Jokers Wild wc-3

by George R. R. Martin

  The door swung open on well-oiled hinges, and he waved her through. Her sharp retreat brought her up hard against his chest.

  "Don't be afraid."

  "My God, what?" She glanced cautiously at the glowing monstrosity squatting in the center of the empty, echoing room. It looked rather like a wentletrap seashell, but the tips of its gray spines were set with glowing amber and purple lights. It also seemed to be resting in a glittering whirlpool, for dust was spiraling in toward the creature.

  "The ship."

  "What?"

  "Your ship," she amended quickly. "Yes, Baby."

  "Baby?"

  "Uh huh." Tachyon's lilac eyes rested lovingly on the ship, and Roulette's shields (painstakingly erected by the Astronomer) responded to a nearby telepathic communication.

  "She's frustrated. She tried to say hello to you, but you have shields." He cocked his head to one side, seriously regarding her. "Strange. Most humans…" A quick shake of the head. "Well, come inside."

  "I… I'd rather not."

  "She won't hurt you."

  "It's not that."

  "What then?"

  She hunched her shoulders and walked toward the ship, though it felt like a betrayal. Sometime early tomorrow morning the Astronomer would seize this living vessel, and pilot her far away.

  The ship obligingly opened her lock, and they entered the control room. The inner walls and floor of the ship glowed like polished mother-of-pearl, casting opalescent light across the large canopy bed that dominated the room. Tachyon chuckled. "Your expression is priceless. You see, unlike most of my kind I vowed I would die in bed. This seemed to be a way to ensure it."

  The rest of the furniture had a fragile beauty, and it was clear from the width of the chair seats that Takisians were smaller than humans. Unless this furniture had been made for Tachyon's personal use.

  The alien took her gently by the shoulders, and indicated the wall. Flowing silver script gleamed.

  Greetings, Roolete.

  Tachyon smiled, and shook his head. Roulette.

  "Her spelling isn't so good yet. She just started this when I had some other friends aboard. She's picking up a knowledge of written English by a low-level drain. I'm indulgent so I let her get away with it."

  "It's unbelievable."

  She seated herself on the bed while Tachyon unearthed a pair of crystal goblets from a chest which seemed to be an extrusion of the ship herself.

  Another message flitted across the wall while the alien's back was turned.

  You are honored. There was something peevish about the message.

  "Cut it out, Baby," warned Tachyon. Apology.

  "Accepted," Roulette said, feeling like an idiot.

  Tachyon splashed a dollop of brandy into each glass from his hip flask. Two bright spots of color were burning on his cheeks. "You are the first woman I've ever brought here. So she is curious, hopeful, and a little resentful."

  "She loves you."

  "Yes, and I her." He brushed his palm across one curving wall.

  "Why hopeful?" She took a sip of cognac.

  "Despite being a little jealous she wants to see me marry, and sire children. Pedigree, continuance, is very important to the ships. Over the centuries they've absorbed our obsession with ancestor worship, and she considers me a failure. I keep telling her I have a lot of time left. Especially since I now live on Earth." He joined her on the bed.

  "I've read a great deal about you, but I've never seen this mentioned. Of course its logical you would have a ship, how else would you have gotten here?"

  "I try to keep it very quiet. When I was trying to recover her from the government I raised a great to-do about Baby. Now I'm more cautious, and fortunately people's memories are short. Unfortunately she gets lonely so I come as often as I can. She misses her own kind too. They are essentially herd creatures, and this kind of isolation is not good for her."

  "Why don't you live in her, then?"

  "I want a social life, and I also want to keep her secret. Those two goals rather conflict. So I compromise. I live nearby, I visit often, and sometimes I take her out. According to Sister Magdalene at the South Street mission I'm doing a positive service. She's had several derelicts take the pledge after spotting us."

  She laughed, leaned down, and kissed him where he reclined against the cushions. He caught the top button of her blouse in trembling fingers, and from the corner of her eye she could see his erection straining at the satin material of his breeches. She jerked away, and swiftly rebuttoned her blouse. "I'm sorry, but I thought you… we-"

  "Not here! I couldn't perform with an audience." She also wondered what would be the ship's reaction if she killed Tachyon within Baby's skin. Roulette doubted she'd leave the ship alive.

  The Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum (Admission Only $2) was closed, probably because its manager realized that most people would be taking advantage of the day's free entertainment.

  That was, Jennifer thought, just fine. She went down a side alley and, making sure no one was watching, slipped through the wall. It was difficult. It took some moments of concentration and then she had to fight her way through the brickwork as if she were solid and the bricks were a viscous, unyielding liquid. Her body was getting tired and she knew that she shouldn't ghost for a while, but she had to get this done and then maybe she could think about resting.

  She finallv made it through and found herself in a small dark room with a series of dimly glowing glass bottles set along one wall like a bank of aquariums in a pet store. Floating in the tanks were pathetic little corpses, little embalmed "Monstrous Joker Babies" as the sign above the exhibit proclaimed. There were maybe thirty of them. Most had little of humanity about them and Jennifer was thankful, in a way, that they had experienced for so short a time the cruelty of the world.

  She hurried from the room and found herself in the section of the museum devoted to large displays that were life-sized dioramas. It was eerily quiet and dark with the displays' lighting and sound effects turned of and quite disconcerting to be the only living thing about.

  She went by a scene depicting Jokertown burning, commemorating, as it were, the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. There was, now only mildly shocking to modern tastes, an older tableau showing a purported Jokertown orgy. A sign in front of a curtained-off area said to watch for the latest addition to the entertaining yet informative displays, Earth vs. The Swarm.

  Jennifer went on past the dioramas into the long hallway beyond and entered the museum's Hall of Fame, or, in some instances, Infamy.

  Lifelike wax figures of prominent aces and jokers clustered in groups or stood alone in the hallway. Jetboy looked young and handsome, his scarf blowing out behind him in an unfelt, perhaps divine wind, his eyes squinting slightly as if he were staring into a gentle sun. The Four Aces-Black Eagle, Brain Trust, the Envoy, and Golden Boy-stood in a group, three of them together, one isolated by the slightly turned backs, the slightly averted faces of his fellow aces. Dr. Tachyon was resplendent in an outfit that a small card at his feet said had been donated by him to the museum. And there were others. Peregrine maintaining, Jennifer had to admit, her smoldering sensuality even when graven in wax, Cyclone, Hiram Worchester's astonishing bulk apparently floating lightly over his pedestal, Chrysalis with invisible flesh and visible organs caged by her skeleton…

  Jennifer looked them over carefully. Tachyon, she decided, would be the one. She stepped over the velvet rope and approached the waxen statue. She towered over it by half a foot and its waxen features were as delicate as her own. Moved by an irresistible impulse, she ran her hand down the rich fabric of his peach-colored waistcoat. It had a fine, soft feel to it. She could almost believe that the card was telling the truth and the outfit had once belonged to Tachyon himself.

  She caught herself and looked around guiltily. The hallway, of course, was deserted. She summoned all her will, reached out, and put the bag through the chest of the wax figure. She withdrew her hand and left t
he bag snug in Tachyon's chest, the two stockbooks of stamps and the mysterious volume safely hidden away until her return.

  Now she had to get in touch with Kien. It might take some doing. She couldn't simply look him up in the phone book.

  She left the Hall of Fame with one last jealous glance at the Peregrine figure, pondering her next move. She never noticed the eye watching from a curtained doorway at the other end of the hallway.

  The worst of it, Fortunato thought, was having to listen to the goddamned politicians. There were a dozen of them on stage, including Mayor Koch and Senator Hartmann. Tachyon, the bastard, was already gone, cozied up to a gorgeous black woman with plaited hair.

  Hartmann was at the podium. "The time has come for acceptance. A time for peace, as the biblical poet said. Not only for peace between nations, but peace within ourselves. A time to look into our own hearts, human and joker and ace alike. A time not to forget the past, but to be able to look back at it and say, this is where I have been, and I am not ashamed. But my duty now is to the future. Thank you very much."

  A police helicopter circled overhead. As Fortunato glanced up he saw the Turtle's shell float slowly over the park and then pass out of sight again.

  Fortunato knew roughly where the kid was. This close to him he could get a vague image of what the kid saw, and he could triangulate off Hartmann as he sat down at the edge of the stage.

  There. Fifteen or twenty yards away, wearing clothes, for once, which meant he'd come in his human form and stayed that way. The kid slouched against a light pole, a good fifteen or twenty feet away from an older version of himself, clearly his father.

  The kid looked around at all the suits and high heels as they offered Hartmann dignified, minimal applause. One side of his mouth turned up in disgust. Fortunato knew how the kid felt. Maybe once there'd been some sincere feeling in these ceremonies, but now it was a case of the bored leading the boring. Nobody came to self-serving political speeches except the people who needed to be seen there, the ones making some kind of political statement themselves by showing up. And those few who really did care. The starstruck kids who still had some illusions about personal power, who still believed in that sharp, clean line between good and evil and wanted to wage war across it.

  Fortunato saw the wild card as a kind of Aladdin's lamp of the unconscious. The virus rewrote DNA to match what it read in the back of the mind. If your luck was bad it transcribed a nightmare, and if you lived through it you were a joker. But sometimes it hit a vein of the pure stuff, like Arnie's love for dinosaurs and comic books and aces. And even though it made a bit of a joke out of him, it let him live his dreams out on the street.

  The joke was a law of nature, the conservation of mass. Arnie could turn into any dinosaur he could visualize, but his mass remained the same. If he was a tyrannosaur he was a three-foot-high tyrannosaur. Okay for a kid, but he was already thirteen or fourteen, full of adolescent juice and delusions of immortality.

  "Hey," Fortunato shouted at him. "Hey, kid!" Arnie turned to look at him.

  The kids arm came off.

  It flopped like the muscles had grown their own brain, and then it was sailing through the air and bouncing across the pavement. Fortunato and the kid both stood there for an instant, not comprehending. And then blood began to fountain out of the ragged flap of flesh and the air smelled like a butcher shop.

  The kid started to change. Even with an arm gone his instincts were good. His remaining arm shrank and grew scales. His thighs began to swell and his stomach shrank.

  Fortunato reached out with his power and tried to stop time. The people around him slowed but the blood pumped undiminished from the kid's arm socket.

  The Astronomer, Fortunato thought. Shielding the kid from the power that could save him.

  Fortunato tried to run toward him. It was like running in a nightmare, the air thick as wet cement, draining his strength. The kid was losing too much blood. It puddled around his tennis shoes, soaked the cuffs of his jeans. He couldn't finish the change. His left hand had grown a huge, scythe-shaped claw and he slashed futilely in front of him with it. His face was still human except for a bulging lower jaw. The eyes flashed from shock to rage to fear and finally to helplessness.

  A handful of flesh came out of the kid's throat. The blood from his shoulder slowed as his neck began to spurt.

  The kid collapsed. His weirdly jointed legs and the beginnings of a long, stiff tail kept him from falling more than halfway. His chest opened and his heart fell out onto the concrete. The heart seemed to shiver in the sunlight, fibrillating spasmodically for no more than a second before it lay still.

  And then there was a little man, maybe a couple of inches over five feet tall, standing next to the kid's distorted corpse. He had an ankle-length black robe that was soaked and spattered with blood. His head was too big for his body and he wore thick glasses.

  Fortunato had seen him twice before. Once was inside an Egyptian Masonic temple in Jokertown, seven years before. Fortunato had been looking'out through the eyes of a woman he loved, a woman named Eileen who was now dead.

  The second time was when Fortunato had led the attack on the Cloisters. Which had led to the Howler being dead, and to this death, right here in front of him.

  "I waited for you," the Astronomer said. "I was beginning to think you wouldn't come and I'd have to start without you." His voice had an ugly singsong rhythm.

  Fortunato couldn't get within twenty feet of him. "Why the kid? For Christ's sake, why the kid?"

  "I wanted you to know," the Astronomer said. "I'm not fucking around any more." He sniffed his blood-drenched fingers. "You're all going to die. Between now and four A.M. Be sure and set your watches." He glanced up at the podium, his eyes moving as if he was looking for somebody that wasn't there. He nodded to himself and smiled.

  "Four A.M.?" Fortunato was shouting. He leaned into the force field that straitjacketed him. "Why four A.M.? What happens then?"

  Then the field was gone and he staggered forward, offbalance. The Astronomer was gone. Time sped up around him. He was unable to look away as the kid's father saw the mangled ruin of his son and began to scream.

  Spector emptied his beer mug and stifled a belch. The Bottomless Pit, located between 27th and 28th Streets a halfblock west of Chelsea Park, was far enough off the beaten track to avoid a crush of tourists. The place had a reputation for violence that kept most of the locals away. There were only two other people sitting at the bar, although all the tables were occupied. The only light in the bar area came from the neon beer signs and the television. He heard billiard balls smacking together in the back room.

  "You want another?" the bartender asked. He was tall, with curly blond hair and a bodybuilder's physique.

  "Sure." Spector was a little light-headed. His fingers and toes were getting numb. It was about time. He'd been drinking on and off all day. The Astronomer was off his back, so he could lie low here, get drunk, and watch the game when it came on. That would just about fill the time until he had to go to the Haiphong Lily.

  The bartender drew a beer and set it down on the scratched, pitted wood. Someone had carved "Joyce + whoever I say" into the surface. Spector picked up the beer, enjoying the cold glass on his skin. As usual, the pain was chewing him up inside. Maybe, if everything went well tonight, he'd cap off the evening by killing some tourists. He'd never go to jail for it. That was the beauty of his power. The cops had hauled him in once, but the case had been thrown, out in the preliminary hearing. There was never any physical evidence to prove he'd killed his victims.

  "And now, for a special report from Channel Nine reporter Carl Thomas, live, at Jetboy's Tomb." Spector looked up at the television.

  The young black reporter paused, put a finger to his ear, and nodded. People standing in the crowd behind him leaned around and waved their arms, trying to get into the shot. "This is Carl Thomas reporting. Yet another story in what is already the most violent Wild Card Day in ten years. App
arently, a psychopathic ace killer is roaming the streets. His latest victim is a young boy who had the power to turn himself into a small dinosaur. There is no official word from the police indicating whether the boy's death is related to the earlier killing of the Howler. However, based on eyewitness accounts, this is the second such attack today by the same person. This morning in Jokertown a man fitting the suspects description assaulted what we hope was only his first such victim, twisting his head completely around. Luckily, Fortunato intervened and healed the victim with his ace powers. Sadly, be was unable to do anything to save the boy. This is Carl Thomas, Channel Nine News, at Jetboy's Tomb."

  "Fuck." Spector reached for his beer and knocked it over. Foam spread slowly over the bar. "They have to come on the goddamn TV about that. Couldn't have kept their ugly mouths shut. "

  "… that terrible tragedy. In an apparently unrelated incident Frederico Macellaio was killed in an automobile accident earlier this afternoon. Macellaio, also known as 'the Butcher' and reputed to be a major figure in the city's underworld, was dead at the scene."

  "It's just not my fucking day," Spector muttered.

  He pulled out his wallet and motioned to the bartender, but the man was looking at the door. Spector turned. There were three punks standing just inside the doorway. They all had black hair cut like Moe of the Three Stooges. The words BEDTIME Boys were emblazoned in red on the backs of their leather jackets. Each carried a fiberglass skateboard. The leader, who was a head shorter than the other two, wore mirrored sunglasses.

  "Shake everybody down," said the little boss, blowing on his fingertips.

  Spector's barstool creaked loudly as he swiveled to face them. He was worried about the kid with shades; his power was no good unless his victim's eyes were visible. The other two he could handle.

  "Nice of you to get that out for us," said one of the stooges, eyeing Spector's wallet. "Iland it over."

  Spector shoved his wallet back into his pants pocket. "Fuck off, you little shit. While you still can."