Introduction
That the Wild Cards series is still alive and kicking after over 15 years might be a surprise to some, but not to me. Then again, I’m the creator of James Spector, aka Demise, who died from the Wild Card virus but still managed to stay alive long enough to wreak havoc through several volumes of the series. The book you’re getting ready to read, Deuces Down, is not only the first new Wild Card opus in quite some time but also proof that the story ideas and concepts nurtured by the series’ writers have a way of coming to fruition eventually.
Let me digress for a moment to explain how I was lucky enough to become a Wild Cards author in the first place, since it bears to some degree on Deuces Down. When George R. R. Martin, Melinda Snodgrass, and the rest of the New Mexico writers and gamers were creating the foundation for the series, George cleverly decided to expand his group of participating writers beyond the borders of the Land of Enchantment. Being either incredibly insightful or a masochist, depending on how you look at it, one of the first people George turned to was his long-time buddy Howard Waldrop, who wrote “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!” the lead story in Wild Cards. To know Howard is to love him, but his artistic temperament can best be described as inflexible, so it doesn’t make him ideal for team projects. Howard’s plan was to write his one story and jump ship, which he did. Master agreements and consortium points weren’t part of his game plan.
At that time, Howard lived in Austin (of which I’m a native and current resident) and was one of the Turkey City writers. Turkey City was, and is, a writers conference where friends sit around reading and then dismembering each other’s stories in turn. Given its Texas location, Turkey City was a bit more of a rock-em, sock-em affair than some of the more genteel writers conferences, but to date no fatalities have been reported among even the more brutalized participants. Another then–Austinite and Turkey Citizen was Lew Shiner, who George also quickly got on board for Wild Cards. Lew loved comic books and was an up-and-comer on the science fiction scene, being (with Bruce Sterling, also an Austinite and a Turkey City writer, I’m sure you’re getting the general drift of this by now) one of the core group in the newly formed cyberpunk movement. Lew’s character Fortunato, along with his antagonist, the Astronomer, was an integral part of the first Wild Cards triad. Lew, Howard, and I hung out a lot, including going on a weekly comic-buying run. Since I was also a Turkey City regular, Lew knew I could write, and sold George on giving me a shot at Wild Cards. How hard a sell he had to give George, I’m not sure. George had met me several times, read one of my early (unpublished and unpublishable) stories, and agreed to see what I could do. I wasn’t entirely without credentials, having done some work for DC Comics that eventually showed up in World’s Finest and House of Mystery as well as having a short story or two published.
Incidentally, I did the comic book writing under the name Bud Simons, which is what everyone calls me, although I’d been using Walton Simons for my fiction. This created mistaken assumptions about my true identity later on, but how was I to know? In any case, I was completely psyched to be on the Wild Cards team. The notion of being in the same book as Roger Zelazny filled me with glee, but I was going to have to earn it. The first book Wild Cards was already full, so I went to work on a Demise story for Aces High that I cleverly tied into Lew’s Fortunato yarn. George bought it and I’ve been lucky enough to be a Wild Carder ever since.
Now in those days, if you got a couple of Wild Cards writers together, sooner or later (usually sooner) the conversation would drift to aces, jokers, and upcoming story ideas. The exception, as always, was Howard, who was far too busy for all this folderol, other than to explain (in consummate Waldropian logic) how his piece of the Wild Cards pie would keep getting bigger over time. Lew and I, on the other hand, spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other. In the process, we came up with Kid Dinosaur and most of the Astronomer’s ace cronies.
During one of the early sessions, I went off on an absurd tangent and made up characters like Sign Girl, who could stand up in front of a neon sign or billboard, look like one of the letters, and disappear, Grow-Grip Man, whose hands became enormous when he grabbed someone, and Puddle-Man. Puddle-Man looks like … well if you’ve read Bradbury’s “Skeleton” you know what he looks like. If you want to find out how that might actually be useful, read “Walking the Floor Over You” later in this book.
Which brings us back to Deuces Down. As writers, we’ve been talking about doing this particular book in the Wild Cards canon for a long time. After all, for every alpha ace power like those of Fortunato, the Turtle, and Golden Boy, there has to be an omega. Might not the effect on those lives be as dramatic as those fortunate enough to receive more profound abilities? We always thought so, and you hold the result of that notion in your hands. Deuces Down has another advantage in that its stories aren’t all contemporary. The first book covered the history of the Wild Cards universe during its first forty years or so, but since that time the stories had remained firmly in the here and now. With Deuces Down those first four decades are opened up again to the possibilities of the storytellers herein. We hope you enjoy the results.
Just for the record. Walton Simons is not a pseudonym for the wonderfully talented comic book artist/writer Walt Simonson. Not that I wouldn’t give a lot to be able to draw as well as he does. “A lot” doesn’t include being a Wild Cards writer, which I don’t think I’d trade for much of anything short of world peace.
Walton Simons, February 22, 2002
Age of Wonders
by Carrie Vaughn
If I’m an ace, I’d hate to see a deuce.
—Timothy Wiggins, congressional testimony in 1953
ONE
June 2003
RALEIGH JACKSON SET HER alarm and planned on leaving the apartment early, grabbing coffee and a bagel on the way to the Aces! magazine office, so she wouldn’t have to talk to her mother. But when she stepped into the kitchen to grab her bag and coat, Aurora was sitting there wrapped in her silk robe, two mugs of hot coffee placed in front of her, beaming with a thousand-watt smile. Even this early, a shimmer of light haloed her head, to match the bright smile.
How had her mother managed to be awake before eight? She was an actress, theater people were never up before noon. “Good morning!” Aurora gushed at her.
Raleigh sagged. “Hi, Mom.” She climbed onto the stool at the breakfast bar, took the offered mug with a wan smile, and waited for the lecture.
At least Aurora let her take a first sip before launching in. “So. You’re really going to do it.”
Raleigh gritted her teeth. She loved her mother, she did … “Yes. I’m really going to do it.”
“Raleigh, I love you, and I wish you wouldn’t take this job.”
“Mom—”
“Aces! is a rag! A gossip-mongering rag!”
But it was a gossip-mongering rag that everyone read. “It’s a first step. A big first step. I get a few professional bylines, I break a few stories of my own—this is a really big deal. I gotta start somewhere.”
Her mother might have been bitter that Aces! hadn’t published anything about her in a decade. Raleigh knew she kept a scrapbook of clippings from back in the day, when Aurora had been at her peak during the seventies, when she’d been in her twenties, beautiful and glowing—literally—and starring opposite Robert Redford.
Aurora was pushing sixty now, and still beautiful and glowing. Just not young anymore. The rainbow of light and colors that she could make ripple around her had taken on a silver sheen, a hint of diamond sparkle among the reds and oranges. She couldn’t dye that color away like she could the gray in her hair. Raleigh loved the silver lights; they were like a crown over her mother’s head. Aurora was maybe learning to love them. She still turned heads, anyway.
But she wanted to work, and good acting gigs for aging actresses were few and far between. She’d done some TV guest spots over the last few years, and she never complained. But it wasn’t the same.
Her mother hadn’t taken a sip of the coffee yet; she just held on to the mug like she wanted to strangle it and glanced out the window over the Upper West Side skyline. “Do you have to start at all? Can’t you work someplace … quiet? Journalism isn’t quiet.” She made it a declaration, forceful. “I just want you to be safe.”
Quiet. Raleigh’s whole life had been about keeping quiet, keeping calm. They’d had this same fight when she wanted to go away to college. To summer camp. When she wanted to take riding lessons.
Copyright © 2002 by George R. R. Martin and the Wild Cards Trust
