Marked Cards Read online

  "It is a wonderful child you have, Dr. Meadows," Ganesha said.

  Belew frowned. Eyes and heart full, Mark could only nod.

  "Rudo!" a voice bellowed. "Ruuuuuudo!"

  Mark jumped. The sudden noise was like having a bulldozer crash into the Garden of Eden. He looked wildly left and right, one hand going around Sprout's shoulders, the other to the pocket that held the vials of powder in which resided his friends.

  "Looks like Mr. Crenson finally switched on CNN," Belew remarked dryly.

  Croyd appeared in the corridor, skidding slightly on the tile. Black taloned toes had burst through his shoes, and were interfering with his traction.

  "That motherfucker," he raged. "I should have killed him. I'm gonna kill him."

  Mark moved toward him. Croyd was far gone in the amphetamine psychosis of his waking phase's downside. His judgment was, to say the least, impaired.

  "Here, man, I know how you feel," he said soothingly. "But are you sure you should, like, rush into anythingr"

  Croyd glared him back. "Don't try to stop me!" he shouted. "Don't give me any of your hippie-dippy love crap! Rip his fucking arms off and beat him to death with 'em - that's what I'm gonna do!"

  "My child," Ganesha said mildly, "there is so much violence and misery in the world. Do you truly want to increase them? Would you be happier walking the path of peace?"

  Croyd held out two fingers in a V. "Peace?"

  He turned the fingers toward his face and stared between them at the guru with one burning yellow eye. "Peace on you, fatso! I'm outta here!"

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "No, I don't want a drink," Croyd Crenson cackled to the pretty mahogany-faced stewardess as the Indonesian Air Lines 747 banked over the South China Sea. He had the anechoic cavern of coach virtually to himself; there was not much demand for flights leaving Saigon these days. "But if you got any crank - "

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  In his office in the villa he occupied to keep his people - Moonchild's people - happy, Mark had a desk. It was a fine old desk, exquisitely carved of oak, imported by some colonialist and well-cherished the last few years by some Party functionary as one of the perqs of life under revolutionary socialism. It wasn't unusually big, not like the half-acre Power Desks you'd find in corporate HQs in New York - or that he imagined you'd find there, anyway - but grand withal, definitely appropriate to his dual role as President and Chancellor of Free Vietnam. Mark chose not to sit behind the desk, but beside it, in a plain wooden chair, holding his forehead with thumb and forefinger.

  The air-conditioning kept more than the awful Saigon heat at bay. It also muted the cries and chanting of the crowd of protestors outside.

  Belew stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, gazing at the well-dressed mob without the walls. "That actor still hanging around?"

  Mark nodded. A certain fading blond ingenue American actor with a penchant for trendy causes and socialist dictators had blown into town a few days before Belew. With so many of his old cronies unseated and facing indictment for things like murder and embezzlement on a Cyclopean scale, the last several years had not been kind to him. So he had come to identify himself with the dispossessed and downtrodden of Moonchild's regime: the former bureaucrats and Party members from the old days, who wanted their jobs and their privilege back.

  Like a membrane around the protest stood a cordon of police in riot gear. They weren't there to keep the demonstrators in line. They were there to keep the much larger mob of Saigon citizens beyond from falling on the Party folk and beating the crap out of them.

  "We have troubles enough," Belew said. "Maybe it's time to take up arms against them. Why don't you let me whack him, make it look like Hanoi did it. He hasn't made a decent movie for years."

  Mark stared at him. Belew, half-turned from the window, regarded him with that studied infuriating blandness he displayed when he didn't intend to let you know if he was serious or not. Mark felt a stab of fury: How dare he still test me, after all these years!

  And of course he felt instantly contrite. It's the strain, man, I'm sorry.

  Mark, came JJ Flash's voice, gende for once, you didn't say anything. No need to apologize to the man.

  He shook his head. When he glanced at Belew again, the man's expression had gone from bland to blank. The older man was trying to mask pity and concern, and that pissed Mark off all over again.

  "Forget it," he said with a wave of his hand. "The way the world media treat us, we'd get blamed for it even if Hanoi did do it, man."

  Belew laughed. "There was a time when you'd have tried to talk me out of it on purely humanitarian grounds."

  "Hanging around with you has made me worse."

  "Something else that's getting worse," Belew said, "is our old friend Colonel Nguyen, up in the Highlands. He's starting to lean on the Montagnards and make noises about bolting to Hanoi."

  "He wouldn't do that." To hang onto their own power in the face of the successful revolt of the South and increasing dissatisfaction in the North, the aging rulers of the rump Socialist Republic of Vietnam had resorted to increasingly savage repression. "They're like Nazis up there."

  "Hitler was a socialist, after all. And Nguyen probably doesn't take their kill-the-wild-cards all that personally, since he's a nat in good standing."

  "Yeah, but they're also liquidating anybody they even suspect of disloyalty. He fought against them. How can he expect they'd do anything but knife him, first chance they got?"

  Belew laughed. "The capacity for self-deception in those who believe themselves practical men of politics is limitless. It's one of the great forces of nature. Besides, as I'm fond of saying, politics makes strange bedfellows; look at our other old friend, Dong, the ex-Saigon crimelord. Since you bankrupted his racket by legalizing drugs, he's in the vest pocket of both the DEA and Hanoi, all the while running smack from the old Golden Triangle CIA plantations in Thailand."

  "So you think he's serious?"

  Belew shrugged. "He wants Moonchild to kiss him and tell him how important he is." Initially skeptical of Moonchild's leadership of the revolt, Nguyen had turned into a fervent admirer. He had spent the last couple of years growing progressively sulkier that his change of heart hadn't won him a look at what Moonchild had beneath that slinky black outfit.

  "No way, man. I've gotta find something to do with all these refugees. And the violence keeps getting worse. A gang beat an Austrian joker to death on the street in Cholon last night."

  Anti-wild card zealots were in a definite minority in the South; most Vietnamese, urban and rural alike, did not really love the jokers, but what they wanted first and foremost was to be left alone. Moonchild's regime gave them that, for the first time in at least a century.

  But the really determined few were a nasty lot. They were getting open encouragement from Hanoi and covert help from America - and no doubt from the Card Sharks.

  Belew nodded. "Somebody blew the doors off Rick's Cafe American with a hand grenade a couple of days ago." Rick's was a popular wild card hangout in downtown Saigon, off Freedom Street. "Just like the good old days. Look, why don't I make a trip up north, show the flag, lay down some law to our rambunctious colonel, reassure the 'Yards that we have no intention of letting the Viets beat up on them?"

  Mark felt tension blow out of him in a gusty sigh. Not all of it. But some. "Yeah. Would you do that? Please?" He found himself almost pleading, eyes misty that someone was sharing the strain.

  Belew started to leave, caught himself at the door, turned back. "There is something else."

  Mark felt the muscles at the back of his neck go rigid. "Not Ganesha again."

  "Listen to me. There's something very wrong with this picture."

  "It's okay, man," Mark forced himself to say calmly, "really. He's just a guest of Moonchild. It's not like he's taking over my mind or anything."

  "He's been thrown out of half the petty kingdoms in India," Belew said, "and all the not-so-petty ones. He won't
show his face in Europe any more. He's persona non grata in Hong Kong and Singapore. There's something going on."

  "What about America?"

  Belew snorted a laugh. "He's not stupid, our Hosenose. He learned from the example of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Bhagwan Rajneesh, and Dwight Gooden."

  Mark raised an eyebrow at his friend. "Okay, man. Lay it on me. What do they have in common?"

  "Got busted for being NIBCs, Mark," J. Bob said. "Niggers in big cars."

  Mark made a face. "See, man? There's the problem there. It's prejudice, man. That's why he keeps getting chased out of places. You know how unpopular the wild cards are. The Sharks are probably on his case."

  "Let's not get hypnotized, here; there'd be plenty of anti-wild card sentiment loose in the world without the help of a conspiracy."

  "Ganesha's a victim of it. He's discriminated against because he's a joker."

  "Not in India, Mark. If you draw an ace, it's because of good karma, and a joker means you're working off a mighty negative load all at once. Either way, you're holy. India's the only place in the Third World they don't treat jokers as kindling with legs. They love Hosenose there. He has upwards of two million followers scattered across the subcontinent."

  "Don't call him 'Hosenose,' man. You're making fun of his disability."

  "'Disability?' Mark, he's the spit and image of a god If there wasn't something funny going on, the Hindu kingdoms would all have put their little squabbles aside so he could rule them and lead them in squashing their Muslim neighbors."

  "He'd never do that. He's a man of peace."

  "He's a man of something, I'll grant you that." Belew shoved a dossier in a gray-green folder that lay on the corner of the desk toward Mark. "But I'm having Beelzebub's own time finding out just what. All I've gotten so far is a stack of press clippings. But I'm putting some inquiries out, to Interpol and some of my old buddies in the business. Of course, I'm having to be mighty roundabout, inasmuch as we're an 'oudaw regime' and all."

  Mark pulled his head up. "Hey! Lay off him, man."

  "I'm your national security adviser, Mark," Belew said evenly, "not to mention your chief bodyguard. You have a couple million bucks in prices on your head right now. When an ace with a mysterious past and even more mysterious powers starts hanging around the palace, it's my business to run a little background check."

  "What do you mean, ace? He's a joker."

  "So's Peregrine," Belew said, "but she sure can fly. Mark, he made a BMP disappear. I wish it had been that easy back when we were going mano a mono with the evil empire, let me tell you. And he surrounds himself with imaginary friends like the Apsarases, that you can see and talk to and even touch, and go away without a trace when he's through with them. What do you call somebody who can do things like that? David Copperfield?"

  Mark's half-open hands waved in air, shaping vague clay. "He's, like, a holy man."

  Belew sighed and sat on the corner of the desk. "You never had a guru, did you?" he asked with deceptive gentleness. "Back when the Beatles and the Who and everybody and his dog was trooping East for Enlightenment. You missed that scene, too, didn't you? You managed to get in on the peace-love-dope trip, back when everybody else was switching to burn-baby-burn. But you never did manage to jump on the old swami bandwagon."

  "Stop it."

  The words were spoken in a flat, hard tone, the way rapping a baton on the desk might have sounded. It was a voice Mark would never have believed of himself, before the last couple of years. Takis, Europe, the flight to the Nam, the war he had stumbled into leading.... He had seen many changes, in his world and in himself, and not all were for the better.

  Belew's full lips worked briefly beneath his moustache. Mark watched him, feeling his anger-spike subside. Belew was a man who generally placed his words as he did his bullets, with precision and care; but it seldom took him so long to aim either.

  "If he's a powerful ace, does that really matter?" Mark said, leaping in. "Or have you suddenly turned into an advocate of ace control?"

  Belew slapped his hands down on his khaki-clad thighs. "For an old hippie burn-out, you turn in a fair imitation of a Jesuit, Mark." He stood.

  "How would you know? You're an Episcopalian."

  "But us High-Church Anglicans are Catholic wannabes, remember. We keep a close eye on the bead rattlers. You Methodists wouldn't know about that."

  Mark laughed. Stopping going to church was perhaps the first of his few adolescent acts of rebellion. It was futile as the rest. When his father came home on leave from commanding a tactical fighter wing in Nam, he didn't even notice.

  At the door Belew paused. "'Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue,'" he said. "There's Eastern wisdom for you: Confucius his bad self."

  Polishing his wire-rim glasses on the hem of his shirt, Mark looked up at him. "With the Doc back on Takis," he said, "you're the slickest talker and the snappiest dresser I know, man."

  Shaking his hand in half-mock exasperation, J. Bob shut the door and was gone.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Faces. Who am I?

  Faces. Where am I? Where am I going? What will become of me.

  In the swirling black there is no answer: only faces. K.C. Strange with her silver eyes. Durg at-Morakh. Starshine. Eric the Dreamer. Starshine. Colonel Sobel?

  Why do you look at me? Am I you? Was I you.

  "You killed us," the faces say, a growling chorus. They are joined by more, an infinity of faces, shifting, swirling, becoming one another in a kaleidoscope display: Takisian faces, Vietnamese faces, joker faces, nat faces.

  "You killed us. And we are you."

  No!

  Other faces superimpose above the maelstrom, so close he can feel their breath: Moonchild in her black half-mask; JJ Flash; Cosmic Traveler's blue face, itself infinitely mutable, shadowed within the cowl of his cloak of stars; Aquarius' gray face, stolid, smooth, and disapproving.

  "You have trapped us," Traveler says. "We are your victims too."

  "You must release us to pursue our own karma," says Moonchild "You must not hold onto us for your own selfish purposes."

  JJ Flash says, "I wanna lie my own life. Not be a sometime stooge for a burnt-out old hippie." Aquarius says nothing at all.

  In the background, a clamor; familiar voices, vying for attention. He recognizes the chorus from the back of his skull. Aren't they already talking to him? He concentrates, looks past the faces of his friends, which scatter to the corners of the Universe with mocking laughter. Beyond them he sees ... their true faces?

  A glimpse, no more; and then a giant fanged mouth, yellow-orange with the flames of Hell and rushing toward him with locomotive speed. He smells the stink of brimstone and corruption and turns to flee -

  - He is caught up, swallowed, swept up and up and up, till he towers two hundred feet above the ground, and on his head are upswept horns, and thrusting from his loins is a hard-on the size of a Greyhound bus, and burning in his belly is the lust to slay and maim and rape the world while it lies at his feet.

  And at his feet lies Sprout, naked and cowering. He bends toward her, erection quivering, stretches out a hand with human meat decaying beneath black claws -

  "No!"

  - Mark sat bolt upright, wet as though he'd just emerged from a swimming pool, throat hoarse from the scream that woke him. Sprout, wearing a long T-shirt, clung to his neck crying, "Daddy, Daddy!" He tried to soothe her, but she could only sob.

  Then he smelled incense and heard cool music, and looked up. Ganesha stood above his bed, great ears outspread in darkness. He held forth a lotus bloom.

  "Dreamless sleep," the guru said, "is the gift of the gods. It may be attained as an elevated form of samadhi, through meditation."

  Slowly Mark unwound his clawed hands from the sheets. He slid an arm around his daughter. He held the palm of his other hand up to accept the flower.

  "Can you teach me, man?" he asked.

 
The great head nodded. "I can."

  "Hold it! Don't move!" A shout from the doorway, Western and angular and strident after the lilt of Ganesha's voice. Belew stood there in nightshirt and skivvies, holding his handgun leveled two-handed at the center of Ganesna's back.

  "It's - I'm okay, J. Bob," Mark said. "It was the dream again."

  "I gathered. What's he doing here?"

  "Just trying to help out, man," Mark said, annoyed at his friend's obtuseness.

  "Indeed. How'd he get in here? Your door's gone, Mark!"

  "I am the Remover of Obstacles," Ganesha said placidly. He smiled at Sprout, who brushed back tear-sodden bangs to smile tentatively back at him.

  "That's not much of an answer, my friend," J. Bob said, not taking the gun off him.

  "Come on, man," Mark said.

  The air around J. Bob was suddenly filled with fluttering brightness. He jumped back as they swarmed around him, lashed out with his pistol. The cold steel mass struck one. It fell to the wooden floor at his feet and lay, feebly opening and closing brightly colored, self-luminous wings.

  "You need not react so violently, my friend," Ganesha said, "inasmuch as they are only butterflies."

  A violet and yellow one landed on Sprout's nose. She giggled.

  J. Bob stood for a moment, looking at Mark through the shifting, glowing cloud. Then he let the hammer down on his pistol, turned, and stalked off to bed.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  A week later J. Robert Belew came back. Fatigue and the aching in his joints reminded him that he was not as young as he used to be. Nonetheless, he carried a glow of satisfaction in the pit of his stomach. He had reassured the Montagnards, chastised the colonel, and ambushed and destroyed a squad of North Vietnamese infiltrators. He had gotten out in the field again, and he still had his licks.

  Then he came to the former ballroom which served Mark as his audience chamber, and stopped as if a Lexan barrier sealed the doorway.

  J. Bob had never cared for the hippie hangings Mark affected to take the totalitarian edge off Moonchild's dealings with the public. They were nothing to what assailed his aesthetic sense now.

  The room was the picture of Hindu Heaven, straight out of a hopelessly garish mid-Seventies Hare Krishna broadsheet. It was all gaud and gold and ivory, well-bangled celestial maidens playing upon the flute, the kartal cymbals and mridanga drums; bright-pinioned birds and flowers everywhere of hues so bright it hurt to look at them. In the midst of it all sat Ganesha, fat and smug, with one of those beaded Indian elephant head-harnesses strung over his Indian elephant head. Next to him, eyes shut, Moonchild floated in full lotus, eighteen inches in the air.