Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  He spoke with great sorrow. Zoe sipped her coffee. Tell him. Tell him what you've never told anyone before.

  "There is so much hatred. I fear that my mother will be locked away. My dad's pension has been commandeered. These things are real, whether or not the Card Sharks are real. I've got to do something, Mr. Dutton, even if it's wrong." She caught her breath. "I have - I have a wild card power. It's not a great power, it's just this little thing I can do, and I trained myself years ago never to use it. There are other things, things like money and political clout that might help the wild carders now, but I don't have those things, not any more. I've lost a lot of what I thought was me, since my partner framed me for embezzlement. But that doesn't mean I want to come out of the deck."

  Through the closed door, she could hear murmurs of sound, the jokers doing what they could to protect each other.

  "I'll send momma to Jerusalem. I'll talk to your Twisted Fist people, because I might need them someday. I'll get my latents out of the country, the ones who work for my company. There are thirteen of them, Mr. Dutton. But maybe you knew that."

  Dutton said nothing.

  "That will take every cent I have, but that's okay. I'll get momma out, and Bjorn. I'll start there. Then I'll deal with this embezzlement mess. I haven't done anything wrong. Things are bound to work out for me. The court system is designed to protect the innocent, isn't it? This thing with the company is just an awful nightmare mistake, that's all it is."

  Dutton sighed. "More coffee, Zoe?"

  "Yes. No. Yes, half a cup. It's not like I can use my ace when I want to. I don't know how to use it! And I don't want to. It's ugly, it's strange. Mr. Dutton, I hate what I am underneath this, but this is me, too." She held her hands palms up, her fingers stained, as always, with residues of the chemicals she still worked with, CEO or no, for she was good at finding the mixes, it was as if she shoved the molecules into place - and she moved her hands to indicate her flat belly, her long thighs, like a model on a runway pointing out design details. "But I've got to learn to use my ace. I've got to stop hiding from it. But I don't want to. I want to keep on hiding in the nat world. But I can't. I'd hate myself, every morning, if I did. Who can help me?"

  "Turtle," Dutton said.

  "Turtle? That man's a bag of neuroses! I mean, there's defense mechanisms, but his are made of armor plate!" And needless to say, she wasn't neurotic, or defensive, at all. No way.

  "He's in town for a week." Dutton rummaged in a drawer, extracted a business card, and handed it to her.

  Thomas Tudbury. A California address. There was a Manhattan number scrawled on it in ballpoint.

  A knock sounded on Dutton's thick door.

  "Zoe? Zoelady? You ready to go?"

  "Yes," Zoe said. "Thank you, Mr. Dutton. I think."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Zoe tried to slip in quietly, but they were already awake. Anne, in her chenille bathrobe, sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Bjorn, always warm in his fur, wore seersucker jogging pants. He paced back and forth, blowing on a cup of chamomile tea.

  "Wups. You heard me leave, didn't you?" Zoe asked.

  "No," Anne said. "But we worried, a little, when we found you were gone. I have to admit I'm - concerned - about this cancer thing, Zoe. That's why I woke up, I guess."

  "Mother. The clinic. You can't go there." Zoe put Dutton's folder on the kitchen table. She shrugged out of her windbreaker and sat down. "Momma, you've got to go to Jerusalem instead."

  "It's that bad is it?" Anne asked.

  "I fear for you."

  "Bad times have come and gone," Bjorn said.

  "This is different. Maybe the Sharks are real, maybe they aren't. But until this craziness is over, I want you safe."

  Bjorn sat down. He looked mean and big. It was just his fur standing on end, but it did make him look scary.

  "You're right, daughter. I'm afraid that this time you are right. We'll go."

  "Good. I want you to call a travel agency and book tickets to Jerusalem for you and Anne. And get me the price of tickets from New York to Saigon. I'm going to be buying quite a few."

  "Quite a few?" Anne asked.

  "I can't leave yet, not with this grand jury nonsense. But the latents who work for me - pardon me, that's who worked for me - they can get out. I've got to talk to them. Damn. What time is it?"

  "Don't swear, darling. It's six."

  "I can get to Maria's place before she goes to work. I need to talk to people face to face. Can I shower first, daddy?"

  "Don't stay in all day, is all I ask. I've got to walk my route, you know."

  "You're not going to the clinic with momma?" Zoe asked.

  "Last time I was in the clinic, I ended up getting married," Bjorn said. "Anne says for me not to come."

  True. He had come to the labor room and waited through Zoe's birth. "Must be mine," he'd said to the delivery room nurses. "Look at that red hair." Father Squid had married them while the nurse on duty had stitched up Anne's episiotomy. The doc had been attending a transformation crisis and hadn't made it into the room until later. It had been, Anne said, a typical night at the Jokertown clinic.

  Zoe got her shower and came back to the kitchen. Bjorn, his bifocals perched far down his nose, turned over the last page of the morning Times and looked up at her. "Daughter? I don't want you to use your money for these tickets."

  "I can't desert these people! I know that most of them don't have the cash to get out! I can't just watch them get slaughtered! Daddy - "

  He stared at her with his "I won't take this nonsense from you, young lady" expression. "You need your money for your lawyers. Your mother and I have been talking. I have a savings account that isn't part of the pension. It just might cover the costs on this rescue of yours."

  "It will leave you with no safety margin."

  "I'm old. Your mother isn't so young. These workers of yours are young, and some of them have children. Let's get them out of here."

  "You've always said not to run away from problems," Zoe said.

  "Running away can be the only good choice, sometimes. This looks like one of those times."

  "I can't let you do this," Zoe said.

  "Since when, young lady, have you begun to decide what your parents can and cannot do?"

  "Since never. Thank you, daddy." Zoe bent down and hugged him, hard. She hid her face against his chest, afraid that he would see her thoughts, and what she was thinking was - Daddy's contribution gives me a little more slack. Needles, Jellyhead, Jimmy, Jimmy and Jan, you're getting out, too.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  He just wasn't what she'd expected. Maybe she wasn't what he'd expected; the short little man took a step backward, his hand still firmly on the hotel room's doorknob, and looked her up and down. This was the Great and Powerful Turtle? This graying, paunchy, blue-collar nerd? She knew he'd written Shell Games, the Turtle's story, himself, even if it had been published with an "as told to" name. She'd caught a glimpse of him on Arsenio once, but the cameras hadn't given her the leprechaun look of him. He wore chinos that were baggy in the butt, and a rust-colored shirt, some sort of brocade. But he looked like he'd be happier in a coverall, one with "Turtle" embroidered in red over the left pocket.

  "Mr. Tudbury?"

  "You're Zoe, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Come on in. Charles Dutton just called. Good thing he did, too. I was ready to call this off. Dutton made me change my mind." He waved her toward a table by the window, stacked with the remnants of a room service breakfast - for two. No bed, the room held a couch and end tables, and a desk with a laptop and modem.

  "Want some coffee?" he asked. "Lemme get a clean cup, there's one on the dresser."

  "Uh, I didn't mean to intrude ..."

  "You're not intruding." He ducked into the bedroom of the suite and came back with the promised cup. "Danny's in the shower." He poured coffee for her, indicated the sugarbowl and the cream pitcher, and sat down with a definitive thump, as if he p
lanned to stay in his chair all day.

  "I got another hate call this morning. The hotel usually screens the calls pretty well, but this was a real nut case. Gave the right names, you know, and then it turns out to be some fanatic who insists that the shell's forcefield, whatever that might be, made his roses die. He'll probably sue. They all do."

  Turtle projected a sense of restless energy. He wasn't doing real well with eye contact. "It could have been worse," he said, as if he were talking to himself. "It could have been someone who lost someone on the Rox. To save people I loved, I killed people I loved. That's a bitch. That's such a bitch." He stared out at the bricks outside the window until Zoe thought he'd forgotten she was there. The shower kept running, and CNN's electronic ta-da-da-dat! came from the bedroom. "My old friend Charles says you want to be a hero. Do you?"

  "No!"

  "That's good. Only fools want to be heroes." When he smiled, he was a different person. "What do you want, then?"

  "Mr. Dutton thinks you can help me learn to use my ace."

  "Ace, huh. What makes you think you're an ace?"

  "I've got a power. I can't use it when I want to. I tried so hard to pass as a nat that I guess it just got ... repressed or something."

  "I'm not a shrink," Turtle said.

  "No. You're an ace. How could I trust a shrink with this?"

  "Good question. What's wrong with being a nat?" Turtle asked.

  "Nothing!"

  He was looking away again, and she feared she had lost him; he looked as if he were thinking about showing her to the door. "I've lost my company. My VP has framed me with an embezzlement charge. My father lost his pension because he's a joker. The feds are about to put jokers in fucking concentration camps! And maybe this shit about the Card Sharks is fake, or maybe it's real, but if it's real, it must be stopped. About the only asset I have left is a little wild card power that I can only use when I'm scared to death, and it's not any help because I don't know how to use it!"

  His guarded look was replaced by one of wry amusement. "Embezzlement, huh? I've only been stuck with insurance fraud myself. So far."

  "But I didn't embezzle anything."

  "You don't look the type."

  "I'm not the type."

  "You look like a total yuppie. I'm not comfortable around yuppies."

  "I'm sorry."

  "You're sorry. You've got money problems, is all I've heard so far. Money problems! Let me tell you about money problems. I've got the IRS on my ass, the City of New York wants me to fix the Brooklyn Bridge, the feds want the Statue of Liberty put back, on my tab, and that's only the money part! That doesn't even begin to get close to what I did to those jokers on the Rox!"

  "My mother's got cancer, and I think the feds are going to lock her up in a Biological Research center! It's not just money, Mr. Tudbury."

  He'd hunched his shoulders up as if he were trying to pull his head down beneath his collar.

  "The tabloids said you didn't do anything but stir up some water. They say the kids went to never-never land. Some sort of alternate reality business. Jumpers, jokers, and all," Zoe said.

  "You want me to believe the tabloids?"

  "It would beat believing that you're a mass murderer."

  "Yeah. It would. Some of the bodies were real, though. Kids in uniform, serving their country, or trying to. Jokers floating in with the tides, and the ambulance crews afraid to pick up the bodies, couldn't be convinced the wild card wasn't like AIDS. Sometimes I ..."

  He looked dazed, as if the world had slapped him, hard. Zoe pushed her chair back, leaned across the breakfast dishes, and reached for him. She held his face in her hands and kissed him, gently, half-convinced that she'd gone mad, and totally aware that a buttered muffin was squashed against the pocket of her Versace blouse.

  The shower had stopped running. The woman who had been in it stood in the bedroom doorway. She was drying her red, red hair with a towel, and she wore another draped like a sarong.

  "Oh, sorry to interrupt. Tuds, you have more old friends than a politician."

  Zoe disengaged from what was turning out to be a lingering and very satisfactory kiss, brushed crumbs away from her blazer, stood up straight, and offered her hand to the naked woman.

  "Zoe Harris," she said. "You must be ..."

  "Danny Shepherd."

  From his chair, Turtle yelped out in a voice that had suddenly gone about an octave higher, "She's not an old friend. I just met her!"

  If Central Casting had a prototype for a perfect starlet's body, Danny Shepherd fit it. Periwinkle eyes, long legs, high firm breasts, a dancer's muscles, triple-cream skin, Danny had it all. And she had one of the most honest and infectious cheerleader's grins Zoe had ever seen.

  "New friend, then."

  "She's got a repressed ace. She wants some help, Danny."

  "So help her. Jeez, Turtle, do what you can, okay? The way things are going, we're going to need all the ace powers there are. Right?"

  "Thanks," Zoe said. "Thank you, Danny."

  "He's shy, you know." Danny turned and bent to kiss Turtle's cheek. "Tuds, I forgot my razor. Can I borrow yours?"

  "Sure."

  Danny wandered back toward the bath. Turtle loved her. That showed in his eyes. She hurt him, sometimes. That showed, too. He braced his forearms on the table and motioned Zoe back toward her chair.

  "She's beautiful," Zoe said.

  "Yes. Yes, she is. Now about this power of yours."

  "I ... animate things. I guess that's what you'd call it."

  "What you do. Is it like teke?"

  "It's not teke. I can't float a coffeecup in the air. But I could grow legs on it, and it would jump, or I could give it a big floppy ear where its handle is, and it could fly."

  "Show me."

  "Oh, no!"

  "Why not?"

  "I'm shy. Maybe that's part of it." So why had she kissed him? Well, because he'd needed it. So there.

  "I'm shy myself. Show me."

  "I can't do it while you're watching me."

  "Fine. I'll go in the other room." He got up and left her there.

  Can't work, won't work, nothing was ever this simple. Just do it? Zoe stared at the coffeecup, picked it up, breathed against it, tried to imagine the amorphous latticework of the fired clay flowing into new shapes, the metallic ions becoming gears and levers. Nothing. She heard Turtle say something, and Danny giggling. Zoe held the cup and tried again. Can't do it. Can't.

  "Well?" Turtle reappeared at the doorway.

  "I have to be scared. I have to be convinced I'm in danger. Sorry, Turtle. You're just not scary enough."

  "That's what they all say," he said, very low. He looked disappointed, and wary, as if he still didn't believe she wasn't here on some sort of scam or the other.

  "I hurt a mugger once. I think. He had a knife, or I thought he did. I grabbed my special twenty, you know, the one I carry in my bra, and made it turn into a little airplane. Like a paper airplane, but metal, with razor edges, and it went for his eyes. He ran."

  "Weren't people watching you then?"

  "On the street? No one looks. I'm trying to remember when I've used the power. Sometimes when I can't find my keys, I just open the locks anyway, if no one's watching. I try to forget when I do things like that."

  "I'm not sure you can save the world if that's all you can do," Turtle said.

  Danny came in and sat down on the couch. She had put on jeans and a bomber jacket, both in a deep butternut color. On her, the simple clothes were a designer's wet dream.

  "If I didn't have to wait until I was scared, if I could plan things out in advance, I could think about how to use them better. I could set a watch to watch someone, or put a listener in someone's pocket"

  "Electronic bugs have been around for a long time," Turtle said.

  "I could make weapons out of things, vases, silverware, coffeepots. Design them to resume their original shapes once they'd been used."

  "That has possibil
ities," Danny said.

  "Yeah," the Turtle said.

  "Small things," Zoe said. "I have to be able to pick them up. I can't do it with anything that's alive. The energies aren't right, they move around so much, anyway."

  "Nothing alive. Nothing big. How big, Zoe?"

  "The biggest thing so far was a ..." She had just met these people. She couldn't tell them all her secrets. But if she didn't, she was running from possible help. And she liked them, both of them. "... a bedspread. It almost strangled a guy I was in bed with." There wasn't any way this was going to sound right "No, no, he wasn't trying to rape me or anything. He just scared me."

  "Your first time?" Danny asked.

  "Yes. I just didn't realize ..."

  "How big they could get," Danny said. She began to laugh. Turtle didn't.

  "Oh, the poor bastard," Danny said. "Did he recover? Enough to - "

  "No. Not that night anyway."

  "But later?"

  "Oh, yes." Zoe smiled, remembering his embarrassment, her confusion, the mutual reassurances which had blotted out, she hoped, his memories of the bedspread levitating above them, then twisting in the air to form a noose that snaked its way around the poor guy's neck. The relationship hadn't lasted long, though. A few weeks.

  "But when you do the keyhole bit, you aren't scared then."

  "No."

  "How do you feel afterwards?" Danny asked.

  "Uh ... fatigued."

  "For how long?"

  "It depends. It depends on how much energy goes into the animation, I guess."

  "Sleepy?" Danny asked.

  "Yes." Zoe had never thought about it, but yes, sleepy.

  "Uh, huh. Zoe, what's your schedule today?" Danny asked.

  Time to go. They think I'm a total nut case, and Danny wants me out of here. "I'm due at the attorney's office." These were sweet people, but they couldn't help. Zoe had to meet with Mendlen again, and she dreaded the encounter, the questions, the mutual evaluations. "Soon. I really should be going."

  "Let's do lunch," Danny said. "Tuds, you have an interview. Sell that book, honey."

  "Where this time?" Turtle asked.

  "It's a radio thing. Here's the address. I'll be back around midafternoon. Come on, Zoe."