George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (52 page)

“Bugsy,” Fortune said. “Wake up. There’s someone here wants to see you.”

Jonathan rolled over on his bed, blinking up into the light. Fortune looked slightly better. Still cadaverously thin, still with the deep, bruiselike bags under his eyes. He and Sekhmet apparently hadn’t quite settled on a schedule for sleep yet. And still, the poor bastard looked better.

“Someone wants to see me?” Jonathan asked.

“You should come.”

“Beautiful blond entomologist with no boyfriend and a webcam?”

“CNN,” Fortune said.

Jonathan took in a deep breath and let it out with a sense of growing satisfaction. The traditional media finally there to agree he’d scooped them.

“A close second,” Jonathan said. I’ll be right there.”

He washed his hair, considered shaving, decided that the stubble was a decent manly touch—you never saw Indiana Jones breaking out a safety razor—and headed out for the lobby of the hotel that had become the aces’ barracks. The camera crew had set up shop by one of the big couches
designed for travelers to lounge on in times of peace. The reporter looked familiar; black guy in his late thirties, close-cropped hair with a little gray coming in at the temples. He was wearing a khaki shirt with epaulets, like he’d been trekking through the desert instead of driving in from the airport.

“Hey,” Jonathan said, “I heard you boys were looking for me?”

Hands were shaken, admiration was expressed, someone got Jonathan a cup of coffee. Five minutes flat, and he was sitting on the couch, klieg lights shining in his face, sincere talking head leaning in toward him with an expression built to convey gravity and concern.

It was fucking sweet. Right up until it wasn’t.

“How do you respond to the accusations that you’ve sided with terrorists?”

“That’s stupid,” Jonathan said. “And anyone who says it doesn’t understand anything about how international politics works.”

“But you have come to the defense of a group that’s been accused of sheltering the Twisted Fists.”

“Well, accused, sure …”

“And the assassination of the Caliph.”

“These people didn’t assassinate the Caliph,” Jonathan said. “There were kids dying out on the road. Kids! You think some eight-year-old joker kid killed the Nur?”

“Right, and you also said in your blog that these people didn’t kill the Caliph. You have investigated the alleged link between the Living Gods and the Twisted Fists, then?”

Jonathan tapped his fingers on his knee. “I’ve been a little busy being shot at,” he said. “But I am perfectly comfortable that no such connection exists.”

“And how would you reply to the critics who say that Westerners—especially self-styled crusaders like Lohengrin and religious leaders like Holy Roller—represent an unacceptable Western interference in the internal affairs of Egypt?”

“I probably wouldn’t,” Jonathan said.

“So you don’t think there is an issue of national sovereignty here? You
are
a group of aces not affiliated with any government entering into armed conflict with the military of a
legitimate state. How do you see that as different from a terrorist organization?”

“They were killing people,” Jonathan said. “Okay? Innocent people were dying. And we stopped it.”

The reporter seemed to sense an unpleasant stinging sensation in his future. He smiled and nodded as if he were agreeing with something, then changed the subject. “Will your forces remain in Syrene when the army of the caliphate arrives?”

“We are going to stay here until we’re sure that…” Jonathan held up a finger and licked his lips. The klieg lights seemed hotter than they’d been at the start of the interview. The couch had developed some uncomfortable lumps. “…
army
of the caliphate?” he asked.

“You didn’t know the new Caliph has sworn his support for Kamal Farag Aziz and his Egyptian government? His troops have been on the move for days.”

“Army. Of the caliphate. Ah. Well. That’s probably a pretty big army, huh?”

The reporter shrugged. Jonathan got the feeling that the guy might be enjoying this opportunity to make the blogger look dumb.

“About three times the size of the Egyptian forces. And the Caliph’s aces Bahir of the Scimitar and the Righteous Djinn,” the reporter said. “The Caliph says that this kind of Western adventurism is a threat to all sovereign nations of the world, and that your defense of terrorists places you in violation of international law. The Caliph also says he’s taken the secretary-general of the United Nations into protective custody to prevent his being attacked by the citizens of Cairo who are outraged by his apparent support of
your
cause.”

“Ah,” Jonathan said. “Huh.”

“Do you have a response to that?”

Jonathan blinked into the lights. He wished Fortune was nearby; they needed to talk. They all needed to talk. A lot. And right now.

“Jonathan,” the reporter said. “This is your chance to make a response.”

“Oops?” Jonathan suggested.

Incidental Music for Heroes

THE WORLD ROARED AROUND
Joker Plague: a barrage from the stage amplifiers; the black boxes of monitors taking the roar and hurling it back; the massive cliff-wall ramparts of the sound system thundering to either side of the stage; the crowd screaming; slap-back from the rear walls of the auditorium a second assault; the insistent rhythm of the song a hammer pounding at them.

To stage left, Bottom thumb-slapped his Fender Precision, his ass’s head nodding aggressively in time to the music. Michael felt rather than heard Bottom’s bass, a solid minor pattern caught in lockstep with the subsonic pounding of Michael’s bass drum, the lowest of the tympanic rings set on his body. Shivers, his appearance that of a demon snatched directly from the fires of hell, stalked stage right before a wall of Marshalls, his blood-red guitar screaming like a tortured soul in hands of the same color.

Next to Shivers was S’Live, floating behind the ranks of his keyboards like a garish hot air balloon painted with a face, multitudinous tongues flickering from a too-wide mouth to punch at the keys. And, in the gel-colored clouds of dry ice fog drifting at the front of the stage, there was
something:
the ghost of a thin body caught in the floodlight-colored wisps and gone again, a wireless Shure SM58 microphone floating in the air before it, though no hand seemed to hold up the black cylinder. There was a voice, though—
The
Voice: a powerful baritone that alternately
growled and purred and shrieked the lyrics to “Self-Fulfilling Fool.”

Michael—“DB” to his band mates and most of his friends, “Drummer Boy” to much of the world—heard mostly The Voice. He wore earpiece monitors to dampen the 120+ decibel hurricane, with only The Voice’s vocals coming through his monitor feed. He could hear his drumming quite well, resonating through his body, and no earplugs could entirely shut out the unearthly cacophony of the stage equipment.

Michael loomed at center stage, pinned in spotlights, his six arms flailing as he beat on his wide, tattooed, and too-long torso with his signature graphite drumsticks, the multiple throats on his thick muscular neck gaping and flexing as they funneled and shaped the furious rhythm. He wore a set of small wireless mics on a metal collar around his upper shoulders. While the gift of his wild card talent gave him more than enough natural amplification to be heard throughout the auditorium, the volume would have been uncomfortable for everyone on stage and in the first rows: it was easier to let the sound system do the work. He prowled the stage as he drummed, the actinic blue of the spots following him as he danced with The Voice in his cold fog, grinned at Bottom’s driving, intricate bass line, screamed his approval of Shiver’s
searing licks, or swayed alongside S’Live’s saliva-drenched tongue-lashing of his keyboards.

For the moment, he thought only of being
here.
It was what Michael loved about being on stage: for those magical few hours he could leave the rest of the world behind. For that time, there was only the music.

La Cavea, the outdoor venue at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, could accommodate 7,000 spectators. There were that many and more packed into the seething mass of humanity in front of him, a dark, fitfully lit sea of heads bobbing in time to the song, fists pumping their approval back to the stage, their energy fueling Joker Plague’s performance in an endless feedback loop. The pit in front of the stage was a tight crush; out in the auditorium, everyone was out of their seats and standing. Against the night sky, the beetlelike shell of the Parco della Musica loomed, caught in blue and red spotlights beyond the tall ranks of the upper balcony.

It reminded Michael uncomfortably of an Egyptian scarab.

The song—their third and last encore—ended in a flourish of riffs and cymbal crashes from Michael, a final power chord from Shiver, and an explosion of pure white light from a bank of floodlights behind the stage. The audience roared, a deluge of adulation that swelled and broke over them. “Fuckin’ yeah!” The Voice screamed at the audience through the Italian night. “Thank you!
Grazie! Buona notte!”
They shouted back, a wordless, thousand-throated monster’s voice. Michael underhanded his half-dozen sticks into the audience as the stage lights went dark and house lights came up at the rear of the auditorium. The audience seemed to be split nearly evenly between jokers and nats, judging from the faces Michael glimpsed, but it was the jokers who were nearest the stage, the nats mostly lurking to the rear.

Roadies swarmed the stage, hooded flashlights guiding the band off to the tunnel behind the stage. “Fantastic show, DB! Great job!
Esposizione eccellente!”
they said, as he passed them, leading the way. He nodded, but he could already feel the stage adrenaline rushing away, and with it any sense of pleasure. The malaise and subdued anger he’d felt since leaving
American Hero
wrapped more tightly around him with
every step he made toward the dressing room, the energy and pleasure of the performance fading.

“Fuckin’ A, that was
tight,”
Shivers said as the door closed behind them. He tossed his ancient, scarred Stratocaster into its case, grinning—with his red-and-black-scaled face, it looked more like a leer. “Better than the Paris show. Shit, DB, those new kicks in ‘Stop Me Again’ were killer. Just killer. S’Live, you and me gotta catch those next time.”

“Yeah,” Bottom added. He’d popped one of the champagne bottles and upturned it into his horselike snout. More of the bubbling liquid seemed to escape the sides of his mouth than went down his throat, soaking his already-sopping T-shirt. “Let’s listen to the board tape. If I punch those bass drum hits with you, it’ll be monster. Wish we’d recorded it that way in the studio. DB, man, you listening?”

He wasn’t. Michael dropped onto the couch, multiple arms sprawled out, his eyes closed. The remnants of the show still rang in his ears. The cushions at the far end sagged a few moments later under an unseen weight and Michael felt the springs move in response.

“’Sup, big guy? You ain’t yourself,” The Voice said from the air: low, sonorous, a cello bowed by a master. “You were playing
angry
out there—sounded nice and aggressive, but it ain’t the usual fun-lovin‘ you. ’S matter, man?”

Michael shook his head. The searing adrenaline high he’d felt during the concert was gone, as if someone had pulled a handle and flushed it away. “Nuthin’,” he said. “And fuckin’ everything. When we’re playing, it’s cool. But after …”

“Bad shit goin’ down in Egypt.” Michael glanced over to where The Voice’s head would have been and could almost see the raised eyebrows. “Hey, I ain’t fuckin’ stupid, man. I seen what you kick up on your laptop: CNN and Yahoo News instead of porn. Shit, how boring is that?”

Michael shrugged with all six arms. “Hey, I’ve been—”

The door opened and their manager came into the room: Grady Cohen, a nat the label had hired as part of their contract. “Kiss-Ass Cohen,” DB had dubbed him early on. He wondered if Grady knew why the band usually called him “KA.” Michael thought that if Grady was ever infected with
the wild card, he’d turn into an empty suit. Behind him, in the theater’s backstage corridor, Michael could see the groupies waiting to be let in.

There were always women waiting, nat or joker, whatever he wanted. Only …

Grady was grinning and applauding as he strode into the room. “Hey, KA!” The Voice said loudly. “You look happy—you snag a blow job on the way back?”

Grady ignored The Voice. “Great show, boys. That’s all I need to say. The promoters are contentedly counting the ticket sales, and the label tells me that
Incidental Music for Heroes
shows up as number-one on
Billboard
next week.
Numero Uno.
It doesn’t get any better than that. So congratulations all around, eh? Don’t need to say more.” He clapped his hands again. He looked at each of them as if he were counting bills in his wallet. “All right, here’s the schedule. Wake-up call is at noon, and the limo will be at the hotel to get us to the airport two hours later. It’s Berlin tomorrow night, then London, then right on to New York—the label’s added Cleveland, Dallas, and Denver to the American tour. Boys, Joker Plague is hot. Hot. Enjoy the ride.” He grinned again. “And speaking of rides …”