The Sacrifice Game (5 page)

( 3 )

“H
i there, welcome to Florida’s scenic Ronald Reagan Turnpike,” he or it said in the voice of, I think, Will Ferrell. Its wide black grin narrowed and widened roughly along with the consonants and the vertical black ovals that represented its eyes rotated thirty degrees in apical opposition, signifying childlike delight. “Could I jus’ get a peek at your handprint real quick please?” He held out his right “hand,” a thick four-fingered white glove with a round glass scanner in the center of the palm like a Jain dharmachakra.

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” I was about to say, but then I figured they must hear that a thousand times a day. Instead I just held out my hand, palm down. Green laser light flashed over it. Nanny Jackboots, I thought, except that I guess I should be glad now that I have stock in the company. Parts of the outfit he wore, and the whole Rolly Po-Po Program design, were Warren Group products. Marena’d shown me a brochure. It was from the Zerothruster division, which was all about mastering crowd psychology, and its current tagline was “The Fun, Fuzzy, and Family-Friendly Frontier of Nonconfrontational Law Enforcement.” Basically the outfits were the regular water-cooled Explosive Ordinance Disposal Advanced Bomb Suits made by the Westminster Group, but since 9/11, when they’d started supplying them as character suits for Disney and Six Flags and other parks, Zerothruster had been facelifting the Nomex/Kevlar with poodlefurry flocking in “varied and cheerful designer colors,” and adding big round outer heads that fit over the high collar and SCBA helmet and that featured “a wide array of designs customizable for cultural nonaggression and local correctness.” This one was a black-and-orange neotenized cat with a teal-blue T-shirt that meant, I guess, that it was the mascot of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and an oversized round badge that said F
LORIDA
H
IGHWAY
P
ATROL
.

“Good-o, guy, well, jus’ gimmie a sec here,” the thing’s next prerecording said. The thing’s left “hand” held a long angled stick with a camera on the end, and he started sweeping it under the ’Cuda. Was he watching the video with one of his eyes, or was someone or something else watching it?

“Hey, you’re good to go, have a good one,” the thing said. The words
$14.50 RRT TOLL
appeared on my bright new dashboard screen. Thanks, I thought. And enjoy being MicroHitler. For another fifty-two days. I merged law-abidingly onto the Turnpike. A blast of tianguiscore Dopplered by on the right at eight-five, coming from a Cutlass low-rider with curb sensors like catfish barbells and a young but obese Tejano hunched over the tiny steering wheel. Bet it could one-eighty on a peso at sixty-five. Well, I’m just an old square bourgie fart. Except why should I hurry? I least of all people ever to walk the earth. The Rapture’s coming and it’s
todo por mi culpa.
He zinged around an orange Yellow Van Lines truck and back into the right lane. Probably heading into the No-Go Zone, I thought. Some monster
delirio.
It’s not a party unless you burn the place down at the end. Well, I agree. Have fun, hermano. Maybe I’ll drop by on the way back from MP’s. One of the odder things about the No-Go Zone was that even though some places were still clocking in at over 40 curies per square kilometer, since it covered over four thousand square miles, and there were about four hundred different roads leading into it, and since squatters don’t much care about long-term health anyway, the police speculated that the population of the NGZ area had actually gone up since the Horror. I’d been there a couple of times to buy fake identity papers and it was actually kind of great, a whole sort of lawless Pirates’ Nassau Town with a smorgasbord of meth, horse, crank, dogfighting, and preteen BJs, but actually not all that dangerous because M13 and a couple of the smaller gangs wanted to keep the carriage trade and policed the place themselves. Next, since it was a personalized feed, I got the malacological news: Sun-Min Hsu and Tobi Ramadan had described a species of nudibranch from the Line Islands area that they said might be eusocial, that is, divided into castes like ants and bees, although I couldn’t imagine how that could be possible, and I actually do know a little bit about opisthobranches. Some people think nudibranchs are the world’s most beautiful living things, with all the extruded gills and polyps in Fantasia-Phiokol colors, and other people think they’re the ugliest, and most people haven’t heard of them at all. Although to some other critter—to a lobster, say—they probably look pretty drab. Anyway, they have some unusual characteristics, including the almost unique ability to devour their prey and, instead of digesting all of it, incorporate some of its useful cells—cnidarians’ stinger cells, for instance, or photosynthesizing algae—into their own bodies. I’d miss them. Except of course I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t exist. And, experientially anyway, not existing is exactly equivalent to never having existed. So really we didn’t have a problem. Anyway, after the Jedcentric news, for some reason the car decided I’d heard all the news and now wanted to listen to a feed called Last Age of Heroes, which seemed to be having a Stones/Byrds/Doors festival. Debuting at Marker 31, DHSMV had initiated another decade of postdeconstruction on the granny lane—
INJURE/KILL A WORKER—$7,500 + 15 YEARS,
a sign said, so temptingly that I couldn’t imagine anyone resisting the offer. At the Kissimmee exit I voice-texted Marena that I’d be there in ten minutes. Why give her any more time to stage the place? See what she’s really wearing, doing, reading, smoking, fucking, fisting,
et ceteris paribus ad foetidus hepaticum
. Right?

Marena’s house was just outside the south city limit of Orlando on Orchid Island, one of quite a few residential patches that weren’t only not abandoned, but were making a good-neighborly effort to muddle through as though things were normal. The faux-wrought-iron gate was open, but the dude came out of the guardhouse, made sure I was really me, and he was really polite about it. Classy. I tip-tired through the two
S
-curves of a long pink-concrete driveway flanked with close-packed pepper trees. There was a three-car garage, but Marena’s Cherokee was parked on the side of the big circle, with two other dark SUVs behind it, and I parked in the front of the line.

At some point, I forget when, Marena’d told me that Walt had built her house during Epcot’s early grand Utopian phase, and I’d thought she’d been exaggerating, but it turned out to be true, and the place was a nearly exact replica of some Frank Lloyd Wright house or other. From this side it looked a lot like the palaces at Uxmal, which is a Yucatec Maya city that was a big capital in the AD 900s, and which, incidentally, had been ruled by some of my ancestors, the Xiws.

I scrumbled out. Crack. Ow. Stiff. Getting old. Damn, it was stuffy. I repocketed my wallet and phone into my shirt and left my jacket on the passenger seat. Okay. Out of habit, I locked the doors. I looked up at NNE +30 degrees to see if I could spot Comet Ixchel but there was too much smaze. Okay, here goes. I toed on the microvibration, pushed away from the car, and skated—sorry, Sleeked™—across the cement. Sleeking felt like you were doing something between ice skating and old-time four-wheel roller skating, but since your feet were flat on the ground there was a sense like you were on a buttered Teflon tray. Basically, the deal was that the treads vibrated at a very high frequency, so they’d slip around even on an ordinary road surface, and then, when the vibe wasn’t on, the action of walking on them generated electricity that they’d store for later, so there weren’t any big battery packs. I guess if they’d come out when I was seven I would have gone monkey over them, but right now they weren’t plugging my wound. Instinctively—already—I cut off the vibration with my big toes and came to a hard stop at the single doorstep. The car must have rung an alarm because before I got to the door a medium-tall Latino guy opened it.

“. . . Uh, Jed,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. It was Tony Sic.

( 4 )

“H
i,” I mumbled again. “Tony. Hi.” At first I hadn’t recognized him because he’d gotten a vicious crew cut. He was in shorts and a blue-and-white-striped Mérida Fútbol Club shirt with a big number 28. Huh, I thought. Huh. Wonder what’s going on. He kind of stared at me. I felt a twinge of that old-rival feeling.

He asked how I was. I said better and asked him how he was. He said something. He seemed nervouser than usual. Were he and Marena having a thing? I wondered. She’d said she was getting married to somebody—but no way, she can’t, can’t, can’t have meant she was getting married to Tony Sic. That was too ghastly to contemplate, and I’d been contemplating some ghastly stuff lately. Although why so ghastly, really? I didn’t have anything against the guy. We were sort of competitive colleagues with the Game and I’d been terribly jealous of him when I’d thought he’d get to get downloaded into 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Maya ahau, instead of me, and then when I’d gotten selected to go naturally I’d felt all guilty. He wasn’t my William Wilson, but his story was quite a bit like mine. He was a Maya speaker, he’d gotten into academics and worked with Taro, and he’d even spent some time working for one of the CPRs, the one in Ixcán that isn’t the same as Ix. Be nice to him, I thought. Remember, you’re going to kill him. Along with everybody else, of course, but still.

Eh,
pues
. I stepped into the dry frigidity. I’d never gotten used to the benthic depth of air conditioning in El Norte. And never would. Sic motioned me to edge past him in the narrow entryway and I started to, but then he rattled a sort of nonobjective coatrack, and I said I’d keep my jacket on and there was a sort of awkward moment. We after-youed into a little sort of vestibule. There was a Geiger tube lying on the sort of radiator housing thing, charging from a big hazardous extension tentacle, and I had to get my feet over that, and then there was an orange SleekerBoard—it had kind of runners on the bottom like on a sled, and with what looked like a pretty heavy battery on its undercarriage, which I was sure Warren would deal with in the iterations to come, or would have, rather—which I guess belonged to Max, leaning precariously against the concrete-block doorjamb, and I avoided that, and then there were all the shoes, and I got around those and took three steps and then remembered it was an Asian-style house and went back. Instead of having laces, the Sleekers were spring-loaded to sort of intelligently release your foot when you toe a thingy on the side. I parked them next to sextet of Sic’s big Diadora
fútbol
shoes. Sic seemed to feel like he was being rude watching me but didn’t want to turn away from me, either, so he sort of backed away into the other side of the house, which didn’t seem really like him. I got a spider-sense that there were other people around. Ashley
₃
, probably—Marena’s housekeeper—and maybe her creepy driver with the ridiculously would-be scary name, Grgur.

“I’m in the orifice,” Marena’s voice called. Maybe she’d forgotten that I’d never been here before. Except that wasn’t like her. I looked back at Sic. He kind of indicated that it was to the right. I went to the right, across pseudoglyphish cast flagstones, through a stony living room with a sort of squashed cathedral ceiling—maybe they call it a hut ceiling?—and through a high trapezoidal door into a dimly lit room with a big table smattered with monitors and hard drives. There were big French doors on the far side with a dark garden and a narrow pool glowing phthalocyanine blue. Something stretched up and—

Whoa.

( 5 )

T
he something had kissed me on the lower lip. It was Marena. She was in a sort of anthracite-gray, probably pashmina sort of top and a matching sort of bottom, with a sort of hairband thingie and a necklace with a hundred and eight garnet beads on it. Her face—it was a square, flat face, maybe too ethnic for a lot of howlies, but the sort of thing you really like if you like that sort of thing—her face was tanner, as expected, and it seemed more so because of big silver clustery Bucellati earrings that seemed clunky for her. She stepped back and sank to her normal height. She looked a little uncomfortable.

“Hi, that was nice,” I said. She said hi.

I looked at her. She looked at me. I looked away first.

“You’re looking really good,” she said.

“Thanks.” Damn, now if I tell her she looks good it’ll sound insincere. Instead I started to tell her how she looked tan.

“No, I mean you really look healthy and happy and everything,” she said. Really? I wondered. I’d thought I was moping, what with the Sic business and everything. “What’s up?”

“Up? Nothing.”

“Really?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’ve been working out, right?”

“Well, I changed the fluidized bed filters in the sponge tanks.”

“No, really, you’re doing good, right?”

“Better never. I mean, never better.”

There was a pause. You know how they say that when you’re at a loss for words to talk about something that’s in the room? So I looked around the room. There was a huge monitor on a big wooden easel, like it was an oil painting, and there was a sketch on the monitor of a sort of Mayanesque city, and I indicated it.

“Did you do that freehand?” I asked. She said yes. I said that was really something. It was too. The girl really could sketch. “That’s what it’ll look like from the plaza,” she said.

“What will?”

“You know, Neo-Teo™.” That is, she didn’t pronounce the little ™ symbol, but I heard the name like it was there. “I mean, the analog version.”

“By
analog
you mean real, right?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, real life, full scale, inhabitable, the whole thing. I’m the first single person in charge of designing a city this large since, like, Peter the Great.”

“Cool,” I inarticulated. Marena talked fast sometimes, almost like she was from 1940s radio, and it could take one a second to digest what she’d said. I liked it about her, though. These days if you take a business-presentations class or whatever they always tell you to speak as slow as sloth shit, not just so the ’tards can keep up but because they’ve done studies where people think the same exact speech is more important if it takes two minutes instead of one minute. On the other hand, if you’ve ever been in, say, any software-development meetings of more than three people, you might have seen how there’ll be two or three people who figure the problem out right away, and they work it out together speaking really fast with all this heavy jargon, and then when they’ve solved the problem they’ll take a break and one of them will explain the solution to all the lesser minds. Marena was one of those two or three people. It’s like, whoa, Brain on Board.

“Check this out,” she said. She sort of pulled me around the desk area to a pair of low side tables. One of them was displaying a little crowd of vinyl dolls, or I guess you’re supposed to call them action figures, and when I got closer I could see they were vinyl Barbie-gauge Maya mythological characters, all in that trendy sort of Jesse Hernandez Urban-Ocelomeh style. Each had its name in raised gold on its little fauxstone base. But even without the labels, “Jun Raqan,” that is, Hurricane, would have been easy to recognize because of his single leg, and it wasn’t too hard to pick out “One Ocelot,” “1 Turquoise Ocelot,” “Mam” (who, since he still turned up sometimes these days under the name Maximón, sported a nineteenth-century hat and bolo tie over his Classic Maya gear), “Waterlily Jaguar,” “Ix Chel,” and “Star Rattler,” which was a long feathery snake with goo-goo-googly eyes and a lot of centipedalian legs. There was also a quartet of hunchbacked dwarfs in different colors, which they’d called “Northeast Chak,” “Northwest Chak,” and “Southwest Chak,” and then a gang of creepshowy types, obviously the nine Lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. They’d named the tallest one, the leader, “4 Jaguar Night,” and then his posse of eight henchmen all had names beginning with
S
—Scab, Skitters, Spine (a mastiff-sized fanged rabbit), Scald, Snatchbat, Scurf (a big disembodied head), Sarcoma, and Serpigo—who, to me anyway, looked more Cthuluish than Maya, but what do I know?

“Not those, this,” Marena said. She edged behind the other table. It was covered with what looked like stacks of aerogel building blocks. She found a remote and clicked it on. The blocks filled with light and shadow.

Whoa, I said, or tried to. Anyway, I’ve left off the inverted commas because I suspect I didn’t get it all the way out of my throat.

It was an architectural model of a futuristic Mayanesque city: pyramids, plazas, palaces, spires, towers, bartizans, barbicans, brattices, lattices, oubliettes, obalesques, clerestories, labyrinthories, minatourets, and zigzaggurats, all bathed in a late-afternoon glow and with the inhuman clarity of, say, a daguerreotype, or, to get flowery, something woven out of spun sugar by an army of tiny elves trained at the École des Hôteliers Gastronomiques. The table was only about four feet square and the model didn’t even cover the whole thing, but every carved stone and enamel tile and copper-electroplated window stood out realer than real, so that there seemed to be more detail in it than you’d be able to see in a real city, from a good vantage point, on a clear day, with binoculars, and with the eyes you had as a ten-year-old. It really looked like something from the future. Although of course we’ve been living in the future for a while now, but still. And it wasn’t holographic—obviously, because of the color—and it wasn’t any kind of video, or—oh, right. I remembered. It had to be that new 3-D system they’d been talking about.
They
meaning Marena and her design team from Warren Entertainment. The Barbie Something.

“Have you seen it before?” Marena asked.

I think I still didn’t say anything.

“I mean, the DHI?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

“Doll House Interface.”

“Oh, right.”

“It’s these blocks of aerogel with all these layers of plasma video screens like, sandwiched into them,” she said. “So without the input it’s almost transparent. The consumer version’s still a few years away.”

“Right.”

“And then there’s also layers of reverse-polarizers, so that makes the shadows. And then there’s a lot of transparency, so you get color depth. And each little layer’s twenty-four hundred DPI.”

I mumbled how thrillingly advanced that all was.

There was a sense of movement somewhere inside the thing and when I squinted closer it turned out that the staircases on the pyramids were escalators. It sounds tacky, but the thing had such a what I guess you’d call a sense of unity that even that, and the neonish ersatz Maya gargoyles and animatronic caryatids and whatever, all seemed to be the right things in the right places.

“See, that’s the Hyperbowl,” she said. She picked up an oval block that was displaying a glass-and-titanium pyramidal shell and uncovered a playing field and tiers of seats.

“So, wait, you’re going to build all this on top of the Stake?” I asked. That is, on top of what was officially called the Belize Olympics Complex. A stake is a Mormon mission, which was what it was originally, so that was what everyone called it around the Warren Family of Caring Companies.

“Well, eventually, that’s the idea,” she said. She handed me the oval block. When I squinted close at it I could just make out nets of gold wires and a black chip the size of the letter
M
in six-point pica. “After the games the Morons want their own boutique country. Basically it’s a tax dodge.”

“Well, it’s always good to plan for the future.”
End of Everything,
I thought. Hell. Don’t think about it.

“Yeah. I guess, you know, now that they’ve prevented the end of the world, the Firm’s getting right back to trying to own it.”

“Right.”
EOE,
I thought again. Damn. It really felt like I was thinking it in that Stephen King echo-effect punctuation, you know, like:

Okay, so there I was, like, walking along, doo-dee-doo-dee-doo, and I

(End of Everything)

walked into the East Innesmouth Post Office and

(EOE)

the lady at the window, about whom much, much more in a moment, handed me a tattered, oddly heavy manila envelope wrapped in ratty twine, and I

(todo por mi culpabilidad)

opened it and . . .

You know.

“You sound doubtful,” Marena said.

“No, I’m, I’m not, it, uh, it sounds . . .”

“Yeah, you are. What are you doubtful aboutful?”

“I’m not, I’m . . .”

“Hi, boss,” Marena said.

“Hi,” a ten-year-old boy’s voice said behind me. It was her kid, Max. “Hi, Uncle Jed.”

I said hi. He’d come up and was hugging me. I kind of hugged back but it felt really awkward for obvious reasons, like, because, you know. Okay, I’ll say it. Because I was going to kill him. Had killed him. Fuck. I was starting not to feel so good. Coming up here had not been a good idea. He pulled away and looked at the Neo-Teo model. The afternoon-light effect had deepened to sunset cerises, and the stone and tiles on the “east” side—which was actually turned to the north—had gone to twilight blues and grays. Window lights and faux-neon signage, with Mayanesque glyphs in new Decoesque fonts, started flickering on. They made the place look a little more like the Syd Mead sets for
Blade Runner,
but without the grunge.

“Pretty godless, huh?” he asked.

“Your mom’s very talented,” I said.

“Tony says we can order whatever we want for dinner,” he said. He’d gotten the Star Rattler figurine and was unsnapping its segments and reconnecting them in a different order.

“Whatever that’s not Indian,” Marena said.

“What do you do on Sleekers?” he asked me. He must have seen mine in the entryway. I said nothing much yet. “Lookit this,” he said. He stepped back into the hallway, ran in through the door, and in what I guess was a parkour move vaulted one-handed over the desk, somehow avoiding the thicket of monitors. Evidently he activated his Sleekers in midair because he came down in a glide and, just as he was about to crash through the French doors, channeled his momentum into a scratch spin, pulling in his arms and spotting on my face each time. We said wow.

“Wait, that wasn’t good,” he said. “I’m gonna do it again.” He did it again. We told him how great it was and how seeing it again would dilute our enjoyment of its surprising and utterly radical greatness. Marena asked what I wanted for sort of dinner. I started to say how, well, I hadn’t been planning on making them feed me, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She negotiated Max down to a “vegetarian array” of Korean food and he left to give the orders. Fuckez moi, I thought. I’d felt like a jerk before, but it had gotten a whole lot worse, that is, if it’s even possible to be the worst person who ever lived and then get even more disgustingly evil. I’m the bad guy, I thought. Oh, well. He’s still at the stage where things seem interesting. Better for him to just disappear before he finds out what the world’s really like. Who’s—

“Hey, don’t rapture those Krispy Kremes,” Marena called after him.

“Max is really great,” I said.

“Oh,
définitivement,
” she said. “It’s like a whole, it gives you a whole different set of priorities, about what’s important, I mean, momming . . . hey, guess what he’s going to be tomorrow.”

“Sorry?”

“For trick-or-treating.”

“Oh. I can’t guess.”

“Dick Cheney. He wrote a paper on him for Social Studies.”

“Gosh.”

“Hey, speaking of the date, I got something for you.”