Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

“Naw. They won’t smell anything but gunsmoke and their own sweat — and shit, probably.” The adrenal fear-rush of deadly danger seemed to be having a calming effect on the amphetamine-soaked Croyd. Mark was not in a mood to appreciate the biochemical subtleties of the fact. “They’re just as scared as we are.”

  “What are you talking about?” He started to push the slim, vented snout of his M-16 over the low log. A burst of gunfire chewed up the log, spraying his face with friable punky wood and writhing white grubs.

  “They haven’t hit anybody. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  As if taking a cue, Sarge called, “Anybody hit? Sound off.” The squad members called out negative replies.

  “Eye Ball’s okay, too, Sarge,” Mario yelled from somewhere behind and to the left of Mark.

  “Hey!” Mark said. “They stopped shooting!” He started to peek over the log.

  Croyd grabbed him by the arm. His grip was clammy and not strong, but emphatic just the same. “Hold on to your horses, boy.”

  “Open fire!” Sarge yelled. “Start busting caps! Right now!”

  Mark glanced at Croyd, then held his M-16 up over the top of the log and fired off the whole magazine in a shuddering spasm.

  Croyd nodded. “Flashback time again. That’s just the way they used to do it, in Nam Round One.”

  Return fire was cracking past overhead, more desultory than before. “Why’d they stop shooting?” Mark asked, dropping his spent magazine and trying to cram in another. He dropped the fresh mag three times.

  “Same reason you did. They all went dry at once. Sarge Hamilton ordered everybody to shoot so we’d grab fire superiority.” Croyd took a hit from his cigar. “Basically that means making them keep their heads down.”

  Mark’s fingers were scrabbling in the dark soil for the fallen magazine like the legs of some giant jungle insect. Suddenly he stopped, took a deep breath. Then he carefully picked up the full magazine and pushed it into the well with a click.

  “How come you know all this stuff?” he asked Croyd.

  Croyd popped a huge pale beetle into his mouth with his tongue and rolled over onto his back, as if bullets weren’t passing with miniature sonic booms inches above his nose. “I read books. I never did finish my education, but I can read.” He looked at Mark. “All the fear went out of you just then, didn’t it? What happened?”

  Mark stared at him. He had studied the workings of the mind enough to have no sentimental notions about the insights of the crazy. Crazy people thought crazy things. But amphetamine intoxication or no, Croyd was being very perceptive, out here on death’s green edge.

  “Yeah. I let go my fear. Now I feel calm.”

  Croyd eyed him with glittering gold interest. “How’d you accomplish that?”

  “I died. On Takis — off Takis, I mean. In orbit. I — part of me died. I died.”

  “No white light?”

  “No. Just dead.”

  “So what happened just now?”

  Mark shrugged. “I panicked when Eye Ball came running back and those people opened up. But talking with you, I suddenly thought, ‘What the heck? What’s it matter?’ They can’t do anything to me that hasn’t been done before.”

  The attempt to make the enemy keep his head down had failed, unless they were hip to that blind-firing trick too; a brisk little firefight was in progress. To Mark it all seemed to be happening to someone else, far, far away. As if he were watching it all on TV in his parents’ den in smug southern California safety.

  Croyd was studying him with speed-freak intensity. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “Why ‘uh-oh’?”

  “Holy shit!” It was the normally calm Slick, his voice sliding on a glass sheet of panic. “Sarge, they’re getting around behind us!”

  “Excuse me, man,” Mark said, unbuttoning a pocket of his camouflaged blouse. “I’m gonna roll behind this bush …

  “Hey, it’s cool. I’ve seen you change before.”

  Mark stared. Only K.C. Strange and Tachyon had actually seen him turn into one of his “friends.” Well, yes, about half of New York had seen it on the evening news, at that apartment fire the last night with Sprout and Kimberly Anne, but that was an accident. The only reason the jumper girl — Blaise’s main squeeze of that moment — who had befriended him on the Rox had gotten to witness the change was that Mark was half-convinced it wouldn’t work.

  “Remember that night we both did up some windowpane? You tried this new batch of powder you’d been working on and turned into this giant raccoon. I thought I’d flipped out totally.” Mark stared at him. A friend he didn’t even know about? He shook his head. No, he was tripping…

  Fresh gunfire from the left — the heavy, slow clatter of an AK. Mark slammed the contents of the tiny vial in his vest.

  Croyd yelped and rolled away from the flames that enveloped Mark. “Jesus! What’s in that stuff?”

  “Me,” said Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, flexing his fingers. Orange flames capered from tip to tip.

  He looked at Croyd, who was flat on his belly several meters away. “So what was that ‘uh-oh,’ anyway?”

  “You ever read Joseph Campbell? Hero with a Thousand Faces?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was pretentious jive.”

  He swooped up ten feet in the air and hovered, arms akimbo. “All right, you jerks, you haven’t hit anything yet. Try your luck with me.”

  For a moment all was silence except for the dripping of rain from a billion leaves. Then gunfire reached for him from behind the huge fallen tree.

  “Your aim still sucks,” he said. He rolled his left palm open. A line of fire stabbed into the heart of the great trunk.

  The tree exploded as the water trapped in it flashed into steam.

  J. J. Flash laughed as half a dozen black-pajama-clad ambushers went rolling backward from the blast. They picked themselves up and ran off into the bush, elbows pumping.

  Shots from the left. J. J. felt the shock waves of their passing slap his face. He pivoted, jetted flame from his palm. Another tree, this one standing, blew up, fragments black against an expanding ball of plasma. As the top half of the tree crashed down, another set of ambushers fled.

  Laughing, Jumpin’ Jack Flash cast his fire-lances far and wide. Miniature suns flared. Trees fell. Ambushers ran for their lives.

  Then all was still. A few birds began tentatively to sing.

  Wreathed in smoke, J. J. Flash looked down on his fellow squad-mates. They stared up at him, faces blank.

  He conjured a guitar, a Fender o’ Flame, alive in his hands. He struck a chord, reverberating off through the jungle. The smoke whipped away. He floated against a low, cement-colored sky.

  “It’s a gas-gas-gas,” he said.

  A raindrop struck his shoulder. He yelped in sudden pain. “This is what I get for being overconfident,” he said, and darted for the cover of an intact stand of trees.

  When the squad, still pale and unsteady on its feet — whether from the ambush or J. J. ’s demonstration — reached the point where Flash had vanished, they found Mark sitting in the rain, humming “Give Peace a Chance.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Hey, bay-bee!”

  Moonchild ignored the wolf calls from around the bonfire that leaped higher than Giraffe’s mottled mauve head. Normally she would have stopped to upbraid the young men for their sexist behavior. Not tonight. She would have to fight one or many of them, and they would come at her with such ferocity that she was afraid she might hurt one inadvertently. These war dances, which had begun after the gloves came off and the New Brigade was put on combat status, put the boys in a badger-savage mood.

  As she walked on, a fight broke out behind her. The non-participants gathered around to urge the fighters on with howls and jeers and the throb of Public Enemy for soundtrack. Beer had been banned from the camp, but she doubted that the youths had tea or the heavily chemical-flavored water in their cups and canteens. Even pariah Mark had heard rumors of secret s
tills inside the wire. And the raggedy army of vendors that had gathered outside the gates, despite Sobel’s fulminations and the best efforts of the Vietnamese authorities, were willing to provide anything at all for a wad of Vietnamese dong or, better, a few dollars carried across the water in a back jeans pocket.

  She owed her very presence to that enterprise, in sad fact. The store of potions Mark had mixed in Athens was running low. And there were limits to the kind of drugs he could get his hands on as camp pharmacist. He was severely worried about the purity of what he was able to scrounge; given the powerful effect of his potions, he didn’t even want to imagine the possible effect of a bad trip caused by tainted components. But so far his luck had held.

  She veered in the other direction then, to carry herself wide of the Boxes and their reek of human filth marinade. Sobel had five of them now. They still had a waiting list.

  Behind her someone started screaming. Her reflex was to turn and run back, to help. But to interfere would be anti-communitarian — acting against the popular will. She kept walking.

  She was learning a lot here in the struggle-capital of Fort Venceremos. All Mark’s personae were.

  She reached the entry to Eric’s solo bunker, paused. From inside came sounds of conversation, male laughter, hard as brass. For a moment she concentrated on centering herself. Then she rapped on the peeled-pole lintel.

  “Come,” Eric’s voice called.

  She advanced into gloom that seemed more intensified than diminished by the low-turned kerosene lantern. Eric the Dreamer sat with three young jokers, new arrivals. The one sitting cross-legged with his back to Moonchild when she entered still wore Killer Geek colors — a violation of New Joker Brigade policy. It surprised Moonchild; Eric was a vocal upholder of Sobel’s discipline, one of the few among the young bloods who was.

  Her resolve faltered. ’Am I interrupting something?”

  The young blood with the colors squeezed out a low wolf whistle. “Stop that,” Eric said softly.

  “Hey,” said another through a mouthful of teeth like curved yellow knitting needles. “I thought we was like all pals here. Share and share alike. No property.”

  Eric looked at him. The boy with the teeth suddenly paled. He shot to his feet, staggered against the doorframe next to Moonchild, then managed somehow to eel out without touching her. His two buddies followed, stumbling all over each other in their eagerness to get outside without coming in contact with the slim young woman.

  “What did you do to them?” she asked Eric, who still sat cross-legged and serene, like a slender youthful Buddha.

  “Showed them the error of their ways,” he said with a smile. “We don’t tolerate sexism here.”

  “So you have the power to give nightmares as well as beautiful dreams.”

  He held his hands palm up and open on his thighs. “To every yin there must be yang. You’re Asian; surely that’s no surprise.”

  She shook her head as if trying to drive away the omnipresent bugs, swarming in that especially frenetic way they did just before the rains hit again. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “They brought disturbing news,” he said. “Word on the street back home is the government massacred the jokers they took prisoner on the Rox.”

  “No!”

  He nodded. “It’s the rumor. But I believe it. Don’t you — really, deep inside?”

  “I can’t. The government — it’s America! They’d never do anything like that! They wouldn’t permit it.”

  “Then why,” he said calmly, “are you here and not there?”

  She was in his arms, clinging to him like a baby monkey, weeping. He sat statue-solid, statue centered, holding her and whispering endearments into her hair until she cried herself out.

  She rose. He looked up at her, calm and unsurprised as she stood over him. Her hair fell heavy across his forehead, his face. She put her hands on the tortured badlands of his cheeks.

  She bent and kissed his knobbed and scab-like lips.

  His eyes widened in surprise. Her tongue slid over his lips, insinuated itself between. He accepted her, caressed her tongue with his, then thrust it into her mouth.

  She broke away, straightened. She reached up and removed the half mask, pulling it off over her hair. The right side of her face was stained with a port-wine birthmark like a splash of paint.

  “Tsk, tsk.” Sitting back propped on the heels of his hands, Eric shook his head. “In a camp full of jokers you hide such a small deformity. I’m not ashamed to show my face.”

  If he was trying to bait her, she refused to rise. “My mask is symbolic. And it is fitting that I wear it. Understand, I am a creature of the night.”

  She stepped back into the shadows and was gone. Eric uttered a soft cry of surprise, started to stand.

  “Wait,” her voice said. She seemed very near, but squint as he might, he could see nothing.

  A bare foot emerged into the wan light-pool of the lantern, a leg, and then she was standing again before him. She was nude. Her breasts were small, pink-tipped and conical. Her pubic bush was a dainty vertical band, very sparse.

  “I am a creature of light and darkness,” she said in a husky voice, “mostly darkness.”

  Standing astride him, she drew off the denim vest he wore, pulled his white T-shirt up over his head. The skin of his chest was ridged and folded. She ran her lips over it.

  He caressed her head with his rough hands. Her fingers worked inexpertly at his belt and the buttons of his jeans. After a moment he grinned at her and guided her hands away.

  “I guess there are some things even an ace can’t do,” he said. She stood up, an uncertain look on her face. He unfastened the pants himself, slid them off.

  He grasped her by the hips, kissed her in the midst of her bush. She gasped and grabbed his head with both hands. Her breathing went stop-and-go as he ran his tongue down the centerline of her pubic thatch.

  The tip of his tongue slid down between her smooth-muscled thighs, parted the tangled hair, found the lips of her pussy and teased them apart. Her fingers drilled into the sides of his head.

  A strangled sound escaped him. He pulled his head back. She looked down at him in confusion and disappointment.

  “Careful, love,” he said. “You damn near squashed my head there. Don’t forget, you’ve got an ace’s strength.”

  “Oh, dear. I am most terribly sorry.” She started to pull away, blushing, almost weeping in embarrassment.

  He grabbed her by the buttocks and buried his face in her. She put her head back and moaned, practically collapsing onto him.

  In less than a minute she cried out, sharply, sounding almost frightened. She rocked her hips forward into the sweet, insistent pressure of his tongue. She dug her fingers into his shoulders, froze, relaxed her hands to keep from harming him.

  She pushed him away. “That was quick,” he said, looking up at her with her juices shining on his misshapen face. “You’re easy to please.”

  “It was so … so intense,” she said breathlessly. “I was not expecting it.”

  “Don’t tell me nobody ever did that to you before.”

  “Not … that I recall.”

  Eric shook his head. “Then I can confidently say your taste in men has improved, Isis.”

  He straightened his legs. He put his hands on her waist and drew her down. She allowed herself to be drawn to her knees, down.

  She went rigid as the head of his cock touched her pussy. Then she sat down upon him, moaning as he entered her.

  “Ahh —” He took her face in his hands. “Haven’t you ever done this before either?”

  “I — I don’t know.” She threw herself forward, breasts flattening against his chest, arms looping around his neck. She put her chin on his shoulder and rested her cheek against the roughness of his neck.

  He drew up his knees, put his hands up behind her back, and began rocking his hips. The friction of his corrugated chest on her nipples was both painful and d
elicious. The sliding within her made it hard to concentrate, hard to breathe.

  She heard the voices yammering within her. She firmly pressed them down. She did not ask much for herself — she did not know how. But this was what she wanted to do. This moment was hers.

  She came again, three times, before they finished together, he lying on his back, body arching into her, braced at shoulders and heels as his head thumped heedless on the planks, she upright and astride, head tossing, hair waving like anarchy’s flag. Their hands were locked at the ends of outstretched arms. They cried, and strove together.

  Drops of sweat fell into the midst of the desolation of Eric’s chest. Then she collapsed onto him. He held her, murmuring and caressing her hair.

  When she was in control again — too soon, too soon; her control was so iron and constant that liberation had been as sweet as the physical pleasure — she raised her head and smiled at him.

  “No dreams?” she asked, teasing, tentative lest he take offense.

  He laughed, out of breath. “Whoa! I’m enjoying the dream we have here together. You’re generating this one, babe, and you’re doing just fine.”

  She slid partway off him, slippery with sweat, resting an elbow on the harshness of a plank. “It is a dream, isn’t it?” she said, holding down the babble of voices within, but marking their presence. “All this — it’s not real, is it? It’s the hatred and injustice and war outside that are real.”

  Her mind filled once more with the pastoral symphony of visions Mark had experienced at that first rally, when he and she and the rest first laid eyes on beautiful Eric. A land of peace and nature and harmony, where no smokestacks broke the sky and the words and stares of bigots no longer assailed jokers like thrown stones.

  “That’s real, Isis. That’s the reality. It’s the rest that’s the dream — the nightmare. What we’re doing here, we’re dispelling the nightmare. Breaking the spell of the dark magic of Western values, Western materialism, Western linear thought.”

  The ANC burned twenty jokers in a township last week with gasoline, J. J. Flash’s outraged thought broke through. In Calcutta a mob killed a hundred and fifty the week before that. I don’t mind you taking the high hard one from Elephant Boy here, hon, but tell me what the fuck those atrocities have to do with Western goddam values.