quiet at 7:00 a.m. There was only a wino sleeping in a corner and a joker mother clutching her four-year-old as he alternated between sobs and hacking coughs.
Niobe gazed at the little fellow with naked longing in her green eyes. Unlike his mother, he was completely normal though to Noel’s mind the green snot crusting his upper lip and his beet-red face made him a more unlovely sight than her.
The receptionist made a call, and he and Niobe settled into chairs to wait. A television hung on the wall was set to MSNBC. Noel’s attention was caught by the heading-The sudd. A helicopter shot was panning across an expanse of reeds and water. On bits of dry ground that humped like the backs of prehistoric water beasts hiding in the swamp, destroyed tanks belched smoke into the air. Bodies, doll-like at this height, floated in pools and bled onto the ground.
Noel read the scrolling subtitles. The Sudanese government had voted to join with the Caliphate. Dr. Nshombo, leader of the People’s Paradise of Africa, has charged the Sudanese with genocide against the non- Muslim black tribesmen of the south, and moved into the Sudan to protect them. Clearly a major battle between PPA and Caliphate forces has occurred.
Noel turned away from the lure of the flicking box. It wasn’t his problem. He was done with political games on a world stage. A pox on both of them.
But there was no way that Prince Siraj could be compared to the madman who led the armies of the PPA. Siraj was a cunning politician, and killed when expedient. Dr. Nshombo was a cold ideological killer. Tom Weathers was just a killer. And they all hate you. Why not take one of them off the table? Make Siraj an ally rather than an enemy? You were close friends once.
Because I don’t know if I can trust him now. Those boys of Cambridge are dead, Noel replied to that part of himself that sometimes missed the excitement of the game and that sense of serving a greater cause.
Fifteen minutes later the centaur doctor came clattering through the door. Dr. Finn took Niobe’s wrist in his hand, feeling for her pulse. “Worse or better?”
“Better,” she said.
“That’s good.”
“If… if something were to go wrong… I won’t try again. I can’t watch any more of my children die.”
Niobe wasn’t just talking about the miscarriages. She was thinking of the hundreds of “kids” born from her ace power. Her “tail” was actually an ovipositor. Within minutes of sex, two to five eggs would move through the tail, be laid, and hatch into tiny children. They were usually aces, and their powers seemed to be linked to Niobe’s needs at a given moment.
They were the primary reason she had been able to escape from a secure facility and help free the young boy whose nuclear ace had endangered them all. But these children only lived for a few hours or a few days. Their homes were filled with photographs of the kids. Niobe grieved for every one of them. The last four had been Noel’s. He grieved for them.
One of the reasons Niobe-or Genetrix as they had called her at BICC-had been studied was her ability to reverse the wild card odds. Instead of ninety percent black queens, her clutches were ninety percent aces. She and Noel had hoped that those odds would continue when they tried to conceive a normal baby.
Unfortunately that hadn’t been the case.
Like every other ace and joker/ace trying to have a baby, they had the same devastating odds of a black queen. Add to that the fact that Noel was a hermaphrodite and functionally sterile, and the odds of Niobe every achieving her dream of motherhood seemed remote… until they came to the Jokertown Clinic, where more authorities on the wild card practiced than in any other place in the world. Dr. Clara van Rennsaeler had designed an ingenious plan of treatment, which her husband Dr. Bradley Finn was implementing.
First he pumped Niobe full of hormones so her ovaries produced multiple eggs. Then Finn had combined the nucleus from one of Niobe’s wild card ovipositor eggs with Noel’s barely mobile sperm and a real egg from her womb. By Noel’s count they’d discarded forty-three zygotes. Sad little creatures who had begun and ended their lives in petri dishes when they turned out to be black queens or jokers. Four had been viable, but they’d lost three to miscarriages.
And now this one. They knew the sex-male. They knew he would be an ace. Finn told them that if they reached sixteen weeks they were home free. But now…
“Let’s see what we’ve got.” The centaur doctor led them out of the waiting room and into the examination room. Noel waited just beyond the screening curtains while Finn and a female nurse examined Niobe. A few moments later the steel rings chattered as Finn pulled back the curtain.
Niobe was beaming.
“We’re good,” the joker doctor said. “Thirteen weeks and counting. We’re not going to lose this little guy.” He made it sound like a vow.
Noel stepped up to the bed, and was surprised when Niobe took his hand and pulled him down. “Sit down before you fall down,” she said.
Noel realized that relief had left him limp. “What caused the cramping?”
“Just a little gas,” Finn replied.
Niobe hung her head, taking refuge behind her mane of chestnut hair. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I understand why you’re jumpy as a cat,” Finn said.
“Can you blame us?” Noel snapped. Niobe shushed him, and stroked her hand down his arm.
“No, of course not. Not after three miscarriages,” Finn soothed. “But we’re in good shape.”
Noel looked at his wife’s wan face, and suddenly hugged her tight.
Finn cleared his throat. “I know you don’t want to take anything,” he said. “But I can prescribe a mild sedative.”
Niobe was already shaking her head.
“Just to take the edge off.”
A more emphatic shake.
Finn sighed. “All right.” He tapped Noel on the shoulder. “Take her home and keep her happy, okay?”
Noel nodded, and acknowledged to himself that going off to Baghdad would definitely not keep her happy.
Louis B. Armstrong
International Airport
New Orleans, Louisiana
The first thing wally noticed as he tromped down the jetway was the smell.
New Orleans smelled different from Manhattan. It didn’t smell like sidewalk garbage and truck exhaust; it smelled, faintly, of earth and water. There was humidity in the air, too, which along with the wet smell reminded him of summers at the lake cabin, back home in Minnesota. It had been that way the first time he came here, too, back when Bubbles saved the city.
Thinking about Michelle saddened him. Part of him had never wanted to come back here, and part of him felt badly for not visiting Michelle.
He waited in the airport, watching people buff the floors for an hour, before calling Jerusha. He figured she might not be that happy to hear from him again, and that would only be worse if he woke her up. Was she an early riser? They hadn’t shared a tent in Timor, like he and DB had done a number of times, so he had no idea. DB snored.
“Hello?” Her voice didn’t sound gravelly, like most people when awakened by the phone. Whew.
“Jerusha? This is Wally.”
“Oh, hey, Wally. Look, I hope you’re not upset about yesterday-”
“Nah, I understand. I did sorta spring the whole thing on you outta the blue.”
“Well, yeah. I’m glad you understand.”
“Sure. But hey, can I show you something? It’ll be real quick, I promise.” Farther down the terminal, a buzzer launched into a series of short, loud bursts. A baggage carousel creaked to life.
Jerusha heard it, too. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m at the airport. I caught a flight.”
“Wally…” She was doing it again-cradling her head. He could tell.
