across the next two months to the ridge at 4 Ahau, but I couldn’t see how to get there, let alone over it and beyond. The whole Game-state depends on the truism that if you don’t know what something is, you can’t visualize it enough to predict its effects. You know, ya can’t tell where you’re goin’ without knowin’ where you’re comin’ from, all that. Which was Koh’s problem all along. I mean, there’s a limit. And right now it was as though I could see all these details spread out in front of me, maybe like I was stumbling over a vast Petoskeyish pebble beach, except instead of pebbles it was more like those drifts of novelties and jawbreakers and figurines and dice and tiny cameras and flashlights and trinkets in plastic capsules in one of those arcade crane-game things. But the thing with details is they’re so small and there are so many of them. And I had to grab the right one just to take the next step, I could walk out into space and across to the next mesa if I could just find the bridge, find the solid path through this fruit-salad bog of image-confetti quicksand, but when I’d squint down into the surface I wasn’t just picking through a coastlineful of stationary objects, I was peering down into a Gaudi-Facteur Cheval-Watts Tower mosaic of compressed events churning under my feet, translucent layers of forking capillaries, knotted nets of beads, each bead with something different inside, an idea or a particle collision or a disease or just any old thing, people and minerals and televised political speeches and dead termites and schedules and trajectories, charities, deaths, monetary units, chemical reactions, shoes, and ships. It was like Error’s vomit in the beginning of the Faerie Queene, just this tidal wave of crud, and there was still only one pathway solid enough to get you where you wanted to go, the others would just collapse and you’d slide into some totally unrelated track. You had to start with something you knew well. Scope out some chain of cause and effect on the other side, something you recognized, and then follow it back. Like No Way had been over there. He’d left what was like a handful of footprints glowing up the other side, a few little bits of detritus I recognized as his. Or rather he hadn’t really been there, exactly, since it was in the future, but there was something that made me think he’d seen over the rise somehow, and if I did want to get over there maybe I could ask him. It was like I could see his intention of going there, or his knowledge of how to get there.
Okay, decision time. Only, I realized I’d already decided.
Making a real chocolate ice-cream soda is getting to be a lost art, like semaphore signing. The deal is to put a mouthful of milk, two mouthfuls of chocolate syrup, and a coarse shot of seltzer in the bottom of the glass, and mix them all really really up before you do anything else. Then I like to put in a handful of chocolate ice cream shavings and stir those around to get everything cold. Then you pour in the bulk of the seltzer, up to within two fingerwidths of the rim, and stir that around really gently. Then you drop in two scoops of ice cream, submerge them in the liquid, let them bob back up, and perch the last and most perfectly spherical scoop of ice cream on the side of the glass. Finally, you blast in the last bit of coarse seltzer until the foam rises out of the cylinder and is just about to spill over. Oh, and if you like, you can make sure a little seltzer drizzles over the top scoop and forms an icy crust. And then you sink in a long, long spoon and you’re done.
So I did all that and cleaned up and then tasted it.
Gastronodelic, I thought. Not quite there yet, though. Only one thing could possibly make it better. I checked the GPS. It showed Marena’s Cherokee hurrying into the hospital parking lot. Whatever. I got the Lobel Brothers tub out of my food delivery, put the two Styro cylinders on the lap desk, and poured the little one over the big one.
Fabulous. I took a fountainspoonful.
Mnmnmnmnmn.
Perfect. Perfectomundino.
(102)
“Hi, Jed.”
“Hi, Marena.”
“So how are you doing?” she asked. She put down an empty Phlegmy cup, found the food delivery, dug out a slice of salmon, folded it onto a big round water biscuit, and pushed the package five finger-widths in front of me.
“I’m good,” I said. An imaginary mosquito buzzed behind my neck. That thing I’d forgotten. Damn.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why, don’t I seem good?”
“Well, I don’t want to say you don’t seem good, but you don’t seem exactly happy, you know.”
“Maybe I just have a sad face.” I lifted out a slice and lowered it onto my plate. I took a bite. It wasn’t dry enough and the smoking was different, but it still had that great old taste. I said thanks to Great Grandfather Salmon.
“Oh, yeah… but, you know, you brought back the stuff, we’ll work out the LEON software on the Sacrifice Game, we’ll deal with it, we should all be feeling a lot better than we did two months ago.”
“Yes.” I uncapped the Tabasco sauce and shook five shake-worths onto the salmon.
“I mean, I know it’s hard to believe, but there was a time when people weren’t so blase about time travel.”
“Right.”
“You’re like Neil Armstrong or, well, you know, I hesitate to mention Christopher Columbus, obviously.”
“Thanks,” I said. “No one’s going to know about it, though, right?”
“Come on, don’t make me a schmuck. What’s it look like out there?”
“It doesn’t work too well without the drugs.”
“I know,” she said, “but still… seriously, what’s up with it? Any stock tips?”
“Uh, yeah. Buy gold and ammunition and keep them both under the mattress and stay down there with them.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know. Yes, basically.”
“Do you realize you’ve used up, like, half a bottle of Tabasco sauce?”
“Uh, no,” I said, “I guess I hadn’t noticed that.” I put down the bottle. “Thank you.” I picked up the cup of water and automatically poured a shot out on the floor for No Way. “Oops. Sorry,” I said. I found a napkin and bent down to wipe up the spill. The cup was still in my hand.
“It’s okay,” Marena said. I looked up at her. She wasn’t looking. I knocked the Tabasco sauce onto the tile floor.
“Oops again.” When I stood up I stepped on the bottle. It shattered.
“Damn,” I said. “Sorry. I am such a total mess.”
“It’s nothing,” Marena said. She started to get up.
“No, sit, I’ve got it,” I said. I squatted and picked up the pieces, getting sauce in my hands. Damn. Random perturbation. Okay. Mime washing. I took the pieces and cap thingy to the bathroom, pulling my IV with me. In the bathroom I rinsed my hands and, noisily, dropped most of the bottle in the wastebasket. I kept a nice long shard that, conveniently, had part of the neck on it, making a good handle. I tucked it under the soft inner-arm edge of my cast, sat back down, and picked up the clear sporkf.
“You know, you’ve been stabbing that salmon over and over.”
“Oh. Sorry.” The mosquito was buzzing louder.
“Yeah,” she said, “the way you’re holding that fork, I don’t know, it’s scary.” Pause. “Okay, so, you want to show me what you’re doing with the Game? Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said. You lyin’, cheatin’ honky-tonk angel, I thought. I am totally onto you. I finished smoothing down the foil and rolled it into a little cylinder. This stuff is incredible, I thought. Color, thinness, pliability, a miraculous confluence of properties achieved by some unfathomable alchemy… in the old days we would have traded ten thralls for something like this. I slipped it into my shirt pocket.
“This tastes kind of weird,” she said, “is there salt in it?”
I looked around. She’d picked up what was left of my ice cream soda and tried it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s the way we used to have it.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“It’s a chocolate soda,” I said.
