In the Courts of the Sun (77 page)

[68]

L
EON moved. I moved. He moved. I moved, toward the shape. It felt like it might be a ruined pyramid or a dead volcano, but it was horribly eroded, full of fissures and debris flows. And there was something odd just a little below the peak, a protuberance like a gigantic wart. LEON moved.
Hmm.
I moved, plodding through the blizzard of data. All this noise and so little signal, I thought. It was like TV snow in your eyes. He moved. Hmm. Not this. Not that. It was getting harder to feel my way forward. Fewer and fewer solid spots in the swamp.
He moved. Hypothetical moves faded in and out of clarity ahead of me. I moved. Now it felt as though I was climbing high, irregular, eroded steps. There were big shapes around, but I couldn’t see them, or rather I couldn’t visualize them, since it’s not really like you can see the landscape of the Game anyway, it’s more like you get an inner sense of it. Maybe it’s like that blind mountain climber who keeps setting all those records in Tibet. Since he can’t get a view of things all at once, he has to grab bits of information sequentially, feeling his way along traverses between shapeless heights and gaping unknowns, and then assemble an interior model of the route, laboriously and one-dimensionally, like stringing beads. The steps rose toward 4 Ahau. He moved. I moved. Up, up. Come on. A sound, or rather a feeling like the memory of a sound, came from somewhere near the apex, a faint irregular murmur that reminded me of something I’d heard a long time ago, something—hmm. The memory was on the tip of my mental tongue but I couldn’t quite bring it up. Don’t worry about it. Focus. Now I was starting to sense that there was a hollow near the peak of the cone, something like what we call a
k’otb’aj
in Ch’olan, a cave-in-the-sky. LEON moved, trying to force me back down the slope. I brought in another skull and set it down. He countermoved. Hmm. He goes, I go, he goes . . . okay. I moved up the slope.
He moved. I moved. Up, up. It felt as though there was rusty red stone, like Badlands pumice, crumbling under my feet. Up. There was already a sense of being way above the tree line. He moved. I moved. Up. Now it was so high that not even the condors came here. I was on the west side of the mountain, where there was still some warmth from the wrinkled sun. It was a different sun, not the daily sun. It was the sun of the b’ak’tun, the 394-year sun, which wouldn’t reach its zenith until 4 Ahau. And, since we were on the other side of the world—the reflected side, you could say—it was rising in the west.
Up, up. He goes, I go. I moved.
Ahhh.
There was a pause.
It was as though I was on a level landing or plateau, or what you’d call a
tablero
if you interpreted the mound as the ruin of a Teotihuacan-style mul. Not far ahead there was a wide opening in the level shelf, a ragged, lopsided oval with a hint of a deep shaft slanting down into the mountain, and then just beyond it the next rise of the mountain, the
talud
, sloped up at a gentle angle . . . and then, at the edge of the next
tablero
, it was as though I could just make out a gigantic gibbous boulder, dull orange in the low nonlight. I tapped my way forward. He goes. I go. Okay.
The sound got louder, or I should say the feeling of sound intensified. It was a deep bleating, a fleshy trumpeting, and it definitely came from the pit. And somehow you could tell from the curve of the echoes that the cave was bigger inside than that mountain was outside, and that even so it was crowded with beings. They were like bats but not bats. They might be hanging in family clusters, it seemed, like bats, or at least clustering in families, and you could tell there were as many of them as there are bats in a big cave, in fact more, uncountable trillions of them, even. But they didn’t sound like bats. They were bigger. And somehow I got a sense that they were hairless. What were they? The sound reminded me of something, something from my childhood, but it wasn’t a Guatemala thing, it was something—oh, okay. Got it.
It was the
Eumetopias jubatus
. Around the third year I was living with them, the Ødegârds brought me along on a church trip to San Francisco and then to Seattle, and then on the way back the bus stopped at the Sea Lion Caves, which is a privately owned roadside attraction near a town called Florence on the Oregon coast. In the spring there are about three hundred Steller’s sea lions gathering and mating on the rock shelves. You take this elevator down from the cliff scarp, and then you go through this passage in the limestone to this rock-hewn balcony that looks out over the grotto, with the waves the equivalent of about three stories below you and the cave roof about ten stories above, and you try to make some sense out of all these churning hummocks of fat and bone. The cows shriek as the two-thousand-pound bulls mount them, and the bachelor and dominant bulls bellow at each other for hours on end, and the roars resonate and echo off the wet stone. These days, when you think
loud and terrifying sound
, you think man-made, jackhammers dismantling a mountaintop, monster jets warming their engines, artillery and explosions and whatever. But even though the sound of that cave is 100 percent natural—in fact it probably hasn’t changed for millions of years, in fact it’s probably not much different from the booming leks of, say, dxatrimas or ankylosaurs, or herds of pentaceratopsians—it was still as horrifying as any sound you’ll ever hear, something one almost can’t bear and certainly can’t forget. I inched forward. Something in the sound made it seem that the beings were stirring, stretching their wings, getting ready to swarm out when this sun was buried on 4 Ahau. They’d stream out almost endlessly, through tuns and k’atuns and bundles of bundles of b’ak’tunob, and they’d spread over the world and grow, and live. If you haven’t watched bats leave a big cave, I can’t describe it, and if you have there’s no need to describe it. But the scariest thing about it is how endless they seem. You think that inside the earth, it’s all just bats.
I felt my way around the opening. By now I could tell that all the bleatings and bellowings had too much variance and repetition to be random, and I paused on that square for a minute, trying to make out what they were saying.
Well, it was some language, all right, I thought. But not one I’d heard, in fact I’d bet it wasn’t even a human language, in fact some of the syllables reminded me of the curse language the howler monkeys use when . . . Hmm. If I could hear it a little more clearly, if I could stay here a little longer, I almost think I could figure it out . . . but LEON had moved again, and LEON didn’t stop thinking while my clock was running, and the sun was inching west toward 4 Ahau, and I HAVE TO MOVE ON, I thought, and I pushed my eighth skull forward two squares, trying not to respond too defensively. Don’t let LEON get the initiative back, I thought. Now I was past the pit, at a point where it was as though I could look up at the boulder hanging over me. From here you couldn’t believe it was still supported by something. If it ever slid off its perch and rolled down, it’d pop me like a tick under a steel boot heel. But more importantly, it would plug up that cave mouth, and those guys would never, ever get out. LEON moved one square back. I moved one square forward, to where it felt like I was reaching up, feeling its base.
Whoa.
The rock moved. Terror. I recoiled in the chair, contracting into a little ball as though the stone was already crashing down on me, and then after a while, when it was clear I was still around, I felt for the stone again. It was still there, wherever there is, the giant stone was poised on its center of gravity, it was just wobbling slowly in the wind on its tiny fulcrum. It was a rocking stone, like the Pagoda of the Golden Boulder at Kyaiktiyo, in Myanmar, which seems to be sliding off its perch. In fact, you can’t believe it hasn’t fallen already. But it’s been there for at least two thousand years, and that’s just using historical records. I could feel that the stone was just a tiny bit off balance, that it was leaning just a weensy bit this way, west, that it wanted to fall down onto the mouth of the cave and block it up forever, and then as I groped closer it was as though I could feel a single pebble jammed into the cleft between the boulder and the rock shelf. And then it was as though I could feel there was a filament or a thread tied around the pebble and stretching off, as untwangably taut as a piano’s C8 string, out into the empty space to my left, and I understood that the whole thing was a deadfall trap, a Wile E. Coyoteish rig like the traps the Paiutes used to set to crush gophers and desert foxes. And for some reason I understood that it was as though somebody far away was holding the far end of the wire and was getting ready to pull it and jerk out the pebble and tip the boulder crashing down into the shaft. And the only way to keep that from happening, so whatever was inside could leave the cave on schedule, was to find the bastard holding that string—the Doomster—and keep him from pulling it.
I leaned back in the Ergo Chair and yanked on a clump of my blessedly regrowing hair. I could barely feel it. I tried touching my nose, but I couldn’t tell I was touching it without peeking. Getting numb, I thought. Damn, I’m messed up. I leaned forward again and it was as though I could reach out and touch the wire. It was too thin to see, or rather to imagine seeing, but there was still a grayness about it that meant it was stretching off north-by-northwest, out into the black quadrant but close to the white one. I rubbed my head again, stepping back, and it was as though I could almost see the wire stretching away overhead to where it vanished in the haze above the Pacific. Alaska? I wondered. Can’t tell from here. I felt it again. There was no way to attach a pulley to it or slide down along the string or anything like that, and not just because it was imaginary—although it was, of course, as convincing as it all was seeming to me at the moment—but because the Game doesn’t work that way. It would be like suddenly deciding that your rook could jump diagonally. I’d have to go overland, as it were. Was. Is. I raced down the northern stairs and bore northwest across the plain. LEON trailed after me. I jumped forward again. He followed. Sometimes I thought that I could just sense the wire high overhead. Which meant that so far the latest hunch felt right, and that our guy—and by the way we’d already decided to assume it was a guy, since chicks generally aren’t so into genocide—had some connection to the Pacific Northwest. Not that that narrows things down enough, of course. It’s like saying “Asian food.” The search engines gathered another few thousand terabytes of data. Damn it, I need tougher math on this stuff. More stochastics. Better curve fitting. Maybe some kind of Kolmogorovian-ass constraining function. Still, he’s got to be in there. At this point there’s hardly anyone who’s entirely off the grid. In order to be completely undocumented in the online universe you’d almost have to be a newborn child in some hunter-gatherer tribe up in the mountains in New Guinea. And then you wouldn’t be the Doomster anyway. Our guy’d have to have some technical skills. There was almost no way he hadn’t been enrolled in a half-decent high school within the last forty years. Even if he’d been homeschooled, he’d be registered with a provincial education department or a state department of education. So that already limits it down to a measly billion or so souls, out of a world population of 6.8. With the Pacific Northwest thing, it takes it down to, say, thirty million. No problem.
I moved three squares east, farther into the future, to November. Data swirled by, names, addresses, social security numbers, military service records, occupations, investments, domain names, postal codes, arrest records, supposedly expunged juvenile arrest records, lists of corporate employees, lists of government employees, professional associations, unions, guilds, social clubs, secret societies, church memberships, magazine subscriptions, Google alerts, vehicle registrations, telephone records, prescription purchases, even paintball teams, an un-untanglable snarl of cross-references like a scalpful of matted, dreadlocked hair. I moved. LEON sifted the data, evaluated it, discarded all but .00001 percent of it, and moved.
Nothing. Fine. I moved again, into December. Another load of bits started to come in. I waited. The Net was slow today. Some new kind of Trojan worm had been closing down servers, not just locals but the routing stations on the T3 lines. People said it was the kind of thing only the U.S. government could manage to do. Either that, I thought, or just a clever twelve-year-old with a keyboard and a dream. LEON processed the whole thing, rating each bit of data by the likelihood of its intersecting with the hypothesized doomster. He moved. I moved. Another 3 × 10
¹²
bits. Uncomplainingly, LEON sifted through it. This time he checked it against known millenarianist religions and doomsday cults. There were a lot of them—the end of the world’s always been popular—and Taro had insisted we set up the system to check against them every few moves. Still, my guess was that our suspect would be an independent, or at most someone only on the edge of one of the movements. He might be an ethnic Muslim or an ex-Jehovah’s Witness or even a holdout from the Order of the Solar Temple or whatever, but even if he were, I’d give five to one he wouldn’t be a very active member. He’d be a loner. And not some Oswald-style patsy either. A real loner.
LEON moved. Damn. Nothing.
Hmm.
Okay. Slow down. Breathe.
Narrow it down. Suppose he’s been bragging. Even just a little. I moved back a bit, into what we’d been calling the Bigmouth Space. It was a galaxy of hosted services, networking sites, and any other likely online communities, plus a little over a trillion cached e-mails, text messages, computer-transcribed phone calls, and whatnot. It was a monster, 2 × 10
¹³
bits as of this millisecond. Take that, LEON babe.
He did. He cross-referenced everything we’d done so far with the whole load, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, MySpace, Blogger, Technorati, and a hundred other lesser darknesses, active, cached, and abandoned. God dog, I thought. Imagine that they once called it the Information Superhighway. Information Superfund site, more like. World’s biggest and smelliest dump. The Staten Island landfill of the mind. LEON dealt with it, though.
Esta bien.
Trim it down again. I moved into a space called “Shibboleths.” It was basically lists of giveaway words (“Rapture Day,” “Dajjal,” “chillism,” “Abaddon,” “Kali Yug”), giveaway phrases (“I have a bomb,” “I hate all humanity,” “The world must be destroyed”), and things that reminded LEON’s increasingly insightful autodidactic engines of giveaway words and/or phrases. I told him to keep checking misspellings but that it was okay to ignore unlikely languages. Take a few seconds off. You’ve earned it.