Dealer's Choice

Friday afternoon

September 21, 1990

Using a few of the specialized tools that Travnicek had used to create him, working slowly and with great care, Modular Man managed to bend his fingers back into a shape that would work. But they didn’t work as well as they had, and the proportions were slightly different — just a little deformed. At least the plastic skin covering them hadn’t torn: the distortion wasn’t as noticeable as it would have been if the structural metal were peeking through.

Modular Man had been attending Columbia University for two semesters now, taking courses in advanced physics, metallurgy, and chemistry. He had been hoping to learn ways of repairing himself. He got his tuition free in return for allowing the professors to examine him.

He had learned a lot — he could memorize the textbooks in a single sitting — but he hadn’t learned much that could help him. Travnicek was a wild card genius, and no one could duplicate his work.

And Modular Man himself, despite all the facts he memorized, didn’t seem able to duplicate the work either. It appeared that the android wasn’t very creative.

He was trying to rewrite his programming slightly, hoping it would improve his creativity. He hadn’t had much luck with that either.

Travnicek had told him to fix himself, then wait. Having finished his repair job, Modular Man went to Travnicek’s room and waited.

He was used to waiting. Usually, to help time pass, he called up pleasant memories from his past and relived them in great detail.

This time he watched as Travnicek watched some of his least pleasant memories on his television. Travnicek was playing the recordings from the android’s visit to the Rox. He watched both the video portion and the radar image.

The old Travnicek hadn’t known how to read the radar images, or if he did, simply wasn’t interested. This one did. Maybe it was similar to one of the ways in which he now apprehended the universe.

Travnicek came to the part of the recording where the merman appeared out of the air in front of the android. Stray alarm programs flickered through the android’s circuits at the sight. Travnicek slowed the recording, ran it through the collision, then reversed it. He halted it at the instant in which the merman appeared.

“Toaster,” he said. “Do you have the time at which this happened?”

“11:16:31:14 Eastern Daylight Time,” the android said.

“Hah.” One of Travnicek’s trumpet-flowers gave an unpleasant laugh from the base of his featureless head. “I remember this happening then,” he said. “I remember the feeling of that thing coming into being. I sensed it on a southwesterly bearing from the balcony. It was… extraordinary.” Another nasty laugh. “Very pleasurable. And then only a few seconds later it just came to bits. Annihilated. And that didn’t feel so bad either. I’ve been feeling things like that ever since that castle got built. And the castle itself” Two of his sense organs, facing Modular Man, came erect. The android had the feeling they were peering at him. “That feeling was immense. That must be why God creates things. It feels so good.” Another laugh. “And why He destroys.”

Travnicek rose from the bed and turned off the video and recorder. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?” the android asked.

Travnicek headed out of the room. “The Rox,” he said. “We’re joining them. I want to feel the place firsthand.”

“Sir.” The android followed, his self-preservation programming shattering hopelessly against the overriding hardwired command to obey his creator. “Sir. Do you think that’s wise?”

“Fuck you, Toaster.” Walking rapidly through the living room. “I’ll decide what’s wise around here.”

“Sir. They think I’m an enemy. They’ll probably open fire the second they see me. And if I’m carrying you, you’ll be in danger. You could be —” One of those thoughts he wasn’t allowed to think shot through his circuits, then slammed to a halt against hardwired circuits. “You could be killed,” he said.

“We’ll do some fast talking.”

“Sir. Ellis Island is coming under heavy assault if they don’t surrender. If I’m damaged, you’ll never get off. I don’t think this is…”

“If you’re damaged, I’ll fix you.” Breezily. “Do as I say.”

There was no point, the android knew, in reminding Travnicek that he’d lost his abilities to repair his creation. Travnicek was obstinate in claiming that his second dose of the wild card had enhanced rather than diminished his capabilities.

“And you’ve got that Zapper’s battle plan,” Travnicek added. “Bloat would give a lot for that, I betcha.”

“Zappa.” Hopelessly.

Travnicek stepped onto the balcony and raised his blue-skinned arms to the sun. “It’s a good day for flying,” he said.

Sometimes it pays to have a private office, however small. This was one of those times.

Ray sat down at his desk and took out the can of Glade — natural pine scent — that he kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. He squirted the air, which was still contaminated by the smell of cigar smoke, burned flesh, and Bobby Joe Puckett. He wished the office had a window, but opening it would only have let in equally disgusting city odors. The air freshener smelled as much like real pine trees as anything from a test tube could, but it was hardly adequate.

He put the can away and flipped on his computer, asking it to search for the names “Bobby Joe Puckett” and “George G. Battle” among various law agency and newspaper files. He keyed in half a dozen databases, and then sat back to wait, memories of Puckett’s handshake rising unbidden in his mind.

If there was one thing Ray despised it was bullies. Puckett, Ray was sure, fit that category big time. He was begging for payback. Ray was just playing the opening sequences of such a confrontation in his mind when a line of words crawling across his computer screen brought him back to the here and now.

It was, he saw, the info he’d requested on Puckett. And it wasn’t good. Reading it first brought a sense of disbelief, then a frisson of fear. Something was wrong here. Definitely wrong.

FBI records listed a Bobby Joe Puckett born June 5, 1959, in Cross Plains, Texas. He was arrested for car theft at fourteen. The case was dropped due to lack of evidence, but he’d been before the judge three more times in the next two years for car theft, again, and B and E. He spent seven months in a juvvie home, and three weeks after being released was arrested for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon for pistol-whipping a 7-1l clerk. He’d spent the next three years in jail.

All of this was unremarkable and wouldn’t have deserved inclusion in a national data bank, except that it provided the backdrop for the next stage of Puckett’s career. He apparently drifted through the early 1980s, occasionally in trouble for more smalltime stuff, then the highlight of his life of crime came down in 1987.

Ray clenched his misshapen jaw as he read the details of a liquor-store robbery gone wrong. This time Puckett killed the clerk instead of only scarring her for life. The killing snapped something in Puckett and he took a deer rifle and .45 Magnum handgun to the top of a tower at the University of Texas in Austin and spent an afternoon sniping at passersby. He got twenty-six students and cops before the police charged his stronghold. To avoid capture he put his Magnum in his mouth and blew away the right side of his face. Shot himself as dead as any of his victims.

Only Puckett wasn’t dead. Ray had shaken hands with him just a few hours before and he could attest to the strength of the man’s grip. But, with a chill running down his spine, Ray remembered the odd, misshapen silhouette of the man’s face under his all-enveloping hood. Given the state of his own face, Ray hadn’t thought much about it then. But now

And the smell —

His file said Puckett was dead. Maybe, Ray thought, Puckett hadn’t really killed himself. Maybe, for some reason, he’d been brought into government service and the suicide story was leaked as cover. Ray could see why the government would want to recruit him. He was an ace, after all. But was he?

Ray stopped and reread the file. There was no indication that Puckett was anything other than another petty criminal whose stupidity had driven him to a horrible death.

But Ray had felt Puckett’s grip. Maybe he hadn’t been an ace before his purported death but he sure was one now. He’d been a scumbag then, and was one now. Except now he was a scumbag for the government.

And speaking of government scumbags, the file on Battle was coming online.

Ray studied it intently, but there were no hints of the bizarre like those that abounded in Puckett’s story.

Battle came from a prosperous family. He was now a lawyer, but he’d started out in the army. He’d been too young for World War II, but he hadn’t served active duty in Korea or Vietnam, either.

After graduating from law school, Battle had gone into government service rather than private practice. He started out in the FBI, but stayed there only into the early 1960s when he disappeared into a haze of agencies, committees, and staff positions that was enough to give a headache to anyone who tried to sort it all out. There was one agency that Ray was familiar with. Battle had been special counsel to CREEP — the Committee to Reelect the President — when Nixon was running for his second term. After that there seemed to be a gap in his career. His next official posting was in the middle 1970s, and he’d also served on both of Reagan’s election campaigns. Currently he was attached to something called the Special Executive Task Force headed by someone named Phillip Baron von Herzenhagen, which sounded like a Nazi name if anything did. The Task Force was headed by Dan Quayle.

Great, Ray thought. Just fucking great. It looked like wheels within wheels time. He thought about it for a second and then dumped the files. He went through his requests meticulously making sure that no trace of them survived in the computer system.

Ray usually didn’t worry about covering his ass, but very definitely something whacko was going on here. And he had put himself right in the middle of it.

He sat at his desk for a moment, thinking. He’d never paid too much attention to office-politics bullshit. His job had been guarding bodies and kicking ass, and he’d been good at it too, until the business with Hartmann.

The senator’s face suddenly filled Ray’s mind and he felt a flash of anger. All those years he’d spent with the bastard, and then the prick had never even come to see him in the hospital when he’d literally had his guts spilled trying to keep Messer from him.

Ray’d done everything he could for the senator, even turning his face the other way when the man had stepped out on his wife all those times, even acting as his personal messenger boy when the man wanted someone summoned to his presence. And then, the first time he failed him, Hartmann shut him off, just like that.

Ray still felt a sense of loss, a void that ached to be filled by the simple touch of Hartmann’s hand on his shoulder. But he hadn’t seen Hartmann since the day he’d been carried out on a stretcher from the Atlanta Convention Center trying to stuff his guts back into his stomach cavity. He’d heard nothing from the senator, no word, no visit, not even a lousy phone call or a stupid card.

Ray caught himself, realizing he was standing on the brink of a very treacherous abyss, and pulled himself back with great effort.

That was then, he thought. This is now. He had Battle to worry about, and their upcoming mission. He looked at his wristwatch. He just had time to head for the second place on the list before he was due to meet with Battle. It was someplace in Chinatown. Looked like an apartment address, belonging to a guy the name of Ben Choy.

Modular Man dived out of the sun with Travnicek in his arms. Wind whipped at Travnicek’s organ lei, and the organs folded in on themselves. The jokers at their posts down below didn’t see him. The lacy spires of the Rox waited ahead.

The android crossed over the outer wall. Travnicek suddenly clutched at him. “Wait!” he screamed. “Stop! Go back!” The words came from several trumpet-flowers at once with a curious harmony effect.

Relief flooded through the android. He began to slow. He’d head back up-sun and get away before anyone noticed him.

“No,” Travnicek said. “No, hold on here.” The panic faded from his voice. “Keep going.”

The android kept slowing. “Are you sure?”

“Yah. Just felt a little frightened there for a second. But I’m okay now.”

Just wait, the android thought, till the fish-things come at you with lances.

But in that he was disappointed.

They were back in Jack Robicheaux’s clinic room. Cordelia’s nails were buried in Wyungare’s upper arm nearly to the point of drawing blood.

“Mon dieu,” she said shakily, “what happened?”

The Aborigine turned toward her and gently disengaged her fingers. He enfolded her into his arms. Just above her head, he said, “That was only a taste of the madness.”

She tilted her head back so she could look at him. “Whose madness? Bloat?”

“At one time, I would have said yes. Now… “ He shook his head. “There is a contagion, and it is spreading like a physical disease, except this one’s not — it’s psychic.”

The black cat whined from beside Jack’s bed. Cordelia suddenly shook her head violently. “Jack! The boy — where is he?” She stared about the room.

“Calm yourself,” said Wyungare, stroking her hair. “He’s still inside there.” He gestured with his chin toward the bed where the great reptile wheezed ponderously and the massaging rollers moved endlessly up and down the mottled body. “We got him out of his initial captivity, but he is still there in the upper world. I don’t think there’s a way to manifest him back here in this physical reality.”

Cordelia looked stricken. Her dark eyes started to glisten. She pulled free of Wyungare’s hands and moved toward the bed, bending down and taking hold of the black cat’s head with her fingers. The cat meowed deep in his throat. “Can’t we do something?”

“We can go back,” said the man. “But we must first have a council. We need to sort things out.”

“The madness,” said Cordelia, not yet turning to look back. “What did you mean by that?”

“The boy Bloat is powerful. On the psychic plane, in the dreamtime, whatever you want to call it, his power has obeyed no rules, confined itself to no boundaries.”

Cordelia nodded silently.

“There’s something you have to understand,” said Wyungare. “In this world there are many, many cultures who have a greater appreciation of these things than do most of the Europeans. With my people, the dreamtime is not just a part of reality, it is reality.” The man hesitated. “Imagine a group of villagers spending most of their lives living in a delicate, balanced environment like a grove of trees and flowers, with a crystalline stream running past their homes. Imagine that one day, without warning, an enormous steel bulldozer bursts through the brush and cuts a swath of destruction through all the green things and through the houses. It pushes all manner of debris into the stream. The shock to the people who live here is incalculable. They can no longer reach what they know is their reality. Some are maddened. Some are hurt in lesser ways. But no one is left unaffected.”

Cordelia continued unconsciously stroking the cat, her face averted toward Wyungare. “Bloat is doing all that?” Wyungare nodded soberly. “He is not simply giving scattered sleepers nightmares. He’s destroying them — he’s blasting their realities.”

“Whole peoples?” Cordelia whispered.

“He has to be stopped. If he can be healed, then that will happen. If not…” Wyungare spread his hands in a universal gesture.

“You can do this?”

The Aborigine chewed his lip. “Perhaps. I have some allies. There is a Peruvian holy man named Viracocha. I hope to draw aid from Buddy Holley here in your country. There are others. It is possible I — we — can help the boy.”

“And heal the dreamtime,” said Cordelia. The cat had started to relax, butting his black snout into her hand.

Wyungare nodded. “To attempt this, I need to meet with the boy in person.”

“You can’t just, uh, call him up on the psychic telephone, you know, find him there in the dreamtime?”

“Remember the interference,” said Wyungare. “It’s something like sunspots and radio broadcasts. I need to be close to him physically.”

“That won’t be easy. There’s a wall. CNN’s been carrying it all morning. You can’t get through.”

“It’s fundamentally a psychic barrier,” said Wyungare. “I’ve got a plan I’ve stolen from Homer. It worked for the noble Odysseus; I think it will work for me. But I’m going to need your uncle.”

Cordelia stood up, shocked. “You’re going to manifest him in this world?”

Wyungare shook his head violently. “No! I thought of this while we were inside him, within the dreamtime. For this, I need him in his alligator form. I must get him to the water.”

Cordelia stared, at first as though her lover were utterly demented, and then as a grin started to quirk around the corners of her mouth. She began to giggle, then to laugh outright. “You’re crazy too,” she said. “I saw that movie. Circe’s island. The hero was tied to the mast, and the crew put wax in their ears.” She shook her head and wiped away tears. "Just like the movie,” said Wyungare. “Jack won’t need wax in his ears.”

“Good!” said Cordelia. “I wouldn’t relish trying to put it there. How are we going to get him to the bay?”

Wyungare shrugged. “Walk him. Wake him up and point him in the right direction. Alligators can move rather fast when they wish to.”

Cordelia giggled again, a little hysterically. “How are you going to steer him, dangle a poodle in front of his snout?”

The Aborigine shook his head quite seriously. “Just as I contacted his human self, I can do the same with his reptile brain.” He looked down. The black cat had ambled over in front of the man and sat down on his haunches. He looked up expectantly at Wyungare. “Our friend here will help, I think. He has a bit of a bond with your uncle.”

“Rub-a-dub-dub,” said Cordelia, cracking up again. “Three men in a tub. No, one man, a gator, and a pussycat. But no owl…”

“An owl would be handy,” said Wyungare. “But first we must get the alligator to the shore.”

“I think not,” said a new voice. Both Wyungare and Cordelia turned. The black cat hissed and showed his claws, the fur rising up along his tail.

Dr. Bob stepped all the way into the room. He wasn’t smiling. “Rounds bring me back every once in a while,” he said, “and sometimes my timing seems to work out.” He smiled again, but managed to make the expression look disapproving in the extreme.

“You might knock,” said Cordelia.

“This is a hospital,” said Dr. Bob. “I am a physician. Normal rules are, shall we say, a bit suspended.”

“What happened to Troll?” Cordelia looked puzzled, realizing that the head of security should have kept Dr. Bob out.

“There was a code zero,” said the doctor. “Our lumpen green friend’s services were required in matters of more urgency.”

“Granted,” said Wyungare. “Could you excuse us, please?”

“You mean, would I leave?” The doctor shook his head. “Under the circumstances, assuming I heard correctly, that would seem to be unadvisable.”

The three of them stared at each other.

“We seem to be in a bit of stalemate.” said Wyungare finally. He smiled humorlessly. “Time is wasting. I suspect I could settle this matter quickly by taking up my nulla nulla and cracking your skull smartly, Dr. Mengele.” The physician seemed to take an unconscious step back. “But we should probably pursue a more civilized course.”

“You want me to hit him?” said Cordelia.

Wyungare shook his head. “Channels. To ensure peace and good karma, as you say here, I think we shall consult the good doctor’s superior. Let’s go.”

“Fine,” said Dr. Bob. “Let’s.”

On the physician’s way out the door, the black cat hissed and lightly struck with his forepaw. The claws ripped through Dr. Bob’s expensive slacks and the man recoiled.

He bent and probed his ankle with a forefinger. “I do believe,” he said mildly, “our friend drew blood.”

They traipsed down a floor to Dr. Finn’s disarranged office. There was no one there. Cordelia picked up a phone and had the doctor paged. In about thirty seconds, an answer came back.

“Up,” said Cordelia. She gestured with her index finger. Her look at Dr. Bob suggested a wish to use a very different digit.

In the elevator, the woman punched the button marked ROOF. Wyungare looked questioningly at her.

“I should have thought,” said Dr. Bob, “it’s our administrator’s exercise hour.”

“What about the code zero?” said Cordelia. “Don’t those emergencies draw on everyone?”

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Bob, “I exaggerated a bit.”

“Perhaps,” said Wyungare, “you lied altogether.”

“Perhaps.”

The car chimed, the door drew back, and the three stepped out. They walked through an open doorway and found an exercise track laid out crudely on the clinic roof. Finn loped around the nearest turn and drew up, chuffing loudly, in front of them. The doctor was holding a stopwatch.

“Not bad,” he said. “Not Derby quality, but pretty good for a man of my age.” Finn grinned and snorted. He picked up a white towel from the graveled roof and wiped at the profuse sweat. “Frankly, I just don’t give a damn about the Triple Crown anymore.” He glanced at the three. “Let me guess. Problems?”

Dr. Bob explained the problems.

Then Wyungare and Cordelia told their side of it.

Finn stood silently, taking it all in. At the end, Finn uttered a sigh. He said, “Obviously we cannot lightly discharge a patient in Mr. Robicheaux’s condition.”

Dr. Bob nodded vigorously and smirked.

“He is in no condition to leave the clinic without a thorough set of evaluations,” added Finn.

“Absolutely,” said Dr. Bob.

“Perhaps you can now excuse us,” said Finn to Dr. Bob, “while I explain certain facts of medical life to our guests.”

Dr. Bob frowned, looking quickly at his superior. Then he offered his unctuous smile and nodded. As he turned to leave, he winked at Cordelia. The young woman balled her fists, but said and did nothing.

After the elevator door had sucked shut after Dr. Bob, Finn cleared his throat. “Listen up, you two. I’ve got a clinic to run and I need the confidence of my staff. But I am not blind. I’ll say this just once. Give it a rest for a time, perhaps an hour. Exactly — an hour. I will make sure Dr. Bob Mengele is occupied. It will be up to you two to finesse the smuggling of a fourteen-foot alligator from his room. I don’t know anything about this.”

Wyungare said gravely, “We shall do our best.”

Cordelia said, “We’ll have to wake him up.”

“It can be done,” said Finn. “Remember something: I can’t give you permission. But I can give you one shot at the gold ring.” He smiled.

“Good,” said Cordelia. “I wasn’t looking forward to buying every Mylar helium balloon in the gift shop, tying them on, and floating him out like a zeppelin.”

Even Wyungare cracked a smile.

It all went very smoothly. Modular Man didn’t know whether to be pleased by that or not.

He hadn’t known that Bloat could read the minds of people inside his domain. Bloat had read Travnicek as soon as Modular Man had carried him across the outer wall — read his intentions, and called off the castle’s defenders.

“I want some things,” Travnicek said. He stood, blue-skinned and featureless, below the vast creature that was Bloat, pale body pulsing beneath the broken arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Armored mermen stood guard, lances at rest. The giant carp on which they rode were propped on the floor on splayed fins. Marble columns rose on high.

“I want a place of my own,” Travnicek said. “A tower, so I can get up and down when I want, arranged to my specifications. You can built it the way I want, yah?”

“Just visualize it,” Bloat said, “and I’ll try to put it somewhere.” His voice was high-pitched and adolescent.

Travnicek turned to Modular Man. “This is the damn life, right?” he said. “I think it, and White, Fat, and Ugly here builds it.”

A joker named Kafka made an angry, chittering sound, but Bloat only giggled.

“You don’t care what people think, do you?” he asked.

Travnicek’s voice was defiant. “Why should I?”

Bloat looked down on him. There was a touch of sadness in his tone. “Welcome to the Rox,” he said, “I think you’ll fit right in.”

“Of course I have a plan,” said Wyungare. “Do you think I’m bluffing?”

Cordelia raised her eyes ceiling-ward. They stood again in room 228, Jack’s room. “Give me patience, Lord.” The black cat moved restlessly about their feet, stalking fluidly between their legs in a slalom pattern.

“I need to borrow your Walkman,” said the Aborigine. “Please.”

Cordelia looked curious, but extracted the small black box from her handbag. “You want some tunes to go with it?”

“I have my own, thank you.” He dug into his dilly bag and took out a tape cassette.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’ll take a quick journey into your uncle’s reptile mind and attempt to establish some communication. This will be quick and dirty, no time for ceremony.”

“You’re not going to strip?”

He shook his head. “No time.”

“Good,” said Troll. “Aesthetics are important here.”

Cordelia jerked around. “None of you ever knocks.”

“Sorry. I’m used to just barging in. Besides, as I gather your Australian friend was saying, we don’t have a lot of time for social niceties. Dr. Finn really cannot afford to be seen helping you. I can.”

“So what’s the tape?” said Cordelia as Wyungare clicked it into the Walkman.

He adjusted the ear-buds and handed her the box.

“Gene Krupa? Cool. Not exactly traditional,” she said.

“I’m not going to bother with my own drumming,” said Wyungare. “I need what’s called a sonic driver. This will do admirably. I find Mr. Krupa’s approach to rhythm quite impressive.”

“I’ll go ahead and disconnect the sleep probes,” said Troll. “The moment the voltage stops going into the alligator’s brain, he should start to wake up.” He set the medical case down on a chair. “I’ve got some stimulants that should help accelerate the process.”

“You know how to do all this?” Cordelia shook her head. “Gator uppers.”

“Precisely.” Troll hesitated. “Hang around this place long enough and you either have to learn something or go bug-fuck. I sure don’t have an M.D., but please trust me anyway.” Cordelia laughed. “You sound like a doctor.”

Wyungare sat down cross-legged. “Carry on,” he said to the two. “I’ll be back with you soon.” He punched the tape player’s ON button and closed his eyes.

Bloat’s Wall towered a hundred feet high. Brokers on Wall Street could look out their office windows and count the demons on its ramparts. The Staten Island Ferry passed right under its battlements, or had before service was suspended.

But above the physical barrier was another wall. Invisible. Intangible. A wall of fear. A wall of loathing cold as stone, of hatred hard as iron. The wall of terror had the same boundaries as the other, but it was higher, much higher. To get to the Rox took courage and a strong stomach. Most people didn’t have either.

The previous month, when the Turtle had tried to take Dr. Tachyon out to the Rox in search of his stolen body, the stone wall hadn’t been there, but the invisible wall had stopped him dead. On the second try, Tom had discovered a very important fact: the wall ended around two thousand feet.

This time he came in high, and it was candy.

The powers-that-be had decided it would be undignified for the rest of the peace delegation to sit on top of his shell. The vice president had volunteered his limousine. Tom couldn’t help notice that he hadn’t volunteered himself.

The limo floated under the shell, gripped tight by Tom’s telekinesis, the two moving as one. It was long and black and bulletproof. A little flag emblazoned with the vice presidential seal flew from one fender, a miniature stars and stripes from the other. The delegates sat in back. Nobody sat in front. The Great and Powerful Turtle was all the driver they needed.

The demons moved in as they passed over Bloat’s Wall.

Tom watched them approach on his screens. Mermen riding on flying fish, carrying lances shaped like swordfish. They took up positions around the shell, and escorted him in, surreal outriders in a procession out of nightmare. The Rox grew stranger the closer they got. Inside the Wall was more bay. Slender stone causeways connected the castle with its outer defenses. On Ellis itself, the castle bulked huge as Gormenghast. Tom glimpsed stone walls twenty feet thick, a confusion of towers and turrets and courtyards, crystalline fairy bridges delicate as spun sugar, onion domes carved in obsidian and ruby, black iron portcullises, huge wooden doors banded in steel, and in the center of it all a high golden dome as wide across as three football fields.

When they got above it, Tom saw that the golden dome was fashioned in the shape of a tremendous face, staring up at the sky. The eyes were skylights, but they seemed to follow them as they approached. One of the mermen dipped his spear. Tom understood the gesture. Down.

He thought of falling leaves.

The shell and the limo drifted downward. The face swelled larger and larger on his screens. When they were almost on top of it, the mouth opened wide, swallowing the limo. Tom followed.

He found himself in a vast, airy chamber full of golden light and jokers. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, staring up at the peacemakers as they descended. And from the middle of that human sea rose a mountain of pale flesh.

Bloat.

The governor was even bigger than Tom remembered. Still growing, it seemed. The chubby, boyish face and the two small arms that grew from the top of his monstrous body looked like flyspecks. Tom pressed a button: his cameras tracked and zoomed in. Bloat’s features filled his screens. The boy governor was smiling.

It was the face of the golden dome, Tom realized.

The torch from the Statue of Liberty stood behind Bloat’s throne, mounted on an iron frame. In front of him, a landing area had been cordoned off with velvet ropes. Tom teked the limo down to a gentle landing, and hovered ten feet above it.

A handful of VIPs had been allowed inside the ropes. Tom swung some cameras toward them. A humanoid cockroach stood protectively in front of Bloat, a penguin at his side. A magnificent antlered joker towered over both of them, shaking out a red-gold mane as he watched the limo. On the fringes stood groups of normal-looking teenagers who had to be jumpers.

The penguin skated forward and opened the back door of the limousine. Senator Gregg Hartmann stepped out, looked around for a hand to shake, found none offered, and cleared his throat. Father Squid squeezed out after him, struggling with his bulk and the folds of his cassock.

High above them, Bloat giggled. “Welcome to the Rox.”

“Governor,” Hartmann said politely. “Thank you for seeing us. We’ve come in the name of peace.”

“Peace?” the stagman said. He had a deep voice and a British accent. “You mean surrender.”

“…My children…” Father Squid began, spreading his hands.

The stagman moved forward, cloven hooves ringing on stone. “Bugger that,” he interrupted. “We’re not your bloody children.”

Father Squid’s voice was drowned out in a chorus of obscenities.

Hartmann appealed to Bloat. “You agreed to this peace conference, Governor. The least you can do is hear us out.”

The cockroach stepped toward the senator. “The governor knows everything you have to say. You can’t lie to him. You can’t keep secrets.”

Bloat giggled. “Yes, Senator,” he said to Hartmann, “the smell in here is appalling. Even in my throne room, there’s no escaping bloatblack. Especially in my throne room.”

The shell had its own air-conditioning. Tom couldn’t smell a thing. But Hartmann paled and hesitated for a moment.

“Go on,” Bloat urged. “Wrinkle your nose, you want to. Use your handkerchief if you must. Silk, isn’t it?”

Hartmann had actually started to pull out the handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, but now he froze. Tom heard scattered laughter at the senator’s discomfiture. “Governor,” Father Squid said, “think of your people. Of the price they’ll pay if this mission fails.”

Hartmann tried to recover himself. He took out the handkerchief after all, mopped at his forehead. “You may know what we’re going to say,” he said loudly to Bloat. He looked around the vast room at the sea of joker faces. “But your people have the right to hear our terms for themselves. Don’t they?”

One of the jumpers spoke up. “You’re offering amnesty?”

“Full and unconditional,” Hartmann replied. He tried to tuck the handkerchief back into his breast pocket, and missed. It fluttered lightly to the floor. Hartmann ignored it. “Forgiveness for all past crimes, regardless.”

’You guarantee it?” another jumper asked.

“You have my word, and the solemn pledge of the United States government,” Hartmann declared.

Several of the jumpers exchanged glances.

Bloat tittered. “Oh, that’s good, Senator. That’s very good.” He giggled again. “So your government will forgive us all for being criminals. Well, that’s fine for our jumper friends. But tell me. Senator. My people would like to know.” He took a long dramatic pause. “Who’s going to forgive us for being jokers?”

The silence in the hail was profound.

“Yeah,” Bloat said smugly. “That’s what I thought.”

Tom could feel the tension in the pit of his stomach. He turned his exterior volume all the way up. But Bloat spoke up before Tom could find the words. “The man in the can’s got something to say,” he announced.

Tom pushed with his teke, floating up, until he was higher than Bloat, higher than the balconies, higher than the torch, commanding the whole room. He wanted them to look up at him. “THIS ISN’T A FUCKING GAME. IF YOU DON’T SURRENDER, THEY’LL KILL YOU.”

“They’ve tried to kill us before,” Bloat said.

“LISTEN TO ME. YOU ONLY HAVE TILL SUNSET…”

“Then we all turn into pumpkins, right?” a jumper put in.

“Then they send more soldiers,” the stagman said.

“NOT JUST SOLDIERS,” promised the Turtle. He had to make them understand. “THE AIR FORCE AND THE NAVY WILL HIT YOU FROM BEYOND THE WALL WITH EVERYTHING THEY’VE GOT.”

“Let them try,” the antlered joker said, “we’ll hit them back.” He stepped toward Hartmann and Father Squid, bent suddenly, scooped up the senator’s fallen hankie. He clenched it in his fist, raised it high over his head like a banner. “Five for one!” he shouted, his deep voice ringing off the rafters.

“Go on,” Bloat said, giggling. “Tell us about the aces.”

He’s reading my mind, Tom realized in panic. He’d known Bloat was a telepath, but knowing it and experiencing it were two different things. “THEY’RE RECRUITING ACES TOO. YOU HAVE NO IDEA THE KIND OF POWER YOU’LL BE FACING. CYCLONE AND MISTRAL, DETROIT STEEL, PULSE, ELEPHANT GIRL.” He was blanking. He licked his lips. “FORTUNATO.” He couldn’t think of anyone else. He lied. “J.J. FLASH, STARSHINE…”

“Flash and Starshine,” Bloat said merrily. “I can’t wait to see that.”

Fuck, Tom thought wildly. You can’t bluff a telepath. Another name came to him. “MODULAR MAN,” he blurted.

The whole Great Hall erupted into laughter.

Bloat jiggled and rumbled, pipe-stem arms slapping helplessly against his sides in a paroxysm of hilarity. The stagman was laughing thunderclaps. Jokers and jumpers on all sides were roaring and falling down. The penguin was twirling figure-eights in the air. Even the human cockroach looked like he was smiling. The dome overhead rang with laughter.

Tom’s eyes went wildly from screen to screen to screen. They were all laughing, everyone but Hartmann and Father Squid, who looked as baffled as he was. He didn’t get it.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS SO GODDAMN FUNNY?” he asked.

The laughter died away slowly, like the ebbing of a great tide. Out from behind Bloat’s immensity stepped a solitary, sheepish figure. A handsome man in a blue jumpsuit, with guns mounted on his shoulders. “Excuse me,” Modular Man said. “Senator, Father, Turtle.” He sounded as embarrassed as an android could sound. “I don’t know how to tell you this but, well… I met the enemy, and he is me.”

The jokers laughed at the Turtle, Father Squid, and Hartmann’s discomfiture; Modular Man looked as bemused and uncomfortable as an android could. Bloat made no effort to cut them off. He stared at the peace delegation and grimaced. Hypocrites, every last one of them — and one of them especially.

Bloat knew about Hartmann — he’d figured out months ago that the senator must be a hidden ace. Several of the jokers on the Rox carried painful memories of actions that were entirely out of character for them; old, loyal Peanut most prominent among them. And like Peanut, most of those jokers had associations with Hartmann; as with Peanut, the circumstantial evidence indicated that someone had manipulated them, had taken control of their actions for a brief time.

The information Black Shadow had given him a few months ago had confirmed that suspicion in Bloat’s mind. Bloat figured Hartmann was an ace “up the sleeve.” He also suspected that the ace had much to do with Tachyon’s betrayal of the senator at the Democratic National Convention. It all made sense. Bloat knew, but he’d never met the man, never had the opportunity to prowl through his thoughts.

What Bloat had found in the last hour was a stench worse than bloatblack, a deformity uglier than any joker’s.

Hartmann had been paranoid from the moment he entered the Rox’s boundaries, knowing Bloat’s reputation as a mind reader. The fear had made it difficult for the senator to pass the psychic barrier of Bloat’s Wall. Once forced through, his mind sagged open like a rotten fruit.

… can’t even think about Puppetman … he’ll know … can’t even think about it at all… but of course that only opened the gates of Hartmann’s memory. Through all the talk, through all the nice little speeches about how he had the best interests of everyone at heart, through all the entreaties for reasonableness, Bloat listened to that interior voice, those old memories.

A sickness, a charnel house of putrefaction, spilled out. Bloat had gagged at the taste of it in his head, unbelieving. This was Senator Hartmann, the hero of Jokertown, the almost-president, the friend of the jokers? This thing?

Any optimism that Bloat had harbored concerning this meeting dissolved under the barrage. Hartmann was not a good man, a compassionate one, or even a misguided one. Jokers were human beings whose bodies were twisted by the wild card into something inhuman. Hartmann was a joker in reverse — a normal form with something horribly inhuman inside.

The realization made Bloat angry. The deceit of all of them made him furious.

“You’re all liars,” he said suddenly, and the hilarity around him ended as if it had been cut off by a switch. The anger in him made his body writhe around the inlet pipes that impaled him like a mounted insect. Bloatblack oozed from the scabrous pores and the miasma of raw sewage filled the room. The inhabitants of the Rox might be used to the stench; the thoughts of the others were quite expressive.

“Don’t you like Eau de Bloat?” He giggled, and then frowned. “Can’t you taste the shit that’s coming out of your own mouths? God, such a fine trio of hypocrites. I listened to all this crap and there’s nothing in your words. Nothing at all.”

Father Squid gaped, his tentacles wriggling over his open mouth; inside the shell of the Turtle, Bloat could hear Tudbury gasp as if struck; Hartmann looked like he wanted to run. Around the room, automatic rifle bolts clicked back; Kafka waved angrily at the joker guards.

“GOVERNOR,” the Turtle began. He’d turned up the volume on his speakers, trying to gain in decibels what he couldn’t in fervor. Bloat could hear the turmoil and sudden guilt in the man-boy’s mind. “PLEASE…”

“I hear you,” Bloat interrupted, waving his helpless stick arms. “I hear the thoughts, not the words. I know all your secrets. I know your name. Oh Great and Powerful Turtle. You can’t hide from me behind the shell, and you can’t hide from the world in it, either. You don’t really like what your side is doing in this, do you? That’s an armored shell you ride, not a fucking white horse. Your own little Wall, and you the Bloat behind it.”

Bloat’s gaze went to the priest. “And you, Father Squid? Are you a saint?”

“I’m at peace with myself,” the large joker answered, but Bloat could hear the skittering memories inside. Bloat followed their sounds into dark places.

“No, you’re not at peace, Father,” he cackled. “Not when you spend some nights kneeling by the bed asking God for forgiveness — and you still have those nights, don’t you, Father? Don’t the faces of the ones you killed with your own hands haunt your dreams? You protest that you were young then and caught up in something you’ve since found to be wrong, but don’t you still find that you look the other way when violence just happens to benefit your side, even now? You want the names. Father? You want the dates and places? I can get them for you. I can tell everyone, just like I could tell everyone the Turtle’s real name.”

Father Squid was silent, clutching the crucifix of Christ the Joker to his huge chests. He made soft, wet sounds deep in his throat, as if he were sobbing.

“And you, Senator. …”

Hartmann visibly startled. He looked old suddenly, and frail. He wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.

“Governor,” he said pleadingly.

Bloat guffawed. “Wow, the great senator wants a little goddamn compassion. C’mon, Senator, you’re the sickest one of all. Sure, I can see that in your mind as clearly as you can. You even agree with me. The great friend of Jokertown certainly did love the jokers, didn’t he?”

The ugly pores along Bloat’s flanks flexed and pouted like circular mouths, great turds of bloatblack emerged from them, sliding down the stained hills of his flesh. His body was trembling again, as it had when the Temptation of St. Anthony had been destroyed and he’d first brought forth the demons from his mind. Bloat forced the energy back down, tried to still the turmoil inside the vastness of his form. Bloat looked around the room. He could feel the rising enmity against the delegation. The torrent of voices inside his head made him grin. Their massed support sparked the dream-energy inside him. He could feel it rising once more, chaotic, and he reached out with mental hands to channel that vitality. For a moment as he first grasped the power, there was a whirling disorientation — like he remembered as a kid, spinning with arms outspread in the living room until the room danced around him. In that split second, he thought he could hear angry voices calling him … Teddy … and there was a wisp of cold mountain air; an impression of a flat, dark-skinned, wide-nosed face; a sense of outraged invasion from watching minds.

Then he was back. The cold air was only the warm stink of his own bloatblack and he was speaking with the resonant, compelling tones of the Outcast, causing everyone to look up at him in astonishment.

“You don’t want to help me, Senator,” he said, banishing the residual dizziness. “You don’t care about the jokers at all. You don’t give a shit about the Rox or what we’ve done here. None of you really do.”

From around the room came shouts of agreement, loud enough that the huge torch on the wall behind him rattled in sympathy. Father Squid and Hartmann had moved back close to the Turtle and the limousine, and their mindvoices chattered in panic. “All the three of you want to do is save yourselves the guilt of having to fight with the nats against your own kind, and you don’t care that you sell out the Rox and all the people here to do it.” More shouting: jokers and jumpers alike added their voices. But when he spoke, the Outcast’s voice sent them all silent again.

“You can tell Bush and General Zappa this. If anyone wants to leave here, he or she can do so. Governor Bloat doesn’t chain his people up against their will — hey, I’ve got Liberty’s torch right behind me, after all. But all I’m hearing is the same old shit from you. All I hear is that… that those who the wild card touched are lepers: diseased people to be shut away, sterilized, and kept watch over. Man, I didn’t choose to be this way. It ain’t my fucking fault. I didn’t want to put up the Wall — it’s just there and I can’t turn it on and off at will. All I’m doing is using what I was given in the best way I know. That’s all any of us here are doing, and I think we’re beginning to make progress. I think we’re beginning to put something together for jokers.”

More shouts. Bloat laughed, and this time it wasn’t his adolescent, shrill giggle, but something deep-throated and full. “But you don’t care. Huh-uh. We’re just pieces of bloatblack to you, to be disposed of or put somewhere out of sight.”

More cries erupted around them. Captain Chaos, standing next to Bloat, reached down and plucked one of the pieces of bloatblack from the floor. She flung it; the fecal blob bounced off Hartmann’s shoulder and left a brown stain on his gray suit coat. Hartman flinched back, startled. “Here’s an answer to take back with you,” Chaos said, and suddenly several of the jokers in the hail were running to Bloat’s side, grasping the filth there and flinging it at the delegation.

Bloat laughed. Hartmann and Father Squid scrambled into the limousine for shelter. The jokers ran to the car and began rocking it side to side. The suspension squealed in protest; the tires sagged like the waists of tired old men. “GET BACK!” the Turtle roared, and lifted the limousine straight up. Bloatblack missiles thudded dully against the bottom of the car and the Turtle’s shell.

“GOVERNOR…” ….the Turtle began, then the speakers crackled and went silent. Bloat could hear the man’s thoughts racing, trying to find words and coming up with nothing that seemed appropriate. Finally, the ace gave up. Hartmann stared at Bloat from the window of the car… ugly little thing. If! had Puppetman… Father Squid looked down from the opposite side.

“I understand,” the priest said softly, and the faint smell of the sea came to Bloat. “I really do.”

Then the Turtle and his burden moved softly away as the Bloatblack barrage continued. To the jeers of the Rox, the Turtle and the limo left through the open mouth of the Bloat-face in the ceiling of the Great Hall.

The light was red.

The Buick idled in the middle of the Jokertown intersection. The bodysnatcher tapped on the driver’s window. The man inside looked at her, hesitated. He must have decided she looked harmless enough. The window came rolling down. Power window. Very nice.

There was a family inside. Daddy was tall and balding, wearing a gray suit. His wife was a plump woman in a polyester pants suit. In back was an ugly little girl in blue jeans and Smurfs T-shirt, maybe three.

“Yes?” Daddy asked. “Can I help you?”

“Your little girl isn’t wearing her seat belt,” the bodysnatcher told him. “What kind of parents are you?”

The man didn’t know what to make of this. His wife said, “The light’s changed,” nervously. She was smarter than he was. She knew you don’t stop and talk to strangers in the middle of a Jokertown street.

“It’s not just a good idea,” the bodysnatcher said. “It’s the law. Watch this.” She took the bottle of Drano out of the pocket of her trench coat, twisted off the cap, and drank.

The pain was a purifying fire inside her, burning out all the filth. She heard them gasp. When the bottle was empty, the bodysnatcher tossed it aside, wiped her lips, and smiled down at Daddy. She had to lean against the car to keep from falling. She would have said something, but her throat was too badly burned.

Daddy was staring up at her in horror, knuckles white where they gripped the steering wheel. The bodysnatcher blinked back tears, and jumped.

Inside the car, inside Daddy, he raised the power window and watched the face outside twist in sudden agony. Mommy was whimpering in the seat beside him. The bodysnatcher hit the accelerator, heard a thump as the body hit the street. The screams began before they were halfway across the intersection.

“Oh, God, oh, God,” the wife was saying. The Buick’s handling was flabby. The bodysnatcher turned a corner hard. “We have to call the police,” the wife finally managed. "Blueboy would like that,” the bodysnatcher told her.

The wife looked at him strangely. “John?” she said. She still didn’t get it. By then the bodysnatcher was turning into the alley, and it was too late. They went down past the dumpster, to the dead end way in back, under the fire escape. Blueboy and Vanilla and Molly Bolt were waiting there, in the shadows.

“No,” the wife said as they came toward the car. “No, no, no.” She locked all the doors, closed all the windows, frantic with fear. As if windows could stop a jumper.

Molly Bolt shook her head in disgust, and jumped.

Mommy sat back, adjusted her pantsuit. “Polyester,” she complained. “I hate polyester.” She looked over her shoulder at the girl in the backseat. “How you doing?”

“Motherfucker,” the little girl said, squirming. “The brat isn’t even toilet trained yet. This is disgusting.”

Outside, Molly and Blueboy had both collapsed. Vanilla carried them under the fire escape, and tied them at wrist and ankle in case they came to. It wouldn’t do for them to run off. Molly and Blueboy had a sentimental attachment to their original flesh. “Where to?” the bodysnatcher asked impatiently.

“The Empire State Building,” said Mommy, counting the money in her purse. “I think we got enough for lunch at Aces High.”

The world into which Wyungare plunged was dark.

The dull thudding of the drum was not what he remembered of the complex jazz rhythms. He didn’t know where he was.

Wyungare raised his right hand and snapped his fingers once, twice, and then on the third attempt, a flame sprang up on his palm. It was cool and blue and did not burn his flesh. Instead, the flickering illumination crept out around him until he could see that he stood on a springy carpet of dark moss in the midst of huge trees. The trunks of those trees descended into tangled puzzles of winding, interconnected roots.

The Aborigine turned until he saw an opening among the trees, a path that led through that gap. He began to follow it, his hand held in front of him like a torch.

He walked perhaps a quarter of a mile until he saw the path blocked by a hillock; more properly, it looked like the flank of a mountain. Bare of vegetation, the stony surface seemed to shine.

Wyungare blinked. The mountainside had now become the mouth of an enormous cavern. The top and bottom of the opening was lined with sharp, curving stalactites and stalagmites. The man couldn’t remember which of those was supposed to grow from the top down, and which from the bottom up. He supposed it didn’t matter, since the formations jutted everywhere around the opening.

And then the cave spoke. “So, my star-seeking cousin, you travel in company with unusual and fine drums.” The words vibrated low, shaking inside Wyungare like ocean tides sweeping up an estuary and into the coastal swamplands.

Wyungare stopped in his tracks and slowly began to grin. “Cousin Kurria, it is you? The crocodile guardian?”

“None other.” High on the flank of the “mountain,” two huge eyes abruptly blinked open. staring down at the man. “I watch over all such as the one you seek, even if their forms are a bit alien, something less sleek than the cousins in our home.”

“Then you know my mission.”

The laugh sounded like the toppling of tall trees. “I have spoken with Viracocha and others. I know of your need to encounter this one called Jack Robicheaux.”

“Will you aid me?”

“Come right on in.” The laughter rolled out again. “I will help you.”

Wyungare walked up to the huge spikes he now understood to be teeth. He slipped between two of the largest and sharpest. He climbed up into the jaw of Kurria. He stepped upon the resilient tongue and walked forward, toward the back of the guardian’s throat.

Then the jaws closed and there was utter darkness, save for the blue flame still flickering from Wyungare’s hand.

The man walked farther. He didn’t know how long he traveled, or how long it took. But finally, he found himself in a room darker than the passage through which he had come. He could feel impressions: sleep, hunger, pain. The walls around him pulsed. A pair of invisible eyes opened behind their armored, protective lids.

“Cousin,” said Wyungare. “Friend.”

Hunger, came the response.

Hunger can be fed. Wyungare projected the image of fish. Enough fish to sate.

Hunger.

Wyungare projected the image of the black cat, of Cordelia. He received back flickers of recognition, but still one overriding response.

Hunger.

Wyungare sighed. It looked to be a long, though not especially sophisticated conversation.

The hallway was narrow and filthy. The walls looked like they hadn’t been washed, let alone painted, in Ray’s lifetime. He couldn’t understand how anyone, particularly an ace, could live in such an environment.

He stopped before the warped door. Light spilled through the gaps in the frame from the apartment beyond. Ray paused, smelling the exotic fragrances wafting through the floor from the Chinese grocery below. A mysterious touch of the Orient, he thought, rapping authoritatively on the door. How appropriate.

There was silence, then he heard light footsteps.

“Yes?” It was a woman’s voice.

“I’m looking for Ben Choy,” Ray said.

The door opened. A dark-haired, dark-eyed Asian woman stood in the doorway. Ray glanced past her. The tiny apartment beyond was empty. It was, he noted in approval, spotlessly clean. He focused on the girl. She was young, maybe in her mid-twenties, cute without being beautiful, serious and somehow disapproving as she looked silently at Ray.

“You Choy’s girlfriend?”

“His sister,” she said. She looked like him, Ray thought.

“Where is he?”

She shook her head. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he went.”

Ray nodded. Ben Choy, also known as Lazy Dragon, was an ace who frequently worked on the wrong side of the law. He wasn’t wanted for any specific crimes, but he’d been associated with the Shadow Fists when they were the preeminent criminal organization in New York City. But, as Dragon’s dossier indicated, he sometimes disappeared for long periods of time. This looked like one of those times.

“I’m from the government,” Ray told the girl. “Special Executive Task Force.” She looked at him blankly. He didn’t know what that meant either, but it sounded as impressive as hell. “It’d be to your brother’s advantage to get in touch with me. I’m prepared to offer him a full executive pardon for all crimes he may have committed.”

“Why?” the girl asked.

“What’s your name?” Ray asked, flashing his best lopsided smile.

“Vivian.”

“Well, Vivian, it’s a secret actually. A secret mission you might say.”

She nodded her head, apparently unconvinced. “A full pardon?”

Ray handed her his card. “That’s right. But there isn’t much time. He has to call tonight, before midnight.”

Vivian still looked doubtful.

“By the way,” Ray said, “you busy next Friday? The new Bruce Lee movie is opening. It’s supposed to be great.”

That she was busy she had no doubts at all.

Daddy’s body was flabby and out of shape, pale little gut pressing against the buttons of his shirt. The way the air felt against the bald head made the bodysnatcher feel vulnerable, and when he tried to move, he found he was slow and clumsy.

The restaurant pissed him off too. Aces High was supposed to be this high-class place, with four-star service and famous aces at every other table. It was all hype. They’d been hanging around for more than a hour, spending Daddy’s money, and the only thing scarcer than aces were waiters.

“Where’s the fat guy?” Molly-Mommy wanted to know. “This is his place. He’s supposed to be here.”

“Maybe he’ll come in later,” Bluebaby said in a little Shirley Temple voice.

The waiter finally appeared with their drinks. One Chivas straight up, one extra-dry martini, one tall glass of milk. “So where are all the aces?” Molly-Mommy asked him. “The guidebook says this place is always full of aces.”

“Some days are slow,” the waiter said, like he could give a shit. He nodded toward two men at the far end of the bar. “You got a couple right there.”

The bodysnatcher glanced over in that direction. The aces didn’t look like much. An average-looking white guy drinking beer, and a slender black guy in a gray suit and an orange domino mask. Except for the mask, they could have been a couple of insurance agents. “Are they famous?” the bodysnatcher asked.

The waiter shrugged. “This is New York. Everybody’s famous. That’s nine seventy-five.”

The bodysnatcher pulled a ten out of Daddy’s wallet and gave it to the waiter. “Keep the change.”

The waiter made a sour face and moved off. Molly-Mommy leaned across the table. “I think the white guy is Pulse.”

“So?” the bodysnatcher asked.

Bluebaby picked up the Chivas and took a sip. The tumbler looked huge in the tiny three-year-old hand. “Jesus, Zelda, don’t you know nothing? He was in the Swarm War, I read about him in Aces. Guy can turn himself into a fucking laser.”

“Even better than Hiram,” Molly-Mommy said. Her eyes sparkled. She took the olive out of her martini with her fingers and popped it into her mouth. “This is more like it.” She opened Mommy’s purse, took out one of Patchwork’s eyes, and dropped it into the martini in place of the olive.

The bodysnatcher sipped his milk. He had too much respect for the human body to pollute it with alcohol. He glanced over casually at the aces. “What about the other one?”

“Beats me,” Molly-Mommy said. She put the martini glass under the drooping leaves of a potted plant, where the busboy wouldn’t spot it. From there, Patchwork ought to have a good clear view of the whole room.

The bodysnatcher wiped milk off Daddy’s upper lip with the back of his hand. “I’ll find out,” he said, rising.

The aces were deep in conversation. Even up close, Pulse didn’t look like much. He had little love handles bulging out above his belt, and his dark hair was going gray.

“Sony to bother you, Mr. Pulse,” he said, “but we’re big fans, and well, we don’t get to New York real often, you know. My little girl would sure like your autograph.”

“No bother,” Pulse said, smiling. He put down his beer and scrawled a signature on a cocktail napkin.

“She’s just going to be thrilled,” the bodysnatcher said. He looked at the black man. “Say, don’t I know you too? You’re somebody famous, right?”

“Wall Walker,” the black man said. He had an accent. Jamaica, maybe.

“Really?” the bodysnatcher said. “And what do you do? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“I walk up de wall.” Wall Walker didn’t seem nearly as friendly as Pulse.

The bodysnatcher bobbed Daddy’s head up and down and grinned like an idiot. “This is terrific,” he said when Pulse handed him the cocktail napkin. “Say, I was wondering… would you mind posing for a picture with the wife?”

“Not at all,” Pulse said. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said to Wall Walker.

“Got to be going anyway,” Wall Walker replied. “Good luck, mon. By and by, you going to be needing it.” The black ace tossed some change on the bar and left.

“Why doesn’t he just walk down the side of the building?” the bodysnatcher asked Pulse.

“The Good Lord gave some of us super powers,” Pulse replied, “but He also gave us elevators.” The bodysnatcher decided he was really going to enjoy killing this asshole. He led him over to their table. “Honey, this is Mr. Pulse, the man we read about in Aces.”

Pulse extended a hand. “Cy.”

Molly-Mommy twinkled at him. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m sorry your friend had to leave.”

“That was Mr. Wall Walker,” the bodysnatcher told her. “He walks up walls. Sometimes. When there’s no elevator.” Everyone chuckled happily. It would have made a great Norman Rockwell scene, so long as he left out the eyeball in the martini glass.

“So where do you want to take this picture?” Pulse asked in a genial tone of voice.

“Let’s go outside,” Molly-Mommy suggested. “Then we can get the view.”

Aces High was eighty-six stories above the street. You could see all the way to the Rox. “Magnificent,” Molly-Mommy said when they stepped out onto the terrace.

“Jesus,” Bluebaby said as her hair whipped around her face. “What’s with this fucking wind?”

The bodysnatcher shot her a look, but Pulse didn’t seem to notice. He looked up, shaded his eyes, smiled. “You’re in luck, folks,” he said, pointing. “See there.”

The bodysnatcher looked up, glimpsed a parachute falling toward them, white against the deep blue sky. But it was moving wrong, circling the building in a graceful spiral instead of coming straight down. Then he realized it wasn’t a parachute at all. It was a woman, dressed all in blue, riding the winds on a huge white cape.

“Mistral,” Pulse told them as she glided down toward the terrace. “Beautiful, isn’t she? Sweet girl.”

Mommy and Daddy exchanged glances. “We’ll have to get a picture of her too,” said Mommy.

There were no rumors on the Rox. Not, at least, for

Bloat. No gossip, no secrets. Bloat knew.

In a perverse way, it was mildly interesting to listen to the jumpers’ sinking confidence. That damned 1-800-I-GIVE-UP number kept flitting through their minds like a mantra for AT&T executives. Most of the jumpers — nearly a hundred of them — had gathered in one of the halls across the island. Without the strong leadership of Molly and Bodysnatcher, the impromptu strategy meeting was turning into a rout. It was an ugly scratch on the surface of the Rox’s thoughts.

“You’d really let them go, wouldn’t you?” The penguin was gazing up at Bloat as it skated in nonchalant circles around the lobby floor. Outside, the sun was lowering itself gingerly onto the spires of his Wall.

“Anyone who wants to throw themselves on the mercy of Hartmann and the nats can go ahead. I’m not keeping anyone here against their will. That’s not why I created the Rox.”

“Uh-huh.” The penguin did a quick twirl and a high leap, landing gracefully just below Bloat’s head and shoulders and then skiing down the steep slope of his body to the floor once more. The joker guards stationed around the balcony applauded: the penguin gave a grinning bow. “Good ol’ kindly Bloat. Compassionate Governor Bloat. Doesn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“All I’ve ever wanted is a joker homeland,” he told the penguin. “That’s all. A place where we can be whatever it is we need to be. The nats can have the rest.”

“That ain’t gonna happen, Your Immensitude,” the penguin cackled. “I’ve told you that a hundred times before.” The penguin canted its head and the funnel hat tilted dangerously to one side. “You stay here and you’re gonna haveta fight.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Don’t stay here. I should think that’s obvious.”

“Right. Excuse me. I’ve been so stupid. I’ll just get up and walk away.” Bloat giggled; on cue, so did the guards who had been half listening to the conversation. The penguin put on an aggrieved look and pouted.

“Tell me, Gov, why is it that idiot nats with paranoia complexes use every last ounce of power they got, and a joker with more ability than ten aces put together just sits here and waits for them to take potshots at him? I swear I don’t understand it. Can’t you feel it, fat boy? All that power . The penguin sighed. Flippers folded behind its back, it skated off down one of the side corridors. Bloat watched his creature leave, pondering as he listened to the continuing disagreements in the joker compound. He could feel the degeneration of the Rox’s morale; more with each passing hour, it seemed.

The answer came to him suddenly.

This morning, Kafka looking at the side corridor where the penguin and the Outcast stood and seeing them… The way his voice had sounded during the meeting with Hartmann’s delegation…

He could walk away. He actually could.

With the thought, his vision shimmered. Bloat yawned; his body began to tremble and the odor of bloatblack arose. As his mind relaxed and Bloat began to slumber, a surging violet tendril fanned up from somewhere deep within him, turning and sparking, dividing and dividing again.

The Outcast laughed. He knew this feeling: the power of dreams. He took the electric force and shaped it. He shaped it, he put himself into the vessel of energy and told it where to carry him.

The transformation didn’t happen immediately. For several moments he felt himself lost in some limbo. Pulsing cords of self led back to Bloat, drawing sustenance from that immense form and keeping him irrevocably tethered to it. There was a sensation of falling. A fierce brightness made him shade his eyes with his hands. He was in the dream-world again. He saw creatures of all kinds in a landscape like a Chinese brush painting, skeletal trees and steep round hills. A slavering ogre lurched by with a struggling young girl flung over its hunched back. A naked young boy waggled his newly severed, bloody foreskin before the Outcast’s face. An androgynous, six-armed figure in a headdress danced by. A lion strutted past, bearing a man holding a glowing orb that was as bright as the sun.

Voices assailed his ears as the sights invaded his eyes, alternately pleading and threatening …. go back!… Don’t you know what you’re doing? … You have no understanding. None…

The Outcast pulled power from Bloat and from the dream-world itself. He willed himself to return to reality. The Rox snapped into existence around him.

“.…I say we leave.”

“You do, Juggler? Why? Are you frightened of nats?”

The jumper named Juggler had literally leapt into the air at the unexpected voice behind his back. “Who the fuck are you?” he snarled, his hands fisted. At the same time, the Outcast heard the thought… jump the mother… and felt the force of the boy’s mind recoil off the perfect alabaster shield of his own ego.

“No, I can’t be jumped,” he told Juggler and the others. Captain Chaos took the challenge; she failed. So did Iceman, then Suzy Creamcheese. The Outcast smiled. “You already know me,” he told them. “Just not in this form. I’m your governor, after all.”

“Governor Bloat?” Juggler snorted. “Fuck, man, you sure as hell lost some weight. You on Nutrisystem?”

“Yeah,” Alvin said from farther back in the room. “This guy could be one of the aces Modman says Hartmann’s got.”

“No.” The Outcast smiled, and he let the power of his presence leap out. “I am Bloat,” he said to them, encasing the words within his power. “In this form, you can call me the Outcast. Like you. Like all of us cast from society by the wild card.” The energy touched each of them, calming and soothing them, dampening their skepticism. “And you still haven’t answered my question. Why are you so frightened? There’s no reason for it. None at all. Let me show you.”

He rapped his long wooden staff against the floor. The amethyst flared.

They were all crowded on the ledge near Bloat’s Moat. The heat from the rushing lava far below made the jumpers gasp; the ruddy light rendered the Outcast’s features fierce and stern. “I built the Rox. I shaped it. Did you think I would make it easy for them?”

The Outcast slammed the base of his staff against the rocks. They were now arrayed along the north side of the Wall facing Manhattan. The glass eyes of the skyscrapers glittered at them mockingly; behind, the Disney-meets-Escher fairyland of the new Rox stuck out spired tongues in return. “This is our land,” the Outcast told them. “It grows every day in size and strength. Just as the Wall’s now visible, so is my power. You see it in what I’ve done with the Rox. You see it in the demons and strange things that walk in the caverns. And — I promise you this — you’ll see it if the nats are foolish enough to attack.”

As he spoke the words, a flare shot from across the bay, near where the Wall touched the Jersey shore. It quickly resolved into a cylinder trailing a line of billowing smoke. The weapon shot directly toward them at immense speed. The jumpers cried out, but the Outcast laughed. In the instant before the glowing missile would have struck them, he waved his staff, the stone at its summit glaring, and the jumpers were showered with pink and white petals.

“In this world, things are as I wish them to be.” The Outcast laughed and flung his arms wide.

They were back in the hall once more. The Outcast brushed bright petals from his shoulders and folded his hands across the top of his staff, resting his chin atop his hands as he gazed at the jumpers, a hint of a smile on his lips. “I know you’re worried. I understand that. If any of you want to leave, no one here will stop you. You’re free to go if you think that’s what you should do — I’ve told you that before. But I want you to know how much we need you. I’m Bloat, your governor. I’m also the Outcast, the one who calls demons and who builds the Rox. Molly and Bodysnatcher will be back soon with more aces. Croyd will wake up any moment, and his form is very, very promising. But all that’s not enough. I need all of you. The Rox is your land; I’m asking you to stay with me to help protect it. It’s up to you.”

“The governor says he’s ready.” Kafka gazed at Travnicek from his insect face. His expression was unreadable, but the rest of his body radiated disapproval. “All you have to do is visualize what you want.”

Travnicek leaned back and threw out his arms. “All right, fat maggot!” he said. “You listening?” Kafka quivered in anger. Jumpers, standing in the courtyard, snickered among themselves.

Kafka and Travnicek and Modular Man stood in the inner bailey, facing the semitransparent inner wall of the Crystal Keep with its delicate gingerbread balconies and stained-glass eyes. Mortar crews, lounging around their pits, watched from behind sandbags.

Modular Man’s eyes focused on the inner keep wall. Something was happening there.

Even replaying the event later he found it difficult to follow. Something shadowlike crawled up the inner wall, something silent and purposeful. One second there was nothing on radar, the next there was. But what it was wasn’t clear until a few seconds later, until it firmed from the ground up like a tree growing in fast motion.

Travnicek gave a high cackling laugh. All the clustered organs around his neck were swollen and erect.

“Jesus,” one of the mortar jokers said. “Never saw a neck get a hard-on before!”

Bloat’s creation stood clear in the light of day. “Hey!” the mortar joker said. “Another goddamn boner!”

“Not bad, eh?” Travnicek gloated. “Home away from home.”

What it looked like was a thick tube welded to the inner wall of the keep. The tube thickened as it approached the ground, like a bulbous plant, disappeared below ground level, and on top blossomed into an armored, conical roof.

Travnicek’s tower.

Travnicek looked at Kafka. “Thank the Stinkworm for me. will you?” he said, then walked toward the tower. He planted a foot on its vertical surface, tested it, then began walking up the outside of the tower. His body was reflected in its glassine surface. He paused partway up and turned to Modular Man. “Come with me,” he said. “I want you to know how this works.”

The android floated up next to him as Travnicek finished his climb, then slid through one of the upper story’s armored shutters. Modular Man followed, floating through the window feet first. The upper story consisted of a floor with a hole near the wall that led down into the tower. The heavy metal shutters could be dropped into place at the touch of a lever. Travnicek threw out his arms. “Great!” he said. “I can feel everything from here! Right to the horizon!”

He moved to the hole in the floor and sat in it, then planted his feet against the wall again and began walking down. His voice came hollow from the hole.

“Follow.”

Modular Man floated down the hole. Daylight shining through the semitransparent tower wall provided enough light to see.

“No stairs, see?” Travnicek said. “Nobody’s gonna follow me down here.”

The tower seemed to extend some distance below ground level, where the walls became opaque black stone. The floor was bare flags. On the inner wall was a heavy metal hatch with a wheel in the center, like something from a submarine. Travnicek spun the wheel and swung the door open.

Inside was a room about twenty feet square. There were shelves with canned goods, plastic bottles of water, candles and matches, fantastic Rox furniture, all carved baroque dragons with lolling tongues, including a bed with a headboard made of carved intertwining monsters. Even a chemical toilet behind an oriental screen. Travnicek had visualized things pretty thoroughly.

“I can stay down here forever,” Travnicek gloated.

The android let his boots touch the soft carpet on the floor. He glanced around. Calculations sped through his brain, slammed up against one of his hardwired imperatives.

“Sir?” he said. “Is that door airtight?”

“Air and watertight!” Travnicek said. “Nothing’s getting in here I don’t want in.”

“Is there concealed ventilation?” Modular Man asked. “Because if there isn’t, you’ll smother in here. More quickly if you light any of those candles.”

Travnicek stiffened. “Good you thought of that,” he said.

The android really hadn’t had any choice. The welfare of his creator was his highest priority. He couldn’t not try to preserve Travnicek’s life.

Travnicek stood stock-still, concentrating.

The walls shimmered. Ventilation shafts appeared at head-level, leading up to the tower’s exterior.

Travnicek cackled. “Thanks, big maggot.”

The ventilation shafts were another problem, the android realized, another way to get in. But he didn’t think there was an alternative, and anything coming down the shafts would have to be very small.

“Sir?” Modular Man asked. “How long are we going to stay here? You don’t actually think the governor is going to win, do you?”

“I don’t much care who wins, toaster,” Travnicek said. “And as for how long we’ll stay” He gave one of his little laughs. “We’ll stay till it’s over. Till Bloat’s dead and can’t do these interesting things anymore.”

“But if Bloat’s dead”

“When Bloat’s dead, you get me out,” Travnicek said. “Nobody has to know I’ve ever been here.”

“They’ll know I’ve been here.’

Travnicek turned. “That’s something else I don’t care about,” he said.

The tape ended.

Wyungare was jerked back from the dark world, from the swamp, from the inside of the crocodile guardian’s head, from the company of Jack the alligator. He opened his eyes, blinked, looked up into the concerned faces of Cordelia and Troll.

“How do you feel?” said the security man.

“Like that chap in My Dinner With Andre,” said Wyungare, “except I was attempting to converse with a reptile, and a famished one at that.”

“The patient’s received plenty of nutrients.”

“He wants meat,” said Wyungare. “I tried to bargain on that basis.”

“And?” said Cordelia. “You really contacted him? How is he?” "He is an alligator,” said Wyungare. “There is very little of the human aspect of your uncle at home on that side. But I believe we have come to something of an agreement.”

“Good,” said Troll, “because he’s starting to come awake. Time for me to go invisible again. I don’t know anything of what’s happening. Remember that.”

“That’s Dr. Finn’s line,” said Cordelia.

Troll smiled. “You’re right. Actually, I’ve got an appointment.” He started for the door. “Good luck, you two.” His tone got serious. “Don’t let him hurt anyone.” He indicated the alligator. “Except maybe Dr. Bob, that kraut son of a bitch. And don’t let him hurt himself. Please?”

“We shall do our best,” said Wyungare.

“I love him,” said Cordelia.

Troll looked at them a moment longer, then turned and was gone.

“Now what?” said Cordelia.

Wyungare looked down at the outside window. He smiled. “The clinic deals with laundry several times a day.”

“The clean comes in, the dirty goes out, so?”

“There is a truck downstairs now, apparently loading soiled laundry.”

“So?” Cordelia said. “You proposing to smuggle Uncle Jack out in a laundry hamper? That’s another movie I’ve seen more than once.”

“I think not. He’s just a little large for a hamper.” The alligator was beginning to writhe on the bed platform. The black cat jumped onto the chair at the platform’s head and stared at the alligator, nose to snout. “We are on the third floor,” said Wyungare. “We have to get past the second to the ground floor. I saw some reconstruction going on — on the second level. We have to get Jack down there.” He quickly outlined the rest of his plans to Cordelia. “I’ll accompany you for a ways, then I will go down to the ground floor and maneuver the truck in place.”

The Aborigine went to the alligator, whose eyes were now fully open. Fetid breath whistled in and out of the powerful jaws. Wyungare placed the heel of his hand on the reptile’s forehead. His palm seemed dwarfed by the armored plates. He concentrated for a few seconds. “All right,” he said, “let us go.”

“Thank God,” said Cordelia, once they were out in the corridor. Jack took up a considerable amount of that corridor. Wyungare looked at her questioningly. “I’m afraid there’ll be more witnesses a floor down,” she said. “The elevator?”

Wyungare shook his head. “I don’t think so. Your uncle’s flexible, but I don’t think he’ll bend that much.” They came to the door to the stairwell and the Aborigine pulled it open. He held it for the others.

“We could just walk all the way down to the first floor,” said Cordelia.

“There are many more people there,” said Wyungare. “Our answer is a floor above them.”

“You’re the shaman,” said Cordelia, flashing him a brilliant smile. She went ahead, the cat bounding down the steps as though on point. The alligator wheezed and cantilevered his body down the concrete flight. Wyungare followed.

The mid-floor landing was a squeeze, but the alligator got around it. The party approached the second-floor access door. Cordelia slipped it open a few inches, looked out, turned, and motioned the rest to follow. She opened the door as far as it would go. The doorway was close to the juncture of two main halls.

“To the right,” said Wyungare, “to the renovation work.”

“Ssh,” said Cordelia.

The alligator’s short legs pumped and the reptile squeezed into the hallway. The other hallway led to the physicians’ office wing. The elevator bank was about halfway to the offices where they had searched in vain for Finn.

A bell chimed and elevator doors hissed open.

“Oh, shit,” said Cordelia.

Three people exited the car and turned toward the offices, and away from the escape party. One of them was Finn, prancing a little as his hooves clattered on the tile. One was Troll. The other was Dr. Bob Mengele.

Troll ushered the party along the hall, away from the escapees. Finn carefully kept his eyes to the fore. Wyungare couldn’t see Dr. Bob’s face, but it sounded as though he was talking through clenched teeth.

“Tonight,” said Dr. Bob. “I will disassemble our Cajun friend tonight. There is no question of ethical ambiguity here. I will be vivisecting only an alligator, not a human being. I will find things out. The gay community will thank me. I may, as well, discover things of great importance to the joker community as well.”

“I don’t think this will be possible,” Finn said.

“It will be possible,” said Dr. Bob tightly. “Trust me.”

The doctors and the security man reached an office door at the end of the hail. Finn and Dr. Bob went first. Wyungare was sure he saw a flash of one huge Troll eye winking back at him. Then the door closed.

He started, realizing the explosive rush of fetid air beside him was because the alligator had been holding his breath too.

“You can take Jack the rest of the way,” said Wyungare. “I will find another stairwell and go to the ground. Wait for my signal.”

Cordelia nodded. She looked appraisingly at the alligator and then kissed Wyungare. “Hurry,” she said.

The Aborigine sprinted down to the end of the corridor, noting with approval the placement of the mouth of the waste chute to the street. He found the stairwell access and sped down the concrete steps silently.

On the ground floor, he found the street exit. Outside, the laundry truck was still there, and only a few yards from the spot he wanted. Wyungare sprang into the back and started throwing armloads of dirty linens out onto the street. He had a small mountain of soiled laundry piled up when the driver came out of the clinic.

“Hey, muthuh!” he yelled. The driver was short and spindly, skin looking like it had been crisped in a waffle iron.

Wyungare grunted and tossed another armload of sheets out the back. “Please leave me alone,” he grunted. He fixed the driver’s eyes and grinned in what he hoped was a maniacal way.

“Urn, sure, man,” said the driver. “Take all the filthy sheets you want. No problem.” He turned and walked toward the clinic door. “Honk when you’re done. I’m gonna shoot up some Java.”

Wyungare was done. He glanced up at the second floor, then reached forward past the driver’s seat and punched the horn rim three times. Then he got out and waited.

Like many other buildings renovating on the cheap in Manhattan, the builders used a simple plank-and-timber chute to convey all the broken wallboard and plaster and scrap down to the street, where it could be carted off.

Wyungare saw the snout of the alligator first, then the rest of him as he wiggled into the chute and started to flow downward like a mossy, green tidal wave. The alligator hit the mounded laundry with an audible whoof and an impact that shook the sidewalk.

The Aborigine saw Cordelia staring down from a window. He motioned to her. Then he stood clear as the large reptile whipped his tail back and forth, struggling free of the sheets and towels.

“Let’s go, my cousin,” said Wyungare. He glanced about, getting his bearings. He knew which way was the Rox.

Cordelia and the black cat burst out through the door of the clinic and followed after them, on the run. Wyungare was trotting now. “Uncle Jack can really motor,” gasped Cordelia, catching up.

Man, woman, alligator, and cat, they escaped together. Nobody seemed to notice.

After all, this was Jokertown.

And it was New York.

Do whatever the Great White Worm wants, Travnicek had said. Just check with me every couple hours.

What the Great White Worm wanted was information.

“Your memory is very detailed, yes?” Kafka leaned forward to peer at Modular Man from only a few inches away. The android had noticed that Kafka kept his distance from everyone else but didn’t seem to mind getting close to him. Maybe he liked machines, Modular Man thought. Or disliked people.

“Yes,” Modular Man said. “My memory is very detailed, though I frequently edit unimportant parts to save space.”

“And you’ve been in Zappa’s headquarters.”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the maps?”

“Yes.”

“Describe them.”

“I wasn’t paying any particular attention to them.”

“But the memories are very detailed. Pay attention to them.”

“I will.” He brought the images scrolling out of his memory banks. “I don’t know what most of the symbols mean,” he added.

“That doesn’t matter. We do.”

Modular Man, since the rout of the peace mission, had spent most of the afternoon being debriefed by Bloat’s assistants. Zappa’s plans for overwhelming the Rox with a barrage of missiles had both impressed and angered them. It appeared they had been expecting another attack by ground troops, much like the last.

“Come with me,” Kafka said. “I’ll show you our maps.”

Kafka led Modular Man up several flights of stairs, into a part of the castle made of gray stone instead of glass, and then down a long corridor tiled in black-and-white slate. Graceful Romanesque window arches were supported by columns painted in spirals of white and blue. Stained-glass windows showed heroic, legendary scenes, identified in strong Roman letters: LOHENGRIN DISPLAYS THE GRAIL, YSVELT MOVRNS FOR TRISTRAM, THEODEN DEFEATS THE ORCS OF SARVMAN. The panicked, screaming ores all looked like jokers in armor. Kafka didn’t seem to notice.

The end of the corridor was less impressive — the bare stone was fused and scabbed, as if it had been melted, and a misshapen door was set into it. Apparently Bloat hadn’t thought out this part of the building very thoroughly. Kafka led Modular Man inside. Inside, high in a tower, was what looked like a medieval version of Zappa’s headquarters. Communications equipment was stacked on shelves; maps were pinned to the wall; a large reel-to-reel tape recorder spun on a desktop; an intent four-eyed joker worked a court reporter’s stenography machine; a legless joker in a wheelchair frowned at pins in a map. Light was provided by fluorescents and cross-shaped arrow slits.

In the center of the room was a thin young woman, maybe eighteen, lying on a couch. The arms of the couch were carved to look like swans. The woman wore combat fatigues, a wide cloth band across her eyes, and a floppy black beret down over one ear. As the door opened her head turned toward the sound.

“It’s Kafka, Patchwork,” the joker said. “I’ve got Modular Man with me.”

The woman gave a thin smile. Modular Man noticed a spray of freckles across her nose. She held out her hand, not toward Modular Man but in his direction. She was blind.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Modular Woman.”

The android didn’t quite know what to make of this. He took the hand. “Hello,” he said.

“Call me Pat.”

“Okay.”

She turned toward the stenographer and tilted her head back. “I just heard about the location of another platoon of 155s. Inside the perimeter of Newark International, northeast corner. They’re digging them in.”

“Mobile or towed?”

A hesitation. “Towed. I think.”

A labeled pin went into the map. Kafka turned to Modular Man. “Patchwork can’t get a full view of a lot of the maps,” he said. “She’s vague on some of her information. But if your data can be cross-referenced with hers, we can get a pretty good view of Zappa’s dispositions.”

The android looked at Patchwork. “How are you getting this?” he asked.

Patchwork lifted the bandage covering her empty eye sockets, and the beret covering another socket where her ear should be. “One of my eyes and my missing ear are sitting on a shelf in Zappa’s communications center. One of our people put them there.”

“Modular Woman.” The android nodded. “I get it now.”

Patchwork slid the bandage down over her sockets again. “The other eye isn’t getting much,” she said. “Not since Pulse and Mistral left. Maybe you could send somebody to get it back?”

Kafka made an agitated movement. “Let’s get this debriefing over with,” he said. “We’ve all got plans to make.”

Not quite, the android thought.

Everyone was making plans but him. And he didn’t have any choice but to try to fit into whatever plans were made.

Detroit Steel’s armor stood in center field like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but it didn’t look like anyone was home. None of the other aces were in evidence.

“WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” Tom asked one of the officers working on the Rox model.

“General Zappa’s down in command HQ with his staff,” a captain told him. “Some of the aces went out to get dinner.”

There was nothing to do for it but wait. Tom drifted out over the outfield and set the shell down on the grass beside Detroit Steel. He popped his seat belt and stretched. It felt good to relax. He could feel a mother of a headache coming on. Sometimes that happened when he overdid the telekinesis for a long period of time.

He turned off his cameras to let darkness fill the shell. There was a can of Schaefer in his miniature fridge. He washed down two aspirin with a swallow of beer. Then he reclined his seat all the way, and stared at the darkness. Sleep would have been nice, but there was no way. He wished Dr. Tachyon hadn’t run off to the stars. Bloat respected Tachyon; he might have listened to him. As it was, the jokers had left them with damn little choice.

It was easy to lose track of time as he lay there in the dark, sipping his can of beer and thinking. The sound of someone knocking on his shell brought him out of his reverie.

Tom sat up, turned on the nearest camera. A bald woman was outside, leaning into his lens, a little white cardboard container in one hand. The only hair on her shaved head was a buzz-cut purple lightning bolt right down the center. Her skintight red leather jumpsuit glittered with golden studs, and she wore a tiny gold skull in her right nostril.

For one awful second Tom thought the jumpers had found him. Then he realized that the girl was Danny Shepherd.

It was the smile that gave her away. The hair, the clothes, everything was different, but her smile was the same. Tom pressed a button to turn on his exterior mikes.

one home?” She glanced over her shoulder at a man standing behind her. “I don’t think he’s in there, Mike.”

“I’M HERE,” Tom boomed. Danny winced. Tom twisted a dial to lower the volume. “I was, ah, resting,” he explained.

Danny waved the cardboard container. “We went over to Chinatown, got some Chinese food. Come on out and join us.”

Tom found himself staring at the skull in her nose. He felt like Rip Van Winkle. When had Danny found time to get her nose pierced? Never mind getting a haircut and a new leather wardrobe. He’d only been gone a few hours. “I, uh, don’t do that,” he said.

“You don’t do what?” Danny asked. “You don’t come out? Or you don’t eat Chinese food?”

“I don’t come out,” Tom explained.

“Ever?” said the man behind her. He was a big guy about Cyclone’s age, with close-cropped blond hair and a beer gut. His arms were full of brown paper sacks. “That’s no way to live. I ought to know.”

Tom got it. “You’re Detroit Steel.”

“Mike Tsakos,” he said. “That’s Detroit Steel.” With both hands full, he had to use his chin to gesture toward the armored suit. “I got to put this stuff down,” he said, moving off camera.

“You sure you’re not hungry?” Danny asked. “We’ve got a real Chinese feast here. Egg rolls, pot-stickers, moo shu pork, lemon duck, hot shredded Hunan beef, three-flavor shrimp, fried rice…” She looked behind her. “What am I leaving out, Mike?”

“Chicken chow mein,” Mike Tsakos called out.

Danny made a face. “Right. I was trying to forget.”

“General Tso’s chicken,” a woman’s voice called. “Extra hot.” It sounded like Danny.

But Danny was right there in front of Tom’s camera. “Just who is this General Tso, I wonder, and why are we eating his chicken?” she said lightly.

Suddenly Tom was very confused. He threw a row of switches, one after the other, turning on the rest of his cameras. His screens blinked on, giving him a 360-degree view.

On the other side of the shell, in the shadow of Detroit Steel, Mike Tsakos and Danny Shepherd were laying out cartons of Chinese food while two other women spread a picnic blanket on the outfield grass. Startled, Tom looked from Danny in red leather to Danny with the ponytail and the baseball cap, and back again. Twins, he thought, for at least a moment… until it dawned on him that the two other women were also Danny Shepherd.

One was in uniform, with her black hair cropped short and a corporal’s stripes on her sleeve. The other one looked like a yuppie: business suit, big round glasses, carefully styled hair, gold Rolex. But the faces were the same.

“Danny,” Tom said. All four looked toward the shell. “What the fuck is going on here? Are these your sisters, or what?”

“Sisters,” said punk Danny. “That’s good. I like that.”

Ponytail Danny stood up. “I should have introduced you,” she said. “This is my sister Danny, and my other sister Danny, and my other sister Danny. My sister Danny would have been here too, but she had to pick up my sister Danny at the airport.” She grinned.

“They’re all the same girl,” Mike Tsakos added.

“Von Herzenhagen told you I was an ace,” punk Danny said.

“Wait a minute,” Tom objected. “You weren’t even there.” "We were all there,” Corporal Danny said.

“Her name is Legion,” Mike Tsakos put in.

Ponytail Danny stuck out her tongue at him. “Her name is Danny,” she said. “Is anyone going to eat this Chinese food before it gets cold?”

Tsakos started filling a paper plate with chicken chow mein. The other Dannys all moved in too. When they were close together like that, you could see they were more than twins. Something about their movements, their conversation, the way each one seemed to know exactly what the others were doing. And yet they were less than twins too, Tom thought as he watched them. Maybe it was just their clothes, but Corporal Danny looked at least two inches taller than the others, and yuppie Danny definitely had larger breasts.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come out?” ponytail Danny asked him. Her plate was heavily laden with shredded beef, moo shu pork, and General Tso’s chicken. “It’s going to be a long night. You must be hungry.”

“I’m fine,” Tom said. “I’ve got food in here.” There was half a bag of nacho-flavored Doritos around somewhere, he knew. His stomach growled at him. Fortunately, the microphones didn’t pick it up.

“Okay,” two Dannys said in chorus.

Tom sat inside his shell, watching Mike Tsakos and the four girls put away a ton of Chinese food. They seemed to be having a great time. He got hungrier and hungrier.

After a while, the rest of the team began to drift in. The Reflector came up out of the dugout from command HQ, and looked at the picnic in confusion. Punk Danny rolled him a moo shu pork burrito. He accepted the plate, stared at it suspiciously for a moment, then ate it with his fingers. Tom had to make a conscious effort not to think of him as Snotman.

Two more Dannys joined them a little later. One was a young starlet with a cascade of honey-blond hair that fell past her waist, long slender legs in tight jeans, a low-cut lace blouse that hinted at breasts most Playmates would kill for. The other one was pregnant. She wore a blue maternity dress and a gold wedding band, and looked like she was ready to give birth any moment now. Both of them talked like Danny, moved like Danny, smiled like Danny.

The food was pretty well gone by the time Zappa, Hartmann, and von Herzenhagen emerged from command HQ to start the briefing. With them came a gaggle of brass in assorted uniforms, Cyclone and his daughter Mistral in matching blue-and-white flying suits and a slight, green-eyed, Irish-Indian woman named Radha Valeria O’Reilly. Radha had a strange beauty: deep auburn hair, dark lashes, skin like burnished gold. She wore a green, spangled acrobat’s costume and a caste mark in the center of her forehead.

“All of you know Elephant Girl, I believe,” Hartmann began. “Once Pulse arrives, our team will be in place.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. “He should have been here by now. It’s not like Cyril to be late.”

“I saw him at Aces High an hour ago,” Mistral said. She had her helmet cradled under one arm. A light wind riffled through her hair. She’d dyed a bright blue streak down one side, to match her costume. “He was having pictures taken with some tourists.”

“Just mark him tardy and get on with it,” Cyclone said irritably. He didn’t look nearly as good in his cape and Kevlar as his daughter did in hers.

Zappa agreed. “Major Vidkunssen, perhaps you’d care to go over the layout of the Rox with the team?”

“WHAT ABOUT MODULAR MAN?” Tom wanted to know.

Von Herzenhagen took a puff. “What about him?”

“HE’S CHANGED SIDES,” Tom pointed out.

“Unfortunate,” von Herzenhagen said, “but hardly a fatal blow. If he gets in our way, we’ll simply have to destroy him. It’s not as if it hasn’t been done before.”

“Leave him to Detroit Steel,” Mike Tsakos put in cheerfully. “I got no use for turncoats.”

“Get in line, tin man,” Snotman snapped. “I trashed him before. I can trash him again.”

Tom was aghast. “A COUPLE OF HOURS AGO, HE WAS ONE OF US.”

“He made his choice,” von Herzenhagen said. “Now I’m afraid he’ll have to live — or die — with the consequences.” He waved his pipe at Tsakos and Snotman. “Gentlemen, we appreciate your eagerness to get in there and grapple with the enemy, but we don’t want to distract ourselves with personal vendettas. Let’s just leave Modular Man to Pulse, shall we? He should be able to burn through that cheap plastic skin just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You can’t dance with a laser. The robot won’t even see it coming.”

“Poor Mod Man,” the pregnant Danny said.

Time had stopped.

The bodysnatcher rose through a silent sunlit sky. He had no body now. He was fire, he was light. He was a burning arrow, ascending. It seemed as though he were moving in slow motion. But around him, nothing else moved at all.

The towers of Manhattan dwindled beneath him. Everything was strangely distorted. Objects seemed to stretch away, receding into infinity when he looked at them. Ahead of him, everything was tinted blue; behind, the world was awash with sunset, as if seen through a red filter. His passage etched a burning line through the sky, like a tracer frozen in flight.

The endless music of the streets was gone now. There was no wind, no words, no sound at all. The silence was endless. There was no sense of movement. No sensation at all.

Below, stretched and reddened, were the shoreline of the Battery, the waters of the bay, the twisted towers of the Rox, small as a child’s toys. Indigo clouds appeared above him. He knifed through them. For an instant he felt a vague heat. Around him, the cloud stuff turned red and orange. It was over so fast it was almost subliminal. Then the bodysnatcher was above the clouds.

He saw a jet high against the blue, its fuselage as long as a freight train, stretching back to infinity. Slowly, ever so slowly, he drifted up toward it. The jet hung dead still in the sky, frozen in space and time, a big 747 with KLM markings. Pale round faces peered out of the windows, little Norman Rockwell faces looking down on the city. The bodysnatcher wondered what they’d think when they saw him, realized that he’d never know. He’d be a hundred thousand miles into space before their vapid little mouths began to open in surprise. He’d be past the moon before the pilot could turn to the copilot to say, “What the fuck was that?”

This was what it was like to move at the speed of light.

Intoxicated, the bodysnatcher rose higher and higher. He could see all of Manhattan and Staten Island now, and most of Long Island. The sky was growing darker, and the stars were coming out. Maybe he would go to the moon, he thought.

Except… it seemed he was rising so slowly … time turned subjective when you moved at light-speed… a laser might reach the moon in minutes… seconds… but it would seem like weeks to him. And if he got tired… how long could the Pulse body stay in its light-form before it ran out of energy?

The bodysnatcher felt a twinge of sudden panic. He was high enough now to see the curve of the earth. He would have flailed his hands against the empty air, if he’d had hands to flail. How does a laser turn, he thought wildly.

And as he thought it, it happened.

He curved downward, watched the line of his ascension grow into a glowing arc, a rainbow painted in a single color. The colors all shifted around him. Now the earth below was blue, the sky a red sea above him. He fell as slowly as he’d climbed. He willed himself to veer right, then left, then right again. It happened. His ascent had been straight as a ruler; his fall was frozen lightning, jagged and bright.

A hundred feet above the Rox, a sea gull was frozen in time, white against the dark water. The bodysnatcher altered course. He went through the bird’s head. The heat was sudden and intense, scalding water on bare skin, gone as quickly as it came. For an instant he was surrounded by walls of flesh and blood and bone. He saw them blacken and burn around him. Then he was gone.

By the time the gull began its fall, the bodysnatcher had burned through the eye of the dome’s great golden face into the throne room, and willed himself back to human flesh.

That was the hardest part. He fell the last five feet and bloodied his knee on the rough stone floor. The world came crashing in around him: noise, smells, pain. He realized he was naked. The smell of bloatblack was enough to gag him. His legs trembled as he got to his feet beneath the looming torch.

“Zelda?” Bloat squeaked in astonishment. His joker guards swung their weapons to bear. Kafka gaped at him. Only the penguin seemed unperturbed.

“The bitch is dead,” the bodysnatcher said, laughing. “Leave her rot. I’m Pulse now.”

Kafka asked, “What about Molly and —”

Bloat took the answer out of his head. “Vanilla and Blueboy are bringing back her body,” he told Kafka. “Her guest may be conscious by the time Charon comes in. Take her down to the dungeon. We may need a hostage or two to bargain with.”

The bodysnatcher looked up at Bloat, and pictured himself turning to light, burning into the governor’s mountainous flesh, lancing through him again and again, until blood and pus and bloatblack oozed from a hundred smoking holes. He savored the thought, turning it over and over in his mind to give the governor a good long look. For once, the fat boy had nothing to say.

The bodysnatcher laughed hysterically. Let them come. The nats with their guns. the aces with their powers. Let them all come. He would be waiting for them.

The bodysnatcher finally had a body he liked.

“There’s no more information coming in,” Patchwork said. “Everything seems to be in place or nearly. All Zappa’s people are eating pizza. I think we can take a break.”

Kafka looked at the maps; his chitin made a scraping sound. “I should talk to the governor and the others. Decisions have to be made.” He turned to the other jokers..” Help me carry these maps.”

The jokers carried the maps away, leaving Modular Man with the blind woman. Modular Man turned to her. “What are they going to do?”

“I don’t know. They don’t tell me much.” She leaned her head in the direction of the big reel-to-reel. “Would you mind turning that off?”

Modular Man snapped off the recorder. Patchwork leaned back on her swan-necked sofa.

“They don’t tell me much because I don’t think Bloat believes I’m loyal.”

“Are you?”

She smiled vaguely. “Some things I’m loyal to, some things I’m not.” She gave her head a toss. “1-800-I-GIVE-UP. Was that serious? Can we really surrender?”

“So far as I understand.”

“Because I’ve never done anything criminal other than be here, y’know? But if I give up” She gestured toward the band across her face. “How do I get my eyes and ear back?”

“I don’t know.”

She drew up her legs. “I’m not normally blind and I have a hard time tracking people. Would you mind sitting down? That way I’d know where you were.”

He settled onto a cushion. “As I understand it,” Patchwork said. “you’re not here voluntarily.”

“No.”

“But you just can’t fly away.”

Modular Man hesitated — a human mannerism he’d picked up. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t explained this before. “I can’t even think about flying away. I have to obey my creator.”

“Funny about not thinking. Because that’s what people here have to do, so the governor can’t pick up our thoughts. We have to sort of keep our minds far off, way in the atmosphere like. Scramble up our thoughts. And even then we can’t know for sure if he can hear us.”

“Can Governor Bloat hear all of you all the time?”

“I think he can hear anything he really wants to. But it’s work for him, and usually he doesn’t want to bother. And when he sleeps — well, he sleeps a lot. But I don’t really know how it is with him. Or anybody.” She grinned faintly. “I got a better line to Zappa than to anybody here.”

“What do you think is going to happen?”

“What’s gonna happen?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, man. But I’ve been reeling off these statistics for the last few hours. Tanks and helicopters and fighter-attack squadrons and Hellfires and LAWs and 155s and 105s and 120s — all those numbers. And LCACs and AAVs and MLRs and ATACMS — initials, okay? Just like the numbers, only letters, and lots of them. A whole fuck of a lot of them. And the New Jersey, which I know is a battleship. A carrier task group built around the John F. Kennedy. And a Los Angeles submarine with cruise missiles. So —” She took a breath. “I have no idea what a 155 is, and I wouldn’t know an MLR if it bit me, but I have a feeling I’m gonna get bit pretty soon. We’re all gonna get bit. So all I can do is hope that the governor can do something brilliant, or that the phone lines stay open so that I can call that 800 number once things get serious.”

From having worked with the military in the past Modular Man knew what a lot of those numbers and letters meant, and he hadn’t seen anything here that could stop them from doing their work.

“I hope the lines stay open too,” he said.

Patchwork frowned a bit, as if concentrating. “I’m thinking dirty thoughts,” she said. “Real porn. It embarrasses the governor, you know — he’s just a kid.”

“You’re not so old yourself.”

Her concentrated look deepened. “I’m thinking about something really disgusting. I don’t want the governor listening in.”

“He’s probably more interested in Kafka talking about MLRs and 155s.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” She relaxed against the swan couch and put a hand over where her eyes had been. “No fucking eyes,” she said, “one ear. I can’t go to the toilet without someone leading me, and plumbing wasn’t one of the governor’s major concerns when he built this place so it’s a long goddamn walk from here, and when I get there there isn’t going to be any toilet paper.” She laughed again, cynically this time. “That’ll teach me to fall in love.”

“Are you in love?”

“I was. He’s dead.” She said it lightly, as if it didn’t matter. "I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Defiantly. “The bastard was stepping out on me when he got killed. Neck snapped and the body turned to a block of ice — him and the bitch both. They said Black Shadow did it. That cold bastard.”

“Ah.” Not certain what else to say.

“I met Black Shadow myself just a few weeks ago. Here on the Rox.” She shuddered. “He knocked my block off. And all because I fell in love.” She waved her hands. “I thought about it, you know. I mean, sometimes you fall in love with the person, and sometimes it’s just with the person’s style. And it was his style that I fell for.”

“Ah.”

“Diego was a jumper, right? And we were both gonna be jumpers together, and rich, and he’d have a black Ferrari and I’d have a red one, and we’d both have great clothes and drugs and parties, and we’d have adventures. But Diego got killed, and so did the Prime, so I never got made into a jumper. And now I’m sitting here in this tower and I haven’t got any eyes.” She reached up into her bandage and made swabbing motions with her fingers. “Still got tear ducts, though. Yep. Still do.” She shook her head, then looked up blindly. “How come I’m doing all the talking here?”

“Probably because I haven’t got a whole lot of news you haven’t already heard.”

“Oh. Okay.” She laughed again. “Just wanted to find out.” She paused, licked her lips. “Would you mind taking me to the toilet?”

“I’ll take you, I don’t know where it is.”

“I’ll give directions, you do the steering.” She put her feet on the floor and rose hesitantly. Modular Man stood and offered her an arm.

“Thank you,” she said. “Anything here we can use for toilet paper?”

“A spare roll of paper for the stenograph machine.”

“Great. That’ll do.”

Modular Man reached for the roll and handed it to her. “I’m glad the toilet paper shortage is one problem I’m not going to have to face,” he said. Patchwork laughed. He escorted her out the misshapen door and then down the black-and-white-tiled corridor. At the top of the stairs they turned onto a long balcony that overlooked the stairwell, then turned off onto the battlements.

The toilet was a little shed built onto the massive wall of the inner bailey, a two-holer that simply dropped waste out into the mile-wide moat. Patchwork said thank you, patted his arm, and disappeared inside, pulling the door shut after her.

Modular Man waited. Both his radar and his optics reported a lot of air traffic overhead.

The door opened and Patchwork reemerged. She stuffed the roll of paper into a pocket and held out her arm. Modular Man took it and led her carefully back inside.

“The governor can make all sorts of things appear,” she said, “but there are some necessities he can’t be bothered with. I’ve got a couple unused tampons I’m guarding with my life.”

A pair of young men dressed in a mix of military gear and black leather with zips were waiting just inside the keep. One had a buzz-cut and one didn’t. Both carried guns. One had a roll of computer printout under an arm. Apparently they were heading for the toilets.

“Yo, Pat,” buzz-cut said as he passed — he stuck out an arm and clothes-lined Patchwork with his forearm.

Electronic hash sizzled through the android’s macro-atomic circuits as Patchwork’s head came off and bounced. Her jaw came loose and skittered over the hard surface.

Patchwork’s body staggered, then recovered. Headless, it bent down carefully and began to search for its head with its hands.

Knocked my block off. Now Modular Man knew what she’d meant.

“I love it when that happens,” buzz-cut said.

“Don’t do it again,” said Modular Man. He picked up Patchwork’s head and handed it to her. With a practiced gesture she reattached it. Eye sockets gazed blankly from under the disarrayed bandage. The android retrieved the jaw — the tongue was still attached and flapped frantically — and gave it to Pat.

“Don’t do it again?” buzz-cut smirked. “What happens if I do?”

Modular Man grabbed him by the throat and hung him out over the balcony.

“We find out if you can fly,” he said.

The boy’s arms and legs flopped wildly. His friend made a move, but Modular Man saw it on radar and the servomotors on his right shoulder swung his microwave laser up and pointed it straight between non-buzz-cut’s eyes.

Non-buzz-cut decided not to continue moving.

Buzz-cut was turning purple. Evidence of a savage effort showed in his face. He stared at Modular Man and narrowed his eyes menacingly.

“By the way.” the android said, “I can’t be jumped.”

Buzz-cut passed out.

The android hauled the boy in and lowered him to the floor. All through his movements, Modular Man’s laser remained focused on non-buzz-cut. Then he straightened and took Patchwork’s arm.

“As you were,” he said. “The toilet’s free.”

Though, judging from the smell, it was a little late for the toilet in buzz-cut’s case.

Modular Man led Patchwork back along the walk overlooking the main stairs. He glanced down and saw someone climbing it.

Astonishment didn’t come easily to him. He was a machine and for the most part he accepted the readings he got on reality. He’d seen some pretty strange things and accepted what he’d had to.

Still, seeing Pulse climbing the stairs was the cause of the first double take in his life.

Bodysnatcher was performing a relentless series of pushups. The Outcast could hear the steady counting inside his head: … seventy-six … seventy-seven … He could also tell that bodysnatcher was as disappointed in this body as with any other, finding it soft and flabby in comparison with his old body, the one the aces had destroyed …. Seventy-eight.. … seventy-nine.. … eighty…

The right arm spasmed and went out from under him. He slammed hard onto the wooden floor. “You’d never have made a hundred anyway,” the Outcast said. The penguin appeared alongside him. It was doing curls with a set of tiny barbells as it skated around the Outcast’s feet.

“Jesus” The rage inside bodysnatcher’s head went to sudden fright and then cold. He rolled to a fighting crouch, sweat raining on the floor. His eyes narrowed but hands relaxed. “You’re the one Juggler was talking about. The Outcast. You really the governor?”

“You really Zelda?”

“Zelda died, motherfucker.”

The Outcast ignored that. “Oh, he’s the gov, all right,” the penguin told her. “Same old weenie, different package. Like YOU.”

“Shut up,” they both told the penguin at the same time. It shrugged, doffed its funnel hat, and skated out the door, still doing reps. “Juggler’s going to surrender,” the Outcast said to bodysnatcher.

“Thought you had talked him out of it with those fancy pyrotechnics, Governor.” Bodysnatcher managed to put an edge on the word as he went over to a bench press, grabbed a towel, and started to dry off.

“I did, for a while. I didn’t think it’d last and it hasn’t. Juggler’s talked several of them into it: Creamcheese, Porker, Rain Man, the twins, some others. I can’t really say I blame them.”

“Yeah? So what do you want me to do? Go give them another goddamn pep talk? Let the little fucks surrender. We don’t need ’em.”

The Outcast smiled. “No,” he said. “I’ve said that I’d never hold anyone here who didn’t want to be here, and I meant that. I don’t keep slaves. If they want to go, I’m not going to let anyone stop them. But… I’ve been thinking about it. What do you think the Combine’s going to do with the jumpers when they give themselves up?”

Bodysnatcher shrugged, but the Outcast heard the sudden curiosity the question aroused. “I don’t know,” he started to say, then he — almost — grinned. “You’re thinking that maybe we should find out.”

The Outcast allowed himself another smile. “Exactly.”

“Then send Needles up here,” Bodysnatcher said.

“Why?”

“I want to look nice for the man when I surrender,” he said.

“So,” Battle said after Ray summarized his meetings with Ackroyd and Vivian Choy, “I think we can count on Ackroyd. You did a good job there.” He hmmmed for a moment. “I guess we can forget about Lazy Dragon. I don’t think he’ll call. That’s all right. We should have enough muscle for anything that freak Bloat might throw at us.”

“That’s it then?” Ray asked.

“Not quite,” Battle said. “We still have one more visit tonight. To Our Lady of Perpetual Misery.”

“The Church of Jesus Christ, Joker?” Ray asked.

“Not the church. The graveyard.”

Ray looked at him. “Christ. Not another deader.”

“How’s that?” Battle asked.

Ray was being as subtle as he could. “Well, Puckett’s dead, isn’t he? And he’s on the roster.”

Puckett was waiting outside Ray’s office, ostensibly because Ray said there wasn’t room for the three of them inside, but really because Ray couldn’t stand the sight or smell of him. The government ace acquiesced easily enough and Battle didn’t seem to be missing his company either.

“Puckett is a special case,” Battle said slowly. “And I see you’ve been checking on us.”

“Not really,” Ray lied. “I just recognized the name. It took me a little while to remember where I’d heard it. The Texas sniping incident.”

Battle nodded. “We should really use Puckett’s code name, Crypt Kicker. And you’re quite right. He’s dead.”

Somehow hearing Battle say that in such calm, reasoned tones made it seem even worse. “I didn’t know tower snipers were usually recruited into government service,” Ray said with distaste.

“They’re not,” Battle explained, “but Puckett, as I’ve said, is a special case. Oh, he’s had his problems with the law in the past. Haven’t we all?” Battle asked. “But Bobby Joe has seriously repented for his wrongdoings. When he — well — woke up, he knew that the Lord had given him a second chance to do right with his life. He accepted Jesus as his personal savior and decided to devote the rest of his life — or whatever — to upholding the law.”

“Christ!” Ray said.

“Exactly.”

This was getting too weird. “Just where did he ’wake up’?”

“In the potters field where he’d been buried by the state. It seems the grounds had also been used as a toxic waste dump. PCBs, insecticides, industrial acids, light radioactives. That sort of thing,” Battle said, leaning forward with a tight little smile. “And Puckett — that is, Crypt Kicker — found that he’d absorbed the toxic wastes into his body and that he can now secrete them. Couple this with the fact that he’s also extremely strong and extremely hard to hurt — he is dead, after all — and extremely, extremely loyal to the government and its properly appointed representatives, and you can see that he makes the perfect soldier.”

“Too bad he smells so damn bad.”

“Well, almost perfect.”

Ray nodded. This was all as crazy as he had feared. Worse even. “What about this graveyard stuff? Are we counting on another convenient resurrection?”

“Oh,” Battle said, a twinkle in his eye, “in a way.” He stood and checked his watch. “I’ve got to be going, but I’ll meet you at the graveyard in six hours. And bring a shovel, will you?”

The military was deploying again, and Patchwork was busy reeling off their movements to the crew of the Joker Situation Room. The Rox, however, was making its own preparations.

Cruise missiles, for example, were supposed to be incredibly accurate, but they guided themselves to the target through a radar image of the target locked into their guidance systems.

So, with Modular Man’s help, the Rox was changing its radar profile.

Bloat was creating rafts with radar reflectors. Building them out of thin air so that jokers in rubber boats could tow them out into the bay and anchor them there. Some of the reflectors were hollow masts filled with lead foil, some were odd structures that looked like step pyramids covered with aluminum.

“Right angles,” Kafka kept saying. “We want lots of right angles.”

Modular Man’s radar had several times picked up the New Jersey offshore. The funny step pyramids and hollow masts gave off radar profiles almost as large as the battleship.

High above the Rox, looking at its reflection in his radar image, he was certainly confused.

He could only hope it would confuse the cruise missiles.

As the skies had darkened in the west above New Jersey, the pair with the black cat and alligator in tow felt more confident about crossing the financial district and the southern tip of Manhattan to Battery Park.

The small groups of humans and beasts continued to attract little attention. The onset of night helped. The major exception was an elderly lady walking her two poodles. As Wyungare and the others crossed Chambers, the old woman, apparently noticing them from a block away, pointedly crossed to the other side of Park Row. Once there, she ignored them as she tottered abreast of the fugitives. Both dogs, attired in matching red sweaters, yapped as they pulled at their leashes. The old woman jerked them back into line, eyes still fixed straight ahead. Jack started to veer into the street. Wyungare set his hand on the gator’s snout and the reptile returned to his original course.

“I think he’s hungry,” said Cordelia.

“We’ll be at the water soon.”

“I’d never eat anything from that cesspool.”

“You’re not an alligator with a four-meter metabolism.” Wyungare paused thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, I could do with a snack myself.”

“I thought you people could trek for weeks without eating,” said Cordelia.

“’You people’?” said Wyungare. He reached and lightly touched her hip with his index finger. “Perhaps you might try that regimen yourself, Euro-girl.”

Cordelia slapped the finger away. “You weren’t complaining earlier.”

White teeth, major grin. “I must admit I enjoy some meat on a woman.”

Cordelia matched his smile tooth for tooth. “Me too, love, depending on whose meat it is.”

Wyungare, a bit embarrassed, let his hands swing at his sides. “Ah, look, our destination.” They could see the elms of Battery Park.

“Listen, mon cherie,” said Cordelia, “I have a question.”

Wyungare looked at her quizzically. Beside them, the paws of the black cat padded steadily; the alligator grunted in hoarse accompaniment.

“I’m helping the three of you make a break and embark on this fantastic voyage to the Rox. For whatever good it will do, you know? I hope you’ll accomplish some good. But the question I still have is, what about Uncle Jack?”

Wyungare said. “I will continue searching him out. I shall talk with him.”

“So?” said Cordelia. “That sounds like the same sort of rigmarole I got from the clinic staff. At least Dr. Bob Mengele, asshole that he is, actually tried to do something.” The grit in her voice edged her words. “I know you’re not just bullshitting me, love; if you were, that would be it for us. So just tell me what you think you can do. Please.” The metal in her voice dulled. Wyungare saw tears in her eyes.

He stopped and gripped her shoulders, confronting her face-to-face. Wyungare carefully side-kicked the alligator; Jack whuffled and looked around confusedly, but stopped too. The black cat turned his head and burred curiously from deep in his throat.

“Cordie, it’s not that I won’t tell you my plan, it’s that I cannot. There’s a fundamental principle that says that now is the moment of power. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. I am not planning a long-term strategy because, simply, I cannot.”

He hesitated and, for the first time, avoided her look. “What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“The tuckonies taught me something.” Wyungare shook his head. “The tree-spirits, the spirits of growth,” he said by way of explanation. “I assume you have your own definition of karma?”

Cordelia looked puzzled. “What goes ’round… All that kind of thing?”

Wyungare nodded slowly. “Most Europeans see it as a function of the distant past. Sins of your childhood come back to haunt you as an adult.”

Cordelia nodded.

“Try it this way,” said her lover. “You, me, all of us, represent a huge gene pool, both physically and psychically. Our resources span an enormous inventory. Karma’s not some ancient instrument of vengeance. It is now. Each moment we recreate who we are and what we do.” He gently raised his hands to her face, cradling her chin between thumb and forefinger. “Perhaps this is all simply an elaborate way of saying that karma is the ongoing process of winging it.”

Cordelia smiled. “I don’t think that’s what a lot of the sensitive New Age folk want to hear. What you just said means that we all bear a burden of responsibility for our actions.”

“See, young missy?” said Wyungare. “An easy lesson to comprehend.” "But hard to carry out.” Cordelia shook her head. “Karma is now.”

“The past distances things. People let that soften their responsibilities.”

She took his hands into hers and dug in her nails. “So connect this with Uncle Jack.”

He didn’t flinch. “I believe I have three tasks to perform within a day. The first is to speak with the boy, Bloat, and help him pass from warrior to magician. The second is to draw upon mana, to help Jack Robicheaux draw strength from the power within, and to define a condition of healing. The third —” His voice dropped off and he shook his head. “The third I must not speak of now.”

She regarded him puzzledly. “Does it have anything to do with us?”

Wyungare dropped his head so that his chin tucked into his chest. He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked straight at her again. “Whatever happens, Cordie, remember this: I feel a great amount of affection for you.”

“Merde,” she said, eyes flashing dangerously. “Guys are such wimps, even if they’re revolutionaries and shamans” She leaned toward him, up on her toes, face close to his. “So do you love me?”

Wyungare regarded her gravely. Then he smiled. It was as though a gate had opened. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Very much. I love you.”

“Then that’s enough.” She drew his lips down to hers. Parting from his mouth at last, she said, “I will love you always.” The seriousness in her voice suddenly moderated. “This is no teen crush, wombat-boy.” She grinned. He kissed her again.

The black cat rubbed around their legs, purring. Then Jack rushed past them, reptilian patience apparently at an end.

“Boat’s leaving,” said Cordelia. “Wait, Uncle Jack!” she called. They both followed.

The cat bounded ahead, as though acting as a forward observer. He yowled triumphantly and cut right, past some anonymous statue covered with pigeon droppings, then in front of a phalanx of empty green benches. He bounced almost as stiff-legged as a kitten through some brush and then they were at the water’s edge. Wyungare set a restraining hand on the alligator’s head. He was no physical match for Jack’s reptile avatar, but he directed a sensation of soothing wellbeing into the creature’s soul. That should last just long enough, he thought.

Gray water lapped unappetizingly against the ornamental rocks. Directly ahead they could see the dark wall that surrounded the Rox.

Cordelia stooped and touched the water with one finger. Then she rubbed it vigorously on her denim-clad hip. “Yuck. Bad stuff. Are you sure you can’t just translate out there through the dreamtime?”

Wyungare shook his head. “Interference from the boy is making that too chancy. Believe me, I’d rather fly than swim.”

Cordelia took his hand and held it as though it were a direct line to sanity. “Is there any way we can communicate while you’re out there? I’d like to try.”

The Aborigine shrugged. “Perhaps in the dreamtime. You’ve had a bit of experience now in getting there. Just be cautious. The worlds are not altogether safe.”

“I’ll be careful.” she said.

“We must leave.” Wyungare disengaged himself. The alligator roared, a cry of challenge, of hunger and impatience. He shuffled forward into the water, looking suddenly like a huge, rough-barked log floating low in the Upper Bay.

The black cat rubbed against Cordelia’s calf and then leapt onto the alligator’s back. He stalked along the ridge of the reptile and settled himself on Jack’s armored skull. The cat sat on his haunches and regarded the distant view of New Jersey. The alligator didn’t seem to mind.

“My turn,” said Wyungare. He gave Cordelia a sudden, fierce hug.

“Come back to me,” said the young woman.

“One way or another.”

“What?” she said, confused.

He kissed her a final time. “Remember me.” Then he turned and stepped onto the back of the gator as though boarding a gangplank. Balancing, he strode forward and then settled himself astraddle the alligator’s midsection with both brown legs trailing into the disgusting bay water. He ran his fingers along Jack’s dorsal line.

“I feel like I should be tying you to the mast,” said Cordelia, “and stuffing beeswax in your ears.”

Wyungare turned back toward her. “Just like Odysseus.” He tapped the fingers of his right hand against Jack’s armored hide. “That’s your uncle’s job. He’s not human now. He can get me through the barrier.”

Like a warship pulling away from its dock, the alligator smoothly and sinuously launched himself toward the deeper water.

Wyungare again turned and saw Cordelia standing on the shore watching them. He felt a sudden empathic flash. To Cordelia, the image of her three friends leaving the land was weirdly reminiscent of Gilbert Stuart’s famous iconographic American painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.

She wishes she had a camera, Wyungare thought. But she has her memory. That will be enough.

But before turning back to their course and the waiting Wall, Wyungare couldn’t help himself. Silly, maybe: melodramatic, definitely. He waved.

And Cordelia waved back.