Marked Cards

  Clara removed her wrap and sat. Her nerves were twitching like little jumping beans. The waiter brought her a double gin and tonic.

  "I took the liberty," he said. Clara nodded her thanks and downed half of it in a few swallows.

  They chatted about inconsequential for a few moments; she asked how Chloe was and how the practice was going, and he told her. The waiter took their order for appetizers. As the waiter walked away she pressed her fingers against her lip, mentally girding herself.

  "We need to talk," she said.

  His glance was sharp. He never missed much. "About your research."

  "Exactly." She touched his hand. "Papa, why have you withdrawn your support? We need you."

  He looked at her and said nothing, merely swirled his cognac and sniffed its aroma, wearing a thoughtful expression.

  "Well?"

  "You're your own woman," he said, and took a sip. "I can't stop you from pursuing the course you've chosen. God knows, I wish I could. But you're making a big mistake with this Black Trump project. And we're all going to pay."

  "Damn it, I wish you would trust me. I know what I'm doing." She leaned forward. "The virus will work, Papa. I'm that close to perfecting it" - she held up thumb and forefinger. "We have the resources to disperse it. We have human immunology on our side. Once the virus is released there'll be no way to stop it. We'll be rid of the wild card forever.

  "But Eric Fleming and his whole network won't cooperate unless you do, and if we don't have a series of vectors in the South Pacific, there'll still be large pockets of disease in the southern hemisphere. You must tell him to do what Uncle Pan says."

  Brandon sighed, sipped at his brandy. The waiter brought prosciutto-stuffed wild mushrooms and gave them miniature forks. Brandon dug in right away, but Clara had no appetite. She sat with her hands in her lap, fighting the urge to lean across the table and shake him. Brandon asked the waiter to give them a few more minutes to select their entrees, and perused the menu. Clara seethed.

  "Well?" she asked.

  Brandon rubbed his forehead. "There's a word for what you're doing, and people are going to use it. Genocide. Mass murder."

  Clara gasped caught between outrage and irony. A laugh escaped her. "You don't mince words, do you?"

  He sighed. "If you're going to go through with this, you'd better get used to that label, Clara. I've seen what the legal system, and the media, can do to people." She started to speak, but he lifted a finger. "Yes, I know your intentions are good. And I hate the wild card as much as you do. I'm not prepared to wage a frontal war against Rudo. But I simply can't support you in this."

  "But why?" Clara's fists clenched. "Why won't you support me?"

  Brandon shook his head. "It's going too far. I can't condone it. Your heart is in the right place, Clara, but this Black Trump scheme is deeply misguided. There are plenty of actions we can take against the wild card without spreading killer diseases."

  "Papa - "

  "As I've told Rudo, if he wanted to do this he should have used someone else. Left you out of it."

  At her look of distress he took her hand, and his expression softened. "I'm very concerned about what will become of you."

  She jerked her hand loose. "How can you say that? You lost your wife to the wild card - I lost my mother! How many more people have to suffer the way we have - the way she did - before something is done?"

  "Your voice is carrying," he said.

  She lowered her voice. "Papa, you have to help."

  His look was piercing. "Who says so? Rudo? Has he been pressuring you to get to me?"

  She felt her color rise. At her expression, his lips went thin. "Thought so. That's just his style. It's my own damned fault; I should have removed you from his influence years ago, before he got his hooks into you. They're in you so deep now I don't know if they can ever be extracted."

  "You don't know what you're talking about."

  "Oh, I'm afraid I do. Rudo has turned you into a tool of mass destruction ... he's twisted your brilliance into something dreadful.... My God, look at you! Look at what you're doing! Look at your main collaborator - a man who spreads disease for the pleasure he gets from it. Doesn't that tell you anything?"

  Clara dropped her napkin on the table.

  "I didn't choose to work with Etienne Faneuil." She said it calmly, but she felt as if she were going to explode.

  "No? Tell me, how is what you're doing different from what he's done?"

  "I don't experiment on human subjects! I don't enjoy this the way he does. I'm putting an end to the suffering, and preventing the spread of a terrible disease. There's no other way!"

  "Drop your work on the virus, Clara." He said it softly. "There are other ways to deal with the wild card, without resorting to genocide. Don't let Rudo manipulate you. You can walk away from it - there's still time. I'll protect you from any Shark fallout. Rudo doesn't dare attack me directly."

  "Papa ..." She struggled with tears, won the struggle, stood. "Your support would have meant a lot to me. But I'll go on without you if I must."

  He merely stared at her with deep sadness. She stood there for a moment, speechless. Then she turned and walked out.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Clara van Renssaeler, Journal Entry, 27 Apr 94

  Just got back from dinner with Papa. Still shaking. It was horrid. He all but accused me of being a carbon copy of Faneuil. How can he say that? How can he not understand? How dare he accuse me of genocide when it was he who inducted me into the organization to begin with? I'm furious.

  I knew, I just knew it would end up this way. Damn him. Uncle Pan will have to find some other way to win Eric over. I've done all I can.

  I wish things were like before. I want to talk to Papa about my research. And about Maman. With all this exposure to victims of the wild card, she's on my mind a lot. I want to ask him what she was like. I wish I'd known her. I barely remember her.

  I saw two people draw the Black Queen at the clinic yesterday. When I think of how she must have suffered, it's like a great hand squeezing my heart.

  The Black Trump is the only way to stop the anguish the wild card causes. If there were another way I'd take it, but there's not. How can he wish what we've suffered - what she suffered - on the rest of the human race?

  Damn you, Papa. I won't stop for you or for anyone. I know I'm right in this.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "I'm gonna ask her out."

  Cody dropped onto a bench in the scrub room. Her green surgical gown was splattered with yellow gore. Finn stripped the scrubs off his torso, and bent double trying to reach back to unwrap the horse body from its sterile wrap. Cody gestured with a finger, and he allowed her to catch the velcro edge, and strip him.

  "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

  "It's not a date date. She's hearing all the problems of Jokertown, I thought it might be nice for her to see the up side."

  "Is there one?"

  For the first time in all the years Finn had known the surgeon she sounded old. And sad. And tired. He trotted to her, the rubber booties on his four hooves making squeaking sounds on the linoleum floor, put his arms around her neck. They rested their foreheads against each other.

  "Yes, Cody, there is one. No, many. People still fall in love, and children play, and old men squabble over their chess boards in the park, and people trade books out of the back of the Worm's station wagon."

  Cody straightened, smiled, pushed back a lock of his white-blond hair. "How old are you, Bradley?"

  "Thirty-eight, why?"

  "How did you keep cynicism at bay?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know. Too dumb to be depressed?"

  She stood. "If an older, more experienced woman might give you some advice...."

  "Any time."

  "I would couch this request as if it is a date." She turned that single, all seeing, all knowing eye on him. "Because, of course, that's what you want. And if you phrase it like an educational tour
she's going to turn you down, convinced that you're condescending to her again. And, of course, she'd be right."

  "She'll turn me down faster if she thinks this is a date," Finn said glumly.

  "I don't think so."

  She started out of the scrub room. Finn made a leap after her, and ended up tangling three of his four feet. "What do you know?" he demanded when he finally regained his equilibrium.

  "Everything ... you know that, Bradley." She winked at him, and left.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Clara can Renssaeler, Journal Entry, 28 Apr 94

  Well, the analytical results are back and I've had a chance to study them. I think I may have figured out the problem with virus 94-15-04-24LQ. The situation is not as bad as I'd feared; this is still a viable Black Trump virus. But it's not ideal.

  To make sure the virus doesn't die out due to lack of disease vectors, I hid the Black Trump gene inside a more benign virus that affects both wild cards and nats - like a Trojan horse. The benign virus is a linear, single-stranded DNA virus, which contains a "negative" of my Black Trump as part of its gene sequence, and a locator for the wild card receptor. I packaged all this with a reverse transcriptase for the Black Trump gene and a transposon to encourage mutations.

  When the viral package enters a cell and the benign carrier virus starts to reproduce, the reverse transcriptase is synthesized. The Black Trump m-RNA is split out and converted to a proper, double-stranded Black Trump DNA sequence by the reverse transcriptase. All as planned.

  For the control cultures, in which the wild card initiator sequence isn't present in the DNA, the Black Trump has nowhere to attach on the genome, so it and the transposon remain as junk floating around in the cell. The carrier - a much less dangerous virus - proliferates instead.

  In the wild card cell cultures, the Black Trump attaches at the initiator site on the DNA. The linked transposon element wildly recombines and reproduces the Black Trump, causing random genetic insertion and throwing the cell immediately into lytic phase. The cells burst, dispersing the Black Trump virus to other cells.

  In theory this should be deadly. But the 94-15-04-24LQ virus got progressively weaker as it was transmitted from cell to cell.

  According to my follow-up tests, it appears that - ironically - this virus is too virulent. Introducing the transposon has made it so wildly recombinant that it produces a host of missense mutations, weaker strains that are more successful than the original Black Trump gene at repackaging themselves before the cell bursts. So the more lethal strain gradually kills itself off. Progressively weaker strains result.

  Given the rates of mutation in the tissue cultures, my calculations indicate that the first wild card who contracts the virus will die, and also the wild card who catches it from the first, for a total of about three to four generations of wild card transmission. The intervening nats who contract it don't alter the Black Trump portion of the virus, so they don't dilute the effect.

  Given the length of the viral incubation period and the ease with which it's transmitted, three to four generations should be enough to kill most of the wild carders in any given population center, before it mutates to the nonfatal form. So this is a powerful virus, despite its limitations. But it means that we can't use the virus to effectively sweep the globe, without mounting a larger infection campaign than Uncle Pan intended. Its virulence will peter out within weeks of its release. Thus it might be stoppable with the use of quarantines, unless we hit all the major centers at once. It will also almost certainly miss isolated areas, and it will be useless against the inevitable new wild card infections that will occur. That in particular concerns me.

  The other potential concern is that this virus is so recombinant it could mutate to a form harmful to non-wild cards, under the right circumstances. It's a small risk, but I'd be more comfortable with a rather less mutable version.

  Overall, though, I'm fairly pleased with this virus. I've dubbed it necrovirus Takis I - Black Trump, strain I.

  And I think a few modifications will make it truly unstoppable. I'm now trying the same viral package, but without the transposon. That should diminish the virus's mutability enough - I hope - that the lethal form has enough time to repackage itself before the cell destructs, and is able to compete against the weaker, daughter strains. It should also reduce the risk that the virus might somehow become harmful to non-wild cards.

  I should have preliminary results on the new batch, 94-04-28-24LQ, Black Trump II, by Sunday.

  I want to share this with someone - I'm so close to solving the puzzle! But there's only one person I can confide in, and I find myself reluctant to tell Uncle Pan about my progress.

  Not that I could reach him right now in any event; he's off to Asia, trying to consolidate support for our plan. But he was back for a day or two, and Saturday night he came by the lab and asked me out to dinner. He took me to a lovely little restaurant in the Village and we talked for hours. As tense as things have been between us, I was relieved that our relationship was returning to normal.

  He asked me about my meeting with my father. Of course I told him nothing of what was said, only that Papa was adamant. He urged me to continue my efforts. I told him it's pointless. Papa's mind is made up. I wish Pan would believe me.

  And when he dropped me off he kissed me. I mean on the lips. A romantic kiss.

  And - I don't know, I mean there's no doubt he's a very attractive man, especially now - but it feels vaguely incestuous. Wrong. I've known him for too long as a sort of second father to be comfortable switching roles this way.

  And I can't help but wonder, why now? And why me?

  I feel terrible for harboring these thoughts against Uncle Pan, but I feel there's something else behind all this. I've overheard some of the angry remarks he's made about my father in unguarded moments, and the other day I heard him and Faneuil talking in Faneuil's office. (I must confess to being a bit of a snoop; I listened at the door when I heard my name.) Only caught a few words, but he seemed to be saying that I wasn't to be invited to some meeting or another. Faneuil mentioned someone named "Nor" or "Ner." And Pan said that the less I knew about any of Faneuil's work the better.

  Faneuil's work is epidemiology - he has been working on ways to disperse the Black Trump through the populace. I'm being shut out of a major portion of the Black Trump effort. Because of my father, I'm certain.

  And last night I dreamt about the dinner date, only Uncle Pan really was Pan, the mythical goat. Grotesque genitalia and all. He kept leering at me, and I was very frightened of him, but kept laughing and laughing so he wouldn't know. When we got to my apartment, Bradley Finn rode up and shot Pan with an arrow. It didn't seem to hurt Pan, but suddenly I was free of whatever spell of fear he had cast over me. I jumped onto Finn's back and he leapt out a window.

  Then Finn turned into this Benji sort of dog, and a big snake with the face, arms, and breasts of a woman appeared and attacked him. I woke up shouting, in a cold sweat, at four A.M. and I've been awake since.

  I've dreamt of that snake before. She was a lamia. A weeping lamia. More distorted Greek mythology.

  Seeing auras and such, but no headache yet. I've taken some medication to see if I can fend off the migraine.

  I guess I'm just under too much stress.

  It's odd that I should dream of Bradley Finn. Perhaps it was because I've been thinking about him in terms of Greek mythology, and that got linked to Pan's name.

  Had a long talk with Cody Havero the other night. My feelings about the wild card are changing. My commitment to eradicating the virus hasn't changed; it must be destroyed and there is only one way. Even if Pan, or Papa - even, I hope, if I - contracted the virus, I would continue my work on the Black Trump, for the good of the human race.

  But I do think that knowing the people - realizing these are human beings, not just statistics - is important for me to face. I don't want to become another Etienne Faneuil, whatever Papa says. And I have to respect people like Bradle
y Finn. I'm struck by the difference between his natural, enthusiastic charisma and Pan's, whose charm has the feel of artifice, of calculation.

  It's a shame the world must lose people like Bradley Finn, when the disease is released. Damn Tachyon and his race, for inflicting this disease on us.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Umm," Bradley Finn said, twining a finger in his lab coat buttonhole. His hind leg stamped and his tail swished. "Sunday is May Day."

  Clara removed her reading glasses and eyed him. What on earth was he so nervous about? Was he afraid to ask for the day off?

  "I know," she said, mildly.

  "Well," he went on, "there's going to be a street festival, here in Jokertown."

  "So I've heard."

  "So." He cleared his throat. "You want to go with me?"

  Clara gaped, flattening her hands on the desk. Her heart did a tap dance in her rib cage and her mouth went dry. "I beg your pardon?"

  He stared back at her for a long moment. Then he tossed his head with a look of irritation. "Never mind. It was a dumb idea."

  He wheeled in a clatter of hooves and headed for the door.

  "Doctor - Bradley."

  His hand was already on the door knob. He didn't turn to look at her. She tried to catch her breath, which had gotten quite short.

  "I'd be glad to." It came out quickly, before a more prudent voice could intervene.

  He turned then, and the raw, open look on his face made her heart skip another couple of beats.

  "So," she said, sliding her reading glasses back on and clearing her own throat. "Where shall I meet you?"

  Afterwards, she wondered what the hell she thought she was doing.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  They weren't just wandering randomly. There was order to this wander. They'd hit the May Day block party, eat great hotdogs, then the day would culminate at Joan's and Perry's apartment. Joan would invite them in, and give them tea on her beautiful bone china, and Perry would come in and snuggle with Joan....