Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  “But we must first concern ourselves with practicalities,” Singh said. Mark’s heart folded its wings and fell to the floor of his chest like a buckshot dove. No joy had ever come into his life from speeches with the word practicality in them.

  “Haryana is a poor state, Doctor. We lack the enormous wealth of Kashmir to the north. It is a substantial drain upon our resources to keep ourselves in a state of readiness to resist any encroachment from the Punjab or Uttar Pradesh. You will have your fine research laboratory, but first we must discuss our immediate need for revenue enhancement.”

  He leaned his fine turbaned head forward. “Now. What would it take you to begin producing the drug rapture for export?”

  In the main square of Ambala it was hot as hell. The seat of the Maharajah of Haryana was practically in the Himalayan foothills, but it was still about 103 in the late-morning, and the heat hit the pavement and bounced up into your face and stomach like medicine balls.

  He walked around two sides of the square to a little sidewalk café with parasols. He bought a copy of a newspaper and sat down thankfully in the shade, ordering a bottled fruit juice from the bowing waiter.

  You told him you’d think about it? There was no mistaking J. J. Flash’s voice, blaring out from the cheap seats of Mark’s mind. You’re a total schmuck. These little vest-pocket princes and their grand viziers are the only law west of the Pecos, and they aren’t used to being told you’ll “think about it.” You tell them, “Yes, O great and powerful Lord of All Creation, I am your eager and obedient slave.” Then you run like a bunny.

  He found himself sweating from more than the heat, which was more than enough by itself At least I had sense not to turn him down pointblank.

  Oh, Flash said, impress me. You’re just dumb, not suicidal, is that it?

  Maybe if Mr. Singh had hit him with a proposition to manufacture a different drug, Mark would have responded differently. Despite the attempts of the government and media to demonize them, the major recreationals weren’t very dangerous. As a general thing they had fewer side effects than a majority of prescription drugs, and all of them were physically less harmful by a long shot than legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine. And Mark had no reason in the world to love America’s drug warriors.

  But rapture was one of those synthetics that crop up when the government actually does manage to put a temporary squeeze on the importation of recreational drugs. Unlike heroin, say — which, according to the DEA, has no clinical side effects — the synthetics, the “designer drugs,” have unpredictable and frequently horrible side effects, commonly including things like neurological dysfunction and death. Mark wanted no part of that.

  But even if Singh had offered him his own marijuana plantation, Mark probably would have felt miffed and recalcitrant. He wanted to do real work, wanted to be a scientist again. On Takis he had seen just what biochemistry and bioengineering could accomplish. Earth’s technology was ready for a revolution, a nanotechnological upheaval that would produce plenty and prosperity for all humans while not only eliminating pollution but actually providing the means to repair the damage Man had done his planet. That was where Mark wanted to be.

  A sacred elephant was wandering across the plaza with a mahout on his back. Japanese tourists stood snapping pictures as devout locals ran up to touch its trunk. Mark reached into his shirt pocket and took out the head of the rose Au Sher had been wearing behind his ear. It was definitely the worse for wear, and getting black around the edges.

  When they’d finally parted company at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, Mi Sher had wept like a baby and kissed him on the cheeks. He had wanted to do considerably more, he had made clear, but there was a limit to how understanding even Mark was willing to be. Freewheelin’ Frank had given him a thousand bucks American for his escort services and said that any time he wanted to go into the caravan line along the old Silk Road, he should look him up. Mi Sher had broken the head off the rose he wore behind his ear and given it to Mark to remember him by.

  A bus honked at bicyclists. Mark sighed. India was not shaping up to be the way he’d imagined it. The gurus weren’t interested in you if you didn’t have your Gold Card. And riding into town at dawn two days ago on the Delhi Express from Amritsar, Mark had looked out the window to see the fields covered with hundreds and hundreds of locals, hunkering down for their morning constitutional. It looked like the whole cast of Gandhi taking a communal crap.

  Mark had never bought into the dirty hippie part of the sixties trip. Sunflower used to say he was anal retentive, back in their Bay student days — though she’d turned into Ms. Clean quick enough, once she actually moved in with him. Mark was too much the biochemist not to have a handsome regard for hygiene. It didn’t seem like a number-one priority here.

  He sipped his juice and opened the paper. It was a copy of the Haryana Times, written in this funny stilted Babu English. The first thing he saw was an article on Vietnam.

  “‘We suffered forty years of war,’ said Mr. Tran Quang, a cultural and ideological spokesman for the Central Committee. ‘More than other countries we need friendship.’”

  Vietnam. They were still holding out, holding on to the socialist dream. It was tough on them; the Soviets were telling them they had to go it on their own from here on in, according to the article. Even wanted the Viets to start paying them back.

  Most of the world had turned its back on communism, Mark knew. In fact, most of the world seemed determined to forget there’d ever been such a thing in the first place. Mark guessed maybe it hadn’t worked so well.

  But he remembered the old days, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/NLF is gonna win, Bonnie Raitt dedicating her second album to the people of North Vietnam. There was something stirring in Vietnam’s defiance, something grand. Something that spoke to the old hippie in Mark.

  And then he saw it. “Mr. Tran announced that the Socialist Republic is opening its doors to all the people across the world who have been touched by the wild card virus. ’When all the rest of the world is turning against the aces and jokers,’ he said, ’we welcome them. We invite them all to come and enjoy the benefits of life in our progressive republic.’”

  Mark laid the paper across his thighs and for a while just stared out into the heat shimmer. Then he stood.

  A couple of tall bearded guys in turbans, Sikhs most likely, had been loitering half a block from the outdoor café. When Mark stood, one of them touched the other on the arm. Very discreet motion, but Mark caught it anyway.

  He turned and walked directly away from them. As he came up alongside a parked Hyundai, he glanced in the wing mirror. Sure enough, they were following him.

  Obviously the maharajah thought he was too priceless a pearl to be permitted to slip through his fingers. It was flattering in a way. He turned a corner.

  The two Sikhs broke into a run. Just as they reached the corner, a giant Pushtun came around it. He stopped a moment, glared at each of them in turn. They stood their ground — Sikhs don’t give way to any scabby Khyber trash, even when it looms half a head taller than them — but they shared a look of frank relief when he grumbled and went his way. They hustled around the corner in pursuit of Mark.

  “What buttholes,” Mi Sher said in the voice of Cosmic Traveler. He grinned in his beard, stuck the dead rose over his ear, and walked off toward the train station, whistling Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

  Part Two

  ICE CREAM

  PHOENIX

  Chapter Fifteen

  The former American embassy compound had a washed-out look to it. Mark attributed it to the blinding sunlight of afternoon, and not the flaking stucco and missing roof tiles. Summer monsoon was late to hit the Mekong Delta this year. It made everything look oppressed and gritty.

  The Wild Cards Affairs office was in a bungalow off to one side, seemingly shouldered there by the huge embassy building proper, which was currently headquarters to the Vietnam State Oil Company. “I’m Mark Meadows, Ph.D.,” Mark told the plu
mp and horn-rimmed woman behind the desk. “I’m an ace.”

  She beamed. She had started out beaming, and she didn’t stop doing so. “That is very nice,” she said in chipper musical English. “The Socialist Republic of Vietnam welcomes all victims of the wild card who seek refuge from the unconcern and persecution of the capitalist world.”

  That nasty Takisian-born part of him thought that latter statement had the flat copper tang of a memorized speech. Mark wished he could do something about that cynical streak.

  The woman wore a lightweight dark dress with flowers printed on it. She was the first person he had dealt with in any official capacity since arriving in Cong Hoa Xa Hoi Chu Nghia Viet Nam, if he had all the syllables right and in the right order, who wasn’t in a uniform. He found that reassuring, a humanizing touch. He knew that the revolutionary socialist world, or what was left of it, had been getting some bad press of late. All those uniforms had caused the unhappy suspicion there might be something in it.

  “I’m a biochemist,” he said. “I, uh, I don’t have copies of any of my diplomas or anything. But it would be easy to verify.”

  “First you must have a blood test, to show that you have the wild card,” she said, squaring a stack of papers.

  “Yeah. Fine. But, like, I have some skills that could be very useful, and I’d like to use them to benefit the jokers.”

  She beamed. “First the blood test.”

  “Roll up your sleeve, please.” the orderly said in English. He wore a tan tunic that reminded Mark forcibly of a Nehru jacket, over double-knit blue-herringbone bells. Mark thought of 1971 with a nostalgic twinge.

  Mark was sitting in an uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chair that must have been sold to the former Republic of Vietnam as surplus by the California public school system, because he was dead certain he’d sat in it in elementary school in 1958. It made it natural to do as he was told. Still obedient, he knotted a length of rubber tubing around his biceps and gazed raptly around at the posters on the walls, some of which showed obvious doctors in white coats exhorting peasants in conical straw hats, and others dudes in pith helmets waving guns and yelling. He wished he could understand what they said. He wanted to, like, get with the program.

  Then he noticed the orderly picking up a syringe that had been lying beside the rusty sink, drying on a square of gauze. It had obviously been used before. More than once, Mark guessed.

  “Make a fist, please,” the orderly said mechanically, advancing and waving the hypo in the air.

  Mark gave it the fish eye. “Don’t you, like, have another one of those?” he asked. “A newer one?”

  “We are a poor country,” the orderly said peevishly. “We cannot afford luxuries such as extra hypodermic needles. If your government sent us aid, we would be able to provide such services. Give me your arm, please.”

  Oh, no. When Mark had blown America, the public was still being mega-dosed with AIDS hysteria, courtesy of the government and complaisant, sensation-loving media. Millions of people imagined themselves at risk who were in more danger of being hit by a meteorite.

  On the other hand, if you really, truly wanted to contract HIV, getting stuck with a well-used hypodermic needle in the depths of the Third World was an excellent way to go about it. If only this were Haiti, it would be perfect.

  Mark jumped up and backed away from the man. “I’ll write my congressman just as soon as I get out of here.”

  The orderly stopped and folded his arms. “If you do not have the blood test, you cannot register as a wild card. Then no food, no ID, no place to stay in Saigon. Giai phong.”

  “Maybe if I, like, kicked in a couple bucks, I could get a new needle?”

  “It is against regulations.”

  Mark sighed. “Look. You got a scalpel anywhere? I can draw my own blood with that. I’m not afraid to cut myself.”

  The orderly looked mulish. Or I could bounce your jug-eared head off the counter a few times, you crummy little jackboot quack, a voice said at the back of Mark’s head.

  J. J.! he thought, shocked and appalled. Since Starshine died, he had noticed it was harder to keep down the Flash’s antisocial impulses. The two seemed to have counteracted one another.

  The orderly was staring at Mark’s face His own was the color of wood ash. “Very sorry,” he said. “Of course I will find a scalpel at once. Of course.”

  “Why, thanks, man,” Mark said, thinking, See, J. J.? Give peace a chance.

  For some reason J. J. Flash just laughed.

  He left the bureau with a piece of official paper announcing his status as a provisional ace and wild card refugee — on his own recognizance, so to speak, pending the test results; a booklet of ration coupons with pictures of sainted Ho printed on them in blue; and another form assigning his quarters in Cholon, the district of Ho Chi Mirth City set aside for wild cards, with instructions on how to get there scrawled on the back.

  Walking into daylight was like walking into a wall, a phenomenon he was getting used to in South Asia. He paused a moment, letting his eyes adjust.

  When he started across the yard a whistling scream drew his eyes up into the dazzling pale-blue sky. An airplane was passing over with its flaps and gear down, heading for a landing at Tan Son Nhut, a fighter, lean and predatory with delta wings and twin tail fins. He felt a weird sense of sideways nostalgia, of adventitious déjà vu: his father had often flown fighters into that very base, more than twenty years ago. Despite his years of professed pacifism, Mark easily recognized the airplane as a MiG-29, one of the latest generation of Soviet military aircraft — he had always harbored a secret, guilty fascination for warplanes.

  As he left the compound, some skinny brown kids in shorts threw stones at him, shouted obvious insults at him, and ran off, their tire-soled Ho Chi Minh slippers clacking against their feet like motorized novelty-store dentures.

  Fortunately their aim was bad. Watching them go, Mark shook his head sadly. “They sure must still hate Americans around here,” he said. Not that he could blame them.

  Some of Cholon looked pretty good — more prosperous than the rest of what Mark had seen of Ho Chi Minh City, and more lively. The wild cards quarter wasn’t in that part.

  He felt self-conscious sitting in the shade of the little fringed awning on top of the cyclo bicycle cab, resting while the driver pedaled his heart out in the sun. It didn’t seem consistent with socialist equality. All the same a lot of putatively good socialist Vietnamese seemed to be riding around in the things, so who knew?

  Mark wasn’t really a socialist, when it all came down to it, and actually didn’t know vast amounts about the doctrine, though people who spoke in Capital Letters had frequently tried to explain it to him — or at least lectured about it. He just knew in a vague Summer of Love way that it was a Good Thing.

  Besides, the shade gave relief from the pile-driving force of the sun, and their wind of passage even kicked up a bit of a breeze.

  The stucco began to flake off the façades and trash to pile up in the gutters, and Cholon began to look more like the rest of Ho Chi Minh City. He gathered he was getting closer to his destination.

  The cyclo stopped abruptly, bang in the middle of a block and the street. A little decaying orangish Trabant screeched its brakes and veered around them with a fart of exhaust and a trail of what Mark was fairly sure were Vietnamese obscenities.

  “This it, man?” he asked dubiously.

  “This far as I go,” the driver said. For all his exertion he wasn’t breathing heavily. Cyclo-driving must be great aerobic exercise. “This place Number Ten.”

  “Oh.” He paid the guy off in a fistful of the flimsy dong they’d given him at the Wild Cards Affairs office, hesitated, and handed him a buck for a tip. “You might be tempted to head into Commie-land at some point,” his buddy Freewheelin’ Frank had explained when he paid Mark off. “Good old greenbacks are good as gold there, and a whole lot easier to carry.”

  He must have been right. The
cyclo driver cranked his eyes left and right, snatched the dollar out of Mark’s fingers, and instantly made it disappear — a good trick, since the sleeves of his black Harley Davidson T-shirt only came halfway down his skinny biceps. Then he whipped his cab around and went pumping off the way he had come. Mark shrugged and continued afoot.

  About the first thing he saw was a joker child with the body of a big green-black beetle and the face of a four-year-old girl. He smiled and nodded at her. She clutched her rag-doll to her chitin with the upper two pairs of legs and stirred her wing-cases with a noise that reminded Mark of his childhood trick of fixing a playing card to the frame of his bicycle so the spokes would snap it as he rode, and stared at Mark as if he were the most terrifying thing she had ever seen in her life.

  “But look here,” Mark said, sticking his sheaf of official papers under the woman’s nose. “My Ho Khau form is all in order. See? It says I have a room here.”

  He pointed to the number over the doorway, then pointed to the form. It was fortuitous that the building had a street number. Few buildings he’d passed did. For that matter, few of the places on this block deserved the name “building”; they mostly ran to shanties slapped together out of plywood and corrugated tin.

  Mark’s assigned domicile was whitewashed brick, which he gathered meant it was a survival from French Colonial days. The stocky concierge, or whatever she was, obviously had no intention of letting him into it. She stood there expostulating in no language he knew and waving her little pudgy fists and turning red until her face looked like a beet with a bandanna tied on it.

  Culture shock was starting to set in, and some good old down-home paranoia. Mark was a stranger in the strangest land yet — okay, maybe it wasn’t stranger than Takis, but as far as Earth went, it was pretty alien — and he had been given to believe things worked a certain way, and here they weren’t working at all. The smiling woman at the Wild Cards office had handed him his papers and permits and said everything was taken care of, and he just naturally expected things to proceed with smooth scientific-socialist efficiency. And here was this woman yelling at him in a street full of jokers, refusing to let him into the living quarters assigned him.