The George Washington Bridge was a steel shadow in the foggy night. Even here, no traffic moved. New York was a ghost town.
He pushed on. Now the Bronx was on his right as he floated up the Hudson, and finally the fog was thinning out. The gray curtains turned to a drifting gauze and then to pale white wisps and then to nothing. The night was crisp and clear, with a moon above and the river rolling blackly beneath him.
Danny’s blood had dried on his arms and chest. When he scratched, it fell away in brown flakes.
There was no air in the shell. Most of his screens were dead now. He could smell the circuits overheating. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He could see well enough to fly.
He was far past thinking.
The Bronx was behind him now. He moved up through Westchester. The New Jersey Palisades loomed up ahead of him. When he was a kid, Dom DiAngelis took him there with Joey, to the old amusement park. He still remembered the jingle. Palisades amusement park, swings all day and after dark. Gone now, like so much else.
North he went, and north, following the course of the Hudson, staring into the dead screen in front of him, hardly moving. The shell was full of ghosts. His parents. Dom DiAngelis. Joey and Gina. Barbara Casko, who’d loved him once. Dr. Tachyon. Jetboy. Thomas Tudbury. They were all looking at him. Whispering to him. But he was past hearing. Somewhere up where the Palisades rose high and white in the moonlight, he slowed, then came to a stop.
All his microphones were off. There was no sound in the shell but his own ragged breathing. But he could still hear her screaming.
He turned away from the dead screen.
The river rolled below him, black as death. The Hudson. It could have been the Styx. As if it mattered. He watched it for a long time.
Then he thought of a wall.
He was and he wasn’t.
That was the state of how he discerned himself.
After all, he had never been dead before. At least not that he recalled.
He contemplated all this while he drifted… somewhere. This was not the upper world, nor the lower world. It was not the earth. It was not the dreamtime.
He felt no temperature, yet no discomfort.
He could detect no direction home, yet felt certain he was moving. But from where, and to where, he had no idea.
It could have been millennia.
But after a certain amount of time (or non-time) had elapsed, he heard/saw/felt a voice. More than one.
Wyungare. It was more a statement than a question.
“I’m here.”
We would speak with you.
“Then you’ve found me.” The voice(s) were naggingly familiar. He had dealt with them long before.
We must know certain things of you.
“Then be direct. I’m dead, you know. Pomposity is lost on me.”
He felt a reaction very much like amusement. We shall be direct, then. About the boy, the one called Bloat. We have to make our own decisions.
“So what do you want from me?”
You taught him. Tell us of his lesson.
“It’s not as though I’ve a grade sheet,” said Wyungare. “No report card. I’m not granting or denying him passage to another form.”
We know that, Wyungare. The sensation of exasperation.
Tell us.
Then a new, individual voice. One with what Wyungare
recalled spoke with a West Texas twang. Never mind those high-minded sidewinders, man. You and me, we’ve got one hellacious more set of lives in common than them.
Wyungare would have smiled, had he lips. “Buddy?”
None other, pardner. Mighty sorry you won’t be seeing me at the Texarcana Club this go-round.
“Me too.” And then he remembered Cordelia. And tried not to remember Cordelia. That would come later.
About the Bloat kid, said Buddy.
“All right, why didn’t you say so?” said Wyungare. He gathered his thoughts, concentrated, molded a tight-beam image, and launched it like a bottle into the ocean from a desert island. No, more like a sounding rocket blasting into the mesosphere.
The young boy walks away from the place that was his home. It was not a happy place, but it was the only home he had known. And now he’s on his way. Gone. Trudging toward the forbidding trees that begin to forest the verges of the road.
Over his shoulder, the boy has packed the belongings that are important to him in a wrapped kerchief The corners are tied and the bundle is impaled by the stick the boy lays back over his shoulder.
As he walks, he realizes just how heavy his belongings are. He glances back and sees that the bundle has grown. It balloons as he watches, expanding into an enormous and untidy mass.
The boy turns hack to his course and resolutely forges forward. His burden grows even heavier. Yet the voices inside him, the voices of his old home, remind him that he has to carry it all. Every ounce, every pound, every ton of it.
— until he suddenly realizes that he no longer has to do that. There is no purpose served.
He releases his grip on the stick. He looses his hold on the burden that has somehow now grown to be larger than what he ever could have imagined he could carry.
It’s gone. Left behind him. He cannot believe how easy the final decision was.
As he continues down the road, he glances from side to side at the enveloping trees. They no longer seem as ominous.
The boy whistles. Not to warn away monsters. But in joy.
We see, come the voices. This was your perception?
“It is,” says Wyungare.
Hey, looks okay by me, says Buddy merrily. Seriously.
Some of the voices have faces now. An ancient holy man on a wind-flayed ridge in the Andes. A woman in the Bronx cradling a chicken. A young man tossing knucklebones in Riyadh. Many others.
Come on, friends, says Buddy. Time’s awastin’. Let’s do it.
And they vote. The decision is quick and anticlimactic.
Wyungare is suddenly aware of his aloneness.
Except for one remaining voice.
Rock on, says Buddy. You will, my friend.
And then he’s gone too.
What remains of Wyungare is still thinking about something else. The boy shucking his burdens … is it Bloat… or Jack? Or both?
Billy Ray reached down into the mess on the floor that had been Wyungare. He straightened a moment later, holding a rough-cut opal on a charred leather thong. He handed it to the one called Cameo as if it were a holy relic. Cameo stretched out her hand to take the offering. When she looked up again, her eyes were not her own.
“Hello, Teddy,” Cameo said. “It’s time to choose.” The sudden silence in her head was the silence of Wyungare.
“You really are him?” Teddy asked slowly. “You really are?”
“Yeah, she is,” Carnifex said. “So let’s get moving.”
“Choose,” Cameo/Wyungare repeated, frowning in the same way that the Aborigine had frowned. “You still want to be the Outcast, a nat? Then you will be.” "Wait.” Teddy licked his blood-flecked lips, groaning under the weight of the torch and the agony of his wounds. The light in the room seemed to be flickering blood-red. Shadows were gathering, like vultures crouching around him.
“…Wait…” he said again, wondering if he could wait or if the deepening darkness would take him.
Teddy glanced around the room, looking at the carnage.
Most of them are here because of you. So many people dead, and they were fighting for you as well as themselves. Wyungare, the penguin, all of them who were killed by soldiers and the shelling. For you
“I’m a fucking lousy hero,” he told Cameo/Wyungare. The stench of corruption was overpowering. “I don’t want to be the Outcast, don’t want to be a nat. That ain’t me.”
Briefly, Wyungare smiled. “Good,” he said.
Cameo/Wyungare began bass chanting. Battle started forward to interrupt, but Carnifex held the man back. At first Teddy felt nothing, bu
t the pain from the open wounds on Bloat’s body slowly began to recede and the trembling stopped. He could feel the power swelling deep within the body once more, but the energy was different this time — more diffuse, softer, and yet more powerful than what he had been given before. There was no longer just the connection to Bloat and the dreamtime, but an entire network of bright links, interlacing and flowing, all coming together inside himself. He could hear indistinct voices and a monotone, rhythmic drumming beat that made his blood pulse in time.
He let his consciousness sink into the chant, into the red pulsing, into the flaring, lacy threads.
Teddy looked outward. He had no eyes, no head; he saw in some way he didn’t yet understand. It was as if he stood high above the Rox itself and could look out over the entire New York Bay panorama. Through the last haze of the dying fog, he could see something, something far up the Hudson.
The chanting stopped. Now.…said a voice. Open yourself to us…
He tried. He imagined the Wall falling, collapsing, crumbling into nothingness. He sensed himself falling and he let himself go freely.
D
O
W
N
and then…
Entering
He rode five feet above the flood, his shell a green chariot in the moonlight.
Beneath him, the water was a living thing, a black torrent lashed with white, hundreds of feet high, roaring. Even through three layers of plate steel, he could hear its anger.
He had let the water build until it threatened to overflow the Palisades themselves. Then he wrapped his teke around it, pushed his wall up the banks of the river, and forced it even higher. Behind his dam, looming over him like a building about to fall, the river had fought like a living thing, like a monster in chains, like a terrible great beast hungry to be free.
He had let it build until he was trembling from the effort, until he was almost blind from the pain, until he could feel the blood trickling from his nose. He had held it until the last possible moment. Then he had risen, high over the river, high over the Palisades, high over the sword that he had forged.
He looked down at what he had done, and set it free.
Now he rode with it. Faster than he had ever flown before, his head throbbing as he channeled the waters, walling off the shores with his teke, scouring out the riverbed, keeping the torrent on course, aiming the hammer.
The Palisades vanished behind him. The fog sent out its tendrils. The black waters swept them aside. The lights of Manhattan shimmered up ahead. And beyond them, under the rolling mist, square in the mouth of the Hudson: The Rox.
He pushed ahead of the flood, and turned on his mikes. The roar of the waters filled the world, a thunder out of hell. There was no other sound. There could be no other sound.
And the sound was doom.
A north wind had sprung up and torn Bloat’s fog away from Manhattan. The island was remarkably still. Modular Man floated over its brightness, torn between a wish to savor his freedom and a desire to mourn that which was lost. His innocence, not least of all.
Something rolled down the flank of the island.
Foreboding chilled the android’s mind. He arched upward to get a better look, saw boiling white water thundering down the bed of the Hudson, its anger miraculously contained within invisible walls that prevented it from spilling into the city.
The water sounded like a world coming to an end.
And now that he had risen above the tall buildings of the island, Modular Man saw the fleeting radar image of the Turtle leading the angry waters down.
It was the end of the Rox. Nothing was going to survive that impact.
Hovering in air, the android thought for a long moment. He was a shooter. The business of the Rox filled him with little but disgust The island was full of criminals and killers, all shootees, and had nothing to do with him.
Criminals and killers and shootees like Patchwork.
He dropped to the top of one tall building and placed the tarpaulin carefully on the roof.
And then he was off.
The android’s top speed was over 500 miles per hour, and the Turtle was slow, tied to the speed of the tumbling river he was bringing to the Rox. Modular Man made it to the island well ahead of him.
The north wind had torn Bloat’s fog away. The island was a rum, all torn walls and fire. There was hardly anyone moving. He flew through the ruins of the golden dome into the governor’s throne room. Bloat lay, bleeding and half-crushed, under Liberty’s fallen torch. A young woman sat cross-legged on the floor beside a corpse burned beyond recognition. She was chanting.
The rest of them were staring through the walls of shattered crystal, wondering at the sound of the water that was bearing down on them. There were too many to carry. Plans raced through the android’s macro-atomic mind.
He flew across the room to Bloat. The governor’s eyes were closed. He looked asleep, or dead. The huge weight of the torch had cut deep into his flesh.
The android placed himself beneath it, poured power into his generators, and pulled. Saint Elmo’s fire glowed off the broken glass surfaces of the beacon. Slowly, it began to move.
The oncoming wave sounded like a thousand Niagaras.
Modular Man looked at the others. “Huddled masses!” he shouted. “Hurry! Get on board.”
Billy Ray moved at once. The woman on the floor did not seem to hear. She kept on with her chanting, oblivious. The man with the mustache hesitated, then followed Ray.
The jokers had not moved. “There’s no more time,” Modular Man called out to them.
Kafka moved closer to Bloat, and shook his head. Herne hesitated, then backed away to stand beside the other joker. He reached out and took the cockroach-man by the hand. Kafka looked up at him, startled.
The wave sounded like a million typhoons.
Modular Man poured power into his flight modules. He was at the outer limits of his strength. Saint Elmo’s fire flickered off the shattered walls of the throne room, off the twisted bodies that littered the floor, off Bloat’s pale white flesh, off the solemn face of the chanting woman.
Slowly the torch began to lift.
“Wyungare?” Bloat asked. “Hello?”
He wasn’t sure where he was or what he was. He seemed to be everywhere within the Rox: within the ruined Great Hall where people were staring at the ugly, twisted thing that was Bloat; watching as jokers tried to pull the wounded from the wreckage of the shelling; stalking the ramparts of the breached Wall. Teddy’s outward vision was troubled. Under the moon’s regard, the water around Ellis Island was swirling, flowing strangely away from the Rox and moving upstream toward the Hudson. Teddy could see a glimmering there, a wall of angry water that even as he watched grew larger as it raged toward the Rox. A feeling of dread touched him with the sight.
“Wyungare, we have to hurry.”
There was no answer from the joker who held the Aborigine. Cameo was well beyond the Wall. “Wyungare? Viracocha? One Blue Bead?”
No answer.
Instead, he could hear the unison chanting again, the mingled mindvoices of the shamans. The power that they had lent him was changing again. The portals to the outside world closed like small wounds; the energy flow was now inward, concentrating deep within Teddy. It pulsed with the chant, growing smaller but more concentrated. The gift seared and flared and crackled. It was impossible to look upon.
The mass of light begun to whirl and spin. At the center of the vortex was an opening, a darkness through which Teddy could go — the gateway into the dreamtime. The chanting and drumming redoubled in volume and tempo, and Teddy concentrated on the sound himself, letting the Rox resonate with it, throbbing in time with the sonorous words.
The energy gaped wider, the darkness at its center a mouth that must swallow him soon.
Not soon enough.
New York Bay had dropped several feet in depth. Mud flats extended outward from the shores of Ellis and Liberty islands, fish wri
ggling silver-scaled in the moonlight as the Mother-Wave up the Hudson sucked the bay into itself. Teddy could see the tsunami rising, towering, a frothing Niagara set on end and spilling over itself as it hurtled impossibly down the Hudson’s bank. It was going to smash the Rox like a hammer against a wineglass. It would break him into a thousand pieces. The thing, this monster of water, was unstoppable. There was no power in this world or any other that could halt it.
Teddy felt awe, even as he felt terror.
There wasn’t enough time. The shamans were still chanting, still widening the gateway. Teddy readied himself to steal away the power of their rite and try to stop this monster of water even though he knew it to be hopeless. He raged at the Turtle’s shell.
You won’t kill them. 1 won’t let you. You can have me but I won’t let you hurt them. He knew that to do so would close the opening gateway for himself, but he didn’t care. My fault. It’s my fault for waiting so long.
He almost didn’t notice that the chanting had stopped.
“Now!” whispered Wyungare/Cameo desperately.
As the wave thundered and pounded over the flats, a nightmare bending to devour the Rox, Teddy took the swelling energy and willed himself to
MOVE
He was a half-mile ahead of his tsunami by the time he reached the foot of Manhattan. The bay opened out around him. He moved across the waters with the thunder coming hard behind him.
The outer curtain wall of the Rox loomed up out of the fog and flashed by beneath him in the blink of an eye. If there was another wall above it, it never touched him. He was beyond fear, beyond doubt, beyond loathing.
Through torn wisps of fog, dimly, he saw the Rox.
Fallen battlements. Shattered walls. Onion domes half blown away by artillery. Towers that ended in jagged stubs. The castle lay spread out below him like a box of broken toys. The fog seemed thinner now. He could see it clearly. The thunder was louder, a deafening roar behind him.
Faintly, a mile to the south, he could see Lady Liberty and the south curtain wall. Beyond that was Jersey City, Bayonne, Staten Island, with their millions of innocents.
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