Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. He shouted at them to get back down off of there, and then, when they didn’t, to jump. Even I had to laugh, he was really kind of a pantomime genius, like Grock or David Shiner. I’d never seen anyone move like that. For a beat he seemed to be walking along my arm and I realized I’d lost my scale and couldn’t tell which was bigger, the insect board in front of me or the human one on our left, or the celestial one overhead. I tried to focus on the blue-green center of the board. At least it was easier than if I’d still had two eyes. Turquoise really is an excellent color, I thought. There just wasn’t enough of it around. I have got to get more turquoise stuff. Koh intoned another little number jingle, programming the interactions faster now. Without any warning the main runner, the one with the staff, seemed to get caught between two human points on vast intersecting ellipses, and the other catchers rushed in like T-cells rushing to spin a net across a wound. The main runner handed off the streamered staff to another runner on an adjoining square, and the nacom executed him, and the array settled again. The other runners were off in the Northwest, still pretty isolated from the hunters, but at this rate they might not last the length of the game.
Koh regathered her seeds and counted them out again, shifting back and subtracting, and gave the herald another directive, and the human net dissolved and reformed, the invisible spider spinning her a dewy web and eating it and respinning it and eating it again. I was beginning to see a bit of a pattern in it, not more than the kind of vague sense you get when you look at a long row of successive calculations and try to guess the function they’re coming from, but for a beat I thought I had a notion of how the Sacrifice Game had grown, back when things didn’t change so much, when technology and population increase were barely factors at all, and the main thing was just to keep going, not to stay on in a bad place, not to get caught by bad weather, and the tribal knowers nurtured the craft over those big empty millennia between Late Paleolithic and Historic, working out settlements, summer and winter camps, lookout fortresses on the frontier, dividing territory, spreading alliances out into space and time, locating the freeholds for new families, seeding new cross-pollinated strains of humans out into the vastness, the universe focusing into the great-great board, and that focusing into the miniature one, and that one focusing into our brains. And all the time, like I keep saying, it wasn’t any magic or fortune-telling, it wasn’t supernatural, it was just a big human computer, and to run it right you had to be a kind of symphony conductor. And, as you know, if you’re a classical music fan, with a tricky composition, some conductors just get it and some don’t. Koh was one of the last of a tradition that just knew or felt some mathematical trick other people had forgotten, something about spotting potential catastrophe points way in advance. She was at 910 AD. 1353. 1840. Oh, my God, she’s going to do it. 1900.
There was a burst of laughter below us. Porcupine had dragged the skeletons off the mul and was threading through the elders’ mats on the long, high stone benches that took up south side of the Game zone. He had a long drinking reed, twice as tall as he was, and he’d snuck it into one of the elders’ balche-pots and drunk the whole thing in one draft. The old man who was holding the pot had turned back to it and just now found it empty. He saw from the reaction of the crowd that something was up and he whirled around, but Porcupine ducked behind a fat old guy next to him, grabbed a big tamale out of his dish, and replaced it with a sort of rat-baby doll. The victim looked back at the tamale, did something almost like a real double-take, jumped up, spotted Porcupine, and threw the dish at him. Porcupine deflected it and backed off, dancing nonchalantly over the low tables. It was like a Candid Camera thing. The audience was in hysterics and a couple people threw expensive shawls at him to show how much they loved it. Porcupine picked up the shawls with a flourish, struck a pose that was like the equivalent of a bow, and took a bite out of the tamale, except it was the rat-doll. He spat it out and made a disgusted face. The crowd was roaring.
The beat divided into fourths, each one a complete miniature of the phrase of the polyrhythm. I heard Koh’s counter click resolutely on the board. Eye on the ball, I thought. I looked down at the move. It felt like my boulder- sized head would roll down and crash through the board. She’d moved the sapphire again, back to where it had been in terms of days, but according to the hotun-count she was already at 10 Alligator, 20 Jaguar, 14.8.4.56. AD 2002. I started to wipe a too-tickly tear from under my non-eye, the hell with my regal fucking bearing, but it felt like my hand was in a plutonium boxing glove. What if I got too much of the tzam lic? It was good for playing a thousand moves ahead, and for Koh and I to communicate wordlessly with each other and everything, but I knew from experience that the hangover could be a bear. How’d I gotten this much out of a few puffs on a funny cigar? It must be some new recipe. Did Nurse Feelgood really know what she was doing? She might be able to sprinkle Agent Orange on her Shredded Ralstons, but the rest of us Squelch that thought. Don’t worry. At least I now knew what the big deal was about this stuff. Bet if I live I’ll sleep for at least a week. Below us Porcupine had gotten back on the mul again and was teetering along the fifth step, holding a shrunken Dzonotob trophy head-which he must have yanked off somebody’s court dress-in front of his own white and black-masked face and working the mouth up and down.
“Help help, help help!” he ventriloquized. “How did my body ever grow so big?” He forced his right thumb in through the neck and wagged it through the mouth like a tongue. His left hand pretended to turn the reluctant head around, pulled it down to his crotch, and forced it into sucking motions. He howled. He’d gotten two other fingers of his right hand up behind the shell eyeballs and pushed them out from inside, making them bounce bug-eyed. Meanwhile his left hand had found a bowl of white atole and as he pretended to come he shrieked, blasted the gruel up over himself in a milky shower, pushed the head away, and shook himself off like a dog.
Charming, I thought. Japanese game-show humor. Next vee have zee socolate-mousse wrestlink “Six sproutings, fourteen witherings,” Koh said.
She was at August 12, 2005.
“Next fifteen rainings, eighteen crackings; next,
Six sparkings, twenty-seven darkenings.”
The beat divided again into sixteenths-about the length of a p’ip’il, an eyeblink-and the branches of possibility spread out at such a steep curve that they almost headed into reverse, like the umbrella profile of a ceiba tree with branches that curve out almost to the horizontal, but never quite droop. I could see there was some equation there. If only I had room to write it down in the margin of my brain, I thought. My fingers were aching from setting and resetting the seeds, but it didn’t affect the performance of my autopiloted hands. Koh moved her sapphire right through the equivalent of 2007 and out toward the rim. I thrashed along after her. She was down to two quarries. The sun and moon and the two Venuses flashed their ellipses over the board, and it churned underneath them motokaleidoscopically like heaps of floating rhinestones going down a drain, although really I could have been either seeing it or just imagining it. The catchers closed in on the last runner. Koh came to the threshold at 2012.
(62)
The runner was surrounded at the northwest corner of the board, cut off at the edge of the world. It was like Koh and her avatar were checkmated, there was nowhere for the sapphire to escape to. Oh, shit, I thought, that’s really it, the end, the end, the end, the end. I looked up at Koh. She was still studying the board. I saw movement at the nose-edge of my right eye and bent down to focus on the board again. Koh was definitely seeing something, she’d made another move in her head, but I couldn’t imagine where. I tried to see what she was seeing on the board but it was all murky and distorted like the lens in my eye was melting. Koh picked up her sapphire and moved it toward the center of the board, like the runner was somehow jumping over the mass of catchers.
Something touched her shoulder and she looked up. The Porcupine Clown had gotten all the way up to our level and was leaning over Lady Koh herself, flirting with her like he was trying to lead her down into the zocalo. Was he supposed to do that? I wondered. Wait a beat, I thought. Koh stood up and I thought she was laughing but then I thought maybe something was actually wrong, the Porcupine was hugging her, and she wasn’t just being a good sport in the act, she was really struggling. Where were the guards? I wondered, but of course it had looked like just part of his act. I jumped over the table at them but I was too groggy and the Porcupine was too fast, he was already over the lip of the sanctuary and rolling down the steps with his arms and legs wrapped around Lady Koh. I lurched down after them but my Ahab leg slipped out from under me and I slid down into the arms of one of the guards. Attendants were bouncing down the steps below me and for a beat I thought Koh had rolled down all the way, but as I screamed for them to get me down, DOWN!!! Porcupine had fetched up on the tenth step below us, caught by a ball of belayed guards, and I saw some of Koh’s robe in the knot. I couldn’t hear anything over cataracts of blood through my ears, but the guard got me down to them and I sort of slid down into the cluster,
