It was Tachyon's phrase. How many times had Blaise heard it? Resented it, hoarded it while waiting for this moment, savored it as he threw back the words like a challenge.
Then Tachyon forgot all about thinking as Blaise raped her again.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
IX.
There are things that a person shouldn't have to remember. Peanut's martyrdom was still reverberating in my head, driving out everything else. Governor, I won't talk. I won't. Don't worry...
I could feel the knifepoint against his throat, could feel it through his mind.
And then Peanut shoved it home. Drove it into his own body to save me.
When I heard Peanut's pain, when I felt it rake my mind like clawed fingers, I screamed for Kafka and told him to bring Blaise to me as soon as he came out of the caverns.
I suppose it was a measure of Blaise's arrogance and his contempt for me that he came alone except for the two jumpers carrying Peanut's body. He'd sent Durg back with Tachyon.
They just dumped him on the lobby floor. The poor joker's eyes were still open.
Peanut stared at me, but his mind was utterly still and empty. I blinked. Tears blurred the bloody corpse.
Can't let them know who sent me. Can't let Blaise hurt the governor. Those were the last thoughts I'd heard from Peanut.
Damn you, Peanut. Did you have to be so goddamn noble? Maybe if you hadn't, I wouldn't feel so guilty. I didn't know he'd be there. I didn't. I thought it would be simple.
Blaise glanced at the Temptation, at Kafka, and at the jokers who had gathered.
Can't let them know..'.
Simple, brave Peanut. I wondered how in the hell I'd come to deserve that kind of loyalty. The only legacy of my efforts was that Peanut was dead. I'd killed a friend, ruined my dream fantasy, and Tachyon was still a prisoner.
Fucking effective.
"He killed himself, Bloat," Blaise crowed. He was mocking me in his head, daring me to object. "He was helping my old granpere to escape. He interfered with me, but I didn't touch him. Of course, you know all this, don't you. You were listening, right? Governor Bloat knows everything."
Inside, he taunted: I know it was you, Bloat. I know. That fuck Peanut didn't have two brain cells to rub together. He didn't think of this on his own, did he. He let the thoughts drift out of the veils hiding his mind.
"Get out of here, Blaise," I said. "You did what you wanted to do. It's over.
Now get the hell out of here."
But Blaise wanted to brag, wanted to strut. He was laughing, talking about how this was a lesson to anyone who thought they could interfere with him, that he'd do the same to anyone else who got in his way. Anyone. He was looking at me when he said it.
"You got Tachyon back," I told him. I looked at Peanut, at the gory vision of his sacrifice for me. The tears threatened again, and my voice was breaking.
"Peanut's dead. Drop it." Blaise just snorted and kept going.
"Blaise, I've warned you-" Even to myself, my blustering sounded like bad empty movie dialogue, and Peanut's body was a symbol of just how empty my words were.
I wasn't surprised when Blaise just laughed. Guards brought their guns up, swinging them to bear on the red-haired kid, but he just waved his arms at them.
He just kept blathering. "You gonna tell 'em to shoot, Gov? You think that's going to stop me? Maybe I should just jump one of them and start firing away."
"Put your guns down," I told my people.
Blaise laughed louder. "Ain't that just like you, Gov? You never kill anyone.
Prime had you pegged-you're a whimp. The fucking caves are you, too-they mean you don't have to worry about making a move to New York. You didn't want to do that anyway, did you? Not really. You might have had to hurt someone if you did.
You wimped out with my grandfather, too. You could've sent a whole squadron of jokers or used some of the renegade aces on the Rox. But no, you tried to do it hidden and bloodless. You sent Peanut -I know it was you, Governor. That was a wimp's rescue; it had 'Bloat' engraved all fucking over it. Bloat doesn't hurt jokers or jumpers or anyone. Bloat wants to make a fairyland where everyone kisses and hugs and loves each other, all encircled in Bloat's sturdy little wall. Well, you know what? That's fucking stupid."
My jokers were watching me. I didn't have anything to say. Peanut looked up at me, and I thought I could see that damn idiotic trust still in his eyes.
"Somebody cover that body," I husked out.
Blaise howled with. laughter.
He is scared of you. Underneath it all, he's not confident. I know it. Blaise fears anything he can't control; you can't be jumped and the screens around your mind are too strong for him. He's afraid of your unconscious power, toothe dreamstuff. He's seen the caverns; they worry him. The scope of the power that created them ... Tachyon tried to soothe me.
I raged back at her.
I don't control the ability. It's like the wall-things just happen. You think I would've let Peanut die if I could do it on my own? I don't have power. Not really. You know that now, don't you? You detest me.
No. Bloat, I'm so ... I'm so sorry. I didn't want to hurt you. Neither one of us wanted Peanut to die, but he died because he loved you, because he believed in you. I believe in you, too. I still do.
I can't do anything for you. I failed.
You can, Bloat. You can. Please ... Promise me one thing. Promise that you won't give up. Promise me that. Why'
Because the Outcast loved the Princess, and the Princess loved the Outcast, too.
Because what you're trying to do here is good. Because if you don't, then Peanut wasted his life. We were both crying.
I'll still get you out, I promised her. I will. I'll do ... I don't know what.
But I'll find some way, someone to help me. But the contact had faded, as it always did. I don't know if she heard me or not. I caught only the faintest whisper of her voice:... you have the power, Bloat. Use it.
I raged. I sobbed.
"She's right. She's telling you just what I've been telling you." The penguin.
It stood in the lobby before me. Not a hallucination, not a dream-I could see the guards looking at it curiously and wondering. "Right," the penguin said.
"You made me, like you made the rest."
"How?" I shouted. "Tell me how I can control this." But it didn't answer. It waddled away down the corridor to the west wing, toward the caves. "I'll be back," it said. "When you need me."
"Governor?" Andiron, one of the guards, asked. "Should we stop him?"
"You see it? You really do?"
Andiron looked at me strangely. "Yes. Of course."
I sighed. I looked at the Temptation and tried to think. "Let it go," I told him. "Let it go."
I guess that after Peanut's death I felt that I had to do something. I needed to gain some (however grudging) respect from the jumpers, not to mention the jokers. And despite Tachyon's entreaties, the only thing I seemed to have accomplished with my dreams had been to make the penguin real. Several jokers reported seeing it moving through the caves.
A parlor trick. Bloat can pull a penguin from his hat. Great. Boy, will that scare the nats. Gosh, is that going to make Blaise tremble.
I needed action. I needed a symbol. I needed to feel that I was doing something.
I thought it time to make official what was already true in fact.
Kafka punched home the switch on the power strips. Arc lights flared with an audible snarling, and I was bathed in incandescent splendor. I watched the monitor as Kafka ticked off the seconds with his fingers. He jabbed a finger at me as the red light blinked on the video camera. In the monitor, the Temptation appeared in a slow pan.
I started talking. I had the script memorized. I'd practiced it for two days straight, making little changes here and there.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" I said, and heard my high voice reverberate through the sound system we'd bought back when we'd had money to play with. Across the monitor, St. Anthony was bedeviled by strange hordes,, beaten by demons flying in the sky, tantalized by a seductress with her surreal following. "It's The Temptation of St. Anthony, if you're not familiar with the painting. Bosch is giving us the tale of Anthony of Egypt and how he was unable to function in his own society. He couldn't exist there, not unless he was the same as they were.
So Anthony decided to retreat. He fled the worldly life and went into the desert. He made a place where he could be as he needed to be."
The camera pulled back from the painting and focused on my face, my plump-cheeked, pimply, fatboy face nearly lost in the folds of pasty flesh. The camera continued to zoom back, farther and farther, showing the gravid landscape of my body crammed into the lobby.
"Ain't it funny how your world always views evil as something misshapen or twisted or ugly? Like a joker, y'know. Funny. But to us, being that way is normal."
Panning now, the camera moving over the solemn joker faces in front of me and around the balcony...
"Your world treats jokers badly. That statement doesn't exactly surprise you, does it? Then it shouldn't surprise you that, hey, sometimes a joker will kick back one way or another. The only trouble is, whenever that happens, the violence ante just gets upped one more notch. The joker gets stomped again, only harder this time. We're tired of that game. Hey, it's one we can't win-you've got the power and there's nowhere for a joker to hide. You don't even have to brand us or legislate our movements to keep track of us; we wear our identification all the time. All you have to do is look."
Back to me: half a teenager glued onto a slug thing from a bad Japanese monster movie ...
"I'm Bloat. This is the Rox, what most of you still call Ellis Island. I'm the governor of the Rox. I'm the one who keeps all of you out and lets the jokers in. What I have to say is pretty simple, really."
I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. Bloatblack rippled down my sides; I tried to ignore the smell.
Now that it had come to it, I was scared. Reading about revolutions in history books never made me feel the experience-I always knew how it would end. Doing the same thing in role-playing games was simple: If my character died, I'd roll another and keep playing.
But here, now, I didn't know what would happen afterward. I'd already learned that-in this world-you only get one death.
"I'm the governor of the Rox," I repeated. Kafka winced at my blunder and pointed out my place in the cue cards alongside the camera. I stumbled over the next few lines, stuttering. "The ... the Rox has become a joker's haven. A place away from the nats and hostile authorities. Here, we're normal. Here, we can be as we need to be. So what I'm saying now is just legitimizing something that's already a fact."
Tight in ...
"I hereby declare the Rox to be a separate political entity. We declare ourselves independent of the state of New York and the United States. You have no authority over us. We're the joker homeland."
Around me, jokers burst into prolonged cheering. The camera swung around to show the celebration. I gestured to Kafka. The lights kicked off, and the video feed went dead.
The loud jubilation of the jokers, my people, continued unabated. I could hear it here, could feel it going on all over the Rox. I looked down at Kafka, characteristically somber. He was thinking of the Astronomer again, of another stronghold that had been destroyed.
"How do you think that went over?" I asked him. "We'll find out," he answered.
"Won't we?"
While Night's Black Agents to Their Preys Do Rouse
II.
Life in the USSA wasn't so bad. The variety of clothing wasn't great, and people tended, to have a lot of moles and winkles and carbunkles on their faces-Shad hadn't realized how much cosmetic surgery had altered the looks of ordinary people back in his own New York-but on the other hand there weren't any jokers filling the streets with their agony and no homeless people wandering the streets, and the doctors at the Jean Jaures Memorial Clinic had patched him up without asking for his insurance card first. There wasn't any wild card or AIDS or Jokertown or Takisians or Swarm, and there hadn't been a Second World War because the Socialists had taken power in Berlin in 1919 and hung onto it, no one had ever heard of Hitler, and there wasn't a cold war or atom bomb, and the Big Apple still bopped along in its own distinctive way.
Or maybe bopped wasn't the right word. The thing Shad found himself missing most of all about his own world was the music. Jazz had stopped evolving around 1940--big bands here in 1990 toured the country playing "Mood Indigo" and "Satin Doll" exactly the way Duke Ellington had in -I940, note for scripted note. Most of the musicians were black-jazz and blues were national cultural resources, forms of "folk art" created by the "Protected Negro Minority." Early rock and roll had been considered an offshoot of the blues and more or less restricted to black people-white performers were discouraged because they were thought to be ripping off a protected culture-and without the white audience, the form had died.
No Charlie Parker. That was what Shad found hard to adjust to. No John Coltrane.
No Miles Davis. Dizzy Gillespie fronted something called the Fort Wayne People's Folk Orchestra and blew some good licks, but it wasn't anywhere near the same.
In the hospital he'd claimed amnesia--he just couldn't remember who he was or why he'd been shot or why he was dressed in a Halloween costume. The police hadn't believed him-strip-searched him at gunpoint right in the emergency room in fact, with the doctor and nurses protesting-but his fingerprints didn't turn up in the Central Criminal Computer Registry in Maryland (the computer search took three days with the wretched equipment they had), and they had nothing to hold him on. They concluded he was an illegal immigrant, but by the time the authorities arrived to deport he'd already slipped out into the night, clumsy in his arm-and-shoulder cast, and within twenty-four hours he got himself a job maintaining the awful sound equipment in an illegal samba club on the East Side.
The stuff still had tubes, and it needed all the help it could get.
Illegal samba club ... and it wasn't the club that was illegal, it was the music. Samba was against the law--Latin music was considered subversive because South America wasn't in the Socialist bloc but allied with Imperial Japan. But despite the law, there were illegal samba clubs parked on half the street corners in Harlem and all down the East Side-this was, after all, the Big Apple, and in the Apple you could find everything. If people couldn't have rock and roll, they had to have something. And some of the club's biggest patrons were the sons and daughters of high FarmerLabor party members, so the place was pretty safe.
Shad spent his free hours looking for Chalktalk. She'd disappeared the second she got him into the E-room. When he asked the hospital personnel, no one could remember seeing her.
He still didn't know why she'd been following him. He didn't know why she helped or whether she'd somehow plotted the whole thing.
The attitudes toward him were different here, and it took him a while on the street before he finally figured it out. In his own New York, white people looked at him like he was a criminal, or anyway a potential criminal. There were some jewelry stores that wouldn't even unlock their doors for him, even after he waved fistfuls of money through the window. But the crime and homicide rates for blacks weren't particularly high here, and people looked at him differently--the Protected Negro Minority was a historically oppressed race struggling to elevate itself toward an equality that, despite everyone's best efforts, they seemed not to have reached.
In short, white people treated him as if he were mildly retarded-good-hearted and deserving of sympathy, but a little slow. It wasn't his fault if he needed a little extra help, of course-Forces of History were responsible, after all, not peoples--but all that meant was that nobody expected much from him.
After he figured out what was going on, Shad fit in well enough. He liked being patronized a lot less than .he liked being feared, but he was still himself inside, whoever that was. The masks he wore were different, but they were still masks.
He still wore the night's mask best of all. He went for long walks after the club closed, quartering the parts of the city that, in another reality, were Jokertown. Music ran through his head, music that didn't even exist here, and pictures rolled through his memory, images of that portable concentration camp set up in the brownstone warehouse, the joker in the necktie with his head blown off, the hard con-boss look in Lisa Traeger's eyes, crates of gold and drugs, Nelson Dixon and Blaise exchanging high fives on the boardroom table ...
The green hills of someplace he'd probably never see again.