"Get up, Scott." Ozzie reached down with his free hand and shook Crane's shoulder, and Crane got slowly to his feet, not even wincing when his bad leg took his weight. "It's—really, it's no more your fault than if you'd been driving and got in a crash, and she died. But your hippie friend might be smart to … continue his friendship with you over the phone," Ozzie said.
Crane was blinking around. Nothing had changed—the people who had been walking past the shops further up the street were still walking—but there seemed to be a ringing in the air and a quiver in the pavement, as if some thing had just happened.
Caused by me …
He and the old man resumed their labored progress down the sidewalk.
"My hippie friend," Crane said absently. He yawned. "It's, what, it's too late for my hippie friend, he's already got cancer. Had it before he ever found me." Crane felt very tired—he hadn't got any sleep last night—but his heart was pounding, and his forehead was cold with nausea.
"I'd hate to see him eat through that mustache." Ozzie was staring ahead; Crane followed his gaze and saw Mavranos sitting on a brick planter.
"Yeah, it is a sight," said Crane automatically. He waved, and Mavranos hiked himself off it and slouched forward.
"You say he found you," said Ozzie. "Why was he looking for you?"
It was an effort to speak. "He thinks I'll lead him to the place where randomness lives—" He paused to try and take a deep breath, "—and he'll be able to trick randomness into undoing his cancer."
Still frowning, Ozzie laughed softly. "That's not bad. Like raising to the limit and then throwing away all five cards for new ones. Stupid and hopeless, but I like the style." The old man's hand was still in the pocket of the windbreaker. "Why don't you go explain to him about my gun, hmm?"
CHAPTER 12: To the Chapel Perilous
All three of them sat on the coping of the brick planter. Ozzie was on the end, a couple of feet away from Crane, and he looked at his watch.
"I can give you boys ten minutes," the old man said, "and then I won't ever see either of you again in this world."
Looking away, the old man reached over and squeezed Crane's hand for a moment.
"After Diana called me last night," Ozzie said, "I got in touch with some friends, and they've been watching the cars that park, and the ferry, and they had you two down for doubtful as soon as you'd got out of your truck. If I don't walk away from you within half an hour of when I first spoke to you, Scott, a couple of them'll walk down here and escort me away. And if I go any farther than this here spot with you, they'll kill both of you. And of course, if anyone else should authoritatively join us—and even a helicopter would have a time getting in or out of here easy—we're probably all three dead instantly."
Mavranos stared past Crane at Ozzie for a moment, then laughed. "I like this old fart, Scott," he drawled.
Crane forced himself to think. "How did that game on the water, the game on Lake Mead, give Ricky Leroy a lien on my body?" he asked quickly.
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?"