Brian D'Amato Read online

  WHY HAVE YOU INFECTED ME, POSSESSED ME?

  What? I said, or rather thought. I came to learn to play the Sacrifice Game. It was the truth.

  WHY?

  Well, because—because I come from the last days of the world, from the thirteenth b’ak’tun. Because my world is in big, big trouble and we need to learn the Game to see if we can save it.

  GET OUT, he thought.

  I can’t.

  GET OUT.

  Sorry. I really, really can’t. You’re the one who—

  IM OT’ XEN. GET OUT OF MY SKIN.

  I can’t do that, I thought back. But, listen, how about this, I can—

  THEN HIDE, he thought. STAY DOWN, STAY STILL, STAY SILENT.

  I shut up. I was getting a bad feeling about this.

  My hand rose to my open mouth and closed on a barbed cord, basically a rope of thorns, that ran through a hole in the center of my tongue. I yanked on it. Five thorn-knots squeezed down through the hole, spattering blood, before the rope popped out. Hmm, painful, I thought vaguely. Actually, it was enough to have made my former body scream for an hour, but now I didn’t even squirm. More oddly than that, I didn’t feel the Fear, the old hćmophiliac’s fear of bleeding out that I’d never gotten rid of when I was Jed. I coiled the rope into the bowl, as automatically as an ejected fighter pilot wadding up his parachute. It blackened and curled, and blood smoke filled the room with a coppery tang.

  I swallowed a big gob of blood. Tasty. The chanting outside had grown louder and I found I could pick out the words, and that even though the Ch’olan was more different from our twenty-first-century reconstructed version than I would have thought possible, I could still understand them:

  “Uuk ahau k’alomte yaxoc …”

  “Overlord, greatfather,

  Grandfather-grandmother

  Jade Sun, Jade Ocelot,

  Captor of 25 Duelist of Three Hill Lake,

  Captor of 1,000 Strangler of Broken Sky …”

  Our legs uncrossed. Our hands straightened our headdress—it felt like a tall stiff pillow tufted with cat fur—but didn’t wipe the blood off our face.

  “Captor of 17 Sandstorm of Scorched Mountain,

  Nurturer, watchkeeper,

  Jade 9 Fanged Hummingbird:

  When will you next

  Reemerge from your sky cave

  To hear us, to look on us?”

  We crept forward to the tiny door, keeping our head down, and crouched through, out into the wide air. There was a sudden silence from the throngs in the plazas and then a collective gasp, breath rushing into so many lungs that I thought I could feel the drop in pressure. We stood up. Jade scales and spiny-oyster beads clattered over our skin. It seemed like whatever little blood we had left had drained out of our head, and I suppose on any normal day even this body would have fainted, but now some higher hormone held him together and we didn’t even wobble on our high platform sandals, which were really more like stilts, with soles at least eight inches thick. I could feel I was smaller than Jed had been. And lighter and stronger. I definitely didn’t feel forty-eight years old. I felt about sixteen. Odd. I looked up. Ix spread out below us and covered the world.

  Our eyes only sucked it in for two and a half seconds before they looked up again at Algenib. But it was enough time to see that not one of us in 2012—or, for that matter, in any of the preceding five centuries—had had the slightest notion of what this place had actually looked like.

  We were worse than wrong, I thought. We were dull. It was as though we’d been walking through the desert and found five bleached bones out of the 206 or so bones that make up your basic skeleton, and instead of just working out the dead person’s sex and age and genetic heritage and whatever else you can legitimately get from a few ribs and vertebrae and just stopping there, we’d spun out this whole scenario about what her life was like, her clothes, her hobbies, her children’s names, whatever, and then we’d gone on to write a full biographical textbook about her, complete with beige pie graphs and anemic illustrations in scruffy gouache. And now that I was actually meeting the living person, not only did she have very little physical resemblance to the reconstruction, but her personality and life story and place in the universe were utterly different from our pedestrian guesswork.

  The scraps of granular ruins that had survived into the twenty-first century had been less than 5 percent of the story, just the stone underframes of a city that hadn’t been built so much as woven and plaited and knotted and laced out of reeds and lath and swamp cane, a wickerwork metropolis so unlike what I’d imagined that I couldn’t even pick out the monuments I knew. We faced due east across the river, toward Cerro San Enero, the highest peak of the cordillera that ringed the valley of Ix. Now it was erupting, spewing a fan of black ash against the mauve predawn … no, wait, I thought. No way, it’s not a volcano. They must have built a rubberwood bonfire up there—but the other hills were wrong too, they’d been forested before and now they were all denuded, carved into terraces and nested plazas cascading down the slopes like waterfall pools, and they were crested with headdresses of canework spikes that radiated like liberty crowns. Shoals of spots or flecks or something bobbed above and in front of the hills and towers, and, for the first half of the second I had to look at the city, I thought the spots were an illusion of my own new eyes, migraine flashers, maybe, or some kind of iridescent nematodes swimming in my aqueous humor, but at the next beat I realized they were hundreds of human-size featherwork kites, all either round or pentagonal and all in target patterns of black, white, and magenta, floating on the hot breath of the crowd, reflecting the city like a lake in the air.

  The crowd started a new chant, in a new key:

  “Hun k’in , ka k’inob, ox k’inob …”

  “One sun, then two suns, then three suns …”

  De todos modos, I thought. Focus. Get oriented.

  Find some landmarks. Where was the river? I had an impression that it had been widened into a lake, but I couldn’t see any actual water. Instead there was a plane tessellated with what must have been rushwork rafts and giant canoes, with bright-yellow veins between the boats that might have been millions of floating marigold heads. I had an impression of tiers within tiers of interlocking compounds on the opposite shore, stegosaurus-backed longhouses and buttressed towers with gravity-disregarding overhangs that seemed so structurally unsound they had to be featherlight, maybe made out of lattice and corn paste … but like I said, it was just an impression, because every facet, every horizontal or vertical surface, from the hilltops to the plaza just below us, seethed with life. Serried ranks of the ajche’ejob, the Laughing People, that is, the Ixians, carpeted the squares and clung to poles and scaffolds and façades in a pulsing mass, like the layer of polyps that ripples over the skeleton of a thousand-year-old reef, straining gorgonians out of the sea. The only unpopulated surfaces were the steep-angled shoulder planes of the four great mulob, the subordinate pyramids, rising out of the turbulence like step-cut chunks of lab-grown carborundum. And even those didn’t show a single patch of their stone cores; everything was stuccoed over and dyed and oiled and petal-tufted, striated in layers of turquoise, yellow, and black, hard-edged and mischievous, an array of poisoned pastry. Each mul wore a gigantic fletched roof comb and spewed smoke from hidden vents. How many thousands of people were there? Fifty? Seventy? I could only see a fraction of them. Say there are two thousand in the Ocelots’ plaza, that’s about two and a half acres, then suppose there are thirty plazas that size in all—never mind. Stick to the mission. De todos modos. Where was 9 Fanged Hummingbird? Got to try to find him—

  “Wak k’inob, wuk k’inob …”

  “Six suns, then seven suns …”

  Upa. Uh-oh.

  Something was wrong.

  That is, besides the way this guy was still in his head. There was something else wrong. Very ghastlyly wrong. What was it?

  I tried to listen to his thoughts, the way he listened to mine. And I did hear something, and I got flashes of images, wrinkl
ed toothless farmers’ faces, naked, goitred children waddling out of twig huts, bloody footsmears on yellow sunlit pavement, big, heavy flaming rubber balls lobbing through violet air, arcing toward me, streaking away from me … well, they weren’t the memories of a king. Somehow a sense of his sense of his identity percolated through, and I realized I knew his name: Chacal.

  Not 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Chacal.

  And he’s not the ahau. No. I’m—he’s—he’s a hipball player.

  Yep. Wrong. Something had gone really, seriously wrong.

  This guy’s dressed as the ahau, and he’s up here in the ahau’s special chamber, but he’s not …

  “Bolon k’inob, lahun k’inob,” the crowd chanted.

  “Nine suns, then ten suns,

  Eleven suns, twelve suns …”

  It was a countdown. Although they were counting up, to nineteen.

  Okay, what the hell’s going on with this guy? He’s not the ahau, but he’s going, he’s playing …

  The certainty descended around me like lead rain. He’s taking 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s place.

  And this isn’t a reenthronement, I thought. It’s an offering. He’s a sacrifice. A willing, happy sacrifice. They were counting up to a liftoff, or rather a jump-off. After nineteen, the count would go back to zero. And I’d go down.

  Oh, cripes.

  Stupid. Should’ve thought of that. Obvious possibility.

  In fact, come to think of it, I even remembered reading something about this kind of thing. It was in an article in JPCS called “Royal Auto-Sacrifice by Proxy in Pre-Columbian America.” The theory was that in the old days—that is, the really really old days even before this one—the ahau would only have been put in charge for one k’atun. A k’atun is a vicennium, a period of about twenty years. And then, before the ahau got old and feeble and spread that weakness to the body politic, he would have turned the town over to a younger heir and then committed suicide. But at some point some genius ahau had decided he could make it all a little easier on himself and still keep up the formalities. So he’d put on a big ceremony where he’d transfer his name and regalia to somebody else—not even a look-alike or an impersonator but just a captive or volunteer or whatever—and that person would take on his identity and act as the ahau for five days. And when the five days were up, he’d sacrifice himself. It was like burning someone in effigy. A living effigy. And then when that was over the old ahau would have another ritual where he’d give himself a new name, and he’d stay in charge for another k’atun.

  Well, great. At least I know what’s going on. What’s going on is I’m all the hell up here in this unfamiliar body, I’m utterly alone—in fact, nobody I know has even been born yet—and now it turns out I’m supposed to kill myself. What next?

  Okay. Don’t freak. You can still pull this off. So you’re not in the right guy. Ve al grano. It’s still just a minor setback. Right? Luckily, we have some contingency plans just in case of little glitches like this.

  Along with the Chocula Team and the Freaky Friday Team—and I realize this is throwing a lot of jargon at once—Warren had also put together a linguistic research group called the Connecticut Yankee Team. Its job had been to create a menu of things for me to say and/or do when/if I came up against this sort of problem or something like it. They’d trained me to the point where I knew every one of them as well as I knew the lyrics to “Happy Birthday.” The appropriate action for this contingency was called the Volcano Speech. Okay. I ran through it a couple times in my side of my mind, adapting the words to the surprisingly unfamiliar version of Ch’olan. Bueno. Got it. No problem.

  Ready? Just shout it out. “I am the blinder,” et cetera. They’ll hear the prediction, they’ll wait to see if it’s true, and then, when the sucker erupts, I’ll be too valuable to kill. In fact, they’ll probably set me up with my own shop. A modest fifty-room palace, three or four hundred nubile concubines, maybe a pyramid or two. Or maybe they’ll even make me the ahau. It’ll be like Lord Jungle Jim crashing his plane in the jungle. Just flick your Zippo and the cannibals’ll pull you out of the stew pot and call you Bwana White. No sweat. Right? Right.

  Estas bien. Deep breath. Go.

  Go.

  Nothing.

  Okay. Go.

  Nothing.

  Again. Go. Shout. Now!

  Frozen.

  Oh, hell.

  Come on, Jed, you know what to say. Spit it out. I am the blinder of the coming sun. Come on. Open the mouth. Open mouth. All I have to do is open my—

  MY MOUTH.

  Oh hell oh hell. ĄNi mierditas!

  Okay, come on, guy, come on—nnnnnNNNNNNh!!!

  I strained to pry my jaws apart but the only physical effect was a distant ache, like somewhere I was biting a rock.

  Oh Christ, oh Christ. This can’t be happening. Chacal cannot be in control of this body. It’s mine. Come on. Move. Anything. Just squirm, for crying out loud. Raise hand.

  Nothing.

  Raise hand.

  Nothing.

  Raise hand, raise hand! Raise finger—

  Hell.

  We screwed up, we screwed up. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

  We took five formal steps toward the lip of the staircase. I strained against his body. There was no effect. It felt as though I was strapped into an industrial robot, maybe like the one in Aliens, and it was just marching along pre-programmedly while I couldn’t even find the controls. We stopped. Our toes projected just slightly out into the void.

  I knew that we were exactly 116˝ vertical feet above the surface of the Ocelots’ plaza, or 389 diagonal feet by way of the two hundred and sixty steps. But it seemed twice as high now, and not just because I was smaller than I’d been. We looked down into the vortex of the receding planes. Vertigo pulled at us. The turquoise stairs glistened with pink suds, a mixture of maguey beer and the blood of previous sacrifices. The steps were edged with triangular stones that made them look serrated, like hacksaw blades. Architecture as weapon.

  The idea was that I’d leap down the stairs, with as much grace as possible, and by the time I got to the bottom I’d be in several different pieces. And they’d all grab up my parts and then, probably, mix me into tamale meat and distribute me throughout the tri-pyramid area.

  Well, hell. That’s some really bad luck. Maybe I’d been expecting too much. I’d thought I’d just cruise back here and be all set, curled up in a nice clean brain inside the big chalupa of the whole place, and that since I was in charge I could do roughly whatever I wanted, I’d have a decent chance at getting the dirt on the Game, I’d build my tomb just the way I wanted, I’d live it up a little, no problem. If that had—

  Stop it, I thought. Stick to the reality. The reality was that I was simply not in control of Chacal’s motor neurons. I was just along for the ride, just hanging out somewhere in his prefrontal cortex. And he was totally, reverently, imbecilically determined to kill himself—in spectacular and heroic fashion—in only a few seconds.

  “Fourteen suns, fifteen suns …”

  The pitch of the chanting rose higher. They were cheering me, egging me on, and I felt the urge to leap, floating higher on the wave of their expectation. They were so hopeful, so eager, and they only wanted one little thing from me. It felt like anybody in this position might jump just because he was caught up in the excitement. Maybe it is the right thing to do—

  No. Squelch that thought. Come on, Jed. Just push this doofus out of the driver’s seat, grab the wheel, and turn the damn car around. The locals’ll fall right into line. No sweat—

  MA! Chacal snarled around me. NO!

  I felt a constriction tightening on my thoughts, a kind of mental lockjaw, and for an indeterminate amount of time I was all just the plain panic of claustrophobia and suffocation. At one point I thought I started to scream, and then I noticed my lips weren’t opening, my lungs weren’t pumping, nothing was happening. I was just standing there, looking cute, flipping up inside, just sheer terror, repeating myself, oh God, oh God, oh God, and then I thought I could hear or sense Chacal’s consc
iousness laughing, almost cheering, almost, in fact, orgasming.

  Well, this is it. Old Jed’s last moment before the click of oblivion, which in fact was seeming more and more attractive.

  Estoy jodido. I’m fucked. This is it, this is what it’s like, death—

  Waitwaitwait. Snap out of it. Get back on track. Think!

  En todos modos. Bad break. Regroup. New tactic.

  What we need to do here is … uh … what we have to do is get old Chacal here on our side.

  Right. Okay.

  Chacal? I thought at him. Let’s just cool out for a second. Prenez un chill pill. You don’t have to do this.