Read Online In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato - Free Book Online
Authors: Brian D’Amato
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players in the field. So I worked up histories of most of the big individual investors and started treating them as absent players in a giant Sacrifice Game. Usually I ran about twenty long-range climate simulations and then bought straddles on stuff that looked unclear. Pretty soon I had a slight but definite edge. Six months ago I’d banked my first half-million, and now I was heading into private-plane territory. Speaking of which, I thought, I’ll lock up a little cash right now. Good idea. SELL 3350 DECEMBER CONTRACTS at 223.00 at MARKET to OPEN, I clicked. Hah. I hit COMPLETE TRANSACTION, counted the zeroes twice, and lay back on the floor.
Hot spit, I thought. Yes! I am KING of the FUCKIVERSE! ¡¡DOMINO EL MUNDO!! I RULE THE WASTELAND!!! Finally. I’m an eater, not an eaten. It was like the eyes that had been on either side of my head had migrated to the front and given me binocular vision. Predator, not prey. Dang. Next thing you know old Jed’s a thrillionaire.
Hmm, what to do next? Well, I thought, with great power comes great responsibility. I must use my abilities for the cause of good.
I called Todd Rosenthal at Naples Motorsports. He was an early owl and he picked up his business line.
“Okay, I’ll take the ’Cuda,” I said. It was a Metalflake Aztec Red 1970 hemi collapsible hardtop, 383 block, all-original metal, new electronics, numbers-matching monster that I’d had my eye on for a while, and I’d dickered it down to only $290K. He said he’d have it and the papers trucked over by 9:00 A.M. so that I wouldn’t have time for second thoughts. Click.
Ahhhhh. That’s the ticket. Doing my bit to make the world a better place. Wouldn’t want to let some cracker show monkey get his hooks on a work of art like that. I already had a ’73 Road Runner parked outside, and another Barracuda in the Villanuevas’ garage, but I hadn’t quite reached Plymouth saturation. I have kind of bad taste. It’s more fun than the other kind. Okay, now what? Maybe a little oceanfront property. Just a medium-size island, a loaf of bread, a jug of Squirt, a twenty-thousand-gallon reef tank, a five-thousand-gallon Jacuzzi, a couple of J-porn starlets, and a Vatnajökull Glacier of pure Colombian rock. Simple pleasures. Oriental vixens desire liquidity. No problemo.
Naturally, the rush didn’t last. Two hours later I was still in my special spot on the floor, blinking up at the overhead screens, doing a reading for a client—one of the few I’d never had the heart to blow off—named Mother Flor de Mayo, from the Grace Rural School. She was wondering whether to finally retire this year.
“¿Podré caminar después de la operación?” her old voice asked over the speakerphone.
“Déme un momento,” I said. I was having some trouble because her surgery was scheduled for the morning, and for some reason the Game had always seemed to work better on things that happened later in the day. “Estoy dispersando estas semillas amarillas y las semillas negras—”
Codex. The word had popped up in the high-priority Google Search window on my trading screen. I clicked it up. Usually if anything comes in it’s from a pretty obscure post, like the Foundation for Ancient Mesoamerican Research or the Cyberslugs Webring, but this was an article in Time :
An Ancient Book . . .
Whoa. Tzam lic.
That is, that sheet lightning under the skin.
An Ancient Book with Modern Relevance Comes to Light in Germany
The “Codex Nurnberg”—an eighty-page Mayan book that has been gathering dust and speculation in that city’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum since the 1850s—has, finally, been read.
The lead photo showed the top half of a page from a Maya codex, a delicate drawing of what they call Waterlily Jaguar sitting in a field of Classic-period-style glyphs. That is, the forms were pre-900 AD.
Ni modos. No way, I thought.
“¿ Joaquinito? ¿Está allí?” Mother Flor’s voice asked.
“¿Madre? Perdóneme,” I said.
Hot spit, I thought. Yes! I am KING of the FUCKIVERSE! ¡¡DOMINO EL MUNDO!! I RULE THE WASTELAND!!! Finally. I’m an eater, not an eaten. It was like the eyes that had been on either side of my head had migrated to the front and given me binocular vision. Predator, not prey. Dang. Next thing you know old Jed’s a thrillionaire.
Hmm, what to do next? Well, I thought, with great power comes great responsibility. I must use my abilities for the cause of good.
I called Todd Rosenthal at Naples Motorsports. He was an early owl and he picked up his business line.
“Okay, I’ll take the ’Cuda,” I said. It was a Metalflake Aztec Red 1970 hemi collapsible hardtop, 383 block, all-original metal, new electronics, numbers-matching monster that I’d had my eye on for a while, and I’d dickered it down to only $290K. He said he’d have it and the papers trucked over by 9:00 A.M. so that I wouldn’t have time for second thoughts. Click.
Ahhhhh. That’s the ticket. Doing my bit to make the world a better place. Wouldn’t want to let some cracker show monkey get his hooks on a work of art like that. I already had a ’73 Road Runner parked outside, and another Barracuda in the Villanuevas’ garage, but I hadn’t quite reached Plymouth saturation. I have kind of bad taste. It’s more fun than the other kind. Okay, now what? Maybe a little oceanfront property. Just a medium-size island, a loaf of bread, a jug of Squirt, a twenty-thousand-gallon reef tank, a five-thousand-gallon Jacuzzi, a couple of J-porn starlets, and a Vatnajökull Glacier of pure Colombian rock. Simple pleasures. Oriental vixens desire liquidity. No problemo.
Naturally, the rush didn’t last. Two hours later I was still in my special spot on the floor, blinking up at the overhead screens, doing a reading for a client—one of the few I’d never had the heart to blow off—named Mother Flor de Mayo, from the Grace Rural School. She was wondering whether to finally retire this year.
“¿Podré caminar después de la operación?” her old voice asked over the speakerphone.
“Déme un momento,” I said. I was having some trouble because her surgery was scheduled for the morning, and for some reason the Game had always seemed to work better on things that happened later in the day. “Estoy dispersando estas semillas amarillas y las semillas negras—”
Codex. The word had popped up in the high-priority Google Search window on my trading screen. I clicked it up. Usually if anything comes in it’s from a pretty obscure post, like the Foundation for Ancient Mesoamerican Research or the Cyberslugs Webring, but this was an article in Time :
An Ancient Book . . .
Whoa. Tzam lic.
That is, that sheet lightning under the skin.
An Ancient Book with Modern Relevance Comes to Light in Germany
The “Codex Nurnberg”—an eighty-page Mayan book that has been gathering dust and speculation in that city’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum since the 1850s—has, finally, been read.
The lead photo showed the top half of a page from a Maya codex, a delicate drawing of what they call Waterlily Jaguar sitting in a field of Classic-period-style glyphs. That is, the forms were pre-900 AD.
Ni modos. No way, I thought.
“¿ Joaquinito? ¿Está allí?” Mother Flor’s voice asked.
“¿Madre? Perdóneme,” I said.
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