Wild Cards V (75 page)

“I don't
know
where he went, damn it!” Hiram's voice. “He just walked out!”

“He was looking for you!” There was a sudden crash, as if a stack of pans had just toppled.

“I don't know! I don't know! He just walked out, goddammit!”

“He wouldn't walk out on
me
!”

“He walked out on both of us!”

“
Jane
wouldn't walk out!”

“They both left us!”

“I don't believe you!” More pans crashed.

“Out! Out! Get out of my place!”
Hiram's voice was a scream. Suddenly he appeared, rushing out of the kitchen with another man in his arms. The man was Asian and wore a chef's uniform. He seemed light as a feather.

Hiram flung the man into the outside door. He didn't have enough weight to swing it open and began to drift to the floor. Hiram flushed. He rushed forward and pushed the man through the door.

There was a silence in the restaurant, filled only by the sound of Hiram's winded breaths. The restauranteur gave the bar a defiant glare, then stalked into his office. One of the customers rose hastily to pay for his drink and leave.

“Goddamn,” the other customer said. He was a lanky, brown-haired man who looked uncomfortable in his well-tailored clothes. “I spent
twenty years
trying to get into this place, and look what happens when I finally get here.”

Modular Man looked at Wall Walker. The black man gave him a rueful smile and said, “Standards fallin' all over.”

The android took an odd comfort from the scene. Hiram
was
different. It wasn't just some programming glitch.

He turned his mind back to Wild Card Day. Circuits sifted possibilities. “Could Croyd have been working for the Astronomer?”

“Back on Wild Card Day?” Wall Walker seemed to find this thought interesting. “He
is
a mercenary of sorts—it's possible. But the Astronomer killed just about all of his own henchmen—a real bloodbath, mon—and Croyd is still with us.”

“How do you know so much about Croyd?”

A smile. “I keep my ear to the ground, mon.”

“What's he look like?” Modular Man intended to avoid him.

“I cannot give a description of what he looks like right now. Fella keeps changing appearance and abilities, understand, mon—his wild card. And last time he surfaced he had someone with him, a bodyguard or something, and no one knows which is which. Or who. One of them, Croyd or the other guy, he's an albino, mon. Probably got his hair dyed and shades over his eyes by now. The other is young, good-looking. But neither have been seen for a few days—no new cases of wild card—so whichever one is Croyd, he may be someone else now. He may not be carrying the plague anymore.”

“In that case the emergency's over, right?”

“Guess so. There is still the gang war going on, though.”

“I don't want to hear about it.”

“And the elections. Even
I
don't believe who's running.”

Seen on radar, Hiram appeared from his office, cast another anxious glance over the barroom, left again. Wall Walker's eyes tracked him over Modular Man's right shoulder. He looked concerned.

“Hiram's not doing well.”

“I thought he seemed different.”

“Business is way off, mon. Aces are not as fashionable as once we were. The Wild Card Day massacres were a real black eye for all wild talents. And then there was violence all
over
the bloody place on the WHO tour, a real cock-up, and Hiram took part … beg pardon, mon, that's something else you probably don't know about.”

“Never mind,” said the android.

“Okay. And now, the Croyd buggering up and dealing jokers and Black Queens all over town, a big reaction is going on. Soon it may not be … politically astute … to be seen in aces' company.”

“I'm not an ace. I'm a machine.”

“You fly, mon! You are abnormally strong, and you shoot energy bolts. Try and tell someone the difference.”

“I suppose.”

Someone walked into the bar. The radar image was strange enough that Modular Man turned his head to pick up on him visually.

The man's brown hair and beard hung almost to his ankles. He had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, outside the hair, and otherwise wore a dirty T-shirt, blue jean cutoffs, and was barefoot.

None of this was sufficiently abnormal to do more than suggest a wild card, but as the man ambled closer, Modular Man saw the different-colored irises, orange-yellow-green, set one within the other like target symbols. His hands were deformed, the fingers thin and hairy. He held a six-ounce bottle of Coke in one hand.

“This is the man I need to see,” Wall Walker said. “If you'll pardon me.”

“See you later maybe.” Modular Man stood up.

The hairy stranger walked up to the table and looked at Wall Walker and said, “I know you.”

“You know me, Flattop.”

Modular Man made his way to the bar and ordered another zombie. Hiram appeared and ejected Flattop for lacking proper footwear. When he left with Wall Walker, the android noticed that he had plugged the Coke bottle into the inside of his elbow joint, as if the bottle were a hypodermic needle, and left it there.

The bar was empty. Hiram seemed fretful and depressed, and the bartender echoed his boss's mood. The android made excuses and left.

He wouldn't drink zombies ever again. The associations were just too depressing.

“Yah. Gotta get us some money, right, food processor?” Maxim Travnicek was rooting through a pile of notes he'd written to himself during Modular Man's assemblage. “I want you to get to the patent office tomorrow. Get some forms. Shit, my foot itches.” He rubbed the toe of his left shoe against his right calf.

“I could try to get on
Peregrine's Perch
tomorrow. Let everyone know I'm back. She only pays scale, but…”

“The bitch is pregnant, you know. Gonna pop any day now, from what I can see.”

Something else I hadn't heard about
, the android thought.
Wonderful.
Next he would discover that France had changed its name to Fredonia and moved to Asia.

“But you should see her tits! If you thought they were good before, you should see them now! Fantastic!”

“I'll fly over and visit her producer.”

“Bosonic strings,” Travnicek said. He had one of his notes in his hand but didn't seem to be looking at it. “Minus one to the
N
th is minus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals one.” His eyes had glazed over. His body swayed back and forth. He seemed to have fallen into some kind of trance. “For superstrings,” he went on, “minus one to the
N
th is plus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals minus one … All of the
n
times
n
antihermitian matrices taken together represent
U
(
n
) in the complex case … Potential clash with unitarity…”

Cold terror washed over the android. He had never seen his creator do this before.

Travnicek went on in this mode for several minutes. Then he seemed to jerk awake. He turned to Modular Man.

“Did I say something?” he asked.

The android repeated it word for word. Travnicek listened with a frown. “That's open strings, okay,” he said. “It's the ghost string operator that's the bitch. Did I say anything about Sigma sub plus one over two?”

“Sorry,” said the android.

“Damn it.” Travnicek shook his head. “I'm a physicist, not a mathematician. I've been working too hard. And my fucking foot keeps itching.” He hopped to his camp bed, sat down, took off his shoe and sock. He began scratching between his toes.

“If I could get a handle on the fucking fermion-emission vertex I could solve that power-drain problem you have when you rotate out of the normal spectrum. Massless particles are easy, it's the…”

He stopped talking and stared at his foot.

Two of his toes had come off in his hand. Bluish ooze dripped deliberately from the wounds.

The android stared in disbelief.

Travnicek began to scream.

“The operators in question,” said Travnicek, “are fermionic only in a two-dimensional world-sheet sense and not in the space-time
D
-dimensional sense.” Lying on a gurney in the Rensselaer Clinic E-room, Travnicek had lapsed into a trance again. Modular Man wondered if this had anything to do with the “ghost operator” his creator had mentioned earlier.

“Truncating the spectrum to an even
G
parity sector … eliminates the tachyon from the spectrum…”

“It's wild card,” Dr. Finn said to Modular Man. There had scarcely been any doubt. “But it's strange. I don't understand the spectra.” He glanced at a series of computer printouts. His hooves clicked nervously on the floor. “There seem to be
two
strains of wild card.”

“Ghost-free light-cone gauge … Lorentz invariance is valid…”

“I've informed Tachyon,” said Finn. He was a pony-size centaur, his human half wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope. He looked at Travnicek, then at the android. “Can you assume responsibility for this man, should we decide to give him the serum? Are you family?”

“I can't sign legal documents. I'm not a person, I'm a sixth-generation machine intelligence.”

Finn absorbed this. “We'll wait for Tachyon,” he decided.

The plastic curtains parted. The alien's violet eyes widened in surprise. “You're back,” he said. Modular Man realized this was the first time he'd ever heard Tachyon use a contraction.

Tachyon was dressed in a white lab coat over which he wore a hussar jacket with enough gold lace to outfit the Ruritanian Royal Guard. Over it was strapped a Colt Python on a black gunbelt with silver-and-turquoise conchos. “You're carrying a six-gun,” Modular Man said.

Tachyon recovered quickly from his surprise. He waved his hand carelessly. “There has been … harassment. We are coping, however, I am pleased to see you have been reassembled.”

“Thank you. I've brought in a patient.”

Tachyon took the printouts from the centaur and began glancing through them. “This is the first appearance of the wild card in three days,” he remarked. “If we can discover where the patient was infected, we might be able to trace Croyd.”

“Reparametrization invariance of the bosonic string!” Travnicek shouted. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “Preserve the covariant gauge!”

Tachyon's eyes narrowed as he glanced at the printouts. “There are two strains of wild card,” Tachyon said. “One old infection, one new.”

Modular Man looked at Travnicek in surprise. Probabilities poured through his mind. Travnicek had been a wild card all along. His ability to build Modular Man had been a function of his talent, not native genius.

Tachyon looked at Travnicek. “Can he be awakened from this state?”

“I don't know.”

Tachyon leaned over the gurney, looked at Travnicek intently. Mental powers, Modular Man thought.

Travnicek gave a shout and batted the alien's arms away. He sat up and stared.

“It's that fucking Lorelei!” he said. “She's doing this to me, the bitch. Just because I wouldn't tip.”

Tachyon looked at him. “Mister, ah…”

Travnicek brandished a finger. “Stop singing when we do it, I said, and maybe I'll tip! Who needs that kind of distraction?”

“Sir,” Tachyon said. “We need a list of your contacts over the last few days.”

Sweat poured down Travnicek's face. “I haven't seen anyone. I've been in the loft the last three days. Only ate a few slices of pizza from the fridge.” His voice rose to a shriek. “It's that Lorelei, I tell you! She's doing it!”

“Are you sure this Lorelei is your only contact?”