In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato Read Free Book Online Page B

Central Asia, but pretty soon the research had led them to the Americas.

A lot of anthropologists at the time tore down the idea. And it did sound a bit like another Thor Von Danekovsky cult-archaeology crock-pot contact theory. But Taro was really a mathematician and didn’t care. He was a pure researcher and one of only a few people working on the overlap between catastrophe theory, the physics of complex systems, and recombinant game theory, or RGT. RGT is basically the theory of games like chess and Go, where the pieces form different units of force in space. Economists and generals and whoever have been using classical game theory—which is mainly about gambling—since World War Two, but applied RGT only really got going in the 1990s. Taro’s idea was that using a reconstructed version of the Sacrifice Game as a human interface could significantly improve performance in strategic modeling, like simulations of economics, of battles, or maybe even of weather. He’d had some experimental success with it before he even met me, but he said he wanted even more spectacular results before he published anything. His lab had worked up dozens of different reconstructions of what the original game board might have looked like. We all put in hundreds of hours, both before and after I went to college, trying to dope it out. But the thing that kept stopping us was that even if we’d been sure about the design of the board, there was no way to know what the exact counting protocol had been in the old days or how many seeds or pebbles or whatever they’d used. So Taro decided to try another approach. He brought in brain scanners.

I still had my five quartz pebbles from Guatemala. In fact, they were the only things from there I still had, since the tz’ite seeds had eroded to pink powder and had been replaced with Skittles. I’d only scattered—that is, played the Sacrifice Game—a few times since I’d been in the States. But when I started again, sitting all wired up in a Ganzfeld chamber in the basement in Provo, it seemed like I’d been a beneficiary of the particular sort of improvement that comes from not practicing. At first they had people in a room on the other side of the building acting out different scenarios, and I’d try to predict those. I did pretty well. Then we found it worked better when the experimenters were actually losing money, or getting hurt, or something real. After a few months we started working on events in the real world, the spread of the AIDS virus or the first oil war or whatever, which was a lot harder to set up controls for. We kept beating the odds and getting better and better but still on an agonizingly gentle curve. He said my calendrical savant thing was helping me play faster but that so far I wasn’t really playing deeper. That is, I wasn’t focusing enough. I was like, well, I’m a teenager, how should I be able to focus at all? Anyway, five years later, when I started working with Taro again at Yale, he’d given up the isolation tests and was back to trying to crack the design of the original game board. By the time I left we were using two runners and playing on a game board that worked better but which he still didn’t think was the original layout. It made the Game more flexible but also easier to play, even though it was more complicated than my mother’s design:

    My break with Taro was over something stupid. I’d thought my tuition was getting paid by the Berlencamp Fund and by his lab at Yale, but it turned out the money had come from FARMS, the same lunatics he’d been working for back in Provo. I’d known for a while that the foundation was a Mormon soft-think tank dedicated to proving, among other things, that American Indians are the descendants of the Tribe of Joseph. When I got into my angry Pan-Maya Coalition phase it started to really bother me and I grilled him about it. There’s no pleasing some people, right? What an ingrate I was. Am. Anyway, he said