Again silence fell between them. Tach remembered Peanut's admonition. "Teddy, the longer I stay here, the greater the danger. Peanut and I-"
"Bloat, the name's Bloat. Teddy belongs to another world ... and haven't you forgotten something?" Tachyon cringed, eyes flicking guiltily from side to side.
"No, you haven't forgotten, you were just hoping I had. I disgust you, don't I?"
Tach just shook her head. She wished she could lie. Knew she couldn't. He was in her mind again. She couldn't hide anything from him. His face puckered like a baby about to cry.
"We've all revolted you. For forty-five years you've been totally grossed-out every time you touched one of us, cared for one of us." His tone wound higher, fueled by his growing anger.
"I'm sorry..."
"I thought you loved me!" The enormous body was quivering, sending shocks through the walls and floor of the old building. Tach tottered, struggled to maintain her footing. Peanut was terrified.
"You're a fraud, Tachyon, a total fucking fraud!"
Her shame collapsed before a wave of indignation. "No--I helped create you-I'll bear that guilt. But I have worked and lived among you, given half my life to your care, your protection, your well-being. I do care for you. You are my wounded step-children, but how can you ask me to love you when you can't even love yourselves?"
Snorting, gasping sobs emerged from the boy atop his hideous throne. Unable to help, Tachyon listened to the sounds of woe come falling down the joker's sides like the rivers of bloatblack.
"Somebody's coming," said Peanut suddenly. Tachyon hadn't even noticed him moving to the door.
"Has to be Blaise. My jokers are all under strict orders."
"Ideal," murmured Tachyon, and felt her bowels go to water. The boy's face hardened. He scrubbed at his eyes. Tach dug to her core. Takisian pride would support her. It was all she had left. "This is your moment. Revenge yourself and all your fellows upon me. You have the power."
Bloat stared at her. Fury fell away. He sighed. "I can't do that to you. For months you've cried, and sung, and talked in my mind. You're beautiful ... I can't hurt you. Climb up."
Tachyon needed no urging. Revulsion gave way to selfpreservation. She picked her way through the mounds of fecal waste, placed a foot on one of the pipes jabbed IV-like into the joker's body. Fingers pinching at the skin she hauled herself upward, and fell forward into the folds of flesh. She lifted a flap of skin. It was like handling a sack of wet sand, but sweat made it oily. She slipped beneath it, and pulled it up like a blanket. It was horrible.
The sound of the doors slamming open brought back memories. Tach chewed on a corner of the handkerchief. "How dare you bust in on me like this!" Bloat roared. "This is joker territory, jumpers only come when invited."
"Looking for someone," wailed a boy in a cracking adolescent's tone. The door slammed again. Tach sagged with relief.
She stood and made her way to the head, her feet sinking several inches with every step. His head reached only to her breast. She pushed his hair off his forehead. It was silky, freshly washed. She caught the thought in preparation for meeting you.
Their thoughts continued to dance and weave about and through one another.
"I wish you could come with me too," said Tach in answer to an unspoken question.
"Will you ever come back?" Pleading without ever having asked.
"I must."
"Oh, yeah, your body'll still be here."
"More than that. There's you, and I'll help you if I can." Tach hesitated.
Bloat's dark eyes were pleading with her. He looked away, mumbled, "Blaise knows you're gone, they're hunting... you better go."
Setting her jaw, Tach drew in a hissing breath between her teeth. Took Bloat's face between her hands, bent in for the kiss. His flabby arms wrapped about her waist, drew her in close, and Tachyon began to shake. This had nothing to do with Takisian revulsion for the deformed. This was gutwrenching terror.
Blaise's teeth drawing blood from her lower lip in his own grotesque and evil version of a kiss. Almost choking her as he thrust his penis down her throat.
Tachyon whimpered as Bloat's hands closed tightly about her wrists.
He forced her hands from his face, pushed her away. "NO!" The word twisted and vibrated with his emotional agony. "I'm not going to hurt you. You'll never remember me as someone who hurt you."
"I promised!" cried Tach.
"And I want it! But not this way. Not when all you can remember is a rape!
Peanut, help her down." The joker scurried up onto Bloat's back, put a hand beneath Tachyon's elbow. "Hurry"
It was harder going down. Eventually Tachyon just sat down and slid. Her dress and hands were stained with bloatblack.
She looked back up the wall of flesh. "No, Peanut, I've got to do it. I've got to go back. I can't leave him with my word broken."
"No, Doctor, we've gotta go. It'll hurt him worse if you get caught."
They stepped through the secret door. The last sound Tachyon heard was a boy weeping.
Eventually fear can kill you. It starts by sapping the will and turning the body into a shivering sickly husk. Tach had reached that state. Without the support of Peanut's arm, she could never have reached the chamber in which they now stood. In another lifetime she would have shrunk from that rough contact. But she had endured the sweating, stinking, flaccid mound that was Bloat, and she had felt his love and his despair. She had been assaulted by the physical beauty that was Blaise and known his hate.
"It doesn't matter," she whispered as she sank down on the glittering sand that formed the floor of the cavern chamber. "What, Doctor?"
She looked up at him. The sad, sad eyes, the chiseled wrinkles about that slit of a mouth.
"Peanut... you're a very handsome man."
"No, Doctor, I'm a joker." Bending, he held out his single hand to her. "You rested enough? Can you go on? That Blaise ... he knows we're running."
The tinkling of falling water drew her attention. She looked and located the source. "Let me bathe my face and hands. That will help."
"Okay," said Peanut dubiously.
The water was icy cold, but it revived her like a slap. She looked down at her dress, gave a little mew of disgust, and pulled it over her head. Immersed it beneath the tiny waterfall that had first attracted her. The waters of the pool were soon fouled and darkened with the bloatblack. She put the dress back on, shivering at its clammy touch, but at last she was clean, and the stink was gone.
They kept walking. Tachyon slid a hand into Peanut's. He looked back and smiled.
Striations of mica in the rock walls threw off a soft phosphorescent glow.
Tachyon was no geologist, but she didn't think that mica could do that.
Elaborate stalagmites and stalactites yearned for each other from the floors and ceilings of the caverns, their colors shell pink, sea green, amber.
"Peanut, Ellis Island isn't a real island," Tach said conversationally. They were passing another underground grotto, and on a whim Tach kicked a small pebble into the mirror-like water. The reflected stalagmites and stalactites bowed and swayed like stony dancers.
Forehead buckling with a frown that made the horny skin erupt like the earth in an earthquake, Peanut said, "But it's surrounded by water."
"That's not what I mean. It was made from landfill. There can't be caverns like this beneath its surface."
"But they're here," said Peanut with a blunt practicality that made Tachyon's intellectual maunderings seem inane. Tachyon nodded, shrugged, but only made it through part of the action because she saw the spider. The size of a coffee table, it was stalking deliberately through the caverns, its eight multijointed legs making a horrible creaking sound. A tiny mew of fear made it past her blocked throat.
Peanut followed her terrified gaze. Adding a cocky swing to his normally stiff, blundering walk, Peanut strolled over and ran his hand through the body of the arachnid. It broke apart like stirred oil, globules of ectoplasmic spider floating in all directions.
"Don't worry, it's not real. None of 'em are real. You see things down here.
Monsters and people, and just plain things. I think this is the place where nightmares live."
"Whose?" asked Tach a little breathlessly.
"Maybe everybody's in the whole world. Maybe just ours-us on the Rox, I mean."
"Then my nightmares..."
"Oh, there're probably a few sneaking around," answered the joker.
It was an intriguing thought, and Tach searched for these fragments of self.
There was a strange sense of deja vu when she finally spotted one because she so clearly recalled the dream that had given birth to this sad-faced phantom. Cody, lost, crying-so strange because Tachyon couldn't recall ever having seen Cody cry. Adding to the grotesquerie-the tears were slipping from beneath her eye patch but not from the normal healthy eye. She was in her green surgical scrubs, a giant bloodstain directly over the crotch.
"Don't let them hurt me. Keep him away from me. Don't let him hurt me again."
The phantom wasn't really speaking. The mouth moved, and Tachyon supplied the words. Rape dreams seemed to torment her. Her own, of course, but also Cody's.
Was she safe, or had Blaise inflicted the most brutal assault and indignity upon her?
Peanut became alarmed at her rigid, white-hpped stare. "You want me to break it up, Doctor?"
"No, don't touch her. Let nothing touch her." Tach resumed her plodding trek for freedom.
Minutes passed, marked by the scuffle of their shoes in the white sand and the hiss of their puffing breath. Tachyon walked diagonally across the path in front of them. Tachyon froze and watched himself pass. The Tachyon phantasm was bigger than in reality. The expression was cruel, the knuckles of the artificial right hand stained with blood.
"I'm glad-" her voice was a low, ugly growl, "glad to know that I'm part of Blaise's nightmares. The Ideal knows he forms a prominent figure in mine."
Peanut rolled a wary eye at her. Shook his head, kept walking. Around a curve, a new apparition waited. A narrowhipped, broad-shouldered man of indeterminate years. Hair like silver gilt caught the ghostly light from the walls forming an effect like a nimbus about his head. He was dressed in a white and gold uniform that would have been in place at an Austro-Hungarian ball. The man was seated on an outcropping of rock, one booted foot drawn up, nursing a knee. He was very beautiful.
"Wow!" An expression of awe from Peanut. "Like an angel."
Tach laughed. It echoed back from the unseen cavern roof, a strange sound in these dim halls. An even stranger sound in the dim recesses of her burdened soul. Idly, she wondered when she had last laughed.
"Hardly. It's my wicked cousin Zabb. Zabb and several other of my relatives tried to meddle in your affairs back ... oh, I guess it must be five years now"
"What'd he try to do?"
"Drop a very large asteroid on top of your pretty planet." The path was beginning to rise. Tach could feel the stress in the muscles of her calves. Her mood rose with the angle of the floor. Free-free-free-free-free, sang a jaunty little litany in her head.
"Who stopped him?"
"I did, ably and critically assisted by Cap'n Trips. Yes, that was certainly one of Zabb's more flamboyant and malicious gestures. On a more personal, less cosmic scale, he's just plotted and tried to kill me several times," Tach continued with great joviality. "I wish I had seen Zabb first. Then I would have known this was all a mind cheat." She answered Peanut's puzzled glance. "Zabb's either dead or several hundred light-years away. I know damn good and well he's not living in a tunnel under New Jersey."
"You've had such an interesting life," said Peanut wistfully. Tach saw Blaise slipping through the rock formations to their left. She shuddered, and increased her pace. "The Chinese curse. Don't long for it, Peanut. Embrace, caress, cherish the mundane-"
Hands closed around her hips just below the curve of her pregnancy, lifted her into the air. Tach screamed. "Going somewhere, Granddad?" crooned Blaise in her ear. Spittle wet her lobe, and his stubble rasped across her cheek. "But the fun's just begun. You can't leave until you've popped... and I've given you another one. You wouldn't cheat a father out of his firstborn, would you? It's not a very fucking Takisian thing to do." The words dripped with venom. Jumpers were emerging from the rocks and shadow. Poor Peanut was splayed on his stomach, held down by several young men. Blaise casually tossed Tachyon into the arms of one of his lieutenants. Sauntered over to where Peanut lay supine and shivering.
Tachyon realized she was making a horrible little mewling sound in the back of her throat. She had never heard a sound like that out of a human or a Takisian before--only out of dying animals. She bit down on her cheek to still the shocking sound.
"Okay, Peanut, now you're going to tell me all about who put you up to this."
Before Blaise exercised his mind-control power, he always set and shot his jaw.
Obviously Peanut knew the habit, knew what it signified. Peanut's fingers crawled across the sand, moving carefully, subtly, toward the boot of one of his captors and the large bowie knife that rested there. Peanut, NO! The mental scream echoed about the confines of her skull, and Tachyon felt Bloat stir, a huge stretched presence on the edge of her consciousness.
Peanut's hand closed about the knife, yanked it free. Twisting wildly, he managed to get the blade beneath his chin. He drove his head down, and blood gouted first from beneath his chin and then from his eye as the tip of the blade emerged through the socket like a moray eel nosing out from its rock cavern.
Grief raced through her, fused with Bloat's feelings of disgust and relief.
Together they mourned for the dying joker. Blaise was quivering with fury, and his jumper minions stepped hurriedly away, trying to escape the parameters of his power, trying to blend with the rocks.
"Mother... fucker," spat Blaise, and rounded on his grandfather. "So you'll just have to tell me. Bloat was behind this, wasn't he?" The demand was shrill.
Tach shook her head. "No, only poor Peanut. While exploring the caverns, he found my basement cell. He brought me food, and eventually I convinced him to help me."
"I think you're lying. Peanut wasn't smart enough to cook this up."
"He didn't. I did. And as for lying-" ever so sweetly, she continued, "you can always read my mind and find out." It had the desired result. Blaise's face twisted with fury as he considered this void in his power. He could control, but he couldn't read. The secrets of the soul and mind were forever beyond him.
"The only advantage telepathy gives is that people don't know they've been fucked with. Well, I prefer for you to know I'm fucking with you."
It didn't take a genius to figure out what was coming. He would mind control her, and force her to talk. Tach broke free from Bloat. She needed all her concentration to marshal her feeble shields.
"I've put up the deathlock," Tach warned.
Blaise understood the significance. The deathlock was the ultimate Takisian mindshield. It could be broken, but only at the cost of the victim's life.
"You don't have shields. You're just a human now"
Was there hesitation in those purple-black eyes? This was high-stakes poker-very high stakes-lives and minds hung in the balance. Could she risk everything on a bluff? Tach considered that gargantuan lump of fat, supine and helpless in the Administration Building. Pictured Blaise with a gasoline can, pictured Teddy burning, dying.
"Try me," Tach invited.
Power lanced out, struck her shields, was repelled, and withdrew. And her shields crumbled like a sand castle at high tide. But Tachyon had won the bluff.
Having been repelled, Blaise did not come back for another try.
Shoulders hunched, hands balled into fists, the teenager turned away. Suddenly spun back, fist lashing out in a punishing backhand. Only the support of her captor kept Tachyon upright as the blow landed hard on her temple.
Blaise was unlimbering his belt. "It's time you learned the price of disobedience, Granpere."