by Hal Duncan
Behind the throne, Guy stands with Anaesthesia now. She's listening to him but watching Jack and, even as the Duke succumbs, it's seems her sense of who she really is slowly returns. She rolls her shoulders, cricks her neck, adjusts her stance like someone at a party moves their weight from foot to foot, but with each movement she looks less demure, less maidenly. Her feet farther apart, her hips uncock. She turns her gaze to me and our eyes lock for a brief second till she closes hers and drops her face. She takes the riding hat off, and unpins her hair. When she looks up again she's staring at the Duke with hate.
Jack snaps his fingers right in front of me. I jump.
“Earth calling Thomas Messenger,” he whispers.
Hell, I think. It's Hell, you mean, instead of Earth. And fuck you if I miss my sister. But I nod.
He kicks himself up off a prop. He swings from rigging, a mad monkey pirate reveling in the madness that he's bringing.
“I'll drive him mad,” he says, “and fill his head with wild delusions. Till his mind is gone completely in confusion. While his senses are his own, we'll never get a woman's dress on him; and, after all his menacing and threats, I want to hear the laughs as he is led in woman's dress all through the city.”
Anaesthesia—Phreedom, pretty little Phreedom who grew up, God, so much more than me; who walked out into Hinter's night, her brother and her son both lost, set out to start a raging fight against the angels and the demons, all the archons of the broken Covenant, the dukes of Hell and all their knights; who lost herself in trying desperately to do what's right—shakes out her long red hair. She undoes the top few buttons of her riding dress, brings out a necklace made of chicken bones and leaves it hanging there for all to see.
“But now I've got to go,” says Jack, “to make Pierrot pretty in the robes he'll wear, so he'll look oh so fine when he sets out from Hell's halls to play victim to the rage of his own mother, Columbine.”
Jack slips back into a dark area of the stage. I watch Don lead the Duke down one side of the hall, and round behind our wagon. Then, Guy at her heels, my little sister Phreedom strides along the facing wall. With all the pseudo-medieval setting, she should really have a sword. But then again, I think, she's less the knight and more the dragon.
“The King of Tears will come to know the Harlequin. The son of Sooth will show his nature in the end,” says Jack.
He lights a cigarette, fire glowing on his leather mask.
“A god most terrible,” he says, “for all his gentleness to men.”
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Slowly, lazily, a vast steel bulk of metal storm cloud blotting out the moon, the rumble of its engines shuddering the ground with visceral thunder, the dreadnought of the skies moves closer to its target. Airbarges swarming round it seem like minnows round a whale, and the ornithopters, smaller still, like pond insects skittering across the surface of the water. As a hundred chi-cannons turn against the Rookery, Joey takes the pillbox from his pocket, clicks it open and pops a white one. They're every bit as good as the Circus assured him they would be.
Jack doesn't even notice him—shit, he doesn't even notice the airpower—as he crouches down over a rag-doll man half hidden among the fallen sandbags of the barricade. All along the perimeter of the wasted parkland, the sandbagged trench of mud that used to be a river is strewn with silent gun emplacements, moaning bodies. Joey tries to find some sort of emotional connection with the limp, lolling flesh of his onetime comrades, but there's nothing left to feel.
The trail of lobotomy reaches all the way south to the captured ICI orgone plant just visible between the splintered trees and broken walls. It stretches north too, disappearing with the curve of the river round the Rookery's battlements. Wooden shoring, duckboards, mud and contorted bodies—it's like something out of World War I except these bodies are still alive … more or less.
Yes, the word bomb did its job exactly as they said it would, the psychic chain reaction sparking down the line like wildfire. Most of them still have the moment of horror, of realization, captured on their idiot faces. Joey can feel it buried somewhere in his own mind, that word, that thought, muted by chemistry and his natural defenses; he had to learn it in order to carry it to them, after all. It's not so much that he has the mental armor to shield him. It's more that, well, if you don't know what hope is, fear has no hold on you.
It's 1979 and the revolution is over. They probably have the bulldozers waiting in the streets beyond the Circus.
Joey pockets the pillbox and takes the chi-gun out of the inside pocket of his black woolen overcoat. There's just the faintest click as he powers it up, raises it at the back of Jack's head.
“All for a briefcase full of adamantium, and a lifetime supply of chemical oblivion.”
Joey snaps his psyche back from the fucker's flashback trap, and snaps his arm up to point the gun straight at the bastard's face. It still looks like Jack, but Joey's even more convinced now that it's not. No, Fox has just found himself an agent with a few psyche-specialist tricks up his sleeve. He studies the impostor looking for the little something that the whole illusion hinges on, that little bit of Jack. The leathers and the jackboots look too new … no goggles either … but even as Joey's trying to work out what it could be, the fake Jack reaches into his pocket and brings out a battered-looking roll-up and a silver lighter. Bingo, Jack's Zippo.
“Smoke and mirrors,” says Joey. “Vodoun ghost illusion.”
Jack sparks up his cigarette.
“D'ye think?”
It's a good one, Joey has to admit. Most psyche specialists couldn't pull off a doppelganger gig like this even if they had an army of Haitian babaloas working the mojo behind the scenes. He spends at least a second admiring the skill of it, but not much more. He has a job to do, after all.
He lowers the gun just a little before he fires.
“You know, armored longcoats are fuck-all use if you leave them flapping open in the wind,” says Joey.
The man is on his knees, supporting himself with one hand resting on the ground in front of him. His head hangs down. Little trails of blood, as dark as oil or ink in this light, dribble from his lips as he coughs up his pulverized insides.
“What? Did you think I was going to fuck around with you all night? Swap witty banter while we chase each other round the park?”
Joey crouches down beside this pale imitation of the real Jack Flash. The man gurgles as he tries to answer—the chi-blast probably shattered his sternum along with more than a few ribs, Joey reckons—and Joey puts a finger to his lips and the barrel of the gun to the impostor's temple. From the man's rasping, gasping last attempt to breathe, Joey figures one lung's already collapsed and the other is giving up the ghost. He gives it two minutes before the fucker's suffocated under the pressure of his own internal organs, less if his heart gives in first. Should be just enough time.
“So, let's see who you really are,” he says.
He pulls up the man's chin and looks into the desperation of his eyes, so close now that, as subtle and shifting as the psyche is, Joey can feel it, hear it, all the turbulent sounds of his dreams, the guttering of dying hope, the hiss of thoughts, denials, king rat, king rat, traitor to everything we've fought for, died for, no, he's thinking, no, not this, no, Joey, no, and the tinkling sounds of ideals shattering like a flowing stream, you bastard, no, all gathering into a roar of river of voices, no, a waterfall crashing down into an abyss of nothing, no, not nothing, never nothing, no where white noise crackles as cosmic radiation dies, no where in the emptiness of vacuum, no, of death, no, entropy, God no, no God, no, nothing, only—
Jack Flash.
Doom.
The gun batteries of the Rookery open fire and ornithopters start to dive out of the sky, swoop down to answer fire with fire, but the dreadnought is turning, because the rebels of the Rookery mean nothing as far as the Powers That Be are concerned. They're nothing against Albion's air force, nothing against the fucking battalions waiting to march
in from the north once their way is opened up. Flies to be swatted.
Joey watches the dreadnought turning and he knows he was right.
“We take the factories and the shipyards,” King Finn had said, “and we have Kentigern itself. We arm the workers, we arm the people, and sure and they'll fookin take back what's theirs by right. All they need is a fookin sign that the time is right.”
Joey had laughed. The people don't fucking want it, mate, he'd thought. And then he'd realized, as they sat in the Rookery club, drinking and planning revolution, that Finn and Fox, Anaesthesia and Puck, and even Jack did want it. They actually wanted freedom. Or power, if you ditch the empty rhetoric. Power is what it's all about.
Jack stands up from the brain-fried rebel.
A few of the airbarges break off to fire slicing chi-beams through the stone and metal of the Rookery's defenses, but the main fleet is turning, its guns now training on the captured ICI plant where Finn and Anaesthesia are holed up. With the artillery line all flopping in the mud, the plant is open. Jack is turning now, seeing Joey, wondering what the fuck he's doing here, why he's not like the others, and—
Joey levels his gun at Jack's look of utter incomprehension.
Shit, man. What can he say? A few thousand rooks would never have held the city against all of Albion's knights; at least this way the rest of the city might be spared another Purge. Jack would never fucking understand that. None of them will ever understand it. It's a cold judgment, but Joey's always grasped, far more than the others, the way a fascist's mind works, clear of the smoke-and-mirrors illusions of idealism.
So he doesn't say anything.
As the Imperial Chi Industries orgone manufactory, symbol of everything that made Kentigern the Second City of the Empire, explodes under the booming chi-guns of the dreadnought and its fleet, Joey just pulls the trigger.
The Prisoner's Dilemma
“We'll dance all night barefoot in ecstasy,” I sing, “and throw our heads back to the rain to cool us like a fawn that frisks in green fields of delight, safe from the humans in the bushes of the woods, glad she's escaped the fright, the terror of her flight, the hunters chasing with their nets, the huntsman shouting to his barking hounds as, with a pounding heart and aching limbs, she bounds across the flat ground down around the river's edge as fast as lightning.”
I pause. The doors of the castle open up to swallow us, and the wagon rolls inside, off tarmac onto flagstones, under the grid of the first portcullis that's still low enough for me to slap my hand on the cold metal as we pass beneath. It starts to close behind us as the next one rises. There are seven of them in all, each with its own armed retinue of guards in daft anachronistic armor, breastplates and helmets of dull synthe. Not shiny like steel but battleship gray, the alloy of adamantium and iron has no luster, no sheen; and, after the color of the city, it makes the soldiers look like grim shades in comparison. But then that's probably how they're meant to look.
I can't deny that it scares the shit out of me. The Duke has some serious defenses, and we don't even know how deep my sister's stuck, how far she's bought into his dream. I can guess what he told her, though, the bastard with his medieval setting, castles, knights and all those lies—of course he'd have his fantasy of how it came to be, this poor young orphan boy raised in obscurity, a grand quest and a hero's prize. And looking at her with that fire in his eyes, he'd give her just that tiny bit of hope back.
All he had to tell her was this Duke was once a Jack.
“What is true wisdom?” Jack prompts.
But I'm thinking of other things. There are a million Jacks, and you had to find the worst of them, Phree. A million? A gazillion, more like. That's what he is, after all, what makes him Jack. Scattered all across the fucking Vellum. Cracked and broken because everyone always wants their Jack to be a hero and he's just fucking crazy enough to try to be all that they want, and so he crashes and burns every fucking time. And I fucking love him for it.
“What better prize …”
He lies on his back, my Jack, the pages of Guy's script held up before him.
“Come on, spaceboy”
I click my fingers, trying to remember my next line.
“What better prize … what better prize has heaven placed within our reach, than when our weapons rise in victory over an enemy that we despise, and then they fall? Oh, yes, nobility is the most precious thing of all.”
“More bitter.” Guy calls his directions from below. “More ironic. Remember, you've followed Harlequin all the way from the East only to be locked up in Pentheus's prison—Pierrot's prison. You've been sweetness and light up till now but this is where you start to show your teeth. You're throwing his warrior ethic back in his face. You're saying maybe might is right, but Pierrot doesn't have a bloody clue what he is dealing with.”
I nod. We're going under the third gate now.
I always thought of the Vellum as, underneath it all, a sort of blank page on which anything could be written. But what do we end up writing on it? Eternities of deals, pacts of souls and social contracts, so many that in places the scrawl of desires across the Vellum is like a tangled mass of ink, like the crazy graving of the marks on Jack's chest or Guy's scribblings of scripts, all arrows and annotations, scored out and corrected until entirely inscrutable to anyone but him. The bitmites only gave us what we wanted; but we don't always know what we want, I guess.
“The power of the gods,” prompts Jack. “Fuck, I thought I was bad.”
“The power of the gods,” I sing, “moves slow but steady as they lie in wait, in secret, through the march of time, to hunt the godless down, put right those mortal sprites who, in some foolish fancy, underestimate divinity and worship their own senseless pride. It's never right—in theory or in practice—to ignore the ancient ways. Here is a piece of wisdom, offered to us at a bargain price. It comes from myth and history, emerging as a law of nature. This and only this is true: Do unto others as they do to you.”
“That's a bit harsh,” I say.
I sit down on the edge of the roof, kicking my legs.
“I thought you were the nice guy … good form and sympathy for the huddled masses of humanity, and a man's a man for a’ that.”
He beckons me with a finger, and I droopy down onto the driver's bench between him and Don.
“You've heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma?” says Guy. “You're stuck in a prison where everyone wants snout—tobacco. Do you share yours with anyone you run across, in the hope of making allies, or do you keep it to yourself, even steal it from others at every opportunity?”
I shrug.
“What am I in for?” I ask.
“Look at it as a puzzle about altruism and evolution. You have a society of free agents stuck in an environment of limited resources; they can either cooperate or compete with other individuals they encounter, share their own stock of ‘food’ or take what they can get and run. Which tactic works best in the long term? Is it every man for himself until there's nobody left standing? Or if we're all nice to strangers, do we just end up getting taken advantage of?”
The wagon trundles to a stop before the fifth gate, and its guards move forward to give our gear a quick once-over. Don jumps down to explain exactly what all of the complex equipment's for. Oh, that's just for sound effects. A dry-ice generator.
“Thing is,” says Guy, “back in the days before the bitmites, someone ran a simulation on it and came up with an answer. If you have agents that just cooperate with anyone, sad to say, they lose out to the nasties. If you have agents that just treat everyone as rivals, though, they lose out as well because in the end they have nobody to look out for them. The actual winning strategy is beautifully simple.”
The next gate starts to open as Don climbs back up onto the wagon.
“You meet another agent for the first time,” says Guy, “you just do to them whatever the last stranger you encountered did to you. You pass it on. Sharing or stealing. Cooperation or competition. You
pass it on down the line.”
The wagon starts forward.
“I'm not saying that's all there is to human nature. On the contrary. I'm saying that it's not about some wired-in way of doing things, some noble sense of honor that drives us to self-sacrifice, or some cold and calculating instinct for self-preservation that ends up with us at each other's throats. You switch strategy. You change your behavior. You do unto others as they do to you.”
“What better prize has heaven placed within our reach than when our weapons rise in victory over an enemy that we despise, and then they fall? Oh, yes, nobility is the most precious thing of all.”
The consul and the courtiers look uncomfortable seated around the empty thrones, unsure of how to act now that their Duke and Princess have gone off to join the show. The consul waves a serving boy away, puts down his cup and calls a maid-in-waiting over, sends her to make sure that the Princess is all right. Shit, if this girl walks in on them the whole plan could go tits-up, but there's no way I can warn them.
I sing on, a little louder.
“One man may have more wealth and power than his double. One man who has escaped the crashing waves of violent seas and reached safe haven can be happy in his triumph over trouble. But…”
I jump down off the stage to intercept the maid-in-waiting, block her way. I smile at her, playing as sweet and innocent as I can; she blushes as I take her hand, draw her into the spotlight. Shy as anything, she drops her eyes. I lean in close to whisper a white lie into her ear and she goes redder still. I'm sure Joey won't mind me telling her he likes the girl.
“There are as many plans and schemes as there are minds,” I sing to her. ‘And while one dream ends with one happy man, another only seems to fall apart, a patchwork leather jacket worn too long, worn at the seams.”
She pulls free, one hand covering her giggles. I have no choice but to let her go, the consul watching with suspicion now; but as she reaches the backstage I see Guy spot her and come out to meet her, flap a handkerchief out of his sleeve. Thank fuck for chloroform, I think. She might have given the whole show away.
