Planet Hustlers

by J. S. Morin

  Mort swallowed. Right. He was Carl. With a grin, he spread his hands. “What can I say? When life gives you lemons, you make lemon meringue pie. When a dog shits in your garden, you just let the fertilizer do its work.” He waved in the direction of his discarded hand.

  “No, no, NO!” Carl chided him. “That’s not me at all. You’ve got to sound like Carl Ramsey, not one of those auto-generated philosophy spewers on the omni.”

  “How droll,” Chisholm commented as she matched Enzio’s bet.

  Mort studied his opponents as they dueled with one another and momentarily forgot his presence. This is what poker was all about, and this was why Carl was such shit at it. The boy couldn’t pry his face out of a mirror long enough to realize that the game was only half about his own cards. The other players were individual puzzles to solve. Carl knew that, but he never acted on it. Couldn’t deliver on it. Couldn’t wrap his head around playing a game where what you did mattered less than the attention to every detail about your enemies.

  They were polar opposites, hot and cold. Chisholm played like a duchess, as if she sullied her hands each time she touched the cards or chips. Her face was calm disdain. Enzio, on the other hand, was a cacophony of facial contortions. He grinned and winked and made elaborate scowls at his cards whenever he looked at them. Those facial expressions didn’t merely cry wolf, they wrote a song about wolves and played it at a busy tram station.

  Enzio won the hand, along with a small chunk of the planet they were orbiting. Odd abstraction, that. To see a whole planet broken down into stacks of plastic coins and parceled off like groceries.

  The game wore on, and Mort settled into a groove, winning sure hands and giving up on the rest. Carl stewed but remained largely silent.

  Until the cocky spacer could remain silent no longer. “They’re running over you because you’re passive. Keep this up and even cheating won’t get us anywhere.”

  Mort tossed away another iffy hand boasting modestly of a jack and six. Then he marched down into his borrowed mind to give Carl a piece of it.

  “Where do you get off complaining about my poker savvy?” Mort thundered, safely insulated against the other players hearing them. “The first winning night of poker you play will be the first. There are monkeys—and I don’t mean laaku—better suited to cards than you.”

  A mental image of Carl threw up his hands. “Well, they’d be able to play your one move: throw it away, throw it away, throw it away.”

  “Better than pissing away all your chips on a hunch,” Mort countered. “You’re so proud of the fact that no one can unravel this knotted brain of yours that you don’t even pause to think what someone else might be planning.”

  There was a silence. Carl looked at the environs of his cramped, featureless mind. “Well, in fairness, I doubt anyone would guess what’s going on in here right now.” Then a motion caught Carl’s eye, out in the real world. “You just did it again! A queen nine has straight potential. Let Gale flip some cards and see what happens.”

  Mort crossed his arms and harrumphed. “You know, this isn’t going to work out, us fighting like this. We need a plan.”

  “How about you let me lose for a while. If we’re going to blow chips early on, it might as well be with style. You can hop in when we need a hand.”

  Mort gave a nod.

  When Carl took his next breath, it was with real lungs. “I call. These cards are shit, but I’m getting a little bored of folding. Let’s see what our buddy Gale here can turn over.” He peeked to see what his hand actually contained, having missed the last deal during his negotiations with Mort.

  The nines of spades and clubs peeked back. Carl’s expression remained neutral, but that wasn’t half bad.

  All three players were in the pot, and the cards came jack, jack, ten.

  He was probably still winning. After all, who kept a jack ten?

  “Five planet pieces,” Carl announced. Five chips lay down in front of him, stacked tidily.

  Enzio folded. He even tossed away his cards like an asshole. It was the gesture of a guy who tipped waiters by throwing hardcoin terras on the floor.

  “Raise,” Chisholm said calmly. She moved stacks of chips. Carl’s quick math was confirmed when Gale stated that there were fifteen there.

  Was Chisholm the type to play loose with jacks? Carl smirked internally. Nah, she seemed more inclined toward queens.

  “Fold,” Mort screamed in his head. “Fold, you blundering ignoramus. Doesn’t matter if she’s got the jack or not. You don’t.”

  “Call,” Carl said, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at Chisholm. “I always call.”

  “Oh, please.”

  Gale turned over an eight.

  Carl now had an open-ended straight draw. “Check.”

  “First smart move today. Bow out gracefully.”

  “Forty,” Chisholm said after a pause.

  “The math’s bad. Bloody hell. Let me back up there. I’ll fold it for you.”

  Carl fiddled with a stack of chips. He counted out five, stacked another five next to them, set one atop the other, then made three little towers just like it. Thirty Mobiuses each, huh…?

  “Fuck it. I call.” Chisholm wasn’t going to push him around. He moved the little high-rise apartment complex of chips forward.

  The final card was a seven. Though his face betrayed nothing, internally, Carl smirked. Mort, being internal, got to see that smug look firsthand.

  “I bet everything,” Chisholm said with a flick of her hand.

  Ice water. Carl had to give her credit. Unfortunately for her, he’d made his straight. He reached for his chips.

  Or tried.

  Jaw clenched, fingers clawing the table, Carl could do nothing but resist the incursion of a stodgy old wizardly ghost who couldn’t abide the idea that a pirate admiral would bluff with the stakes this high.

  “Move aside. This is for your own good.”

  Sweat beaded at Carl’s forehead. His instinct was to remove his jacket, play it off as if he were merely warm. But he couldn’t move. All he could do was attempt to stop Mort from doing the moving. He tried to call verbally, but the wizard had a choke hold on his vocal chords.

  “I tried to be sporting about this…”

  In an instant, Carl was standing inside his own mind again, watching as Mort took command of his body.

  Piloting Carl’s body now, Mort flipped over just one of Carl’s nines. He flipped it face down once again and tossed it away. “Show me that pair of jacks.”

  Chisholm mucked her hand, landing them in the mix with Mort’s and Enzio’s discards to forestall curious, cheating card flippers. “I don’t know what you could mean.” She reached and raked in all the errant chips Carl had bet.

  “She was bluffing! Bluh. Fing. The odds of her having four jacks are like a million to one. We practically had her covered. We could have traded a few scraps of Ithaca for the rest.”

  Mort harrumphed softly. It didn’t feel the same with Carl’s lungs doing it, but it felt good to move a little air for once.

  Let Carl rant and rave. This was his show, now. There would be no more boondoggle bets or planet-losing bluff calls that turned out to be unbeatable hands.

  This was poker. It was a kids’ game at heart. He’d be thrice damned if he let an amateur like Carl ruin a whole species’ way of life over it.

  # # #

  Inside the front pocket of her sweatshirt, Esper’s hands clasped furiously. There was nothing she could do. She didn’t even have that good a view of the cards. It didn’t help that most of the time the players didn’t even flip them right side up. Carl was frittering away chips, and there were people living on those chips.

  Well, not Carl’s so much. But Tanny and Emily were playing with people’s homes, schools, and churches. The tiny plastic playing pieces made it all seem so trite, but there was so much on the line.

  And to top it off, Carl was bowing under the pressure. Usually, he had a dozen lives or fewer
on the line. On that space station, he’d been more concerned with saving the Mobius crew than the station personnel. The last time he’d rescued even a fraction of this many people, it had been at the Gologlex Menagerie, and even that had been an afterthought to a smuggling mission.

  He was acting so odd.

  The other spectators were muttering amongst themselves. Esper had thus far remained quiet and attentive, but she needed to talk to someone. Keeping her eyes on the felt table, she made her way over to Cedric. The younger Brown wizard was munching on stuunji-made waffle crackers.

  “Not going well,” she whispered.

  Cedric guarded his silence. He took another cracker and stuffed it into his mouth.

  “Does Carl seem more stressed than usual to you?” Esper asked, leaning close enough to brush against Cedric’s shoulder.

  At the table, Carl lifted his chin to scratch at his neck. “What the hell. I call.”

  Was he trying to send signals? Was he acting erratic to throw off his opponents? That seemed to be Enzio’s style, but whereas Tanny’s champion made it look effortless and stylish, Carl was hamming it up like a grade-school play.

  Emily and Enzio folded. Carl pulled in a small number of chips, pieces of New Garrelon and Carousel respectively. It was something, but his pile seemed to be shrinking by the hour.

  “Do you think someone might be sneaking magic past the detector?” Esper asked, lips close enough to Cedric’s ear that he must have felt her breath. He was so tall that she had to stand on tiptoe.

  Mouth still full of crackers, Cedric harrumphed. “Not on my watch. I’ve got this room clamped down like a marine occupation force.”

  Standing behind her commanding officer, Emily’s security chief, Indira, oversaw the game at the center of the room. Esper had never been impressed with the woman. She was a wizard, sure, but that didn’t mean she could sneak past a hypersensitive detector and a room full of observant players.

  She could feel the tension emanating from Cedric. “It’ll be nice to get back aboard the Mobius.”

  “Yes. You look utterly haggard.”

  Esper bit her lip. She looked nothing of the sort, and Cedric knew it. Was it Esper’s fault that the Poet Fleet—and Emily in particular—insisted on pampered prisoners? Well, maybe a little.

  Play continued at the table. Most hands never got played as someone collected a pittance of chips from before the common cards even came out. It was like listening to the rehearsal of an amateur orchestra, the same few beginning notes, followed by a reset to try again from the start.

  Emily and Carl got into a betting hand, and Carl made a bet of ten chips. “I raise to fifty,” Emily announced. She has such a presence about her. Even rooting for Carl and the stuunji people, it was hard to deny the gravity Emily projected throughout the room.

  Everyone had to feel it.

  Didn’t they?

  Glancing sidelong at Cedric, he looked less than impressed.

  At the table, Carl drummed his fingers a moment before snarling and throwing away his cards. “Blazes, woman. Lucifer himself wouldn’t draw so many flushes.”

  Eyebrow cocked skeptically, Esper wondered whether she had heard that correctly? For a second there—voice aside—Carl had sounded a lot like Mort.

  It made sense, she supposed. Carl probably wanted a blustering, crotchety demeanor to throw off his opponents. He knew Mort better than anyone, after all. Why wouldn’t he be able to do a good impression?

  Still, if Carl was pulling out impressions and intimidation tricks, it might help if they improved his pile of chips. Ithaca was slipping away, hand by hand.

  # # #

  Mort folded.

  Then, the next hand, he folded again.

  The hand after, he was on the big blind and got to see the common cards before folding to the first bet by Enzio.

  There was time. Plenty of chips remained. This little tournament wasn’t meant to be won in a single hand or a single hour. It was a test of endurance, of restraint, of judgment over an extended period of time.

  It was a game designed to break Carl Ramsey.

  Every time he folded, Mort watched his opponents. Unlike Carl, who only saw two, Mort was aware—keenly aware—of the third and most dangerous adversary he faced.

  The device.

  Magic detectors came in all shapes and sizes, but the most common looked like the one on the table before him. It was a bell jar with a contraption inside that ran on every sort of science known to man. An abomination of circuitry and wires, levers, springs, and fluid-filled tubes, it existed in an uneasy equilibrium of opposed forces. The slightest alteration to the local laws of physics would set it wailing like a banshee on karaoke night.

  Also, Cedric seemed intent on squelching magic in the area. Nice lad. Good idea, if it were just Carl at the table with a dilettante wizard and a pirate whose pet sorceress lurked in the shadows behind her. Nothing Mort couldn’t overcome, but it made the delicate balancing act of exerting magical will all the more taxing.

  It was like trying to swat a fly that had landed on a glass-topped table. There was a way to crush the fly in a swift blow without damaging the table, but it wasn’t an undertaking without risk or the necessity of forethought.

  “Five places,” Mort said, sliding in his bet on a hand with an ace and a queen of diamonds. Best starting hand he’d seen in an hour. Still, he wanted people to join in the hand with him rather than merely relinquish the paltry three chips pre-bet per game rules.

  “Call.”

  “Call.”

  Bugger. One was good news. Two was too many chances for randomness to sneak up and kick him in the nethers.

  King.

  Ten.

  Ten.

  Not a diamond to be had. Mort was tempted to take a look at the next few cards and see if there was a jack coming up.

  “Yes,” Carl shouted, picking up on Mort’s thoughts as they echoed aloud in their shared brain. “Do it. For fuck’s sake. Either do it or let me in there to play some poker. You’re a sieve, an hourglass running out of sand.”

  Mort focused on the table and let Carl’s yammering recede into the background of his own thoughts.

  “Fifteen parcels,” Enzio said, counting out his bet with languorous care. The showboat had nothing, most likely. But the board was a crystal soul trap for anyone who didn’t have a ten.

  Chisholm was already reaching for her chips before he finished. “Fifty.”

  Mort caught himself reaching for his cards to throw them away. A jack short of a straight was no place to be betting a third of his remaining chips. His opponents could be packing half a load of nothing apiece, and he still couldn’t risk calling. But this was a prime opportunity to be Carl. Since he couldn’t trust the real McCoy at the table, he needed to make sure they knew who they were dealing with.

  “Hey, Enzio. Tanny ever tell you about the time I got so drunk my mechanic ran off with my starship?” Mort asked amiably.

  “No.”

  “Well, we were on… ah, shit, I can’t even remember the planet name. But there was this bar with a live laaku blues band, and—”

  “Just play,” Enzio snapped. Mort couldn’t tell if he was an excellent actor or not acting at all. “Tanny doesn’t say much about you but to complain what a shit you were and how much better I please her.”

  “Oh, let me at him,” Carl shouted. “He does not get to make cracks like that to my face when I’m not even in it. That’s just cowardly.”

  “Probably just the drugs wearing off. Sobriety can be a real aphrodisiac, I hear. Bulk her back up like a she-ape, and see if you can still handle her. Bet ya you can’t,” Mort said, peering over his beer bottle at Enzio as he took a sip.

  “Um. OK. I take it back. Have at him, Mort.”

  “Your action,” Gale pointed out.

  Mort glanced down. “Ah. These rags?” He flung them away.

  “OK. That was fun and all, but we need some poker here. And by poker, I mean magic. And by mag
ic, I mean get off your ass and use some. Just make the whole next hand come out the way you want. Illusion up the cards, or brain-wipe Gale into dealing them however you want. I don’t care. Just don’t sit there tossing out killer insults while you lose the game.”

  Enzio folded as well, and Chisholm raked in her chips.

  “I’d like a time out,” Tanny announced.

  Gale thumped the deck of cards on the table upside down and spread the fifty-two cards out for everyone to see. Then, he held up his hands and pushed away from the table.

  Enzio got up and met with Tanny at the back of the room. Mort strained Carl’s ears, but couldn’t make out anything. By the body language, a certain former she-ape wasn’t going to be very frisky later.

  “Hey, back at the buffet. Did I just see Esper slip her hand inside Cedric’s pants?”

  Mort blinked. Without pausing to think, he whirled around and looked for himself. That two-timing trollop apprentice of his. How dare she…

  But as Mort saw Esper and Cedric standing side by side, each with their hands tucked in sleeves or sweatshirt, he realized that he was looking out from a spectator’s view.

  Carl had taken charge of his body while Mort was distracted.

  He cracked his knuckles and drained the rest of his beer in a single gulp. Waggling the bottle, he summoned a stuunji waiter. “Kel Mau, be a good fellow and beer me, would ya?”

  Mort’s poker wasn’t getting them anywhere.

  Sober poker wasn’t doing Carl any favors, either.

  His best and worst hands of cards had all come with a beer by his side. Time to get a buzz on and loosen up his game. Mort had thrown Enzio off his mojo, and it only took one stack of chips to win him back a planet.

  “Hey, pool boy,” Carl called over to Enzio. “Park your ass while you can still sit on it. Take your medicine later. Just don’t let her pick it out.”

  “I did study your philosophers, you know,” Chisholm said as Enzio made his way back to the table. “Startlingly insightful into your lifestyle. I did some extracurricular listening beyond your suggestions. A particular crooner philosopher named Kenny Rogers comes to mind.”