Jokers Wild Page 0,149

that he obviously didn't trust her enough to take her to where he lived. He returned as he had promised, bringing a cloak for Jennifer to wrap herself in and a pair of thonged sandals for her feet.

"They're a little large," Brennan said, "but it'll be better than running around barefoot."

She was still stung by his distrust, but couldn't resist asking about the pack on his back.

"What's in there?"

"Some things we might need before the evening is over."

"Informative as always," she said. "Can you tell me something straight out? Where are we headed now?"

"The place we might be able to get some answers. The Crystal Palace."

For seventeen years Fortunato had kept to the shadows. Not from modesty, but to avoid distractions. He didn't fly to the rescue of trapped miners or break up muggings on the subway. Except for a few months of covert politics back in the sixties he'd stayed in his apartment and read. Studied Aleister Crowley and E D. Ouspensky, learned Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sanskrit and ancient Greek. Nothing had seemed more important than knowledge for its own sake.

He couldn't say when that had started to change. Sometime after a woman named Eileen had died in a Jokertown alley, her brain wiped clean by the Astronomer. Sometime after everything he read, from particle physics to Masonic ritual to the Bhagavad Gita, told him the same thing, over and over: all is one. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered.

Tonight he flew over Manhattan Island in the remains of his evening clothes, glowing like a neon tube, a dead woman in his arms. Drunken tourists and cranked-up jokers and the last of the theater crowd looked up and saw him there and it didn't matter.

He looked at the idea that he might not live through the night and that didn't seem to matter much either. What was one pimp more or less?

He saw Jokertown spread out below him. The barricaded streets were crammed with people in costumes and people who were costumes, all of them carrying candles and flash lights and torches. Every streetlight and every light in every window up and down the Bowery was at full power.

He left Caroline on the steps of the Jokertown clinic. The crowds opened up to let him through and then closed again after him. There wasn't a lot of time for sentimental gestures. Caroline. was dead now and beyond caring.

He levitated straight up into the sky. He floated there and cleared his mind and pictured Tachyon, in his effeminate clown suits and Day-Glo hair. You dead yet, Tachyon? he thought. Yo, Tachyon, do you read me?

Tachyon's thoughts filled his head. Finally! Where have you been? I've been trying to get through to you! There was some kind of wall of power around you!

I'm a little charged up tonight, Fortunato told him.

I have to see you. The image of a warehouse on the East River formed in his mind. Can you meet me here? It's desperately important. It's about the Astronomer.

Fortunato turned the picture of the warehouse inside out. The ship was inside. Shaped like a jewel-studded conch shell and bigger than most houses.

I know, Fortunato thought. I already know.

Tachyon was still weeping. An inexhaustible flow, Roulette thought wearily, followed by an irritated flash: What does he want from me?

"Stop it," she said, and her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.

The alien caught his breath on a sob, lifted his blotchy, tear-stained face from his hands.

"Nobody cares. You can cry your soul out, but nobody will care."

"I loved you." His voice was a husky rasp in the shadows of the room.

"Always in the past tense." And the remark struck her as being unbearably humorous. She never noticed when the laughter became tears.

His hands gripped her shoulders, shaking her until the teeth chattered in her head and the crystal beads in her hair set a cold ringing. "Why? Why?" he shouted.

"He promised me revenge, and peace."

"The peace of the grave. The Astronomer destroys everything he touches. How many bodies must it take to convince you?" He was screaming into her face. "And now Baby, Baby," he groaned, thrusting her aside.

"And what about you, Doctor?" she cried. "What about a lifetime of bodies?" The demons began their play, and she clutched at her head whimpering. "My baby."

His mind met hers, but this time there was no blending of thoughts. The chaos of her mind rejected the meld.

"It's happening again," Tachyon cried in an anguished whisper. "I can't bear it. Not again. What