"Prime," I called as he and Zelda started to leave. He stopped and turned back to me. "I'll find something," I told him. "I'll find some leverage somewhere. Then we'll talk again. You understand?"
"Of course I understand," he said. "It's exactly what I would do, after all. You see, Governor, we're not so different, are we? We just have different agendas."
They'd had to move the Bosch painting since I seemed to be undergoing some new growth spurt. My body was pushing forward into the lobby. Kafka told me that I'd filled two more of the offices in back and that new floor struts needed to be added. I was hungry all the time too. The Rox's sewage system only took the edge off. The bloatblack that rolled off me was lighter in color and less solid, but stank worse.
I guess it was a corollary that the Wall was a quarter mile farther out into the bay now. It was stronger, too; I could push back almost anyone who didn't really want to be here. A nice power, if it were under my control, but it wasn't. The Wall just was, as always.
Too bad the Wall can't do anything to the people inside it.
Blaise was in the lobby, with his tagalong assassin, Durg. Tachyon's grandson didn't do much more than glance at the work in progress. Around the lobby and behind the Temptation, jokers were busily taking out walls and replacing them with enormous panes of glass. Already the lobby was brighter, and I could see more of the Rox. When the renovation was finished, when all around me there would be nothing but windows and my body was raised even higher, I'd be able to look out and see the entire panorama of the island and bay. I'd have transformed the building into the turreted, glittering Crystal Castle I'd seen in my dreams.
All it would take was money. Money we had plenty of now.
My body rumbled. Sphincters dilated, pulsed, and more bloatblack sloughed off down my stained sides. The blackers moved in to shovel away the waste. Blaise stared at them, refusing to show on his face the disgust that was in his mind, though Durg openly scowled. The hypocrisy was enough to make me laugh.
So I did.
"You and your stupid giggling," Blaise muttered, then more loudly: "Tell me, Governor, are you going to still be laughing when we start fighting over land on the Rox? 'Cause that's what's gonna happen, real soon. There ain't room here, Bloat. There's too many people coming out here now. Christ, you're going to want to move the fucking Statue of Liberty over here next. `Give us your twisted, your disfigured, your huddled masses yearning to be normal…' Damn it, be realistic. There's only so much room here, and we're full. No fucking vacancy."
Kafka was glaring at Blaise, but in his mind there was some grudging agreement. That was a first. Kafka nodded. "Governor, Blaise is at least partially right. I don't know that we can keep up with the demand on services. If we get too many immigrants, we won't be able to feed them, no matter how much money we have. We won't be able to clean up the garbage, won't be able to give them water and sewage and power. We'll have fights and arguments over space and facilities. It'll be worse than Jokertown. That's not what you want. Things are good here now"
"What do you want me to do, Kafka? Say to those who get past the wall, 'Sorry, you can't come in'? You want me to shoot them?"
"Sounds like a fucking good idea to me," Blaise said. Kafka snarled at him.
"Hey," Blaise retorted. "I'm not asking, I'm telling. There's no more room. You want rapture, you want money, then close the fucking borders. That's my feeling, that's Prime's feeling. So do it, huh? I don't care how, just keep the new jokers out, or maybe we'll stop playing ball with you at all. Then where you gonna be?" He challenged me with a stare. "Ain't that what Prime told you too?"
All the time Blaise was yapping, I was feeling something else. I don't know when I first noticed it not long after the argument began. I could sense an extension of myself, some psychic limb like the wall that was just beginning to bud and grow. I could feel this thing pushing, pushing against something hard and solid.
Inside… I don't know how to describe it… there was a sense of stretching, of growing… Like I was experiencing a dream at the same time I was talking to them.
I was so tired of feeling powerless, you see-with Tachyon, with the growing pains of the Rox, with what had happened during the cops' attack, with Blaise's goddamn superiority complex, with Prime's cold manipulations. I was so deadly tired of it.
Nobody was agreeing with me. They were all saying the same thing: There's no room anymore. We don't have the resources to waste on new people or new buildings. You gotta send some of 'em back. You gotta stop them from coming here.
And I kept thinking of my dreams, of what I wanted the Rox to be.
"Look, the Wall's the only immigration policy the Rox needs," I answered.
"Yeah, it sure fucking kept out the cops, didn't it?"
"Hey," I shouted back, "if one of your stupid jumpers hadn't barged in and wrecked things, yeah, the Wall would've kept them out."
"You're full of shit, Governor."
Durg, next to Blaise, suddenly became very alert. I knew he expected me to do something in response to Blaise's blatant rudeness.
But I was full. I was full of a vision. A vision of space, a dream of dark places and echoing rooms. The dreams inside me were stretching…
A deep rumble cut off our argument. Blaise was shouting; Kafka was chattering; they were all shouting, inside and out. I was scared myself.
The whole Administration Building was shaking. I heard glass breaking and saw the ramshackle buildings across the court swaying. A curtain of dust rippled across the courtyard, even though there was no wind. My feeling of extension hardened, became full.
Then it was over. The quiet was very loud.
I knew. I knew even as the tremors died and the plaster dust drifted down like snow from the ceilings, as Blaise and Kafka and the rest picked themselves off the floor.
"What was that?" Their thoughts were all confused and panicked. Blaise was thinking it was another attack.
I just looked at them calmly and told them what it was. "It was a dream."
They just looked at me. "Go to the west wing," I told them. "The basement. You'll see. Go on-all of you. Leave me alone. I'm tired and I'm hungry"
They stared at me. Blaise was thinking that I'd finally gone mad; Kafka was puzzling; Peanut was gazing at me trustingly.
"Go on," I told them again. "Then come back and tell me what you've seen."
They were gone for an hour. I followed them, riding with their minds. When they returned, they were quiet, all of them. Blaise was regarding me with a grudging wonder and a touch just a touch-of fear. God knows what Durg was thinking.
I gazed at the remembered images in their heads, chuckling now. They were gorgeous, my caves. Walls of fluted smooth stone rippling from vast ceilings to distant floors; glittering, snowy patches of calcite crystals; deep pits where water roared in the darkness; hidden places where beasts of dreams walked.
Another world. A joker's land. I laughed.
Tachyon's grandson had wrapped his thoughts so I could hear very little of them. Only the barest tinge of his emotions leaked out. He asked me-knowing the answer-if I'd seen the caverns through their minds.
I told him that I had.
Then he asked me the question he didn't really want to ask because he was afraid that he already knew the answer. "Did you make them?"
I was too exhausted for anything but honesty. "I think so, Blaise," I admitted. "I'm not sure, but I've dreamed of them. Still
… there's a lot more there than what I dreamed. I don't control it. I don't know what-all is down there."
Blaise gave a brief nod of his head, almost a salute. Confusion radiated from behind his mindshields. He turned and left the lobby without another word.
"You don't think big enough," the penguin had told me. Well, was this the right size?
"It's not possible," Kafka whispered. "I saw it, but it's not possible. Ellis is just old ship ballast. It's not even a real island."