In the Courts of the Sun (62 page)

Okay, think.
Empathy just as a concept was a little abstract to express in Ixian. You had to frame it in the language of family.
Okay, here goes.
“I know . . . ,” I said, “I know that if you were on the road and you saw someone strangling a five-rounder”—that is, about a three-year-old—“you would want to stop it. Even if it was his child, even if the child was scab-possessed and inauspiciously born, even if he had every right to kill it, you would still want to stop him, and if you had the power to—that is, if you could stop him, you would.”
“Your hometimers are not on our road,” she said.
“They are. By then scores of scores of scores of scores of them will all be your descendants, or descendants of your sisters, your brothers, because . . .”
I trailed off. I looked up at her. Her eyes were still looking past me, over my head.
“They are dying,” I said, “they will be dying, and just before they die they’ll wonder why nobody cared to help them, and if they knew that I under you and you could have saved them and decided not to, they would wonder why, and if we told them, it wouldn’t be a good enough . . .”
I trailed off. Those never-to-be-born tears were welling up again somewhere a bit behind my eyeballs. And I was gasping, I was short of breath, and even almost stuttering like I used to do in English when I got panicked when I was little. Damn it, Jed, keep it together, keep it to—
“I next to you have made my decision,” Koh said,
“Too many suns have already been born
And too many are coming.
All corn-fleshed people will end with the sun
On 4 Overlord, 3 Yellow.
Maybe someday after that some new heir of Iztamna will come along,
Maybe he’ll model new lineages from some other material,
Maybe from jade.”
She paused and then started to say
“Ca’ek,”
“Finished,” but I interrupted her.
“WAIT
,
”
I said—well, let’s say I shouted—“wait, you
DO NOT
have, you”—Tone it down, Jed, I thought—“you far over me do not have the authority to decide that for them. Not even if your decision is correct.”
“No,” she said, “it is that I don’t have the right to prolong their time on the zeroth level, even if I could.”
“No, you do, it—you want to save them, but you think you shouldn’t, or rather you know you shouldn’t, but if what I’ve seen can add anything to what you’ve seen—that is, I’ve been in both places, and I’ve seen things that . . .”
Damn. I lost track of what I was saying. I started again:
“If I know one thing—and it’s not even a good thing, but it’s true—it’s that you’re allowed to do whatever you want.”
Since I’d already broken almost every other rule of decorum, I looked into her eyes. Her eyes opened wide and bulged—no, wait, that wasn’t it. She’d shut her eyes, but her eyelids had been painted with white lead, so they looked like they were still open and pupil-less, like they’d been drawn by Harold Gray in
Little Orphan Annie.
Whew. That was a little shock. Shocklet. Damn, had she not blinked this whole time? Well, if she had, I’d missed it. Okay.
I didn’t know what to do, so I just looked at her false eyes. I guess she hadn’t wanted to look down, or to lash out at me, as she had a right to, so instead she’d just shut down.
Come on, Jed. Come up with something.
“I underneath you challenge you to look at me,” I said. It was like saying “I dare you to hit me.” Still, I felt like I needed it, I needed a scrap of eye contact that wasn’t just about dominance. Anyway, maybe it was just sheer fighting spirit—as I think I mentioned, around here you’d do anything on a dare—but she opened her eyes and looked back.

[51]

W
hen I was at Nephi K-12—and I realize there’s really never any good time to break up a narrative, and that even if there were this wouldn’t be it, but still, as they used to say, dear and thrice-indulgent reader, let us pause for just a moment—there was a perennial substitute teacher who worked the lower grades, a large, ancient lady who remembered when the grandsons of the pioneers came to school barefoot and who was a dissertation-worthy storehouse of premedia entertainments. She knew what there was to know about yarn puppets, fancy needlework, and folding dolls, and especially parlor games—Forfeits, Charades, the terrifying ritual of apple bobbing, Pass-the-Slipper, Snapdragon, and Shadow Buff—a whole lost world from endless dim evenings before the REA. And anyway one Friday afternoon she cut a row of three pairs of tiny eyeholes in an old white bedsheet and had us tape it up over the wide doorway into what they called the cubbyhole room. Half the class of twenty-four went behind the sheet, and three of them came up and peered out at the rest of us from behind the eyeholes. And each of us in turn went up close to the sheet, and looked directly into their eyes, and tried to guess who was looking back. It had turned out that it was almost impossible, that—except in the case of Jessica Gunnerson, a nearalbinic ginger whose irises were the same aniline violet as the methanolated ink on the last and lightest copy out of the ditto machine—you couldn’t tell who it was. Without seeing more of the face, you couldn’t tell whether it was your best friend or your worst enemy, you couldn’t tell what funny faces that person might be making at you, you couldn’t even tell whether it was a boy or a girl. It was disturbing enough so that decades later I might be looking into, say, some young lady’s eyes, attempting to connect on some at least supra-animalistic level, or to convey a scintilla of commitment or, at worst, a trace amount of honesty, and I’d be feeling that yes, she was being straight with me because I was looking right into the limpid depths of her windows into the whatever, and then out of nowhere I’d remember that stupid guessing game and suddenly her pupils would look like just two cutout holes with just blank transgalactic vacuity behind them, and that cut-loose feeling would swell up between us, that sense of being adrift in the mechanistic cosmos not just without any communication with another being but with no possibility of any communication with any other being now or in the future or even in the past, and everything would just turn to
mierditas refritos
. And now—I mean, right now in AD 664—I was at it again, I was looking into Lady Koh’s eyes, and I was hoping more than desperately that I could see something there, some shred of magic or spirit or at least indeterminacy, some sign that she and I were both more or less real and conscious and autonomously volitional and in the same space at the same time. As I think I said, Lady Koh’s face was about as inexpressive as any I’ve encountered, and I’ve seen some stony ones, across about ten thousand chessboards, Go boards, and Hold ’Em tables, but her eyes had something else to them, something liquefacient and vortical, like Cléo de Mérode’s. Her irises were so dark that you couldn’t see where the pupils started, but you could still see that they were two different colors of black, like in an Ad Reinhardt painting, that the left eye was colder and the right eye was warmer . . . I thought it was raining outside and then I realized I was hearing blood swashing through my ears.
Come on, I thought. I know you’re in there. Come on.
Forty beats went by. I thought I saw something in her blank face, something like maybe she was biting her tongue, some kind of pain that wasn’t quite concealable, and then I decided I’d probably imagined it.
Eighty beats.
This doesn’t need to be a rape-like moment. Let’s turn it into a lovemakinglike moment. Okay?
At the hundred-and-twentieth beat there was a click in my back, a vertebra resettling, and I got an urge to pull my eyes away and managed not to. Just keep at it, Jed. Now I felt like we were a couple of sumos exerting a half-ton or so of pressure on each other in the middle of the dohyo. Come on, I thought. No need to wrestle. Come on. Hold it. Hold. Please, Nonexistent Dude, just this one time, let there be something there. Please. Please.
“It is because I do care for them as my children that I do not want them to have to toil through the zeroth level,” Koh’s voice said, sounding about a mile away. She didn’t look away.
“The zeroth level is the only level,” I choked out.
“If that is true it is just as well,” she said.
“No, no, no, no, it is not just as well, they want to . . . they want to spend as many days with each other as they can.”
“So they are greedy and afraid.”
“No, no, not—no, they’re like a family going together to a festival.”
“And what is there to see at the festival?” she asked. I guess she meant that the fun wears off after a while.
“That’s why they want to have new children,” I said, “to see it fresh, that . . . what I and you are saying here is
b’ach na tok
.” That is, this whole thing is ridiculous.
“Yes, it is,” she clicked.
“And if the suns do go on,” I said, “if a new race of suns . . . who knows what could happen after that? I and you could play the Game four hundred score times and we wouldn’t know. Maybe something will happen in the ten scoreth b’ak’tun, in the hundred scoreth b’ak’tun, that will make it all worthwhile. . . .”
I trailed off. Jesus, I thought. This is getting a little intense for me. A billion years of evolution and five million years of human evolution and it’s all come down to the two of us.
“There is a jar in the blackmost mountain,” Koh said. “All the
yaj
”—that is, all the pain, or pain smoke, or in this case, tears—“of all beings everywhere drips into the jar.”
“I under you have heard of this,” I said.
She said,
“Lai can h’tulnaac,”
she said,
“Lail x nuc homoaa
Cu tz’o, cu tz’a.”
“And when the great jar
Is filled to the brim
It will end, it will shatter.”
“X’tan boc ch’ana k’awal nab,”
I said. “This is making solidified corn gruel with peccary urine.” In Ixian, it was the closest thing you could say to “bullshit.” Although I guess it sounds funnier if you’ve spent the whole day dragging two-hundred-pound limestone blocks up a ninety-foot pyramid in 110-degree heat.
“As you next to me say,” Koh gestured.
And for some reason—and I don’t think it was one of Koh’s witchy-poo tricks—after that, I had a feeling almost like passing out for a second or two, or like having been thinking of something important and then forgetting it, and when I remembered what I’d been up to we weren’t staring at each other anymore. I looked down. Koh shifted under her manta. We were in some other timespace.
“Old Steersman isn’t coming here,” Koh said. She meant that she didn’t have Old Steersman’s dust, the topolytic component of the Game drugs.
“Would you next to me play without it?” I asked.
She signed there wasn’t any point.
“But you do follow the Steersman sometimes, correct?” I asked.
She clicked yes.
I heard the Penguin Woman behind me. She came into view and lit a second incense ball. Well, that’s a good sign. Does that mean it’s a yes? She waddled up to Koh and stood on tiptalons. Koh tilted her head, whispered about fifty words into her ear, and handed her something. The dwarfess scuttled out.
It’s happening, I thought. She’s going to get hold of some of that Steersman shit and go for it. Maybe we can just catch that bastard right now. If we get a name, I could just leave that in the lodestone cross box and not even worry about the drugs for the time being. I’m gonna get you, Doomster Man. Yeah. No sweat.
Koh took a fresh myrtle torch and held it in the brazier. It flared up yellow-green. She set it in the holder. The light glinted on the dark side of her face.
If there’d been a single moment when Koh had a change of heart, I hadn’t seen it. And now that we were going ahead I didn’t even feel that I’d convinced her myself. There was a sense that it wasn’t about me, that at most I’d been able to deliver some new information and she’d been strong enough to change her mind based on it. I felt weakened. She opened one of the baskets, took out a long, thin, green cigar, bit a quarter-inch off the mouth end, lit it on the myrtle torch, took a deep drag, puffed smoke to the five directions, and said
“Now my heart’s breath is white,
Now my heart’s breath is black,
Now my heart’s breath is gold,
Now my heart’s breath is red,
Lord Old Salter, we two here far under you
Ask you to loan us your quick eyes, your wary eyes,
Sovereign knowing lord, watching lord. Finished.”
She bent down and puffed a chestful of smoke through the mesh of the basket. She waited a moment, lifted off the cover, reached in, and pulled out a slightly smaller basket that had been nested inside it. Its mesh was looser and I could see movement and a white heart-shaped thing hanging in the center. Koh set it down and half-lifted the lid with her right hand. The white thing was the paper nest of a small colony of polybiine wasps. More quickly than I could follow Koh had reached in with her left hand and had grabbed a fat golden-green female wasp with the long black nails of her thumb and sixth finger. She set her down in the center of a little dish. The wasp was at least two inches long, with a gravid abdomen and an extended ovipositor. Her wings had been amputated. She peered around with her big eyes. Koh’s left forefinger came down out of the sky and pressed the wasp down on the dish at the junction of her thorax and abdomen. Even though she was tranquilized by the smoke, the wasp scrambled to get away, her feet slipping on the smooth glaze of the plate. Koh used the first two fingernails of her right hand as scissors and snipped off the wasp’s head. It bounced on the dish, its mandibles opening and closing. Next she grabbed the stinger and ovipositor and yanked them out of the poor thing’s abdomen. A fat little toxin sac, a couple of clear beady eggs, and some yellow hairs and shreds of chitin came along with them. Koh set the cluster of gunk down on the side of the dish. Finally, still holding down the abdomen with her left hand, she tore off one of the six thrashing legs—the right front, I think—and dropped it on a second tiny dish. She pushed the dish over to me.
Koh lifted up the struggling, five-legged, headless insect, popped it into her mouth, chewed twice, and swallowed.
I hesitated.
Come on, Jed, I thought. Don’t be such a wuss. I picked up the leg and rolled it stupidly around in my hand as though it might leap up and pinch my eye. Okay. I popped it into my mouth. It was still twitching on my tongue. I crunched it up and swallowed as fast as I could. Koh handed me the stogie, I guess to wash it down. I took a good-size drag. It was a little dry and oddly spiced but not bad. I didn’t know what to do with it so I held on to it. The dwarfess came back in and laid out a little array of baskets, jars, and tiny dishes on each side of the hearth cover as though we were about to have afternoon tea. Already my mouth felt as though it was larger than my head.
Koh said,
“Now we’ll suppose that I play a great-Game here,
In front of you next to me,
Would you betray me to hostile greathouses?
Or name me to strangers?
Would you recount in the open what now happens
Inside our citadel,
Here on our jade mountain, here underneath the sky,
Over the heartland?
Would you then chatter about it outside, in the hundred zocalos?
Would you slice open my vein-knotted book
In the sun, in the daylight?”
I choked out a response around a tongue that felt as fat and slow as a woodchuck:
“How would I still be a blood
If I ever repeated a secret?
Then from that time they would no longer call me
A son of the Harpy House,
Grackles would jeer at me, hornets would sting
My two lips, my two eyeballs,
Then armadillos would lick at my skull
In the dunes, in the wastenesses,
Far from this mountain cave over the sea crater,
Under the sky shell.”
How was that? I wondered. Correct enough for you? Or do you also want to hear it in Latin?
Slowly, Koh gestured, “Acknowledged.” I watched her dark hand drop toward her thigh. It seemed to be falling and falling and not getting there, and then it seemed as though it wasn’t falling anymore, that she was just holding it out in midair. Weird, I thought. I looked over at the clock, or rather I started to, but it took my eyes a while to get there. It’s that time-smashing Old Salter dust stuff again, I thought. Chronolytic. Except this is a lot more chronolytic than the last—oh, there it is. My eyes had gotten to the incense ball, finally; it looked like it was about half-gone, but I couldn’t see it well because the dwarfess must have hung a strip of cheesecloth or something over it—oh, sorry, no, it was just a wisp of smoke, not moving, or appearing not to move because of the drug. I heard the Penguiness whispering something. I turned my eyes back to Koh. They felt like big granite spheres rolling in oiled sockets. Koh gave me a “strong wait” hand gesture, the same gesture the Harpy clan used in hunts or raids when everyone was supposed to freeze.
Someone outside the room whistled. The dwarf scuttled out the door. It seemed that minutes went by between each little footfall. Koh stood up. It was like watching a mountain being slowly thrust up by the subduction of the tectonic plate underneath it. She turned toward me and shook her manta into a better attitude. Whoa, I thought. Surprisingly, she was a lot taller than the average Maya woman, maybe even a hair taller than I was, that is, than I was now, and Chacal was a big guy. Rudely, I twisted my head around, watching. She seemed thin under her quechquemitl. Most sun adders were thin, but she was maybe a little too thin. She took four steps toward the center of the half-room and lowered herself to her knees facing the door behind me. I’m not generally a ballet queen, but a long time ago I saw Rudolf Nureyev in
L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,
and there was a kind of haughtiness in his movements, where every finger was just, like, I’m the hottest and you’re the nottest, and Lady Koh had something a lot like that. Except around here it wasn’t so off-putting.
I twisted around. A head and shoulders appeared in the little doorway and bobbed up and down as their owner stood up. My irises had to strain but gradually, like a nebula in a big telescope, he came into focus. He was a tall man. He wore a dark thin manta. He had loose hair like a nacom’s and skin rubbed with gray ash. I couldn’t make out his markings, but he smelled like cat musk, or rather he was wearing a kind of artificial musk, made from