Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  Michael grunted, his head slamming against the roof of the car with every bump, his legs folded up against his chest, his several hands clutching at any hold he could find. The heat made him sweat, which made the sand stick to his bare skin, and he could taste the gritty stuff in his mouth. They drove rapidly east, through a village where people watched the taxi from open doorways or behind shuttered windows. The market they passed was closed and deserted; Michael suspected that most of the inhabitants had already fled the area. The driver turned onto a four-lane highway, and Michael saw ahead the curve of the massive dam that held Lake Nasser. “Sadd el Aali,” Ahmed said, pointing through the sandblasted windshield. “The High Dam. And there, that is our memorial, celebrating the cooperation of Egypt and the Soviet Union which allowed us to build such a wonderful dam.”

  The memorial was monumentally ugly to Michael’s eyes: five huge pillars like the petals of a concrete flower holding up a concrete ring at the summit. There were tents erected in the open space around the memorial. As they approached, guards with automatic weapons waved the taxi to the side of the road. AH of the guards appeared to be jokers. Ahmed honked at the men and appeared prepared to run them down, but Michael reached over the seat with a muscular top hand and pulled the wheel hard to the right. “This is my stop,” he said, and Ahmed shrugged and braked. Michael opened one of the rear doors and managed to unfold himself from the car without quite falling down. He rummaged in a pocket and tossed several bills onto the passenger seat of the taxi. “Salam alekum,” he said.

  “Wa alekum es salam,” Ahmed replied, glancing at the bills—that he didn’t bother to haggle told Michael he’d drastically overpaid. “Though I doubt that you will find much peace here,” Ahmed said solemnly. “Here, my number if you need me again.” Michael took the crumpled business card as the guards approached, their weapons trained on his bare chest. He put down his duffel bag and raised his many hands.

  “Hey, Drummer Boy!” one of them said in Arabic-accented English. He lifted an iPod from the breast pocket of his fatigues, and Michael saw the white cord of headphones running up to a hairless head that looked more like a skull, the buds stuffed into earless holes. “Joker Plague—love your music. I have all your CDs.”

  They slung their weapons over their shoulders and Michael lowered his hands. Ten minutes later, he knew the joker fan’s name was Masud, the other guard had taken their picture together, and Michael picked up his duffel bag again. “I’m looking for Lohengrin or John Fortune,” he said.

  “I’ll take you to them,” Masud said. He inclined his head toward the monument. “This way. Would you mind giving me an autograph, too?”

  There was a rusting and decrepit motorcycle parked outside the tent. Fortune was inside, standing alongside a table with maps spread out and held down by rocks against the furnace-like wind off the desert. The armpits of his white shirt were stained a pale yellow and his normal café au lait skin was tanned darkly; his blond, curly hair was bleached by the sun, so that the contrast between skin and hair was stark. Lohengrin—looking more like a pudgy, badly sunburned college student than a warrior without the white armor—stood next to him, along with Jonathan Hive. Three of the Living Gods were gazing at the maps as well; the one called Sobek, who bore the head of a crocodile, the hippopotamus god Taweret, and a dark-haired teenaged girl Michael remembered from her brief stint on American Hero: Aliyah Malik, also known as Simoon.

  He’d never been to bed with her. Not that he probably wouldn’t have tried, if she’d stayed in the game long enough.

  Fortune touched a finger to the jewel of Sekhmet embedded in his forehead, as if trying to massage it. The lump was far too prominent for Michael’s comfort. “What’s left of the Egyptian army has pulled back north of Aswan, but all the reports we’re hearing say that Ikhlas al-Din and the army of the caliphate are advancing southward along the road from Daraw and Kôm Ombo—the Djinn’s with them, and so is the Caliph. Some are coming by rail, some in vehicles. They have C-130 transport planes, too. That means that taking out the airport is a priority, to keep them on the east side of the river and away from Sehel Island and Syrene. They’re moving quickly. It’ll be the same tactical situation we had with the Egyptians: they’re on the east side, and will be looking to cross the Nile at the British dam, or maybe here at the High Dam where the road is wider. We don’t know where they’ll make their initial attack, or how.… ”

  Fortune lifted up his head as Michael stepped under the shadow of the open-sided tent. He grimaced and his voice changed slightly. “Well, the Little Drummer Boy shows up,” he said. “What are you doing here? Your tour cancelled already?”

  Michael held back the anger that surged through him at the hated nickname. “I figured you could use more help.”

  Fortune snorted. “You know what? This isn’t a goddamn television show and I’m not your Captain Cruller anymore. We don’t need a guest star appearance, especially from someone who’s only here for publicity. You just want to see your face on CNN so you can sell a few more CDs. This is serious. People are dying here.” His face twisted, and for a moment Michael wondered who was talking, Fortune or Sekhmet. “We just buried King Cobalt. The Caliph intends to wipe out all the rest of us, along with the Living Gods and all their followers. This is war, and it’s real. I—we—don’t need dilettantes strolling in at the last minute.”

  A wasp shrilled by Michael’s ear. He ignored it. “That’s what I figured you’d say. But you ain’t the only one here. What would Kate say? Or you, Lohengrin? Bugsy? You know what I got to offer.”

  Lohengrin neither smiled nor frowned. Sweat beaded on his forehead, but evaporated before it could slide down his pale, doughy features. “He’s strong enough, ja? We shouldn’t turn down allies, John. We need every ace.”

  “I’m a joker, not an ace,” Michael told him.

  Lohengrin shrugged. Bugsy only stared. Sobek and Taweret were conferring sibilantly with Ali in Arabic, and she said something quietly to Fortune. Michael waited.

  Finally Fortune looked down at the map again. “Fine. I don’t give a damn one way or the other. Just stay the hell away from me.”

  “Not a problem,” Michael said. He waited a beat. “Where’s Kate?” he asked.

  That brought Fortune’s head up again. “You’ll leave her alone.”

  “I’ll let her tell me that.” Michael glanced at the map. “When you figure out where I can help you, let me know.” He turned to leave the tent. “No, you ain’t Captain Cruller no more,” he muttered. “You’re fucking Beetle Boy.”

  He didn’t particularly care if Fortune or his companions heard him. He was tapping at his chest as he left, and the sound of drums echoed from the low hills around Lake Nasser.

  “Ana! Earth Witch! Hey, I heard you saved the day with the dam.”

  The woman, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes widened as she recognized him, then narrowed tightly. “I thought I was ‘Earth Bitch’ to you.”

  “Ouch.” Michael spread his lower hands. The lines of his tattoos crawled over his abdomen and biceps with the movement. “Hey, I was just pissed off when I said that, Ana. I really didn’t mean it to stick.”

  “It did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet you are.” Ana took a breath, looking away from him to the nearest tent and back. “Kate doesn’t need you here. Your being around is only going to stir things up again, and that’s dangerous for Kate. You’ve hurt her badly enough. Distract her here and you could kill her.”

  “C’mon, Ana, lighten up.”

  Her dark eyes glittered under the hat. She glanced again at the tent. “I’m not joking.” Michael could see a deep sadness in her eyes, a grief that had never been there before. “You care about Kate? Then stay away from her. She won’t say that to you because she’s too polite for her own good, but I will.”

  “She’s in there, isn’t she? Why don’t I just ask her what she thinks?”

/>   “I can’t stop you. You always get what you want, don’t you?”

  “Not always,” Michael told her. “Not with—” He stopped.

  The tent flap flipped open and Kate stepped out. She looked tired and worried, the skin pouched and brown under her eyes. If she was startled to see him, she didn’t show it. He wondered if she’d been listening and for how long. “Michael,” she said, and a faint smile brushed her lips. She tossed a marble up and down in her right hand. Ana sniffed loudly and Kate glanced at her. “Take a walk with me, Michael?”

  “Sure.” He extended his middle left hand to Kate. Her head moved from side to side faintly and he let the hand drop back down.

  “We need to get you a hat,” she said. “And something over your torso and arms. You’re going to burn up here.”

  She said little else, and Michael was content to walk alongside her. She led him across the road to an observation tower on the northern face of the dam. The guard there, a joker whose face was silver and reflective, nodded to Kate and opened the door. Beyond was a set of metal stairs. When they reached the first platform, she stopped and pointed north—downstream. The water on that side lay a few hundred feet below them, a winding lake held back by another dam several miles north. “That’s the Low Dam, Aswan Dam, built by the British,” Kate said, seeing where he was looking. “Four miles away, maybe a little more. The island just this side of it, the smaller one over to the right, is Philae; some of the Living Gods are there right now, but mostly they’re on Sehel Island, just on the other side of the dam. The Gods and their followers restored the ruins of the temples and rebuilt the town over the last several years. Philae’s really gorgeous, truly breathtaking. You should go see it if you get the chance, before …” She didn’t finish the phrase. Her voice was strained, dispassionate, and too quick. Michael thought she was talking mostly so he couldn’t.

  “The main city of Aswan’s maybe another four or five miles past the Low Dam on the east bank,” she continued. “Syrene’s on the western bank, directly across from Sehel—again, just a bit north of the dam. Right now there’s a quarter million or so of the followers of the Living Gods living there, most of them refugees from downriver—from Alexandria, Cairo, Karnak, and Luxor. They can’t go any farther. There’s nowhere else in Egypt where they could survive except along the Nile. So they’ll stand here, with their Living Gods.”

  Kate touched his arm, pointing behind them. Michael turned, feeling the lingering touch of her fingers on his skin. South of the dam, a gigantic lake pooled behind the curved ramparts of the dam out to the horizon, its water crowding the top of the structure. “Yeah, Lake Nasser,” he said. “I know. I looked at the maps.”

  Kate smiled. “You knew all this?”

  “Pretty much. Figured it might be useful.”

  A nod. “If it weren’t for Ana, we would have already lost Syrene and Sehel Island, and I don’t know how many people. We won the battle but almost lost Aswan Dam in the process. That wouldn’t be as catastrophic as if this dam were to rupture—that would send a wall of water rushing all the way down to the Mediterranean—but it would have been bad enough. Controlling the dams is the key to controlling Egypt.” She took a breath. “Some of the Living Gods are afraid that Abdul-Alim might just try and take out the High Dam if things get desperate. He’s a fanatic, Michael. He means to destroy the Living Gods and all their followers.”

  Michael stared downriver. On Philae, the sun glinted on gilded columns. Feluccas dotted the waters of the Nile, moving from island to island, shore to shore. He tried to imagine it all gone in a roaring fury of white water.

  “Why’d you come, Michael?”

  He knew she’d ask. He’d formulated a hundred replies to the question on the way, but they’d all evaporated in the heat and sunlight and her presence. He licked dry lips. “I wanted … the way things happened back on American Hero … I don’t know, Kate. I really don’t. It’s all fucking mixed up in my head. I wasn’t happy where I was. Even playing with the band wasn’t helping. I felt like if I came here—if I showed up …” He tapped at his chest; a mournful, low dhoom answered. “Y’know, back in L.A., we talked about doing something genuine, something that wasn’t faked and artificial. I’ve been on stage most of my life; I worked my ass off to get where I am. But I know I could do more. The fame, the money—I have all of that I need. I can either play with it all, or I can use it. The visibility, the publicity, the money—they can be tools, just like what the wild card gave me. Sometimes they’re better.” He flicked his fingers over his chest; a rapid drumbeat answered as the throats along his neck pulsed—a quartet of paradiddles, followed by the splash of a cymbal. “I’ve always been able to get what I want if I work at it hard enough.” He found her gaze, held it. “Every time but once. I really hate fucking up. With you, I fucked up worse than I ever have, and I’m not even sure why. I know I’ve regretted it every day since.”

  “Sometimes you can’t have what you want just ’cause you want it.” She hefted the marble; her arm arced back and forward almost too fast to see. He heard the hiss of the glass ball through the air. A moment later, far out in Lake Nasser, a fountain of white water erupted. “I like you, Michael. I do. You can be charming and funny and empathetic, and when you drop the rock star act there’s actually a great person underneath.”

  “But?”

  “I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that.”

  He spread all six hands wide. “How can I show you you’re wrong, Kate?”

  “You can’t. And …” She stopped.

  “And you’re with him. Fortune.”

  One shoulder lifted. “I’m not here because of John. I’m here to stop the genocide. You should understand the difference.”

  “You can trust him, with that thing in his brain? That’s not even Fortune talking half the time. What if he’s just a marionette dancing on Sekhmet’s strings? Remember how he was when we first met him? Just Berman’s toady, Momma Peregrine’s little fetch-it boy. We all thought that he was a joke. Even you, I bet.”

  “Shut up, Michael.” Her cheeks flushed. “Look, I’m—I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure we can use your strength.”

  He flexed his arms reflexively. “My strength. But that’s all.”

  She caught her lower lip in her teeth, as if trying to stop herself from saying more. “We should get back,” she said finally. “We’ll need to find you a place to sleep. Maybe you could share a tent with Rusty.”

  “Toolbelt? The iron bigot? No fucking way.”

  “He’s not that. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”

  “If you say so.”

  “No. Here. Hold it like this.” Michael demonstrated the proper way to hold a drumstick to the child, a dark-skinned, dog-headed boy. He was thinking that Ahmed the cabdriver had been right: animal-headed jokers were common as sand among the followers of the Living Gods. He gave the drumstick back to the kid and a loud percussive crack followed as the boy slammed the stick onto Michael’s chest.

  Michael lay on the ground outside his tent, his top arms under his head, the others set close to his body as a crowd of joker children gathered around him, laughing and jabbering excitedly as they played him as if he were a drum set. Parents and other adults watched, smiling from the periphery. Masud, his soldier fan, stood nearby, clapping and smiling. A joker with eyes set on long stalks and press credentials draped around his neck pulled a heavy, professional video camera to his shoulder and put his eyestalk to the viewfinder. A red light pulsed next to the lens.

  The racket was incredible, and Michael’s neck throats yawned open as he let the sound boom out. There was a definite beat—the two kids kneeling by the lowest of the tympanic rings on his abdomen poured forth a subsonic phoom that was more felt than heard, a steady rhythm that struck the onlookers like invisible, soft fists. The children playing the higher-pitched, smaller rings above unleashed a cascade of varied tones as Michael shaped the noise with the matrix of vocal cords layered in his thi
ck neck.

  The noise radiated out, forte.

  Rustbelt came out from the tent, yawning with a groan like ancient hinges. One of the kids rushed to him and began tapping at his leg with a drumstick. “Hey, you’re not a half-bad cowbell,” Michael said to him, half-shouting.

  Rustbelt glanced at the knot of kids flailing at Michael’s body. “Cripes,” he said. “What are you doing, fella?”

  “Getting to know the locals. Kids are kids, no matter where you are.”

  Rustbelt glanced at the joker with the videocam. “Yeah.”

  Some of the aces and the Living Gods had come to investigate the racket as well. Through the crowd, Michael could see Lohengrin and Fortune standing several yards away, looking at the scene as Fortune shook his head and whispered something to Lohengrin. Slightly behind them, he glimpsed Kate and Ana. He lifted a middle hand to wave to Kate. She nodded. Michael glanced over at Rustbelt, who was also looking in Kate’s direction. “‘I like kids’ can’t be a bad message.”

  Rustbelt grunted. It sounded like a dump truck farting. “Not so long as it’s true.” Eyebrows lifted above the rust spots on his face. He stepped away carefully from the child banging on his leg and walked toward the other aces. Kate glanced back once, but through the arms and the blur of drumsticks, Michael couldn’t see if she was smiling or not.

  He awoke to predawn explosions—a stutter of blasts muffled by distance and reverberations, sounding almost like a distant thunderstorm. He blinked, wondering if he’d dreamt the sound, but as he dressed quickly and splashed water over his face, Rustbelt came clanking into their tent, his massive steam shovel jaw half-open. “What the fuck’s the racket?” Michael asked him.