In the Courts of the Sun (61 page)

I leaned forward—unconscionably rudely, again, but I hoped we were past that—and swept away a drift of petals with my powerful forearm, exposing a truncated crescent of pale, fine-woven reed matting. I poked my index finger into the least hot-looking zone of the brazier, rubbed it around in the soot, and drew a circle on the mat.
“This little round is the Fourth Sun,” I said. “The ball that is both Sun Vanquisher and Sun Herald rolls around it on this larger round.” I had to go back for more soot six times before I finished the drawing:

Of course, my sketch looked a lot rougher, but it was still readable. “This is the zeroth level here,” I said, writing an eye/oyster glyph at the extreme left. “And this is where Sun Vanquisher rises furthest whiteward.” I wrote a Venusas-Evening Star glyph at 11:00 on the large circle and put a single dot next to it.
I thought Koh was about to say something, but she didn’t.
“This is Sun Vanquisher’s last night,” I said. I wrote the glyph below and to the left of the first. I poked two dots next to it.
Koh stared at the drawing. She didn’t say anything. As I think I mentioned somewhere, it’s true that the Maya calendar was indeed famously accurate, better on the solar count than the uncorrected Gregorian one. But they didn’t have heliocentrism yet, although from the way Koh was taking it I guessed that she and the very best Maya astronomers might have an inkling of it.
“And this third spot is the ball’s first morning, when it’s named Sun Herald,” I said, moving it around counterclockwise. “Then this is yellowmost morning. This is its last morning. Then it’s behind the sun for fifty days, and then it appears again as Sun Vanquisher, here. Twelve score and four days and ninety-one score and five beats in all.” I wrote the number 6 next to the last glyph. I didn’t mention the superior and inferior conjunctions. Why belabor the point?
I paused.
The pause stretched on.
Gotcha, I thought. If there’s one thing you could always count on with these folks, it’s a solid foundation in naked-eye astronomy. She was a sun adder, after all. And every adder was always looking for an edge over the others. Even if progress got frowned upon—that is, what we dead white males would call progress—there was still the haphazard sort of progress that comes naturally and irrepressibly out of plain one-upmanship. Adders are hustlers, and they’re always looking for a new angle. And not even just to, say, predict the first rain a little more accurately than the adder in the next town, but to trade with other adders. In Koh’s case, for instance, she’d be expected to share stuff like this with the other Orb Weavers, so that the whole group could use the extra accuracy as a bargaining chip in their squabble with the Synods.
Finally, Koh spoke: “And so you say that when 2 Peccary steps out of the procession and turns back caveward down the white road, that is the same.” She meant Mars.
“He doesn’t turn at all,” I said. “It only looks that way to us because the ground underneath us is moving. It’s the same as with Sun Herald. But it takes longer because 2 Peccary is farther away from the sun than we are.”
“And Sun Herald is closer.”
“Sun Herald is closer.”
“And you say the sun is bigger than the zeroth level,” she said.
“More than four hundred times four hundred times bigger,” I said. “And if you started walking to the sun now, although you couldn’t, but let’s say you were flying as fast as you can walk, you wouldn’t get there for nine hundred times four hundred b’ak’tunob.”
Koh stared at the diagram, calculating. She’s making some leaps, I thought. She’s Copernicus at Warmia. She’s Tycho Brahe, freezing his nose off from poking it into space. She’s Johannes Kepler. She’s Gallifreakingleo. Wait’ll I turn you on to some general relativity, I thought. You’ll cream on your abacus. e = babes
²
.
“And so your hometimers know everything,” Koh said finally. I had to stifle a jump, she’d been quiet for so long.
“Not quite everything,” I gestured. “They are—they will be working to know everything eventually.”
“And are they all powerful greathousers?” That is, were they all rich and in charge?
“No, many of them are still roundhousers. But still, most of them are much richer than roundhousers now. There’s so much food even the hearthless get fat. Most people will live for more than three k’atuns. We’ll ride through the sky inside giant copper bird canoes. We’ll have cold torches that burn for hundred-scores of nights and weapons that kill hundred-scores of people a hundred-score jornadas away. We’ll speak to each other and see each other’s faces over any distance, through lines of invisible light. Even before I was born, twelve men had canoed to the ball of the moon. There will be four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score- four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score of us. We’ll see inside ourselves without cutting ourselves open. We’ll make devices that are cleverer than we are. We’ll dive to the bottom of the salt sea, and stay there for days, and come back alive.”
“But you have forgotten the most important things,” she said. “And so you came here. Correct?”
I paused. Well, whatever. “Correct,” I clicked.
“Because you in your time have forgotten your grandfathermothers,” she said.
I made a “not entirely” gesture.
“But you do know how many suns the Razor City will keep up its offerings,” she said. That is, how long would Teotihuacan last?
Damn. “We do not know that,” I said.
She asked why, if I came from the thirteenth b’ak’tun and knew so much, I didn’t know the exact sun.
I told her how, by the time I was born, almost all her world’s books had been destroyed, and how the few that had survived didn’t give the date. I tried to explain what archaeologists were, and how they dated things, and told her that they’d calculated the abandonment of the city to some time in the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth k’atun of this b’ak’tun, that is, roughly between AD 650 and 710, but couldn’t get any more accurate than that. “The damage will be too extensive for better archaeological dating,” I tried to say.
Pause again. She stared at the drawings.
I didn’t say anything. At least it was easier not to talk than it had been. The mental Ex-Lax was wearing off.
Koh took one of the fly whisks off the rack and held it against her thigh. It meant the reading was over.
“Perhaps you next to me and I will consult the skulls again in a basket of suns, after the Chewer has been driven off,” she said.
God DAMN it, I thought. No, let’s make that “I inwardly shrieked.” Bitch. Maybe I should just take off, maybe I can just score the shit on the street, better than schlumping around here all—
No. Be persistent. Who knows, maybe she’s just haggling you up for more goodies. Take it up a level.
“The Orb Weavers’ House will not survive much longer,” I said, desperately breaking protocol. “We don’t know how long it will last but it won’t be long.”
“I next to you have known that for a long time.”
“2 Jeweled Skull offers asylum in Ix, for you and for your order.”
Koh shifted. I thought she cocked her head a bit, as though she heard something, but I might have just imagined it. She didn’t answer.
Hell, I thought. Well, that’s the end of my A material. 2JS had said I should wait to make the offer until she asked for it, and then to make it seem like a concession, and that otherwise she’d think it was some sort of con.
She shifted again. For a second I thought she was just going to stand up and leave, and that would be it. Instead, she said: “And so, you next to me wager that 2 Jeweled Skull will win his hipball game against the Ocelots?” She meant that she thought the Harpies were going to lose—fairly or otherwise—and would get run out of Ix.
“Ma’ lo’ yanil,”
I said. That is, “No problem.” “Win or no win, the Harpies will stay. And the Ocelots will run.” The idea was to let her think that my superhuman knowledge had provided 2JS with enough firepower to hold off the Ocelots.
As you might guess, there was another interminable pause. Well, at least she didn’t just keep babbling like your average
chica perica
.
“You came here for the Steersman, not for me,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. Well, maybe that’s it, I thought. I’m getting thrown out. Back to Square Zero.
Instead, Koh said: “Your hometimers have forgotten how to seat a cycle.”
I clicked yes.
“But the ahaus you suckle would like to midwife a lineage of new suns. After the suns of the thirteenth b’ak’tun have died out.”
“I would like to help start another cycle,” I said.
“And why?” she asked. “Are you going back?”
“I want to try,” I said, half-avoiding the question. I thought she was going to ask me how I was planning to do that, but instead she just took the answer as a “yes” and asked:
“Bax ten tex kaabet?”
That is, “why do you want to [go through all this]?”
“Everyone wants to protect his family.”
“And do you next to me have family there?”
“I have—people whom I think of as foster family.” Or at least I have a few half-friends on the web, I thought. I guess Koh knew I was pushing it. Still, she didn’t pursue the thought.
“And if your hometimers do survive,”
Would they still forget us?
Would they observe all the days of our namings,
The days of our dyings?
Will they forget how we planted, and raided,
And built, and bore children?
Will they sometimes sing a song with our names in it?
Will they remember?”
“I will arrange for them to remember your lineage, and to suckle your uay on your deathdays.”
“But you told me they only offer poor things.”
“Not necessarily,” I gestured.
“And you said your hometimers are dishonorable,” she said. There wasn’t really an Ixian word for “evil,” and even if there had been, “dishonorable” would have been worse.
When did I say that? I wondered. Huh. “In many ways they’ll be worse than people are now,” I said. “But in some ways you over me might say they are better.”
“And so you want me to play a nine-stone Game. And you think just by watching you could learn to play it in two lights.” “Two lights” was an idiom, like saying “You think you could learn it overnight.”
“I under you do not think that.”
“Then what else do you next to me and I have to do here?”
“I under you request a reading,” I said.
“But I next to you have already read for you.”
“But I want to exchange something larger this time,” I said. I told her that I could tell her almost anything she wanted to know about anything that would be explored or discovered or created through all the next four b’ak’tuns.
“I know enough already to make me sorry I know it,” she said. It wasn’t clear whether she meant the things I’d told her about, or the things she’d already known, or both.
“Then let me tell you something that will help you. Let me give you something.”
“You already gave me the shape of the sun.”
“Let me give you something that would put honey into your followers’
ch’anac.
” That is, something that would help out the regular folks.
“I next to you . . . we could build any number of yet-unseen devices,” I said.
“Like what?” she signed. She put down the fly whisk.
“What about captive rollers?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she gestured.
I started to explain about wheels. I told her how they were like rollers, but with a stick through the center, and how great wheelbarrows were, and I started to draw one, but then she said they already had them here, and she sent the Penguiness out for an example. I didn’t know what to think. But the dwarf brought back a little yellow wooden jaguar with a respectable wheel on each of its feet. Koh said that toys with this feature were pretty popular among the elite, but they weren’t to be allowed out of the house where the public could see them. As far as I could tell, this wasn’t because regular folks might get the idea that wheels would be useful, but because someone might copy them and use them to gather a following. That person could go to some other city, impress everybody with his gadgets, promote himself as a great sorcerer, and ultimately become a problem for the aristocracy. The wheel could become another magic cult object, the center of another order, like the knife or fire or the closely guarded secret of the concave mirror—or, of course, the Game drugs. And besides, Koh said—and I’m paraphrasing pretty freely here—there were so many roundhousers around these days that there wasn’t any need for wheelbarrows anyway. If you wanted to move something heavy, you just got the plebes to drag it.
It was frustrating, but I dropped the subject. It was like this one time when I was giving this very Park Avenue-type girl a ride up to New Haven in my van, and I mentioned that she ought to learn to drive. “What if I hadn’t been going up today?” I’d asked.
“I’d ring up some other boy and gotten him to drive me,” she’d said. “And then I’d fuck him.”
Well, okay, I thought, forget wheels for transportation. What about just for dinnerware?
I started to tell her about potter’s wheels. The thing was, just to be frank, when you talked about the dinnerware around here, I mean here in Mesoamerica, you had to admit that, yes, some of the painting was awesome, but the shape was always just a little bit borkly. Anybody turning out perfectly round pots would cause a sensation. But as Koh caught on to what I was saying, she came back with the same objection. That is, the Synods would say that whoever had created the new pots was some kind of inordinately powerful sorcerer, and they’d immediately send out hit squads to get rid of him. And even if that didn’t happen and the wheel-thrown stuff caught on, it would doom thousands of potter families to starvation, since they’d never be capable of making the change. I guess it was basically the same rationale behind how we—I mean, we Maya or Teotihuacanos or any of the big-city Mesoamerican civilizations—didn’t use bows and arrows, even though the Too-Talls used them. It was like the whole samurai cult-of-the-sword thing, how Tokugawa figured that if decent guns got into Japan they’d wobble the power structure even if the shogunate got hold of them first. So he and his successors confiscated firearms and gunpowder, shut the Portuguese traders out of most of Japan, and basically kept the place as backward as possible for another two hundred and fifty years.
“We cannot use those things here,” she said. “Finished.”
Hell. I was running out of ideas. This was one eventuality we hadn’t rehearsed for back at the Stake.
“Then do it just to throw out a fresh ball,” I said. It was like saying “Throw in the bet for the pot” in poker, just to see what the other hands were. Do it on a bet, do it on a dare, do it for the sheer ineffable fuck of it.
“You think I’m not curious about your level,” she said. I didn’t answer. “But I am curious. But curiosity is of the teaser, the torturer.” That is, her being curious would hurt people she had no reason to hurt.
Well, at least that suggests she’s got some empathy in there, I thought. Doesn’t it? The thing is—although in general I don’t want to make sweeping statements about humanity in general, not because I’m wrong but just because they’ve all already been made—the thing is, either you’re a person with a head for empathy or, much more often, you’re not. And either she was the first type or we were fucked, and that was all there was to it.