Dealer's Choice

  “Peace?” the stagman said. He had a deep voice and a British accent. “You mean surrender.”

  “…My children…” Father Squid began, spreading his hands.

  The stagman moved forward, cloven hooves ringing on stone. “Bugger that,” he interrupted. “We’re not your bloody children.”

  Father Squid’s voice was drowned out in a chorus of obscenities.

  Hartmann appealed to Bloat. “You agreed to this peace conference, Governor. The least you can do is hear us out.”

  The cockroach stepped toward the senator. “The governor knows everything you have to say. You can’t lie to him. You can’t keep secrets.”

  Bloat giggled. “Yes, Senator,” he said to Hartmann, “the smell in here is appalling. Even in my throne room, there’s no escaping bloatblack. Especially in my throne room.”

  The shell had its own air-conditioning. Tom couldn’t smell a thing. But Hartmann paled and hesitated for a moment.

  “Go on,” Bloat urged. “Wrinkle your nose, you want to. Use your handkerchief if you must. Silk, isn’t it?”

  Hartmann had actually started to pull out the handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, but now he froze. Tom heard scattered laughter at the senator’s discomfiture. “Governor,” Father Squid said, “think of your people. Of the price they’ll pay if this mission fails.”

  Hartmann tried to recover himself. He took out the handkerchief after all, mopped at his forehead. “You may know what we’re going to say,” he said loudly to Bloat. He looked around the vast room at the sea of joker faces. “But your people have the right to hear our terms for themselves. Don’t they?”

  One of the jumpers spoke up. “You’re offering amnesty?”

  “Full and unconditional,” Hartmann replied. He tried to tuck the handkerchief back into his breast pocket, and missed. It fluttered lightly to the floor. Hartmann ignored it. “Forgiveness for all past crimes, regardless.”

  ’You guarantee it?” another jumper asked.

  “You have my word, and the solemn pledge of the United States government,” Hartmann declared.

  Several of the jumpers exchanged glances.

  Bloat tittered. “Oh, that’s good, Senator. That’s very good.” He giggled again. “So your government will forgive us all for being criminals. Well, that’s fine for our jumper friends. But tell me. Senator. My people would like to know.” He took a long dramatic pause. “Who’s going to forgive us for being jokers?”

  The silence in the hail was profound.

  “Yeah,” Bloat said smugly. “That’s what I thought.”

  Tom could feel the tension in the pit of his stomach. He turned his exterior volume all the way up. But Bloat spoke up before Tom could find the words. “The man in the can’s got something to say,” he announced.

  Tom pushed with his teke, floating up, until he was higher than Bloat, higher than the balconies, higher than the torch, commanding the whole room. He wanted them to look up at him. “THIS ISN’T A FUCKING GAME. IF YOU DON’T SURRENDER, THEY’LL KILL YOU.”

  “They’ve tried to kill us before,” Bloat said.

  “LISTEN TO ME. YOU ONLY HAVE TILL SUNSET…”

  “Then we all turn into pumpkins, right?” a jumper put in.

  “Then they send more soldiers,” the stagman said.

  “NOT JUST SOLDIERS,” promised the Turtle. He had to make them understand. “THE AIR FORCE AND THE NAVY WILL HIT YOU FROM BEYOND THE WALL WITH EVERYTHING THEY’VE GOT.”

  “Let them try,” the antlered joker said, “we’ll hit them back.” He stepped toward Hartmann and Father Squid, bent suddenly, scooped up the senator’s fallen hankie. He clenched it in his fist, raised it high over his head like a banner. “Five for one!” he shouted, his deep voice ringing off the rafters.

  “Go on,” Bloat said, giggling. “Tell us about the aces.”

  He’s reading my mind, Tom realized in panic. He’d known Bloat was a telepath, but knowing it and experiencing it were two different things. “THEY’RE RECRUITING ACES TOO. YOU HAVE NO IDEA THE KIND OF POWER YOU’LL BE FACING. CYCLONE AND MISTRAL, DETROIT STEEL, PULSE, ELEPHANT GIRL.” He was blanking. He licked his lips. “FORTUNATO.” He couldn’t think of anyone else. He lied. “J.J. FLASH, STARSHINE…”

  “Flash and Starshine,” Bloat said merrily. “I can’t wait to see that.”

  Fuck, Tom thought wildly. You can’t bluff a telepath. Another name came to him. “MODULAR MAN,” he blurted.

  The whole Great Hall erupted into laughter.

  Bloat jiggled and rumbled, pipe-stem arms slapping helplessly against his sides in a paroxysm of hilarity. The stagman was laughing thunderclaps. Jokers and jumpers on all sides were roaring and falling down. The penguin was twirling figure-eights in the air. Even the human cockroach looked like he was smiling. The dome overhead rang with laughter.

  Tom’s eyes went wildly from screen to screen to screen. They were all laughing, everyone but Hartmann and Father Squid, who looked as baffled as he was. He didn’t get it.

  “WHAT THE FUCK IS SO GODDAMN FUNNY?” he asked.

  The laughter died away slowly, like the ebbing of a great tide. Out from behind Bloat’s immensity stepped a solitary, sheepish figure. A handsome man in a blue jumpsuit, with guns mounted on his shoulders. “Excuse me,” Modular Man said. “Senator, Father, Turtle.” He sounded as embarrassed as an android could sound. “I don’t know how to tell you this but, well… I met the enemy, and he is me.”

  The jokers laughed at the Turtle, Father Squid, and Hartmann’s discomfiture; Modular Man looked as bemused and uncomfortable as an android could. Bloat made no effort to cut them off. He stared at the peace delegation and grimaced. Hypocrites, every last one of them — and one of them especially.

  Bloat knew about Hartmann — he’d figured out months ago that the senator must be a hidden ace. Several of the jokers on the Rox carried painful memories of actions that were entirely out of character for them; old, loyal Peanut most prominent among them. And like Peanut, most of those jokers had associations with Hartmann; as with Peanut, the circumstantial evidence indicated that someone had manipulated them, had taken control of their actions for a brief time.

  The information Black Shadow had given him a few months ago had confirmed that suspicion in Bloat’s mind. Bloat figured Hartmann was an ace “up the sleeve.” He also suspected that the ace had much to do with Tachyon’s betrayal of the senator at the Democratic National Convention. It all made sense. Bloat knew, but he’d never met the man, never had the opportunity to prowl through his thoughts.

  What Bloat had found in the last hour was a stench worse than bloatblack, a deformity uglier than any joker’s.

  Hartmann had been paranoid from the moment he entered the Rox’s boundaries, knowing Bloat’s reputation as a mind reader. The fear had made it difficult for the senator to pass the psychic barrier of Bloat’s Wall. Once forced through, his mind sagged open like a rotten fruit.

  … can’t even think about Puppetman … he’ll know … can’t even think about it at all… but of course that only opened the gates of Hartmann’s memory. Through all the talk, through all the nice little speeches about how he had the best interests of everyone at heart, through all the entreaties for reasonableness, Bloat listened to that interior voice, those old memories.

  A sickness, a charnel house of putrefaction, spilled out. Bloat had gagged at the taste of it in his head, unbelieving. This was Senator Hartmann, the hero of Jokertown, the almost-president, the friend of the jokers? This thing?

  Any optimism that Bloat had harbored concerning this meeting dissolved under the barrage. Hartmann was not a good man, a compassionate one, or even a misguided one. Jokers were human beings whose bodies were twisted by the wild card into something inhuman. Hartmann was a joker in reverse — a normal form with something horribly inhuman inside.

  The realization made Bloat angry. The deceit of all of them made him furious.

  “You’re all liars,” he said suddenly, and th
e hilarity around him ended as if it had been cut off by a switch. The anger in him made his body writhe around the inlet pipes that impaled him like a mounted insect. Bloatblack oozed from the scabrous pores and the miasma of raw sewage filled the room. The inhabitants of the Rox might be used to the stench; the thoughts of the others were quite expressive.

  “Don’t you like Eau de Bloat?” He giggled, and then frowned. “Can’t you taste the shit that’s coming out of your own mouths? God, such a fine trio of hypocrites. I listened to all this crap and there’s nothing in your words. Nothing at all.”

  Father Squid gaped, his tentacles wriggling over his open mouth; inside the shell of the Turtle, Bloat could hear Tudbury gasp as if struck; Hartmann looked like he wanted to run. Around the room, automatic rifle bolts clicked back; Kafka waved angrily at the joker guards.

  “GOVERNOR,” the Turtle began. He’d turned up the volume on his speakers, trying to gain in decibels what he couldn’t in fervor. Bloat could hear the turmoil and sudden guilt in the man-boy’s mind. “PLEASE…”

  “I hear you,” Bloat interrupted, waving his helpless stick arms. “I hear the thoughts, not the words. I know all your secrets. I know your name. Oh Great and Powerful Turtle. You can’t hide from me behind the shell, and you can’t hide from the world in it, either. You don’t really like what your side is doing in this, do you? That’s an armored shell you ride, not a fucking white horse. Your own little Wall, and you the Bloat behind it.”

  Bloat’s gaze went to the priest. “And you, Father Squid? Are you a saint?”

  “I’m at peace with myself,” the large joker answered, but Bloat could hear the skittering memories inside. Bloat followed their sounds into dark places.

  “No, you’re not at peace, Father,” he cackled. “Not when you spend some nights kneeling by the bed asking God for forgiveness — and you still have those nights, don’t you, Father? Don’t the faces of the ones you killed with your own hands haunt your dreams? You protest that you were young then and caught up in something you’ve since found to be wrong, but don’t you still find that you look the other way when violence just happens to benefit your side, even now? You want the names. Father? You want the dates and places? I can get them for you. I can tell everyone, just like I could tell everyone the Turtle’s real name.”

  Father Squid was silent, clutching the crucifix of Christ the Joker to his huge chests. He made soft, wet sounds deep in his throat, as if he were sobbing.

  “And you, Senator. …”

  Hartmann visibly startled. He looked old suddenly, and frail. He wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.

  “Governor,” he said pleadingly.

  Bloat guffawed. “Wow, the great senator wants a little goddamn compassion. C’mon, Senator, you’re the sickest one of all. Sure, I can see that in your mind as clearly as you can. You even agree with me. The great friend of Jokertown certainly did love the jokers, didn’t he?”

  The ugly pores along Bloat’s flanks flexed and pouted like circular mouths, great turds of bloatblack emerged from them, sliding down the stained hills of his flesh. His body was trembling again, as it had when the Temptation of St. Anthony had been destroyed and he’d first brought forth the demons from his mind. Bloat forced the energy back down, tried to still the turmoil inside the vastness of his form. Bloat looked around the room. He could feel the rising enmity against the delegation. The torrent of voices inside his head made him grin. Their massed support sparked the dream-energy inside him. He could feel it rising once more, chaotic, and he reached out with mental hands to channel that vitality. For a moment as he first grasped the power, there was a whirling disorientation — like he remembered as a kid, spinning with arms outspread in the living room until the room danced around him. In that split second, he thought he could hear angry voices calling him … Teddy … and there was a wisp of cold mountain air; an impression of a flat, dark-skinned, wide-nosed face; a sense of outraged invasion from watching minds.

  Then he was back. The cold air was only the warm stink of his own bloatblack and he was speaking with the resonant, compelling tones of the Outcast, causing everyone to look up at him in astonishment.

  “You don’t want to help me, Senator,” he said, banishing the residual dizziness. “You don’t care about the jokers at all. You don’t give a shit about the Rox or what we’ve done here. None of you really do.”

  From around the room came shouts of agreement, loud enough that the huge torch on the wall behind him rattled in sympathy. Father Squid and Hartmann had moved back close to the Turtle and the limousine, and their mindvoices chattered in panic. “All the three of you want to do is save yourselves the guilt of having to fight with the nats against your own kind, and you don’t care that you sell out the Rox and all the people here to do it.” More shouting: jokers and jumpers alike added their voices. But when he spoke, the Outcast’s voice sent them all silent again.

  “You can tell Bush and General Zappa this. If anyone wants to leave here, he or she can do so. Governor Bloat doesn’t chain his people up against their will — hey, I’ve got Liberty’s torch right behind me, after all. But all I’m hearing is the same old shit from you. All I hear is that… that those who the wild card touched are lepers: diseased people to be shut away, sterilized, and kept watch over. Man, I didn’t choose to be this way. It ain’t my fucking fault. I didn’t want to put up the Wall — it’s just there and I can’t turn it on and off at will. All I’m doing is using what I was given in the best way I know. That’s all any of us here are doing, and I think we’re beginning to make progress. I think we’re beginning to put something together for jokers.”

  More shouts. Bloat laughed, and this time it wasn’t his adolescent, shrill giggle, but something deep-throated and full. “But you don’t care. Huh-uh. We’re just pieces of bloatblack to you, to be disposed of or put somewhere out of sight.”

  More cries erupted around them. Captain Chaos, standing next to Bloat, reached down and plucked one of the pieces of bloatblack from the floor. She flung it; the fecal blob bounced off Hartmann’s shoulder and left a brown stain on his gray suit coat. Hartman flinched back, startled. “Here’s an answer to take back with you,” Chaos said, and suddenly several of the jokers in the hail were running to Bloat’s side, grasping the filth there and flinging it at the delegation.

  Bloat laughed. Hartmann and Father Squid scrambled into the limousine for shelter. The jokers ran to the car and began rocking it side to side. The suspension squealed in protest; the tires sagged like the waists of tired old men. “GET BACK!” the Turtle roared, and lifted the limousine straight up. Bloatblack missiles thudded dully against the bottom of the car and the Turtle’s shell.

  “GOVERNOR…” ….the Turtle began, then the speakers crackled and went silent. Bloat could hear the man’s thoughts racing, trying to find words and coming up with nothing that seemed appropriate. Finally, the ace gave up. Hartmann stared at Bloat from the window of the car… ugly little thing. If! had Puppetman… Father Squid looked down from the opposite side.

  “I understand,” the priest said softly, and the faint smell of the sea came to Bloat. “I really do.”

  Then the Turtle and his burden moved softly away as the Bloatblack barrage continued. To the jeers of the Rox, the Turtle and the limo left through the open mouth of the Bloat-face in the ceiling of the Great Hall.

  The light was red.

  The Buick idled in the middle of the Jokertown intersection. The bodysnatcher tapped on the driver’s window. The man inside looked at her, hesitated. He must have decided she looked harmless enough. The window came rolling down. Power window. Very nice.

  There was a family inside. Daddy was tall and balding, wearing a gray suit. His wife was a plump woman in a polyester pants suit. In back was an ugly little girl in blue jeans and Smurfs T-shirt, maybe three.

  “Yes?” Daddy asked. “Can I help you?”

  “Your little girl isn’t wearing her seat belt,” the bodysnatcher tol
d him. “What kind of parents are you?”

  The man didn’t know what to make of this. His wife said, “The light’s changed,” nervously. She was smarter than he was. She knew you don’t stop and talk to strangers in the middle of a Jokertown street.

  “It’s not just a good idea,” the bodysnatcher said. “It’s the law. Watch this.” She took the bottle of Drano out of the pocket of her trench coat, twisted off the cap, and drank.

  The pain was a purifying fire inside her, burning out all the filth. She heard them gasp. When the bottle was empty, the bodysnatcher tossed it aside, wiped her lips, and smiled down at Daddy. She had to lean against the car to keep from falling. She would have said something, but her throat was too badly burned.

  Daddy was staring up at her in horror, knuckles white where they gripped the steering wheel. The bodysnatcher blinked back tears, and jumped.

  Inside the car, inside Daddy, he raised the power window and watched the face outside twist in sudden agony. Mommy was whimpering in the seat beside him. The bodysnatcher hit the accelerator, heard a thump as the body hit the street. The screams began before they were halfway across the intersection.

  “Oh, God, oh, God,” the wife was saying. The Buick’s handling was flabby. The bodysnatcher turned a corner hard. “We have to call the police,” the wife finally managed. "Blueboy would like that,” the bodysnatcher told her.

  The wife looked at him strangely. “John?” she said. She still didn’t get it. By then the bodysnatcher was turning into the alley, and it was too late. They went down past the dumpster, to the dead end way in back, under the fire escape. Blueboy and Vanilla and Molly Bolt were waiting there, in the shadows.

  “No,” the wife said as they came toward the car. “No, no, no.” She locked all the doors, closed all the windows, frantic with fear. As if windows could stop a jumper.

  Molly Bolt shook her head in disgust, and jumped.

  Mommy sat back, adjusted her pantsuit. “Polyester,” she complained. “I hate polyester.” She looked over her shoulder at the girl in the backseat. “How you doing?”