Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  “So my client is free to go?”

  Redfern sighed. “Yeah. But you know, jokers are not too popular in these parts just now, what with the president being killed and all. Miss Pretorius might want to enjoy the sights of Charleston at some later time.”

  Jonathan Tipton-Clark was lost in thought as he wheeled his rent-a-car though the quaint historic streets of old Charleston. He did not keep a car in Manhattan, and it had been a long while since he’d driven so much. As he turned a corner, his car fishtailed a bit, just missing a slim figure in black leather on a café racer motorcycle entering the parking lot. He roared off down the street, unfollowed.

  He sighed. It felt like he had stumbled into something weird, but he’d no idea what, and he was disinclined to pursue it much further. The idea of enjoying a cool drink by poolside was still rather appealing. Maybe a mint julep. They made good mint juleps in the South, he’d heard. Perhaps he could sort things out given a few moments of calm contemplation.

  He was on a main road on Charleston’s outskirts, heading toward the airport and his nearby hotel. Traffic was moderate and he was moving along a little over the speed limit, his thoughts still centered on what had just happened, when suddenly a billowy white pillow exploded from the center of his steering wheel to fill his vision and punch him in the nose so hard that he blacked out for a moment, seeing only red stars dancing inside his skull. When his consciousness kicked in a heartbeat later his eyes were filled with white and his head was filled with pain. His ears rang.

  Airbag! The fuck?

  He couldn’t steer because the bag was in his face. He tried to brake. The pedal sank straight to the floor without any resistance. Or any sign of slowing the rental car. The Lexus accelerated.

  “Help!” he croaked helplessly. The pain was localizing to his nose, and he felt something hot running down his upper lip. He tasted salt. Broke my damn nose.

  Cars were honking furiously all around him. Still too befuddled by the impact of the exploding airbag on his face to have a clue as to why his car had rebelled, Jonathan gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to at least hold it steady while peering around the airbag that blocked his vision.

  “Aren’t these things supposed to deflate right away?” he asked himself while silently praying that the road didn’t curve. He tried to roll the driver’s side window down, but the electronic switch wouldn’t work. He tried the door. It was locked and stubbornly refused to open. He could turn into a cloud of wasps, but then he’d be a cloud of wasps still trapped in an accelerating car that would probably soon end in a fiery crash. Bugsy realized that he was running out of viable options as quickly as he was running out of clear road.

  He caught a glimpse of a sudden flash of motion in the adjacent lane and rolled his eyes leftward to see a sleek motorcycle pull up beside him. Upon it was a woman clad in black leathers, wearing a black helmet and black leather gauntlets. She took her right hand off the handlebars and made a frantic gesture at him. After a moment he realized that she was urging him to roll down his window. He glanced at her helplessly and shook his head.

  She seemed to understand. Her hand moved to a pouch at her waist, and, still showing amazing ability to guide her bike as she kept up beside him, pointed a small automatic at the window. Bugsy just stared at her for a long second in even greater shock, then suddenly realized what she was doing, and ducked.

  A single shot smashed the window and Bugsy exploded outward in a swarm of wasps, tens of thousands of wasps pouring through the shattered glass as he left his human form and his clothes behind. He was mostly out when both car and motorcycle hit the beginnings of a sudden banked curve.

  Bugsy watched through a myriad of wasp eyes as the cyclist swung the motorcycle so close to the car’s gleaming gray flank it almost kissed her leather-clad knee. Reaching through the broken window, she grabbed the steering wheel and guided both hurtling vehicles across lanes of traffic. An exit was coming up, but steering the car on it would only be diverting the potentially deadly missile to a different target. With exquisite timing, the cyclist abruptly let go of the steering wheel and straightened up and with a loud, liquid bang the car rammed the water barrier beside the exit ramp. Its back end swung up in the air, its hood popped open, and it slammed back down on its suspension.

  The bike wobbling beneath her, but still under control, she turned the machine right, laying the bike on its side so that only her booted foot was holding it up as she coiled herself to jump off her stricken ride. Instead it slammed into the safety rail and flipped her over it into space.

  Bugsy coalesced into his human form halfway up the exit ramp. “My God!” he yelled as she dropped out of view. Heart still pumping with the terror induced by his wild ride, he lurched to the rail, grabbing it with shaking hands to stop from hurtling over after her.

  To his horror he saw a busy side street below, cars and trucks honking furiously, screeching brakes, and veering to avoid the slim figure in black leather that was darting for the sidewalk. Once there his rescuer stopped, took off her helmet, and waved up at Bugsy.

  He knew her. It was Ice Blue Sibyl, the ward of the joker lawyer Dr. Pretorius. Jonathan had never met her before face-to-face, but then, even in a world stricken by the wild card, she was a unique figure. “You all right?” he called out to her.

  “I’m fine,” she shouted back, her lips unmoving, but somehow producing a smooth contralto voice that was hauntingly familiar.

  Bugsy felt his knees quiver in relief. “That was amazing.”

  She was making her way toward him. “Looks like you need some medical attention yourself.” She paused. “Not to mention some clothes.”

  The cops that descended on them were rather dubious about Jonathan’s claim that his car had just gone nuts and tried to kill him, but numerous motorists stopped to confirm his story, and Sibyl’s. “The weirdest, craziest, bravest thing I ever saw,” one witness said. He happened to be an off-duty policeman himself.

  “Uh-huh,” the sergeant in charge of the accident scene replied. “We usually don’t see many blue folk around here,” he added suspiciously, looking up from his notebook where he’d been scribbling furiously.

  The cop who’d stopped to describe what he’d witnessed was Black. He frowned at the sergeant. “What does the color of her skin have to do with anything?” he asked.

  “Um, nothing, sir.”

  “Right.” The off-duty cop reached into his back pants pocket and took out his wallet. He removed a card and handed it to Sibyl. “You need me to confirm any part of your story, you just give me a call.”

  Sibyl glanced at the card. “Thank you, Detective Johnson. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  “Now you sure you don’t need any medical attention?”

  “As long as I don’t get burned, cut, or punctured, I’m really pretty durable.”

  He glanced at Bugsy. “How about you?”

  Sibyl caught Hive’s eye before he could speak and he understood the emotionless look she gave him. “I’m fine.”

  The cops took them down to the station house anyway, for further questioning, but the answers did not change, no matter how many times the same questions were asked. When they were finally told they were free to go, Bugsy told his rescuer, “I’d like to go to my hotel to freshen up and, uh, get some real clothes.” He was wearing a spare set of scrubs borrowed from the EMTs who had already arrived on the scene. “The least I can do for your saving my life is buy you dinner.”

  “I don’t eat. But we should talk.”

  “Ah … what brings you to Charleston?” Bugsy said awkwardly.

  “Save it for the hotel room,” Sibyl said, as she mounted her bike. Bugsy sat carefully on the seat behind her and gingerly put his arms around her as she pulled out into traffic. Under her leathers her flesh felt hard to his touch but pliant, and a perceptible coolness wafted off her. It was, Bugsy thought, like hugging an air conditioner set to low.

  Holding her conjured images of past gir
lfriends. At least, he thought, she is alive.

  Ice Blue Sibyl didn’t have a trusting soul (if she had one at all), but her actions were largely guided by practical concerns. She tried to reserve her contemplation of such metaphysical concepts as trust and love and honor for nighttime, when people slept and she often powered down to rest mode. It passed the time and was certainly more entertaining than late-night television with its constant stream of useless infomercials.

  Sibyl sat on a stained and rumpled bedspread. While she sustained herself on literal sunlight, by some process akin to photosynthesis, she ingested key additional nutrients by direct absorption through her blue-green skin. She had unsettled the Charleston police by spending some of the four hours she and Bugsy had been held at the station with one hand in a vat of Gatorade, helping her body repair the abrasion she’d suffered in her trip over the high side with her bike.

  She stared at Bugsy, who was occupying her small motel room’s only chair and sucking down a Slurpee they’d stopped to pick up at a 7–Eleven. That was all she could do when making eye-to-eye contact with someone. There was no way to soften her expression or soothe the blank mask of her features. Her lack of facial mobility disturbed most people, so, like everything else she had been dealt, she used it to her advantage when she could.

  This Jonathan Tipton-Clark, whose file she’d conjured up from its place in her data bank of famous and infamous jokers and aces, did seem to have some useful traits. She wasn’t sure if turning into a swarm of wasps could be considered an ace, but it was obviously of some utility. The wasps made good spies and trackers, and they could also sting … a minor kind of annoyance, but she understood that it discomfited some people. While Hive’s physical courage seemed overmatched by his need for safety, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He clearly wasn’t terribly bright, but he did seem to have a certain amount of cunning. She decided that she could work with him, and, to a degree, trust him. Sibyl pegged his mood as a mixture of melancholy and worry.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked him, Peregrine’s voice sounded concerned, as he sucked up the last bit of Slurpee through his plastic straw.

  “Oh, my laptop. It was destroyed in the crash.”

  “Surely you have backups stored in the cloud?”

  “Yeah.” Hive frowned at the empty plastic cup and lobbed it in the direction of the wastepaper basket adjacent to the desk. It clanked off the rim and rolled around on the linoleum floor, which at least was cleaner than a carpet of comparable age would’ve been. He sighed.

  “What did happen with your car?” Sibyl asked.

  “Weird stuff,” said Bugsy. “It was like, like it suddenly had a mind of its own, and the main thing on it was to leave me dead on the highway.”

  “That’s…” Even her lightning-fast brain had to pause momentarily. “… quite a coincidence. I was just interviewing a source who might have been able to shed some light on … whatever this is … but…” Sibyl looked at him emotionlessly, but there was a kind of odd tingling that ran through her neural network. “… she died in a freak microwave accident before she could tell me any details.”

  “A freak microwave accident?” Bugsy asked.

  They looked at each other for a long moment.

  “Two potentially fatal malfunctioning machines isn’t a coincidence—” Bugsy said.

  “—it’s a pattern.”

  “There’s more,” said Bugsy. “The other day, I was checking out this local joker dive bar, and I spotted this SCARE agent. Justice, he goes by.”

  Sibyl had heard the name. “There are SCARE agents crawling all over Charleston. A dozen of them, at least. Jim Dandy, Phalanx, Tin Soldier … they even dragged old Nephi Callendar out of retirement, I understand. They are working with the FBI and the Secret Service to try and find leads on the assassins. The presence of a SCARE agent in Charleston is only to be expected.”

  “Maybe, but his presence in Hot Mama’s was not,” insisted Bugsy. “He wasn’t investigating anything, that I saw. He was rousting some redneck and telling him to get the fuck out of town.”

  “A local?” Sibyl asked.

  Bugsy shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was a kind of scruffy guy. Justice called him Buck, and didn’t seem too happy that Buck was out drinking. He told this Buck that he and his brother should go to Hong Kong or … I don’t know, other places far away. Then Buck spotted my wasp and swatted it and I decided I had to get out of there. Buck came chasing after me, but I stung the shit out of him and drove off.”

  “You think this might connect with your car going crazy?”

  “Maybe. Who the fuck knows? What if SCARE is involved in the assassination? You say there are a dozen agents in Charleston. Could be even more. SCARE has undercover operatives, too, I’ve always heard. Agents whose names never appear in the papers. Who knows what powers they might have?”

  “The power to make machines go crazy, you’re thinking?” Sibyl went to her saddlebags, pulled out her own laptop, took it to the desk, and opened it up.

  Bugsy wandered over to where he could watch over her shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “Calling up the JADL’s wild carder database. ‘Buck’ isn’t all that common of a name. Let’s see what comes up.”

  “You don’t have all jokers and aces in that, do you?”

  “No,” Sibyl said. “Of course not. Socially prominent and important ones. Ones that the JADL has had business with. Ones in various accessible criminal databases.”

  Her voice ran down as she concentrated on her typing, and Bugsy leaned closer so he could see the screen better. “What’s it say in there about me?”

  Sibyl turned to look at him. Their faces were just inches apart. She just looked at him until he cleared his throat and flinched back.

  “Or we can look later, when we have some spare time.”

  Sibyl returned her attention to the keyboard. “Here we go,” she said after a few more moments. “Looks like … seven hits on the name ‘Buck.’ Hmmm. Buckaroo Bobby.” She clicked on the name and the photo of an orange-skinned joker in a cowboy outfit appeared on the screen.

  “Nope,” Bugsy said.

  “Buck-Toothed Jane. Probably a woman…”

  “Better check, anyway.”

  Sibyl nodded. “Yeah. Joker hooker.”

  “Kind of cute—” Bugsy began, and fell silent when Sibyl glanced at him.

  “Buckminster Fuller … no, he’s dead.”

  “Buckminster Fuller was a joker?” Bugsy asked. “The geodesic dome guy?”

  Sibyl nodded again. “Little-known fact. Eustace Buckington-Buckington … no. English con man … Buck McGee?”

  Bugsy leaned in so close she could feel the warmth wafting off him. “Bingo. What’s it say about him?”

  “Nat handler of his brother, Blood, a canid-form joker of limited intelligence who has the ability to create interdimensional gates that can instantaneously transport people up to several thousand miles. Originally small-time criminals specializing in knocking over 7–Elevens and Piggly Wigglys throughout the South, they first gained notoriety while working for the Allumbrados. Since the sudden disappearance of the sect in the early 2000s, they have worked for several criminal organizations, most notably the Mafia, but can best be regarded as freelancers.”

  “The mob?” he said.

  “There are reports of ties to the Gambiones in Cuba, the Grillet-Devereaux Gang in Marseilles, Ivan the Terrible in New York City, Julie the Weasel LaCanfora in Texas, the Praetorians in Rome … the McGee boys get around, it would seem.”

  “Shit,” said Bugsy. “That’s not good.”

  “Blood opens gates,” said Sibyl. “What better way to get an assassin in and out without leaving a trace.”

  “Hot damn,” said Bugsy. “We might just have found the assassin’s wheelmen.”

  “We?” Sibyl asked.

  “Sure, look, why don’t we pool our resources? You want to see Finn freed. I want to break a story—”

>   “And see justice done?”

  “Yes, of course,” Bugsy assured her. “Justice. Absolutely.”

  Sibyl still didn’t entirely trust him, but the more resources brought to the investigation, the better the chance of a good outcome. Even if one of the resources was a blogger who could turn into bugs. “All right,” she said.

  “Good,” Bugsy said, rubbing his hands together with evident glee. “Great.” He looked at the computer screen, then back to Sibyl. “I’m in. Absolutely. Teammates all the way. What’s our next step, partner?”

  Sibyl’s cell phone suddenly trilled. She held up a hand to silence Bugsy and answered the call. “Yes?” She listened for a moment. “All right,” she said briefly, clicked the phone off, and turned and looked at Bugsy, as deadpan as always. “We split up.”

  That took him aback. “What? Why?”

  “Buck and Blood can go anywhere, it would seem, but they can’t be two places at once,” Sibyl pointed out. “And it would seem the other side has an ace who can make machines turn murderous as well. We are safer apart than together.”

  “Yeah,” said Bugsy. Uncertainly. “So … where are we going?”

  “Home,” said Sibyl. “Separately.”

  “You Jonathan?” the burly young Black man behind the wheel of a six-year-old blue Yaris, rather shiny and well kept up, asked Bugsy.

  Bugsy leaned down to peer at him as he opened the front passenger-side door. And slid in the front seat. He smiled at the Uber driver engagingly. For some reason the young man didn’t smile back. “You’re Dwight, right?”

  “Uh-huh.” He stared at Bugsy for a long moment. “You the dude wants a ride to the Daughters of the Confederacy Civil War Museum?”

  “Um, well, actually no.”

  That did not please Dwight. “The app said…”

  “Well, I didn’t want Uber to know where I am going. I’m on a, well, an important mission and I’ve got to go somewhere without anyone knowing I’m going there.”