“We hadn’t decided between you and Tony yet.”
“But you thought I should do it and not Sic. You were being really deceptive.”
“Well, okay, I’ll say-but, I mean, come on. Would you say you’re a very trusting person?”
“Uh, no.”
“If you’d thought we had any-you wouldn’t have gotten near us. Right?”
“Well, maybe I… I guess not.” Any what? I wondered. Nefarious designs, I guess. Let it go.
“So I’ll say yes, but now you’re glad anyway, right?” Finally, she succeeded in severing the fingernail’s last attachment with her left canine tooth.
“Okay, right,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.” Somehow, now, it didn’t seem like she’d done anything so bad.
She moved the loose nail into position with her tongue and started chewing on it with the same level of unself-conscious purposefulness my Jasus crayfish exhibit when they eat their molted exoskeletons. “Okay,” she said. “My turn.”
“Okay.” Okay, I thought. Don’t stiffen up. But don’t flail either. Make normal-sized arm gestures. No hunching over. And if you have to lie, it’s just like with a polygraph, you have to make yourself believe you’re telling the truth. How’d I get into this? I don’t have to do-except I still wanted to find out about what had happened in Guatemala. If anything. After all, she’d been down there for months. The last I’d heard she’d still been at the Stake, trying to get permission from the Guates to dig officially at Ix Ruinas. But maybe something more had happened. Or was going to happen. Maybe they’d found the tomb and there was more info in it. And if it looked like Jed 2 ’s memories would get through, well, that would be huge. There “Okay. I think there’s something big going on, and it’s making you feel happy and powerful, but also you’re a bit worried about whether it’s going to come off. Am I right?”
Damn. Okay, I thought. Don’t make any partial shrugs. No quick changes of expression. I checked my hands-that is, without looking at them, I thought about them. They were open with the fingers extended. Good. Okay. I focused on the bridge of her nose and, lowering my usual pitch a bit, said, “Yes.”
“Okay, great. That’s progress. So what is it?”
“That’s a second question,” I said.
“Okay, fine. You go.”
“Okay. You guys are watching me. Right?”
“What do you mean us guys?”
“The Warren Spook Corporation.”
“They’re keeping an eye on all of us.”
“That’s not a good-I mean, I can tell I’m under surveillance.”
“So what’s the question?”
“Well…”
“Look, what do you think they’re going to do? The Game-you’re a Sacrifice Game specialist, right? It’s like you’re driving around with a trunkful of hydrogen bombs. We all are. They’re watching me too, I mean, of course, and, you know, I think Corporate’s being pretty reserved about it, frankly.”
She had a point. “Well, you have a point.”
“Okay, my turn,” she said. “What did you do to make yourself so excited?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m excited.”
“But you are happy about something. Or relieved.”
“No, I’m not-I mean, I’m relieved about the EOE.”
“What’s that stand for again?”
“The End of Everything.”
“Oh, right. Okay, you’re relieved that’s not happening?”‘
“Um, yeah. That’s right.”
“But that’s not new. You said something new was going on.”
“I did?” I had? I wondered. When? Or was she doing some hypno-thing on me? Bitch. Just be cool. Okay.
“Okay,” I said. “I went very long on some futures a little while ago and I’m doing super well on them. I’m completely on Easy Street.”
She looked at me. I tried to look back. Her eyes seemed bottomless. Finally it felt like I was staring into a gale-force wind. Fine, let her win the stare-down. I looked over at the Neo-Teo model. Most of the window lights and signs and had gone out, and its walls were a convincing range of deep-night blacks and blues.
“Well, that’s great,” she said finally. “Okay, ask me about Tony.”
Huh. Well, maybe I’d passed, I thought. “Okay, well, are you and-”
Hell.
(9)
The main phone, the one in my key pocket, had pulsed-silently, but it felt as loud as if were standing in a foghorn. Time to check on the, you know. The thing.
I said something like “Hang on, I’ve got a call I’ve got to blow off,” or something. I pulled the thing out. The CBT site had automatically come up on the screen. I hesitated. I looked closer.
Oh, Dios.
They’d suspended after-hours trading. The third domino had fallen. Oh God, oh God. I–I guess I should say even I-felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, another notch of acceptance that it was really happening, that it was not reversible. My nefarious plan was working to perfection. Todo mi culpabilidad.
In a way, even-well, not in a way, forget the qualifiers-even I still couldn’t believe it. I know I said that because of the Game and everything I’d become uniquely able to comprehend astronomical figures, humanly unfathomable amounts of money, of grains of corn, of suffering… but even so, the thing that was going to happen-let alone the fact that I’d made it happen-the thing that would happen in about four and a half million seconds was I think more than any human or maybe any consciousness of any possible type could ever comprehend. By definition, for that matter. You’d need a brain the size of the Hyperbowl, one that had been living for millions of years, enough parallelism to weigh the mass of lived experience, human, animal, and probably, now, even artificial, against that infinity-times-infinity of oblivion, you’d have to live, love, and lose a trillion times over even to glimpse how “Are you okay?” Marena asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You were going to ask me about Tony.”
“Okay, what about Tony?”
“What about him?”
“Are you and he having a thing?”
“No.” She looked at me. I looked at she. Her eyes looked like she was-except, fuck, I thought, I really can’t tell, can I? Accursed Oriental inscrutability.
“Are you having a thing with anybody else?”
“That’s another question.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What are you, my mother?”
“Look-”
“Okay, fine. No. Nobody.”
Naturally, I tried to watch for tells, but I couldn’t see anything one way or the other. Damn, I thought. I’m at a big disadvantage here. I’d always had a little issue with facial expressions. When I was six I found a sheet in my Nephi K-12 folder-which was in a filing cabinet with a four-digit combination lock, as though that was going to hold me up for more than two minutes-that said I had “PTSD presenting as pervasive developmental disorder.” That is, savant skills without IQ loss, but with defects of emotional affect. It’s not autism, but it presents like it, as they say. So, for instance, you know how most kids get flash cards with words and numbers on them? I got cards with smiling or frowning or whatever faces on them, so that I could learn emotions. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy or sad just by looking at her. Telling whether she was lying or not would be like reading page 100 of a book while it’s still on the shelf in the bookstore, in stretch wrap, and in Arabic.
“You said you were getting married to some jerk,” I said.
“Nope. As of now, Octy is out.” Octy? I wondered. Who the hell is that, Emperor Octavian? Dr. Octopus? No, don’t ask and use up a question.
“Okay, my turn,” she said.
“Right.”
“What did you do that’s making you feel so different?” she asked.
“Well, there’s, there’s that long shot on-”
“Okay, but why the hesitation just now?”
“Asking abo
ut the hesitation is another question already.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Well-”
“Just-look, you have to answer the whole thing, you know, whole truth, not bits and pieces. Right?”
“Okay, fine.” Pause. “I just went very, very long on the corn futures and I’m-look, the reason I’m not talking about it is I feel a bit guilty, uh…”
“Now you feel guilty?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you’re relieved.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Hmm. Apparent paradox.”
“No, it’s, like-look, I said, I’m making a ton of cash but the longs, that is, some of the stuff I’m doing is going to cause some hardship, I mean, in fact, there are going to be more famine deaths than there are already, and of course I’m just getting on the bandwagon, but I still feel really guilty about it.” All true, I thought. “Okay?”
“Well… that’s not the kind of thing I’m going to chew you out about, I mean, I work for Lindsay Warren, for God’s sake, I’m going to hell in a Hummer.”
“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.
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 about 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.”
The Sacrifice Game jd-2 Page 6
