Jokers Wild

Fortunato took a breath. He had a little power left after all, enough to keep them afloat, but that was all. And it would soon be gone.

He couldn't seem to move. A sense of nothingness surrounded him.

The Astronomer opened his eyes.

"Is that all?" he said. He screamed with laughter, and slowly straightened his body. Burned skin showered off him and Fortunato could see the scalded pink flesh underneath. "Is that your best shot? Is that really all you can do? I would pity you. I would pity you except you hurt me, and now you have to die."

Fortunato saw the hideous, blistered little man gathering himself, and the nothingness around him told him what to do. He chanted silently, banishing his fear. He cleared his mind, found the last thoughts that still snagged there-Caroline, Veronica, Peregrine-pulled them loose and let them flutter down toward the lights below.

He slowed his heart and it started thrashing again and he calmed it, finally.

It was, after all, only death.

He touched the Astronomer's mind and saw the power begi

We go together, Fortunato thought. You and me. Nothing mattered; he became nothing, less than nothing, a vacuum. Come to me, he thought. Bring everything you have.

The night filled with cold white light.

Most of the crowd couldn't even see the battle over the East River because of their angle of sight being limited by the Manhattan skyline. It was mainly the observers standing in the intersections who could look along the numbered streeets east to the spectacle.

Even those onlookers weren't completely impressed as the fireballs coruscated and exploded. One joker, staring at the sparks cascading down toward the river, said in range of Jack's hearing, "Hey, I saw a lot more spectacular stuff during the Bicente

"Yeah!" said someone else. "That'd be neat."

No one peering goggle-eyed from the intersection of 14th Street and Avenue A had any idea just what was going on above the river.

"I've got a date in three hours," said Bagabond. "It's my first date in twenty years, and now the world's ending." The fireworks dimmed and died.

"I think it's over," said Jack. "The world's not ending. You've still got your date. Who's the lucky guy?"

She recoiled and stepped away from him.

He realized what she was thinking and hastily said, "I'm not being sarcastic. I mean it. Who is he?"

"Paul Goldberg."

"The lawyer? Rosemary's office?"

"That's right."

"What're you going to wear?" said Jack. Bagabond hesitated. "The usual." Jack laughed. "Bag lady outfit?"

She shook her head angrily. "Business suit."

"Come on."

This time it was Jack who grabbed Bagabond's arm and tugged her along the street. "It's maybe three blocks to All Nite Mari A

"What do you mean?" said Bagabond.

"You need an all-night boutique," said Jack. "This is going to be fun."

"I'm not looking for fun," said Bagabond.

"You want to look really great at your breakfast date?" She resolutely stared straight ahead.

"Then, let's go, kiddo."

She tried to lag as he led the way down the street. Jack waited for her, took her elbow, merrily steered her along. He was whistling an off-key version of "We're Off to See the Wizard."

"You're no Judy Garland." Bagabond said. Jack just smiled.

The crowds were starting to thin out, almost as though the epic battle over the East River had been equivalent to the nightly fireworks at Disneyland, signaling families it was time to take the kids home. More than that, the crowds seemed simply to be exhausted. It had been a long, long day.

All Nite Mari A

Jack led Bagabond along a window-shopping tour of the front of the store. "Yes," he said. "Oh yes. A silk dress, see?" He pointed. He looked into her face and then back into the interior of the shop. "Teal, I think. Perfect." He moved ahead of her. "Come on, Suza

Bagabond made one final attempt to stall. "I don't have much money with me."

Holding the door for her, Jack said, "I have an account."

When the burst of power went through him, there was nothing left of Fortunato to resist it. Nothing resisted it, and so it passed through him. And as it passed it left particles behind, particles of knowledge and memory and understanding.

Fortunato saw a little man in thick glasses crawling out of the East River, twenty years ago. There were no memories before that. Where there should have been memories there was only a seared place, self-inflicted. The Astronomer was self-made; there was no human identity, no human history left to him.

The little man had crawled into the grass of East River Park and he had looked up into the night sky. And the wild card virus uncoiled in him for the first time and his mind shot out into that sky and moved between the stars. It saw clouds of gas that burned in reds and purples and blues. It saw planets striped and whorled and ringed and haloed. It saw moons and comets and shapeless lumps of asteroid.

And it saw something moving. Something dark and nearly mindless, something vast and rubbery and foul, something hungry. And his mind began to scream.

The little man found himself outside a brick building in Jokertown, naked except for his glasses, still screaming. A door opened and a man named Balsam took him in. Took him in and taught him the secrets, taught him the name of the thing he'd seen, the name that was the ultimate Masonic word: TIAMAT Taught him about the machine, the Shakti device that the brother from the stars had brought to Cagliostro. Cagliostro who had founded the Order, to protect the knowledge of TIAMAT-the Dark Sister-and the Shakti device.

Until Balsam had nothing left to teach the little man, and it was time for the little man to become the Astronomer, and remove Balsam, with the unwitting help of a bumbling magician named Fortunato. To take control of the Order. To realize their destiny. To found a religious tyra

"No," Fortunato said. "No."

But the knowledge would not go away. The knowledge that the Shakti device had been given to the Masons to save the Earth from TIAMAT, not to lure her there. To call the Network to destroy her.

The Shakti device could have saved them and Fortunato had destroyed it. Because of him, thousands had died. For all his claims of wisdom he was still only a creature of impulse, nothing but a temperamental child.

The Astronomer still lived. The filmed glasses were still hooked around his ears, the tatters of his robe snapped in the wind, his chest moved up and down. His eyes had rolled back in his head, and his power was gone. Completely.

It would take nothing at all for Fortunato to drift across the thirty feet that separated them, put his hands around the little mans throat, and finish him.

Instead he left him fall.

Long seconds later Fortunato heard the splash as the little man came full circle, back into the East River again.

Henry Street was still and deserted, its revelry closed with the Crystal Palace. Sawhorses still closed off both ends of the block, though the street fair was long over. Hiram and Jay walked down the middle of the street, past the darkened rowhouses. The gutters were choked with litter: napkins, paper cups, plastic forks, newspapers.