Free In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato

ball of rock and frozen gases will miss the earth by at least fifty thousand miles.

For the 2.3 million Mayans still living in Central America, the date betokens something nearer home: The twenty-first has also been set as a limit for talks in the renewed treaty effort between the small Central American state of Belize, a British protectorate, and the Republic of Guatemala, which in 2010, for the fourth time in a hundred years of disagreement, again claimed Belize as its twenty-third state, or departamento.

If the opportunity passes, the day might bring another era of disaster to the Mayans—but a resolution could begin a new era of peace in the troubled region.

U.S. efforts to aid the peace process have been complicated by the fact that the Mexican government has blamed a 2010 accelerator explosion in the Oaxacan city of Huajapan de León—in which over 30,000 people were killed—on Zapatistist indigenous-rights groups, Indian revolutionaries operating out of Guatemala and Belize. But if the region is not stabilized, there’s also media trouble ahead: Many observers fear that the International Olympic Committee might favor other sites than Belize for the 2020 Summer Games.

What clues are there in the Codex Nurnberg? Along with the astronomical data usual to Mayan texts, the book is said to mention both the date of the accelerator blast and a celestial event that could well be Comet Ixchel. Predicting the future based on images of “year-bearers” in the images of rabbits, centipedes . . .

Whoa.

The old squirt of tzam lic under my left thigh. Something wasn’t right about that last word. Centipedes.

I couldn’t get a grip on what it was, though, and of course the harder I tried the more it slipped away. Come back to that one later.

. . . centipedes, blue deer, and green jaguars may seem a bit far-fetched. Interpretation will be, to say the least, a long and difficult process.

Aside from the Codex, does the divination game itself have anything to teach us? Professor Taro Mora, a physicist and specialist in prediction models who has been studying Mayan games with Weiner’s help, clearly thinks so. Mora, a spry sixty-eight-year-old who spends most of his eighteen-hour days “teaching computers to teach themselves,” waxes enthusiastic over its potential.

“There is much to learn from ancient approaches to science,” Mora says. “Just as we are using Go [an ancient Japanese strategy game] to help computers develop basic consciousness, we may use other games to teach them other things.”

Way to go, Tar babe. That’s the way to wax, if you want to wax at all.

Asked whether the game held any insights about the world’s eventual end, Mora joked, “No, but if the universe does disappear, at least we will know the Maya were on to something.”

Could the End Date foretell an unhappy event for the Mayan region, or even for the entire world? And if so, what should we do about it?

Many people’s answer seems to be, “When on Mayan time, do as the Mayans do.” Thousands of visitors from all over the world, and from all walks of life, are already planning trips to Chichén Itzá and other popular Mayan sites, waiting to salute the comet, greet the dawn, and ask the old gods for another five thousand-plus years for humanity. And while most of us wouldn’t go that far, we should be willing to entertain the possibility that the mysterious Mayans had far-reaching spiritual insights into their future—and, possibly, our own.

Pendejos, I thought. Morons.

No, wait. I’m the moron.

The minute—well, the decade—that I leave Taro alone, he comes up with the goods. I felt like I’d held a stock for thirty years and sold it just before it took off.

Well, I thought, I certainly can’t just wait until you decide to publish. I need to see that game board this minute. This second. This picosecond.

I searched up Taro’s page. It said he was at the University of Central Florida, and that the lab was now being