"Senator, you have a fine humanitarian record. But…"

Let me have him…! "Reverend, sometimes my passion gets out of hand. Again, I apologize."

Jackson still frowned, but the anger was gone from his eyes.

You almost blew it.

Shut up. It was your interference. Let me handle it. You have to let me out. Soon.

Soon. I promise. Just be quiet.

"All right," the Reverend was saying. "I think I can arrange things with my people. Senator, you have my support."

Jackson held out his hand. Gregg could feel his fingers trembling as he took it. Mine! Mine! The power shuddered inside, screaming and clawing and throwing itself at the bars.

It took all Gregg's effort to hold Puppetman back as he shook hands with Jackson, and he broke the contact quickly. "Senator, are you all right?"

Gregg smiled wanly at Jackson. "I'm fine," he said. "Thank you, Reverend. Just a little bit hungry, that's all."

"Where I was raised, a person does not seat themselves uninvited at another person's table."

Tachyon shuffled through the seven pink message slipsall from Hiram-and thrust them into a pocket. "Where you were raised, a person also does not fail to acknowledge and thank another person for a gift. I know, I was there when you first learned to lisp out tank-oo when I would bring you candy."

The fury flaming in Fleur's brown eyes was so intense that Tachyon flinched, and half raised a hand in defense.

"Leave me alone!" "I cannot."

"Why?" She wrung her hands, the fingers twisting desperately through one another. "Why are you torturing me? Wasn't killing my mother enough?"

"In all fairness, I think your father and I must share the blame. I broke her mind, but he allowed her to be tortured in that sanatorium. If he had left her with me, I might have found a way to repair the broken shards."

"If that was the choice, then I'm glad she died. Better that than being your whore."

"Your mother was never a whore. You dishonor her and yourself by that remark. You can't really feel that way."

"Well, I do, and why should I feel any differently? I never knew her. You saw to that."

"I didn't throw her out of the house."

"She could have gone to her parents."

"She loved me."

"I can't imagine why."

"Give me a chance, I could show you."

And as soon as the glib, flirtatious comment passed his lips Tachyon knew he had done a very stupid thing. As if to hold back the words, he pressed his fingers to his lips, but it was too late. Far, far too late.

Forty years too late?

Fleur rose from her chair like a wrathful goddess, and dealt him a ringing slap. Her nail caught on his lower lip, splitting it, and he tasted the sharp, coppery taste of blood. All conversation ceased in Pompano's. The silence made his skin crawl, and Tachyon chewed down the humiliation that filled his mouth like a foul taste. The tick of her high heels, as she stormed from the restaurant, beat into his ringing head.

Carefully, he held up two fingers before his face. Counted them. Dabbed at the cup with her discarded napkin. It smelled faintly of her perfume. His jaw tightened into a stubborn line.

"Muscular dystrophy. Is it up or down on MS, Charles?"

"Christ!" Devaughn s voice, roaring through Jack's cellular phone, seemed more surly than ever. "I guess we can't be against Jerry's Kids, can we?"

The convention band staggered into the last bars of "Mame." Louis Armstrong could have played it better in his sleep. Jack was on the convention floor, standing on a scarred, gray folding chair, surrounded by his throng of Californians.

"Up or down, Charles?" Jack demanded.

"Up. Shit. Up." Jack could clearly hear deVaughn's fist banging on a desktop. "Shit-shit-shit. Shit-fuck-cunt. That bitch. That fucking WASP slut."

"I want to wring Fleur van Renssaeler's neck."

"You'll have to stand in line behind me, buddy."

"They're calling the vote." Emil Rodriguez tugged on Jack's sleeve. Jack hung up his portable phone and gave the thumbs-up sign to his horde of delegates. He tried to picture thousands of Americans in wheelchairs and leg braces cheering and reshuffling their political alignment, but his imagination failed.

Rodriguez, a short, bull-chested man, looked up at Jack with fury in his eyes.

"This sucks, man," he spat.

Jack got down from the chair and lit up a smoke. "You said it, ese."

Jim Wright gaveled for order. Jack looked at the dissolving huddles of delegates and considered the chaos that had descended on Atlanta today. The violent demonstrations, the platform fight, Sara Moregenstern's bizarre interruption of the press conference that morning.

Secret ace? he thought.

And then he thought, Which one?

For hours the convention had been tearing itself to bits over the joker's Rights plank. The platform committee had passed it with a strong dissent from Barnett's crowd: Barnett had moved the issue onto the floor while no one was looking, and then the sweaty brawl started in earnest. Barnett's people stood united against the plank, Hartmann for, and Jackson made a principled stand with Hartmann. The others had just tried to delay things till they could work out how much mileage they could get out of declaring one way or another. The thing might have breezed through if it hadn't been for the violence surrounding the joker camp that afternoon; the middle-of-the-road candidates hung on for as long as possible, wondering if there was going to be an anti-joker backlash, but eventually the delegates began sideling toward the Hartmann point of view.

It was then that the Barnett campaign made their master stroke. Since they realized they couldn't stop the plank from passing, they began their attempts to dilute it.

Why should the party be only in favor of joker's Rights, they asked. Shouldn't the party declare in favor of the rights of people with other handicaps?

Soon there was an up-or-down vote on whether victims of multiple sclerosis should be included in the civil rights plank. While Hartmann's managers, knowing perfectly well they were being sandbagged, cursed and threw furniture, the motion passed unanimously: no Democrat was going to be caught dead opposing people with an incurable illness.

Other diseases followed: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, guillain-barre syndrome, spina bifida, post-polio syndrome the vote on that one was close, mainly because no one had ever heard of it-and now Jerry's Kids. Barnett was succeeding in making the whole joker's Rights issue look ridiculous. Barnett's delegate head from Texas, a blue-haired woman in a white cowboy hat, red lacquered boots, and a matching red skirt and vest with a swaying white Buffalo Bob fringe, was on her feet making another motion. Jack told his phone to dial HQ and climbed on his chair again.

"Jesus Christ," said Rodriguez. "It's AIDS."

A panicked yelp went up from the convention. Barnett had made his master stroke. The eyes of every viewer panicked by retrovirus homophobic hysteria would be glued to the set, ready to see if the Democrats would endorse the pollution of their bodily fluids by lurking sodomites and junkies drooling contamination from every orifice. Furthermore, Barnett had convincingly linked AIDS with xenovirus Takis-A.

"Up or down, Charles?" Jack asked wearily.

"Fuck the queers!" Devaughn raged. "The hell with this!" Jack grinned and gave his people the thumbs-down. The retrovirus lost in a landslide. The convention had had enough of Barnett's tactics. The distractions had provided amusement for a while, and had succeeded in their principle duty of making Hartmann's convictions look silly, but now they were getting tiresome.