Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

It wasn’t hard to get her on board, though. Even though she’d thought I still wanted to kill her.

“I know what’s happening,” I said, “and I can stop it.”

Well, actually, I had to put in another few words.

“Look,” she said, “if you’re not going to save Max, I’m not interested.”

“We’re going to save Max. And everybody.”

“Who cares about everybody?”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“All in the light, then,” I said. “Fine.”

“Fine. Tell me.”

The center gate led right into the long covered arcade approaching the stadium lobby. There were four checkpoints of greeters and identifiers and guards, and a few thousand neo-MARCOSite protestors they were keeping at bay but Marena biometricked herself through the gauntlet, and her vouching for me worked again. We came into the Warren lobby, which was now a kind of far-up-the-scale food court, or food empyrean, as it seemed to be called, laid out as an idealized diagram of a human body. The air was breezy with what Jed’s memory said was extra oxygen pumped in.

Marena piloted me down the center aisle, around a green central square filled with ears of quadricolored sweet corn and up into the food court’s head, past counters of fish flesh and strange fruit. The thralls behind the counters were working screens of base-twenty abacus-calculators. Once in a while she squeezed my arm, cutting into it with her nails, like I was an overturned canoe. We walked into the Hyperbowl entrance. The high false arch was flanked with animated DHI video statues of the athletes performing their greatest feats and routines over and over again, monuments of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, when Warren really got going. We passed through a sound cone and heard a snatch of John Tesch’s voice: “ At this time we’d like to extend our condolences to the family of Greg ‘The Leg’ Nagel, our beloved Jaguar forward, who passed away during practice earlier today. As we all know, Greg’s outstanding stats included…”

Trapezoidal doors slid open and shut around us and the air changed to some designer mix, cool but still tropical and scented like a disinfected rain forest. It was almost quiet because of the active sound baffles, but there was the roorsh of artificial waterfalls and conversation.

“Let me carry your handbag,” I said, grabbing it on the second word.

The lobby was almost large enough to enclose the Ocelots’ mul. But it was still all in earth colors, with five kinds of grass growing out of slits in the granite floor and clusters of furniture twisted out of unfinished hardwood. There were about two thousand people milling around on the floor in black and white clusters dotted with much more colorful neo-Maya outfits, all mood-lit by pin spots slowly roving through the gloom. I noticed Shaquille O’Neal and a few other emeritus basketball players sticking up out of the crowd like spirit poles in a cornfield. There were also quite a few officers’ uniforms, Belizean, British Territorial, and U.S. In the center of the room, where the information kiosk would have been, a giant thing rose up three rope-lengths, almost too confusing-looking to name at first, a tower, a ceiba tree, a poplar tree, a wooden stele, a stone stele, a high-angled pyramid, a Christmas tree. The ornaments were all DHI spheres, most of them running different views of the Ix IIa softworld. One of them showed a slowly rotating readout of today’s soon-to-expire Maya date:

On the far side of the lobby high-arched corridors led through to what I figured were the stadium seats. There weren’t any crowd-control stanchions that I could see. Good.

The first person we knew who saw us was Michael Weiner, in full NeoMaya drag.

“Hi,” I said. “Wow. You look absolutely… uh… suburban.”

He opened his mouth and then shut it. It was a true-bliss moment.

“Tony?” he asked.

“Hi,” I said. He didn’t clap me on the back, like usual, so I clapped him on his. He had on a sort of carcanet, a quilted ceremonial collar, and I managed to get the brown Bug Bom planted on it without anyone noticing. The colors didn’t quite match, but I figured nobody would notice. “How’s my favorite thing on the History Channel?” I asked.

“I’m, I’m fine,” he said.

“Yoo-hoo!” someone said. She pushed through to us. She had hair. Very faintly, Jed’s crumbling Book of Uay’s Names seemed to read that they called her Ashley 1. She was holding a phone, which I guess she’d spotted us on.

“Come on,” I said to Michael. “We’re going to go talk with Lindsay and I want to ask you both something. Okay?”

“Uh, okay,” Michael said.

“You are so great,” A 1 said to Marena, talking loud above the noise of the crowd. “You actually decided to make it!” She’d met Tony Sic, but she didn’t recognize me, although that didn’t mean much because she was as dumb as a bag of squashes. Two bags. “So, great, great, great,” she went on, “let me show-”

“Thanks,” Marena cut her off. “Listen, could you find Lindsay for me?”

“Uh, okay, he’ll be thrilled you made it-”

“It’s really important. Seriously.”

“Sure.” She held her phone up to the crowd and waved it around. “Okay, I got him,” she said. I looked over Marena’s shoulder at the screen. It turned the real architecture behind it to a wire-frame model of the room with little security-tag dots floating around.

“Okay,” A 1 said, “Lindsay’s this pink dot with the L.”

“Great,” I said. It meant he was over behind the Tree of Life, under the giant display screen. Marena clocked him herself and led me left and down a flight of stairs on the left out onto the floor and around a tableful of barbecued emu skewers and would-be primevally menacing ice sculptures and into a darkened area behind a row of dichromatic halogen spots. Michael and Ashley 1 followed along.

“That’s Bob Costas over there,” she whispered to me.

“Who?” I asked.

“There.”

“Huh.”

“You know, the great many, many award-winning sportscaster,” she said. “He’s here with John Tesch.”

“Oh, right, that’s, yes,” I said. “That’s a big deal.”

“Exactly,” Ashley 1 chirped, brightly. “Defini tive ly. Great, great, great.” She went back to pointing out all these people you’d never heard of. Well, at least, I’d never heard of them. In the old days we would have said they were mouse-uayed people pretending to be felines. Here I guess we’d just say they were irretrievably B-list. I caught up with Marena, but some ditzy-grinned lady had buttonholed her.

“Uh, Tony?” Marena said. “Michael? You guys know Peggy Noonan, right? Peggy Noonan, Tony Sic.” The woman held her hand out.

“Hi. Wow, the Leni Riefenstahl of speechwriting,” I blurted out, before I quite knew what I was saying. “It is nice to meet you, but your hand has too much blood on it.” She froze for a split-beat. “Your old boss had my parents killed.” Noonan turned and stalked off. Jed would never have had the nerve to say that, I thought.

“Thanks a lot,” Marena said. “It wasn’t Jed who said that, was it?”

“No,” I said. “But I support some of Jed’s causes. Jed is an old friend.”

“You’re such a self-righteous cornball,” she said. “You’re dis-fucking-gusting, I mean, I don’t love her, either, but for crying out bloody tears.”

“What’s going on?” Michael said. “The last thing I heard you were in real trouble.”

I mumbled something.

“There he is,” Marena said. Lindsay was about thirty steps femaleward of us, standing under the Tree of Life, ringed by a bunch of what looked like investors. You had to hand something to him, he had this whole vast private-army black op going on right at this moment and he was standing here shmoozing like he didn’t have a care in the world. A waiter held a tray out at us.