Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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They rolled the next batch of sacrifices down the stairs alive, just to get the party mood going again, first Loopy, then Retarded, and then Jock, Sullen, and Scuzzy all at once. Since the atole was finished it was all right to pollute the stairs with inferior blood. They bounced over and down and around and around, glortching and squealing, their movements defining five separate arcs from living to dead. To the audience-I almost said “to my family”-it was pretty much the funniest thing in the world. Great sense of humor, guys, I thought. I shoulda brung some tapes of The Benny Hill Show.

An acolyte tapped the platform next to my foot. I turned. He was offering me a regulation-size ball, freshly wrapped out of white rubber ribbon. Its glyphs said 18 Jog’s head was inside, just in case there was any doubt. I took the ball and held it over my head. I could feel the inrush of breath underneath me. I threw it down the steps. It bounced higher and higher as it fell lower, finally arcing high into the crowd, and then bobbing from one lucky person to another as they hipped it back and forth across the square.

Pitzom pay-ee, I thought. Let the Game Begin. I signed for Koh’s escort to bring her out. The hissing rose up again from Star Rattler’s mul. The snake poured down her steps again. The crowd below scattered aside. The mul’s temple doorway, recently resculpted as Star Rattler’s giant mouth, vomit-birthed a big blue egg-box and flicked its rattle against it. The egg exploded and Koh emerged headfirst, like a baby, in a cowl of metallic green beetle shells sewn in a celestial map onto a manto pieced from the skins of four hundred black iguanas.

(60)

She floated up the steps toward me, twice as tall as her actual height, carried by a pair of dwarf bearers hidden under her long star-scale-skirt. Four of her own attendants followed her, two steps behind. It was a little out of the ordinary for her to be here and there’d be some muttering among the oldsters. But really, since the gifts were over, women could step on the holy ground without polluting anything. Anyway, things are gonna be different around here, I thought. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

I reset my stilt-sandals on the sharp lip of the threshold and nearly fell forward again. In the smoke and the amethyst half-light things seemed closer than they were, even without depth perception. A new set of Harpy Fliers had climbed the poles and were spinning downward, and the Ocelots were dancing through the costumed celebrants, rocking and almost falling, strutting and voguing, uninhibited but also totally controlled. It wasn’t like a nightclub or anything, actually it was just the old men who were supposed to really dance, and the others just sort of bopped. But the righteous dub ran through everything. It was so different from the dour, stale Teotihuacan vigil. It had a sense of beginning. A lot of the spectators and dancers were popping off into orgasmic trances, but even so, they still kept pulsing to the same gemutlich beat. There’s really nothing nearly so powerful as tribal fellow-feeling. And as I watched the rough edges of artifice disappeared and I forgot the dragon had legs, or that there were ropes holding the fliers in the air. The revelers’ masks fused to their flesh and pulsed and rippled and grimaced. I could feel my smile flowing through to the scales of my jade mask, everything meshing. The dancers’ back racks unfolded into pulsing mating displays, the gods’ power rising off them in clouds of musk, and it wasn’t a ceremony anymore but the event itself, gods kicking up the world just for the hell of it a long time ago, now, and again. It was a childlike feeling but it also had this brooding, shrouded purposefulness to it, and a bittersweetness about how I was part of a we, and how we were all so pathetically grand, so hopeful, so alive, I got this love-twinge and felt tears soaking my face-padding. It sounds sappy but it’s really comprehending the quiddity of whatever it is, the what-it-is-ness, how limited it is, how much we could love only each other, that really gets you. Twenty-first-century people haven’t lived at all, I thought. You’ve got to go for it, you have to string yourself along the thread where sex and violence and pleasure and pain and egotism and oblivion all intersect on the intensity graph, to this point of exhilaration without concepts, just thereness, that pure no-doubt living-goal insects feel, and if you haven’t gotten there at least once it’s like you’ve been looking at the ocean through a window without ever swimming in it. Or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time.

Koh rose up in front of me. Invisibles spread the ancient great-mat at the edge of the platform. I stepped onto it and sat down-so slowly that it took over a minute-facing north, so that when I looked over my left shoulder I could see the vertiginous rush of the Steps and the whole roiling zocalo. Actually, the entire area between the two great pyramids was considered a kind of ball court. But it was at least a hundred times the area of an actual playing trench, much too big for humans to play on. Instead the balls were the planets and moon and sun. Normally it just worked on its own, slowly, but in this one ritual Koh and I were going to bounce them forwards ourselves, and use the people to mark where they might land.

The dwarves set Koh down four arms away from me, facing me-that is, south-and slithered off, back into the sanctuary, keeping low so the crowd couldn’t see them. Down in the forum the invisibles were clearing everyone off the central square, an area about three rope-lengths on a side. It had been pumiced and buffed and freshly repainted in the color zones of the five directions with the full Sacrifice Game grid superimposed on it like a squared-off spiderweb. Finally, I thought. The Human Game. Let’s go.

Koh’s attendants snipped off her blue-green-goggle-eyed snake-jaw helmet and instantly started constructing an Ocelot queen’s coiffure and headdress in its place. She was pretty much giving up her old role as a sort of nun to Star Rattler. Still, marrying me was the safest plan for her. Later-not much later-before I entombed myself, I’d announce at the popol na that Koh was going to continue ruling, as the mouth of my uay, and then, eventually, as regent for her son, assuming we were going to have or secretly adopt one. And meanwhile, with me out of the picture, Koh would keep working to unify the Ocelot and Rattler factions until the situation was stable enough for her to relocate. And-at least until the twelfth b’aktun-that would be my contribution to posterity.

She and I saluted each other, but she didn’t say anything. An attendant set a covered Game-table between us.

Down in the forum the invisibles swept and oiled the Game grid. Alligator Root, Koh’s crier, sat two stairs below us, wearing a thin black mask, like a domino mask, fastened over his eyes with wax. At least she hadn’t had him blinded.

The first fifty-nine evaders-or poison oracles-walked out and stood at their posts at the center of the tetragon. Each one held a pair of sticks and they wore tall zero-masks. One of the leading one’s sticks was a big red-streamered staff, twice as tall as he was. Next the fifty-eight masked catchers took their places around them, seven at each of the eight star points and two in reserve outside the grid. Each of the catchers had a little drum on a stick. The hundred and seventeen players had all been chosen from four– or five-stone adders from trusted dependent clans, which meant they could all feel the blood-lightning and count like they had little abacus cashiers in their heads. But presumably it also meant that they wouldn’t know enough to direct a City Game on this scale, or to remember it and take the knowledge with them. They’d picked the thirteen evaders from among themselves, by cleromancy, and tattooed them and studded them with the patterns of the sidereal scorpion, and fed them on liver and deer’s blood to make them strong. And for the last ten days they’d all practiced every hour they were awake. Each one would be, in a way, playing his own separate game, and the totality of games would magnify the totality of the master game.

The Game beaters started on their clay water drums, in time with the beat of the universal festival, but more insistent.

Let’s go, I thought. Letsgoletsgoletsgo. I still couldn’t quite believe that the Human Game was really happening. It was like-well, I don’t know if it was like anything. But if it worked, I’d learn what I needed to know, what we all needed to know. And then, knowing… knowing…

“You know, at best I’ll only see the moves,” Koh reminded me. “You’ll have to interpret.”

I said I knew that, and I thanked her again. She smiled, like, Hey, no problem, we’re just hangin’ out anyway, right?

As I think I mentioned, as far as anyone knew, this was going to be the first City Game since the one played in Teotihuacan k’atuns before. And given the way the art was dying out, this might turn out to be the last one anywhere. This Game was supposed to be a public demonstration of my ability to read the future, but it would really be Lady Koh who was doing the seeing, and she and I would be playing for our own reasons. And, if all went well, nobody else would find out the farthest-off or the most important things we’d see. We’d throw them a few solid predictions about the next few k’atuns, and keep the rest to ourselves.

Koh lit one of her green cigars-the kind with chili and chocolate threaded through the tobacco-took a hit, and passed it to me. I puffed. She started the invocation. As I think I started to say at some point and then lost track of, it was in the old heavily metaphorical adders’ dialect, and-especially in a heavily accented language like English-it’s hard to get a sense of the swing, which it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got. So I’ll make this a bit closer than a paraphrase, but less than a translation. Okay, Jedketeers? Right. Here we go:

Koh:

“You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning,

You over us who foreknows his final dying,

You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin,

You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern,

You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,

Deign to respond to us from out your whirlwind.”

Koh looked up, not at my eyes, but at the emerald-green mask of One Ocelot on my pectoral sash. I hesitated, cleared my throat, and launched into my first response.

Jed:

“We who are only dust motes in the whirlwind,

We, born at sun’s fall and gone before its dawning,

Who will be waiting for us by the hearth fire?

Whose hands will polish our bones beyond our dying?

Will our skulls just bounce on the floor of the fresh-sea cistern?

Will the potters rebake the shards of our shattered basins?”

Ahau-na Koh:

“You, Cyclone, grant us a perch below the basin

But over the clouds, above the wrecking whirlwinds:

An overlook above the fourfold cistern

Where we can scatter the seeds of coming dawnings

Where we can count their growings and their dyings

Where we can spot young floods and fresh-sparked fires.”

Jed:

“Where we can warn our heirs of nearing fires,

Where we can feel the first cracks in the basin

And cradle our lineage and forestall its dying,

Where we can hear them crying in the whirlwind,

Where the entire talley of their dawnings

Reads full and clear, above the yawning cistern.”

Ahau-na Koh:

“You at the center of the turquoise cistern

Show us the gold southwest fires,

Let us see redward, through the sierra of dawning,

Southeast to where the horizon meets the basin.

Guide us northeasterly through the bone-dust whirlwinds,

And even northwest, through the soot-black dunes of dying.”

Jed:

“So that in ages far beyond our dying

Our daughters can still pour offerings in your cistern,

Our sons can still feed blood-smoke to your whirlwinds,

Our thralls will always tend your altar fires,

Pouring you chocolate from brimful basins

Through all the days undawned but now soon dawning.”

Ahau-na Koh:

“Dawning we bake our bodies and smash them dying.”

Jed:

“We shatter our basins and drown them in your cistern,

And snuff our last fires to steam, to slake you, Whirlwind.”

Koh scattered the seeds and whispered their position to the cantor. He called them out and the human pieces took their places. She waited five beats.

She made her first move.

(61)

“One death, one wind, four thought, sixteen, nineteen,”

Koh said, immediately giving the last date from the Teotihuacan City Game. She’d basically just skipped ahead about four hundred solar years, to Gregorian 1225. I’d thought she’d guide the adders to it, ease them into it a bit, but maybe she wanted to see if they knew what they were doing. The nine clumps of adders broke up and shifted somehow and for a beat the plaza seemed like just a jumble, like the human crystals had just dissolved in solution, and then they coalesced into a new octalinear pattern, and melted again and lined up again. Even though I was expecting something like it I was totally taken aback. It was definitely like something. Not anything biological, something from physics or technology, I don’t know what, maybe like hundreds of those Pac-Mannish magnetic polarities coursing through the domains of a synthetic-garnet bubble-memory chip. What was actually happening was each adder was walking forward, on the beat, out onto the lines separating the points of the grid, the interstices interspersed between the intersections, earth-marching from his old position to a new one determined by his individual count of the days and cycles, which in turn were all different because each person represented a different cycle that he counted on his sticks or his drum, and each person’s cycle was a unique mathematical progression that ignored some beats and, say, triple-counted others, and then redirected his progression based on the people he intersected in his nonrandom walk. On a human scale the movements had similarities to reconstructions I’d seen of Renaissance minuets, and there was a flavor of Gujarat stick-dancing, or like I said, the morris dance. But even if it was dancelike it was so obviously not just for effect, they were all really doing something. Or building something. They stopped.

Two evaders had been taken out in the shuffle-that is, intersected with and caught by a catcher– but they didn’t kill them since it wasn’t necessary yet, they still weren’t really counting ahead. The pair just slunk off don’t-notice-me-ishly through the forest of erect catchers, as neatly arranged in their staggered ranks as North Korean parade soldiers.

“Now wait,” Koh said, her herald repeating. “Now

He goes on seething, now she’s resting, breathing.”

She meant they were supposed to hang out where they were for a beat. The catchers looked impatient, gesturing at the remaining evaders like they were trying to grab them from a distance. I would have thought it was insubordinate, but it really meant they were already trancing into their roles. Koh’s attendant set her Game board on the table, and positioned a close-weave basket and little brazier on the mat just upstage of it. Koh undid the knots and uncovered the board. From where we were sitting the cleared Game-zone in the zocalo below us and the board in front of us both seemed about the same size, like if you had two eyes you could look at one out of each eye and focus them together to get a stereo view. The attendants descended onto the apron beneath us and spread out to the edges, so that no one would be so high as Koh and I. Unless you counted the old trog-in-the-box.

Alligator Root must have signaled the drummers at the first sight of the flame, because in unison they launched into double time.

“First runner, move to fourteen Night,” Koh said.

I moved it. My role in this thing was actually pretty mechanical. I was just supposed to translate the positions of the human pieces onto Koh’s board and wait for her move. “You can’t keep track of all the strains,” Koh had said at some point, I forget when. “You need someone to hold them down.”

Alligator Root called the move out to the zocalo. The runner with the red streamer walked circuitously to his new position. The colors were going Disney on me, like the ninestrips of Technicolor they used in the Bahia sequence in The Three Caballeros. About thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twenty people on the peninsula, I thought, and then I realized I’d guessed the number by counting the people in a small section of zocalo and multiplying it out, and it had taken me less than a beat. I felt like I could count a swarm of a million-plus bats coming out of a cave. Not even. I could instantly count a swarm of midges floating up out of a dead whale by counting the legs and dividing by six. Just for the hell of it I made up a couple of integrations, did them in my head, and checked them. Right on. My Jedman powers were coming back. I could see the parabolas like they were giant intersecting towers of Lego bricks, warm colors for even numbers, cold for odd, metallic for prime.

The blue of Koh’s face was seeping into the regular flesh tone, and vice versa. I sniffled so I wouldn’t have to wipe my runny nose. Gods didn’t do stuff like that. I ran through a few distribution tables, 0.5040, 0.5438, 0.5832, 0.6271. I let a tear or two fall out of my eye and socket. I was feeling a little restless and weak and everything. I can handle this, I thought. I reached into the jars, counted out a red corn-skull for each runner and a blue one for each catcher, and reset the position on the world-board around us. It’s hard to describe, but it seemed to me like the mul we were on was just the central peak of an unimaginably vast plateaued landscape. Koh thought for twenty beats and twenty more.

“Two entering, twelve striking, northward eight,” she said.

Her herald repeated it and the catchers and quarries shuffled again, separating and weaving together like threads on an invisible Jacquard loom, multiple warps coming up through the weft, heddles and treadles and shuttles and lams. There was a moment of near-stasis as the lead runner moved upward through suns of the same name again and again, days from the past turning up in the future, and then the catchers and quarries added up their combined and respective totals, each called out his result, and then each moved again, that much farther forward on the basis of the others, blasting through progressions it would take Encyclopaedia Mathematicas – full of tables to even hint at, and then they’d melt into a different rhythm, like gears on a Pascal adding machine, the Quarries spiraling away from the meshing circles, stately, microscopic, and terrified, until one of the Quarries was caught between two catchers, and they all stopped while the nacom walked out and strangled him with a red-and-blue ribbon.

Invisibles carried the body off the court.

The idea here, briefly, and to put it in a way Koh wouldn’t have, was that the closer you are to death, the more of your own event cone you’re able to see. Not many of the human pieces would survive the Game. But their counts would be preternaturally insightful. It was cruel but effective.

It was already dark. No twilight in the courts of the sun. Who said that? Damn. Forgetting things. The Usher Gods had lit torches inside tall vertical cylinders of oiled rushwork, almost like giant paper lanterns, and the rows of them glowed in lavender and deep sea-snail purples. Two skeletons flopped up the stairs of the mul, only a hundred and ten steps below us. They weren’t really supposed to be on the mul, but this was kind of like an anything-goes Mardi Gras where all the roles are reversed, one of those masters-wait-on-the-servants kind of things, and I guessed it was okay as long as they couldn’t get up here or see the board or whatever. I looked at Koh but she was way too out there to get distracted. I could probably have leaned over and kissed her and gotten zero reaction. Koh’s Porcupine Clown flop-danced up after the skeletons, staggering and reeling on the edges of the steps like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. He shouted at them to get back down off of there, and then, when they didn’t, to jump. Even I had to laugh, he was really kind of a pantomime genius, like Grock or David Shiner. I’d never seen anyone move like that. For a beat he seemed to be walking along my arm and I realized I’d lost my scale and couldn’t tell which was bigger, the insect board in front of me or the human one on our left, or the celestial one overhead. I tried to focus on the blue-green center of the board. At least it was easier than if I’d still had two eyes. Turquoise really is an excellent color, I thought. There just wasn’t enough of it around. I have got to get more turquoise stuff. Koh intoned another little number jingle, programming the interactions faster now. Without any warning the main runner, the one with the staff, seemed to get caught between two human points on vast intersecting ellipses, and the other catchers rushed in like T-cells rushing to spin a net across a wound. The main runner handed off the streamered staff to another runner on an adjoining square, and the nacom executed him, and the array settled again. The other runners were off in the Northwest, still pretty isolated from the hunters, but at this rate they might not last the length of the game.

Koh regathered her seeds and counted them out again, shifting back and subtracting, and gave the herald another directive, and the human net dissolved and reformed, the invisible spider spinning her a dewy web and eating it and respinning it and eating it again. I was beginning to see a bit of a pattern in it, not more than the kind of vague sense you get when you look at a long row of successive calculations and try to guess the function they’re coming from, but for a beat I thought I had a notion of how the Sacrifice Game had grown, back when things didn’t change so much, when technology and population increase were barely factors at all, and the main thing was just to keep going, not to stay on in a bad place, not to get caught by bad weather, and the tribal knowers nurtured the craft over those big empty millennia between Late Paleolithic and Historic, working out settlements, summer and winter camps, lookout fortresses on the frontier, dividing territory, spreading alliances out into space and time, locating the freeholds for new families, seeding new cross-pollinated strains of humans out into the vastness, the universe focusing into the great-great board, and that focusing into the miniature one, and that one focusing into our brains. And all the time, like I keep saying, it wasn’t any magic or fortune-telling, it wasn’t supernatural, it was just a big human computer, and to run it right you had to be a kind of symphony conductor. And, as you know, if you’re a classical music fan, with a tricky composition, some conductors just get it and some don’t. Koh was one of the last of a tradition that just knew or felt some mathematical trick other people had forgotten, something about spotting potential catastrophe points way in advance. She was at 910 AD. 1353. 1840. Oh, my God, she’s going to do it. 1900.

There was a burst of laughter below us. Porcupine had dragged the skeletons off the mul and was threading through the elders’ mats on the long, high stone benches that took up south side of the Game zone. He had a long drinking reed, twice as tall as he was, and he’d snuck it into one of the elders’ balche-pots and drunk the whole thing in one draft. The old man who was holding the pot had turned back to it and just now found it empty. He saw from the reaction of the crowd that something was up and he whirled around, but Porcupine ducked behind a fat old guy next to him, grabbed a big tamale out of his dish, and replaced it with a sort of rat-baby doll. The victim looked back at the tamale, did something almost like a real double-take, jumped up, spotted Porcupine, and threw the dish at him. Porcupine deflected it and backed off, dancing nonchalantly over the low tables. It was like a Candid Camera thing. The audience was in hysterics and a couple people threw expensive shawls at him to show how much they loved it. Porcupine picked up the shawls with a flourish, struck a pose that was like the equivalent of a bow, and took a bite out of the tamale, except it was the rat-doll. He spat it out and made a disgusted face. The crowd was roaring.

The beat divided into fourths, each one a complete miniature of the phrase of the polyrhythm. I heard Koh’s counter click resolutely on the board. Eye on the ball, I thought. I looked down at the move. It felt like my boulder-sized head would roll down and crash through the board. She’d moved the sapphire again, back to where it had been in terms of days, but according to the hotun-count she was already at 10 Alligator, 20 Jaguar, 14.8.4.56. AD 2002. I started to wipe a too-tickly tear from under my non-eye, the hell with my regal fucking bearing, but it felt like my hand was in a plutonium boxing glove. What if I got too much of the tzam lic? It was good for playing a thousand moves ahead, and for Koh and I to communicate wordlessly with each other and everything, but I knew from experience that the hangover could be a bear. How’d I gotten this much out of a few puffs on a funny cigar? It must be some new recipe. Did Nurse Feelgood really know what she was doing? She might be able to sprinkle Agent Orange on her Shredded Ralstons, but the rest of us Squelch that thought. Don’t worry. At least I now knew what the big deal was about this stuff. Bet if I live I’ll sleep for at least a week. Below us Porcupine had gotten back on the mul again and was teetering along the fifth step, holding a shrunken Dzonotob trophy head-which he must have yanked off somebody’s court dress-in front of his own white and black-masked face and working the mouth up and down.

“Help help, help help!” he ventriloquized. “How did my body ever grow so big?” He forced his right thumb in through the neck and wagged it through the mouth like a tongue. His left hand pretended to turn the reluctant head around, pulled it down to his crotch, and forced it into sucking motions. He howled. He’d gotten two other fingers of his right hand up behind the shell eyeballs and pushed them out from inside, making them bounce bug-eyed. Meanwhile his left hand had found a bowl of white atole and as he pretended to come he shrieked, blasted the gruel up over himself in a milky shower, pushed the head away, and shook himself off like a dog.

Charming, I thought. Japanese game-show humor. Next vee have zee socolate-mousse wrestlink “Six sproutings, fourteen witherings,” Koh said.

She was at August 12, 2005.

“Next fifteen rainings, eighteen crackings; next,

Six sparkings, twenty-seven darkenings.”

The beat divided again into sixteenths-about the length of a p’ip’il, an eyeblink-and the branches of possibility spread out at such a steep curve that they almost headed into reverse, like the umbrella profile of a ceiba tree with branches that curve out almost to the horizontal, but never quite droop. I could see there was some equation there. If only I had room to write it down in the margin of my brain, I thought. My fingers were aching from setting and resetting the seeds, but it didn’t affect the performance of my autopiloted hands. Koh moved her sapphire right through the equivalent of 2007 and out toward the rim. I thrashed along after her. She was down to two quarries. The sun and moon and the two Venuses flashed their ellipses over the board, and it churned underneath them motokaleidoscopically like heaps of floating rhinestones going down a drain, although really I could have been either seeing it or just imagining it. The catchers closed in on the last runner. Koh came to the threshold at 2012.