In the Courts of the Sun (24 page)

[18]

“I
t’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I spent some time in one of your hospitals.”
“Oh, yeah? Salt Lake Central?” he asked. I nodded. “That’s real gratifying to hear, Missus Warren and I are real proud o’ that one . . . and you’re feelin’ better now, I suppose?”
“So they tell me,” I said.
“Hey, what’s this cake about?” Marena asked.
“It’s my birthday,” Lindsay said. “I’m fifty-darn-two.”
“Full of grace,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“Tuesday’s child,” I said. “Is, you know, full of grace. Sorry.”
“Oh. No, no, you’re right,” he said. He smiled. “I was born on a Tuesday.”
“You should see the other stuff he can do,” Marena said. “He’s like Rain Man.”
Thanks a lot, I thought.
“Without all the problems,” she backtracked.
“Very interesting,” Lindsay said.
“Would either of you like a slice?” Ashley
₁
asked. We said no, thanks.
“How about some jasmine tea?”
“Oh, thanks, uh, a coffee would be great,” I said.
“Oh, sorry, no, there’s no coffee, there’s, there’s hot chocolate, I can do a Snelgrove’s Smoothie, or—”
“Oh, okay, chocolate, sure, thanks,” I said.
Jesu,
I thought. So these people are such by-the-books Saints, there’s no caffeine up here anywhere.
“Just give me a sec,” she said. She left through the door we’d come through. Maybe it was the only door.
“The gals had it all ready to celebrate,” Lindsay said. “But then things in the wide world . . . we weren’t feelin’ very festive.”
“Oh, yeah,” Marena said. “No kidding. Still, congratulations anyway.”
“Thanks.” He looked at me again. “All righty. What’s my Mayan horoscope?”
“What day were you named on?” I asked.
“The same day.”
“So that’s 2 Jaguar, 2 Growing,” I said. “That’s a royal-type day, like a king would have. Only, that’s not exactly a horoscope. You’d have to ask for advice about a certain day.”
“Well, good deal, then, what advice would you have for today?”
“Well, today’s 3 Venus, 16 Growing. So for you it’s a very good time to start a project, or go on a trip, or anything like that.” I didn’t mention how the night of today was ruled by the Heart of the Mountains, and how that could also mean betrayal of, or by, another jaguar. It sounded like a downer.
“Well, maybe we can start a project,” he said. He turned to the other three men, who’d sat back down. “Just gimme two shakes.”
“Here you go,” Ashley
₁
enthused. She handed me a brimming mug of foamy sweetness. One side sported the Warren logo and the legend “Warren. Works for Me.™” I said thanks.
“Y’ know, I looked over Larry’s report on that Mayan book,” Lindsay said. “And it was a real good report. But I didn’t quite get all those dates in it.”
“What exactly about them?” Marena asked. She sat down, or rather she balanced on the back of a chair, with her feet on the seat. Boyle drifted toward the table but didn’t sit. Hatch and Snow just sat where they were, looking out of their depth. Orson, at least, seemed fascinated.
“Just, why’d they pick out those dates and not others?” Lindsay asked. “There must have been a lot of dates that were just as wrong ’uns.” He looked straight at me. “Why didn’t it have 9/11, or Katrina, fr’instance?”
It was something Taro and I had been over a hundred times. But for a nonspecialist it was a good question.
“Well, they didn’t write it for us,” I said. “The book was probably commissioned by a single cat clan—”
“Cat clan?”
“Like a royal family.”
“All righty.”
“And they were probably only interested in what would happen to their descendants. Nine-eleven or Katrina didn’t affect many Maya Indians. That’s why—with the possible exception of the Orlando event—all the events in the book take place in or near the Maya area.”
“Well, fair enough,” he said. He eased one haunch onto the edge of the table. As friendly as he was, there was a sort of relaxed rich-guy aura around him, like he wasn’t used to other people asking questions or choosing subjects of conversation. And he sure wasn’t asking me to sit down.
“But then why do we think the last date, the one a year from now, why do you-all think that’s going to mess up everybody? Maybe the last date just means their last
descendants
’ll die off this year.”
“That’s a clever thought,” Boyle brown-nosed.
“Well, less because of the Codex and more because of other calculations,” I said. “And also, when I play through scenarios with the Game, it feels like there’s a real problem right around that date.”
“So you think the whole world is way up a crick.”
“Well . . . for what it’s worth I am beginning to think it’s very possible—or let’s say it’s probable. And of course, if it’s the end for everybody it’s the end for the Maya too—”
“But you’re not sure.”
“Personally, I’m quite sure, but I can’t give many concrete reasons. Besides the Game records, I mean—”
“So then we might be reading too much into it,” he said. “Right? Maybe there isn’t really a problem.”
“Well . . . personally, I’m now convinced there’s a problem,” I said. “A week ago I hadn’t been. Playing through, I just don’t see a way around it. But it is hard to describe and you might have to learn to play the Game to really see it for yourself.” Damn, this guy’s not an idiot, I thought. Unlike your average Saint, he seemed to have a skeptical streak. Most of those guys were always expecting the End Times to start about five seconds from now. Well, maybe they were right this time. Even an anosmic hog finds a truffle once in a while. No wonder they built this place up in the hills. Imagine the thousands of square feet of bunkers they must have under here. Fifty years’ supply of freeze-dried meat loaf and sugar-free Tang. Just kill me now.
“All righty, then, tell me, Jed, then, what’s it really feel like playin’ that Game thing?”
“Well . . . when you start out it’s called rooting yourself, like you’re centering yourself on the world.” I was starting to feel not just terrified but also really, really uncomfortable. Whenever I talk about the Game it comes out sounding insufferably zhuzhy-wooshy-newy-agey. And I don’t know how to avoid it. “Then when you’re looking for a move you wait for what we call blood lightning, that’s a kind of fluttering feeling. A physical feeling.”
“Where?”
“It can be in any part of your body, usually it feels like it’s down near a bone . . . it’s not easy to put into words. But then when you act on that, and you move through the game board, it starts to feel like you’re traveling. You feel there are lots of paths ahead. Or in this case, you feel that past the end date, there are no paths.”
“All righty, good enough,” Lindsay said. “Let’s move on. Suppose you folks do find out how to play the thing with—what is it, nine stones?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not even going to ask what that’s all about. Let’s just say you do find out how to play it, and then that still doesn’t help? What if it just says, yep, the world’s had it, and you can’t do anything about it?”
Another tough one, I thought. Had he asked Sic these same questions? I wondered. Or different ones? I should have asked Marena before we came here. Idiot. I’d almost gotten a response together when he answered himself.
“I s’pose then we won’t need to worry anyway,” he said. “Eh? We won’t have lost anything.”
“Well, no,” I said. “But personally I don’t think—the thing is, the way to avert whatever it is ought to be contained in
what
it is.” Jed, that was totally incomprehensible, I thought. “Let me put that another way. The thing you have to understand is that they didn’t think of them as prophecies. They thought of them as advance reportage. They’re not supernatural events.”
“All righty.”
“And the ancient guys—they didn’t think in terms of progress. In fact, they thought of history as a process of decay. And to keep the world running as long as possible you had to do certain things. Like for example, with the Maya, even a historical event like a war was a holy act. And you had to do it at certain times and in certain ways, and you had to be purified first, and Lord knows what else. And maybe that was less silly than it sounds. Maybe by sacrificing this or that person—for instance—or by starting a forest fire or whatever, they were actually tweaking history.”
“Well, fair enough,” he said. “But why’s it always a fire or a war or murders . . . y’know, everything that happens in that book is
bad
.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“Well, I think the Game was designed to focus on the negative. It helps you identify trouble spots.”
“That’s why the trading software version does best after crashes,” Boyle put in. “Or with short funds.”
Lindsay smiled. “Well, that’s for sure the true bill,” he said to Boyle. He turned back to me. “Y’ know,” he said in a confidential voice, “you might have heard how back in 2009, after the housing crash, we were almost in Chapter Eleven?”
“No, I hadn’t,” I said.
“Well, we were. And we kept the coyotes off the herd by starting to base our actual trades on your friend Taro’s simulated trades. Back then it was only a half-point or so over our regular managers, but as of the first of this last year we were making nearly thirty-two percent per blessed annum.”
“Wow,” I said. Who the hell cares? I thought. It’s
The Last Days of Pompeii
around here and you’re worried about your margin? That’s pretty cold. Although, come to think of it, an automatic 32 percent really is pretty—
“But like Larry says, that software did its best work right before bull markets.”
“It did well at predicting meltdowns,” Boyle said. “Almost every point of profit we made on Taro’s work was from shorting major funds before a crisis.”
“That sounds right to me,” I said.
“You’re involved with corn futures, right?” Boyle asked.
“Right,” I said.
“Well, good,” he said. “So you’re in the same boat we are.”
I kind of nodded.
“You know, though, some of Taro’s work is proprietary.”
“I’m aware of that,” I said. “I’m not using any of Taro’s work in my own trading.” It wasn’t entirely true, but on the other hand I’d never signed anything beyond the usual university research papers. And that was a long time ago, before we’d even changed the Game layout the first time. And also, Warren was definitely using some stuff I’d come up with, things I’d clued Taro in on years after the school gig.
“We were talking about the big problems, though,” Lindsay said. “Let’s get back to that. Everything in that Codex thing is bad. And it’s all happened.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But not everything you foresee with the Game on a day-to-day basis happens. With a lot of things, at least, so far, it’s helped people stay out of trouble. Isn’t that right?”
“Right,” Lindsay said.
“So the hope is that the 4 Ahau date will be just like that,” I said. “On a bigger scale. If the Game operates well, if it describes the event more specifically, then it shouldn’t be anything unavertable.” Was that a real word? I wondered. Never mind. Move on. “Especially since it’s almost certainly going to be anthropogenic. I mean, since it’s likely to be caused by people. It’s just the last link in a chain.”
“A chain of what?”
“Of cause and effect. That is—well, what we think it is, the Game is a reading-ahead of a web of catastrophe that spreads outward from the point in space-time where the Game was played.”
“You’re saying what you’re calling a web, that these disasters, they have the same ultimate cause.”
“That’s right. It’s not just that they have features in common. It’s that they’re part of a larger process. It’s as though they were battles in a single continuing war. That’s why there aren’t any natural disasters in the Codex. And the Game doesn’t work very well on natural events. On weather, it only does a little better than the programs that the Air Force Weather Agency uses. It’s just about the human world.”
“So if some really big asteroid had slammed into the earth or, or something of the sort, something unpredictable . . . then what?”
“I’d say that might have thrown the process off the track. And they wouldn’t have foreseen that. But that didn’t happen. Whatever process they identified is still going on.”
“Got it.”
“So the point is, it’s not that they foresaw that there would be a Disney World. It’s that they knew that a progression had been set in motion that would require that sort of a pilgrimage center to be roughly in that location at this particular time, in order to keep things together—”
“But still, that doesn’t tell us what we need to know,” Boyle said. Shut
up
, Boil Face, I thought. “What we need to know is whether a nine-stone version would really allow us to head off whatever’s coming.”
Lindsay’s eyes were on Boyle for a second, so I glanced at Marena. She looked back like, yes, Boyle’s a jerk, he’ll stab us in the back in a second, in fact he’ll shoot us in the back from a long distance and make it look like somebody else did it, and then—
“Well, it’s just a hugely high percentage,” Marena said. “There’s no hundred-percent guarantee. But like the report should say, I’ve had Taro’s math checked by two outside labs and they both said it seems pretty sound.”
“Look at it this way,” I said. “The four-stone version of the Game that we’re playing now works pretty well on human events within, say, three days. A nine-runner game would work one thousand and twenty-four times better, so in terms of advance warning—”
“Let’s just take that as a yes,” Lindsay said.
There was a pause. Lindsay looked at Marena. I looked at Marena. She looked back at Lindsay. I looked back at Lindsay.
“So then they knew how to do all this back then, and we don’t,” he said.
I nodded. I took a sip of the hot chocolate. Ahh. Bland but still welcome.
“And that’s a sockdolager of a skill set. Ain’t it? Back then, your people had the bulge on everybody. The Maya back then, they could write their own ticket. Right?”
“Well, I guess,” I said. Had I gotten any foam on my upper lip? I wondered. “They did very well for a very long time. But of course, it didn’t go on forever.” Marena’s eyes caught mine. A little less soft sell, they said. Idiot.
“That’s just what I’m drivin’ at,” Lindsay said. As quickly and discreetly as possible, I sort of wiped my upper lip with my lower one. “If the Maya knew so darn much, then why didn’t they take over the whole world?”
“Maybe just knowing how isn’t enough,” I said. “Or maybe they would have, but for some reason they, they lost the knack.”
“Why?”
“Maybe just because the Game was a specialized skill. Maybe they tried to keep it too secret.”
“So they didn’t let other people draw water from the well,” he said.
“Very possibly,” I said. “Anyway, you know, technologies fall out of use all the time. Like when the first people came to Tasmania like ten thousand years ago or whatever, they had pottery and seagoing canoes and fishing nets and a lot of other things. But by the time of their first contact with outsiders they’d forgotten how to make them. They’d even forgotten how to start fires. They had to wait for lightning to hit a tree and then they’d carry the coals around.”