In the Courts of the Sun (11 page)

“Oh. Sorry.”
“And anyway, what’s the big deal with that? I mean, at this point cannibalism’s so mainstream, it’s like golf.”
“Heh. Rather.”
“You know, there was medicinal cannibalism in England into the nineteenth century.”
“Like mummy dust and stuff?”
“Yeah, and, like, for instance they thought that the blood from somebody who died violently could cure epilepsy, so, like, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields the pharmacists used to bleed people who’d just been hanged, and they’d reduce the blood down and mix it with alcohol, and you could buy it at Harris Apothecary.”
“Neat.”
“Yeah, and now there’s some sort of, uh, Christianized consensual-cannibalism sect somewhere, it’s called like the Church of the Overly Literal Communion or something.”
“Oh, so so so, I did hear about that. Well, maybe it’s just another weight-loss fad.”
“Maybe.”
“But I guess you’re right, it’s not a big deal. I mean, I ate my placenta.”
That stopped me.
“Sorry, did that gross you out?” she asked.
“Well—”
“Hey,” she said, “Taro also says you do astronomy tricks.”
“Really?”
“ Yep.”
“Did he tell you how I can catch Frisbees in my mouth?”
“Oh, come on. Indulge me.”
“Okay, pick a date.”
“A date when?” she asked.
“Whenever.”
“Okay, uh, February twenty-ninth, um, 2594.”
“That’s not a leap year.”
“Okay, how about February twenty-eighth?”
“That’s a Friday,” I said.
“ You’re gonking me.”
“It’s true.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. However, I can also tell you that sunrise on that day—assuming there is one—will be at about six fifty A.M. Eastern, and then sunset’s at roughly six twenty-four.”
“Sure,” she said. “And I’m Anastasia Romanov.”
“Wait, there’s more. On that date Venus is going to rise at eight fifty-seven A.M.—although you wouldn’t see that, of course—and set at nine fifty-six p.M. I mean, if you’re around here. And Saturn’s going to set at four thirty-four A.M.”
“Bullshit.”
“Google it.”
“Never mind,” she said. She had a big smile. “That’s
godless
.” Evidently
godless
was the new
awesome
. “So how many people can do that?”
“I don’t know of anybody else. There are people who can do other things—”
“Hmm.” She half giggled. Yeah, I thought, I’ve got a beautiful mind, all right. I’ll unscramble your old Rubik’s Cubes, I’ll solve the undone pages in your Sudoku books, I’ll do your taxes in base sixteen, just show me the book—
“Is it true that you speak twelve languages?” she asked.
“Oh, no, no way,” I said. “I only really speak three. Unless you count the different Mayan languages. I can speak most of those.”
“So you speak English, Spanish, and Mayan.”
“Right. I can understand a few others. Like, to read. Maybe I could speak them well enough to buy tomatoes.”
“Like which?”
“Just usual stuff, German, French, Greek, Nahuatl, uh, Mixteca, Otomi—”
“So, look,” she said, “what do you think about the world ending? You think that’s going to happen?”
“Um . . . well . . .”
I hesitated. We have a little problem here, I thought. On the one hand I was a little nervous about it despite myself. On the other hand I didn’t have a single solid fact. And of course I wanted to say that there was a problem and that I could help her with it, but then again I was already getting a sense that Ms. Park might be a tad harder to snow than your average
chica alegre
.
“Um . . . well,” I said, “no, not on the basis of anything I know. Why, are people around here nervous about it?”
“Some people are, and then, then I guess Taro said it might only apply to the Maya . . . not that that’s not important, of course.”
“Oh, sure, no, don’t worry,” I said.
“Seriously, though, what do you think?”
“Well, it’s definitely an important date,” I said. “In the old days they would have at least had a big festival. And they would have gotten all the wise old scribes or whatever together and worked out what to do next. Maybe they’d have constructed a new calendar.”
“So no big giant whatever.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Huh,” she said. She almost sounded disappointed. “So is it true that the Maya, like, worshipped time?”
“Well, that’s a little strong . . . it might be fair to say that no other culture has ever been so, so
obsessed
with time.”
“But they did come up with all these impossibly complicated dates with the names and the weird numbers.”
“Actually, if you teach kids Maya numbers, they say they’re easier than Arabic ones. They’re like dominoes; they’re just spots and lines.”
“Well, okay, but Taro was trying to tell me about the dates one time and I got totally lost. And I’m a code monkey.”
“That’s a great clock,” I said.
“Thanks. Yeah, that used to belong to John Huston, you know, the film director, like
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
?”
“Cool.”
“And then the Neo-Teo team gave it to me after the AIE thing.”
“It’s great.”
“But like I say, I haven’t figured it out yet. Although they say it’s running.”
“Well, it’s not really that hard,” I said.
“You mean, like, the Mayan calendar isn’t that hard.”
“Yeah. There are some tricksomenesses to it but the basic idea is simple, if—well, look, don’t think of it like a clock, think of it like an odometer, you know, in a car, I mean an old car, before they were electric.”
“Okay.”
“Well, so each place value in the mileage is on a gear, right? And when one gear turns over once the one to the left of it turns thirty degrees. One twelfth. Except with the Maya dates, most of the gears are in base twenty, like twenty teeth. Except for one that has eighteen. And then there’s another important gear with thirteen teeth, that’s the ritual calendar, and that one has the names on it. So every thirteen-times-twenty days, the same name-and-number combination comes up. Like say it’s a Zero Bat day like today, then two hundred and sixty days from now there’s another Zero Bat. So it’s a big day when a lot of the cycles come up at the same time, like—”
“Like when the odometer’s going to turn over another hundred thousand miles and the kids in the backseat all get really excited and lean over to watch.”
“Right,” I said. “Except each time it’ll be in a different tun, that is, like, a bundle of three hundred and sixty days. And then a k’atun is twenty tuns, and then twenty k’atuns make a b’ak’tun. And eighteen of those—”
“Okay, I get that.”
“Okay. And that’s it, except there are other counts for Venus and other astronomical things, and for anniversaries, and for supernatural beings, like each day has a different set of protectors and threateners. It’s kind of like how the Catholic saints all have days, except—”
“Except it’s vastly more complicated.”
“Well . . . except you have that kind of thing today, right? Like the Olympics and presidential elections are every four years, and then senatorial elections are every six years, but they’re staggered, and then there’s, like, economic cycles and five-year plans, and there’s seventeen-year locusts and hundred-and-thirty-year bamboo. Uh, John Travolta makes a big comeback every fifteen and a half years—”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Anyway, the only ones you really have to know are the solar cycle. That’s 360 days, and the tz’olk’in, and that’s in bunches of twenties and thirteens, and that makes up the ba’k’tuns. Those are about 256 years. The tz’olk’in sets the cycle seat and the main—”
“What’s the cycle seat?”
“Oh, that’s, that’s like a temporary capital. Like they’d trade off, like, they’d decide on one city or, like, temple district, that would be the place where all the kings met and decided international policy and when the festivals would be or whatever. And then at the end of twenty years that temple district would get ritually killed. Like they’d cancel the inscriptions and the royal family would leave and they’d knock down the monuments and whatever. And then that area would be kind of taboo, and for the next twenty years the capital would be somewhere else.”
“So is that the reason the Maya just left all those cities?”
“Well, yeah, it’s possibly one reason that some of the ceremonial centers were abandoned, but—”
“So anyway,” she said, “I understand you use a Sacrifice Game system to pick stocks.”
“Commodities.”
“Right. And you do it by hand, correct?” She meant not on computer.
“Well, I still have Taro’s old software,” I said, “but, yes, mainly.”
“Do you have, like, a pouch of little pebbles or whatevs?”
“A grandeza,” I said. “ Yes.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“Uh, yeah.”
She didn’t ask to see it. Too innuendoish, maybe.
“But you know,” I said, “I’m not an astrologer or anything. It doesn’t have anything to do with the supernatural.” Hey, I thought, how about you show me the book and I’ll show you my rocks?
“But, still, the Game really does let you predict things. Yes?”
“Well, a prediction sounds like a, like something a fortune teller would do.”
“Huh.” She paused. Don’t be so honest, Jed, I thought. If she doesn’t think you’re special, she’s not going to show you anything. Right? On the other hand, there is the theory of the soft sell. Anyway, you’re not trying to get a date with her. Even if she is kind of hot. All you need right now is for her to show you the Codex. Right?
“So,” she said, “so you’re saying the old Maya dudes weren’t really making prophecies?”
“Well, no, they—look, I guess what I’m saying is that they wouldn’t have thought of them as prophecies. It’s more like they were permanent, like flavors, or, say, like personalities, that each day naturally had. It’s like a, a
Farmers’ Almanac
that says there’ll be snow that day, except it’s saying there’ll be disease or war or something. And then the flavors would develop over time, like if there were a big battle on that day, that would add a violent taste to the day from then on. Just like how a royal birthday is a lucky day. I mean even these days.”
“Gotcha.”
“But the real point is that the Game is
not
, like, giving you visions of the future. It just improves your guessing.”
“How?”
“Well, to oversimplify, I guess I’d say it speeds up your brain somehow. Or allows it to focus better, and that feels like the same thing. It makes playtime. So like—”
“Wait, what’s playtime, you mean, like, in nursery school?”
“No, well, that’s just jargon from StrategyNet. But they use it to mean how each game generates its own kind of alternate time. Like, you know, a turn-based strategy game uses a different measurement of time that’s not based on the wall time, or on duration, but on the events of the game itself. Right?”
“Right.”
“Basically a game is measured in tempi. That is, moves. So if a player makes a move that achieves nothing, you’ve just lost a tempo. The clock time is just a convenience that has nothing to do with the dynamics of an actual game.”
She nodded.
“And if your move doesn’t keep up in the context of the game—if it doesn’t jump out far enough or develop your pieces fast enough or whatever—it’s still too slow.”
She nodded.
“So playtime is like time measured in state changes. Without measuring duration.”
She nodded.
“It also just means how, you know how when you’re playing a game everything around you seems to be moving more slowly?”
She nodded.
This time I shut up.
“So anyway,” she said, “you’re saying all you’re doing is just reading ahead.”
In Go
reading
means working out the next sequence of moves. Professional Go players can read a hundred moves ahead.
“Right,” I said. “Exactly.”
Yes,
I thought. Bond! Game Bond! Brotherhood of gamesters! Now, naturally you’ll want to show me the damn book. Right? Right.
The thing is, those of us who play a serious game—and by
serious
I mean what mathematicians call a nontrivial game, like Go, chess, shogi, bridge, poker, the Sacrifice Game, or one of the few important computer games like the Sim games—know, or feel we know, that there’s a different and more purposeful world out there, one tuned to a more powerful wave. But this knowledge makes us exiles. And, of course, that makes us feel superior to everybody else—despite everybody else’s somehow being healthier, happier, and more socioeconomically successful—and so we become intolerable.
“Still,” she said, “reading ahead is enough for some good investing.”
“I guess.”
“I understand you’ve been making some good trades.”
“May I ask according to whom?”
“The
firm,
” she said, giving the word an ominous Grishamish inflection.
“Hmm.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Okay.”
“So anyway—look, you haven’t seen any dooming—I mean, looming doom a year from now? Have you?”
“ You mean the 4 Ahau date? The end of the calendar?”
“Right. Twelve twenty-one twelve.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“I guess that’s good.” I was getting that feeling that we were approaching the end of our conversation, like the sound of a bottle filling up. Come on, Jed. How do you make yourself indispensable to this woman? Come up with some persuasive, spectacular, façade-shattering . . . no, don’t even try. Just ask something.
“Hey, I have a question,” I said.
“Go for it.”
“Why is an entertainment division sponsoring Taro’s research? I mean, it’s not exactly entertainment.”
“Everything’s entertainment now,” she said.
“Right.” Just show me the book, I thought. Show book to me. Show
me
—
book
.
Book—me.
“Anyway, Lindsay’s always been good at leveraging entertainment with whatever other things—you know, that’s why the studio did the remake of
Silent Running,
because he bought Botania—that’s a closed-system hydroponics company?”
“Right.”
“And it tied in with that.”
“Mmm.” Great, I thought. Survivalism. More Mormon moronities. Stocking up for the Tribulation. You wouldn’t want to have to meet Jesus on an empty stomach.
“It’s got that survivalist thing going on,” she said. Evidently she’d seen what I was thinking. Damn it, I thought. I hate psychics.
“Right,” I said. “ Yeah, I grew up in Utah—”
“Oh, right—”
“—so I know a little about that stuff.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“I mean, it’s true, Lindsay’s a major Saint and everything. He’s just been elected to the Seventy.”
“Gee.” The Council of Seventy was the governing body of the Latter-Day Saints, kind of like the College of Cardinals.
“But
I
barely speak to those people. You know.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re scary,” she said.
“Right.” Well, I thought, it’s nice of her to try to put me at ease. Not that—
“But Lindsay’s a lot more enlightened than the rest of them . . . anyway, those guys fund stuff nobody else’ll touch.”