The Sacrifice Game

(61)

“One death, one wind, four thought, sixteen, nineteen,”

Koh said, immediately giving the last date from the Teotihuacan City Game. She’d basically just skipped ahead about four hundred solar years, to Gregorian 1225. I’d thought she’d guide the adders to it, ease them into it a bit, but maybe she wanted to see if they knew what they were doing. The nine clumps of adders broke up and shifted somehow and for a beat the plaza seemed like just a jumble, like the human crystals had just dissolved in solution, and then they coalesced into a new octalinear pattern, and melted again and lined up again. Even though I was expecting something like it I was totally taken aback. It was definitely like something. Not anything biological, something from physics or technology, I don’t know what, maybe like hundreds of those Pac-Mannish magnetic polarities coursing through the domains of a synthetic-garnet bubble-memory chip. What was actually happening was each adder was walking forward, on the beat, out onto the lines separating the points of the grid, the interstices interspersed between the intersections, earth-marching from his old position to a new one determined by his individual count of the days and cycles, which in turn were all different because each person represented a different cycle that he counted on his sticks or his drum, and each person’s cycle was a unique mathematical progression that ignored some beats and, say, triple-counted others, and then redirected his progression based on the people he intersected in his nonrandom walk. On a human scale the movements had similarities to reconstructions I’d seen of Renaissance minuets, and there was a flavor of Gujarat stick-dancing, or like I said, the morris dance. But even if it was dancelike it was so obviously not just for effect, they were all really doing something. Or building something. They stopped.

Two evaders had been taken out in the shuffle-that is, intersected with and caught by a catcher- but they didn’t kill them since it wasn’t necessary yet, they still weren’t really counting ahead. The pair just slunk off don’t-notice-me-ishly through the forest of erect catchers, as neatly arranged in their staggered ranks as North Korean parade soldiers.

“Now wait,” Koh said, her herald repeating. “Now

He goes on seething, now she’s resting, breathing.”

She meant they were supposed to hang out where they were for a beat. The catchers looked impatient, gesturing at the remaining evaders like they were trying to grab them from a distance. I would have thought it was insubordinate, but it really meant they were already trancing into their roles. Koh’s attendant set her Game board on the table, and positioned a close-weave basket and little brazier on the mat just upstage of it. Koh undid the knots and uncovered the board. From where we were sitting the cleared Game-zone in the zocalo below us and the board in front of us both seemed about the same size, like if you had two eyes you could look at one out of each eye and focus them together to get a stereo view. The attendants descended onto the apron beneath us and spread out to the edges, so that no one would be so high as Koh and I. Unless you counted the old trog-in-the-box.

Alligator Root must have signaled the drummers at the first sight of the flame, because in unison they launched into double time.

“First runner, move to fourteen Night,” Koh said.

I moved it. My role in this thing was actually pretty mechanical. I was just supposed to translate the positions of the human pieces onto Koh’s board and wait for her move. “You can’t keep track of all the strains,” Koh had said at some point, I forget when. “You need someone to hold them down.”

Alligator Root called the move out to the zocalo. The runner with the red streamer walked circuitously to his new position. The colors were going Disney on me, like the ninestrips of Technicolor they used in the Bahia sequence in The Three Caballeros. About thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twenty people on the peninsula, I thought, and then I realized I’d guessed the number by counting the people in a small section of zocalo and multiplying it out, and it had taken me less than a beat. I felt like I could count a swarm of a million-plus bats coming out of a cave. Not even. I could instantly count a swarm of midges floating up out of a dead whale by counting the legs and dividing by six. Just for the hell of it I made up a couple of integrations, did them in my head, and checked them. Right on. My Jedman powers were coming back. I could see the parabolas like they were giant intersecting towers of Lego bricks, warm colors for even numbers, cold for odd, metallic for prime.

The blue of Koh’s face was seeping into the regular flesh tone, and vice versa. I sniffled so I wouldn’t have to wipe my runny nose. Gods didn’t do stuff like that. I ran through a few distribution tables, 0.5040, 0.5438, 0.5832, 0.6271. I let a tear or two fall out of my eye and socket. I was feeling a little restless and weak and everything. I can handle this, I thought. I reached into the jars, counted out a red corn-skull for each runner and a blue one for each catcher, and reset the position on the world-board around us. It’s hard to describe, but it seemed to me like the mul we were on was just the central peak of an unimaginably vast plateaued landscape. Koh thought for twenty beats and twenty more.

“Two entering, twelve striking, northward eight,” she said.

Her herald repeated it and the catchers and quarries shuffled again, separating and weaving together like threads on an invisible Jacquard loom, multiple warps coming up through the weft, heddles and treadles and shuttles and lams. There was a moment of near-stasis as the lead runner moved upward through suns of the same name again and again, days from the past turning up in the future, and then the catchers and quarries added up their combined and respective totals, each called out his result, and then each moved again, that much farther forward on the basis of the others, blasting through progressions it would take Encyclopaedia Mathematicas — full of tables to even hint at, and then they’d melt into a different rhythm, like gears on a Pascal adding machine, the Quarries spiraling away from the meshing circles, stately, microscopic, and terrified, until one of the Quarries was caught between two catchers, and they all stopped while the nacom walked out and strangled him with a red-and-blue ribbon.

Invisibles carried the body off the court.

The idea here, briefly, and to put it in a way Koh wouldn’t have, was that the closer you are to death, the more of your own event cone you’re able to see. Not many of the human pieces would survive the Game. But their counts would be preternaturally insightful. It was cruel but effective.

It was already dark. No twilight in the courts of the sun. Who said that? Damn. Forgetting things. The Usher Gods had lit torches inside tall vertical cylinders of oiled rushwork, almost like giant paper lanterns, and the rows of them glowed in lavender and deep sea-snail purples. Two skeletons flopped up the stairs of the mul, only a hundred and ten steps below us. They weren’t really supposed to be on the mul, but this was kind of like an anything-goes Mardi Gras where all the roles are reversed, one of those masters-wait-on-the-servants kind of things, and I guessed it was okay as long as they couldn’t get up here or see the board or whatever. I looked at Koh but she was way too out there to get distracted. I could probably have leaned over and kissed her and gotten zero reaction. Koh’s Porcupine Clown flop-danced up after the skeletons, staggering and reeling on the edges of the steps like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. He shouted at them to get back down off of there, and then, when they didn’t, to jump. Even I had to laugh, he was really kind of a pantomime genius, like Grock or David Shiner. I’d never seen anyone move like that. For a beat he seemed to be walking along my arm and I realized I’d lost my scale and couldn’t tell which was bigger, the insect board in front of me or the human one on our left, or the celestial one overhead. I tried to focus on the blue-green center of the board. At least it was easier than if I’d still had two eyes. Turquoise really is an excellent color, I thought. There just wasn’t enough of it around. I have got to get more turquoise stuff. Koh intoned another little number jingle, programming the interactions faster now. Without any warning the main runner, the one with the staff, seemed to get caught between two human points on vast intersecting ellipses, and the other catchers rushed in like T-cells rushing to spin a net across a wound. The main runner handed off the streamered staff to another runner on an adjoining square, and the nacom executed him, and the array settled again. The other runners were off in the Northwest, still pretty isolated from the hunters, but at this rate they might not last the length of the game.

Koh regathered her seeds and counted them out again, shifting back and subtracting, and gave the herald another directive, and the human net dissolved and reformed, the invisible spider spinning her a dewy web and eating it and respinning it and eating it again. I was beginning to see a bit of a pattern in it, not more than the kind of vague sense you get when you look at a long row of successive calculations and try to guess the function they’re coming from, but for a beat I thought I had a notion of how the Sacrifice Game had grown, back when things didn’t change so much, when technology and population increase were barely factors at all, and the main thing was just to keep going, not to stay on in a bad place, not to get caught by bad weather, and the tribal knowers nurtured the craft over those big empty millennia between Late Paleolithic and Historic, working out settlements, summer and winter camps, lookout fortresses on the frontier, dividing territory, spreading alliances out into space and time, locating the freeholds for new families, seeding new cross-pollinated strains of humans out into the vastness, the universe focusing into the great-great board, and that focusing into the miniature one, and that one focusing into our brains. And all the time, like I keep saying, it wasn’t any magic or fortune-telling, it wasn’t supernatural, it was just a big human computer, and to run it right you had to be a kind of symphony conductor. And, as you know, if you’re a classical music fan, with a tricky composition, some conductors just get it and some don’t. Koh was one of the last of a tradition that just knew or felt some mathematical trick other people had forgotten, something about spotting potential catastrophe points way in advance. She was at 910 AD. 1353. 1840. Oh, my God, she’s going to do it. 1900.

There was a burst of laughter below us. Porcupine had dragged the skeletons off the mul and was threading through the elders’ mats on the long, high stone benches that took up south side of the Game zone. He had a long drinking reed, twice as tall as he was, and he’d snuck it into one of the elders’ balche-pots and drunk the whole thing in one draft. The old man who was holding the pot had turned back to it and just now found it empty. He saw from the reaction of the crowd that something was up and he whirled around, but Porcupine ducked behind a fat old guy next to him, grabbed a big tamale out of his dish, and replaced it with a sort of rat-baby doll. The victim looked back at the tamale, did something almost like a real double-take, jumped up, spotted Porcupine, and threw the dish at him. Porcupine deflected it and backed off, dancing nonchalantly over the low tables. It was like a Candid Camera thing. The audience was in hysterics and a couple people threw expensive shawls at him to show how much they loved it. Porcupine picked up the shawls with a flourish, struck a pose that was like the equivalent of a bow, and took a bite out of the tamale, except it was the rat-doll. He spat it out and made a disgusted face. The crowd was roaring.

The beat divided into fourths, each one a complete miniature of the phrase of the polyrhythm. I heard Koh’s counter click resolutely on the board. Eye on the ball, I thought. I looked down at the move. It felt like my boulder-sized head would roll down and crash through the board. She’d moved the sapphire again, back to where it had been in terms of days, but according to the hotun-count she was already at 10 Alligator, 20 Jaguar, 14.8.4.56. AD 2002. I started to wipe a too-tickly tear from under my non-eye, the hell with my regal fucking bearing, but it felt like my hand was in a plutonium boxing glove. What if I got too much of the tzam lic? It was good for playing a thousand moves ahead, and for Koh and I to communicate wordlessly with each other and everything, but I knew from experience that the hangover could be a bear. How’d I gotten this much out of a few puffs on a funny cigar? It must be some new recipe. Did Nurse Feelgood really know what she was doing? She might be able to sprinkle Agent Orange on her Shredded Ralstons, but the rest of us Squelch that thought. Don’t worry. At least I now knew what the big deal was about this stuff. Bet if I live I’ll sleep for at least a week. Below us Porcupine had gotten back on the mul again and was teetering along the fifth step, holding a shrunken Dzonotob trophy head-which he must have yanked off somebody’s court dress-in front of his own white and black-masked face and working the mouth up and down.

“Help help, help help!” he ventriloquized. “How did my body ever grow so big?” He forced his right thumb in through the neck and wagged it through the mouth like a tongue. His left hand pretended to turn the reluctant head around, pulled it down to his crotch, and forced it into sucking motions. He howled. He’d gotten two other fingers of his right hand up behind the shell eyeballs and pushed them out from inside, making them bounce bug-eyed. Meanwhile his left hand had found a bowl of white atole and as he pretended to come he shrieked, blasted the gruel up over himself in a milky shower, pushed the head away, and shook himself off like a dog.

Charming, I thought. Japanese game-show humor. Next vee have zee socolate-mousse wrestlink “Six sproutings, fourteen witherings,” Koh said.

She was at August 12, 2005.

“Next fifteen rainings, eighteen crackings; next,

Six sparkings, twenty-seven darkenings.”

The beat divided again into sixteenths-about the length of a p’ip’il, an eyeblink-and the branches of possibility spread out at such a steep curve that they almost headed into reverse, like the umbrella profile of a ceiba tree with branches that curve out almost to the horizontal, but never quite droop. I could see there was some equation there. If only I had room to write it down in the margin of my brain, I thought. My fingers were aching from setting and resetting the seeds, but it didn’t affect the performance of my autopiloted hands. Koh moved her sapphire right through the equivalent of 2007 and out toward the rim. I thrashed along after her. She was down to two quarries. The sun and moon and the two Venuses flashed their ellipses over the board, and it churned underneath them motokaleidoscopically like heaps of floating rhinestones going down a drain, although really I could have been either seeing it or just imagining it. The catchers closed in on the last runner. Koh came to the threshold at 2012.