A bus honked at bicyclists. Mark sighed. India was not shaping up to be the way he’d imagined it. The gurus weren’t interested in you if you didn’t have your Gold Card. And riding into town at dawn two days ago on the Delhi Express from Amritsar, Mark had looked out the window to see the fields covered with hundreds and hundreds of locals, hunkering down for their morning constitutional. It looked like the whole cast of Gandhi taking a communal crap.

Mark had never bought into the dirty hippie part of the sixties trip. Sunflower used to say he was anal retentive, back in their Bay student days – though she’d turned into Ms. Clean quick enough, once she actually moved in with him. Mark was too much the biochemist not to have a handsome regard for hygiene. It didn’t seem like a number-one priority here.

He sipped his juice and opened the paper. It was a copy of the Haryana Times, written in this funny stilted Babu English. The first thing he saw was an article on Vietnam.

“‘We suffered forty years of war,’ said Mr. Tran Quang, a cultural and ideological spokesman for the Central Committee. ‘More than other countries we need friendship.’”

Vietnam. They were still holding out, holding on to the socialist dream. It was tough on them; the Soviets were telling them they had to go it on their own from here on in, according to the article. Even wanted the Viets to start paying them back.

Most of the world had turned its back on communism, Mark knew. In fact, most of the world seemed determined to forget there’d ever been such a thing in the first place. Mark guessed maybe it hadn’t worked so well.

But he remembered the old days, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/NLF is gonna win, Bonnie Raitt dedicating her second album to the people of North Vietnam. There was something stirring in Vietnam’s defiance, something grand. Something that spoke to the old hippie in Mark.

And then he saw it. “Mr. Tran announced that the Socialist Republic is opening its doors to all the people across the world who have been touched by the wild card virus. ’When all the rest of the world is turning against the aces and jokers,’ he said, ’we welcome them. We invite them all to come and enjoy the benefits of life in our progressive republic.’”

Mark laid the paper across his thighs and for a while just stared out into the heat shimmer. Then he stood.

A couple of tall bearded guys in turbans, Sikhs most likely, had been loitering half a block from the outdoor cafй. When Mark stood, one of them touched the other on the arm. Very discreet motion, but Mark caught it anyway.

He turned and walked directly away from them. As he came up alongside a parked Hyundai, he glanced in the wing mirror. Sure enough, they were following him.

Obviously the maharajah thought he was too priceless a pearl to be permitted to slip through his fingers. It was flattering in a way. He turned a corner.

The two Sikhs broke into a run. Just as they reached the corner, a giant Pushtun came around it. He stopped a moment, glared at each of them in turn. They stood their ground – Sikhs don’t give way to any scabby Khyber trash, even when it looms half a head taller than them – but they shared a look of frank relief when he grumbled and went his way. They hustled around the corner in pursuit of Mark.

“What buttholes,” Mi Sher said in the voice of Cosmic Traveler. He grinned in his beard, stuck the dead rose over his ear, and walked off toward the train station, whistling Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Part Two

PHOENIX

Chapter Fifteen

The former American embassy compound had a washed-out look to it. Mark attributed it to the blinding sunlight of afternoon, and not the flaking stucco and missing roof tiles. Summer monsoon was late to hit the Mekong Delta this year. It made everything look oppressed and gritty.

The Wild Cards Affairs office was in a bungalow off to one side, seemingly shouldered there by the huge embassy building proper, which was currently headquarters to the Vietnam State Oil Company. “I’m Mark Meadows, Ph.D.,” Mark told the plump and horn-rimmed woman behind the desk. “I’m an ace.”

She beamed. She had started out beaming, and she didn’t stop doing so. “That is very nice,” she said in chipper musical English. “The Socialist Republic of Vietnam welcomes all victims of the wild card who seek refuge from the unconcern and persecution of the capitalist world.”

That nasty Takisian-born part of him thought that latter statement had the flat copper tang of a memorized speech. Mark wished he could do something about that cynical streak.

The woman wore a lightweight dark dress with flowers printed on it. She was the first person he had dealt with in any official capacity since arriving in Cong Hoa Xa Hoi Chu Nghia Viet Nam, if he had all the syllables right and in the right order, who wasn’t in a uniform. He found that reassuring, a humanizing touch. He knew that the revolutionary socialist world, or what was left of it, had been getting some bad press of late. All those uniforms had caused the unhappy suspicion there might be something in it.

“I’m a biochemist,” he said. “I, uh, I don’t have copies of any of my diplomas or anything. But it would be easy to verify.”

“First you must have a blood test, to show that you have the wild card,” she said, squaring a stack of papers.

“Yeah. Fine. But, like, I have some skills that could be very useful, and I’d like to use them to benefit the jokers.”

She beamed. “First the blood test.”

“Roll up your sleeve, please.” the orderly said in English. He wore a tan tunic that reminded Mark forcibly of a Nehru jacket, over double-knit blue-herringbone bells. Mark thought of 1971 with a nostalgic twinge.

Mark was sitting in an uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chair that must have been sold to the former Republic of Vietnam as surplus by the California public school system, because he was dead certain he’d sat in it in elementary school in 1958. It made it natural to do as he was told. Still obedient, he knotted a length of rubber tubing around his biceps and gazed raptly around at the posters on the walls, some of which showed obvious doctors in white coats exhorting peasants in conical straw hats, and others dudes in pith helmets waving guns and yelling. He wished he could understand what they said. He wanted to, like, get with the program.

Then he noticed the orderly picking up a syringe that had been lying beside the rusty sink, drying on a square of gauze. It had obviously been used before. More than once, Mark guessed.

“Make a fist, please,” the orderly said mechanically, advancing and waving the hypo in the air.

Mark gave it the fish eye. “Don’t you, like, have another one of those?” he asked. “A newer one?”

“We are a poor country,” the orderly said peevishly. “We cannot afford luxuries such as extra hypodermic needles. If your government sent us aid, we would be able to provide such services. Give me your arm, please.”

Oh, no. When Mark had blown America, the public was still being mega-dosed with AIDS hysteria, courtesy of the government and complaisant, sensation-loving media. Millions of people imagined themselves at risk who were in more danger of being hit by a meteorite.

On the other hand, if you really, truly wanted to contract HIV, getting stuck with a well-used hypodermic needle in the depths of the Third World was an excellent way to go about it. If only this were Haiti, it would be perfect.

Mark jumped up and backed away from the man. “I’ll write my congressman just as soon as I get out of here.”

The orderly stopped and folded his arms. “If you do not have the blood test, you cannot register as a wild card. Then no food, no ID, no place to stay in Saigon. Giai phong.”