In the Courts of the Sun (39 page)

“I’ll take your world to mine,” I said, “and rebirth it there. I’ll give your descendants their names again, their time, their history, everything.”
“B’a’ax-ti’a’al chokoj upol?”
he asked. “Why should I care about that?” It wasn’t really a question.
“As you above me say,” I said automatically. “But—”
“Then I allow you to take back your Jed.”
Uh-oh.
He’s got to know I can’t do that, I thought. Doesn’t he? Or maybe he really did only get a few bits of my mind. Or maybe his ego’s just too big to accept it. Or does he even really know what I am? Maybe he really thinks I’m just some kind of creepy imp who snuck into his ear. Well . . .
“But you above me could learn from it,” I said.
“Call your reflection out of my skin now,” 2 Jeweled Skull said. Deep in his composed voice there was a sense of a stifled shudder. He’s grossed out, I thought. He feels dirty. Having me in there disqualifies him. He thinks he’s going to be kept out of the goddamn Celestial VIP Lodge or whatever. Oh cripes oh cripes. Should I just fess up that he’s stuck with me? No, he’ll just go even more bananashit. Time to lie like linoleum.
“I will, but it will take me time,” I said.
Pain like a snapping banjo string shot from my stomach up to my left eye. It was something in Chacal’s nervous system twisting out of alignment at the thought of keeping secrets from his greatfathermother. The idea of lying to this guy just wasn’t in Chacal’s gestalt. Hold still, for God’s sake, don’t twitch but don’t hold your breath, either, just breathe, breathe . . .
“How soon will this be done?” 2 Jeweled Skull asked.
“It can’t be done without the right preparations,” I said, half in Ixian and half in English. “We have to offer to the right . . . I need to find a certain kind of herb.” Yeah, eleven secret herbs and spices, I thought. He’ll believe that, all right.
I felt his eyes palpating my skin, looking for a flutter, a shiver . . .
“What will you need?” he asked.
I said if he gave me paper and a brush I could sketch it out for him. Anything to stall, I thought. I’ll draw a catapult too. Maybe a crossbow. Stranger engines for the brunt of war. Get him interested in those, and he’ll forget about—
“Remove your uay worm from my stomach
now.
Finished.
”
“Finished” was what you said when you were done with a subject. It was like saying “full stop.”
I hesitated. I repeated the lie. He looked at me.
When he was a child, Chacal had believed that 2 Jeweled Skull could smell his thoughts through dirt walls, that on moonless nights, in the shape of something like a harpy eagle, 2 Jeweled Skull would glide over their villages and scrutinize his thralls’ sleeping bodies through the smoke vents in the roofs of their houses, guarding them, but also ready to swoop through the roof and scratch out a betrayer’s eyes. And even now it wasn’t like Chacal’s mind quite disbelieved it. I felt like a career army sergeant trying to lie to a five-star general.
2 Jeweled Skull—or now that we know him a little better, why don’t we just call him “2JS”—must have given some kind of a signal, because all at once there was another person in the room, a nondescript middle-aged man with a plain gray turban and no particular markings that I could read. He had a thin, junior-high-school physical-education teacher’s face, like a Maya version of the elder George Bush. Somehow he’d just materialized out of the left-hand wall. I figured out that he’d crouched in from a hidden door through a slit in the feather tapestries. He squatted and set down a round tripedal tray on the floor an arm in front of me. There was a thing on the tray. He turned to 2 Jeweled Skull and held his right wrist on his left breast with his arm parallel to the floor. It was almost like an ancient Roman salute or the old French military salute. Maybe it was some sort of universal cultural constant. I stared at the thing in the tray. It was a steaming hot black wobbling bulbous shape, like a whole boiled eggplant.
“Oh, boy,” I said in English. “Cajun fetus?”
I got zero reaction. Some people take themselves so seriously.
The new guy picked up the Thing with his free hand. It had some kind of tube-and-nozzle on it. There was an instant of disorientation, and before I realized that the guards had picked me up and bent me over into the Eternal Position, there was an electrosnake wriggling up my anus
EEEOOOWUUGHFFFFF!!!
Eeeyah. Boofed on the first date.
I actually saw stars, and even in accurate constellations. There was Draco, Scorpio, the Dumbbell Nebula was right over there . . . and then it was already over, except for the trickle of hot liquid between my legs and a heat spreading from my intestines out onto my skin.
Whoa. That’ll put some hair on your eyeballs.
The guards let me collapse flat-out prone into the red sea.
“Thank you, sir, may I have another?” I said, my breath raising a puff of petals.
They waited. I waited. We didn’t wait very long. Drug enemas work almost instantly. There’d been a vogue for taking K—which is a synthetic tranquilizer popular among vets that makes humans feel really, really perky—up the ass at gay clubs in the 1990s. I’d only done it a couple of times—okay, sixteen times—but it really was something; you went from blah to rah in under twenty seconds. Anyway, I could already feel gravity subsiding.
“And when you take your twin
ixnok’ol mak
out of my stomach,” 2JS asked, “will the rot still burn through my head?”
It took me a minute to get what he meant.
Ixnok’ol mak
meant something like “malicious uay,” or maybe “parasitic worm, intelligent variety of.” Supposedly the idea of demonic possession is a cultural universal, so that wasn’t so surprising. But by the rot in his head . . . well, not to put too fine a point on it, he meant cancer.
Damn. If he didn’t pick up all of Jed’s memories, why’d he have to get that one?
The deal was, as I may have mentioned, the downloading process wasn’t entirely benign. Basically, the luon beams would have hit the target—that is, Chacal’s brain—with around forty thousand mrads, about the equivalent of three hundred thousand current chest X-rays. Because their wavelength would be tuned to neuronal tissues, they wouldn’t cause skin cancer or leukemia. But brain and possibly spinal tumors would start forming that same day. Dr. Lisuarte had said that within seven or eight months, even if the target wasn’t predisposed to cancer, the growth would be severe enough to “inhibit normal functioning.” The odds of my living more than a year would be under one in fifty. So I was already on a pretty tight clock. And 2JS—well, he wouldn’t have gotten such a big dose, but he was probably still in trouble. He was going to die, maybe not in nine months, but not of old age either. I’d guess he’d have less than five years. Okay, what do I do, lie? No. Prevaricate.
“Jed’s uay has been given to ours. To both of us. As a servant. And it will bring us huge advantages. Jed had to come here to protect us and our descendants.”
Silence.
Damn, that was lame, I thought. I was feeling as swollen and sore as a big tourniqueted foot. I’d expected whatever they’d shot me up with to numb me into cretinism, but instead it was doing the opposite. It was a sensitizer. The petals under my thighs had hardened into stone chips, and the air currents curling over me felt like strips of sharkskin.
“Tell your xcarec-uay to stop wearing me.”
“I will,” I said, “but I can’t do it right here right now. I don’t have the right tools.” Keep it simple, I thought. My good hand involuntarily slid over the petals on the floor and it felt like a herd of giant hissing cockroaches was stampeding under my palm.
“How?” he asked.
“It’s a mental thing, there are procedures for it, but it takes training.” Christ, I thought, now I’m trying to sell this guy on talk therapy.
“And then not what?” he asked. He meant what if that didn’t work.
“Well, then, if I get my memories back to 2012, I’ll be able to do it from there.” I said it again in Ixian. He didn’t answer. I rattled on a bit. “Just as you above me must see in Jed’s uay, I need to be preserved in gel, that is, in a colloid, that is, a liquid that becomes hard, the way copal sap transfigures into crystals.”
Silence. Darn.
“The bitumen suspension . . . will preserve the connections in my brain sufficiently for them to be copied,” I quoted, in English, from Taro’s project summary. “That is,” I said in Ixian, “it will keep my souls from escaping. My
b’olonob
.”
B’olan
was actually one of three or four things people had here that you could call souls. It was the one you’d see in shadows and reflections, and the one that might have to make its way through Xib’alb’a and serve the landlords there, before someday being allowed to dissolve into nothing. The other souls were the uay, that is, your animal counterpart, and the
p’al,
like the name, which stayed with the remains of your body. There was also the
ch’al,
“breath,” although it might be a stretch to call that a soul.
“And after that, my souls will help you, over me, they will, after . . .”
I trailed off. My bullshit muscles were locking up. And it wasn’t just because I could feel in Chacal’s body how much he revered 2 Jeweled Skull, how much Chacal thought he was semi-supernatural—although, strictly speaking, in this mindset nothing was really supernatural, it was just that—some beings were more natural than others—anyway, it was mainly just that he absolutely radiated authority and would have even if you had no idea who he was. Behind him the walls seemed to be flowing, like we were in a crystal box sinking into lava.
“This is while I above you wait for you to come back?” he asked. “And hope for you below me to come and call your twin?”
“You over me would not have to wait at all,” I lied. “We can time it to the exact moment.”
“And what will you send to take away your uay?”
“It’s like a javelin of sunlight,” I said, “a sort of lightning.”
No answer. Maybe he’s just not answering what he doesn’t understand, I thought. I switched to Ixian:
“In my own k’atun I will send the right, the right message, through the passage I came through, and it will reach you here and erase me, pull me out of you.”
Pause.
Maybe he’s buying this, I thought. Wait, don’t even think that way. That’s not how to lie. Believe what you’re saying. Don’t change your story again. Be cool.
2JS looked at the nondescript new guy. I was getting the sense that I hadn’t passed.
Suddenly I had an inspiration.
“Or we can go together,” I said. “We can entomb the two of us, and then, and then your souls can get sent back.”
He looked at me. My eyes scurried away and focused on the shrunken head on his belt. It was glowing with golden fuzz. All faces, even Native American ones, have this fine down all over them that you can barely see, but when a face gets concentrated to the size of a peach it gets that cute fluffy-stuffy toddlery flocking—
“You underneath me, you would like to trick me,” he almost whispered.
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t.” Fear, like a self-cooling soda can, popped open in my small intestine. Oh,
chíngalo
. Chacal’s nervous system might keep me from flinching, but my mind was Jed’s, and Jed was a wimp, and I was afraid.
“PULL OUT YOUR PARASITE NOW OR LIVE IN PAIN!”
I started to say something and couldn’t.
Oh, spooge and corruption. I’m going to die today. I’d never been much of an actor, and now what with the dope and the new bod and the tough audience—
The Bush-looking character, who I’d realized was a
b’et-yaj
, a “teaser”—that is, a torturer—sat on my left side and walked his fingers up my cheek. They were in sort of finger-cots made, I guessed, from intestines. When he came to my left eye he held the lids apart, rather gently, and, with his other hand, lifted the lid off a miniature
incensario
.
“Hun tzunumtub tz-ik-een yaj,”
the teaser chanted. He spoke in the women’s language and had a womanly voice. He held the censer underneath my eye. I got a glimpse of pink embers and a curl of tan smoke.
Now, I generally like chilies. Poblano, serrano, rocoto, habañero, you pick ’em, peel ’em, cook ’em, serve ’em, and pay for ’em, I’ll put ’em away. And at first it didn’t even seem so bad. Maybe they were using some special species, or the reaction was delayed by the bufotenine or whatever it was that was spreading through my bloodstream. But there was just a faint tingling at the beginning, like someone across the room was peeling a single onion. The teaser set down and covered the
incensario
. There was something in the way he did it that triggered a flash of my real father putting down a Squirt bottle with the same species of motion, and I bit my lip to stifle the nostalgia rush. The teaser took a tobacco leaf and fanned away the smoke. I felt one of the guards holding me stifle a cough, as though if he let it out he’d be demoted to the ranks, which was probably close to the case. Dryness spread out from the rims of my eyelids and around the balls, back toward what felt like the base of my optic nerve, but I, or rather Chacal’s warrior’s body, didn’t want to give these guys the satisfaction of trying to wink.
“Take back your twin,” 2 Jeweled Skull said.
“I’m going to,” I said lockjawedly. “You have to let me start.” Fluid swelled in my nose and little dust devils whirled up under my lids. Probably everyone who’s not from a chili culture has had the experience of innocently munching a slice of spic-flavor pizza and biting into a wayward level-ten green habañero. So this kind of pain ought to be easy to identify with. Except that’s confined to your mouth, and somehow this spread to my whole body. Now, as I said, Chacal’s body had this disconnect, this precious ability to distance itself from major pain. But I could almost see the gap narrowing, closing like slow, slow elevator doors. My orbital muscles contracted. I managed to keep my other eye open and not twist my head, but then before I knew it I’d tried to wink, and as his fingers pushed the lids wider the teaser turned to 2JS and grinned, and 2JS looked back and it was like I could hear him chuckling even though his face didn’t move and he didn’t make a sound. Now my eyeball was rolling in onion zest and the tighter I squeezed my lids the more it swelled up like a red sun, and the more tears streamed around it the more desiccated it felt, and then everything crashed in as the capsaicin penetrated the liner cells around my eyeball and blasted the overload into my spinal cord. The priceless disconnect closed and evaporated. I screamed, almost but not quite silently, more like a sort of endless sputtering hiss like rain falling on a hot griddle, and even though I was more or less insane at that moment I felt that automatic shame rising out of Chacal’s brain, that brown, crushing shame that the Oprah Syndrome had nearly wiped out of twenty-first-century emotional life. It was like his body knew that my weakness had disgraced it.