Wild Cards: Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  “Perhaps they won’t try again,” said the warrior woman. “What can we have that’s worth more than five lives?”

  He laughed shortly. “I hope you’re right.”

  “We’ll take turns to watch.”

  Standing breathless, every sense alert, they smiled at each other in new-forged comradeship. There was no second attack. At dawn Sonja, rousing from a light doze, sat up and pushed back the heavy masses of her red hair.

  “You are very beautiful,” said the man, gazing at her.

  “So are you,” she answered.

  The caravanserai was deserted, except for the dead. The brigands’ riding animals were gone. The innkeeper and his family had vanished into some bolt-hole in the ruins.

  “I am heading for the mountains,” he said, as they packed up their gear. “For the pass into Zimiamvia.”

  “I too.”

  “Then our way lies together.”

  He was wearing the same leather jerkin, over knee-length loose breeches of heavy violet silk. Sonja looked at the strips of linen that bound the wound on his upper arm. “When did you tie up that cut?”

  “You dressed it for me, for which I thank you.”

  “When did I do that?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, sometime.”

  Sonja mounted Lemiak, a little frown between her brows. They rode together until dusk. She was not talkative and the man soon accepted her silence. But when night fell, they camped without a fire on the houseless plain; then, as the demons stalked, they were glad of each other’s company. Next dawn, the mountains seemed as distant as ever. Again, they met no living creature all day, spoke little to each other, and made the same comfortless camp. There was no moon. The stars were almost bright enough to cast shadow; the cold was intense. Sleep was impossible, but they were not tempted to ride on. Few travelers attempt the passage over the high plains to Zimiamvia. Of those few most turn back, defeated. Some wander among the ruins forever, tearing at their own flesh. Those who survive are the ones who do not defy the terrors of darkness. They crouched shoulder to shoulder, each wrapped in a single blanket, to endure. Evil emanations of the death-steeped plain rose from the soil and bred phantoms. The sweat of fear was cold as ice melt on Sonja’s cheeks. Horrors made of nothingness prowled and muttered in her mind.

  “How long?” she whispered. “How long do we have to bear this?”

  The man’s shoulder lifted against hers. “Until we get well, I suppose.”

  The warrior woman turned to face him, green eyes flashing in appalled outrage.

  “He’s not supposed to do that,” she protested from the foam couch in the doctor’s office. He was sitting beside her, his notebook on his knee. “He damaged my experience.”

  Dr. Hamilton nodded. “Okay. Let’s take a step back. Leave aside the risk of disease or pregnancy: Because we can leave those bogeys aside, forever if you like. Would you agree that sex is essentially an innocent and playful social behavior—something you’d offer to or take from a friend, in an ideal world, as easily as food or drink?”

  “Sonja” recalled certain dreams—meat dreams, not the computer-assisted kind. She blushed. But the man was a doctor after all. “That’s what I do feel,” she agreed. “That’s why I’m here. I want to get back to the pure pleasure, to get rid of the baggage.”

  “The sexual experience offered in virtuality therapy is readily available on the nets. You know that. And you could find an agency that would vet your partners for you. You chose to join this group because you need to feel that you’re taking medicine, so you don’t have to feel ashamed. And because you need to feel that you’re interacting with people who, like yourself, perceive sex as a problem.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “You and another group member went off into your own private world. That’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Let me tell you, it doesn’t always. The software gives you access to a vast multisensual library, all the sexual fantasy ever committed to media. But you and your partner, or partners, have to customize the information and use it to create and maintain what we call the consensual perceptual plenum. Success in holding a shared dreamland together is a knack. It depends on something in the neural makeup that no one has yet fully analyzed. Some have it, some don’t. You two are really in sync.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m complaining about—”

  “You think he’s damaging the pocket universe you two built up. But he isn’t, not from his character’s point of view. It’s part Lessingham’s thing, to be conscious that he’s in a fantasy world.”

  She started, accusingly. “I don’t want to know his name.”

  “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t tell you. ‘Lessingham’ is the name of his virtuality persona. I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. He’s a character from a series of classic fantasy novels by E. R. Eddison. . . . In Eddison’s glorious cosmos ‘Lessingham’ is a splendidly endowed English gentleman who visits fantastic realms of ultramasculine adventure as a lucid dreamer: Though an actor in the drama, he is partly conscious of another existence, while the characters around him are more or less explicitly puppets of the dream. . . .”

  He sounded as if he were quoting from a reference book. He probably was: reading from an autocue that had popped up in lenses of those doctorish horn-rims. She knew that the old-fashioned trappings were there to reassure her. She rather despised them: But it was like the virtuality itself. The buttons were pushed, the mechanism responded. She was reassured.

  Of course she knew the Eddison stories. She recalled “Lessingham” perfectly: the tall, strong, handsome, cultured millionaire jock who has magic journeys to another world, where he is a tall, strong, handsome, cultured jock in Elizabethan costume, with a big sword. The whole thing was an absolutely typical male power-fantasy, she thought—without rancor. Fantasy means never having to say you’re sorry. The women in those books, she remembered, were drenched in sex, but they had no part in the action. They stayed at home being princesses, occasionally allowing the millionaire jocks to get them into bed. She could understand why “Lessingham” would be interested in “Sonja” . . . for a change.

  “You think he goosed you, psychically. What do you expect? You can’t dress the way ‘Sonja’ dresses and hope to be treated like the Queen of May.”

  Dr. Hamilton was only doing his job. He was supposed to be provocative, so they could react against him. That was his excuse, anyway. . . . On the contrary, she thought. “Sonja” dresses the way she does because she can dress any way she likes. “Sonja” doesn’t have to hope for respect, and she doesn’t have to demand it. She just gets it. “It’s dominance display,” she said, enjoying the theft of his jargon. “Females do that too, you know. The way ‘Sonja’ dresses is not an invitation. It’s a warning. Or a challenge, to anyone who can measure up.”

  He laughed, but he sounded irritated. “Frankly, I’m amazed that you two work together. I’d have expected ‘Lessingham’ to go for an ultrafeminine—”

  “I am . . . ‘Sonja’ is ultrafeminine. Isn’t a tigress feminine?”

  “Well, okay. But I guess you’ve found out his little weakness. He likes to be a teeny bit in control, even when he’s letting his hair down in dreamland.”

  She remembered the secret mockery lurking in those blue eyes.

  “That’s the problem. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want either of us to be in control.”

  “I can’t interfere with his persona. So, it’s up to you. Do you want to carry on?”

  “Something works,” she muttered. She was unwilling to admit that there’d been no one else, in the text-interface phase of the group, that she found remotely attractive. It was “Lessingham,” or drop out and start again. “I just want him to stop spoiling things.”

  “You can’t expect your masturbation fantasies to mesh completely. This is about getting beyond solitary sex. Go with it: Where’s the harm? One day you’ll want to face a sexual partner in the real, and then you’ll b
e well. Meanwhile, you could be passing ‘Lessingham’ in reception—he comes to his meat sessions around your time—and not know it. That’s safety, and you never have to breach it. You two have proved that you can sustain an imaginary world together: It’s almost like being in love. I could argue that lucid dreaming, being in the fantasy world but not of it, is the next big step. Think about that.”

  The clinic room had mirrored walls: more deliberate provocation. How much reality can you take? the reflections asked. But she felt only a vague distaste for the woman she saw, at once hollow-cheeked and bloated, lying in the doctor’s foam couch. He was glancing over her records on his notebook screen; which meant the session was almost up.

  “Still no overt sexual contact?”

  “I’m not read. . . .” She stirred restlessly. “Is it a man or a woman?”

  “Ah!” smiled Dr. Hamilton, waving a finger at her. “Naughty, naughty—”

  He was the one who’d started taunting her, with his hints that the meat—“Lessingham”—might be near. She hated herself for asking a genuine question. It was her rule to give him no entry to her real thoughts. But Dr. Jim knew everything, without being told: every change in her brain chemistry, every effect on her body: sweaty palms, racing heart, damp underwear. . . . The telltales on his damned autocue left her precious little dignity. Why do I subject myself to this? she wondered, disgusted. But in the virtuality she forgot utterly about Dr. Jim. She didn’t care who was watching. She had her brazen-hilted sword. She had the piercing intensity of dusk on the high plains, the snow-light on the mountains; the hard, warm silk of her own perfect limbs. She felt a brief complicity with “Lessingham.” She had a conviction that Dr. Jim didn’t play favorites. He despised all his patients equally. . . . You get your kicks, doctor. But we have the freedom of dreamland.

  She gazed at the cards, feeling uneasily that she’d have to give up this habit. She used to glance at them sidelong; now she’d pause and linger. She was getting desperate. She was lucky there was medically supervised virtuality sex to be had. She would be helpless prey in the wild world of the nets, and she’d never, ever risk trying one of these meat-numbers. And she had no intention of returning to her husband. Let him make his own coffee. She wouldn’t call that getting well. She turned, and caught the eye of a nicely dressed young woman standing next to her. They walked away quickly in opposite directions. Everybody’s having the same dreams. . . .

  They must be vigilant. The approaches to fortunate Zimiamvia were guarded. They could not expect to reach the pass unopposed. And the nights were haunted still. They made camp at a flat bend of the river, where the crags of the defile drew away, and they could see far up and down their valley. To the north, peaks of diamond and indigo reared above them. Their fire of aromatic wood burned brightly, as the white stars began to blossom.

  “No one knows about the long-term effects,” she said. “It can’t be safe. At the least, we’re risking irreversible addiction. They warn you about that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a cyberspace couch potato.”

  “Nobody claims it’s safe. If it were safe, it wouldn’t be so intense.”

  Their eyes met. “Sonja”’s barbarian simplicity combined surprisingly well with the man’s more elaborate furnishing. The consensual perceptual plenum was a flawless reality: the sound of the river, the clear silence of the mountain twilight . . . their two perfect bodies. She turned from him to gaze into the sweet-scented flames. The warrior woman’s glorious vitality throbbed in her veins. The fire held worlds of its own, liquid furnaces: the sunward surface of Mercury.

  “Have you ever been to a place like this in the real?”

  He grimaced. “You’re kidding. In the real, I’m not a magic-wielding millionaire.”

  Something howled. The blood-stopping cry was repeated. A taint of sickening foulness swept by them. They both shuddered, and drew closer together. “Sonja” knew the scientific explanation for the legendary virtuality-paranoia, the price you paid for the virtual world’s super-real, dreamlike richness. It was all down to heightened neurotransmitter levels, a positive-feedback effect, psychic overheating. But the horrors were still horrors.

  “The doctor says if we can talk like this, it means we’re getting well.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not sick. It’s like you said. Virtuality’s addictive and I’m an addict. I’m getting my drug of choice safely, on prescription. That’s how I see it.”

  All this time “Sonja” was in her apartment, lying in a foam couch with a visor over her head. The visor delivered compressed bursts of stimuli to her visual cortex: the other sense perceptions riding piggyback on the visual, triggering a whole complex of neuronal groups; tricking her mind/brain into believing the world of the dream was out there. The brain works like a computer. You cannot “see” a hippopotamus until your system has retrieved the “hippopotamus” template from memory, and checked it against the incoming. Where does the “real” exist? In a sense this world was as real as the other. . . . But the thought of “Lessingham” ’s unknown body disturbed her. If he was too poor to lease good equipment, he might be lying in the clinic now in a grungy public cubicle . . . cathetered, and so forth: the sordid details.

  She had never tried virtual sex. The solitary version had seemed a depressing idea. People said the partnered kind was the perfect zipless fuck. He sounded experienced; she was afraid he would be able to tell she was not. But it didn’t matter. The virtual-therapy group wasn’t like a dating agency. She would never meet him in the real, that was the whole idea. She didn’t have to think about that stranger’s body. She didn’t have to worry about the real “Lessingham” ’s opinion of her. She drew herself up in the firelight. It was right, she decided, that Sonja should be a virgin. When the moment came, her surrender would be the more absolute.

  In their daytime he stayed in character. It was a tacit trade-off. She would acknowledge the other world at nightfall by the campfire, as long as he didn’t mention it the rest of the time. So they traveled on together, Lessingham and Red Sonja, the courtly scholar-knight and the taciturn warrior-maiden, through an exquisite Maytime: exchanging lingering glances, “accidental” touches. . . . And still nothing happened. “Sonja” was aware that “Lessingham,” as much as herself, was holding back from the brink. She felt piqued at this. But they were both, she guessed, waiting for the fantasy they had generated to throw up the perfect moment of itself. It ought to. There was no other reason for its existence.

  Turning a shoulder of the hillside, they found a sheltered hollow. Two rowan trees in flower grew above the river. In the shadow of their blossom tumbled a little waterfall, so beautiful it was a wonder to behold. The water fell clear from the upper edge of a slab of stone twice a man’s height, into a rocky basin. The water in the basin was clear and deep, a-churn with bubbles from the jet plunging from above. The riverbanks were lawns of velvet; over the rocks grew emerald mosses and tiny water flowers.

  “I would live here,” said Lessingham softly, his hand dropping from his riding bird’s bridle. “I would build me a house in this fairy place, and rest my heart here forever.”

  Sonja loosed the black stallion’s rein. The two beasts moved off, feeding each in its own way on the sweet grasses and springtime foliage.

  “I would like to bathe in that pool,” said the warrior-maiden.

  “Why not?” He smiled. “I will stand guard.”

  She pulled off her leather harness and slowly unbound her hair. It fell in a trembling mass of copper and russet lights, a cloud of glory around the richness of her barely clothed body. Gravely she gazed at her own perfection, mirrored in the homage of his eyes. Lessingham’s breath was coming fast. She saw a pulse beat, in the strong beauty of his throat. The pure physical majesty of him caught her breath. . . .

  It was their moment. But it still needed something to break this strange spell of reluctance. “Lady—” he murmured—

  Sonja gasped. “Back-to-back!” she cried. “Qu
ickly, or it is too late!”

  Six warriors surrounded them, covered from head to foot in red-and-black armor. They were human in the lower body, but the head of each appeared beaked and fanged, with monstrous faceted eyes, and each bore an extra pair of armored limbs between breastbone and belly. They fell on Sonja and Lessingham without pause or a challenge.

  Sonja fought fiercely as always, her blade ringing against the monster armor. But something cogged her fabulous skill. Some power had drained the strength from her splendid limbs. She was disarmed. The clawed creatures held her, a monstrous head stooped over her, choking her with its fetid breath. . . .

  When she woke again she was bound against a great boulder, by thongs around her wrists and ankles, tied to hoops of iron driven into the rock. She was naked but for her linen shift; it was in tatters. Lessingham was standing, leaning on his sword. “I drove them off,” he said. “At last.” He dropped the sword and took his dagger to cut her down.

  She lay in his arms. “You are very beautiful,” he murmured. She thought he would kiss her. His mouth plunged instead to her breast, biting and sucking at the engorged nipple. She gasped in shock; a fierce pang leapt through her virgin flesh. What did they want with kisses? They were warriors. Sonja could not restrain a moan of pleasure. He had won her. How wonderful to be overwhelmed, to surrender to the raw lust of this godlike animal.

  Lessingham set her on her feet.

  “Tie me up.”

  He was proffering a handful of blood-slicked leather thongs.

  “What?”

  “Tie me to the rock, mount me. It’s what I want.”

  “The evil warriors tied you—?”

  “And you come and rescue me.” He made an impatient gesture. “Whatever. Trust me. It’ll be good for you too.” He tugged at his bloodstained silk breeches, releasing a huge, iron-hard erection. “See, they tore my clothes. When you see that, you go crazy, you can’t resist . . . and I’m at your mercy. Tie me up!”