Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  Never play poker with a man named Doc, Charlie remembered. Pretorius and Finn were both doctors, but … He had been invited to sit in at the weekly poker game of the Black Velvet Society once himself. Once had been enough.

  “Where are you, Unca Henk?” sang out Leonore.

  “Sri Lanka. Get your daddy to help you spell that for Google before he runs straight out the door.”

  “I can’t run straight out the door,” Charlie protested. “I have the kids.”

  “Your cousin’s always free to watch your kids,” Dr. P. said. “She’s obsessed with the fact she can’t have any of her own.”

  “How the hel—on Earth do you know that?”

  “You always say Unca Henk knows everything,” Leonore said.

  Pretorius laughed. “Not to my face. I wish he and Sibyl would both stop thinking that way. The last thing the JADL needs is more yes-jokers.” Dr. Henrik Pretorius had spent much of his eighty-two years as a lawyer crusading for wild card rights, much of the time on behalf of the Joker Anti-Defamation League. He knew everybody. He was also richer than God.

  “What are you doing in Sri Lanka, running a hypermarathon?”

  “Just a regular marathon. Old age is catching up to me. The hypermarathon’s next week in Buenos Aires, but I believe I will have to miss it. I’m flying back on the red-eye, but don’t wait on me. I want to stop in D.C. and speak to some of my people there.”

  The JADL had offices in Washington, and a full staff of lobbyists and attorneys, but Charlie knew those were not the people the boss was speaking of. There were jokers everywhere; in SCARE, in the FBI, in the Secret Service. If any of them knew anything, the Old Man would get it out of them. “What do you want us to do?”

  “You start digging right there in New York. Charles Dutton is thick as thieves with Theodorus. We’ve argued about him at poker. See if you can find him. Talk to some of our friends on the Cry as well, see what’s in their morgue. Dirt, gossip, anything. And head down to Fort Freak, see what they have in the files on Finn. I doubt it will be much. I’m sending Sibyl to Charleston to shake a few trees, poke around…”

  “Isn’t that like sending her into the dragon’s den? Except maybe more directly into the dragon’s mouth? Charleston’s where Theodorus lives. It’s his corporate headquarters. He owns that town! Do you actually think Theodorus had something to do with the assassination? He seems pretty sincere in his desire to make a better world for jokers. Literally.”

  “Sure. The critics who say he’s just a huckster miss the mark by a long shot. But the greatest crimes are committed by the true believers. If you absolutely know what’s best for the world, then anybody who disagrees has to be pretty much an actual devil, right? Invincible certainty breeds invincible self-righteousness.”

  He sounds unusually certain himself, thought Charlie. “So you think he’s involved?”

  “Did I say that?” The Old Man smiled. “The president was killed on her way to a meeting with him. Witherspoon has always been high-handed, imperious even. And these last few years he’s been wandering deeper into a swamp of megalomania, messianism, and paranoia. Would he go so far as to remove someone he saw as threatening his dream? He might. I’ve never met Theodorus Witherspoon myself, but we move in similar orbits, you might say. We’re a class that usually does not feel the same burden of constraints that the common folk do. And Theodorus has long been said to have a particular tendency to believe the end justifies the means. Do I think he was involved?” Pretorius snorted. “Of course not. Whether the Big Snail would go so far as to kill a president, I don’t know … but I do know that he wouldn’t do it so clumsily, and he’d never do it on his own doorstep. Whatever else he may be, no one ever accused Theodorus of being stupid. No, either there is a leak in his organization or someone wants to ruin him, or both. No one loves a billionaire, and a secretive joker billionaire is easy to hate. Of course he’s up to no good.”

  The joker in the woodpile always gets the blame, thought Charlie. “I’ll find out whatever I can.”

  “I know. It’s what I pay you the big bucks for. Move!”

  Jonathan Tipton-Clark slipped into Hot Mama’s with his laptop under his arm and found a seat at an isolated table next to a wall, partially hidden between tall glass-sided display cases that contained clothing allegedly worn by members of Joker Plague and the Jokertown Boys. Jonathan knew Drummer Boy, the one-time leader of Joker Plague, and he didn’t think the torn and worn jeans in the Plague case would have actually fit him. DB was a pretty big dude, but … face it, all in all, it was hard to distinguish between old jeans. The costumes purportedly worn by the Jokertown Boys were certainly more colorful and theatrical than those of the punk Joker Plague, but Jonathan really hadn’t followed them during their mercifully brief heyday. After all, he’d never been an adolescent girl. Actually, he hadn’t really been much of a fan of Joker Plague, either. He’d known Drummer Boy far too well and he couldn’t bring himself to separate the musician from his music, as unfair as that was.

  Hot Mama’s was fairly crowded for a midweek afternoon. To Jonathan’s jaundiced eye it appeared to be the bastard child of Aces High, the legendary restaurant atop the Empire State Building that had passed its peak of popularity soon after he’d been born, and the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum (admission only $29.95, family discounts available).

  Charleston wasn’t exactly a buzzing hive of wild card activity, but a huge majority of the Witherspoon Aerospace workforce were jokers who apparently found Hot Mama’s a comfortable place to hang out. They provided the joint with steady custom, augmented by Charleston’s teeming tourist crowd, many of whom dropped by to have a drink of Tachyon Tea or a Bloatburger and gaze at the uniform Slugs Miligne wore when he played that one game for the New York Yankees.

  Jonathan popped open his laptop and surreptitiously surveyed the crowded room, mentally dividing the Witherspoon employees from the tourists. A waiter came by and he ordered an iced coffee. He waited for her to return with his drink and, after she’d delivered it, discreetly freed a few wasps from the flesh of his lower left leg. One by one they crawled out from under his pants cuff and quietly took off as Jonathan settled back, sipped his coffee, and concentrated on the threads of the various conversations overheard by his tiny aerial spies.

  Most of the talk was mundane. Personal discussions, commentary on the foods and the exhibits, plans for the day. But, as might be expected, the assassination was also a common topic of conversation. Jonathan listened through his wasps and took notes on his laptop. It was all part of his job. He’d started out wanting to become a famous blogger, and ended up a reporter for Aces! with a steady salary, an expense account, a 401k, health insurance, and everything. Politics was something the magazine usually avoided, yet nonetheless here he was in Charleston, together with reporters from half the world’s media, all chasing after an angle on the assassination.

  “Try to get an interview with Theodorus,” Digger Downs told him when he’d announced that he was sending Jonathan to Charleston.

  “Everyone wants an interview with Theodorus,” Jonathan had protested. “No one is getting one. Why would he make an exception for me?”

  “Joker solidarity. Help a brother joker out.”

  Bugsy had stiffened. “I am not a joker,” he said.

  “I’ve seen wasps crawl up your nose. You’re a joker. Get to Charleston.”

  Jonathan liked to go his own way, however. While hundreds of his fellow reporter and TV crews were encamped outside the Witherspoon estate, hoping for a glimpse of the Big Snail, Bugsy preferred to let his wasps do the footwork while he sat comfortably at his table, sipping iced coffee and typing away. It was almost too easy. This is the way to do investigative journalism. An hour, tops, and I’ll have enough copy for a feature on the local reaction to the assassination. Then he could clear the hell out of Hot Mama’s and relax by the hotel swimming pool with an old-fashioned. And tomorrow he could check out that lead Digger had given him, some local nu
tcase with a story to sell. “Probably nothing,” Downs had told him, “but you never know. Nose around, put a few bugs on her…”

  “You shouldn’t be here, Buck,” a man said coldly, down at the end of the bar.

  He wasn’t talking to Bugsy, but the voice gave him the chills all the same. He gathered half a dozen scouts and sent them high above a couple of patrons huddled together alone at the end of the bar, to get a wasp’s-eye view of the proceedings.

  “Christ,” an unfamiliar voice drawled in a countrified Southern accent, “you can’t expect me to stay holed up with my brother in that damn motel room forever. Maybe he’s happy eating Slim Jims and watching that damn pit bull show on the teevee, but I need more. I ain’t never been to Charleston before.”

  “Charleston is crawling with police,” replied the first voice, the familiar voice. “FBI, Secret Service, SCARE. If you don’t want them crawling up your ass, take your brother and go somewhere far away. LA, London, Hong Kong, I don’t care. We’ll call you when you’re needed again.”

  “Shit,” the first replied in a disgusted voice.

  What the hell? Bugsy thought. One of his wasps buzzed lower so he could get a good look at their faces. SCARE, yes, he should know. The man with the cold voice was a SCARE agent who went by the code name Justice: middle-aged, handsome, Hispanic, and tough as nails. The second speaker was white, older, lean, dressed in worn jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt and wearing a baseball cap that had seen better days. But what are they up to? It made sense that Justice would be in Charleston. As he’d said, the feds were here in score, including a dozen or more SCARE aces. But who is the chinless wonder, and how does he connect?

  “What the fuck?” the redneck said. He slapped at the wasp buzzing over his head, and connected. The wasp hit the top of the bar, bounced, and buzzed weakly, dazed. Uh-oh, Bugsy thought. His wasps were green … too green, too bright, too recognizable.

  Through the eyes of a second scout Bugsy could see Justice’s face turn suddenly hard. “Hive,” he said. He looked wildly around. “He’s here.”

  “The fuck!” Buck slapped his bottle of beer down upon the dazed wasp and Bugsy felt it blink out of existence as the redneck turned to scan the room.

  Keep calm, Hive told himself as he shut his laptop and slowly got to his feet. The loss of one wasp didn’t matter much to him—it was, after all, only a few grams of body mass. The fact that he’d been made was much more important. Don’t make any sudden moves. They’ll never spot me in this crowd.

  “There he is,” Justice said quietly, and pointed at him.

  For a moment they stared at one another across the crowded bar. Bugsy didn’t like what he saw in their eyes. He bolted like a panicked rabbit, just as Buck started through the crowd toward him. He was, Hive realized, a lot closer to the door to the parking lot than they were.

  “Hey,” someone protested as Bugsy banged into him as he was looking at the Joker Plague exhibit, spilling his drink. “Watch it, asshole.”

  Buck was closing, no more than a dozen feet away. Bugsy let his left arm dissolve (his right was clutching his computer). A stream of bright green wasps flew from the sleeve of his jacket as he ran, hundreds of them. They moved as one, descending on the redneck in a stinging, buzzing cloud. “Son of a bitch!” Buck exclaimed. He stopped and did a jittering dance, slapping at the air as the wasps engulfed his head and shoulders, stinging.

  Bugsy reached the exit, dodging a couple of women as they tried to enter. He ran out into the parking lot followed by a trail of green wasps, fumbling his rental car keys from his pocket with his remaining arm. He reached the rental just as Justice made it out of the door, coming after him.

  “Federal agent!” Justice shouted. “Damnit!” he added as a trio of wasps Bugsy had left behind on guard duty landed on him, stinging his neck and face.

  Bugsy threw open the car door, tossed his laptop on the passenger seat, then slammed the door shut. He missed the ignition once, then with a supreme effort of will stilled his jittery hand, rammed the key home, and turned it. The engine caught and he risked a backward glance to see Justice staring at him as he whirled the rental out of the parking lot. Buck joined Justice and made a move to follow, but Justice grabbed his arm, restraining him as Bugsy roared away.

  It was late morning, and the Waffle House was mostly empty.

  “I’m sorry,” the tall, lean brunette with the lethally long, sparkling purple nails said to Ice Blue Sibyl across her untouched plate of french fries. Her name was Siobhan. She was, not shockingly, a nail stylist. “Ginny cut herself off from all of us when she left Witherspoon.”

  “And Siobhan’s her BFF,” said the chunky blonde woman who sat beside her in the orange-upholstered booth. She was a bartender and psych student named Lynn. “I mean, she and I and Ginny grew up here in the same neighborhood in West Ashley. I’m pretty tight with her, too. Or was. But those two were like this.” She held up her hand with two fingers with much shorter and less colorfully nailed fingers crossed.

  Teena, the tall Black woman who sat beside Lynn, could not take her eyes off Sibyl’s face. “How do you—” she blurted out, then shut her mouth as the details of Sibyl’s expressionless face and unmoving lips fully struck her.

  “Speak?” Sibyl asked. She couldn’t smile—or frown, for that matter—but her voice remained pleasant. “In several ways,” she said. “Can any of you read sign language?”

  The three women shook their heads.

  “Most people can’t.” She held up her wrist, showing the women a small electronic element strapped to it. “This is a Bluetooth vocoder. This”—she fingered the gorget that she wore around her slim neck—“is a speaker.”

  She skipped the technical details. While she didn’t exactly have organs or blood circulation as humans understood them, Sibyl had something analogous to a natural neuromuscular system. The bioelectrical impulses that controlled it could be read by sensors, digitalized, and translated into speech by the vocoder and transmitted by the speaker.

  “You do have a nice voice,” Teena said.

  “Thank you,” Sibyl replied. “It’s Peregrine’s.”

  “Oh.” The woman’s face brightened. “I thought it sounded familiar.” She gestured to the coffee cup on the table beside her. “Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

  “No, thank you,” Sibyl said. “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh.” Teena fell silent for a moment. “Of course.”

  “If we could get back to Virginia,” Sibyl said. “How did you know her, Teena?”

  “From work,” Teena said. “I’m a materials scientist at Witherspoon Aerospace and she’s a secretary, but we met in the cafeteria one day and kinda bonded because we started kidding around about how we lucked into drawing jokers a lot of guys think are hot.” She giggled and touched one of the two short, curved horns sticking out of her carefully coifed hair. “I met Lynn and Siobhan through her, and we sort of hit it off, too.”

  Sibyl had spent the previous three days in the JADL’s New York City offices combing various electronic databases for any clue, any slight anomaly, any strange circumstance or coincidence, that might help free Dr. Finn. She’d been on the computer for twenty hours a day, powering down for what passed for sleep for her only four hours out of every twenty-four when, against all odds, she’d found a slender lead. The private secretary to Witherspoon Aerospace’s CFO had mysteriously gone missing the day before the assassination. With that slim lead in hand, Sibyl had hopped on the first available flight from Tomlin International to Charleston.

  She’d taken a room in an appropriately anonymous motel on the city’s edge, then gone out immediately and rented her vehicle of choice—a Triumph Thruxton 1200 café racer motorcycle—and gotten down to the almost impossible task of finding a single lost needle in the haystack that was Charleston. What made her job even more difficult was the probability that the needle wanted to be missing—and that was the best-case scenario.

  The worst case was that she was
dead.

  “But none of you have heard from Virginia since she quit?” Sibyl asked.

  Her lips a line, Siobhan shook her head. “I got a late-night text from her the night before she quit. Said something about not trying to find her because that was best for everybody.”

  “What do you think she meant?”

  Siobhan shook her head.

  “She always liked to drink,” Lynn said. “But the month or so before she left Witherspoon—had to cut her off twice, myself. She yelled at me both times.”

  Sibyl was almost out of leads; none of Virginia’s other coworkers she’d been able to identify wanted to talk about her at all. The ones she’d found who knew Virginia Matusczak seemed to believe she had been let go for neglecting her duties. Or that she had betrayed Witherspoon and her fellow jokers somehow by quitting. Facebook had coughed up these three as the missing woman’s closest friends. On the flight down she had made contact with them and set up a meeting. If they didn’t know …

  The Waffle House had been Virginia’s favorite restaurant, she had been told; a place where her friends would feel comfortable. After more than three decades of living among nats and ordinary humans, Sibyl knew that even by wild card standards her appearance could be disconcerting to someone who’d never seen her before. Ice Blue Sibyl was tall, five feet nine, and slim, with the general proportions of a Barbie doll. Also like a Barbie, she was smooth-skinned—although in her case it was a pleasing bluish-greenish shade—and totally lacked bodily orifices. Although she had full, attractively sculpted lips, her mouth was completely and permanently shut. Her finely chiseled, slender nose lacked nostrils. Her ears, set close to her hairless head, were without auditory canals. Her other abnormalities were hidden by the black leather motorcycle leathers she wore.

  “Had Virginia been having trouble at work?” she asked.