Aces High by George R. R. Martin
“Maybe he was growing them in a petri jar. I don’t know, Doctor. Nor do I know the credentials of whoever identified this alleged swarmling tissue—”
“I assure you I am an alien biochemistry expert—”
“In several senses.” He jerked slightly back from the receiver; perversely, he was starting to like this woman. “I’m not saying I doubt you, Doctor. But I can’t just wave my hand and let your man walk free. That’s up to the DA. Whatever you have, take to Doughboy’s attorney and have him present it. And if you’ve really found more swarmlings, I’d suggest you take that up with General Meadows at SPACECOM.”
Who is Mark’s father. “And one more thing, Doctor.”
“What is that, Lieutenant Arrupe?”
“Get off this case or I’ll chuck your ass in the joint. I don’t need amateurs muddying the water.”
Chrysalis looked at him with a face glass-clear and china bone. “Anything strange happening in Jokertown?” she drawled in that hermaphrodite British accent of hers. “Whatever makes you think anything strange might happen here?”
He sat at one end of the bar, well away from the morning regulars. He wasn’t exactly a stranger at the Crystal Palace. He never quite relaxed here, just the same.
“Not just Jokertown. This part of Manhattan, from Midtown south.”
She set down a glass she was polishing. “You’re serious?”
“When I say strange, I mean strange for Jokertown. Not the latest outrage at Jokers Wild. Not Black Shadow dangling some mugger from a streetlamp by his foot. Not even another bow-and-arrow murder by that maniac with his playing cards. Something out of what passes for the ordinary hereabouts.”
“Gimli’s back.”
Tach sipped his brandy and soda. “So they say.”
“What are you paying?”
He raised a brow.
“Dammit, I’m not just a back-fence gossip! I pay for my information.”
“And are well paid. I’ve contributed my share, Chrysalis.”
“Yes. But there’s so much you don’t tell me. Things that go on at the clinic … confidential things.”
“Which shall remain confidential.”
“All right. Goodwill in this mutant community is my stock in trade too, and you don’t have to remind me how influential you are. But someday you’ll go too far, you metal-haired little alien fox.”
He grinned at her. And was gone.
Tring. Tach winched one eye open. The world was dark but for the usual Manhattan light-haze and perhaps a little moonlight oozing in through open curtains, silvering the bare female rump upturned beside him on the maroon coverlet of his water bed. He blinked, gummily, and tried to remember the name of the person to whom the buttocks belonged. They were really outstanding buttocks.
Tring. More exigent this time. One of this world’s most satanic inventions, the telephone. Beside him the glorious buttocks shifted slightly and a pair of shoulders came into view from behind a ridge of comforter.
Trrrr- He picked up the phone. “Tachyon.”
“It’s Chrysalis.”
“Delighted to hear from you. Do you have any idea what hour of the night it is?”
“One-thirty, which is more than you knew. I’ve got something for you, Doctor darling.”
“Whozat, Tach?” mumbled the woman at his side. He patted her rump abstractedly, trying to remember her name. Janet? Elaine? Blast.
“What is it?” Cathy? Candi? Sue?
Chrysalis hummed a tune.
“What in the name of the Ideal was that?” he demanded. Mary? Confound Chrysalis and her damned humming!
“A song we used to sing, back when I was at camp ‘Johnny Rebeck.’”
“You called at one-thirty in the morning to sing me a campfire song?” Belinda? This was getting to be too much.
“‘And all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen/They’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Rebeck’s machine.’”
Tach sat up. “What is it?” the woman beside him demanded, petulant now, turning toward him a face masked with sleep and dark hair.
“You’ve got something.”
“Like I told you, luv. Not Jokertown, but nearby. Around Division, next to Chinatown. Dogs and cats disappearing—strays, pets; people in these parts aren’t too concerned with leash laws. And pigeons. And rats. And squirrels. Several blocks are just devoid of the usual urban wildlife. Jokes about oriental cuisine aside, I thought this might qualify as your strange event.”
“It does.” Ancestors, how it does!
She purred. “You owe me, Tachyon.”
He was swinging his legs out of bed, wishing for courtesy’s sake he could remember this young woman’s name to send her packing. “I do.”
“And by the way,” Chrysalis said, “her name’s Karen.”
“Doctor,” Trips said through a cloud of his own breath, “do you have any idea what Brenda called me when I phoned her to come look after Sprout at this hour of the night?”
In the weeks he’d known Mark, it was the first time he had heard him voice a complaint of any sort. He sympathized. “I don’t want to even imagine, dear Mark. But this is crucial. And I feel we have no time to waste.”
Mark crumpled. “Yeah. You’re right. Doughboy’s got it a whole lot worse than anything I’ve ever known. I’m sorry, Doc.”
Tachyon looked at this man, a brilliant scientist whom personal demons had driven to batter himself into little more than a derelict, and honestly wondered. He stroked his arm. “No harm done, Mark.”
Not far away the cars hissed over the Manhattan Bridge. They had here a dark side street in a none-too-prepossessing part of town, small shops and shadows and loan sharks and derelict manors, gray cramped buildings winking here and there with broken windows in the glow of a single fading streetlight. Not an hour to be abroad here, even without the prospect of otherworldy menace.
“This may just be a false alarm,” Tach said. “When Chrysalis told me about the animal disappearances, it occurred to me that swarmlings need food, and unless this culture advances more quickly than any I’ve heard of, they could scarcely buy it at the A&P.”
He stopped, faced his friend, gripped him by the biceps. “Understand this now, Mark. There may be nothing here. But if we’ve found what we are looking for, we are going to be confronting a monster like something from a horror movie. But it’s real. It’s the enemy of every living organism on this planet, and it is utterly without compunction.”
Mildly, Mark gestured up the block. “Does it look anything like that, man?”
Tach stared at him a moment. Slowly he swiveled his head right.
A figure stood on the corner at the end of the block nearer the overpass. A coat was stretched around it, a hat pulled low, but even muffled as it was there was no hiding that its proportions were never those of a normal human being.
“Excuse me a moment, man,” Trips said. He pulled away, and holding hat on head ran from the apparition, rounding the corner with knee-swinging sole-slapping strides.
Coward! blazed up nova in Tach’s breast, and then, But no, I cannot be so hard on him, for he is no fighter and this is a menace strange to his kind. He squared his shoulders, straightened his cravat, and turned to face the creature.
It took a swaying step forward, another. One foot made a sucking sound as it came off the asphalt. From the darkness behind it another figure lurched, clothed the same way, its outline different but clearly kindred. Ah, Benaf’saj, you were right to doubt me. I never imagined there might be two. He readied his spirit for death.
“Doctor.”
His head snapped round. A young woman stood beside him, dressed from throat to soles in black broken only by the sideways commas of a yin-yang design on her chest. The emblem was matched by a black mask that curved up from her left cheekbone across the right side of her forehead, leaving half her face bare. She was taller than he. Her hair was black and lustrous. What he could see of her face looked Oriental and br
He performed a courtly if abbreviated bow. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“I am Moonchild, Doctor. And I have the honor of knowing you—if not exactly at first hand.”
It was beginning to seep through his blood-brain barrier. “You’re one of the Captain’s friends.”
“I am.”
Danger always made his blood run high. At least that was his subsequent excuse for the lechery that gripped him now. “Dearest child,” he breathed, grabbing her hands, “you are the loveliest sight these eyes have beheld in ages.…”
Even in the diffuse glow he saw her blush. “I will do my poor best to aid you, Doctor,” she said, misunderstanding … maybe.
She whirled from him and glided down the street, relaxed and poised and deadly-seeming as a stalking leopard. He marveled at her aura of strength, her liquid grace, the play of buttocks beneath her tight black suit—buttocks were much with him, tonight. He trotted after her, Takisian-unwilling to let a woman face danger.
When she was twenty meters from the nearer swarmling she flowed into a charge, at ten launched herself clear of the street with panache that made him gasp. She pirouetted in flight, snapped her right heel around behind her, pivoting driving a perfect spinning back kick into the shoulder of the beast. There was a dry squelch, dropped-pumpkin sound. The thing gave back. Still spinning, Moonchild rebounded, touched lightly down, recovered into battle stance.
The monster’s arm fell off. Dropped right out of its sleeve.
She freaked.
All at once she was all over the street without ever moving. Screaming, wailing, thrashing like a three-way cat-fight, sinking to the pavement all the while. Tachyon stared. But she made such a strong start, he thought plaintively.
For a moment the swarmlings seemed to stare at her too. Then as one they turned back to face Tachyon, the chemoreceptors that had alerted them to his nearness guiding them inexorably toward the hated, dreaded Takisian. An empty sleeve flapped grotesquely against the first one’s side.
Tach reached for its mind. It was like clutching fog. His thought passed ineffectually through the diffusion of electrochemical signals that made up the thing’s mind.
Unsurprised, he pulled out the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson, leaned into an isosceles stance, gun gripped both-handed, sights lined up on the center of that unlovely mass, inhaled, held it, squeezed twice. The pistol produced a very satisfactory amount of flame and recoil and noise. No other results.
Shocked, he lowered the pistol. The beast was twenty meters away; he couldn’t have missed. Then he saw the two small holes, right where they should have been, one on either side of the buttoned coat-front. Mental attacks weren’t the only things that passed right through a swarmling.
“I’m in trouble,” he announced. He aimed for the shadow beneath the hat-brim, fired twice more. The hat flew off. So did great chunks of the diseased-potato mass within that served the being as a head. It came on.
Moonchild had quit screaming and beating at herself, and sat with hands between knees, watching intently. “Bullets don’t hurt them,” she said, voice raw from screaming. “They—they’re not human.”
“Very observant.” He fired off the last two, started backing away, groping in a pocket for a speed reloader, hoping he had one.
“I thought I had mutilated a human being, a joker,” she said. She was on her feet. She raced toward a building to Tach’s right, crossing behind the lumbering swarmlings, launching herself again, this time on a trajectory Tach would have sworn would take her to the third floor of the structure. But he didn’t see, because when she entered the building’s shadow she vanished.
To reappear seconds later, feetfirst right through the middle of the second swarmling. Cloth tore, biomass gave, and the being just generally came apart as she hit pavement and rolled.
A moment and she was up again, sprinting forward, dropping low to support herself on one hand while her leg swept before her in a scything kick. The first swarmling’s legs simply snapped out from beneath it at the knees. It landed on the stumps, plodded imperturbably on. Grimly, Moonchild closed.
Sirens were chasing each other up the sky when she finished. Tachyon applauded softly as she walked up to him. “I owe you an apology, lovely lady, for what I was thinking about you.”
She started to smooth back her hair, looked at her fingers, used her wrist instead. “You need never apologize to me, Doctor. You had reason to think as you did. But I must never use my arts to permanently harm a thinking being. And I thought I had.”
He gathered her into his arms. She laid her head on his shoulder. Indeed, he thought. He was not sure how he was going to explain this to Mark.…
She pushed herself away. “It won’t do for me to be found here. Too many questions.”
“But wait. Don’t go—there’s so much to say!”
“But no time to say it.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Be careful, Father,” she said, and once more disappeared.
“So you really did turn up swarmlings, Doctor,” said Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe, taking a plastic-tipped black cigarillo out of her mouth. “You are definitely the most active expert witness I ever saw.”
“Father,” he was thinking. An honorific, nothing more. “Sure did a number on those mothers,” observed a patrolman who clutched a riot gun like a talisman.
“With a little help from his friends, Dr. Smith and Dr. Wesson,” somebody else offered.
The street was full of flashing blue lights and uniforms and camera crews. “Guns don’t do much against those Swarm fuckers,” the first cop said.
“So how did you overcome these creatures, Doctor?” asked a reporter, thrusting the foam phallus of a mike under his nose.
“Mystic fighting arts.”
“Get these jerks out of here,” Arrupe said. To Tach’s disappointment she wasn’t pretty. She was stumpy and thick-legged, with a bulldog face and stiff short hair, like Brenda’s at the Pumpkin. She had dark freckles liberally smeared across her pug nose. But her eyes were sharp as glass shards.
“Well, Lieutenant,” he said. “Will you let Doughboy go now?”
“You have got alleged swarmling stuff in the victim’s lab, and you got a whole street full of unmistakable swarmling parts, except where they used to look like Godzilla’s baby they now look like derelicts, which may or may not be an improvement. It’s a hell of a state of affairs.”
“You won’t.”
“I have a witness, Doctor.”
“Burning Sky, woman, have you no compassion? Don’t you care for justice?”
“Do you think I’m just off the boat from San Juan? This is a solid citizen, doesn’t know Doughboy from the Pope, has no grudge against jokers, and he walks in and describes him personally. And don’t tell me witnesses are unreliable. They are. But this one’s solid.”
Tach combed back his hair with clutching fingers. “Let me talk to him.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s important. Something is happening, not just Doughboy. I know it.”
“You have some kind of damned alien brujería in mind.”
Lothario grin: “But of course.”
She slumped. “You made yourself a hero with these swarmlings, Doctor. And you know more about this kind of thing than I do.” Sidelong: “But you fuck me up with a civil-liberty beef on this, ’manito, I’m just simply gonna shoot you.”
As soon as he touched the mind, he knew.
He was a dentist, a short, athletic, ruddy man in his fifties who lived in the building next door to Warren’s. He’d been out walking the dog around the block—a daring act at that time of the night—and seen a peculiar-looking man emerge from the alleyway that ran behind the apartments. The man stopped for a moment, not ten feet away, looked the intrepid dentist straight in the eye, and shambled off into the Park.
The story jibed with that of the other two witnesses, one of whom was the super of Warren’s building, who had been investigating a broken-in back door when he w
Tachyon had only to brush the dentist’s mind to know his story was untrue. Not a lie; he believed it implicitly. Because it had been implanted.
Reluctantly, Tach dug deeper. The old pain of Blythe had receded, he no longer went clammy inside at the mere thought of using his mental powers; it wasn’t that. The nature of the implant clearly revealed what sort of being had made it. All that remained was to uncover which individual from among a very few possibilities. He had a good idea.
In a way it didn’t matter. The implications were already inescapable.
And monstrous beyond anything Tach had imagined.
“I mislike that place,” grumbled Durg at’Morakh bo Zabb Vayawand-sa as they mounted the rickety back stair to their flat in a less than fashionable corner of the Village.
Rabdan sneered back over a gold shoulder-board. “How can you cavil? You never went inside.”
“The Gatekeeper, the one with the strange dead face, he wouldn’t let me.”
“Ha! What would the Vayawand say, if they knew one of their precious Morakh sports permitted a groundling to say him nay? Truly, their sperm runs thin.”
Durg flexed a hand that could powder granite. The tough white twill of his uniform sleeve parted at his biceps with a sound like a pistol shot. “Zabb brant Sabina sek Shaza sek Risala commands I fight only as needful to the mission,” he grated. “Even as he commands me to serve one as unworthy as you, to test my devotion. But I warn you: some day your incompetence will lose you the master’s pleasure. And on that day I pluck your limbs off, little man, and squash your head like a pimple.”
Rabdan tried to laugh. It stumbled, so he tried again. “So hostile. Such a pity you could not have seen: a woman flayed, a maid dismayed; quite stylish entertainment. When the groundlings are destroyed some rare talents shall be lost, I must admit.”