"Yes, dear." He couldn't bring himself to call the joker "Doughboy."
"They thaid Mith Thara's a twaitor, and now they thay you are too. I don't underthand. "
"It's very confusing, child."
"Don't you love the thenator anymore?"
Tach covered his eyes with a hand. "I love all of you better. "
"Funny way of showing it," howled a voice from the crowd.
"Traitor. Traitor! TRAITOR!"
The sound battered at him, and Tach dropped his face into his hands. Suddenly Jackson was there, an arm tight about his shoulders.
"Come on. You can do it. We walk through this crowd. We get up on that truck, and we speak. It's going to be all right. "
"No, Reverend, I am afraid that some things can never be repaired."
But he had been reminded of his duty, so with a smile firmly in place Tach began moving down the line of people. Some of the most unbelievable things were held out to him-claws, tentacles, misshapen lumps covered with foulsmelling discharge. The sight of a normal human hand was such a relief that Tachyon almost ran to grip it.
A young man, dressed in a leather jacket despite the heat, raised heavy lids to regard him. Eyes as blank as a shark's.
Jokers clogged the street, silent and horrible. The heat and the light seemed to suffocate you, to wrap around your chest like a python, tightening by degrees. It reminded Mackie of Hamburg in summertime. He hated anything that reminded him of home. He hated the heat and the humidity, and wasn't too crazy about the light of day. Most of all he hated jokers.
Nonetheless he was happy. Redemption sang in his veins like a hit of good speed.
Der Mann was giving him another chance. He was Macheath again, slipping through the mob with his song bubbling mantric down in his throat.
In this mass of monsters, nothing was remarkable. Particularly Mackie. His lack of size let him avoid most contact. The awful heat sent sweat tentacles crawling down his ribs inside his jacket and aging T-shirt, but his personal stink was lost in the crowd.
Glancing impact, then, "Hey, there, motherfucker!" The hand on his arm was feathered. "Watch who you're shoving! Who the fuck you think you are?"
"I'm Mack the Knife, you filthy creature!" Anger swelled like his cock. He started to bring a buzz.
No! Remember your job! He snarled something wordless and phased out, leaving the monstrosity standing there holding air. The stupid look on what passed for its face made him laugh.
Insubstantial, he walked through a maggot clump of horrors pretending to be people, found an eddy big enough to phase his skinny body back in. The jokers paid him no mind.
A chant had started, low and hostile. The words blurred in his mind. He didn't try to understand. Jokers had nothing to say. The beasts didn't even know he was walking through them! He was Mackie Messer, he was stone mystery and death. He was invincible.
Looming alongside his quarry was the tall nigger running for president-and wasn't that capitalist decadence, to let such people hold political office? Karl Marx said the black man was a slave, and der alte Karl knew what he was talking about. The man hanging tight on Tach's other side struck Mackie somehow familiar. Probably one of the alien's toadies from Jokertown.
Tachyon was moving down a line, shaking hands or whatever. The thought of all that joker touch made Mackie's skin creep. He circled, like the shark in his song, who wears his teeth in his face.
You must be extremely careful, the Man had said. Tachyon is a mind reader. You must not let him sense your intention.
Good enough. He was Mack the Knife. He knew how to do these things.
It would be simple to phase through the crowd, approach from behind, buzz his hand and jam it right through Doctor precious Tachyon's alien fucking heart. It would be too simple.
He'd never done an alien before. Nor had he done anybody really big, really famous like Tachyon was.
He wanted to feel Tachyon's eyes in his. He wanted the little bastard to know who was killing him.
The jokers surged forward, carrying him right where he needed to go.
The world contracted to Tachyon and the touch.
The afternoon came to Jack in little coherent bursts interspersed with noise and pointless movement, like a film cut into pieces and spliced together at random. Delegates surged back and forth, vote totals changed by the half hour.
The only two constants were that Hartmann was losing votes and Barnett was gaining. Despite denials from Hartmann and Devaughn, everyone assumed that Jack's accusation of Barnett had been a last, desperate attempt by Hartmann's camp to regain its lost momentum. "Hey," Devaughn finally scowled as reporters pressed him. "Give the guy a break. Yesterday somebody stopped his heart-who knows how many brain cells he lost?"
Thanks, Charles, Jack thought. Compassionate as always. The only conceivable remedy was another swig of overproof.
Jim Wright, calling for vote after vote, looked as if his liver had just failed. Fistfights swirled on the floor. The band played whatever came into its collective head, anything from Stephen Foster to Jagger-Richards. A Starshine glider crashed in front of Jack and he stepped on it by mistake while trying to pick it up. He tried to throw the crumpled thing anyway, and it came apart as it left his hand.
Fucking flying joker, he thought.
As Jack finished the bottle, a kind of lucidity returned, an intense consciousness of the horror of it all. Aw, shit, Jack thought. I've drunk myself sober.
No choice, he decided, but to get another bottle. He lurched from his seat and headed across the pandemonium toward the nearest exit. As he left the auditorium, he saw a young woman with Hartmann buttons talking earnestly to a tall black man in hornrims.
"Sorry, Sheila," the man in glasses said. "Your old man's the nicest guy I've ever met, and I'm sorry to disappoint him, but if I don't switch to Jesse on this vote I can kiss my standing in the neighborhood goodbye."
Some kind of rally was going on right outside the auditorium. There was a flatbed truck covered with Jackson banners and a limo trying to get through the crowd toward it, the horn bleating. Swarming around everything were more jokers than Jack had ever seen in one place.
He tried moving through the crowd, but it was too dense. The people in the limo must have decided the same thing, because its doors opened and the passengers got out-Straight Arrow in his gray uniform, some little white guy Jack didn't recognize, Jesse Jackson, and Tachyon.
Great. Just the people Jack wanted to see.
The crowd roared. Media people jostled jokers to find camera setups. Police and Secret Service were trying to wedge their way to the truck without knocking anyone off their feet.
Tachyon and the candidate were shaking hands as they progressed. Someone spit in Tach's face. Straight Arrow looked appalled, probably not at the saliva but at the fact it could as easily have been a bullet.
A shadow passed overhead and Jack looked up. The Turtle moved past in silence. Someone had painted HARTMANN! across his shell in big silver letters.
Jack looked down and saw, through a split-second gap in the crowd, the freak gliding through the. crowd. The kid with buzz saw hands, just fifteen feet away.
Adrenaline crashed into Jack with the force of a hurricane. "No!" he yelled, and began to swim through the crowd with great sweeps of his arms, driving his way heedless of yells of protest.
The leather boy had disappeared. Jack craned to find him. Then there he was, leaning forward under the arm of a policeman, his hand outstretched. Tachyon saw him and smiled.
"No!" Jack yelled again, but no one could hear him. Tachyon took the hand.
Tachyon took his hand with something like relief. He clamped down hard.
"I'm Mackie Messer," he said, and laid on maximum buzz.
There was a shower of blood and bone and the buzzsaw sound that Jack remembered all too well. Tachyon screamed. So did a hundred other people. So, maybe, did Jack.