The Sacrifice Game Read online

  “Look,” I said, “dying isn’t—I mean, they probably didn’t even notice.”

  “Why, you know what it’s like?”

  “Dying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s like, nothing.”

  “But apart from that.”

  “No, I mean, all I was saying was—look, the deal is, despite one’s ingrained denial of it, the fact is that every time you fall asleep, you die. In fact you basically die every time you even just lose your train of thought. And when you die for the last time, for you it won’t be any different, you’ll just forget what you were thinking about and not start up again. I mean, you won’t notice. The illusion of continuance is just pure nonsense.”

  “So maybe the world did end and we just didn’t notice.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly—”

  “Or else the Bush administration covered it up.”

  “Well, then we wouldn’t be making that speculation, though.” She didn’t answer, but she did look at me as though she was interested. “Actually, there are a lot of ways the world could end and nobody’d notice.”

  “You mean like if it happened too fast?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How would that work?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know, strangelets, earth-core perturbations, remote atom, atomic events from like naked singularities or whatever, um . . .”

  “Well, that’d suck.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think most people wouldn’t even mind.”

  “You mean if they didn’t understand what was happening?”

  “No, I mean, even in advance, people wouldn’t—I mean, look, half of them are at least wannabe suicidal anyway. They just don’t want to deal with a lot of nooses and razor blades and guns and wreckage and starvation and fire and plague and stuff.” I half noticed that we’d gotten into dangerous conversational territory, but, as so often, I didn’t shut up. “They just don’t want to see that shot of the top of the Empire State Building poking out of the water.”

  “Well, maybe. Still, that’s only half of them.”

  “And the other half are just too dumb to be suicidal.”

  “Okay, but everybody dying is a bigger deal because then nothing means anything.”

  “You mean like it does now?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I mean, mean. You know, mean . . .”

  “So anyway you think that’s just, that’s the boy of it,” she said. “Like, those pilots died happy.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “God, you’re so butch.”

  Huh? I thought. “Wow. Thanks,” I said. “I wish I’d known that in high school.”

  “And it’s like you don’t even know it. Which makes it that much eroticker.”

  I mumbled something so incoherent I couldn’t understand it myself.

  “I can’t get over how healthy you look,” she said. “You’re like, ruddy.”

  “Rutty?”

  “Have you been working out?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know . . .” I guess she’s right, actually, I thought. Ever since I’d knocked over that first domino this afternoon—despite the occasional twang of guilt, and even despite some trepanation, I mean, trepidation, or, let’s admit, fear—I’d felt this sort of . . . I guess, warmth. Hmm. Well, Jed, that’s the evolutionary psychology of it. Chicks always dig guys who’ve killed a few people. Or, evidently, guys who are about to kill a whole lot of people. It gives a dude a glow, like the third month of pregnancy.

  Marena flopped mustelinely onto her side. “Okay, questies. What if I started making out with you right now?”

  “Uh, well, I’d certainly reciprocate, for sure, I’d—”

  “Don’t do me any favors—”

  “No, I’m flattered, I mean—”

  “Maybe I should get out my toy chest. You should see the thingy I just got.”

  “Is it like, an orgasmatron?”

  “Kind of. It’ll keep you going for, well, for a while.”

  “Going, like, what?”

  “Well, not quite climaxing.”

  “Darn.”

  “Still, that’s on the way.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. In the future, everyone will be able to sustain an orgasm for fifteen minutes.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. The very near future. So get ready.” She raised herself up in kind of upward-facing-dog position, stretched her head out on her long neck, and kissed me. I reciprocated. What if Max Sleeks in? I wondered. Better bar the door, Katie. Well, maybe he’s used to such things. Hot mama.

  “Call A-sub-three,” she said. Pause. “Hi. Get me a half hour, okay? Yeah, Happy Rapture. Bye. Sorry.” She got my head in her hands. Whoa. What seemed like a hundred and eight fingernails swarmed over my doubly naked scalp, and I saw as well as felt schools of that silver glitter that fireworks makers call drizzle effects. I try to take my hat off indoors, but it’s a struggle, especially now after my head got shaved for the downloadings, and it was about the most gloves-offly intimate thing she could do, like she was slicing off my pants with bandage scissors. Wow, we’re making out, I thought, like I was back in fifth grade. Now one of her other hands was fumbling with my groin area.

  “How about you fuck me like it’s still the end of the world?”

  “Uh, mmm,” I said. Okay, I thought, one last time, it’s probably a good idea—but then at the same moment I thought how maybe I couldn’t deal with it, and/or, more importantly, it was feeling like Jed junior wouldn’t be able to deal with it. As they can, he could tell I was afraid of something. Chill out, I thought. No fear. Fear is the woody-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total erectile obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see the path where it has gone past on its path. And I will see that where the fear has gone there will be only a trail of tiny fearprints in the sands of the Erg. And only I will remain, picking grains of erg-sand out of my inner eye, like one whose water is frothy with liban and who has forgotten the ilm of his axolotls, one who—

  Can it, Muad’Jed. Get a grip. I got a grip on her head, but it didn’t help. Marena came up for air.

  “You’re distracted,” she said.

  “No, I’m . . . I’m, I’m, I’m a simple soul today, I’m—”

  “No, your sacral chakra’s off-line. You’re up to something.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m just, you know, preoccu—”

  “No, I think you’re feeling distrustful.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Okay, fine,” she said. She pushed both of the buttons down halfway, stopping both clocks, and resettled herself in a lotosish position. “Look, tell you what, I’ll give you three Truth or Deaths.”

  ( 8 )

  “Sorry?”

  “You ask me anything, any one thing at a time, and I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and then I get to ask you and et sequels.”

  “Sequentes,” I said.

  “Right. Boy, you’re really on a Latin kick.”

  “Well, I’m a Latin American.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s the death part?” I asked.

  “You have to tell the truth, like, whole and nothing but. Or else drink hemlock.”

  “Is that a real game?”

  “So I’ll come totally clean if you will. Okay? Pinkie swear.”

  “Okay.” We swore. Her pinkie nearly ripped mine off its metacarpal capitulum.

  “You start. Ask me whatevs.”

  “Okay. You set me up, right?”

  “In what way?” she asked. She didn’t hesitate. She was a cool customer.

  “All the time when I was explaining to you about the colored directions and whatever else about the Sacrifice Game and whatever, you actually knew all about it.”
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  “No, I did not—I didn’t know all that stuff, in fact I still don’t understand it, in—”

  “But like, when I—the first time I came to your office, you guys already wanted to reel me in, right? Taro’d said I’d want to see the Codex and you used that to bait me. Right?”

  “Well, there’s some truth to that, but you weren’t the only—I mean, we looked up at least four others of Taro’s students from when he was in New Haven and interviewed all of them.”

  “But when I begged you to send me you’d already decided to.”

  “No, not entirely.”

  “But you thought I’d be better at it, I mean, instead of Tony Sic, to zap back to Mayaland, but you figured I’d get spooked unless I thought I was convincing you to let me do it. Right?”

  “We hadn’t decided between you and Tony yet.”

  “But you thought I should do it and not Sic. You were being really deceptive.”

  “Well, okay, I’ll say—but, I mean, come on. Would you say you’re a very trusting person?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “If you’d thought we had any—you wouldn’t have gotten near us. Right?”

  “Well, maybe I . . . I guess not.” Any what? I wondered. Nefarious designs, I guess. Let it go.

  “So I’ll say yes, but now you’re glad anyway, right?” Finally, she succeeded in severing the fingernail’s last attachment with her left canine tooth.

  “Okay, right,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.” Somehow, now, it didn’t seem like she’d done anything so bad.

  She moved the loose nail into position with her tongue and started chewing on it with the same level of unself-conscious purposefulness my Jasus crayfish exhibit when they eat their molted exoskeletons. “Okay,” she said. “My turn.”

  “Okay.” Okay, I thought. Don’t stiffen up. But don’t flail either. Make normal-sized arm gestures. No hunching over. And if you have to lie, it’s just like with a polygraph, you have to make yourself believe you’re telling the truth. How’d I get into this? I don’t have to do—except I still wanted to find out about what had happened in Guatemala. If anything. After all, she’d been down there for months. The last I’d heard she’d still been at the Stake, trying to get permission from the Guates to dig officially at Ix Ruinas. But maybe something more had happened. Or was going to happen. Maybe they’d found the tomb and there was more info in it. And if it looked like Jed2’s memories would get through, well, that would be huge. There—

  “Okay. I think there’s something big going on, and it’s making you feel happy and powerful, but also you’re a bit worried about whether it’s going to come off. Am I right?”

  Damn. Okay, I thought. Don’t make any partial shrugs. No quick changes of expression. I checked my hands—that is, without looking at them, I thought about them. They were open with the fingers extended. Good. Okay. I focused on the bridge of her nose and, lowering my usual pitch a bit, said, “Yes.”

  “Okay, great. That’s progress. So what is it?”

  “That’s a second question,” I said.

  “Okay, fine. You go.”

  “Okay. You guys are watching me. Right?”

  “What do you mean us guys?”

  “The Warren Spook Corporation.”

  “They’re keeping an eye on all of us.”

  “That’s not a good—I mean, I can tell I’m under surveillance.”

  “So what’s the question?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Look, what do you think they’re going to do? The Game—you’re a Sacrifice Game specialist, right? It’s like you’re driving around with a trunkful of hydrogen bombs. We all are. They’re watching me too, I mean, of course, and, you know, I think Corporate’s being pretty reserved about it, frankly.”

  She had a point. “Well, you have a point.”

  “Okay, my turn,” she said. “What did you do to make yourself so excited?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m excited.”

  “But you are happy about something. Or relieved.”

  “No, I’m not—I mean, I’m relieved about the EOE.”

  “What’s that stand for again?”

  “The End of Everything.”

  “Oh, right. Okay, you’re relieved that’s not happening?”‘

  “Um, yeah. That’s right.”

  “But that’s not new. You said something new was going on.”

  “I did?” I had? I wondered. When? Or was she doing some hypno-thing on me? Bitch. Just be cool. Okay.

  “Okay,” I said. “I went very long on some futures a little while ago and I’m doing super well on them. I’m completely on Easy Street.”

  She looked at me. I tried to look back. Her eyes seemed bottomless. Finally it felt like I was staring into a gale-force wind. Fine, let her win the stare-down. I looked over at the Neo-Teo model. Most of the window lights and signs and had gone out, and its walls were a convincing range of deep-night blacks and blues.

  “Well, that’s great,” she said finally. “Okay, ask me about Tony.”

  Huh. Well, maybe I’d passed, I thought. “Okay, well, are you and—”

  Hell.

  ( 9 )

  The main phone, the one in my key pocket, had pulsed—silently, but it felt as loud as if were standing in a foghorn. Time to check on the, you know. The thing.

  I said something like “Hang on, I’ve got a call I’ve got to blow off,” or something. I pulled the thing out. The CBT site had automatically come up on the screen. I hesitated. I looked closer.

  Oh, Dios.

  They’d suspended after-hours trading. The third domino had fallen. Oh God, oh God. I—I guess I should say even I—felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, another notch of acceptance that it was really happening, that it was not reversible. My nefarious plan was working to perfection. Todo mi culpabilidad.

  In a way, even—well, not in a way, forget the qualifiers—even I still couldn’t believe it. I know I said that because of the Game and everything I’d become uniquely able to comprehend astronomical figures, humanly unfathomable amounts of money, of grains of corn, of suffering . . . but even so, the thing that was going to happen—let alone the fact that I’d made it happen—the thing that would happen in about four and a half million seconds was I think more than any human or maybe any consciousness of any possible type could ever comprehend. By definition, for that matter. You’d need a brain the size of the Hyperbowl, one that had been living for millions of years, enough parallelism to weigh the mass of lived experience, human, animal, and probably, now, even artificial, against that infinity-times-infinity of oblivion, you’d have to live, love, and lose a trillion times over even to glimpse how—

  “Are you okay?” Marena asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You were going to ask me about Tony.”

  “Okay, what about Tony?”

  “What about him?”

  “Are you and he having a thing?”

  “No.” She looked at me. I looked at she. Her eyes looked like she was—except, fuck, I thought, I really can’t tell, can I? Accursed Oriental inscrutability.

  “Are you having a thing with anybody else?”

  “That’s another question.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “Look—”

  “Okay, fine. No. Nobody.”

  Naturally, I tried to watch for tells, but I couldn’t see anything one way or the other. Damn, I thought. I’m at a big disadvantage here. I’d always had a little issue with facial expressions. When I was six I found a sheet in my Nephi K–12 folder—which was in a filing cabinet with a four-digit combination lock, as though that was going to hold me up for more than two minutes—that said I had “PTSD presenting as pervasive developmental disorder.” That is, savant skills without IQ loss, but with defects of emotional affect. It’s not autism, but it presents like it, as they say. So, for instance, you know how most kids
get flash cards with words and numbers on them? I got cards with smiling or frowning or whatever faces on them, so that I could learn emotions. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy or sad just by looking at her. Telling whether she was lying or not would be like reading page 100 of a book while it’s still on the shelf in the bookstore, in stretch wrap, and in Arabic.

  “You said you were getting married to some jerk,” I said.

  “Nope. As of now, Octy is out.” Octy? I wondered. Who the hell is that, Emperor Octavian? Dr. Octopus? No, don’t ask and use up a question.

  “Okay, my turn,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “What did you do that’s making you feel so different?” she asked.

  “Well, there’s, there’s that long shot on—”

  “Okay, but why the hesitation just now?”

  “Asking about the hesitation is another question already.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Well—”

  “Just—look, you have to answer the whole thing, you know, whole truth, not bits and pieces. Right?”

  “Okay, fine.” Pause. “I just went very, very long on the corn futures and I’m—look, the reason I’m not talking about it is I feel a bit guilty, uh . . .”

  “Now you feel guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you’re relieved.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Hmm. Apparent paradox.”

  “No, it’s, like—look, I said, I’m making a ton of cash but the longs, that is, some of the stuff I’m doing is going to cause some hardship, I mean, in fact, there are going to be more famine deaths than there are already, and of course I’m just getting on the bandwagon, but I still feel really guilty about it.” All true, I thought. “Okay?”

  “Well . . . that’s not the kind of thing I’m going to chew you out about, I mean, I work for Lindsay Warren, for God’s sake, I’m going to hell in a Hummer.”