We should go in before we get smoke-cured, Hun Xoc said behind me.
I signed. The musicians stepped it up and crescendoed. The crowd answered. I withdrew my divine fucking presence and we stumbled back into the sanctuary.
At this point the only bloods in the sanctum were me, Hun Xoc, Alligator Root-who was acting as his hands-and Mask of Jaguar Night. Then there were my four bearers holding my mat and staff and private box, five attendants, and thirteen workmen huddled in clusters on heaped bags of gravel, holding unlit torches and bundles of flint axes. I signed for them to open the floor-door to the Nether Throat.
You should really go with 1 Gila, I said to Hun Xoc.
I wouldn’t enjoy it, he said,
“Now that I’m just a lump of dough with eyes.”
I next to you am sorry about that, I gestured.
Just tell your new clan about all the ball games we won, and list the captives we took, he said.
I said of course I would. Yeah, I’ll tell the gang that once there was a fleeting wisp of glory that was known as Camelot. And they’ll be like, so what?
Still, I did at least get the Sacrifice Game skillz, I thought. And the drugs. That’s something I haven’t quite fucked up on. Yet.
If it still works after all that time. Maybe when you take it out of Toyland the magic drains out Squelch. Cancel. Can But wait, even if everything works, how likely is it that your little rotten brain is going to work? Not bloody. Memember, Mebecca? They’ll screw it up, you’re just going to rot. I wasn’t even sure I’d made enough gel, the lodestones I’d managed to get seemed weak, maybe I didn’t have enough salt, maybe it was too wet down there, the sandbags might not work FOCUS, I yelled to the projectionist behind my eyes. Don’t even think about it.
The true flaming hell of it was, I thought, I didn’t even feel displaced or centerless or whatever here anymore. I felt at home. Even if I did get back to Planet Dismal I’d feel exiled there. I guess that’s part of the punishment, I thought, you only get things when you don’t want them anymore.
I sent a single torchbearer down ahead of us and let them carry me down the steep inner stairs. They were still dirty from the last excavation. Everyone followed except six of the workmen, who were going to fill the staircase up after us. The ventilation tubes had been cleared, too, and the Jaguar-adders’ singing from the ritual outside came in through the pipes and feedbacked around in the stone. I’d say it was like a death march except its melody didn’t repeat or resolve itself, it was more kind of an ever-rising fugue of sad, extended tonal interrogations, questions you felt you must have asked a long time ago and now somebody was asking you, and you didn’t have any answers. We went down three hundred and sixty steps from the top of the mul into the Jaguar’s caverns, the bearers lowering me in time with the beat of suspended logs on the facades resonating through the stone, the entire mul acting as a drum:
Throoomb,
Throoomb,
Throoomb…
(78)
T hrooomb,
Throoomb…
FOMP.
The shock wave punched through the stone and then the sound came and went suddenly, a round echoless explosion like a report shell in a sound studio, and then migraineish pain through my head over an absolute silence I’d never experienced before. The pressure had popped my eardrums.
So what, I thought, I won’t need them. Finally, after a lifetime of noise. It was a kind of peace you could get used to.
I was already in the uterus-shaped sarcophagus, sitting upright like it was a bathtub. I must have looked kind of silly. There were only three other people in the room, Hun Xoc, Alligator Root, and my attendant. Mask of Jaguar Night and the rest of the workmen and attendants had been out in the collapse. Just as well I can’t hear them screaming, I thought, if that’s what they’re doing. That would have harshed me out. Hun Xoc was leaning his callused elbow-stumps on the rim of the casket. We smiled at each other. A drop of blood scrolled out of his ear, wobbling on his cheek, threatening to detach and fall on me, but then it didn’t. I pointed to my ear and Hun Xoc nodded and made a casting-off gesture. I thumped my right hand on his left shoulder, the equivalent of a thumbs-up. He raised his left elbow-stump to his right shoulder, the pledge position. Still just a couple of old vets.
The tomb’s inner chamber hadn’t been decorated, but the prepared white limestone walls were covered with charcoal cartoons for reliefs that would never get carved. The small square room was bare except for the four piles of lodestones, one in each corner, and in the center the mahogany scaffolding surrounding the ovary-shaped coffin with its arm-length-thick granite walls. The thick stone lid hung a half a rope-length above me, suspended on hemp ropes and counterweighted by two huge embroidered sandbags plopped on the ground like severed testicles. Then there were four big bulging liquid-baskets suspended from the ceiling, two on either side of the scaffolding, filled with the thin solution that formed the base of the aminoplastic gel. It was basically salts, my imitation camphor powder, and a few different anesthetics suspended in a mixture of urea formaldehyde, and methanol. Each basket held more than enough of the stuff to overflow the casket. The rest were just for fail-safe. And that was about it.
Okay, Step Two, I thought. It’s easy. Don’t rush it.
I signed a “now” to Alligator Root. He poked a bone dagger into the marked zero on the liquid-baskets. Horrible-smelling yellow stuff shot out, like the thing was a urinating mastodon. He got the attendant to hold the bamboo trough under the stream so that it flowed into the casket. The stuff felt colder than water, like rubbing alcohol, and at first it splashed up over my face. Alligator Root wiped me off and handed me the Little Cup, mint pulque mixed with about five percent of belladonna tea and a few other tranqs. I chugged it down. If I’d dosed it right it would have me nearly knocked out just before I drowned. No matter what anybody says, suffocation is not a fun way to go. He reached in and folded my pillow-sandbag so I could keep my head up out of the liquid.
Cool. Step Three.
I reached down and opened my right femoral vein with my little finger-knife. The Formalin-like compound stung the wound for a few beats before the anesthetics numbed it out. The idea was that as I slowly bled to death some of my body tissues would soak up the solution to replace lost body fluid. Not that this would keep the body viable-that part was going to be a total loss-but just to more closely approach a state of deep hypothermia. I took a last look at eight jars of salted toads and scorpions and puppy dog’s tails and stuff I’d packed where my other foot used to be. They looked okay. I was bringing back enough little druggy-critters to dope up a herd of wildebeest.
Four. I signaled to Alligator Root. Hun Xoc made a wan grin that meant, “Sorry I can’t help out too.” Alligator Root held up a sealed jar the size of a coffee can. I eyed another okay and he broke the top off and poured the hardener into the casket near my feet. It was thicker than the base solution, like maple syrup, and when it hit the pooling liquid in the casket it extruded out of its glob in threads, folding over my legs, spreading and dispersing in the solvent. Basically I was being cast in a kind of a simple organic epoxy, with a few extra metal salts that were supposed to preserve my neuronal structure more or less perfectly-not so much that you could get the same brain going again, but enough so that you could map the changed connections onto the new brain, Jed 1 ’s brain, enough to recover the memories.
Memories, I thought. Not consciousness. You’re dying, dude. It’s going to be Jed 1 hanging on to them, not you. Not you, your self -