Jokertown Shuffle

IV

The little room under the eaves was a stupendous improvement over the basement cell. There was a narrow window, and she could watch the sun set. She had a cot and folding metal chair, and once a day her guards took her for a walk about the perimeter of the hospital building. The food was no better, but at least there was more of it. But unfortunately she was, for the most part, denied the things most necessary to a breeding female-milk, fresh green vegetables, fruit. But as the days and weeks passed, as she became rounder and rounder, she developed a grudging respect for Illyana even as the baby made her more and more ungainly.

"You are a tough little bitch, aren't you? Fed on next to nothing, and you still thrive. That's your Takisian bloodmakes you a fighter."

Tachyon was sitting on the chair gazing out the window at a truly lovely sunset, provided courtesy of Manhattan's smog. It was beastly hot up under the eaves. Tach lifted the skirt of her dress, opened her legs even wider than was necessary to accommodate the bulge of her belly, and farmed herself vigorously. And for the hundredth time she made herself-and the illusory wife she might someday possess, should fate and fortune smile and restore her to her rightful body-the promise that she would never force a woman to endure a pregnancy in the summer.

A small knot of jumpers emerged from the door four stories below and walked toward the trees. Tach leaned forward, more from force of habit than any real drive, and studied them. Fell back when there was no glint of copperred hair. Her body was not among them.

This complacency was a recent development. In the beginning, she had peered from the window. During her walks, she had cast about like a hunting hound seeking desperately for a glimpse of herself, but the Tachyon body remained stubbornly out of sight. Now it was hard to arouse that level of concern. Her focus had narrowed to the room, and more importantly to what was occurring within her borrowed body.

She was content to sit for hours listening to her heart beat, weaving her thought colors through the fabric and colors of the baby's thoughts, singing Takisian lullabies she had thought long forgotten.

The grate of the key in the lock brought her head around, a frown of puzzlement between the blond brows. One of her guards, his mouth slack, drool running down his chin, jerked zombielike into the room. Her body was behind him. The reaction ran like fire along her nerve endings. Tach came to her feet, stared hungrily at her own body.

The girl who wore her skin was dressed in tattered cutoffs. The shirt was the one Tachyon had been wearing at the time of the kidnapping-billowing sleeves, drawstring at the throat. It was open now, revealing a good deal of the chest with its whorls of copper hair. The bones of the clavicle were like stony ropes beneath the white skin, the legs stick thin. Stubble littered the pointed chin and the sunken cheeks.

The sound they both made was surprisingly similar. A tiny whimper of misery, divided by two octaves. Tachyon recovered first. Stretched out imploring hands.

"He raped me." The words were jarring in that husky baritone.

"No, he raped me." Furious, Tach gripped the jumper by the shoulders. "Return me. Put us back! I can handle him."

"I can't." "Won't:"

"Can't! I'm not a jumper. Can't ever be one now" Before that bit of miserable knowledge could fully penetrate, the guard let out a choking sound and fell to the floor like a broken puppet. For Tachyon, medical instinct took over. Jerking her eyes from her body, she knelt awkwardly beside the boy and checked his pulse.

Eyes shifting with lightning speed from the prone boy to Tachyon and back again, the body asked, "What's wrong with him? What did I do?"

"A mind-control can be a silken web or a steel trap. Yours was of the latter variety"

"Will he be okay?"

Tachyon looked up at her eerie doppelganger. "No. His mind has been shredded. Death is only a matter of time." The body gasped, a sharp little hiss of fear. " I had to see you. You've got to help me."

Tach gave a short bark of laughter. "Me? Help you? Isn't that rather presumptuous of you?"

"You've got me pregnant," said the body in a blinding non sequitur.

"Well, no. It's not something I managed all by myself… any more than I managed to get your body raped all by myself."

The body was staring in fascination at the curve of her belly. He advanced a few steps, and his eyes jerked up to meet Tach's.

"My head's making me crazy. I can't turn it off. I think things, and they happen."

Tears welled up in the lavender eyes. Tachyon writhed inwardly. How painful to watch yourself weep. And for a brief instant she acknowledged that there was more than one victim in this hellish scenario.

"What are you called, child?" she asked gently, feeling unimaginably old.

"Kelly."

Plans began to explode in Tachyon's mind. "Kelly, listen to me. Blaise is no match for my body. I can teach you how to control the power. You can mind-control him. Force him to return us."

She was pursuing Kelly around the room as he retreated before her, desperately shaking his head. With panic shortening his breath, Kelly said, "I can't. I can't. He hurts me="

The door slammed into the wall. They both cried out and whirled to face Blaise. And both fell back, for they knew the maddened rage that glittered in those dark eyes.

Blaise seized Kelly by the arm and threw him across the room. " I told you… you couldn't see him. Don't ever… disobey me again."

Kelly's teeth were chattering so hard, he couldn't speak. He shook his head frantically, the long red hair flying about his face.

Blaise turned with almost balletic grace to face his grandfather. Tachyon's heart was jumping in her throat. Blaise stepped inclose, cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. Suddenly his teeth clamped down on his lower lip, and hauling off, he backhanded her across the face. She was flung into the wall, pain exploding in her shoulder and head. With a moan, she slid down the wall. Black spots danced before her eyes. She could hear Blaise approaching. Ponderous footsteps.

A lighter, quicker step. The sounds of a struggle. "Stop it! Stop it!" the Tachyon voice shouting shrilly. Tach opened her eyes. Kelly was clinging to Blaise's shoulder, clawing at his face. All the gestures were oddly feminine, jarring to Tachyon. Blaise snarled, and gathering up Kelly's shirtfront, he proceeded to beat the crap out of the smaller man. Kelly's screams filled the room. He subsided into muffled sobbing, curled like a ball on the floor.

Blaise resumed his threatening advance. Tach watched the boy's foot draw back. She knew what was coming, and she managed to get her arms across her stomach before it happened. Her wrist took most of the kick, but even the residual force was enough to set her retching. Illyana's thoughts, pain, and fear were like the beating of wings in the confines of Tachyon's skull.

Blaise backed off, reached down, and hauled Kelly to his feet. They exited, leaving Tachyon with the dying guard. "I swear to you, by all that I am and ever shall be." The musical Takisian syllables rippled through the room and mingled hideously with the dying boy's moans. "By Blood and Line. You shall die. And by my hand."

Then and only then did Tachyon allow herself to faint.

The garret room had metamorphosed into a tower cell. Lancet windows, gray stone walls, a private prie-dieu-ironic considering she wasn't Christian-a curtained canopy bed… a romantic's vision of the Middle Ages.

And it irritated the shit out of her. This wasn't fantasy; this was deadly reality. And Tach was sick of the games. Her head seemed to be throbbing in time to her pulse, an outside pressure trying to warp and force the dream to fit his standards. Grimly, Tachyon fought back. What was achieved was a strange hermaphroditic compromise. Tachyon was male again, but pregnant.

Alien man gives birth to human child!

The ultimate tabloid headline, Tach thought, but then, we live in a tabloid nightmare. The wild card virus saw to that. We took order, peace, security… and gave them chaos.

Tachyon was braiding his-her hair. But it really was his-her hair. Metallic copper curls sliding between his-her fingers. Frowning, tip of the tongue peeking from between his-her lips, he-she concentrated, struggled. Suddenly other hands took over the chore. The deft pull, right over left over right, the tug to the scalp was heaven. Tachyon sighed and dropped his-her hands into his-her lap, cradling the curve of their pregnancy.

"You sent for me," said the Outcast. "Yes."

Tach shifted around to face him. The wide brim of his hat shadowed his eyes but could not match the darkness within those eyes. Tachyon took the Outcast's hand and laid the palm against his-her belly. "Feel her." And Tachyon gathered up his-her child's thought and thrust them into the mind of his-her courtly lover.

The Outcast reacted like a slaughterhouse steer seeing the fall of the hammer.

"She's going to die. I'm going to die… if you don't help us."

The man pulled his hand away as if the contact pained him. "I've tried… tried to help."

"Here?" Tach gestured. "Well, it's not enough. The time for dreams is over."

"It's difficult. He's very dangerous."

"I know…" Long pause, then Tach added with poisonous softness, "I'd wager… better than you."

The flush rode up in the Outcast's cheeks like a spill of blood. "How do you even know I can do anything?" There was a childish complaining note in the deep voice.

"I don't… and you'd probably like me to assume you're merely a symptom of incipient madness. That would let you off the hook. But you sent Peanut. He speaks of you with reverence. No, you exist. And now you have to find the courage to act."

The Outcast turned away. "There are so many… so many of them needing me-"

"And now there's one more," Tach interrupted. He-She touched her belly. "Her name is Illyana. I sing, and she thinks music back to me. She's a trickster because she knows there's one particular place where she kicks and I have to urinate. She knows it makes me mad, and it makes her giggle."

Tachyon could see the tension in her reluctant hero's back. The muscles in his neck formed corded rejection. "That's Illyana," Tachyon continued quietly. "And Blaise kicked me in the stomach. To him, she's just a parasite. A means to torture me. But I know better… she is my daughter… and I love her."

Tachyon rose. Made his ungainly way to the Outcast's side. Lightly touched the man on the back of the hand. "Don't let him kill her."

The man whirled, almost knocking Tach off his feet. "Would you kiss me?"

"What? Now?"

"Now… sometimes… always."

"Well… yes."

"You hesitated!" Accusation and suspicion made the words cut like blades.

"Of course. I don't know who you are. You don't know what I am."

"My love."

Tachyon covered his ears and spun awkwardly away. Fled until the width of the circular room lay between them. "Stop it, stop it, sTOP IT!" Panting breaths punctuated each word. "Why does no one know me? Am I always to be a symbol? The saint of Jokertown. The faggot from outer space. The Takisian. The drunkard, the prince, doctor, alien, lover, rival. And now your `love.' Well, dammit, why can't I just be." He was sobbing wildly.

The Outcast crossed the room in three long strides. Took Tach in his arms. Made soothing, shushing noises.

"A kiss," the Takisian murmured wearily as his sobs subsided. "Is that the price of freedom? Then you'll have it. I swear."

The dream was fading. Tach became aware of the sagging cot beneath her body, the pressure of an overfull bladder, the smell of the slops bucket, voices calling outside.

And fluttering through her consciousness like a fading memory, another voice. "You promised. Remember, you promised."

"Doctor. Doctor Tachyon, wake up."

Tach cranked up on an elbow. Pushed back her hair, tried to focus. "Peanut, by the Ideal…" The words died into silence as she stared at the joker protruding from the floor like a horny mushroom. Tach blinked and realized that the lower half of the man was beneath the level of a trapdoor-where there shouldn't be a trapdoor.

"Come quick. I'm gonna get you outta here."

The joker had a Coleman lantern hung over the stump of his arm. With his other hand he reached out to help her. As Peanut's chitinous fingers closed about her hand, Tachyon felt a thrill as great as if it had been the touch of a lover. Free, free-she was almost free.

"It's a long ladder. Can you make it?"

"Not easily," said Tach as her stomach rubbed at a rung. "But I'll manage," she concluded grimly.

"Can you close the trap?"

She stretched, grasped the edge, pulled. It fell with a dull thump. Peanut's terror was palpable in the confined space.

"Sorry," said Tach. "It was heavier than I thought."

"That's okay, but let's hurry"

They began climbing.

"Can you go a little faster?" Peanut asked after several minutes.

"No. I'm a little awkward right now. And a little scared," she added.

"Don't worry, Doctor. I won't let you fall. And anyway, you'd land on me."

"And then where would I be?" She smiled back and down over her shoulder. "You're my guide, Peanut."

At last they reached bottom, and Tach found herself in a cavern. Seven openings debouched into the vaultlike room. Tach pivoted slowly, staring in wonder at the colorful painted glyphs that rioted on the curving walls. Somewhat reminiscent of Mayan art, they also partook of Balinese temple paintings.

"Blood and Line, this is very strange," Tach murmured. "Pardon?" said Peanut politely.

"Nothing… hysteria… relief," Tach quickly added at the joker's look of alarm. "But this can't be real… can it?"

"It is. He's had me down here exploring them. They go all over. Weird places, but okay places too."_

Peanut headed toward one of the openings. Tach fell in step with him.

"Places like where?"

"New Jersey."

"Definitely a weird place," said Tach thoughtfully.

The tunnel had started to climb, and Tach knew damn good and well that they hadn't walked to New Jersey yet. She stopped, planting both feet heavily like a balky foal. Peanut looked back questioningly.

"Where are you taking me?" Suspicion sharpened her tone.

Peanut seemed to collapse in on himself. His thickened eyelids blinked rapidly several times. The effect was like watching a stone idol come to life, and Tach imagined that she could hear a sharp click as the hoary lids met and sprang apart.

"I gotta take you to him first. Then we'll go. He just wants to see you."

"Who? The Outcast?"

"The governor."

"Governor? What are you babbling about?"

Wounded dignity descended over the joker like rolling fog. "This is a joker place now. We take care of each other, and he takes care of us. We got laws now and everything."

"I'm sorry, Peanut," Tachyon said contritely. "It's probably a good thing you have a joker place. And I'm very fortunate. You're probably the only people in the world who would help me right now"

They resumed walking. "We're scared of Blaise, but not enough to stop caring for you."

"You didn't feel that way two years ago when I derailed Senator Hartmann's presidential campaign."

"The governor explained why you did that."

That stopped Tachyon in her tracks again. "He did?" she asked in a voice gone suddenly as wobbly as her knees. "Yeah. He wouldn't give us details. He just said that what you did probably saved us from even worse persu… persecution." Peanut faltered slightly over the unfamiliar word. "He says you do care for the jokers like nobody ever has."

Falling into step with the joker, Tach asked hesitantly, "Is… is the governor a joker?"

"Of course."

That stopped her yet again. It was an act of will to kick herself back into motion again. She steeled herself to pay the price of freedom.

A kiss. A joker.

"You promised… remember, you promised." A joker.

Faceted surfaces seized the light. Broke it into the primary colors of the spectrum. Threw it back in rainbow striations on the white sand floor of the cavern. Tach shook her head. Only on the world of her birth had she seen such gaudy extravagance. A jewel-encrusted door, the gems forming the pattern of a coat of arms.

"Your governor doesn't underrate his importance."

"We didn't build it. Honest. It just happens."

"How?"

"I don't know."

Enchanting ice, the faceted surfaces cool and sharp against the palm of her hand. One of the gems was loose. It formed the eye of an eagle, and beneath her probing fingers, it suddenly tumbled free like a bloody tear. Bewitching fire, as a ruby the size of a plum filled her hand. She couldn't resist. She pocketed the wealth.

"The ability to make dreams manifest… energy-to-matter transference," murmured Tach, trying to remove this latest wild card mutation from the realm of fantasy into the workaday reality that was science.

Scientific theories held little interest for Peanut. He threw back the elaborate bolt, the turned to Tachyon. "Wait here. I gotta make sure everybody's cleared out. The fewer people who know, the better."

Darkness fell around her like a storm as Peanut and the lantern passed through the doorway. And carried on its stygian wings was a stench that defied description. Tach, her stomach heaving, spun and staggered back a few steps from the door.

What could possibly live and produce such foulness? For over forty years she'd faced and physicked the worse the wild card had to offer. She could face this too. What she couldn't face was the blackness. Memories of her basement cell scurried like tormenting demons through her mind. Footfalls in the darkness, raucous laughter. Light struck her like a blow, and Tachyon screamed. Blaise was coming.

Peanut's hand across her mouth smothered the sound, yanked her back from the edge of madness.

"I'm sorry… I'm sorry" Her teeth chattered over each consonant like hail on a tin roof.

"Don't be afraid of the dark. We won't let anything getcha. Now come on, but you remember-because he won't, won't want to-you gotta hurry."

They were through the secret door, and her feet recoiled from a sticky resinous substance. The stench made her head reel, made her doubt the evidence of her eyes. That voluminous mass of stained white couldn't possibly be flesh? Could it?

Pipes thrust into the mass like air hoses into an inflating balloon. But this was not so benign. Dried blood flaked from the skin around the punctures like peeling paint, and Tach could see an angry red, the corona of infection, flaring from several of the crudely sewn incisions. And from the pores poured the source of the foulness-liquid shit oozing in perfect beadlike globules, running down the joker's side to join the mountains of waste. Ancestors help the poor creature, it was flesh, it did live. Stomach heaving like a bucking horse, Tach fought her revulsion and tried to see where in thIs mountain of protoplasm resided the mind, the soul.

"Get the doctor a handkerchief, Peanut," said a highpitched voice from high above her. "She's not accustomed to the smell of bloatblack." The boy hit the word bloat with the bitterness of a falling hammer.

Tach searched wildly for the source of the voice. Finally located it. Pygmylike, the head, neck, shoulders, and arms of a young man perched like a figurehead on the prow of a massive ship of flesh.

Was there anything in that round fat face reminiscent of her dream phantom suitor? Only the hair color. A nudge from Peanut startled her. He offered a handkerchief. It had been drenched in Lagerfeld. It had been Tachyon's favorite-

"After-shave, yes, I know," said the young man in chorus with her thoughts. "That's why I got it for you… for this moment."

The damp cloth formed a veil against the stink and Tachyon's horror. "Are you…" She couldn't form the rest of the words.

"The Outcast? Yeah. Now, I suppose, you see why." They were tuned. He was the first person she had read with her feeble telepathy. They had walked in dreams together. It was easy to slide into his mind. Past the lithe, tanned figure that was the Outcast, the soul's image of his true self. Past erotic visions of Kelly. A simulacrum of Tachyon-heroic, noble, suffering. Down to where the boy-child lived. Encased in fat, eating sewage, lying in shit, and dreaming of beauty. Quick blurred images flashed past-of Teddy, slow and always a little pudgy, but blessed with beautiful hands. Those hands sweeping across the page of a sketchbook. The smell of drying oil, the romantic quirky paintings that filled his room. They were lovely; they added something to a world that dismissed, discounted, and rejected Theodore Honorlaw. Monster/tired/screaming/hateself/mustlive/mustdie. Tachyon's spirit wept.

Teddy looked down at her. "You're crying on the inside for me."

"Yes."

"Why don't you cry on the outside?"

"I can't. I've lost the ability," Tach said simply. "When?"

"After the rape." They studied each other for a long moment. "Now you're weeping for me," Tach added softly. "Yeah… but only on the inside. Wouldn't do for the governor of the Rox to show weakness."

Again silence fell between them. Tach remembered Peanut's admonition. "Teddy, the longer I stay here, the greater the danger. Peanut and I-"

"Bloat, the name's Bloat. Teddy belongs to another world… and haven't you forgotten something?" Tachyon cringed, eyes flicking guiltily from side to side. "No, you haven't forgotten, you were just hoping I had. I disgust you, don't I?" Tach just shook her head. She wished she could lie. Knew she couldn't. He was in her mind again. She couldn't hide anything from him. His face puckered like a baby about to cry.

"We've all revolted you. For forty-five years you've been totally grossed-out every time you touched one of us, cared for one of us." His tone wound higher, fueled by his growing anger.

"I'm sorry…"

"I thought you loved me!" The enormous body was quivering, sending shocks through the walls and floor of the old building. Tach tottered, struggled to maintain her footing. Peanut was terrified.

"You're a fraud, Tachyon, a total fucking fraud!"

Her shame collapsed before a wave of indignation. "No-I helped create you-I'll bear that guilt. But I have worked and lived among you, given half my life to your care, your protection, your well-being. I do care for you. You are my wounded step-children, but how can you ask me to love you when you can't even love yourselves?"

Snorting, gasping sobs emerged from the boy atop his hideous throne. Unable to help, Tachyon listened to the sounds of woe come falling down the joker's sides like the rivers of bloatblack.

"Somebody's coming," said Peanut suddenly. Tachyon hadn't even noticed him moving to the door.

"Has to be Blaise. My jokers are all under strict orders."

"Ideal," murmured Tachyon, and felt her bowels go to water. The boy's face hardened. He scrubbed at his eyes. Tach dug to her core. Takisian pride would support her. It was all she had left. "This is your moment. Revenge yourself and all your fellows upon me. You have the power."

Bloat stared at her. Fury fell away. He sighed. "I can't do that to you. For months you've cried, and sung, and talked in my mind. You're beautiful… I can't hurt you. Climb up."

Tachyon needed no urging. Revulsion gave way to selfpreservation. She picked her way through the mounds of fecal waste, placed a foot on one of the pipes jabbed IV-like into the joker's body. Fingers pinching at the skin she hauled herself upward, and fell forward into the folds of flesh. She lifted a flap of skin. It was like handling a sack of wet sand, but sweat made it oily. She slipped beneath it, and pulled it up like a blanket. It was horrible.

The sound of the doors slamming open brought back memories. Tach chewed on a corner of the handkerchief. "How dare you bust in on me like this!" Bloat roared. "This is joker territory, jumpers only come when invited."

"Looking for someone," wailed a boy in a cracking adolescent's tone. The door slammed again. Tach sagged with relief.

She stood and made her way to the head, her feet sinking several inches with every step. His head reached only to her breast. She pushed his hair off his forehead. It was silky, freshly washed. She caught the thought in preparation for meeting you.

Their thoughts continued to dance and weave about and through one another.

"I wish you could come with me too," said Tach in answer to an unspoken question.

"Will you ever come back?" Pleading without ever having asked.

"I must."

"Oh, yeah, your body'll still be here."

"More than that. There's you, and I'll help you if I can." Tach hesitated. Bloat's dark eyes were pleading with her. He looked away, mumbled, "Blaise knows you're gone, they're hunting… you better go."

Setting her jaw, Tach drew in a hissing breath between her teeth. Took Bloat's face between her hands, bent in for the kiss. His flabby arms wrapped about her waist, drew her in close, and Tachyon began to shake. This had nothing to do with Takisian revulsion for the deformed. This was gutwrenching terror.

Blaise's teeth drawing blood from her lower lip in his own grotesque and evil version of a kiss. Almost choking her as he thrust his penis down her throat.

Tachyon whimpered as Bloat's hands closed tightly about her wrists.

He forced her hands from his face, pushed her away. "NO!" The word twisted and vibrated with his emotional agony. "I'm not going to hurt you. You'll never remember me as someone who hurt you."

"I promised!" cried Tach.

"And I want it! But not this way. Not when all you can remember is a rape! Peanut, help her down." The joker scurried up onto Bloat's back, put a hand beneath Tachyon's elbow. "Hurry"

It was harder going down. Eventually Tachyon just sat down and slid. Her dress and hands were stained with bloatblack.

She looked back up the wall of flesh. "No, Peanut, I've got to do it. I've got to go back. I can't leave him with my word broken."

"No, Doctor, we've gotta go. It'll hurt him worse if you get caught."

They stepped through the secret door. The last sound Tachyon heard was a boy weeping.

Eventually fear can kill you. It starts by sapping the will and turning the body into a shivering sickly husk. Tach had reached that state. Without the support of Peanut's arm, she could never have reached the chamber in which they now stood. In another lifetime she would have shrunk from that rough contact. But she had endured the sweating, stinking, flaccid mound that was Bloat, and she had felt his love and his despair. She had been assaulted by the physical beauty that was Blaise and known his hate.

"It doesn't matter," she whispered as she sank down on the glittering sand that formed the floor of the cavern chamber. "What, Doctor?"

She looked up at him. The sad, sad eyes, the chiseled wrinkles about that slit of a mouth.

"Peanut… you're a very handsome man."

"No, Doctor, I'm a joker." Bending, he held out his single hand to her. "You rested enough? Can you go on? That Blaise… he knows we're running."

The tinkling of falling water drew her attention. She looked and located the source. "Let me bathe my face and hands. That will help."

"Okay," said Peanut dubiously.

The water was icy cold, but it revived her like a slap. She looked down at her dress, gave a little mew of disgust, and pulled it over her head. Immersed it beneath the tiny waterfall that had first attracted her. The waters of the pool were soon fouled and darkened with the bloatblack. She put the dress back on, shivering at its clammy touch, but at last she was clean, and the stink was gone.

They kept walking. Tachyon slid a hand into Peanut's. He looked back and smiled. Striations of mica in the rock walls threw off a soft phosphorescent glow. Tachyon was no geologist, but she didn't think that mica could do that. Elaborate stalagmites and stalactites yearned for each other from the floors and ceilings of the caverns, their colors shell pink, sea green, amber.

"Peanut, Ellis Island isn't a real island," Tach said conversationally. They were passing another underground grotto, and on a whim Tach kicked a small pebble into the mirror-like water. The reflected stalagmites and stalactites bowed and swayed like stony dancers.

Forehead buckling with a frown that made the horny skin erupt like the earth in an earthquake, Peanut said, "But it's surrounded by water."

"That's not what I mean. It was made from landfill. There can't be caverns like this beneath its surface."

"But they're here," said Peanut with a blunt practicality that made Tachyon's intellectual maunderings seem inane. Tachyon nodded, shrugged, but only made it through part of the action because she saw the spider. The size of a coffee table, it was stalking deliberately through the caverns, its eight multijointed legs making a horrible creaking sound. A tiny mew of fear made it past her blocked throat.

Peanut followed her terrified gaze. Adding a cocky swing to his normally stiff, blundering walk, Peanut strolled over and ran his hand through the body of the arachnid. It broke apart like stirred oil, globules of ectoplasmic spider floating in all directions.

"Don't worry, it's not real. None of 'em are real. You see things down here. Monsters and people, and just plain things. I think this is the place where nightmares live."

"Whose?" asked Tach a little breathlessly.

"Maybe everybody's in the whole world. Maybe just ours-us on the Rox, I mean."

"Then my nightmares…"

"Oh, there're probably a few sneaking around," answered the joker.

It was an intriguing thought, and Tach searched for these fragments of self. There was a strange sense of deja vu when she finally spotted one because she so clearly recalled the dream that had given birth to this sad-faced phantom. Cody, lost, crying-so strange because Tachyon couldn't recall ever having seen Cody cry. Adding to the grotesquerie-the tears were slipping from beneath her eye patch but not from the normal healthy eye. She was in her green surgical scrubs, a giant bloodstain directly over the crotch.

"Don't let them hurt me. Keep him away from me. Don't let him hurt me again."

The phantom wasn't really speaking. The mouth moved, and Tachyon supplied the words. Rape dreams seemed to torment her. Her own, of course, but also Cody's. Was she safe, or had Blaise inflicted the most brutal assault and indignity upon her?

Peanut became alarmed at her rigid, white-hpped stare. "You want me to break it up, Doctor?"

"No, don't touch her. Let nothing touch her." Tach resumed her plodding trek for freedom.

Minutes passed, marked by the scuffle of their shoes in the white sand and the hiss of their puffing breath. Tachyon walked diagonally across the path in front of them. Tachyon froze and watched himself pass. The Tachyon phantasm was bigger than in reality. The expression was cruel, the knuckles of the artificial right hand stained with blood.

"I'm glad-" her voice was a low, ugly growl, "glad to know that I'm part of Blaise's nightmares. The Ideal knows he forms a prominent figure in mine."

Peanut rolled a wary eye at her. Shook his head, kept walking. Around a curve, a new apparition waited. A narrowhipped, broad-shouldered man of indeterminate years. Hair like silver gilt caught the ghostly light from the walls forming an effect like a nimbus about his head. He was dressed in a white and gold uniform that would have been in place at an Austro-Hungarian ball. The man was seated on an outcropping of rock, one booted foot drawn up, nursing a knee. He was very beautiful.

"Wow!" An expression of awe from Peanut. "Like an angel."

Tach laughed. It echoed back from the unseen cavern roof, a strange sound in these dim halls. An even stranger sound in the dim recesses of her burdened soul. Idly, she wondered when she had last laughed.

"Hardly. It's my wicked cousin Zabb. Zabb and several other of my relatives tried to meddle in your affairs back… oh, I guess it must be five years now"

"What'd he try to do?"

"Drop a very large asteroid on top of your pretty planet." The path was beginning to rise. Tach could feel the stress in the muscles of her calves. Her mood rose with the angle of the floor. Free-free-free-free-free, sang a jaunty little litany in her head.

"Who stopped him?"

"I did, ably and critically assisted by Cap'n Trips. Yes, that was certainly one of Zabb's more flamboyant and malicious gestures. On a more personal, less cosmic scale, he's just plotted and tried to kill me several times," Tach continued with great joviality. "I wish I had seen Zabb first. Then I would have known this was all a mind cheat." She answered Peanut's puzzled glance. "Zabb's either dead or several hundred light-years away. I know damn good and well he's not living in a tunnel under New Jersey."

"You've had such an interesting life," said Peanut wistfully. Tach saw Blaise slipping through the rock formations to their left. She shuddered, and increased her pace. "The Chinese curse. Don't long for it, Peanut. Embrace, caress, cherish the mundane-"

Hands closed around her hips just below the curve of her pregnancy, lifted her into the air. Tach screamed. "Going somewhere, Granddad?" crooned Blaise in her ear. Spittle wet her lobe, and his stubble rasped across her cheek. "But the fun's just begun. You can't leave until you've popped… and I've given you another one. You wouldn't cheat a father out of his firstborn, would you? It's not a very fucking Takisian thing to do." The words dripped with venom. Jumpers were emerging from the rocks and shadow. Poor Peanut was splayed on his stomach, held down by several young men. Blaise casually tossed Tachyon into the arms of one of his lieutenants. Sauntered over to where Peanut lay supine and shivering. Tachyon realized she was making a horrible little mewling sound in the back of her throat. She had never heard a sound like that out of a human or a Takisian before-only out of dying animals. She bit down on her cheek to still the shocking sound.

"Okay, Peanut, now you're going to tell me all about who put you up to this."

Before Blaise exercised his mind-control power, he always set and shot his jaw. Obviously Peanut knew the habit, knew what it signified. Peanut's fingers crawled across the sand, moving carefully, subtly, toward the boot of one of his captors and the large bowie knife that rested there. Peanut, NO! The mental scream echoed about the confines of her skull, and Tachyon felt Bloat stir, a huge stretched presence on the edge of her consciousness.

Peanut's hand closed about the knife, yanked it free. Twisting wildly, he managed to get the blade beneath his chin. He drove his head down, and blood gouted first from beneath his chin and then from his eye as the tip of the blade emerged through the socket like a moray eel nosing out from its rock cavern.

Grief raced through her, fused with Bloat's feelings of disgust and relief. Together they mourned for the dying joker. Blaise was quivering with fury, and his jumper minions stepped hurriedly away, trying to escape the parameters of his power, trying to blend with the rocks.

"Mother… fucker," spat Blaise, and rounded on his grandfather. "So you'll just have to tell me. Bloat was behind this, wasn't he?" The demand was shrill.

Tach shook her head. "No, only poor Peanut. While exploring the caverns, he found my basement cell. He brought me food, and eventually I convinced him to help me."

"I think you're lying. Peanut wasn't smart enough to cook this up."

"He didn't. I did. And as for lying-" ever so sweetly, she continued, "you can always read my mind and find out." It had the desired result. Blaise's face twisted with fury as he considered this void in his power. He could control, but he couldn't read. The secrets of the soul and mind were forever beyond him.

"The only advantage telepathy gives is that people don't know they've been fucked with. Well, I prefer for you to know I'm fucking with you."

It didn't take a genius to figure out what was coming. He would mind control her, and force her to talk. Tach broke free from Bloat. She needed all her concentration to marshal her feeble shields.

"I've put up the deathlock," Tach warned.

Blaise understood the significance. The deathlock was the ultimate Takisian mindshield. It could be broken, but only at the cost of the victim's life.

"You don't have shields. You're just a human now"

Was there hesitation in those purple-black eyes? This was high-stakes poker-very high stakes-lives and minds hung in the balance. Could she risk everything on a bluff? Tach considered that gargantuan lump of fat, supine and helpless in the Administration Building. Pictured Blaise with a gasoline can, pictured Teddy burning, dying.

"Try me," Tach invited.

Power lanced out, struck her shields, was repelled, and withdrew. And her shields crumbled like a sand castle at high tide. But Tachyon had won the bluff. Having been repelled, Blaise did not come back for another try.

Shoulders hunched, hands balled into fists, the teenager turned away. Suddenly spun back, fist lashing out in a punishing backhand. Only the support of her captor kept Tachyon upright as the blow landed hard on her temple.

Blaise was unlimbering his belt. "It's time you learned the price of disobedience, Granpere."

It was Tachyon's phrase. How many times had Blaise heard it? Resented it, hoarded it while waiting for this moment, savored it as he threw back the words like a challenge.

Then Tachyon forgot all about thinking as Blaise raped her again.

The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat