Aces High wc-2

by George R. R. Martin

  "I've sensed you," said the Astronomer, "stirring around the edges, here and there."

  "More than stirring, motherfucker." The man drew himself up so that he seemed even taller, and reached out toward the Astronomer as though to embrace him. The Astronomer descended slightly, still smiling.

  "I would enjoy putting you through your paces…" said the Astronomer, and suddenly drew back, floating across the room to Kafka's machine. He twisted his fists sharply upward. The tall man staggered forward several steps, stopped, and braced himself with his feet wide apart.

  "Don't be coy, Fortunato. Come closer." The pull on Fortunato seemed to grow stronger. Jumpin' Jack Flash looked at Jane.:

  "If you know any other tricks besides drowning yourself, honey," he said in a low voice, "you better use them." Another man suddenly appeared in the doorway. Jane had just enough time to notice the improbable red hair and the flashy clothing before there was even more red, a whole body's worth of red, knocking the man over. The two forms rolled over and over on the floor, Red fighting to pin the smaller man. Then Kim Toy was there, pulling at her husband, telling him to forget it, just forget it and let's get out of here.

  Near Kafka's machine, the Astronomer and Fortunato were still balanced against each other. Jane had the feeling the Astronomer was gaining slightly. The strain on Fortunato's face intensified with the strange glow around him and now horns projected from his bulging forehead. In response, the Astronomer's body was assuming an animal shape, like a greyhound, with a huge forked tail rising up like something poisonous. Her fear began to crescendo and there was no one to hold onto, no one who offered shelter or comfort or escape.

  The boy-dinosaur, thin and long-tailed now, whipped back into the room and landed on Red, knocking him off the man in fancy dress. Kim Toy jumped back and then a fourth person was confusing things, throwing himself on Kim Toy. With a shock, Jane saw it was Judas. Blood was trickling from his ears but he seemed not to notice as he knelt on Kim Toy's legs, pinned her chest with one hand, and then, absurdly, began to undo his pants.

  Jane shook her head incredulously. It was some weird vision of hell, the Astronomer, Roman, that obscene computer, Kafka, the Shakti machine, the dinosaur and Red and the black man and his horns and the other man-Tachyon, she recognized him now, he seemed to be dazed-and Jumpin' Jack Flash, unable to do a thing, and that sleazy scumbag who had brought her here-whom she had allowed to bring her here, she corrected herself, like somebody's dog on a short leashthe scumbag trying to rape Kim Toy in the middle of a fight for all their lives.

  All this ran through her mind in a second and the power gathered itself effortlessly and poured out of her.

  This time Judas was the only one who was oblivious to what she was doing. He never knew, even when it hit him, that all she had meant to do was blind him by drawing a flood of tears to his eyes, but the power had been building up without proper release for too long and she was too scared and too strong in her fear. He never knew, even as he raised up. Then he was not, and in his place was a form made of powder that hung briefly in the air for an impossible moment before it disintegrated. Wetness splattered the walls, the floor, and Kim Toy.

  Jane tried to scream but only a faint sighing came out. Everything stopped; even the struggle between the Astronomer and Fortunato seemed to diminish slightly. Then Jumpin'

  Jack Flash yelled, "Don't anybody move or she'll do it again!" Jane burst into tears.

  The whole room burst into tears; suddenly there was a rainstorm in the room, water spraying from every direction. Jumpin' Jack Flash flung himself out the window and hung suspended in midair. "Drown 'em or turn it off!" he shouted. And then it was turned off, with a gesture from the Astronomer. He favored Jane with another hideous smile. "Do it again. For me."

  She felt herself being turned by an invisible hand and power gathered itself within her again, aiming itself-for the black man, Fortunato- Who was no longer there but behind the Astronomer, standing over Kafka's Shakti machine with both arms raisedAnd Kafka hollered, "NO!" and the word echoed in Jane's mind as the power flew from her against her will, deflected at the final moment with her last shred of strength, so that it bypassed everyone, even the Astronomer, and hit the computer just as the Shakti machine collapsed with a sound too much like a human scream.

  The force from Fortunato struck the machine again and there was another scream, this time very human, as the computer's awful living circuitry crumpled to powder that flowed over Roman's arms and chest.

  Fortunato turned to the Astronomer, reaching out for him. The animal form melted away, leaving the Astronomer human again and very small. He wavered in the air for a moment and the light around him began to dim.

  "Fool," he whispered, but the whisper penetrated the whole room and everyone in it. "Stupid blind nigger fool." He looked around at all of them. "You will all die screaming." And then, like smoke, he vanished.

  "Wait! Wait, goddamn you!" Demise struggled to his feet, clutching his already-healing leg. "You promised me, goddamn you, you promised me!" Underneath his enraged shrieks, Roman's sobs made a bizarre counterpoint.

  Jane felt her knees start to give. She had nothing left. Even with her power, she had no more strength. Tachyon was beside her, holding her up. "Come," he said gently, pulling her toward the door. She felt something flow over the incipient hysteria in her mind, as comforting as a warm blanket. Half in trance, she let him take her out of the room. With another part of her mind, she heard Kafka call to her, and distantly, she was sad that she could not answer him.

  From the shelter of a stand of trees, she watched the last of what became known as the Great Cloisters Raid. Occasionally she caught a glimpse of Peregrine swooping around the tower or flying rings around the Turtle's shell, sometimes accompanied by a graceful, if rather small (to her eyes), pteranodon. Columns of fire shot up into the night, exploding through rooftops, scorching stone. Vainly, she searched for a glimpse of Kafka or Demise in the groups of people Masons, she thought, shaking her head at the absurdity, Masonsgathered neatly up and removed from harm by the Turtle's power.

  "In the end, I tried to take care of someone. I tried to take care of the little boy," she murmured, uncaring if Tachyon beside her knew what she was talking about or not. But he did.

  She could feel his presence sorting through her thoughts, touching her memories of Debbie and Sal and how Judas had found her. And wherever he touched, he left the warmth of comfort and understanding.

  The Howler let loose with another one of those awful wails, but it was a short one.

  She might have cried, except she seemed to have no tears left for the time being.

  A little later, familiar voices brought her back to awareness. Jumpin' Jack Flash was there with the boy-dinosaur, who had chosen another odd form she didn't know. ("Iguanodon,"

  Tachyon whispered to her. "Look appreciative." And, somehow, she did.) Fortunato emerged from an entrance that flickered with dying fire; he stepped over glowing fragments and found his way to them, looking even more tired than Jane felt.

  "Lost them," he said to Tachyon. "The cockroach, the death freak, the other one. That red guy and his woman. Got away, unless the Turtle's picked them up." He jerked his chin at Jane. "What's her story?"

  She looked past him to the burning Cloisters, pulled herself together, felt for the power. There was a surprising amount still left, enough for what she wanted to do.

  Water splashed down on the worst of the flames, helping a little, not much. There was an arsonist around when you needed one after all, she thought, glancing at Jumpin' Jack Flash.

  "Don't waste your energy," he said, and as though to back him up, she heard the sound of fire engines approaching. "I was born in a fire station," she said. "My mother didn't get to the hospital in time."

  "Fascinating," he said "but I've got to leave pretty soon." He looked at Tachyon. "I, uh, I would like to know how you knew-uh, why you called me J.J."

  She shrugged. "J. J. Jumpin' Jack. It was
faster to say." She managed a tiny smile. "That's all. We've never met before. Honest."

  Relief was large on his face. "Ah. Well, listen, sometime soon we could get acquainted and-"

  " Sixty minutes," Tachyon said. "I'd say you're just about out of time. What we could call the Cinderella factor. When someone trips."

  Jumpin' Jack Flash gave him a dirty look before he lifted into the air. A halo of flame ignited itself around him as he roared off into the darkness.

  Jane stared after him for a moment and then looked down sadly. "I almost hurt him back there. I did hurt someone – I… "

  Tachyon put his arms around her. "Lean on me. It's all right."

  Gently, she removed his arms from her. "Thank you. But I'm done leaning." Okay, Sal?

  She turned back to the burning Cloisters and continued to pour water on the worst of the flames.

  Curled up in an alleyway, Demise shuddered. His leg was bad enough that it wasn't completely healed yet, but it would heal; he knew it the way he knew how much he hated the Astronomer for abandoning him, for ever pulling him in with his promises and favors in the first place. TIAMAT, hell. He'd get that twisted-up old fuck before TIAMAT ever got here and that was a promise. He'd put that old fuck through a dance he'd take to hell with him.

  He drifted in semidelirium. Not far away, but unknown to him, Kafka watched the destruction of the Cloisters. When the water poured down into the flames from thin air he turned away, willing the cold deadness of hatred to stay in him.

  MR. KOYAMA'S COMET

  By Walter Jon Williams

  Part One: March 1983

  In June of 1981 a third-generation Mitsubishi executive, Koyama Eido, took his retirement amid the extravagant praise and well-earned respect of his peers and underlings. He got extravagantly drunk, paid off his mistress, and the very next day put into operation a plan he had been working on for almost forty years. He moved with his wife to a house he had built on the island of Shikoku. The house was in rugged terrain on the southern part of the island and was difficult to access; it cost Mr. Koyama an extraordinary amount of money to get the telephone and utilities put in; and the house was built in an unusual style, with a flat roof that would not weather well-but to Mr. Koyama none of that mattered. What mattered was that the house was so remote there was little light pollution, that it looked east to the Pacific and southwest to the Bungo Channel, and that the seeing was better over water.

  In a hutch built on his flat roof, Mr. Koyama installed a fourteen-inch reflective telescope that he had built with his own hands. During good weather he would trundle this out onto the platform and gaze into the sky, at stars and planets and distant galaxies, and he would take careful, studied photographs of them which he would develop in his darkroom and later hang on his walls. But simply watching the sky wasn't quite enough: Mr. Koyama wanted more. He wanted something up there to bear his name.

  Every day, therefore, just after sunset and just before dawn, Mr. Koyama would go onto his roof with a pair of Fujinan naval binoculars that he had purchased in Chiba from a starving ex-submarine captain in 1946. Patiently, wrapped in a warm wool overcoat, he would focus their five-inch objective lenses on the sky and inspect it carefully. He was looking for comets.

  In December of 1982 he found one, but unfortunately had to share the credit with Seki, a comet-finder of some reputation who had discovered the comet some days previous. Mr. Koyama was chagrined by missing Seki-Koyama 1982P by some seventy-two hours but kept looking, vowing increased dedication and vigilance. He wanted one all to himself.

  March of 1983 opened cold and drizzly: Mr. Koyama shivered under his hat and overcoat as he scanned the sky night after night. A bout of influenza kept him off the roof till the twenty-second, and he was annoyed to discover that Seki and Ikeya had together discovered a new comet while he was laid up. Increased dedication and vigilance, he vowed again.

  The morning of the twenty-third, Mr. Koyama finally found his comet. There, near the not-yet-risen sun, he saw a fuzzy ball of light. He sneezed, gripped the Fujinans tightly, and gazed up again to confirm the sighting. Nothing else should be in that part of the sky.

  His heart pounding, Mr. Koyama descended to his study and picked up the telephone. He called the telegraph office and sent a wire to the International Astronomical Union. (Telegrams are de rigueur with the IAU; a telephone call would be considered vulgar.) Offering vague prayers to a host of gods in which he did not profess actual belief, Mr. Koyama returned to the roof with the strange feeling that his comet would have disappeared while he wasn't looking. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  The comet was still there.

  The confirmation from the IAU came two days later, and confirmed as well what Mr. Koyama already knew from his own observations: Koyama 1983D was a real whizzer. It was flying from the sun like a bat out of hell.

  Further reports indicated all sorts of anomalies. A routine spectrographic analysis showed that Koyama 1983D was a decidedly odd duck indeed: instead of the normal hydroxyls and carbon, Mr. Koyama's comet registered large amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, silicon, and various mineral salts. In short, all that was necessary for organic life.

  A storm of controversy immediately arose over Koyama's comet. How anomalous was it, and was organic life possible in the cold and dusty ranges of the Oort Cloud? Mr. Koyama was interviewed by teams from the BBC, NBC, and Soviet television. He was profiled in Time magazine. He offered modest statements about his amateur status and his astonishment as to all the fuss; but he was inwardly more pleased than he had been over anything, even the birth of his eldest son. His wife observed him walking about the house with the strut of a twenty-year-old and the broad grin of a clown.

  Every night and morning, Mr. Koyama was on the roof. It was going to be hard to top this, but he was going to try.

  Part Two: October 1985

  Astronomy was getting more attention these days, what with the reappearance of P/Halley 19821, but Mr. Koyama maintained his equilibrium in the face of the turmoil. He was an old hand now. He had discovered four additional comets since Koyama 1983D, and was assured of a prominent place in cometary history. Each of his cornets had been the so-called 'Koyama-type' comets with their weird spectrography and their bat-out-of-hell speed. Koyama-type comets were being discovered by all manner of amateurs, always hugging the sun.

  The controversy had not died down; had in fact intensified. Was it possible that the solar system was passing through a storm of comets containing organic elements, or was this a fairly ordinary occurrence that somehow hadn't been noticed till now? Fred Hoyle smiled and issued an I-told-youso statement reiterating his theory of cosmic seedlings containing organic life; and even his bitterest opponents conceded that the annoying old Yorkshireman might have won this round.

  Mr. Koyama received many invitations to speak; he declined them all. Time speaking meant time away from his rooftop observatory. Currently the record number of comet discoveries was nine, held by an Australian minister. Mr. Koyama was going to win the honor for Japan or die trying.

  Part Three: Late June 1986

  There: another comet, barely visible, chasing the sun about the sky. That made six altogether. Mr. Koyama descended to his study and called the telegraph office. His heartbeat increased. He needed confirmation on this one desperatelynot confirmation of the sighting, but of the spectrography.

  Mr. Koyama was climbing the charts of comet-sighters, and this was in a period of a nervous, -increased watching of the sky: people were looking up a lot these days, hoping to find the dark nonreflective Swarm parent that was presumably lurking nearby. But the prospect of number six wasn't what excited Mr. Koyama-he was getting fairly blase about finding new comets these days. What he needed was confirmation of his new theory.

  Mr. Koyama accepted the congratulations of the telegrapher and put down the telephone. He gazed with a frown at the chart he had on his desktop. It suggested something that he suspected he was the only one to notice. It was the
kind of thing that was only noticed by people who spent their nights on rooftops, counting the hours and days, shrugging off the dew, and staring at bits of the night through long refractive lenses.

  The Koyama-style comets seemed to possess not only weird organics and uncommon velocity, but an even stranger periodicity. Every three months, more or less, a new Koyama type comet appeared near the sun. It was as if the Oort Cloud were shrugging off a ball of organic compounds to mark each new Terran season.

  Smiling, Mr. Koyama savored the idea of the sensation his observation would cause, the panic among cosmographers trying to work out new formulas for explaining it. His place in astronomy would be assured. Koyama comets were proving as regular as planets. In a way, he thought, it was lucky the Swarm had landed, because otherwise the observation might have been made earlier..

  The thought echoed slowly in his mind. Mr. Koyama's smile turned to a frown. He looked at his chart and performed some mathematics in his head. His frown deepened. He took out a pocket calculator and confirmed his calculations. His heart lurched. He sat down- quickly.

  The Swarm: a tough kilometers-long shell protecting vast quantities of biomass. Something like that would be vulnerable to changes in temperature. If it got near the sun it would have to bleed off excess heat somehow. The result would be a fluorescence not unlike that of a comet.

  Suppose the Swarm were in a fast orbit with the sun at one focus and the Earth at the other. With the Earth in motion relative to the sun, the orbit would be complicated, but not impossible. But with all the sightings of Koyama-type comets, it should be possible to pinpoint the approximate location of the Swarm. A few hundred hydrogen-tipped missiles would then end the War of the Worlds in bang-up style.

  "Muthafucka," breathed Mr. Koyama, a strong word he had learned from GIs during the occupation. Who the hell should he tell about this? he wondered. The IAU was the wrong forum. The Prime Minister? The Jieitai?