Marked Cards

  With the pointed chitinous foreclaw of his right he was stabbing the well-pocked surface between his fingers, moving from one to another with increasing speed.

  The hard-shelled fingertip bit into the web between his first and second human fingers. "Fuck!" he screamed, waved his hand in the air and then stuffed it into his mouth to suck at the injury.

  "Croyd," Moonchild said. "Please."

  "Oh." He took his hand out of his mouth, examined it, giggled. "Oh. Sorry, your Excellency. Sorry. Heh-heh."

  Moonchild turned her attention back to the delegates, who were eyeing Croyd as if he had produced a baby's leg and begun to gnaw it.

  "Mr. Sorenson, if you are so concerned about the welfare of the less fortunate refugees, you might open your own purse to them. I understand you were able to get a great deal of your assets overseas before the freeze went into effect."

  "But that's the government's job!"

  "The Republic has made great strides economically in the past two years," Moonchild said. "Much of the ground has been rained with the assistance of wild card refugees, a fact which many of the Vietnamese people fail to appreciate. Nonetheless, this is a poor country, facing long recovery from decades of abuse. We try to help those who truly need it. But the able-bodied must shift for themselves."

  They stared at her incredulously. "But we're Americans!" the black man burst out.

  The room filled up with a gold glow and tinkling music, the scent of sandalwood. The delegates spun.

  Ganesha stood in the doorway. The glow did not seem to originate from him. It simply surrounded him.

  "I hope very much that I do not intrude - "

  "As a matter of fact - " the beaked woman began pugnaciously.

  "- my guests were on the verge of departure," Moonchild finished, in a voice like silk rustling over an ancient Korean sulsa knight's swordblade.

  Croyd scrabbled the tips of his right fingers on the tabletop. "Want I should show you people out?" he asked.

  The delegates could find their own way. Beaming, Ganesha stood aside to let them leave, and blessed them as they hurried past. Croyd went back to playing his game with his fingers.

  Feeling an inexplicable tension at the pit of her belly, Moonchild said, "How may I help you, guru?" That cynical canker in her soul - or was it just JJ, bleeding through the increasingly porous barriers between personae? - answered, money. Power. The usual.

  The guru tittered. "Already you have, by extending shelter to the wild cards, among whom is numbered my humble self. Now, it is I who must ask, may I help you?"

  Moonchild studied him. He appeared harmless enough, pale, fat, and jolly, like an Asian Santa Claus with a trunk. She had learned to put small stock in appearance. Maya, the Hindus called it.

  "What manner of help, guru?"

  "To bring peace to one who knows no peace, child."

  Something about the way he said one made her look at him narrowly. Does he know?

  She smiled weakly. "The Free Republic has many enemies, guru, some near, some far. If you can win us peace from them, you would do us a very great service."

  "I will happily do what I can, my child," Ganesha said. "But the peace I am speaking of can only exist, or not exist - "

  He extended his trunk and touched its tip between Moonchild's small breasts.

  "- here."

  The touch was so confident yet pure that she did not attempt to ward it off, and took no offense. She felt her eyes fill with tears. She lowered her head.

  "If you can provide such peace," she whispered, "you are a miracle worker indeed."

  "I - uh, I guess I'm intruding here, huh?" Croyd said. "Heh-heh."

  Neither paid him any attention. He twitched his antennae and sidled out, chuckling to himself.

  Moonchild felt the guru's warmth, smelled the perfumed oils with which his roly-poly person was anointed. "The gift is mine to give, my child," he said. "I am a sat-guru, a teacher of reality. Do you wish to learn?"

  She jackknifed. The foreshocks of transition were upon her. It never used to be this way.

  She jumped up, away from his outstretched hand. "I - I must beg permission to leave you, guru," she choked out, and bolted.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Mark came to himself in the bathroom off the parlor behind the audience hall, what he referred to internally as his changing-room. Moonchild had already gone to her knees on the cool tile, which saved him the risk of damaging them as he fell. He vomited into the chipped-enamel toilet.

  When it was done and he felt a measure of strength return to his legs, he rose, went to the sink, splashed water in his face and rinsed his mouth. Then he raised his eyes to the mirror. He felt a visible resistance to looking, like a membrane stretched before his face. He made himself push through, and see.

  The face was his own ... at least, it was the temporary face. The face he most often wore. Lined and haggard: the face of a tired specter.

  "It's getting worse," he husked, his throat raw from puking. At least the voice that emerged was his own. He was getting regular aftershocks from the Moonchild persona now, talking in her voice even after the change, feeling her personality and thoughts swirling in confusion among his own for minutes, keeping him dizzy and unsure of his identity. It was the consequence of calling her too often.

  But he had no choice. She was the President of Free Vietnam, probably the first who could be said to have been freely elected ever. He was merely her Chancellor.

  She was an ace. And still, to most Central and South Vietnamese, a heroine. He was just a nat, whose own role in the Liberation was respected, but far overshadowed by Moonchild's.

  He was her anointed spokesman. But in Asia appearance counted for much. For Moonchild to rule, to maintain a semblance of harmony among the tendentious and generally well-armed factions who formed her support base, she had to be seen.

  What that was doing to Mark's mind and body ... He shook his head. He wanted to lie down and sleep forever.

  In the audience chamber, serene, alone, and glowing, waited the guru. Mark felt a great longing well up within him, as great as the longings he had felt for his daughter during the years of enforced separation. Yet he could not bear to face Ganesha and his terrible calm.

  Someone - French colonial official, American proconsul, Communist bureaucrat - had installed a phone in the bathroom. Mark picked it up, spoke in a frog voice to give instructions for the guru to be escorted from the hall and offered lodging for the night, and then lowered the toilet seat barely in time to collapse onto it.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Bent over a notebook computer held by a young joker in a colorful dashiki, Mark Meadows glanced up to see a man rolling through the bands of white sunlight sprayed onto the corridor walls by the windows at a purposeful amble that missed being a swagger by that much. He was much shorter than Mark, and a ways older, with a flamboyant seal-colored moustache with waxed tips, which showed far less gray than the hair cropped close to his squarish head. He wore a photojournalist's jacket over a pale yellow shirt, and baggy khaki trousers.

  Mark smiled at the joker, sent him on his way with a thanks and a quick recommendation, then turned to meet the newcomer. "J. Bob," he said smiling almost despite himself.

  The man grinned beneath his moustache. "Guilty as charged. The minister without portfolio returns."

  They shook hands. Because that gesture was inadequate for what existed between them, each man clasped the other quickly on the shoulder. Neither was comfortable with New Age touchy-feely rituals, though Mark felt somewhat guilty about the fact.

  The two began to walk in the direction the moustached man had been headed, in the general direction of Mark's office.

  "Have you heard the news?" Mark asked, his long face growing grave.

  "Hartmann's revelations?" Major J. Robert Belew, United States Army Special Forces, retired nodded. "JAL had it on the big screen as we were on final approach. Plane was packed with joker refugees out of Seattle, and there was
much weeping and gnashing of teeth."

  Mark looked at the smaller man. In many ways he represented everything Mark, the Last Hippie, had stood against since his stumbling into a kind of fitful political consciousness at the tag-end of the radical Sixties. This man - a palpable Green Beret Nam vet, conservative, authoritarian, militaristic, and self-describedly ruthless - was the most valued advisor to Vietnam's President, and her Chamberlain.

  He was also Mark's best friend on Earth. Literally, with Tisianne - Tachyon - home ruling Takis.

  "It's like you said all along, man. There is a conspiracy against us wild cards, and it reaches way up into the government."

  "Given my experiences, it wasn't that hard to figure out: 'By their fruits shall ye know them,' to stay with Matthew." He shook his head. "At least the evil now has a name."

  "Card Sharks."

  Belew's moustache quirked to grin. "Got a ring to it, no? Ahh, I never thought I'd hate to be proved right. And by that limp liberal Hartmann, to boot."

  "Gregg's a great man - " Mark began by reflex. Then he caught himself, rewound. "Well, he's a good man. The stress just got to be too much for him - "

  "A man with good intentions, I'll grant," Belew said, "and recall what the road to Hell is paved with? Hartmann's a typical liberal politician. He looked to increase his own power by identifying himself with an ethnic minority, promoting its difference from mainstream America and its identity as a special interest group. That group happened to be us. And maybe he did the wild cards some good - but in the long run, the programs he helped push through gave Mr. Hardworking American Nat Taxpayer the impression that he was being bled to support a surly and uncontrollable super-race and an underclass of resentful monsters.

  "That fractionalization of our society, which Hartmann so ably promoted and exploited, is one of the big reasons we're strangers in a strange land now, with planeloads more arriving each day. When you turn a nation into a collection of competing ethnicities, as the Welfare State has so ably accomplished, you generate losers. And we wild cards have duly lost."

  Mark chewed on his lower lip. Reflex denials rose to the top of his throat and stayed there. He could take a look at Vietnam, before Liberation or after, and see the sick truth, that once a group became hipped on ethnic pride and ethnic awareness, it found it all too easy to slide on down the road to ethnic cleansing. Gregg Hartmann had made much of the common humanity of nats and wild cards; but the bulk of his actions had gone to emphasizing the difference.

  He gave his head a small quick shake, like shedding water after a shower. See what he does to you, man? Belew liked to compare himself to Lucifer, and Mark could see the point; the master intriguer and shadow-operator could so easily lead Mark to stand his own most cherished beliefs on their head. It was why Mark could never entirely trust the man, for all that had passed between them.

  "Unca Bob!" With a rainsquall patter of rubber soles on tile, a slim figure came flying down the hall to wrap Belew in a tangle of bare arms and legs and flying blond hair.

  Belew was not a big man, but he was solidly built, thick through the chest, though he carried just the beginning of a paunch. The person who'd enwrapped him was several inches taller than he, and not light despite adolescent skinniness just beginning to fill out into adulthood. But he managed to absorb the happy impact without backing up more than two steps.

  Mark looked on with a trace of wry envy. It was everything he could do not to go ass-over-teakettle when his daughter hit him like that. Sprout Meadows' mind was that of a four-year-old, perpetually, but her appearance was that of the fit and healthy seventeen year old she otherwise was.

  With great gentleness Belew unwound the girl, who was smothering his face with kisses. She wore a white T-shirt with teddy bears on it, and cut-off shorts. "I'm happy to see you, too, Leaf. But let an old man breathe."

  She laughed musically and stepped away from him. Leaf was his pet nickname for her. Sometimes it exasperated her, but she was happy now, and loved it.

  "Where have you been?" she asked.

  "'Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,'" he paraphrased. "Doing your Dad's bidding."

  "Did you bring me something?" she asked.

  He rubbed his chin, made a mouth, rolled his eyes as if at the effort of searching his memory. Sprout put her hands behind her back and tried not to writhe with impatience. Just when she was about to burst, Belew made a Groucho waggle of the eyebrows and stuck a hand into a pocket of his photojournalist's vest.

  "I happened to run into this one day," he said, coming up with a palm-sized pink Gund polar bear arranged so that it appeared to be holding a box of Callard & Bowser's butterscotch in its lap. "She told me she belonged with Sprout Meadows, and would I please give her a ride to where you were. She had to twist my arm, but she talked me into it."

  Sprout took the bear, hugged it to herself, kissed its forehead. Then she caught Belew's neck in a hug that would have choked a lesser man, and kissed his receding hairline. "Oh, Unca Bob! Thank you, thank you!"

  Cradling the bear carefully between her breasts, she tore open the package. She offered it to her father, Belew, and the bear; politely refused by all three, she unwrapped a candy, popped it into her mouth, and began to suck on it with a blissful expression as she rocked her new toy.

  "I wish you wouldn't give her sweets, man," Mark said. They set off again, Sprout swinging nonchalantly between them, cheeks concave. The whitewashed corridor had a hushed, cathedral quality to it, despite the maroon-tiled floors and a fair degree of traffic. A tiny wizened Nung woman with a scarf with penguins on it tied around her head looked up from her old-fashioned wringer-mounted mop bucket, nodded at Mark and smiled toothlessly as he passed. He smiled and nodded back. "I don't want her turning into a sugar junkie.

  "Stuff. And nonsense. It's not as if she's getting loaded down with calories - she's almost as skinny as you are. Let the kid live a little."

  Mark pouted. "Well - "

  "And spare me the food-faddist 'ills of processed sugar' rap. You're a biochemist. You know perfectly well that sugar is sugar, just as a rose is a rose is a rose."

  Despite himself, Mark chuckled. Had he truly objected to Belew giving his daughter candy, Belew would have cut it out in an instant. But chaffering like this was a standing routine, a way of bleeding existential tension from between two such unlikely friends and allies: the Last Hippie and the Last Cold Warrior.

  "What did you find out?" Mark asked.

  "Much of a muchness. The Canadians resent the Americans, but they buy into the 'aces, guns, drugs - scourge of our cities' rap almost as wholly as Barnett does. They'll vote against us at the UN, and try their best to honor the embargo if it goes through. The Japanese, on the other hand think we're grotesque monsters, but that's not really all that far off how they feel about American nats. In any event, Japanese culture is to a large extent based on swallowing personal preference in pursuit of the bottom line, and naming that duty."

  Mark started to frown, then grinned. Belew loved to make outrageous and sweeping generalizations, the more insensitive the better. At one time Mark would have responded with reflex liberal outrage. He wasn't so easily caught any more. Besides, Belew had a point.

  "So the Japanese are smiling and nodding and making bland noises about how they have to 'consider the problem from every angle,' and stonewalling on the vote in the UN. Meanwhile, they're more than happy to trade with us - and that's unlikely to change if the embargo goes through."

  "What about the Chinese?"

  "The Dragon likes us, because we make Hanoi unhappy. As long as the Northerners are willing to bleed their populace to keep a million men under arms, the Chinese will do anything they can to keep a good percentage of those bad boys peering South. And they want the hard currency our economy's starting to generate, and they're big enough that they flat don't care what the rest of the world thinks. So there's a nice fat veto waiting for the embargo, whenever it hits the Security Council."

/>   He raised his big, square hands. "The situation is far from ideal, I grant, but - "

  They fetched up against a zone of humid heat like a force field trying to hold them back. The wall fell away to their right, opening into a courtyard garden ten yards square, with water singing down a pile of boulders into a mossy pool, and great-leaved plants crowded together amid a pervasive green smell. On a bench beside the pool sat Ganesha. He rose.

  Belew froze in mid-step. "What're you doing here?"

  "I am Ganesha."

  "I know that. What I want to know is what you're doing here."

  "Hey, ease off, man," Mark said, with unaccustomed sharpness, feeling tension pull his brows together. "He's my guest."

  Belew made a mouth. "Is this another of your Sixties-nostalgia plunges? The guru you never had?"

  Inside his head, a clamor of voices. Mark swayed. Sometimes it seemed he had a whole auditorium-load in there, instead of four - and another, hopefully buried so deep it would never surface again.

  "He is my guest, Major." Mark's lips, Moonchild's voice. Not a falsetto, but an actual woman's voice, issuing from Mark's unquestionably masculine six-four frame. The others showed no response to the lapse. They had been coming frequently of late.

  "You are the Minister, Major Belew," Ganesha said in his piping voice. "I have heard much of you."

  From J. Bob's frown he turned to Sprout. "And what delightful creature have we here? Surely, it is an angel, all golden."

  Sprout giggled. "I'm not an angel," she said, "I'm Sprout. This is my Daddy." She hugged Mark, laid her head briefly on his shoulder. "And this is my new pink bear. Are you a heffalump?" She always had trouble with the word, and fell back as usual on the Winnie the Pooh rendition.

  "I am a man, little miss," Ganesha said to the girl. "But I am blessed with the head of an elephant."

  "Oh." Her blue eyes lit. "Neat! Can I touch your nose?"

  She reached a hand to the guru's pale trunk. It extended, twined once about her slim wrist to stroke the tanned back of her hand with its motile pink tip. She giggled.