Turn of the Cards

  “You saw how I dealt with Rhino. His anger and his fear of seeming weak before his peers caused him to come at me after it was obvious he could not best me, nor harm me unless I let him. I met his attacks, and finally he desisted.”

  “That’s fine,” Eric said, gesturing with his fork. “But you’re an ace, Isis. How about the rest of us, who don’t have your meta-human strength and speed and skills, and God knows what else?”

  She looked at him. She moistened her lips with a neat pink tongue. She could find nothing to say.

  “That’s why we’re needed. The New Joker Brigade. The nats aren’t going to be satisfied with their laws and their hate rallies much longer. Their thirst is only going to be quenched in a flood of joker blood — and ace blood, too, don’t jive yourself. They got a taste of it at the Rox. Do you think the lynch mobs will calm down and start loving us humble jokers after you’ve roughed them up some and given them time to think about it?”

  Her mind filled with images of a nat mob coming for her with torches and knives and rope, their white-dough faces twisted into hate pastries. There were dozens of them, hundreds, thousands — too many for her to deal with for all her skill and meta-human traits, surrounding her so that she could not run. Coming to kill her.

  “But if you hurt them, do you not lower yourself to their level?” Desperation tinged her voice.

  “If that’s so, why isn’t it lowering yourself to the level of your attacker to use violence at all?”

  “Perhaps —” She looked all around now, everywhere but at him. “Perhaps we can agree to disagree, yes? I live as I do and act as I do because I have sworn to. If I cause lasting harm, if I take life, I lose what powers I have.”

  “Nonsense. Your powers come from the wild card virus, not some mystic vow.”

  “Please. I know what I speak of. Could — could Peregrine fly without her wings?”

  Eric looked thoughtful. “I read somewhere her wings aren’t near big enough to lift her weight, and that in reality she flies by a kind of telekinesis. Sort of like the Turtle.”

  “But she cannot. She cannot fly if her wings are bound, or if they are damaged. If she lacked her wings, she would not believe she could fly, and so she could not. It is the same with me.”

  “But the world isn’t about what you believe. It’s about what is.”

  She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “Do you truly believe that? You, who call yourself the Dreamer?”

  He looked at her a moment. Then he laughed. “Got me with that one. But let’s see. I dream of a better world and ask, ’Why not?’ I don’t imagine the better world really exists, here and now, just because I dream it. That’s what I’m doing here in Fort Venceremos. Laying my life on the line alongside Colonel Sobel and the rest of the comrades to make the world that better one I dream about. Okay?”

  “Perhaps I am naïve. That is why I am here, as well, to work — yes, to fight — for your better world, Eric—sonsaang. But mine is the gentle way. It must be so.”

  “Let’s hope you enjoy the luxury of keeping your feet on that gentle path.”

  For several minutes they ate in silence. The bunker was smaller than the one Mark shared with Croyd, lower-ceilinged. It was also neater.

  “You’re fascinating,” Eric told her. “Where do you come from?”

  “I was born in Korea,” she said. “My father fought with Inmun Gun — the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. He was captured during the invasion of the South. At the end of the war he refused repatriation to the North, as so many did.

  “My mother was a nurse who tended him in hospital when he was stricken by appendicitis. They fell in love. When he was finally released from the internment camp, they married.”

  She laid her spoon across her plate. Her appetite had faded. She chided herself: how long since you actually took food with these lips, this tongue? And he’ll think you don’t appreciate his cooking.

  “I was born. My father worked in a factory. I don’t remember much about my father. When I was very small, he returned to the North. He was never happy with life in the South.”

  Eric nodded. “The feverish drive to feed the insatiable appetites of Western consumer-junkie culture. The materialism and greed.”

  “So I believe. My mother seldom spoke of him … we moved to the country. She ran a village clinic. I remember she was quiet, not saying much, interested only in helping people.

  “My great-grandfather took care of me. He told me stories of the ancient hwarang knights and their traditions of duty and honor and skill in the martial arts — they were much like the Japanese samurai, you see. He himself was descended from the sulsa, the Knights of the Night. They were a special sect of the hwarang, an elite, trained in stealth and hidden ways. They were much like the ninja, of course, but unlike the ninja they were never outlaws. He taught me much about their ways; he did not want the skills to die.”

  She gazed into the flame of the wick suspended in a bowl of fish oil that was the only light. The fire danced kata in her black eyes.

  “When I was seventeen, I came to America to attend the University of California at Berkeley. My recollections become confused after that.”

  “That’s fascinating, Isis,” Eric said, holding her with those beautiful eyes, “and I want to know as much about you as I can — I want to know all about you, if you’ll let me. But it wasn’t what I asked.”

  He laughed gently at her crestfallen expression. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I just didn’t ask it clear enough. I wonder where you come from — here, now. How did you get into the middle of a well-guarded military base without anyone spotting you? Where do you go after you go into Meadows’ bunker? And what’s your relationship with Meadows, anyway?”

  “I am Mark’s friend,” she said deliberately. “Friend” was what he termed his alter egos, after all. And she truly felt herself to be his friend, so it wasn’t a lie. “Mark’s ace ability is to … call upon us.”

  Eric raised an eyebrow. “’Us?’”

  “He has other such friends.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I remember seeing Jumpin’ Jack Flash on Peregrine’s Perch once — one of the few times I watched TV since I left my parents’ house. He’s one of Meadows’ ’friends,’ isn’t he? And Starshine, isn’t he another?”

  Pain rippled across Moonchild’s face. She stared at the planking floor on which she sat cross-legged. “Yes,” she said, all but inaudibly. She longed to pour out her loss, their loss, to this deformed and beautiful young man, to share the pain. But she sensed resistance from Mark and the others. She would not go against their wishes. Not yet.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Eric asked.

  “No. It was a memory a memory only”

  “So how does Meadows call you? How does such a beautiful woman come into the midst of us, and where do you go when you’re gone?”

  He was leaning forward, face almost touching hers. Her breath was coming rapidly, as if she had been sparring for minutes on end. Can I tell him? Can I trust him? How can I not?

  Thunder detonated. Moonchild cried out and clapped her hands over her ears to keep the drums from imploding. The earth rocked. Fine red dust filtered down between the planks in the low ceiling.

  She leapt up and began to dart outside, convinced the bunker was about to collapse on them both. She grabbed Eric in passing, to rush him to safety. He went limp, becoming deadweight.

  She stopped. She was strong enough to have hauled him bodily out, but she didn’t want to risk dislocating his shoulder.

  “Come on!” she cried. “We must get outside.”

  She saw he was laughing at her. “That’s exactly the wrong response to artillery,” he said.

  “Artillery?”

  “Have no fear. It’s outgoing, from the 152-mm guns in the People’s Army camp next door.”

  She frowned. She let him go, went up the steps made of crates to look out. The whole southern sky lit up in a yellowish flash. A heartb
eat, and the noise hit her like a tidal wave. She set her jaw, made herself endure the awful sound.

  “Pretty bad, isn’t it?” He was standing beside her. She could scarcely hear him for the ringing in her ears.

  “Whom do they shoot at?” She thought she could see faint trails of light arcing away across the night. West, into the mountains.

  “Nothing in particular. It’s just practice firing, that’s all.”

  Just practice firing, that’s all. And Sarge Hamilton had said that the punji trap that injured poor Eraserhead was a relic of the War of Liberation, that the young joker’s stumbling into it had been a bad accident, happenstance of a country still recovering from a horrid military upheaval a decade-and-a-half ended.

  Mark Meadows was no jungle-warfare expert. But even he could recognize green bamboo when he saw it. That punji trap was new.

  At first she thought the spasm that passed through her was a product of recalling the truth of that trap, and all that it implied. A second shock passed through her, tangible as the blast from the distant guns.

  Grandfather! My hour’s up! I’m about to change.

  She tore away from Eric, not knowing till then that he had laid a comforting hand on her arm, running across the compound with her long black hair flying.

  “Isis!” he shouted. “Isis, come back! It’s all right, the guns can’t hurt you.”

  She felt tears squeeze from her eyes and whip across her temples. Her transition back to Mark was intensely personal, private. For others to witness it would be a violation.

  She felt guilt at shutting Eric out. He was open with her. How could she hold a part of herself back from him — especially a part as fundamental as where she came from and where she went?

  Another spasm wracked her. She almost stumbled. Her molecules were stirring, getting ready to realign themselves. The change was almost on her.

  She reached the bunker, hurled herself inside, dove behind the cheap painted rice-paper screen Croyd had scrounged somewhere as a privacy shield. It was Mark Meadows who hit the palette floor. A crack like the gun-thunder echoed in his ears as air rushed in to replace the atmospheric gases that had been sucked into the transition-vortex, to make good the mass difference between compact Moonchild and gangly Mark. The screen lay across him like the wings of a big origami bird.

  He picked himself up. Croyd was lying on his back on his bunk, drumming his sucker-tipped fingers on his belly. He looked at Mark with big golden eyes.

  “So how was your date?” he asked.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “The Man says burn the village,” Sarge said, “we burn the village.” It was a sort of post facto mantra for him; behind them the bamboo hootches were already ablaze, sending clouds of dense smoke to join the overhang of gray.

  Sarge’s German shepherd face was grim. Behind him the squad was chatting excitedly, elevated by what had happened.

  “Did you see the looks on their dumb nat faces when we torched their shacks?” Haskell asked. His mouth tendrils waved like cheerleader arms.

  “Yeah,” the Spoiler said, marching along turning his rifle around in his hands, pointing it this way and that. His eyes shone in his backswept skull. “We really dissed ’em, man. We laid some hurt on them. Too bad we couldn’t burn some of them.”

  “Payback for the Rox begins now!” Studebaker Hawk cried, pumping his fist in the air.

  “The Rox lives!” the squad shouted. Sergeant Hamilton frowned.

  Beside the trail the elephant grass stirred, and Croyd emerged next to Sarge, popping up on his hind legs. He was the only one who could move easily through the taller-than-head-high, razor-edged grass. Sarge whipped his M-203 up to cover him, then lowered it again.

  “Whaddaya say, guy?” Croyd asked. His golden eyes were wet, gleaming bulbs in the heavy, humid air. “Just like the old days, huh?”

  “Shut the fuck up and get back in line,” the sergeant growled. Croyd giggled and vanished back into the tall grass.

  They had found deserters in the Highland village, a pair of them, teenagers with buzz cuts and skinny limbs. One of them glared angrily at the foreigners and tried to shake their hands off whenever they touched him. The other soiled himself as he was being dragged out of a hootch and curled into a fetal ball as soon as he was thrown on the ground by a pair of boys from Slumprock’s squad. He had to be prodded to his feet with the muzzle brake of an M-16 when the search was done and First Squad was ready to march them to the trucks that would carry them back to the Old Church base camp.

  Hamilton’s squad was to continue the patrol. But there was something they had to accomplish first.

  “The order has come down,” Lucius Gilbert announced, strutting around in his baseball cap. “We need to start teaching these traitors to socialism some lessons.”

  Given the daily rains, Mark was surprised how readily the hootches burned. A few white-phosphorus grenades did the trick. They burned with a prodigious quantity of smoke, while the occupants stood by watching with faces so blank that not only all emotion but all thought might have been erased from them.

  Mark marched along, bowed by the weight of his PAVN-issue ruck on its American frame and a rifle he had no intention of using. They were nothing compared to the weight on his soul.

  I’m turning into one of the people I protested against, he thought. What’s happening to me?

  If he ever hoped to recapture the golden Radical of that famed confrontation in People’s Park, he feared those hopes were dead now. His hands were blackened. His soul stained.

  But all I’m trying to do is what’s right!

  “Not always too damned easy to figure what’s right,” said Croyd, popping out of the grass at his side. He jumped, as much because he realized he was thinking aloud again as from being startled.

  “Especially when politics come into it.” Croyd had recently developed the habit of talking very rapidly. It was no surprise to Mark, who had seen it before. “People always think politics are about right and wrong. That’s crap. Politics are about power.”

  “But we’re trying to reform the world, make it a better place, man,” Mark protested. “That isn’t about power.”

  Croyd patted the receiver of his M-16. “What is it that comes out of the barrel of this baby, huh? Hey, how are you going to make the world a better place without you have power?”

  “There’s, like, good power and bad power, man.”

  Croyd laughed and slapped him on the arm. “Hey, hey, Mark my man. You’re coming right along. Pretty soon you’ll be saying there’s good murder and bad murder, huh?”

  Mark licked sweat off his upper lip and blinked very rapidly. His eyes filled with tears at the injustice of Croyd’s words. Gotta make allowances, he told himself The war between fatigue poisons and amphetamines for possession of Croyd’s metabolism was escalating.

  By the time he thought of a comeback, Croyd had slipped off in the weeds again.

  It rained for an hour and stopped, leaving everything dripping and steaming. Their patrol route took them down into jungled ridges, not canopy rain forest — you could find that, too, in the Giai Truong Son — but tall trees spaced far enough apart to let the sunlight in to produce thick, foot-tangling undergrowth, green and wet and just swollen with the scents of decay. There were as many nuances to the smell of decay in the jungle as there were shades of green. There was the lush, sweet, overbearing stink of rotting grass and leaves, fermentation, full and round and fruity, the sinus-invading cat-in-the-crawlspace staleness of animal death — just a hint, but even a hint was noticeable, impossible to ignore, like even the most discreet of tigers at the bal masque.

  Eye Ball had point this afternoon. They had reached a level spot, where the trail widened in a little clearing. The squad began to look at Sarge, who was marching more quietly than usual, hoping he’d allow them to fall out and take five.

  They had mostly filed into the clearing when Eye Ball stopped dead on its far side, near the great trunk of a tree tha
t had fallen at an angle, creating a lean-to of roots and limbs and draped lianas. He seemed to be listening, which meant he was watching with especial intentness, the eyes of his head stirring, rolling.

  Suddenly he turned and ran back across the clearing as fast as he could, clutching his rifle with one hand and signing frantically with the other.

  Sarge didn’t have to wait for Mark or Mario to translate. “Ambush!” he screamed, as flashbulb-flares began to flicker from the tented debris beneath the fallen tree.

  “Get down!” the sergeant screamed. Instead the patrol broke like a dropped plate, shattering away from the muzzle flashes into the brush on the near side of the clearing.

  Mark heard the thunk of Sarge’s grenade launcher, slung beneath the barrel of his M-16, and the crash of the 40mm round exploding off in the woods. His long nose had plowed up a little mound of black mulch just this side of a fallen moss-grown log of much more modest dimensions than the one that blocked their path through the clearing. He had no idea how he’d gotten there.

  “Man! Look at these bugs.”

  Mark’s gut spasmed. He half-rolled onto his side, bringing his rifle up awkwardly. Croyd Crenson had dropped down beside him on his belly and was staring raptly at the assortment of insect life just pullulating in the rotted wood a few inches from their noses.

  The ambushers’ guns were rattling in crowded staccato bursts, like giant woodpeckers on speed. “Christ!” Mark exclaimed. “What are you doing here? You’ll draw their fire!”

  “What? Cap’n Trips actually showing a sign of self-interest?” Incredibly, Croyd produced a stogie and lit it with a lighter from his camo fanny-pack.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mark hissed. “They’ll smell your smoke!”