"I like the taste of joker blood."

-graffiti, NYC subway

"I don't care what they look like, they bleed red just like anybody else . . . most of them, anyway."

-Lt. Col. John Garrick, Joker Brigade

"If I'm an ace, I'd hate to see a deuce."

-Timothy Wiggins

"You want to know if I'm an ace or a joker? The answer is yes."

-The Turtle

I'm a joker, I'm insane, And you cannot say my name Coiled in the streets Waiting only for night

I am the serpent who gnaws the roots of the world -"Serpent Time,"

Thomas Marion Douglas

"I'm delighted to have Baby returned to me, but I have no intention of leaving earth. This planet is my home now, and those touched by the wild card are my children."

-Dr. Tachyon,on the occasion of the return of his s.p.a.ceship

"They are the demon children of the Great Satan, America."

-Ayatollah Khomeini

"In hindsight, the decision to use aces to secure the safe return of the hostages was probably a mistake, and I take full responsibility for the failure of the mission."

-President Jimmy Carter

"Think like an ace, and you can win like an ace. Think like a joker, and the joke's on you."

-Think Like An Ace!

(Ballantine, 1981)

"The parents of America are deeply concerned about the exces- sive coverage of aces and their exploits in the media. They are bad role models for our children, and thousands are injured or killed each year while attempting to imitate their freak powers."

-Naomi Weathers, American Parents League

"Even their kids want to be like us. These are the '80s. A new decade, man, and we're the new people. We can fly, and we don't need no bogus airplane like that nat Jetboy. The nats don't know it yet, but they're obsolete. This is a time for aces."

-anonymous letter in Jokertown Cry, January 1, 1981

COMES A HUNTER.

by John J. Miller

"If you wish to find the unclouded truth, do not concern yourself with right and wrong."

-Seng-ts'an: Hsin-hsin Ming Hsin-hsin Ming.

I.

Brennan watched all the color fade from the landscape as the bus came down from the quiet coolness of the mountains to the sweltering stickiness of a summer city day. Endless asphalt parking lots replaced meadows and gra.s.sy fields. Buildings grew taller and crowded closer to the roadway. Leaden light-poles supplanted the trees on the median and along the road. Even the sky turned sullen and gray, threatening rain.

He disembarked at the Port Authority with the other pa.s.sengers. They scattered to their myriad destinations, their eyes averted in the habitual manner of the big-city dweller, without giving him a second glance. Not that there was anything about him to cause someone to glance twice.

He was tall, but not excessively so. His build was more lithe than bulky. His hands were large. Suntanned and scarred, veins and cords stood out on their backs like thick wires. His face was dark and lean and unremarkable. He wore a denim jacket, frayed and sunbleached, a dark cotton tee shirt, a fresh pair of blue jeans, and dark running shoes. He carried a small soft-sided bag in his left hand and a flat leather case in his right.

Forty-second Street outside the Port Authority building was crowded. He merged into the flow of the foot traffic, allowing it to take him into an area of Manhattan that was only slightly less seedy than some of the more polite parts of Jokertown. He extricated himself from the swarm of pedestrians after a few blocks and went up the decaying stone steps of the Ipswhich Arms, a blowsy hotel that apparently catered to the local hooker trade. It looked as if business was bad. People were apparently going to Jokertown for their kicks. They were cheaper there and, even if only a fraction of what he had read was true, a lot kickier.

The desk clerk looked dubious when he came in alone and with luggage, but took his money and gave him directions to a room that was as small and dirty as he had thought it would be. He closed the door, put his bag on the floor, and carefully set his leather case on the sagging bed.

The room was sweltering, but Brennan had been in hotter places. He felt confined by the filthy bare walls around him, but opening a window wouldn't have helped. He laid down on the bed and stared at the peeling ceiling without seeing the roaches racing above his head. The words of a letter he had received the day before kept running through his mind.

"Captain Brennan, he is here. I have seen him, but I am afraid that he saw and recognized me as well. Come to the restaurant. Be cautious, but open."

There was no signature, but he recognized Minh's elegant, precise hand. There was no address, but he didn't need one. Minh had hidden him in his restaurant for several days when he had surrept.i.tiously returned to the States three years before. And Brennan had no doubt to whom his old friend referred in the letter. It was Kien.

He closed his eyes and saw a face: masculine, lean, predatory. He tried to make it vanish. He tried to blank it from his mind by conjuring from the depths of his consciousness the sound of one hand clapping. He tried, but failed. The face smiled, mocking him. It began to laugh.

He sat on the bed, waiting for the darkness and what it would bring.

II.

The air was flat and unmoving and clogged Brennan's nostrils with the miasma of seven million people crammed too closely together. After three years in the mountains he was unused to the city, but he was still able to take advantage of it. One man among thousands, he was seen but not noticed, heard but not remembered, as he walked to Minh's restaurant on Elizabeth, carrying his flat leather case.

It was early evening and the street was still crowded with potential customers, but the restaurant was closed. That was strange.

The vestibule, the only part of the restaurant's interior visible from the street, was dark. The sign hanging on the inside of the outer gla.s.s door said "Closed. Please call again." in English and Vietnamese. Three men, city punks, lounged on the street in front of the building, joking among themselves.

Brennan walked to the corner, trying to drape his sudden apprehension with a cloak of calmness. He ran through a series of breathing exercises that had been Ishida's first lesson to him when he had decided to give direction to his life by studying the Way. Apprehension, fear, nervousness, hatred-these would do him no good. He needed the ineffable calmness of an unbroken, unclouded mountain pool.

Kien was still alive. Of that he never had a doubt. Kien was a cunning and ruthless survivor to whom the fall of Saigon was merely an inconvenience. It would have taken him some time, but Brennan knew that he must have built a network of agents as potent and relentless as his network in Vietnam. These agents, given the few days that it took the letter to be written, delivered, and acted upon, could have tracked Minh down.

He turned the corner and, unnoticed by the other pedestrians on the street, slipped into a side alley bordering Minh's restaurant. It was dark there, and as quiet and rank as death. He crouched next to a pile of uncollected garbage, listening and watching. He saw nothing, as his eyes adjusted to the deeper gloom of the alley, besides scavenging cats. He heard nothing but the rustling sounds they made as they searched through the garbage.

He set his case down and flicked open its latches. He could barely see in the gloom, but he needed no light at all to a.s.semble what lay inside. He snapped on and dogged down the limbs, upper and lower, to the central grip, and with sure, practiced strength slipped the string over the lower tip, stepped through, set the tip of the lower limb against his foot, bent the upper limb against the back of his thigh, and slipped the string over its tip. He brushed the taut string with his fingers and smiled at the low thrumming sound it produced.

He held a recurved bow, forty-two inches long, made of layers of fibergla.s.s laminated around a yew core. Brennan knew it was a good bow. He had made it himself. It pulled at sixty pounds, powerful enough to bring down a deer, bear, or man.

The case also held a three-fingered leather glove which Brennan slipped on his right hand and a small quiver of arrows which he attached to his belt by Velcro tabs. He pulled one free. It was tipped by a hunting broadhead with four razor-sharp vanes. He nocked it loosely to the taut string and, more silent than the cats scrabbling through the uncollected garbage, crept to the restaurant's back door.

He listened, but could hear nothing. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and cracked it open half an inch. An arc of light spilled out and he found himself looking into a swatch of the kitchen. It, too, was empty and quiet.

He slid inside, a silent blot of darkness in the stainless steel and white porcelain room. Keeping low, moving fast, he went to the double swinging doors that led out into the dining area and cautiously peeked through the oval window set into the door. He saw what he had been afraid he would see.

The waiters, cooks, and customers were huddled together in one corner of the room under the watchful eyes of a man armed with an automatic pistol. Two others held Minh spread-eagled against a wall while a third worked him over. Minh's face was bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y, his eyes were swollen shut. The man who was beating him methodically with a leather sap was also questioning him.

Brennan slipped down below the window, his teeth clenched, rage swelling the veins in his neck and reddening his face.

Kien had recognized Minh and ordered him hunted down. Minh was one of the few people in America who could identify Kien, who knew that he had methodically and ruthlessly used his position as an ARVN general to betray his country, his men, and his American allies. Brennan, of course, also knew Kien for what he was. He also knew that whatever place Kien had made for himself in America, those in authority would respect, listen to, and probably even fear him. Brennan, on the other hand, since he had walked away from the Army in disgust during the debacle of the Fall of Saigon, was an outlaw. No one in authority knew that he was back in the States, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He reached into his back pocket, withdrew a hood, and slipped it on, covering his features from his upper lip to the top of his head.