and beyond that deserts strewn with oil rigs and dry valleys like bowls of acid gas over dark glowing coals, with snarls of asphalt draped on and around them, and beyond that I could see chains of coal smoke from steam locomotives and files of starving families dragging sleds across the prairies, and then beyond that flocks of trash-fed seagulls over dark water, and tundras and grease ice in the permanent twilight. I looked southwest, over choleric salt marshes crawling with malacostraca and plains with packs of giant canary-yellow carnivorous birds running down herds of hipparia. I noticed a coppery armadillo the size of Marenas Cherokee rooting in a dry gulch, and then a formation of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, with forty-foot wings covered with gold down, spiraling unflappingly over the corpses of giant crocodiles on the left bank of the Cretaceous Seaway, and beyond that there were more and more creatures and places and times, instants of the past like sheaves of animation cells pressed into striated canyons, to the point where I had to turn left again. In the southeast, dawn spread bloody onychitomized fingers over realms of pure potential that expanded out and out, past where the horizon would be on a spherical earth, as though I were standing on a planet the size of Jupiter, or not even, but on a truly flat and infinite plain, and because the air was absolutely clear, or maybe rather because there was no air, it was as though I could see the details of events in the farthest distance as clearly as the ones right below me. Too many details, in fact. Too much.
I turned around again, slowly, counterclockwise, like a reflection of the sweeping second hand of Lindsay Warrens Oyster Perpetual. The Steersmans final phase was kicking in, when you start to sense what Lady Koh had called the other winds. Jed2 had explained that she meant something like elementals, or personified invisible forces. With me the first one I usually see is heat. It looks a little like an infrared photograph, except the heat radiating out of bodies and engines and the earth has a color more like Day-Glo brown and a smell like rum and red pepper. Then other things come into the picture, diamond flickers of solar flares spewing
out, looping around the earth, and falling back into the sun, lugubrious maroon radio waves spelling out tides of terabytes of useless data, microwaves in a color like what orange and purple would mix to if they didnt make gray, and, at one limit of my expanding blob of awareness, cyan cyclones of gamma rays jittering through my body like shotgun blasts through a swarm of deerflies. I thought I could hear asteroids screeching toward the earth, that I could feel the friction between tectonic plates, the energy building up in granite watch-springs, that I could watch gravitywhich is a kind of mulberry-purple colorspreading out from the earth and bunching into dark stars and draining into the abscesses in existence, and that even the black holes were visible in a way, silhouetted against drifts of interstellar dustballs. I started to distinguish smaller forces, or lets say humbler ones, the powers of living things, vegetable transpiration flashing green and ocher, the orange mercilessness of trees strangling their neighbors, pheromonal trails dragging animals around like beads on strings. Eventually I started to make out human forces. Sexual compulsion had a highway-flare cherry glow, and it washed over the populous wastes like ripples in a pool of oil, scattered with flashes of orgasms that I thought I could taste at a distance and that I thought had a taste like sea urchins. Green-white sparks and arcs of fear crackled across the landscape, clustering into lightning balls in schools and hospitals and war zones. Yajpain, or pain smokerose off the plain like morning mist from boiling bloody dew. It was that livid gray color, almost lavender but not in a good way. It gathered into wisps and fogbanks and clouds. It had that same flavor that Jed2 had said you taste in animals that have been tortured to death, that extraterrestrial tang like the opposite of cinnamon. It was the essence to which the smokers were most addicted.
As I think I mentioned before, the word yaj means pain in Cholan, but more in the sense of pain smoke or pain as an offering or, you might say, holy pain. The opposing word would be jeelsaj, which you could translate as pleasure or happiness but which really means something more passive, like rest or ease. But even after Id stood for what seemed like hours scanning the eastern horizon, the yaj was like a roof of clouds covering the entire landscape, and the moments of jeelsaj were like grassy lime-green mountain-tops pushing up here and there through the overcast. Its not even a contest, I thought. If you took any individual person and totaled up their instants of pain against their instants of happiness, it was like a gallon against a drop. And the farther I lookedwell, Id have thought things would get better in the future, that theyd run out of wars and cure all diseases or at least just dope everybody up with happy pills and plop them in front of a two-million-pixel screen, but instead the pain became even more pervasive as I looked farther out, and not one of the n-illions of possible world lines had more than a few scattered islands of jeelsaj peeking out of the clouds. For one reason or another things were just going to get worse and worse.
Even so, I tried to do my bit and measure one against the other. But the more I counted and calculated and compared, the more I felt like I was, say, Marie Curie, and somebodyd given me nine tons of pitchblende ore, and Id had to extract all the radium out of it, and after three years Id come up with a residue at the bottom of the last refining mortar that was so thin nobody would even know it was there if it didnt glow like a sunofabitch.
Finally, I gave up.
Really, its no surprise, I thought. Pound for pound, pain is just nfuckth times more powerful. Anybody whos experienced real pain knows that youd give up more than an hour of any kind of pleasureat leastto avoid a minute of real pain. I kept thinking about that kid in the video with the Milk Duds, with her face falling and crunching up and spraying out tears, and how just a few minutes before she was happy, she was bubbly and optimistic and having a great time, possibly the best day of her life so far, even, and how suddenly everything got wrecked for her. Just getting a glimpse of the unbridgeable distance between her state on the video and her state a little before, and how for her that distance is everywhere and foreverwell, to glimpse it is to conclude that the only thing to do is just to have the entire universe vanish immediately, in a puff of quarks, because its just too terribly wrong, and no amount of happiness could ever make up for it. Even if one week from now somebody cured aging and all diseases, and on that same day somebody else invented cold fusion, teleportation, and a delicious nonfattening doughnut, and after that there would be a trillion years of happy, deathless people, it still wouldnt be worth keeping the world around for that long, because in the meantime some other kid would have the same level of disappointment, and nothing that came after would even come close to balancing out the magnitude of that disappointment. If you have even a scrap of empathy, you know it invalidates everything good about the world. If you dont have empathy, then the pain has to happen to you for you to get the message. And people who think they dont feel that waywell, they may be nice people, but theyre addicted to denial. Theyre like kids getting driven past a herd of cows and cooing about how cute the cows are while they eat hamburgers. The pain cant be alleviated, it cant be ameliorated, it cant be recompensed, and it cant be condoned. And most of all, it must not be repeated.
Its a cliché, of course. I mean, the magnitude of pain. Its like saying the speed of light. Its something one knows about and sometimes talks about with a default position of zero comprehension. Except that unlike with the speed of light, theres a good reason for the incomprehension, because the moment you do start to comprehend it you just give up. One runs out of the room and hides in a dry bathtub. And its only through massive self-delusion that you manage ever to do anything again.
Well, that delusion may have been necessary up until now. But now the end is achievable. And we know its the right thing to do
Whoops.
I was wobbling. I took my eyes off the horizon and got my balance back. Better.
Damn. I could still hear the Unborn screaming.
And no wonder, I thought. We drag them into the world, we give them nine tons of noxious crap on one hand and a half-gram of glowing stuff on the other, and then we want them to act as though they got a fair deal. People agree to abort a fetus whose life would inevitably be a misery, who was going to be born with harlequin ichthyosis, say, but they neglect to abort the ones wholl be born with quotidalgesia, everyday agony syndrome.
The thing is, you dont even have an obligation to give somebody something nice, especially not somebody who isnt born yet. But you do have an obligation not to hurt them. And making them conscious is definitely going to hurt them. Consciousness may be one of the many dirty tricks DNA uses to replicate itself, but that doesnt mean we have to buy into it. For us, consciousness is nothing but a mistake.
I took a sip of Cruzan.
On 4 Ahau, 8 Darkness, 0.0.0.0.0, August 13, 3113 BC, the ancients made a covenant with their ancestors to give them descendants. Thered be descendants to feed them, to praise them, to remember them, and most of all, to give them the liquor of pain. Jeelsaj is for us, and yaj is for the smokers. They love it the way oenophiles love a 47 Haut-Brion, the way a butterfly loves sugar water, or the way NASCAR fans love a crash.
But it would only be for so long. You have to give the smokersor ancestors or gods or whateverexactly what you owe them, but you dont have to give them any more than that.
So the Great Adders, the Knowers, had calculated that 4 Ahau was the day the ghastly payoff could finally stop. It was time to do the right thing by the Aftercomers.
I leaned back. I cracked my knuckles and reset my cheek flap. I looked around. The dog with the voice like Desert Dogs had stopped barking. In a few minutes the sunlight would start creeping onto my table. I signaled for the waitress.
The real thing about being an adder, I thought, isnt just being able to play the Game, or being able to deal with the Salter and the Steersman. The real responsibility is to be able to weigh up the world without
getting befuddled by sentimentality, without spending all your energy on wishful thinking and superstitious nostrums and selective denial and all the other things normals do. Your duty is to see things unfogged, to understand enough to be able to work out whats actually right, and then to do whats right and not what makes you feel good. Heed the aaanob, I thought. They know whereof they speak. Kaoolael, kaoltik. He who knows, knows.
Brian D'Amato Page 84