Wild Cards V

by George R. R. Martin

  As he hovered over the streets, eyes and radar casting for familiar images, he replayed the fight in the apartment. He’d tried to knock the unknown man away, and the man hadn’t moved. Punches had struck him and then stopped. When the android had tried to bulldoze him with the refrigerator, motion had just stopped. Bullets hadn’t bounced off the man, just lost their energy and fallen to the floor.

  Lost their energy, the android thought. Lost their energy and died.

  The unknown man, therefore, absorbed kinetic energy. Then he transformed it in an attack of his own. He had to get hit first, the android realized, because he seemed to need to absorb the android’s attack before he could strike back.

  Satisfaction moved through the android’s mind. All he had to do to get around the other guy was not hit him. If he didn’t have any energy to absorb, he couldn’t do anything.

  And if things went wrong, the android could use the microwave laser as a last resort. The unknown man absorbed kinetic energy, not radiation.

  The android smiled. He had the next encounter aced.

  All he had to do was find them.

  At two thirty-one in the afternoon two people drew the Black Queen on Forty-seventh Street near Hammarskjöld Plaza. The radio crackled with NYPD and National Guard commands to reinforce the guards on the United Nations building in case Croyd was intending to make some move on the UN.

  Modular Man was overhead seconds after the alarm. Two victims were stretched on the street half a block apart, one lying still, his body turned into something monstrous, the other writhing in pain as his bones dissolved and he was crushed by the weight of his own body. Olive-green M.A.S.H. ambulances were responding, followed in the distance by a whooping city ambulance. There was nothing Modular Man could do for the victims. He flew a swift search pattern over the block, then began flying in widening circles. Another wild card victim to the west of the others on Third Avenue gave his search another focal point.

  Then he saw one of his targets, Croyd’s brown-haired companion. The man was dressed as the android had last seen him, in a Levi’s jacket and jeans. He was walking east on Forty-eighth Street, having doubled back, and he was moving quickly, hands in his pockets and eyes fixed on the pedestrians ahead of him.

  Modular Man flew behind the parapet of a building across the street, paralleling him, moving his head from cover every so often to keep tabs on his target. There was very little foot traffic and the android found him easy to follow. The young man did not look up. Ambulance sirens wailed in the distance.

  The young man began moving north on Second Avenue. He walked for three blocks, then pushed through the revolving door of a large white-stone bank.

  The android hovered over the building across the street while he decided what to do, then flew swiftly across Second Avenue and dropped to the pavement, careful not to make his movements visible from the bank’s front door. People in white gauze masks gave him plenty of room on the sidewalk.

  The android turned insubstantial and walked into the thick wall of the bank, then pushed his face through the far side. Croyd’s guardian had walked across the bank lobby, past the teller cages, and was speaking to a pudgy, white-haired bank guard who sat on a stool near one of the back doors. He showed the guard a card and a key. The guard nodded, pressed a button, and a sliding door opened. The young man entered an elevator and the door shut behind him.

  Modular Man stepped back from the building. Apparently Croyd’s companion was heading for a safety deposit box. The android, to the audible gasps of a pair of pedestrians, dropped through the pavement.

  Though his vision was dark, his internal navigation systems kept him aligned perfectly. He moved down, then forward. His upper head, containing eyes and radar, moved tentatively through a wall: the android perceived an enormous vault with a clerk behind a desk, her back to him. Stacks of fresh bills, each with a neat paper wrapper, stood on the desk.

  Wrong vault. The android moved back, then to the side, then forward again, then pushed through a row of safety deposit boxes.

  Right vault. Remaining insubstantial was draining his power reserves: he couldn’t do this much longer.

  Croyd’s companion was marching with another guard to one large box. He and the guard inserted their keys, and the young man withdrew the box. The android memorized its location, then made note of the position of all the cameras and other security monitors.

  His energy was running low. He moved back, rose up through the sidewalk, turned substantial, flew to the roof across the street, and lighted. It probably didn’t matter what was in the deposit box, although if it proved relevant, he could always return.

  Croyd’s companion was in the bank for another ten minutes, allowing the android’s energy to return fully. When the man emerged, he began retracing his steps south, turning west on Fiftieth Street to avoid the ambulances and military police setting up checkpoints on Forty-seventh, then hastened to Lexington Avenue, where he turned south again. The android followed, flitting from roof to roof. His quarry walked south to Forty-fourth, then headed west to enter one of the side entrances to Grand Central Station.

  The android turned insubstantial and flew through the wall onto the second level of the station. He lighted on the polished marble balcony and watched his quarry move across the floor below.

  The station was almost deserted. The entrances to the platforms were guarded by regular army Rangers in black berets. They were in full biological warfare rig, hoods and gas masks off but ready. Croyd’s companion walked to a stairway leading down to the arcade level and descended.

  The android followed, moving carefully, turning insubstantial when necessary in order to peer around corners. The young man moved lower, through a utility door with a smashed lock, then down into the train tunnels that stretched north from the station. Rusting iron supports held up what seemed to be half of Manhattan. Occasional bulbs provided dim light. The place smelled of damp and metal. The android, keeping his target in sight with radar, followed without difficulty.

  He found a corpse, a man in several layers of shabby clothing whose body seemed to have calcified, leaving the derelict a huddled figure with his face permanently carved in a look of horror and pain. Croyd had been here all right. There was another body a hundred yards farther on, an elderly woman with her bags clutched around her. The android looked closer.

  It wasn’t the bag lady he had once known. The android was relieved.

  “D’ja get it? D’ja get it?” The albino’s eager voice rapped out of the darkness.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lemme see.”

  “Bunch of keys. Envelope of cash.”

  “Gimme the deposit key.”

  The android crept nearer. An approaching train was rumbling closer, coming from the north.

  “Here you go. You shouldn’t have risked going out.”

  The albino’s rapid-fire voice crackled with suspicion. “Didn’t know if I could trust you. And your signature wasn’t on the card.”

  “The guard barely looked at it. I think he was drunk.”

  “Gimme the gun.”

  “This thing’s heavy. What is it?”

  “Forty-four Automag. The most powerful handgun ever made.” Croyd strapped a giant shoulder holster under his arm. “If the robot comes after us again,” he said, “I wanna be able to dent him. This thing fires cut-down NATO rifle rounds.”

  “Jesus.”

  The albino said something then, but Modular Man couldn’t hear it. The train was getting closer. Its headlight outlined iron stanchions. Croyd and his companion began moving toward Modular Man. The android silently flew upward to the dirty ceiling, hovering in the shadow of a girder.

  Yellow light burned steadily on the iron pillars as the train ground steadily southward. The noise echoed in the cavernous room. Croyd and his bodyguard passed beneath the android.

  Croyd looked up, warned somehow—maybe he’d seen the hovering android in his peripheral vision. The albino yelled something obscur
ed by the sound of the train and clawed for his pistol with incredible speed. His companion began to turn.

  Modular Man dropped from the ceiling, his arms going around the albino from behind. The train bathed the scene in garish cinema light. Croyd shouted, tried to throw himself from side to side. His strength was considerably more than that of a normal human, but not equal to that of the android. Modular Man rose into the air, his legs wrapping around Croyd’s, and he began to fly south. Wind from the train pushed him on.

  “Hey…!” The companion was running after, waving an arm. “Bring him back!” The huge gun, still jammed in Croyd’s armpit, fired out and down through Croyd’s coat. A ricochet struck bright sparks from an iron stanchion.

  Croyd’s guardian swerved. He leaped directly into the path of the train.

  There was a burst of light, a crackling sound. The train stopped dead. The young man was hurled fifty feet farther down the track. When he hit the ground, a smaller burst of electricity jumped between him and the nearest rail.

  The man jumped to his feet. In the bright light of the train’s headlight the android could see his grin.

  Modular Man made a brief calculation of the amount of kinetic energy possessed by a fully loaded train moving at fifteen or so miles per hour. Although Croyd’s guardian hadn’t absorbed all of it, and the excess had bled off in a burst of lightning—there were some limits on his power, fortunately—the total of what he had absorbed was appalling. The android’s laser whined as it tracked toward the man standing on the tracks.

  The man crouched, bracing his feet against the track, then jumped. His leap was aimed ahead of the android, to cut him off. The man tumbled in air—evidently he wasn’t used to traveling this way—then hit a stanchion and fell to the ground. No electricity this time. He picked himself up and looked at the approaching android with clenched teeth. His clothing smoldered.

  Swift calculations passed through macroatomic circuits, followed by lightspeed regret. Modular Man hadn’t ever shot a real person before. He didn’t want to now. But Croyd was killing people even in hiding, even in the tunnels deep under Grand Central. And if Croyd’s guardian got his hands on the android, he could tear his alloy skeleton to bits.

  The android fired. Then suddenly he was falling, his arms limp. Croyd tumbled to the ground. The android crashed to the ground at the young man’s feet. The young man reached, seized him by the shoulders. The android tried to move, failed.

  Modular Man realized that Croyd’s protector didn’t just absorb kinetic energy. He absorbed any kind of energy and could return it instantly.

  Bad mistake, he thought.

  Suddenly he was flying again. He crashed through the side of the commuter train, sprawled across several seats in a spill of glass and torn aluminum. Someone’s briefcase tumbled to the aisle, papers flying. The android heard a scream.

  His sensors registered the smell of burning.

  The few people on board—executives whose work forced them into the quarantined city—rushed to his aid. Lifting him from his ungainly sprawl across the seats, they laid him carefully in the aisle. “What’s that on his head?” asked a white-haired man with a mustache.

  Radar imaging was gone. Its control unit had been fried when Croyd’s bodyguard returned the coherent microwave pulse. The monitor that controlled his ability to turn insubstantial was gone. His alloy underskin had a neat hole in it. The excess energy had blown a lot of circuit breakers. The android reset as many as possible and felt control return to his limbs. Some breakers wouldn’t reset.

  “Pardon me,” he said, and stood up. People faded back. The train gave a jerk as it started moving again, and the android tumbled backward, arms windmilling, and sat down in the aisle. People rushed toward him again. He felt the helping hands on his right side but not on his left. Balance and coordination were still affected. He rerouted internal circuits, but still something was wrong.

  “Excuse me.” He unzipped and pulled off the upper half of his jumpsuit. Train passengers gasped. Plastic flesh was blackened around the wound. Modular Man opened his chest and reached inside with one hand. Someone turned away and began to be sick, but the other passengers seemed interested, one woman standing on a seat and craning her neck to peer into the android’s interior through horn-rimmed spectacles.

  The android removed one of his internal guidance units, saw melted connections, and sighed mentally. He returned the unit. The trip home was going to be pretty shaky. He certainly couldn’t fly.

  He looked up at the people on the train.

  “Do any of you have five dollars for a taxi?” he asked.

  The trip to Jokertown was humiliating and dangerous. Some of the passengers supported him out of the station, but even so he fell a few times. With some money given him by the man with the mustache, he took a taxi to the other side of the block from Travnicek’s brownstone. He pushed the money through the slot in the taxi’s bulletproof shield, then staggered out onto the sidewalk. He half-walked, half-crawled down the alley to Travnicek’s building, then dragged himself up the fire escape to the roof. From there he crawled to the skylight and lowered himself down.

  Travnicek lay on his camp bed, naked to the waist. His skin was light blue. Writhing cilia, covered with long hairs, grew from where his fingers and toes had been. A fly hummed over his head.

  The swollen skin around his neck had split open, revealing a flower lei of organs. Some were recognizable—trumpet-shaped ears, yellowish eyes, some normal in size and some not—but others of the organs were not.

  “The only left-moving ghosts,” he muttered, “are the reparametrization ghosts.” His voice was thick, indistinct. The android had the intuition that his lips might be growing together. And the words seemed half-unfamiliar, as if he no longer entirely comprehended their meaning.

  “Sir,” said Modular Man. “Sir. I’ve been injured again.”

  Travnicek sat up with a start. The eyes clustered around his neck swiveled to focus on the android. “Ah. Toaster. You look … very interesting … this way.” The eyes in his skull were closed. Perhaps, the android thought, forever.

  “I need repairs. Croyd’s companion reflected my laser back at me.”

  “Why the fuck did you shoot him, blender? All forms of energy are the same. Same as matter, as far as that goes.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Fucking moron. You’d think you’d pick up a little intelligence from me.”

  Travnicek jumped up from his cot, moving very fast, faster than a normal human. He caught hold of a roof beam with one hand, swung around it to stand on his head. He planted his feet on the ceiling, the hairy cilia splaying, and then removed his hand from the beam and hung inverted. Yellow eyes looked steadily at the android.

  “Not bad, hey? Haven’t felt this good in years.” He moved carefully along the ceiling toward the android.

  “Sir. Radar control is burned out. I’ve lost a stabilizer. My flux control is damaged.”

  “I hear you.” His voice was serene, drifting. “In fact I don’t just hear you, I perceive you in all sorts of ways. I’m not sure what some of them are just yet.” Travnicek grabbed another roof beam, swung to the floor, dropped. The fly buzzed airily in the distance. Sadness swelled in the android’s analog mind. A mounting hush of fear, like white noise, sizzled steadily in the background of his thoughts.

  “Open your chest,” Travnicek said. “Give me the monitor. There’s a spare guidance unit in the cabinet.”

  “There’s a hole in my chest.”

  The yellow eyes looked at him. The android waited for an outburst.

  “Better patch it yourself,” Travnicek said mildly. “When you have the time.” He took the flux monitor and stepped to a workbench. “It’s getting hard to think about all this,” he said.

  “Preserve your genius, sir.” Modular Man tried not to let his desperation show. “Fight the infection. I’ll get Croyd here.”

  A touch of vinegar entered Travnicek’s voice. “Yah. You d
o that. Now let me worry about the fermionic coordinates, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mildly reassured.

  He staggered to the locker and began looking for a new gyroscope.

  The BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT poster had been defaced. Someone had drawn a knife or fingernail file through the candidate’s picture several times, then written JOKER DEATH over it in thick red letters. Next to it was a freehand drawing of an animal head—a black dog?—executed in thick felt tip.

  “Hi. I need to talk.”

  Kate blew cigarette smoke. “Okay. For a little while.”

  “How are the Roman poets coming along?”

  “If Latin weren’t already a dead language, Statius would have killed it.”

  Modular Man was hunched over the public phone again. His gyroscope had been replaced and he could walk and fly.

  Except for the heavy presence of the National Guard and Army, the streets were nearly deserted. Half the restaurants and cabarets in Jokertown were shut down.

  “Kate,” the android said, “I think I’m going to die.”

  There was a moment of startled silence. Then, “Tell me.”

  “My creator got infected by the wild card. He’s turning into a joker and forgetting how to repair me. And he’s sending me after the plague carrier, hoping the man can make it stop.”

  “Okay.” Cautiously. “I’m following.”

  “He seems to think the man’s deliberately doing this to him. But most people think the guy is just a carrier, and if that’s true, and I bring him to my creator, the chances are nine to one that if my creator’s reinfected, he’ll draw the Black Queen and die.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the man I’m after—his name is Croyd—is the man who killed me the first time. And this time Croyd has a protector who is more powerful than he is. We’re already fought twice, and they’ve beaten me both times. The last time I could easily have died. And my creator can’t put me together again. He’s losing his abilities. He may not be able to repair the damage from the last attack.”