Jokertown Shuffle

VI

I dreamed. I knew I dreamed, but I couldn't wake myself.

I could hear the Princess sobbing, echoing in my head. The eerie sound of her pain reverberated from the depths of the place I somehow knew was called the Catacombs, and I couldn't bear the sound of it. Even though I knew that this was the Pretender's domain, this time I had to go to her physically.

With the thought, I found myself-the tall, lithe, and muscular Outcast-standing at the yawning, broken archway to the Catacombs, deep under the Crystal Castle where jokers walked. A rapier hung at my wide leather belt; I was dressed in fine supple leather and wore a wide-brimmed hat of stiff black cloth. With one last glance back at the sunlit world, I took the torch guttering in the wall sconce and entered the cold, empty darkness.

There were stairs, leading always down. I could hear the brush of the leather pants against my legs and the weeping of the Princess. Her anguish drew me and led me through the labyrinthine stairwells, among the multitude of corridors leading away right and left. This was a maze, like the dusty tombs I'd followed in my imagination in role-playing games.

Yet this felt like no game in my mind. I was the Outcast, the Hidden One, and I followed the distress of my distant imprisoned love. I moved cautiously, as silently as possible, since I knew I couldn't risk being seen here by the Pretender or any of his companions. He couldn't know that I plotted against him. It was only because I could never shut out the voice of the Princess that I came here-because I had always loved her from afar and now she was in pain. Because we talked with our minds and she knew me.

It seemed hours later that I came at last to a deep landing. It was cold here. A chill foulness emanated from a crevice in the wall to my left, though the passageway led straight ahead. Still, some compulsion drew me to the crevice first. It was a thin jagged crack from floor to ceiling, too small for me to fit through easily. From it issued that strange coldness and a bitter stench. I was glad the Princess wasn't down there; I didn't know if I could have gone to her. I tried to see into that darkness. Beyond there were series of caverns. The torchlight glittered from frozen falls of crystals; shimmering stalactites and stalagmites formed columns leading into the unknown depths. For a moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of a large dark bird lurking there, a penguin who looked at me with human, amused eyes.

Then it was gone.

The Princess cried out again, and I turned from the opening. I followed her compelling sobs until I came to a thick oaken door banded with great steel straps. A small hole, stoutly barred, was set in it. I let the light of my torch fall inside and peered in.

She lay in a pile of filthy straw in one corner of the bare stone cell. her golden hair spread out around her. She was more beautiful than my memory of her when I would watch her walking outside.

"Princess," I called softly.

She turned, gasping at the sound of my voice. "Yes," I said. "I am the Outcast."

She rose to her feet. Her plain cotton dress was torn, her face, arms, and legs bruised with the Pretender's abuse, but she was still enchanting.

She limped to the door and gazed at my face in wonderment. "So handsome," she breathed, as if voicing her thoughts. "I've heard your voice in my mind…" She touched my face with soft warm fingers, wonderingly. The tears began again, bright crystalline spheres tracking down her cheeks. "Please. I want out of here, Outcast. I can't stand this anymore. Please."

Her pleading tore at me in my helplessness. "Princess, this door's too strong; I don't have the keys." I didn't know what to say to her or how to explain. I couldn't help her, not that way.

"I understand," she said, and I knew she did. "You will find a way. You will."

"I'll try. That I promise you. I give you my oath, because I love you."

From somewhere nearby there was the sound of bolts rasping and hinges groaning. We could hear rough male voices, laughing, and what sounded to me like the low grumbling of some monstrous toad. "Quickly," the Princess said. "Go now."

"I'll send someone to help you," I promised her, twining her fingers in mine one more time. "I have friends. They'll help me. I'll be back."

"I know. But now you must go." The Princess kissed my fingers.

I moved back into the dark maze of stairs, returning to the sunlight above. Long before I reached it, though, I heard her scream.

And the scream woke me.

It was Tachyon, crying in Kelly's voice in my head, over and over again.

Prime looked around the lobby, nodding faintly. Zelda stood behind Prime and my guards, her muscular forearms folded in front of her and the thought Fuck you if you're listening rattling through her head like a mantra.

"It's nice to have money, isn't it," Prime commented at last. "Wide-screen projection TV, expensive sound equipment, fine art, tapestries on the wall-you have quite the modern castle here. Very nice, Governor." Prime looked at me with a cold gaze and colder thoughts. "I suppose you know why I'm here," he said.

I did. I didn't like it either. "No is the answer," I told him. "But I suppose you're not going to just take that and leave."

Prime smiled slightly. He pulled one of the Chippendale chairs toward him and sat. Zelda moved alongside him.

"I didn't think so," I said. "But eighty percent of the take is out of the question."

If he was offended by my blatant theft of his thoughts, he didn't react-but then, Prime never reacts. He just crossed his legs, folded his hands on top of the immaculate and neatly creased pants, and shrugged. "My jumpers are doing most of the work in this little scheme," he said.

"The jumpers are the engine, yes," I admitted, "but it's jokers who are the body. Your little gang of juvenile delinquents doesn't like the drudge work of guarding the bodies and keeping the records straight so that we can pull off the blackmail. And you're making a lot of money from the jokers themselves, the ones who want new bodies. I expect you to give some of that back to us. Fifty-fifty was the deal. It was my idea, my setup, and my jokers administer it." I was getting angry. (I knew this was coming; Kafka had warned me that it would happen. "They'll get greedy," he'd said. "You just watch.")

"You can't do it without us, Governor."

"And you can't do it without me," I shouted back at him. "You're forgetting that I'm the Rox. Blaise and the rest of your hoodlums need this place."

Latham didn't say anything. But he thought a lot. I am going to do you a favor and not say this aloud. Don't threaten me, Governor, especially not with a weak argument like that.

Look at the facts. Fact: While you do make the Rox possible, we all know it's not a power you can turn on and off. Fact: The wall is as much for you as the jumpers, and the only way to get rid of it is to kill yourself, which you're not stupid enough to try. Fact: No one is starving here anymore because of the money your jump-the-rich scheme has brought in, which is good, but it also means that no one particularly wants to go back to the old way, which is what will happen if my people pull out of the deal. Fact: A lot of jokers want to keep this going because they want to buy a new body for themselves. Fact: You have a severe population problem. Our success is bringing more and more jokers here, and even with the money and rapture, you're already having problems finding places to put them.

And the last fact: If I pull out, you not only have lost the jump-the-rich scheme, you've lost your rapture connection. Tell me, Bloat, what would happen to the Rox if there was no rapture?

We don't need you at all, Governor. You had the idea; we're paying you for that. I have plenty of contacts to keep this going myself, and enough jokers in Jokertown who are hungry for a new body and willing to pay for it that I can pull in as much cash as I'd want. If I were you, I'd be happy with the twenty percent I'm offering. I'd be happy to get anything at all. After all, twenty percent will keep the Rox in food and rapture.

The fact is, Governor, that unless you have something else to bargain with, you have nothing to say about this at all. Latham smiled at me. "So, Governor," he said aloud, "what do you have to say?"

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I looked at Prime, at the grinning Zelda, and the quizzical glances of my guards. "Get out of here, Prime," I said. "Just get out and leave me alone."

He smiled. He smoothed the crease in his pants and languidly uncrossed his legs. " I thought so," he said. "Good doing business with you, Governor."

"Prime," I called as he and Zelda started to leave. He stopped and turned back to me. "I'll find something," I told him. "I'll find some leverage somewhere. Then we'll talk again. You understand?"

"Of course I understand," he said. "It's exactly what I would do, after all. You see, Governor, we're not so different, are we? We just have different agendas."

They'd had to move the Bosch painting since I seemed to be undergoing some new growth spurt. My body was pushing forward into the lobby. Kafka told me that I'd filled two more of the offices in back and that new floor struts needed to be added. I was hungry all the time too. The Rox's sewage system only took the edge off. The bloatblack that rolled off me was lighter in color and less solid, but stank worse.

I guess it was a corollary that the Wall was a quarter mile farther out into the bay now. It was stronger, too; I could push back almost anyone who didn't really want to be here. A nice power, if it were under my control, but it wasn't. The Wall just was, as always.

Too bad the Wall can't do anything to the people inside it.

Blaise was in the lobby, with his tagalong assassin, Durg. Tachyon's grandson didn't do much more than glance at the work in progress. Around the lobby and behind the Temptation, jokers were busily taking out walls and replacing them with enormous panes of glass. Already the lobby was brighter, and I could see more of the Rox. When the renovation was finished, when all around me there would be nothing but windows and my body was raised even higher, I'd be able to look out and see the entire panorama of the island and bay. I'd have transformed the building into the turreted, glittering Crystal Castle I'd seen in my dreams.

All it would take was money. Money we had plenty of now.

My body rumbled. Sphincters dilated, pulsed, and more bloatblack sloughed off down my stained sides. The blackers moved in to shovel away the waste. Blaise stared at them, refusing to show on his face the disgust that was in his mind, though Durg openly scowled. The hypocrisy was enough to make me laugh.

So I did.

"You and your stupid giggling," Blaise muttered, then more loudly: "Tell me, Governor, are you going to still be laughing when we start fighting over land on the Rox? 'Cause that's what's gonna happen, real soon. There ain't room here, Bloat. There's too many people coming out here now. Christ, you're going to want to move the fucking Statue of Liberty over here next. `Give us your twisted, your disfigured, your huddled masses yearning to be normal…' Damn it, be realistic. There's only so much room here, and we're full. No fucking vacancy."

Kafka was glaring at Blaise, but in his mind there was some grudging agreement. That was a first. Kafka nodded. "Governor, Blaise is at least partially right. I don't know that we can keep up with the demand on services. If we get too many immigrants, we won't be able to feed them, no matter how much money we have. We won't be able to clean up the garbage, won't be able to give them water and sewage and power. We'll have fights and arguments over space and facilities. It'll be worse than Jokertown. That's not what you want. Things are good here now"

"What do you want me to do, Kafka? Say to those who get past the wall, 'Sorry, you can't come in'? You want me to shoot them?"

"Sounds like a fucking good idea to me," Blaise said. Kafka snarled at him.

"Hey," Blaise retorted. "I'm not asking, I'm telling. There's no more room. You want rapture, you want money, then close the fucking borders. That's my feeling, that's Prime's feeling. So do it, huh? I don't care how, just keep the new jokers out, or maybe we'll stop playing ball with you at all. Then where you gonna be?" He challenged me with a stare. "Ain't that what Prime told you too?"

All the time Blaise was yapping, I was feeling something else. I don't know when I first noticed it not long after the argument began. I could sense an extension of myself, some psychic limb like the wall that was just beginning to bud and grow. I could feel this thing pushing, pushing against something hard and solid.

Inside… I don't know how to describe it… there was a sense of stretching, of growing… Like I was experiencing a dream at the same time I was talking to them.

I was so tired of feeling powerless, you see-with Tachyon, with the growing pains of the Rox, with what had happened during the cops' attack, with Blaise's goddamn superiority complex, with Prime's cold manipulations. I was so deadly tired of it.

Nobody was agreeing with me. They were all saying the same thing: There's no room anymore. We don't have the resources to waste on new people or new buildings. You gotta send some of 'em back. You gotta stop them from coming here.

And I kept thinking of my dreams, of what I wanted the Rox to be.

"Look, the Wall's the only immigration policy the Rox needs," I answered.

"Yeah, it sure fucking kept out the cops, didn't it?"

"Hey," I shouted back, "if one of your stupid jumpers hadn't barged in and wrecked things, yeah, the Wall would've kept them out."

"You're full of shit, Governor."

Durg, next to Blaise, suddenly became very alert. I knew he expected me to do something in response to Blaise's blatant rudeness.

But I was full. I was full of a vision. A vision of space, a dream of dark places and echoing rooms. The dreams inside me were stretching…

A deep rumble cut off our argument. Blaise was shouting; Kafka was chattering; they were all shouting, inside and out. I was scared myself.

The whole Administration Building was shaking. I heard glass breaking and saw the ramshackle buildings across the court swaying. A curtain of dust rippled across the courtyard, even though there was no wind. My feeling of extension hardened, became full.

Then it was over. The quiet was very loud.

I knew. I knew even as the tremors died and the plaster dust drifted down like snow from the ceilings, as Blaise and Kafka and the rest picked themselves off the floor.

"What was that?" Their thoughts were all confused and panicked. Blaise was thinking it was another attack.

I just looked at them calmly and told them what it was. "It was a dream."

They just looked at me. "Go to the west wing," I told them. "The basement. You'll see. Go on-all of you. Leave me alone. I'm tired and I'm hungry"

They stared at me. Blaise was thinking that I'd finally gone mad; Kafka was puzzling; Peanut was gazing at me trustingly.

"Go on," I told them again. "Then come back and tell me what you've seen."

They were gone for an hour. I followed them, riding with their minds. When they returned, they were quiet, all of them. Blaise was regarding me with a grudging wonder and a touch just a touch-of fear. God knows what Durg was thinking.

I gazed at the remembered images in their heads, chuckling now. They were gorgeous, my caves. Walls of fluted smooth stone rippling from vast ceilings to distant floors; glittering, snowy patches of calcite crystals; deep pits where water roared in the darkness; hidden places where beasts of dreams walked.

Another world. A joker's land. I laughed.

Tachyon's grandson had wrapped his thoughts so I could hear very little of them. Only the barest tinge of his emotions leaked out. He asked me-knowing the answer-if I'd seen the caverns through their minds.

I told him that I had.

Then he asked me the question he didn't really want to ask because he was afraid that he already knew the answer. "Did you make them?"

I was too exhausted for anything but honesty. "I think so, Blaise," I admitted. "I'm not sure, but I've dreamed of them. Still

… there's a lot more there than what I dreamed. I don't control it. I don't know what-all is down there."

Blaise gave a brief nod of his head, almost a salute. Confusion radiated from behind his mindshields. He turned and left the lobby without another word.

"You don't think big enough," the penguin had told me. Well, was this the right size?

"It's not possible," Kafka whispered. "I saw it, but it's not possible. Ellis is just old ship ballast. It's not even a real island."

"Then it's the perfect place for a fantasy, isn't it," I told him. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn't.

While Night's Black Agents to Their Preys Do Rouse by Walter Jon Williams