In the Courts of the Sun (75 page)

, et al.:
Forty-six of us, the inner remnants of our division, made it through the suburbs of Teotihuacan, and eighteen suns ago we reached 14 Wounded’s men at the rendezvous point. 14 has lost nearly half of his division, and his scouts said the remains of the Puma clans, who have reorganized under Severed Right Hand, attacked and slaughtered whatever Eagle and Rattler Children are still in the Teotihuacan Valley. Now they are coming after us. A circle of destruction and fire, much of it apparently self-inflicted, seems to be spreading outward from the ruins of the metropolis, like a growing sinkhole. We pass through villages that have starved themselves to death because they believe that, since the world has ended, there’s no reason to eat.
However, there are still living people everywhere. Many of them are now homeless, or uninterested in returning to their homes, and they attach themselves to our caravan. So our numbers continue to grow.
Most of them are not fighters. But this morning, Lady Koh has sent out about a hundred heralds—I’m using the word to convey a job title that combines “runners,” “recruiters,” and “missionaries”—to rustle up combat-age vingtaines out of whatever groups of Star Rattler pilgrims there still are in the unburnt parts of the lake country. They’re also taking word to the heads of a few towns that have converted en masse to the path of the Rattler that Lady Koh wants them to meet her at Akpaktapec, a Oaxacan Rattler town two days west. We’ll gather as many converted families around us as possible as a buffer and then march east to Flayed Hill, where the Cloud House has offered us sanctuary as fellow enemies of the Pumas. From there, if possible, we’ll take an inland route, well off the beaten path, east and south to Ix.
I suppose all this is to say that my chances of reaching Ix again are low. So I’ve decided to put this first cross here, ahead of schedule, before something worse happens. I haven’t yet mastered what I came to master. But I hope (obviously) that there’s enough information in the notes for you to reconstruct the Game and that the Game drug components make their way through the years sufficiently intact for you to reconstruct them chemically or even clonally. To say something cringeworthily corny, if they do, maybe this will all be worthwhile, despite what things look like from here. Anyway, sorry for the mournful tone—more later if possible—
Best,
JDL
₂
Encls.
P.S. Jed—could you pick up some more of those Pyramides for Maximón? Thanks, J
₂
.

[66]

“N
ow, this is the burning, the clearing,” I said in Ch’olan. I took a plug of tobacco, chewed it, and rubbed some into the stain on my inner thigh.
“Now I am borrowing the breath of today, of Ox la hun Ok, Ox la uaxac K’ayab, 13 Dog, 18 Tortoise, of the tenth sun of the third tun of the nineteenth uinal of the nineteenth k’atun of the twelfth b’ak’tun, at noon on the eighth of April in the Year of Our Lord 2012, the sixty-first anniversary of my mother’s birth, and two hundred and fifty-seven suns before the last sun of the last b’ak’tun. Now I ask the saint of today, Santa Constantina, and I ask Saint Simón, whose name to us who are his friends is Maximón, to guard this square of earth, to watch this field.”
I rooted myself at the hub of the revolving worlds.
“Quinchapo wa ’k’ani, pley saki piley,”
I said. “This is the sowing, the planting, now I am scattering the red skulls, white skulls.”
I clicked SCATTER. Three hundred and sixty so-called virtual seeds rattled down onto the 2.8 million OLED pixels that covered one wall of the dark, ergonomically luxurious isolation room, which was forty feet under the Stake Hyperbowl’s playing field. LEON hesitated, lost in thought.
I stretched back in the new, comfy, tacky, expensive shiatsu recliner. An itch flared up under the blood-pressure cuff on my left arm and I scratched it. Well, here we are again, I thought. I should have known it would all come down to the online world in the end. Because, after all, I’m still just a code monkey. We all are. Toiling away in the data mines. Drag. I should’ve been the one that got to see it. Our ancient world, I mean. Yeah, shoulda been Jed
₂
. Lucky bastard. He saw the whole thing. Jewels and muls. Ocellated turkeys and turquoise ocelots. Feather canyons every—
LEON beeped.
It moved a red skull one tun northward, to April 28, and tagged it as
k’ak’ilix
. That is, kind of Anything Can Happen Day. Like on the Mouse Club. YOUR MOVE, it said in the File window.
Hmm.
Over the last three weeks we’d set up LEON so that it could work as a search engine. That is, in addition to the Game window, you could also open windows on the data its autodidactic engines were looking at, and you could use your own moves to steer its searches. Taro’s kids had also improved the interface, so that when we played against LEON we’d have more of a feeling of playing a human opponent. Still, the most LEON could do was make the correct moves. That is, not the insightful moves, or even the best moves. Just the correct ones, what you’d call the “book moves,” if there were a book. And the thing is, in a high-level game of anything—chess, Go, Cootie—the book move isn’t always that different from a bad move. Sometimes it’s even the losing move.
Taro had been visibly disappointed at how things had turned out, how there was no algorithm, no secret formula, nothing that you could teach to a computer and have it solve all your problems. Taro’d wanted some kind of closure. LEON was his baby. He’d wanted that bundle to contain some solutions to his equations, and he’d wanted it so much he almost expected it. Instead, all we got was a whole lot more game lore and game strategies and those five jars of drugs and critter parts. Which wouldn’t increase LEON’s computing power any more than pouring coffee on its hard drive. I tried to tell him how playing the Game isn’t any one thing you can point to, how it was a whole way of being, how there’s no secret to it any more than there’s a secret to playing the cello, but he wasn’t in a mood to hear it. He was a total scientist. If a problem didn’t have a solution you could write on a blackboard, it wasn’t part of his
Welterklärungsmodell
.
And really, why should we even have thought it would work on a computer anyway? The Game had been designed as a lens for the mind, not for some as yet uninvented gadget. To get a computer to play it the way a human would, you’d have to build a computer as massively parallel as a human brain. And even LEON was still a long way from that level. No matter how much more computers know than we do, and no matter how fast they process it, to them it’s still just zeros and ones.
Naturally, as soon as we read about the drugs and before they’d even started analyzing them, I was practically trying to eat the stuff right out of the jar, like Marshmallow Fluff. And naturally they didn’t let me.
I hadn’t thought they’d be so uptight about it. I kept saying that we should take Jed
₂
at his word, estimate the dosage he’d taken, and give it a shot. But the good folks at Lotos Labs—the psychopharmaceutical arm of the Warren Research Group—wanted to test the stuff first. They said they’d concluded that the two active components in the “tzam lic experience” were a bufoteninlike tryptamine and a benzamide compound that was similar to artificial ampakines like CX717. Together, they somehow enabled a vastly increased level of neuronal firing in certain cortices of the brain. Maybe more importantly, the first tomographic tests on sea slugs recorded “unprecedented growth in synaptic plasticity,” that is, a huge increase in the number of new connections, and the types and lengths of new connections, made in the brain during the drugs’ period of bioavailablity. Over time, the stuff would actually change the shape of your brain.
By the seventh they’d synthesized enough for animal testing. The first observation was that there seemed to be different phases as the drugs worked through the system. During the first phase it massively increased geographical memory and sense of direction. They spun the sea slugs around on potter’s wheels in a dark room and put them back into a new, lightless tank, and within a minute or so they stopped spinning around and swam to the east corner, where the feeder had been in the old tank. We watched videos of mice swimming through water labyrinths, and on their second try the little bastards remembered the way through the most complicated mazes the lab had room to build. The monkeys did even more amazing things. Normal macaques can walk on tightropes, but the doped-up ones could walk on wobbling tightropes, in the dark, and then, on command, jump onto another tightrope they’d walked over an hour before. Lisuarte said the equilibrioceptual and muscular effects reminded her of propranolol, which is a beta blocker that a lot of classical musicians take before concerts. During this phase, IQ increased slowly, to over a standard deviation above the individual’s baseline. This even happened with the slugs—which do have IQs, by the way, although none of them are quite Goethe level. The macaques learned dozens of new hand signs. They did jigsaw puzzles that would have stumped an average five-year-old. They staged a mass escape from their cages by having one of them pull a fire alarm on bath day. It was a whole
Secret of NIMH
scene.
But as the intelligence phase peaked, performance began to increase in other, odder areas, skills that aren’t covered in IQ tests. For instance, the monkeys became hypersensitive to color. In general, people can only remember and distinguish a few thousand colors. People who work in, say, the textile printing industry can do around ten thousand. Macaques only manage a few hundred. But in the third hour of exposure to the drugs, that number quadrupled. Another thing was that the slugs and, to a lesser but significant extent, the mammals became much more sensitive to subsonic vibrations, and even to electrical currents in the water around them or running through the floors of their cages. When they groomed each other, one spark of static could make them scream. As they increased the dosage, the lab people also started seeing negative effects—that is, besides the usual and expected nausea, cold sweats, and sniffles. “In
Macaca mulatta
, onychophagia and trichophagia progressed to chronicity,” the report said. In other words, they started biting their nails and chewing and eating their fur. And “in
Aplysia californica
, repeated large doses led to cases of acute autosarcophagy.” That is, the slugs ate themselves until they died.
Dr. Lisuarte and the Lotos people were in an awkward position. Certainly they weren’t strangers to the lucrative world of performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, there was talk that we might have done some inadvertent bio-prospecting. Maybe a damped-down version of the stuff would have a bright future as a civilian medication. But like a lot of big companies Warren Group was heavily invested in the drug prohibition scam, to the point at which most of them probably really believed in it. And the whole Mormon thing didn’t help either. Basically, they were as square as robot shit. And this was despite the fact that everybody around here was a total dope head. Michael Weiner popped oxycontin like Pez when he wasn’t chugging Bundy out of the flask. Tony Sic still took steroids and androstenedione even though he’d stopped playing semipro soccer four years ago, and the lab’s interns were smoking sativa landrace and having fat-white-geek ecstasy parties six nights a week. Even Taro took modafinil. Marena’d gone back to a pack a day. The construction workers were cranked to the eyeballs, the construction workers’ kids were huffing toluene, and at least half of the Mormon staff loaded up on vodka and Red Bull when they thought no one was looking. So you’d think there’d have been some skepticism about the party line. But no.
Marena—talking to me from Colorado, over a new set of encrypted cell phones that she said the firm didn’t know about—told me she wanted to push the suits to loosen up a bit, too, but that I shouldn’t try to force the issue and risk getting kicked out of the project. “Boyle and those guys are just a bunch of accountants,” she said. “Collectively, they have about as much curiosity as a jar of stale kimchi.”
“Uh, yeah,” I went.
“But whenever Lindsay sees the reports he’ll lean on them and they’ll come around.” She also said she was worried about my health if I started popping the stuff unsupervised. I said that was sweet of her, but that she was taking on a Sisyphean task.
“Just hang in there,” she said.
At any rate, on March 10 the results came in on a course of toxicity tests on a line of transgenic Yucatán micropigs. They’d gotten pretty smart on the stuff, and so far they hadn’t manifested any serious health problems. “And biochemically, they’re more than half human,” Lisuarte said. It seemed fair, since behaviorally, humans are more than half pig. Of course, my guess was that Lotos were already doing human trials, probably in India, but that they didn’t want anybody outside of the lab to know about it. Especially not a loose cannon like me. Anyway, they said they’d give us the go-ahead in a week.
But they didn’t. The calendar gears ground forward toward 4 Ahau without us, or anyone else, getting any closer to closing in on any doomster. And outside our little enclave the world was degenerating.
On the eighteenth the Lotos people finally sent down nearly a half-liter of each of the Game drug components. “I told you they would,” Lisuarte said. “They’re as worried as we are.” And she had a point. They were corporate, they were risk-averse, they were a bunch of lily-white, red-state, chicken-pluckin’, shotgun-totin’, penny-wise, pound-foolish, just-say-no Republican douche-bags, but in the end, they were people. They had families, they had investments, they had ambitions, they had medical needs . . . and like us, they understood the math.
Releases got drawn up and signed. Doctors from Salt Lake Central came in to examine me and, I guessed, cover up and/or take the heat if it all went south. People put papers in front of me and I signed them. Probably I shouldn’t have, but there was no time for the niceties. On the nineteenth Lisuarte gave me the green light. I could try thirty mgs of the combined chronolytic and topolytic drugs as long as I was monitored nine ways from Sunday. And then, the first time they gave me the stuff, I got too messed up to play.
Symptoms included vertigo, nausea, scintillating auras—like with a migraine—blackout, tachycardia, and presuicidal depression. When they came into the isolation room I’d slipped out of the chair and, according to Dr. Lisuarte, I’d bitten through my lower lip and was trying to gouge my right calf open with a Logitech ball mouse. They bundled me off to the infirmary. I told them those symptoms weren’t anything out of the ordinary for me, that in fact I went through all of them a few times a day, on a good day, and that I just needed to take another dose and go back to work. But instead they flushed the stuff out of my system and wouldn’t let me near the lab.
I was pretty upset. That is, even after the shit wore off and my mood was back to baseline, I was still pretty upset. I’d gone through fire, water, wind, and human excrement to get the stuff—well, actually, Jed
₂
had taken most of the abuse, but still—and now I wouldn’t even be able to use it. Lisuarte guessed the high-alkaloid component might be interacting badly with my meds. Specifically, it was blocking too much reuptake of glutamic acid, which led to excess nitrogen, excitotoxicity, self-injurious ideation, and a swag bag of other disagreeable effects. Over the next week she replaced my trusty old crew of behavior modifiers with a Don the Beachcomber Zombie cocktail of newer, meaner behavior modifiers. When I’d looked over the dosage list, it was too complicated for me to make much sense of, so I’d run it past my regular doctor back in Miami. He said it sounded like “hammering in a two-penny nail with a battering ram,” as he put it in his folksy way, but I wanted to be a sport and went on it anyway. Amazingly, the new stuff seemed to work. Just a few days later we were getting the effect we wanted: It seemed like there wasn’t much of the old Jed left. Instead of the angsty, vindictive troglodyte I used to enjoy being, there was a cautiously optimistic and rather bland individual also named Jed. In fact, the new me was almost imperturbable. For instance—just as an example—Marena had left for the States on the tenth to see Max, and she’d said she was going to make it back in a week, but here it was almost a month later and she still wasn’t here. She’d said it was because it wasn’t safe to travel. And it was true that things were seriously messed up. People were fleeing some cities and streaming into others. Customs checkpoints had waits of over ten hours. Airlines were hoarding jet fuel. Most major airports had turned a third of their hangars into enforced quarantine camps. Still, it sounded like excuses to me. If Marena gave the Warren gang a chance to work their magic, she could get back here. In fact, it seemed kind of out of character for her to be away while the rest of us thrashed on her project. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. Maybe she couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. Maybe she just didn’t want to pull Max out of school. We’d kind of moved in together, if you could count sleeping in the same prefab dorm room moving in, and I’d thought we’d gotten pretty close, but then when she’d taken off, I wasn’t so sure. Normally I would have been raging and raving and flying up there and panting after her like a cowardly dog. But now, when I thought about her, I’d just get wistful for a second and then go grimly back to what I was doing, just like any normal person meekly accepting his daily ration of despair. Also, No Way still hadn’t turned up. I’d been freaked out about him at first and tried to go back to find him, but now I was just pretty calmly waiting to see what happened. Maybe he’d been sucked into a black hole, like I had.