Gulgowski hefted the briefcase he carried. “We’ve got the evidence here to nail the bastard, Cap’n. Come here’n take a look.”
Brennan dropped his bow, stepped forward to look into the briefcase Gulgowski proffered, ignoring the shouts behind him, ignoring the blasting roar that reverberated through the corridor.
Gulgowski, holding out the briefcase toward him, staggered. Brennan looked at him. It was odd. He had only one eye now. The other had been shot out and thick green fluid was running sluggishly down his cheek. But that was all right. Brennan seemed to remember that Gulgowski had been shot in the head before, and lived. He was here, after all. He looked at the briefcase. The handle melted into the flesh of Gulgowski’s hand. They were one thing. The mouth of the briefcase was lined with rows of sharp teeth. It jerked at him, the teeth snapping.
He felt a sudden shock as something hurled itself at his knees from behind. He went down and lay with his cheek pressed against the floor of the chamber, feeling its pulsating warmth, and glanced back in annoyance.
Fortunato had tackled him. The ace released his hold on Brennan, kneeled, and drew the .45 again. Brennan looked up at his men. Fortunato shot pieces of them away, part of a face here, a bit of an arm there. Fortunato cursed in a steady stream as he fired the .45 and Brennan’s men died again.
Brennan felt a surge of tremendous anger. He half-stood and closed his eyes. The roar of gunfire stopped as Fortunato ejected an empty clip, but the stench of powder was in the air, the thunder of gunfire was in his ears, and the hot, humid smell of the jungle was in his nose. He opened his eyes again.
Ghastly caricatures of men, faces and body parts shot away, dripping green slime, were shambling toward him. They weren’t his men. Mendoza had died in the raid on VC headquarters. Gulgowski had been killed by Kien later that night. And Minh had been killed years later by Kien’s men in New York City.
Although his brain was still foggy, Brennan picked up his bow, and shot his last explosive arrow at the simulacra. It hit the caricature of Minh and exploded, sending gobbets of biomass everywhere. The backblast knocked Brennan down and took out the other two simulacra as well.
Brennan took a deep breath, and wiped slime and crushed protoplasm from his face.
“The Swarm Mother took their images from your mind,” Fortunato said. “The other things were just buying time so it could prepare those walking wax-dummies.”
Brennan nodded, his face hard and set. He turned from Fortunato and looked at Mai.
She was almost gone, nearly covered by the gray-pink flesh of the alien being. Her cheek rested against the pulsating organ and the half of her face that Brennan could see was untouched. Her eye was open and clear.
“Mai?”
The eye turned, tracking the sound of his voice, and focused on him. Her lips moved.
“So vast,” she whispered. “So wondrous and vast.”
The light in the chamber dimmed for a moment, then came back.
“No,” Mai murmured. “We shall not do that. There is a sentient being in the ship. And the ship itself is also a living entity.”
The floor of the chamber shook, but the light remained on. Mai spoke again, more to herself than Brennan or Fortunato.
“To have lived so long without thought … to have wielded so much power without consequence … to have traveled so far and seen so much without realization … this shall change … all change…”
The eye focused again upon Brennan. There was recognition in it that faded as she spoke.
“Don’t mourn, Captain. One of us has given herself to save her planet. The other has given up her race to save … who knows what? Perhaps some day the universe. Don’t be sad. Remember us when you look to the night sky, and know we are among the stars, probing, pondering, discovering, thinking innumerable wondrous things.”
Brennan blinked back tears as the eye in Mai’s face closed.
“Good-bye, Captain.”
The singularity shifter began to throw off sparks. Fortunato slung the pack off his back. He looked down at it, startled. “I’m not doing that. She … it…”
They were back on the bridge of Tachyon’s ship. The three men stared at each other.
“You succeeded?” Tachyon asked after a moment.
“Oh yeah, man,” Fortunato said, collapsing on a nearby hassock. “Oh yeah.”
“Where’s Mai?”
Brennan felt a stab of anger cut into him like a knife.
“You let her go,” he cursed, taking a step toward Tachyon, his hands clenched into quivering fists. But his eyes told who he really blamed for Mai’s loss. He shuddered all over like a dog throwing off water, then abruptly turned away. Tachyon stared at him, then turned to Fortunato.
“Let’s go home,” Fortunato said.
After a while, Brennan would remember Mai’s words, and wonder what philosophies, what realms of thought, the spirit of a gentle Buddhist girl melded with the mind and body of a creature of nearly unimaginable power would spin down through the centuries. After a while, he’d remember. But now, with a sense of pain and loss as familiar to him as his own name, he felt none of that. He just felt half past dead.
Jube: Seven
THERE WAS A KNOCK on the door. Dressed in a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and a Brooklyn Dodgers tee shirt, Jube padded across the basement and peered through the spyhole.
Dr. Tachyon stood on the stoop, wearing a white summer suit with wide notched lapels over a kelly-green shirt. His orange ascot matched the silk handkerchief in his pocket and the foot-long feather in his white fedora. He was holding a bowling ball.
Jube pulled back the police bolt, undid the chain, lifted the hook from the eye, turned the key in the deadlock, and popped the button in the middle of the doorknob. The door swung open. Dr. Tachyon stepped jauntily into the apartment, flipping the bowling ball from hand to hand. Then he bowled it across the living-room floor. It came to rest against the leg of the tachyon transmitter. Tachyon jumped in the air and clicked the heels of his boots together.
Jube shut the door, pressed the button, turned the key, dropped the hook, latched the chain, and slid shut the police bolt before turning.
The red-haired man swept off his hat and bowed. “Dr. Tachyon, at your service,” he said.
Jube made a gurgling sound of dismay. “Takisian princes are never at anyone’s service,” he said. “And white isn’t his color. Too, uh, colorless. Did you have any trouble?”
The man sat down on the couch. “It’s freezing in here,” he complained. “And what’s that smell? You’re not trying to save that body I got you, are you?”
“No,” said Jube. “Just, uh, a little meat that went bad.”
The man’s outlines began to waver and blur. In the blink of an eye, he’d grown eight inches and gained fifty pounds, the red hair had turned long and gray, the lilac eyes had gone black, and a scraggly beard had sprouted from a square-cut jaw.
He locked his hands around his knee. “No trouble at all,” he reported in a voice much deeper than Tachyon’s. “I came in looking like a spider with a human head, and told them I had athlete’s feet. Eight of them. Nobody but Tachyon would touch a case like that, so they stuck me behind a curtain and went for him. I turned into Big Nurse and ducked into the ladies’ room down from his lab. When they paged him, he went south and I went north, wearing his face. If anyone was looking at the security monitors, they saw Dr. Tachyon entering his lab, that’s all.” He held his hands up appraisingly, turning them up and down. “It was the strangest feeling. I mean, I could see my hands as I walked, swollen knuckles, hair on the back of my fingers, dirty nails. Obviously there wasn’t any kind of physical transformation involved. But whenever I passed a mirror I saw whoever I was supposed to be, just like everyone else.” He shrugged. “The bowling ball was behind a glass partition. He’d been examining it with scanners, waldoes, X rays, stuff like that. I tucked it under my arm and strolled out.”
“They let you just walk out?” Jube couldn
’t believe it.
“Well, not precisely. I thought I was home free when Troll walked past and said good afternoon as nice as you please. I even pinched a nurse and acted guilty about stuff that wasn’t my fault, which I figured would cinch things for sure.” He cleared his throat. “Then the elevator hit the first floor, and as I was getting off, the real Tachyon got on. Gave me quite a start.”
Jube scratched at a tusk. “What did you do?”
Croyd shrugged. “What could I do? He was right in front of me, and my power didn’t fool him for an instant. I turned into Teddy Roosevelt, hoping that might throw him, and devoutly wished to be somewhere else. All of a sudden I was.”
“Where?” Jube wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
“My old school,” Croyd said sheepishly. “Ninth-grade algebra class. The same desk I was sitting at when Jetboy blew up over Manhattan in ’46. I have to say, I don’t remember any of the girls looking like that when I was in ninth grade.” He sounded a little sad. “I would have stayed for the lecture, but it caused quite a commotion when Teddy Roosevelt suddenly appeared in class clutching a bowling ball. So I left, and here I am. Don’t worry, I changed subways twice and bodies four times.” He got to his feet, stretched. “Walrus, I’ve got to give it to you, it’s never dull working for you.”
“I don’t exactly pay minimum wage either,” Jube said.
“There is that,” Croyd admitted. “And now that you mention it … have you ever met Veronica? One of Fortunato’s ladies. I had a notion to take her to Aces High and see if I could talk Hiram into serving his rack of lamb.”
Jube had the stones in his pocket. He counted them out into the Sleeper’s hand. “You know,” Jube said when Croyd’s fingers closed over his wages, “you could have kept the device for yourself. Maybe gotten a lot more from someone else.”
“This is plenty,” Croyd said. “Besides, I don’t bowl. Never learned to keep score. I think they do it with algebra.” His outline shimmered briefly, and suddenly Jimmy Cagney was standing there, dressed in a snappy light-blue suit with a flower in his lapel. As he climbed the steps to the street, he began to whistle the theme song to an old musical called Never Steal Anything Small.
Jube shut the door, pressed the button, turned the key, dropped the hook, and latched the chain. As he slid the police bolt shut, he heard a soft footstep behind him, and turned.
Red was shivering in a green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt filched from Jube’s closet. He’d lost all of his own clothing in the raid on the Cloisters. The shirt was so big he looked like a deflated balloon. “That the gizmo?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jube replied. He crossed the room and lifted the black sphere with careful reverence. It was warm to the touch.
Jube had watched the televised press conference when Dr. Tachyon returned from space to announce that the Swarm Mother was no longer a threat. Tachyon spoke eloquently and at length about his young colleague Mai and her great sacrifice, her courage within the Mother, her selfless humanity. Jhubben found himself more interested by what the Takisian left unsaid. He downplayed his own role in the affair, and made no mention of how Mai had gotten inside the Swarm Mother to effect the merging he spoke of so movingly. The reporters seemed to assume that Tachyon had simply flown Baby to the Mother and docked. Jube knew better.
When the Sleeper woke, he had decided to play his hunch.
“Hate to tell you, but it looks like a bowling ball to me,” Red said amiably.
“With this, I could send the complete works of Shakespeare to the galaxy you call Andromeda,” Jube told him.
“Pal o’ mine,” said Red, “they’d only send it back, and tell you it wasn’t suitable to their current needs.” He was in much better shape now than when he’d first turned up on Jube’s doorstep three weeks after the aces had smashed the new temple, wearing a hideous moth-eaten poncho, work gloves, a full-face ski mask, and mirrorshades. Jube hadn’t recognized him until he’d lifted his shades to show the red skin around his eyes. “Help me,” he’d said. And then he’d collapsed.
Jube had dragged him inside and locked the door. Red had been gaunt and feverish. After fleeing the Cloisters (Jube had missed the whole thing, for which he was profoundly grateful), Red had put Kim Toy on a Greyhound to San Francisco, where she had old friends in Chinatown who would hide her. But there was no question of his going with her. His skin made him too conspicuous; only in Jokertown could he hope to find anonymity. He’d run out of money after ten days on the street, and had been eating out of the trash cans behind Hairy’s ever since. With Roman under arrest and Matthias dead (freeze-dried by some new ace whose name had been carefully kept from the press), the rest of the inner circle were the objects of a citywide manhunt.
Jube might have turned him in. Instead he fed him, cleaned him up, nursed him back to health. Doubts and misgivings gnawed at him. Some of what he had learned about the Masons appalled him, and the greater secrets they hinted at were far, far worse. Perhaps he should call the police. Captain Black had been aghast at the involvement of one of his own men in the conspiracy, and had publicly sworn to nail every Mason in Jokertown. If Red was found here, it would go badly for Jube.
But Jube remembered the night that he and twelve others had been initiated at the Cloisters, remembered the ceremony, the masks of hawk and jackal and the cold brightness of Lord Amun as he towered over them, austere and terrible. He remembered the sound of TIAMAT as the initiates spoke the word for the first time, and remembered the tale the Worshipful Master told them of the sacred origins of the order, of Guiseppe Balsamo, called Cagliostro, and the secret entrusted him by the Shining Brother in an English wood.
No more secrets had been forthcoming on that night of nights. Jube was only a first-degree initiate, and the higher truths were reserved for the inner circle. Yet it had been enough. His suspicions had been confirmed, and when Red in his delerium had stared across Jube’s living room and cried out, “Shakti!” he had known for a certainty.
He could not abandon the Mason to the fate he deserved. Parents did not abandon children, no matter how depraved and corrupt they might grow with the passage of years. Twisted and confused and ignorant the children might be, but they remained blood of your blood, the tree grown from your seed. The teacher did not abandon the pupil. There was no one else; the responsibility was his.
“We going to stand here all day?” Red asked as the singularity shifter tingled against the palms of Jube’s hands. “Or are we going to see if it works?”
“Pardon,” Jube said. Lifting a curved panel on the tachyon transmitter, he slid the shifter into the matrix field. He began the feed from his fusion cell, and watched as the power flux enveloped the shifter. Saint Elmo’s fire ran up and down the strange geometries of the machine. Readouts swam across shining metal surfaces in a spiky script that Jube had half forgotten, and vanished into angles that seemed to bend the wrong way.
Red lapsed back into Irish Catholicism and made the sign of the cross. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said.
It works, Jhubben thought. He should have been triumphant. Instead he felt weak and confused.
“I need a drink,” Red said.
“There’s a bottle of dark rum under the sink.”
Red found the bottle and filled two tumblers with rum and crushed ice. He drank his down straightaway. Jube sat on the couch, glass in hand, and stared at the tachyon transmitter, its high, thin sound barely audible above the air conditioner.
“Walrus,” Red said when he had refilled his tumbler, “I had you figured for a lunatic. An amiable lunatic, sure, and I’m grateful to you for taking me in and all, with the police after me the way they are. But when I saw you’d built your own Shakti machine, well, who’d blame me for thinking you were a little short on the gray matter.” He downed a slug of rum. “Yours is four times as big as Kafka’s,” he said. “Looks like a bad model. But I never saw the roach’s light up that way.”
“It’s larger than it needs to be because I b
uilt it with primitive electronics,” Jube told him. He spread his hands, three thick fingers and blunt curved thumb. “And these hands are incapable of delicate work. The device at the Cloisters would have lit up had it ever been powered.” He looked at Red. “How did the Worshipful Master plan to accomplish that?”
Red shook his head. “I can’t tell you. Sure, and you’re a prince to save my sweet red ass, but you’re still a first-degree prince, if you get my meaning.”
“Could a first-degree initiate construct a Shakti machine?” Jube asked him. “How many degrees had you passed before they even told you the device existed?” He shook his head. “Never mind, I know the punch line. How many jokers does it take to turn on a light bulb? One, as long as his nose is AC. The Astronomer was going to power the machine himself.”
The look on Red’s face was all the confirmation Jube needed. “Kafka’s Shakti was supposed to give the Order dominion over the Earth,” the Mason said.
“Yeah,” Jube said. The Shining Brother in the wood gave the secret to Cagliostro, and told him to keep it safe, to hand it down from generation to generation until the coming of the Dark Sister. Probably the Shining Brother had given Cagliostro other artifacts; without a doubt he had given him a power source, there being no way the Takisian wild card could have been anticipated two centuries ago.
“Clever,” Jube said aloud, “yeah, but still a man of his times. Primitive, superstitious, greedy. He used the things he had been given for selfish personal gain.”
“Who?” Red asked, confused.
“Balsamo,” Jube replied. Balsamo had invented the rest himself, the Egyptian mythos, the degrees, the rituals. He took the things he had been told and twisted them to his own use. “The Shining Brother was a Ly’bahr,” he announced.
“What?” Red said.
“A Ly’bahr,” Jube told him. “They’re cyborgs, Red, more machine than flesh, awesomely powerful. The jokers of space, no two look alike, but you wouldn’t want to meet one in the alley. Some of my best friends are Ly’bahr.” He was babbling, he realized, but he was helpless to stop. “Oh, yeah, it could have been some other species, maybe a Kreg, or even one of my people in a liquid-metal spacesuit. But I think it was a Ly’bahr. Do you know why? TIAMAT.”