Wild Cards 14 - Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  "The attorney - "

  "Can wait."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The waiter led them through a maze of tables and past stainless steel dim sum carts to a red leather booth where Danny sat, except Danny was beside Zoe and the Danny scarfing up phoenix-eye dumplings was a little more angular. Her absolutely perfect auburn hair was cut in a side-parted, chin-length wedge, the sort of cut that Zoe's waves would never let her wear.

  "I can't blame you for feeling a little jittery," Danny said. "Lawyers can wreck your day. But you've got a couple of hours before you have to meet this shyster of yours. You'll feel stronger after a good lunch. Trust me."

  And then, "Hi, Danny," Turtle's Danny said, and Zoe found herself seated between them, while the cart arrived and Turtle's Danny picked out an assortment of neat small fattening things.

  Identical twins? Of course. But the thinner Danny stabbed a smoking hot pot-sticker and said, "Zoe, you made a hell of a first impression. The expression on Turtle's face when I came in from the shower!"

  "Don't worry, Zoe," Turtle's Danny said. Their voices were identical. The effect was like listening to a stereo set for too much separation. "It's good for him to find that attractive women think he's kissable. He'll get used to it, someday."

  "But you?" Zoe pointed to the thinner Danny.

  "Oh, yes. I was there. I don't listen in all the time, but we're me."

  "We are Legion," Turtle's Danny said.

  "Uh, like clones?" Zoe asked.

  "Better," they both said.

  "I'm the Danny who lives with Rick," thinner Danny said.

  "Rick?"

  "Beautiful, black, Rick," Turtle's Danny said.

  "How many of you are there?" Zoe asked.

  "Only three," starlet Danny said. "Nobody wants to hide out and eat enough to bud another one right now."

  "Turtle got a little freaked when we did that last time," Rick's Danny said. "Zoe, you didn't tell me everything about this talent of yours. A little more detail, please. Just eat your pot-sticker, there, and tell me how you get a lock to unlock. Like Turtle said, you won't get far if you have to be scared to death to do your thing. And you want to fix this in a hurry, it sounds like."

  All right, fine. She was sitting in a Manhattan dim sum place with two women who were the same person, and the situation felt a little trippy, like the pot she'd tried only once, and then she'd gotten loose and floaty and not at all scared, so she'd had the napkins on the coffee table fold themselves into origami cranes and fly around the room. Fortunately, the three people around her had said nothing more than "Oh, wow," and passed off the experience as a contact hallucination. She'd never tried it again, and she didn't ever drink.

  She felt drunk now. The world had gone tilt in a Chinese restaurant where reality duplicated itself and two selves could exist in one booth, but this was New York, after all, and no one seemed to notice. "It's not a verbal process," Zoe said. "But I'll try." She felt like a drab shadow between these two. Their porcelain skins made her olive coloring look darker, and to her eyes, muddy. "I think - I can't be sure, but it sort of feels like nano-engineering would feel, if anybody could really do that. I have to be close to things. Like this chopstick, say. It's not ivory, of course, it's plastic, so there's a way that the hydrogen links can bond and unbond fairly easily. It could have legs there, see, and little arms, and this chrysanthemum painted on the blunt end could be a mouth."

  "Well?" starlet Danny asked. "Go ahead."

  "Well, not here. But I would pick it up and hold it."

  "That's all you need to do?"

  "No. I would ... breathe on it. What my breathing does is sort of instruct the molecular bonds. I think. When I was little, I sort of thought it was like giving CPR, or something. I guess."

  But they were laughing, both of them.

  "You blow on things to bring them to life?" starlet Danny asked.

  "Wnat's funny?" Zoe asked.

  Starlet Danny grinned her cheerleader's grin again. "Zoe? I have to ask you something. How's your sex life?"

  "What?"

  "No, seriously."

  "It's ... okay, I guess. No. It's not okay at all. I'm always afraid I'm going to get too involved and that whoever I'm with is going to find out about me. That I'll slip up and animate something. So I'm a little guarded."

  "You fake it," Wall Street said.

  "Well, yes." Faked sexual satisfaction, and then dealt with the frustration later, courtesy of a vibrator and a size C battery. And if she hadn't felt safe with these two, hadn't trusted them, she could never have admitted any of this.

  "Zoe. Zoe, I think you've just told us what could replace getting scared to death, if you can handle it. No harm intended, now. This may be hard to accept," starlet Danny said.

  "Think about it for a minute," Rick's Danny said. "What other activity, other than animating things or going to the john, would you rather have a little privacy for? What else makes you tired, a little sleepy, after? But relaxed maybe? A little less tense?"

  "Oh." The chopstick in Zoe's hand was warm, plastic, potentially malleable. She squeezed it harder. "Oh, that's ridiculous."

  "Is it?"

  "Oh, for gravy's sake."

  "She's thinking about it," starlet Danny said.

  "That's the equation? Animating things, for me, is a sexual activity?" Analytically, and she began to analyze, right then and there, it was possible. Profound changes in physiology, in neurochemistry, were part of sexual arousal and certainly occurred in orgasm. The whole chain of interactions, sex, violence, arousal, were so closely related in the architecture of the brain.

  The chopstick broke with a snap. It wasn't animated in any way, it was just a plastic chopstick. She dropped the pieces on the table. But she knew, she knew to the level of her very cells, that what she'd keyed through terror, yes, could be keyed through desire. "I'll be damned." The Dannys were smiling at her. Their smiles were accepting, tolerant, and warm. "I think you're right.

  "Will knowing it help?" Rick's Danny asked.

  "I don't know," Zoe said. "I don't think so."

  "Blowjob, honey, come back up to the hotel tomorrow night. Turtle and I are free then. We'll work on this, okay?" starlet Danny asked.

  "Okay," Zoe said. "Blowjob?" Blowjob. Some of the more flamboyant aces wore costumes. She tried to imagine one for a woman called Blowjob.

  "Why is this woman laughing?" Rick's Danny asked.

  "I'll tell you later," Zoe said. "Maybe." She bit into a sweet dumpling covered with sesame seeds, and listened to the sisters talk. Thinking, at least talking with Turtle and Danny would delay, for a while, the prospect of another restless night and its fantasies of courts, jail, disgrace. And that she wouldn't have to think so much about Anne, about losing her, about how sick she was going to be in Jerusalem, with surgery and chemotherapy. Anne would need her there. As soon as the court thing got finished, she'd follow momma and Bjorn. Off to a country that she still thought of as a place with sand and camels, full of people who wore flowing robes, where all the men had big, thick beards, and all the women were beautiful, with eyes like roe deer, and their bellies were like heaps of wheat.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The kitchen at home was empty, the coffee cups washed and put away. Anne had gone back to work. Dr. Finn was displeased, she'd said, that Anne was delaying her surgery. Anne still seemed to think that things weren't all that bad, and she liked Finn a lot.

  But she'd promised that she'd leave when the airline called. The flights were booked heavily for the next six months, El Al kept saying. The Israelis took political refugees, yes, but officially speaking, jokers weren't political refugees.

  Zoe managed to talk to the first three latents on her list. She arranged lunches with them. Some of them didn't really want to talk to her. They hadn't known her that well; the rumor mill had told them she was in disgrace, even if she was still the official President of Subtle Scents. But Maria, this morning, had listened. "I'll do it. I'll leave. But
Zoe, I'll pay you back," she kept saying. On her bottle-washer's salary, living in Jerusalem's inflated economy, Zoe didn't count on the money coming back real soon. But the thought was nice.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Danny wasn't in the hotel room. A soap producer, Turtle said, a meeting. He seemed uneasy without Danny, so Zoe suggested they get dinner. French, he wanted, which surprised her, and he drank white Bordeaux with it. She might have thought beer. But she got him talking about the Shell Games movie, and Richard Dreyfuss was going to play Turtle. Turtle liked that a lot. By the time the profiteroles arrived, he was almost, but not quite, expansive.

  "I'm glad we came," Turtle said. "I was afraid someone would recognize me, but they haven't, so far. I hate it when that happens. Either it's someone who is delighted that I 'cleaned out the Rox,' or it's someone who thinks I'm a mass murderer and they want to kill me. Those guys, I can understand. They're the sane ones. The ones who make my skin crawl are the idiots who think it's neat that I killed a bunch of miserable jokers. They probably have my picture on the wall right between Hitler and Pol Pot."

  "You've had death threats?" Zoe asked.

  "Death threats, love letters from women I don't know, and three hundred lawsuits by people who claim they were 'telekinetically assaulted' by the Turtle. Most of those claims are bizarre as hell. A lot of crossover with UFO abductees, and all the kinky sex fantasies that go with it. Tom Tudbury and his big smooth round sex object shell." He polished off the last profiterole. "Are you still sure you want to be a hero?"

  "I never said I wanted to be a hero. I said I was afraid not to."

  "Danny told me her theories. What you talked about at lunch."

  Tom seemed wistfully shy. Charming, Zoe thought. "Danny's sex theory on animation? She may be right, Tom."

  "Well, she would never have a problem like that. You met Rick's Danny?"

  "Yes. I like her, too."

  "It bothers me. Rick's a nice guy. But when Danny makes out with him, Danny, my Danny, gets to make out with him, too. I mean, not there, but in Venice in the apartment, sometimes, she'll get this look, and I know what they're doing."

  The check had come, had been examined; Tom's card had paid for it. He opened the heavy brass-fitted door that led them back out into Manhattan's night-time streets. They navigated back toward the hotel, dodging a mink-clad woman wearing tennis shoes, a crowd of shavehead wannabes in baggy pants and hightops, and a large poodle walking a small man.

  "You're jealous, Tom."

  "I guess. But it's more weird than jealousy. Sometimes I think about what Rick's Danny is feeling when my Danny and I are making out. I think about the fact that I'm in bed with two women at once, and one of them isn't there. It feels pretty strange."

  The elevator took them back toward the hotel suite. Starlet Danny wasn't there.

  "About this power of yours. You've been practicing?"

  "No." There was a bar in the room, and one of those little refrigerators stocked with booze and chips and candy, with a card to check off what you'd taken out.

  "Tom? What do I do if I learn to use it? Is there an organization I could work with?"

  "There's the government, I guess. SCARE and the Justice department."

  "No."

  "Good. I'm glad you said that."

  "But something else? There has to be something else."

  "I really don't know. I'm out of the hero business, myself." He looked troubled.

  "Tom? I'm in the mood for some cognac."

  "Fine with me." He settled into the cushions on the couch.

  Zoe poured cognac into tumblers, good stiff doses, and brought one to him. She never drank. She planned to play with her glass and sniff the fumes.

  "Danny says she figures you don't drink," Tom said. "She make it sound really sad. You don't drink, you don't make love unless you're on guard about it. That's sad Zoe."

  "I'm not always on guard about it," she said. She sniffed at the cognac. It made her eyes water a little. She walked to the window, which had a view of a brick wall outside, and then back to the little bar. Pacing. She was tense, and didn't much care.

  "What happens when you aren't? Do you animate, uh, modify, uh, do you - "

  Poor man. No, I don't modify penises. "My talent doesn't work on anything living. The energies aren't right. I don't know how to explain it."

  "But if you have an orgasm, things start jumping?"

  "Well - yes."

  "Should be interesting," Tom said.

  Zoe wondered how it would be, to celebrate an orgasm with showers of confetti, with a round of applause from chiming crystal glasses on a bedside table, with chandeliers strobing themselves on and off. And someone else there to enjoy the show, not just her trusty vibrator.

  The phone rang. Tom picked it up. He said yes a couple of times and hung up.

  "Danny. She's going to stay with her sister."

  "Oh. I wanted her to be here." She really did. Danny had this healthy, relaxed attitude about all sorts of things.

  "Well. She won't be here. She'll be there. I hope Rick has a good time."

  "Because you think they'll make out?"

  "Because I know they will. Or Rick is a purblind fool who doesn't deserve a Danny in his life. Sit down, Zoe. You make me think I'm watching a tennis match."

  She sat down.

  "Now. You have to be scared to animate things. Or you have to be horny, Danny thinks. Or you have to be alone."

  "That's right."

  "No crazier than I am, when you come to think about it. Me, I have to have my shell to do really good teke. Little things, like this glass, I can lift without it, but that's about it."

  Zoe put her glass down on the coffee table.

  "Show me," she said.

  "You're challenging your teacher."

  "Yup."

  "I'll try." Tom stared at the glass. He clenched his fists. Nothing happened. "This is harder than you might think," Tom said. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The room was very quiet. The glass lifted about an inch, the meniscus of cognac tilting as the glass swayed in the air. Then it thumped back down on the table. "Getting there," Tom said. "One more time." He tried again, and the glass sailed up, hovered in the air, and beelined for Zoe's face. It adjusted its angle as if waiting for her to sip. So she did.

  "Oooh," she said. "Applause, applause. Clap, clap." She lifted the glass from the air, and sipped again. The cognac burned all the way down. It tasted of apples, late summer, and oak.

  "Your turn," Tom said. He put his glass on the table. "Here. Maybe this will help." He reached up and clicked off the table lamp. The room was lighted only by a faint glow that came from the lamp in the bedroom. Tom got up and half-closed that door, too. "See? Nobody's watching."

  "I'll try," Zoe said. She tried. Gossamer wings on the stem of the glass, that would be nice, and a program to flutter them to let the glass waft around the room. She really wanted this to work. She tried. "Nothing. Damn."

  "My turn." Turtle lifted his glass for her. It seemed easier for him this time. "Drink up," he said.

  "We're going to run out of cognac." Zoe spluttered on a too-large gulp.

  "That's what room service is for," Turtle said.

  It took them about a half-bottle to get from the couch into the bedroom.

  "I guess," Turtle mentioned at one point, "that anything you can animate, I can move out of the way with my teke. Just keep it lightweight," he said.

  "Sure." He didn't have a pelt, like Bjorn, but the curls on his chest were quite pleasant to stroke, all the same.

  There wasn't any confetti to dance around the room. But, eventually, the glasses on the bedside table clapped their crystal hands against their bellies, and gave them a round of ringing applause.

  "Damn," Tom said. One of the glasses leaped from the bedside table and hung in the air over their heads. "I think you did it, Zoe."

  "Hell of a way to have to get things going," she said. "Tom, you may not always be there when I need
you."

  "You're right. It's going to be a problem, if this is what it takes to get your powers working."

  "Maybe I jus' need a lil more practice," Zoe said.

  "Good thought."

  Good man, this Thomas Tudbury.

  Sooner than anyone might have expected, the glasses again rang their chimes.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Turtle was gone, back to California with his Danny. Zoe had seen him again, but he'd seemed defensive, a little frightened, and she didn't want to get in his space and upset it. He'd said something about getting back in harness. He'd said he had to contact some people.

  He left Zoe with memories, fine rich memories, and a wistful hope. Someday, someday, someone for me. If only.

  The days lurched forward toward the grand jury hearing. In her mind, she faced an inquisition, hooded figures cloaked in red who carried candles the size of walking sticks. They snuffed them out on the floor, and her breath died with the dying flames.

  She became something she had never been, a drifter in Jokertown streets in the daytime, alone when the Escorts slept in the warm mornings. She heard tales of hunger and death and outrage. The tabloids kept up their barrage of joker hate stories. And in the Times, she read of the groundbreaking for the first of the Biological Research Centers.

  Her bank balance sank daily. Some of her latents had asked for transfers to Jerusalem. Some wouldn't think of leaving. Zoe worked with Dutton and set the Escorts up as a student tour group, with Bjorn and Anne as adults-in-charge. The Escorts thought the idea sucked. She stuffed the tickets in their pockets anyway.

  "You'll go when there's space for you on the damned plane. You'll check with my daddy every day to see if your flight is scheduled. You'll get the fuck out of here when he says go. These are round-trip tickets, kids. Think of it as cultural enrichment."

  "Mess around with yuppies, and look what happens to us," Needles said. But in his streetwise eyes, there was something like hope.

  Home base was her parents' flat, her childhood bedroom with its pink and white French Provincial canopy bed. Zoe rummaged through her closet, still crowded with mementoes of triumphs past, her prom dress, the first Calvin Klein she'd ever been able to afford, an Issey Miyake with its artful cutouts. She'd bought it the first year the company had gone public; still a lovely dress, but now hopelessly outdated. She had dressed for success, once. She had been a success, once.