"What have you done to Mark?" Tachyon hissed. His flesh hand inched back toward the little H amp;K nine-millimeter tucked in a waistband holster inside the back of his breeches.
The other put fist to palm and flexed. Cloth tore. "Served loyally and without stint, as befits a Morakh." Being destroyed as an abomination befits a Morakh, Tachyon thought. He was about to say so when an equally outlandish apparition loomed up behind the creature. This one had a gray sleeveless sweatshirt and paint-splashed dungarees hung on a frame like a street sign and graying blond hair clipped skull close. He seemed to consist all of nose, Adam's apple, and elbows.
"Doc! How are you, man?" the scarecrow said. Tachyon squinted at him. "Who the hell are you?" The other blinked and looked as if he were about to cry. "It's me, man. Mark."
Tachyon goggled. A blond rocket in cutoffs shot out the door, hit the Morakh in the middle of his broad back, scaled him like a monkey, and seated itself with slim bare legs straddling his rhinoceros neck.
"Uncle Tachy!" Sprout chirped. "Uncle Dirk is giving me a piggyback ride."
"Indeed." Ignoring the Morakh's scowl, Tach stepped close to kiss the girl on her proffered cheek.
Durg at-Morakh was the strongest non-ace on Earth: no Golden Boy or Harlem Hammer, but far stronger than any normal human. He was not human; he was Takisian-a Morakh, a gene-engineered fighting machine created by the Vayawand, bitter enemies of Tachyon's House Ilkazam. He had come to Earth with Tachyon's cousin Zabb, a foe of a more intimate nature.
Now he served Mark, having been defeated in unarmed combat by Mark's "friend" Moonchild. He and Tachyon tolerated each other for Mark's sake.
Tachyon gripped his old friend by the biceps. "Mark, man, what has happened to you?"
Mark grimaced. Tachyon realized he had never seen his chin before.
"It's this court thing," Mark said, glancing at his daughter. "They start taking depositions soon. Dr. Pretorius said I needed to, like, straighten up my image."
Taking his cue, Durg patted Sprout's shins and said, "Let us go for a walk, little mistress." They went out into the sunlight on Fitz-James.
"`Dr. Pretorius,"' Tachyon repeated with distaste. The two regarded each other like a pair of dogs who claim the same turf. "He thinks you should then give in, change the way you lives-the way you wear your hair?"
Mark shrugged helplessly. "He says if I challenge the system, I'll lose."
"Perhaps if you had a more competent lawyer."
"Everybody says he's the best. The legal version of, like, you."
"Well." Tach fingered his narrow chin. "I admit I've no cause to believe that your justice' is aptly named. What are you doing to your store?"
"Pretorius says if I go in as a head-shop owner I'll get blown out of the water. So I'm selling off the paraphernalia and letting Jube take the comix as a lot. I'm making the Pumpkin into more a New Age place. Gonna call it a `Wellness Center' or something."
Tachyon winced.
"Yeah, man, I know. But it's, like, the eighties."
"Indeed."
Mark turned and went into the back, where he had boxes of refuse piled to go into the dumpster in the alley. Tachyon followed.
"What music is this?" he asked, gesturing to a tape player with a coat-hanger antenna.
"Old Buffalo Springfield. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing."' He dabbed a fingertip at a corner of his eye. `Always has made me cry, darn it."
"I understand." Tach plucked a silken handkerchief from the sleeve of his stump and dabbed at the sweat that daintily beaded his eyebrows. "So Pretorius thinks changing your life-style at this late date will impress the court? It seems a childishly obvious expedient."
"Appearances count for a lot in court, he says. See, the judge decided to hold open hearings at the end, not just take depositions and briefs like they usually do in custody cases. And Doc Pretorius says Sun-Kimberly's attorney's trying to get the press in, and they'll play it up big; the ace thing and all. You know how popular we are now. So this image thing, it's like, if a biker gets busted for murder or something, they shave off his beard and put a suit on him for trial."
"But you are not on trial."
"Dr. E says I am."
"Hmm. Who is the judge?"
"Justice Mary Conower." He bent, picked up a box, and brightened. "She's supposed to be a liberal; she was, like, a big Dukakis supporter. She won't let all these ace haters trash me. Will she?"
"I remember her from the campaign. Last fall I'd have said you were correct. Now… I'm not so sure. It seems we have few friends on any side."
"Maybe that's why Dr. E told me to go underground instead ' of doing the court thing. But I always thought being a liberal meant you believed in people's rights and stuff."
"A lot of us thought that, once." Something stuffed in a box caught Tach's eye. He stooped like a hawk. "Mark, no!" he exclaimed, brandishing a crumpled purple top hat.
Mark stood holding the box and avoiding his eyes. "I had to straighten up. Stop doing drugs. Pretorius said they'd ream me out royally if I didn't. Might even go to the DA and get me busted."
"Your Sunflower would do this to you?"
"Her attorney would. Dude named Latham. They call him, like, Sturgeon or something."
" `Sinjin.' Yes. He would do that. He would do anything." He held up the hat. "But this?"
The tears were streaming freely down Mark's shorn cheeks now. "I decided on my own, man. After the vials I got now are all used up, I'm not making any more. There's just too much risk, and I gotta keep Sprout. No matter what."
"So Captain Trips-"
"Has hung it up, man."
"Have you ever used drugs, Dr. Meadows?"
With effort Mark pulled his consciousness back to the deposition room. The oak paneling seemed to be pressing him like a Salem witch. His attention was showing a tendency to spin around inside his skull.
"Uh. Back in the sixties," he told St. John Latham. Pretorius opposed conceding even that much. But this new Mark, the one emerging from a cannabis pupa into the chill of century's end, thought that would be a little much.
"Not since?"
"No."
"What about tobacco?"
He rubbed his eyes. He was getting a headache. "I quit smoking in '78, man."
"And alcohol?"
"I drink wine, sometimes. Not too often."
"You eat chocolate?"
"Yes."
"You're a biochemist. It surprises me you aren't aware these are all drugs; addictive ones, in fact."
"I do know" Very subdued.
"Ah. What about aspirin? Yes? Penicillin? Antihistamines?"
"Yeah. I'm, uh, allergic to penicillin."
"So. You do still use drugs. Even addictive drugs. Though you just now denied doing it."
"I didn't know that's what you meant."
"What other drugs do you use that you claim you don't?"
Mark glanced to Pretorius. The lawyer shrugged. "None, man. I mean, uh, none."
When they got back to the Village from Latham's office, Mark could tell Sprout was tired and footsore, simply because she wasn't bouncing around in the usual happy-puppy way she had when she was out somewhere with Daddy. She wore a lightweight dress and flats, and her long straight blond hair was tied in a ponytail to keep it off her neck. Mark fingered his own nape, which still felt naked in the sticky-hot spring-afternoon breeze, rich with polynucleic aromatic hydrocarbons.
A couple of kids in bicycling caps and lycra shorts clumped by on the other side of the street. They watched Sprout with overt interest. She was just falling into adolescence, still skinny as a car antenna. But she had an ingenue face, startlingly pretty. The kind to attract attention. Reflexively he tugged her closer. I'm turning into an uptight old man, he thought, and tugged again at the loosened white collar of his shirt. His neck felt ropeburned by the tie now wadded in the pocket of his gray suit coat.
The light of the falling sun shattered like glass on windshields and shop windows and filled his eyes with sharp fragments. Even in this backwater street the noise of nearby traffic was like a rocker-arm engine pounding in his skull, and each honk of a horn threatened to pop his eyes like a steel needle.