In the Courts of the Sun (3 page)

Bueno.
Got it. No problem.
Ready? Just shout it out. “I am the blinder,” et cetera. They’ll hear the prediction, they’ll wait to see if it’s true, and then, when the sucker erupts, I’ll be too valuable to kill. In fact, they’ll probably set me up with my own shop. A modest fifty-room palace, three or four hundred nubile concubines, maybe a pyramid or two. Or maybe they’ll even make me the ahau. It’ll be like Lord Jungle Jim crashing his plane in the jungle. Just flick your Zippo and the cannibals’ll pull you out of the stew pot and call you Bwana White. No sweat. Right? Right.
Estas bien.
Deep breath. Go.
Go.
Nothing.
Okay. Go.
Nothing.
Again. Go. Shout. Now!
Frozen.
Oh, hell.
Come on, Jed, you know what to say. Spit it out.
I am the blinder of the coming sun.
Come on. Open the mouth. Open mouth. All I have to do is open my—
MY
MOUTH.
Oh hell oh hell.
¡Ni mierditas!
Okay, come on, guy, come on—nnnnnNNN
NN
Nh!!!
I strained to pry my jaws apart but the only physical effect was a distant ache, like somewhere I was biting a rock.
Oh Christ, oh Christ. This can’t be happening. Chacal
cannot
be in control of this body. It’s mine. Come on. Move. Anything. Just
squirm
, for crying out loud. Raise hand.
Nothing.
Raise hand.
Nothing.
Raise hand,
raise hand!
Raise
finger
—
Hell.
We screwed up, we screwed up. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
We took five formal steps toward the lip of the staircase. I strained against his body. There was no effect. It felt as though I was strapped into an industrial robot, maybe like the one in
Aliens
, and it was just marching along pre-programmedly while I couldn’t even find the controls. We stopped. Our toes projected just slightly out into the void.
I knew that we were exactly 116½ vertical feet above the surface of the Ocelots’ plaza, or 389 diagonal feet by way of the two hundred and sixty steps. But it seemed twice as high now, and not just because I was smaller than I’d been. We looked down into the vortex of the receding planes. Vertigo pulled at us. The turquoise stairs glistened with pink suds, a mixture of maguey beer and the blood of previous sacrifices. The steps were edged with triangular stones that made them look serrated, like hacksaw blades. Architecture as weapon.
The idea was that I’d leap down the stairs, with as much grace as possible, and by the time I got to the bottom I’d be in several different pieces. And they’d all grab up my parts and then, probably, mix me into tamale meat and distribute me throughout the tri-pyramid area.
Well, hell. That’s some really bad luck. Maybe I’d been expecting too much. I’d thought I’d just cruise back here and be all set, curled up in a nice clean brain inside the big chalupa of the whole place, and that since I was in charge I could do roughly whatever I wanted, I’d have a decent chance at getting the dirt on the Game, I’d build my tomb just the way I wanted, I’d live it up a little, no problem. If that had—
Stop it, I thought. Stick to the reality. The reality was that I was simply
not
in control of Chacal’s motor neurons. I was just along for the ride, just hanging out somewhere in his prefrontal cortex. And he was totally, reverently, imbecilically determined to kill himself—in spectacular and heroic fashion—in only a few seconds.
“Fourteen suns, fifteen suns . . .”
The pitch of the chanting rose higher. They were cheering me, egging me on, and I felt the urge to leap, floating higher on the wave of their expectation. They were so hopeful, so eager, and they only wanted one little thing from me. It felt like anybody in this position might jump just because he was caught up in the excitement. Maybe it is the right thing to do—
No. Squelch that thought. Come on, Jed. Just push this doofus out of the driver’s seat, grab the wheel, and turn the damn car around. The locals’ll fall right into line. No sweat—
MA! Chacal snarled around me. NO!
I felt a constriction tightening on my thoughts, a kind of mental lockjaw, and for an indeterminate amount of time I was all just the plain panic of claustrophobia and suffocation. At one point I thought I started to scream, and then I noticed my lips weren’t opening, my lungs weren’t pumping, nothing was happening. I was just standing there, looking cute, flipping up inside, just sheer terror, repeating myself, oh God, oh God, oh God, and then I thought I could hear or sense Chacal’s consciousness laughing, almost cheering, almost, in fact, orgasming.
Well, this is it. Old Jed’s last moment before the click of oblivion, which in fact was seeming more and more attractive.
Estoy jodido.
I’m fucked. This is it, this is what it’s like, death—
Waitwaitwait. Snap out of it. Get back on track.
Think!
En todos modos.
Bad break. Regroup. New tactic.
What we need to do here is . . . uh . . . what we have to do is get old Chacal here on our side.
Right. Okay.
Chacal? I thought at him. Let’s just cool out for a second.
Prenez un chill pill.
You don’t have to do this.
Silence. That is, mental silence.
Chac man?
Compadre
?
Let me tell you something. Okay? Okay. All this around here isn’t everything. There’s a whole lot more to the world. Just take a peek in my memories. You can see in there, right? Check it out, Europe, Asia, computers, marshmallows . . . you see how relative everything is? Look into my memories. Bet you didn’t know the earth was ball-shaped. Cool, huh? And there’s other stuff. Doesn’t this maybe provoke a few tiny second thoughts?
YOU ARE A SCAB CASTER’S MAGGOT-
UAY
AND THESE ARE YOUR USUAL LIES, Chacal thought.
Huh? I thought back. I didn’t get all that. At least we’ve got a dialogue going, though. That’s good. Okay. Chacal? Listen. You
know
I’m not lying. We’re a team now. We’re in this together. And I, for one, am just fine with that. What do you think? I think we’ll do very well together. Chacal?
YOU ARE POLLUTED AND YOU ARE AFRAID. I WILL NOT LET YOU DEFILE THIS PUREST OF PLACES.
Fine, I thought. Whatever. Look, come on, Chaco dude. Wake up. You’re being used.
IT IS TOO LATE FOR YOU. I HAVE MADE THE DUTIFUL DECISION.
Oh. Okay. Well, good, I respect that. At least you do realize there isn’t any One Ocelot, right? Not in any Womb of the Sky or anywhere else. That’s just propaganda. You know what propaganda is? Anyway, the thing is, even if it was the right decision at the time, the right thing to do now, even in terms of helping out your family, say, may be to at least see what I have to offer and then—
SILENCE FROM THE MAGGOT-UAY.
“Seventeen suns, eighteen suns . . .”
Okay, look, Chaco, let’s just give it a shot, why don’t you let me just say what I have to say and then see what happens. I promise that for both of us, things will improve dramatically—
NO MORE FROM YOU.
One second. I really have some ideas here. A few days and you’ll be in charge. Crush your enemies, reward your friends. Live it up. I have magic. I’ll just say a few really powerful—
NO!
It was his last word on the matter.
There was another constriction around me, tighter. Can’t breathe. Can’t think, even.
Nnn.
Come on. Resist. Have to get him to say the thing, one way or another. Think of something.
Nnnnn.
Okay. Come on, Jed. It’s still quite possible that you can control this guy’s movements. Maybe he’s not really the dominant consciousness. Maybe he just thinks he is. It’s probably just a matter of point of view. It’s all about strength of character. Taking charge. Be a mensch for once.
Come on. Just show him you’re tougher than he is. Say it!
I am the blinder of the coming sun
. Say it. Come
on
, Jed, assert your
chingado
self for once.
I am the blinder of the coming sun.
Come on,
TWIST THE WHEEL
! Get it out.
I am the blinder of the coming . . .
Nnnnt.
“Nineteen suns . . .”
Come on, Jed old guy. Resist this jerk. Resistance is
not
useless. I strained.
Nnnnnnnn.
Jed! Hey! Now!
You
must
do something. Talk, scream, grunt, anything . . .
NnnnnmmmmNNNzzznnkk. Fuck!
It was like being hopelessly constipated, straining and squeezing and getting nothing, nothing coming out, nothing—
“Zero suns.”
Come on, Jed. Save the Project, save the planet, save your ass, come on, just this one time, got to do something, something, come on do something clev—

ONE

The Qarafa of Megacon

[1]

B
ut hold on a second. Maybe we’re getting a little too cute here.
Maybe I’m throwing too much out at once. Maybe we need to answer some basic questions. After all, this is a deposition of a kind. I have a whistle to blow. So maybe I should take it a little seriously and not get coy, and briefly run through how the hell I got here. Maybe you can’t escape at least a smidgen of backstory any more than you can escape, say, the future.
My full name is Joaquín Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda. Unlike most Maya Indians I was born in a real hospital, in a small city called San Cristobal Verapaz, in the Alta Verapaz area of southeastern Guatemala and thirty miles west of the Gulf of Honduras. SCV is about ninety miles northeast of CG, that’s Ciudad Guatemala, or Guatemala City, and ten miles west of T’ozal, the village, or really the hamlet, where I grew up. My naming day, which is more important than my birthday, was three days later, on November 2, 1974, or, in our reckoning, 11 Howler, 4 Whiteness, in the fifth uinal of the first
tun
of the eighteenth k’atun of the thirteenth and last b’ak’tun. This was exactly one million eight hundred and fifty-eight thousand and seventy-one
k’inob—
suns, or lights, or days—since the first day of the Long Count calendar on 4 Overlord, 8 Dark Egg, 0.0.0.0.0, or August 11, 3113 BCE. And it was a mere thirteen thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight days before the last sun, on 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowribs, on the last day of the last k’atun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun. That is, before December 21, AD 2012. Which, as you probably already have heard, is the day they say time stops.
My father was a half-Hispanic K’ekchi speaker and something of an intellectual by local standards. He’d gone to the Santiago Indigenous Institute in Guate City and ran the area’s rudimentary school system. My mother spoke Ch’olan, which, of all the living Mayan dialects, is the closest to the ancient southern Maya language. Her family had been displaced from Chiapas in the 1930s and was now part of a small Ch’olan enclave south of their main concentration. I learned more than most of the local kids did about who we were and the history of the country and whatever. But I still didn’t know much. I knew that in the old days we had been architects and kings, but that now we were poor. Still, I didn’t know our culture was dying. I thought our
akal,
that is, a house with cinder-block walls and a thatched roof, and—Jesus, I grew up under a
thatched roof,
for God’s sake, it’s like I’m Grout of the Cave Sloth Clan, I can hardly believe it myself sometimes—and our
jon-ka’il,
the town plaza, was the center of a very small universe. When I look back on it, it seems pretty benighted. But really I suppose I didn’t know much less about history than the average U.S. public-school kid does today. Most people probably have an idea there are all these odd-looking ruined pyramids somewhere down south. A smaller group would be able to tell you there were ancient people down there called the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Inca, and the Maya. A lot of people might have seen the Maya in the Mel Gibson movie about them, or they might have been to Mexico City and seen the ruins of Teotihuacan. But it would be unusual to just run into someone in the U.S. who could tell you, say, what the differences were between the Aztecs and the Toltecs, or who would know that there were a lot of other equally accomplished but less famous people, like the Mixtecs and Zapotecs and Tarascans, in the area from Central Mexico to Honduras that we now prefer to call Mesoamerica, or that the Inca lived thousands of miles to the southwest, on a whole other continent, so that as far as we Maya were concerned, they might as well have been on Neptune.
There are also huge stretches of time between the flowerings of these different civilizations. The Toltecs hit their peak around 1100. Teotihuacan was largely abandoned sometime between 650 and 700. What they call the Maya’s Late Classic Period lasted from about AD 600 to 850, and by the time the Aztecs were getting started, about six hundred years later, the Maya were in an advanced state of political decline. The old saw in introductory Mesoamerican studies is that if the Maya were like the ancient Greeks, the Toltecs and Aztecs were like the Romans. Except that the only thing the Maya really had in common with the Greeks was genius.
Now, of course, these days you have to say each culture or whatever is outstanding in its own way. When I was in school there was a day when they went around and changed all the labels in the university art museum so that instead of reading, say, “Dung Fetish, Ookaboolakonga Tribe, Nineteenth Century,” they’d read “Dung Fetish, Ookaboolakonga Civilization, Nineteenth Century.” Like five huts and a woodcarver and it’s a civilization. But the sad fact is that cultures are like artists: Only a few of them are real geniuses. And of all the world’s genius cultures the Maya seem most to have bloomed out of the blue. Phonetic writing was only invented three times: once in China, once in Mesopotamia, once by the ancestors of the Maya. Zero was only invented twice: once near what’s now Pakistan, and once, before that, by the Maya. The Maya were and are special, and that’s all you need to know.
Not so many people know even this much, probably for two reasons. One is plain prejudice. The other is that it’s probably fair to say that probably no other civilization, and certainly no other literate civilization, has ever been so thoroughly eradicated. But there are more than six million living speakers of Maya languages left, more than half of whom live in Guatemala, and a lot of us still know something about the old days.
My mother, especially, knew something. But I had no sense there was anything remarkable about her, beyond being the most important person in the world. And I suppose you could say there wasn’t, except for one little thing she taught me about in 1981, during the rains—when I got sick, as our padre charmingly put it, “unto death.”