No. Bloat, I'm so… I'm so sorry. I didn't want to hurt you. Neither one of us wanted Peanut to die, but he died because he loved you, because he believed in you. I believe in you, too. I still do.
I can't do anything for you. I failed.
You can, Bloat. You can. Please… Promise me one thing. Promise that you won't give up. Promise me that. Why'
Because the Outcast loved the Princess, and the Princess loved the Outcast, too. Because what you're trying to do here is good. Because if you don't, then Peanut wasted his life. We were both crying.
I'll still get you out, I promised her. I will. I'll do… I don't know what. But I'll find some way, someone to help me. But the contact had faded, as it always did. I don't know if she heard me or not. I caught only the faintest whisper of her voice:… you have the power, Bloat. Use it.
I raged. I sobbed.
"She's right. She's telling you just what I've been telling you." The penguin. It stood in the lobby before me. Not a hallucination, not a dream-I could see the guards looking at it curiously and wondering. "Right," the penguin said. "You made me, like you made the rest."
"How?" I shouted. "Tell me how I can control this." But it didn't answer. It waddled away down the corridor to the west wing, toward the caves. "I'll be back," it said. "When you need me."
"Governor?" Andiron, one of the guards, asked. "Should we stop him?"
"You see it? You really do?"
Andiron looked at me strangely. "Yes. Of course."
I sighed. I looked at the Temptation and tried to think. "Let it go," I told him. "Let it go."
I guess that after Peanut's death I felt that I had to do something. I needed to gain some (however grudging) respect from the jumpers, not to mention the jokers. And despite Tachyon's entreaties, the only thing I seemed to have accomplished with my dreams had been to make the penguin real. Several jokers reported seeing it moving through the caves.
A parlor trick. Bloat can pull a penguin from his hat. Great. Boy, will that scare the nats. Gosh, is that going to make Blaise tremble.
I needed action. I needed a symbol. I needed to feel that I was doing something.
I thought it time to make official what was already true in fact.
Kafka punched home the switch on the power strips. Arc lights flared with an audible snarling, and I was bathed in incandescent splendor. I watched the monitor as Kafka ticked off the seconds with his fingers. He jabbed a finger at me as the red light blinked on the video camera. In the monitor, the Temptation appeared in a slow pan.
I started talking. I had the script memorized. I'd practiced it for two days straight, making little changes here and there.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" I said, and heard my high voice reverberate through the sound system we'd bought back when we'd had money to play with. Across the monitor, St. Anthony was bedeviled by strange hordes,, beaten by demons flying in the sky, tantalized by a seductress with her surreal following. "It's The Temptation of St. Anthony, if you're not familiar with the painting. Bosch is giving us the tale of Anthony of Egypt and how he was unable to function in his own society. He couldn't exist there, not unless he was the same as they were. So Anthony decided to retreat. He fled the worldly life and went into the desert. He made a place where he could be as he needed to be."
The camera pulled back from the painting and focused on my face, my plump-cheeked, pimply, fatboy face nearly lost in the folds of pasty flesh. The camera continued to zoom back, farther and farther, showing the gravid landscape of my body crammed into the lobby.
"Ain't it funny how your world always views evil as something misshapen or twisted or ugly? Like a joker, y'know. Funny. But to us, being that way is normal."
Panning now, the camera moving over the solemn joker faces in front of me and around the balcony…
"Your world treats jokers badly. That statement doesn't exactly surprise you, does it? Then it shouldn't surprise you that, hey, sometimes a joker will kick back one way or another. The only trouble is, whenever that happens, the violence ante just gets upped one more notch. The joker gets stomped again, only harder this time. We're tired of that game. Hey, it's one we can't win-you've got the power and there's nowhere for a joker to hide. You don't even have to brand us or legislate our movements to keep track of us; we wear our identification all the time. All you have to do is look."
Back to me: half a teenager glued onto a slug thing from a bad Japanese monster movie…
"I'm Bloat. This is the Rox, what most of you still call Ellis Island. I'm the governor of the Rox. I'm the one who keeps all of you out and lets the jokers in. What I have to say is pretty simple, really."
I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. Bloatblack rippled down my sides; I tried to ignore the smell.
Now that it had come to it, I was scared. Reading about revolutions in history books never made me feel the experience-I always knew how it would end. Doing the same thing in role-playing games was simple: If my character died, I'd roll another and keep playing.
But here, now, I didn't know what would happen afterward. I'd already learned that-in this world-you only get one death.
"I'm the governor of the Rox," I repeated. Kafka winced at my blunder and pointed out my place in the cue cards alongside the camera. I stumbled over the next few lines, stuttering. "The… the Rox has become a joker's haven. A place away from the nats and hostile authorities. Here, we're normal. Here, we can be as we need to be. So what I'm saying now is just legitimizing something that's already a fact."
Tight in…
"I hereby declare the Rox to be a separate political entity. We declare ourselves independent of the state of New York and the United States. You have no authority over us. We're the joker homeland."
Around me, jokers burst into prolonged cheering. The camera swung around to show the celebration. I gestured to Kafka. The lights kicked off, and the video feed went dead.
The loud jubilation of the jokers, my people, continued unabated. I could hear it here, could feel it going on all over the Rox. I looked down at Kafka, characteristically somber. He was thinking of the Astronomer again, of another stronghold that had been destroyed.
"How do you think that went over?" I asked him. "We'll find out," he answered. "Won't we?"
While Night's Black Agents to Their Preys Do Rouse
II
Life in the USSA wasn't so bad. The variety of clothing wasn't great, and people tended, to have a lot of moles and winkles and carbunkles on their faces-Shad hadn't realized how much cosmetic surgery had altered the looks of ordinary people back in his own New York-but on the other hand there weren't any jokers filling the streets with their agony and no homeless people wandering the streets, and the doctors at the Jean Jaures Memorial Clinic had patched him up without asking for his insurance card first. There wasn't any wild card or AIDS or Jokertown or Takisians or Swarm, and there hadn't been a Second World War because the Socialists had taken power in Berlin in 1919 and hung onto it, no one had ever heard of Hitler, and there wasn't a cold war or atom bomb, and the Big Apple still bopped along in its own distinctive way.
Or maybe bopped wasn't the right word. The thing Shad found himself missing most of all about his own world was the music. Jazz had stopped evolving around 1940-big bands here in 1990 toured the country playing "Mood Indigo" and "Satin Doll" exactly the way Duke Ellington had in -I940, note for scripted note. Most of the musicians were black-jazz and blues were national cultural resources, forms of "folk art" created by the "Protected Negro Minority." Early rock and roll had been considered an offshoot of the blues and more or less restricted to black people-white performers were discouraged because they were thought to be ripping off a protected culture-and without the white audience, the form had died.