We go together, Fortunato thought. You and me. Nothing mattered; he became nothing, less than nothing, a vacuum. Come to me, he thought. Bring everything you have.
The night filled with cold white light.
Most of the crowd couldn't even see the battle over the East River because of their angle of sight being limited by the Manhattan skyline. It was mainly the observers standing in the intersections who could look along the numbered streeets east to the spectacle.
Even those onlookers weren't completely impressed as the fireballs coruscated and exploded. One joker, staring at the sparks cascading down toward the river, said in range of Jack's hearing, "Hey, I saw a lot more spectacular stuff during the Bicentennial. This ain't nothing. Why don't they go do something over the Statue of Liberty?"
"Yeah!" said someone else. "That'd be neat."
No one peering goggle-eyed from the intersection of 14th Street and Avenue A had any idea just what was going on above the river.
"I've got a date in three hours," said Bagabond. "It's my first date in twenty years, and now the world's ending." The fireworks dimmed and died.
"I think it's over," said Jack. "The world's not ending. You've still got your date. Who's the lucky guy?"
She recoiled and stepped away from him.
He realized what she was thinking and hastily said, "I'm not being sarcastic. I mean it. Who is he?"
"Paul Goldberg."
"The lawyer? Rosemary's office?"
"That's right."
"What're you going to wear?" said Jack. Bagabond hesitated. "The usual." Jack laughed. "Bag lady outfit?"
She shook her head angrily. "Business suit."
"Come on."
This time it was Jack who grabbed Bagabond's arm and tugged her along the street. "It's maybe three blocks to All Nite Mari Ann's," he said. "It's the in place this season."
"What do you mean?" said Bagabond.
"You need an all-night boutique," said Jack. "This is going to be fun."
"I'm not looking for fun," said Bagabond.
"You want to look really great at your breakfast date?" She resolutely stared straight ahead.
"Then, let's go, kiddo."
She tried to lag as he led the way down the street. Jack waited for her, took her elbow, merrily steered her along. He was whistling an off-key version of "We're Off to See the Wizard."
"You're no Judy Garland." Bagabond said. Jack just smiled.
The crowds were starting to thin out, almost as though the epic battle over the East River had been equivalent to the nightly fireworks at Disneyland, signaling families it was time to take the kids home. More than that, the crowds seemed simply to be exhausted. It had been a long, long day.
All Nite Mari Ann's was sufficiently successful; it could afford to spread out more than the average boutique. It sprawled through the ground floor of what had once been a parking garage.
Jack led Bagabond along a window-shopping tour of the front of the store. "Yes," he said. "Oh yes. A silk dress, see?" He pointed. He looked into her face and then back into the interior of the shop. "Teal, I think. Perfect." He moved ahead of her. "Come on, Suzanne. It's Cinderella time."
Bagabond made one final attempt to stall. "I don't have much money with me."
Holding the door for her, Jack said, "I have an account."
When the burst of power went through him, there was nothing left of Fortunato to resist it. Nothing resisted it, and so it passed through him. And as it passed it left particles behind, particles of knowledge and memory and understanding.
Fortunato saw a little man in thick glasses crawling out of the East River, twenty years ago. There were no memories before that. Where there should have been memories there was only a seared place, self-inflicted. The Astronomer was self-made; there was no human identity, no human history left to him.
The little man had crawled into the grass of East River Park and he had looked up into the night sky. And the wild card virus uncoiled in him for the first time and his mind shot out into that sky and moved between the stars. It saw clouds of gas that burned in reds and purples and blues. It saw planets striped and whorled and ringed and haloed. It saw moons and comets and shapeless lumps of asteroid.
And it saw something moving. Something dark and nearly mindless, something vast and rubbery and foul, something hungry. And his mind began to scream.
The little man found himself outside a brick building in Jokertown, naked except for his glasses, still screaming. A door opened and a man named Balsam took him in. Took him in and taught him the secrets, taught him the name of the thing he'd seen, the name that was the ultimate Masonic word: TIAMAT Taught him about the machine, the Shakti device that the brother from the stars had brought to Cagliostro. Cagliostro who had founded the Order, to protect the knowledge of TIAMAT-the Dark Sister-and the Shakti device.
Until Balsam had nothing left to teach the little man, and it was time for the little man to become the Astronomer, and remove Balsam, with the unwitting help of a bumbling magician named Fortunato. To take control of the Order. To realize their destiny. To found a religious tyranny of Egyptian Masons that would rule the world. A world that would come begging to be ruled out of awe and gratitude. For the Astronomer would use the Shakti device as it had always been meant to be used…
"No," Fortunato said. "No."
But the knowledge would not go away. The knowledge that the Shakti device had been given to the Masons to save the Earth from TIAMAT, not to lure her there. To call the Network to destroy her.
The Shakti device could have saved them and Fortunato had destroyed it. Because of him, thousands had died. For all his claims of wisdom he was still only a creature of impulse, nothing but a temperamental child.
The Astronomer still lived. The filmed glasses were still hooked around his ears, the tatters of his robe snapped in the wind, his chest moved up and down. His eyes had rolled back in his head, and his power was gone. Completely.
It would take nothing at all for Fortunato to drift across the thirty feet that separated them, put his hands around the little mans throat, and finish him.
Instead he left him fall.
Long seconds later Fortunato heard the splash as the little man came full circle, back into the East River again.
Henry Street was still and deserted, its revelry closed with the Crystal Palace. Sawhorses still closed off both ends of the block, though the street fair was long over. Hiram and Jay walked down the middle of the street, past the darkened rowhouses. The gutters were choked with litter: napkins, paper cups, plastic forks, newspapers.
Halfway up the block, a dark shape stepped out from the shadows to accost them. Popinjay's hand came out of his pocket fast, but Hiram grabbed his arm. "Don't," he said.
The shape moved under the light of a streetlamp. It was a heavy gray-haired woman in a shapeless green army jacket. The bottom half of her body was a single huge white leg, moist and boneless. She pushed herself forward like a snail. "Spare change?" she asked. "Spare change for a poor joker?"
Hiram found he could not look at her. He took out a wallet, gave her a five-dollar bill. As she took it from his hand, his fist clenched, and he cut her weight in half. It wouldn't last, but for a little while it would be easier for her.
A fire was burning in the vacant, debris-strewn lot beside the Crystal Palace. A dozen small twisted forms were huddled around it, and an animal of some sort was turning on a spit above the flames. At the sounds of footsteps, some of the creatures got up and vanished into the ruins. Others turned to stare, eves hot as embers in the darkness. Hiram paused. He didn't often come down to Jokertown, and now he remembered why.
"They won't bother us," Ackroyd said. "This is their time, when the streets are empty and the world's asleep."
"I think that's a dog they're cooking," Hiram said.