The Sacrifice Game

(67)

It was a whole little society down there. The same bonded family had been tending the hiding places down here forever. You wouldn’t think native Americans could be pale, but they were, in a yellowish waxy way, with eyes that squinted and watered in our torchlight. The keeper didn’t even ask for our prepared spiel about why 2 Jeweled Skull couldn’t come himself, he just showed us through more tiny passages to a little room with a hewn limestone floor and heavily braced walls. It wasn’t so well vented as the passages had been, and the smell of sweat and salted feces and stale rush matting was almost too much to take at first, but I could still feel air rushing past us and up through the speaking tube, wherever it was, way up to the top of the mul.

Inside, an attendant was helping the hierophant sit up on his invalid’s mat. The old man had a horrible bottle-imp gargoyle face with marionette lines descending like cliff-cuts down into folded shale, but he still had a full head of real hair, divided into twenty-decades-old braids trailing down from silver into black. Supposedly he was a hundred and two solar years old, about five normal lifespans. I didn’t believe it, though. He probably just looked that way because he didn’t take care of himself. Or smoked too much.

I signaled over my shoulder and everyone backed out, even Hun Xoc, so it was just the hierophant, his attendant, the keeper, and me. The keeper set the torches behind him so he could see me. I pushed an offering-dish of cigars toward one of the hierophant’s frozen knees, put my fist on my chest, and looked below his chin. He lifted one arm and made a feeble “Well, speak, what do you want?” sign.

“My great-grandfather, could it be my turn

To pose my great-grandfather a question?” I asked.

He waved a “permitted.” I untied Koh’s traveling board and set up the position just before her last move, the one she hadn’t had time to make. Like I said, the position would take a book the size of Modern Chess Openings to explain clearly in words, but basically the runner was being forced into the corner, off the edge, but wasn’t quite surrounded yet. I didn’t see how you could get around past the end date at 4 Ahau to the center of the board again, but Koh had evidently seen there was some equivalency there, that you could take a shortcut. Like a ladder in snakes and ladders, or like the secret passages in Clue. The hierophant bent down, studied it for a few minutes, and then looked up and got my eye in his, peering through cascaded cataracts. Like I mentioned, eye contact was unusual, aggressive behavior, good for staring down a bear or an attacker, but not for company. I’d gotten unused to it and had trouble not flinching. Don’t blink, I thought, instantly needing to blink more than anything else. I thought I saw his face crags recrumble into a pseudosmile, but maybe it was just me.

“And so what should I tell you, new-ahau?” he asked, in ancient-accented holy language. His voice wasn’t from vocal cords, it was a stomach thing that seemed to be squeezing out of a hole in his back.

I asked what he meant.

There are thousands of possible moves, he said, how could I tell you the next one?

Shall I play it out for you up to this point? I asked.

You don’t really know that much about the Sacrifice Game, do you? the hierophant asked.

No, I said.

I started to tell him what was at stake, about how Koh had said only “you” at the final moment, but after a few minutes he cut me off. It seemed like he already knew that I came from sometime else, or maybe a lot more about me than that, but wasn’t that interested. He said you might be able to get from the corner to the center through some vast sequence of steps, but it was much too much for most players to deal with. Especially himself, he said. He said he wasn’t so quick as he once had been. I could believe him on that one. Koh had been thinking somewhere between two and three hundred moves ahead, he said. How could we know which result she was working toward?

“Then what would you do, Great-Grandfather?” I asked. Figure it fucking out, you useless old trog.

“Ma na’atik,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

He said that whatever Koh’s shortcut was, it was something she’d invented with herself. Maybe some other players had figured it out, too, but it sure wasn’t a general thing, since it wasn’t a position that often came up. Or ever came up. Anyway, he’d have to get the human players together again to hear how the counting was going before he could even guess at the moves. Maybe just talking to me gave Koh some insight, he said.

Then talk to me, I said.

I’m too tired, he said, I’m a babbling mush-bowl. He giggled a little and I noticed he still had four or five fang-filed red-enameled teeth left.

I couldn’t say anything for a minute. Damn it, I thought, I knew she was a genius. She’d seen that single line of code that would generate an entire fractal planet, the repeating pattern at the heart of chance. God plays dice with the universe, but you can win at dice. But, hey, she didn’t share it in time, and the rest of us were just blundering doomed retards. We’re fooked, I thought, for the octillionth time. Tilt, fins, it’s domino for us now, and cetera. Nearly had it. The greased pig just kept squealing out of my hands. Total disappointment has a very specific taste and it welled up in my mouth and drooled out onto my greasepainted chin. I felt like I’d come to see a cancer specialist and he’d said, “Sorry, it’s too late to help you, if you’d come to me three months ago you would have been fine.”

I knew the interview was over, that I was supposed to thank him and ask him if it was all right for me to leave, but I was too dizzy to do anything but stare at the intersection of two stained reed-fibers on the mat underneath me. I needed a word for frustrating the size of Popocatepetl.

You’d better ask your wife, he said all of a sudden.

I looked back at him.

You’ve brought me something else, he said.

Oh, yeah, that’s right, I thought. Mask had insisted, even though I’d said the whole idea was a gross-out. I signaled for my attendant. He entered, handed me a jade-scaled box, and backed out. I unbound the lid, lifted out Lady Koh’s stiff salt-cured hand, and passed it to the hierophant’s dune-dry baked-thin fingers. I tried not to shiver until he took his hand away. It felt like he had hollow bones, like a bird’s. He examined the hand from every side, stroking the nails against his cheek, counting her fingers over and over and chortling each time when he got to seven.

“Well, I can’t read her move from this,” he said.

“But maybe you can still go down and ask her.”

It was like he wasn’t suggesting anything unusual. Evidently he chatted with dead people all the time. Why, can you get me in to see her? I wondered. I didn’t say anything, though, I just looked at him and tried to slow down my breathing.

“She passed this way four suns ago,” he said.

“I saw her walking upside down, and sobbing.”

I leaned forward. His breath was like meat ashes. This is totally stupid, I thought, except, you know how when you’re totally desperate you’re ready to believe almost anything?

“And how then would I get to her?” I asked.

“Don’t go back up, keep going down,” he said.

“She’s strong, she’ll last, she’s going to find the tree

And climb it. Ask the Sickeners to help you.”

“Great-Grandfather, please lead me there,” I said.

“No, I’m too old right now,” he said. “The oracle

Can show you to the shore; then call the oarsmen;

They’ll bear you four more gorges west-Blood River,

Pus River, Lancet River, Gangrene River And vomit you up on the Xibalban shore;

Attend the court, implore Lord Jaguar Night

Before Star Rattler swallows her newborn.”

Whoa, okay, I thought. Sure, I can handle that. I’m sure I’ve still got three whole days left. Plenty of time. Okay, I’ll just head back upstairs and deal with this. It’s got to work. Well, why not? Ya gotta believe. At least when there’s nothing else to do.

What the hierophant was talking about wasn’t really an afterlife like a Christian one, and it wasn’t reincarnation either. It was more like some people, like Koh, are just so powerful they’re already among the immortals on this level. In fact, if you are that powerful death just makes you more so, but most people are so transient they’re practically dead even while they’re alive, and when they die they’re just supposed to do their thing and release their uay back to their relatively immortal clan-spirit. Even somebody like Koh might not be totally herself after she died. She’d be more, like, one of the Rattler pack, and not even the main one. But she’d want to get to the other dead and unborn members of her clan, which meant taking the long way around, going down before she could go up.

I picked up Koh’s hand, did my little obeisance, and started to take my goddamn leave of the abominable hierophant. He asked me to leave the hand with him. Probably so he could try to jerk himself off with it, I thought. Oh, well, why begrudge him his bit of fun, right? I said okay.

This is not going to work, I thought, as I trudged up the sweating steps. No, wait, squelch that. I couldn’t afford to doubt at this point. Who knows, maybe these guys do know something besides the one equation.

Which they also don’t even know Squelch. Just try it.

Damn.

Must I do everything myself?