Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-two

This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.

Mark Meadows sighed, dug the point of his shovel into red clay still slimy from the rain that was giving them a brief respite, and leaned on the handle.

Quit your bitching, Jumpin’ Jack Flash said in his mind. You make a pretty ridiculous Oliver Hardy, Trav. It’s not like we’re doing the actual digging.

It’s our body becoming unduly exhausted, our body being callously abused, the familiar and seldom-welcome voice of Cosmic Traveler persisted. Look at your hands, man. They’re a mass of blisters.

I can heal them. It was Moonchild, her thought-stream cool and soothing as the waters of a stream. It is my power to heal us.

Yeah? Traveler thought savagely. God knows what kind of horrible infections there are in this cesspool. You can heal wounds, you addled Asian bimbo. You aren’t Ms. Immune System…

“For God’s sake,” Mark said aloud, “will all of you just shut up?” From the furthest recesses of his mind he could detect the formless surge and mutter of Aquarius. He was lost in his dolphin-dreaming again, which was fine with Mark: Aquarius would disapprove of what he was doing now, on the grounds that he disapproved of everything landlings did. At least Mark didn’t have to hear about it.

Starshine, on the other hand, would have unleashed a tirade about the inherent nobility of manual labor and damned them all as spoiled materialists; for once Mark would have welcomed his bombast as he raked the Traveler roundly over the coals… he felt an emptiness within, a sense of teetering on the edge of some abyss. It was a mystery to him, and no less to the mind doctors of Takis with their accumulated millennia of lore and experience, how he could have survived the violent death of one of his “friends.” He had the feeling, when he permitted himself to dwell on it, of living on borrowed time, living within his own bubble of virtual reality that might contract back to nothingness at any moment, taking him – or at least his mind – with it.

– A hot drop of rain struck him on the cheek. Well, he hadn’t done a black-hole dive over the event horizon just yet. The others attacking the earth with pick and shovel and filling sandbags with the excavated soil were all jokers and had yet to speak a word to him, civil or otherwise. The way they were eyeing him now suggested they didn’t appreciate him taking a break with most of the bunker left to dig and the monsoon rain about to squat on them again.

He smiled and bobbed his head foolishly at them, grabbed his shovel, and bent to work. He made himself ignore the pain in his shoulders and back and knees. The voices in his brain he just tuned down.

Fort Venceremos didn’t look much like a fort to Mark. It looked like a movie set. It consisted mainly of ranks of olive-drab tents and sandbagged bunkers that were, he gathered, slowly spreading outward from the parade ground in the middle, with its podium and its flagpole flying the yellow-star-on-red-ground flag of the Socialist Republic. Paddy land surrounded the fort’s wire-tangle perimeter, pool-table flat and well-drowned with the monsoon. Hills several hundred meters high, perfectly conical and an almost painfully intense green, stuck up seemingly at random from the midst of them. When the truck clattered in through the wire, the clouds had broken briefly to let some orange sunset beacons flash through the ramparts of the Giai Truong Son, the Central Mountains to the west, and set the sides of the hills alight.

Off to the north, according to the conversation Mark overheard – none was directed toward him during the entire day and a half they’d spent grinding up the coast on Highway One – lay Da Nang, its giant American-built airbase still intact and still jointly occupied, despite the general collapse of the USSR’s overseas empire, by Soviet Frontal Aviation as well as by the Vietnamese. A few Hicks behind them lay the coastal town of Tam Ky.

The ride up from Ho Chi Minh City had been frequently punctuated by bouts of waiting in the red laterite that sided the paved highway, while military convoys rumbled past in the rain and the deuce-and-a-half sank to its hubs again. Mark’s dozen joker fellow passengers were all Americans – with the possible exception of a pair who said nothing and, by the look of them, might not have been able to – and none of them was familiar, from Rick’s or elsewhere. The ones who could bitched mightily at the delays, at the way their hosts failed to appreciate the sacrifices they were willing to make on their behalf, and especially when it came time to push the truck out of the mud and onto the cracked blacktop yet again.

Mark willingly if ineffectually took his place at the bumper and heaved. Of his remaining friends the only one strong enough to be a lot of help probably wouldn’t, so Mark figured their identities as well as his should all better just be kept quiet for the moment.

After allowing the weary mud-caked passengers a brief and unpromising look at their new home, darkness and the rain descended pretty much simultaneously. Mark was processed with the rest, assigned temporary quarters, and sent off to the mess tent, without a single friendly or even neutral word or glance – except from the quartermaster clerk, a bespectacled black with a cone-shaped body and no perceptible legs, who pushed himself around the raised-plank floor of the Q.M. tent on a cable-spool end mounted on casters, and was almost tearily grateful that Mark would not require any alterations to his issue fatigues.

Fashionably attired in American O.D. trousers and blouse of unguessable age, which left his ankles and wrists well bare but, of course, bagged substantially at belly and butt, Mark sloshed off toward the mess tent. The meal was tough boiled pork and rice, dished up by jokers who were sullen even to their fellows and who seemed to have been chosen for their unappetizing appearance. Mark didn’t exactly think it was a balanced meal, but he didn’t complain. He sat by himself and ate with good appetite, as befit a man who’d done his time in the chow lines of innumerable midnight missions, and then went off to the flooded tent he shared with a joker who glared wordlessly at him from a face like a giant bristlecone as he came in.

On the whole, he decided, squishing around on his cot trying to get less uncomfortable, being in the New Joker Brigade was a lot like being on the Rox. Bad accommodations, bad food, and nobody around who didn’t hate him on sight: perfect. There was even the lingering feeling of being under siege, though all those tanks they’d passed on Highway One – that had passed them, really – riding on the beds of semi-trailers with their long guns trailed and covered, were ostensibly on their side this time.

At least there were no roving bands of psychopathic kids who could flip you out of your body and into God knows what on a whim. And there was no Blaise.

Blaise… The sun had probably gone down long since, but here with the monsoon sweeping inland off the South China Sea it was still hot. The thought of Tachyon’s grandson did what the night and rain could not: cooled him to the marrow.

Blaise the beautiful boy, Blaise the prodigy of mental power. Blaise the sociopath, murderer, and rapist, who had committed crimes unimagined on Earth or even on Takis, where they had even more practice at that sort of thing. Blaise the Hitler wannabe, who had come within an ace – two aces and a Takisian prince trapped in an Earth woman’s body, to be more precise – of conquering Takis. Not with his unprecedented mind powers, but with a handful of political clichйs so threadbare they didn’t even try them on at Berkeley anymore. Psi-power giants Takis had known and dealt with before, but its ancient culture lacked any antibodies to everyday Earth demagoguery.

He thought of K. C. Strange, and he thought of Roxalana. Women who, God knew why, had found something in him worth loving and nurturing amid alien surroundings – on the whole, he thought, it was pretty much a tossup between Takis and the Rox for alienness.

He thought of Sprout, his lost daughter. He wondered what she was doing. It was morning in California, probably – he was doing well if he knew what the time was where he was at any given moment. She would be getting up and dressing herself with her persnickety little-girl care, and combing her golden hair – long when he’d seen it last – and getting ready to go off to the special school Mark’s father was sending her to.

Will I ever see her again? he wondered. And then, much worse: Should I?

For all their differences Mark’s father was a man of ironclad character, with both the advantages and disadvantages that entailed. He had promised Mark that Sprout would receive the best of care, and Mark knew that this would happen.

Mark had always spurned materialism and the pursuit of gain. Of course that was before spending weeks on skid row and months on the lam. It was easy to sneer at comfort when you weren’t lying on a soaking-wet cot with the monsoon pounding on the canvas over your head and dead bugs and lumps of Christ-knew-what bobbing around in the ankle-deep water.

Maybe Kimberly Anne, his former wife, his lost beloved Sunflower, had been right all along. He had always given Sprout all the love in the world, no one could say otherwise. But Beatles songs notwithstanding, love ain’t all you need.

General Meadows could provide the child material security and comfort greater than anything her father had ever been able to offer her. But he would also see that she did not lack love, and the knowledge that she was wanted.

She’s better off where she is, Mark thought, and shifted miserably. On the other cot his tent-mate grumbled and blew like a surfacing walrus. She probably doesn’t even think about me anymore…

He wandered away into sleep. In the morning they blew him out of bed with a tape-recorded bugle and handed him a shovel.

The rains fell back to regroup in late afternoon – not their usual pattern, Mark gathered. To his surprise the joker Brigaders turned dark looks to the semi-clear skies. He himself would’ve felt like singing from the sight of open sky and the sun just falling down into clouds that seemed to have been poured across the western mountains like cement, except that he barely had the energy left to hold up his head.

Chow tonight was rice and fish parts. Mark’s messmates bitched considerably about the fare. It tasted just fine to Mark.

After dinner jokers wearing red armbands chased everybody out into the red mud of the parade ground for political education. “Goddamn,” he heard a joker say whose head was covered with skin folds like a Shar Pei’s. “It ain’t enough we have to dig in the rain. But then the storm goes away the minute we knock off and we have to haul our sorry asses out here to get lectured at.”

Instantly two large and menacing young jokers appeared to either side of the complainer. “Showin’ signs of antisocial tendencies, are we, bud?”

“Bourgeois tendencies,” the older of the pair said.

“Whatever. Sounds like you’re in need of a few good self-criticism sessions, help get your mind right.”

Mark moved away quickly, feeling cowardly for doing so. He thought the man was being unfair, complaining like that – they’d all volunteered, after all, and Mark reckoned it was standard Midnight Mission rules: you want to eat the soup, you got to hear the sermon. All the same, he wasn’t eager to find out just what self-criticism sessions were all about.

For once, you’re acting sensibly, Mark, Traveler’s voice said in his skull. My, those two were quick off the mark, weren’t they?

Mark’s spirits sank into his muddy boots. The Traveler approved his actions. Now he knew he was chicken-shit.

The clouds still clustered thickly overhead, blotting most of the stars. Mark had come to terms with the night and the stars, back on that Aegean island where he’d had no choice but to confront them. Sort of. He still was not heartbroken when overcast hid the stars.

They assembled in ranks facing the podium, several hundred strong – Mark had never been good at estimating crowd numbers. Mark thought he could make out a substantial split in the social structure. About a third of the crowd had at least a foot on the lower rungs of middle age, or were right up on the ladder, like Mark himself The rest were young and intense, though in a lot of them the intensity showed in the way they joked and grab-assed with each other.

Then there was Mark. Here and there a man who’d pulled extreme height out of the wild card deck stood above the rest, one nearly ten feet tall and covered with what looked suspiciously like rough bark, and green leaves instead of hair; another, seven feet tall and even skinnier than mark, his skin covered in giraffe dapples, but dark purple on mauve. Mostly though, Mark towered above this mob as he towered above most. Which made him a conspicuous minority of one, the only nat in sight.

Until Colonel Charles Sobel appeared, marching from between the tents as if he were headed to shake hands with Black Eagle himself, trailing a retinue like the late, great Emperor Bokassa’s cape. He mounted the podium and took his place behind the lectern. Brew and Luce, Luce in his customary T-shirt with the extra armholes and Brew dressed as if he were headed out nightclubbing after the camp meeting was done, took positions flanking him on the dais.

“Be seated, comrades – and I’m proud to use the term.” Sobel’s voice rolled out of the speakers like warm motor oil. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to sit at attention.”

That provoked a ripple of laughter, probably from guys in armbands, the cynical J. J. Flash facet within Mark thought. From somewhere in the audience a voice rang out, “How about sittin’ in chairs?”

Luce thrust his round face forward. “The revolution isn’t about your personal comfort, buddy,” he snarled. “That’s bogus. If you can’t stand a little inconvenience, maybe you better start walking back to your white-bread world to be a doormat for the nats again -”

Sobel held up a hand. “Here, Lucius, I’ve got it. I understand a lot of you men – and you are men, more so than the nats who look down upon you – are new among us. You maybe aren’t sure what you’re doing here. What’s expected of you, what you can expect.

“I can answer both questions simply enough. What’s expected of you? Everything you’ve got. To give less than maximum effort is to sell out to the oppressor.

“As to what to expect, one word will suffice: victory.”

The applause was fuller-bodied this time, and at least some of it was sincere. Mark still heard scattered catcalls, saw guys making jack-off gestures.

The Colonel stood with his hands resting on the podium, smiling over his jutted chin, waiting for the noise to dwindle. “I look out this evening and see many new faces, many recent recruits to our cause. I know my words strike some of you as empty rhetoric. All your lives you’ve been bombarded with empty promises from politicians and glossy Wall Street come-ons. You’ve earned your right to skepticism, no doubt about it.

“Now, I’m a pretty fair country speaker” – the armband boys laughed dutifully, though Mark wasn’t sure what the joke was – “but I also know how closely I fit the profile of the Oppressor: a white, a nat, a man. An authority figure. But there is one among us – one of you – whose gift it is to show you the truths which underlie my words.

“Comrades, it is with pride I present to you – Eric Bell!”

Much of the crowd erupted in cheers – the watchful old-timers, Mark saw. His recent ride-mates just stood there with oh, please expressions on.

A person stepped up onto the platform from behind. Smiling grandly, Sobel stepped back and nodded him to center stage, out front of the podium. He was slender, dressed in a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt and jeans, and by the way he moved, he was way young. But his face was horribly disfigured, a brutal animal jut of muzzle and brows.

He held out his hands. The crowd fell quiet, even the cynical new arrivals, leaving the Wurlitzer automatic accompaniment of the little generator that powered the P.A. thump-thumpa-ing along in the background.

It was as if somebody had dropped a movie screen just behind Mark’s eyes. He saw an island by night. On that island was a fantasy castle, a wonderland of towers and domes and battlemented walls. But a giant had come to fairyland and stomped it proper; the towers were fallen, the glittering domes crushed.

Then Mark took in the surroundings, the dark cliff-like shapes on the land surrounding, sprayed with myriad lights. The skyline of Manhattan. My God, that’s the Rox! Mark thought. But it’s so changed.

It was about to change again. Gleaming white in the moonlight, a mobile cliff of water rushed down the Hudson. Straight for Ellis Island.

Floating above the wave was Turtle’s unmistakable battleship-plate shell. A moan rose from the crowd as the tsunami struck the Rox like God’s own bulldozer. Upon the face of the waters lay chaos. Below them, nothing could still live.

“Look,” the young man said in a voice that didn’t need an amplifier. “See. As I saw. Bloat sent me away from the Rox, away from my comrades, my fellow jokers, though I begged to be allowed to stay and share their fate. He sent me away so that I could see this thing done – and so that, through me, you could see it too.”

The crowd was raging, screaming, shaking fists and less conventional appendages in the air. Mark hunched his head between his shoulders and wanted to vomit. All he could think of was the half-remembered words from the radio cast of the Hindenburg disaster – “Oh, my God, the humanity, the humanity!”

– That wasn’t true. For all his horror and shame there was room in his guts for the realization that his unaltered human appearance marked him in this crowd, as if three sixes glowed upon his forehead.

“But that was not all Bloat wished for me to show you. My friends, I do not come to ask your pity,” the young man said. “I don’t even come to ask for your anger. I ask of you just one thing. In the word of the immortal John Lennon – imagine.”

“A better world,” Sobel intoned. And Mark saw – a better world.

A city loomed in the distance, across a techno-horror landscape of dead cars glistening like chrome beetles in the sun, with tall stacks violating the sky in the background, dark smoke for come.

He was aware of Sobel’s words blowing through his brain like the finest Thai stick, but they left no mark. As he watched, the jumbled car bodies faded, vanished, leaving a field of purple and yellow wildflowers that rippled like a flag. Then the stacks disappeared, and redwoods stretched sunward in their place. At last the steel-and-glass towers of the city shimmered and were gone, leaving a small thatched-hut village on a hill. Healthy tan-cheeked people worked in gardens and carried water up the hill in wooden buckets. Looking closer, you could see they all were jokers, happy, free, and unafraid. It was so beautiful, he could barely breathe. He felt his eyes fill with tears.

Rain struck his cheek, warm as spittle. He blinked, and once again he was seeing the close-packed ranks of jokers and a sky beginning to congeal again with night and storm.

“That’s the true legacy of the Rox,” Eric said. His voice seemed a whisper, but it carried to the roots of the distant mountains.

“You’ve seen the vision now that we’re all striving for,” Sobel was saying. “All the people in harmony, with the Earth and with each other, striving shoulder to shoulder for the common good, not selfish gain.”

Sobel had more words to say, but they were anticlimax. When the session was over, Mark thrust himself forward, risking the wrath of jokers aroused by the vision of the Rox’s destruction in his fever to speak to the boy they called the Dreamer. Fortunately the audience was still sluggish, coming out of its dream-state.

He reached the podium as Eric came off it and started to walk away, surrounded by admirers. “Wait!” he shouted desperately. “Wait, I’ve got to talk to you!”

Eric turned. “It’s a fucking nat,” somebody said in disbelief and disgust.

Mark bulled through to the boy. “That vision you-you showed us,” he said. “Was it real? Did it happen that way? Was Turtle -”

The contempt in the young joker’s eyes hit him like a blow. “You think I’d use my gift to lie to the people?” Eric asked.

“No – I mean, I’m not saying it isn’t true, I just can’t believe that Turtle would do anything like that.”

“Who cares what a nat believes?” Eric asked, and turned away.

Mark tried to keep after him. A kid reared up in his path. He had a Mohawk of white spines like porcupine quills. His mouth was a gape that stretched almost back to the hinge of his jaw, barred with four vertical strips of flesh. A ragged vest left his skinny chest bare. I LOVE THE TASTE OF NAT BLOOD was burn-scarred across it as if by a soldering iron.

“Give it a rest, you old nat fuck,” he snarled. Hands held helplessly out to the sides, Mark fell back. Eric and his retinue disappeared into the night.

“My, my,” a voice behind him said. “The attitude these kids show.”

Mark turned to find himself staring at a man-sized gold lizard. It blinked huge and beautiful topaz eyes.

“Impressionable bunch too,” the lizard said, taking a cigar from its mouth and extending a hand with three pad-tipped fingers. “Mark Meadows. Small world. How the hell are you?”