Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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THREE

To the Dorids of Emperor Hirohito

The Remains of an Ancient Sovereign at Rest upon His Bier

Discovered at Aguateca by Graf von Stepanwald

Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

By Subscription Lambeth • 1831

(80)

The first thing I saw was a red dot on an indigo field.

“Please focus on the red dot,” a bonesetterly-I mean, doctorly-female voice said.

I did.

“Please follow the dot,” the voice said. The dot slid up, down, to the left-I mean, right-and then to the left.

“That’s good,” the woman said. Her name wasn’t coming through, but I knew who it was: It was the project’s head doctor. Right. And I knew where I was. Well, not exactly where. But I mean I knew that I was in the twenty-first century, and in some modern facility, a dimly lit, medium-sized room with scents of Phisohex and latex and some, but not all, other components of That Hospital Smell. Definitely not a hospital, though, I thought. There were at least several well-washed but not recently washed bodies in the microatmosphere, but no smells of ejected foul liquids, foul semiliquids, and foul solids, or that special cleaner for what they call an “appliance.” So more like a small clinic or a corporate or school nurse’s office. Hmm. Somewhere nearby a pink-noise generator was generating pink noise. Something about the sound, or lack of other sounds, or lack of certain types of echoes, or something, conveyed that we were underground. As my ears focused, they identified the sound of several sets of fingers discreetly tapping on membrane keyboards. So more like a clean room, I thought. A Warren building. At the Stake, in Belize? No, I didn’t think so. Something about the smells, the sweat or dust or types of pollen or whatever, didn’t whisper, as they always do however faintly, “Central America.” I used to fantasize about saving the day in some vague and debilitating way and waking up surrounded by sexily starched nurses and going, “What happened? Where am I?” Well, not this time, I thought. There wasn’t even the dissociation we’d figured I’d experience. Not yet, anyway. I knew that I’d been in Chacal, in the seventh century, and that now I was Jed again-Jed 3, let’s say-and I was back.

That’s good, the voice said, or something to that effect. The dot vanished. And by now the field of my effective vision had widened enough for me to see that it was on a big, big OLED monitor angled over me on a ceiling-mounted arm.

Okay. I stretched. I wiggled my left, I mean, right set of toes, and then the other set. I moved my head back but my C3 vertebra didn’t crack the way it usually did. I swallowed.

Hmm.

Well, fuck me with a pre-Columbian ceremonial jade battle saw. The world was still here.

Big disappointment.

Kidding. Actually, I can deal with the world. Its apex-predator inhabitants aren’t anything to write home about, but The cold disk of a stethoscope materialized on my chest.

“Take a deep breath, please,” the doctor said. I did.

“It’s October twenty-eighth,” the female doctor’s voice said. “2012.”

2 Kimi, 9 Sak, my brain went, automatically but, for some reason not nearly so automatically as usual. That is, 2 Death, 9 Whiteness, in the sixth k’in of the fifteenth uinal of the nineteenth and last tun of the nineteenth and last k’atun of the twelfth and last b’aktun. Fifty-four shopping days left before 4 Ahau. Okay. And it meant I’d lost two hundred and twenty-two days. That is, all the memories I’d picked up in the months between the downloading in March and today were as gone as an unsaved Angry Birds score. In a way-in fact, in more than just a way-that Jed, Jed 1, the one who’d lived on until yesterday, that Jed was dead.

Oh, well, okay. Easy come, easy go. If I’d had any brilliant insights or late-breaking commodities tips or anything, I would have left notes to myself. Which would show up tomorrow or so on my cold e-mail, that is, the account nobody but me knows about, not even my best friend, No Way, or my lawyer, Jerry Weir. Got to sneak out and get some fresh phones. Later.

The thing is-well, one of the many things is-at the same time that I was thinking about all the time I’d lost, or maybe a little before-when you’re as tranquilized as I undoubtedly was, it’s hard enough to remember what you were just thinking, let alone what order the thoughts came in-I got a microflash of a feeling of triumph and an image of a ball falling away from me between two vaguely sketched opposing players and into a goal, and a remembered sound of cheering. The big hipball game, I thought. Against the Ocelots. Except, no, not hipball, the dudes weren’t wearing any padding. And more definitively than that, I’d propelled the ball with my foot. Something from my childhood? Except I’d always sucked at soccer, and they didn’t even play it much in Utah anyway. Something I’d seen on TV and misfiled as my own memory? Maybe. And why did it come up? I thought back. When did it come up? Twenty-Eighth. Right. I guessed that it’d been triggered by the sound of the number “28.” Huh. Well, look, if that’s the worst jumble your consciousness is going to get after all this reshuffling, repackaging, reuploading, and other reabuse, count yourself ahead. Right?

“Exhale,” the voice said, or a word to that effect.

I did. Fabric resettled on my chest.

A latex-gloved hand touched mine. I almost-passably-automatically looked down and the little scene came into focus: It was handing me a Tyvek cup half-empty of water, with a single prolate ellipsoid of ice floating in it like a ghost’s turd. Evidently I was closer to vertical than I’d thought. I took it. My hand, and now, I saw, my bare forearm, had gotten a lot more muscular. Ripped, even. That’s from hipball, my brain said. No way, I responded, we are not still in Chacal’s body. Don’t bust my balls, brain. And they don’t play hipball in the twenty-first century either. Must’ve just been working out a lot while I was waiting for oblivion. I guess I’d wanted to pleasantly surprise myself. Except the arm had also grown an unprecedented crop of dark hair, which meant they’d upped my testosterone for some reason. Ask about it later. For now, just do the minimum and get out of here.

I sipped down a half-ounce. The water tasted a little different. I mean, from water. Grrg. My tongue flopped around, checking out the oral cavescape. Nnng. My sidewise tooth must have been fixed while I was out. That is, I’d always had my left canine tooth kind of negligently wedged in there, and now it felt right in line The voice said something like “Tell me your name.”

“Don’t start with the hard ones,” I said, or maybe wished I’d said after I said something even more lame. Or had she even really asked anything? Maybe I wasn’t quite so on the ball as I’d thought. I handed the cup back.

“How do you feel?” a different, male voice asked. Taro? No, somebody I didn’t like as much. Who? Don’t sweat it, I thought, it’ll come back.

“Surprised,” I tried to say. Only, nothing came out. At least I was trying to be honest. Almost my only emotion was simple surprise that it had worked. The uploading had always been less sure, by a big factor, than going the other way, that is, than the transmission into the Maya host mind. And even that hadn’t gone perfectly. I’d always half suspected that the Warren people had just been leading me on, that they’d never really expected the uploading to work, although realistically they’d put a lot more money and prep time into the ROC phase-as we were calling it, based on a phrase of Heinlein’s, the “Rigor of Colloids”-than they would have just to fool me. Probably they’d just had a lower expectation for it than they’d let on. And, really, they did want to get as much of a return on their investment as they could. I figured that by this point I’d cost about as much as two new aircraft carriers. One with a black-maple bowling alley.

In the first part of the recovery process, just before the uploading, my original memories-that is, all the higher-level long-term memories I’d built up in my brain over my lifetime-would have gotten “wiped down” by a series of medium-pulsed 2000-milliamp electroconvulsive shocks. Basically, they’d killed me, or vegetablized me. And then, in the second phase, my empty brain would have watched, or let’s say it would have experienced, a sped-up “quintesensory video”-as Taro had called it-of the memories that had been downloaded from the ancient brain that had been preserved in the sarcophagus under the Ocelots’ mul. And the living brain would rationalize or let’s say overinterpret that input to imagine it was really experiencing it. Essentially, it would fool itself into believing it had a Jed 2 – like identity. It was basically the same thing brains do with more random input when they’re creating a dream.

I felt a disposable sheet slide off my feet. “Tell me what you feel.” She rolled a spiked wheel up the sole of my foot.

“I feel one of those spiky reflex wheel things rolling up the sole of my foot,” I said.

“Hold on a second,” the doctorly voice said, not to me. There was one of those pauses where somebody else is doing something you can’t see. I stretched again, crackling the butcher’s paper on the examination table underneath me.

“Could you please tell me your mother’s first name?” Lisuarte asked.

“Consuela,” I said. “Oh, no, wait, it’s Flor.” Who the hell was Consuela? I didn’t know any Consuelas. I’d gotten a flash of a cinder-block house with a big hand-painted Fresca logo on the outside and two men inside it watching Telemundo on an old Quasar color TV, and me inside it-that is, I was seeing the place both from outside and inside-inside the house, looking out its open front, watching a woman come up the road outside with a blue plastic basket of washing on her head, and there wasn’t anything at all remarkable about any of it except that I realized I loved the woman but that she wasn’t my mother, that is, she wasn’t my real mother from Guatemala. She was someone’s mother, she “Jed?” Marena’s voice asked.

“Marena,” I croaked. “Hi!”

“Hi,” she said again, not so warmly as one would like. She didn’t come over to touch me either. Guess she didn’t want to be too lovey-dovey on camera, I thought. Either that or whatever thing we had wasn’t a big thing, or-no, that was definitely something to think about later on. Stay chilled. Any big emotions you have, they’ll show up on the graphs and you’ll have to explain them later “Jed? You’ll want to know that we identified and neutralized him,” Marena’s voice said.

“Who?” I asked, or rather made a raspy interrogative grunt. Oh, I remembered. The doomster. “The doomster?” It sounded like “Thhh dhhhmppstrdrdrdrrr?”

“Yes.”

I tried to say that was great, or something, but again, nothing came out. By neutralized do you mean “blew him away with a double-tap to the right side of his face,” or what? It was one of those Commander Weasel words that Marena wouldn’t normally use. Just play along, I thought. Until you’re not being recorded twenty different ways. Wait.

“His name was Madison Czerwick.” Lisuarte, it came to me. The voice’s name is Dr. Lisuarte. Right.

That’s great, I tried to say again. For the EEG’s sake I tried to feel the relief I should have felt-that I would have felt if I didn’t know better-but I don’t think the graph changed appreciably. It’s hard to fool the graph.

So they got the guy, I thought. And they still took the trouble to dig me up and upload me. Well, that was gratifying.

Either that or they weren’t sure they’d gotten the whole scoop about the Sacrifice Game from the Lodestone Cross cache. Which they hadn’t.

It took Dr. Lisuarte another ten minutes to check my short-term memory, perception, and motor skills. Things seemed roughly up to code. Maybe I should tell them about the second doomster, I thought, while she was making me brush my teeth over a sort of portable sink. In case my brain fries out unexpectedly or something. It’s the decent thing to do. Except Koh’d been pretty clear that I’d have to hunt him or her down myself. And that she or he might be somebody I knew. Not knew face-to-face, she’d said-right? – but maybe knew secondhand, or on the phone, or something, which meant maybe one of the Warren people or maybe-well, it meant that I didn’t want to spill anything about it until I got my ducks in a row. I asked for a mirror and they said they wanted to see how I did it without a mirror to check my motor skills. Which weren’t good, I thought, in fact I wasn’t even brushing my teeth right, I was poking my cheek, I was spitting in front of people, which I never did, I wasn’t minding the taste of Tom’s Propolis and Myrrh, which has got to be the world’s most revolting, and I was holding the toothbrush like it was a pen, which is not the right way. And for that matter, why was I using my right hand? I always used my left hand. I mean, I was left-handed. Maybe the uploading had reversed my polarity, like I was a dilithium crystal? Except that wouldn’t happen, it doesn’t go that deep, it’s just memories. Maybe I was looking at myself in a mirror. That had to be it. I winced my eyes closed and brushed again. Nope. Same same. I spat. I rinsed. I drank again. I felt my head. It was shaved, of course, and stuck all over with prickly electrodes. My hand got grabbed before it could feel any more.

“We’d better take those off in a minute,” Lisuarte’s voice said. “Please don’t touch them right-”

“Jed? Do you have any questions right away?” Marena’s voice asked, behind me this time.

“Uh, yeah,” I rasped. “Did Kamsky win the WCC against Anand?” My voice was weird. It was way hoarse, which argued for a long time under respiratory anesthetic. But it was weirder than that, there was kind of a heavier accent to it. Maybe like a Yucatecan accent. It’s a subtle thing, but still “Let me check on that,” Marena’s voice said, humoring me.

“Are we at the Stake?”

Lisuarte’s voice seemed to hesitate, but I imagined, I think correctly, Marena nodding at her in a who’s-the-boss-here? way, and a beat later Lisuarte said, “No, we’re in Holopaw.”

“Holopaw?”

“Right.”

“You mean, like on Balam, uh, Cat Lake?” It was a nonplace town about, I’d guess, twenty miles southeast of Orlando.

“Correct,” she said.

“Kamsky lost five and a half to six and a half,” Marena said. “According to the Chess Federation site.” She’d come around into view, but she was wearing one of those poufy hairnets and a lab mask with an earphone-and-microphone rig on it, and the little bit of her face that I could see was a funny powdery lavender shade. It had to be the OR lights.

“I’m sure the Federation is correct,” I said.

“Jed?” Marena said. “Listen, we need you to focus now for a minute.”

“Right,” I said. “No problem.” Damn, it wasn’t even just the accent, it didn’t even sound like my voice. I have a surprisingly deep and/or authoritative voice for my charming but relatively unthreatening physical presence. But this was a tenor. Looking back on it, of course, I should have guessed what had happened a long time before this point. But even if you’re the most rational person out there-as I figured I was, given the competition-there’s a kind of denial about things like this that kicks in automatically. Well, not that a lot of people have experienced any “things like this.” But say you’ve lost an arm or something, it can take days to convince yourself that it’s happened. Or if you’ve had a certain kind of stroke, you might never have any further contact with the whole left side of your body, but until your dying day, nobody’s going to be able to convince you of the fact. Denial isn’t just the Ventura Freeway of Egypt. It’s the essential condition of all supra-single-cellular existence.

“Okay, before we do anything else, we should go over the most important algorithms and procedures from the Human Game, you know, the City Game.”

I nodded. How’d they know about the Human Game? I wondered. Had they gotten me to chat in my sleep? I mean, of course they had me wired up the wazoo, but they still can’t read stuff that specifically. Can they? No, no way. Or had I blabbed about it in the Lodestone Cross letters, about how we were looking forward to somehow getting it going? I didn’t think so “Just in case there are any complex memories that you might not retain consistently,” she said.

“Okay, I want to get up first, though,” I said.

“Well, you’re still under some sedation,” she said. “It’d be better to do it right away like in the rehearsals. Remember?”

“Right,” I said. Better give them something, I thought. Just don’t give them the big stuff until you’ve worked it out yourself whether 28.

Huh.

I saw the number 28, in black, against three light blue stripes on a white field.

Wait a second.

Twenty-eight. Merida Futbol Club. Right-handed. Yucatecan.

Oh. Oh Chri It wasn’t my body. It was Tony Sic’s.

(81)

I screamed:

“WHERE’S THE OTHER ME?”

Now, in general, I try to have a snide remark ready for any situation. It doesn’t have to be funny, just smug and mean-spirited. But not this time. I just screamed. And on top of that, despite terror, astonishment, apocalyptic rage, and everything else going on in there, my brain also found room to think of the scene of Ronald Reagan waking up in a similar room and similarly screaming, “Where’s the rest of me?”

“Where’s Jed?” I shouted. My God, I thought. My God. I’d known these were very serious people, crony defense contractors and private ops goons who could disappear you in a second, but I hadn’t quite imagined that they were capable of this. Not this. Not this. Not this.

I started to lurch up, but more than a couple sets of squeakily gloved hands-“gently but firmly,” as they used to say in handbooks about milking cows-pulled me back. One set reclamped the blood-oxygen thingie on my nondominant ring finger and another felt like what must have been an IV farther up the same arm.

“Is he dead?” I shrieked. My God, my God. I’d thought I’d imagined every nefarious trick that the Warren Family of Caring Companies could possibly pull, and now here was an all-new one. And I’d thought that Marena and Taro-I mean, had Taro signed off on this? Was Marena really this much of an antifreeze-blooded murdering psychopathette? Tony Sic’s brain, I thought. Jesus. That choza with the Fresca logo, I thought. That wasn’t one of mine. It was one of Tony’s very early memories. And that woman, Consuela, was Tony’s mother. Holy mierdi -

“Jed’s fine,” Lisuarte said.

“But he doesn’t know? The other me doesn’t know?”

She didn’t answer. I tried to see who else was in the room, but when I rolled my head around it felt like one of those colossal Olmec basalt helmeted ballplayer heads. Still, I got the impression of about a dozen people. Technicians? Nurses? Male nurses? Warren goons? Was that scary Grgur guy here?

Got to get out.

I started to slide off the exam table-vaguely planning to jump up, punch out the guards, steal some ID, get out of the building, and light out for the Territory-but I found myself sinking back down like I was wearing lead exercise weights, or not even, but like I had lead blood. Like even my earlobes were tired.

“Jed,” Marena said. Her hand was on my forehead and the sleeve of her powder-blue lab coat pulled back so you could see a Warren live-badge bracelet. “You have to stay relaxed, there’s still, uh, motor pathways coming in-”

“Your brain’s still building connections to the new memories,” Lisuarte said. “If you-”

“Wait, he doesn’t know?” I asked again. “Jed, I mean, the other Jed, he doesn’t know about me?”

“Jed’s good,” Marena said. “And, no, he doesn’t even know we went back to the site yet. But we are going to tell him. Or if you want you can tell him.”

Damn, so I was going to get to meet myself. I’d thought I’d taken care of this with that 2 Jeweled Skull creep. And now it’s even more… hell, hell, hell. Well, we’d have a lot to talk about, I guess.

Well, so much for Tony. Poor sucker. He’d been twenty-eight years old. He’d never even had a chance. I’d never been crazy about the guy, but now I was almost feeling tears for him simmering behind my eyes. What the hell was he thinking? Did he have some kind of debilitating depression I hadn’t picked up on? Was he terminally ill? Or had they given him some new kind of ultraspecific drug that increased his natural death wish and still left him cogent enough to defend his decision on video? Or maybe they’d brainwashed him over years and years. He’d been with the company for almost a decade, right? Jesus Christ, these Warren guys, they make the Carlyle Group look like Oxfam. They’ll do you in a second. Bastards.

And why him? Wouldn’t it have been better if it were somebody I’d never met?

Well, maybe that just hadn’t been possible. They couldn’t foresee everything, they were making it up as they went along too. They might not even have made the decision until a few days ago. And they’d needed someone who spoke Chol. Language is too basic. The mind encodes it way below the level of the sort of memories that we can (now) just pass around. And they’d needed a brain that was already proven to be smart enough, in the right kind of way, to be good at the Sacrifice Game. He hadn’t been so good as I was, of course, but he was getting there. So there weren’t too many candidates beside Sic to begin with. And as I should have expected, they’d been grooming Sic for years.

“Dude,” I said. “You-guys-just-murdered-Tony.”

“He volunteered,” Marena said.

“What, like some, some, some, some, like some, some, some suicide bomber?”

“All right, you could say that, I’m not going to debate you about it.”

“And you thought I wouldn’t mind?”

“No, but, I’d say, well, yes, it’s a bit of a surprise for most of us that you’re quite this upset. Look, Tony Sic made a deal and in a way it doesn’t really have much to do with you. He was figuring on a suicide mission of some kind.”

“You mean he thought he’d be going to Mayaland and wouldn’t be able to get back.”

“Well, yeah, he hoped he’d get to go. But when you went instead, he accepted it. He’d already made the deal.”

I didn’t answer. Nobody else said anything.

“I want to see my face,” I said.

Marena got out a quality-paperback-size Samsung tablet, switched it to mirror function, and handed it to me. It felt like I was lifting a three-inch-thick plate of polonium-210, but I got it into position and it “reflected” my face. Sic’s face.

It was handsome in a rustic John Leguizamo-ish style, except for the shaved head with its white plague spots of about two hundred silicon-glued electrodes. I’d just seen it on the video, of course, but I’d never really seen it. That is, when it’s in a mirror, you look at a face in a different way. And I don’t mean because it’s reversed-and the mirror function on her tablet defaulted to reversing the image as though it were a real mirror-but because you know your consciousness is in there, and in the face’s microreactions, you think you can almost see it. I’m inside there, I thought. I’m inside. It’s me inside.

“Oh, my God,” I went. “Oh my God, oh my God.” And I think I said it a few more times. Finally I started saying, “I can’t believe you did this, I can’t believe you did this, I can’t be-”

“Jed, listen, ” Marena said. She pulled off her-or do you have to say “doffed”?-she doffed her mask. It was Marena, all right, a little more creased and careworn than I’d remembered her while I was “away,” but no wonder. “ Listen. Did you really want the other Jed killed? Is that what you wanted? That would have made you happier?”

“No, but I mean, of course I signed up for that, and, no, I’m glad he’s around, of course, but still.”

“It will be interesting… for you to meet him,” Taro’s voice said.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, interesting?” I went. “Are you all psychotic?” I managed to roll my head to see where Taro’s voice had come from. He was just standing there. He was still in his mask. He was the type who’d forgotten he had it on. What does he really think about this? I wondered. His, what do I call it, I guess I’ll say his complicity, his complicity in the thing was bugging me almost more than Marena’s. Except, Taro’s always been too otherworldly to really think about this sort of thing. Too spergy. Probably he feels like as long as my consciousness is somewhere he’s done right by me, and as for Tony, well, Taro’s weird, I mean, sometimes I’d gotten the feeling that he thought of the whole EOE thing more as just part of an experiment than something to really worry about. He’s not a psycho, he’s not sadistic, but, it’s like everything’s an equation to him. And it felt weird talking to my old teacher this way, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop. “You just, you just murdered this like friend and colleague of yours and now you’re all like, doo-dee-doo, let’s all jump in the Mystery Machine with his reanimated corpse and go have drinks with-”

“Jed, listen, what are we talk-”

“That’s how you guys treat your friends? How do you treat your enemies? Maybe you give them-”

“Hey,” she said. “Jed. What are we talking about here? I mean, ultimately. Are we talking about the survival of the entire planet?”

I was about to say “But you guys caught the doomster.” But then I remembered that I didn’t believe that Madison was the doomster, and the fact that I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying would show up on the polygraph.

And “polygraph” is putting it mildly, I thought. Try polyinnumerabillomyriadomultinominalograph. There were teams of experts, both software and meatware, and not just here in this room, but in several different labs, all watching and interpreting every snack, crapple, and pock in every lobe and fissure of my brain. Hell, they could probably see video of me playing hipball against the Ocelots and having sex with Lady Koh and-well, okay, they can’t quite do that yet. But they can sure tell whether I’m lying, and a lot more besides.

“Jed?” Marena asked. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

Don’t answer, my other side said. That is, “my other side” as in “my regular interlocutor in my endless internal dialogue.” If you talk, you’ll say one thing too much. Just stay as schtum as possible and get the hell out of these ’trodes before you blurt something out. Right?

Right.

With great effort, I made contact with a few of my opiate-sodden muscles and rolled my head around. I could see that I was roughly in the center of a room the size of an average high-school classroom, and that besides Lisuarte, Marena, Taro, Michael Weiner, Ashleys sub-2 and sub-3, and Lance Boyle-all of whom, besides Taro, had, uh, doffed their masks-there were six other people working at portable workstations set around the walls. I thought I recognized a couple of them through their masks, students of Taro’s who’d worked on the Sacrifice Game software. Still, I hadn’t thought this many people were in on the specifics of the project. One, how’d they expect them all to keep it secret? And, two, hell’s bells, I’ve spilled my guts. This was not an intimate spot for a panic attack, a lover’s quarrel, or any other sort of freakout. And with my brain opened up for general viewing, it-basically I’d feel more private if I were having a gynecological exam in a sold-out operating theater. Fuckity fuckity fu “Because,” Marena went on, “because, if we’re talking about the survival of the entire planet, then, that kind of changes things, doesn’t it, that is, we’re kind of in wartime here, in fact, you, it’s, it’s more serious than just wartime, we’re at the tipping point of like life on earth, and a zillion innocent standbyers are all about to just-just, look, yes, of course we feel bad about Tony, but we’re grateful, I mean, look, he’s somebody we worked with, he’s a member of our unit who volunteered for a suicide mission, he, with, with conspicuous bravery, and, okay, he’s saving the day. It’s his decision. Okay?”

Again, I thought of saying something that sounded fairly good at first-this time it was “Oh, thanks, GI Jane, well, at least we’ve stopped pretending this isn’t a military operation”-and again, after about two seconds of thought, I said nothing. For one thing, at this stage I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t more worried that it might not be a military operation and might be just a commercial one, or rather maybe I was hoping that there was still an iota of difference.

“And the other-look, Jed 1 ’s still alive too,” Marena said. “That’s more than you expected, right?”

I sort of grunted.

“What would you have done? Think about it.”

“I don’t know what I would have done,” I said. “Anyway, that’s a meaningless-”

She started to interrupt me but I cut her off. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she said, “because the psych evaluations indicated that it’d be better to hold off on any major shocks until you got your bearings, you-”

“Because you wanted me to go through any and all Sacrifice Game data first,” I said. “And then after that you can just toss me out on the street.”

“Nonsense,” Marena went. “Just relax a little. I’m not telling you not to think about the Sic thing, but you do need to relax or we’ll all be in worse trouble.”

I started to snap back at her and then didn’t. Chill, I thought. She’s right, you have to relax. She’s Hmm.

I wasn’t proud of it, but I was starting to suspect she might be right about a few other things. Like, was I really all that upset? Or did I just think I was upset because that would be the right way to feel? Sometimes one does the right thing just to make oneself feel like a decent person. You don’t want to admit to yourself that you’re a jerk. So you moan and complain but inside, not very deep down, there’s less upsetness there than you’d expect, or want people to know.

Maybe they’re right, I thought. They know I’ll get over it.

For one thing, I was alive again. It was an unexpected plus. And one feels grateful to whoever makes you alive. For another thing, I was already starting to think again about how I’d go about finding and neutralizing the real doomster. When you’re on a mission you forget about your own problems, or you accept it when other people solve them for you. Third, the team knew from my Lodestone letters that my stint in AD 664 hadn’t exactly been characterized by nonviolence. So maybe they figured I wouldn’t mind another sort-of death in my retinue.