"It happened," Tachyon said. "She may appear normal, but the virus is still there. Latent. Most likely, it will never manifest, and genetically it's axecessive, but when you and she have-"
"I know a lot of people think I'm a joker," Tom interrupted, "but I'm not, believe me, I'm an ace. I'm an ace, damn it! So what if the kid carries the wild card gene, so he'll have major-league teke. He'll be an ace, like me."
"No," Tachyon said. He slid the photographs back into the file folder, his eyes averted from the cameras. Deliberately? "I'm sorry, my friend. The odds against that are astronomical." "Cyclone," Tom had said, on the edge of hysteria. Cyclone was a West-Coast ace whose daughter had inherited his command of the winds.
"No," said Tachyon. "Mistral -is a special case. We're almost certain now that her father somehow subconsciously manipulated her germ plasm while she was still in the womb. On Takis… well, the process is not unknown to us, but it rarely succeeds. You're the most powerful telekineticist I've ever seen, but something like that demands a fine control that is orders of magnitude beyond you, not to mention centuries of experience in microsurgery and gene splicing. And even if you had all of that, you'd probably fail. Cyclone had no idea what he was doing on any conscious level, and was freakishly lucky on top of it." The Takisian shook his head. "Your case is entirely different. All that's guaranteed is that you'll be drawing a wild card, and the odds are just the same as if-"
"I know the odds," Tom said hoarsely. Of every hundred humans dealt the wild card, only one developed ace powers. There were ten hideously malformed jokers for every ace, and ten black-queen deaths for every joker.
In his mind's eyes, he saw Barbara sitting up in bed, the sheet tangled about her waist, her blond hair cascading softly around her shoulders, her face solemn and sweet as their child suckled at her breast. And then the infant looked up, and he saw its teeth and bulging eyes and monstrous, twisted features; and when it hissed at him, Barbara cried out in pain as the milk and blood flowed freely from her raw, torn nipple. "I'm sorry," Dr. Tachyon repeated numbly.
It was past midnight before Tom returned to his empty house on First Street.
He shrugged out of his jacket, sat down on the couch, and stared out the window at the Kill and the lights of Staten Island. A freezing rain had begun. The droplets pinged against his windows with a sharp, crystalline sound, like forks tinging off empty wineglasses when the wedding guests want the newlyweds to kiss. Tom sat in the dark for a long time.
Finally, he turned on a lamp and picked up the telephone. He punched six numbers, and couldn't bring himself to hit the seventh. Like a high-school kid terrified of asking a pretty girl for a date, he thought, smiling grimly. He pressed the button down firmly, and listened to the ring.
"Top Hat," a gruff voice said.
"I'd like to speak to Barbara Casko," Tom said.
"You mean the new Missus Bruder," the voice replied. Tom took a long breath. "Yes," he said.
"Hey, the newlyweds left hours ago. Off for their wedding night." The man was obviously drunk. "Going to Paris for the honeymoon."
"Yeah," Tom said. "Is her father still there?"
"I'll look and see."
There was a long silence before the phone was picked up again. "This is Stanley Casko. Who am I speaking to?"
"Tom Tudbury. I'm sorry I couldn't attend, Mr. Casko. I was, uh, occupied."
"Yes, Tom. Are you all right?"
"Fine. Couldn't be better. I just wanted…"
"Yes?"
He swallowed. "Just tell her to be happy, okay? That's all. Just tell her I want her to be happy." He set the phone back in its cradle.
Outside in the night, a big freighter was going down the Kill. It was too dark to see what flag it flew. Tom turned out the lights and watched it pass him by.
JUBE: FIVE
The trace was unmistakable.
Jube sat at his console as the readings crawled across his holocube, his hearts thundering away with fear and hope. He had spent most of his first four months on Earth in darkened movie theaters, sitting through the same films a dozen times, reinforcing his English and broadening his grasp of human cultural nuances as reflected in their fiction. He'd learned to love their movies, especially westerns, and his favorite part had always been when the cavalry came thundering over the hill, all its banners flying.
The Network flew no banners; still, Jube thought he could hear the faint sound of bugles and the pounding of hoofbeats in those spiderly twists of light within his holocube.
Tachyons! Bugles and tachyons!
His observation satellites had detected a wash of tachyons, and that could mean only one thing: a starship in nearEarth orbit. Deliverance was at hand.
Now the satellites swept the skies for the source. It was not the Swarm Mother, Jhubben knew that. The Mother crept between the stars at speeds slower than light; time was nothing to her. Only the civilized races used tachyon-drive starships.
If Ekkedme had gotten off a transmission before the singleship was smashed from the skies… if the Master Trader had decided to check on human progress earlier than planned… if the Mother had somehow been detected by some new technology undreamed of when Jhubben began his assignment on Earth… if, if, if… then it might well be the Opportunity up there, the Network returned to deliver this world, with only the means and price yet to be determined. It would not be easy even then, but of the ultimate result he had no doubt. Jube smiled as his satellites probed and his computers analyzed.
Then the holocube turned violet, and his smile died. He made a low gurgly sound deep in the back of his throat. The sophisticated sensors in his satellites stripped away the screens that cloaked the starship from human instrumentation and displayed its image within the ominous violet of the cube. It revolved slowly, etched in lines of red and white light like some terrible construct of fire and ice. The readouts flashed below the image: dimensions, tachyon output, course. But everything Jube needed to know was written on the lines of the ship: written in every twisted spire, proclaimed by every fanciful excrescence, trumpeted by every baroque whorl and projection, shouted in that panoply of unnecessary lights. It looked like the results of a high-speed collision between a Christmas ornament and a prickly pear. Only the Takisians had such rococo aesthetics.
Jube lurched to his feet. Takisians! Had Dr. Tachyon summoned them? He found that hard to believe, after all the years the doctor had spent in exile. What did it mean? Had Takis been monitoring Earth all this time, observing the wild card experiment even as the Network had? If so, why had Jhubben found no trace of them until now, and how had they managed to conceal themselves from Ekkedme? Would they destroy the Swarm Mother? Could they destroy the Mother? The Opportunity was roughly the size of Manhattan island, and carried tens of thousands of specialists representing countless species, cultures, castes, and vocations-merchants and pleasurers, scientists and priests, technicians, artists, warriors, envoys. The Takisian craft was a tiny thing; it couldn't possibly hold more than fifty sentients, perhaps only half that number. Unless Takisian military technology had progressed astronomically in the last forty years, what could that little thing hope to do, alone, against the devourer of worlds? And would the Takisians even care about the lives of their experimental animals?
As Jhubben stared at the outlines of the ship with mounting rage and confusion, his phone rang.
For an instant he thought insanely that somehow the Takisians had found him out, that they knew he was looking at them and had rung him up to castigate him. But that was ridiculous. He slammed a thumb into the console, and the holocube went dark as Jube thumped into the living room. He had to detour around the tortured geometries of the half-built tachyon transmitter that dominated the center of the room like isome massive piece of avant-garde sculpture. If the thing didn't work when he powered it up, Jube planned to title it 'Joker Lust' and sell it to some gallery in Soho. Even halfassembled, its angles were curiously deceptive, and he was always bumping into it. This time he dodged around it neatly and took the phone from Mickey's hand. "Hello," he said, trying to sound his normal jovial self.