In the Courts of the Sun (82 page)

It’s a cliché, of course. I mean, the magnitude of pain. It’s like saying “the speed of light.” It’s something one knows about and sometimes talks about with a default position of zero comprehension. Except that unlike with the speed of light, there’s a good reason for the incomprehension, because the moment you do start to comprehend it you just give up. One runs out of the room and hides in a dry bathtub. And it’s only through massive self-delusion that you manage ever to do anything again.
Well, that delusion may have been necessary up until now. But now the end is achievable. And we know it’s the right thing to do—
Whoops.
I was wobbling. I took my eyes off the horizon and got my balance back. Better.
Damn. I could still hear the Unborn screaming.
And no wonder, I thought. We drag them into the world, we give them nine tons of noxious crap on one hand and a half-gram of glowing stuff on the other, and then we want them to act as though they got a fair deal. People agree to abort a fetus whose life would inevitably be a misery, who was going to be born with harlequin ichthyosis, say, but they neglect to abort the ones who’ll be born with quotidalgesia, everyday agony syndrome.
The thing is, you don’t even have an obligation to give somebody something nice, especially not somebody who isn’t born yet. But you do have an obligation not to hurt them. And making them conscious is definitely going to hurt them. Consciousness may be one of the many dirty tricks DNA uses to replicate itself, but that doesn’t mean we have to buy into it. For us, consciousness is nothing but a mistake.
I took a sip of Cruzan.
On 4 Ahau, 8 Darkness, 0.0.0.0.0, August 13, 3113 BC, the ancients made a covenant with their ancestors to give them descendants. There’d be descendants to feed them, to praise them, to remember them, and most of all, to give them the liquor of pain. Je’elsaj is for us, and yaj is for the smokers. They love it the way oenophiles love a ’47 Haut-Brion, the way a butterfly loves sugar water, or the way NASCAR fans love a crash.
But it would only be for so long. You have to give the smokers—or ancestors or gods or whatever—exactly what you owe them, but you don’t have to give them any more than that.
So the Great Adders, the Knowers, had calculated that 4 Ahau was the day the ghastly payoff could finally stop. It was time to do the right thing by the Aftercomers.
I leaned back. I cracked my knuckles and reset my cheek flap. I looked around. The dog with the voice like Desert Dog’s had stopped barking. In a few minutes the sunlight would start creeping onto my table. I signaled for the waitress.
The real thing about being an adder, I thought, isn’t just being able to play the Game, or being able to deal with the Salter and the Steersman. The real responsibility is to be able to weigh up the world without getting befuddled by sentimentality, without spending all your energy on wishful thinking and superstitious nostrums and selective denial and all the other things normals do. Your duty is to see things unfogged, to understand enough to be able to work out what’s actually right, and then to do what’s right and not what makes you feel good. Heed the a’aanob, I thought. They know whereof they speak.
K’a’oola’el, k’a’oltik.
He who knows, knows.
The sages who wrote the Codex weren’t telling us what would happen, but what should happen.

[0]

W
aitress Girl sidled over. For the first time I really looked at her. She had frappuccino skin, a punky hair arrangement, and a guileless face. I figured she was about fifteen. Even though I wasn’t in Gametime I could see a halo around her waist in that horrible yaj color, that bruised gray like hot pewter. Some kind of abdominal pain, I thought. A difficult baby? No, I’d spot that. An ulcer? Or a uterine cyst, maybe. Don’t ask her about it. You’re getting sharper, but you’re not a doctor.
I paid. She sashayed off.
En todos modos.
One thing was still bugging me, though. How could Koh not have known about what the Codex was telling me to do? Or rather, of course she knew, but how could she not have told me, or rather not have told Jed
₂
?
I guess she’d just wanted us, or rather me, to get the message. Well, so she led Jed
₂
on a bit. Nothing new there. But how could he have been so clueless about it?
Except that I’ve had that sort of trouble with a lot of things. I mean, I can be pretty gullible sometimes. Especially when there’s a good-looking young lady involved.
Well, anyway, he’d never know. Jed
₂
, that is.
I had the penultimate slug of rum. Good luck to him. Bastard.
I got out my wallet again and left a 500 percent tip, because, you know, what’s the difference? I finished the coffee. I popped one more marshmallow.
Parasites, huh?
Mierditas
. Oh, well. Maybe they can’t handle alcohol. I had the last slug of rum. I leaned back.
So it’s on me, I thought. It was a sense of . . . well, it was a tremendous sense of duty. But it wasn’t overwhelming. It was energizing.
Anyway, like I’d said, it would have to be somebody who’d looked at the world and rejected it completely. Right? Somebody who could grasp the magnitude of what needed to happen, and who could accept that obligation, and who could manage to carry it out.
Esta bien.
No problem.
I had the means. I had the will. I had the disgust and the despair. And best of all, I wasn’t some dyed-in-the-DNA fuckup like Madison. He’d probably have half botched it anyway. There would have been some virus-free holdouts in Antarctica or wherever, and eventually they would have gotten the whole thing started again, and it would’ve all been for nothing. Well, that wasn’t going to happen this time. Not on my watch.
It was a big responsibility, but I could handle it.
In fact, I thought, it was going to be easy. They’d sent the message of what had to be done, but more importantly they’d also sent the tool to achieve it.
I closed the Game board and stood up. Finally and unequivocally, I knew what I had to do.

End of Book I

GLOSSARY

ahau—lord, overlord
ahau-na—lady, noblewoman
bacab—“world-bearer,” one of four local ahauob subject to the k’alomte’
b’ak’tun—a period of 144,000 days, roughly 394.52 years
b’alche’—lilac-tree beer
b’et-yaj—teaser, torturer
Ch’olan—the twenty-first-century version of the language spoken by the Ixians and others
grandeza—a pouchful of pebbles
h’men—a calendrical priest or shaman. Also translated as “sun adder” or “daykeeper”
hun—“one,” or “a” as a definite article
k’atun—a period of 7,200 days (nearly twenty years)
k’iik—blood, a male belonging to a warrior society
k’in—sun, day
koh—tooth
kutz—a neotropical ocellated turkey
milpa—a traditional raised cornfield of about 21 × 20 meters, usually cleared by burning
mul—hill; by extension “pyramid” or “volcano”
nacom—sacrificer
pitzom—the Maya ball game
popol na—council house
quechquemitl—Mexican woman’s triangular serape
sacbe—“white path,” a sacred straight causeway
sinan—scorpion
tablero—the horizontal element in a Mexican-style pyramid
talud—the sloped element in a Mexican-style pyramid
teocalli—Nahuatl for “god house,” or temple
tun—360 days
tu’nikob’—sacrificers or offering priests, or, literally, “sucklers”
tzam lic—“blood lightning,” a frisson under the skin
tz’olk’in—the ritual year of 260 days
uay—a person’s animal co-essence
uinal—a period of twenty days
waah—tortilla
Xib’alb’a—the Underworld, ruled by the Nine Lords of the Night
xoc—shark
yaj—pain, pain smoke
Yucatec—the present-day language of the Yucatán Maya, a version of which was also spoken during the Classic period

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

People who did enough work on this book to deserve (at least) second-author credit include Anthony D’Amato, Barbara D’Amato, Julie Doughty, Janice Kim, Prudence Rice, and Deborah Schneider.
People who commented on multiple drafts and who helped in many other ways include Jacqueline Cantor, Lisa Chau, Brian DeFiore, Michael Denneny, Molly Friedrich, Marissa Ignacio, Erika Imranyi, James Meyer, and Brian Tart.
People who commented on at least one draft and helped in other respects include Amy Adler, Janine Cirincione, Sheryl D’Amato, Michael Ferraro, Jonny Geller, Karin Greenfield-Sanders, Sherrie Holman, Francis Jalet-Miller, Ellen Kim, Diana MacKay, Bill Massey, Julie Oda, Bruce Price, David Rimanelli, Rebecca Stone-Miller, Susan Schulman, Michael Siegel, Brian Tart, Caroline Trefler, and Joan Turchik.
People who helped in other ways include, among many others, Laurie Anderson, Steve Arons, Jack Bankowsky, Eric Banks, Barbara and Ken Bauer, Mary Boone, Peter Coe, Anne-Marie Corominas, Paul, Emily, and Adam D’Amato, Christy Ennis, Stanley Fish, Patrick Garlinger, Sherrie Gelden, Cathy Gleason, Justin Gooding, Stacy Goodman, Wendy Goodman, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, John Habich, Peter Halley, Sylvia Heisel, Bryan Huizienga, Nick Jones, Barbara and Justin Kerr, Malachi Kim-Price, Lily Kosner, John Byron Kuhner, “Mad P,” Jamie McDonald, Annetta Massie, Jamie McDonald, Mary Ellen Miller, Barbara Mundy, Pablo and Shana Pastrana, Helmut Pesch, Robert Pincus-Witten, Marlón Quinoa, Alexis Rockman, Sarah Rogers, Eric S. Rosenthal, M.D., Dietmar Schmidt, Deb Sheedlo, Pamela Singh, Michael Spertus, Stephane Theodore, Jack Tilton, Jane Tompkins, Andrew Solomon, Brian Vandenberg, Marshall Weir, “Tony Xoc,” “Flor Xul,” Alice Yang, Eric Zimmerman, and Sergej Zoubok.
The equations in Chapter 20 are taken from Joaquin P. Noyola, University of Texas at Arlington, “Relativity and Wormholes,” 2006, and from S. V. Krasnikov, “Toward a Transversable Wormhole,” 2008.
Thanks also to the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, pauahtun.org, the University of Illinois, and Yale University. Illustrations were produced using software by Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Wacom.
Finally, thanks to Brian D’Amato for any and all errors.
For a select bibliography, please see briandamato.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian D’Amato can usually be found in either New York, Michigan, or Chicago. He is an artist who has shown his sculptures and installations at galleries and museums in the U.S. and abroad, including the Whitney Museum, the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1992 he co-organized a show at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York that was the first gallery show exploring the then-new medium of “virtual reality.” He has written for magazines including
Harper’s Bazaar, Index, Vogue, Flash Art,
and most frequently
Artforum,
and has taught art and art history at CUNY, the Ohio State University, and Yale. His 1992 novel,
Beauty,
which Dean Koontz called “the best first novel I have read in a decade,” was a best-seller in the U.S. and abroad and was translated into several popular languages. For more information see www.briandamato.com.

Look for the second book in the Sacrifice Game Trilogy
by Brian D’Amato
Coming from Dutton in 2010.