Wild Cards Part 46

"Hey, nat!" he called out. "Where are you, man? I tell you what. You give me a good hunt, I'll cut you a few times then finish you fast. You disappoint me, I'll cut your b.a.l.l.s off. Even the gook chick won't be able to grow you a new pair."

Scar laughed at his joke, then followed Brennan into the dark. He stopped after a moment and listened. He heard nothing but the sounds of the wind in the trees and, distantly, occasional cars moving in the far streets. His prey was gone, vanished into the night. Scar frowned. Something was wrong. He walked deeper into the trees.

And from nowhere, a ghost silent among shadows, Brennan rose from his hiding place, his waxed nylon bowstring wrapped around his fists. He looped the string around Scar's throat from behind, yanked, and twisted. Flesh and gristle crumpled and Scar vanished. He reappeared a few feet away, clutching at his crushed windpipe. He tried to suck in air, but nothing reached his laboring lungs. He opened his mouth to say something at Brennan, to curse him or plead with him, but no words came. He vanished again, but reappeared a microsecond later in the same place, his tattooed face screwed up in pain and fear, his concentration shattered, his control gone. Brennan watched him flicker crazily among the trees, desperation on his face, teleporting madly, nonsensically. Finally he appeared spewing blood from his mouth, staggered against a tree, dropped his razor, and fell face up. Brennan approached cautiously, but he was dead. He hunkered over him, and took out the felt-tip pen that the waiter had given him in Minh's restaurant. He drew an ace of spades on the back of Scar's right hand, and, to be sure that Kien wouldn't miss it, placed the hand over Scar's marked face.

He made his way back through the trees silently, like the ghost of a forest animal. Mai was waiting for him on the patio. She didn't seem surprised when it was he who emerged from the trees. She knew him, and what he could do.

"Captain Brennan, is Father really dead?"

He nodded, unable to say the words. She seemed to shrink, to look frailer, more tired, if that were possible. She closed her eyes and tears welled silently from beneath their lids.

"Let's go home."

He led her into the welcome darkness of the night.

IV.

He left after she bandaged his wounds, promising to drop by when he could, sadness for her welling inside him, merging with the grief he himself felt at Minh's death. Another comrade, another friend, gone.

Kien had to be brought down. It was up to him, one man, alone, with nothing but the strength of his hands and the cunning of his mind. It would take a long time. He needed a base to operate from, and equipment. Special bows, special arrows. He needed money.

He drew back into the shadows of the Jokertown night, waiting for a certain type of man to come by, a street merchant who exchanged packets of white powder for green bills crumpled in sweaty desperation.

He breathed deeply. The night stank with the countless scents of seven million people and their myriad hopes, fears, and desperations. He was one of them now. He had left the mountains and returned to humanity and he knew that this return would bring with it disappointment and grief and lost hopes. And comfort, some part of him said, wondering at the warm touch of invisible flesh and the sight of a visible heart beating faster and faster with growing pa.s.sion.

A sudden noise, a softly sc.r.a.ping step, caught his attention. A man pa.s.sed him. He was dressed richly for a poor neighborhood, and he walked with jaunty arrogance. This was the one for whom he waited.

Brennan slipped quietly among the shadows, following him. The hunter had come to the city.

EPILOGUE:.

THIRD GENERATION.

by Lewis Shiner

Jetboy dove out of the sky in his rocket-sleek plane, speed lines roaring off the swept-back wings. Twenty-millimeter cannons barked ragged calligraphy and the tyrannosaur staggered as the sh.e.l.ls tore into him.

"Arnie? Arnie, turn out that light!"

"Yes, Mother," Arnie said. He slid the fifty-four-page special Jetboy on Dinosaur Island Jetboy on Dinosaur Island back into its plastic bag. He switched off his reading light and carried the comic across the familiar darkness of his bedroom and put it away in the closet. back into its plastic bag. He switched off his reading light and carried the comic across the familiar darkness of his bedroom and put it away in the closet.

He had a complete run of Jetboy Comics Jetboy Comics in one of the waxed cardboard boxes they used to ship chickens to grocery stores. On the shelf above it were stacked sc.r.a.pbooks full of clippings about the Great and Powerful Turtle and the Howler and Jumpin' Jack Flash. And next to them stood the dinosaur books, not just the kid stuff with the crude drawings, but textbooks on paleontology and botany and zoology. in one of the waxed cardboard boxes they used to ship chickens to grocery stores. On the shelf above it were stacked sc.r.a.pbooks full of clippings about the Great and Powerful Turtle and the Howler and Jumpin' Jack Flash. And next to them stood the dinosaur books, not just the kid stuff with the crude drawings, but textbooks on paleontology and botany and zoology.

Hidden in the back of another box of comics was the Playboy Playboy that had Peregrine in it. Lately, looking at those pictures had made Arnie feel strange, kind of nervous and excited and guilty all at the same time. that had Peregrine in it. Lately, looking at those pictures had made Arnie feel strange, kind of nervous and excited and guilty all at the same time.

His parents knew about his obsessions, all but the Playboy Playboy, anyway. It was only the wild card business that bothered them. Arnie's grandfather had been on the street that day, had seen it with his own eyes when Jetboy exploded into history. A year later Arnie's mother had been born with low-grade telekinesis, just enough to move a coin a few inches across a plastic tablecloth. Sometimes Arnie wished she'd just been normal. Better that than to get a power that wasn't good for anything.

He'd made his grandfather tell him about it over and over. "He wanted to die," the old man would say. "He saw the future, and he wasn't in it. Just wasn't any place for him anymore."

"Hush, Grandpa," Arnie's mother would say. "Don't talk that way in front of Arnie."

"I know what I saw," the old man would say, and shake his head. "I was there."

Arnie crept quietly back to bed and lay on his stomach, pleasantly aware of the pressure on his groin. He thought about Dinosaur Island. There was no question in his mind that it was real. Aces were real. Aliens were real-they had brought the wild card to earth.

He turned on his side and pulled his knees up toward his chest. What would it be like? When he was eight he'd driven through Utah with his parents and he'd made them stop at Vernal. They'd gone on the Prehistoric Nature Trail, and Arnie had run ahead to be by himself with the life-sized dinosaur models. Dinosaur Island would look like that, he thought, the rugged brush-covered hills in the background, the diplodocus big enough that he could walk under its belly, the struthiomimus like a huge, scaly ostrich, the pteranodon crouched like it had just glided in for a landing.

His eyes closed and he could see them moving now, not just the crummy dinosaurs you could see on TV but the special ones: the tiny, vicious deinonychus, the "terrible claw." Or the hideous, lumpy ankylosaur, a thirty-five-foot horned toad with a club on its tail that could dent steel plate.

And deep in his brain, inflamed by the rich, yeasty endocrine soup in which it floated, the wild card virus hovered over a cell, paused, then pumped out its alien message and died. And so, on and on it went, spiraling down through the years in a double helix of fear and ecstasy, mutilation and miraculous change . . .

APPENDIX.

THE SCIENCE OF THE WILD CARD VIRUS:.

Excerpts from the Literature

. . . fearful beyond imagining, worse in many ways than what we saw in Belsen. Nine out of ten affected by this unknown pathogen die horribly. No treatment helps. The survivors aren't a lot more lucky. Nine out of ten of them them are somehow transformed, by a process I can't even begin to understand, into are somehow transformed, by a process I can't even begin to understand, into something something else else-sometimes not even remotely human. I've seen men turn into effigies of galvanized rubber, children sprouting extra heads . . . I can't go on. And what's worst is, they're still alive. Still alive, Mac.

Strangest of all, maybe, are the ten percent of survivors, the one-in-a-hundred of those who actually contract the sickness. They don't show any outward signs of change, mostly. But they have-I have to call them powers. They can do things a normal human can't. I've seen a man soaring into the sky like a V2, looping the loop and returning to land lightly on his feet. A berserk patient tearing a heavy steel gurney apart as if it were tissue paper. Not ten minutes ago a woman walked through the wall of the little office of this onetime warehouse where. I've shut myself away for a few minutes' respite. A naked woman, gorgeous, a real pinup type, glowing with a rosy light that seemed to come from inside her body, smiling a fixed gla.s.sy smile.

I'm not cracking up, Mac. I haven't gone round the bend into madness or morphine. Not yet. Even if I'm lucky to get an hour or two of sleep a night-and then the horror fills my dreams, so I'm almost glad to crawl out of my cot and face the reality of what's happened here. These things are happening, they're real. You may read about it yourself someday, if the bra.s.s don't succeed in clamping the lid down. I don't see how they can-this is Manhattan Manhattan, for Christ's sake, and the victims number tens of thousands.

Thank G.o.d it's not catching. Thank G.o.d for that. As far as we can see, it only develops in those directly exposed to the dust or whatever it was-and not in all of them, or we'd have a million more. As it is, quarantine is impossible, even adequate sanitation. We've had an outbreak of influenza in our wards, expecting typhus any hour . . .

They say some kind of aliens are behind it all, men from outer s.p.a.ce. Given what we've all seen, that doesn't sound farfetched. I've heard it noised around at the highest levels that they've even caught one. I hope it's true. Then they can stick the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in the docket with the n.a.z.i bosses at Nuremberg, and hang him like the animal he is . . .

-personal letter from Captain Kevin McCarthy, United States Army Medical Corps, September 21, 1946

Accounts of the incident make it clear that the vessel containing xenovirus Takis-A exploded at an alt.i.tude of 30,000 feet, well within the so-called jet stream. In its dormant state the virus is encased in a durable protein sheath, the "spores" so often and incorrectly referred to in the lay press, which experiment has shown to be resistant to extremes of temperature and pressure such as to permit its survival under natural conditions from several hundred feet beneath the ocean to the upper limits of the stratosphere. Viral particles were borne eastward across the Atlantic on the jet stream, washing out at random intervals by droplets of rain, or settling naturally; the precise mechanisms still await demonstration or observation. This accounts for the mid-Atlantic Queen Mary Queen Mary tragedy (September 17, 1946), as well as the subsequent outbreaks in England and on the Continent. (Note: Rumors persist of a large-scale outbreak in the U.S.S.R., but Premier Khrushchev's regime continues to maintain a silence as absolute as its predecessors on the matter). tragedy (September 17, 1946), as well as the subsequent outbreaks in England and on the Continent. (Note: Rumors persist of a large-scale outbreak in the U.S.S.R., but Premier Khrushchev's regime continues to maintain a silence as absolute as its predecessors on the matter).

Wind and ocean currents provided short-term dispersal of the virus over a substantial area of the eastern United States (map 1). More alarming by far have been subsequent irruptions of the virus, in spite of the fact that it does not appear to be infectious, widely distributed across both time and geographic distance. In 1946 alone there were over a score of outbreaks reported, and almost a hundred isolated cases, extending clear across the United States and southern Canada (map 2).

The location of the majority of major international outbreaks provides a clue as to a possible pattern: Rio de Janeiro (1947), Mombasa (1948), Port Said (1948), Hong Kong (1949), Auckland (1950), to name a few of the most notorious-all major seaports. The problem was how to account for appearances of the virus, generally in isolated incidents, in locations as far from the sea as the Peruvian Andes and the remote uplands of Nepal.

As our investigation reveals, the answer clearly lies in the durability of the protein coat. The virus can be carried by any means, human, mechanical, animal, or natural, and survives indefinitely unless exposed to destructive agents such as fire or corrosive chemicals. The majority of North American outbreaks, and the relatively large occurrences in seaports have been persuasively traced (McCarthy, Report to Report to the Surgeon General, the Surgeon General, 1951) to items awaiting shipment in the docks and warehouses of the affected district of Manhattan. Others have been attributed to the precipitation of viral particles onto vessels and vehicles in transit. Individuals, even birds and animals (who are never affected), can carry the particles on their person without knowing it. The Nepalese outbreak referred to above, for example, was traced to a 1951) to items awaiting shipment in the docks and warehouses of the affected district of Manhattan. Others have been attributed to the precipitation of viral particles onto vessels and vehicles in transit. Individuals, even birds and animals (who are never affected), can carry the particles on their person without knowing it. The Nepalese outbreak referred to above, for example, was traced to a naik naik of the Gurung clan, whose regiment, the King's Gurkha Rifles, was involved in attempting to contain the ghastly communal violence of August 1013 in Calcutta, India, in which the Hindu and Muslim communities blamed one another for an outbreak of the virus, with a resulting loss of life estimated at twenty-five thousand; the Gurkha corporal himself never developed the disease. of the Gurung clan, whose regiment, the King's Gurkha Rifles, was involved in attempting to contain the ghastly communal violence of August 1013 in Calcutta, India, in which the Hindu and Muslim communities blamed one another for an outbreak of the virus, with a resulting loss of life estimated at twenty-five thousand; the Gurkha corporal himself never developed the disease.

. . . how many deposits of dormant virus remain, dusted across rooftops, gathered in sediment in rivers and sewers, lying in deposits in the soil, still borne aloft on the jet stream, cannot be determined. How serious a threat it still poses to the public health is still equally inascertainable. In this context the inability of the virus to affect the vast majority of the populace should be borne in mind. . . .

-Goldberg and Hoyne, "The Wild Card Virus: Persistence and Dispersal," Problems in Problems in Modern Biochemistry, Schinner, Schinner, Paek, and Ozawa, eds.

The ability of the wild card virus to alter its host's genetic programming resembles that of terrestrial herpesviruses. It is however much more comprehensive, altering DNA throughout the host's body, rather than affecting and being expressed in a certain location-e.g., the lips or genitalia-as are the herpes family.

We know now that xenovirus Takis-A affects a larger percentage of an exposed population than originally a.s.sumed-perhaps as much as one-half of one percent. In many cases the virus merely appends its own code to the host DNA; this is the dormant form, in which the virus has no objective existence, but exists only in the form of information-another trait it shares with the herpesform viruses. It may remain pa.s.sive and undetected indefinitely, or some trauma or stress to the host may cause it to express itself, generally with shattering results. Amounting as it does to "reprogramming" of the host's genetic code, the virus (in either active or pa.s.sive form) is truly inheritable, like blue eyes or curly hair.

Apparently antic.i.p.ating its predominantly lethal effects, the Takisian scientists who created the virus designed it to perpetuate itself as, in effect, a recessive "wild card gene." Recessive, because a dominant gene that produced lethal mutations in ninety percent of offspring and rendered another nine percent either unable or unlikely to reproduce would survive only a few generations, even if, as is estimated, thirty percent of all those with xenovirus-modified DNA carry the dormant form.

The wild card therefore follows the conventional rules of inheritance for recessive traits. Only in cases where both parents carry the viral code does any possibility of producing an affected offspring exist; even then the chance is only one in four, versus a fifty percent chance of producing a carrier with no chance of expressing the virus, and another one-in-four chance of an offspring who does not carry the code. . . .

-Marcus A. Meadows, Genetics, Genetics, January 1974, pp. 231-244

Despite the Red-baiting paranoia of the late 1940s and early 1950s and the "findings" of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, aces fared no better behind the Iron Curtain than in this country, and in fact considerably worse. The party line was laid down by Trofim D. Lysenko, semiliterate maven of Stalinist science, that the supposedly alien "wild card" was merely a mask for diabolical bourgeois capitalist-imperialist experimentation. In Korea, captured Americans were made to sign confessions of germ warfare in an apparent attempt to account for the outbreak of the virus that swept that nation, North and South, in 1951. Meanwhile, anyone showing signs of metahuman talents within the Soviet sphere simply disappeared, some to forcedlabor camps, others to labs-and no few to shallow graves.

With Stalin's death in 1953 came a minor relaxation. Khrushchev acknowledged the existence of aces, and they began to "enjoy" the status they had in the U.S.-i.e., they had the privilege of serving in the military or GPU (later KGB), or vanishing into the Gulag Archipelago. As the 1960s pa.s.sed, strictures against them relaxed, if not to the extent that they did in the United States, and state-sponsored superheroes were permitted to become media personalities, like cosmonauts and Olympic stars.

Why the initial rejection of blatant reality? The Brezhnev/Kosygin regime admitted in 1971 that Lysenko was a joker, in whom the virus was expressed as hideous disfigurement; the existence of aces was a personal affront to the former farmer. As to why Stalin went along with the anti-ace campaign, the rampant paranoia of the dictator's later years in particular is generally considered sufficient explanation. However, several highly placed defectors of the late 1960s and early 1970s repeated the rumor that Comrade Nikita sometimes, late at night in his cups with boon companions, boasted that he himself had slain the former dictator with his own hand in the cellar of the Lubyanka Prison-driving a stake through his heart. . . .

-J. Neil Wilson, "Back in the U.S.S.R.," Reason, Reason, March March 1977.

Xenovirus Takis-A, colloquially called wild card, was an experimental organic device developed by the Ilkazam, a leading family among the Psi Lords of Takis. Written into its DNA is a program that reads the genetic code of the host organism and modifies that code in order to enhance the host's innate propensities and characteristics. Such an optimization gratifies as never before the great Takisian drive to cultivate personal (and by extension familial) virtu virtu. Takisians already possess potent mental powers; by means of wild card the Ilkazam sought to bring forth a multiplicity of wild talents in its members, ensuring its preeminence for many years to come.

The challenge the Ilkazam researchers faced was to produce a program that would identify and enhance desirable desirable characteristics; no one wants to be a better hemophiliac. Biochemical individuality among Takisians, however, is even more marked than in humans, who are one of the most biochemically diverse species on Terra. To develop software capable of discerning favorable characteristics-an "intelligent" program-and enhancing them, and which could be implemented in the viral DNA, required experimentation on an extravagant scale. Given the nature of Takisian society there were always plenty of subjects available for even the most drastic experimentation, Takisians as a whole not having many hangups about insisting the subjects volunteer. However, even Takis lacked a sufficiently large supply of criminals and vanquished political enemies-not a distinction commonly drawn in that culture-to provide the sort of experimental base needed to fully develop such a complex tool. Fortunately, from the Takisian point of view, a pool of creatures of astonishingly similar genetic makeup presented itself . . . earth. characteristics; no one wants to be a better hemophiliac. Biochemical individuality among Takisians, however, is even more marked than in humans, who are one of the most biochemically diverse species on Terra. To develop software capable of discerning favorable characteristics-an "intelligent" program-and enhancing them, and which could be implemented in the viral DNA, required experimentation on an extravagant scale. Given the nature of Takisian society there were always plenty of subjects available for even the most drastic experimentation, Takisians as a whole not having many hangups about insisting the subjects volunteer. However, even Takis lacked a sufficiently large supply of criminals and vanquished political enemies-not a distinction commonly drawn in that culture-to provide the sort of experimental base needed to fully develop such a complex tool. Fortunately, from the Takisian point of view, a pool of creatures of astonishingly similar genetic makeup presented itself . . . earth.

. . . Most wild card enhancements aren't favorable to survival, or are survival traits taken to lethal lengths, such as keying the adrenaline fight-or-flight system so high that the slightest stress forces the victim into overdrive, burning him out in a single burst of terminal speed-trip frenzy. Nine out of ten survivors had undesirable characteristics enhanced, or desirable ones enhanced in undesirable ways. The "joker" takes forms ranging from the hideous through the painful to the pathetic or merely inconvenient. A victim might be reduced to a formless blob of mucus like the familiar Jokertown resident Snotman, or might be transformed into a partial animal likeness like tavern-keeper Ernie the Lizard. He might acquire a power that in other circ.u.mstances would make him an ace, such as the limited but uncontrollable levitation of the Floater. The manifestation may be quite minor, like the ma.s.s of tentacles that form the right hand of Joker's Wilde, Jokertown's decadent poet laureate.

In certain cases the distinction between cla.s.sifications is blurred, as in the aforementioned Ernie, whose slightly-greater-than-human strength and the protection offered by his scaly hide are insufficient to make him a true ace. Another, more horrific example is the tragic Burning Woman incident of the late 1970s, in which the virus affected a young woman by causing her body to burn with an inextinguishable flame, but to regenerate itself even as her flesh was consumed. The victim begged pa.s.sersby to kill her, and finally died in Jokertown's Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, apparently as a result of euthanasia-a resulting indictment against Dr. Tachyon was quashed. Whether her card qualified as joker or black queen cannot be determined.

Because it is designed to interact with its host's individual code, no two expressions of wild card are alike. Moreover, its behavior differs from subject to subject. . . .

. . . That as many as ten percent of those who contracted the virus survived its effects is a tribute to the skill of Takisian genetic software and hardware artistes. For a first large-scale test, among a subject population different from that for which it was originally designed, the release of the virus on Terra was a tremendous success which would greatly have pleased its creators, had they learned of its outcome.

Earth, on the other hand, had a different point of view.

-Sara Morgenstern, "Blues for Jokertown: Forty Years of Wild Cards," Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, September 16, 1986

Excerpts from the Minutes of the American Metabiological Society Conference on Metahuman Abilities (Clarion Hotel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 14-17, 1987)