In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato Page B

doing it for a while and I had most of it written up. Then at least everybody’d have it. I’d kept putting it off because—well, a few reasons. I felt like I hadn’t figured it all out yet. It was still tough to learn and harder to master. Also, I had a few things I wanted to take care of with it myself before I attracted any attention. Well, frankly—I wasn’t going to mention this, but maybe I should level with you, now that we know each other a little better—the truth is I was saving up to sponsor a blind-contract hit on García-Torres. It’s not an easy thing to do these days, since the people you hire tend to turn you in even if they actually do the job. Still, I thought . . . but still, the other thing was, it wasn’t even clear that putting the Game out in the world would be the best thing. Maybe it would be like with nukes; it’s bad enough that some crook politicians have them, but it’s still better than giving one to every nut on the planet. Hmm, mmm, mmm . . .

Except, the thing is, if Warren was trying to keep a lid on, why’d they let Taro talk to Time ? If they couldn’t keep the Codex from getting published, because too many Mayanists knew about it, they might have asked him to say something lukewarm—

“Would you like to see the current game board?” Taro asked.

I said sure.

“I should not be showing it to you because it is absolutely secret, but of course you helped develop it and I know we can trust you.”

I said thanks. Damn, I thought. I’d been a real pisado . It was all choking me up a bit, actually.

Taro clicked it up on the screen:

    Whoa, I thought. Simple. Elegant. Sometimes you look at something and it’s just obvious it’s right.

Damn. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

“Huh,” I said. “And, uh, this one’s based on the Codex, uh, Nymphenberg?”

He said largely, yes.

I spent about half an hour clicking around the board, trying different calendrical assignments and getting used to the interface. It wasn’t so hard to adapt to as I’d have thought. One tends to think of game boards as always being the same size, like 9 squares for tic-tac-toe or 64 squares for chess. But that’s not really true. Some people teach chess to newbies on a 36-square board. Shogi, or Japanese chess, has 81 squares. A standard Go board has 361 points, but even serious players sometimes play quick games on boards with only 81. Serious tic-tac-toe people play on larger or multidimensional boards. In feudal Japan, generals and courtiers used to play shogi on 625-square boards filled with all sorts of wacky pieces like blue dragons, evil wolves, and drunken elephants. And of course, in episodes 1-2, 1-3, 1-20, and 3-14, Kirk and Spock played chess on that trilevel board that you can now get a replica of from the Franklin Mint. So the Sacrifice Game is the same way; you can play on a larger or smaller board without changing the rules or even changing the strategy all that much. But it can take a long time to get really good at playing on a new scale. I could do nothing but kid around with this for ten years. Damn it, this is the right stuff, I thought. If I’d been using this version I’d have made billions by now, not just millions. Taro’s company must be picking trades with this thing. If they’re not, they’re insane. Well, don’t worry about it. Focus.

“I think I’m ready to try it out,” I said.

“All right,” Taro said, “I have the first question.”

I fished my packet of chaw out of my watch pocket. “Ajpaayeen b’aje’ laj k’in ik’ . . . ,” I said. (“I’m borrowing the breath of today.”) I tapped the screen five times, cast some so-called virtual seeds over the board, and snuck a look behind me, at LEON. Ripples rolled up through the fluid as the thing started to really think. I nodded that I was ready.

Taro threw me a few softballs and then started asking tougher questions. Suddenly the new board seemed bigger than I’d thought, as though my