In the Courts of the Sun (22 page)

What does
SSC
stand for? Okay. Secondary School Certificate, Societas Sanctae Crucis, Species Survival Commission, but, really . . .
Hah. Superconducting supercollider.
Holy shit, I thought.
That’s it. That’s it. Holy shit. Shit. It. It . . .
Taro wasn’t just going off on some tangent of hypotheticals the way he does. He was continuing something. They’d been talking together about time travel before.
No es posible,
I thought.
I flicked my phone to the Stake map and hit TARO. His purple dot was nowhere in sight. How dare he turn off his dot? I wondered. Maybe he was in some secret, undottable part of the facility. Hell. I tried MARENA. Her blue dot came up in the dormitory-soon-to-be-hotel, probably in her room. So whatever Taro and Tony and Boyle were doing, she wasn’t doing it with them. Hmm. I got up, walked, too fast, to the exit, ran up the stairs—the elevators weren’t working yet—and dashed out into the sun, across the tarred lot, and into the dorm. The long hall was crowded with doughy, clean-cut Saints types bustling in and out of rooms with loads of unfashionable laundry. A plane-load of them had landed this morning and more were coming in every hour. On the Stake LAN portal page—under “Other Important Information”—it had warned us not to call them refugees because they were Americans. I pushed through to Marena’s door. I banged on it. No answer. I highlighted her dot and touched URGENT.
I waited. Her voice came on.
“What?” she asked.
“It’s urgent,” I panted.
“I’m in the shower.”
“I’m serious. Really. Really.”
“Hang on.”
Two minutes later she opened the door. She was in a big tacky green Marriott Amenities bathrobe, with a green towel around her head like a feather headdress. Her face was wet. Any other time it would have been sexy enough to be distracting. I just said I had, had, had to talk to her, ultraprivately.
“Let’s go outside,” she said. Like me, and like a lot of Asians, and I guess more and more people these days, her instinct when she wanted privacy wasn’t to go into some little room and shut the door, but rather to go outside where you could see nobody was listening. She led me past the break room and the laundry room and out the back side of the building, trailing the bottom six inches of her robe in the dust. We were in a shady sort of nook between the building’s vinyl siding and a six-foot stack of rebar.
“Okay, what’s the big deal?” she asked.
My lungs were stuttering, like I was back at Nephi K-12 calling Jessica Gunnison for a date. Okay, go for it, Jed. Say something.
“Well, I was thinking about this Kerr space business,” I said.
“What about it?” she asked. At least she didn’t pretend not to know about it.
“Just that, you know, if you really wanted to learn how the old guys played that game, you’d have to ask them.”
“So how would you suggest we do that?” she asked. It was hard to hear her over the rasp of another turboprop coming in for a landing.
“Maybe you guys have a time machine,” I said. Damn, I thought, that didn’t really sound very casual. Not really.
“Are you kidding?” Marena asked. She peeled the towel off her hair. For a little person she really had a lot of hair, and now that it was swollen and spiked up she looked kind of like a cuter Troll doll. “Time machines don’t work. Do they?”
“Doesn’t that depend on what you do with them?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a—it’s a
Freaky Friday
thing,” I said.
“Who told you about Freaky Friday?”
“That means, they’re not going to send any physical object.”
She dropped the towel on the ground and ran her hands back through her hair, sculpting it into a big dangling flipper. She looked into my eyes. In her nearer eye the lower rim of the brown-and-gold iris was in direct sunlight, so you could see how it was a flattened torus over a dark hollow. I looked down into her pupil, hoping for a flicker or a dilation or something that would . . . but the thing is, people think that the eyes are windows into the soul, but actually they’re just as mute and opaque as anything else.
Her phone buzzed somewhere. As her hand went into her pocket to turn it off, she broke the stare-down. “I said I’d call Max right now,” she said.
“They’re just sending a wave or whatever, the SSC makes a, a naked singularity or a wormhole or something, and then it’s going to, you’re going to rewire somebody’s head back there.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Well . . . I guess you have cracked a physics book once or twice, haven’t you?”
I said something or other, but it probably came out like mush because most of my head was busy tumbling into a swirlpool of expanded potential.
In one of the oldest Arthur stories Merlin had a chess set with pieces that moved by themselves and, even more impressively, never lost a game. These days, most of us who’ve lived to see such things have also seen them grow and mature, so it’s no wonder we take them for granted. But one time, in 1998, I showed my old Excalibur 2400 to an eighty-plus-year-old chess-addicted Maya sun adder in Santa Eulalia—which is way up in the Huehuetenango Highlands, totally the backside of beyond—and you could feel the full force of the onrush of technology in the fear and excitement in his eyes, and the way he kept playing and playing the thing, sitting on a Pemex Oil box outside the bodega, clicking it through one old Ruy López after another, losing game after game, way into the night. Finally I just left the thing with him, along with a year’s supply of AAs. And now I was feeling that rush myself, that whole moon-landing, DNA-solving, radium-refining wonderment. Son of a bitch, I thought. Son of two bitches.
She’d turned and walked out of the little nook, past the rebar and into a canyon between a giant backhoe and a cement mixer in matching apotropaic stripes. I followed.
“And Tony Sic’s going to go,” I said.
“Go where?”
“Go back.”
“Back to, like, olden times?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not exactly—”
“Just loan me the thing for a minute,” I said. “I promise I’ll bring it back before I leave.” Fuck Sic, I thought. Sick fuck. Fick suck. That smug outdoorsy bastard. He’s going to see it. He’s going to know what it was like. And I’m not. FUCK! People say that sex, greed, and fear are the three biggest motivators, but actually jealousy is. None of the others are even close.
“Listen,” I said. “Seriously. I can do this
much
better than that guy. I
clobbered
him on three-stone, I know
infinitely
more than he does—you know, the stuff he has to study, I knew it cold when I was five.”
There was a short, brutish pause. Another helicopter whipped by to the west, patrolling the border.
“Look,” she said. She sat down on a plug of newly cast concrete, crossed one invisible leg over the other, and, with a Dietrichy set of motions, lit a Camel. I stood, trying not to pace in circles like I do. Come on, Jed, get it together. Have at least a drop of sangfroid. She knows you want it, but you don’t have to let her know how much.
“It’s not just me running this,” she said. “Whatever’s going to happen with Tony is already in the pipeline—”
“Also I know I can pick up
anything
about the Game,” I said. I noticed my hands were waving around in front of my face and got them into my pockets. “No matter how complicated it turns out. Anything.”
“You don’t know what’s involved.
I
don’t know what’s involved.” She took a long drag. She exhaled. “Anyway, now I’m in trouble.”
“I don’t care what’s
involved,
” I said.
Involved
indeed. Please. “I’ve got a billion times the motivation to do it right. I’ve got more motivation than the, than the, I don’t know, than the, than the whole Lee Strasberg Institute.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“Yes, it is.” In fact I’d give my right testicle, I thought. And my right arm, right eye, right leg, and right brain. All my nondominant—
“Anyway, now that I’ve told you, I have to commit seppuku.” She dropped her cigarette and toed it into the gravel with a size-six bright-green complimentary-Crocs-shod foot. It was an eloquent old gesture and she did it with some assurance.
“Would it help if I begged you?” I asked. “I’ll beg you. It’s got to be me.” So much for cool.
“Let’s see what things look like in a few hours when we’re not running on fumes,” she said. She ran her hands up over her cheeks like she was rehearsing a facelift. “ You know, it’s not easy to get people to change their whole—”
“Please,” I said. “It’s got to be me.”

[16]

O
n 9 Death’s-head, 19 Whiteness, 11.14.18.12.6, or Friday, November 8, 1518, when the soi-disant Army of New Spain marched up the wide eastern causeway into Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital was the fourth-largest city in the world, a canal city like a clean, gridded Venice in the center of the lake that then covered sixty square miles of central Mexico. In the best eye-witness account, Bernal Díaz, one of Cortés’s lieutenants, said that the gleaming pastel palaces and pyramids rising out of the water “seemed like an enchanted vision from the realm of Amadis, and indeed some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream.”
Now,
The Tale of Amadis of Gaul
was a King Arthur knockoff written in 1508 by a mediocrity named García Ordoñez de Montalvo, and really, it’s a pretty run-of-the-mill popular romance, the then-equivalent of Tom Clancy, and an easy target a long time before Cervantes spoofed it. And the fact that this mercenary twerp was thinking about something like that as he helped initiate the largest episode of genocide in the history of the planet is truly beyond revolting.
But the worst part, the real
chingo
of it, is that in fact it actually
was
like a fantastic romance. The Conquest, or at least the first part of it, really did partake of the period’s fabulous epic tales of derring-do. The Spanish actually
did
voyage to this incredible place, penetrate a splendid and fierce empire, meet exotic people, torture them, triumph against overwhelming odds, and become vastly wealthy. They got to live their dream, and that was the problem. Humans have a way of actualizing their hallucinations, and the thing to really watch out for is when people take their passion and, as Irene Cara says, make it happen. Still, at that moment, when I realized—dimly, as it turned out—what they were going to do, I wasn’t thinking about that sort of thing either. I’d passed into the lands of Amadis, into the Dream Dimension of Unlimited Possibility where the galaxy reverses its polarity, Lolita whispers in your ear, and Moby Dick rises out of the sea.
Marena wouldn’t tell me exactly what they were planning to do. But I figured it wasn’t conventional sci-fi time travel, because I was pretty sure that was impossible. From the way she hemmed and hedged, it sounded like it would be some kind of remote viewing, which couldn’t be very active or dangerous. I guess I imagined myself sitting comfortably in Taro’s lab, enjoying a quintisensory VR feed from some counterpart in ancient Mayaland as he watched two adders playing the full nine-stone version of the Sacrifice Game. No problem.
Marena said that the idea of my trying out for Sic’s position in what they called the Count Chocula Project—apparently all Warren black ops were named after breakfast cereals—had already occurred to her. She said she’d even mentioned me as a backup. But the Kerr-space people had said Sic had some advantages over me. I asked what they were. She said mental stability was probably one of them. Another was that he’d already conducted a few wet tests. She wouldn’t give me any more details about what they were planning.
She said she’d talk to Taro about it and that I should either go back to work or take some Vicos and calm down. We talked again that day at 8:40 p.M., on the phone. She said she was having dinner at “Lindsay’s compound,” and that she’d put in a word for me. I said thanks. I took the Vicodin. Taro called at eleven. He said Marena had asked him about it and that he’d been thinking about it too. He said he couldn’t tell me any more about the project. He said he’d put in a word for me.
I stayed up all night agonizing. I was back at the lab at 7:00 A.M. Sic wasn’t there. I kept asking to challenge him to a game. A
₂
said they—or They—didn’t even want me to talk to him anymore. Maybe They were afraid I’d kill him. I managed to get back to work on the Game. But of course I couldn’t focus.
The next day, the thirty-first, Marena told me they’d got me a trial, which could get me into the candidate pool. That evening, the Stake’s Morons, now over twenty thousand strong, gathered in the Hyperbowl to watch the current prophet give his fireside chat on a six-story video screen. Afterward, there was a sing-along with the Tabernacle Choir Road Show. I really, really wanted to go but somehow I just didn’t make it. I stayed in and checked on the home front. Things in Indiantown weren’t good. About half the people I knew from there were still unaccounted for. Instead of quartering the displaced in other cities, which had caused problems after Katrina, FEMA had built a single refugee center at Camp Blanding, which now had over two million inhabitants.
On the blogs, BitterOldExGreenBeretCracker was going on about how the Nation of Islam was behind the attacks because Wednesday had been predicted as the second coming of a mad scientist named Yakub, who I guess was sort of like their Antichrist. Hell Rot was saying that the polonium particles had been dispersed with some kind of smog-seeding system that was way too complicated for any independent hacker/terrorist/whatever to design, and that the attack had almost certainly been engineered by a big government, probably our own. He’s probably a bit, somewhat, slightly right, I thought. The trouble with conspiracies isn’t that there aren’t any. There are plenty. But for every real conspiracy behind X situation there are a few thousand untrue theories, some of which are even started by the actual conspirators. There are so many half-truths camouflaging the real ones that even decades later there’s almost no way to sort out what actually happened. Except maybe this time . . .
Testing started on the second. I’d thought it would be something that if I worked hard I could do better than someone else. Instead it turned out to be already out of my hands. That is, it was all about the way I was already. It started with six hours of medical and cardiovascular-fitness tests. We determined that aside from having a life-threatening disability I was in B+ shape, not because I wanted to be or because I liked exercise, but because if you’re a bleeder you’re either in decent shape or dead. There were fourteen hours of basic mental tests, including memory (easy), sequence and spatial puzzles (almost as easy), linguistic exams (still pretty easy), emotional sampling (which I assumed I failed as usual), and interpersonal skills like trying to tell if someone on video was lying or not (utterly incomprehensible). They did a new emotional-assessment sort of thing where they wired me up and played videos of sick children and gut-shot dogs, like I was Alex DeLarge. Then there were personalized tests, including a whole expanded-polygraph thing where, as far as I could tell, they were trying to determine how committed I was and what my motivations were. God knows what the results were on that one. I wasn’t sure how honest I needed to be about my real motivation. I mean, my motivation aside from saving the day. Not that I didn’t care about Doom Soon. I mean, who wouldn’t? But that wasn’t my personal reason. And neither was Marena. That is, of course I thought she was kind of hot, and it’s a natural urge to want to be the hero. Right? Well, if she needed to go out with somebody major, fine, this was my way to be major, not just rich major but total hero major, absolute Dudley Do-Right major, so that anything else I ever did, no matter how rotten, wouldn’t matter. But that wasn’t my main motivation either.
The fact was, I already had my own agenda. And I’d had it practically since birth. Have you heard about those people who were one of a set of twins, and one was aborted or absorbed or eaten early in the pregnancy, and when they grow up, even if they don’t know about it, they always say they feel they’re missing someone? I don’t have that, but I’ve always had this feeling that I’m looking for something I’ve lost. I figure about three-fifths of my dreams are about running around looking for something. Or someplace, rather. It’s not something small. It’s somewhere that ought to be around the corner but never is. And now I was finally drawing a bead on the little gray personal demons I’d been swatting at for my whole glum-ass life. I wanted the books back, I wanted my beaten, maimed, raped, infected, abandoned, and all-but-deceased culture back, and I wanted it right the hell now. Corny but true. Suppose you were a child exile from some trashed place, say Atlantis or the Warsaw Ghetto or Krypton or Bosnia or Guatemala or wherever, and before your parents sent you away they gave you—as a kind of γνωρισματων, that is, a birth token—a couple of pieces out of an old wooden jigsaw puzzle. They’re worn around the edges, but the colors of their cryptic bits of picture are still deep and festive. And you’ve carried them with you through your whole life, but as much as you’d stared at them you only had vague guesses about what the image they were part of might be. And now you heard that somebody had the picture, or at least some of it. What would you do? What would Jesus do? What would anybody do?
Well, what I was going to do was, I was going to get myself chosen over Sic, I was going to go through the Kerr-space thing. I was going to deal with whatever I had to deal with. And I was going to bring back my whole goddamn civilization, all soaked up in the little 1,534-cubic-centimeter sponge of my own brain.