Dreamsongs. Volume II

by George R. R. Martin

  By rights I ought to object to Hiram Worchester, who revels in his acedom more than any other man I know, but I find it hard to dislike anyone who enjoys life so much and brings such enjoyment to those around him. Besides, I am well aware of his various anonymous charities in Jokertown, though he does his best to conceal them. Hiram is no more comfortable around my kind than Tachyon is, but his heart is as large as the rest of him.

  Tomorrow the group will fragment yet again. Senators Hartmann and Lyons, Congressman Rabinowitz, and Ericsson from WHO will meet with the leaders of the PRI, Mexico’s ruling party, while Tachyon and our medical staff visit a clinic that has claimed extraordinary success in treating the virus with laetrile. Our aces are scheduled to lunch with three of their Mexican counterparts. I’m pleased to say that Troll has been invited to join them. In some quarters, at least, his superhuman strength and near invulnerability have qualified him as an ace. A small breakthrough, of course, but a breakthrough nonetheless.

  The rest of us will be traveling down to Yucatán and the Quintana Roo to look at Mayan ruins and the sites of several reported antijoker atrocities. Rural Mexico, it seems, is not as enlightened as Mexico City. The others will join us in Chichén Itzá the following day, and our last day in Mexico will be given over to tourism.

  And then it will be on to Guatemala…perhaps. The daily press has been full of reports on an insurrection down there, an Indian uprising against the central government, and several of our journalists have gone ahead already, sensing a bigger story than this tour. If the situation seems too unstable, we may be forced to skip that stop.

  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 hope. 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 Latino, 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 Muslims 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 Shiites 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 Fire-breather). 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 US 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 the 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’ 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.

  DECEMBER 29, 1986/BUENOS AIRES

  Don’t cry for Jack, Argentina….

  Evita’s bane has come back to Buenos Aires. When the musical first played Broadway, I wondered what Jack Braun must have thought, listening to Lupone sing of the Four Aces. Now that question has even more poignance. Braun has been very calm, almost stoic, in the face of his reception here, but what must he be feeling inside?

  Perón is dead, Ev
ita even deader, even Isabel just a memory, but the Perónistas are still very much a part of the Argentine political scene. They have not forgotten. Everywhere the signs taunt Braun and invite him to go home. He is the ultimate gringo (do they use that word in Argentina, I wonder), the ugly but awesomely powerful American who came to the Argentine uninvited and toppled a sovereign government because he disapproved of its politics. The United States has been doing such things for as long as there has been a Latin America, and I have no doubt that these same resentments fester in many other places. The United States and even the dread “secret aces” of the CIA are abstract concepts, however, faceless and difficult to get a fix on—Golden Boy is flesh and blood, real and very visible, and here.

  Someone inside the hotel leaked our room assignments, and when Jack stepped out onto his balcony the first day, he was showered with dung and rotten fruit. He has stayed inside ever since, except for official functions, but even there he is not safe. Last night as we stood in a receiving line at the Casa Rosada, the wife of a union official—a beautiful young woman, her small dark face framed by masses of lustrous black hair—stepped up to him with a sweet smile, looked straight into his eyes, and spit in his face.

  It caused quite a stir, and Senators Hartmann and Lyons have filed some sort of protest, I believe. Braun himself was remarkably restrained, almost gallant. Digger was hounding him ruthlessly after the reception; he’s cabling a write-up on the incident back to Aces and wanted a quote. Braun finally gave him something. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of,” he said, “but getting rid of Juan Perón isn’t one of them.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I heard Digger tell him, “but how did you feel when she spit on you?”

  Jack just looked disgusted. “I don’t hit women,” he said. Then he walked off and sat by himself.

  Downs turned to me when Braun was gone. “I don’t hit women,” he echoed in a singsong imitation of Golden Boy’s voice, then added, “What a weenie….”

  The world is too ready to read cowardice and betrayal into anything Jack Braun says and does, but the truth, I suspect, is more complex. Given his youthful appearance, it’s hard to recall at times how old the Golden Boy really is—his formative years were during the Depression and World War II, and he grew up listening to the NBC Blue Network, not MTV. No wonder some of his values seem quaintly old-fashioned.

  In many ways the Judas Ace seems almost an innocent, a bit lost in a world that has grown too complicated for him. I think he is more troubled than he admits by his reception here in Argentina. Braun is the last representative of a lost dream that flourished briefly in the aftermath of World War II and died in Korea and the HUAC hearings and the Cold War. They thought they could reshape the world, Archibald Holmes and his Four Aces. They had no doubts, no more than their country did. Power existed to be used, and they were supremely confident in their ability to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Their own democratic ideals and the shining purity of their intentions were all the justification they needed. For those few early aces it must have been a golden age, and how appropriate that a golden boy be at its center.

  Golden ages give way to dark ages, as any student of history knows, and as all of us are currently finding out.

  Braun and his colleagues could do things no one else had ever done—they could fly and lift tanks and absorb a man’s mind and memories, and so they bought the illusion that they could make a real difference on a global scale, and when that illusion dissolved beneath them, they fell a very long way indeed. Since then no other ace has dared to dream as big.

  Even in the face of imprisonment, despair, insanity, disgrace, and death, the Four Aces had triumphs to cling to, and Argentina was perhaps the brightest of those triumphs. What a bitter homecoming this must be for Jack Braun.

  As if this was not enough, our mail caught up with us just before we left Brazil, and the pouch included a dozen copies of the new issue of Aces with Digger’s promised feature story. The cover has Jack Braun and Mordecai Jones in profile, scowling at each other (All cleverly doctored, of course. I don’t believe the two had ever met before we all got together at Tomlin) over a blurb that reads, “The Strongest Man in the World.”

  The article itself is a lengthy discussion of the two men and their public careers, enlivened by numerous anecdotes about their feats of strength and much speculation about which of the two is, indeed, the strongest man in the world.

  Both of the principals seem embarrassed by the piece, Braun perhaps more acutely. Neither much wants to discuss it, and they certainly don’t seem likely to settle the matter anytime soon. I understand that there has been considerable argument and even wagering back in the press compartment since Digger’s piece came out (for once, Downs seems to have had an impact on his journalistic colleagues), but the bets are likely to remain unresolved for a long time to come. I told Downs that the story was spurious and offensive as soon as I read it. He seemed startled. “I don’t get it,” he said to me. “What’s your beef?”

  My beef, as I explained to him, was simple. Braun and Jones are scarcely the only people to manifest superhuman strength since the advent of the wild card; in fact, that particular power is a fairly common one, ranking close behind telekinesis and telepathy in Tachyon’s incidence-of-occurrence charts. It has something to do with maximizing the contractile strength of the muscles, I believe. My point is, a number of prominent jokers display augmented strength as well—just off the top of my head, I cited Elmo (the dwarf bouncer at the Crystal Palace), Ernie of Ernie’s Bar & Grill, the Oddity, Quasiman…and, most notably, Howard Mueller. The Troll’s strength does not perhaps equal that of Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer, but assuredly it approaches it. None of these jokers were so much as mentioned in passing in Digger’s story, although the names of a dozen other superstrong aces were dropped here and there. Why was that? I wanted to know.

  I can’t claim to have made much of an impression unfortunately. When I was through, Downs simply rolled his eyes and said, “You people are so damned touchy.” He tried to be accommodating by telling me that if this story went over big, maybe he’d write up a sequel on the strongest joker in the world, and he couldn’t comprehend why that “concession” made me even angrier. And they wonder why we people are touchy…

  Howard thought the whole argument was vastly amusing. Sometimes I wonder about him.

  Actually my fit of pique was nothing compared to the reaction the magazine drew from Billy Ray, our security chief. Ray was one of the other aces mentioned in passing, his strength dismissed as not being truly “major league.” Afterward he could be heard the length of the plane, suggesting that maybe Downs would like to step outside with him, seeing as how he was so minor league. Digger declined the offer. From the smile on his face I doubt that Carnifex will be getting any good press in Aces anytime soon.

  Since then, Ray has been grousing about the story to anyone who will listen. The crux of his argument is that strength isn’t everything; he may not be as strong as Braun or Jones, but he’s strong enough to take either of them in a fight, and he’d be glad to put his money where his mouth is.

  Personally I have gotten a certain perverse satisfaction out of this tempest in a teapot. The irony is, they are arguing about who has the most of what is essentially a minor power. I seem to recall that there was some sort of demonstration in the early seventies, when the battleship New Jersey was being refitted at the Bayonne Naval Supply Center over in New Jersey. The Turtle lifted the battleship telekinetically, got it out of the water by several feet, and held it there for almost half a minute. Braun and Jones lift tanks and toss automobiles about, but neither could come remotely close to what the Turtle did that day.

  The simple truth is, the contractile strength of the human musculature can be increased only so much. Physical limits apply. Dr. Tachyon says there may also be limits to what the human mind can accomplish, but so far they have not been reached.

  If the Turtle is indeed a joker, as many believe, I would
find this irony especially satisfying.

  I suppose I am, at base, as small a man as any.

  JANUARY 16/ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

  A hard day in a stricken land. The local Red Cross representatives took some of us out to see some of their famine relief efforts. Of course we’d all been aware of the drought and the starvation long before we got here, but seeing it on television is one thing, and being here amidst it is quite another.

  A day like this makes me acutely aware of my own failures and shortcomings. Since the cancer took hold of me, I’ve lost a good deal of weight (some unsuspecting friends have even told me how good I look), but moving among these people made me very self-conscious of the small paunch that remains. They were starving before my eyes, while our plane waited to take us back to Addis Ababa…to our hotel, another reception, and no doubt a gourmet Ethiopian meal. The guilt was overwhelming, as was the sense of helplessness.

  I believe we all felt it. I cannot conceive of how Hiram Worchester must have felt. To his credit he looked sick as he moved among the victims, and at one point he was trembling so badly he had to sit in the shade for a while by himself. The sweat was just pouring off him. But he got up again afterward, his face white and grim, and used his gravity power to help them unload the relief provisions we had brought with us.

  So many people have contributed so much and worked so hard for the relief effort, but here it seems like nothing. The only realities in the relief camps are the skeletal bodies with their massive swollen bellies, the dead eyes of the children, and the endless heat pouring down from above onto this baked, parched landscape.