Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Two evaders had been taken out in the shuffle-that is, intersected with and caught by a catcher- but they didn’t kill them since it wasn’t necessary yet, they still weren’t really counting ahead. The pair just slunk off don’t-notice-me-ishly through the forest of erect catchers, as neatly arranged in their staggered ranks as North Korean parade soldiers.

“Now wait,” Koh said, her herald repeating. “Now

He goes on seething, now she’s resting, breathing.”

She meant they were supposed to hang out where they were for a beat. The catchers looked impatient, gesturing at the remaining evaders like they were trying to grab them from a distance. I would have thought it was insubordinate, but it really meant they were already trancing into their roles. Koh’s attendant set her Game board on the table, and positioned a close-weave basket and little brazier on the mat just upstage of it. Koh undid the knots and uncovered the board. From where we were sitting the cleared Game-zone in the zocalo below us and the board in front of us both seemed about the same size, like if you had two eyes you could look at one out of each eye and focus them together to get a stereo view. The attendants descended onto the apron beneath us and spread out to the edges, so that no one would be so high as Koh and I. Unless you counted the old trog-in-the-box.

Alligator Root must have signaled the drummers at the first sight of the flame, because in unison they launched into double time.

“First runner, move to fourteen Night,” Koh said.

I moved it. My role in this thing was actually pretty mechanical. I was just supposed to translate the positions of the human pieces onto Koh’s board and wait for her move. “You can’t keep track of all the strains,” Koh had said at some point, I forget when. “You need someone to hold them down.”

Alligator Root called the move out to the zocalo. The runner with the red streamer walked circuitously to his new position. The colors were going Disney on me, like the ninestrips of Technicolor they used in the Bahia sequence in The Three Caballeros. About thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twenty people on the peninsula, I thought, and then I realized I’d guessed the number by counting the people in a small section of zocalo and multiplying it out, and it had taken me less than a beat. I felt like I could count a swarm of a million-plus bats coming out of a cave. Not even. I could instantly count a swarm of midges floating up out of a dead whale by counting the legs and dividing by six. Just for the hell of it I made up a couple of integrations, did them in my head, and checked them. Right on. My Jedman powers were coming back. I could see the parabolas like they were giant intersecting towers of Lego bricks, warm colors for even numbers, cold for odd, metallic for prime.

The blue of Koh’s face was seeping into the regular flesh tone, and vice versa. I sniffled so I wouldn’t have to wipe my runny nose. Gods didn’t do stuff like that. I ran through a few distribution tables, 0.5040, 0.5438, 0.5832, 0.6271. I let a tear or two fall out of my eye and socket. I was feeling a little restless and weak and everything. I can handle this, I thought. I reached into the jars, counted out a red corn-skull for each runner and a blue one for each catcher, and reset the position on the world-board around us. It’s hard to describe, but it seemed to me like the mul we were on was just the central peak of an unimaginably vast plateaued landscape. Koh thought for twenty beats and twenty more.

“Two entering, twelve striking, northward eight,” she said.

Her herald repeated it and the catchers and quarries shuffled again, separating and weaving together like threads on an invisible Jacquard loom, multiple warps coming up through the weft, heddles and treadles and shuttles and lams. There was a moment of near-stasis as the lead runner moved upward through suns of the same name again and again, days from the past turning up in the future, and then the catchers and quarries added up their combined and respective totals, each called out his result, and then each moved again, that much farther forward on the basis of the others, blasting through progressions it would take Encyclopaedia Mathematicas — full of tables to even hint at, and then they’d melt into a different rhythm, like gears on a Pascal adding machine, the Quarries spiraling away from the meshing circles, stately, microscopic, and terrified, until one of the Quarries was caught between two catchers, and they all stopped while the nacom walked out and strangled him with a red-and-blue ribbon.

Invisibles carried the body off the court.

The idea here, briefly, and to put it in a way Koh wouldn’t have, was that the closer you are to death, the more of your own event cone you’re able to see. Not many of the human pieces would survive the Game. But their counts would be preternaturally insightful. It was cruel but effective.

It was already dark. No twilight in the courts of the sun. Who said that? Damn. Forgetting things. The Usher Gods had lit torches inside tall vertical cylinders of oiled rushwork, almost like giant paper lanterns, and the rows of them glowed in lavender and deep sea-snail purples. Two skeletons flopped up the stairs of the mul, only a hundred and ten steps below us. They weren’t really supposed to be on the mul, but this was kind of like an anything-goes Mardi Gras where all the roles are reversed, one of those masters-wait-on-the-servants kind of things, and I guessed it was okay as long as they couldn’t get up here or see the board or whatever. I looked at Koh but she was way too out there to get distracted. I could probably have leaned over and kissed her and gotten zero reaction. Koh’s Porcupine Clown flop-danced up after the skeletons, staggering and reeling on the edges of the steps like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. He shouted at them to get back down off of there, and then, when they didn’t, to jump. Even I had to laugh, he was really kind of a pantomime genius, like Grock or David Shiner. I’d never seen anyone move like that. For a beat he seemed to be walking along my arm and I realized I’d lost my scale and couldn’t tell which was bigger, the insect board in front of me or the human one on our left, or the celestial one overhead. I tried to focus on the blue-green center of the board. At least it was easier than if I’d still had two eyes. Turquoise really is an excellent color, I thought. There just wasn’t enough of it around. I have got to get more turquoise stuff. Koh intoned another little number jingle, programming the interactions faster now. Without any warning the main runner, the one with the staff, seemed to get caught between two human points on vast intersecting ellipses, and the other catchers rushed in like T-cells rushing to spin a net across a wound. The main runner handed off the streamered staff to another runner on an adjoining square, and the nacom executed him, and the array settled again. The other runners were off in the Northwest, still pretty isolated from the hunters, but at this rate they might not last the length of the game.

Koh regathered her seeds and counted them out again, shifting back and subtracting, and gave the herald another directive, and the human net dissolved and reformed, the invisible spider spinning her a dewy web and eating it and respinning it and eating it again. I was beginning to see a bit of a pattern in it, not more than the kind of vague sense you get when you look at a long row of successive calculations and try to guess the function they’re coming from, but for a beat I thought I had a notion of how the Sacrifice Game had grown, back when things didn’t change so much, when technology and population increase were barely factors at all, and the main thing was just to keep going, not to stay on in a bad place, not to get caught by bad weather, and the tribal knowers nurtured the craft over those big empty millennia between Late Paleolithic and Historic, working out settlements, summer and winter camps, lookout fortresses on the frontier, dividing territory, spreading alliances out into space and time, locating the freeholds for new families, seeding new cross-pollinated strains of humans out into the vastness, the universe focusing into the great-great board, and that focusing into the miniature one, and that one focusing into our brains. And all the time, like I keep saying, it wasn’t any magic or fortune-telling, it wasn’t supernatural, it was just a big human computer, and to run it right you had to be a kind of symphony conductor. And, as you know, if you’re a classical music fan, with a tricky composition, some conductors just get it and some don’t. Koh was one of the last of a tradition that just knew or felt some mathematical trick other people had forgotten, something about spotting potential catastrophe points way in advance. She was at 910 AD. 1353. 1840. Oh, my God, she’s going to do it. 1900.