Turn of the Cards

Epilogue

WHAT A LONG,

STRANGE TRIP

IT’S BEEN

“So love conquers all.”

The room was elegantly furnished, in dainty fin-de-siècle French style. Mark perched on one of the antique chairs, looking luridly out of place, like a stork in a drawing room. His cheeks were still sunburn pink from the dragon’s breath of the fuel-air blast, and his ears rang.

He was paying half attention to the television droning on: “— White House appears to be backing down from a statement made earlier today by President Bush that he was prepared to dispatch the American Pacific Fleet to prevent what he termed an ‘ace-powered criminal mastermind’ from becoming president pro tem of South Vietnam. The reassessment seems to have been prompted by the People’s Republic of China’s recognition of the breakaway Republic.

“Meanwhile the survival of the communist regime in Hanoi itself remains very much in doubt —”

Mark looked up at his guest. “At least love helps an old hippie conquer himself,” he replied.

Belew laughed. The renegade secret agent had a pair of tubular metal crutches propped by his chair and bandages on his face. He had not made a real good landing after Monster blew up in his face.

“The great work,” Belew said. “It goes on and on. ‘Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.’”

“I’ve been there, man.”

Among the other tightrope walkers over the Abyss, William “Carnifex” Ray was lying under guard in a Saigon clinic formerly reserved for Party officials and their families. He was in much worse shape from his aerial adventures than Belew was. Without his body’s ability to regenerate he would have been dead, crippled at the least. As it was, the Medecins sans Frontières doctors expected him to make a full recovery over time.

Crypt Kicker’s condition was stable: he was dead. Whether his condition was critical or not was a different matter. His lightning-blasted corpse lay in a cold drawer in the Saigon city morgue. The bemused attendants were under instructions to open up if they heard knocking.

Croyd Crenson lay in a bedroom here in Mark’s official Saigon residence. He was still sound asleep.

“How do you feel?” J. Bob asked Mark.

“I feel strange. Soiled, somehow. Evil. I didn’t know I had all that in me.”

“Everybody has that in ’em, son,” Belew said. “You’re just the only one who has such an impressive means of letting it out.”

He slapped Mark on the arm. “Just think of all the anger you managed to work out of your system. Does wonders for you, they say.”

Mark grimaced.

“Some people say no one ever won a fight,” Belew said. “They lie. But there’s always a cost. Always a butcher’s bill. You pay a price in blood, whether you’re scratched or not.”

He walked over and touched Mark on the shoulder. “Time for a change,” he said softly. “Your public’s waiting.”

“Thanks,” Mark said.

Belew gathered up his crutches and left the room. I hope I don’t have to kill him someday, Mark thought.

Mark looked toward the window. The night had come down outside. It was time for the new president to address her constituents.

He took his hand from his pocket, held the vial it held up to the light. Black crystals swirled among silver. He brought it to his lips, hesitated. He would never take one of the potions again without that moment of fear, that glass-breaking instant of decision.

He took the potion.

A moment later Moonchild bent to turn off the television. “Goodbye, Eric,” she said. There was no pain in the space he had occupied in her soul. Just void. “The Dream is in my hands now.”

She stepped to the French doors that gave onto the balcony. She could feel the adulation of the crowd coursing through them like benevolent radiation. Like the healing rays of the moon.

The opportunity before her was great: to turn South Vietnam into a safe haven for all those touched by the wild card; to lay the foundation for a better world. To give peace a chance, the way the song said.

It was also terrible. A fleeting glimpse of such opportunity as this had led Sobel and Eric astray. Had led them to mortgage their souls, to become in the end that which they had dedicated themselves to struggling against.

But we know well always try to do what’s right, Mark said from just below the surface of her mind. We won’t give in to the temptations of power Won’t make all the same mistakes.

Yeah, J. J. Flash thought. Right.

The white jetliner turned its nose wheel into a quicksilver pool of sun-shimmer on the Tan Son Nhut runway and stopped. Mark’s motley honor guard of jokers, Montagnards, and ethnic Vietnamese snapped as close to attention as they ever got. Feeling his heart going all light and drifty in his chest, Mark looked left and right at them and thought it was a good thing he didn’t take this presidential trip too seriously.

Especially since he wasn’t actually the president.

The ramp was wheeled up to the door of the plane. It opened. A slim young woman in jeans and a white T-shirt with teddy bears on it came down the steps. Her long blonde hair gleamed in the sun.

Mark craned his head, looking past her. Then he looked more closely at her. She was studying him with a puzzled look.

They broke toward each other, running gangle-legged and careless, hit and hugged, their tears mingling.

“Daddy!”

“Sprout!” He hugged her again, then held her away to look at her. “Honey, you look all grown up now.”

She threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I didn’t recognize you. You look so strong.”

“I’ve been getting lots of exercise, honey,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s get you out of the sun.”

“Daddy, I love you.”

He felt tears sting his eyes. He smiled. “Honey, I love you too. More than anything in the world.”

THE VIETNAM WAR

A Personal Statement

I did not go to Nam. I was too young (just). I could have arranged to, had I worked at it, but the truth is I didn’t want to.

In the sixties and seventies I had two feelings about the War:

First, I thought the American involvement in Vietnam was wrong, from a moral, political, and military point of view. It’s no reflection on those who fought there; they didn’t make the policy.

Second, I thought communism was a bad thing. I did not support the government of North Vietnam. I simply believed that the U.S. government had no business spending our lives and treasure trying to make other people behave the way it wanted them to.

Nothing has happened since the end of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to cause me to amend those views.

This book is not an expression of nostalgia for the war I missed; I’m glad I missed it. It is not a working-out of some weird national angst over the War. It isn’t a “Vietnam War book.” It’s a thriller — I hope, anyway — and a WILD CARDS novel. It’s set in 1991, not 1967. I hope people will approach it on its own terms.

VICTOR MILÁN

May 11, 1992