It’s a heavy, fragile, floppy organ, but I found and cut the vena cava and the portal vein, got both big lobes out-along with the gallbladder-and plopped them into the dish. An acolyte wiped my hands with palm oil. I took the dish, turned, and walked up into the sanctuary. It was darker inside now but there were still flares burning and a single feline acolyte crouching in the back next to the heirophant’s casket. I set the basin down on the old great-mat. The acolyte lifted the old man’s torso. He looked at me and then bent down over the liver to inspect it. I came forward and watched. He turned it over. It seemed like a big, healthy, blood-rich sucker, but then he reached into the fissure between the left and quadrate lobes, and pointed to a smelly little abscessed necrosis, like a popped tube of anchovy paste. He looked at me.

“All right for now, but not for later,” he rasped. Or, well, his voice was a little thinner and finer than a rasp. “He sanded”? “He emeryboarded?” “He nailfiled?” Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t get any more out of him. He was set on being difficult. I thanked him, did my little obeisance, and walked out back to the threshold.

“Kimak-kimak,” I said. “All’s good to swim,

Forward, four times four hundred solar years.”

The crowd answered with a din like a giant cave full of sea lions. Just to show off, the ordinands released 18 Jog and let him stand on his own for a beat. He just stood there for five beats. His chest and legs were solid red but he was still alive. Finally he tried to take a step toward me but tilted forward, and just as he was about to fall into my arms the acolytes caught him and held him while the nacom expertly sawed the rest of his head off his body and handed it to a preparator-acolyte for wrapping. There was almost no blood from the neck. The ordinands released the body again and the nacom nudged it downstage, over the lip of the saw-stairs. It tumbled over and down almost noiselessly. The crowds went silent for a beat and then slid back into a softer, more awed-sounding cycle of the chant. I felt this wave of protectiveness of them, and I could feel how grateful they all were, love and relief rising off them like heat waves. Sacrifice can create this incredible bond, maybe the strongest bond you can have with more than one other person at a time. And especially with throngs of people you haven’t met. There’s this community epiphany, you get a rush of shared exaltation of surviving on together. You know so clearly you’ve all felt the same thing and lived through the same little terror, it’s like you’ve just had sex with everyone there.

They rolled the next batch of sacrifices down the stairs alive, just to get the party mood going again, first Loopy, then Retarded, and then Jock, Sullen, and Scuzzy all at once. Since the atole was finished it was all right to pollute the stairs with inferior blood. They bounced over and down and around and around, glortching and squealing, their movements defining five separate arcs from living to dead. To the audience-I almost said “to my family”-it was pretty much the funniest thing in the world. Great sense of humor, guys, I thought. I shoulda brung some tapes of The Benny Hill Show.

An acolyte tapped the platform next to my foot. I turned. He was offering me a regulation-size ball, freshly wrapped out of white rubber ribbon. Its glyphs said 18 Jog’s head was inside, just in case there was any doubt. I took the ball and held it over my head. I could feel the inrush of breath underneath me. I threw it down the steps. It bounced higher and higher as it fell lower, finally arcing high into the crowd, and then bobbing from one lucky person to another as they hipped it back and forth across the square.

Pitzom pay-ee, I thought. Let the Game Begin. I signed for Koh’s escort to bring her out. The hissing rose up again from Star Rattler’s mul. The snake poured down her steps again. The crowd below scattered aside. The mul’s temple doorway, recently resculpted as Star Rattler’s giant mouth, vomit-birthed a big blue egg-box and flicked its rattle against it. The egg exploded and Koh emerged headfirst, like a baby, in a cowl of metallic green beetle shells sewn in a celestial map onto a manto pieced from the skins of four hundred black iguanas.

She floated up the steps toward me, twice as tall as her actual height, carried by a pair of dwarf bearers hidden under her long star-scale-skirt. Four of her own attendants followed her, two steps behind. It was a little out of the ordinary for her to be here and there’d be some muttering among the oldsters. But really, since the gifts were over, women could step on the holy ground without polluting anything. Anyway, things are gonna be different around here, I thought. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

I reset my stilt-sandals on the sharp lip of the threshold and nearly fell forward again. In the smoke and the amethyst half-light things seemed closer than they were, even without depth perception. A new set of Harpy Fliers had climbed the poles and were spinning downward, and the Ocelots were dancing through the costumed celebrants, rocking and almost falling, strutting and voguing, uninhibited but also totally controlled. It wasn’t like a nightclub or anything, actually it was just the old men who were supposed to really dance, and the others just sort of bopped. But the righteous dub ran through everything. It was so different from the dour, stale Teotihuacan vigil. It had a sense of beginning. A lot of the spectators and dancers were popping off into orgasmic trances, but even so, they still kept pulsing to the same gemutlich beat. There’s really nothing nearly so powerful as tribal fellow-feeling. And as I watched the rough edges of artifice disappeared and I forgot the dragon had legs, or that there were ropes holding the fliers in the air. The revelers’ masks fused to their flesh and pulsed and rippled and grimaced. I could feel my smile flowing through to the scales of my jade mask, everything meshing. The dancers’ back racks unfolded into pulsing mating displays, the gods’ power rising off them in clouds of musk, and it wasn’t a ceremony anymore but the event itself, gods kicking up the world just for the hell of it a long time ago, now, and again. It was a childlike feeling but it also had this brooding, shrouded purposefulness to it, and a bittersweetness about how I was part of a we, and how we were all so pathetically grand, so hopeful, so alive, I got this love-twinge and felt tears soaking my face-padding. It sounds sappy but it’s really comprehending the quiddity of whatever it is, the what-it-is-ness, how limited it is, how much we could love only each other, that really gets you. Twenty-first-century people haven’t lived at all, I thought. You’ve got to go for it, you have to string yourself along the thread where sex and violence and pleasure and pain and egotism and oblivion all intersect on the intensity graph, to this point of exhilaration without concepts, just thereness, that pure no-doubt living-goal insects feel, and if you haven’t gotten there at least once it’s like you’ve been looking at the ocean through a window without ever swimming in it. Or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time.

Koh rose up in front of me. Invisibles spread the ancient great-mat at the edge of the platform. I stepped onto it and sat down-so slowly that it took over a minute-facing north, so that when I looked over my left shoulder I could see the vertiginous rush of the Steps and the whole roiling zocalo. Actually, the entire area between the two great pyramids was considered a kind of ball court. But it was at least a hundred times the area of an actual playing trench, much too big for humans to play on. Instead the balls were the planets and moon and sun. Normally it just worked on its own, slowly, but in this one ritual Koh and I were going to bounce them forwards ourselves, and use the people to mark where they might land.