Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Mark snapped his head back and forth as if watching a tennis match on speed — him or the players, it didn’t make much difference. Yes, he saw them. Faces in the shadows. Some sullen, some openly hostile. Most of them wore a blank resignation he imagined a rape victim got when she knew she couldn’t fight back.

  “Why are they doing this?” Spoiler demanded in a high-pitched voice. “Why the hick are they hiding from us?”

  “They’re afraid of us,” the sergeant said. “They think we’re monsters — even Meadows, who looks about two feet taller’n any human they ever seen before. Also, we got these.”

  He slapped the receiver of the M-16 he, like the rest of them, had been issued that morning. They were the reason Mark was being so hypercautious. He was afraid the thing would go off by itself.

  The sergeant chuckled. “Got no way of knowing we got no bullets.”

  “But we’re here to help them!” Mario said.

  The sergeant gave him a look. “They heard that one before, son.”

  Croyd tipped back his bottle of Giai Phong. He and mark, whose squad had been stood down after coming in a little after noon, sat on lawn chairs in front of their bunker. The afternoon sun lit up bubbles the color of Croyd’s eyes.

  “As far as I know,” he said regretfully, “I got no ace powers this time around.” He gave a half-lidded glare to a bunch of jokers drifting their way in evident hope of cadging beer. “Not that I’ve been in any hurry to let these shrabs know that.”

  “You really dig life as a gecko, man?” asked Mark. He wore a T-shirt tied turban-fashion around his head and nothing on his chest. He wasn’t worried about ultraviolet radiation at the moment. He was worried about hot.

  “Skink, dammit. I’m a skink.”

  “I thought skinks were skinny, squinty lizards with heads smaller than their necks.”

  Croyd drew himself up in his chair. At Mark’s suggestion he had discovered that he could sit in a lawn chair if he fed his tail through the back.

  “See the words you’re using?” he asked. “Skinny. Squinty. ‘Sk’ words. They sound like ‘skink.’ That’s why you associate them with skinks.”

  Mark looked mulish. “I don’t know, man.”

  “Look, who’s the authority here? You — all right, you’re a biochemist. But I — I’m a skink. So there.”

  He had an audience for his outburst. “Naw,” said one of the old breed, a three-eyed joker Brigade vet everybody called Tabasco. “You’re a fuck-you lizard.”

  “Okay,” Croyd said. “Fuck you.” He lunged at the joker, opening his mouth wide. It was shocking red inside and armed with alarming teeth. Tabasco squawked and ran, pelted by the jeers of his buddies.

  “You fools wouldn’t know a skink if it bit you on the ass,” Croyd grumbled. He settled back and resumed his beer.

  “Uh-oh,” he said at once. “Now what?”

  For the last ten or fifteen minutes there had been a lot of activity around the wooden headquarters buildings in the center of camp. Now the tall figure of Evan Brewer — Brew — was striding across the parade ground toward Croyd’s bunker.

  Tabasco was standing on the far side of the group of idlers from Croyd, batting at his buddies’ hands as they poked at him. His hand hit something hard and spiky. He stopped and turned to see Brew with the end of his lobster-claw resting on his shoulder.

  “You. Down to the quartermaster. Do it now. And you, and you.” He was picking out men from the original Brigade.

  He stopped in front of Mark, reached out his claw to touch Mark on the sternum. The spiny tip was strangely cool as it pricked Mark’s bare skin.

  “You too,” Brew said. “The Colonel wants an ace along. Though I don’t exactly know how your friends will find you to help you if something comes down.”

  Even a half day on patrol had left Mark drained. But he struggled to make himself rise. “What’s happening, man?” he asked.

  Brew’s handsome face clouded. “Somebody just took a couple of shots at one of our training patrols.”

  “The bastards! The nat fuckin’ sons of bitches!”

  The sun had vanished into a cloud tsunami rolling in across the South China Sea. Rays of pale light fanned out from the place where it had vanished like the fingers of a cosmic hand. Ambling back from the mess hall — he went along to chow to be comradely and also because there were sometimes big snaggletooth bamboo rats to be found — Croyd gestured toward the rec hall with his cigar.

  “Spoiler’s in good voice tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. The parade-ground mud sucked at his feet, trying to pull his boots off. He could barely muster the strength to lift them. An hour of flying cover for a rescue mission as J. J. Flash left him feeling completely blasted. They hadn’t found any enemies, and no one had been hurt, but the tension had wrung more out of him than even J. J.’s overamped metabolism.

  Spoiler tore off his Brooklyn Dodgers hat and threw it down. Then he tore off his T-shirt and threw that too. “It was those Vietnamese Army assholes, you know it was! They think all us jokers are dog-shit, do you hear me? Dog shit. We ought to go down to that camp and just mop the place with the cocksuckers!”

  Croyd stopped to watch. “Oh, yeah,” he said, though Spoiler was out of earshot even if he could hear anything over his tantrum. “You don’t even know how to fire your M-16s yet. The People’s Army has machine guns. This should be interesting.”

  Mark noticed a deputation marching across from the headquarters buildings. Brew and Luce and a couple of their cronies he recognized from Rick’s, Osprey and Purple and his squad-mate Slick.

  Spoiler was still rampaging around offering to personally kick the ass of the entire People’s Army of Vietnam, collectively or one at a time, when Brewer called out, “Hey, why burn up all this energy? Is this display really accomplishing anything?”

  Spoiler stopped in the process of trying to fight his way through a knot of his pals to get inside the rec hall, presumably to bust up the pool table, which was way the hell off true anyway. He turned to face the older jokers, skinny chest working like a donkey engine.

  “It’s those fucking nat bastards,” he panted. “They were the ones who bushwhacked our boys today”

  Luce’s cheeks puffed out. “Is that the Vietnamese Army you’re talking about?” he demanded. “Is that our comrades-in-arms…” Brew put a calming hand on his friend’s upper biceps. “What happened today was an accident. Things happen. Life’s like that.”

  “Bull-fucking-shit it was an accident. Your butthole buddies from down the road were out to bag them some joker meat. What the fuck are we doing here? I thought we were supposed to be training to defend the right of jokers everywhere. How the fuck can we do that if we can’t even defend ourselves?”

  Luce was starting to turn colors and ball all his hands into fists. “If the attack today was deliberate,” Brew said smoothly, interposing himself a little more firmly, “bourgeois elements had to be responsible. The reactionaries have been kicking over the traces all over the South the last couple of days. And if that’s the case

  He shrugged. “Then you may get a chance to fight for joker rights a lot sooner than you think. And for our hosts.”

  “Why should we fight for them, man?” another young joker asked. “They hate us.”

  “Well, so what? How important is it for you to have the nats love you? It isn’t going to happen.

  “The Vietnamese are giving us a shot at being the nucleation point for a whole new phase of joker activism. But more than that, they’re giving us a chance to atone for the sins of America. This is Vietnam, man. It’s crucial, absolutely crucial. What went down here is the focal point of our national consciousness.”

  The joker boy looked at him blankly. “Why? Did something happen here?”

  Croyd tugged on Mark’s olive-drab sleeve. “We better draw a curtain discreetly over this scene. Spoiler’s lost his head of steam, and the only thing liable to happen here now is our friend Brewer having apopl
exy. Or don’t people have apoplexy anymore?”

  “They call it having a stroke, now, man.”

  “Is that so? Damn. It’s hard to keep up with slang when you spend two thirds of your life asleep. Of course, I guess you normal people spend a third of your lives asleep, but it’s not, like, all at once, if you know what I mean.”

  Mark looked at him with bleary intensity. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right, man? You’re starting to sound like you need sleep worse than I do.”

  “Bite your tongue. I never felt better in my life. In my whole damned life. Besides, I told you: lizards don’t sleep.”

  “Huh,” Mark said, and allowed himself to be led off to the bunker.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Night, and a kata in the rain. This time Moonchild — and the semi-submerged Mark persona — were feeling guilty about being so well rested. The rain had returned in mid-afternoon. Moonchild carried on her martial dance uncaring, serene and lovely, her heavy black hair hanging around her shoulders like seaweed.

  The sun had been high up in the sky and the bunker filling with heat like a Cadillac with cement when Mark opened his eyes. He had slept through reveille, which was a much-abused record played over the camp P.A. system. It was a weird note, after even Mark “The Last Hippie” Meadows, Cap’n Trips, had broken down and bought a CD player for his long-lost head shop, the Cosmic Pumpkin, to wake up every morning to the firefight sounds of old-fashioned vinyl getting scratched by a needle. Maybe they figured the cracks in the record would roust out the somnolent better than the recorded bugle solo.

  It hadn’t awakened Mark. The miracle was, nobody had come along to kick him awake when he didn’t fall in for P. T. Nor was he in the deep shit he assumed he was, when he turned up at H.Q. at ten o’clock in the morning with his shirt buttoned one hole off to report, heart-in-throat, that he’d overslept. He had been told not to sweat it and was given minor make-work jobs to while the day away inside the perimeter. They hadn’t even made him fill sandbags.

  Mark was feeling almost human by evening chow. Afterward the nightly political meetings were held in several big tents, lit by kerosene lamps and smelling of wet canvas, like a militaristic camp revival. Brew taught the one Mark and Croyd wound up at, explaining the history of the Vietnamese war of liberation from a socialist point of view. The young bloods kept getting bored and making noise or dozing off. They were pounced on by Revolutionary Vigilance monitors — other young recruits whose interest in the proceedings had been engaged by giving them red armbands and Authority — written up and told to attend the dreaded daily self-criticism sessions that followed the regular political meetings.

  Every once in a while an original joker Brigader would lose his cool at some quietly dry remark Brew made concerning the American involvement in Vietnam and start yelling. Brew never flinched. He just got this sardonic half smile on his heavy, handsome face, listened to what the retread had to say, and then demolished him without ever raising his voice. His refutations didn’t always seem logically watertight to the ever-scientific Mark, but the recipients seldom found an answer to them. Brew fought with words the way his buddy Luce did, toward the same end — total Clausewitzian devastation of the enemy — but his skills were subtler. “Jack the Ripper compared to the Skid Row Slasher,” Croyd said, sotto voce, when Mark mentioned it to him.

  When Brew finished with him, the objecting veteran got handed a yellow slip requiring his presence at the ensuing kiem thao session. The veterans accepted them meekly, seeming almost to welcome additional contrition. The young bloods generally had to be threatened with worse, like a good beating by the monitors, or some downtime in the Box. The Box was a recent innovation right out of every direct-to-video prison flick ever made: a tiny tin-roof shed at the foot of the parade ground. Malefactors were locked into it and allowed twenty-four hours or so to enjoy the stunning heat of day and the surprising nighttime chill.

  When the indoctrination session ended, the sun was long gone. It was safe for Moonchild to come out and play.

  As she moved through her forms, the blocks and punches and startling high kicks, she did not lack an audience. She was an attractive female alone in a camp full of lonely men. The gawkers kept a wet, respectful distance, though, and went easy on the catcalls. They’d all seen how she handled Rhino — or heard, which pumped the act up to more than it was.

  Eric Bell stood by himself to the side, near the bunker Mark shared with Croyd, the rain matting his dark-blond hair to his misshapen skull. He was silent, his hands and body at rest.

  When she felt the end of her hour nearing, Moonchild finished her practice and turned to enter the bunker. Eric stepped forward. “May I talk to you?” he asked. His voice was low and deep beyond his years.

  She tipped her head and regarded him coolly. “You are disappointed that there was no fight tonight, yes?”

  The boy shook his head. “Relieved. I don’t have much taste for violence.”

  “Really? Why, then, are you here, in the middle of a military camp?”

  To her surprise he laughed. “I might ask you the same question. The answer is, I believe in love. But love isn’t all you need, no matter what the Beatles sang. The nats have been grinding our faces in that fact since long before I was born — or you either, I suspect. We must have strength, the strength to protect ourselves. Then our love can begin its work — not in a spirit of confrontation, but confidently and unafraid.”

  She dropped her gaze to the mud. “That is very beautiful.”

  He laughed again. “I was a street poet in Brooklyn before I came here to be a peaceful guerrilla warrior. I picked up a few oratorical tricks back then. It’s all sleight-of-tongue.”

  Her mind filled with an urban street-corner image, young Eric barefoot in torn jeans, addressing an afternoon-rush pedestrian throng. First one man in hardhat and coveralls stopped and turned to listen to him, then a woman in a smart gray executive suit, a delivery boy on a mountain bike, one after another, until the homeward surge stood still to hear the boy poet’s words.

  He finished his poem, the words of which Moonchild could not quite hear, though they tantalized with the promise of infinite meaning. The crowd barraged him with dead cats and garbage. She laughed. “That never happened, surely!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in amused delight.

  His distorted features slipped into a highly charming grin. “Not exactly,” he said. “You can call that a sleight-of-mind. Another one of my gifts.”

  She smiled and started to turn away, suddenly shy. “The way you handled Rhino…” he said.

  She froze, every muscle tensed, as if expecting his next words to strike like a blow.

  “It was beautiful,” he said. “You could have hurt him badly, yet you did not. You could have shamed him, too. I guess a lot of the guys think you did. But I know better. I saw the way you gave him a chance to strike you when you helped him up, gave him the pride of choosing to do the right thing. That was the most magnificent thing of all.

  “You have an ace’s powers, but none of an ace’s arrogance. You have enormous strengths, but you use them with restraint — yes, and with love. That’s what this place” — he gestured around at the dark, rain-swept camp. — “what Fort Venceremos is all about. You show us the way that, yes, we shall overcome.”

  She licked her lips and swallowed. She could find no words.

  “I’d like to talk to you more,” he said. “I want to know you. May I see you sometime?”

  She nodded, almost frantically, agitated by some emotion she could not identify and the coming transformation. “Ask Mark,” she said quickly. “He is a good man.”

  She vanished into the bunker, leaving Eric in the rain.

  “Check,” Croyd said, moving his bishop. It tipped over his knight en route. “Excuse it. These digits aren’t really designed for manipulation,”

  “Uh-uh,” Mark said, shaking his head. “Can’t do that, man.”

  For a being virtually beref
t of mimetic muscles, Croyd could muster a hell of an outraged look. “Why the hell not?”

  “Revealed check from my queen. Can’t put your own king in jeopardy, man.”

  “Shit.” Croyd retracted the move, knocking the white knight down again. “And here I thought I had your back to the wall.” Mark gave him a thin smile. Once upon a time he had been a middling-hot chess player; he’d held a master’s rating in high school and college, playing tournaments, memorizing games by the book-load. Time and extensive experimentation with psychoactive chemicals had left certain gaps in his knowledge, and he hadn’t had much occasion to keep his skills honed since. He still fancied himself a dangerous player.

  Unfortunately Croyd played with the banzai intensity of an amateur. All those classical openings painstakingly committed to memory, all Mark’s fianchettos and his Nimzo-Indian Defenses, all his careful strategic analysis, blew right out the door in the face of a player who didn’t know enough to know what he wasn’t supposed to do. Despite the misfire of Croyd’s current attack, Mark saw yet another draw looming a few moves ahead like the face of a glacier.

  Somebody rapped on the bunker’s doorpost with something hard. “Hello? Anybody in here?”

  “Lizards and old hippies, if that counts,” Croyd called. “Come right on in.”

  Brew and Luce entered, Brew folding an umbrella, Luce’s face streaming with rain and his T-shirt soaked transparent and clinging to his rather flabby middle. Umbrellas were bogus, apparently.

  Gilbert immediately started batting at the air, which was a near-solid blue haze from about the level of Mark’s breastbone up, with several of his arms. “You’re smoking that damned cigar in here. I don’t know why the Colonel permits tobacco onbase. Smoking is a bourgeois habituation, fostered by capitalist consumer fascism.”

  “That must be why every Viet over the age of three years old smokes,” Croyd said affably.