Brennan felt he couldn't be ungrateful. He had, after all, gotten Jennifer back. But he looked down at Brutus's shattered body and knew there was still immense suffering and injustice in the world, and no matter what he did, he couldn't stop it all.
Trace shook her head. "You are very hard to please," she said, not ungently.
"I guess I am," Brennan admitted. "Did you trick the joker into bringing Brutus back to us?"
"It was easy," Trace said. "Everything I do should be so easy."
"How much was you in that place," Brennan asked, "and how much was real?"
"Haven't you learned your lesson about the reality of reality yet?" Trace asked.
"I don't know," Brennan said. "I just wish it weren't so hard."
"It's as hard as you make it," Trace told him in his mother's voice. "Sometimes there's nothing anyone can do to make it easier. Sometimes there is."
The door to the room shot open, and Dr. Tachyon rushed in. "What's going on?" he demanded. "A strange joker was seen running out of here-"
He looked around, genuinely puzzled. "What did I miss?"
Brennan looked at him. It was time, he thought, to try to make things easier. He went to Tachyon and took his hand. "The end of an age, old friend, and the beginning of a new."
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
II
I have a dream.
I have several dreams, in fact. I suppose that makes this teenage governor marginally better than old King, right? They're very odd, my dreams-a lot more hard-edged and surreal than I remember them being before the wild card hit me. But then, I always did like the painters who could twist reality and make it their own: Dali, Bosch, Brueghel, Chagall…
Last night I had a dream too.
I was in the Administration Building. (Where else would I be, huh?) But the old place had changed. The stone and brick had changed to glass. It was a wondrous, clear crystal line palace from which I could see out into the world again. The sunlight shattered on it and bled rainbows.
I'd changed too. I was someone else, not Bloat. I stood on my own legs, and my body was a gorgeous, muscular wonder. Kelly, as resplendent and alluring as a fairy-tale princess, stood alongside me. Her thoughts were no longer pitying but full of love and trust for me. Together, we strode up and down inside my palace, marveling at its beauty.
Kafka was kneeling in the lobby as we approached, hooking up that generator he keeps insisting we need. A snarl of wires went all around him.
Then I noticed that the brilliant sunlight had tricked me. These weren't wires. The lobby was filled to overflowing with jokers, their bodies all pressed together. They were screaming at me, waving hands and tentacles and filaments and antennae, and shouting, "There's no more room! No more room!"
I looked out and saw that-omigod!-they were right. Through the windows I could see that all the Rox was the same way-a living, writhing carpet of jokers from end to end, right into the greasy waves of the bay.
I shouted to them all. My voice was the voice of a King, deep and charismatic. Not at all the adolescent boy's screech it really is. " I will make you a new home!" I told them. " I will do that for you!"
Kelly applauded. The jokers cheered.
But Kafka glanced up at me from the generator. "They won't let you," he said softly.
The massed jokers all howled agreement. I knew that Kafka spoke of every joker's eternal "they": the nats who hate us, the turncoat aces who are weapons against their own kind.
"My Wall keeps them out," I insisted, shaking my head. Kafka sighed.
I suddenly felt a chill. I looked up to see that the entire roof of the building was gone. Above, a winter wind flung dirty wet snow from massed, hurtling clouds. The snow piled in drifts around and over the mountain of my body-I was Bloat again. Kelly, disgust on her face, fled the lobby. I was frightened. I felt more helpless than I'd ever felt, for I knew that the wall couldn't keep out the snow.
"The wall isn't enough," Kafka told me. "Not enough."
"The jumpers. My joker army."
"Not enough."
The wind howled, a mad laughter. Sleet hissed around the columns of the lobby, between the supports that held the floor against my weight…
And I woke. My enormous body was trembling so that the whole building was shaking in sympathy. All the guards were looking at me, and the smell of the bloatblack… Well, you get the idea.
Hell, dreams are supposed to be escapes. I should be dreaming of being in a normal body or having some postpubescent wet dreams about Kelly.
Every joker needs a refuge. I can't even find one in my dreams.
I talked to Molly Bolt rather than Blaise because I could hear through the mindvoices that Blaise was busy.
All right, I'll be honest here. That was a lousy excuse. I talked to Molly because I really don't like Blaise.
But even Molly doesn't listen very well to me. She spoke her thoughts, and I heard them twice. You're a softy, Bloat. Weak. "Power is information." C'mon, that's crap. You know what power is? It's taking the body of some rich snot and humiliating him. Making him run naked down Wall Street jacking off. Having him fire his staff with a goddamn AK-47. Walking him to J-town and having him suck some joker's dick. Making him feel helpless and used. That's power, Governor.
Molly flung one jean-clad leg over the other as she slouched in the chair in front of me. Details: the knees were out of the jeans. Despite the three inches of snow on the ground outside, she was wearing sneakers without socks and a cutoff T under her leather jacket. She ran a hand through spiked multicolored hair. Her lower lip was out, pouting.
I notice things like that. It's the artist in me.
"Molly, your kind of power is just kicks. You do it because you're a sick, twisted little child. Because you enjoy it." She smiled at that; I chuckled.
"But you're worried too," I told her. "All of you are. I hear the thoughts. You're worried because if an assassin can take out a man as well protected as Kien-a man I know Blaise and his friends were supposed to be protecting-then Prime can be killed, even with Zelda watching him. For that matter, so can Blaise or you. The fact you can jump ain't enough."
As I said it, I caught the thought she tried to hide. So I laughed again. "Oh, you wouldn't mind if Blaise were offed, would you? Excuse me, that's `that fucking son-of-a-bitch cocksucking alien prickhead Blaise,' to be exact. You really need to work on your cursing, Molly. You show a lack of inventiveness. All those cliches…"
"Stop your fucking giggling and get on with it, Bloat."
"Information is power. For instance, what if I told Blaise what you were thinking just now. Or what if I mentioned your and Blackhead's half-assed plan to get rid of Blaise-" Molly angrily filled her mind with other images. I chuckled. "You've stirred up a hornet's nest, Molly," I said. "I can hear them buzzing around. So can you. I notice these things. I notice that since Kien died, since Prime's been acting strange, you jumpers have been, well, stupid. You're terrorizing the city like you're in some bad teenage biker movie." She wasn't impressed. "We're just showing the fuckers we ain't afraid of them."
"Right. What you're doing is playing right into the nats' hands. All you're doing is making them angry, and only blind fools would think that a hundred jumpers and a thousand or so jokers on a little island can really stand against `them.' If they want to just clean us out, they can."
Molly sniffed, though I knew that inside she had listened. "So talk to Blaise or Prime. Since when did you get so fucking political? You ain't no older than me, or any smarter."
"It's because I like you."
I had to laugh at the strange image that put in her head. "Oh, I still have the right equipment for it," I told her. "I think so, at least. It's buried inside. I doubt if it's in proportion to my current body, though. Besides, Kelly's really more my type. Look, I've been studying a lot, Molly-there are minds on this island…" I shook my head. The mindvoices intruded even as I tried to talk about them.