Wild Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Kundalini, she'd said. He'd heard the name before and when he saw a book called The Rising Serpent he made the connection. He took it down and started to read.

  He read about the Great White Brotherhood of Ultima Thule, located somewhere in Tartary. The lost Book of Dyzan and the vama chara, the lefthand path. The kali yuga, the final, most corrupt of ages, now upon us. “Do whatever you desire, for in this way you please the goddess.” Shakti. Semen as the rasa, the juice, of power: the yod. Sodomy that revived the dead. Shape shifters, astral bodies, implanted obsessions leading to suicide. Paracelsus, Aleister Crowley, Mehmet Karagoz, L. Ron Hubbard.

  Fortunato's concentration was absolute. He absorbed every word, every diagram, flipped back and forth to make comparisons, to study the illustrations. When he finished he saw that twenty-three minutes had passed since Lenore walked out the door.

  The trembling in his chest was fear.

  In the middle of the night he reached out to touch Lenore's cheek and his fingers came away wet. “Are you awake?” he said.

  She rolled over and huddled tight against him. The warmth of her naked skin electrified and soothed him at the same time, like the taste of expensive whiskey. He combed through her hair with his fingers and kissed her fragrant neck. “What are you crying for?” he said.

  “It's stupid,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I really believe in that stuff. Magick. The Great Work, Crowley calls it.” She pronounced magic with a long a and Crowley with a long o like the bird. “I did the Yoga and learned the Qabalah and the Tarot and the Enochian system. I fasted and did the Bornless Ritual and studied Abramelin. But nothing ever happened.”

  “What were you trying for?”

  “I don't know. A vision. Samadhi. I wanted to see something besides a goddamned Greyhound stop in Virginia where they try to lynch kids for growing out their hair. I wanted out of myself. I wanted what happened to you this afternoon. And it happened to you and you don't even want it.”

  “I read some of your books tonight,” he said. In fact he'd read two dozen of them, nearly half of her collection. “I don't know what's going on, but I don't think it's magic. Not like that guy Crowley's magic. What you did to me set it off, but I think it was something already inside me.”

  “You mean that spore thing, don't you? That wild card virus?” She had tensed up involuntarily, just at the mention of it.

  “I can't think of anything else it could be.”

  “There's that Dr. Whatsisname. He could check you out. He could probably even fix you back, if that was what you wanted.”

  “No,” he said. “You don't understand. When I read those books I could feel all those powers they talked about. Like if you were a high diver and you read about some complicated dive you'd never done, but you knew you could do it if you practiced on it. You said I didn't want this, and maybe I didn't, not right at first. But now I do.” There was one picture, among the giant sex organs and impossible contortions of a Japanese pillow book: the Tantric magician, forehead swollen with the power of his retained sperm, fingers twisted in mudras of power. He had stared at it until his eyes burned. “Now I want it,” he said.

  “You've definitely drawn a wild card,” the little man said. “An ace, I'd say.”

  Fortunato had nothing in particular against white people, but he couldn't stand their slang. “Could you put that in plain English?”

  “Your genetics have been rewritten by the Takisian virus. Apparently it was dormant in your central nervous system, probably in the spine. The intromission apparently gave you quite a jolt, enough to activate the virus.”

  “So now what happens?”

  “The way I see it, you've got two choices.” The little man hopped up onto the examining table across from Fortunato and brushed long red hair back over his ears. He looked like he should be in a rock band or working in a record store. He didn't make a convincing doctor. “I can try to reverse the effects of the virus. No guarantees there—I've got about a thirty-percent success rate. Every once in a while people end up worse than before.”

  “Or?”

  “Or you can learn to live with your power. You wouldn't be alone. I can put you in touch with other people in your situation.”

  “Yeah? Like the 'Great and Powerful Turtle'? So I can fly around and pull people out of wrecked cars? I don't think so.”

  “What you did with your abilities would be up to you.”

  “What kind of 'abilities' are we talking about?”

  “I can't say for sure. It looks like they're still coming on. The EEG shows strong telekinesis. The Kirilian chromatograph shows a very powerful astral body that I expect you can manipulate.”

  “Magic, is what you're saying.”

  “No, not really. But it's a funny thing about the wild card. Sometimes it requires a very specific mechanism to bring it under conscious control. I wouldn't be surprised if you need this Tantric ritual to make it work for you.”

  Fortunato stood up and peeled a hundred from the roll in his front pocket. “For the clinic,” he said.

  The little man looked at the money for a long time, and then he stuffed it in his Sgt. Pepper jacket. “Thank you,” he said, like it hurt him to get the words out. “Remember what I said. You can call me anytime.”

  Fortunato nodded and walked out to look at the freaks of Jokertown.

  He'd been six years old when Jetboy exploded over Manhattan, had grown up with the fear of the virus, the memory of the ten thousand who'd died on the first day of the new world. His father had been one of them, lying in bed while his skin split open and healed itself over and over again, the whole cycle not taking more than a minute or two. Until one of the cracks opened through his heart, spewing blood all over their Harlem apartment. And even while the old man lay in his coffin, waiting his turn for a two-minute funeral and a mass grave, he kept splitting open and healing, splitting and healing.

  The memory never faded, but in time it got pushed aside by newer ones. Gradually Fortunato came to believe that nothing was going to happen to him. For those the virus didn't touch, life went on the way it always had.

  He realized early on that he was going to have to make his own way. From listening to his mother complain about American women he came up with the idea of the prostitute as geisha; at age fourteen he brought home a stunning Puerto Rican girl from his high school for his mother to train. That had been the beginning.

  He looked up and saw that night had fallen while he'd been walking aimlessly through Jokertown. The grays and pastels had turned to neon, street clothes to paisley and leopard prints. Just ahead of him demonstrators had blocked off the street with a flatbed truck. There were drums and amps and guitars up there and a couple of heavy-duty extension cords running in through the open door of the Chaos Club.

  At the moment the stage was empty except for a woman with long red curly hair and an acoustic guitar. A banner behind her read S.N.C.C. Fortunato had no idea what the letters stood for. She had the audience singing along with some folk song or other. They all went through the chorus a couple of times without the guitar, and then she took a bow and they clapped and she got down off the back of the truck.

  She wasn't beautiful in the way Lenore was; her nose was a little large, her skin was not that good. She was in the radical uniform of blue jeans and work shirt that didn't do anything for her. But she had an aura of energy he could see without even wanting to.

  Women were Fortunato's weakness. He was like a deer in their headlights. Even as low as he felt he couldn't help but stop and look at her, and before he knew it she was standing next to him, shaking a coffee can with a few coins in the bottom.

  “Hey, man, how about a donation?”

  “Not today,” Fortunato said. “I don't have a lot of politics.”

  “You're black, Nixon's president, and you don't have any politics? Brother, have I got news for you.”

  “Is all this about being black?” Fortunato didn't see another black f
ace in the crowd.

  “No, man, it's about jokers. Whoa, did I strike a nerve or something?” When Fortunato didn't answer she went on anyway. “You know how long the average life expectancy of a joker in 'Nam is? Less than two months. If you take the percentage of jokers in the U.S. population and divide it by the percentage of jokers in 'Nam, you know what you get? You get about a hundred times too many jokers over there. A hundred times, man!”

  “Yeah, okay, so what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Make a donation. We're going to get lawyers on this and stop it. It's the FBI, man. The FBI and SCARE. It's like McCarthy all over again. They've got lists of all the jokers and they're drafting them on purpose. If they can walk and hold a gun, they're not even getting a real physical, it's off to Saigon. It's genocide, pure and simple.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He dug out a twenty and dropped it in the can.

  “You know what I wish?” She hadn't even noticed the size of the bill. “I wish those fucking aces would do something about their own, you know? What would it take for Cyclone, or one of those other assholes, to wipe out those files? Nothing, man, nothing at all, but they're too busy getting headlines.”

  She started to walk away and then she looked in the can. “Hey, thanks, man. You're okay. Listen, here's a flyer. If you want to do some more, call us.”

  “Sure,” Fortunato said. “What's your name?”

  “They call me C.C.,” she said. “C.C. Ryder.”

  “Is it the same C.C. as up there?” He pointed to the S.N.C.C. banner.

  C.C. shook her head. “You're funny, man,” she said, and smiled once and faded into the crowd.

  He folded up the flyer and stuck it in his pocket and turned off the Bowery. All the talk about jokers had left him feeling disconnected. Just down the street was a mirror-walled club called the Funhouse, owned by a guy named Desmond who had a trunk instead of a nose. He was one of Fortunato's customers, always wanting a geisha with finer skin or darker hair or a sweeter face than Fortunato could find for him. Fortunato could not stand the thought of seeing him just then.

  On the side streets hardly anyone wore masks anymore, and eyes stared back defiantly at him from upside-down faces or heads the size of cantaloupes. Your new brothers and sisters, he told himself. For every ace there were ten of these, lurking in alleys while the lucky ones put on capes and talked their lame jargon and jetted around fighting each other. The aces had the headlines and the talk shows, and the freaks and cripples had Jokertown. Jokertown and the jungles of Vietnam, if C.C.'s story was right.

  But the only place Fortunato wanted to be was back in Lenore's apartment, making love to her. And this time he would let go, and if it made him weak it wouldn't matter, and things would go back to the way they always had been.

  Except that sooner or later the killer was going to move again. Vietnam was halfway around the world, but the killer was right here, maybe in this very block.

  He stopped walking, looked up, and saw that his subconscious had brought him right to the alley where they told him they'd found Erika.

  He thought about what C.C. had said. Using power to take care of your own.

  When Lenore had jolted him out of his body he'd seen things he'd never seen before, swirls and patterns of energy that he had no name for. If he could get out again he might see something the cops had missed.

  A wino in a long, filthy overcoat started at him. It took Fortunato a second to realize the man had long, floppy, basset ears and a moist, black nose. Fortunato ignored him, shutting his eyes and trying to remember the feeling.

  He might as well have been trying to think himself to the moon. He needed Lenore but he was afraid to bring her here. Could he do it at her place, then fly back here? Would he be able to keep it going that long? What would happen to his physical body if he did?

  Too many questions. He called her from a pay phone and told her where to meet him.

  “Do you have a gun?” he asked.

  “Yes. Ever since . . . you know.”

  “Bring it.”

  “Fortunato? Are you in trouble?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  By the time he got back to the alley with Lenore he'd drawn a crowd. They all wore Salvation Army leftovers: baggy pants, ripped and stained flannel shirts, jackets the color of dried grease. One short old woman looked like a wax museum statue that had started to melt. Off to her right was a teenaged boy, standing next to a rack of garbage cans, vibrating. When the vibrations got to a certain pitch the cans would bang together like a spastic cymbal section and the woman would turn on them in a fury and kick at them. The others were less obviously deformed: a man with suckers on the ends of his fingers, a girl whose features had been squared off with ridges of hardened skin.

  Lenore held onto Fortunato's arm. “What now?” she whispered.

  Fortunato kissed her. She tried to pull away when the audience of freaks started to snicker, but Fortunato was insistent, opening her lips with his tongue, moving his hands over the small of her back, and finally she began to breathe heavily and he felt the power stirring at the base of his spine. He moved his lips down Lenore's shoulder, her long fingernails digging into his neck, and then he raised his eyes until he was looking at the dog-man. He felt the power flow into his eyes and voice and said, quietly, “Go away.”

  The dog-man turned and walked out of the alley. One at a time he ordered the others away and then he said, “Now,” and guided her hand into his trousers. “Do it to me, what you did before.” He slid his hands up under her sweater and moved them slowly over her breasts. Her right hand closed over him and her left went around his waist, comforting him with the weight of her S&W .32. He closed his eyes as the heat began to build, letting the brick wall behind him take his weight. In seconds he was ready to come, his astral body bobbling like a loosely held balloon.

  And then, like stepping sideways out of a moving car, he slipped free.

  Every brick and candy wrapper glistened with clarity. As he concentrated, the rumble of traffic slowed and deepened until it was barely audible.

  They'd found Erika in a doorway deep in the alley, severed arms and legs stacked like firewood in her lap, head attached by less than half the thickness of her neck. Fortunato could see the stains of her blood deep within the molecules of the concrete, still glowing faintly with her life essence. The wood of the doorframe still held a trace of her perfume and a single thread of ash-blond hair.

  The baritone murmur of the street dropped to a vibration so low that Fortunato could feel the individual wave peaks pass through him. Now he could see the indentation Erika's body had made in the concrete stoop, the infinitesimal trace her shoes had pressed into the asphalt. And beside them the footprints of her killer.

  They led from the street to Erika's body and back again, and at the curb they met the imprint of a car. He had no idea what kind of a car it had been, but he could see the tracks it had left, thick and black and fibrous, as if it had been burning rubber the entire way.

  He stopped for an instant and looked back at his material body frozen in Lenore's arms. Then he let the tracks of the car pull him out into the street, across to Second Avenue, then south to Delancey. He felt himself gradually weakening, his vision clouding up and the background noises of the city starting to shake the edge of his hearing. He concentrated harder, pulling the last reserves of strength out of his physical body.

  The car turned north on the Bowery and paused in front of a shabby gray warehouse. Fortunato bore down on the sidewalk, saw the footprints as they crossed from the car to the building's front door.

  He followed them upstairs. He felt as if he'd been tied to a giant elastic band and run to its limit. Each stair took more out of him than the last. Finally the footprints disappeared at the entrance to a loft, and he knew he was finished.

  The traffic noise spun up to speed around him and he shot backward the way he'd come, drawn irresistibly home to his body. Blissful, exhausted, as if he'd drained himself
in sex, he fell into it like a diver into a pool. Lenore staggered under his sudden dead weight and then he slid down into unconsciousness.

  “No,” she said, and rolled away from him. “I can't.”

  She had purple circles under her eyes and her body was limp with exhaustion. Fortunato wondered how she'd been able to get him into a taxi and help him up the stairs to her apartment.

  “I don't understand,” he said.

  “You build up a charge, and then sex burns it off. You see? The power, the shakti. Except with tantric magick you absorb the energy back into you. Not just yours, but whatever energy I give up to you.”

  “So when you come, you give up this shakti.”

  “Right.”

  “And you've given me all you have.”

  “That's right, big guy. I'm all fucked out.”

  Fortunato reached for the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I know where the killer is,” he said, dialing. “If you can't give me the strength to take him, I'll have to get it somewhere else.” He didn't like the way it came out but he was too tired right then to care. Tired and something else. His brain hummed with the knowledge of his power, and he felt it changing him, taking control.

  The phone rang at the other end and then he heard Miranda answer it. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned back to Lenore. “Will you help?”

  She closed her eyes and did something with her mouth that was almost a smile. “I guess a hooker should know better than to be jealous.”

  “Geisha,” Fortunato said.

  “All right,” Lenore said. “I'll show her what to do.”

  They had a line each of cocaine and some intense Vietnamese pot. Lenore swore it would only help tune them into each other. Miranda, tall, black-haired, lush, the most physically adept of his women, stripped slowly to garter belt, stockings, and a black brassiere so thin he could see the dark ovals of her nipples.