Turn of the Cards

  “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.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Moonchild got a soft-slippered foot into Belew’s gut as she rolled onto her back, pulled him over her and launched him into the night. Then she caught herself, stopped rolling.

  She got to all fours. Her arms and legs were shaking so hard, it felt as if she would fly apart. She vomited again.

  She heard brush stir. Belew was coming back. She had no idea why he was assaulting her. Perhaps his conservative machismo was driving him to rape. She tried to get up, to fight or flee, but her body would not respond.

  Then his arms were around her again. Go away! she wanted to shriek. But she could not produce words.

  A whistling of wind, a stinging inrush of debris, and it was Mark huddling in Belew’s arms, shivering violently.

  “Now you see what I was up to?” the spy asked softly. “I thought you might still consider that transition a private matter.”

  Mark spat to clear his mouth. “What happened, man? The change never hit me that hard before!”

  “Moonchild’s having an existential crisis, in a way the Existentialists never dreamed of. Her emotional state made the transition bad. Also —” he shook his head — “it was as if something else was eating her, as if she was listening to something from far away, that was riling her up more.”

  Mark tensed, forced himself to relax. He knows too much. He sees too much. Can I trust him?

  Do I have any choice?

  You always got a choice, bunky, J. J. Flash finished for him. Mark made himself shake his head. “I don’t remember anything about that, man,” he said, “just that she was upset.” As always the lie tasted like copper in his mouth. He’d always hated the taste of lies.

  Belew stood up, helped him to his feet. “How are you handling it?”

  “I … I don’t know.” That tasted of truth. “I’m gonna have to sort this out”

  To the north the sky lit, silhouetting the hunchbacked peak they had just skirted in white. A moment later a rumble reached them, through the ground and cold air. The sound and lights went on and on, pulsing irregularly.

  “Air-strike!” Mark cried. He tensed to run.

  Belew touched him lightly on the arm. “No. It’s okay. Sov-bloc planes don’t fly at night. It’s artillery.”

  He stood for a moment to watch the display. “Our unbiased, impartial media friends ratted us off to the People’s Army. What did I tell you?” He preened his mustache with a thumb.

  “I know it’s bad of me…” he said. His teeth were white beneath his well-tended brush. “But is it too much to hope a few of them got caught in the barrage?”

  Torches sent strange, misshapen shadows chasing each other between tents and bunkers like imps in a Bosch painting. Jokers swarmed around the two men making their way into the belly of Fort Venceremos, half-naked, sweat-slimed, painted or scarred when they weren’t feathered or scaled or otherwise disfigured by the wild card.

  “Aces, aces, let’s get in their faces,” chanted a joker. He brandished a torch in a fist covered all over with short bristles.

  “I hear you, man,” another jeered. “Aces are just nats with some spice.”

  “Just meat, man.”

  “Gimme six.”

  “You wave that fucking torch
in my face anymore,” said the man in white, “and you’ll fucking eat it.”

  He was about medium height, beefy in shoulder and chest. His tight-fitting white suit had the black hood thrown back at the nape. His dark hair was short. His eyes were green, dangerous, and not on the same level. His face seemed to have been assembled from whatever parts were to hand in a bin. He walked with a hitched and swaggering gait.

  They came to the parade ground, passing between poles. He tossed a thumb at the white-bleached human skulls that topped them. “I kind of get behind your decor, though.”

  His partner just lumbered silently at his side. He was taller by a head. From the mask that hid his face to his pointy-toe cowboy boots he was dressed entirely in black. Except for the white straw cowboy hat with the peacock feather in the band, of course.

  A teenaged joker planted himself solidly in their path. He had torches in his outstretched hands and a face whorled like a thumbprint. The skin on his bare chest and arms was normal human skin. As if to counteract that, he had cut vertical gouges in his torso from collarbone to the waist of his jungle-cammie trousers.

  “So you’re the mighty aces from back in the World,” he said. “Hear me: we don’t like aces. And we aren’t part of your fucking world anymore. We got our own New World Order, here. It looks like you just don’t belong.”

  “Oh, no?” the man in white said. “We’ll see about that, asshole.”

  The tall man took off his cowboy hat and handed it to him. Then he grabbed his mask by the crown and pulled it off.

  The joker screamed.

  The crowd surged back. Someone turned and vomited. The whorl-faced joker dropped his torches and ran.

  The man in black had half a face. From the onlookers’ point of view it was unfortunate he had any. What remained looked like hamburger that had been left on the counter for three-four days and then set afire with charcoal starter.

  “Now that we got that out of the way,” the white-clad man said, handing back the hat, “we got an appointment with your boss. Now, do you let us get to it, or do we start kicking your ugly asses?”

  He laced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “I’d really hate that,” he said. “It’s not professional to put pleasure before business.”

  “Gentlemen.” Colonel Charles Sobel rose from behind his broad, empty desk. The exacting order of the photo-crowded office made it seem an island of sanity in the chaotic sea of Fort Venceremos. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here.”

  Then he tipped his head to the side, and his noble Doug MacArthur profile took on some wrinkles. “What’s that smell?”

  The man in white jerked a thumb at the one in black. “Him. He’s dead. Or didn’t you know that?”

  Sobel rubbed his chin, nodded slowly. “I’ve read your dossiers, of course, Mr. Ray.”

  “Call me Carnifex. Sir.”

  Sobel paused, nodded again. “Very well, And you are Bobby Joe Puckett.”

  The man in black nodded.

  “Also known as Crypt Kicker,” Billy Ray said. “He’s a ball of laughs.”

  “Please be seated,” the Colonel said.

  “I’m fine,” Carnifex said.

  “The dead don’t need to sit,” Crypt Kicker said.

  Sobel raised a brow at him, as if surprised he could speak. “Initial reports indicated you were lost in the last assault on the Rox, Mr., ah, Kicker.”

  “He was fried by a dragon, he got left below the bottom of the Hudson River when the Rox disappeared, he went boiling up to the surface in the giant air bubble that got left behind, and then he got hit by the Turtle’s tidal wave,” Carnifex said. “They found his dead ass wrapped around a light pole on Staten Island.”

  “It sounds as if you had a trying day.”

  “He told Baffle he didn’t need to shower before we hit the Rox,” Carnifex said, “because he knew he’d wash up on shore.”

  “Mr. Baffle, yes,” the Colonel said. “I’m very grateful to your superior for providing us with your services. You are badly needed.”

  “Yeah, I’m so happy I could puke that he sent me out here among all these damned monsters of yours, Colonel. And stuck me with the biggest monster of all for a partner.”

  He leaned forward and put his black-gauntleted knuckles on the desk. “I still don’t get it, Colonel. You’re out here playing butt-boy for about the last pack of commies left on Earth. Just what the hell is the CIA doing, looking out for that particular endangered species?”

  The smooth, tanned skin of Sobel’s face writhed briefly, as if it had live mice beneath it. Then it firmed. “Believe it or not, Mr. Battle does possess a social conscience. If you knew him as I do, you’d understand.”

  He folded his hands. “I realize you are confused and resentful at the unexpected turns of events that brought you here. I hope you’re not going to have any problems working with us.”

  Carnifex straightened. “I do my goddam job. I’m the very best.” He dipped his head right, raised it again. “Nobody said I had to like it.”

  “What Mr. Battle says, I do,” Crypt Kicker said. “He said obey you.”

  “If I get to kick some butt, I’ll do fine, Colonel,” Carnifex said.

  Sobel smiled. He picked some invisible lint from his immaculate uniform sleeve. “I think I can promise you that, Mr. Ray.”

  He leaned forward. “Our situation is grave here, gentlemen. The rebels have been having everything their own way. They still don’t have any military strength to speak of — some support among urban capitalists greedy for a chance to exploit their fellow men, some sympathy from primitive minorities who resent the modernizing influences of social reform. A number of soldiers of the People’s Army have deserted to them, it’s true, but they’re all cowards and weaklings, of course.

  “But psychologically” — he shook his magnificent head — “they’re picking us apart. Not just the standard assassinations, sabotage, and other acts of terrorism. You would not believe the reports we’re getting: beautiful, bulletproof women who walk through shadows. Burning men who fly through the air and shoot down jet aircraft with fireballs from their hands. Sea monsters attacking river-patrol craft. The site of that press conference the traitors gave last week, the mining camp — it was abandoned after the workers and security detachment reported one of the big ore shovels came to life and began attacking them. Even the administrators and technicians claimed it was true, and they were Russians.”

  He shook his head. “Someone — or some thing impersonated a high official of the Socialist Republic’s security apparatus, a dedicated, loyal officer well known to me personally, and helped a major leader of the rebels to escape government custody.” He leaned back. “Our people are strong, gentlemen; they are righteous, as we in the New Joker Brigade are righteous. But they’re starting to lose heart. They’re afraid. They feel they’re up against some supernatural enemy.”

  Billy Ray looked at Crypt Kicker and cracked his knuckles. “Naw,” he said with a nasty, lopsided grin. “You’re just suffering what we call your severe ace infestation.”

  The grin went wide and feral. “Fortunately, Colonel, you just called on Ace Exterminators.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  “Thanks, guys,” Mark said wearily, forcing a smile. He sat cross-legged on the floor with his elbows on his thighs, rubbing sunken eyes and wondering if he’d ever sit in a chair again.

  The men of his original runaway squad stood in the doorway of the hootch or crowded together close outside

  Slick, Studebaker Hawk, Mario, and Lou Inmon, Osprey from First Squad, their eyes shining. Eye Ball was missing; he had continued to insist on walking point and had gotten cut down in a chance meeting with a government patrol on the way to an ammo-dump raid.

  They had brought news; great news, Mark supposed. The sugar plantation near his current village command post had a satellite dish. The news had come down it.

  The Soviets had pulled an East Germany on the Socialist Republic. T
hey had not quite told the regime that they were willing to guarantee its fall if it looked as if the rebels were running into difficulty. But they had announced that, effective immediately, all fraternal assistance to Vietnam was suspended indefinitely. The freighters in Haiphong Harbor weighed anchor and steamed into Tonkin Gulf. The administrators and skilled technicians were pulling out of the huge, environment-wrecking logging and mining and construction camps. Starshine would be proud.

  Soviet personnel in military installations the length of Vietnam blandly shook their heads when their Vietnamese counterparts begged them to fly air-strikes against the waves of resistance passing like peristalsis throughout the country — even in the militant North, ancient Tonkin, the actual winner of the Vietnam War. The Soviet commander of the giant Da Nang airbase, near Fort Venceremos, ordered all Vietnamese brusquely off the premises. The Soviets were evacuating their huge civilian and military complements from the Socialist Republic and could not afford to have outsiders getting underfoot. The Soviets, he said, would be more than happy to hand the facilities over to the government of Vietnam when they left — whoever that government happened to be.

  Mark felt his head drop forward on his neck, as if the people it contained were too heavy for his muscles to support. Tears dripped to the back of his hands. Misreading his body language, the others drew back to leave him to his triumph.

  All he felt was numb. Dead from the neck both ways. Maybe that’s a blessing, he thought. The voices in his head were still for the moment.

  In the shadows stood J. Bob Belew, sipping tea from a cracked old French porcelain cup. “We’re winning,” he said.

  Mark shook his head. It was as if he had not five — four now — personae, but dozens of them, hundreds, and each was filled to bursting with a different emotion. He raised his hands, moved them ineffectually in the air. The only possible release he could see for all those volcanic emotions was to throw his head back and open his mouth wide and just vent them in one long scream.

  Except, once started, that scream would go on forever, as near as he could calculate.