Wild Cards IV

by George R. R. Martin

  “Xibalba.” He spoke only to his brother.

  “Yes.” Hunapu nodded. “The gods have grown hungry. Our blood was not enough. They want more blood, blood with power. A king’s blood.”

  “Do you think they would accept a general’s blood? A war captain’s?” Xbalanque looked over his shoulder at the army on the other side of the dirt mound.

  The guerrillas were following the exchange closely, looking for a reason to hope for victory. Both nodded at the thought.

  “If you can take the general, things will fall apart down the line. They’re draftees out there, not volunteers.” The man wiped dusty black hair out of his eyes and shrugged. “It’s the best idea I’ve heard.”

  “Where is the war captain?” Hunapu’s eyes fixed on a distant goal. “I will bring him back. It must be done correctly or the gods will not be pleased.”

  “He’ll be in the rear. I saw a truck back there with lots of antennas, a communications center. Over to the east.” Xbalanque looked at his brother uneasily. Something felt wrong about him. “Are you all right?”

  “I serve my people and my gods.” Hunapu walked a few steps away and vanished with a soft clok.

  “I’m not so sure that this was a good idea.” Xbalanque wondered what Hunapu had in mind.

  “Got a better one? He’ll be okay.” The rebel started to shrug but was stopped with shoulders lifted by the sound of helicopters.

  “Xbalanque, you’ve got to take them. If they can attack from the air, we’re dead.” Before the other man had finished, Xbalanque was running back toward the helicopters and the middle of Kaminaljuyu. As the brace of Hueys came into sight, he picked up a rock the size of his head and launched it. The helicopter to the left exploded in flames. Its companion pulled up and away from the camp. But Xbalanque hadn’t realized the position of the helicopter he had destroyed. Burning debris fell on his huddled followers, causing as much death and pain as a government rocket.

  Xbalanque turned away, cursing himself for being oblivious to his people, and saw Hunapu atop the tallest mound. His brother held a limp figure, half-sprawled on the ground, beside Maria’s altar. Xbalanque ran toward the temple.

  From the other side Akabal had seen Hunapu appear with his captive. Akabal had been separated from the Twins in the melee following the first mortar strike. Now he turned his back to the mass of followers jammed together around the central dirt mounds. Maxine Chen’s tug on his arm stopped him. She joined him, her face filthy and sweating and her two-man crew looking haggard. Robert had reclaimed his camera and filmed everything he could get as he moved around Kaminaljuyu.

  “What’s going on?” She had to shout to be heard over the crowd and the guns. “Who’s that with Hunapu? Is it Xbalanque?”

  Akabal shook his head and kept moving, followed by Chen. When she saw that Akabal intended to climb the mound in the open, she and Robert hesitated and followed him. The sound man shook his head and crouched at the base of the temple. Xbalanque had been met by Maria, and they scrambled up the other side. The cameraman stepped back and began filming as soon as all six had made it to the top.

  Seeing Xbalanque, Hunapu lifted his face and began to chant to the sky. He no longer had his knife, and the dried blood that covered much of his face looked like ceremonial paint. Xbalanque listened for a moment and then shook his head. In an archaic Maya he argued with Hunapu, who continued his chant, oblivious to Xbalanque’s interruption. Maxine asked Akabal what was happening, but he shook his head in confusion. Maria had hauled the Guatemalan general onto the earthen altar and began to strip off his uniform.

  The guns ceased firing at the same moment Hunapu ended his chant and held out his hand to Xbalanque. In the silence Maxine put her hands to her ears. Maria knelt beside the general, holding the offering bowl in front of her. Xbalanque backed away, shaking his head. Hunapu sharply thrust his arm out at Xbalanque. Looking over Hunapu’s shoulder, Xbalanque saw the government tanks roll forward, tearing apart the fence and crushing the Indians under their treads.

  As Xbalanque hesitated, the general woke up. Finding himself stretched out on an altar, he cursed and tried to roll off. Maria shoved him back onto it. Noting her feathers, he held himself away from her as if he could be contaminated. He began haranguing Hunapu and Xbalanque in Spanish.

  “What the hell do you think you are doing? The Geneva convention clearly states that officer prisoners of war are to be treated with dignity and respect. Give me back my clothes!”

  Xbalanque heard the tanks and screams behind him as the Guatemalan army officer cursed him. He tossed his obsidian knife to Hunapu and grabbed the general’s flailing arms.

  “Let me go. What do you savages think you’re doing?” As Hunapu raised the knife, the man’s eyes widened. “You can’t do this! Please, this is 1986. You’re all mad. Listen, I’ll stop them; I’ll call them off. Let me up. Please, Jesus, let me up!”

  Xbalanque pinned the general back against the altar and looked up as Hunapu brought the knife down.

  “Hail, Mary, full of g—”

  The obsidian blade cut through flesh and cartilage, spraying the brothers and Maria with blood. Xbalanque watched in horrified fascination as Hunapu decapitated the general, bearing down with the knife against the spine and severing the final connections before lifting the Ladino’s head to the sky.

  Xbalanque released the dead man’s arms and, trembling, took the bowl filled with blood from Maria. Shoving the body off the altar, he set fire to the blood as Maria lit copal incense. He threw back his head and called the names of his gods to the sky. His voice was echoed by his people, gathered below with arms thrust into the air toward the temple. Hunapu placed the head, its eyes open and staring into Xibalba, on the altar.

  The tanks stopped their advance and began a lumbering retreat. The foot soldiers dropped their guns and ran. A few shot officers that tried to stop them, and the officers joined the flight. The government forces disbanded in chaos, scattering into the city, abandoning their equipment and weapons.

  Maxine had vomited at the sight of the sacrifice, but her cameraman had it all on tape. Shaking and pale, she asked Akabal what was happening. He looked down at her with wide eyes.

  “It is the time of the Fourth Creation. The birth of Huracan, the heart of heaven, our home. The gods have returned to us! Death to the enemies of our people!” Akabal knelt and stretched his hands toward the Hero Twins. “Lead us to glory, favored of the gods.”

  In room 502 of the Camino Real a tourist in flowered shorts and a pale blue polyester shirt stuffed the last souvenir weaving into his suitcase. He looked around the room for his wife and saw her at the window.

  “Next time, Martha, don’t buy anything that won’t fit into your suitcase.” He leaned his considerable weight on the bag and slid the catches closed. “Where is that boy? We must have called half an hour ago. What’s so interesting out there?”

  “The people, Simon. It’s some kind of procession. I wonder if it’s a religious occasion.”

  “Is it a riot? With all this unrest we’ve been hearing about, the sooner we get out of here the better I’m going to feel.”

  “No, they just seem to be going somewhere.” His wife continued to peer down at the streets filled with men, women, and children. “They’re all Indians too. You can tell by the costumes.”

  “My god, we’re going to miss our plane if they don’t get a move on.” He glared at his watch as if it were responsible. “Call again, will you? Where the hell can he be?”

  From The Journal of Xavier Desmond

  DECEMBER 15, 1986/EN ROUTE TO LIMA, PERU:

  I HAVE BEEN DILATORY about keeping up my journal—no entry yesterday or the day before. I can only plead exhaustion and a certain amount of despondence.

  Guatemala took its toll on my spirit, I’m afraid. We are, of course, stringently neutral, but when I saw the televised news reports of the insurrection and heard some of the rhetoric being attributed to the Mayan revolutionaries, I dared to h
ope. When we actually met with the Indian leaders, I was even briefly elated. They considered my presence in the room an honor, an auspicious omen, seemed to treat me with the same sort of respect (or lack of respect) they gave Hartmann and Tachyon, and the way they treated their own jokers gave me heart.

  Well, I am an old man—an old joker in fact—and I tend to clutch at straws. Now the Mayan revolutionaries have proclaimed a new nation, an Amerindian homeland, where their jokers will be welcomed and honored. The rest of us need not apply. Not that I would care much to live in the jungles of Guatemala—even an autonomous joker homeland down here would scarcely cause a ripple in Jokertown, let alone any kind of significant exodus. Still, there are so few places in the world where jokers are welcome, where we can make our homes in peace … the more we travel on, the more we see, the more I am forced to conclude that Jokertown is the best place for us, our only true home. I cannot express how much that conclusion saddens and terrifies me.

  Why must we draw these lines, these fine distinctions, these labels and barriers that set us apart? Ace and nat and joker, capitalist and communist, Catholic and Protestant, Arab and Jew, Indian and Ladino, and on and on everywhere, and of course true humanity is to be found only on our side of the line and we feel free to oppress and rape and kill the “other,” whoever he might be.

  There are those on the Stacked Deck who charge that the Guatemalans were engaged in conscious genocide against their own Indian populations, and who see this new nation as a very good thing. But I wonder.

  The Mayas think jokers are touched by the gods, specially blessed. No doubt it is better to be honored than reviled for our various handicaps and deformities. No doubt.

  But …

  We have the Islamic nations still ahead of us … a third of the world, someone told me. Some Moslems are more tolerant than others, but virtually all of them consider deformity a sign of Allah’s displeasure. The attitudes of the true fanatics such as the Shi’ites in Iran and the Nur sect in Syria are terrifying, Hitlerian. How many jokers were slaughtered when the Ayatollah displaced the Shah? To some Iranians, the tolerance he extended to jokers and women was the Shah’s greatest sin.

  And are we so very much better in the enlightened USA, where fundamentalists like Leo Barnett preach that jokers are being punished for their sins? Oh, yes, there is a distinction, I must remember that. Barnett says he hates the sins but loves the sinners, and if we will only repent and have faith and love Jesus, surely we will be cured.

  No, I’m afraid that ultimately Barnett and the Ayatollah and the Mayan priests are all preaching the same creed—that our bodies in some sense reflect our souls, that some divine being has taken a direct hand and twisted us into these shapes to signify his pleasure (the Mayas) or displeasure (Nur al-Allah, the Ayatollah, the Firebreather). Most of all, each of them is saying that jokers are different.

  My own creed is distressingly simple—I believe that jokers and aces and nats are all just men and women and ought to be treated as such. During my dark nights of the soul I wonder if I am the only one left who still believes this.

  Still brooding about Guatemala and the Mayas. A point I failed to make earlier—I could not help noticing that this glorious idealistic revolution of theirs was led by two aces and a nat. Even down here, where jokers are supposedly kissed by the gods, the aces lead and the jokers follow.

  A few days ago—it was during our visit to the Panama Canal, I believe—Digger Downs asked me if I thought the U.S. would ever have a joker president. I told him I’d settle for a joker congressman (I’m afraid Nathan Rabinowitz, whose district includes Jokertown, heard the comment and took it for some sort of criticism of his representation). Then Digger wanted to know if I thought an ace could be elected president. A more interesting question, I must admit. Downs always looks half-asleep, but he is sharper than he appears, though not in a class with some of the other reporters aboard the Stacked Deck, like Herrmann of AP or Morgenstern of the Washington Post.

  I told Downs that before this last Wild Card Day it might have been possible … barely. Certain aces, like the Turtle (still missing, the latest NY papers confirm), Peregrine, Cyclone, and a handful of others are first-rank celebrities, commanding considerable public affection. How much of that could translate to the public arena, and how well it might survive the rough give-and-take of a presidential campaign, that’s a more difficult question. Heroism is a perishable commodity.

  Jack Braun was standing close enough to hear Digger’s question and my reply. Before I could conclude—I wanted to say that the whole equation had changed this September, that among the casualties of Wild Card Day was any faint chance that an ace might be a viable presidential candidate—Braun interrupted. “They’d tear him apart,” he told us.

  What if it was someone they loved? Digger wanted to know.

  “They loved the Four Aces,” Braun said.

  Braun is no longer quite the exile he was at the beginning of the tour. Tachyon still refuses to acknowledge his existence and Hiram is barely polite, but the other aces don’t seem to know or care who he is. In Panama he was often in Fantasy’s company, squiring her here and there, and I’ve heard rumors of a liaison between Golden Boy and Senator Lyons’s press secretary, an attractive young blonde. Undoubtedly, of the male aces, Braun is by far the most attractive in the conventional sense, although Mordecai Jones has a certain brooding presence. Downs has been struck by those two also. The next issue of Aces will feature a piece comparing Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer, he informs me.

  Warts and All

  by Kevin Andrew Murphy

  DECEMBER 18, 1986, LIMA:

  A LINE OF POTTED plants stood arrayed against the whitewashed walls of the Museo Larco. Trailing succulents mingled with shrubby annuals, and spindly vines stretched heavenward on trellis wires, the blossoms displaying all the colors of the old Andrew Lang Fairy Books Howard Mueller had owned as a child: red, blue, yellow, pink, orange, crimson, lilac, and violet. The green were the cacti, most of which were wrinkled and warty.

  So was Howard, known to most back in Jokertown simply as Troll.

  Tourists took pictures of the greenery, a few angling the shot to get him too.

  Howard was used to it. When you grew up a joker, you learned it was hard to avoid the stares. When you reached nine feet tall, it became almost impossible. Fortunately, Howard had also grown an extremely thick skin, at least physically.

  He heard the click of shutters behind him, the hushed exclamations in Spanish: “¡Ay, que la chingada! ¡Mira a ese puto!” The Peruvian accent was different from the Puerto Rican he was used to, but there are only so many swear words—and when you worked hospital security, you heard all of them. Especially in Jokertown.

  Puto literally meant “man whore,” but idiomatically it was whatever insult you wanted. Howard wished his Spanish stretched further than that.

  Being nine feet tall, he had also learned to plan his day accordingly. Back home, Howard’s favorite spot for his day off was the reading room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. Bibliophiles tended to be more interested in their books than gawking. Plus, Howard had learned to appreciate venues with vaulted ceilings—or no ceiling at all.

  He stooped to get a brochure from a wooden stand, selecting one of the English ones, and glanced at the photographic illustrations of various moths and butterflies to be found in the gardens. The text described Caligo idomeneus, the owl butterfly, named for the yellow eye spots on its wings that made it look like an owl’s face; Copaxa sapatoza, a pretty gold Saturn moth with feathery antennae and lunular wing marks; and Ascalapha odorata and Thysania agrippina, the black witch moth and the white witch moth, two of the largest moths, known by various colorful names throughout Latin America. Tara bruja, Spanish for witch moth. Also la sorcière noire for the black ones, if you spoke French. Supposedly if one flew over your head, you’d go bald, but if it landed on your hand, you’d win the lottery. Howard had been bald ever since he’d drawn his wil
d card. But winning the lottery would be nice.

  A few specimens of the Lepidoptera from the pamphlet fluttered around the museum garden. They were impressive, especially the white witch moths, as big across as a nat’s hand.

  Howard’s hands were more substantial, and green, but that let one mimic a cactus paddle. A moth alighted upon it. Howard brought it closer. “So,” he asked it softly, “do I win the lottery?” The white witch fanned her wings as coolly as Andersen’s Snow Queen might toy with a fan, apparently considering his question, then fluttered off across the lawn.

  Howard watched her go and chuckled, taking a moment to adjust the strap of the oversized novelty sunglasses he had purchased back in New York. Oversized was relative. They fit many jokers fine as plain sunglasses, Howard included. The novelty was finding them in his size. Almost everything had to be custom fit.

  Howard glanced back at the butterfly guide. The next name for the witch moth was mariposa de la muerte, the butterfly of death, though the pamphlet observed that this would be a better name for Lonomia obliqua, the giant silkworm moth. Its larval form was known as the assassin caterpillar since it injected an anticoagulant poison through wickedly barbed spines, resulting in several deaths every year. Megalopyge opercularis, the flannel moth, was even more dangerous. Nicknamed the asp, its caterpillars, while less poisonous than the assassins, were bewitchingly cute. They looked like fluffy lost toupees in the photograph, but they had poisoned spines hidden beneath their silky yellow hair.

  Howard wasn’t much worried about poison himself. His skin was tough as an elephant’s hide. But the flannel moth caterpillars looked like they’d be a problem for kids, who’d want to pick them up and pet them.

  The witch moths, however, were harmless—from a scientific perspective, at least. But in Peru, in the local Quechua, they were known as taparaco and featured prominently in the folktale of El Emisario Negro, the Messenger in Black, a dark stranger who brought a mysterious box to the Inca Huayna Capac. When he opened it, moths and butterflies flew out like the four and twenty blackbirds. But instead of singing for the king or snipping off maid’s noses, they spread a plague. People in folktales were always doing stupid stuff like that. If reading Lang’s Fairy Books had taught Howard anything, it was that if someone gives you a mysterious box, don’t open it. There was never much good inside. Ask Pandora.