Turn of the cards

Chapter Thirty-four

“The gloves have come off.” Colonel Charles Sobel’s voice rolled out over his assembled troops like a wave of righteousness. “The forces of reaction are on the march across the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The eyes of the world are upon us; make no mistake about that.

“And make no mistake about this: we are locked now in the fight for the rights of jokers everywhere. This is not just politics. It is survival, for everyone touched by the wild card.”

Comfortably far back in the crowd, Croyd Crenson circled thumb and forefinger and jacked off the air.

“Stop that,” Mark hissed. “Somebody’ll see.”

“No way. They only have eyes for Magic Man and his line of miracle bullshit up there.”

Left and right and to the front of them, the joker Brigaders seemed absorbed by the spectacle of Colonel Sobel in his glory. And spectacle it was: torches flaming to either side of his podium, their light writhing on his face and the painted faces and bare chests of the honor guard of joker youths that surrounded the dais.

“It’s not bullshit,” Mark insisted. The uncertainty in his eyes made his words weak.

Croyd studied him. “You’re a military brat, aren’t you? Your dad just retired as head of the Space Command, didn’t he? Old Charles is mashing all your daddy buttons at once.”

Mark flushed. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“We have learned from the mistakes of the American imperialists whose crimes we have come to atone for. We haven’t got any off-limits here, no rules of engagement to keep us from doing the right thing. We know what’s right, and by God, we will do it.”

The crowd erupted in applause and hoarse cheers and cries of, “Rox lives! Payback time!” The young recruits who made up the majority of the New Joker Brigade were skeptical and wary of the original Brigaders, if not downright hostile and the hostility was becoming daily more pronounced, especially since the Originals uniformly sneered at that optimistic slogan of the young, The Rox lives.

None of that hostility seemed directed toward Sobel. He told the boys what they wanted to hear.

Off to the side, quiet and slim in the dancing shadows, stood Eric, awaiting his cue. Mark couldn’t make himself look at him.

“We are righteous,” the Colonel thundered. “We are armored in righteousness, and we have the irresistible impetus of history behind us.

“The nats have oppressed you. And now they are trying to do it again, here in the haven provided us by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The gloves are off; you’ve all seen your brother jokers carried in on stretchers – or carried out in body bags!

“But the tide shall turn. The tide is turning, and it turns here, at Fort Venceremos! Our fight is the fight for jokers everywhere, and as the name of this base declares to the world, we shall overcome!”

As the applause erupted with redoubled violence, Mark’s mind filled with a panorama of Final Battle: nats and jokers locked in combat on a field where the mud was soaked with blood and the sky was filled with fire. The New Joker Brigade sent up a roaring crescendo of approval as the dream reached a climax of slashing and smashing and burning and crushing.

And then it was done, and a band of weary, wounded jokers, their uniforms tattered and scorched, slumped upon the weapons to survey their victory. The battlefield was drowned in blood. Nat blood.

The crowd went insane. Mark had his eyes squeezed shut and his palms pressed over his ears in a futile effort to shut the horrific visions from his brain. “That good a show, huh?” he heard Croyd comment, through his hands and the mob’s fierce ecstasy.

He dropped his hands and opened his eyes. Tears poured forth. “I don’t understand,” he sobbed. “We’re supposed to be struggling for, for brotherhood and tolerance. But here the colonel’s deliberately trying to whip up race hatred for the nats!”

He shook his head. “What’s going on, man? What’s going on?”

Croyd took his cigar from his mouth and surveyed the scene with fine amphetamine detachment. “Looks like Armageddon to me,” he said.

“You sound like you approve of all this!” Mark said, pitching his reproof to carry above the bloodlust cries of the mob.

Croyd produced a lizard shrug. “Hey, I don’t have any problem with kicking nat ass. Nats never did much for me; shit, they hunted me like a dog, back when I was being Typhoid Croyd. Croak ’em all; no scales off my ass.”

He paused, looked confused. “Except my family. But they, they’re far away. Yeah, that’s it. They’re out of it. So fuck a bunch of nats. Fuck ’em!”

He was shivering and babbling now. The hellbrew of amphetamines he was pumping through his system to fend off sleep was starting to kick him over into delirium.

Mark provided his friend with stimulants because Croyd asked him to; what Croyd did with them was Croyd’s responsibility and Croyd’s concern. Croyd the Sleeper never articulated it, but he had a deep fear of sleep, almost pathological in its intensity, and Mark knew why: there was no knowing when Croyd would wake up to find the wild card had dealt him the Black Queen. If there was one thing worse than being an enormous pink bat or a great big skink, it was being dead.

But Mark had purely selfish reasons for wanting Croyd awake. Croyd was his sole friend, his sole ally, a raft of comradeship in a strange and murderous sea. If he nodded off, for days or weeks or even months, Mark would be all alone.

There was Eric, of course. But he was Moonchild’s connection; he had no interest in Mark. Mark suspected that if Eric knew the truth about where Moonchild came from, he would not be so interested in her either. He’d care, he felt her think. He’d still care. He’s very caring.

Mark looked at Eric, discreet and powerful. He shuddered.

“Colonel? Colonel Sobel, sir?”

One of the Colonel’s flying wedge of escorts laid hard hands on Mark as he tried to intercept Sobel on his march back to his quarters. Sobel recognized Mark, nodded them off. They fell back, glaring hate.

Sobel put a hand on Mark’s shoulder, brought him along. “Walk with me, son. What’s on your mind?”

“Sir, I’m, uh – I’m not, like, trying to criticize or anything, but didn’t it seem like you were trying to stir up anti-nat sentiments with your speech tonight?”

“Hell, yes. I was.” He laughed at Mark’s confused expression. “I was trying to instill fighting spirit in a unit that’s still pretty much civilian, a unit that’s trying to cope with taking real-life casualties for the first time. You don’t do that by beating around any bushes.”

“But isn’t that racist? I thought the Brigade was about tolerance.”

“The New Joker Brigade is about two things. One: atonement. Two: survival. It’s us against the nats, son. Here in Vietnam we have a chance to carve out a sanctuary for the wild cards. A place to build a better life, based on sharing and caring, socialist discipline and solidarity. A beachhead from which to take on the whole corrupt, capitalist, white bread nat world. I don’t see much room for sentiment in that agenda. Do you?

“Besides, toleration is a dead white-male concept. It has no relevance to the oppressed. To what we’re doing here and now.”

Mark felt like crying. This wasn’t the way he’d expected it to go. And now – damn Croyd! – he felt as if he were betraying his father, in the doubts that surged unchecked through him now.

Distraught, he blurted another question that was eating at him: “Why aren’t there any Vietnamese jokers in camp?”

“There are no jokers in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

“That’s craz – I mean, that can’t be true. The wild card virus was dispersed widely enough -”

Sobel faced him, laid hands on his shoulders. “Son,” he said, “you ask a lot of questions. I appreciate how concerned you are, and I admire your ethics. Truly I do. But remember, you left the normal nat concept of civil liberties back home when you left the white-bread USA. And also remember, a lot of communities these days are taking steps to protect themselves against people asking the wrong kind of questions.”

“The wrong kind of questions?”

“Destructive questions. Insensitive questions. Questions that stir up bad feeling or dissent. A lot of our American colleges are taking the lead in that these days.

“Asking too many questions will weaken us here, what we’re doing here. That hurts jokers everywhere.”

Mark tried to speak. Words would not come.

“Don’t bother yourself with questions, son.” The Colonel smiled and patted Mark on the shoulder. “The time for questions is past.”

He walked away and left Mark standing.

Fueled by repression, desertion, ethnic and sectional tensions, and the Socialist Republic’s lack of economic progress compared to its noncommunist neighbors, full-scale guerrilla war flamed up. Determined not to be among the last few communist dominoes to topple, the Republic reacted with fury. The New Joker Brigade was thrust into the fire.

Squads began coming back to Venceremos with hairy tales of firefights and nighttime ambushes. And more. Several young-bloods began strutting around with necklaces of human ears. Swaggering talk of torture, mutilation, and village massacre made the mess-hall rounds.

Not everyone approved of the atrocity talk, among either the Originals or the new kids. There were angry words in the mess, shoving incidents, out-and-out brawls.

Then, the night after Mark and his squad had returned from a grueling two-week patrol in the Highlands, the Joker Brigade original named Tabasco was stabbed and left to die on the parade ground.

“How could that happen?” Moonchild asked. She was lying naked on her side next to Eric, beneath a blanket to fend off the surprising night chill, listening to rain drum dully on the sandbag-reinforced roof

Eric lay on his back with his hands behind his head, staring at the play of shadows thrown on the ceiling by the single fish-oil candle. “How could what happen, babe?”

“The murder of that man. Tabasco. Who would do such a thing?”

Eric shrugged. “Tabasco pressured a lot of people. He made enemies.”

Moonchild pulled herself up on one elbow. “Pressured people? How? About what?”

“Some of the things going down out in the bush. He was hung up on old times, how the New Brigade had to make up for all the bad things he and his buddies did way back when.” He shook his head. “He didn’t seem to realize that that war’s over and done with. It’s history. It has no bearing.”

She frowned. “You sound almost as if you approve of his murder.”

“When people start getting shot at, it changes them. Changes their outlook. You go ragging on them at your own risk.”

“I can hardly believe you are so callous. He was criticizing people who bragged of murder, of rape. Terrible crimes.”

He looked at her with half a smile. “Are there really such things as crimes in a war? Look, the people who are suffering are deserters and traitors. They’re a threat to the Socialist Republic.”

He put his fingers beneath her chin, raised her face. Tear-trails shone on her cheeks. “Besides, they don’t think we’re human. They think anyone touched by the wild card is a devil. They’d do worse to us.”

“Do the Vietnamese in the government think any better of us?”

He shrugged. “Probably not. But it doesn’t matter. They’re behind us, whether they love us or not. They’re giving us what we need.”

“And what might that be?”

“A place to stand, darlin’. It’s coming down Holocaust time – you should know that as well as anybody, after what your friend Meadows has been through. The nats fear us. They know what we are: homo superior. We’re the future, babe.”

“You don’t believe that!”

He raised his head to look at her. His eyes were like amber beacons, burning through her. “I do. It’s true. Look at you – aren’t you superior to any nat?”

She bit her lip, trying to order her thoughts, form a denial that would not sound foolish. “I am stronger than most nats, faster,” she said. “I can conceal myself in shadow. I recover from injury with unnatural quickness. But these things do not make me superior. Not in a moral sense.”

He laughed and laid his splendid head back down. “A moral sense? How moral is genocide? That’s what the nats have in mind – for me, for you, for all the little ace and deuce and joker babies in the world. Lights out.”

She shivered. She could feel much truth in what he said. But it did not make all that he was saying right.

“The Vietnamese are giving us a place to make a stand. A place to settle, once the fight is done. A place to build the dream.”

“Is that the coin they use to purchase our souls, then? Land?”

“Call it space, if that makes you happy. Call it tolerance; call it a fighting chance. That’s more than anyone else is even willing to offer us. So we owe them.”

“Is that all there is to it? That we ’owe’ it to them to kill for them?”

“It’s the dream, babe. The dream. It’s greater than anything – you, me, the whole Brigade.”

Her mind filled with those seductive pastoral images again – the happy, liberated jokers about their appropriate-technology pursuits. Moonchild shook her head.

“No, no, please. No more pretty pictures. We are talking about pain here, pain and killing.”

“Is that really wrong? If a toe becomes gangrenous, don’t you have to amputate it or lose the foot? If the foot gets gangrene, don’t you have to amputate it so as not to lose the leg? If the leg is gangrenous, don’t you have to cut it off or die? You don’t cut off your toe because you don’t love it. But there comes a point at which a part is beyond saving, and endangers the greater whole.”

“But a man is not a toe. He’s a life.”

“Aren’t you forgetting the Way? Aren’t you falling prey to the Western illusion that the individual is greater than the group?”

She hung her head. “We are becoming what we fight against.”

“No.” He kissed her forehead. “Can’t happen, hon. Because we’re righteous.”