Last Call (Last Call 1)

Ozzie ran his free hand through his sparse white hair. "Fortune-telling by cards works sometimes. But it's prescriptive rather than descriptive. When it's working, if you take money for a hand, you've sold the hand, sold the lucky-in-finances or unlucky-with-girls or whatever the cards may happen to represent. If you pay money, you've bought it, bought those qualities, bought that luck. And a hand of Poker is a number of qualities. The sum of the five cards may mean that you're rich but impotent, or happy but gonna die young, or any other combination of factors. You buy or sell all five at once, or all seven if it's Seven-Stud. This much I told you years ago."

"Yeah, I—"

"Shut up. That's how you can buy or sell … consequences with cards; with bodies it's trickier. To buy a guy's body, you've got to become his parent first. I don't know how that works; it's got something to do with genes and cards both being quantized things, discrete things, and the fact that it's a random selection of 'em from two sources that defines the resulting individual. There was a hand that was a combination of two people's cards, and that hand defined you, and then you took money for it. It was you, it was the makeup of you, as surely as the pattern of your genes is the makeup of you, and you let Ricky Leroy assume it. Have it. Buy your body. He's let you run around with it for twenty years, but after this next game, when he'll buy another lot of idiots, he's gonna take possession of the ripe old ones." The old man had been staring hard at the pavement as he spoke, and now he pressed his lips together firmly.

"And there's nothing I can do even to … slow this down?"

Ozzie looked up and exhaled. "Oh, slow it down—sure. Don't drink alcohol. Dionysus isn't a nice guy these days—he's also known as Bacchus, the god of wine—and he's on Leroy's side. A case could probably be made that Leroy is Dionysus. Stay by water—on it, if you can—though you're gonna start hating the sight of water like a hydrophobic dog. Don't play cards; he can sense you if you do. But after Easter none of it will have made any difference." He shook his head. "I'm very goddamn sorry, son."

Crane took a deep breath of the chilly sea air. "I'm going to fight it," he said wonderingly, realizing that he meant it. "Fight him."

Ozzie shrugged and nodded. "It's good to have something to occupy your time."

Mavranos leaned forward. "Me ditching my cancer. Is there a chance of it?"

Ozzie smiled gently, and though it deepened his wrinkles, it made him look younger. "Sure. A worthless chance, but no worse than playing the lottery. If you can be in a … place, a focus, where a heavy recurrent statistical pattern turns random, or vice versa … something like when the pattern of a Craps table changes from hot to cold, if you could be at a sweaty high-stakes game when it shifts … it's practically got to be in Las Vegas, you need the odds swarming like flies around you real thick, a lot of games working … and they all of them at once shift from in-step to not-in-step, a phase change, with you participating, you could come out with your cells not remembering that they wanted to go cancerous."

"Like what Arthur Winfree did with mosquitoes," said Mavranos. Seeing Ozzie's blank look, he explained, "Mosquitoes eat and sleep in a regular cycle, and the—the timing gear is the sunlight coming and going every day. You can shorten or lengthen that cycle, readjust the timing, by keeping 'em indoors and changing the periods of light and dark; and the various possible patterns, if you chart 'em, contain a math thing called a singularity. If you hit the mosquitoes with a bright light at precisely the right instant, they lose the cycle, just sleep and fly and stand around with no sense or pattern at all. Another calculated flash will put 'em back into the cycle."

Ozzie stared at Mavranos. "Yes. Very good. That's a better example than my Craps table, though I still think you'll have to try it in Vegas. Freest possible flow of numbers and odds around you, and psychic factors, too, you better believe it. And it'd help to go in with a very conspicuously ordered thing or person or something, so that when the rearrangement wave collapsed, there'd be incentive for it all to fall out on the side of order. Like a seed crystal." The old man yawned and shrugged. "I think."

Crane shook himself and dug in his pocket. "And what can we do to save Diana?"

Ozzie was suddenly alert. "What does she need saving from?"

"Look at this," said Crane, passing the old man the photograph of Lady Issit. "I assume 'fold' means 'kill.' "