You’d have to play in your own time, she said.
I said I wouldn’t know how.
You know enough to do it, she said, just play it there, closer to the edge.
I don’t know a thing, I said, the position’s no good. Remember? The runner was trapped in the wasteland, there wasn’t any way to keep playing.
So if I show you how to win from that position, she asked, will you give me your bond that if you play in the afterworld, if what you see is wrong, and shouldn’t happen, you’ll stop?
I said of course I would.
You’ll just resign the Game and let your world run out? she asked.
“Wife-sister-father-mother-daughter,” I said,
“Ahau-na Koh, accept your blood-twin. Please.”
Koh hesitated a moment, scooped a handful of stars up out of the road, let some slip out of her fist like corn, and cast them out over the world, the real world, which was now her board. It wasn’t like a globe, it was a flat square, but somehow it also mapped the whole world correctly, and I could see other continents, southern Africa and Australia, under the swirling cloud-steam. The star-crystals bounced and landed into the final position from the City Game, and she set the Sun-Carrier as the runner, trapped in the far northwest.
“And if you see what’s going to happen,” she said,
“And if it’s right, you’ll play it out. If not,
You’ll take the runner to the edge, and jump.”
The word she used for “right,” or rather the silent word I understood, was maybe a bit more like the English words appropriate or inevitable, but stronger than either. It wasn’t just like “Do the right thing,” it was like “Don’t mess up the program.”
I asked how I’d be able to tell what was right. She said I’d have to be the umpire on that one, and anyway, it ought to be easy. I promised again that I’d do what she said. Koh looked at me and took the four far corners of the square board, two in each hand, like the world was a map on a square of stiff cloth, and folded them up over the center. They met in the middle, making a pyramid.
“The farthest points are all the same,” Koh said.
I felt like Immanuel Kant must have felt when he suspected how the Milky Way could be the foreshortened section of a galaxy, and suddenly the universe was bigger for him than it had ever been for anyone. Although of course that was his own idea.
So the board was a mat, a pop, and it was flexible. The mulob were the same map folded convexly into pyramids-a mountain fold, as they say in origami-and the ball courts were the same map folded concave, in a valley fold. And even the globe of the earth had something to do with the same map, twist-folded back on itself somehow, a torus mapping the inside of a sphere. I almost had a glimpse of insight into how the colors and directions and tendencies and cycles all meshed, how the Sacrifice Game wasn’t absolute but just a visualization of a subtle tendency in the universe, put in a form a human being could almost, but not quite, comprehend, like a three- dimensional model of a four-dimensional solid. It was easy to see how the Runner could escape by jumping from the corner where he was trapped. But then after that he could move off anywhere. Although I thought I saw something, not an idea but just a notion And then it just slipped away, like the eighth move in a chess game, it was just too much for my pea brain. I didn’t have the organizing principle, it was like I was looking at a disk sliced out of the body of a snake and trying to guess what its head looked like.
I’m not taking much back, I thought. Just one trick. One idea, as we say in chess.
“Even from here I see it only dimly,” she said. “But I see you alongside him.” Or, I should mention again at this point, Mayan is ungendered so it might have meant either him or her. “It’s someone you know, but whose face you’ve never seen.”
“I’ll try it as soon as I get back to the zeroth level,” I said.
“Don’t bother, you won’t see anything from there,” she said, “you’ll only drown yourself. Wait until you’re all the way there.” By all the way there she meant “then,” that is, in the last b’aktun. “A lot of things can happen from the same position,” she said, although those weren’t her exact words, which I don’t remember. Or maybe she didn’t exactly speak in words. “When you’re closer you’ll see the move you need to make. If we played now we’d be hunting in the dark.”
I said all right. It wasn’t the time to argue. I was dubious, though. Even knowing about the strategy for the move, I was a long way from feeling like I’d be able to play through and get it right. Even assuming I got back.
I’ll just have to take really good notes, I thought. Leave it to Marena. She’ll figure it out. She’ll give it to LEON.
Below us the sun bubbled up in ecstasy at the horizon apex of the mul board, bloated with offerings, glowing a bloodier-than-blood oxygenated red that was simultaneously blue-green, yax, the double-faced color of life, and for a p’ip’il I thought I saw Waterlily Jaguar at its center.
I asked her if she could just stay for a beat.
I can’t, she said, I have to go. If you see your Marena, would you give her a message?
What? I thought. Of course, I said.
“Just tell her not to wait until the sun’s
Last beat,” she said. “And ask her to calculate the remainder of twenty minus thirteen.”
What do you mean? I thought. Seven? It can’t be that simple. “Do you-” I started to say, but she’d already slid away above me and I slipped backward down along the hard shell of the sky, rolling around it like a marble in a bowl. The sick sun slid into the black land, crashing and bleeding out as the mouth of the Earthtoad closed over it, and it was night again, and the skeleton-joint jewelscape of Xibalba rotated over me, the layers of heaven swinging underneath like giant multiple eyelids, and I clawed and scrambled at the sky shell but there was nothing to hold, it was like a water slide at one of Lindsay Warren’s old AquaParks, and as I vortexed down into the galactic sewer I know I saw something past the rim, up in the thirteenth level, some kind of a structure I recognized, but I was already in that waking-up state where you feel the dream’s sharp-carved details deliquescing into foam but you can’t do anything about it, and when they hauled me up out of the ice water I’d already forgotten. They dragged me out of the wet cave to an ember basket in the antechamber and said it was only two suns since I’d begun the vigil. I guess I must have been on dreamtime. Even so, Hun Xoc said I was pretty sick from dehydration. Eventually I looked up at him. He was in his capturing face.
(76)
I had them scrape me clean and get me up out of the caves, up the newly cleared interior staircase to the top of the mul. Even from inside I could hear that weird oceanic all-over noise. It wasn’t loud like an industrial-age battle, it was more just the amount and multiplicity of the voices that made it up, the shouts and dogs barking and the raiding drums and signal horns and bull-roarers all combining into a desperate whirring wave. My attendants screened the door of the sanctuary enough for me to peep out without being spotted. It was clear the situation was way hopeless. It was midafternoon on 2 °Cayman. The lace blanket of the city around us was on fire at its edges and wide waves of pus-colored grass smoke rolled southeastward through the temple district. I couldn’t see much actual flame but from the amount of smoke behind the mountains it was obviously too late to put them out without help from a massive rainstorm, which the Chak-answerers said wasn’t likely to happen. I couldn’t see much of the defense from here, either, but it definitely looked disorganized. Thousands of refugees had pressed inward onto the peninsula, instead of doing the rational thing and taking off, and they were eddying around just outside the holy courts, not knowing what to do and expecting us to protect them with our nonexistent magic.
Severed Right Hand had attacked after dawn with at least ninety thousand bloods, about twice the number Hun Xoc had been able to get together for the defense. And it was probably just Severed Right Hand’s first wave. The attackers seemed to have picked up some of the Napoleonic tactics 2 Jeweled Skull had introduced, at least to the extent of going for the kill as a goal and not just the capture. Maybe through 9 Fanged Hummingbird.
It looked too late to do anything but leave. Severed Right Hand would be here in less than two days. And my brain spikes were getting so bad that I worried that at any moment I might collapse into a 75-IQ blob. Dag, I’ve really made a mess, I thought. I was in charge for the shortest possible time and I got the whole place trashed. If I
