Battle sputtered. “Why you, you...”
Ray looked at him with eyes as merciless as Mackie Messer’s “It’ll be a real pleasure working with you, George, looking over your shoulder as you make your little plans and run your little schemes. A real goddamn pleasure.”
Battle shut his mouth and nodded stiffly. “We can discuss this later.”
“You bet,” Ray said. He felt happy, almost content. At last he’d found a really worthy foe.
“Fine,” Battle said, through gritted teeth.
“You know, George,” Ray said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
And he smiled, though his face hurt like hell. Battle, despite the warmth of the hospital room, shivered.
There was still 65,000 dollars in neatly sorted bills on the kitchen table. Patchwork — Modular Woman — was lying in pieces on a plastic drop-cloth in Travnicek’s bedroom. Modular Man was trying to reassemble her.
He had run into some difficulties. Which eye was which? He couldn’t tell the left from right. There were other similar problems with some of the digits; and during the night he had to break into a medical school library and steal some books on anatomy so as to figure out where some of the internal organs went.
And whatever he did, there were still a good many bits missing. They’ll grow back, she had said, but that takes weeks. Months, sometimes.
The television chattered at him as he worked. Someone who might be dead, the Turtle, or both was being sought in connection with a murder in Jersey. Zappa had scheduled a press conference for later in the day. He was expected to declare a victory. The battleship New Jersey, or the listing first half of it, was being carefully towed to a breaker’s yard. Dan Quayle was giving an anti-drug speech in Iowa and was unavailable for comment, and George Bush had gone fishing in Maine.
Not much had been made of Modular Man’s rescue of a few people from the Rox. He was still being sought as a traitor and outlaw.
The android figured that Canada was sounding better and better. From there he might be able to cut a deal with someone in the government, or alternatively emigrate to Buenos Aires.
But first things first. He needed to put Patchwork back together.
Sorting out the real Patchwork from Travnicek’s remains presented a problem. Some parts rather obviously belonged to a joker, however, and others turned cold and began to decay and were obviously useless whether they belonged to her or not.
Patchwork’s parts cooled slightly, but not to air temperature. And if he fitted them together properly, they stayed together.
At the moment he was puzzling over a bagpipe-like organ that he had identified from the medical textbook as a “ventriculus.” The name made it sound as if it belonged somewhere in the heart area.
He put the organ down and reached for a dictionary. “Ventriculus,” he discovered, meant “stomach.”
He picked the stomach up again. Which end was up?
It was almost enough — almost — to make him wish he had Travnicek back to guide him.
How appalling had it been, he wondered, to arrange for Travnicek’s death? And, because he couldn’t do it himself, to coax Patchwork into doing the deed?
He had wanted to live. At some point he had decided, like Bloat, that some lives were worth more than others; that his existence was worth more than his creator’s.
And now, because he had wanted to live so desperately, he was going to have to live with the consequences of that decision.
And Patchwork would have to deal with it as well, if her life didn’t fade as he was reassembling her.
It was possible for a murderer to redeem himself, according to society’s rules. There were traditional ways of dealing with those who were guilty of crime. Imprisonment or execution was high on the list. But sometimes the criminal was allowed to redeem himself through service to others.
Another traditional road to redemption was through love. Modular Man thought he might give that one a try.
But first things first. He had to work out which end of Patchwork’s stomach went up.
Perhaps he should try attaching it to something.
The intestines were a mess he hadn’t dealt with yet, but he’d found a muscular tube that might well be an esophagus. He went to where that was on the pile and picked it up. He matched torn ends together and found that they fused.
Well. One mystery solved. On to the next.
This was obviously going to take some time.
But Modular Man had all the patience required.
Her name was Ariel, but for the last decade she had been called Slash, since she contracted the wild card and moved to Jokertown. Now she sat on a dock along the East River. Dirty, moonlit wavelets slapped the pilings, hiding the faint sound of clashing steel as she moved. Moonlight sparked on a hedge of blades, a bristling snarl of edged steel that lined her body. She was naked; no clothing could last long on her. It didn’t matter that anyone could see the flesh between the knife-blade ridges of her body. She was safe. She was always safe. Always. Whether she wanted to be or not.
Iaido had been her passion — the art of sword — drawing. She had spent years studying, years of sweat with a hakama swirling around her legs and a sai thrust between the belt at her left side. The lure of the blade had taken her from Cincinnati to New York in pursuit of a sensei, then to Japan, then back to New York yet again. Her life had begun to expand in a grand, delightful fashion: landing a big contract as a programmer; studying under a wonderful sensei; finding Dennis and realizing for the first time that there were other types of loves too.
And New York had gifted her with the wild card.
Dennis had fled in terror. The contract had been voided. Her sensei told her that she was a distraction to his other students. She had been made a mockery of herself. Because she had been made into what she loved, she had been made unlovable. Untouchable. The isolation and hatred had grown year by year until — now — she didn’t think she could stand it anymore.
Slash sat waiting, throwing mocking, sharp light back at the city’s brilliance, not quite sure what or why she was waiting but knowing that she must.
Light glimmered just under the surface of the murky waves — a faint drifting wash of phosphorescence. Just below Slash, water suddenly bulged and ran as something large and rounded rose from underneath. Slash threw herself back, blades clashing. The apparition surfaced: a sphere of gelatinous, semitransparent flesh with wriggling cilia covering its surface and a vaguely human face set atop it. Points of soft, multicolored light dotted the body; gills fluttered near the head. A Hefty trash bag was snagged on its side; as Slash watched, the green plastic slipped loose and splashed back into the river.
There seemed to be something — someone inside the creature. As Slash watched from underneath one of the dock lamps, a woman pushed her way through the belly of the creature and hauled herself up onto the dock. She was — maybe — twenty; blond hair and dark eyes that seemed to have seen too much, judging by the circles underneath them. The woman glanced at Slash, then at the city. She sighed. “Charon,” she said. “Thanks for the ride.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Yes. I guess it is.” The woman’s gaze found Slash. To her credit, she shuddered very little. “Looks like you have a fare waiting,” she said. She nodded to Slash, touched the choker around her neck as if to make sure that the antique cameo there wasn’t lost, then frowned at the city. She began to walk away from the water toward the lights without another word. Slash watched her leave.