Turn of the Cards

  “…How?…” he managed to ask in a strangled voice. “How — is it — possible? There’s so many of them. There’s — so few — of us.”

  “‘In war, numbers alone confer no advantage,’” Belew quoted. “‘Do not advance relying on sheer military power.’ Sun Tzu.”

  Mark shook his head. “Just words, man. I need … answers.”

  Belew laughed. “All right. First of all, don’t give yourself — or Moonchild — too much credit. What’s happening here is as close to inevitable as anything ever is — it’s like the ’historic process’ the Marxists are so fond of, only they’re the ones it’s grinding into cotto salami. Soon or late — this year, next year, 1999 — what is happening now would happen anyway. What you, your friends, all of us, are is merely a catalyst.”

  Mark stared at his hands. They had come to seem great and ungainly to him, as he himself did, in contrast to the tiny and graceful Vietnamese. Even Moonchild felt bloated around them.

  He didn’t know whether he felt resentment or relief at what Belew said. Part of him wanted to trumpet, I am too important!

  Another part was happy to avoid the blame.

  “Next,” Belew said, ticking off right-hand fingers with his bandaged stump, “don’t discount the numbers of ’us.’ Our name is legion. If you take passive sympathy into account, I’d say upward of half the population is with us — and I’d say an overwhelming majority from the old DMZ south, in Annam and Cochin China. But even in the North we have support, if the demonstrations in Hanoi are any indication. There’s a twenty-four-hour vigil going on at the lake where the Trung sisters drowned themselves, you know, and the authorities are afraid to break it up.”

  “Hey, I was at People’s Park in ’70, man. We had the people then too. They had the guns.”

  “That didn’t stop you then, I notice, Mark. Or were you not really the Radical?”

  All Mark could do was thrust his face into his palms and sob. When he could see and speak again, Belew was squatting Vietnamese-style on the mat nearby, not close enough to threaten, but close enough that Mark could feel his presence.

  “I don’t know, man,” Mark said brokenly. “I’ve never known. All I’ve done since, the experimentation, turning into my friends, all that — it was all so I could know. Know that just once, in this fucked-up, useless life of mine, to know that I was a hero.”

  He dabbed his eyes clear, raised his head, matched Belew gaze for gaze. “Whether I was or not, man, it didn’t matter. Radical won that fight, yeah. The other side won the war.”

  “You’re beginning to grasp the essence of strategy, son, which is the difference between winning a battle and winning a war. But just the same, I have to disagree with you. You won. Trust me; I was on the other side. I know. We cut and ran and left South Vietnam in the lurch, because in the crunch Nixon didn’t have any balls in his pants. You — Radical, whoever — you helped cut his nuts off. You might as well feel proud.”

  Mark laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh. But it was a laugh.

  “Well, anyway, we didn’t win it all. There was no revolution. We had the numbers, but they had the guns.”

  “No,” Belew said, “you didn’t win it all. But you did exercise leverage on the government — mainly, of course, because our government was sadly lacking in will. At home or abroad.

  “That’s why People Power fizzled out so badly, with the Tiananmen massacre. People thought that what ran the Shah out of Iran and Marcos from the Philippines was the popular will, peacefully expressed. But it wasn’t that at all. The army and the secret police — the enforcers — lost faith in their main man to hold the center. And if he went, the army and the secret police wouldn’t be the biggest, baddest, most untouchable gangs around anymore. They’d be a mass of individuals, each liable to be hunted down and killed by the friends and family of anybody they wasted trying to defend their boss. People in the West underestimate the socializing effect of the blood feud in these ceiling-fan countries.

  “That’s what happened in Guatemala. The Hero Twins got to exploit Soviet aid to an extant underground movement, plus the intense racial hatred the Indians harbored for mestizos and the Spanish. They dealt themselves guns and numbers. That’s what we’ve been trying to do here. That’s why we’re winning.”

  “But all we’re doing — we’re picking at them. It’s like the bugs around here.” A pang for Croyd, still asleep, still being bundled along as baggage. “They bite you and bite you, and you go, like, half crazy. But you don’t stop what you’re doing.”

  “That’s right. Because unlike your swarming bugs, we don’t bite at random. Each bite is calculated to make the enemy feel the most insecure, to make us seem most supernaturally powerful to them — and to the population we’re trying to attract to the cause. People want to go with a winner. We seem to have a hundred aces on our side, and we strike where we please. What does it matter that the strikes don’t amount to anything much, singly or taken all together? We live in the world of Maya, Mark, the world of illusion. Perception is reality The perception we are creating is that we are invincible.

  “Add that to the marvelous job the Northerners, the Tonkinese, have done of instilling the resentment of the conquered in their ’liberated’ southern brothers, and the standard hash that communist rule has made of the economy and of everyday life, and you have a highly receptive audience. The Viet in the village and the Ho-ville street looks at Rumania and East Germany and even the USSR and asks, ’Why not?’ And that’s why we’re winning.”

  “And what are we winning? A chance for brother to exploit brother?”

  “Come on, Mark. That’s not your brain talking, it’s sixties nostalgia. You’ve lived on the fringes of Jokertown, and you’ve lived here. Who has it better, the despised minority members in their New York ghetto — even with Barnett and his crazies on the loose — or the dead — average ethnic Vietnamese in the villes?”

  Mark hung his head. “Back home.”

  Belew nodded. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, Mark. It’s lousy in a lot of ways — I’m a wild card too. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Belew’s head snapped back. Mark cursed as seldom as he did.

  “You’re taking another shot at the title, man,” Mark said accusingly. “You didn’t win it all back in the sixties and seventies. You’re trying again to do it right this time. You’re just like … like…

  His voice trailed away. He could not speak the name that had come into his mind.

  “Like Colonel Charles Self-Righteousness Personified Sobel?” Belew laughed. “Guilty as charged. We’re middle-aged assholes trying to erase the failures of our youth. Did you think you were going to shame me? I know what I am: I’m a man who always does what he believes to be right, and I’m not embarrassed when what’s right happens to gratify my less noble instincts — which I don’t think are necessarily ignoble, by the way. I legitimately want Vietnam to be free I fought and spilled my blood to that end in the first round, and I’ve done it this time too. And I am a wild card, mark, and I do know a hawk from a hernshaw.”

  “What the heck is a hernshaw, anyway, man?”

  “Nobody knows. Don’t let the junior-college Hamlet commentators tell you the word is really ’handsaw,’ though. That’s hooey.”

  He reached to touch Mark on the knee. “I also know that’s not what’s really bothering you, son. I know you feel like one of those two lizards walking on a cloud in one of Vaughan Bodé’s old Deadbone Erotica strips, the boys who suddenly realized that what they were doing was impossible and plunged to their deaths.”

  “You read Deadbone, man?”

  “Did you think conservatives couldn’t be cool? Okay, so most of them aren’t. But most of them aren’t real conservatives, either, they’re New Dealers warmed over and allowed to congeal. Or are you practicing age discrimination here? Think about it, if young equated to hip, Vanilla ice would be a busboy.”

  Mark laughed. He had spent hi
s life fighting against everything J. Robert Belew was and stood for. But he sure liked the dude.

  “But if, in the long run, you let the mere fact of something’s being impossible slow you down, you wouldn’t be here, would you? You would never have turned up all those wonderful friends who can walk the shadows and fly through the sky and hide behind the face of anyone in the world, would you? You’d never have flown to an alien planet and back, and done God knows what along the way. The cloud-dancing isn’t what’s eating you either.”

  Mark sighed. “Okay. I don’t know what I am. Anymore. Am I a man? Am I four — uh, three — men and a woman? Am I nuts?”

  “Isis Moon’s little episode has still got you down, eh? I suspected as much.”

  “Well, she had a point, man. I always bought what she told you, that she had been born and raised and lived her life and all, and that something happened and next thing anybody knew, she was trapped inside me.”

  “Doesn’t that seem a little farfetched?”

  Mark looked at him. After a moment Belew laughed. “All right. Touché. You’re getting pretty Zen as we go along here, Mark. Still.” He turned a hand palm-up, questioning.

  “All right. I wondered, too; I’d have to be brain dead not to. I did some research.

  “There are three people named Isis Moon in the whole United States, at least that I could track down; heck, one of ’em lived at the commune I hung out at after I sprung Sprout, outside Taos.”

  At the mention of his daughter’s name he swallowed hard and paused. It was as if he had picked away a scab to find a wound the size of the Grand Canyon gaping in his flesh. He had to look away, hurry himself past, lest he pitch in headfirst and fall forever.

  “They’re all ex-hippies, New Agers, or both. None of them’s Korean.

  “J. J. Flash — his real name’s John Jacob Flash, you may know that, he mentioned it on Peregrine’s Perch once or twice. There is a John Jacob Flash in Manhattan. He’s a Wall Street broker. J. J. — Jumpin’ Jack — met him once, on Peri’s show. They’re the same man. I mean, the broker is a bit paunchier, though he looks like he works out. But they’re the same — same looks, same gestures, same smart mouths.

  “But Jumpin’ Jack is a lawyer, not a stockbroker. Flash-the-broker isn’t an ace — he’s tested negative for the wild card. And Jumpin’ Jack doesn’t think of himself as an ace either; that’s jargon he picked up. Where he comes from — where he thinks he comes from — he’s called a ‘superhero,’ just like in the old comic books.”

  “Which you loved.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know about me?”

  “What you’re telling me now, Mark.”

  Mark sighed again. “No one knows it. Not even — not even Tach. But it’s got to come out, now, man, or my head will explode.”

  “We don’t want that. Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “I checked Damon Strange — cool name, you gotta admit. Too bad he’s such a weenie, Cosmic Traveler is. I mean, I even got his name wrong, his ace name — the real song title is ‘Mystic Traveler,’ it’s an old Dave Mason song. Now, there’s a Damon Strange in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who’s a lawyer, No connection there. There is also an insurance adjustor of that name in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’ve got his picture, and he looks a lot like the Traveler, though he isn’t blue. He had a car accident in 1983 and has been a veg since — Florida courts won’t let ’em turn off life support. Sorry for being insensitive, man.”

  “You’re a biochemist. You know what brain death means. Why tiptoe around?”

  Mark took a breath. “Yeah. The thing is, this Strange in Florida had his accident two days before Cosmic Traveler first appeared. As near as I can pin down, his EEC went flatline ten minutes before I took the potion for the first time.

  “Traveler won’t let me have anything about his real past — Aquarius won’t either, though I think he’s French-Canadian. But that spooked me, man. And then, to find out Moonchild doesn’t speak any Korean”

  He shook his head. “What am I, man?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I somehow managed to draw in these souls that had gotten loose from their bodies and were wandering through the cosmos — from alternate dimensions, like?”

  Belew nodded.

  “But this thing with Moonchild — maybe I just have the world’s most vivid multiple-personality disorder, man. Though I always thought, like, with an MPD, the identities had no memories of one another, weren’t even aware the others existed. My alter egos hardly shut up, these days.”

  He looked at Belew. “You know everything about me now, man. Tell me what I am.”

  “Okay.”

  Mark rocked back, stunned. He expected another “mu” out of him.

  Belew stood, put hands behind hips, stretched. He looked toward the open door of the hootch.

  Outside was turning mauve and gray-blue as the night prepared to descend like a lead weight in a Monty Python skit. The insects were out in the day’s most profuse profusion, and the night birds were, too, scything through their clouds with happy savagery. Somewhere a box played Public Enemy.

  That was a band Belew could respect, Public Enemy. He wasn’t fond of their message or their sound. But they weren’t wimps.

  “I don’t know where your friends come from, Mark. I don’t know if they’re unmoored psyches who happened to roost behind your baby blues or whether you’re just nuts. Or all of the above.

  “But, Mark, I know what you are.

  “You’re a hero.”

  He came over and slapped the stunned Mark on the shoulder. “It’s what you’ve wanted all your life. Wise men — men who think they’re wise, anyway — always tell us to beware what we ask for, because we might actually get it. Well, you did.

  “Now you just have to deal with it.” And he walked out the door into evening air that hummed as with ozone after thunder.

  Chapter Forty-four

  The rope-handled wooden box was longer than tall or wide and God knew how old. The stencils on its side were weathered to near-invisibility: U.S. ARMY MORTAR ROUND 81MM M301A3 ILLUMINATING. It sat in the middle of a clearing in the woods in the Kon Tum foothills east of Pleiku. The grass had been cropped close by grazing water buffalo. An array of other junk was scattered around the fringes of the clearing, including a clapped-out Ural truck.

  A tall man with blue-black hair and a notable jut of jaw stood at the clearing’s edge, gazing intently at the box. A curl of blue smoke rose from it.

  The box burst into flame.

  Standing at the muscular man’s side, Mark jumped despite himself. “Hoo!” he half whistled, half exclaimed. “Uh … yeah. Yeah. So you can, uh, do that too.”

  “Mark,” Croyd Crenson said, in a baritone Diskau would have killed for, “the problem right now really seems to be finding something I can’t do.”

  He chuckled from the depths of his heroic chest. He laced his fingers together and flexed. Muscles heaved the skin of his bare arms and the olive-drab cloth of his T-shirt like the Loma Prieta quake.

  “I feel great. Really great. I’ve never felt this way before. Except maybe when I’m just starting to hit the amphetamines, and they give me a rush instead of just keeping me going.”

  Mark moistened lips that, despite the humidity, were dry as the thousand-foot cliffs of the Khyber Pass. “Great, man,” he said, though it cost him effort. Croyd was his friend. To feel this way

  “Dr. Meadows.”

  Mark sighed and turned. At least he had convinced the coalition’s Vietnamese rank-and-file to quit calling him “your Excellency.”

  It was one of Bui Bam Dinh’s Annamese peasant guerrillas, a tiny brown man in black pajamas, a conical straw hat that overwhelmed the rest of him, Ho Chi Minh slippers, and an AK-47 with black electrician’s tape wrapped around a cracked fore-grip slung over one shoulder. He was the classic Time magazine portrait of a VC, circa 1966.

  “Yes, Bui?” The man wa
s also one of the leader’s cousins, or in any event part of his extended family. As far as Mark could tell, there were about twenty family names in common use in Vietnam. Telling everybody apart was not simplified by the Western media’s habit of calling Vietnamese by their last names, which happened to be personal names, not family names, as in most Asian cultures. Thus “Uncle Ho” for the late northern leader, used with jocular familiarity by people who thought “Ho” was a first name, like Frank or Ed; and thus Ho’s foremost general, Vo, was universally known as “Giap.”

  This Bui was actually a blood relation of the rebel leader, in any event. He bobbed his head and smiled. He modestly kept a hand before his mouth, but Mark could see it was full of steel Soviet teeth.

  “There is someone,” he said. “Perhaps you would wish to come and see.”

  “Xin vui long,” Mark replied. As always he was surprised at how rapidly he was picking up Vietnamese. Moonchild handled the rising, fallen, and “broken” tones far more gracefully than any of the other personalities — another mystery, since Korean was not a tonal language. “Thanks. I’m coming.”

  He glanced back at his friend. Croyd was staring at the derelict Ural. He had his right arm stretched out straight, palm down, fingers extended. He waggled his fingers slightly.

  Obediently the truck was hovering about four inches off the ground.

  Mark swallowed. “Later,” he said.

  The newcomer sat on the hootch’s mat floor in a sprawl of complete collapse. He was gaunt. His clothes were shreds, scorched, torn, rotting from his frame, revealing fading yellow bruises and oozing sores. The tip of the gigantic lobster claw that was his right hand had been broken off. His eyes, sunken deep below what had been a domineering brow and was now a jut, stared through the bamboo wall of the hootch, outward toward infinity.

  Evan Brewer wasn’t looking so dapper and self-assured today.

  “They fragged us,” he said in a voice that made it sound as if each word tore away the lining of his throat in sheets. “I wasn’t in the bunker, but I think they were going for both of us. They didn’t want to hear about socialism anymore; all they wanted to talk about was how good nat blood tasted when you drank it, how it felt when you rubbed it on your skin.”