Turn of the Cards

Chapter Ten

Mark sat beneath a cypress tree like bonsai on steroids with his knees up under his chin and watched the last fingernail fragment of sun, red and not particularly bright, disappear into the horizon. He shivered, though it wasn’t cold. He wasn’t even wet; Aquarius had grumpily emerged from the water before returning to Mark-form, and Aquarius’ slick delphinoid skin shed water.

He still felt waterlogged, the way he always did after taking Aquarius out for a spin. It was something he had never done that often; there was water all around Manhattan, but not so you’d want to swim in it. Besides, Aquarius resented the baseline Mark persona worse than any of Mark’s other friends. There was always a chance that he’d take it in mind to just swim way out of sight of land before making the transition back.

It was a risk Mark was taking now, again and again. Ironically the silvery-gray powder that summoned Aquarius was the cheapest and easiest to make of Mark’s five potions — four, now. So he had made up an especially large number of doses of it, back in Athens, figuring he might have to try to split via water. The Aegean was ideal for that, dotted as it was with small and mostly uninhabited islands like this one. Aquarius’ dolphin-form could swim at just upward of twenty knots — Mark had once gotten Tach out in the Hudson in a boat to time him — and that meant he could island-hop, taking time out as Mark to recuperate.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash could fly a lot faster than that of course. But, small as he was, a flying man was not exactly inconspicuous. And being J. J. took a lot out of Mark, emotionally as well as physically. Jumpin’ Jack lived with an intensity Mark found almost as alien as the mind of Aquarius’s dolphin-form. When he was J. J. Flash, it really was like being on a drug trip, a sort of blazing speedball rush.

Mark opened the fluorescent green fanny-pack he’d bought way back in Rome. Aquarius, human or Tursiops, was bulkier than Mark; when he made the transition, he somehow sucked up enough ambient matter to make up the difference: air primarily, but also things like personal effects. It was a handy way to carry things.

Inside the fanny-pack were a mess of extra vials of powder, some figs, and a few Mars bars. Mark knew from experience that he had to get his blood sugar up in a hurry after being either Aquarius or J. J. Flash, or get the shakes real bad, plus nausea and dizziness. If Aquarius hadn’t scarfed a lot of fish en route, he’d be barely conscious now.

Mark stuffed his mouth with a whole candy bar, realizing suddenly just how hungry he was. He ate some figs, and another Mars bar, and felt better.

But by then the sun was completely out of sight, leaving only a glowing green band across the horizon. Overhead the stars were beginning to open like tiny demon eyes. There were no clouds in sight to cover their malevolent gaze.

Mark burped softly, wiped a chocolate smear from the side of his mouth and mustache, and gazed ruminatively into his pack.

For most of his adult life Mark had sought shelter from the stresses of existence in chemicals. That was why his drug of choice was marijuana. He wasn’t interested in the artificial self-esteem of coke — self-esteem was pretty alien to his experience, and he wasn’t comfortable with it, and besides coke gave him shooting pains in his chest and made him honk like a Canada goose when he talked — nor in the edge you got from speed. He was mainly into taking edges off. He didn’t like needles, which mostly let heroin out, and besides he had a basic middleclass hippie prejudice against being a junkie, plus real concern about heavy physical habituation. His use of psychedelics he’d always regarded as experimental.

When he had to say, “Gimme shelter,” he’d turned to his old friend Mary Jane. Then Sunflower — Kimberly Anne Cordayne Meadows Gooding — had turned up suing for Sprout. For the first time in his life Mark had had real problems. He faced them cold-turkey. He came off the grass at the suggestion of Jokertown’s joker lawyer Dr. Pretorius. He had spent the first couple of weeks after the trial ended drunk, but that was a phase; he had basically spent the last two years clean and sober, as the yuppies say.

He’d scored himself some hash in Amsterdam, but that was mainly because he was bored after the constant fear-and-culture-shock rush of Takis and also because he was in Amsterdam, and that was what you did there. It had been dabbling, like a retired tennis pro who turns in a couple of sets occasionally for nostalgia’s sake.

Now the night was coming, and he wanted to hide. Not that he could hide completely; there was no overhead shelter except for these scraggly cypress trees. But creative chemistry would offer him shelter — if only a temporary one.

What’s the big deal about the stars? he tried to tell himself. What’s to be afraid of?

The answer, unfortunately, was death.

As a kid he’d loved comics. He’d grown up thrilling to the four-color adventures of Jetboy and the Great and Powerful Turtle — no Superman for him; he was only interested in actual aces, even though he understood their exploits were mostly made up by Cosh Comics or whoever held the license. He had wanted, more than anything in the world, to be a Hero, like the ones he read about.

That was the spring which drove him in his long search for the Radical. It was the obsession that had shaped the expression of his personal ace. He had become not one Hero but five.

— And yet, and yet. They weren’t him. At least, he could not accept that they were. He formed a theory that his “friends” were real, actual individuals, from alternate realities, perhaps — he was a science fiction fan, too, of course — whom he had somehow, unknowingly, abducted and trapped within the recesses of his own psyche. They seemed to buy that explanation too; the Traveler and J. J. Flash were always trying to figure out ways to spring themselves, or at least establish themselves as baseline persona instead of Mark, and Moonchild had the expressed goal of liberating all of them, Mark included, so that each could work out his or her own karma.

So while each of them performed many deeds that might be called heroic — J. J. Flash fighting in the raid on the Astronomer’s headquarters in the Cloisters, Moonchild defeating the gene-engineered Takisian killing machine Durg at-Morakh, Starshine deflecting a killer asteroid set on a collision course with Earth by the unholy alliance of the Swarm Mother and Tach’s dashing cousin, Zabb — Mark was adroitly able to escape taking credit for any of them.

Then the last two years happened. Sunflower came back into his life. The custody battle began. Mark not only went off the dope, he did the unthinkable: put the purple tailcoat and top hat out on the curb with the trash and retired Cap’n Trips. One final dose of blue powder had permitted him to escape the courtroom and the friendly clutches of the DEA, but after that he was cold-turkey — on his own.

It had not been easy. He had done things he was not proud of. But he had survived. On the streets and on the Rox. Alone. Without chemical crutches of any kind.

The time had come to call his friends back, to rescue his daughter from the living hell of a New York kid jail. But it was different, then. It wasn’t J. J. Flash or Starshine or Moonchild acting the hero on their own. Mark was the director, the initiator, deploying his friends like a combat commander his troops.

Of course combat had its casualties. He’d left the woman he loved dead by the side of a New Jersey road, fatally injured by the hand of Tach’s grandson, Blaise. And he had left Durg there, too, telling him that he was free, that he belonged now to no master but himself…

Yes, and that was the worst loss of all. He had not understood, though Durg had tried to tell him, that a Morakh could not be free, that they were bred to require servitude as they needed air and water. So Durg, the ultimate bodyguard, designed by Takisian genetic scientists to be master of the arts, not just of combat, but of strategy and diplomacy as well, had transferred his loyalty to the best available master.

Perhaps ten million Takisians had died as a result. Payback for the wild card, with interest, if only Mark could think that way. He couldn’t. Blaise had taken Doctor Tachyon’s body, with the mind of Kelly Jenkins trapped inside, and with Durg in tow as his adviser, had stolen Baby and headed back to Takis. Tachyon, trapped in Kelly’s body— impregnated by Blaise’s repeated rapes — had gathered his three dearest human friends and gone in pursuit.

Since then Mark had done wonderful things. He. Mark.

He had passed a test his boyhood idol Turtle had failed, stepping aboard the Network scoutship in the White Sands desert. The ship was too small to accommodate the Turtle’s shell, and Tommy, for all his proven love and loyalty to Tach, had been unable to leave it behind.

He had flown across the unimaginable distances of interstellar space, and found out spaceflight was mainly boring as hell.

He had taken part in the glittering, bloodstained intrigues of Takis, had helped commit murder, had seen the inside of a hareem that made the Thousand Nights and A Night seem tame. He had helped a woman — who was also his best male friend — give birth. He had fled with a captive princess across a snow-covered mountain range as mighty as Earth’s Himalayas. He had flown on the back of a winged predator the size of a Cessna.

His friends had been there. But he had made the tough decisions.

He had engaged in a wrestling match with Zabb, a Takisian warrior who made Errol Flynn look like a wimp. He had taken part in a desperate commando raid against an enemy castle. He had fought a battle in space.

And he had died.

Starshine, the poet with the wavy blond hair and jutting jaw, so politically correct he was actually solar-powered, was probably the most potent physically-oriented ace Earth had produced — Fortunato was more powerful still, but his powers were of the mind, of a scope and breadth even the Takisians had trouble grasping. Starshine was nearly as strong as Golden Boy, and he could fly through space at the speed of light and fire sunbeams from his hands. He was also a pain in the ass.

He was brave, though. In the battle with the Network he had fought a Ly’bahr cyborg, an alien brain encased in a body like a miniature battleship. He had done what no other being was ever known to have accomplished: defeated a Ly’bahr one-on-one in personal combat.

Unfortunately there were two of the cyborg legionnaires. The second had wrenched Starshine’s leg off at the hip.

He died. Up above the world so high, where night always was. Where the stars never shut their eyes.

Mark had survived, somehow, and the magic of Takisian technology had made him whole again. His body anyway. The mentatic magic of Tachyon’s sister Roxalana had given him back the power of speech. She’d used a different kind of magic, to give him back something he hadn’t been able to identify yet. He was grateful anyway.

But he had not been able to face the stars. The stars that killed him.

He held up a vial. The powder within was black and silver, swirled together.

There was no hiding from the stars now. But night was Moonchild’s element. He didn’t have enough of the black-and-silver vials to take him all the way through to dawn, even if he wanted to burn them all up. But if he had to face the night, he could at least ease into it.

Besides, Moonchild had the power of self-regeneration, and now that he was over his hunger attack, he was becoming acutely aware of the pain that stabbed him in the side with every breath. It was time to heal the damage Mistral had laid on J. J. Flash in the Parthenon.

If they gave out black belts in rationalization, you’d have a third dan. It was J. J.’s voice, way back in his head.

He smiled.

So fucking what, J. J.? He uncorked the vial and tossed its contents back.

On the foreshore the woman dances through the stations of her art. She is small and finely formed. Her black hair falls unbound to her shoulders. She wears a formfitting garment of black and silver; a black half mask is yang to the yin of her face.

She dances the first Ki-Cho, simplest and most bluntly physical of the Poom-Se forms. She is stretching her muscles after long disuse, blowing the dust from her neuromuscular pathways. She slides her right foot forward and fires her right fist in a middle punch as a kiai explodes from the center of her, then cocks her left foot and snaps ninety degrees into a low block. Then step forward, punch, reverse, block, step forward, punch, the ancient dance, and activity and long familiarity begins to soothe the fear that yammers in her hindbrain and makes even her warrior’s heart flutter.

She consummates the first Ki-Cho, segues smoothly into the next, and next, and then on to the Tae-Kook forms, the shadowboxing, in which combat is more realistically acted out. Then, when she is warmed and energized and her body is well oxygenated, she moves on to Pal-Gwe, the forms of Law and harmony, the active meditation that reconciles the three Do: Heaven, Man, and Earth.

Rest easy, Mark, my older brothers, she thinks, controlling her breath so that active calm suffuses her selves. Now we have nothing to fear from Death. We have transcended, passed through the Flame, stepped through the Gateless Gate.

Don’t fear the stars. What can they do to us, who have died and risen again?

The moon comes up, laying a silver path upon the water. Where its rays touch her, her skin tingles and grows warm. The pain in her ribs fades, is gone. All that remains is serene exaltation, and motion, and the wind on her cheek, and the smells of sea and cooling soil and grass and trees, and the moon’s mother love.

Mark took a deep, shuddering breath as he came back to himself. Moonchild sure gets herself a heck of a workout, he thought. He lifted his head from between his bony knees.

The stars stared him in the face, unwinking.

He looked at the sky for a long time. I wonder if those three stars in a row down by the horizon are Orion’s Belt, he thought after a while. He had owned a telescope as a kid, a simple little Tasco three-inch refractor, and had been an avid amateur astronomer. But it had been a long time, and anyway he’d never quite been able to get the hang of the constellations.

He wished Sprout were here to see it with him. When I get somewhere the DEA can’t trace me, 171 have to send her a postcard, let her know that I still love her and that I miss her If there was any such place on Earth.

He stood up, batted the loose earth off the seat of his pants, and trudged up to the top of the promontory that dominated the tiny island. He needed some heavy-duty sleep, and he didn’t want to be soaked in case a tide came in.