The Sacrifice Game

(112)

Lindsay was certainly less surprised about all this than one might have thought. I suppose that like any businessman, he was always expecting a shakedown. And in fact, that was probably the right thing to expect from a domehead like Jed. But from me it was not, or rather from me it would not be for money. He was about to get shaken down for the main event.

“The first thing we need to do is harden this room,” I said.

I tapped the tabletop. The granite effect disappeared and a keyboard and standard interface screen-Warren proprietary, but basically like Windows-bloomed on its north quadrant. The tabletop functioned as a single large touchscreen, leading to a station that could control hundreds of Warren’s networks. I got to Lindsay’s personal desktop, to MENU, to SEALING ROOM SYSTEMS, and to ISOLATE SEALING ROOM SYSTEMS, before I had to ask for Lindsay for a password. He gave me one and it worked. When I closed the vault-style doors over the standard door behind us I could almost feel the steel dead bolts sliding shut. I did the same thing with the rest of the floor, locking down the Great Glass Elevator, the six other elevators, and even, contrary to regulations in nonprivate countries, the fire doors to the stairs. According to the room’s HELP file, they could not be opened from outside, even if there were a fire. Lindsay had probably guessed that I would make contact at some point, although he had not expected this situation. On the one hand, I could not get out of here. But on the other hand, Ana’s group couldn’t use any of the usual hostage-grabbing tactics, or even exotic ones like CCV, that is, Cognition-Compromising Vapor, or stupid-making gas. So far, Lindsay’s millennial paranoia, especially his care in constructing his refuge, was working against him. I looked at my watch. It was 3:23 P.M.

“I’m awfully busy,” Lindsay said. He sounded less worried than one might think.

“I know,” I said. “Do not worry. If everything goes well, I am not going to interfere with the invasion.”

Lindsay and Marena both reacted to this, although I had the sense that only Lindsay knew what I was talking about.

“All right,” I said. “Well, as always, the first thing is to get drugs. I understand there is a new formulation of the tsam lic.”

“That’s correct,” Lindsay said.

“There should be some in a wall safe in this room.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Let’s see,” I said.

After some back-and-forth, he told me how to open the safe. The door swung out of the blue-silk-looking wall without any booby traps. There were a few interesting-looking things inside-storage chips, wrapped cash, jewelry rolls, the Vase of the Seven Xibalban Gods that used to be in the Art Institute of Chicago-but all I took out was a pharmacy bottle labeled 41-037. It was full of white gelcaps.

“Where is the bar?” I asked.

Lindsay told me. It opened the same way. It was a whole little alcove with hot and cold running everything, so I got a glass of warm water. I opened one of the gel caps and tasted the powder. Even though it was a synthetic version, my tongue could still tell that it was the real deal, and more potent than ever. I swallowed the powder and pocketed the rest of the capsules. I drank the water.

By now the Hyperbowl took up most of our field of view. It had been refaced and enlarged and was now an impossibly huge truncated cone, stepped like a pyramid but too squat and too big, a gold-glass-sheathed tumor that supposedly seated 255,300 people. A ring of 365 vertical white lasers, bright enough to be visible in daylight, beamed from the roof up into space in an update of the Lichtdom, Albert Speer’s searchlight pillars at the Party Conference at the Zeppelintribune in 1934. Despite its hugeitude, though, the stadium was just part of a larger sports district. Off to the north I could see something like the Disney Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Ride. A little east of that, gladiators in furry suits fought in big clear balls. The whole thing had a sense of continuous, controlled combat, a cross between extreme fighting, a rave party, and an elegant promenade. Most people had sandals with some kind of Sleeker striations on the soles that functioned as skates. Some of them were pushing carts with gliders instead of wheels. I tried to read their clans by the color coding, but I got the feeling that clan membership was decided more by competition and adoption than by birth. Anyway, most people from the powerful clans were probably inside waiting for the Big Hipball Game, the ball game that would, presumably, launch the new era. Everyone else would watch it on whatever the new 3-D system was-probably a better view, at this point, but reality still had a certain prestige. The pipes sounded again three octaves up, and I recognized what they were playing: the introduction to “Stairway to Heaven.” Christ, I thought, what is this, the Class of 1978 Junior Prom? Evidently the revolution hadn’t been exclusively a highbrow event.

Wait a beat, I thought. Had I thought that, or was it Jed? I barely knew what a junior prom was. The last thing I needed was for Jed to start butting in again. Well, worry about that later.

“So, Lindsay?” I asked. “Let us play Password.”

“What password is that?” he asked.

“Let’s just get into the sysop desk first.”

“All right,” he said. I slid a phone over to him-not my own, but one of the three fresh ones I’d brought along. I liberated his right hand. He spent some time flexing the circulation back into it,

as though he was reluctant to start, and I was about turn up his dorsal joy-buzzer when he typed thirteen keys and slid it back to me. It said SAMARANA 7104.

I pecked it out on the lengthening password list in my own phone. I wished I still had Jed 1 ’s brain’s facility for remembering everything. But why get hung up on details?

I typed in the password one-handed on the desktop. Marena snuck a look at what I was doing but there was a chunk of DHI model between her and my hand.

A menu came up labeled SEALING ROOM PROFILES. It looked pretty simple. Lindsay’s programmers had made the interface so user-sycophantic anybody could do it.

I touched an item called SET VIDEO WALLS. The big “paintings” of Christ in America and whatever disappeared and the walls went to black. The ceiling light dimmed and a vast A-chord came from an angelic choir everywhere at once.

The walls began to fill up with stars and, one after another, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the other neighborly planets, all complacently rouletting around the solar drain. The room’s walls, ceiling, and even floor were entirely covered with a seamless mosaic of DHI video panels, so a huge number of interface windows, from any source, could be called up and displayed simultaneously. Since Jed had last seen it, the system had been upgraded with iris-sensing xographic panels that could display in 3-D, and the current show was overusing the effect, trying to make us feel like we were really floating through a friendlier version of outer space.

“The Great White God of Ancient America still lives!” an impossibly deep voice said. An image of a tall, Caucasian Jesus rose out of outer space. “ The divine personage that emerges from the discoveries of archaeologists now stands out as an unassailable reality. ”

“I don’t think that is the right channel,” I said.

“Try Five,” Lindsay said.

“This being,” the room said, “known to the Mayans as Kukulcan, to the Mexicans as Quetzalcoatl, was also known as Wixpechocha in Chiapas…”

“Jeez, Lindsay,” Marena said. “You’re really into this bullshit, aren’t you?”

I found Channel Five. A long menu came up.

“Who was this Great White God who appeared to the ancient Americans? ” James Oreo Vader-Jones asked. “The Father of the Maya, Caculha Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, Quetzalcoatl?”

Faux Dvorak music welled up.

“Who was the Feathered Serpent, the White and bearded Lord of Light? He is Jesus the Christ, the Savior of all Mankind.”

“How do we turn this off?” I asked.

“I’ll do it,” Lindsay said.

“We are not going to untape you,” I said.

“Try END TOUR PRESENTATION,” he said.

“I mean, I hate to break it to you,” Marena said, “but Jesus Hershel Christ did not fly over to Central America and rap with the Oldmexes or the Latexes or whoever, and he definitely was not Itchy Coo-Coo or Kukluxfranandoli or whatever the shit his name was, the whole thing is just ri-fucking-diculous.”

“Millions of people believe it,” Lindsay said. Don’t they have something more important to talk about? I wondered. It’s amazing how they chitchat around here. The world could be ending and they’d-well, in fact-never mind. Keep typing, I thought. Don’t look at the keyboard, it’ll just confuse you. Use Sic’s muscle memory. Damn. I was having trouble finding the command. I tried again. How many attempts before it turns itself off? On the screens we were being treated to a montage of aerial shots of other Mesoamerican sites, Cleft Sky, Teotihuacan, and Ix. I got that hometown feeling.

“So what,” Marena said, “millions of people believe, like, I don’t know, they believe that Kenneth Branagh’s a talented actor. They believe anything anybody ever tells them. Whatever.” She was getting more nervous and less articulate. On the big video display the heavenly outer space had been replaced by postcardy shots of the Ciudadela at Chichen.

“When the Crucifixion took place and the earthquake shook Palestine, even worse conflagrations swept over the Western Hemisphere…”

Marena turned to me. “Doesn’t this stuff upset you?” she asked. She was trying to feel me out a bit.

“Not really,” I said, trying to look like I knew what I was doing.

“The Book of Mormon tells the story of the Christ in the New World…”

Hah. Found it. Kill.

The Christ in America show winked out. The walls went to black.

“Thank the Lord,” Marena said. Actually, she was right. I hated what I’d seen of Christianity even more than Jed had. It had such a bad case of the cutes. I mean, just for one thing, crucifying someone on a world-tree is not the most painful thing you can do to him. Not to brag, but if I were going to get to be Supreme Ruler of the Entire Universe for doing it, I could hang out nailed to a cross all day and barely even notice. In fact, I bet I could roll jade earspools through my fingers on both hands and sing the Harpy Ball Brethren marching song over and over, all day, for three days.

I touched HYPERBOWL LOCAL SURVEILLANCE.