Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump

by George R. R. Martin

  "I know Churchill," Gregg told her. "I've met Winston several times, and he's solidly on the side of the wild carders. He's publicly admitted he's infected by the virus himself - and I'd say the wild card gave him extended life, since the man was born in 1874. He'll help us."

  "If we can get to him."

  "There's that, yes."

  Hannah laughed in the twilight. "Well, I'll give you credit for trying. And Gregg, thanks for what you did before. I think you probably saved my life."

  "Don't worry about it."

  "I do." Hannah stroked him, her hand moving from his head down the rolled, bristly flank. Gregg watched her face, watched the way the smile wavered as she touched him. Gregg found himself pushing up, trying to prolong the touch. The reaction was instinctive, automatic. Hannah pulled away, just slightly. Her eyes questioned. "Gregg?"

  "Hannah, I - " Gregg didn't know how to answer. He didn't know what he wanted; didn't know what his body wanted. He wasn't sure how this body responded sexually; he wasn't even sure it had a sexual response. He could feel odd sensations along his lower flank, sensual. Hannah's hand, brushing the wiry clumps of hair, was a delicious agony, and something bright neon-orange and bifurcated like a divining rod was protruding low down on his body.

  "Oh," Hannah said. Her hand came away. She moved away from him - just a few inches, but they both noticed the instinctive retreat. "Gregg, I'm ..." There were tears in her eyes now, and she bit her lower lip, her breath trembling. Her gaze went to her hands, on her lap.

  He could have deflected her apology. He could have made a joke, could have dropped down on all sixes again so that the embarrassing, unbidden erection couldn't be seen. He didn't. You see? She's disgusted by you. She can't even look at you.

  "Gregg, I don't know ... I don't know if I can." A breath. Her blue eyes found him again, but she would not look down the length of his body. "I'm sorry. Look, give me some time, and maybe ... I didn't mean to ..."

  "Didn't mean to arouse me?" Gregg seemed to say it in concert with an inner voice. A bitter laugh followed the words.

  The tears were tracking down the side of her face. Part of Gregg felt pity for her obvious emotional torment. I understand, he wanted to say. I'm sorry, too. But he didn't. "No," she said. "Gregg, look ... Shit ... I'm the one who's failing here. Can you understand? It shouldn't make any difference, not after all you've meant to me ..." Her voice trailed off.

  "But it does?"

  Hannah nodded.

  Bitch ... The erection was fading, withdrawing back into his body. Gregg dropped until only his first two segments were up. Hannah watched him. Her hands were on her lap again, her eyes were rimmed with tears. Nat bitch ...

  "It's okay," he said. "I know what I look like."

  "Gregg - "

  "Like you said," Gregg told her, and he knew that the very understanding of his tone was cutting at her soul, tearing at her. He liked knowing that. "Give it some time. We have more pressing problems." Hannah was looking at him bleakly, and he continued, enjoying the hurt in her face. "I figure that our message will get to Churchill sometime tomorrow - the details I put in there should convince him that I am who I am. I know Churchill; he's not going to be able to resist the invitation to meet. Brian should hear from him soon. So - "

  "Gregg, I'm so sorry."

  "Don't worry. It's not that important" he told her, and he saw the way she grasped at that, the way she gave him a weak, uncertain smile. She clutched at the lie, wanting to believe it: "It's not important at all."

  But it really is, isn't it, Greggie? It really is....

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Nanotechnology," Carter Jarnavon said, with the air of a benediction. "That's where the promise for the future lies."

  Mark sat in one of those terrible spring-loaded office chairs that tempts you to lean far back and dumps you on your cranium if you do, leafing through printout of the lab journal of an anonymous researcher. He wondered idly what parts beside the name had been cut out.

  The researcher had modified a comparatively mild droplet-carried human-virulent flu virus - affecting both nats and wild cards - by hanging a Black Trump gene on its DNA:

  "For the control cultures, in which the wild card initiator sequence isn't present in the DNA, the Black Trump has nowhere to attach on the genome, so it and the transposon remain as junk floating around in the cell. The carrier - a much less dangerous virus - proliferates instead.

  "In the wild card cell cultures, the Black Trump attaches at the initiator site on the DNA. The linked transposon element wildly recombines and reproduces the Black Trump, causing random genetic insertion and throwing the cell immediately into lytic phase. The cells burst, dispersing the Black Trump virus to other cells.

  "In theory this should be deadly. But the 94-15-04-24LQ virus got progressively weaker as it was transmitted from cell to cell...."

  "I was working in nanotech," Jarnavon said almost dreamily, sitting on the stool with hands clasped between his knees. "Pioneering work. Vital work. Work that could have transformed the world."

  Mark almost smiled. The nameless researcher had succeeded too well. Virus 94-15-04-24LO, dubbed necrovirus Takis I, was so mutable that in reproducing it created versions of itself that, while less lethal, managed to out-compete the original. As it was, it was nasty enough to kill up to four generations of hosts.

  But it would hardly suffice to rid the world of aces, jokers, and ever-elusive dormant carriers.

  "I had a grant from the DEA. It was written to research a self-replicating assembler, that's something like a robot virus you can program to perform tasks - " A chuckle, accompanied by a quick thumb-stab to slide heavy-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose. "Not that I need to tell you that, Doctor. This assembler was designed to wipe out the world's supply of coca plants, and end the cocaine plague once and for all."

  The uncontrollable self-mutation of the Black Trump, Strain I, added another joker to the deck, so to speak. It could conceivably mutate into something that would burst cell-walls without being triggered by attachment to the original wild card sequence. That would make the virus as deadly to nats as wild cards - the deadliest plague in human history.

  "Worthy as that goal was - and achievable, too, I'm sure you understand - that wasn't the project I was really working on. I was actually put to work on a project to achieve control of the human mind through nanotechnology. Programmed happiness - no more disobedience to authority, no more self-destructive behavior. Utopia. And that led me to you, Dr. Meadows."

  The journal promised results on a Black Trump II, 94-04-28-24LQ, "by Sunday." And that was all she wrote. Sunday never came, the old song had it, and evidently it hadn't.

  Jarnavon's words in filtrated Mark's forebrain. He glanced up and blinked through the round lenses. "Huh?"

  The younger man nodded, smiling a smug toad's smile. "To you. To the journals describing your own hegira through the labyrinth of human consciousness. We have them, you know - Drug Enforcement, that is."

  Mark struggled to shift the gears of his mind. Hegira? It was as if he had fallen into a recursive looking-glass world, defined by laboratory journals.

  "You looked through my notebooks?" Suddenly rising outrage burned his cheeks. He felt violated - that this hackwork Frankenstein wanna-be had raped his personal diaries with his eyes, in the service of his ancient nemesis, the DEA.

  The young man bobbed his head. "Yes, yes, and a treasure they were. You truly could not grasp the vistas you would help to unfold, Doctor."

  No, Mark thought, I damned well didn't. "I helped you design a mind-control nanodevice?" he asked in horror.

  "No." Jarnavon said sadly. "Someone blabbed. A reporter caught wind of it, started asking questions. Oh, the Agency had the meddling bitch strangled in her BMW, got 60 Minutes to help make it look as if she'd been in with the Medellin cartel and gotten burned by them. But by then the damage was done; bleeding hearts were asking questions in Congress. We shut down; we just couldn't hand
le exposure."

  He shook his head. "But you if anybody know what it's like to be afflicted by those who lack vision, Dr. Meadows."

  Yes, Mark thought. And most of them are friends of yours. He realized, then, that what he very much wanted to do was to kill Dr. Carter Jarnavon.

  And here I thought I didn't have any innocence left to lose.

  He forced his attention back to the sheaf of computer paper. From the viewpoint of the Card Sharks, the nameless scientist had not gone far enough. From Mark's point of view he or she had gone much too far. Because the researcher had recorded clearly - so clearly even a layman like Casaday could comprehend, never mind Jarnavon - what needed to be done to enhance the virus' lethality.

  Ironically, it was to make it less lethal, by inhibiting its self-recombinant action. The journal even outlined a possible way to do that: omit the transposon.

  Mark let the printout fall into his lap. Jarnavon gazed at him with shining eyes. Mark met the gaze, even offered a watery smile. Takis-instilled caginess was kicking in.

  How good is he? he wondered. His experience of the DEA suggested that they were fully capable of hiring an incompetent to run their mind-control research. They had set nincompoops to pursue him around half the world, after all; why not a half-baked scientist? Certainly they had hooked themselves somebody who showed few signs of having all his marbles.

  He can read the journal as well as I can. That means he's not good enough to carry the work forward himself, or Sprout and I would still be in Saigon. For a moment Mark found the inner space actually to be amused at himself, for missing his multiple life in Free Vietnam.

  We never know when we're well off. It occurred to him to wonder when the time would arrive at which he looked back at now and thought, those were the good old days. He stifled a shudder.

  "It's late," he said, glancing at the old-fashioned analog dock - meaning, with hands - on the walls. The hands said it was after eight. "I need to knock it off. I've had a tough couple of days."

  "Certainly, certainly." Jarnavon bounced to his feet and stuck out his hand like a victorious tennis player. "Until tomorrow, Doctor."

  His handshake was cool, dry, and surprisingly strong. Is he good enough to know if I fake it? Is he good enough to know if I try to recombine the virus into something harmless, or try to poison the whole batch? Mark had no aptitude for intrigue, though God knew he'd been exposed to it enough since he was driven underground. He would have to do his best to draw the enthusiastic young scientist out, learn just what he might expect to slip by him.

  Because, otherwise, Mark Meadows would have to decide between sacrificing his daughter Sprout, or the lives of every wild card on Earth.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The letters crawled before Zoe's eyes, black bugs on a paperback page yellowed by the lamp over her bunk. She had been staring at the same paragraph of Shell Games for what seemed like hours, trying not to think.

  Visions of the stone catacombs of Jerusalem crept around the edges of the page to haunt her. She couldn't forget the feel of the dead Ukrainian's skin under her hands or the hatred in the New York skinheads' eyes when they brought her father down. She saw the stubby claws on Bjorn's dead feet, naked for any passerby to stare at and cringe. Look, there's a joker man! A dead joker man, whose daughter lay on a narrow bunk in a tiny cabin on a rusty freighter in the Black Sea, playing teamster to the worst abomination humans had managed to invent yet.

  In Odessa, someone must be putting the pieces together by now. Any moment, someone would come with guns. Any moment.

  But maybe no one had reported the deaths. Maybe no one had looked for the warehouse boss for hours, and hadn't said anything when they found him. Maybe nothing would happen.

  She couldn't stand it anymore. Up, across the cabin, back to the bunk, to the door again. If she didn't find something to distract her, she'd go mad. Zoe leaned against the cabin door, thinking - I'll get dressed and find somebody to talk to. Yes.

  Who? She couldn't talk to anyone on the ship. Zoe pounded her fist against the door and sat back down on the bunk.

  Probably some of the crew spoke English, but she couldn't chat them up. She wasn't Zoe Harris, she was a nameless "wife" of a Turkish entrepreneur and she had to stay in character. She couldn't even talk to Croyd. He was gone, prowling about the ship in the night hours, hanging out in crew quarters or trying to work up a poker game. He didn't sleep and he didn't stay in the cabin much.

  Above her, on the deck, heavy footsteps rushed toward the rail. Zoe heard words that had to be curses, unmistakable even though they were Russian curses, full of gutturals she didn't understand. They would come and get her; she knew it. Zoe pulled on a black sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans. She didn't want to die naked.

  Something metallic clanged against the side of the ship.

  Who was up there? The Card Sharks, whoever they might turn out to be? The Russian Army, hot to recover a stolen and extremely embarrassing nuclear device?

  We're dead, Zoe thought. All of us, the captain who smiles and thinks I'm a mute of some sort, the sailors, who are just working guys trying to get by. All of us. It's an answer of sorts. Let them sink us here, let this hellish bomb sink to pollute the fishes. Let it be over.

  Barefoot, she climbed the ladder that led to the bridge and stopped short at the open doorway that looked out on deck.

  Russian sailors were popping up over the side of the ship. Russian sailors with big, ugly guns. She heard the captain's voice, gone oily and smooth, explaining something to a short, thick officer who carried no gun that Zoe could see.

  She felt a split second's warmth behind her, someone close. Before she could turn, a hand snaked past her neck and strong fingers clamped themselves over her mouth.

  "Shh!" Croyd whispered. Zoe choked back a scream. "Cargo. Fast."

  He turned toward the hold. Zoe followed him past the closed doors that led into the four tiny cabins, through the hatch into the cargo space.

  "They'll search," Croyd said. He dogged the hatch behind them. "The Captain says he's running a Ukrainian ship, not a Russian one. The Russians say they're searching anyway. Something about medical radioactives that got into some crates accidentally." Croyd scooted down the ladder, talking as he went. Zoe came down behind him. "Fuck, Zoe. The Russians know a bomb's missing, and they won't even talk about it to each other."

  They would have Geiger counters, then. Zoe looked at the row of irrigation pumps lined up in the ship's hold.

  The stocky Russian officer opened the hatch from the deck. He turned and began to climb down the ladder. No gun. He had a black case strung over his neck on a strap. He was facing the bulkhead, not the murky cargo hold. Zoe grabbed the neck of her sweatshirt and tried to tear it.

  "Zoe! Are you crazy? They'll see us!"

  "I can't help it, I've got to fix the counter or we've had it. Shit! Help me with this, would you?"

  Croyd, looking baffled, tugged at the thick fabric.

  "Rip it!" Zoe hissed.

  The neckline tore. The Russian officer had reached the deck, and turned at the sound. Croyd dropped the cloth as if it burned his hands. Zoe screamed and swung her open hand at Croyd. It smacked against his face with a satisfying sound.

  Someone hit the light switches, probably the captain, who clambered down the ladder behind the Russian. Bare yellow bulbs gave enough light to see pathways through the stacked crates. Zoe sobbed, twisted away from Croyd, and ran across the deck toward the Russian. The sobs were real, generated from sheer, sick terror. Under her bare feet, the rough metal decking made her clumsy, and that made her look even more helpless than she felt. Good. She held the torn sweatshirt across her breasts like a towel. When she got close to the Russian, she reached out for him. The sweatshirt sagged baring her nipples. Zoe stumbled into the Russian's arms and buried her face against his shoulder. She got a close look at the instrument slung across his chest. It had a screen like an oscilloscope, tiny flashes appearing and fading. The little box t
icked like a drunken cricket.

  Now, if Croyd would just think!

  The Russian, gentleman that he was, tightened his arms around her while Croyd shouted something. The Russian replied. Zoe cringed against the man's chest as if to take shelter and tried to imagine the innards of a Russian particle detector. Two Russian sailors climbed down the ladder and took up positions beside the Captain. They held their guns at the ready. They were children, Zoe realized, still in their teens.

  Croyd held both hands open in what seemed to be exasperation. He came forward slowly, talking nonstop.

  Copper wire. There had to be copper wire that led from the battery to power this thing, there had to be a metal snapper that made the tapping little cricket sound, or a diaphragm of some kind. She didn't know which phosphor was making the little flashes on the screen. Opaque the screen? No, too obvious. Zoe took a deep breath and sobbed it out toward the little box. There. The copper wiring would slowly draw itself thinner, and then coalesce into tiny spheres, beads that would separate and begin to rattle, maybe. So be it.

  Croyd began to sound like he was begging her to forgive him. Zoe peeked at him from under the officers sheltering arm.

  "Zoe?" Croyd asked.

  Zoe drew away from the Russian. She ran to Croyd, grabbed his face in both hands, and gave him a passionate kiss.

  Croyd shrugged. The Russian shrugged. The captain smiled, but the smile faded as the Russian officer began to explore the rows of stacked crates, his gadget in his hand.

  It ticked as he walked along, but the ticks were keeping a steady rhythm. He frowned at the screen, shook it, and then continued to walk through the cartons. Zoe hoped she had the timing right. He went past the pumps. Zoe held her breath, but the officer kept walking at a steady pace, his eyes on the instrument's little screen. The officer passed the pump and Zoe sighed. Croyd's arm tightened around her shoulders.