Jokertown Shuffle

  He was tired of tasting it at one remove. It was like eating soup through a straw.

  He came around a corner. To his right the river licked the beach like a wound. A knot of assorted seedballs was drifting though the wet cold sand toward the food tables, gray shapes half distinct in the false light. He paid them no mind. They were the basic flotsam that that fat fool Bloat got such a charge of clasping to his bosom, or whatever you called it: jokers, monstrous to the Takisian sensibilities Blaise had picked up as much despite his grandfather as because of him, nat trash not a lot more tasteful. The sort of scum he would've gotten a kick out of finding asleep in some alley, soaking down with gas, and lighting off if he'd been born a mere groundling.

  Then Blaise saw him.

  In cognition's ground-zero flash he went from a gangly shape stilting head and shoulders over the trash stream to a terror that yammered in Blaise's skull and pounded on the temples like a mad thing trying to get out. With a martial artist's backward leap, Blaise put the cold block of a building between him and the awful apparition. Burning Sky, could he have seen me?

  "Blaise?"

  Like a soft knife, the voice cut through the hammering in his temples. He looked up and saw K. C. Strange framed by his knees, realized he'd sunk into a sort of fetal crouch with his back to the chill cement wall.

  "Blaise, what's the matter? You look like you're about to throw up."

  He felt a stab of fury, a yellow ice pick through the purple throbbing fog in his brain. How dare she intrude? How dare she question? But the anger flickered and vanished like sparks from an oil-drum fire.

  From the other jumpers he got fear and deference and awe-even from Molly Bolt, who hated his guts. From K.C. he got concern. He had never had people really care about him for his own sake before-he didn't count his grandfather or the one-eyed bitch. Tach's only interest was to keep him from becoming what he was truly meant to be, and Cody was only playing with him. In that last few years he had come to realize, to acknowledge, that for his beloved "Uncle George" he had never been more than a means to an end, and he'd been a kind of revolutionary mascot to the terrorist cells who raised him before that, before his accursed grandfather stumbled across him. K.C. of all the people he'd known gave a fuck for him._

  Maybe that was why he kept her around in spite of her mouth. She was cute. But with his shoulders and attitude and sculpted looks, most of all with his power, he could have cute any time, any way.

  He let out a long sobbing breath. "It's him. He's come for my grandfather."

  "Who?"

  "Him. He's cut his hair, he dresses differently, but it is him. I can smell him. I can feel his mind. He is here to rescue Tachyon."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  He shot her a hot-eyed look, which she ignored. "Nobody knows about Tachyon except us-and Bloat, because he knows everything that goes down on the Rox. But Bloat's got a bigger hard-on for the straights than we do. He'd never spill."

  "It doesn't matter," said Blaise. "He is an ace. He has his ways."

  "Now go back to the beginning and tell me just who this he is."

  "Mark Meadows," he said in a voice that rang with adolescent Sturm and Drang. "Captain Trips."

  "Mark Meadows?" She laughed. "You're working up a sweat for nothing, lover boy. Why, I met him yesterday. He's just a harmless old-who did you say he was?"

  "Captain Trips. The ace who has the friends. Jumpin' Jack Flash, Starshine, Moonchild-I am not sure how many more. He was one of Grandfather's best friends." He looked up at her with a face drawn like a Greco martyr's. "I must stop him. He will destroy us."

  K.C. laughed. Blaise's face froze. She ruled his hair. Her fingers did a better job than the wind. As she teased and tickled his scalp, he relaxed slightly, knew again why he tolerated her.

  He also knew that one day he would pay her back for each and every impertinence, with interest. But he was learning to defer gratification, sometimes. Grandpere would be so proud.

  "Relax. He's just a harmless old geezer."

  "He's an ace, I tell you-"

  She laughed again. "He may have been a big ace, babe. He's nothing now, capisc'? When I tripped over him, he was in the process of getting his skinny butt kicked by Tyrone and Foureyes and company. Righteous dweebs. They were about to stomp his brains out through his big beaky nose until a little tiny teenage girl with a toy knife turned up to the rescue." She squatted beside him and played with the braided tail that hung down the back of Blaise's bombardier's jacket. "Some ace, huh?"

  He shook his head clear with a flip of irritation. "He is undercover. He has to hide his powers. You never lived underground. You would not know"

  "No, hey, I just lived out on the streets since I was twelve years old, I wouldn't know anything about that, and anyway I'm just a girl."

  "That's right."

  She reared back, ready to spit at him like a cobra. At the last instant before she said something he would have to destroy her for, he showed his teeth in a feral gin. She blinked, grinned back, hung her hands around his neck, and shook her head. "You son of a bitch."

  This is our game, he thought, smiling complacently. I push her to see how far she pushes back. She pushes back to see how far I'll go.

  And the stakes are her life. Wouldn't that surprise her? He remembered Mark, then, and lost his taste for games. He pushed her arms off his neck, only half roughly, and started to stand. "Enough of this, cheri."

  "Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty"

  He shook his head sharply, like a ferret with a mouse. She took the hint. "Your Mark Meadows has played a foolish game and lost. It's time to take from him the price="

  "Andrieux."

  He looked up. Mustelina and Andiron stood there. Mustelina cradled an AKM assault rifle in her furry paws-not one of the semiautomatics the liberals were so spastic about, but a real assault rifle, full auto as issued to a Baltic conscript with the Warsaw Pact in Poland, who had sold it for a lid. Andiron wasn't armed. He just tapped his blunt greenishblack forearms together gently with a ringing like weights dropped cn a carpeted gym floor.

  Blaise snapped upright, heels together, and performed a mock bow, half Takisian, half French. "To what do I owe the honor?"

  Monsters, he thought, and his skin crawled. "Governor wants to see you," Mustelina said.

  Blaise smiled his beautiful smile at the ferretlike joker. "Ah, but I regret, urgent business requires me-" Andiron's handless arms pealed like a bell. "Now," he said.

  Blaise's eyes became slits. "I could make you dance a waltz into the river and drown."

  "Sure you could," Mustelina agreed easily, "but you won't."

  Blaise stood a moment longer, his lips stretching across his teeth so tightly he feared they'd tear. "Someday," he hissed.

  Mustelina levered the AK from full auto to safe with two loud clacks. "Someday," she agreed.

  Blaise turned to K. C., gripped her by the arms. "Go find Meadows. Get to know him. Find out what he wants." She nodded and slipped away.

  He turned to the two Bloat guards, straightened, pulled back his shoulders, and adjusted the fit of his leather jacket. "Well? We burn the daylight."

  Mark settled down with his rump propped on a mostly horizontal slab of asphalt, part of a stack of paving chunks piled at the tip of the southern arm of the blocky U that was Ellis Island, next to the mouth of the tiny little harbor. It was a crisp, clear morning. His breath smoked like a dragon's as he tried to get comfortable with his plastic plate of lukewarm beans perched on his knees.

  "Hey there."

  He started at the voice, looked up furtively, prepared to run. He still wasn't sure he was entitled to eat. The fooddistribution system on the Rox was pretty rough and ready:

  Some plundered steam tables out on the sand, where a pair of truly horrible-looking puswad jokers in stained paper hats ladled out crud to queues of shabby, surly residents. Another joker, as big and as ugly as any two of the bunch who'd hassled him yesterday, stood watch with a pair of l
ean mean kids, not jokers-which meant they probably were jumpersarmed with bats. They scrutinized him when he took his place in line behind somebody with a head like a burn-victim mushroom growing out of a black leather jacket, but didn't challenge. He guessed the drill was if you looked too familiar, they figured you were trying to jump seconds and thumped you accordingly.

  For a moment he feared they'd belatedly decided he didn't look familiar enough, but the shadow between him and the sun rising over Manhattan was small. Also familiar.

  "Mind if I sit down?" K. C. Strange asked. "No, no. Uh, like, go ahead."

  She hunkered down next to him. He tried hard not to notice the contours of her black Spandex pants. This wasn't the time or the place or the person. He was an outsider. Just an old nat.

  He proffered his plate. She waved him off. "You like the water?" she asked.

  "I never thought the smell of the Hudson would be a relief."

  He regretted it immediately. She seemed to be a big Rox booster. But she laughed.

  "Well, it isn't your white-bread world here, that's for sure." She glanced down at him. "Sleep okay?"

  "Done worse." Right after the trial he'd spent a few weeks on the street, just wandering, sleeping in alleys or the occasional midnight mission, while Pretorius did all he could, which unfortunately wasn't much. That had been in summer. The makeshift dorms of the Rox smelled so bad, the stench was like a weight, and the debris rustled constantly with small unseen things, but they kept the winter wind off. He didn't care that some of the bodies pressed against his were human only by ancestry; they were warm.

  "Thought I'd check on you. After all, it isn't everybody out here I can talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with."

  "Not even your, uh, your boyfriend?"

  Why did you ask that, you nitwit? the little guy who sat in the peanut gallery of his mind asked. It used to be Flash and the Traveler who sat back there and gave him a hard time. Now it was just a little gray guy, anonymous as everybody else in New York. Mark didn't have a ready answer anyway.

  She looked at him from the sides of her eyes. They were gray eyes, pale, almost silver. "He doesn't read much. What brings you to the Rox?"

  "Had a little… run-in with the law."

  It was funny. Here he'd been a member of the counterculture most of his adult life, even when the original countercultural heavies were all joining brokerage firms or flogging diet plans and self-help seminars on paid-programming TV shows. And now that he was at last genuinely, authentically underground, it embarrassed the hell out of him. Also, he understood in an inchoate sort of way that it wasn't exactly survival-positive to trot out his personal problems in front of strangers. It's 1990, and, as Gilbert Shelton used to say, government spies are everywhere.

  She laughed. "Come on. It had to be more than that." He stuck out his lower lip, mulish, and she laughed louder.

  "Give me a break. We don't have informers here, even if President George is coming to town to encourage us all to turn in our neighbors. Take a look over there."

  She pointed with her chin. A shape was just breaking water out in the miniature harbor, streaming water thousandcolored like an oil slick: a translucent glabrosity, a Portuguese man-o'-war the size of Godzilla's piles. "That's Charon. Making a late run; he usually doesn't like to surface by daylight. He's how you got here, right?"

  "Uh, yeah."

  He didn't know it-he-was called Charon. All he knew was what the joker who looked like a clump of seaweed in an Orioles cap and Coors Light jacket and oozed into the record store to warn him the DEA were on their way had told him: If he thought he might need the sanctuary of the Rox, he ought to blow what roll he carried on a bag of groceries at some late-night bodega, go down to the river, fire up a flashlight, and think real hard about how bad he wanted to go there. It smacked to Mark of clicking his tiny heels together and chanting "There's No Place Like Home," three times, but the drug-war dogs were on his track, and if they took him, he'd never get Sprout free, and so he did what he was told.

  And the damnedest thing of all, it worked.

  "He's how most people get here. Now look real close. What do you see inside him?"

  Mark squinted into the spindrift sun. From this perspective, Charon looked like a grotesque exaggerated glass Oliver Hardy-shaped Christmas-tree ornament; you could just see a hint of face, up near the top. With the late-dawn light shining through his body, you could see-

  "Nothing."

  "Good answer. But think about this. Charon never makes dry runs."

  He felt the greasy congealed beans he'd choked down start becoming buoyant. "But-"

  "Yeah. And when you come to the wall-Bloat's Wall that surrounds this place-you start to feel Big Fear. And then you better want to get here real bad. Because if you don't, you stick-and Charon never stops, either. So the wall holds you in place, and he just sort of oozes out from around you and leaves you on the bottom. Osmosis, like."

  Mark bit his lip and put his plate down on the damp sand. But he took care not to spill it; his appetite might come back in a bit. He'd learned to be practical that way these last few months.

  K.C. shaded her face with her hand and looked at him. She was quite pretty, once you got past the crown-of-thorns hair.

  "So what're you really doing on the Rox? You're not just on the run for knocking over a 7-11."

  "It's my little girl. My daughter. I need to get her back."

  "She's on the Rox? Joker or jumper, let me tell you, dude, if she's here, you don't really want to see her. Capisc'?" "No. It isn't that. She's in a juvenile detention center. I don't know which one. I need to find her and get her out." Something passed behind her ice-fleck eyes. Then her face hardened. "A middle-class wimp who's spun out on the ice past thirty-something, run a jailbreak? Give me a break. You wouldn't know the first thing about it."

  "Hey, I can do it!" he exclaimed, outraged. "I can do something, anyway," he mumbled, coming all over uncertain. "Yeah. Like what?" Her smile taunted him.

  "Uhh-" His ears got hot. Aware he'd said too much, he turned quickly away.

  "So tell me," she whispered, right by his ear, "where are your friends, Cap'n Trips?"

  When he spun around, she was gone.

  "Now, Blaise," the creature called Bloat said, and tittered. "I heard you. thinking bad thoughts about one of our guests here on the Rox. That won't do. It won't do at all, at all."

  Blaise let his nose and upper lip contort in disgust at the stench that washed off the shimmering translucent maggot mass as palpably as the evil black crud that cascaded endlessly down its sides. It wouldn't do any good to hide his reaction, even though K. C. said it made him look like a fruit bat. Bloat could read his mind.

  Blaise hated that. He let the nausea shine back like a beacon, filled his head with images of throwing up, great yellow geysers.

  Hovering in attendance, the big cockroach Kafka made a set of sounds like knuckles popping. Kafka was kind of grand vizier to Bloat and was always trying to make sure his boss got the treatment merited by his position as governor of the Rox, and not that earned by his appearance. Kafka didn't much like the jumpers. He liked Blaise least of all.

  "I suppose you're going to try to tell us what to think now," Blaise said, very brassy. "Authority has gone to your head, wherever the hell you keep it."

  "No," Bloat said, and he forgot to titter. "I wish I could tell you what to think. Better yet, I'd like to tell you not to think. But you can't help thinking, any more than I can help… hearing you."

  He faltered a little, because Blaise had conjured up a vivid memory of going down on K. C. Strange. Her pubic hair was sparse, dark blonde and very fine. Her flesh was pink, and when he moved his tongue, she moved with it.

  "Then why did you send your pet monsters to drag me here?" Blaise asked.

  "Ahh. Mark Meadows. The man who once was Cap'n Trips. You plan to harm him."

  "What of it?"

  "He is a victim of the straight world's hatred and fear. I choos
e to offer him refuge. If he still has his ace powers, he will be an invaluable ally when the nats try to crush us. If he does not… his body is still warm. He can still attract bullets that might otherwise find homes in joker flesh. I forbid you to touch him."

  Blaise laughed. "What gives you the right, fat thing?"

  "He's the governor of the Rox," Kafka hissed, his voice like a snake in dry leaves.

  Blaise started to give back static, but Bloat had pulled it from his mind already. "Give me a break. We've had this discussion before. You need the Rox, which means you need me. And if you think you're going to change that, Latham might have a few different ideas."

  Latham. That cold fish. He felt a memory of pain deep in his belly and shuddered. He was not ready to square accounts with Latham. Which meant settling Bloat had to be deferred-and worse, the monster knew it.

  "Very well, Governor." He performed a mock bow. Bloat just giggled. "I bow to your authority… on the Rox. If Mark Meadows takes action against me here, I claim the right of self-defense."

  "Please, Blaise, don't make this difficult. You have that right. But Meadows isn't going to move against you. He doesn't know what you've done with his friend, your grandfather. I read his mind, remember?"

  He's an ace, remember?

  "He thinks you're his friend, Blaise."

  "Be that as it may, I have other scores to settle with him. Should he leave the Rox, he leaves your domain, and then he is mine."

  "The mainland is a dangerous place," Kafka rasped. Blaise frowned at him. He wasn't naive enough to take the cockroach's agreement at face value. "Even you could have an accident there, Blaise."

  To his own surprise, Blaise's reaction was amusement, not anger. "If anyone was going to lay hurt on me, I'd read it. And I'd hurt them worse." He was bluffing, of course. It was always good to keep the monsters off balance. And even if Bloat had the perseverance to endure the image of K. C.'s lean thighs wrapped around Blaise's head, he would be able to read only that Blaise was bluffing. Not to what extent.

  "Your power is great, Blaise," Kafka said, "but what's its range? There's a thing called a Barrett Light Fifty. A sniper's rifle. It fires the same round as a fifty-caliber machine gun. It has a range of over a mile. Does your power reach that far, Blaise?" He moved his chitinous limbs in the gesture that served him as a shrug. "I'm afraid somebody might take it in mind to pick you right off the Rox with a shot from the mainland. Meadows has lots of friends among the jokers, Blaise."