Aces High

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 i

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 i

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."

"It's larger than it needs to be because I built it with primitive electronics," Jube told him. He spread his hands, three thick fingers and blunt curved thumb. "And these hands are incapable of delicate work. The device at the Cloisters would have lit up had it ever been powered." He looked at Red. "How did the Worshipful Master plan to accomplish that?"

Red shook his head. "I can't tell you. Sure, and you're a prince to save my sweet red ass, but you're still a first-degree prince, if you get my meaning."

"Could a first-degree initiate construct a Shakti machine?" Jube asked him. "How many degrees had you passed before they even told you the device existed?" He shook his head. "Never mind, I know the punch line. How many jokers does it take to turn on a light bulb? One, as long as his nose is AC. The Astronomer was going to power the machine himself."

The look on Red's face was all the confirmation Jube needed. "Kafka's Shakti was supposed to give the order dominion over the Earth," the Mason said.

"Yeah," Jube said. The Shining Brother in the wood gave the secret to Cagliostro, and told him to keep it safe, to hand it down from generation to generation until the coming of the Dark Sister. Probably the Shining Brother had given Cagliostro other artifacts; without a doubt he had given him a power source, there being no way the Takisian wild card could have been anticipated two centuries ago:

"Clever," Jube said aloud, "yeah, but still a man of his times. Primitive, superstitious, greedy. He used the things he had been given for selfish personal gain."

"Who?" Red asked, confused.

"Balsamo," Jube replied. Balsamo had invented the rest himself, the Egyptian mythos, the degrees, the rituals. He took the things he had been told and twisted them to his own use. "The Shining Brother was a Ly'bahr," he a

"What?" Red said.

"A Ly'bahr," Jube told him. "They're cyborgs, Red, more machine than flesh, awesomely powerful. The jokers of space, no two look alike, but you wouldn't want to meet one in the alley. Some of my best friends are Ly'bahr." He was babbling, he realized, but he was helpless to stop. "Oh, yeah, it could have been some other species, maybe a Kreg, or even one of my people in a liquid-metal spacesuit. But I think it was a Ly'bahr. Do you know why? TIAMAT"

Red just stared at him.

"TIAMAT," Jhubben repeated, the newsboy gone from his voice and ma

"I don't know," Red said.

"I do. Because TIAMAT sounds vaguely like something the Shining Brother said. Thyat M'hruh. Darkness-for-therace. The Ly'bahr term for the Swarm." Jube laughed. He had been telling jokes for thirty-odd years, but no one had ever heard his real laugh before. It sounded like the bark of a seal. "The Master Trader would never have given you world dominion. We don't give anything away for free. But we would have sold it to you. You would have been an elite of high priests, with `gods' who actually listened and produced miracles on demand."