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.
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.