“What the heck is a hernshaw, anyway, man?”

“Nobody knows. Don’t let the junior-college Hamlet commentators tell you the word is really ’handsaw,’ though. That’s hooey.”

He reached to touch Mark on the knee. “I also know that’s not what’s really bothering you, son. I know you feel like one of those two lizards walking on a cloud in one of Vaughan Bodй’s old Deadbone Erotica strips, the boys who suddenly realized that what they were doing was impossible and plunged to their deaths.”

“You read Deadbone, man?”

“Did you think conservatives couldn’t be cool? Okay, so most of them aren’t. But most of them aren’t real conservatives, either, they’re New Dealers warmed over and allowed to congeal. Or are you practicing age discrimination here? Think about it, if young equated to hip, Vanilla ice would be a busboy.”

Mark laughed. He had spent his life fighting against everything J. Robert Belew was and stood for. But he sure liked the dude.

“But if, in the long run, you let the mere fact of something’s being impossible slow you down, you wouldn’t be here, would you? You would never have turned up all those wonderful friends who can walk the shadows and fly through the sky and hide behind the face of anyone in the world, would you? You’d never have flown to an alien planet and back, and done God knows what along the way. The cloud-dancing isn’t what’s eating you either.”

Mark sighed. “Okay. I don’t know what I am. Anymore. Am I a man? Am I four – uh, three – men and a woman? Am I nuts?”

“Isis Moon’s little episode has still got you down, eh? I suspected as much.”

“Well, she had a point, man. I always bought what she told you, that she had been born and raised and lived her life and all, and that something happened and next thing anybody knew, she was trapped inside me.”

“Doesn’t that seem a little farfetched?”

Mark looked at him. After a moment Belew laughed. “All right. Touchй. You’re getting pretty Zen as we go along here, Mark. Still.” He turned a hand palm-up, questioning.

“All right. I wondered, too; I’d have to be brain dead not to. I did some research.

“There are three people named Isis Moon in the whole United States, at least that I could track down; heck, one of ’em lived at the commune I hung out at after I sprung Sprout, outside Taos.”

At the mention of his daughter’s name he swallowed hard and paused. It was as if he had picked away a scab to find a wound the size of the Grand Canyon gaping in his flesh. He had to look away, hurry himself past, lest he pitch in headfirst and fall forever.

“They’re all ex-hippies, New Agers, or both. None of them’s Korean.

“J. J. Flash – his real name’s John Jacob Flash, you may know that, he mentioned it on Peregrine’s Perch once or twice. There is a John Jacob Flash in Manhattan. He’s a Wall Street broker. J. J. – Jumpin’ Jack – met him once, on Peri’s show. They’re the same man. I mean, the broker is a bit paunchier, though he looks like he works out. But they’re the same – same looks, same gestures, same smart mouths.

“But Jumpin’ Jack is a lawyer, not a stockbroker. Flash-the-broker isn’t an ace – he’s tested negative for the wild card. And Jumpin’ Jack doesn’t think of himself as an ace either; that’s jargon he picked up. Where he comes from – where he thinks he comes from – he’s called a ‘superhero,’ just like in the old comic books.”

“Which you loved.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about me?”

“What you’re telling me now, Mark.”

Mark sighed again. “No one knows it. Not even – not even Tach. But it’s got to come out, now, man, or my head will explode.”

“We don’t want that. Don’t let me interrupt.”

“I checked Damon Strange – cool name, you gotta admit. Too bad he’s such a weenie, Cosmic Traveler is. I mean, I even got his name wrong, his ace name – the real song title is ‘Mystic Traveler,’ it’s an old Dave Mason song. Now, there’s a Damon Strange in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who’s a lawyer, No connection there. There is also an insurance adjustor of that name in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’ve got his picture, and he looks a lot like the Traveler, though he isn’t blue. He had a car accident in 1983 and has been a veg since – Florida courts won’t let ’em turn off life support. Sorry for being insensitive, man.”

“You’re a biochemist. You know what brain death means. Why tiptoe around?”

Mark took a breath. “Yeah. The thing is, this Strange in Florida had his accident two days before Cosmic Traveler first appeared. As near as I can pin down, his EEC went flatline ten minutes before I took the potion for the first time.

“Traveler won’t let me have anything about his real past – Aquarius won’t either, though I think he’s French-Canadian. But that spooked me, man. And then, to find out Moonchild doesn’t speak any Korean”

He shook his head. “What am I, man?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I somehow managed to draw in these souls that had gotten loose from their bodies and were wandering through the cosmos – from alternate dimensions, like?”

Belew nodded.

“But this thing with Moonchild – maybe I just have the world’s most vivid multiple-personality disorder, man. Though I always thought, like, with an MPD, the identities had no memories of one another, weren’t even aware the others existed. My alter egos hardly shut up, these days.”

He looked at Belew. “You know everything about me now, man. Tell me what I am.”

“Okay.”

Mark rocked back, stunned. He expected another “mu” out of him.

Belew stood, put hands behind hips, stretched. He looked toward the open door of the hootch.

Outside was turning mauve and gray-blue as the night prepared to descend like a lead weight in a Monty Python skit. The insects were out in the day’s most profuse profusion, and the night birds were, too, scything through their clouds with happy savagery. Somewhere a box played Public Enemy.

That was a band Belew could respect, Public Enemy. He wasn’t fond of their message or their sound. But they weren’t wimps.

“I don’t know where your friends come from, Mark. I don’t know if they’re unmoored psyches who happened to roost behind your baby blues or whether you’re just nuts. Or all of the above.

“But, Mark, I know what you are.

“You’re a hero.”

He came over and slapped the stunned Mark on the shoulder. “It’s what you’ve wanted all your life. Wise men – men who think they’re wise, anyway – always tell us to beware what we ask for, because we might actually get it. Well, you did.

“Now you just have to deal with it.” And he walked out the door into evening air that hummed as with ozone after thunder.

Chapter Forty-four

The rope-handled wooden box was longer than tall or wide and God knew how old. The stencils on its side were weathered to near-invisibility: U.S. ARMY MORTAR ROUND 81MM M301A3 ILLUMINATING. It sat in the middle of a clearing in the woods in the Kon Tum foothills east of Pleiku. The grass had been cropped close by grazing water buffalo. An array of other junk was scattered around the fringes of the clearing, including a clapped-out Ural truck.

A tall man with blue-black hair and a notable jut of jaw stood at the clearing’s edge, gazing intently at the box. A curl of blue smoke rose from it.

The box burst into flame.

Standing at the muscular man’s side, Mark jumped despite himself. “Hoo!” he half whistled, half exclaimed. “Uh… yeah. Yeah. So you can, uh, do that too.”

“Mark,” Croyd Crenson said, in a baritone Diskau would have killed for, “the problem right now really seems to be finding something I can’t do.”

He chuckled from the depths of his heroic chest. He laced his fingers together and flexed. Muscles heaved the skin of his bare arms and the olive-drab cloth of his T-shirt like the Loma Prieta quake.