George Martin: Aces High

"They let you just walk out?" Jube couldn't believe it. "Well, not precisely. I thought I was home free when Troll walked past and said good afternoon as nice as you please. I even pinched a nurse and acted guilty about stuff that wasn't my fault, which I figured would cinch things for sure." He cleared his throat. "Then the elevator hit the first floor, and as I was getting off, the real Tachyon got on. Gave me quite a start. "

Jube scratched at a tusk. "What did you do?"

Croyd shrugged. "What could I do? He was right in front of me, and my power didn't fool him for an instant. I turned into Teddy Roosevelt, hoping that might throw him, and devoutly wished to be somewhere else. All of a sudden I was."

"Where?" Jube wasn't sure he really wanted to know.

"My old school," Croyd said sheepishly. "Ninth-grade algebra class. The same desk I was sitting at when Jetboy blew up over Manhattan in '46. I have to say, I don't remember any of the girls looking like that when I was in ninth grade." He sounded a little sad. "I would have stayed for the lecture, but it caused quite a commotion when Teddy Roosevelt suddenly appeared in class clutching a bowling ball. So I left, and here I am. Don't worry, I changed subways twice and bodies four times." He got to his feet, stretched. "Walrus, I've got to give it to you, it's never dull working for you."

"I don't exactly pay minimum wage either," Jube said.

"There is that," Croyd admitted. "And now that you mention it.. . have you ever met Veronica? One of Fortunato's ladies. I had a notion to take her to Aces High and see if I could talk Hiram into serving his rack of lamb."

Jube had the stones in his pocket. He counted them out into the Sleeper's hand. "You know," Jube said when Croyd's fingers closed over his wages, "you could have kept the device for yourself. Maybe gotten a lot more from someone else."

"This is plenty," Croyd said. "Besides, I don't bowl. Never learned to keep score. I think they do it with algebra." His outline shimmered briefly, and suddenly Jimmy Cagney was standing there, dressed in a snappy light-blue suit with a flower in his lapel. As he climbed the steps to the street, he began to whistle the theme song to an old musical called Never Steal Anything Small.

Jube shut the door, pressed the button, turned the key, dropped the hook, and latched the chain. As he slid the police bolt shut, he heard a soft footstep behind him, and turned.

Red was shivering in a green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt filched from Jube's closet. He'd lost all of his own clothing in the raid on the Cloisters. The shirt was so big he looked like a deflated balloon. "That the gizmo?" he asked.

"Yeah," Jube replied. He crossed the room and lifted the black sphere with careful reverence. It was warm to the touch. Jube had watched the televised press conference when Dr. Tachyon returned from space to announce that the Swarm Mother was no longer a threat. Tachyon spoke eloquently and at length about his young colleague Mai and her great sacrifice, her courage within the Mother, her selfless humanity. Jhubben found himself more interested by what the Takisian left unsaid. He downplayed his own role in the affair, and made no mention of how Mai had gotten inside the Swarm Mother to effect the merging he spoke of so movingly. The reporters seemed to assume that Tachyon had simply flown Baby to the Mother and docked. Jube knew better.

When the Sleeper woke, he had decided to play his hunch.

"Hate to tell you, but it looks like a bowling ball to me," Red said amiably.

"With this, I could send the complete works of Shakespeare to the galaxy you call Andromeda," Jube told him.

"Pal o' mine," said Red, "they'd only send it back, and tell you it wasn't suitable to their current needs." He was in much better shape now than when he'd first turned up on Jube's doorstep three weeks after the aces had smashed the new temple, wearing a hideous moth-eaten poncho, work gloves, a full-face ski mask, and mirrorshades. Jube hadn't recognized him until he'd lifted his shades to show the red skin around his eyes. "Help me," he'd said. And then he'd collapsed. Jube had dragged him inside and locked the door. Red had been gaunt and feverish. After fleeing the Cloisters (Jube had missed the whole thing, for which he was profoundly grateful), Red had put Kim Toy on a Greyhound to San Francisco, where she had old friends in Chinatown who would hide her. But there was no question of his going with her. His skin made him too conspicuous; only in Jokertown could he hope to find anonymity. He'd run out of money after ten days on the street, and had been eating out of the trash cans behind Hairy's ever since. With Roman under arrest and Matthias dead (freeze-dried by some new ace whose name had been carefully kept from the press), the rest of the inner circle were the objects of a citywide manhunt.

Jube might have turned him in. Instead he fed him, cleaned him up, nursed him back to health. Doubts and misgivings gnawed at him. Some of what he had learned about the Masons appalled him, and the greater secrets they hinted at were far, far worse. Perhaps he should call the police. Captain Black had been aghast at the involvement of one of his own men in the conspiracy, and had publicly sworn to nail every Mason in Jokertown. If Red was found here, it would go badly for Jube.

But Jube remembered the night that he and twelve others had been initiated at the Cloisters, remembered the ceremony, the masks of hawk and jackal and the cold brightness of Lord Amun as he towered over them, austere and terrible. He remembered the sound of TIAMAT as the initiates spoke the word for the first time, and remembered the tale the Worshipful Master told them of the sacred origins of the order, of Guiseppe Balsamo, called Cagliostro, and the secret entrusted him by the Shining Brother in an English wood.

No more secrets had been forthcoming on that night of nights. Jube was only a first-degree initiate, and the higher truths were reserved for the inner circle. Yet it had been enough. His suspicions had been confirmed, and when Red in his delerium had stared across Jube's living room and cried out, "Shakti!" he had known for a certainty.

He could not abandon the Mason to the fate he deserved. Parents did not abandon children, no matter how depraved and corrupt they might grow with the passage of years. Twisted and confused and ignorant the children might be, but they remained blood of your blood, the tree grown from your seed. The teacher did not abandon the pupil. There was no one else; the responsibility was his.

"We going to stand here all day?" Red asked as the singularity shifter tingled against the palms of Jube's hands. "Or are we going to see if it works?"

"Pardon," Jube said. Lifting a curved panel on the tachyon transmitter, he slid the shifter into the matrix field. He began the feed from his fusion cell, and watched as the power flux enveloped the shifter. Saint Elmo's fire ran up and down the strange geometries of the machine. Readouts swam across shining metal surfaces in a spiky script that Jube had half forgotten, and vanished into angles that seemed to bend the wrong way.

Red lapsed back into Irish Catholicism and made the sign of the cross. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," he said.

It works, Jhubben thought. He should have been triumphant. Instead he felt weak and confused.

"I need a drink," Red said.

"There's a bottle of dark rum under the sink."

Red found the bottle and filled two tumblers with rum and crushed ice. He drank his down straightaway Jube sat on the couch, glass in hand, and stared at the tachyon transmitter, its high, thin sound barely audible above the air conditioner. "Walrus," Red said when he had refilled his tumbler, "I had you figured for a lunatic. An amiable lunatic, sure, and I'm grateful to you for taking me in and all, with the police after me the way they are. But when I saw you'd built your own Shakti machine, well, who'd blame me for thinking you were a little short on the gray matter." He downed a slug of rum. "Yours is four times as big as Kafka's," he said. "Looks like a bad model. But I never saw the roach's light up that way."