Marked Cards

WILD CARDS

EDITED BY

GEORGE R.R.

MARTIN

Book II of a New Cycle

MARKED CARDS

The Color of His Skin

by Stephen Leigh

Part 1

"Ms. Davis, I promise you that I take the concerns of the jokers very seriously. I will do whatever needs to be done."

Gregg Hartmann ushered the attractive and intense blond woman from his offices, sliding her out the door with a perfect blend of smile and frown. Yes, I understand the importance of what you've just shown me, his expression said. You've made the right decision. Really, you have ...

"Hold my calls, Jo Ann," he said to his secretary after the outer door closed. A soft, strangely inflected "Gotcha, boss" followed him as he closed the mahogany doors to his private office. The way she said it made him look back, but Jo Ann only smiled at him. Jo Ann was a minor joker, a woman whose only visible affliction was that her skin was as green and warty as a fairy tale witch's - and her tongue as sharp. Gregg had always had joker secretaries; it was expected of him.

Gregg sank into the leather caress of his chair and contemplated the cardboard box of transcripts, tapes, and photos Hannah Davis had given him. His right hand throbbed achingly, but when he looked down there was only the dead plastic mockery of the prosthetic resting on the chair's arm - a dead weight whose ironic, crude symbolism didn't escape him. The inner voice that had begun to nag him more and more over the last several months spoke again.

You took Tachyon's hand with Mackie Messer and Herne's hounds returned you a just revenge. Don't complain when you bear only a tithe of the pain you've caused over the years, Greggie. An eye for an eye ...

Shut up, he told the voice. Left-handed, he touched the speed dial on his phone system and punched in two numbers. He listened to the phone ringing and picked up the receiver as the line clicked open.

"Pan?" he said "Gregg Hartmann."

"Gregg, so good to hear from you." The voice on the other end sounded entirely normal. Gregg heard nothing in the soft accents he hadn't heard before, and Gregg knew Pan Rudo, or at least he once had. He'd known him very well indeed. "In fact, I've just learned that the new WHO funding sailed through the Senate untouched, thanks largely to the lobbying you've done on our behalf. Thank you."

"You're entirely welcome, and Jo Ann should have my invoice to you tomorrow, but that's not what I'm calling about. Pan ... well, I need to talk to you. In person. I'm also calling Brandon van Renssaeler...."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"She is truly a most persistent woman," Pan said.

The director of the World Health Organization placed the sheaf of transcripts back in the box on Gregg's desk and sat back in his chair, as elegant and composed as usual. Rudo shook his graying head slowly and let out a deep sigh, glancing at Brandon van Renssaeler, who sat silently next to him with his gaze directed on the shuttered windows behind Gregg, his jaw muscles bunched under his grim frown. Brandon had flushed brightly when he'd seen Lamia's transcript; since then, he'd said little.

"But then, fanatics often are persistent," Rudo continued. "I should have guessed that she'd come to you eventually, considering your reputation."

"I felt you both deserved a chance at private rebuttal before I did anything. Since we all know each other, and since you're both mentioned in the material, I thought I might as well talk to the two of you together. But I have to tell you, Pan, Brandon, this stuff here ..." Gregg frowned. "I'd hate to think there was any truth in it."

"There's none," Brandon grunted suddenly. "Not in what was said about me, anyway. Gregg, we've known each other a long, long time. I consider us friends as well as colleagues. Pan and I certainly know each other well, and I've done work for him through the firm, but to suggest that I had something to do with the assassination of Robert Kennedy ..." He shook his head. "My ... wife was never exactly a stable person, Gregg. You knew her then. You were at the damn party she talks about in this transcript, where I supposedly became involved with Ms. Monroe. Gregg, I really hope you're not planning to do anything about this."

"You're denying it, then."

"Yes," Brandon said emphatically. "All of it. And believe me, if I hear a word of it in the press or anywhere else, I will slap a lawsuit on this Hannah Davis and whoever is with her so fast ..." Brandon pressed his lips together. "We're both attorneys, Gregg. You can see as well as I can that all Davis has are the imaginings of a neurotic woman who probably blames me for the failure of our marriage. There's no photograph, Gregg. There never was one. I believe world-spanning conspiracies are best left to comic books and the tabloids. I understand why you feel you had to ask, and I appreciate that you called before doing anything Davis wanted you to do, but I resent the fact that I have to defend myself against anything so ludicrous, even to you." Brandon released a long, heavy exhalation after that. He ran fingers through perfectly clipped hair. He was so obviously angry that Gregg simply nodded and turned to Rudo.

"And you, Pan? I take it you're denying all this as well?"

Pan smiled, and Gregg once more felt the sense of frustrating interior blindness that had afflicted him for the last five and a half years, since that terrible night in Atlanta. Once, Gregg could have deciphered the emotional matrix behind that smile. Once, Gregg would have known exactly how Rudo was feeling, could have twisted and pulled on that emotion until Rudo writhed in his chair in fury or disgust. Rudo had been a puppet like a thousand others - not one Gregg had ever used much, but pliable and interesting in his own way, with odd quirks that made him ... tasty. But Puppetman had perished in the black chasm of Demise's gaze, and the power had gone with him. Like his lost hand, the vestigial remnants of the ability still ached, mockingly useless.

"Gregg, my friend, I would prefer to talk with you alone, if that's possible."

Brandon cast Rudo a sharp glance at that, and the two men locked gazes for a second. Once more, Gregg regretted the loss of his power. There was something going on here that he was missing, some unspoken communication between the two men. Like Rudo, Brandon had also been a puppet - and like Rudo, one not much used. He regretted that; it seemed he might have missed something.

"Fine with me," Brandon said. "I'm supposed to be at a Chamber meeting anyway. Gregg, is there anything else?"

Gregg shook his head. "No. I think you've told me all I need to know."

"Good." Brandon put his hand on Hannah's cardboard box. "Give this stuff back, Gregg. Give it back or just burn it and be done. That's the best advice I can give you, both as a professional and as a friend. Don't get involved in this insanity."

"I hear you, Brandon. Thanks for coming."

Brandon nodded to Gregg, then looked again at Pan before taking his coat from the rack and leaving the office. As the outer door closed behind the man, Rudo rose stiffly from his chair and went to the side window of Gregg's office.

Gregg had sent Jo Ann home at five. Brandon and Pan had arrived around seven, within minutes of each other. A few office lights in the old building across the alley gleamed outside Gregg's windows. Scant blocks away, hidden behind the brick flanks of Broadway and 44th, Jokertown was awakening, rising as the sun set. Now more than ever in its life, J-town was a place of night and shadow, a land where the only normality was abnormality.

And if what Hannah Davis had told Gregg was even partially true, then the person sitting before him was responsible for much of that. If it's true, then I wasted a glorious puppet ... And with that, the voice scolded: Be glad. It was that much less pain laid at your feet, and Hannah has given you a chance for atonement.

"Do I deny it?" Pan repeated. "Gregg, how long have we known each other?"

Gregg shrugged. "I don't know.... Ten, twelve years, I guess. Since you hooked up with WHO."

"Have I ever indicated to you a particular hatred of jokers in that time?"

A party at the Lindsays' ... there were several prominent jokers in the crowd, and you radiated such revulsion that Puppetman awoke. I never had the opportunity to use you that night, but Puppetman's hunger drove me out into the street afterward, seeking pain. I remember.... "No," Gregg told him. "Nothing overt, anyway. Nothing that stands out."

Pan nodded. "Then let me tell you the truth, Gregg. I hate the wild card virus. I loathe it. And there is an organization known as the Card Sharks."

"Oh my God ..." Gregg sucked in an voluntary breath. He blinked, startled by the unexpected, quick admission and not certain how to react to the vehemence in the man's voice. Yes! the voice inside him exulted. You've wanted to erase the horrors of Puppetman. You've wanted to make amends, and the way has been handed to you ... "Pan ... Pan, I - "

"I know," Pan said. "You asked me here because you were certain that it was poppycock, that I could dismiss this so-called evidence of Ms. Davis's with a shrug and a laugh, and you could forget about it and her. Well, as much as I hate to admit it, the woman has done all too good a job. How's the saying go? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This is a fine example of exactly that."

"Pan ..." Gregg had no words. He almost laughed in surprise and shock. "Brandon, too? Is that what you're saying?"

Rudo grimaced, waving a hand. "Brandon has done some legal work for us, work done under my own name, but he ... let's just say that he told you the truth as he knows it. Not everything Ms. Davis has surmised is true."

"Pan, do you realize what you're telling me? You leave me no choice but to call the authorities and go public with this."

Rudo looked out at the city. Gregg watched Rudo's wavering reflection in the glass, trying to see a demon and only seeing the image of a man. "Let me finish," Rudo said. "Ms. Davis has it half right, Gregg. We're not the hidden viper she imagines. In fact, I believe you would be sympathetic to our aims."

Rudo turned back into the room. His eyes were alight, his face serious. "I'm not going to give you the recruitment speech, Gregg. We both know that nothing about the wild card is simple. The issues are complex. There's no black or white, just endless shades of gray. That's where Ms. Davis has found her delusions. We can both agree that this alien virus is a scourge, a plague that is best eradicated. For every hundred it infects, it horribly slays most, curses nearly all that survive with disfigurement or worse, and leaves one person, one out of that entire hundred with a small gift in exchange. Hardly a fair trade, I would say. And that's without mentioning the social chaos that has resulted from the virus, the thousands upon thousands of secondary deaths from misunderstanding and prejudice and outright hatred. That's the legacy of the wild card, and I believe very strongly that anyone who doesn't despise the virus is truly insane."

Rudo stopped His hands, frozen in the midst of frantic motion, suddenly dropped to his side. He gave Gregg a self-deprecating smile. "I see that I've given you the speech anyway. Forgive me, it does spill out at odd moments. But let me add the second part, the part Ms. Davis has forgotten or has chosen not to see. I - we, the Sharks - hate the virus. Not the people infected with it: they're utterly blameless. They are sad, innocent victims. The Card Sharks - I must complement our dear Hannah. She's even ferreted out the pet name we once gave ourselves - do not exist to terrorize or kill jokers. We have pledged to end this modern plague by finding a cure: a treatment to halt the disease in those already infected, a vaccine to inoculate those who haven't yet been exposed. We are not a cabal; we are not terrorists. We are, very simply, a private research organization, funded by several wealthy and influential people who prefer that their efforts remain anonymous."

Rudo spread his hands wide, like a performer taking a bow, like the pope blessing the multitudes.

"Am I supposed to applaud now, Pan?" Gregg asked. "I can't. All this ..." He gestured at Hannah's box. "You can't erase everything with a few well-chosen words." You should know that more than anyone, Greggie.... "This Dr. Faneuil, infecting the jokers with AIDS - "

"We've made mistakes," Rudo said. "Kenya was a terrible one. I'll admit that freely. We'd manufactured a retrovirus, an infection that would rewrite DNA the way the Takisian virus does. We had hopes that it would reverse the process and bring an infected body back to its original form. We thought we were on the right trail; we were wrong."

"You experimented on jokers," Gregg said. Why do you sound so composed? Where's the heat? There's no rage, no fury in your voice. Here's someone dancing around to justify a horror. "It's not really my fault." The same thing you used to say .... "You used people as laboratory animals."

Rudo pressed his lips tightly together. "We experimented on jokers who were dying already, from drought and neglect, from horrible prejudice directed at them from their own people, and from the wild card. We did it in the hope of saving them, and if we'd been successful we would have been heroes. As it was ... the wild card infects no other animal besides us, Gregg. Once the lab tests were done, Dr. Faneuil had no other way to know."

Under the urging of his inner voice, Gregg started to protest, but Rudo shook his head once more. "Let me bring us to the bottom line. Gregg, my good friend, the Card Sharks had nothing to do with the incident that precipitated all this and brought Hannah Davis into the picture in the first place - the tragic fire at the church. You're a lawyer: I will wager that there is not one shred of hard evidence in your box pointing to that, not one. I've spoken with Ms. Davis and she admitted that to me. Nor have we ever threatened Ms. Davis's life or attempted to silence her, as she claims. For an organization that's supposed to be as huge and powerful as she's contending, it would seem that we're remarkably inefficient at carrying out death threats. Brandon already gave you his answer to the assassination of Robert Kennedy; I'll tell you that we also had nothing to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. We never tried to burn down Jokertown; we never sabotaged the X-11A space program, we weren't part of the witch hunts of the fifties. Gregg, the woman's prime piece of evidence is a talking hat. I'm afraid that Hannah Davis is paranoid and delusional. A very intelligent and a very attractive woman, but unfortunately mentally unbalanced - and that's a diagnosis I can give you from my own field of expertise, as you know."

Again, the faint, uneasy smile. Rudo seemed to be trying to gauge Gregg in some way; Gregg remained silent. Shout! Get angry! Point out the inconsistencies! the inner voice railed, but Gregg ignored it.

Fascinating. All the time this was festering inside Pan and I didn't know -

"Still," Rudo continued, sitting once more, "if the contents of that box were to become public knowledge, we would find it embarrassing and costly. We'd rather that didn't happen. Gregg, you're known as a friend of the jokers. I appreciate that. I admire your dedication, the way you've sacrificed your own ambitions for a higher ideal. I also know that fate hasn't been kind to you. This office - it's expensive enough, but not exactly upscale. You've had to sell property and assets you once owned to stay solvent. You're in your mid-fifties, you have no hope of recovering your political career, and frankly, in a country that elected the Barnett/Zappa ticket, your views are hardly popular anyway. How does this sound? I would like to hire you as a consultant for our research facility. Name your own salary, whatever you need. Write your own job description, as well. Maybe you're right. We've kept our work secret because we wanted to leapfrog over the tangles of legislation and regulations, because we wanted to move as fast as possible, and Gregg, I will tell you that we are closer than we have ever dreamed. A few more puzzle pieces ... Maybe with your help and contacts, we can bring our work to completion - in the mainstream."

"You're offering me a bribe, Pan."

"Bribe is an ugly word. I am offering you compensation for decades of effort. I'm offering you a chance to continue your good work. I am offering you a chance at redemption for the unfortunate failures in your life."

Redemption ... "And if I say no? If I tell you that the implications of the Davis material disgust me and I can't in good conscience condone it by silence?" Because you don't believe this artful deceit. You don't believe it at all. You can look at him and see that's he's lying, Greggie....

Rudo did smile now. He chuckled - a cultured, controlled amusement. His long, delicate fingers steepled under his chin. "Am I supposed to threaten you, to say 'then we will be forced to eliminate you?' Gregg ..."

The laugh came again, then Rudo's face fell into serious lines as he leaned forward. "If you say no, I walk out of your office believing you have the sense to look at your 'evidence' and realize that you have nothing actionable beyond a few tall tales and the musings of a deranged woman. And if you still go public with this, then - " Rudo smiled again. "Then I contact Brandon and my other lawyers. There, that is a threat worse than death."

Rudo laughed once more, and Gregg found it hard not to smile in response. Gregg drew Hannah's box to him and glanced at the contents. He's lying.... "Pan, I don't know. This 'research organization' of yours.... You're operating totally outside the legal system. A cure for the wild card virus would be a wonderful thing - a damn miracle, in fact - but this.... She didn't sound deranged to me."

"They rarely do, at first. Think about it, Gregg. Mull it over. Check out this Davis woman and her conspiracy theory. If you'd like, I can arrange for you to meet with Ms. Monroe - she's still in town. I invite you to ask her version of what happened the other night. Ms. Davis's tale is so compelling because it is an artful blend of truth and delusion, fact and fiction. If you decide that there's anything evil about me, well, do what you need to do."

"That's exactly my intention."

"Good." Rudo uncrossed his legs and stood. He strode quickly across the room to the office door and paused, his hand on the brass handle. "Thank you for calling me first, Gregg. I appreciate that. And keep my offer in mind," he said. "Tell me what you need, and we will get it for you."

No! You can't just let him go like that! But Gregg found himself nodding. Rudo gave a short inclination of his head in return, and left.

... A chance at redemption ...

So what are you going to do? What are you going to do?

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He still prowled Jokertown - not as Puppetman, no longer looking to feed on rage and fury and hatred, but searching for more mundane, more human solace.

So poor Gregg Hartmann can't get it up with normal women anymore. So you only really get off on jokers. Why should you be surprised? That's your penance, too, Greggie....

She called him "Jack," though Gregg knew that she must have recognized him - one-handed ex-senators whose faces were occasionally plastered all over the various media weren't exactly plentiful. Over the last year he'd picked up this same woman a half dozen times. Her real name Gregg neither knew nor cared to know. On the J-Town streets she was known as Ichor-bod. Her pores oozed a translucent jelly that coated her like a second skin. Her short dark hair was perpetually slicked down like a twenties movie star, and her clothing - what little she generally wore - was stained as if it'd been dipped in Vaseline. If one could have turned off the internal tap, she might have been pretty; as it was, her features were obscured and smeared with gelatinous perspiration.

She reclined on the bed naked, her legs sprawled carelessly apart, the glistening effluvium of her skin already staining the cheap sheets, the triangle of pubic hair matted with it. She watched him undress with an expression of bored impatience. "What's the problem, Jack?" she asked, her gaze low. "Oh, that's right, I remember. Jack likes it hot. He likes it hot and slick and wet."

She crawled across the bed toward him. Kneeling, she kissed him from navel to nipple, leaving a glistening trail across his abdomen as he gasped. Her hand caressed him. Where she kissed, where she touched, wherever the strange substance from her body came into contact with his skin, there was a tingling, growing heat - another attribute of Ichor-bod. She cupped his scrotum in her other hand, and the sudden warmth seared upward in his groin, just on the edge of pain. Her breasts were twin fires on his belly.

Gregg closed his eyes, moaning.

... Peanut moaning as Puppetman pumped his libido and lust to unnatural levels, as the unbidden, frightening erection split open his scaly, inelastic skin, melding glorious pain with the pleasure....

... Mackie Messer, gleefully dissecting the living Kahina before the horrified eyes of Chrysalis and Digger Downs as Gregg leaned against the wall outside the room and gorged at the feast....

... Ellen tumbling down the flight of stairs, and Puppetman reveling in the death-throes of the child dying inside her womb - the child possessed by Gimli (and it was Gimli, no matter what the bastard Tachyon said)....

"Yes, now that's more like it," Ichor-bod crooned below him. Gregg felt her slip a condom over his length, and he suddenly pushed her down, falling heavily on top of her as his hips lunged forward helplessly.

Afterward, he took a long shower.

Gregg could feel her watching as he dressed, as he settled the Leo Barnett mask over his face. Somehow it felt right to wear the face of the man who now held the position Gregg had once coveted. If Ichor-bod noticed the irony, she said nothing. "Here's another fifty," Gregg said, dropping the bill on the nightstand. "A tip."

Ichor-bod shrugged on the bed. "Whassa matter, Jack? Feeling especially guilty about humpin' a poor joker tonight?"

Gregg didn't answer. He left her room without another word - he'd learned long ago that whores didn't expect good-byes. On the way down the stairs of the apartment building, he slipped on the gloves with the sewn-on extra fingers: just another joker in the night.

Just another victim.

"Senator!"

Gregg jumped, his heart pounding. The voice came from the alley between the buildings. A shape moved there: a massive, cloaked form. The steel mesh of a fencing mask glimmered in the light of the street lamp. Gregg slowly relaxed. "Oddity. How did you - "

"Someone needs to talk to you." Oddity beckoned back into the shadows. The slurred voice sounded like Patti's, Gregg's favorite of the menage de'trois trapped inside the powerful, misshapen body. Oddity groaned as shapes moved under the cloak. Gregg remembered Oddity's eternal agony of transformation, too. That pain had fed Puppetman all too well.

"Patti, I - "

Oddity stared at him. "I hate that mask, Senator, on you of all people. You shouldn't mock yourself that way. Please, Senator. This really is important."

"All right." Gregg followed the joker into the alleyway. Oddity too had been a puppet, one of the jokers close to him during his years of power. Oddity's great strength and loyalty had aided him numerous times. He told himself there was no reason to be apprehensive, not with Oddity.

"You went immediately to the goddamn enemy."

Gregg peered through Leo Barnett's eye holes into the shadows of the alley. A woman stepped out from under a fire escape, shaking blond hair from under a paisley cap. She was dressed like the night: black jeans, a black sweatshirt on the front of which was lettered in red: THE ROX DIDN'T DIE.

"Ms. Davis ..." Under the mask, Gregg's mouth had dropped open. She knows. How ...? Then it struck him: Jo Ann. She's a member of Father Squid's church. A bug ... The other voice, the one he hated, spoke as well: Hey, Greggie, no reason for you to get pissed. The woman's right - you're a slime.

Hannah stood in front of him like a sullen Valkyrie, hands folded under her breasts. She didn't look like she'd slept much in the two days since he'd last seen her. There were dark circles of fatigue under her eyes; her face was drawn and pale. She seemed dangerous, nervous, and there was the unmistakable bulge of a handgun at her right hip. Gregg felt the first beginnings of panic. "Pan Rudo and Brandon van Renssaeler visited you not four hours after I left. Did I make another mistake?" she asked him, cutting off his halting protest.

Tell her, Greggie. Tell her how you're about the worst choice she could have made....

"Have you decided to take Rudo's bribe?" Hannah continued, raging. She came up close to him, though she was very careful not to touch him. The scent of her shampoo wafted around him, contrasting strangely with her fury. "How much, Senator? How much are you charging for your 'consultation'?"

The worst thing is that you know that she's right. You're scared. You're scared of Rudo and the Sharks, and scared because you know Hannah's right. Gregg Hartmann doesn't have the balls to atone for his sins, to do what needs to be done. Not any more....

"Just shut up," he told the voice.

She blinked at him. "Shut up? Shut up?" Hannah backed away a step, giving a mocking laugh of disbelief. "We came to you for help, Senator. I need to know if you've already betrayed us."

Not yet. But you've been thinking about it....

"I don't have to listen to this," Gregg said. He started to turn, but Oddity's hand was on his shoulder. He looked up into the mismatched eyes hidden behind the fencing mask.

"I think you do need to listen, Senator," Patti said, and though her voice was gentle, there was steel in her grip.

"Patti, I don't know how you three got involved in this, but you know me."

"Yes, we do, Senator, and I'm sorry," she said. "We're involved because Father Squid asked me for help. We're protecting Hannah - Quasiman isn't exactly reliable right now."

"She's got a damn gun for protection."

"She's also had people shooting at her. She needs all the help she can get. She needs you." Oddity groaned again, and the hand clenching his shoulder tightened briefly. When Gregg looked at it, the fingers were no longer Patti's, but a black male's. "I've been telling Hannah that she's wrong, that you were just being careful. Evan's told her the same thing, and John's a lawyer - he says you were obliged to talk to the other party. But Hannah - "

Gregg looked back at Hannah, standing with arms crossed as she glared at him. Tell her how after Rudo left, you sat there staring at the box like it was going to bite you, how you kept trying to believe all that crap Rudo fed you.

"John's right," Gregg said to both of them, clutching at the proffered excuse. "You can't expect me to go public with what you gave me without first talking to Rudo. Since you've obviously bugged my office, you also know that I told him what he did was wrong."

Hannah sniffed. Her sneakers scuffed at the dirty pavement. In her eyes, he found only scorn, as if she were contemplating a turd on a tablecloth. "I'm so damned impressed. He told you that he'd been directly responsible for infecting hundreds of jokers with AIDS, and you gave him a tongue-lashing. My, my. I'll bet you'll turn him over your knee if he kills Father Squid or me. Maybe even send him to his room without supper."

She started to turn away from him. Once I could have broken you like a stick, you bitch.... Gregg reached for her. "Listen ..."

Hannah whirled around and slapped his hand aside contemptuously. Reflexively, Gregg raised his hand to strike back. Hannah pushed him and Gregg stumbled, staggering backward. His head slammed into wet, soiled brick. For a moment his vision blurred as interior fireworks splattered and burst against his eyelids.

She looked down at him, sagging against the filthy wall. "I should have known better," she said. "You're a fat, old, powerless man living on memories."

Anger filled him with that, a searing denial that rose from deep inside him. His head roared drowning out the voices and the pain, and the blood-red tsunami battered against unseen, five-year-old walls in his mind, foaming and tearing. A fat, old, powerless man ...

From beneath the fury, something rose. Gregg almost felt dizzy with the presence. He stood, drawing in a deep breath and confronting Hannah's ridicule with sudden honed steel in his voice. He pulled off the Barnett mask and threw it to the ground.

"I won't let you insult me that way," he said. And the words burned. They nearly lit the darkness. "Not after all I've done for the jokers. Over the years, I've nearly died for the wild card: in Syria at the hands of the Nur, in Berlin to terrorist kidnappers, in Atlanta to a crazed joker, during the invasion of the Rox to Herne. Everything I've done has been in the best interests of those infected by this damned virus. You have no right to question my intentions or my methods."

Yes! Gregg's voice had gone resonant and deep, the way he'd sounded when Puppetman filled his speeches with conviction. He felt young, powerful. The words flamed, and Hannah looked suddenly uncertain. Gregg pulled the glove from his right hand and held up the prosthesis in front of her face, turning it so she could not escape the vision. "You want to compare scars, Hannah? Here's one of mine."

Oddity growled wordlessly in the background. Hannah stared at him wide-eyed, as if seeing Gregg for the first time. For a long second, she held his unmasked gaze, then the resistance in her collapsed. "I - " she began, and stopped. She paced to the back of the alley like a caged beast, one hand beating against her thigh. Gregg saw the back of her sweatshirt: IT JUST FADED AWAY.

Gregg wanted to shout, to scream in delight. It was torture to simply stand there. Under his shoes, molded plastic crackled like dry fire.

My God, I thought it was lost and dead, but I've found it again! The power ... And in response: Don't you see, Greggie? It's been returned to you as a gift, a tool to allow you to atone for your sins, a way for you to make up for all the pain and misery you've caused. A gift...

Gregg marveled.

When Hannah came back to him, the bristly defiance was gone from her voice. "Senator ... I ... well, I guess the only thing to say is, I'm sorry." Her hands fluttered up from her sides, fell again.

The apology was so sweet it almost made him grin. Instead, he simply nodded. "I understand. You've been under an enormous amount of pressure. Your apology's accepted, of course. And please, can we drop the formality, since we're on the same side here? I'm Gregg."

"Gregg." She glanced quickly away from him, biting her lower lip. "Umm, did I just make a total ass of myself?"

"No. You just reminded me again how important all this is." Gregg allowed himself a small smile. He tried to project some of his newly returned ability into the gesture, feeling - tasting - her passion. He touched her shoulder with his left hand, wanting to take her as he used to take puppets, to make the full psychic connection.

He felt nothing. He couldn't do it.

The charisma, the conviction was back in his voice, but this was not Puppetman. Gregg couldn't find the strings of her emotions, couldn't follow them back to their sources and make her dance the old dance. He could only tug gently at her feelings, not shape them completely. Hannah wanted so badly to believe him; that was the only thing that had made it possible.

Still, even this truncated power, after having it all vanish for so long, nearly took the breath from him. He nearly missed her question.

"Did you hear Barnett's speech tonight?"

"No. I was - "

"- occupied. We know." Hannah's look was almost shy, but it still made Gregg look aside for a moment. Ashamed, Greggie? Ahh, too bad - well, you should be....

"Barnett called for mandatory blood testing for anyone who is currently in or is applying for a public service position," Hannah told him. "That's every doctor, every nurse, every health care worker, every police officer, every firefighter, every last government worker. 'The great majority of decent people have a right to know if the person treating them is infected by this horrible scourge.' That's what Barnett said. He's promised to sign the legislation as soon as Congress puts it on his desk. Zappa's already stumping for support, and you know how effective a speaker the vice president can be. A coalition of senators and representatives has pledged to introduce a joint bill in session tomorrow. It's starting - all the controls and oppression you oppose. First, it'll be the testing, then.... That's why ..."

Hannah stopped, biting her lower lip. She was glorious, the emotions cascading from her like a fountain. So attractive.

So very, very attractive.

"Senator ... Gregg - we can't wait any longer. My God, all the hidden manipulations, all the strings they pulled."

Manipulations. Strings. You remember those, don't you, Greggie.... Hannah nodded toward Oddity, watching them silently near the mouth of the alley. "Patti suggested something the other night: look at what happened to you, in '76 and again in '88. Doesn't it make you wonder? Who would the Sharks have been most against having as president? If they were willing to assassinate the Kennedys, what would they have been willing to do to you?"

Christ! Gregg couldn't speak, couldn't answer. Of course! I missed Rudo. I could have missed others. Could Tachyon ...? His other voice seemed equally stunned. You see! There it is, Greggie: redemption, redemption for it all! "There was nothing in what you gave me to indicate that, Hannah," he heard himself protest automatically.

"No," she admitted. "But the Sharks were there. Given their ideology, they must have been. You want yet another reason to go after the Sharks, Senator? Try revenge."

"I would say that you're fairly adept at manipulation yourself, Ms. Davis." She colored nicely at the soft accusation. Gregg hurried into the gap, his words laced with the old power. "Hannah, I have to be certain that all your facts are correct and verifiable before we move." He was certain as soon as he said it. Gregg was not a particularly devout man: call it God, call it Fate, call it Destiny, call it Accident. Whatever, Gregg had been handed a Gift. He'd been given back a portion of what he'd once had, and he intended to use it. "Hannah, I will take care of this. It is very, very important to me."

Hannah gave him the first smile he'd seen from her. Behind her, Oddity was nodding.

It was what he would have told her anyway. But now conviction lent strength to the words. This time he meant them. Tomorrow, he'd start things rolling.

After all, now he had something to prove.

This is your chance, Greggie. This is your one last chance to get it all back. If Hannah's even halfway right, you can redeem yourself.

He wasn't going to blow it this time.

Two of a Kind

by Walton Simons

She was beautiful, the kind of woman men killed or died for. The gabardine suit wasn't tailored to show off the exquisite contours of her body, and her hair was pinned back. It didn't matter. One look into her crimson eyes and any man was lost, swallowed up in the promise of a single, sensual glance. Seeing her made coming into work every morning a pleasure.

"Is he in yet?" Jerry eased himself onto the corner of Ezili's polished mahogany desk. Everything in the offices reflected taste and wealth. From the plush carpeting and deco fixtures to the location itself. Ackroyd and Creighton took up half a floor of the most expensive office space in Manhattan.

"Yes. He actually came in early, I think. I hope there's no trouble at home." Ezili smiled, a look that went beyond mischief into a kind of unconscious predation.

"I don't think there's much chance of that. Hastet would never allow it." Friendly as she was, Jerry couldn't help being intimidated by Jay's wife. But then, she was a Takisian.

Jerry rapped on the smoked glass of the door, right under the painted letters which read:

JAY ACKROYD, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

"Come in," Jay said. Jerry stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Ackroyd straightened a stack of papers against the desktop and put them in a drawer. "How are you today? Ezili keep you up late again?"

"That's off and on, you know that." Jerry sat in the chair next to Jay's. "I want to sit in on the next meeting. The one with Hartmann."

"Hmmm."

"What does that mean?"

"It means hmmm," Jay said. "Jesus, now you've got me quoting the movies. I don't know. He's a big fish and I don't want to spook him."

Jerry tapped his fingers together. He didn't buy Jay's excuse, but that wasn't the real issue. "I'm a full partner. I want to be treated like one."

"You are treated like a full partner. Your fake name is as big as mine on the office stationery." Jay held up a piece of paper. "See. Ackroyd and Creighton. You never did tell me why you chose such a weird nom de snoop."

"It was Lon Chaney Jr.'s real first name." Jerry's Creighton face was a cross between Chaney Jr. and Bogart, craggy, but with sharp features and knowing eyes. "Stop trying to change the subject. You keep me away from all the really big cases, Jay."

Ackroyd rubbed the side of his head. "It's too early in the morning for anyone to be giving me this kind of headache."

The intercom buzzed. "He's here," Ezili said.

"I'm staying," Jerry said, settling as deeply as he could into the leather chair.

Jay sighed. "I guess you are." He pressed the intercom button. "Send him in."

Jerry stood as Hartmann walked into the room. His hair was thinning a bit, and his eyes had a touch less sparkle, but he still looked the part of a senator. He extended his prosthetic hand quickly and awkwardly to Jay. The real one had been mangled by some kind of demonic dog during the war for the Rox. "Mr. Ackroyd."

Jay held hack for a second, then shook Hartmann's hand. "Senator, this is my partner, Mr. Creighton."

Hartmann turned and placed his prosthetic hand in Jerry's. Jerry shook it tentatively. They made brief eye contact. There was an intensity about Hartmann that Jerry couldn't quite classify.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Creighton."

"A pleasure," Jerry said. "Please, sit down."

Hartmann clumsily unbuttoned his tailored blue coat and seated himself, his briefcase in his lap.

"What is it exactly we can do for you?" Jay was giving Hartmann a look he usually reserved for thugs and lousy waiters.

"I've come across some information recently which, if true, could have major implications for wild cards everywhere." Hartman pulled a sheaf of papers from the briefcase. "In here is a list of individuals I need investigated. I want everything done in the quietest possible manner. Some of them are very influential, so I'd advise you to be circumspect."

Jay extended a hand. Hartmann handed the papers over. Jay began flipping through them, and shook his head. "Pan Rudo, Etienne Faneuil, Philip Baron von Herzenhagen, George G. Battle ..."

"George G. Battle?" Jerry said the name much louder than he'd intended.

"Yes," Hartmann said, "you know him?"

Jerry cleared his throat. "We've met."

Jay handed the papers back to Hartmann, shaking his head. "What is the reason for these investigations, Senator? What are we looking for?"

Hartmann glanced away from Jay, toward the windows. "I'm afraid I can't divulge that. At least, not at this point."

"Then I'm afraid we can't be of any help to you," Jay said.

Hartmann arched an eyebrow and sat back in his chair. "Really? Why is that?"

"Well, if you're correct about how powerful these people are, we could be placing ourselves in real jeopardy if we go poking around." Jay shrugged. "Besides which, you're holding out information on us. I just don't like the way it smells, Senator."

Hartmann took the papers and tucked them back into his briefcase, then stood and gave Jay a tight smile. "I know your reputation, Mr. Ackroyd. You're not afraid of danger. Still, your reasons for refusing are your own. I trust you'll keep the nature of this meeting entirely confidential?"

Jay nodded. "That goes without saying, Senator. Goodbye."

Hartmann nodded and glanced over at Jerry. "Nice meeting you, Mr. Creighton." He brushed a piece of lint from his coat and walked imperiously from the office. If Hartmann was disappointed, it didn't register in his posture.

"You must not care for politicians," Jerry said.

Jay grinned. "Some I do, some I don't. Sascha?"

An eyeless man stepped from behind a partition in the corner. Sascha was one of the agency's key operatives. He was a skimmer, could pick up on a person's surface thoughts, though the depths were as much a mystery to him as anyone else. He'd been a bartender at the Crystal Palace until it burned down. Like Ezili, he'd become one of Ti Malice's mounts. They'd both done some pretty twisted stuff while under the little monster's influence. Jerry hadn't even known Sascha was in the room.

"Hartmann believes that the person who gave him this information is on the up-and-up. Her name is Hannah Davis, for what it's worth. I don't think he's convinced it's true, though." Sascha smoothed his moustache. "I don't think he likes you much either, Mr. Ackroyd."

"Nobody likes me. That's why I had to get married." Jay rubbed the back of his neck. "That's all we need for now, Sascha."

The eyeless joker walked in measured steps to the doorway, paused a second, then left.

"I'm always afraid he's going to send me to the cornfield," Jerry said, exhaling.

Jay laughed. "Yeah, he told me. You jumped a little high at Battle's name."

"Yeah," Jerry said. "Well, since he almost got me killed, I think I'm entitled."

It was true. When Jay was on Takis, Jerry had assumed his identity to get a little practical experience as a P.I. Battle had recruited him for a covert assault on the Rox, assuming he was the real Popinjay. Jerry managed to get caught in a flood in the caverns under the Rox, and had escaped by turning into the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He'd almost lost his mind, clawing and paddling his way through the dark waters under the Rox. The experience had terrified him on another level. Whenever he changed into something inhuman, he had to fight for control of his body. It had been a close thing as a gill-man; a slightly weaker will and he might be living in the East River, eating rotting fish.

"He sounded like a typical spook to me, just took a few more chances than most." Jay put his feet up on his desk. "You're not thinking of going after him on your own, are you?"

Jerry squirmed up from his chair and moved quickly to the door. "Of course not."

"Never hold out on your partner. It's the fifth rule of detective work."

"What are the first four rules?" Jerry asked from the doorway.

Ackroyd grinned. "Tell me the truth and I'll clue you in."

"You know I never lie," Jerry said. "Well, almost never."

Jay shook his head "Have it your way."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ezili was on top. Her cafe au lait skin was electric under his fingertips. Jerry looked into her red eyes. They were wild and unfocused, as if she were seeing some great truth far beyond either of them. He grabbed her shoulders hard and pushed upward. She leaned backward and bared her teeth. They were perfectly formed and perfectly white. Perfect, like every inch of her. Jerry closed his eyes and came. There was noise, almost inhuman. He thought Ezili must have made it, but wasn't sure. Ecstasy lingered a few moments, then passed, like the sun on a cloudy day.

He felt Ezili roll off him and he opened his eyes. She looked down at him, the wildness gone from her. Jerry got the feeling she was going to ask for something.

"How would you like to rub my feet?" he said, making a preemptive strike.

Ezili smiled and ran a finger down his calf. "Very well. Later will be for me." Her finger reached the bottom of his foot and she ran it lightly up to his toes.

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'll bite off one of your toes. It would make a fine necklace."

Jerry ignored the threat and sank into contentment. "Okay. Later is definitely for you. Do you think Jay respects me?" The question revealed more than he'd wanted it to. Abandon had its drawbacks.

Ezili looked at his feet. "If he did, it would not show. Mr. Ackroyd always seeks the advantage. Old habits die with their owner."

"Interesting twist on that old adage." Jerry pulled one foot away and offered the other. "I know better than to ask if you respect me."

You get what you want from me. I get what I want from you. Is respect better than that?"

"Good question. You're full of them tonight."

Ezili took his feet out of her lap. "Now for me. Something unusual."

Jerry lifted his head up and bit his lip suspiciously. "What?"

"I want you to be a woman for me."

"You can't ... I mean, that's not exactly playing to my strength."

She smiled her Ezili-will-have-it smile. "Get up." She took his hand and led him over to the bedroom mirror. "I want you to watch yourself do it."

Jerry lusted after many beautiful women, but right now he couldn't think of a single one he wanted to be. "Where should I start?"

"Here," she said, running a lacquered fingernail over one of his nipples.

Jerry concentrated. Breasts formed on his chest. Big, but not as large as Ezili's, with dark nipples. There wasn't much hair on his chest, but he got rid of it anyway. Ezili glanced down at his crotch. Jerry sighed, then watched his pride and joy disappear and shift into a female organ. An image of a young Julie Newmar crept into his mind and transformed his flesh. He/she had a wanton look that might be a challenge even for Ezili.

"Satisfied?"

Ezili nuzzled Jerry/Julie's ear. "Aren't you glad I don't just fuck you because you're the boss?"

"If you ever tell Jay about this, I'll kill you."

Ezili laughed and pulled her lover into the bed. She positioned her head between Jerry's legs and blew lightly, then extended her tongue. Jerry felt a ribbon of pleasure knotting inside.

"The sweetest," Ezili said, then flicked her tongue across him again.

"Yes," Jerry whispered. "The sweetest."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In spite of the fact that it was hell on his eyes, Jerry did his computer work in the dark. He liked being alone with the phosphor glow of the CRT while he prowled through a system. He'd had a few of the local hackers teach him system breaking, and in return provided them with top-of-the-line equipment.

He was after George G. Battle. Jerry hadn't liked being drafted by him, hadn't liked the way Battle looked or spoke, or the company he kept. Jerry wouldn't be surprised if Battle were involved in some anti-wild card plot, in spite of the fact that George G. had employed aces in his covert team. Jerry figured Battle was one of those people, who, the better you know them, the more you despised them. Finding out more was his top priority right now.

He always started with a person's credit record. Almost everybody had one, and the systems were fairly easy to get into and around in. He'd tried two, but so far no BATTLE, GEORGE G. Jerry stretched and made his way over to the red light on the coffee-pot, then poured himself half a cup. He'd already put away most of the pot. If he didn't slow down, he'd be typing from the ceiling.

Jerry sat back down and tapped into the next system. He typed NOBODY, his superuser ID. Jerry started the listing with Battle, G, and began paging slowly through.

"Bingo," he said, locating his target. Jerry punched into the general history screen and started printing. He rubbed his moist palms together. There was always an adrenaline surge when he found what he was looking for, but this was something else. Maybe it was just the coffee. Then again, maybe it was that he thought George G. Battle might be a bad guy straight from the movies. There were four pages of material on as many screens, with plenty of base information. Jerry jumped out of the system as soon as the last sheet of paper slid up from his printer.

He turned on the lights and flipped through the pages. There was a lot to go on, home and secondary address, phone numbers, SSN, drivers license number. It was a good starting point.

He leaned rack in his chair and sipped at his coffee. If Jerry's theory about Battle proved out, Jay was going to have to eat a heaping helping of crow for not taking the case.

Which would be just fine with Jerry.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Midtown traffic had been a snarl south of Central Park and Jerry was late. There wasn't a line of people waiting to get into Starfields, which was not too surprising, given the public's current level of paranoia and the fact that Starfields was run by a Takisian. Hastet.

The decor was different enough to be alien, but also had a curiously homey feel. Jerry took a few deep breaths and tried to relax. Although the food was superb, Hastet scared the bejesus out of him. Like Tachyon, she had a way of looking right through you. Unlike Tachyon, she didn't mince words. Jay had a bowl of something turquoise in front of him when Jerry walked up.

"Evening, partner," Jerry said, sitting down.

"Hi. You should try some of this soup, it's fabulous." Jay motioned to a waiter, who immediately walked over. "A bottle of your best red wine."

"I didn't think Hastet liked you to tie one on," Jerry said, opening his menu.

"She doesn't. I'll have a glass or two. The rest is for you." Jay smiled "I'm going to get you drunk and have my way with you."

Jerry set down the menu and looked hard at Jay. "You think I'm after Battle, don't you?"

"You just may make a detective yet," Jay said. "You wouldn't keep it to yourself unless you had some ideas about the guy."

"You're right. If you'd accepted the case, we might have more than my ideas right now, but you didn't." Jerry shook his head. "Sorry, that came out a little sharper than I intended."

"I think it came out exactly as sharp as you intended." The waiter arrived with the wine, opened and poured it. Jay took a sip. "Wonderful, just what I had in mind. We'll need a couple more minutes before we order." The waiter nodded and left.

Jerry ignored the wine. "Hastet doesn't have that thing here tonight, does she?" Jerry didn't much care for Hastet's pet. It reminded him of some of the things he'd run into under the Rox, and it always looked hungry.

"Changing the subject on me?" Jay paused, as if on the verge of pursuing his line of questioning, then slowly exhaled "I promise you'll be safe as long as I'm around. It's never even drooled on you."

Jerry gave in and took a sip of wine. It warmed, caressed, and soothed all the way down. He wondered why in hell Jay had taken him on in the first place. His partner had plenty of other operatives, and with his wealth from Takis, he certainly didn't need Jerry to bankroll the agency. Maybe it was just plain guilt. Jerry had almost died trying to help Jay out. "Why don't you put Peter Pann or Topper on me to find out if I'm after Battle?"

Jay shook his head. "I can't waste them on anything so stupid. You need a stable woman in your life, Jerry. Get you to toe the line. Whatever happened with Beth?"

That one still hurt. Beth had moved to Chicago and Jerry had refused to go with her. New York was the only place worth living as far as he was concerned, and he had been sure he could convince her to come back. He was wrong.

"Irreconcilable differences, I suppose. And anyone who speaks ill of unstable women should spend a few nights with Ezili. However, there is one thing I know we can agree on."

"It's time to eat," Jay offered.

Jerry set down his menu and signalled the waiter. "Common ground at last."

"That's why we're partners."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

It was perfect weather for a drive. The October air was crisp and cool, even in the full sunlight. The pictures of Vermont in the fall didn't really do it justice. No photograph could capture the movement of the red, gold, and brown leaves against the blue sky.

He was driving an ash-gray Ford Taurus. He'd rented it under the name Anthony Carbone, one of a half-dozen false identities he'd created. His hair and skin were dark, and he had a small scar on his chin. If someone spotted him at Battle's house, they might figure he was Mafia. Battle could easily have enemies in the mob, or at least someone who might hire a hit.

Jerry pulled down the sun visor. He'd made a map of the area on a Post-it-note. If he had navigated right, Battle's place was only a couple of miles away. The area was still rural, with most houses out of sight of their nearest neighbors. That's what Jerry was counting on anyway.

Battle spent most of his time in DC, so the Vermont place was a logical starting point. There would be security, but he'd planned for that. He'd phoned earlier in the day and gotten a generic recording. He planned to have the house all to himself.

Jerry turned off the main highway and onto a narrow asphalt road. It turned into gravel a few hundred yards in and Jerry saw a yard bordered with a high stone wall. He pulled the Taurus as far onto the shoulder as he could and killed the engine.

Jerry stepped out of the car and looked both ways before trotting across the gravel roadway to a wooded area by the wall. He jumped and caught the edge with his fingertips, then swung a leg over and hoisted himself up. Jerry paused for a moment, listening, then dropped over the side. Evening was coming fast, and Jerry crept toward the house, using trees for cover. The house was two stories of wood and stone, not formidable, but not friendly looking either.

Jerry made his way around back to the power and telephone lines. One thing he'd learned was that his body responded to electric current by converting it to mass. For the few moments his body was in flux, he could discharge the current; otherwise it became a part of him. At that point it became a little trickier to get rid of. He pulled out a knife and cut carefully into the power and telephone lines. He caught the juice from the power line and waited a moment then discharged a portion of it into the house's main line. He reached over to the phone line and gave it the rest of the juice. He figured the electricity had tripped every breaker in the house. The phone equipment should be fried too, so even if a security system was working, it still couldn't contact anyone on the outside.

Jerry walked over to the nearest window. It was heavily bolted from the inside. Jerry pulled out his glass cutter, and removed a section big enough to get his arm comfortably through, then unbolted the window and lifted it.

The trophy heads stared glassy-eyed down at him from the walls - deer, elk, what looked like a grizzly bear in a particularly bad mood. The temperature was low, not as cool as it was outside, but Jerry still figured there hadn't been anyone there that day. He walked over to a heavy oak desk and tried the drawers. Locked. Jerry took a couple of deep breaths and put the end of his first finger against the keyhole in the top drawer. He softened the tip of his finger and pushed it inside, tearing his skin. Jerry hardened his finger and turned carefully. It hurt like hell, but he felt the metal give and swivel. Jerry pulled his damaged finger out. He'd have to learn how to pick locks the old-fashioned way someday.

Jerry rifled through the desk quickly. His fingertips were smooth to avoid prints. He pushed aside the bank statements and appliance warranties, and pulled out a file marked "October Surprise." He opened it, then took out a pocket camera and carefully photographed each page. There were three unmarked blueprints. Jerry had no idea what they belonged to. He could worry about that later. He put the file back into the drawer and checked out the rest of the desk, but didn't find anything of interest.

Jerry stepped carefully out into the interior hallway. He saw a motion detector at ceiling level, but its lights were obligingly dark. If the system had a backup battery it was dead. Jerry stopped at the phone stand and popped open the answering machine. He lifted out the minicassette and dropped in a blank one he'd brought along. He'd planned more than usual, ultimately wanting to impress Jay.

He reached the end of the hallway and stepped into the living room. More trophies. There was a thick-legged table in the center of the room surrounded by several uncomfortable looking high-backed chairs. Jerry decided to head upstairs. He'd only taken a couple of steps when something caught his ankle and he pitched forward, smacking his forearm onto the hardwood stair. He crawled back down and fingered the ankle-height wire. It had pulled out several inches.

Jerry heard loud barking from alongside the house. He bounced up off the stairs and ran to the living room window. The two mastiffs saw him and bared their teeth. The wire must have triggered a physical mechanism to set them loose. Battle had a military mind, and was nobody's fool. He planned for every contingency.

He backed away from the window. He'd been feeling lucky and hadn't brought a gun on this trip. Next time he'd ignore his instincts and pack something. There was no choice but to run for it. Jerry crossed into the front of the house and unbolted the door, then opened it and sprinted toward the wall.

The dogs were on his heels before he made it twenty yards. Jerry fashioned his fingertips into claws and turned to face them. The first mastiff was already in the air, jaws open, going for this throat. Jerry brought his arm around as fast as he could and tore into its neck. It yelped and fell. The second animal hurled itself at him before he could get his arm back around. The mastiff slammed into his chest and knocked him to the ground. Jerry grabbed the dog's throat with a clawed hand and dug in. The animal shook its head violently, trying to break free. Saliva fell on Jerry's face, then blood. The mastiff collapsed on top of him, snapped its jaws, and was still. Jerry dragged himself from under the dog, fighting for breath. The other animal was still alive, lying in a pool of blood. Its eyes were peaceful, almost sad. Jerry looked at the blood on his clawed hand and gritted his teeth. The wound was fatal. There was nothing he could do.

He returned his hands to normal and staggered to the wall. It took him two tries to grab the top, and all his remaining strength to haul himself up. He checked his pockets to make sure the camera and mini-cassette were still there, then dropped heavily to the ground on the far side.

His silver Ford reflected golden in the sunset. Jerry jumped inside and power locked the doors, then took time for a few deep breaths. He started the car and did a quick U-turn. It was getting cold and he flipped on the heater. The main highway was clear, and he pulled out and sped away.

He noticed the car about a mile and a half later. It was black or dark blue, Jerry couldn't tell which in the fading light. There were two men in the front seat. Jerry changed lanes to let them around, but they stayed right behind him. Jerry didn't panic, but he wasn't calm either. Maybe they worked for Battle and had heard the dogs. Maybe they'd driven by the place earlier and seen his car. Maybe they just liked tailgating. It didn't particularly matter, Jerry wanted them gone. A high speed chase was out of the question. His driving skills were only adequate at best. He would drive until he found a restaurant or something, pull in, and change into someone else in the bathroom. He'd done it before.

It was like they read his mind. The dark car pulled up alongside. Now Jerry had them on one side and a nasty incline into the trees on the other.

"Shit," he said.

The car veered over and slammed into the side of the Taurus. Sparks flew and the tires squealed and smoked. The impact knocked him onto the shoulder. Jerry hit the brakes, hoping they would sail by him, but the other car moved over again and caught his front fender. There was nothing but big trees in front, and Jerry threw up his hands.

There was a noise like styrofoam being cut, only a hundred times louder. The air bag hit him like a heavyweight with a grudge. His wrist crashed into his lip, splitting it. Jerry smelled fuel. He clutched for the clasp on the safety belt and ripped it loose. The passenger side of the car was facing down, so he opened it and dropped out onto the ground.

Jerry knew they might be watching from the road, so he limped away from the wreck in the opposite direction as fast as he could. There was a flash of heat and a concussion from behind. He was knocked further down the hill, tumbling until he landed against the bole of a tree. Jerry felt around behind him. The back of his shirt was in tatters. The pain wasn't that bad yet. He knew with a burn it sometimes took awhile before you could really tell. Something to look forward to, if he managed to get through the night alive.

He heard tires squeal above him. Jerry looked up and saw taillights twinkling in and out as they receded through the trees. He was suddenly very cold. Jerry clambered up the hill, pulling himself along on bushes and low hanging branches. He could see a fair distance down the road. There was a single headlight approaching. Jerry took a breath and thought Austrian. His jaw went square and his hair shortened. He bulked up his entire body and lost a few inches of height in the process. He took a few steps to the center of the road and held up his right hand, motioning the approaching vehicle to stop.

The motorcycle slowed from a thrum to a putter. Jerry couldn't see anything of the driver, because of the glare from the headlights.

"I need your jacket, your boots, and your motorcycle." The accent was perfect. Jerry had been practicing it for months.

"Jesus, Mr. Schwarzenegger?" said the cyclist. His voice was shaky.

Jerry walked around and looked the driver in the eyes. The man looked to be in his early twenties, and was on the thin side. "Wrong, osshole."

"Uh." The man unbuckled his helmet and handed it over. "No boots." He looked down the hill at the burning Taurus. "Emergency, huh?"

"Get off the bike, dickweed," Jerry said. The cyclist dismounted. Jerry caught the bike before it fell over. "The chacket."

The man tugged the leather bomber jacket off and handed it over. Jerry slipped it on. It was wonderfully warm, but tight. He could fix that in a few moments.

The man put his hand on Jerry's shoulder. "It's only a Honda."

Jerry smiled thinly. "Hasta la vista, baby." The first phone he saw, he'd call the cops. That would take care of the motorcycle's owner. He accelerated off into the night, feeling more like something from Pee Wee's Big Adventure than The Wild One.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He'd had to pay the cab driver a hundred dollars to take him to the clinic. But then, it was the Jokertown Clinic, and almost nobody went into Jokertown anymore unless they were looking for trouble. Jerry told the cabbie that the police had been making a point of being visible, at least during the day, and it was noon at the time. That, plus the money, had finally convinced the hack to make the trip. Jerry could have had Jay pop him there, but then Jay would have started prying. He didn't want his partner to know he was going there to have his bums looked at. Jay was too smart for any story Jerry could make up; besides, he'd never been on the receiving end of Jay's ace. It might be something he wouldn't enjoy. Jerry was disoriented enough without Jay's help.

The corridors were crammed with jokers. Some were trauma victims, some were sick, some were likely just trying to get in off the streets. Jerry tried to overlook the fact that they were different, deformed. He'd impersonated jokers plenty of times, and seen the way they were treated. But it was different for him. He could turn back whenever he wanted. They had to wait for the next life, assuming there was one.

Jerry saw Doctor Finn from halfway down the hall. Finn was a centaur, and a handsome one at that, so he was easy to pick out of any crowd. Even the one here.

Finn glanced Jerry's way and flashed a quick smile, then continued his conversation with a nurse. Jerry walked up and waited a few feet away from them. He didn't recognize the nurse, and he knew most of the staff. She was pretty enough that in contrast with her surroundings she looked positively beautiful. She was blond, pushing forty, judging by the lines around her eyes, but her overall bone structure was model perfect. If she was a bit overweight, she carried it well. Jerry thought of Ezili. He hoped his adventures with her hadn't spoiled him for other women.

"Mr. Strauss," Finn said, his conversation with the nurse apparently finished. "So good to see you. You always manage to show up on one of our slow days."

Jerry laughed. "Actually, I've been waiting for a day and a half. Uh, can I see you in private for a few minutes?"

"That will be no mean feat, but I'll see what I can arrange." The centaur moved carefully through a knot of people and unlocked a door. He motioned Jerry inside. Jerry stepped in quickly and Finn closed the door behind them. "What can I do for you?"

"First, this." Jerry handed over a check for five thousand dollars. Finn took it and tucked it into a breast pocket. Jerry carefully unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it slowly off. "Then, this." He turned around and snowed Finn his back. Jerry wondered why he couldn't heal the wounds himself. Maybe it was that he could only control healthy tissues, not dead or damaged ones. Then again, maybe the pain just made it too hard to concentrate.

"Umm," Finn said, testing the area carefully with his fingers. It hurt, but Jerry stayed still. "Would you like to tell me how this happened?"

"No. Just tell me what to do about it."

"Okay," Firm said, noncommittally. Jerry heard hooves on the floor. "It's bad, but not terrible. You won't need any debridement, and I doubt there will be any scarring. Still, I want to put you on a course of antibiotics. Keep an eye on it. If the pain gets too bad, I can prescribe something."

"It hurts a lot," Jerry said. "Can I put my shirt back on now?"

"Of course." Finn walked around in front of Jerry, busy scrawling on a pad. He tore two pieces of paper from it and gave them to Jerry. "Fill these ASAP. Get started on the antibiotics immediately. The pain reliever is codeine based, not very strong, but it should let you sleep. I want to see you again in a couple of days."

Jerry slid his shirt gingerly over his reddened shoulders. "If only the women in my life had your attitude."

Finn smiled and cocked his head. "Be sure to get an injection from Nurse Moffat before you go. More antibiotics. Get you started."

Jerry made a face. "A shot. I hate shots."

Finn wagged a finger. "Doctor's orders. Besides, you won't mind, she's cute. And her nickname around here is 'Painless.'"

Jerry's shoulders slumped. Might as well get it over with, but god he did hate needles. "Do I get a sucker on the way out?"

Finn opened the door and motioned Jerry out with his pen. "Back in two days."

"Yes, sir."

Jerry walked slowly down the hall, eyeing the doorway to the nurse's station like it was the gateway to hell. He stuck his head inside, hoping to find it packed with patients. A short, scaly joker pushed past him, leaving the room empty except For the nurse.

"Hello," he said. "Nurse Moffat?" She turned around. It was the nurse he'd seen talking to Finn a few moments before. Jerry straightened his shoulders and walked in.

"Yes," she said. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"Dr. Finn said I need an injection." He handed her the paper with the antibiotic prescription. "This stuff, I think."

She looked at the paper and gave it back. "No problem. Get that shirt off and have a seat." She indicated an aluminum chair with cracked red vinyl upholstery.

Jerry did as he was told. "Didn't Dr. Tachyon have a treatment that caused tissue to regenerate? Sure would be useful now."

"I don't think so. That lovely bit of technology gave us Demise. Besides, since Dr. Tachyon left, all the experimental equipment is locked up. Dr. Finn inventories it now and then, but otherwise we leave it be."

Jerry heard the sound of a needle going into a bottle cover. "Do they really call you 'Painless?'"

She walked around in front of him, holding the hypodermic. "Them what speaks of me at all." She put a hand on his shoulder and bent down. "Now think of something pleasant."

Jerry closed his eyes. To his surprise he found himself thinking of his nurse. "I'm as ready as I'm going to get." He waited a few seconds, then looked.

Nurse Moffat smiled at him. "You're done. They don't call me 'Painless' for nothing."

Jerry sat up straight and reached for his shirt. "Wow. You're great. You're going to have to do all my injections from now on." He stood, tucked in his shirt and walked to the door, then turned around. "What's your name? I mean, other than 'Painless.'"

"Emily Moffat. What's yours?"

"Jerry Strauss."

"Well, pleased to meet you, Jerry Strauss." She smiled again, and motioned with her hand. A joker scuttled into the room. "Drop in again anytime."

"I will," he said. "I will."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The answering machine cassette from Battle's house had one message on it, a female voice saying, "The Halloween party is on. Expect you to bring the treats. See you then."

Jerry figured that whatever the "October Surprise" was, the payoff was coming on Halloween. The pictures had survived the wreck, too, but the blueprints didn't mean anything to Jerry. He knew somebody that might have a better idea.

Ernie Swartz had been the archivist at the Department of Public Works for the past twenty years. He was the antithesis of the absent-minded clerk. He could carry on three conversations and simultaneously do whatever task was currently at hand. Jerry had done some architectural research for a period film set in New York. The movie was a pipe dream, but it had given him the opportunity to meet Ernie.

The office was relatively quiet today. There was actually one of the staff who didn't have a handful of documents, or a phone glued to his ear.

Jerry walked up to the unoccupied clerk, a young man nursing a large mug of coffee, and indicated Ernie's office. "He in today?"

"Today and everyday." The clerk's phone buzzed. He rolled his eyes and picked up.

Jerry made his way down an aisle between the rows of desks and rapped on Ernie's door.

"Come in."

Ernie had a sheaf of papers on the desk in front of him and his "in" box was overflowing with more. He looked up, saw Jerry, and smiled. "Jerry. Made your Citizen Kane yet?" He took Jerry's extended hand and gave it a warm shake.

"No. I think I'm either too young or too old to be a cinematic genius." Jerry sat down in the chair opposite Ernie, tapping the envelope with the blueprints against his pants' leg.

Ernie pointed to the envelope. "You got something else for me?"

Jerry handed it over. "There's some old blueprints. I don't even know if they're New York. I thought maybe you could tell me what building they go to."

Ernie slid the photographs out and pursed his lips. "Might be Manhattan. Hard to say. You need this in a hurry?"

"Well, if you don't find out before Halloween, it probably won't matter."

Ernie tossed the blueprints into his desk drawer. "That's less than a week. I'll see what I can manage in my copious free time. No promises."

"Great. I'll get you into a couple of Knicks games, regardless." Jerry stood and fished in his pocket for an agency business card. "Oh, and if you can't get in touch with me at home, call this number and leave a message for Mr. Creighton."

Ernie's phone buzzed. He gave Jerry an "OK" sign and snatched up the receiver. "Swartz."

Jerry nodded and left.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ezili was standing by the door when he stepped in. "Mr. Ackroyd wants to see you first thing. You should make time for me later."

Jerry smiled at the thought. "Sounds good. I'll let you know."

She returned the smile and walked slowly back to her desk, rolling her hips just enough to remind him what it was like to be with her. Not that he needed reminding.

Jay had his feet propped up on the desk, and was staring out the window. "I kind of miss the neon 'live nude girls' sign." He turned to Jerry. "Not that I'm against being more upscale. There's just too little neon in the world."

"Right. Now I know what to get you for Christmas. You wanted to see me?"

Jay walked over and slapped Jerry on the back, hard. Jerry tensed his shoulders, but managed not to scream. "I like you, Jerry. You know that."

"I appreciate that. I like you, too."

"So, it would be very depressing if you got yourself killed." Jay eased into his desk chair. "I know you're working on something right now. I know it's dangerous and probably has something to do with Battle."

"Hold it." Jerry lifted a hand. "If I am involved in something a little risky, and I'm not saying I am, then there's a damned good reason. And for Christ's sake, Jay, I'm not just a stooge out there. I can handle myself."

Jay rubbed his forehead. "You're just not getting the message here. It takes years to develop the instincts and techniques to be a good private investigator. I'm still learning, myself."

Jerry started taking deep, measured breaths. He didn't want to start yelling, that would only reinforce Jay's argument. "You're just going to have to trust me on this one. It's important."

Jay slowly formed his hand into the familiar gun-shape, then pointed it at Jerry. "I should send you to Takis, to worry Tachyon's ass."

"Yeah. I could change to look like you, go home and fuck your wife." Jerry leaned onto Jay's desktop. "But I'm no more going to do that, than you're going to send me to Takis."

Jay looked Jerry in the eye. "Don't bet on it. The only person I know as stubborn as Tachyon is you. Don't force my hand on this, I've got a business to run."

"We've got a business to run." Jerry walked to the door. "There are two names on the glass outside. Don't forget it." He shut the door and stalked put of the office.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

It was Halloween, a little after three in the afternoon. The coffee shop at the George Washington was nearly deserted. Jerry remembered a time when the place was a real dive, but they'd done a few renovations, even put in color TV. It was a weird place for Battle to be staying, but that only made Jerry more certain something was up.

Tracking Battle down had been easier than he figured. He'd called George G.'s office using Peter Jennings' voice, said the network was considering doing a special on the last days of the Rox. Battle's secretary had started gushing as soon as she heard his accent. She explained that he was out of town at the moment, but gave Jerry/Jennings a phone number where he could be reached. Jerry tapped into the phone system and fed it the number, out came the George Washington Hotel on Lexington Avenue.

His motorcycle was parked outside. He'd enjoyed riding one so much, he'd bought one. It was an old Triumph, black and almost too heavy. He'd picked it up under an assumed name, of course.

Jerry's look today was somewhere between James Dean and Nicholas Cage. His dark hair was slicked back and his eyes were bright with too much caffeine. He'd made a couple of lightning fast trips to the men's room earlier, but was sure Battle hadn't gotten out past him. Jerry didn't really expect anything to go down until evening anyway, but better safe than sorry. He eased back and ordered another cheese Danish.

Battle went past when Jerry was in mid-bite. His quarry was wearing a gray overcoat and tan pants. He seemed to be alone. Jerry tossed a twenty onto the countertop and headed for the street. Battle was getting into an old silver van when Jerry hit the door. Jerry trotted down to his Triumph and kicked it to life.

The van was halfway down the block when Jerry pulled out. He accelerated around a bus. The van was about five cars ahead of him and one lane over. They stayed on Lexington through Gramercy Park and then over to Park Avenue South. Jerry maintained his distance and tried not to get directly behind the van.

He heard sirens to his right, heading his way. The light at Fourteenth Street turned amber and the van charged through the intersection. Jerry gunned it, slicing between the lanes of slowing autos. He was into the intersection when the police car flashed in front of him. Jerry braked and twisted the handlebars to the right. The tires went out from under him, and the bike skidded sideways across the rest of Fourteenth Street and onto the sidewalk. Jerry struggled to right the bike as passers-by began to form around him. The cop car was long gone.

"I'm okay," he said. It was more or less true. His right leg was a little torn up, but there were no broken bones. "Just get out of my way."

Jerry bounced his bike off the curb and onto the street, headed south. He thought he glimpsed a silver car top ahead and began weaving through the traffic, closing in. A couple of blocks later, he caught up. It was a silver van alright, but it belonged to a florist shop. A light turned red ahead. Jerry slowed the bike to a stop. He rubbed his right thigh, which was beginning to throb. It hurt almost as much as his pride.

He'd lost them.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He'd gone back to the George Washington in the hope that Battle would show up, but that hadn't worked. Jerry's instincts were right about that. At this moment Battle was doing something that could affect wild cards everywhere, and Jerry couldn't raise a finger to stop him. Jay was right; he wasn't good enough yet.

He put on his Creighton face and went back to the office. There was a bottle of Jack Black and a Gameboy in his desk. Right now that was the only company he wanted.

She was sitting behind the desk, filing her nails, when he walked in. Ezili looked up and nodded. "I thought you'd be coming back here."

Jerry shook his head. "I'm tired, Ezili. So tired even the prospect of sex with you couldn't pep me up. If tomorrow night's okay with you, I'll be more than happy to do whatever you want."

Ezili smiled. "I didn't stay for that reason. A man called. A Mr. Swartz. He said he identified the blueprints you left him."

Jerry's brain was slow in taking the information in. He thought for a second then straightened. "What? What did he say it was?"

"The Jokertown Clinic."

Jerry bent down and kissed Ezili, a kiss of gratitude, not passion. "Thanks. You may have saved my career as a detective. If I'm still alive tomorrow, I'll try to get you another raise."

"Your energy has come back, I see. Save some for me tomorrow." She moistened her lips. "No good deed should go unpunished."

"It won't." Jerry dashed from the office, the pain in his leg forgotten. Maybe his luck was changing. He'd know soon enough.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

No amount of money was going to get a cabbie into Jokertown on Halloween night. There was no point in taking his bike either. Somebody would rip it out from under him long before he made it to the clinic. That left the subway. When Jerry got on he was a nat with a Nixon mask propped on the top of his head. As the train rumbled south the crowds began to thin. At the last stop outside Jokertown, there were only two people left in the car with him. One was a drunk, the other was a transit cop. Jerry pulled the mask down and started changing his face. He felt particularly ugly tonight, and his features were going to reflect it. He extended his mouth from just under one ear to the other and filled it with large, yellowing teeth; he thickened his brow ridge and skull. He didn't want anyone fucking with him in the streets. It was several blocks from the subway to the clinic, and he wanted to make it as quickly as possible. Once there, he'd poke around. Battle couldn't hide the way he could. Jerry should be able to spot him right away.

The lights flickered and the subway car squealed around a turn, then slowed down next to the platform. A tentacle slapped up against the glass next to Jerry's head as the car hissed to a stop. Jerry lifted his mask and gave the joker a baleful stare. She made a face and turned away. Jerry got up and slid through the door, as it opened, then made his way up to the street.

A bottle broke at his feet as he stepped into the open air. There were screams all around him, some happy, some crazy, some from pain. A group of jokers was performing something resembling a dance in the middle of the street. Another knot was clustered by a warehouse wall, spraying it with cans of paint. Most of the crowd looked young to Jerry. A generation of "hideous joker babies" grown into their teens.

Jerry started making his way toward the clinic. He smelled smoke, but couldn't see any sign of a fire. Maybe it was just fireworks. He hoped the entire neighborhood wasn't burned to the ground by morning. Public sentiment being what it currently was, no one would care much if the fire department was slow answering calls to Jokertown.

Jerry walked with his hands in his pockets. He fingered the .45 automatic with his right hand. Jerry didn't much care for guns, especially handguns, but Battle played rough. He wasn't planning on being a martyr.

He felt hands on his shoulders from behind. Jerry spun around. A joker was extending a hand to him. His skin was the color of uncooked sausage and the top of his head was oversized and misshapen. "Help me out, friend?"

Jerry fished out a five and handed it over.

The joker smiled. As his face moved, it squeaked. "I think you can do better than that." He whipped out a knife.

"Okay," Jerry said. He pulled out the gun and pointed it at the joker's face. "Give me a reason."

The joker took two careful steps backward, hands raised, then turned and ran.

He put the gun away. This is all the public ever sees. They give the rest a bad name, Jerry thought. He watched the joker disappear around the corner, then trotted toward the clinic. He was close enough now that he could make it without getting winded.

He almost needed the gun to get into the clinic. Wounded jokers were everywhere. Jerry waded through the misery into the waiting area. Finding Battle might not be as easy as he'd first figured. The clinic was a big place, and Jerry wasn't sure what it was they were after. Arson was his first guess, but that seemed too small an operation for someone with Battle's ambitions. There was no point in trying to disgrace Tachyon in some way. The doctor was gone, and might never return. No. Jerry figured there had to be something here they wanted. His logic couldn't get him any further than that.

Jerry bounced up and down as he made his way down the hall. He was looking for Finn. He wanted to warn them that the clinic was targeted for trouble. At the top of one of his jumps he saw a familiar blond head. Emily Moffat was walking his way, moving with tired but purposeful strides.

He grabbed her by the arm as she reached his side. "Nurse Moffat, we met the other day."

"I'm sorry, I don't recall you." She looked him over. "You don't look too bad you'll have to wait your turn."

Jerry paused for a second, not knowing how much he could really trust her. He leaned in and whispered, "I'm Jerry Strauss. I really need to talk to Dr. Finn."

She looked at him incredulously. "Who? I'm in no mood for jokes. Dr. Finn is in surgery, and I'm very busy."

"Sorry," Jerry said grabbing her by the elbow and guiding her into a room. He pulled her into one of the bedspaces and closed the curtain. "Look at me." His appearance shifted to Jerry Strauss, then back to his joker facade. "Now do you believe me?"

She looked hard at Jerry for a moment, her eyes betraying nothing. "Okay. So you're probably Mr. Strauss. What the hell is going on?"

Jerry shook his head. "I wish I knew. The clinic is a target for something tonight. Is there anything around here worth stealing?"

"Hardly. Most of our facilities and equipment are practically antique. Except for the experimental stuff, of course. I can't imagine anyone would even know what to do with most of that."

Jerry noticed he was still holding her arm and let it go. "It's at least worth checking out. I can't think of anything else. Do you have access to that area?"

"Yes, but I can't - " she paused, conflict evident in her eyes. "What the hell. If you're right, something has to be done." She pointed to his face. "How long have you been able to do that?"

"A long time. Let's go."

They took the stairs to the basement. Emily punched a code into the keypad on the door. It buzzed and the lock clicked back. She opened it and stared down the dark corridor.

"I'll have to come with you," she said.

"No," Jerry whispered. "This is potentially very dangerous. Wait at the top of the stairs. Better yet, find Troll and send him down here to back me up, but tell him to keep it quiet. If you don't see us again in half an hour, call the police."

She took two steps up the stairs, then turned. Jerry motioned her to keep going. She sighed and continued her ascent.

Jerry slipped in and closed the door behind him. The darkness was almost complete, dotted here and there with small lights from the equipment. He pulled off his shoes and slipped slowly down the hallway, sliding his hand along the cold wall. He thought he heard something and froze, taking shallow breaths. He waited a minute. Nothing. He continued on his way. His hand found a door frame. Jerry fumbled for the knob and slowly twisted it, then stepped inside. He saw a small spot of light sweep over a glassed-in wall to his left. Whoever was holding the light was in the adjacent room. The light continued to roam about the room, lighting here and there, then moving on. Jerry's eyes had adjusted to the darkness well enough for him to make out a door between the two rooms. He walked slowly toward the door, sliding his feet. If he stubbed his toe now, it could be a fatal mistake. He pressed his body up against the door and pulled the automatic from his pocket.

Make your next move a good one, he thought. Make it count.

There was no way he could get through the doorway and still retain the element of surprise. His chances of dropping Battle and whoever he had with him before they got him weren't very good. While he was groping for a solution, the door opened slightly and light came through the crack. Jerry backed away, holding his breath.

They slid into the room and stopped, playing the light over the contents of the laboratory. Jerry was only a few feet behind them. In a moment they'd turn around with the flashlight and he'd be dead meat. Jerry moved forward silently and smashed his automatic into the side of one of the intruders' heads. He felt the shock of the blow up to his elbow, and heard the man crumple to the floor. Jerry crouched and foot-swept his other opponent. The man cried out as his legs went out from under him. Jerry scrambled forward in the near darkness, placed his knee solidly in the man's back and pressed the barrel of his gun into the captive's temple.

"Hands behind you," Jerry said. The man quickly did as he was ordered. Jerry pulled a pair of cuffs from his belt and snapped them on. He picked up the flashlight and pointed it at the face he hoped would be Battle's. The man wasn't George G. or anyone else Jerry recognized. He looked thirtyish and Hispanic, Cuban maybe. Jerry directed the flashlight to the man he'd pistol-whipped. This one could have been the other guy's twin, except for the bruise that was coming up on the side of his head.

Jerry figured there was nothing to be gained talking to either of these two. He pulled a glove out of his pocket and shoved it deep into the mouth of his conscious captive. Having cuffed him first, Jerry did the same to the one who was out. Whatever other reason Battle had for using these men, it wasn't for their personal hygiene. They smelled like a garbage dump on an August afternoon.

There was a soft voice behind him. "Now, Bobby Joe."

Something closed around Jerry's wrist. His bones ground together and he stifled a scream. The gun clattered to the linoleum floor. Jerry twisted his head around and saw the giant form in the dim light. He'd seen this guy before - smelled him too. It hadn't been the Cubans. If only he'd remembered!

Booby Joe, aka the Crypt Kicker, was dead. He looked worse than the last time Jerry had seen him, under the Rox. The Crypt Kicker was dressed in jet black, with a half-hood over one side of his face. The hood draped so that Jerry could tell a sizable portion of his skull was missing underneath it. There was a crimson cross over one eye, and the dead man looked like someone had used him for flamethrower practice. Jerry's jacket began to smoke where the Crypt Kicker was holding it. He tried to whip-kick the dead giant, but his foot glanced off without getting so much as a grunt.

"Make it look like an accident if you can, Bobby Joe. Keep it quiet. I'll be down the hall." Battle patted Jerry on me cheek and smiled. "Enjoy it."

A huge hand clamped over Jerry's mouth, searing his flesh with noxious chemicals. He started to change. As afraid as he was of being inhuman, he was a lot more scared of being dead. Lon Chaney Jr.'s wolfman was a sentimental favorite, but he'd seen The Howling recently, and that lycanthrope looked considerably more lethal. Jerry elongated his mouth into a snout and filled it with sharp teeth. Claws formed at the ends of his fingers and toes. He bit down on his enemy's wrist and began worrying at the dead flesh. Bits came off in his mouth, acid-sour and putrid.

Crypt Kicker tossed him in the air. Jerry brought his legs underneath him and landed on all fours. A coat of thick hair now covered him from head to foot. He could see better, too. His blood was pounding, and Jerry wanted the kill, wanted to feel his enemy's throat in his mouth and tear the life from it. He growled and charged.

The lumbering giant brought his fists down as Jerry leapt in, catching him on the shoulder and knocking him aside. Jerry pounced up on one of the lab tables and bared his teeth. Crypt Kicker lurched forward, arms outstretched. Jerry scrambled out of the way and launched himself onto the corpse-thing's back. He tore through the clothing and into the muscles in the dead monstrosity's back and shoulders, the flesh burning his lips and mouth. The giant, moving quicker than Jerry had anticipated, pushed himself over backwards and landed on top of Jerry. He felt a rib give way under the weight.

Jerry crawled away and looked around the room. This was a losing battle. There was no way he could kill someone who was already dead. He saw a freezer in the corner and ran for it. Jerry opened the door with a clawed hand, and turned to make sure Crypt Kicker was following him. He was. Jerry dodged into the freezer and crouched in the back, among cases of pharmaceuticals. The room was about twelve feet deep and half as wide. Crypt Kicker appeared in the doorway, ducking to get inside. He seemed unable to locate his enemy in the darkness. Jerry picked up a case with clawed hands and tossed it at Crypt Kicker, then darted out between the giant's legs. He slammed the door shut and brought down the heavy metal handle. A slow, heavy pounding began on the door. Jerry figured it would keep him there, for awhile anyway.

Jerry crept out into the hall and sniffed. Battle was still there, and close. He hunched down and walked down the hall, claws clicking on the cold floor. There was a different smell now. Fear. Jerry began salivating. Soon Battle would be his, screaming in terror as the blood pumped from his torn body. Soon. Jerry continued to creep forward, his broken rib searing his side. A shape appeared in a doorway at the end of the hall and there was an explosion of light with a muffled sound. Jerry felt something whine past his ear. He bounded forward, wanting nothing but the kill. No matter the cost. Light filled the hallway. Jerry squinted and kept going. Battle screamed and ducked out of the hallway into one of the rooms.

Jerry crouched down and let his vision clear, then started advancing slowly. A growl started at the back of his throat. He cut it off. No point in giving his position away.

He paused outside the room. Battle was inside. The man's heart raced, his breathing was shallow. He was terrified, but not yet ready to die. Jerry didn't care what Battle wanted. George G. wasn't leaving the clinic alive. He sprang into the room. There were twin staccato bursts of light and sound, but the bullets missed. Jerry snarled and scrambled toward Battle, who fell over backward onto a lab table, shattering glass beneath him. Jerry swatted the gun from Battle's hand, leaving claw marks on the man's wrist. The man was helpless, it was time to make him pay.

"Stop." The voice came from behind him. It was the nurse. Troll stood behind her, his huge green body tensed.

Jerry could take her next, after the man. Troll would be more difficult, but Jerry could outmaneuver him. Just like the Crypt Kicker. Jerry bent down and took his prey's throat. He could almost taste the blood pulsing underneath the skin.

"I said stop." The nurse took a step toward him. "What are you doing?"

Jerry let go of Battle and curled his lips. The woman moved beautifully. Her eyes were bright with life. It would be sweeter to kill her last, but he wanted her now. Wanted her to come apart in his hands and mouth.

She stood in front of him, unafraid. Jerry leaned in her direction, ready to spring. She would never even feel it.

The pain in his side vanished. Jerry lowered his arms. The nurse moved closer and looked into his eyes. Hers were aqua. He couldn't see anything else. Just her eyes.

"Change back."

Jerry felt the mat of hair on his skin. It itched. He wanted it to go away. His teeth began to recede, and his face began to shift.

"That's it. Change back."

Jerry felt the world shifting underneath him. He collapsed to the floor, breathing heavily. "I could have killed you."

Battle screamed. Jerry turned at the sound, still lightheaded. Battle was in convulsions. Emily moved in and tried to grab his shoulders, but Battle racked her away. His body poured out of his clothes and onto the floor. The flesh shifted and changed color and texture, becoming yellow and brittle. Multiple legs sprouted from Battle's new form. His face became putty-like and his ears melted into dark globs. The thing screamed and backed into a corner. There was a crash from another room. Jerry heard steel thud heavily onto the linoleum floor.

"Jesus, the Crypt Kicker," Jerry said.

"I'll get him," Troll said, turning away.

"Look out for his hands," Jerry said. Troll nodded and headed own the hall.

"What the fuck happened to him?" Jerry looked over at Battle, who was cowering in the corner.

"You mean you don't have all the answers? Who was that to begin with?" She began to sift through the glass wreckage on the table. "Hello." She pulled out a broken vial, dappled with blood, and examined it. "Xenovirus Takis-A."

Jerry laughed. "A joker. He turned into a joker. There is some justice after all. Eh, George G.?"

"Who the fuck are you?" Battle screamed, curling his limbs protectively around his body.

"Nobody," Jerry replied, and smiled.

"What did he want here?" Emily tapped Jerry on the shoulder.

Jerry said nothing. He wasn't really sure, anyway. The pain in his side returned, worse than before. All the air went out of him and he crumpled back to the floor.

"Sorry," she said. "I pushed you too hard. I still want some answers. We've got to get this wing sealed off, too."

"Come with me to visit a friend and I'll tell you everything I know." He held out his hand. She took it and helped him back to his feet.

"Troll can handle anything else that might happen. You'd better get the hell out of here before the police show. I have a feeling you aren't going to want to answer most of their questions." She picked up Battle's gun and pointed it in his direction. "Besides, I want your answers all to myself."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"He kept screaming, 'I'm not a joker. I'm not a joker,' when the cops took him away." Emily drained the coffee from the bottom of her cup.

Jay sat behind his desk listening to the story, stopping them once or twice to clarify a point. Jerry couldn't really gauge his partner's reaction. He'd left out any references to a conspiracy, or to himself as Mr. Creighton of Ackroyd and Creighton.

"Do you know what Battle was after?" Emily asked, then yawned.

"No. But we're going to check into it. You can count on that." Jay looked over at the half-empty coffeepot. "I think you're past the point of caffeine being a help. Want me to send you back to the clinic?"

"Yes." She rubbed the side of her head. "The explanation I left Dr. Finn with wasn't exactly adequate. And the cops want to talk to me again."

"No doubt," Jay said. "Thanks for taking care of Jerry here. He's a valued client. If you don't mind, either Mr. Creighton or I would like to buy you dinner sometime."

"Who's Mr. Creighton?"

"One of our best, Ms. Moffat. One of our very best." Jay made his hand gun-shaped and pointed at the nurse. "Get to sleep as soon as you can."

She nodded, then vanished with a soft pop.

"Another nurse," Jay said, raising his eyebrow. "An analyst would say you're trying to reenact your failed relationship with Beth and make it come out right. Ezili might not like it."

Jerry shook his head. "So I'm attracted to her. I don't think that has anything to do with Beth. I don't have any idea what's going to happen with any of the women in my life. Par for the course." He paused. "Well, aren't you going to let me have it?"

"What for?"

"Taking stupid chances, risking lives, mine included." Jerry felt the fatigue in his body down to his bones. He wanted to get this over with.

"Nope. You did take chances, but it turned out alright." Jay grinned. "That's one of the keys. You're still alive and still learning. I'll bet next time you won't be such an eager beaver."

"That's for damned sure. If Emily hadn't helped turn me back ..." He shook his head. "All I wanted to do was kill. It was scary. I owe Ezili, too. You just can't do it all on your own."

"That's why I have operatives." Jay smiled "And a partner."

Jerry straightened in his chair. "That's all I want to be. Are we really going to look into this conspiracy?"

"Might not be a bad idea. But it would be an agency investigation. No freelancing." Jay stood and stretched. "Let's get out of here."

Jerry pulled himself up out of the chair. "You going to tell me why you don't like Hartmann?"

Jay fingered his palm. "If I could, I would, but I can't. Have you had any dirty dreams about Emily Moffat?"

Jerry made a face. "You want something for nothing, eh?" He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. "It'll cost you dinner."

"A small price to pay."

Jerry was so tired he could barely walk, but he felt good. Content. "You know, Jay. This could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership."

The Color of His Skin

Part 2

"What do you know about this Judge Sweeney, Sam?"

The city prosecutor - Samuel Hanley, in his mid-thirties and showing progressive male pattern baldness and perpetual bags of weariness under his eyes - shrugged at Gregg and adjusted his wrinkled Brooks Brothers suit. It wasn't much of an improvement. "Not a hell of a lot. Political appointment, probably has his eye on some cushy circuit. He's been fair enough in the cases I've had before him up until now." Hanley rummaged in his briefcase and pulled out the case file - the edges of paper bristled and curled around the manila folder. "I'm more worried about the guy van Renssaeler's firm has brought in: Fitzpatrick. That's a fed if I ever saw one."

Brandon van Renssaeler, at the table on the other side of the courtroom, was one of a quartet of lawyers retained by Battle and Puckett. He conversed earnestly with a tall man in a tailored dark suit. The bristle-cut hair and the lean, muscular body lurking under the expensive wool, Gregg admitted, seemed to shout "Federal agent." Fitzpatrick glanced over once at Gregg, nodded, and favored him with a faint smile that bordered on a smirk before turning back to Brandon. The knot in Gregg's stomach tightened another notch.

Nothing about this case made Gregg feel good.

With the break-in at the Jokertown clinic and Troll's identification of Battle and Crypt Kicker as the two men responsible, Gregg had felt a surge of optimism. It had seemed fated, his path laid out in neon letters before him: Here is the Way. All the hazy plans Hannah, Gregg, and Father Squid had devised were quickly scrapped.

Armed with the information Ackroyd and Creighton had funneled to him, Gregg had gone to Hanley, the DA in charge of Battle's case. Gregg had convinced the man that this trial would be a fame-maker, something to bust open the whole conspiracy and (just incidentally) make everyone involved very, very visible. Expanded charges had been filed, bench warrants and subpoenas issued. Everything was moving so well for a week or so that Gregg could almost envision the headlines. It didn't matter that Battle and the joker known as Crypt Kicker had disappeared - in fact, that was in their favor. Let them run. Gregg had already put out tentative feelers to America's Most Wanted; their executive producer seemed interested, especially with Gregg's hints that there was a deeper plot behind the burglary. Gregg had begun outlining the way they'd pull the existence of the Sharks into the tale of the Jokertown Clinic Burglary. Hardly the forum Gregg wanted, but it was a start. He could almost imagine Robert Stack's intro....

But Battle and Puckett had suddenly and unexpectedly turned themselves in to the authorities. A high-powered staff of attorneys had been hired, and the case had suddenly gone forward at a breakneck pace. Gregg pulled a few of the strings he still held: the DA had received permission to allow Gregg to act as co-counsel in the case. He figured a trial was almost as good as a television show. The onlookers were mostly press, and camera crews were waiting outside.

But Gregg didn't like the way Brandon smiled easily as he talked with his companion, glancing from Gregg to Hannah, who sat in the spectator's area behind the railing. He didn't like the fact that after the bailiff announced Judge Sweeney's arrival, the judge immediately asked Fitzpatrick to approach the bench. The two were quickly engaged in a lengthy whispered conversation. The judge had a thin nap of salt-and-pepper hair receding from his forehead, and his small eyes were sharp and hard - he looked like someone who knew political expediencies; he looked like someone who would have been a tasty puppet. But Gregg could sense nothing but a smug self-satisfaction from the man, nothing more. Gregg cursed the limits of his new power.

The judge nodded as Fitzpatrick stepped away. "We will delay proceedings for an hour, gentlemen. I will be meeting with Mr. Fitzpatrick in my chambers immediately."

Hanley, followed a moment later by Gregg, leapt up from his chair. "Your Honor," the prosecutor said urgently, "the prosecution has the right and the obligation to be part of any discussion in this case. If there's something of import to our case - "

"I'm sorry, Mr. Hanley, but it seems that there are potential issues of national security involved, and I had been so notified earlier this morning, on a very high level. The precedent is clear enough; I don't have any choice in the matter. I will make the prosecution aware of the content of the discussion as soon as I can." Judge Sweeney nodded to Fitzpatrick, Brandon, and the others. "In my chambers, Mr. Fitzpatrick ..."

Sweeney banged his gavel. Fitzpatrick gave Gregg the smile again as he passed their table, causing the dull embers of nervous pain in Gregg's stomach to burst into a full roaring inferno. He tried to reach out with the Gift, but again it did nothing but let him sip the sour taste of confidence in Fitzpatrick's mind. The voice scolded him: "If I had Puppetman ..." We both know that old lament, Greggie. Give it up. That's not the way to redeem yourself.

Hanley shook his head, scooped up his files and dumped them in his briefcase again. He snapped the lid closed on the heap and shrugged at Gregg with a tired expression on his face. "Not a damn thing we can do about it right now," he said. "I'm going for coffee and a Danish. Join me? No? See you in an hour, then."

Brandon looked at Gregg. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

"Gregg?" Hannah had come up from her chair. She glared at Brandon as he passed on his way out of the courtroom. "What's going on?"

"I'm not sure," he answered. "But I don't like the look of it. They've brought in some heavy suit from the government."

"Damn it!" Hannah burst out. "My God, the Sharks broke into Tachyon's lab for some reason - once they're brought to trial, everything we know can be brought out. All of it...."

Hannah leaned heavily on the railing, intense, her fingers white where they curled around the polished mahogany. Now she sighed, and Gregg sensed the woman's weariness, her despair, and her idealistic fury. She is truly incredible. I wish I had known her before ...

With Puppetman? the inner voice interjected. What would you have done with her, Greggie? You would have dragged her through the slime like all the rest. You don't deserve her. Not until you've redeemed yourself.

"These are lives we're talking about," Hannah continued, softer now. "People who happen to be jokers. People who laugh, and love - and hurt."

"Hannah," Gregg said quietly. "You're preaching to the converted."

That earned him a fleeting smile. "I know. It's just ..." She stared at the door through which the judge and Fitzpatrick had gone. "I just wish I could do something."

"So do I," Gregg told her. But you can't, the voice answered him. Not this way. Gregg had the sense of being outmaneuvered, of being hemmed in by unseen forces behind the scenes. He could feel the Sharks' presence again, a hidden, sinister presence tugging on his line from below the surface. The sensation brought back strange feelings of yearning. If only I'd known, back then. If only I'd stumbled across them before, with Puppetman ...

An hour later, Gregg heard the words he'd somehow known he was going to hear as soon as he'd seen Fitzpatrick and van Renssaeler. Judge Sweeney cleared the courtroom of everyone but the lawyers and himself. He took a long breath before he spoke. "Mr. Hanley, I regret this, as I can tell by the reams of paper that you've stacked over there that you've done your usual exemplary job of preparing your case. However, I must tell you and your co-counsel that I have been informed of certain mitigating circumstances regarding the break-in at the Jokertown Clinic. I have already ordered the release of Mr. Battle and Mr. Puckett from custody."

"No!" Hanley slapped his hand down on his briefcase. Sweeney glowered at the prosecutor, but the judge's attention snapped back to Gregg as he stood. Gregg reached out with the Gift and felt the emotions within Sweeney. He could sense a nagging irritation within the man - evidently the judge had been looking forward to the publicity this trial would bring him as well.

"Your Honor," Gregg began, letting the Gift lend his words all the power it could, "surely the defendants are not claiming that this was a matter of national security. That's ludicrous. The Jokertown Clinic treats the poor jokers of this city. It provides a badly needed service to people who would not otherwise have it available to them, and it has done that good work for decades. The clinic is hardly a threat to the nation; in fact, it is quite the opposite. There are no hidden agendas there, no weapons, no secret laboratories, no threat to the public welfare. There are only caring people and a dedicated, caring staff."

Gregg could feel Sweeney's agreement, like an azure sea deep within him, but the Gift would only let him raise the smallest wavelets on that surface. He could also sense something else holding back that agreement, a dam of scarlet, nameless fear that made Gregg wonder. Puppetman could have raised a storm of certainty, a hurricane of assurance that would have shattered that dam. With Puppetman, Sweeney would have nodded and smiled and spread his hands wide. "I have never heard anything more convincing," he would have said. "I have never been so moved...."

The words flared with the Gift. Incandescent, they battered against the dark fear and fell guttering into silence. Something inside Sweeney was stronger than the Gift. Gregg could sense the seed of compassion the Gift found within the man, but the seed was locked in stone, captured in a hold the Gift could not break.

What is it that holds him? Damn it! What use is this power if it doesn't work?

The voice chided him. Accept it as it is, Greggie. Use the Gift correctly and it will become powerful.

Sweeney was speaking. "Mr. Hanley, Mr. Hartmann, it is done. I have no choice. This court has dropped all charges against George G. Battle and Robert Joseph Puckett in the matter of the Jokertown Clinic burglary."

"Judge Sweeney," Hanley persisted "Mr. Battle is known to be attached to the Special Executive Task Force. Are Mr. Fitzpatrick and Mr. van Renssaeler claiming that the burglary of the clinic was performed at the behest of the executive branch?"

Sweeney looked at Fitzpatrick, and then back at Hanley. "I have nothing more to say on the matter at all, Mr. Hanley." Sweeney raised his hand as Hanley started to speak again. "The matter is closed. One more word, and you'll be held in contempt. Mr. Battle and Mr. Puckett have been cleared of all charges against them. That is the ruling of this court. Furthermore, I must warn both of you to be very careful as to what you say to the press outside ..." The judge was still talking, but Gregg heard nothing of it.

Brandon van Renssaeler snapped shut the locks of his briefcase. The sound was very loud in the room.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In the cab afterward, Gregg looked over to see tears gathering in Hannah's eyes. He was surprised momentarily, to see the vulnerability in the woman. She would have been a glorious puppet. She feels so deeply, so strongly....

"What now?" Hannah asked him. She stared straight ahead as the cab headed uptown. "We're sunk, right?"

Gregg reached over to her and touched her shoulder gently with his left hand, his real hand. Hannah shrugged away from him, glaring at him. "Hannah," he said, and he let the Gift, the power, touch the word. Greggie ... the voice said warningly inside him, but he ignored it. "I'm very sorry."

The tears fell then, twin droplets tracking down either cheek. Hannah brushed them away angrily. The desire to use the power came on him. Even with this poor shadow of the old ability, he knew he could make this grief that so filled her overflow. He could take her in his arms and let her sob her despair, sheltering her, and once the tears were gone, she might look up at him and ...

He was surprised at how much he wanted to do that. At how much he desired her. His hand was still out. All he had to do was touch, to say the right words garlanded with his new Gift.

He withdrew his hand. Set it on his lap and covered it with the prosthetic. That was very nearly harder to do than anything he'd ever done in his life.

She's angry and furious because this means that more people will be hurt. She cries for them, not herself. But you, Greggie ... you're just disappointed. You're feeling irritated because this means Gregg Hartmann won't get the publicity he wants. You're a sham. You're an ass.

"We're not done, Hannah," he said, ignoring the voice. "There's another way - if you're willing to trust me."

"I still don't know you well enough to trust you."

"Father Squid tells me that you couldn't trust Quasiman in the beginning, either."

That nearly brought the tears again. "Poor Quasi ..." Hannah covered her mouth with her hand, then wiped at her eyes as she looked out at the skyscraper canyon around them. "What is it you want to do, Gregg?"

"First, I have to know how much you're willing to risk," he said.

Hannah tossed her hair defiantly. "To expose the Sharks? Anything."

"This would be a true gamble. If it doesn't work, we'd have nowhere else to go. It would involve playing almost our full hand, laying it all out in the open. All or nothing. Either we cause things to break loose, or we find out once and for all that no one cares." And just incidentally, it will also give me the most exposure. Yes! I should have pushed for this from the beginning.... "On the other hand with hindsight and the publicity from the break-in, I think it's probably the way we should have gone in the first place. What do you think?"

"You're saying that we go public anyway - just lay it all out for everyone to see."

"Yes. And I think I know how."

"I'm still listening."

"Great." Gregg smiled at her. "First I think we'll stop midtown and see someone...."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Are you ready, Mr. Hartmann?"

Gregg gave the floor director a grim-faced nod and a thumbs-up. He hadn't expected to be this nervous. He'd been on Peregrine's Perch a dozen times or more over the years, though the last time - a few months after the debacle of the '88 convention - had been an unmitigated disaster. Stripped of Puppetman, shamed by Tachyon's brutal mind-controlling, and unable to speak freely with Tachyon there on the stage with him, he'd only reinforced his image as a man with a few loose wheels.

He was ready this time. This time would be much, much different.

Through the thick stage curtains, Gregg could hear the audience settle into silence. On the backstage monitor, he saw the house lights dim. The band swung into "Peri's Theme" as a single spot plucked Peregrine's announcer out of the darkness. "From our studio high atop New York City, here she is: PEEEEERRRRRegrine."

The announcer's spot flicked off. A trio of searchlights arced out over the open balcony of the studio, lancing the New York skyline with blue-white lines. In the intersection of the three beams, Peregrine appeared, the searchlights gleaming from her snow-white wings and blue-sequined flying costume. She soared into the applause, flying through the open studio windows and onto the stage as the audience roared. She smiled into their adulation and blew her traditional kiss to the back row.

As the applause died, Peregrine let her wings fold behind, no longer smiling but looking seriously into the front camera. "Thank you," she said "Thank you very much. Tonight's format is going to be a little different. As you know, our original schedule had Elephant Girl, Tom Cruise, and Cosmos & Chaos. They've consented to appear on a later show because of the importance of what we're going to talk about tonight."

The stage curtains billowed open behind Peregrine, revealing the traditional set: a couch, Peregrine's stool - the Perch. Gregg was standing alongside the couch as the curtains opened. Peregrine offered him a hand and turned her cheek. He gave her a perfunctory kiss, being careful - as the makeup people had warned him - not to actually touch skin. "Gregg Hartman," she announced to the camera.

The applause that followed was polite but hardly overwhelming. Peri's live audience, at least recently, tended to be largely jokers. Since the rise and fall of the Rox, New York had lost much of its luster as a tourist city, and nats tended to stay away from anything having to do with the wild card. Hartmann's reputation among the jokers was mixed. To some he was still the saviour of J-Town; to others, he'd been tarnished by the '88 failure and his recent stand against the Rox. He could feel their coolness toward him, washing from the tiers of seats like a winter wind.

Not yet. They aren't ready yet.

Peregrine had wanted to tape the show. It was Gregg who had insisted on the live audience, knowing that he needed them. He nodded to them now: his tools. For the last four days, the network had been running teasers: a black-and-white still picture of Peregrine's empty set and the legend underneath: WARNING: WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO LEARN ON FRIDAY WILL SHOCK YOU. The secret of Peri's guest list held; speculation and curiosity had peaked. The promos and resultant publicity had resulted in huge lines for tickets to the show; it was estimated that Peri's Nielsen ratings would go through the roof tonight.

The newfound power inside Gregg ached.

In the last few weeks, he'd consolidated their information. Gregg had called everyone with whom he had a vestige of influence, asking questions with a growing enthusiasm, researching the erratic trail of the Sharks and uncovering a filmy web of deceit and ugliness that amazed even him. He'd consulted with Furs, once one of his campaign directors and now a media consultant, deciding with him, Hannah and Father Squid the best way to present their case. What they'd put together was powerful, powerful enough that even Gregg was moved by it.

He didn't hate the Sharks as Hannah did. He loved them. They were going to turn things around for Gregg Hartmann, and tonight, tonight was the beginning.

Peregrine took her perch. Gregg sat on the couch. "I don't think Gregg needs introduction. He's an ex-Senator from New York, a man who won the Democratic nomination for president before an unfortunate incident ended that dream, a man who has always been a champion of the rights of people of the virus."

Peri patted Gregg's hand - his left hand - and smiled at him. "And I find, Gregg, that I don't know quite where to start. What you've brought for us tonight... well, let's just say that it's nearly unbelievable."

"Unfortunately, it's all too real, Peri," Gregg answered "My investigations have convinced me of that. As to where to start, well, let's begin with a fire."

Furs had chosen and edited the footage. The studio monitors flickered; an orange inferno, a harsh roar, and the camera pulled back to show a church steeple lost in hell, wreathed in flame and smoke as sparks danced toward the sky. The scene shifted to news footage from the next morning: destruction, the ruins of the church steaming in the mist, the street a snarl of firehoses and equipment, twisted and blackened bodies sprawled in rubble.

The video was at once horrible and fascinating.

"The Church of Jesus Christ Joker burned last Black Queen Night," Gregg's voice said over the film. "We all remember that disaster, when over a hundred innocent jokers were murdered by an arsonist who blocked the church doors and then set fire to the church while those inside were worshipping. The alleged arsonist was found, but not before he killed himself in an accidental explosion. The official explanation is that the arsonist acted alone. But that's not what the chief investigator of the fire believes. I'd like you to meet Hannah Davis, whose task it was to find the arsonist."

The tape faded, and the cameras swung to follow Hannah's entrance onto the set. Gregg had to admit that the woman managed to give Peri a run for her money, and she was perfect for the revelation tonight: pretty, yet vulnerable. Again, Furs had chosen the image and tailored Hannah to match it: a blond nat, just like the millions of other whitebread Americans watching - and that fact would give more credence to the story. Furs had insisted that Hannah rest, and makeup had done the rest. The dark shadows were gone from under her eyes, and she looked rested and attractive.

Like Andrea, Gregg realized with a start, or Succubus. The memory of those two caused a stirring inside as he gazed at Hannah, and the voice rose to scold him. She isn't why you're here, it said. You're here to make amends.

Gregg could feel Hannah's nervousness as she blinked into the stage lights and the audience's applause. "You'll be fine," he whispered as she sat alongside him. He let the power ride along with the words, and was gratified to see her smile in response. He sat back as Peregrine finished Hannah's introduction.

"I was called by my boss, Malcolm Coan, around midnight," Hannah began. Her voice was hesitant at first, but Gregg let the new Gift nudge her - a touch here, a caress there - and as Hannah fell into the tale, she spoke more forcefully. "The fire had just gone to five alarms and we realized that there was going to be significant loss of life. The NYFD had already reported the blocked exits ..."

Yes, very attractive ...

For the next forty-five minutes, Gregg and Peregrine, with Hannah's assistance, walked the viewers through the serendipitous discovery of the Sharks. The presentation was a careful mixture of live interviews, tapes, and stills of various photos and documents. Father Squid, to a tremendous acclamation from the audience, was brought on early to give his account of the fire and add his corroboration of Hannah's evidence. Dr. Finn had adamantly refused to go on with them - "Even if I absolutely believed in the conspiracy, and I don't, this isn't the way to go about dealing with it. And Hannah, Gregg Hartmann, of all people?" - but the AIDS outbreak at Dr. Faneuil's Kenya clinic was public knowledge and easily covered; Margaret Durand's role in the X11A tragedy was outlined; Cameo channeled Nick Williams' fedora to give the Marilyn Monroe connection; the Hedda Hopper documents indicting Hoover, Hughes, and others as Sharks were shown; the three failed attempts against Hannah's life were chronicled; Battle's connections with Iran, the Rox, and the botched burglary of the Jokertown Clinic were exposed.

Gregg kept one thing out: Brandon van Renssaeler and the assassination or Robert Kennedy. Whether van Renssaeler was directly involved with the Sharks or not, he was right about one thing - until they found Lamia's photograph of Brandon and Sirhan Sirhan, there was no hard evidence against the man. Lamia had seemed relieved when Gregg and Hannah had told her that they weren't going to ask her to appear.

And Pan Rudo - his name was never specifically mentioned but Gregg knew that any reporter with half a brain could put together the connections of this mysterious, unnamed figure who kept cropping up in the tales. There would be people on Rudo's doorstep tomorrow. "Leave the media with some mud to sling on their own," Furs had advised them. "Believe me, they're more vicious than any Shark - it might also keep us out of a quick lawsuit."

It was ugly. It was brutal. It was extremely effective.

Gregg could feel it as they broke for the last commercial segment. The anger and disgust radiated from the audience like a bank of infrared lamps. They were primed now. Ready.

It was Gregg's turn.

The Gift that had been given him wasn't nearly as strong as his old ace. His meeting with Ackroyd had proved that, if his failure with Judge Sweeney hadn't. Jay hated Gregg so much that Gregg's power was useless. He could put the conviction in his voice, but the ones he affected had to have the core of belief already in place. It was only Creighton's odd reaction to Battle's name that had enabled him to be successful there. Gregg knew that if he tried to sway the audience before they'd seen the evidence, he would fail.

But now ...

The cameras zoomed in on Peregrine. "Gregg," she asked, leading into the question they'd agreed upon, "conspiracy theories are as old as humanity. We seem to have a difficult time believing that things simply are the way they are. Somehow it's strangely comforting to believe that there is some force acting upon us, some sinister group who controls all the hidden strings - I don't know why, maybe that way we can evade responsibility for our lives. The evidence you've all just shown is certainly compelling, but you'd be the first to admit that it's still very circumstantial. You ask for a certain leap of faith if we're to give credence to the Card Sharks. How would you answer those who say that the Sharks are just another Illuminati?"

Gregg gave a slow, deliberate sigh as if bending under the awful burden of what they'd just shown. As he did so, as the cameras panned in on his face, he opened the gates in his mind and let the Gift spill out. His words found the emotions of those listening and followed the threads back, strengthening them, deepening the flow, beginning the slow feedback between himself and them.

"Peri, I would tell you first that I've never earned your trust," he began, and heard the echo inside: You're damned right about that ... From some of the audience there came a soft protest, but Gregg raised his right hand, smiling sympathetically as the prosthesis glittered dully in the lights.

"No. I'd like to believe that I've made some small contribution, but - for whatever reasons, and I'm beginning to question just what those reasons might be - I've never accomplished all I could or hoped to do. I ask you this, first of all: please, please do not let my own failures blind you to the truth of what we've brought here tonight."

Gregg paused, looking back at Hannah, at Father Squid, at Peregrine and the others on the stage. He could feel the pulse of the studio inside himself, all the emotions beating in time to his own heart. "I don't expect you to believe because Gregg Hartmann says it's so," he continued. "We had people refuse to appear tonight because of my involvement, and I can sympathize with their feelings. They're right. Gregg Hartmann doesn't deserve that kind of trust. Instead, believe because you've seen and heard our evidence with your own eyes and ears. Believe because you've felt the hatred and prejudice yourselves. Believe because you've experienced the pain and now you look at Hannah and Father Squid and you see your own pain reflected in their lives. Believe - "

Gregg stopped. The linked emotions of the crowd hammered at him, made him take a breath that nearly sobbed. He rose from the couch where he sat with Hannah, Father Squid, and Cameo. He felt the tears gather in the corners of his eyes. Careful ... You can't let this be seen as another breakdown....

He gestured, softly pounding a fist into the cupped palm of the prosthesis as if it were the top of a lectern. "Believe because everything good in you is crying out in outrage and fury. And with belief comes the next question: what do we do about it?"

Like a wave crashing against rocks, the question sent shattered anger flashing. There were shouted answers from the audience, but Gregg raised his hand for quiet again.

"Hannah had to face that question." Gregg gave Hannah a long glance, knowing that the cameras would follow his lead. He extended his hand to her; they touched fingers briefly. "Imagine this young woman's dilemma, if you will. Imagine uncovering something more vile and disgusting than anything you or I have ever imagined, and then finding that no one wants to believe you. Imagine having to give up your job, your home, the whole structure of your life, because that's the only way you can find the truth. And imagine, if you can, being hounded, reviled, threatened, and nearly killed for your efforts. Hannah - "

Gregg stopped, shaking his head, and he let the gift swell and build until the sympathy of the audience threatened to burst. "Hannah knew that if she came forward with this, she would not be believed. She knew that she didn't have the clout to force those in power to listen. At best, her hard work would be swept under the rug and buried. She also knew that if she waited too long, the Sharks would find her and her evidence, and they would ... well, that's best left unsaid. So, in wisdom or folly, she looked for a voice who would speak for her. She came to me."

Gregg smiled at Hannah. She nodded back to him. Gregg held the pose long enough to know that the cameras caught the interchange, then turned back.

"I think Hannah thought she'd made a mistake there at first." Gregg gave the half-smile that had been the political cartoonist's icon for him over the years. "You see, like many of you, I couldn't just accept what she'd given me. I had to do some investigation of my own. I had to check and verify all the facets of her story. And I could do one thing Hannah couldn't. I immediately confronted the man whom Hannah's evidence cites as the current head of the Sharks. Why? Because, like you, I needed to get rid of that last little shred of skepticism. I laid out what Hannah had given me, and I dared him to tell me that it was a mistake. I challenged him to refute the evidence. He did not. Instead - "

Gregg stopped. He took a long breath. They were hanging on his words now, leaning forward. The mingled emotions of the audience cocooned him. He was a chrysalis, waiting to break out of the self-made shell of years of failure.... redemption ...

"Instead, he coldly admitted that it was true," Gregg finished.

The howl of outrage drowned out anything else he might have said, and the power of their anger surged back through his Gift, nearly too powerful to handle. Gregg gaped momentarily, open-mouthed, then clamped down on his ace, slammed the mental floodgates. Careful ... This was not as easy to control as Puppetman's power had been. He felt like he was wearing mental mittens - he hadn't wanted the emotions to peak so fast. "Who is he?" someone shouted in the audience, too loud to ignore. Gregg cursed under his breath, shaking his head. Too early ...

"We can't tell you that yet. Not until we have all the evidence we need to convict him," he answered. The answer was clumsy, out of sequence in the script they'd planned. Gregg was momentarily lost.

"Why this forum, Gregg?" Peregrine asked, saving him. One of her wings fluttered softly; a snowy feather drifted to the stage floor. "Why come here?"

"I can answer that very simply, Peri," Gregg said, finding himself once more. "First, I did it for safety, for the safety of all of us here tonight. Hannah already knows that these people will go to any lengths to stay hidden. If Hannah had been killed before she came to me, this whole mess would have stayed in the shadows, in the darkness it likes so much. Not now. Now it's too late to hide."

He turned away from Peri, letting his gaze travel over the audience as the gates of his power opened and touched the chord of their emotions. "And because we need help. We need the aid of all people of conscience, and we need the courage of those who have already been touched by the Sharks. Now that all of you know that the beast exists, we hope that more of you will come forward with your own stories, and more and more light will glare down until everyone can see exactly what horrors this prejudice and hatred bring."

The audience erupted into applause, and Gregg reveled in the sound, an orgasm of support. He let the power loose fully now, let it rip open the last restraints on them. Now ...

"More importantly," he continued, "as a lawyer I look at what we have, and know that legally the only ones we can touch are the little people. I don't want the goons and the subordinates, because they mean nothing. That would be like trying to catch a lizard by the tail - all you'll get is the tail while the lizard scurries away to grow another. I want the whole creature. To do that, we need more; to get more, we need each and every one of you. We have to know that none, none of you here will forget. We have to know that you will not permit this to continue even one day longer."

A wordless shout of affirmation came from several voices within the audience, and the reverberation made Gregg lift his head and smile. Yes ... he exulted, and echoed the word aloud.

"Yes. That's why we came here. Because true power lies within the people. Within you, and you, and you." With each word, he stabbed a forefinger toward the audience. Where Gregg pointed, people rose in support, shouting back to him, screaming. "With your help," he concluded, "we will snare the head of this beast, and when we do ..."

They waited, hanging on his words, the power, this Gift of his redemption seeming to sizzle and spark around him.

"We. Will. Slay. It." He finished each word as a thundering concussion.

They roared, they shouted, they screamed back at him. Inside, another voice shouted over the din. Remember what the Gift is for, Greggie, it warned. Remember that it's to be used for atonement, for penance, for redemption. Never forget that ...

Gregg nodded.

Redemption, it seemed, was very, very tasty.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg could already imagine the headlines in tomorrow's papers: HARTMANN UNCOVERS CONSPIRACY AGAINST WILD CARD. HARTMANN INDICTS HIGH-LEVEL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS IN PLOT.

The floor director was waving to him as he left the stage. "A phone call for you, sir," he said. Gregg took the proferred phone.

"This is Gregg Hartmann."

There was a click on the other end. He heard the popping hiss of a recording - a lone low tone, then another a half-step higher: daaaaaahnhhhh-DUM. The sequence repeated again, then again a little faster and more urgent until it was a pounding, insistent rhythm. Gregg suddenly realized what the music was: the theme from Jaws. A sudden chill prowled his spine.

He hung up the phone as if something was about to leap from the receiver and devour him.

My Sweet Lord

by Victor Milan

Walking with great deliberation, conscious of his destiny, and the eyes of the world - in the form of half a hundred news cameras - upon him, the man in the saffron robe entered the space between the shouting, cheering mob, and the armored personnel carrier that barred its entrance to the joker quarter of Cholon. The morning sun that leaned upon Saigon like a surly giant pressed sweat to his face and highlights to his shaven skull. The news services usually stayed away from the anti-wild cards riots in favor of the more politically correct demonstrations before the Presidential Pad, but today they had been tipped off, and were out in force, jostling the rioters and poking boom-microphones at the monk like dung-beetle antennas.

A man burning himself to death live and in color was what TV news was all about.

The BMP's commander watched the Buddhist monk and his assistant warily from his seat, half out of the turret, in case they got frisky with the red plastic jerricans of gasoline the assistant carried. The monk ignored him as serenely as he did the mob and the ungainly, pale-faced newsfolk. Turning his back to the armored vehicle he assumed full lotus on the griddle-hot pavement.

Visibly torn between self-importance and dismay, the assistant took the cans of gas one at a time and doused the monk with them, being careful not to get any of the fluid on himself. Then he stood to the side and drew himself to his full height, which wasn't conspicuous.

"The holy monk Thich will now immolate himself," he announced in a reedy voice - and in English, of course, the language of international news - "to protest the continued invasion of our country by the foreign monsters."

The Saigon mob was fairly well educated, as mobs go; many of its components understood English, and the rest caught the drift. The crowd roared anger, or approval, or whatever it is that communal entities bent on mayhem feel. For the slow in the street and among the viewers at home, the assistant propped placards against the empty jerricans, left and right of the monk and well clear. One read NO MORE JOKERS in English. The other repeated the message in Vietnamese.

The assistant took out a book of matches and began to fumble at it. On his third attempt he got one to light, singeing his fingers in the process. "Yi!" he yelped, and flipped the match away.

Crowd and journalists caught their breath. The burning match happened to land in the clear puddle surrounding the monk. The gasoline went up in a whoosh.

For a moment the monk was obscured by an orange wash of fire. Then the flame shot upward away from him in a mushroom cloud, to surround the figure of a man hanging in midair, two meters above the monk. For a moment it blazed like a saint's full-body halo in a pre-Renaissance religious painting. Then it collapsed inward, to outline momentarily the head and limbs and body of the man.

Then it vanished.

"Ahh," the floating figure said, stretching its arms, "I needed that." He was a small man for an overt Occidental, not much bigger than the Vietnamese norm, with a narrow clever face and red hair. He wore an orange sweatsuit and athletic shoes.

His cheeks pink with seeming sunburn, the monk was staring upward at the interloper. "What is the meaning of this?" the assistant demanded.

"The meaning of this is, I'm denying your pal his cheap theatrics. Get him out of here and get him a shower."

"But - "

"Hit the road, Junior, before I scorch your tuchus." He sent a squirt of fire to the pavement at the acolyte's sandaled feet. The assistant jumped. Then he grabbed the monk by a skinny biceps and hauled him upright. With the supreme moment passed into anticlimax, flaming death didn't look so appealing any more; the monk allowed himself to be led away without protest.

The flying man settled into the pool of gas from which he had sucked the flame. A jet of fire from his fingertips reignited it. When it burned off, he was still standing there, arms akimbo, grinning like a fox.

"Jumpin' Jack Flash at your service," he told the assembled media. "Normally, as a good libertarian, I wouldn't dream of interfering with our little friend's right to light up anything he damn well pleased, himself included. But today I decided to make an exception, just to piss you people off."

The crowd was standing well back away from all this. The journalists grumbled among themselves. A couple shook their fists at the interloper.

"What about allegations that Vietnam is being overrun by jokers?" a British reporter shouted. The flying ace was, after all, a semi-official spokesman for the government of the Republic of Free Vietnam. He was rumored to be like this with its President. Perhaps anticlimax could be partly redeemed in embarrassing questions.

"If you brought all the jokers in the world here, they wouldn't make up five percent of the population," JJ said. "Get real."

"What about the way wealthy American jokers are dominating the economy?" asked a woman reporter for Frontline.

"At least now there's an economy to dominate," Flash said. "Even if that were true, which of course it isn't."

He cocked his head at her. "Didn't I see you do a feature a couple years ago, about how America was shortchanging her jokers? Now they come over here, and you bitch because they've got it too good. Make up your damn mind, lady - "

He broke off because some of the reporters and the mob were trying to crane past the parked BMP, at something going on in the streets of the joker district. JJ Flash frowned. He wasn't used to being upstaged. He rose ten feet in the air and turned around.

An astounding cavalcade was approaching down the broad street of the former Chinese quarter. To the skirl of chants, chimes, and pipes, came a bevy of maidens of celestial beauty, hung about with flowers, and trinkets of ivory and gold: the sort of Indian gaud usually attendant upon Indian gods. So celestial was their beauty, in fact, that their bare lotus feet failed to touch the pavement as they walked.

Next up were a band of youths, boys and girls alike, dressed in the saffron robes of sannyasi, Indian ascetics. These were raising the musical din, clanging kartal cymbals, thumping mridansa drums with the heels of their hands, blowing wood flutes and singing songs of praise.

And behind came the evident object of that praise: a joker with an opulent belly spilling over a simple loincloth. His head was the head of an elephant, with one tusk. He carried a parasol in his trunk to shade himself. He rode a giant white rat whose eyes were the color of blood.

"Now, that's something you don't see every day," JJ Flash remarked to the air.

And way down inside him, a voice breathed, Ganesha. Oh, wow.

Oblivious, the cavalcade danced straight up to the flank of the BMP. The Apsarases - as JJ recalled the celestial babes were called - winged out to either side and froze into pretty curtsies, still in midair. Ganesha dismounted and danced up to the half-track.

"Please to vacate your vehicle immediately," he sang, "for I have no wish to put you at risk of harm."

The vehicle commander blinked down at him.

A fall of flowers rained upon Ganesha's elephant head, from a point in the air about three feet above the crown.

That did it. The President of Free Vietnam had made good on the hollow promise of the former Socialist Republic, turning Vietnam into a haven for the oppressed wild cards of the world - and damned near all of them were, by now. Cops who could not contain that customary Asian distaste for human deformity which animated today's mob had been booted off the force long since. So jokers did not particularly bother the APC commander. And he didn't know squat about the Hindu religion, so he had no idea he was being confronted by the spitting image of an actual god, offspring of Shiva and Parvati.

But flowers materializing in midair ... that got his attention. He yelped into his intercom and unassed his track right smart, followed in short order by the other two crew.

Ganesha smiled. "Know that I am the Remover of Obstacles," he sang in his high, pure voice. His acolytes cheered. The Apsarases beamed celestially. The rat sat on his haunches and cleaned his whiskers. His incisors were the color of the acolytes' robes.

Ganesha put forth his hands, pressed plump palms to the hot metal skin of the armored carrier. The vehicle shimmered and vanished. A gust of wind blew outward into the faces of the mob and the blank camera eyes. It smelled vaguely of sandalwood.

A single sigh rose up from the crowd on either side of the police line.

"I'll be dipped in shit," JJ Flash announced, "and fried for a corn dog."

Ganesha danced forward, through the space where the BMP had been. The rat waddled behind, and then the Floating Celestial Babes fell in, and the yellowrobe acolytes, singing and tootling up a storm. The crowd bolted away from the guru, front ranks battling those behind in their frenzy to get away from this apparition who could make fourteen and half metric tons of armored fighting vehicle disappear. Not to mention the rat.

Ganesha raised a plump hand, first two fingers extended. "Peace," he declared, in a voice both penetrant and musical. "Peace - and love. These are the tidings I bear you."

More flowers rained upon the mob. The protestors quit trying to escape, turned back to stare in wonder.

Ganesha strode into the crowd, straight up to a sullen man, big for a Vietnamese, who stood with his shirttail out, his bangs in his eyes, and a length of lumber in one hand. He had come prepared to crack joker heads.

"I am a joker," the guru sang, "and a holy fool. He who would harm any of the Lord Krishna's children, let him first strike me."

His merry eyes met those of the club-wielder. "Strike, my child, if that is what you will. No harm shall come to you."

The aspiring joker-basher dropped to his knees and began to weep. Ganesha laid a soft hand upon his head. The crying stopped.

"My peace upon you, child," he said, and passed on, into the heart of the mob. It gave before him like the sea before a supertanker. Behind him, the Vietnamese man tossed away his two-by-four and joined the ranks of chanting faithful, clapping his hands and dancing clumsily, like a trained bear.

The camcorders were whirring, sucking the spectacle in through their optics. "This is where I check out," JJ Flash said. He darted down a side street and out of sight into a doorway.

A moment, and a figure emerged. A very different figure - gangly-tall and blond, with wire-rimmed spectacles before blue eyes that blinked at the vehemence of the Southeast Asian sun. He wore Western jeans and a blue chambray shirt with flowers embroidered on the pockets.

"Ganesha," he breathed. "Far out."

He moved quickly back into the intersection. Guru and company were making their musical way toward the center of Saigon. More of the protestors had broken away to join them. The rest were beginning to drift away, with hanging heads and slack arms. Their intention to harm had evaporated, like the Buddhist monk's resolve to burn.

Mark Meadows knelt, picked up a flower that had avoided being trampled by bare pious feet. It was a lotus blossom, red, heavy, and fragrant. He raised it, sniffed it.

The flower faded. It did not create a puff of breeze the way the BMP had. It simply melted back into the air.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Madam President," the man in the suit was saying in sonorous American English. He had a nose like a flesh icicle that had begun to drip, and ears that consisted of bunches of limp pink tendrils that stirred with a feeble life of their own. He wore a blue pinstriped suit, well-tailored to his form, which was on the ample side. "We have come to bring certain matters to your attention."

The Saigon night, hot but none too black, tried to press itself in the tall windows of the French colonial villa the President's supporters had insisted she make her residence. Night was Moonchild's element. She could not bear the touch of the sun. The Republic's enemies - like President Barnett, and George Bush before him - made much of the fact.

Her audience chamber was the former ballroom, high-ceilinged, with an exquisitely polished floor of European hardwoods. Parachutes tie-dyed in firework explosions of color hung flanking her chair of state, which looked a great deal like a common camp stool, and was. To the dismay of her allies, she permitted no guards in the chamber with her, though there was one other person present tonight. But she was an ace, mistress of the martial arts, possessed of metahuman speed and powers of recuperation; if she encountered danger she couldn't handle, a handful of Vietnamese People's Army vets or expatriate joker kid-gang members from New York armed with Kalashnikovs wouldn't be much use.

The President of Free Vietnam gazed up at the joker spokesman and felt guilty for her impulses. Which were to grab him by the front of his immaculate vest and shake him and shout, Out with it, then, and don't waste my time mouthing the obvious, you pompous fat fool!

She sighed. After two years of rulership she had never sought, and had no idea how to escape from, her soul was growing threadbare and grimy, like a rag in one of the tenderloin bars that had sprung back up aboveground with the fall of the communist regime.

"What might those matters be, Mr. Sorenson?" she asked.

He glanced at the others of his delegation: a sturdy man in a polo shirt whose collar was stretched almost to bursting around his muscular neck, and whose skin had the color and apparent consistency of none-too-well-dressed cement; a small precise woman with a yellow beak in place of nose and lips; and a handsome black man whose knees were articulated backwards.

"First of all," Sorenson said, "under increasing pressure from the Barnett administration, American wild cards - refugees - are arriving daily in ever-increasing numbers."

Moonchild nodded. She was a small woman, dressed in close-fitting black. The half of her face exposed by her yin-yang mask was Asian, and lovely. Black hair hung straight down her back, glossy as Japanese lacquer.

"I was aware of that," she murmured, and wondered when she had learned to be sarcastic. She who was so caring, so giving, so accepting.

Tock. At the sound the delegation stiffened, and its eyes fluttered over Moonchild's shoulder, past the hangings. Moonchild paid no attention.

"They, ah, they are being housed in quite intolerable conditions." After a moment's consternation Sorenson got his momentum back. "Shanty-towns, to be blunt."

"Are you living in a shanty, Mr. Sorenson?"

Tock-tock. Sorenson shook his head, his ear fringes wagging. He had begun to sweat, though the old colonial villa was equipped with excellent air-conditioning.

"As you must be aware, we are also receiving an influx of Vietnamese refugees from the North. And, to be frank, the poorest of you American refugees is wealthy by Vietnamese standards. Most could find better accommodation more readily than their Vietnamese counterparts, if they were willing to do things such as share quarters with one another."

"And be gouged by landlords!" the beaked woman exclaimed. "You're permitting these Vietnamese to indulge in unbridled capitalism!"

"The Vietnamese are under the apprehension that their homes are their own." Tock-tock. Tock.

"And back home," the bull-necked man said, "we're protected against having to compete with people like these dinks."

"We can hardly erect trade barriers against the Vietnamese in Vietnam."

The tocking sound really took off, like a machine gun in a jungle ambush. The delegation frankly stared past Moonchild at the rear of the ballroom.

Croyd Crenson stood by a window. In his current incarnation he was tall and skinny, with protruding faceted yellow eyes and black segmented antennae emerging from his unruly shock of black hair. He had his normal human left hand pressed, fingers splayed, on the top of a wooden table.

With the pointed chitinous foreclaw of his right he was stabbing the well-pocked surface between his fingers, moving from one to another with increasing speed.

The hard-shelled fingertip bit into the web between his first and second human fingers. "Fuck!" he screamed, waved his hand in the air and then stuffed it into his mouth to suck at the injury.

"Croyd," Moonchild said. "Please."

"Oh." He took his hand out of his mouth, examined it, giggled. "Oh. Sorry, your Excellency. Sorry. Heh-heh."

Moonchild turned her attention back to the delegates, who were eyeing Croyd as if he had produced a baby's leg and begun to gnaw it.

"Mr. Sorenson, if you are so concerned about the welfare of the less fortunate refugees, you might open your own purse to them. I understand you were able to get a great deal of your assets overseas before the freeze went into effect."

"But that's the government's job!"

"The Republic has made great strides economically in the past two years," Moonchild said. "Much of the ground has been rained with the assistance of wild card refugees, a fact which many of the Vietnamese people fail to appreciate. Nonetheless, this is a poor country, facing long recovery from decades of abuse. We try to help those who truly need it. But the able-bodied must shift for themselves."

They stared at her incredulously. "But we're Americans!" the black man burst out.

The room filled up with a gold glow and tinkling music, the scent of sandalwood. The delegates spun.

Ganesha stood in the doorway. The glow did not seem to originate from him. It simply surrounded him.

"I hope very much that I do not intrude - "

"As a matter of fact - " the beaked woman began pugnaciously.

"- my guests were on the verge of departure," Moonchild finished, in a voice like silk rustling over an ancient Korean sulsa knight's swordblade.

Croyd scrabbled the tips of his right fingers on the tabletop. "Want I should show you people out?" he asked.

The delegates could find their own way. Beaming, Ganesha stood aside to let them leave, and blessed them as they hurried past. Croyd went back to playing his game with his fingers.

Feeling an inexplicable tension at the pit of her belly, Moonchild said, "How may I help you, guru?" That cynical canker in her soul - or was it just JJ, bleeding through the increasingly porous barriers between personae? - answered, money. Power. The usual.

The guru tittered. "Already you have, by extending shelter to the wild cards, among whom is numbered my humble self. Now, it is I who must ask, may I help you?"

Moonchild studied him. He appeared harmless enough, pale, fat, and jolly, like an Asian Santa Claus with a trunk. She had learned to put small stock in appearance. Maya, the Hindus called it.

"What manner of help, guru?"

"To bring peace to one who knows no peace, child."

Something about the way he said one made her look at him narrowly. Does he know?

She smiled weakly. "The Free Republic has many enemies, guru, some near, some far. If you can win us peace from them, you would do us a very great service."

"I will happily do what I can, my child," Ganesha said. "But the peace I am speaking of can only exist, or not exist - "

He extended his trunk and touched its tip between Moonchild's small breasts.

"- here."

The touch was so confident yet pure that she did not attempt to ward it off, and took no offense. She felt her eyes fill with tears. She lowered her head.

"If you can provide such peace," she whispered, "you are a miracle worker indeed."

"I - uh, I guess I'm intruding here, huh?" Croyd said. "Heh-heh."

Neither paid him any attention. He twitched his antennae and sidled out, chuckling to himself.

Moonchild felt the guru's warmth, smelled the perfumed oils with which his roly-poly person was anointed. "The gift is mine to give, my child," he said. "I am a sat-guru, a teacher of reality. Do you wish to learn?"

She jackknifed. The foreshocks of transition were upon her. It never used to be this way.

She jumped up, away from his outstretched hand. "I - I must beg permission to leave you, guru," she choked out, and bolted.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Mark came to himself in the bathroom off the parlor behind the audience hall, what he referred to internally as his changing-room. Moonchild had already gone to her knees on the cool tile, which saved him the risk of damaging them as he fell. He vomited into the chipped-enamel toilet.

When it was done and he felt a measure of strength return to his legs, he rose, went to the sink, splashed water in his face and rinsed his mouth. Then he raised his eyes to the mirror. He felt a visible resistance to looking, like a membrane stretched before his face. He made himself push through, and see.

The face was his own ... at least, it was the temporary face. The face he most often wore. Lined and haggard: the face of a tired specter.

"It's getting worse," he husked, his throat raw from puking. At least the voice that emerged was his own. He was getting regular aftershocks from the Moonchild persona now, talking in her voice even after the change, feeling her personality and thoughts swirling in confusion among his own for minutes, keeping him dizzy and unsure of his identity. It was the consequence of calling her too often.

But he had no choice. She was the President of Free Vietnam, probably the first who could be said to have been freely elected ever. He was merely her Chancellor.

She was an ace. And still, to most Central and South Vietnamese, a heroine. He was just a nat, whose own role in the Liberation was respected, but far overshadowed by Moonchild's.

He was her anointed spokesman. But in Asia appearance counted for much. For Moonchild to rule, to maintain a semblance of harmony among the tendentious and generally well-armed factions who formed her support base, she had to be seen.

What that was doing to Mark's mind and body ... He shook his head. He wanted to lie down and sleep forever.

In the audience chamber, serene, alone, and glowing, waited the guru. Mark felt a great longing well up within him, as great as the longings he had felt for his daughter during the years of enforced separation. Yet he could not bear to face Ganesha and his terrible calm.

Someone - French colonial official, American proconsul, Communist bureaucrat - had installed a phone in the bathroom. Mark picked it up, spoke in a frog voice to give instructions for the guru to be escorted from the hall and offered lodging for the night, and then lowered the toilet seat barely in time to collapse onto it.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Bent over a notebook computer held by a young joker in a colorful dashiki, Mark Meadows glanced up to see a man rolling through the bands of white sunlight sprayed onto the corridor walls by the windows at a purposeful amble that missed being a swagger by that much. He was much shorter than Mark, and a ways older, with a flamboyant seal-colored moustache with waxed tips, which showed far less gray than the hair cropped close to his squarish head. He wore a photojournalist's jacket over a pale yellow shirt, and baggy khaki trousers.

Mark smiled at the joker, sent him on his way with a thanks and a quick recommendation, then turned to meet the newcomer. "J. Bob," he said smiling almost despite himself.

The man grinned beneath his moustache. "Guilty as charged. The minister without portfolio returns."

They shook hands. Because that gesture was inadequate for what existed between them, each man clasped the other quickly on the shoulder. Neither was comfortable with New Age touchy-feely rituals, though Mark felt somewhat guilty about the fact.

The two began to walk in the direction the moustached man had been headed, in the general direction of Mark's office.

"Have you heard the news?" Mark asked, his long face growing grave.

"Hartmann's revelations?" Major J. Robert Belew, United States Army Special Forces, retired nodded. "JAL had it on the big screen as we were on final approach. Plane was packed with joker refugees out of Seattle, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Mark looked at the smaller man. In many ways he represented everything Mark, the Last Hippie, had stood against since his stumbling into a kind of fitful political consciousness at the tag-end of the radical Sixties. This man - a palpable Green Beret Nam vet, conservative, authoritarian, militaristic, and self-describedly ruthless - was the most valued advisor to Vietnam's President, and her Chamberlain.

He was also Mark's best friend on Earth. Literally, with Tisianne - Tachyon - home ruling Takis.

"It's like you said all along, man. There is a conspiracy against us wild cards, and it reaches way up into the government."

"Given my experiences, it wasn't that hard to figure out: 'By their fruits shall ye know them,' to stay with Matthew." He shook his head. "At least the evil now has a name."

"Card Sharks."

Belew's moustache quirked to grin. "Got a ring to it, no? Ahh, I never thought I'd hate to be proved right. And by that limp liberal Hartmann, to boot."

"Gregg's a great man - " Mark began by reflex. Then he caught himself, rewound. "Well, he's a good man. The stress just got to be too much for him - "

"A man with good intentions, I'll grant," Belew said, "and recall what the road to Hell is paved with? Hartmann's a typical liberal politician. He looked to increase his own power by identifying himself with an ethnic minority, promoting its difference from mainstream America and its identity as a special interest group. That group happened to be us. And maybe he did the wild cards some good - but in the long run, the programs he helped push through gave Mr. Hardworking American Nat Taxpayer the impression that he was being bled to support a surly and uncontrollable super-race and an underclass of resentful monsters.

"That fractionalization of our society, which Hartmann so ably promoted and exploited, is one of the big reasons we're strangers in a strange land now, with planeloads more arriving each day. When you turn a nation into a collection of competing ethnicities, as the Welfare State has so ably accomplished, you generate losers. And we wild cards have duly lost."

Mark chewed on his lower lip. Reflex denials rose to the top of his throat and stayed there. He could take a look at Vietnam, before Liberation or after, and see the sick truth, that once a group became hipped on ethnic pride and ethnic awareness, it found it all too easy to slide on down the road to ethnic cleansing. Gregg Hartmann had made much of the common humanity of nats and wild cards; but the bulk of his actions had gone to emphasizing the difference.

He gave his head a small quick shake, like shedding water after a shower. See what he does to you, man? Belew liked to compare himself to Lucifer, and Mark could see the point; the master intriguer and shadow-operator could so easily lead Mark to stand his own most cherished beliefs on their head. It was why Mark could never entirely trust the man, for all that had passed between them.

"Unca Bob!" With a rainsquall patter of rubber soles on tile, a slim figure came flying down the hall to wrap Belew in a tangle of bare arms and legs and flying blond hair.

Belew was not a big man, but he was solidly built, thick through the chest, though he carried just the beginning of a paunch. The person who'd enwrapped him was several inches taller than he, and not light despite adolescent skinniness just beginning to fill out into adulthood. But he managed to absorb the happy impact without backing up more than two steps.

Mark looked on with a trace of wry envy. It was everything he could do not to go ass-over-teakettle when his daughter hit him like that. Sprout Meadows' mind was that of a four-year-old, perpetually, but her appearance was that of the fit and healthy seventeen year old she otherwise was.

With great gentleness Belew unwound the girl, who was smothering his face with kisses. She wore a white T-shirt with teddy bears on it, and cut-off shorts. "I'm happy to see you, too, Leaf. But let an old man breathe."

She laughed musically and stepped away from him. Leaf was his pet nickname for her. Sometimes it exasperated her, but she was happy now, and loved it.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"'Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,'" he paraphrased. "Doing your Dad's bidding."

"Did you bring me something?" she asked.

He rubbed his chin, made a mouth, rolled his eyes as if at the effort of searching his memory. Sprout put her hands behind her back and tried not to writhe with impatience. Just when she was about to burst, Belew made a Groucho waggle of the eyebrows and stuck a hand into a pocket of his photojournalist's vest.

"I happened to run into this one day," he said, coming up with a palm-sized pink Gund polar bear arranged so that it appeared to be holding a box of Callard & Bowser's butterscotch in its lap. "She told me she belonged with Sprout Meadows, and would I please give her a ride to where you were. She had to twist my arm, but she talked me into it."

Sprout took the bear, hugged it to herself, kissed its forehead. Then she caught Belew's neck in a hug that would have choked a lesser man, and kissed his receding hairline. "Oh, Unca Bob! Thank you, thank you!"

Cradling the bear carefully between her breasts, she tore open the package. She offered it to her father, Belew, and the bear; politely refused by all three, she unwrapped a candy, popped it into her mouth, and began to suck on it with a blissful expression as she rocked her new toy.

"I wish you wouldn't give her sweets, man," Mark said. They set off again, Sprout swinging nonchalantly between them, cheeks concave. The whitewashed corridor had a hushed, cathedral quality to it, despite the maroon-tiled floors and a fair degree of traffic. A tiny wizened Nung woman with a scarf with penguins on it tied around her head looked up from her old-fashioned wringer-mounted mop bucket, nodded at Mark and smiled toothlessly as he passed. He smiled and nodded back. "I don't want her turning into a sugar junkie.

"Stuff. And nonsense. It's not as if she's getting loaded down with calories - she's almost as skinny as you are. Let the kid live a little."

Mark pouted. "Well - "

"And spare me the food-faddist 'ills of processed sugar' rap. You're a biochemist. You know perfectly well that sugar is sugar, just as a rose is a rose is a rose."

Despite himself, Mark chuckled. Had he truly objected to Belew giving his daughter candy, Belew would have cut it out in an instant. But chaffering like this was a standing routine, a way of bleeding existential tension from between two such unlikely friends and allies: the Last Hippie and the Last Cold Warrior.

"What did you find out?" Mark asked.

"Much of a muchness. The Canadians resent the Americans, but they buy into the 'aces, guns, drugs - scourge of our cities' rap almost as wholly as Barnett does. They'll vote against us at the UN, and try their best to honor the embargo if it goes through. The Japanese, on the other hand think we're grotesque monsters, but that's not really all that far off how they feel about American nats. In any event, Japanese culture is to a large extent based on swallowing personal preference in pursuit of the bottom line, and naming that duty."

Mark started to frown, then grinned. Belew loved to make outrageous and sweeping generalizations, the more insensitive the better. At one time Mark would have responded with reflex liberal outrage. He wasn't so easily caught any more. Besides, Belew had a point.

"So the Japanese are smiling and nodding and making bland noises about how they have to 'consider the problem from every angle,' and stonewalling on the vote in the UN. Meanwhile, they're more than happy to trade with us - and that's unlikely to change if the embargo goes through."

"What about the Chinese?"

"The Dragon likes us, because we make Hanoi unhappy. As long as the Northerners are willing to bleed their populace to keep a million men under arms, the Chinese will do anything they can to keep a good percentage of those bad boys peering South. And they want the hard currency our economy's starting to generate, and they're big enough that they flat don't care what the rest of the world thinks. So there's a nice fat veto waiting for the embargo, whenever it hits the Security Council."

He raised his big, square hands. "The situation is far from ideal, I grant, but - "

They fetched up against a zone of humid heat like a force field trying to hold them back. The wall fell away to their right, opening into a courtyard garden ten yards square, with water singing down a pile of boulders into a mossy pool, and great-leaved plants crowded together amid a pervasive green smell. On a bench beside the pool sat Ganesha. He rose.

Belew froze in mid-step. "What're you doing here?"

"I am Ganesha."

"I know that. What I want to know is what you're doing here."

"Hey, ease off, man," Mark said, with unaccustomed sharpness, feeling tension pull his brows together. "He's my guest."

Belew made a mouth. "Is this another of your Sixties-nostalgia plunges? The guru you never had?"

Inside his head, a clamor of voices. Mark swayed. Sometimes it seemed he had a whole auditorium-load in there, instead of four - and another, hopefully buried so deep it would never surface again.

"He is my guest, Major." Mark's lips, Moonchild's voice. Not a falsetto, but an actual woman's voice, issuing from Mark's unquestionably masculine six-four frame. The others showed no response to the lapse. They had been coming frequently of late.

"You are the Minister, Major Belew," Ganesha said in his piping voice. "I have heard much of you."

From J. Bob's frown he turned to Sprout. "And what delightful creature have we here? Surely, it is an angel, all golden."

Sprout giggled. "I'm not an angel," she said, "I'm Sprout. This is my Daddy." She hugged Mark, laid her head briefly on his shoulder. "And this is my new pink bear. Are you a heffalump?" She always had trouble with the word, and fell back as usual on the Winnie the Pooh rendition.

"I am a man, little miss," Ganesha said to the girl. "But I am blessed with the head of an elephant."

"Oh." Her blue eyes lit. "Neat! Can I touch your nose?"

She reached a hand to the guru's pale trunk. It extended, twined once about her slim wrist to stroke the tanned back of her hand with its motile pink tip. She giggled.

"It is a wonderful child you have, Dr. Meadows," Ganesha said.

Belew frowned. Eyes and heart full, Mark could only nod.

"Rudo!" a voice bellowed. "Ruuuuuudo!"

Mark jumped. The sudden noise was like having a bulldozer crash into the Garden of Eden. He looked wildly left and right, one hand going around Sprout's shoulders, the other to the pocket that held the vials of powder in which resided his friends.

"Looks like Mr. Crenson finally switched on CNN," Belew remarked dryly.

Croyd appeared in the corridor, skidding slightly on the tile. Black taloned toes had burst through his shoes, and were interfering with his traction.

"That motherfucker," he raged. "I should have killed him. I'm gonna kill him."

Mark moved toward him. Croyd was far gone in the amphetamine psychosis of his waking phase's downside. His judgment was, to say the least, impaired.

"Here, man, I know how you feel," he said soothingly. "But are you sure you should, like, rush into anythingr"

Croyd glared him back. "Don't try to stop me!" he shouted. "Don't give me any of your hippie-dippy love crap! Rip his fucking arms off and beat him to death with 'em - that's what I'm gonna do!"

"My child," Ganesha said mildly, "there is so much violence and misery in the world. Do you truly want to increase them? Would you be happier walking the path of peace?"

Croyd held out two fingers in a V. "Peace?"

He turned the fingers toward his face and stared between them at the guru with one burning yellow eye. "Peace on you, fatso! I'm outta here!"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"No, I don't want a drink," Croyd Crenson cackled to the pretty mahogany-faced stewardess as the Indonesian Air Lines 747 banked over the South China Sea. He had the anechoic cavern of coach virtually to himself; there was not much demand for flights leaving Saigon these days. "But if you got any crank - "

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In his office in the villa he occupied to keep his people - Moonchild's people - happy, Mark had a desk. It was a fine old desk, exquisitely carved of oak, imported by some colonialist and well-cherished the last few years by some Party functionary as one of the perqs of life under revolutionary socialism. It wasn't unusually big, not like the half-acre Power Desks you'd find in corporate HQs in New York - or that he imagined you'd find there, anyway - but grand withal, definitely appropriate to his dual role as President and Chancellor of Free Vietnam. Mark chose not to sit behind the desk, but beside it, in a plain wooden chair, holding his forehead with thumb and forefinger.

The air-conditioning kept more than the awful Saigon heat at bay. It also muted the cries and chanting of the crowd of protestors outside.

Belew stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, gazing at the well-dressed mob without the walls. "That actor still hanging around?"

Mark nodded. A certain fading blond ingenue American actor with a penchant for trendy causes and socialist dictators had blown into town a few days before Belew. With so many of his old cronies unseated and facing indictment for things like murder and embezzlement on a Cyclopean scale, the last several years had not been kind to him. So he had come to identify himself with the dispossessed and downtrodden of Moonchild's regime: the former bureaucrats and Party members from the old days, who wanted their jobs and their privilege back.

Like a membrane around the protest stood a cordon of police in riot gear. They weren't there to keep the demonstrators in line. They were there to keep the much larger mob of Saigon citizens beyond from falling on the Party folk and beating the crap out of them.

"We have troubles enough," Belew said. "Maybe it's time to take up arms against them. Why don't you let me whack him, make it look like Hanoi did it. He hasn't made a decent movie for years."

Mark stared at him. Belew, half-turned from the window, regarded him with that studied infuriating blandness he displayed when he didn't intend to let you know if he was serious or not. Mark felt a stab of fury: How dare he still test me, after all these years!

And of course he felt instantly contrite. It's the strain, man, I'm sorry.

Mark, came JJ Flash's voice, gende for once, you didn't say anything. No need to apologize to the man.

He shook his head. When he glanced at Belew again, the man's expression had gone from bland to blank. The older man was trying to mask pity and concern, and that pissed Mark off all over again.

"Forget it," he said with a wave of his hand. "The way the world media treat us, we'd get blamed for it even if Hanoi did do it, man."

Belew laughed. "There was a time when you'd have tried to talk me out of it on purely humanitarian grounds."

"Hanging around with you has made me worse."

"Something else that's getting worse," Belew said, "is our old friend Colonel Nguyen, up in the Highlands. He's starting to lean on the Montagnards and make noises about bolting to Hanoi."

"He wouldn't do that." To hang onto their own power in the face of the successful revolt of the South and increasing dissatisfaction in the North, the aging rulers of the rump Socialist Republic of Vietnam had resorted to increasingly savage repression. "They're like Nazis up there."

"Hitler was a socialist, after all. And Nguyen probably doesn't take their kill-the-wild-cards all that personally, since he's a nat in good standing."

"Yeah, but they're also liquidating anybody they even suspect of disloyalty. He fought against them. How can he expect they'd do anything but knife him, first chance they got?"

Belew laughed. "The capacity for self-deception in those who believe themselves practical men of politics is limitless. It's one of the great forces of nature. Besides, as I'm fond of saying, politics makes strange bedfellows; look at our other old friend, Dong, the ex-Saigon crimelord. Since you bankrupted his racket by legalizing drugs, he's in the vest pocket of both the DEA and Hanoi, all the while running smack from the old Golden Triangle CIA plantations in Thailand."

"So you think he's serious?"

Belew shrugged. "He wants Moonchild to kiss him and tell him how important he is." Initially skeptical of Moonchild's leadership of the revolt, Nguyen had turned into a fervent admirer. He had spent the last couple of years growing progressively sulkier that his change of heart hadn't won him a look at what Moonchild had beneath that slinky black outfit.

"No way, man. I've gotta find something to do with all these refugees. And the violence keeps getting worse. A gang beat an Austrian joker to death on the street in Cholon last night."

Anti-wild card zealots were in a definite minority in the South; most Vietnamese, urban and rural alike, did not really love the jokers, but what they wanted first and foremost was to be left alone. Moonchild's regime gave them that, for the first time in at least a century.

But the really determined few were a nasty lot. They were getting open encouragement from Hanoi and covert help from America - and no doubt from the Card Sharks.

Belew nodded. "Somebody blew the doors off Rick's Cafe American with a hand grenade a couple of days ago." Rick's was a popular wild card hangout in downtown Saigon, off Freedom Street. "Just like the good old days. Look, why don't I make a trip up north, show the flag, lay down some law to our rambunctious colonel, reassure the 'Yards that we have no intention of letting the Viets beat up on them?"

Mark felt tension blow out of him in a gusty sigh. Not all of it. But some. "Yeah. Would you do that? Please?" He found himself almost pleading, eyes misty that someone was sharing the strain.

Belew started to leave, caught himself at the door, turned back. "There is something else."

Mark felt the muscles at the back of his neck go rigid. "Not Ganesha again."

"Listen to me. There's something very wrong with this picture."

"It's okay, man," Mark forced himself to say calmly, "really. He's just a guest of Moonchild. It's not like he's taking over my mind or anything."

"He's been thrown out of half the petty kingdoms in India," Belew said, "and all the not-so-petty ones. He won't show his face in Europe any more. He's persona non grata in Hong Kong and Singapore. There's something going on."

"What about America?"

Belew snorted a laugh. "He's not stupid, our Hosenose. He learned from the example of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Bhagwan Rajneesh, and Dwight Gooden."

Mark raised an eyebrow at his friend. "Okay, man. Lay it on me. What do they have in common?"

"Got busted for being NIBCs, Mark," J. Bob said. "Niggers in big cars."

Mark made a face. "See, man? There's the problem there. It's prejudice, man. That's why he keeps getting chased out of places. You know how unpopular the wild cards are. The Sharks are probably on his case."

"Let's not get hypnotized, here; there'd be plenty of anti-wild card sentiment loose in the world without the help of a conspiracy."

"Ganesha's a victim of it. He's discriminated against because he's a joker."

"Not in India, Mark. If you draw an ace, it's because of good karma, and a joker means you're working off a mighty negative load all at once. Either way, you're holy. India's the only place in the Third World they don't treat jokers as kindling with legs. They love Hosenose there. He has upwards of two million followers scattered across the subcontinent."

"Don't call him 'Hosenose,' man. You're making fun of his disability."

"'Disability?' Mark, he's the spit and image of a god If there wasn't something funny going on, the Hindu kingdoms would all have put their little squabbles aside so he could rule them and lead them in squashing their Muslim neighbors."

"He'd never do that. He's a man of peace."

"He's a man of something, I'll grant you that." Belew shoved a dossier in a gray-green folder that lay on the corner of the desk toward Mark. "But I'm having Beelzebub's own time finding out just what. All I've gotten so far is a stack of press clippings. But I'm putting some inquiries out, to Interpol and some of my old buddies in the business. Of course, I'm having to be mighty roundabout, inasmuch as we're an 'oudaw regime' and all."

Mark pulled his head up. "Hey! Lay off him, man."

"I'm your national security adviser, Mark," Belew said evenly, "not to mention your chief bodyguard. You have a couple million bucks in prices on your head right now. When an ace with a mysterious past and even more mysterious powers starts hanging around the palace, it's my business to run a little background check."

"What do you mean, ace? He's a joker."

"So's Peregrine," Belew said, "but she sure can fly. Mark, he made a BMP disappear. I wish it had been that easy back when we were going mano a mono with the evil empire, let me tell you. And he surrounds himself with imaginary friends like the Apsarases, that you can see and talk to and even touch, and go away without a trace when he's through with them. What do you call somebody who can do things like that? David Copperfield?"

Mark's half-open hands waved in air, shaping vague clay. "He's, like, a holy man."

Belew sighed and sat on the corner of the desk. "You never had a guru, did you?" he asked with deceptive gentleness. "Back when the Beatles and the Who and everybody and his dog was trooping East for Enlightenment. You missed that scene, too, didn't you? You managed to get in on the peace-love-dope trip, back when everybody else was switching to burn-baby-burn. But you never did manage to jump on the old swami bandwagon."

"Stop it."

The words were spoken in a flat, hard tone, the way rapping a baton on the desk might have sounded. It was a voice Mark would never have believed of himself, before the last couple of years. Takis, Europe, the flight to the Nam, the war he had stumbled into leading.... He had seen many changes, in his world and in himself, and not all were for the better.

Belew's full lips worked briefly beneath his moustache. Mark watched him, feeling his anger-spike subside. Belew was a man who generally placed his words as he did his bullets, with precision and care; but it seldom took him so long to aim either.

"If he's a powerful ace, does that really matter?" Mark said, leaping in. "Or have you suddenly turned into an advocate of ace control?"

Belew slapped his hands down on his khaki-clad thighs. "For an old hippie burn-out, you turn in a fair imitation of a Jesuit, Mark." He stood.

"How would you know? You're an Episcopalian."

"But us High-Church Anglicans are Catholic wannabes, remember. We keep a close eye on the bead rattlers. You Methodists wouldn't know about that."

Mark laughed. Stopping going to church was perhaps the first of his few adolescent acts of rebellion. It was futile as the rest. When his father came home on leave from commanding a tactical fighter wing in Nam, he didn't even notice.

At the door Belew paused. "'Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue,'" he said. "There's Eastern wisdom for you: Confucius his bad self."

Polishing his wire-rim glasses on the hem of his shirt, Mark looked up at him. "With the Doc back on Takis," he said, "you're the slickest talker and the snappiest dresser I know, man."

Shaking his hand in half-mock exasperation, J. Bob shut the door and was gone.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Faces. Who am I?

Faces. Where am I? Where am I going? What will become of me.

In the swirling black there is no answer: only faces. K.C. Strange with her silver eyes. Durg at-Morakh. Starshine. Eric the Dreamer. Starshine. Colonel Sobel?

Why do you look at me? Am I you? Was I you.

"You killed us," the faces say, a growling chorus. They are joined by more, an infinity of faces, shifting, swirling, becoming one another in a kaleidoscope display: Takisian faces, Vietnamese faces, joker faces, nat faces.

"You killed us. And we are you."

No!

Other faces superimpose above the maelstrom, so close he can feel their breath: Moonchild in her black half-mask; JJ Flash; Cosmic Traveler's blue face, itself infinitely mutable, shadowed within the cowl of his cloak of stars; Aquarius' gray face, stolid, smooth, and disapproving.

"You have trapped us," Traveler says. "We are your victims too."

"You must release us to pursue our own karma," says Moonchild "You must not hold onto us for your own selfish purposes."

JJ Flash says, "I wanna lie my own life. Not be a sometime stooge for a burnt-out old hippie." Aquarius says nothing at all.

In the background, a clamor; familiar voices, vying for attention. He recognizes the chorus from the back of his skull. Aren't they already talking to him? He concentrates, looks past the faces of his friends, which scatter to the corners of the Universe with mocking laughter. Beyond them he sees ... their true faces?

A glimpse, no more; and then a giant fanged mouth, yellow-orange with the flames of Hell and rushing toward him with locomotive speed. He smells the stink of brimstone and corruption and turns to flee -

- He is caught up, swallowed, swept up and up and up, till he towers two hundred feet above the ground, and on his head are upswept horns, and thrusting from his loins is a hard-on the size of a Greyhound bus, and burning in his belly is the lust to slay and maim and rape the world while it lies at his feet.

And at his feet lies Sprout, naked and cowering. He bends toward her, erection quivering, stretches out a hand with human meat decaying beneath black claws -

"No!"

- Mark sat bolt upright, wet as though he'd just emerged from a swimming pool, throat hoarse from the scream that woke him. Sprout, wearing a long T-shirt, clung to his neck crying, "Daddy, Daddy!" He tried to soothe her, but she could only sob.

Then he smelled incense and heard cool music, and looked up. Ganesha stood above his bed, great ears outspread in darkness. He held forth a lotus bloom.

"Dreamless sleep," the guru said, "is the gift of the gods. It may be attained as an elevated form of samadhi, through meditation."

Slowly Mark unwound his clawed hands from the sheets. He slid an arm around his daughter. He held the palm of his other hand up to accept the flower.

"Can you teach me, man?" he asked.

The great head nodded. "I can."

"Hold it! Don't move!" A shout from the doorway, Western and angular and strident after the lilt of Ganesha's voice. Belew stood there in nightshirt and skivvies, holding his handgun leveled two-handed at the center of Ganesna's back.

"It's - I'm okay, J. Bob," Mark said. "It was the dream again."

"I gathered. What's he doing here?"

"Just trying to help out, man," Mark said, annoyed at his friend's obtuseness.

"Indeed. How'd he get in here? Your door's gone, Mark!"

"I am the Remover of Obstacles," Ganesha said placidly. He smiled at Sprout, who brushed back tear-sodden bangs to smile tentatively back at him.

"That's not much of an answer, my friend," J. Bob said, not taking the gun off him.

"Come on, man," Mark said.

The air around J. Bob was suddenly filled with fluttering brightness. He jumped back as they swarmed around him, lashed out with his pistol. The cold steel mass struck one. It fell to the wooden floor at his feet and lay, feebly opening and closing brightly colored, self-luminous wings.

"You need not react so violently, my friend," Ganesha said, "inasmuch as they are only butterflies."

A violet and yellow one landed on Sprout's nose. She giggled.

J. Bob stood for a moment, looking at Mark through the shifting, glowing cloud. Then he let the hammer down on his pistol, turned, and stalked off to bed.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

A week later J. Robert Belew came back. Fatigue and the aching in his joints reminded him that he was not as young as he used to be. Nonetheless, he carried a glow of satisfaction in the pit of his stomach. He had reassured the Montagnards, chastised the colonel, and ambushed and destroyed a squad of North Vietnamese infiltrators. He had gotten out in the field again, and he still had his licks.

Then he came to the former ballroom which served Mark as his audience chamber, and stopped as if a Lexan barrier sealed the doorway.

J. Bob had never cared for the hippie hangings Mark affected to take the totalitarian edge off Moonchild's dealings with the public. They were nothing to what assailed his aesthetic sense now.

The room was the picture of Hindu Heaven, straight out of a hopelessly garish mid-Seventies Hare Krishna broadsheet. It was all gaud and gold and ivory, well-bangled celestial maidens playing upon the flute, the kartal cymbals and mridanga drums; bright-pinioned birds and flowers everywhere of hues so bright it hurt to look at them. In the midst of it all sat Ganesha, fat and smug, with one of those beaded Indian elephant head-harnesses strung over his Indian elephant head. Next to him, eyes shut, Moonchild floated in full lotus, eighteen inches in the air.

"There are, my daughter, many varieties of maya," the guru was explaining. "In the fatter days, after wise Shankara sought to reconcile Hinduism with Buddhism, maya came to be understood by many as meaning illusion, pure and simple. Yet there is an older meaning, woven through the Vedas, by which maya is the creative energy of nature and gods. And Nature, while it is real through the will and eternal presence of Brahma, is yet real enough.

"This is my poor power: a humble measure of the creative maya."

"So this world is not mere illusion, guru?" murmured Moonchild.

"It is, and it is not. Hold out your hand."

She did so. A yellow rose materialized in her palm. Her fingers closed around its stem.

Her eyes opened in surprise. A drop of red welled from the ball of her thumb where a thorn had pricked it. She sucked the blood away.

"The world is as real as that rose," the guru said. "If it pricks you, you bleed."

The rose vanished. Moonchild took her thumb from her mouth. A tiny drop of fresh blood ballooned from the puncture.

Belew stood leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded over his chest. "So what?" he said "So you can make her levitate. JJ Flash can fly."

Moonchild looked up with a start, then instantly dropped her eyes, as if in guilt. Ganesha laughed and laughed. Belew unfolded his arms and entered the room.

A slim figure in a saffron robe barred his way. The features were almost Takisian in fineness, the hair shaved to a russet scalplock. Belew couldn't tell whether the figure was male or female.

"What do you want here, machine?" the figure asked in a lisping hermaphrodite German accent.

"I'm this woman's head bodyguard," Belew said, looking the yellowrobe over without evident favor. "Now I'm intent on moseying over to guard her body closer up ... whether or not I have to walk over yours."

Ganesha giggled and waved. The yellowrobe drew back gracefully, with a graceful sneer of contempt. Belew mastered the impulse to tread on its toes as he walked into the room.

"Sandalwood?" he said, sniffing. "Isis, I thought Old Hippie taste was bad. But this - ?"

"Isn't it wonderful?"

Belew sighed. "What's with the she-males?" he asked, gesturing at the wispy forms in saffron robes, draped artistically about the chamber. "Are they real too, guru?"

"My sannyasi are as real as you yourself."

"Some mornings," Belew said, digging in the many pockets of his vest, "I wonder."

"Guru is a teacher of reality," Moonchild said. "Perhaps he can teach you as well."

"Thank you, Madam President." Moonchild flushed and dropped her eyes from Belew's. She always found it difficult to look her Minister in the eye. "But Reality herself has taught me of her myriad ways, and a harsh schoolmistress she is."

He produced a cigar and a cutter, snipped the end, fished in a pocket again. "But what was that about 'machine?'"

"There are different kinds of maya, as Guru was just explaining," the door-keeper said languidly from behind Belew. "His maya is creative maya, natural maya. Yours is the maya of Western linear thought. The maya of the machine." The yellowrobe sniffed. "The true illusion. Special effects."

"Indeed." Belew produced an ancient Zippo lighter, gleaming and metal, held it up like a magician a card.

"Well, that's appropriate in my case - " Holding the cigar in his teeth he stuck his right thumb in the cigar cutter and nipped the tip off. Blood pulsed, flowed down his hairy wrist.

"- because I'm the ace of the machine." He stuck the lighter firmly on the bleeding thumbtip. It stuck. As if of its own accord, it opened its cover. Its wheel turned, striking flame. Belew bent forward and lit his cigar.

"Oh, please," the yellowrobe said. Belew turned and blew a cloud of smoke into its ethereal face. It doubled in a coughing fit.

A man-high sunflower swiveled on its stem, bringing its black face to bear on Belew. He turned back to Moonchild and the guru, bringing the cigar to his lips.

The sunflower shot a stream of water full into his face, extinguishing the cigar with a hiss and melting his moustache into sad wet-bird wings.

Ganesha and his sannyasi laughed and laughed.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Hot afternoon. Walking the corridor, face darkened by his thoughts, Belew caught a murmur of voices from the garden. He paused, and then without the least self-consciousness had edged to the beginning of the arcaded walkway that surrounded the garden, peered around the corner. As security chief, he was privileged to lurk as he pleased around the Palace.