The Sacrifice Game

(78)

T hrooomb,

Throoomb…

FOMP.

The shock wave punched through the stone and then the sound came and went suddenly, a round echoless explosion like a report shell in a sound studio, and then migraineish pain through my head over an absolute silence I’d never experienced before. The pressure had popped my eardrums.

So what, I thought, I won’t need them. Finally, after a lifetime of noise. It was a kind of peace you could get used to.

I was already in the uterus-shaped sarcophagus, sitting upright like it was a bathtub. I must have looked kind of silly. There were only three other people in the room, Hun Xoc, Alligator Root, and my attendant. Mask of Jaguar Night and the rest of the workmen and attendants had been out in the collapse. Just as well I can’t hear them screaming, I thought, if that’s what they’re doing. That would have harshed me out. Hun Xoc was leaning his callused elbow-stumps on the rim of the casket. We smiled at each other. A drop of blood scrolled out of his ear, wobbling on his cheek, threatening to detach and fall on me, but then it didn’t. I pointed to my ear and Hun Xoc nodded and made a casting-off gesture. I thumped my right hand on his left shoulder, the equivalent of a thumbs-up. He raised his left elbow-stump to his right shoulder, the pledge position. Still just a couple of old vets.

The tomb’s inner chamber hadn’t been decorated, but the prepared white limestone walls were covered with charcoal cartoons for reliefs that would never get carved. The small square room was bare except for the four piles of lodestones, one in each corner, and in the center the mahogany scaffolding surrounding the ovary-shaped coffin with its arm-length-thick granite walls. The thick stone lid hung a half a rope-length above me, suspended on hemp ropes and counterweighted by two huge embroidered sandbags plopped on the ground like severed testicles. Then there were four big bulging liquid-baskets suspended from the ceiling, two on either side of the scaffolding, filled with the thin solution that formed the base of the aminoplastic gel. It was basically salts, my imitation camphor powder, and a few different anesthetics suspended in a mixture of urea formaldehyde, and methanol. Each basket held more than enough of the stuff to overflow the casket. The rest were just for fail-safe. And that was about it.

Okay, Step Two, I thought. It’s easy. Don’t rush it.

I signed a “now” to Alligator Root. He poked a bone dagger into the marked zero on the liquid-baskets. Horrible-smelling yellow stuff shot out, like the thing was a urinating mastodon. He got the attendant to hold the bamboo trough under the stream so that it flowed into the casket. The stuff felt colder than water, like rubbing alcohol, and at first it splashed up over my face. Alligator Root wiped me off and handed me the Little Cup, mint pulque mixed with about five percent of belladonna tea and a few other tranqs. I chugged it down. If I’d dosed it right it would have me nearly knocked out just before I drowned. No matter what anybody says, suffocation is not a fun way to go. He reached in and folded my pillow-sandbag so I could keep my head up out of the liquid.

Cool. Step Three.

I reached down and opened my right femoral vein with my little finger-knife. The Formalin-like compound stung the wound for a few beats before the anesthetics numbed it out. The idea was that as I slowly bled to death some of my body tissues would soak up the solution to replace lost body fluid. Not that this would keep the body viable-that part was going to be a total loss-but just to more closely approach a state of deep hypothermia. I took a last look at eight jars of salted toads and scorpions and puppy dog’s tails and stuff I’d packed where my other foot used to be. They looked okay. I was bringing back enough little druggy-critters to dope up a herd of wildebeest.

Four. I signaled to Alligator Root. Hun Xoc made a wan grin that meant, “Sorry I can’t help out too.” Alligator Root held up a sealed jar the size of a coffee can. I eyed another okay and he broke the top off and poured the hardener into the casket near my feet. It was thicker than the base solution, like maple syrup, and when it hit the pooling liquid in the casket it extruded out of its glob in threads, folding over my legs, spreading and dispersing in the solvent. Basically I was being cast in a kind of a simple organic epoxy, with a few extra metal salts that were supposed to preserve my neuronal structure more or less perfectly-not so much that you could get the same brain going again, but enough so that you could map the changed connections onto the new brain, Jed 1 ’s brain, enough to recover the memories.

Memories, I thought. Not consciousness. You’re dying, dude. It’s going to be Jed 1 hanging on to them, not you. Not you, your self -

Cancel. Cancel. Step Five. Alligator Root handed me the Big Cup.

It was a thinned version of the hardener. If everything worked, it would spread through me and react with the solution as it spread into me through my skin and lungs. A thin skin had formed on the surface. I poked through it and drank the rest in two quick drafts like I’d practiced. Ghac yuk. It was thinned with honeyed pulque but it was still just a total bitter disgusto-sting. Ghastly. Just don’t barf, I thought, just don’t barf, just don’t barf. Do! Not! Barf!!! ’Gator handed me another cup of pulque and practically forced it down my throat to wash the goop down. I got spit all over his hand but he got me back together and he helped me lean back into the casket. I sank onto the sand cushions, settling an arm-length below the rim, still gagging, struggling to keep the stuff down. It was like cold chrome bocce balls were growing in my esophagus. I dry-swallowed a few times and it was like the balls supercooled and I was all numb inside, just a shell of feeling.

Whoa, it’s really comfy in here, I thought, it really did feel like a womb must feel. The solution had filled it up faster than I’d thought and was flowing over the rim. It smelled worse than the courts of Xibalba, though. I wished I could have popped my nose along with my ears. A shot of cold ran down my throat into my groin, and I got a flash from when I was in the Warren Hospital for Special Diseases when I was ten and they gave me total anesthesia, and I tried to stay awake and then realized I had to just dive into the big zero and see if there had been any water in the pool and I just let myself slide, and that was okay and I was still here, dammit. Six. I signed again. Gator bent down and pushed the knife into each of the two big bear-hide sandbags that counterweighted the lid. I could see a bit of the dry silver jets of fine sand, but I couldn’t see any motion in the lid at first. It’s stuck, I thought, it’s going to crash down and shatter and the whole thing’s fucked. But then the shadow grew slightly, it was coming down, gently, like an eyelid. I squinted up at it. It was convex on the lower side to push any air bubbles out of the surface of the liquid. For Keeps, the lid said. Except that was still too weak. It exuded this total eternal stay-putness no matter what.

Alligator Root took the sandbag out from under my head and it sank back, just floating on top of the liquid. It was getting to about the consistency of homogenized milk. The dark lid grew over me like the earth looming under a nocturnal skydiver. No parachute. I repositioned the wax-sealed box on my chest and folded my left arm over it. There were two things in it, Koh’s folded feather-cloth Game-mat and a doeskin book filled with my detailed and probably redundant notes on the Game. I was actually pretty proud of the notes, I figured that with them and the drugs a quick study like Marena would learn the Game overnight. She’ll handle it, I thought, she’ll play and beat the Smokers of Randomness, and in her first play, she’ll see past the rim.

I held my right hand on Hun Xoc’s forehead until the lid was about six finger-widths from the rim, and then pulled it back into the box. We got a last look in each other’s eyes. Before the stone came between us I turned away, to the left, to looked at Koh’s profile in the last swallow of light. She was still great-looking and all shiny in her coat of liquid wax. Her head was floating a little on the gel. It’s a shame we didn’t get to bring your brain back, too, I thought. I held her hand. The silence grew in volume but in my head it was like I could still hear them singing that counting rhyme with the parts of the deer. Relax, I thought. Safe. Safer than walking around waiting to die. I settled into the eternal subterranean cool. I felt like a bottle of great old Burgundy. We’ll gel no brine before it’s time. My leg was cold, but not shivery cold, and then it was gone, like it had passed directly to frostbite. The colloid was hydrogen bonding to the walls of my capillaries.

This isn’t so bad, I thought. It wouldn’t be too bad if I just stayed down here forever. Totally separate, out of my old time, out of my new time. Civilizations would flower and seed and rot and I wouldn’t have to sweat any of it. And eventually in a nanofraction of that universeful of time I’d be born, I’d be a little boy, I’d grow up and have friends and enemies and do stuff and meet Marena and come right back here and meet Koh and not be able to protect her, and the universe would spiral out to unimaginable emptiness again while I stayed all cozy right here dreaming in infinite slow motion, free of the clock like a demon on a beam of light. Maybe it was okay, I was finally where I was always going to be and Koh and I could finally rest for real, just be in ourselves, never have to go and do any goddamned things again. Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course.

Okay, don’t forget to wink, I thought. Supposedly there was this French aristocrat who was executed during the Terror who told some of his friends to be sure to watch his execution, and he made sure the headsman was going to take his head out of the basket and hold it up to the crowd. And the idea was that if he was still living and conscious, he’d wink, just as an experiment. And his head did wink. So what I meant was not to wink, exactly, but to see whether I could still think or whatever after my heart had stopped, and for how long. It was just something I was interested in. A last little treat.

My heart was already bumping kind of hard, THUB-bub, THUB-bub. Settle down, you’re doomed, I thought. I sucked in a deep breath and had to stifle a cough from the dust from the cave-in and the smoke of the mint-and-musk torch sputtering in the reduced oxygen.

Cortez and Pisarro and DeLanda can trash this place all they want, I thought. I’ll rebuild it, and I’ll rebuild it better, Ocelot will rise, the Lords of the Mat can crack the skull-ball again out into the next age, the blue.