Turn of the cards

Chapter Thirty-one

The latter half of the squad was clumped on the trail like a gall on a tree-limb. On the ground in their midst someone was flopping like a fish and screaming as if he didn’t ever have to breathe. Mark shed his ruck and went racing toward them. Sarge arrived the same instant, ordering the squaddies to stand back and let him through.

Eraserhead writhed in the mud. His right leg bent like a bow – not a bad sign in itself; though his body and limbs would bend and stretch, they wouldn’t break. But the leg disappeared into a hole in the mud beside the trail.

Haskell and the Hawk had him by the shoulders. They pulled on him. His right leg stretched until his bloused pant leg pulled out of his boot and his leg, thinned like a rubber band under tension, was bared. His lips skinned back from his teeth and his head thrashed from side to side. Only the whites of his eyes showed.

“Lay off that!” Sarge barked. “You’re doing more harm than good. Dig him out, dammit!”

“With what?” Only Mark and Croyd still had their entrenching tools. The others had covertly thrown theirs away.

“Meadows, Croyd, use your E-tools. The rest of you, use your belt knives or use your bare hands. Just get him out.”

They attacked the sodden earth. Eraserhead began to thump in a circle around his trapped foot, shrieking hysterically. Haskell and Mario had to pin his shoulders.

“A pot,” gasped the Hawk, clawing up mud though his hands bled from nicks by shovels and knives. “He’s got his foot in a fucking pot.”

“Careful, careful,” Sarge urged. “Get it out of there slow. Somebody – no, fuck it. Spoiler, gimme your Ka-bar.”

As pale as the rest of them, Spoiler handed over his heavy knife without argument. “Sheath too.” The former gang member unfastened his sheath from his harness and gave it to him.

The sergeant sheathed the knife, reversed it to grip it by the sheath. “Hold that sucker steady,” he murmured. Mark and Eye Ball reached in to hold the pot firm. Sarge rapped it carefully with the knife pommel. Eraserhead screamed.

On the third hit the crude pot cracked. Sarge tapped it a few more times to extend the crack. Blood spilled out. The fired clay was thick, and bore the marks of the fingers that had shaped it.

They opened the pot. It was a vicious kind of egg. The inside of the shell was lined with sharp bamboo splinters, smeared with chocolate-brown shit.

They had to hump Eraserhead back to the old church on a stretcher fashioned out of rain-slicks and long black M-16s. It took seven hours. Eraserhead sobbed the whole time, though Spoiler raved and threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up. Mark thought he was crying more from fear and a certain outrage than pain, but by the time they got him to their base camp, his foot had swollen to twice its normal size, and streamed clear serum from a score of red-rimmed holes.

The rain broke not long after they arrived. Just before sunset a polliwog-shaped Mi-8 Hip utility chopper motored in from Da Nang. It touched down beside the church, and a crew of khaki-clad medics bundled the now-quiescent Eraserhead aboard. They seemed to be trying to hold the stretcher at arm’s length, to avoid all contact with the patient. Most dinks – uh, Vietnamese – don’t think black people are human, any more than they think jokers are, Sarge had told him once. Eraserhead was both.

Mark had wanted to ask Sergeant Hamilton why, if the Vietnamese were so prejudiced against jokers and blacks – and Sarge was both those things too – he had volunteered to come back and fight for them. He hadn’t had the nerve.

“Stay hard, man,” Mario called after Eraserhead. “The Rox lives!” Some of the old-timers sneered, but none said anything.

As the Hip lifted off, Croyd came out of the apparent trance he’d been in since they finally stumbled back up the hill. He rose from the base of the church’s pocked wall and wandered over to stand next to Mark.

“All right, everybody,” Sarge told the quiet crowd after the chopper’s rotor thunder had dwindled enough to permit speech. “We all got better things to do than stand around with our mouths open collecting flies. Or if not, I can sure as hell think of a few.”

“But, Sarge,” Slick said, “that thing the kid’s foot got stuck in”

“Punji trap. Old piece of shit, left over from the last war. Like that old crashed Huey we found, remember? It don’t mean nothin’.”

He walked off. The crowd began to break up. Mark watched with single-minded intensity as the helicopter lost itself against a distant slab of slate-colored cloud that seemed to be balancing just above the horizon with the half-set sun for a blinding fulcrum. He felt a sense of isolation and dread. There were monsters thronged around them, in all that evening green. One of their youngest and most vulnerable was being taken away into the land of monsters, and there was nobody to look after him.

A star came out, visible just above the band of cloud. Mark shivered.

Croyd yawned, stretched, and took a cigar from the camo fanny-pack he wore in front of his smooth-scaled belly. “Penny for your thoughts.”

Mark shuddered. “I wonder what’ll happen to him.”

Croyd scratched a match alight on his pectoral scales and fired up his smoke. “If we’re lucky,” he said between puffs, “we’ll never find out.”

He whipped the match out and dropped it into the red clay at their feet. Glaring at him with ecological fervor, Mark bent over to pick it up.

“What’s your sweat, man?” Croyd asked. “It’s organic.

It’s just wood. Soldier termites think it’s a tasty hors d’oeuvre. Something exotic, a break from the same-old same-old.”

“Oh.” Mark straightened, feeling sheepish. He also felt surprise. He thought the trendy activist side of him had died with Starshine, in orbit around a far, cold world.

Croyd yawned again. “Uh, y’know, man,” he said, looking down at his splayed skink feet, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor when we get back to Venceremos tomorrow.”

“What do you need?”

“Well, you’re the Brigade pharmacist now and all. I was wondering if you could maybe slip me a little something to help keep me, y’know, sharp.”

Mark looked at him and sighed. Maybe nothing did change.

“I guess,” he said in a carefully neutral tone.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, guy. I just need to keep my” – yawn – “my edge, if you know what I mean. Lizards don’t sleep.”

“Of course not,” Mark said.

“What does it mean,” she asked, accepting a tin plate of steaming rice and vegetables, “when the jokers say, ‘The Rox lives’?”

“It means they come from a TV generation that never learned to tell the difference between reality and spun-sugar Steven Spielberg Technicolor bullshit,” said Eric the Dreamer. To the light of his bunker’s single lantern his eyes showed the depth and shimmer of the layered glazes of a seventeenth-century Japanese cup. It was hard to say what color they were – harder, perhaps, to say which they weren’t. From somewhere in the depths of her, Moonchild summoned the knowledge that such varicolored eyes were called “hazel.”

He nodded his heavy jut-encrusted head at the plate, which his guest had yet to touch. “There’s no meat in there, if that’s bothering you,” he said. “I don’t eat it myself.”

“Koreans are not necessarily vegetarians,” she said.

We are a harsh people in some ways, I suppose.” She dropped her eyes. Her black yin-yang half mask and a heavy fall of black hair hid most of her face in shadow. “But I eat no meat either. It is against my… my principles to take life.”

He took a bite, chewed slowly, watching her the while. She found she couldn’t look at him for any length of time without her cheeks growing uncomfortably warm.

“Strange to find you in the camp of Mars, then,” he said. “We are an army, Ms. Moonchild.”

“Isis,” she said quickly. “Isis Moon. ‘Moonchild’ is an ace name. I don’t know where I got it, to be honest. There are so many things I don’t know… To use an ace name seems so ego-bound, yet that’s how Mark and his other friends refer to me.”

“Isis, then. If I may.”

“Oh, yes – Eric.”

“So why are you here? This seems like a funny place to find a pacifist.”

“Perhaps pacifist is not the right word to use – oh. Forgive me if I seem to contradict you.”

He shook his head, mouth full.

“This food is excellent. The vegetables are crisp and flavorful.”

“Thank you. The Sterno-can cooking method adapts well to stir-frying. Sorry I’m not able to offer you kimchi.

“This probably tastes a little on the anemic side to you.”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s wonderful.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

She lowered her eyes again. “I lack the skill with words that I have with my body. I have no gift of verbal evasion.”

She took a few bites in silence. He let her. He watched her closely.

“I do not forswear – is this the word? I have not renounced the use of force. There are times when it is necessary to defend the weak or needy, or to defend oneself. But I do renounce the doing of harm. Therefore I use force to subdue an attacker without hurting him, so that I can leave his presence. And so, with luck, he can cool down, let go his anger and perhaps through meditation realize that there is no need for violence.”

“But there is need for violence sometimes. However gently applied, the means you use to subdue your attacker still are violence.”

She sighed. “As I say, I have no skill for debate. The violence – I use is restrained, defensive. None suffer it who do not intend harm, and even they suffer as little as possible.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s a sweet sentiment. I really applaud you for it, Ms. Moon – Isis. But what happens when your attacker isn’t just coming after you in the heat of passion? What happens when he really comes to kill you, and he won’t cool down? When he keeps picking himself up and dusting himself off and coming after you?”

“You saw how I dealt with Rhino. His anger and his fear of seeming weak before his peers caused him to come at me after it was obvious he could not best me, nor harm me unless I let him. I met his attacks, and finally he desisted.”

“That’s fine,” Eric said, gesturing with his fork. “But you’re an ace, Isis. How about the rest of us, who don’t have your meta-human strength and speed and skills, and God knows what else?”

She looked at him. She moistened her lips with a neat pink tongue. She could find nothing to say.

“That’s why we’re needed. The New Joker Brigade. The nats aren’t going to be satisfied with their laws and their hate rallies much longer. Their thirst is only going to be quenched in a flood of joker blood – and ace blood, too, don’t jive yourself. They got a taste of it at the Rox. Do you think the lynch mobs will calm down and start loving us humble jokers after you’ve roughed them up some and given them time to think about it?”

Her mind filled with images of a nat mob coming for her with torches and knives and rope, their white-dough faces twisted into hate pastries. There were dozens of them, hundreds, thousands – too many for her to deal with for all her skill and meta-human traits, surrounding her so that she could not run. Coming to kill her.

“But if you hurt them, do you not lower yourself to their level?” Desperation tinged her voice.

“If that’s so, why isn’t it lowering yourself to the level of your attacker to use violence at all?”

“Perhaps -” She looked all around now, everywhere but at him. “Perhaps we can agree to disagree, yes? I live as I do and act as I do because I have sworn to. If I cause lasting harm, if I take life, I lose what powers I have.”

“Nonsense. Your powers come from the wild card virus, not some mystic vow.”

“Please. I know what I speak of. Could – could Peregrine fly without her wings?”

Eric looked thoughtful. “I read somewhere her wings aren’t near big enough to lift her weight, and that in reality she flies by a kind of telekinesis. Sort of like the Turtle.”

“But she cannot. She cannot fly if her wings are bound, or if they are damaged. If she lacked her wings, she would not believe she could fly, and so she could not. It is the same with me.”

“But the world isn’t about what you believe. It’s about what is.”

She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “Do you truly believe that? You, who call yourself the Dreamer?”

He looked at her a moment. Then he laughed. “Got me with that one. But let’s see. I dream of a better world and ask, ’Why not?’ I don’t imagine the better world really exists, here and now, just because I dream it. That’s what I’m doing here in Fort Venceremos. Laying my life on the line alongside Colonel Sobel and the rest of the comrades to make the world that better one I dream about. Okay?”

“Perhaps I am naпve. That is why I am here, as well, to work – yes, to fight – for your better world, Eric-sonsaang. But mine is the gentle way. It must be so.”

“Let’s hope you enjoy the luxury of keeping your feet on that gentle path.”

For several minutes they ate in silence. The bunker was smaller than the one Mark shared with Croyd, lower-ceilinged. It was also neater.

“You’re fascinating,” Eric told her. “Where do you come from?”

“I was born in Korea,” she said. “My father fought with Inmun Gun – the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. He was captured during the invasion of the South. At the end of the war he refused repatriation to the North, as so many did.

“My mother was a nurse who tended him in hospital when he was stricken by appendicitis. They fell in love. When he was finally released from the internment camp, they married.”

She laid her spoon across her plate. Her appetite had faded. She chided herself: how long since you actually took food with these lips, this tongue? And he’ll think you don’t appreciate his cooking.

“I was born. My father worked in a factory. I don’t remember much about my father. When I was very small, he returned to the North. He was never happy with life in the South.”

Eric nodded. “The feverish drive to feed the insatiable appetites of Western consumer-junkie culture. The materialism and greed.”

“So I believe. My mother seldom spoke of him… we moved to the country. She ran a village clinic. I remember she was quiet, not saying much, interested only in helping people.

“My great-grandfather took care of me. He told me stories of the ancient hwarang knights and their traditions of duty and honor and skill in the martial arts – they were much like the Japanese samurai, you see. He himself was descended from the sulsa, the Knights of the Night. They were a special sect of the hwarang, an elite, trained in stealth and hidden ways. They were much like the ninja, of course, but unlike the ninja they were never outlaws. He taught me much about their ways; he did not want the skills to die.”

She gazed into the flame of the wick suspended in a bowl of fish oil that was the only light. The fire danced kata in her black eyes.

“When I was seventeen, I came to America to attend the University of California at Berkeley. My recollections become confused after that.”

“That’s fascinating, Isis,” Eric said, holding her with those beautiful eyes, “and I want to know as much about you as I can – I want to know all about you, if you’ll let me. But it wasn’t what I asked.”

He laughed gently at her crestfallen expression. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I just didn’t ask it clear enough. I wonder where you come from – here, now. How did you get into the middle of a well-guarded military base without anyone spotting you? Where do you go after you go into Meadows’ bunker? And what’s your relationship with Meadows, anyway?”

“I am Mark’s friend,” she said deliberately. “Friend” was what he termed his alter egos, after all. And she truly felt herself to be his friend, so it wasn’t a lie. “Mark’s ace ability is to… call upon us.”

Eric raised an eyebrow. “’Us?’”

“He has other such friends.”

“Yeah. Okay. I remember seeing Jumpin’ Jack Flash on Peregrine’s Perch once – one of the few times I watched TV since I left my parents’ house. He’s one of Meadows’ ’friends,’ isn’t he? And Starshine, isn’t he another?”

Pain rippled across Moonchild’s face. She stared at the planking floor on which she sat cross-legged. “Yes,” she said, all but inaudibly. She longed to pour out her loss, their loss, to this deformed and beautiful young man, to share the pain. But she sensed resistance from Mark and the others. She would not go against their wishes. Not yet.

“Did I say something wrong?” Eric asked.

“No. It was a memory a memory only”

“So how does Meadows call you? How does such a beautiful woman come into the midst of us, and where do you go when you’re gone?”

He was leaning forward, face almost touching hers. Her breath was coming rapidly, as if she had been sparring for minutes on end. Can I tell him? Can I trust him? How can I not?

Thunder detonated. Moonchild cried out and clapped her hands over her ears to keep the drums from imploding. The earth rocked. Fine red dust filtered down between the planks in the low ceiling.

She leapt up and began to dart outside, convinced the bunker was about to collapse on them both. She grabbed Eric in passing, to rush him to safety. He went limp, becoming deadweight.

She stopped. She was strong enough to have hauled him bodily out, but she didn’t want to risk dislocating his shoulder.

“Come on!” she cried. “We must get outside.”

She saw he was laughing at her. “That’s exactly the wrong response to artillery,” he said.

“Artillery?”

“Have no fear. It’s outgoing, from the 152-mm guns in the People’s Army camp next door.”

She frowned. She let him go, went up the steps made of crates to look out. The whole southern sky lit up in a yellowish flash. A heartbeat, and the noise hit her like a tidal wave. She set her jaw, made herself endure the awful sound.

“Pretty bad, isn’t it?” He was standing beside her. She could scarcely hear him for the ringing in her ears.

“Whom do they shoot at?” She thought she could see faint trails of light arcing away across the night. West, into the mountains.

“Nothing in particular. It’s just practice firing, that’s all.”

Just practice firing, that’s all. And Sarge Hamilton had said that the punji trap that injured poor Eraserhead was a relic of the War of Liberation, that the young joker’s stumbling into it had been a bad accident, happenstance of a country still recovering from a horrid military upheaval a decade-and-a-half ended.

Mark Meadows was no jungle-warfare expert. But even he could recognize green bamboo when he saw it. That punji trap was new.

At first she thought the spasm that passed through her was a product of recalling the truth of that trap, and all that it implied. A second shock passed through her, tangible as the blast from the distant guns.

Grandfather! My hour’s up! I’m about to change.

She tore away from Eric, not knowing till then that he had laid a comforting hand on her arm, running across the compound with her long black hair flying.

“Isis!” he shouted. “Isis, come back! It’s all right, the guns can’t hurt you.”

She felt tears squeeze from her eyes and whip across her temples. Her transition back to Mark was intensely personal, private. For others to witness it would be a violation.

She felt guilt at shutting Eric out. He was open with her. How could she hold a part of herself back from him – especially a part as fundamental as where she came from and where she went?

Another spasm wracked her. She almost stumbled. Her molecules were stirring, getting ready to realign themselves. The change was almost on her.

She reached the bunker, hurled herself inside, dove behind the cheap painted rice-paper screen Croyd had scrounged somewhere as a privacy shield. It was Mark Meadows who hit the palette floor. A crack like the gun-thunder echoed in his ears as air rushed in to replace the atmospheric gases that had been sucked into the transition-vortex, to make good the mass difference between compact Moonchild and gangly Mark. The screen lay across him like the wings of a big origami bird.

He picked himself up. Croyd was lying on his back on his bunk, drumming his sucker-tipped fingers on his belly. He looked at Mark with big golden eyes.

“So how was your date?” he asked.