Aces High

EITHER. GUESS I'LL TRY THE MIDDLE ONE."

The boy exited in such haste that he whacked his head on the overhang of the barrel as he stood up. The impact dazed him momentarily. The bowling ball he'd been clutching with both hands was suddenly whisked from his grip. It shot straight up. The boy screamed obscenities through shiny steelcapped teeth. He made a desperate leap for his weapon, but all he managed to do was brush the tips of his fingers against its underside. Then he came down hard, scraping his hands and knees along the concrete.

By then the cops were already moving in. Tom watched as they surrounded him, yanked him to his feet, and read him his rights. He was nineteen, maybe younger, wearing gang colors and a studded dog collar, shaggy black hair teased out in spikes. They asked him where all the people were, and he snarled curses at them and screamed that he didn't know.

As they hustled him toward the waiting cruisers, Tom opened an armored portal and floated the bowling ball inside his shell for a closer look, shivering in the blast of cold air that came with it. It was a weird thing. Too light to be a bowling ball, he thought when he hefted it; four pounds, maybe five. No holes either. When he ran his hand over it, his fingers tingled, and colors glimmered briefly on its surface, like the rainbows on an oil slick. It made him uneasy. Maybe Tachyon would know what to make of it. He set it aside.

Darkness was falling over the city. Tom pushed his shell higher and higher, until he floated up above even the distant tower of the Empire State Building. He stayed there for a long time, watching the lights go on all across the city, transforming Manhattan into an electric fairyland.

From this high up, on a clear cold night like this, he could even see the lights of Jersey over across the frigid black water. One of those dots was the Top Hat Lounge, he knew.

He shouldn't just float here, he thought. He ought to take the bowling ball to the clinic; that was the next order of business. He didn't move. He'd do it tomorrow, he thought. Tachyon wasn't going anywhere, and neither was the bowling ball. Somehow Tom could not bring himself to face Tachyon tonight. Not tonight of all nights.

In those days, his shell was a lot more primitive. No telephoto lenses, no zooms, no infrared cameras. Just a ring of hot spotlights, so bright that they left Tachyon squinting. But he needed them. It was dark on the roof on the clinic, where the shell had come to rest.

The photographs that Tachyon held up were not the sort that Tom wanted to see in more detail anyway. He sat in darkness, staring into his screens, saying nothing, as Tachyon shuffled through them one by one. They had all been taken in the clinic's maternity ward. One or two of the children had lived long enough to be moved to the nursery.

Finally he found his voice. "Their mothers are jokers," he said, his voice emphatic with false conviction. "Bar-She's normal, I tell you. A nat. She got it when she was two, damn it; it's like it never happened."

"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.