Look at the facts. Fact: While you do make the Rox possible, we all know it's not a power you can turn on and off. Fact: The wall is as much for you as the jumpers, and the only way to get rid of it is to kill yourself, which you're not stupid enough to try. Fact: No one is starving here anymore because of the money your jump-the-rich scheme has brought in, which is good, but it also means that no one particularly wants to go back to the old way, which is what will happen if my people pull out of the deal. Fact: A lot of jokers want to keep this going because they want to buy a new body for themselves. Fact: You have a severe population problem. Our success is bringing more and more jokers here, and even with the money and rapture, you're already having problems finding places to put them.

And the last fact: If I pull out, you not only have lost the jump-the-rich scheme, you've lost your rapture connection. Tell me, Bloat, what would happen to the Rox if there was no rapture?

We don't need you at all, Governor. You had the idea; we're paying you for that. I have plenty of contacts to keep this going myself, and enough jokers in Jokertown who are hungry for a new body and willing to pay for it that I can pull in as much cash as I'd want. If I were you, I'd be happy with the twenty percent I'm offering. I'd be happy to get anything at all. After all, twenty percent will keep the Rox in food and rapture.

The fact is, Governor, that unless you have something else to bargain with, you have nothing to say about this at all. Latham smiled at me. "So, Governor," he said aloud, "what do you have to say?"

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I looked at Prime, at the grinning Zelda, and the quizzical glances of my guards. "Get out of here, Prime," I said. "Just get out and leave me alone."

He smiled. He smoothed the crease in his pants and languidly uncrossed his legs. " I thought so," he said. "Good doing business with you, Governor."

"Prime," I called as he and Zelda started to leave. He stopped and turned back to me. "I'll find something," I told him. "I'll find some leverage somewhere. Then we'll talk again. You understand?"

"Of course I understand," he said. "It's exactly what I would do, after all. You see, Governor, we're not so different, are we? We just have different agendas."

They'd had to move the Bosch painting since I seemed to be undergoing some new growth spurt. My body was pushing forward into the lobby. Kafka told me that I'd filled two more of the offices in back and that new floor struts needed to be added. I was hungry all the time too. The Rox's sewage system only took the edge off. The bloatblack that rolled off me was lighter in color and less solid, but stank worse.

I guess it was a corollary that the Wall was a quarter mile farther out into the bay now. It was stronger, too; I could push back almost anyone who didn't really want to be here. A nice power, if it were under my control, but it wasn't. The Wall just was, as always.

Too bad the Wall can't do anything to the people inside it.

Blaise was in the lobby, with his tagalong assassin, Durg. Tachyon's grandson didn't do much more than glance at the work in progress. Around the lobby and behind the Temptation, jokers were busily taking out walls and replacing them with enormous panes of glass. Already the lobby was brighter, and I could see more of the Rox. When the renovation was finished, when all around me there would be nothing but windows and my body was raised even higher, I'd be able to look out and see the entire panorama of the island and bay. I'd have transformed the building into the turreted, glittering Crystal Castle I'd seen in my dreams.

All it would take was money. Money we had plenty of now.

My body rumbled. Sphincters dilated, pulsed, and more bloatblack sloughed off down my stained sides. The blackers moved in to shovel away the waste. Blaise stared at them, refusing to show on his face the disgust that was in his mind, though Durg openly scowled. The hypocrisy was enough to make me laugh.

So I did.

"You and your stupid giggling," Blaise muttered, then more loudly: "Tell me, Governor, are you going to still be laughing when we start fighting over land on the Rox? 'Cause that's what's gonna happen, real soon. There ain't room here, Bloat. There's too many people coming out here now. Christ, you're going to want to move the fucking Statue of Liberty over here next. `Give us your twisted, your disfigured, your huddled masses yearning to be normal…' Damn it, be realistic. There's only so much room here, and we're full. No fucking vacancy."

Kafka was glaring at Blaise, but in his mind there was some grudging agreement. That was a first. Kafka nodded. "Governor, Blaise is at least partially right. I don't know that we can keep up with the demand on services. If we get too many immigrants, we won't be able to feed them, no matter how much money we have. We won't be able to clean up the garbage, won't be able to give them water and sewage and power. We'll have fights and arguments over space and facilities. It'll be worse than Jokertown. That's not what you want. Things are good here now"

"What do you want me to do, Kafka? Say to those who get past the wall, 'Sorry, you can't come in'? You want me to shoot them?"

"Sounds like a fucking good idea to me," Blaise said. Kafka snarled at him.

"Hey," Blaise retorted. "I'm not asking, I'm telling. There's no more room. You want rapture, you want money, then close the fucking borders. That's my feeling, that's Prime's feeling. So do it, huh? I don't care how, just keep the new jokers out, or maybe we'll stop playing ball with you at all. Then where you gonna be?" He challenged me with a stare. "Ain't that what Prime told you too?"

All the time Blaise was yapping, I was feeling something else. I don't know when I first noticed it not long after the argument began. I could sense an extension of myself, some psychic limb like the wall that was just beginning to bud and grow. I could feel this thing pushing, pushing against something hard and solid.

Inside… I don't know how to describe it… there was a sense of stretching, of growing… Like I was experiencing a dream at the same time I was talking to them.

I was so tired of feeling powerless, you see-with Tachyon, with the growing pains of the Rox, with what had happened during the cops' attack, with Blaise's goddamn superiority complex, with Prime's cold manipulations. I was so deadly tired of it.

Nobody was agreeing with me. They were all saying the same thing: There's no room anymore. We don't have the resources to waste on new people or new buildings. You gotta send some of 'em back. You gotta stop them from coming here.

And I kept thinking of my dreams, of what I wanted the Rox to be.

"Look, the Wall's the only immigration policy the Rox needs," I answered.

"Yeah, it sure fucking kept out the cops, didn't it?"

"Hey," I shouted back, "if one of your stupid jumpers hadn't barged in and wrecked things, yeah, the Wall would've kept them out."

"You're full of shit, Governor."

Durg, next to Blaise, suddenly became very alert. I knew he expected me to do something in response to Blaise's blatant rudeness.

But I was full. I was full of a vision. A vision of space, a dream of dark places and echoing rooms. The dreams inside me were stretching…

A deep rumble cut off our argument. Blaise was shouting; Kafka was chattering; they were all shouting, inside and out. I was scared myself.

The whole Administration Building was shaking. I heard glass breaking and saw the ramshackle buildings across the court swaying. A curtain of dust rippled across the courtyard, even though there was no wind. My feeling of extension hardened, became full.

Then it was over. The quiet was very loud.

I knew. I knew even as the tremors died and the plaster dust drifted down like snow from the ceilings, as Blaise and Kafka and the rest picked themselves off the floor.