George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (39 page)
Read George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] Online
Authors: Inside Straight
“Jonathan, my friend, why would God have given us these powers, except to protect the weak and innocent?”
“Oh
please
. Do I look like a caped crusader? Are you my plucky sidekick? God did it to fuck with our heads. Or to win a bet with Satan. He did it for the same reason he gives kids leukemia. How should I know? He’s God; he doesn’t explain this stuff to me. Did you miss the part where I was saying how we could get
killed?”
“Who will help these people, if not us?”
“The United Nations. The secretary-general’s flying into Cairo. Not Kofi Annan, the new one. He was on the TV in the bar when you were up in the suite screwing what’s her name. Lilly of the Valley.”
“Lili Marlene. We were making love. She was beautiful, Jonathan. Perhaps God sent her as well.”
“Him or the night manager. Ask what escort service he used, you can ring her up again. I promise you, you’re not going to bump into
her
in Egypt. Hey, what say we check out the Excalibur? I hear they have jousting. You’d like that, I bet.”
“Jonathan, Isis said that people are
dying.”
Jonathan put down his drink and focused on the great muscle-bound lunk at his side.
“People are always dying somewhere in the world,” he said. “When they’re not dying in Cairo, they’re dying in Timbuktu, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohoswinegrunt, or some other goddamned place.”
“Hohenschwangau, but no one died there. I saved them. With
this.”
Lohengrin stood up, a broadsword appearing in his hand, white, shimmering, its edge a razor. He brought it down hard, shearing through the steel and mica table in one sudden, savage cut. Coasters, coconuts, and paper umbrellas flew everywhere.
“Great,” Jonathan said, “that’s a good argument. Beat up the furniture.”
The waitress—a blond woman in her midthirties with an expression that could stun rats at twenty yards—came up to them.
“You can put it on the room,” Jonathan said.
She nodded in a way that assured them both that she would, while simultaneously informing them that they had had their last alcohol for the evening. All without speaking. She was very talented that way.
“How about a cup of coffee?” Jonathan asked.
She nodded again, turned, and walked away.
“We are men,” Lohengrin said. “We are blessed among men. Our actions should be guided by what is right and noble!”
“We’re drunks in Vegas,” Jonathan said. “Our actions should be guided by vice and alcohol.”
Lohengrin shook his head. He managed to look deeply disappointed without precisely focusing his eyes.
“Do you have no dreams, Jonathan?”
“Sure,” Jonathan said. “They just don’t involve getting anointed by God.”
“What then?” Lohengrin demanded. “What is your dream?”
“I want to be a journalist,” Jonathan said.
“And what is it a journalist would do?”
The waitress reappeared with two cups of coffee. She balanced them on the remains of the table, nodded, and walked away again. Jonathan looked at the black surface, neon bar lights and the flickering blue television screens reflecting in it.
What would a journalist do?
“Ah, fuck you,” he sighed. “Fine. We’ll go.”
Posted Today 11:42 pm
EGYPT | DEPRESSED | “ROCK THE CASBAH”—THE CLASH
There was a time not all that long ago when I thought poverty was not having enough cash to order a bucket of fried chicken. I may have been optimistic about that. When it comes to pure human misery, pencil in the Necropolis outside Cairo for your touristy needs.
I came here from Las Vegas, specifically the Luxor. I have moved from the fantasy of Egypt to the reality. Given the choice between drinking and playing craps with a fake Cleopatra whose tits are always just offering to fall out of her dress, and walking through the slums of Cairo, I’m not sure which I’d recommend. The fake is a beautiful dream, but there’s nothing like reality for reminding you just how toxic dreams like that can be. I have gone from the city of excess to the city of desperate want. The change has left me a little nauseated.
The first day here, we started at the pyramids. They were, indeed, amazing. They’re bigger than you think. Start about the size you imagine them, then up it by another half or two thirds. They’re huge. You can see why the idea of them made it all the way to Vegas.
But they’re also not Egypt.
Egypt
came when Lohengrin was moved to charity. He started handing out euros to the beggars. We were swamped so bad it took half an hour to make it the thirty feet back to the car. If a couple of the kids got stung, I can apologize and feel like shit about it, but at the time it seemed like the only option.
Imagine being in the middle of a crowd of forty, fifty, maybe a hundred shouting kids, their hands out, pushing against each other and against you. The air smelled
like unwashed bodies and desperation, and there we were. Westerners with money. Aces, no less. You wouldn’t think I’d have been frightened, but let me just tell you, there’s something in a hungry kid’s eyes that doesn’t have anything to do with pathos or gratitude. At the time, I thought it was just hunger. And yeah, it scared me.
That’s been the signature moment of the trip—the flat, angry eyes of hungry children. And that, boys and girls, was just tourism. It doesn’t even touch on the riots.
So, yeah…the riots.
Things were quiet the first few days we were here. During the day we’d try to track down Fortune when we weren’t taking in the sights. At night, we pretty much stayed in the little faded hotel room with its yellow wallpaper and air-conditioning that smelled vaguely like fish, watching old American sitcoms dubbed into languages I don’t speak. The fifth day there was a news brief that broke in. It was local, and neither of us knew what the guy was saying, so I got online and looked it up on the CNN and Al Jazeera sites. Turned out there was a riot going on right here, near Cairo.
A little background: After the Caliph got himself assassinated in Baghdad, the leaders of the Ikhlas al-Din called for retribution on the killers. And, hey, cool by me, I say. Someone offed the president, I’d be happy to see them strung up, and I didn’t even vote for the guy. “Root out the terrorists and the people who shelter them.” That was the slogan. Again, I’m all for it.
On paper at least.
The thing is, how do you know who the bad guys are? If a Muslim kills the president, does that make all Muslims bad guys? If a joker organization kills the
Caliph, does that mean all jokers are guilty? If the Twisted Fists are a bunch of joker terrorists and the Living Gods are also jokers, does that make them allies?
The answer is, apparently, yes.
Through the night, other riots bloomed all through the Middle East. Alexandria, Port Said, Damietta. The temples of what they were calling the Old Religion burned. There was some particularly ugly footage of Hathor being pulled from her temple by the horns. The talking heads on CNN and Al Jazeera both talked about these being “spontaneous outbreaks.” Kamal Farag Aziz, the local Ikhlas al-Din strongman—added “of righteous wrath,” but the basic sentiment was the same. The fans of the Caliph were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
We found Fortune the next day in the Necropolis. The spontaneous outbreak of the previous night had been teams of well-organized men with guns and tasers, all wearing black fatigues and black-and-green
keffiyeh
, moving through the poorest parts of the city and slaughtering whoever crossed their paths.
The Necropolis is a great, huge, sprawling suburb of the dead. Ancient mausoleums with whole families of squatters living inside. No food, little water. Squalor, though.
Yes, most of the people living there are jokers, but some are just poor. John Fortune—Sekhmet, really—showed us a lot of bodies. Most of them were new. The Cairo police were around, too, allegedly taking statements, but most of what they did was assure people that the streets weren’t safe, that there weren’t enough police, that the time had come for the jokers to get out of town. Their eyes were flat, just like the beggars’ had been. That was when I figured out that
what I’d seen in those children around the pyramids hadn’t been hunger at all. It was hatred.
That night, Fortune and Lohengrin and I joined up with the local folks to patrol the Necropolis. There were a couple death squads we came across. But the graves here go on forever, and there were other groups we missed. The night after the riot, we lost another couple dozen people. They might be dead, they might have been taken prisoner, they might have done the sane thing by saying fuck this and heading south.
Okay, so why south? What’s the silver lining? The jokers do have someplace to go. The farther up the Nile (which is to say south) they go, the more refuges there are for the Living Gods. The nearest big stronghold is Karnak. Already, the Necropolis is emptying. The jokers are putting what few belongings they have on carts or in grocery baskets, or tying them to their backs and walking south. There are other poverty-sick people swarming in to take over the prime gravesites, the mausoleums with the best roofs and the fewest bodies.
The Egyptian army, seeing the mass flight, is offering what protection it can on the road. Fortune’s going, too. So’s Lohengrin. And so, God help me, am I.
Internet access is what you could charitably call spotty out on the road. My cell phone does have upload options, if I can get a signal from a satellite. There are, I’m told, villages with land lines I could use to dial up if there’s nothing better.
I may be a little scarce for a while, folks, but hang tight. This is news really happening, right now. And I’m going to tell you how it comes down.
One side note. We were getting ready to head out, Lohengrin and me, and I said something about how well organized the “spontaneous outbreaks” all
seemed to be. I just want everyone to be very clear that it was the German guy who brought up Kristallnacht.
I wasn’t going to go there.
1002 COMMENTS | LEAVE COMMENT
George R. R. MartinTHE SHORTCUT IS A
mistake.
The road runs along the west bank, following the course of the Nile. Once chariots carved deep ruts in its surface, and priests and pharaohs and Roman legionnaires moved along it, but now it carries cars and trucks and yellow school buses. Semis belch diesel as they roar past palm trees and fields of sugar cane.
The family has neither truck nor chariot, only a pair of wire grocery carts stolen from some Cairo supermarket, piled high with clothes and toys and pots and all the rest of their worldly possessions. A small boy rides in one shopping cart, a crippled old man in the other. The mother and the father push, and from time to time the daughter lends a hand. She is twelve and already taller than her parents, a slender girl and pretty.
They have been walking for days, every day and all day, pushing the rattling carts down the two-lane road, part of the great river of refugees flowing from the delta down toward Karnak, Aswan, and Abu Simbel, stopping only at night to rest exhausted in some nearby field. All that long way they have stayed on the road, never straying far from the column. Every day Karnak is a little closer. In Karnak they will be safe, the old man promises. Their gods are strong in Karnak. Anubis will open the way for them, Horus and Sobek and Taweret will defend them. There will be food for everyone, beds to sleep in, shelter from the sun—but only when they reach the temple, the glorious New Temple.
The talk along the road is that Karnak lies no more than a day and a half ahead, as the ibis flies, but the road follows the river, so when the Nile loops east the road loops as well. That is when the whisper goes up and down the ragged column, passed from mouth to mouth.
There is a quicker way, a shorter way, just leave the road and cut due south, and you’ll shave twenty kilometers off your journey
. Twenty kilometers is nothing for a man in a car, but for a family pushing two old shopping carts it is a long way. The daughter’s feet are blistered, the little boy is sunburned, and the father’s back aches more with every step. Small wonder that they leave the road to take the shortcut.