Wild Cards III: Jokers Wild

by George R. R. Martin

  Hiram jerked upright, scattering pillows and bedclothes, just as a fist the size and color of a smoked Virginia ham crashed through the closed bedroom door. The door was kicked, once, twice, and on the third kick it few apart, and Bludgeon stepped through. Hiram gasped.

  He was seven feet tall, dressed in tight-fitting leather. His head was square and brutal, seamed with callous and twisted horn, eyes set beneath a heavy ridge of bone, one a clear bright blue, the other a vivid red. The right side of his mouth was closed by the slick, shiny scar tissue that had grown over it, and his flesh was mottled by a huge greenish bruise. His ears were veined leathery things like the wings of bats, his scalp covered by boils instead of hair. “Fucker,” he screamed in a voice that whistled out of half his mouth like scalding steam. “Fucking cuntface ace,” he shrieked. The fingers of his right hand were closed permanently in a fist, rough calloused skin grown over fingers and knuckles in great ridges. When he made a fist of his left hand, his muscles bulged, and the seams of his leather jacket split open. “I’m gonna kill you, you fucking cuntface asshole fatboy.”

  “You’re only a nightmare,” Hiram said. “I’m still asleep.”

  Bludgeon screamed and kicked the bed. The wooden frame shattered, the plastic burst, and water began spraying out from underneath the blankets. It looked like a sprinkler. Hiram sat there numbly, the water soaking through his underwear, blinking in shock. This wasn’t a dream, he told himself as he got wetter and wetter. Bludgeon reached through the spray and grabbed the front of his undershirt with his left hand, lifting him bodily in the air. “You fucker,” the giant was screaming over and over. “I’m out, you cuntface bastard, you stinkin’ piece of lard, they cut me fuckin’ out and it’s all because of you, I’m going to fuckin’ kill you, you shitface cunt-lapping fatboy, you’re fuckin’ dead, you hear that, you fuckin’ hear that?”

  His right hand waved under Hiram’s nose, a misshapen ball of bone and scar tissue and horny callus cocked into an eternal fist. “I can dent fuckin’ tanks with this, you cuntface fucker, so just imagine what it’s going to do to your pussy-eating face. You see it? Do you see it, fucker!”

  Dangling at the end of Bludgeon’s arm, Hiram Worchester managed to nod. “Yes,” he said. He raised his own hand. “Do you see this one?” he asked, and made a fist.

  As Bludgeon bobbed off the floor, his clubfist came around and caught Hiram on the cheek. It smarted quite a bit and left a red welt. By then Bludgeon was floating, hanging onto Hiram for dear life, his feet scraping against the ceiling. He began to scream threats. “Oh, keep quiet,” Hiram told him. He tried to disentangle Bludgeon’s fingers from his undershirt, but the joker was too strong.

  Frowning, Hiram restored himself to full weight.

  Then he doubled it.

  Then he doubled that.

  Instead of trying to push Bludgeon away, he pulled him nearer, hugged him tightly to his ample stomach, and did a bellyflop onto the hardwood floor. It was the second time that day he heard bones crack.

  Hiram climbed to his feet, panting, his heart trip-hammering away in his chest. He lightened himself and stood frowning down at Bludgeon, who was hugging his ribs and screaming. As he drifted up off the floor again, Hiram caught him by wrist and ankle and heaved him right out the open window.

  He fell up. Hiram went to the window and watched him rise. The wind was from the west. It ought to blow him over the city, toward the East River, Long Island, and eventually the Atlantic. He wondered if Bludgeon could swim.

  The bed was ruined. Hiram went to the linen closet. He paused with the sheets in his hand, shook his head, stacked them neatly back in the closet. What was the use? The night was almost gone, and he had so much to do—Aces High was supposed to be open for lunch, someone would have to supervise the repairs, and in a few minutes the dawn would be coming up, the start of a whole new day. He was too tired to sleep anyway.

  Sighing deeply, Hiram Worchester went downstairs and began to cook. He made himself a cheese omelet and a triple rasher of bacon, fried up some small red potatoes with onions and peppers, and washed it all down with a large orange juice and a fresh-brewed pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain.

  Afterward, he was almost certain that he would live.

  Around her the city was coming alive. Several million people performing the routine little actions that give form to a life. A litany of the ordinary, the mundane, the comfortable. And Roulette felt a stir of interest, a flare of anticipation. So humdrum when compared to the obsession that had ruled her life. But so restful in its simplicity. She thought she would start by brewing a cup of coffee. And after that? The possibilities were limitless.

  There were still merchant ships headed for the Far East. It was still possible to get a cabin on one, though with this short a notice it had been expensive.

  But it was done. Fortunato stood at the rail as they steamed out past Governor’s Island and into Upper New York Bay.

  The sun was coming up over Brooklyn. Underneath him the sea moved at its own pace, vast, balanced, fluid yet unchanging. It was the first of Fortunato’s new teachers.

  CLOSING CREDITS

  starring created & written by

  Bagabond Leanne C. Harper

  Fortunato Lewis Shiner

  Jennifer (Wraith) Maloy John J. Miller

  Jack (Sewer Jack) Robicheaux Edward Bryant

  Roulette Melinda M. Snodgrass

  James (Demise) Spector Walton Simons

  Hiram Worchester George R. R. Martin

  co-starring created by

  Daniel (Yeoman) Brennan John J. Miller

  Dr. Tachyon Melinda M. Snodgrass

  The Astronomer Lewis Shiner

  Jay (Popinjay) Ackroyd George R. R. Martin

  Rosemary (Gambione) Muldoon Leanne C. Harper

  featuring created by

  Peregrine Gail Gerstner-Miller

  St. John (Loophole) Latham Lewis Shiner

  Jane (Water Lily) Dow Pat Cadigan

  Chrysalis John J. Miller

  Kid Dinosaur Lewis Shiner

  Modular Man Walter Jon Williams

  The Howler Stephen Leigh

  Wyrm John J. Miller

  Cordelia Chaisson Edward Bryant and Leanne C. Harper

  The Great &-Powerful Turtle George R. R. Martin

  with created by

  Billy Ray John J. Miller

  The Bludgeon George R. R. Martin

  Cap’n Trips Victor Milán

  Imp and Insulin Lewis Shiner and Walton Simons

  Ralph Norton Walton Simons

  Digger Downs Steve Perrin

  Senator Gregg Hartmann (D., NY) Stephen Leigh

  WILD CARDS

  THE TOM PALMER GALLERY

  Frontispiece: Peregrine flies to the aid of a plummeting Water Lily during an attack by the Astronomer.

  Gallery title page: Hiram Worchester welcomes one and all to the annual Wild Card dinner.

  [Illustration] Jennifer Maloy—the underdressed thief known as Wraith—helps herself to the riches contained in Kien Phuc’s wall safe.

  [Illustration] Bagabond feeds the other strays who call the streets of New York their home.

  [Illustration] At the Freakers club, the beauteous Roulette Brown-Roxbury comes face-to-chest with the always flamboyant Dr. Tachyon.

  [Illustration] Yeoman is about to put paid on Lizard Man’s unwanted advances on Wraith.

  [Illustration] A street punk is about to learn why it’s not such a good idea to make Sewer Jack mad.

  [Illustration] Having bared most of her flesh to Father Squid of the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker, Wraith decides baring her soul is the next logical step.

  [Illustration] Astronomer gets hot under the collar, and everywhere else courtesy of the super-powered pimp, Fortunato.

  [Illustration] The Astronomer meets his well-deserved end at the . . . hands of James Spector, one of the deadliest Aces around.

  AFTERWORD

  BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  The great
boom in shared world anthologies began in 1979, when Ace Books published Robert Asprin’s Thieves World, the first volume in a long-running fantasy series about the imaginary city of Sanctuary and the motley cast of swordsmen, sorcerors, princes, rogues, and thieves who roamed its streets, with occasional guest appearances by an equally motley assortment of gods.

  Thieves World had its precursors, to be sure. In comic books, both and the Marvel and DC universes were shared worlds, wherein the heroes and villains lived in the same world, constantly crossed paths with one another, and had their friendships, feuds, and love affairs. In prose there was H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft encouraged his writer friends to borrow elements from his stories, and to add their own, and Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and others gleefully took up the game. HPL himself would then make mention of the gods, cults, and accursed books the others had contributed, and the mythos became ever richer and more detailed.

  Much later came Medea: Harlan’s World, wherein Harlan Ellison assembled a group of top-rank science fiction writers to create an imaginary planet and work out all the details of its flora, fauna, geography, history, and orbital mechanics, whereupon each writer penned a story set on the world they had created together.

  But Thieves World was the breakthrough book that defined the modern shared world, and it proved so successful that it soon spawned a whole host of imitators. Ithkar and Liavek and Merovingan Nights had fantasy settings and the flavor of sword and sorcery, as did Thieves World itself. Borderlands was more urban fantasy, with its punk elves and contemporary setting. The Fleet and War World brought the shared world format to space opera, Greystone Bay extended it to horror, and Heroes in Hell took it to hell.

  Some of these series came before ours; others followed us. Some had long runs; others only lasted for a book or two. In the end, Wild Cards would outlast all of them to become the longest-running shared world series of them all, with twelve volumes from Bantam and three from Baen . . . and now two more in the works from ibooks. Which means that I now have more experience with shared worlds than any other editor, I suppose.

  When Wild Cards was starting out, however, my editorial experience was limited to New Voices, the annual (in theory) collection of stories by the finalists for the John W. Campbell Award. I knew going in that a shared world was a very different sort of animal, and not one easily tamed, so I set out to learn as much about the beast as I could. Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey were gracious enough to sit down with me and share all the trials and tribulations they had undergone editing Thieves World, and the lessons they had learned from them. Will Shetterly and Emma Bull were equally forthcoming about their own experiences editing Liavek. From the Master Agreements that governed those two series, I was able to devise a Master Agreement for Wild Cards that provided a firm but fair legal foundation upon which to build the series.

  A shared world also poses some difficult artistic questions, the most crucial one being the amount of sharing involved and the rules that govern it. All of the shared worlds of the ‘80s answered these questions in their own ways, I found, but some of the answers were more satisfactory than others. Some books shared only their settings; the characters never crossed paths, nor did the events of one story have any impact on those that followed. Each story existed in isolation, aside from a common geography and history. In other series, the characters did make “guest star” appearances in one another’s tales, while the stories themselves continued to stand alone. But the best shared world anthologies, the ones that were the most entertaining and the most successful, were those that shared characters and plots as well as settings. In those books, and those alone, the whole was more than the sum of its parts. The “shared worlds” that minimized the sharing were missing the point of the exercise, it seemed to me.

  Wild Cards would not make that mistake, I decided. We would maximize the sharing. More, we would strive to go well beyond what anyone else had ever done in the shared world game. So much so that when I drew up my “immodest proposal” for the first three Wild Cards books, I eschewed the old term “shared world” and promised the publishers a series of “mosaic novels.”

  That initial proposal was for three books, for no particular reason but that we wanted to do more than one, and no publisher was likely to buy twelve at a shot. That set a precedent, and later on we continued to plot, sell, and write the books in groups of three—”triads,” as we called them, since they were not quite trilogies (the second triad turned into four books and the third one into five, but those are stories for another afterword). The first two volumes of that first triad (which would eventually become Wild Cards and Aces High, though they had other titles in the proposal) would feature individual stories, each with its own plot and protagonist, a beginning, a middle, and an end. But all the stories would also advance what we called the “overplot.” And between the stories we would add an interstitial narrative that would tie them all together and create the “mosaic novel” feel we wanted.

  But the true mosaic novel would be the third book, wherein we brought our overplot to a smashing conclusion. No other shared world had ever attempted anything quite like what we proposed to do with Jokers Wild: a single braided narrative, wherein all the characters, stories, and events were interwoven from start to finish in a sort of seven-handed collaboration. The end result, we hoped, would be a book that read like a novel with multiple viewpoints rather than simply a collection of related stories.

  In my proposal I spoke of Jokers Wild as “a Robert Altman film in prose.” Like Nashville and A Wedding and several other of Altman’s trademark films, Jokers Wild would feature a large and varied cast of characters whose paths would cross and recross during the course of the book. The setting would be New York City on September 15, 1986—Wild Card Day, forty years after Jetboy’s death and the release of the Takisian xenovirus over Manhattan. All the action would take place within twenty-four hours, giving us a strong chronological framework on which to hang our story threads. The first two Wild Cards books had featured the work of eleven writers and nine writers, respectively, but because of complexity of what we were about to attempt, I decided to limit Jokers Wild to six stories (there are seven names on the title page, to be sure, but Edward Bryant and Leanne C. Harper were collaborating, as they had in Volume One). Each of the seven viewpoint characters had his dreams, his own demons, and his own goals, the pursuit of which would take him back and forth across the city, up skyscrapers and down into the sewers, bumping into other characters and other stories as he went.

  It was seven stories and it was one story, but mostly it was an enormous headache. I did a lot of cutting and pasting and shuffling of sections as the manuscripts came in, striving for the perfect placement of all our cliffhangers, climaxes, and foreshadowing while simultaneously trying to keep chronology and geography firmly in mind. Half a hundred times I thought I had it, until noticing that Yeoman had taken six hours to get to Brooklyn, that Fortunato was in two places at once, that it been three hundred pages since we’d last seen Demise. Then it was time to sigh and shuffle again. But I finally got it right. (I think).

  In truth, we were creating a new literary form of sorts, though none of us quite realized that at the time. We did realize that what we were doing was an experiment, and there were days when none of us were at all certain that that the beast was going to fly. It was the hardest, most challenging editing that I ever did, and the writing was no day at the beach either.

  In the end, though, all the effort was worth it. Readers and reviewers both seemed to love the mosaic novel form (although one reviewer amused me vastly by making a point of how seamlessly I had blended the styles of such dissimilar writers, when of course I’d made no attempt to “blend” any styles whatsoever, preferring that each character retain his own distinctive individual voice).

  And my writers and I agreed: Jokers Wild was the strongest volume in the series to date. The experiment had been a success, and the template wa
s set. The full mosaic was too difficult and time-consuming a form to be used in every volume, but every third volume was just about right. So the template was set: all the Wild Cards triads to come would also conclude with a climactic mosaic, fully interwoven in the same manner as Jokers Wild.

  Before I close, let me add one last aside. This being an afterword, I presume that all of you reading these words (yes, I’m talking to you, don’t look over your shoulder, there’s no one here but you and me) have already finished Jokers Wild

  If you haven’t, STOP. What follows is in the nature of a spoiler, and not meant for your eyes. Why do you think we call them Afterwords, damn it! Go read the book.

  Is he gone?

  Good. Now I can tell you about Kid Dinosaur and the Howler.

  Over the course of Wild Cards, probably the single thing that upset our fans the most was the Astonomer’s hideous murder of Kid Dinosaur in Jokers Wild. For years thereafter, whenever we did a Wild Cards panel at a convention, one of the questions would inevitably be, “Why did you kill Kid Dinosaur? He was my favorite character.” The Howler was less prominent and far less popular, yet he had fans as well, some of whom wrote us in dismay when Roulette did the nasty with him.

  The truth is, both characters had been marked for death from the day they were created. Remember, we plotted the Wild Cards book in triads. We knew, even before we started writing our stories for Volume One, that come Volume Three the Astronomer and the surviving Masons would be trying to hunt down and kill all the aces who had smashed them at the Cloisters at the end of Book Two. A number of our major on-going characters would be on that hit list, of course, and we wanted the readers to feel as though their lives were in desperate peril, the better to keep them on the edge of their seats.