Edward Bryant: Dealer's Choice

This was a national emergency, Hartmann told Wolf Blitzer. He quoted John Kennedy and Tom Paine. Many of his ace friends had come forward already; he hoped others would volunteer to help out in this crisis. “With great power comes great responsibility,” he said. They wanted Starshine, Modular Man, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Water Lily, Chimera.

They already had the Great and Powerful Turtle.

Tom sipped at his coffee. It was too hot. He blew on it to cool it down.

“This afternoon’s meeting will be our last best hope for a peaceful solution,” Hartmann told Blitzer. He asked everyone listening to pray for their success.

It was smart of them to use Hartmann. Tom didn’t trust politicians, least of all George Bush and his rightwing friends. But Gregg Hartmann was different. Tom had believed in Gregg Hartmann. When the senator had his nervous breakdown in Atlanta in 1988, and lost his hard-won presidential nomination, it had almost broken his heart.

Tom had witnessed the carnage last month, when the military tried to take the Rox. Hartmann was right; they had to make Bloat and his followers listen to reason. If not …

He didn’t want to think about it. Hartmann would negotiate a settlement, he told himself. He had to.

Joey had a spare room down in North Carolina. He had urged Tom to move down with them, before the shithammer came down. “This is where I belong,” Tom said simply.

He turned off the television. In the silence of the morning, he felt utterly alone. Joey and Gina moved down to Charlotte. Tachyon gone to the stars, back to his homeworld Takis, no telling if he’d ever be back. That was most of the people who knew he was alive right there. Dead men don’t make a whole lot of friends.

But it was only Tom Tudbury who was dead. The Turtle still had miles to go before he slept.

He finished his coffee, and went to get his shell.

Travnicek was facing south again. He had been doing that a lot lately, just standing there in the still light of dawn, motionless on his terrace above the park. His organ cluster, which looked like a lei made from H. R. Giger flowers, had blossomed around the featureless blue dome of his head. Petals, tentacles, sensors — whatever they were — had come erect and were tracking south like some kind of organic radar.

Modular Man did not think this was a good sign. Travnicek’s obsessions were rarely healthy.

“Sir,” he said, “do you still want me to join the government aces at Ebbets Field?”

He spoke from the shelter of the penthouse door, where neighbors in the surrounding buildings couldn’t see him. Normally he flew in and out only at night, but he’d been delayed by the necessity of sorting the 65,000-odd dollars he had stolen, on Travnicek’s orders, from a Brink’s truck while its drivers were drinking coffee in a Roy Rogers.

Travnicek had an uncanny ability to detect money — not that it required much skill in the case of a Brink’s truck. And Modular Man was very good with locks, particularly the electronic kind.

Modular Man was wired to obey his creator and to protect him. He didn’t have any choice in the matter.

“Sir?” he prompted. “Ebbets Field? Senator Hartmann’s request to help him in the battle against the Rox?”

If he was lucky, he thought, Travnicek would order him to steal something else.

“The Rox?” Maxim Travnicek didn’t have to turn around to address his creation — the mitteleuropean accent came out of a trumpet-shaped blossom on the back of Travnicek’s lei. “So go,” he said. “I want to see recordings of that place. It’s … interesting.”

If he were human, the android thought, he would have shuddered at the tone of that interesting. “ Sir?” he ventured. “There is probably going to be a fight. I might get injured.”

“I built you twice, toaster,” Travnicek said. “If you get blown up again, I’ll build another one.”

There was no point, the android knew, in pointing out that since Travnicek had become a joker he’d lost his ability to construct much of anything. Travnicek would just deny it, then order him to do something humiliating.

“If you’re sure, sir,” Modular Man said. “If you’ve got enough money to”

“Go!” The blue-skinned joker waved an arm. “And fuck you!”

“May I take my guns first?”

“Take whatever you want. Just stop bothering me.”

Modular Man took the microwave laser and the .30-caliber Browning.

It looked like it was shaping up to be that kind of day.

The potpourri of thoughts around Bloat were amusing in their diversity.

Kafka was radiating his usual sour paranoia and annoyance with the “juvenile behavior” of his compatriots: Zelda (who these days insisted on being called Bodysnatcher) was wondering whether she’d done a hundred bench presses this morning or just ninety. That was just mind-static: she’d been trying different strategies to keep him from reading her thoughts for the last few weeks. Shroud was gazing at his hand and wondering whether it was a little more translucent today than yesterday; Video was replaying the arrival of Herne a few hours ago; Molly was staring at Herne and speculating graphically about what she’d like to do with him (and whether it would be physically possible — evidently she’d seen some of the porno films in which he’d starred). Herne had become more his daytime personality of Dylan Hardesty; Hardesty was guiltily remembering an earlier Hunt and how good it had felt to kill the victim…

And the penguin, as usual, was mind-silent — like all of Bloat’s creations. The penguin was staring at him, but he could sense no thoughts at all behind the blank gaze.

None of them were particularly thinking about the subject at hand. Bloat blinked and cleared his throat.

“Look, people, you’ve all heard Hardesty’s information from the Twisted Fists,” Bloat said loudly. Thoughts shattered and refocused on the sound; Bloat grinned in quick amusement. “So who here thinks we got something to worry about?”

Molly sniffed. The bodysnatcher crossed her arms across the middle-aged woman’s body she was wearing and scowled. Video silently, emptily recorded. Shroud grumbled inwardly. Hardesty looked at the others expectantly.

“I do, Governor,” Kafka said. His carapace rattled like a child’s toy as he shifted position. “I’ve been telling you this since the last time, sir; they aren’t just going to leave us alone. They never do.” Dark images of the aces’ raid on the Cloisters ran unbidden in his head. Kafka rattled his carapace gloomily. “Bush is a hardass when it comes to confrontations — he’s shown that abroad and he’s shown it with anti-joker legislation.”

“We have a conference with Hartmann today,” Bloat reminded him. “A peace conference .”

“The Japanese were negotiating with Washington when they attacked Pearl Harbor too,” Kafka said. “This time they’ll use the aces to help. Pulse, Mistral, the Turtle… The fact that Hartmann’s involved cinches it — they want him because he knows the government aces best, through SCARE. This time they’ll use the aces to help.”

“Aces can be jumped,” Bloat answered, taking the words that Molly was about to speak and smiling at the annoyance on the young woman’s face. “If they’re jumped, they’re ours . Aces will also hit the Wall and not be able to get through, just like nats. My dream creatures will eat them, just like with the nats. The jokers here are well armed.”

“Governor, that’s all true, I suppose, but —”

“We’re fine here,” Bloat interrupted. “I don’t see what we got to be worried about. Hey, you should see what I’ve done with the caverns.”