The Sacrifice Game

(115)

Most of the drone cameras got knocked out by the first shock wave, but there were a few dozen that had stationed themselves at a five-score-rope-length circumference, and the screens in the Safe Room automatically switched to them, and then when those got knocked out they switched to an octet of drones at the quarter-jornada mark, and so on, so we got a gods’-eyes view of the blast.

I’d never seen an explosion before. That is, as Chacal I hadn’t, even though there are sometimes all-natural ones, dust explosions in caves and volcanic incursions into oil pockets and so on. So to me it was new. Somewhere what was left of Jed-in-Me compared it to the many explosions he’d seen, many on video and a couple in his real life, and now I could hear him again, for the first time in a long time, thinking that it seemed bizarrely slow, that explosions in films are always shot in high-speed and then slowed down, but that this one, maybe because of the size or the convection or air pressure or whatever, would actually have to be sped up to look convincing. And I heard, or felt, echoes of the many metaphors they use in English to describe explosions, words like flower and mushroom. But to me it seemed to be taking place very fast-I wasn’t used to the speed of this world in general-and more than a flower or mushroom it seemed to me to be a tree, the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the Tree with the Mirror Leaves. The canopy of dirt and carbonized flesh and smoke and sand and steam and barium isotopes and four hundred times four hundred other materials branched out two-score rope-lengths over us-and we could still see it from underneath on some of the drone cameras, as well as from the side and even from a seventy-degree angle over it-in such a wide, embracing curve that I couldn’t help feeling it was welcoming and motherly, like the Tree, and we felt its voice, a long growl through the millions of cubic rope-lengths of packed earth around us.

I felt burning in those head-caves where tears would be made if I were the sort of person who would make them, and then the groan faded, and it seemed the three of us were still alive. The collider had been cut in half by a premature release of millions of BTUs of spontaneously generated heat, and despite the loss of life upstairs, the outcome had been, by his lights, a huge relief, and maybe everything would be okay, so to speak… and then, although Jed-in-Me was stronger than he’d been in a long time, he seemed to wilt and go silent, as though his consciousness had fainted from the excitement.

When my attention slid back to them, Marena and Lindsay were, oddly, having something like a civil conversation. Lindsay said the air supply was fine-“for three little breathers, adequate for over a month,” was how he put it-and that it would be better to hold off for two days on using the tram system because the air over the terminus, a jornada away at a facility on the highway to Belize City, might still be toxic. Marena-who I thought might almost want to thank me, at some point, for saving Max, despite everything else, but who seemed unsure, to say the least, of how to behave with me-said, “We can’t be sure about the O 2.”

“What?” I asked. I started untaping her.

“We got, our seal got breached. I can smell it.”

“Oh. Right.”

Even down here we were getting a whiff of oxidized polymers and carbonized flesh. And we’d have to worry about earth gases getting in. They aren’t good for you. Anyway, our own air would leak out pretty fast. We couldn’t stay.

“I can’t find the hole,” Marena said. She’d gotten herself the rest of the way loose and was feeling around the west door. “I think it’s on the other side of the, the inner door vaulty thingie.”

“I wouldn’t open it right now,” I said.

“I’m not.” She untaped Lindsay and as he massaged his ankles she went back to typing.

I rolled over. There were three red dots on the blue Zeonex floor, and as they came into focus I saw they were beads from Marena’s necklace, which must have broken during the unpleasantness. I laid my head down. Beds and whatever are great, but really, I thought, there’s nothing so comfortable as a nice flat floor. The blue screens shut down, meaning the system wasn’t finding any outside electricity and wanted to be thrifty. Emergency lights came on, just a few red and white LEDs in the floor and ceiling. It was quiet. Like all military elevator shafts, the one above us had a set of baffles that slid over us as we went down. But I could still feel an occasional explosion through the thousands of tons of clay, as soft as that earthquake in Oaxaca that rocked me to sleep “We have to cruise,” Marena said.

“How much air do we have?” I asked. “It should be, uh, keeping track of that-”

“I’m going to open the other door. I mean, the main door. Hang on.”

“Let’s wait.”

“If there’s a problem with the tunnels, nobody’s going to bother to dig us out.”

“I just need a little nap,” I said, although I knew she was right. “Forty score-uh, ten minutes.”

There was a click and whir from the main door. Maybe I dozed off. At any rate, I saw something, like a snake farm, maybe “Damn it,” Marena said. “I can’t get the thing open.” Lindsay was working on it with a penknife.

Great, I thought. We’re going to get through all this and then get stuck in here. Asphyxiate.

“Come on,” Lindsay said, “help us with this.”

“Five minutes and I’ll be good to go.”

“Hang on.” Maybe there was a pause. At some point I heard something loud, and only a few beats later I smelled cordite.

“Come on, we’re cruising,” she said.

I made a last effort, stood up, and slid back down. I started to try again, and then realized I really, really couldn’t stand up, and it wasn’t just laziness. I could have stood up on the wall, like the way I used to run up the angled sides of hipball courts, but not on the floor. The reason I’d slid off the table wasn’t just because I was tired, but because pressure from that nearby explosion had blown through my semicircular canals and harshed my equilibrium. And if you’ve ever had that happen, you know that when it’s gone, even though you know that the ground is still the ground, you believe, in your heart of hearts, that you know better, that the sky, or the wall or whatever, is where the gravity is. For some reason Marena didn’t have that problem. Maybe she’d been chewing gum or something.

I gave up the standing idea and either crawled or got dragged over an irregular threshold, into a red-lit tunnel with the smells of stone mold, fresh concrete, and Janitor In A Drum. There was a backlit map on the wall showing the network of tunnels, glowing in Ocelot emerald. YOU ARE HERE , it said. As always, I thought.

“Sit in this,” Marena said. She kind of molded me into one of the Aeron chairs and rolled me past some pieces of door. I guessed the bang I’d heard had been exploding bolts blowing the door outward into the tunnel. Thoughtfully designed for just such an emergency. I’d expected to run into a crowd of refugees in the tunnel, but there was nobody. Evidently this one was for VVIPs only, and we were the only ones left.

She started pushing me along like I was in a wheelchair. “Stop leaning over,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Lean in the other direction.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and come back and get me after you get settled?”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve just about had it with your martyr syndrome.”

“Sorry.”

Bathetically, there was still that Dvorakmusak on somewhere and it echoed behind us, woodwinds wailing. We went a long way. Lindsay fell down a few times-despite everything, he really was an old guy, I thought-and I had to hold his arm most of the way. I knew that later all I’d be able to remember would be long, long, long passages, dreary pipes and concrete, and a sense that we’d walked for at least two-score rope-lengths. At some point Marena was banging on a door above us, and then she was strongly encouraging us to climb up some stairs, and eventually, on all fours, I did. She steered me through a door and up more stairs and it took me more than a minute to realize we were outside because the fresh air wasn’t fresh, it was full of gasoline smoke, although there were a few nicer smells in it, wood and green-leaf smoke that made me think it was the burning season, and it was hot, and it was night already. No twilight. Except it wasn’t dark. The sky was charred tangerine. I listened for explosions or artillery but didn’t hear anything, just distant sirens and that sort of over-Niagara-in-a-barrel sound of the wind of glass rushing past us on its way to the giant updrafts, columns of a million different carbon compounds rolling up into the stratosphere, and then I thought I heard lightning but I think it was actually malfunctioning defense lasers firing blind. They make a sort of crackle as the air boils away in the beam, and then a miniature thunderclap as the surrounding atmosphere closes in around the vacuum.

“Lie here,” she said. I said thanks. I lay down on the asphalt, near the top step. She duct-taped Lindsay to a Siamese pipe connection. I got it together to look around. The door was down in a sort of retaining wall, and the stairs came up sheltered between two sort of huge concrete Jersey barriers. There was a warehouse or something across the whatever that seemed intact but I couldn’t see very far. Anyway, it didn’t feel worth it to go back to try some other branch of the tunnel. A few leaves of plasticky fallout fell around us like the pages of an incinerated book. A big sheet of red-anodized metal siding rattled up and down around on the pavement in front of us, threatening to chop us into bits when the pressure changed. Latin American builders, I thought. Cruddy house-of-cards postmodern architecture. One little thing and it’s all over the place.

“I was thinking about sending a distress signal,” Marena said. “But now I think I won’t, okay?” I noticed she had something over her shoulder, a big transparent bag with a big orange word EMERGENCY on it and all kinds of electric beacons and radios flares and things inside.

“Sure,” I said. She was probably right. If we went exploring we’d be more likely to get hit by flying whatever, or caught by Executive Solutions or even by troops from the UN or Belize or anybody else.

I thought I heard a scream not so far away, but it could have been shrapnel.

“I don’t think we’re going to burn up here,” Marena said. “And if the smoke gets bad we’ll go back into the tunnel. I don’t want to get stuck in a fire. Okay?”

I said something like “Fine.” I would have agreed to anything. My field of vision was reverse-tunnelling. That is, widening, weirdly, past 200 degrees. Marena was saying something about how the best thing to do is sit tight until morning, walk east, find the highway, and try to get a lift to Belmopan. I mumbled that that sounded right. We sat.

“Are you Jed again?” she asked. “Or Chacal?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.

Marena took out her phone. The line was dead, but we watched the clock. Nine minutes left, it said. And then it would be officially a new b’aktun, and a new sun, and a new creation, and, and, and…

By Subscription Lambeth • 1831

December 21 came and went like any other day.

But of course that didn’t mean that nothing had changed. Everything had changed. Everyone’s tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and the next tun, and the next k’atun, and the universe’s final seven b’aktuns-what Koh had called the “remainder of twenty minus thirteen,” would be whatever I made of it. Or whatever we deigned to make of it, Marena and I, or let’s call her what she would be called: One Ocelot.

My field of vision kept widening. Now I could see above and behind and above my head and now in every direction, even, it seemed, into my body, and, as I rose through the tree and curved into higher dimensions, I could see through objects, and out past the last straggling galaxies, until I even seemed to get a glimpse or two or three of that other universe, the bubbleverse, our less lucky twin, the one that had diverged from ours thirteen years and three hundred and fifty-two days ago, the one where One Liberty Plaza hadn’t burned down on 9/11 and so Lindsay hadn’t been able to use the marble floor from it in his fucking VVIP Skybox, the one where both towers had collapsed all the way instead of that half of the South one still sticking up like a fodder pollard, the one where the Disney World Horror hadn’t happened, where Dick Cheney hadn’t killed himself as he was being arrested, where Amy Winehouse had died in that coma and had never recorded or even written “Shake Before Serving,” one where the nine-stone Game had never come back and which was, therefore, on the royal road to ruin because at some point soon, somewhere, some doomster would hit on the right combination and there’d be no way to stop him or even find out about him until it was too, too, too too late, where I and Marena, maybe, had never met, and where I’d never even heard of Lady Koh, and where they were not yet, even, aspects of each other, if they even ever…

Don’t think about it. We’re here, in our own friendly universe, and it would still last a while. Until 19.19.19.17.19, 9 Kawak, 12 Yaxki’in. Thursday, October 12th, 4772. After that, the big nothing. Well, that was still quite a distance off. Don’t think about that either. Look, you bought the world quite a good amount of time. Human-scale-wise. Anyway, things’ll be quite different then, right? In fact I could already see some different… yes. I already saw the new city, the capital of the world, with its double mul rising in undulating omnichromatic stairways to an apex higher than Popocatepetl and, then, widening, filling the zeroth sky. I saw odd decisions being made, the Pantheon in Rome exploding in violet lava, a fashionably naked pair of two-ropelengths-long humans with thirteen pairs of dainty thalidomidesque arms sprouting centipedishly down their sides nuzzling each other as they reclined on a fur toboggan drawn through the Park Avenue Tunnel by four yellow phororhacci, and the trail led down an alley of titanic ceiba trees that shed clouds of jade razors around my defleshing body, and there was something horrible waiting at the end of the path, something pustuled with screaming larvae but still wearing the knowing smirk of the toad, and I already knew, I knew why it had started and when it had to end, the smell of a graviton, the color of the Ku band, the reason a skull smiles. But as I came to know I stayed to forget, thirteen, nine, five, I was already forgetting, four, three, I will have already forgotten, two, zero, I’ve already forgotten.