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    Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards
    Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards
    Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards
    Ebook528 pages10 hours

    Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards

    By George R. R. Martin and Victor Milan

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    About this ebook

    The Wild Cards series goes into unexplored depths in Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards, a standalone novel written by award-winning author Victor Milan and edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin.

    Pursued by the CIA, the DEA, and the Wild Card mistress of the winds, Mistral, renegade biochemist Mark Meadows uses the three personalities buried in his psyche to outwit his pursuers. Fleeing across Europe and Asia, Mark meets a Vietnam veteran with an astounding plan—to lead an army of jokers in a war of conquest. Caught between jokers who despise him and nationalists who want him dead, Mark must decide whether to unleash his ace powers for a madman’s bloody dream, or to stay true to his peaceful ideals—and die.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 9, 2021
    ISBN9781250168160
    Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards
    Author

    George R. R. Martin

    George R.R. Martin is the author of fifteen novels and novellas, including five volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, several collections of short stories, as well as screenplays for television and feature films. Dubbed ‘the American Tolkien’, George R.R. Martin has won numerous awards including the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an Executive Producer on HBO’s Emmy Award-winning Game of Thrones, which is based on his A Song of Ice and Fire series. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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      Book preview

      Wild Cards XII - George R. R. Martin

      PART ONE

      Friend of the Devil

      Chapter 1

      IF THE TALL MAN had not been to an alien world, he would never have seen the danger.

      Spring on the Damplein, with the North Sea sky above, blue arid astringent as the taste of peppermint, as if to cut the smell of the IJ docks beyond the rail yards. Mark Meadows said, Huh? and came back to himself with a sensation like a bubble bursting.

      A newspaper had wrapped itself around his shins like an affectionate amoeba. He reached down, picked it up. It was a two-day-old copy of the international Herald Tribune in English. He glanced at the headlines. Governor Martínez was announcing victory in the War on Drugs. The UN was still debating whether the American suppression of the jokers on the Rox had been genocide—a twinge went through his soul at that. He’d had friends on the Rox, and it hadn’t been the fault of the poor jokers who had gathered there to defy an increasingly hostile nat world that he’d had to flee for his life.

      Bloat, man, I’m sorry. K. C. was right. The Combine couldn’t let you go, and they were just too damned much for you. Requiescat in Pace.

      In other news, the European Council was convening a summit on wild cards affairs. Nur al-Allah terrorists had bombed a free joker clinic in Vienna. The government of Vietnam declared it would keep the revolutionary socialist faith until the end of time, no matter that everyone else from South Yemen to the USSR was dropping it like a rabid rat.

      It was as if he’d never left.

      Mark would rather have his nails pulled out than litter; he wadded the paper into a back pocket of his secondhand khaki trousers. Now that he had been pulled back out of that remote place inside his head where he’d been spending so much time of late, he blinked in the thin noonday light. A lunchtime mob was squeezed in between the Palladian-style Royal Palace—with its green statues of mythological figures and its seven symbolic archways that led, symbolically, nowhere—and a lot of boxy old brown buildings with gabled roofs. The scene felt comfortable but just a bit drab, which struck Mark as a perfect microcosm of what he’d experienced of Dutch life in the few weeks since he’d returned to Earth.

      People were looking up and pointing. He raised his head too. He had to squint against the sky’s brightness, but right away he saw what they were looking at: a slim figure, high above the Earth, flying without aid of an aircraft.

      Where he came from, that was no big deal; flying aces were as regular a feature of New York’s sky as smog and traffic helicopters. The Europeans had less experience with such phenomena. They still got excited.

      Mark shaded his eyes, tried to make out who it was. The suit seemed to be blue, hard to pick out against the sky, and it trailed a voluminous white cape. The getup belonged to no one he’d met personally, but it was familiar from countless TV broadcasts.

      Hmm, he said. Mistral. Wonder what she’s, like, doing over here?

      Nobody stepped forward to enlighten him. He noticed that something was going down on the Vischmarkt side of the square. He had some free time—very little but, in fact—and had been vaguely acting on an urge to wander down and check out the Central Station again. It was the product of the same daffy late-nineteenth-century romanticism that led Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig to build the original of what Walt Disney would make into Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, all gingerbread and silly towers that its builder fondly believed was Renaissance. Just to Mark’s taste, in other words.

      Curious, Mark dared the stream of lorries and buses and bicycles pedaled by puffing businessmen and Indonesians whose limbs and faces seemed carved of polished mahogany to cross the broad street called Damrak or Rokin, depending on where you were, that split the square in two. Speakers had been placed among the concentric rings that circled the white cement dildo of the war memorial. A young man with baggy paratrooper pants and his hair cropped to a silvery-blond plush was striding back and forth between them, hollering into a cordless mike. He was attracting a crowd, mostly young.

      What’s going on? Mark asked the air in general. Amsterdammers tend to be reserved, but they’re also cordial, and have a seven-hundred-year tradition of taking strangers in stride. As Mark anticipated, one caught hold of the conversational line he’d thrown.

      The young man is a Green, came a reply in an old man’s voice that made the Dutch-accented English sound gruff. He is speaking about the wild cards.

      Wild cards? Mark frowned. He rubbed at his beard—it was growing in nicely, full this time instead of the goatee which had been his trademark for so long, and he wasn’t entirely used to feeling hair on his cheeks. Have things changed since I left? he wondered. I thought the Greens were, like, an environmental party.

      The young orator was pointing after Mistral, about to vanish to the southwest. His exhortation had cranked up a notch in pitch and vehemence.

      They are. The old man nodded precisely, once. He had a dark suit and dark Homburg and leaned on a dark cane. Time seemed to have reduced him to the bare essentials except for round red cheeks. With his snow-white Imperial he looked like a shrunken Colonel Sanders. But they are a political party, and so they must have an agenda for everything.

      What’s he saying? Mark didn’t know much about the Greens except for what he read in Time and the Village Voice or saw on the CBS Evening News, but he’d always had the impression they were pretty right-on. Still, whenever he heard people talk about wild cards and politics in one breath, he got that old familiar ice-water trickle down the small of his back.

      He says that the new Europe must make all those touched by the wild card wards of the state.

      What? His daughter had been a ward of the state for a while. Getting her out of kid jail—where she’d been thrown because the government disapproved of both her parents, not because she had done anything wrong—was the reason he was living undercover in a foreign land. One of them, anyway. That—that’s discrimination. It’s like racism.

      Indeed. It does seem that way. The young man assures us it is for everyone’s good. The jokers must be cared for in the interests of compassion, the aces must be constrained in the interests of public safety. In this way only can an environmentally pure Europe emerge.

      He shook his head. I do not like this myself. The earnest young man has the right to say his piece, no true Amsterdammer would deny him. But I remember another group that wanted to single a particular group out for special treatment. They were very concerned with the purity of the environment; they were quite Green, in fact. This very monument commemorates their victims.

      The Greens aren’t the only ones who, uh, have it in for the wild cards, Mark said. He’d seen English-language telecasts of debates in the European Parliament in The Hague on RTL.

      No, indeed. It is a very popular point of view these days. Very progressive. The Eastern Europeans can turn on wild cards instead of Jews, now that the Soviet boot is off their necks, and no one will criticize them. He looked at Mark closely. Once again, you Americans lead the way.

      It’s not something I’m proud of, man.

      Good. Good for you.

      He held up a hand. Wait. Listen: ‘There is nothing natural about the wild cards. That is not their fault; they are innocent victims of an alien technology more monstrous than even American technology. But like Styrofoam or the products of gene-engineering, their access to our threatened biosphere must be supervised and carefully restricted.’

      At least we’re easily recyclable, man, Mark said.

      His stomach dropped away toward the center of the Earth when the old man’s eyes caught his and held them and he realized what he’d said.

      I hope you have not correctly grasped the thrust of what that very sincere young man is saying, the old man said, but I very much fear you have.

      Feeling strange, feeling as if the Beast’s mark the fundamentalists said listening to rock ’n’ roll would give you was finally glowing to red life on his forehead, 666, Mark mumbled thanks and started away. The old man called him back.

      I hope you will forgive my saying so, young man, but you look just like the Jesus of the Calvinists, with your long blond hair and your beard, the old man said. Fortunately I am Catholic.

      Mark blinked and smiled sheepishly, as startled at being called young as by the rest of what the old man said. He was in his early forties, and he didn’t feel young.

      Then purposeful movement caught the corners of his peripheral vision, and alarms rang in his skull.

      On Takis the assassin’s knife is just part of the decor. You reflexively learn to pick it out of the background, the way an antique freak could spot a Louis Quinze chiffonier in the clutter of an Amsterdam spring market. Or you die.

      Get down, Mark said to the old man. He turned to run.

      Hey! A voice shouted behind him—American English, bright and brassy as a trumpet. Hey, you son of a bitch, stop!

      That was it. The dogs were on him. He thought it would take them longer to sniff him out. He stretched his long legs and ran like hell.

      Motherfucker, the slender dark-haired man snarled. His hand dove inside the summer-weight off-white jacket he wore without a tie.

      His beefier, blonder comrade grabbed at his arm. Lynn, no—

      The Czech Skorpion is a true machine pistol, which is to say it’s pistol-sized and it shoots full-automatic like a machine gun. Not appreciably accurate but nice and concealable, just the thing for chopping up people at handshake range. It was a popular number with the Euroterrorist set, like the West German Red Army Faction before the Wall came tumbling down.

      The Colt Scorpion is entirely different. It’s manufactured in America for use by various government agencies, which is to say the DEA. It looks like the Czech Skorpion, it works like the Czech Skorpion, and it fires the same round as the Czech Skorpion. But the Czech Skorpion is used by terrorists, and the American Scorpion is used by the good guys. No similarity at all.

      The man called Lynn used his Scorpion the way they teach at all the better law-enforcement academies: you fire short bursts and sort of slash the thing around as if it’s a scimitar. People screamed and fell. A loudspeaker popped and died. The plush-headed young man in the para pants goggled and ran for cover behind the white pillar of the monument.

      The Netherlands was a peaceful place, and proud of it. Though first socialism and then Greenthink had made them self-conscious about it, the Dutch still regarded trade as a more elevated calling than murder made legal, made sport. They lacked gunfire reflexes.

      Most of the crowd was just standing and staring, not realizing where the sudden loud sounds were coming from or even what they were. The tall man took instinctive advantage of this, darting this way and that through the crush like a frightened earthbound crane, his shoulder-length gray-blond hair flying a head above the crowd but not offering any kind of shot, even for someone calm enough to draw bead.

      The man with the Scorpion wasn’t. His dark eyes burned like drops of molten metal, and beads of knotted muscle stood out inside the hinge of either jaw. The veins and bones of his hands seemed about to burst through the skin as his partner wrestled them and the machine pistol into the air.

      Lynn, Jesus, take it easy, the big blond kid gasped. There’s gonna be hell to pay if you cap too many natives.

      Lynn tore away from him with a wordless curse, raised the weapon again. Their quarry had darted behind the white cement demilune that backed the monument pillar and vanished.

      The good burghers were belatedly getting the message that something was very wrong, and diving to the pavement to join those who were rolling around clutching themselves and screaming. "You son of a bitch, Gary, Lynn raged, swinging the Scorpion both-armed in front of him like José Canseco in the on-deck circle. You let him get away!"

      Yeah, Gary said, hauling on the sleeve of his Don Johnson pastel sport jacket. Now we’d better think about getting away before the cavalry comes.

      He dragged Lynn, still screaming, through a now-panicked crowd. The Amsterdammers didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, as if they didn’t associate the two Americans with the abrupt irruption of noise and pain. They dodged across Damrak/Rokin and down the street that ran along the north side of the square, to a silver and blue cicada of a Citroën parked in front of the Nieuwe Kerk.

      A figure dropped down from the sky to meet them. Her slim form was encased in a uniform of blue and silver. A parachute-like cape deflated around her shoulders as she touched down. Her hair was brown.

      You missed him, she said in a flat voice.

      Lynn slammed his Scorpion back into its shoulder holster. If you’d been down low covering us instead of showboating way the hell up there in the wild blue yonder, he never would’ve gotten away.

      She gave him a haughty look. She was well equipped for it, with the kind of narrow nose and fine features that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a glamour magazine, and hadn’t. There were dark circles beneath the green-hazel eyes, though, and a haunted look within them.

      I had no idea you were going to move so quickly. I thought we were going to set this up carefully and then move. Forgive me if I don’t quite have the hang of your methods.

      Lynn saw the sucker, the blond agent said. It just kind of set him off. There’s history between them, y’know?

      I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, the ace said. I’d figure that going off prematurely would be one of your friend’s difficulties.

      Lynn gave her a look black and hot as the flank of a potbellied stove. Then he turned and kicked the Citro’s door. He’s just a hippie. A fucking burned-out hippie. How the hell could he make us?

      Somebody must have told him, his partner said. Somebody turned us over.

      These damned Dutch uncles. They don’t have the stomach for the War on Drugs. They’ve been jacking with us since day one. He shook his head. If I hadn’t cut loose on him the second I spotted him, we’d never— The sirens had tuned up, their little voices rising and falling like a computer-simulated doo-wop group.

      The woman’s face went white. You trigger-happy halfwits! she snarled. "You just sprayed a crowd with bullets?"

      He’s an ace, the bigger man said defensively. What do you want Lynn to do, Ms. Carlysle, let Meadows have first crack at him? A good man’s already died on the trail of this puke.

      Shot accidentally by NYPD, the woman said, as a result of his own carelessness.

      "You fucking bitch." Lynn started forward as if to strike her.

      A whistling rose around the agent. A cloud of dust swirled upward to surround him. His dark hair began to whip in his face, and his clothing to flap as if he were caught in the midst of a whirlwind. He opened his mouth, but suddenly seemed to have no air to speak with.

      His partner laid a hand on his arm. Lynn, take it easy. She didn’t mean anything.

      The whistling stopped. Lynn fell back against the car, briefly and resentfully touched the base of his throat with his fingertips.

      I’m quite capable of taking care of myself, Agent Hamilton, the woman said. Your being so quick on the draw is going to cause us serious problems with our hosts.

      Lynn had recovered enough to show her a smirk. So what? They can’t touch us. We’re DEA.

      If innocent people died—

      Hey, baby, we’re in a war, Lynn said. In war, people die. The sooner these fat-ass Dutchmen wake up and smell that cup of coffee, the sooner they’re gonna fit into this new Unified Europe thing.

      Mistral Helene Carlysle gave him a final angry look and got into the driver’s seat. The two agents piled hastily in after her. They squealed away from the ancient church as emergency vehicles flooded the square behind them.

      Chapter 2

      ON EGLANTIER STRAAT THE narrow ancient houses leaned gently toward one another across the canal, the tulips in the boxes at every sill like overemphatic splashes of makeup on the faces of aging tarts. Mark Meadows collapsed in the doorway of the house where he rented a flat, and just breathed. It was a questionable move, however necessary. The streets in this district were all named for flowers—its name, Jordaan, was the nearest the Dutch could come to phonetically spelling its old name, which was the French word for garden—but the Eglantine Canal that ran right past the house front smelled more like a sewer.

      After a while old Mrs. Haring’s big black tom Tyl appeared and jumped on Mark. He made sure to brace his hind feet in Mark’s crotch and knead Mark’s solar plexus with his powerful forepaws, making it difficult to breathe. Mark thought he loved all animals, but Tyl was an evil bastard.

      In the first flush of panic Mark’s instinct had been to return here, home, like a fox to its earth. Now that he had a chance to think about it, he wondered if it had been such a good idea.

      They’ve found me. How do I know they’re not upstairs waiting? How do I know they aren’t up under the gables across the canal, watching, calling to each other on their walkie-talkies, getting ready to yank the snare?

      He felt scattered, strange, irresolute. He felt as if maybe he should just lie here in the doorway until they came for him. It was better than having to choose. To act.

      He squeezed his eyes shut. No. He’d been suffering these bouts of indecision, of the sensation that he was a lot of dissociated motes flying around without a common center, since Takis. Dr. Tachyon said they ought to pass, in time, but that was mostly just to make Mark feel better, not to mention himself. The truth was, Mark’s condition was something entirely new to the psychological sciences of Takis as well as of Earth.

      A part of Mark had died on Takis. Literally.

      He reached to his chest, felt the reassuring lumps of the vials in his shirt pocket, beneath the sweater. Only four now. He hadn’t even thought of them when the shooting started.

      Would I have had the presence of mind to take one before … before Takis?

      He told himself to hang on. Things had worked out fine. He hadn’t needed a friend; if he’d summoned one, there might have been a confrontation with his pursuers. More innocents might have been hurt. As it was, he desperately hoped no one had been killed by the gunfire meant for him.

      And he could not stop from wondering, What have I really lost?

      He made himself breathe slowly, from his diaphragm—not easy with that damned fifteen-pound cat digging him there and grinning—and pull his wits together. He wasn’t too hip to modern police procedure, but he understood that cops were basically lazy. If they knew where he was living, they’d just have waited for him there, rather than roam all over the city in hopes of stumbling across him. They could take him easily and unobtrusively here, in this still-slummy backwater of the generally gentrified district just west of where the medieval town walls once stood.

      If unobtrusiveness was a priority. They had been willing to spray a crowd of innocents with gunfire in broad daylight. Not exactly discreet.

      He shivered. And they were Americans. Not since Vietnam and his belated rise to consciousness of the antiwar movement had he felt such shame in the country of his birth. What have we come to?

      He was a criminal, of course. A federal fugitive, and one whom the authorities believed was fantastically dangerous. They were right, too, if you considered raw power. But he believed, in the core of him, that he had done nothing wrong.

      In fact they were primarily hunting him for doing something right. The rightest thing he had ever done: rescuing his daughter Sprout from the living hell of the kid jail the kinder, gentler New York authorities had committed her to.

      A vague alarm, trilling in the pit of his stomach: what if they followed me here? But frightened as he was, he hadn’t gone completely stupid. The path he’d taken had been anything but direct. Like a lot of ancient European cities, Amsterdam was compact—tiny, actually, at the core—but it was also as convoluted as Hieronymus Bosch’s brain. Ideal for losing pursuers.

      He pushed the cat off his chest. Tyl got a good dig into him with foreclaws through sweater and T-shirt, then rubbed purring against Mark’s shins as he stood. Hoping to overbalance him so that he’d crack his head on the stoop, no doubt.

      He pushed into the house. The stairwell was filled with gloom and the smell of vinegar-intensive Dutch cooking. Mark put his head down and started up the steep steps.

      Because the grachtenhuizen, canal houses, were painfully narrow—the palaces of the old syndics over on the Bend of the Herengracht no less than the tenements—there was little room for switchbacks in the stairwells. This house had been built with the stairs a straight shot up to the fifth-floor attic flat Mark rented. Mark told himself it was aerobic exercise and kept climbing, though the tendons of his shins were already so tight, it felt as if they’d snap his tibias like Popsicle sticks.

      The door opened at what he still thought of as the second floor, though everyone in Europe insisted it was the first. The face of his landlord glared out like a big lumpy fist clutching a wad of wiry black hair, with two round turquoise rings for eyes.

      Ahh, the landlord breathed in a juniper-scented gust of genever, the local gin. Mr. Marcus.

      Afternoon, Henk. As unobtrusively as he could manage, Mark craned to look past him into his apartment, just in case it was packed to the rafters with American narcs and automatic weapons. There was nothing but the usual clutter of bottles, tracts, and porcelain figurines. Henk Boortjes liked to keep a supply of cutesy bric-a-brac; symbols of hypertrophied bourgeois gezelligheid, on hand so he could bust them up when the iconoclastic fit was on him.

      Henk was an old kabouter. The kabouters—gnomes—were a post hippie movement of the early Dutch seventies, self-proclaimed anarchists and environmentalists. Some of them still hung on, but their niche in the food chain had been mostly co-opted by the Greens.

      The landlord squeezed onto the stairs. Mark managed to sidle past before his belly, which overflowed from the bottom of a well-holed black T-shirt with a red-circled A on it, blocked the passage. There was no room for a landing in this narrow scheme of things.

      Have you heard the news? Henk demanded.

      No, man. I’ve been out.

      There was shooting, down in the Damplein. Someone fired a machine gun at the crowd. Half a dozen were injured, though nobody has died yet.

      That’s, uh—that’s terrible, man.

      Henk fixed him with a red-rimmed glare. Whenever such things happen, one can be certain there are Americans at the bottom of it.

      Mark swallowed. It wasn’t me, man, he joked feebly.

      The landlord kept him pinned with his stare. Mark realized the man was half convinced he—Mark—was a CIA spy sent to make sure he didn’t single-handedly upset the applecart of American imperialism. He was guiltily familiar with that kind of self-glorifying paranoia. During his years as a counterculture fringie he’d indulged in a lot of it himself.

      Then came the last couple of years, when Mark learned what it was like when they really were after you.

      Henk nodded suddenly, with a grunt that made it sound as if his neck were a rusty hinge, releasing Mark from the bonds of his eyes.

      I’ve caught him, he said, with a brown-toothed grimace Mark suspected was a smile.

      Who, man?

      That old bastard de Groot, down the block.

      De Groot was Henk’s archenemy. He was an artist, at least to the extent that every few weeks he’d splash some paint on a canvas and then get the Arts Ministry to pay him a totally optimistic price to stick it in one of these enormous warehouses they maintained for the purpose. He was in fact more or less a contemporary of Mark’s landlord, and belonged to some rival anarcho-faction that the kabouters had splintered into. Mark had a suspicion Henk’s real grievance was that he himself couldn’t get registered to sell his modeling-clay sculpture to the Ministry, and he suspected his rival of blackballing him.

      What’s he done, man? Mark asked.

      He has violated our fair-housing laws. He’s renting to an Indonesian family, and he has too many of them crammed in that tiny flat. He spat on the stairs. Mark yanked his foot up in alarm and almost toppled over. Exploiter. He won’t get away with it; I’ve notified the authorities.

      So, like, what happens to the Indonesians?

      Certainly, they shall move out.

      "You mean they’re gonna get thrown out on the street?"

      The glare returned. Their rights must be protected. Obviously you don’t understand.

      I guess I don’t, man.

      Mark’s flat was stuffy with the rising heat of mid-afternoon, up in the attic beneath the bell-gabled roof. He opened the front window and walked back through the apartment.

      It was narrow but not really small. The canal-front houses were surprisingly deep, and the flat ran all the way to the rear of the building, a succession of rooms strung together in what Mark thought of as shotgun style. In the bathroom all the way back Mark opened the other window to let the rank Amsterdam breeze in.

      As he returned to his living room, Mark took out his wire-rim glasses and put them on. It wasn’t vanity that made him leave them off when he was out; he was a skinny six-four American, which did not make him the least conspicuous person in the world. Not wearing the glasses was at least a gesture in the direction of not being spotted by hostile eyes. For a man whose Secret Ace Identity once consisted of dressing up in a purple Uncle Sam suit and matching stovepipe hat, it was a pretty comprehensive gesture.

      It didn’t seem to have worked, though. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat on the sill of the open window. Right over his head a massive wooden hoist beam jutted from the face of the house. All the old-time grachtenhuizen had them. People rigged blocks-and-tackles to them when they had to move things in and out of the upper floors. You didn’t want to try wrestling a piano up those stairs, or anything less wieldy than a loaf of bread.

      He was careful not to knock over the window box. It was crowded with red and yellow tulips he’d bought on a day trip to the country, just like the boxes on all the sills on the block and, as far as he could tell, in the whole damn country.

      He wasn’t, in retrospect, sure what he’d expected to find in Amsterdam—a sort of Hippie Heaven on Earth, perhaps, with naked people chasing each other happily through the streets and screwing in the fountains to the tune of the Dead and the Lovin’ Spoonful, all seen through a blue-green scrim of pot smoke. The actuality was staid: a lot of neat reserved plump people who left their front curtains open so you could admire the crowded coziness of their living rooms—Bourgeois Paradise in all truth, though with the occasional startling tangent.

      On the other hand, after the never-ending adrenal nerve-whine of palace life and open warfare on Takis, a little petit bourgeois calm was not at all unwelcome. Or maybe Mark was getting old.

      When it came to flowers, though, the good people of Amsterdam made the Flower Children of the Summer of Love look like developers. Mark had the vague impression that a couple of centuries back they’d actually had a boom-and-bust depression over tulip bulbs. April was tulip season, and the city looked as if it had been invaded by a race of tiny aliens with bulbous brightly colored heads who liked to hang out on windowsills. It made Mark wonder what the tulip mania had been like.

      Still, a country that could go hock-the-baby crazy over flowers had to have a place for Mark. After everything he’d been through, he was still the Last Hippie.

      Gazing at the gaudy flowers and sipping his coffee—an exotic blend with a taste like licorice to it that the little Indonesian guy who ran the coffee store down the street had pressed on him—he thought about his daughter, Sprout. His lips smiled, but his blue nearsighted eyes grew sad behind his glasses.

      She would be fifteen now, his daughter. With her mom’s features and his eyes and blonde corn-silk hair. He hadn’t seen her for almost two years.

      She was perpetually four, was Sprout. Though she was physically perfect, quite beautiful, in fact, she was severely developmentally disadvantaged—or whatever euphemism they were hanging on it this year. No matter what name they gave it, the doctors could do nothing to cure it.

      Mark loved her desperately. For her he had made the Great Leap Forward from common or garden federal fugitive to perennial guest star on America’s Most Wanted.

      Now there were more tough decisions to be faced. About Sprout.

      He rose, set the cracked Delftware cup from the service he’d picked up at one of Amsterdam’s innumerable flea markets on the sill beside the planter. He walked between posters he’d bought here in the Jordaan, Tom Douglas’s bearded glare answering Janis Joplin’s sad, doomed smile, to kneel by the fireplace. He rummaged around up inside the flue. His fingers found a still-strange texture, resilient to the touch. He lifted the pouch off the smoke shelf. It took all his never-great strength to get it over the blade of the damper.

      He laid the pouch along the hearth. It was half the length of his arm and gleamed a rich, blue-veined maroon. He ran a thumb along the top. A hidden seam parted. The pouch was Takisian, artifact of a culture that preferred growing things to fabricating them. He wasn’t entirely sure the pouch was not in some sense alive. He tried not to think about it.

      He pushed the pouch open. Inside, faces ignored him with fine Takisian hauteur. Too-sharp features turned profile, captured in crisp relief on soft yellow metal, showed an unmistakable resemblance to Tachyon. Tach’s grandfather; by custom, Tach’s father had had the gold coins struck on his accession, as a memorial. Mark guessed the Doctor would be having some coins of his own minted now, in honor of his own loved/feared father, Shaklan.

      Oh, Tach—Tis. He shut his eyes and squeezed tears out. His closest friend, sometimes it seemed his only friend, now light-years away. Tach had returned home from his forty-year exile to find his father a vegetable, beyond reclamation even by Takisian science, kept alive only to preserve the claim of his branch of the family rulership of House Ilkazam. One of the first acts by Tachyon—still trapped in the body of Blaise’s ex-girlfriend, Kelly—had been to shut down his father’s last vital processes by a touch of his mind. The ostensible reason was to ensure Tach’s own accession and head off a coup attempt by a hostile line, and Jay Ackroyd still thought he was a monster for it.

      Mark thought that, whatever the motive, it had been an act of transcendent mercy. He hoped he would have the moral courage to do the same. He feared he wouldn’t.

      There were about five pounds of the coins, each a little shy of twenty-three grams, around eighty percent of an ounce. For reasons Mark could not begin to fathom—economic processes were pure alchemy to him—gold prices had really launched of late. He did get the drift, which was that the coins were worth a pretty piece of change.

      But they were nothing compared to the jewelry. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, cut in strange geometric shapes. The stones were set in silver, a metal the Takisians—or Tach’s House Ilkazam, at any rate—favored over gold. The silverwork was truly breathtaking. Fine filigree, fantasies spun in wire that intertwined like dreams, like the destiny of a race. Mark had never seen work remotely like it. It possessed a hypnotic quality, as if the twining lines could draw the eye of the observer in, draw his soul. Even without the rarity value of being genuine artifacts from an alien world—hard to substantiate, though surely no one could ever really believe human hands had made them—the pieces of jewelry were priceless.

      He had no idea what to do with them. He had passed a few of the coins; the canny Dutch were a bit bemused by the unearthly patterns they were struck in, but accepted them readily enough once they satisfied themselves they were real gold.

      The loot made him feel strange. He had helped Tach because the Doctor was his friend and needed his help. He had done things for Tachyon that he’d never done for anybody else, that he never imagined he’d be called on to do. But he hadn’t done them for treasure.

      He had accepted the reward because Tach insisted. Tachyon had his own pride, he knew that. But what Mark wanted was to find a way to make it without becoming reliant on the alien’s beneficence.

      He wanted to send the treasure to Sprout. That posed problems too. Under the RICO and Continuing Crime Acts—America’s answer to the Nacht und Nebel decrees—any property identified as his was liable to confiscation by the federal government.

      Even if he could find a way to smuggle it to his daughter, his dad might not accept it. Sprout was in the care of General Marcus Antonius Meadows, recently retired as commander-in-chief of America’s Space Command. The aging Vietnam War hero had a pride prickly as any Takisian’s.

      Mark picked up a bracelet—armlet, maybe, openwork, light as a breath. Set in it was a spherical stone, tawny and pearlescent. It glowed with its own light. The glow grew brighter when he held it in his hand. He traced the patterns of the silverwork in his mind. They seemed to lead him into the heart of the stone. It was warm in there, warm and safe and far from worry and fear and strange, harsh-voiced young men with guns.

      When he came back to himself, it was dusk outside. He shook himself, hastily scooped the treasure back into its alien pouch and stuffed it back up the flue. He was spacing out a lot these days. He was doing a little dope—this was Holland, after all, and despite growing pressure from the rest of the European community, they practically gave the stuff away like the Green Stamps of Mark’s childhood. His appetite for grass was nowhere near what it had been before his ex-wife Sunflower had come back into his life, bringing with her the child-custody suit that would wind up with Mark on the lam, Sprout in the juvie home, and Sunflower herself committed to a mental institution.

      He doubted the dope had anything to do with the fugues anyway. There was a void inside him since Takis. Sometimes when he wasn’t careful he wandered into it.

      So far he’d always come back.

      He closed the window, drew the chintz curtains. At this altitude nobody could see into his living room anyway, so it didn’t look out of place. It would be dark soon, and even though this was the North Sea, the night sky sometimes cleared.

      He couldn’t handle stars yet.

      Chapter 3

      COUGHING AND GRUMBLING, HENK emerged from his doorway as Mark trudged up the stairs next afternoon, a loaf of French bread and an English-language book on silver-smithing tucked under his arm. Mark had found the book in a Jordaan shop. He was so entranced with his Takisian silverwork, he had decided that that might be what he should try to do for a living: learn to capture that airy beauty, seduction in pale metal.

      Today the landlord wore an apron. As far as Mark knew, he didn’t cook. He seemed to subsist entirely on meat pies from a little shop around the corner.

      There has been more about the shooting, Henk announced. Yesterday. In the Damplein.

      Really, man? Mark asked, trying to sidle by, waiting to be denounced as a fugitive, as responsible.

      It was an attempt on the life of a noted Green activist. He was speaking on the need for the new European Community to take an active role in wild cards affairs. He waited with his chest puffed out portentously.

      Really? Mark managed to say.

      Henk nodded. Is it not obvious? They are a conspiracy, these aces. They think they are better than the rest of us. Mark my words, they must soon be controlled, or they will take over.

      Mark fled up the stairs.

      Night arrived. Mark was heating soup on the cracked-enamel gas stove when someone knocked on the door.

      His heart jumped into the base of his throat. His long fingers sought the little leather pouch he wore to carry his vials when he wore a T-shirt without pockets beneath his sweater. After the excitement in the Dam Square yesterday he had stuffed an extra set into it.

      Take it easy, man, he told himself. Don’t get paranoid.

      It’s probably only Henk. Wiping his hands on a linen towel with blue windmills printed on it, he walked to the well and down the short flight of stairs that led to the flat’s door.

      It wasn’t Henk. It was a short man dressed like a tourist, in a navy windbreaker and khaki pants, a New York Yankees baseball cap worn over short hair that had clearly once been brown but was now mostly the color of ash. He had a luxuriant mustache with obviously waxed tips. It was mostly seal-colored. Maybe he dyed

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