Wild Cards IV: Aces Abroad

by Stephen Leigh

  “Bad fortune,” said Murga-muggai. She laughed, an oily, sticky sound.

  “Why, cousin?” said Wyungare. “Why do you do any of this?”

  “Silly boy,” said Murga-muggai, “you’ve lost hold of tradition. It will be the death of you, if not the death of our people. You are so wrong. I must remedy this.”

  Apparently in no hurry to eat, she slowly closed the distance between them. Her legs continued to strobe. It was dizzying to watch. “My appetite for Europeans is growing,” she said. “I will enjoy today’s varied feast.”

  “I will have only one chance,” Wyungare said in a low voice. “If it doesn’t work—”

  “It will,” said Cordelia. She stepped even with him and touched his arm. “Laissez les bon temps rouler.”

  Wyungare glanced at her.

  “Let the good times roll. My daddy’s favorite line.”

  Murga-muggai leapt.

  The spider-creature descended over them like a wind-torn umbrella with spare, bent struts flexing.

  Wyungare jammed the butt of the spear into the unyielding sandstone and lifted the fire-hardened head toward the body of the monster. Murga-muggai cried out in rage and triumph.

  The spear-head glanced off one mandible and broke. The supple shaft of the spear at first bent, then cracked into splinters like the shattering of a spine. The spider-creature was so close, Cordelia could see the abdomen pulse. She could smell a dark, acrid odor.

  Now we’re in trouble, she thought.

  Both Wyungare and she scrambled backward, attempting to avoid the seeking legs and clashing mandibles. The nullanulla skittered across the sandstone.

  Cordelia scooped up the flint knife. It was suddenly like watching everything in slow motion. One of Murga-muggai’s hairy forelegs lashed out toward Wyungare. The tip fell across the man’s chest, just below his heart. The force of the blow hurled him backward. Wyungare’s body tumbled across the stone clearing like one of the limp rag dolls Cordelia had played with as a girl.

  And just as lifeless.

  “No!” Cordelia screamed. She ran to Wyungare, knelt beside him, felt for the pulse in his throat. Nothing. He was not breathing. His eyes stared blindly toward the empty sky.

  She cradled the man’s body for just a moment, realizing that the spider-creature was patiently regarding them from twenty yards away. “You are next, imperfect cousin,” came the ground-out words. “You are brave, but I don’t think you can help the cause of my people any more than the Wombat.” Murga-muggai started forward.

  Cordelia realized she was still clinging to the gun. She aimed the H and K mini at the spider-creature and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. She clicked the safety on, then off again. Pulled the trigger. Nothing. Damn. It was finally empty.

  Focus, she thought. She stared at Murga-muggai’s eyes and willed the creature to die. The power was still there within her. She could feel it. She strained. But nothing happened. She was helpless. Murga-muggai was not even slowed.

  Evidently the reptile-level had nothing to say to spiders.

  The spider-thing rushed toward her like a graceful, eight-legged express train.

  Cordelia knew there was nothing left to do. Except the one thing she dreaded most.

  She wondered if the image in her mind would be the last thing she would ever know. It was the memory of an old cartoon showing Fay Wray in the fist of King Kong on the side of the Empire State Building. A man in a biplane was calling out to the woman, “Trip, him, Fay! Trip him!”

  Cordelia summoned all the hysterical strength left within her and hurled the empty H and K at Murga-muggai’s head. The weapon hit one faceted eye and the monster shied slightly. She leapt forward, wrapping arms and legs around one of the pistoning spider-creature’s forelegs.

  The monster stumbled, started to recover, but then Cordelia jammed the flint knife into a leg joint. The extremity folded and momentum took over. The spider-thing was a ball of flailing legs rolling along with Cordelia clinging to one hairy limb.

  The woman had a chaotic glimpse of the desert floor looming ahead and below her. She let go, hit the stone, rolled, grabbed an outcropping and stopped.

  Murga-muggai was propelled out into open space. To Cordelia the monster seemed to hang there for a moment, suspended like the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. Then the spider-creature plummeted.

  Cordelia watched the flailing, struggling thing diminish. A screech like nails on chalkboard trailed after.

  Finally all she could see was what looked like a black stain at the foot of Uluru. She could imagine only too well the shattered remains with the legs splayed out. “You deserved it!” she said aloud. “Bitch.”

  Wyungare! She turned and limped back to his body.

  He was still dead.

  For a moment Cordelia allowed herself the luxury of angry tears. Then she realized she had her own magic. “It’s only been a minute,” she said, as if praying. “Not longer. Not long at all. Only a minute.”

  She bent close to Wyungare and concentrated. She felt the power draining out of her mind and floating down around the man, insulating the cold flesh. The thought had been a revelation. In the past she had tried only to shut autonomic nervous systems down. She had never tried to start one up. It had never occurred to her.

  Jack’s words seemed to echo from eight thousand miles away: “You can use it for life too.”

  The energy flowed.

  The slightest heartbeat.

  The faintest breath.

  Another.

  Wyungare began to breathe.

  He groaned.

  Thank God, thought Cordelia. Or Baiame. She glanced around self-consciously at the top of Uluru.

  Wyungare opened his eyes. “Thank you,” he said faintly but distinctly.

  The riot swirled past them. Police clubs swung. Aboriginal heads cracked. “Bloody hell,” said Wyungare. “You’d think this was bloody Queensland.” He seemed restrained from joining the fray only by Cordelia’s presence.

  Cordelia reeled back against the alley wall. “You’ve brought me back to Alice?”

  Wyungare nodded.

  “This is the same night?”

  “All the distances are different in the Dreamtime,” said Wyungare. “Time as well as space.”

  “I’m grateful.” The noise of angry shouts, screams, sirens, was deafening.

  “Now what?” said the young man.

  “A night’s sleep. In the morning I’ll rent a Land-Rover. Then I’ll drive to Madhi Gap.” She pondered a question. “Will you stay with me?”

  “Tonight?” Wyungare hesitated as well. “Yes, I’ll stay with you. You’re not as bad as the preacher-from-the-sky, but I must find a way to talk you out of what you want to do with the satellite station.”

  Cordelia started to relax just a little.

  “Of course,” said Wyungare, glancing around, “you’ll have to sneak me into your room.”

  Cordelia shook her head. It’s like high school again, she thought. She put her arm around the man beside her.

  There were so many things she needed to tell people. The road south to Madhi Gap stretched ahead. She still hadn’t decided whether she was going to call New York first.

  “There is one thing,” said Wyungare.

  She glanced at him questioningly.

  “It has always been the custom,” he said slowly, “for European men to use their aboriginal mistresses and then abandon them.”

  Cordelia looked him in the eye. “I am not a European man,” she said.

  Wyungare smiled.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF

  XAVIER DESMOND

  MARCH 14/HONG KONG:

  I have been feeling better of late, I’m pleased to say. Perhaps it was our brief sojourn in Australia and New Zealand. Coming close upon the heels of Singapore and Jakarta, Sydney seemed almost like home, and I was strangely taken with Auckland and the comparative prosperity and cleanliness of its little toy jokertown. Aside from a distressing tendency to call
themselves “uglies,” an even more offensive term than “joker,” my Kiwi brethren seem to live as decently as any jokers anywhere. I was even able to purchase a week-old copy of the Jokertown Cry at my hotel. It did my soul good to read the news of home, even though too many of the headlines seem to be concerned with a gang war being fought in our streets.

  Hong Kong has its jokertown too, as relentlessly mercantile as the rest of the city. I understand that mainland China dumps most of its jokers here, in the Crown Colony. In fact a delegation of leading joker merchants have invited Chrysalis and me to lunch with them tomorrow and discuss “possible commercial ties between jokers in Hong Kong and New York City.” I’m looking forward to it.

  Frankly it will be good to get away from my fellow delegates for a few hours. The mood aboard the Stacked Deck is testy at best at present, chiefly thanks to Thomas Downs and his rather overdeveloped journalistic instincts.

  Our mail caught up with us in Christchurch, just as we were taking off for Hong Kong, and the packet included advance copies of the latest issue of Aces. Digger went up and down the aisles after we were airborne, distributing complimentary copies as is his wont. He ought to have read them first. He and his execrable magazine hit a new low this time out, I’m afraid.

  The issue features his cover story of Peregrine’s pregnancy. I was amused to note that the magazine obviously feels that Peri’s baby is the big news of the trip, since they devoted twice as much space to it as they have to any of Digger’s previous stories, even the hideous incident in Syria, though perhaps that was only to justify the glossy four-page footspread of Peregrine past and present, in various costumes and states of undress.

  The whispers about her pregnancy started as early as India and were officially confirmed while we were in Thailand, so Digger could hardly be blamed for filing a story. It’s just the sort of thing that Aces thrives on. Unfortunately for his own health and our sense of camaraderie aboard the Stacked Deck, Digger clearly did not agree with Peri that her “delicate condition” was a private matter. Digger dug too far.

  The cover asks, “Who Fathered Peri’s Baby?” Inside, the piece opens with a double-page spread illustrated by an artist’s conception of Peregrine holding an infant in her arms, except that the child is a black silhouette with a question mark instead of a face. “Daddy’s an Ace, Tachyon Says,” reads the subhead, leading into a much larger orange banner that claims, “Friends Beg Her to Abort Monstrous Joker Baby.” Gossip has it that Digger plied Tachyon with brandy while the two of them were inspecting the raunchier side of Singapore’s nightlife, managing to elicit a few choice indiscretions. He did not get the name of the father of Peregrine’s baby, but once drunk enough, Tachyon displayed no reticence in sounding off about all the reasons why he believes Peregrine ought to abort this child, the foremost of which is the nine percent chance that the baby will be born a joker.

  I confess that reading the story filled me with a cold rage and made me doubly glad that Dr. Tachyon is not my personal physician. It is at moments such as this that I find myself wondering how Tachyon can possibly pretend to be my friend, or the friend of any joker. In vino veritas, they say; Tachyon’s comments make it quite clear that he thinks abortion is the only choice for any woman in Peregrine’s position. The Takisians abhor deformity and customarily “cull” (such a polite word) their own deformed children (very few in number, since they have not yet been blessed with the virus that they so generously decided to share with Earth) shortly after birth. Call me oversensitive if you will, but the clear implication of what Tachyon is saying is that death is preferable to jokerhood, that it is better that this child never live at all than live the life of a joker.

  When I set the magazine aside I was so livid that I knew I could not possibly speak to Tachyon himself in any rational manner, so I got up and went back to the press compartment to give Downs a piece of my mind. At the very least I wanted to point out rather forcefully that it was grammatically permissible to omit the adjective “monstrous” before the phrase “joker baby,” though clearly the copy editors at Aces feel it compulsory.

  Digger saw me coming, however, and met me halfway. I’ve managed to raise his consciousness at least enough so that he knew how upset I’d be, because he started right in with excuses. “Hey, I just wrote the article,” he began. “They do the headlines back in New York, that and the art, I’ve got no control over it. Look, Des, next time I’ll talk to them—”

  He never had a chance to finish whatever promise he was about to make, because just then Josh McCoy stepped up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder with a rolled-up copy of Aces. When Downs turned around, McCoy started swinging. The first punch broke Digger’s nose with a sickening noise that made me feel rather faint. McCoy went on to split Digger’s lips and loosen a few teeth. I grabbed McCoy with my arms and wrapped my trunk around his neck to try to hold him still, but he was crazy strong with rage and brushed me off easily, I’m afraid. I’ve never been the physical sort, and in my present condition I fear that I’m pitifully weak. Fortunately Billy Ray came along in time to break them up before McCoy could do serious damage.

  Digger spent the rest of the flight back in the rear of the plane, stoked up with painkillers. He managed to offend Billy Ray as well by dripping blood on the front of his white Carnifex costume. Billy is nothing if not obsessive about his appearance, and as he kept telling us, “those fucking bloodstains don’t come out.” McCoy went up front, where he helped Hiram, Mistral, and Mr. Jayewardene console Peri, who was considerably upset by the story. While McCoy was assaulting Digger in the rear of the plane, she was tearing into Dr. Tachyon up front. Their confrontation was less physical but equally dramatic, Howard tells me. Tachyon kept apologizing over and over again, but no amount of apologies seemed to stay Peregrine’s fury. Howard says it was a good thing that her talons were packed away safely with the luggage.

  Tachyon finished out the flight alone in the first-class lounge with a bottle of Remy Martin and the forlorn look of a puppy dog who has just piddled on the Persian rug. If I had been a crueler man, I might have gone upstairs and explained my own grievances to him, but I found that I did not have the heart. I find that very curious, but there is something about Dr. Tachyon that makes it difficult to stay angry with him for very long, no matter how insensitive and egregious his behavior.

  No matter. I am looking forward to this part of the trip. From Hong Kong we travel to the mainland, Canton and Shanghai and Peking and other stops equally exotic. I plan to walk upon the Great Wall and see the Forbidden City. During World War II I’d chosen to serve in the Navy in hopes of seeing the world, and the Far East always had a special glamour for me, but I wound up assigned to a desk in Bayonne, New Jersey. Mary and I were going to make up for that afterward, when the baby was a little older and we had a little more in the way of financial security.

  Well, we made our plans, and meanwhile the Takisians made theirs.

  Over the years China came to represent all the things I’d never done, all the far places I meant to visit and never did, my own personal Jolson story. And now it looms on my horizon, at last. It’s enough to make one believe the end is truly near.

  ZERO HOUR

  Lewis Shiner

  The store had a pyramid of TV sets in the window, all tuned to the same channel. They tracked a 747 landing at Narita Airport, then pulled back to show an announcer in front of a screen. Then the airport scene switched to a graphic featuring a caricature of Tachyon, a cartoon jet, and the English words Stacked Deck.

  Fortunato stopped in front of the store. It was just getting dark, and all around him the neon ideograms of the Ginza blazed into red and blue and yellow life. He couldn’t hear anything through the glass, so he watched helplessly while the screen flashed pictures of Hartmann and Chrysalis and Jack Braun.

  He knew they were going to show Peregrine an instant before she flashed on the screen, lips slightly parted, her eyes starting to look away, the wind in her hair. He didn’t need
wild card powers to have predicted it. Even if he’d still had them. He knew they’d show her because it was the thing he feared. Fortunato watched his reflected image superimposed over hers, faint, ghostlike.

  He bought a Japanese Times, Tokyo’s biggest English-language paper. “Aces Invade Japan,” the headline said, and there was a special pullout section with color photographs. The crowds surged around him, mostly male, mostly in business suits, mostly on autopilot. The ones that noticed him gave him a shocked glance and looked away again. They saw his height and thinness and foreignness. If they could tell he was half-Japanese, they didn’t care; the other half was black American, kokujin. In Japan, as in too many other parts of the world, the whiter the skin the better.

  The paper said the tour would be staying at the newly remodeled Imperial Hotel, a few blocks from where Fortunato stood. And so, Fortunato thought, the mountain has come to Muhammad. Whether Muhammad wants it or not.

  It was time, Fortunato thought, for a bath.

  Fortunato crouched by the tap and soaped himself all over, then carefully rinsed it off with his plastic bucket. Getting soap into the ofuro was one of two breaches of etiquette the Japanese would not tolerate, the other being the wearing of shoes on tatami mats. Once he was clean, Fortunato walked over to the edge of the pool, his towel hanging to cover his genitals with the casual skill of a native Japanese.

  He slipped into the 115-degree water, giving himself over to the agonizing pleasure. A mixture of sweat and condensation immediately broke out across his forehead and ran down his face. His muscles relaxed in spite of himself. Around him the other men in the ofuro sat with their eyes shut, ignoring him.

  He bathed about this time every day. In the six months he’d spent in Japan he’d become a creature of habit, just like the millions of Japanese around him. He was up by nine in the morning, an hour he’d seen only half a dozen times back in New York City. He spent the mornings in meditation or study, going twice a week to a zen Shukubo across the bay in Chiba City.