Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Oh, sure, no, don’t worry,” I said.

  “Seriously, though, what do you think?”

  “Well, it’s definitely an important date,” I said. “In the old days they would have at least had a big festival. And they would have gotten all the wise old scribes or whatever together and worked out what to do next. Maybe they’d have constructed a new calendar.”

  “So no big giant whatever.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Huh,” she said. She almost sounded disappointed. “So is it true that the Maya, like, worshipped time?”

  “Well, that’s a little strong … it might be fair to say that no other culture has ever been so, so obsessed with time.”

  “But they did come up with all these impossibly complicated dates with the names and the weird numbers.”

  “Actually, if you teach kids Maya numbers, they say they’re easier than Arabic ones. They’re like dominoes; they’re just spots and lines.”

  “Well, okay, but Taro was trying to tell me about the dates one time and I got totally lost. And I’m a code monkey.”

  “That’s a great clock,” I said.

  “Thanks. Yeah, that used to belong to John Huston, you know, the film director, like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?”

  “Cool.”

  “And then the Neo-Teo team gave it to me after the AIE thing.”

  “It’s great.”

  “But like I say, I haven’t figured it out yet. Although they say it’s running.”

  “Well, it’s not really that hard,” I said.

  “You mean, like, the Mayan calendar isn’t that hard.”

  “Yeah. There are some tricksomenesses to it but the basic idea is simple, if—well, look, don’t think of it like a clock, think of it like an odometer, you know, in a car, I mean an old car, before they were electric.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, so each place value in the mileage is on a gear, right? And when one gear turns over once the one to the left of it turns thirty degrees. One twelfth. Except with the Maya dates, most of the gears are in base twenty, like twenty teeth. Except for one that has eighteen. And then there’s another important gear with thirteen teeth, that’s the ritual calendar, and that one has the names on it. So every thirteen-times-twenty days, the same name-and-number combination comes up. Like say it’s a Zero Bat day like today, then two hundred and sixty days from now there’s another Zero Bat. So it’s a big day when a lot of the cycles come up at the same time, like—”

  “Like when the odometer’s going to turn over another hundred thousand miles and the kids in the backseat all get really excited and lean over to watch.”

  “Right,” I said. “Except each time it’ll be in a different tun, that is, like, a bundle of three hundred and sixty days. And then a k’atun is twenty tuns, and then twenty k’atuns make a b’ak’tun. And eighteen of those—”

  “Okay, I get that.”

  “Okay. And that’s it, except there are other counts for Venus and other astronomical things, and for anniversaries, and for supernatural beings, like each day has a different set of protectors and threateners. It’s kind of like how the Catholic saints all have days, except—”

  “Except it’s vastly more complicated.”

  “Well … except you have that kind of thing today, right? Like the Olympics and presidential elections are every four years, and then senatorial elections are every six years, but they’re staggered, and then there’s, like, economic cycles and five-year plans, and there’s seventeen-year locusts and hundred-and-thirty-year bamboo. Uh, John Travolta makes a big comeback every fifteen and a half years—”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “Anyway, the only ones you really have to know are the solar cycle. That’s 360 days, and the tz’olk’in, and that’s in bunches of twenties and thirteens, and that makes up the ba’k’tuns. Those are about 256 years. The tz’olk’in sets the cycle seat and the main—”

  “What’s the cycle seat?”

  “Oh, that’s, that’s like a temporary capital. Like they’d trade off, like, they’d decide on one city or, like, temple district, that would be the place where all the kings met and decided international policy and when the festivals would be or whatever. And then at the end of twenty years that temple district would get ritually killed. Like they’d cancel the inscriptions and the royal family would leave and they’d knock down the monuments and whatever. And then that area would be kind of taboo, and for the next twenty years the capital would be somewhere else.”

  “So is that the reason the Maya just left all those cities?”

  “Well, yeah, it’s possibly one reason that some of the ceremonial centers were abandoned, but—”

  “So anyway,” she said, “I understand you use a Sacrifice Game system to pick stocks.”

  “Commodities.”

  “Right. And you do it by hand, correct?” She meant not on computer.

  “Well, I still have Taro’s old software,” I said, “but, yes, mainly.”

  “Do you have, like, a pouch of little pebbles or whatevs?”

  “A grandeza,” I said. “ Yes.”

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  She didn’t ask to see it. Too innuendoish, maybe.

  “But you know,” I said, “I’m not an astrologer or anything. It doesn’t have anything to do with the supernatural.” Hey, I thought, how about you show me the book and I’ll show you my rocks?

  “But, still, the Game really does let you predict things. Yes?”

  “Well, a prediction sounds like a, like something a fortune teller would do.”

  “Huh.” She paused. Don’t be so honest, Jed, I thought. If she doesn’t think you’re special, she’s not going to show you anything. Right? On the other hand, there is the theory of the soft sell. Anyway, you’re not trying to get a date with her. Even if she is kind of hot. All you need right now is for her to show you the Codex. Right?

  “So,” she said, “so you’re saying the old Maya dudes weren’t really making prophecies?”

  “Well, no, they—look, I guess what I’m saying is that they wouldn’t have thought of them as prophecies. It’s more like they were permanent, like flavors, or, say, like personalities, that each day naturally had. It’s like a, a Farmers’ Almanac that says there’ll be snow that day, except it’s saying there’ll be disease or war or something. And then the flavors would develop over time, like if there were a big battle on that day, that would add a violent taste to the day from then on. Just like how a royal birthday is a lucky day. I mean even these days.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “But the real point is that the Game is not, like, giving you visions of the future. It just improves your guessing.”

  “How?”

  “Well, to oversimplify, I guess I’d say it speeds up your brain somehow. Or allows it to focus better, and that feels like the same thing. It makes playtime. So like—”

  “Wait, what’s playtime, you mean, like, in nursery school?”

  “No, well, that’s just jargon from StrategyNet. But they use it to mean how each game generates its own kind of alternate time. Like, you know, a turn-based strategy game uses a different measurement of time that’s not based on the wall time, or on duration, but on the events of the game itself. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Basically a game is measured in tempi. That is, moves. So if a player makes a move that achieves nothing, you’ve just lost a tempo. The clock time is just a convenience that has nothing to do with the dynamics of an actual game.”

  She nodded.

  “And if your move doesn’t keep up in the context of the game—if it doesn’t jump out far enough or develop your pieces fast enough or whatever—it’s still too slow.”

  She nodded.

  “So playtime is like time measured in state changes. Without measuring duration.”

  She nodded.

  “It also just means how, you know how when you’re playing a game everything around you seems to be moving more slowly?”

  She nodded.

  This time I shut up.

  “So anyway,” she said, “you’re sayin
g all you’re doing is just reading ahead.”

  In Go reading means working out the next sequence of moves. Professional Go players can read a hundred moves ahead.

  “Right,” I said. “Exactly.” Yes, I thought. Bond! Game Bond! Brotherhood of gamesters! Now, naturally you’ll want to show me the damn book. Right? Right.

  The thing is, those of us who play a serious game—and by serious I mean what mathematicians call a nontrivial game, like Go, chess, shogi, bridge, poker, the Sacrifice Game, or one of the few important computer games like the Sim games—know, or feel we know, that there’s a different and more purposeful world out there, one tuned to a more powerful wave. But this knowledge makes us exiles. And, of course, that makes us feel superior to everybody else—despite everybody else’s somehow being healthier, happier, and more socioeconomically successful—and so we become intolerable.

  “Still,” she said, “reading ahead is enough for some good investing.”

  “I guess.”

  “I understand you’ve been making some good trades.”

  “May I ask according to whom?”

  “The firm,” she said, giving the word an ominous Grishamish inflection.

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Okay.”

  “So anyway—look, you haven’t seen any dooming—I mean, looming doom a year from now? Have you?”

  “ You mean the 4 Ahau date? The end of the calendar?”

  “Right. Twelve twenty-one twelve.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “I guess that’s good.” I was getting that feeling that we were approaching the end of our conversation, like the sound of a bottle filling up. Come on, Jed. How do you make yourself indispensable to this woman? Come up with some persuasive, spectacular, façade-shattering … no, don’t even try. Just ask something.

  “Hey, I have a question,” I said.

  “Go for it.”

  “Why is an entertainment division sponsoring Taro’s research? I mean, it’s not exactly entertainment.”

  “Everything’s entertainment now,” she said.

  “Right.” Just show me the book, I thought. Show book to me. Show me—book. Book—me.

  “Anyway, Lindsay’s always been good at leveraging entertainment with whatever other things—you know, that’s why the studio did the remake of Silent Running, because he bought Botania—that’s a closed-system hydroponics company?”

  “Right.”

  “And it tied in with that.”

  “Mmm.” Great, I thought. Survivalism. More Mormon moronities. Stocking up for the Tribulation. You wouldn’t want to have to meet Jesus on an empty stomach.

  “It’s got that survivalist thing going on,” she said. Evidently she’d seen what I was thinking. Damn it, I thought. I hate psychics.

  “Right,” I said. “ Yeah, I grew up in Utah—”

  “Oh, right—”

  “—so I know a little about that stuff.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean, it’s true, Lindsay’s a major Saint and everything. He’s just been elected to the Seventy.”

  “Gee.” The Council of Seventy was the governing body of the Latter-Day Saints, kind of like the College of Cardinals.

  “But I barely speak to those people. You know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re scary,” she said.

  “Right.” Well, I thought, it’s nice of her to try to put me at ease. Not that—

  “But Lindsay’s a lot more enlightened than the rest of them … anyway, those guys fund stuff nobody else’ll touch.”

  “Like cold fusion?”

  “Well, yeah, sure,” she said, “but there are a thousand other things. It’s not all O-rings.”

  “Right.” For the benefit of those lucky enough not to have lived and/or worked in the Salt Lake region, the events Marena and I were referring to here were, first, the University of Utah’s erroneous announcement, in 1989, that they’d successfully produced cold fusion, and, second, the Challenger space shuttle scandal, when it turned out that Mormon congressmen had steered construction of the shuttle to Morton-Thiokol, which skimmed millions of dollars off the project and, as some may remember, delivered an iffy product. And those were only two things out of many. It was kind of a joke, in fact, all the crackpot research the Saints kept paying for. Among science types in the Southwest, anyway. Mormon organizations spend millions every year on spirit detection, genetic memory, DNA-assisted genealogical research, cult archaeology, TEOTWAWKI retreats, free bug-out bags, and a dozen other pseudologies. Actually, the low point was probably in 1998, when a couple of researchers at the Layton Institute for Applied Physics said they’d jazzed the quantum foam and created a bubble universe. That is, for probably the first time since the big bang, a duplicate universe was now forming inside the usual one. They’d added that the two universes would be identical at the moment of fission, but that because of subatomic randomness they’d start diverging pretty fast. When an interviewer from CNN asked the senior guy where the new universe was, he’d said, “We’re in it.” Unsurprisingly, their results were not replicated.

  “Anyway,” Marena Park said, “it’s easier to get it in the report on my budget because I already have Mayan-related stuff going on.”

  “Right,” I said.

  There was another pause. Well, great, I thought. I guess this means you don’t need me for anything. I’ll just slink out of here with my tail between my legs and—

  “So you can read Mayan writing, right?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah. I’m okay at it. But you know, it’s not quite like regular reading, they’re usually not really in sentences, and there’s a lot of interpretation.”

  “Right. So, I guess you want to look at the Koh Codex, right?”

  “Well, sure, of course I would,” I said. YES!!! I thought.

  “The thing is, it’s still unpublished, so I’m not supposed to let it out yet. It’s the biggest secret since Natalie Portman’s nose job.”

  “Oh.” Pause.

  “But I don’t know,” she said, “maybe if you want to work with Taro again, maybe you could come in when he starts the next testing phase … that won’t be for a while, though.”

  “Oh, uh-huh.” Sure, thanks for the brush-off. You’re a loser, Jedface. My hand tightened on the chair arm, inadvertently triggering it to self-adjust up a notch. I was getting a wave of molecular-level disappointment like the G-force reversal at the zenith of the Superman Tower of Power ride at Six Flags over Texas. Well, screw it anyway, this is just probably all part of the hype. They’re trying to turn this thing into another Dead Sea Scrolls and maybe they don’t really have anything, maybe the Codex is just another bunch of Venus tables, a few old names, maybe a recipe for guacamole—

  “You want to look at the End Date page?” Marena asked. “I bet I can show you just that one without getting in trouble.”

  “Uh, sure.” Oh, God our GOD om NI potent REIGN eth! HaaleLUjah! HalleLUJAH! Ha-LE-E-loo-YAH—

  “Okay.” She reached down behind her and without looking took a large-screen phone out of a drawer and tapped on it for a few seconds. I scooted my chair over but not too far over. Hot spit.

  “Would you like me to sign a release or anything?” I asked.

  “Well, you could leave a hostage.”

  “I am a hostage.”

  She put the phone on the desk, turned it around, and slid it over to me. It had a new OLED-3D display without a trace of a distinguishable pixel, just the high, narrow page lying in three dimensions just under the Zeonex film. Since the gessoed fig-bark paper hadn’t seen the sun for centuries, its original fugitive dyes had been preserved, and the hyperspectral imaging had deepened them a little more, so that they throbbed between the dark outlines like old stained glass.

  [7]

  The game board was in the middle of the page, flanked by two figures. An overlord in jaguar-lineage regalia sat on the left, arms folded. According to Michael Weiner’s notes, which floated annoyingly over the image, he was probably an ahau named 9 Fanged Hummingbird, who ruled from 644 to rough
ly 666 in a city in Alta Verapaz that Weiner’s team had identified as Ixnich’i-Sotz—or, as the locals now called the ruins, just Ix. The portrait glyph above the other figure, who sat facing the future on the southwestern side of the board, seemed to read as something along the lines of Ahau-Na Hun Koh, that is, “Lady 1 Tooth”: