“Do the Vietnamese in the government think any better of us?”

He shrugged. “Probably not. But it doesn’t matter. They’re behind us, whether they love us or not. They’re giving us what we need.”

“And what might that be?”

“A place to stand, darlin’. It’s coming down Holocaust time – you should know that as well as anybody, after what your friend Meadows has been through. The nats fear us. They know what we are: homo superior. We’re the future, babe.”

“You don’t believe that!”

He raised his head to look at her. His eyes were like amber beacons, burning through her. “I do. It’s true. Look at you – aren’t you superior to any nat?”

She bit her lip, trying to order her thoughts, form a denial that would not sound foolish. “I am stronger than most nats, faster,” she said. “I can conceal myself in shadow. I recover from injury with unnatural quickness. But these things do not make me superior. Not in a moral sense.”

He laughed and laid his splendid head back down. “A moral sense? How moral is genocide? That’s what the nats have in mind – for me, for you, for all the little ace and deuce and joker babies in the world. Lights out.”

She shivered. She could feel much truth in what he said. But it did not make all that he was saying right.

“The Vietnamese are giving us a place to make a stand. A place to settle, once the fight is done. A place to build the dream.”

“Is that the coin they use to purchase our souls, then? Land?”

“Call it space, if that makes you happy. Call it tolerance; call it a fighting chance. That’s more than anyone else is even willing to offer us. So we owe them.”

“Is that all there is to it? That we ’owe’ it to them to kill for them?”

“It’s the dream, babe. The dream. It’s greater than anything – you, me, the whole Brigade.”

Her mind filled with those seductive pastoral images again – the happy, liberated jokers about their appropriate-technology pursuits. Moonchild shook her head.

“No, no, please. No more pretty pictures. We are talking about pain here, pain and killing.”

“Is that really wrong? If a toe becomes gangrenous, don’t you have to amputate it or lose the foot? If the foot gets gangrene, don’t you have to amputate it so as not to lose the leg? If the leg is gangrenous, don’t you have to cut it off or die? You don’t cut off your toe because you don’t love it. But there comes a point at which a part is beyond saving, and endangers the greater whole.”

“But a man is not a toe. He’s a life.”

“Aren’t you forgetting the Way? Aren’t you falling prey to the Western illusion that the individual is greater than the group?”

She hung her head. “We are becoming what we fight against.”

“No.” He kissed her forehead. “Can’t happen, hon. Because we’re righteous.”

Chapter Thirty-five

The villagers stood outside the bamboo fence that encircled their collection of hootches, a sad huddle beneath the guns of Second Squad. The morning mist of the valley wound about them like living gauze, shifting and twining, and detached the surrounding mountain peaks from the planet, so that they seemed to float on cloud. Mark felt a sense of strangeness as great as any he had known on Takis; it was as if the valley and village and the mountains were on another planet, remote from Earth.

The evidence lay on the damp earth before them: an ancient American M2 carbine with a skeleton stock that may have folded before it turned to rust. Decrepit as it was, sniff tests revealed the tang of burned powder and lubricant that betrayed it as the weapon – or one of them – that had been fired at the patrol on its approach. The villagers claimed not to know whose hand had held it.

Why were there no young men in the village? They had all been drafted into the People’s Army, of course. The villagers responded sullenly to the questions shrieked at them by Pham, strutting to and fro before them like a cock keeping an eye on his hens, but they answered.

It was just that no one believed their answers.

Crouching beside the weathered stone gate, Haskell looked up from the radio that Croyd had humped up here and shed. His pink mouth-tendrils quivered.

“Word is to waste ’em,” he said. “Comes right from the Man Himself.”

“All right!” Spoiler yelled, and pumped his fist in the air. “Payback!”

Mark felt an ice-ball the size of Takis form in his stomach. No! his mind yammered in several voices.

“Bullshit,” Sarge said.

Haskell looked mulish. “That’s what they say. I’m just passing the word along.” His expression said that word didn’t make him any too unhappy.

Black lips drawn back to show businesslike white canines, Sarge strode forward and grabbed the headset away from the younger joker. He turned his back on his squad to speak.

Mark glanced at Croyd. Croyd was propped on his tail, whistling “Mack the Knife,” which Mark thought was in pretty damned poor taste. He alternated whistling with talking to himself. At least he was being quiet about it. Mark had managed to impress upon him the importance of not raving out loud. Given Croyd’s state, it was quite a diplomatic feat.

A white T-shirt was still plastered to Croyd’s dorsal scales from the predawn rains. He had one four-fingered hand up inside it, scratching at those invisible bugs. Across the shirt’s front was written SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK in jagged ink-slash letters. It was a tribute to that legendary outlaw, the Sleeper. Croyd had seen a fresh recruit walking around in it during that last downtime in Venceremos, the time Tabasco died. He had demanded it. After a quick consultation with his comrades the kid had peeled it off his back and handed it over, in deference to the witchy reputation that had earned Croyd the right to a bunker of his own, and to his increasingly savage unpredictability. Also, Croyd was the Sleeper.

Croyd caught Mark’s eye and gave him a weird lizard smile. Mark didn’t know how to read it.

Sarge threw down the headset and turned. “No,” he said. “No way.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” shrieked Spoiler. He racked the bolt of his M-16. The clack was shockingly loud in the echo chamber of mist and mountains. “We got our goddam orders!”

Sarge faced him squarely, hands down by his sides. “So did the Nazis at Nuremberg.”

“What does fucking cheese have to do with anything? You’re talking history again, old man. This ain’t fucking history. This is now.”

He turned to face the others. “Who’s with me? Who’s for jokers, who’s for payback for the Rox – and who’s with this nat-lover?”

The squad passed looks around like a red-hot iron bar. Haskell was grinning through his tendrils and caressing the humpbacked receiver of his M-60. The two newbies, Stewart and Ram, sidled over to stand near him, fingering the long black rifles they halfway knew how to use. Stewart’s thin face was flushed behind the constantly running sores that covered it. Ram let his head with the heavy horns curling from the sides tip forward. His wide nostrils flared.

Pham made a pistol of thumb and forefinger and pointed it at the villagers. “Bang,” he said. “You dead.”

Croyd pumped the charging handle of his own M-16. Mark turned to him, feeling his facial muscles go slack with shock. “Croyd! You’re not going along with this, man?”

“Rock and roll,” Croyd said. He held the rifle by its pistol grip while his left hand wandered back up his shirt in its endless quest for nonexistent vermin. “Rock ’n’ fucking roll. Nats are out to get us, and they’re everywhere. Hiding in the mist all around – can’t you feel ’em, Mark?”

He stared searchingly into Mark’s face. “Mark, man, you’re changing. Your face is flowing, all funny… are you turning into a joker too?”

“I’m still in command of this outfit,” Sarge said. “We’re not wasting anybody. Spoiler, put your piece on safety and hand it over to me until you settle down.”