Jokertown Shuffle

by George R. R. Martin

  "The gas tank!" somebody screamed. "Get back!"

  Cops and institute staffers scattered. Now that somebody'd had an idea, JJ Flash turned up the heat. The LeBaron exploded with a very satisfactory whoomp and a ball of yellow flame.

  Explosion! A quarter mile ahead, Turtle saw a fireball blossom into the sky.

  "Here we fucking go again." He tipped his shell into a shallow dive and accelerated.

  The four cops in back turned to stare at the big black ball of smoke rising from the far side of the building. Leaving K.C. balanced on his broad shoulder, Durg rammed his right fist into the wall.

  Brick gave. Powdered mortar drooled away. He punched the wall again. It bowed outward.

  JJ Flash shot out the second-story window, holding Sprout in his arms.

  Durg spun a back-kick into the wall. A man-size section exploded outward as though struck by a cannon shell. Nodding politely to the SWAT men, he backed through, dragging Norwalk with him.

  Fire has a wonderful effect on people. The fear of burning is immediate and deeply ingrained. Flash enjoyed burning things but not people, so the psychological effect of his fireballs was very convenient.

  The Brooklyn cops hadn't forgotten all about the back wall. They thought it unlikely the fugitives could make it out that way, so they'd just stuck a patrol car and a couple of uniforms there on general principles.

  By a remarkable coincidence, both uniformed patrolmen remembered urgent appointments when JJ Flash burned through the roof of the car's backseat. Took off down the street in opposite directions.

  "It smells icky in here," Sprout complained as she slid in back.

  "Be better once the car gets moving," Flash said.

  He helped Durg ease K. C. in beside her, then fired a blast back through the hole in the wall to keep the SWAT boys on the other side from getting too curious. Durg broke pistol and gun hand free of Norwalk's head, shoved the still-stunned detective lieutenant in the passenger seat, then ran around to slide in behind the wheel.

  "I'll catch up with you later," Flash said. "Want to make sure our friends on the other side have their minds right -whoa!"

  He was snatched straight up into the sky. A voice boomed down,

  "FLASH? JJ FLASH? WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, YOU

  NITWIT?"

  "Run!" Flash shouted. "I'll handle him."

  Without a backward glance, Durg put the car in gear and floored it.

  Flash tried to dart away. An invisible hand seemed to be holding him fast, pinning his arms to his side. He couldn't move. "Don't make me get rough with you," he said.

  Turtle chewed his underlip. "Have you gone nuts?" he asked his microphone.

  "Just a little stir-crazy," came back through the audio pickups mounted in the hull. "Look, it's great schmoozing with you, Turtle, but the boys in blue are going to get sorted out down there and start shooting at me in a minute, and I've got things to see and people to do."

  "You're a federal fugitive, for God's sake. Why are you-" He stopped. "I get it. It's Sprout."

  "You definitely win the Bonus Round. It's Sprout. Now let me go."

  "Jesus, Flash, this is jailbreak. I can't let you get away with this."

  "So you're lining up with the pigs? Battle lines are being drawn and all that sixties stuff is that the side of the barricades you're comfortable with?"

  A shot popped off from below. Turtle winced. Flame darted from Flash's hand. An especially bold SWAT man yelped and dropped his M16 as if it were red-hot, largely because it was.

  "You people down there stop that," Turtle said. "I have the situation under control."

  "My ass you do."

  "It's your ass that's gonna get extra holes shot in it if they don't think I can handle you. Come on, Flash, don't you see this isn't the way?"

  "We're fresh out of other ways."

  "Flash, I feel for you and Mark, and especially Sprout. But we can't do things this way anymore. And not now, for God's sake! George Bush is in town. The whole country thinks aces are arm-in-arm with the devil. What's a scene like this going to do to wild cards everywhere?"

  "Not a fucking thing, you complacent tin-plated son of a bitch! If they're going to let the lynch mobs loose, they'll find an excuse sooner or later. They'll make one up if they have to. Let me go."

  "No," Turtle said primly. "The welfare of everybody touched by the wild card's at stake here. I'm taking you in." "A little girl's life is at stake, you bastard. And Mark Meadows isn't going to rot in federal slam!"

  Flash set his jaw and forced flame out through every pore of his body. The unseen grip did not slacken. "So I can't singe your telekinetic fingers, eh?"

  "THEY'RE ONLY IMAGINARY, YOU KNOW." "Yeah? Well what can they do to me, then?"

  "THIS." Inexorably, the hand began to crush the air out of him.

  He looked around. The cop car was already out of sight. Durg had instructions what to do if Mark was captured, in whatever persona. The mission was a success if only Sprout got away. And K.C.

  Damn, that's a fine one. And Mark really loves her. But there's nothing I can do for her.

  His vision began to swim. Blackness gathered around the edges. He knew Turtle didn't want to kill him, just black him out. But he had a higher metabolic rate than a nat, used air more quickly. Old Ironsides might hold on just a little too long, and then it was going to be JJ Flash, Turnip. And he knew that wouldn't do Meadows much good either.

  Besides, he was Jumpin' Jack Flash. No pansy who wouldn't go out in public without his fat ass wrapped in armor plate was going to take him. He began to rotate his left hand, slowly so that Turtle wouldn't notice. The Turtle hadn't bothered to immobilize him totally, and Flash was fairly sure he could. Slowly, slowly-there. Palm outward.

  "It's not-that-easy," he gritted. Fire shot from his palm and splashed against the underside of the Turtle's shell.

  "GIVE IT A REST, JJ, ALL RIGHT? THIS IS BATTLESHIP PLATE. ITS

  DESIGNED TO STAND UP TO SIXTEEN-INCH SHELLS. YOU THINK A LITTLE FIRE'S

  GOING TO DO ANYTHING?"

  The hand squeezed tighter. Flash gasped in pain, blackness flickered across his brain, the fire jet sputtered. "Go-ahead-and-squash me. But you're gonna-be Great-and Powerful-Turtle-soup."

  The flame got brighter. The roar was like a blast furnace in full throat. Flash felt his chest being crushed, felt ribs give and squeak as they reached the breaking point.

  He screamed. And put all the force of his pain and fury into the fire.

  A tentacle of smoke ran up Turtle's nose. He froze. His control panel lit up like a crash scene on the Triboro Bridge, and the display from his forward vid pickup popped and died from the heat.

  "Shit!" Turtle yelled. "Shit!"

  A klaxon began its cat-in-a-stamping-mill yammer as the fire-suppression system-the same as the M-1 Abrams used, surplus production from FY 1988-flushed the interior with halon gas. He freaked.

  The teke hand crushing the life from Jumpin' Jack Flash, Esquire, became sudden nothing.

  Bullets hit the hull like hail as the policemen on the ground cut loose. It was too late.

  The shell plummeted toward the peaked roofs of the neighborhood. Fear hit the Turtle like a cattle prod in the nuts. For a rare moment in his life, it was a focusing fear, a fear that overrode the reflex panic induced by heat-noiselight-smoke: fear of collision with the planet.

  Like a man about to be hanged, Turtle found his mind wonderfully concentrated. The shell wobbled, sideslipped, knocked over a chimney with a sliding clatter of yellow brick, and rolled out to a flat hover just below rooftop level.

  By that time, even the afterimage of Flash's blazing departure had faded from the watchers eyes.

  For a moment, Blaise just lay there. He felt like a man drowning in rapids who had abruptly fetched up on the bank. He had been spinning, spinning in a roaring sunless void. Reaching out for something he could barely remember, reaching and feeling and desperately trying to force himself toward that familia
r shard he sensed in a place without time and space and things.

  Home. He was back in his body, his splendid body. Burning Sky, that was close! he thought.

  Any other jumper would have been lost when he was bounced out of Mark Meadows's body during the phase-shift to JJ Flash. Would have spun forever, or until his consciousness had unraveled and diffused and gone, become one with ever-black. Only the supreme power of Blaise's mind had saved him. It was a test he alone could meet, and he had met it.

  Exaltation filled him like a gush of semen: I have triumphed. I am Blaise!

  Then he remembered what he had come for, and it turned to bile in his mouth. Meadows, his idiot blond brat, Durg, K.C., had escaped. He had failed. Blaise.

  He rolled onto his belly and began to pound his fist against the floor.

  Round sunset, this stretch of New Jersey was just like Disneyland, if your tastes ran to industrial. Car corpses strewed fields to either side of the road, inorganic fertilizer spread perhaps to foster the growth of the squat tanks and pipe tangles that hovered in the shimmering petrochemical haze of the horizon. The sun swelled like a huge red festering boil as it fell into the pooled gray-brown crud. It made World War III look like not such a bad idea.

  K. C. Strange lay on her back on a dirty old blanket next to the station wagon they'd stashed a few blocks from Reeves and collected when they ditched the cop car and a grumpy, groggy Lieutenant Norwalk. Her breath was coming quick and shallow now, and pink froth bubbled her lips at each exhalation.

  Sprout Meadows bent over her, trailing tears and long blond hair in the jumper's upturned face. "Don't die, pretty lady. Please." Her father stroked her hair with the hand that wasn't cradling K. C.'s head in his lap.

  Durg stood a discreet distance down the road, keeping watch. A rose-gray Toyota Corolla had been parked there since yesterday, all full of blankets and nonperishable food and stuffed toys for Sprout, to ensure they began the crosscountry leg of their escape as clean as possible.

  "Blaise did this?" he repeated wonderingly. "Blaise." K. C. repeated.

  He shook his head. "He tried to do something to mejump me, I guess. Why, man? You were his-his lady. I was his friend!" He bit his lip. "It wasn't because we="

  She laughed, winced. "He was through with me. He… hated you. Thought you were… threat. Tell you his dirty secret, babe… mine too. He has his grand-"

  He pressed a finger to her lips. "Cool it. No time for that now" It was cold as hell out here on this long-forgotten county road, and his breath came in puffs of fog. He didn't notice. "We're away from the city. You gotta let us take you to a hospital. Nobody'll recognize you."

  Her fingernails dug into his arm through the thin cotton of his Brooks Brothers shirt with a strength he didn't think she still had. "No! Ahh!"

  She clung, eyes shut, until the pain spasm passed. "No," she said again, a whisper now. "Don't give me up to the Combine."

  "Nobody's looking for you, babe. We'll tell 'em you got shot when somebody tried to rape you-"

  She was shaking her head, slowly, as if each movement tore her further open. "No. I'm wanted. Hospitals, pigs… all part of the Combine. Too late, anyway-I'm… about out of air time." Her eyes came all the way open and looked way back in his. "I'd rather die free than live in a cage."

  "You don't have to die."

  "No," she said, and her voice was clear. " I don't."

  She reached up and grabbed his head with both hands. Mark cried out in alarm as blood welled up around the edges of the tape Durg had wound around her chest, almost black in the orange dusklight. She pulled his face close to hers. Her eyes held his like pins through a butterfly's wings.

  "I don't have to die." The blood-froth static was back now, and her voice was sinking under it. "I'm a… jumper, remember? I don't have to-go down with this ship. But I can't touch the alien. I won't touch the baby. And you-"

  She forced her shoulders up off the mottled blanket, forced her mouth to his. " I love you, Mark," she said, falling back. Her eyes met his again. "Remember… me…"

  Something passed behind his eyes as the light went out of hers. And then her blood was on his mouth, and she was dead.

  The three shots were startlingly loud. They seemed to race clear to the horizon, where a thin scum of day's last light lay like self-luminous chemical waste, and rebound in a heartbeat.

  The smell of gasoline from the station wagon's ruptured tank crowded Mark's nostrils as Durg slowly lowered the 10-mm. Mark held the highway flare before his skinny chest desperate-hard for just one moment, so the tendons stood out on the back of his hand. Then he pulled the tab. "Good-bye, K.C.," he said. "Rest easy, babe." He tossed the hissing magenta spark into the dark pool spreading below the vehicle.

  It went up in a rush and a shout of yellow flame.

  Mark stood there staring until the heat got so intense that even Sprout backed up, tugging her daddy's hand with gentle insistence. He stayed put. Durg took hold of the back of his shirt and drew him irresistibly back until his eyebrows were in no danger of crisping.

  "It is done," the alien said. "We must leave before someone comes to investigate the fire."

  They walked to the Toy, soles crunching quietly in the cinder berm.

  Mark unlocked and opened the passenger door, then walked to the other side. Durg awaited him.

  "The bike we stashed for you is still all right?" Mark asked.

  The alien nodded. "You intend to leave me, then," he said flatly.

  "We talked about this before, man. The three of us together are, like, just too distinctive."

  The fine narrow head nodded. "Indeed. But later… may I not join you?"

  Mark felt tears crowding his eyes again. I thought I'd run out of those.

  "No, man. I'm sorry. I've put you through too much already."

  "It is what I am made for."

  "No. I can't. People can't own people, man. It doesn't work that way here." Like a man breaking through a membrane wall, Mark abruptly leaned forward and wrapped scarecrow arms briefly around Durg's shoulders. It was like hugging a statue. "Don't be so sad. It's freedom, man. It's the greatest thing in the world."

  "It is for you."

  Sprout hugged the Morakh. He smiled then, and hugged her back. She and Mark climbed into the car.

  "Look, man," Mark said out the window, "maybe you should, like, try the Rox. I can't go back, not with Blaise there. But it's me Blaise is mad at, you were just like incidental. Talk to Bloat. He can help keep Blaise off your back if he tries to come down on you, and you can help him out like I was supposed to. Do that, yeah. The Rox."

  "Do you so order me, lord?"

  Compassion struggled with principle in Mark. As it sometimes should, compassion won. "Yes," he said, not meeting the lilac eyes. "I so order it."

  Durg stepped back. "I thank you, lord."

  "Good-bye, man, I'll never forget you."

  "Nor I you," said Durg at-Morakh.

  The Toyota rolled away through crackling gravel. Sprout leaned out the window and waved.

  Mark looked back himself, once, as the tires took the cracked, neglected blacktop. For a flicker, he thought he saw something glistening on the alien's high cheek. But it had to be a trick of the light from K.C.'s pyre.

  Sprout began to sing a song, something of her own, with words that made sense only to her. The road curved. The alien and the burning car were wiped from sight, and nothing remained but a glow in the sky that gradually faded as the Toyota pulled west for California and freedom. Eventually it was gone.

  The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat

  V

  He was a lacuna in the fabric of the mindvoices. A vacuum. A null.

  I'd never encountered a mindshield like this one. It was a hard round shell that I couldn't quite grasp. Tachyon's mind might have been that way once, but her mind powers were now weak and diffuse. Blaise's shields, as I knew, were erratic and poor, emotions dribbling around and underneath them. But this one… He had to be an ace, and I
don't like aces. I had Kafka send Shroud, File, and Video to meet Charon at the docks.

  Video came back a little ahead of the others with images that disturbed me: Our intruder was a man about five feet tall and oddly wide, moving too fast for a mere human and lifting the front end of a jeep as easily as someone picking up a pencil. "He says his name's Doug Morkle. Says he's a Takisian, being hunted by the Combine. The demo's supposed to prove to you that he is who he says he is. He wants refuge. He also wants to meet Blaise."

  A little stab of fright shuddered through me, setting off an avalanche of bloatblack. They were walking in the front door now, the Takisian between Shroud and File, neither of whom looked to be so much guarding Morkle as hoping that if he made a move, he'd go for the other. Looking at Morkle, I had no doubt that he could disable both of them before they could move to stop him.

  But what I couldn't do was read his thoughts. Their absence roared in my head. I didn't realized just how much I depended on that hearing-I felt like someone suddenly deaf. The Takisian, already a threat from a simple physical standpoint, was more frightening because of that.

  "Why is he here, Governor?" Kafka whispered to me as Morkle came across the lobby. The man didn't glance at the lush tapestries, the gorgeous expanse of the Temptation, the new paint and gilt, or the stained-glass windows that were slowly transforming this place into a palace. None of that seemed to matter to him. He stared up at me. Pale eyes. Lavender eyes.

  "I don't know," I answered Kafka.

  His carapace rattled as he looked up at me, startled. "You don't know?…"

  "It is not your concern, in any case," said Morkle, telling us that his hearing was as enhanced as his strength and agility. His words, coupled with the frustration of not being able to eavesdrop on his thoughts, made me angry.

  "You're on the Rox now," I snapped back. "Everything on the Rox is my business."

  Morkle only gazed at me flatly, like a snake. His nose wrinkled. I thought maybe that was disgust, the smell of the bloatblack, but I didn't know. "It you want to stay on the Rox, Morkle," I continued, "you'd better learn-" I stopped. Another, less complete hole was moving through the mindvoices, very close by. "Damn it."