He had gotten so engrossed in his mission, in fact, that he'd overstayed his hour, stranding Mark in a smoldering patch of devastation in the middle of the Amazon basin with a whole regiment of the Brazilian army closing in and mightily pissed off. Even with his other friends to call on, Mark had some bad moments getting back to the States. He'd been so miffed he hadn't summoned Starshine for six months afterward.
It did no good, of course. The Brazilian government borrowed more money from the World Bank and bought more and bigger earth-raping machines. The destruction went on with barely a hiccup.
The truth is, the world doesn't need more aces, he thought. It doesn't need us at all. We can't do anything real.
He looked into the sun. Its roaring song of life and light blinded him, suffused him. But for all his exaltation, he was a mote-a spark, quickly consumed.
And he knew that he had come to his truth.
Dr. Pretorius leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed hands over his hard paunch. His suit was white today. He looked like a hip Colonel Sanders.
"So, Dr. Meadows, do you have a decision for me?" Mark nodded, started to speak. A door opened behind Pretorius and the words stuck tight in Mark's throat. A woman had slipped silently into the room-a girl, maybe; she looked more like a special effect than a human. She was five and a half feet tall, inhumanly slim, and blue-blue green, actually, gleaming in the same shade as the dyes used in blue ice. The room temperature, already cool, had dropped perceptibly.
"You haven't met my ward, have you? Dr. Meadows, let me present Ice Blue Sibyl."
She looked at him. At least she turned her face toward him. Whatever she was made of looked hard as glass, but seemed constantly, subtly to be shifting. Her features seemed high-cheekboned and forward thrusting, though it was hard to be sure. Her body was attenuated as a mannequin's and almost as sexless; though she appeared to be nude, the tiny breasts showed no nipples, nor did she display genitalia. Still, there was some alien, elflike quality to her, something that caused a stirring in Mark's crotch as she looked at him with her blue-glass stare.
She turned her face to Pretorius, tipped it attentively. Mark got the impression that some communication passed between them. The lawyer nodded. Sibyl turned and walked to the door with sinuous inhuman grace. She stopped, gave Mark a last glance, vanished.
Pretorius was looking at him. "You've decided?" Mark reached out and hugged his daughter to him. "Yeah, man. There's only one thing I can do."
"Hello? Is anyone here?" Dr. Tachyon stepped cautiously through the open door. Today he wore an eighteenthcentury peach coat over a pale pink shirt with lace spraying out the front of a mauve waistcoat. His breeches were deep purple satin, caught at the knee with gold rosettes. His stockings were lilac, his shoes gold. Instead of an artificial hand, he wore a lace cozy on his stump, with a red rose sprouting from it.
Amazement stopped him cold. The Pumpkin was gutted. Tables were overturned, the counter torn up, the magazine racks lying on their backs, the psychedelic-era posters gone from the walls. Somewhere music played.
"Burning Sky! What's happened here? Markl Mark!" Through a doorway at the back that looked curiously naked without the beaded curtain that had always hung there stepped a remarkable figure. It wore torn khaki pants, a black Queensrykche T-shirt stretched to the bursting point across a disproportionately huge chest. With a narrow head and finely sculpted, almost elfin features set on an inhumanly squat body, the newcomer looked the way pretty-boy movie martial-artist Jean Claude Van Damme would if they put him in a hydraulic press and mashed him down him a foot or so.
He stopped and turned a cool smile on Tachyon. "So. The little prince." His English had a curious, almost Eastern European accent. Just like Tachyon's.
"What have you done to Mark?" Tachyon hissed. His flesh hand inched back toward the little H amp;K nine-millimeter tucked in a waistband holster inside the back of his breeches.
The other put fist to palm and flexed. Cloth tore. "Served loyally and without stint, as befits a Morakh." Being destroyed as an abomination befits a Morakh, Tachyon thought. He was about to say so when an equally outlandish apparition loomed up behind the creature. This one had a gray sleeveless sweatshirt and paint-splashed dungarees hung on a frame like a street sign and graying blond hair clipped skull close. He seemed to consist all of nose, Adam's apple, and elbows.
"Doc! How are you, man?" the scarecrow said. Tachyon squinted at him. "Who the hell are you?" The other blinked and looked as if he were about to cry. "It's me, man. Mark."
Tachyon goggled. A blond rocket in cutoffs shot out the door, hit the Morakh in the middle of his broad back, scaled him like a monkey, and seated itself with slim bare legs straddling his rhinoceros neck.
"Uncle Tachy!" Sprout chirped. "Uncle Dirk is giving me a piggyback ride."
"Indeed." Ignoring the Morakh's scowl, Tach stepped close to kiss the girl on her proffered cheek.
Durg at-Morakh was the strongest non-ace on Earth: no Golden Boy or Harlem Hammer, but far stronger than any normal human. He was not human; he was Takisian-a Morakh, a gene-engineered fighting machine created by the Vayawand, bitter enemies of Tachyon's House Ilkazam. He had come to Earth with Tachyon's cousin Zabb, a foe of a more intimate nature.
Now he served Mark, having been defeated in unarmed combat by Mark's "friend" Moonchild. He and Tachyon tolerated each other for Mark's sake.
Tachyon gripped his old friend by the biceps. "Mark, man, what has happened to you?"
Mark grimaced. Tachyon realized he had never seen his chin before.
"It's this court thing," Mark said, glancing at his daughter. "They start taking depositions soon. Dr. Pretorius said I needed to, like, straighten up my image."
Taking his cue, Durg patted Sprout's shins and said, "Let us go for a walk, little mistress." They went out into the sunlight on Fitz-James.
"`Dr. Pretorius,"' Tachyon repeated with distaste. The two regarded each other like a pair of dogs who claim the same turf. "He thinks you should then give in, change the way you lives-the way you wear your hair?"
Mark shrugged helplessly. "He says if I challenge the system, I'll lose."
"Perhaps if you had a more competent lawyer."
"Everybody says he's the best. The legal version of, like, you."
"Well." Tach fingered his narrow chin. "I admit I've no cause to believe that your justice' is aptly named. What are you doing to your store?"
"Pretorius says if I go in as a head-shop owner I'll get blown out of the water. So I'm selling off the paraphernalia and letting Jube take the comix as a lot. I'm making the Pumpkin into more a New Age place. Gonna call it a `Wellness Center' or something."
Tachyon winced.
"Yeah, man, I know. But it's, like, the eighties."
"Indeed."
Mark turned and went into the back, where he had boxes of refuse piled to go into the dumpster in the alley. Tachyon followed.
"What music is this?" he asked, gesturing to a tape player with a coat-hanger antenna.
"Old Buffalo Springfield. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing."' He dabbed a fingertip at a corner of his eye. `Always has made me cry, darn it."
"I understand." Tach plucked a silken handkerchief from the sleeve of his stump and dabbed at the sweat that daintily beaded his eyebrows. "So Pretorius thinks changing your life-style at this late date will impress the court? It seems a childishly obvious expedient."
"Appearances count for a lot in court, he says. See, the judge decided to hold open hearings at the end, not just take depositions and briefs like they usually do in custody cases. And Doc Pretorius says Sun-Kimberly's attorney's trying to get the press in, and they'll play it up big; the ace thing and all. You know how popular we are now. So this image thing, it's like, if a biker gets busted for murder or something, they shave off his beard and put a suit on him for trial."
"But you are not on trial."
"Dr. E says I am."
"Hmm. Who is the judge?"
"Justice Mary Conower." He bent, picked up a box, and brightened. "She's supposed to be a liberal; she was, like, a big Dukakis supporter. She won't let all these ace haters trash me. Will she?"
"I remember her from the campaign. Last fall I'd have said you were correct. Now… I'm not so sure. It seems we have few friends on any side."
"Maybe that's why Dr. E told me to go underground instead ' of doing the court thing. But I always thought being a liberal meant you believed in people's rights and stuff."
"A lot of us thought that, once." Something stuffed in a box caught Tach's eye. He stooped like a hawk. "Mark, no!" he exclaimed, brandishing a crumpled purple top hat.
Mark stood holding the box and avoiding his eyes. "I had to straighten up. Stop doing drugs. Pretorius said they'd ream me out royally if I didn't. Might even go to the DA and get me busted."
"Your Sunflower would do this to you?"
"Her attorney would. Dude named Latham. They call him, like, Sturgeon or something."
" `Sinjin.' Yes. He would do that. He would do anything." He held up the hat. "But this?"
The tears were streaming freely down Mark's shorn cheeks now. "I decided on my own, man. After the vials I got now are all used up, I'm not making any more. There's just too much risk, and I gotta keep Sprout. No matter what."
"So Captain Trips-"
"Has hung it up, man."
"Have you ever used drugs, Dr. Meadows?"
With effort Mark pulled his consciousness back to the deposition room. The oak paneling seemed to be pressing him like a Salem witch. His attention was showing a tendency to spin around inside his skull.
"Uh. Back in the sixties," he told St. John Latham. Pretorius opposed conceding even that much. But this new Mark, the one emerging from a cannabis pupa into the chill of century's end, thought that would be a little much.
"Not since?"
"No."
"What about tobacco?"
He rubbed his eyes. He was getting a headache. "I quit smoking in '78, man."
"And alcohol?"
"I drink wine, sometimes. Not too often."
"You eat chocolate?"
"Yes."
"You're a biochemist. It surprises me you aren't aware these are all drugs; addictive ones, in fact."
"I do know" Very subdued.
"Ah. What about aspirin? Yes? Penicillin? Antihistamines?"
"Yeah. I'm, uh, allergic to penicillin."
"So. You do still use drugs. Even addictive drugs. Though you just now denied doing it."
"I didn't know that's what you meant."
"What other drugs do you use that you claim you don't?"
Mark glanced to Pretorius. The lawyer shrugged. "None, man. I mean, uh, none."
When they got back to the Village from Latham's office, Mark could tell Sprout was tired and footsore, simply because she wasn't bouncing around in the usual happy-puppy way she had when she was out somewhere with Daddy. She wore a lightweight dress and flats, and her long straight blond hair was tied in a ponytail to keep it off her neck. Mark fingered his own nape, which still felt naked in the sticky-hot spring-afternoon breeze, rich with polynucleic aromatic hydrocarbons.
A couple of kids in bicycling caps and lycra shorts clumped by on the other side of the street. They watched Sprout with overt interest. She was just falling into adolescence, still skinny as a car antenna. But she had an ingenue face, startlingly pretty. The kind to attract attention. Reflexively he tugged her closer. I'm turning into an uptight old man, he thought, and tugged again at the loosened white collar of his shirt. His neck felt ropeburned by the tie now wadded in the pocket of his gray suit coat.
The light of the falling sun shattered like glass on windshields and shop windows and filled his eyes with sharp fragments. Even in this backwater street the noise of nearby traffic was like a rocker-arm engine pounding in his skull, and each honk of a horn threatened to pop his eyes like a steel needle.
For years Mark had lived in a haze of marijuana smoke. He dabbled in other drugs, but that was more in the nature of biochemical experimentation with himself as subject-such as had called up the Radical, and subsequently his "friends." Grass was his drug of choice. Way back in those strange days of the late sixties early seventies, actually, but the sixties didn't end until Nixon did-it seemed a perfect solace to someone who had come to terms with the fact that he was doomed to disappoint everyone who expected anything of him. Especially himself.
Now he was emerging from the cushioning fog. Off the weed, the world was a lot more surreal place to be. Someone stepped from the doorway of the Pumpkin, features obscured by the broad straw brim of a hat. Mark's hand moved to the inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a set of his dwindling supply of vials.
Sprout lunged forward with arms outspread. The figure knelt, embraced her, and then violet eyes were looking up at him from beneath the hat brim.
"Mark," Kimberly said. "I had to see you."
The ball bounced across the patchy grass of Central Park as though it were bopping out the lyrics to a sixties cigarette-commercial jingle. Sprout pursued it, skipping and chirping happily.
"What does your old man think of all this?" Mark asked, lying on his elbows on the beach towel Kimberly had brought along with the ball.
"About what?" she asked him. She wasn't showing her agency game face this afternoon. In an impressionistic cotton blouse and blue jeans that looked as if they'd been worn after she bought them instead of before, knees drawn up to support her chin and hair hanging in a braid down her back, she looked so much like the Sunflower of old he could barely breathe.
He wanted to say, "about the trial," but he also wanted to say, "about you seeing me," but the two kind of jostled against each other and got jammed up like fat men trying to go through a men's room door at the same time, and so he just made vaguely circular gestures in the air and said, "About, uh, this."
"He's in Japan on business. T. Boone Pickens is trying to open up the country to American businesses. Cornelius is one of his advisers." She seemed to speak with unaccustomed crispness, but then he'd never been good at telling that kind of thing. It had been one of their problems. One of many.
He was trying to think of something to say when Sunflower-no, Kimberly--clutched his arm. "Mark, look-" Their daughter had followed the bouncing ball into the middle of a large blanket and the Puerto Rican family that occupied it, almost bowling over a stout woman in lime-green shorts. A short, wiry man with tattoos all over his arm jumped up and started expostulating. Half a dozen children gathered around, including a boy about Sprout's own age with a switchblade face.
"Mark, aren't you going to do something?"
He looked at her, puzzled. "What, man? She's okay."
"But those… people. That is, Sprout ran into them, they're justifiably upset-"
He laughed. "Look."
The Puerto Ricans were laughing, too. The fat woman hugged Sprout. The tough kid smiled and tossed her the ball. She turned and came racing back up the slope toward her parents, graceful and clumsy as a week-old foal.
"See? She gets along pretty well with people, even if…" The sentence ran down uncompleted, as they usually did on that subject.
Kimberly still looked skeptical. Mark shrugged, then by reflex touched the pocket of the denim jacket he wore despite the heat.
Maybe he did rely on the implicit promise of his 'friends' too much. He'd have to go cold turkey from that, too, one of these days. He wasn't calling up the personae too often. Occasionally he felt the peevish pressure in his brain, like heckling from the back of an old auditorium, though he had explained to his 'friends' what he had to do and thought most of them accepted it. But eventually the powders would be gone.
As it was, Pretorius would kill him if he knew he still had any of them. Pretorius thought a raid was a real possibility, and the vials contained a wider variety of proscribed substances than a DEA agent was liable to resell in a year.
But what am I supposed to do? Pour them down
the drain? That felt like murder.
Then Sprout's arms horseshoed his skinny neck and they went over, all three of them, in a laughing, tickling tangle, and for a moment it was almost like real life.
The Parade of Liars, as Pretorius called the succession of expert witnesses he and Latham took turns deposing, trudged on from spring into summer. The Twenty-eighth Army taught the students in Gate of Heavenly Peace Square what the old dragon Mao had told them so often: where political power springs from. Nur al-Allah fanatics attacked a joker-rights rally in London's Hyde Park with bottles and brickbats, winning praise from Muslim leaders throughout the West. "Secular law must yield to the laws of God," a noted Palestine-born Princeton professor announced, "and these creatures are an abomination in the eyes of Allah."
A skinhead beat a joker to death with a baseball bat. The media swelled with indignation. When it turned out that the chief of staff of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee had tried the same thing back in '73, liberals called it "a meanness out there, a feeding frenzy" when people took him to task for it. After all, he had helped to pass some very caring legislation, and anyway the bitch survived.
Kimberly flitted in and out of Mark's life like a moth. Every time he thought he could catch hold of her, she eluded him. She seldom kept a date two times running. But she never stayed away long.
The hearings began.
Pretorius turned up precious few character witnesses for Mark. Dr. Tachyon, of course, and Jube the news dealer; Doughboy, the retarded joker ace, broke down and sobbed mountainously as he recounted how Mark and his friends had saved him from being convicted of murder- and, incidentally, saved the planet from the Swarm. His testimony was corroborated by laconic Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe of Homicide South, who chewed a toothpick in place of her customary cigarillo. Pretorius wanted to bring on reporter Sara Morgenstern, but she had dropped from sight after the nightmare of last year's Atlanta convention.