The Sacrifice Game (8 page)

“Is it like, an orgasmatron?”

“Kind of. It’ll keep you going for, well, for a while.”

“Going, like, what?”

“Well, not quite climaxing.”

“Darn.”

“Still, that’s on the way.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. In the future, everyone will be able to sustain an orgasm for fifteen minutes.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. The very near future. So get ready.” She raised herself up in kind of upward-facing-dog position, stretched her head out on her long neck, and kissed me. I reciprocated. What if Max Sleeks in? I wondered. Better bar the door, Katie. Well, maybe he’s used to such things. Hot mama.

“Call A-sub-three,” she said. Pause. “Hi. Get me a half hour, okay? Yeah, Happy Rapture. Bye. Sorry.” She got my head in her hands. Whoa. What seemed like a hundred and eight fingernails swarmed over my doubly naked scalp, and I saw as well as felt schools of that silver glitter that fireworks makers call drizzle effects. I try to take my hat off indoors, but it’s a struggle, especially now after my head got shaved for the downloadings, and it was about the most gloves-offly intimate thing she could do, like she was slicing off my pants with bandage scissors. Wow, we’re making out, I thought, like I was back in fifth grade. Now one of her other hands was fumbling with my groin area.

“How about you fuck me like it’s still the end of the world?”

“Uh, mmm,” I said. Okay, I thought, one last time, it’s probably a good idea—but then at the same moment I thought how maybe I couldn’t deal with it, and/or, more importantly, it was feeling like Jed junior wouldn’t be able to deal with it. As they can, he could tell I was afraid of something.
Chill out,
I thought.
No fear.
Fear is the woody-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total erectile obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see the path where it has gone past on its path. And I will see that where the fear has gone there will be only a trail of tiny fearprints in the sands of the Erg. And only I will remain, picking grains of erg-sand out of my inner eye, like one whose water is frothy with liban and who has forgotten the ilm of his axolotls, one who—

Can it, Muad’Jed. Get a grip. I got a grip on her head, but it didn’t help. Marena came up for air.

“You’re distracted,” she said.

“No, I’m . . . I’m, I’m, I’m a simple soul today, I’m—”

“No, your sacral chakra’s off-line. You’re up to something.”

“No,” I said, “I’m just, you know, preoccu—”

“No, I think you’re feeling distrustful.”

“Well . . .”

“Okay, fine,” she said. She pushed both of the buttons down halfway, stopping both clocks, and resettled herself in a lotosish position. “Look, tell you what, I’ll give you three Truth or Deaths.”

( 8 )

“S
orry?”

“You ask me anything, any one thing at a time, and I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and then I get to ask you and et sequels.”

“Sequentes,” I said.

“Right. Boy, you’re really on a Latin kick.”

“Well, I’m a Latin American.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s the death part?” I asked.

“You have to tell the truth, like, whole and nothing but. Or else drink hemlock.”

“Is that a real game?”

“So I’ll come totally clean if you will. Okay? Pinkie swear.”

“Okay.” We swore. Her pinkie nearly ripped mine off its metacarpal capitulum.

“You start. Ask me whatevs.”

“Okay. You set me up, right?”

“In what way?” she asked. She didn’t hesitate. She was a cool customer.

“All the time when I was explaining to you about the colored directions and whatever else about the Sacrifice Game and whatever, you actually knew all about it.”

“No, I did not—I didn’t know all that stuff, in fact I still don’t understand it, in—”

“But like, when I—the first time I came to your office, you guys already wanted to reel me in, right? Taro’d said I’d want to see the Codex and you used that to bait me. Right?”

“Well, there’s some truth to that, but you weren’t the only—I mean, we looked up at least four others of Taro’s students from when he was in New Haven and interviewed all of them.”

“But when I begged you to send me you’d already decided to.”

“No, not entirely.”

“But you thought I’d be better at it, I mean, instead of Tony Sic, to zap back to Mayaland, but you figured I’d get spooked unless I thought I was convincing you to let me do it. Right?”

“We hadn’t decided between you and Tony yet.”

“But
you
thought I should do it and not Sic. You were being really deceptive.”

“Well, okay, I’ll say—but, I mean, come on. Would you say you’re a very trusting person?”

“Uh, no.”

“If you’d thought we had any—you wouldn’t have gotten near us. Right?”

“Well, maybe I . . . I guess not.” Any what? I wondered. Nefarious designs, I guess. Let it go.

“So I’ll say yes, but now you’re glad anyway, right?” Finally, she succeeded in severing the fingernail’s last attachment with her left canine tooth.

“Okay, right,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.” Somehow, now, it didn’t seem like she’d done anything so bad.

She moved the loose nail into position with her tongue and started chewing on it with the same level of unself-conscious purposefulness my Jasus crayfish exhibit when they eat their molted exoskeletons. “Okay,” she said. “My turn.”

“Okay.” Okay, I thought. Don’t stiffen up. But don’t flail either. Make normal-sized arm gestures. No hunching over. And if you have to lie, it’s just like with a polygraph, you have to make yourself believe you’re telling the truth. How’d I get into this? I don’t have to do—except I still wanted to find out about what had happened in Guatemala. If anything. After all, she’d been down there for months. The last I’d heard she’d still been at the Stake, trying to get permission from the Guates to dig officially at Ix Ruinas. But maybe something more had happened. Or was going to happen. Maybe they’d found the tomb and there was more info in it. And if it looked like Jed
₂
’s memories would get through, well, that would be huge. There—

“Okay. I think there’s something big going on, and it’s making you feel happy and powerful, but also you’re a bit worried about whether it’s going to come off. Am I right?”

Damn. Okay, I thought. Don’t make any partial shrugs. No quick changes of expression. I checked my hands—that is, without looking at them, I thought about them. They were open with the fingers extended. Good. Okay. I focused on the bridge of her nose and, lowering my usual pitch a bit, said, “Yes.”

“Okay, great. That’s progress. So what is it?”

“That’s a second question,” I said.

“Okay, fine. You go.”

“Okay. You guys are watching me. Right?”

“What do you mean us guys?”

“The Warren Spook Corporation.”

“They’re keeping an eye on all of us.”

“That’s not a good—I mean, I can tell I’m under surveillance.”

“So what’s the question?”

“Well . . .”

“Look, what do you think they’re going to do? The Game—you’re a Sacrifice Game specialist, right? It’s like you’re driving around with a trunkful of hydrogen bombs. We all are. They’re watching me too, I mean, of course, and, you know, I think Corporate’s being pretty reserved about it, frankly.”

She had a point. “Well, you have a point.”

“Okay, my turn,” she said. “What did you do to make yourself so excited?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m excited.”

“But you are happy about something. Or relieved.”

“No, I’m not—I mean, I’m relieved about the EOE.”

“What’s that stand for again?”

“The End of Everything.”

“Oh, right. Okay, you’re relieved that’s not happening?”‘

“Um, yeah. That’s right.”

“But that’s not new. You said something new was going on.”

“I did?” I had? I wondered. When? Or was she doing some hypno-thing on me? Bitch. Just be cool. Okay.

“Okay,” I said. “I went very long on some futures a little while ago and I’m doing super well on them. I’m completely on Easy Street.”

She looked at me. I tried to look back. Her eyes seemed bottomless. Finally it felt like I was staring into a gale-force wind. Fine, let her win the stare-down. I looked over at the Neo-Teo model. Most of the window lights and signs and had gone out, and its walls were a convincing range of deep-night blacks and blues.

“Well, that’s great,” she said finally. “Okay, ask me about Tony.”

Huh. Well, maybe I’d passed, I thought. “Okay, well, are you and—”

Hell.

( 9 )

T
he main phone, the one in my key pocket, had pulsed—silently, but it felt as loud as if were standing in a foghorn. Time to check on the, you know. The thing.

I said something like “Hang on, I’ve got a call I’ve got to blow off,” or something. I pulled the thing out. The CBT site had automatically come up on the screen. I hesitated. I looked closer.

Oh, Dios.

They’d suspended after-hours trading. The third domino had fallen. Oh God, oh God. I—I guess I should say even I—felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, another notch of acceptance that it was really happening, that it was not reversible. My nefarious plan was working to perfection.
Todo mi culpabilidad
.

In a way, even—well, not in a way, forget the qualifiers—even I still couldn’t believe it. I know I said that because of the Game and everything I’d become uniquely able to comprehend astronomical figures, humanly unfathomable amounts of money, of grains of corn, of suffering . . . but even so, the thing that was going to happen—let alone the fact that I’d made it happen—the thing that would happen in about four and a half million seconds was I think more than any human or maybe any consciousness of any possible type could ever comprehend. By definition, for that matter. You’d need a brain the size of the Hyperbowl, one that had been living for millions of years, enough parallelism to weigh the mass of lived experience, human, animal, and probably, now, even artificial, against that infinity-times-infinity of oblivion, you’d have to live, love, and lose a trillion times over even to glimpse how—

“Are you okay?” Marena asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You were going to ask me about Tony.”

“Okay, what about Tony?”

“What about him?”

“Are you and he having a thing?”

“No.” She looked at me. I looked at she. Her eyes looked like she was—except, fuck, I thought, I really can’t tell, can I? Accursed Oriental inscrutability.

“Are you having a thing with anybody else?”

“That’s another question.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“Look—”

“Okay, fine. No. Nobody.”

Naturally, I tried to watch for tells, but I couldn’t see anything one way or the other. Damn, I thought. I’m at a big disadvantage here. I’d always had a little issue with facial expressions. When I was six I found a sheet in my Nephi K–12 folder—which was in a filing cabinet with a four-digit combination lock, as though that was going to hold me up for more than two minutes—that said I had “PTSD presenting as pervasive developmental disorder.” That is, savant skills without IQ loss, but with defects of emotional affect. It’s not autism, but it presents like it, as they say. So, for instance, you know how most kids get flash cards with words and numbers on them? I got cards with smiling or frowning or whatever faces on them, so that I could learn emotions. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy or sad just by looking at her. Telling whether she was lying or not would be like reading page 100 of a book while it’s still on the shelf in the bookstore, in stretch wrap, and in Arabic.

“You said you were getting married to some jerk,” I said.

“Nope. As of now, Octy is out.” Octy? I wondered. Who the hell is that, Emperor Octavian? Dr. Octopus? No, don’t ask and use up a question.

“Okay, my turn,” she said.

“Right.”

“What did you do that’s making you feel so different?” she asked.

“Well, there’s, there’s that long shot on—”

“Okay, but why the hesitation just now?”

“Asking about the hesitation is another question already.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Well—”

“Just—look, you have to answer the whole thing, you know, whole truth, not bits and pieces. Right?”

“Okay, fine.” Pause. “I just went very, very long on the corn futures and I’m—look, the reason I’m not talking about it is I feel a bit guilty, uh . . .”

“Now you feel guilty?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you’re relieved.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Hmm. Apparent paradox.”

“No, it’s, like—look, I said, I’m making a ton of cash but the longs, that is, some of the stuff I’m doing is going to cause some hardship, I mean, in fact, there are going to be more famine deaths than there are already, and of course I’m just getting on the bandwagon, but I still feel really guilty about it.” All true, I thought. “Okay?”

“Well . . . that’s not the kind of thing I’m going to chew you out about, I mean, I work for Lindsay Warren, for God’s sake, I’m going to hell in a Hummer.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s happening with Ix Ruinas?”

“Sorry,” she said, “that’s a fourth question.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, come on, we’re adults, and, you know, we’re leveling with each other.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, let’s each agree to add a question.”

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the answer if you come back to work for us.”

“On what?”

“On Neo-Teo. It’ll be
the
art-and-life-and-everything work of the next century. It’ll be fucking
Rome
.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said—I didn’t want to say, “Yeah, but the Warren Corporation makes
Caligula
look like
Heidi
,” or some other forcedly snippy thing—“but you’re the artist, designer, whatever, I’m just a code monkey—”

“No, seriously, we really want you on the team.”

“Doing what?”

“Like, getting the imagineering and architecture into tune with the Game, more in tune with the new calendar . . .”

“What new calendar?” Have you been studying?” I meant studying the Game.

“Yeah.”

“Great.”

“But we are already missing your expertise. And it’ll be fun to work with you. I like you.”

“Oh. Thanks. Well, I like you.”

Her body sort of constricted and extended. “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe we’re getting into feelings here.”

“Yeah, I have a little trouble with, you know, feelings whoo whoo whoo feelings.”

“Everybody has trouble with feelings.”

“I guess.”

“But, like I say, I do feel very fond of you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s great, I, feel fond of you.” Hell. I really did, and it was cramping my act. I guess the takeaway is when you’re planning to betray, destroy, and murder somebody and her child, bonding is not a good idea. Damn. It and I and everything all felt dark, evil, and not as inevitable as I’d—

“So let’s hang out together and do this project.”

“Thanks, but still, no, I don’t have time, I mean, it’d take a lot of time.”

“It’ll take an hour a day, what’s the problem?”

“I mean, I just don’t feel like doing it.” Except I was realizing that I did kind of feel like doing it. Or at least I was realizing that being here felt good. No, worse than that. I was realizing that I wanted to see what Max looked like in his little Dick Cheney costume, I wanted to see how the next Bond movie would turn out, I wanted to see whether she was right about that orgasm thing, I wanted to settle down in some gated compound and wake up with Marena every morning and go out together to feed the turkeys and water the soybeans and pull the corpses off the electric fence. Hell. Maybe these people really weren’t so bad, I thought. Maybe even a nontrivial fraction of people everywhere weren’t so bad, maybe people in the future would adapt themselves to be even less bad. Maybe I hadn’t been weighing the decency fraction heavily enough, maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, I mean, with the EOE, maybe I had to stop it, maybe—

“Jed. You said you don’t have time to do it. Not that you don’t want to do it. Which is it?”

“It’s, uh, the latter.”

“Bullfuckingshitfuckbullcrapfuckingshit.”

I thought. I was sure I hadn’t touched my nose or rubbed my ears or any of that stuff. Had I looked toward the door? Maybe she could spot microexpressions. Maybe that’s how she got to be such a big deal in the competitive, high-stakes world of the international entertainment industry. I mean, besides talent. She could walk into a meeting and—

“Okay,
why
don’t you have time to do it?” she asked. “What’s going to happen?”

“Sorry, you’re out of questions—”

“Fuck the three questions.”

“
You
came up with the three questions.”

“Then fuck me and the three questions, I’m asking you, as one concerned adult to another.” She bounced up, walked to a built-in bookcase on the south wall, and dug a pack of Camel shorts out of their hiding place behind a copy of
Autodesk Maya 9 Fundamentals.

“Okay, fine. Nothing’s going to happen.” Wow, I thought, she’s feeling some real angst. Of course, one realizes that nobody ever really quits, but in her case, and with Max in the house—

“Again I call bullshit,” she said.
She lit a cigarette with an old blue-enamel Decoish desk lighter, came back around, sat down, pushed the Go board aside, and set down a big, heavy glass cigar ashtray in its place.

Pause. She pulled in a long, luxurious drag, vaporizing a full inch. Despite everything else, you could feel the satisfaction of long-denied addiction.

Damn it. I’d thought the Q-and-A was over, and I’d been thinking about something else—well, honestly I’d been wondering again what kind of name Octy was besides Roman/Shakespearean/Peakean—and then she’d come in and zapped me.

“Something’s going to—” she started to say.

Pause. “What?” I asked.

“Oh, God—”