Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

by George R. R. Martin

  There was nobody in the room but Hiram. It hurt Fortunato to make his head turn; to Hiram it would have seemed like he was moving in a blur of speed. The sliding doors to the bathroom were open. Fortunato couldn’t see anyone in there either.

  Then he remembered how the Astronomer had been able to hide from him, to make Fortunato not see him. He let time begin to trickle past him again. He brought up his hands, fighting the heavy, clinging air, and framed the room, making an empty square bordered by his thumbs and index fingers. Here was the closet, the doors open. Here was a stretch of bamboo-patterned wall with nothing in it. Here was the foot of the bed, and the edge of a samurai sword moving slowly toward Hiram’s head.

  Fortunato threw himself forward. His body seemed to take forever to rise into the air and float toward Hiram. He opened his arms and knocked Hiram to the floor, feeling something hard scrape the bottoms of his shoes. He rolled onto his back and saw the sheets and mattress slowly splitting in two.

  The sword, he thought. Once he convinced himself it was there, he could see it. Now the arm, he thought, and slowly the entire man took shape in front of him, a young Japanese in a white dress shirt and gray wool pants and bare feet.

  He let time start again before the strain wore him out completely. He heard footsteps in the hall. He was afraid to look away, afraid he might loose the killer again. “Drop the sword,” Fortunato said.

  “You can see me,” the man said in English. He turned to look toward the door.

  “Put it down,” Fortunato said, making it an order now, but it was too late. He no longer had eye contact and the man resisted him.

  Without thinking, Fortunato looked at the doorway. It was Tachyon, in red silk pajamas, Mistral behind him. Tachyon was charging into the room, and Fortunato knew the little alien was about to die.

  He looked back for Mori. Mori was gone. Fortunato went cold with panic. The sword, he thought. Find the sword. He looked where the sword would have to be if it were slicing toward Tachyon and slowed time again.

  There. The blade, curved and impossibly sharp, the steel daz­zling as sunlight. Come to me, Fortunato thought. He pulled at the blade with his mind.

  He only meant to take it from Mori’s hands. He misjudged his own power. The blade spun completely around, missing Tachyon by inches. It whirled around ten or fifteen times and finally buried itself in the wall behind the bed.

  Somewhere in there it had sliced off the top of Mori’s head.

  Fortunato shielded them with his power until they were on the street. It was the same trick Zero Man had used. No one saw them. They left Mori’s corpse in the room, his blood soaking into the carpet.

  A taxi pulled up and Peregrine got out. The man who’d been in bed with her got out behind her. He was a bit shorter than Fortunato, with blond hair and a mustache. He stood next to Peregrine and she reached out and took his hand. “Is everything okay?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Hiram said. “It’s okay.”

  “Does this mean you’re back on the tour?”

  Hiram looked around at the others. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

  “That’s good,” Peregrine said, suddenly noticing how serious everyone was. “We were all worried about you.”

  Hiram nodded.

  Tachyon moved next to Fortunato. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Not only for saving my life. You probably saved the tour as well. Another violent incident—after Haiti and Guatemala and Syria—well, it would have undone everything we were trying to accomplish.”

  “Sure,” Fortunato said. “We probably shouldn’t hang around here too long. No point in taking chances.”

  “No,” Tachyon said. “I guess not.”

  “Uh, Fortunato,” Peregrine said. “Josh McCoy.”

  Fortunato shook his hand and nodded. McCoy smiled and gave his hand back to Peregrine. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “There’s blood on your shirt,” Peregrine said. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing,” Fortunato said. “It’s all over now.”

  “So much blood,” Peregrine said. “Like with the Astronomer. There’s so much violence in you. It’s scary sometimes.”

  Fortunato didn’t say anything.

  “So,” McCoy said. “What happens now?”

  “I guess,” Fortunato said, “me and G.C. Jayewardene will go see a man about a monastery.”

  “You kidding?” McCoy said.

  “No,” Peregrine said. “I don’t think he is.” She looked at Fortunato for a long time, and then she said, “Take care of yourself, will you?”

  “Sure,” Fortunato said. “What else?”

  “There it is,” Fortunato said. The monastery straggled across the entire hillside, and beyond it were stone gardens and terraced fields. Fortunato wiped the snow from a rock next to the path and sat down. His head was clear and his stomach quiet. Maybe it was just the clean mountain air. Maybe it was something more.

  “It’s very beautiful,” Jayewardene said, crouching on his heels.

  Spring wouldn’t get to Hokkaido for another month and a half. The sky was clear, though. Clear enough to see, for instance, a 747 from miles and miles away. But the 747s didn’t fly over Hokkaido. Especially not the ones headed for Korea, almost a thousand miles to the southwest.

  “What happened Wednesday night?” Jayewardene asked after a few minutes. “There was all kind of commotion, and when it was over Hiram was back. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not much to tell,” Fortunato said. “People fighting over money. A boy died. He’d never actually killed anybody, as it turned out. He was very young, very afraid. He just wanted to do a good job, to live up to the reputation he’d invented for himself.” Fortunato shrugged. “It’s the way of the world. That kind of thing is always going to happen in a place like Tokyo.” He stood up, brushing at the seat of his pants. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” Jayewardene said. “I’ve been waiting for this a long time.”

  Fortunato nodded. “Then let’s get on with it.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF

  XAVIER DESMOND

  MARCH 21/EN ROUTE TO SEOUL:

  A face out of my past confronted me in Tokyo and has preyed on my mind ever since. Two days ago I decided that I would ignore him and the issues raised by his presence, that I would make no mention of him in this journal.

  I’ve made plans to have this volume to be offered for publication after my death. I do not expect a best-seller, but I would think the number of celebrities aboard the Stacked Deck and the various newsworthy events we’ve generated will stir up at least a little interest in the great American public, so my volume may find its own audience. Whatever modest royalties it earns will be welcomed by the JADL, to which I’ve willed my entire estate.

  Yet, even though I will be safely dead and buried before anyone reads these words, and therefore in no position to be harmed by any personal admissions I might make, I find myself reluctant to write of Fortunato. Call it cowardice, if you will. Jokers are notorious cowards, if one listens to the jests, the cruel sort that they do not allow on television. I can easily justify my decision to say nothing of Fortunato. My dealings with him over the years have been private matters, having little to do with politics or world affairs or the issues that I’ve tried to address in this journal, and nothing at all to do with this tour.

  Yet I have felt free, in these pages, to repeat the gossip that has inevitably swirled about the airplane, to report on the various foibles and indiscretions of Dr. Tachyon and Peregrine and Jack Braun and Digger Downs and all the rest. Can I truly pretend that their weaknesses are of public interest and my own are not? Perhaps I could . . . the public has always been fascinated by aces and repelled by jokers . . . but I will not. I want this journal to be an honest one, a true one. And I want the readers to understand a little of what it has been like to live forty years a joker. And to do that I must talk of Fortunato, no matter how deeply it may shame me.

  Fortunato now lives in Japan. He helped Hi
ram in some obscure way after Hiram had suddenly and quite mysteriously left the tour in Tokyo. I don’t pretend to know the details of that; it was all carefully hushed up. Hiram seemed almost himself when he returned to us in Calcutta, but he has deteriorated rapidly again, and he looks worse every day. He has become volatile and unpleasant, and secretive. But this is not about Hiram, of whose woes I know nothing. The point is, Fortunato was embroiled in the business somehow and came to our hotel, where I spoke to him briefly in the corridor. That was all there was to it . . . now. But in years past Fortunato and I have had other dealings.

  Forgive me. This is hard. I am an old man and a joker, and age and deformity alike have made me sensitive. My dignity is all I have left, and I am about to surrender it.

  I was writing about self-loathing.

  This is a time for hard truths, and the first of those is that many nats are disgusted by jokers. Some of these are bigots, always ready to hate anything different. In that regard we jokers are no different from any other oppressed minority; we are all hated with the same honest venom by those predisposed to hate.

  There are other normals, however, who are more predisposed to tolerance, who try to see beyond the surface to the human being beneath. People of good will, not haters, well-meaning generous people like . . . well, like Dr. Tachyon and Hiram Worchester to choose two examples close to hand. Both of these gentlemen have proven over the years that they care deeply about jokers in the abstract, Hiram through his anonymous charities, Tachyon through his work at the clinic. And yet both of them, I am convinced, are just as sick­ened by the simple physical deformity of most jokers as the Nur al-Allah or Leo Barnett. You can see it in their eyes, no matter how nonchalant and cosmopolitan they strive to be. Some of their best friends are jokers, but they wouldn’t want their sister to marry one.

  This is the first unspeakable truth of jokerhood.

  How easy it would be to rail against this, to condemn men like Tach and Hiram for hypocrisy and “formism” (a hideous word coined by a particularly moronic joker activist and taken up by Tom Miller’s Jokers for a Just Society in their heyday). Easy, and wrong. They are decent men, but still only men, and cannot be thought less because they have normal human feelings.

  Because, you see, the second unspeakable truth of jokerhood is that no matter how much jokers offend nats, we offend ourselves even more.

  Self-loathing is the particular psychological pestilence of Jokertown, a disease that is often fatal. The leading cause of death among jokers under the age of fifty is, and always has been, suicide. This despite the fact that virtually every disease known to man is more serious when contracted by a joker, because our body chemistries and very shapes vary so widely and unpredictably that no course of treatment is truly safe.

  In Jokertown you’ll search long and hard before you’ll find a place to buy a mirror, but there are mask shops on every block.

  If that was not proof enough, consider the issue of names. Nicknames, they call them. They are more than that. They are spotlights on the true depths of joker self-loathing.

  If this journal is to be published, I intend to insist that it be titled The Journal of Xavier Desmond, not A Joker’s Journal or any such variant. I am a man, a particular man, not just a generic joker. Names are important; they are more than just words, they shape and color the things they name. The feminists realized this long ago, but jokers still have not grasped it.

  I have made it a point over the years to answer to no name but my own, yet I know a joker dentist who calls himself Fishface, an accomplished ragtime pianist who answers to Catbox, and a brilliant joker mathematician who signs his papers “Slimer.” Even on this tour I find myself accompanied by three people named Chrysalis, Troll, and Father Squid.

  We are, of course, not the first minority to experience this par­ticular form of oppression. Certainly black people have been there; entire generations were raised with the belief that the “prettiest” black girls were the ones with the lightest skins whose features most closely approximated the Caucasian ideal. Finally some of them saw through that lie and proclaimed that black was beautiful.

  From time to time various well-meaning but foolish jokers have attempted to do the same thing. Freakers, one of the more debauched institutions of Jokertown, has what it calls a “Twisted Miss” contest every year on Valentine’s Day. However sincere or cynical these efforts are, they are surely misguided. Our friends the Takisians took care of that by putting a clever little twist on the prank they played on us.

  The problem is, every joker is unique.

  Even before my transformation I was never a handsome man. Even after the change I am by no means hideous. My “nose” is a trunk, about two feet long, with fingers at its end. My experience has been that most people get used to the way I look if they are around me for a few days. I like to tell myself that after a week or so you scarcely notice that I’m any different, and maybe there’s even a grain of truth in that.

  If the virus had only been so kind as to give all jokers trunks where their noses had been, the adjustment might have been a good deal easier, and a “Trunks Are Beautiful” campaign might have done some real good.

  But to the best of my knowledge I am the only joker with a trunk. I might work very hard to disregard the aesthetics of the nat culture I live in, to convince myself that I am one handsome devil and that the rest of them are the funny-looking ones, but none of that will help the next time I find that pathetic creature they call Snotman sleeping in the dumpster behind the Funhouse. The horrible reality is, my stomach is as thoroughly turned by the more extreme cases of joker deformity as I imagine Dr. Tachyon’s must be—but if anything, I am even more guilty about it.

  Which brings me, in a roundabout way, back to Fortunato. Fortunato is . . . or was at least . . . a procurer. He ran a high-priced call girl ring. All of his girls were exquisite; beautiful, sensual, skilled in every erotic art, and by and large pleasant people, as much a delight out of bed as in it. He called them geishas.

  For more than two decades I was one of his best customers.

  I believe he did a lot of business in Jokertown. I know for a fact that Chrysalis often trades information for sex, upstairs in her Crystal Palace, whenever a man who needs her services happens to strike her fancy. I know a handful of truly wealthy jokers, none of whom are married, but almost all of whom have nat mistresses. The hometown papers we’ve seen tell us that the Five Families and the Shadow Fists are warring in the streets, and I know why—because in Jokertown prostitution is big business, along with drugs and gambling.

  The first thing a joker loses is his sexuality. Some lose it totally, becoming incapable or asexual. But even those whose genitalia and sexual drives remain unaffected by the wild card find themselves bereft of sexual identity. From the instant one stabilizes, one is no longer a man or a woman, only a joker.

  A normal sex drive, abnormal self-loathing, and a yearning for the thing that’s been lost . . . manhood, femininity, beauty, whatever. They are common demons in Jokertown, and I know them well. The onset of my cancer and the chemotherapy have combined to kill all my interest in sex, but my memories and my shame remain intact. It shames me to be reminded of Fortunato. Not because I patronized a prostitute or broke their silly laws—I have contempt for those laws. It shames me because, try as I did over the years, I could never find it in me to desire a joker woman. I knew several who were worthy of love; kind, gentle, caring women, who needed commitment and tenderness and yes, sex, as much as I did. Some of them became my cherished friends. Yet I could never respond to them sexually. They remained as unattractive in my eyes as I must have been in theirs.

  So it goes, in Jokertown.

  The seat belt light has just come on, and I’m not feeling very well at present, so I will sign off here.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF

  XAVIER DESMOND

  APRIL 10/STOCKHOLM:

  Very tired. I fear my doctor was correct—this trip may have been a drastic mista
ke, insofar as my health is concerned. I feel I held up remarkably well during the first few months, when everything was fresh and new and exciting, but during this last month a cumulative exhaustion has set in, and the day-to-day grind has become almost unbearable. The flights, the dinners, the endless receiving lines, the visits to hospitals and joker ghettos and research institutions, it is all threatening to become one great blur of dignitaries and airports and translators and buses and hotel dining rooms.

  I am not keeping my food down well, and I know I have lost weight. The cancer, the strain of travel, my age... who can say? All of these, I suspect.

  Fortunately the trip is almost over now. We are scheduled to return to Tomlin on April 29, and only a handful of stops remain. I confess that I am looking forward to my return home, and I do not think I am alone in that. We are all tired.

  Still, despite the toll it has taken, I would not have forfeited this trip for anything. I have seen the Pyramids and the Great Wall, walked the streets of Rio and Marrakesh and Moscow, and soon I will add Rome and Paris and London to that list. I have seen and experienced the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and I have learned much, I think. I can only pray that I survive long enough to use some of that knowledge.

  Sweden is a bracing change from the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact nations we have visited. I have no strong feelings about socialism one way or the other, but grew very weary of the model joker “medical hostels” we were constantly being shown and the model jokers who occupied them. Socialist medicine and socialist science would undoubtedly conquer the wild card, and great strides were already being made, we were repeatedly told, but even if one credits these claims, the price is a lifetime of “treatment” for the handful of jokers the Soviets admit to having.