In the Courts of the Sun (13 page)

Zero sun it ends place of daylight pilgrimages precious stair-place

It was true that the glyph at the far left, a head with a hand on its chin, could mean zero, but it could also mean completion or beginning. The hand meant the dude was about to have his jaw torn off, which was supposedly one of my ancestors’ favorite methods of cruel and usual punishment. But I guess it was a good thing if you owned the hand. But the second glyph, the hand reaching for a bauble and not grasping it, definitely meant “ending.” The travel or pilgrimage glyph was pretty straightforward . . . but the second element of the fourth glyph, the one with the temples at the four sides, wasn’t something I’d seen before.
Hmm . . . well, there’s always the possibility that, you know, maybe this Lady Koh person, or whoever had worked all this out, hadn’t seen this one very clearly either. Maybe she’d had a few loose thoughts and just tacked them together. I’d just had the same thing happen to me in Taro’s lab. You get these notions or floating images, but you can’t tie them onto a time or a place or even an agent. And often, if they pan out later, it’s usually not in a way you’d thought of.
Otherwise . . . hmm. The astronomical data seemed good, but the latitude business wasn’t too clear. It was confused, something about “beyond the overhead sun,” which Weiner had interpreted as meaning just above the Tropic of Cancer. He’d written “Monterrey, Mexico?” as the probable location of the event. What else is—
Wait a second, I thought. Oh, hell.
No mames.
That is, very no way.
No
way. You’ve got to be kidding me—
“Are you looking at the twenty-eighth?” Marena asked.
“Uh, yeah.”
“What do you think?”
“Well, it does look odd.” I didn’t mention that I’d been getting some funky results around that date myself. I don’t like sounding like a café psychic.
“So it’s a really bad day?”
“Well, that would depend on who you are. You know how, like, it’s an ill wind—”
“Okay, okay. Look, what do you think of what Michael says about it?”
“Well . . . hmm. First of all I think the main thing is I think the first glyph here is a place name. It’s not just the word
city
, the way Weiner has it. It means a specific city.”
“Okay, what city is that?”
“Well, look.” I turned the phone back around and slid it over to her. She bent forward a little and her hair almost brushed my forehead. “The infix has a, uh—”
“What’s an infix?”
“Like, something you add to the middle of the word. Or in this case the middle of a glyph. Like English has prefixes and suffixes but no infixes.”
“Okay. Wait, what about
fucking
?”
“Sorry?” I asked.
“ You know, like in, like,
specfuckingtacular.
”
“Oh. Yeah, uh . . . huh, you’re right. Maybe that’s the only one.”
“Anyway,
mian hamnida,
please go on.”
“Right, um, the toponym, that’s the pictogram in the middle one—that’s the cross shape with the four sort of little pyramids?”
“Yes.”
“Weiner doesn’t really deal with that. But it’s different from a lot of other city glyphs. It’s a cosmogram that looks a lot like the Sacrifice Game board. You know about Taro’s research with the Game, right?”
“I know a little about it.”
“Well, you know how the game board has five directions?”
“Not four directions?”
“Four compass directions and then the center.”
“So so so.”
“But the point is, each direction’s a different color. Right?”
“Right. Actually, all Native Americans and also a lot of Asians visualize the directions that way.”
“We do?”
“Well, anyway, did Taro tell you about, like, the whole Jaipur thing?”
“What?” she asked. “No.”
“ You know about, like, the city of Jaipur, in India?”
“Aniyo.”
She shook her head a little so that non-Korean speakers could tell it meant no.
“Okay, well . . . look, you know how, how the whole deal with Taro’s research is that he postulates that a version of the Sacrifice Game was the ancestor of most modern games? Or maybe all games. You know, even chess and Go used to have quadrilateral symmetry, I mean, they were both originally games for four players. And certainly games like mah-jongg and bridge and backgammon all—”
“I thought he said it was like Parcheesi,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “Exactly, the, the closest descendant of it that people still play is Parcheesi. Parcheesi was the Brahman holy game. And there are hundreds of living versions of that all over the world. And the Parcheesi board is also a
thanka,
right? You know, a mandala. Like for meditation and stuff.”
“You know, I’m feeling a little stupid because I design games and now it’s like I guess I don’t know a lot about them.”
“Well, it’s fairly esoteric stuff.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, what I’m getting at is that mandalas weren’t just to stare at. They got played. Or they got walked around in. Like Southeast Asian pagodas were built on the plan of a mandala. Or you might say on the plan of a Parcheesi board. You know, the same way cathedrals are built in a cross shape. And all through Asia you get all these stupas and temples and wats—”
“Oh my.”
“—and the whole city of Jaipur is laid out in the shape of a Parcheesi board.”
“Ah, narohodo,”
she said. It meant “I understand.” She exaggerated the Asian breathiness. One of the good things about being ethnic is that there’s at least one accent you can mock without fear.
“But there’s also a whole bunch of Native American versions of the same game. Not just the Sacrifice Game. The Aztec version was called
patolli
. Montezuma played it with Cortés. It’s just like in Asia, it wasn’t just game boards that had that sort of design. Maya hipball courts and probably their pyramids and sometimes maybe whole cities were laid out that way. And like in Jaipur, they’d do processions and rituals and stuff going from one direction to another to mean one thing, and a different—well, you get the idea.”
“I think I do, maybe.”
“Each section of the board, or the city—that is, each direction—has a different ruling god, and different days and times of day and even different foods and whatever. And the southwest and the northwest are also sort of the earth and lower world, and the northeast and the southeast are like the sky and the stars. And then the center is like a fifth direction.”
“Why not six directions, with, like, up and down?”
“Up and down are in a whole different ballpark. They’re about, like, the other twenty-two layers of the universe. The center direction is just, like, You Are Here. Or . . . maybe I’m going on too much about this—”
“No, no, please,” she said. “Rave on.”
“The directions are associated with time too. The east is the future and the west is the past. And the northwest is kind of female, which they thought of as the hypothetical, and the southeast is kind of male. And they interpreted the southeast as sort of leading into the here-and-now in the center.” Do I look confident? I wondered. Sit up a little straighter. Right. Not
that
straight—
“Sorry, I lost the thread,” she said. “What’s that got to do with the name of the place again?”
“Well, what I’m getting at is, it looks to me like the third glyph is just a sort of miniature stylized map of the center of a Maya-type city. They’ve got “precious stair-place” here, but that really just means, like, a temple zone.”
“Okay.”
“And the suffix means, it means something like ‘the seat of the k’atun.’ So whatever happens three days from now is going to happen in a city that’s roughly divided into four colors. Or five, counting the center. And its inhabitants would think of it as the center of the world. Or at least the center of something important.”
“So it’s some old Maya site.”
“No, no, I don’t think so. My guess would be that they meant some ceremonial center that’s active today. Not some old ruin or anything. Because there’s a mat glyph in the phrase that means ‘the k’atun-seat.’ ”
“What’s a cartoon again?”
“It’s about a twenty-year period on the solar calendar.”
“Oh, right.”
“Okay. So the seat of the k’atun means they’re talking about the most important city of the next two decades. Like the capital. Anyway, it would be a very important city that’s at its peak right about now.”
“Okay, so they mean D.C. Whoa. That’s a little scary.”
“Well, maybe,” I said. “But my guess is that Washington doesn’t fit the bill.”
“Why not?”
“I think D.C.’s too much of a normal city. This word really means more like a temple district. A regal-ritual city, not a governmental city. People might not even live there. You’d make pilgrimages there to get favors out of some powerful dead person. And you’d do some marketing on the way, of course. But the buildings and rooms and everything in the center of town would only be occupied for special functions, during a big festival or something. Also, Washington doesn’t have specific colors or time associated with the different quarters. And anyway D.C.’s way farther north than what, uh, Dr. Weiner thinks the latitudinal coordinates seem to indicate.”
“Okay okay,” she said, “so, look, where do you think they mean?”
“Well, it would be someplace that has a lot of people from all over making long trips to get there, maybe at a certain point in their lives, or a certain age. And like I say, it would be someplace with a sort of holy zone, in that kind of configuration. I mean, with quadrants coded to different directions. Each direction would be associated with a different color, and with a different period of time.”
“So come on, what’s your guess?” she asked.
“Disney World.”

[8]

“W
hat?” Marena asked.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“Dude, we’re practically
standing
in Disney World. You can see Epcot from here.”
“ Yeah, I saw it—”
“I worked at the Rat for years. I still live practically on
top
of the place. Walt
built my house
.”
“Sorry, I don’t know what to say. Except I could be wrong, and the book could be wrong—”
“Anyway, the thing—look.” Marena turned and looked out the window, toward Disney World, and slid off her desk. She was short but svelte. “Look, in Disney World the colors are different from what you said. Like Fantasyland is coded purple. And anyway, the color coding’s not that visible, you know, you only see it on signage and staff stuff and in the tunnels and wherever. And also I don’t quite get the time thing; I mean, I guess Adventureland and Frontier-land, those are in the west, so I guess you’re saying that’s like the past, right?”
“Yes,” I said. I stood up.
“And Tomorrowland’s in the east. That’s obvs. But then in the south it’s just Main Street USA.”
“Well, right,” I said, “isn’t that, like, the present? Or the very recent past?”
“Well, okay, but then what’s Fantasyland? That’s in the north. That’s not any particular time.”
“Maybe that’s like the hypothetical,” I said. “In the Maya system it’s called the unrevealed.”
“Hmm.” There was a long pause. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
She looked troubled, but I couldn’t tell how seriously she was taking it. “Okay,” she said. “Look, what, what do you think is going to happen?”
“Well . . . I don’t know, I’m not sure about the gloss anyway, it’s not—”
“What?”
“Well, one thing is—look, Weiner’s got the event glyphs for that day translated as, uh, ‘the warlocks spray fire from razors, from flint.’ Right?”
“Okay.”
“Which is okay, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t give you the whole sense of it. I mean, he’s translated it, but he hasn’t interpreted it.”
“So what do you think it means?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said, “but, for instance, ‘warlocks,’ that’s from an idiom in Mayan that means ‘scab casters.’ ”
“Which are what?”
“Like people who throw scabs at you from a distance. Like they could make you sick by thinking it. Witches.”
“Okay.”
“But the thing is, this is a verbal form, so it’s more like ‘someone casts scabs.’ That would be, like, somebody sends a misfortune or a disease.”
“Okay.”
“And then the part about spraying fire, that’s more likely to be the subject. In my opinion. And ‘fire’ could be light or fire or daytime or whatever. And then he’s just got ‘flint,’ and I’d guess it’s more like ‘the middle of a stone,’ or ‘inside a pebble,’ or something like that.”
“So what’s it really say?”
“I’d say it’s more like, uh, like ‘The light casts its scabs from within, from the rock. And we carry the blame.’ ”
“Okay,” she said.
Pause.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s all I can think of.”
“Does that tell us any more than we knew already?”
“Uh, maybe not. . . .” I trailed off. There was another pause, a grimmer one.
“I mean, that’s not really specific enough, is it?” she asked. “ You can’t just tell people to watch out for whatevs.”
I shook my head.
“Okay, look,” she went on, “the thing . . . you know, I have no idea whether to be worried about this, or like panicked, or completely dismissive.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Also, there must always be a lot of predictions out there.”
“Yeah. Always.” I didn’t want to say, “And of course, there’s also always the possibility that your book is just a really clever scam,” but she could probably smell me thinking it.
“What do you really think? Personally.”
“Well, I know the thing works, so I guess I’d take it seriously. But I could be wrong. I should play it through a few times.”
“ You mean with the Sacrifice Game.”
“Right.”
“Good idea,” she said. She was pacing behind her desk in a figure eight. I didn’t know where it was okay to pace, so I just stood behind my chair. “Also, we could get another opinion. Or a few.”
“Yeah.”
We stood for a few seconds. Well, this had certainly dampened the mood. Finally I said, “Maybe we should call Taro and see what he thinks.”
“All right,” Marena said, “you call him. I want to look around for a second.”
I did. It was six p.M., getting toward the end of his nineteen-hour workday, but Taro was still at the lab. He said we should come over. I said I would, but I didn’t know if Ms. Park would. She’d gotten on her EarSet and was giving orders.
“Just keep him under your toe,” she said to someone. “Hang on. Check this out,” she said to me. She swung a monitor around. It said that at this time of year, Orange County “hosted nearly a quarter of a million visitors per day” and showed a list of events on the twenty-eighth in the Greater Orlando area. There was a Jamaican street festival, a concept-car show, a vintage-car show, an air show, a parade for some retiring Magic coach, a Disney parade for
Snow White II,
a Winter Festival Tree relighting at Holidays Around the World, Late Grinchmas at Universal, and a special show of the Osbourne Family Spectacle of Lights at MGM Studios. There was a preopening ceremony for the Capital One Bowl, the Magic were playing an exhibition at the arena, there was a Buccaneers game at the Civic Center, a marines drill exhibition at CityWalk, and the Father/Son Golf Challenge at ChampionsGate. MegaCon, the big comics-and-sci-fi/fantasy-and-gaming-and-toys-and-whatever thing, was two months earlier this year and would be in its third day at the new William Hendrix Harmony Hall. The International Council of Island States was in town, and there were twenty-eight lesser conventions, including orthodontists, virologists, real-estate appraisers, roofers, roofing suppliers, web designers, erotic-toy manufacturers, and mortgage professionals. Elsewhere in the state, there were navy exercises based in Fort Lauderdale, a big regatta in Tampa, and a Fiesta Pan-Latino in Miami. Ordinarily, I would have fallen asleep before even finishing the list, but now it looked almost scary enough not to be boring.
“See anything?” she asked.
I said no and that I wouldn’t expect to anyway because
cuaranderos
didn’t work that way. “I wish I were more of a psychic,” I said, “but I’m not, I have to sit down and—”
“Okay, forget it,” she said, “look, what do you think we should do? Assuming you’re right.”
“Um—”
“Because, you know, if the two of us just start calling people and posting stuff, not many people are going to take it that seriously.”
“No.” Despite everything else I found a moment to like the way she said “the two of us.”
“And even if Taro’s lab does, they’re not that—I mean, they’ve done some work for a few government agencies, but most of the predictions they’ve made are just economic, and they keep them in-house. It’s not a fund, there’s no newsletter or shareholder’s report on it or anything.”
“I understand,” I said.
“So it might mean a little more if they say something, but—I mean, look, you’ve, we’ve got to get some more data here.”
“Definitely.”
She took what looked like an old green enamel Ronson cigarette case out of a desk drawer, took out a filterless Camel, looked at it, put it back in the case, and put the case back in the drawer.
“Okay,” she said, “one good thing is, Lindsay has some unspeakable connections in the DHS,” she said. I guess she meant the Department of Homeland Security. “Maybe if he can get them to say there’s a problem, it’ll be better than if it comes from us.”
“Definitely,” I said. I was thinking that, yeah, that sounded okay, if it would really happen, but that the other thing to do was to post everything I knew on as many blogs as possible, everything about the Game, Taro’s software, the Codex, and everything. Somebody else out there might figure something out.
Marena looked at me. I got a brief but creepy feeling that she knew what I was thinking. I had a weird notion to turn and run out the door, lock myself in an empty office, and start typing in the post.
Cálmate,
Joaquín, I thought. It’s just
el paranoia de las repúblicas bananeras
. There is no goon squad about to grab you and take you back to—
“Why don’t you go back to Taro’s and I’ll call in a while?” she asked. I started to answer but her secretary—sorry, assistant—called back through the open door that she had someone named Laurence Boyle on five.
“Okay, I’m getting put through to Lindsay,” she said. She waved as though I were already out the door. It was like she was saying, “Sorry, I have a conference call on line two with Kim Jong Il, David Geffen, and the pope.” I sort of oozed backward out the door.
Most of the office folk had left, but the Hair walked me out to my car. The offices were cool and bright and outside it was gray and stuffy, so there was that feeling like you’d just gone indoors instead of outdoors. I did my meds and factor VIII injection and drove back to Taro’s. Well, she didn’t tell me to keep my mouth shut, I thought. She probably figured if she did I wouldn’t. Or maybe she’d just sized me up as a paranoiac the minute I walked in.
Taro and I talked for an hour. He said he wasn’t sure about the Disney thing but that he’d treat it as a priority. He said that he thought the author of the Codex must have been playing with nine stones, that is, nine runners. “Even though that would seem to be impossible,” he said. I said it sounded impossible to me too. A nine-stone game would have 9
⁹
more possible moves than a one-stone one. And a one-stone game has an average of 10
²⁴
moves. So then a nine-stoner would have more possible moves than there are electrons in the universe.
At around eight o’clock he sat me down in front of a monitor. I dug out my tobacco, rooted myself, and started thrashing around with three runners, looking for anything that reminded me of the Codex. It was difficult. One of Taro’s students brought me some Vegan Vibe Hot Pockets. Tony Sic came in. Taro told him about my idea for the twenty-eighth. He went into an isolation room and started working on it. Two more adders-in-training came in later. They weren’t Maya, just Korean or whatever gamer types, and I didn’t know either of them. They sat down and started working like they were already experts.
Marena didn’t call until ten p.M. She talked to Taro for a while and talked to me for about two minutes. Evidently she and some of her cohorts had had a meeting. She said Michael Weiner, the TV Mayanist, had pooh-poohed it, naturally. She said she and Laurence Boyle—whoever that was—had talked with some people at the Orlando mayor’s office, but without anything specific to tell them nobody was sure how much of a fuss they should make. “I didn’t want to even mention the Maya connection,” she said. “It would sound like we were
In Search of Ancient Astronauts
or whatever.” Instead they’d pitched it as a surprise result of Taro’s simulation research, which had at least some academic credibility. At least Taro had backed me up. He’d told her that he didn’t want to be an alarmist, but I’d “often been right before”—what do you mean “often,” I’d thought. If you’re talking about that 1992 World Series business, if you’ll think back you’ll remember I said wasn’t comfortable making that call—“so maybe we should take his interpretation seriously,” Taro said.
“I see the DHS guy in the morning,” she said. “I’ll tell you what happens.”
I said great. I went back to the keyboard. I kept getting the feeling there was something Taro wasn’t telling me. Well, whatever.
I rubbed in another shot of tobacco, even though my leg below the knee was already buzzing. It feels like your leg’s waking up from being “asleep,” as they call it up here.
Bueno. “Ajpaayeen b’aje’ laj k’in ik,”
Okay.
What’s the question?
Well, to ask the right question, you have to know stuff. You can’t guess about things without knowing what things there are. Sometimes you don’t have to know so much as you’d think, but you have to know something. Usually it boils down to reading a lot of news. I clicked up HEADLINES.
Top stories at this hour,
it read:
Jorge Pena’s 89th Homer Marks New Off-Season High . . . Five Michigan State University Students Killed in Hoops Loss Riot . . . 2 Killed at Universal Studios Tower of Terror . . . Bangladesh Seeks Explanation for the Downing of Troop-Carrier Chopper . . . Bob Zemeckis’s Epic Vanessa, Based on the Life of Artist Vanessa Bell, Hits Screens Today . . . Man Dies in Spitting Contest . . . Twister Outbreak in Heartlands . . .
Hmm.
I assigned the hypothetical author of the hypothetical catastrophe—who we were calling Dr. X—to black. I assigned the mass of the population to yellow. I took red, as usual. And I kept white in reserve, as usual. And since we were only looking three days into the future, I was only going to use the three outer rows. Right. I assigned the suns.
Bueno.
I concentrated on my uay for a minute, long enough to feel myself shrinking. Like I think I said, it’s a snail. But I imagine it as a sea slug so that I can move a little faster. I scattered and counted the seeds and started swimming toward the twenty-eighth—9 Sea Rattler, 9 Yellowness—edging along the line of uncertainty. Pretty soon I had to start jumping. I guess it’s hard to think of a slug jumping. But if you watch them in the water they actually do; they jump from one rock slowly down to another. Anyway, I thought, it’s going like this. Right. Now that way. No. Okay, now I think it’s going to go this way. No, wait, it’d go this way.
Claro.
He goes, I go. Then he reacts.
Primero, segundo,
this happens, then they react to that. Okay.
Claro que sí.
Bueno. Wait. No.
Damn. I kept getting something, a sense of these things like, I don’t know, shapes, milling around in a reddish fog, lumpy clusters of something gyrating to a slow, silent beat. But it wasn’t anything you could hang a label on.
I played for four hours. I took a break. I played for another five hours. Around dawn all of us adders huddled together around the espresso machine and compared notes. We’d all gotten similar results. They all said they were worried about something in the area on that day, but the event was vague, and nobody would have put it at Disney World without getting that from the Codex first. I couldn’t think to play anymore so I took a nap on the floor of an isolation room and drove home at noon on Christmas Eve.
I did maintenance on the skimmers. I got my Perpetual Refugee stuff ready in case anything happened tomorrow. I plugged a driveful of Taro’s top-secret software (He trusts me! I thought) into my own system and fired it up on the overhead screens. It took an hour to get it working and then when I started playing, I couldn’t get any further than before. The period after the twenty-eighth was just a blank. Not that that meant the world was going to end ahead of schedule, but just that all the causes and effects were too hard to read. LEON hadn’t come up with anything, either, not that any of us thought it would. It just didn’t know enough, I thought. No matter how many data streams it read, it didn’t really know what they meant. I don’t care how many games it can play through at once. Speed isn’t everything.