Wild Cards IV

by George R. R. Martin

  “Ray, let’s go,” Joann said, settling her cloak more firmly over her shoulders and starting away. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “You’re sure?” Ray said.

  “Yeah.”

  Together they walked to the next intersection. When she looked over her shoulder, the Czech agent was gone.

  A mental clock was ticking—had Katrina gotten into trouble yet? How close was she to getting arrested?

  This late, traffic was minimal, but they must have passed a dozen police cars along the way. Joann thought for sure they’d get stopped. She had the dark surface of her cloak turned out and could be inconspicuous, but Ray’s white suit gleamed like a beacon. The police seemed to be on a mission, driving fast, heading in similar directions. It didn’t bode well. Joann hurried, and Ray trailed, keeping a lookout.

  Joann heard laughter and shouting voices as the broad thoroughfare of the square opened before her. Finally, she spotted them.

  A gang of young people, teenagers on up to punks in their mid-twenties, ran across the street several blocks ahead, laughing and carrying on in a tangled mob. She might have spotted Katrina’s peasant skirt, sweater, and writhing joker limb, but she wasn’t sure. It might have been someone else’s scarf. The group certainly looked like the kids from the basement. Joann ran to catch up with them, but they had a head start and no intention of waiting around. Whatever they’d planned, they’d done it, and they’d been successful, and now they were out of here. They pelted down the street, around a distant corner, and out of sight. Not seeing much use in chasing them further, Joann slowed, stopped, and turned to look up the thoroughfare to the heart of Wenceslas Square and the equestrian statue of King Wenceslas that occupied its center.

  The statue was covered in flowers. Draped with blankets of them on the horse’s flank and neck, garlands around its head, ropes of them around mounted King Wenceslas, spiraling up his spear, hanging off the end of it like a banner. More flowers, spares and strays, lay scattered across the shrubbery around the statue, a few draped in the trees across the street. The acres of paper flowers were what they’d been making in their basement arts-and-crafts session. They’d transformed the monument into a whimsical garden, springing up in the middle of the city.

  Along with the flowers, the kids had posted banners, signs, and posters, tying them in the trees, taping them to storefronts, plastering them to the statue’s base. Symbols, cartoons, slogans, most of them in Czech, which Joann couldn’t read. Some in German, some in English—none in Russian. Pro-democracy, pro-peace slogans. There were drawings of tanks and bombs with red cross-out symbols over them, peace signs, lyrics from songs, and so on. Katrina’s beautiful charcoal drawing was among them, destined to be rained on, torn up, and trashed. Joann almost wanted to rescue it, carefully roll it up and save it. But no, it belonged here.

  And this was their protest. No marching, no shouting, no disruption. Nothing blown up, no one set on fire. Dawn would come, and the city’s residents, police, Soviet occupiers, and photojournalists would see a bright, colorful work of art, full of energy and hope.

  “That’s it?” Ray declared, coming up to stand next to Joann. “That’s their big protest demonstration whatsit?”

  “That’s it,” Joann said, chuckling. “It’s pretty, don’t you think?”

  Ray regarded the scene, expression pursed in confusion, scratching his short hair. “I guess. Don’t know that I’d call it art or anything.”

  She looked at him. “Billy, you wouldn’t know art if it smacked you upside the head and bought you dinner.”

  “Joann, that almost sounds like you’re asking me on a date.”

  It was one of those moments when gravity seemed to shift slightly, or maybe the oxygen content of the atmosphere suddenly changed, making her light-headed. She could say yes, she realized. She could ask the man to dinner. And it wouldn’t go anywhere, it wouldn’t mean anything, there’d be no point to it. Except … except what if there was a point? She could have said yes, she could have said no, but she didn’t say anything. She just stood there looking at him like an idiot, and he looked back at her with similar bemusement. Then he leaned in.

  He was like a kid inching his way to the very edge of a cliff, peering over, seeing how far he could get without tumbling to his death. Maybe convinced that even if he fell, he couldn’t possibly get hurt. Well, this was Billy Ray, after all. He could be beaten but not broken.

  Just this once, she didn’t inch away. Didn’t put her hood up and turn her shoulder. Didn’t protect bystanders, or herself. His fingertips brushed her chin, trailed up her left cheek. A tingle trailed after his touch, and she humored herself for that fraction of a second that the feeling came from the shock of human contact on her skin, from the surprisingly gentle movement of a seductive hand against her face, inviting her to lean in for more. She could turn her face, brush along his palm, and reach for him. Overcoming a lifetime of instinct to keep her distance would suddenly be very easy.

  Ray must have also indulged a moment of wishful thinking, because he grew bolder, pressing his hand to her face instead of just testing, taking another step in like he might actually kiss her. But that pleasant, warm tingle wasn’t the thrill of flirting or nascent foreplay; it was energy. Life force sparked between them, power from Ray’s hand flowing into her skin, flooding her nerve endings, pouring through her and making her blood feel molten. Ray hissed in pain and shuddered, and his eyes rolled.

  He fell back in a dead faint. Instead of lunging forward to catch him as any normal person would have done, Joann wrapped her cloak around herself and stepped back. She insulated her power, pulling it close in, forcing her breathing to stay calm even as her heart pounded. She kept control of herself, as she’d practiced doing her whole life.

  Ray hit the ground, cracked his head on the pavement, and lay there a moment, still. Then, letting out a groan, he put a hand to his head. So, not dead. She was relieved.

  “You got a punch like a Mack truck, you know that?” he muttered.

  He was one of the tough aces, one of the ones who could take a lot of damage. For just a moment there she’d thought that maybe, just maybe … But no.

  And that was okay. It had to be okay.

  “You knew the risks,” she said to Ray, her smile lopsided.

  “Nothing ventured,” he muttered back, gasping for breath while pretending not to. “I’d ask for a hand up … but no. No offense.” He hauled himself to his feet, creaking like an old man.

  “We should get back to the embassy,” she said. “Make sure the drunk delegates get back to the hotel okay.”

  “I think I’d rather have you knock me out cold again.”

  Joann was calm enough that she could laugh at that.

  The WHO tour was scheduled to leave for Krakow the next afternoon, but Joann was able to arrange a meeting between Cramer and Katrina for that morning in a coffee shop halfway between the hotel and the Old Town. They wouldn’t draw so much attention, and they would have some privacy.

  Cramer was already seated at a table with Joann when Katrina came in, looking bleary-eyed, because of course she did—her group had probably stayed up all night partying after their successful redecoration of Wenceslas Square. The police had cleaned up the square quickly, but not before pictures of it had ended up in the papers that morning. The international press had even picked up the story. Maybe Katrina was right; maybe protests like that—enough of them, over time—could work.

  Cramer stood, adjusting her sleeves nervously as if she were meeting her own daughter. Katrina saw them, sighed, and walked over.

  Cramer held out her hand. “Katrina, dear, I don’t know if you remember me—”

  “I do, Mrs. Cramer. It’s good to see you,” Katrina said, and dutifully shook the woman’s hand. The polite daughter of a wealthy family coming to the fore. The facade seemed wrong on her, after getting to know the bright-eyed artist.

  They sat, and Katrina put her arm with its tangle of snakes right on
the table. Cramer stared a moment, blanching a bit. But to her credit she recovered quickly and turned earnest.

  Cramer said, “I have to confess, I’m very disappointed in your parents—”

  “But you’ll still take their contributions, I’m sure.”

  “And you’ll still draw on your trust fund. This isn’t about money, not for me. I just want you to know—you have friends. I know that you can’t ever go to them for help. But I want you to know you’re not alone.”

  “I know I’m not, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “And when you decide you’re ready to come home—”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to buy a plane ticket, like everyone else,” Katrina said.

  Joann hid a smile behind her hand.

  Katrina let the Congresswoman buy her a coffee, and they made awkward small talk for half an hour before Cramer declared she needed to get back to the hotel to rejoin the rest of the delegates for the trip to the airport. Joann managed to get a few minutes alone with Katrina as she walked the young woman out of the café.

  “She’s just like my parents,” Katrina explained. “I mean, not just like. She at least seems to have some sense of common decency. But my parents want me to think this is the end of the world, that it’ll ruin my life.” She held up her arm, and the snakes writhed, angry and rippling. “But I can still paint, I can still draw. I can still see the world and find a boyfriend. I still have a life. A good life. Can’t they see that?”

  “The rest of us see it,” Joann said, because the question didn’t seem rhetorical. Katrina needed an answer, validation. But Joann had to pause and turn the question back on herself. She could still have a good life. She’d built herself a good life, dammit. Here she was, traveling the world, which so many people dreamed of and never got to do. She had friends, she had purpose. And maybe, someday, somewhere, she’d meet an ace with the exact power to balance hers. Maybe someone who could produce endless fountains of energy out of nothing. And maybe he’d also be smart, handsome, witty, kind …

  It didn’t hurt to dream, did it?

  “Take care of yourself, Katrina.” Joann said good-bye to the young woman before walking Representative Cramer back to the hotel.

  From The Journal of Xavier Desmond

  APRIL 10/STOCKHOLM:

  VERY TIRED. I FEAR my doctor was correct—this trip may have been a drastic mistake, 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 I 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.

  Billy Ray insists that the Russians actually have thousands of jokers locked away safely out of sight in huge gray “joker warehouses,” nominally hospitals but actually prisons in all but name, staffed by a lot of guards and precious few doctors and nurses. Ray also says there are a dozen Soviet aces, all of them secretly employed by the government, the military, the police, or the party. If these things exist—the Soviet Union denies all such allegations, of course—we got nowhere close to any of them, with Intourist and the KGB carefully managing every aspect of our visit, despite the government’s assurance to the United Nations that this U.N.-sanctioned tour would receive “every cooperation.”

  To say that Dr. Tachyon did not get along well with his socialist colleagues would be a considerable understatement. His disdain for Soviet medicine is exceeded only by Hiram’s disdain for Soviet cooking. Both of them do seem to approve of Soviet vodka, however, and have consumed a great deal of it.

  There was an amusing little debate in the Winter Palace, when one of our hosts explained the dialectic of history to Dr. Tachyon, telling him feudalism must inevitably give way to capitalism, and capitalism to socialism, as a civilization matures. Tachyon listened with remarkable politeness and then said, “My dear man, there are two great star-faring civilizations in this small sector of the galaxy. My own people, by your lights, must be considered feudal, and the Network is a form of capitalism more rapacious and virulent than anything you’ve ever dreamed of. Neither of us shows any signs of maturing into socialism, thank you.” Then he paused for a moment and added, “Although, if you think of it in the right light, perhaps the Swarm might be considered communist, though scarcely civilized.”

  It was a clever little speech, I must admit, although I think it might have impressed the Soviets more if Tachyon had not been dressed in full Cossack regalia when he delivered it. Where does he get these outfits?

  Of the other Warsaw Bloc nations there is little to report. Yugoslavia was the warmest, Poland the grimmest, Czechoslovakia seemed the most like home. Downs wrote a marvelously engrossing piece for Aces, speculating that the widespread peasant accounts of active contemporary vampires in Hungary and Rumania were actually manifestations of the wild card. It was his best work, actually, some really excellent writing, and all the more remarkable when you consider that he based the whole thing on a five-minute conversation with a pastry chef in Budapest. We found a small joker ghetto in Warsaw and a widespread belief in a hidden “solidarity ace” who will shortly come forth to lead that outlawed trade union to victory. He did not, alas, come forth during our two days in Poland. Senator Hartmann, with greatest difficulty, managed to arrange a meeting with Lech Walesa, and I believe that the AP news photo of their meeting has enhanced his stature back home. Hiram left us briefly in Hungary—another “emergency” back in New York, he said—and returned just as we arrived in Sweden, in somewhat better spirits.

  Stockholm is a most congenial city, after many of the places we have been. Virtually all the Swedes we have met speak excellent English, we are free to come and go as we please (within the confines of our merciless schedule, of course), and the king was most gracious to all of us. Jokers are quite rare here, this far north, but he greeted us with complete equanimity, as if he’d been hosting jokers all of his life.

  Still, as enjoyable as our brief visit has been, there is only one incident that is worth recording for posterity. I believe we have unearthed something that will make the historians around the world sit up and take notice, a hitherto-unknown fact that puts much of recent Middle Eastern history into a new and startling perspective.

  It occurred during an otherwise unremarkable afternoon a number of the delegates spent with the Nobel trustees. I believe it was Senator Hartmann they actually wanted to meet. Although it ended in violence, his attempt to meet and negotiate with the Nur al-Alla
h in Syria is correctly seen here for what it was—a sincere and courageous effort on behalf of peace and understanding, and one that makes him to my mind a legitimate candidate for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

  At any rate, several of the other delegates accompanied Gregg to the meeting, which was cordial but hardly stimulating. One of our hosts, it turned out, had been a secretary to Count Folke Bernadotte when he negotiated the Peace of Jerusalem, and sadly enough had also been with Bernadotte when he was gunned down by Israeli terrorists two years later. He told us several fascinating anecdotes about Bernadotte, for whom he clearly had great admiration, and also showed us some of his personal memorabilia of those difficult negotiations. Among the notes, journals, and interim drafts was a photo book.

  I gave the book a cursory glance and then passed it on, as did most of my companions. Dr. Tachyon, who was seated beside me on the couch, seemed bored by the proceedings and leafed through the photographs with rather more care. Bernadotte figured in most of them, of course—standing with his negotiating team, talking with David Ben-Gurion in one photo and King Faisal in the next. The various aides, including our host, were seen in less formal poses, shaking hands with Israeli soldiers, eating with a tentful of bedouin, and so on. The usual sort of thing. By far the single most arresting picture showed Bernadotte surrounded by the Nasr, the Port Said aces who so dramatically reversed the tide of battle when they joined with Jordan’s crack Arab Legion. Khôf sits beside Bernadotte in the center of the photograph, all in black, looking like death incarnate, surrounded by the younger aces. Ironically enough, of all the faces in that photo, only three are sill alive, the ageless Khôf among them. Even an undeclared war takes it toll.

  That was not the photograph that caught Tachyon’s attention, however. It was another, a very informal snapshot, showing Bernadotte and various members of his team in some hotel room, the table in front of them littered with papers. In one corner of the photograph was a young man I had not noticed in any of the other pictures—slim, dark-haired, with a certain intense look around the eyes, and a rather ingratiating grin. He was pouring a cup of coffee. All very innocent, but Tachyon stared at the photograph for a long time and then called our host over and said to him privately, “Forgive me if I tax your memory, but I would be very interested to know if you remember this man.” He pointed him out. “Was he a member of your team?”