The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

“Well, thanks,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s happening with Ix Ruinas?”

  “Sorry,” she said, “that’s a fourth question.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, come on, we’re adults, and, you know, we’re leveling with each other.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, let’s each agree to add a question.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the answer if you come back to work for us.”

  “On what?”

  “On Neo-Teo. It’ll be the art-and-life-and-everything work of the next century. It’ll be fucking Rome.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said—I didn’t want to say, “Yeah, but the Warren Corporation makes Caligula look like Heidi,” or some other forcedly snippy thing—“but you’re the artist, designer, whatever, I’m just a code monkey—”

  “No, seriously, we really want you on the team.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Like, getting the imagineering and architecture into tune with the Game, more in tune with the new calendar . . .”

  “What new calendar?” Have you been studying?” I meant studying the Game.

  “Yeah.”

  “Great.”

  “But we are already missing your expertise. And it’ll be fun to work with you. I like you.”

  “Oh. Thanks. Well, I like you.”

  Her body sort of constricted and extended. “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe we’re getting into feelings here.”

  “Yeah, I have a little trouble with, you know, feelings whoo whoo whoo feelings.”

  “Everybody has trouble with feelings.”

  “I guess.”

  “But, like I say, I do feel very fond of you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s great, I, feel fond of you.” Hell. I really did, and it was cramping my act. I guess the takeaway is when you’re planning to betray, destroy, and murder somebody and her child, bonding is not a good idea. Damn. It and I and everything all felt dark, evil, and not as inevitable as I’d—

  “So let’s hang out together and do this project.”

  “Thanks, but still, no, I don’t have time, I mean, it’d take a lot of time.”

  “It’ll take an hour a day, what’s the problem?”

  “I mean, I just don’t feel like doing it.” Except I was realizing that I did kind of feel like doing it. Or at least I was realizing that being here felt good. No, worse than that. I was realizing that I wanted to see what Max looked like in his little Dick Cheney costume, I wanted to see how the next Bond movie would turn out, I wanted to see whether she was right about that orgasm thing, I wanted to settle down in some gated compound and wake up with Marena every morning and go out together to feed the turkeys and water the soybeans and pull the corpses off the electric fence. Hell. Maybe these people really weren’t so bad, I thought. Maybe even a nontrivial fraction of people everywhere weren’t so bad, maybe people in the future would adapt themselves to be even less bad. Maybe I hadn’t been weighing the decency fraction heavily enough, maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, I mean, with the EOE, maybe I had to stop it, maybe—

  “Jed. You said you don’t have time to do it. Not that you don’t want to do it. Which is it?”

  “It’s, uh, the latter.”

  “Bullfuckingshitfuckbullcrapfuckingshit.”

  I thought. I was sure I hadn’t touched my nose or rubbed my ears or any of that stuff. Had I looked toward the door? Maybe she could spot microexpressions. Maybe that’s how she got to be such a big deal in the competitive, high-stakes world of the international entertainment industry. I mean, besides talent. She could walk into a meeting and—

  “Okay, why don’t you have time to do it?” she asked. “What’s going to happen?”

  “Sorry, you’re out of questions—”

  “Fuck the three questions.”

  “You came up with the three questions.”

  “Then fuck me and the three questions, I’m asking you, as one concerned adult to another.” She bounced up, walked to a built-in bookcase on the south wall, and dug a pack of Camel shorts out of their hiding place behind a copy of Autodesk Maya 9 Fundamentals.

  “Okay, fine. Nothing’s going to happen.” Wow, I thought, she’s feeling some real angst. Of course, one realizes that nobody ever really quits, but in her case, and with Max in the house—

  “Again I call bullshit,” she said. She lit a cigarette with an old blue-enamel Decoish desk lighter, came back around, sat down, pushed the Go board aside, and set down a big, heavy glass cigar ashtray in its place.

  Pause. She pulled in a long, luxurious drag, vaporizing a full inch. Despite everything else, you could feel the satisfaction of long-denied addiction.

  Damn it. I’d thought the Q-and-A was over, and I’d been thinking about something else—well, honestly I’d been wondering again what kind of name Octy was besides Roman/Shakespearean/Peakean—and then she’d come in and zapped me.

  “Something’s going to—” she started to say.

  Pause. “What?” I asked.

  “Oh, God—”

  ( 10 )

  “—you mean you don’t have time to waste,” she said. “You’re sick, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are, you’re like, terminally Pythian or something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ve got to fix this. Lindsay’ll pay the bill whether you’ve quit or not.” The words came out bunched together.

  “Marena, come on, stop. I’m not sick.”

  “Really? Well, something’s wrong.”

  “I’m just not feeling top-tip, uh, tup—”

  “You’ve like, seen that you’re going to get sick, in the Game.”

  “Um . . . well . . .”

  “Fuck, I knew it. Hell.” She bounced up and around the Go board and touched my brow with the back of her hand. “Yeah, you feel a little squeamy. And your pupils are dilated, they’re, like, like ripe olives, how much of the stuff are you on, right now?”

  “Not too much, just the regular dose. It’s nothing, it’s like an espresso. Well, like nine espressos. Uh, -si.”

  “I want to get Dr. Lisuarte on it right now.”

  “No, I—”

  “Why not? They made this mess, let’s get them to clean it up.”

  “Look, sweetie, I don’t want them messing with me any more right now, okay?”

  “So who’s going to deal with it?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m handling it.”

  “Handle what? What is it? A brain tumor?”

  “No—”

  “Fibrous lungs? Blood press—oh, my God, you’re a hemophiliac. You’re going to have a little stroke and it’s going to wipe you out. Right? Shit.”

  “Look, however you’re figuring out—well, I’m not sick. Ask me if I’m sick.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  She watched me for a few seconds.

  “Okay,” she said. Evidently, however she was reading me, she’d decided that last bit was the truth. “So, if you don’t have time, but you’re not worried about, about, uh, your own death, then. . . . oh, hell.”

  I know I said that her face didn’t show things, but maybe I was just getting in a little ethnic slur there, because now something in her face did change, slowly but very noticeably, even to me. It showed fear, and it showed it unmistakably.

  “It’s me, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said, “It’s—”

  “I’m sick. It’s that EVC thing again. How long do I have?”

  “It’s definitely not you. Honest injun.”

  She looked at me. She looked at me some more. One thing we auties and pseudoauties don’t do too much, and which normals do way too much for our taste, is that normals fucking look at you.

  “Okay, fine. So what is it, did you see something in the Game?”

  “Nothing unusual. If I had you’d know a
bout it.”

  Pause. As before, she looked at me and I looked back.

  “So, so, what are you saying? You do know how you’re going to die, we’ve established that. Right?” She took another drag.

  “Well, uh—kind of, but it’s a discouraging topic, let’s talk about something—”

  “How? How are you going to die?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. I’m done.”

  “Okay, when? When are you going to die?”

  “Not before any—not for a while, I don’t—okay, look. I didn’t want to get into this because I’m still really vague about it and I have to play some more sessions. But there’s going to be a huge civil war in two years and we’re all going to have to leave and go to, like, Iceland.”

  Again, she looked at me. Yet again, I looked back.

  “That’s not it,” she said. “Come on, what’s going to happen?”

  “If you don’t like that one, then I don’t know.”

  “No, I know you’ve been looking in on the future, and you saw something big, but that wasn’t it.”

  “Okay, fine—”

  “Oh, hell, you found another doomster. Right?”

  Better not answer that one, I thought. Don’t answer anything, Jeddiot. Just stay mum, dumb, and schtum and you’ll get out—

  “That’s why you’re not going to die before anybody else, we’re all going to die at the same time, you said there’d be other doomsters someday. And you’ve found out about one and you don’t think you can stop him.”

  I shook my head.

  “Or else it’s some natural disaster. Right?”

  “No,” I said. “No asteroids, no tidal waves, no, no zombies, no lava . . .”

  “Okay, so it’s a nuke. Nuclear war.”

  “No, that’s not it,” I said.

  “What is it? You gave off a guilty signal just now.”

  “It’s—it’s that investment.”

  “How many people is it going to affect?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it going to kill more than a hundred people?”

  “I—okay, I think so.”

  “More than ten thousand?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.”

  “Fifty thousand deaths.”

  “I’m not answering any more. I’m done. I’m a jerk and that’s it.”

  “How big of a jerk?”

  I got my eyes detached from hers and swung them around the room. The clock said it was to .

  Out in the courtyard, the pool lights had gone out and without the contrast you could make out a hedge of I guess pepper trees beyond it. Over in Neo-Teo, Eos Aimatiródactylos—bloody-fingernailed dawn—was grazing the “east” facets of the roof combs. But somehow, inevitably, my focus gravitated back to her face. Our eyes locked.

  She guesses, I thought.

  She put the last inch of cigarette in the ashtray but didn’t stub it out.

  No. No, she doesn’t. Just chill out. Just sit tight. Chill tight and sit it out. Shill sight tit shite chit . . .

  One second. Two seconds. Was something changed in her expression? I couldn’t look away. Yes, it was. Changing.

  As of today I was thirty-eight short years old, and I’d already seen more than enough horrible stuff in my exile here on Planet Retardia, and not just on YouTube, either, all the things you’d pay a lot to be able to unsee, your second-grade class’s gerbils in the act of maternal cannibalism, a tentacle-faced star-nosed mole, that photo of the six-year-old girl walking two steps behind her grandmother toward the gas chamber at Treblinka, a knot of eight dead naked toddlers in a six-month-old mass grave that No Way and I helped dig up in La Sierra when No Way and I were working for the relief corps of the CPRs, the Communities of Populations in Resistance, the unadulterated evil in the gargoyle face of Pope Benedict XVI, the giant toothy lamprey face of the Chunnel drilling machine, a woman in Mexico City with a huge facial tumor that made her head look like giant peeled pomegranate—but this, now, was easily the most horrible thing I’d ever seen, and I knew it was the most horrible thing I ever would see, not a fleshy gross-out or a monument of cruelty or an ugh-eyed monster, but, rather, just the slow, dark dawn of understanding in her eyes. She knew, I could tell that she knew, and that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. And I could tell that she could tell that I could tell that she knew. It was as though there were some kind of pneuma flowing between our eyes, like it feels with lovers orgasming together in bright light, but of course this was the hideous negative of anything loving, she was looking into me and seeing a wasteland of shit, a whole more-than-earth-size planet with diarrhea oceans broken by mountain-islands of stacked dry turds, and in my looking back I was agreeing with that assessment. A sound rose inside her, a rumble under her chest, and metastasized into something like a voice, but a voice that rasped out of some huge, recently dead thing buried in frozen ground:

  “WHAT DID YOU DO?”

  I noticed that my knees were cracking, and that meant I was standing up, slowly. I backed away from her, toward the big desk.

  “I didn’t,” I started to say, “I mean, it’s nothing, it’s the right—”

  “WHAT DID YOU DO?”

  She bounced up and ducked around in front of me, as small, lissome people can. I jumped left and got the desk between us. Her eyes had an indescribable look—indescribable but not something I’d never seen, because I’d seen it in dying patients in the field hospitals at the CPRs, an expression of horror, horror and hatred and terror, or rather, I think, terror not for her but more, or maybe only, for her child, which is even more primal.

  “I want . . . to . . . see . . . Max . . . grow . . . up,” she barked.

  “Marena, look—”

  “How—can—you –k-kill—MAX?”

  The forgotten Go clock ticked once. It ticked again. Tick. Tick—

  “Max is Desert Dog,” I said.

  “What? What the fuck is that?”

  “Nothing, it’s just—”

  “Is that . . . what you call all . . . call all . . . those . . . people you—”

  “No, it’s just, I know it’s the right thing, it won’t hurt, there’s no way to—”

  “Don’t even tell me, you fuck, you, you, you . . . you think you’re going to make that decision—you can’t make that decision, you’re not some like, wise being, you’re just, you’re a loser, you’re a boring windbaggy geek loser, you’re, you think you mean anything to anybody? You don’t know anybody worth knowing, nobody’s heard of you, you’ve never done anything remotely important, you’re—”

  On the last syllable of important, she darted to her right. I circled away, clockwise. She stopped, feinted clockwise again in kind of a Texas tango maneuver, and dashed counterclockwise, almost getting me, but I made it to the opposite side, so the French doors were at my back. Somewhere in my churning gray matter I realized something was off, that she wasn’t acting quite the way she would normally, or let’s say “normally,” act faced with this information, that even though tears were almost squirting out of her eyes, she maybe wasn’t yelling so loud as you’d have thought, but I didn’t get the implication. Damn, I thought, I should just attack her and like strangle her or bonk her brains in or something right now. Except I didn’t feel like it. In fact, I bet I’d never felt less like doing anything like that in my life—in fact, I felt like I wanted to hold on to her and shield her while the world vanished so that she and I could float off together like the shades of Paolo and Francesca, out into Earth-free space. God damn it, my other side said, you’re a pussy after all. You’d think that someone who was going to kill everybody later wouldn’t have trouble killing one person, but there’s a difference between someone who kills for fun and someone who kills out of compassion, like, say, a veterinarian, and—

  “You shit,” Marena said, “I was, I was, I was practically falling in love with you and you were shit. You were worse than shit. You’re what shit would shit if it could shit.”r />
  “Yeah, I was just thinking along those lines.” It was an idiotic thing to say, of course, but I was a long way from thinking clearly, and in fact I had just been thinking how I was one of them, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, DeLanda, and then I was thinking how she was right, that I wasn’t even an accomplished whatever like they all were, I wasn’t a conqueror or a dynasty founder or even a good public speaker, I was the worst of all of them without even being in their league, just a loser who happened to find a way to make everyone else lose along with me, except even that was giving me too much credit because it was making me out to be at least a human being and I wasn’t, I was the opposite of a human being, I was a smear of wriggling little verminettes that had to be immediately wiped off the ass of the universe—

  “How do I stop it?”

  “Just trust me, I saw the whole situation in—”

  The click of a doorknob is one of those sounds you come to recognize unmistakably, and when I heard it behind me I instantly realized why Marena hadn’t been shouting at me and in fact had been speaking almost softly, and that she must have said something that had activated her earring phone and—oh, right, in fact I knew what it was, it was when she’d used the words call all, that rang all the phones in the house—and—

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Tony Sic’s voice said.

  I snuck a peek over my left shoulder. He was in the doorway, about eight feet away. “Hi, Tony, nothing,” I started to say, but before I got to the -thing part Grgur had loomed in behind him. I may have said at some point that he looked like Leonid Brezhnev’s uglier brother, but now he looked like Leonid Brezhnev himself after going through the same gamma-ray-o-genic mutation that turned Ben Grimm into the Thing. He was in his goon outfit with the collar tips spreading over the lapels of the ill-fitting gray one-button sport coat. He was big. He edged Tony aside. There was an impression of motion on my right side and a shot of pain up my right thigh, and as I folded I realized that her foot had switchbladed into my knee—it was one of those low kicks Ana Vergara’d taught her—and I thought I was going to have to operate from the floor for a little while, but I surprised myself by getting my hands on the edge of the desk and holding myself up with I guess my arm strengthened by the epinephrine that sprays into your bloodstream so unbelievably fast when your amphibian brain decides there’s a threat out there. As Marena came toward me I picked up a big old LCD monitor off the desk with my right hand and tossed it at her. She tried to bat it away but hurt her hand, I think, since she grunted, and as it fell, trailing cables, the edge hit her knee and her second kick stopped almost before it started. Run, I thought. Holy shit holy shite shat shot run run run run. My hand was on the handle of the French door and I yanked it up. It was one of those locks that open when you open it, if you know what I mean, and I slid out into the dark courtyard. Grgur was right there but I took the time to push the door shut behind me, since I figured it would buy me a good two seconds, and I turned and dashed out, with my stocking feet ouching on this sort of upscale little shiny black rocks. Bright light flashed on all over, like movie lights. I’m on camera, I thought. Oh, well.