"Scott," she said with quiet urgency, "what's happening here!"
"I think—I think it's going to happen," he said unsteadily; his throat was quivering with imminent laughter or sobbing. "I think you and I are about to … become the Queen and the King."
Both of them were breathing fast.
"What—today! What does it mean? What will we do?"
Crane spread his hands helplessly. "I don't know. Get married, be fertile, have children, work, plant gardens—"
Diana almost seemed angry. "—get special T-shirts, print up some letterhead."
Crane grinned at her, but took a deep breath and went on seriously. "If we're healthy and productive, you and I, so will the land be. The land, and us, are going to be sort of voodoo dolls of each other." He thought of the dull, constant pain in his wounded side. "Warning lights for each other."
His fingers brushed her blond hair. "We may lose this honorary youthfulness in the winters, but I'll bet we'll get at least most of it back each spring. I hope it'll be a good long time before those winters start to get too harsh."
"You don't figure this is … immortality."
"No. I'm sure part of our job is to one day die, so another King and Queen can take over. Maybe kids of ours. In twenty years or so there'll be jacks to watch for, and there'll still always be disease, and eventually old age. The only way to get immortality out of this is to—well, become Saturn, eat your children."
"I haven't been a great mother so far," Diana said shakily, "but I'd pass on that."
"And I think we'll—in visions and dreams or hallucinations—I think we'll deal with the things the cards are pictures of, the Archetypes that subterraneanly drive people. We might even be able to … be diplomats, somehow induce the things to assume patterns for less terrible crap in the world. My father didn't dare deal with the Archetypes face-to-face, so he went through the formal channel of the cards and used people like matches to light the things up. There's power here—my father's been using it just in a crippled way, like having a great car but only running the engine so you can cook on the hood." He gave her a frightened smile. "I think we've got to learn how to drive it."
"God," she said quietly. "I guess we can try."
They walked back to the others.
"Let's hurry," Crane called to Mavranos. "The sun's going to be up soon, and he's going to start."
Mavranos picked up his bundled windbreaker, and he and Crane walked away down the street toward the dark boats.
They were challenged when they stepped onto the dock.
"Whoa, boys," said a young man on the deck of Leon's houseboat. Crane recognized him—it was Stevie, the Amino Acid who had been tending bar. "If you're looking to play Poker, you missed it—and if you're looking to steal cameras or fishing gear"—he stepped out of the shadows and let them see the revolver he was casually pointing at them—"you've come to the wrong boat."
"I've come to talk to the owner," said Crane. "I believe he'll be awake already."
"Jesus!" Stevie's eyes suddenly widened and he held his gun up at arm's length. "You're the two guys that were in that boat on Lake Mead Sunday. You killed our King!"
Mavranos quickly stepped to the side, raising the wrapped shotgun, and Crane darted his hand up toward the revolver under his shirt.
But at that moment a deep voice shouted, "Freeze!" from the shadows behind Stevie, and everyone tensely held still. "Drop your gun over the side, Stevie," Leon's Hanari voice went on. "Do it!"
For a moment Stevie's gun hand just shook, still extended, and Crane expected Leon to shoot the young man in the back. Then with a shaky curse Stevie tossed the gun over the rail.
Mavranos lowered the shotgun and exhaled harshly through his fluttering mustache.
Leon stepped forward into the brightening light, and he was smiling under the bandage on his forehead. Again Crane noticed the bulge in the tailored slacks, and he guessed that his father had had some kind of artificial implant put into the body. His notion of physical perfection? Crane wondered. A perpetual boner?
"You're Scott Crane," said Leon in a tone of cold satisfaction. He was holding a big-caliber automatic down by his thigh. "You seem to know something about all this, about what you and I did in the '69 game. And you went and killed this guy's candidate for King?" He was laughing now. "Well, thanks for saving me the trouble. Why have you … come here?"
Crane was glad nobody recognized him as the poor Flying Nun. He glanced past Leon at the lake, where he had killed the Amino Acids' King with a magical .45, and he remembered the place that was the physical totem of the King.
"I'm going to assume the Flamingo," Crane said.
Now Leon was laughing harshly. "Oh, really. You're a fish, sonny, not a jack." Abruptly his inflamed face went blank, and he glanced to the still-dark west; then his pistol was up and pointed squarely at the middle of Crane's torso. "Stevie!" Leon barked. "Go up to him and look at his eyes!"
Stevie hesitated, then shambled across the deck to Crane and peered into his face. "Uh," he said, "they're blue … his eyes, right? … They're bloodshot—"
"Bloodshot's good," said Leon cautiously. "Hold a lighter flame up to each of them—don't burn him—and tell me what his pupils do."
Crane's new eye was dazzled by the flame when Stevie held it up in front of him, but he managed to keep both eyes at least squintingly open.
"Pupils both went narrow fast," Stevie said.
Leon relaxed and started laughing again, clearly with relief. "Sorry, Mr. Crane," he said, "it's just that I once … knew someone else with your first name. An old friend of mine named Betsy used to worry about it, but she was getting paranoid." He waved his pistol at Mavranos. "That guy's got a rifle or something in the cloth there, Stevie. Would you take it from him?"
Mavranos looked at Crane, who nodded, and he let Stevie take the shotgun.
"Now," said Leon, "Crane, you come aboard, you can be the first—you wrecked my beautiful Hanari. Your friend can wait out here on the dock. You'll probably have some things to talk to him about when you leave."
Crane walked up the dock to the section of the deck where the rail had been folded back on a hinge, and he stepped across the gap easily now that he was wearing sneakers.
The cards were spread out face up on the otherwise-empty green felt table, and in spite of the dawn light outside, the wall lamps threw a late-evening glow across the long room. Doctor Leaky was belted into his wheelchair again, but he was mercifully wearing a different leisure suit. Another armed Amino Acid stood alertly in front of the bar, puffing a cigarette.
The air conditioner hummed, and there were no smells in the cool air.
The Art Hanari body was still carrying the gun, and Leon faced Crane from the other side of the room, glaring out of the inflamed Hanari eyes.
"Why did you come here? I really don't think you know what happens now," he said.
You take what you bought, Crane thought. May it please be the right one. "I assume the Flamingo."
Again the declaration seemed to jar his father. "You sold the hand," Leon said, his voice flat but louder, "you'll become the King the way … the way his food does! I don't have time for—"
"Why do you keep a wrecked old clown like that around?" Crane interrupted, nodding toward Doctor Leaky and blinking tears out of his new eye. "Hey, Doctor," he called, "how's your love life these days?"
Doctor Leaky began giggling and making fart sounds with his mouth. "Beam me up, Scotty!" he said.