Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

by George R. R. Martin

  A day like this makes me acutely aware of my own failures and shortcomings. Since the cancer took hold of me, I’ve lost a good deal of weight (some unsuspecting friends have even told me how good I look), but moving among these people made me very self-conscious of the small paunch that remains. They were starving before my eyes, while our plane waited to take us back to Addis Ababa . . . to our hotel, another reception, and no doubt a gourmet Ethiopian meal. The guilt was overwhelming, as was the sense of helplessness.

  I believe we all felt it. I cannot conceive of how Hiram Worch­ester must have felt. To his credit he looked sick as he moved among the victims, and at one point he was trembling so badly he had to sit in the shade for a while by himself. The sweat was just pouring off him. But he got up again afterward, his face white and grim, and used his gravity power to help them unload the relief provisions we had brought with us.

  So many people have contributed so much and worked so hard for the relief effort, but here it seems like nothing. The only reali­ties in the relief camps are the skeletal bodies with their massive swollen bellies, the dead eyes of the children, and the endless heat pouring down from above onto this baked, parched landscape.

  Parts of this day will linger in my memory for a long time—or at least as long a time as I have left to me. Father Squid gave the last rites to a dying woman who had a Coptic cross around her neck. Peregrine and her cameraman recorded much of the scene on film for her documentary, but after a short time she had had enough and returned to the plane to wait for us. I’ve heard that she was so sick she lost her breakfast.

  And there was a young mother, no more than seventeen or eighteen surely, so gaunt that you could count every rib, with eyes incredibly ancient. She was holding her baby to a withered, empty breast. The child had been dead long enough to begin to smell, but she would not let them take it from her. Dr. Tachyon took control of her mind and held her still while he gently pried the child’s body from her grasp and carried it away. He handed it to one of the relief workers and then sat on the ground and began to weep, his body shaking with each sob.

  Mistral ended the day in tears as well. En route to the refugee camp, she had changed into her blue-and-white flying costume. The girl is young, an ace, and a powerful one; no doubt she thought she could help. When she called the winds to her, the huge cape she wears fastened at wrist and ankle ballooned out like a parachute and pulled her up into the sky. Even the strangeness of the jokers walking between them had not awakened much interest in the inward-looking eyes of the refugees, but when Mistral took flight, most of them—not, all, but most—turned to watch, and their gaze followed her upward into that high, hot blueness until finally they sank back into the lethargy of despair. I think Mistral had dreamed that somehow her wind powers could push the clouds around and make the rains come to heal this land. And what a beautiful, vainglorious dream it was. . . .

  She flew for almost two hours, sometimes so high and far that she vanished from our sight, but for all her ace powers, all she could raise was a dust devil. When she gave up at last, she was exhausted, her sweet young face grimy with dust and sand, her eyes red and swollen.

  Just before we left, an atrocity underscored the depth of the despair here. A tall youth with acne scars on his cheeks attacked a fellow refugee—went berserk, gouged out a woman’s eye, and actually ate it while the people watched without comprehension. Ironically we’d met the boy briefly when we’d first arrived—he’d spent a year in a Christian school and had a few words of English. He seemed stronger and healthier than most of the others we saw. When Mistral flew, he jumped to his feet and called out after her. “Jetboy!” he said in a very clear, strong voice. Father Squid and Senator Hartmann tried to talk to him, but his English-language skills were limited to a few nouns, including “chocolate,” “televi­sion,” and “Jesus Christ.” Still, the boy was more alive than most—his eyes went wide at Father Squid, and he put out a hand and touched his facial tendrils wonderingly and actually smiled when the senator patted his shoulder and told him that we were here to help, though I don’t think he understood a word. We were all shocked when we saw them carrying him away, still screaming, those gaunt brown cheeks smeared with blood.

  A hideous day all around. This evening back in Addis Ababa our driver swung us by the docks, where relief shipment stand two stories high in some places. Hartmann was in a cold rage. If anyone can make this criminal government take action and feed its starving people, he is the one. I pray for him, or would, if I believed in a god . . . but what kind of god would permit the obscenities we have seen on this trip. . . .

  Africa is as beautiful a land as any on the face of the earth. I should write of all the beauty we have seen this past month. Victo­ria Falls, the snows of Kilimanjaro, a thousand zebra moving through the tall grass as if the wind had stripes. I’ve walked among the ruins of proud ancient kingdoms whose very names were unknown to me, held pygmy artifacts in my hand, seen the face of a bushman light up with curiosity instead of horror when he beheld me for the first time. Once during a visit to a game preserve I woke early, and when I looked out of my window at the dawn, I saw that two huge African elephants had come to the very build­ing, and Radha stood between them, naked in the early morning light, while they touched her with their trunks. I turned away then; it seemed somehow a private moment.

  Beauty, yes—in the land and in so many of the people, whose faces are full of warmth and compassion.

  Still, for all that beauty, Africa has depressed and saddened me considerably, and I will be glad to leave. The camp was only part of it. Before Ethiopia there was Kenya and South Africa. It is the wrong time of year for Thanksgiving, but the scenes we have wit­nessed these past few weeks have put me more in the mood for giving thanks than I’ve ever felt during America’s smug November celebration of football and gluttony. Even jokers have things to give thanks for. I knew that already, but Africa has brought it home to me forcefully.

  South Africa was a grim way to begin this leg of the trip. The same hatreds and prejudices exist at home of course, but whatever our faults we are at least civilized enough to maintain a facade of tolerance, brotherhood, and equality under the law. Once I might have called that mere sophistry, but that was before I tasted the reality of Capetown and Pretoria, where all the ugliness is out in the open, enshrined by law, enforced by an iron fist whose velvet glove has grown thin and worn indeed. It is argued that at least South Africa hates openly, while America hides behind a hypocrit­ical facade. Perhaps, perhaps . . . but if so, I will take the hypocrisy and thank you for it.

  I suppose that was Africa’s first lesson, that there are worse places in the world than Jokertown. The second was that there are worse things than repression, and Kenya taught us that.

  Like most of the other nations of Central and East Africa, Kenya was spared the worst of the wild card. Some spores would have reached these lands through airborne diffusion, more through the seaports, arriving via contaminated cargo in holds that had been poorly sterilized or never sterilized at all. CARE packages are looked on with deep suspicion in much of the world, and with good reason, and many captains have become quite adept at concealing the fact that their last port of call was New York City.

  When one moves inland, wild card cases become almost nonex­istent. There are those who say that the late Idi Amin was some kind of insane joker-ace, with strength as great as Troll or the Harlem Hammer, and the ability to transform into some kind of were-creature, a leopard or a lion or a hawk. Amin himself claimed to be able to ferret out his enemies telepathically, and those few enemies who survived say that he was a cannibal who felt human flesh was necessary to maintain his powers. All this is the stuff of rumor and propaganda, however, and whether Amin was a joker, an ace, or a pathetically deluded nat madman, he is assuredly dead, and in this corner of the world, documented cases of the wild card virus are vanishingly hard to locate.

  But Kenya and the surrounding nations have their own viral nightmare. If th
e wild card is a chimera here, AIDS is an epidemic. While the president was hosting Senator Hartmann and most of the tour, a few of us were on an exhausting visit to a half-dozen clinics in rural Kenya, hopping from one village to another by helicopter. They assigned us only one battered chopper, and that at Tachyon’s insistence. The government would have much preferred that we spend our time lecturing at the university, meeting with educators and political leaders, touring game preserves and museums.

  Most of my fellow delegates were only too glad to comply. The wild card is forty years old, and we have grown used to it—but AIDS, that is a new terror in the world, and one that we have only begun to understand. At home it is thought of as a homosexual affliction, and I confess that I am guilty of thinking of it that way myself, but here in Africa, that belief is given the lie. Already there are more AIDS victims on this continent alone than have ever been infected by the Takisian xenovirus since its release over Manhattan forty years ago.

  And AIDS seems a crueler demon somehow. The wild card kills ninety percent of those who draw it, often in ways that are terrible and painful, but the distance between ninety percent and one hundred is not insignificant if you are among the ten who live. It is the distance between life and death, between hope and despair. Some claim that it’s better to die than to live as a joker, but you will not find me among their number. If my own life has not always been happy, nonetheless I have memories I cherish and accomplishments I am proud of. I am glad to have lived, and I do not want to die. I’ve accepted my death, but that does not mean I welcome it. I have too much unfinished business. Like Robert Tomlin, I have not yet seen The Jolson Story. None of us have.

  In Kenya we saw whole villages that are dying. Alive, smiling, talking, capable of eating and defecating and making love and even babies, alive to all practical purposes—and yet dead. Those who draw the Black Queen may die in the agony of unspeakable transformations, but there are drugs for pain, and at least they die quickly. AIDS is less merciful.

  We have much in common, jokers and AIDS victims. Before I left Jokertown, we had been planning for a JADL fund-raising benefit at the Funhouse in late May—a major event with as much big-name entertainment as we could book. After Kenya I cabled instructions back to New York to arrange for the proceeds of the benefit to be split with a suitable AIDS victims’ group. We pariahs need to stick together. Perhaps I can still erect a few necessary bridges before my own Black Queen lies face up on the table.

  DOWN BY THE NILE

  Gail Gerstner-Miller

  The torches in the temple burned slowly, steadily, occasionally flickering when someone passed by. Their light illuminated the faces of the people gathered in a small antechamber off the main hall. They were all present, those who looked like ordinary people, and the others who were extraordinary: the cat woman, the jackal-headed man, those with wings, crocodile skin, and bird heads.

  Osiris the far-seer spoke. “The winged one comes.”

  “Is she one of us?”

  “Will she help us?”

  “Not directly,” Osiris answered. “But within her is that which will have the power to do great things. For now we must wait.”

  “We have waited a very long time,” said Anubis the jackal. “A little longer will not make a difference.”

  The others murmured in agreement. The living gods settled back to patiently wait.

  The room in Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel was sweltering, and it was still only morning. The ceiling fan stirred the sluggish air tiredly and sweat ran in tickling rivulets over Peregrine’s rib cage and breasts as she lay propped up in bed, watching Josh McCoy slip a new film cassette into his camera. He looked at her and smiled.

  “We’d better get going,” he said.

  She smiled back lazily from the bed, her wings moving gently, bringing more coolness into the room than the slow-moving fan.

  “If you say so.” She stood, stretched lithely, and watched McCoy watch her. She walked by him, dancing out of his way as he reached for her. “Haven’t you had enough yet?” she asked teas­ingly as she took a clean pair of jeans from her suitcase. She wig­gled into them, batting her wings to keep her balance. “The hotel laundry must have washed these in boiling water.” She took a deep breath and pulled on the stubborn zipper. “There.”

  “They look great, though,” McCoy said. He put his arms around her from behind, and Peregrine shivered as he kissed the back of her neck and caressed her breasts, still sensitive from their morning lovemaking.

  “I thought you said we had to get going.” She settled back against him.

  McCoy sighed and pulled away reluctantly. “We do. We have to meet the others in”—he checked his wristwatch—“three minutes.”

  “Too bad,” Peregrine said, smiling mischievously. “I think I could be coaxed into spending all day in bed.”

  “Work awaits,” McCoy said, rummaging for his clothes as Pere­grine put on a tank top. “And I’m anxious to see if these self-proclaimed living gods can do all they claim.”

  She watched him as he dressed, admiring his lean, muscular body. He was blond and fit, a documentary filmmaker and cameraman, and a wonderful lover.

  “Got everything? Don’t forget your hat. The sun’s fierce, even if it is winter.”

  “I’ve got everything I need,” Peregrine said with a sidelong glance. “Let’s go.”

  McCoy turned the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the door han­dle to the other side, then closed and locked the door. The hotel corridor was quiet and deserted. Tachyon must have heard their muffled footsteps, because he poked his head out as they passed his room.

  “Morning, Tachy,” Peregrine said. “Josh, Father Squid, Hiram, and I are going to catch the afternoon ceremony at the Temple of the Living Gods. Want to come along?”

  “Good morning, my dear.” Tachyon, looking resplendent in a white brocade dressing gown, nodded distantly to McCoy. “No, thank you. I’ll see everything I need to see at the meeting tonight. Right now it’s much too hot to venture out.” Tachyon looked closely at her. “Are you feeling all right? You look pale.”

  “I think the heat’s getting to me too,” Peregrine replied. “That and the food and water. Or rather the microbes that live in them.”

  “We don’t need you getting sick,” Tachyon said seriously. “Come in and let me do a quick examination.” He fanned his face. “We’ll find out what’s bothering you, and it will give me something useful to do with my day.”

  “We don’t have the time right now. The others are waiting for us—”

  “Peri,” McCoy interrupted, a concerned look on his face, “it’ll only take a few minutes. I’ll go downstairs and tell Hiram and Father Squid you’ve been delayed.” She hesitated. “Please,” he added.

  “Oh, all right.” She smiled at him. “I’ll see you downstairs.”

  McCoy nodded and continued down the hallway as Peregrine followed Tachyon into his ornately appointed suite. The sitting room was spacious, and much cooler than the room she shared with McCoy. Of course, she reflected, they had generated a lot of heat themselves that morning.

  “Wow,” she commented, glancing around the luxuriously deco­rated room. “I must have gotten the servants’ quarters.”

  “It’s really something, isn’t it? I especially like the bed.” Tachyon pointed to a large four-poster draped with white netting that was visible through the bedroom’s open door. “You have to climb steps to get into it.”

  “What fun!”

  He glanced at her mischievously. “Want to try it out?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve already had my morning sex.”

  “Peri,” Tachyon complained in a teasing tone, “I don’t understand why you’re attracted to that man.” He retrieved his red leather medical bag from the closet. “Sit there,” he said, indicating a plush velvet wingback chair, “and open your mouth. Say ahhh.”

  “Ahh,” Peregrine repeated obediently after seating herself.

  Tachyon peered down her throat. “W
ell, that looks nice and healthy.” He swiftly examined her ears and looked into her eyes. “Seems okay. Tell me about your symptoms.” He removed his stethoscope from his bag. “Nausea, vomiting, dizziness?”

  “Some nausea and vomiting.”

  “When? After you eat?”

  “No, not really. Anytime.”

  “Do you get sick every day?”

  “No. Maybe a couple times a week.”

  “Hmmmm.” He lifted her shirt up and held his stethoscope against her left breast. She jumped at the touch of cold steel against her warm flesh. “Sorry . . . heartbeat is strong and regular. How long has this vomiting been occurring?”

  “A couple of months, I guess. Since before the tour started. I thought it was stress related.”

  He frowned. “You’ve been vomiting for a couple of months, and you didn’t see fit to consult me? I am your doctor.”

  She squirmed uncomfortably. “Tachy, you’ve been so busy. I didn’t want to bother you. I think it’s all the traveling, the food, dif­ferent water, different standards of hygiene.”

  “Allow me to make the diagnosis, if you please, young lady. Are you getting enough sleep, or is your new boyfriend keeping you up all hours?”

  “I’m getting to bed early every night,” she assured him.

  “I’m certain you are,” he said drily. “But that wasn’t what I asked. Are you getting enough sleep?”

  Peregrine blushed. “Of course I am.”

  Tachyon replaced his equipment in his bag. “How’s your men­strual cycle? Any problems?”

  “Well, I haven’t had a period in a while, but that’s not unusual, even though I’m on the pill.”

  “Peri, please try to be a little more precise. How long is ‘a while’?”

  She bit her lip and waved her wings gently. “I don’t know, a couple of months, I guess.”

  “Hmmmmm. Come here.” He led her into his bedroom, and her wings instinctively curled over her body. The air conditioner was going full blast and it felt about twenty degrees cooler. Tachyon gestured at the bed. “Take off your jeans and lie down.”