In the Courts of the Sun (81 page)

“Leucochloridium.”
“Yeah. Or like, you know, that thing that makes mice stop being afraid of cats.”
“Toxoplasmosis.”
“Right. That’s why it had to be in a liquid, there were like really tiny little critters swimming around in there.”
“Uh . . . huh,” I said. I was a little dizzy but I don’t think I visibly wobbled.
“And that’s why it took so long to get the stuff ready, they had to clone them up out of some other thingie or something.”
“Okay, well, what . . . look, what are they, exactly?”
“The critters?”
“Yeah, are they trematodes, are they protozoans, are—”
“I don’t know.” She looked me in the eyes. I looked back. She looked down.
“Why couldn’t they just isolate the psychoactive part of the secretions and just give us that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “I guess that would have taken too long, or they didn’t know which compounds it was, or it had to combine with some human neurotransmitter, or . . . I don’t know. You know more about that kind of—”
“Well then, okay, what are the symptoms, what’s their life cycle, what are the short- and long-term effects, what’s the prognosis—”
“They say they’re working on a cure.”
“A cure or a treatment? There isn’t even a cure for malaria yet.”
“Maybe it’s just a treatment.”
“Damn.”
“If you can resist your impulse to go—well, I don’t know what you want to do, but I was afraid you might try to interrogate Dr. Lisuarte or something—”
“That’s a good idea.”
“If you can hold off on that, as soon as I get out there”—she meant to the Stake—“I’m going to find out whatever else I can and call you. . . .”
“You might make them nervous.”
“I won’t. Trust me.”
“What about Ashley
₂
and all the other people who took the stuff ?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to work on it and we’re going to find out and document whatever we can and I’m going to take it all to Lindsay, who I’m sure isn’t in on it because all these people always try to tell him as little as possible anyway, and then you and I are just going to deal with it. But I’m really, really sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. We’ll handle it.”
Cono cono cono,
I thought. I am so, so screwed. They really hung me out to dry, these, these people—I am so going to—
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Pause.
“Well, otherwise you seem good,” she said. There was a bass note of impending closure in her tone.
“You have to go?”
“Well, I’m sure they’re done refueling.”
Don’t push it, I thought. Forget it. Don’t fool yourself, don’t drive yourself crazy, don’t beg, don’t do any of those things. She’s busy. She really does have to work. She’s got a child. She’s got an empire to run. She’s got fish to fly and kites to fry. She’s corporate. She’s tightly scheduled. She’s living Xtra Large.
“Hey, are you sure you’re all right?” Marena asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I can quit anytime.”
“Very funny.”
As one might have expected, there was another awkward pause. Was I smelling the vomit from out in the street, or was it just my inner landscape?
“I’m feeling a little awkward here,” I said.
“Sorry.” She looked down at the blue Formica tabletop.
“It’s okay.” Damn it, Jed. You just rolled over, spread your legs, and said, ‘Please be rough.’ You pussy. Corny, stupid, pathetic pussy—
“All right, look,” she said. “There’s another thing. I wasn’t going to mention this right now, but I should tell you that I’m thinking about getting married. Again.”
Pause.
“This would be to someone other than myself,” I said.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, you don’t know him, he’s a neighbor in Woody Creek.”
“Huh. Uh, well, congratulations.”
“Save it, look, you know . . . I think, the deal is, I think the you-and-I thing is actually really terrific. But I don’t think you’re a settler-downer. Are you?”
“Well, mmm, no, I settle—I mean, I’m not a settler, no.”
“Girls need to settle,” she said. “I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s just a time-scale thing. Girls have a very short shelf life, and this whole Doom thing just made—I mean, look, girls just need all this stupid—you know, they don’t really care who it is as long as he’ll just, like, wear khaki shorts and, like, coach Max’s lacrosse team and stay awake during the day and go to bed at night, and, like, be boring—anyway, you know all this.”
“Boring is hot,” I said.
“Yeah, for girls of a certain age, it definitely is.”
“Right.” Stupidly, I was feeling kind of not-in-a-good-way weightless. And maybe more about this Marena thing than about my new status as an infected host.
“Anyway—look, just come out and we’ll talk about it when we have time to talk about it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Okay. I’d better go. I swear I’m going to make this right. Call me.”
“I will,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I mean it.” She stood up.
“I will,” I said. I stood up.
She kissed me again. I didn’t entirely kiss back. She turned and walked into the indoor part of the restaurant. I looked over the balcony.
Damn, I thought.
The thing was, when I’d just met her, Marena had seemed like she was from some fresher, cooler planet close to the universe’s imaginary bright center. And I was like, don’t even fantasize about it, Jed. Not in a quintillion years. And then I’d thought she was turning out a bit like me under the gloss, and we were developing a rapport, and all the coolness was just an act. And now she was back to coolness, and I was thinking maybe it was the rapport that was an act. Or they were both acts, but she only did the rapport one at special command performances. Bitch. What you need—oh, there she is.
She came out of the door twenty feet below me and walked out into Fort Street. She didn’t look up. Oops, no, she did. She waved. I waved. She turned away and let herself into the back of the X1. It pulled away. I sat back in the little uncomfortable chair.
Well, that was . . . unbearably uncomfortable, I thought.
Moth okay.
Hell.
Stupidly, intolerably, inevitably, I’d started thinking about this moment—it was after the Hippogriff incident and before we picked up the lodestone cross—when I was reading and Marena was asleep and dreaming with her eyes darting around behind her smooth lids. The window had been open and there was a medium-large sphinx moth in the room, flapping around the screen of my phone, and it landed on her forehead.
“Spider,” she said, still 90 percent asleep but a little alarmed. “Get it away.”
“It’s just a friendly moth,” I said in her ear.
“Oh,” she said in this unconsciously little-girlish tone. “Moth okay. Friendly.” She rolled over toward me. It felt like having a baby daughter, somebody who absolutely trusts you—
Fuck.
You get a moment or two of absolute closeness, and then when it’s back to the dirty business of life as usual you get upset that it’s not still there, and then try to find that again and keep repeating the cycle, over and over without learning. There’s intimacy and distance and the ancient, perennial, insoluble, and cataclysmic disjunction between them, and you just keep—Fuck. You know this person inside out, you know how she orgasms, how she sleeps, and then in the morning you’re both just a pair of dirty fucks again, and you hate yourselves and each other for it. You’re pathetic. What did you expect? That you were going to ride off with her into the sunset in a maroon X1? It was just a nine-night stand. Or was it eight?
Maybe I should go back out there, I thought. Maybe we’d get back into that same groove again. Isolation, nothing to do, bad-looking colleagues. You’ll be back in the sack again in one day. No big deal. These days it’s just in and out of grooves, she’ll give Woody the boot in—
Except no. Don’t delude yourself. She was just gaming you to get you to work harder. Just volunteer for this suicide mission and you get to spend your last night before deployment with Miss Seoul. You maroon.
And the worst thing about it is how conventional it all is. The stupid little fling, your stupid emotions, the unavoidable last awkward conversation, it’s corny and unremarkable. You’re worse than damaged, unstable, and semiautistic, Jedface. You’re
ordinary
. Skills or no skills. Money or no money. Game or no Game.
And even when you play the Game, you’re not really playing it. It’s playing you. As was she. As does everybody.
Loser.
I took my hat off and wiped an installment of sweat out of the band. Frigid interstellar plasma winds whistled over my dome. Well, maybe you deserve it, I thought. You’re not even that great at the Game. You can’t even get to nine stones. Not even with the aid of a computer with a brain the size of the Orion Nebula. You can’t even finish an eight-stoner.
I put my hat back on.
Damn it.
What the hell were those things, anyway?
Hmm.
Just one little solitaire game, I thought. Half an hour. Just play out that last position. No big deal. I can quit anytime. Go ahead, set your sights a little higher.
I dug two plugs of tobacco out of the little bag in my other waist pocket and sneaked them into my mouth and masticated them into a big old quid. Okay. I got up, went inside past the noisy second-floor bar, down the stairs, and into the bathroom—the door said BAD BWOYS—and shot up with the fourth-from-last AirJet of my clandestine stash of hatz’ k’ik’. I spat out the quid of tobacco. God, I’m disgusting, I thought. Silly habit. Quids are for hicks. I rubbed tobacco juice into my stain, put myself back together, rubbed lukey water on my face, and went back to my mini-table.
I opened my phone. That Ixian mural was still there. Damn, what was that thing? Snail, centipede, both, or neither? Well, whatevs. I clicked SACRIFICE. The game board came up. Just to feel independent, I closed down the Net connection. I didn’t need it this time anyway. By now I pretty much knew what was out there. I had facts at my fingertips. Too many facts. The hard thing is to comprehend the weights of those facts relative to each other. Like, “There’s a
Sphecius
wasp on the side of my rum glass” and “The universe contains about 4 × 10
⁷⁹
atoms” are both facts, but one is a lot more important than the other. Although I’m not saying which one.
I started feeling the throbs, spreading from my left thigh, down into my foot, and up into my groin.
“Now, this is the burning, the clearing,” I mumbled. I put up the last position from my last good game, the one that nailed Madison. I wasn’t even sure why I was going back into it, except that sometimes you want to finish playing out an alternate line to see who would have won. No matter how little you’re enjoying the show, past a certain point you stay in the theater to see how it ends.
“Now I am borrowing the breath of today,” I said, “
La hun Kawak, ka Wo,
10 Hurricane, 2 Toad, the nineteenth sun of the fifth uinal of the nineteenth tun of the nineteenth ka’tun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun.” I moved my eighth skull forward, toward 4 Ahau, up the western slope of that eroded mountain with the rusty dust, toward the cave in the sky with the echoing howls.

[71]

O
ne of the distinctive effects of the Game drugs was that they seemed to create a separate place in your mind. You could take a break from a game and go about your regular life for days or weeks, and you wouldn’t feel like you were thinking about the game at all, but then when you took another shot of the stuff you’d click right back into where you were and go on playing without having to reorient yourself. I guess it wasn’t really much different from the feeling of watching a new episode of a TV show every week, or picking up a book where you left off, or just playing Warcraft on your phone or whatever, except that it was more self-generated and orders of magnitude more intense. Anyway, even though on one level I knew I was sitting at this rickety table on a balcony in Belize City, when I focused on the board it was as though I was right back in the same place I’d been when I was looking for Madison, on the west side of that crumbling mountain, and with almost no effort I could imagine the warmth of the old sun on my back and hear the hiss of the clouds of brick-red dust sifting down around me, and as I moved my eighth skull forward the lucidity increased and it was almost as though I could feel the stone under my feet and smell the bone smoke in the wind. This way, I thought. He goes. I go. That way. I kept climbing, up past the dust into clouds of steam and then up past that, through a layer of clouds of ashes. I stumbled. The stairs had aged since the last time I’d come this way and they were almost too cracked and pitted to stand on, but on the mental equivalent of all fours I kept climbing, out of the ash and through clouds of ice shards into the frozen zone just below the shell of the sky, up onto the eroded terrace. The booming and bellowing were louder than before. The boulder was gone. For a second I tried to get a look at the coming worlds in the east, but they were still hidden behind the bulk of the mountain, and I crouched down again. The maw of the shaft in front of me had widened since 13 Dog 18 Tortoise, and as I felt my way down into it the stone crumbled around me, and the chasm opened out as I descended, and I could tell it was way too deep for skull #8. Go for it, I thought. No problem.
I moved out my ninth skull. The abyss widened, and already I could tell it was larger than any cave on earth. Maybe it would be like rappelling down a methane icefall into one of the miles-wide bubbles in the interior of some Saturnian moon. Even so, the ninth stone had a solid link to the eighth, and I crawled down and down, toward the center of the sphere, into the roaring vortex. The beings whirled around me, almost but never quite grazing me, the way bats will rush past you if you stand in the mouth of a cave at sundown. You smell their sour guano smell, you feel the whipping air, and you hear the soft roar of their wings like a storm of leather leaves, and they always, always miss you . . . but the things around me were bigger than bats, and slower, and somehow . . . gentler, I guess, and wingless—and of course bats, to us anyway, are silent, and these things were deafeningly loud. Maybe this was where Dante’s mind had gone, I thought, when he imagined the
luxuriosi
in their infernal hurricane. As my internal eyes adapted to the gloom the presences became clearer, and without seeing individuals I began to make out their motion, which was more like sea creatures, although now they didn’t look like sea lions. They were more like beluga whales with their domed brows and taut white skin . . . but then their curled spines made them look like hunchbacks, or maybe they were more like dwarfs, with short bodies and huge heads . . . but then they had short fat tails, and only rudimentary buds for arms—like tadpoles, maybe, just morphing into toads?—except they had ears, and throbbing hearts visible through their translucent skin, and swelling eyes darting behind closed lids, like—
They were embryos.
They were the a’aanob, the aftercomers, the spirits of the unborn.
No wonder there were millions and quintillions and near infinities of them. There were whole populations of the future in here, all the men and women who would be born after 4 Ahau and who would never have been born if that boulder had fallen and blocked the shaft. Now, when the sun of the b’ak’tun reached its zenith on 4 Ahau, it would shine down the shaft into this cave and light up the multitudes of a’aanob. The ether in the great cave would heat and expand, and inexorably, irresistibly, they’d be carried up and out of the shaft, and wave after wave of them would spread over the earth. I remembered what Jed
₂
had said, that Lady Koh had said about how the people of the zeroth level had three caves: the Cave of the Dead, which was on the other side of the world, in the west, and then the Cave of the Breathing, which is of course what we would call the world, and then, here, the Cave of the Unborn.
I watched. I listened. Suddenly, I realized something about them: that they were happy.
The shades of potential consciousnesses were playing. Or, to use an obsolescent word, they were frolicking. They swam in knots, chasing each other, like otters. They bumped hips like dancers in a 1970s disco. They spun around and around out of sheer delight in the motion.
Slowly, like my inner eyes, my internal ears adapted, and the cacophony of howls almost began to make sense. The first thing I realized was that they weren’t roaring at each other. They were calling out to me, specifically me, in the ur-language babies know, and now I could make out what they were saying:
LEAVE US HERE!
YOU! FLESH DROPPER! PLEASE LEAVE US HERE!
WE DON’T WANT TO LEAVE!
WE DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN THE SUN!
COVER US UP!
DROP THE STONE OVER US!
PROTECT US!
HIDE US!
DROP THE STONE!!!
There wasn’t even one of them who wanted to be born.
Still, I couldn’t stay here. At some point, even in a solo game, you have to make a move, and it was as though my ninth skull was straining against the edges of its square. I climbed four squares up the blue-green axis, up through the striated years, out of the cave and into cold air, doggishly shaking off the amniotic mist. I could still hear the a’aanob screaming behind me, begging me to help them stay unborn, away from the world of pain. My last skull climbed and climbed and came to a small flat green jade block, about the size of home plate, and I realized that now the thin air was cloudless. I stood and looked around. The planes of time rotated below me, white, black, yellow, and red. I’d reached the summit.
“Can I get you anything else, honey?” the waitress asked in her soft voice.
“Uh, could I get another triple espresso?” I asked. “And another shot of Cruzan?”
“Sure thing, honey.” She rolled off. I stretched and resettled myself. That dog was still barking out there, in a howly voice like Desert Dog’s. I watched the little scene loop in my mind a few times, the last few minutes of the last night I’d sneaked out to his cage, when I knew my stepbrothers were going to torture him to death the next morning, and I’d given him water and petted him for a while through the wire, and then finally when it was clear that the sun wouldn’t wait I got a strap from my backpack and found a stick of chromed metal from some car trimming, and I tied the strap around his neck with the stick through it and twisted it around. The strap sank deep into his luxuriant ruff, but he was oddly quiet, trembling but not struggling, so that I was quite sure he knew what I was doing. He was dead in less than a minute, curled up with an expression of frozen gratitude. The waitress came back. I had a sip of rum, a slug of espresso, and, just to spite Marena, a marshmallow.
Ahh. Better.
I looked back down at the board, where I was still standing on the turquoise center square, at the peak of the inverted mountain. I blinked around. Below me the storms had calmed and the dust was settling over the plains. Four staircases, or paths or arteries or whatever, led down from the block. The northeast path stretched off over coasts crusted with corroded mill towns and through whitecaps and silver gulfs over undersea canyons, under strings of giant aluminum aircraft and out past stained limestone cities, off into the fast ice, and then floe ice, and then field ice. A hot-tar smell of the recent past wafted up on my left and I turned ninety degrees counterclockwise, toward the northwest. There were dunes of cinders and puffs of radioactive ash, and beyond that deserts strewn with oil rigs and dry valleys like bowls of acid gas over dark glowing coals, with snarls of asphalt draped on and around them, and beyond that I could see chains of coal smoke from steam locomotives and files of starving families dragging sleds across the prairies, and then beyond that flocks of trash-fed seagulls over dark water, and tundras and grease ice in the permanent twilight. I looked southwest, over choleric salt marshes crawling with malacostraca and plains with packs of giant canary-yellow carnivorous birds running down herds of hipparia. I noticed a coppery armadillo the size of Marena’s Cherokee rooting in a dry gulch, and then a formation of
Quetzalcoatlus northropi
, with forty-foot wings covered with gold down, spiraling unflappingly over the corpses of giant crocodiles on the left bank of the Cretaceous Seaway, and beyond that there were more and more creatures and places and times, instants of the past like sheaves of animation cells pressed into striated canyons, to the point where I had to turn left again. In the southeast, dawn spread bloody onychitomized fingers over realms of pure potential that expanded out and out, past where the horizon would be on a spherical earth, as though I were standing on a planet the size of Jupiter, or not even, but on a truly flat and infinite plain, and because the air was absolutely clear, or maybe rather because there was no air, it was as though I could see the details of events in the farthest distance as clearly as the ones right below me. Too many details, in fact. Too much.
I turned around again, slowly, counterclockwise, like a reflection of the sweeping second hand of Lindsay Warren’s Oyster Perpetual. The Steersman’s final phase was kicking in, when you start to sense what Lady Koh had called the “other winds.” Jed
₂
had explained that she meant something like “elementals,” or personified invisible forces. With me the first one I usually see is heat. It looks a little like an infrared photograph, except the heat radiating out of bodies and engines and the earth has a color more like Day-Glo brown and a smell like rum and red pepper. Then other things come into the picture, diamond flickers of solar flares spewing out, looping around the earth, and falling back into the sun, lugubrious maroon radio waves spelling out tides of terabytes of useless data, microwaves in a color like what orange and purple would mix to if they didn’t make gray, and, at one limit of my expanding blob of awareness, cyan cyclones of gamma rays jittering through my body like shotgun blasts through a swarm of deerflies. I thought I could hear asteroids screeching toward the earth, that I could feel the friction between tectonic plates, the energy building up in granite watch-springs, that I could watch gravity—which is a kind of mulberry-purple color—spreading out from the earth and bunching into dark stars and draining into the abscesses in existence, and that even the black holes were visible in a way, silhouetted against drifts of interstellar dustballs. I started to distinguish smaller forces, or let’s say humbler ones, the powers of living things, vegetable transpiration flashing green and ocher, the orange mercilessness of trees strangling their neighbors, pheromonal trails dragging animals around like beads on strings. Eventually I started to make out human forces. Sexual compulsion had a highway-flare cherry glow, and it washed over the populous wastes like ripples in a pool of oil, scattered with flashes of orgasms that I thought I could taste at a distance and that I thought had a taste like sea urchins. Green-white sparks and arcs of fear crackled across the landscape, clustering into lightning balls in schools and hospitals and war zones.
Yaj
—pain, or pain smoke—rose off the plain like morning mist from boiling bloody dew. It was that livid gray color, almost lavender but not in a good way. It gathered into wisps and fogbanks and clouds. It had that same flavor that Jed
₂
had said you taste in animals that have been tortured to death, that extraterrestrial tang like the opposite of cinnamon. It was the essence to which the smokers were most addicted.
As I think I mentioned before, the word
yaj
means “pain” in Ch’olan, but more in the sense of “pain smoke” or “pain as an offering” or, you might say, “holy pain.” The opposing word would be
je’elsaj,
which you could translate as “pleasure” or “happiness” but which really means something more passive, like “rest” or “ease.” But even after I’d stood for what seemed like hours scanning the eastern horizon, the yaj was like a roof of clouds covering the entire landscape, and the moments of je’elsaj were like grassy lime-green mountain-tops pushing up here and there through the overcast. It’s not even a contest, I thought. If you took any individual person and totaled up their instants of pain against their instants of happiness, it was like a gallon against a drop. And the farther I looked—well, I’d have thought things would get better in the future, that they’d run out of wars and cure all diseases or at least just dope everybody up with happy pills and plop them in front of a two-million-pixel screen, but instead the pain became even more pervasive as I looked farther out, and not one of the n-illions of possible world lines had more than a few scattered islands of je’elsaj peeking out of the clouds. For one reason or another things were just going to get worse and worse.
Even so, I tried to do my bit and measure one against the other. But the more I counted and calculated and compared, the more I felt like I was, say, Marie Curie, and somebody’d given me nine tons of pitchblende ore, and I’d had to extract all the radium out of it, and after three years I’d come up with a residue at the bottom of the last refining mortar that was so thin nobody would even know it was there if it didn’t glow like a sunofabitch.
Finally, I gave up.
Really, it’s no surprise, I thought. Pound for pound, pain is just n
^fuck
th times more powerful. Anybody who’s experienced real pain knows that you’d give up more than an hour of any kind of pleasure—at least—to avoid a minute of real pain. I kept thinking about that kid in the video with the Milk Duds, with her face falling and crunching up and spraying out tears, and how just a few minutes before she was happy, she was bubbly and optimistic and having a great time, possibly the best day of her life so far, even, and how suddenly everything got wrecked for her. Just getting a glimpse of the unbridgeable distance between her state on the video and her state a little before, and how for her that distance is everywhere and forever—well, to glimpse it is to conclude that the only thing to do is just to have the entire universe vanish immediately, in a puff of quarks, because it’s just too terribly wrong, and no amount of happiness could ever make up for it. Even if one week from now somebody cured aging and all diseases, and on that same day somebody else invented cold fusion, teleportation, and a delicious nonfattening doughnut, and after that there would be a trillion years of happy, deathless people, it still wouldn’t be worth keeping the world around for that long, because in the meantime some other kid would have the same level of disappointment, and nothing that came after would even come close to balancing out the magnitude of that disappointment. If you have even a scrap of empathy, you know it invalidates everything good about the world. If you don’t have empathy, then the pain has to happen to you for you to get the message. And people who think they don’t feel that way—well, they may be nice people, but they’re addicted to denial. They’re like kids getting driven past a herd of cows and cooing about how cute the cows are while they eat hamburgers. The pain can’t be alleviated, it can’t be ameliorated, it can’t be recompensed, and it can’t be condoned. And most of all, it must not be repeated.