I said no, not really. Maybe my tongue felt a little numb and frisky, but I wasn’t giddy or anything. Given what a long day it had been I felt totally in control.

“Well, listen, if you take the court,” she said,

“You can always have this with you just in case.”

I said something along the lines of “Sure, whatever.” You’re delusional, babe, I thought. I guess again she could tell what I really thought because she said something like “Well, we may not need it anyway,” lit another pair of cigars, and handed me one. After a few puffs we exchanged cigars. It was a gesture of extreme hospitality.

I leaned back on Armadillo Shit and puffed. We exchanged cigars again, completing the little ritual.

“Just now this picture flew through me,” Koh said. “What would you say to it?”

I pointed to my ear, meaning that I was listening.

“If you could really move your ruling uay from one skin to another,” she said, “then you could stay on this level forever. You wouldn’t have to paddle downstream through the canyons.” She meant I wouldn’t have to die.

That’s right, I said. I could just possess someone younger. She was right. I’d thought about that particular implication of the consciousness transference only a couple of times. But there wasn’t any reason it wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t have to invent all the gigantic neural nets and zettabyte storage networks and everything else you’d need to make a mechanical substitute of the brain. You could just have yourself copied and zap into whoever. Or if you felt bad about killing someone that way you’d just clone a few babies of yourself, keep them drugged and unconscious until they get to a good brain-size age, and then use them as vessels. It might be a good growth industry to get into, I thought, another few billion for the Warren Organization.

Still, I can’t do this from here, I thought. Let’s not build castles in the air. Deal with the here-and-now here and now. And then if you get Back to the Future you can take care of Marena and Lindsay and the Warren Group and the whole unholy crew. Right?

Warren. Lindsay “Big Data” Warren. Christ allwhitey. Back to Square Zero. Hell.

Everything I’d gone through in 2012 seemed pretty remote. Once in a while I’d even catch myself thinking it hadn’t been real, that I was just a regular Maya ballplayer with delusional paranoia and a lot of imagination, and I’d have to remind myself that no old Maya dude could have made up the history of the entire Western world, no matter how clever he was.

And how clever am I? I wondered. Maybe Koh’s right to worry about 2 Jeweled Skull. Maybe I should worry more. Maybe I didn’t worry enough about coming here in the fucking first place. Maybe I hadn’t been that thoughtful about that whole business with the Warren Corporation.

I don’t know, Idunno, idddnnnow. I was getting pretty sure that Marena wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of dealing with me if she hadn’t been thinking of sending me even then, from before the beginning.

Maybe Tony Sic never really wanted to go in the first place. The more I thought about it the clearer it seemed. They’d needed somebody inconsequential, so naturally they’d chosen little yo. Fruck. Yuck. Well, the joke’s on me HOT! OUUUCH, TA’, TA’, TA’! Shitskies! There were all these scalding drops of water on my face and I brushed them away. Confusion over us. Somehow I was lying on the ground and Armadillo Shit was rolling on top of me, squealing a little like he was in pain. Orange flies. Two bloods were pulling on me and we all fell back I squinted into the dark forest, toward the river. Hun Xoc and another person were rolling over broken pottery and pools of liquid. There were a couple of big thumps, Hun Xoc butting his head into the other person’s face. I looked around for Lady Koh and couldn’t find her and then it turned out she was behind me. She had a funny expression and at first I thought she was in pain but then saw that she was laughing silently. She’d gotten a few drops of hot stuff, too, but her dwarf was already daubing them with ointment, like one of those movie makeup people who rush in and redoes your entire look in the two minutes between takes. I looked back at Hun Xoc. The others were holding him up. The man he’d butted with his head was still on the ground, mashed and moaning. You couldn’t make out much of his face anymore, but his threadbare manto had been newly edged with Lady Koh Blue, which implied that he was one of the village elders who’d been adopted into our household and was, supposedly, serving us.

Well, I thought, I guess he really had tried to kill us. But I was laughing so hard that it took everyone a while to explain to me that it had been an assassination attempt, that the dude had tried to throw a pot of boiling oil into our faces. They also explained that we were under attack again, but even though I could hear the alarm calls and the whistles of bull-roarers, it still all seemed incredibly funny to me, no prob, no sweat, no brain, no pain, and I still couldn’t stop giggling.

They bundled me into a sled and we took off. I squinted up at the beige sky. It turned pink and then green and then, oddly for a sky, it disappeared. Boy, I guess that crud really does creep up on you after all, I thought. So let’s see, if it had taken about a hundred-score beats to hit me last night, it might take three times as long in cold water, so maybe you could count on over a half a day of delay. Maybe Koh really had a point with that stuff.

Nobody’d gotten anything out of the village greatfather who’d tried to kill Koh or me or both of us. The other elders said he had been out foraging the day before and had probably gotten co-opted by the Pumas then. The Harpy bloods started to kick the other elders around but I was pretty sure none of them had anything to do with it and got them to let them go. My good deed for the month. Well, the year. Lifetime. It was hard to even tell them what I wanted since I was still cackling like a moron, but Hun Xoc asked Koh whether I’d had too much wild tobacco-which was strong enough to be hallucinogenic in medium doses-and Koh said probably. She didn’t want to tell the Harpy Clan or even the Rattlers about the earthstar compound until the last possible moment, in case somebody got captured and turned.

Again, embarrassingly, I giggled. Maybe things weren’t really so bad.

In the youth of the fifth sun following we were in a desert again, and a sixty-blood Puma raiding party somehow got ahead of us under cover of a sandstorm. For a while our bloods dug in and protected our flanks, but by dawn it was clear from the long-distance way the Pumas were fighting that they were just trying to hold us up until the main body of troops under Severed Right Hand could get to us. So we started off, without even going after them. It’s like in Go, sometimes the more you ignore the opponent and don’t even deign to respond to what he’s doing, the better off you are. We kept our convoy in the closest thing to a real defensive march formation we could manage but took some losses on the flanks. Hun Xoc led a party of running spearmen ahead and then back, to try to come up on the Pumas from the rear, but they kept ducking into dry-gulches and getting away. You still couldn’t see much out here, it was like those crummy overpriced photos of Mars.

All during the march that day we-I mean we fearless leaders-ran back and forth and counted and formed up the squadrons. As soon as night covered us three hundred and twenty of us hotshots split off from the big line. 1 Gila’s whole group and thirty-one score Rattler bloods were with them, so they weren’t defenseless. But we hardly sent any Harpies with them, only a score of 14 Wounded’s men and four Ixian Harpy bloods. Good luck, guys, I thought. Have fun taking the heat. Poor bastards.