Pairing Up is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2023 by the Wild Cards Trust

  “Trudy of the Apes” copyright © 2023 by Kevin Andrew Murphy

  “Cyrano d’Escargot” copyright © 2023 by Christopher Rowe

  “In the Forests of the Night” copyright © 2023 by Marko Kloos

  “The Wounded Heart” copyright © 2023 by Melinda M. Snodgrass

  “Echoes from a Canyon Wall” copyright © 2023 by Bradley Denton

  “The Long Goodbye” copyright © 2023 by Walton Simons

  “What’s Your Sign?” copyright © 2023 by Gwenda Bond and Peter Newman

  “The Wolf and the Butterfly” copyright © 2023 by David Anthony Durham

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Bantam & B colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All characters featured in this book, and the distinctive names and likenesses thereof, and all related indicia are trademarks of George R. R. Martin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Martin, George R. R., editor. | Snodgrass, Melinda M., contributor. | Murphy, Kevin (Kevin Andrew), author. | Rowe, Christopher, author. | Kloos, Marko, author.

  Title: George R. R. Martin presents Wild Cards: Pairing up: tales of love & lust from the world of the Wild Cards / edited by George R.R. Martin; assisted by Melinda M. Snodgrass and written by Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, Marko Kloos [and others].

  Other titles: Pairing up

  Description: New York: Bantam Books, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022038255 (print) | LCCN 2022038256 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593357866 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593357873 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction, American.

  Classification: LCC PS648.S3 G46 2022 (print) | LCC PS648.S3 (ebook) | DDC 813/.0876208—dc23/eng/20221014

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022038255

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022038256

  Ebook ISBN 9780593357873

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson and Scott Biel

  Cover illustration: Zlatina Zareva

  ep_prh_6.1_144228926_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Trudy of the Apes by Kevin Andrew Murphy

  Cyrano d’Escargot by Christopher Rowe

  In the Forests of the Night by Marko Kloos

  The Wounded Heart by Melinda M. Snodgrass

  Echoes from a Canyon Wall by Bradley Denton

  The Long Goodbye by Walton Simons

  What’s Your Sign? by Gwenda Bond and Peter Newman

  The Wolf and the Butterfly by David Anthony Durham

  Dedication

  About the Editor

  _144228926_

  Wild Cards

  The virus was created on TAKIS, hundreds of light-years from Earth. The ruling mentats of the great Takisian Houses were looking for a way to enhance their formidable psionic abilities and augment them with physical powers. The retrovirus they devised showed enough promise that the psi lords decided to field-test it on Earth, whose inhabitants were genetically identical to Takisians.

  Prince Tisianne of House Ilkazam opposed the experiment and raced to Earth in his own living starship to stop it. The alien ships fought high above the atmosphere. The ship carrying the virus was torn apart, the virus itself lost. Prince Tisianne landed his own damaged ship at White Sands, where his talk of tachyon drives prompted the military to dub him DR. TACHYON.

  Across the continent, the virus fell into the hands of DR. TOD, a crime boss and war criminal, who resolved to use it to extort wealth and power from the cities of America. He lashed five blimps together and set out for New York City. President Harry S. Truman reached out to Robert Tomlin, JETBOY, the teenage fighter ace of World War II, to stop him. Flying his experimental jet, the JB-1, Jetboy reached Tod’s blimps and crashed into the gondola. The young hero and his old foe met for the last time as the bomb containing the virus fell to Earth. “Die, Jetboy, die,” Tod shouted as he shot Tomlin again and again. “I can’t die yet, I haven’t seen The Jolson Story,” Jetboy replied as the bomb exploded.

  Thousands of microscopic spores rained down upon Manhattan. Thousands more were dispersed into the atmosphere and swept up by the jet stream, to spread all across the Earth. But New York City got the worst of it.

  It was September 15, 1946. The first Wild Card Day.

  Ten thousand died that first day in Manhattan alone. Thousands more were transformed, their DNA rewritten in terrible and unpredictable ways. Every case was unique. No two victims were affected in the same way. For that reason, the press dubbed xenovirus Takis-A (its scientific name) the wild card.

  Ninety percent of those infected died, unable to withstand the violent bodily changes the virus unleashed upon them. Those victims were said to have drawn the black queen.

  Of those who survived, nine of every ten were twisted and mutated in ways great and small. They were called jokers (or jacks, knaves, or joker-aces if they also gained powers). Shunned, outcast, and feared, they began to gather in the Bowery, in a neighborhood that soon became known as Jokertown.

  Only one in a hundred of those infected emerged with superhuman powers: telepathy, telekinesis, enhanced strength, superspeed, invulnerability, flight, and a thousand other strange and wondrous abilities. These were the aces, the celebrities of the dawning new age. Unlike the heroes of the comic book, very few of them chose to don spandex costumes and fight crime, but they would soon begin to rewrite history all the same.

  These are their stories.

  1957

  Trudy of the Apes

  by Kevin Andrew Murphy

  The Garden of Allah was found, not in the Prophet’s Paradise, but in Hollywood, at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Havenhurst Drive. But instead of flying there on the back of the Buraq like Muhammad, Trudy Pirandello had taken Pan Am.

  She checked her bags at the front desk, checked her makeup with her compact, and in the reflection, checked out the jewels and jewelry on display on the other guests—a nice watch here, a pretty ring there, but nothing that wouldn’t be missed and nothing worth risking, especially with her eyes on a greater prize. Trudy slipped her compact back in her handbag, slipped the bellman a generous but not lavish tip, and slipped off into the interior of the Garden of Allah.

  She had expected paradise to look a bit more Arabian, with fanciful fountains and arabesques, not a couple dozen Spanish Mission–style bungalows, all terra-cotta tiles and stucco. At least the landscaping was pretty and tropical enough, with bougainvillea vines and night-blooming jasmine, the dark shiny leaves glittering in the sun. The houris were there, too, or at least starlets, many of them taking advantage of a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, the legacy of Alla Nazimova, silent-screen Salomé turned hotelier.

  Rumor also had it that Nazimova coined the term sewing circle for ladies who liked ladies, though as Trudy understood, Alla liked everyone. Her tradition had continued—the Garden of Allah, as the hotel had been renamed with an added h, was the swinging place to go if you were a Hollywood creative. F. Scott Fitzgerald had stayed there, as had Errol Flynn. It-girl Clara Bow, Ernest Hemingway, Ginger Rogers, D. W. Griffith, Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, and Dorothy Parker. Even Marlene Dietrich, who’d starred in the movie The Garden of Allah.

  Of course, the hotel had seen better days. Alla Nazimova had died in ’44—two years before the wild card—and it was now 1957. Errol Flynn had swashbuckled away. Trudy thought she glimpsed the dark-haired head of Ronald Reagan in the pool, surrounded by a bevy of bathing beauties—a definite trade-up from Bonzo the chimp—but a B-movie star wasn’t what Trudy needed. What she needed was an ace: a blonde, to be specific.

  She spied a very small one: A little blond girl, no more than six, sat poolside sipping a pink lemonade. She wore a white blouse, a black skirt with suspenders, matching white socks and black Mary Janes, with a shocking-pink bow in her hair, and a supercilious expression as she watched the adults.

  “Hello, Eloise.” Trudy sat down next to her. “I was hoping to see Kay.”

  “She’s taking a nap…” Eloise told her.

  “I expected she might,” Trudy said, keeping the secret unspoken. Kay was taking a nap because Eloise was her alter ego. Kay was Kay Thompson, star of stage and screen—singer, dancer, multitalented everywoman—who three years ago had gone to New York for a singing gig and taken ill. There were rumors that it might have been the wild card, but Thompson brushed them off, saying it was nothing more remarkable than menopause, then went on with her show.

  No one else had noticed a little girl from time to time slipping out of
Thompson’s suite at the Plaza Hotel, going off to make mischief or spy on guests. No one else except Trudy.

  Trudy was an ace herself, but she was also smart enough to keep her wild card up her sleeve…and not just because she was also a thief who specialized in teleporting small objects—particularly jewelry—into her hands. Aces who got caught ended up in government service, doing far more dangerous and less rewarding jobs than going to nightclubs and musical revues and, in the dimness, teleporting this diamond earring or that gold watch to the inside of an evening bag.

  Hotel lobbies were also good places to spy valuable jewels, particularly hotels as swanky as the Plaza—although Trudy hadn’t expected that the sharp-eyed little girl would be the same person as the popular songstress whose shows Trudy had pick-teleported one too many times. But Eloise was a touch too fashion-conscious for the average little girl, sharing a few too many tastes in common with Kay Thompson, which Trudy had remarked upon. Soon an uneasy truce sparked an unlikely friendship.

  The fact was, Trudy liked Kay, and Kay liked Trudy, and two lady aces up the sleeve could cover for each other better than either could alone. Plus, Kay owed Trudy. Kay’s ace wasn’t fully under her control, tied, Trudy suspected, to menopause and hot flashes, and last year there’d been an overly suspicious hotel detective at the Plaza, asking a few too many questions about Kay’s occasional young guest, Eloise. After Trudy had arranged for the police to find him with a stolen string of pearls in his pocket, he’d gone away, and Trudy had let his successor think that Eloise was her own daughter, going off and getting into mischief while Trudy visited with Kay.

  “So, what brings you to Hollywood, Trudy?” Eloise glanced up over her lemonade, holding it the way an older sophisticated woman would handle a cocktail. “Something I could help with? Or do you need Kay?”

  “Well,” Trudy admitted, “Kay mentioned in her last postcard that Jack Braun had a bungalow here. I was hoping for an introduction…”

  “What sort of introduction?”

  Trudy cocked her head, gazing at the pool with Ronnie and his bevy of beauties, then gave Eloise a sidelong glance. “Not the sort of introduction it would be proper for a little girl to give…”

  “Wait here.” Eloise gave her a knowing look and a wink. “I’ll manage it.” With that she downed the last of her lemonade like a hard-drinking woman would a cocktail, then skipped off down the tiles beside the pool with all the skill of a dancer with forty-plus years of training.

  Trudy was a bit bemused. The parties at the Garden of Allah were legendary; she’d planned to find her way to them at night, try to work her charms on Jack, and see where that led. Instead, she looked at the poolside menu and ordered a limeade and an avocado-and-bacon sandwich, feeling very Californian in her choice. She wondered how many stories about the Garden were true.

  The best she’d heard was the one about the naked actress, her pet monkey, and the telegram boy, which sounded like a bawdy tale from The Arabian Nights lightly retold for the Silent Era. But then Trudy heard the actual screeching of the remembered monkey, or at least a little girl screeching like a monkey: Eloise careening back into the pool area in her Mary Janes. Somewhere she’d acquired a fruit basket the size of one of Carmen Miranda’s headdresses. “Ook! Ook!” Eloise shrieked, hurling an orange with startling accuracy at a blond man chasing her. He was tall, handsome, and barefoot, wearing only shorts, and the orange hit him right in the middle of his broad bare chest. Or almost did, because there was a golden flash of light as it splatted on the air half an inch from his skin. “Eloise!” he roared.

  “Ook!” cried Eloise. “You Tarzan, me monkey!” She danced around the pool to the amusement of minor stars and starlets, lobbing tangerines and apples at Jack Braun, Golden Boy of the Four Aces, the strongest man in the world…and also, incidentally, the actor playing Tarzan on television for NBC, coming off his first season in the role and almost ready to start his second. Eloise’s game would have been dangerous for anyone else to play, but the strongest man in the world didn’t mean the most agile, Jack Braun looked hungover, and Eloise had all the training of a dancer in her forties packed into the body of a six-year-old girl.

  She also had a fruit basket with a bunch of bananas inserted randomly for color, so Trudy made a decision. One of the bananas disappeared from the basket and reappeared in Trudy’s hand underneath the napkin in her lap. Trudy produced the banana, as if she’d had it all along, and idly began to eat it as Eloise continued to pelt Golden Boy with fruit, dancing and laughing and crying, “Ook!” until she got him to chase her at just the right angle, headed straight toward Trudy.

  The old slapstick trick had worked for Harold Lloyd in The Flirt, but rather than toss her banana peel under Golden Boy’s foot, Trudy teleported it there, with the desired effect—he skidded out. Rather than run past her after Eloise, he slid straight into her, knocking her, her chair, and himself into the pool. Trudy yelped, feigning surprise as best she could, and then they were tumbling into the water with a flailing of arms and a flashing of golden light.

  Ladies falling clothed into the pool was something of a tradition at the Garden of Allah, and while it wasn’t quite the Hollywood meet-cute she’d planned—she’d learned the screenwriters’ term when she saw Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? last year on Broadway—it more than worked, allowing Trudy to put her arms around Jack’s neck and play the frightened soggy young thing while Jack played the gentleman. “Are you okay?” he asked, sweeping her up in his arms and dumping her on the side of the pool, then clambering out himself. “That kid is a menace!”

  “I’m okay,” Trudy said, “just wet. Oh, I must look a fright…” Trudy considered feigning tears, but the waterworks weren’t really warranted, just a bit of vanity, because she knew she looked like a very attractive brunette with a wet blouse and nice tits.

  “You just need to get dried off,” Jack Braun told her. “Are you staying here? Do you have dry clothes?”

  “In my bags at the front desk,” Trudy told him. “I’m visiting a friend, but she’s not home yet.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to change at my place…”

  Trudy smiled. “Thank you,” she said, half to Jack, half to Eloise, who’d made her escape.

  Kay Thompson had more than repaid her debt.

  * * *

  —

  Getting Jack into bed wasn’t that hard. He was reasonably good in it, and so was Trudy, plus Jack was easy on the eyes, which helped. Besides, they were around the same age, so they had that in common—although, unfairly, he looked younger than her, even though Trudy was pretty certain he was actually older. She had thought that blonds wrinkled early, but somehow Jack’s body hadn’t gotten the memo. But he was also coming off a painful and expensive divorce and made it clear that he wasn’t looking for a new Mrs. Braun. “I may be Golden Boy,” he told her, “but the only gold I’ve got left is my hair—and this.” He clenched his fist, making it glow with golden light, the power of his force field.

  Trudy considered. While she wasn’t without her charms, they were also in Hollywood, and hotties were nothing special, especially for a handsome famous ace. She needed to up her ante if she wanted to stay in the game. “Well, I won’t say I’m no gold digger, but I dug my gold years ago and I’ve got more than enough to last me.” Trudy laughed what she hoped was the right amount. “Now I’m just out for a good time. Don’t believe me? Here, let me show you my rocks.”

  Trudy got up from bed, naked, and went to her luggage, leaning over it long enough for Jack to get a nice view of her ass while she got into her jewel case. The rocks were a couple of diamonds and an emerald, and rocks indeed—a thirty-three-carat diamond pendant, a twenty-one-carat emerald flanked by baguette diamonds, and an almost forty-two-carat diamond ring. The diamond pendant was greenish yellow, but pretty, in a Second Empire setting with three tulips and three teardrops; the diamond ring was a bluish-white stunner, in a newer setting by Cartier; and the emerald had a Cartier setting, too. Trudy put on all three. “Ta-da!” She turned around, wearing nothing but them and her birthday suit. “Like I said—rocks.”