Intoxicated, the bodysnatcher rose higher and higher. He could see all of Manhattan and Staten Island now, and most of Long Island. The sky was growing darker, and the stars were coming out. Maybe he would go to the moon, he thought.
Except… it seemed he was rising so slowly … time turned subjective when you moved at light-speed… a laser might reach the moon in minutes… seconds… but it would seem like weeks to him. And if he got tired… how long could the Pulse body stay in its light-form before it ran out of energy?
The bodysnatcher felt a twinge of sudden panic. He was high enough now to see the curve of the earth. He would have flailed his hands against the empty air, if he’d had hands to flail. How does a laser turn, he thought wildly.
And as he thought it, it happened.
He curved downward, watched the line of his ascension grow into a glowing arc, a rainbow painted in a single color. The colors all shifted around him. Now the earth below was blue, the sky a red sea above him. He fell as slowly as he’d climbed. He willed himself to veer right, then left, then right again. It happened. His ascent had been straight as a ruler; his fall was frozen lightning, jagged and bright.
A hundred feet above the Rox, a sea gull was frozen in time, white against the dark water. The bodysnatcher altered course. He went through the bird’s head. The heat was sudden and intense, scalding water on bare skin, gone as quickly as it came. For an instant he was surrounded by walls of flesh and blood and bone. He saw them blacken and burn around him. Then he was gone.
By the time the gull began its fall, the bodysnatcher had burned through the eye of the dome’s great golden face into the throne room, and willed himself back to human flesh.
That was the hardest part. He fell the last five feet and bloodied his knee on the rough stone floor. The world came crashing in around him: noise, smells, pain. He realized he was naked. The smell of bloatblack was enough to gag him. His legs trembled as he got to his feet beneath the looming torch.
“Zelda?” Bloat squeaked in astonishment. His joker guards swung their weapons to bear. Kafka gaped at him. Only the penguin seemed unperturbed.
“The bitch is dead,” the bodysnatcher said, laughing. “Leave her rot. I’m Pulse now.”
Kafka asked, “What about Molly and —”
Bloat took the answer out of his head. “Vanilla and Blueboy are bringing back her body,” he told Kafka. “Her guest may be conscious by the time Charon comes in. Take her down to the dungeon. We may need a hostage or two to bargain with.”
The bodysnatcher looked up at Bloat, and pictured himself turning to light, burning into the governor’s mountainous flesh, lancing through him again and again, until blood and pus and bloatblack oozed from a hundred smoking holes. He savored the thought, turning it over and over in his mind to give the governor a good long look. For once, the fat boy had nothing to say.
The bodysnatcher laughed hysterically. Let them come. The nats with their guns. the aces with their powers. Let them all come. He would be waiting for them.
The bodysnatcher finally had a body he liked.
“There’s no more information coming in,” Patchwork said. “Everything seems to be in place or nearly. All Zappa’s people are eating pizza. I think we can take a break.”
Kafka looked at the maps; his chitin made a scraping sound. “I should talk to the governor and the others. Decisions have to be made.” He turned to the other jokers..” Help me carry these maps.”
The jokers carried the maps away, leaving Modular Man with the blind woman. Modular Man turned to her. “What are they going to do?”
“I don’t know. They don’t tell me much.” She leaned her head in the direction of the big reel-to-reel. “Would you mind turning that off?”
Modular Man snapped off the recorder. Patchwork leaned back on her swan-necked sofa.
“They don’t tell me much because I don’t think Bloat believes I’m loyal.”
“Are you?”
She smiled vaguely. “Some things I’m loyal to, some things I’m not.” She gave her head a toss. “1-800-I-GIVE-UP. Was that serious? Can we really surrender?”
“So far as I understand.”
“Because I’ve never done anything criminal other than be here, y’know? But if I give up” She gestured toward the band across her face. “How do I get my eyes and ear back?”
“I don’t know.”
She drew up her legs. “I’m not normally blind and I have a hard time tracking people. Would you mind sitting down? That way I’d know where you were.”
He settled onto a cushion. “As I understand it,” Patchwork said. “you’re not here voluntarily.”
“No.”
“But you just can’t fly away.”
Modular Man hesitated — a human mannerism he’d picked up. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t explained this before. “I can’t even think about flying away. I have to obey my creator.”
“Funny about not thinking. Because that’s what people here have to do, so the governor can’t pick up our thoughts. We have to sort of keep our minds far off, way in the atmosphere like. Scramble up our thoughts. And even then we can’t know for sure if he can hear us.”
“Can Governor Bloat hear all of you all the time?”
“I think he can hear anything he really wants to. But it’s work for him, and usually he doesn’t want to bother. And when he sleeps — well, he sleeps a lot. But I don’t really know how it is with him. Or anybody.” She grinned faintly. “I got a better line to Zappa than to anybody here.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“What’s gonna happen?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, man. But I’ve been reeling off these statistics for the last few hours. Tanks and helicopters and fighter-attack squadrons and Hellfires and LAWs and 155s and 105s and 120s — all those numbers. And LCACs and AAVs and MLRs and ATACMS — initials, okay? Just like the numbers, only letters, and lots of them. A whole fuck of a lot of them. And the New Jersey, which I know is a battleship. A carrier task group built around the John F. Kennedy. And a Los Angeles submarine with cruise missiles. So —” She took a breath. “I have no idea what a 155 is, and I wouldn’t know an MLR if it bit me, but I have a feeling I’m gonna get bit pretty soon. We’re all gonna get bit. So all I can do is hope that the governor can do something brilliant, or that the phone lines stay open so that I can call that 800 number once things get serious.”
From having worked with the military in the past Modular Man knew what a lot of those numbers and letters meant, and he hadn’t seen anything here that could stop them from doing their work.
“I hope the lines stay open too,” he said.
Patchwork frowned a bit, as if concentrating. “I’m thinking dirty thoughts,” she said. “Real porn. It embarrasses the governor, you know — he’s just a kid.”
“You’re not so old yourself.”
Her concentrated look deepened. “I’m thinking about something really disgusting. I don’t want the governor listening in.”
“He’s probably more interested in Kafka talking about MLRs and 155s.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” She relaxed against the swan couch and put a hand over where her eyes had been. “No fucking eyes,” she said, “one ear. I can’t go to the toilet without someone leading me, and plumbing wasn’t one of the governor’s major concerns when he built this place so it’s a long goddamn walk from here, and when I get there there isn’t going to be any toilet paper.” She laughed again, cynically this time. “That’ll teach me to fall in love.”
“Are you in love?”
“I was. He’s dead.” She said it lightly, as if it didn’t matter. "I’m sorry.”