The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  “Up? Nothing.”

  “Really?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’ve been working out, right?”

  “Well, I changed the fluidized bed filters in the sponge tanks.”

  “No, really, you’re doing good, right?”

  “Better never. I mean, never better.”

  There was a pause. You know how they say that when you’re at a loss for words to talk about something that’s in the room? So I looked around the room. There was a huge monitor on a big wooden easel, like it was an oil painting, and there was a sketch on the monitor of a sort of Mayanesque city, and I indicated it.

  “Did you do that freehand?” I asked. She said yes. I said that was really something. It was too. The girl really could sketch. “That’s what it’ll look like from the plaza,” she said.

  “What will?”

  “You know, Neo-Teo™.” That is, she didn’t pronounce the little ™ symbol, but I heard the name like it was there. “I mean, the analog version.”

  “By analog you mean real, right?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah, real life, full scale, inhabitable, the whole thing. I’m the first single person in charge of designing a city this large since, like, Peter the Great.”

  “Cool,” I inarticulated. Marena talked fast sometimes, almost like she was from 1940s radio, and it could take one a second to digest what she’d said. I liked it about her, though. These days if you take a business-presentations class or whatever they always tell you to speak as slow as sloth shit, not just so the ’tards can keep up but because they’ve done studies where people think the same exact speech is more important if it takes two minutes instead of one minute. On the other hand, if you’ve ever been in, say, any software-development meetings of more than three people, you might have seen how there’ll be two or three people who figure the problem out right away, and they work it out together speaking really fast with all this heavy jargon, and then when they’ve solved the problem they’ll take a break and one of them will explain the solution to all the lesser minds. Marena was one of those two or three people. It’s like, whoa, Brain on Board.

  “Check this out,” she said. She sort of pulled me around the desk area to a pair of low side tables. One of them was displaying a little crowd of vinyl dolls, or I guess you’re supposed to call them action figures, and when I got closer I could see they were vinyl Barbie-gauge Maya mythological characters, all in that trendy sort of Jesse Hernandez Urban-Ocelomeh style. Each had its name in raised gold on its little fauxstone base. But even without the labels, “Jun Raqan,” that is, Hurricane, would have been easy to recognize because of his single leg, and it wasn’t too hard to pick out “One Ocelot,” “1 Turquoise Ocelot,” “Mam” (who, since he still turned up sometimes these days under the name Maximon, sported a nineteenth-century hat and bolo tie over his Classic Maya gear), “Waterlily Jaguar,” “Ix Chel,” and “Star Rattler,” which was a long feathery snake with goo-goo-googly eyes and a lot of centipedalian legs. There was also a quartet of hunchbacked dwarfs in different colors, which they’d called “Northeast Chak,” “Northwest Chak,” and “Southwest Chak,” and then a gang of creepshowy types, obviously the nine Lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. They’d named the tallest one, the leader, “4 Jaguar Night,” and then his posse of eight henchmen all had names beginning with S — Scab, Skitters, Spine (a mastiff-sized fanged rabbit), Scald, Snatchbat, Scurf (a big disembodied head), Sarcoma, and Serpigo-who, to me anyway, looked more Cthuluish than Maya, but what do I know?

  “Not those, this,” Marena said. She edged behind the other table. It was covered with what looked like stacks of aerogel building blocks. She found a remote and clicked it on. The blocks filled with light and shadow.

  Whoa, I said, or tried to. Anyway, I’ve left off the inverted commas because I suspect I didn’t get it all the way out of my throat.

  It was an architectural model of a futuristic Mayanesque city: pyramids, plazas, palaces, spires, towers, bartizans, barbicans, brattices, lattices, oubliettes, obalesques, clerestories, labyrinthories, minatourets, and zigzaggurats, all bathed in a late-afternoon glow and with the inhuman clarity of, say, a daguerreotype, or, to get flowery, something woven out of spun sugar by an army of tiny elves trained at the Ecole des Hoteliers Gastronomiques. The table was only about four feet square and the model didn’t even cover the whole thing, but every carved stone and enamel tile and copper-electroplated window stood out realer than real, so that there seemed to be more detail in it than you’d be able to see in a real city, from a good vantage point, on a clear day, with binoculars, and with the eyes you had as a ten-year-old. It really looked like something from the future. Although of course we’ve been living in the future for a while now, but still. And it wasn’t holographic-obviously, because of the color-and it wasn’t any kind of video, or-oh, right. I remembered. It had to be that new 3-D system they’d been talking about. They meaning Marena and her design team from Warren Entertainment. The Barbie Something.

  “Have you seen it before?” Marena asked.

  I think I still didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, the DHI?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Doll House Interface.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “It’s these blocks of aerogel with all these layers of plasma video screens like, sandwiched into them,” she said. “So without the input it’s almost transparent. The consumer version’s still a few years away.”

  “Right.”

  “And then there’s also layers of reverse-polarizers, so that makes the shadows. And then there’s a lot of transparency, so you get color depth. And each little layer’s twenty-four hundred DPI.”

  I mumbled how thrillingly advanced that all was.

  There was a sense of movement somewhere inside the thing and when I squinted closer it turned out that the staircases on the pyramids were escalators. It sounds tacky, but the thing had such a what I guess you’d call a sense of unity that even that, and the neonish ersatz Maya gargoyles and animatronic caryatids and whatever, all seemed to be the right things in the right places.

  “See, that’s the Hyperbowl,” she said. She picked up an oval block that was displaying a glass-and-titanium pyramidal shell and uncovered a playing field and tiers of seats.

  “So, wait, you’re going to build all this on top of the Stake?” I asked. That is, on top of what was officially called the Belize Olympics Complex. A stake is a Mormon mission, which was what it was originally, so that was what everyone called it around the Warren Family of Caring Companies.

  “Well, eventually, that’s the idea,” she said. She handed me the oval block. When I squinted close at it I could just make out nets of gold wires and a black chip the size of the letter M in six-point pica. “After the games the Morons want their own boutique country. Basically it’s a tax dodge.”

  “Well, it’s always good to plan for the future.” End of Everything, I thought. Hell. Don’t think about it.

  “Yeah. I guess, you know, now that they’ve prevented the end of the world, the Firm’s getting right back to trying to own it.”

  “Right.” EOE, I thought again. Damn. It really felt like I was thinking it in that Stephen King echo-effect punctuation, you know, like:

  Okay, so there I was, like, walking along, doo-dee-doo-dee-doo, and I

  (End of Everything) walked into the East Innesmouth Post Office and

  (EOE) the lady at the window, about whom much, much more in a moment, handed me a tattered, oddly heavy manila envelope wrapped in ratty twine, and I

  (todo por mi culpabilidad) opened it and…

  You know.

  “You sound doubtful,” Marena said.

  “No, I’m, I’m not, it, uh, it sounds…”

  “Yeah, you are. What are you doubtful aboutful?”

  “I’m not, I’m…”

  “Hi, boss,” Marena said.

  “Hi,” a ten-year-old
boy’s voice said behind me. It was her kid, Max. “Hi, Uncle Jed.”

  I said hi. He’d come up and was hugging me. I kind of hugged back but it felt really awkward for obvious reasons, like, because, you know. Okay, I’ll say it. Because I was going to kill him. Had killed him. Fuck. I was starting not to feel so good. Coming up here had not been a good idea. He pulled away and looked at the Neo-Teo model. The afternoon-light effect had deepened to sunset cerises, and the stone and tiles on the “east” side-which was actually turned to the north-had gone to twilight blues and grays. Window lights and faux-neon signage, with Mayanesque glyphs in new Decoesque fonts, started flickering on. They made the place look a little more like the Syd Mead sets for Blade Runner, but without the grunge.

  “Pretty godless, huh?” he asked.

  “Your mom’s very talented,” I said.

  “Tony says we can order whatever we want for dinner,” he said. He’d gotten the Star Rattler figurine and was unsnapping its segments and reconnecting them in a different order.

  “Whatever that’s not Indian,” Marena said.

  “What do you do on Sleekers?” he asked me. He must have seen mine in the entryway. I said nothing much yet. “Lookit this,” he said. He stepped back into the hallway, ran in through the door, and in what I guess was a parkour move vaulted one-handed over the desk, somehow avoiding the thicket of monitors. Evidently he activated his Sleekers in midair because he came down in a glide and, just as he was about to crash through the French doors, channeled his momentum into a scratch spin, pulling in his arms and spotting on my face each time. We said wow.

  “Wait, that wasn’t good,” he said. “I’m gonna do it again.” He did it again. We told him how great it was and how seeing it again would dilute our enjoyment of its surprising and utterly radical greatness. Marena asked what I wanted for sort of dinner. I started to say how, well, I hadn’t been planning on making them feed me, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She negotiated Max down to a “vegetarian array” of Korean food and he left to give the orders. Fuckez moi, I thought. I’d felt like a jerk before, but it had gotten a whole lot worse, that is, if it’s even possible to be the worst person who ever lived and then get even more disgustingly evil. I’m the bad guy, I thought. Oh, well. He’s still at the stage where things seem interesting. Better for him to just disappear before he finds out what the world’s really like. Who’s “Hey, don’t rapture those Krispy Kremes,” Marena called after him.

  “Max is really great,” I said.

  “Oh, definitivement, ” she said. “It’s like a whole, it gives you a whole different set of priorities, about what’s important, I mean, momming… hey, guess what he’s going to be tomorrow.”

  “Sorry?”

  “For trick-or-treating.”

  “Oh. I can’t guess.”

  “Dick Cheney. He wrote a paper on him for Social Studies.”

  “Gosh.”

  “Hey, speaking of the date, I got something for you.”

  Oh, right, I thought. It’s my birthday. Actually, for Maya folks your name day-mine was three days from now-is a bigger deal, but maybe she didn’t know that. She handed me what was clearly an elephant-folio book, cleverly folded up in blue Genji-cloud kozogami. I coaxed it open without wrap rage. It was a book from 1831, von Stepanwald’s Curious Antiquities of British Honduras. I must have told her how I’d lost my copy and ABE wasn’t finding another.

  “Wow,” or something, I said. I thanked her profusely. I flipped through it. The copper engravings-and a few etchings-were as sharp as if they’d been pulled yesterday. “This is great,” I said. There Wait.

  Huh.

  Hell.

  The Citadel of the Ocelot Dynasty at Ixnichi Sotz in Ancient Days

  As It Was Described by Senor Diego San Nino de Atocha Xotz

  Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

  By Subscription Lambeth • 1831

  (6)

  You’d think I’d be beyond it at this stage, but I felt a welling up of some sort of good feeling mixed with some sort of bad feeling. I couldn’t quite hit on their names, though. I guess the good one was like coziness or fuzzy-’n’-warmness and the bad one was… guilt? No. No way. Well, maybe. Dude. You’re slipping. Undo, undo. You did the right thing. And you knew there’d be moments like this. You need to just get through the next fifty-one days. And there’s only one way you’re going to do that: denial. Right? Right.

  “Okay, anyway,” she said, when the little scene was over, “well, that gives us twenty minutes to finish that game.”

  “Okay,” I said, managing to leave out the introductory “uh.”

  She steered me around to where there were two quadricolored Korean cushions on either side of an old and very thick straight-grained kaya-wood Go board, the one that had been in her now-closed office downtown, and which I figured was worth north of fifty K. You could just see the sunken pyramid on its underside reflected in the dark tile floor. She took the bowls off the board, set them down, opened them, and started scooping out stones.

  “You don’t like Indian food?” I asked.

  “Hate. That stuff is dirty.” The way she said the word it sounded like it was in that Tales-from-the-Crypt y drip font, like

  “I didn’t know that about you.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s the last thing.” She dug an old Insa analog chess clock out of somewhere, wound up both sides, and settled it next to the board.

  “Oh, no, I’m sure there’s lots I don’t… you’re a woman of mystery…”

  “ You’re the mystery,” she said. “You’ve got something going on.” Marena started laying out the game where we’d left it three months ago, at the seventieth move. We’d started it at the Stake, during the Madison business, and a lot had happened since then, but-as I maybe should mention for the benefit of non-Go players in the audience-there wasn’t anything outstandingly mentally acrobatic about picking it up again now. Actually, all Go players above a certain level can remember all their games and can pick up any of them at any stage. Also, as long as we’re making explanations, maybe I should say how it might seem a little odd that we’d do this now, but only to people who don’t play. No Go player wants an unresolved game hanging around in the air like a hungry ghost.

  “Sorry?” I asked.

  “You’re not planning some damn thing for my birthday, are you? Because I’m not putting this one on my resume.” She snuck her right middle finger into the side of her mouth and, discreetly, bit on it.

  “Oh, uh, sorry, no.” Mierditas, I thought. I hate mind readers.

  “So what’s up? I bet you made another huge and foolishly attention-getting investment coup.”

  “No, no… it’s just you haven’t seen me for a while, that’s all-”

  “Uh-huh.” She conveyed a mass of dubiousness. Hell, I thought. (EOE) I’m transfuckingparent. Better take off now. No, wait. That’s even more suspicious-making. I looked up at the nearest one of the nine or so clocks on her desk. It was some I guess Masonic antique that said it was to. The next one in the row was an impossible-to-read skeleton clock-maybe it told the time in Xibalba-but the third one was highly legible: “6:41,” it said. “Smartlite Sweeper ™ /Quartz USA.” Damn. The night is far-effing young. Damn. Okay, just stick it out. It’s no biggie. Don’t get para. All chicks have empath powers. Right? But she can’t actually read your mind. Not without a whole lot of gadgetry, anyway.

  “Nothing’s up,” I said. (EOE! EOE!)

  “Are you sure-wait, hang on.” She paused for eight seconds. I finished laying out the game. “Okay, just use the Amex number,” she said. “Sorry,” she said to me. Oh, that’s why, I thought. I mean, why she had those big earrings. They were telephones. I mean, one of them was. The other probably had an extra condom in it or something.

  “Okay,” I said. I nodded. Marena nodded. I punched my clock. As it does, time seemed to slow down slightly. I’d decided on my move weeks ago, so I put it right down. She’d anticipated it and responded
immediately. The world slowed down another five clicks. Despite everything else that was going on, despite whatever little secrets she had and despite the big deal-breaking secret I had, we were in Gametime.

  And so it came to pass that there now followed about twelve and one-fifth minutes of silence, punctuated by six raps of stones hitting the thick wood. I always thought one of the most off-balancing things in life is when there’s a pause at the wrong time, and this felt especially wrong, a strange interlude with nothing happening in the middle of-well, maybe it just feels wrong to me. Damn it, how can Korean food take so long? Like it takes time to open ten jars of assorted kimchee. I focused on the board. In the first stages of a Go game it feels like you’re emplacing forts on a wide, desolate frontier. But at this point, almost halfway in, the stone pictures were coming into focus, crosses, flowers, a poodle, a long black staircase growing out of her second corner and bifurcating near the center into distended jaws, like the Star Rattlers balusters at Chichen. I pushed through a gap in the stairs and, maybe too fliply, hit the clock.

  She didn’t make a move. One minute. She bit down again on her presumably nonconforming fingernail, noticed she was doing it, and pulled her hand away and tucked it under her thigh. Two minutes.

  “Damn,” she said, at two minutes and eighteen seconds. Her biggest group was in real trouble. “This is not good.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not good. Maybe you should give me three stones next time.”

  “I shouldn’t even be giving you two stones.”

  “I’m rusty, I’ve been running an empire and saving the planet and decluttering the kid’s room and stuff. You should give me four stones.”

  “No way. With four stones you can beat anybody. Theoretically.”

  “Yeah? How many to beat God?”

  “The world champion would be at a disadvantage by the fiftieth move with one stone against God.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Hey, do you know what game I can beat God at every time?” she asked. “Without a handicap?”