I need to ask her something, I said.
You should have had plenty of suns already, he said.
That’s true, I said.
All right, he said, just give us your own skin, and we’ll see you get to her.
I can’t do that, I said. I didn’t even bother to say that I needed to get back. He knew that anyway, he was just giving me a hard time.
Too late, he said.
I know you can, I said, I know how strong you next to me are.
I won’t, he said.
Then I challenge your champion to a hipball match, I said. It was my last-resort prepared sentence.
He looked at me with an eye a like plucked-out rabbit’s eye floating in a Petri dish of upscale shampoo. He sighed through his pleuroceles and, pensively, scratched his tentacles with a testic-that is, rather, he stenched his tensicles with-I mean, he tested his scratchsicles with a tenticrotch-never mind.
All right, he screaked. Then field five balls. And if you win we’ll show you the way to Lady Koh.
(74)
I should have expected it, but I hadn’t negotiated the rules, and they sent four players out against me: Three Balls, a little rotten but looking tougher than ever, and my old mashed-and-charred friends from my last ball game, 15 Immanent, 20 Silence, and 9 Dog. I can’t deal with this, I thought, it’s too Dawn of the Dead around here, but it didn’t help. What was I thinking? I wondered. I still only had one leg and one eye, for Chrissake, I could barely play five rounds of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.
“Good luck. Ball One, play ball,” Jaguar Night said.
I got the face-off and hipped the ball west, but as it bounced and 3 Balls gingerly headed it off I realized I’d already screwed up, my hip was spraying blood. They’d let me get to the ball first because the ball was really a spherical knife. It was like this thing that happened to this friend of No Way’s named Cobi, he was in a fight in a school cafeteria and got hit with what they called a ballestero, a hard orange with a whole bunch of single-edged razor blades stuck deep in it with just their corners sticking out. It really messed him up and he had to have about a hundred stitches. Except this thing the Xibalbans had didn’t exactly have blades, it was more like a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle, where even though the surface was round it was still also a big razor-sharp knot that whirled like a Cuisinart blade. Anyway, before I’d gotten it together 3 Balls yoked the thing onto my goal-peg.
I limped back to my marker. Spine ambled out to tidy me up. “Really,” he said, “of all of us, you under me are the most nauseating.” Yeah, yeah, I signed. He dusted me off with a long-haired scalp.
The second ball came down. 9 Dog blasted it into my chest and it stuck. All four of them ran to my side, picked me up, and threw me up against the peg. My ear knocked over the dish of mica flakes and I bounced down the bank like a Gumby doll.
I won the next six balls, though, and won the match.
A cacophony of jeers all rose around me, it was just horrible, like you’d never think people could laugh that way at something so stupid except of course you can see it every day on TV on talk shows. They were gibbering so hard they were gnawing on their own arms, rolling over and down onto the court, lying on their backs and juggling me in the air and kicking me back and forth until I was ricocheting off the stone bank with steel-on-steel impact. I just took it. It certainly didn’t hurt any less than it would have in the real world. They closed around me into a spanking line and thwacked me through it with bone saw-paddles, like I was that chicken the Nephi Knights used to kick around. But I was off in the right direction.
“Hey,” I called to 2 Jeweled Skull. “Toss me another towel, will ya? I’ll schmear you a fiver next time.” I screwed a fist into my working eye and walked forward against the obsidian wind.
(75)
I came to the citadel at the crossroads, in the center of the center. The northern path led down into a scabrous clotted horror-desert, past fractal fungal rock-bones impacted and twisted with projecting nodes in serried rows like sharks’ teeth. I felt my scalp peeling back and the flesh shredding off my bones. I turned left at the first new moon, 4 Motion, 7 Thought. Days flickered by underneath me like railroad ties. Whilrlwinds of razors sanded my skeleton. Five layers of fabric parted one after the other, white porcupine quills, yellow leather, mulberry cotton, black snakeskin, and gold-green feathers, and I was through, and I thought I saw someone up ahead, and I saw that what was going to happen on the last day wasn’t going to be a natural disaster, or any known type of man- made disaster, that it meant something but something totally new… but then it was gone, and then the floor, or what I was visualizing as the floor, must have just rotted underneath me, because I was lying covered with dirt. I was dirt myself. I must have been decomposing for years, I thought, but when it’s years of pain you lose track fast. I felt leaf-cutter ants growing fungus farms in my adipocere. I oozed through level nine, and ten and eleven and twelve, and the Tree of Mirrors forked out into a white road, the back of the double-headed star-feathered diamondback Rattler, the Milky Way, and I slid down one arc and up another following Sun-Carrier toward the Heart of Sky. The sun crawled out of the ragged cave-mouth, exhausted and bloodless and thirsty after his escape from the dark lords, and stumbled blindly up onto the rim of the blue-green basin, blinking, looking around for prey. I backed up, scrambling down the serpent’s dry, slippery body, but I was stuck, and as I pulled I saw that the serpent was my own foot, or rather the stump under my knee, which had scaled over, and extended, and grown into a rattlesnake. The snake’s neck twisted away from me and reared up like a whip stopped in midcrack, and its vibrating head sighted on me, sensing my body heat through the pits in its cheeks, licking my sweat spray out of the air. I could see my reflection in its opaque lidless eyes. Could I really swallow myself? The snake built up the torsion to strike, its snare-drum-roll-thunder peaking to the snapping point, and with the speed of a crack traveling through a sheet of glass it lunged at my lips, hemotoxin welling out of the grooves in its fangs.
But instead of striking, it held itself still, mouth gaping. There was a wet black ball down in its salmon-pale throat. It just swallowed something, I thought, it hasn’t finished digesting its last gift. But it regurgitated the black bolus up toward me, and I saw the ball was covered with hair, it was the top of a head, and I recognized the whorl. The head turned backward and a bicolored forehead rotated toward me, and I was looking upside-down into Lady Koh’s eyes as she extruded onto the wide scale-path, naked and glistening with cosmic universal solvent and studded with diamond-patterned traceries of jade stars. Wow, I thought. I guess this really is kind of neat. Koh lowered herself up to me along her own death-umbilicus. I know she was more beautiful than ever but I can’t remember what she looked like. Just not the same.
“I wanted a separate time with you,” I said. She gave a Maya click-shrug, but it wasn’t so dismissive as it sounds, there was regret there. I think I was kind of crying, or not really of course, since it probably wasn’t even possible in my not-quite physical state, but I at least felt like crying. I’d thought I was past being too emotional but I really did get just this flood of love or whatever and it kind of freaked me out.
Koh said something like “You didn’t follow me here just to see me again.” Only, it wasn’t exactly in words that had any sound or exact shape to them, so I can’t quote it exactly.
I said I would have anyway, but that of course I wanted to ask her about the Sacrifice Game.
She either gestured or said that I could ask her.
What did you see at the hotun-end? I asked.
I couldn’t see a thing, she said.
No, I don’t understand, I said. I watched you.
It’s just too far, she said. The chance builds up.
I guess I already said the word frustration doesn’t have enough size on it. This was like frustration supersized, with fries, with a bullet. I kept thinking I was getting closer to it, whatever it was, and then it kept shifting shape and backing away.
I’ve got to do something, I said.
