God of Tarot (30 page)

The girl felt the thrust and knew she had been wounded. Maybe she
was
the accidental child of a prostitute. The insults were not intended to be accurate reflections on one’s opponent, but if one struck close enough to home to make a person lose his composure, he was also losing the contest. “Get out of here, seven-eighths ball!” she screamed. “Go back to your ma’s lily-white cunt!”

“Hoo!” someone exclaimed admiringly. Losing ground, Karrie had struck hard indeed, producing a marvelous eight-ball pun on his white ancestry, and calling him a motherfucker. That was close to the ultimate insult, almost impossible to top in the normal course of the game, and in this case he was unable to reply in kind.
She
could not convincingly be called a motherfucker. He realized now that the match had been weighted against him; some prime insults did not apply to females or children. Karrie presented a disconcertingly small target.

Still, he was warmed up now, and not out of it by any means. “My ma’s in Africa; I never saw her cunt./And it’s none of your business, you little black runt.”

No comment from the gallery. Paul had defended himself aptly enough, but had not taken the attack to her. He had lost the initiative.

Karrie sensed victory. She went for the kill. “Her ass is in Africa so she can see/how to get the cure for your pa’s veedee.”

Making him the child of venereal disease. How was he to top that?

Suddenly it came to him: the irrefutable implication, utterly dastardly. The fecal connection! “When your pa fucked your ma, he missed the slit;/he peed up her ass and didn’t quit;/and you came out as brown as shit.” A triple rhyme, yet!

Karrie stared at him, defeated, unable to respond. He had really nailed her, making her the spawn of urine and defecation. But there was no applause from the audience; all stood in stony silence.

Then he realized: he had won the dozens, but lost his objective. For he had by implication likened
all
brown people to feces, and yellow people to urine, including his own nonwhite components. In his heat to win, he had let the means justify the end, and so destroyed the value of that end. Only a white soul would have conceived and executed that insult.

Once again, he had grasped salvation—and discovered a turd.

It seemed only a moment before it happened. He found himself standing in the street, wondering where he was going. He knew that hours had passed, for now the city’s shadows were long, and he was hungry. The mnem was draining from his system, and he had no replacement; his memory was going. He must have suffered a blackout; the drug was like that. Sometimes the fading was perceptible; at other times it was in chunks.

He smelled shit. And he knew. This was the Animation that revealed his inner worth, the sources of his feculence. The woman Amaranth had played the part of Sister Beth—but the memory was genuine. He had murdered an innocent girl, ten years ago. Or nine, or eight. Mnem had shrouded his memory, and now Animation had brought it back, his dirtiest secret. He was worthless.

A window lighted. He stood before a residential building, and the shade was not drawn on this ground-level aperture, or else he was up on a fire escape, snooping. It wasn’t clear, and it didn’t matter. He peered in, and saw Therion standing naked while the girl squatted, clothed, in the corner. Call her Amaranth, call her Light, call her Sister Beth or a cartel secretary or an anonymous casino waitress; she was Everygirl, the focus of man’s eye and penis. This was the castle of discovery of human interrelations.

Something nagged him about the positioning of the two in the room. It was the same room he had shared with them, and he understood why he himself was absent, because now he was out here looking in, seeing it all from another perspective. But he had made love to her in the center, not the corner. And she had been nude, not clothed. Here it was Therion who was in the center, naked.

Now Paul heard Therion’s voice: “Stab your demoniac smile to my brain; soak me in cony-ack, cunt, and cocaine.” And the paunchy man pushed out his flabby rear.

The smell of shit became overpowering. Paul’s gorge rose; he tried to suppress it, but could not. He turned away from the window, teetering vertiginously o’er the abyss of the alley. Vomit spewed out of his mouth and nose, heave after heave, brown in this light, trailing yellow strings of mucus that would not let go. Yet even so, he smelled the shit.

The dart, imperfectly thrown in the dark, struck his belt and was turned aside. The needle had not penetrated his flesh, by sheer chance and the motion of his heaving body. But Paul clapped his hand to his flank and cried out as if in pain.

A man emerged from the shadows. “Nothing personal about this,” he said. “I guess you thought you could just quit the cartel, and in a few days you wouldn’t remember nothing about it anyway.”

Paul realized he had suffered another memory lapse. Now it was full night, and the vomit stains on his shirt were dry; the smell of shit was fault. What had he done in the intervening hours? He had no notion; mnem had taken that away, as cleanly as the knife took away the infant’s foreskin. The dart had jogged him into full awareness, though; he knew its significance. The survival instinct was more basic than these routine events; all his faculties were being marshalled to meet this threat. The dart bore an anesthetic, to make his body lethargic and uncoordinated so that he could be conveniently dispatched. It had happened to others he knew.

“Now you just come along with me,” the man said, unaware that the dart had missed and that he faced an alert, dangerous man. “A nice little ride. See, if you turned up with a mnem-wash, the police’d pick you up in no time and check you out, and then they’d know you was an addict. And that’d be bad nuts for us all. So we can’t afford for them to find you. Ever.” He leached for Paul’s shoulder.

Paul put up his right arm to ward him off, forearm to forearm. He spun to the right, stretching the man out, overbalancing him, then closed his right hand around the man’s right, his fingers grasping the knife-edge of the man’s hand. Paul turned under his own arm as if doing a figure in a minuet. As he completed his turn, his two hands were gripping the man’s arm, bending the wrist cruelly. He applied leverage.

With an exclamation of surprise and pain, the man went down. As well he might; had he resisted, his arm would have been wrenched out of joint. A child could bring down a 180-kilogram sumo wrestler with this hold.

Paul twisted the man’s arm, forcing him to lie facedown on the pavement. He picked up the fallen dart and jabbed it into the flesh of the man’s exposed neck. He waited a few seconds until the man relaxed, then let go and stepped back. The man did not get up. “Nothing personal, friend,” Paul said, adding, “God bless you.” He walked away.

So now he knew what should have been obvious before: the cartel would not let him quit. His life was in peril, regardless of the fate of his mind. He would have to hide, before the next goon squad caught up with him. Or the feds.

She was a fortune-teller of the age-old school: a woman of indeterminate years and large, dark eyes, wearing a long gown decorated with enigmatic symbols, seated in a curtained, gloom-shrouded compartment, at a table with a genuinely faked crystal ball. Modern technology had insinuated itself into the act. The crystal contained an illuminated holograph of a twilight landscape, with a full moon rising over gnarled oaks.

“Your card,” she murmured.

“No, I—have no card,” Paul said. He knew his credit had been cut off, and even attempted use of his card would alert his pursuers to his whereabouts. It had been a great hour for the technocracy when credit had become universal, for every person had to spend to live, and when he spent he was identified. Convenience had increased, but freedom had suffered.

The fear that Sister Beth had expressed, of being caught through the computer system, was now his own fear.

Sister who? Pursuit? Was he in some sort of trouble? He couldn’t remember.

“Money, then,” she said with resignation. Physical cash was an uncertain tool; it was too easy to counterfeit, and it offered no inherent proof of identity. But a fortune-teller couldn’t be choosy.

Paul delved into a pocket and came up with what small change he had: two fifty-dollar bills and a twenty-five. He laid them on the table beside the crystal ban.

She sighed. It wasn’t enough—but again, she was constrained to accept what she could get This was evidently a slow day. “Sit down.”

Paul sat. “I don’t know why I’m here,” he said.

“We shall find out.” She looked into the crystal, and the holograph changed, becoming a swirl of colors. That was the thing about multiple-facet holography: the slightest motion of the globe changed the viewing angle, bringing out a new image. But this could be tricky, because the three-dimensional effect suffered if the shift occurred on the vertical plane between the two eyes, making different pictures. There had to be some leeway. Generally the facet-lines were horizontal, so that both eyes showed the same view, and the ball was rotated on a horizontal axis. The colors spiraled hypnotically, and Paul knew it, but didn’t care.

“You are confused, tired, hungry, alone,” the fortune-teller said. “You need help, but do not know how or where to seek it.”

Paul nodded. “Programming,” he said, in a small flash of memory. “Deprogramming—must escape—drug—”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Let me have your hand.”

Paul put out his hand. She turned it palm upward and studied the lines. “Mixed type, unclassifiable, but with indications of psychic gifts,” she said, reading as if from a text. “Long Line of Life, broken…” She paused, looking very closely. “But there is a faint Line of Mars. And a fork at the lower end.” She looked up, her eyes meeting his. “You have a long life ahead, but soon—even now—an accident or a very serious illness. You will survive, but in changed form. Your life will never be the same as before, and you will live and die in a country or manner alien to your birth.”

“Quite likely,” Paul agreed.

“Clear Line of the Head, rising from the Mount of Jupiter, tangent to the Line of Life, branching to the Mount of the Moon. You have an exceptionally powerful intellect and strong ambition, and will succeed through imagination and psychic awareness.”

“At the moment I seem to have failed,” Paul said.

“Your hand knows better than your mind,” she assured him. “You may be in flux at the moment, but you have formidable powers.” She returned to the hand. “The Line of the Heart rises between the Mounts of Jupiter and Saturn. You have the capacity for both idealistic and passionate love—and that love is exceptionally strong.” She looked into his eyes again. “In fact, you are a most attractive man. I could make you an offer…” She shrugged, letting her shawl slide down to expose her bosom. Amaranth, in a new role, turning on her sex appeal again.

“I just want to know my future,” he said.

She sighed. “Line of Fate—very short, not rising at all until the middle of the palm, then well-marked and forked. You have had an extremely difficult early life, but will win success through your own efforts, especially through your imagination. The Line of Fortune, clear and sharp across the Mount of Apollo. You will have good fortune and contentment in the later years of your life.”

“Aren’t you just telling me what I want to hear?” Paul demanded. “I don’t
want
to hear what I want to hear! I mean—what
do
I mean?”

“I am telling you what your own hand tells me,” she insisted. “Would you prefer another mode? The Tarot—”

“No, not the Tarot!”

“I Ching?”

Paul didn’t know what that was, at this stage of his life, so he was suspicious. “No.”

“Then the ouija board.”

Paul had bad associations with that; he regarded it as a child’s game, not to be taken seriously. “No.”

“Then it will have to be astrology.”

Paul rose, confused and disturbed. “No. I don’t want to know any more! I just want…” But he could not continue, because he did not know what he wanted, other than relief from—what? Some terrible feeling…

“Or divination by dreams,” she suggested. “Or the tea leaves. Or by the forehead—you have a very expressive forehead, with good lines of Saturn and Jupiter.”

But Paul was moving out, fleeing her. He knew there were a hundred or a thousand modes of divination, and they might all be valid, but just now he was afraid of his future and wanted to avoid it.

Dawn. His legs were weary, one arm was bruised, and dust and dried vomit filmed his clothing. He was hungry and sleepy, but he couldn’t sleep. He must have been running all night, wearing himself out, and now he had no memory of it and no knowledge of where he was. He must have had to fight again, and he knew he was not safe yet. But where could he go?

Where had he
been
going, during his lapse? He must have been conscious and thinking, and he was not stupid. Maybe he had figured out a good hiding place, and was almost there—if only he could remember. But maybe he could figure it out again; maybe he had already figured it out half a dozen times in the course of the night, and made further progress toward it each time before lapsing out.

Oooff
! He stumbled forward. Then the slow pain started. He saw the brick bounce on the pavement. It had hit him on the back of the head, but it hadn’t knocked him out. He staggered, feeling his consciousness waning; the mnem withdrawal was complicating it, making his brain react inadequately. He put out a hand to brace himself against a brick wall.

Children emerged from alcoves, carrying scrounged weapons. A sub-teen gang, out for thrills, money, and maybe a fat commission from a bootleg organ bank. Artificial blood and organs made natural ones unnecessary, but some patients insisted on the genuine article. Lungs, kidneys, and livers fetched excellent prices if they were fresh and healthy, and his own were.

Paul tried to organize himself to flee, but he had trouble remembering
why
he was fleeing or what the immediate threat was. Deprogramming—was that it? No, that was the girl, Sister Who, and she was dead, and he had killed her, and a strange man had defecated on her face, and what could he do now to bring her back? He was guilty of persecuting an innocent person, and he had to pay—the penalty had to fit the crime. Christ equaled guilt.
He
had to be sacrificed to the inanities of this society—a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, shit for shit—yet that was capital punishment, and she didn’t like that—