Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-three

“Yeah, man, it’s true, as far as it goes. Happened about the way you say Eric showed it – don’t get his mental sound-and-light shows, myself – Turtle wasted the Rox with a tidal wave.” Croyd Crenson poured himself a cup of tea from the chipped green enamel pot in his bunker. The light of the single kerosene lamp made his fine scales shimmer like Elvis’ coat. “Of course the Feds shelled the place pretty well in advance. But yeah, Turtle did it.”

Sandbags piled on the bunker roof absorbed most of the fury of the rain, dulling its noise to a white-noise background murmur. Seated on a splintery wood crate, Mark sat with his head between his knees and just tried to breathe without throwing up.

“Lose some friends?” Croyd asked.

“Not many.” He looked up. “I wasn’t real popular on the Rox. Bloat, though – he was a good man. He and his people deserved better. But Turtle” – he shook his head – “I can’t see him committing genocide.”

“He had his reasons. The jumpers were way out of hand. Things were getting pretty scaly toward the end, if you’ll pardon the figure of speech.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. And there seemed no more to say. He was still shocked to the core by what Tommy had done. But Tommy had made the decision, and would have to live with it the rest of his life. Mark would not condemn him until he knew his side of the story.

Croyd’s apparent detachment bothered him a little. But that was Croyd. You didn’t live the way Croyd did without being wrenched somewhat loose from the world around you. “So,” he said, casting about for conversation, “what are you doing here in Vietnam, anyway?”

“’Bout the same thing you are, I guess: traveling for my health,” Croyd winked a big topaz eye and puffed on his cigar. “I made some bad career calls, and then things started getting generally interesting in the Big Apple – interesting in the Chinese curse sense, what with the War for the Rox and all.”

He leaned back, using his tail as a prop – his reptilian hindquarters were ill suited for sitting in a chair. Mark looked at him holding his saucer with one hand and the cup with another, third and last finger daintily extended, and had to cough to keep from going into a giggling fit. Things are happening too fast in your life.

Croyd regarded him from beneath lowered horny lids, “I’m surprised you don’t know all this about Turtle and the Rox and everything already. It’s not as if it wasn’t plastered all over the newspapers and TV and everything. They even had one of those one-week-wonder paperbacks by General Zappa, called Triumph Over Terror. Kind of hard to miss. Then again, you did kind of drop off the face of the Earth for a while, there, friend.”

“Literally. I was on another planet.”

“I thought you gave that shit up.”

“No, no. You don’t understand, man. I was on Takis.”

He told him the story, leaving out certain details, such as Starshine’s death. He didn’t trust himself to talk about that, and somehow it seemed too personal to share. Croyd and he were friends of long standing, but the fabric of both their lives was so woven that they never had gotten exactly close.

“So Tach got his body back, and he’s gonna get a new hand, and got to be king of the Alakazams or whatever you call ’em.” Croyd shook his head in wonder. “Regular fairy tale.”

He froze, stared down. A huge horned black beetle was making its way across the wooden shipping-pallet floor of his bunker.

“Excuse me a minute,” he said, setting aside his cup. “You might want to look the other way, here, pal.”

Mark shrugged him off. Croyd got down on all fours, peering intently at the bug. Then his lipless mouth opened and a pale tongue whipped out and back, and there was no more bug.

“Mmm,” Croyd said, resuming his tail-rest seat and picking up his cup. “Breakfast of champions. I tell you, man, I must be working out my insect-eating karma – you’re an old hippie, you’re into that karma shit, right? I was a bug-eater last year, too, during my giant-pink-bat phase.”

He shook his head. “On the other hand, if you have to do a turn as an insectivore, this is definitely the primo place on Earth to do it in. Bugs everywhere, huge fuckers like that one, and fine – man, are they fine!”

He looked at Mark. “Say, that didn’t gross you out at all, did it?”

Mark shook his head.

“Shoot, that’s rare. My gustatory habits are a big reason I have this lovely bunker all to my lizard lonesome. Great word, gustatory. Picked it up ten, eleven years ago, and damned if I don’t think this is the first time I ever found a way to slip it into a sentence.”

“Happy to be of service, man.”

“And you tell me the good Doctor had a baby. I’ll be Goddamned. I don’t envy a kid growing up with her mom and great-something grandpa being one and the same.” He sipped his tea and smacked his lack of lips. “Then again, I don’t envy anybody having Blaise for a dad either. What happened to the sleazy little psycho, anyway?”

“Tach’s cousin Zabb killed him, during the final fight for House Vayawand.”

Mark was lying like a dog. He knew perfectly well what had happened to Blaise Andrieux – had seen it happen in reality, and saw it again in rerun about every third night, when he woke up sweating and pale. The story of Tach’s return to the planet that gave him and the wild card virus birth was also like a fairy tale in that its ending held a twist of grotesque horror.

For the first time in all the years he and Tachyon had known each other, Blaise’s fate had really struck Mark in the face with the truth of what his best pal had told him all along: genes notwithstanding, Prince Tisianne brant Ts’ara of House Ilkazam was not a human being.

“So why is it that you didn’t see Eric’s visions?” Mark was desperate for a change of subject. Croyd shrugged, which almost pitched mark headfirst into the giggles. “Lizards don’t dream – something about the reptile brain. I never see anything when old Eric does his thing. I don’t think I’m missing much.”

Mark shook his head. “It was beautiful. I saw -”

Yeah. You saw fields and forests and birds, oh my. Strawberry fields forever Banal City. It sounded a lot like J. J. Flash.

Mark shook his head. “Words can’t describe it. But it was beautiful – as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Yeah, all the faithful sit there with that pole-axed look, drooling gently in their laps. I’m glad my most recent draw from the wild card deck spared me that. Never been much of the True Believer type.” He gazed at Mark over the rim of his cup. “Ever read the Hoffer book?”

“Yes,” said Mark, feeling pissed-off and chagrined at the same time. Part of him said Croyd was a cynic, the kind of scoffer who made the world what it was. Another part said Mark was a mark. If only Starshine wasn’t dead, I wouldn’t have all this trouble believing in the perfectibility of humankind.

Croyd was staring down at his cup as if there were a bug in it. Or rather, as if there weren’t. “Trouble with this stuff is, it starts tasting like boiled weeds after a while. Maybe because it is.”

He tossed cup and saucer over his shoulder. They bounced off the rough planks with a clatter and fell into the mud-red water that had accrued beneath the pallets. He went to a neon-green-and-white Coleman cooler by one wall, opened it, took out a couple of bottles.

“Time for a little of that good old Giai Phong beer, The beer that made Ho Chi Minh City famous.”

Mark made a face. “It tastes like formaldehyde.”

“That’s what its famous for.” He stuck both tops into his horny mouth and popped the caps off.

Mark accepted his beer without qualm. Maybe life on the Rox and in the back of a mujahidin arms-smuggling van and other interesting places had wrung the squeamishness out of him. Or maybe that was another hole where Starshine used to be.

Croyd hoisted his bottle. “Here’s to good friends. Here we are in damn near the last commie country on Earth, waiting for the monsoon to wash us into the South China Sea, in a camp full of refugees from New York’s blood-thirstiest joker street gangs and run by a crazed Nam vet. I say that’s worth drinking to.”

He drained his bottle and tossed it in a corner. “So. You might as well crash the night here. Hell, you might as well move in. Most of these boys don’t have much conversation, if you get my drift. The young ones strut around trying to see who’s got the biggest balls, and the old ones spend all their time spouting slogans and bitching about how all the rest of us don’t appreciate all they did for us the last time they were over here.”

“I don’t want to be any bother, man,” Mark said into his own beer.

“Hey, no bother. I’m not exactly afraid you’ll keep me up with your snoring.”

Mark eyed him guardedly. “So, like, how long has it been?”

On the street they called Croyd the Sleeper. He was an original, who got caught in the open the day Jetboy made his final faux pas. Since then every time he laid him down to sleep, he slept for a long time – and woke with a brand-new face and form, not to mention a brand-new set of ace powers. Actually, that didn’t always happen – sometimes he drew an unadulterated joker. He had, obviously, never yet drawn a Black Queen. A few years ago he had gotten something stranger: the power to produce an infectious form of xenovirus Takis-A in his own body, one that could even re-infect people with expressed wild card traits. He had caused a hell of a stir until he eventually nodded off.

When Croyd woke up, he usually had no trouble staying awake for a while, a period ranging from days to weeks. When he started to sag, though, he frequently found himself none too eager to drop back to dreamland. He might have an especially useful or entertaining form, or unfinished business, and his wake-up-call surprises weren’t always any too pleasant – and there was always the possibility of that Black Bitch slipping out of his personal wild cards deck.

That was the main way Mark had gotten to know him, in his own capacity as overqualified street pharmacologist. When Croyd’s eyelids started drooping, he started gobbling pills in record quantities. After a time they began to affect him – as his sometime speeding buddy Hunter Thompson put it back in the sixties – the way the full moon affected a werewolf.

For his own research Mark kept a stock of powerful and rare stimulants on hand, and Croyd knew him as a man who didn’t like to leave a buddy strung out. For his part Mark had experimented to come up with some speed-analogue that would not, in time, turn Croyd into a raving psychotic. But even if drugs aren’t the irredeemable Devil Things the Just Say No crowd claims they are, there is a payback to overdoing anything – eating, breathing, and sleeping, no less than amphetamines. No-comeback speed proved just as elusive a goal as reviving the Radical had been.

Mark had a good reason for asking Croyd how long he’d been up this time. If the Sleeper was about to start rolling those big yellow candy-flake eyes and raving that invisible creatures were gnawing on his legs, Mark wanted to be, you know, prepared. And there was a still-outstanding matter of what if any powers Gordon Gecko Croyd possessed. He was not too discriminate when the amphetamine psychosis had him.

Mark clutched a vial of blue-and-black powder swirl in a pocket of his trousers, just in case. If he was into the pill-gobbling stage, Croyd could be very touchy.

But Croyd just laughed. “Weeks and weeks. Been here six weeks. Woke up like this in the hold of a Yugo freighter. Crew was too strung out over all the ethnic tension back home even to be scared of me. I’ve been like this ever since, and nary a yawn.”

He held up a sucker-tipped finger and winked conspiratorially. “You see, old man,” he said, “that’s my power this go-round, my current ace-in-the-hole. I like this form just fine, for now – it’s kind of relaxing, being a skink – and I don’t have to worry about losing it and coming back as Snotman Part II, because lizards don’t sleep.”

And while lizards don’t have lips, either, he managed to grin hugely as he sat back on his gold-lamй tail.

“Oh,” Mark said. And he was thinking, I’m not a herpetologist; but I don’t think that’s right.

He decided it wasn’t his problem. He went to the bunk beside the trench wall, which was stabilized with tree trunks from the mountains, sat down, and began to take his boots off. Right now he wished he could take Croyd’s next six-month snooze for him.

Croyd went to the door, craned his head out. A raindrop exploded on the tip of his snout, between the widely spaced nostrils. “It’s a good thing I’m not actually cold-blooded,” he said, “’cause this is real primetime for me.”

“What?” Mark asked, lying down and pulling an army blanket up his long legs.

“Hunting. They all come out at night, just like the song says.”

“Album title. What does, man?”

“I’m going hunting. Lot of big bugs out, a night like this. And every once in a while I come across one of these big-ass Vietnamese rats”

“I’m sorry I asked.”