Jokers Wild Page 0,154

resisted it, and so it passed through him. And as it passed it left particles behind, particles of knowledge and memory and understanding.

Fortunato saw a little man in thick glasses crawling out of the East River, twenty years ago. There were no memories before that. Where there should have been memories there was only a seared place, self-inflicted. The Astronomer was self-made; there was no human identity, no human history left to him.

The little man had crawled into the grass of East River Park and he had looked up into the night sky. And the wild card virus uncoiled in him for the first time and his mind shot out into that sky and moved between the stars. It saw clouds of gas that burned in reds and purples and blues. It saw planets striped and whorled and ringed and haloed. It saw moons and comets and shapeless lumps of asteroid.

And it saw something moving. Something dark and nearly mindless, something vast and rubbery and foul, something hungry. And his mind began to scream.

The little man found himself outside a brick building in Jokertown, naked except for his glasses, still screaming. A door opened and a man named Balsam took him in. Took him in and taught him the secrets, taught him the name of the thing he'd seen, the name that was the ultimate Masonic word: TIAMAT Taught him about the machine, the Shakti device that the brother from the stars had brought to Cagliostro. Cagliostro who had founded the Order, to protect the knowledge of TIAMAT-the Dark Sister-and the Shakti device.

Until Balsam had nothing left to teach the little man, and it was time for the little man to become the Astronomer, and remove Balsam, with the unwitting help of a bumbling magician named Fortunato. To take control of the Order. To realize their destiny. To found a religious tyranny of Egyptian Masons that would rule the world. A world that would come begging to be ruled out of awe and gratitude. For the Astronomer would use the Shakti device as it had always been meant to be used ...

"No," Fortunato said. "No."

But the knowledge would not go away. The knowledge that the Shakti device had been given to the Masons to save the Earth from TIAMAT, not to lure her there. To call the Network to destroy her.

The Shakti device could have saved them and Fortunato had destroyed it. Because of him, thousands had died. For all his claims of wisdom he was still only a creature of impulse, nothing but a temperamental child.

The Astronomer still lived. The filmed glasses were still hooked around his ears, the tatters of his robe snapped in the wind, his chest moved up and down. His eyes had rolled back in his head, and his power was gone. Completely.

It would take nothing at all for Fortunato to drift across the thirty feet that separated them, put his hands around the little mans throat, and finish him.

Instead he left him fall.

Long seconds later Fortunato heard the splash as the little man came full circle, back into the East River again.

Henry Street was still and deserted, its revelry closed with the Crystal Palace. Sawhorses still closed off both ends of the block, though the street fair was long over. Hiram and Jay walked down the middle of the street, past the darkened rowhouses. The gutters were choked with litter: napkins, paper cups, plastic forks, newspapers.

Halfway up the block, a dark shape stepped out from the shadows to accost them. Popinjay's hand came out of his pocket fast, but Hiram grabbed his arm. "Don't," he said.

The shape moved under the light of a streetlamp. It was a heavy gray-haired woman in a shapeless green army jacket. The bottom half of her body was a single huge white leg, moist and boneless. She pushed herself forward like a snail. "Spare change?" she asked. "Spare change for a poor joker?"

Hiram found he could not look at her. He took out a wallet, gave her a five-dollar bill. As she took it from his hand, his fist clenched, and he cut her weight in half. It wouldn't last, but for a little while it would be easier for her.

A fire was burning in the vacant, debris-strewn lot beside the Crystal Palace. A dozen small twisted forms were huddled around it, and an animal of some sort was turning on a spit above the flames. At the sounds of footsteps, some of the creatures got up and vanished