Last Call (Last Call 1)

"You … put the fake eye back in?" faltered Diana, glancing down at the pavement. "I thought you—shouldn't you—"

"He grew a new one," said Nardie flatly. "You and Scott are both now … what, at your physical peaks, okay?—except for the wound in the side that the King always has."

"Jesus," said Mavranos softly.

Diana was still clutching Crane's elbow, and now she tugged at him. "Come over here, Scott." Crane and Diana walked a dozen steps away and stood by the coping of a dusty redwood planter.

"You grew a new goddamn eye?" she said. "Is that true!?"

"Yes." Crane was breathing rapidly. I'm not dying, he thought tentatively.

"Scott," she said with quiet urgency, "what's happening here!"

"I think—I think it's going to happen," he said unsteadily; his throat was quivering with imminent laughter or sobbing. "I think you and I are about to … become the Queen and the King."

Both of them were breathing fast.

"What—today! What does it mean? What will we do?"

Crane spread his hands helplessly. "I don't know. Get married, be fertile, have children, work, plant gardens—"

Diana almost seemed angry. "—get special T-shirts, print up some letterhead."

Crane grinned at her, but took a deep breath and went on seriously. "If we're healthy and productive, you and I, so will the land be. The land, and us, are going to be sort of voodoo dolls of each other." He thought of the dull, constant pain in his wounded side. "Warning lights for each other."

His fingers brushed her blond hair. "We may lose this honorary youthfulness in the winters, but I'll bet we'll get at least most of it back each spring. I hope it'll be a good long time before those winters start to get too harsh."

"You don't figure this is … immortality."

"No. I'm sure part of our job is to one day die, so another King and Queen can take over. Maybe kids of ours. In twenty years or so there'll be jacks to watch for, and there'll still always be disease, and eventually old age. The only way to get immortality out of this is to—well, become Saturn, eat your children."

"I haven't been a great mother so far," Diana said shakily, "but I'd pass on that."

"And I think we'll—in visions and dreams or hallucinations—I think we'll deal with the things the cards are pictures of, the Archetypes that subterraneanly drive people. We might even be able to … be diplomats, somehow induce the things to assume patterns for less terrible crap in the world. My father didn't dare deal with the Archetypes face-to-face, so he went through the formal channel of the cards and used people like matches to light the things up. There's power here—my father's been using it just in a crippled way, like having a great car but only running the engine so you can cook on the hood." He gave her a frightened smile. "I think we've got to learn how to drive it."

"God," she said quietly. "I guess we can try."

They walked back to the others.

"Let's hurry," Crane called to Mavranos. "The sun's going to be up soon, and he's going to start."

Mavranos picked up his bundled windbreaker, and he and Crane walked away down the street toward the dark boats.

They were challenged when they stepped onto the dock.

"Whoa, boys," said a young man on the deck of Leon's houseboat. Crane recognized him—it was Stevie, the Amino Acid who had been tending bar. "If you're looking to play Poker, you missed it—and if you're looking to steal cameras or fishing gear"—he stepped out of the shadows and let them see the revolver he was casually pointing at them—"you've come to the wrong boat."

"I've come to talk to the owner," said Crane. "I believe he'll be awake already."

"Jesus!" Stevie's eyes suddenly widened and he held his gun up at arm's length. "You're the two guys that were in that boat on Lake Mead Sunday. You killed our King!"

Mavranos quickly stepped to the side, raising the wrapped shotgun, and Crane darted his hand up toward the revolver under his shirt.

But at that moment a deep voice shouted, "Freeze!" from the shadows behind Stevie, and everyone tensely held still. "Drop your gun over the side, Stevie," Leon's Hanari voice went on. "Do it!"

For a moment Stevie's gun hand just shook, still extended, and Crane expected Leon to shoot the young man in the back. Then with a shaky curse Stevie tossed the gun over the rail.

Mavranos lowered the shotgun and exhaled harshly through his fluttering mustache.

Leon stepped forward into the brightening light, and he was smiling under the bandage on his forehead. Again Crane noticed the bulge in the tailored slacks, and he guessed that his father had had some kind of artificial implant put into the body. His notion of physical perfection? Crane wondered. A perpetual boner?