Turn of the Cards

Chapter Forty-one

Moonchild flinched as the TV spots hit her. She felt the exposed skin of her face redden under their assault. She could not endure them long, she knew. She would make herself stand them long enough.

“We, the Revolutionary Oversight Council for Free Vietnam, have agreed upon a platform of goals. We seek to secure freedom for the people of Vietnam, freedom in its many forms. These include first and foremost the freedom of conscience, the freedom of expression, the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labors…

She could feel the skepticism of the small but dedicated band of reporters on the other sides of the lights and glass camera eyes. Crews from CNN, CBS, RTL, and the French national news agency had all made their way to this former mining camp in the jagged spine of the Chaîne Annamitique, plus some print media. J. Bob had set it up, of course; he had contacts everywhere.

Belew sets so much up, she thought as her mouth transferred words from paper to sound. Maybe it is too much.

The statement was brief, indicating nothing of the hours of violent wrangling that had gone into its composition. It was tough enough to keep the ethnic-Vietnamese factions, such as the Cao Dai and the Annamese separatists, the Hoa, and the Montagnards, from trying to cut one another’s throats, let alone agree on anything. The minorities were no more tractable than the haughty Vietnamese. Even though FULRO, the Unified Fighting Front of the Oppressed Races — represented by Belew’s friends Bert and Ernie — had existed since the sixties, when it fought both the VC and the South Vietnamese government, its Cambodian and Montagnard members feuded incessantly with each other. They only gave it a rest when they combined to beat up on the Muslim Cham of the coastal region.

The coalition’s continuance required Moonchild’s all-but-constant presence as peacekeeper. In the early days she repeatedly found it necessary to wade in physically to break up fights or keep an overly aggressive debater under control — as she had done with Colonel Nguyen, now one of her most vehement supporters. There was less of the physical stuff now — the ability to take on an opponent who had the drop on you with a gun and win deeply impressed the Vietnamese, who had enough intimate acquaintance with deadly force to know that sort of thing belonged normally in the movies. But she was still an all-but-indispensable control rod, whose presence was necessary to keep all those hot rebel heads from achieving critical mass.

It meant that Revolutionary Council meetings had to take place at night for the highly UV-sensitive Moonchild to be able to attend. Fortunately night is the natural medium of conspirators and rebels; no one thought twice about it. Her playing the part of sulsa, a ninja-esque Knight of the Night, only enhanced her status among the rebels. It only built the legend, the mystique — with, inevitably, more than a little help from J. Bob Belew.

But it also meant that Mark often had to take his Moonchild powder more than once a night. Playing the sporadic presence, who appeared mainly when and as she was needed and was otherwise not seen, added fabric to Moonchild’s cloak of mystery. Sometimes, though, she had to come and stay for more than an hour, to maintain her credibility and prevent internecine bloodshed.

Mark had long ago learned that doing one of his personae even twice in a twenty-four-hour period had savage aftershocks, mentally and physically. His island-hopping passage of the Aegean as Aquarius had left him weak and sick and talking in voices other than his own for several days. The time Isis Moon was spending expressed was taking a toll on Mark and all his friends. Not even Moonchild’s healing powers could make up the costs.

And he was far, far away from reliable sources of the drugs that made up his powders. He had Belew funneling stuff to him from old connections in the Golden Triangle drug trade. J. Bob would not vouch for their purity. That made Mark happy, yes indeed.

Moonchild finished, looked up for questions. As Belew had warned her, they weren’t friendly.

“What about the environment?” a reporter asked. “How can a supposedly free regime protect the environment from pollution and exploitation?”

She smiled slightly. She feared Belew was a devil, but he was a cunning devil, she had to admit. Remoteness, and the consequent difficulty to government forces seeking to decapitate the rebellion, was only one of the reasons for selecting this site for the press conference.

“Did you look around yourselves on your way in, please?” she asked. “You must have seen the great scar gouged out of the side of the mountain. This was a strip-mining camp. There are many such across Vietnam, just as there are horribly polluted factory sites and clear-cut forests. To the Socialist Republic, Nature is something to be subjugated and exploited with a ruthlessness unknown to even the most rapacious capitalists of the West. Everyone has seen the terrible environmental costs this philosophy exacted in the former East Germany. The same heedless forces are at work here.”

“What about the homeless?” another reporter asked quickly, eager to drop that subject.

“The government of the Socialist Republic has created homelessness, not combated it. Its housing policies have fallen greatly short of meeting the needs of its urban populations. Its solution has been to try to herd unhoused masses into khu nha moi, New Economic Zones, which are no more than the old New Life Hamlets that were such a shame of the former South Vietnamese regime. You would call them concentration camps. And to create these New Economic Zones, the Socialist Republic has forcibly displaced minority populations such as the Hmong, the Nung, the Muong, and the Khmer. Such displacement, by the way, has been defined as genocide by the United Nations.

“Understand, also, that as in the USSR, in the Socialist Republic indigence is a crime. People you would see living on the streets in the West are here arrested and shipped to trai cai tao, reeducation camps. As with the environment, Free Vietnam cannot offer magical solutions. We can promise to be less brutal and ineffectual than the current regime.”

The journalists shifted and rumbled. Moonchild felt stirrings of contempt for them, and put the feelings down with shocked surprise and self-reproach. But while the facts she had recounted were news to her and Mark, these people had to have seen their truth before, have known them. But they chose to act as if they were untrue, and to present that pretense to the public as fact.

She was beginning to understand Belew’s virulent contempt for the media. It made her uncomfortable, as agreeing with the ultraconservative spook always did.

She moistened her lips, which felt not just dry but strange, as if they were developing cold sores. She hated the lights.

“Are there any more questions?”

“Why do they want me for their spokesperson?” Moonchild asked, picking her way down the steep slope. She saw better at night, by moon or starlight, than she did in artificial illumination. But the mountainside was brushy, the footing unreliable.

“Let me count the ways,” Belew said. He was actually moving with more confidence than she. It did not occur to her that for all her intrinsically superior physical abilities, he was the one with experience of the land. She just took the fact as a reproach. “You’re an ace. You’re beautiful. You’re charismatic. You’re photogenic. And you’re not Vietnamese. The Viets are adept at not taking the rap for their mistakes — look at what they did to us Americans. If the rebellion pulls a rock, they can point their finger at a foreigner and say, ’It’s all her fault.’”

“Oh.” She misstepped, slipped, caught herself on her hands as gravel slid rattling away from beneath her feet. “I am sorry. I am so clumsy.”

“A gentleman never disagrees with a lady,” Belew said, extending a helping hand, which she declined. “Fortunately I know when not to be a gentleman. Nonsense, dear child. You are far more coordinated than any nat or most aces. You’re simply upset and fighting yourself.”

She stood upright again, came close to him. “If you know so much, tell me what I am!” she whispered fiercely.

“You’re what would be called, in the current vernacular, a babe.”

She clenched her fists. “No! You know what I mean. Why could I not speak Korean when Kim addressed me?”

“Maybe because you’re not Korean.”

She felt her knees lose all cohesion, as if the collagens binding her sinews had dissolved. Even the stars, stabbing down hard as needles through clear thin mountain air, could not heal her with their ancient light. She felt a stab of Mark’s remnant dread of them.

“What am I?” she whispered. The escort of jokers and Khmers Rouges slipped and slid past them down the trail, eager to put as much mountain up-and-down between themselves and the press-conference site as they quickly could.

“What am I?” she asked, tears running down her cheeks.

“I don’t know, darlin’. What do you think you are? How do you account for being trapped inside the six-four male body of the world’s Last Hippie?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something must have happened. To me and the others. We were … lost. Somehow we found — shelter — in Mark’s psyche.”

“Did you lose your grasp of Korean along with your separate existence?”

“What are you trying to do to me?” she sobbed.

“Trying to lead you to the truth,” he said with quiet intensity. “I don’t know what it is. But if you just wander, and wonder, and don’t try to confront the facts of who and what you are — whatever they are — you’re never going to hold up. You’ll lose your center. And with it the resistance will lose its own.”

She covered her face with her hands. “You think Mark has — what do you say? — a split personality.”

“‘Multiple-personality disorder’ is the current catchphrase, unless they changed it again while I wasn’t looking.”

She grabbed his biceps. “I’m a fantasy, then? I don’t exist?”

“Mu,” he said evenly. “Zen negation. That question was never asked, the way the rōshi Jōshū unasked the question of whether a dog has Buddha nature. Was it a fantasy that shattered Colonel Nguyen’s .45-caliber manhood into a zillion pieces? Is it a fantasy that’s about to pinch my arms in half?”

“Oh,” she said. She let go and stepped back. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe it’s time you quit hiding behind apologies. Where’s Mark, right this instant?”

She placed a hand between her breasts. “Inside.”

“All right. When you’re not here, where are you?”

“Inside … Mark.”

“That’s right. So, is Mark unreal?”

“No.”

“Are you?”

“But, Mark is the real one. He becomes us”

“Bullshit.”

She shut her mouth.

“Mark is the baseline personality, as he calls himself What’s the difference? You don’t lose your consciousness when you’re inside him, now, do you? I know he hears the voices of all of you. Once in a while he even speaks in them.”

She hung her head, felt the tears drip from her eyes. “That’s true.”

“So you never don’t exist. It’s just that sometimes you have no physical reality. Visible, anyway — I sure as heck am not pretending to understand the mechanics of your coming and going.

“Look, child. You are real, you are here. How can it matter where you really came from, or what you’re doing here? You’re a fact. And if you let brooding about an unanswerable question like who you really are — and who on Earth can ever wholly answer that question, anyway? — if you let that dissolve you, you are going to leave a whole lot of people who depend on you sinking without a life preserver.”

She began to tremble. He put his arm around her. She stiffened, then stopped fighting the contact and melted against him.

“Isis. Isis, do you feel me?”

She went rigid. Belew held her, firm but not constricting. His left hand was a bandaged stump again; he’d been up to tricks, which was why the government-owned mine site was available for the rebels to hold a press conference in.

“Isis, where are you?”

Eric?

“Accept no substitutes.”

Eric, what’s happening to me?

“An attack of conscience, maybe?”

I’m doing the right thing.

“Really? Then where’s all that grief coming from? All that guilt? I can feel it there, down inside you, surging like a black, stormy sea.”

You really are a poet, Eric.

“I’m the voice of your conscience, hon. Do you feel good about what you’re doing?”

Yes

“Then why do you weep so, my love? You’re helping the exploiters, the bigots. The ones who want to see us burn, to see our joker flesh blacken and shrivel from our bones”

She felt an image begin to form in her mind, an image bright with flame. She pushed it down.

“What? You’re fighting me? Can’t you bear to see the truth?”

I won’t be manipulated anymore. Not even by you. No matter how good your reasons are, I won’t have it.

The glow came back, persisted, grew. She shook her head, fighting. Her body began to tremble uncontrollably. Flashes of light were stabbing in her head, themselves threatening to white out the dream Eric was trying to force into her mind.

“You can’t run forever, baby. You can’t hide. Just as your ragtag reactionary lynch mob can’t play keep-away with us and the People’s Army forever. We will win. We are righteous.”

“Why won’t you come back where you belong?”

She turned her head aside, vomited all over Belew’s arm. “Isis, what’s happening to you?”

“What’s happening to me?” she screamed.

Belew wrapped both arms around her and threw himself sideways, dragging her off the trail. The two went rolling and bouncing down the mountainside.