"I don't know," I answered Kafka.

His carapace rattled as he looked up at me, startled. "You don't know?…"

"It is not your concern, in any case," said Morkle, telling us that his hearing was as enhanced as his strength and agility. His words, coupled with the frustration of not being able to eavesdrop on his thoughts, made me angry.

"You're on the Rox now," I snapped back. "Everything on the Rox is my business."

Morkle only gazed at me flatly, like a snake. His nose wrinkled. I thought maybe that was disgust, the smell of the bloatblack, but I didn't know. "It you want to stay on the Rox, Morkle," I continued, "you'd better learn-" I stopped. Another, less complete hole was moving through the mindvoices, very close by. "Damn it."

"Governor?" Kafka asked.

"Blaise. He's here. This might be trouble."

Tachyon's grandson threw back the lobby doors. Molly Bolt and Red came in with him, all three armed with automatic weapons. They fanned out as they entered, making distance between them. Their weapons were aimed at Morkle, who made no move at all.

Blaise was radiating a curious mixture of fear and pleasure. "Durg at-Morakh," he said. "Why are you here? I hope you didn't come here to finish what was started with Meadows. I'd hate to have to kill you."

"Blaise-" I began, but he didn't even glance at me. The Takisian spoke in a flat, emotionless voice. "Morakh serve," he said. "You have Takisian blood; you lived when I tried to kill you. I came to see if you would have need of me."

He did something then I hadn't expected. He went to his knees, prostrating himself before Blaise.

Blaise's mind gleamed with sudden triumph. The look he shot at me then was terrifying in its contempt. Mine. My beautiful weapon…, I caught, and then Blaise's paranoia made him pay attention to his mindshields, and the thoughts were cut off. "Let's go, Durg at-Morakh bo Zabb Vayawandsa," he said, and gestured to the other jumpers.

"Blaise." He turned. "I wasn't done," I told him.

He just looked at me. I didn't want to know his thoughts at all. I could see it all, there in his eyes. You are done. Half of your jokers are hooked on rapture; more and more are coming here every day, and all the supplies that feed and house them are bought with the money Prime gives you. We have the rapture, we can give the jokers the nat bodies they want. We can jump the rich or not. Jokers like you are eating at the jumpers' trough. You remember how the Rox used to be? Do you remember jokers starving and living in tumbledown shacks? Is that the kingdom you want to govern, Bloat?

I knew. I knew when Blaise walked from the lobby with Durg that any chance I had to rescue Tachyon had just dwindled to almost nothing. I knew that Blaise's grip on the Rox would become stronger and more harsh. I knew that my own influence would be damaged, maybe fatally.

I also knew that if I ordered my people to fire, to mow them down in cold blood and take control back again, they might not do it. I could hear their thoughts. The blue tinge of rapture would make them hesitate, the remembrance of hunger and overcrowding, the hope for a new, normal body… Hell, we were rich now. Everyone had food. Everyone had all the toys jumper money could buy. No one wanted to give that up.

I didn't know what they'd do or what would happen. I don't hurt jokers. I won't hurt jokers.

"You may leave," I told Blaise. "I'm done with you now" It was a poor exit line. It was also the only one I had.

The pond outside the Administration Building-which was again the Crystal Castle in my dream-was frozen over with a late hard freeze. From the castle's glass expanse, from all the sparkling spires and flying buttresses, long icicles hung.

A penguin wearing a funnel hat was skating on the pond.

"Bosch was just like you, y'know," it said, and its voice was just like Robert Wanda's, the art teacher at my high school. I was outside, too, though I was still Bloat. The morning snowfall had blanketed me in thick damp snow. Jokers were sledding down my slopes in sleds made from everything from garbage-can lids to sheet metal. One joker was shaped just like an American Flyer and was carrying Elmo, Peanut, and Kafka down my sides. They laughed and shouted so that I could hardly hear the penguin.

"What do you mean?" I asked it.

The penguin did a triple axel in front of me and came to a dead stop, showering me with ice flakes. "Well," it said. "Bosch's world was also marked by huge, terrible upheavals. The years of his life were marked by pestilence and unrest: economic, social, political, religious. The writers and artists of his time reflected a nearly universal pessimism. A sour lot, all of them, obsessed with death and violence and decay." The penguin began skating backward, effortlessly. "Like you, big guy," it said.

The penguin turned and glided away under a low bridge. Above it, crossing the pond on the bridge, Tachyon was being beaten by a large toad creature with the face of Blaise who brandished a hugh wooden penis. Durg, looking like a thing of shadow, walked behind them.

Tachyon was wearing a dress but otherwise looked like the Tachyon of old, not Kelly. I could hear the wailing torment in his mind and regretted once more that I hadn't told Meadows about her. Maybe, maybe he could have gotten her out.

Not now.

"That's right, flagellate yourself with the guilt. It's good for you."

"You can read my mind?" I asked the penguin. "What there is of it." It cackled loudly.

I could not read the penguin's thoughts at all. The penguin was a vacuum in the world, an emptiness. Like Durg.

"'All that happens can be performed by demons,"' the penguin quoted. It winked. "Thomas Aquinas."

"Is that supposed to be significant?"

"Could be. Could mean that if you want to rule in a place most of the nats think of as hell, you'd better get ruthless, asshole." The penguin pointed across the bay. There I could see Manhattan, but there were no skyscrapers, just millions upon millions of people like maggots on a piece of rotting meat in July. They were fighting, quarreling, killing. Above them, demons with disfigured hateful faces spat fire on them, pissed great floods of acid, or shat streams of boiling pitch. I could hear the faint screams and smell the stench of burning flesh on the wind.' The sky was blood-red above them.

"Alchemy and witchcraft were real stuff then," the penguin intoned. I could feel the agony of the people washing over me now, a relentless, thundering, screaming tide of it. I wanted to hold my hands over my ears to shut it out.

"Devils pranced, incubi and succubi prowled the night," the penguin continued. "Monsters lurked in the dark forests."

"Like jokers in the city," I murmured as if answering some damn refrain in church. With the words, I could see a vision of my people in Jokertown, flitting like angry ghosts from shadow to shadow, many of their lips tinted with the blue of rapture. The nats turned their faces away in fear and loathing.

"Bosch's world was a world for youth. Old age began at thirty. By the time you were twelve, you were already doing your life's work." The penguin was spinning in front of me on one foot. "Only the young can be innocently cruel or unintentionally evil. Like a child, Bosch viewed the world through symbols and icons-so did everyone else. When you put on a priest's vestments, you were the church. A king was not just the ruler-he was the country."

"I am the Rox."

"So you say," the penguin replied. "Is that why so many of your jokers are looking to Blaise and Prime as the Rox's leaders? Is that why so many jokers are offering to pay the jumpers to transfer them to a nat body? You're losing it, fatboy. It's all dripping through your useless little fingers." The penguin's tone was so mocking that I reared up like a giant cobra, ready to slam my entire weight down on the fucking bird. Sledding jokers screamed as I tossed them aside like fragile toys. "I am the ruler here!" I shouted. "There is no Rox without me!"