The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  “Don’t do anything or I’ll kill you,” I said in Spanish. “Drive around that taxi.” The kid started to grab for something between his legs, so I killed him, swishing my cast-mace between his eyes, through the bridge of his nose, and then back through his Adam’s apple. Instead of pushing him out I just shifted into drive, crouched down, pressed his foot down on the pedal, and steered us around the taxi judging by the lights overhead and then around a couple of minivans, sensed their bumpers with the low-rider’s little catfish-barbels, and got us out into the far left lane and accelerated. We got out from under the overhang. Out of range, I thought. I stuck my head up and started really driving. I floored the thing around the sort of rotary and got to the ramp leading to the highway, scraping the ground. Low-riders are great, they really do corner. No flip, no slip. There were cop cars with sirens pulling into the overhang from the other side, way too late as usual. I buzzed over the road’s molars—rumble strips, Jed’s mind said, automatically but a little late—out of the hospital complex and up a curved slope and onto a frictionless gray sacbe, sliding between crystals of topaz, all identical and as big as a fist, set into the surface. Even with the sled’s masks down—windows open—I was starting to smell the dead pre-blood’s feces and urine, so I steadied the car for a few beats in the left lane, managed to get his jacket off him, and when I got up to about fifty I just opened the driver’s-side door and body-nudged him out. I felt him bounce and the car started jerking all over. His leg was still partly caught in the shoulder harness and he was scraping along the asphalt, and from the way he twitched he was still partly alive. There was a little auto-rush of revulsion from the Jed side of my head, sort of fear and loathing combined, but I slashed through the strap with my cast-mace and finally he rolled away from the sled like a used-up captive into a mass grave. As the back roller bumped over him the car nearly skudged into the median strip, but I wrenched it inexpertly around, got back on course, and closed the door.

  I knew to let Jed’s motor memories take over. Despite my shameful fear of the giant sled he got the car onto the Great Sacbe. The wind felt great through my bandages. I’m just getting started, I thought. No stink of them here. SOUTH, I read off a green sign. Wrong color for South, I thought. I was going too fast to look around but I moved the rearview mirror from side to side. No cars coming up behind me, at least not fast. I looked at the gas. Enough, I somewhere knew the needle pointed to. Jed’s mind seemed to think that the night watcher bloods, I mean, the police, might be relatively easy to shake because no matter what bonuses they were getting they’d still only assign a couple of people to the case. But I also had a large, well-funded private organization after me, which is a lot more serious. I figured I’d cruise as far as possible for about four-hundred-score beats and then change cars. No sweat, as they say these days. I started pulling at the last layer of magically clear cloth that was still stuck to my right hand. I watched the yellow speed indicator clicking up through these people’s gangly base-ten numerals, up through a sort of sky or ceiling that Jed’s mind called the Invisible Gardol Shield, 67, 71, 79, 83, 97. I touched the CRUISE glyph at 94 and held on to the steering plate like a child on its mother’s back, feeling the speed of twenty Mixtec runners.

  Score, I said to myself. Goal.

  Game.

  FOUR

  The Anareta

  ( 108 )

  I left the U.S. heading backward on the so-called “Maya Diaspora” illegal-immigration route that Jed had once sponsored, from Miami to San Antonio and then male-handward along what they called the Pan-American Sacbe through the resettled Teotihuacán and finally Belize City. I was able to utilize some of the fruits of Jed’s paranoia. Before leaving Florida, I rolled someone from a pastless clan—I think they call them Homeless People here—for his revolting but correctly sized clothing, picked up a semifake passport from Jed1’s anonymous safe at a storage warehouse, and even found that he had set up a Dominican Republic account under a false name that would let me withdraw cash from Western Union ATMs using a code, and not a card—and after a bit of bullying, Jed’s dying consciousness gave me the code. I kept up my pentadaily call to what Jed1 had called his Secret Server, to keep it from spilling the beans. One of Jed1’s old Zeta contacts—I gambled on his being okay because it was one of a few that he’d never mentioned or entered on any keyboard—sold me some other papers and five very small explosive devices, which we FedExed, disguised as printer cartridges, to another Zeta guy in Ladyville, Belize.

  Getting from Orlando to Belmopan used up five suns. By the time I dug in there, a jornada from the Stake, I’d become familiar enough with English and Spanish to interact with the domeheads without making Jed-in-Me interpret—he’d had a big advantage over me when he was my guest, of course, because he already spoke a decayed dialect of Chorti—and I even stopped bumping into people on the sidewalk. I’d been trying to pass them on the sunward side, what they’d call the British side. But people here went around things clockwise, as they called it. And there were other things that were hard to get used to. Car fart, or exhaust as they euphemistically called it, was one thing I could never handle, even though I’d slept in killing valleys filled in a fog of burning gangrene. Exhaust was soaked into everything, in the water and in the food. On the other hand there were the splendid things. I got so amazed by the Wal-Mart in Monterrey that I wasted hours just walking around in it. First it was the amount and variety of sheer things that got me, and then it was the goods themselves, rolls of turquoise foil and mats of fur cut, I thought, from giant blue deer that lived on the verso of the world in a place Jed’s brain said was called China—and televisions and carnival glass and so on—but finally the oddest thing for me was the way the same complex object could be flawlessly repeated over and over, like it was one of those demons that used to live in the hills, who could be in different places at the same time. Metal bothered me, so I got a complete set of thirty-four Ming Tsai white ceramic knives. Then I found the upscale malls, and for a while I couldn’t keep myself from buying all sorts of red-striped clothing at Versace and Richard James, until I realized it was making me stand out too much. So I forced myself to blend in, to dress for the hunt. I got my tattoos back as compensation, so I could wear some of my old power-glyphs inside, on my skin. The tattoo artist loved some of the designs so much he wanted to keep them, but I explained they were secret and if he let them out, I’d have to come back and eat him. I got my hair extended again. My hotel room started filling up with jewelry and exotic mock-weapons and sports equipment and gadgets from Sharper Image and Lifestyle Innovations. Eventually I realized that for some reason all the stuff that I thought was the most expensive, turquoise, jade, amber, ivory, jet, pyrite—all those things—were now the cheapest substances of all thanks to the new alchemy. Color, matter, and place were all worth nothing, and that had turned the people into cowards, only half alive.

  I bought a thigh-top magic book and got Jed’s fading memories working on hacking into the Warren files again, but I couldn’t manage to do much. Jed-in-Me felt almost gone. And I didn’t have any tsam lic to help me crack the passwords. Finally I gave up. That Marena’s going to have to do this stuff, I thought. Even if I have to boil her feet.

  So instead, I focused on blending in. Food around now had been hard to get used to. Most of the foods I liked were easy to find, turkey, peanuts, chilies, tortillas, tequila—although they were all quite different, all uniform, with no souls. Corn was gigantic and sweet but they had only one kind on the ear. You could get the sacred blue strain—in fact, anyone could get it—but only in shards of broken tortillas. I found I could get venison and some fish and shellfish, but that dog, bats, locusts, and axolotl, and of course people, were almost unobtainable. When I did catch and cook up a stray dog, its flesh was gamy and festering with internal boils. Pet dogs were better but harder to capture, and still had that all-pervading taste of petroleum—which was the most unpleasant thing about the final hotun. The entire time, since I’d found
myself in the hospital, there wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t hear and smell an engine digesting somewhere, on the streets, in the walls, overhead, whatever. So generally I stuck to turkey. There was even a kind of sacrificial festival for birds, with even the lower clans eating big fat birds, with divination by something they called the wishbone and the cranberry sauce standing in for blood.

  I scattered my white blood a few times, with professionals from sex castes. Tony Sic’s mutilated foreskinless penis was much less sensitive than mine had been, even with all the scars mine had from the offerings. Anyway, it wasn’t safe, since I had to execute and dispose of them, so I gave it up.

  The U.S.—increasingly an outcast state anyway—had had to recall ambassadors and shut down embassies in all of Latin America and in several countries around the world. Troops were being asked to leave their bases in over fifty countries. Another domino falling. Two weeks ago the UN had passed a resolution condemning the U.S.’s actions. The next domino. However, following the UK’s lead, Belize had not passed a resolution condemning the U.S. With this as something of an excuse, two days ago Guatemala had demanded that Belize break off ties with the UK. Belize, knowing that would make them vulnerable to a Guate invasion, refused. Now, it seemed that the Guates were poised to cross into Belize at its southern and southeastern borders.

  Among other countries, Guatemala was demanding that all U.S. military advisers leave the country. And the U.S. State Department was in crisis mode about it, since Belize was still a British protectorate, the borders were closed and the militaries of both countries were on full alert. I was by now understanding more and more about Jed’s life and world and I wondered whether the conflict meant that Lindsay would have to cancel his planned Neo-Teo opening party at the NeoMayaLand Hyperbowl in Belize, less than two jornadas from the Guatemala border—or whether the dispute was something Lindsay wanted to make happen.

  The newscasters mentioned that there were reports that officials in the stricken villages had received anonymous tips that something disastrous was going to happen—probably, it was said, from someone within the Drug Enforcement Administration who didn’t agree with the policy.

  And, in astronomical news, there was a new Herbig Ae/Be star in the Pleiades.

  Jed’s memories gave me four hundred times four hundred ways of keeping out of sight. I worked out a good approach, a very direct one, low tech for today’s post-high-tech world, and crossed what was now the border of the Stake well ahead of time. I hid out in a dry wash near a hot water pipe from the power plant, in a foundation for a cooling tank that wouldn’t begin construction until the next b’aktun, which meant never.

  Even when I’d been hiding out in Texas KOA kampgrounds, I learned from police broadcasts that while there was a warrant out for me, it wasn’t for murder or even assault but simply for fleeing arrest. There was nothing saying I was armed and/or dangerous. Evidently Lindsay’s people didn’t want me to get caught by the police and must have managed to cover up the killings at the hospital.

  On what they called December sixteenth I moved into a pastless—I mean, transient dwelling in the suburbs. That night—the seventeenth—the events of the Greatfather Heat’s incarnations seemed promising. I started acquiring and testing the hardware I needed and studying the Hyperbowl compound from a safe distance. After a few days of frustration, I learned to draw on Jed’s knowledge of computers, and eventually I reconstructed enough skills from Jed’s memories to master the basic programming that would be necessary to work my way into the Warren systems. Many of Jed’s math skills seemed to work more or less automatically, ready for anyone to use. And while I certainly never really understood anything more complex than a simple loop, computers, surprisingly, fascinated more than repelled me. Without Jed’s uay, I could not have done it.

  Were they watching me? Did I have any tracking implants? By mid-December, I’d taken too much evasive action and had been examined by enough underground-friendly doctors to be pretty sure I could answer the last two questions in the negative. Speaking of which, my fractured right hand was healing faster than I’d have thought. All good. All good.

  I hired a truck driver to smuggle me to the Stake. There were patrols out and Jed—in either body—would have been spotted right away, but I used the old methods, sticking to the jungles, wearing and carrying very little, and keeping all my metal equipment in a little Otter fishing-tackle case. I made an ambush camp under a collapsed wooden water tank in sight of the border and waited.

  When I felt the time was right, I crossed the trench, the electric fences, picking up a couple shocks, but ignoring them and the field of razor-wire, which I rolled over, laying down Kevlar blankets.

  As I expected, the security at the Stake’s inner Olympic Complex was harder to penetrate than the border. There were trucks and passenger vans going in and out, and helicopters and, once, a new white Zeppelin, landing with VIP guests for the opening—which had not been put off by the hail—but despite the activity at the gates, I decided to sneak in the old way. Through radio intercepts and observation, I found that, evidently because of the war, there was a fleet of small remote-piloted vehicles patrolling the air above the Stake and, certainly, watching the ground. This was a setback, but finally, during a brief rain before dawn (off-season, because of the mixed-up weather) I took a chance and made my way across the perimeter. I rubbed myself with burro dung to throw off the guard dogs, crawled through ten rope-lengths of card teasel and poison ivy, and lay motionless for eight hours until I was sure I could get to what seemed to be a currently unworked construction site near the racetrack. I hid out, as I’d learned to do in my youth, silently, unmoving, in a pylon excavation, eating Snickers bars and putting my human waste into baggies of sodium polyacrylate beads. When the Pleiades rose that night, the new star, which they’d named Akhushtal, was clearly visible just below Maia. No surprise there. Lady Koh had been right again. And in that video, Lindsay’d meant “Live in Maia.” Not Maya. He never pronounced “Maya” right anyway. Maia like the star in the Pleiades. The next Kobol, I guess. He also knew.

  At the death of Grandfather Heat, I waylaid a right-sized waiter near one of the pools, washed myself in the unearthly blue water, took his clothes, key cards, IDs, and a room-service cart, and walked into the hotel lobby and up to Marena’s room—which I’d located by monitoring conversations on the waiters’ earphones. Jed’s bible was the Collected Works of Ian Fleming, and I’d decided to stick to the faith. Anyway, it’s not so hard to get into a place as long as you don’t care about getting out. The very second key card made the lock light green. I walked in. She was already dressed, in a flinty pants suit, a garnet necklace, and up hair, but still without her sandals. She tried not to show that she was surprised to see me, and then not to show that she thought I was going to try and kill her. But she picked up a square chrome-framed table mirror in both hands and weighed it like she was going to swing it through my face.

  It wasn’t hard to get her on board, though. Even though she’d thought I still wanted to kill her.

  “I know what’s happening,” I said, “and I can stop it.”

  Well, actually, I had to put in another few words.

  “Look,” she said, “if you’re not going to save Max, I’m not interested.”

  “We’re going to save Max. And everybody.”

  “Who cares about everybody?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “All in the light, then,” I said. “Fine.”

  “Fine. Tell me.”

  ( 109 )

  The center gate led right into the long covered arcade approaching the stadium lobby. There were four checkpoints of greeters and identifiers and guards, and a few thousand neo-MARCOSite protestors they were keeping at bay but Marena biometricked herself through the gauntlet, and her vouching for me worked again. We came into the Warren lobby, which was now a kind of far-up-the-scale food court, or food empyrean, as it seemed to be called, laid out as an idealize
d diagram of a human body. The air was breezy with what Jed’s memory said was extra oxygen pumped in.

  Marena piloted me down the center aisle, around a green central square filled with ears of quadricolored sweet corn and up into the food court’s head, past counters of fish flesh and strange fruit. The thralls behind the counters were working screens of base-twenty abacus-calculators. Once in a while she squeezed my arm, cutting into it with her nails, like I was an overturned canoe. We walked into the Hyperbowl entrance. The high false arch was flanked with animated DHI video statues of the athletes performing their greatest feats and routines over and over again, monuments of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, when Warren really got going. We passed through a sound cone and heard a snatch of John Tesch’s voice: “At this time we’d like to extend our condolences to the family of Greg ‘The Leg’ Nagel, our beloved Jaguar forward, who passed away during practice earlier today. As we all know, Greg’s outstanding stats included . . .”

  Trapezoidal doors slid open and shut around us and the air changed to some designer mix, cool but still tropical and scented like a disinfected rain forest. It was almost quiet because of the active sound baffles, but there was the roorsh of artificial waterfalls and conversation.