The Sacrifice Game

(101)

“Hi, friend,” her head said. “I stopped for slushies. And I have to do a few things. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.” I said great and managed to stay expressionless. She disappeared herself. The Windows status bar said it was already 5:11:23 P.M.

Okay. Let’s do the hustle.

Order something. I clicked up ParkShop and after a little thrashing around I picked out a few needful things from Lobel Brothers’ Prime Kosher Provisions and the New Prana Botanica and Balducci’s South and a few other places and prepaid them on Marena’s Mall number. Instead of using Marena’s delivery service I clicked up Pink Dot-it’s this really fast high-end driving-and-errand place we used to use a lot in the Kings-and sent them the list. You really can get almost anything almost anywhere without even speaking to anybody. A mosquito-how’d it get in here? — passed between me and the screen and I grabbed and crushed it. Under my breath I said sorry to Greatfather Mosquito and, just for good measure, to the whole Mosquito clan. I ZPZFZPP!! ed some shmutz off the pyramid with Marena’s beloved Dust-Off. I sat back down. I took the precious Kleenex out of my pocket and unwrapped it. I took off my sweatshirt, found some Centrix scissors, and cut off the cuff. I pushed the Kleenex down into one glass and the cuff down into another and poured in just enough water to cover them. I watched them soak for a while, mushed each of them around with a pen cap, and watched some more.

Okay. Dosage. Maybe just drink the whole thing. There’s no way to tell, anyway. The stuff’s different now. Maybe it had lost its kick. I’m different. I’m probably nearly twice as heavy. On the other hand, maybe the Greathouse families had built up such an immunity to this stuff over the centuries that now even a little taste would kill me.

Face it, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll have to just do it by taste. Trust the Force.

I sat and thought for a hundred beats.

I put the emergency nurse call button near my good hand just in case. Okay. I opened my water carafes. One of them was hot water for a selection of muslin-bagged teas. I set my two original tumblers on the cart, away from the drug infusions, and filled each glass with water. There was a salt shaker near the food tray and I poured half of it into each glass and stirred it up. Okay.

If I felt like I was in trouble, I was going to punch the call button, drink the first glass of saline solution, “induce vomiting,” as they say, all over the floor, and then drink the second glass. Then I’d yell for a nurse.

I rehearsed it a couple of times in my head. Okay.

I took two Styrofoam cups off the cart, squeezed half the scorpion tincture into one and half the orb weaver stuff into the other, and drank them both. The scorpion fluid only had a numbing taste, but the spider essence rang that blue-ambergris taste up into my sinuses and back into my Eustachian tubes, and it was like I could feel Koh stroking me and telling me not to worry in that soft Chol as the neurotoxins ratcheted in my inner ears.

I opened the DHI driver program. I needed a password and I just clicked through it, KCAJ/ZENOBIA/1132. I didn’t have to figure it out, I just remembered the patterns of Marena’s fingers on her phone from the night before, although ordinarily I wouldn’t be able to do something like that. The stuff was already getting to me.

I looked through all her work. She’d saved about ten copies of each version of the Sacrifice Game we’d played since I’d been back, and each one had a different silly name. At first I couldn’t find the current model but finally I clicked up something called Molly Niven’s Ringworm and it turned out to be an automatic backup of everything we’d worked on when we’d played the Game a few days ago, including the setup of Koh’s last position. It took me another twenty-score beats to get it going. Marena definitely hadn’t made it easy for me. I felt like Bluebeard’s eighth wife, turning forbidden doorknobs and listening for a creak on the stairs.

There was a little bar graph on the phone interface and I moved it halfway to the right. The difference was like how things looked when I first got two eyes back again. The pyramid-world seemed to get bigger somehow, except it didn’t actually grow, its edges were still in the same place, and I could still see the room around it, but it was like I’d risen up in this secret dirigible sky fortress and I was looking down through at this vast multilayered mesa-pyramid Game-pueblo through my ultra-high-power Master of the World Giant Brass Telescope. I moved my finger a few millimeters to the right again and without losing clarity I was another fifty or so kilometers above ground level and the city had expanded to the scale of a mountain range. It was like that Vertigo effect, where you track the movie camera forward while you zoom the lens down from telephoto to extreme wide-angle. I got my finger on the part of the table that worked like a joystick, and I leaned closer and moved my point of view down and in, and it was like I was diving at a more-than-possible acceleration and I could feel my pituitary gland pumping adrenaline and tightened my grip on the edge of the table, but at the same time I was still totally aware that I was sitting on a hospital bed. In fact, if anything I was more aware than usual of how my body was part of the world. Marena’s design was all spare, like an idealized city by Piero della Francesca, but it was also homey somehow, like you wanted to live there. It was something about how every part implied every other part, it made it like a real place, or the essence of place, it had that particularity that places had in the old days or when you were a child, before you could see how the Plasticland strip-mall grid had tightened around the world. A beat before I hit the green center of the mul I pulled back and there was an instant of stillness right over the apex as my parabolic course reached its nadir, and then I wafted back up over the courts and floated below the hard turquoise shell of the sky like I was in an upside-down Great Salt Lake.

Rapraprap. Another nurse-knock.

“Mr. Sic?” She pronounced it like “sick.”

“Uh, hi, yeah, just a beat. Just a second.”

The food order was here already. It seemed like it had only taken about forty beats. Actually, the thing was that even though the tsam lic made everything slow down for you-so that you had all the time in the world to calculate-it also kept you from getting tired, and you’d get involved with what you’re doing and lose track of time. I signed Marena’s number to a thirtypercent tip. I’m a kept man, I thought. It looked like Grgur had pawed through the stuff, not found any weapons, and let it pass. I closed the door, rolled the cart up against it, and locked the casters. Okay. I ran some water over a towel and laid it along the base of the hall door. I got out my box of personal stuff. I dug through it and found a small cotton sack and a foil-wrapped stack of black disks like miniature hockey pucks. I set one disk on an upside-down cocoa saucer, took four big copal crystals out of the bag, and laid them on the disk. I took a book of matches out from under my scrotum and touched a flame to the charcoal. Spark worms crawled through the disk, melting the crystals into boiling resin. A thin sticky smoke-snake drew itself up to the ceiling, filling the room with that clearing resin scent. It eddied toward the exhaust fan. I dug around some more, found a pack of Camel regulars, and lit one up. Camels have a bit of chocolate mixed in with the tobacco. Of course it’s mild compared to the old stuff, but it’s got something right about it. I purified the four directions and sat smoking for a few score beats, picking grains of tobacco off my tongue, feeling a cold electromassaging bodysuit of silk-fine woven magnesium slip over my skin. The tsam lic didn’t seem quite the same as before, but it was definitely kicking in.

I put out the stub and peered back into the softworld. It felt like the precredits sequence in The Spy Who Loved Me, when he skis off that cliff and falls past all these interestingly striated rock formations while it takes forever before his parachute opens. From a distance the landscape underneath me was more numerical-not strings of digits the way a computer would think of it, but constellations of coordinates on the nodes of vast curves-but as I got closer I could see it more as a weirdly weathered landscape, Monument Ice Valley as redesigned by Eero Saarinen, bluffs and buttes and interlocking rock bridges coalescing out of the mist and eroding away again, not like Gibsonian cyberspace but all pale and fragile and mysterious.

My disembodied eye settled on the apex of the mul, paused, and then seemed to unreel away from the apex in a widening equiangular spiral, spinning fourteen hundred and forty degrees around the sanctuary in a condor-smooth glide through the coordinate ether. Potentiality-paths radiated out from the mul like the hundreds of thin spokes on an old Alfa Romeo wheel, crisscrossing each other in that reverse-slant pattern at four different angles. The closer the paths were to the base-to the nexus at the present-the more similar they were to each other, but as they diverged off into space-time they bifurcated and quadrifurcated into vegetal veins pulsating with events that each caused infinities of new events until the branches broke up into vast pixilated patterns of three-dimensional archipelagoes over the four-dimensional ocean, stretching out to the fogged horizon at 2012, and the thing was to trace the single path through the matted snarl that could lead you to that edge and beyond it, like the gold thread in Queen Zixi’s cloak. The tsam lic was a flexible process, and to someone else it might seem totally different. I attached my point of view down into the Quarry and stood on top of the mul. It would be way too lame to say it was an amazing view. Or inspiring prospect, or whatever. It was like I could see anything I wanted, I had the whole observation platform to myself, and the only problem was that there were still a few more even higher ridges visible ahead of me. When I was playing the Human Game with Koh I’d just gotten a scruffy glimpse of the peak I was now standing on, squinting up at it through veils of snow and ash. And now that I was so solidly there, it was like, so what was so tough about that?

I felt for the keyboard and called up LEON. The processors had been thinking all night, and almost all day, now, and they’d come up with a move. I touched INPUT.

Everything shifted around me. I stayed the same. Now it was like I was standing at the edge of a low cliff at the tip of a sterile promontory, not that high up but a little too high to jump and survive, and much too steep to climb down. So from where I was in the Game-world-at least the way I was visualizing it at the moment-I could see 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.