Dealer's Choice Page 17

  “I’m helping the three of you make a break and embark on this fantastic voyage to the Rox. For whatever good it will do, you know? I hope you’ll accomplish some good. But the question I still have is, what about Uncle Jack?”

  Wyungare said. “I will continue searching him out. I shall talk with him.”

  “So?” said Cordelia. “That sounds like the same sort of rigmarole I got from the clinic staff. At least Dr. Bob Mengele, asshole that he is, actually tried to do something.” The grit in her voice edged her words. “I know you’re not just bullshitting me, love; if you were, that would be it for us. So just tell me what you think you can do. Please.” The metal in her voice dulled. Wyungare saw tears in her eyes.

  He stopped and gripped her shoulders, confronting her face-to-face. Wyungare carefully side-kicked the alligator; Jack whuffled and looked around confusedly, but stopped too. The black cat turned his head and burred curiously from deep in his throat.

  “Cordie, it’s not that I won’t tell you my plan, it’s that I cannot. There’s a fundamental principle that says that now is the moment of power. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. I am not planning a long-term strategy because, simply, I cannot.”

  He hesitated and, for the first time, avoided her look. “What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “The tuckonies taught me something.” Wyungare shook his head. “The tree-spirits, the spirits of growth,” he said by way of explanation. “I assume you have your own definition of karma?”

  Cordelia looked puzzled. “What goes ’round… All that kind of thing?”

  Wyungare nodded slowly. “Most Europeans see it as a function of the distant past. Sins of your childhood come back to haunt you as an adult.”

  Cordelia nodded.

  “Try it this way,” said her lover. “You, me, all of us, represent a huge gene pool, both physically and psychically. Our resources span an enormous inventory. Karma’s not some ancient instrument of vengeance. It is now. Each moment we recreate who we are and what we do.” He gently raised his hands to her face, cradling her chin between thumb and forefinger. “Perhaps this is all simply an elaborate way of saying that karma is the ongoing process of winging it.”

  Cordelia smiled. “I don’t think that’s what a lot of the sensitive New Age folk want to hear. What you just said means that we all bear a burden of responsibility for our actions.”

  “See, young missy?” said Wyungare. “An easy lesson to comprehend.” "But hard to carry out.” Cordelia shook her head. “Karma is now.”

  “The past distances things. People let that soften their responsibilities.”

  She took his hands into hers and dug in her nails. “So connect this with Uncle Jack.”

  He didn’t flinch. “I believe I have three tasks to perform within a day. The first is to speak with the boy, Bloat, and help him pass from warrior to magician. The second is to draw upon mana, to help Jack Robicheaux draw strength from the power within, and to define a condition of healing. The third —” His voice dropped off and he shook his head. “The third I must not speak of now.”

  She regarded him puzzledly. “Does it have anything to do with us?”

  Wyungare dropped his head so that his chin tucked into his chest. He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked straight at her again. “Whatever happens, Cordie, remember this: I feel a great amount of affection for you.”

  “Merde,” she said, eyes flashing dangerously. “Guys are such wimps, even if they’re revolutionaries and shamans” She leaned toward him, up on her toes, face close to his. “So do you love me?”

  Wyungare regarded her gravely. Then he smiled. It was as though a gate had opened. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Very much. I love you.”

  “Then that’s enough.” She drew his lips down to hers. Parting from his mouth at last, she said, “I will love you always.” The seriousness in her voice suddenly moderated. “This is no teen crush, wombat-boy.” She grinned. He kissed her again.

  The black cat rubbed around their legs, purring. Then Jack rushed past them, reptilian patience apparently at an end.

  “Boat’s leaving,” said Cordelia. “Wait, Uncle Jack!” she called. They both followed.

  The cat bounded ahead, as though acting as a forward observer. He yowled triumphantly and cut right, past some anonymous statue covered with pigeon droppings, then in front of a phalanx of empty green benches. He bounced almost as stiff-legged as a kitten through some brush and then they were at the water’s edge. Wyungare set a restraining hand on the alligator’s head. He was no physical match for Jack’s reptile avatar, but he directed a sensation of soothing wellbeing into the creature’s soul. That should last just long enough, he thought.

  Gray water lapped unappetizingly against the ornamental rocks. Directly ahead they could see the dark wall that surrounded the Rox.

  Cordelia stooped and touched the water with one finger. Then she rubbed it vigorously on her denim-clad hip. “Yuck. Bad stuff. Are you sure you can’t just translate out there through the dreamtime?”

  Wyungare shook his head. “Interference from the boy is making that too chancy. Believe me, I’d rather fly than swim.”

  Cordelia took his hand and held it as though it were a direct line to sanity. “Is there any way we can communicate while you’re out there? I’d like to try.”

  The Aborigine shrugged. “Perhaps in the dreamtime. You’ve had a bit of experience now in getting there. Just be cautious. The worlds are not altogether safe.”

  “I’ll be careful.” she said.

  “We must leave.” Wyungare disengaged himself. The alligator roared, a cry of challenge, of hunger and impatience. He shuffled forward into the water, looking suddenly like a huge, rough-barked log floating low in the Upper Bay.

  The black cat rubbed against Cordelia’s calf and then leapt onto the alligator’s back. He stalked along the ridge of the reptile and settled himself on Jack’s armored skull. The cat sat on his haunches and regarded the distant view of New Jersey. The alligator didn’t seem to mind.

  “My turn,” said Wyungare. He gave Cordelia a sudden, fierce hug.

  “Come back to me,” said the young woman.

  “One way or another.”

  “What?” she said, confused.

  He kissed her a final time. “Remember me.” Then he turned and stepped onto the back of the gator as though boarding a gangplank. Balancing, he strode forward and then settled himself astraddle the alligator’s midsection with both brown legs trailing into the disgusting bay water. He ran his fingers along Jack’s dorsal line.

  “I feel like I should be tying you to the mast,” said Cordelia, “and stuffing beeswax in your ears.”

  Wyungare turned back toward her. “Just like Odysseus.” He tapped the fingers of his right hand against Jack’s armored hide. “That’s your uncle’s job. He’s not human now. He can get me through the barrier.”

  Like a warship pulling away from its dock, the alligator smoothly and sinuously launched himself toward the deeper water.

  Wyungare again turned and saw Cordelia standing on the shore watching them. He felt a sudden empathic flash. To Cordelia, the image of her three friends leaving the land was weirdly reminiscent of Gilbert Stuart’s famous iconographic American painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.

  She wishes she had a camera, Wyungare thought. But she has her memory. That will be enough.

  But before turning back to their course and the waiting Wall, Wyungare couldn’t help himself. Silly, maybe: melodramatic, definitely. He waved.

  And Cordelia waved back.

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  September 21, 1990

  The bodysnatcher waited by the Jersey Gate with the cowards and weak sisters. A fog was rolling in off the bay. The light from the setting sun brushed a hundred-odd silent, frightened faces as the small clot of jokers and jumpers waited.

  A few stragglers were still crossing the causeway, lugging whatever they could lug. Most had bedrolls or blankets. A few
were carrying their pathetic little sacks with all their worldly possessions. No one had any weapons. Bloat’s joker guards had relieved them of guns and knives. They could leave if they wanted to, but the guns stayed behind to defend the Rox.

  Pulse’s body was all the weapon the bodysnatcher needed. No one dared to say a word to him.

  He looked at the crowd around him. A bare hundred jokers had shown up, out of the thousands on the Rox. Old women, the sick and feeble, a few mothers with small children. Nobody who’d be missed.

  The jumpers were clustered together under the watchful eyes of Bloat’s demon guards. The bodysnatcher counted them twice, and came up with twenty-one. Twenty-two counting him. The world’s only middle-aged jumper.

  He was taking a risk. Someone might recognize the Pulse body. But the bodysnatcher had made it hard for them.

  He’d shaved his head, plastered tattoo transfers over his face. A death’s head moth spread its wings around his eyes. He was wearing a filthy pair of denims and a leather vest. Under the vest he was bare-chested. There was a safety pin through his right cheek, and another in his left tit. His nipple leaked blood like a mother leaking milk. That was all right. The pain kept him sharp. He didn’t think anyone would want to look at him too long.

  Finally the huge gate swung open. Jokers on the walls stared down with contempt as they raised the portcullis. Outside, the bodysnatcher glimpsed men in uniform, trucks, a yellow school bus.

  For a long moment, no one moved.

  Then Juggler took a step forward. He was carrying a beat-up old suitcase in one hand, and the amnesty leaflet in the other. He looked back over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The parade of cowards shuffled slowly out through the castle gate. Up on the ramparts, one of the guards unzipped and began to piss down on them as they passed, moving the stream back and forth as jokers and jumpers tried to scramble out of the way.

  The bodysnatcher waited until almost the end, when the guard had run out of piss. Then he mixed in with a sorry bunch of jokers. Outside the gate a grizzled sergeant was directing traffic. “Jumpers left, jokers right,” he droned, over and over.

  The trucks were parked to the right, military troop carriers, a double row of them. Uniformed soldiers were helping the jokers up inside. Father Squid was there too, tending to his flock. There were way too many trucks. The Combine had grossly overestimated the coward count. Off to the left, the jumpers were boarding a battered yellow school bus. The bodysnatcher studied the setup for a beat, then decided to go right, with the jokers.

  He hadn’t taken more than three steps when two soldiers fell in beside him. One put a hand on his arm. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “I think you want to go that way.” He pointed.

  The bodysnatcher imagined all the ways he could kill him. “Where are you taking us?” he asked.

  “Routine debriefing,” the soldier said.

  The bodysnatcher went to join the other bozos on the bus.

  The Outcast had orders for Modular Man. The Outcast was supposed to be Bloat in another form.

  Which was certainly on a par with all the surrealism Modular Man had seen so far.

  “We need to get some messages out,” the Outcast said. He held an amethyst-headed staff with the same casual, elegant sense of power with which a king held his scepter. “There are teams of jumpers and jokers we have waiting in the city and in Jersey. The only secure method of communications is by messenger.”

  “The orders are important,” Kafka said. “We want you to carry them for us.” His mouth parts worked. “The governor has decided we need to take political action.”

  “Political action?”

  The Outcast gave an apologetic giggle that completely undermined his nonchalant air of authority. “Hey,” he said, “we’re gonna blow things up. Okay?”

  “You’re certain?” Herne asked. “I mean, this is something you really want me to do, Governor?” His voice was eager, as were his thoughts — this was Herne the Huntsman speaking, not the daylight personality of Hardesty. The inner transformation had already begun.

  “Yes,” the Outcast replied. He looked at the jokers gathered in the courtyard in front of the Crystal Castle. Bloat’s white body, snared in a web of spotlights, could be seen sleeping there, guarded as always by a few dozen jokers and a squadron of fish-knights. In the gathering darkness, the lights of the skyscrapers shone beyond the ebony stones of the Wall out in the bay. The Outcast raised his staff as if in benediction, the glittering rays from the amethyst touching the faces: Mustelina, Andiron, One-Eye, Squirt, Bumbilino, a handful more — all of their minds set and firm.

  Angry.

  Anxious.

  “You want to know about Hartmann?” the Outcast said, and he let his power bleed into the words so that they sparked in the minds of the listeners. “You want to hear what I’ve heard in his mind? Let me tell you. Hartmann’s an ace, or he once was. A powerful ace and an evil one. He could make you dance to the strings of the power in his mind, and he used that power. He used it to get his kicks, to take pleasure from the pain of the jokers he controlled. He used us, his own little pet slaves. He used us to kill and maim and torment, and he let us be blamed for the things he made us do. Oh, Hartmann deserves this. Believe me.”

  Herne pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. An ornate “H” was stitched on the cloth. He tossed it on the ground.

  “Now,” the Outcast said to Herne.

  This was a power the Outcast had never felt before. Most aces seemed to have powers that affected only their own bodies, made them stronger or faster or able to project energy in some way. Like Bloat himself. Hardesty/Herne affected the very shape of reality around him. As it had with so many others, the wild card had taken something from Hardesty’s mind and given it form. In the dark of night, Hardesty could become a figure from Celtic mythology: Herne, the leader of the Wild Hunt.

  Herne took the battered silver horn that hung around his huge chest and inhaled deeply. He lifted the horn to his lips and winded the instrument. The note that emerged was pure and crystalline in the night air; as the sound lingered, storm clouds began to gather far above. A wind rose from the east, and the horn shimmered in the joker’s hand, the patina changing from tarnished silver to rich, polished gold, the dings and dents filling in until the surface gleamed and threw back the lights of the Crystal Castle. The Outcast’s skin prickled, the hair on his forearms lifting as if with static electricity. The long call continued to sound, impossibly loud and vast, like a celestial horn calling the end of the world.

  But the world didn’t end. Instead, the heavens answered with a barrage of lightnings. As the mournful sound faded, it was replaced by thunder and wind and the wild howling of dogs. A mist rose around the courtyard, incandescent with its own light. The Outcast shivered, but Herne laughed, deep and resonant.

  They came, the Hunt.

  The mist coiled and folded; from the tendrils issued the shape of the Gabriel Hounds, fierce and glowing-eyed. Herne reached down and plucked the handkerchief from the ground. He threw the cloth toward the pack, and they pounced on it, sniffing and tearing, howling all the while. A lightning flash momentarily blinded the Outcast — when he could see again, Herne was leaping astride an enormous black stallion, and a herd of like beasts paced alongside.

  Andiron clashed his steely fists like a gong against his chest and clambered onto the nearest steed, the other jokers alighting a few moments later. “Away!” Herne shouted. The hounds leapt and growled in response, the stallion reared underneath him. The others in the courtyard shouted with the Huntsman, and the Outcast heard his own voice join with them.

  A great power here, one that tugs at you like an addiction.

  The mindvoices raged like the storm, a cyclone of rage and fury and blood lust, all linked to the madness of Herne. The jokers, the jumpers — they howled like Herne’s beasts; they shouted and raised fists.

  “Ride!” exclaimed Herne.

  “Ride!” echoed the Rox, an
d dug their heels into the sides of their horses.

  “Ride for Hartmann!” Herne exclaimed. His stallion screamed, the hounds bayed; like an onrushing stormfront, the Wild Hunt tore from the gates of the Crystal Castle, leaving the sleeping Bloat and the Outcast behind.

  “Wait!” the Outcast cried, knowing he was snared in the web of fury that Herne spun but finding himself helpless to resist it. He wanted to be with them, he had to be with them.

  “I’m coming too. Wait!”

  The Outcast spoke a word of power and became lightning himself, streaking above the Hunt as they pounded from the shore of the Rox onto the frothing water of the bay, the mounts and hounds riding over the waves as if they were nothing more than rolling, transient hills. The Outcast followed, his breath fast, the wind of his passage ruffling his hair and making him squint. In a few minutes they came to the stone edifice of the Wall itself. Herne looked up, and the Outcast grinned back. He sent his power down to the Wall and opened the great gates facing Manhattan, letting the immense doors of oak and steel swing out to loose the Hunt. He flung himself forward to keep pace, crying as Herne sounded the horn again.

  And he found that he could go no farther. The air became a solid fist and pushed back at him. He could not pass his own boundary. His world would not let him go.

  “No!” the Outcast wailed, almost weeping. “Please!”

  But the lust was already fading, his mind emerging from the spell of the Hunt as it moved farther and farther away from him. He could feel the strings that bound him eternally to the great form of Bloat. Those bonds were far, far stronger.

  He could not ride with the Hunt. He was a prisoner in the Rox, confined to his own land.

  The Outcast materialized on the top of the nearest tower. He pounded his fists on the stones there — they seemed substantial enough, cutting his flesh so that he bled and cried out. There, his hands gripping the cold blocks of granite, he watched the green fire and the blue lightnings of the Hunt recede over the bay, the turbulent cloud of death riding toward the city.

  He found that he was crying, and there were too many reasons for the sorrow for him to sort out why.