The Sacrifice Game Read online

  THE SACRIFICE GAME

  ALSO BY BRIAN D’AMATO

  Beauty

  In the Courts of the Sun

  THE SACRIFICE GAME

  BOOK II IN THE SACRIFICE GAME TRILOGY

  Brian D’Amato

  With Illustrations by the Author

  DUTTON

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, July 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Brian D’Amato

  All illustrations, maps, glyph renderings, and other graphics are by Brian D’Amato.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  D’Amato, Brian.

  The sacrifice game / Brian D’Amato.

  p. cm.—(The sacrifice game trilogy ; bk. 2)

  ISBN 978-1-101-58550-4

  1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Mayas—Prophecies—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A4675S24 2012

  813'.54—dc23

  2011051637

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  COVER

  ALSO BY BRIAN D’AMATO

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

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  APPENDIX

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Manet alta menta repostum

  Harold Steketee Sr.

  1887–1984

  There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun . . .

  A percentage of the author’s proceeds from this series helps support various environmental, educational, and archaeological projects in the Maya area.

  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  Most Mayan words in this book are spelled according to the current orthography adopted by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas in Guatemala. However, I’ve retained older spellings for a few words—for instance, the text uses uay instead of the now-preferred way in order to distinguish the word from the English “way.” Specialists may also notice that some words are spelled to be pronounced in Ch’olti, which usually means a ch takes the place of a k. I’ve italicized Mayan and most Spanish words on the first use, and dropped the italics after that.

  Vowels in Maya languages are written like those in Spanish. “Ay” in Maya, uay, etc., is pronounced like the “I” in “I am.” J is pronounced like the Spanish j, that is, a guttural h with the tongue farther back than in English. X is like English sh. Tz is like the English ts in “pots.” Otherwise, consonants are pronounced as in English. An apostrophe indicates a glottal stop, which is like the tt in the Scottish or Brooklynese pronunciation of “bottle.” All Mayan words are stressed on the last syllable, but Mayan languages are less stressed than English. Mayan languages are somewhat tonal, and their prosody tends to emphasize brief couplets. This gives the spoken language a certain lilt, which in some places I’ve tried to convey with dactylic dimeter, although readers may differ on whether this is successful.

  A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

  Readers of the first book in this series have asked about illustration techniques. Most of the pictures here were drawn on a pair of Wacom Cintiq monitors using Adobe and Andromeda software. Some of them incorporate scans of drawings in ink and scraping on scratchboard. Many of the glyphs were first sketched out in pencil by Prudence Rice.

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  Simple Experiments with Everyday Household Objects

  Conce
pt Sketch for Neo-Teo—Double Mul OC-A

  Marena Park, Warren Interactive Entertainment

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  Why I Did It

  By Joachim (“Jed”) Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda

  For General Release—

  To post at noon, EST, on December 19, 2012—

  Contact: None

  Indiantown, Florida, USA

  4 Lamat, 12 Sac, 12.19.19.15.9

  4 Sundog, 12 Whiteness, on the ninth K’in of the fifteenth Uinal of the nineteenth and last Tun of the nineteenth and last K’atun of the twelfth and last B’aktun

  Thursday, October 30, 2012

  5:42:08 P.M.

  To All, Whom It Concerns:

  . . . five . . .

  four . . .

  three . . .

  almost there . . .

  one . . .

  zero . . .

  tap.

  Whoa.

  That’s it. I’ve done it.

  Let me catch my breath here for a second.

  Okay.

  I didn’t expect it, but just now, at the moment I tapped that icon, I—I guess I should say even I—felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, that it was really happening, and that it wasn’t reversible. Was there any guilt in the twinge? Hmm. Remorse, yes. Nausea that it had come to this? Sure. But guilt? I guess not. It won’t hurt, for one thing. In fact, you won’t even notice.

  What I just did was—all I did—was I bought a hundred standard five-thousand-bushel corn contracts for February delivery, effective at the opening of the Chicago Board of Trade tomorrow. At 5:41:59 P.M. a bushel was at $7.10, so this only—“only”—took $3,550,000.00 out of my main Schwab account. I realize it doesn’t sound like this transaction could be a very big event. Certainly not something that will end the whole place. I mean, end the world. And I don’t mean just the world as we know it either. I mean the world, like everything.

  But it will. According to calculations using Warren’s latest (2.3 Beta) version of the Sacrifice Game software—a spectacularly accurate proprietary prediction tool, of which a little more later—the trade’s going to drive up the price at the worst possible time. This will set off a very unfortunate sequence of events. Eighteen minutes from now, the second domino—that is, that’s what I’m calling the second key event out of what I’m visualizing as a row of dominoes that will culminate in the end of us humans—the second domino will tip over as the Board of Trade software notices after-hours trading spiraling up at geometric rate that, just before it pulls the plug, will reach U.S. $1,244.02 per second. The third domino will fall exactly four hours and 21.02 minutes from now, as the Hang Seng sees a similar thing happening and suspends its own trading in all corn, wheat, barley, soy, and of course rice. And then, tomorrow morning, when the CBT opens at the ungodsly hour of 6:00 A.M., the fourth domino will fall as every hick trader and his adelphogamic brother jumps on the hay wagon and tries to buy as much—as many?—as much piles of staples as they can get their flippers on. At 8:48 P.M., Central time, the CBT will suspend all trading—Domino Number Five—and, on November 2, three trading days from now, the first of the food riots will start, in Dêqên Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in Yunan, China. That’ll be the sixth domino. By the next morning, over sixteen thousand people will have died in the riots, mainly in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou—and those will inspire another, much larger riot in Gujarat—but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. And anyway, by Number Seven you’ll have seen a lot of all this on the news. So let’s skip ahead to the morning of—well, you’ve already heard about the date. It’s the big one, the one that’s caused so much storm and stress. The last domino—it’s a bigger number than nine, but smaller than, say, thirty-one—will fall on December 21, 2012, or in our reckoning,

  that is, 12.19.19.17.19, of the fourth Overlord and the third Gold Sun. And on that date, just like a whole lot of kooks, New Agers, and pantophobics have babbled about for what seems like another thirteen b’aktuns already, that’ll be it, the last of the last, the EOE, as we call it at the Warren Family of Caring Companies. The End of Everything.

  For years now, when people heard that I was a Maya, they’d ask me what woo-wooey supernatural event was going to happen on that day, and I’d usually say something like “Nothing you need to know about.” Or, often, just “Nothing.” Well, now something’s going to happen. Or, in an active sense, “Nothing.” Only, there won’t be anything supernatural about it. I’ll have done it all myself. With my little cursor. Whatever humans are alive on earth, including the lady next door, the pope, you, the president, myself, and even the crew of seven aboard the International Space Station—who’ll last a little longer than the others, but not much—will be the last humans ever. And, possibly, the last consciousnesses ever. I hope.

  Why?

  Well, because, it won’t matter why, will it? In fact this whole exercise—I mean, writing this—seems pointless. I mean, to write a deposition for posterity when, if all goes well, as it will, there won’t be any posterity. There won’t even be any extraterrestrial archaeologists coming around to ask questions about the collapse of humanity. Most people will barely have time to read this before they wink out into zeroness. Still, I do feel that at least some of you, short-lived or not, deserve an explanation.

  So, how did it come to this? Or, to put it more relevantly, How Do I Know This Is the Right Thing to Do?

  Well, briefly, because I do. That is, I understand all the considerations involved, the math, you might even call it. Unlike almost anyone else, I can visualize the numbers involved, and unlike absolutely anyone else, I can comprehend what those numbers will lead to. And if you could follow it all, you’d agree with me. And you’d do exactly the same thing.

  More clearly, I can understand how much human life is out there, and how much is coming. And I understand—and most of all accept—that over 99.8 percent of it, now, in the future, and always, is and will be sheer unrelieved agony. Pain. And no matter how many distractions and evasions people come up with, no matter how much gets spent on the denial industry, any honest person with an IQ over room temperature—that is, anyone worth asking—will admit that, to put it in the most ordinary and bathetic language possible, life sucks. I’m doing us all a mercy. And that’s the beginning, end, and entire sum and substance.

  I know, I know. Don’t do us any favors. But this wasn’t something I wanted. And it isn’t something I’m making up. In fact, this ability—the ability to comprehend—didn’t even come to me naturally, the way things do to crazy people. In a way, it took over thirteen hundred years. And also, I didn’t make this decision so much for you and me, anyway. I’m doing it more for the kids. The coming generations. Yes, you and I are already well and royally fucked, but we can, at least, refrain from bringing any further consciousnesses into existence. It’s the right thing to do. And actually, there are a lot of people—not just Schopenhauerian philosophers and their wannabe counterparts—who even know it’s the right thing. But they haven’t done anything about it. I think I have the will to do it—and the means, but especially the will—because I saw it with my own eyes. Or at least, I saw it with my intraregarding eye, through the lens of the Game.

  Anthropologists would classify the Sacrifice Game as a sortilege divination game, something that uses counts of pebbles or seeds to investigate the future or, more rarely, the past. Playing it well feels like playing Parcheesi against God and winning. Although the Sacrifice Game is to Parcheesi as cooking a Peking duck is to getting a bag of Skittles out of a vending machine.

  I’d been playing the Game since I was little. As some of you might guess from my middle names (below), I’m an ethnic Maya, a twenty-first-century descendant of those guys who built all those palaces in Mexico and Guatemala with the big wacko pyramids with the scary stairs and then, presumably, abandoned them. We tend to be confused with Aztecs, Toltecs, or Venusians. When I was five, when we lived in a village called T’ozal, in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, my m
other, who was a na h’me—a “sun-adderess,” that is, kind of lesser shamaness—taught me a version of it that her mother had taught her, and which had survived, handed down in increasingly simplified forms, for hundreds of years. Two years later, in 1982, a Guate government death squad called the Mano Blanco disappeared my parents along with about a quarter of the village. Supposedly my mother died when they made her drink gasoline. I was in a hospital at the time for my hemophilia and eventually got adopted by a Mormon family in Utah. I kept up with the Game in my dreadful teen years and then in college I helped work out some of the theory of it with a professor of mine named Taro Mora. Unlike most economics/game-theory mumbo-jumbo, it really did do something, and eventually I learned to use it to make quite a bit of money in corn futures. Taro didn’t come up with a mathematical solution for it, though, so the Game never worked well on computers. I went back to Guate a few times and tried to help bring the perps from the old regime to semijustice, but it was frustrating. I also became a frustrated opisthobranchologist and a few other frustrated things, but I never thought I’d do anything spectacular. And then, three hundred and thirteen days ago, on the fourth Owl and the fourth Yellowness of 12.19.18.17.16, or we could say December 23, I was approached by a woman named Marena Park.

  Or actually, at the time I thought I was approaching her, but that’s another kettle of verrucomicrobia we don’t need to get into right now. She was—and is—an executive at the entertainment division of the Warren Group (or “family,” as they like to say) of companies. It turned out she was a kind-of-famous game designer who was now, a bit oddly, I thought, coordinating a research project with my old mentor, Taro. And she wanted me to consult with them about a software version of the Sacrifice Game. And I would have said no, but they’d gotten hold of some new data: a description of the Game the way it was played at the height of the Maya Classic Period, thirteen hundred and forty-six years before.