"I try to keep it very quiet. When I was trying to recover her from the government I raised a great to-do about Baby. Now I'm more cautious, and fortunately people's memories are short. Unfortunately she gets lonely so I come as often as I can. She misses her own kind too. They are essentially herd creatures, and this kind of isolation is not good for her."

"Why don't you live in her, then?"

"I want a social life, and I also want to keep her secret. Those two goals rather conflict. So I compromise. I live nearby, I visit often, and sometimes I take her out. According to Sister Magdalene at the South Street mission I'm doing a positive service. She's had several derelicts take the pledge after spotting us."

She laughed, leaned down, and kissed him where he reclined against the cushions. He caught the top button of her blouse in trembling fingers, and from the corner of her eye she could see his erection straining at the satin material of his breeches. She jerked away, and swiftly rebuttoned her blouse. "I'm sorry, but I thought you… we-"

"Not here! I couldn't perform with an audience." She also wondered what would be the ship's reaction if she killed Tachyon within Baby's skin. Roulette doubted she'd leave the ship alive.

The Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum (Admission Only $2) was closed, probably because its manager realized that most people would be taking advantage of the day's free entertainment.

That was, Jennifer thought, just fine. She went down a side alley and, making sure no one was watching, slipped through the wall. It was difficult. It took some moments of concentration and then she had to fight her way through the brickwork as if she were solid and the bricks were a viscous, unyielding liquid. Her body was getting tired and she knew that she shouldn't ghost for a while, but she had to get this done and then maybe she could think about resting.

She finallv made it through and found herself in a small dark room with a series of dimly glowing glass bottles set along one wall like a bank of aquariums in a pet store. Floating in the tanks were pathetic little corpses, little embalmed "Monstrous Joker Babies" as the sign above the exhibit proclaimed. There were maybe thirty of them. Most had little of humanity about them and Jennifer was thankful, in a way, that they had experienced for so short a time the cruelty of the world.

She hurried from the room and found herself in the section of the museum devoted to large displays that were life-sized dioramas. It was eerily quiet and dark with the displays' lighting and sound effects turned of and quite disconcerting to be the only living thing about.

She went by a scene depicting Jokertown burning, commemorating, as it were, the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. There was, now only mildly shocking to modern tastes, an older tableau showing a purported Jokertown orgy. A sign in front of a curtained-off area said to watch for the latest addition to the entertaining yet informative displays, Earth vs. The Swarm.

Jennifer went on past the dioramas into the long hallway beyond and entered the museum's Hall of Fame, or, in some instances, Infamy.

Lifelike wax figures of prominent aces and jokers clustered in groups or stood alone in the hallway. Jetboy looked young and handsome, his scarf blowing out behind him in an unfelt, perhaps divine wind, his eyes squinting slightly as if he were staring into a gentle sun. The Four Aces-Black Eagle, Brain Trust, the Envoy, and Golden Boy-stood in a group, three of them together, one isolated by the slightly turned backs, the slightly averted faces of his fellow aces. Dr. Tachyon was resplendent in an outfit that a small card at his feet said had been donated by him to the museum. And there were others. Peregrine maintaining, Jennifer had to admit, her smoldering sensuality even when graven in wax, Cyclone, Hiram Worchester's astonishing bulk apparently floating lightly over his pedestal, Chrysalis with invisible flesh and visible organs caged by her skeleton…

Jennifer looked them over carefully. Tachyon, she decided, would be the one. She stepped over the velvet rope and approached the waxen statue. She towered over it by half a foot and its waxen features were as delicate as her own. Moved by an irresistible impulse, she ran her hand down the rich fabric of his peach-colored waistcoat. It had a fine, soft feel to it. She could almost believe that the card was telling the truth and the outfit had once belonged to Tachyon himself.

She caught herself and looked around guiltily. The hallway, of course, was deserted. She summoned all her will, reached out, and put the bag through the chest of the wax figure. She withdrew her hand and left the bag snug in Tachyon's chest, the two stockbooks of stamps and the mysterious volume safely hidden away until her return.

Now she had to get in touch with Kien. It might take some doing. She couldn't simply look him up in the phone book.

She left the Hall of Fame with one last jealous glance at the Peregrine figure, pondering her next move. She never noticed the eye watching from a curtained doorway at the other end of the hallway.

The worst of it, Fortunato thought, was having to listen to the goddamned politicians. There were a dozen of them on stage, including Mayor Koch and Senator Hartmann. Tachyon, the bastard, was already gone, cozied up to a gorgeous black woman with plaited hair.

Hartmann was at the podium. "The time has come for acceptance. A time for peace, as the biblical poet said. Not only for peace between nations, but peace within ourselves. A time to look into our own hearts, human and joker and ace alike. A time not to forget the past, but to be able to look back at it and say, this is where I have been, and I am not ashamed. But my duty now is to the future. Thank you very much."

A police helicopter circled overhead. As Fortunato glanced up he saw the Turtle's shell float slowly over the park and then pass out of sight again.

Fortunato knew roughly where the kid was. This close to him he could get a vague image of what the kid saw, and he could triangulate off Hartmann as he sat down at the edge of the stage.

There. Fifteen or twenty yards away, wearing clothes, for once, which meant he'd come in his human form and stayed that way. The kid slouched against a light pole, a good fifteen or twenty feet away from an older version of himself, clearly his father.

The kid looked around at all the suits and high heels as they offered Hartmann dignified, minimal applause. One side of his mouth turned up in disgust. Fortunato knew how the kid felt. Maybe once there'd been some sincere feeling in these ceremonies, but now it was a case of the bored leading the boring. Nobody came to self-serving political speeches except the people who needed to be seen there, the ones making some kind of political statement themselves by showing up. And those few who really did care. The starstruck kids who still had some illusions about personal power, who still believed in that sharp, clean line between good and evil and wanted to wage war across it.

Fortunato saw the wild card as a kind of Aladdin's lamp of the unconscious. The virus rewrote DNA to match what it read in the back of the mind. If your luck was bad it transcribed a nightmare, and if you lived through it you were a joker. But sometimes it hit a vein of the pure stuff, like Arnie's love for dinosaurs and comic books and aces. And even though it made a bit of a joke out of him, it let him live his dreams out on the street.

The joke was a law of nature, the conservation of mass. Arnie could turn into any dinosaur he could visualize, but his mass remained the same. If he was a tyrannosaur he was a three-foot-high tyrannosaur. Okay for a kid, but he was already thirteen or fourteen, full of adolescent juice and delusions of immortality.