Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Marena didn’t call until ten p.M. She talked to Taro for a while and talked to me for about two minutes. Evidently she and some of her cohorts had had a meeting. She said Michael Weiner, the TV Mayanist, had pooh-poohed it, naturally. She said she and Laurence Boyle—whoever that was—had talked with some people at the Orlando mayor’s office, but without anything specific to tell them nobody was sure how much of a fuss they should make. “I didn’t want to even mention the Maya connection,” she said. “It would sound like we were In Search of Ancient Astronauts or whatever.” Instead they’d pitched it as a surprise result of Taro’s simulation research, which had at least some academic credibility. At least Taro had backed me up. He’d told her that he didn’t want to be an alarmist, but I’d “often been right before”—what do you mean “often,” I’d thought. If you’re talking about that 1992 World Series business, if you’ll think back you’ll remember I said wasn’t comfortable making that call—“so maybe we should take his interpretation seriously,” Taro said.

  “I see the DHS guy in the morning,” she said. “I’ll tell you what happens.”

  I said great. I went back to the keyboard. I kept getting the feeling there was something Taro wasn’t telling me. Well, whatever.

  I rubbed in another shot of tobacco, even though my leg below the knee was already buzzing. It feels like your leg’s waking up from being “asleep,” as they call it up here. Bueno. “Ajpaayeen b’aje’ laj k’in ik,”

  Okay.

  What’s the question?

  Well, to ask the right question, you have to know stuff. You can’t guess about things without knowing what things there are. Sometimes you don’t have to know so much as you’d think, but you have to know something. Usually it boils down to reading a lot of news. I clicked up HEADLINES.

  Top stories at this hour, it read: Jorge Pena’s 89th Homer Marks New Off-Season High … Five Michigan State University Students Killed in Hoops Loss Riot … 2 Killed at Universal Studios Tower of Terror … Bangladesh Seeks Explanation for the Downing of Troop-Carrier Chopper … Bob Zemeckis’s Epic Vanessa, Based on the Life of Artist Vanessa Bell, Hits Screens Today … Man Dies in Spitting Contest … Twister Outbreak in Heartlands …

  Hmm.

  I assigned the hypothetical author of the hypothetical catastrophe—who we were calling Dr. X—to black. I assigned the mass of the population to yellow. I took red, as usual. And I kept white in reserve, as usual. And since we were only looking three days into the future, I was only going to use the three outer rows. Right. I assigned the suns.

  Bueno.

  I concentrated on my uay for a minute, long enough to feel myself shrinking. Like I think I said, it’s a snail. But I imagine it as a sea slug so that I can move a little faster. I scattered and counted the seeds and started swimming toward the twenty-eighth—9 Sea Rattler, 9 Yellowness—edging along the line of uncertainty. Pretty soon I had to start jumping. I guess it’s hard to think of a slug jumping. But if you watch them in the water they actually do; they jump from one rock slowly down to another. Anyway, I thought, it’s going like this. Right. Now that way. No. Okay, now I think it’s going to go this way. No, wait, it’d go this way. Claro. He goes, I go. Then he reacts. Primero, segundo, this happens, then they react to that. Okay. Claro que sí. Bueno. Wait. No.

  Damn. I kept getting something, a sense of these things like, I don’t know, shapes, milling around in a reddish fog, lumpy clusters of something gyrating to a slow, silent beat. But it wasn’t anything you could hang a label on.

  I played for four hours. I took a break. I played for another five hours. Around dawn all of us adders huddled together around the espresso machine and compared notes. We’d all gotten similar results. They all said they were worried about something in the area on that day, but the event was vague, and nobody would have put it at Disney World without getting that from the Codex first. I couldn’t think to play anymore so I took a nap on the floor of an isolation room and drove home at noon on Christmas Eve.

  I did maintenance on the skimmers. I got my Perpetual Refugee stuff ready in case anything happened tomorrow. I plugged a driveful of Taro’s top-secret software (He trusts me! I thought) into my own system and fired it up on the overhead screens. It took an hour to get it working and then when I started playing, I couldn’t get any further than before. The period after the twenty-eighth was just a blank. Not that that meant the world was going to end ahead of schedule, but just that all the causes and effects were too hard to read. LEON hadn’t come up with anything, either, not that any of us thought it would. It just didn’t know enough, I thought. No matter how many data streams it read, it didn’t really know what they meant. I don’t care how many games it can play through at once. Speed isn’t everything.

  I don’t celebrate Christmas. Or Easter, even though I’m supposed to when I’m doing cuandero stuff. Or birthdays, or weekends, or anything. But I especially didn’t celebrate Christmas this time. I spent the day working on the game. Numbers like 84, 209, 210 and 124,030 kept coming up again and again, but I couldn’t make anything out of them. Marena called at six. There were kid squeals in the background. She said the DHS was willing to bump up the threat level on the twenty-eighth to “Elevated” in Orange, Polk, Osceola, Hardee, DeSoto, and Highlands counties. They’d said that would mean police and fire departments would be on evacuation alert that day. I guess that meant they’d make it easier for people to clear out if anything went wrong. Or they’d just gum up the system, I thought. Well, anyway, that Marena lady came through, I guess. Should I do anything else? Or would anything else make it worse?

  By the end of the twenty-seventh, nobody’d gotten any further. That is, nobody from Taro’s lab, and not me either. The only thing I could think to work on was Michael Weiner’s translation. A few things about it were still bothering me, especially the “scab casters” bit. As I think I said, the phrase usually means a witch or a warlock, but here it was being used more as a verb, like “witching,” which I didn’t think was a known usage in any Mayan language. Although of course the old language was different, but still … anyway, it didn’t go anywhere. This is bullshit, I thought. You’re overthinking it. Maybe the whole business was just me being a Nervous Nellie. I gave up at two minutes after the beginning of H-hour. Whatever was going to happen was.

  The twenty-eighth was a nice day in Central Florida except for worse-than-average smog. The heightened DHS alert made the local news, but reporting on it seemed half-hearted. Folks are jaded these days. To get any sort of a rise out of them, a lot of people need to already be dead. Although to be fair you can’t just clear everybody out because one catastrophe-modeling team—and Taro’d said he figured there were at least five other serious ones operating, by the way, including the DHS’s own, which had hardware almost as sophisticated as LEON and which they were very proud of—had come up with a totally speculative, unspecific bad feeling about a populated place and a vague time. I watched news and raw news feeds and local chat rooms all day. Even though I was pretty far from Orlando, it felt like my foot was half out the door. Whenever I encountered an odd-looking phrase, my teeth almost started chattering. Still, the worst things to happen in the Park District were a few false fire alarms and a bunch of people getting food poisoning at the Pinocchio Village Haus. Not exactly anything apocalyptic. I lay down just after midnight.

  I Dios. Tired.

  I’d been awake for about twenty-eight hours—which actually wasn’t that unusual for me. I have DSPS, delayed sleep phase syndrome, on top of whatever else—but I guess there was a little stress in the system. Okay. Just going to grab a twenty-second pestańa. There was a dog barking somewhere—not the Villanuevas’ little Xoloitzcuintle, but some bigger individual I hadn’t heard before—and it kept reminding me of the Desert Dog. Although I guess I haven’t told that story yet. Although maybe that’s just as well, because it’s a bit of a downer. Except now I’ve mentioned it. Hell. Well, briefly, the Desert Dog was a kind of ugly yellow-and-gray terrier/hound/coyote sort of individual that Ezra, the middle one of my three stepbrothers, said had atta
cked him while he was mowing the golf course, although I didn’t believe that. Anyway, there was a lot with a bunch of old sheep crates and chicken coops and whatever out across 15 toward the gypsum mill, and Ezra had the dog in one of them. When the brothers showed him to me he had no front paws. There were just two ragged stumps there. Maybe he’d been injured by something, or more likely he had gotten caught in a fence or a trap and gnawed them off. You’d think he might have bled to death, but instead the wounds were healing and he was scrambling around on the zinc floor of the crate, getting up and sliding down, and his eyes were big and terrified of us. They had him in there without any water or anything. I asked Ezra what—

  “—not a drill. Jed? It’s me. Pick up. I’m serious.”

  Huh?

  I clicked on the front door speaker. “We don’t sell fish anymore,” I started to croak, but as I got to the word sell I realized I was still in bed and that it was the middle of the day. Evidently I’d zonked out.

  “Jed?” the voice asked. “It’s Marena.”

  Whoa, I thought. What exactly the hell was she doing in here? That is, in my bedroom. Or rather it wasn’t even exactly a room, it was a Mitsubishi capseru, a capsule, that is, one of those soundproofed, climate-controlled fiberglass sleeping pods they make for cheap Japanese hotels.

  “I mean it, this is urgent, pick up.” Her voice was coming from my phone, which weirded me out a bit because I didn’t remember giving her the emergency number.

  “Hi,” I said, checking whether I could still speak. I sounded like Jack Klugman. I tried again. “Hi!” Better. Estas bien. I found the gadget and hit TALK. “Hi,” I said chipperly.

  “Hi, good,” she said, “you exist.”

  “Huh? Oh. Well, I wouldn’t go that far—”

  “So there’s a little bit of a problem at Disney World. It’s probably nothing, but, you know.”

  “Sorry? Balaam’s ass?”

  “What?”

  “Um—oh, sorry, nothing.” It must have been something to do with an interrupted dream, although I’d already forgotten it, but there was that sense of just having stopped moving through some huge, complicated space—

  “Jed?”

  “Hi.” WTF? I wondered. Did I sleep a whole day? No way. If I had I wouldn’t be feeling like mierditas refritas. I found the thingie and hit TIME. Big green laser characters scrolled across the ceiling: 2:55:02 P.M… . 29-12-11 … 2:55:05 P.M …

  “Uh, what kind of a problem?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” her voice said. “There’s only a little about it, but my friend at the old place says it’s not food poisoning and it’s like eighty people.”

  “Oh. Huh.” People what? I wondered. Dead? Sick? Making noise?

  “Anyway, we’re on 441 and Orange Avenue,” she said. “And now this came up so I thought we’d come by. Just in case.”

  “Come by here?” She was only about forty-five miles away.

  “ Yeah,” she said.

  “Uh, sure.” No way, I thought, she can’t show up here. There’s dead snails and tarantula molts and stuff all over. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about chicks, it’s that they don’t dig invertebrates. “Um, so, why are you coming this way? I mean, that’s great, but, you know—”

  “Because the wind’s from the southeast,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. Uh-oh, I thought. Gas. Fuck. “Okay, great, um, you know where I am?” Of course she does, I thought. I’d been trying to get my address delisted, but the days when you could really do that were long gone.

  “Yeah, I see it, look, you want to, uh, you want to go out to U.S. 98 and meet me there? I’m in the car, we’ll be there in about thirty-five minutes.”

  “Um—”

  “Just a second. Sure, go ahead,” she said to someone else in the car. “No, I’m on it. Bye. Sorry, Jed. Yeah, forty minutes, okay?”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you back.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She started to say, “Bye,” but clicked off, as people do, before she’d finished the word.

  It’s got to be nothing, I thought. Anyway, bad stuff happens every day. Every minute. So it’s probably just a not very incredible coincidence.

  She’s probably just getting jumpy. Or she just wants to drop in and jump my bones. Heh. Maybe she’s got a touch of scarlet fever. Plus my yellow variety equals the orange flame of passion. Esta belleza, she has the uay of a panther. Better shower.

  I clicked on the overheads and hit HOME→NEWS→ LOCAL. PARKS DISTRICT ADMISSIONS SUSPENDED, it said.

  Hell.

  [9]

  The story under the headline said that beginning around three p.M. yesterday, people had begun to vomit and “to complain of other symptoms, including erythema and vertigo,” and that the story was developing. It didn’t sound like much and it didn’t say anything about gas. I searched the keywords out of the article but all I got was one thread on a parks workers’ forum where they were talking about “why everyone is freaking out so bad” and “why it’s a two-hour wait in the ER.” Nobody mentioned any gas. It really sounds like nothing, I thought. She’s just getting jumpy. Well, whatevs. Anyway, you like her, right? It’s a cheap date. Right. Get it together.

  I decapsuled, staggered in and out of the still-institutional bathroom, toweled off with a PDI Super Sani-Cloth Germicidal Degradable Wipe™ instead of showering, rubbed some tooth towels over my teeth instead of brushing, visited the espresso machine, ate a scoop of Fluff, checked the meters, looked over the ’branchs. Bueno. Tank temperature, check. Protein skimmers, check. Feeders, check. Chem monitors, check. Home system to phone link, check. Nourishment, check. Bueno. Hair, breath, deodorant. Check. I got into a clean copy of my winter uniform, reset the automatic feeders, dosers, and alarms, got another spoonful of Fluff, and staggered out the back door. It was hot for December. De todos modos. Wallet, keys, money belt, passport, phone. Check. Smoke hood, check. Hemi kit, wipes, meds, check. Hat. Shoes, shirt, service—

  Oops.

  I went back inside, into Messy Zone Beta, found Lenny’s old safe, got two ankle wallets—they were pretty heavy and bulky because each one had thirty Krugerrands, $10K in hundreds, and $2K in old premagnetic twenties—and strapped them on just in case things really did go all Omega Man. Okay. Alarms, check. Main lock, check. Bolt, check. We’re off.

  It was too hot for the jacket, but I kept it on. It was clear. Lake Okeechobee was calm but not shiny, like the ventral skin of a swordfish, and a manslaughter of crows were freaking out about something on the end of the jetty. Otherwise the ’hood seemed normal. Irretrievably banal, even. Just the way we like it. The ’cuda looked good snuggled up between the old Mini Cooper and the Dodge van in my private little ten-car parking lot. Got to get her out to the lot at the Colonial Gardens ghost mall and do a few power slides. Burn down those Geoffrey Holders and get some Pirelli 210s. I walked the three blocks west. Sr., Sra., and all the little Villanuevas were out working in their yard and they all said hi to me like I was Squire Stoutfellow. Should I warn them to get out of here? I wondered. No earthly reason, right? A pair of troop carriers, maybe C-17s, whined west at about ten thousand feet, heading to MacDill. It always gets me how far-freaking loud those things are, even though I already know they are. My phone throbbed. I screwed the ear thing into my ear and said hi. Marena said she was getting onto 710.

  “Okay,” I said, “if you get off at 76 there’s a Baja Fresh and I can be in there.”

  “We’re not getting off the highway.”

  Hmm. “Uh, okay, then, I’ll be, I’ll be about a hundred yards past—”

  “Can you turn on a locator?”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “Right.” I found the function under “Communications—GPS” and clicked it.

  “Okay, I see you,” she said. No, I thought, you see a dot representing me. I stumbled up to the road and stood on the shoulder in the truck gusts. La gran puta, I thought. This already sucks. I got Local6.com on the screen and squinted at it in the solar radiation. Apparently it hadn’t been just a few people but more like a hundred, and the police had hit them with some kin
d of Active Denial System, that is, some kind of pain ray. Still, it doesn’t sound that serious, I thought. She’s just on edge. Which one can understand. Can’t one? Yeps.

  Hmm. Erythema means, like, red skin, right? Can you get that from food poi—

  A black Cherokee loomed up and ground to a grudging halt. I♥OTOWN, its license plate squealed. I guess ♥ was a letter now. The passenger door puffed open and I got a twinge of ingrained fear that I’d been tricked and was getting arrested. Cálmate, mano, I thought. If you’re from anyplace where disappear is a transitive verb, it’s normal to break into a sweat every time you see a big new dark car slow down next to you. But the States are pretty much still the States. Aren’t they?