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.

“Is something wrong?” Eric asked.

She shook her head. “Voices…”

“All the voices of the past,” he agreed. “Telling you that what is is right. Jokers and aces are different. They must be bad. All that matters is getting ahead, the bottom line. Nature exists to be subjugated by Man.”

That’s Lenin you’re quoting there, you little commie creep! Flash thought.

“Hush!” Moonchild said aloud. Eric blinked. It came to her that it had been a long time since anyone told him to shut up.

Hurriedly she kissed him. “Not you, never you. The voices in my head.”

The tension of hurt anger flowed out of him. He kissed her back. “We all have those voices, babe,” he said, only a little dubiously.

She touched him at the forehead, the line of his curly dark-blond hair. She ran the fingertip gently down the face, tracing every fold and protrusion, as though burning them into her central nervous system. She kissed his lips.

“You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” she said, forcing her voice through her throat with difficulty. “I love you.”

He grinned, buried his face in the base of her throat, began to lick the hollow and nip gently at her clavicle. She gasped. His hands began to move about her body, doing amazing things.

An alarm tolled in the back of her head. The change is coming.

“Oh!” She jumped up with meta-human ease, to her feet in a quick pulse. He stared up at her, completely lost.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, I” She snatched frantically at her clothing, lying in a pile by the shadowed bunker wall. Her ancestors alone knew what would happen if she didn’t have everything she came into the world with when she translated out again. “I have to go.”

Clutching the clothing to her breasts, she leaned in to quickly kiss his lips. “It’s nothing to do with you,” she said. “I love you.”

“You’re going out there naked?” he asked in amazement. She was already gone.

It was Mark Meadows who collapsed on the crating floor inside the door of Croyd’s bunker in his own brief private whirlwind. He was gasping, from nervous tension and humiliation as much as exertion.

Nobody seemed to be looking her way when Moonchild darted out of Eric’s bunker in a flash of moon-white skin. Then she found the shadows and was lost to view. There were advantages to being a nocturnal ace.

Croyd was sitting on the edge of his bunk, wearing dark sunglasses and rocking back and forth. He wasn’t holding his usual beer – the ban and all. He didn’t mind; he was beyond depressants now.

“What’s happening?” Mark sat with his knees up and his head hung between them. He felt weird. He had just been, well, fucked. His cock felt distended and sore.

He had never doubted his own sexuality, at least when it came to orientation. He wasn’t attracted to his own sex, had never had even any particular impulse to experiment with it. And here he’d just had sex with a guy.

Okay, so he wasn’t himself at the time. The worst thing was he was actually still feeling turned on, residue from Moonchild – he hoped. Why can’t I have a normal sex life? He was glad he came back to himself fully dressed. What Croyd would make of him stumbling back naked with a hard-on from a Moonchild date with Eric the Dreamer, God only knew.

Croyd just kept rocking, off in a world of his own. He was dangling off the edge right now like one of those Aztec pole-dancers, soaring at the end of what Mark knew to be an increasingly frayed rope.

Croyd twitched, stared at Mark as if seeing him for the first time. “How’s it going, man?” he asked. He scratched himself with sudden intensity. “Say, dude, feel free to speak up next time you see me with fucking bugs all over me.”

Mark bit his lip. There were no bugs on Croyd.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

He didn’t even know if the quote came from J. J. Flash or from himself. But it was true enough.

It was going to be a race to see which fell apart first: himself or his surroundings.

Chapter Thirty-four

“The gloves have come off.” Colonel Charles Sobel’s voice rolled out over his assembled troops like a wave of righteousness. “The forces of reaction are on the march across the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The eyes of the world are upon us; make no mistake about that.

“And make no mistake about this: we are locked now in the fight for the rights of jokers everywhere. This is not just politics. It is survival, for everyone touched by the wild card.”

Comfortably far back in the crowd, Croyd Crenson circled thumb and forefinger and jacked off the air.

“Stop that,” Mark hissed. “Somebody’ll see.”

“No way. They only have eyes for Magic Man and his line of miracle bullshit up there.”

Left and right and to the front of them, the joker Brigaders seemed absorbed by the spectacle of Colonel Sobel in his glory. And spectacle it was: torches flaming to either side of his podium, their light writhing on his face and the painted faces and bare chests of the honor guard of joker youths that surrounded the dais.

“It’s not bullshit,” Mark insisted. The uncertainty in his eyes made his words weak.

Croyd studied him. “You’re a military brat, aren’t you? Your dad just retired as head of the Space Command, didn’t he? Old Charles is mashing all your daddy buttons at once.”

Mark flushed. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“We have learned from the mistakes of the American imperialists whose crimes we have come to atone for. We haven’t got any off-limits here, no rules of engagement to keep us from doing the right thing. We know what’s right, and by God, we will do it.”

The crowd erupted in applause and hoarse cheers and cries of, “Rox lives! Payback time!” The young recruits who made up the majority of the New Joker Brigade were skeptical and wary of the original Brigaders, if not downright hostile and the hostility was becoming daily more pronounced, especially since the Originals uniformly sneered at that optimistic slogan of the young, The Rox lives.

None of that hostility seemed directed toward Sobel. He told the boys what they wanted to hear.

Off to the side, quiet and slim in the dancing shadows, stood Eric, awaiting his cue. Mark couldn’t make himself look at him.

“We are righteous,” the Colonel thundered. “We are armored in righteousness, and we have the irresistible impetus of history behind us.

“The nats have oppressed you. And now they are trying to do it again, here in the haven provided us by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The gloves are off; you’ve all seen your brother jokers carried in on stretchers – or carried out in body bags!

“But the tide shall turn. The tide is turning, and it turns here, at Fort Venceremos! Our fight is the fight for jokers everywhere, and as the name of this base declares to the world, we shall overcome!”

As the applause erupted with redoubled violence, Mark’s mind filled with a panorama of Final Battle: nats and jokers locked in combat on a field where the mud was soaked with blood and the sky was filled with fire. The New Joker Brigade sent up a roaring crescendo of approval as the dream reached a climax of slashing and smashing and burning and crushing.

And then it was done, and a band of weary, wounded jokers, their uniforms tattered and scorched, slumped upon the weapons to survey their victory. The battlefield was drowned in blood. Nat blood.