Dealer's Choice Read online

  Dealer's Choice

  ( Wildcards - 11 )

  George R. R. Martin

  DEALER’S CHOICE

  A Wild Cards mosaic novel

  edited by

  George R.R. Martin

  assistant editor

  Melinda M. Snodgrass

  and written by

  Stephen Leigh

  Edward W. Bryant

  John J. Miller

  Walter Jon Williams

  George R.R. Martin

  to mom with love

  FRIDAY MORNING

  September 21, 1990

  Frontier Airlines flight 8, Los Angeles to Newark, raced to beat the morning, to meet the sun. It would lose, but only slightly. At 39,000 feet, the sky was spangled with other suns. They twinkled significantly less than they would if seen from the ground.

  The man in 14A pressed his broad forehead against the cold window. He could pick out no familiar constellation. He hadn’t expected to. Still, he missed the southern cross, as the Europeans called it. To him it was the great mirragen, the hunting cat with claws spread, leaping upon its prey.

  Hunting… He wondered if his weapons were still intact in his checked bag, deep in the belly of the 747. It wasn’t as though he were smuggling a MAC-10 or an Ingram. If there were any questions, it would be easy to declare his weapons as art. He smiled. If a hollow-point slug split your heart or a nulla nulla smashed your skull, you were just as dead. Art could be fatal.

  He smiled grimly, fingering the rough-cut opal that hung from the leather thong circling his neck.

  A patch of lights far below slowly moved past the craft and disappeared behind. The man wondered which city that had been. This was such a vast land, but then he was accustomed to vast lands. Still, two continents and a major sea in two days were a bit too much travel to absorb easily. He knew he would be joyous in the extreme when he was back on solid earth, land that didn’t vibrate to the marrow of his bones with the buzz of jet engines.

  While the occasional distant lights beneath him clearly moved, relatively speaking, the stars above remained constant. He was glad for that.

  Then the voice told him to sleep. He didn’t wish to, but the seductive whisper curled through the avenues of his skull and wrapped his brain in soothing warmth. He fought it. But he drifted, the voice gently reproaching him and reminding him of who he was… “You who returns to the stars, you are summoned.”

  And Wyungare slept.

  He descended toward the lower world, the place where he would meet and speak with the warreen, his animal guide. This time, he clambered along rocky ledges before finding the broken places where he could use handholds to lower himself to another tier of stone. This painful process went on for a long time, though the angle of sun to his right did not seem to change.

  Finally he was among trees and the slope was gentler. The grass beneath his feet soothed his skin and began to heal the ragged places where the rough stone had abraded his soles. He heard a cry from overhead. Looking up, he saw the graceful ga-ra-gah. The blue crane rode the wind with indifferent ease.

  “Welcome, Wyungare.”

  The man looked down and saw the warreen. The lower half of the creature’s bulky body was wet with mud. It seemed recently to have visited the edge of a water hole or river.

  “Hello, cousin,” said Wyungare. “I hope you are well.”

  “As well as can be expected, all these evil things of late considered. Thank you for visiting.”

  “There is little to do on the airplane. This is no sacrifice at all.”

  “Hmph,” said the warreen. “You wouldn’t catch me up in a thing like that. Those wings are so little blessed with grace, it would appear to fly with no more ease than cousin dinewan.”

  “Consider that a 747 is constructed to fly, and that cousin dinewan chose to fly no more.”

  “So?” The warreen snorted. “Our cousin could soar again if he so wished.”

  “Not for a long, long time. I fear his physical form has evolved to reflect his long-ago choice.”

  The warreen shook himself. Drying mud flew. “I still say he could change his mind, emu or no.”

  The two of them walked farther into Googoorewon, the place of trees. The sunlight was hot, and the dappled shadows cooling Wyungare’s skin felt good.

  “The times are no better outside the dreamtime?”

  Wyungare shook his head. “They are not.”

  “Nor are they within the dreamtime,” said the warreen. “That maira, that paddy-melon of a fat boy, his vision keeps floating before me.”

  “And that’s who I seek. If I find him in the land of Tya-America, I will speak with him.”

  “And if that does nothing?” The warreen’s tone was edged. “You must kill him.”

  “I would prefer not to.”

  “I am aware of that desire,” said the warreen. “You are a healer, but a warrior too. If it demands a warrior’s task, then you must perform it.”

  Wyungare nodded. “If it is necessary, then I shall. But if I can, I will make sure the task will not be necessary.”

  “Good fortune.” the warreen said politely. Then he tipped his head back, muzzle indicating the sky. “I fear we are about to receive an object lesson in thinking to heal demons.”

  The shadows gathered together on Wyungare’s skin. Clouds roiled, jostling for position, and masked the sun. A cold wind began to bend the trees.

  The blue crane still soared far above. Her cry echoed across the Googoorewon.

  The sky convulsed and lightning speared valleyward. A mallee exploded into a fountain of crackling sparks. Wyungare took a step backward. The burning scrub eucalyptus was only a score of paces distant. The wind curled and whipped dark smoke into his face and eyes.

  More lightning pierced the earth. More trees became torches. The acrid scent filled Wyungare’s nostrils.

  One bolt never reached the ground. Cousin ga-ra-rah shimmered with a nimbus of vibrating light. Then she exploded. Feathers of blue crane drifted down around Wyungare and the warreen like leaves before the winter season.

  “And what will happen to her children?” the warreen asked somberly. “In Tya-America, where you go to visit, who will guard such as the millin-nulu-nubba?”

  “They are called passenger pigeons,” said Wyungare. “I fear it is already too late in the waking world for them. I had no idea that this was the cause of the loss of their patron and guide.” He shrugged. “The evil can, of course, travel through waking time.”

  A final feather landed desultorily at his feet. Both Wyungare and the warreen cried for their cousin. When they had grieved, the sky was bright again with sun.

  “I’m going to go back up,” said the man. “I do not know when I’ll be back.”

  “Sooner than you now suspect,” said the warreen. “The fat boy will make sure of that.”

  “You make a prophecy?”

  “No,” said the warreen sourly. “I need only look about me.”

  Wyungare saw the flickering overlay on the Googoorewon: an island lapped with waves, a walled castle like the ones he’d seen in European movies, monsters.

  “All right.” Wyungare shrugged. “I’ll be back.” The man lifted his palm in farewell and started up the mountainside.

  “I think this will be difficult,” called the warreen after him. “All your cousins will be concerned. I will do what I can.”

  “I know,” said Warreen, raising his voice to cover the widening distance. “I will show my appreciation when I can.”

  “Just stop the depletion of the dreamtime,” said the warreen, voice fading out.

  Just like the ozone layer, Wyungare said silently. Not humorous. Accurate. Damn the fat boy! Europeans seemed never to have the slightest cognizance of
what they truly did to the world. Everything was now. Everything was me.

  As he climbed higher on the rocky mountainside, ever closer to the newly mottled sky, Wyungare thought: Whether it comes from the muzzle of a gun or at the tip of a pointed bone, change will come. This is the single irrevocable law.

  Billy Ray stood alone in the prow of the Coast Guard cutter, his face turned into the biting wind. He blinked involuntary tears from his eyes as the cutter sliced through the choppy waters of the Narrows, just south of New York Bay. The predawn wind was cold, but it felt good upon his face. It felt damn good to feel anything.

  Ray hadn’t seen any real action since the fiasco at the Democratic National Convention when that ugly hunchbacked bastard with the buzz-saw hands had gutted him like a fish. It had taken long months of rehabilitation for his fingers and jaw to grow back and the flesh, muscle, sinew, and bone that Mackie Messer had cut apart to knit together again. During his time in the hospital he’d played the battle over and over again in his mind, still losing every time.

  Ray heard soft footsteps on the deck behind him, and put up the hood on his black fighting suit before turning to face the Coast Guard captain who commanded the cutter. The fight with Messer had done even less good to Ray’s face than it had to his psyche. Messer had cut off half of Ray’s lower jaw. It had grown back unevenly, giving him a lopsided look that would’ve been comical if it weren’t so damn ugly.

  “We’ve spotted the freighter, sir,” the captain said with more disdain than respect. Ray, after all, was only a civilian who had special orders that made him part of this operation. He was an ace, which gave him a certain cachet, but he was an ace who had gotten his ass kicked on national television.

  Ray nodded. “Is the boarding squad ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain said. He sketched an unenthusiastic salute.

  Ray looked back over the Narrows. He didn’t know who had dropped him into the middle of this smuggler interception, but he was grateful for the opportunity. Ray needed action as badly as an addict needed rapture. He could feel his heart already starting to race, the adrenaline coursing through his system as he spotted the target ship in the predawn darkness.

  It was a tramp freighter illuminated only by lines of multicolored running lights. Flying the flag of some third-world country whose waters it had never even seen, it lumbered through the choppy waters south of the Narrows like a pregnant fat lady, leaving a spreading slick of waste oil in its wake. It had to be the ship their informant in the Twisted Fists had told them about.

  The Twisted Fists were radical joker terrorists whose main targets were anti-joker groups and governments in the Middle East. They were a studly bunch that Ray grudgingly admired. They took no shit from anyone, which was fine with Ray as long as they kept their asses out of America. Running guns to the rebellious jokers holed up on Ellis Island, however, was a definite breach of good sense.

  Ray and the boarding crew climbed into the cutter’s launch and silently slipped away. They’d almost reached the freighter when, according to plan, the cutter, put on its full display of lights and Klaxons. The captain hailed the freighter, ordering it to heave to just as they reached its bow.

  “Up hooks,” Ray said quietly as the launch bobbed up and down next to the freighter. Two men in the bow stood on wide-braced legs and tossed grappling hooks over the ship’s rail thirty feet above their heads. Both caught on the first try, and Ray went up one of the trailing ropes like a starving monkey up a banana tree. He didn’t wait for the rest of the squad. He couldn’t hold himself back anymore.

  Fighting was all that Ray lived for. He didn’t formulate policy or make decisions. He was a weapon, always primed and ready to explode. When pointed in the direction of a foe he’d erupt like a heat-seeking missile aimed at the sun and nothing could deter him from his course.

  He hadn’t seen any real action since Messer had cut him so badly. He’d taken part in a raid the Secret Service had conducted on Long Island, but that hadn’t amounted to anything. Supposedly on the trail of hot computer criminals, they’d targeted a small outfit called Jack Stevenson Games that published kids’ role-playing games. Ray was among the agents who’d busted in with guns drawn and warrants flapping to find themselves in a room full of goofballs who had nothing more lethal than twenty-sided dice. The Secret Service had still hauled everything away, computers, files, dice, and all, and then Ray had spent more than a month wading through piles of game manuals filled with crap about dungeons and hit points and saving rolls only to discover that you committed computer crime in these games by rolling dice real well.

  But this was the real thing, the first step on the mad to redemption. Ray slipped silently over the rail and crouched on the deck in shadow. It was quiet, but huge pallets laden with tarp-covered bundles of freight blocked Ray’s vision in all directions. There could be an army of Fists lying in ambush among the twelve-foot-high freight bundles, though the only immediately visible men were aft, in the lighted bridgehouse.

  So far the timing had been perfect. The Coast Guard had given the warning required by law and the assault team had gained the freighter’s deck without opposition. Now to see if the tub was carrying guns like their undercover man claimed, or just a shitload of cheap South Korean VCRs.

  Ray gestured silently to the men who had clambered up the ropes after him. They dispersed, some heading aft to take control of the bridge, others following Ray among the freight toward the hatches leading down into the hold.

  The central hatch swung open before they could reach it and a squat figure climbed out onto the deck and peered around in the darkness. A spotlight from the cutter speared him and he shrank back and threw up two pairs of arms to shield his eye.

  It was a joker, Ray thought, and a damn ugly one, with half a dozen pairs of arms spouting from his rib cage and a huge central eye right smack over the bridge of his nose. But the fact that the freighter had a joker crewman meant nothing. It wasn’t illegal to be a joker. Not yet, anyway.

  The joker squinted in the glare and screamed in a high-pitched whine that seemed inappropriate for his powerful-looking body. His lowest pair of arms brought up an assault rifle that had been dangling on a shoulder strap and he triggered a burst in the general direction of the Coast Guard cutter.

  Ray’s uneven features split wide in a crazy grin. “Put down your weapon!” he shouted. “You’re under arrest!”

  The joker whirled, his huge eye blinking blindly as he stared into the darkness where Ray stood. He fired at the sound of Ray’s voice, but Ray had already moved. The joker’s fusillade whined harmlessly over the freighter’s rail, and then the solitary gunman was cut down by a barrage of return fire that blew him out of the spotlight’s unmerciful glare.

  “Told you to put the gun down,” Ray said. He glanced right and left at the others. Lets try to take the next alive, okay?”

  The guardsmen were too disciplined to grumble, but Ray could almost feel their sarcastic glances. These men knew Ray’s reputation as a brutal brawler, and here he was chewing them out for taking out an armed and dangerous smuggler. They thought, maybe, that he’d gone soft. That Mackie Messer’s vibrating hands had cut something out of him. That the long, painful months in the hospital had leeched out his fire.

  But they were wrong. Ray hadn’t gone soft. He just wanted all of the gunrunning bastards for himself.

  All the freighter’s lights and alarms were blaring by now, though there was still plenty of shadow left on the deck. The tub’s captain wasn’t following the orders to heave to and kill all engines. He was trying to make a run for it.

  That was insane, Ray told himself as he skulked in shadow, making his way silently toward the bridge. They couldn’t expect to hide or receive sanctuary even if by some miracle they eluded the Coast Guard and reached Ellis Island.

  Ray heard a whisper of movement in the shadows to his right, and his conscious mind clicked off. He moved without thinking, pivoting on his right foot and ducking low. Some
thing big, flat, and pancake-shaped swooped down from a tarp-covered pile of freight behind him. If it had been the size of a normal human being it would have missed Ray. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

  It slammed Ray to his knees, smothering him in a cloak of rubbery skin. Ray pistoned backward with both elbows, but they sank into yielding flesh without doing any apparent damage. For a moment he panicked. He imagined buzz-saw hands coming from out of the smothering darkness and carving off bits of his body. He fought to his feet with a wild surge of strength, still enveloped in the clinging folds of resilient flesh. He struck out blindly and felt his hand connect with something solid. There was the satisfying crack of snapping bone and his attacker pulled away.

  He looked at the joker and laughed. “It’s Flying Squirrel Man,” Ray said as another jolt of adrenaline pushed through a nervous system already juiced to the max. He grinned without realizing it, a mad light dancing in his eyes.

  The joker did look a little like a flying squirrel — if flying squirrels were seven feet tall with more muscles than the average linebacker. The smuggler was holding one arm pressed to his rib cage where Ray’s last blow had broken a rib or two.

  “Where’s the moose, squirrel?” Ray asked.

  The joker charged him with an angry growl, raising his arms above his head and spreading the mantle of skin that hung from his wrists to his ankles. He was big, strong, and pissed. Just the way Ray liked them.

  Ray straightened out of his crouch and hammered the joker hard in the solar plexus. The smuggler went down and this time showed no inclination to get up.

  “Come on,” Ray spit through clenched teeth, “come on you pussy bastard.”

  The joker curled into a fetal ball, arms wrapped around his stomach. Ray snarled wordlessly. Some small part of his mind told him to slow down, but most of his consciousness was submerged in the powerful need to find another foe. This one had been too easy. Much too easy.

  He reined in his savage disappointment and went down on one knee next to the joker. He rolled the Fist onto his face and pulled his thickly muscled arms away from his still-heaving stomach. The smuggler tried to resist and Ray put his knee in the small of his back and leaned down, hard. The joker went limp and Ray slipped a set of plastic cuffs on him. He started to get up, stopped, and added another pair. He patted the joker on the fanny. “Have a nice day,” he said, and left him bound on the deck.