Dealer's Choice

  In the center of the room was a thin young woman, maybe eighteen, lying on a couch. The arms of the couch were carved to look like swans. The woman wore combat fatigues, a wide cloth band across her eyes, and a floppy black beret down over one ear. As the door opened her head turned toward the sound.

  “It’s Kafka, Patchwork,” the joker said. “I’ve got Modular Man with me.”

  The woman gave a thin smile. Modular Man noticed a spray of freckles across her nose. She held out her hand, not toward Modular Man but in his direction. She was blind.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Modular Woman.”

  The android didn’t quite know what to make of this. He took the hand. “Hello,” he said.

  “Call me Pat.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned toward the stenographer and tilted her head back. “I just heard about the location of another platoon of 155s. Inside the perimeter of Newark International, northeast corner. They’re digging them in.”

  “Mobile or towed?”

  A hesitation. “Towed. I think.”

  A labeled pin went into the map. Kafka turned to Modular Man. “Patchwork can’t get a full view of a lot of the maps,” he said. “She’s vague on some of her information. But if your data can be cross-referenced with hers, we can get a pretty good view of Zappa’s dispositions.”

  The android looked at Patchwork. “How are you getting this?” he asked.

  Patchwork lifted the bandage covering her empty eye sockets, and the beret covering another socket where her ear should be. “One of my eyes and my missing ear are sitting on a shelf in Zappa’s communications center. One of our people put them there.”

  “Modular Woman.” The android nodded. “I get it now.”

  Patchwork slid the bandage down over her sockets again. “The other eye isn’t getting much,” she said. “Not since Pulse and Mistral left. Maybe you could send somebody to get it back?”

  Kafka made an agitated movement. “Let’s get this debriefing over with,” he said. “We’ve all got plans to make.”

  Not quite, the android thought.

  Everyone was making plans but him. And he didn’t have any choice but to try to fit into whatever plans were made.

  Detroit Steel’s armor stood in center field like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but it didn’t look like anyone was home. None of the other aces were in evidence.

  “WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” Tom asked one of the officers working on the Rox model.

  “General Zappa’s down in command HQ with his staff,” a captain told him. “Some of the aces went out to get dinner.”

  There was nothing to do for it but wait. Tom drifted out over the outfield and set the shell down on the grass beside Detroit Steel. He popped his seat belt and stretched. It felt good to relax. He could feel a mother of a headache coming on. Sometimes that happened when he overdid the telekinesis for a long period of time.

  He turned off his cameras to let darkness fill the shell. There was a can of Schaefer in his miniature fridge. He washed down two aspirin with a swallow of beer. Then he reclined his seat all the way, and stared at the darkness. Sleep would have been nice, but there was no way. He wished Dr. Tachyon hadn’t run off to the stars. Bloat respected Tachyon; he might have listened to him. As it was, the jokers had left them with damn little choice.

  It was easy to lose track of time as he lay there in the dark, sipping his can of beer and thinking. The sound of someone knocking on his shell brought him out of his reverie.

  Tom sat up, turned on the nearest camera. A bald woman was outside, leaning into his lens, a little white cardboard container in one hand. The only hair on her shaved head was a buzz-cut purple lightning bolt right down the center. Her skintight red leather jumpsuit glittered with golden studs, and she wore a tiny gold skull in her right nostril.

  For one awful second Tom thought the jumpers had found him. Then he realized that the girl was Danny Shepherd.

  It was the smile that gave her away. The hair, the clothes, everything was different, but her smile was the same. Tom pressed a button to turn on his exterior mikes.

  one home?” She glanced over her shoulder at a man standing behind her. “I don’t think he’s in there, Mike.”

  “I’M HERE,” Tom boomed. Danny winced. Tom twisted a dial to lower the volume. “I was, ah, resting,” he explained.

  Danny waved the cardboard container. “We went over to Chinatown, got some Chinese food. Come on out and join us.”

  Tom found himself staring at the skull in her nose. He felt like Rip Van Winkle. When had Danny found time to get her nose pierced? Never mind getting a haircut and a new leather wardrobe. He’d only been gone a few hours. “I, uh, don’t do that,” he said.

  “You don’t do what?” Danny asked. “You don’t come out? Or you don’t eat Chinese food?”

  “I don’t come out,” Tom explained.

  “Ever?” said the man behind her. He was a big guy about Cyclone’s age, with close-cropped blond hair and a beer gut. His arms were full of brown paper sacks. “That’s no way to live. I ought to know.”

  Tom got it. “You’re Detroit Steel.”

  “Mike Tsakos,” he said. “That’s Detroit Steel.” With both hands full, he had to use his chin to gesture toward the armored suit. “I got to put this stuff down,” he said, moving off camera.

  “You sure you’re not hungry?” Danny asked. “We’ve got a real Chinese feast here. Egg rolls, pot-stickers, moo shu pork, lemon duck, hot shredded Hunan beef, three-flavor shrimp, fried rice…” She looked behind her. “What am I leaving out, Mike?”

  “Chicken chow mein,” Mike Tsakos called out.

  Danny made a face. “Right. I was trying to forget.”

  “General Tso’s chicken,” a woman’s voice called. “Extra hot.” It sounded like Danny.

  But Danny was right there in front of Tom’s camera. “Just who is this General Tso, I wonder, and why are we eating his chicken?” she said lightly.

  Suddenly Tom was very confused. He threw a row of switches, one after the other, turning on the rest of his cameras. His screens blinked on, giving him a 360-degree view.

  On the other side of the shell, in the shadow of Detroit Steel, Mike Tsakos and Danny Shepherd were laying out cartons of Chinese food while two other women spread a picnic blanket on the outfield grass. Startled, Tom looked from Danny in red leather to Danny with the ponytail and the baseball cap, and back again. Twins, he thought, for at least a moment… until it dawned on him that the two other women were also Danny Shepherd.

  One was in uniform, with her black hair cropped short and a corporal’s stripes on her sleeve. The other one looked like a yuppie: business suit, big round glasses, carefully styled hair, gold Rolex. But the faces were the same.

  “Danny,” Tom said. All four looked toward the shell. “What the fuck is going on here? Are these your sisters, or what?”

  “Sisters,” said punk Danny. “That’s good. I like that.”

  Ponytail Danny stood up. “I should have introduced you,” she said. “This is my sister Danny, and my other sister Danny, and my other sister Danny. My sister Danny would have been here too, but she had to pick up my sister Danny at the airport.” She grinned.

  “They’re all the same girl,” Mike Tsakos added.

  “Von Herzenhagen told you I was an ace,” punk Danny said.

  “Wait a minute,” Tom objected. “You weren’t even there.” "We were all there,” Corporal Danny said.

  “Her name is Legion,” Mike Tsakos put in.

  Ponytail Danny stuck out her tongue at him. “Her name is Danny,” she said. “Is anyone going to eat this Chinese food before it gets cold?”

  Tsakos started filling a paper plate with chicken chow mein. The other Dannys all moved in too. When they were close together like that, you could see they were more than twins. Something about their movements, their conversation, the way each one seemed to know exactly what the others were doing. And yet they were less
than twins too, Tom thought as he watched them. Maybe it was just their clothes, but Corporal Danny looked at least two inches taller than the others, and yuppie Danny definitely had larger breasts.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come out?” ponytail Danny asked him. Her plate was heavily laden with shredded beef, moo shu pork, and General Tso’s chicken. “It’s going to be a long night. You must be hungry.”

  “I’m fine,” Tom said. “I’ve got food in here.” There was half a bag of nacho-flavored Doritos around somewhere, he knew. His stomach growled at him. Fortunately, the microphones didn’t pick it up.

  “Okay,” two Dannys said in chorus.

  Tom sat inside his shell, watching Mike Tsakos and the four girls put away a ton of Chinese food. They seemed to be having a great time. He got hungrier and hungrier.

  After a while, the rest of the team began to drift in. The Reflector came up out of the dugout from command HQ, and looked at the picnic in confusion. Punk Danny rolled him a moo shu pork burrito. He accepted the plate, stared at it suspiciously for a moment, then ate it with his fingers. Tom had to make a conscious effort not to think of him as Snotman.

  Two more Dannys joined them a little later. One was a young starlet with a cascade of honey-blond hair that fell past her waist, long slender legs in tight jeans, a low-cut lace blouse that hinted at breasts most Playmates would kill for. The other one was pregnant. She wore a blue maternity dress and a gold wedding band, and looked like she was ready to give birth any moment now. Both of them talked like Danny, moved like Danny, smiled like Danny.

  The food was pretty well gone by the time Zappa, Hartmann, and von Herzenhagen emerged from command HQ to start the briefing. With them came a gaggle of brass in assorted uniforms, Cyclone and his daughter Mistral in matching blue-and-white flying suits and a slight, green-eyed, Irish-Indian woman named Radha Valeria O’Reilly. Radha had a strange beauty: deep auburn hair, dark lashes, skin like burnished gold. She wore a green, spangled acrobat’s costume and a caste mark in the center of her forehead.

  “All of you know Elephant Girl, I believe,” Hartmann began. “Once Pulse arrives, our team will be in place.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. “He should have been here by now. It’s not like Cyril to be late.”

  “I saw him at Aces High an hour ago,” Mistral said. She had her helmet cradled under one arm. A light wind riffled through her hair. She’d dyed a bright blue streak down one side, to match her costume. “He was having pictures taken with some tourists.”

  “Just mark him tardy and get on with it,” Cyclone said irritably. He didn’t look nearly as good in his cape and Kevlar as his daughter did in hers.

  Zappa agreed. “Major Vidkunssen, perhaps you’d care to go over the layout of the Rox with the team?”

  “WHAT ABOUT MODULAR MAN?” Tom wanted to know.

  Von Herzenhagen took a puff. “What about him?”

  “HE’S CHANGED SIDES,” Tom pointed out.

  “Unfortunate,” von Herzenhagen said, “but hardly a fatal blow. If he gets in our way, we’ll simply have to destroy him. It’s not as if it hasn’t been done before.”

  “Leave him to Detroit Steel,” Mike Tsakos put in cheerfully. “I got no use for turncoats.”

  “Get in line, tin man,” Snotman snapped. “I trashed him before. I can trash him again.”

  Tom was aghast. “A COUPLE OF HOURS AGO, HE WAS ONE OF US.”

  “He made his choice,” von Herzenhagen said. “Now I’m afraid he’ll have to live — or die — with the consequences.” He waved his pipe at Tsakos and Snotman. “Gentlemen, we appreciate your eagerness to get in there and grapple with the enemy, but we don’t want to distract ourselves with personal vendettas. Let’s just leave Modular Man to Pulse, shall we? He should be able to burn through that cheap plastic skin just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You can’t dance with a laser. The robot won’t even see it coming.”

  “Poor Mod Man,” the pregnant Danny said.

  Time had stopped.

  The bodysnatcher rose through a silent sunlit sky. He had no body now. He was fire, he was light. He was a burning arrow, ascending. It seemed as though he were moving in slow motion. But around him, nothing else moved at all.

  The towers of Manhattan dwindled beneath him. Everything was strangely distorted. Objects seemed to stretch away, receding into infinity when he looked at them. Ahead of him, everything was tinted blue; behind, the world was awash with sunset, as if seen through a red filter. His passage etched a burning line through the sky, like a tracer frozen in flight.

  The endless music of the streets was gone now. There was no wind, no words, no sound at all. The silence was endless. There was no sense of movement. No sensation at all.

  Below, stretched and reddened, were the shoreline of the Battery, the waters of the bay, the twisted towers of the Rox, small as a child’s toys. Indigo clouds appeared above him. He knifed through them. For an instant he felt a vague heat. Around him, the cloud stuff turned red and orange. It was over so fast it was almost subliminal. Then the bodysnatcher was above the clouds.

  He saw a jet high against the blue, its fuselage as long as a freight train, stretching back to infinity. Slowly, ever so slowly, he drifted up toward it. The jet hung dead still in the sky, frozen in space and time, a big 747 with KLM markings. Pale round faces peered out of the windows, little Norman Rockwell faces looking down on the city. The bodysnatcher wondered what they’d think when they saw him, realized that he’d never know. He’d be a hundred thousand miles into space before their vapid little mouths began to open in surprise. He’d be past the moon before the pilot could turn to the copilot to say, “What the fuck was that?”

  This was what it was like to move at the speed of light.

  Intoxicated, the bodysnatcher rose higher and higher. He could see all of Manhattan and Staten Island now, and most of Long Island. The sky was growing darker, and the stars were coming out. Maybe he would go to the moon, he thought.

  Except… it seemed he was rising so slowly … time turned subjective when you moved at light-speed… a laser might reach the moon in minutes… seconds… but it would seem like weeks to him. And if he got tired… how long could the Pulse body stay in its light-form before it ran out of energy?

  The bodysnatcher felt a twinge of sudden panic. He was high enough now to see the curve of the earth. He would have flailed his hands against the empty air, if he’d had hands to flail. How does a laser turn, he thought wildly.

  And as he thought it, it happened.

  He curved downward, watched the line of his ascension grow into a glowing arc, a rainbow painted in a single color. The colors all shifted around him. Now the earth below was blue, the sky a red sea above him. He fell as slowly as he’d climbed. He willed himself to veer right, then left, then right again. It happened. His ascent had been straight as a ruler; his fall was frozen lightning, jagged and bright.

  A hundred feet above the Rox, a sea gull was frozen in time, white against the dark water. The bodysnatcher altered course. He went through the bird’s head. The heat was sudden and intense, scalding water on bare skin, gone as quickly as it came. For an instant he was surrounded by walls of flesh and blood and bone. He saw them blacken and burn around him. Then he was gone.

  By the time the gull began its fall, the bodysnatcher had burned through the eye of the dome’s great golden face into the throne room, and willed himself back to human flesh.

  That was the hardest part. He fell the last five feet and bloodied his knee on the rough stone floor. The world came crashing in around him: noise, smells, pain. He realized he was naked. The smell of bloatblack was enough to gag him. His legs trembled as he got to his feet beneath the looming torch.

  “Zelda?” Bloat squeaked in astonishment. His joker guards swung their weapons to bear. Kafka gaped at him. Only the penguin seemed unperturbed.

  “The bitch is dead,” the bodysnatcher said, laughing. “Leave her rot. I’m Pulse now.”

  K
afka asked, “What about Molly and —”

  Bloat took the answer out of his head. “Vanilla and Blueboy are bringing back her body,” he told Kafka. “Her guest may be conscious by the time Charon comes in. Take her down to the dungeon. We may need a hostage or two to bargain with.”

  The bodysnatcher looked up at Bloat, and pictured himself turning to light, burning into the governor’s mountainous flesh, lancing through him again and again, until blood and pus and bloatblack oozed from a hundred smoking holes. He savored the thought, turning it over and over in his mind to give the governor a good long look. For once, the fat boy had nothing to say.

  The bodysnatcher laughed hysterically. Let them come. The nats with their guns. the aces with their powers. Let them all come. He would be waiting for them.

  The bodysnatcher finally had a body he liked.

  “There’s no more information coming in,” Patchwork said. “Everything seems to be in place or nearly. All Zappa’s people are eating pizza. I think we can take a break.”

  Kafka looked at the maps; his chitin made a scraping sound. “I should talk to the governor and the others. Decisions have to be made.” He turned to the other jokers..” Help me carry these maps.”

  The jokers carried the maps away, leaving Modular Man with the blind woman. Modular Man turned to her. “What are they going to do?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t tell me much.” She leaned her head in the direction of the big reel-to-reel. “Would you mind turning that off?”

  Modular Man snapped off the recorder. Patchwork leaned back on her swan-necked sofa.

  “They don’t tell me much because I don’t think Bloat believes I’m loyal.”

  “Are you?”

  She smiled vaguely. “Some things I’m loyal to, some things I’m not.” She gave her head a toss. “1-800-I-GIVE-UP. Was that serious? Can we really surrender?”