Okay, Step Two, I thought. It’s easy. Don’t rush it.
I signed a “now” to Alligator Root. He poked a bone dagger into the marked zero on the liquid-baskets. Horrible-smelling yellow stuff shot out, like the thing was a urinating mastodon. He got the attendant to hold the bamboo trough under the stream so that it flowed into the casket. The stuff felt colder than water, like rubbing alcohol, and at first it splashed up over my face. Alligator Root wiped me off and handed me the Little Cup, mint pulque mixed with about five percent of belladonna tea and a few other tranqs. I chugged it down. If I’d dosed it right it would have me nearly knocked out just before I drowned. No matter what anybody says, suffocation is not a fun way to go. He reached in and folded my pillow-sandbag so I could keep my head up out of the liquid.
Cool. Step Three.
I reached down and opened my right femoral vein with my little finger-knife. The Formalin-like compound stung the wound for a few beats before the anesthetics numbed it out. The idea was that as I slowly bled to death some of my body tissues would soak up the solution to replace lost body fluid. Not that this would keep the body viable-that part was going to be a total loss-but just to more closely approach a state of deep hypothermia. I took a last look at eight jars of salted toads and scorpions and puppy dog’s tails and stuff I’d packed where my other foot used to be. They looked okay. I was bringing back enough little druggy-critters to dope up a herd of wildebeest.
Four. I signaled to Alligator Root. Hun Xoc made a wan grin that meant, “Sorry I can’t help out too.” Alligator Root held up a sealed jar the size of a coffee can. I eyed another okay and he broke the top off and poured the hardener into the casket near my feet. It was thicker than the base solution, like maple syrup, and when it hit the pooling liquid in the casket it extruded out of its glob in threads, folding over my legs, spreading and dispersing in the solvent. Basically I was being cast in a kind of a simple organic epoxy, with a few extra metal salts that were supposed to preserve my neuronal structure more or less perfectly-not so much that you could get the same brain going again, but enough so that you could map the changed connections onto the new brain, Jed 1 ’s brain, enough to recover the memories.
Memories, I thought. Not consciousness. You’re dying, dude. It’s going to be Jed 1 hanging on to them, not you. Not you, your self -
Cancel. Cancel. Step Five. Alligator Root handed me the Big Cup.
It was a thinned version of the hardener. If everything worked, it would spread through me and react with the solution as it spread into me through my skin and lungs. A thin skin had formed on the surface. I poked through it and drank the rest in two quick drafts like I’d practiced. Ghac yuk. It was thinned with honeyed pulque but it was still just a total bitter disgusto-sting. Ghastly. Just don’t barf, I thought, just don’t barf, just don’t barf. Do! Not! Barf!!! ’Gator handed me another cup of pulque and practically forced it down my throat to wash the goop down. I got spit all over his hand but he got me back together and he helped me lean back into the casket. I sank onto the sand cushions, settling an arm-length below the rim, still gagging, struggling to keep the stuff down. It was like cold chrome bocce balls were growing in my esophagus. I dry-swallowed a few times and it was like the balls supercooled and I was all numb inside, just a shell of feeling.
Whoa, it’s really comfy in here, I thought, it really did feel like a womb must feel. The solution had filled it up faster than I’d thought and was flowing over the rim. It smelled worse than the courts of Xibalba, though. I wished I could have popped my nose along with my ears. A shot of cold ran down my throat into my groin, and I got a flash from when I was in the Warren Hospital for Special Diseases when I was ten and they gave me total anesthesia, and I tried to stay awake and then realized I had to just dive into the big zero and see if there had been any water in the pool and I just let myself slide, and that was okay and I was still here, dammit. Six. I signed again. Gator bent down and pushed the knife into each of the two big bear-hide sandbags that counterweighted the lid. I could see a bit of the dry silver jets of fine sand, but I couldn’t see any motion in the lid at first. It’s stuck, I thought, it’s going to crash down and shatter and the whole thing’s fucked. But then the shadow grew slightly, it was coming down, gently, like an eyelid. I squinted up at it. It was convex on the lower side to push any air bubbles out of the surface of the liquid. For Keeps, the lid said. Except that was still too weak. It exuded this total eternal stay-putness no matter what.
Alligator Root took the sandbag out from under my head and it sank back, just floating on top of the liquid. It was getting to about the consistency of homogenized milk. The dark lid grew over me like the earth looming under a nocturnal skydiver. No parachute. I repositioned the wax-sealed box on my chest and folded my left arm over it. There were two things in it, Koh’s folded feather-cloth Game-mat and a doeskin book filled with my detailed and probably redundant notes on the Game. I was actually pretty proud of the notes, I figured that with them and the drugs a quick study like Marena would learn the Game overnight. She’ll handle it, I thought, she’ll play and beat the Smokers of Randomness, and in her first play, she’ll see past the rim.
I held my right hand on Hun Xoc’s forehead until the lid was about six finger-widths from the rim, and then pulled it back into the box. We got a last look in each other’s eyes. Before the stone came between us I turned away, to the left, to looked at Koh’s profile in the last swallow of light. She was still great-looking and all shiny in her coat of liquid wax. Her head was floating a little on the gel. It’s a shame we didn’t get to bring your brain back, too, I thought. I held her hand. The silence grew in volume but in my head it was like I could still hear them singing that counting rhyme with the parts of the deer. Relax, I thought. Safe. Safer than walking around waiting to die. I settled into the eternal subterranean cool. I felt like a bottle of great old Burgundy. We’ll gel no brine before it’s time. My leg was cold, but not shivery cold, and then it was gone, like it had passed directly to frostbite. The colloid was hydrogen bonding to the walls of my capillaries.
This isn’t so bad, I thought. It wouldn’t be too bad if I just stayed down here forever. Totally separate, out of my old time, out of my new time. Civilizations would flower and seed and rot and I wouldn’t have to sweat any of it. And eventually in a nanofraction of that universeful of time I’d be born, I’d be a little boy, I’d grow up and have friends and enemies and do stuff and meet Marena and come right back here and meet Koh and not be able to protect her, and the universe would spiral out to unimaginable emptiness again while I stayed all cozy right here dreaming in infinite slow motion, free of the clock like a demon on a beam of light. Maybe it was okay, I was finally where I was always going to be and Koh and I could finally rest for real, just be in ourselves, never have to go and do any goddamned things again. Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course.
Okay, don’t forget to wink, I thought. Supposedly there was this French aristocrat who was executed during the Terror who told some of his friends to be sure to watch his execution, and he made sure the headsman was going to take his head out of the basket and hold it up to the crowd. And the idea was that if he was still living and conscious, he’d wink, just as an experiment. And his head did wink. So what I meant was not to wink, exactly, but to see whether I could still think or whatever after my heart had stopped, and for how long. It was just something I was interested in. A last little treat.
My heart was already bumping kind of hard, THUB-bub, THUB-bub. Settle down, you’re doomed, I thought. I sucked in a deep breath and had to stifle a cough from the dust from the cave-in and the smoke of the mint-and-musk torch sputtering in the reduced oxygen.
Cortez and Pisarro and DeLanda can trash this place all they want, I thought. I’ll rebuild it, and I’ll rebuild it better, Ocelot will rise, the Lords of the Mat can crack the skull-ball again out into the next age, the blue.
(79)
PANIC
PANIC
&nb
sp; PANIC
Wait.
Hun Xoc and Alligator Root were still watching. Just to make sure everything was sealed up okay. They weren’t even going to bleed themselves to death until they were sure. The lid grew slowly, like the shadow of my hand when I used to cast it on the ceiling of my room with a flashlight when I couldn’t sleep. I used to bring it down as slowly as possible, like the claw of God. This won’t work, I thought, everything will have been for nothing, nobody’ll figure out the move, and everything’s over, by Christmas Eve of 2012 all the world and people and kids and art and giraffes and diseases and pyramids and, like, life itself, it’ll all just be a cloud of hot space dust.
I squinted up at the lid closing over me. There were about two finger-widths of space left. The gel was stinging my eye and the light diffusing through it faded, and I felt the pressure of the lid through the colloid, it had closed without even the vibration of a click through the stone, just with a stopping of everything like the stopping of breath, and it was dark. Sealed. Vacuum packed.
I found a last bubble of air, at the edge of the crack. I wheezed in a breath and the gel seeped in too. I clenched my teeth. My last air. Bye-bye, air. Always liked ya. My head was floating against the stone of the lid, turning sideways. I couldn’t feel anything below my chest, except for my nonexistent foot. There was an itch on it that I tried to scratch and couldn’t and I dropped into a wave of claustrophobia and tried to wriggle to get it, just this one itch, come on, tranqs not working, I thought, I should be getting happy, and then I was just blind suffocopanic, total insanity, what a tomato hornworm feels as it’s being eaten from inside by wasp larvae.
I could feel my heartbeat getting irregular. Calm down, du calme, calm down. You’ll live again, I thought. All your memories and everything. It’s all right, don’t worry, there, there, it’s all right. You’ll be just like any old e-mail, copied and read there almost before you’re even out of here, you’ll be just fine, just great, just fine No. Nope. No such luck. Wishful thinking. Even if they get you back, consciousness is nontransferable. You’re dying, plain as fuck. That big old yawning chasm opened inside me again, just that total terror of certain emptiness that there’s no way to describe, just that certainty of emptiness, it was just too much, but I was still here, I had to get out No, don’t think that way, everything you did, everything you learned, the world’s keeping all that, it’s living on, on and on.
Gee, that’s comforting.
Not. Nope.
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and I let it out but it barely even bubbled out into this shit that was now the consistency of warm yogurt as the polymer chains linked up and twined around me. Around my foot, where they’d poured in the hardener, it was already like solid clay.
I’ve had it, I’ve had it.
THUB-bub. THUB-bub.
I could tell there was something different about my thinking, even under the chorus of panic it was slower but also clearer, like I’d had a massive dose of THC. I’ve had it, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it. That’s what it is like. This is what it is. This is the big one. Meet the Void. I couldn’t feel tears but I could feel the swelling behind my eyes. Something clicked in my stomach and I was sinking into an endless gray vacuum tube, let me out, it’s time, I thought, I’m ready, I knew it had all already happened. Ix had been eaten by the jungle, Pedro de Alvarado had come and the People had died, atom bombs thrummed through the stone, Marena and I had been born and she’d given up and gone away and died and they’d all gone away, they weren’t going to come for me, no one was ever going to come for me, I was just spinning out into the graphite stars and no one would ever remember. Looosing meeeee. Packed in fuzz. Big cotton fuzz. Somewhere I realized my hands were pounding on the lid and I was biting the stone. I’d forgotten something, something important. What the hell was it? Something green, maybe? Something window.
THUB-bub
THUB-bub
Are you getting up, Mr. Wolf? It’s twelve o’clock. I got rhythm, I got myugaaallllummmaorm. Thub. Aerror. Aearror. Bub bub. I died. I dead. Nn. Died. A. Bub.
Auriooonium. Raoiony oiny onny ooon oon oon.
Aorny oon oon. bub. Oun ou
THREE
To the Dorids of Emperor Hirohito
The Remains of an Ancient Sovereign at Rest upon His Bier
Discovered at Aguateca by Graf von Stepanwald
Curious Antiquities of British Honduras
By Subscription Lambeth • 1831
(80)
The first thing I saw was a red dot on an indigo field.
“Please focus on the red dot,” a bonesetterly-I mean, doctorly-female voice said.
I did.
“Please follow the dot,” the voice said. The dot slid up, down, to the left-I mean, right-and then to the left.
“That’s good,” the woman said. Her name wasn’t coming through, but I knew who it was: It was the project’s head doctor. Right. And I knew where I was. Well, not exactly where. But I mean I knew that I was in the twenty-first century, and in some modern facility, a dimly lit, medium-sized room with scents of Phisohex and latex and some, but not all, other components of That Hospital Smell. Definitely not a hospital, though, I thought. There were at least several well-washed but not recently washed bodies in the microatmosphere, but no smells of ejected foul liquids, foul semiliquids, and foul solids, or that special cleaner for what they call an “appliance.” So more like a small clinic or a corporate or school nurse’s office. Hmm. Somewhere nearby a pink-noise generator was generating pink noise. Something about the sound, or lack of other sounds, or lack of certain types of echoes, or something, conveyed that we were underground. As my ears focused, they identified the sound of several sets of fingers discreetly tapping on membrane keyboards. So more like a clean room, I thought. A Warren building. At the Stake, in Belize? No, I didn’t think so. Something about the smells, the sweat or dust or types of pollen or whatever, didn’t whisper, as they always do however faintly, “Central America.” I used to fantasize about saving the day in some vague and debilitating way and waking up surrounded by sexily starched nurses and going, “What happened? Where am I?” Well, not this time, I thought. There wasn’t even the dissociation we’d figured I’d experience. Not yet, anyway. I knew that I’d been in Chacal, in the seventh century, and that now I was Jed again-Jed 3, let’s say-and I was back.
That’s good, the voice said, or something to that effect. The dot vanished. And by now the field of my effective vision had widened enough for me to see that it was on a big, big OLED monitor angled over me on a ceiling-mounted arm.
Okay. I stretched. I wiggled my left, I mean, right set of toes, and then the other set. I moved my head back but my C3 vertebra didn’t crack the way it usually did. I swallowed.
Hmm.
Well, fuck me with a pre-Columbian ceremonial jade battle saw. The world was still here.
Big disappointment.
Kidding. Actually, I can deal with the world. Its apex-predator inhabitants aren’t anything to write home about, but The cold disk of a stethoscope materialized on my chest.
“Take a deep breath, please,” the doctor said. I did.
“It’s October twenty-eighth,” the female doctor’s voice said. “2012.”
2 Kimi, 9 Sak, my brain went, automatically but, for some reason not nearly so automatically as usual. That is, 2 Death, 9 Whiteness, in the sixth k’in of the fifteenth uinal of the nineteenth and last tun of the nineteenth and last k’atun of the twelfth and last b’aktun. Fifty-four shopping days left before 4 Ahau. Okay. And it meant I’d lost two hundred and twenty-two days. That is, all the memories I’d picked up in the months between the downloading in March and today were as gone as an unsaved Angry Birds score. In a way-in fact, in more than just a way-that Jed, Jed 1, the one who’d lived on until yesterday, that Jed was dead.
Oh, well, okay. Easy come, easy go. If I’d had any brilliant insights or late-breaking commodities tips or anything, I would have left note
s to myself. Which would show up tomorrow or so on my cold e-mail, that is, the account nobody but me knows about, not even my best friend, No Way, or my lawyer, Jerry Weir. Got to sneak out and get some fresh phones. Later.
The thing is-well, one of the many things is-at the same time that I was thinking about all the time I’d lost, or maybe a little before-when you’re as tranquilized as I undoubtedly was, it’s hard enough to remember what you were just thinking, let alone what order the thoughts came in-I got a microflash of a feeling of triumph and an image of a ball falling away from me between two vaguely sketched opposing players and into a goal, and a remembered sound of cheering. The big hipball game, I thought. Against the Ocelots. Except, no, not hipball, the dudes weren’t wearing any padding. And more definitively than that, I’d propelled the ball with my foot. Something from my childhood? Except I’d always sucked at soccer, and they didn’t even play it much in Utah anyway. Something I’d seen on TV and misfiled as my own memory? Maybe. And why did it come up? I thought back. When did it come up? Twenty-Eighth. Right. I guessed that it’d been triggered by the sound of the number “28.” Huh. Well, look, if that’s the worst jumble your consciousness is going to get after all this reshuffling, repackaging, reuploading, and other reabuse, count yourself ahead. Right?
The Sacrifice Game jd-2 Page 45
