Ace in the Hole by George R. R. Martin
Devaughn raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“Fuck the polls,” Gregg said. He glowered at Devaughn as glass dribbled from his cuffs. “I don’t believe in polls. Hell, let me debate Bush and I’ll tear his nuts off. He’s about as dynamic as dry toast. That’ll turn the polls around.”
“Bush won’t debate you, Gregg. He won’t come near a platform with you and he’ll make you look like a fool when you insist. Resign, Gregg.”
“Look, Charles, I’m the candidate. Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what you or anyone else thinks. This convention elected me and by god, I’m running. I’ve got Jackson—he’s charismatic…”
“He’ll also pull out of the ticket if you try to continue this charade.” Devaughn sniffed like a prissy English lord. Like Tachyon. “You broke down, Gregg. America saw you on TV acting like a gibbering fool and they wonder how you’d react in a crisis in the White House. They don’t want your finger on the button, Gregg. And frankly, neither do I.”
“Damn it, that wasn’t me that broke down, I tell you. It was Tachyon doing it. He took over my mind. I’ve told you that now a hundred times.”
“So you say. You’ll have a hell of a time proving it, though, won’t you? Frankly, Gregg, that’s going to sound like just another weak excuse. Or are you claiming Tachyon did it to you in ’76, too?”
“Goddamn you!” Gregg roared. He pushed Devaughn with both hands, and the big man rocked backward, a suddenly frightened look on his face. “I’m not resigning!”
“Take your hands off me, Gregg.”
Gregg looked at Devaughn. With Puppetman, I’d make the bastard crawl … He took a deep breath and stepped back. He rubbed his hands on his pants as if they were dirty. “I’ve made up my mind on this,” he said softly.
Devaughn stared at him scornfully. “Then they’ll reconvene the convention whether you like it or not. If you fight, you come out with nothing. You’ll be made to look like a total ass. Resign, and maybe you can salvage at least your dignity from this mess. That’s my final piece of advice for you, Senator.” He stressed the last word mockingly.
Gregg went over to the couch, picture-tube glass crunching under his wingtips. He flung himself down on it. He cursed monotonously to himself, Devaughn watching silently. When he finally looked up, the words he spat out tasted like ash.
“I’ve been hanging on with my damn fingertips, and now you’re getting your kicks jumping up and down on them until I let go, aren’t you? Well, you get your wish. Tell Tony to write the damn resignation,” Gregg said. “He can write whatever he wants; I don’t care. You read it—you’ll get the most fucking pleasure out of it. And tell Amy to make arrangements to get me and Ellen out of Atlanta. I don’t want to see any reporters. You got it?”
Devaughn sniffed. His gaze was scornful and superior, and Gregg ached to tear it from his face, but he didn’t have the power anymore.
“Tell them yourself. I don’t work for you anymore.” Devaughn shook his head. “I had it all for you and you blew it. I’m going to see if Dukakis can use my talents.”
Devaughn left the room with prissy dignity. A Secret Service man stuck his head in, glanced at Gregg and the shattered glass on the rug, and shut the door again.
Gregg sat there alone for a very long time.
9:00 A.M.
Somehow over the years he had managed to spend a lot of time in morgues. And no matter how beautifully appointed, how perfectly cleaned, nothing could hide the essential fact—they were freezers for dead human meat.
“I appreciate your coming down here,” the M.E. was saying as he led Tachyon into the operating room. His eyes slid to Tachyon’s stump, and quickly away. “Especially after … but I’ve never seen anything like this, and you’re the expert.”
“No problem. It’s sort of fitting somehow.”
The M.E. helped him into gown and mask. They walked to the table. A wan-faced woman was clutching rib cutters to her chest, and eyeing the headless body with wary alarm.
The corpse had been slit from sternum to groin, the ribs cut and pulled aside. But pale yellow fat was growing across the glistening intestines. The ribs were putting out bony tendrils. Skin had grown across the severed neck, and pooching up from the center of the neck, like a finger thrust into a drum, was a tiny bud. Tachyon bent in for a closer look. Fascinated and horrified and unable to stop himself.
“It’s almost as if it’s … trying to … to…”
“To grow a new head, yes.” Tach jerked back when he realized the embryonic head had eyes.
What if they suddenly opened? Would Demise’s power remain? Would he make good his threat even from beyond the grave?
Stupid! He’s always killed from beyond the grave.
Bending Tachyon slid his dagger from its boot sheath, and jabbed it sharply into a buttock. The body arched and jerked.
“Shit!” screamed the woman, and the M.E. didn’t stop running until he reached the door.
Clinging to the swinging door, he stuttered, “Wha … what the fuck is that?”
“A mistake. A major miscalculation on my part. My nemesis and a reminder not to play God. May I suggest that we dispense with the autopsy, and move straight to cremation?”
“Great. You’ll get no argument from me. What about the ashes? Are there any next of kin?”
A humorless smile touched Tachyon’s lips. “I suppose I stand in loco parentis. I’ll take them.”
“Doc, you are one weird dude,” sighed the woman, and she snipped off a rib that had grown beyond the edge of the chest cavity.
10:00 A.M.
ACES BATTLE IN CONVENTION BLOODBATH
Sara winced and let the newspaper fall into mud drenched by firehoses and churned by a thousand feet of various descriptions.
You’re right, damn you, she thought, in case Tachyon happened to be listening in. He wouldn’t, though; that Takisian honor of his. That damned expedient Takisian honor.
He’d laid it right on the line, as straightforwardly as he’d laid her Friday night, and even less gently: You cannot unmask Hartmann. It would hand the election to Barnett on a platter. How many innocent joker lives are you willing to spend on your vengeance?
“None,” she said.
A couple of joker faces looked at her with shell-shock blankness. None of them recognized her; she had a leopard mask on today. It had been lying in a gutter on Peachtree. The riot hadn’t mashed it beyond usefulness.
Something crunched beneath her foot. She kicked at it until a sign emerged from the mud, hand-lettered at the JADL headquarters tent for last night’s demonstration. The message almost made her smile.
Judas Jack, 1950
Traitor Tach, 1988
Two of A Kind
With Mackie dead she’d been able to return to her own room. She was dressed today in blue jeans and a loose pale-blue blouse. She let her Reeboks carry her past a CBS remote van, where an earnest young black stringer was talking into a yellow-foam phallus.
“Piedmont Park remains virtually deserted after a night of rioting in which three hundred jokers were arrested. Several dozen jokers wander, as if dazed, among the trampled ruins of the tent city; Atlanta mayor Andrew Young has rescinded his order that any jokers found on the street should be arrested on sight, following a personal plea in the early hours of this morning by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Debate still rages over Governor Harris’s refusal to declare martial law.…”
They were few enough, but they were in a sense her people. She walked among them for the last time. No joker would trust her again, and she had sworn on her soul never to reveal the secret that would vindicate her in their eyes. For their sake she had to let them hate her.
For my sake. Unless I never plan to pass another mirror with my eyes open.
Tom Brokaw spoke to her from a portable television resting on an upturned ice chest and being ignored by a listless black joker with glowing blue carbuncles covering his face and such of his body as his cover
“… uneasy truce that prevails between a mixed force of police and aces and several hundred joker demonstrators outside the Blythe van Renssaeler Clinic.…”
The camera cut to a sign supported either edge by six green sucker-tipped fingers: “The Knave of Hearts Beats Every Joker in the Deck.” Then it panned to a joker Sara knew named Canker, for obvious reasons, with the beleaguered J-Town Clinic for backdrop.
“Aces are helping the pigs oppress jokers on this street,” he told the camera, gesturing at the cordon that kept the protesters at bay. “An ace did Chrysalis and a joker stands to burn for it. It’s us against them!”
Tachyon, Tachyon, did you know what you were sacrificing? She knew. That was one reason she was willing to burn her own career and reputation at his behest.
The other was that she had her vengeance, and nothing else mattered.
Puppetman was dead—that was what Hartmann called his power, Tachyon said. Demise had killed it, sucked it right out through Hartmann’s eyes before Mackie Messer decapitated him.
The evil wasn’t dead; oh, no. No matter how much Gregg wept, how bitterly he protested his innocence. Puppetman had been the crystallization of Hartmann’s lusts. Those lusts still lived.
But Gregg didn’t have the ability to pull strings and make puppets dance to gratify his needs anymore. That was what Demise had destroyed.
And Gregg would never have the balls to walk the night with a knife in his own hand.
Without his power, Gregg was trapped in hell. Sara no longer wished he’d die. Now she hoped he lived a long, long time.
She sat on an overturned trash can. Andi, she thought, this is vengeance, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want me to ruin the life of every wild card in America just to buy you a little more?
The spoiled little bitch probably would. But Andrea Whitman was dead now, too.
Sara shook out her winter-pale hair, smoothed it back from her face with her hands. A breeze blew across the park, almost cool. She lifted her head and looked out over the morning-after battlefield.
A black policeman rode around the outskirts of the park on a tall bay gelding. He watched her closely. A pig hunting more victims? A frightened man trying to do his job? It was a judgment call, and Sara Morgenstern was fresh out of judgments.
Victims …
Puppetman’s strings were all cut. But Gregg Hartmann had one more victim left.
She stood up and left the park with a sense of purpose that tasted like an alien emotion to one who thought her purpose was all used up. She left the mask in a can that said KEEP ATLANTA BEAUTIFUL.
Tachyon closed the door to Gregg’s suite behind him. Gregg looked up from the Samsonite suitcase he was packing. “Doctor,” he said. “I’m surprised you came so quickly. Amy must have just called you a few minutes ago…”
“I suppose I felt I owed it to you.” The alien was holding himself in stiffly, his chin cocked forward over a ruffled lace collar and a paisley, electric-blue silk shirt. Despite the pose, Tachyon was obviously on the edge of exhaustion. His skin was too pale, the eyes too sunken and hollow, and Gregg noticed that he held the stump of his hand behind him. “I feel no guilt about what I did to you. I would do it again, gladly.”
Gregg nodded. He closed the suitcase, latched it, locked it. “I’m picking up Ellen at the hospital in a few hours,” he said conversationally. Setting the luggage down on the floor, he gestured silently to a chair.
Tachyon seated himself. The lilac gaze was utterly expressionless. “Well, let us play it—the final scene in this little drama. But quickly. There are other people I need to see.”
Gregg tried to stare him down. It was difficult to hold the alien’s intense, unblinking gaze. “You can’t say anything, you know. You still can’t.”
Tachyon grimaced and his eyes darkened as if in implicit threat.
“No, you won’t,” Gregg said softly. “You tell the press what you know about me and you prove that Barnett was right all along. There was a secret ace with his hands on the strings of the government. The wild card virus is something to be feared. The nats do need to do something to protect themselves from us. You talk, Doctor, and all the old laws will seem like freedom. I know you. I’ve had twenty years to watch you and learn how you think and how you respond. No, you won’t talk. After all, that’s why you did what you did last night.”
“Yes, you are quite correct.” Tachyon sighed and pressed his stump to his chest as if it pained him. “What I did went against all my principles—some old ones, and some newfound ones. It was not something I did lightly or at whim. You are a murderer and you should pay.” He shook his head in weary frustration. “And ships should be stars, but they’re not, and nothing can ever make them so.”
“What the hell is that—the Takisian version of spilt milk?” Gregg paced across the room, then whirled to face the alien. “Look, you’ve got to know one thing. I didn’t do it,” Gregg told him. “Puppetman did it. The wild card power. All of it was the wild card. Not me. You don’t understand what it was like to have him inside. I had to feed him or he’d destroy me. I’d have given anything to have rid myself of him, and now I have. I can make a fresh start, I can begin again—”
“What!” Tachyon’s roar interrupted.
“Yes. Puppetman’s dead. Last night on the podium, Demise took him. Look inside me, Doctor, and tell me what you see. You didn’t have to ruin me; the evil was already gone. By the time you took my mind, I was free.” Gregg studied his hands. A deep sorrow welled up in him, and he looked at Tachyon with eyes that shimmered with moisture. “I would have made a fine president, Doctor. Maybe even a great one.”
Tachyon gazed back with unyielding steel in his gaze.
“Gregg, there is no Puppetman. There never was a Puppetman. There was only Gregg Hartmann and his weaknesses, a man who was touched by an alien virus and was provided with a power whereby he could feed the darkest corners of his soul. Your problem is not that you are a wild card, Gregg. Your problem is that you are a sadist. This feeble excuse of yours is almost classic guilt transference. You constructed a shadow personality so you could pretend that somehow Gregg was still clean and decent. That is a child’s trick. That is a child’s deception, and you are smarter than that.”
Tachyon’s harsh words were like a slap. Gregg flushed, angry that Tachyon would not understand. It was so obvious; it seemed impossible that Tachyon could not tell the difference. “But he’s dead,” Gregg cried in desperation. “I’ll prove it to you. Go on,” Gregg insisted. “I’m asking you to. Look inside me and tell me what you see.”
Tachyon sighed. He closed his eyes, opened them. He turned away from Gregg, pacing the room silently for a long minute and then coming to a halt near the windows. When he looked at Gregg again, it was with a strange sympathy.
“You see, I told you,” Gregg said, almost laughing with relief. “Puppetman died last night. And I’m glad. I’m so goddamn glad.” Gregg felt the laughter becoming tinged with hysteria, and he took a deep breath. He looked at Tachyon, who stared at him sternly. Gregg raced to say the rest. “My god, the words are so fucking inadequate and stupid, but it’s true. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for it all and I’d like to do what I can to start making up for it. Doctor, I’ve been made to do things that I hated. I lost a son because Gimli used Puppetman against me, I—”
“You are not listening to me. There was no Puppetman and Gimli died over a year ago. There was no Gimli either.”
It took several long seconds before the impact of those words sunk into Gregg. “What?” he stuttered, then the denial came fierce and desperate and angry. “You don’t know what the hell you’re saying, Doctor. Gimli’s body died, but not his mind. He found his way into my son. He was in my head; he nearly made me lose any control of Puppetman at all—that’s how all this started. He threatened me, said he was going to make Puppetman destroy me and my career.”
“Gimli died a year ago,” Tachyon repeated, relentlessly. “All of him.
“You lie!” The word was a shout. Gregg’s face was distorted with rage.
Tachyon just stared at him coldly. “I was in your head, Senator. You have no secrets from me. You are a disassociative personality. You’ve denied the responsibility for your own actions by creating Puppetman, and when that threatened to get out of hand, you needed another excuse: Gimli.”
“No!” Gregg shouted again.
“Yes,” Tachyon insisted. “I will tell you once more. There was never a Gimli, never a Puppetman. Just Gregg. Everything you did, you did yourself.”
Hartmann shook his head wildly. His gaze was pleading, hurt and vulnerable. “No,” he said softly. “Gimli was there.” His eyes went suddenly wide and frightened. “I … I wouldn’t have killed my child, Doctor.”
“You did,” Tachyon said, and he saw in Gregg’s eyes the deep wounds each word ripped into the man’s soul, even though Gregg would not admit it. Already Hartmann was defiantly forcing himself into a semblance of calm and control. He smoothed his hair back with one hand.
“Doctor, I don’t know what you want me to do. Even assuming that I gave any credence at all to what you’re saying—”
“Get help.”
Intent on his own words, Hartmann almost missed Tachyon’s. “Hmm?”
“Get help, Gregg. Find a therapist. I’ll find you a therapist—” Suddenly Tachyon realized how impossible that was. A therapist would have to be told too much, and it would all come out. Somehow, it could all unravel. Tachyon’s face twisted in frustration. He did not like the only answer he could see. “We’re going to spend a lot of time together, Gregg.”
“What do you mean?”
“As of now, I am your physician. You are under my care.”
Gregg spat laughter, turning his back on the doctor. “No,” he said. “Uh-uh. I don’t need a damn shrink because Puppetman’s gone. You’re not even human, Doctor. I doubt you’re particularly well-qualified to act as a psychologist.”
“Consider it a compromise position. It will guarantee my silence.”