Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  "There are, my daughter, many varieties of maya," the guru was explaining. "In the fatter days, after wise Shankara sought to reconcile Hinduism with Buddhism, maya came to be understood by many as meaning illusion, pure and simple. Yet there is an older meaning, woven through the Vedas, by which maya is the creative energy of nature and gods. And Nature, while it is real through the will and eternal presence of Brahma, is yet real enough.

  "This is my poor power: a humble measure of the creative maya."

  "So this world is not mere illusion, guru?" murmured Moonchild.

  "It is, and it is not. Hold out your hand."

  She did so. A yellow rose materialized in her palm. Her fingers closed around its stem.

  Her eyes opened in surprise. A drop of red welled from the ball of her thumb where a thorn had pricked it. She sucked the blood away.

  "The world is as real as that rose," the guru said. "If it pricks you, you bleed."

  The rose vanished. Moonchild took her thumb from her mouth. A tiny drop of fresh blood ballooned from the puncture.

  Belew stood leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded over his chest. "So what?" he said "So you can make her levitate. JJ Flash can fly."

  Moonchild looked up with a start, then instantly dropped her eyes, as if in guilt. Ganesha laughed and laughed. Belew unfolded his arms and entered the room.

  A slim figure in a saffron robe barred his way. The features were almost Takisian in fineness, the hair shaved to a russet scalplock. Belew couldn't tell whether the figure was male or female.

  "What do you want here, machine?" the figure asked in a lisping hermaphrodite German accent.

  "I'm this woman's head bodyguard," Belew said, looking the yellowrobe over without evident favor. "Now I'm intent on moseying over to guard her body closer up ... whether or not I have to walk over yours."

  Ganesha giggled and waved. The yellowrobe drew back gracefully, with a graceful sneer of contempt. Belew mastered the impulse to tread on its toes as he walked into the room.

  "Sandalwood?" he said, sniffing. "Isis, I thought Old Hippie taste was bad. But this - ?"

  "Isn't it wonderful?"

  Belew sighed. "What's with the she-males?" he asked, gesturing at the wispy forms in saffron robes, draped artistically about the chamber. "Are they real too, guru?"

  "My sannyasi are as real as you yourself."

  "Some mornings," Belew said, digging in the many pockets of his vest, "I wonder."

  "Guru is a teacher of reality," Moonchild said. "Perhaps he can teach you as well."

  "Thank you, Madam President." Moonchild flushed and dropped her eyes from Belew's. She always found it difficult to look her Minister in the eye. "But Reality herself has taught me of her myriad ways, and a harsh schoolmistress she is."

  He produced a cigar and a cutter, snipped the end, fished in a pocket again. "But what was that about 'machine?'"

  "There are different kinds of maya, as Guru was just explaining," the door-keeper said languidly from behind Belew. "His maya is creative maya, natural maya. Yours is the maya of Western linear thought. The maya of the machine." The yellowrobe sniffed. "The true illusion. Special effects."

  "Indeed." Belew produced an ancient Zippo lighter, gleaming and metal, held it up like a magician a card.

  "Well, that's appropriate in my case - " Holding the cigar in his teeth he stuck his right thumb in the cigar cutter and nipped the tip off. Blood pulsed, flowed down his hairy wrist.

  "- because I'm the ace of the machine." He stuck the lighter firmly on the bleeding thumbtip. It stuck. As if of its own accord, it opened its cover. Its wheel turned, striking flame. Belew bent forward and lit his cigar.

  "Oh, please," the yellowrobe said. Belew turned and blew a cloud of smoke into its ethereal face. It doubled in a coughing fit.

  A man-high sunflower swiveled on its stem, bringing its black face to bear on Belew. He turned back to Moonchild and the guru, bringing the cigar to his lips.

  The sunflower shot a stream of water full into his face, extinguishing the cigar with a hiss and melting his moustache into sad wet-bird wings.

  Ganesha and his sannyasi laughed and laughed.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Hot afternoon. Walking the corridor, face darkened by his thoughts, Belew caught a murmur of voices from the garden. He paused, and then without the least self-consciousness had edged to the beginning of the arcaded walkway that surrounded the garden, peered around the corner. As security chief, he was privileged to lurk as he pleased around the Palace.

  Ganesha sat on the stone bench with Sprout arranged beside him, pointing into the water of the pool. "See the fish, with his veil fins, so colorful and lovely," he said in a singsong murmur. "So does atman swim in Nirvana, in perfect freedom and release."

  Sprout clapped her hands together. "Pretty!"

  "Now look, my child," Ganesha said. "Hold out your hands."

  Sprout obeyed. A large plush stuffed fish like a rainbow-hued fancy goldfish materialized in air, dropped softly into them. She gaped, astonished, then hugged it to her cheek.

  "Oh, thank you, Unca Neesha! Thank you, thank you!"

  "Does it find favor, O jewel child?"

  She set the toy down between them to gather him into a fervent hug. "Oh yes! I love it! I love you, Unca Neesha!"

  A shudder ran visibly through the guru's plump body then. Watching around the corner, Belew marked the way Ganesha's eyes caressed the very grown-up breasts, swelling the girl's white T-shirt under pressure from his own chest. The line of Belew's jaw grew harder.

  With obvious reluctance Ganesha pushed Sprout away. "Now, my child, observe once again the fish in his pond, serene. See how he changes color - "

  Obedient, she leaned well out over the pond, then exclaimed delightedly again as the fish, apparently, performed as advertised. What she did not see was Ganesha twitch aside the hem of the white robe he wore today, pluck a stuffed fish identical to the one he had materialized from beneath the bench, and slam it into the place of the materialization, which duly vanished just as Sprout straightened.

  A strange sensation came over Belew then - the sense of being observed, which he had learned long ago to honor. He ducked back.

  From the far end of the garden, where the corridor moved indoors again, a figure in a yellow robe was watching Belew watch the guru. Belew straightened. He nodded to the sannyas, turned, and walked away, not too fast.

  Inside, he seethed.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  In his Spartan bedchamber, Mark sat lotus on his big colonial brass bed, rocking forward and back, pounding his thighs with knotted fists, tears pouring down his baby-red face.

  "Oh, Guru, Guru," he moaned. "I've looked inside myself and seen what's there. It's evil. Ultimate darkness." He pounded his skinny chest. "In me."

  He raised his head and looked at Ganesha through a cataract of tears. "Do you know what it's like, Guru? Do you?"

  Ganesha's huge head nodded. "Yes, my son. I do."

  Mark blinked, eyes as innocent as Sprout's. "And you overcame the darkness? You cleansed yourself of evil."

  "I did." the Guru said. But his head turned away from Mark, ever so slightly, so that the pupil could not see what passed behind the master's eyes.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Belew had his own office near Mark's. It was modest in size, the walls hung with high-quality reproductions of paintings by Dutch masters: Rembrandt, macabre Brueghel, the vans Eyck and Dyck - but never Rubens, whom he considered too much of a good thing. His only presumption upon his status was a grand recliner chair, in which he could listen to music: Vivaldi, Verdi, or Van Halen, for his tastes were as diverse as his talents.

  His fax machine was busy disgorging a stack of papers. He knocked the dottle from his pipe, filled, tamped, relit. Then he squared a sheaf on the table beside him, held it up before his face, and carefully settled a pair of reading-glasses on his occasionally broken nose. It was a pity, but the regenerative gift which was alread
y budding out a new pink tip to the thumb he'd truncated as a parlor trick yesterday, could only buffer him against so many of the ravages of that old devil, Time.

  He read for an interval. Then he set his pipe aside and read the pages carefully through once more. Then he set them aside, tilted his head back, massaged the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

  "Was I fearing to see something like this," he asked the ceiling, "or hoping?"

  Because he would not lie to himself, he silently answered yes to both questions. Then he rose and looked for his shoes.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The Vietnamese activist and the American joker spokesman stood in the audience hall and yelled at each other through interpreters. Moonchild stared from one to another in growing horror. She understood both languages well enough, yet she could not grasp what either was saying. It was as if she were trapped in a dream, one of those dreams when people look at you earnestly and mouth words, but all you hear are inchoate sounds, unintelligible as surf.

  She glanced aside at guru, who stood beside her chair of state. He nodded slightly, smiled, and she felt warmth suffuse her.

  He strengthens me with his darshan, his presence, she thought. He reassures me that there are answers, even if I have to grope for them myself....

  Yet she still felt that desperate dislocation. Still the disputants' words held no meaning. She felt otherness ripple across her like a shockwave packet from a distant earthquake, as the other personalities all threatened to burst the seams of her consciousness and come tumbling in at once.

  Guru says there is a cure for that, too. The cure for all my - our - problems. I can make that sacrifice. Can the others?

  You better believe not, an internal voice was responding, male and angry, when she looked up and saw J. Bob standing in the door.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "You seemed to be in something of a hurry to get out of there, Madam President," J. Bob said, standing in the corridor outside. "Not deriving the same serenity from the Presence as you used to?"

  "I believe you wished to talk to me," Moonchild said coolly.

  Belew nodded crisply. "This just came in. You and Mark might be interested in it Mark especially."

  Eyeing him sidelong, which was not her usual style at all, Moonchild accepted a sheaf of printout from Belew, began to flip the pages up.

  "There's still not much concrete in there," Belew said. "No surprise; the money that flows into your pal's coffers from the faithful will buy a supertanker load of Third World justice of the blind variety, if you catch my drift. What's significant is that as much shows up as does.

  "Especially since in India, frankly, they're pretty casual about sex with children. Holy men have near carte blanche. And at least Hosenose generally goes for early teens, not eight-year-olds. Have to give him that."

  Moonchild glared at him. She tore the document in two with a petulant flip of her wrists.

  "With a little practice," Belew said, watching the torn sheets flutter to the marble floor, "you'll work your way up to the Manhattan phonebook."

  When his eyes found hers again Moonchild's anger was gone, replaced by sadness deep as arthritis. "I would not have believed it of you, Major Belew," she said softly. "But perhaps I should have expected it. Your fascist tendencies have finally gotten the better of you."

  "Fascist?"

  "To resort to such slander, simply because you feel threatened by Guru's antimaterialism." She shook her head. "There is much good in you, I still know that. Yet, as Mark might say, once a fascist, always a fascist."

  She turned and vanished back into her audience chamber. Belew stood staring at the door for perhaps a minute. Then he laughed at himself for standing there like an adolescent left on the stoop without so much as a good-night kiss, and went up to bed.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Morning in the garden. Sprout stood on an inch of air. Her golden hair was caught in a ponytail. Her cheeks glowed like dawn.

  "What I do, little miss," Ganesha was saying, "is create a layer of air beneath the soles of your lotus feet. Only it is not quite air, but something more substantial. And this do I add to, layer upon layer, until you, my little pretty one, are levitating." He knelt beside her on the white sand of the little path.

  She smiled and nodded. Also fidgeted. She didn't really see the point to this. But her Daddy had taught her always to be nice, and Unca Neesha was always nice to her. She would play along for now.

  "Sometime, perhaps, you would care to play in the evening," Ganesha said. "We could go somewhere outside the Palace - "

  "Oh, I always go to bed at - " She briefly consulted her fingers. " - at eight. Daddy doesn't make me. But it makes him happy."

  Ganesha rose with a soft grunt of effort. "You are a dear child, to serve your father so well," he said. "Yet sometimes, well - what he does not know does not hurt him, don't they say, after all?"

  "Learning to fly, Leaf?" a voice asked from behind them. The guru stiffened.

  "Oh, Unca Bob," Sprout said. "You know my name's not Leaf. I told you."

  J. Robert Belew slapped the side of his head with hand's heel. "Guess I forgot. Must be getting old." He grinned at her. "Feel like riding a horse, or would you rather hang there in midair?"

  She clapped her hands together. "A horsie, really?" He nodded!

  "'Bye, Unca Neesha!" Sprout jumped down from her invisible pedestal and ran toward the soldier, who took her by the hand and led her away.

  Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, looked darkly after. Tiny malformed things appeared in the air, and flew buzzing around his vast-eared head.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  For the next few days Belew stayed well out of Mark's way. He didn't stay out of Ganesha's. Whenever the guru contrived to get Sprout alone Belew appeared out of the woodwork with some new game or diversion.

  J. Bob gave her a toy train and a six-foot panda. She enjoyed both gifts with a child's single-mindedness. But Belew, who was not as proud of the job he had done raising his own two children as he was of most things in his life, perceived that he could not bribe her.

  On the other hand ... it was clear that, throughout her life, she had never had as much of a father as she might have wanted. That was not to say that Mark was a failure as a father or a man; far from it. For all his hippie ways and New Age outlook, for all the fact that the first obstacle course he ran would be his last by reason of gasping death, Mark was a real man to J. Bob, who had an unfashionably archaic view of such things.

  More, he was a real father. Mark had given everything for his daughter's sake that a man could give and still be able to draw breath. It was more, candidly, than J. Robert Belew had ever done in the role.

  But like many another parent who would give anything for his or her child's welfare, Mark had never entirely known how to give himself to her. He loved her, cherished her. But he had never really learned to spend time with her.

  Belew had never known how to spend time with his own children. But he wasn't too old a dog to learn.

  As often as he interrupted Ganesha, he found himself observed by the surly yellow robed sannyasi who haunted the Palace. Let them look, he told himself. Nothing they see will bring much comfort to old Hosenose.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Master."

  The yellowrobes had been chased from the ballroom. The maya splendor was still intact, save for the Apsarases, who had been sent packing back into immateriality. This was a private occasion.

  "Yes, my son."

  "I - I would become your disciple. I would take dik-sha, and have my mantra from you."

  "And do you understand what this initiation entails?"

  "Renunciation, Master."

  "And do you realize what you must renounce?"

  "I must renounce the world, and my will."

  "That is not all, my son. To become my disciple truly, you must become a sannyas. You must become celibate. You must give over choice and preference."

  "I am prepared."r />
  "You must give over the becoming what you call your 'friends.' You must put them all aside, and put them all from your mind."

  Mark hesitated, hearing a defiant chorus in the back of his head. "And will I - will we all win freedom by my doing that, each of us to work out his or her own karma?"

  "You shall."

  "And I shall receive forgiveness? And ... forgetfulness?"

  "All these things."

  Mark bowed his head. "I am ready to receive my mantra, Master."

  "Tomorrow."

  Mark started to raise his head. The guru wagged a chubby finger. "No, no. You are surrendering your will entirely to God, through me. Remember?"

  Mark nodded.

  "Tomorrow it shall be."

  "Tomorrow."

  "And now, my son, there is something else I must speak with you about, something of the gravest concern."

  The guru's high, musical voice seemed to catch. Mark looked up at him in wonder and dismay.

  "It is with great sadness that I must speak to you of your friend J. Robert's unnatural and unholy interest in your virgin daughter, Sprout...."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Sprout. Sprout, now, settle down." The girl in the garden writhed and wriggled and laughed aloud at Belew's efforts to disloge her from his knee. "Sprout, this isn't dignified. And anyway, you're heavy."

  "Am not. Am not. Unca Neesha says I'm slender as a willow branch. Whatever that means."

  It means he's a disgusting tentacle-faced old pervert, Belew thought

  "Sprout," Belew said, trying not to be aware himself of the long, slim bare legs straddling his lap, or the full breasts bouncing around inside her sweater like puppies in a sack. "Sprout. You're a wonderful child. I - ouch - I understand that part of being a wonderful child is to be a brat sometimes, inasmuch as perfection is boring. But still, if you don't climb off Unca Bob's lap right now, Unca Bob is going to turn you over and tan your behind."