In the Courts of the Sun (2 page)

ZERO

[Ø]

T
he first thing I saw was a red dot on a turquoise field. Then another dot appeared above it and to the left, and a third bloomed close below that one, and then there was another and another, five and then nine and then thirteen. The dots grew and spread, and where they touched they merged and flowed together, and I realized they were drops of my own blood, falling out of my tongue onto blue offering paper.
It worked, I thought. Holy
mierditas
.
It isn’t 2012. It’s 664. And it’s March 20. Or in Maya reckoning, it’s 3 Earth Rattler, 5 Rainfrog, in the eleventh
uinal
of the eleventh
tun
of the eleventh
k’atun
of the tenth
b’ak’tun
. And it’s about 4:48 A.M. Sunday.
Hmm.
I guess it was like any other big life-mode change; you can only comprehend it after a drawn-out, unfunny double-take, like, oh my God, I’m actually being arrested, I’ve been stabbed, I’m getting married, I have a child, I’m really having a triple bypass, those buildings are really collapsing—and each time it feels like nothing remotely this serious has ever happened to you or to anyone else.
Hijo de puta,
I thought. I looked up and focused through the tiny trapezoidal doorway. The sky was violet now but somehow I could still see more stars than I ever had before, drifts and spatters of stars down to the fourth magnitude. They’d shifted, of course, but Taro had timed the download so that the tip of One Ocelot’s cigar—Algenib, in Pegasus—was nearly in the same position in the trapezoid as before, framed just right of center. There was a new star to its left, halfway to Homam, that would have been bright enough to be listed as Gamma Andromedae. It must be within a hundred years or so of flaming out. Otherwise al-Khawarzimi would have named it.
Unbefarfreakingoutlieveable, I thought. They actually got it right. New bat time, same bat place. Not that I was actually in the same place in the universe, of course, if that even means anything. The solar system moves a lot in 1,347 years. But I was in the same spot on earth. I was still in a tiny room near the apex of the tallest pyramid in the city of Ix, in what would later be called Alta Verapaz, in central Guatemala. But now the sanctuary was orange with torchlight, and the columns of scarabesque glyphs on the walls were smooth and unpitted and polychromed in black, blue, and cochineal carmine. And now the city was alive. I could hear the crowds outside, or maybe, rather, I could feel their chanting through the stone. The point is that from my POV, I hadn’t moved in space. But I had—
Hmm. I almost said I’d been sent back in time. But I wouldn’t want to start out by dumbing down.
The sad fact is that time travel is impossible. Into the past, that is. If you want to go faster into the future you can just freeze yourself. But going backward is absolutely, unequivocally, and forever unworkable, for a number of well-known reasons. One is the grandfather paradox, meaning you could always go back in time and kill your grandfather, and then you’d presumably never have existed in the first place. Another is that even if you went back and did nothing, you’d almost certainly have some of the same molecules your younger self had been using incorporated into your body. And so the same molecule would be in two different places at once. And that can’t happen. The third reason is just a mechanical problem. The only way into the past that anyone knows of is the famous wormhole route. But putting matter through a wormhole is like putting a Meissen vase through a pasta machine. Anything going through it is going to come out the other end crushed and scrambled and no good for anything.
But—but, but, but—there is a workaround.
The Warren Lab’s insight was that even if you can’t send matter into the past, that still doesn’t rule out every possibility. If you can’t send anything, that should mean that you can send nothing. And nothing, roughly speaking, includes electromagnetism. They developed a way to send bursts of energy through a tiny, artificially created Krasnikovian tube. They figured the pattern of energy bursts might be able to carry some information. In fact, it could carry a lot of information. The signal they sent back encoded a lifetime of distilled memories, basically everything that creates the illusion called a sense of self. In this case my self.
Of course, the next problem is that there has to be a receiver and storage on the other end. And in the era we were interested in, there weren’t any radar dishes or disk drives or silicon chips or IF antennas or even a crystal radio. Circa 664 there was only one existing object that could receive and store that much information. A brain.
I began to be able to move my eyeballs. I started to make out how my right hand, the one holding the thorn rope, was broad and beefy and heavily callused on the palm heel. Its nails were long and sharpened and inlaid with T-shaped carnelian studs, and the fingers were tattooed with red and black bands like coral snakes’. A jade-scale bracelet stretched from the wrist almost to the elbow. Like the section I could see of my naked chest and my cauliflowerish left knee, it was crusted with bright blue clay.
Score one for the Freaky Friday Team, I thought. I really was in another person’s body. Specifically, I was in the brain of someone named 9 Fanged Hummingbird.
We—that is, we at the Warren Project—knew a little about him. He was the patriarch of the Ocelot Clan and the
ahau
—that is, the king or overlord or warlord—of the city of Ix and of the roughly two thousand towns and villages in Ix’s orbit. He was the son of the twelfth ahau, 22 Burning Forest, and Lady Cyclone. Today he was forty-eight years and sixty-one days old. He’d been sitting in here, fasting, for about forty-two straight hours. And he was about to emerge, at dawn, to be reenthroned for a second twenty-year period as the ahau.
There was a bowl of hot embers five inches to the north of my left knee, and without thinking about it I peeled the rectangle of blood-soaked paper off the reed mat and held it over the heat. For a moment the light of the coals glowed through the sheet and I could see glyphs on the other side, the phrase
Watch over us, protect us
, and then the profile of an eagle:

More specifically, it was a harpy eagle,
Thrasyaetus harpyia.
In Spanish it was
arpía
and in Mayan it was
hunk’uk
, “gold ripper.” And the Aztecs called it the Wolf with Wings. It was the emblem of a clan, my clan—that is, the clan of the person whose brain I’d commandeered. The paper was a letter, my clan’s petition to One Ocelot, at the womb of the sky. Automatically, I folded the sticky sheet into a triangular bundle—it was a complicated set of motions, like making an origami crane, but I, or rather my body’s previous owner, must have rehearsed it a hundred times—and set the paper down in the bowl. It must have been soaked in some kind of copper salts, because it sizzled and then sputtered into green flame.
My tongue throbbed. I pulled it in—no, wait. I pulled—
Huh. Nothing happened.
I tried to swallow and then just to close my mouth over my tongue. It was like my face was frozen. Nothing moved.
M’AX ECHE?
I thought, in Ch’olan Mayan. Who are you?
No, wait.
I
hadn’t thought it. It was from somewhere else.
It was as though I’d heard a voice, but I knew I hadn’t actually heard anything except the hum of the throng in the plaza below and the swallowed booms of cedar-trunk slit-drums, throbbing in an odd 5/4 beat. Maybe it was more like I’d read it, on some kind of news crawl across my eyes. And even though it was silent it was as though it was loud, or rather forceful, as though it was written in upper case. It was like I’d thought it, but without think—
M’AX ECHE?
Oh, hell.
I wasn’t alone in this body.
I was alone in the room, but not in my brain.
Oh,
coño Dios.
The thing is, the first part of the Freaky Friday process had been supposed to erase the target’s memories, to give my consciousness a clean slate to work on, as it were. But evidently that part hadn’t worked, or at least not very well. He still thought he was him.
M’AX ECHE?
My name is Jed DeLanda, I thought back.
B’A’AX UKA’AJ CHOK B’OLECH TEN?
Roughly, “WHY HAVE YOU PO-SESSED ME?”
I’m not possessing you, I thought. That is, I’m inside, I mean, my consciousness is inside you because, because we sent it into you—
T’ECHE HUN BALAMAC?
ARE YOU ONE OCELOT?
No, I thought back, too quickly. I mean—
Damn it. Stupid.
Come on, Jed, I thought. It’s like Winston says, when somebody asks if you’re a god, you say yes. Got it? Okay.
Here goes.
Yes! I thought at him, more consciously. I
am
One Ocelot. Ocelot the Ocetarian. I am Ocelot, the great and power—
MA-I’IJ TEC.
NO, YOU ARE NOT.
No, I am, I thought, I—oh,
demonio
. It’s not easy to lie to this guy. And no wonder. He’s hearing everything I think. And even though he only spoke old Ch’olan and I was thinking in my usual mix of Spanish, English, and late, degenerate Ch’olan, we still understood each other completely. In fact, it felt less like talking with someone else than it felt like arguing with yourself, thinking, Jed, maybe you should do this, and no, Jed, you should do that, except that one side of the internal dialogue was effortless and self-assured, and the other side—my side—was having trouble getting its points together.
WHY HAVE YOU INFECTED ME, POSSESSED ME?
What? I said, or rather thought. I came to learn to play the Sacrifice Game. It was the truth.
WHY?
Well, because—because I come from the last days of the world, from the thirteenth b’ak’tun. Because my world is in big, big trouble and we need to learn the Game to see if we can save it.
GET OUT, he thought.
I can’t.
GET OUT.
Sorry. I really, really can’t. You’re the one who—
IM OT’ XEN.
GET OUT OF MY SKIN.
I can’t do that, I thought back. But, listen, how about this, I can—
THEN
HIDE,
he thought. STAY DOWN, STAY STILL, STAY SILENT.
I shut up. I was getting a bad feeling about this.
My hand rose to my open mouth and closed on a barbed cord, basically a rope of thorns, that ran through a hole in the center of my tongue. I yanked on it. Five thorn-knots squeezed down through the hole, spattering blood, before the rope popped out. Hmm, painful, I thought vaguely. Actually, it was enough to have made my former body scream for an hour, but now I didn’t even squirm. More oddly than that, I didn’t feel the Fear, the old hæmophiliac’s fear of bleeding out that I’d never gotten rid of when I was Jed. I coiled the rope into the bowl, as automatically as an ejected fighter pilot wadding up his parachute. It blackened and curled, and blood smoke filled the room with a coppery tang.
I swallowed a big gob of blood. Tasty. The chanting outside had grown louder and I found I could pick out the words, and that even though the Ch’olan was more different from our twenty-first-century reconstructed version than I would have thought possible, I could still understand them:
“Uuk ahau k’alomte yaxoc . . .”
“Overlord, greatfather,
Grandfather-grandmother
Jade Sun, Jade Ocelot,
Captor of 25 Duelist of Three Hill Lake,
Captor of 1,000 Strangler of Broken Sky . . .”
Our legs uncrossed. Our hands straightened our headdress—it felt like a tall stiff pillow tufted with cat fur—but didn’t wipe the blood off our face.
“Captor of 17 Sandstorm of Scorched Mountain,
Nurturer, watchkeeper,
Jade 9 Fanged Hummingbird:
When will you next
Reemerge from your sky cave
To hear us, to look on us?”
We crept forward to the tiny door, keeping our head down, and crouched through, out into the wide air. There was a sudden silence from the throngs in the plazas and then a collective gasp, breath rushing into so many lungs that I thought I could feel the drop in pressure. We stood up. Jade scales and spiny-oyster beads clattered over our skin. It seemed like whatever little blood we had left had drained out of our head, and I suppose on any normal day even this body would have fainted, but now some higher hormone held him together and we didn’t even wobble on our high platform sandals, which were really more like stilts, with soles at least eight inches thick. I could feel I was smaller than Jed had been. And lighter and stronger. I definitely didn’t feel forty-eight years old. I felt about sixteen. Odd. I looked up. Ix spread out below us and covered the world.
Our eyes only sucked it in for two and a half seconds before they looked up again at Algenib. But it was enough time to see that not one of us in 2012—or, for that matter, in any of the preceding five centuries—had had the slightest notion of what this place had actually looked like.
We were worse than wrong, I thought. We were dull. It was as though we’d been walking through the desert and found five bleached bones out of the 206 or so bones that make up your basic skeleton, and instead of just working out the dead person’s sex and age and genetic heritage and whatever else you can legitimately get from a few ribs and vertebrae and just stopping there, we’d spun out this whole scenario about what her life was like, her clothes, her hobbies, her children’s names, whatever, and then we’d gone on to write a full biographical textbook about her, complete with beige pie graphs and anemic illustrations in scruffy gouache. And now that I was actually meeting the living person, not only did she have very little physical resemblance to the reconstruction, but her personality and life story and place in the universe were utterly different from our pedestrian guesswork.
The scraps of granular ruins that had survived into the twenty-first century had been less than 5 percent of the story, just the stone underframes of a city that hadn’t been built so much as woven and plaited and knotted and laced out of reeds and lath and swamp cane, a wickerwork metropolis so unlike what I’d imagined that I couldn’t even pick out the monuments I knew. We faced due east across the river, toward Cerro San Enero, the highest peak of the cordillera that ringed the valley of Ix. Now it was erupting, spewing a fan of black ash against the mauve predawn . . . no, wait, I thought. No way, it’s not a volcano. They must have built a rubberwood bonfire up there—but the other hills were wrong too, they’d been forested before and now they were all denuded, carved into terraces and nested plazas cascading down the slopes like waterfall pools, and they were crested with headdresses of canework spikes that radiated like liberty crowns. Shoals of spots or flecks or something bobbed above and in front of the hills and towers, and, for the first half of the second I had to look at the city, I thought the spots were an illusion of my own new eyes, migraine flashers, maybe, or some kind of iridescent nematodes swimming in my aqueous humor, but at the next beat I realized they were hundreds of human-size featherwork kites, all either round or pentagonal and all in target patterns of black, white, and magenta, floating on the hot breath of the crowd, reflecting the city like a lake in the air.
The crowd started a new chant, in a new key:
“Hun k’in , ka k’inob, ox k’inob . . .”
“One sun, then two suns, then three suns . . .”
De todos modos,
I thought. Focus. Get oriented.
Find some landmarks. Where was the river? I had an impression that it had been widened into a lake, but I couldn’t see any actual water. Instead there was a plane tessellated with what must have been rushwork rafts and giant canoes, with bright-yellow veins between the boats that might have been millions of floating marigold heads. I had an impression of tiers within tiers of interlocking compounds on the opposite shore, stegosaurus-backed longhouses and buttressed towers with gravity-disregarding overhangs that seemed so structurally unsound they had to be featherlight, maybe made out of lattice and corn paste . . . but like I said, it was just an impression, because every facet, every horizontal or vertical surface, from the hilltops to the plaza just below us, seethed with life. Serried ranks of the
ajche’ejob
, the Laughing People, that is, the Ixians, carpeted the squares and clung to poles and scaffolds and façades in a pulsing mass, like the layer of polyps that ripples over the skeleton of a thousand-year-old reef, straining gorgonians out of the sea. The only unpopulated surfaces were the steep-angled shoulder planes of the four great
mulob,
the subordinate pyramids, rising out of the turbulence like step-cut chunks of lab-grown carborundum. And even those didn’t show a single patch of their stone cores; everything was stuccoed over and dyed and oiled and petal-tufted, striated in layers of turquoise, yellow, and black, hard-edged and mischievous, an array of poisoned pastry. Each
mul
wore a gigantic fletched roof comb and spewed smoke from hidden vents. How many thousands of people were there? Fifty? Seventy? I could only see a fraction of them. Say there are two thousand in the Ocelots’ plaza, that’s about two and a half acres, then suppose there are thirty plazas that size in all—never mind. Stick to the mission.
De todos modos.
Where was 9 Fanged Hummingbird? Got to try to find him—
“Wak k’inob, wuk k’inob . . .”
“Six suns, then seven suns . . .”
Upa.
Uh-oh.
Something was wrong.
That is, besides the way this guy was still in his head. There was something else wrong. Very ghastlyly wrong. What was it?
I tried to listen to his thoughts, the way he listened to mine. And I did hear something, and I got flashes of images, wrinkled toothless farmers’ faces, naked, goitred children waddling out of twig huts, bloody footsmears on yellow sunlit pavement, big, heavy flaming rubber balls lobbing through violet air, arcing toward me, streaking away from me . . . well, they weren’t the memories of a king. Somehow a sense of his sense of his identity percolated through, and I realized I knew his name: Chacal.
Not 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Chacal.
And he’s not the ahau. No. I’m—he’s—he’s a hipball player.
Yep. Wrong. Something had gone really, seriously wrong.
This guy’s
dressed
as the ahau, and he’s up here in the ahau’s special chamber, but he’s not . . .
“Bolon k’inob, lahun k’inob,”
the crowd chanted.
“Nine suns, then ten suns,
Eleven suns, twelve suns . . .”
It was a countdown. Although they were counting up, to nineteen.
Okay, what the hell’s going on with this guy? He’s not the ahau, but he’s going, he’s playing . . .
The certainty descended around me like lead rain. He’s taking 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s place.
And this isn’t a reenthronement, I thought. It’s an offering. He’s a sacrifice. A willing, happy sacrifice. They were counting up to a liftoff, or rather a jump-off. After nineteen, the count would go back to zero. And I’d go down.
Oh, cripes.
Stupid. Should’ve thought of that. Obvious possibility.
In fact, come to think of it, I even remembered reading something about this kind of thing. It was in an article in
JPCS
called “Royal Auto-Sacrifice by Proxy in Pre-Columbian America.” The theory was that in the old days—that is, the really really old days even before this one—the ahau would only have been put in charge for one k’atun. A k’atun is a vicennium, a period of about twenty years. And then, before the ahau got old and feeble and spread that weakness to the body politic, he would have turned the town over to a younger heir and then committed suicide. But at some point some genius ahau had decided he could make it all a little easier on himself and still keep up the formalities. So he’d put on a big ceremony where he’d transfer his name and regalia to somebody else—not even a look-alike or an impersonator but just a captive or volunteer or whatever—and that person would take on his identity and act as the ahau for five days. And when the five days were up, he’d sacrifice himself. It was like burning someone in effigy. A living effigy. And then when that was over the old ahau would have another ritual where he’d give himself a new name, and he’d stay in charge for another k’atun.
Well, great. At least I know what’s going on. What’s going on is I’m all the hell up here in this unfamiliar body, I’m utterly alone—in fact, nobody I know has even been born yet—and now it turns out I’m supposed to kill myself. What next?
Okay. Don’t freak. You can still pull this off. So you’re not in the right guy.
Ve al grano.
It’s still just a minor setback. Right? Luckily, we have some contingency plans just in case of little glitches like this.
Along with the Chocula Team and the Freaky Friday Team—and I realize this is throwing a lot of jargon at once—Warren had also put together a linguistic research group called the Connecticut Yankee Team. Its job had been to create a menu of things for me to say and/or do when/if I came up against this sort of problem or something like it. They’d trained me to the point where I knew every one of them as well as I knew the lyrics to “Happy Birthday.” The appropriate action for this contingency was called the Volcano Speech. Okay. I ran through it a couple times in my side of my mind, adapting the words to the surprisingly unfamiliar version of Ch’olan.