He still felt waterlogged, the way he always did after taking Aquarius out for a spin. It was something he had never done that often; there was water all around Manhattan, but not so you’d want to swim in it. Besides, Aquarius resented the baseline Mark persona worse than any of Mark’s other friends. There was always a chance that he’d take it in mind to just swim way out of sight of land before making the transition back.
It was a risk Mark was taking now, again and again. Ironically the silvery-gray powder that summoned Aquarius was the cheapest and easiest to make of Mark’s five potions — four, now. So he had made up an especially large number of doses of it, back in Athens, figuring he might have to try to split via water. The Aegean was ideal for that, dotted as it was with small and mostly uninhabited islands like this one. Aquarius’ dolphin-form could swim at just upward of twenty knots — Mark had once gotten Tach out in the Hudson in a boat to time him — and that meant he could island-hop, taking time out as Mark to recuperate.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash could fly a lot faster than that of course. But, small as he was, a flying man was not exactly inconspicuous. And being J. J. took a lot out of Mark, emotionally as well as physically. Jumpin’ Jack lived with an intensity Mark found almost as alien as the mind of Aquarius’s dolphin-form. When he was J. J. Flash, it really was like being on a drug trip, a sort of blazing speedball rush.
Mark opened the fluorescent green fanny-pack he’d bought way back in Rome. Aquarius, human or Tursiops, was bulkier than Mark; when he made the transition, he somehow sucked up enough ambient matter to make up the difference: air primarily, but also things like personal effects. It was a handy way to carry things.
Inside the fanny-pack were a mess of extra vials of powder, some figs, and a few Mars bars. Mark knew from experience that he had to get his blood sugar up in a hurry after being either Aquarius or J. J. Flash, or get the shakes real bad, plus nausea and dizziness. If Aquarius hadn’t scarfed a lot of fish en route, he’d be barely conscious now.
Mark stuffed his mouth with a whole candy bar, realizing suddenly just how hungry he was. He ate some figs, and another Mars bar, and felt better.
But by then the sun was completely out of sight, leaving only a glowing green band across the horizon. Overhead the stars were beginning to open like tiny demon eyes. There were no clouds in sight to cover their malevolent gaze.
Mark burped softly, wiped a chocolate smear from the side of his mouth and mustache, and gazed ruminatively into his pack.
For most of his adult life Mark had sought shelter from the stresses of existence in chemicals. That was why his drug of choice was marijuana. He wasn’t interested in the artificial self-esteem of coke — self-esteem was pretty alien to his experience, and he wasn’t comfortable with it, and besides coke gave him shooting pains in his chest and made him honk like a Canada goose when he talked — nor in the edge you got from speed. He was mainly into taking edges off. He didn’t like needles, which mostly let heroin out, and besides he had a basic middleclass hippie prejudice against being a junkie, plus real concern about heavy physical habituation. His use of psychedelics he’d always regarded as experimental.
When he had to say, “Gimme shelter,” he’d turned to his old friend Mary Jane. Then Sunflower — Kimberly Anne Cordayne Meadows Gooding — had turned up suing for Sprout. For the first time in his life Mark had had real problems. He faced them cold-turkey. He came off the grass at the suggestion of Jokertown’s joker lawyer Dr. Pretorius. He had spent the first couple of weeks after the trial ended drunk, but that was a phase; he had basically spent the last two years clean and sober, as the yuppies say.
He’d scored himself some hash in Amsterdam, but that was mainly because he was bored after the constant fear-and-culture-shock rush of Takis and also because he was in Amsterdam, and that was what you did there. It had been dabbling, like a retired tennis pro who turns in a couple of sets occasionally for nostalgia’s sake.
Now the night was coming, and he wanted to hide. Not that he could hide completely; there was no overhead shelter except for these scraggly cypress trees. But creative chemistry would offer him shelter — if only a temporary one.
What’s the big deal about the stars? he tried to tell himself. What’s to be afraid of?
The answer, unfortunately, was death.
As a kid he’d loved comics. He’d grown up thrilling to the four-color adventures of Jetboy and the Great and Powerful Turtle — no Superman for him; he was only interested in actual aces, even though he understood their exploits were mostly made up by Cosh Comics or whoever held the license. He had wanted, more than anything in the world, to be a Hero, like the ones he read about.
That was the spring which drove him in his long search for the Radical. It was the obsession that had shaped the expression of his personal ace. He had become not one Hero but five.
— And yet, and yet. They weren’t him. At least, he could not accept that they were. He formed a theory that his “friends” were real, actual individuals, from alternate realities, perhaps — he was a science fiction fan, too, of course — whom he had somehow, unknowingly, abducted and trapped within the recesses of his own psyche. They seemed to buy that explanation too; the Traveler and J. J. Flash were always trying to figure out ways to spring themselves, or at least establish themselves as baseline persona instead of Mark, and Moonchild had the expressed goal of liberating all of them, Mark included, so that each could work out his or her own karma.
So while each of them performed many deeds that might be called heroic — J. J. Flash fighting in the raid on the Astronomer’s headquarters in the Cloisters, Moonchild defeating the gene-engineered Takisian killing machine Durg at-Morakh, Starshine deflecting a killer asteroid set on a collision course with Earth by the unholy alliance of the Swarm Mother and Tach’s dashing cousin, Zabb — Mark was adroitly able to escape taking credit for any of them.
Then the last two years happened. Sunflower came back into his life. The custody battle began. Mark not only went off the dope, he did the unthinkable: put the purple tailcoat and top hat out on the curb with the trash and retired Cap’n Trips. One final dose of blue powder had permitted him to escape the courtroom and the friendly clutches of the DEA, but after that he was cold-turkey — on his own.
It had not been easy. He had done things he was not proud of. But he had survived. On the streets and on the Rox. Alone. Without chemical crutches of any kind.
The time had come to call his friends back, to rescue his daughter from the living hell of a New York kid jail. But it was different, then. It wasn’t J. J. Flash or Starshine or Moonchild acting the hero on their own. Mark was the director, the initiator, deploying his friends like a combat commander his troops.
Of course combat had its casualties. He’d left the woman he loved dead by the side of a New Jersey road, fatally injured by the hand of Tach’s grandson, Blaise. And he had left Durg there, too, telling him that he was free, that he belonged now to no master but himself…
Yes, and that was the worst loss of all. He had not understood, though Durg had tried to tell him, that a Morakh could not be free, that they were bred to require servitude as they needed air and water. So Durg, the ultimate bodyguard, designed by Takisian genetic scientists to be master of the arts, not just of combat, but of strategy and diplomacy as well, had transferred his loyalty to the best available master.