Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  “Mom.” He took a deep breath. Suddenly it all seemed very clear to him. “Really, this is a great opportunity.”

  “You have a thing in your head.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “How can you be sure that it’s not controlling your brain?”

  “What, Isra?”

  “If that is its name.”

  “Isra’s not an ‘it.’ She’s a woman. An Egyptian woman. And I’d know.”

  “How?”

  “I’d know,” Fortune repeated firmly. “It’s not as if we don’t have discussions with each other. Arguments, even. It’s not like she’s turned me into some kind of robot or something.”

  “John—” Peregrine said, anguish in her voice.

  “Listen, Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. I’m grown up. You can’t treat me like a kid, surround me with bodyguards, watch over me twenty-four hours a day.” Again, Lohengrin’s words came unbidden into his mind. “I’ve got to find my own destiny.”

  “It’s not your destiny, John. It’s what that creature in your head wants.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “How do you know? How can you know that?”

  “Because,” Fortune said quietly. “I wanted it, too, before I put the amulet on. I’ve always wanted it. I don’t want to work on TV shows, fetching donuts, doing errands. I want to be someone who can do important things. Who can make a difference in the world. Like my father. Like you. You were my age when you fought the Astronomer.”

  “That was different.”

  “How?” Fortune asked.

  “I was in control. I knew what I was doing. You—you’re younger than I was. And maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I did protect you too much. Sheltered you. But you’re my son. I couldn’t stand by and let something awful happen to you. And this…this Isra. We just don’t know what it’s doing to you. Can’t you see that? We have to at least get it checked out. I can be there by seven in the morning. I’ve messengered a credit card and some ID. Just stay put until I get there. We’ll charter a plane and have you at the Jokertown Clinic before we know it. Dr. Finn will be able to help. I know he will.”

  Suddenly all of Fortune’s certainty was gone. He couldn’t forget the fear he’d felt when the amulet had burrowed into his body. The feeling of someone else locking him up in his own head, controlling him. It was creepy, and it was frightening.

  And Isra would be with him, always. For the rest of my life.

  “I don’t know,” he said hollowly.

  “I do,” Peregrine said. “Sit tight. I’ll be with you before you know it. You’re my son, and I love you.”

  “All right,” John Fortune he said. “I’ll wait.”

  It was an interminable wait.

  The messenger showed up not too long after Fortune hung up the phone with a package containing fresh clothing, a black Amex card, and a wad of cash. It would be hours before Peregrine could make it up from Hollywood.

  Suddenly John couldn’t stand to be confined to the room any longer. He had to get out and do something. Anything.

  He wandered down to the casino. There were no clocks there, no night and day. Just color, action, lights, and noise, mindless and buzzing. He got a cup of quarters, fed some into a slot machine and pulled the handle. He watched the wheels buzz around. He got an ankh, a sphinx, a bar, a mummy. He fed in more quarters.

  Isra asked him.

  Fortune dug out more quarters from his plastic cup, fed them into the slot, and pulled the handle. “I’ve been wondering where you were.”

 

  “Thanks. That’s real decent of you.” Two mummys. He won a buck. He fished the quarters out of the mouth of the return slot and fed them into the machine again.

 

  “I didn’t ask for this, you know.” The person at the next machine looked at him, and Fortune realized that he was speaking out loud. He didn’t care.

  Isra said.

  Fortune shrugged angrily. “Sure. Why not?”

  The person at the next machine got up and left.

  Isra told him. <’As Allah wills.’ But I no longer believe in Allah. I lost my faith when I lost my son Fuad. I once had children. Fuad was my oldest. I bore him when I was sixteen. He died a week before his twentieth birthday, crushed in an accident at the docks. He was my oldest, of eight, and lived the longest. He was the last one I lost. Gone. They are all gone.>

  Fortune paused in his mechanical feeding of the machine. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

 

  “No,” he whispered.

  But Isra knew his mind, and knew that he was really saying yes.

  She opened her memories to him, and they slammed into him like an express train. The agony of birth. The ecstasy of holding her baby for the first time. Their lives, difficult and hard, their trials and sorrows, all compressed into a millisecond of time that bit into his brain like a knife. A child dying in her arms, carried to its grave wrapped up in an insufficient cloth shroud. Put in a coffinless grave, the hard clods of dirt raining down upon the tiny corpse.

  Fortune was too stunned, too overwhelmed to cry.

  Isra’s voice hardened.

  Fortune knew he couldn’t, either. And it wasn’t Isra. It was him thinking it.

  He put his last quarters into the machine, and for the first time relinquished control willingly. Their hand pulled the handle together, the wheels spun, and five ankhs in a row came up. Sirens started to wail.

  Isra was bemused by the flashing lights and the loud sounds the coins made clattering down the shoot and spilling out and onto the carpet, but she knew the flash of silver when she saw it, and she realized what it meant. She grabbed a handful of large plastic cups that were stacked on a nearby counter and filled them with coins.

  Behind them, a voice said, smooth as silk, “You’re very lucky.”

  It was a woman. She was lithe and sinewy without tautness. Her simple black dress clung to every line of her body like a second skin, her long black hair swept down her back, past her waist, like a living wave. Her face was elfin, but not mischievous. It was queenly, full of a beauty that Isra could have only dreamt of. Her eyes were startling. They were silver, with odd flecks in them, gleaming like stars.

  “Yes,” Isra told her. “I am.”

  The woman smiled. Her smile was dazzling and promising at the same time. Her strange eyes fastened on Fortune’s and looked deep, as if she were more interested in him, in what he thought, in what he desired, than anything else in the world. She stood so close that their bodies nearly brushed. Isra set down her plastic cups full of coins. The woman smelled like a tropical night. Like languid flowers, musk, and heat.

  “What do you plan on doing with your winnings?” the woman asked.

  “I plan on putting them to good use.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. There are many worthy charities.” She paused. “Just one question. You’re not John Fortune, are you?”

  “What makes you say that?” Isra didn’t like this woman. Under her own scent was another, a man’s smell. The woman had been with one, and recently. But there was something else.…

  The woman said, “You’re not a man.”

  “You read minds?” Isra asked, defensively.

  “No. I read men. And you’re not one.” Another smile—warm, seductive. “I am interested in aces. And I find fire-breathing lions fascinating. Lionesses, that is.” Her sensual lips pursed. “I can see that
my curiosity is not going to be satisfied.”

  “Why should it be?”

  “No reason,” she admitted. She turned to go and paused for a final word over a finely turned shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

  Isra watched her go, her snarl unheard amid the buzz of the casino’s background noise.

  Isra took a cab to the airport, and paid the driver with coins taken from one of her cups. The Pan American counter was fairly quiet, until she dumped her winnings out all over it.

  “Is this enough for a ticket to Cairo?” she asked. “One way.”

  The ticket agent, used to the eccentricities of Vegas life, counted out the coins as quickly as he could, but ended up shaking his head. “Sorry. You’re short a couple of hundred.”

  She growled her frustration, which alarmed the agent somewhat. Fortune said.

  The agent watched, somewhat mystified, as his customer began to talk to himself. “All right,” the young man finally decided. “Wallah. It is in the hands of the Gods.” Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a passport and black Amex card, the kind without a credit limit. “Charge it to this, please. First class.”

  Jonathan Hive

  Daniel Abraham

  A BAD DAY IN CAIRO

  LAS VEGAS: THE WORLD capital of massive overstimulation. Ever since they’d arrived, Jonathan had been feeling the contact high of the city. Every time they left a casino, men and women waited to press advertisements into his hand. Other gambling establishments or sex shops or invitations to warehouse parties or the kinds of phone lines where a girl with a husky voice would describe what exactly she’d be doing to you if she was there. And, for the right price, she could be.

  The air itself in the timeless elf world of the casinos was different. Jonathan had heard that they pumped extra oxygen into the atmosphere, just to keep the rollers rolling and the little, wizened women at the nickel slots pulling on the levers and pressing the buttons and moving on to the next machine. And always, everything was bright and buzzing and ringing, half-naked and fast and exciting and maybe, just maybe, the key to the one jackpot that would make everything, always be worthwhile. It was like swimming in a fever dream.

  It might not help that they were very, very drunk.

  “Fortune has a beetle in his head,” Jonathan said. “That’s not an accepted recipe for clear thinking.”

  “Your head turns into bugs,” Lohengrin replied. Somehow that seemed to be a refutation.

  “Wasps,” Jonathan said, and gave a little belch. “Not beetles. Wasps. Anyway, what does John need us for? Isis said he’ll have the power of Ra. Ra, Ra, sis-boom-bah. You got Ra on your side, you don’t need bugs. Did I tell you about my system for blackjack?”

  They had been playing Stump the Barman. Lohengrin had never known that so many drinks were served in pineapples and coconuts, and his amazement pushed Jonathan to think of more and more obscure drinks, just for the expression on his face. Some were garnished with cherries and slices of pineapple, some with olives, some with onions. One had a shrimp in it. Their table was covered with paper parasols and tiny plastic swords. After a Slimer, a Sledgehammer, a Blue Motherfucker, a Purple People Eater, and a Sloe Screw on the Beach, Lohengrin started talking about the day at Neuschwanstein when he walked into the castle to face the terrorists. “The gate was sealed, but I cut through it with my sword. They shot at me, but they could not hurt me. There were five of them.”

  “You’re not talking five wingnuts down in Egypt. You’re not talking the Bavarian Freedom Front. Millions of pissed-off Muslims, that’s what we’re talking here. We could be killed. I don’t have the power of Ra. Did I mention that?”

  “You are an ace. A warrior.”

  “You may be a warrior, Mein Herr. I turn into bugs.”

  “Many, many, many bugs,” said Lohengrin. “Too many for anyone to kill them all, nein? Why do you have this power, do you think?”

  “There was this virus. Maybe you heard about it. There were aliens and a guy with a blimp and some dude called Jet-boy. The guy with the blimp might have been German, come to think of it, but I won’t hold that against you. I try to be well-mannered. I haven’t mentioned Hitler once in all the time I’ve known you.”

  “God,” said Klaus. “God made the world. All the worlds. The aliens, the germs, he made them, too. Jetboy.”

  “I think the press made Jetboy.”

  Lohengrin ignored that, which was too bad. Jonathan thought it was a pretty good line. “God wanted us to have these powers. You and me. He puts a sword into my hand and armors me in ghost steel, and he turns you into flies.”

  “Wasps. Hello? Flies are gross.”

  “Jonathan, my friend, why would God have given us these powers, except to protect the weak and innocent?”

  “Oh please. Do I look like a caped crusader? Are you my plucky sidekick? God did it to fuck with our heads. Or to win a bet with Satan. He did it for the same reason he gives kids leukemia. How should I know? He’s God; he doesn’t explain this stuff to me. Did you miss the part where I was saying how we could get killed?”

  “Who will help these people, if not us?”

  “The United Nations. The secretary-general’s flying into Cairo. Not Kofi Annan, the new one. He was on the TV in the bar when you were up in the suite screwing what’s her name. Lilly of the Valley.”

  “Lili Marlene. We were making love. She was beautiful, Jonathan. Perhaps God sent her as well.”

  “Him or the night manager. Ask what escort service he used, you can ring her up again. I promise you, you’re not going to bump into her in Egypt. Hey, what say we check out the Excalibur? I hear they have jousting. You’d like that, I bet.”

  “Jonathan, Isis said that people are dying.”

  Jonathan put down his drink and focused on the great muscle-bound lunk at his side.

  “People are always dying somewhere in the world,” he said. “When they’re not dying in Cairo, they’re dying in Timbuktu, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohoswinegrunt, or some other goddamned place.”

  “Hohenschwangau, but no one died there. I saved them. With this.” Lohengrin stood up, a broadsword appearing in his hand, white, shimmering, its edge a razor. He brought it down hard, shearing through the steel and mica table in one sudden, savage cut. Coasters, coconuts, and paper umbrellas flew everywhere.

  “Great,” Jonathan said, “that’s a good argument. Beat up the furniture.”

  The waitress—a blond woman in her midthirties with an expression that could stun rats at twenty yards—came up to them.

  “You can put it on the room,” Jonathan said.

  She nodded in a way that assured them both that she would, while simultaneously informing them that they had had their last alcohol for the evening. All without speaking. She was very talented that way.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” Jonathan asked.

  She nodded again, turned, and walked away.

  “We are men,” Lohengrin said. “We are blessed among men. Our actions should be guided by what is right and noble!”

  “We’re drunks in Vegas,” Jonathan said. “Our actions should be guided by vice and alcohol.”

  Lohengrin shook his head. He managed to look deeply disappointed without precisely focusing his eyes.

  “Do you have no dreams, Jonathan?”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said. “They just don’t involve getting anointed by God.”

  “What then?” Lohengrin demanded. “What is your dream?”

  “I want to be a journalist,” Jonathan said.

  “And what is it a journalist would do?”

  The waitress reappeared with two cups of coffee. She balanced them on the remains of the table, nodded, and walked away again. Jonathan looked at the black surface, neon bar lights and the flickering blue television screens reflecting in it. What would a journalist do?

  “Ah, fuck you,” he sighed. “Fine. We’ll go.”


  Posted Today 11:42 pm

  EGYPT | DEPRESSED | “ROCK THE CASBAH”—THE CLASH

  There was a time not all that long ago when I thought poverty was not having enough cash to order a bucket of fried chicken. I may have been optimistic about that. When it comes to pure human misery, pencil in the Necropolis outside Cairo for your touristy needs.

  I came here from Las Vegas, specifically the Luxor. I have moved from the fantasy of Egypt to the reality. Given the choice between drinking and playing craps with a fake Cleopatra whose tits are always just offering to fall out of her dress, and walking through the slums of Cairo, I’m not sure which I’d recommend. The fake is a beautiful dream, but there’s nothing like reality for reminding you just how toxic dreams like that can be. I have gone from the city of excess to the city of desperate want. The change has left me a little nauseated.

  The first day here, we started at the pyramids. They were, indeed, amazing. They’re bigger than you think. Start about the size you imagine them, then up it by another half or two thirds. They’re huge. You can see why the idea of them made it all the way to Vegas.

  But they’re also not Egypt. Egypt came when Lohengrin was moved to charity. He started handing out euros to the beggars. We were swamped so bad it took half an hour to make it the thirty feet back to the car. If a couple of the kids got stung, I can apologize and feel like shit about it, but at the time it seemed like the only option.

  Imagine being in the middle of a crowd of forty, fifty, maybe a hundred shouting kids, their hands out, pushing against each other and against you. The air smelled like unwashed bodies and desperation, and there we were. Westerners with money. Aces, no less. You wouldn’t think I’d have been frightened, but let me just tell you, there’s something in a hungry kid’s eyes that doesn’t have anything to do with pathos or gratitude. At the time, I thought it was just hunger. And yeah, it scared me.

  That’s been the signature moment of the trip—the flat, angry eyes of hungry children. And that, boys and girls, was just tourism. It doesn’t even touch on the riots.