Aces High

"A. W.?"

"Morgenstern was my married name, Doctor. I kept it after my divorce." She half-turned away, knees pressed together, shoulders hunched. "Andrea was her name. Andrea Whitman."

"Was?"

"She died." She stood up rapidly.

"Sorry."

"It was a long time ago."

"Uncle Tachy! Uncle Tachy!" A blond projectile hit him in the shin and wrapped about him like seaweed as he stepped up to the door of the Cosmic Pumpkin ('Food for Body, Mind, amp; Spirit') Head Shop and Delicatessen on Fitz-James O'Brien Street, near the border of Jokertown and the Village. Laughing, he bent down, scooped the little girl up and hugged her. "What did you bring me, Uncle Tachy?"

He rooted in a pocket of his coat, produced a caramel cube. "Don't tell your father I gave you this." Wide-eyed solemn, she shook her head.

He carried her into amiable clutter. Inside he was clenched. Hard to believe this beautiful child of nine was mentally retarded, like Doughboy, permanently consigned to four.

Doughboy had been easier, somehow. He was immense, over two meters tall, an almost-spherical mass of white flesh, hairless, faintly bluish, face bloated almost to featurelessness, raisin eyes staring out from fat and tears. He was in his late twenties. He could not remember ever being called by anything other than a cruel nickname from a bakery's registered trademark. He was frightened. He missed Mr. Shiner and Mr. Benson the newsdealer who lived below them, he wanted the Go-Bot Shiner had bought him shortly before the men came and took him away. He wanted to go home, to get away from strange harsh men who poked him with their fingers and called him mocking names. He was pathetically grateful to Tachyon for coming to see him; when Tach took leave, in the bile-green visitation room in the Tombs, he clung to his hand and wept.

Tach wept too, but afterward, when Doughboy couldn't see.

But Doughboy was obviously a joker, victim of the wild card virus Tach's own clan had brought this world. Sprout Meadows was physically a perfect child, exquisite even by the exacting standards of the lord-lines of Ilkazam or Alaa or Kalimantari, sweeter-tempered than any daughter of Takis. Yet she was no less deformed than Doughboy, no less a monster by the standards of Tach's homeworld-and like him would have been instantly destroyed.

He looked around. A couple of secretaries nibbled late lunch by the front window, under the weathered aegis of a cigar-store Indian. "Where's your daddy?"

Her mouth carameled shut, she nodded her head left toward the head shop.

"What are you staring at, buster?" a voice demanded. He blinked, focused belatedly on a sturdy young woman in a soiled gray CUNY sweatshirt standing behind the glass deli display. "I beg your pardon?"

"Listen, you male chauvinist asshole, I know about you. Just watch yourself."

Belatedly Tach recalled Mark Meadows's interchangeable pair of clerks. "Ah-Brenda, is it?" A pugnacious nod. "Very well, Brenda, let me assure you I had no intention of staring at you."

"Oh, I get it. I'm not a debutante type like Peregrine, not your kind at all. I'm one of those women men like you don't see." She ran a hand through a stiff brush of hair, reddish with tea-colored roots, sniffed.

"Doc!" A familiar stork figure stood bent over in the doorway to the head shop.

"Mark, I am so glad to see you," Tachyon said with feeling. He kissed Sprout on the forehead, ruffled her pigtailed hair, set her on the murky linoleum. "Run and play, dearest child. I would speak with your father."

She scooted off. "Have you a moment, Mark?"

"Oh, sure, man. Always, for you."

A pair of kids with leather overcoats and dandelion-climax hair lurked among the paraphernalia and vintage posters on the other side, but Mark was not the suspicious type. He nodded Tach toward a table by the far wall, collected a teapot and a couple of mugs, and followed, loose-limbed, bobbing his head slightly as he walked. He had on an ancient pink Brooks Brothers shirt, a fringed leather vest, a pair of vast elephant bells faded almost to the hue of the white firework bursts tiedyed into them. Shoulder-length blond hair was crimped at his temples by a braided thong. Had Tachyon not seen him in the full splendor of his secret identity, he'd have thought the man had no sense of dress at all.

"So what can I do for you, man?" Mark asked, beaming happily through the glass planchets of his wire-rims.

Tach set elbows on the tablecloth-also tie-dyed-pursed his lips as Mark poured. "A joker named Doughboy has been arrested for murder. A young woman reporter has come to me maintaining that be's innocent."

He drew breath. " I myself believe it, too. He is a very gentle individual, for all that he is huge and hideous and possesses metahuman strength. He is… retarded."

He waited a moment, heart hanging in his throat, but what Mark said was, "So it's a rip-off, man. Why do the pigs say he did it?" The epithet was spoken without rancor.

"The murdered man is a Dr. Warner Fred Warren, a popular astronomy-to use the term loosely-writer in the tabloids. To give you some idea, he wrote an article last year entitled, `Did Comet Kohoutek Bring AIDS?"'

Mark grimaced. He was not your standard hippie, disdaining/distrusting all science. Then again, he was a latecomer to the faith, who had gotten into Flower Power at a time when everyone else in the Bay Area was getting heavily into Stalin.

"Dr. Warren's latest prognostication is that an asteroid is about to strike the Earth and end all life, or at least civilization as you know it. It did create quite a bit of controversy; amazing what attention you Earthers lavish on such folly. The police theorize that Doughboy heard his friends talking about it, became frightened, and one night last week went into the doctor's lab and beat him to death."

Mark whistled softly. "Any evidence?"

"Three witnesses." Tach paused. "One of them positively identifies Doughboy as the man he saw leaving Warren's apartment building the night of the crime."

Mark waved a hand. "No problem. We'll get him free, man."

Tachyon opened his mouth, shut it. Finally he said, "We need to see what other information they have amassed in the case. The police are not proving cooperative. They tell me to mind my own business, almost!"

Mark's blue eyes drifted off Tach's sightline. Tach sipped his tea. It was stringent and crisp, some kind of mint. "I know how you can take care of that. Does Doughboy, like, have an attorney?"

"Legal Aid."

"Why don't you get in touch with him, offer to act as unpaid medical expert."

"Splendid." He looked quizzically at his friend, head tipped like a curious bird. "How do you know to do that?"

"I don't know, man. It just came to me. So, like, where do I come in?"

Tach studied the tabletop. In the background forks clove tofu and thunked against earthenware cushioned by soggy romaine lettuce. It had been as much for the tonic effect Mark had on his spirits that he'd come here from the Tombs. But still…

He was out of his depth; he was, as he'd assured Sara, no detective. Now, Mark Meadows, the Last Hippie, didn't on the surface appear a much more promising candidate for sleuth, but he happened also to be Marcus Aurelius Meadows, PhD, the most brilliant biochemist alive. Before dropping out he'd been responsible for a number of breakthroughs, laid the groundwork for many more. He was trained to observe and trained to think. He was a genius.

Also, Tach liked the cut of his coat, which in itself was about enough for a Takisian.

"You've already helped me, Mark. This is your world, after all. You understand its ways better than L" Though I've been on it longer, he realized. "And there are your friends. You do have, ah, others than the two we met on my cousin's ship?" Mark nodded. "Three others, so far."

"Good. I hope these prove more tractable than the others." He hoped one or the other of the Captain's alter egos would have skills that might fall handy; fortunately he could imagine no purpose the surly were-porpoise Aquarius might serve, but the vainglorious coward Cosmic Traveler was another matter. And, even to save poor Doughboy from death in life, he wasn't ready to endure the Traveler again so soon.

He scraped his chair back and rose. "Let us go play detective together, you and L"

The kid had cammie pants and a Rambo rag, standing there on the corner of Hester and the Bowery trying to hold down magazine pages against the wind's tugging. Tach glanced over his shoulder. The article was slugged, "Dr. Death: Selfmade Cyborg Soldier of Fortune Battles Commies in Salvo." The kid looked up as the two men took their places beside him at the newsstand, truculence tightening lean Puerto Rican features. His expression flowed like wax into awe.

He was looking at the center button of a yellow paisley vest. Out over his forehead an immense green bow tie with yellow polka dots blossomed from a pink shirt collar. To either side hung a purple tailcoat. A purple stovepipe hat, its green band embossed in gold peace signs, threatened the wateredmilk overcast.

Yellow-gloved fingers flashed a V "Peace," said the beaky norteamericano face hovering up there amid all that color. The kid tossed the magazine at the proprietor and fled. Captain Trips stood blinking after him, wounded. "What'd I say, man?"

"Never mind," chortled the being behind the counter. "He wouldn't have bought it anyway. What can I do you for, Doctor? And your colorful friend here?"

"Mm," said Mark, sniffing, nostrils wide, "fresh popcorn."

"That's me," Jube said. "That's how I smell." Tachyon winced.

"Far out!"

For a moment glass-bead eyes stared, blue-black skin rumpled up Jubal's forehead: orogenic surprise. Then he laughed.

"I get it! You're a hippie."

The Cap'n beamed. "That's right, man."

Blubber shook. "Goo-goo-goo-Jube," he bellowed. "I am the Walrus. Pleased to meetcha."

He did look like a walrus, five foot nothing, hanging fat, a big smooth skull. with random hair-tufts sticking out from it here and there like rusty shaving brushes, flowing into the collar of his green and black and yellow Hawaiian shirt without the intervention of a neck. He had little white tusks stuck at either end of his grin. He pushed out a Warner Brothers cartoon hand, three fingers and a thumb, which the Captain eagerly shook.

"This is Captain Trips. An ace, a new associate of mine. Captain, meet Jubal Benson. Jube, we need from you some information."

"Shoot." He made a pistol gesture with his right hand, rolled his eyes at Trips.

"What do you know about the joker called Doughboy?" Jube scowled tectonically. "That's a bum rap. Boy wouldn't hurt a fly. He even lives in the same rooming house I do. See him most every day-used to, before this came down."

"He didn't, like, hear people talking about an asteroid crashing into the Earth and get real worked up about it, did he?" Trips asked. A vagrant piece of newsprint had washed up against the backs of his calves on a wind that hadn't yet realized it was spring. He ignored it and the chill alike.

"If he'd heard anything like that, he'd hide under his cot and you'd never get him out till you convinced him it was a joke. IS that what they're claiming?"

Trips nodded.

"The one to talk to is Shiner. He rents the place, feeds Doughboy, and lets him stay there. He's got a shoeshine stand up Bowery almost to Delancey, up where Jokertown's more touristy."

"Would he be there now?" Tach asked.

Jube consulted a Mickey Mouse watch whose band all but vanished into his rubbery wrist. "Lunch hour's over, which means he's prob'ly knocking off himself to eat lunch right now. He should be home. Apartment Six."

Tachyon thanked him. Solemn, Trips tipped his hat. They started off.

"Doc."

"Yes, Jubal."

"Better get this cleared up quick. Things could get very heavy around here this summer if Doughboy gets a railroad job. They say Gimli's back on the streets."

An eyebrow rose. "Tom Miller? But I thought he was in Russia."

The Walrus laid a finger along his broad flat nose. "That's what I mean, Doc. That's what I mean."

"I found him, oh, fifteen, sixteen year ago it was." The man called Shiner sat on his cot in the single room of the apartment on Eldridge Street, rocking to and fro with his hands clasped between skinny knees. "Back in 1970. Wintertime it was. He was sitting there next to a dumpster in a alley behind this mask shop, bawling his eyes out. Mama just took him there and left him."

"That's terrible, man," said Trips. He and Tach were standing on the meticulously swept hardwood floor of the apartment. Shiner's cot and a big mattress with stained ticking were the only furniture.

"Oh, I guess maybe I can understand. He was eleven or twelve, already twice as big as me, stronger'n most men. Must have been powerful hard to take care of."

He was small for an Earther, shorter than Tach. From a distance he looked to be an unexceptional black man in his fifties, with gray-dusted hair and a gold right incisor. Up close you noticed that he shone with an unnatural luster, more like obsidian than skin. "I do my own advertisin', like," he'd explained to Trips when Tachyon introduced them. "Drum up business for my `shine stand."

"How well could Doughboy find his way around the city unaided?" Tachyon asked.

"He couln'nt. Find his way around Jokertown all right, always be jokers looking out for him, you know, seeing he didn't wander off." For a moment he sat and stared at a spill of sunlight in which a tiny metal Ferrari lay on its side. "They say he killed this scientist dude up by the Park. He never even been to the Park but twice. He don't know nothin' about no astronomy."

He squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked through. "Oh, Doctor, you got to do something. He's my boy, he's like my son, and he's hurtin'. And there nothing I can do."

Tachyon shifted weight from boot to boot. The Captain plucked a daisy, rather the worse for wear, from his lapel, squatted down and held it out to Shiner.

Sobbing, the black man opened his eyes. They narrowed at once, in suspicion, confusion. Trips just hunkered there with flower proffered. After a moment Shiner took it.

Trips squeezed his hand. A tear fell on his own. He and Tachyon quietly left.

"Dr. Warren was not just a scientist," Martha Quinlan said as she guided them back through the apartment, "he was a saint. The quest to get the truth before the people was never ending for him. He is a martyr to man's quest for Knowledge."

"Oh, wow," Cap'n Trips said.

As far as Tachyon had been able to learn, the late Warner Fred Warren had had no next of kin. A legal battle was shaping up for possession of the trust fund which had enabled him to keep a penthouse apartment on Central Park and devote his life to science-his grandfather had been an Oklahoma oil millionaire who attributed his success to dowsing and died claiming he was Queen Victoria-but in her capacity as managing editor of the National Informer Ms. Quinlan seemed to be acting as executor for Warren's estate.

"It's so good of you to come pay your respects to a fallen colleague, Dr. Tachyon. It would have meant so much to dear Fred, to know our distinguished visitor from the stars had taken a personal interest in him."

"Dr. Warren's contribution to the cause of science was unparalleled," Tachyon said sonorously… since Trofim Lysenko, he emended mentally. Ah, Doughboy, may you never guess what I endure to gain you justice. It was a reflexive bit of Takisian misdirection, the story Tachyon had given Quinlan when he called to see about looking over the murder scene.

"It's a terrible thing," Quinlan warbled, leading them along a hallway hung with framed prints of hunting dogs from 1920s magazines. She was a little taller than Tach, wearing a dress like a black sack from neck and elbows to thighs, scarlet tights, white shoes, and thick plastic bracelets. Her gray-blond hair was styled straight and cut at a bias. Her eyes were made up like Theda Bara's; she wore no lipstick. "A tragedy. So fortunate they caught the fellow who did it. Not right in the head, they say, and a joker to boot. Probably some kind of sex deviant. Our reporters are looking into this story very carefully, I can assure you."

Trips made a sound. Quinlan stopped at the end of the. hall. "Here it is, gentlemen. Preserved as it was the day he died. We intend to make this a museum, against the day poor Fred's greatness is at last acknowledged by the scientific establishment which so persecuted him." She gestured them grandly in.

The door to Dr. Fred's lab had been wood, solid even for a ritzy New York apartment. It didn't seem to have slowed down his last visitor. Conscientious gnomes from the forensic lab in the brick tower at One Police Plaza had swept up most of the splinters, but a shattered stub of door still hung on bent brass hinges.

Tachyon still had a certain difficulty fitting his eyes around the utilitarian, rectilinear shapes of terrestrial scientific equipment. Science on Takis was the province of the few, even among the Psi Lords; their equipment was grown of geneengineered organisms even as their ships were, or custombuilt by craftsmen concerned to make each piece unique, significant. Here he didn't have much trouble. The gear that occupied the rubber-topped workbenches had been busted all to hell. Papers and shattered glass were strewn everywhere.

"Did he have, like, his observatory here?" Trips asked, craning around with his stupendous topper in hand.

"Oh, no. He had an observatory out on Long Island where he did most of his stargazing. He analyzed his results here, I suppose. There's a darkroom and everything." She rested a long fingernail on the line of her jaw. "What exactly was your name again? Captain… ?"

"Trips. "

"Like in that Stephen King book? What was it? The Stand."

"Uh, no. It's like, they used to call Jerry Garcia that." When she showed no signs of enlightenment, he went on, "He was the leader of the Grateful Dead. He, uh, he still is. He didn't draw an ace, you know, like Jagger or Tom Douglas, and…" He noticed that her eyes had gone glassy and focused on oblivion, trailed his words away, and wandered off around the perimeter of the largish, cluttered, ruined room.

"Say, Doctor, what're these dark splashes all over the walls?"

Tach glanced up. "Oh, those? Dried blood, of course." Trips paled and his eyes bulged a bit. Tachyon realized he'd run roughshod yet again over Earther sensibilities. For a folk so robust, Terrestrials had such tender stomachs.

Still, even he was amazed at the savagery vented on the penthouse lab. There was a mindless quality to it, a palpable psychic emanation of fury and malice. Given the limited imagination of most police he'd encountered, Tachyon was no longer surprised they found Doughboy a plausible suspect; they thought him a demented freak, a caricature from a slasher flick, and that certainly described Dr. Warner Fred Warren's assailant. Yet Tach was more convinced than ever that vast gentle child was incapable of such an act, however provoked.

The Informer editor had vanished, overcome with emotion no doubt. "Hey, Doe, come look at this," Trips called. He was bending over a drafting table scattered with star-speckled photographs, peering intently at one edge.

Tach bent down beside him. There was a thin patch of gray, wrinkled, like a bit of tissue paper that had been wetted, stretched on the plastic surface, and left to dry. There was a curious membraneous quality to it that tickled the fringes of cognition.

"What is this stuff?" Trips asked.

"I do not know." His eyes skimmed curiously over the photographs. A date penciled on the edge of one caught his eye: 4/5/86, the day Warren was murdered.

From a pocket Cap'n Trips produced a little vial and a scalpel in a disposable plastic sheath. "Do you always carry such implements?" Tach asked as he began to scrape up a few flakes of the gray stuff.

"Thought they might come in handy, man. If I was gonna be a detective and all."

Shrugging, Tach turned his attention to the photograph that had caught his eye. It was the top of a small stack. Picking it up, he discovered a dozen or more photos which to his untrained eye all seemed to show the same star field.

"All right, Doc, Captain," an unfamiliar voice blared from behind. "Give us a big smile for posterity."

With a dexterity that surprised even himself, Tach half-rolled the photos and slipped them into one voluminous coat sleeve even as he spun to face the intruder. Martha Quinlan stood inside the door beaming while a young black man dropped to one knee and bombed them with a camera flash that could have driven a laser beam to Mars.

With a certain reluctance Tach let his fingers slip from the outsized wooden grips of the. 357 magnum neatly concealed in a shoulder rig beneath his yellow coat. "I presume you've an explanation for this," he said with fine Takisian frost.

"Oh, this is Rick," Quinlan warbled. "He's one of our staff photographers. I simply had to have him come down and record this event."

"Madam, I'm afraid I do not do this for publicity," Tach said, alarmed.

Unfolding himself, Rick waved a reassuring hand. "Don't sweat it, man," he said. "It's just for our files. Trust me."

"Tezcatlipoca," Dr. Allan Berg said, tossing the print back on top of the mound of books, papers, and photos under which his desk putatively lurked.

"Say what?" Trips said.

"1954C-1100. It's a rock, gentlemen. Nothing more, nothing less."

The little office smelled strongly of sweat and pipe tobacco. Trips stared out the window at the afternoon Columbia campus, watching a gray squirrel halfway up a maple tree cussing out a black kid walking past with a scuffed French-horn case.

"A curious name," Tachyon said.

"It's an Aztec deity. A pretty surly one, I gather, but that's the way it goes: you find an asteroid, you get to name it." Berg grinned. "I've thought about hunting for one to name after me. What the hey-immortality of a sort." He looked like a goodnatured Jewish kid, eager eyes, long oval face, big nose, except that his curly unkempt hair was gray. He had a blue shirt and brown tie under a sweater so loosely woven you could just about fish with it. His manner was infectious.

"It's big enough to, like, do some damage if it hits?" Trips asked. "Or is that more exaggeration?"

"No, ah, Captain, I can assure you it's not." He stumbled a little over the honorific. "Norms, especially in the New York area, had pretty well had to accustom themselves to the ways of aces, especially those who chose to emulate the comic-book heroes of yore and don colorful costumes. And Cap'n Trips was weirder than most."

"Tezcatlipoca's a nickel-iron oblong roughly a kilometer by a kilometer and a half, weighing a good many million metric tons. Depending on the angle at which it struck, it could create devastating tidal waves and earthquakes, it could produce effects such as those hypothesized for a nuclear winter, it could quite conceivably crack the crust or blow away much of the atmosphere. It would almost certainly be the greatest catastrophe in recorded history-I might give you a better estimate if I took time to work it all out on paper."

"But I won't. Because it's not going to hit the planet." He sipped coffee from a cracked mug. "Poor Fred."

"I admit I was rather startled that you spoke so sympathetically of him when I called you, Dr. Berg," Tachyon said. Berg set the cup down, stared at the tepid black surface. "Fred and I went to MIT together, Doctor. We were roommates for a year."

"But I thought everybody said Dr. Warren was just some kind of crackpot," Trips said.

"That's what they say. And he was a crackpot, much as I hate to say it., But he was not just any crackpot."

"I fail to see how a trained scientist could espouse the theories for which Dr. Warren was so, ah-"

"Notorious, Doctor. Go ahead and say it. You sure you won't have any coffee?" They refused politely. Berg sighed. "Fred had what you call a will of iron. And he had a romantic streak. He always felt there should be fantastic things out there-ancient astronauts, alien machines on the moon, creatures unknown to science. He wanted to be the first to go out and rigorously prove so many things respectable scientists scoffed at." His mouth slipped into a sad smile. "And who knows? When Fred and I were kids, people thought the idea of intelligent life on other planets was farfetched. Maybe he could have pulled it off."

"But Fred was impatient. When he didn't see the results he wanted-why, he started seeing them anyway, if you know what I mean."

"So it was as Dr. Sagan said in his article in the Times," Tachyon said, "Dr. Warren fastened upon a rock which falls by the Earth at regular intervals and embued it with menace."

Berg frowned. "With all due respect, Dr. Sagan got it wrong this time. Gentlemen, Dr. Warren had an infinite capacity for self-deception, but he wasn't just some fool the Informer dragged in off Seventh Avenue. He knew how to use an ephemeris, was surely cognizant of 1954C-1100's history."

"He was a trained astronomer, and as far as technical and observational details go, a damned fine one." He shook his shaggy head. "How he could talk himself into believing this nonsense about Tezcatlipoca, God alone knows."

Trips was polishing his glasses on his fantastic bow tie. "Any chance he could've been right, man?"

Berg laughed. "Forgive me, Captain. But Tezcatlipoca's newest approach was spotted and plotted eight months ago by Japanese astronomers. It does in fact intersect the Earth's orbital path, but well clear of the planet itself "

He stood up, smoothed down his sweater, which had ridden up to the center of his stomach. "That's the pity, gentlemen. Oh, not this"-patting incipient paunch-"but the disservice Fred performed his fellow scientists. Our instruments are so much more sophisticated than they were even last time Tezcatlipoca passed, in 1970. And yet any astronomer who dares twitch his telescope in its direction will wind up lumped with von Daniken and Velikovsky forevermore."

The night was well advanced. Tach was sitting slumped in a chair in his apartment in a maroon smoking jacket and semidarkness, listening to Mozart in violins, bibbing brandy, and getting far gone in maudlin when the phone rang.

"Doe? It's me, Mark. I've found something."

The tone in his voice cut through brandy fog like a firehose. "Yes, Mark, what is it?"

"I think you better come see for yourself."

"On my way."

Fifteen minutes later he was on the floor above the Cosmic Pumpkin, gaping around in stoned amazement. "Mark? You have a whole laboratory above your head shop?"

"It's not complete, man. I don't have any real big-scale stuff, no electron microscopes or anything. Just what I was able to piece together over the years."

It looked like a cross between Crick amp; Watson and a hippie crash pad circa 1967, shoehorned into a space barely larger than a broom closet. Diagrams of DNA strands and polysaccharides shared wall with posters of the Stones, Jimi, Janis, and, of course, Mark's hero Tom Marion Douglas, the Lizard King-a twinge here for Tach, who still blamed himself for Douglas's death in 1971. A Terrestrial biochemist's tools were more familiar to Tach than an astronomers, so he recognized here a centrifuge, there a microtome, and so on. A lot of it had obviously seen hard use before passing into Trips's hands, some was jerry-rigged, but it all looked serviceable. Mark was in a lab coat, looking grim. "`Course, I didn't need anything too fancy, once I saw the gas chromatography on that tissue sample."

Tach blinked and shook his head, realizing the large and convolute piece of equipment whose identity he'd been puzzling over the last half-minute was possibly the world's most intricate bong. "What did you find, then?" he demanded. Mark passed him a slip of paper. "I don't, like, have enough data to confirm the structure of that protein chain. But the chemical composition, the proportions…"

Tachyon felt as if a coin were being dragged down the vertebrae in his neck. "Swarmling biomass," he breathed. Mark gestured at a bale of papers stacked on a bench. "You can check the references on this, analyses from the Swarm invasion. I-"

"No, no. I trust your work, Mark, more than anyone's but mine." He shook his head. "So swarmlings murdered Dr. Warren. Why?"

"How about how, man? I thought swarmlings were great big things, like in some Japanese monster movie."

"At first, yes. But a Swarm culture-a Mother-how to say?- evolves in response to stimuli. Its first brute-force attack failed. Now it refines its approach-as I've been warning those fools in Washington it might, all along." His mouth tightened. "I suspect that it is now attempting to emulate the life-form that repulsed it before. Such is a common pattern for these monsters."

"So you've had a lot of experience with these things?"

"Not I. But my people, yes. They are, you might say, our bitterest enemies, these Swarm creatures. And we theirs."

"And now they're, like, infiltrating us?" Mark shuddered. "I think they are a long way from being able to pass undetected. Yet something about this troubles me. Usually at this stage of a Swarm incursion they are not so discriminating."

"And why did they pick on poor Fred?"

"You begin to sound like that horrid woman, my friend." Tach grinned, clapped him on the shoulder. "I hope we'll find the answer to that question when we track these horrors down. Which is the next thing we must do."

"What about Doughboy?"

Tach sighed. "You're right. I will call the police, first thing in the morning, and tell them what we learned."

"They're never gonna buy it."

"I can but try. Get rest, my friend."

They didn't buy it.

"So you found swarmling tissue in Warren's lab," rasped the Homicide South lieutenant in charge of the case. By phone she sounded young, Puerto Rican, harassed, and as if she did not at the moment love Tisianne brant Ts'ara of House Ilkazam. "You are taking a very active interest in this case for a medical expert witness, Doctor."

" I am trying to perform my civic duty. To prevent an innocent man from suffering further. And, incidentally, to alert the proper authorities to a frightful danger which may threaten this entire world."

"I appreciate your concern, Doctor. But I'm a homicide investigator. Planetary defense is not in my jurisdiction. I have to get permission just to go into Queens."

"But I have solved a homicide for you!"

"Doctor, the Warren case is under investigation by the competent authorities, which is us. We have a witness who positively identifies Doughboy leaving the scene at the right time."

"But the tissue samples-"

"Maybe he was growing them in a petri jar. I don't know, Doctor. Nor do I know the credentials of whoever identified this alleged swarmling tissue-"

" I assure you I am an alien biochemistry expert-"

"In several senses." He jerked slightly back from the receiver; perversely, he was starting to like this woman. "I'm not saying I doubt you, Doctor. But I can't just wave my hand and let your man walk free. That's up to the DA. Whatever you have, take to Doughboy's attorney and have him present it. And if you've really found more swarmlings, I'd suggest you take that up with General Meadows at SPACECOM." Who is Mark's father. "And one more thing, Doctor."

"What is that, Lt. Arrupe?"

"Get off this case or I'll chuck your ass in the joint. I don't need amateurs muddying the water."

Chrysalis looked at him with a face glass-clear and china bone. "Anything strange happening in Jokertown?" she drawled in that hermaphrodite British accent of hers. "Whatever makes you think anything strange might happen here?" He sat at one end of the bar, well away from the morning regulars. He wasn't exactly a stranger at the Crystal Palace. He never quite relaxed here, just the same.

"Not just Jokertown. This part of Manhattan, from Midtown south."

She set down a glass she was polishing. "You're serious?"

"When I say strange, I mean strange for jokertown. Not the latest outrage at jokers Wild. Not Black Shadow dangling some mugger from a streetlamp by his foot. Not even another bow-and-arrow murder by that maniac with his playing cards. Something out of what passes for the ordinary hereabouts."

"Gimli's back."

Tach sipped his brandy and soda. "So they say."

"What are you paying?"

He raised a brow.

"Dammit, I'm not just a back-fence gossip! I pay for my information."

"And are well paid. I've contributed my share, Chrysalis."

"Yes. But there's so much you don't tell me. Things that go on at the clinic… confidential things."

"Which shall remain confidential."

"All right. Goodwill in this mutant community is my stock in trade too, and you don't have to remind me how influential you are. But someday you'll go too far, you metal-haired little alien fox. "

He grinned at her. And was gone.

Tring. Tach winched one eye open. The world was dark but for the usual Manhattan light-haze and perhaps a little moonlight oozing in through open curtains, silvering the bare female rump upturned beside him on the maroon coverlet of his water bed. He blinked, gummily, and tried to remember the name of the person to whom the buttocks belonged. They were really outstanding buttocks.

Tring. More exigent this time. One of this world's most satanic inventions, the telephone. Beside him the glorious buttocks shifted slightly and a pair of shoulders came into view from behind a ridge of comforter.

Trrrr- He picked up the phone. "Tachyon."

"It's Chrysalis."

"Delighted to hear from you. Do you have any idea what hour of the night it is?"

"One-thirty, which is more than you knew. I've got something for you, Doctor darling."

"Whozat, Tach?" mumbled the woman at his side. He patted her rump abstractedly, trying to remember her name. Janet? Elaine? Blast.

"What is it?" Cathy? Candi? Sue? Chrysalis hummed a tune.

"What in the name of the ideal was that?" he demanded. Mary? Confound Chrysalis and her damned humming!

"A song we used to sing, back when I was at camp. `Johnny Rebeck.'"

"You called at one-thirty in the morning to sing me a campfire song?" Belinda? This was getting to be too much. "'And all the neighbors' cats and dogs will nevermore be seen/They've all been ground to sausages in Johnny Rebeck's machine."'

Tach sat up. "What is it?" the woman beside him demanded, petulant now, turning toward him a face masked with sleep and dark hair.

"You've got something."

"Like I told you, luv. Not Jokertown, but nearby. Around Division, next to Chinatown. Dogs and cats disappearingstrays, pets; people in these parts aren't too concerned with leash laws. And pigeons. And rats. And squirrels. Several blocks are just devoid of the usual urban wildlife. Jokes about oriental cuisine aside, I thought this might qualify as your strange event."

"It does." Ancestors, how it does! She purred. "You owe me, Tachyon."

He was swinging his legs out of bed, wishing for courtesy's sake he could remember this young woman's name to send her packing. "I do."

"And by the way," Chrysalis said, "her name's Karen."

"Doctor," Trips said through a cloud of his own breath, "do you have any idea what Brenda called me when I phoned her to come look after Sprout at this hour of the night?"

In the weeks he'd known Mark, it was the first time he had heard him voice a complaint of any sort. He sympathized. "I don't want to even imagine, dear Mark. But this is crucial. And I feel we have no time to waste."

Mark crumpled. "Yeah. You're right. Doughboy's got it a whole lot worse than anything I've ever known. I'm sorry, Doc. "

Tachyon looked at this man, a brilliant scientist whom personal demons had driven to batter himself into little more than a derelict, and honestly wondered. He stroked his arm. "No harm done, Mark."

Not far away the cars hissed over the Manhattan Bridge. They had here a dark side street in a none-too-prepossessing part of town, small shops and shadows and loan sharks and derelict manors, gray cramped buildings winking here and there with broken windows in the glow of a single fading streetlight. Not an hour to be abroad here, even without the prospect of otherworldy menace.

"This may just be a false alarm," Tach said. "When Chrysalis told me about the animal disappearances, it occurred to me that swarmlings need food, and unless this culture advances more quickly than any I've heard of, they could scarcely buy it at the A amp;P "

He stopped, faced his friend, gripped him by the biceps. "Understand this now, Mark. There may be nothing here. But if we've found what. we are looking for, we are going to be confronting a monster like something from a horror movie. But it's real. It's the enemy of every living organism on this planet, and it is utterly without compunction."

Mildly, Mark gestured up the block. "Does it look anything like that, man?"

Tach stared at him a moment. Slowly he swiveled his head right.

A figure stood on the corner at the end of the block nearer the overpass. A coat was stretched around it, a hat pulled low, but even muffled as it was there was no hiding that its proportions were never those of a normal human being.

"Excuse me a moment, man," Trips said. He pulled away, and holding hat on head ran from the apparition, rounding the corner with knee-swinging sole-slapping strides.

Coward! blazed up nova in Tach's breast, and then, But no, I cannot be so hard on him, for he is no fighter and this is a menace strange to his kind. He squared his shoulders, straightened his cravat, and turned to face the creature.

It took a swaying step forward, another. One foot made a sucking sound as it came off the asphalt. From the darkness behind it another figure lurched; clothed the same way, its outline different but clearly kindred. Ah, Benafsaj, you were right to doubt me. I never imagined there might be two. He readied his spirit for death.

"Doctor."

His head snapped round. A young woman stood beside him, dressed from throat to soles in black broken only by the sideways commas of a yin-yang design on her chest. The emblem was matched by a black mask which curved up from her left cheekbone across the right side of her forehead, leaving half her face bare. She was taller than he. Her hair was black and lustrous. What he could see of her face looked Oriental and breathtakingly beautiful.

He performed a courtly if abbreviated bow. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure."

"I am Moonchild, Doctor. And I have the honor of knowing you-if not exactly at first hand."

It was beginning to seep through his blood-brain barrier. "You're one of the Captain's friends."

"I am."

Danger always made his blood run high. At least that was his subsequent excuse for the lechery that gripped him now. "Dearest child," he breathed, grabbing her hands, "you are the loveliest sight these eyes have beheld in ages…"

Even in the diffuse glow he saw her blush. "I will do my poor best to aid you, Doctor," she said, misunderstanding… maybe.

She whirled from him and glided down the street, relaxed and poised and deadly-seeming as a stalking leopard. He marveled at her aura of strength, her liquid grace, the play of buttocks beneath her tight black suit-buttocks were much with him, tonight. He trotted after her, Takisian-unwilling to let a woman face danger.

When she was twenty meters from the nearer swarmling she flowed into a charge, at ten launched herself clear of the street with panache that made him gasp. She pirouetted in flight, snapped her right heel around behind her, pivoting, driving a perfect spinning back kick into the shoulder of the beast. There was a dry squelch, dropped-pumpkin sound. The thing gave back. Still spinning, Moonchild rebounded, touched lightly down, recovered into battle stance.

The monster's arm fell off. Dropped right out of its sleeve. She freaked.

All at once she was all over the street without even moving. Screaming, wailing, thrashing like a three-way catfight, sinking to the pavement all the while. Tachyon stared. But she made such a strong start, he thought plaintively.

For a moment the swarmlings seemed to stare at her too. Then as one they turned back to face Tachyon, the chemoreceptors that had alerted them to his nearness guiding them inexorably toward the hated, dreaded Takisian. An empty sleeve flapped grotesquely against the first one's side. Tach reached for its mind. It was like clutching fog. His thought passed ineffectually through the diffusion of electrochemical signals that made up the thing's mind. Unsurprised, he pulled out the snub-nosed Smith amp; Wesson, leaned into an isosceles stance, gun gripped bothhanded, sights lined up on the center of that unlovely mass, inhaled, held it, squeezed twice. The pistol produced a very satisfactory amount of flame and recoil and noise. No other results.

Shocked, he lowered the pistol. The beast was twenty meters away; he couldn't have missed. Then he saw the two small holes, right where they should have been, one on either side of the buttoned coat-front. Mental attacks weren't the only things that passed right through a swarmling.

"I'm in trouble," he announced. He aimed for the shadow beneath the hat-brim, fired twice more. The hat flew off. So did great chunks of the diseased-potato mass within that served the being as a head. It came on.

Moonchild had quit screaming and beating at herself, and sat with hands between knees, watching intently. "Bullets don't hurt them," she said, voice raw from screaming. "They-they're not human."

"Very observant." He fired off the last two, started backing away, groping in a pocket for a speed reloader, hoping he had one.'

"I thought I had mutilated a human being, a joker," she said. She was on her feet. She raced toward a building to Tach's right, crossing behind the lumbering swarmlings, launching herself again, this time on a trajectory Tach would have sworn would take her to the third floor of the structure. But he didn't see, because when she entered the building's shadow she vanished.

To reappear seconds later, feetfirst right through the middle of the second swarmling. Cloth tore, biomass gave, and the being just generally came apart as she hit pavement and rolled.

A moment and she was up again, sprinting forward, dropping low to support herself on one hand while her leg swept before her in a scything kick. The first swarmlings legs simply snapped out from beneath it at the knees. It landed on the stumps, plodded imperturbably on. Grimly, Moonchild closed.

Sirens were chasing each other up the sky when she finished. Tachyon applauded softly as she walked up to him. "I owe you an apology, lovely lady, for what I was thinking about you. "

She started to smooth back her hair, looked at her fingers, used her wrist instead. "You need never apologize to me, Doctor. You had reason to think as you did. But I must never use my arts to permanently harm a thinking being. And I thought I had."

He gathered her into his arms. She laid her head on his shoulder. Indeed, he thought. He was not sure how he was going to explain this to Mark…

She pushed herself away. "It won't do for me to be found here. Too many questions."

"But wait. Don't go-there's so much to say!"

"But no time to say it." She kissed him on the cheek. "Be careful, Father," she said, and once more disappeared.

"So you really did turn up swarmlings, Doctor," said Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe, taking a plastic-tipped black cigarillo out of her mouth. "You are definitely the most active expert witness I ever saw.

"

`Father,' he was thinking. An honorific, nothing more. "Sure did a number on those mothers," observed a patrolman who clutched a riot gun like a talisman.

"With a little help from his friends, Dr, Smith and Dr. Wesson," somebody else offered.

The street was full of flashing blue lights and uniforms and camera crews. "Guns don't do much against those Swarm fuckers," the first cop said.

"So how did you overcome these creatures, Doctor?" asked a reporter, thrusting the foam phallus of a mike under his nose. . "Mystic fighting arts."

"Get these jerks out of here," Arrupe said. To Tach's disappointment she wasn't pretty. She was stumpy and thicklegged, with a bulldog face and; tiff short hair, like Brenda's at the Pumpkin. She had dark freckles liberally smeared across her pug nose. But her eyes were sharp as glass shards.

"Well, Lieutenant," he said. "Will you let Doughboy go now?"

"You have got alleged swarmling stuff in the victim's lab, and you got a whole street full of unmistakable swarmling parts, except where they used to look like Godzilla's baby they now look like derelicts, which may or may not be an improvement. It's a hell of a state of affairs."

"You won't."

"I have a witness, Doctor."

"Burning Sky, woman, have you no compassion? Don't you care for justice?"

"Do you think I'm just of the boat from San Juan? This is a solid citizen, doesn't know Doughboy from the Pope, has no grudge against jokers, and he walks in and describes him personally. And don't tell me witnesses are unreliable. They are. But this one's solid."

Tach combed back his hair with clutching fingers. "Let me talk to . him." She rolled her eyes. "It's important. Something is happening, not just Doughboy. I know it."

"You have some kind of damned alien brujeria in mind." Lothario grin: "But of course."

She slumped. "You made yourself a hero with these swarmlings, Doctor. And you know more about this kind of thing than I do." Sidelong: "But you fuck me up with a civil liberty beef on this, 'rnanito, I'm just simply gonna shoot you."

As soon as he touched the mind, he knew.

He was a dentist, a short, athletic, ruddy man in his fifties who lived in the building next door to Warren's. He'd been out walking the dog around the block-a daring act at that time of the night-and seen a peculiar-looking man emerge from the alleyway that ran behind the apartments. The man stopped for a moment, not ten feet away, looked the intrepid dentist straight in the eye, and shambled off into the Park.

The story jibed with that of the other two witnesses, one of whom was the super of Warren's building, who had been investigating a broken-in back door when he was clubbed down from behind, the other a woman who had for reasons best known to herself been looking down into the alley from the apartments across. They had both glimpsed a large, pallid, manlike shape coming out the back door and lurching down the alley. But neither could offer anything but the most general description.

Tachyon had only to brush the dentist's mind to know his story was untrue. Not a lie; he believed it implicitly. Because it had been implanted.

Reluctantly, Tach dug deeper. The old pain of Blythe had receded, he no longer went clammy inside at the mere thought of using his mental powers; it wasn't that. The nature of the implant clearly revealed what sort of being had made it. All that remained was to uncover which individual from among a very few possibilities. He had a good idea.

In a way it didn't matter. The implications were already inescapable.

And monstrous beyond anything Tach had imagined.

"I mislike that place," grumbled Durg at'Morakh bo Zabb Vayawand-sa as they mounted the rickety back stair to their flat in a less than fashionable corner of the Village.

Rabdan sneered back over a gold shoulder-board. "How can you cavil? You never went inside."

"The Gatekeeper, the one with the strange dead face, he wouldn't let me."

"Ha! What would the Vayawand say, if they knew one of their precious Morakh sports permitted a groundling to say him nay? Truly, their sperm runs thin."

Durg flexed a hand that could powder granite. The tough white twill of his uniform sleeve parted at his biceps with a sound like a pistol shot. "Zabb brant Sabina sek Shaza sek Risala commands I fight only as needful to the mission," he grated. "Even as he commands me to serve one as unworthy as you, to test my devotion. But I warn you: some day your incompetence will lose you the master's pleasure. And on that day I pluck your limbs off, little man, and squash your head like a pimple."

Rabdan tried to laugh. It stumbled, so he tried again. "So hostile. Such a pity you could not have seen: a woman flayed, a maid dismayed; quite stylish entertainment. When the groundlings are destroyed some rare talents shall be lost, I must admit."

They came to the top landing and their door. Rabdan paused outside, furrowed his brow as his mind probed within.

It would not do to be ambushed by groundling burglars. Durg stood silently a few steps below. His kindred were of the Psi Lord class, but like most Morakh he was virtually mind-blind. If Rabdan detected danger, then he would fulfill his function.

Satisfied, Rabdan unlocked the door and stepped inside. Durg followed, closed it behind him. From the hallway to the bedrooms stepped a figure.

"Tisianne! But I searched-"

"You of all my cousin's people could never drive a probe I could not deflect," said Tachyon. "It bodes ill for us all that I find you here. Indeed, perhaps for all of Takis."

"But worst for you," Rabdan said. He stepped to one side. "burg, dismember him."

"Zabb's monster!" Tach hissed, despite himself.

"The little prince," Durg said. "This will be sweet."

A second figure appeared at Tachyon's side. "Doctor, who is this?" Moonchild asked, squinting a little in the bright light of the single lamp on the low table.

She saw a small man -even to her, unmistakably Takisian-with fine sharp features, metallic blond hair, pale eyes that bulged and rapidly blinked. The being lumbering across the threadbare carpet of the little living room she found harder to classify. He was short, barely above five feet, but terrifically muscled, literally almost as broad as tall. Yet his head was a Takisian elf-lord's, long and thin, austere of feature: beautiful. The contrast was jarring.

"My cousin's toady Rabdan," Tach said, "and his monster, Durg." For all that he had lived four decades among jokers Tach could scarcely stomach sight of the Morakh killer. This was not a near-Takisian Earther twisted into a grotesque misshape; this was the sight most abhorrent to Tach's people, a perversion of the Takisian form itself. Part of what made Morakh so terrible in war was the revulsion they instilled in their foes.

"He's a creature bred by a family hostile to mine. An organic killing machine, powerful as an elephant, trained to perfection." Durg had halted, perfect brow furrowed at this new arrival. "Even by our standards they're almost indestructible. Zabb took this one in a raid when he was a pup; he transferred his loyalty to him."

"Doctor, how can you speak of a human being that way?"

"He's not a human," he gritted, "and watch him." Squat as a troll, Durg lunged with a speed no human could match. But Moonchild wasn't strictly human; whatever she was, wherever she came from, she was an ace. She caught gold-braided sleeve behind the hand that grabbed for her, tugged, pivoted her hips. Durg shot past to slam into the wall in an explosion of plaster.

"How did you find us?" Rabdan asked, leaning against the doorjamb.

"Once we found that man whose mind you tampered with, I knew Takisians were still on Earth," Tach said, sidling away from Durg, "and from the ineptness of technique I deduced it could be none but you. Once we knew what to look for, you weren't that hard to trace. Your appearance is distinctive, and you would hardly cower in an abandoned warehouse and subsist off rats and stray cats like the swarmlings."

"Of course-" he nodded at Rabdan's white-and-gold outfit, "I never guessed even you'd be fool enough to venture out in Zabb's own livery."

"The groundlings find us the height of fashion. And would you have swans go about in the guise of geese?"

"When the swans' mission-" Durg came up from the depression he'd made in the plasterboard, moaning, shaking off plaster powder like water "-is to pass for geese, then yes."

Durg's hand lashed out in a vicious knifehand that caught Moonchild in the ribs and threw her into the bar that separated living room from kitchen. Wood splintered. Tach started forward with a cry. Grinning, Durg came for him.

Moonchild lunged from the wrecked bar, took two mincing steps forward, kicked Durg in the side of the knee. His leg buckled. She slammed a second kick into the side of his jaw. He groaned-his hand flashed up, caught her ankle, yanked her forward into reach of his other arm.

He grappled for a backbreaking hold. Tach started forward again. Rabdan's hand came out of his tunic with the flat black glint of an arrester. "Go for him and I'll finish you now, Tis."

Moonchild slammed an elbow down on top of Durg's head. Tach heard teeth slam together like a trap. She swung cupped palms viciously inward against his ears. He groaned, shook his head, and she writhed free.

… Durg was on his feet facing her. She kicked for his chest. He blocked without effort. She flew at him with bolas fury, kicking for head, knee, groin. He gave back several steps, then as she struck again leapt up and lashed out with both feet, kicking Moonchild across the room to smash against the outside wall.

Tachyon hesitated. He could attempt to seize Durg's mind, but that ran him up against the sole psionic ability the Morakh possessed, an all-but-insurmountable resistance to mental compulsion. While he concentrated on Durg, Rabdan would kill him… if he tried to fight down Rabdan's rather feeble screens, Durg would kill Moonchild. He reached for his pistol, hoping the girl would not think too harshly of him.

She stirred. Durg was shocked; when he kicked someone that hard, they stayed down. He hurled himself forward, heedless.

She met him halfway. Grabbing his tunic front she fell backward with her boot in his belly, projected him over her. The combined force of his leap and her thrust drove him like a rivet through the wall, four stories above the street.

"Oh, dear," she said, standing, " I hope I didn't hurt him." She ran to the hole. "He's still moving." She clambered out without hesitation.

Guessing she could take care of herself Tach let her go, still all aback. Durg was as strong as some powerhouse human aces. Moonchild, though she had metahuman strength, was nowhere his match-she had mastered him with skill alone, Durg the master slayer.

Rabdan came out of freeze and threw open the door. Tachyon's mind grabbed his like a mailed fist. And squeezed. And now, friend Rabdan," he remarked, "we are going to talk.

It was bad. Rabdan was an incompetent and more than something of a coward. Yet he was a Psi Lord, and at the last he behaved as one, the worse for him. No normal shield he might erect could keep the subtle Tisianne from prying the last crumb of information from his brain. But Rabdan in extremis went heroic, put the deathlock on, laid his name upon it. All that he was opposed Tachyon, and no subtlety, no artifice, no force, could get past such an opposition and leave anything of Rabdan intact.

Perhaps that was Rabdan's final cunning; knowing his distant cousin's softness of heart, he gambled that Tisianne would turn away from the awful finality of unraveling his mind skein by skein.

Rabdan's judgment was never the best.

Joy, joy, joy. My master comes again so soon. Or is something wrong, that he has so much time for me of a sudden?

Knock it off, Baby.

"Hi, Baby. What's happenin'?" She twinkled her lights in happy greeting and sphinctered open a lock in her side. The damned rock was headed for Earth, of course. Zabb's people had deflected it months ago. Not much; it would take tremendous amounts of power to change the moment of such a mass by any appreciable amount. A sliver of a degree, scarcely perceptible-but over time, enough.

It was a rock familiar to the groundlings, its reappearance unremarkable. Nonetheless Rabdan and Durg had been sent down to make sure its intended recipients didn't realize its itinerary had changed. What luck, then, when the alteration in course had been noted by the one man absolutely no one in authority would listen to-whose having claimed the rock for his own, as it were, would mean every other scientist on the planet would shun it like offal. The Takisians could have asked for nothing better to seal the planet's fate. No one would realize what was happening until the asteroid was so close its path was unmistakable. And that would be too late, not all the thermonuclear weapons in all the planet's stockpiles could forestall the wrath to come.

But their ally had panicked. Zab's ally. Much as he hated his cousin, Tachyon could barely bring himself to believe it. The vast lump of malignance which was the Swarm Mother had detected Hellcat as she floated in orbit around the world it intended, in its dim, insistent way, to make its own, and had attacked. And somehow, for his own mad reasons, once the attack was repulsed, the warhound of the Ilkazam had made alliance with the greatest enemy of his house-of all Takisians.

Together they had made a plan. Semisentient, the Mother had perceived only that the plan was detected when Dr. Warren made his announcement. It acted in haste leaving Rabdan something less than leisure to try to undo the damage it had wrought.

It had seemed fabulous fortune to spot on the Jokertown streets a being who might be mistaken for a swarmling. So Rabdan and Durg went up to Central Park and made themselves a witness. How can it fail? Rabdan had gloated to his comrade.

Tach had given Rabdan the final mercy no Takisian could deny another. Moonchild accepted that his heart gave out unexpectedly under mind probe, and Tach felt soiled at having lied to her. Tach took the pictures purloined from Warren's lab to Baby. Her astrogational analysis confirmed Rabdan's story. A hasty planning session, a night spent trying to sleep.

Now Trips and Tachyon were ready to launch a genuinely harebrained scheme to Save the World. There was no time to come up with a better one. It might already be too late.

And out there Zabb waited. Zabb. Who'd killed Tach's Kibr. And betrayed all Takis. In his warship: Zabb.

Jake was trucking down the street with his bottle of La Copita in its paper bag in hand. On the waterfront, in Jokertown, and him a nat, and it was no damned thing to do at this hour of the night, especially if you were this shitfaced. But Jake wasn't sure where he'd wandered since the big fuck with the head like an iguana threw him out of his bar for messing on the floor. A good thing he'd thought to carry a spare in his coat pocket.

A rumbling took his ear. He stopped and watched as the top came off a building right in front of him-not exploding, not collapsing, but coming off in a piece, neatly as you please, like the lid off a box. It set down gently on the roof next door, and then this gigantic seashell covered all over with tiny specks of light came floating up out of the building. Nary a sound was made. It hovered against the dull-orange sky while the roof floated back into place. Then it angled upward and was gone, lining out for the Long Black.

Very deliberately, Jake walked to the nearest storm drain, and with precise aim dropped his half-full La Copita bottle down it. Then he walked very rapidly out of Jokertown.

"I never thought of, like, flying a starship from your bedroom, man," Captain Trips said, clearly enchanted.

"I think your people would call this a stateroom, yes?" As a matter of fact, it looked like a cross between an Ottoman harem and Carlsbad Caverns. In the midst of it all was a huge canopied bed piled with fat cushions, and in a dressing gown in the midst of that lay Tach. He had long ago sworn to die in bed; Takisian biotechnology made it possible to achieve that goal and a heroic demise at the same time, if you were so inclined.

"There is no formal command center-bridge?-on a ship such as this. On most warships, such as my cousin's vessel Hellcat, there is, but on a yacht, no." He felt a sizzle of fury from Baby at the mention of Hellcat's name. They were rivals of long standing.

"A Takisian symbiont-ship is psionically controlled. The pilot can receive information directly, mentally, or visually. For example.. ." Tach gestured and an image of Earth sprang into being on a curve of membranous bulkhead next to the bed. A yellow line reached away from it, describing their orbit. Then like a computer animation the globe spun away, dwindled, until an out-of-scale image of their entire projected flight path from Earth to 1954C-1100 was displayed.

Trips applauded. "That's fantastic, man. Groovy."

"Yes, it is. You Earthers are attempting to create sentience in your computers; we have grown sophonts who are capable of performing computer functions. And much more."

"How does Baby feel about all this?"

The picture vanished. Words appeared: I am honored to convey lords such as Master Tis and yourself-though I'm afraid you may poke me with that hat, it's so tall.

Trips jumped. "I didn't know she could do that."

"Neither did I. She's stealing knowledge of written English from me with a very low-powered drain-which is mildly naughty. However, she knows I. am indulgent, and will forgive her."

Trips shook his head in amazement. He was sitting on a chair that had thrust itself from the floor for him and adjusted to his frame when Tach finally convinced him to sit on it. "Not that I don't have faith in Baby," he said, "but isn't your cousin's vessel, like, a warship?"

"Yes. And you don't have to ask the question you're hoping not to have to. Under normal circumstances Baby would have no chance against Hellcat-and don't go static in my head like that, Baby, or I'll spank you! It's true."

"But Baby is fast, even with her ghostdrive gone, none faster. And maneuverable. And, frankly, smarter than Hellcat. But the important factor is that Hellcat was badly injured by the Swarm attack. A Swarm Mother as ancient and vast as this one generally will have developed biological weapons antibodies, almost-against Takisians and their ghostships. We use similar weapons against them, since only a full war fleet can carry enough firepower to harm even a small one, whereas infection can spread of itself. Zabb fought off a boarding attack, with sword and pistol and bioweapons, and was able to drive off the swarmlings. But Hellcat was infected and damaged, and though they arrested the sickness she will be a long time healing."

Softly: "And Zabb felt each of her wounds as his own, whatever you may say of him." His eyes stung.

Mournfully Trips shook his head. "Talking about fighting bums me out, man."

"This must be hard for you, given your pacifist convictions. But your role in what lies ahead is not martial, and I'll fight only if attacked."

"But Moonchild fought. Most of the others would too. I've never fought in my life. I only hit one person, and he hauled off and busted my nose, and then one day I'm in, like, someone else's body while she throws some muscle-bound alien through a wall."

"It was a glorious spectacle," said Tach, chuckling despite himself.

"Being an ace is turning out to be a pretty heavy trip." Tisianne, I feel her! Hellcat comes.

Tach rumpled his hair and sighed. "I fear it's time, my friend." He swung his legs out of bed and rose. "I'll see you to the lock."

Luminance paced them down a curving corridor. "You're sure you-he-can find the rock?" Tachyon said.

"It's not like there're going to be many others in the vicinity, Doc."

The bitch is shaping interception orbit. Max weapons range in twenty minutes.

Head her off Baby.

They stopped by the inner sphincter of the crewlock. Tach and Trips embraced, both weeping, both trying not to show it. "Good luck, Mark."

"Same to you, Doc. Say, this whole ship is Baby, isn't it?"

"That's right."

Self-consciously, Trips leaned over and lightly kissed a brace whose form flowed like a stalagmite. "Bye, Baby. Peace."

"Good-bye, Captain. Godspeed."

Pandering to primitive superstitions, Tach chided as they withdrew politely around a bend.

Amusement. What will the new person be like, Tis?

I don't know. I'm eager to see. Another Moonchild was too much to hope for. Fortuitous enough that they had access to an ace with a combination of powers that gave them some small chance of success.

"Doctor?" The voice rolled around to them like liquid amber, deep and rich. Tachyon walked forward.

The visual impact stopped him in his tracks. Ace as Greek god: tall, elaborately muscled, a jaw like a bridge abutment, a clear green gaze, a nimbus of curly blond hair, all wrapped in a skintight yellow suit with a sunburst blazing on the chest. "I," the vision said, "am Starshine."

"The honor is entirely mine," Tach said reflexively. "Quite correct. You are a militarist, representative of a decadent and repressive civilization. I am about to attempt to avert a horror brought upon my world by your unbridled technology, while you engage in combat with another faction of the same technocratic gang that afflicted Earth with your satanic virus in the first place. Under the circumstances I find it difficult to wish you success, Doctor. Nonetheless, I do so." Tachyon's voice seemed to have vanished, and Baby was making little staticky phosphene pops in his head. "I'm so grateful," he managed at last.

"Yes." Starshine stroked his heroic jaw. "Perhaps I shall compose a poem, about the moral dilemma I face-"

"Hadn't you better go face the asteroid first?" Tach almost screamed.

Starshine scowled like Zeus caught by Hera, but he said, "I suppose so."

The lock dilated. "Farewell," Tach said. "Thank you." He stepped through.

As the outer lock cycled open, Baby transmitted the view from outside very square centimeter of her skin was photosensitive at need-to Tach's mind. Starshine floated out into vacuum, turned his face into the full glare of the sun, now more or less astern, and appeared to take a deep breath. Then he pushed off from the ship, arms and body straightened to a line, and he became a single brilliant yellow beam bisecting eternal night.

"Photon transformation," Tach said, impressed. "Like the tachyon transformation of our ghostdrive, but allowing only lightspeed. Incredible." For a moment he felt almost proud of the wild card.

He shook the sensation off. "I'm going to find it hard," he remarked, "to like that one."

He's sure a prick. I liked the Captain ever so much better.. Tis, they're coming.

Floating, timeless. Pure release, nonexistence/coexistence with all the universe. The final consummation: satori in a laser beam.

But duration must be. Resolution, downward to ego. To matter.

The asteroid awaited. An unlovely lumpish mass of slag, seeming to fall toward Starshine, though his line of sight ran perpendicular to its path.

He rubbed his jaw and frowned. He had a lot more to say to that alien doctor, about the evil his kind had brought the world, about his own culpability in luring that pathetic burnout Trips into wild dangers. But it would have to wait; time passed.

He wondered how much time he had. From the memories he shared with Mark and the rest, he knew the drug lasted an hour. He hoped he could do what had to be done in that time.

He held out a hand. A beam of light leapt from it to Tezcatlipoca's pockmarked surface, dazzling white-hot. A circle of rock raced the spectrum and boiled from the surface in a glowing jet.

He was fabulously strong. But all his strength would not divert the evil mass. Nor did he have the power to destroy the rock. What he could do was use his sunbeam to heat a spot on its flank, so that the stuff of the asteroid flared away like a rocket exhaust at right angles to its orbit. Even now, a million miles from Earth, a tiny deflection would make all the difference.

But even the tiniest deviation in the asteroid's course would require fantastic amounts of energy. And an unknown amount of time.

By increments Starshine increased his output. He felt alive, and huge, and full of power; he could not fail, here before the holy Sun's naked eye, with her energy to sustain him.

At stake was a planet, his planet, Earth, green and gravid.

And, incidentally, his own life, and that of Mark Meadows and the other entities whose existence was somehow locked in his.

At detection's instant Tach knew Hellcat's deadliest weapon was out. The coherent tachyns of her ghost lance would have strewn Baby's component atoms-and his-across a dozen dimensions in an attosecond if it still functioned, and with Baby's ghostdrive gland had also gone her tachyon sense, so they would have had no warning. But Tach gambled that the Swarm attack had disabled the tachyon beam. It would have been the Mother's most urgent target; the planetoid-beings feared the lance, even small ones such as Courser-class ships like Hellcat carried.

Zabb's ship was far from helpless, though. As Baby thrust on a course tangent to hers, crossing outsystem from the path Starshine had taken, a pulse of purple light flashed by to port. I was expecting that, Baby said smugly as she threw herself into an evasive dance, intricate as a minuet, which kept her crossing Hellcat's bows as the other vessel rounded on her.

Together they sent forth a probe, Tach directing Baby's greater raw psionic powei to scan the other craft. He sensed damage that brought bile to his throat, raw wounds with edges burned or withered gaping in Hellcat's flanks. She seeks our lives, he thought, but no faithful ship of Takis deserves the taint of swarmling contagion.

Before he could gain a sharper vision he was cut off by mental force like a guillotine blade. No matter; Baby had sensed enough to evaluate what capacity her rival still possessed. Still, he was surprised.

Spavined slut, consort of barges! Tach felt Hellcat's anger stab Baby like a spear. This jaundiced sun shall taste thee and thy weakling lord.

Brave talk, thou who cannot waddle fast enough to catch me!

Your mental powers have grown, cousin, he projected. A dry chuckle came into his mind. Adversity forces growth. You've come, Tisianne. I take it you found my emissaries on Earth?

Baby was reporting Hellcat's status: Tegument weakened in several sections; a lesion in her main drive organ… I have, thought Tach.

Rabdan was a fool. You've disposed of him? I perceive you have. And Durg? His death was clean, I trust.

He lives, cousin. With malice: He's transferred his loyalty to the groundling who bested him. Your former captive, Captain Trips.

White-hot anger spike: You lie! A moment. But no. Perhaps you begin to understand why I've taken the steps I have, then, Tis.

According to plan, Baby shaped a curving orbit on constant boost. Despite her best efforts Hellcat could not close the range. Her fire control had suffered as well; at this distance the overwhelming superiority of her firepower was cancelled by the more precise aim of Baby's single heavy laser-picking at her, forcing her to trade pursuit for evasion.

I understand you've betrayed our clan and our people, Tach thought.

It seems so, Tis. But consider: this virus you loosed on that hot, heavy world threatens our existence far more surely than the mindless Swarm.

The experiment was a success.

Therein lies the danger. These altered groundlings, these aces, aided you to escape against all our strength. Now you tell me a gangling weakling bested the deadliest bare-hand fighter Takis has produced. Do you not in this see the eclipse of our kind, Tisianne?

Perhaps the fall of the Psi Lords is overdue.

And you call me traitor. The thought felt more wearily amused than outraged.

You would've destroyed the entire species. Of course. They're groundlings.

Agony splashed Tach's brain like acid. He was thrown half out of bed as Baby's acceleration compensator slipped. Baby! Are you all right?

A grazing wound, Lord Tis. I'm fine. But there was a tentative note; she'd never been injured in battle before. He caressed her with a brief, healing mind-touch, drove fiercely at Zabb, So you made common cause with the filthy Swarm?

You've seen what they did to poor Hellcat. This Mother's encountered Takisians before, or shared plasm with another who had, and survived-which ought to tell you much, cousin mine. A pod seeded swarmlings in orbit on the far side of this adoptive world of yours, where they remained inert until we drifted in among them. Then they were upon us, with acid, quick-acting pathogens, and brute force.

We drove them off. Tach's mind filled with images stolen from Rabdan's, of battle in wavering light against amorphous beings whose touch might mean death by irreversible dissolution. Of swordblades glinting, and screams, and the most desperate defense of all, laser pistols flaring in the corridors while peristaltic spasms racked Hellcat's whole fabric. We lost four your old weapons-master among them. The next attack would have finished us. So I chose negotiation.

Violet eyes clenched shut. Sedjur.

After we repulsed the assault, Zabb continued, I managed to touch the swollen dimness that is the Mother's consciousness even as we tended our wounded and flushed the passageways with antibiotic emulsion, to impress on her that I wished to deal. She understood but vaguely; I believe she felt something akin to curiosity at my temerity, wanted to examine me at closer range. I traveled to her in a single lifeboat, passed within.

Baby was back in control of herself; her violent high-gee maneuvering no longer so much as rippled the surface of the brandy remaining in the goblet by the bed. Sweat stood out in cool domes on Tach's forehead. Despite himself he felt awe of his cousin-even admiration. To journey alone and unarmed into the colossal body of the Mother, ancient enemy, bogey of a million cradle stories-that took courage from the epic songs.

And this above all was why Zabb had done it, Tach knew: he had suffered humiliation at Tach's hands, he who had never known defeat. He had to perform some fabulous deed or have his significance, his virtu, drain from him like water from a broken vessel. And to a Takisian even treason was glorious, if grand enough in scale.

Inside a great cavern I stepped from my craft and stood upon the very substance of our oldest foe. The walls around seemed festooned with strands of black moss, illuminated by witchlights in half a hundred pallid covers; the stink was such my vision dimmed. But I made contact with a mind as huge and diffuse as a nebula. After a fashion, we communicated.

The monster and I alike had interest in destroying life on this Earth of yours. So we came to an accommodation. Bile bubbled into Tach's mouth in shocked reflex. We came to an accommodation. With what insouciance his cousin passed the thought, as if it did not at once describe the greatest treason and the greatest act of courage their kind had known. I honor you, Zabb. I must. If you win this day, they'll sing your song for a thousand generations. But… I despise you.

I'll try to bear up.

Tach shuddered in a breath. And you murdered Benafsaj. I had to do so. She would never have consented to taking action against you and your precious Earth, to say nothing of treating with the Swarm. To all appearances she died in the swarmling assault; Rabdan saw to it, you'll be pleased to know. A tear fell to the silk coverlet.

Zabb. I'm coming to kill you.

Perhaps you even can, so weakened is Hellcat. Or it may be I'll kill you. A weary chuckle. Either outcome is satisfactory, from my point of view.

Baby screamed.

Suddenly Tach was bouncing around the organiform opulence of his stateroom. He smelled hot silicone; his mind reverberated to his vessel's anguish.

Now, bitch, came Hellcat's thought, sizzling with hatred, thou cant flee no longer. A blue-white flare unfolded as Hellcat threw her drive into terminal triumphant overdrive, closing for the kill.

Baby, Baby! Her mind was white-noise terror and pain. Symbiont-ships had advantages over nonliving craft, could think for themselves, could heal themselves of damage. But they had wills of their own, and those could be broken.

Tach grabbed a projection, clung, spread his mind to encompass his tormented ship. Air rushed from a two-meter gash in her hull, tumbling her through space. Oh, Baby, get control of yourself!,

He felt the demon breath of a laser pass her by. Daddy, Daddy, I can't, I can't!

Light pulsed from the walls in random splashes of color. He summoned all his healing strength, all his love and empathy for his ship, poured his whole being on the terrified flames within her. I love you, Baby. But you must let me help you.

No!

Our lives lie at stake. A whole world's at stake. Slowly terror ebbed. The ship's wild gyration damped, and Tach felt her compensator TK field enfold him once again. He breathed once more.

Hellcat had shape now without magnification, a spiked darkness alive with tiny lights, riding a tidal wave of fire. Her triumph filled Tach's head as a laser spiked forth and one of Baby's sponsons evanesced in a flash. Scream for mercy, coward! Thou'll float forever friendless!

DAMN YOU! Baby's internal lights dimmed as she channeled all power to her laser. A scarlet spike impaled Hellcat just ahead of her drive. She shrieked-then again, louder, a tumult of agony that went on and on until Tach thought his brain would burst.

1954C-1100 was vomiting its own substance into space. For a moment Starshine almost wished he'd brought some sort of instrument, to measure his progress. Time was fast running out, and no sign of that treacherous alien technocrat returning. It would be good to know if his sacrifice was going to be in vain.

He firmly squelched the thought. He would at least die free of the subtle chains of technology. And the green Earth would live a while longer, until the land-rapers and technofreaks burned her out. But he would have done his part.

He began composing his final poem; a poignant piece, the more so since there were none to hear it above the asteroid's silent photonic scream but the other entities who made up the composite which was Captain Trips.

When he could think again: Baby, are you all right? We won! Lord Tis, I beat her!-An image of Hellcat, lightless and torn, tumbling away on a cometary path, away from the world her master had sought to devastate.

Zabb! Zabb, do you still live? No reply, and he wondered why his pulse quickened anxiously.

And then, I do. Damn you. Can you do nothing right? What of our people?

Three died when your shot blew the drive: Aliura, Zovar S'ang, that servant wench you were so fond of. All vanished in a gout of flame. Are you then proud, Tisianne?

He sat dead still, cold emptiness within. He had murdered his own kinsman, first Rabdan, then these others. And Talli, his playmate, who'd warned him of Zabb's intentions when he and Turtle and Trips were kidnapped. All for a good cause, of course. Yet could not Zabb claim the same? You've won. Take your vengeance, Tisianne.

Baby, match vectors with Hellcat. This must be quickly done.

But, Master… What?

Starshine-he's about to revert to Captain Trips. What are you waiting for? A rising note. Do you gloat, Tisianne? It isn't like you. Finish it.

Tach stared blankly at the membrane-wall ahead, where Baby formed an image of her stricken foe. His pride demanded consummation. And practicality: as long as Zabb lived, Tachyon was in mortal peril, and Earth besides.

Tis: when my mother cast that mongrel bitch who pupped you down the stairs, I watched. I stood by the balustrade and laughed. The way her head lolled on her neck

But Tachyon laughed. Enough. Save your venom for the Void, Zabb.

Shoot, then. Damn you, shoot.

No. Repair your ship if you can, limp back to Takis, fly to Network space and live as a renegade. Live in the knowledge that I've bested you again. That you betrayed your lineageand failed.

He threw up a wall against a surge of fury. Baby, find the Captain quickly! She sheered away, her own drives a yellow coma.

… destroy you, Tisianne, I swear… he sensed. Then Zabb was gone out of range, tumbling into the infinite hole of night.

The shine of his hands winked out. As they did, Starshine felt a sickness, a shifting of the very fabric of his being. At least I died in the Sun's embrace.

Three hundred seconds later Baby braked to match velocity with a form hanging apparently lifeless above a stillglowing crater in the asteroid's flank. Gently she reached out with her grappler field, caught up the purple-clad form with blood dried in rings about mouth and ears, the silk hat which followed it like a purple satellite, drew them within her. As her master bent weeping over his friend she set her prow toward the world which had become their home.

"Mark, Mark old man!" Dr. Tachyon exploded through the door of the Cosmic Pumpkin, arms full of bouquets and bottles of wine in paper bags.

Mark wheeled his chair in from the head shop. "Doc! It's, like, far out to see you. What's the occasion?" His face had an unnaturally ruddy cast where vacuum had burst capillaries beneath the skin, and until his eardrums healed he was hearing by a little bone-conduction unit taped to the mastoid process beside his left ear, but on the whole he didn't look too bad for what he'd survived.

"What's the occasion? What's the occasion? Doughboy is cleared of all charges, he comes home today. You're a herothat is, your friend the Captain is. And I, of course. There's a celebration at the Crystal Palace, and the drinks are on the house. "

"What about those bottles?"

"These?" A smile. "I might be having a private celebration of my own, after the festivities at Chrysalis's."

He stuck out a bouquet. "These are for you. Let me be the first to congratulate you, Mark."

Mark sniffed. "Uh, thanks, Doc."

"Shall we away? Why don't you slip into-you knowmore formal clothing?"

Mark glanced away. " I, uh, like, I think I better stay here. I got the store and Sprout to look after, and I'm not getting around too well."

"Nonsense. You must come. You've earned adulation, Mark. You. You're a hero."

His friend evaded his eye. "Brenda will be more than happy to look after the shop and Sprout for you."

"Not so fast, buster," said the woman behind the counter. "And I'm Susan."

Tach fixed her with a penetrant stare. After a moment she crumpled. "I, I guess I could."

"But this chair," Mark whined.

"Do you require assistance, Mistress Isis?" a voice asked from the rear of the store, deep and resonant like an alien gong. Durg at'Morakh bo-Isis Vayawand-sa emerged into the deli, a collector's-item Steppenwolf tee shirt stretched to near explosion across his giant chest. He was limping, his cheeks puffy and bruised, but otherwise little the worse for wear. "I can carry you wherever you wish to go, Mistress."

Mark's drunkard's flush deepened. " I wish you'd quit calling me that, man. My name's Mark."

Durg nodded.' "As you wish, Mistress. If you wish to conceal your name from the envy of your weaker fellows as you conceal your form, I shall use your nom de guerre when there are groundlings present."

"Jesus," Mark said. For his part Tach was annoyed that the Morakh had managed to learn that Moonchild's real name (whatever that meant) was Isis Moon, which was more than he knew. He was also more than slightly amused.

"Splendid," he said, shifting his grip on his burdens. "You run upstairs and change, and I'll meet you at the Palace."

"Where'll you be?"

"I've an appointment first." Durg picked Mark up, wheelchair and all, and carried him up the stairs.

Sara Morgenstern's face was flushed almost as deeply as Mark's, here in the late-afternoon gloom of Tach's office. "So you did it," she breathed.

He was aware of the scent ou her, sensed her excitement. He could barely contain his own. "It was simple," he lied. "Tell me. How was the crime committed?"

He told her, with a minimum of embellishment, since concupiscence enjoyed a higher priority even than inflating his ego. And when he finished he saw to his amazement that her eager expression had collapsed on itself like a fallen souffle. "Aliens? It was aliens?" She could barely force the words out; her disappointment beat at his frontal lobes like surf. "Why yes, new-stage swarmlings in league with my cousin Zabb. And that's an important part of this story you will write, the danger posed by this new manifestation by the Swarm. Because this means the Mother's not been content to go and leave this world in peace."

The bouquet he'd given her dropped to the floor. A dozen roses lay around her feet like trees flattened by an air-bursting bomb. "Andi," she sobbed, face distorted, shellacked with tears. Then she was gone, heels ticking heedlessly down the corridor.

As they receded Tach knelt, tenderly picked up a single blood-red bud. I will never understand these Earthers, he thought.

Tucking the flower into the buttonhole of his sky-blue coat, he stepped delicately over the other flowers, shut the door, locked it, and went out whistling to join the celebration.