Wild Cards 14 - Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  The audience erupted into applause, and Gregg reveled in the sound, an orgasm of support. He let the power loose fully now, let it rip open the last restraints on them. Now ...

  "More importantly," he continued, "as a lawyer I look at what we have, and know that legally the only ones we can touch are the little people. I don't want the goons and the subordinates, because they mean nothing. That would be like trying to catch a lizard by the tail - all you'll get is the tail while the lizard scurries away to grow another. I want the whole creature. To do that, we need more; to get more, we need each and every one of you. We have to know that none, none of you here will forget. We have to know that you will not permit this to continue even one day longer."

  A wordless shout of affirmation came from several voices within the audience, and the reverberation made Gregg lift his head and smile. Yes ... he exulted, and echoed the word aloud.

  "Yes. That's why we came here. Because true power lies within the people. Within you, and you, and you." With each word, he stabbed a forefinger toward the audience. Where Gregg pointed, people rose in support, shouting back to him, screaming. "With your help," he concluded, "we will snare the head of this beast, and when we do ..."

  They waited, hanging on his words, the power, this Gift of his redemption seeming to sizzle and spark around him.

  "We. Will. Slay. It." He finished each word as a thundering concussion.

  They roared, they shouted, they screamed back at him. Inside, another voice shouted over the din. Remember what the Gift is for, Greggie, it warned. Remember that it's to be used for atonement, for penance, for redemption. Never forget that ...

  Gregg nodded.

  Redemption, it seemed, was very, very tasty.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Gregg could already imagine the headlines in tomorrow's papers: HARTMANN UNCOVERS CONSPIRACY AGAINST WILD CARD. HARTMANN INDICTS HIGH-LEVEL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS IN PLOT.

  The floor director was waving to him as he left the stage. "A phone call for you, sir," he said. Gregg took the proferred phone.

  "This is Gregg Hartmann."

  There was a click on the other end. He heard the popping hiss of a recording - a lone low tone, then another a half-step higher: daaaaaahnhhhh-DUM. The sequence repeated again, then again a little faster and more urgent until it was a pounding, insistent rhythm. Gregg suddenly realized what the music was: the theme from Jaws. A sudden chill prowled his spine.

  He hung up the phone as if something was about to leap from the receiver and devour him.

  My Sweet Lord

  by Victor Milan

  Walking with great deliberation, conscious of his destiny, and the eyes of the world - in the form of half a hundred news cameras - upon him, the man in the saffron robe entered the space between the shouting, cheering mob, and the armored personnel carrier that barred its entrance to the joker quarter of Cholon. The morning sun that leaned upon Saigon like a surly giant pressed sweat to his face and highlights to his shaven skull. The news services usually stayed away from the anti-wild cards riots in favor of the more politically correct demonstrations before the Presidential Pad, but today they had been tipped off, and were out in force, jostling the rioters and poking boom-microphones at the monk like dung-beetle antennas.

  A man burning himself to death live and in color was what TV news was all about.

  The BMP's commander watched the Buddhist monk and his assistant warily from his seat, half out of the turret, in case they got frisky with the red plastic jerricans of gasoline the assistant carried. The monk ignored him as serenely as he did the mob and the ungainly, pale-faced newsfolk. Turning his back to the armored vehicle he assumed full lotus on the griddle-hot pavement.

  Visibly torn between self-importance and dismay, the assistant took the cans of gas one at a time and doused the monk with them, being careful not to get any of the fluid on himself. Then he stood to the side and drew himself to his full height, which wasn't conspicuous.

  "The holy monk Thich will now immolate himself," he announced in a reedy voice - and in English, of course, the language of international news - "to protest the continued invasion of our country by the foreign monsters."

  The Saigon mob was fairly well educated, as mobs go; many of its components understood English, and the rest caught the drift. The crowd roared anger, or approval, or whatever it is that communal entities bent on mayhem feel. For the slow in the street and among the viewers at home, the assistant propped placards against the empty jerricans, left and right of the monk and well clear. One read NO MORE JOKERS in English. The other repeated the message in Vietnamese.

  The assistant took out a book of matches and began to fumble at it. On his third attempt he got one to light, singeing his fingers in the process. "Yi!" he yelped, and flipped the match away.

  Crowd and journalists caught their breath. The burning match happened to land in the clear puddle surrounding the monk. The gasoline went up in a whoosh.

  For a moment the monk was obscured by an orange wash of fire. Then the flame shot upward away from him in a mushroom cloud, to surround the figure of a man hanging in midair, two meters above the monk. For a moment it blazed like a saint's full-body halo in a pre-Renaissance religious painting. Then it collapsed inward, to outline momentarily the head and limbs and body of the man.

  Then it vanished.

  "Ahh," the floating figure said, stretching its arms, "I needed that." He was a small man for an overt Occidental, not much bigger than the Vietnamese norm, with a narrow clever face and red hair. He wore an orange sweatsuit and athletic shoes.

  His cheeks pink with seeming sunburn, the monk was staring upward at the interloper. "What is the meaning of this?" the assistant demanded.

  "The meaning of this is, I'm denying your pal his cheap theatrics. Get him out of here and get him a shower."

  "But - "

  "Hit the road, Junior, before I scorch your tuchus." He sent a squirt of fire to the pavement at the acolyte's sandaled feet. The assistant jumped. Then he grabbed the monk by a skinny biceps and hauled him upright. With the supreme moment passed into anticlimax, flaming death didn't look so appealing any more; the monk allowed himself to be led away without protest.

  The flying man settled into the pool of gas from which he had sucked the flame. A jet of fire from his fingertips reignited it. When it burned off, he was still standing there, arms akimbo, grinning like a fox.

  "Jumpin' Jack Flash at your service," he told the assembled media. "Normally, as a good libertarian, I wouldn't dream of interfering with our little friend's right to light up anything he damn well pleased, himself included. But today I decided to make an exception, just to piss you people off."

  The crowd was standing well back away from all this. The journalists grumbled among themselves. A couple shook their fists at the interloper.

  "What about allegations that Vietnam is being overrun by jokers?" a British reporter shouted. The flying ace was, after all, a semi-official spokesman for the government of the Republic of Free Vietnam. He was rumored to be like this with its President. Perhaps anticlimax could be partly redeemed in embarrassing questions.

  "If you brought all the jokers in the world here, they wouldn't make up five percent of the population," JJ said. "Get real."

  "What about the way wealthy American jokers are dominating the economy?" asked a woman reporter for Frontline.

  "At least now there's an economy to dominate," Flash said. "Even if that were true, which of course it isn't."

  He cocked his head at her. "Didn't I see you do a feature a couple years ago, about how America was shortchanging her jokers? Now they come over here, and you bitch because they've got it too good. Make up your damn mind, lady - "

  He broke off because some of the reporters and the mob were trying to crane past the parked BMP, at something going on in the streets of the joker district. JJ Flash frowned. He wasn't used to being upstaged. He rose ten feet in the air and turned around.

  An astounding
cavalcade was approaching down the broad street of the former Chinese quarter. To the skirl of chants, chimes, and pipes, came a bevy of maidens of celestial beauty, hung about with flowers, and trinkets of ivory and gold: the sort of Indian gaud usually attendant upon Indian gods. So celestial was their beauty, in fact, that their bare lotus feet failed to touch the pavement as they walked.

  Next up were a band of youths, boys and girls alike, dressed in the saffron robes of sannyasi, Indian ascetics. These were raising the musical din, clanging kartal cymbals, thumping mridansa drums with the heels of their hands, blowing wood flutes and singing songs of praise.

  And behind came the evident object of that praise: a joker with an opulent belly spilling over a simple loincloth. His head was the head of an elephant, with one tusk. He carried a parasol in his trunk to shade himself. He rode a giant white rat whose eyes were the color of blood.

  "Now, that's something you don't see every day," JJ Flash remarked to the air.

  And way down inside him, a voice breathed, Ganesha. Oh, wow.

  Oblivious, the cavalcade danced straight up to the flank of the BMP. The Apsarases - as JJ recalled the celestial babes were called - winged out to either side and froze into pretty curtsies, still in midair. Ganesha dismounted and danced up to the half-track.

  "Please to vacate your vehicle immediately," he sang, "for I have no wish to put you at risk of harm."

  The vehicle commander blinked down at him.

  A fall of flowers rained upon Ganesha's elephant head, from a point in the air about three feet above the crown.

  That did it. The President of Free Vietnam had made good on the hollow promise of the former Socialist Republic, turning Vietnam into a haven for the oppressed wild cards of the world - and damned near all of them were, by now. Cops who could not contain that customary Asian distaste for human deformity which animated today's mob had been booted off the force long since. So jokers did not particularly bother the APC commander. And he didn't know squat about the Hindu religion, so he had no idea he was being confronted by the spitting image of an actual god, offspring of Shiva and Parvati.

  But flowers materializing in midair ... that got his attention. He yelped into his intercom and unassed his track right smart, followed in short order by the other two crew.

  Ganesha smiled. "Know that I am the Remover of Obstacles," he sang in his high, pure voice. His acolytes cheered. The Apsarases beamed celestially. The rat sat on his haunches and cleaned his whiskers. His incisors were the color of the acolytes' robes.

  Ganesha put forth his hands, pressed plump palms to the hot metal skin of the armored carrier. The vehicle shimmered and vanished. A gust of wind blew outward into the faces of the mob and the blank camera eyes. It smelled vaguely of sandalwood.

  A single sigh rose up from the crowd on either side of the police line.

  "I'll be dipped in shit," JJ Flash announced, "and fried for a corn dog."

  Ganesha danced forward, through the space where the BMP had been. The rat waddled behind, and then the Floating Celestial Babes fell in, and the yellowrobe acolytes, singing and tootling up a storm. The crowd bolted away from the guru, front ranks battling those behind in their frenzy to get away from this apparition who could make fourteen and half metric tons of armored fighting vehicle disappear. Not to mention the rat.

  Ganesha raised a plump hand, first two fingers extended. "Peace," he declared, in a voice both penetrant and musical. "Peace - and love. These are the tidings I bear you."

  More flowers rained upon the mob. The protestors quit trying to escape, turned back to stare in wonder.

  Ganesha strode into the crowd, straight up to a sullen man, big for a Vietnamese, who stood with his shirttail out, his bangs in his eyes, and a length of lumber in one hand. He had come prepared to crack joker heads.

  "I am a joker," the guru sang, "and a holy fool. He who would harm any of the Lord Krishna's children, let him first strike me."

  His merry eyes met those of the club-wielder. "Strike, my child, if that is what you will. No harm shall come to you."

  The aspiring joker-basher dropped to his knees and began to weep. Ganesha laid a soft hand upon his head. The crying stopped.

  "My peace upon you, child," he said, and passed on, into the heart of the mob. It gave before him like the sea before a supertanker. Behind him, the Vietnamese man tossed away his two-by-four and joined the ranks of chanting faithful, clapping his hands and dancing clumsily, like a trained bear.

  The camcorders were whirring, sucking the spectacle in through their optics. "This is where I check out," JJ Flash said. He darted down a side street and out of sight into a doorway.

  A moment, and a figure emerged. A very different figure - gangly-tall and blond, with wire-rimmed spectacles before blue eyes that blinked at the vehemence of the Southeast Asian sun. He wore Western jeans and a blue chambray shirt with flowers embroidered on the pockets.

  "Ganesha," he breathed. "Far out."

  He moved quickly back into the intersection. Guru and company were making their musical way toward the center of Saigon. More of the protestors had broken away to join them. The rest were beginning to drift away, with hanging heads and slack arms. Their intention to harm had evaporated, like the Buddhist monk's resolve to burn.

  Mark Meadows knelt, picked up a flower that had avoided being trampled by bare pious feet. It was a lotus blossom, red, heavy, and fragrant. He raised it, sniffed it.

  The flower faded. It did not create a puff of breeze the way the BMP had. It simply melted back into the air.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Madam President," the man in the suit was saying in sonorous American English. He had a nose like a flesh icicle that had begun to drip, and ears that consisted of bunches of limp pink tendrils that stirred with a feeble life of their own. He wore a blue pinstriped suit, well-tailored to his form, which was on the ample side. "We have come to bring certain matters to your attention."

  The Saigon night, hot but none too black, tried to press itself in the tall windows of the French colonial villa the President's supporters had insisted she make her residence. Night was Moonchild's element. She could not bear the touch of the sun. The Republic's enemies - like President Barnett, and George Bush before him - made much of the fact.

  Her audience chamber was the former ballroom, high-ceilinged, with an exquisitely polished floor of European hardwoods. Parachutes tie-dyed in firework explosions of color hung flanking her chair of state, which looked a great deal like a common camp stool, and was. To the dismay of her allies, she permitted no guards in the chamber with her, though there was one other person present tonight. But she was an ace, mistress of the martial arts, possessed of metahuman speed and powers of recuperation; if she encountered danger she couldn't handle, a handful of Vietnamese People's Army vets or expatriate joker kid-gang members from New York armed with Kalashnikovs wouldn't be much use.

  The President of Free Vietnam gazed up at the joker spokesman and felt guilty for her impulses. Which were to grab him by the front of his immaculate vest and shake him and shout, Out with it, then, and don't waste my time mouthing the obvious, you pompous fat fool!

  She sighed. After two years of rulership she had never sought, and had no idea how to escape from, her soul was growing threadbare and grimy, like a rag in one of the tenderloin bars that had sprung back up aboveground with the fall of the communist regime.

  "What might those matters be, Mr. Sorenson?" she asked.

  He glanced at the others of his delegation: a sturdy man in a polo shirt whose collar was stretched almost to bursting around his muscular neck, and whose skin had the color and apparent consistency of none-too-well-dressed cement; a small precise woman with a yellow beak in place of nose and lips; and a handsome black man whose knees were articulated backwards.

  "First of all," Sorenson said, "under increasing pressure from the Barnett administration, American wild cards - refugees - are arriving daily in ever-increasing numbers."

&nb
sp; Moonchild nodded. She was a small woman, dressed in close-fitting black. The half of her face exposed by her yin-yang mask was Asian, and lovely. Black hair hung straight down her back, glossy as Japanese lacquer.

  "I was aware of that," she murmured, and wondered when she had learned to be sarcastic. She who was so caring, so giving, so accepting.

  Tock. At the sound the delegation stiffened, and its eyes fluttered over Moonchild's shoulder, past the hangings. Moonchild paid no attention.

  "They, ah, they are being housed in quite intolerable conditions." After a moment's consternation Sorenson got his momentum back. "Shanty-towns, to be blunt."

  "Are you living in a shanty, Mr. Sorenson?"

  Tock-tock. Sorenson shook his head, his ear fringes wagging. He had begun to sweat, though the old colonial villa was equipped with excellent air-conditioning.

  "As you must be aware, we are also receiving an influx of Vietnamese refugees from the North. And, to be frank, the poorest of you American refugees is wealthy by Vietnamese standards. Most could find better accommodation more readily than their Vietnamese counterparts, if they were willing to do things such as share quarters with one another."

  "And be gouged by landlords!" the beaked woman exclaimed. "You're permitting these Vietnamese to indulge in unbridled capitalism!"

  "The Vietnamese are under the apprehension that their homes are their own." Tock-tock. Tock.

  "And back home," the bull-necked man said, "we're protected against having to compete with people like these dinks."

  "We can hardly erect trade barriers against the Vietnamese in Vietnam."

  The tocking sound really took off, like a machine gun in a jungle ambush. The delegation frankly stared past Moonchild at the rear of the ballroom.

  Croyd Crenson stood by a window. In his current incarnation he was tall and skinny, with protruding faceted yellow eyes and black segmented antennae emerging from his unruly shock of black hair. He had his normal human left hand pressed, fingers splayed, on the top of a wooden table.